Prosperity Comes To Intaki At Last

Fiction Portal Intergalactic Summit
61

Ms. Hikare,

I personally have no ill intentions against your alliance other that my resentment against ideals of freedom. And in the mentioned operation I was just a gunner.

However, as a representative of the Coalition, I am bringing you our sincere apologies. This fight shouldn’t have happened, and it was our fault.

Our fleet was “batphoned” by the third party and we have found that we have “blues” on your side a bit too late. This was a miscommunication.

D. Kim, Strike Commander,
State Protectorate, CMC,
Caldari State

62

Apology accepted, although I can’t even rightfully say I am mad.

I couldn’t stop laughing the entire fight after your fleet arrived.

63

I think this is the first time I’ve seen Kim-haani apologize for something, to bad it is to guri.

5 Likes
64

Diana Kim making friendly with Yumi Hikare. Yeah, we really are in the darkest timeline.

4 Likes
65

Do not mistake my rationality and respect for friendliness. You really don’t have to be a genius to see the difference. I may strongly disagree with Ms. Hikare, but she definitely does not deserve disrespect.

You have clearly misunderstood and foolishly misinterpreted my actions and intentions.

D. Kim, Strike Commander,
State Protectorate, CMC,
Caldari State

1 Like
66

There is plenty to be found in the news archives and other historic records, and our own Intaki Cultural Centre maintains a reference library which is open to the public.

I’ll invest some time to update the catalogue I have linked, to include original Scope News articles for further reference.

And, of course, you’re more than welcome to contact me by mail, if Intaki politics interests you further.

7 Likes
67

So, here’s another question. When the customer requires rehabilitation from the drugs you’ve been selling, who pays for the rehab? Is it the customer, or your corporation? If it’s the customer, isn’t your business pushing the cost of being in the drug business back onto the customer? This is problematic because this no longer represents a free market, but a captive market. A business operating in a free market would should be able to bear the cost of doing business or be allowed to go down in flames.

Could you clarify this for us, please?

2 Likes
68

Strictly, if it’s a freeport, it can’t be closed off to Serpentis-aligned capsuleers, now can it?

2 Likes
69

That would be the people selling the drug who are pushing the cost of being in the drug business onto the customer. After all, the customers’ money is what finances the drugs cuz they’re buying them. If the customer has to pay for rehab, then the cost of drug rehab is being pushed onto the customer, not the cost of ‘being in the drug business’.

2 Likes
70

Wouldn’t the cost of rehab be the cost of business, as the seller is knowingly selling an addictive substance?

2 Likes
71

Regarding the availability of addictive substances for sale, I would like to provide this gem I retrieved from some archaeological inquiries some time ago. The source has been lost, but the philosopher responsible for this sagacity ought have been better remembered.

“It is irrelevant to the entrepreneur, as the servant of the consumers, whether the wishes and wants of the consumers are wise or unwise, moral or immoral. He produces what the consumers want. In this sense he is amoral. He manufactures whiskey and guns just as he produces food and clothing. It is not his task to teach reason to the sovereign consumers. Should one entrepreneur, for ethical reasons of his own, refuse to manufacture whiskey, other entrepreneurs would do so as long as whiskey is wanted and bought. It is not because we have distilleries that people drink whiskey; it is because people like to drink whiskey that we have distilleries. One may deplore this. But it is not up to the entrepreneurs to improve mankind morally. And they are not to be blamed if those whose duty this is have failed to do so.”

1 Like
72

if the station is running a market, then what can be sold on the market is determined by CONCORD and the SEC, not the station operator. Thus, at best, the person actually selling the drugs is the ‘seller’, not the station operator.

3 Likes
73

Alright, so perhaps not the station.

In response to that my question now: Is the seller responsible for covering their own cost of doing business if their product is known to be harmful when used as intended?

2 Likes
74

Is this authoritative? More important, is this valid given what we know today? Honestly, it comes across a bit naive.

4 Likes
75

I never said otherwise, just that it was an unfortunate situation for the people of Intaki.

Are you familiar with Aenebra? They are a cult that follows a twisted interpretation of the Ida that centers around the belief that death as a transformative event is a tool to be used without reservation to effect wanted change in the world, they murder without remorse and have no fear of death. I know you are going to make a wisecrack about how they sound like capsuleers, the difference is that most baseliners will never cross a capsuleer’s path unless they are engaged in piracy or have signed up to be a member of a capsuleer crew. This cult works under the employ of Serpentis, drawing in unstable and isolated youths, getting them addicted to powerful narcotics and twisting their minds with warped philosophy before sending them out to get others hooked and kill anyone who interferes with the cult’s operations.

These are the people empowered by this project. By having this freeport in the Intaki system they can operate outside of the purview of Federal police, and in fact I have seen members of Aenebra doing just that over the past week.

We all talk about free markets and free trade but in reality that freedom is just the freedom for predatory groups to prey on those who don’t know better or are not in a position to resist. Markets must be regulated.

2 Likes
76

I have followed your tangent in this thread with some interest, as the concepts of freedom as espoused by the Federation are quite alien to me and worthy of some study.

Your arguments against this particular economic freedom (to wit, the freedom to buy and sell drugs) seem rather flawed. By extension of your above example, surely you are arguing a like case that arms manufacturers are responsible for paying the funeral costs of all those killed by their munitions?

For argument’s sake, 1400mm projectiles are reasonably harmful when used as intended. Indeed, the recipient of such a shell rarely accepts the delivery voluntarily, unlike the buyer of drugs.

1 Like
77

The costs of any business will always be passed on to the customers. They have to be: that’s the business’s only source of funding to cover those costs. By definition, any profits the business makes means the customers have already paid the operating costs.

Yes. Demand, not supply, drives the economy. Build a factory for someone no-one wants, no-one will buy it. If people want something, they will find a way to get it.

2 Likes
78

Said? No. But you strongly implied it:

Tell me, how do you propose establishing a capsuleer-run market that doesn’t suffer this problem? Limit who has access to it, and you’re limiting the ability of the people of Intaki—who will certainly not be members of any group on an access list—to seek prosperity there. Even if you do, and you find a way to keep any capsuleers with ‘Serpentis’ in the name of their organization out, they can simply work through middlemen. CONCORD and the SEC allow this trade in capsuleer-run markets. They, not the people running the market, are the ones ‘empowering’ the Serpentis.

Moreover, as has been said: where there’s a demand, a supply will be found. It’s simply an eternal truth of economics. Make something illegal, all you do is provide price supports to the criminals. Make it legal, tax it, track it, and you can at least ensure that some of the profits from it are diverted off into providing medical and rehabilitation facilities for those who need them. And it will be some of the profits. Because any fees or taxes you put on the goods will simply be added to the end price.

And that’s not ‘free markets’, that’s there is ultimately no way to stop people from getting what they want, if they want it badly enough. There’s a flourishing trade in Empress Jamyl simulated pornography in Amarr. It’s not legal. If you want it, though, you can get it. Not even difficult[1].

If there’s a demand, there will be a supply. Period. The more you push things into the shadows, the more you empower groups like the Serpentis, not less. They’ll still move their product, and people will be more desperate to get it. Worse, if there’s some problem, like say, an impurity that’s killing people? Nobody’s gonna report it. People will die rather than come forward and admit they’ve been doing this.

Keeping it in the shadows, keeping it something that people have to go to some brain-fried cult[2] to get… means driving people to the brain-fried cult. Bring it out in the open, with a well-regulated and inspected channel for distribution, and what power does the cult have? How does the cult have the ability to twist peoples’ minds when they can just go someplace else for the drugs?

This isn’t exactly a new problem. Societies have faced the question of ‘how do you control dangerous substances?’ since the first fish crawled out of the sea and ate a trippy plant (not literally, but you get the point). Repression and criminalization has never worked. Never.

  1. And yes, I almost said 'not even hard, but let’s face it, even I wouldn’t have been able to keep from making a horrible joke about that phrasing.
  2. No, I wasn’t particularly of a mind to liken that cult to capsuleers. If all of the capsuleers you know never feel remorse over the lives they take, and have no fear of dying… start hanging out with better capsuleers. We may be serially-immortal copies of dead people, but there’s plenty of us who actually value our own existence as more than just the memories of the next short-lived copy, and don’t like the idea of indiscriminate murder. But hey, thanks for putting your own biases on display, I guess?
2 Likes
79

If the cost of this product goes up as a result of the business covering its cost then I don’t have an issue with that. If they’re charging for rehab to keep their costs down then that’s crooked. Why? Because they’re not being up front about the actual cost of buying and using their products.

Should the company be unable to sell enough of its product because the cost of selling it is too high, then they should have had a better business model.

Yeah, I should have read the quote more closely. It just came across as a trite response to my original question. I wasn’t questioning the availability and the response triggered me a bit, much to my embarrassment.

2 Likes
80

If the business is forced to pay for rehab, then paying for rehab is part of its operating costs. Where does the money for those operating costs come from?

1 Like