ARCADIA

English version (20th century midwestern American, net-accessible, alphabetic with images, alphabetical order, perspective-set:moderate liberal) and all other versions ©2221 ARCADI.

Explanation of code used.

Entries

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Pace

Pacific Mining Union

Pakistan

Palestine

Pan-African Industries

Pandora

PanMedia

Paraguay

Penglai

Peoples' Manufacturing

Perlak

Persia

Peru

Petit-Sol

Petit-Terre (pln)

Petronas

Philippines

Phobos

Pioneer

Pluto

Poland

Portugal

Potsdam

Principe

Prithvi

Privateering (gen)

The license to equip a vessel with military weapons, a privateering license, is almost always subject to strict requirements:

• the vessel so equipped may never stray further than a specified distance from the space of the sphere granting it;
• the vessel must report within a certain number of days when called upon;
• A certain percentage of carrying capacity (cargo, data or passengers) must be made available to the granting government at a discount or even for free;
• the vessel must equip all such systems with identification friend-or-foe systems; and
• failsafe destructs which can be operated only by high-level governmental officers must also be equipped

Historically, privateering began with the ISC's rebellion against the LSN.   Although the rebellion was successful, one of the ISC's admirals rebelled in turn against the ISC and began the Fuxing War.  This sapped the ISC's military resources and required various stop-gap measures.  One of these was privateering.  The idea was originally that a decentralized, merchant-based fleet would be less likely to rebel, and in the short term, it was (the admiral, Ding Huilong, was eventually defeated).  However, after the war, reining in the privateers proved more difficult than was originally imagined.  A few were enticed with offers of large sums of money or profitable trade allowances in exchange for dismantling their weapons.  Most, though, refused, and simply carried on as before.

Since this time, governments have tended to grant privateering licenses only in times of dire need, or only with extremely strict requirements.  The recent Tripod War was such a time of dire need, and pirate activity has increased a great deal since.

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Professions (gen)

• Biofuel farmers:  Responsible for growing and maintaining the equipment which produces biofuel, this profession can be pure drudgery but is nonetheless a necessary one.
• Bounty hunters:  Interstellar law is often hazy, and interstellar extradition treaties are rarely enforceable or enforced, so bounty hunters and skip tracers have their hands full.
• Corporate-national relations specialists:  Effectively the ambassadors between corps and nation-states.
• Corpsec: Corporate security in the 23rd century is significantly different from its 20th century counterpart; modern corporate armies are often just that -- full armies -- and have every variety of soldier, from infotage expert to motor-pool maintenance worker to cook.
• Couriers:  Though information has become easier and easier to carry -- a microscopic memory chip can easily contain immense, valuable files -- actually transporting such information securely from place to place has become quite difficult, especially when distances are interstellar; couriers must also transport sensitive materials from place to place.
• Fashion consultants:  Where the fashion consultant of the 20th century had a somewhat extraneous usefulness, the consultant of the 23rd century is nearly indispensable;  fashions vary vastly between systems, and knowing the local taboos and trends is a necessity for many interstellar travellers.
• Fusion monitor:  Fusion drives account for a large part of intersystem spaceflight, creating large amounts of radiation.  Although it is impossible to elminate all radiation from the spacelanes, the exact levels created are routinely monitored by concerned governments, and violators are fined or worse.
• Government administration consultant:  Professional governmental administrators, hired to provide standard government services with much higher efficiency
• Immigrant teachers:  Knowledge of skills and arts is not easily recorded, and thus those who have something to teach may find their abilities called for until the students run out, at which point they move on
• Infobrokers: Those who buy and sell information as a pure commodity.
• Infodrone:  It is quite easy to immerse oneself in the vast sea of information available, and there are those who find ways to make the consumption of information profitable; they are like couch potatoes gone pro.  Infodrones are also sometimes called infoprotatoes.
• Infoflow managers:  A combination of spin doctor and infotage expert, the modern infoflow manager works to restrict the flow of information to exactly those pieces which the employer desires.
• Ombudspeople:  In the huge corps, the position of ombudsperson rises to the status of public defender or attorney general
• Nanoimmunologists:  These medical-cyberneticists work to combat malignanopathy and other diseases arising from dangerous nanotech; this field requires constant study to stay on top of developments, positive and negative.
• Rapid pattern shop programmer:  Setting a rapid pattern shop to begin a production run is a difficult and specialized job.
• Resettlement brokers:  While real estate agents assist people in moving from place to place within a city or perhaps within a country, resettlement brokers help those who wish to move off-world, either intrasystem or intersystem.
• Technical metabolist/Technical nutritionists: These people work to make ensure the proper fuelling and nutrition of biotech.
• Traffic designer/Commerce engineers:  Those who design automated traffic grids and keep them maintained on a day-to-day basis.

Prostitutes' War

Provence

Psychology (gen)

The exact workings of the mind have long since been known to be more complicated and more mysterious than most models can hope to cope with.  Many scientists have even speculated that, at its root, each human mind is as complicated as the entire rest of the universe.  However, the modelling abilities of humans have increased greatly with the growth in infotech, up to the point where incredibly complex systems can now be modelled quite accurately (though only with the help of info systems).  The workings of memory, emotional response, learning and several other key brain functions are now quite well understood.

One of the largest leaps over 20th century understanding is the fact that most known mental illnesses are now treatable.  This includes depression, mild schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder and many others.  Most are treated with a combination of biotech and direct neural interfacing, mostly consisting of drugs of various sorts.  The treatment of mental illnesses is often compared to the editing or proofreading of a document;  once the errors have been removed, the document's original beauty can shine through.  Most humans have been treated for one or another mental illness at some point, though exactly how many is a matter of some debate;  it is considered a person's right, throughout most of known space, that their psychological records be held secret.

To continue the editing metaphor, though, such correction can often blur the original text.  Should small errors be allowed to stand, so as to highlight the person's personality?  Do not texts which are throughly edited begin to look alike?  And in the case of documents which are corrupted beyond recognition (to continue the metaphor), what can or should the editor do?

In extreme cases, patients may in fact be subjected to Artificial Intelligence Personality-Sampling (AIPS), a procedure which effectively creates a new personality, almost from scratch, from a complicated array of interviews and direct sampling.  AIPS cannot recreate a complete personality, however; at best, those who receive such treatment will resemble the best computer AI's (which, to be fair, are often extremely difficult to tell from real human intelligences).  Thus, many criminal defense experts decry this as simply being a new form of capital punishment.  Nonetheless, most criminals choose AIPS over death when given the choice.

A recent development in the field of psychology has been the understanding of the physical basis of feelings of subjectivity and objectivity come from (though not why they arise).  Many mental illnesses which result in violence are actually, goes a new theory, derived from an inability to sympathize with others.  Thus, this new breakthrough apparently allows scientists to cure violent behaviors insofar as they are derived from excessive subjectivity or objectivity.  A new drug, GoldenRule, has been created which will hopefully use this understanding to introduce compassion.  However, its developers caution that excessive or incautious use may result in flattening of affect, or other debilitating mental illnesses.

Pure Land, the (nat: pwr 2/1/6)

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