2026-10-03

• Timing of possible submissions in February.
• Major areas of development for fall 2026.
  • Joint production
    • Output inventories, stored-up output
    • Model by-products
    • Adaopt new products in catalogues
    • Firms change production techniques
  • Retirement -- life cycle
  • Trade with a capitalist economy
  • Model fixed capital
• The Boston group versus the people outside of Boston -- coordinating.
• Improved PR procedure

2026-08-26

• Presentation drafting.

Order of Presenters at INDEP 2026-08-29 Meeting

• Introduction: Amittai (1-13)
• System overview first slide: Nathan (15)
• Design principles: Alex (16-17)
• Supply chain (high level) + System overview: Nathan (18-24)
• Initialization: Alex (25-34)
• Operation:
• Persons, Firm Intro, Demand, Reordering Decisions: Devin (35-42)
• Plan — Basic theory — Amittai (43)
• Plan Drafting: Devin (44-51)
• Plan Starting, Execution, Ending: Amittai (52-58)
• Price Controller and Employment Transfers: Alex (59-70)
• Results/Overseer Demo: Alex presenting. Everyone can jump in.
• Basics (Supply, demand, plans, prices), Activity, Division of Labor, Busyness - Alex (72-88)
• Firm accounts - Amittai (89)
• FIC: Theory - Alex (90-91)
• FIC: Results, Public Sector Fund, Work Week Adjustments - Devin (92-99)
• Conclusion/future goals: Amittai (100-END)

2026-08-19

• Lightning rounds.
• Presentation prep - who is presenting what?
• PR #285 - Eventually migrate employment transfer system to workers.
• PR #299 - Work week adjustment prototype demo.
• Final possible tweaks before presentation
  • max_order_size circular dependency
  • The reorder threshold guard — unnecessary?
  • Demand processing during plan execution instead of at time of reservation.

2026-08-12

• Lightning rounds.
• Undergraduate presentations.
• Changes to worker transfer mechanism — Issue #294 and PR #295 (Alex).
• Floating work week — Issue #223 and PR #258 (Devin).

2026-08-05

• Lightning rounds.
• Current status of the code base and Overseer.
• Any further changes before INDEP presentation time —
  • Nathan — -02 flag and DEBUG compilation.
  • Amittai — firm accounts.
  • Devin — work day?
  • Alex - new Overseer submodule, etc.
• Undergrad presentations 2026-08-11 — 10 minutes per presentation!
• INDEP presentation preparations.

2026-07-29

• Lightning rounds
• Review current status - we have achieved stability!!!!!!
• Performance and number of people/employment transfers
• Presentation prep

2026-07-15

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Plans for the CS Department's summer-"end" undergraduate research presentations.
• Avoiding duplicate orders (PR #283, Devin).
• Machines.
• Write-up so far.
• Release for presentation
• Employment

2026-07-15

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Undergraduate research symposium — August 4, 5, or 11.
• Check and reorder.
• Worker allocation.
• Demand.
• Bugs, insights, discoveries, questions.
• Near-term priorities.

2026-07-08

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• We are moving too fast and breaking things.
  • Prioritizing issues.
  • Keeping algorithms as simple and self-evident (and un-ingenious) as possible.
  • Making sure that everything is working robustly before moving on to a new goal.
  • Minimal functionality goals?
• Worker allocation bug.
• Current issues.

2026-07-01

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Price computation options
• The meaning of a firm's account
• Current issues

2026-06-24

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Presentation to IDA (and INDEP) in late summer: Sat. 2026-08-29, time TBD
• Modeling fixed capital ("machines")
• Unit testing! (Nathan)
• Current issues

2026-06-17

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Presentation to IDA (and INDEP) in late summer: Sat. 2026-08-29?
• Uses of debt as a signal
• Modeling supply chains (Ivan)
• Current issues

2026-06-03

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Presentation to IDA (and INDEP) in late summer
• Services and the public sector
  • Theory of FIC
• Correcting the normalization of the IO matrix that includes consumer goods
• Report from Mexico
  • Advanced and underdeveloped regions
  • How do we get there from here?
• Current issues

2026-05-27

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Funding issues (and loss of Wes)
• Time banks
• Debt
• Concurrency
• Current issues

2026-05-17

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Wealth divergence.
• Meeting times.
• New issues.
  • Logging API and format (#204).
  • New class hierarchy (#202).
    • Where does the mean consumption frequency belong?
      • Side note: eliminate mean_consumption_period. Please do not leave commented-out code in the code base! Please call this out in code reviews.
    • Keep production batch size?
  • Safety issues (#191).
  • Other new issues.
• Old issues.

2026-05-10

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Zhejun's project presentation.
• Time banks.
• Welcome, Wes!
• Distributor changes (Sal).
• Falling wealth issue: updates?
• Summer priorities
  • Clean up the code base
  • Machines
  • Model services
  • Model a public sector
  • Introduce productivity improvements
  • Introduce competition (over quality)
  • Model inventions and changes in tastes or needs
  • Model trade with money-based economies
  • Model Systems IV and V.

2026-05-03

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Money and time distribution for our team. (10 minutes)
• Zhejun quick preview of next week. (10 minutes)
• Discussion: initial conditions, busyness, and equilibrium conditions. (45 - 60 minutes)
  • Corresponding action items.

2026-04-26

• Welcome, Nathan!
• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Order size - 30 minutes.
• Old PR in Trade repo?
• Pending issues, assignments, appointments.

2026-04-19

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Name of new repo (Amittai) - 10 minutes.
• New member: Nathan Lim (?) (Amittai) - 2 minutes.
• Review Alex's questions about Devin's code (Alex and Devin) - 20 minutes.
• Steps for the rest of the semester.
  • Unit tests and refactoring?

2026-04-12

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Graphic interface (Alex) - 45 minutes.
• Reorganization of the GitHub repos (Amittai) - 10 minutes.
• Current issues - 10 minutes.

2026-04-05

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• New logging features.
• Problems encountered during the logging development:
  • Workers at firms:
    • Workers seem to be added to workers only one by one when transferred in.
    • Producers move workers from workers or from the unemployed into a plan's workers, but never move them back to Firm::workers.
    • Distributors never seem to acquire workers at all.
  • Distributors' plans: a distributor only creates plans in its constructor. What happens when the plan is finished?
• Devin's new list of bugs (Issue #170).
• BEACH poster.
• Future challenges in adding or removing people or products.
  • The numbers (goods, people, perhaps machines) need to come from Society rather than from Sim's initial settings.
  • Pricing a new product: is an IO recomputation necessary?
• Monopolies and competition.

2026-03-29

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Modeling supply graphs and pipelines (Ivan) - 30 minutes.
• Poster for BEACH (2026-04-10) - 15 minutes.
• Making the repo public and restructuring the repo - 15 minutes.

2026-03-22

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Modeling worker reallocation.
• Zhejun's poster.
• Review current issues from oldest to newest.

2026-03-15

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes each, please!
• Input and output inventories.
• Issue #134 (consumption and shopping).
• Review current issues from oldest to newest.
• Upcoming: BEACH Workshop at BC. Undergrad posters are invited (without review).

2026-02-22

• Lightning round. Under 3 minutes, please!
• Current state of PRs and issues.
• Modeling trade (Zhejun) - 10 minutes.
• Overall review (Alex)
• Future stuff
  • Controlling plans — prices and debts as signals (Amittai)
  • Modeling risk and the public sector (Amittai)

2026-02-15

• Meeting cancelled last week because of overload. Individual meetings were held during the week.
• Lightning round: 3-minute timer.
• Price controller changes.
• Bug demo.
• New Wiki page: chain of events.
• Modeling the person.

2026-02-01

• Meeting cancelled this week because Devin and Sal are at a hackathon.
• Sending updates to each other by e-mail for this week.
• We have a scheduling problem next week as well.
• Next deadline: March 22 (IEEE-SMC).
• Other research group, Gesellschaft Nach dem Geld ("Society after Money").

2026-01-23

• Lightning round: 3-minute timer.
• CCSCNE2026 🙁.
• Next: ACM-SIGECOM
• Code: Consumption and distribution.
• Code: Plan (cleaning up).
• Code: Logging subsystem.
• When shall we make the repo public?

2026-01-18

• Lightning round: 3-minute timer.
• Bugs in Firm (and elsewhere?) revealed through simulation trace.
• How to model distributors' prices.
• Current issues.
• Graphing.
  • We need to create a logging abstraction that can switch between text traces and the accumulation of data in std::vectors or std::unordered_maps.
  • What do we want to graph?
    • Inventory levels
    • Orders — placement, bidding, adoption of a plan, completion, price revisions.
    • Worker allocation
    • Demand signals?
    • Earnings, consumption expenditures

2026-01-12

• Lightning round: 3-minute timer.
• The current state of the project
  • Changes that I have made — reorganization, support for unit tests, initial prices, machinery, and price updates with the Price Controller.
  • Changes that Sal and Devin have made — accounting for machinery use (Sal), workers’ abilities (Devin), the “bidding” process (Devin), etc.
• Process
  • Code review: acknowledging our apparent hierarchy
  • Coding style
  • Before creating a PR, please always
    • Build the project: run make from the Agent-Based Simulation directory. (Then run make clean.)
    • Build and run unit tests: make tests, cd test, ./run_tests.sh.
  • Issue labels: in process and under review.
• Plans for this spring
  • Development
    • Graphs
    • Modeling services
    • Modeling spontaneous productivity improvements
    • Modeling trade with capitalist economies
    • Modeling changes in consumer demands, creation of new firms, etc.
    • Modeling the public sector.
  • Publication and support
    • Paper for ACM-SIGECOM (Rome) (2/2).
    • Posters for CCSCNE2026 (Smith College) (3/1).
    • Paper for IEEE-SMC (Bellevue) (3/22).
    • Various grant possibilities

2025-12-14

• Lightning round—please be brief!—we can come back later to matters requiring discussion.
• Tidying things up
  • Repo organization.
  • Style—see the Style Guide wiki page. In particular: 4 spaces for indentation at each level. Use my vimrc configuration file.
  • Keep interfaces as small as possible and keep concerns separated.
  • Revisions to Society class and consequences to other classes.
  • The Git workflow
    • Someone writes a new issue and assigns it. (Issues should be small enough to become manageable PRs.)
    • The assignee does the work, including tests. (Mark the issue "in progress.")
    • The author creates a PR and marks the issue "under review."
    • Reviewers may comment and may request changes.
    • The author should respond to comments explicitly. The reviewer should mark each comment as "resolved" if and only if it is indeed resolved.
    • A reviewer A=approves. The reviewer does not merge the changes into main.
    • The author of the PR merges the changes into main.
    • Everybody else must sync up local repos.
• Changes to price logic.
  • In Product: living labor and input units are per unit, not per order. (Devin: do you need to change your arithmetic?)
  • The Society constructor initializes input dependencies in a way that avoids cycles.
  • Machines to be added. Society must distinguish machines from other products because Product distinguishes them from other inputs, because plans distinguish accounts for machines from other accounts.
• The Beginning of Time
  • Distributors need to have initial inventories. Otherwise, consumers would have to wait, and we do not—and perhaps should not—model that. (It would require distinguishing staple from luxury goods, which is for later.)
• TESTING!
  • Doctest.
  • How shall we organize the work?
• Next steps—high-priority issues and a timeline.

2025-12-07

• Lightning round - time <= 3 min. each, please! (25 min.)
• New issues: on_time_step. (Amittai, 2 min.)
• Report: Devin (30 min.)
  • Create new issues as neccesary.
• Report: Sal (30 min.)
  • Create new issues as neccesary.
• Question: overproduction and lack of take-up from a producer or consequences of not producing on time.

---

2025-06-30

• Thomas Haerdin: Planning Complexity for Model Economies -- https://www.haerdin.se/blog/2021/02/24/planning-complexity-for-model-economies/ (Alex)
• Simulation modeling of capitalism (Sal)
• Cockshott, et al., Classical Econophysics, Chapter 8 (Joshua)
• Cockshott, et al., Classical Econophysics, Chapter 9 (Zhejun)
• Reflections on the INDEP meeting and proposals (Amittai)

2025-07-07

• Sal, Zhejun: diagrams of subsystems and discussions.
• In-kind planning, budgeting, and accounting.

2025-07-14

• Report on SASE (Alex)
• Code presentations (Zhejun, Sal, Joshua?)
• Time-money interface
• Organization: we need an economist; venues for presentation (Amittai)
• Phase II ideas, including in-kind accounting (Amittai)
• Action items:
  • Individual meetings to be scheduled (Amittai)
  • Alex will contact Sascha Tomič
  • Zhejun will investigate published research on estimating the money value of labor

2025-07-21

• Updates (Amittai)

  • Juliet Schor, Sasha Tomic, Richard Wolff.
  • INDEP thread. https://forum.indep.network/t/a-question-to-ida-comrades-labour-time-accounting-of-inputs/120/2
  • Zhejun's issues (for discussion), bibliography, and resources.

• Code updates:

  • Joshua
  • Sal
  • Zhejun

• Thomas's blog posting on in-kind accounting: https://www.haerdin.se/blog/2024/10/08/in-kind-accounting/

2025-07-28

• Code updates and presentations (Joshua, Sal, Zhejun)
• Publication and presentation targets and deadlines.
• Individual innovation -- spreads "instantaneously" throughout the firm.
• The sector -- other firms in the industry adapt the innovation at various (random) rates, but fairly quickly.
• The society as a whole sees productivity increases across sectors. (State change.)
• Options regarding the threshold:
  • (a) All (or almost all) sectors have seen a decrease in labor time costs of at least x%.
  • (b) At least y% of all sectors have sen a decrease in labor time costs of at least x%.
• Options regarding the response:
  • (a) Prices are recomputed based on new real average costs, sector by sector.
  • (b) - Compute average decrease in necessary labor time across all sectors as a percentage of current official prices.
    • Apply that average decrease equally to all prices to for the new official prices.

============== 2025-08-04

• Code updates from everyone - walking us through the current big picture of what each student is doing and continuing to work on issues.
  • Begin thinking about what we are going to try and show with our simulations
• Theory Q&A session: bring questions about value theory/cybernetics and I'll do my best to answer them! Suggested topics:
  • The relationship between prices and values within an equilibrium model
  • Rigorously defining the rate of exploitation
  • The fundamental Marxian theorem (exploitation is necessary and sufficient for profit)
  • The transformation problem
  • The falling rate of profit
  • The general law of capital accumulation
  • Anything else (not necessarily relating to value theory!)

2025-08-11

• Presentation day (8/22).
• Joshua
• Labor reallocation
• Zhejun
• MELT computation techniques

2025-08-18

• Brief report on a conversation with Tom O'Brien and Donal O'Coisdealbha
• Titles and abstracts
  • Sal
  • Zhejun
• Presentations
  • Sal
  • Zhejun
• Dinner plans?

2025-09-14

• Frequency of future meetings.
• Immediate next steps:
  • Rewrite Joshua's code to make it more readable and transparent.
  • Formalize the relation of simulation step k + 1 to simulation step k as a recurrence relation (or set of recurrence relations) of the form s_{k + 1} = f(s_{k}).
  • Expand the model, based on a defined basket of essential goods and services. (Many firms producing, workers entering and leaving the workforce, etc.)
  • Add into the new framework the recomputation of prices (from Sal's project).
    • Hypothesis: the more different goods and services there are in the basket, the shorter the period before the threshold is met, approaching a point where prices can be recomputed immediately.
• Longer-term issues to be addressed:
  • Trade with the money economy -- what regulations would we need and how can we model them?
  • Managing capital investments.
    • Amortizing cost.
    • Theorizing "debt."
  • Managing labor force relocation.
  • Modeling new firm creation and firm destruction.
  • Managing scarcity and harmful outputs.
• Our research environment:
  • Robin Hahnel: Participatory Economics, democratic economic planning.
  • Cockshott and Cottrell: planning by computing inputs and outputs.
  • Aaron Benanav: Two currencies; plans for transition.
  • In-kind accounting (Tomas Härdin).

2025-10-5

• Marx's objections to the depreciation model (? — Alex?).
• Simulation classes so far (Sal).
• Pace of production (Amittai).
• Workers, career choices, allocation, and dislocation (Devin).

2025-10-19

• Marx's objections to the depreciation model (? — Alex?).
• Response to Hahnel — decentralized planning (GIC, IDA) and the economy as a computer (BC-LTEWG) versus explicit society-wide planning (Hahnel) and the economy using computers (Cockshott and Cottrell) (Amittai).
• Basic supply-demand interactions (Amittai).

2025-10-26

• Brief progress reports (5 min. each) (Sal, Zhejun, Ivan, Alex, Amittai).
  • (Zhejun: speak with Alex about Ian Wright's paper.)
• Reading for next time? -- Hal Draper, "The Two Souls of Socialism" (1966): https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/The%20Two%20Souls%20of%20Socialism.pdf . Cited in the latest episode of the From Alpha to Omega podcast, "Red Flags" (Interview with David Camfield). (Amittai)
• Ivan on modeling distribution with optimal inventories and ordering policies.
• Sal: review of current code and next steps.

2025-11-2

• Intro: two aspects of the simulation (Amittai) (5 minutes).
• Modeling a capitalist economy (Alex) (30 minutes).
• Modeling inventories (Ivan) (30 minutes).
• Modeling needs and expertise (Amittai) (20 minutes).

2025-11-9

• Lightning round. (10 min.)
• Response to paper on Hahnel from Hermann Lueer (Amittai). (2 min.)
• Zhejun's dependency map and issue.
• Development procedure and schedule (Amittai). (15 min.)
• Algedonics (Amittai). (5 min.)
• Development progress reports (Sal, Devin, Zhejun). (30 min.)
  • Trading: APIs on both sides (Amittai).
• Queuing theory (Ivan).

2025-11-16

• Lightning round. (10 min.)
• Tour of the codebase. (Devin, Sal, Zhejun)
• CCSCNE2026 paper. (Amittai)

2025-11-23

• Lightning round - time <= 3 min. each, please! (25 min.)
• Every agent must have a void on_time_step() function. The simulation loop will call society.on_time_step() on each iteration.
  • Society (a singleton!) — will call on_time_step on every entity.
  • Firm
    • Producer
    • Distributor
  • Person
  • Product
  • The right way to do this is to define an abstract class Agent, from which all agents inherit, and which has a pure virtual function on_time_step, which all derived classes must override.
• Worker allocation
  • We should use aggregate worker abilities to determine a firm's time to completion of a plan.
• Handling input costs in Product, Plan, and Price Controller. (30 min.)
  • Living labor
    • Set as a random vale (hours, uniformly distributed) per unit per product at simulation start.
    • The Plan takes the value from the Product.
    • An innovation may change the actual living labor cost.
    • The Price Controller periodically recomputes the average and updates each product.
  • Raw materials
    • Like living labor, but each product has a map from input product to quantity (not hours).
    • The Plan gets the quantities and then gets the current costs from the Price Controller.
    • An innovation may change the quantity of a given input. (— Or even the choice of inputs — more complicated.)
    • The Price Controller recomputes the average input quantity for each input for each product? This implies some transparency about process, not just final cost.)
  • Machinery
    • Each product has a vector of machines needed to make it.
    • The firm, in drafting a plan, checks its current stock of machines. It must purchase any machines it lacks. (The required hours must be brought into existence by fiat — ? It then has to transfer the inverse of those hours to the PRD account. Maybe there should be a separate machinery "slush fund"?)
    • The firm should check the status of every machine on every time step and replace a broken or obsolete machine.
• Follow-ups from lighning round. (? 30 min.)
• Updates to the schedule and assignment of tasks.