In Flint, Michigan, local industrial companies were pumping toxic waste into the Flint River and, to avoid having to do anything about it and keep their cushy jobs, officials in charge of managing the river went “nope, everything’s fine” and went out of their way to put roadblocks in the way of people trying to stop the bullshit and get the river drinkable again.
So okay, maybe private institutions are more likely to actually fuck stuff up for profit, but public bureaucrats are just as good at subcontracting the fucking up to private enterprise and then enabling the latter.
Better examples perhaps of the private sector susceptibility to the same problem and ones large in the American imagination might be Enron or Madoff. Basically from inception both entire enterprises were elaborate rent seeking Ponzi schemes.
yeah that’s an issue with the public sector and I certainly don’t think the public sector is run by saints or the absolute best and brightest in our society.
I think ultimately the trouble is that the way our society is structured the fact that people had poison in their water was not an issue for the people with the power to change that fact
That’s presumably Breden if they are kicked out and still alive, and Radmar/Elery in the Owlscap if you start letting people starve during the winter, but who else? Just whoever you’ve set as leader while galavanting in the Xaos lands?
Humorously, you know when London finally got its shit together (literally) and cleaned up the Thames? After the Great Stink, when it was so bad that even chemically-treated curtains couldn’t keep the air in the Parliament building fresh. There just wasn’t any way for the Honourable Members of Parliament to pretend it wasn’t a problem anymore.
Elery might split off at some point from Caroline. Breden suffered a very unfortunate (and fatal) accident crossing a stream over the winter following a raid on a suspiciously well defended market town Breden had scouted.
Elery somehow got it into her head that Zvad and Caroline were responsible for Breden’s clumsiness and seems to hate them.
Oh, I was being facetious, Caroline totally decided to murder Breden after the town Breden scouted had too many allastors (decided that was enough circumstantial evidence) and Zvad made sure the “accident” happened. Elery saw through it.
Absolutely! And you’re right that there are no large warrior nomad populations around to enlist… though it is possible to get a boost to your military strength if you can find a way to mobilize margin-dwellers like the Wiendish highlanders or Nyr reindeer pastoralists on a greater scale than the Hegemony has so far been able to. Still, the core approaches would as you note be taking over a chunk of the existing military and/or mass mobilization of some populous base group that supports your revolt.
COM does indeed cover organization and mobilization. Even at COM 2, I’ve written text like: “You put your well-honed command skills to good use, briskly organizing the nervous, somewhat reluctant villagers into teams with clear tasks.” That capacity will scale with additional COM points.
This is where, again, I think Karl Polanyi’s work is so important. Economic activity has never in human history been just about profit maximizing. This was an inescapable truth in pre-modern contexts, with abundant social restrictions on e.g. lending at interest, working on holy days, selling certain luxuries to certain classes, etc. If people had imagined a “private sector” back then, they would have taken for granted that its role was not simply to boost its revenues and cut its costs by any possible means. But even as we come to European modernity, where as part of the bourgeoisie fighting against monarchs and aristos you see the first emergence of the myth of an entirely autonomous and profit-driven private sector, the reality never matched the ideal.
Jump to contemporary America. Choice of Games LLC is a successful little private sector company. Is profit maximization CoG’s “entire purpose as an organization”? Absolutely not. Its purposes sincerely include promoting social justice and lowering “the bar for entry for the writing and game-design professions” through their royalty rates, HG imprint, etc. CoG didn’t pick those purposes because they thought that was the best way to maximize their profits; rather, they’re things that the founders, partners, and staff genuinely care about.
CoG also cares about making a profit; any company needs to have that as one of its primary purposes, or it won’t be much good at fulfilling any others. But companies that have that as their sole purpose are fewer and further between than you (or Milton Friedman and his heirs) might think. Making things well, or providing services well, is an intrinsic satisfaction for most people, not just something they do in the service of maxing out profitability. Loads of great companies succeed because they have a vision for what they can do/deliver better than anyone else.
Many companies have lost their way and failed because they lost touch with that, and started chasing short-term profitability at the expense of excellence, or took cost-cutting to foolish extremes that hurt their reputation and their clients. (And there’s no question that a certain flavor of right-wing ideology has worsened that damage by promoting market institutions that offer short-term incentives to reward short-termist thinking.) Still, most companies genuinely care about their reputation and following the law… both of which would constrain many service providers from putting raw sewage into the water supply!
When a company does something stupidly destructive like that, it’s wrongly reductionist to shrug it off as if that’s just an inevitable consequence of the profit motive at work. Not every company is an Enron. Most aren’t.
LIke I said above, much “public choice theory” applies a similarly reductionist lens to bureaucrats-- that they’re budget maximizers, always looking to preserve their institutional niche and boost the budget available to them by any means possible, whether or not it actually involves working for the public good. I’ve worked in a number of countries where local governments deliberately skimp on their spending on e.g. health post equipment or water treatment, leading to results similar in terms of cancer deaths and waterborne disease to what you describe.
But I don’t think those failures are inevitable, either. The principal-agent problem in public services doesn’t go away by treating either for-profit or non-profit institutions as inherently superior, but by careful (and usually iterative) design of regulatory institutions specific to the context.
Have you seen the Infinite Sea threads? We’re a quiet, sporadic little corner by comparison.
I think part of that is on the current “professional” managerial and consultant class who are often not in touch with the kind of business they are managing at all and live in their own almost parallel world of other Ivy league economics graduates with MBA’s and they’d manage a company that supplies parts for farm equipment the same as a pharmaceutical giant or, for that matter, a hospital. And, yes, that style seems to mostly be focused on short term, quarterly figures and reducing all businesses to their most profitable core, while jettisoning the rest often along with a pile of debt into non-viable spinoff companies.
To them far too often everything is interchangeable, while this is not true for the average employee or indeed the founders of most companies.
And that of course is itself a result of how some things, most notably economics have been taught at our most prestigious institutions over the last half century in particular.
Zebed is likely not a lone actor with regard to the interpretation he preaches and the Hegemony is built upon meting out regular and brutal violence to its slave underclass. With regards to gay helots Zebed’s views seem tacitly tolerated because they are in line with the goals the Hegemony has for the helots, breed, breed, breed and would have likely become the accepted orthodoxy in two or three generations that helots “imitating the real/higher castes in love is a sin”.
Ironically, the principal-agent problem is the reason why laws on publically-traded corporations demand that the company does pursue profit at the expense of all other goals.
Fortunately, that particular brand of evil doesn’t yet exist in Karagond, in part because it’s still built as a semi-theocracy and compassion is (at least if you’re not Zebed) a sacred law as well as a door to Xaos.
Hey @Havenstone , quick linguistic question: I’m putting together a new character, but I like to use custom names. What’s your process for making Karagond dynasty/family names?
Tacitly tolerated is not the same thing as said outright. Or in other words, the Hegemony is largely a normative government and not a bunch of revolutionary punks. I imagine that a lot of Zebed’s superiors have not been happy with him saying the quiet part out loud. It’s just that Olynna…well, she was holding too tightly to the official line when it wasn’t the real line, and you know how that turned out.
Point being, the religion has a lot of clergy (especially in the lower ranks) who know what the Codex actually says. That’s why the priesthood have a credibility stat instead of being another appendage of the Thaumatarchy (which you can’t gain any support from as such).
How would potential(and hypothetical) Cabelite, Northern-Shayardene state call itself if it wouldn’t unite with the rest of liberated realm? In analogy, how would Coastal-Shayardene state be named in that situation? Would they both pretend to the “Shayard” title?
A hypothetical new realm across upper Shayard would ditch the name of the old capital and rename itself Eàrlund for “land of rivers” (in contrast to Brimlund, the lands of the coast). The Coast and Southriding would keep Shayard (and fight to keep the whole country).
I like it. If my main mc can reach an agreement with the Cabelites he has no objections whatsoever to let them have most of upper Shayard as a province by that name.
For my alternate mc it is even easier as splitting Shayard is the goal and Eàrlund would certainly be a welcome member of the Koinon.
“Eàrlund” sounds great. Would all southern/eastern Shayard factions fight to restore pan-shayardene borders if unification proves to be impossible without war? If so, would they do it because “Earlund” has something valuable? Like agricultural potential
