I can't say I'm surprised. The leadership at Xbox drove the games division of Microsoft from a humble beginning to being a solid player in the gaming scene, with many beloved franchises which they've handled reasonably well. Halo has become a classis for good reason, they've kept as good care of Minecraft as can be expected, and the new MSFS flight sim is really nice. They're clearly motivated by a love for the craft, and for wanting to cater to gamers. Under them, Xbox grew from being a piece of hardware which had a few exclusive games to a behemoth of a gaming division handling massive and popular franchises like World of Warcraft, Bethesda's Fallout and Skyrim, and Doom. They've got control of some of the biggest names in the history of gaming, and they've generally appeared to actually care about providing games which gamers will enjoy.

And then came the demand for 30% profit, no matter what it takes. Something which is pretty much unheard of in the games industry, except for a few rare outliers. And definitely not something anyone has managed to consistently maintain over a diverse game portfolio - and the Xbox portfolio is getting quite diverse. This has shifted focus from catering to gamers to instead shafting gamers for as much money as possible, while slashing costs, which means delaying, crippling and outright cancelling games which have been eagerly awaited by gamers, and finding ways to add microtransactions and the like to ensure maximum squeeze out of what is being published.

Small wonder the people who want to share good games to gamers are less than thrilled with navigating those waters. And slapping in a CEO who has no clue about gaming is a perfect way to ensure decisions are not sidetracked by concern for the audience, but remain focused on what matters: 30% profit, even if it kills off Xbox once and for all.

Because what drives people who end up in such high level positions is the desire to be in such high level positions.

Xbox is a gaming division. Xbox today means franchises like Mechwarrior, Halo, MSFS 2025, Doom, Fallout, World of Warcraft, Skyrim, Diablo, and lots of others.

If Microsoft kills Xbox, that means killing all of those franchises. Arguably, they're trying, with the demand for 30% profits which is really hurting Xbox, but it seems unlikely they'll simply off them.

This law can and will stop that. Exactly the scenario you depict here will be a crime under the law. That's what is happening now, and which is to be corrected. This is a law which vastly increases cost of polluting compared to optimizing resource use. That's the entire reason it exists.

I will add, this has worked in other fields. Recycling and lower overproduction is reality in many areas in the EU already, through much more limited regulation and tax incentives. This is an outlier in resource waste, which is why it's getting targeted in this way.

You haven't even read the post, and from ignorance you promote authoritarian nonsense in order to destroy your own world to enrich the top percent. It's really sad how this site has fallen into antiintellectualism and authoritarianism.

Indeed I am, and that is why all of those things need to be reigned in. Companies should not be allowed to dump externalities on us, and we should not be allowed to dump externalities on others. Using the excuse "but others do it" only means those others also need to be reigned in.

The same logic SHOULD be applied to everything. Anything else is authoritarian nonsense. But we can't start with everything at once.

If the costs could actually be covered, then simply having disposal costs would work. But there is no way to reduce the externalities other than avoiding the disposal in the first place.

To claim that people should be able to simply dump externalities on others to get larger numbers on a spreadshet is authoritarian nonsense.

They aren't disposing of it in the EU. They're dumping it in countries with no environmental regulations. That's exactly what the rules are intended to stop.

And thus the solution is to do... nothing at all, because doing something only moves the problem.

Except then they can move the problem. And where it is moved then, they can move the problem. Until there is nowhere left to move the problem.

It may take time, but if everyone just gives up and says "the problem will just move elsewhere", the problem will never go away. Ever.

Several companies, like Microsoft, have set bizarre profit goals and divisions are doing everything they can to meet them. The Xbox division (which handles all gaming for Microsoft) has a 30% profit target, for example, which means they are both squeezing customers extremely hard with price increases, and shutting down development of games and franchises expected to do well in the long term in order to cut short term costs.

They're (probably) the most extreme, but this is hitting everyone with the crazy way the market has rewarded "AI firms", and with how everyone wants in on that - both the valuation and the potential slashing of personnel costs. And seeing the "AI firms" stocks race away makes a lot of C level execs very nervous, meaning they want to reverse their own trends, meaning they use these methods as well to make a more palatable next quarter.

Of course, that valuation of "AI firms" which is propping up the markets is currently made from a slice of blue sky. There is no real value add justifying that price tag, other than in a few narrow fields. Meta, for example, use it to great effect to target and create ads much cheaper than human analysts and designers do it, and with a slightly better hit rate since statistics is one thing these tools do rather well. But apart from cases like that, it's a problem looking for a high value solution.

So yeah. AI is used as an excuse. Stock valuations are overall completely bonkers high, and there is no way companies can perform as expected from those valuations. And that makes the people whos skin is in that game nervous, so they place the skin of the employees in the game to soften their own blow.

Drone motors are standardized. 1203 7500 KV 1.5 for example has a 12 mm diameter 3 mm tall stator, 7500 revolutions per volt and a 1.5 mm prop shaft. While you want to match the four mounted, you can replace all four with any other brand and just retrim the drone and you're done.

That dongle says it's not intended for gaming consoles, for good reason. They add latency, as conversion is active and not passive, and they do not support VRR. Nor will they allow HDR at over 60 Hz. At least not any I have found.

COBOL is designed around being transactional and error free. That's how it allows for fast batch processing. That's where its ability comes from. This is what allows mainframes to run COBOL code extremely efficiently.

If you know of another language which can solve that problem as efficiently, please, educate me.

COBOL is still the best at error-free transactions in batches. Many hopeful startups have tried to replace it in this role and gone under without a trace. There's nothing which can do that around today, except COBOL.

The combination of error free finance handling, ability to handle immense amounts of batches per time period, and everything being transactions, and all that built into the language and not an afterthought written as a class or similar, is unmatched.

This is also a set of requirements which is highly niche. HIGHLY nice. But within that niche, it stands alone.

Japanese uses 2136 official characters, the JÅyÅ Kanji, yes. But they are not enough. There are also the JinmeiyÅ kanji, a few thousand names which have to be known to be able to read and write. Basic proficiency is often seen as the JÅyÅ Kanji plus around 1000 names. Expert proficiency is at over 3000 names, for some 6000 total characters.