delight_in_wt | 13 Oix 4385: On My Way

delight-in.livejournal.com posting in

Song for Always,

I'm on an airship for Daukrhame now. I'll be there in two days.

In the meantime, you should take

gavinfox's advice. Find out what Boomsy's actually been charged with. If you can find a lawyer who'll take his case, I'll pay the retainer when I get there. If you can't, see if you can find a guard you haven't taked to yet that can confirm what you've already been told. I want to know if we're being charged extra for a bribe. Or if we're paying extra for a bribe that'll avoid further charges. Look up the statute he's being charged under and see if 200 lozens is the standard fine. Find out what the deadline for the fine is and if there's an appeals process for outsized fines. I want to know the exact forfeit date, too.

And in answer to your questions, Gavsy: no, they won't hold Boomsy indefinitely if he doesn't pay the fine.

On the forfeit date, they'll sell him at auction as an indentured servant.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

gavinfox.livejournal.com

Ah, right. Your society does the slavery thing rather than the long term prison thing. Indentured Servants have a limited amount of time they are sold for though, correct? And there are actively enforced laws protecting them from mistreatment, hopefully? And hopefully, they are only indentured servants for the duration of their sentencing, somewhere between (I'm pulling these numbers as educated guesses) six months and six years?

From:

delight-in.livejournal.com

If you're indentured for a violent or property crime (like murder or assault or theft) then the court sentences you to a certain number of months or years. If you're indentured to pay a debt, which I think is what would happen because he's being fined not sentenced, then at auction people bid for however many weeks or years or whatever of your service they'd be willing to pay your debts for. So if I owed 300 lozens then the auctioneer might start the bidding at two years and people would bid down from there -- maybe someone would take only eight months of service in return for paying 300 lz. Any bidder is going to have to pay 300 lz, the auction is to see who'll accept the least time in return for the cost.

Also the details DON'T MATTER BECAUSE I AM NOT LETTING BOOMSY BE SOLD AT AUCTION!!!!!!!

From:

terrycloth.livejournal.com

Oooh, okay. That makes sense. Yuck.

From:

delight-in.livejournal.com

This is why I never ever ever borrow money but Boomsy won't have a choice that's why Song is all panicked but it's okay I WILL FIX THIS.

From:

gavinfox.livejournal.com

Personally, I think I may be as glad to live in a society with forms of banking and debt management that are, well. How to describe this.

You know how I explained how healing in my world worked, and I believe you understood it, but you said that even though there are workarounds, you would prefer to live in a place where there was a proper god of healing, and where things have an 'ideal' concept which they can be Healed to (you implied this last bit, I got that from something I read about your world)? And I agreed that yea, even with all the ways of healing in my world which are fantastic and incredible, I would still probably rather live in a world like yours?

I think the positions are a bit reversed, ie, I feel the way you felt, but with things like slavery, and banking systems, and debt management, and economics, and currency, and legal protections for individuals, and the judicial system, and how law enforcement works, etc. etc.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can really easily explain to you the concepts on how my world works on these topics. At least, not as easily as I understood how healing on the World Tree works... but I feel there's a bit of mirror symmetry by this point.

That isn't to say that there aren't places in my world where there are still Debtor's Prison (or similar concepts), and there aren't places where slavery still effectively exists... but it is something that we, as a world, have for the most part said that such things are an unacceptable way to put together a society.

From:

delight-in.livejournal.com

I don't know how you could make everything work without being able to indenture people for crimes and debts but I kinda understand because if it DID work without that I sure wouldn't miss indenturing primes! Or slavery for that matter but we don't have slaves around here.

From:

gavinfox.livejournal.com

We put indentured servitude, serfdom, and several types of slavery (chattel slavery and other sorts involving legal penalties and such) in the same conceptual context as things which are outlawed.

From:

gavinfox.livejournal.com

In fact, there are protections on the sorts of things people or banks or whatever who loan money can do to get repaid by their debtors. They can't actually threaten their person, and they have to follow rules (which are sometimes flouted... it happens). Sometimes the loaners have to just take the loss. These people who loan money still manage to make tons of money though, because of interest and intelligently choosing who to loan money to. There's also the practice of putting up collateral for loans: if you don't repay the loan back, the institution that loaned you the money takes back the collateral, be it a pricey musical instrument, your horse, your house, your airship, etc. Some government institutions can even garnish a person's wages until loans to the government are paid off... but what ISN'T done is putting people in prison for debts, or selling them into indentured servitude, or anything like that.

From:

delight-in.livejournal.com

... but if you outlaw indentured servitude what do you do with outlaws? Do you just exile all of them that sounds kind of harsh?

From:

gavinfox.livejournal.com

We have quite a few options! The status of 'outlawry' as a permanent thing only really has to happen if you don't have sufficient centralized resources to do other options. Since your society naturally comes up against geographical issues whenever anyone tries to do a bigger government than well, 'a chain of allied City-States', you all can't do that. However, when you have a very, very large Nation-State which can project Power and Control and centralized authority and legal jurisdiction over... how do I describe this.

Uhm, consider what would happen if some major advancements in magic allowed, say, centralized authority to rule over --in a real significant way-- all of the cities on three completely filled branches. And everyone considered themselves to be part of the Nation whose identity was tied to those branches, rather than just part of a City or a Mene. And travel and communication between all the cities on those three branches was quick, easy, and cheap. Then you could actually make a Prison somewhere to house Outlaws, where you sentence them for 2 years through 'lifetime', and then just keep them there for the duration of their debt to society. And consider if the government was wealthy enough, through taxes, that this was not an incredible strain on their resources, so they could still do other government things too without much problems (like keep the rule of law in the whole area).

Consider also that for absolute terrible things, some of the branches decided to allow no-resurrection executions for the very, very worst of things, so that was always an option.

Consider that for petty criminals, requiring them to pay fines, them to do community service, them to have activities restricted and be required to check in with a 'Parole' officer to make sure they hadn't committed crimes and such.

And consider that people could not easily just LEAVE the area of influence of this Nation, because to leave, you would have to enter ANOTHER Nation's Territory, because EVERY place on the Tree had a Nation somewhere, of varying sizes (Sometimes half a branch, sometimes a few branches). Consider also the idea that 'fast travel' is far faster than horses or airships, but slower than Sythyry style weird-locador transportation... BUT it is far, far easier to do than Sythyry's Locador teleports, and it was definitely within the realm of Governments to do on large scale (ie, thousands of people and their equipment).

Consider the idea as if the Tree were somewhat smaller, and it's depth stopped roughly where sunlight stops hitting it on the way down, so people couldn't just leave to go to a new, uninhabited branch. There might be BARELY inhabited branches, but Prime cities -- and the Nations they are a part of -- were in pretty much everywhere.

Also consider the idea that whatever made this world wasn't particularly interested in it being, well, 'entertaining', so they didn't arbitrarily make lots of terrible and heinous things which only powerful adventurers can slay in the verticals and the underneaths, and those areas were just areas which were bad for farming and hard (but not impossible) to get to.

That will give you a closer idea to what my world is like. Do note that the metaphor breaks down a bit, because my world isn't shaped like a tree, and doesn't have the particular features of your world. That's why some of the things I said may seem ludicrous, cause I had to put them in 'most similar' terms for you...

..But it basically all boils down to 'it is somewhat hard for people to get exiled somewhere, it is relatively easy to make prisons to house people and put them there, it is hard for people to just up and leave to go elsewhere to a new frontier, it is easier for larger governments to exist and govern large areas, it is easier for governments to deal with criminals by being more annoyingly present in their lives on a day to day basis.'

From:

delight-in.livejournal.com

...

I think I got lost at trying to imagine THREE ENTIRE BRANCHES as ONE city-state.

Three WHOLE branches? Your city-states are tens of thousands of miles long? How can you even never mind I think your "Here" must like you all better than ours.

From:

gavinfox.livejournal.com

Okay, I don't know about the units per se... I think your world might be bigger than mine. One of the largest countries ever is under 7000 miles long. Also, I think the units which are being translated as 'miles' might be different in our worlds? Hold on, let me check my notes...

From:

gavinfox.livejournal.com

Yea, my world is smaller than yours. I don't know if the units work out, but consider my world as a solid sphere (with down pointing towards the center of the sphere, so as long as you are on the surface, the 'down' is under your feet) with a radius of about 4000 miles (I have NO IDEA if the units will translate). We live on the surface of the sphere. It's about 70% covered with water, with the deepest part of the deepest ocean being 7 miles under water. We live on the continents, which are large land masses, with mountains and valleys and rivers and such much like your world, but no verticals or anything. The single largest Nation-State by total square miles is about six and a half million square miles. That's the one that had a length of under 7000 miles.

From:

gavinfox.livejournal.com

Sorry, the units got messed up... we have countries that can have lots of area, because they aren't all long and stuff. It's not in a line. I was trying to get across the idea that the Nation States aren't all spread across in a line?

From:

gavinfox.livejournal.com

I THINK our miles and our hours are close to yours. These SHOULD be comparable.

Actually, the top speed of an airship which carried paying passengers, for non military use, was 1,330 miles per hour. That fastest one is no longer flying (too costly). The one which is moving about normally usually goes about 570 miles an hour. Our fastest 'Spy' Airship went 2,100 miles an hour (again, no longer flying). Our fastest airship ever went 4,500 miles an hour (experimental, currently being developed). The fastest currently flying military airship goes about 2,100 miles per hour. All of these were manned, by the way.

It's crazy what you can do with no air elementals to mess things up, isn't it? No Locador used either...

From:

terrycloth.livejournal.com

If you can't pay a fine (but not if you can't pay a debt) or do the sort of crime you'd get indentured for, they throw you in prison instead and sometimes force you to do manual labor until your release date.

It's basically the same idea, only you don't let random people off the street decide what the people being punished have to do. Because that's kind of abusable.

Not that prison is a really awesome idea since it usually ends up teaching people to be better criminals.

Edited Date: 2011-10-18 09:37 pm (UTC)

From:

delight-in.livejournal.com

You have to be in prison the whole time that you're indentured YUCK that doesn't sound any better really?

From:

terrycloth.livejournal.com

It's not supposed to be better, you're being punished. Indenture was outlawed because it was too much like slavery which was really, really, horribly abused. And it's *easy* to build something that's officially 'indenture' but acts just like slavery in all the bad ways.

I mean, people still do it -- they convince people to indenture themselves voluntarily and then effectively enslave them. It's just that they get put in prison when they get caught.