[Dragaera] _Iorich_ random brief comments (spoilers!)

[Philip Hart]

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On Tue, 26 Jan 2010, Howard Brazee wrote:

> On 1/26/2010 8:42 AM, Alexx Kay wrote:
>> Lastly, transport by water is*astoundingly*  cheap.  If you haven't done
>> the research, you'd be amazed at how much cheaper than ground transport it
>> is.  Even in the modern world, with airports, freeways, and railroads,
>> shipping by water is very often the cheapest option.

Ack, meant to respond to Alexx's comment above too.

Lost in the snippage the claim that Vlad doesn't teleport well - I think 
he didn't like to do it because it made him sick, but we've seen him 
accomplish it under incredibly difficult circumstances (with some help of 
the sort that would be easy to set up here).


> And their society isn't one that is designed around doing everything quickly.

So iirc it takes three days to transport goods down river from the start 
point of the novel, at no profit (the profit is going upriver with salt).
It must take longer going upriver.  So that's over a week's salaries for 
the crews, plus feed for the oxen or whatever that pull the barges 
upriver, plus loading and unloading time at the docks, plus transport to 
and from the docks if the final warehouses are elsewhere.  Can that really 
be cheaper than a teleport, even without time pressure in the society, if 
that's still true?  At the end of the Piroiad we already see that 
merchants are abandoning land travel.

If in fact the calculation works out cheaper for the crew/longshoremen/etc 
salaries/etc., then that means there is an incredible gulf between the 
value of manual labor and simple magical labor.  I don't know how that 
would be supportable economically or societally.