- Merchant: What can I do for you, darling?
- Scarlet: I’m here for the job you posted.
- Merchant: You can’t be serious, I hope!?
- Carpenter: If you were two or three years older, then maaaaybeeee.
- Painter: I don’t think it’s legal to employ nine-year-olds. And even if it were, I wouldn’t do it.
- Scarlet: No one wants to hire me.
- Tibor: Thanks for trying. But that was a given.
- Scarlet: Things are going to be tough.
- Tibor: You can say that again.
A Sky Full of Stars 024
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33 thoughts on “A Sky Full of Stars 024”
Mark
They have electricity but not motorised vehicles, not even electrically powered ones? Interesting.
7arty
Electricity? If you’re talking the lamps, those are just yellow crystals (as seen in Tibor’s surgery and a couple other pages).
…But you got me thinking about the drill Tibor was using when he fell. Could whatever the crystal(?)-tech that powered it be scaled up for proper vehicles? What is the limiting factor here?
I mean, it can’t just be scarcity. That drill didn’t seem powerful enough for it’s value to be tied to anything but convenience, so if it were the case that the materials are just scarce it would be worth more sold off and replaced with a hand drill, and the components used for something more important.
Maybe it’s about power/torque being relative to size? If these crystals are natural resources, maybe smaller ones are more common than larger ones, (whether in nature or through recycling), and trying to connect enough tiny “motor crystals” together to would result in an assembly disproportionately large/heavy compared to a single large crystal …This could play well with the decaying technological know-how theme too, if there was a long-lost process to fuse smaller crystals into larger ones, so the civilizations employing said process didn’t think twice about splitting larger crystals down for low-power convenience tools, knowing they could re-fuse them. So it’d make sense to go mine the larger ones for ease of transport, resulting in this current paradoxical state of large crystal depletion and small crystal over-abundance.
HKMaly
Alternatively, there is process for creating those crystals which originally was able to produce big crystals, but due to the machines wearing out, the size goes down and noone knows how to fix them to produce big crystals again.
HKMaly
Note that steam engines are HORRIBLE for car equivalent: They don’t scale down well. For steam engines, you need something bigger, like train, to make it reasonably efficient.
Maybe they do have some train-equivalent but not car-equivalent for similar reasons.
Dilandu
Erm, steam cars and trucks were produced up until 1920s. In 1890s-1900s they actually outnumbered ICE cars to wide margin.
Somdudewillson
That they existed does not somehow prove that they were efficient. It just indicates that they were not sufficiently inefficient to be economically unviable (i.e. coal was cheap).
Vicious Sand
If the employers were serious about hiring someone, they’d consider Scarlet. Even a ‘beginning apprentice-in-training’ would get half a wage. Nothing’s been said about minimum wage laws. The fox woman in panel 4 looks cute. Furniture painting? Most varnish and paint comes from plants, the rest from minerals and ores. Perhaps that business is in as much trouble as the firebeets.
Graybeard
The employers’ reactions all seem sensible, since we know how bright Scarlet is but they don’t. I do wonder, though, why she didn’t mention Tibor to any of them as another candidate. Or is that maybe coming on Monday?
BlackDragonSlayer
Good to see this world (or maybe just this country?) has some decent child labor laws. Unfortunately for Scarlet and Tibor.
JW
It seems odd to me for a society to rather let a family starve to death than to let children work. It can’t be that uncommon a situation they’re in (especially with wars going on); to have a single adult, unable to work due to disability, with children to take care of.
Or maybe the standard solution is to send the children to an orphanage and let the adult die alone?
But I’d still wonder how a society functions if adults are written off this easily when they don’t have a family network to fall back on.
No one of conseqence
Very many societies worked like that. You cannot sustain yourself or your family? Your problem. Dying of hunger was very much happening on a regular basis.
That being said, it is still not much better in many places in the world. Publically available healthcare and social safety nets are a privilage of living in a developed country and even that is not certain as in the US you can easily get into such a situation: you are severly injured -> high medical bills + unemployment -> no money to pay for putting yourself back together + no money for rent -> congratulations! you are homeless and disabled, which means being permanently cast out from society.
Dilandu
It was basically a staple behavior before the system of universal pension and healthcare was invented in XIX century (if I recall correctly, Germany was the first – Bismark was very worried about socialists undermining his conservative social order, and he decided that the simplest way to dealt with social unrest would be to improve workers conditions, so they would be less inclined to radical reformists propaganda). Befire that, pensions mainly existed for military only; military service was long, soldiers get injured or disabled often, and pension system was important in maintaining military morale.
JW
I’m not talking about government sponsored social safety nets, though; not in particular.
Unless everyone is starving, I’d expect neighbors to take care of each other, and for there to be religious charity, maybe guilds providing mutual insurance, etc. Simply, ways for the people that make up a community to protect themselves and each other against temporary misfortune.
I’m pretty sure that’s what people have always historically done.
But maybe there’s a historian/anthropologist in the room that correct me.
HKMaly
Lot of that “community” was actually wide family. Note that Scarlet is orphan AND war refugee. She might lack support lot of other people have.
MegaJar
Scarlet, Scarlet, Scarlet…you’re going about this all wrong, sweetie. You need to play the sympathy card here. Don’t just say “Hi, I’m nine years old and I need a job”. Say “Hi, I’m a nine-year-old war orphan, and my legal guardian just broke his leg and can’t work, so I need a job to support us both or else we’ll starve to death.” You’ll get WAY better results that way.
FuryoftheStars
👍
Crystalgate
Yeah, that has a better chance of working. The apparent strong anti child labor laws could be a problem even with this approach though.
Eric
Novil’s right, some of these commenters are insufferably pedantic.
Crystalgate
I wonder what they will do now. I hope Scarlet can get trough this without resorting to unsavory methods. I think she will, but there is a reason to worry.
Hegel-Marx
Unfortunately, “I have a plasma gun and I know how to use it!” probably wouldn’t solve the problem of getting a job. 🙄
Quixote
Scarlett is going to have to learn the only trade that tibor can teach. Thieving.
But unlike him, she’s going to be great at it.
Tauben
Huh, I never considered how banning child labour in a country without a social security system can be problematic.
HKMaly
Most simple solutions are much worse than they seem on first look. Governing well is hard job and there are hidden dependencies which result in solutions working well in one country not working in other.
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