What would be the skills to obtain sovereignty?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Unless you are obtaining your raw materials by transmuting rock, air, or sea water into whatever elements you need as feedstock, you still have to have suppliers of raw materials. And to get them in the bulk a huge business needs, you're going to have to buy from big suppliers, not from backyard operations.

"You've been running this place like a piecework factory. We're going to run it like a business. We're going to put it under one roof." (James T. Kirk)

This isn't necessarily true. Big food businesses did fine sourcing from small-(ish) farms back when that was the main source of supply. Walmart (in)famously leans very hard indeed on its suppliers, which is only possible because it can replace them if it has to.

Dealing with lots of small (or 'small' - any resource extraction firm is likely to rupture the notion of a small business) suppliers requires having more people handling your purchasing than working out one trade deal with a monopolist, but overall that's likely to be a source of savings rather than a net loss...

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

Unless you are Facebook or OASIS (Ready Player One) with TL11 AIs, isnt it? And then you start playing Eve Online in real life through asteroid mining...

I think you are going to need to buy huge amounts of raw materials, or of plant and equipment, before you can set up your first asteroid mine.

See, I keep seeing you do a kind of bootstrap process (from "lifting yourself by your own bootstraps"): You address a problem in reaching a desired state by citing resources and capabilities that will be available AT that state as things to be used to ARRIVE at that state. Unless you are envisioning a world with closed timelike lines, that doesn't help. It's like saying, "I will attain godhood, and then I will use my divine powers to overcome the obstacles to attaining godhood." If you don't already have those powers, it may well be that you can't get there from here.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

How about making the key word extraterritoriality?

It sounds like what you require is not sovereignty but a safe enclave. For that you need Patron. Or you need to have enough muscle yourself for the idea to be accepted.

Self-governing merchant enclaves are common in history and their is no reason not to reuse the idea.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I think you are going to need to buy huge amounts of raw materials, or of plant and equipment, before you can set up your first asteroid mine.

I can see the problem but how important would Merchant be on a scale from 1 to 10 in a market in which you are the one and only seller?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

I can see the problem but how important would Merchant be on a scale from 1 to 10 in a market in which you are the one and only seller?

Actually, fairly important. You need to find a point where raising your price any higher will eliminate so many buyers that your net returns start to drop instead of climbing. You'd probably rather not do this by trial and error.

And, again, you almost certainly are not the only BUYER for some of the materials you use to produce things (if you are, those are probably materials that you produce in house, because there wasn't a market for them till you came along). And Merchant helps with buying as much as with selling. If you can sell widgets at a great profit, but you need kryptonite ingots to make widgets, the kryptonite miners and smelters are likely to figure out that they can charge you a lot more and still get you to pay it, so you need bargaining skill to keep the price manageable.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Actually, fairly important. You need to find a point where raising your price any higher will eliminate so many buyers that your net returns start to drop instead of climbing. You'd probably rather not do this by trial and error.

And, again, you almost certainly are not the only BUYER for some of the materials you use to produce things (if you are, those are probably materials that you produce in house, because there wasn't a market for them till you came along). And Merchant helps with buying as much as with selling. If you can sell widgets at a great profit, but you need kryptonite ingots to make widgets, the kryptonite miners and smelters are likely to figure out that they can charge you a lot more and still get you to pay it, so you need bargaining skill to keep the price manageable.

But if you're doing this on a global scale, why aren't you using Finance?

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Actually, fairly important. You need to find a point where raising your price any higher will eliminate so many buyers that your net returns start to drop instead of climbing. You'd probably rather not do this by trial and error.

Of course but I meant it from a CEO´s perspective, in the sense of job rolls. Merchant is the world of ​​managers, sales representatives or even department directors, but so far I have not requested monthly rolls of Merchant to company CEOs, asking them to roll Finance instead (?).

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by Icelander

But if you're doing this on a global scale, why aren't you using Finance?

Same question here.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

But if you're doing this on a global scale, why aren't you using Finance?

Because the difference between Finance and Merchant has nothing to do with scale. Merchant is about buying and selling; Finance is about raising funds to support a business, enterprise, or project. In a private sector organization, this rests on selling stock, issuing bonds, negotiating bank loans, setting up lines of credit, and so forth. The people you do this with aren't giving you money to get goods or services; they're giving you money to get back more money in the long run. That's two different propositions. A pushcart vendor may need to roll against either skill; so may the head of a trillion dollar corporation.

[Michele]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

It sounds like what you require is not sovereignty but a safe enclave. For that you need Patron. Or you need to have enough muscle yourself for the idea to be accepted.

Self-governing merchant enclaves are common in history and their is no reason not to reuse the idea.

But they require the target state to be weak and accomodating (China and its concessions). In this scenario, Europa, Russia and present day China aren't going to cave.