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.