Turn 60 - She Answers With Her Staff
There’s a bit of excitement in the palace, as you are awakened in the middle of the night by the fire alarm of all things going off. Your security detachment hustles you and Willis off to a secure area.
There was a fire, but it was nowhere near the living area. A fire had broken out in the storeroom serving one of the Palace gift shops in the public area of the complex. The shop had been closed at the time. The fire was particularly annoying because it was a battery fire, as a damaged battery had somehow caught fire, which had ignited other batteries stored in the same area. The fire suppression system had to extinguish the blaze two dozen times before it was finally fully dealt with.
Investigation shows that the box containing the battery which ignited had been dropped at some point by an automated inventory management robotic system. There was no visually apparent damage to the packaging, so the box had simply been stored in the warehouse. A day later it ignited, as the battery had suffered a pinhole penetration that had been missed.
And it was one of the neat Eagle models too.
Diagnostics are done on the entire system as a precaution. Maintenance logs are up to date, and there is absolutely no sign of any malfeasance. It just looks like a freak accident, and thankfully nobody was hurt even if the gift shop’s insurance has taken a hit.
Well, apart from losing sleep that night anyways. You are almost certain that you didn’t bite anybody's head off all day, and feel quite virtuous.
That determination to behave yourself is sorely tested when you see a number of proposals from the Imperial Parliament.
None have actually passed yet, but are being hotly debated. The recent economic fluctuations and corrections have caused some interesting turmoil in the job markets, with some people claiming that the extremely generous unemployment and social safety net provisions are causing issues due to people preferring to remain on them for longer rather than accepting lower paying work. As a consequence, while there are plenty of jobs open, they tend to go unfilled as people wait for higher level jobs that may or may not appear in that particular market segment.
Needless to say this is highly controversial. The unemployment and safety net provisions are carefully designed to keep people from staying static and simply living off of them, with educational and training requirements intended to keep people prepared for the workforce. The critics are claiming that this isn’t enough, that the benefits need to be cut back in order to make it less attractive to people to remain on them for extended periods of time. The current system does slowly scale benefits down over time in order to do just that, but the critics are wanting the starting point to be 50% of the current percentage of income. They are also wanting to accelerate the depreciation of benefits so that they zero out after a year unless the beneficiary is enrolled full time in university level classes for an initial degree or an initial graduate degree.
A second proposal, which is also in committee at this time, regards colonial development.
Proponents of the proposal argue that currently many of the new settlements and systems that have been incorporated into the Griffon Empire are barely contributing to the prosperity and defense of the Empire as a whole, for the simple reason that they are at best lightly developed and settled, and in some cases are flapping exposed in the breeze. They point to the significant revenues brought in by Imperial taxation and argue that it would be appropriate for the Empire to substantially invest in developing those systems that currently are not part of the ‘Core’, namely not Griffin’s Roost nor Nowy Gdansk.
As such they propose a funding scheme that would reduce the effective Imperial Tax Rate by 5%, but would substantially increase GDP and POP growth on all non-core systems. In the short term this would reduce the funds available to you for your budgets, but in the long term substantially strengthen the Empire as a whole by reducing wealth and industrial disparities between the current Core and the Colonies.
The Eldest is in favor of this, as is your daughter Sarah, both noting that the massive economic gulf between the central worlds of the Terran Alliance and the more remote colonies was one of the major drivers which saw the initial fracturing of the Inner Sphere. Avoiding such mistakes now could only profit you in the long term.
The final proposal from Parliament is more in the nature of a bill being advanced which would mandate that all systems in the Empire have a mix of HPG, Defense, and Recharge stations ‘as soon as practicable’, as well as requiring annual reports on the status of garrison forces on all planets controlled by the Empire.
Considering that this is something you want to do anyways it doesn’t seem to be that far out there, although the bill has been advanced by some individuals who seem a bit more enamored with their own potential power and prestige than the good of the Empire itself.
There’s a bit of excitement in the palace, as you are awakened in the middle of the night by the fire alarm of all things going off. Your security detachment hustles you and Willis off to a secure area.
There was a fire, but it was nowhere near the living area. A fire had broken out in the storeroom serving one of the Palace gift shops in the public area of the complex. The shop had been closed at the time. The fire was particularly annoying because it was a battery fire, as a damaged battery had somehow caught fire, which had ignited other batteries stored in the same area. The fire suppression system had to extinguish the blaze two dozen times before it was finally fully dealt with.
Investigation shows that the box containing the battery which ignited had been dropped at some point by an automated inventory management robotic system. There was no visually apparent damage to the packaging, so the box had simply been stored in the warehouse. A day later it ignited, as the battery had suffered a pinhole penetration that had been missed.
And it was one of the neat Eagle models too.
Diagnostics are done on the entire system as a precaution. Maintenance logs are up to date, and there is absolutely no sign of any malfeasance. It just looks like a freak accident, and thankfully nobody was hurt even if the gift shop’s insurance has taken a hit.
Well, apart from losing sleep that night anyways. You are almost certain that you didn’t bite anybody's head off all day, and feel quite virtuous.
That determination to behave yourself is sorely tested when you see a number of proposals from the Imperial Parliament.
None have actually passed yet, but are being hotly debated. The recent economic fluctuations and corrections have caused some interesting turmoil in the job markets, with some people claiming that the extremely generous unemployment and social safety net provisions are causing issues due to people preferring to remain on them for longer rather than accepting lower paying work. As a consequence, while there are plenty of jobs open, they tend to go unfilled as people wait for higher level jobs that may or may not appear in that particular market segment.
Needless to say this is highly controversial. The unemployment and safety net provisions are carefully designed to keep people from staying static and simply living off of them, with educational and training requirements intended to keep people prepared for the workforce. The critics are claiming that this isn’t enough, that the benefits need to be cut back in order to make it less attractive to people to remain on them for extended periods of time. The current system does slowly scale benefits down over time in order to do just that, but the critics are wanting the starting point to be 50% of the current percentage of income. They are also wanting to accelerate the depreciation of benefits so that they zero out after a year unless the beneficiary is enrolled full time in university level classes for an initial degree or an initial graduate degree.
| [] | Support |
|
| [] | Oppose |
|
A second proposal, which is also in committee at this time, regards colonial development.
Proponents of the proposal argue that currently many of the new settlements and systems that have been incorporated into the Griffon Empire are barely contributing to the prosperity and defense of the Empire as a whole, for the simple reason that they are at best lightly developed and settled, and in some cases are flapping exposed in the breeze. They point to the significant revenues brought in by Imperial taxation and argue that it would be appropriate for the Empire to substantially invest in developing those systems that currently are not part of the ‘Core’, namely not Griffin’s Roost nor Nowy Gdansk.
As such they propose a funding scheme that would reduce the effective Imperial Tax Rate by 5%, but would substantially increase GDP and POP growth on all non-core systems. In the short term this would reduce the funds available to you for your budgets, but in the long term substantially strengthen the Empire as a whole by reducing wealth and industrial disparities between the current Core and the Colonies.
The Eldest is in favor of this, as is your daughter Sarah, both noting that the massive economic gulf between the central worlds of the Terran Alliance and the more remote colonies was one of the major drivers which saw the initial fracturing of the Inner Sphere. Avoiding such mistakes now could only profit you in the long term.
| [] | Go For It |
|
| [] | We Need the Money Now |
|
The final proposal from Parliament is more in the nature of a bill being advanced which would mandate that all systems in the Empire have a mix of HPG, Defense, and Recharge stations ‘as soon as practicable’, as well as requiring annual reports on the status of garrison forces on all planets controlled by the Empire.
Considering that this is something you want to do anyways it doesn’t seem to be that far out there, although the bill has been advanced by some individuals who seem a bit more enamored with their own potential power and prestige than the good of the Empire itself.
| [] | Approve |
|
| [] | Veto |
|
