> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer.
This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you).
It's also worth considering that certain industries (fisheries and agriculture for instance) are subsidised. It's in our national interest to maintain production capacity, so profits are the least of our concerns. Both the UK and the EU's agricultural sectors are heavily subsidised mainly for this reason. It's cheaper to import than to produce locally, especially with our environmental standards and targets, but we need to keep producing. More so in the current geopolitical climate.
And whilst nobody wants to risk being starved to submission, it's also equally important to promote more profitable sectors, and tax accordingly, so that we can support our more strategic sectors. I wouldn't say we're doing a good job at that for what its worth.
+1, exactly. Focusing too much in the money makes you forget about the power. At a national leadership level, there isn't much power in having a local Warhammer industry, fishing is much more strategic.
In broad terms, this is related to the error the USA made. Manufacturing in China was a very profitable deal for the USA. A lot of companies view labour first and foremost as expense, wealth as as the goal, and power in wealth— so it's not surprising as a whole the industry opted to "contract out" labour across the globe.
A lot of power lays in labour though. Money doesn't produce, invent, move, feed, etc— money is only good if someone will take it at the amounts you have it to do that specific labour you need for you.
This is a bit harsh: the USA didn't devalue labor in general, just manufacturing. They hired software engineers from all over the world, along with a lot of higher value engineering and product development jobs. The error the USA made was in pushing the workforce up the value chain faster than everyone could handle, and a lot of Americans got left behind.
China is moving up the value chain also, they are being forced to by their demographics, and they are investing heavily in the change ATM (just like they started investing heavily in green energy 10 years ago) so I don't think they will make the same mistake as the Americans are making right now.
SE will one day realize they are as screwed as the average worker and unionize in some way. The endless money pits are not for every SE, even today the majority does not work for the creme-de-creme of well paying companies. While specialists and smooth talkers might profit from the current model, as always is the case, most won't.
Unions are a bad solution to the problem of companies not vaulting their employees. Unfortunately, without altruism by the corporations or governments action, they are also the only effective solution.
I'd prefer we look to other countries that have solved the problem in other ways, such as including representatives of the employees in the board.
Also, we need to remember that corporations exist at the mercy of the state, having received a special dispensation (corporate charter) to exist. Those companies that are not a net benefit to society have no right to exist and ought to be dissolved.
Then when they unionize, all the software jobs will head to cheaper locales. Unless of course you’re suggesting that the U.S. use tariffs on labor to prevent that?
It's extortion. Sometimes the extorting party can act on its threats, sometimes they can't.
In regards to the auto industry, I'm not sure what you mean by "look where auto manufacturing investment in the US is". Most auto manufacturing jobs are still in the rust belt [1]. Most EV Production investment is in the rust belt [2].
If the goal is to have high paying jobs in the US, then yes the government should put penalties in place to encourage that. US cost of living (housing, real estate taxes, health care costs, college costs, etc) is way higher than many countries, especially those where jobs are being offshored to, especially India, so salaries have to be higher here.
So, do we let US companies invest US consumer derived revenue in the Indian economy, just to boost profits a bit, or do we protect good jobs at home instead, and have a virtuous circle where US profits get plowed back into the US economy?
Sure but when it comes to tech US currently (supposedly) has very high labor costs and weak labor laws. All other countries with a tiny number of exceptions have low to very low labor costs and more regulation.
I only see a push for AI to produce more developers. How could AI, as we know it today, even replace developers?
More developers isn't at odds with the previous comment. That is how you can more easily push the jobs to low cost areas! When 张三 in rural China is given his first computer he can jump right into being a programmer too. Thus you can give him the job instead of a high priced developer in America.
I want to build a thing. Before AI it would take 1 year and a team of five developers. Now with ai, it's gonna take you 6 months and 3 developers. Those two developers didn't get jobs because of AI.
You haven't even put developers out of job as you must remember that I also wanted to build a thing, but couldn't because you had all the available developers tied up. Now there are two freed up who can come work for me. There is no end to all the software we want to write.
That is the hope! Only time will tell if this tech is deflationary or inflationary though. You also want to build a thing, but do you have funding for it? in this economy?
> Only time will tell if this tech is deflationary or inflationary though.
Or both. That would be my bet. The industry in general will see a decline. The massive growth in developer numbers will place enormous supply-side pressure. But certain experts who remain supply constrained along with increasing demand for those special services amid the explosion of new software being written will make a killing.
I work for a US org that also hires internationally, including Europeans like me. It does location-based pay, so we're much cheaper than especially my Silicon Valley colleagues, yet somehow, we keep hiring there more than we are in Europe.
A lot of our “value chain” is bullshit. If and when China becomes twice as big an economy as the US, much of our “edge” in marketing, finance, and services isn’t going to mean squat. E.g. how much “GDP” will evaporate overnight when American universities no longer have the cachet that comes along with being the best universities in America?
No it isn't, productivity has to increase, that's why we constantly get rid of jobs that do not provide much value. People want more money, and the only way we get there is with more productivity (doing jobs that make more money).
> If and when China becomes twice as big an economy as the US, much of our “edge” in marketing, finance, and services isn’t going to mean squat.
China gets to 2X our GDP by doing what we basically did in the 90s, so you are definitely right! They will have their own marketing, financing and services. The only difference is that they won't need to outsource manufacturing to China (well, they are outsourcing it a bit now, but also investing tons in automation).
> E.g. how much “GDP” will evaporate overnight when American universities no longer have the cachet that comes along with being the best universities in America?
I don't know what you are ranting about, but I get the feeling that if I did know what you were saying here I would probably agree with you.
> No it isn't, productivity has to increase, that's why we constantly get rid of jobs that do not provide much value.
Our measures of “value” are wrong.
> I don't know what you are ranting about
My point is that a lot of what we think of as “higher value” activities are actually derivative of and downstream of our industrial supremacy. As China takes up that mantle, the higher value activities will go along with it. E.g., how long do we expect the US to do the cutting edge nuclear power and weapons research when China is the one building all the nuclear power plants?
I mean look at the path dependency that led to Silicon Valley. Why did the software revolution happen in the same place we were building the microchips?
We basically agree then: as China takes up higher value activities, they won't need those activities from the US anymore. Also, France is the cutting edge designer of nuclear power plants these days.
> Why did the software revolution happen in the same place we were building the microchips?
Hardware people becoming software people was extremely common back then, and still is today (EEs can make more coding than using their degree directly). Now we have the opposite problem (we don't have enough hardware people because software sucked all the oxygen out of the room) and China has less of it (although increasingly...they are repeating history as well). If anything, this just backs up my point in how higher value activities de-emphasize manufacturing (even super high end manufacturing as in semiconductors).
You can replace perceived value with actual value if you don't agree with the value judgement calls that were made, which is entirely reasonable.
"we don't have enough hardware people because software sucked all the oxygen out of the room"
How much is this exacerbated by the lack of domestic hardware manufacturing in the US for the hardware people? Seems like software boom starting in the late 1990's happened as China came online for hardware outsourcing. Not suggesting a causal relationship there, just complementary effects.
The same thing happens in China. If you want a good job, software will pay way more than hardware. Heck, you even see people from Taiwan doing software jobs in China because they at more than the hardware jobs in Taiwan that they could get.
That’s the biggest thing I took away from the whole Boeing corporate disaster
You need to maintain at least a minimum amount of internal competency in almost all areas
If you completely give away a capability to other countries (in this case, fishing knowledge and labour) it is much harder to bring back than just coughing up the money
Those sectors you let die might not matter right now, but they might matter later. And you might have to scale up fast.
We buy local brands of shoes that are in inr 300-2000 range and that solves like 70% of the shoes market in India. From shoes to skippers to formal shoes to ladies heels and such.
Then you gave INr 3000-8000 that are considered really really expensive.
Convert that to usd and you will see how much premium is being charged.
Perhaps. But does a subsidized industry retain competence, or retain incompetence? After all, if you're making a profit no matter what, what incentive is there to do well?
Many of the EU farming and fishing subsidies are to NOT produce anything.
That often depends on the structure of the subsidy.
"We will pay you 5 euros per kg of fish sold in supermarkets to consumers" is different from "We will pay you 500,000 euros a year to keep fishing".
There is a very reasonable argument in fisheries starting at least a century ago (and locally long before that), that we're looking at a partially renewable good - that it would be easy to cause an unsustainable population collapse with unrestricted harvesting, and so you should try and intervene in the market to sustain fish populations and stabilize harvests. Subsidies intended to do this are distinct from subsidies intended to keep fishermen employed fishing.
See also How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/, where the author asks, "In any organization, in any company, in any group, any country and even any continent, what level of technical capability, do we need to retain?"
Once you've outsourced everything except the management work, the organization forgets how to do the thing they're supposed to be managing.
> If you completely give away a capability to other countries (in this case, fishing knowledge and labour) it is much harder to bring back than just coughing up the money
I feel like money is overwhelmingly how we denominate value, effort, and agency in our society. Almost every time somebody says "You can't just throw money at the problem", they are arguing that we shouldn't even try that, contrary to all established reasoning about how society works.
There are diminishing returns to funding, but the people who use this expression are typically at a tiny fraction of where we would expect to hit them.
If you want to have a fishing industry because fish are your idealized heritage, then choose to subsidize it heavily either to continue to exist, and/or to expand it into waters and economies of scale where you can still fish profitably. Like the Japanese and the Chinese do, respectively.
You need to pay money to people who will put in effort and agency. You can't just throw money at random people and expect something useful to happen. Sometimes, the people who will make things happen if you throw money to them don't exist. Sometimes, you have to turn people into those people (which also costs money).
Money is something you give people so they can eat and stay warm while they do the thing you want. They still have to be doing the thing you want. Sometimes there's enough reputation and legal threats on the line that you can assume the person will do the thing just based on the fact they're taking money from you and not freaking out. Companies do things this way a lot - individuals not as much.
The abstraction is not the territory, and the idea that money denominates value is an abstraction... often we define "value" as "that for which money is exchanged", making the abstraction tautological, at no gain. This is often done by people who want to think the thing they're spending a lot of money on is very valuable, or want to make you think the thing you're spending a lot of money on is very valuable.
Also, continuing overfishing is a terrible long-term strategy. Sure, we will have the boats, fishermen and infrastructure around fishing, but that's of no help if the fish are gone.
You missed the "you can fix it with money though, and our friends are just the people to give the money to" step that comes after each problem statement.
Agreed, and the same goes for most strategic sectors: energy, agriculture, animal husbandry, semiconductors, communications, space, the infrastructure to support all these, education, etc.
It's only ~100 years since seafood was the primary protein source of most coastal regions. The rampant mismanagement of fish/shellfish stocks that put an end to that has had knock-on effects across our entire food supply, that continue to influence agricultural policy to this day
Which amid everything, maybe it is time to focus again on our own programming languages and OSes like in the cold war and export regulation days, it will suck for a while, but apparently it is how everything is going.
I'm kinda surprised people aren't just buying a 3D printer. I print stuff all the time. I'm not into this kind of game but if I were I wouldn't pay that much for a piece of plastic I can print at home for 3 bucks.
My group is 3D printing most of our stuff for beer and pretzels games. But official tournaments have a rule where your miniatures have to be official products.
Note that a standard printer won't be anywhere near as nice quality as official models. You need a resin printer for that, which requires ventilation, some basic PPE, and additional labor to clean and cure the prints correctly. Not something you want to do with small children or pets in the house.
We resin print most of our models. We use FDM for blocky things like tanks and buildings, though. And some complex or very large models can't be printed (although we sometimes use alternatives for those).
Warhammer is an unusually expensive game, too. Other games like One Page Rules will sell you STLs to self-print, or charge very reasonable prices for pro-printed minis. You can buy a 2-player starter kit for OPR for about the same money as one WH40K unit.
Yes I know, resin printing is not great, I don't like it myself either. But FDM printing has gotten a lot better, especially with the bambulab material switcher where you can use water-dissolvable support material.
But cool to hear you're printing them. I can imagine they don't want to allow it at official tournament to protect the golden goose :)
Even with the 0.2mm nozzle? With that you can go pretty detailed because the maximum it can do with that is 0.1mm (how they pull that off with a 0.2mm nozzle I don't know, but all their nozzles do half the nozzle size in layer height).
Of course it's not the resolution of a good laser resin printer but resin is also much more expensive and it's a PITA to work with as discussed here.
Works fine for a tank, but something like Imperial Guardsman, Sisters of Battle or a Necron Tomb Blade all have features that are too small for FDM. Look up the "Celestine the Living Saint" model - the entire sculpt is small enough to fit inside your hand.
The extra cost of resin is negligible at this scale, it's mostly the safety requirements and extra labor that makes it harder.
Ahhh yes ok I didn't realise that. I'm not into this kind of game at all but a friend who was into it showed me his big flying tanks so I thought they were all that big.
Additionally: If you want to _mass_ mass produce these things, an injection molding setup is going to be your goal. You can sort of hack one together for plastic molding using a pneumatic/hydraulic cylinder and some mold plates that are either cast metal (lost-PLA, lost-wax), cured plaster, or CNC'd. The stuff that will give you five million units a day costs as much as a house, but there is a middle ground that is competitive with FDM on quality but significantly faster for more like $300-$3000.
The limitation with injection molding is typically the cost and complexity of having mold plates made when you don't have a demand for all that many units.
Resin is also slow (probably slower per mm^3 than FDM depending on nozzle size), but speed doesn't really matter IMO. But yeah with a high detail 0.2mm nozzle (0.1mm extrusions size) it does tend to get pretty slow. Layer lines are a factor of orientation a lot (you want to have steep angles, not very shallow ones).
I have several printers and I ususually have something "in the oven" while I WFH (my job is not related to 3D printing sadly)
One advantage of resin is that it takes a fixed amount of time per layer no matter the size of the layer. FDM time obviously increases linearly depending on the amount of material to deposit. So a resin printer will take the same amount of time to produce a single figure or as many figures will fit into its print area.
I just Googled for "resin printer at home". There are loads of Reddit discussions and YouTube videos about it. Yes, precautions and a careful setup are required, but "isn't safe" does not look true anymore.
A lot of those people on Reddit and YouTube are doing dangerous things like handling liquid resin without gloves or eye protection, or not ventilating/filtering resin fumes that cause cancer. There are horror stories of people who splashed a bit of resin in their eye and went blind.
It's no more dangerous than a craft like woodworking or spray painting when you follow very basic safety protocols, but the safety culture is near nonexistent in the community.
It's possible, you have to put in some effort. Active ventilation to outside, working with PPE on, washing in isopropyl alcohol, curing with UV light. At least that is what I would do in smaller apartments.
I live in northern county and can vent my 3d printers exhaust to the outside. Friend of mine from CPH did the same with his resin printer.
And if you actively went it outside carpet and close proximity should ok ok'ish health wise. It's just effort and noise that a lot of people don't like to put in.
> That rules out most apartments in countries like the USA and UK
Yes I've always wondered why they love carpets so much. When I lived in such an apartment it was terrible. Always dirty and dusty. I'd much rather have a plastic, wooden or tile floor (the latter not ideal due to breakage though).
But you can ventilate, especially if you blow the air outside through an active blower.
And finally, makerspaces are a great way to do these things anyway. A community that can support and help you when you run into issues, friendly people around to borrow equiment and materials from, and they're usually pretty cheap if you don't get a fixed desks.
Hmm it depends on your sensitivity also. I know some people at our makerspace who have serious allergies to the stuff, even a minor trace and their skin gets all red.
Not everyone is as careful with the stuff so that doesn't really help.
I don't find Lego especially expensive. And Lego is way more difficult to manufacture, has very exacting functional requirements and extremely good QA.
I bought a Warhammer set during Covid and was amazed at the detail, compared to the 1990s stuff I had as a kid.
I can't say what's more difficult to manufacture - millions of identical bricks that snap together, or a huge range of different, detailed designs which fit snugly together but don't lock.
Proportionate to the size of each company and the amount of toys they produce, I'll bet there's significantly more variety in Warhammer.
Just from a quick search, within a year Games Workshop offer about 3000 different model kits, each of which will contain ~1-4 unique moulded sprues. There seem to be at least 50 new kits each year, possibly 100, otherwise what's available rotates around the older kits.
Lego have produced about 15,000 different sets since 1950, and a huge number of the parts are shared between sets. (That's the whole point of the toy, no?)
Yeah I tried to look up the number of different Lego partszbut it gets hard to define what a Lego part is. And are we counting different colours, different designs printed on them, etc. Somewhere between 5k and 60k.
Also you have to take in account that Lego frequently stops certain parts and also that they more and more create complex parts and comparatively less "classic" bricks.
Which is an issue because it makes the sets way more difficult to reuse than 30 years ago. Go figure what to build with a random ninjago set except the official model. But that’s another ~~rant~~story.
Lego is pure IP (both from LEGO itself, and then e.g. Disney or whoever is behind the theme of a given set). If you get sets designed in China and made at the same factories that make Lego bricks, they're like 1/3 the cost. If you get sets designed in not-China but obviously ripped off ("Star World" sets that are 1:1 copies of Star Wars legos), also in the same factories, it's like 1/10 the cost.
The manufacturing isn't easy, sure, but it's more or less a solved problem and not at all reflected in the cost.
So when GP says priced like Lego, they just mean that - priced based on something completely different from the cost of materials, manufacturing, etc.
False. Lego is some of the most precise injection molding in the world. The tolerances are insane and they nail them every time. Compare with offbrand building blocks and you'll feel the difference.
Micromolding is very hard, and Lego is the best at it.
10-20 years ago, sure. Nowadays you can get basically the same product from LEGO compatible competitors for way cheaper. Dunno how many modern sets of the variety of competitor stuff you've assembled recently, there's huge variance. Some of it definitely has crap QC. Some of it is really, really good now. My wife put together some knockoff 8000+ piece set the other year and the pieces were basically flawless.
Where I've seen the difference is in the quality of the instructions (which matters) and the packaging (which arguably doesn't). The bricks themselves are, as you say, basically flawless.
Exactly. I bought 3 or 4 China Lego clones to try and the parts were slightly different in size and in color. Some blocks way too big, so building was not good experience. For original Lego you don’t need sanding paper on the table.
> If you get sets designed in China and made at the same factories that make Lego bricks, they're like 1/3 the cost.
Lego does not outsource brick making. They tried it out back in 2005 with Flextronics in Hungary and got a painful lesson. Lego runs all their factories themselves now.
Lego may run the factories, but the factory will run extra and sell the excess off books. Maybe less so nowadays that (1) they can charge a 20-30% premium over US Lego prices in China, and (2) competitor off-brand Lego have caught up in quality
I don't think the official Lego China factory products get sold to the US, only Asia?
Right and I'm talking about the one in China (that opened like 10 years ago), selling stuff to people in China (and presumably elsewhere in Asia).
Nowadays it's kinda irrelevant to the greater point anyways, because some of the knock off factories make parts that are just as good. (Some knock off factories push out terrible QC)
Not only that, they are actively expanding their manufacturing because their revenue is limited by supply. Their factories are running 24/7 and some products are still consistently out of stock.
There are lots of JKR-adjacent industries that employ working class people.
The Harry Potter World theme park in London has over two million visitors annually. That tourism must be more economically significant than fishing for cod.
But still, the money that's going straight into working class people's pockets is probably better for the UK in the long run. Don't worry, it will get taxed over and over and over and over again as they pay each other for things.
Velocity is one of those critically important concepts that often gets left out of these discussions because it's hard to understand if you haven't formally studied economics because it's all about second order effects. But it's a big part of understanding why, historically speaking, maximizing corporate profits doesn't seem to correlate all that well with overall prosperity trends.
There are quite a lot of people who make money from Harry Potter apart from JKR. People running cinemas, bookshops, making the movies, running the studio tour and so on.
And the more of that that happens, the better for the economy overall. The less of that that happens - implying more of it ends up in JKR's proverbial dragon hoard, not doing much good beyond being an impressive pile of wealth for the dragon to sleep on top of - the less good for the economy overall.
When rich people get large amounts of money they don’t hoard it like they did in Roman times.
That money either goes into the stock market or to a bank. If it’s in the stock market that money is being used in investments that further economic growth. The portion of the leftover money that’s in the bank is then lent out by the bank to others in the forms of loans and so on for purchasing houses, starting business and so on.
The idea that the pile of wealth is simply hoarded to be slept on is out of date and not representative of modern economics.
Also, as for JK Rowling specifically, she had donated a significant amount of her wealth to charity.
A lot of that "economic growth" is stuff like flooding the US with opioids, burning mountains of gas and coal to produce crypto scams, and chaining people to the office 60+ hours a week to produce reports justifying their "impact".
The nominal gdp is my father's time was lower and yet he could buy a house and support a family of four on a single salary as an immigrant in his early 20s.
The problem with investment dollars is that they're typically "spent" (invested) only when they can extract more wealth than they create. You invest $10,000 now so you can have $15,000 later. Where did that $5,000 come from? Well, someone gave it to you in exchange for that $10,000.
In other words, they're effectively rent-seeking dollars. The whole hope of investment is that you get more money without doing any labor yourself.
And if you invest and they're lost? Well, now it's not even rent-seeking. It's just burning money.
This isn't to say that there's no benefit from that money being available. The issue is that the real value that investment creates isn't really the money going back to the investor. It's the value of the labor and products generated by whatever the money fronted costs for. The actual value is still generated by the labor. The investor does help start the ball rolling, but is still a leech.
Once we get to shareholders, things don't really improve. Shareholders are also only interested in dividends. They want dividends at the cost of the company. At the cost of the product. At the cost of the customer. There's no responsibility to society or to the customer in the face of a shareholder.
Shareholders are like employees that don't do any work but still want a paycheck. "Oh, but they're owners," is kind of a poor excuse when these owners do no work. Stock is like buying a box of Crackerjack and letting your brother take the whistle and sticker.
> Also, as for JK Rowling specifically, she had donated a significant amount of her wealth to charity.
Which she does because donations offset the taxes she owes. She's no Dolly Parton.
> The actual value is still generated by the labor.
The labour _needed_ the money. In other words, the labour doesn't want to take on capital risk (aka, the output turning worthless, or something like that).
Investors aren't leeching, they are taking risks - risks that the labourers dont want to take (otherwise, they would've been the one fronting the cost, rather than expecting to get paid for labour!).
The old idea of capital being leeches only happens when your capital comes from lords who granted you ownership (of the land).
> Which she does because donations offset the taxes she owes.
How would that work? You can only write off the amount you actually donate. Paying 100% to save 40% (or whatever your tax rate is) seems very counterproductive if the goal is to actually save money.
The home took someone money to build, the land cost money to buy (from the previous owners) - thru the long chain of title ownership that would stem from the conquerors of this land (who ultimately took the land from either natives, or whoever that previously owned it by force).
The previous owners who now got paid by you will use this money for other investments. It is not slept on. Your house is also providing utility (of being a shelter).
You just stopped thinking about the money as soon as it left your bank when you buy the house, and thus you feel that the value of the house is merely being "slept on", when in actual fact, this transaction that is your house is a small cog in a very large system.
your largest investment is your home cause you live in strange times when over the last decade the price of housing has ballooned like a big bubble that it is now. if you lived your “core” years in say 50’s to ‘80’s the house would neither be your largest investment nor your primary source of wealth (guessing you are affluent “white collar”…)
I look at my tiny townhouse that my Dad could built in 6 weekends with his buddies and zillow needing seven digits to display the price and very well thinking “what a fucking real estate bubble we live in currently.”
I don't think this is true. Housing has basically been around 50% of total wealth for the past 50 years or so. Check out Pikettys capital in the 21st century for far more details.
there is a clear point at which one might start thinking about real estate as investment (and it sure looks bubbly). if you bought a house as an investments some decades ago it is not much of an investment and basically a loss inflation-adjusted, no?
While I can’t speak to which one of you is correct I think it’s worth pointing out that 50 years ago only pushes into 5 of the 30 years that they referred to. I can’t imagine it would’ve jumped to 50% overnight in that change but I still thought it was worth mentioning.
I do wonder how much of fishery money ends up in the working class pockets. I assume the surviving companies survived because they have economy of scale, meaning most of the profits goes to corporate. If somebody has the numbers, I'd like to know.
Quoting Wikipedia's source, Forbes estimated her donations were $120 million to date in 2012. However, she co-founded her own charity in 2005, of which she is the president, and I suspect most of it has been donated in that direction.
Personally, I'm always dubious of the rich and famous genuinely finding unmet cases for charitable organisations. Especially when they've made a fortune outsourcing being morally dubious to others - she can save children because others are paying her to be allowed to sell low quality merchandise almost certainly made in exploitative conditions.
She's not alone, there's many more e.g. Messi donating lots to children's cause through his own charitable organisation after gladly being a global ambassador for unhealthy snacks targeted at children.
Rowling made a lot of her money from books, which would mostly be printed by adults in the country they are published in. Also films, filmed in the UK.
That's a long way from advertising unhealthy snacks.
Lego isn't made in dubious conditions, so for toys she's already above average.
I'm not into Warhammer, but out of curiosity, how did they check that? Scrape a sample off each figurine and run it through a mass spectrometer or something?
Official paint was never a requirement AFAIK. Parent comment has probably confused the Battle Ready rule, which basically says the model and base must be completely painted with multiple colors and shading, but doesn't care about what brands of paints you use.
A game that is not on a computer... So they don't even calculate damage or move distance for you. And you have to buy each figurine and paint it yourself...
And people are spending all their money on this? That's why we're not mining asteroids right now?
I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time.
You approaching this the wrong way. What you are listing as disadvantages is, for the most part, the USP.
For example, if you are in the target group, you buy it exactly because it does not uses AR glasses; If you are proficient, you are sleepwalking the damage/distance/all other calculations within seconds in your head, you don’t even have to take a single look at any rule book. The biggest selling point, however is: there are others sitting in front of you, it can be very competitive, you can see the reaction, like in chess.
> And you have to buy each figurine and paint it yourself...
This is a _feature_ for the target audience. There's a sizable chunk of the playerbase who enjoy painting more than the game. I even have friends who paint these miniatures professionally as their side gig.
> And people are spending all their money on this?
No. Most people are playing at home on a budget, similar to other board games. A very tiny fraction of the playerbase plays competitively and have larger collections.
> I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time.
You can play this game in Tabletop Simulator, which supports VR. It's _far_ less fun than playing in person with real objects. TTS is mostly used to test strategies before committing to buying the required miniatures.
As sibling comment mentions, the damage calculation is rather simplistic, and it's an exciting moment around the table when you roll a fistful of dice, kind of like gambling. I'm not even that proficient of a player and I can calculate a 17 dice roll attack while sleep deprived at 3AM, no computer needed.
The UK ain't alone in that either. California's agricultural sector is one of the largest in the world (let alone in the US) in terms of revenue and output, in many cases providing most/all of national and even global supplies of various fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Virtually all American almonds and broccoli, 90% or more of American dates and avocados, top producer of peaches and dairy products, the list goes on.
And yet, California's entire agricultural sector only totals to $50 billion in annual revenue. There are multiple tech and entertainment companies in California that individually surpass that, in some cases (like Apple and Amazon) by an order of magnitude.
This is so key to understand because it illuminates how not every job is equal in raw value.
You cannot have a drying rack manufacturer in the US that pays a bunch of workers $35/hr. There simply is not enough value in drying racks to achieve this.
This is what is lost on the populist crowd. They compare themselves to high value workers (i.e. workers that produce a lot of raw economic value per hour), and then want to legislate that low value work pays on the same order.
To put that into simple terms, they want to make it so that producing a single $20 bill per hours pays them $30 an hour. No matter what, that isn't going to work out well.
Value isn't static, of course. Take the food that was brought up earlier. Food saw a real increase in value by around 30% from 2019 to 2024. A couple of destructive weather events, fertilizer scarcity, and war in the Ukrainian breadbasket shook people enough to think that maybe they shouldn't take food quite so for granted.
Drying racks aren't considered terribly valuable today, but if you lock up manufacturing to a single country and impose a number of other restrictions, sentiment can change quickly. The latest episode of Ted Lasso might not seem so important anymore.
This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you).
Thanks for this interesting fact.