Toxic Waste Deal

I used to play a lot of SimCity, especially Simcity 3000.

That version of the game was more mature and robust, with business deals and enough options to make it feasible to keep your city alive and they had done away with some ridiculous game mechanics, like creating a waterfall wherever you wanted and adding hydroelectric as free, clean energy forever. If you are actually doing community and economic development work, the real world has changed its opinions and policies related to hydroelectric. 

Hydroelectric isn't actually as environmentally friendly as it was once viewed. You can look up information on the Elwha River as a case study. They removed the dam to bring the river back to life.

It can still be a good idea when done on a small scale off grid. Here's an article about water wheels. 

If you are in the middle of nowhere, a mix of electric sources on a small scale can help provide the electricity you need without undue environmental burden. You do a mix in part because if you have solar power and wind power, you get more solar power on nice days and more wind power on stormy days. If you have a small stream, a micro hydroelectric set-up can provide a portion of your electric demand sustainably and without undue environmental consequences, but probably can't carry the whole load adequately.

But damming up a huge river to generate electricity and provide an aquifer for water supply is hugely disruptive to the environment and I've touched on the fact elsewhere that the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River accomplished everything they wanted, such as electric generation, and is also a huge economic, environmental and public health catastrophe.

It dramatically increased the use of chemical fertilizers because of loss of silt as organic fertilizer. This is expensive and less nutritious. It raises food costs, is not long-term sustainable because chemical fertilizers come from petroleum and it undermines nutrition which is a massive public health issue.

It also dramatically increased the incidence of schistosomiasis, a horrific parasitic infection. Parasitic infections are inherently hard to treat and more common among the poor, which promotes intractable poverty.

So SimCity 3000 had game mechanics I liked generally that weren't too crazy out of line with reality and you could save the file under a new file name and do versioning. So it was the best SimCity game for testing ideas.

Like "Okay, I suddenly have a pile of money and once I spend it, I'm committed to a course of action. Let me save the game here and check what happens if I spend it this way and then that way and see which accomplishes my goals best."

I believe it introduced business deals because earlier versions only had taxes and loans as your financing options and they were extremely challenging to make work. There are four business deals:

1. The Maximum Security Prison

I love this one and I place it in the middle of nowhere, surround it with a ZILLION trees to mitigate pollution and then place farms all around it. I've mentioned that before on this site.

2. Casino 

I have mixed feelings about this. It pushes up crime and you need to be careful to not place it too close to other things that promote crime.

3. GigaMall

This is fairly benign as long as you keep in mind that, like Walmart, it may kill all your existing commercial development. It helps to take this deal only when you have substantial unmet commercial demand and your options are spend money you don't have to zone commercial or take this deal and get paid to get commercial demand met.

4. Toxic Waste Disposal Plant 

I used this for a time and would put it in a corner of the map to minimize its negative environmental impact on MY city. Why the corner? 

On the edge of the map, 50 percent of your pollution disappears and poisons some neighbor. In the corner, 75 percent of your pollution goes away.

In game mechanic terms, there's no downside to this policy of screwing your neighbors, but in real life the neighbors care if you go "You can have all my pollution! I just want the MONEY!"

I also surrounded it by a large buffer of undeveloped land full of trees to mitigate pollution. There's opportunity cost involved in doing that. It's land you can never develop if you want to not poison your people.

I typically didn't get catastrophes like toxic cloud. One of my big headaches was industry screaming at me about not being able to find cheap land to develop because I tend to make gorgeous garden cities with high land values.

ONCE, to entertain my son who was watching me play, I piled all the polluting and land value lowering stuff together. I got huge industrial buildings I had never seen before and also toxic cloud which destroys buildings and infrastructure and doesn't stop until you lower pollution.

I think the Toxic Waste Disposal Plant pays the most of all the business deals, but at some point I got curious about if it's REALLY worth it and I A/B tested that until I was satisfied with the conclusion that your city will be financially better off if you just say NO to toxic waste disposal.

After that, I never took this business deal again. It's just not worth it. It's better to actually get competent at doing community development so business thrives.

I started with playing the original SimCity and it's extremely hard to keep a city alive in that game. If you mess up, good luck recovering from it because you only get paid taxes once a year instead of once a month, there are no business deals and there are limited options for water infrastructure and electricity generation. So it's just very hard to meet demand for basic services and make the budget work and mistakes tend to be unrecoverable.

On exactly one occasion I had my city go to hell and managed to successfully recover it. I also spent substantial time in later versions of the game burning my cities to the ground regularly before going "Oh. Duh! Underfunding my fire stations is why and I should find some other way to cut costs and stay within budget."

I mean I had games where I just closed the game and walked away and gave up on putting out the fire and in one case things were so devastated, I saw poor white trash trailers as housing afterwards, something I have never seen before or since and don't know how to intentionally trigger. I had emotional scars associated with doing that and it's only a GAME. There's not actual lives at stake.

That's why I recommend playing games as free or cheap education for people in small communities trying to do any kind of development and it's why there's a dearth of good planning and economic development resources for small communities. Urban planning is inherently complicated and in the real world, you really do also just have people move away and not come back when you screw something up badly enough.

If I'm correct and the Main Street America program is a form of organized crime AND if I'm also correct that the people in Aberdeen, Washington running the local Main Street program are corrupt and have taken money to allow illegal dumping of toxic chemicals, that may help explain their extremely bizarre behavior towards me.

These were generally religious people and they believe in Christianity where the narrative is God loves you and where they believe in a personal savior who will PAY for YOUR sins so you can get into heaven. They believe in a concept of God sacrificing His only begotten son out of love for them and to pay off their spiritual debts so you get to go to heaven no matter how badly you screwed up.

I'm not Christian. I don't believe in that. I believe in karma and reincarnation. I believe your crap comes back to you.

So it's possible these crazy people believed the corrupt and incompetent gatekeepers could line their pockets by saying YES to poisoning the town and then selectively use some of my ideas to mitigate the harm THEY agreed to do to the town by using my information for free and intentionally SHAFTING me and insanely EXPECTING me to CARE about them and fall on my sword and sacrifice myself for their benefit to mitigate the evil of the Mafia preying upon them.

Sorry, no, the Mafia isn't the problem here. It's local leadership agreeing to be their little bitches that is the problem here.

As their Bible says, you cannot serve two masters. 

You cannot use my information while actively harming me and expect me to indefinitely say "That's FINE!"

If they were getting benefit from my lovely and well-researched profile of the town, well, I removed all that and that site now actively warns people to stay away and I've added another site encouraging people to shop elsewhere.

Historically, Greece, Iran and some other places esteemed to this day as bastions of civilized development viewed the honey bee as a symbol of peace because it's a mental model for trade.

The honey bee provides a service to flowers and pollinates them in exchange for getting what they need to make honey to feed themselves. It doesn't eat the flowers or damage the flowers. It helps them propagate and thrive in exchange for getting what they need to live.

This project is probably DEAD and this is the first NEW post I've written in several months, though I'm still doing some ongoing edits. I finally have the comic I've been trying to develop for something close to two decades and I hope to eventually have a clothing line.

My writing has NEVER adequately paid my bills and most writers don't make much. We have a few big names rolling in dough, but most writers are not making a ton of money.

The way to bet is that my best shot at establishing a planning and development business serving small communities was while actually living in Aberdeen, Washington in the thumb of the mitten state which has mostly small towns and no really big cities. Even the state capital not far from Aberdeen is a modest-sized city.

That was my best hope for getting people to use my maps on their websites for free and then link back to this site or other sites of mine with maps as free promotion for my work. People outside the region have little or no reason to use maps about that area.

It was my best hope for getting business via word of mouth or similar. That's a very big thing in small communities and small businesses and small communities tend to not be tech savvy and are unlikely to just hop on the band wagon of that hot new thing online.

I continue to write. If my clothing line aspirations ever get traction, I may stop having time to write as much.

If you value something, you should do right by the people involved in providing it. 

The people in Aberdeen knew I was trying to establish an income and I was extremely poor. They knew it was CRAZY to expect me to want to SAVE them from the Mafia if that's their personal Boogeyman or sheer incompetence of that's the real explanation while they actively and intentionally made it impossible for me to get credit for my work and turn my work into an earned income.

If you are getting value out of my writing and EXPECTING me to continue writing though it doesn't pay me adequately, you are both an asshole and a FOOL. Because if THIS doesn't pay off and some other opportunity comes up, you KNOW that I am going to go with what takes care of me by paying my bills.

There are countless sayings rooted in hard won human wisdom pertinent to what I think is probably happening in Aberdeen, Washington. Here's a couple:

Don't take the Dane geld.

If you lose your money, you've lost nothing. If you lose your health you've lost something. If you lose your character, you've lost everything.

Having nothing to do with ME per se, IF the Main Street America program is, in fact, a Mafia organization and its real mission is strangling development in the towns in question, you can't serve the needs of the people AND serve the goals of that program. If you actually WANT good things happening in your town so YOU have places to eat and shop, you have to say no to something like that.

That's WHY I made a good faith effort to genuinely support Wil Russoul, the man who got the job I applied for: He was a local and it's a position of trust and you can't prove to the town "You can TRUST me! Hire ME!" by SHAFTING him because you are mad he got the job you wanted and ALSO he's an INTENTIONALLY abusive asshole.

Anyone looking at that and CHOOSING to see Christian compassion or some nonsense -- well, that kind of ignorant stupid garbage is why religious homeschoolers give all homeschoolers a bad reputation. 

I'm glad Aberdeen, Washington is in my rearview mirror. I suggest you do all in your power to edit them out of your life if you live nearby and typically shop there.

No amount of money is worth it if the deal is "Let me POISON you and all your neighbors." That's before getting into my suspicion that the goal of the Main Street America program is strangling development in small town America.