James Swan

Conservative party would impose unilateral tax on banks to recover taxpayers' billions if elected, party leader says

The Conservative party would impose a unilateral tax on banks to claw back the billions of pounds of taxpayers' money used to prop up major financial institutions during the economic crisis, David Cameron said today.

His pledge came as the Financial Times reported that the chancellor, Alistair Darling, is to use next week's budget to signal government support for a global bank tax, although only as part of an international agreement.

Darling will set out detailed options in his budget statement but will insist that the money raised should go to national governments and not be used for an insurance fund against future collapse, the paper said.

There are fears that the existence of an insurance fund could encourage risk-taking and that any unilateral action could prompt an exodus of banks from the City to less punitive regimes abroad.

But Cameron said the Conservatives' proposed levy, similar to unilateral measures announced by the US president, Barack Obama, was needed to protect British taxpayers from future bank collapses.

He said the banking industry was one of the vested interests he would confront if elected and accused Gordon Brown of failing to stand up to the financial sector.

"We had the biggest bank bailout in the world. We can't just carry on as if nothing happened," he said.

"In America, President Obama has said he will get taxpayers back every cent they put in. Why should it be any different here?

"So I can announce today that a Conservative government will introduce a new bank levy to pay back taxpayers for the support they gave and to protect them in the future.

"No, it won't be popular in every part of the City. But I believe it's fair and it's necessary."

The prime minister has been a leading advocate of a globally co-ordinated levy on banks, which could bring in tens of billions of pounds a year from the financial services sector worldwide.

He was forced to abandon his preferred option – a "Tobin" tax on financial transactions – but hopes the International Monetary Fund will back the measure at its April meeting in Washington ahead of a G20 meeting in June.

The FT said Labour's manifesto could commit to diverting some of the proceeds of the levy into aid for poorer countries – in line with a campaign for a "Robin Hood tax" on the banks.

• Conservatives
• Banking
• Tax and spending
• Recession
• Global recession

Less than two months after talking up the turnaround at Dow Jones-IAC (NSDQ: IACI) personal finance JV FiLife, paidContent has learned the site’s continued existence is no certainty. It survived the multiple trimmings as Barry Diller cut back on IAC’s portfolio of emerging businesses, but the company is now exploring options that range from leaving it open to a sale or a full shut down. When Ezra Kucharz, president and GM for just over a year, left for CBS (NYSE: CBS) in January, both IAC and DJ credited him publicly with turning around the site and building it to 4.4 million unique visitors in December. Now both companies are declining comment about the site’s future.

Less than two months after talking up the turnaround at Dow Jones-IAC (NSDQ: IACI) personal finance JV FiLife, paidContent has learned the site’s continued existence is no certainty. It survived the multiple trimmings as Barry Diller cut back on IAC’s portfolio of emerging businesses, but the company is now exploring options that range from leaving it open to a sale or a full shut down. When Ezra Kucharz, president and GM for just over a year, left for CBS (NYSE: CBS) in January, both IAC and DJ credited him publicly with turning around the site and building it to 4.4 million unique visitors in December. Now both companies are declining comment about the site’s future.

When Terri was diagnosed with cancer, Lionel Shriver was doting – at first. But as her condition worsened, there always seemed to be a reason not to call...

I met Terri in the early 1980s at an arts camp in Connecticut. We were both in the metalsmithing workshop, and this sharply featured, appealingly surly Armenian taught me some new tricks. Her speciality was rivets and other "cold connections", an apt expression in her case. She was a wilful, stubborn woman, more fiercely so than I first realised; 25 years later, I'd discover just how defiant my closest girlfriend could be, even in the face of the undeniable.

Terri was full of the contradictions that always captivate me in people: inclined to bear grudges but incredibly generous (often rocking up with gifts for no reason – why, I still have half a dozen pairs of her shoes). Harsh but warm. Prone to depression but with a knack for festivity. I conjure her scowling down the pavement and rolling in laughter with equal ease. She was tortured and brooding; she was terribly kind. And she was a serious artist in the best sense: not pretentious, but determined to craft interesting work well.

Back in Queens, where we both lived in our mid-20s, we found common cause in our improbable aspirations. She wanted to become a famous artist, I a famous novelist – but Terri had then sold next to nothing and I'd not published more than my phone number. It was a big, indifferent world out there, and an ally was crucial. We'd conspire over a six-pack in my tiny one-bedroom flat, jovially certain that we'd still be best friends when we were "cancerous old bags". It was a running gag. We thought it was funny.

Beware the jokes of your heedless, immortal youth. Fast-forward through two and a half decades, during which Terri and I survived abusive boyfriends, marital problems, professional setbacks, my expatriation to the UK and her exile to New Jersey, Terri's painful endometriosis and four failed IVF treatments, as well as, of course, each other. During my regular summer migration to New York, in 2005, Terri shared her perplexity that she'd been running a low-grade fever for weeks. I said it sounded like a tenacious virus. But shortly thereafter she rang from hospital.

She was being tested for a range of ailments, the most far-fetched of these a rare disease called mesothelioma. Thus it was quite a shock when the doctors confirmed that peritoneal mesothelioma was exactly what she had – almost certainly caused by exposure to the asbestos that laced metalsmithing materials when she was in art school. Her husband Paul reported grimly that the average survival rate for this ravaging cancer was a single year.

Terri was only 50, and the timing was tragic for other reasons, too. From frustration, malaise and exactingly high standards, through most of her career she had underproduced. Yet in recent years something had loosened up, and her output had accelerated. Better still, she was at last imbuing her creations with the feeling they'd sometimes lacked, the most moving of which was an elegy to her unavailing IVF treatments. She was finally pulling in big commissions, one of which was about to go on display at the V&A. At the same time, her brooding demeanour had brightened; she'd grown more outgoing, energetic and relaxed. Almost... happy. Well, so much for that.

On the heels of her diagnosis, I was doting. I'm not tooting my own horn. I suspect being a paragon at the very start of a loved one's illness is pretty much the form. We're on the phone daily. We stop by regularly, and bring freshly baked scones. We follow every medical twist and turn. And we're inclined to rash promises. With a flinch, I recall declaring before Terri's surgery that I'd be willing to move into their house in New Jersey for weeks at a time! I'd be at her beck and call, running errands, preparing meals and filling prescriptions.

Useful tip: if someone close to you falls gravely ill, at the outset, in the first flush of anguish and desperation to help? Watch the mouth.

For the timing of Terri's cancer was terrible for me as well. A month after her diagnosis, I was intending to return home to London, where a host of professional commitments could not (or so it seemed) be reneged upon. Although for most of my literary career I'd scribbled in obscurity, my prospects were suddenly looking up. My seventh novel had inexplicably hit the bestseller list in the UK, and subsequently won the Orange prize earlier that summer. (I still have the droll good-luck package Terri and Paul delivered when I made the shortlist: orange marmalade, orange candles, orange oil.) For the first time, I faced a smorgasbord of opportunities – festival gigs, bookstore appearances, feature assignments – and I was in the middle of a new book.

So, however reluctantly, I flew back to London. After Terri's surgery, Paul phoned with the lowdown: the surgeons had discovered a patch of aggressive "sarcomatoid" cells, which meant Terri's prognosis was bleak.

I will give myself this grudging credit: I did fly back to visit Terri for Thanksgiving that November, and for a while I kept in faithful touch, ringing weekly and following every grisly detail of her punishing chemotherapy. But this is not a boast about what a wonderful friend I was in Terri's time of need. This is a mea culpa.

Little by little, I'd notice that it had been a fortnight since I'd rung New Jersey. I'd kick myself. But some book review would be due that afternoon, so I'd vow to ring tomorrow. Time and again some immediate task would seem more urgent, and I'd tell myself that I should ring Terri when I'm settled and concentrated. Watch out whenever you "tell yourself" anything; it's the red flag of self-deceit. Long hours of being "settled and concentrated" mysteriously failed to manifest themselves.

I stuck a Post-it note on the edge of my desk: "RING TERRI!" Over the months, the note faded, much like my resolve. On the too-rare occasions I acted on the reminder, I had to put a mental gun to my head. But why? This was one of my closest friends, and she was dying. While she was still on this Earth, why was I not battling to maximise every moment? Surely the problem should have been my ringing too often, whizzing back to the States too many times, making a pest of myself.

Granted, our conversations were sometimes awkward. My own life had never gone more swimmingly, while Terri's was circling the drain. I was embarrassed. I found myself editing from our discussions anything I'd done that was exciting or fun. When I returned from an author's tour of Sweden, I portrayed the trip as a drag. This  sort of cover-up reliably backfired. So apparently I felt sorry for myself – for going to Sweden! When Terri could rarely leave the house.

I make no apologies for this, since this is what novelists do: at some midpoint in Terri's decline, I decided that my next novel would draw on this encounter with cancer. At least I had the humanity to refrain from taking notes during our phone calls, thus relinquishing many a "telling detail" and much "great material". Consequently, I had to do an enormous amount of research on mesothelioma later, and this is what I do apologise for: not having done all those web searches on her treatments – the surgery, the drugs, the side-effects – when Terri was still suffering through them. Now, I'm mortified to have Googled "mesothelioma" only once the search was for a book.

When I returned to the US that second summer, Terri had alarmingly deteriorated. Thin to start with, she'd lost weight. She was gaunt and weak, her skin tinged a dark, unsettling orange: a chemo tan. It was obvious where this was headed. But whenever anyone acted as if she wasn't going to make it, Terri grew enraged. She resented the "sentimental" testimonials her friends and relatives recited at her bedside; she thought they were delivering a death sentence. Though she wouldn't have put it that way. I wonder if throughout her illness I ever heard her say the word "death" aloud.

Thus on one count only could I blame Terri herself for my increasingly deficient friendship. Her refusal to admit she was dying meant we couldn't ever talk about the elephant in the room. Pretending that the treatments were working and she was going to come through this injected an artifice in our relationship at odds with the confidences we'd shared for 25 years. Days I did visit, afternoons I did ring, we'd end up talking, lamely, about recipes. Indeed, on a brief trip in November 2006, I visited Terri in New Jersey; it was the last time I'd ever see her, and I knew this instinctively at the time. Yet we spent an appalling proportion of that final visit talking about mashed potatoes.

When her husband rang me in London a few days later with the news, he was consumed with a steely rage. Obviously Paul was angry that he'd lost his wife. But he was also angry at other people. Oh, he expressed his disgust in general terms, as a disillusionment with the human race, a good-riddance to our whole species. But I knew what he meant. Paul's fury was aimed at Terri's friends and family, who had almost universally made themselves scarce for months. His fury was also aimed at me.

I thought I deserved it. I had visited, some. I had rung up, some. But not nearly often enough, and in truth one of my best friends perishing before my eyes had instilled a deep aversion, an instinctive avoidance, a desperation to flee.

It would be a far better thing if I were a lone shithead amid an ocean of altruists. And surely some folks really do step up to the plate when a friend or relative falls mortally ill – wonderful people who keep popping by with casseroles to the very last day. I have a new admiration for such stalwarts, as well as a new appreciation for the Christian duty to "visit the sick". Yet I fear this suddenly-remembering-somewhere-you-gotta-be is a common failing of our time. In fearing and avoiding death, we fear and avoid the dying.

I'll risk sounding preachy, since I've paid for my sermon with a regret that never leaves me. Most of us will experience the afflictions of our nearest and dearest perhaps multiple times before we're faced with a deadly diagnosis of our own. So be mindful. Disease is frightening. It's unpleasant. It reminds us of everything we try not to think about on our own accounts. A biological instinct to steer clear of contagion can kick in even with diseases like cancer that we understand rationally aren't communicable. So the urge to avoid sick people runs very deep. Notice it. Then overcome it. There will always be something you'd rather do than confront the agony, anxiety and exile of serious illness, and these alternative endeavours seem terribly pressing in the moment: replacing the printer cartridge, catching up on urgent work-related email. But nothing is more pressing than someone you love who's suffering, and whose continuing existence you can no longer take for granted. So never vow to ring "tomorrow" – pick up the bloody phone.

· So Much For That, by Lionel Shriver, is published by HarperCollins on 25 March at £15. To order a copy for £14, with free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

• Bereavement
• Relationships
• Cancer
• Health

Let’s say it’s 2005 and online video is in its infancy. If you’re a Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, how much would it cost to start up and run a video sharing site with the hopes of flipping it for more than $1.6 billion? As of this week we know, thanks to confidential Profit and loss information released as part of filings that have been made public in the copyright infringement case between Viacom and YouTube.

Based on those filings, we were able to put together some numbers about how much it cost to run YouTube leading up to the Google acquisition. During the first 18 months of YouTube’s operations, from February 2005 when the domain was first purchased through August 2006 when it was desperately seeking acquirers, the fledgling video company spent more than $11.5 million to grow its user base big enough to become attractive to Google.

Most of that money — about $8 million or so — went to paying for infrastructure needed to run the site, with a vast majority of that money going toward the site’s web hosting costs. In the three months from June 2006 through August 2006, the company was spending about $1 million each month on hosting costs alone, and that wasn’t even taking into account data center costs that YouTube was also paying for or ad serving costs as the firm began selling its own advertising.

In addition to web infrastructure costs, YouTube had other operating expenses and personnel costs to contend with. In the first 18 months of its existence, YouTube spent about $3.6 million on employee compensation, travel, facilities, costs and the like. By November 2005, its regular operating expenses were about even with infrastructure costs — at a little more than $130,000 per month, but not long after that, the company’s web hosting bills really started to take off as the video sharing site gained traction.

It wasn’t until December 2005 that YouTube started clocking revenue — a meager $15,000 during that month — and by that point, the company had spent more than $400,000 on operating and infrastructure expenses. But costs began to increase rapidly after that, and topped out at about $2.6 million during August 2006 — just two months before Google’s purchase of the company was made public.

YouTube was never profitable before the Google acquisition — in fact, it pulled in just $5 million in revenues during its first 18 months — but it came close in August 2006, which might have been one reason that Google had an interest in the firm. That month, it posted revenues of $2.5 million. The site did post a gross profit of more than $575,000 during the month if you don’t take into account its monthly operating expenses. Otherwise, with total opex of about $2.6 million, the site fell about $100,000 shy of hitting profitability.

The site raised about $11.5 million in two rounds of financing before being bought by Google in a deal valued in excess of $1.65 billion in October 2006 — which wasn’t a bad return on investment for YouTube’s investors or founders. Famously, though, YouTube has yet to reach profitability, in part because Google had remained committed to growing its user base after its acquisition.

As reported in Viacom’s filings, Google CEO Eric Schmidt mandated for the company to focus on aggressively growing the site, aiming “to grow playbacks to 1b/day [one billion per day].” That mandate remained in place until early 2008, when Schmidt decided the site should shift its focus to monetization of its video assets. Since then, the company has been increasingly focused on bringing more premium content to the site and increasing the number of videos it can place ads against. That focus means that the online video site might finally become profitable this year, according to some analyst projections.

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[‘Design Diversions’ is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Andrew Vanden Bossche. It looks at the unexpected moments when games take us behind the scenes, and the details of how game design engages us. This time -- how emotional design can make us think about not thinking about violence.]

Senseless violence in videogames is fun, but more importantly, it can also be intellectually stimulating and thought provoking. While designers and critics alike cry out for more depth in games, pathos is not the only path to artistic merit. For a medium that's constantly patronized, misunderstood, and derided even by its supporters, sometimes satire and irony is the best way to get a point across.

This is the philosophy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, as the most unapologetic of that series so lambasted by those who were the target of the game’s satire. The ultraviolent and candy colored Vice City is an excessively pink world in which violence is comical and cartoonish. Violence in this game is already highly desensitized. Pedestrians die, but after their bodies despawn the world will be back to normal as if nothing happened, maintaining the status quo like a TV serial.

It's the worst possible environment for a serious engagement with issues of violence, but it's a great environment to engage with how we depict violence. Most games take the opposite position of Haunting Ground, and are designed to soften, justify, or excuse violent actions so that players feel like heroes instead of murderers.

It's the same treatment summer blockbusters get. But unlike most of these media, Vice City goes a step further. This is a game that mercilessly skewers the groups most opposed to its existence, freely leaps into self parody, and satirizes the cultural attitudes towards violence that ultimately gave it form. By the end of Vice City it's clear that everyone from the mob to the talking heads on the radio are guilty of the same violence as the protagonist. No one in Vice City is innocent, and neither is anyone in the world.

How to Take the Sense Out of Violence

While technology makes blood and gore more realistic, game designers continue to construct this violence to minimize its impact. In the goriest of games (like Mortal Kombat) violence is there to thrill or disgust, not to inspire existential terror. Designers (and gamers) get excited over realism, but we want it for specific reasons. Despite how much we clamor for realism in graphics and physics, emotional realism actually gets in the way of enjoying games like Grand Theft Auto.

For this reason GTA4 has actually been criticized for being too realistic. GTA4 succeeded in its attempt to be more serious and taken more seriously, but it resulted in a different game experience--one that many fans hadn't been looking for and subsequently found in the much less serious Saints Row 2.

GTA4’s Nico feels more like a person than the caricature that is Vice City’s Tommy Vercetti, and for that reason it can be hard for players to engage senseless violence. Even the normal missions feel a little odd considering the sheer number of people you kill, creating a scenario in which the gameplay and story don’t quite mesh.

Abstracting Emotion

Trauma Center is an interesting example of a game that uses abstraction to eliminate squeamishness. This is a game inspired heavily by medical dramas with surgery-based gameplay. Medical dramas have a wide appeal; exposed organs do not. Surgeons and other medical professionals have to get used to blood and guts, but most people are pretty squeamish about that. Even the bloody fantasy violence of the average videogame can be less intense than the exposed entrails of a living human. Because of this, the designers went to great lengths to create a representation of the human body that wouldn't be grotesque.

Naoya Maeda, the lead 3D and event designer said on the Trauma Team web site that he came up with this abstract approach while thinking of how a surgeon would see the entrails. What's interesting about this approach is that the more realistic option may be less "true." In the game, the player is a doctor and revulsion is not part of the experience. In the same way, Tommy Vercetti attitude towards human life is pretty obvious from the way pedestrians are depicted.

A World of Mannequins

In violent videogames, it’s common to dehumanize the enemy so that players can feel justified in killing them. Zombies, robots, and aliens all serve their roles. With human opponents, it’s common to make them as evil as possible, which may be why WWII is the favorite FPS genre and Nazis the favorite foe. Ultimately though, the greatest tool for removing humanity is simply to leave them undeveloped.

The civilians in GTA don’t mourn, cry, or express themselves. Because they don't exhibit sympathetic actions, it's hard to empathize with them. They exist only to run screaming like Godzilla was stomping through the city. Vice City is inhabited by crash test dummies that respawn endlessly no matter how many times they die. It’s similar to watching Bugs Bunny gets blasted point blank with a shotgun: the next second, he's up and chomping carrots.

No matter how many times the player dies in GTA, or however many generic citizens he wastes, everything in the world will be respawning and back to normal in minutes. In this way, actions that would normally appear reprehensible loose all their emotional impact. If GTA was an accurate murder simulator, depicting the horror of real-world violence and murder with unflinching accuracy, the nightly news stories would have been about kids getting PTSD.

Sensitive Violence

If there is a flaw in this form of violence in videogames, it’s that it isn’t violent enough. It’s emotionally casual, designed specifically to not challenge the player’s feelings of empathy or guilt. Although it takes a lot of design work to make sure the player won’t feel sorry for the extras, seeing how many pixilated crash-test dummies you can run over isn’t emotionally challenging for the player.

Haunting Ground has a near-opposite outcome, but the design is obviously quite intentional. Compare GTA to the visceral Manhunt, and you can see that Rockstar is quite capable of creating an experience uniquely tailored to inspiring certain emotions. That’s a game that really does make the player feel like a murderer.

So Vice City is engineered for players to be as violent as possible without thinking about it. This is where a lot of game stop, having accomplished their purpose, and just let the player have fun. But Vice City fills the game with relentless satire, and this cleverness works in part because it's so violent. The result is a game about thinking about not thinking about violence.

Whose America?

The talk radio blabbering about videogame violence is underscored by the incredible violence perpetuated by the player. With Tommy Vercetti chaining rows of exploding cars and fighting everything from SWAT to the US Army, the irony of legislating against bleeding pixels isn’t lost on the player.

The jingoistic ads run by the game's gun stores unsubtly implicate that GTA is not the cause of America's attitudes towards violence, but a product of it. The entrepreneurial rise of the main character reflects a certain pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-attitude that, along with this construction of violence, satirically constructs Tommy Vercetti as an ideal American.

Vice City is violent videogame about America’s attitude towards violence. Vice City came out after GTA 3, and it was born while the immediate reaction to that game was fresh in the minds of its audience and opponents. As the in game talk show parody unfolds, extremists from all sides fight over which vision of America to cram down the rest of the country’s throat while the player is laughing at them and having a grand old time.

While the guests on talk radio worry about fictional violence, their world is being blown up by the player on a regular basis. After mowing down the city in a tank, players may wonder why they aren't the ones being discussed on the news. Shouldn't they be thinking about real violence? Shouldn't the player? It's fun to live the American Dream as Tommy Vercetti, but is this bitter satire worth bringing to reality?

Even though Vice City goes to great lengths to create emotionally uninvolved violence, it wants the player to be conscious of how different this is from real world violence. At the time, the charge levied against the playerbase and the industry was that videogames confused the two. With the pitch perfect satire of radio pundits and activists, Vice City invites the player to think about whether the game is more damaging to society than the people trying to ban it. Rockstar has a clear agenda, of course, and stacks the deck in their favor. Even so, that’s a lot to think about for a game that’s not supposed to be about thinking at all.

Pathos certainly has its place in videogames, and it's certainly something we need more of. A GTA like game that forced players to confront the realities of murder would be an interesting idea. It couldn't work as a satire, and it wouldn't really be fun, but that’s just fine as it’s another way to engage the player. One of the great things about survival horror games like Haunting Ground is that they've proven that games don't necessarily need to be fun to be compelling.

But let's not underestimate Vice City just because it makes us laugh.

[Andrew Vanden Bossche is a freelance writer and student. He has a blog called Mammon Machine, which is updated less often than this message, and can be reached at AndrewVandenB@gmail.com]

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

The radiation levels following the Great Holy War of the twenty third century made living on the surface of the Earth impossible. Consequently, humanity moved underground. After millennia of self-sufficient, artificial environments, humanity lost all ties to the surface. Eventually, the sum on the “known universe” consisted of 50,000 humans, living in 800 cubic miles of subterranean rock. The very existence of the sun and moon, of the land and sea, of the sky and horizon, were all forgotten. Nothing else existed. That is, until an urban Expansion Project penetrated into the unknown.

“Okay, okay,” bellowed the governor as he entered the meeting chamber. “What’s so damn urgent that it became necessary to interrupt my sleep cycle?”

“I’m sorry, Governor,” replied the Secretary of Construction, “but there was an ‘incident’ in one of the mine shafts.”

“An Incident! What kind of incident?”

“Well, sir, as you know, urban expansion projects are typically limited to the X-Y plane, where the ambient rock temperature is between 70 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. However, the Limestone Expansion Project is moving in the positive-Z direction, where the rock temperatures are generally lower. Although expanding in this direction will have higher recurring cost, the lower construction costs tunneling through the softer limestone are too significant to ignore.” The Secretary sensed that the governor was losing patience, so he cut to the chase. “Anyway, sir, late yesterday, the exploratory mine shaft broke into an extremely large chamber.”

The governor snapped to attention. “What’s that you say? A chamber?” A wave of spontaneous thoughts raced though his mind. Could there be other life forms in the universe? What would that mean to their society? Chaos, unrest, revolt, the end of civilization? This could be very bad news indeed. “Was the chamber natural of artificial?”

“Unknown, sir. It had its own light source. Initially, the light source was hundreds of times brighter than anything we have in the City. However, after half a cycle, it became significantly darker. We were able to send a team through the shaft. They say there is a large semicircular light on the ceiling and thousands of diamond lights surrounding it. They say they cannot see the walls. They estimate that the chamber is hundreds of miles in diameter.”

“That’s ridiculous. No chamber can be that large. What do your engineers say?”

“They are at a loss, sir. But, there are a few eccentric scientists that claim that the universe physically ends several miles above our heads. These scientists say that the Earth is just a solid spherical ball with nothing beyond.”

“That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard. The rock extends forever in all directions. Everybody knows that.”

“Of course, sir. But there are also crackpots who say that man once lived on that spherical surface, but was banished to the ‘underworld’ because of a great sin.”

“Ignore my earlier statement. Now, that is the stupidest idea I ever heard. How can anyone live on a sphere? They’d fall off. No, I suspect that the positive-Z direction contains evil beings. They probably blind their prey with the bright light, and then attack them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they eat their victims while they’re still alive. Recall your men immediately. We must seal the shaft before it is too late. In the morning, I’ll meet with the full Senate. We must pass a law that forbids expansion in the positive-Z direction. And for now, we must all pray that the gods will forgive our blasphemous behavior, lest we all perish.”