NationStates Issues **SPOILER ALERT**

[TalAkMaChen]

An interesting... discussion.

However, we got new issues as well!

#1868 Phoning It In [Promethius Prime; ed: Nardin]
The Issue
A young woman appeared in court today accused of murder after fatally shooting her friend while testing a widely believed urban legend. With no internet access to research the claim, and no books on such myths in their local library, the two felt compelled to explore it themselves. The stunt in question involved using a phone book to stop a bullet, with the unfortunate conclusion that phone books are not, in fact, bulletproof.

The Debate
1a. “The obvious problem is that phone books and other large tomes are just not tough enough,” explains paper technologist @@RANDOM_NAME@@ as @@HE@@ slams an unusually hefty children’s picture book on your desk. “If we required all new books be made out of more indestructible materials, then the assumption that they would stop a bullet would finally be realized. It just so happens that I have developed a new hardwood paper, patent pending, which is able to stop all but the most intransigent of munitions.” [does not have Child Self-Rearing]

1b. “The obvious problem is that phone books and other large tomes are just not tough enough,” explains paper technologist @@RANDOM_NAME@@ as @@HE@@ slams an unusually hefty novella on your desk. “If we required all new books be made out of more indestructible materials, then the assumption that they would stop a bullet would finally be realized. It just so happens that I have developed a new hardwood paper, patent pending, which is able to stop all but the most intransigent of munitions.” [has Child Self-Rearing]

2. “I can only suspect that the book they used failed as armor because the book itself was woefully out of date,” muses @@RANDOM_NAME@@, your Minister for Development. “Years worth of additional phone numbers may very well have saved their life. To stop this from happening again we need to introduce strict ‘best before’ dates on all books, so that people can know for certain whether or not they can trust them with their lives!”

3. “The problem wasn’t the toughness or age of the phone book, the problem is that they thought it could stop a bullet to begin with,” chimes in @@RANDOM_NAME@@, Assistant Minister for Education. “Our education system has clearly failed if it produces people who think that a speeding bullet could be stopped by a few hundred sheets of tissue-thin paper. Add gun safety education to the national curriculum and encourage safe experimentation in place of blind risk taking. Then asinine stunts like this or last year’s Blood Orange incident can finally die out.”

4. “Everyone’s avoiding why the death happened at all!” storms anti-gun activist @@RANDOM_NAME@@. “The solution is obvious: ban the private ownership of guns! If those morons didn’t have a gun to begin with then no one would have been shot and this tragedy would never have happened. In fact, I would say we need to go further and ban the display of guns in media altogether!”

[Dexterra]

Another contest winner has been published! Only one encounter so far. Not sure about names (option 3 seems random) names are all random, still not sure about additional options, or validities yet.

Issue #1,869: Architects of Tomorrow

The Issue

What was supposed to be a routine meeting with the state architectural bureau about the style of new housing developments in @@CAPITAL@@ quickly devolved when a radical rabble of renegade architects burst into the room, demanding @@NAME@@ take the opportunity to rework the city’s plans.

The Debate

1. “Out with the old, in with the new!” declares @@RANDOMNAME@@, the apparent leader of the group, as @@HE@@ slides the scale model that was the topic of today’s meeting off the conference table, shattering it. One of @@HIS@@ associates plants a new model on the table. “Our current cities encourage inequality through inefficient distribution of population and bourgeois centralized commercial districts. We can do better! With a liberal peppering of public amenities equidistant to places of work and a redesign of the most decadent districts with glass, steel beams, and pure socialism, we can abolish the inequities of city living and build a truly new way of life. Some will say we’re paving over our history, but that’s just the price of progress, baby!”

2. “My model!” wails Chief Architect @@RANDOMNAME@@, as @@HE@@ rushes to reassemble the destroyed prototype. After several seconds of sobbing and a deep breath, @@HE@@ begins, “Look at this... monstrosity! Note the dangerous use of glass and steel, dangerous redistribution of centralized services, and that’s not even to mention the lack of gravitas of it all! If you would let me, I’ll have plans drawn up in the classical Merovingian Imperial style with a baroque twist. That would surely rouse the spirits of the proletariat and inspire them to continue the revolution, as architecture is meant to do! It will be a complete triumph of the working class, complete with a triumphal arch, of course.”

3. Your Minister of Public Housing, @@RANDOMNAME@@ snaps awake, having been driven to sleep with the drudgery of the preceding meeting, “Is it over?” @@HE@@ yawns. As one of your aides whispers in @@HIS@@ ear, informing @@HIM@@ of the ongoing debate, your minister frowns and remarks, “this all sounds terribly... pointless and expensive. They’re just buildings, who cares what some whiners think about where they go or what they look like? @@LEADER@@, prioritize substance over style and just mass produce city neighborhoods like we would any other product; our economy would be most efficient if everyone lived and worked in identical standard-grey mid-rise units: simple, easy, cheap. Concrete blocks may admittedly not be the most inspired or appealing structures, but they sure beat sitting in these blasted meetings!”

Authored by The Cosmocratic Order of Valrifell, edited by Haymarket Riot

[TalAkMaChen]

Interestingly, I had it 17 times so far and all people were females. The draft had it random, very small odds to be random at 17 encounters. But I'll keep watching.

[Trotterdam]

That sounds like someone might have introduced a glitch in the server's random number generator?

[TalAkMaChen]

That sounds like someone might have introduced a glitch in the server's random number generator?

I don't think so, other issues still have random male speakers. It would rather seem an editorial choice, for whatever reason. Now with 60 female-only in every option (180 in total!) the likelihood of having any males there is close to zero.

[TalAkMaChen]

Update on #1692: Options 4/5 only show up at nations that don't have the "Referendum" policy. Finally we can see it, before it was one of the hidden policies and I kept wondering why some nations only saw options 1-3. It turns out, they all have the "Referendums" policy active.

Update (part 1): It is not referendums, but something else. I'm running another check on my dataset, then I'll export and check it.
Update (part 2): It is "free tertiary education". The updated validity for 1692 options 4/5 should be:

*4: [Does not have Free Tertiary Education; does not have child labor]
*5: [Does not have Free Tertiary Education; has child labor]

[Rocain Founder]

Is #1692 possibly a typo? #1692 is about corporal punishment and home schooling, and though it has 5 options, none of them seem to have anything to do with elections much less referendums. My notes suggest that options 4/5 of this issue are conditional on the presence or absence of Child Labor.

If the issue number is right, what in the World do referendums have to do with it?

[TalAkMaChen]

Is #1692 possibly a typo? #1692 is about corporal punishment and home schooling, and though it has 5 options, none of them seem to have anything to do with elections much less referendums. My notes suggest that options 4/5 of this issue are conditional on the presence or absence of Child Labor.

If the issue number is right, what in the World do referendums have to do with it?

1692 is correct. It is, however, not about referendums, indeed. I added the new policies and my program didn't know what to do with those as I put them in the wrong order. The result was a nice output, but it didn't make any sense, i.e., many nations with/without a referendum policy even before that policy was introduced. I'm running the program again and will update this post once I have correct results.

I have no idea what the nations with just options 1-3 have in common and what prevents them from seeing option 4/5. The split 4/5 is correctly attributed to (not) having child labor. But some nations don't even get that choice. I have nations with and without child labor that only received options 1-3 there. The only thing I could find them having in common was the "has referendums (some)" policy while all my nations that got #1692 option 4 or 5 since July do not have the "referendum" (some) policy".

Update: We have a winner. It is the "has free tertiary education". That makes more sense. Thanks for the catch!
Nations that have that policy don't get options 4/5, those without get either 4/5, depending on their child labor status.
The policy was officially added in April 2026, well after the issue was first revealed. I guess the issue got updated with the addition of the policy.

[TalAkMaChen]

Time for another new issue!

#1870 Legally Binned [Rudastan; ed: Kractero]
The Issue
While enjoying a long walk on the outskirts of @@CAPITAL@@, you hear an explosion from a nearby recycling facility. The facility’s officer is quick to show you boxes of fizzing and leaking ‘recyclables’, exposing a quiet trade by local and foreign firms to exploit @@NAME@@’s lax recyclable and scrap import laws to smuggle in and dump hazardous waste within national borders.

The Debate
1. Your personal secretary, pale and overworked, adjusts @@HIS@@ glasses and smiles like @@HE@@’s going to get ignored again. “N-no need for alarm, hehe. This is merely a misunderstanding between administrative cultures. These poor foreign shippers have simply been left without — ah — adequate labeling guidance. Once we provide unambiguous labels, foreign carriers and our more — erm — imaginative domestic companies will have no choice but to put things in the proper category. I’m sure that if we translate words like ‘recyclable’, ‘biohazard’, and ‘highly explosive’ into the relevant languages, Dàguó and friends will stop sending over... whatever the muck in that pizza box is supposed to be.”

2. “Ach, don’t be daft, there’s plenty tae see here, and none o’ it good,” insists the officer, standing ankle-deep in something that presumably used to be liquid. “@@LEADER@@, they’re takin’ us fer fools. The law is the law, darn it! It’s always the dastardly Dàguórens, or the rest o’ that lot sniffin’ aboot our ports. Our companies wouldn’t be needin’ tae break a single rule if ootsiders weren’t floodin’ the place with filth and abusin’ loopholes. How can we tell who’s been honest wi’ us and who ‘asn’t? Jus’ shut the gates an’ ban all imported trash!”

3. “You didn’t hear this from me,” confides a damp-haired customs contractor, pausing to flick his toothpick into something that hisses on impact. “But these barrels are rolling in either way. Today it’s labeled industrial solvent, tomorrow it’s fertilizer, and everybody gets paid except the people with the stamp. You ain’t stopping it, so put a proper name on it. Special handling, restricted disposal. Whatever makes the clerks feel clean. We stamp it at the docks and move the stuff worth selling, and the rest disappears quiet — there’s always someone Bigtopia ready to breathe poison for a living. Trust me, @@LEADER@@, you don’t have a waste problem. You have a revenue problem.”

4. “Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s just beautiful,” groans a sanitation worker on the scene, wringing out a mop that dissolves halfway through the process. “I’m pullin’ doubles, my crew’s quittin’, and now we got imported sludge of the apocalypse? They feel like shippin’ us their junk? Fine. We ship it back, with interest! The brass want their next miracle weapon? Tell ‘em to stop polishin’ their missiles and start fillin’ ‘em. Strap this stuff into shells, load it on drones, and send the whole toxic, corrosive, flammable mess their way! Oughta scare the hell outta anyone caught underneath it.”