Turn 41 - Look At The Faces
You grumble loudly as you review the full case record. Up until literally the final approval everything had been handled well, then the final approval got hung up by the two most pedantic morons you’d ever had the displeasure to have to read. Thankfully neither of them were still in government service, rather the two much more junior people who’d shepherded the low-water-use grain through the process were now doing their jobs.
Seriously, one of the two academic idiots had rejected the final application for failing to use APA citation formatting. Then the second of the two academic idiots had rejected the revision of the final application (which had been revised to APA style) because it failed to use MLA citation formatting. And the cycle had continued. The company could have had this wheat out for sale
two years ago if it hadn’t been for Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum.
You understood why the new administration was redoing everything. The sheer levels of incompetence and idiocy was eye watering, and separating the wheat from the chaff (you pause for a moment and laugh at the inadvertent pun) is something that no sane person wants to deal with.
So they’d cut the Gordian knot and just discarded everything, requiring everybody to start over from square one on an expedited basis and allowing them to use the research results from previous approvals as the basis for new ones. Reasonable, especially since they were performing rather Herculean labors to clear out the backlog and bring everything into order. You knew that for certain, you’d seen the overtime numbers, and had a private note from Jane that many of the better sorts who’d been assigned this task had been working off the clock in order to simply get more done faster after they’d exhausted the legal maximum weekly overtime allowance.
But they weren’t superhuman, they weren’t perfect, and the low-water grain approval had been held up long enough that competitors to the company had almost caught up. You understood the situation, and truly it was above the local bureaucrats paygrade to slice through yet another Gordian knot. So you had to do it. The balance of equities here was complex, but in the end the company didn’t deserve to suffer for what was ultimately a pair of morons fault.
So you sent an official decision to the office, praising them for their hard work, reminding them quite sternly that the maximum weekly overtime limits existed for a reason and they really needed to take the time off to keep from working themselves into early graves, and ruling that any and all final applications that had been rejected by either Wannabe Professor Tweedle-dee or Wannabe Professor Tweedle-dum for citation formatting issues were to be escalated directly to a special Tiger Team for processing.
Said team consisted of Jane and her accomplices Bastet and Anubis. You had to get her back for her shenanigans with the music, and them for enabling her.
With the new embassy on planet and everything else you’d been dreading what shenanigans Parliament might get up to this year.
They didn’t. Get up to shenanigans that is.
Instead they are actually being rather helpful. Apparently all of your efforts and hard work is finally paying off with helpful politicians!
Nah, it’s probably just a fluke and they’ll get back to normal next year.
There are two separate bits of legislation that are awaiting your decision.
The first is actually sponsored by The Eldest and concerns grifftiger emigration to Nowy Gdansk. Currently due to their great size in comparison to humans grifftigers are required to pay proportionally higher passage fees, which honestly makes sense since they are so large that specialized facilities are required for passage, and the mass they take up could accommodate multiple humans.
What the Eldest is proposing is an emigration subsidy for grifftigers to help defray these costs, paid for by a small surtax on various ‘tiger specific goods and services. Thus the ‘tiger community would be shouldering the expense for the subsidy while gaining the benefit from it.
There is very little opposition, indeed the legislation had passed with unanimous consent when it came up, now it just requires your approval.
[] | Approve - +1% POP growth Nowy Gdansk |
[] | Disapprove - -1 support Delegates and Senate |
The second is much more controversial in some ways. A group of Senators and Delegates have put forward legislation that would commit the Empire to the colonization and development of Griffin IV. If passed this would commit you to a number of projects over the next two decades or so, but by the same token would help defray the expenses from the Parliamentary Discretionary Fund.
The project would be divided into phases.
- Phase One (+.5% Tax Revenue per year phase active)
- Interior/Colonization Action - Colonize Griffin IV
- Interior Action - Planetary Resource Survey - Griffin IV
- MIC/Interior Action - Build Space Station - Griffin IV Orbit
- Procurement Action - Flight of Goshawk IIG for Space Station
- Phase Two (+1% Tax Revenue per year phase active)
- DOME - Asteroid Redirect Mission - Griffin IV
- DOME - Water Seeding - Griffin IV
- Research Action - Industrial Mechs Tier IV
- (Optional) Research Action - LOSTECH - Terraforming Equipment Lvl 4
- Phase Three (+.25% Tax Revenue per year phase active)
- Interior/Colonization Action - Colonize Griffin IV Surface
- Political Action - Establish Griffin IV Planetary Government
- Justice Action - Extend Imperial Law Enforcement to Griffin IV
- Phase Four (+10% Tax Revenue per year phase active)
- DOME - Planetary Sculpting - Artificial Oceans - Griffin IV
- DOME - Planetary Sculpting - Artificial Riverbeds - Griffin IV
- DOME - Planetary Sculpting - Artificial Lakes - Griffin IV
- Phase Five (Optional) (+10% Tax Revenue per year phase active)
- DOME - Planetary Sculpting - Artificial Oceans - Griffin IV
- DOME - Planetary Sculpting - Artificial Riverbeds - Griffin IV
- DOME - Planetary Sculpting - Artificial Lakes - Griffin IV
The legislation also provides for the speculative sale of property on Griffin IV to investors in order to further defray costs.
[] | Do IT! | Upon Passage
+1 Approval Change
+1 Senate and House of Delegates Influence
Each Turn Project Is Active
+10% Interest Rate
+2% Tax Rate |
[] | Don’t Tell Me What To Do! | +1 Politics
-25 Senate and House of Delegates Support |