At what point does he just start cutting features and release a game that's more or less Elite: Dangerous on a smaller scale?

Is he even obligated to produce a functional product? I haven't read the terms for Kickstarter projects, but at what level does he have to deliver?

And does he sleep well at night?

That's a great question!

Token crowdfunding is considered a final sale, which means he's responsible for providing the products (backer rewards) for which people have paid. To this end, he has already provided something that resembles a game. I'm not sure if that is sufficient to absolve himself of his liabilities, or if he is required to deliver the product as advertised, which N.B. is basically impossible.

MacFarlane might actually have a real answer to these questions, but unfortunately I'm just an internet critic so *pppppppppbbbbbt* pee pee poo poo chris roberts is a bad software developer

I suppose only time will tell.....

...and a lot of other peoples' money.

/me chases a duck while yelling "space_ghost"

Yes, yes. As it should be.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/solar-roadways

i'm endlessly amazed at the **** people throw their money at. i should start selling magic.. er, science-powered popsicles on the corner for 20$

oh yeah, solar roadways has received federal funding

people throw money at magic because





Kickstarter is a fundamentally broken way of distributing capital for the same reason that finance and other forms of central planning are: the people making the decision don't have the skills to effectively evaluate a product or team. Except it's worse because unlike other forms of public solicitation Kickstarter has an extremely low barrier to entry, so you also get a lot of people who honestly have no clue what it takes to actually do the stuff they're promising.

Never forget, this was done by PROFESSIONALS:




Is it really so surprising that Kickstarter would be just as moronic?

Didn't Oculus Rift start off with Kickstarter? And then get bought by Facebook for $2bil?

Yes. We are currently in the internet advertising bubble, which is just as big today as the internet commerce bubble was.

I remember this. I actually wished those folks built a significantly larger mock-up of the paneled test track. It would be fun to watch a car lose control at 60 mph because of the glass surface (those dimples on the top aren't going to do ****, imagine that covered with rain runoff too). Or a freight truck causing the glass panels to explode and shoot shards toward onlookers.

wait, seriously? That hasn't died and gone away yet?



Or the hundreds of other things that can, and will, mess them up. But, hey, we built a 10ft by 10ft test square on perfect pavement in Florida! And we did some basic math that assumes complete perfection in the entire system! IT WILL WORK!
...if you give us more money.

It received ~1 million in total from the federal government, but once that money dried (maybe because it's about as legit as a perpetual motion machine), they moved to kickstarter/etc. to find other suckers. A channel I enjoy watching, EEVBlog, tore apart those particular solar roadways projects with actual math, just for fun. It was hilarious just how incredibly wasteful and useless it is. It would take something like 300 years to pay for itself, not counting any maintenance at all. This is also assuming like hilariously generous estimates, and I'm pretty sure he didn't even factor in the "heating the roadway" portion of the project because it would easily drain more power than it'd generate even under perfect conditions.

Yeahhhh.... I remember when that was first going around. People I know kept sending me links to it, "hey Dan, I know you like technology, look this! Revolutionary!" Yeah... no.

I think crowdfunding is a neat tool. Unfortunately, many people have good ideas, but fail to do the full research into it, or lack in the technical knowledge needed. The solar roadway seemed like an idea that someone had one day, got REALLY excited about, and immediately ran out to try to get funding for, without talking to engineers or researching it thoroughly enough. A solar roadway would be neat. However, in the real world, you have dirt, oil, floods, heavy equipment, boulders and landslides, earthquakes, shade, trees, storms, snow, ice, and other things... and that's before going into the technical limitations.

Looking through kickstarter or any other site, you'll find many other projects that are lead by people with no technical background at all (usually art majors, so they make flashy videos and graphics). They either want to sucker people out of their money, or they genuinely think they can make it work but they just don't know how. Usually with the latter, they hope to use all of those internet dollars to hire someone to do it all for them,or hope that limitations go away after throwing enough money at it. This is just my observation, though... it seems to happen a whole lot, crowdfunded or not.

I have thought of trying kickstarter for some ideas of my own. Though, I'd rather have something that's well designed, thought out, and prototyped first. I guess that just makes me crazy.

Once everyone gets over the "stick it to the man" hype, they'll remember why we haven't been funding products this way all along. It was painfully obvious that it would die out after the market saturated high profile failures that promised the impossible for funding. Highly successful kickstarters are already becoming more rare. In a few years, it's will probably die out almost completely.



EEVBlog is great. I love how much effort he puts into tearing apart hardware projects aimed at gullible people.

Except 90's tech company IPO and the tech bubble was mainly driven by Goldman Sachs who knew it was garbage. it wasn't necessarily a "mistake" in judgment that got stocks that high

Because, you know, there's the whole enthalpy of fusion thing to fight, as well as the long-term damages of melting things on top of electronic components, as well as whatever will be dissolved in that water from the road

it's fairly trivial to show that snow plows are more efficient

you'll actually see troves of youtube comments defending solar roadways and literally accusing people of being "big oil shills" for saying it's a stupid idea, and probably a scam

"SCIENCE!" is magic beans for the uneducated

unsophisticated investors put high buy orders on pets dot com

"not a mistake in judgement"

I've yet to see a solar panel that isn't made: a.) out of oil, or b.) by burning oil


edit: i read a popsci article recently that claimed the solar power industry is operating at a net energy loss, and will only break even by 2020 assuming generous efficiency improvements

I agree that the people who drove up the prices were in large part unsophisticated, but the firm doing the IPO didn't care. Goldman used to make 6-8% commissions, so they would push these tech companies really hard and inflate the value and say "**** the poor saps who actually buy this". Wall Street is one of the few places where Hanlon's razor isn't always true.

You have to consider that, maybe Goldman didn't actually want things to progress exactly as they did, but that doesn't mean they didn't have malicious intent. they generated much of the tech hype, alan greenspan let it happen because otherwise atlas would shrug and the world would collapse and all other sorts of randian spooks

Yup, which is why nuclear energy is almost definitely the only alternative after oil, which is a potentially scary predicament

At least the Russians have an interesting idea for disposing of the waste: dig a really deep hole, drop spent nuclear fuel in and let the energy of the nuclear reaction go toward boring the fuel down deeper, returning the waste from whence it came. I can never tell if Russian science is insane or brilliant

Plus, the tech burst directly caused the bush regressive tax cuts. win win!

If central planning isn't the alternative to the deficiencies of free-for-all capitalism then what is? I agree that central planning isn't a good way to distribute capital to startups but surely it can do a better job of making sure everybody is housed and fed than capitalism does?

you have to define "capitalism"

nothing in our world is "free-for-all capitalism", if "free-for-all capitalism" means free, unmanipulated, adam smith markets

I know that. What I'm getting at is that capitalism has no goal beyond making money for shareholders. Presumably central planning could have goals such as "house and feed everyone."

Jon`C's opinions on normative economics seem to come largely from Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, you could try reading that

Besides, Massassi has gone over Kickstarter before.

How 'bout them patreons lol

I'm the sole patron on FGR's patreon. We're € [/COLOR]1,999/mo. away from ToDX:NoA. Let's rally, guys.

Don't forget the cancer causing, highly explosive Vinyl Fluoride that requires biblical amounts of anhydrous HF to produce.

I don't like the green energy movement. It seems like a scam to grant tax breaks and subsides to wealthy investors, and gain points with gullible west cost environmentalists. Transitioning a small percentage of our power generation to extremely expensive wind and solar energy is not going to make any meaningful impact on our contribution to climate change. Worse, our renewable energy investments aren't in anything that could ever be scaled up to anything close to our total power requirements, so it's not even a first step in a useful direction. The fact that our energy policy is driven by constituents who think solar roadway or piezoelectric floor in shopping malls is the solution to our energy problems makes me want to scream.



I think it's pretty futile to have an opinion on economics. You can go the Austrian route, and end up reducing everything to abstract decision theory where are people simplified to rational free agents, but that doesn't work because people aren't rational free agents. You can try to empirically analyze it, but the system is too complex and chaotic to control properly, so you have a bunch of correlations and a regressions but have no way of ever knowing what set of conditions is required for them to be accurate. And on top of that, almost everyone has emotional ideological beliefs that they want to read into the ambiguity of the data. And in the end it shows. There is very little consensus on anything, economies are constantly falling into recessions, and everyone insists that it is because policy wasn't perfectly tailored to their particular school of thought. If I spent six years getting a PHD in economics, I'd barely have a handle on what is going on. It's completely pointless for me to have a casual opinion. I'd just be arbitrarily siding with someone who told me my preconceived ideological notions are correct.

And I'm thankful for your support, hoss.

Stepping in a useful direction means opposing the interests of many people.


That's the first time I've ever heard of piezoelectric floors. Can't you just belt an alternator to an exercise bike, and wire that to a light bulb so people can see just how much energy is generated?

It's still amazing that people think kinetic energy is a good source of fuel. We burn coal because chemical bonds hold ****loads more potential energy than all of this stuff. The solution for using too many resource is to use less resources; it's not exactly a hard question to answer, it's a hard answer to accept


Economics is a hard field because all new information on economics effects economic decision making


uhh i think you might be overstating this a little bit

You could, but people will insist that "every little bit helps," even though it clearly doesn't when you take into account the opportunity cost of the materials and the nonexistent payback period of the energy investment. These same people think it's a good idea to harvest energy from cars useing plates on the road ways, as if small car engines are somehow more energy efficient than a power plant. Pointing this out makes you a shill for the oil industry, despite the fact that oil isn't used for power generation to any significant degree.



Yes, but acknowledging that would mean that non-trivial personal sacrifices would be required to feel morally superior to everyone else.


Time variance is solvable. The issue is that the scale of the problem is too large. We can't successfully model a brain. Much less billions of them and all the trillions of environmental variables that they all process. It's a chaotic, time variant, non-linear system, of chaotic, time variant non-linear systems. If you assume linearity in order to make some kind of analysis, you don't even know all the variables that you have linearized.



It's not totally worthless, it's just very hard, and in practical terms, economists haven't really been all that successful. Look at biology. We can cure diseases and illnesses now that one hundred years ago we wouldn't even diagnose. Aerospace engineering, Electrical engineering, materials science, all fields of research that have had a massive amount to show for themselves in the last hundred years. Economics? I guess we don't get recessions quite as badly as we used to? Maybe? Every few years we hit a recession, and it's all due to the evil influence of the other schools of thought who are stupid and bad.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century talks about this actually

its only been very recently that large scale data driven economic studies have been possible, since it requires both an enormous amount of computer power and societies that mandate the creation and retention of income records. Before income taxation few people even had an idea of how much money they made or where it was going.

past economists may have had good points but they literally never had the data to back it up. And now that it turns out that Marx Was Right(tm) pretty much the only thing the rich have to fall back on is warring ideologies because anybody with a brain knows better.

By which I mean the return on capital is invariable greater than economic growth, leading any capitalist economy to the market failure we are experiencing today. Predicted by Marx and proven by Piketty.

eat the rich

Yeah, except many, many, probably most, economists disagree that the data says that. You can have all the processing power you want, but a computationally expensive model isn't the same as an accurate model. As soon as someone does get an accurate model, you'll know because they will suddenly become very, very rich.

You can fall back on the whole, "everyone who disagrees is an evil self absorbed rich person", but that's just falling back on ideology. May as well be Austrian or whatever at that point.

Really, it's probably not a bad thing. We can complain about the market under-performing the ideal, but in the grand scheme of things, we are advancing at a dangerous rate. Our success as a species has happened far too quickly for us to biologically adapt our behavioral instincts. We could be advancing ten times slower and it would be effectively be discontinuity on a larger ecological scale.

Well, based on what you've said you: don't know what the data says, what his conclusions are, how he arrived at them, what they mean or what other prominent economists actually think about his work, but I'm glad to see that hasn't stopped you from speculating wildly about all of those things.

But by all means, ignore this post and continue to accuse empiricists of being "basically Austrian".

"Macroeconomics is basically like picking stocks, right?" - Obi_Kwiet

FYI this is how you actually sound to people educated in this subject