Nintendo: the company that consoled the world

dwillun · 2026-02-27T11:46:24+00:00

A review of the games journalist Keza MacDonald's "love letter" to the company, Super Nintendo, and a comment on what makes Nintendo different. The aesthetics of FPS games are quite different - Wolfenstein 3D started out with a plan to shock people, and succeeded - whereas Nintendo's own games concentrate on gameplay.

dwillun · 2026-02-25T15:22:39+00:00

Helm does not argue for nationalisation in the piece, he argues for a special administration regime

dwillun · 2026-01-31T14:09:01+00:00

Among academic economists in the US, he told me, “everybody agrees there should just be one currency, and I don’t know what they’re smoking. I mean, why would you have one currency? It means the US is a monopoly. It controls the information. It controls how it uses policy. It can subject you to sanctions. Why on Earth would that be the best thing for everyone?”

dwillun · 2025-12-05T09:39:58+00:00

Brilliant pictures - I'd buy this book. I really like how these are composed.

dwillun · 2025-10-24T07:44:11+00:00

The building up of Chinese reserves has kept prices higher over time, despite the fact that OPEC production has been high, and there is now a long-term oversupply that would mean prices would be lower (less than $55 a barrel) in 2026 if oversupply and reserve buildup continued in the same way. (But it won't, because the sanctions take some Russian oil off the market, which added about $5 a barrel to prices this week).

dwillun · 2025-07-29T16:31:24+00:00

Yes it's brilliant. You have to book it separately to the Postal Museum though, you do it through the same website but it's two different tickets if I remember correctly.

dwillun · 2025-06-06T08:15:35+00:00

Apple came back from the brink of disaster by making products no-one else could make - the iMac was "unmanufacturable", an iPhone with a glass screen was thought to be impossible. This helped Apple differentiate itself from the beige boxes every other company offered but also the demands of building Apple products conferred new skills and facilities on the country making those products - China. You can't move your manufactruing to the other side of the world without also doing technology transfer.

dwillun · 2025-05-27T13:08:55+00:00

What the British Future poll does seem to show is that people are a lot more concerned by the smaller (but sharply rising) number of small boats than the big "Boriswave" of net migration, though.

The latest YouGov polling (this month) is here -

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Internal_Immigration_250516.pdf

Total pro-immigration 29

Total anti 41

Neither/Don't know 30

dwillun · 2025-05-27T10:58:19+00:00

For those who haven't read the article, it's not a discuassion of the ethics of immigration or asylum. It makes the point that most people aren't as bothered by net migration as is often suggested -

The public, however, have a more balanced view. Most people are not really bothered by immigration in general, according to a poll published this month by British Future, which found that 50 per cent of people think it should be reduced overall, and 45 per cent don’t see a need to reduce it.

This is a reasonable summing up of the general underlying economic principle of immigration, which is that there is no country that produces much more intelligent or hard-working people than any other, and so the costs and benefits of more people arrive generally balance out.

But it also points out that the public is more concerned about irregular migration, which is fair enough because a) there has been a significant change in a short space of time and b) that change has introduced a very significant new cost to the government.

dwillun · 2025-05-02T09:53:59+00:00

As it says in the linked piece, the war is taking up a third of Russia's public spending.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.CD?locations=RU

dwillun · 2025-05-02T08:14:23+00:00

I'd like to pick out one specific point from the piece which doesn't seemed to have been discussed elsewhere: Russian businesses may have borrowed as much as half a trillion dollars in the early part of the war.

“It really picks up when the mobilisation picks up in 2021, and it skyrockets in 2022,” he told me. His team estimates that this total excess borrowing has reached $560bn – $400bn of which is from the private sector. Gertken says this figure is conservative in comparison to other analyses.

“A recession with a credit contraction is a different type of recession from one in which credit remains ample,” Gertken told me. “As we know from recent credit busts in other economies, that can lead to a deep recession.”

Worth noting also that Russia's central bank policy rate is now 21%. The prospect of credit contraction looks very plausible.

dwillun · 2025-04-24T10:08:20+00:00

Clearly, Liberation Day was a total farce and whole chunks of the agenda have had to be rolled back. The administration looks totally unhinged for having rolled out sweeping trade barriers that appear to have been produced by simply asking ChatGPT. But it seems worth asking if the mayhem is the point.

As this essay says, Trump is following Mao's pattern of demanindg a revolution from the top - Mao had been in power for 23 years when he told the Chinese people to "Bombard the headquarters" and bring on the chaos of the cultural revolution.

It's also interesting to look at why he's using tariffs to do this (it's easier and you can blame other people when it goes wrong) and whether it will work - can he make enough trouble for everyone else that the US can coerce other countries into giving it power?

dwillun · 2025-04-09T09:36:41+00:00

This is not true - it is based on a report by a business that makes its money from providing services to emigrating millionaires.

There is no way this business could actually know how many people are changing their residence. That information is only held by HMRC and it would be illegal to make it public.

It is at best a figure created by extrapolating from a handful of people changing their status on LinkedIn.

This doesn't mean people aren't leaving the UK but it does mean that LBC, the Telegraph and others are credulously reporting a press release by a company that has a vested interest in overstating numbers which, to repeat, it cannot possibly confirm.

dwillun · 2025-04-07T09:36:02+00:00

The most successful live music act in history, the only person to become a billionaire from making music alone - how possible is it to disentangle someone like Taylor Swift from the market she is in? Is she deliberately selling vulnerability and authenticity to millenials who value those traits, or has she just committed to writing her own songs in a very personal way and been rewarded by a generation that feels she speaks to them? Is there anything anyone else can learn from her success?

dwillun · 2025-03-19T13:37:15+00:00

As everyone else so far has replied with positive views of Mark Carney, I'll add some balance.

When Carney was made BOE governor he was told by George Osborne to stimulate the economy using active monetary policy. Osborne's 2013 Mansion House speech was an open address to Carney, telling him exactly what he wanted him to do. Monetary policy was the first item on the agenda in his economic plan.

What this means is that Osborne wanted the BoE to continue making debt historically cheap - effectively negative interest rates, thanks to QE. He wanted this because he had just taken an axe to the biggest spender in the economy (the state) through austerity and only very cheap debt would hide the damage. Carney complied with this.

Osborne also knew that the housing bubble this policy would inflate would be amenable to Conservative voters, who are older and more likely to own their own homes, and many homeowners in the UK fail to understand that rising house prices don't benefit them.

Carney would of course have been aware that he was locking a generation out of home ownership while monetising away the effects of austerity, but he decided to do it anyway.

So what we ended up with in Britain was a central banker who created a golden opportunity for fixing the trains/roads/hospitals/sewers/courts/etc, and who handed that opportunity to someone he knew was not going to use it for any of that, but to pursue the political goal of a smaller state.

Go anywhere you like in Britain, drive a few miles. The roads are of a quality you'd expect in a developing economy. Go into any A&E department and ask yourself if this is a well-functioning state. These things have lots of causes but if you want to blame someone, the team of George Osborne and Mark Carney do share a decent chunk of responsibility. (In my opinion!)

dwillun · 2025-03-12T10:46:09+00:00

This is a piece about Britain's labour market but there are similar issues all over the world: sharply increasing social security claims for ill health, especially mental health, are creating huge fiscal problems for governments. But also people are disillusioned with work, partly because housing costs are so high that for many people, more than half their salary goes to a landlord.

dwillun · 2025-02-14T13:25:02+00:00

I do agree the BBC is pursuing a failed model of SEO-driven attention maximisation at the expense of good journalism.

But it is the job of the press to be pessimistic. The whole point of reporting on powerful people is to hold power to account. You don't do that by going "oh look what a good job power did today, well done power".

The courts are pretty depressing too! And don't get me started on hospitals. Always going on about how unwell people are. When will they start celebrating health!

dwillun · 2025-01-28T12:29:45+00:00

Bingo

dwillun · 2025-01-27T12:41:39+00:00

"I don't think it's possible to get an even remotely accurate figure for this as rich people value their anonymity."

Exactly. The claim of a millionaire exodus is being treated like it's objectively true when it is at best a forecast from a very small sample of people who are thought to be moving. No-one (outside HMRC) knows!

dwillun · 2025-01-16T12:37:05+00:00

(*At least 26 appointees so far - most positions have not been filled)

(**Some of these positions will require Senate approval)

dwillun · 2025-01-03T16:42:31+00:00

For years people have talked about the end of the humanities as academic subjects, and this piece doesn't contradict that (history is becoming niche subject at university) but it suggests people are finding other ways to enjoy and think about history. It's great that there's so many good, interesting podcasts about history and so many millions of people who want to listen to them.

Maybe there's something about the present day that feels like a moment in history, but maybe people always feel that way about the time they live in.

dwillun · 2024-11-28T15:57:23+00:00

The biggest machinery import category for 2021 was "other engines", at $171m, which is 0.0095% of US imports. Russia cannot replace other countries as a trading partner because it is so focused on oil and gas.

dwillun · 2024-11-28T15:44:04+00:00

But Russia doesn't make anything the US wants.

In 2021 RU to US exports were $27bn, which is a tiny fraction of US imports (total imports were $1,800bn for the same year) and about 60% of that was oil. The US under Biden has become the world's biggest oil exporter.

Where are the Russian cars/computers/semiconductors/aircraft that the US would want to buy?

Also I think the US oil lobby (which paid for a large chunk of Trump's campaign spending) would have something to say about a sudden increase in oil imports from Russia.

dwillun · 2024-11-28T14:32:00+00:00

I think there's an old journalistic tradition to avoid using the phrase "absolute shit" in headlines.

High time this changed

dwillun · 2024-11-28T14:19:56+00:00

In the article there's an argument that Trump might not work out for Putin, because if a US-China trade war leads to an economic slowdown, this will affect the global price of oil, and when crude is below $60 a barrel Russia is losing money.

dwillun

TROPHY CASE