Microsoft has been in the gaming space since the 80's, they definitely make money in games. If my memory is correct during their slump years the XBox division (I think this was around the 360 era) was the best performing sector of the company while other divisions (like mobile) were bleeding money.

Where were are now it seems like XBox is specifically struggling but gaming as a whole is doing well.

Xbox Sales Drop But Microsoft’s Gaming Division Grows in Revenue

I personally would much rather they get out of the "console" space entirely and merge that with with PC hardware division, put out something like a competitor to the Steam Deck, every generation the line between PC and console blurs more. Plus them exiting the console space would leave Sony and Nintendo alone which makes for a much more interesting anti-trust situation for the two of them.

KSP2 from what I have read is in such a weird spot. An original indie game built by a company with not really much game dev experience before this should be a slam dunk for a fleshed out sequel by a more experienced dev team but alas it seems like balls were dropped left and right. Just on word of mouth I haven't even attempted to try KSP2 as a fan of the original, I just hear about terrible performance, still wonky physics and lack of content.

Sorry, meant to post the source for that

https://www.energypolicy.colum...

Lot of interesting info in there, it goes over some of the ways to handle imports and other externalities. .

A carbon tax's outcome doesn't necessarily have to be for pollution reduction, in fact today I would say it's better goal would be to fund mitigation efforts for the fact that we have missed most targets. A tax is just a revenue stream, what we do with it is the second part and the most important. A carbon tax has had a pretty large approval from economics for decades, there's a lot of thought and proposals into the drawbacks, downsides and mitigation measures to those.

One approach, contemplated by the Deutch Bill and Baker Proposal, is to use most or all of the revenue for equal per capita household rebates/dividends. Figure 5 below shows that in contrast to other revenue uses, when all revenues are used for equal rebates, the policy is progressive, with lower-income households receiving far more in rebates than they pay in additional taxes. The tax burden for low-income households (bottom 20 percent) decreases by 4–5 percent of pre-tax income in a $50/ton carbon tax scenario.

We do, over the past 40 years 'we' as in the world with the US as hegemonic order we have folded many countries into the global economic system which brings wealth which brings the funds to do this type of infrastructure.

Fact is coal is cheap and abundant and there's 100 years of oil and gas infrastructure existing and operating. We can say "clean up your own backyard first" until we are blue in the face but their reply would be "we need the energy to build the economy to clean up the mess we made building up the economy" which is pretty much what the US and Europe did, just earlier.

Also the USA did not pass any direct climate legislation until like, what, 2 years ago? I think as the largest and most influential nation in the world there is a responsibility to set a good example, "do as i say, not as i do" is not great on international relations.

enforce = enact*

Lack of political will to enforce carbon taxes which is the (or would have been) the obvious, capitalist solution. You're spot on that the credits system is a mess.

You said exactly what I was thinking of after this, it could take off if Twitter implodes. Yeah I don't know the timescale, to his credit(?) it has not yet and it doesn't appear that he cares about it losing money.

I gotta disagree there. A film with little or no music was intended to be that way. Like No Country for Old Men going from like no music to having a big soundtrack just doesn't work, or just like The Wire only uses incidentals, the director and creative team intended it that way and convey what they need through other means, some, like Star Wars and many many others use that music to effect, like any other part if it's executed well it is part of what makes movies work.

One of my favorites, Jurassic Park. The classic island approach sequence. The music opens the scene up, we go to some dialog on the helicopter, winds down but the dialog builds some anticipation, the music picks up and then bam, audience butterflies. The scene is a winding route through a vast green vista, the shot and the music convey to the audience what to feel and that's what good directors do imo is conveying the emotions, they're supposed to "tell" you what to feel, that's sorta the point to me, music is just another tool.

True, too much exposition is bad screenwriting which a lot of movies today have problems with. Hollywood has a way of thinking people are dumber than they are sometimes. Something I appreciated about the recent Dune movies is I thought they did a good job of building this pretty big world with a lot of weird concepts without beating people over the head with it. I think most people are OK walking away form something a little perplexed because if it was entertaining enough they'll still be interested enough to figure it out.

That is absolutely true I cannot nor would I dispute it. That does not make it a successful competitor to Twitter simply because it doesn't have the users, just a matter of what metrics are we judging it. In a better world we are all using Mastodon.

It's the same with desktops as opposed to those other spaces. Why use Windows? "All my software is there". Why use Twitter? "All my follows and followers are there, along with celebrities, journalists, shitposters, all types.

Bluesky has like 4x the users Mastodon does but they are both dead, irrelevant projects as far as viable Twitter competitors are, these are just their own smaller enclaves now. The network effect is too strong and 10 little guys can't always do the work of just another big guy.

Which contrasted to the texts he sent Elon Musk when he was contemplating purchasing it talking about making it an open protocol with no advertising model without centralized control which Twitter is sorta 1/6 of the way there since they have opened up some parts of their system.

My guess is either Dorsey, realizing Twitter has brushed off all the attempts to dethrone it is going "undercover" to convince Musk to to enact more of his vision since now there are no shareholders, he just has to convince one guy.

Second option is he's fully drank the sauce and wants in on the right-wing audience capture game loop Musk has created for himself.

Nobody wants to say it but some people are just capable of driving while a bit drunk. A drunk driver driving properly is just a driver.

Sure, but you can apply that to almost *every movie*. LOTR without Howard Shore is kinda dull. Jaws without the "dun un" does not clearly carry tension the same. Inception or the Nolan Batman films with the Zimmer score is kinda dull. Fact is SW does in fact have the JW soundtrack, you cannot just decouple them, if a director directs a shot he usually has some music in mind, if it didn't they would probably do the shot different.

Yes, Star Wars is basically a mash up of a spaghetti western, a Kurosawa film, 1920's serials with a smear of space opera over top. I mean that in in the best way possible tot eh OG trilogy, it all plays into the certain je ne sais quoi

Also Lucas is famously not a great writer, like you said in the OG trilogy he had a lot of assistance, also from his directing buddies as well as people like Irving Kershner who masterfully directed ESB.

Let's not levy this on the American's solely. Every country loves Star Wars, and Marvel movies and hell I am pretty sure China is primary reason we still get Transformers movies so "lowest common denominator" is a worldwide phenomenon.

Sure, except Blade Runner was 1982, 5 years after Episode 4 and 2 years after ESB. Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" also wan't until 1985 and let's be honest all of them reallt just pull influence from Metropolis.

The city size does speak to my point, everything in SW is small, like a western or a fantasy movie. Mos Eisley is a small town bar pretty much. Cloud City has what, a couple thousand people in it from what we see? Even in the prequels for all this huge scale we see the world still feels kinda empty (this is partly Lucas's whole directing paradigm) But again, none of this matter if the parts all work as a whole.

This ironically for me is the weakest part of Star Wars, the universe it takes place in makes no practical sense and is actually rather small in scale but that is also because outside of the aesthetic it's a fantasy story, not a science fiction one (The film Star Wars stole from)

Now that being said for most people some of your negatives are positives for the (original) series success. The characters storyline and characters are classic archetypes well suited to a story, just total Joseph Cambell stuff, the action for the time was literally mind blowing. Nobody had seen such feats of motion capture and effects work since 2001 and so much of that practical work holds up today. And that's ok for me because it works as a whole (especially with a healthy slathering of John Williams over the top of it).

Star Wars is totally built on vibes, that's what's so tricky about new spinoffs to get a handle on.

That is true, also if we could just swap all the humans with self driving cars we'd all be riding in them pretty soon.