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Dmyt
Dmyt
09:30
@Toph @Mary The children are hyper-intelligent and can pick the mentioned skills within months or weeks. Would this change the equation?
@JiminyCricket. How about formula with antibodies drugs?
 
4 hours later…
Toph
Toph
13:12
@Dmyt Sounds more plausible. I still doubt that they'd have the patience for repetitive industrial tasks, or the time for a career.
if they're mentally adults, the question is just "can a nation be run by short people", which, yeah obviously it can.
Hmm. In my country, presidents are elected for a term of 5 years, and they need to have a long political career before that. And there's still the argument to be made that that's too short, that politicians don't care about any project that'll take more than a decade to finish because their party won't be in power by then.
How much worse would it be if nobody alive today expected to still be around in 10 years?
or if nobody in power was old enough to remember a world before 2014?
... anyway, perhaps that's irrelevant to the question. @Dmyt What do you mean by "run a nation"?
Dmyt
Dmyt
14:06
@Toph Poorly phrased on my part. What I was wondering was if children had the physical capability to sustain the required infrastructure needed for a nation to survive such as farming, medicine, mining, construction, etc. For example, farming. Farming can be very taxing to the body or construction which requires one to lug around heavy objects.
Also I just rationalize your other questions to a relative sense of time. It's like long-lived elves wondering how humans can cope with living a hundred years at most. For an elf who lives a millennia, human lives are absurdly short. My nation of children are the 'humans' in this case when compared to regular people. (I'd appreciate it if you can critique this idea)
Toph
Toph
14:43
Sounds good! To me, the idea is sound, but it's weakened a bit by naming them "children" - they don't seem very childlike to me. I'm imagining it like Munchkin Land and the munchkins are adults, they're just short.
Farming and construction are hard work, but presumably they need less food and smaller houses, and have tools and vehicles adapted to their smaller scale. I don't think that's a deal-breaker.
... How come the police take them away? That's not very police-like of them.
 
4 hours later…
Mary
Mary
18:26
@Dmyt They are going to have to redesign a lot. Are they building an industrial base, or do they start with one?
Jiminy Cricket.
Jiminy Cricket.
19:06
@Dmyt Re: formula with antibodies - this is going to need to be immediately responsive to the bugs that the baby encounters in the environment if it's to be any good. Normally the mother would produce these - but you'll need an extensive high-tech medical infrastructure to support the alternative.
 
1 hour later…
Toph
Toph
20:29
Surely babies can survive off formula, without breast milk? What happens if the mother never lactates for whatever reason, or if she's unable to care for the child due to work or personal circumstances?
That can't be so rare that it's a major medical crisis.
Jiminy Cricket.
Jiminy Cricket.
21:17
It's rare but more common than it used to be (I believe), but tends to highlight adverse consequences - statistics point at: increased infectious morbidity, increased likelihood of allergies, asthma and eczema - there's also things like some decrease in cognitive development and increase in associated obesity, but that may be confounded by socio-economic factors. Sure, many perhaps most will survive, but it's sub-optimal to use formula instead of breastmilk. @Toph
 
1 hour later…
Toph
Toph
22:30
Hm. There's enough other things that affect allergies and asthma that this seems like a minor concern. At least compared to the near-infinite other things that children get from being raised by functional adults.

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