"I mean if they'd rather we raise them we can do that, just, orcs are crazy about babies and accordingly more numerous. I - guess they're kind of screwed up compared to our species but they're not worse than death."

"We should meet your orcs. Could be it's a great idea."

"If they don't work we'll take them instead."

Nod.

"Still don't want to lose the nurseries. Be better if nobody who wanted a kid had to decide to give them away."

"I think I might need more context to understand what the nurseries are for."

"If a woman has a baby and can't be with it all the time, she can drop it off at a nursery for several hours and pick it up later. Without them, unmarried mothers, widows, and married women who work and don't have stay-at-home family members have a lot fewer options."

"So the kids get taken care of by...strangers? Is that bad for them?"

"Possibly? They still spend time with their mothers in the evenings. And they get to interact with other kids, and the nurseries can have better toys and equipment than individual people can afford, for kids who are a little bigger."

"Okay. I guess we can also pay to keep those open if they're really the best thing for humans."

"You mostly can't get humans to do the best thing. It's probably better than what they'd have otherwise."

"It's not obvious what the best thing is. If you ask people in Cheliax they'll give you different answers than they'll give you in Osirion. But I don't think it'd help anyone if the nurseries closed."

"The best thing is for kids to be born to at least two married parents and parents not to be trying to do other stuff while the kids are young, unless it's something that gives them more energy to spend on their kids. But - we can keep them open if they're helping."

"That - doesn't sound feasible, given that maybe half of adults at any given point are parents?"

"Why would that make it infeasible?"

"Because - if half of society stops doing anything besides childcare then everyone will starve."

"We will get you guys better crops so that no one ever starves."

" - I would think that someone would still have to grow them? I suppose maybe if the yield were enormous enough you could maybe limit agriculture to slaves?"

"What do you need in order to stop having slaves - no, wait, this is probably going about this in the wrong order or something. Uh. In my world, no one is required to work, and food grows in the wild abundantly enough to feed everybody with minimal effort, and jobs are worked by people who particularly like them, and money is used for allocating inherently scarce things like apartments in the desirable parts of cities and concert tickets, or really expensive things like lightleapers and newly terraformed planets. I think that other societies should also work like this, probably, but I don't know all of the stuff you are doing so I don't know which changes are most urgent - there are slaves? If they were all freed what would happen?"

"People would starve. - I guess we might not starve, but we would starve if the slaves in fact decided to move away and we weren't able to replace them with free people who knew how to farm.

"In our world almost everyone works because if people generally stop working then, most obviously, we will starve, or people's children won't be taken care of, or their houses will fall apart and not be fixed, or there won't be clothes for people to buy. I don't doubt that Hagan could survive in the wild, if he wanted to, but most people can't, and even the ones who could would need to put a lot of effort into not dying. So people have to work, or rely on the charity of people who are attached to them, or else they run out of money and die."

- nod. "So, cheap food will help, and maybe the thing the Valar do in Valinor proper that stops clothing from falling apart and houses from falling apart?"

"I mean, it'd help."

"You don't think it'd be enough?"

"I think that ending both scarcity and the cultural effects of a history of scarcity is probably going to take a lot."

Nod.

"But it would help a lot if we didn't have to worry about food. Although I imagine that Cheliax will be pretty hesitant to end up fully reliant on a foreign power. I suppose if Elizabeth conquers them it might not matter."