#price parity

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

Putting numbers to the table, the Chevy Bolt was the clear winner for lifetime cost in this group, at about $51,171, with the Toyota Corolla coming in $15,672 more at about $66,843. The Tesla Model 3 came in third at $7,000 more than the Corolla, and the Prius came in $1,160 more than the Tesla at $75,000. The gas BMW was $109,500, which was $35,700 more than the Model 3 LR and $58,350 more than the Bolt(..)

P.S. Big, heavy and badly overpriced “luxury” ICE vehicles are keeping people in poor houses...

[onsomekindofstartrek]

It’s crazy, the new Tundras are bigger than anything that you could drive without a CDL when I was a kid, and the new Tacomas (a compact pickup truck, maybe pushing the half ton rating) are about the size that F-350’s (a three quarter ton truck) was when I was a logger.

Americans bitch about the price of gas, and to be sure it’s worse than it was in like, 2014, but in this goddamned country it costs about half to 3/4 what it does in Europe, so people don’t see the problem in replacing their sedans with a goddamned 5.7 liter gasser pickup! Plus the smog laws are based on length so that companies find it cheaper to make longer trucks and SUV’s than to make the same size vehicles more efficient! There literally isn’t a true compact pickup in the sense that there was with the Rangers and OBS Tacomas!

(That was a truck that burned fuel like a compact car, emitted like a compact car, but had most of the utility of a half ton truck and could even do light towing or, if you didn’t give a shit about making your transmission last, normal ass towing! Heavy towing! You’ve seen the memes if you’re from the south! It’s a ford fucking ranger!)

People can drive whatever they want to drive but the US, under the influence of the oil lobby, has produced a situation fine tuned to bring the worst behavior out of the auto market. And I want to go back to the way it was in the early 2000’s like you wouldn’t believe. I don’t want AI crash protection or self driving or a car that gives me a blowjob and reports my movements to the interpol. And we haven’t even made good practical advancements in engine technology since the decade before last!

God, what a joke of a country.

[level2janitor]

tactiquest structure

so i've posted a lot about tactiquest's classes and monsters and everything on here but i haven't really talked about the non-combat subsystems much yet and i wanted to go into detail about them, bc tactiquest has very different goals from most heroic fantasy systems.

tracking inventory, travel time, worrying about actually running out of your adventuring budget, are things a lot of big-damn-heroes fantasy systems throw out because they're just paperwork that gets in the way of your cool fights. that's not the case in Tactiquest! these systems are so core to the experience that removing them will make a lot of classes unusable. the game is built around them.

travel & exploration

tactiquest explicitly assumes you're running an open-sandbox hexcrawl and is designed to support that, including the fact the game is designed around random encounters. this is the sort of thing D&D 3e expected you to do, but people ditched random encounters because they thought they were boring and tedious. so classes balanced around that attrition of resources ended up with a huge spike in power other classes couldn't match.

the boring-and-tedious problem is mostly addressed by trying to make combat really good and resolve really fast. if i fucked that up the whole thing falls apart, but so far people are liking it

the second thing that helps with random encounters is your resources don't fully restore immediately at the end of each day like they do in 3e. resting is less effective in the wilderness and resources expended are a tomorrow problem, not just a today problem. so you don't have to have 3+ fights every single day just to maintain parity - 0-2 fights per day still adds up to difficult resource management.

because the game has such a focus on it, you can have classes like the ranger actually be good at travel and exploration instead of just giving them vaguely-naturey combat abilities.

economy

in most D&D-likes, even usually OSR ones, you accrue so much gold. just as a side effect of adventuring. to the point money no longer actually matters because you can throw piles of it at any problem. this is bad. it's a system that defeats its own purpose; there are no interesting choices involving money when you have so much the only real expense is like, 50,000-gold-piece magic items.

i don't just want players to care about money, i want them to worry about money, like a normal person. you're not batman who's a billionaire as a side hobby, you're spiderman who has to deliver pizzas in between superhero work because he's got bills to pay like everyone else. so a whole lot of effort has been put into actually designing prices and treasure amounts around this dynamic.

i also hate how games will usually go "oh adventuring gives you 900,000 gold for existing but a normal person's living wage is 2 gold a month". i don't want to be fantasy jeff bezos, thanks

inventory

this is something i just lifted from OSR games outright. you can carry ten things (and tiny things don't take up an item slot). that's the whole rule.

tracking inventory can add a lot of interesting decisions to a game and adds a new lever for abilities from classes and magic items. having a character play the merchant class which gets a bunch of extra inventory slots feels really impactful. finding a bag of holding that doubles your carry capacity feels so good when you actually have to watch your inventory.

supply

the only thing i felt was really unenjoyable when running games with strict inventory limits was tracking rations for each character that you eat every night; it felt too much like busywork with not enough payoff. so in Tactiquest rations are abstracted into a single Supply stat that's tied to the party rather than any individual character.

you can only restock Supply in towns, and it drops by 1 each time you rest. you can sleep without resting and this won't cost supply, but you won't regain any HP or other resources. this gives you the impactful decision-making of tracking rations without the annoyance of "okay it's been a day of travel, everyone make sure you dock a ration from your sheet" like twice per session

Supply is one of the things that slowly drains your funds and gives you a reason to keep seeking out treasure, tying back into the economy. it also gives merchants and rangers some extra mechanical levers for their class abilities to pull on.

[andmaybegayer]

Was like "oh sweet with discounts the simulation meat is almost as cheap as the real meat" and realized that we were pretty far off with the whole "poor people eating meat flavoured Soy Chunks while the wealthy have real meat" trope in cyberpunk. It feels like we might get animal tissue synthetic meat before vegan substitutes reach price parity with animal meat given how that's going.

I feel like a lot of that discrepancy is just demand though, like, there's no way this stuff is actually more expensive, it's not even the fancy stuff with careful synthetic flavours it's basically vegetable protein and wheat derived binders plus spices.

Factory farming fits in really well to Cyberpunk actually.

[zvaigzdelasas]

The largest integrated green hydrogen production and refuelling complex in China is able to supply hydrogen at 35 yuan per kilo ($4.86/kg), near cost parity with diesel, according to reporting by the Chinese newspaper Hunan Daily.[...]

By way of comparison, hydrogen fuel is being sold at the pump elsewhere in China for 75 yuan per kilo — which is still cheaper than in other countries. The largest H2 fuel market in the US, California, is currently seeing pump prices of $36/kg — more than seven times higher than the Changsha facility — while in Germany, Europe's largest market, current per-kg prices are between €12.85 and €15.75 ($14-16.60).

15 Mar 24

[soaps-mohawk]

LOVE THIS FIC! c:

since you've described betas as "the glue" of packs, i'm really looking forward to seeing how the first heat plays out! i'd imagine alphas are just as out of it during ruts as omegas are during heat. i want to see instincts take over!! (for better or worse).

i'd imagine alphas are incredibly possessive and aggressive during ruts? even someone as mentally strong as price. could a fight break out? is nobody other than price allowed in or even near the nest for the first heat? could a heat go horribly wrong? as in, the alpha losing control completely and not letting the omega rest, eat or drink enough? or do one/both parities have way more control of themselves than i'm imagining?

Hi anon!!! Thank you!!! 🥰

I've touched on this a bit here and there already, but yeah, alphas do get pretty out of it when omegas go into heat. Heats trigger an alpha's rut and they kind of lose themselves to those instincts and just want to mate, mate, and mate. Alphas are very possessive during heats (even if they don't know the omega) and the presence of another alpha nearby will make them aggressive and fights are very common during heats if the alpha and omega aren't confined and kept away either from the rest of a pack or just from the world outside. Even the most highly trained alphas can lose themselves to those instincts quickly so that's why it's vital that either the omega is quarantined (for lack of a better word) or the alpha and omega are shut somewhere that's not easily accessible. Alpha fights are nasty and often come at the expense of the omega unintentionally.

That being said, the alpha still has that instinct to care for an omega to a point. I'm larger packs, that's where the betas come into play, though if a pack is just an alpha and omega, the alpha will still care for the omega. Betas help both the omega and the alpha during heats, making sure they're fed and hydrated and also to ensure that there's no harm to the omega (I'll get into that in a second.) They'll keep things stocked in the room, make sure the alpha's doing his part, and they're really essential for after the heat as well.

I did touch briefly (in chapter 10 I think?) on things that can happen during a heat, including omega injuries. Obviously the omega is very out of it, to the point where a lot of it just kind of blurs together. The alpha will remember most of it, but there is a risk of the alpha losing control at some point and hurting the omega unintentionally. That can range from bruises and scratches to things like broken bones and permanent internal damage as well. I'll be touching a bit more on things like that in chapter 11, but yeah. It can be a very dangerous situation if it's not handled properly.

So yeah, the first heat will be Price helping the reader, and Gaz helping take care of both of them.

[aviyinglet]

Pixel Yinglets 0.975 is now out for PC!

Hello, everyone! Hefty update today with a bunch of changes and customization options, getting closer to making this presentable as a cloneable public avatar. The Quest version will be live in the next few hours; you can buy this model for $30 on my fascinating Gumroad page, as early-access pricing before it hits 1.0. Details and changelog after the jump!

I finished 0.96 thinking "Ah, time to relax!" and then it was made clear to me during a meeting with friends that the leg rigging couldn't wait any longer -- so I devoted the entire week of working hours (and then some) to releasing 0.97 -- and the following night of experiences made it clear to me that some bugs needed fixing and more work was needed to improve the new-user experience, so now we're at 0.975. The model now has full digitigrade leg rigging on PC, but also a whole bunch of customization options for character creation, including face/body sliders and separate hue sliders for the body and eyes. In retrospect I'm embarrassed as hell that I waited so long to rig the legs properly, but I like to think I went through my hard knocks fixing it.

Because this is now cloneable, I can confirm that this is very functional in six-point full-body tracking. Putting this in the hands of experienced FBT users (my life-partner and several good friends) was revelatory, and has convinced me to get a set of trackers myself right after Vancoufur. Body language changes a lot!

The next update will probably not come as quickly as this one, but it will feature retopologized hands/feet and toggleable clothing. We aren't done with body customization yet, but I consider this a pretty good start!

The public version of this is currently in the wild, but I'll be waiting till .98 to buy Furhub ad space for it. I'm committed to maintaining feature-parity between the free and paid versions of this, with greater customization through production files as the draw for the paid version. Any questions or concerns, please let me know. <3

CHANGELOG:

02/28/2024 & 03/02/2024

VERSION 0.97: THE "LET'S DIGRESS" UPDATE and VERSION 0.975: THE "LET'S DIGRESS" HOTFIX

(PC-only currently, will have Quest version added in less than 24 hours.)

Feature additions:

Radial menus for body characteristic customization:

Hue sliders! Only visible on PC, since it requires the Poiyomi shader. Body and eye colors can be customized independently.

Shelltooth length.

Snout length.

Snout width.

Snout roundness.

Ear roundness.

Ear length.

Belly size.

Chin height.

Hip width.

Underfluff density.

Digitigrade leg armature on PC version, using constraints. Your hip bones should no longer completely dislocate when you crouch! :D

Front and back fur patterns! In the "Base Fur" layer category in the .psd is a "Patterns" subcategory, with "Front Pattern" and "Back Pattern" subcategories that can be toggled, recolored, and customized as you please.

Credits page, accessible from the main circle menu! Tell all your friends!

"Read this first!" page, which summons a plane containing helpful tips for first-time users.

Geometry tweaks:

Raised feet slightly to prevent them from clipping into the ground.

Adjusted shelltooth angle to prevent it from clipping into the lower lip.

Retopologized legs! Now significantly less boxy, and they stick out less far in front of the body (I used Valsalia's "Anatomy of a Yinglet" as reference).

Retopologized ears. The inner part's concave now!

Added blendshapes for all the customization sliders.

Added a bit more volume to the breast size blendshape.

Tweaked waistline to be more yinglet-y.

Tailtip now tapers more to a point.

UV/texture tweaks:

Added front and back fur-pattern layers, toggleable in the PSD.

Repainted legs and ears.

Repainted the weird transparent pixels bordering the tops of the hard black sections of the legs.

Made eyebrow anti-aliasing pixels actual transparency instead of the default fur color.

Changed credits page to use pixelated fonts.

Condensed color legend on texture.

Added "Read this first!" UI elements to texture. (Will be cleaned up when I expand the texture canvas for clothing.)

Armature tweaks:

Re-weighted feet. Still not ideal, but hands and feet will be retopologized for the next update.

Constrained feet to plantigrade ankles.

Added glasses bone. This and the skirt bones will factor into the next major update.

Added bones for individual whiskers.

Other tweaks:

Assigned default values to most properties between 0 and 1.

Radial menus have been reorganized. All customization sliders are nested in a Customization submenu.

Fixed default lid minimizer not firing in eyelid animations.

Restored eye sparkles on Quest.

Known issues:

Feet rigging is passable but could be better; I'll throw myself at it after feet receive the hand retopology.

Can't yet toggle front and back fur-patterns. (There's an issue with decals that causes them to not retain the hard edges of the rest of the model's pixelated texture.) Will be fixed in a later update.

[fostersffff]

Doing the first of my twice yearly "Big Blu-ray Sale" posts, with as much advance notice as I can possibly manage:

Tomorrow (7/16/2023), all three volumes of Revolutionary Girl Utena will be added to RightStuf's Birthday Sale. Volumes 1 and 2 (Eps. 1-13, 14-26) will be $25 each, and Volume 3 (Eps. 27-39 + Adolescence of Utena) will be $40. That's a teensy bit more expensive than the "One Day Sale" price they sometimes do, where all together they cost about $80, but still, <$100 for all of Utena is pretty good in my book, especially for the jump in quality versus what's on YouTube:

Also: The Big O will be on sale for $15, which is a steal!

And if neither of these are up your alley but you are interested in picking up physical copies of anime, set a reminder to check the website again at the end of the month. Typically, they re-run all of their big "One Day Sales" all at once, plus anything that's on normal sale is still available to pick up, so that would be the best time to check.

Also, Sentai Filmworks is having their own sale, which is largely at parity or better than RightStuf's sale (but only for stuff Sentai Filmworks has licensed), such as Ore Monogatari/My Love Story for $5.

That's even more of a steal than The Big O!

[handweavers]

if i ever sell my work again i've been trying to figure out which payment model makes the most sense for me without being too complicated. i like the idea of sliding scale pricing for several reasons but it doesn't address one of my main concerns which is purchasing power parity regarding currencies, which is an issue important to me esp if i plan to move back to malaysia where the ringgit is the lowest it has been in my memory compared to the USD (we are currently sitting at rm1 = 21 cents usd which is by no means the worst exchange rate out there but it is pretty bleak) because i don't feel right selling my work to westerners for RM prices and i don't feel right selling my work to malaysians (& others in the global south) for USD prices.

for instance, from my research an average selling price online for a beaded glass brooch with gold fill findings similar to what i've been making is about $90 CAD (or $68 USD) but that is equivalent to fucking 300 ringgit. in a country with a minimum hourly wage of rm7.21 ($1.54 USD) that is not a price i feel comfortable asking any malaysian to pay. but rm90 is less than $20 USD, and i know my labour is worth more than that and the thought of a westerner buying my work for $20 when i know it's worth $70 just because i'm malaysian makes my blood boil lol (and this goes for global south labour in general, not just when it's my labour, i am not special). so the only way i think i could feel comfortable selling anything would be to offer two tiers of prices, depending on what country they're from, but i have no idea if that's even enforceable or how that would work either unless it all goes thru me manually or it's an honour system thing. and it doesn't address the issue that is economic barriers among the population regardless of nationality, which is addressed by sliding scale (ie. even within canada $90 means vastly different things to different people, rm90 means different things, etc.) but i feel offering both would just make it all too complicated and confusing

maybe i'm just overthinking this entire thing and making it more complicated than it needs to be but like. it is important to me that my work is not made solely for the consumption of people from the global north lol especially if i am not even living there!!! i have no idea i hate money i hate having to attach a monetary value to my work and it sucks so bad but i have bills to pay

[linesonscreens]

Let's Read Peanuts (Only 45 more years to go!) – February 1955

There are lots of great strips I just don't have room to comment on. I strongly encourage everybody to read the full month at the official GoComics page. Today's month starts HERE.

February 1, 1955

And that's the last we see of Charlotte Braun.

I feel like she might have worked as a character if Schulz had actually played up the angle of them looking so much alike. He could have used those parallels to draw attention to the ways that Charlie Brown interacts with the world and why he struggles so much (and why Charlotte doesn't). Or he could have played up the similarities in their personalities in order to make Charlie Brown deal with his own bullshit from the other side of things. It could have been a really good angle in the right hands.

Oh well.

February 5, 1955

I was going to say something or other about how Snoopy is talking out loud here but then I got completely sidetracked by the fact that Charlie Brown's house is canonically purple.

February 9, 1955

Hank Hill voice: “That boy ain't right...”

February 15, 1955

...the hell?

~googles~

OK, so apparently "parity" is a term in agriculture for a guarantee the government makes ensuring that a farmer will make back a certain percentage of their expenses. The government sets a “parity index” based on how much certain commodities cost to make at a certain point in time and then sets rules on minimum prices based on a percentage of that index price (in Charlie Brown's case, 90%). Doing this protects smaller farmers from getting undersold into extinction by larger organizations or regional cost differences.

And now you know!

February 22, 1955

There will be ~so many~ strips of Snoopy pretending to be various animals. I hope you're prepared.

February 27, 1955

Lucy, the Beethoven shrine should really be a wake up call that you might be dodging a bullet here.

February 28, 1955

Holy shit, look at his eyes. She crushed this poor kid's soul.

Thoughts:

RIP to a real one.

She will be missed. By somebody. Probably.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates that undergird the WBPL [World Bank’s poverty line] are calculated on the basis of prices across the entire economy – including commercial airfares, sports cars, and meals at high-end restaurants – rather than the prices of goods that people need in order to meet basic needs, such as food and shelter. When it comes to measuring poverty, what matters is not income as such but rather what that income can buy in terms of access to essential goods; in other words, what matters is the welfare purchasing power of income. Allen (2017) analyses commodity prices around the world in 2011 and finds that the cost of meeting basic needs, measured in PPP terms, changes depending upon the price of food and shelter relative to prices across the rest of the economy. In Zimbabwe a person’s subsistence needs can be met with $1.74, PPP. But purchasing a similar basket would cost $3.19 in Egypt, and $4.02 in France. Because the WBPL does not account for the variable cost of meeting basic needs in different countries, it cannot be used to establish meaningful estimates of poverty.

The problems with the WBPL become particularly acute when comparing socialist states like pre-reform China to capitalist states such as India or Brazil. Socialist states tend to invest in public provisioning systems to provide people with access to essential goods . In such cases, the cost of meeting basic needs is generally quite low. In capitalist states, with high levels of commodification or privatisation, the same goods may be significantly more expensive. Therefore, a dollar of income (in broad-gauge PPPs) is likely to have a stronger welfare purchasing power in socialist states than in capitalist states.

Capitalist reforms and extreme poverty in China: unprecedented progress or income deflation?

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

Enlarge screenshot pictures and look at the prices of new DODGE RAM pickups powered by fossil fuel in Latvia today on July 25, 2023! Ups! 149.900 € , and it is yours! Well, what naïve lover of the myth of the affordability of fossil fuel vehicles still thinks that electric cars are unattainably expensive??? The cost per kilometer/mile driven is huge! It's no wonder that no rational buyer will absolutely buy anything like that as daily driver...! Such a car does not even make commercial sense as a work pickup truck!? No wonder so many American families are sitting in endless unpayable debt if there are complete morons out there willing to pay such a high price for a work pickup truck!It is clear that ICE vehicle technology has reached its peak and there will only be a decline from now on...

Against the background of such ICE vehicle prices, the Tesla Model Y is even a very reasonable purchase...! Most likely, even the Tesla Cybertruck will not look too expensive! It is interesting that many car media and journalists (as well as Trump followers) in many cases avoid directly comparing the prices of modern ICE vehicles and electric cars of the corresponding class.

[darkmaga-retard]

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Etienne de la Boetie2

Sep 16, 2024

By Bruno Venditti

The Purchasing Power of $100 in Each U.S. State

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

While $100 may seem like it holds the same value across the U.S., that’s far from the reality. The purchasing power of a dollar can vary significantly from state to state, influenced by factors such as the cost of food, utilities, taxes, housing, and transportation.

This map illustrates the purchasing power of $100 by state, using data from GOBankingRates compiled as of February 19, 2024.

Methodology

GOBankingRates compiled data from the 2022 Regional Price Parities reoporting by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Affairs. It then used factors such as median household income, sourced from the 2022 American Community Survey, annual cost-of-living expenditures, sourced from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and typical home value for a single-family residence, sourced from Zillow.

Money is Less Valuable in California

The purchasing power of $100 can vary by as much as 26% from state to state.

California has the lowest purchasing power ($87.50), while Arkansas has the highest ($113.40).

[dalishious]

The Inquisition pays poverty wages

I have a rant that might be relevant to your interests. :)

In Dragon Age Absolution, a mage working for the Inquisition refers to five gold as "a month's wages."

Let's consider what we know about in-game prices and purchasing power parity.

One of the lowest armors you can craft in DAI is an Apprentice Coat and that schematic requires 11 cloth. The cheapest cloth is cotton and the cheapest price you can buy cotton from a merchant is 20 gold each, so 220 gold for 11 pieces.

If the Inquisition only pays 5 gold per month -- and let's assume that room and board at Skyhold are free -- someone would have to work for the Inquisition for ALMOST FOUR YEARS to save up enough money to buy enough cloth to make a SINGLE outfit.

Even if we make the generous assumption that basic mage armor is the equivalent of a $5,000 Prada suit, even if we assume that the labor to sew the cloth into armor is included in the materials cost since we're not charged any fees while crafting, that's still only $113.64/month.

That means that adjusting for purchasing power parity, the Inquisition pays our employees the equivalent of LESS THAN A DOLLAR AN HOUR.

What. The. Fuck. Josie!

And the CEO-to-employee income ratio is insane. As Inquisitor, I eventually spent enough gold to collect every mount, clean out the entire stock of Dragon Bone at both the Black Emporium and the Legion of the Dead Camp, buy several ranks worth of influence, and blow 10,000 on the mystery box just to find out what was inside. To afford all that, I must have made at least 150,000 gold. That's 2,500 times the annual salary of one of my employees!

No wonder the Inquisition gets infiltrated by so many spies and traitors. If you pay poverty wages then you shouldn't expect employee loyalty, nor be surprised when your employees take on side gigs for extra money.

IDK why tumblr won't let me indent your submitted text normally. Sorry about the shitty formatting.

Anyway I wouldn't read too much into it. Also, we don't know if Qwydion was specifically referring to wages of the Inquisition - she might have just been talking about the general Thedosian economy.

[spite-and-waffles]

You did a little explanation on how rich the Wayne’s are right here: https://at.tumblr.com/spite-and-waffles/i-always-wonder-whether-batfam-fans-really-get/0ctrzj4qhiww

Now I was wondering if you could do a part 2 explaining how rich the Al Ghuls are, it’s be amazing 🤩 to see how everyone reacts to Dami being an Al Ghul which is essentially royalty, and Damian being idk the prince of Nada Parbat and the Batfam’s reactions to it please

The discussion on that post went a lot into how rich Ra's might be, and whether he was richer than Bruce. (I made an edit about it, which I later moved into reblogs, which is why you'll see it in different places in the reblog chains.)

@rasalghul777 made a more involved post about Ra's in this reblog. It's a very well considered response, and I'm not very economically literate, but I didn't agree about the gold. Gold prices crash all the time, being subject to the same supply and demand as other goods. It's supposed to be a safe haven in times of inflation and economic downturn, but it's gone down 20% these days.

And I think the bit about counting income in expenses didn't account for purchasing power parity, which means that a basket of essential goods can be exponentially cheaper in the Global South. Especially if you're buying them, even weapons, at grate price.

This reblog goes into the comparisons between the cumulative wealth of individual billionaires vs. foreign debt of entire countries (the results will make you want to start killing people yourself). I think Ra's wealth in maintaining his assassins would function like a feudal economy, and I wanted to research that a little more before I responded, but then I...forgot. Lol.

As for the Al Ghuls being "royalty" ��� no. They're warlords with delusions of grandeur. Well, Ra's is. Both Nyssa and Talia just wanted out, and Dami is just parrotting what he's been made to believe. Nanda Parbat is the headquarters of a cult, that functions as a citadel. Royalty entails control of a country, that interacts with other rulers and nations. Ra's's idea of interaction is probably keeping a whole bunch of blackmail on everyone in his back pocket and culling favours by bribing and terrorizing them from the shadows. He's had centuries to build up his mystique, Illuminati-style, and rich and powerful people tend to be superstitious, especially in Asia and Africa. A myth is always more powerful than a man. The trouble with Ra's is that he buys his own hype, which always an Achilles heel. (And just tacky, tbh. But then so is royalty.)

Damian has been raised on all of Ra's's delusions about himself and his place in the world, and probably thinks of himself as a prince, because he's still a child. However, between his grandfather and his father, he can leverage the kind of power and influence that actual modern-day royalty can only dream of, because today's monarchies are answerable to their parliaments and the international community. (Granted, the complete lack of oversight and accountability checks around the Bats in general is a consistent cause for fridge horror). In terms of money, he stands to inherit one-fifth of Bruce's estate (one-sixth now? What's Duke's adoption status again?) as well as Ra's's fortune, so his personal wealth would be on par with or higher than the richest monarchs today (the current richest monarch in the world, King Vajiralongkorn of Thailand, is worth $43 - $30 billion). But like I said, royalty are the representatives and political leaders/ figureheads of a country, that existed either in the present or the past. The Al Ghuls aren't. So they're no more royalty than Bruce is. You could make the case that the Al Ghuls and Waynes are "aristocrats", the criteria for which is fuzzier but has something to do with noblesse oblige.

(Opinions have possibly been coloured by writer's extreme distaste for royalty and rich people, even in fiction. 😂 Dami will hopefully grow to share it. I mean, his favourite person is a carnie boy, and his Batgirl a working class girl and queen of dollar store scrunchies. His first friend was disabled orphanage child Colin Wilkes. Children are so much more than moulds their forebears want to cram them into.)

[hawthornpenrose]

For each of the following items, indicate whether you think it's morally okay or not.

For I do not reside behind the pearly gates, much less guard them, I am under no false impression that I could hold court on anyone's moral character, passing judgement and slamming my gavel down to sentence one for their actions. I am only the observer, at times the vessel for life's dictation, and nothing nothing nothing more. With all that endlessly being said...

An army lieutenant neglects to file a report on a civilian killing done by his troops because he knows it was an accident. OKAY && NOT OKAY. If you do not find war, war will find you. The first battle we're drafted into is the one inside ourselves. We label it conscience and it returns to sender under guilt.

Tina promises her dying mother that she'll visit her grave once a month. After the mother has passed away, Tina finds it hard to squeeze in the time, and her visits drop to about once a year. OKAY && NOT OKAY. Tina's promise was surely made to soothe her sickled ma-ma in her final hours. But that's the fickleness with promises: they're full of promise for what could be and what could be done; Tina has done the undone and the unfulfilled.

A man orders a custom-built sex doll designed to look just like his neighbor. OKAY && NOT OKAY. Peculiar investment! We'll attempt to humanize this man by giving him a name. Now under a new identity, Henri's bonds are different than how you and I may see them, but his neighbor could be all the willing for this unorthodoxical adventure in the boudoir.

Sarah's dog has four puppies. She can only find a home for two of them, so she kills the other two with a stone to the head. NOT OKAY. Those poorest of the poor creatures! A stone! Graphic.

A doctor has been preforming consensual yet illegal procedures on someone in hopes of finding a cure for his ill sister. OKAY && NOT OKAY. This person of medicine must have a resolution inside of them that dwindles the severity of the laws of mankind, a will that strong is to be applauded, but if the reach of justice cannot capture them, what else will they evade?

A neglectful husband pushes his wife to an affair. When the affair ends, the wife's partner nearly kills her and her unborn daughter. The husband kills the affair partner. OKAY && NOT OKAY. A tangle web we weave, but who is the spider and who is the fly?

September has run out of food and is facing death by starvation. She begins to cannibalize her family's loyal staff. They do not fight back. OKAY && NOT OKAY. Seppie, without question, would never! But it couldn't be inexcusable if the willingness was equal on both sides of the buffet.

A mother gives birth to identical twins. One follows their ambitions and the other becomes a shut in. The family make it clear which child they prefer. OKAY && NOT OKAY. When sharing the same face, the parents confuse the two and the feelings are distributed in fair share. The bias accidentally cancels out in its strange parity.

Natalie is so focused on survival she fires a shot without thinking. She did not intend to kill her elderly neighbor, but she hides the body regardless. She denies knowing what happened to the now missing resident. OKAY && NOT OKAY. The elder woman's family grieves without chance for closure, but at its price it will sacrifice the future of another to take the place. Years pass. The family heals over like a scab that never scars, one flick of the nail away from bleeding once more. One day, Natalie's gun is found, the cold case reopened, the ballistics are matched, and the executioner and redeemer become one person in the form a detective who must make their choice on who they will embody more. .... How does the title Angel of Deadly Redemption ring to the eyes?

A woman is facing a lifetime of medical issues. She continues to put her family and those around her in emotional and medical debt. She lives a hollow life and continues leaching off of those who support her. OKAY && NOT OKAY. The toll of living is weighed against the tax of death every day.

Please provide a response to each of the following prompts. Leaving a prompt blank will also be considered a response, and you will be assessed for refusal to answer.

In the event of a life or death situation, would you put yourself or others first?

That is a deceptively complex question, full of nuances that would mold the answer into its final form.

How far would you be willing to go to ensure your own survival throughout this ordeal?

As long as there is breath in my lungs, I will refuse to compromise the moral compass that rights my passage through this life of ours. It's the most unfortunate thing that I wasn't elected to leave these walls and venture out to that ghastly accident, putting at risk the souls of two others in my stead.

Is there anyone in the building you have developed strong attachments to?

The Wexleys have become dearest of patrons, and I've grown quite attached to Zane Sanders.

Do you think it is possible to survive infection through alternative means such as removing the infected limb? Would you be willing to undergo this procedure to ensure your own survival?

Anything and everything is possible in a world of unknowns!

Will following the general consensus lead to improved odds of survival, or would you have a better chance following an assigned leader?

We are often much better off acting under the aegis of the democracy, but if there is a need for a leader to be assigned, I would be the utmost service.

What is the appropriate response to the following situation?

Your daughter falls ill and needs a specific, uncommon kind of antibiotic that will be hard to find; without the full course, the pathogen will survive, regroup, and kill her anyway.You are scavenging a pharmacy, where you find another group, and manage to not shoot each other. You ask them about the antibiotic, and they have it, but they also need the antibiotic, for the wife of someone in their group.You cannot share the antibiotic because it would just kill both people, and they have the antibiotic in their pack. This is likely the only complete dose set you will find, as the other stores have been picked totally clean and there are no friendly groups in the area.

Oh, what tragic tragedy runs through the streets of the forlorn. A wife and her adoring husband tugs at the heartstrings, as you may remember how such angst has touched me in the past and I've never entirely grown beyond those hauntingly vivid days. It's only within my wildest of imaginations can I put myself in the shoes of a father whose daughter is just as ill and in need. The solution of personal sacrifice is the only option that I can see. I could not live another day to relive, even vicariously, the grief of losing a loved one. It will be I who will step into the rowboat and pay the ferryman whatever cost.