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David Fickling Profile picture
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14 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Oh nbd, just Roblox explaining to developers how they can get children addicted to *cough* "engaged with" their product:

developer.roblox.com/en-us/articles…
Survey of recent studies shows prevalence of Internet Gaming Disorder of around 2% among children and adolescents, so you're probably looking at 3 million addicts among a 150 million active-user base.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dm…
Obviously you can get IGD playing any game, but most games aren't in the business of encouraging addictive behaviours in children as part of their revenue model.

There's a remarkable (and, I suspect, lucrative) incuriosity about where "engagement" ends and "addiction" begins.
Not all highly-engaged gamers are addicts. But some of them will be, or will develop IGD. Encouraging high engagement among children as the basis of your business model is playing with fire.

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More from @davidfickling

David Fickling Profile picture
15 Dec
One other thing I'd point out with regard to this analysis is that much of it is just driven by the current account surplus.

Throughout 2009-2018, China reinvested a consistent 4%-7% of its BoP surplus in BRI projects.
Before 2009 of course the destination of choice for BoP surplus funds was U.S. Treasuries. 2019 clearly does break that trend too at ~0.75% of the BoP surplus going into BRI projects.
But the decline in 2018 was really pretty much in line with the previous decade. In fact a higher share of the surplus went to BRI that year than in 2015, when 4x the dollar amount was invested.
Read 6 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
15 Dec
Am I the only one who finds some of these 1960s numbers just ... not credible?

You see the UK, Spain and Denmark in 1965 spending less than an hour, between both parents, for *all* daily childcare tasks.
That to me looks like sampling bias of some sort, or maybe survey response changes such as whether you consider making dinner to be "childcare" or not. Perhaps also something to do with the decline of domestic service?
I don't want to look like a feckless parent, but did the average parent in Denmark in 1965 really spend no more than ~10 minutes a day "washing, feeding, preparing food, putting to bed, supervising and playing with children"?
Read 4 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
14 Dec
A few quick thoughts on China reportedly making the unofficial ban on Australian coal imports official:

theguardian.com/australia-news…
This is the big one. Wine and lobster get the headlines, but coal makes up nearly 2/3 of the export value of the products on China's naughty list:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… Image
At the same time, it's not iron ore, where exports are $55bn a year vs. less than $10bn for coal: Image
Read 21 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
29 Nov
Future generations are going to regard it as really odd that during the 2010s — a decade that cracked the century-old dominance of thermal power and internal combustion engines — one of the Big Ideas was that technological progress was over.
They'll regard it as even odder when they're told the main cited exceptions to the progress-is-dead rule were a taxi-booking app and another one using old techniques from the slot machine industry to make our phones more addictive.
One thing that I think capitalists tend to misunderstand about capitalism is that when it's working it's really hard to make much of a profit.

Solar panel makers increasing shipments 40% a year but getting single-digit profit margins is what effficient capitalism looks like!
Read 4 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
13 Oct
How is it that New Zealand is pulling off an election amid pandemic with aplomb, while the U.S. is on the brink of chaos?

I can see a few simple fixes and a deep fundamental problem:
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
One issue is that America, paradoxically, has *too much democracy*.

The constitution puts states in charge of running elections, and almost everywhere that means elected officials are the umpires of the electoral process.

They have an obvious conflict of interest.
In New Zealand, as with most democracies other than the U.S., elections are run by an independent national commission controlled by independent, non-partisan bureaucrats.
Read 12 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
12 Oct
He resigned over misleading an anti-corruption inquiry about accepting a secret $3,000 gift from the CEO of Eddie Obeid's water company, but sure let's call it "a bottle of wine"
It's worth reading O'Farrell's *extremely emphatic* denial about this event just three years earlier when you think about what "misleading the inquiry" means in that sentence. Apparently his memory was just a bit patchy.
Report here:

apo.org.au/sites/default/…
Read 5 tweets

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