Real effects of Lacoon II

Gunny wrote:

Thunder Child Actual wrote:
Which just goes to show that the Mandarins are not that bright. They should have been intervening in the Haven-Manti war from the get go if they relied that much on Manti Freighters for their commerce. That conflict had the potential to disrupt their freight network if the Manti’s lost and Haven took control of the freighters. Instead they sat it out and hoped for the best. They and the SLN did not even pay attention as to why their freight network did not get disrupted.

You are right, the Mandarins are not that bright.

Unfortunately they do things like spend all their time trying to get elected and reelected. They go heavily into things like borrowing endlessly to have more money to give away. Listen to what God told them about the evils of abortion (as if that's anyone's business except the woman's). Gun control, probably because of fear that they will get un-elected in a messy way. Destroy the educational system. Ignore global warming, pollution, and ... Oh Well, why go on.

The Mandarins are not elected, their perpetual bureaucrats, they're actually accountable to no one, they pass regulations etc. It's like in the RW on some regulations. The U.S. EPA could tax breathing if it worded the regs the right way. In some states it's illegal to store water collected from the roof of your own house. Try opening a small business and see how many pages of regulations you have to comply with. Your average small restaurant will entail complying with 1900 page's of health codes, 650 pages of safety codes, 500 pages of fire codes, 2700 pages building codes. That's just local government codes this doesn't count state and federal government codes.

saber964 wrote:

Gunny wrote:
You are right, the Mandarins are not that bright.

Unfortunately they do things like spend all their time trying to get elected and reelected. They go heavily into things like borrowing endlessly to have more money to give away. Listen to what God told them about the evils of abortion (as if that's anyone's business except the woman's). Gun control, probably because of fear that they will get un-elected in a messy way. Destroy the educational system. Ignore global warming, pollution, and ... Oh Well, why go on.

The Mandarins are not elected, their perpetual bureaucrats, they're actually accountable to no one, they pass regulations etc. It's like in the RW on some regulations. The U.S. EPA could tax breathing if it worded the regs the right way. In some states it's illegal to store water collected from the roof of your own house. Try opening a small business and see how many pages of regulations you have to comply with. Your average small restaurant will entail complying with 1900 page's of health codes, 650 pages of safety codes, 500 pages of fire codes, 2700 pages building codes. That's just local government codes this doesn't count state and federal government codes.

And just how long do our leaders stay in power. Harry Reid since 1987. Robert Byrd from 1953 to 2010. Hillary in one capacity or another for basically her whole life, the one thing she did as a businesswoman was Whitewater, repeatedly referred to the US Attorney but not prosecuted. Mandarins!

Gunny wrote:And just how long do our leaders stay in power. Harry Reid since 1987. Robert Byrd from 1953 to 2010. Hillary in one capacity or another for basically her whole life, the one thing she did as a businesswoman was Whitewater, repeatedly referred to the US Attorney but not prosecuted. Mandarins!

Half of West Virginia is named after Robert Byrd (D-KKK).

saber964 wrote:

Gunny wrote:You are right, the Mandarins are not that bright.

Unfortunately they do things like spend all their time trying to get elected and reelected. They go heavily into things like borrowing endlessly to have more money to give away. Listen to what God told them about the evils of abortion (as if that's anyone's business except the woman's). Gun control, probably because of fear that they will get un-elected in a messy way. Destroy the educational system. Ignore global warming, pollution, and ... Oh Well, why go on.

The Mandarins are not elected, their perpetual bureaucrats, they're actually accountable to no one, they pass regulations etc. It's like in the RW on some regulations. The U.S. EPA could tax breathing if it worded the regs the right way. In some states it's illegal to store water collected from the roof of your own house. Try opening a small business and see how many pages of regulations you have to comply with. Your average small restaurant will entail complying with 1900 page's of health codes, 650 pages of safety codes, 500 pages of fire codes, 2700 pages building codes. That's just local government codes this doesn't count state and federal government codes.

They may not be elected by the citizens at large, but there has to be some means of succession. One of Kolokeltsev's concerns was maintaining the support of the bureaucracy and the transstellars, otherwise he and his fellows at the top table get replaced. He wasn't too worried about the Assembly at first, though.

Whenever a Permanent Undersecretary retires or dies, how is the next one selected? So yeah, the bureaucrats who want to be in charge have to pander to whatever body makes that decision. That pandering could be considered a perpetual election campaign, albeit with a very limited franchise.

wasn't there a mention in one of the early meetings of the mandarins where one of them muses about how so and so was the newest member and had been a compromise as all the others had allies they would have preferred in the position?

Yup, so it seems that whenever one of the senior posts vacates, the others on that level decides whom to appoint to the vacant post. Don't know how it would work for lower positions, though.

You guys are overlooking the economics of Lacoon II. Namely the length of the trip. Lacoon doesn't stop a SL merchant from trading with a planet they just can't use the MWJ so a particular run takes longer to make. Here is a break down of a merchant run between Casca and New Rotterdam both planets are roughly 15 days travel time from each end of the MWJ/BJT. Now a normal ship will spend say M$ 500,000 per T-day on pay, spare parts, maintenance, food etc. That cost just went through the roof from M$ 15,000,000+ MWJ transit fee of M$ 5,000,000 for a one month run to M$ 90,000,000 for six month run. Also say you have to a major overhaul of the Alpha and Beta nodes every 1100-1200 T-days of operation. That means you go from doing roughly 36 runs per overhaul to roughly 6 runs per overhaul.

saber964 wrote:You guys are overlooking the economics of Lacoon II. Namely the length of the trip. Lacoon doesn't stop a SL merchant from trading with a planet they just can't use the MWJ so a particular run takes longer to make. Here is a break down of a merchant run between Casca and New Rotterdam both planets are roughly 15 days travel time from each end of the MWJ/BJT. Now a normal ship will spend say M$ 500,000 per T-day on pay, spare parts, maintenance, food etc. That cost just went through the roof from M$ 15,000,000+ MWJ transit fee of M$ 5,000,000 for a one month run to M$ 90,000,000 for six month run. Also say you have to a major overhaul of the Alpha and Beta nodes every 1100-1200 T-days of operation. That means you go from doing roughly 36 runs per overhaul to roughly 6 runs per overhaul.

Freighters overhaul like every decade. It's part of why they have lower performance.

The killer isn't operating costs. Whether you have a crew of 10 or 100, food and pay isn't that much per day. What kills you is the note on the ship. Assume you have a one billion $M loan on the ship at 7% over 40 years. How much do you owe to the bank every month? $6.2 million, whether you have a cargo or even a crew. Plus operating costs, insurance, etc.

That, by the way, is why the entire Manticoran merchant marine has gone bankrupt unless the government bailed them all out (which didn't seem to be in the cards). So if you want a bunch of freighters cheap there are a bunch of banks looking to unload them...

Anyhow, there are both not enough freighters and the travel times often went up a lot. what happens is the the rates go up, a lot. To some extent it becomes a seller's market for freighters. Low value cargos sit on the docks forever. Medium value stuff may or may not get shipped and if it does it will cost significantly more at the far end. High value cargos get shipped and take longer to be delivered and the merchant gets paid more.

This causes an obvious opportunity someone to get a bunch of freighters and start carrying the cargo that gets pushed out of shipping by high value cargos. Now if you could buy a bunch of freighters cheap (hmm, where might you be able to do that?) you will, but otherwise you will build them. Freighters are very well understood tech, roughly equivalent to locomotives in maturity. (They haven't changed much in a couple of centuries - so locomotives are much less mature than Honorverse freighters, but let's pretend.) Every single industrialized country can build locomotives if they want to. It might take some time to build a plant and some might be better than others, they will all move freight.

Edit: lets change cargo trailers to locomotives.

kzt wrote:

saber964 wrote:You guys are overlooking the economics of Lacoon II. Namely the length of the trip. Lacoon doesn't stop a SL merchant from trading with a planet they just can't use the MWJ so a particular run takes longer to make. Here is a break down of a merchant run between Casca and New Rotterdam both planets are roughly 15 days travel time from each end of the MWJ/BJT. Now a normal ship will spend say M$ 500,000 per T-day on pay, spare parts, maintenance, food etc. That cost just went through the roof from M$ 15,000,000+ MWJ transit fee of M$ 5,000,000 for a one month run to M$ 90,000,000 for six month run. Also say you have to a major overhaul of the Alpha and Beta nodes every 1100-1200 T-days of operation. That means you go from doing roughly 36 runs per overhaul to roughly 6 runs per overhaul.

Freighters overhaul like every decade. It's part of why they have lower performance.

The killer isn't operating costs. Whether you have a crew of 10 or 100, food and pay isn't that much per day. What kills you is the note on the ship. Assume you have a one billion $M loan on the ship at 7% over 40 years. How much do you owe to the bank every month? $6.2 million, whether you have a cargo or even a crew. Plus operating costs, insurance, etc.

That, by the way, is why the entire Manticoran merchant marine has gone bankrupt unless the government bailed them all out (which didn't seem to be in the cards). So if you want a bunch of freighters cheap there are a bunch of banks looking to unload them...

Anyhow, there are both not enough freighters and the travel times often went up a lot. what happens is the the rates go up, a lot. To some extent it becomes a seller's market for freighters. Low value cargos sit on the docks forever. Medium value stuff may or may not get shipped and if it does it will cost significantly more at the far end. High value cargos get shipped and take longer to be delivered and the merchant gets paid more.

This causes an obvious opportunity someone to get a bunch of freighters and start carrying the cargo that gets pushed out of shipping by high value cargos. Now if you could buy a bunch of freighters cheap (hmm, where might you be able to do that?) you will, but otherwise you will build them. Freighters are very well understood tech, roughly equivalent to locomotives in maturity. (They haven't changed much in a couple of centuries - so locomotives are much less mature than Honorverse freighters, but let's pretend.) Every single industrialized country can build locomotives if they want to. It might take some time to build a plant and some might be better than others, they will all move freight.

Edit: lets change cargo trailers to locomotives.

That's why i generalized the operating costs, but pay can add up to a significant chunk of change. This information is 20 years out of date. The starting salary of an USMM able seaman/oiler wiper was $2500-3000 per month Ships officer/department head eg Chief Engineer $8-12,000 per month Master $12-20,000 per month.

Nico wrote:Yup, so it seems that whenever one of the senior posts vacates, the others on that level decides whom to appoint to the vacant post. Don't know how it would work for lower positions, though.

Though I'd imagine the only plausible candidates are the most senior underlings of the outgoing permanent undersecretary. Defense doesn't have a permanent undersecretary among the Mandarins, but Ranji was the next best thing to one, and Kingsford was his obvious successor.