Tiger is also much smarter than the median Evalite child, and almost as smart as the median Evalite adult, at least on paper. She's not going to say that where an adult might hear her, though. They might then insist on treating her like one.

Like many ten-year-olds, realising they have only two more years of this before a court could reasonably decide to treat them as an adolescent over their own objections, Tiger wants to make the most of it.

This could well be her last chance to safely answer some big questions about herself. Could she make it as a criminal? Are adults really that smart? Are society's defences against malicious actors really strong enough to stop her, or just strong enough to stop other, less clever children?

There have been some efforts by more civilised factions to have "Tiger", along with a few dozen others, removed from the long list of around eleven thousand suggested first names for children. They argue this based on small but firm statistical evidence that naming a child such things very slightly increases their tendency towards violent misadventure. Their efforts have been primarily opposed by:

- People who have one of the names they're disparaging.

- People who have ever had a mild annoyance caused by meeting someone else with the same name and therefore think the list is too short already.

- People who subscribe to one of several alternative interpretations of the data where it's less clear that removing the names from the list will improve things and not just make the next few dozen edgiest names on the list the new "Tiger"s of the world.

- And the sub-factions of the pro-crime factions who agree with their interpretation of the data and are therefore trying to bring back even more cool names already removed, like "Blade" and "Assassin".

To be clear, they're not trying to force anyone to name their kids anything. They're just trying to get it removed from the list that normal, well-intentioned parents randomly draw from when naming a child. Such parents trust the government to have already filtered all the words that provoke bullying or that sound silly in common contexts off of the list. Names that make a child slightly more prone to violence oughtn't be on there, either.

They've already removed it from their own political faction suggested lists, but it doesn't work. Nobody uses those because naming your child off a list suggested by a particular political faction would be arbitrarily imposing your own beliefs on a new person's personal identity until they come of age and probably just change it anyway. The overwhelming majority of parents wouldn't want to do that and would rather just draw straws off the same list of supposedly safe names that everybody else uses already.

And we're supposed to believe these "pro-crime" factions are more politically influential than, say, anti-vegetable factions?

Yes?

The crime factions have a Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement of just committing a lot of crimes themselves. The anti-vegetable factions usually won't resort to arson about it. Anyway, you should be saving second-order objections until the end. They're not necessarily dispositive.

Thus was organised a conspiratorial meeting between Tiger, Toffee, and Bun, who had resolved to attempt an armed bank robbery before any of them turned twelve.

Adding more members to a conspiracy is always risky. They could dob the others in for a reward and ruin the whole scheme, but then none of them would get to learn if they could theoretically rob a bank, and to her team that didn't seem worth it. Having fewer would make the challenge harder than it already was, but she thought she could trust these two.

Waiting too close to the end of one's childhood is also risky. It was known that either the Guard would watch you closer as your twelfth birthday approached, or that they pretended they'd do that in a way that wouldn't trick a smart girl like Tiger but could easily scare some of her would-be co-conspirators into defecting. They'd be better off doing it sooner rather than later, and not dally about it and risk creating more opportunities for feet to get cold.

Ordinarily, armed bank robbery would have a lot of negative side effects and be very negative-sum overall.

A large amount of money might also change hands, but that part at least is only zero-sum. Call it the zero-sum component of the bank robbery. With respect to that component, society is in strict competition with bank robbers and no hope of peaceful trade exists.

With respect to all other components: The death or risk of death of bank employees, civilians, guards, and the robbers themselves, the destruction of property, and anything else considered bad, the robbers are harming society in a way they don't benefit from and don't particularly intend. There is a possibility of reducing the harm by coordinating in advance so long as everyone is very honourable about it. Call that the negative-sum component of the bank robbery, the part that is solely a harm.

Thus, the government creates a Commission for Harm-Reduction of Crime, called just the Harms Commission for short. It allows the pro-crime political factions oversight of that Commission, though obviously all of the actual employees are extremely honest and trustworthy people, and when children are approaching an age when it might start to be relevant it ensures representatives have an opportunity to meet with a lecture hall full of kids at a time and explain what they should do if they're thinking of being evil themselves.

It is difficult to convince children that the government is serious about this kind of thing. Of course the government is serious about this kind of thing.

Four separate times a criminal conspiracy has independently built a working nuclear weapon, and given the Commission a detailed plan for how they could obtain the equivalent of several hundred worker-lifetimes of value by detonating it. The Commission just gave them the money to buy the nukes off of them, it's not going to risk actual harm.

For more pedestrian criminal activity, you can at least expect to get to do a re-enactment. This representative, for example, once forced a senior minister into retirement by successfully planting a fake bomb in his hotel room.

I built a real one first, and then the commission agreed to swap it out for one that wouldn't actually get anybody hurt. I still have no idea who paid me to do that. The guard still hasn't managed to prove it was me who did it, which is why I’m out free. Obviously this conversation isn't admissible proof, the Harms Commission asked me to come here and talk to all of you, so it's protected.

There's no way that nuke thing is true. If it were you wouldn't be allowed to tell us.

I'd only be not allowed to tell you if I found out legally. If I either found out illegally or just correctly guessed I wouldn't have any binding commitments about not telling people, would I?

Are you seriously expecting to increase your credibility by claiming that you might have correctly guessed the information?

I keep forgetting that that argument doesn’t work on children. Adults find it persuasive all the time. There's no fundamental reason I couldn't have just correctly guessed it.

What you should do, they'll explain, is pre-register your schemes with the Commission, before you do anything. Then, the commission can figure all the harms that would result, if you did that as described, and what your likely sentence would be if caught, and suggest ways you could work together and make it not as bad. In exchange they can offer a significantly reduced sentence if caught, and sometimes even direct cash to make working with them worth your time, too.

Not all of this only applies to criminals, there are some socially agreed upon standard practices that affect everyone. For example?

Oh yeah, I'm supposed to tell them about that too.

Now that you're old enough to hopefully understand this sort of stuff, you should also know that, if anyone ever shoots you with a paintball gun while out in public, society expects you to lie on the floor and play dead for ten minutes or until the situation is over. Also you're not allowed to, for example, try to tell the guards where the gunman went, or stop the gunman from grabbing your wallet, or anything like that. If you get personally robbed in any situation like that the Harms Commission will almost always just compensate you later anyway. 

Afterwards, you're prohibited from testifying against anyone about anything prior to when you got shot, if the guy who shot you doesn't want you testifying about it. That sounds weird, but remember that if society didn't agree to that standard, people like me would just shoot witnesses with actual guns and then they still can't testify against us and also they're dead.

If you really strongly don't like the idea of having to do that, you can fill in this form with the Commission and they'll try pretty hard, to the extent it's possible, to make sure that you're not around when crimes are scheduled to happen. From my experience most people think it's pretty fun, though.

As for the bad guys side, if you do a robbery and then shoot a bunch of witnesses with a gun, you'll be charged with robbery and mass murder, and probably spend the rest of your life in a maximum security cell. If you use a paintball gun instead, you're not actually guilty of murder, just robbery, and you can't get more than 10 years in a medium security apartment for only property crimes.

If you don't get caught, which isn't easy but they still can't testify against you and the guard would have spent way more resources hunting an actual murderer, then you get to keep all the profits just like you would've otherwise.

I've personally killed over a hundred witnesses, and since nobody saw me do a crime and lived to tell the tale, I'm still out here free.

Why is everyone letting this moustache-twirling supervillain talk to us kids, exactly?

Many political factions convincingly demonstrated that they could, if they wanted, migrate to cities dominated by their own faction members, raise their children in a culture of their own propaganda, and produce faithful faction members out of a supermajority of children. This would then turn politics into a race to the bottom of who could mass-produce the most brainwashed children to control elections, until a faction got a majority and could convincingly demonstrate it could take over the world by force if everyone else didn't just capitulate first.

Since most factions would prefer to avoid that race to the bottom, it was compromised that all factions would forfeit the right to do that, or else be ganged up on by everyone else.

The compromise agreed is that all children get exposure to representatives of all political factions, mostly in proportion to voter support and with relatively few other constraints.

Some people vote for the crime faction, so they get a turn at trying to brainwash children into their ideology, too. If you stop applying the rules of fairness to people just because you don't like them, you were never really applying the rule of fairness in the first place.

Wouldn't a supermajority of factions at least be willing to gang up on the faction explicitly in favour of crime?

If they'd be going to do that, the sort of people in favour of crime would stop calling themselves a "political faction", and start just shooting everyone they didn't like. Who's to say who'd be left standing at the end of that, the guys who believe in following the rules, or the guys who have repeatedly made nuclear weapons in their own basements?

If you stop applying the rules of fairness to people just because you don't like them, you get to play out the rules of nature, instead.

Tiger will, on behalf of her conspiracy, turn over their plans.

If you do this with an actual gun, it'll count as lethal violence and they're not just going to release you when you start claiming to not be a child anymore.

Actual murder gets taken very seriously.

But if, hypothetically, I did it with a paintball gun?

We feel you're not acting in accordance with the spirit of harm-reduction, if you were never willing to do the non-harm-reduced version of your own crimes. It seems unlikely that you'd still be planning to do this if you didn't know you could bargain away having to do any actual violence, and remove any risk of real consequences at the same time and just get it all suppressed at adolescence.

That's an interesting theory you've got there. Maybe you're really confident in it. Maybe you're 99.5% certain. If that were the case, by refusing to bargain, you'd expect to be stopping 199 robberies, and causing 1 mass murder.

Do you think that's worth it?

… If we went along with this, would you later be willing to consent to what you've said here being used as evidence in parliament for lowering the minimum age at which the courts will start treating people as adults against their will?

Objection! That’s corruption. The Harms department guy is using his public office to create evidence that supports his political faction. If public office powers are going to be used in that way, we’d have to ensure they were fairly split between factions too, and apparently one of the factions is pro-crime so that’d be a nightmare.

Objection Sustained. That last guy shall be thrown into a pit of angry lions for misconduct.

Anyway:

... I've been led to believe that nothing I say to you can be used as evidence for anything.

Not without your permission, no. We wouldn't dream of anything you say here being used as evidence of your guilt, nor as evidence of anything else without your consent. It can totally be used as evidence of your innocence, if you're somehow accused of something that the Harms Commission knows you didn't do.

... huh.

Sure.

Anyway, if that's all agreeable, I'd also like to pre-register this other thing too, and I've been led to believe that even though you can't say anything that would help me, you can provide legal advice about whether or not certain things are crimes or whether certain legal arguments would work?

Yes, we are also lawyers. We can, technically, give that sort of legal advice.
Strictly so long as none of it is helpful.

The first actually hard part is getting a firearm.

You'd think nobody would be willing to sell guns to children. It's a pretty law-abiding society, mostly.

Earlier:

Here's proof we can flood the black markets with cheap handguns, if we want to. Here's how hard it'd be for people to buy those guns. Here's how much profit we expect we can make before you found our secret factory.

How about you try flooding the markets with paintball guns instead, and we use that as a baseline for how many sales you could've gotten before the guards stop you?

Objection! They're only interested in sales-revenue, right? So the Harms Commission would be doing a way better job if people didn't even get paintball guns out of it, and they just bought out their supplies until the guards caught them.

Maybe society thought about paying them for that outcome, and maybe my friends and I offered to pay them even more not to do that?

There's no way you could possibly outbid the rest of society.

Good Objection! If there’s time we’ll come back to it.

Sure, we can do that instead.

We'd also like to sell you some advice about how to stop the next dozen conspiracies doing the same thing.

They track them down in six weeks.

Everybody who was willing to put in the effort in any of these eleven cities has an illegal paintball gun now. Everyone at the hidden factory was a patsy. You've got no idea where the real mastermind is. So long suckers.

Tiger's conspiracy has two paintball guns, between the three of them.

It's plenty.

The third task was to pick the bank. The closest and most robbed bank in the city was on the corner of 3rd and 5th, because it was next to their middle school.

Like any customer facing market, several different financial service providers competed on price and service within the same building, who can accept and distribute physical tokens to those wanting to make withdrawals and deposits to their accounts. While the marketplace is regulated to the point that goods are almost standardised, a healthy competition of providers can exist on the other side of that marketplace, competing at any moment in time for who can offer account holders the most interest.

Government services, such as the stipend paid to children, could be accessed through an account from a provider of your choice, but physical token withdrawals still mostly had to be made in person. Adults mostly made large purchases online and only used physical tokens for smaller goods and incidentals, but children mostly used their money in token-form more locally.

The customers for a bank mostly consisted of children wanting tokens to buy goods from nearby retailers, and the retailers themselves returning the tokens as a bank deposit at the end of each day. Rarely would the tokens move further than that unless a child decided to go on a vacation.

One of the least robbed banks was six blocks from the water park, prime vacation destination for many children across the city, because children wouldn't think of ruining their time off by getting arrested, and they'd have to have smuggled in the paintball gun in advance.

This seemed foolish to Tiger, who believed in planning further ahead than that, and because it had the second most important property of a robbery target: a crowd of similar looking children to disappear into afterwards.

Rooms adjacent to the water park could be rented easily, and it would not be suspicious for a child to do so, nor could the Guard search you or your room without first offering to bet at least a thousand tokens against you that they'd find something incriminating.

Unfortunately, the nearest guard station sat directly between the two, which had a chilling effect on nearby children considering crimes and made escape harder.

Phase 1 begins with their mutual friend Search opening a small stall, just opposite the bank, selling masks with custom acrylic painted art on them at below the cost of production. This immediately attracts the guards attention, but Search says "I have no particular knowledge of a crime being planned involving my stall being here". This wouldn't work because no one they know has ever successfully lied to a guard, but it's in fact true. They haven't told Search anything and she's not very smart.

The stall is there every afternoon for 3 days before phase 2. The Guards will not be able to predict this (despite their nigh absolute predictive ability over the supposedly unpredictable elements of every other child’s scheme to rob a bank) because how long to wait was chosen by a die. While the conspiracy was watching them, the guards seemed to stop watching Search and go back to their station after day 1, and weren't doing anything weird on day 3.

Phase 2 begins with Tiger telling children near the bank that there's a secret surprise later for anyone who buys and wears a mask. Nobody would believe it isn't some salesman's confidence trick except that the masks are high quality, nicely painted, and very cheap, so many of the children decide to get one and wear it around.

Also it's obviously part of some cleverness and they really want to be in the in-group, but if anyone asks they'll say the first thing instead.

Phase 3 takes effect when half the guards are called away to a commotion at the water park. This was instigated by Toffee, who has been encouraging people all week in the belief the water turns green if you pee in it, and then has spent the morning slipping dissolving green dye tablets into people's pockets. The ability to predict the anti-social behaviour of children is not unique to guards, and this has caused some anger and impoliteness.

Phase 4 begins as soon as the guards reach the park entry.

It consists of Tiger, the supposed mastermind, attacking the bank by herself, wearing a mask and carrying her smuggled weapon. Her aim isn't ideal, but the bank tellers don't try very hard to dodge and are lying on the ground in under a minute. She obtains the keys and opens the token box while the assorted children, teenagers, and a few adults, watch in stunned, excited, and bemused silence, respectively.

She takes the entire pile of tokens.

"Hey everyone", she begins. "I've got all these tokens, you can tell they're mine by the fact I'm holding them. I'm willing to pay a 100 to anyone who intends to wear a mask and say 'I might be a bank robber' near a guard. Masks can be bought across the street. Who’s interested?"

Her plan is to recruit everyone here as distractions, without her last-minute co-conspirators technically breaking the law.

Tokens are fungible. It says so in the law. That means all tokens are the same. There can't be a law that says "You can't knowingly buy stolen tokens" because that would mean there were two kinds of tokens, knowingly-stolen and not-knowingly-stolen. There are not two kinds of tokens.

Even if there was a law that said that, you could just throw one normal token in the bag and mix it around, and now none of the tokens would be knowingly stolen anymore, would they?

The only attribute of a token is who owns it, and you're allowed to enter into contracts with anyone holding a token on the assumption they own it, because otherwise you'd never be able to enter into a contract with anyone ever.

Obviously it's dumb to have a law that lets you assume things that aren't true. There's gotta be some way to turn that into a pump for infinite money or infinitely improbable beliefs or something.

Can't the law just say that you can only trade tokens if it's more likely than not that it's not stolen?

He pulls a token out of his pocket.

"How likely is it that this token is stolen?"

Objection withdrawn.

The other children aren't as confident in their understanding of rather complex legal details as Tiger is. She's spent prep time diligently checking everything.

The adult customers, however, think only for a moment about the many complex interlocking rules that build up their society, and decide individually but with a unanimous symmetry that the offer is technically legal and profitable in expectation. They look at each other, and nod.

They take a 100 token each from her pile, and head across the street to buy a mask for much less than that. The teenagers and children, having it be confirmed as a good idea by the older ones who everyone says are so much smarter, eagerly copy them.

How could that possibly be legal? They're helping criminals escape.

And why would they want to help a criminal escape, anyway? Sure they get some tokens out of it, but by choosing like that they're causing the bank robbery to happen in the first place, and any damages will be their problem in taxes or bank fees or something. They're only stealing from themselves.

Maybe they have fond memories of their own childhood mischiefs? Maybe the cost is going to end up imposed on everyone equally, but the benefits only accrue to the people in the room at that moment, which they know includes them?

I don't claim to understand how adults think but I've heard them talk about complicated stuff a lot and that definitely isn't how adults think.

It's legal because every step is legal. Being paid to do legal things is legal. Wearing a mask is legal. Saying true things to a guard is legal.

You can't make "Helping criminals escape" illegal because everyone is doing that all the time. Just by standing around in the street you're creating a crowd that might help a criminal escape. Just by existing you’re making the haystack slightly bigger that the guard must search through to find bad guys. Criminal laws should be discrete choices, with as little vague unpredictable line-drawing as possible.

Eval wants it to be possible to know in advance if something is a criminal act. Acts with mere civil harms can be compensated fairly afterwards, but criminal law should be solvable with a computer, ideally. Eval doesn't quite have that, yet, but it's trying, and it's not going to make a criminal law that depends on distant contextual considerations if it can possibly avoid it.

Hey wait a second, this is all the Harm Commission’s fault.

They're willing to participate in some harmless childhood shenanigans, but if she'd been using an actual gun and had actually murdered a bank teller, there's no way random adults would want to help her escape by making themselves into a distraction.

The non-harm-reduced version of her plan was doomed all along.

Adults don't think that way?

If you see someone run into a bank and rob it with an actual gun, actually killing someone in the process, it should seem immediately obvious that you're almost certainly inside a counterfactual under consideration by the Harms Commission.

You should act to control how you'd want that counterfactual to go, including by how it'll affect the Harms Commission's decision, which is very likely the only thing it'll affect and therefore the only thing you need to consider.

But then it's still the Harms Commission’s fault!

If they weren't going around making counterfactuals that make crime less bad in reality, adults wouldn't be so willing to choose to decide in ways that make it more easy to commit them.

If the Harms Commission wasn't going around making counterfactuals that make crime less bad in reality, all of you would be dead by now, so it wouldn't matter.

I mentioned a while ago that a few cities have been counterfactually nuked. I never mentioned which ones.

Abject Horror.

The hardest part of any crime is getting away with it afterwards.

Search didn't have enough information to infer a crime was being planned in advance, but she's not so dumb that she won't be able to figure out which of her friends talked her into doing this afterwards.

Tiger, hauling her remaining bag of tokens, runs back across the street and shoots her dead on the spot.

People outside who weren’t around to witness the bank robbery itself will start running and/or screaming, according to their personal preferences.

Search being nominally dead will not stop any of the new recruits from buying masks: there is a sign that says how much masks cost, and Search never retracted the offer, so the customers just put money on the table, take one, and leave.

A more opportunistic and less careful masked child, almost at their eleventh birthday and therefore lacking much disincentive, takes the undefended sales money off the table to run away with.

This whole "all crimes forgiven at an arbitrary line" thing is creating terrible incentives. Couldn't there just be a rolling period of 1 year or something, so that there's always at least some consequences?

No you fool don't say that if he can trick us into agreeing that's what the rules should be then it'll turn out that's what the rules already are.

The Guards do not actually consider upset children on vacation to be higher priority than a bank's alarm, and quickly sprint back.

The number of children wearing masks and obviously being distractions has grown substantially since the last time they checked, and it's not immediately obvious what's going on enough to bet money that any child in particular is worth arresting.

If you do run into anyone up to some mischief near that alarm, and we are in no way suggesting we think you will, we think you should respond to them with your paintball guns and not your real ones.

Thanks. We'll make a note of that.

Tiger slips past them easily on her way to her final co-conspirator and hopefully victim.

Along the way, she'll bump into Bun, unmasked, who'll quickly swap identical bags with her.

And then Bun darts away.

Somewhere in an anonymous office building, an officer of the Inquisition receives an alert from the bank's alarm, and is on the case.

He does not possess a weapon, or any capacity for violence, but he does have some powers that officers of the Guard do not. The bank's cameras show the mask, clothing, and build of the person responsible. The outdoor cameras show her murder of another child, presumed an accomplice. Masks have been tried before, in many crimes, including masks that match those of others nearby, but the children do not all have identical build, nor identical clothing.

Her shirt and dress are found again moments later by a camera overlooking the water park entrance.

Tiger is stopped at the point of a paintball gun at the entrance to the water park. "Have you recently robbed a bank?" is the only question asked.

Tiger knows that no child ever, as far as she has been able to see, has successfully lied to a member of the Guard. It is common knowledge that they simply categorically know whether you are lying.

It does not occur to her, even at the age of ten, that a reason might be not any power of truth-detection, but simply a policy kept secret by all adults: A Guard will never ask a question of a child to which he does not already know the answer. How can he always know the answer? Because such children are not yet exposed to the many ways of gaining such information available to a Guard, or the earpiece in their helmets with an officer of the Inquisition behind it.

Objection! If that’s true, you wouldn't know it, and wouldn't be allowed to tell us.

Are you objecting to my saying it, or to it being true?

… What?

"I might be a bank robber", attempts Tiger, in her best impression of a child not entirely sure whether the payment taken earlier that day was strictly legal, but for having seen many adults participate in it as well.

Many a child has tried refusing to properly answer, that this might be a loophole in the apparent truth-detection powers of the Guard. The Guard's policy, with such clever children as to attempt this, is to pretend that it in fact works, because it cultivates even more valuable beliefs amongst the children of society, and because a supermajority of adults think it's funny.

"Well then I can't be entirely sure either way, but, ..." the guard pauses, for dramatic effect, "I am hereby willing to offer you the required 1000 token bet that, were I to search your person now, I would find material evidence of a crime."

"I do not accept this bet", mutters Tiger, knowing that at this point she is caught either way, and may as well save herself some of the cost of losing.

And then Toffee, waiting inside the water park and armed with the second paintball gun, shoots them both in the back.

Why's he shooting his ally? They could escape together.

He wants to keep all the money.

But Tiger doesn't even have the money any more. Bun took it.

There's no way he's going to escape after killing a guard.
There's only one way out now.

Zero witnesses.

Toffee shoots himself in the chest, and collapses, pretend dead.

What?

I can't testify against myself later, if I'm already dead.

Then this is still all the Harms Commission’s fault.

There's no way he'd have been willing to kill himself for real with an actual gun, just to stop himself from being forced to testify against himself and his friends, all of whom are also dead.

But we're not all dead, are we?

I'm twenty blocks away in the other direction with all the money. And there's nobody who knows I have it or can prove my involvement.

The guards are gonna look hard enough to figure every suspect is dead, and they won't be able to pick me out of the crowd, making my escape out of the chaos.

After my allies are back alive, I’ll offer to buy potato chips off of them at inflated prices until I’m broke, and then turn myself in and claim adolescence myself.

It's the perfect crime.

You're doing a really good job with the voices.

Thanks!

But don't they still get punished?

When they stop pretending to be dead, I mean.

With all the harm-reduction, Tiger's punishment is reduced to the predictable: confinement in a childhood detention facility until she starts claiming to not be a child any more and can pass a test about it.

She'd normally be expected to repay the costs to the bank, but children can't be in debt, including to the courts, so it gets waved.

The children who took her money get to keep it. The adults who took her money are held to have only broken civil law and forced to give it back, if the guard can be bothered tracking them down.

I would like to start claiming I'm not a child any more. Can you give me the test?

Oh wow I passed that was easy.

Most Evalites would be very understanding if there's anything from your childhood you want to have sealed, at this point.

The thing where I participated in a bank robbery.

Yeah we were expecting that.

There's still no way that's how it works though.

The only thing stopping Toffee testifying is that he shot himself, but you said that he can still testify against people if the person who shot him gives permission. So when he claims maturity to get out of jail they can just ask him, as an adolescent, if he's willing to give himself permission to turn in his friends, and if he doesn’t they can punish him as an adolescent for not un-murdering himself, and he goes back to jail.

No, silly. He can't give himself permission when he's older in the future if he already shot himself in the past.

This story makes no sense for like a dozen different reasons, and almost all of them are the Harms Commission's fault.

He's pretty much gotten to the end, now. He'll take off his moustache.

Well then, you all seem to think I've made some mistakes in how a Harms Commission should behave.

Clearly, you can do it better. Who thinks they can figure out the rest of how the rules need to be structured, if we don't want to end up causing even more problems than we solve?

Since the show's over, Tiger will return to her seat, and join in the discussion.

And if they're not convinced enough, you've got no choice but to prove them wrong by setting off the nuke in real life?

It'd have to be a cost-benefit analysis. They'd weigh up the cost of letting you do a harm-reduction agreement where you might not have done the crime without it, versus the damage of what would happen otherwise if you're not bluffing.

The point of still making you do most of it is because it's some evidence you really would do it? Or because it creates a realistic chance of the guard stopping you, which you’d have to believe is small if you really would have gone through with it otherwise?

And you can have plans that would kill witnesses to stop them testifying, but it shouldn't be allowed to plan to kill your own allies.

Why not? You could kill your own allies to stop them testifying in real life.

No you couldn't. They could all set up hidden journals that would be found if they died, that reveal everyone else in the conspiracy, and if they don't want to get betrayed they'd obviously choose to do that, so you'd expect killing your allies gets your whole plan leaked in retaliation.

What if your allies are dumb and didn't think of that?

But the government could just guarantee that'd never happen by telling everyone in advance that they could do that, which they'd want to do anyway since it disadvantages criminals.

No, it advantages criminals to know that, since then they know they can't easily kill each other and can coordinate better, so the government wouldn’t want to tell them about it.

He hastily puts his moustache back on.

Ha! If the government doesn't want it done, then I'll do it. Hey kids! You can get better coordination in all your criminal conspiracies by leaving dead-man's switches set to leak all your co-conspirators' names in the event that any of them betray you!

Well covering up that knowledge was a doomed endeavour from the start.

Then you definitely shouldn't be allowed to make plans that involve killing your co-conspirators to stop them testifying. It wouldn't ever work.

If it wouldn't ever work, why should we need to stop bad guys doing it? They can just do the plan and then it fails and then they get caught.

No because it does work but only if they're not really getting killed. They're only pretend-dying, so they can just negotiate beforehand to split up the loot afterwards.

So something like, if you betray one of your allies by pretending to kill them, you're not later allowed to give them any of the loot? And because they can't get the loot later it'll never be in their interests, so they'll always choose to set up a dead-man's switch to betray you back?

What happens if they just agree to that, and then secretly give them a share of the loot later anyway? They are criminals, after all.

The Harms Commission knows who they are and is watching, even if the guard haven't solved it yet.

They can dob them in if they do something against the Harms Commission rules, even if they aren’t allowed to dob them in about anything else.

We're allowed to get people arrested for stuff now? But only for things where they break their agreements with us? This is getting pretty confusing, I think I need a diagram.

We only have like two minutes left before next-

DON'T SAY THAT YOU FOOL-

Mwahahaha! Then I've got no choice but to give you all homework!
And as a clever supervillain, I've of course foreseen this very eventuality and prepared worksheets in advance!