RE: spoon-discuss: RE: spoon-business: Proposal: No Kickbacks (Justice, Administered Piecemeal)

["Jonathan Van Matre" <JVanMatre@xxxxxxxx>]

> Well... no. If someone *attempts* to take an action which is 
> illegal, it doesn't work (although more on this later). A CFJ 
> doesn't need to *change* anything to prevent it from 
> happening, because it never happened in the first place; a 
> CFJ just establishes whether it was legal or not. Of course, 
> if someone takes an action that's illegal, and no one 
> notices, then the statute of limitations kicks in after a 
> week, and it *becomes* legal.

Let's try some logic, shall we?

1)  Any player action can be CFJed up to one week after it has occurred.

Therefore, *any* player action is potentially illegal for one week.

2)  Assume, as you assert, that potentially illegal actions become legal
when one of two things happens:

	a) The statute of limitations kicks in, or

	b) The action is CFJed, and the CFJ "establishes whether it was
legal or not", deciding in favor of the legality of the action

Therefore, *no* action is certifiably legal until either a) or b)
occurs.  No change to the rule set or game state is real until it has
gone unquestioned for one week.

This is plainly ridiculous.   It undermines the very fabric of the game,
since the rules are being constantly applied to the current game state.
They can't wait a week to see if the game state is real.

For example, if the rules say the player with the lowest score gets the
Sushi, and the records show I have the lowest score, following your
logic I can dodge the Sushi by claiming that my score isn't real until
all actions which have changed it have lapsed unquestioned for one week,
or been ratified by a CFJ.

As I said previously, actions should essentially be "innocent until
proven guilty" -- real and legal, until found to be illegal in a CFJ /
inquest / whatever you want to call it.

You said yourself, an inquest is to find out what happened.  The inquest
/ CFJ establishes a course of events that took place in the past, as
well as a decision on the legality of those events.  What it can't do is
un-event those events -- a murder inquest can't un-murder a body, a
Senate hearing on a political scandal can't un-publicize the scandal.

Remedial actions are taken in the here and now.  When things can be
undone in the same way they were done, they are (e.g. the Secretary of
the Treasury embezzles $1 billion, so it is taken back into the Treasury
from eir Grand Cayman bank account), and it is *as if* they never
happened.  But in other cases, such as a very dead, very murdered corpse
(or to offer a potential game example, a player has resigned the game
due to the illegal action taken against em by another player), the
correction cannot directly undo the course of events, so a suitable
remedy is chosen (such as penalizing the person / player responsible).

This whole mass-hallucination it-was-just-a-dream it-never-happened tack
is the stuff of bad soap opera plots.

--Scoff!