An innocent robotics researcher's lab has been demolished, the roboticist is dead, the lab assistants range from dead to traumatized, and a pocket everything on one of the rioters shows a recent text exchange - innocent, but anything could be code.
The greys arrest the other party to the conversation.
Munch munch fried things. "Parents' parents often help with the credit. So do their parents, some places."
"Does this just kind of end up with the government extracting virtually all of everyone's money?"
"Yep. People are torn on whether that's a plus or a minus but it's definitely an effect."
"Consumer goods are really cheap, you won't get a kid faster by cutting corners on that."
" - hmm, say a credit sells for two hundred alien dollars, and a typical salary is 40 alien dollars a year. The difference between living as frugally as possible and living very lavishly is like the difference between living expenses being twelve dollars and being twenty, but most of that is - the best consumer goods as soon as they come out and a nice apartment with no roommates right near where you work and food delivered to your house every day, it's not things like refrigerators. The difference between 'as frugally as possible' and 'frugally, but with refrigerators and new clothes whenever you notice the old ones getting worn' is maybe twelve and fourteen?
And if you're putting the rest of your money towards a credit, that means in one case it takes you seven years and a bit, which means eight because you have to have the money up front and in the other it takes you seven years and a half, which also means eight.
That's not how it is for blues but it's approximately how it is for everyone else."
"In addition to buying the credit you want to have enough money to set your kid up to live comfortably, and while there are people who could afford ten credits they wouldn't be so irresponsible as to have ten blue children, you'd have ten broke blue children who had to work for a living and who no one wanted to marry and without much prospect of grandchildren and people with that impulse mostly drove their families to ruin long ago. So - in this analogy a blue credit is six hundred alien dollars. Our blue has sixteen thousand alien dollars in the bank and makes eight hundred a year in investment returns, and they could live on two hundred a year and buy a credit every spring, but then they have to split the sixteen thousand in the bank among the children somehow. So instead they live on between four hundred and eight hundred and just have two children typically, and someone who tried to live on twenty and saved all the rest would barely, after twenty years, have saved enough to make the portfolio for one more child. Blues who have more children usually found a way to make a lot of money, they weren't frugal with what they had."
"Gosh. I think I am glad not to be colorful, neat though refrigerators sound."
"I think people here are probably happier on average, and definitely will be once you have the internet."
"You're getting my hopes way up about the internet. What if it is disappointing, what then."
"And hopefully with the better sanitation you all will live longer and get more time to enjoy it."
"Here's hoping. Vaccines have been getting much more popular since around the time a stork dropped me, sanitation can probably ride a similar wave."
"Some guy? I don't know, I got all mine when I was a kid and haven't thought about it very much since then except to generally vote 'yes, vaccinate kids'."
"Putting that up for vote is strange to think about - what if lots of people thought that vaccinations were government mind control and voted it down..."
"It hadn't occurred to me as a problem that might exist! But now I'm glad we don't have it!"
"'People are wrong about important science things' is one of the most common concerns about democracy at home. Though I suspect they overstate it."
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