Robot turtles

[Nicholas Clark]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 03:00:53PM +0100, Smylers wrote:
> Nicholas Clark writes:
> 
> > So, there is this kickstarter for "Robot Turtles":
> > 
> >     Robot Turtles is a board game you play with your favorite 3-8 year
> >     old. It sneakily teaches programming fundamentals.
> > 
> > http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danshapiro/robot-turtles-the-board-game-for-little-programmer
> 
> Oooh. Thanks for letting us know about that, Nicholas. And more thanks
> for doing the maths, currency conversion, and so on.

Well, there may be errors. I'm assuming that the VAT divide is correct.
Currency rates were from purl while I was writing the e-mail, etc

The Kickstarter estimates delivery "for Christmas". And it's Kickstarter, so
it's risky (although the guy doing it seems to check out)

> >    3-pack:  $80 * 1.2 + $40    = $136 = £84.70  =   £28.23 each
> >    10-pack: $240 * 1.2 + $100  = $388 = £241.65 =   £24.16 each
> 
> Plus the cost of distributing the extra copies around the UK.

My calculations were always on the basis that "buyer collects" from the
(relevant) social. [There are places outside the M25? Really! No - it's a
tale told to scare small children :-)]

> > PS I'm not kidding about the 14000 categories.
> 
> Last time I looked at this I found there were different duty rates for
> radios and CD players, and that a combined CD player and radio had a
> third rate which was lower than either of the two individual ones. It
> cannot possibly make sense for this list to exist.

That sounds like the Raspberry Pi folks finding that the duty on an assembled
Raspberry Pi was lower than on the components. This, obviously, was done to
encourage local manufacturing :-(

(Politicians are involved. The cost of implementation is an externality. Or
treated as such. Heck - who cares - 5 years hence is S.E.P., and 5 weeks
hence might as well be)

Nicholas Clark