imagine a crime ring entirely comprised of philosophers

That's where the android breakthrough comes in handy. Just a locked down slave dome without any non essential services and only inhabited by androids.

You mean how Qatar did to their guest workers when they built the 2022 Football Stadiums?

"in this video essay I will describe the pervasive conditions in our current society and their roots..."

I think there is a NIMBY policy that encourages people to use less public transit. Idk about the sequel.

They did a lot more than that. The simulation in Cities Skylines 2 was so broken at the beginning that people couldn’t afford their rent but at the same time demanded better housing. The patch that fixed that essentially had „Removed landlords“ in its patch notes.

to clarify: the game monopoly plagiarized was created to mock landlords (the game in question is The Landlord’s Game)

Cities Skylines is the first domino on the new boom of people caring about city planning, walkability, public transit, micro-mobility, etc.

People build extremely dense cities then go "wait but traffic" dig into how to fix it and ultimately end up building far less car dependency into their cities as the easiest solution

This is about half of it. The "winning" city Magnasanti (pop 6 million, city stands for 50 thousand years):

Technically, no one is leaving or coming into the city. Population growth is stagnant. Sims don’t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it’s like going to the same place.

There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle – this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards.

The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time. – Vincent Ocasla, while explaining the reason why he wanted to create Magnasanti.

This comment goes hard.

I sure hope this isn't something that regularly occurs throughout many civilizations over the past few thousand years.

I read well more than half of this before I realized it was not advice for Cities Skylines. lol

Related/unrelated.

I played Sim City at an early age and ever since then I've always looked at riots and large-scale social unrest as a failure on the part of the player. IE: if you are tasked with running, managing and creating policy and housing and jobs for your citizens, and then they riot or protest, it's because YOU fucked up.

I cannot fathom how this basic, simple "game mechanic" has been lost across such a large swath of the population.

Oh, yeah, once you break down everything happening in Factorio or Satisfactory, it's pretty quickly apparent that you're the bad guy in this story. I often hum "Paved Paradise, put up a parking lot" while playing them.

Isn't colonialism sucking the between-the-lines premise of Factorio? You arrive on a new planet which already has a local population. You start collecting resources, building factories&shit there, polluting the hell out of the air around you. Locals get pissed and start attacking you, you kill them without ever considering them sentient beings. At some point, you also kinda have to also reduce everything and everyone within the range of your artillery to ashes - even before they become hostile. In the process you keep polluting the air until it is black with soot, destroy entire ecosystems for land or resources, turn water into sludge. The only thing missing to make it more realistic is enslaving the locals to work for you. It's really grim if you think about the gameplay that way.

IRL, this is why conservatives are working so hard to turn community colleges into vocational schools as opposed to low-cost ways to transfer to 4-year schools.

History and systemic racism did a great job of making sure that going straight from HS to 4-year schools is only possible if you come from privilege (for the most part), and community colleges fought back to give all people access to traditional college education. So now, conservatives are trying to incentivize CC's turning into vocational schools while pushing to cut their funding at every opportunity.

Source: I teach in a CC and have watched all sorts of right-wing talking points get pushed onto us under the guise of student success. Turns out, ~~forcing unprepared students to leave~~ cutting funding to their community college if they don't finish fast enough is not really about student success; it's about limiting their options. edit: they're not truly forcing them to leave, just penalizing colleges if it takes students more than 3 years to transfer and trying to make it illegal to offer foundational math/English courses