Well if you look at Seattle today it probably looks as much like the Seattle metroplex as 18th century manhatten looks like 20th century. Ok, overstatement but the point is that the city has expanded into the suburbs, thus the lots of the suburbian homes would be replaced by large industrial and residential homes. I got the impression Redmond was heavily populated until the first crash, thus it would need apartment blocks, coffin hotels etc.

I Have to agree with Friend, despite what it may look like now, alot has changed in 63 years. Thinking on it, I have always viewed the barrens as an urban jungle. Though would Redmond be more fun if it were spread out? Unfortunately I think that would make it easier to maintain, and it would not have developed into the lawless state it is.

...me too. I went back to my old hometown a couple years ago & decided to do a pilgramage to my old neighbourhood.

...My grade school was torn down & replaced by an apartment complex.
...the corner grocery is now a duplex flat.
...the railroad tracks a block away from my old house are now a freeway spur.
...both maple trees in the yard have been cut down.
...there is a garage in the backyard now.
...the "Humpback" Bridge (Norwich Ave - over the aforementioned replaced railroad tracks) is gone.
...The old "400" line (named after an express train run by the Chicago & Northwestern RR) is now only one track. It used to be two & no passenger trains run on it anymore.
...my savings & loan is now a "Useless" Bank (US Bank)
...the Rexall Drugstore is now some hoite toite boutique.
...The old Sentry Supermarket is now some discount flea market/antique shop.
...and I just read that the Catholic Academy is being sold to developers who will build Condos on the site.

All this happened in a span of less than 7 years.

This is why I'm surprised that Seattle seems even gloomier and more economically depressed after the Crash than before. Runner Havens mentions a few times that Seattle has become a world leader in AR programming after 2.0 yet all the neighborhoods seem to be in a slump (except Bellevue). You should be seeing some economic rebound.

..if you can have perfect virtual walls - why pay the keep-up for the real ones?

That's not exactly how economics works, I'm afraid. The U.S. markets have been going up, but regular joes like myself didn't see a dime of that money. The city I live in (Oakland) hasn't really improved much, despite businesses in the surrounding areas experiencing record numbers (Google, Genentech, and Yahoo are all in commute distance).

Trickle-down economics doesn't really work. Presumably the people who benefited from the AR boom are located mostly in Bellvue (makes sense; that's where the rich people fled to when things went bad, right?). Given that "legit" people in Shadowrun tend to live in self-sustaining enclaves (basically walled communities with malls inside), and usually ones owned by their employers, any wealth they accumulate is going to stay within that closed system. The mom & pop diner owned by that nice ork couple at the edge of Redmond isn't going to see a dime of that money, no matter how good their homefries are.

...political aside...

Once saw a great cartoon on the Trickle Down theory. It had old Ronnie Raygun standing with his schlong out, pissing on a map of the country.

The caption read "The Real Trickle Down Theory"

Opposition to 'trickle down' economics spans both parties in the U.S. Didn't Bush Sr. call it "Voodoo" economics?

In any case, real-life economics aside, wealth distribution is even more problematic in the 6th World, given that the rich and the poor don't even interact with one another on a day to day basis anymore.

...indeed he did which as I remember caught a lot of the Reaganites off guard.

As to the gulf between the plebeians & patricians, it is already pretty bad in RL. the Middle Class (which I used to be a member of, has almost gone the way of the Triceratops.

Yeah, I keep finding that out the more I travel. Being from Minnesota kinda sheltered me a lot in that regard- compared to a lot of states, the cost of living and the per capita income actually match up pretty well. Even just spending some time one state over in South Dakota and finding out that over 10% of the population lives below the official poverty line was kind of crazy. And that doesn't even begin to touch the people who are lower class but not quite qualifying for the government's official poverty criteria, (which is a pretty dang low number, btw).


Not to mention... how many of you people have checked out the statistics on California housing relative to that of other states for a similar home? It's absolutely ridiculous. If you're below upper middle class, you can probably kiss your dreams of home ownership anywhere near the city goodbye. Luckily Cali is probably the most extreme example of this you can find, but I somehow doubt the general housing trend will reverse any time soon.

No trickle down economics doesn't work like that. And no where in my post did I mention individuals. I was talking about whole neighborhoods which encompass 4 counties. Oakland has been a rough neighborhood for a long time and that tends to chase money away from it. However, there are plenty of neighborhoods around Oakland that are doing well and benefiting from those aforementioned companies. And last time I checked the whole Bay area wasn't doing poorly except for one neighborhood. Several areas of the Bay area are doing well and some doing poorly.

Workers can retrain. People can move. There have been 5 years for people to retrain after Crash 2.0 and to develop this AR economy. Maybe 5 years isn't enough since that still only gives about 3 years after getting out of community college to work and earn money.

Maybe I looked at this the wrong way. Maybe the question should be "Why hasn't more of the metroplex become Corporate Affiliated," as corporations pay to put people through college or as the corporations bring more imigrants in with the appropriate training.

Well, it's not just Oakland. Right in the shadow of the Google and Yahoo campuses you could drive just a few exits on the freeway and find a suitably Oakland-ish part of San Jose. Economic revival of a region isn't created by an influx of money to a small number of people. Tech jobs benefit the well-educated and well-connected. It's not until you start opening up warehouses and industry that you start seeing an area recover from top to bottom. Biotech companies need warehouse workers and drivers to move their product around, but tech companies just don't work that way. And Matrix 2.0/AR technology doesn't even require a physical media, so there isn't really any production work being done. It's all engineers. And those engineers, apparently, live in Bellevue.

As for why there aren't more sections with corporate affiliations...the corps already have their own enclaves. Why would they want to waste money on educating people who can't afford to do it themselves, or even trucking in foreigners? It's quite possible that their demand for workers has largely been met. Plus, foreign workers can probably just telecommute, as Whipstitch was pointing out.

what about just direct connections between two PANs? Or hacking the PAN of someone else? If they're within sensor range, can you access their commlink without a matrix hookup in between?

A static zone means that the matrix connection is poor... meaning a -1 to -3 to all matrix actions (I go for -2 for most of the Barrens). Additionally there are dead zones in the Barrens as well, most of Glow city for example.

Oh, and satelite uplink costs only 500 nuyen and means you can access the matrix anywwhere. So it's not a problem.

Yes, absolutely.

You cannot acces the greater Matrix, but you can access any device within your sensor range. You can't order pizza in the Barrens, but you can hack any commlink you physically get close to.

So in your guys' version of SR4 everything is automated? There is no human contact at all in retail/fast food? All gardening is done by machine? No fancy restaurants anymore where actual people prepare and serve the food? The service industry is gone? What of clerks, data entry, low-end data search, and other administrative tasks? All done by agents? Who supports the infrastructure (pipes, roads, electirc grids, sewage)? Where do all these security guards come from?

The fact of the matter is, even if there is only a certain percentage of people who benefit from an economic event, eventually there will be recovery that does reach the other portions. Like I said maybe 5 years isn't enough. But all these people who are getting rich are now demanding MORE consumer goods. These consumer goods come from somewhere. You could import all the durable goods but what about the non-durables like service? And lets face it, the richer you get the less you can do on your own.

Seattle has probably swung from a recessionary gap after the Crash and is likely now beginning an inflationary gap as a result of the AR boom. This means that with all that money that they are making off of AR they are now demanding more goods but the aggregate supply can't keep up. This means that wages will start going up until the economy gets back to equilibrium.

This doesn't mean that everything is hunky-dory for the lower classes. In fact it is really shitty if you are down there. As the wage rate goes up it doesn't mean that everyone is getting a raise at their job. In this case it is far more indicative of old, lower paying jobs getting destroyed and new higher paid ones being made. So instead of sitting there on the assembly line joe average is now having to learn how to use data search tools or else how to be a butler. If he can't or won't do that then he's stuck and becomes part of the natural employment.

The issue is that there doesn't seem to be a central bank for the UCAS that can help alleviate some of these issues. What's probably going to happen is that employers are going to over-estimate what the wage rate should be to adjust for the inflationary gap which means that AS will overcompensate and create another round of recessionary inflation.

I myself used to be an accountant. The company got bought so the new owners fired me so that they could bring in "their" guy. Now I'm below the poverty line (which is still pretty high in Canada) and sitting on Employment Insurance. I could get a job next week if I wanted to be an accountant. But I want to be a Financial Analyst. It pays more and it is something that I enjoy more. So I am sitting here without a job until I find one that I deem more suitable. It's called Frictional Unemployment and is a part of any healthy economy.

What Seattle is going through is called Structural Unemployment. It occurs when there is a major change in technology or international competition that leads to an economy undergoing major changes. That shock was Crash 2.0 and the AR boom. For some time after the shock there will be higher than Natural Unemployment as the economy, represented by the workers, tries to "reset" itself to this new economy.

Although I probably just contradicted what I said above about Seattle being in a inflationary gap. In that case unemployment should be below the natural rate. And Seattle certainly isn't described that way. So my statement about me being wrong about how fast Seattle should recover is right. That I was wrong about 5 years being enough time to recover because I may have just proven that it is still on the recessionary gap part of the business cycle. However, my economic reasoning for things is correct, although rudimentary and it is certainly not "voodoo" economics. Joe Average will not see a penny of the AR boom in Seattle if he is unwilling to leave his current job and seek a new one.

This was the case long before Matrix 2.0. It has been the case for the last 50 years, with the regular Matrix.

Unskilled labor most certainly exists, but if you've ever worked an entry-level job, you know that "economic recovery" has nothing to do with it. Labor costs are trending down, especially with the influx of immigrants eager to take whatever jobs they can find. The problem only gets worse in the Sixth World with Sinless being even more desperate. If the labor market is a race to the bottom (as it currently is), then no amount of demand for workers is going to positively affect the quality of life of the majority of people. Or rather, the difference will be between a bunch of people living on the streets, and a bunch of people living in crumbling tenements, up to their eyeballs in debt and eating cheap, unhealthy food (with the higher mortality rate that creates).

Wow, you win for saying the most ignorant and somewhat racist thing I've heard in a long while. Are you upset that immigrants are coming into the country and taking away your glorious working opportunities such as cleaning up other people's shit, picking lettuce, or doing other unskilled labor.

I didn't think that someone who had the ability to pay for luxury items such as SR books and has the leisure time to play the game would be worried about losing a job to someone willing to work in a lettuce field for 14 hours a day for a handful of dollars.

As to the wage rate going down: give me proof? The wage rate is going down in some sectors of the economy but not in ALL sectors. I'm pretty sure that wage rates are going up as old, low skilled, low paid jobs are being replaced by new ones. As to Labor Expense for individuals corporations, that could perhaps be going down. Of course looking at a company's financial statements without doing some massive rearranging is as useful as looking at a crystal ball. Especially when you are talking about the macroeconomics of Seattle or the entire US.

This only applies to the megacorporations who have been granted extraterritoriality. You need to have a SIN to work anywhere else and it is easier for INS to track down illegal people thanks to the Wireless World.

Whoa. Speaking of ignorant and racist...did you pull a muscle jumping to those conclusions?

I'm actually a first-generation American, so I know a quite a bit about what it's like from the other end of this equation. I'm not blaming immigrants; I'd blame the companies that exploit them and use them as an economic weapon against working class Americans (by artificially lowering the cost of labor through what is basically human trafficking). Instead, we have a system that basically rewards and assists the people who expose immigrant workers to dangerous conditions, exploitative labor practices (i.e. you'll work in this dangerous, mine and *like* it, or we'll call INS and replace you with someone else), and criminally low wages. And to top it all off, we've got Lou Dobbs and the mainstream media blaming the problem on the victims.

I never said anything about the upper classes in SR having a problem with this; hell, they're benefitting from it to an even greater extent. I'm sure it's a lot easier to become a citizen of the U.S. than it is to get a SIN if you were born outside of the system; likewise, undocumented immigrants have far better advocacy groups working for them here in the real world.

As for wages getting lower...dude, read a book. Or if that's too much work, watch the news. The stock market is hitting record highs, but the average American is totally unaffected. For the labor market to properly function, both sides have to be playing by the rules, and right now that just isn't the case. If you won't listen to me, go ask your professors (I'd start with sociology and economics, or maybe a community development guy)

Oh, and for the record, nothing pisses me off more than these disingenuous accusations of "racism" whenever someone points out that the entirety of the working class are being bent over a barrel because of the way undocumented workers are treated in this country. We're talking about a system where people who come here for a better life are bullied by their employers into accepting employment situations that are absurdly low-paying, often dangerous due to code violations, and threatened with deportation and separation from their families...and THEN they have to deal with being villainized in the media as being responsible for the exploitation of other American workers? And those of us who fall into the same ethnic category have to deal with it too?

Yes, they are the cause of lower wages for the working class. But they don't hold the blame. Just like if you're hit by a stolen car, it should be the fault of the guy driving, not the fault of the owner of the car.

Well, yeah, but that's kinda the whole point. All I'm getting at is that AR is only going to provide jobs for the tech heads that are by and large already rich or in the corp's pocket. It's not anything really new, it's just a new enhancement that is quite happy to make the corps even less reliant on physical industry.

And yeah, Cheop, ya need to chill a bit.

I'm half Mexican descendent of recent immigrants in a town based upon a meat packing industry that cares little for it's immigrant workers. It's not all fun and games, and there's people taking eachother for a ride on both sides of the fence. It's just the truth of the matter.

Shoot. I finally check this thread and can't say how I envisioned the Barrens. Oh well.

Actually, I was being serious.