Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on Today at 02:39:38 PMColegas:

We are a few years away from our fiftieth anniversary as a country.  Very few nations of our size make it to such a point, and I think we should try to think ahead and plan something big for that event (26 Dec 2029).

I call for His Majesty to establish a Royal Commission on the subject, intended to span the time up until that point.  I believe His Grace should chair the commission himself, if he is so willing, since it's a perfect role for our term-spanning head of state.  I hope that other party leaders of good character are willing to join or delegate others to the commission.

@King Txec , what do you think?

Great idea. I'll give it some thought as to how best to structure a Royal Commission.

-Txec R

An oldie but a goodie - from a ZRT election campaign 14 years ago

I had written an update, but then I accidentally clicked something and then upsettingly, it was gone, so you get the short version:

There was a sprint. Kooij won, Kanter came second. Veistroffer was solo in front of the peloton for most of the day. De Lie already abandoned in stage 3.

GHST scored the most points. Menceis remain in the lead.

Standings after stage 5:

Pos	±		Team	Pts Ove	Pts Today
1st	(=)		Maritiimi-Maxhestic Mençeis (MMM)	2119	+187
2nd	(=)		Cyclohexane (CHX)	2024	+309
3rd	(+2)		Gordon Hiatus Support Team (GHS)	1983	+344
4th	(-1)		Els Talossaes Rexhital (REX)	1901	+249
5th	(-1)		Esqipă Velocostă (EVC)	1856	+216
6th	(=)		Velociposse Florencia (VFL)	1795	+205
7th	(=)		Cézembre Caçeirs dals Mailintzarăs (BDC)	1687	+278
8th	(=)		Cézembre Fieschā (CFA)	1343	+84
9th	(=)		Naziun Cjovani (CJO)	1290	+56

Tomorrow a big day for climbers and GC contenders: it's Tourmalet day!

Colegas:

We are a few years away from our fiftieth anniversary as a country.  Very few nations of our size make it to such a point, and I think we should try to think ahead and plan something big for that event (26 Dec 2029).

I call for His Majesty to establish a Royal Commission on the subject, intended to span the time up until that point.  I believe His Grace should chair the commission himself, if he is so willing, since it's a perfect role for our term-spanning head of state.  I hope that other party leaders of good character are willing to join or delegate others to the commission.

@King Txec , what do you think?

It was pretty simple. As I recall, the only reason we stopped playing is because my buddy got a Dune board game he really wanted to do.

One thing I really liked about Carcassone was that it felt like you ended up making a work of art with the tiles by the end of the game. Just very nice to look at, in the way that I didn't I feel like Catan was.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on Today at 09:32:12 AMWe have that board game! We only tried playing it a couple of times, but maybe we should give it another chance.

Well I can't claim to be a boardgame expert, but it's great fun and pretty simple to pick up! Plenty of expansions you can pick-and-choose to round it out too.

We have that board game! We only tried playing it a couple of times, but maybe we should give it another chance.

Any chance I can transfer my success here over to my world cup bracket? Mads Pedersen would maybe make a good football player...

I thank the MZ for the question, and I am happy to answer it. 

Let's first get some useful numbers, if we can.  The MZ is comparing the first six months of this term with nine months from the last.  I am sure that was an accident, so let's get out the information that we need.

The month after the election was January, and it's been six months since then.  We have had nine successful naturalizations, and that was with a pause in our promotional strategy to see if it was working.  During the previous term, the month after the election was April, and six months after that was September.  In this period, the Government in which the MZ served saw a total of three successful naturalizations.

So then, how have we been so successful that we've tripled the immigration rate?

First of all, we've actually implemented almost all of the recommendations of the bipartisan Royal Commission on Immigration.

• The TalossAssistant program has restarted, with six inaugural members who have dedicated themselves to the effort: King Txec, Françal I. Lux, Moinul Moin, Sir Lüc, Barclamïu da Miéletz, and myself.  We have had a lot of great success to start with, but we need to make sure that the efforts continue past immigration to include new citizenship.
• We have restarted the Pretz Pätriotic del Seneschal and made it into a physical award.  It looks like there will be three recipients for the inaugural awarding.  But while this might help spur some similar activity, we haven't seen a lot of fruits yet.
• The New Citizen's Guide has been updated and put onto the website, and then sent to our two newest citizens.  Previously, it was a PDF and not really very much used... we think this new version will be a lot more successful (and a lot easier to improve and update).  This also is recent, though, so it might not be the cause.
• His Majesty has made it clear he'd like to issue Royal Charters to anyone starting a new effort.

But as you can see, it doesn't seem like this explains our success.

Similarly, the threefold improvement is probably not a result of our changes to the immigration system:

• Obviously, it's still a good thing we closed the hole in our security.  We're no longer exposing the personal information of hundreds of people, including every citizen who'd immigrated in recent years, to anyone who gains access to any account with edit rights. 
• And obviously, it's a good thing we're able to look in detail at what's working and what isn't working.  A secure and easily-analyzed database of our immigration data is a very important tool. 

But neither of these things are likely to be very relevant.

No, we think it's most likely down to our promotional efforts.  In January and February, we posted on Reddit in interested communities (just a couple of posts, actually... not a lot!) and we posted a promotional video on social media.  Then we didn't do it for a couple of months.  And now again this past month we resumed.  And during that span when we didn't do any promotion?  Zero new immigrants!

This is great news, since it means we're not entirely trapped by secular forces or luck.  I mean, it's still going to be great if we get lucky... remember when the viral language Tiktok video that happened to get made that spiked a lot of interest last term near the end?  But we don't have to just cross our fingers and hope!  We can do things to make it better and get more interest!

So to answer the MZ, we plan to build on this success.  Frustratingly, I can't make new videos right at the moment, but that should hopefully be remedied.  And we can definitely still promote other ways, which we will do.

Brief trivia moment: with EVC and MMM winning stages already, they both confirm their record of getting a stagewin in every edition they competed in. GHST is the only other team who may also join them by winning one of the remaining 17 stages. Team in the Wind is not competing in this edition, but they also technically share that record by winning three stages in the one leg they took part in.

With their stagewin on Sunday, Velociposse became the third team to win 20 stages in TCAT; there was a "hidden" small race to be the first to cross that threshold between them, the Mençeis and Cyclohexane, and they indeed all won a stage already, but Cyclohexane initially stood at 18 stagewins (now 19) and the Mençeis at 17 (now 18). The Mençeis also overtook Port Maxhestic for fifth overall in the all-time stagewin ranking. Gonna be interesting to see who among the three will get the most after this leg is completed!