Grrl Power #728 – She spent two months not existing for tax purposes
I spent some time thinking about this, and really, Archon would probably wind up paying anyone the least amount possible for time travel incidents. Not because they’re cheap, but when it comes down to it, it’s logical. From Sydney’s point of view, she only “worked” two days, and for some of that time she was asleep on Cora’s ship anyway. From Archon’s point of view, Sydney was technically on the clock for 53 days, but also absent from work. She is salaried and not hourly, so there’s no O.T. to consider in either frame of reference.
If she had traveled to the past, that could be trickier. Assuming she didn’t show up back on Archon’s doorstep before they ever hired her, that’s a whole other discussion. But if she went a month in to the past, then showed up five minutes after going back, and could prove she’d spent the time saving the world from whatever… would they pay her for a month or 5 minutes? It seems like the easy answer would be that they pay her for the month. She was doing her job the whole time after all. But what happens if someone got sent a year in the past, or ten? Their salaries are not inconsiderable. Sydney is a recruit, but Major Hiro went ten years in the past, that kind of back pay could cause a budgetary crisis.
Not that Hiro would show up and demand a huge paycheck necessarily, but it’s something that the bean counters might need to consider at some point, now that they know time travel is possible.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Max in Panel 5 is excellently done. Good work, DaveB!
Looking forward to what the debriefing brings the team. Aaaand the resolution of the Alaari refugee crisis.
Max looks good, but… also different. Looks younger and less cranky.
I miss the crankier, more mature Max ;)
You have to remember that Max isn’t THAT old. Yes, she’s in her 30s, and yes during that time she’s served in the military, but when we’ve seen Max in out-of-combat, out-of-training situations, they have shown a woman who is remarkably younger.
She is demonstrably a closet-geek; she has been shown to have fun with her coworkers in “classified” moments getting up to wacky hijinks, her method of discipline can be unique, and she’s been shown to be somewhat forgetful/lacking knowledge about aspects of human life–in particular, because her powers mean she doesn’t experience what they do.
Spending that length of time in the military, with powers that render her fairly alien, means that in many ways, she hasn’t had a chance to mature to be truly “older”. She’s *professional* at all times…and in being “professional” she can appear cranky…but she’s not all maturity/crankiness.
Maturity is a significant part of her character, because she IS a bit older and she HAS been in the military for a significant amount of time–but there’s more to her than that, and she has a whole other side of her that we’re seeing here. I quite like the exploration of this “softer” side of her; I expect we’ll be getting more of the ‘mature, cranky’ side once ARCHON is back in action again.
I concur that panel 5 Max looks excellent. She does look younger and more innocent, but that humanizes her; the dialogue has always made her seem more naive than she looked. Drawn this way, her image feels like it matches her personality better.
I enjoy the whole page. Whilst I also liked the more detailed shading, currently on hiatus, if Dave can produce the comic with a lot less effort, like this, I think it is perfectly fine.
Ditto – I’d rather get some side stories than painstakingly perfected art.
Although, sometimes the extra shading does push things into the uncanny valley – Arianna’s face in particular looks way better to me today than her new appearance as of a few pages ago.
Max’s relief at Sydney’s safe return would tend to improve her mood, maybe even enough to make her seem younger.
In case anyone was interested, the GDP of Morocco in 2018 was $110 Billion U.S.
FYI: The currency of Morocco is the Dirham and is worth about 10 cents U.S.
They are also known for the Fez, which may be more or less cool than bow ties, depending on your personal opinion.
Wait, so their monthly wage is around nine MILLION a month? Holy moley…
And now you understand Sydney’s reaction upon seeing her first paycheck. “Queen of salt”, and such.
In cases of overdue back pay usually the employer is required to pay interest as well, so maybe they are paid less. Or that could include merchandising and movie rights. Or they could just make that much. When you think what the US military is willing to pay for equipment that the team makes obsolete it makes sense, it would be a change considering how much the military tends to undervalue it’s personnel compared to it’s equipment but supers are special cases.
It was hyperbole. You don’t actually think that Arianna actually A) knows the GDP of Morocco off the top of her head and B) actually calculated Sydney’s salary out to a millennium do you? Don’t take that off the cuff remark as an indication of their salary.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s obviously substantial enough that even one paycheck is going to change Sydney’s life forever, but don’t be trying to calculate the exact amount based on an off the cuff statement like that. Trying to do so just doesn’t make sense.
Given that it’s been stated they “have to be competitive with industry”, when Sydney got her first check, I’ve assumed her salary as a recruit was on the order of 10 to 20K per week. This would allow for increase as you go up the ranks, and presumptively Max would be paid at about 10 times that.
IOW, Sydney is probably getting paid at a rate of about a half million to a million per year, IMHO, and Max is getting about ten million per year. Not a lot of gap percentage wise, but it’s a special case in a new service formed to deal with special cases.
I haven’t tried to puzzle out what the General is getting paid. He’s not powered, so he’s not a special case, but OTOH, he gives orders to special cases and should be getting paid more than they are. Again, he’s in a special case all by his lonesome. And they certainly aren’t going to extend that all the way up to the JCS. Much as the JCS would like it.
I just realized that Max’s hair is longer!
I am fairly inconsistent with hair length and breast size. Max’s hair should be mid shoulder-blade, but it looks like it’s about two months from being mid back. I’m okay with it actually.
After 57 days, some changes in the hair lenght is plausible
Which does raise the question of how she cuts her hair in the first place. Superman supposedly uses his heat vision. Does she use her finger blasts?
Depends does her hair have here protection aura or just her skin.. Her Aura is enough to protect her outfit to some degree. but since human hair is dead cells one chould say any hair that gets more then an inch or 2 from her body may be more or less normal or at least not Uber striong.. She can also lower per own protection down to devert power to other things link speed. So she many just tone down her power when getting a trim and then they can use a staple to cut her hair..
It’s already been established that Maxima can rebalance her attributes: i.e. lower her defense to up her offense.
So she can just drop her shields (so to speak) if she needs a haircut or whatever.
*paw print of approval*
Maxima would still probably need an angle grinder or industrial diamond edged cutters mind. As she cannot totally control how her power is distributed. She always has a minimum level (which is still modestly powerful super level) but can concentrate to lower that further (if not completely).
Just think about how casually Maxima used rebar (industrial iron bars used in construction) as a hairpin, after the battle at the steak house car park! A fair indicator that she is used to that degree of haircare requirement.
my answer to that falls somewhere in between probably, it depends on how she sees herself, and it’s comic book, let’s just sit back and enjoy.
Hair is NOT made of dead cells. It’s a chemical extrusion, not your body’s graveyard. And we’ve seen Max’s hair stand up to some pretty impressive blasts before, and not even look frizzy as a result. It’s pretty clear Max’s hair is tough as hell, at least while still attached to her. Whether it maintains that level of durability after the connection has been severed is anybody’s guess. Then again, I’m willing to bet Ashley has already considered the possibility of weaving her hair into armor, and since ArcSWAT doesn’t have purple uniforms, my personal assumption is that the defense goes away once cut.
Allison of Strong Female Protagonist has someone cut her hair with a portable tablesaw.
Well, the bout with Vehemence did introduce the team to “the Barberian” (you know, the guy with the zebra mohawk), who by his own account is a hairstylist (pg 372) with super strength and diamond edged shears and offered his services. So that’s certainly a recent possibility, provided Maxima’s hair durability didn’t exceed his expectations.
Yup. Looking forward to him making a return in a professional capacity. I’m sure the Arc-SWAT staff will have been calling for him to be allocated a salon in the Archon shopping mall. And with 2 months elapsed he may already be set up in residence.
And there may even be a branch of Event Horizons Comic shop there too. I hear they are quite the place to go for super hero merchandise.
The real question is: how does a person with super strength/invulnerability, like Maxima or Superman, cut their hair when they are still in diapers and no one knows they have super powers.
Max gained her powers as a teen. Retcon says Supes didn’t have powers all that much until he’d soaked in enough solar radiation. Although, I think they used handwavium.
You are right they did use handwavium. I have seen issues of Superman covering when he was preschool that showed him already having powers. The question still stands, what happens to a super powered being during their childhood when they have powers, but don’t know how to handle them.
Can’t you put #592 on your desk and reference panel 8 to get breast size for Maxima consistent?
Sydney was on duty, worked the entire time she was gone, she should get paid.
Federal law does not make any exceptions for time travel.
From Maxima’s comment, they’re trying to handle this particular mess administratively, but they really don’t have the authority to do so.
Funny thing… Federal law would cover time travel, technically.
Contracts have to specify the jurisdiction under which they’re governed, and the pay schedule is based on that. This is mostly to help with administrative issues re: time zones, daylight savings, and so on… but also applies to astronauts, who experience enough time dilation that we’ve been able to do experiments with it.
Technically, no matter whether she travelled forward or backward, Sydney could only ever get paid for the time that passed *according to Archon’s jurisdictional area.*
Course, if she goes back in time like Dave says, they’d probably at least have to give her a deployment bonus or something.
They can’t legally be salaried because they don’t own 25% of the company. I worked for a company that had all of us working salary’s and wage and hour came in and I recieved over a thousand dollars back pay for two years, the rest of the ten year was outside of their scope but we were suddenly all clocking in and being told to make sure we were’t working overtime when before we were putting in 60-65 hours a week during the spring summer.
My dad was salaried, and I promise you, he didn’t own 25% of the company where he worked. Same for my mom. Most white collar employees are salaried. So are most managers. Salaries are generally paid any time when you don’t expect the job to involve lots of overtime (although many employers have no problem asking the employee to put in said overtime anyway). Dunno where you got the idea that you have to own 25% of the company to be salaried, but I promise you, it’s not true.
The Government suffers no such strictures.
The entire military has always been salaried.
Ownership of the company is irrelevant in the United States when determining if an employee is salaried (FLSA Exempt) or hourly (FLSA Non-exempt). I spent most of my career as an exempt employee for the U.S. Government, and I own no more of that than any citizen of the United States does.
ref: https://www.flsa.com/coverage.html
I can’t decide whether this is the coolest thing ever, or completely insane. Are you sure about this?
I mean… it’s based on the contract, but government contracts always specify jurisdiction in order to facilitate their own paperwork.
Say I’m hired by the government to do inspections on various embassies… they don’t want to have to sign a check a day earlier just cause I’m scheduled to cross the international date line on payday.
IANAL, but the way this is written in every contract I’ve gotten to look at… it would apply to time travel as well.
At a minimum – it applies to astronauts, who are government workers that experience time travel (albeit very, very minor time travel).
Maybe a better comparison would be time spent as a POW. Sydney is with the military anyway. So what does the military pay if you’re captured on duty. Held as a captive for a couple of months or years and released back into active duty?
A quick search reveals that U.S. POWs are still considered to be on active duty during their imprisonment and entitled to salary back pay. That’s probably the best comparison.
My thoughts are that Sydney could likely contest this “split difference” pretty cheaply. Heck, wouldn’t surprise me if a firm offered it pro bono for the cred of representing a hero and defining law around time.
(Also don’t forget that income earned in a combat zone is non-taxable.)
Sydney was in an active foreign combat zone when they got separated through no fault of her own. The method of transport (time wormhole & spaceship back) took significant time even though she did not subjectively experience it. She was brought back on a militarily(ARCON) arranged transport. There was no TDDY, nor leave issued, nor was She AWOL. For a time she was MIA in a combat action. Thus
The worst thing ARCON can do is fail to pay her full salary due her. It’s not like Sydney’s expenses were only like 2 days worth of food, its like 2 months of utilities and rent that occurred while she time stasised.
I remember my platoon’s sergeant explaining this to me once. In the army there two ways one should not _ _ _ _ with a soldier. Don’t mess with his pay. Don’t mess with his family. _ _ _ _ing with his pay also messes with his family… so _ _ _ _ing with the pay is worse.
All Sydney would have to do would be ask advice from her local VA rep in town hall. That VA rep should have a few phone numbers of attorneys to speak with, if not JAG officers to discuss the matter with.
Most likely if direct deposit was already instituted for her paycheck then she won’t need to do anything since stopping the paycheck of a MIA soldier is a political hot potato. (Nobody would want to be caught doing it.)
And since the public explanation was “She was away doing training.” if they wish to keep the mission on the down low it would be best not to have a written pubic record, a.k.a. the pay stub not dispute the public statment.
Of course that is my assumptions if ARCON is run like a branch of the armed forces as opposed to something akin to the FBI. While the exposition in a few comics before and leading leading up to #147 does talk about ARCON it doesn’t talk about the day to day operations of the organizaton.
+1
And eloquently argued.
Very well argued one thing you forgot though was MIAPD (Missing in Action Presumed Dead). which would allow the government to halt pay. However such halt in pay would be back payed on return to service. Since they had a good idea on where and when she was it would more then likely not have come up.
However in the case of time travel to distant future and not returned to present that would either entail MIAPD or furloughed until reappearance.
But here is the real question if someone was transferred to the distant future/past and fought for years in said future/past but was returned to same week or even day. Would said person be paid only that month’s salary or would they be paid for the years they spent in future or past as well.
Years. Unless they want a mutiny. Not a sensible attempted savings when dealing with people in a situation to change the course of history.
Years. But they would likely have to specifically amend the rules to account for it, because by normal rules it would be a week or a day. But obviously if you’re sending them there on purpose you’re going to have trouble motivating them to follow orders when you tell them they’ll be paid one day’s salary for one year of work.
They would be paid for the time they worked, which is why Sydney is only entitled to two days’ pay: as far as she is concerned, she was only gone for two days, and spent a considerable less of that actually working
Her time passed is actually irrelevant, what is relevant is how much time passed at the paymasters office.
She was lost in combat, and if not found would be listed as MIA. Or she’d be listed as presumed dead. If she was married and listed as presumed dead, her husband would get death benefits, but if MIA he’d get her pay every month. If she was listed as presumed dead, but then changed to MIA, the family would get back pay up to date, and she’d likely get promotions with the rest of her class. That’s exactly how the Navy did it with Capt. Scott Speicher when they changed his status to MIA from presumed dead.
POWs not only receive their pay, they also receive promotions and raises based on time in service. It is theoretically possible to be captured as a Lieutenant and return as a General.
Um … the WHO???
United Underwater Wartribe of Amexicanda???
Sound like a group that is all wet from the Rio Grand or the great lake of Gitchee Gumee.
Amexicanada. Basically what NAFTA led to.
We should get to find out if Sydney got any birthday presents.
Arianna did refer to getting party supplies…
Nice Hitchhiker’s ref there. :) As for pay – if they have a clause for reimbursement for work travel I think they are still coming out ahead. Even at 6 cents a mile, multiple light years would be expensive!
Most instances of time travel are portrayed as instantaneous.
What if it’s the Classic HG Welles type where it takes time to time travel?
“We are now traveling at 1000 hours per hour.” (41 2/3 days per hr.)
If miles gets you mileage, does time get you hours?
Managing your airmiles must involve solving Shrodinger’s equation for an entire planet’s worth of particles.
However Sydney travelled across both space and time. So even taking the time-travel as being instantaneous she did still end up on another planet many light years away from Earth.
That is some decent frequent-flyer mileage!
Yeah, butt is the distance calculated by how far Sydney herself travelled (only a few feet seeing how the Portal itself moved, not the team) or the distance of the destination?
Sydney’s salary really shouldn’t be a question. She remained an employee of Archon. Unless you’re going to use a time portal to send her back to a point shortly after her jump forwards, pay her as you would had she not been sent forward in time.
She’s a salaried employee, it was an involuntary, unforseeable, work related incident.
Given the super hero milieu that the team operates in, they probably do want to establish a maximum period you can be lost in time before you are made an inactive (and thus not paid (at least not paid fully)) member of the team. But that would be a contract thing they apparently have not yet mandated, so Sydney is due her full time pay. This isn’t really the sort of thing you can decide on the fly without inviting all sorts of legal trouble.
Since Sidney is based in the US, and is a salaried employee, she should receive pay for the time period she was absent from Archon’s frame of reference unless there are specific contract provisions for her absence, or they terminated her employment during that time. Since it was a work related incident, terminating employment could probably lead to some legal troubles, but I’ve got an MBA not a JD so don’t know there. If they don’t fully pay her for that period, and she retained employment that can be used as proof that she is an hourly employee, not a salaried employee and her and any others in the same position would be due back pay for any overtime that was worked (The employer can’t deduct for time that was less than 40hrs or whatever your locality sets as the overtime threshold). This could have big implications for Archon since they are basically on-call employees. They would rack up a lot of overtime hours unless supervillains only commit crime during operating business hours, Archon moves everyone to shifts and employees don’t work
and aren’t called when it isn’t their shift to avoid overtime pay, or they move everyone to be independent contractors that they call as needed.
When time travel becomes a verifiable thing (or at least seriously anticipated), we can expect the various contracts and employment terms to be reviewed to cover the foreseeable effects.
In Sidney’s case, where it’s a “time skip forward” (and work related), covering her expenses and situations “at home” should be a minimum. After that you get into questions of status (unavailable, on call, deployed, etc.) and the appropriate rates for each. She might also get bonuses based on how well she can report what happened.
What I’d find fun to see is having one of Sidney’s spheres being able to replay what happened on the planet.
Well that is pretty much one of the speculated functions for the last unknown orb: Flight Data Recorder and data access. For when “just memorizing the Galaxy” isn’t really on option.
The first supervillain attack was after 5 PM (they were having dinner and the conference was over and it was dark out).
Jiggawatt was off that day.
MIAs get paid until the fate of the person, living or dead, is determined. If the fate of an MIA is never determined, the military eventually declares them missing presumed dead. At that point, their pay would end, but survivor’s benefits would still be paid. Time travel would be similar: after X number of years, the agent is presumed dead and pay stops. IF they do eventually show up they might get back pay.
The experience of the family of Capt. Scott Speicher would be relevant, IMHO.
I would say the best answer to the question is look at what the US military dose for POW’s. They do consider them as being active duty during captivity and pay them accordingly. Of course I Imagine there are situations were this changes, IE: Assumed dead, turned traitor, and so on.
I would also assume Archon doesn’t manually issue checks every pay period. Again it’s likely they use a similar pay schedule to the military and many salary based company’s. 1st and 15th of the month you get paid, regardless.
in this case i think it would also come down to a matter of compensating Sydney for her lost time instead of her worked hours. She lost nearly 2 months of time while preforming her duties. Likewise I don’t think traveling to the past would get her paid extra for her time.
From my limited experience salaried employees are rarely compensated for extra time worked. You get paid X doesn’t matter if you work 40 hours, 20 hours, or 80 hours. As long as you are preforming your duties to an acceptable level.
This reminded me of an episode of Stargate, “A matter of Time.” they open the gate to a plate being sucked into a black hole. At the end they mention that in the single relative day for Jack it’s been 2 weeks.
I hadn’t considered that, but POW situations are probably the closest equivalent to this sort of situation.
You might also want to consider medical comas or being lost (at sea, in the wilderness, etc.) for long periods. POWs are probably more common, though.
You can bet that with the issue now brought to the table, the bureaucrats and lawyers are going to hash it over and develop rules based on existing policies — and maybe some policy changes, too.
This is America! She got brought BACK in time a lot, so that way time divergence (light speed travel) would sync up with current day as close as possible, which is why she only lost 2 months. So because she gained 150 years, she has to pay the government. Who cares if that 149 years 10 months or so was in FTL and she only noticed 2 days and not 2 months?
Contrary to the crap you see in Star Trek, and other science fiction, special relativity does not allow time to run backward when one exceeds the speed of light. It does not allow travel at faster than the speed of light at.all To travel “FTL” one would have to use “warp” drive, or some other similarly esoteric method of travel, that BYPASSES normal space and avoids special relativity all together.
For the record:
She was time-displaced while on active duty, so she would get the 57 days paid.
She would, however, only be earning combat pay for the two days she experienced.
I’m pretty sure her contract had specific provisions regarding time away from the store, which would cover some of this. They simply can’t pull her away from the management of her business and then pretend that there was no opportunity cost to Sydney for that.
I’m pretty sure that they won’t want to give Sydney any legit or quasi-legit reason to walk away from her enlistment contract given what she has now seen and done, now knows about her powers, and what she now represents to the world. (The first “official” trans-galactic traveling Earther to visit an alien civilization and return.)
My guess is they’d pay her according to the passage of time in “earth standard time” just to keep the accountants sane, and the payroll paperwork easy, if nothing else. Probably with a cap to avoid the whole “jump a thousand years into the future” bill.
That, or just have “no unauthorized time travel; authorization through XX level/process only” put into employment contracts; that way you don’t need to deal with it… or if does happen, the right people can know about and pre-determine the payment method.
At least then, if someone gets shunted back in time, they don’t toil for decades thinking they will get paid, only to find out… nope!
Assuming acounting is using an automated payment processing system then I would think Sydney would have 2 months pay already sitting in her bank account as her paycheck was cut automatically with each pasisng payday. Unless a hold was placed when she went missing.
@Kal you would be correct in that salary means the same pay regardless of hours, which can be a double edge sword. Get finished early and nothing else really to be done, get some home early with no change in your pay, YAYs, on the other hand, end up with a massive workload, spend extra hours finishing that up without overtime pay. Does make planning things around your finances really easy in that you always know exactly how much is going to be dumped into your bank account with each payday.
Pfffft, everyone knows Amexicanada runs on a system of cyborg chicken bartering!
But it’s the Cyborg Chickens doing the bartering, of course.
And Robot Chicken is king of Amexicanada, of course.
I bet if you told the tax office you had not existed for two months, they would go away and think about it for a bit and then send you a bill for inheritance tax.
Either that or you can apply to get a job with them again but you are a new employee and they have no inclination to pay you for the previous time because you didn’t exist.
Funny you should mention tax purposes, as she was outside the continental US for two months, per military law, she should be tax free.
That’s only the first $70,000 IIRC.
She doesn’t pay income tax anyway. Military personnel. Taxes pay them. Easier to exempt them from income tax than it is to pay them, take a portion of that pay back, and use it to pay them.
Sorry. When I was in the military, we paid income tax. Don’t try to apply logic to taxes (or other laws).
Common misconception. In the United States military pay is taxable at the federal level. There might be some clause that exempts pay earned when deployed to a combat zone. Some states exempt military pay from state income tax, so Sydney may be saving some taxes depending on which state she lives in.
In my home state of Illinois military pay is exempt from state income tax, or at least it was when I was in the service. However they still expected a member of the service to pay state income tax on any income they received from non-military sources. I worked at the post bowling alley part time to supplement my income, and I had to pay Illinois state income tax on that money. I had to pay it even though I was in Germany at the time. Illinois was my home of record and the fact that I was nowhere near Illinois was irrelevant.
^ Just so. I’m actually helping build a platform right now that does payroll across the entire US, and this is just the sort of thing we have to deal with. You would not believe some of the weird rules that exist when going between various states/municipalities, let alone another country.
When the accounting folks tell you they can’t send checks any earlier because they’re “processing payroll” even though you know they’re using an “automated” system, believe them.
States like Texas have no state income tax so it never comes into play.
If sent backwards in time, then it could go to a period before the entity’s contract is in effect, rendering them unemployed and making their time their own.
Which is fine.
There is so much money to be made for someone with knowledge of the future.
I have to disagree on the payment because government bureaucracy. Do you have any idea how much paperwork they’d have to fill out to reduce Sydney’s pay by two months?
Great. Thanks for this. This is yet ANOTHER time travel headache that I will never be able to let go of. You couldn’t just treat it like the Punchline is Machismo and have someone storm off in the middle of a fight only to come back in 5 minutes after 4 years of hell apologizing and thankful that they just get to see their significant other again? They will have to consider this somewhat like being shipwrecked while on the clock. Sure someone is technically only working for “x” amount of time during a period of “y” and “x” could either be greater than or less than “y” but in the event of “x > y” they’ve worked for a lot of time in a very short period but in the event of “x < y" they haven't really worked but have still lost "y" in amount of time during their life. After a disappearance of 10 years that only lasted a few hours for the traveler people could have moved on after they were declared dead. They could have missed their children growing up, graduating, and going off to college. Honestly the most reasonable thing would be to take whichever variable is greater and pay them for that BUT with a maximum cap on the payout alongside certain hardship claims that they can be compensated for (like their daughter dying while they were in transit as happened in "Alien" to Ellen Ripley although that was a significantly different situation since there wasn't really any time travel involved). Huh, guess that wasn't as much of a headache as I thought. Probably should have been an accountant.
GDP of Monoco $6,075,000,000
Divided by 1000 years
————————————–
E1 Salary in Archon $6,075,000
I think Hazardous Duty Pay is kinda cute at that point.
You know, that’s actually not…. too far off of the numbers I have rolling around in my head. Maybe… half that, but I figure they’d get paid like athletes. NFL or MLB.
Ya from Syd remark about her advanced check asking if that was for a year i Figured hes being paid about 2 million or so a year..
Yeah. Getting paid half a million a month, six million a year is pretty good for average MLB and other athletes. But like was calculated earlier, she said Morocco, not Monaco. Something like 20x the GDP @ $110B. Giving Halo a MONTHLY salary of $9.1666… Million.
My Marty-Stu head cannon now needs to include Robin Leach.
I mean, it seems like a lot of money, sure. But considering that Sydney could make that much in a day by putting a satellite into orbit and still be the cheaper option for a telecommunications company, it’s not that much.
Ah, but you forget that Arianna is a business lawyer, not sure how trained she is for military law/contracts?
Business contracts (capitalism) they would not have to pay her. They could not lay her off, but if she did not report for duty she would be put on leave.
If it is a military contract than yes, they would have to pay her until she is proven lost or dead. Soldiers stuck behind enemy lines are still in service, and her being in a (time status) is not her fault and she should be paid, but as a business, they sadly have the right to say its up to her to check in, if she doesn’t she is taken off payroll since she has not checked in. It would be based on the contract, got to love Capitalism!
Given that Archon is explicitly a military organization, I’m gonna say they wouldn’t have hired a lawyer who doesn’t understand military law. In fact I’d guess that Arianna probably served in JAG.
Nitpick – Sydney could get a satellite to orbital altitude, but she lacks the precision (and possibly the speed, even with her new flight levels) to put a satellite in stable orbit.
Your point still stands though, there’s a ton of very valuable services she could be performing and Archon pay is unlikely to top it.
In the United States federal employee salaries are capped. In 2016 this cap was $205,700. There are a few exceptions (extremely few) when a position cannot be filled by someone with the necessary skills due to this pay cap.
Obviously in the Grrl Power universe the US Congress has had to make exceptions for Archon recruitment. It has already been established that supers are rare, and that they can net some extremely high compensation on the open market. $205K isn’t going to entice anyone when Deus can (and will) offer salaries in the tens of millions.
Well they fit the exemption for having extraordinary skills, even without Congress intervention. Math especially so as he is pure skills based, and with no peer who could be employed at a low salary. Similarly if you consider “skill with flying without an aircraft” for several of the team, including Halo. Similarly for their other super powers.
And clearly the adjusted salary has to be weighed at the level that their skills demand on the open market.
Hell ya.. heck take Opal for example.. How much would the team save on in transport cost if they had her or someone like her on team. Syd can sub in for Peggey’s chopper for short hops with a few people (Watching image of Syd Rapidly changing fly and air ball in mid air to keep air quality up in my head) Esp if opals range in transcontinental taking D from US to Africa at will. Would be work her weight in gold literally many times over..
I would tend to believe that they operate as civilian contractors. This would bypass the limitations, if not directly then by setting the individual up with a personal corporation. Effectively, Halo could be put on the books as a rented destroyer. By that scale she is actually cheap.
Arianna was probably going off of a higher pay grade rather than Sydney’s. Figure about half that for an S-E1
The “GDP of Morocco” was an off the cuff remark by Arianna. I doubt she had actually calculated it that fast nor did she know the GDP of Morocco off the top of her head. She was simply saying “more money than some countries produce in an entire year”.
Arianna has a thing about “Off the Cuff” remarks, and obviously she had been looking into this. So, I’m inclined to believe the statment is at least in the ballpark, probably in the close proximity of home plate.
It’s almost like she (or her scriptwriter) knows a crowd of pedants will be analyzing and debating her every word in online forums.
Dunno what Arianna is so worried about.
It seems like she’s been set up to be the classic corporate villain/more competent pointy-haired boss: Penny-pinching, overzealous with PR, and overly concerned with what employees can and can’t do.
If someone does indeed get lobbed a thousand years into the future, it really wouldn’t matter if they were still paid the equivalent to “the GDP of Mororoco”. Inflation would likely have completely outstripped the value, assuming they’re even still using the same currency and the payday paid wouldn’t be completely worthless/obsolete.
More importantly, you’d think an organization the size and scope of Archon could afford both a PR person *and* an accountant.
You would also think that a competent PR person like Arianna would realize the negative press that will result when the news media finds out that Sydney was docked pay for no valid reason. The media has shown considerable interest in Sydney, which was why a cover story for her absence was necessary. Does Arianna want to explain to the press what really happened?
“Yeah, we sent a raw recruit with less than a week’s worth of training on a dangerous mission. While protecting the retreat of the far more experienced members of the away team, she was stranded off planet and several weeks in the future. She only survived this experience through an incredible amount of pluck and courage on her part. We were able to send a team of extraterrestrials to retrieve her, only because we have an extraterrestrial on our own team which we totally lied to you about. We have decided that even though we completely disrupted Sydney’s life for a 2 month period, we are going to use the time travel as a loophole through which we are going to weasel out of paying Sydney the pay to which she is entitled.”
I think what would worry her the most is, “Man of Steel”
The narrative that everyone is following is that Superman participated in and perhaps even caused mass slaughter of civilians on the scale of the Rape of Nanking.
Now, obviously, he didn’t pick the fight or the location and was in no way responsible for the property damage of the death toll. He was stuck in an absolutely horrible situation where a group of equally powerful and better trained but less experienced adversaries were literally trying to kill every person on earth because they had asthma.
But all everyone remembers is that “Superman killed people accidentally.” Which actually translates to “Superman Couldn’t Save Everyone, So Let’s Blame Him.”
For a PR hack trying to keep all this under-control, that movie would lead to substance abuse.
She really should receive full pay. They would have paid her if she’d been frozen in carbonite somewhere. It doesn’t matter what her relative time feels like, it matters if she was employed full time while she was gone. She was.
Best way I can think to look at it is compare the situation to a military POW.
I figure that the minimum salary for supers in Archon is probably $1 milion/year. You don’t want your super powered people out delivering pizzas and stocking shelves when they are better suited to rescuing people and building up the country.
If you think that 1 million a year is the minimum amount to keep people from delivering pizzas and stocking shelves on the side to make a living then you either exist in a world with MUCH worse inflation than I, or your standard of living is insanely high. I’ve spent the last few years working a full-time job that pulled less than 24k, and that’s before taxes were taken out.
So can I borrow a couple hundred thousand then?
You pretty much missed the all important words “super powered.”
So time travel is one thing, but time dilation due to FTL speeds should probably be considered differently. I’m in the same boat as everyone else who is talking about how salaried pay and military pay works. Once they knew that she was okay and would be coming home, they should have been setting aside the money for her paychecks into an escrow account to be payable upon her return. Then it’s not a “budgetary crisis” kind of situation since they’d already budgeted for her regularly occurring pay.
She’s on direct deposit. All they needed to do was… Nothing. Let the automated systems take care of it and not worry about it.
Julie has a point – I’ve worked with finance management tools for multinational organizations, and the money has to come from somewhere to arrive in her account.
For 2 months yeah, just letting stuff flow as usual is fine, but when you start talking on the scale of centuries, you’re going to have a lot of payable accounts accruing. You could just pay their trust/estate as usual and it’s no longer your problem, but at some point (probably very early on) there will be a business person looking for additional budget and going “you know, if we just push these line items down the road a few generations…”
Special relativity does not allow FTL at all. FTL would require some form of esoteric drive that bypasses normal space. There would be no time dilation in that case. Time dilation occurs only in normal space at speeds less than the speed of light.
The real question is what happens in a Groundhog’s Day scenario, where the same day loops hundreds of times before they figure out how to break it. Technically EVERYONE could be working on the problem for most of those loops, so it would be unfair to only pay the ones with memory continuity, but the ones with memory continuity would most certainly have considerable stress buildup from the problem that would deserve some kind of remuneration.
They’re salaried.
They lose.
They get nothing.
Good day sir!
Honestly, she gets two days pay, plus a couple million dollar bonus for each destroyed supermonster. Or did y’all forget the time she spent working on that?
So, like, does Harem get five paychecks or one? Or is it pro-rated according to how many instances she has? This gets confusing very quickly.
She is and can be one person. She just chooses to be five for most of the time.
Mentally. But she still needs to buy five sets of clothes, five times as many meals, five times the sanitary products, pay five seats on a bus or taxi*, pay rent on a property with five beds, and so on.
And job wise she can do the work of five people, with half a century’s worth of training and experience, all acting in perfect concert with instantaneous communication. So being far more effective than just five extra employees. As shown when she was acting as the communications between five teams when they were hunting Sciona initially.
* Unless she reduces her number of bodies. But as she considers that akin to becoming physically and mentally impaired, demanding that she do so is akin to torture, so should not be mandatory to save transportation fees.
She does need to get some type of special consideration for multiple bodies.
Only one of her is on call 24/7 though.
Unlike the rest of the team, she can lead several normal lives away from Archon most of the time.
She could call the whole time as OT, as she was on duty. 24 hour shifts don’t mean no naps. Also, if she’s salary and a form of military, she’s only missing four checks in that amount of time.
However, she’s a super and they’re paid lots of money, so my guess is she’d still make due with two checks, as she’s likely not used to the high pay yet.
Plus, it sounds like they covered her other expenses while she was away.
I know that this is a long shot request but as Sydney experiences character growth and becomes more of the Hero, can she lose the glasses more to reflect this? We have the tech to fix her eyes right now, not to mention any better health tech that surrounds her.
I think this would be counter to the premise and current feel of the comic. Sydney morphing into Yet Another Cookie-Cutter Super without her outward flaws would drain a lot of the appeal for me, and ditching the nerd glasses is one way to start her down that slippery slope.
I agree.
However (since it’s paramilitary superheroes) I would like to see some sort of armored suit uniform for Arc-Swat missions in hazardous environments.
Because Sydney wearing a visor.
You know she would be playing Cyclops.
Yeah, I’m with the ‘MIA’ group. As far as Archon is concerned, she went on an authorized mission, was cut off from contact, faced an enemy force singlehandedly (well, two-handedly), and managed to use her own resources to survive until rescued by friendly assets. No different than if a fighter pilot was on a mission, crashed, and had to escape – they’d get paid for that time too.
on another topic, still want to see dabbler making fun by way of “you did what with who?”
Military personnel DO pay taxes unless a specific act of law says otherwise. Currently there are laws that exempt military personnel stationed in areas officially designated as combat zone from the obligation to pay taxes but outside of the zone would be expected to do so. A personal observation; The IRS still expects you to file the paperwork even if there is technically no income because you were in a tax exclusion zone.
The comments about MIA / POW status are on the nose here. If ARCHON is operating under Department of Defense, then Sydney gets paid for the days she was on active duty, i.e. 53, regardless of what her subjective passage of time was. Anything else would require someone representing ARCHON (General Fawkes) to talk with a congressional committee.
Love the story and the art btw. Been a fan almost since the beginning. :)
Just my two cents. But if I was an ARC paymaster, I would put it in employee contacts that that would pay any ongoing bills (rent, gym membership, etc) but they would not get any more pay while nonexistent. And if a future traveler appears, they get a one time payment too take care of setting up a life in the present. And then just paid normally.
Practical, and enomical.
They’re under the DoD, so DoD regulations apply. She’s owed pay for time spent POW/MIA.
She’s owed 57 days of pay, of which two are combat pay.
Bingo. DoD pays you whether you’re imprisoned, or in a coma. If your employment with a non-government employer might realistically result in the same, I’m sure they would treat it identically—it’s an on the job hazard that they have to cover. Time travel or time dialation situations are functionally no different than being in a coma due to a work-related incident, with the possible exception that your cells didn’t age.
Not practical.
I assume that you are young enough that neither you nor any of your friends have children.
Once family life enters the picture financial obligations become less a variable and more of a constant. Kids have to be provided for, tuitions paid, medical care, clothes all that stuff.
If Arc were to not cover weird time hijinks which happen to supers then other employers would lure their super agents away.
+1 for mentioning family issues. Don’t know how it would be handled, but if timey-wimey hijinks were a significant possibility, there would have to be some serious consideration and counseling for the psychological effects of missing out on your children growing up. Coming back to play with your great-grandkids when they join the service is not the way most people want to handle their personal relationships.
An earlier post said that POWs, and presumably MIAs, get 80% of their pay sent to the family and 20% reserved for the soldier them self.
A major plot subpoint in the novel “The Forever War” is military pay accumulating (with interest) in real time while soldiers experience time dilation over the course of a thousand-year interstellar war. Accumulated earnings are enough to buy a star system. Oh, the joys of compound interest.
Fiction.
Across thousands of years of human history, no nation on earth has ever gone a thousand years without a currency collapse.
British Pounds Sterling, 1200 years. Governments have come and gone, the value has fluctuated and its physical form has changed numerous times, as well as how it is backed. And it came damned close to collapse a few years back. But it is still here one thousand two hundred years after introduction.
splitting the difference and calling it hazard pay is probably the right way to go
Ooh, payroll conundra!
First, she did not actually time travel here (I’m assuming), just time dialated, so the question would be completely different if she had actually skipped any time rather than just percieving it differently.
If she is salaried and exempt (that is, doesn’t get overtime and also doesn’t get paid less if she works less), and considered “on the clock” while stranded offworld—which seems completely reasonable given the line of work—she should be paid in full for the entire period. She was awake and working—albeit moving extremely slowly from the Earth frame of reference—during most of those days, and in fact in many of the days she worked (again, from the earth frame of reference) for 24 hours straight.
But of course you don’t even have to look at it that way. If you treat it as an unplanned business trip, it doesn’t really matter how she percieved time or how much of the actual time she worked—she was away from home for that period and was not allowed to return, so she was on the clock. Period. Hence, two months of pay.
Which is not at all unfair; you may not have to feed or entertain yourself during periods of unpercieved time, but your obligations on earth—rent, utilities, insurance—are still due, so you should still get those covered. Especially since the time-trip was out of your control. If anything, skipping time perceived on earth—having to miss favorite TV shows, important events, birthdays, FOMO hazard, etc—should be plenty to require extra compensation for unperceived time. Maybe even bonus pay, because that could theoretically be pretty traumatic.
Think of it like worker’s comp for superheros. If I have a work-related incident that renders me unable to work for 57 days, I still get paid in full for those 57 days. It doesn’t matter whether I’m unconscious the entire time or playing video games, I haven’t done any work, it’s *because* of my work, and so they still have to pay me for that time. In this case the incident was generated by time travel or time dilation, but it was still unplanned, caused by my job, and I had no say in it, so I should get paid.
Now, if I time traveled on my *own*, off the clock, that’s different. Now it’s just an unpaid absence and at best should be considered on leave without pay. It’s possible that, if I didn’t time travel by choice, it should be counted as sick leave if my employer were being kind (as noted, I still have to pay rent, mortgage, car payments, insurance, even if I’m not in existence at that moment, just like I’d have to if I were in a coma).
So yeah, I’d argue strenuously she should get paid full time for any time-slip incidents incurred while on the job.
Traveling backwards in time, though, that just gets weird.
It was actual time travel.
A magic gate tore the universe asunder.
Read this article. Time dilation PREVENTS FTL thus not allowing travel backwards through time. Any thing that equates to FTL is bypassing normal space and avoids time dilation completely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
It’s pretty easy from a bookkeeping point of view. 3 days active duty in combat zone (1 day Alari planet / Fracture station, 2 days on Cora’s ship, which isn’t technically a combat zone, but is travel from combat zone), and 50 days reserve status. Bonus points if they write “Temporary Duty” and scratch out the “ry” and replace it with an “l”.
I have two birthdays. My actual birthday and my official birthday. The latter being held whenever is convenient for meeting up with family. Anything plus or minus eleven months from the former, depending on how hard that is to do any year.
I’ve long held the opinion that time travel ruins everything, and I still do. But now I also know that bureaucracy ruins time travel.
So, like everyone else here, I have a bone to pick with the salary bit. I’m a salaried employee in the US, working for a major regional bank. I’ve also been disabled since Dec 3 with a broken spine. I’m still getting paid, but only at 70% because a) I was placed on administrative/disability leave after 90 days, and b) I paid for extra insurance to boost it from 60% to 70%. Even still, I was still counted as working 40 hours a week for the first 90 days. If a bank can do it for me, surely the DoD can do it for Sydney. I didn’t even get lasers shot at me, I’ve just mostly been rehabbing and playing video games.
Did anyone miss that Archon has been staffing the comic book store?
Sydney’s shifts have been covered though Arc Swat personnel hasn’t specifically been mentioned.
Most likely one of Harms spares I would imagine she gets a lot of the grunt work
Absolutely LOVE this comic, good laughs through ‘n through.
That said; Totally burst out laughing whilst reading the dialogue in the last panel !!