LengAwaits

Just in case you hadn't seen this follow-up:

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gold-apollo-says-it-did-not-make-pagers-used-lebanon-explosion-2024-09-18/

And some info even suggests that this B.A.C. company was a shell company owned by Israel:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/israel-exploding-pagers-hezbollah.html

By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.

When things get bad enough, people will revolt to build a better system.

An optimist, I see!

Not quite as simple as checkboxes, but the ability is there to some degree!

I think he still is!

Oh wait, I just realized that you probably mean the "Environmental Protection Agency."

Here I was thinking you meant the "Eager for Punani Association."

Cities: Skylines II Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords

For months, players have been complaining about the high rents in the city-building sim. This week, developer Colossal Order fixed the problem by doing something real cities can’t: removing landlords.

The rent is too damn high, even in video games. For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of living was too high in their burgeoning metropolises and complained there was no way to fix it. This week, the developer finally announced a solution: tossing the game’s landlords to the curb.

“First of all, we removed the virtual landlord so a building’s upkeep is now paid equally by all renters,” the developer posted in a blog on the game’s Steam page. “Second, we changed the way rent is calculated.” Now, Colossal Order says, it will be based on a household’s income: “Even if they currently don’t have enough money in their balance to pay rent, they won’t complain and will instead spend less money on resource consumption.”

The rent problem in the city sim is almost a little too on the nose. Over the last few years real-world rents have skyrocketed—in some cases, rising faster than wages. In cities like New York, advocates and tenants alike are fighting against the fees making housing less and less affordable; in the UK, rent is almost 10 percent higher than it was a year ago. From Hawaii to Berlin the cost of living is exorbitant. Landlords aren’t always to blame, but for renters they’re often the easiest targets.

From this perspective, perhaps Cities’ simulator is too good. Prior to this week’s fix, players found themselves getting tripped up on some of the same problems government officials and city planners are facing. “For the love of god I can not fix high rent,” wrote one player in April. “Anything I do re-zone, de-zone, more jobs, less jobs, taxes high or low, wait time in game. Increased education, decreased education. City services does nothing. It seems anything I try does nothing.”

On the game’s subreddit, players have also criticised “how the game's logic around ‘high rent’ contrasts reality,” with one player conceding that centralized locations with amenities will inevitably have higher land values. “But this game makes the assumption of a hyper-capitalist hellscape where all land is owned by speculative rent-seeking landlord classes who automatically make every effort to make people homeless over provisioning housing as it is needed,” the player continued. “In the real world, socialised housing can exist centrally.”

This is true. It exists in Vienna, which the New York Times last year dubbed “a renters’ utopia.” Except, in Vienna the landlord is the city itself (it owns about 220,000 apartments). In Cities: Skylines II, the devs just got rid of landlords completely.

The change in-game will have “a transition period as the simulation adapts to the changes,” and the developer “can’t make any guarantees” with how it will impact games with mods. Although the update aims to fix most of the problems at hand, that doesn’t mean players should never expect to see rent complaints again. When household incomes are too low to pay, tenants will be loud about it. “Only when their income is too low to be able to pay rent will they complain about ‘High Rent’ and look for cheaper housing or move out of the city.” Maybe it’s time players had a few in-game tenant groups of their own.

Call yourself whatever you want, at the end of the day we're all utopianists who're overly self-assured that our favorite pet-theory-system will eventually remove all suffering.

"If my vision for society were adopted, the world would be perfect!"

Keep dreaming. We're fucked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKGb8KFY5F8

Sorry for my delay in response. I try to limit the amount of time I spend on social media as it can be harmful to my mental health.

As for good game theory resources, it's going to somewhat depend on your existing math literacy. I'm going to paste a list (below) that I'd found on reddit when I was first exploring game theory about 10 years ago. I haven't read all of the suggestions.

The following are three foundational works in the development of game theory:

• Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Oskar Morgenstern and John Von Neumann (THE seminal text)

• A Theory of Justice, John Rawls (an early political application of game theory)

• Convention, David Lewis (a philosophy-heavy investigation of rationality and sociality)

These are four widely-respected contemporary surveys of the subject, listed in descending order of complexity:

• Game Theory and the Social Contract, Ken Binmore (anything by Ken Binmore is worthwhile).

• Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction, Colin Camerer (perhaps the definitive work on behavior economics)

• Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely (introductory)

• Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction, Morton Davis (introductory)

I also recommend checking out MIT's OpenCourseWare game theory polisci course. I found it quite interesting.

Will do. This honestly means the world because I don’t have a lot of players in my court.

I do mean it. I'm not always fast to reply, but I'm around if you ever want to have a chat about anything! The grad student path seems like a worthwhile pursuit and I wish you all the best with it! As for the social aspect, I can relate, certainly. I was pretty unsure that things would work out when I set out to try alternative living systems in my early 20s. Being around like-minded people ended up being extremely valuable for my social skills, in the end.

Maybe when you're done with your coursework you can investigate the opportunities available. I lived for a while in a co-op house in upstate New York that would have been perfect for a young professional. Private rooms with common spaces and a nightly shared meal. Communal chores to be done, but income was not shared. Members had to have their own incomes.

There was a good discussion of this on Reddit recently. Sorry to link to Reddit, but it's a good, topical post worth perusal.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Agriculture/comments/1dv7fw9/how_much_good_land_is_used_to_grow_food_for/

ETA:

We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).

^https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf^

I didn't ask for your answer, I asked for your opinion. I already knew that you didn't have the answer. Nether do I.

I was young, idealistic, autistic, and naive myself, once, long ago. Still autistic, but less young, idealistic, and naive these days. I tripped over my ideals and ethics for a long time before figuring out how to survive in this capitalist hellscape. I'm still not very good at it, and my path needn't be yours. I won't shove it down your throat.

I wasn't sharing that song with the intent to be adversarial. I shared it because Bad Religion has been a very helpful band for me throughout my young-adulthood, and their lyrics continue to help me to this day. No offense intended. My opinion of what this song meant, for example, when I was young, was vastly different to the meaning I take from it now.

I'm very familiar with anarchist theory and the praxis thereof. I read all of the links you provided and I don't wholly disagree with the bulk of it. Please don't get me wrong.

BUT. Refusing to vote against fascists because of ideological distaste is indeed moral superiority, whether you want to admit that or not. People can die.

I have no love for Democrats, and I don't in any way identify as one. I do, however, have a great love for game theory, and game theory tells me that there's only one correct decision to make where voting in the USA in 2024 is concerned. I will continue to take direct action to further my own personal beliefs and ideologies, but I won't let that stand in the way of doing things that I find morally distasteful (such as voting for a Democrat) to keep fascists out of power.

I hope this doesn't come across as condescending. I don't mean it that way but people often tell me I'm being condescending. I wish you all the best in life. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help you in any way, and don't hesitate to reach out if you want a conversational partner or a sympathetic ear. I'm always open to discussing the world with intelligent people.

If you're interested in communal living or alternative lifestyles (at it pertains to anarchist communities), I'm happy to help there, as well. I think I still have some friends that know folx at Emma Goldman Finishing School in Seattle. Admittedly, I don't know if they're looking for any new members right now, but I'd be happy to put a word in for you.

When fascists take power it's not unheard of for them to line up commies and anarchists against a wall and shoot them. I'm all for ideological utopianism, I've lived on intentional communities in the country and anarchist collectives in the city, but preserving your moral superiority is little comfort when you and your family are staring down the barrel of a fascist's gun.

The Answer.

Voting in the general election does nothing to brake the train. Not near zero, zero.

I fear that you're mistaking your own pessimism for absolute truth, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

Voting is orthogonal to what needs to be done.

What, in your view, needs to be done?

The answer:

Everyone would have heat pumps.