First point of order, I want to publicly remind everyone that the new gentleman with the shift key and the trip code is someone else entirely. I have no plans to do any text quests. No matter how lazy my drawing gets, it will still at least happen. :V

I HAVE A QUESTION:


Why is it pronounced circle?

So anyway, I need your help!
I am trying to decide what I should do next. There are several options, which I will now lay out. Discuss, vote, insult, compose poetry, I'll take it all into consideration.

Option One: Get back to work, slacker
I resume updates on my original quest (which still technically lacks an official name, but is sometimes known as flower/girl.)

Option Two: No one will vote for this
I continue updating my trainwreck of a quest experiment, Pest Assassin. The experiment has served its purpose, and I doubt anyone is attached to it.

Option Three: Start something new
I start a new sandbox quest in a fantasy setting. Updates will be faster than my other quest, as I don't have an existing (slow) art style to match.

Option Four: Plagiarism for your enjoyment
I run from one to several quests based on excellent short stories which you have probably not encountered before. I promise not to railroad them, that would spoil the whole point of doing this in the first place.

>>345582
I am O or Shot or OP or MrMorrison.

We are indeed not to be confused!

If it's supposed to be pronounced "circle" then why did you use "o" which is normally pronounces "oh" and not "○" which is normally pronounced "circle"?

i vote option 2.

>>345585
Girl/flower.

i am bad at wiki, someone make this better.
http://www1.tgchan.org/wiki/A_Flower

>>345588
Because nobody ever uses that character, ever.

Voting for the first option.

o 2011/04/26(Tue)20:11 No. 35821 ID: 45be60
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>>345583
That is how my parents taught me to pronounce it. Any spelling inconsistencies are probably just another result of poor literacy rates a couple hundred years ago.

>>345588
While this is technically correct, my keyboard does not have a ○ button. If your name required alt keys, and was undisplayable in some font sets, wouldn't you find a simplification? It's the same for any special character. Nobody types "über" when "uber" will work just as well, and "resume" even passes spell-checkers these days.

>>345621
Wait is that your avatar or something? It looks like a lava bunny. Fursona...?

Flower unless you don't want to do it anymore! Like flower...

>If your name required alt keys, and was undisplayable in some font sets, wouldn't you find a simplification?
No. It's on codepage 437, for fuck's sake. The alt code is 9.

>>345629
It still requires use of alt codes, which are impossible to enter on many keyboards.

>>345621
>and "resume" even passes spell-checkers these days.
You may want to take a moment to contemplate why that may be.

o 2011/06/02(Thu)16:41 No. 37392 ID: 45be60
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There have (finally) been some questions regarding world specifics in my quest which you as characters flowers would know, but you as players do not. Professor Flower is here to correct that. Lets start with the most basic question.

>The world of this quest is obviously similar to our own, so what all is different?

Apart from a few minor details here and there, Florence's world is an alternate history version of our Earth of 201X. The split in realities occurred at the turn of the last century, when a lawyer in the United States successfully argued that the legal principle of "innocent until proven guilty" applied not just to people, and not just to corporations, but also to any chemical or industrial process suspected of being harmful. This court case had far reaching global consequences. From that day on, the burden of proof was not on a company to prove their product safe, but on various watchdog groups to prove that product harmful. The history of the use of asbestos we all know in our world became a common theme. The FDA became a reactionary agency, not a hurdle new drugs had to clear before being released to the public. Many companies still go through rigorous studies prior to product launch in order to protect themselves from future financial hardship, but it is not required. Some less scrupulous corporations do not bother with these trials, and simply sweep mistakes under the rug.

It is suspected by many that the huge uptick in primate genetic mutation in the last few decades are a result of one such chemical or pharmaceutical's widespread release, but no definitive source has ever been nailed down. What IS known now is that no one born prior to about 1965 has been identified with any abnormal genetic traits, though it was several decades before the first formal study was performed.

The global state of the environment in Florence's world is virtually identical to our own, except for trace quantities of some quite exotic substances which are absent from our reality. Deforestation proceeds apace, the ozone layer appears to be slowly recovering, and many major rivers are mildly hazardous to swim in.

Without such strict checks on progress, Florence's world does boast significantly more advanced technologies in the areas of chemical and biomedical engineering than our own. Some diseases can be identified and treated prior to birth, cloning was only banned after the first human testing, and most cars on the road are some form of hybrid/low emission vehicle. (This has done little to stem the tides of global warming.)

>>347192
>From that day on, the burden of proof was not on a company to prove their product safe, but on various watchdog groups to prove that product harmful.
This is utterly horrifying.

>Without such strict checks on progress, Florence's world does boast significantly more advanced technologies in the areas of chemical and biomedical engineering than our own.
It also logically boasts birth defect rates several orders of magnitude higher, a wide variety of chemically-induced illnesses considered niche problems today afflicting relatively large segments of the population, wildlife (particularly anything living in or around lakes and rivers) afflicted by even worse horribly widespread mutation and defect problems than humans- where they've managed to survive at all. This isn't "many major rivers are mildly hazardous", this kind of situation will making skinny-dipping potentially fatal or permanently damaging in any river within a hundred kilometers of any major industrial or agricultural area.

With any industrial process suspected of being harmful allowed until it is proven to have caused damage, things like chemical runoff, toxic or non-degradable emissions, and careless waste dumping are allowed to continue rampantly until studies have been done which conclusively indicate that they are fucking shit up. Even once those studies are completed, it will take years or decades to successfully prove beyond reasonable doubt that what caused harm in one location will also cause harm in another, particularly if corporations muddy the waters by having just slightly lower levels of byproducts. It's likely that any given industrial process will continue for fifteen to twenty years minimum before all those hoops are jumped through, by which point the damage will be done- and there will be more industrial processes to take their place anyway.

Environmental regulation is virtually all grounded in the concept that certain processes are likely to be harmful to the general populace and the world they live in, and therefore the government should restrain them. The heart of it is that once the environment in a given area is damaged, repairing it takes a huge amount of effort- meaning time, work, and money- if it's even possible at all, and therefore we should err on the side of caution where possible. Erring on the side of caution is already difficult enough when almost all the profit (and therefore corporate political pressure) says to lessen or ignore restrictions; this kind of legal precedent basically shoots that whole concept in the head.

On the other hand, Flora's world apparently also has ecoterrorists, so it's entirely possible that the problems got so damn bad that the green movement exploded in response. It explains why it would be economical to research hybrid cars, at any rate; certainly no one would care about low-emissions vehicles, since our current laws on the topic wouldn't come into play until it was proven beyond reasonable doubt that the emissions were causing harm. That would probably set research on the topic back a solid thirty years, unless the green movement was so popular even way back that the market value of being able to advertise a genuinely low-emissions vehicle substantially exceeded the associated research and development costs.

o 2011/06/02(Thu)18:23 No. 37401 ID: 45be60
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>>347198
Expertly analyzed for the most part, though you are missing a key point. If a substance or process your company has been using turns out to be harmful, it is insufficient to simply stop using it, chuckling all the way to the bank. You as a company need to pay the exorbitant damages and cleanup costs, and suffer damage to your reputation on par with what having a felony conviction does for an individual. Most companies try to avoid that.

The end result is that they have traded a somewhat higher pollution rate for a somewhat improved technological advancement rate by relying on economic pressures rather regulatory agencies to dictate the terms of the system.

>>347201
The costs of making a company pay exorbitant damages are substantial. It requires a huge number of government employees to even try to keep up with it today; forcing a single relatively localized company to pay restitution for a single industrial waste infraction can and often does literally keep a dozen federal workers employed for a decade while the company fights for every inch. In a situation like this, it would be even harder to prosecute due to weaker laws- instead of being able to merely prove that regulations were violated, anyone interested in gaining restitution would be forced to undertake their own extremely expensive studies, which often require a great deal of time from highly trained personnel using very specialized equipment, and then fight the corporate lawyers who will strive to discredit their every effort for years on end.

Basically, it would be utterly economically infeasible to even begin prosecuting a tiny fraction of those who actually end up causing harm. Corporations would treat severe environmental damage with roughly the same amount of respect that file sharers today treat copyright law- which is to say, it might be nasty if they come after you for it, but as a practical matter it's so unlikely that anyone actually will that you might as well act as though there are no laws at all.

>>347202
and reputation damage which is worse. think about how people who are convicted of a child molestation are treated, NO ONE wants ANYTHING to do with them. entire world refuses to buy your product and you are SUNK. so once it is decided a company fucked up they are done.

>>347203
It doesn't matter. Firstly, in order to get a company seriously charged at all you'll need to have an up-front pile of cash measured in the millions of dollars at minimum- for a big case, easily in the tens of millions. Even after investing all that, there's no guarantee that they'll actually be convicted; they might actually be able to make whoever is charging them pay their legal fees, which will throw a few more million on top after twenty years of bullshit lawyer evasions. That makes launching investigations of any but the most ridiculously flagrant health offenses with almost no other possible explanation virtually impossible.

Secondly, reputation damage is not the hammer you're making it out to be. Many- even most- companies which cause the most industrial damage are not the same ones that depend upon consumer-level brand recognition to prosper; when was the last time you heard the name of the company that built a skyscraper? What about the companies that provided that company with their steel, or their paint, or their microchips? What about the company that sold that microchip company their supply of rare earth metals? If one of those tiny companies was somehow convicted of creating horrible environmental damage after a heroic effort costing tens of millions of dollars on the part of either the government or whomever was wronged, do you really think that all their clients- who are corporate partners interested in working them because they provide the lowest cost product, not because they're nice people- are going to abandon them? That's hopelessly naive, unless the green movement is so widespread that they follow up every conviction with gigantic grassroots campaigns to locate every end-user of the convicted corporation's services and convince people to boycott them specifically to twist the knife on a company they've already managed to convict. Since doing that would only likely ensure that the company goes backrupt and is never able to pay those hard-won massive damages, why in the world would they bother? Toss in the "everyone's doing it anyway, that guy just got caught" factor that would apply here to mitigate rep damage overall, and while some companies might try for a green policy so that they can keep a good rep for it, that's going to be the exception rather than the rule except at the level catering to consumers directly.

Thirdly, except in the case of the very largest corporations, a company that is truly screwed economically will simply fail. All employees will leave, generally for substantially similar companies, and most assets will be bought, generally by substantially similar companies. And because the company no longer exists once all the cash is sucked from its carcass, the law can't get anything more out of it in terms of damages, and another company that does mostly the same things will enter the scene, proceed to avoid the specific problem that got the prior corporation convicted but not remedy anything else that they did wrong, and chuckle all the way to the bank for a couple decades before someone builds up the twenty million bucks needed to fuck with them.

>>347203
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahaha... Do you read the news? Major environmental damage is just a temporary setback under even our world's laws if the company is big enough. Sure a CEO might get kicked out, but even he gets a golden parachute. (And with some organizations, not even getting caught at actual child abuse hurts them that much.)

fine how about, shut up and roll with it cause it's a quest?

>The costs of making a company pay exorbitant damages are substantial.
They are. Therefor, there is a substantial tax earmark to pay ongoing costs for federal watchdog organizations. Court fees are always levied against the losing side. Furthermore, in many cases the prosecution's budget is supplemented by investments from other "concerned citizen" groups. In a perfect world, these investments would come from neutral organizations, like Green Planet, but more often they come from other companies seeking a leg up on their competitors. This unfortunate trend has often generated accusations of corruption, but the system is considered necessary to the process nonetheless.

>forced to undertake their own extremely expensive studies
These are exactly the same studies which are used in our own world to make these determinations, and are undertaken by similar agencies. Only the timeline differs.

>twenty years of bullshit lawyer evasions.
I just decided that corporate lawsuits of this nature are required to go to trial in no less than two years, and even delaying that long requires significant legal tap-dancing. so :p

>unless the green movement is so widespread that they follow up every conviction with gigantic grassroots campaigns to locate every end-user of the convicted corporation's services...
Because of the amount of money and public outcry associated with prosecuting these cases, they tend to be news-makers. Often entire industry sectors come under fire. In cases where that is not the case, competing companies can reliably be expected to ensure that the infraction lingers in the public consciousness. True boycotts are rare, but stock prices drop reliably.

>And because the company no longer exists once all the cash is sucked from its carcass, the law can't get anything more out of it in terms of damages.
This happened occasionally before 1945. After that, it was determined that if corporate assets were insufficient to pay damages, employee assets became fair game. The decision was a private sector application of the military ruling on Superior Orders during the Nuremberg Trials. Corporate sponsored assets, most notably 401K and retirement benefits, are always garnished first, but in extreme cases not even private residences are safe. Occasionally it is judged that another company elsewhere in the supply chain was complicit in the environmentally damaging decisions, and they may be forced to make some payments as well. Though it is theoretically possible, no case to date has sought damages against the general public.

>the "everyone's doing it anyway, that guy just got caught" factor.
It is true that not all pollution results in court payouts, those are generally saved for gross negligence and/or novel contaminants. Many companies do try to maintain clean environmental records. Known pollutants which are deemed necessary to industrial processes, such as ubiquitous CO2 waste gasses, are handled via so-called ecotaxes. Accurate or not, even someone as cynical as Florence does not believe EVERYONE is polluting irresponsibly. The relative accuracy of this belief may become plot relevant at a later date.

----
Let's consider a case study. In our world, upon discovering that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, the world said "oops, we shouldn't do that," no blame was laid, and we set about slowly thinking about fixing it. Regulation began in the 1970s and in 1987 we drafted an international treating agreeing to phase out production of CFCs completely by 1996, and HCFCs almost completely by 2030.

In Florence's world, Dow Chemical (as a PR move to improve their own tarnished reputation) provided some of the financial backing required to bring the test case against Claire Manufacturing, one of three manufacturers of aerosol spray cans, to trial. The case went before a judge in 1982, sixteen months after being filed. Claire was found guilty, forced to repay all court costs, and an appropriate pollution tax rate was applied retroactively. Without enough capital available to absorb the costs levied against them, their assets were sold off to Georgia-Pacific, and retirement funds were further garnished a flat 45% across all employee levels. Since direct cleanup was deemed infeasible, the money left after court costs were repaid was split between NASA's Langley Atmospheric Science Data Center, and federal research grants offered to help combat the lingering effects on the ozone layer.

Similar lawsuits were filed against other companies, such as Chase Products Company and Dart Container. DuPont settled out of court four months later. The details of the settlement are not publicly available, but Freon was phased out almost overnight and the company issued a public apology.

>>347240
>These are exactly the same studies which are used in our own world to make these determinations, and are undertaken by similar agencies. Only the timeline differs.
This actually doesn't work. To give an example, in our world, in order to prove that a company needs to pay tens of millions to, say, clean up a river, all you need to show is that they were discharging polychlorinated biphenyls into the river, that the concentration of said PCBs is above the legally mandated allowed levels in said river, and that no one else is discharging them; ergo, the company is breaking the law and have to pay. In Flora's world, not only do you have to prove all that, you also have to conduct health studies or environmental studies in the region fed by the river which show beyond reasonable doubt that specific detrimental effects have emerged since the discharge began, and then further prove beyond all reasonable doubt that said effects are a direct result of the PCB discharge rather than any of the other myriad of factors that the defense will drag in to confuse the issue, some of which might very well be substantial contributors to the same or similar problems.

It's comparatively easy to show that someone broke the letter of a law. Proving beyond reasonable doubt that they actually caused significant harm? That is much, much harder, and requires much more research and far more compelling evidence. Said research and evidence costs money.


>I just decided that corporate lawsuits of this nature are required to go to trial in no less than two years, and even delaying that long requires significant legal tap-dancing. so :p
They're required to go to trial in two years... or else what? Obviously if they haven't gone to trial yet, the corporation can't be assumed to be guilty, since they're explicitly being assumed to be innocent until it's shown otherwise and that doesn't happen until the trial, so they can't be the one penalized if the trial doesn't occur in a timely fashion.


>After that, it was determined that if corporate assets were insufficient to pay damages, employee assets became fair game.
Oh god what?

Let's look at a hypothetical example here, which I believe would be substantially representative of what would occur in many cases under this system. My apologies if it seems to be straw-manning things; that is not my intent.

There's a chemical plant in a fairly small town. It supports, directly or indirectly, about seventy percent of the town's population. It's the only chemical plant that the people living there are familiar with, and none of them have the technical education to know much about the variants in the design of plants that produce this particular type of chemical; every so often someone asks about the amount of smoke it puts out and the black crap that it dumps into the river, but management assures them that it's fairly standard and that no company has ever been prosecuted for using their methods, which is true because this is the first plant to use this particular process. Anyway, the pay's pretty good, and the town prospers because of it.

So after about five years the fish in the river are dying, and they're getting mutants frogs, and all that good stuff, but there's no public outcry at this point because hell, what are the people going to do, bring a suit against the company that lets them support their families because they can't go fishing anymore? So operations continue.

Five years after that they've got remarkably high birth defect rates, what they were originally, and a lot of them, particularly the kids, are developing health disorders- there's a particular one that's rather prevalent. Things are getting bad enough that they get together and call in an environmental group to help them make the plant pay their kids' health bills and somehow make the problems go away.

The environmental group comes in and, while they might not have done a study, spot in a matter of days all the earmarks of a place that they could conduct a successful prosecution. They start prep work.

The company gets wind of this. They know they've been doing nasty shit, and won't be able to stand up against a prosecution, so what do they do? Answer: They immediately dig up the very worst example that they can of total corporate collapse and employee asset seizure. In fact, the worst ten or fifteen examples, so that it's clearly not an isolated case. They make it quietly very clear to their employees that they do NOT want to let this environmental prosecution go through, because if it does not only will the chemical plant be forced to close and make all of them lose their jobs, the people who care more about fish and rivers and trees than they do about jobs and families will steal their retirement funds and if that's not enough, they'll drain their very bank accounts and force them to sell their homes, leaving their kids on the street. It's a very bleak picture, and except for those few families who are already drowning in medical bills, the town is now inclined to actively fight against the environmental groups.

The result is going to be either the case against the company dissolving under pressure from the community, possibly coupled a quick out-of-court settlement with those who have been most substantially harmed. The company keeps doing things as they've been doing them, or at most cuts a deal to make some small improvements in their chemical disposal processes in order to get the greens off their back, loudly trumpeting their accommodating nature because of this the whole time and discrediting any remaining public outcry against them. The case falls apart, the pollution stays bad and only gets worse until the next five or ten years pass and the health problems get so bad that even the prospect of mass unemployment, losing their retirement funds- which by this point is virtually certain for the entire town both due to the rising cost of the cleanup and because they were obviously all knowingly supporting the corporation's processes after the first time around- possibly also having their houses stolen out from under them seems like an even worse alternative than putting up with kids who need to take pills three times a day from the time they're born and still aren't healthy, plus medical problems that are killing them all off by the time they hit sixty.

Basically, taking employee assets is going to massively bolster the public support of the corporations as they resist lawsuits and arm them with powerful weapons in the PR battle for fighting against environmentalists and health regulators.


>an appropriate pollution tax rate was applied retroactively
Ex post facto taxes are an utterly terrifying thing. Are you implying that whenever a court case finds a particular industrial process to be harmful, taxes are retroactively applied to anyone who uses it- effectively demanding that companies across the country spontaneously cough up anywhere from thousands to millions of dollars which they're unlikely to often have in liquid assets?

sounds good, if ALL companies have to cough up a fuckload of cash for doing something they will be VERY careful to make sure they aren't doing something harmful or spend a ton of money to cover it up. also have to remember OTHER companies are using this way to take out the competitors so some of the prices. also the defence has to be ready in two years, you don't make a claim unless you are ALREADY sure your case is good, meaning the defense is the one who must prepare and so they are the ones who stall for time meaning that yes they have to pay the penalty cause they are trying to take to long.

>>347248
First of all, OOOOOH, I see how we are envisioning this differently. No, proving that a chemical or drug is harmful is not a major part of a court case. That is done with testing in independent labs. An expert witness reporting on the effects of PCB exposure on lab rats and how difficult it is to break down would usually suffice. If there are multiple widely conflicting studies, then things might get interesting, but the court case is usually just a matter of "look, these are the measured levels we think you are responsible for, the scientists tell us it is X arbitrary badness units, what do you have to say for yourselves?"

>They're required to go to trial in two years... or else what?
Just like a criminal trial. The court date is set, you can appeal for change of date maybe twice, and if you don't show up ready, the judge rules in favor of the other side.

>management assures them that it's fairly standard and that no company has ever been prosecuted for using their methods
If management was this shortsighted, then yes, they would pretty much doom the town, and themselves as well. That's the idea. It's an incentive for the company to figure out what a new substance does ahead of time.

>Ex post facto taxes are an utterly terrifying thing.
Yes. This IS horrifying. Sort of the point really.

I never said this system would be a great idea and we should totes be using it. I said it's a system that *almost* works. But it's a system that has resulted more than half of the children born since 1970 being mutated in some minor way.

>Is this still fun
no, i just want to get back to the quest and tell the haters to suspend their disbelief.

>>347283
>An expert witness reporting on the effects of PCB exposure on lab rats and how difficult it is to break down would usually suffice.
That certainly makes things a hell of a lot easier- though in many cases, those studies with lab rats would have to be conducted specifically for the case, potentially requiring a couple years of testing on the part of the prosecution or their affiliates. It's fairly rare that animals are experimentally exposed to various levels of specific industrial wastes in order to measure the effects, after all.

Fortunately, this is exactly the sort of research that would attract corporate backing, which can easily circle around to tie in with the inter-company competition bit that you were bringing up- because a company who bankrolls it can not only use the results as a weapon against their competitors, they can also design their own next industrial process to skirt in just under the line of what their study's results declare harmful and thereby have a reasonable rationale for their own level of pollution if they get charged in turn.

>If management was this shortsighted, then yes, they would pretty much doom the town, and themselves as well. That's the idea.
The number of companies that are willing to look more than five years ahead is... very small. Hell, a lot of them- particularly those which are publicly held- aren't willing to look more than one or two years ahead. The drive to raise stock value is huge.

Something that occurs to me here is this: By the time the court case rolls around, it's possible- even likely- that the vast majority of those who were involved in the original construction and operation of the plant will have retired or otherwise left the company. Are they considered responsible as individuals? What if they left the company while specifically citing environmental or other practices concerns? What of employees who came to the business while problems which they had nothing to do with the origin of are still ongoing- and quite possibly left the company while affairs remained the same?

Further, is the contractor who built the plant considered liable even though they haven't touched the thing in a decade and their company might not even exist anymore? Very few companies do their own design and construction work. What of the contractors' employees, either at the time of the case- who have never heard of the project in question- or at the time of construction- who are likely long gone?

>Yes. This IS horrifying. Sort of the point really.
It's horrifying in that every major pollution case could result in billions of dollars in economic damage as an entire industry gets sucker-punched with charges they hadn't counted on. That's a huge blow to inflict on one's own nation, particularly in a country that's more than willing to throw tens of billions of dollars in bailout money towards industries which show signs of instability. I'm honestly not sure if it could actually happen on any kind of significant basis; corporations whining about the expense are one of the main reasons that our own environmental regulations tend to give them 10-15 years to retool all their equipment to meet standards. Anything that charges money to an entire industry at once gets handled very delicately, at least in America.

>But it's a system that has resulted more than half of the children born since 1970 being mutated in some minor way.
What percentage of those are real-world-style mutations (aka birth defects, a large portion of which significantly negatively impact quality and duration of life) as compared to fantasyland mutations (aka useful powers like Flora's got which are completely unnoticeable and make people better)? Because in the real world, a 50% mutation rate would be the sort of thing that would get laws written up to be much more restrictive and money thrown at the problem until all our children stop dying.