babies are so small when they’re born

so, so, so small

lamagav kicked me in the liver and it was awesome

baby has a naaaame

I’m not going to post it here but it’s a really really good name 

I think here I’m going to call him Lamagav

(have to force transliteration on that one, though, because otherwise the software will translate it to ‘kindness’)

I agree that jobs should not be arbitrarily recasted, both because it’s important that government policy be predictable and because skilled people should not be forced out of their jobs. If they think it’s a good idea to change web development to purple (and it might be, the demographic imbalance is pretty bad), and dual casting isn’t feasible, then yellow web developers should at least be grandfathered in. I think it is sort of hypocritical of you to make this point while also advocating for splitting the castes and dramatically limiting everyone’s options, but I agree with it.

But what does “purple skills are specialized for purple work” have to do with this? Obviously purples in the skilled trades have spent years learning to be carpenters or plumbers or clockmakers (<3), and those people are doing well enough that they have no reason to leave their careers for web development. It’d be bad to create a situation that incentivized them to do so, but that’s not what’s happening here.

Voa has a large surplus of purple labor. It’s important to remember that a lot of purple work is not skilled labor; it doesn’t take a long time to learn to be a cashier or a janitor. Unskilled purples have a comparative advantage in these jobs only because they don’t have other options, and if a few of them leave for other work, there will be plenty of other purples waiting to take their places. 

There are, of course, other ways to solve the imbalance. Voa could pursue large-scale swaps between Voan purples and foreign yellows, but there are really very few places in the world with a shortage of purples and a surplus of yellows. It’s doubtful that it would be enough to correct the imbalance. Alternatively, Voa could deny purples the two children they’ve been promised, and offer additional children to yellows. If the imbalance were bad enough, then this might be on the table, but it would be hugely disruptive, much more disruptive than recasting a few occupations. Given this, recasting a few occupations seems like a more sensible second-line response.

Obviously, I don’t think this means that we should just open arbitrary jobs to purples. Purples should be directed towards the jobs that are most suited to their capabilities. Capabilities, mind you, not skills - skills are teachable, and anyone from any caste can develop them. 

Whether web development in particular is a good field to direct purples to relies on two questions.

One, are purples are capable of the sort of logical reasoning capabilities necessary to do basic web development? I think the answer to this is obviously “yes”; the purple caste includes mechanics, electricians, and civil engineers, who are all clearly using similar logical reasoning capabilities (not to mention lots of hobbyist web developers). 

Two, are their capabilities close enough to those of yellows that any decrease in the quality of Voan web development will be offset by the increased productivity of yellows in other areas (ie, do purples have a comparative advantage in web development)? This I’m less certain of, but I think it’a another “yes”, and I even think that the quality of web developers may ultimately go up - there are a lot more Voan purples than Voan yellows, which means a larger pool of competition. Web development would also be a very high-paying career choice for purples, so purples will compete for web development jobs, while yellows mostly don’t need to.

Castes are not skill sets. They are economic and cultural divisions that exist to give us the structure and sensible division of labor necessary for a stable and prosperous society. They exist to ensure that all necessary work continues to be done by people who are prepared to do it, and if they stand in the way of that, we can and should change their boundaries in relatively non-disruptive ways.

I’m going to pre-emptively grant you the point that people from different castes do have different average aptitudes. I think it’s silly to apply this point to web development. The internet is new enough that people cannot possibly have been bred to be particularly good at making web pages, and the aptitudes required are not obviously closer to those of yellow secretaries, lawyers, and translators than to those of purple engineers or craftspeople.

@nuance-in-tech-reporting: Just got back from the biannual summit on employment in Medrat. It was amazing, I’m so glad this blog is popular enough for me to get an invitation. I have a lot of assorted thoughts and will also write a formal post about it but I want to address one thing that came up, because out of everything it’s probably of the most interest to my readers. There were roundtable discussions on each of the top three preliminary suggestions for reducing purple unemployment (top three meaning proposed by policy greens before the conference and voted on in secret by the blues) and one of the suggestions was making some low-level web development and database admin jobs purple. This discussion did not get as…heated as one of the other ones (which I’m not going to talk about because it didn’t have much to do with tech). The head of the programmers’ union was at the table and she had several words of caution, but was not adamant that web development remain yellow. A quote: “We all know that Voan tech isn’t where it should be compared to the rest of the word. This could be the motivation we need to fill in the gaps”. Now people are saying that she threw web developers under the bus. What do you guys think? PLEASE KEEP IN MIND IN THE COMMENTS THAT IT WILL BE AT LEAST ANOTHER TWO SEASONS BEFORE ANY CONCRETE ACTION IS EVEN ON THE TABLE.

What a great picture! Thanks for making it! :D

Stuff I’m Currently Writing:

This Unkind Season, a science fiction series chronicling the development of a near-future colony planet. Following a plague that kills most of the colonists, the remaining population is forced to rebuild with limited resources and limited contact with Amenta. 

Song of Zenmarel, an early-medieval fantasy series that alternates between narrative epic and interludes taken from fictional historical documents. Concerns a magical tailor who undertakes a forbidden quest to raise his only child from the dead, becoming embroiled in foreign politics in the process.

Of Hunger, a locative epic focused on the Voan city of Alar Nar during the food crisis. Probably the most traditional thing I’ve written.

The first few chapters of all three works are available on the Overmorrow Studios website, a new fiction network spearheaded by Arvan-born Voan Elden be-Ta’yes, which aims to make it easy to support both green and non-green authors without resorting to traditional anti-piracy measures. New chapters are set to be released as funding milestones are reached (mine are currently set to 200 noavo per chapter), and are afterwards free to read and distribute to everyone. Non-greens can easily make sure that the majority of the money they earn goes to charities of their choice (money from my stories goes to Clean Hands, the Sul Arin Research Hospital, and the Voan Center for Astronomical Research). 

Most of my past works can be read for free at Overmorrow (if original) and at Scribbling Ink (if fanfic), if you don’t want to look through the #imrainai writes tag.

Stuff I’m Currently Writing:

This Unkind Season, a science fiction series chronicling the development of a near-future colony planet. Following a plague that kills most of the colonists, the remaining population is forced to rebuild with limited resources and limited contact with Amenta. 

Song of Zenmarel, an early-medieval fantasy series that alternates between narrative epic and interludes taken from fictional historical documents. Concerns a magical tailor who undertakes a forbidden quest to raise his only child from the dead, becoming embroiled in foreign politics in the process.

Of Hunger, a locative epic focused on the Voan city of Alar Nar during the food crisis. Probably the most traditional thing I’ve written.

The first few chapters of all three works are available on the Overmorrow Studios website, a new fiction network spearheaded by Arvan-born Voan Elden be-Ta’yes, which aims to make it easy to support both green and non-green authors without resorting to traditional anti-piracy measures. New chapters are set to be released as funding milestones are reached (mine are currently set to 200 noavo per chapter), and are afterwards free to read and distribute to everyone. Non-greens can easily make sure that the majority of the money they earn goes to charities of their choice (money from my stories goes to Clean Hands, the Sul Arin Research Hospital, and the Voan Center for Astronomical Research). 

Most of my past works can be read for free at Overmorrow (if original) and at Scribbling Ink (if fanfic), if you don’t want to look through the #imrainai writes tag.

if you tell the internet what your sister did the internet could tell you if her kids'd've been executed in met probably

Probably, but I’d prefer not to discuss the specifics of my sister’s crimes on the internet.

[@separatistlulami] That last asker was obviously not from Met, or they would not have been so egregiously misinformed. We chain-execute only for extremely serious offenses, and there are only about two each year, as the deterrent effect is so extreme. This also means that we can avoid most serious crimes -- for instance, Savo could never have happened here, because no one would chance the execution of your grandparent's descendants simply to help *reds*.

I agree that Savo could definitely not have happened in Met, but mostly because Met doesn’t export food to half the world. I think that even under the best possible justice system, there are always going to be some people who make terrible decisions sometimes. On the other hand, it’s totally possible that people make those decisions less often in Met. I’m not sure whether my niece and nephew would have been killed in Met, but obviously I’m glad they’re not dead.

Anyway, I’m glad that you sound happy to be living in Met, and if previous anon doesn’t live in Met, then I hope they eventually get to live under a justice system that satisfies them.

IN A SENSIBLE COUNTRY THE DESCENDANTS OF ANYONE WHO COMMITTED A CAPITAL CRIME WOULD ALSO BE EXECUTED

I’m glad you’re happy living in Met! I hear it’s pretty OK in most ways.

Why did you raise your nephew and niece? Were you and their parents living together to save money or something?

I did live with their parents for a while when I was four, but their parents are dead now. Dad died in an accident, mom committed a capital crime and was executed. I didn’t raise them all on my own - I had help from a lot of my extended family members, especially when Ves was really small - but I ended up their primary caretaker, yeah. It happens sometimes.

Nice to know that you hadn't disappeared because the bears had finally finished tracking you down.

The bears have given me permission to continue living among the amentans for now. They hope that, in time, there can be true peace between our peoples.

Wait, if you're Voan and you've already had two kids, how are you having a third? I didn't think they gave out thirds to purples these days?

Oh yeah, they basically don’t give out third children to purples ever, which makes complete sense given demographics. But Taz and Ves are my nephew and niece, so I haven’t had any children of my own yet. I hadn’t even sprung yet when Taz was born.

Thanks! And yeah! I should probably write about it all properly at some point, but in case I don’t get to it for a while, SHORT VERSION:

I really didn’t think this time last year that I was anywhere near ready to have a child - I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time, and it seems irresponsible to marry someone without spending a pretty significant amount of time with them beforehand, so I figured it wouldn’t happen for a long time yet, if it ever happened at all.

But then I ran into my husband! Ran into him for the second time, actually, which is a lot of why I decided it was OK to do this so quickly; we knew each other back when I was living with Magraz and Tuyi, and then lost touch when I went to the moon. It was really pretty coincidental that we ran into each other again a couple seasons ago, but we were both finally in a position to make a relationship work, and he HAPPENS to be amazing and adorable and kind and intelligent and generally excellent, but also to have dubious enough taste to fall in love with me. :P

So now we’re married, and we’re going to have the first of two children this year. And they’re going to be wonderful. <3

[[OOC: The thread is still in progress, but should anyone so desire, they can read about imrainai’s initial meeting with her husband in Constant as the Seasons.]]

ATTENTION

there is a tiny amentan inside me 

they are very small

when I am done making them, they will be an ideal amount of small

and someday they will tell stories

Hi! I don’t think we have met, but I’m glad you like my writing! Thanks so much! :D

ATTENTION

there is a tiny amentan inside me 

they are very small

when I am done making them, they will be an ideal amount of small

and someday they will tell stories

thanks!! congratulations on your upcoming nibling, too!

ATTENTION

there is a tiny amentan inside me 

they are very small

when I am done making them, they will be an ideal amount of small

and someday they will tell stories

ATTENTION

there is a tiny amentan inside me 

they are very small

when I am done making them, they will be an ideal amount of small

and someday they will tell stories

Hello again, everyone! It looks like my goodbye post never went up properly, and I’m really sorry if people wondered where I was. 

I was on the moon! Long-term lunar posts are generally pretty difficult to fill, but I figured it couldn’t be much harder to deal with than the arctic, and apparently people still need things delivered and cleaned when they’re on the moon. Ves really really wanted to come along, so we’ve been on the moon together. :)

I wanted Ves to spring on Amenta before making a final decision about whether she wants to work in space, though, so now we’re back. We’ll have to see what happens this spring. ^_^

Oh, I ended up writing a novel while I was away, too. It’s not quite ready for publication yet, but I’ll let you all know when it is. :)

How is everyone? What’d I miss?