On Sun, 2022-06-19 at 15:51 -0700, Kerim Aydin via agora-business wrote: > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > Rule 2621/9 (Power=1.0) > > VP Wins > > > > If a player has at least 20 more Winsomes than each other player, > > e CAN Take Over the Economy by announcement, provided no person > > has won the game by doing so in the past 30 days. > > I agree to the following contract: "Winsome More": > 1. G. is the only party to this contract, and can amend or terminate > it by announcement. > 2. Winsomes are a currency tracked by G. in eir monthly report. > 3. G. CAN create, destroy, or transfer Winsomes by announcement. > > > I create 21 Winsomes in my possession. > > Winsome Report: I have 21, nobody else has any. > > Comment: > > There's a bit of ambiguity in these two paragraphs in Rule 1586: > A rule, contract, or regulation that refers to an entity by name > refers to the entity that had that name when the rule first came > to include that reference, even if the entity's name has since > changed. > > If the entity that defines another entity is amended such that it > no longer defines the second entity, then the second entity and > its attributes cease to exist. > > Winsomes are no longer "defined" by the rules but they rules do "refer" to > Winsomes. If Winsomes have ceased to exist as per the second paragraph, > they are no longer entities, and the "reference" bit may or may not apply > to *former* entities. "Even if the entity's name has since changed" is > very different than "even if the entity no longer exists", and if rules > referred to no-longer-existing entities then we'd have to go back a long > way into the rules to find terms that were repealed and brought back...
I think it's fairly clear that the rules don't refer to your newly created Winsomes – IIRC, the usual precedent is that you can't define undefined words in rules using things of a lower power. Also, imagine if I made a similar contract – would the rules be referring to your Winsomes or mine? There's no particular reason why they should be referring to the first such contract. I could see an argument that the rule is using standard English definitions, in which case it would be referring to "things that are winsome". Most likely, though, it's referring to an undefined entity that cannot be defined below power 1; this sort of thing happens all the time at non-Agora nomics, and occasionally at Agora too (e.g. some past iterations of Device-like rules didn't start with any definition of their "Device" equivalent and it was an undefined term for a while). After all, the rules imply that "Winsomes have ceased to exist", and thus there's no way to have 20 Winsomes-as-seen-by-rule-2621 unless we create a rule to make it possible. -- ais523
