Yes, there are a few useful corners of social media.

And you could watch symphonies on TV too. And educational stuff. But kids didn't, did they? Or those who did were a rounding error.

And then of course there's the fact that social media is a million times worse than TV ever was. You wouldn't let your kids wander down every dark alley of every city on earth, so why would you let them wander every corner of the internet?

MicroStrategy market cap, which has dropped to $54 billion since I wrote that.

Just rip the bandage off and move the family to LibreOffice. My mom has been using it for over a decade now and it's honestly one of the things that requires the least amount of tech support. I don't think LibreOffice has any bullshit AI crap to worry about either. Most people don't need MS Office for what they're doing.

That's even worse for them. None of the studios that they bought are making games that anyone really loves or will fondly remember twenty years from now. They paid a shit ton of money for studios cashing in on past successes are the ones who will be left holding the bag. Some might still manage to sell titles in the millions, but they really on exist until something better comes along and disrupts the market. Halo, GoW, or other Xbox mainstays haven't been relevant in years and none of the studios they bought have done anything on the level of their historical achievements in the last several years either.

True but even sports cards traditionally they are given player in a given years, TOPS or whoever printed however many Babe Ruth cards they thought they might sell in his rookie year, and later when he turned out to be a sensation, people wanted those early issued cards.

Pikachu as far as I know is ageless, and Nintendo can decide to issue more of any given card, there are no real rules that anyone would slam as a rug pull or be able to reasonably say - well the 're-issue' isn't worth anything they there would be if one of the Base Ball card companies decided to print more TreyYesavage 2025 season cards, in 2032.

Infinite money machines are trivially easy. There's nothing stopping an issuing agency from printing even more money. Zimbabwe's 100 Trillion dollar note is but one such example. Of course that bill wasn't worth the paper used to print it shortly after it was printed due to the well over billion-percent monthly inflation, but infinite money machines do exist. Incidentally they seem to themselves be infinite pain machines judging by the historical effects of running the printing press or infinite money machine.

What doesn't exist is an infinite wealth machine. Well that sort of exists, but it only gets there by a few percent per year on average and no cajoling will make it get there faster. Most of the time that just slows it down or even causes it to work backwards. It's a funny machine like that. It's reliable enough for your retirement account at least.

No one is going to balk at $7 a month when the Excel monkey using the product costs five times as much as that per hour. Th A just shows how badly all of the AI efforts at Microsoft must be failing though. The money has to come from somewhere at the end of the day. I'm surprised they aren't squeezing harder. Even though there are alternatives to Office, many of which are good, the amount of time lost to switching or retraining easily exceeds years worth of subscription fees.

Still beats the alternatives. The people remaining in Venezuela are fighting over what scraps of food remain. The rest of your comment is just stupid. This is people operating in a free market and acting in their own self-interest. If they can make more money doing this than some other job they could have instead, why shouldn't they do this? Maybe they even like doing this more than working retail, cleaning carpets, or whatever job they might do if this weren't available. If I could earn as much buying and reselling cards to wealthy collectors as I could doing hard labor, guess what I'd be doing. People spontaneously acting for their own self-benefit by engaging in labor that didn't previously exist is the free market in action. Just because you don't like it doesn't change reality. I wish no one were involved in the illegal drug trade, but that's not going to stop it from existing. Collectors don't want to go stand in line at stores to buy packs of cards themselves so they hire someone else to do it for them. It's fundamentally no different than any other job. It doesn't matter if you think it's useless if other people are willing to pay for it with their own money. No one is making them do it.

Really this is just indicative of a supply problem and Nintendo could fix it overnight if they wanted to. Presumably they don't make any additional money from this market beyond the first sale, so there's no reason for them not to just print cards on demand. That would immediately kill the scalper market designed to capitalize on the excess demand for the cards. There's no reason for Pokémon cards to be artificially scarce as they're just cardboard with graphics printed on them. They could still sell packs with a different design if they're worried about losing the collector market, but for someone who just wants to play the card game it ensures that they can get the cards that they want. Nintendo even stands to make more money with this approach as they're cutting out a middleman.

This is a self-correcting problem for any detrimental behavior in the long term. I know it tears some people up inside, but let others make their own decisions freely and allow them to deal with the consequences of them. You can't reason someone out of a position that they did not use reason to arrive at in the first place. Sure, some people will never learn to quit touching the stove, but many other people can learn from their misfortune.

What's your point. Once upon a time the wealthy were installing indoor plumbing and fancy water closets while everyone else was still using outhouses or chamber pots. They subsidized the capital expenses necessary to for various businesses to offer their goods and services and refine the invention to make it better, less expensive, and more widely available. It was the same for automobiles, computers, and just about anything else you might care to name. Why would you expect it to be any different here?

So NFTs but even dumber because we now have an asset that isn't unique, is only rare in context, and probably lacks any meaningful anti-counterfeit controls etc.

Every time it appears Gen-Z has a solid lead in race to be dumbest generation, the now middle aged Millennials groan and say hold on there youngin hold my beer!

To which Gen-Z replies, eww you still drink that stuff.

I am not sure about that.

Microsoft isn't a hardware company, going back to add on cards in mice for XTs, Microsoft has always used hardware to push software.

We see the ROG Xbox Ally and the pushing of Xbox branded content in Windows 11. I think all suggests that while XBox as brand and XBox 'titles' are not going away Microsoft is testing the waters for options that don't include them sell hardware. Those options range from pure PC based / Windows software plays to partnering with OEMs to build gaming oriented hardware that can run custom spins of Windows 11.

Microsoft has long history of trying to get into the living room with various products, webTV, that floppy based picture viewer thing whatever that was called, Media Center releases of windows.. XBox as we have known it might just be another corpse beside that highway. It failed to give them the gatekeeping positions for media in the home they have always sought. In someways I think Microsoft missed Smart-TVs they way they missed the web and mobile.

Over and over and over... Same words. Same fools.

Xbox has been dying for 20 years now.

I know hating on Xbox is the approved take, but Microsoft isn't going to walk away from their cut of the console market in your lifetime.

A 56 billion dollar Ponzi scheme is about to explode.

Black swan event. Buckle up folks.