Whoah.

I'm sorry but I won't believe that without proof. Perhaps you honestly believe that, perhaps it's even true.

But to become a believer I need proof.

You're basically claiming that an anonymous guy can artificially influence the market from his PC in order to generate a profit. Without proof I have to say "bull". Institutional investors with more money tha any private citizen have never been able to consistently do that, or else their shareholder would be overjoyed.

No offense to your acquaintance but small time investors are like gamblers. Their perception of reality is often skewed. You could have a guy doing 12% from his basement with his "tricks" and be convinced that he has a sixth sense for trading. He'd share his secrets with his drinking buddies and claim his tradings affect the market. He might believe it too. But in fact the market he is playing could be doing 14% overall and the schmuck who thinks he is hot stuff is actually barely doing okay by the standards of the pool he's swimming in. Plus, these guys only remember the winning and forget losses. They have a selective memory.

You get the same phenemenon amongst Poker player. I know people who are worse player than me who are convinced they are making a killing regularly and aren't losing money. Me, I keep a log of each game and I know I didn't even break even this month and usually just wins a little pocket change on average. I have no illusions as to my skill level at the present. So when an idiot who wins big once in a while but usually lose money to me claims he's hot stuff and want to share his wisdom with me, it's hard not to laugh.

Might sound harsh, but without proof that's what your claim sounds like. I've heard too many variations on the theme to take it at face value. Your acquaintance might be doing well and might even have a story or two about great investments. But he surely took losses too and if he's foing better than the market by influencing himself the price and benefitting from it I will need more than just an anecdote to believe it.

Back to the kiddie porn : Even local cops won't come come barging in the office of a respectable businessman. Come on. I worked at a police station. The tip will get buried with the other crank calls. If it's not an ongoing investigation it won't get any attention.

If for some reason the tip come at a point were they are facing more pressure than usual to crack down on that kind of things, they might look into it but won't get a warrant out of your tip AFAIC. No DA wants to go against anyone with money without an airtight case. And you are not getting an airtight case out of what you suggested. It takes a more elaborate (and onerous) run that does a helluva lot more than plant kiddie porn on a computer and tipping cops. I'm might not even sure that would stand a chance to get joe public arrested if the cops have a busy schedule that week.

Wow, you don;t work with the cops I work with. It's relatively easy to verify the info for somehting like that, then it's like a field day. This is the easiest of things to do, it's a gimme. They would be kicking in the door ASAP here. Although, because it's net related, it may get turned over to the FBI. Interstate crime and all.

I worked for six month at the call center for my city. Anonymous tip weren't very welcome if the police hadn't asked for them in particular case. Now, if the tipper was willing to leave his name, a cop would go and talk to him, sure. It's their job. Anonymous tip that can't be readily verified, not so much. Especially since the claaer is viewed with suspicion until identity has been established. He could easily be the crook. In the case we are discussiong, he is the crook!

Planted is irrelevant. If it's on your computer you're screwed. The details beyond that aren't our problem, that's the problem of the person's lawyer. If it's on their system, whether they know it or not they've comitted a crime. Just like a key of coke in a car, it doesn't matter if you know how it got there or even if you were aware of it.

Because that's what we pay the kiddie porn task force to do. That's all they do. Especially int he case of online crime where a follow up takes so little time rtelatively speaking.

Actually anon tips are valid a large part of the time, because typically they are from folks that are either competitors trying to eliminate the competition. THis doesn't apply as much in cybercrime as drug dealing, ect. Most kiddie porn tips aren't anon though.

It would raise. It would raise as you buy it. First lots might be paid at a low price but the last are paid at a premium due to the demand you created yourself.

You wouldn't be buying 10,000,000 share at 10 bucks and then driving up the price to 14$.

You would be buying the first lots at 10$ but then the market react and the price rises. So by the time the share is worth 14$, you will have been paying your last lots at 14$, not 10$. When you start selling, same thing happens in reverse. You start offering at 14$ but by the end of your selling spree it's down to 10$. Heck, it might be down to 8$ and you lost money. Investors hate downward spiral even more than they like rising stocks.

As for what I would consider an appreciable percentage, it depends. A lot. Enough to create the impression amongst other investors that something hot is happening. That's pretty much always a lot more than a single individual can afford.

Hey, I believe that your acquaintance can live off the market. Wouldn't be the only guy doing it. Doesn't mean he is magically affecting the market from his home computer, no matter what he says. You don't have to break the rules to make money. Just have to play the game smartly. Or with a portfolio diversified enough that it doesn't matter whether you are smart or not.

Kiddie porn : I'll let it go now. I'll just say that I can't believe high ranking executives from even a modest corporation can get harassed that easily on so flimsy an excuse in the cynical world of SR. I don't even see it happening it today in that high morality war against sin climate. You need rock solid evidence to move against the rich and powerful or they'll squash you on the return of the balance. Police department have usually too many ongoing suits against them to risk the ire of a rich man without being damn sure they did everything by the book and have a tight case against him.

Actually I was thinking along totally different lines, I was arguing sideways. My bad, I agree with you.

Rember too that not all the developers are Financial experts, Computer experts, Combat experts, or (fill-in the blank) experts.

As far as fiction goes, it is a story, most of this stuff is made up so I wouldn't scrutinize the exactness or complete lack there-of when reading some of the storylines and trying to relate them to real-life.

It's a game and a story. Relax and enjoy it.

Well yeah. That's why I said I'd just cut a few zeros for my campaign and be done with it.

This has degenerated in a long arguments only because many people insist that it is, in fact, possible and I'm too stubborn to let go when I know I'm right.

To resume my argument : such growth (Over 6 000 000% in yearly effective growth) is very faintly possible with small amounts of capital as one shot deals, impossible with large ones over a sustained amount of time.

Hurray, someone agrees!

You've missed my point entirely.

PS : Technically, you didn't make a point for me to miss entirely. You just gave me a friendly advice.

Wow, you're an ass. Welcome to my "do not respond" list.

Once Costs for Crew, and Logistics (fuel, bullets, beans, band-aids) is covered the art of stripping cargo convoys bare of anything worth the trouble of delivering in large quantities wether it by air, sea, or water can have a Very high profit margin. Say I've got me a Bergen, and some crew members. We've got some info from one of our Deckers that some corp in Denver is using remotely controlled, or auto navigating trucks to haul cargo through a specific route. We find a spot in the route where we can be isolated from scrutiny, set up something for which the autonomous truck would have to stop, huge hole in road or something like that, and wait. Auto truck comes, stops, we open it, grab everything and send it out, and await for then next one. Being that it's a Corp operation and not a private operation, the crew is already paid for (or expendable). so more or less that's a 99% profit with every truck that group happens to clean out befor they are even discovered. And that's just one small example out of dozens upon dozens.

Do you mean that a corp. sponsored the run? Or do you mean that a corp. put its own security personnel on the job?

Well, I won't deny that. Very high risk but very high potential profit. That's why people have risked getting hanged since the dawn of time. Same for any high profile robbery, really. Get desperate enough and you are willing to try ling odds.

It's still not a way to turn billions into trillions in six month, never has been. But it is a way to turn thousands into millions in a few years. And perhaps even live to enjoy retirement as a select few have demonstrated over the years. Most died by the sword, the iron (in prison) or in abject poverty, though, but they knew the risks. Can't all be Henry Morgan.

The thing you have to understand is that you can't just take one tactic that can yield huge profit margin on a modest investment, multiply that tactic by a a hundred thousand time and expect it to yield the same profit on an investment of 20 billion. It doesn't work that way.

In the case of piracy the limits are :

1 - You can't beat the odds all the time (play too much and without adequate preparation and you die), A good pirate choose his prey carefully and with consideration to many factor extern to the target. He doesn't attack willy nilly everything that moves. Or he shouldn't anyway, otherwise he will find that lady luck is fickle. Therefore, how much return on investment (consider costs of all assets including especially the boat) does he do in 6 month? How many juicy fish can he get without overplaying his hand and get sunk?

2 - You can't reinvest at the same rate of return the spoils of war. You can't invest 1000K in a boat and a crew, get spoils worth 3000K in 3 months and then invest that money in 3 more boat that will each make you 3000K of spoils in the next three months. I'm sure you see the absurdity of such a scenario. But that's the kind of exponential growth required to match Art's accomplishment.

3 - I don't buy your theory that you don't have to cut in the personnel for a share of the profit because they are on salary. First of all, the corporation won't lend you personnel. That kind of goes against the point of hiring deniable assets in the first place. And even if you hire seaman on salary, it doesn't work that way. I for one would never agree to take all the risks with none of the reward. Unless the salary is proportional to the risk in the first place, in which case the employees are charging so much you better put them 'on commision' and agree to share the loot. It's like saying you can hire additional runners to go on a run for 30$ an hour and no participation in the profits. Bull. They might accept not to split the pay check and loot with you... But you'll have to give them a flat fee that amounts to helluva lot more than 30$ an hour in that case.

In the case of piracy, it's optimistic to expect the full reward to go to the captain once the crew is accounted for with salary. Very optimistic. You need to cut the crew in for a significant shares of the profit, otherwise they will abandon you, won't fight for you or worse, mutiny. While the captain has the biggest individual share by far, the crew as a whole will as a rule of thumb get over 50% of the spoils. More like 70% I'd think. I.e. One share for novices, two shares for able seaman, 3 to 10 shares for the officers... I'll ask my pirate historian of a friend when I see him how it was handled in the golden age of piracy and come back on that issue.

*sigh*

It wasn't meant to be.

We are natural rivals. You work a toll bridge and I work as a ferryman.

Oh, really?

And where, pray tell, did you learn this little gem?

I seem to remember certain bigshots at Renraku and Shiawase having an interest in seeing Villiers and Novatech sink... and no, Novatech doesn't have Fuchi's old miltech apparatus to back it up. At full strength it's only slightly bigger than a third the size of Fuchi.

72

BTW, according to Corporate Shadowfiles, Fuchi's military assets was ... 1 Company. Speaking of which, to put things in perspective Fuchi's rating was 123--1 point less than S-K. While Aztechnology and Yamatetsu were at the bottom at 114.

Clearly, things changed a great deal.

Funny. I was always under the assumption that a normal Regiment is around 2,250 men--at least, that's the value I have for Russian Regiments on page 50 of my copy of How to Make War, 3rd Ed. by James F. Dunnigan which is sitting in front of me. And I quote:

I would use the U.S. value, but the U.S. does not organize units by Regiments with a couple of notable exceptions (e.g., the 75th Rangers Regiment, which is composed of 3 battalions and 1 training brigade). Moreover, what was deployed to Silicon Valley was Knight Errant--which can field far more than 2,500 men given the fact that some of their policing contracts alone would dwarf that number. Ares Arms controls their military forces, and AFAIK, aren't the ones hunkered down outside of San Jose. One of the reasons I know for a fact that it's Knight Errant is because Grey Knight (Lt. Col. Ritter) was and is a KE officer. That and because he's commanding KE battalions according to YotC, page 108.

Corporate Shadowfiles says no such thing. It does not give any information on their military assets. One of the comments says that it may just be what they say, "officially." But if we're going to use shadowtalk as reference, how about the comment Pyramid Watcher says in the Ares file? The one that says, "Hard to tell where Aztechnology's military ends and Aztlan's begins."

While we're on the subject of Aztlan, let me also remind you that the vaunted Ensenada strike was conducted with military assets by the seven largest corporations in the history of the world, and they used military assets which the U.S. considered obsolete a decade ago (e.g. the F-4 "Phantom") and created the impression to Aztechnology that they were probably flying other such SOTA-for-2048 vehicles as the B-1 bomber. If that wasn't fielding their "A" team, then fine. But IMO that's only because their "A" team is enough Thor shots to cause a second Extinction-level event.

They also used the Imperial Japanese Navy. If the corps are so badass militarily, why would they have needed to use IJN bases and assets? Yes, Yamatestu has a naval force. They all do--for security purposes. Yamatestu has at least one CVN--considering that a major division is called "Yamatetsu Naval Technologies" it seemed reasonable under the circumstances to have one for their own R&D purposes. Aztechnology has one (Seattle, New Seattle). But Aztechnology is a whole other class of creature when it comes to military assets. Using them in this argument is like referring to U.S. force projection capabilities when discussing the force structure of EuroForce member states.

Not done. I can continue, but I don't want to because I'd be here all day.

My point is this: Novatech is not a monolith of force projection. Reading the description of its physical security in CD, it would make no sense not to have them re-deploy these uber-elite military assets to protect R&D labs like S-K does. The fact that they didn't leads me to believe that it is more likely than not that it was because those forces don't exist, or at least not in any appreciable size or organizational capability to mean fuck-all when dealing with Art.

But this is completely off-topic I'm afraid...

That was written a year before the Rodney King riots, when the LAPD and NYPD weren't nearly as large as they are now. Imagine how many armed response personnel will roam the streets in Awakened America given some of the major events to befall the UCAS.

Whereas there are 2,500 Ares/KE troopers in Silicon Valley, and KE's become stretched thin that they can't send more (or send them to COGMA in 2063), when President Haeffner sent General Colloton to Seattle, her Joint Task Force Seattle was comprised of enough personnel than the 1st Infantry Division was amongst them. Even though it meant sending an offensive military force over hostile nations, and that precluded a large force, the UCAS Army sent over 10,000 soldiers in the 1st ID alone to Seattle to contain Deus.

All the Japanese Navy did during Operation Reciprocity was to allow the corporate vessels to move within their 'perimeter' (dunno how it's called in the navy), so as to hide from the azzies.

Yamatetsu Naval Technologies did not exist then. It was created in 2059 to regroup Yamatetsu military assets. It's not clear if Yamatetsu had military shipbuilding activity now or then, outside of manufacturing hovercraft. No clue of a CVN.

I just wanted to point out that quoting the size of Fuchi military size from Corporate Shadowfiles held no water since for nearly all the other corps in that book, that size is proved wrong, particularly with the use of security personnel. I never intended to even suggest Novatech military force could be in any way considered as big or even medium. But I'd still say it can probably fields more than the third of a company inherited from Fuchi.

Funny you mention that, since the beginning of this thread I'm thinking about another mistake a lot of SR authors makes about finance. You don't buy a corp like you buy a beer. No matter how rich and powerful one is, if it's not for sale, you can't buy it. To effectively take over a corp, you need to convince enough shareholders to sell you more than half of the stock.

In this case, Cross' stock is locked, by the lack of a stronger word. 27% by Leonard Aurelius, who hate Knight even more than Lucien Cross does, 9% by Lucien's own son, and 3% by a woman stuck in a wheelchair since she took a bullet to save Lucien during a hit ordered by Knight... Even if Ares managed to convince those people to sell, gods know how, as well as the people holding the other 10%, Lucien Cross would still control his corp with 51% of the stock.

Ares only chance to ever take over Cross would be to kill Lucien Cross and every possible heir he might have mentionned in his will, as well as in his family tree, until somebody willing to sell to the higest bidder inherit (and this before another corp seize the opportunity). Oh, and if the Corporate Court finds about that, you're on for an Omega Order. The most sacred thing in the corporate system are probably the shareholders' rights.

Actually, takeover are even easier in reality than in SR. Most of the big corps IRL have fragmented capital, with more than half of the stock publicly held and no institutional shareholders, most of them banks and funds, above 5%. I you offer twice the share's value, it's surely going to be for sale for a lot of these people, and you will be able to buy the corp out.

But not in SR. Three people owned 94% of Fuchi, three people, own 60% of Ares, four people own 90% of Cross, four people also, own 76% of Novatech, six people own 64% of Mitsuhama, six people own 54% of Shiawase, four people own 54% of Wuxing, six people own 70% of Yamatetsu, and we all know Lofwyr is the unique owner of Saeder-Krupp. Why would they ever sell, they're like heads of states, richer than... wait, a comparison, Bill Gates owns 10.07% of Microsoft. Those guys in SR have more control than he does over even bigger corps. Just like Art's operation is impossible, nobody could ever turn a company into such a world dominating monstruosity without opening the capital to get cash and thus reducing their hold. The reasoning is just the opposite: if that was possible to do so, those who would not do it and emit shares to get funding would beat the crap out of them.

Hard to sell, since it's written down in letters, not numbers. Okay, I did wrote down in letters 'regiments' where I should have said 'battalions'... The guy is an investment broker (not the kind of job you got wrong numbers, though it might help understand why was he unemployed then). Maybe, if he wrote that using a transducer, on a bad day, he may have gotten the wrong word passing.

I stand corrected. My assertion of a Yama CVN, or at least some carrier, comes from Aztlan somewhere. I'm looking.

I understand. I never suggested you said it was that powerful. I was responding to Cynic's post, made without any factual statements to back it up that, " NOVA TECH IS NOT A SMALL CORP. Nova tech has ARMED FORCE that would give NATIONs, like say the UCAS a run for it's money." I think that most of this discussion could have been summed up more easily to show the vast dichotomy between KE's presence in SV vs. JTF Seattle's presence in Seattle.

Perhaps they amassed the capital through their subsidiaries.

Otherwise, you're right. It''s pretty much impossible. But you knew that already.

And no one wants that. At least no one who should be playing shadowrun wants that.

I agree. I tend to rate what the narators says based on the shadowtalk given. When Chromed Accountant vouches for something then I usually agree more with it. Its funny because I know that CA is just as much a part of the writer's imagination as the main narrotor of the piece is. So having the CA verify the numbers was a little odd to say the least, IMO. I gues that CA also makes mistakes too.

VEracusse

I would think that CA would have thought that the statement was so evidently more hyperbole than fact that he simply dismissed it off hand as not requiring editing.

Sometimes authors and editors make mistakes. This one could get fixed with errata.

Or by covering posteriors with lame spin after the fact.

True. Though in this particular case, I neither wrote nor edited that section, so I have little motivation to spin things.

The truth of the matter though is that sometimes we make errors (though one can argue about the difficulty of making errors in a fictional world removed from ours by about a decade of past events, over five decades of future events, and a whole fantasy world layered over top). The truth is also that we state fairly clearly that the entire thing is "buyer beware." We never necessarily intend for the whole truth to be given up front by the narrator, although that may be the case. The goal is to provide material filled with hearsay, rumor, and a bit of truth, and let players and GMs sort out which is which for themselves depending on what best suits their particular game. Thus, both these truths can co-exist in a fair amount of ease.

For that reason, it is highly unlikely that it will ever be "fixed in errata." For one, that would require that we decide and clearly state what is definitively true... and frankly, that's not SR's style. For two, the exact amount of money Art may or may not have is frankly irrelevant. Once you get to a certain number of zeros, it's all just accounting anyway. The amount of trouble he can cause doesn't measurably change. It's not a system problem, which is something we DO errata, but a possible setting wrinkle. It's not my call one way or the other, but I'd set the odds of errata for this at "very low."

We really do try not to make egregious errors, but at the same time, sometimes it's in the nature of the game to have things go over the top, off the scale of what we consider normal, probable, or even ostensibly possible. I mean, we have dragons running corporations and even being elected president, for cripes sake. We have corps maintaining private orbital stations. We have entire countries ruled by Elves and Trolls and Orks. We have fake realities where you can wire your brain in directly and have it all seem real. "Unrealistic" is a relative term.

I guess it boils down to that if you feel it's too unrealistic, then please do change the number to something more in keeping with your game. Roll to disbelieve. Wonder why the CA could have been duped, or what he might be covering up. Or, if he's right, wonder what sort of event could have occured that could make that even remotely possible. Just as long as you're having fun with it. That's all we're trying to do.