So how does this not make you a worthless freeloader?
I may be literally worthless to such sites. I just don't think they ever had a reasonable expectation that I would be any more than that, any more than someone paying for an ad on a billboard has a reasonable expectation that every driver will stop and read it, or any TV advertiser has a reasonable expectation that no-one is going to go take a leak during the ad break.
There is no law requiring someone to give their time to the ads just because they are there, and there never has been, making this a fundamentally different situation to copyright infringement, fraud, or whatever other bad analogies people are throwing around in today's discussion.
Ultimately, if someone wants a promise to be paid in return for their work, there are a number of options available to them, starting with charging for it just like every other industry in the world that produces value. And if the work has some modest value to a lot of people but the overheads of formally charging are too great, there are plenty of other ways to accumulate minor contributions without spamming disreputable ad networks all over your site.
Just like all the people who "share" music or software without paying the artists/creator a dime for their work.
Not really.
One obvious difference is that the law generally prohibits copying a copyrighted work without complying with the copyright holder's terms for payment etc. There is no analogous law about downloading freely available content without viewing the ads, unless you want to start arguing that the implicit permission to access that content does not apply if you don't view the ads as well, which is quite the can of worms to open.
Another obvious difference is that buying a legal copy of a creative work does not in itself subject me to severely degraded system performance, wasting arbitrary amounts of bandwidth I'm already paying for on things I didn't ask for, or assorted security and privacy risks. Not blocking ads and trackers on-line does all of these things. (Obviously some content comes with DRM and similar malware that also does some or all of these things, but let's not conflate buying from dubious sources with buying at all.)
It might not seem fair, but the fact is that levying a fee for any claimed chargeback was the industry norm for a long time, regardless of the final outcome. Remember, the card payments industry is fundamentally and systemically screwed up, and approximately 99.9% of the time it's the merchant who is the screwee when things go wrong whether or not they have actually done anything wrong.
As far as I'm aware, it's only relatively recently that some card payments services have been more fair about this and started imposing the fee only for successful chargebacks.
I know it's Blackpool, but still, no one should expect much for 36 pounds.
You say that, but there are plenty of local B&Bs and some of the big national chains like Premier Inn that would charge little more than that for a night off season and still offer decent accommodation and a good breakfast. Short stay accommodation is a fiercely competitive market in Blackpool, and prices really can be much lower than similar places in most of the UK.
It looks like you need to use a better card payment service. Although the chargeback system is certainly horribly biased against honest merchants and vulnerable to abuse, you can still dispute any chargeback, and any serious card payment service will surely provide for this.
Also worth knowing:
1. Some payment services these days will waive the chargeback fee if you successfully defend the charge.
2. If you use 3-D Secure to authenticate the buyer, then chargeback liability shifts to the financial companies rather than you as the merchant under most circumstances.
So the situation here is at least a bit better for honest merchants than it used to be.
I'm guessing from your comments on the £100 figure that you're referring to the protections under section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act (the one making your credit card company liable along with the retailer under certain conditions, if you buy something using your card). That's a useful law to know, but in this case it doesn't seem necessary.
The small print supposedly enabling the "fine" here is almost certainly a straight-up unfair term in a consumer contract, and as such it would not be binding on the consumer according to the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999.
In practice the quickest way to get the matter resolved might be to ask the card company to charge the "fine" back, and given that the chargeback system is heavily loaded against merchants this seems likely to succeed.
If that doesn't work, a small claims court action might be entertaining, but as with any low value legal action there is unfortunately a high probability that the time and hassle of finding your way around that system and going to court if necessary would far outweigh any financial benefit you might gain by the end of it, unless you've done this sort of thing before and so already know how it works.
(I'm not a lawyer, so obviously check that the above is still correct if this affects you, but this situation is so clear-cut...)
Personally, I agree. If I want to play a game or watch a movie, I buy it. If I don't think it's worth the money, I move past it and do something else instead.
It therefore annoys me greatly when software or a movie or music I've paid good money for then doesn't work properly and DRM or unskippable ads or whatever it is this week actively give me a worse experience than someone who pirates. This is a significant part of the reason I haven't bought a new AAA game from a big studio for many years, and I only buy DRM-free music formats.
Sadly, I suspect we are in a minority and a lot of people still don't see why they should pay for something they can easily get for free, often with a better experience, without much real downside.
Your strawman about wages is irrelevant. I said nothing about the individual staff working on game development -- who, as you said, do seem to be treated very badly by certain large employers in the gaming industry. (For completeness, perhaps it is fair to note at this point that Frontier Developments is local to me here in Cambridge, UK and does not have that kind of reputation for mistreating its staff as far as I'm aware.)
In any case, that is an entirely separate issue to the one I raised, where the big businesses in the gaming industry are now spending staggering amounts of money to develop and market a AAA title. When that kind of money is involved, their management is likely to choose safer bets, even if that means some genres and the gamers who enjoy them now lose out.
I don't know the financial model of this particular game. I have found widespread reports that each newsletter seems to ask for more payment for something, so it seems clear that someone has at a minimum misjudged the pricing model and the presentation/PR side of the project. But these guys are industry vets, so it would be naive to think they aren't aware of the general trends in the industry and likely to react to them. Again, it seems like they probably made a mistake in how they handled that reaction in this particular case.
There are hundreds of thousands of junctions in the UK. 10s of projects does not make any significant difference.
Sure they do. Some junctions carry several orders of magnitude more than others.
And for the kind of money we're talking about for HS2, you could do a lot more than 10s of these projects. The entire A14 upgrade through Cambridgeshire -- a single project spanning many miles of a major trunk route -- only has an estimated budget in the region of £1B, about 2% of HS2, and this is work that has been delayed for years because of the cost despite a crazy number of accidents, many of them fatal, happening on the existing A14 corridor every year.
I figured that's what you were doing. Yet local roads are significant. Few journeys start and end by a motorway or dual-carriageway.
No they don't. But again different roads carry vastly different volumes of traffic. When the M25 was effectively closed a few days ago because an overnight repair didn't set properly, there were 16 miles of tailbacks, across 3-4 lanes, for several hours. That is roughly equivalent to gridlocking an entire small city for an entire working day.
And what of the M4 bus lane scheme, where it was deemed that using fewer lanes for cars actually speeded up the cars journeys?
You go with the evidence, of course. I'm not saying building more roads is always the answer to congestion or inefficiency in the road network. On the contrary, as I wrote before, traffic engineering is sometimes a surprising field with counter-intuitive results.
My point throughout this discussion is simply that high speed rail is in many senses a very expensive type of infrastructure to build, and there are certainly alternative uses for those resources that might plausibly give much better returns. Improving the road network is merely one possibility, and as you just demonstrated, there are useful improvements that can be made that don't necessarily involve building new roads.
Game creators seem to hate single player anymore. I guess it is because they have to make an actual game with a plot, and goals, and an actual AI to fight against you.
I fear there is a much simpler explanation: on-line games are far less susceptible to piracy and generate more reliable financial returns.
Next time some pirate posts about how copyright isn't theft because the developer didn't lose anything, they wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and DRM is pointless, consider that the modern games industry is the logical result. Copyright infringement is economic damage and the big game publishers have routed around it.
Unfortunately, in doing so, they have almost killed off entire chunks of the industry, such as single player games with any serious depth, or games with novel gameplay and new ideas. Why bother with little things like creativity and making fun new games when Call of EVE: Advanced WarCraft 2017 is a safe bet to make a fortune?
Most of the innovation in the industry these days is done by the little guys. On very rare occasions, those little guys make it big, but mostly you just don't get the same kind of epic scale and production values at that end of the market.
You could say that (and in a way it's true), but technically there is no "buyer" since it's NOT a purchase, it's financial backing of a project.
Right, but when grown-ups accept investment in their company/fund/whatever, they normally publish various information about their strategy so investors know what they are backing. If the officers/fund manager/whoever then deviate significantly from that strategy, investors typically have some redress in law and regulatory action may be involved.
It's a simple analogy to look at backing a Kickstarter campaign that states certain things about their project goals in the same way. Whatever the legal position, in practice a deliberate and unnecessary deviation from what backers were explicitly told they were supporting seems likely to end only one of three ways:
1. The project team relent to save their reputation/project and issue refunds to those who feel it's not a project they would have backed under the new conditions.
2. Kickstarter themselves step in to protect their own reputation, somehow forcing the project to issue refunds. This issue could be an existential threat for the crowd-sourcing business model, after all.
3. Kickstarter and/or the project admins argue that a bait and switch is OK under Kickstarter rules and say something weaselly about legal terms and the deal not being what everyone thought it was. If too many backers take a different view and pursue this with their card providers claiming fraud, good luck doing any further business after the resulting chargebacks.
It's not clear to me how significant and widespread the objections to this actually are, but if it's a real problem, I don't really see any way it ends well for either the project or Kickstarter if they don't proactively do something to make things right with backers who thought they were being ripped off.
A lot of this is getting quite off-topic now, but I feel I have to respond to some of these points.
The ONLY way they can be avoided altogether is with flyovers/unders. And other than motorways, they are as rare as hens teeth. A miniscule fraction of a percent of junctions. And that's not changing.
Yes, it is. The current plans place a lot of emphasis on upgrading trunk roads managed by the Highways Agency to dual carriageway and grade separated junctions. If you're interested, there's a list of these projects on the Highways Agency web site.
Widening motorways doesn't create junctions, but it does pour ever more traffic onto the existing roundabouts that most motorway sliproads feed onto. With ever lengthening queues to get on and get off the motorways as a result.
And likewise that is why significant junction remodelling works are going on at some of the major black spots for this, such as the bottom of the M6.
You talk of projects to simplify junctions. And that's true. But equally more and more junctions with traffic lights or roundabouts are created. Every time theres a new housing estate, business park or supermarket built for starters.
But those are rarely heavily congested, nor likely to become so because as you say they are typically there to serve specific local requirements. It's really the main trunk roads that we need to consider if we're comparing the efficiency of road transport with the rail network and potential high speed rail infrastructure.
There is no finite population. The number of cars increases every year.
Perhaps, but any given driver is still driving no more than one of them at once. We're seeing more two-driver households that have two (or more) cars and as a general demographic trend more people are staying single for longer and many of them have their own cars. However, neither of these factors (but particularly the first one) necessarily means all of those extra cars are being driven all the time.
It's also worth noting that with the general hostility toward new/young drivers these days, particularly within the insurance industry, more people are waiting until well into their 20s to take their driving tests, which will reduce the number of (legal) drivers if the trend continues. At least for the next few years, it looks as though this effect is going to more than cancel out the increase in the general adult population that you mentioned. (This is actually one of the stronger arguments for improving public transport provision at the expense of funding improvements to the road network.)
And you are thinking about it in the wrong way completely when you talk of "road space". The only thing space gives predictably you is car parks. The road system is a mostly 2D network. And as such it's limited by it's nodes. The bottlenecks are the junctions.
That is true up to a point, but you are oversimplifying. Traffic engineering can be a surprisingly interesting field, because you get all kinds of perverse-seeming behaviours that actually make complete sense when you consider the actors with their local knowledge making decisions in isolation, but which result in tragedy of the commons kind of outcomes. We see this every time a motorway is congested, when the most efficient way to use the space is to have the traffic slowing down and moving uniformly, but there is always Lane Changing Guy who has to jump around cutting everyone up so he can get there five seconds sooner.
There are also all kinds of circumstances when the modelling these guys use still makes daft assumptions which predictably result in unintended outcomes when implemented. They just spent about half a million pounds "improving" a roundabout on the Cambridge ring road to make it more cycle-friendly, but because they apparently didn't understand the ideas they were borrowing from abroad and didn't implement the whole system, the
I don't think it's a question of ignoring the indirect benefits. As I see it, since we can't know what true benefits will be derived without doing the entire project anyway, it is probably more fruitful to consider the likely benefits relative to other options. In particular, one other option is improving existing transport infrastructure instead of building a completely new long distance, high speed railway line.
We do know that HS2 could only transport a modest number of people compared to the overall railway network, even at its full long-term capacity. We also know that it will offer only a modest reduction in journey time, so almost certainly a quantitative but not qualitative improvement for most passengers. (This is one area where the high speed rail in the UK may differ from the high speed rail in Japan that started this whole discussion.) So whatever indirect benefits may result from creating HS2 are likely to be more incremental, evolutionary improvements in the affected local economies and communities, rather than dramatic shifts in productivity or quality of life. The flip side is that you could do a lot of that with the kind of money we're talking about if you invested it elsewhere in transport infrastructure, and a lot of those projects have much more predictable and reliable long term benefits than the relative unknown of high speed long distance rail.
This is because we have been making collosal investments for decades in the road network so there generally isn't much low-hanging fruit.
We must be talking about different countries. Here in the UK, road infrastructure funding has fallen about 80% in real terms since its peak. Across the Channel, the French have built as much new road over the past couple of decades as we have in our entire road network.
Pretending there's some arbitrary number of separations before it ceases to matter, it's not really helping the discussion. That's not how benefits such as these work
Which, with due respect, is an awfully convenient method of hand-waving away the staggering costs and significant disruption of such a project while demonstrating neither any verifiable level of benefit nor any objective advantage relative to other work that could have been done instead.
To put this in perspective, the official estimates for HS2 costs are currently £42.6B for the line plus £7.5B for rolling stock, which is in the general region of £1,000 for each person in the working population. For comparison, the same amount of funding could build about 90 large hospitals like this one, or fund the government's entire national road network enhancements programme almost twice over, or fully fund a major government department like Education or Defence for a year, or pay the interest on the entire national debt for a year.
You need a lot of indirect benefit from a high speed rail project like HS2 to outweigh those kinds of things. I'm not saying it's completely impossible that such benefits will eventually result, but a bit of optimistic commentary doesn't go very far in making the case.
Living in continental Europe, your comments about "general reduction in flexibility" and "much higher ticket prices" are laughably nonsensical to me.
That must be a different continental Europe to the one I visit, then, because every time I go the old school trains seem to cost single figures of Euros for a whole day of travel, while taking a single Eurostar journey between major cities is typically two orders of magnitude more expensive. In some cases the latter also require booking in advance, unlike the older long-distance routes that have often been shut down once a Eurostar-style high speed replacement is available.
It is self-evident that if you build enough road then there will be enough space for a finite population of drivers and vehicles. It is also obvious that we physically have enough resources to do so. The road-building question is a cost/benefit trade-off, a matter of what is practical to build given realistic time and money constraints, opposition on environmental grounds, opposition from those who would be disrupted by the work, and so on.
I didn't respond to the point you made relating to junctions, because you claim without evidence that it's not possible to avoid them in most cases, yet the reality at least here in the UK is that many of the major road-building projects in recent years have been carried out precisely to simplify junctions or eliminate the need for some of them altogether, while others have been widening trunk roads that have insufficient capacity, which doesn't necessarily create any new junctions at all.
I'm not sure you understand the practical relationships between government and big business in Japan.
Also, speaking of basic fact checking, you might like to consider the origins of the commercial operation behind today's Shinkansen. Hint: The original developments were a financial disaster, and got snapped up for the equivalent of cents-on-a-dollar money at privatization after the government had invested a fortune in the early days.
But it is true that the situation in Japan is not directly comparable to other high speed rail such as European or US networks and their potential developments. The economics, demographics and geography are different, and do make very high speed rail a more attractive proposition in Japan.
I don't know enough about US infrastructure to know how much potential there might be in that idea, but sure, reasonable alternative strategies should always be properly considered.
For the kind of very high speed, maglev-based trains we were originally talking about, I wonder how much any advantage in somewhat faster movement would really be worth. Presumably the implications for increasing the spec on the infrastructure to cope with shifting much heavier trains would be significant, and you would need a lot of trains to shift the kind of volumes that modern container ships routinely carry, so I suspect when you looked at the facts and did the math the idea of fast transcontinental rail freight might be a non-starter.
Even so, the modern container-centric shipping industry is one of the most remarkable yet unspoken success stories of the technological world, so it surely makes sense to integrate general developments in rail infrastructure with shipping where there is an advantage to be had.
Maybe. There obviously are people in British politics today who genuinely want to make things better and have worthy principles to match. There seem to be at least a few in each of the major parties in our various national assemblies, and you'll find others if you look at those who are active within smaller communities and local government. What saddens me is that the system appears to be constructed so that only those who play the game and toe the line can progress to the top, and thus we find ourselves with political leadership who don't seem to have enough bones to form a spine between them. That particular systemic failing seems to be responsible for a great many ills in our societies today, not the least of which is a tendency to chase high-profile projects whether or not they are really the best way to proceed.
Right, but there are only going to be relatively small numbers of them as well. Once again, we're talking about enough money to instead make dramatic improvements to the existing rail network, or to upgrade national communications infrastructure to make teleconferences (and remote working more generally) much more practical, or numerous other things that would also benefit exactly the same kinds of people who might benefit from the existence of HS2.
It's also important to realise -- which many people don't -- that when these new high-speed lines are introduced, they often have a negative effect on some travellers. In a nutshell, prices are typically far higher to travel on the high speed trains, and there is a significant emphasis on booking as far in advance as possible because of limited capacity. However, once those services are available, the existing long-distance routes on existing network infrastructure tend to be scaled back, actually reducing the quantity and quality of the available alternatives. It remains to be seen whether saving an hour or two travelling between two big cities on a journey that is still going to take several hours is really that helpful when it happens at the expense of much higher ticket prices and a general reduction in flexibility in rail travel as a whole; evidence from what has happened so far in places like Europe and Asia is not exactly a glowing endorsement of this strategy.
The UK roads are becoming increasingly congested, and that can't be cured by building more roads.
Of course it can. You might not like the financial or environmental implications of taking that policy to its logical conclusion. (Neither would I, for the record.) However, there are only so many people in this country, only so many cars for those who drive to use, and only so many hours in the day for them to spend behind the wheel. That creates a hard upper bound for the capacity required, even before you apply common sense and make more realistic assumptions about how long people will actually be willing to spend driving even on a perfectly efficient road network.
I know it's a popular sound-bite, particularly for the green movement, to claim that you can't build your way out of congestion, but such a general and unqualified proposition doesn't stand up to even elementary scrutiny. There is no question that we could do exactly that, but the interesting questions are all about whether or when we would want to.
That's why it makes sense to invest in rail. Because every 1.x passenger means one fewer car on the road. It's very debatable whether HS2 is the best investment to make in rail. But the principle of investing in rail is not wrong.
I'm certainly not against investment in rail in general. I believe the most effective and efficient transport system must be a combination of mass and personal transit, playing to the strengths of each where you can/must.
All I'm saying in this thread is that there are genuine concerns about whether high-speed rail of the kind we're talking about in Japan or less extreme versions like HS2 are justifiable given how much they cost in various ways and how few people they directly benefit.
Living in rural Wales I don't get any direct benefit from new motorways or road widenings in, say the Midlands; nor do most people living in Newcastle or Scotland for that matter.
That is true, but there is a much higher chance that you will benefit indirectly from improved transport infrastructure that helps anything you buy get moved to your local area so you can buy it. HS2 isn't, as far as I know, currently expected to carry much if any freight itself, and arguments that it will free up significant room on the existing railway network for freight by shifting long-distance services have been criticised for various reasons.
Usually, when these things are built, people just start travelling longer distances
That is certainly true as a local effect and up to a certain level, and it is therefore something that should be taken into consideration when planning whether and where to improve the road network.
In that case there really is a reductio ad absurdum case, though. Suppose you can open up an often overcrowded route such as the M25 enough that all traffic can move twice as fast at busy times. You save a lot of time for a lot of people, and of course you also improve the environmental situation (at least, if you ignore the costs of the development itself and look only at ongoing fuel consumption and emissions by vehicles using the road). Would this mean some people would commute further to work or relocate? Sure. Would it mean everyone using the road would extend their commute or relocate their business to cheaper areas outside London and therefore just shift the burden elsewhere? Of course not. People drive to places for specific reasons, and they choose those places for other specific reasons, and neither those reasons nor economic drivers would completely or even mostly negate the benefits if we could move to some hypothetical road transport network that ran with 100% efficiency tomorrow.
I know people who were seriously hurt in the London transport attacks, so while I'm not That Guy who thinks everyone who writes something dumb on the Internet is actually a terrorist, I still find such "jokes" in poor taste. Your mileage may vary depending on how many people you know were permanently disfigured or disabled just because they took the wrong train one day.
Also, if you read my previous post properly you'll find my figures are right about 9/11. Not that it's really the point; I don't meet a lot of people who think jokes about flying planes into buildings are funny and I don't imagine I'd meet many more if each plane crash that day had only killed a hundred innocent people instead.
Yes. I'm in Cambridge, and Julian Huppert is currently our MP.
I'm not sure for how much longer that will be true, because he's a Lib Dem in a seat that can swing sharply from one election to the next, and I suspect the Lib Dems are in real danger of being annihilated at the next general election thanks to some poor leadership decisions in recent years.
Personally, I'll be sorry if he does go. We don't always agree on policy, but at least he's the kind of representative someone can have an intelligent discussion with and if he does still go another way then he's probably got a reasonable basis for his position. I think we need more people like that in government whatever colour is on their party flag (and fewer people who think the appropriate response to intelligent discourse in government is mockery).
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So how does this not make you a worthless freeloader?
I may be literally worthless to such sites. I just don't think they ever had a reasonable expectation that I would be any more than that, any more than someone paying for an ad on a billboard has a reasonable expectation that every driver will stop and read it, or any TV advertiser has a reasonable expectation that no-one is going to go take a leak during the ad break.
There is no law requiring someone to give their time to the ads just because they are there, and there never has been, making this a fundamentally different situation to copyright infringement, fraud, or whatever other bad analogies people are throwing around in today's discussion.
Ultimately, if someone wants a promise to be paid in return for their work, there are a number of options available to them, starting with charging for it just like every other industry in the world that produces value. And if the work has some modest value to a lot of people but the overheads of formally charging are too great, there are plenty of other ways to accumulate minor contributions without spamming disreputable ad networks all over your site.
Just like all the people who "share" music or software without paying the artists/creator a dime for their work.
Not really.
One obvious difference is that the law generally prohibits copying a copyrighted work without complying with the copyright holder's terms for payment etc. There is no analogous law about downloading freely available content without viewing the ads, unless you want to start arguing that the implicit permission to access that content does not apply if you don't view the ads as well, which is quite the can of worms to open.
Another obvious difference is that buying a legal copy of a creative work does not in itself subject me to severely degraded system performance, wasting arbitrary amounts of bandwidth I'm already paying for on things I didn't ask for, or assorted security and privacy risks. Not blocking ads and trackers on-line does all of these things. (Obviously some content comes with DRM and similar malware that also does some or all of these things, but let's not conflate buying from dubious sources with buying at all.)
It might not seem fair, but the fact is that levying a fee for any claimed chargeback was the industry norm for a long time, regardless of the final outcome. Remember, the card payments industry is fundamentally and systemically screwed up, and approximately 99.9% of the time it's the merchant who is the screwee when things go wrong whether or not they have actually done anything wrong.
As far as I'm aware, it's only relatively recently that some card payments services have been more fair about this and started imposing the fee only for successful chargebacks.
I know it's Blackpool, but still, no one should expect much for 36 pounds.
You say that, but there are plenty of local B&Bs and some of the big national chains like Premier Inn that would charge little more than that for a night off season and still offer decent accommodation and a good breakfast. Short stay accommodation is a fiercely competitive market in Blackpool, and prices really can be much lower than similar places in most of the UK.
I was told there was nothing I could do.
It looks like you need to use a better card payment service. Although the chargeback system is certainly horribly biased against honest merchants and vulnerable to abuse, you can still dispute any chargeback, and any serious card payment service will surely provide for this.
Also worth knowing:
1. Some payment services these days will waive the chargeback fee if you successfully defend the charge.
2. If you use 3-D Secure to authenticate the buyer, then chargeback liability shifts to the financial companies rather than you as the merchant under most circumstances.
So the situation here is at least a bit better for honest merchants than it used to be.
I'm guessing from your comments on the £100 figure that you're referring to the protections under section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act (the one making your credit card company liable along with the retailer under certain conditions, if you buy something using your card). That's a useful law to know, but in this case it doesn't seem necessary.
The small print supposedly enabling the "fine" here is almost certainly a straight-up unfair term in a consumer contract, and as such it would not be binding on the consumer according to the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999.
In practice the quickest way to get the matter resolved might be to ask the card company to charge the "fine" back, and given that the chargeback system is heavily loaded against merchants this seems likely to succeed.
If that doesn't work, a small claims court action might be entertaining, but as with any low value legal action there is unfortunately a high probability that the time and hassle of finding your way around that system and going to court if necessary would far outweigh any financial benefit you might gain by the end of it, unless you've done this sort of thing before and so already know how it works.
(I'm not a lawyer, so obviously check that the above is still correct if this affects you, but this situation is so clear-cut...)
Sad, but true. Sadder still that "after the servers have been shut down" can be a very short time after the game has been bought.
Personally, I agree. If I want to play a game or watch a movie, I buy it. If I don't think it's worth the money, I move past it and do something else instead.
It therefore annoys me greatly when software or a movie or music I've paid good money for then doesn't work properly and DRM or unskippable ads or whatever it is this week actively give me a worse experience than someone who pirates. This is a significant part of the reason I haven't bought a new AAA game from a big studio for many years, and I only buy DRM-free music formats.
Sadly, I suspect we are in a minority and a lot of people still don't see why they should pay for something they can easily get for free, often with a better experience, without much real downside.
Your strawman about wages is irrelevant. I said nothing about the individual staff working on game development -- who, as you said, do seem to be treated very badly by certain large employers in the gaming industry. (For completeness, perhaps it is fair to note at this point that Frontier Developments is local to me here in Cambridge, UK and does not have that kind of reputation for mistreating its staff as far as I'm aware.)
In any case, that is an entirely separate issue to the one I raised, where the big businesses in the gaming industry are now spending staggering amounts of money to develop and market a AAA title. When that kind of money is involved, their management is likely to choose safer bets, even if that means some genres and the gamers who enjoy them now lose out.
I don't know the financial model of this particular game. I have found widespread reports that each newsletter seems to ask for more payment for something, so it seems clear that someone has at a minimum misjudged the pricing model and the presentation/PR side of the project. But these guys are industry vets, so it would be naive to think they aren't aware of the general trends in the industry and likely to react to them. Again, it seems like they probably made a mistake in how they handled that reaction in this particular case.
There are hundreds of thousands of junctions in the UK. 10s of projects does not make any significant difference.
Sure they do. Some junctions carry several orders of magnitude more than others.
And for the kind of money we're talking about for HS2, you could do a lot more than 10s of these projects. The entire A14 upgrade through Cambridgeshire -- a single project spanning many miles of a major trunk route -- only has an estimated budget in the region of £1B, about 2% of HS2, and this is work that has been delayed for years because of the cost despite a crazy number of accidents, many of them fatal, happening on the existing A14 corridor every year.
I figured that's what you were doing. Yet local roads are significant. Few journeys start and end by a motorway or dual-carriageway.
No they don't. But again different roads carry vastly different volumes of traffic. When the M25 was effectively closed a few days ago because an overnight repair didn't set properly, there were 16 miles of tailbacks, across 3-4 lanes, for several hours. That is roughly equivalent to gridlocking an entire small city for an entire working day.
And what of the M4 bus lane scheme, where it was deemed that using fewer lanes for cars actually speeded up the cars journeys?
You go with the evidence, of course. I'm not saying building more roads is always the answer to congestion or inefficiency in the road network. On the contrary, as I wrote before, traffic engineering is sometimes a surprising field with counter-intuitive results.
My point throughout this discussion is simply that high speed rail is in many senses a very expensive type of infrastructure to build, and there are certainly alternative uses for those resources that might plausibly give much better returns. Improving the road network is merely one possibility, and as you just demonstrated, there are useful improvements that can be made that don't necessarily involve building new roads.
Game creators seem to hate single player anymore. I guess it is because they have to make an actual game with a plot, and goals, and an actual AI to fight against you.
I fear there is a much simpler explanation: on-line games are far less susceptible to piracy and generate more reliable financial returns.
Next time some pirate posts about how copyright isn't theft because the developer didn't lose anything, they wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and DRM is pointless, consider that the modern games industry is the logical result. Copyright infringement is economic damage and the big game publishers have routed around it.
Unfortunately, in doing so, they have almost killed off entire chunks of the industry, such as single player games with any serious depth, or games with novel gameplay and new ideas. Why bother with little things like creativity and making fun new games when Call of EVE: Advanced WarCraft 2017 is a safe bet to make a fortune?
Most of the innovation in the industry these days is done by the little guys. On very rare occasions, those little guys make it big, but mostly you just don't get the same kind of epic scale and production values at that end of the market.
You could say that (and in a way it's true), but technically there is no "buyer" since it's NOT a purchase, it's financial backing of a project.
Right, but when grown-ups accept investment in their company/fund/whatever, they normally publish various information about their strategy so investors know what they are backing. If the officers/fund manager/whoever then deviate significantly from that strategy, investors typically have some redress in law and regulatory action may be involved.
It's a simple analogy to look at backing a Kickstarter campaign that states certain things about their project goals in the same way. Whatever the legal position, in practice a deliberate and unnecessary deviation from what backers were explicitly told they were supporting seems likely to end only one of three ways:
1. The project team relent to save their reputation/project and issue refunds to those who feel it's not a project they would have backed under the new conditions.
2. Kickstarter themselves step in to protect their own reputation, somehow forcing the project to issue refunds. This issue could be an existential threat for the crowd-sourcing business model, after all.
3. Kickstarter and/or the project admins argue that a bait and switch is OK under Kickstarter rules and say something weaselly about legal terms and the deal not being what everyone thought it was. If too many backers take a different view and pursue this with their card providers claiming fraud, good luck doing any further business after the resulting chargebacks.
It's not clear to me how significant and widespread the objections to this actually are, but if it's a real problem, I don't really see any way it ends well for either the project or Kickstarter if they don't proactively do something to make things right with backers who thought they were being ripped off.
A lot of this is getting quite off-topic now, but I feel I have to respond to some of these points.
The ONLY way they can be avoided altogether is with flyovers/unders. And other than motorways, they are as rare as hens teeth. A miniscule fraction of a percent of junctions. And that's not changing.
Yes, it is. The current plans place a lot of emphasis on upgrading trunk roads managed by the Highways Agency to dual carriageway and grade separated junctions. If you're interested, there's a list of these projects on the Highways Agency web site.
Widening motorways doesn't create junctions, but it does pour ever more traffic onto the existing roundabouts that most motorway sliproads feed onto. With ever lengthening queues to get on and get off the motorways as a result.
And likewise that is why significant junction remodelling works are going on at some of the major black spots for this, such as the bottom of the M6.
You talk of projects to simplify junctions. And that's true. But equally more and more junctions with traffic lights or roundabouts are created. Every time theres a new housing estate, business park or supermarket built for starters.
But those are rarely heavily congested, nor likely to become so because as you say they are typically there to serve specific local requirements. It's really the main trunk roads that we need to consider if we're comparing the efficiency of road transport with the rail network and potential high speed rail infrastructure.
There is no finite population. The number of cars increases every year.
Perhaps, but any given driver is still driving no more than one of them at once. We're seeing more two-driver households that have two (or more) cars and as a general demographic trend more people are staying single for longer and many of them have their own cars. However, neither of these factors (but particularly the first one) necessarily means all of those extra cars are being driven all the time.
It's also worth noting that with the general hostility toward new/young drivers these days, particularly within the insurance industry, more people are waiting until well into their 20s to take their driving tests, which will reduce the number of (legal) drivers if the trend continues. At least for the next few years, it looks as though this effect is going to more than cancel out the increase in the general adult population that you mentioned. (This is actually one of the stronger arguments for improving public transport provision at the expense of funding improvements to the road network.)
And you are thinking about it in the wrong way completely when you talk of "road space". The only thing space gives predictably you is car parks. The road system is a mostly 2D network. And as such it's limited by it's nodes. The bottlenecks are the junctions.
That is true up to a point, but you are oversimplifying. Traffic engineering can be a surprisingly interesting field, because you get all kinds of perverse-seeming behaviours that actually make complete sense when you consider the actors with their local knowledge making decisions in isolation, but which result in tragedy of the commons kind of outcomes. We see this every time a motorway is congested, when the most efficient way to use the space is to have the traffic slowing down and moving uniformly, but there is always Lane Changing Guy who has to jump around cutting everyone up so he can get there five seconds sooner.
There are also all kinds of circumstances when the modelling these guys use still makes daft assumptions which predictably result in unintended outcomes when implemented. They just spent about half a million pounds "improving" a roundabout on the Cambridge ring road to make it more cycle-friendly, but because they apparently didn't understand the ideas they were borrowing from abroad and didn't implement the whole system, the
I don't think it's a question of ignoring the indirect benefits. As I see it, since we can't know what true benefits will be derived without doing the entire project anyway, it is probably more fruitful to consider the likely benefits relative to other options. In particular, one other option is improving existing transport infrastructure instead of building a completely new long distance, high speed railway line.
We do know that HS2 could only transport a modest number of people compared to the overall railway network, even at its full long-term capacity. We also know that it will offer only a modest reduction in journey time, so almost certainly a quantitative but not qualitative improvement for most passengers. (This is one area where the high speed rail in the UK may differ from the high speed rail in Japan that started this whole discussion.) So whatever indirect benefits may result from creating HS2 are likely to be more incremental, evolutionary improvements in the affected local economies and communities, rather than dramatic shifts in productivity or quality of life. The flip side is that you could do a lot of that with the kind of money we're talking about if you invested it elsewhere in transport infrastructure, and a lot of those projects have much more predictable and reliable long term benefits than the relative unknown of high speed long distance rail.
This is because we have been making collosal investments for decades in the road network so there generally isn't much low-hanging fruit.
We must be talking about different countries. Here in the UK, road infrastructure funding has fallen about 80% in real terms since its peak. Across the Channel, the French have built as much new road over the past couple of decades as we have in our entire road network.
Pretending there's some arbitrary number of separations before it ceases to matter, it's not really helping the discussion. That's not how benefits such as these work
Which, with due respect, is an awfully convenient method of hand-waving away the staggering costs and significant disruption of such a project while demonstrating neither any verifiable level of benefit nor any objective advantage relative to other work that could have been done instead.
To put this in perspective, the official estimates for HS2 costs are currently £42.6B for the line plus £7.5B for rolling stock, which is in the general region of £1,000 for each person in the working population. For comparison, the same amount of funding could build about 90 large hospitals like this one, or fund the government's entire national road network enhancements programme almost twice over, or fully fund a major government department like Education or Defence for a year, or pay the interest on the entire national debt for a year.
You need a lot of indirect benefit from a high speed rail project like HS2 to outweigh those kinds of things. I'm not saying it's completely impossible that such benefits will eventually result, but a bit of optimistic commentary doesn't go very far in making the case.
Living in continental Europe, your comments about "general reduction in flexibility" and "much higher ticket prices" are laughably nonsensical to me.
That must be a different continental Europe to the one I visit, then, because every time I go the old school trains seem to cost single figures of Euros for a whole day of travel, while taking a single Eurostar journey between major cities is typically two orders of magnitude more expensive. In some cases the latter also require booking in advance, unlike the older long-distance routes that have often been shut down once a Eurostar-style high speed replacement is available.
It is self-evident that if you build enough road then there will be enough space for a finite population of drivers and vehicles. It is also obvious that we physically have enough resources to do so. The road-building question is a cost/benefit trade-off, a matter of what is practical to build given realistic time and money constraints, opposition on environmental grounds, opposition from those who would be disrupted by the work, and so on.
I didn't respond to the point you made relating to junctions, because you claim without evidence that it's not possible to avoid them in most cases, yet the reality at least here in the UK is that many of the major road-building projects in recent years have been carried out precisely to simplify junctions or eliminate the need for some of them altogether, while others have been widening trunk roads that have insufficient capacity, which doesn't necessarily create any new junctions at all.
I'm not sure you understand the practical relationships between government and big business in Japan.
Also, speaking of basic fact checking, you might like to consider the origins of the commercial operation behind today's Shinkansen. Hint: The original developments were a financial disaster, and got snapped up for the equivalent of cents-on-a-dollar money at privatization after the government had invested a fortune in the early days.
But it is true that the situation in Japan is not directly comparable to other high speed rail such as European or US networks and their potential developments. The economics, demographics and geography are different, and do make very high speed rail a more attractive proposition in Japan.
I don't know enough about US infrastructure to know how much potential there might be in that idea, but sure, reasonable alternative strategies should always be properly considered.
For the kind of very high speed, maglev-based trains we were originally talking about, I wonder how much any advantage in somewhat faster movement would really be worth. Presumably the implications for increasing the spec on the infrastructure to cope with shifting much heavier trains would be significant, and you would need a lot of trains to shift the kind of volumes that modern container ships routinely carry, so I suspect when you looked at the facts and did the math the idea of fast transcontinental rail freight might be a non-starter.
Even so, the modern container-centric shipping industry is one of the most remarkable yet unspoken success stories of the technological world, so it surely makes sense to integrate general developments in rail infrastructure with shipping where there is an advantage to be had.
Maybe. There obviously are people in British politics today who genuinely want to make things better and have worthy principles to match. There seem to be at least a few in each of the major parties in our various national assemblies, and you'll find others if you look at those who are active within smaller communities and local government. What saddens me is that the system appears to be constructed so that only those who play the game and toe the line can progress to the top, and thus we find ourselves with political leadership who don't seem to have enough bones to form a spine between them. That particular systemic failing seems to be responsible for a great many ills in our societies today, not the least of which is a tendency to chase high-profile projects whether or not they are really the best way to proceed.
Right, but there are only going to be relatively small numbers of them as well. Once again, we're talking about enough money to instead make dramatic improvements to the existing rail network, or to upgrade national communications infrastructure to make teleconferences (and remote working more generally) much more practical, or numerous other things that would also benefit exactly the same kinds of people who might benefit from the existence of HS2.
It's also important to realise -- which many people don't -- that when these new high-speed lines are introduced, they often have a negative effect on some travellers. In a nutshell, prices are typically far higher to travel on the high speed trains, and there is a significant emphasis on booking as far in advance as possible because of limited capacity. However, once those services are available, the existing long-distance routes on existing network infrastructure tend to be scaled back, actually reducing the quantity and quality of the available alternatives. It remains to be seen whether saving an hour or two travelling between two big cities on a journey that is still going to take several hours is really that helpful when it happens at the expense of much higher ticket prices and a general reduction in flexibility in rail travel as a whole; evidence from what has happened so far in places like Europe and Asia is not exactly a glowing endorsement of this strategy.
The UK roads are becoming increasingly congested, and that can't be cured by building more roads.
Of course it can. You might not like the financial or environmental implications of taking that policy to its logical conclusion. (Neither would I, for the record.) However, there are only so many people in this country, only so many cars for those who drive to use, and only so many hours in the day for them to spend behind the wheel. That creates a hard upper bound for the capacity required, even before you apply common sense and make more realistic assumptions about how long people will actually be willing to spend driving even on a perfectly efficient road network.
I know it's a popular sound-bite, particularly for the green movement, to claim that you can't build your way out of congestion, but such a general and unqualified proposition doesn't stand up to even elementary scrutiny. There is no question that we could do exactly that, but the interesting questions are all about whether or when we would want to.
That's why it makes sense to invest in rail. Because every 1.x passenger means one fewer car on the road. It's very debatable whether HS2 is the best investment to make in rail. But the principle of investing in rail is not wrong.
I'm certainly not against investment in rail in general. I believe the most effective and efficient transport system must be a combination of mass and personal transit, playing to the strengths of each where you can/must.
All I'm saying in this thread is that there are genuine concerns about whether high-speed rail of the kind we're talking about in Japan or less extreme versions like HS2 are justifiable given how much they cost in various ways and how few people they directly benefit.
Living in rural Wales I don't get any direct benefit from new motorways or road widenings in, say the Midlands; nor do most people living in Newcastle or Scotland for that matter.
That is true, but there is a much higher chance that you will benefit indirectly from improved transport infrastructure that helps anything you buy get moved to your local area so you can buy it. HS2 isn't, as far as I know, currently expected to carry much if any freight itself, and arguments that it will free up significant room on the existing railway network for freight by shifting long-distance services have been criticised for various reasons.
Usually, when these things are built, people just start travelling longer distances
That is certainly true as a local effect and up to a certain level, and it is therefore something that should be taken into consideration when planning whether and where to improve the road network.
In that case there really is a reductio ad absurdum case, though. Suppose you can open up an often overcrowded route such as the M25 enough that all traffic can move twice as fast at busy times. You save a lot of time for a lot of people, and of course you also improve the environmental situation (at least, if you ignore the costs of the development itself and look only at ongoing fuel consumption and emissions by vehicles using the road). Would this mean some people would commute further to work or relocate? Sure. Would it mean everyone using the road would extend their commute or relocate their business to cheaper areas outside London and therefore just shift the burden elsewhere? Of course not. People drive to places for specific reasons, and they choose those places for other specific reasons, and neither those reasons nor economic drivers would completely or even mostly negate the benefits if we could move to some hypothetical road transport network that ran with 100% efficiency tomorrow.
I know people who were seriously hurt in the London transport attacks, so while I'm not That Guy who thinks everyone who writes something dumb on the Internet is actually a terrorist, I still find such "jokes" in poor taste. Your mileage may vary depending on how many people you know were permanently disfigured or disabled just because they took the wrong train one day.
Also, if you read my previous post properly you'll find my figures are right about 9/11. Not that it's really the point; I don't meet a lot of people who think jokes about flying planes into buildings are funny and I don't imagine I'd meet many more if each plane crash that day had only killed a hundred innocent people instead.
Yes. I'm in Cambridge, and Julian Huppert is currently our MP.
I'm not sure for how much longer that will be true, because he's a Lib Dem in a seat that can swing sharply from one election to the next, and I suspect the Lib Dems are in real danger of being annihilated at the next general election thanks to some poor leadership decisions in recent years.
Personally, I'll be sorry if he does go. We don't always agree on policy, but at least he's the kind of representative someone can have an intelligent discussion with and if he does still go another way then he's probably got a reasonable basis for his position. I think we need more people like that in government whatever colour is on their party flag (and fewer people who think the appropriate response to intelligent discourse in government is mockery).