Join the new world

First off, sorry, it’s a couple of days past when I wanted to post this particular one, but what with the Christmas holidays my schedule at work has been changed, and so has my personal life stuff, so this is the first time since Wednesday that I have had the chance to sit down and write for an hour or two. Don’t laugh, the rest of my time recently has been made up of games of Carcassonne and Catan with my fiancé and some friends, so it’s well spent time.

It’s been a fairly good time this past ten days or so here in Canada as we have managed to kick the French and the English off our shores, and we look quite good at defeating the French in a few minutes from capturing Nova Scotia. TemujinBC has had his hand on the wheel this whole time, and so far as I ride along beside him I have not seen anything particularly disturbing to me. I think having met him back in August in real life proved to be a good thing, as I got to meet and know the person behind the persona. When I first met him and was introduced to him as being Tem, the words out of my mouth were “Oh…..you….” no doubt sounding exactly as you would expect them. I am glad so far to see that impressions were just that and meant to be broken.

We have had some problems of late though with our MPP’s. Recently TemujinBC reached out to the world and got us some more interesting and new ones, including Bulgaria, Mexico and Venezuela. We have run into some problems though with these MPP’s. Our MPP’s with Spain and the USA, two of our most powerful allies were just recently broken because of actions by these allies. From my perspective, the biggest problem with this is the loss gold that was spent on the alliances with Spain and the USA, though Tem has said he would repay it if he was specifically asked for it.

In more recent and close to home news, there was apparently an attempt to PTO EPIC, though in the end it turned out to be a fairly minor thing to deal with as Nosyt was handidly elected as the party president. Other parties have claimed it was all a distraction from the realz dealz, but that could be true, or just an attempt at saving face.


My Votes.

17) Tax change: Grain: Income tax from 15% to 10%. One of several votes this go around that had to do with various tax dealings with food and grain. None of this was discussed on the forums in any way. While I support the move to lower income taxes now from 15% across the board down to 11% (what they were before we upped them to 15% to attempt to make up for the thefts by Rolo), that is best done at the very beginning of a new congressional term as everyone has votes to use. Voted no. Motion passed.

1😎 Do you agree to transfer 30000 CAD from the country accounts to National Bank of Canada? Just a few days before this vote we had printed 30k in CAD, this motion was set to move that CAD out of the treasury and put it into the organization which the government uses to do it’s banking, and so turn it into very useful gold for the country to spend on things like MPP’s, battles and further money printings. Voted yes. Motion passed.

19) President of Canada proposed a mutual protection pact with Spain? This really was a no brainer as Spain has been a long time ally of Canada’s and is still one of the more powerful countries out and about in the eworld. Of course this would come to bite us in the butt only a short time later when we had this MPP broken when Spain attacked Venezuela who we were about to get an MPP with. Voted yes. Motion passed.

20) President of Venezuela proposed a mutual protection pact with Canada? TemujinBC has brought a whole slew of new MPP’s into our fold, and this was one of them. As stated just above it turned out to not be that great of a thing for us as we lost our alliance with Spain. I hope we are able to get that alliance with Spain back sooner rather than later. Voted yes. Motion passed.

21) Tax change: Foo😛 Import from 99% to 15%? This was an attempt to even out the import taxes here in Canada. Somewhere in the fray the food import tax was not taken down from the 99% or somewhere it was raised back up to 99%, I honestly don’t know. While I believe in a closed economy, I saw no reason for food to solely be the one product sitting with a 99% so voted in favour of this being lowered. Hopefully we will raise it once again shortly. Voted Yes. Motion passed.

22) Do you agree on the text used by the president to welcome new Citizens in your country?' Dear New Citizen of Canada,

Welcome to Canada, and welcome to The New World! Thank you so much for choosing Canada as your birthplace. My name is TemujinBC, but you can call me TemujinCP for short. I'm so glad you chose this nation. And do you know who else is glad?

Adam Sutler, that's who.

Do you believe in Adam Sutler?

Perhaps you've never given any thought to Adam Sutler, but I'd like to take a moment to talk with you about our great God and Hero. Adam Sutler was 'born' into The New World on Day 161. Almost immediately, the authorities tried to have him arrested. You see, they were afraid of him because his birth was a sign from Admin which signaled a new day for Canada. Almost immediately, Adam Sutler gathered a large gathering of followers (I like to call them Temmings), and faced a great deal of persecution from teh oligarkiezz (ie, the establishment). Adam Sutler gave so much to those around him. His selfless nature and giving spirit endeared him to many. As his popularity grew though, he came to face overwhelming difficulty. His final words to us were "A world at peace, there had to be a sacrifice". Be comforted by these words, dear citizen.

If you have any further questions, I encourage you to explore the great life and legacy of this man. Sincerely,

TemujinBC
Country President

I got no idea where this one came from. I think TemujinBC was wanting to test out the welcome message, as it has been bugged before in the past and make sure it was working. We have been working for quite some time on a new and improved message. The above was not it. Voted No. Motion failed.

23) The President of France demanded a sum of 0 gold from your National Treasury in return to a peace treaty with Canada. Do you agree? Both the UK and France came to us, or we to them, I honestly have no idea how it came about, you would have to ask TemujinBC about the specific details. Anyways, at the end of the day we voted down the motion from France and accepted the terms from the UK, which was a stalemate of sorts. I personally could live with that. Voted No. Motion failed.

24) The President of United Kingdom demanded a sum of 0 gold from your National Treasury in return to a peace treaty with Canada. Do you agree? We chose to accept this one and turn down peace with France. Voted yes. Motion passed.

25) President of Mexico proposed a mutual protection pact with Canada? Another one of those MPP’s that would bite us in the ass. For some reason the US decided to launch an attack into Mexico. I don’t know the details, and it has not been given to us in Congress what the rationale was for it. None the less, we lost our MPP with the USA at the cost of having the Mexican one. Voted yes. Motion passed.

26) Do you agree to transfer 574 GRD from the country accounts to National Bank of Canada? Anyone who has read enough of these by me knows that we slip foreign currency out of the treasury as often as we can. This is one of those motions. Voted yes. Motion passed.

27) Do you agree to transfer 27600 CAD from the country accounts to Canadian National Defense? This was a budget approved request to transfer money to the CAF and the TCO. I think motions like this are one of the things I take the most pride in with regards to the budget. No longer are we scrambling to figure out when to send money, how much has already been sent etc. Now we know when we are over paying, or under paying them, plus when we should be giving it to them. Voted yes. Motion passed.

2😎 Tax change: Foo😛 Import tax from 15% to 20%, Income tax from 15% to 10%? This is one of those food related tax motions I had talked about. Once again, not sure what was hoped to be gained from this as it was not discussed in Congress at all prior to making the motion. It’s not even as though this is done for exp either as we don’t get any for voting or setting out motions. Voted No. Motion failed.

29) Tax change: Foo😛 Import tax from 15% to 5%? See number 28. Voted No. Motion failed.

30) Minimum wage change from 1.2 CAD to 1.5 CAD? No discussion on this topic what so ever. Is there a need to change the minimum wage? Not that I know of, as far as I can see at this moment a brand new player can be making 12.15 CAD a day on day one. That is a huge step up from the 1.45 or whatever I was making when I first started. Life has also gotten even cheaper to sustain in that time too. Voted no. Motion failed.

31) Do you agree on the text used by the president to welcome new Citizens in your country? You can’t see it here as I can’t copy and paste the motion into this document, but it’s a sweet and pretty one, just click the link. We worked quite hard at it, and KronosQ should be singled out for his valiant effort at it. http://www.erepublik.com/en/Canada/law/63248 Voted yes. Motion passed.

32) Do you agree with the proposal to issue 50000 CAD for 250 GOLD? With a new budget now in motion, this was the first item up on the list of things to do. More than half of this CAD is set to be given back to the people of Canada who gave us their gold and were promised a return on their investment, which should be paid back in the next couple of days, about a week ahead of schedule. Voted yes. Motion passed.

33) Do you agree to transfer 25000 CAD from the country accounts to National Bank of Canada? I got home this afternoon with a message from the Prime Minister telling me that the CAD had gone from 0.030 to 0.031 and that it was my duty to fix it. I looked at the CAD we had in the National Bank of Canada (0 at the time) and told him I couldn’t do much until we had money from the printing in hand. To save us 24 hours I put forward the motion to transfer 25k from the treasury to the bank and only send 25k from the printing to the bank instead of the whole 50k. By the time the money reached the bank though the market had already corrected itself, just as I predicted that it would. Oh well. Voted yes. Motion passed.

34) President of Canada proposed a mutual protection pact with Bulgaria? To be honest, I don’t know anything about Bulgaria except that the other members of congress seem to have no problems with signing an MPP with them and that the Prime Minister says it will be a good thing. I grow wary of this though given what happened to our last two dallies in this field. Voted yes. Motion passed.

34) Do you agree to transfer 25000 CAD from the country accounts to National Bank of Canada? This is the follow up 25k I talked about in motion number 33. Voted yes. Motion pending.


Congress.

Budget: Many have screamed and whined and complained and in general made a royal pain when it comes to the budget not showing everything they want it too. As you can no doubt tell by reading this very paper, I believe in transparency. As such, I set out this month to make the budget in an open capacity. In closed door congress when I first posted the budget I stated quite clearly and openly that unless objections were noted and strong, I would be posting the entire budget save for the timeline page in open door congress this time around. No one objected at all, and as such yesterday I posted the budget in open door congress. All of the information in the budget can be found there save for the timeline page, which I have hidden from the public because if it is in the hands of our enemies, then they can indeed use it against us. See the link for a copy of the budget. https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AiqJdLt5DugkdDUtSUc4TkRHYVdlNmwxVk16c0J2bGc&hl=en&authkey=COGk_OgP

Income Tax: Ralph Kline recently put forward in congress a motion to begin discussion on lowering our income taxes here in Canada from 15% across the board (relatively) to 10% across the board. For my two cents I have chimed in that I agree with this sentiment as we have now recovered from the devastating losses we suffered at the hands of Rolo. With our financial situation in a much better place then it was a couple of months ago, I believe that we can now once more lower our income taxes to 11%. This motion has been set in delay though what with the changes the admins have introduced as we now begin discussion on what impact these changes will have on us in general. If the admins do wipe out organizations, it will have quite the impact on the black market, that much I can say.

Welcome Message: A “debate” seems to be going on in congress as we speak about the most recent welcome message. The problems seems to be that the TCO was included in the message along with the CAF. The opposition seems to be saying that their issue is that the TCO is not a national army, and as such has no place in the welcome message. My first though on this topic is, why wasn’t this mentioned a month ago when we were working on this problem? My second thought is what does the TCO not being a part of the national army have to do with not letting them on the private message. I have never been the biggest fan of the TCO myself, and have been a member of the CAF for over a year now and spent several months in the spring and early summer slaving away as a supply officer handing out guns, but come on, seriously? The TCO is a draw and player retaining part of Canada. Surely we can all agree to that? I may despise their lulz, but I would never be so arrogant as to say they do not deserve a place front and center in the principal organizations that make up the active community of this country, which is what the welcome message is about. The nonsense on the forums about them not being controlled by the government, or the need to pick apart my choice of the word “semi-national” is just ridiculous. The attack on the TCO there seems to me simply a political points game that will do nothing more than put a lever between the two camps and drive them apart. Frankly, I think it’s stupid.

Other Stuff.

Not much to say here that I haven’t really said so far. Hrm. I am really quite glad to see that we have managed to unite this proud country once more and made her whole. We also continue to look good in the battle against France. With a little luck in two hours or so we will have fended them off once more.

My time so far as Minister of Finance has been an interesting one here in eCanada, and I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a novel sensation to open up an organization and stare at the 1500 or so gold that I control there. Thankfully, that is all I will ever do for myself with that gold, stare at it. I have far more self respect for myself and for you the people of Canada to do more than that with it. But on a semi related note to that I have been putting forward some serious thought to the idea of running for Prime Minister in the month of February. I have worked long and hard for this country, but it would be a lie if I said I had a lot of connections here, so if I do run, it will be solely on the fact I have experience, and I have a proven record of hard work and determination and honesty. Besides, if I do screw things up badly, it’s the shortest term of the year 😉

But until then, I will be running once again in the next congressional elections under the EPIC banner, and have currently put my name in the hat to run in Ontario. This month, hopefully we will not get screwed over as we did last month by the regions swaps.

Major congressman etemenanki, Minister of Finance.

P.S. Oh yes, I am hoping to do the activity report sometime before Christmas. I am off on Thursday, so with some luck will get it done for Thursday nigh at the latest, assuming I remember how to post a picture once again.