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[Maximum Spin]

The 1908 New York to Paris Race was an automobile competition consisting of drivers attempting to travel from New York to Paris.

"attempting".

That's unfair, half of them apparently managed.

[Naturegirl1999]

So, flying somewhere could be far cleaner than driving,

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/Stockholm,+Sweden/New+York,+USA/
...loadsa metadata snipped from URL for readability only, as extraneous (the encoded map scale/centre stuff, mostly). Doesn't actually matter, it admits to no route in either form...

(I'm sure that, in the past - possibly not Google Maps but a precursor service - there was actually a 'land' route from Europe to the US, featuring Bering Straits ice-bridge. Perhaps it's actually still programatically there but seasonal and thus not current without changing date-data too.)


((The first version of that also required me to scroll down to the second Stockholm, the first being in the US (before I went into Directions, flipped it to be From and then added NYC), but Google obviously learned what I meant and won't replicate for me to examine at leisure.))


Anyway, to go via the Atlantic I'm obviously now off to electrically-retrofit a DUKW chassis.  6 ton(ne~) and 400 mile (road) range in its WW2 incarnation, with the 91HP engine. So definitely gonna need a solar-cell awning(-cum-sail?), for recharging, and likely some severly enhanced flotation/waterproofing/drainage systems too to deal with pelagic conditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1908_New_York_to_Paris_Race

The 1908 New York to Paris Race was an automobile competition consisting of drivers attempting to travel from New York to Paris.

"attempting".

They would need to make their cars amphibious and have those tools that make the cars float and move within the water resistant to corrosion vis salt

[Reelya]

I just liked the idea, out of context, of them attempting to drive across the ocean not realizing.

[Naturegirl1999]

Surely they’d do research on where the locations are compared to each other, and thus outfit their vehicles appropriately, of course, maybe they’d need boating licenses too, so they can build car boat hybrids, it would be interesting

[Maximum Spin]

Surely they’d do research on where the locations are compared to each other, and thus outfit their vehicles appropriately, of course, maybe they’d need boating licenses too, so they can build car boat hybrids, it would be interesting

They just had them shipped over as cargo, being from 1908 before fun was invented.

[Starver]

It was probably google maps, as google maps used to do all kinds of coy things like that before they started to hate fun.

Back in the early 2000s, I know that one (preGoogle) service[1] had no routes between Scotland and England. (Nearly. The break in routing-data, on investigation of intermediate destinations from both directions, put the disconnect slightly north of the border. With no reasons obvious to me at the time, the day before I was making a journey I wanted to double-check. Though I was actually just going to head for the A1 road, follow my nose for a few hundred miles then follow the roads I knew well enough near my destination.)

So, yeah, might have been the heady early days of Google Fun I remember.  A quick search suggests a route from one or other point in far-eastern Russia to the extremities of Capetown (and/or the return journey) is the longest simple Direction that can be established without a Via.  (Capetown to ~Ushuaia, Tierra Del Fuago would be interesting.)

so they can build car boat hybrids, it would be interesting

https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/Amphibious_Car_Challenge_2

(Viewable on https://youtube.com/watch?v=YVjo6YOT3Zg - maybe?)


[1] My memory tells me it was MapQuest. But that might have been the one that somehow gave milages 100 miles shorter than the actual ground-distance. I'd excuse it as "early days", but given I'd used floppy-installed DOS/EGA-illustrqted route-mapping programs way back in the '80s, you think online services would have been no worse!

[Maximum Spin]

you think online services would have been no worse!

Don't use technology much, do you?

[McTraveller]

Apple 30% commission versus The World:  Fight!

If I thought all the companies were actually looking to reduce prices that would be great. But I guarantee that if Apple stopped charging 30% it won't make companies change their price from $14.99 to $12.99; instead that $2 or whatever is just going to go somewhere else.  (I definitely don't want it going to Facebook.)

That aside - how would you (if you were a non-greedy corporate overlord) go about setting a price point for such a thing?  I'm not looking for a specific number, I'm just curious as to what process you might use to find that price point.  And something more specific than just "use AI!"

I'm wondering if maybe some kind of auction system would work, where you'd like say "Pricing for the next quarter: We will take $0.25 + X% of price.  Second highest price after 2 weeks of bidding wins!"

[Egan_BW]

A lot of what that cut amounts to is marketing, I think. Like, if you're an indie game developer, the reason you'd want to get your game on steam and let valve have 30% of sales rather than sell from your own website is that people are more likely to stumble upon the game browsing through steam than just happen to find your URL. I'm not sure how much that's actually worth, but maybe marketing experts do.

[Reelya]

If I thought all the companies were actually looking to reduce prices that would be great. But I guarantee that if Apple stopped charging 30% it won't make companies change their price from $14.99 to $12.99; instead that $2 or whatever is just going to go somewhere else.  (I definitely don't want it going to Facebook.)

You're not taking into account that sales increase when prices drop. Why do companies pass cost savings onto customers at all? It's because they sell more units then. Any change in your costs changes the equilibrium point.

And another reason this is true is because if it wasn't it would lead to a contradiction: say the cost is reduced by 5 cents, and you lower the price by 5 cents and this change doesn't increase sales enough to cover losing 5 cents per sale, then ... you could have charged 5 cents more to start with, and that also wouldn't have affected the amount of sales enough to cut into the increased profits, so the original price-point should have been higher in the first place.

i.e. if sales are elastic and the current price is the optimal point for profit-making, then any change in costs should be passed on (change the sale price). However, this wouldn't be true if the amount of sales wasn't elastic at that price point, but if that was true then any sensible company would have been charging higher prices in the first place.

[Starver]

Not sure it's technically this thread, but I want to point out that the latest Firefox for Android update that I accepted (without any clues what I would be accepting) has now adopted the Tabless paradigm for multi-paging (I use Chrome on here as well, and already know I dislike that method), and relative font sizes in Bay12 Forums has gone screwy. Perhaps for readability reasons, but it takes away more effective screen estate than the other fiddling changes gave me.

I think I'll switch to the desktop for a while, while I grieve the latest 'advances' in tech and software engineering. And switch to the venerable desktop for a while.

[methylatedspirit]

To disable automatic font resizing (which sounds like the problem you have), go to Settings > Accessibility. The first thing is Automatic font sizing. Just disable that, and the font size wonkyness disappears. It's there for readability, as you said, but on legacy websites like this, it just gets all kinds of screwy.

[McTraveller]

I've spent too much time about this... and I have come up with an idea* that is as "free market" as you can get:  In the store, when you make a purchase, there is a slider that starts at 30%/70%. As the purchaser you move the slider to "Store curator" or "App developer" to decide who gets what cut.  I wonder what the "free market" would side.  Starting at 30%/70% is just because that is what it is "today".  Cap it so it can't go further than 98%/2% or 2%/98% or to where the smallest value can be no less than $0.25.

I would bet that 99% of purchasers would just leave it there at 30/70.  Then you'll probably have 0.5% of apps or something be pegged 98% to Apple, say (*cough* facebook *cough*) and the other 0.5% pegged 2% to Apple (I dunno, maybe some really popular indie game developer with a loyal following?).  Probably nothing in between.  Even if you put a "you didn't move the slider, are you sure?" nag in there.

Put another way: the vast majority of purchasers don't care - it's just the companies.

Spoiler: Regarding price elasticity (click to show/hide)

That argument works both ways: if companies could get 10% more sales volume today by dropping the price 5% - why wouldn't they?  This means the "30% commission" isn't what's keeping the price at its level today. 

And you have to argue this - for a company to drop its price "to pass on its savings" it must think the volume will go up to make up for the lower prices.  For a cut in price to 7/10 its previous value, you have to assume sales increase to 10/7 the previous value for the same total revenue.

The arguments just don't hold water . . . the companies want more of the revenue pie; if they cared about total revenue they would decrease their price already.  They are implicitly saying that the prices are already as low as they can go (they are basically claiming that lower prices won't increase sales volume by a greater proportion than the cut in price).

Don't forget - software has essentially zero marginal cost of production.  So there is no "cost savings" to pass on to the customer - if Facebook or Epic or Ad Laden Cookie Game Maker gets charged 20% by Apple instead of 30% there is no incentive to cut price.

I would be surprised if that doesn't come up in the lawsuit.  I would equally be surprised if the counterargument isn't that if Epic (say) had some of that 30%, they would be able to make more "new products their customers want", but that would be countered by Apple saying they use that 30% to make more of what "their customers want".

*Patent pending.  Not really, and in a sane world this would count as prior art, but now that we're in "first to file" instead of "first to invent" I don't know that it would hold water.

[Maximum Spin]

That description is not actually patentable anyway.

[McTraveller]

That description is not actually patentable anyway.

Hey now, this is the tech thread! And Tech tries to patent EVERYTHING! (and sadly often succeeds with less descriptive things than what I proposed above).

Spoiler: patent language (click to show/hide)

What is claimed is 1) A method of making purchases wherein an element is presented to the purchaser for indicating how much of the purchase price is to be sent to party A and how much is to be sent to party B.  2) The method of 1 where the element is set to an initial position.  3) the method of 1 where the maximum allocations are...
4) where the method is on a computing device where the user choice is transmitted to a servicing agent...

ah I give up. Feels dirty!