Paperclip Maximizer

Celad Tiragdal, the Paperclip Maximizer:

(fl. ~5400) One of the older Master Traders of the Starfall Arc Free Merchant Confraternity, Celad Tiragdal was an early pioneer of methodologies for trading with technologically undeveloped emerging markets (later codified as the Tiragdal Market Development Methodologies) that promoted local development while remaining within the severely constrained volume of trade possible without starport infrastructure and an extant developed market.

His most famous implementation of these methodologies, and the one which earned him his epithet, was in the marketing of office-efficiency technologies to worlds on the threshold of developing administration sophisticated enough to require them. He pursued this on dozens of planets, to immense success, using a two-phase trading strategy: first, importing a million paper clips to civilizations advanced enough to have paper-based bureaucracy, but which had not yet invented the paper clip, and second, importing simple paper-clip producing machines (capable of using even crudely-drawn wire as feedstock) to worlds he had previously visited which were in danger of running out of imported paper clips.

In addition to his position in the Confraternity and the fortune in the trillions of esteyn he earned over the course of his career, the Paperclip Maximizer is worshipped on Handrian (Lisune Pass) as Keledal, He Who Binds Together, a local deity of paperwork, efficiency, justice, and proper form.

– Heroes of Trade: Stories of the Great Merchants

Notable Replies

  1. We cannot, of course, forget the humble post-it note and how it changed everything.

  2. Legends tell of the company mascot - a certain sophomorphised paperclip, known for occasionally providing good advice when the user is faced with technical issues

  3. Note to self: Given the degree of dummy-spitting over this one, when it goes to paper it needs to be revised to make it eye-bleedingly clear that wealth, epithet and fame came from the whole early pioneer of methodologies thing, not only from the first step in that process.

  4. I don’t see how me making an inane remark about Clippy is considered “throwing a tantrum”, unless I’m misunderstanding dummy-spitting

  5. Not you and not here.

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