Before you go public, as you control all the shares. What's SpaceX going to do? You think Elmo is going to give up the shares, or is he going to issue 73 million more and dilute the price?

The thing you are looking for is the Group Policy Editor. There are Group Policies that can disable the prompts to use Microsoft accounts and the ability to use OneDrive or Windows AI features, the hook Bing has in Windows Search (i.e. no more searching in the start menu and having it list web sites before the file or application you wanted) and all the "consumer experience" features in non-Enterprise Windows. There are a few GPO settings that get ignored unless you're on Windows Enterprise or Education. Most of them related to Microsoft Datamining.

It is also possible to transition a Microsoft account back to a local one without losing your Profile. This is done in Settings > Accounts > Your Info in Windows 11.

gpedit.msc is normally only available to non-Home Windows SKUs, but it is unlockable with a tiny bit of Powershell:

Get-ChildItem @(
        "C:\Windows\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package*.mum",
        "C:\Windows\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package*.mum"
) | ForEach-Object { dism.exe /online /norestart /add-package:"$_" }

Open an Administror-elevated Powershell or Terminal session, paste that in and even your $200 Acer vomit-grade notebook can work the way you want it again.

The reason we need GPOs for this stuff is that Microsoft's software updates will occasionally re-set registry changes. If the changes are made with GPOs, the settings get reapplied and overwrite changes no matter what state Windows is in. This is particularly annoying for stuff like OneDrive, CoPilot and Edge preferences. You either have to regularly re-run scripts to alter the registry to the state you like it and hope nothing makes a structural change to where those settings live, or you set a GPO.

Sounds like 46 more targets of investigation.

I mean it's a cut and paste of three lines of powershell.

I wouldn't call the ins and outs of operating gpedit.msc trivial, but enabling on Windows Home is a couple clicks and maybe six key strokes.

I really do agree.
I maintain system images as part of my job, but it always made sense for me to extend that to individual devices since I am asked to help with them anyway. For me, this has been just adding a tweak here or there that grew over time. GPOs for Windows Home didn't become standard in my image management until Microsoft started inflicting Onedrive on everyone. Now I view it mandatory.

For what it's worth, I have a similarly long list of things I do when I configure a Linux system or MacOS. I definitely have to do the most arguing with MacOS since I hate some of the OS default software and Apple has a long history of breaking things that should be scriptable.

You can exclude them from installing through an autounattend.xml (see Schneegans.de for help building one) and prevent them from display via a GPO. You really want to use a group policy object because otherwise a Windows Update might put them back; it'll override a plain old registry change or user preference any time it wants but GPO changes persist.

It is trivial to restore Local Group Policy editing on Windows Home SKUs with a little powershell.

Get-ChildItem @(
        "C:\Windows\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package*.mum",
        "C:\Windows\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package*.mum"
) | ForEach-Object { dism.exe /online /norestart /add-package:"$_" }

Some GPO settings are ignored outside the context of Windows Education or Enterprise SKUs, but most of those are related to user behavior data mining. I can verify that if you're just trying to supress OneDrive, Bing Search and Microsoft Account sign-ins, those are all maintained just fine even on Windows Home.

then dejectedly pay hourly to play it on Xbox cloud instead.

The Xbox Cloud is built around Xbox Series X hardware in blade form. So if 30fps at console quality is not to customer's expectations, then they are going to walk away similarly dejected.

Unless they're secretly training on all your chats despite them saying they're not.

It's highly unlikely that anything you'd do in the course of normal desktop use would make much of a subjective difference from a SATA SSD to an NVMe drive. Most sustained IO operations don't take so long that you'll realize the difference. I can tell when I'm copying 30GB files from my camera card or doing full database dumps, but for just loading up a game or booting an OS? They're subjectively almost exactly the same experience.

That being said, there is such a thing as a cacheless drive. SSDs used to have a certain amount of DRAM or SLC NAND as a faster intermediary interface for storage. Low-cost drives might not have THAT, and that seriously reduces the utility of the SSD in the first place, especially on no-name drives. Those guys are sometimes no better than mechanical drives. Since your system is a refurb, it's possible they did just stick a POS drive in.

Well nuts. I couldn't even get the week right. Thanks for the correction!

Well it is the day after the US midterm elections, so for some it will be the end of the world in a metaphorical sense.

What? No, it's not.

The midterms are on Tuesday, November 10th. Friday is not the day after Tuesday.

99.9% of that can be solved with allowing the construction of new designs of reactors instead of booting the old ones back up.

Uh, huh, sure.

So lets say I am ahead in a field and have a few up and coming competitors. There is a simple solution to the problem, lets get the government to regulate us all. This causes our competitors to massively slow down as they have to respond to the regulations that I wrote (I don't have to slow down as much - I wrote the regulations such that I am already following them of course). There is also a cost to complying with regulations - it tends not to scale with size more like a static cost. As a large incumbent I can spend a billion dollars complying with regulations. That small startup can not spend a billion dollars to comply, even is I can limit my costs to something I can afford to pay - that is money I am paying regulators not engineers making my product better.

the actual production cost of $30 million as indicated by the tax writeoff stated value

The tax write-off can only be for part of the production cost, isn't it? You don't get to deduct the entire cost of the movie.

It's well-reported that WB sold the film below costs to Ketchup, and they paid $50 million for it.