gliese946

Really happy for you that you're able to make this kind of business work. Could you please link to some of the custom bricks you have created? I looked at the website but could not see anything about them. It would be great to hear about the design process for custom bricks, too.

isn't it the case that by that time, the text will be locked in? I expect we'll be told then "yes, you've identified something that isn't ideal, but at this point it's all or nothing and we're better off with all than with nothing". This is the real nightmare, to me: even though the crappy stuff will be pointed out publically before the up-or-down vote, we'll still have to eat the shit sandwich.

Hi, what do you think (if anything) about the fact that with so many people buying and selling (and in some cases hoarding) bricks it drives prices up for families who aren't interested in speculating, they just want to buy some bricks for their kids to play with? Like it used to be possible to find people selling bulk lots second-hand when the kids outgrew their collections. Now there are enough people buying to resell on bricklink, "parting out" someone's large collection brick-by-brick, that you have to be the very first person to spot a local ad, and head over there immediately with cash in hand, if you want any chance to beat the folks who are hustling for bricks. That's how it seems to me, anyway, as I've tried to get stuff for my kids! (Of course we buy new sets too but it's so expensive to build a collection that way.)

This is not an attack on your "way of life" by the way, because I have made purchases on bricklink myself, and I know the Lego community also benefits by the fact it is now possible to find the few very specific bricks you might need to finish a project.

Oh! You (probably Susanna) are the perfect people to ask this question to. A friend and I were walking home very late one night in the city, on a road that has a bus route during the day, but we didn't know whether any buses would run at night, or, if they did, how frequently buses would come. Just as we got to the road, a bus happened along, going the other way. My friend said: "hooray! this improves our chances, as now we not only know that there are buses running on this route, but they most probably come often: if they didn't come often it would have been exceedingly unlikely to see one so soon (albeit one coming the other way)." (We were only teenagers at the time, 20 years or so ago, but he obviously had a Bayesian intuition.) I said "Huh. This is bad news for us. Whatever we knew or didn't know about the buses running on this route at night, the fact was (and is) that there are some fixed number x of buses on this route, running both ways. We just didn't know what the value of x was (now we know x is at least 1). Now, however, we know that at least one of those x buses is unavailable to pick us up, as we just saw it going the other way. There are now x-1 buses that could possibly pick us up, down from x before we found out that particular bus was going the other way. Our chances of being picked up quickly have decreased."

You can assume we're far away from the turning around point where the bus we just saw would have been able to turn and pick us up. Who was right, did our observation improve or hurt our chances of getting a bus home? (As I remember it, it made for an interesting discussion on the long walk home...)

Thank you! Something like that is what I suspected, but that is a very clear explanation... except is it possible that "decreases" should read "increases" and vice-versa in your explanation??