Grrl Power #1105 - Runaway conflation (Patreon)

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These guys really are a liability. He's stretched too thin, but when upper management says they want two guards on every door, the correct response should be "Well now, do you want one guard per door, each of them having an IQ of 97, or do you want two guards per door with IQ's in the mid-to-low 80s?" The problem is that they already had him guarding the motor pool and the elevator doors on every floor plus one of them is out taking care of one of managements cats etc etc, so he wasn't focused enough to consider how stretching himself further would affect him.

Harem loses physical strength with each dupe, but if she exists as only a mono-entity, she's actually quite strong, like not quite Spider-Man strong. Strong enough to roll a car over relatively easily, not strong enough to lift an average car over her head though. Her pattern is that she slowly builds strength over time whether she works out or not, and when she exceeds about 125% of normal strength for a human female of her current age, she can create a new dupe. The extra strength bleeds off into the new dupe. With her current five dupes, she could actually do it as soon as she hit 120% strength, with the extra 20% x 5 going into the new dupe and leaving her with six 100% strength dupes, but she likes having a little extra overhead. Each new dupe she makes slows down the rate at which she accrues new strength though, so you don't have to worry about any sort of geometric Harem-splosion.

Goon Squad has the huge advantage of being able to duplicate any clothing or equipment he's holding (though it reverts to that butter-mint stuff after about an hour if he leaves it lying around, and then eventually crumbles into nothing) But as we're learning, his mental acuity suffers with each split. It's hard to quantify, but it's like an IQ point for every 8-10 dupes? He doesn't seem to have an actual upper limit, but at a certain point he'd start just standing around staring at the wall and not have the wherewithal to continue making copies. If you need someone to capsize a medium sized boat, he's your man. If you need someone to quickly reshelve all the books in a library alphabetically by author, he is not your man.

"Let's see, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, I, Joe... ♪ a real American hero ♫ ... Heh, those guys had a lower body count than the Salvation Army. . . . What was I doing?"