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Shepard Quest Mk VI, Technological Revolution

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TheEyes said:
Having/being a monopoly isn't illegal; it's even less illegal in our case because our monopolies are government-granted via patents. It's monopoly abuse that's illegal, and ironically the only place where we're going to be abusing our monopolies are places where we are apparently legally obligated to, such as the prohibition of selling Repulsor drive technology letting us take over the express shipping business.

"Your honor, we are trying to sell multi-core, Repulsor-driven freighters on the open market. We are literally not allowed to by the executive branch, who don't trust anyone else but us to have the technology!"
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You want to sell miniaturized gigajoule lasers? Super Alloys? TIR? You could say those are going to be on the No-sell list too, but we're going to kill off all SA competition eventually. Hoyr hopefully isn't going to let that go down quietly.

Godogma said:
EDIT: I know I'd have been damn loyal if I was paid more than 10 or 12 bucks an hour, much less 16 plus all those perks.
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azoicennead said:
Our guards are meant to be willing and able to fight in combat. As in, face real bullets when foes arrive. They are not meant to call the cops and hunker down. That said...

If the base is 47k, a 5% increase gives our 20-year guard a salary of 124k. That's solid middle-to-upper-middle-class pay, and hazard pay is a thing we should use.
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We've already had bribery attempts. What do you think is going to happen when we release the most advanced Frigate ever, then a invisible version of it. Then start cruiser research? They only make that much if they stay 20+ years, and we're not going to train them to sit on their asses. Money will be irrelevant by the time we're paying them 2+ million.

STG is gonna squeal harder ten thousand angry pigs to the Asari when they find out, and they are going to bring their 700+ year lifespans of compounding interest to bear on us. We're gonna have to pay more than double/triple ME minimum wage.
 
Throwing money at them won't stop that though - because as you said, any serious bribe could potentially be enormous.
 
azoicennead said:
Our guards are meant to be willing and able to fight in combat. As in, face real bullets when foes arrive. They are not meant to call the cops and hunker down. That said...


That is a fucking ridiculous salary for a guard. No. Let's think more like a 5-10% raise per year for the same position. That gets an end salary of 265% to 672% of the base, which seems reasonable for someone who failed to be promoted for 20 years.
If the base is 47k, a 5% increase gives our 20-year guard a salary of 124k. That's solid middle-to-upper-middle-class pay, and hazard pay is a thing we should use.
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Your pay scale is much more reasonable but frankly ACTIVELY SERVING MILITARY posted in Iraq, Afghanistan and all points in the sandbox get paid less than that with few to no perks. PI pays for our guard's medical, world class entertainment expenses, etc etc etc to boot along with 16 dollrs an hour salary.

And our medical is beyond cutting edge for the ME universe. So, yeah - really not seeing a whole lot of need to boost pay anywhere near what was proposed. I was issued a gun as a security guard; especially since you can hire whole merc companies for less with their own equipment.
 
wootius said:
You want to sell miniaturized gigajoule lasers? Super Alloys? TIR? You could say those are going to be on the No-sell list too, but we're going to kill off all SA competition eventually. Hoyr hopefully isn't going to let that go down quietly.





We've already had bribery attempts. What do you think is going to happen when we release the most advanced Frigate ever, then a invisible version of it. Then start cruiser research? They only make that much if they stay 20+ years, and we're not going to train them to sit on their asses. Money will be irrelevant by the time we're paying them 2+ million.

STG is gonna squeal harder ten thousand angry pigs to the Asari when they find out, and they are going to bring their 700+ year lifespans of compounding interest to bear on us. We're gonna have to pay more than double/triple ME minimum wage.
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You can't buy the type of loyalty we already have from the security guard force. If they were going to take a bribe they already would have; it's the mercs we seem to have on the payroll and the new marines and such I'd worry about a hell of a lot before the guards.

EDIT: Not to mention our research staff is gonna be PISSED when we start increasing guard salaries to multiple times their own. You'd have to increase wages across the board the same way not to breed festering resentment.
 
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Van Ropen said:
Throwing money at them won't stop that though - because as you said, any serious bribe could potentially be enormous.
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After my first few million I think I'd be happy just accepting a 200k+ a year instead of risking it.

60k starting with 10% yearly increases ends up at 400k on year 20. More reasonable?
 
wootius said:
We've already had bribery attempts. What do you think is going to happen when we release the most advanced Frigate ever, then a invisible version of it. Then start cruiser research? They only make that much if they stay 20+ years, and we're not going to train them to sit on their asses. Money will be irrelevant by the time we're paying them 2+ million.

STG is gonna squeal harder ten thousand angry pigs to the Asari when they find out, and they are going to bring their 700+ year lifespans of compounding interest to bear on us. We're gonna have to pay more than double/triple ME minimum wage.
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Look, at 47k per year and a 20% raise per year, the same math is giving me a salary of 1,801k. That's, again, for a security guard who has not advanced at all for 20 years. Our best defense against bribes isn't going to be ridiculous salaries (they could probably throw 30m at a guard in bribes if necessary, and it would be worth it), it's going to be generating non-financial loyalty to the company.
Benefits (including paying them extra for refusing and reporting bribery attempts) will do that.

wootius said:
After my first few million I think I'd be happy just accepting a 200k+ a year instead of risking it.

60k starting with 10% yearly increases ends up at 400k on year 20. More reasonable?
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Very much so.

EDIT: Initial ideas for bonus sources:
  • Refusing and reporting a bribery attempt; amount based on size of bribe
  • Testing help (helping work out the kinks on products, figure out what needs to be known by users)
  • Expanding their knowledge; things like extra training, extra courses, etc. Larger bonuses for stuff that makes them directly better at their job, but security guards who know the basics of things like communication equipment can be useful in countering social engineering attacks ("Oh, you're here to do maintenance on our comms? Let me call Steve from Team Kappa, he's certified to do that and can help you with your work.")
  • Basically any behavior that helps improve the company (better employees make the company better by proxy) but is not directly part of their work; if someone wants to get more money, we should provide ample opportunity to do so
For benefits, we should make sure their families get good health care, their children have good educational opportunities (and a good education), they have vacation time, etc.
EDIT2: Also, (reminded by @TheEyes right below this post) set up a way to give favorable loans to our employees (current or retired). Definitely throw in child-care, paternal/maternal leave, allow people to telecommute if they need to be at home for some reason (or just let them use days off if they're on a project that's too secure for that).
 
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Yeah, I'm fine with ignoring cost-of-living adjustments. Apparently we're just abstracting inflation away, so logic dictates that we can abstract away cost-of-living wage increases as well.
azoicennead said:
Benefits (including paying them extra for refusing and reporting bribery attempts) will do that.
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+1. We're not going to be able to simply throw money at our guards to make them more loyal; what we need are non-salary benefits, things that extend into the future and can be taken away if fired for cause. If you're making promises to your employees and then keeping them, that'll gain you a lot more enduring loyalty than an extra 7-8 bucks per hour. Have PI pay for children's health-care and college; put money into a retirement fund; open a credit union that has favorable interest rates for home loans for current and retired employees, etc.
 
Godogma said:
As far as I know of one company is responsible for making all the medi-gel and it's a Systems Alliance based company.
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Sirta Foundation developed Medigel. However a group of fanatics was able to financially destabilize the company (by attacking a single site!) so much that they need outside help (from a group of Asari no less). This says to me that they don't have a monopoly on medigel. Actually chances are that they got hit by the same minimum production quotas that Arc-Reactors did. Or they made the technology public domain.

Godogma said:
The head of the Honda corporation only accepted less than 100k a year back when I was in high school. It was actually a point of pride for him when my Japanese teacher spoke to him on a visit to Japan.
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As I understand it there are laws in Japan (and other countries) that say a CEO can only make a fixed multiple of the lowest payed worker in the company. Or something like that.

wootius said:
Hoyr hopefully isn't going to let that go down quietly.
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Hell no! That'd be boring!
 
Well, my Japanese teacher who actually met the man said he was quite proud he was only accepting that much money. *shrug*

In any case; we bought their loyalty by being willing to die to save their relatives/friends/etc on Mindoir, and have already paid out bonuses for reporting attempts to bribe them... I don't really see inundating them with money on top of all the other benefits as actually doing a damn thing for us. As a matter of fact it would probably be insulting that we thought we needed to buy their loyalty.

Increases in money per year is all well and good as long as it's done intelligently; I don't have a problem with that. I had a problem with the idea of security guards getting paid 3 million or more dollars a year. Yes, we're made out of money but it's quite insulting to everyone else in the company and we'd have to make equal payments to everyone to keep people from flipping out.

Our top researchers last time I saw it posted were making about 400k or 500k IIRC, admittedly I may have missed a post in amongst all the technobabble.

The company couldn't afford to pay everyone on that same kind of scale and everyone who works for us is just as likely to be bribed when it comes right down to it. There are ways it could be handled; but at the point where you're implanting mind control chips/constant surveillance devices hooked up to very smart VI/AI to monitor your employees you'll get lots of people to quit toot sweet.
 
TheEyes said:
Yeah, I'm fine with ignoring cost-of-living adjustments. Apparently we're just abstracting inflation away, so logic dictates that we can abstract away cost-of-living wage increases as well.
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We literally have NO data on how inflation works or even if there is inflation; the Credit in Mass Effect was set up by the Council using Volus financial practices and is automatically balanced in real time vs every currency in the galaxy. How can we model that from the data we're given? Our inflation is ridiculous in the USA due to the fact we have NOTHING stopping the government from printing more money as they like or so little problem they essentially do it at will.

Hard to make the two systems match up anywhere near enough to extrapolate any data now isn't it? http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Credits
 
Godogma said:
Our top researchers last time I saw it posted were making about 400k or 500k IIRC, admittedly I may have missed a post in amongst all the technobabble.
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Some of the elites get payed in the 1-2 million range. The more normal ones 200k-300k.

TheEyes said:
Yeah, I'm fine with ignoring cost-of-living adjustments. Apparently we're just abstracting inflation away, so logic dictates that we can abstract away cost-of-living wage increases as well.
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For the most part yes. Inflation's a pain.

Godogma said:
Well, my Japanese teacher who actually met the man said he was quite proud he was only accepting that much money. *shrug*
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Hey its much better then it is in other parts of the world 100kisn't even rich in the US any more. I can believe that he'd be proud of making a reasonable wage and putting the rest back toward the company/employees.
 
Looking at the Finance Doc... we're going to close Q4 '73 with 22 billion credits in the bank. The Q1 '74 with 88 billion. 217 Billion in Q1 '74.

Money is effectively infinite now.

Even if we hired something crazy like 50 security teams(20 man teams) and paid them 3mil/yr per person(which wouldn't even happen for 18 years) that's only 750 million a quarter.

In six years, if we don't expand at all we will have three trillion six hundred seventy one billion six hundred and one million one hundred fifty two thousand six hundred sixty credits in the bank.

3,671,601,152,660.

In that time my silly 1000 man force will have cost us 18 billion dollars.

We can easily afford something like 75k/yr starting with 15% yearly increases(1.2mil/yr after 20 years.) AND do the incentives programs.

I'd do the math for researchers, but I don't know how many are on a team and I'm heading to bed.
 
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Yog said:
Free company resorts, free legal counselling and representation.

EDIT: heavy discounts for our production and production of allied firms with whom we could negotiate such a deal.
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Don't even need to strike deals with allied firms. We can just say 'here's your company credit card. This flyer here notes for which companies we'll cover part of any purchases made.


As for salaries and the like for our security teams... Strictly speaking we don't need to pay them more than 80k or so even at the highest scale, so long as we do things like 'that medical procedure you need? Well, we can either have our private hospital handle it, or you can volunteer for an experimental procedure. Either way you pay nothing at all, nor will your spouse and/or children,' or 'don't worry about tuition for your kids' primary and secondary education, we've got that. Oh, their tertiary education? We do that with scholarships,' or 'here's a 400 square meter plot of land. If you work for us you can buy it and we'll build you a home there with a ludicrously low interest rate.'
 
Aside from Security, we can count on the SA Intelligence apparatus as well. We have become a vital, strategic asset to humanity. Anyone with two brain cells will tell the Intel guys to keep PI as safe from the Salarians as they can manage, for as long as possible.

Nevermind that we can probably churn out security machines capable enough to functionally no-sell the Salarians and Asari, leaving only a Conrad shaped hole in our defences. And we can give him a CASIE to helpfully remind him that his opposite is currently fishing for information (we should probably design a Conrad version of that thing. If it can help him, it can help everyone).
 
If nothing else it will telemarketers, snake oil salesmen and used car dealers hate us. Which is a worthwhile endeavour under any circumstance.
 
Amberion said:
I personally would much rather go on an adventure!
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Adventure sounds good. We do have all the toys, but you know what we need? Friends who are peers. With that much money, it can be hard to find someone who's not a sycophant. With all our intelligence, anyone substantially less smart than us is an exercise in boredom. Our parents are great, no doubt, but we need an equal.

I had an idea of a supergenius mixer, but then I realised that anyone with our wealth and brains would probably be an arsehole.
 
AckSed said:
Adventure sounds good. We do have all the toys, but you know what we need? Friends who are peers. With that much money, it can be hard to find someone who's not a sycophant. With all our intelligence, anyone substantially less smart than us is an exercise in boredom. Our parents are great, no doubt, but we need an equal.

I had an idea of a supergenius mixer, but then I realised that anyone with our wealth and brains would probably be an arsehole.
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Yeah, we aren't likely to find friendly peers among the galaxies existing Meatbag population. So:

[Jk]Max research into pure software AI
[Jk]Max research into resleeving technology

We get to make friends that can actually keep up with us and attain immortality in one fell swoop. Nothing can possibly go wrong. Besides getting a galaxy of biocentric bigots after us and possibly being cut off from our fortune because the Alliance Supreme Court decides that infomorphs aren't the people they were uploaded from.

More seriously, we may want to look into engineering a situation that would allow us to save the asses of a couple of our few intellectual (near) equals. After all, if you can't trust the people who literally owe you their lives, who can you trust? Granted, they wouldn't actually owe us anything because we'd be responsible for them being in danger in the first place, but they wouldn't know that.;)
 
AckSed said:
Adventure sounds good. We do have all the toys, but you know what we need? Friends who are peers. With that much money, it can be hard to find someone who's not a sycophant. With all our intelligence, anyone substantially less smart than us is an exercise in boredom. Our parents are great, no doubt, but we need an equal.

I had an idea of a supergenius mixer, but then I realised that anyone with our wealth and brains would probably be an arsehole.
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This isn't Marvel; Mordin Solus is frankly the closest in the ME verse to the character's intelligence. Unless the author starts cribbing super genii from other places there's no way in hell we're going to run into an equal in smarts. Also, if he goes to adding them this late in the game it essentially throws away the concept of the thread and raises the question of "Where have they been before now?"

And frankly the earlier statement is wrong; in everything we've seen of her Revy is nothing like that. Her only dating experience was with a guy who joined up to be grunt marine and she enjoys having fun with kids and even playing around with the security forces. She's not an elitist ivory tower snob. She's a woman who built a suit of power armor in a cave to showcase an arc reactor and parlayed that into a fortune through good decision making.
 
Yog said:
Well, Virtual aliens have perfect inter-species resleeving.
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Yeah, but they don't get found for another decade. And we're all Starkified. We can easily come up with the needed tech before then, and IC we have no reason not to--as far as Revy knows, no-one in the galaxy has resleeving capability.
 
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