That's fair enough, I was mainly thinking of ways like utilising
contracts and offering wincon progress or selling your vote, and in
general I feel like people don't really use what's there as much as we
possibly could? My apologies for coming across harsher than I should
have. One thing that might be reasonable is increasing the authorship
and pend rewards to be more than the pend cost together? And for people
looking at tax systems, a luxury tax (only targeting players with
particularly high shiny balances) might be the best way of going about
it. Hopefully as people create more contracts ways for the currency to
flow will increase, but that depends on coming up with those ideas at
all. Not to mention how loath everyone generally is to sacrifice any
part of their free agency... it's a difficult question to answer, but
I'll certainly be looking into ways to at least do something myself.
On 2017-10-25 17:25, Owen Jacobson wrote:
On Oct 25, 2017, at 1:51 AM, Madeline <j...@iinet.net.au
<mailto:j...@iinet.net.au>> wrote:
I'm not the only one who feels like this is a horribly designed rule?
For a start, basic income is designed to overcome the cost of living,
which in Agora is 0. You could also argue its purpose is already
fulfilled by Action Points, which are far simpler, far more
effective, and far less damaging to the economy as a whole. In
addition, this rule is easy to scam (as has already been pointed
out), and making it impossible to run out of shinies seems /very/
counterproductive. It's also giving a lot of shinies to inactives,
and we're running up against the supply limit enough as it is. Can we
repeal it? It's not like there aren't other ways to get shinies, even
if you aren't an officeholder.
Some background: the statement "It's not like there aren't other ways
to get shinies, even if you aren't an officeholder” has not been held
to be true, up to at least last month. The lack of reliable shiny
sources for non-officers for any amount of effort caused at least one
player to pledge to vote against any changes to the shiny rules unless
they provided _some_ form of income available to all players. We’ve
had substantial hoards develop - at one point, P.S.S. and I combined
held a full fifth of all Shinies, and P.S.S. is on track to beat that
record singlehandedly.
In particular, the primary ways to get shinies if you’re not an
officer are largely driven by speculating against the Floating Value,
but the cadence for speculation and the cadence for changes to the FV
align badly. Passing a proposal span up to three weeks even if all of
the officers involved act promptly - the remainder of the first week
to propose and pend it, one week of voting, and some fraction of the
third week for the proposal to be assessed. By experience, it’s nearly
impossible to predict the Floating Value three weeks out: pending
cheap proposals (when the Pend Cost is 1 sh., for example) is no
guarantee of a return unless the FV both goes up and _stays_ up for
the following two weeks.
AP, which you cite above, were enacted partly as a workaround for the
stagnation of the Shiny economy (or, if you prefer, a tacit
acknowledgement that it wasn’t functioning as an economy). I suspect
there are a few players who would push to repeal AP if the Shiny
economy picks up again.
I’ll freely admit that my solution is deeply flawed. Tapping half of
the shinies passing into Agora’s coffers damps the Floating Value
fairly hard, and I can’t see an obvious value for the Tax Rate that’s
both sufficient to provide a steady stream of shinies back into
players’ hands and low enough to keep Floating Value moving. I’m
hopeful that I haven’t completely broken it, but I’m also fearful that
I have. Put forward a repeal if you like; I can’t predict how voting
will go, at this point, and I’m not even sure how I’d vote. I do ask
that you put forward something to replace it that ensures that
non-officers have a source of shinies that’s more reliable than
gambling, available in return for _some_ reasonable amount of effort.
In conclusion, as my partner regularly reminds me, inventing money is
rude, and inevitably leads to these kinds of problems.
-o
