It is more an artifact of being cut off from the US mint/banking system. For a domestic US bank they can swap any worn currency for new stuff for free.
So as US currency degrades over time it slightly loses inter exchangeability in the third world.
Overstaying a visa is a big deal. You should not be counting days or nights because you should not let yourself be in the country anywhere near the expiry of a visa.
Until a few years ago they had a hold on the upper end of the market. The chinese competitor's quality was unreliable enough that clothing manufacturers were willing to pay a premium to ensure a failed zipper does not trash a garment. That situation has been changing, and chinese companies are offering zippers which are getting used on progressively higher end products.
By releasing a new product with substantial changes and thus patentability they can buy a few decades at the top of the market. I suspect this technology has been in development for a long time, and held back until competitors were threatening the premium traditional zipper market.
It's only even half about the business. Instead it is about the businessman making the pitch.
If someone is good at baking bread that suggest they are qualified to to bake bread. Running a bakery is a super set of that skill. The business plan request is a fantastic method to give such a person a chance to show they have the right resources, enough experience, and reasonable expectations and strong commitment.
It is important to keep in mind how this "Report Card" is a lobbying tool. A wishlist meant to influence, not an independent assessment meant to inform.
The prognosis is to spend more money building more things. This has been the prognosis every year since the lobbying started. Prior projects built based on this excessive lobbying have since reached end of life this scheme is so old. Now the reports include horror stories of this federal lobbied over building which got poorly maintained: as if the poor maintenance is not the expected result of building more than can be maintained.
Infrastucture funding in the US typically operates such that the federal government gives money to build new stuff, while local governments are left attempting to pay for the maintenance.
Try to find a single page dedicated to identifying over provisioned infrastructure which could be downsized to reduce maintance costs... The ASCE's solution to all problems is to spend more money building more.
Everyone appears to agree that Britain is broken. The author recognizes that the issue is not a lack of taxes, but lack of care at where the money goes.
Sadly the author I think is getting distracted by specific issues. Focusing on school or social costs. Or specific large project over runs.
You need to read through a ton, but it paints a picture of a government chasing newspaper headlines. And an overall ineffective method of running a country from the top down.
How could it be that an act of parliament is being held up by local councils? Parliament's orders used to be the law of the land. Now it is but one of many.
Often treatments of British decline read as if the authors wished Britain had been fire bombed to smithereens, and benefited from the Marshel Plan. Yet this undersells the British people. They know how to build new houses. They know how to build trains. Yet Britain as a whole is still searching for that win-win. The path to fixing problems without compromises.
Meanwhile Britain's managerial and governing class is so incompetent, it is hard to imagine replacements who would perform worse.
Hey YesBox! I've been watching your game for ages. I think since you first showed it on the indie subreddit. I'm excited to play it. Sim City 2000 was a big influence for me.
Overall though I'd say: coastal US is a market no one can afford to do gamedev with employees in unless you are a child company of a platform holder. We're based in Japan where cost of living is vastly more reasonable.
Personally I'd suggest you highly question yourself about what sort of studio you want to work in. The environment you want to work in, should be the one you try to make. For me that meant full remote with no offices. I'd honestly be surprised to meet ang gamedev who likes offices and commutes, much less one who list the extra cost.
Warner Bros has been trying to sell off their studios. So I can see Lego succeeding if they buy TT. Otherwise I think Lego will realize what many others have: starting up a new studio is hard, and having money makes it harder.
You cannot will a studio into existence with money. Google tried this. Amazon tried this. Microsoft has tried it a bunch of times.
Games can be a good business, I know my studio is, but it is hard in was that traditional business methods cannot cope with.
So Lego, make sure you acquire TT. That is your only clear opportunity to use money to solve this problem. Otherwise find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games for half a decade. Don't listen to that VP who is promising you can push XXXmillion into an org chart and get an effective studio as the result.
The UK paid the US all it's gold reserves. Next it stole of the UK people's gold to use that to buy weapons.
The US was not giving the UK when it exported, it was selling. Lend lease came in once the UK ran out of gold. So the US gave them credit: which the UK tool until 2006 to repay.
That article is 5 years old. Sadly the article lacks a date, but you can tell because it claims Steam is 15 years old, when it had its 22 anniversary last year.
Next that 7M number is for self-published games. Aka, games where the dev is listed as the publisher. OP has Raw Fury as his publisher. Next Raw Fury posted their contract publically a while ago: it is a pretty harsh contract. 50/50 split, but there is a profit ratio baked into the recoup which is super odd. If OP had held off, did his own marketing for a bit, then negotiated with publishers once he had traction, he might have gotten a better deal.
The challenge for Indie devs with publishers is how the good publishers ask a pretty high take. Meanwhile the good deals come from new publishers with poor or no track record. Personally we signed with Hooded Horse which publically offers better deals and is highly effective. The trade off being Hooded Horse is famously quite selective.
Thus honestly: self publishing is the default-best choice. We did that for our last game and effectively replaced a publisher by just spending a bunch on marketing.
To be honest, those are all valid points which I think are true. I've never met an academic who thinks their country should reduce science funding. And the personal incentives do push researchers overseas for higher wages.
Personally though, I think how a country uses the money dominates over how much. Most countries have a pretty consistent level of funding. Sure some countries might double others, but overall funding tends to follow GDP. No country is spending 10%+ of GDP on research, nor do I think is that justifiable.
Thus the differences come from effectiveness of spend, not volume. Japan has an advantage here in the low English proficiency: you cannot be headhunted by the Americans if you cannot speak English. Thus when Japan does focus on specializations, as it did in the past with semiconductors, those researchers cannot be headhunted away.
This article seems interested in suggestion Japan abandon its unique approach and adopt the approach used by other nations. That is silly.
Japan is one of the foremost funders of deep research. It funds large physics experiments. It has a long history of semiconductor innovations. MEXT scholarships have proven a brilliant method to attract smart men and women from around the world.
Here in Touhoku I've met so many bright international students on MEXT scholarships doing research within those exact project-funded teams. Switching to person-focused funding would be silly, do you really think a smart guy from Congo is going to be able to win funding? That Japan has a system where the product/team can focus on an established topic, then backfill with smart researches, is a strength not a weakness.
Of course Nature is in the business of publishing papers, not science. So it makes sense they would be blind to the reality of science: you measure it in results not papers. The academics I know are all focused on achieve specific goals, they rarely talk about the papers in the way the Canadian Acedemics I know did back home. Think "I want to automate boar trap monitoring so that farmers do not need to check it everytime, and so that non-boars do not get trapped". That is the sort of highly practical research you get when a supervisor knows their field and knows their country. It might not pay off in papers, but it will pay off for Japan as a country.
The world should be taking lessons from Japan, not the other way around. Team based funding. Scholarships for bright students from any country. Deep funding for physical research other than just ITER and LHC.
Riddle me this: if my web page is for a local cafe and I've uploaded 5 images and 7 paragraphs is there anything I shouldn't share?
Wordpress optimized hosts will have "servers" sharing the apache, the kernel, the php libs, even the DB instance. The effective burden of an additional host is tiny. Which is perfect for a local cafe's webpage which might be lucky to get a hit an hour.
Now how do you think you'll compete on price by using containers when your competitor can host a 100x the cafe web pages? The cafe owner does not care that they are sharing a php lib instance. They care that their 7 paragraphs appear when the page loads.
Sounds like the classic strategy of good-customer-service.
85$ is not a lot of money in China either. Double so for English speaking help. Triple so when you get assembled PCBs at the end.
The theory I've heard is that where American business culture prioritizes profit, Chinese businesses are chasing market share. Thus you get combinations like Rumba and Kin Yat. Roomba subcontracts all manufacturing to China, earns incredible gross margins, while the Chinese manufacturer is free to make competitors. In time the competitors tech reaches and exceeds the original. Now Roomba is left with low/mid tier product lines and Chinese companies control the majority market share.
Great while it lasted. Lots of profits for over a decade. The profit maxing strategy just lacks a future.
The issue is that only the south got rich. Not "America".
The north got rich off factories and wage earning labour. To equate the wealth of America to the south is a falsehood. And not a helpful one. It misleads you into missing the travesty of slavery: it did not build a nation. It gave leisure to a couple lucky families at the expense of hundreds per plantation.
The industry and wage earning of the north is what built America.
No, because the light requires twice the time to travel there then back. If Earth did not move relative to the lens, it would work. Sadly we move, a lot, so what was here 2x ago was something not-earth.
To see earth, the lensing would been to be focused on where Earth was 2x ago. Still possible in theory, and you might even argue just as likely as a fully reflecting curve. But you'd not call it "back towards us". It would need to be "curved to where earth was".
So as US currency degrades over time it slightly loses inter exchangeability in the third world.