US Federal Policy

Quote of the Week

When everyone was “driving” horses, and nobody had cars, and there were no gas stations, every isolated new stretch of road built in 1902 could not possibly have passed FTA cost benefit analysis criteria.  — Russell Bozian, in an email.

Did Sim City Make Us Stupid?

250px-SimCity_Classic_cover_art My post on the lack of good simulation games triggered this reverie from Peter, regarding the city-planning simulation game, Sim City:

Ah, SimCity.  … As a youngster I spent many hours building fields of residential tract housing, industrial parks, huge blighted and substantially vacant commercial districts, mega-highways connecting them all, and Godzilla.

When I recently discovered that the original SimCity was released as open source, I had to download it and try it out. I knew that it was inaccurate, but it was nostalgia. Then I discovered exactly how inaccurate it was. “No mixed residential and commercial areas?!? WTF!” I did play it long enough to also notice that transportation was pretty much a capital expenditure with no operating costs. Sigh.

Yes, those are the two of the worst fallacies built into the original Sim City:  

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