I have only basic qualifications.

Do you pay better than delivery?

It's this much hourly, plus performance-based bonuses that external firms currently predict will amount to this much for you specifically. Room is included.

No qualifications beyond basic are needed, it's manual labour. We'll cover your train ticket either overnight tonight or in two days, preferably tonight, conditional on you working at least this many hours or else partially on a pro-rata basis.

We expect to want to keep you for five days, possibly more of you're really great.

What do you need me to do exactly?

And why so short notice?

Yes- Ohhhh.

Wait, why right now? That's still two days away.

There's a lot of work we need to do to prepare, and recovery is faster if we already have enough workers on site.

Every hour the city is closed costs us thiiiiisssss much money.

You're all a bunch of boring people, who only make boring choices at every opportunity. Even when you've got a wacky political theory to guide you, you still play it straight.

You all suck.

If you let people do all the crazy nonsense that they really want to do, on average it'll pan out and everyone will be better off.

No you don't. You have Economic Libertarianism already.

They try to write local laws to not get in the way of the economy, so that everyone can get rich together. They're still willing to limit freedom in the name of property rights, and impose liability rules that in practice limit innovation because you have to pay all of the liability but get only a market-negotiated fraction of potential upsides.

We're Cultural Libertarianism. We want laws that lead to a culture of people being able to do cool stuff, even if those laws require local government investment, a less than perfectly free economy, or less than totally trustworthy property rights.

One of us wants a penthouse apartment only accessible by a twelve story external rock-climbing wall. Another wants to put a rollercoaster between several high-rise buildings.

Both those things aren't efficiently facilitated by any existing cities, and we have the money, therefore you have to let us have our own city.

That sounds like firstly a huge safety risk, secondly a bit cruel to disabled people, and by disabled people we mean people who can't scale a twelve story rock-climbing wall in a reasonable amount of time and effort, and thirdly rather expensive.

Are you totally sure you're not about to bankrupt yourself and everyone dumb enough to invest in you?

Fine, you can have your own city if you want, if you can cover the land taxes.

The design difficulties are all your problem.

Great!

We want this bit of land here, in the tropics.
So that people nearer the poles can have somewhere sunny to visit.
The beaches look pretty sweet.

Sounds cool!

Do we get a discount for that?

Not after you factor in the cost of insurance. You're going to have to build tough, and even then you'll probably have to fix weather damage every few years.

It'll be expensive. Here's how expensive we think it'll be.

Worst case scenario, people will just not be around during bad weather.

Good thing there's a Weather Commission to warn them.

What do you mean not be around? Are you planning a deal with another city to provide temporary housing for disaster refugees?

And we'd really like to know how you plan to pay for all this.
Cities need exports.
Otherwise we're all diligently paying for our share of things like the Weather Commission and you'd just get to have it for free.

Our only real export will be tourism.
If there's a hurricane coming people can just go home.
Nobody really needs to actually live there.

Just you wait, we're going to have so much money soon.

What's the best name not taken yet?

... are we being scammed?

Hey Coast of Adventure, you're having a hurricane soon.

Three days. It's looking pretty bad.

Tiger packs a few changes of clothes, some small electronics, snacks, a few textbooks. Tiger remembers her toothbrush. That's probably enough.

Tiger informs her parents that there's a hurricane in another city and she's visiting to work there for a few days in exchange for money according to a stranger online and no she hasn't suddenly become stupid and yes she did remember all those important things and no but she can just buy one when she gets there if she needs it.

Tiger has seven hours on a train, overnight.

Do they have any homework they want her to do, before she starts? Otherwise she can keep studying for school, she wants to be an economist eventually.

They'll send her detailed maps of the city, its transport network, electrical and water systems. Hopefully it'll be fine but you can never know what might break.

There'll be expert engineers with more detailed blueprints and higher salaries, obviously, but it helps if the common worker has some idea what's going on, too.

They'll send her photos from other similar storms: before damage and after damage and post-cleanup, so she'll have some idea what to expect. There are a lot of things that might need doing. They'll have specific information in the morning, when she arrives.

Optimistically, she'll spend the day beforehand getting something or other organised, and then a few days after digging sand out of blocked drains, or cutting up downed trees into manageable chunks to truck out, or something like that.

Coast of Adventure would prefer not to have lots of vulnerable trees waiting to be turned into projectile weapons by extreme weather, but people consistently claim in surveys that they think it should look pretty and have more trees, so they have lots of trees.

Do you also want to read up on any of our weird city-specific laws?

It might not have occured to Tiger, if she was some other totally different person raised on a totally different planet, that this information is multi-purpose. Tiger will somewhat adjust her expectations, given the apparently large number of random idiots from different backgrounds who all have detailed maps of a city-wide drainage system.

And then she'll get a little more studying in before she passes out in her cabin bed.

It's 8 in the morning, 36 hours till landfall. It's overcast, but only a bit windy out. The sea is choppy but not unnaturally so. You'd need a telescope or a satellite to think anything weird might happen tomorrow.

The email she got says she has a room booked for her.
"Red line 4, North 8.2, Tower of Giraffe, Room 906."?

You're at Hub station. They've optimised around the experience of a first-time visitor, rather than the convenience of the frequent travellers and locals who dominate most other cities.

This train station is impossible to get lost in, even if you're an unaccompanied child. You want to transition onto the red line, and get out at the fourth stop. Then you want to walk out the north exit, continue until the numbers on the pavement says 8.2, and look around over there.

There are arrows drawn in red. They point to a train station with a red line on it. There's a train there. It's also got a red line on it.

Hopefully even particularly dumb children can figure that out.

Tiger makes it to her station (it's the fourth one in the line), and assumes of the four exists she should take the north one, and start walking.

Okay, but where am I supposed to go now?

Can you see any more visual hints?

Even really small children need to be able to find their rooms, if they get lost nearby.

We don't want to assume you're literate.

Yeah that makes sense. Tiger proves her identity, obtains a key, finds her room, and dumps her stuff. It's high enough up that she can see the sea.

Many of the cities attractions are still open, though not for much longer, and a lot of work is being done around them.

She's supposed to meet up at a depot nearby when she's ready. It's not obvious on the maps meant for tourists but she has a map meant for people with jobs.

Do they want her to help with anything?

Tiger will put the sticker on her shirt, pick up the marker, realise the error of her ways, take the sticker back off her shirt, pause momentarily to consider if lying is a good idea or not, decide against, write "tiger contact" on the sticker, and then stick it back onto her shirt.

Should she be wearing a hard hat?

If she wants to.

Great, another pair of hands! Because it seems convenient, he'll arbitrary declare this group of teenagers a team. Eight is probably enough.

They'll performance review eachother after their first task, and maybe he'll also performance review them in some secret and mysterious manner, and if they seem to get on well he'll try to keep them together until they can all go home.

Does that sound good? Good. Then he'll check what's next on the list.

All the permanent structures in the city are hurricane proof, or can be made hurricane proof quickly. Not all the structures are permanent.

These sunshades, for example, consist of giant canvas canopies pulled taught between steel poles embedded in concrete below the ground.

Heavy winds could rip canopies off and be costly to repair, so instead they should just take them all down first.

You take this heavy powertool for removing bolts, and remove these bolts.

Then you can remove the guy rope from the anchor, which lets this corner fall to the ground.

Once you've done all the corners, you fold it up, roll it into a bundle, tie it up with these shorter cords, and put it in the trailer on the back of this buggy.

Then you do the next one in the row. There are eighty of them in the series of beaches that are this his problem. Only go up to here on your map.

It's okay to drive a buggy around if it's just on the beach, they're restricted mechanically to a fast running speed anyway. Try not to steer into the sea.

The eight teenage hirelings gathered here will consider this.

It'd be tiresome walking between each one, easier to all ride in the buggy or on the trailer. They'd get better at it faster if they specialised into a part of the task, but they mostly need to be done sequentially and folding seems like a team effort.

... can they have two buggies and trailers? They wouldn't all fit in one anyway, they'd have to take multiple trips.

Two of them should focus on removing the bolts and taking guy ropes off anchors. They should take one buggy and move ahead, collecting all the bolts up as they go, and progressing to each canopy quickly to stay ahead?

Probably they can do a support pillar every 2 minutes, times 2 pillars each times 80 canopies is 5.3 hours of unbolting, plus travel time should still be fast enough.

The other six will fold up the canopies up, and therefore get better at that over the course of the day, and have their own buggy to get to each one? They won't have to worry about the guy ropes because the canopies will already by on the floor. If they can do one in around 5 minutes they can keep up with the bolt-removers.

If bolt-removers finish first, they can come back and help fold. If folders catch up they can trade another team member to the bolt-removers?

Probably that will work.

Tiger arbitrarily ends up on the canopy folding team.

Tiger will at this point notice the gender-ratio in their group, and in the general social caste of teenage hirelings, is almost exactly even. She does not immediately have a good theory that predicts this.

Either the manual labour needs physical strength and they'd prefer boys, or one sex would respond more readily to a short-term job advertisement and it'd probably still be boys, or there'd be some kind of meaningful filter which would impose some kind of sex-bias or other?

Almost exactly even is weird. It implies either they ended up here truly at random and her apparent free choice was an illusion, or they were going for that on purpose.

They have ceremonially removed and folded the first canopy, timing themselves at each step to make sure their plan makes sense.

There are some little ropes attached, they need to tie it into a bundle?

How are we supposed to get it onto the trailer though?

The whole thing weighs maybe twice as much as Tiger does?

Two of the boys pick it up by the rope ties and throw it onto the trailer together.

It's visibly effortful, but not particularly challenging.

Oh.

Wait why am I being used as a unit of mass

Spoon is only 1.09 Tigers old, and despite boys typically being no taller on average than girls at around this age, typically having growth spurts later, Spoon is already 1.14 Tigers tall.

He speaks in a pitch only 0.63 Tigers high, saying

Tiger is confused about how people who could throw her without significant effort adults and people in the same social category as her children wait no she's not a child anymore she's in a new social category

Tiger is confused about why she should care about these people for their individual characteristics if she's nearly certainly not going to see them again after five days.

Tiger checks and yes she's pretty sure she shouldn't be expecting to see them again after the week, unless she actively tries otherwise.

Tiger attempts to anticipate the probable consequences of treating her new temporary classmates coworkers normally. Tiger exposes the anticipated consequences to her feelings for review. Tiger's feelings are not particularly upset but feel some utility is being missed here.

Tiger attempts to anticipate the consequences of a representative sample of not particularly unTigerly alternative behavioural patterns. Her feelings are not rating those any higher.

Tiger starts querying her feelings if they've got any behavioural patterns in particular they'd like to endorse, before she infers and gets back to them about the consequences of actually doing them. Probably her feelings are imagining something possible here that is not actually possible, and are mad she's not proposing a strategy to get it.

Tiger's feelings raise an exception with an undecipherable error message she'd have to get back to later.

Tiger visibly looks like she is thinking about something.

Does she have a thought she wants to share with the group?

Meta-Tiger notices that Tiger response times have suddenly skyrocketed at an inopportune moment. She is in the middle of a social situation.

Meta-Tiger exposes her current social situation to her internal Tiger model, directly. Her internal Tiger model does not raise any feelings-based objections to its first-order solution to the social situation. This represents an inconsistency between Tiger's model of Tiger and actual Tiger, who did get feelings-based objections she has not already categorized and resolved.

Meta-Tiger's rapidly spun up Tiger model outputs the decision that, in this social situation, the correct action is to speak aloud an optimal strategy for how eight people can most efficiently take down and pack up eightly huge mostly-but-not-quite square canvas canopies, and also she has a time limit and should not first be trying to do complicated meta-Tiger activities like resolving internal consistency errors.

Meta-Tiger can run with that. Meta-Tiger confiscates all cognitive resources to spin up the more pure and mathematical Tiger, ordinarily reserved for math tests. That Tiger logically deduces the solution, with a nice though informal proof so as to get full marks.

Meta-Tiger pipes the solution out of Tiger's mouth as it forms, just barely within the bounds of permissible response times for ordinary conversation. It's correct right? Yes. Great. Crisis averted.

You can have your brain back now.

Please don't do that again.

Where did all these memory issues come from? I was using that memory.

Is there a log of what I was thinking about before?

Also what did I just say?

The other seven hirelings nod along in agreement.

It seems the most sensible approach.

They're breaking up into two teams of four, one will take the bolt-removers and go ahead removing bolts, more quickly because they can do every pillar at the same time. They're also going to do the first two folds, half over and then half over again, to make it smaller and more manageable and because this way they won't get far ahead of the other team and create a backlog or have canopies blown away if the wind starts to pick up.

The second team will straighten it out, because it's still possible to do that after two folds if you can grab all four corners at the same time, do the second two folds, roll it and tie it up.

The canvas canopies are heavy and will make driving slower and more annoying, so they'll leave everything bundled on the ground until they're done taking stuff down. They'll be two teams again on the way back collecting them up. They have to drive back anyway to return to the depot, the stops will be very brief, and it'll give them a chance to alternate work and rest and limit tiredness.

It's a good plan. They test it on the second canopy and can do it fast enough so long as everyone knows who is on which corner.

It takes them five hours to finish and now Tiger is all Tigered out.

The wind has been slowly picking up the whole time, though not enough to be directly a problem.

She now gets to ride back in the buggy for an estimated thirty minutes while two boys pick up the canopy bundles?

Not if she wants a good performance review she doesn't.

If she's not strong enough to help lift them into the trailer, she could drive the buggy?

That way everyone else can sit on the trailer and grab them much more quickly as they go past.

Tiger is not qualified to operate a vehicle.

Tiger was told she didn't need any qualifications.

It doesn't count if you're only driving on a beach.

Its speed is capped at an average person's run. You can't really lose control here.

This is how you make it go, this is how you make it stop, this is how you turn.

You'll be fine.

Back already?

The prediction markets though it'd take longer than that. Well done!

Could you all secretly fill out these forms ranking eachother from most helpful to least? It helps determine fair wages and saves me from having to actually track everyone myself.

Is four still enough that, counterfactually if someone had tried to shirk, everyone else could reliable gang up on them in the reviews? probably. Is it enough that it's unlikely that the whole team would try to shirk? Well if a whole team had tried to shirk they wouldn't have finished this fast.

"Just list the four on your team then, and if you need to split up into sub-teams again on future jobs do it in a different way so we can compare everyone to everyone."

For some reason Tiger's feelings claim she should rank Spoon above herself, because he was strong or something.

This is obviously ridiculous she should of course rank herself first everyone would rank themself first the system obviously assumes everyone ranks themself first and it's not even lying she came up with the strategy that apparently outperformed expected finishing times it's perfectly ethically okay to rank herself first.

And probably the consequences of not doing that are that she'd get less money hey feelings do you want Tiger to have less money Tiger will think intensely about what it is like to experience having slightly less money until her feelings stop suggesting that and she can write herself first like a sensible person.

Actually they just ignore where you put yourself, it doesn't correlate with anything.

For some reason according to studies you get better results if you force people to include themselves in the review rankings. Probably people think about it more if they're incorrectly imagining it affecting their own pay?

He's not actually going to tell anyone that obviously.

"Do any of you want another job? We can keep you as a group since you all seem to get on well together."

If they keep non-quarrelsome people in their groups, and reshuffle quarrelsome ones, reshuffled groups will be worse than his random initial group in expectation.

He should want to preserve his initial group to avoid being grouped with people who are quarrelsome and cause unproductive groups. Doing another task together well decreases probability of this group being reshuffled, which helps him avoid quarrelsome group members, and therefore increases his personal income in expectation.

Spoon endorses doing another task if he can convince everyone else to do another task.

If two people independently think the group should do another task if the group can be convinced to do another task, the group thinks it can safely defer to whatever secret line of reasoning those two people both used.

The group thinks it should do another task if the group can be convinced to do another task.

The group thinks it should do another task.

Great! He's not going to fail to notice what just happened there. He's going to take credit for it. It was his plan all along.

Look at how great he is at using game theory and social manipulation to convince teenagers to want to try hard at their jobs.

What's next?

Coast of Adventure employs, collectively, thirty thousand trained Vermin Control Officers.

Most are assigned to specific buildings and already accounted for, but around five thousand are on general outdoor patrol. They work freelance, wherever they're needed, and can pick their own hours. Supposedly they check in at some point each day, but in practice about 20% don't. Presumably they're busy doing their important work. We want to make sure everyone is safe inside before the storm hits. Unfortunately, the team assigned with finding all the stragglers is running slower than anticipated.

Either the task is unexpectedly more difficult, or they're unexpectedly less competent than predicted. Either way, if we reassign extra staff it should get completed in time and if the extra staff outperform the ones who've been doing it all day we'll know it's because those people were just bad at it.

They should all have a tracking device on them, which can be picked up by one of these scanners. Be careful not to lose any, they're expensive, and would result in a serious security problem if they fell into enemy hands.

There's no good reason any of them can think of to treat this as a team task. They should all split up immediately, to cover more ground.

They agree to meet up for dinner afterwards at least since Spoon will be there it's the kind of thing a group that had good teamwork and therefore shouldn't be reshuffled would do.

They'll each take a scanner and some carry boxes and a quadbike and a map with all the locations on it so they can find the closest one to bring them back to.

Tiger has never driven a vehicle on city streets before and this barely counts and there's relatively few people around and she's not exactly moving very fast and the local laws are heavily biased against holding people accountable so as not to scare people off of doing anything interesting and if she had any medical bills it'd almost certainly be covered by someone else and it's still scary-

No. Tiger's brain doesn't implement Groupthink. Tiger Implements Tiger.

Tiger will request and receive and put on a helmet.

Now, she can go quadbiking.

Yeah that's a great idea can he also have a helmet?

Sure. All you had to do was ask?

He is somehow on a ledge, twenty feet up a rock-climbing wall. There are no apparent ways to the ledge except by scaling the rock-climbing wall.

He does not appear very concerned by the winds, or the approaching storm, or his apparent inability to get back down.

Pigeon.

Tiger checks around for stairs. There are no stairs.

Tiger starts climbing the wall, realises the error of her ways, and climbs back down again. There's no way she could get back down again afterwards, while also carrying the Vermin Control Officer.

What's a person supposed to do if they fall?

If you throw me off this wall, I will never trust you again.

I will run and hide and scream. I will make you bleed if I get the chance.

The only way you'd get me into your carry box after that is by winning a claw fight. My full-time job is winning at claw fights, and you don't even have claws.

That sounds like an incredibly unpleasant experience to put me through.

I don't think I could work with you after that.

As soon as we get back I'll report you for abuse, harassment, and unprofessional conduct.

I've been working here eight long years, you got here this morning. They'll take my claims more seriously than your rebuttals, and with an employment record as short as yours you'll struggle to get another job this nice again.

I continue to not be actually qualified to drive a buggy on city streets, yet.

It's already a stretch that I'm allowed to use a quadbike.

I bet if you just requisition a buggy, intending to drive it on city streets but not explicitly stating that, your supervisor will give you one and not ask any questions.

They're really lax with the rules here. You'd be surprised the kinds of thing I get away with all the time.

He is a skilled professional. He can hear a leaf russle from a hundred yards. He can smell the fear in his enemies hearts. And he can see the malice in this person's eyes, as she climbs the wall after him.

As soon as she gets within arms reach, he jumps down and darts off.

Mother of-

Why?

At some point while Tiger wasn't looking, a large number of people who've never seen a hurricane up close and thought it worth buying two nights at a hotel appeared. They're disappointed that most of the attractions are closed but not very surprised. They'll filter into their rooms for the night, and probably need to be explicitly told that tomorrow is not a day for going outside and even though their suite comes with a balcony they should not use it.

It is a day for hot cocoa and blankets and board games. You can look out the windows if you want. They're hurricane-proof. It is implicitly assumed in that claim that you do not actually open them.

The spaces outside are all stripped bare. Outdoor chairs and tables have been packed away into invisible storage places. Signs have been lifted from their anchors, and fabric awnings taken down. Most ground level entrances have steel garage doors closed over them, and lower windows have had storm sheeting locked in place. Older trees have had loose branches pre-emptively amputated by chainsaw, where arborists judged them doomed.

It's not going to be enough, it's just everything that saves more effort total if you do it in advance.

Some places are open, including the entrances to her residential tower, which at this point it is apparent was near entirely rented out for visiting workers.

The closest cafeteria is suprisingly crowded. Nevertheless, it is still easy to identify her proper social class. They're the teenagers who have nametags stuck on top of regular shirts.

She can find three of her group, who got here a bit before her.

The cafeteria is organised sensibly, based on sound logic of efficiency, individual freedom, and fair pricing.

Tiger takes a tray, a fork, and a large bowl. Then she slides down the line to the first section of food, sensibly organised from cheapest to most expensive.

She places her bowl on the scale, presses the zero button, and adds three scoops of rice, because it's cheap. The scale stabilises and she presses the finish button and taps her card. She slides down the line, repeating with each of, progressively less cheaply, boiled vegetables, scrambled eggs, and chicken in a rich sauce.

At the eggs tray, she will greedily take all remaining scrambled eggs, and the other teenager behind the counter will have to replace it with the next batch.

Tiger will notice that the rice here is slightly cheaper, the veggies and chicken slightly more expensive, the eggs about the same, than is typical in her home city.

She continues not to know why and continues to be mad about it. Is it the hurricane? Something about unexpected change in demand? Something about refrigeration?

Nobody knows.

It all costs about what she gets paid in half an hour, because mass-producing good food isn't actually that expensive.

Two more of your team members have sat with the rest. Either they were hiding in the line already or snuck in while you were distracted with prices.

If you come over now you'll be the sixth to arrive and obtain a reputation for neither finishing early and therefore being unhelpful nor arriving late and therefore being slow.

Exactly as planned.

She'll go sit with them. They'll probably be together a few days, it's a good enough reason. Her doing this can't possibly be evidence of any additional reasons, which should be safely screened behind the first valid reason.

By making decisions in that way, you're creating a perverse incentive for people who want information about your decision-making process to manufacture situations where any already known reasons are carefully screened out.

"Hi Tiger -"

Not evidence of affection, they have name tags.

"- Did you plan ahead for what you're doing tomorrow? There'll be no work for us since no one can go outside, and there's an estimated 45% chance of a power outage."

Mild evidence, but plausibly he's just anticipating being bored, or he wanted a discussion topic to pass time and picked the most obvious one.

She brought some textbooks to read, and has a battery light if needed, is the true answer.

But coincidentally the true answer would be evidence of disinterest.

Aaaahhhhhhh.

Why is Tiger like this. Meta-Tiger is going to have to intervene twice in one day.

Meta-Tiger passes Tiger's current social situation to Tiger's model of a much more socially intelligent person, and then pipes the output to Tiger's mouth without even bothering to check it.

"I brought some textbooks to read, and have a battery light if I need it, but I also thought just watching the storm pass over would be pretty fun."

The weather outside is getting worse, they've probably underestimated it by a bit.
It'll hit around mid afternoon tomorrow.

They only get one or two this size a year, so it's hard to calibrate the models. They're still better at it than anyone else.

The Weather Commissioner doesn't predict the Weather himself, he just oversees the statistics competition that picks which model is considered the best. If you're so good at it enter it yourself. Stop bullying us.

Still, so long as you stay in your steel-framed concrete building tomorrow, and don't get too close to the windows, you'll be fine. Seriously. Hurricanes aren't actually that dangerous, only idiots who go outside get hurt in them.

It's still fine to go outside today, right? It's not even wet yet. It's only a bit windy, and barely dark. Lots of reasonable people are still outside.

Like this young gentleman over here:

Dig just barely organised his equipment in time for a ticket for the last possible train over. This puts him at Hub Station, with all the other people who wanted to see a hurricane up close and were rather last minute about the whole thing.

Does he remember what train he has to catch next? No. Did he write it down? Yes. He'll drag his rather large suitcase to a bench and open it and find his purchasing information. If hypothetically someone was watching they'd see his suitcase contains as he would describe it four rather fancy cameras, on remotely controllable swivelling mounts inside of tough transparent balls.

After his second shorter train trip he'll want to rush to his hotel room, dragging his suitcase along with him, to get organised.

It ought to be okay to be a pedestrian in any weather.

A sensible city - not that Coast of Adventure is always such a place - ensures there exists a way to traverse an urban neighbourhood without going outside at all. Some combination of skybridges between the second floors of neighbouring towers, short pedestrian tunnels between basement common areas, and fully enclosed pedestrian transport corridors in denser areas, shopping districts, and especially connected to transport hubs like train stations.

In the extreme case, there are at least a few emergency tunnels that even most locals - not that Coast of Adventure has locals - don't always know about but are there if you need them.

It's never the fastest route. Eval has had bad experiences in the past with designing spaces so that people literally never have to go outside and would prefer the fastest routes to typically involve going outside. But it's at least a route.

Dig would prefer the fastest route, thanks.

In a different neighbourhood, someone drives a van around, somewhat lost, before opening a garage door somewhere and disappearing inside.

Importantly, this person can't possibly be Dig, as Dig's train ticket, visibility on cameras, clothing, and everything else can attest. They're too far apart.

Eval really wishes there was a universal transportation solution, but hasn't managed to find it.

If you're a person with no more goods than you can comfortably carry, and you're moving around a city, it's most efficient to put trains on rails with regular enough stops that it's only a short walk to your destination from the nearest station. If your city isn't large or dense enough for that to be manageable, you encourage people to buy bicycles and put the train stations a bit more spread out. If even that isn't enough, you have a secondary light-rail system in a grid that moves slowly enough to safely share spaces with pedestrians, and even that doesn't have enough stops that you aren't forced to walk a little bit. People need to get some exercise every day anyway, so Eval doesn't object to forcing them to do so by making not doing that inconvenient.

If you're moving between cities, high-speed rail between hub stations in each city is most efficient. You can usually have it run overnight, even over significant distances. People need to spend some time resting every day anyway, so Eval doesn't object to letting people take a night's sleep on a train. If you're moving between continents, all your options stink, but the least bad is a long-haul flight.

If you're a person with more goods than you can comfortably carry and you are moving around a city, you are best off with a vehicle that can do point-to-point transport. It is not possible to avoid having to create a point-to-point transport network for reasons that include emergency response, construction and maintenance, and logistics. It is possible to use that system as little as you can get away with, and use more efficient solutions instead for everything else. The typical user is not substantially harmed if most streets are shared with pedestrians, and if the vehicle does not travel faster than a person can run anywhere pedestrians share a space. Nor are they substantially harmed if they merely rent the vehicle. It'd be silly to have everyone who needs a vehicle once a week for a shopping trip also need enough storage space to keep it unused the rest of the time. If you're a logistics company who needs to deliver refrigerated goods to a hundred stores across the city every day, then maybe you can justify actually owning your own vehicles and a lot on the outskirts of town on which to keep them, but nobody who doesn't work in logistics should have to worry about that kind of thing.

This solves transport problems for people who live in cities.

If you live in a province, or are a very weird person who lives in wilderness, there aren't any efficient public transport solutions. The best option is to build roads everywhere a person might want to go and have everyone own their own vehicles for traveling along them. This is fine because you have a lot more space, wouldn't be able to easily obtain a vehicle from anywhere nearby anyway, and in an emergency, you'd need to be able to move yourself or a hypothetically injured person immediately instead of requesting to be picked up, thereby doubling your travel time.

If you are a provincial human trying to move themselves and relatively few other goods as fast as possible and you don't want to pay to buy a large, heavy, and complicated vehicle, you are in the correct niche for a motorcycle. If you are moving a lot of material, as provincial people often are, you will want some kind of small van with a large cargo space, possibly pulling a trailer. If traveling by yourself to the city, you'd park your vehicle at a provincial train station, because that would be free, and then take a train to your intended location. Maybe you've got a good reason to do otherwise? Obviously, you're still allowed to use the streets; it's just that you have to pay for taking up the space. It's not unusual for a store to make a special deal with a local farm and ignore sensible logistics solutions in favour of direct delivery. Provincial people are weird, in that the different economic tradeoffs produce vastly different cultural patterns.

Regardless, the tag on the vehicle will identify it, as it passes every checkpoint. The checkpoints will infer travel distance and subtract money from the owner's bank account automatically. There's no reason to make it more complicated than that.

And if you're traveling too fast, because your vehicle is mostly used outside of cities and isn't physically incapable of traveling too fast, that can also be inferred from checkpoint detection times, and automatically billed to the owner's account.

This person isn't traveling too fast, are they?

Of course not. If hypothetically this vehicle had an ownership tag, which pointed at the person driving it, than travelling too fast would cost money at no benefit. This person may feel, intuitively, that everything has an ownership tag pointing at this person, but that's no reason to be unstrategic about it.

And if, on the other hand, this vehicle does not have any tag or has a tag that incorrectly points at some other person, such as because they borrowed without permission the van of someone who lives outside city limits and who isn't around right now because of the storm, then there would still be good reason not to travel too fast: It would pointlessly attract attention. This person may feel, intuitively, that all attention should rightfully be pointed at them at all times, but that also is no reason to be unstrategic.

The important thing is that he can't possibly be driving the van, on account of how he's visibly over here instead.

He then needs to find four different tall buildings, willing to let him access their roofs, with a clear view of the sky so that he can use parallax to get a really good 3d model of the storm.  It's for a personal project, you see. He wanted to call ahead but it's not like he got a lot of advance warning either.

Fortunately Coast of Adventure is the kind of place inclined to just let him do that and not ask many followup questions.

It's kinda cool actually. Can he tell them where they'll be able to see the results afterwards?

No, sorry. He can't.
Bye.

Twenty-five years ago, Eval started getting really very good at consumer electronics, making more powerful ones every year. It was making a lot of money.

Then one day parliament decided that this was actually a terrible idea and they should cap consumer electronics at their current capabilities: enough that anyone could do their own encryption, listen to music, make phone calls, or connect to GPS. Not enough that you could ever run on your own device the kind of large models already used even back then for simple things like predicting the weather.

Instead, they'd make massive government controlled compute-clusters, all connected through the internet, and if you wanted to do something intensive, you'd rent a tiny slice of compute time at a fair price.

Individual businesses shouldn't have to manage the hardware that supports their company databases, nor should they be at the mercy of some third party that might raise prices and make it difficult to change providers. A fair and impartial market mediator was needed.

It was still capitalistic. Private firms still competed over who could produce the best compute to sell to the government, and the government bought from all of them and resold to consumers through a standardized API. The government wasn't asking to be a monopoly, it was just going to be a marketplace and also keep all the physical computing in its own warehouses under, as time progressed, an increasingly strong guard.

Also, it wanted to be able to not let people compute certain things if, hypothetically, parliament later on thought banning certain large and complicated uses of CPU time from taking place at all was a good idea.

That's not too tyrannical, is it?

Most smaller cities protested that they'd have higher pings and be unfairly harmed by this, so the government agreed that any existing cities could get their own smaller compute cluster, which would be used for providing faster services to local sources, so long as the government still got to have its own military guarding it.

Still, as compute resources grew, the overwhelming majority of all compute resources ended up in just eight mega-processors, spread around the world, with a few key manufacture steps happening on site and nowhere else.

Coast of Adventure doesn't host a megaprocessor. That would be stupid. It's not very big, and it's in a hurricane zone. It was, however, already around, so it got to negotiate for its own smaller processor. If you want to play a video game anywhere in the whole city, most of the actual computation will happen there, and your own device is barely doing more than displaying pre-rendered images and passing on your controller inputs.

The compute cluster takes up a moderately large warehouse complex and represents a substantial chunk of the city's electricity. You can infer it clearly from maps of the electrical and communications networks.

There are very few things you can usefully steal, because there are very few things you can efficiently sell stolen.

Commodity merchants will demand an explanation of where exactly you obtained all those commodities from. Non-fungible valuable objects have explicit ownership ledgers held by the Records Department. Physical cash tokens, as all adults have conspired never to tell children, have RFID tags in them that make them trivial to track.

But you don't actually need to sell anyone the CPUs.

If you have your own electricity, you can extract value from it by doing complicated math and then making very good guesses on markets. You can cover up the use by pretending you have some other, completely illegible, reason for making all those guesses, and also some other excuse for the heat-signature visible on satellites that a compute cluster produces.

If there were known trading strategies worth more than the cost of the compute it takes to run them, people would do that until they stopped working. But there's nothing economically impossible about a trading strategy that just barely isn't worth the compute it costs to run, being known by everyone in a whole industry to have this property. If you still have to pay for the electricity, but don't have to pay for the computer chips over their relatively short lifetimes before they start being called out of date, you can make most of the full value of the chip back just by trading with it.

Alternatively, if you own your own black market compute cluster, you can use it to run code that the government doesn't want run at all, such as brute forcing encryption.

Or maybe some third thing.