I can understand being terrified to look up non-msm sources on Venezuela. but you can't just believe CNN Breitbart or vice or other mainstream outlets
“Venezuela no longer has the money to fund its lavish social programs because their oil isn’t worth what it used to be and they have nothing anywhere else” isn’t a terribly controversial take though.
>cricket-sized chickens -- why not chicken-sized crickets?
Also a good option, but this may require a specialized atmospheric chamber. Once that’s taken care of, mega-crickets can be rebranded as a luxury food for rich people - the Lobster of the Land.
How about gentrification? I've seen the pro-property destruction people discussing that, and it's not illegal so appealing to the legal system wouldn't work. And often worker abuse laws are not enforced well, and bringing the lawsuits harms the workers.
1) I do not think ‘your livelihood is destroyed and you are possibly injured or killed in a mass riot’ is an appropriate penalty for ‘some asshole decided you were participating in gentrification’
2) Random mass violence sure is a way to keep property values down, I guess, but if your goal is ‘low property values, period’ rather than ‘livable communities with affordable housing’ then we just profoundly disagree on priorities.
3) …and rioting and destroying businesses never harms the workers, I’m sure. Look, raise money so exploited workers can quit. Ask them what they want and do that - I guarantee you it’s not going to be ‘smash the business and attract tons of police attention’. Don’t decide for yourself who is guilty, decide for yourself that legal mechanisms won’t work, decide for yourself that peaceful mechanisms won’t work, destroy tons of stuff, and then call that ‘fighting for marginalized people’.
4) If your radical leftist politics amount to ‘Kristallnacht, but trust us, they deserve it’ then I’m sorry but fuck you.
How about gentrification? I've seen the pro-property destruction people discussing that, and it's not illegal so appealing to the legal system wouldn't work. And often worker abuse laws are not enforced well, and bringing the lawsuits harms the workers.
1) I do not think ‘your livelihood is destroyed and you are possibly injured or killed in a mass riot’ is an appropriate penalty for ‘some asshole decided you were participating in gentrification’
2) Random mass violence sure is a way to keep property values down, I guess, but if your goal is ‘low property values, period’ rather than ‘livable communities with affordable housing’ then we just profoundly disagree on priorities.
3) …and rioting and destroying businesses never harms the workers, I’m sure. Look, raise money so exploited workers can quit. Ask them what they want and do that - I guarantee you it’s not going to be ‘smash the business and attract tons of police attention’. Don’t decide for yourself who is guilty, decide for yourself that legal mechanisms won’t work, decide for yourself that peaceful mechanisms won’t work, destroy tons of stuff, and then call that ‘fighting for marginalized people’.
4) If your radical leftist politics amount to ‘Kristallnacht, but trust us, they deserve it’ then I’m sorry but fuck you.
ive never actually seen one with my name on it but i think im probably on one of those “BAD PEOPLE:BLOCK IMMEDIETELY” lists somewhere and thats why people ive never interacted with have me blocked
ngl like 80% of people you hang out with either are already literal nazis or defend nazism at every single opportunity
> tags
Here’s a post from recent memory, but I’m not sure how much of it is memeing.
Okay, the ESF part of your blog description bugs me not just because of the ideological signifier, but also because I'm both a Gundam fan and a pedant. The Federation in UC was just the "Earth Federation." The ESF is from Gundam Wing, however, and it was formed after the brutal war between thbe Earth-based Romefeller Foundation and the Barton Foundation-backed colony forces. This probably changes the context of its usage in your blog desc.
Actually, I used it in my blog description without originally intending it to refer to Gundam, as it quickly denotes “a federation controlling the entire Earth sphere”.
But now that I’ve engaged in Gundamposting, I should change it!
Also I think they called it the ESF in Gundam 00 too.
a libertarian who likes fascism or nationalism was never a libertarian to begin with. they were conservatives using the label much like the libertarian party is just about weed and cia shill coporation
This is ideology, not religion. People’s minds are capable of evolution.
how is fascism evolution? are you high on meth?
9 out of 10 ideologies are better than libertarianism, the other is communism.
Future purged brown shirt found.
We’ll be doing the purging actually.
You don’t get it. You all be purged by your own fascist leaders or left for dead in the next Stalingrad. You are a moron. Every fascist state lead to self implosion and lost every war. You are a dumb ass.
So nationalism of any kind, including liking living in Texas rather than California is bad?
Name one instance where nationalism has not led to war or state violence.
This is a bad point because even without nationalism there is still war and violence
blaming nationalism for violence is like blaming religion for violence
Wrong. Nationalism emphasizes conflict, the other, and war. It can only survive on external and internal threats
Name one instance of immune system function that has not lead to microscopic violence.
To put it simply, in this world, an ideology can only be physically instantiated if a sufficiently large, well-armed, well-organized, and well-resourced group are willing to literally fight to the death to ensure it is so. They may not actually have to fight to the death, but the credibility of the threat must be there.
Libertarianism will not be instantiated if the culture does not support it. It doesn’t matter how “objectively moral” it is. If people with the means to enforce their views do not want it, it will not happen.
I don’t particularly care for Libertarianism except as a counter-weight, but it’s easy to see that some Libertarians have noticed that the cultural demographics matter when it comes to whether or not there will be Libertarianism.
but in this year of our lord 2k17 I’m actually genuinely uncertain as to whether describing Japan’s schoolgirl obsession as “kinda messed up” counts as woke or reactionary.
Publicly, woke so they won’t decide to Normalize Schoolgirlhoodphilia or something just to spite reactionaries. Privately? Reactionary.
It isn’t just government subsidies that are in effect when a company doesn’t pay enough to keep workers alive.
The company can also be indirectly subsidized by draining the social and other capital of families, relatives, kind strangers, and whoever keeps those employees alive.
This is “efficient,” not actually efficient.
The alternative is to openly embrace social darwinism, which also deprives society and the economy in general all future value of the worker based on what their feasible value is right now, which may cause a rather significant net loss.
( @collapsedsquid may know if someone has explicitly studied this )
Making it impossible to fire people isn’t a good idea, but letting companies free ride on society’s / the country’s generosity isn’t such a great idea, either.
Now, you may say that direct wage subsidies have to come out of taxes, but those taxes likely aren’t going to come from the scarce poor-families-capital currently subsidizing Walmart, and it significantly reduces the competitive advantage of such behavior. Additionally, with more jobs profitable for more workers, there is more competition between employers to quit being jerks to the working class, which is currently distorted by the massive power imbalance between the working class as individuals and corporations with their collective bargaining power. It’s also less expensive than welfare since it stacks public funding with private funding, instead of running a straight loss, and if structured correctly, it still strongly incentivizes these workers to pursue higher-paying, more economically valuable work.
If walmart vanished, those workers would still be getting public assistance. They are purely making the situation better. If there was anyone around who would be paying those workers better, or enough to NOT need public assistance, they would be working there instead. This is a common progressive instinct: Making the perfect the enemy of the good. It’s far far better that walmart exists and pays the wages it does than if it didn’t. And the most important beneficiaries of Walmart’s low wages aren’t even Walmart’s profits: It’s everyone, primarily poor people, who shops there.
By subsidizing Walmart’s cheap goods and convenience (having a huge selection and being open 24 hours), the USG is actually helping out the poor people a lot!
If you put a bomb in someone’s skull, you have a lot of leverage and can get them to do just about anything, up to the point that they are willing to die to refuse your demands.
And if they’ll merely be homeless? Well that’s not quite as much leverage, but it’s still a lot of leverage. Walmart can walk away with only a few less hours served, but the workers may not necessarily be able to. This imbalance in the amount of skin in the game may mean that Walmart wages are artificially low, even without Medicare preventing their employees from dying of medical conditions.
In this case, I feel it would be better for the workers and their working conditions if we made the subsidies more explicit, so Walmart and everyone else could stop pretending they aren’t being effectively subsidized. And while the effective hourly wages might not rise as much due to not generating that much value, the influx of competing job options into the marketplace would likely result in competition over working conditions, which are one of the things that makes life for the working class so unbearable.
The form of direct action against abusive employers that I personally find the most tempting (this doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or anything, just that I daydream about it):
Employees often don’t file legal complaints about wage fraud and illegal conditions because they can’t afford to lose the job because they’re living paycheck to paycheck. I expect that many people in this situation would quit their horrible job and file a legal complaint if they would be given like $1200 to tide them and their family over while they found a new job.
So here’s what I’d be tempted to do: ask people online to tell you about a business that’s engaging in wage and hours violations/otherwise really shitty but still its employees’ best option. Find one with like 10-15 employees. Fundraise money within your activist group and online to get enough money for every single employee to walk away.
Then the employees go to their boss and say ‘the next time you take half our tips even though you’re not legally allowed to take any/make us come in when we’re really sick/deduct damaged merchandise from our paychecks/etc, we all walk away. We have filed a wage claim in court. If you retaliate for that, we all walk away.’
And then, you know, next time the employer breaks the law, any employee who wants to follow through on the threat gets $1200 to support them once they’ve quit. And then you publicize the heck out of it, and scare other shitty employers, and hopefully the wage claim is successful and your employees get recompensed the money they were owed. And you open online applications for the next place.
You’d have to be very careful to go after places with real, documented, verified workplace conditions violations, because most of the benefit is in the publicity and the scaring other employers into shaping up. And you can’t scare people into shaping up if they don’t know exactly what they need to do (meet their legal obligations). You could only go after small places, because you need most of the employees on the same page and because fundraising larger sums of money would be harder.
But with the right fundraising and PR team, I bet you could create conditions under which employers are way more scared to cheat their employees.
Because employees lack negotiating leverage, the government should have a network of secret labor law informants, such that no business can be entirely sure they won’t get smacked down hard for flagrant violations. Simultaneously, the labor laws could be simplified.
How about gentrification? I've seen the pro-property destruction people discussing that, and it's not illegal so appealing to the legal system wouldn't work. And often worker abuse laws are not enforced well, and bringing the lawsuits harms the workers.
1) I do not think ‘your livelihood is destroyed and you are possibly injured or killed in a mass riot’ is an appropriate penalty for ‘some asshole decided you were participating in gentrification’
2) Random mass violence sure is a way to keep property values down, I guess, but if your goal is ‘low property values, period’ rather than ‘livable communities with affordable housing’ then we just profoundly disagree on priorities.
3) …and rioting and destroying businesses never harms the workers, I’m sure. Look, raise money so exploited workers can quit. Ask them what they want and do that - I guarantee you it’s not going to be ‘smash the business and attract tons of police attention’. Don’t decide for yourself who is guilty, decide for yourself that legal mechanisms won’t work, decide for yourself that peaceful mechanisms won’t work, destroy tons of stuff, and then call that ‘fighting for marginalized people’.
4) If your radical leftist politics amount to ‘Kristallnacht, but trust us, they deserve it’ then I’m sorry but fuck you.
It isn’t just government subsidies that are in effect when a company doesn’t pay enough to keep workers alive.
The company can also be indirectly subsidized by draining the social and other capital of families, relatives, kind strangers, and whoever keeps those employees alive.
This is “efficient,” not actually efficient.
The alternative is to openly embrace social darwinism, which also deprives society and the economy in general all future value of the worker based on what their feasible value is right now, which may cause a rather significant net loss.
( @collapsedsquid may know if someone has explicitly studied this )
Making it impossible to fire people isn’t a good idea, but letting companies free ride on society’s / the country’s generosity isn’t such a great idea, either.
Now, you may say that direct wage subsidies have to come out of taxes, but those taxes likely aren’t going to come from the scarce poor-families-capital currently subsidizing Walmart, and it significantly reduces the competitive advantage of such behavior. Additionally, with more jobs profitable for more workers, there is more competition between employers to quit being jerks to the working class, which is currently distorted by the massive power imbalance between the working class as individuals and corporations with their collective bargaining power. It’s also less expensive than welfare since it stacks public funding with private funding, instead of running a straight loss, and if structured correctly, it still strongly incentivizes these workers to pursue higher-paying, more economically valuable work.
Anaisnein, I went to reblog your comment but Tumblr wanted to say Mutant Aesthetic was saying it. Weird. Anyhow, I used “Communist” and “not uncommon” because Social Democracy, intelligently managed, does not have the same rate of imploding. You can get away with it if you’re smart about it. (But also I was annoyed at the anon, who is in denial.)
The EURO-conversion was used by retailers to raise prices. Aldi, however, reacted with the biggest price reduction of its
corporate history. As a result, it was able to double its profits.
Paragraph edited for clarity - the original is on page 17.
Imagine that - taking market share by improving service and prices.
EDIT: Mind you, some of Walmart’s failure is absolutely because the government has put bars on the free maket that made it illegal for them to succeed:
With organic growth close to being a mission impossible for hypermarket operators
due to stringent* planning and zoning regulations
Soon faced with
rapidly mounting losses, Wal-Mart’s management resorted to staff cuts and closures to
reduce its above-average personnel costs. Due to strict worker protection regulations,
however, making surplus workers redundant can be a complicated, lengthy and costly
affair in Germany – a cumbersome fact of life for its German competitors, but, obviously,
terra incognita for Wal-Mart Germany’s (mostly) American executives
* Stringent is explained elsewhere in the text and it is, indeed, stringent.
Beautiful article. My favorite parts:
- The leading retail strategy in Germany is “hard discounting” which offers a very narrow selection of high quality products at “rock bottom” prices. Aldi rules at this and hard discount retailers control a third of the market. In the UK etc this accounts for less than a tenth of the market. This is the polar opposite of Walmart’s “sell literally everything” strategy. - Germany has zoning laws that favor smaller buildings. This works in favor of hard discounters because they offer a narrow selection and minimalist shopping environment. Compare to Walmart’s “browse an entire warehouse and grocery store then eat at one of several restaurants” model. - Germany has antitrust/fair trade laws that forbid merchants from permanently selling goods below cost. This is Walmart’s favorite strategy famously observed in the gallon-jar pickle campaign. - Germany only allows retailers to be open for 80 hours per week, compared to 196 in the UK, 96 in the Netherlands, and 144 in France. - Walmart refused to recognize the outcome of the collective wage negotiation process with their German unionized employees and were “completely surprised” when said unions promptly organized walkouts in 30 stores. They were probably surprised because of their millions of US employees, only 12 are known to be unionized. This gave Walmart a “union basher” rep in Germany where unions are influential and popular. - Walmart tried to pull their “hire a ton of employees and give them shitty part time hours so we don’t have to give them full-time benefits” but worker protection laws prevented this and Walmart was forced to compete on product margins and services rather than recouping losses by shafting their employees. Aldi was able to match their prices cent for cent, but offered better service and more value. - Walmart repeatedly defied German antitrust laws like “You must provide your balance sheet and annual profit/loss statement” and “You must provide a bottle/plastic refund system for products you sell.” None of the other leading German retailers had a problem sustaining growth and profit while complying with these laws. - Germany put some dude from Arkansas in charge of the acquisition. He didn’t speak German. Anyone who’s spent time with Germans can imagine how well this probably went over.
So basically Walmart rolled up to Germany and tried to play its usual game of “buy out entire supply chains, sell products below cost until competitors are dry, then use their market reach to demand bulk orders from suppliers at near-zero margins, all the while keeping stores open 24/7 to maintain a huge pool of redundant part time workers at minimum wage with no benefits to reduce operating costs and further subsidize more supply chain buyouts” and the heavily unionized, aggressively antitrust, worker protection, high value low price German market laughed in their dumb weasel faces and sent them packing.
Meanwhile, Aldi, who has been commanding the German market while complying with all these regulations, has been expanding seamlessly into the US and has owned Trader Joe’s since 1979, which sells twice as much per square foot as Whole Foods.
This article is a beautiful demonstration that the only reason shitty companies like Walmart keep biting us in the ass in the US is because our leaders refuse to put them on a leash.
Well, I agree with the general point that Walmart couldn’t succeed in Germany because Germany basically had regulations making Walmart illegal.
But I disagree with your normative evaluation of that outcome.
Germany: Makes convenience and low prices illegal
You: HAHA WALMART BTFO I LOVE TO PAY MORE MONEY FOR SHIT
Walmart is de facto subsidized by the US government as many of its employees are on various kinds of welfare.
So how about instead of all this bullshit we issue direct-to-employee wage subsidies to simultaneously improve conditions for the working poor and increase competition. It isn’t fair if only unethical companies that loot the commons and free-ride on the social consequences of their actions get this advantage.
How about gentrification? I've seen the pro-property destruction people discussing that, and it's not illegal so appealing to the legal system wouldn't work. And often worker abuse laws are not enforced well, and bringing the lawsuits harms the workers.
1) I do not think ‘your livelihood is destroyed and you are possibly injured or killed in a mass riot’ is an appropriate penalty for ‘some asshole decided you were participating in gentrification’
2) Random mass violence sure is a way to keep property values down, I guess, but if your goal is ‘low property values, period’ rather than ‘livable communities with affordable housing’ then we just profoundly disagree on priorities.
3) …and rioting and destroying businesses never harms the workers, I’m sure. Look, raise money so exploited workers can quit. Ask them what they want and do that - I guarantee you it’s not going to be ‘smash the business and attract tons of police attention’. Don’t decide for yourself who is guilty, decide for yourself that legal mechanisms won’t work, decide for yourself that peaceful mechanisms won’t work, destroy tons of stuff, and then call that ‘fighting for marginalized people’.
4) If your radical leftist politics amount to ‘Kristallnacht, but trust us, they deserve it’ then I’m sorry but fuck you.
there’s a reverse slippery slope effect where a range of related things all get described as ‘eugenics’:
1. attempting to commit genocide
2. using force or coercion to control the reproduction of others
3. offering incentives or encouragement to influence the reproduction of others
4. making observations that could imply that people should reproduce at different rates
5. simply observing that people currently reproduce at different rates
I think the only way to be completely safe from accusations of eugenics in the first few senses is to avoid any observations of reproduction rates and definitely avoid making any suggestions of how they might be changed, no matter how indirectly or consensually.
One thing that’s interesting to me is how, with the lapsing of most government efforts to forcibly enact eugenic policies, the eugenic aspects of personal family planning become more relevant. People would generally react pretty poorly if the government mandated that all fetuses with serious developmental problems be aborted or genetically modified, but given the ability to notice this and do something about it themselves, people will still do it often enough to have a visible effect over time.
Getting away from the “eu” pretext entirely, sex-selective abortion is already a thing with visible downstream effects. These are things we can grapple with by attempting to reduce stigma, but there will always be some sorts of people heavily stigmatized, and the ability to detect that a real or hypothetical child belongs to those groups before birth or even before conception is going to continue to increase. So at some point people are going to be stuck having to decide which they like better, personal bodily autonomy or forbidding eugenics, and it’ll be a messy situation all around.
I mean, if you offer me the choice between a baby that’s directly related to me and a genetically-engineered gauranteed above-average-or-better designer baby that’s directly related to me, I’m gonna take the second one, because there is no reason for me to have a crippled baby if the baby does not yet exist.
There is no advantage whatsoever to a severe peanut allergy, for instance (though I don’t have one).
Most of the SJ stuff is based on the people already existing, and it isn’t their fault peanut allergies are a thing, but a hypothetical person that doesn’t exist yet doesn’t have the same moral weight as a person that already does.
I can understand being terrified to look up non-msm sources on Venezuela. but you can't just believe CNN Breitbart or vice or other mainstream outlets
“Venezuela no longer has the money to fund its lavish social programs because their oil isn’t worth what it used to be and they have nothing anywhere else” isn’t a terribly controversial take though.
there’s a reverse slippery slope effect where a range of related things all get described as ‘eugenics’:
1. attempting to commit genocide
2. using force or coercion to control the reproduction of others
3. offering incentives or encouragement to influence the reproduction of others
4. making observations that could imply that people should reproduce at different rates
5. simply observing that people currently reproduce at different rates
I think the only way to be completely safe from accusations of eugenics in the first few senses is to avoid any observations of reproduction rates and definitely avoid making any suggestions of how they might be changed, no matter how indirectly or consensually.
Obviously you’re only makimg this post because you secretly want to practice eugenics.
Do not worry, comrade. I, too, believe that the state should subsidize the eventual heritable genetic treatment to remove peanut allergies.
The existence of tall buildings is racist against short people. Also, with a unique culture and phenotypical presentation, short people are a race.
The Mongols should be charged - with interest - for the costly effects of the raids of their ancestors, just as some people consider doing for other countries and ethnic groups.
Eucalyptus is an invasive species within the range of the United States. The President should task the military with eradicating it from the country.
Instead of making protein bars out of crickets, we should breed cricket-sized chickens.
The Institute for Ethical Supervillainy is not a valid cause for Effective Altruism.
Trolley Problem Waifus for Those with No Laifus: Real Facebook page, produced by a neural network, or something I made up just now? Our fifteen-member expert panel debates.
The existence of tall people is racist against short people.
The Mongols countersue for retroactive carbon credits for the forest boom that occurred after they depopulated a swath of central Asia.
People are an invasive species within the United States.
We should take regular protein bars and give them feathers and sentience.
Since supervillains are proactive and superheroes reactive, supervillainy is ultimately humanity’s only chance of surviving the long-term threats it faces.
In the future all panels of talking head pundits will be structured like anime harem comedies.
Since supervillains are proactive and superheroes reactive, supervillainy is ultimately humanity’s only chance of surviving the long-term threats it faces.
The existence of tall buildings is racist against short people. Also, with a unique culture and phenotypical presentation, short people are a race.
The Mongols should be charged - with interest - for the costly effects of the raids of their ancestors, just as some people consider doing for other countries and ethnic groups.
Eucalyptus is an invasive species within the range of the United States. The President should task the military with eradicating it from the country.
Instead of making protein bars out of crickets, we should breed cricket-sized chickens.
The Institute for Ethical Supervillainy is not a valid cause for Effective Altruism.
Trolley Problem Waifus for Those with No Laifus: Real Facebook page, produced by a neural network, or something I made up just now? Our fifteen-member expert panel debates.
“Perhaps the most widely practiced code of ethical behaviour is human rights. However, statements of human rights are often vague, and give little guidance on the question of when it’s permissible to violate someone’s rights, or how to deal with conflicts between them.”—
80000 Hours explains in two sentences why humans are fucked (via wirehead-wannabe)
At this point, I like to imagine you have a big collection labeled “issues” like some people collect butterflies, all conveniently sorted so you can show them to guests.
“And this book is my issues with overly-aggressive criminal justice systems.”
“What about this one? It looks pretty.”
“My issues with collecting issues. It’s a bit too meta so I don’t like to talk about it.”
And what Hayek was saying was that it was very murky indeed even back in 1977 how exactly social justice was defined
Hayek presumably is fighting a rearguard action against any attempt to include redistribution under the label of “justice”.
Of course, there’s always a risk if you include redistribution in justice and then get carried away with it or apply it selectively, so I’m mostly opposed to
collective
intergenerational justice in anything more than weak forms.
the general right-wing sentiment that children aren’t being abused at optimal rates and the cure for being transgender is as much abuse as possible is pretty much reified in Kenneth Zucker’s trans youth conversion therapy program
Now see, someone assumed I identified as right-wing, but if I identified as right-wing, people would either expect me to defend Libertarianism or “youth conversion therapy” and I’m not interested in defending either.
drawing skulls underneath things because this is a simple enough shape that you can manipulate it in your working memory buffer because you’re used to drawing fictional mechanical objects, not faces
> sending me this instead of shitposting about how you’re going to attack me with a Federation mobile suit for supporting the extremely problematic Zeon colony drop like ten posts ago
At this rate, you’ll never be able to stop me from seizing control of Earth and paving over everything you have ever known with trees self-replicating solar-powered CO2 scrubbers, Anon-kun, much less your belovedWestern Australia.
All I need is a few hundred million in venture capital and a marine biologist.
We can make a new biosphere in the empty wastes of the South Pacific Ocean.
First you need some kind of substrate, like concrete barges or a floating grid of bamboo, something cheap and simple and easy to mass produce.
(It would need to be anchored to something, unless it’s practical to use sails or some other active mechanism to maintain position. Probably not?)
Major priority is to get plants growing. Mangrove swamps, coral reefs, forests of kelp, plankton blooms, you gotta get something growing there to kickstart life.
Once you’ve got plants growing, little things are going to show up to eat them, then bigger things are going to show up to eat the little things, and soon you’ve got the whole circle of life shenanigans on your hands.
That’s the bootstrapping phase, now the floating island of biological plenty needs to be made self-sustaining and self-repairing and self-reproducing, so that it can be expanded to thousands of square kilometres in size.
Anyway, that’s phase 1. Who’s in?
a year has passed and I haven’t tiled the south pacific with micro biomes yet
time wasted on Tumblr
How do you keep it from
1. Sinking normally from the floater materials being worn down
As far as advice from right-wing reactionaries goes, “if you’re feeling sad, go work out” is pretty good. Certainly beats “we need to bring back the monarchy”.
I like the idea of making a game based on your city planning prototype, however I don’t think your game will be a great vehicle for your city-planning ideas.
Modelling The Interesting Stuff
In order to make your city-planning ideas work in a game you would either have to model incentives based on individual in-game agents, and thus give agents complex AI for long-term decisions like when to buy or rent or move or renovate or change jobs, how much money to save or to invest with some risk or to spend, how many children to have and so on. You would have to model trust and civic engagement and social cohesion. Or all these factors would just be variables in an abstract cellular automaton based on a system of differential equations, like the original SimCity. In that case, you would have to make simplifications and judgements that look like begging the question.
The middle path would be putting agents into a grid-based world in which they make some decisions individually, but are influenced by grid-based environmental factors. On every grid update, grid cells are first updated based on the aggregate of agents living in the cell, then grid cells update based on surrounding cells. On every decision, an agent consults the values in the current cell it is in, or a weighted combination of the cells it was in most often over a period of time.
You probably want to model trust, safety, length of commute, crime levels, civic engagement, savings, disposable income, taxes, rent and rent controls, property developers, landlords, homeowners, family…
Communicating With The User
You need a way to make the player see what the agents are thinking, when they are making important decisions, and why.
It is important for two reasons:
If things happen but you can’t see them, the game feels boring
If important things happen and you don’t know, the consequences feel unfair
I like the idea of making a game based on your city planning prototype, however I don’t think your game will be a great vehicle for your city-planning ideas.
I agree, but in this case I can use some of those ideas as starting places to give more depth to the simulation, so there can be some simulation of those ideas that isn’t feasible in existing city builders, without the kind of in-depth total simulation we might do if this were a university research project.
Thus, the OTV Game can be differentiated by support for mixed-used buildings where the bottom is commercial and the upper portion is residential, zoning regulations with more potential control, rent bidding, etc.
The middle path would be putting agents into a grid-based world in which they make some decisions individually, but are influenced by grid-based environmental factors. On every grid update, grid cells are first updated based on the aggregate of agents living in the cell, then grid cells update based on surrounding cells. On every decision, an agent consults the values in the current cell it is in, or a weighted combination of the cells it was in most often over a period of time.
This is essentially my plan, along with a goal of 1,000,000 agents and 64km2 of area. Decision trees can be manageable for each agent if they are very small, and various heuristics will be used to make the simulation feasible, including use of grids and hierarchical routing.
Initial simulation will be simpler and focus on the core economic elements, and more complexity will be added over time. For instance, once basic markets are implemented and tested, more industries and specializations can be added and simulation load and difficulty observed.
You probably want to model trust, safety, length of commute, crime levels, civic engagement, savings, disposable income, taxes, rent and rent controls, property developers, landlords, homeowners, family…
Yes, some of that is definitely on the initial slab of what I want to develop, and how to rig up property developers will be one of the interesting questions, since I plan to track firms’ profits and accumulated capital.
However, I think sufficiently complex behavior can be obtained with fairly simple rules - for instance, that firms have a base cost and marginal cost, and scale up production when they make a profit and scale down production when they fail to make a profit, and that when they accumulate enough saved up capital and are profitable, they move to a bigger building to expand.
This pent-up capital accumulated for bigger buildings could then be part of the heuristic used by property developers. (Which probably would skip being physically represented as owning offices in the city, unlike other businesses.)
You need a way to make the player see what the agents are thinking, when they are making important decisions, and why.
It is important for two reasons:
1. If things happen but you can’t see them, the game feels boring 2. If important things happen and you don’t know, the consequences feel unfair
Yes. This will require combing the grid for issues and representing them as visual cues for the users. The form that takes will have to depend on magnitude and kind.
The stylized aesthetic provides plenty of room to provide visual cues in addition to cues such as floating event bubbles above businesses going bankrupt. It also provides room for some interesting overlays.
Ideally, we could also access individual citizens at their home or workplace and get more detailed information about them, but in practical terms this isn’t efficient for a city of 200,000, so there must be other ways to display this data.
Preparations are now in motion. I will be evaluating the difficulty of the development path I want to pursue, level of interest, and so on.
the funny thing about that David Brooks piece is an uneducated lower class person having a crisis over deli food with fancy immigrant names like “baguette” and going to normal honest American food, like tacos and burritos instead
Honestly that never occurred to me, Mexican food is considered totally unadventurous comfort food, here on the west coast, at least
I just got back from having carne asada tacos for dinner in a taqueria that had mariachi music playing, and it still had a bunch of American flags up around it since the town had a 4th of July parade last week
I was thinking it’d be good if I could get my family to try something a little fancier and more exotic like Greek or Thai food instead of the old familiar standbys we’d all been eating since my older relations were kids, like Mexican, Chinese, and Italian…I guess that sounds odd if you think about it objectively
As far as I know, San Francisco claims to have invented the burrito. And, as much as they are loathe to admit it, they are still part of the United States
San Francisco invented the Mission burrito, in the ‘60s, the original burrito is older and probably actually from Mexico
I have seen exclamations like “I bet he does not even have one gay/black/jewish“ friend, used as some kind of bait, to make the target say the unfortunate words.
That’s when to either go meta, attack along another vector of the same topic (“oh, so the only real gay people are the ones that already agree with you?”) or flip the switch and start shitposting about how you are friends with literally every Jew on Earth, including the questioner.
Birthrates have dropped; in the past it was not unusual to have 8+ kids.
Exactly how many people were gay in the past? Most of them?
I was given to understand that higher population density is correlated with a higher proportion of gay individuals, so presumably these two factors cancel out somewhat
we’ll figure this out one day.
No one expected the arrival of what 4chan dubbed the “Fag Maximizer” AI.
(Or, as the beleagured sociology students that accidentally unleashed it onto the world called it, Kinsey Indexer.)
