I imagine they're more or less in an endless cycle of:

1. The economy is good, stockholders want growth, work on making the pizza better to grow the customer base.
2. The economy is bad, stockholders want profit/cost cutting, find cheaper suppliers for ingredients even if it hurts pizza quality.

Pizza is a simple enough dish to make that the quality of a normal pizza is basically just the quality of the ingredients summed together.

There was a guy on here who posted the budget for gut renovating his townhouse: https://www.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/comments/pq0ers/rowhouse_renovation_cost/

Obviously would depend on what 'knocking out some walls' entails, but 100K to do major potentially structural renovation is pretty hard to imagine.

I think you are right that in the classic modern version of the story Pandora is told not to open the box although she is not told why, IIRC she's made to think its a present she has to wait to open.

I'm not sure quite how to square your concept of agency (coming from what sounds like a literary background) with my concept of freedom (coming from someone in political science grad school). Having to pay bills and feed yourself is arguably an infringement on your freedom from need. You are subordinated to others because you have to eat and have shelter and those needs create opportunities for exploitation that you aren't protected from. Not being able to go to Europe is arguably an infringement on your freedom from obstacles, but its sort of a gray area, since your ability to get to Europe is presumably contingent on exploitative relationships with others (pilots, airline employees, taxi drivers, etc).

I would also say that beyond freedom from need stuff, most of the greater agency a billionaire has is not per se personal freedom but the ability to compel the subordination of others to his or her will. That is, the additional freedom/agency/whatever you want to call it of a billionaire compared to you is mostly built on other people being less free then they otherwise would be.

And this is where I have a hard time with how your concept of agency relates to Omelas, for one person to have the agency to remove the child without causing social collapse would imply a level of agency that is only possible by subordinating others. You can't generalize that kind of agency since any increase in it for one person is inherently a reduction for someone else, so a society where someone can free the child cannot possibly be more free than Omelas.

I'm confused by the analogy to Eve eating the apple and pandora's box.

Pandora's story is pretty murky in a lot of retellings, but while someone may have told her not to open the box, it is pretty clear that she didn't know what the consequences of opening the box would be. Hell contemporary classicists aren't super clear on what the consequences of opening the box were supposed to be.

Eve is more cut and dry in that she's forbidden from eating the fruit and is deceived into doing so anyway, but again, while there is a fair amount of hubris in making the choice, the main way in which she lacks freedom in doing so is that she isn't clear on the consequences of making it.

I'm not really sure what you mean by 'agency' either. Traditionally there are two types of freedom, freedom from obstacles and freedom from need. Some scholars extend freedom from need to include 'self mastery' ie being able to control your needs and not have dependence on something others can do without.

It is pretty clear that the people from Omelas have both freedom from constraint and freedom from need, the aside about drooz also demonstrates that self-mastery is fairly ubiquitous in their society although perhaps not universal.

To use your analogy, I would say that if I have been told by some external actor that if I scratch my nose they will kill my loved one, that would impact my freedom from obstacles, a foreign actor is constraining my choices to their own ends, and framing it as forbidden or 'if you do x, y will happen' is just a semantic distinction.

If on the other hand, by some inherent quirk of my and a loved ones physiology, scratching my nose is intrinsically linked to stopping that loved ones heart, that is not a constraint on my freedom any more than not having wings is a constraint on my freedom.

The suffering of the child is foundational and intrinsic to everything that makes Omelas good. And no one is deceived about the nature of the choice to leave the child to suffer. I would say its a pretty freely made choice.

I like the heaven and hell thing you've brought up, it reminds me of the parable of the long spoons, generally I feel like heaven and hell allegories are compelling when they hold a mirror up to the person in them and unsatisfying when they involve externally directed punishment or torture. The most narratively satisfying hells are the ones where you can leave at any time if you simply accept the goodness in the world and god's love, but some people are too broken to do so.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'they can't free or help the child' the child is not particularly guarded, the door to its cell is locked but that's about it, we aren't told who has the key but it seems like many people have access to the cell, hell the cell may only be locked from the inside for all the narrator tells us. No one is externally prevented from freeing the child. No one is even told not to free the child, they are simply told that their way of life cannot exist without the child's suffering.

Actions have consequences, that isn't a constraint on freedom, its simply a fact about the world. If I jump off a tall building, is it a constraint on my freedom that I will fall to my death rather than flying?

My point about the guilt line occurring before the dystopia concession has to do with how I read the story as a meta-narrative. The first part of the story is about a utopia and a meditation on why writing utopias is hard. Everything in the first part is true of Omelas, but it should also be true of a different utopia, or maybe even of the place the people who leave Omelas go. This section ends a little after the part I quoted when the narrator decides to concede a dystopian flaw to the reader, who she believes hasn't been able to suspend disbelief or enjoy the story up to this point.

You can read the free of guilt line as a ban on guilt along the lines of guilt about what happens to the child, but I think its also worth noting that the surface reading is that the world LeGuin wants, the one without child torture, would also be free of guilt. Perhaps the people of Omelas should feel guilt and shame, but it matters that the people who leave should be rid of guilt and shame when they get to where they are going.

I do think people in Omelas have both perfect freedom and perfect agency, everyone that is, except the child. What's brilliant about the child is that freeing it is not something anyone would do for themselves, its something they think they should want to do for the child, but they don't because to do so would also be selfish in terms of exposing a much greater number of people to suffering.

If you violently invade Omelas to save the child and kill/punish those most complicit in the child's suffering (so they don't just put a new child in the dungeon), you just replace the salvation through one suffering soul narrative of the child with salvation through the much greater suffering of the people killed and maimed by your invasion. You can leave Omelas any time you want but there is no way to change Omelas that doesn't produce greater suffering.

I like your free will question and your undergrad thesis sounds super interesting, but I don't think your readings of the guilt line is supportable, as narratively that aside is before the narrator concedes that Omelas is a dystopia, and is mostly in the context of whether the summer festival would have orgies. People in Omelas are free and that freedom includes freedom from any system of morality or social mores that would feel oppressive or cause them to feel guilt.

I think you're onto something about Omelas and free will, but I would flip it around. We tend to think about free will in terms of the ability to fix things that are broken and break things that are perfect. If you can't do both, you aren't free. Ask us to picture a perfect world, and we can only imagine it as some sort of cage, but Omelas is just imperfect enough for people to not just like, murder each other to rattle the bars. Staying in Omelas is a constant, free, uncoerced choice of their comfort over their integrity. You get to live an almost perfect life in total certainty of your own free will.

I tend to think of intentionally breaking the social contract as revolt, which is why it's interesting that no one takes up arms against the injustice, or gets thrown out, or starts a fight over the child. The people who leave either leave immediately after learning about the child or go through a few days of deep contemplation and then just walk out. Just as importantly, they aren't just leaving, they are going somewhere. Probably they are disgusted by the suffering of the child, but there is something deeper than that that actually motivates them to leave.

It's absolutely fair to see different meanings in stories. My beef is that there's a kind of vulgar interpretation of the meaning you're taking that directly contradicts and undermines the meaning that I'm talking about.

When people talk about the story like Le Guin is asking them to leave city life, industrial agriculture, technology, meat eating etc, etc, behind, that feels to me like the same failure of imagination Le Guin is critiquing. You are siding with the people of Omelas that comfort and happiness require abominable suffering, and you're choosing instead to suffer yourself, or you're not even getting there and just assuming that if you do everything the people of Omelas don't (IE live like a hermit in the woods) you are somehow not part of that society or your truck or cult or whatever you have with you in the woods aren't also fueled by the suffering of others.

Obviously in the real world there are tradeoffs and someone doing better sometimes means other people have to suffer, but even in our current, broken world, there are a lot of things we could do that would make everyone better off that we sometimes can't do out of a bitter habit of seeing everything as zero sum. Just going off the things in the story, it's totally possible to imagine that we could have dense, walkable cities with good public transit, abundant cheap food and energy, street fairs, orgies, computers, whatever, and to have the continued operation of all of those things not require any suffering.

I really don't get how everyone's take away from this story is about whether or not they would walk away.

Le Guin is crystal clear from the beginning that The Ones Who Walk Away is a meta-fictional critique of how we think about Utopia and Dystopia. The most powerful passage is in the middle where she writes:

>Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?
>
>They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex than us.
>
>The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
>
>How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time.

The child suffering that is necessary to keep the utopia going and which leads some citizens to walk away in disgust appears when she concedes that we cannot even imagine the joy of utopian Omelas without making it a parable about how things can never be perfect. And the point of the people who walk away isn't that they're morally superior to everyone else, it's that they can imagine and are building a pure utopia that we cannot even imagine and LeGuin cannot even compellingly describe. And we should feel weird about it, why does a fairly realistic take on a post-scarcity world only feel real when we add a single suffering child, what the fuck does a lonely child crying have to do with whether or not the good life is possible?

To be one of the people who walks away isn't to give up your iphone or go vegan or whatever, it's to be able to conceive of and build a future where no sacrifice, no pain, no suffering is remotely necessary. You can have your iphone, and food that tastes like exactly like meat (whether it is or isn't meat is up to your imagination) or maybe even better, you can easily get anywhere and do anything as long as you aren't hurting anyone. But you aren't a protagonist, you aren't special, there is no hierarchy for you to work your way up through, there's no one to lord being better over, there isn't some secret shame to keep you endlessly moving forward. The real test of Omelas is whether you can imagine a world where you are happy even if no one, anywhere, has it worse then you.

What are you even talking about? Miles is the last person we meet and basically every character is in plain sight the entire time besides Janelle Monae.

The comments Lionel and others made strongly suggested that the crystals are just a transport medium, and that everything powered by Klear would be powered through insufficiently retrofitted natural gas lines.

I don’t think gotcha-ing him with burning the Mona Lisa really works, it also cheapens the other interpretation of the ending which is that knowing who’s to blame can’t overcome huge power imbalances and sometimes the only way to achieve the barest recognition or catharsis is through violence.

I feel like this is a little misleading because property taxes also reduce the value of homes all else being equal, so the costs are more likely to be passed on via reduced sale price than increased monthly payments.