How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

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.

But most of that revenue goes to JKR, whereas most of the fishing revenue may end up in "working class" people's pockets.

I am sure JKR has to pay taxes still, which goes back to the government.

Does JKR personally own the copyrights, or have they been sub-licensed to a corporation in (e.g.) Ireland?

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.

Warhammer requires designers, moulding experts, warehouse staff and so on.

Games Workshop is a public company, in case you want to look up their accounts for the comparison.

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.

What an amazing argument to tax the rich!

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.

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.

I had no idea that Warhammer was such a huge industry - they must sell almost 600 sets a quarter.

That's a long way from advertising unhealthy snacks.

Lego isn't made in dubious conditions, so for toys she's already above average.

The stuff they’re putting out these days is really quite good.

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.

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.

Just the first thing on the home page: https://www.warhammer.com/en-GB/shop/Deathlords-Mortarchs-Ma...

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.

Clearly you are not aware of the extraordinary range of Lego pieces.

This decade: "We're not the ones trying to steal your fishing jobs!"

Next decade: "It's not our fault there aren't fish!"

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?)

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.

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.

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.

Am I missing something about modern economics?

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.”

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.

Of course. That way they can sell you the official paints.

Fortunately, it seems they’ve dropped that you’re required to use the official paints if you want to enter a sanctioned tournament.

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.

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.

> The idea that the pile of wealth is simply hoarded to be slept on is out of date

I don't see what you're arguing against. If they did that, what would the problem be?

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.

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?

> 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.

Micromolding is very hard, and Lego is the best at it.

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.

Not quite. It's all about labor and getting rid of the class that used to (and could have) threatened the elites.

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.

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.

Convert that to usd and you will see how much premium is being charged.

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.

It's fine as a token for the game, but people enjoy the painting etc too.

A resin printer isn't safe for use in an apartment, otherwise that would probably be more common.

https://assets.ctfassets.net/ost7hseic9hc/1alE9DriNd0GJq1SYK...

I don't think the official Lego China factory products get sold to the US, only Asia?

https://www.lego.com/nl-nl/product/lego-education-spike-prim...

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).

yes you have.

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.

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.

Many of the EU farming and fishing subsidies are to NOT produce anything.

Dude, how have you completed missed the ongoing push for AI to replace developers?

If US has both it might shift the scale a bit.

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.

"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.

That rules out most apartments in countries like the USA and UK.

* Do not locate dedicated work/personal spaces in close proximity to the printers if odors are a concern

That rules out all small apartments, where there isn't a room that can be dedicated to the printer.

* 3D Printers and uncured, open resin vats should be stored and operated in a well ventilated area or with local exhaust

That rules out all apartments in northern countries (like here in Denmark) with lots of insulation

https://radtech.org/safe-handling-of-3d-printing-resins/

We need a resin printer tuned for mass production of tiny pieces, just like belt FDM printers are tuned for mass production.

FDM prints are either slow or have obvious layer lines or both. If you're painting it maybe that doesn't matter.

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?

I think a lack of seafood would have less of an impact to the general population than say, lack of satellite navigation or communication technology.

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.

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 :)

I have several printers and I ususually have something "in the oven" while I WFH (my job is not related to 3D printing sadly)

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is exactly what Dr. L. J. Hart-Smith wrote in "Out-Sourced Profits – The Cornerstone of Successful Subcontracting", a paper from 2001 https://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2014130646...

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not everyone is as careful with the stuff so that doesn't really help.

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.

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.

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].

[1]: https://engaging-data.com/auto-manufacturing-state/

[2]: https://www.assemblymag.com/articles/98988-ten-us-states-dom...

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?

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.

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.

The extra cost of resin is negligible at this scale, it's mostly the safety requirements and extra labor that makes it harder.