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What routes would attaches from the west coast even use? The overland route sounds pretty hostile, do we have an airport?
Multiple airports, even. When I wrote the Old Crows omakes, I figured that O'Hare would be defunct and Chicago would be relying on Midway International, which is smaller and closer to the city center and probably a lot easier to keep functional on some basic minimum level.

I have laid out my reasoning for taking retraining before, but it is completely understandable if you missed it, since it was inside the longer discussion I had with Simon.
To address your criticism: The best course of action IMO is to take a filler action in tech, since the retraining requires experts and timing to be done properly. Since we will only get experts at best one turn from now, I decided not to take Retraining Campaigns, to be able to time the action to correctly coincide with further factory expansion.
So, the choice remains between getting presses and refilling our old world equipment. And I'm more in inclined towards towards getting old world equipment, since it allows us a immediate edge in the case of hostilities with the Minnesotans, while building semi-modern planes is something years removed from our current abilities.
To present my own counterpoints to this:

1) I think that the retraining campaign's actions can very beneficially be begun even without experts. First, because there are many basic skills that we don't need perfectly trained experts to start teaching. Second, because there is a lot of groundwork to be laid when starting a major adult education campaign, such as "where are the classrooms" and "do we have a budget to pay instructors." This work can be done to a large extent whether the experts are here or not.

2) I think that while the text of this action does caution us against overtraining a ton of workers when we have no place to employ them, this is much less of a concern than the opposite problem. It's much better to have overtrained workers grumbling and going back to digging ditches for a year because there's no factory job that requires their new skills, than to have factories standing idle because no one's taught the ditch-diggers how to read yet. Furthermore, there's a lot of non-state enterprises being founded in the Commonwealth right now, stuff that isn't under our direct control, and those enterprises will benefit from a better trained workforce even if we haven't taken some specific government action yet. The state is not the sole, nor even the primary, employer here.

(For the socialists in the audience, I am treating co-ops as potential employers even though the employees are the owners and all)

For these reasons, I think it would be better to start the retraining campaign sooner, rather than later. In theory, something bad might happen if we complete it too soon, but the consequences of finishing too late would be worse. And it's a two-success action, so if we spend only one action this turn, we can always delay completion if it looks like we don't need to finish it yet. But we can't easily be assured of getting the project done quickly as a rush job if it turns out we waited too long, not without exorbitant overspending of dice.
 
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1) I think that the retraining campaign's actions can very beneficially be begun even without experts. First, because there are many basic skills that we don't need perfectly trained experts to start teaching. Second, because there is a lot of groundwork to be laid when starting a major adult education campaign, such as "where are the classrooms" and "do we have a budget to pay instructors." This work can be done to a large extent whether the experts are here or not.
And I remain skeptical of the idea. Before we actually start expat outreach, the number of experts we can get is unknown to us. The refugees are still lack access to our social system, so doing this before finishing Refugeee Management would make this action geared towards CFC natives, further increasing the social divide. With our current lack of experts, the project will be far planned far below the capacity with foreign experts, leaving us with fewer skilled workers than could be otherwise obtained. Put it another way: How well could you organize primary schools, if you didn't know how many teachers you will have? If your estimates are anywhere between several orders of magnitude?
2) I think that while the text of this action does caution us against overtraining a ton of workers when we have no place to employ them, this is much less of a concern than the opposite problem. It's much better to have overtrained workers grumbling and going back to digging ditches for a year because there's no factory job that requires their new skills, than to have factories standing idle because no one's taught the ditch-diggers how to read yet. Furthermore, there's a lot of non-state enterprises being founded in the Commonwealth right now, stuff that isn't under our direct control, and those enterprises will benefit from a better trained workforce even if we haven't taken some specific government action yet.
I repeat that Retraining campaigns isn't an adult literacy project, it's a project educating people in trades. If we start the project now, the problem will not be a glut of workers. The problem will be not fully using the potential of expats, which leads to fewer skilled workers. Mechanically, you are more likely to waste an action point. I can see no reason to start training people this turn, especially not if the action calls out the complete lack of experts two times as a problem.
ing the branch libraries as cornerstones for this work, roll out training programs focusing on vital sectors of your economy for the war, trying to get your adults in a better position to contribute. You have too many people, right now, whose primary skills consist almost entirely of subsistence farming. Of course, a training effort on this scale...you have few people who could be called specialists in such things, let alone experts. DC: 40. Successes Needed: 2. AP Limit: 3. Effect: Establish a body of workers who can be employed in your vital job industries. Best to time it properly so you have neither a glut of spare workers, nor businesses standing empty...but with few local experts to oversee the training efforts, that timing will be a challenge.
If I'm overlooking a reason to do this action this turn, please tell me.
 
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And I remain skeptical of the idea. Before we actually start expat outreach, the number of experts we can get is unknown to us. The refugees are still lack access to our social system, so doing this before finishing Refugeee Management would make this action geared towards CFC natives, further increasing the social divide. With our current lack of experts, the project will be far planned far below the capacity with foreign experts, leaving us with fewer skilled workers than could be otherwise obtained. Put it another way: How well could you organize primary schools, if you didn't know how many teachers you will have? If your estimates are anywhere between several orders of magnitude?
I don't think we can count on a realistic influx of expats to the point where they outnumber CFC-resident teachers by one order of magnitude, let alone "several." And if we do get such an influx, the rewards of having so many more experts will more than solve our problems. Figuring out what to do with them all will constitute an embarrassment of riches, an "I wish I had problems like this more often" problem, compared to the potential bad consequences of delay.

More realistically, we're going to be getting a flow of expert advice and support, but not a flood. And when it comes to things like that, believe me, there never was a school that couldn't figure out how to benefit from having more teachers than it expected.

I think starting the action will not be a regrettable choice. I think trying to go all-in on it to finish it (that is, 2-3 dice invested) would be a mistake, but I don't think starting it will be a bad idea.

I repeat that Retraining campaigns isn't an adult literacy project, it's a project educating people in trades. If we start the project now, the problem will not be a glut of workers. The problem will be not fully using the potential of expats, which leads to fewer skilled workers.
An existing program can expand to accommodate more people. Nothing about any action we've seen since game start leads me to think that just because the thing we set up was originally designed not to count on having more people working on it, it will be inherently unable to adapt to having more people show up midway through the project. I think you have an excessively inflexible and narrow picture of what this action leads to.

Also, it will be a lot easier to bring in the relevant sort of expat expert if they see us working on the problem. People aren't going to want to go all Peace Corps in the American heartland training tradespeople if there's no actual school being set up for them to teach at.
 
I think starting the action will not be a regrettable choice. I think trying to go all-in on it to finish it (that is, 2-3 dice invested) would be a mistake, but I don't think starting it will be a bad idea.
Let's start from the beginning: Your idea that the first phase just involves planning is pure speculation. It's an assumption made by you and you further assume no negative effects can come from it. There are substantial issues contextually (planning access to a project without knowledge of the resources and with current scarcity, increased difficulty getting the balancing act between maintaining wages for labor and factory demand right, delayed access to training for refugees) from finishing it halfway. There is also the simply mechanical point that you run an increased risk of wasting a tech AP, since getting experts is near guaranteed to drop the action in difficulty. You are ignoring explicit warnings based on speculation to start an action before there is any need for it, because it sounds somewhat important. That is a bad idea in my humble opinion.
An existing program can expand to accommodate more people. Nothing about any action we've seen since game start leads me to think that just because the thing we set up was originally designed not to count on having more people working on it, it will be inherently unable to adapt to having more people show up midway through the project. I think you have an excessively inflexible and narrow picture of what this action leads to.
To continue this conversation: Supposing your unproven assumption about the nature of the halfway point proves true, I still see issues with your reasoning. If you get a sudden influx of experts, you need to throw your previous plans based on scarcity rationing away and plan the thing over. Bureaucracy isn't scalable by default, as our current bureaucratic woes with rapid CFC expansions prove. I don't expect this to be represented mechanically, but expect a lower reward contextually if we finish the action halfway before we get our first stream of experts.

Retraining campaigns isn't a priority. Keeping our military ace in the hole ready for prolonged conflict in case of conflict with Minnesota is.

Also, your plan involves spending two AP on an irrelevant action (council representation could be done literally any time) and double spending on outreach. Given our current AP crunch, I think this waste isn't justifiable. Additionally, the later we get taxation, the later we can form a standing army.
 
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[X] Plan Taxes for our Charm Offensive v2
- [X]DoD (1/1)
-- [X] Officer Academies 1 AP, 1/2 80%
-[X] DepState (4/1)
-- [X] Expand the Department 1 AP, 70%
-- [X] Source Foreign Arms 2 AP, ?%
-- [X] Expatriate Outreach 1 AP, 85%
- [X] DepDomestic (6/1)
-- [X] Refugee Management 2 AP, 1/1 95%, Overflow 56%
-- [X] The Works 2 AP, 1/2 81%, 2/2 49%
-- [X] Renovate the Bureau of Taxation 2 AP, 1/2 84%, 2/2 36%
- [X] DepDev (3/3)
-- [X] Build Rail 2 AP 75%, 1/1 95%, Overflow 56%
-- [X] Industrial Assessment 1 AP, 75%
- [X] DepSec (2/1)
-- [X] Long Tail 1 AP, 70%
-- [X] Trouble in Minnesota 1 AP, 75%
- [X] DepTech (1/1)
-- [X] Old World Equipment, 1 AP, 1/2 70%
- [X] DepEducation (2/2)
-- [X] School Survey 2 AP, 1/2 65%, 2/2 42.3%
 
Let's start from the beginning: Your idea that the first phase just involves planning is pure speculation. It's an assumption made by you and you further assume no negative effects can come from it.
Look at multi-step projects we've taken. The first step is always "groundwork laid, but the project isn't ready to take effect."

In any case, what it comes down to is that you can lecture me on how crippling it might be if the retraining program suddenly has access to a lot more specialists than it expected to when the program is already partway ready for its initial rollout. I don't think it will be that crippling. I have different perceptions from you on the hazards, skill base, logistics, and numbers of people involved. Things you see as powerful, ominous narrative warnings, I see as potential second-order consequences we shouldn't be too afraid of. Things I see as straightforward and obvious results of the narrative reality of the story underlying our mechanics, you see as unproven speculation.

In short, we disagree. Quite vigorously.

This argument has become incredibly repetitive and tiresome, furthermore, so this is going to be the last time I hash this out with you in this thread.

The reason I brought it up this time is because we are now engaged in the vote discussion, so my counterpoints become relevant to the general audience.

And at this point, any reader of our argument up to this point will know what you think the problem is, and that I think you are overestimating the problem.

As far as I'm concerned, that is enough.

Retraining campaigns isn't a priority. Keeping our military ace in the hole ready for prolonged conflict in case of conflict with Minnesota is.
Isn't it?

Given how badly we trounced the Vicks, I don't expect us to really need to use Old World Equipment to defeat the likes of the Minneapolitans. I don't really think our existing forces are likely to bother, and I don't foresee the quest voters expending a charge of it for this situation, except perhaps to avert disaster caused by misfortune, a situation in which I wouldn't mind expending the OWE we have left.

By contrast, having an educated and flexible workforce with an ample supply of tradesmen and increased spread of basic technical knowledge? That really matters in the long run.
 
As a chicagoan the thing about O'hare is that as a major international airport, it is practically it's own city in some ways including what feels like hundreds of miles of parking lot, access road, and such just for the terminals. Feeding right into the highways. Which are likely to be blown up. So yeah, o'hare is probably blyat. Midway's terminal access is practically in the middle of downtown by comparison.

[X] Plan I Got 77 Problems
 
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As a chicagoan the thing about O'hare is that as a major international airport, it is practically it's own city in some ways including what feels like hundreds of miles of parking lot, access road, and such just for the terminals. Feeding right into the highways. Which are likely to be blown up. So yeah, o'hare is probably blyat. Midway's terminal access is practically in the middle of downtown by comparison.
To be fair, this matters a lot less if you're just flying very specific flights out of O'Hare and just need to reactivate one control tower, a few radars, and whatnot, and not the massive machinery of the terminals.

But if you want the CFC to actually have a functional airport for civilian air traffic, Midway sounds like the better choice, yeah.
 
[X] Plan I Got 77 Problems

Bad rolls are revisionist and Victorian propaganda, thus they will not happen and have never occurred. This has been a message from the machine state bureau of agitprop.
 
[X] Plan I Got 77 Problems

I think getting two doses of expatriate outreach is the key here, and having skilled labor of all stripes come to Chicago will make our life easier.

While taxes are nice, we're in such a position of lacking skilled labor that randomly getting someone who is a heart surgeon, a florist, an insurance investigator, a pastry chef, a civil engineer and/or a factory worker is a benefit to our economy as they can both help us with their specific fields and train others on how to be those things. There is that much of a brain drain going on with the American diaspora and the CFC.

Even as someone as common as an old world file clerk would be monumentally useful as they can help us go through the mountains of old paperwork, and if they have time, help train people in all the hidden tips and tricks that would be lost from rediscovering how to do such paperwork from the ground up.

Same with a pastry chef and learning how to bake everything from bread to wedding cakes. A florist in how to preserve plants in the best of conditions, an insurance investigator on how to do espionage and find any discrepancies. Any job that might seem less than practical is actually a godsend because their skill set can be redirected into more practical fields, AND our civilization improves once we have the ability to have a birthday cake, flowers to present our spouse, a safer factory, our medical files not getting lost in the hospital records room, and someone to operate on anyone having health problems.
 
So looking back, it's unintentionally realistic that Rumford never encounters resistance from law enforcement until it's too late. The cops and FBI were probably full of people sympathetic to his cause.
 
I highly doubt that especially with the FBI
They may not have specifically wanted his exact outcome, but we've observed that enough of the police are ultra-conservative in their political leanings that... Well, police, institutionally, may well have been sympathetic to things like the early "Christian Marines" going into "the wrong" areas of Boston and beating the shit out of 'the wrong kind of people.'

The FBI is a mixed bag. They do, in real life, maintain active infiltration of far-right groups and there's no reason to expect that to change unless a string of far-right politicians shut them down. But we've also seen enough about the way they handle certain far-right terrorist groups to make a timeline where they just seem unwilling or unable to really go after a new far-right terrorist group as a priority, and are instead shifting their energy to stop "black radicals" or "eco-terrorist" groups that they exaggerate into far more of a threat to the American people than is really the case.
 
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