Prolong and career choices

Pensions and retirement plans are going to be "interesting" What do you do with a 70 year old who retires from the Navy after 50 years of service and who can be expected to live (barring accident) to age 120?

And for those without any plan of funding and have to keep at the menial job for 100 years. Everything sounds good till someone starts asking actual questions.

Brigade XO wrote:Pensions and retirement plans are going to be "interesting" What do you do with a 70 year old who retires from the Navy after 50 years of service and who can be expected to live (barring accident) to age 120?

And for those without any plan of funding and have to keep at the menial job for 100 years. Everything sounds good till someone starts asking actual questions.

In the US, many companies are going to defined contribution pension plans. IIRC, there is one country where the plan requires a certain percentage of earned income to be invested, anyone know if this is fact? This, properly planned, would eliminate the need for continued funding from the pension provider, but require responsibility from the receiver.

We got started late on investing, so only about 20% of our retirement income is from investments. OTOH, we are really good at bargain hunting, and now have plenty of time to do it

Living expenses can be really low if you keep luxuries rare enough so they never bore you when you get them.

Given Prolong:

= "Jonathan S"
Reach a point where you're getting bored with your career, and have enough savings to easily take 7-10 years off. Then maybe get back up to speed in your old profession, or go back to school and switch professions.

seems most likely for most people. Of course, there are those whose method of preventing boredom is to make trouble for other persons!

If Rajampet held the CNO position for over a century, he must have been appointed by the time he was 20. Which, even in the SLN, seems improbable.

In point of fact, at the beginning of MoH, he was 123 years old, but I haven't seen anything to say how long he'd been CNO. OTOH, in the next chapter, Kingsford anticipates stepping into his shoes in 40-50 years time. Looking at that passage, it says that Rajampet was one of the very first people to get prolong, and thus one of the oldest humans still alive. Since his career would have been essentially unaffected by prolong, it's probably a safe guess that he reached his current rank no later than ~75-80, and more likely a good 10 years earlier.

The point is made several times in the books that the RMN - and by implication Manticore in general - has given a lot of thought to the consequences of prolong, where the SLN, and presumably the rest of the SL bureaucracy, has not. Suggesting that there is a build-up of ambitious Young Turks in the middle ranks who will be more than delighted to whip the rug out from under their superiors if it breaks the log-jam blocking their own advancement - some of whom will be quite aware that that means breaking the current system and putting together a new one.

ChronicRder wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:It seems more likely that people will retire, or semi-retire multiple times. Reach a point where you're getting bored with your career, and have enough savings to easily take 7-10 years off. Then maybe get back up to speed in your old profession, or go back to school and switch professions.
Rinse and repeat.

That seems more likely, to me, that someone working for 140-ish years then taking 50 years off. (Especially since you're unlikely to need to significantly slow down for health reasons)

That would make sense to me as well, but then we have all sorts of interesting examples of people not doing that in the series. Rajampet Rajani's death throws the Solarian Admiralty into disarray as he's held the slot for over a T-century. We can safely assume that at least one of the Mandarans has held their slot for equally as long. Innokentiy Kolokoltsov said as much in either ART or SFTS, (apologies, I can't remember which off hand). I also thought James Webster had served for about a century in uniform. We know White Haven has served about 70-80 years and I wouldn't be surprised if Sebastian D'Orville served a comparable time to either of his associates. I can only assume in the SLN (either FF or BF) that you have to serve quite some time to make Flag rank or General Officer rank even with political/familial connections.
...
I don't think Haven has anyone that has survived long enough over its last three wars (1st Haven-Manticore, Unification (vs State Sec), and 2nd Haven-Manticore) to have over 50 years experience. I might be mistaken in the case of Alfredo Yu or Amos Parnell but neither of them are in the Havenite navy or government any longer.

One of my favorite characters would fit your theory, however. Aivars Terekhov first served in the RMN; then, spent 28 years in the Foreign Office, and went back to the Navy. Side note, he's a favorite becuase he's actually followed the career path I really hope to achieve some day. I really, really want to be a Foreign Area Officer/Military Attache. In spite of the Benghazi and other embassy incidents.

Food for thought.

As indicated. there is text stating that the RMN in particular has carefully considered prolong and its effects on the military. That is why they adopted the policy of rotating officers between shipboard and ground. In fact, had the war not happened I think one could assume that officers such as Honor would have spent years between shipboard commands as instructors or working in headquarters/logistics/etc. With an officer capable of a 200 year career it makes all the sense in the world to get them experience in a broad array of postings and to rotate them continually to keep them mastering new skills and improving.

I would assume that Manticore civil society has, in general, followed the RMNs lead. By that I mean companies are likely to try and rotate their personnel between jobs periodically, both to keep them from stagnation but also to improve their workforce by increasing the skill base in a broad way.

In fact, we have some loose evidence of this from Honor Among Enemies. Stukowski (spelling?), the Hauptman Cartel Captain has spent a good part of Stacey Hauptman's youth commanding the family's personal yacht, but had since transferred back into freighter command. For a nation like the RMN where so many merchantman are part of the reserve it would make sense for the Navy to encourage the Cartel's to regularly shuffle crews around between related positions to keep them up to date on as many jobs as possible. And, from a monetary stand point having employees with diverse skills gives greatly increased flexibility to management in moving pieces around. If you're low on trained engineers, but have a surplus of gravitics techs who have cross-trained as engineers, you can just shuffle some around instead of having to beach gravitics techs while hiring new engineers.

Brigade XO wrote:Pensions and retirement plans are going to be "interesting" What do you do with a 70 year old who retires from the Navy after 50 years of service and who can be expected to live (barring accident) to age 120?

And for those without any plan of funding and have to keep at the menial job for 100 years. Everything sounds good till someone starts asking actual questions.

It depends on what is a menial job. Most of those jobs would be done by an AI. A office building 'janitor's' job might be sitting in front of a bunch of display screens monitoring five floors of cleaning remotes.

Most of my point was that people stay in a given profession for several decades and do not change every 30-40 years after they "get bored" and take a decade off like the original person I was responding to suggested. Starting with Rajani probably wasn't the best choice, but I had several other examples in there too. These people stay in their fields for decades on end with no real changes.
Terekhov MAY be an example of this not being the case. But even during his FO time, he was on detached duty from the Navy. So, technically, it was nothing more than an additional duty that would yield another retirement revenue source.


[quote="Louis R"]If Rajampet held the CNO position for over a century, he must have been appointed by the time he was 20. Which, even in the SLN, seems improbable.

In point of fact, at the beginning of MoH, he was 123 years old, but I haven't seen anything to say how long he'd been CNO. OTOH, in the next chapter, Kingsford anticipates stepping into his shoes in 40-50 years time. Looking at that passage, it says that Rajampet was one of the very first people to get prolong, and thus one of the oldest humans still alive. Since his career would have been essentially unaffected by prolong, it's probably a safe guess that he reached his current rank no later than ~75-80, and more likely a good 10 years earlier.

The point is made several times in the books that the RMN - and by implication Manticore in general - has given a lot of thought to the consequences of prolong, where the SLN, and presumably the rest of the SL bureaucracy, has not. Suggesting that there is a build-up of ambitious Young Turks in the middle ranks who will be more than delighted to whip the rug out from under their superiors if it breaks the log-jam blocking their own advancement - some of whom will be quite aware that that means breaking the current system and putting together a new one.

ChronicRder wrote:Most of my point was that people stay in a given profession for several decades and do not change every 30-40 years after they "get bored" and take a decade off like the original person I was responding to suggested. Starting with Rajani probably wasn't the best choice, but I had several other examples in there too. These people stay in their fields for decades on end with no real changes.
Terekhov MAY be an example of this not being the case. But even during his FO time, he was on detached duty from the Navy. So, technically, it was nothing more than an additional duty that would yield another retirement revenue source.

Louis R wrote:If Rajampet held the CNO position for over a century, he must have been appointed by the time he was 20. Which, even in the SLN, seems improbable.

In point of fact, at the beginning of MoH, he was 123 years old, but I haven't seen anything to say how long he'd been CNO. OTOH, in the next chapter, Kingsford anticipates stepping into his shoes in 40-50 years time. Looking at that passage, it says that Rajampet was one of the very first people to get prolong, and thus one of the oldest humans still alive. Since his career would have been essentially unaffected by prolong, it's probably a safe guess that he reached his current rank no later than ~75-80, and more likely a good 10 years earlier.

The point is made several times in the books that the RMN - and by implication Manticore in general - has given a lot of thought to the consequences of prolong, where the SLN, and presumably the rest of the SL bureaucracy, has not. Suggesting that there is a build-up of ambitious Young Turks in the middle ranks who will be more than delighted to whip the rug out from under their superiors if it breaks the log-jam blocking their own advancement - some of whom will be quite aware that that means breaking the current system and putting together a new one.

Captain Terekov was a RMN reservist who worked for the foreign office, basically it would like being a reservist today namely one weekend a month and two weeks a year. I was a USN reservist for 12 years and used to my advantage several times. I set up my two week training time to go to sub base Pearl Harbor in January and February several times or San Diego in March and April. I also volunteered to go on 6 month long West-Pac deployments when I was laid off from work.

I just hope mental health treatment has at least matched prolong treatment. Family drama must get interesting, too. There's people I put up with for the sake of my kid. But if they expect to stay in my life for the next 200+ years, they're in for a very rude awakening.

(though maybe they feel the same way about me and we'll all be fine...)

cthia wrote:On another front. In sports, like baseball, all sorts of records have been broken. The Guinness Book is unrecognizable.

Babe Ruth's 11 season record will be crushed. In that same vein, logic dictates that Barry Bonds' homerun record of 762 will also be shattered.

I'm as much interested in rehab&healing, specifically in regards to things like boxing, mma, (american)football. How those sports get shaken up(especially the fighting ones) would be interesting.

But forget records, the sheer depth of the talent pool would be immensely satisfying to watch.


Honestly, I feel like baseball's obsession with records is weird anyway. Sure, part of it is because it CAN. Baseball isn't going to evolve as much as more dynamic games. Which makes it super hard to compare people across eras anyway. But it'd sure be fun to watch!

Sully wrote:I just hope mental health treatment has at least matched prolong treatment. Family drama must get interesting, too. There's people I put up with for the sake of my kid. But if they expect to stay in my life for the next 200+ years, they're in for a very rude awakening.

(though maybe they feel the same way about me and we'll all be fine...)

cthia wrote:On another front. In sports, like baseball, all sorts of records have been broken. The Guinness Book is unrecognizable.

Babe Ruth's 11 season record will be crushed. In that same vein, logic dictates that Barry Bonds' homerun record of 762 will also be shattered.

I'm as much interested in rehab&healing, specifically in regards to things like boxing, mma, (american)football. How those sports get shaken up(especially the fighting ones) would be interesting.

But forget records, the sheer depth of the talent pool would be immensely satisfying to watch.


Honestly, I feel like baseball's obsession with records is weird anyway. Sure, part of it is because it CAN. Baseball isn't going to evolve as much as more dynamic games. Which makes it super hard to compare people across eras anyway. But it'd sure be fun to watch!

Imagine what Football (American) would look like with San Martino and Ndebele players on the team's IIRC Thomas Ramirez is 1.8m and 200kg while Thandi is 2m and 114kg.

I would imagine that prolong would find mothers and grandmothers in the same dance club as the kids.

"Aww man, my mom and her mom is here! Let's leave!"