Suspension of Disbelief.

[/quote]
What proportion of America's workforce is involved in her major export industries? Not much, really, right? The vast majority work in the service industries and that part of the manufacturing sector that produces goods for domestic consumption. Can the same be true of Manticore in general, and the belter population specifically?[/quote]

Compaired to when? Compaired to the late 19th century, dam few. Compaired to 1950's, dam few.

Remember the whole problem with shipping manufacturing "off shore", first by moving the factories out of the country and then just doing business with foreign companies and having little or no ownership of the actual production process except for perhaps the original design of products and improvements.

In another life I had a customer( two partners) who were selling tools. The kind you work and fix things with, not machine tools that you make stuff to make stuff. They were contracting with companies (lots of little manfacturing companies in the same state or near by). Then that whole "made in China" thing hit their little market segment. They could buy the same stuff from Chinese suppliers cheeper. One example was what it used to cost them $17,000 to buy wholesale in the US then cost them $10,000. That's net. delivered to their warehouse.

We have already seen that a lot of work (military- building warships and the parts that go into them & civilian ships etc) was being done in Grayson because the cost of labor was significantly lower and but the quality/ efficiency was at least to Manticore mil- spec.

Just boggles the mind that a whole lot of manufactureing - in a counter grave society- wasen't planet side if it didn't need to be for things like need for vacuum, micro/no gravity, etc in mfg process.


How big were those stations around Manticore, Gryphon and Sphinx?
How much of that was MILITARY space and essentialy armaments industries including shipyard space? So Manticore was supposed to be churning out "stuff" by the 4MT load...wait, make that hundreds of 4MT, 5Mt, 6,MT freighter loads in a T-year and not only supplying the SKM, later SEM with all their stuff but selling the same things to mostly all the planets in Silesia, Asguard, etc and hauling the stuff to end-user/distributers across at least half of the SL an "attached" systems.

How many of the people killed on-stations and related structures around the 3 primary Manticor planets were non-military, or military dependents? Just how many were engaged -in some level- of actual manufacturing or administrating the business that were producing the civilian export materials- that filled how many hundreds of megatons of commercial shipping vessels?

So these super-human manufacturing employees were all on the stations when they got blowed up along with all the people who were working making and repairing the military hardware and ships.

Handwavium.

My estimate is that most of the people killed were not part of the manufacturing base. They were people at running the huge naval bases, people running the port facility (cargo and passenger), their dependents and the people that ran the whole support infrastructure for the complexes (ranging from retail salespeople to kindergarten teachers to the facility maintenance staff.)

The actual number of manufacturing staff has to be much less then a million, probably in the 1-300,000 range. That isn't machine operators, that is the entire manufacturing companies, from machine operators to equipment designers to sales staff and the CEO. And includes the ship construction crews. This is the people producing hundreds of millions of tons of manufactured goods every year, in addition to half a billion tons of warships and tens of thousands of missile pods.


Yes, it makes no sense.

Nor does the idea that the RMN wouldn't have huge disruption in operations. Consider what USAF would do if one day every jet engine plant and spare part supplier in the US blew up. Would this impact USAF operations? Hell YES. Since your part stockpile is suddenly all you have every single action that imposes wear on your systems or involves expenditure of munitions would be very closely scrutinized and require careful justification at all levels.

If ship uses up it's recon drones there are no more. If you wear out your nodes, well too bad, you can park you cruiser over there until we have some more. A failed sidewall generator means you run at reduced power or get cannibalized for parts to keep other ships running.

Do you see this kind of thinking depicted in the books? I don't, I see some high level lip service paid to the issue of missile, but no concern at the operational level that they have any issues.

JohnRoth wrote:

Bill Woods wrote:The countries with longest exposure to chemicals and stuff seem to have done pretty well.
http://www.maxroser.com/everyone-is-bet ... increased/

I'd like to see what Kaiser Fung at Junk Charts (http://junkcharts.typepad.com/ ) makes of that chart. Even so, it's shooting fish in a barrel: the majority of the increase in life expectancy is due to the reduction of infant mortality, which in turn is due to public health measures, immunization and antibiotics. Everything else is of marginal importance.

Most, but not all.
http://www.maxroser.com/gains-for-all-l ... cy-by-age/

Bill Woods wrote: The countries with longest exposure to chemicals and stuff seem to have done pretty well.
http://www.maxroser.com/everyone-is-bet ... increased/

Because they have also had improvements in healthcare and access to food happening far faster.

Tenshinai wrote:

Bill Woods wrote: The countries with longest exposure to chemicals and stuff seem to have done pretty well.
http://www.maxroser.com/everyone-is-bet ... increased/

Because they have also had improvements in healthcare and access to food happening far faster.

Where people live the longest. Has little to do with healthcare. Has most everything to do with climate in which they live. Longest living people are in moderate temperate climate zones where the common "flu"/"colds" do not happen. This disease alone kills off more old people than any other. The flu/cold stresses old peoples systems which lead to heart and lung complications that lead to the #1 terminal cause of death, heart attack.

Also due to the temperate climate in which they live, they walk more and stay in mild shape more than those in colder/warmer climates.

In truth, moderation, truly is the best medicine.

Relax wrote:Where people live the longest. Has little to do with healthcare.
...

Riiight...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

Public health measures are credited with much of the recent increase in life expectancy. During the 20th century, despite a brief drop due to the 1918 flu pandemic[35] starting around that time the average lifespan in the United States increased by more than 30 years, of which 25 years can be attributed to advances in public health.

Damn, just how incompetent or ignorant can you be?

Tenshinai wrote:

Relax wrote:Where people live the longest. Has little to do with healthcare.
...

Riiight...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

Public health measures are credited with much of the recent increase in life expectancy. During the 20th century, despite a brief drop due to the 1918 flu pandemic[35] starting around that time the average lifespan in the United States increased by more than 30 years, of which 25 years can be attributed to advances in public health.

Damn, just how incompetent or ignorant can you be?

Damn, how can you completely miss what was being discussed?

What was being discussed, was health care being equal, or near equal, and you were attributing the differences to/going on a diatribe about chemicals, etc.

The answer is, it has nothing to do with chemicals etc.

Relax wrote:The answer is, it has nothing to do with chemicals etc.

It's the Chemtrails! I heard it on the radio!

kzt wrote:It's the Chemtrails! I heard it on the radio!

Sure it wasn't a podcast. I mean it was the internet after all.

Just in humor,
T2M