http://www.glocom.org/special_topics/socia..._s73/index.html

Did you read about the chinese exec. who hung himself after the recent lead paint toy recall last week? I have a sneaking suspicion he was "retired".

I think it was a minister, not an exec. And he had been sentenced to jail for a long, long time. So he took the easy way out. If China wants to off someone, China offs someone. They don't need to pretend it was suicide. That's how China rolls 'em.

No, it was an exec—and as quickly as "justice" can move in the PRC, he moved faster than it.

Whether knowledge of what was waiting for him could have affected his decision is another matter.

~J

My personal favorite was the gentleman who headed up China's EPA during the toxic pet food deal. The guy drops off the face of the earth, nobody who's not party knows where he is, and like two weeks later, they go "He's sentenced to death!"

I'm pretty sure most of that two weeks was to give the illusion of 'due process' to the US. Do not embarass the Party. Ever.

There is a big difference between killing yourself because the People's Republic is about to mutilate your rectum and killing yourself so that the corporation that employs you can get the insurance money.

The former is cowardice; the latter is insane devotion.

I want harmless researchers who scream "BANZAI" before using Friends In Melee to overwhelm the party.

YES! They beat the troll until he says "Toby"!

"YUURE NAMEU ISU TOBY! YUURE NAMEU ISU TOBY!"

LoneStar requires every employe to carry a gun and shoot regularily, if I remember right. I could imagine that other CAS-based corps staff could be a lot more dangerous than saraimen screaming banzai depending on the amount of concealed carrying employees.

Great. Now I coughed white russian onto my desk. Bastard.

Thank you so much for this thread.

Lurking while working as usual today and couldn't help but be doubly amused to be reading this thread while sitting in exactly the sort of place you described (well, not lab coat-wearing grad students but a sea of equity analysts attended 2-to-1 by cute husband-hunting assistants).

And of course I tried to imagine these guys rushing a shadowrunner and beating his ass down, regardless of their own safety - well, it's just one of those priceless humor moments that you remember your whole life. I wanted to share it with my gaijin coworkers, but not being gamers, they just wouldn't have appreciated it.

Suffice to say nothing like that would ever possibly happen at any company I have ever worked at here.

Granted there are a couple of guys that might try to lead such a charge. They'd get killed while the others freaked out and hid under their desks.

Remember, this is the country that makes it policy to pay terrorists off. That has let North Korea get away with kidnapping their people for the past twenty years. That has the second largest economy in the world and relies on its allies for protection.

Before anyone flames me for callous cultural insensitivity, here is my PC disclaimer:



Anyway, I wholeheartedly agree that is would be a totally appropriate corporate culture for SR-style Japanacorps - even if they didn't get overwhelmed, the image of hardened shadowrunners blazing away at a horde of Bic-wielding sararimen and OLs armed with scissors...

The lab tech would not scream 'Banzai' if dying for the corporation. Banzai is an exultation for the Emperor.

You guys have to really read some of the Japanese news services to get an idea how truly screwed up my ethnic ancestors are.

For example the last two ministers of agriculture have been swept away by corruption charges. The larger one submitted a bill for thousands of dollars for his utility bills over several years and they were paid, until someone discovered/remembered that his utilities bills were taken care of by the government since he was living in government owned apartments so he could never have seen a utility bill. He'd been scamming about $10,000 a year for years. He hanged himself before he could be indited. His replacement started doing the exact same thing. He was arrested and sacked before he could kill himself.

A year or so ago there was a case of a commuter train in Tokyo that jumped the tracks and wrapped itself around an apartment building killing people on the train and in the building. The reason it was going too fast? The driver had been reprimanded for being 15 seconds late the previous day and was desperate to avoid being 'late' two days in a row. The media blamed the management of the company, but no one blamed the driver.

A man drives recklessly because he fears for his job should not be blamed? this was not a pizza guy running a light. He was driving a train so fast he wrapped it around a building.

He might not be the only one to get blame but he gets a share of it.

But it is still associated with the Emperor since it wishes him long life. I cannot be responsible for what the film makers write.

Mozeltov

I should point out that I'm fairly sure Ares at least has a policy of arming everyone. Sure they are probably all carrying around revolvers, but still. Remember you don't win a war by dying for your country, you win a war by making some other bastard die for his country.

I could easily see Ares having a corp-wide Open Carry policy.

Of course. This is Ares. If the statistics tell them that seven out of ten people are carrying firearms, they're not going to worry about those seven.

They're going to be wondering how to sell firearms to the other three.


-karma

It's easy. Offer "incentives" to employees who carry.

IE: A break on their company medical/life insurance, because it's clear they're taking "reasonable steps" to protect themselves from thugs.

You could also make it an incentive that any employee who fires at an intruder and hits (by means of their bullet being pulled out of the intruder's corpse) gets a monetary bonus based on the estimated efficacy of their shot compared to the overall toughness of the intruder. (In the event you fail to survive the attempt, your family will get the bonus for you.)

I think the question is how you get the elderly, amputees, pacifists and hoplophobics guns. Presumably if you don't mind making equipment for personal defense, you don't mind carrying them yourself (especially with modern friendly-fire and effective biometric locks, which easily counteract the two arguments against the proliferation of weapons).

I think it more likely most office workers would be under their desks. Managers might act and the young turks looknig to step out of the pack might go nuts but the average worker would get out of the way. Until you come up against some granny who is also a physical adept.

It always is. Hell, just because I'm American doesn't mean I think a lot of things others seem to take for granted. The important part of my upbringing is that I'm Californian, which translates into a wonderful little attitude I call "Fuck you, I'm better." Which, for better or worse, is just the way I am.

For every one guy who's willing to commit suicide for Kabushiki-gaisha Komatsu Seisakusho or Daiwa Securities SMBC, there's six or seven slubs out there saying, "The cradle to grave, top down policies of the bubble years have utterly failed us. We are screwed." I mean, look at the story of Carlos Ghosn, who took over Nissan after Renault bought it out. Nissan had a 6.1 billion US dollar operating debt the year before he took over, and it reversed to a 2.7 billion dollar surplus. That's specifically because Ghosn did everything he could to break up the 'same old same old' of the Japanese business model that had failed Nissan. The company employees couldn't believe what was happening, but also admitted that's because they could never have imagined taking the steps Ghosn took.

The guy who killed himself so his insurance would pay out to his company is a pretty impressive sight, I have to admit. But dollars to donuts, that guy was pining for the same mythic, feudal-inspired past that Yukio Mishima was. I'm betting he wanted to make a gesture that let him feel like the good old days of crade-to-grave weren't on their way out.

Everybody has cultural perspectives that are gonna be set in stone unless they specifically work at self-adaptation.

The great thing about Shadowrun is that the cradle-to-grave top-down policies have not failed at all. They have thrived to the point where most corporations act as nation-states first and businesses second.

You know, I was actually thinking about posting a thread on just that subject. Now that I notice that I'm not the only one who sees that, I think I will.

10 employees even using light pistols (if we can assume light pistols actually become dangerous, instead of the cork guns they are by the rules), ten or twenty skill 3 employees could take out a shadowrunner pretty effectively (just because they'd quickly run his CP down to nothing. Granted, they'd probably lose half their number, but they'd probably win.

Also keep in mind, there's a difference between a suicidal charge and shooting from cover, as well as a difference between convincing people to make a suicidal charge and convincing them that a few well placed shots from your handgun will take down even the most battle-hardened shadowrunner.

A couple of very good points. Problem is, you can convince them that shooting from cover isn't suicide - but the moment the shit hits the fan and their deskmate's head explodes all over them, the distinction between shooting from cover and suicide becomes pretty darned thin.

But then, militaries figured that out and found ways to deal with it centuries ago - no reason a corp might not do the same!

Management is a company's most valuable resource.

Joking aside, though, a Knowsoft Link can substantially replace that training time for ¥3,000 including Datajack cost. If your employee gets offed, you can reuse or resell his or her organs and, if they didn't get hit in the wrong spot, reuse the 'soft.

~J

I also quoted you saying "skillwires", which aren't required to run a knowsoft. The cost of a knowsoft link and datajack is ¥3,000, less than one month's Middle lifestyle rent. If we assume that the datajack is already possessed (which is the obvious assumption—moreover, it'll probably be paid for by the employee or his or her parents to satisfy requirements for the better jobs), it costs the same as one month's Low lifestyle. Even that might be expected to be purchased by the employee or his or her parents before beginning skilled labor.

As for the "investment" of corporate schools, it's returned in numerous ways, only one of which is the employee it produces at the end. The benefits of cutting employee contact with the outside world, greater potential for indoctrination across the entire peer group, and the hook for additional loyalty by parents and relatives are vast compared to the cost of a highly-automatable educational system and a few live teachers paid with credit for the company store, even if the employee is disposed of at the end—especially if it's in a manner that creates "nationalistic" (corporatistic?) sentiment.

~J

Oh. My point was that knowsofts don't require skillwires, which are a much greater investment in an employee than a knowsoft link. My other point is that there are many jobs for which the knowsoft doesn't contain everything that's needed—to give an example, back when I did CAD work I came into my job with what probably would have been CAD 3 or CAD 2 (or maybe CAD 2 (AutoCAD 3) or something like that). What I learned at that job, what made me more productive six months in than when I entered, wasn't increased experience in CAD, it was Knowledge Skills of… I don't know, Plumbing Schematics or Electrical Wiring Plans or whatever, the bit that lets me know not to put the hot and cold water pipes going to the wrong sides when leading into a sink.

CAD is probably a knowledge skill, but the principle remains—you can eliminate that startup time and a great deal of your training investment by teaching them the base skill the old-fashioned way, and then chipping the complementary (whether in the mechanical sense or not) skills.