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And like Jacen, I'm not sure how to apply the settlement spending limits. When do you pay the costs of a building or organization? Can you break them down into individual Rooms and Teams? If so, is there any way to calculate how long it takes to complete the example buildings without using a project management spreadsheet to track the overlapping construction times and costs of various Rooms?

I think the spending limits are mostly for tasks that take far more resources than time, like teams that cost 0 days to recruit or crafting magic items. If you can work on multiple projects at once, you can ignore the limitations of building individual rooms/hiring individual teams. Sum up the total capital the project would consume and divide it by the spending cap; compare the result to the number of days it requires and take the higher number.

And to expand upon Jacen's point about running businesses: it seems that you should always make separate checks for every business you own instead of adding them together to make a single check. Individually, you earn 1 gp per business (from taking 10 for each of them) plus sp equal to the total bonus from all businesses. Making a single check for all businesses, you make 1 gp (total) plus sp equal to the total bonus from all businesses. The single check causes you to lose 1 gp per business after the first.

Or does making separate checks for each business you own require you to hire a separate manager for each independent business, as opposed to hiring a single manager for all of the businesses combined? (Come to think of it, that would actually make the most sense: if you add all of the bonuses from your businesses to your own check, you don't need a manager; for each check you make independent of your own, you need one manager.)

Buildings, rooms and teams are mentioned to be self sufficient, so the money they get is the net income generated by the staff that come with the property. As such, it's numerically more efficient to own a myriad of small businesses and take 10 on each of them. It's more complicated and generally strange. You can rationalize it in a number of ways, but it's probably an oversight rather than an intended feature of the system.

As for managers, they're as overpayed in the mechanics as they are in the real world. The cheapest manager is 2pg/DAY while being away from your business only costs you 7gp/week (rounding down no less).

The other benefit is that they slow down the rate of capital attrition, but unless you're planing to make large payments on projects, it's far more efficient to generate capital as you need it. This is especially true with 2 component businesses, by which you could move one of the bonuses to generating capital and take 10 on both rolls. (Ex: fruit stand with urchins (kitchen + cutpurses) can generate 17 silver on an average day or 14 silver and 1 Goods/Labour)

tl;dr - managers are pointless and expensive (mechanically), many small businesses are better than 1 big one, errata and clarifications are needed

Fredrik wrote:

I think that the phrase "begins to suffocate" is not precisely defined, since "slow suffocation" is completely different, and yet you cannot finish suffocating without beginning to. With vague terms, I look to the fluff, and undine's curse basically forces a creature to hold its breath. It doesn't suck the air out of its lungs or anything.

So, I'd say that you have two minutes to notice that your 10 Con buddy stopped breathing after lying down to take a midday nap. Then he'd start making increasingly-difficult Con checks every round that he was still asleep, and he'd die three rounds after failing one.

Thank you very much, of course you're right. When I posted I was thinking that holding breath is a voluntary action, but anyway 3 rounds are too few to suffocate.

Suffocation

A character who has no air to breathe can hold her breath for 2 rounds per point of Constitution. If a character takes a standard or full-round action, the remaining duration that the character can hold her breath is reduced by 1 round. After this period of time, the character must make a DC 10 Constitution check in order to continue holding her breath. The check must be repeated each round, with the DC increasing by +1 for each previous success.

When the character fails one of these Constitution checks, she begins to suffocate. In the first round, she falls unconscious (0 hit points). In the following round, she drops to –1 hit points and is dying. In the third round, she suffocates.

Not sure if I should post quotes from the spell, as it is not yet on the SRD, but here's the gist: the spell imposes conditions on the creature and when those conditions are met it begins to suffocate.

As such it's pretty clear cut:
-under the rules for holding your breath, you begin to suffocate when you fail a Con check after the initial Con*2 rounds.
-under the effect of the spell, you begin to suffocate when you can't take physical actions.

If either of these conditions are met, the target begins to suffocate and falls unconscious at 0hp and will die 2 turns later of left alone.

Balance-wise this is powerful (especially in the hands of a Witch with a Slumber hex), but by no means broken. You could always do terrible things to sleeping targets in combat and taking 3 rounds to kill someone is rather long. The spell shines when stealth is key, but even then you can only cast it so many times a day. If you want to kill a sleeping target, have the damage dealer coup de grace it.