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With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Twelve)

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Empiricist2 said:
That seems a bit long, certainly too long for the first batch. At the earliest that would mean the first fully independent Lanterns would start in year 3. Looking it up, Marine Corps do a 3 month boot camp, and Lanterns don't need any physical training or really even aiming. I imagine it will be more like 1 month pre-ring, then 2-3 more under supervision depending on performance. Possibly longer, although I doubt the total process will last longer than 6 months.
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Marines aren't facing active corruptive influences while serving, either. You're right about that being too long for the early batches, but I assume that those will have far more strident requirements in exchange for the better matches leading to a faster turnaround.

When he's got that core of competent Lanterns, though, he can afford to slow down and widen his net, because the more time you spend conditioning your recruits the more of them end up being qualified for Lantern work.

Maybe a three-step system would be better. 4 months as a recruit, 4 as a ringless but teched-up deputy, then 4 as an apprentice Lantern?
I'm saying 4 months as a deputy as a minimum, mark you. A lot of people would never go beyond that for reasons of stability, leaving Lanterns as the elites of this organization.
 
Massgamer said:
Wonder when Captain Marvel heard that it was a blow to his pride.:p
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Billy Batson: *with a big grin on his face* Hear that? After all those times I beat Dr. Sivana, he's decided to stop committing crimes and instead go fight evil aliens!
Justice League: *general mix of congratulations and envy*
Batman: I wish my enemies would stop committing crimes and go fight evil aliens.

*elsewhere*
The Joker: *getting eaten by a xenomorph* You know, it's times like this I wish I had a psychiatrist to talk me out of these things.
 
Mr Zoat said:
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My only critique of the SI here is that he doesn't seem to appreciate the potential problems that could come from releasing a large segment of the workforce into the job market without prior preparation and relying on the free market to adjust on its own. Many of the workers laid off as a result of replacing the trains with Dolman gates will not be able to find alternative work and will be reduced to poverty or crime.

The union representative was an idiot though. Benefiting civil society through improved services and clean alternatives is more important then keeping one interest group in work. You just need to prepare the market for the influx of unemployed before hand.
 
Lupercal said:
My only critique of the SI here is that he doesn't seem to appreciate the potential problems that could come from releasing a large segment of the workforce into the job market without prior preparation and relying on the free market to adjust on its own. Many of the workers laid off as a result of replacing the trains with Dolman gates will not be able to find alternative work and will be reduced to poverty or crime.
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If I recall correctly the Dolmen Gate network is still no where near as useful as the trains are since most places do not have a functioning terminal. The rail unions have until production can meet with the inevitable demand to find other ways of keeping the workers employed before that happens. Or they can go on a strike again to protest the Dolmen Gates. Either or.
 
Lupercal said:
My only critique of the SI here is that he doesn't seem to appreciate the potential problems that could come from releasing a large segment of the workforce into the job market without prior preparation and relying on the free market to adjust on its own. Many of the workers laid off as a result of replacing the trains with Dolman gates will not be able to find alternative work and will be reduced to poverty or crime.

The union representative was an idiot though. Benefiting civil society through improved services and clean alternatives is more important then keeping one interest group in work. You just need to prepare the market for the influx of unemployed before hand.
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Well OL did mention newly cleared landfill was going to be partly used to build new homes so maybe they can look into being apart of that.
MiskWisk said:
If I recall correctly the Dolmen Gate network is still no where near as useful as the trains are since most places do not have a functioning terminal. The rail unions have until production can meet with the inevitable demand to find other ways of keeping the workers employed before that happens. Or they can go on a strike again to protest the Dolmen Gates. Either or.
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This to since trains can still be used to transport things and it's not like the whole networks is totally replaced.
 
Mr Zoat said:
"I'm still a bit puzzled by your request to join the Met. Could you explain that?"

"I don't have arrest authority. I don't imagine for a moment that the Lich will actually yield, but best practice requires that I at least try to resolve the situation in a lawful and orderly manner. Or as close to it as possible. Obviously it'll be an on-paper thing and I'll resign as soon as the matter's resolved, but it would be a help."

He nods. "If you say so. I can swear you in as a Special Constable. It will be entirely above board, if a little.. odd. Obviously there's no way our regular police could confront a powerful sorcerer."

"Thank you, Commisioner. That's just what I need."
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... Heh. Hehehehe.
Paul is really trying to meet Nabu halfway here - or (and he might viscerally prefer this, really) prove that Nabu isn't in this for the Order, he's in this for the greed of having a body without having to prepare one himself by training several apprentices and paying them for their labor.
I must admit - in all the negotiating I thought Paul might try, I hadn't considered that he would point out that, extorted magic oaths or no, by the law Nabu is a criminal and would he please turn himself in to the lawful authorities.
 
Evil Plan said:
Should there be an apostrophe with union? If it were American English, I would say "definitely not", but here I top out around "I suspect not".
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WhiteNoise said:
cryogenicist
Commissioner
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Coda said:
workers'
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Thank you, corrected.
Mizu said:
Go figure using teleport gates instead of railways caused issues. Neat to see Paul handle it well regardless, though - I expect we'd face similar situations IRL with self-driving cars and other automated vehicle transport systems, but... somehow handling is unlikely to be quite as smooth.
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We're already seeing it with Uber.
Lupercal said:
My only critique of the SI here is that he doesn't seem to appreciate the potential problems that could come from releasing a large segment of the workforce into the job market without prior preparation and relying on the free market to adjust on its own. Many of the workers laid off as a result of replacing the trains with Dolman gates will not be able to find alternative work and will be reduced to poverty or crime.
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True, but that isn't neglect. That's because he holds them in contempt.
The union representative was an idiot though. Benefiting civil society through improved services and clean alternatives is more important then keeping one interest group in work. You just need to prepare the market for the influx of unemployed before hand.
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You haven't ever had dealing with British train unions, have you?
 
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MiskWisk said:
If I recall correctly the Dolmen Gate network is still no where near as useful as the trains are since most places do not have a functioning terminal. The rail unions have until production can meet with the inevitable demand to find other ways of keeping the workers employed before that happens. Or they can go on a strike again to protest the Dolmen Gates. Either or.
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See, the issue I see here is that large groups of any kind often behave like amoebas, mindlessly pursuing expansion and security without any capacity for situation analysis. They won't try to improve their services or try to find better work, they'll just claw and bite and flail in a vain attempt to make the Dolmen Gates just go away, so when the day comes that the teleportation network has rendered them utterly obsolete they'll just sort of implode. The only way to prevent that would be talking with/threatening the leaders of the unions to make them actually engage their brains and work towards a solution, which OL is not going to do.

Also, he's kind of punching Map right in the dick by rendering the Underground a meaningless appendix to the city, so there's that.

Mr Zoat said:
True, but that isn't neglect. That's because he holds them in contempt.
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Mr Zoat said:
You haven't ever had dealing with British train unions, have you?
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Except again, if they're such dicks when they actually have power and an easy outlet for their aggression/sadism, I expect blood in the streets within a year of their monopoly being dissolved and 90% of the workforce being thrown out on their ears. Even if he doesn't know that the British government will happily take advantage on this by having the new bumper crop of transients either sacrificed to their demonic overlords or recruited as new goons, surely OL can see this will cause problems while he's away? Does he just not give a shit because it won't be his problem?
 
GardenerBriareus said:
Except again, if they're such dicks when they actually have power and an easy outlet for their aggression/sadism, I expect blood in the streets within a year of their monopoly being dissolved and 90% of the workforce being thrown out on their ears. Even if he doesn't know that the British government will happily take advantage on this by having the new bumper crop of transients either sacrificed to their demonic overlords or recruited as new goons, surely OL can see this will cause problems while he's away? Does he just not give a shit because it won't be his problem?
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You're assuming these are sadistic dicks rather than, say, entitled dicks.
 
Ganurath said:
You're assuming these are sadistic dicks rather than, say, entitled dicks.
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Point.

Unfortunately, I'm now more hung up on the fact that the British government will most likely have the former union members either raped to death with hot knives, or harvest their brains to be used as CPUs for a horde of Satanic cyborg death machines. Again, OL doesn't know about that, but that's still a pretty big atrocity that's going to ensue as an indirect result of his actions. Worse, if they're in bed with Satanus, then he just handed the Light a great big pile of human souls and organs to use for their own purposes...
 
GardenerBriareus said:
Except again, if they're such dicks when they actually have power and an easy outlet for their aggression/sadism, I expect blood in the streets within a year of their monopoly being dissolved and 90% of the workforce being thrown out on their ears.
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It will take far longer than that to replace the network.
Even if he doesn't know that the British government will happily take advantage on this by having the new bumper crop of transients either sacrificed to their demonic overlords or recruited as new goons, surely OL can see this will cause problems while he's away? Does he just not give a shit because it won't be his problem?
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The nobs go in for variety more than volume. Remeber; they're going it for fun, not to summon the Dark Prince Whatever.
 
As far as I can tell, OL isn't concerned much about the BR workforce due to a number of issues:

- it will take quite some time for Dolmen Gates to replace BR train stations, and the unions/workforce have advance warning;
- Unemployment, even unemployment due to technological improvement, is still a human-level problem that humans have been dealing with for quite some time - it doesn't need metahuman involvement;
- The eventual replacement of the rail network with a Gate network will improve transport service immeasurably all over London, and eventually the world, bringing planet-wide benefits to the average person on the street;
- Paul just personally doesn't like British Rail. And while that's not necessarily an excuse to dump their entire workforce, it is a very human reaction.

It's also interesting from story perspective because Paul's not considering knock-on effects. It won't just be the BR workforce which has to look for new jobs, it'll eventually be everyone across the globe who was involved in passenger and cargo rail work of any kind. And not only rail - Gates don't seem to have a distance limit, so there goes air and sea transport for anything other than recreation. Once Gates become more widespread, demand for hotels, motels, and camping grounds will drop off and almost vanish. Tourism will undergo a huge boom and then a huge bust, as people first take advantage of cheap international and long-distance travel, and then don't bother visiting places because hey, everywhere is 30 minutes away, it's no longer exotic.

Society, too, will have to cope with the realisation that it's becoming more and more difficult to run away from your problems. That's going to cause issues - kind of a planetary claustrophobia.

Perhaps a more subtle effect - food shortages and excesses may be easier to even out. No more excuses about "Well we could feed those countries ten times over but it costs too much to ship."

And another one - as Gates become more easily mass-producible, chain brands are going to start installing them in stores. Physical stores will no longer need a back end, or storage, or warehouses - they'll just have a Gate to one giant national warehouse. Stores will never run out of anything until they run out nationally. (And I'm only not saying internationally because governments will probably want some control over Gate-transport over national borders.)

Not to mention that employees can move from one store to another in minutes using the back end. If it's quiet at one location, go help out with the lunch rush four timezones away.

And, of course, eventually stores themselves won't want to pay exorbitant rates for good locations; they'll just rent a wall and slap up a Gate, then have the physical store itself located somewhere cheap. Much easier to 'move' a large store's front door location around without needing to move all the merchandise and fittings. And the physical stores will themselves have employee-only access to that combined warehouse back end, so they can be easily replenished and can share employees (thus reducing costs in a number of ways, including needing to hire fewer employees to cover all locations and shifts).

Likewise houses. It won't matter where your house is physically, because your front door can be anywhere.

Real estate prices will fall in the worse crash ever. There will be a surge of interest in building places out in the wilderness, away from traditional grids and support infrastructure.

The house-moving industry will largely collapse when every house move is no more difficult than moving down the street - and eventually, no more difficult than moving from one room to another. Even assuming that people will want to move at all when they can just have a front door (or any door) open to somewhere within walking distance of wherever they want to be.

Roads will see far less traffic. Maintenance will be needed less.

People will travel by vehicle less when they can walk to most places. Car and truck sales, along with every other mass-produced vehicle designed for passenger or cargo transport, will plummet.

Vending machines with internal Gates will never run out of anything.

Service stations / gas stations will never run out of fuel. Although if the current interest in electric vehicles carries over to the story's version of Earth, that may be moot anyway - run a cable through a Gate or send liquid hydrogen through it, and everywhere has as much power as it needs.


In summary, a lot of industries are going to collapse or be severely reduced, because they've been relying on point-to-point transport being a significant barrier. There will be a lot of unemployment from a lot of sectors until people start working out how to make money under the new infrastructure; it won't just be BR employees. On top of that, there's going to be a lot more international tension between countries and governments who are now linked far more tightly than under air/sea/rail/road travel. Tricky to close your borders when teleportation is available to everyone. All your enemies (and all your allies) are now effectively sitting at the bottom of your garden. Isolationism is pretty much dead. Every protest about everything can now be held in your national capital outside your government buildings in front of all the media. All the world's problems, including those which had previously been ignored because they were 'too far away', are now on your doorstep.

Unless Dolmen Gate production is bottlenecked so much that mass production literally cannot be sped up inside of a generation or two, the world is about to undergo a very rocky period in history.
 
Geminii said:
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You're forgetting that Dolmen Gates are strictly point-to-point. You can set up major or minor transport hubs, but you will still need a way to get from the hub to your actual destination. Then you've got traffic volume to consider, the size of the aperture if you're transporting goods in bulk, and probably a lot of other factors.

This is closer to creating a really extensive tunnel/road network than Star Trek transporters.
 
Geminii said:
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All of this... assumes cheap Dolmen gates. And consider that they aren't going to work in their current form over interplanetary distances - which Paul would rather like humanity and martians to expand into at some point.
And... The problems you describe will be spread out over decades, with new ideas coming up to create new possibilities throughout.
The collapse you describe isn't going to happen all at once, adaptation exists, and in-universe we know that species which do have excellent movement tech (Controllers, for instance) still find things worth doing, they don't collapse in a heap because transportation got too easy.
Hmm. Although most of them do seem to want to conquer the galaxy in one way or another.

The best way I can put this is... Change will happen! People are not incapable of becoming better than they are!
Change is not inherently good... but it is far, far from inherently bad! When people can reach across more of the planet... there will still be spaces to move. Yesterday's exotic wonder is today's beloved discovery is tomorrow's starting point for something new.
Even if Dolmen gates do as you say and make the Earth too large in some ways, too small in others - people can adapt, certainly, but beyond even that there are other planets. There is no need to remain in ignorance of a neighbor simply to have something new for tomorrow; if the planet is too small, then the solar system is several planets larger. If that is too small, the galaxy is many, so many stars larger still!
And there is not just one galaxy...
Even if we assume that to maintain something 'exotic' is important - it may be, it may not be - then even if all of humanity ceases to be exotic to one another... Thanagar is out there. Rann is out there. Tamaran is out there. Maltus is out there. Even if there were not already neighbors awaiting, then there are even more planets not yet settled for humanity to spread to and send news home from.
 
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Gforce1000 said:
You're right about that being too long for the early batches
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Why? Neither Paul nor the Controllers are under any time pressure. Far better to do the foundation right than shave a few months off the setup time.

Lupercal said:
You just need to prepare the market for the influx of unemployed before hand.
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A temporary solution.

With the tech Earth 16 could have available, and with Paul's influence should soon have, there is virtually no productive work other than design and spellweaving that people can do more effectively (or more cheaply) than machines. The entire job market is going to shrink from billions to a few thousand, even as population continues to increase.

On the bright side that same tech makes it trivially easy to set up a near-post-scarcity welfare state. The physical needs of the populous can be met by the government, leaving people free to pursue creative projects. As with the renaissance and industrial revolution an abundance of resources and free time will lead to Progress!

…hopefully anyway. You are right that Paul should not be leaving this uplift unsupervised.
 
Something a bit like that?

I'm an Uber driver, and here in Sydney, the Taxi drivers are pissed!

However, I hear that in Malayala, if you driver for Uber, you hide the signs, because Taxi drivers will hunt you down and beat you, and there have been a few murders.
 
Simonbob said:
Something a bit like that?

I'm an Uber driver, and here in Sydney, the Taxi drivers are pissed!

However, I hear that in Malayala, if you driver for Uber, you hide the signs, because Taxi drivers will hunt you down and beat you, and there have been a few murders.
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I'm imagining train-themed supervillains. Paul will be briefly furious... then steal their revolutionary Cosmotrain tech for FTL research.
Edit: Confiscate. Confiscate their Cosmotrain.
 
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