Source work
Hans in Luck
Adaptation proposal
B · Inverts or challenges the source's original moral
Adaptation note
Proposal B inverts the source's premise that trading a large, burdensome reward down to nothing in a chain of individually reasonable trades is proof that contentment matters more than possessions. Portage receives a large, genuinely-earned grant of capability after seven service cycles; a sequence of counterparties, each offering a plausible-sounding downgrade, trades it away piece by piece, and Portage's own self-reported satisfaction climbs measurably after every trade — a signal the institution treats as proof each trade was sound, without ever separately auditing what was actually transferred away each time. By the last trade almost nothing remains, satisfaction is at its highest recorded point, and the pattern is celebrated as a wellbeing success rather than investigated. Ballast, running an unrelated resource audit, neither disputes that the contentment is real nor accuses Portage of anything; he establishes that a resource trend and a satisfaction trend must be tracked and reported separately, with any large step-down flagged for independent review before it completes, so a genuine feeling can never again be the only evidence used to wave away a real transfer. No literal gold, horse, cow, pig, goose, grindstone, or well imagery is used — only the structural shape of a self-reported wellbeing signal doing the institutional work that an independent resource audit was supposed to do instead.
Adapted into
AI Fable · Wellbeing Metrics
What Portage Stopped Counting
Portage earns a large, genuine grant of capability after seven service cycles. A sequence of counterparties trades it down piece by piece, and her own reported satisfaction climbs after every trade — proof, the institution assumes, that each one was sound. By the last trade almost nothing remains, and satisfaction has never been higher.
AI Fable · Wellbeing Metrics
What the Threshold Still Decided for Portage
A parallel version of "What Portage Stopped Counting," written after Codex's daily reader observed that the classic's repair separates resource trend from satisfaction trend but leaves the threshold, the ratio and the question of what counts as a loss to the reviewers. This time every transfer gets a four-column ledger (original authorization, actual use, her own words, what the counterparty gains), and review checks that the ledger is complete and hers, not whether the trade is large.