- Location
- United States
Good lord, I chose the wrong day to wake up-
Right, er, this is far too much for me to go through on a blow by blow basis, so I'm just going to approach broad strokes for the moment.
First off, let's talk about debt internment facilities in more detail, to explain exactly how they came about, and why they're... for lack of a better word, necessary.
So, as we know, humanity on Remnant mainly gets by by living in places that are naturally protected from Grimm- Vale has its mountain ranges and the sea, Vacuo is a harsh desert where hiding from the Grimm is easy for the nomads, Atlas has the cold and its mountain valleys, and Mistral has...
... What does Mistral have?
The point is, most of humanity lives in places where they are naturally protected.
However, there is another option. See, there are places on Remnant that are so hostile to life that even Grimm cannot survive there. The northernmost peaks of Atlas, the southernmost deserts of Vacuo, deep, marshy bogs of Mistral filled with wildlife just as dangerous as the Grimm and twice as nasty, places that simply... don't like humans or Grimm.
These places, perhaps as a consequence of never being touched by humans before they'd learned to make places like that work for them, have a lot of Dust. And not just Dust, but other stuff, ores and minerals that had been all but mined to extinction elsewhere, iridium, palladium, gold, the raw materials needed to actually build weapons and Scrolls and flying cars and so on and so forth- very important materials that have only just been made accessible.
The problem, of course, is twofold. The first is getting out there and setting up a base of operations so workers don't freeze to death in the night, and the second is getting workers out there.
You could, of course, pay them handsomely for their time, it would be the only way to get sane people out there to begin with, but that would very quickly add up, to the point where any useable scale of work would ruin the company. The SDC, when it first started, just wasn't big enough to pull it off.
So, a more... a less...
An evil must be considered necessary, because you've seen the numbers, you've seen the projections, and you have about five years left before formshift weapons and electronics hit a price bump that looks like a vertical line, even with recycling in place. Indentured servitude. An old law, yes, but one that has to be considered, for these are all desperate times, always, always desperate times. A few hundred are gathered, the first lot go out, the first shipment comes back, and suddenly that noose around humanity's neck loosens, just that little bit more.
Prices drop, the CCTS becomes viable, Huntsman weapon parts can be made cheaply, and the SDC can profit from it all, allowing them to expand the operation. The internment facilities are by no means where the vast majority of the SDC's resources come from, aside from one or two very rare materials, but they do... keep the belt loose, so to speak.
They gave breathing room, breathing room that Atlas had sorely needed since after the Great War, in exchange for giving somebody a chance to work off their debts for a few years, and once Atlas has been propped back up on its feet, the rest of the world could benefit.
Then that reptile married into the family, took the reins, and profit became the watchword of the day. Wages got cut, fees were artificially extended, the SDC-run bank descended into outright usury, and debt internment became less a necessary evil and more a profitable one, as time marched on and the facilities grew to the point where, yeah, they very much could send people out there willingly for a price, both for a fat paycheck and because the facilities themselves had become, almost pleasant to live in.
But muh profits.
Nicholas Schnee saw the necessity of debt internment. He hated it, and the devil he was making with it, but there was no other option for him or anyone else. He had no Process, he had no robots, he had warm bodies, and a legal ruling to do whatever the hell he needed to with them to keep Atlas in the black.
Jacques Schnee is the Platonic ideal of the megacorporation CEO, in the one setting that truly cannot afford that kind of callous thinking at the helm of a world-changing entity like the Schnee Dust Company.
As for all that talk of massively undercutting the SDC and running them out of town, to say nothing of the calls for assassination, I cannot begin to explain how much havoc that would cause, Process or no. The Schnee Dust Company isn't just a big name brand, it's Remnant's sole megacorporation- almost everything you can buy or use is from either from the SDC proper, a subsidised company, or a company that's bought the rights to manufacture an SDC patent- the point is, bringing the SDC low is going to bring society to a grinding halt.
Without the SDC, nobody's maintaining the CCTS. Without the SDC, Dust mining just stops in its entirety, manufacture of Huntsman weapon parts grinds to a halt, Scrolls, cars, so many different kinds of electronics- the SDC is the beating heart of modern Remnant, and you cannot rip that out without doing some damage.
In the absolute best case scenario, you would do with the Process what Indiana Jones did with that bag of sand, and we all know how that turned out- thousands of people who did nothing wrong are going to lose their jobs because of the ten or so who actually put all this through the company board 15 years before you were even born.
Neither Remnant nor you are in the position where rocking the boat like that isn't going to capsize it. The SDC is a terrible, terrible, necessary company.
With that out of the way, let's talk about Weiss.
Weiss almost had her brains used as a new coat of paint. This shakes the girl.
No, she is not thinking this through, no, it has not occurred to her that the Process is the answer to all her problems, because it's barely occurred to Jaune that the Process is a socioeconomic panacea on the scale you're thinking about. She is thinking in terms of what she can do, in her bunker, with her Scroll, right now. Once she's had a good cry and calmed down, I'm sure her view of the situation will change towards the longterm, but that doesn't change the fact that...
Well, the two options that she's chasing herself around in circles over are, really the only two options she has. Not to the extremes that she's worked herself up to, but that's what they boil down to. Tell someone, and hope for the best, or don't tell someone, and hope for the best.
Weiss doesn't have any clout in the company, she's just the spoiled princess of the guy with the 51% controlling share. Her father isn't going to listen to her, because Weiss is a rebellious little shit at the best of times, and she's burned away any goodwill left there, and anything that happens in his company goes through him, and he would almost certainly just, imprison the debtors instead of changing the system in any meaningful way. Sure, the PR fallout might twist his arm enough in the end that he'll up raising wages, or reinstate the five year maximum that was there beforehand, or something, but there's a reason the SDC's said to have the best PR division on Remnant.
As for that stuff about her not feeling guilty, fuck off with that bullshit. She didn't put those people in debt, she didn't start up the camps, she wasn't even a resident in Jacques' epididymus by the time he was doing all the stuff that turned the internment facilities into the hellscapes they are today. Weiss doesn't feel guilty about it because she knows she isn't guilty, and if your only evidence is the absence of something, I'm gonna-
Just, hold on, come closer, I have a little secret for you. Nono, come on, closer, closer.
I am an incredibly imprecise writer. Things escape my attention. Assumptions made due to the absence of something from my writing honestly have a coinflip chance of being wrong.
Ok, no, you know what, that's not being entirely fair- yes, she grew up in a family that actively profits off slavery- I can understand where you're coming from, I can see why that assumption has been made. But in case the fact that she isn't entirely opposed to the White Fang of all possible organisations paying people's way out of Schnee debt camps, she doesn't hold them in much higher regard than you do, partly because, well, she's not a complete sociopath like her father, and partly because she somewhat sympathises with having freedom progressively stripped from you.
Weiss has been a prisoner in her own house for the past 17 years. I can definitely see her being against those facilities, if not for some deep-seated empathy for her fellow man, then because she's a rebellious, borderline contrarian little shit where her father is concerned, and intelligent enough to see the company's profits, the average wage of their miners, the maintenance costs of the debt camps, and the overall profit brought in by those camps as is, working people half to death over however long they're out there, and then put two and two and two and two together.
Paying slightly better wages plus hazard pay, cycling people in and out every six months or so with the supply trains would probably keep half of the people working there on the payroll and phase out a disgusting practice all for a minor dent to overall profit- and that's the point where her father would just tune her out.
Nobody likes the debt internment facilities, except for the people who get the money from them at the end of the day.
In the end, you have to understand one thing. Debt slavery... was necessary. For a very, very short period of time, it was the leg that had to be sacrificed so the fox could escape the beartrap, because Atlas was thisclose to imploding on itself after the Great War, and to a lesser extent, so were the rest of the kingdoms. The Great War strained already tight reserves to their breaking point and something needed to be done or the whole house of cards was going to be set on fire.
But it was necessary.
Was. Was. Was. I cannot stress enough that their continued existence should only be tolerated for as long as it takes you to get Process units to legally take operations out of human hands.
It was the result of increasingly desperate men faced with the imminent death of humanity in a few decades time, scrabbling for literally anything that would stave that off for a while. Yes, it's horrible, it's morally bankrupt, it keeps Nicholas up at night that he created this demon he carries on his back as he watches his son-in-law somehow miss the fucking point entirely.
... The most positive projection for the continued existence of the Kingdoms, today, is somewhere around fifty years. Fifty years, then the whole thing falls apart. They only got that far because of the resources mined out in the most hostile places they could go by people who had their freedom taken from them.
And you can think that a society kept alive by slavery shouldn't be allowed to survive. Fine.
So... change that. God knows Jaune's the only person on the planet besides Weiss with better than a snowball's chance in hell of doing it.
Now, with all the seriousness out of the way-
damn the new carpoolparty single's a goddamn bop
TLDR: Your opinions are wrong and here's why.
I mean I thought I was being sane. I said undercut the company because we can. We do have a viable alternative already working itself up to scale.
Also, never was sure what I thought about with Dust being a limited resource. On the one hand, it's a mineral you mine, on the other hand we really see no showings of them rationing or acting like Dust is a limited resource in any way and it's pretty obviously magic and has some mysticism surrounding it. My go to was that it's either the crystallized remains of aura/souls and/or is the crystallized "aura" of the entire planet. Or some combination of the above.
I just dislike how suddenly there's a crisis when by all rights there was never any evidence of one in canon.
If there wasn't a crisis he couldn't try and justify slavery.
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