Microsoft’s gaming division was pretty respected in the industry for a long time. Lots of people give them (deserved) flack over Kinect for the Cbox One, but what really drove them over the cliff was buying all these studios to make Gamepass more attractive. It was actually a good deal for everyone when it was mostly games that were older, but when they started doing day-1 releases of first party games and buying studios to add to the number of games getting that day-1 release it turned sour.

A bunch of games that early adopters would previously have paid 60 bucks for were suddenly included in theit $7/month subscription, so tons of people who would have been buying 10 games a year were suddenly spending less than a hundred bucks on new Xbox games because enough new stuff was coming to Gamepass they could stay busy, so all these AAA releases that cost $100 to make were losing money.

So they raised the process of gamepass to try and keep up, but didn’t. Then they bought Activision and lost their lunch when Call of Duty sales plummeted because millions of people with Gamepass who had been buying it annually didn’t.

So they increased the price of gamepass so high everyone canceled, removing the only reason many of them were still using Xbox over Playstation, and at the same time the consoles skyrocketed in price.

Now they aren’t including Call of Duty from Gamepass for the first year and taking the price partway down, which was a good start to righting the ship but too late.

Chasing the Netflix model doesn’t work if you do it dumb. Netflix didn’t buy all the other studios to make their original programs. They did make some internal studios, but they mainly partnered with existing studios to make specific programs. Instead of buying Bethesda, they could have partnered with them on specific games, which would have been better for the games, the studio, Microsoft, and Xbox customers. But buying Bethesda was a simpler brute-force solution they employed dozens of times.They became an even dumber Embracer Group. Embracer at least they had a (dumb) plan to sell off the assets. Microsoft bought a bunch of studios with no plan for how to make it profitable.

That’s how they’ve been operating for years. They’ll go public soon enough though, so your 401k will take the hit instead of the parasites on top.

That’s what the SpaceX IPO was about. They were listed on the NASDAQ way earlier than companies are normally allowed to be so the assholes up top could raid your retirement fund despite there being no path to profitability.

This is about having the goons enforcing Trump’s orders arrested.

He’ll never die. His cask may wither away, but he’ll find a new host.

The number of justices isn’t the reason for 18 years. It’s the length of Presidential administrations. A single administration is normally limited to 8 years, so the length of the SCOTUS term has to be more than double that to prevent them from nominating half the justices.

Bad justices serve for life now. Bad Presidents can stack the Court with bad justices with terms shorter than 18 years.

And the terms aren’t based on the number of justices, but how long a President serves. A President can usually serve up to 8 years. No matter how many justices you have, having shorter terms would allow a President to stack the court. If you have 100 justices with 16 year terms, an 8-year President would get to change 50 of them. At 18-year terms, they could only nominate 4. And more importantly, they’d automatically get to nominate 4. So you can’t have this bullshit situation where we’ve the majority of the electorate vote for a Republican President twice in the last 34 years, but somehow have 2/3 of the justices appointed by Republicans.

Because we’ve never had a case where the most-unpopular President in history was able to rush judicial nominees through the Senate and stack the Court with political hacks who have been credibly accused of sexual assault and drunkenness. The Senate has totally saved us from that.

If we had 18-year terms, we’d have 4 Obama appointees, 2 Biden, and 3 Trump right now. So it would still be 6-3, but the other direction, and it would represent the medium-long term political viewpoint of the American people, not the newest short-term reactionary position that a 6-year term would provide.

The US has a weird mix of big emplty spaces, really fucking expensive existing underground utilities and roadways, and private property (easements ain’t free) that makes new underground utilities stupidly expensive to run.

You have to buy big easements, negotiate utility contracts with local and state governments (to use the public right-of-way), dodge existing infrastructure while repairing what you break, and lay a fuckton of cable.

I work on the municipal side, and despite Google Fiber having a utility agreement with us for years they still have yet to lay a single foot of underground fiber because we won’t allow them to cut across roads that we just replaced in the last year, require their microtrenches to follow engineering standards, and they need to show existing underground water, gas, wastewater, and electrical services on their plans because they’re famous for just running a trench and making it the water district’s problem when they cut 7 public lines in an hour.

With 6-year terms an unpopular President could appoint a majority in the period of their first term, then cancel elections with their backing.

6 years is a terrible idea. It would allow even 1-term Presidents to select a majority of the justices and get whatever they want, and a 2-term President to appoint every seat.

18 years is correct. It’s the shortest term that doesn’t allow a 2-term President to appoint a majority of the justices (resignationsand draths notwithstanding).

They probably have a stronger claim and higher-ceiling on their portion of any judgment suing individually.

Specifically Civil contempt, since that can’t be pardoned away like criminal contempt.

That rule ain’t gonna stick any more than the lining in th reflection pool.

That actually sounds pretty dope. Make the pitch round with walls (kinda like arena soccer), and that could be fun. You could even do something cool where each goal actually gives points to both the opposing teams so there’s a more strategic dynamic to it.

I so use my Quadraphonic 8-track player as my main speaker system.

I keep “Star Wars and other Galactic Funk” by MECO loaded in it, mostly because i don’t think it would survive being removed at this point.

You haven’t lived until you’ve heard disco mixes of the Star Wars soundtrack that were made as a serious project and not a parody.

Work Product and Attorney Client privilege are broken by AI use, making anything shared with an AI discoverable.

Defaulting AI on is how you get the corporate lawyers to make us drop Microsoft.

People don’t understand just how difficult it is to cool stuff in space. Half of the shit sticking out of the ISS that people think are solar panels are actually radiant cooling systems, and the ISS will generate WAY less heat per volume than a data center.

Why spend all that money and resources cultivating actual intelligence?

Interior Decorator or Interior Designer. They’re very different things.

• An Interior Decorator decorates spaces and requires no certifications.
• An Interior Designer does basic designs of Interior spaces (here’s the bedroom and here’s the kitchen) and requires a basic certification.
• An Architect designs buildings (here’s where the HVAC is going to be and this is what the roof is gonna look like) and requires a higher degree of certification.
• An Engineer designs the structures that support the building (here’s the engineered I-beam, and you require a drainage pond there, and you need a support column under that wall, and the foundation needs piers this deep) and requires the highest level of certification.
• A contractor ignores all of these people and fucks shit up

Interior designers. They act like they’re as qualified as architects or engineers, but they base everything on their gut. And when they fuck up a building they use their lack of real qualifications to absolve themselves of responsibility.