This math really just goes to prove that your offer is ridiculously bad for her. I mean you'd essentially be paying just above her opportunity cost from not investing the money in other potential investments, so she'd not actually be making much more than a safe investment.
And that's before accounting for the massive risk of failure that her other investment options don't have.
Something I noticed while working the math on my proposal; Sachiko's opening offer isn't that good for her. Crazy as it sounds 5% per million actually doesn't have that great a pay off. At an average of $515 income per girl, based off our Pre-Tokyo numbers, we'd be making $309,000 per month with 600 girls and $515,000 per month for a thousand girls. 4% of that, equivalent to 5% of benefits, is $12,360 and $20,600 per month respectively which comes to $148,320 per year and $247,200 per year. With a 5% and 8% discount rates that gives NPVs of:
5% discount rate
NPV (600 girls) = 148,320/0.05 = $2,966,400
NPV (1000 girls) = 247,200/0.05 = $4,944,000
8% discount rate
NPV (600 girls) = 148,320/0.08 = $1,854,000
NPV (1000 girls) = 247,200/0.08 = $3,090,000
If we consider that Sachiko is estimating we have a 50% of death then in the most reasonable of the 4 scenarios, 600 girls and 8% rate, she's actually better off going down to the local Casio and putting it all on Black (in a game of roulette). After all her expected value there would be $-52,632 compared to the $-73,000 of her investment. Even if she's been optimistic and gambling we'll hit our population cap* fast her rewards aren't that great since she's getting an approximately 2:1 payout for 1:1 odds.
Well either that or we are seriously overestimating just how good a return she can squeeze out of the market. E
Fundamentally Japan collapsing into chaos doesn't necessarily make things impossible for magical girls. It changes the paradigm substantially, makes things harder in some ways, but easier in others.
I definitely agree that Japan collapsing doesn't make life
impossible for magical girls. Just
really terrible.
Failed-state Japan would not be a game-over like people think. It would flip the table and radically change the game system. But you could keep playing. Hell that was something I had rudimentary plans for. Scavenging for food each month, defending your homes against raiders, etc. (How do you balance your defenses against a need to hide magic? Maybe if you kill all the witnesses it's fine to use magic in your defenses.) Probably you'd eventually either try to set up human villages defended by you somehow to grow food, or maybe invade another country.
Well no it wouldn't be except for how heavily the SIMP is invested into Tokyo. The only ways I see it happening are either:
A) We lose against the Beholder in which case the vast majority of SIMP is dead including all our leaders.
B) We pull out of Tokyo at which point a massive chunk of our membership Grief Spirals, most of them dying due to our lack of cubes, since morale would instantly shoot to zero and all the heroic girls we've raised would blame themselves for 30+ million people dying.
But that's assuming a failed-state scenario even happens. More likely the national economy would drop 50% or so but law and order would remain intact for the most part. Japan doesn't disintegrate to lawlessness from disasters to the same degree the US does.
I'd struggle to believe Japan could survive as a nation if Tokyo was obliterated. 30% of the nation's population, 40% of it's GDP and the entire national government all being erased simultaneously would almost certainly be a fatal blow.
Also the collapse wouldn't hurt everyone equally. Now Sachiko isn't so callous as to want to use a massive disaster to her advantage instead of work to prevent it, but imagine how much money you could make if you knew a disaster was coming in advance.
I'd actually say you'd make
nothing from a disaster like this because:
Well there's more to life than having money; you also need to have a place still around in which to spend it. Japan is the world's third largest economy. If that vanishes off the face of the Earth, less than a year after Hong Kong and Buenos Aires, there wouldn't be a safe and stable place left. Magical girls can't live well in a world of anarchy: each one needs over 20,000 regular humans to sustain themselves, preferably living in urban centers, and all of that is going to turn into shifting sand if Tokyo completely dies.
Tokyo is one of the three economic hubs of the world, New York and London being the other two, and Japan is the third largest economy in the world, China is number two and it just suffered a major disaster with the loss of Hong Kong albeit not anywhere near as serious as Japan''s would be, so ripples would be felt across the global economy.
That's not even considering the fact that
three major cities
dying in 1 year is going to cause a global panic. Even with the explanations provided by the Incubators that would still be
scary as fuck. Especially since at the rate we're going I (OOC), and most people in universe likely, fully expect to see more major cities cease to be in the coming years.
It should be noted that if you're all still alive in six months she'll give you much more normal loan terms. She's giving you these strange terms because she has you 50/50 on being dead inside 3 months. (Granted normal banks don't know that so it's not factored into their loan rates, but she's not interested in being competitive with them at the cost of taking a non-profitable deal, it wouldn't make sense.)
I'm curious, and I'm not sure if you can tell us this, but would she be willing to offer us more normal loan terms immediately after we kill the Beholder? Because really most the money we need would be for ensuring our stability
after that so we don't really need it until the Beholder is dead. From what you've said our ability to survive fighting it is her primary concern, from a risk perspective, so while our future would still be somewhat uncertain, we could fail to expand into Tokyo and/or stabilize the situation there, but death, which is the only way to escape Sachiko's contracts, would be far less likely then.
[QUOTE="inverted_helix, post: 6233491, member: 1209"...I'm just going to say no, no, and more no.
You cannot put teenage girls in a hole in the ground without lights and sanitation. And magical girls do still eat and poop, air is something they generally need as well. (Keep in mind their passive regen to template feature is fairly slow, slow acting poisons don't affect them, nor most radiation, but something that kills them in a matter of a few hours-never specified exactly how long-still works, and suffocation counts.)
Also keeping in mind that unpleasant can translate to lethal rather quickly for a magical girl.[/QUOTE]
Who said anything about it lacking lights and sanitation? A quick googling tells me portable toilets cost $160 a month to rent and you need on average 1 toilet per 15 girls, at least for an office environment so probably cut that down to say 1 per 10, while battery operated (100+ hours of use per set of batteries) hurricane lanterns clock in at about $40.
So at a rough guess for for say 500 girls we could set up underground housing for:
- 625x Lanterns = $25,000
- Lantern Batteries = $7,500 per month
- Portable Toilets = $8,000 per month
- Total = $40,500 Initial + $15,500 per month afterwards
It's actually surprisingly practical for
emergency short term living space, the morale hit would be too much for prolonged use. The only question that comes to mind would be how difficult would setting up proper ventilation be?
As for the money discussion; it's already quite late now (I can hear the siren call of sleep) so I can't work out anything detailed right now but I'm really learning towards taking a $500,000 investment, which would probably come out to somewhere in the 0.5 to 2 percent equity range, for redoing the village and keeping us afloat until after the Beholder is dead. At which point we'd be in a position to argue for actual
loans, instead of investment, for everything else that needs paying.
I sort of assumed we were keeping an eye on whether they are in singletons or not. So I based everything on the implied status quo of them being still in double-tons. We should just go fishing again, and this means that Serena and her group should be able to handle one just fine.
