Yes. One advantage GW has, is that it has never outsourced manufacturing. The miniatures are still made locally, so they haven't lost their expertise, nor are they threatened by a former contractor turned competitor.
Their success is down to a bunch of factors: near monopoly position in their niche, total vertical integration, obsession with design and marketing, and I think crucially, having the kids who grew up playing coming into a high-spending age bracket.
That said, I think there's something to the comment. The vertical integration is key, IMO. They own the IP, manufacture and distribution. There's a lot of power in that business model: short supply chains, all profit kept in house, a lot less faffing around with third parties.
They have kept skills in house. Two of their great original designers have retired at the company in the last few years. I don't think that's been the one critical factor in their success, but they're well-respected figures who knew the business and were very much a part of building that fanatical brand loyalty. One of my gaming group occasionally plays with the great John Blanche.
And man, keeping manufacturing in the UK. As a Brit, despite my many misgivings about how they operate as a company, I gotta love that. Again, I don't know if it's they key factor here, but they've been doing this for decades, they're good at it, and that's got to help the bottom line.
Keeping things in the UK would have been a difficult decision to maintain, particularly as overseas manufacturing was taking off, but it's clearly paid off in the long run.
how do you identify their niche? Miniature wargaming has a bunch of competitors[0], and so does genre publishing.
I suppose they have more physical shops and places to play[1], and it's easier to find people to play with, so that may be what you're think of.
I myself never played the TT game, but I love the world of 40k, and have spent a lot of time consuming related content. I'd pay for WarhammerTV, if they just let me!
[1] I recall looking slack jawed at the awesome miniatures in a GW shop in.. Maidenhead, I think? 60k people. Around ~1993, I was a kid in a "english studying" holiday.
The near-monopoly comes from network effect. There are plenty of other games, I'm more of a painter and have models from a load of them, but I've only ever played GW games as that's what my friends play.
I can't think of anything that comes close on tabletop in terms of number of active players. I've just moved to a new town (pop ~5K), there's a club and that wasn't surprising. I wouldn't expect that with any other wargame.
Yeah, it's much like D&D in TTRPGs and MtG in CCGs. Anyone you meet who is into those kinds of games will almost certainly play those specific games, and potentially exclusively them, and finding players for any of the many other games in the genre is much more difficult.
Aren't most 40k minis cast resin? The process is incredibly simple, I don't think outsourcing it to China would save a lot of money, just bringing those minis over the ocean would probably cost 10x as much as making them locally.
Injected plastic. Resin occasionally, but it's premium and GW have pretty much discontinued it.
There's definitely a quality component, which will be part design and part manufacture. GW minis are substantially better quality than other brands.
The interesting thing now is resin-based 3D printing! I've done a load and it's great fun. The process is not quite ready for mainstream adoption, resin is icky, but that's the exciting thing to watch out for in the space.
Meanwhile European chemical manufacturing is collapsing under weight of record energy costs.[1][2] Most of other manufacturing is somehow tied to chemicals, you can't build things without material after all. So this will feed ongoing industrial collapse, which now affects even Germany.[3]
Meanwhile, low income households are running into financial issues if they want to turn up the heat.[4]
And the reason for that? Fossil fuels. Cited from one of your articles:
> “Our industry continues to face difficult market dynamics and challenging energy costs, with European gas prices around three times higher than the US,” Arnaud Valenduc, business director for Ineos Inovyn, the Ineos business that makes chloromethane, says in the press release.
Gas prices are high at least in part because of reduced exploitation of resources. For example here in Ireland we have stopped extracting our own gas and now import.
I'm I'm favour of increased renewables, but we need to be truthful about the costs. A fully renewable energy system is probably always going to be more expensive per unit than a fossil fuel based one.
> A fully renewable energy system is probably always going to be more expensive per unit than a fossil fuel based one.
No probably not at all unless you mean in the short term. The fossil industry gets way way way more financial support. The externalities of fossils are costing us incredible amounts of money, health and lives and will do for many many decades if not centuries to come. Renewables are now cheaper than nearly anything despite decades of suppression by the fossil industry.
Sat, past tense. Yes there's still quite a bit in there but the Netherlands is VERY densely populated. And public opinion has swayed towards letting it sit there.
The real reason it's off limits is simply because of externalities. The NAM just doesn't want to pony up the the money to pay for repairs of houses. It's rare for that to backfire like this in the fossil fuel industry.
Might not be a bad call to leave it. I'm sure we'll find a novel use for natural gas decades down the line which might be way more valuable than just burning it.
That quote mentions gas only. What about coal, oil, and biofuel?
Record energy costs are a thing. If solar and wind are 'free', why have European energy prices risen so much?
The real-world contra-indicators are the USA, China and pretty much any country outside the groupthink of the G20.
Whilst state interference is a factor, more tellingly they haven't slavishly followed the suicidal empathy of being 'green' and shutting down nuclear and fossil fuel power plants before a sufficient replacement was available.
We're talking about historically, up until now. They've continued to bring online more fossil fuel and nuclear plants in last decade, whilst Europe has done the complete opposite. It's only this year that fossil fuel plants are predicted to peak in China. The point being plentiful 'anything' forces prices down, including energy, and China are doing exactly what I said in the previous point: not shutting down nuclear or fossil fuels yet.
Europe on the other hand, has shut down nuclear and fossil fuels over the last decade and removed a source of cheap energy from the grid. And by cheap I mean, the build costs, are a sunk cost.
It was Putin that cut off gas supply to Europe almost completely in autumn 2021 in preparation of the invasion and then completely shut it off during 2022. That was before the pipelines were blown up.
Not if you compare states with similar levels of economic development, like US states or EU countries.
Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma have around 50% wind and 10 cent electricity.
When comparing EU states, the correlation is more about who taxes electricity and who builds wind. Comparing pre-tax prices has a very slight downward trend as the country has more wind.
You see a lot of propaganda graphs online that have the EU states clustered in the top right and a cluster of unlabelled Petro states and dictatorships who subsidize electricity in the other quadrant.
The intended implication is that you should emulate the countries they are afraid to name because it would make their graph ridiculous.
There's absolutely mismanagement, and politicians could do an awful lot to change this. Ironically, in the UK at least, most of the reasons why they don't are due to historic regulations designed to protect either the fossil fuel industry or an initially weak green energy industry, which no longer serves any purpose except to push both households and businesses into decline.
The problems of the chemical companies are related to natural gas prices, not electricity. This is because gas is used in the production. It even says so in one of the links you posted:
“Our industry continues to face difficult market dynamics and challenging energy costs, with European gas prices around three times higher than the US,” Arnaud Valenduc, business director for Ineos Inovyn, the Ineos business that makes chloromethane, says in the press release
My takeaway was that it's not really high energy costs (though for sure that doesn't help) but, in the UK's case at least, much more caused by political and policy ignorance over decades. Industrial, polluting industries were simply not vote winners and none of the politicians understood or cared about the strategic implications of letting these industries collapse.
There's a recent case of Wacker. They tried to build their own windpark in Germany but this got shot down by residents. Now they are moving to a chinese industrial area that is connected to windparks and battery storage providing cheap energy.
Why "abundant cheap energy is a key requirement to survive in today's globalized markets" has not made it into the EU leaderships' mindset is beyond comprehension.
Energy price is just one of many inputs for the viability of industry.
Availability of (educated) labor, wage level, infrastructure, political stability and a ton of other factors are at least as if not more important.
Why should we keep tolerating irreversible damage to planet/climate just to keep costs/prices low? If you can't produce some shit sustainably because that makes it too expensive, then maybe it should not get produced in the first place?
The point raised is valid however. Los Angeles in particular notoriously bad track record when it comes to managing water resources and depriving upstream communities of them.[1]
Check latitutes of largest cities in Germany, and compare them to largest cities in China. Have you noticed how all of major German cities are much further north than major Chinese cities?
Your argument is basically "It's only 80% as efficient as another country" so it has to be bad?
what if it's already 50% better than any alternative? Solarpunk is alive and well and economies of scale of panels and batteries will make it even more affordable and viable.
China connected 5 solar panels every second of last year. This is happening.
No, not unless you have a very specific notion of determinism. Some basic operations use arithmetic with finite precision in a way that isn't associative and therefore isn't reproducible. And CUDA introduces its own set of problems[1].
China is has most of its population further south than either USA or Europe. Solar makes much more sense there than in those locations.
Furthermore, by stimulating production of solar and wind related products with domestic consumption, the Chinese state has effectively captured absolute majority share of production across the entire supply chain. This is incredibly useful, when developed countries roll out subsidies for clean power.
Since there are no manufacturers that can match those in China in both price and volume. The bulk of subsidies is used to buy Chinese produced equipment.
At the same time, China is also investing in nuclear technology, and deploying far faster than anywhere in the world.
This hardly matters unless electricity prices for end consumers go down. And that can hardly happen without improved transmission lines and storage. And those are consistently being blocked by NIMBYs.
This is not a matter of policy, but of physics. Producers are far from consumers, in both time and space. Wind turbines are dispersed and far from cities, wind doesn't blow when there is high demand. And yet, these sources are being plugged into a grid that was built over decades under completely different assumptions.
No wonder the energy prices are high.
Edit:
Since some people don't believe that this matters, I'm attaching some basic sources about current state of UK power grid and necessary upgrades.
>The 8.4GW secured at this latest auction just about keeps the offshore wind target in reach, several analysts have told the BBC. But all those projects will still need connecting to the grid to generate electricity.
>"Getting that amount of capacity online by 2030 [will be] extremely challenging," said Nick Civetta, project leader at the Aurora Energy Research think tank.
That doesn't address the problem at all. Viking is connecting two grids together. This can help stabilize them in some scenarios. But much like in any other network, even if you have enough capacity almost everywhere, it doesn't matter, if you have a bottleneck on the path.
Existing grid has been built up with several high density sources, often very close to urban and industrial areas. Wind farms are, by their nature, neither of those.
There is enough material online about this issue. I'll gladly direct you to it.
Draghi report made it abundantly clear that this is the big issue. Despite being outwardly unified, EU market is horribly fractured, with regulations building on top of EU standards in almost every state and every area of business.
Then there are high energy costs, high salary costs, limited mobility of the workforce (partly due to ongoing housing crisis), entrenched overseas competition that doesn't have to deal with same challenges.
Together, these add to a deadly mix. Paradoxically, software is less affected than other industries. But even here it's bad.
I always thought that it could be reasonably simple to have a safe alternative. Have people enter a SHA256 of their password instead, and match against a database of other hashes.
Almost everyone interested in checking for password leaks knows how to generate SHA256 of a string. And those who don't shouldn't put their passwords on the internet.
Or even better, generate hash for all passwords in the database, package these hashes together with a simple search script and let people download it. That way, you are not sending any information anywhere, and noone can exploit the passwords, because hash is a one way function.
Then again, that download could be really large. I admit I have no idea how much storage would that take. But it's just text, so easily compressible. And with some smart indexing, it should be possible to keep most compressed and only unpack a relatively small portion to find a complete match.
Then again, I have virtually no background in cryptography, could be something horribly wrong with this.
When you do a check on https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords nothing is sent to the server. Instead the password is hashed locally and a list of the hash range is downloaded, which contains all the hashes and the number of occurrences.
The server doesn't receive the password, neither in plain-text nor hash form.
It would be easy enough to add this as a "secret" feature:
* user submits password
* gets hashed client side
* server compares it against stored hashes
* server also re-hashes the stored hash, and compares it against the hash received from the client
This would effectively mean that either entering the password, or the password hash would correctly match, since when entering the hash you are effectively "double" hashing the password which gets compared to the double hashed password on the server.
The upside is that users who don't understand hashing or don't feel like opening a sha256 tool wouldn't have to change their behavior or even be confused by a dialog explaining why they should hash the input, while advanced users could find out about the feature via another channel (e.g. hackernews).
The downside would be that it adds an extra hash step to every comparison on the sever. It's hard to know how expensive this would be for them.
Care to explain how you can tell what scripts gp was sent for the page https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords and what scripts he will be sent on future visits?
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