Been daydreaming about a city builder sim that realistically characterizes cars. No “magic parking”, no perfect drivers, with pollution mapping, traffic deaths, an average commute time per citizen as a statistic, that kind of thing.

I imagine it starting out exactly like Cities: Skylines, where you start building out your town with commercial and industrial and residential zones. As you lay out roads and utilities, the citizens keep demanding more parking and bigger roads. If you build them, your town becomes mostly parking lots and huge, dangerous roads. People complain about living near pollution, loud car noises, traffic deaths and commute times. Your town would have negative income from all of the building and maintenance costs and constantly be needing to be bailed out due to how expensive it all is.

The trick, then, would be not to listen to the complaints from car drivers. The only way to build your town where the budget is balanced properly is to increase density, utilize mixed use areas, and to build as few large roads and utility corridors as possible. The game wouldn’t tell you this outright, it would simply give you realistic price tags and maintenance costs compared to people moved and let the player problem solve and optimize.

There would be a robust palette of micromobility options, public transit, greenways and parks and pedestrian areas. Car access would be optional for building placement and based more on emergency vehicles or services. You could design your own streets with your desired configuration of bike paths, street cars, pedestrian walkways and green spaces and save templates to use elsewhere.

There would be lots of beautiful middle density building models, parks, and plazas, and a mode where you could rehabilitate an already developed car centric city.

If someone made this game I would be so happy and play it all the time, making a perfect transit utopia

My point is that if you want to win in a first-past-the-post voting system, if you can’t get everyone to vote for your candidate the next best thing is to stop your opposition from showing up. Common tactics are limiting who has access to polling places, purging people from voting rolls, adding barriers to registration, and sabotaging mail-in ballots, but you can also encourage apathy, purity testing or erode faith in the electoral system, all of which work to allow a party with a minority of supporters to win an election.

Friendly reminder that a common propaganda tactic is to discourage your opposition from voting

Yeah! Pizza dough is pretty easy, it’s basically flour, water, yeast, olive oil and time. A pizza pan is <$20. I’ve played with a lot of weird flavors and toppings and a white pizza is fantastic with apple slices, some ham and a drizzle of honey.

Here’s a recipe I found that seems similar to the one I like to make, but I’d skip the arugula

Apples are so good on a white pizza!

Cilantro, with the soapy gene. It tastes like soap, but eh, I kind of like it.

My Swiss friend got me converted to Kaegie chocolates, same concept as KitKat but so much more decadent!