Yeah, no, that is really not the case. They will work their employees to death, if they are not prevented. I know, because I was one of those people who was forced to do the work of 3 people, got hurt on the job, and they just paid the fine, and pushed me onto the government to care for. So now I am permanently disabled, and even if I were to try to find work again for some reason, like them taking my benefits away, I am blacklisted from ever working there again, because they had to pay my medical bills for making me disabled in the first place.
We catch corporations knowingly selling poison, we have them happily killing off their customers and employees, as long as it turns a profit. Long term is not the goal, it is all about that fiscal quarter, and the next quarter is the next quarter's problem. In fact, corporations are some of the worst examples of this, because of the way it is designed to care only about short term profits. Since that is how their higher ups are rewarded.
But for that to work, people have to give a shit about the company and the people who work there. They milk it for everything they can get, and move on to the next one when/if it fails. The main issue here is that corporations are controlled by the board, which answers to the investors, who only care about their investment, not even the company. In the old days, we could take short term losses to invest in the futures, but now short term losses are not acceptable. We can even see examples of that here on this site, where a dev can work on a game, drop it, move onto another one, and repeat this as long as people still support them.
We also have the tax incentive, the lower the highest tax rates are, the less incentive the leaders of that company have to invest that money back into the company. As an example, at one time in our country, we had the highest tax rate (for income over a certain amount), was about 90%, so rather than take that money as income and give most of it to the government as taxes, they would reinvest in their companies, pay their employees better, and so on. Then they lowered that tax rate, and all of that stopped, the less they have to pay, the more they keep for themselves and the less they put back into the company. History speaks for itself. While greed has its place, it is an addictive beast, and it blinds you to anything other than how to get more.
The people who do look to the future, are not only rarely drawn to power, they are rarely willing to do what is needed to obtain that power, and in those rare cases when they do, they are then indebted and/or controlled by those special interests who control everything with their "donations".
You are right, that the birth rate may not always stay at the rate it is, which might be part of why they are not including half elves in the elf rights laws, creating a new workforce. Forced breeding is a thing, look at Handmaiden. But here is the thing, by the time this becomes an issue, those people who are in charge will be long dead, or at least out of power, so they just don't care. 'The birth rate drops, they can start up factory farms, cloning, etc., whatever, that is something the future generations can deal with ...not
my problem.'
Even if they cut the average lifespan of elves in half, none of them will live to see the end result. Those elves still would outlive their average human several times over. It will take far longer for that problem to show than it did in any real world examples, since no slave here could live for centuries.
Look at climate change, we have been warning about the damage of pollution for most of the last century, but we still refuse to do anything about it, because short term matters more to the people in charge than longer term. They only care about staying in power, and will do anything to make that happen, no matter how stupid and short sighted it is, as long as they get money and power.
This is the case with almost every issue pollution, elf slavery, robot warriors, whatever the issue, long term only matters, if it aligns with their short term goals. While yes, many people are capable of thinking long term, the hard part is getting society and the people in charge of it to care enough to do anything about it.
Which, brings me to another way in which we could change society in this game, once Kali's dad dies, and the girls inherit most of his empire, we could start funding anti-slavery people, use smear campaigns against the pro-slavery candidates, and so on. That could be one way to get Vanessa elected.
Like I said, they DO know better, but they don't care. The real world slavers and corporations know the risks and are doing it anyway. While different from not knowing any better, it has the same effect. Either way, people don't get treated right and that treatment, if left to continue, leads to injury or worse. As you said, you went through it, got hurt, and they just paid the fine instead of fixing the issue. Your employer didn't fail to notice the issue, they just chose not to change anything to get rid of it. The same is happening in game, the humans know perfectly well what this treatment will eventually result in for the elves and are choosing to continue said treatment.
People don't have to care about the company, or in the game's case Syl'anar's economy, to try to wring out maximum profit over the long term, they just have to care enough about profits that they see the long term benefit of keeping the assets in working condition, in this case keeping the elves alive, as that goes a long way in maximizing profits. Much farther than trying to milk the short term would. Here's the thing with investors, all they care about is the big dollar sign and they wouldn't be very pleased to realize that the company they invest in isn't taking the route that maximizes the money going into said investors' pockets. In fact, it would cause major turmoil for the company because the investors would be in an uproar. When the investors aren't happy, the board isn't happy and that cascades down the chain in a way that could lead to major layoffs. The thing preventing that in the real world, the investors don't know this is happening. They only see what they are told and that doesn't include the potential benefits of looking at the long term and acting on them. The same with the people who Cornwall was after with his reforms, they only see the facade, they don't see what is going on behind it, which is the mistreatment that could cost Syl'anar its economy.
I can see where you're coming from with the half elves, but that comes at the cost of longevity. They won't live nearly as long, mistreatment or no mistreatment, and that means less benefit in both the short and the long term. Forced breeding I could see and I did take that into account as a possibility, in fact, I'm almost certain the more radical owners are doing it off screen whether it is breeding the elves themselves to create half elves or lesser or pairing them to create full elves. However, as the mistreatment continues, breeding capability will also be affected much like how animal breeding is affected as animals of certain species are hunted. There may be some in captivity under breeding programs to repopulate the species, but those only have so much they can do because only so many pairs are being bred. The death rate in this real world example is already higher than the birth rate for many of the species in this kind of situation. Once the death rate exceeds the birth rate for the elves, the only fix is to lower the death rate, which means stopping the mistreatment. If the mistreatment continues, you may very well be proven wrong in the humans in charge now outlasting their elven slaves. This mistreatment, if I am correct, is raising the death rate, causing more elves to die earlier and earlier and they will continue to last for shorter and shorter periods of time as it continues, instead dying due to the effects of mistreatment. If they were allowed to live their full lives, even if as laborers, they would indeed last longer than the current generation of humans in Syl'anar, but the mistreatment could kill them at any point, even the very day the latest case of it occurs.
This isn't just potentially cutting elven lives in half, it could be outright ending elven lives in the immediate future. I'm not talking about slowly declining health from the mistreatment, though that is part of the issue, I'm talking mistreatment so bad that the elves just die right there as a direct result. Maybe a particularly radical owner likes to beat his elves, that could lead to death by blunt force trauma. I'm not saying it is happening, but what I am saying is that the effects of the mistreatment are not only long term, they CAN result in death in the immediate future for any given elf.
I love the way you think on that last part, that would be insanely effective aassumiing Cornwall doesn't already have a way to counter. Give them a bit of US election debate antics, smearing one candidate in an election while promoting another, and they won't know what hit them, especially if it is so well funded that our side has a monopoly on media time. If there's anything that wins an election, it's buying out as much media presence as possible.
What extinction? There are over a billion of them, vastly more than when humans arrived on the continent, because they're being breed like livestock; there is precisely zero evidence to support the idea that elvish population levels are dropping precipitously enough for their extinction to be a legitimate concern. Repeated assertion of "when, not if, they go extinct" doesn't make it true. There's no indication they're dying in the massive numbers that'd be required for their extinction to be imminent.
As I already pointed out, you'd have to be killing over 50,000 elves a day, every day, before the population level begins to drop even a single birth below replacement-level fertility. Again, that's the entire US annual homicide rate occuring every day. So, no, it's not a matter of "sooner rather than later"; there is simply no evidence their population is shrinking as a result of human mistreatment. Quite the opposite, actually, given how much their population has increased since the human invasion.
You're right, they only live half as long; that's still about 500 years, though (i.e. longer than the nation of Syl'anar has existed). We also don't know what percentage of their births are half-elf; any human procreating with an elf results in a half-elf, but every elven couple forced to procreate in breeding facilities results in another elf.
Yes, but "sooner" is still longer than the lifespan of most countries, and so therefore outside consideration from a human perspective. Again, humans think in the short-term, and even those who might think "long-term" still aren't thinking about the state of the economy into the mid-26th century, any more than the British East India Company were concerned about the 22nd-century economy. From a human perspective, the labour value of an elf who'll live 1000 years and a half-elf who'll live 500 is functionally identical, because both will still be alive when your great, great-grandchildren have died of old age.
Who cares if a few elves die a little sooner? There are always more elves to do the job. That's the thought process, and we know that because that was the thought process of real-world slave owners, and real-world companies who were killing their employees through negligence; who cares if all the toxic fumes in the factory are killing workers, you can always get more workers. If it cost more to prevent the harm than it did to replace the dead, they didn't bother. They still don't. Are you at all familair with the Recall Formula? If you don't put cash value on the cost of a human life, then corporations will act as if that value is $0.
Even if you reduce an elves lifespan by 300 years, they'll still be alive 700 years after you're dead. Since the people who own elves only care about how they'll benefit them in their lifetime, they're only thinking in terms of years, decades at best. Hypothetical Slave Owner X buys Lin, and mistreats her, cutting her lifespan in half (meaning she'll die in 200 years, instead of living another 700). What does he care? She'll still be useful every day of his life. What happens to her after he dies means less than nothing to him.
What Extinction? The extinction of the elven race, of course. There are over a billion, but a billion is not infinity. Syl'anar does not have a source of labor that is both infinite and affordable. The androids could be considered infinite, but employing them in numbers large enough to support the economy of Syl'anar would be way too expensive and could not be maintained. The replacement of elves with androids would fall apart shortly after it was started because of the cost. They may be getting bred, but as I said above, once the death rate is higher than the birth rate can possibly be, then it is too late to rely on breeding, the only way at that point is to lower the death rate. There is also zero evidence to support that mistreatment isn't having an adverse effect on the elves' ability to live, causing the death rate to rise. We have no real evidence in either direction. That assertion is already true, every living creature dies at some point, so it is not a matter of if the elves die, it is a matter of when. Extinction is also inevitable as it is the end of a species, all species will have their time to die out, but when that happens can be adversely affected by the conditions the species lives in. For example, the elves being mistreated is a condition that hurries the extinction of the elven race through deaths caused by said treatment that exceed the elves' ability to breed fast enough.
The next part is assuming there are at least 50,000 elves being bred. Remember, you also have to take into account how long each birth takes and how easy it is to impregnate an elf. I'm pretty sure there is no mention of how long HH elves take to birth offspring or how easy they are to impregnate, so I will go off of general depiction, which is roughly the same as humans. The key is the ease of impregnation, which is generally MUCH harder than humans as elves are often depicted as almost impossible to get pregnant. There are multiple factors that play into the birth rate, not just the number being used as breeding stock. There WILL be failed attempts to breed due to some of these other factors and it WILL lower the total possible breeding rate. Even if you breed exactly 50,000 elves, it is still VERY possible to only get 100 offspring, which is such a low amount that it wouldn't even put a dent in the death rate.
Yes, half as long, so they only have half the amount of time to give for labor and that's only under treatment that allows them to live full lives. Like full elves, half elves won't live that long under severe enough mistreatment.
Sooner is not necessarily that long, even, as when I said sooner, I was taking into account the potential for death as a direct result of mistreatment, which as I said before, can make death come at any time, not just at a sooner point, but at any point. Their body could give out and they could die on the job one day all because they weren't given treatment that allowed them to survive.
No, there aren't always more. As large a population as they have, elves are still a finite resource that WILL be expended. Once the elves go extinct, what elves are they going to replace the dead ones with? There aren't any left at that point. Again, we're not just talking the reduction of lifespans, but potentially the outright ending of lives that, if the mistreatment continues, will result in no more elves being alive. This COULD happen over a long period of time, maybe several hundred years, or it COULD happen in the next decade because the elves were just in such bad shape that they started dying off on the job en masse. We're talking death by injury, death by stress, death by illness, any manner of death not caused by old age.
Depends on the type of elf, we are talking common and high, the dark elves don't live near as long, but yeah.
It's the same thought process with minimum wage slaves, 'we can always get more trained monkeys', this is why they are always trying to limit education.
So far, she doesn't have much, and even in the end, she won't get all of it, maybe even between both sisters, they won't get all of it, but even if they each only get a small fraction by the end of her story, their family will have access to more money than some small countries, and with some good investments and a few successful endeavors, they could leverage that into more than enough money to fund a political revolution. Could even use Political Action Committees to hide who is funding it, so it won't hurt the company's "image" to the racist public.
Unless her father gives her more power at some point, possibly in preparation to take over when something happens that means his own reign is coming to an end. He could also just give it all to her thinking she'll continue it as it is or grow it to be bigger. He is the top brass there aside from possibly a board. Either way, I don't think money will be an issue once she gets her share, however small it may be, because, as you said, it would still be bigger than some small countries have and would be plenty to wage a political war, not an actual violent war, but a war fought in the political arena. With the amount she gets, she could probably buy out more than enough media coverage to effectively end her opponents before they can fight back.
