Dragaera

Multi-jointed fingers (and houses)

Fri Jun 16 15:29:04 PDT 2006


On Fri, 16 Jun 2006, Scott Schultz wrote:

> >They're granted to Easterners, not Dragaerans, by the Jhereg.
>
> >QED.
>
> /golfclap
>
> Okay, now is there a more useful differentiation that might help illuminate
> us on what differences there are? Saying "they're sold so they're not the
> same" doesn't change anything.

They're sold to Easterners by the Jhereg.  Perhaps you're missing the
point that  Easterners aren't like the vast majority of citizens of the
Empire, who anyway tend to receive their citizenships differently

Look, you're saying "B is like A therefore to doubt B has all properties
of A requires proof."  I'm saying, "That's silly."


The Germans, seeing the success of Silicon Valley etc., instituted a
green card program a few years back to lure tech workers from India.
Except that it's not a path to citizenship.  Someone pointed this out
to them and they said, "But it's a green card!  See, it's green,
and has your picture on it, and you get to come to Aachen or wherever
and work here for years at a good salary just like the American version."


Now, I can imagine the E-citizen issue coming up in the high councils of
state and the Lyorn rep saying, "Over my dead body are they going to get
heritable citizenships", and Zerika replying, "How would you like to be
killed?"  But my guess is that such a racist (speciesist?) society would
be loath to allow the as-it-were link mutation into the Eastern gene-pool.
Or perhaps for a big price increase they'd grant heritable citizenship
on a 1%-of-grants basis.

In any case, we don't know either way, and won't, unless SKZB chooses to
tell us.  A careful population model might show the heritable
E-citizenship hypothesis to be untenable, of course, but reaching any
conclusion on the basis of the available data seems unlikely to me.