Trent Shipley wrote: > > There are two sorts of instability. > > One level of instability is at the level of the lineage. The other is the > stablity of the inter-species political order. Moderate or serious > disparities in wealth curves mean that a lot of lineages die out. Having > lineages die out is not necessarily a problem for Galactic political > stability. In real life lineages are usually short lived--even in lineage > oriented societies like the middle east or in Samoa. Political instability > results when MAJOR lines die out. When the King dies without issues you > get wars of succession. > Ok. But it seems that in the Uplift Universe few lineages die, or there would be more aliances based on ancestry than on religious faith.
> With enough repression *very* repressive regimes can last a long time--but > usually dont. Moderately unfair regimes can be very stable, look at the > wealth curve for the USA. > I don't think there is a correlation between the longevity of a regime and its repressionism. >> But it is _very_ unstable. I claim that the rate should be quite close to >> 1 client : 1 patron, so that _most_ lines would be mantained for long >> periods of time. > > Lets talk in terms of total clients uplifted during a patron's main > sequence existence. In that case a replacement rate of one under total > fairness gives this histogram. > Ok, I get your point without the histograms :-) > > I propose: > So, you would have 35% of _all_ species failing to have a client? That's too much IMHO. > With 200K species the odds of having more than, say, 12 clients would be > vanishingly small. > Unless a species is very long lived, which should _also_ be rare. Alberto Monteiro _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
