A silly rant.
Apr. 8th, 2010 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fings(I just moved files to a new machine, and in the clean up, I found a rant a wrote over a year ago, intending to post. So here it is.)
I was thinking about The Mummy and similar movies.
"We are part of an ancient secret society. For over three thousand years we have guarded the City of the Dead."
Yeah, not so much.
I mean, how much does it take to clothe, house, and feed a secret order of watchmen and their families? And horses, too? Standing guard over a tomb doesn't exactly put bread on the table, so they have to be getting money from somewhere.
I suppose there could be a giant statue, pre-loaded with 10,000+ gold ingots, and spits one out every month, and crazy stories about how the statue will watch the watchmen and know if they fail in their guard duties, while it actually monitors a pressure-plate in a guard post or how much pee the latrine hole gets, but that would only work for the first 1,000 years (until the money runs out), or more likely, until sometime over those 1,000 years when a guard gets greedy and takes a pick-ax to the statue.
So obviously, stored treasure isn't going to cut it. What is needed is profit making investments. You'd want them well diversified, too -- otherwise you run into having all your money invested in wheat production during a year of drought or the like. And since you want to support the guards solely off the interest/profit you make, that means you need big capital investments.
But that means now you need a secret order of accountants and lawyers, to manage the money. And they need to be paid, too, so you need more money. And to keep one or more of them from getting greedy and embezzling funds, you need your watchmen to police the accountants as well as guard the tomb, so you need more of them, too. Which means you need even more money.
So now you have a sizable number of accountants and lawyers investing your big pool of money. If they make lousy investments, the whole scheme goes belly-up, and the guards are out of work. If they are good, they start making more profit than you need to just to pay the guards and themselves. They re-invest, and eventually are sitting on quite a nest egg, and sooner or later some head guy is thinking to himself, "Why the heck do we have to keep paying these watchmen? Because of some 500 year old superstitious nonsense and a centuries-old contract?"
Meanwhile, you have the guards. Sitting out there, day after day. For years. With nothing happening. Oh, maybe once a decade you have to chase away some lost interloper, but after a while even those start getting more infrequent.
And you begin to wonder, why the heck are you out here? Because your great-great grandfather was a royal guard, and promised the king/pharaoh/whatever? *You* didn't promise anything (well, except to your Uncles during your initiation...) But this is BS. You've been sitting out here, watching this stupid tomb for five years now, instead of sitting in a nice shady tavern with your buddies and maybe a girl, and your buds tell you how cushy your job is, but your stupid uncle makes you practice with your spear twice a day for an hour, in addition to your having to watch this stupid tomb, and you know, you bet no one would ever know if you took a nap to get rid of this hangover you have, cause nothing's happened in 5 years, heck nothing's happened in 500 years, Zzzzzzz.
Skip ahead a few years, and you've inherited the leadership of the watchmen after your uncle died of heatstroke, and you realize the accountants haven't made a surprise inspection in almost 10 years, and you realize you can sit on your ass and collect pay and continue to tell them everything's going fine.
Then the some accountant skips off with 50% of the money, and the rest of the firm is reeling, and they need to cut expenses, so let's get rid of these fucking watchmen who sit on their ass watching over a dead guy,
cause let's face it, when did you last see a dead guy get up an move?
And the watchmen complain, but who are they going to go to, the cops? They're a *secret* group of watchmen, they can't really complain to anyone. And sure, they have swords and spears and stuff, but you've got money to hire protection against them, and besides, you are legitimate businessmen here, respected (wealthy) members of the community, and they are a bunch of guys who guard a pile of rocks in a desert.
So the guards have to go out and get jobs to feed their families, and the tomb stands unguarded, and pretty soon everything is forgotten except in apocryphal family tales.
Or am I missing something? Hmm... Maybe if they were a secret society of guard-accountants, where you had to do several years of guard duty while studying accounting (they have plenty of time to study while guarding), then you graduate to accounting when you hit 40, and then you get a big pension at 60...
(/end rant)
I was thinking about The Mummy and similar movies.
"We are part of an ancient secret society. For over three thousand years we have guarded the City of the Dead."
Yeah, not so much.
I mean, how much does it take to clothe, house, and feed a secret order of watchmen and their families? And horses, too? Standing guard over a tomb doesn't exactly put bread on the table, so they have to be getting money from somewhere.
I suppose there could be a giant statue, pre-loaded with 10,000+ gold ingots, and spits one out every month, and crazy stories about how the statue will watch the watchmen and know if they fail in their guard duties, while it actually monitors a pressure-plate in a guard post or how much pee the latrine hole gets, but that would only work for the first 1,000 years (until the money runs out), or more likely, until sometime over those 1,000 years when a guard gets greedy and takes a pick-ax to the statue.
So obviously, stored treasure isn't going to cut it. What is needed is profit making investments. You'd want them well diversified, too -- otherwise you run into having all your money invested in wheat production during a year of drought or the like. And since you want to support the guards solely off the interest/profit you make, that means you need big capital investments.
But that means now you need a secret order of accountants and lawyers, to manage the money. And they need to be paid, too, so you need more money. And to keep one or more of them from getting greedy and embezzling funds, you need your watchmen to police the accountants as well as guard the tomb, so you need more of them, too. Which means you need even more money.
So now you have a sizable number of accountants and lawyers investing your big pool of money. If they make lousy investments, the whole scheme goes belly-up, and the guards are out of work. If they are good, they start making more profit than you need to just to pay the guards and themselves. They re-invest, and eventually are sitting on quite a nest egg, and sooner or later some head guy is thinking to himself, "Why the heck do we have to keep paying these watchmen? Because of some 500 year old superstitious nonsense and a centuries-old contract?"
Meanwhile, you have the guards. Sitting out there, day after day. For years. With nothing happening. Oh, maybe once a decade you have to chase away some lost interloper, but after a while even those start getting more infrequent.
And you begin to wonder, why the heck are you out here? Because your great-great grandfather was a royal guard, and promised the king/pharaoh/whatever? *You* didn't promise anything (well, except to your Uncles during your initiation...) But this is BS. You've been sitting out here, watching this stupid tomb for five years now, instead of sitting in a nice shady tavern with your buddies and maybe a girl, and your buds tell you how cushy your job is, but your stupid uncle makes you practice with your spear twice a day for an hour, in addition to your having to watch this stupid tomb, and you know, you bet no one would ever know if you took a nap to get rid of this hangover you have, cause nothing's happened in 5 years, heck nothing's happened in 500 years, Zzzzzzz.
Skip ahead a few years, and you've inherited the leadership of the watchmen after your uncle died of heatstroke, and you realize the accountants haven't made a surprise inspection in almost 10 years, and you realize you can sit on your ass and collect pay and continue to tell them everything's going fine.
Then the some accountant skips off with 50% of the money, and the rest of the firm is reeling, and they need to cut expenses, so let's get rid of these fucking watchmen who sit on their ass watching over a dead guy,
cause let's face it, when did you last see a dead guy get up an move?
And the watchmen complain, but who are they going to go to, the cops? They're a *secret* group of watchmen, they can't really complain to anyone. And sure, they have swords and spears and stuff, but you've got money to hire protection against them, and besides, you are legitimate businessmen here, respected (wealthy) members of the community, and they are a bunch of guys who guard a pile of rocks in a desert.
So the guards have to go out and get jobs to feed their families, and the tomb stands unguarded, and pretty soon everything is forgotten except in apocryphal family tales.
Or am I missing something? Hmm... Maybe if they were a secret society of guard-accountants, where you had to do several years of guard duty while studying accounting (they have plenty of time to study while guarding), then you graduate to accounting when you hit 40, and then you get a big pension at 60...
(/end rant)
