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.