Karl Peters

Tywin, before you go quoting out historical people and events, make sure they actually happened that way. :mellow:

Just because you read it doesn't mean you understand it. If you actually read the book, you would also realize that it was a manual handed out during lectures purely for note taking and memorization. Without the lecture you just have words and a "kind of sort of" meaning. So please stop using Sun Tzu (it is actually the Art of War written by Sun Tzu) when you have no clue on how the military works or what that book actually says.

Daedric Banrae from NpO deserves one of these for sure. Thought sponging damage for my allies was a good idea, you quickly proved that to be a failed strategy. Keep up them nukes!

This isn't a propaganda thread. Away with you troll. Thanks for the stats Gopher.

Thanks...I think...

College and work has soaked up my time lately. This entry is going to be a rather short one. After this, I will bring the three previous entries together and bring us to a specific area where I want to develop. Enjoy! Money and Flow of Money The final important and most basic principle we need to visit is the concept of money and the flow of money in the economy. Once that is set up we can finally start diving into the wonderful answers and reasoning behind scarcity. Before we go too far, why is money important? The invention and development of money as the main aspect of the economy came about with the abolishment of serfdom and feudalism in Europe. It became the weight of measurement for wealth and development when the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism took hold in Europe. Money is both coinage and paper. With the onset of Capitalism the idea of money start to lead away from a coin to paper and debt. However, paper money and debt was still based on gold or silver, depending on your national laws. As industrialization grew and developed so did the development and implementation of money into the economy. This greatly affected the economy. Money is a way to hold wealth, even when the economy starts to falter, but still can quickly be used and invested back into the economy. The average consumer is allowed to spend money easier than old weighted coins and bars of gold or silver. The easy usage of money quickly developed the concept of the flow of money. In basic terms, “the flow of money is how fast a dollar can move through the economy and how much can be purchased with that dollar.” Bringing these concepts to CN is a rather tricky one since we cannot track every single online generated dollar. Instead we can see this idea through the way we tech deal. Depending on the rate you do the tech deal, a certain amount of NS is generated. That NS then generates more money which in then can generate more NS. The tech deals themselves can be seen as our version of the development of money. We use tech deals to generate wealth, strength, and more money. The same was done with money when Capitalism was brought to the forefront. Tech deals are essential to the way we develop and the way we play the game. Without them we will still be stagnant and at a slow rate of growth.

Division of Labor In order to answer the question of scarcity, we need to bring in a couple more basic ideas. The first of these shall be Division of Labor. Currently, Economic Historians are debating on whether or not Division of Labor came first or the usage of money. Both play a crucial role into how people answer scarcity and how the answers will be developed. So what is Division of Labor? Division of Labor is the concentration of large numbers of workers within very large production units allowed the process of production to be broken down into a series of tasks. By breaking this down a major project into smaller tasks, one person can perfect their part of production and make the entire process more efficient. This process also starts to make more products, better products, and creates less waste. These benefits allow the owner/capitalist/lord to invest less time and money into the economy, but get a bigger return. A crucial part that most economists and students fail to realize is that this process is very de-humanizing and causes dissatisfaction. At a certain point, workers will not be as productive or efficient. You must find a balancing point otherwise you are not getting the most out of your workforce. The workers themselves play a role. If you have workers who are not as productive or efficient as your neighbor, then slowly your neighbor will start to take over and force you out of business. Bringing this into CN is both obvious and hidden. The most obvious part is the breakdown of all alliances. Every alliance has some sort of power hierarchy. A leader and co-leader is supported by Ministers/Secretaries of specific areas which are then supported by staff under them. The entire alliance is balanced around an obvious structure that lets people enter into an area in which they have or gain a specialty. The hidden part comes from the power structure. Depending on the competency, activity, and knowledge of the structure, the alliance will be forced down a certain path. This path is not an FA path or ones that we are common with. It is a path of success and failure. If an alliance has leaders who are incompetent, inactive, lack of knowledge, or a combination, will cause that alliance to start to fail. This rate of failure is dependent on how many leaders within the alliance hold the above characteristics. This idea is shown throughout the history of CN. As a community, we have always had alliances moving around, some faster than others. Sure this is due to a number of things, but the leaders of the alliance play the most crucial and important factor. Alliances who have leaders that are competent, active, knowledgeable, or a combination, tend to speed up the rankings. While alliances with the other type of leaders tend to fall fast. Now we can combine both setups and infer that alliances with more leaders with the favorable characteristics will tend to steadily increase in rank until the weakness is shown then resolved by said alliance. Division of Labor is both an obvious and hidden characteristic of CN. The current power structure of alliances is the most obvious of the game and this idea. The hidden part comes from the leaders themselves. Alliances will succeed or fail due to the competency, activity, and knowledge of their leaders. Combining the obvious and hidden factors force alliances to act, react, and plan for their path.

Before I go into some material, please be aware that all laws have been challenged due to the Great Recession. The entire field of economics is now trying to fix the problems and figure out some problems in our formulas. In all my entries, I will try to make law into "law" in order to represent the current situation in the field of economics. Thank you and enjoy! Law of Scarcity The Law of Scarcity is the most basic and yet most crucial “law” in economic theory. This “law” is the basis for all current and past economic systems. Without this “law”, economics would have remained a philosophical debate instead of forming into a science and math heavy field of study. So what exactly is this law? Human beings have unlimited wants, but a limited amount of resources to meet their desired wants. This is meant to be very broad and overlapping definition. Leaving this room for movement allows economists to answer this basic question with many different ideas and formulas. Applying this to CN seems like a no brainer. We all want to be like Cuba and Hime. Massive nations, enormous amounts of money, and a lot of power. However, we are limited by the coding of the game and the time it takes to grow our nations. The most limiting factor is actually the time required. It takes years of tech deals, rebuilding, and billions of dollars to get anywhere near 100,000 NS, let alone 600,000 or even 800,000 NS. Sure we could limit the rebuilding by becoming a neutral, but even then you still are limited by time. Without the drive to log in every day for several years at a time, your nation will never reach your ultimate desire. However, Cuba and Hime are limited by the same resources that smaller nations face. Their desires are still unlimited and are ultimately limited by time and the coding of the game. I will not touch the issues that people have raised with code and formulas. Instead, I will touch on how they limit us. We all have to follow a set code and a set series of formulas. These formulas that allow the game to exist actually bring about a limitation. We all must follow these formulas! We cannot change these formulas. This limitation is purely incidental, but it in fact limits our ability to reach our desires. This basic idea of scarcity is easily applied to CN. In the Economics departments of CN, we try to take the limitations we are given and exploit them. This idea of exploitation is not one we all think about. Exploitation is taking the laws and theories we are given and try to get the most out of them. Without this basic idea of scarcity and the reaction of exploitation, CN would have never experienced the growth is has since its creation.

My plan is to first start with some basics and then take on more advance theories and laws. Game Theory is one of those difficult theories that gets annoying once you add more than 3 or 4 games back to back.

Welcome to my humble little blog. Before I start actually going around and posting what I want to do with this blog, I figured I would come over and introduce myself. I'm Karl Peters and I am the Minister of Economics for R&R. I have been in and out of the game since '07, traveled many alliances, and held different positions from time to time. I have had this current nation for a year and a half, and been with the Ampersand for the entire time. Do I have any interesting stories? Of course, but those are for me and not the world. Outside of CN, I currently am a Junior at my local university. My major is in History and a minor in Economic Policy Analysis. My main focus is around the Modern European Economies and how they have influenced history and how they might influence future events. The base of my economic thought is a mix of Keynesian and Political Economics. Besides all of this boring stuff, I work full time as a vendor for Coca-Cola and part time as a basketball coach for my local town. With that basic intro of myself, you might be asking what am I doing here? I would like to bring my classwork and apply it directly to the current set up of CN. That means a bunch of economic theory and "laws" being applied to programs and basic ideas that we have been using for years. Sounds quite boring doesn't it. Hopefully not! I would like to use this blog to not just apply the ideas that I have been learning, but be able to practice my writing and logical thinking in a written format. When will my first application be up? I am aiming to release my first entry by Saturday, but it could be up as early as tomorrow. All depends on how much I want to ignore my school work. Thanks for sticking around! I hope you all will stay and enjoy this with me. ~KP

Drank a crap ton of NyQuil to sleep but that didn't work

I can now drink milk from a bag while watching ASR on twitter?! My life is complete!

R&R (+1.16) LoSS (+0.99) Sorry mate. :awesome:

Genius just gave all of CN a CB to declare war!!!

R&R (+0.54) And we are back! :ehm: