Subject: Ackanomic Research Digest V2 #89
From: [email-masked] (Ackanomic Research Digest)
To: acka-research-digest

Ackanomic Research Digest    Tuesday, June 17 1997    Volume 02 : Number 089

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Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 09:51:07 -0500
From: "Bollinger, John C." <[email-masked]>
Subject: RE: Acka:  Proposal 2086

Bascule wrote:

> Oh I love this. I hope it's accepted. It reminds me of that
> wonderful old rule "Coke is it" which had me snorting tea through my
> nose when I first read it. (I was drinking tea at the time. I think)
> Unfortunately our Financier was a bit slack about chasing up the Coca
> Cola company and we never got our money. I hope Mr Lunatic Finger 
> puts plenty of energy into organising these assaults.
> 
The Financier, as I recall, did absolutely everything required by the
Rules with regard to pursuing the Coca Cola company's money.  The fact
that it never turned up should probably be chalked up to evil corporate
greed.  Perhaps this makes you angry.  If so, I recommend protesting by
ridding yourself of any and all Coca Cola products and merchandise that
you may own.  I selflessly put myself forward and volunteer to accept
such unwanted products and merchandise, but regret that I am unable to
provide for their shipping and handling.  But that's okay -- your
protest will feel even better if you shell out some of your own money.
I assure you.

ThinMan
former Financier

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Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 10:04:20 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Joseph W. DeVincentis" <devjoe>
Subject: Re: Acka:  Proposal 2086

> The Financier, as I recall, did absolutely everything required by the
> Rules with regard to pursuing the Coca Cola company's money. [...]
> If so, I recommend protesting by
> ridding yourself of any and all Coca Cola products and merchandise that
> you may own.  I selflessly put myself forward and volunteer to accept
> such unwanted products and merchandise, but regret that I am unable to
> provide for their shipping and handling.

In case the volume of protest is more than ThinMan can consume, I
volunteer to take the excess on the same terms.  It might be cheaper
for some of you to deliver the product to me than to ThinMan, as well.

:-)

/dev/joe

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Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 09:55:44 -0600 (MDT)
From: Aaron Humphrey <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka:  P2061 accepted (The Whistle Recedes In The Distance)

> 
> > >Votes cast by active players:  18 / 21 = 85.714286%
> > >Yes:  20    No:  0     Present:  0   ...Proposal accepted.
> > 
> > Should anything happen because of this unanimous passage? In the good old
> > days, when I was young and the young respected their elders, such rare
> > things were noticed.
> 
> These day, only non-Modest proposals that pass unanimously do fun(ky) stuff.
> P2061 was modest.

And they're the only ones where there's no benefit for voting against it,
so unanimity is just gonna be pretty damn rare.  Without a Bribe, of
course.

- --
- --Alfvaen(Web page: http://www.terranet.ab.ca/~aaron/)
Song In My Head--Billy Joel:You May Be Right
Current Book--Jo Clayton:The Snares of Ibex
Open mouth; insert face.

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Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 22:07:01 -0400 (EDT)
From: John Frederic Mc Coy <[email-masked]>
Subject: acka: RFC That literature stuff

This is my first RFC that actually looks like an RFC.  probably because
I'd actually written the proposal, and was going to go back and throw in
comments, when I realized that the proposal was pretty damn long already.
It also isn't compatible with Alfvaen's proposed Librarian ammendment to
rule 210, so I've decided not to submit it until we see how that one goes.
Personaly, I'm not in favor of it, for reasons already put forward.  If it
were to pass, however, THIS proposal could be adapted to fit the new
realities without too much trouble, I don't think.  In any case, I'm
sorry, but this is going to be quite long.

Ammend Rule 210 Literature in the following manner.

Delete the following phrase, enclosed in quotation marks, from the first
sentence of section A). "found below in section IV"

Add the following text, contained within the $$$ signs, between part B)
and part II.

$$$

C) Even if the quotation meets the above requirements, it is invalid if it
is does not actually become part of a Rule, or a Rule in and of itself.
Quotations are invalid if they are contained within double curly braces as
described in Rule 346, unless the entire text of the proposal is in double
curly braces.  [In other words, the quote has to actually go into the
ruleset, as opposed to being Self Deleting text.]

$$$

The above section is part of my attempt to make Literature a little mnore
permanent than it necessarily has to be under the current rule.  I don't
have anything against Robert Sevin's proposals with quotations in self
deleting text, but it wasn't what I intended when I wrote the rule to
begin with.  Assuming you folks agree with me, I'm going to try and fix
it.

Delete section III and replace it with the following text, enclosed within
the !!! signs.

!!!

III.  A proposal is a Great Work if it meets the following requirements:

a)  All of the text that is ammended to a Rule, or becomes part of a new
rule, consists entirely of quotations and citations as described in
section I.

This bit is what you could see as the heart of the proposal.  I think that
the way I have phrased it will allow people to write proposals with all
the normal window dressing stuff like "renumber this rule to 345," and
still be Literature, which is currently impossible (unless they can find a
quote that say "renumber this rule to 345" of course).  Unlike my
previous, retracted fix to this Rule, it would allow Great Works that are
Ammendments.

b) It creates at least one new rule, or makes at least one ammendment to
existing rules, and these ammendments and new rules must include a total 
of at least 42 words quoted as described in section I.

This patches a loophole in section a), namely that you could submit a
proposal with no text that was added to or became a Rule, and it would
qualify for status as a Great Work.  It also imposes a modest word count,
what's so great about a two sentence quote, after all (or even two one
sentence quotes)?

c) It is not Modest.

If a proposal that is a Great Work passes, then the player who authored
the Great Work will gain A$200 in royalties, in addition to any other
bonus or penalties caused by the passage of the proposal.  All players who
voted against a Great Work that was accepted will lose 7 points, in
addition to any other bonus or penalties caused by their votes on the
proposal.  Great Works which do not pass have no effect, beyond those
normaly associated with failed proposals.

!!!

Delete section IV and replace it with the text enclosed within %%% below.

%%%

IV.  The Literature list is not a Rule, nor part of a Rule, but rather
a document on which is kept the list of sources that can be quoted as
Literature by following the procedures described in this rule.  Entries on
the Literature list can be either Artists of Works.  They must follow the
format of: Artist (or Work): name of Artist ; descriptive information.
Artists can be any individual, or any group of people who collaborated to
produce quotable material [For example, The Police].  Works are some type
of recording of words.  Collections of connected works [such as the Star
Wars trilogy] are permissible as a single entry, but not collections of
unconnected works [such as an anthology of work by several authors].
Descriptive information is information that helps to clarify exactly who
or what a given entry on the list refers to [Artist: The Police ; band
with Sting as lead singer.  ;  or Artist: George Washington ; First
President of the USA].  Any entries onto the  Literature list which are
not in the format described here are invalid, although descriptive
information is optional and need not be included.  The Literature list may
only be altered through the use of Proposals and the Spelling Bee.

It is a duty of the Web-Harfer to maintain a publicly available copy of
the Literature list, and to link it with this Rule.

This Rule takes precedence over any other Rule on matters of Literature,
the Literature list, or Great Works.
%%%

Well, the previous part was something that I decided needed to be done
about halfway through the proposal, so it may not be worded as well as it
should be.  Basicaly, this rule is getting pretty long.  I have something
like 30 or 40 new entries to put on the Literature list, and once they go
through Rule 210 is looking rather bloated.  Hence making it seperate from
the rules.  This also greatly lessens the scam potential, as nothing on
the list actually has any immediate effect on the game.  I left in the
formating stuff mostly to help keep the list in a semi-organized state.  I
added the more or les unregulated descriptive text though.  This allows us
to deal with ambiguous entries fairly easily.  If the list were part of a
rule, the regulations on what constituted descriptive text would be mind
boggling.  the Web-Harfer seemd the obvious choice for maintaining the
list (baring passage of the Librarian thing), and it shouldn't create much
extra work I don't think, as he was going to have t add all the entries to
the Rule otherwise.

When this proposal passes, take the text from Rule 210 between the lines
"Artist: William Shakespear" and "Work: The Constitution of the UNited
States of America" includisve, and add them to the Literature list.  Then
delete those lines, and also the line "The Literature list:"

I think this is sufficient to get the Literature list as it stood before
this proposal onto the new, non-Rule, Literature list.  Err, except I jsut
rememebered that there are some proposed ammendments to that part of the
Rule.  Oops.  I'll have to fix that part.

Add the following entries to The Literature list:

Woudn't you like to know? =)  I was going to include the suggested
entries, actually, but there are a lot of them and this has already taken
me hours.  I will mention that a few of the proposed entries were things
I'd never heard of, or at least am totaly unfamiliar with, and I'm not
going to include them (since I've urged everyone to vote for the proposal
regardless of what itis going to be adding to the list itself).  There was
also one or two that covered whole, shall we call them franchises,
perhaps, like Star Trek.  Personaly, I don't want to see quotes from some
half wit's novella about Nurse Chapel, so I'm going to leave those broad
categories alone.

Please let me know what you think, especially any imporvements you think
can (or should, perhaps even must) be made.  I think my intent is clear,
but I don't always convey it as well as I would like.  In any case,
hopefuly you willb e seeing this, slightly spruced up and minus these long
commentary paragraphs, as a Proposal before week's end.

                                - Vynd

[email-masked]

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End of Ackanomic Research Digest V2 #89
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