I think I’ve figured out how to simulate the “zoning wars between jocks, otakus, and hipsters”. (Which should probably be renamed as Olympians, J-Core, and Fixters.)
I think I’ve also managed to figure out how to do the ask/bid system for labor (and other) prices without exploding the simulation with an 80GB table, for an area about the size of Manhattan.
Later today, I may have a quick sketch on how I want to represent the citizens when not being shown as blocks.
that isn’t voxels. Hmm.
still something I’m chewing on
modern game development is all about finding coherent aesthetics that allow you to eschew realism because god damn realism is expensive.
hence MineCraft, the 8-bit retro craze, Undertale, even polished cartoony looks like Witness and Firewatch.
I think stylised game art has gotten significantly better looking since 2015.
Oh man you aren’t wrong, do you know how many hours it would have taken me to “realistically” model those tiny houses? And that would make the renders less understandable instead of more understandable.
Duesenberg Coupé Simone Midnight Ghost, 1939. Supposed to be the last Duesenberg ever built, commissioned by French cosmetics magnate Gui De LaRouche who contracted coach builder Emmett and Armand to create an exotic-bodied Coupé on a Duesenberg Type J chassis. The car would be a gift to his lover, Simone. It supposedly took three years to complete. In fact it seems the car was entirely fictional and made up by designers for Franklin Mint who had created a model of the Midnight Ghost, a numbered limited edition of 1,500 were made
I think maybe dieselpunks need to be on the culture list for the city game idea.
Actually, have other people noticed that taking ideologies to weird extremes is a Thing among thirteen to fifteen-year-olds? Because that’s definitely something I’ve noticed. Like, I once new a thirteen-year-old girl who claimed to be uncomfortable watching two women dance together because it “promotes lesbianism,” which is…not something most Catholics believe, I’m pretty sure? (They weren’t even, like, slow-dancing, it was some kind of Scandinavian Traditional Cultural Dance that only women did).
Has anyone else observed this among The Youths?
I think age tends to make ideas more nuanced, because you get more experience and the real world is complicated.
13-15 is when people develop something like an adult political consciousness, and you know what they say about new converts being the most fervent believers.
Heck, I totally did that in my youth. I boycotted LL Bean for promoting lesbianism and objected to CCM for having a beat when I was 13 or so *embarrassed emoji*
I got better, in some cases pretty quickly, but that was my nadir.
Haha, I never had ideological extreme phase, and was contrarian against arbitrary non-conformist teenage rebellion aesthetic as a teenager.
I’m probably at my most ideologically extreme right now, even though it’s orthogonal to the existing factions.
The solution to this, of course, is to just give low-wage workers money instead of making laws that try to force their employers to do it. No one should have to live on the money they can bring home from $9/hour? Agreed! Give them money.
What will happen as a result is, of course, that companies will routinely underpay their employees, effectively outcompeting companies that pay fair wages purely on the taxpayer’s dime, which is by the way what already happens when people who work are paid low enough to be eligible for welfare.
This is a fact.
Factual solutions only. No pandering.
Do you actually disagree with any factual statement Kelsey is making here? All I see are value disagreements about “underpaying” and “fair wages.”
A factual statement is what I said.
When companies underpay the employees and you pay those employees instead, you reward companies for underpaying employees.
The correct course of action is to force companies to pay fair wages to employees. The incorrect course of action is to provide companies with more market incentives for not doing so.
That is a factual statement also.
A value judgement would be if you’d disagree with me that people like me are not literal subhumans (which is by the way the universal opinion of people who endorse underpaying as much as possible).
It depends - do we have individuals paying the low wage workers and not a subsidy to all low wage workers by the State? Then the problems with the libertarian plan will ruin it, that’s how the economics works. Do we have state action instead? Then the leverage of all low wage workers will be increased by other economic effects.
Anonymous asked:
mutant-aesthetic answered:
It’s a gesture, all gestures are fundamentally meaningless (unless you’re autistic)
Gestures and symbols become meaningful when you synchronize them with events.
“hey you know, bikes work well in european cities”
yeah i do, did you know that boats work really well in venice? really makes you think about US public transit doesn’t it
flood the cities!
This is the subject of my next one thousand villages post, where I discuss optimal public transport choices for if all citizens weigh over 1,000 lbs.
Honestly, from a business perspective, it’s a totally reasonable and justifiable thing to do. Many of the biggest business costs are tied to peak rather than average throughput, and the previous attempt to solve this, JIT scheduling, was drastically awful. I think the market-wisdom rationale for Uber’s surge pricing was mostly bullshit spin, but in general, you do kind of need to be able to raise prices when there’s excessive demand for an inflexible supply. So my take on it isn’t exactly “oh those capitalists sure are cartoonishly evil.”
But it’s a good example of how capitalism as a whole – and, let’s be honest, most if not all of the alternatives – is kind of horrible even when everyone is behaving reasonably. It’s economically rational for the wealthy and privileged to be charged less for most things and extended advantages others lack, and for the poor and underprivileged to be charged extra and denied opportunities. The natural effect of everyone doing the sensible thing is to exacerbate inequality in a vicious cycle, so it’s little wonder that policies that aren’t sensible have perennial appeal.
I think a lot of such issues could be managed if “we” were more clever about it. (And also had the political will.)
There are a lot more market-flexible initiatives that could be done but which simply aren’t.
We could change the overtime laws so that everyone gets overtime and it ramps up with each additional X hours over, so that businesses can push but are incentivized not to. Or a big city could auction off business start and end times over a two hour window on each side in a revenue-neutral way, spreading out the incredible load on our transit infrastructure from businesses all opening and closing at the same time.
Plans like those don’t say “you cannot,” they say “you can, however-”, which lets the effect be allocated in a more market-efficient way. Friction, rather than a hard wall.
Stravinsky’s Star-Spangled Banner (July 4th, 2016)
Today I learned that Igor Stravinsky’s 1943 arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner got him harassed by the Boston Police Department.
The arrangement, heard in the linked video, contains a diminished seventh chord on the “land” of “oer the land of the free,” right at the 1:30 mark of the video. The effect is palpable. Stravinsky created this arrangement for the Boston Symphony, due to his ”desire to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country.”
From Timothy Judd at The Listeners’ Club:
After the first performance, the audience was apparently shocked by what they considered to be an unconventional harmonization. The Boston Police, misinterpreting a Federal law prohibiting “tampering” with the National Anthem, told Stravinsky that he had to remove his arrangement from the remaining programs. Reluctantly, he conceded.
With the benefit of hindsight, and years of garishly over-embellished ballpark vocal renditions, Stravinsky’s Star Spangled Banner doesn’t sound so bad. This is the National Anthem through the ears of an immigrant. Its bass line and inner voices suggest a hint of “Great Gate of Kiev” Russian weight. There’s some interesting, unorthodox modernist voice leading that might vaguely remind you of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella.
I love it. It might be my new favorite arrangement of our (sorta-crappy) national anthem. To me, that chord suggests that our union is incomplete; that the past 240 years have been the struggle to make it more perfect, with the emphasis on “more.” There will always be more work to be done, more improvements to be made, more successes to celebrate, and more battles to fight. Our truths and values may be self-evident, but they are not self-actuating. Our path is long and winding, and at times we have lost our way, but we can (and must) walk it together.
My favorite version of the national anthem is the various renditions done by the Kentucky All State Choir when they go for their conferences.
It’s very natural and a touch haunting as they fill the entire atrium with sound and “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave?” hits a lot harder than you would expect.
The first time I watched one of these, it was their delivery of that line that caused me to think of what it would mean to me if America were destroyed. They say you don’t really know what you have until it’s gone, so thinking about that really put some things in perspective for me.
What is your alternative? The iron law of Python, where the curly boys are no longer seen, but everything must be exactly in line and know its place else the whole edifice crumbles?
