And here is another bit of the SR fiction that is having the bad habit of becoming real, mildly covered in this Cracked article (which on some level is meant to be humorous)

http://www.cracked.com/article_19274_the-5...a_ibsrc=fanpage

I feel so jaded, none of these made me bat an eye.

My favorite RL example is that in the early 1990's the cheif importer of Russian Vodka was the Xerox corp- yes I was working for them then. Crazy as it sounds the Russians were tyring to get into modern office equpiment and lacking hard capital paid in vodka futures.

Not even on the barrel head vodka, but vodka futures...

No wonder the world economy is the state it is...

Don't knock it, it worked Gotta love those vodka scarfing yuppies. When I worked there Xerox shares werre going for $77 each. Now it's around $25-yeah i feel SOOOO bad about that tumble.

Heh, i just find the whole concept of futures trading questionable. What one is trading is not a good, but the promise to trade a certain amount at some point in the future.

Basically, trader 1 sets up a agreement with trader 2, then sell said agreement to trader 3. When the time comes, it is not trader 1 and 2 that do the exchange, but 2 and 3.

You're only getting half the fun. Player #2 can also sell his end of the contract to another Player #4.

Moreover, any of the four player can get an hedge over the contract with Player #5 (that is, an insurance to get a partial refund from Player #5 if vodka market value rise or fall past a certain point when the exchange comes into effect). And the hedge itself can be sold by either party to say Player #6 and Player #7.

So, your futures contract between Player #1 and Player #2 results in Player #3 delivering the amount of vodka agreed upon to Player #4 while Player #6 pays a refund on that vodka to Player #7.

The really sad part is that I can see the Corps getting Extraterritorial Rights would actually make some of those things better.

I got a hankering for broker huntin...

Tho you left out some party in all this pulling a short in the middle of it all...

When we learned this, we kind of hoped for 'free samples.' We were disappointed. But it makes a great example for SR- a company known for office equipment being the people to go to for high class vodka.- and as a connasuer I prefer Russian or Polish. French or Scandanavian might be ok for some but I think you really can taste the difference.

honestly I don't see what the big deal is in that article. I mean, Hospitals, Science, the Media and to some extent the Military have always been controlled by corporations, in the USA at least. So none of that is really new, at all, except for the prison thing. I don't really get what they were going for with that article.

I want to get my hands on some Kalashnikov Vodka, myself. Too bad they don't ship to my province. Or Ontario either.
Probably trying to wake the content masses up out of their TV-induced Stupor...

Its a humour site, maybe the type of humour that writer was going for was not your thing. I like to call the type of humour that writer was going for "Saying The Emperor Has No Clothes" type humour, also known as "Mentioning The Pink Elephant In The Room", when you state something obvious that everyone else is willfully ignoring.

Comedians rely on this type of humour in alot of their acts as well.

I brought it up here because as anyone knows who likes the Shadowrun setting to play in knows that Corps taking over are a great big terrifying joke, a killing joke if you will. In a lot of ways, the Shadowrun setting wouldn't have balkanized the way it did if it were not for the actions of the corps putting undue influence on the various governments, especially the ones that had people with aspirations to democratic ideals in them - see: Resource Rush pg 24 SR4A.

IIRC, did you know that the original corps had very limited charters in the past because authorities rightly feared their growing influence and power but recognized their economic benefits. I am sure some fine fellow Dumpshocker has some more nitty gritty details to link to on that particular tid bit.

Don't forget that player 1 could then buy both ends of the deal--one way or another--if they really felt like it.

You are, of course, aware that Shadowrun is a fictional setting and is in no way intended to be a textbook on economics or politics, right? And that the companies who have made the game through the years have all been incorporated, and therefore unlikely to take the "evil corporations" element of the setting seriously in a real-world sense?

Privatization happens, and it's not particularly alarming.

And then sell it again. The cycle begins once more.

Oh wait, Shadowrun is fictional!?! Mind is blown!

Why do I get the distinct feeling I am being trolled?

Sorry. Just find your post a bit puzzling. We all like playing in the Shadowrun setting, of course, since we're all here on this forum, but just because we like a fictional setting set in a corporation-dominated dystopian future doesn't mean we "know" that "Corps taking over are a great big terrifying joke, a killing joke if you will" in the context of real life, and with the RL tag on the thread and the Cracked article, I'm assuming we're still talking about the real life implications of privatization. In reality, privatization is a pretty spiffy thing in most instances.

I'm still trying to work out how privatizing a toll road increases the state's revenue (without causing toll hikes).

Or PA's reasons to privatize the state liquor stores:
1) Make the state money (aren't they losing out on the sales profit half of the equation?)
2) Liquor prices won't rise (....really? How does the state know this?)
3) Employees will stay employed and see pay raises (and how does one do that, as a private company, and make money without raising revenue?)

Privatizing a toll road isn't about increasing revenue, exactly. It reduces revenue to the state. However, it's a MASSIVE reduction in expenses, for a net gain for the state, and the company makes money by simply being more efficient.

I'll provide an example of how it works. Let's look at the first thing on the list in that Cracked article - military. The US government has its own military, and yet it hires guys like DynaCorp, Blackwater, and the like. Why? Most of the guys who work for mercenary corporations are former service regular military, but now they're working as mercs hired by the government, and doing the same work, as private contractors.

The reason is that when you compare government employees and private employees, assume equal pay and equal benefits, the government employee is still VASTLY more costly to employ. For a given amount of money, the government can either use its own personnel or hire a private firm, and every time, the private firm is going to have more, better trained, and better equipped personnel for the same price, and the assumption of equal pay is never going to hold up - the private worker is paid better.

I considered mercenary work after I got out of the military, but my health was not good at the time. I never would've made the cut back then.

For similar reasons, private toll roads and liquor stores are less of a burden on the state, provide better service to people for better prices, and in the end provide a net monetary gain for the state.

Think this is my last post on the subject, though. Capitalism talk tends to get political and nasty in a hurry.

Agreed.

Cool, this I can work with, it doesn't insult my ability to reason and delineate between reality and fiction that makes aspirations to being close to reality in some aspects. The article is just an aspect, real world corps taking on more aspects of SR mega-corps.

So allow me to address the highlighted section of your post, I find it kinda hilarious that you acknowledge the setting is corporate dominated and dystopian but then refute that having any basis in reality, especially if you read the Cracked article ( which links to other less comical articles [if you have a dark sense of humour as well, which there is a chance of since you are interested in Shadowrun] ). Next up, my reasoning behind saying "Corps taking over are a great big terrifying joke, a killing joke if you will" is three-fold: 1) SR corps hire and kill shadowrunners, 2) SR corps rape and pillage their enviroment, thus killing everything that relies on that enviroment, 3) SR corps care only for profit and the power that brings them and damn anyone who gets in their way, often providing inferior working and living conditions and products for all but the top 1-10% in the elite class of society, most who were probably born into that and inherited it from their family if only by virtue of having access to better nutrition, education, and employment opportunities.

SR corps taking over led to a resource rush, that caused food shortages, riots, massive scaling back of civil rights, and open rebellion. The return of magic was just icing on that dystopian cake.

Now, if you can look in the well researched, corroborated investigative articles we have access to now via the internet and see the corps rise to power in our own world and the results that lack of public oversight, accountability, and restrictions/regulations has brought about due to the corps stated goals as " greed being good" and not see some similarities between the real and the fictional, well, enjoy the Fox approved koolaid and BTL chipsets. I'll just head back to my slum like a good SiNless...

And even with the advent of magic, it only gave the rebels the ability to cause a stalemate rather then a rollback of the Corporate powers. And with the advent of aptitude screening in school and the hermetic way, the corporations where able to harness the power of magic for their own use.

PA privatizing liquor is a whole other issue. PA owns all the stores except for locally made wine and I guess some beers. They have all the control but the idea of letting other people open stores or sell beer at liquor stores is trying to loosen it up. Ultimately there would be more sales meaning more tax revenue and the state wuld not have to pay for the beurocracy. Remember that's why evil villains don't realyl want to openly rule, they don't want to get hung up in the minutea of running stuff.

As Tom Baker's Doctor Who said on occassions :
"You can't stay in hiuding for ever, you have to comeo ut occassional and wave a tneacle"
and
"What do you want? To rule the universe? You wouldn't know what to do with it except shout at it.'

Hell, I don't even need to rule the universe to shout at it. Much more efficient!

I'd like to point out that I'm in favor of prioritizing the liquor stores, I just can't figure out how the math works.

I put a high priority on Liquor Stores as well. That's where I get my booze!

Looks like this Rupert Murdoch and News Corp stuff is taking some interesting turns that remind me of Shadowrun corps as well

I'm still wondering how the PMC would fare if there wasn't the government and the tax payers to pay for the months and years of training their employees went through in the first place. Basically, the government has to pay soldiers when they're still useless rookie, while PMC skip that part to only recruit combat proven veterans.

I would also be surprised if PMC would provide most of your college tuition and a lifetime of medical support for any injuries sustained, living space for families posted overseas and so on.

Really, our military program is exceptional generous to our troops in every way except the paycheck.

Which is why it's so expensive, taxpayer-wise.

There's also the issues of how well controlled PMC Troopers are... There's been a lot of controversy over various issues...

Military units have MPs.

Readers might find it interesting to watch the documentary The Corporation.

HERE it is in 23 parts on YouTube.

http://www.archive.org/details/The.Corporation

I tried, guys, but an hour and a half of agitprop is taxing regardless as to its source of funding.

Give something a label, and it's easier to deny.

You only get outraged if you have any sort of faith in humanity.

If you assume the worst everything turns out to be a pleasant surprise.






-k

That's communist propaganda?! (see: agitprop) Ok, sure, whatever you say... *backs away slowly*

Agitprop is propaganda designed to agitate. It's definition doesn't have anything more to do with communism than shampoo has with India.

I watched about half an hour before I got sick of it. It's not a balanced view of the issue. It kindly ignores the West India Company in its examination of the kind history of corporations, and then goes on to try and diagnose a political entity by DSM. It's silly. It's not trying to examine an issue, it's trying to push the director's view of the issue. If you're going to cherry-pick facts, I'm going to look somewhere else for my information.

Sounds pretty typical, actually. I mean, hell, the only fair and balanced media you'll find nowadays is in Satire News, and that's only because they burn everyone equally.

Huh, well, then googling that word I hadn't seen before failed me, you seem to be using some definition that didn't convey clearly in that manner on the wiki page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agitprop ) or other answer/definition pages ( http://www.answers.com/topic/agitprop ) ( http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agitprop ).

Apparently all these other sources of the definition are wrong?

*shrugs*

A new scandal on the BBC is reporting that an american maker of body armor was bribing officials at the UN to get the contract to provide gear to UN peace keepers. The company has been bought by a British firm that is cheerfully opening the books, but all this and News Corp not only seem like SR but the breaking of the story seems to also be SR work. And the cover up?

In Philly the School Superintendant is pretty well entrenched behind well paid off supporters- Queen Arlene- and is dispised but difficult to remove, but 'amazingly' 'secret' documents were leaked yesterday about other things Queen Arlene had wanted-like life time health care. Clearly an attempt to make it impossible for her supporters to stick by her.

Its a race back to the bottom. Somalia or somewhere has probably already one the race too. But which corp is in the lead in their division? BP perhaps?

The world seems to be in need of more Do Gooder 'Hooders.