Raise Your Expectations

Day 1,412, 15:48 • Published in Ireland Ireland • by Sweet Drinker
Ask not what your country can do for you,
ask what you can do for your country. - JFK

Nah mate, you want the job,
I wanna know what your government can do for this country! - Sw33t 😉

Hello I'm Sweet Drinker, and from what I can tell, I've been the Minister of Finance throughout the worst economic period in eIrish history.
That's a really sucky thing for me to have to say, but it's the truth 🙁
I watched alongside nearly every other nation's MoF's powerlessly (but not helplessly) as the game changes repeatedly rocked the efinancial world. Only a few 'super-nations' fared any better than us.

I had such high hopes when I first took the post:
currency stability,
reward schemes,
land development schemes,
many the sort of things you can see the British MoF conducting regularly.

Instead we got:
plunged into a 1/2yr war (with no sign of ending),
long periods with little to no resources whatsoever,
the eworld economy collapsing,
an MPP stack that grew from 3 (which our tax revenue covered) to 11 (which keeps us on the map),
a new resource system that put us at a disadvantage

I'm known as a 'finance guy' and a 'numbers guy' and those are fair assessments. But the finance numbers are not the most important ones. Demographic ones are.

Two new citizens spawned in eIreland today, days with just 1 aren't uncommon.
Only 144 Irish citizens turned out to vote in the last election
We use voter turnouts and MU memberships to gauge the 'health' of a population. 144/525 aren't good numbers. Your doctor makes you sit down before telling you numbers like that!
You could easily get the impression Ireland isn't the best place to e-live from figures like those. No what I'm saying?

It's pretty obvious why some ppl might choose not to live here. Compare our realities with another random country. Oh, let's say...
The frakkin Brits:

They have a larger RL userbase to spawn NC's from. Their larger population =
more military might,
more economic activity (tax revenue),
more 'reward gold' in their system,
insulation from PTO threats,
a lower fee/citizen ratio (their MPP's & RW's cost proportionately less)

They have a much better natural resource bonuses package also. 3Wpn,2Food resources (+ often dining on our fruit) vs our 1Wpn,2Food resource allowance. For Britain this means:
yet more military might from increased supply,
yet more economic activity (more taxes),
a tax surplus that allows them to help citizens develop... creating STILL MORE military might and MORE revenue.

Britain has a much larger principle, and receives a better rate of return against it.

The problem isn't simply that we're 1/4 the UK's size. It's that we grow proportionately weaker to them.
Combine that with the fact with our current government model we will have to raise taxes substantially in the hopes of covering our MPP fees or face being wiped on a more permanent basis.
It paints a very grim future for our little eIrish community.

If at this point you're saying 'tell me something I don't know', or just sinking into a severe e-depression, here's the interesting part: It doesn't really have to be like this.

"The Chinese use two brushstrokes for 'crisis' one is the symbol for 'danger', the other 'opportunity'." (I'm crowbarring in this lesser known JFK quote cause it felt wrong crossing out his other quote)

Earlier I said I was powerless as Minister of Finance to stop eIreland being part of the world meltdown, but not helpless. I haven't just been logging into the Bank once a day to see if it received any mail (it didn't). I've been doing lots of eHomework, experimenting, testing. Creating a system to compensate for our disadvantages.

While our resource allowance was being set (dial turned to 'crap') many changes have also been made to the game's mechanics. These have caused 'imbalances' to appear in the world. 'Discrepancies', 'anomalies', you might call them 'flaws'.
I call them opportunity. And by constantly working on them we can make quite an impact on a community as small as ours.

Will it be as good as having 10k citizens and full resource bonuses? Ofc not. But overall it will create strategic advantages for eIrish citizens and MU members. A reason to take/keep Irish citizenship. The relative strength and progression to defend our territories. And the future potential to occupy an extra resource successfully.



In my next article (using lots of illustrations, no more tl;dr I promise!)
I'm going to begin showing you how this will be possible

Vote Sweet Drinker on the 5th!

Oh and cause it seems like this article needs moar statistics. I'm posting one of my favourite eIrish stats:

If there's only 144 Irish citizens active enough to vote, and we have 35 citizenship passes this month. It is possible to make the active population of eIreland grow 24.3% in 1 month! That's much better than a baby boom, that's a soldier boom! Using the citizenship passes intelligently and making eIreland just too rewarding to leave are the keys to unlocking that potential.