Gamestop dedicated all the prime floor space to second hand copies, which usually have more than twice the margin compared to new copies, of console games years before console game downloads became wide spread. Over the years they've gotten harder and harder into aggressively pushing (as in sales staff gets written up if they don't pester anyone buying a new copy if they have second hand ones available) second hand copies with their so-called "circle of life" program where the same copies rotate between them and customers. Making a tidy profit every time a new customer buys a copy. This is all about cutting out game publishers, the actual console makers' bread and butter, to as high of a degree as possible.

It wasn't retailers who got up in arms about the XB1's original licensing model, thou some retailers did help kill the download-only PSP Go by refusing to carry it, it was the customers who got up in arms and it wasn't about second hand copies; it was about being able to borrow and give away games to friends. This is what Sony joked about in their rebuke of Microsoft's plans and did so to thunderous applause. If anyone is going to start popping the champagne when Gamestop goes into liquidation it's not publishers, it's gamers. Who generally hate Gamestop and how it's basically taken over game retail with it's terrible business practices, poor selection, aggressive sales tactics and staff that's badly trained, poorly paid and treated absolutely abysmally.

I'm not even going to try and answer this question because it's a bad straw man.

The actual point was that despite having an ace up in its sleeve, Gamestop has with it's greedy and short sighted business practices alienated it's suppliers and pushed them into trying to cut them out. Gamestop tried to cut out game publishers as much as possible; Game publishers responded by trying to cut out Gamestop as much as possible. If they hadn't been so greedy and played the ace up their sleeve better, they wouldn't be despised by both suppliers and customers alike and in a much better position today.

Me, I'm an old fashioned guy who likes to own, not license, my games and preferably in physical form. But with gamestop being the absolute games retail behemoth that at the same time pushed publishers into going digital only makes thing way harder for me. I don't like how their focus on only what sells large numbers has made it so more obscure games have almost all gone digital only. Similarly, I don't like how retail copies of even certain big titles have become more expensive and harder to find (you try finding a physical copy of Halo Infinite that isn't at or near full price 6 months post release).

Probably the best recent example of what gamestop has done to physical game retail is when I wanted a physical copy of Final Fantasy X/X2 Remaster on XB1; I could not find a single copy in the whole country. The only place I could find one in Europe was Amazon Germany full price despite then being a two-year-old remaster of two nearly 20 year old games. Ended up importing an NTSC copy and turns out the north American distribution was so small that they didn't even have previously standard separate edition with the legally mandated case text in French for Quebec. All NTSC copies have the Quebec French text on the box.

It's still spring and based on a quick Google search the average highest temperature of the day is still going to go up. For Islamabad that number for May is 95F, June is 99F and July is also 95F.

So in plain English; It's very hot, it's going to get hotter and it's going to stay hot until autumn.

What else would they come up with?

We're talking about a business who in their greed became one of the prime movers in making their own business (physical games retail) obsolete despite having the leverage to slow down and limit it. Console makers were and are reliant on them for hardware sales and hence bent over a figurative barrel, but with their attempt to cut out game publishers (from whom console makers actually make their money) trough a hyper-aggressive push for second hand sales, they succeeded in pushing console makers to ignore their protests. Microsoft's current "big thing" in the console space, "Game Pass", completely cuts Gamestop out from software sales, both new and used, i.e their bread and butter. The only reason why Sony haven't followed suit is because they don't have other extremely profitable units and hence have to focus more on short term profits and can't afford a longer term investment like that lest their investor owners rebel and replace company management.

Hence, when they see a grift like cyrpto doing absolute gangbusters, it's obviously going to be like catnip to a cat. Only problem is that they didn't get their attempt at taking advantage of this grift until after it started coming apart at the seems with interest rates going up and speculative assets (opposed to legitimate investments) taking an absolute nosedive.

Shilling? They're writing about the things that are supposed to anchor the whole system to some semblance of sanity failing and the whole thing being at the precipice of coming apart at the seams as a result. It's basically the opposite of shilling.

This stupidity has gone on for long enough. I first read into bitcoin and blockchain after I first heard about it back in 2011 (on 4chan's /g/ of all places) and concluded that it was moronic at best and a scam at worst. It was already clear that bitcoin couldn't scale to make it usable by any significant number of people, but it was in the control of people who had significant holdings in it, and hence a vested interest in keeping it from being replaced, who ensured improved offshoots would never replace it. That's even before you remember that it's not tied to anything and hence fluctuates far too heavily for something you'd keep savings and other long term holdings. Regulating it to either something you buy and spend like ice cubes or speculate on like a stock.

However being the "new hot tech thing" and the allure of being able to make lots of money I knew it'd attract people who like to think of themselves as far smarter and savvier than they actually in droves. What I didn't expect was for them to keep attracting people for this long and for this number of people with this amount of money. Over a decade after I concluded that this is mass idiocy at best and the biggest scam in history at worst, it's about time this whole thing came apart at the seams even if some of the morons who really got into it end up losing their houses and their savings.

The fact that bitcoin doesn't scale is and is hence entirely unsuitable for any significant volume of transactions something that's been blindingly obvious for about a decade at this point. Back then it at least successfully carved out a niche for contraband like narcotics, unlicensed firearms and murder-for-hire along with drug cartel money transfers, bypassing Chinese foreign money transfer controls, crypto locker and other cybercrime ransom payments.

However since then the closer scrutiny of transactions on the public ledger and the significant slowdown in the number of transactions and increase in their cost has driven away more or less all of these questionable users. Most of whom are left are speculators betting on the value, i.e other speculators' interest in it. The whole thing has basically become something akin to a casino game without a dealer. Betting against each other on something that isn't tied to anything in the real world, causing it to swing wildly back and forth as the gamblers' moods swing.

Honestly, this is the sort of stupidity where I say that you deserve your misfortune if you get burned by it. Even when you've over-leveraged yourself so badly you lose your house when it all comes crashing down.

Most of the tanks we've seen being towed away by farmers weren't stuck in mud, they ran out of fuel and had to be abandoned.

The underlying issue is that tanks don't go at it alone and rely on far less offroad-capable support vehicles carrying fuel, ammo, maintenance crews and, importantly, infantry support. Tanks don't just fight other tanks, they support and are supported by infantry that fight other infantry and tanks. Russia's screw-up began by them not having infantry support, usually carried by equally offroad-capable armored vehicles, which left tanks and, most importantly, un-armored support vehicles pretty much defenseless to ambushes by hostile infantry.

First the tanks had to stop to wait or go even back when their defenseless supply vehicles got ambushed by hostile infantry that should've been protected by that missing infantry support. Then they had to stand there with their engines running because without that infantry support they had to be ready to defend themselves at any moment. Eventually, due to their fuel supply vehicles being ambushed, they ran out of fuel and really did become defenseless. Forcing crews to simply abandon their tanks in the fields they were standing in, making it look like they were stuck.

They may have had a lot of independence from when they got bought out, but since then more and more functions, specially related to manufacturing, has been moving to China. All of the vehicles sold under their Polestar brand (which is no different from Nissan's Infiniti and Toyota's Lexus brands) are manufactured in China, not Sweden or the U.S (i.e where Volvo used to make their cars) and you can be sure the Chinese share of manufacturing will be increasing as a bigger and bigger share of their production is electric.

Let's also not forget about management as the move to higher end, having been a mid-range brand for all the time they've been making cars (they started out making trucks) till the Geely buyout, was a directive that came from China.

As usual for you, of course you try and go for the lowest hanging fruit. The usual thing about trying to imply that anyone who complains about a needless race swap is racist. No mention of all the substantial stuff like hokey writing with even downright moronic stuff like Faye now having the personality of Kramer from Seinfeld.

Never change... Never argue in good faith...

Japanse police are known for having the slightly silly problem that they just don't have enough crimes to genuinely keep them busy.

This combined with the Japanese general xenophobia is also why they're infamous among the expat community for harassing foreigners. Doing things like enforcing things like enforcing no smoking signs they simply don't bother enforcing with locals and spending their time checking the foreign residency permit of any foreign-looking person they run into. You constantly hear stories from expats about how any interaction with them, even when you're just trying to return lost property you've found, always beings with them checking your foreign residency permit before they'll even hear what you want to talk to them about.

Prostitution is technically banned, but the very narrow definition of it as "penis in vagina intercourse" means there's a lot of prostitution going on both trough legal businesses like "massage" parlors and unofficial stuff like "compensated dating", which is often a cover for outright prostitution and sometimes performed by minors.

No, the real western influence is in that they've banned sex and the sexualization of minors, something that's been considered totally fine and normal for for literally centuries up until the western influence banned it. Because of the long history, it never actually went away and it's become more common in the last few decades. Both in fiction as part of completely openly sold eromanga and in real life as part of compensated dating, which as I mentioned is sometimes done by minors and a cover for outright prostitution.

The thing about those numbers claiming that the comic book industry is doing better than ever is that the figures from when comic books were sold in news stands are not comparable to the ones we have today. Today's figures include independent artists' direct over-the-internet sales, crowdfunding and, most importantly, sales of manga which are beginning to eclipse that of western comic book series'. Singular manga series like Demon Slayer is selling issues in numbers both DC and Marvel only wish they could sell.

The current situation comics are in is probably best exemplified not by how dedicated comic book stores have been closing left and right for years, but the fact that the distributor both DC and Marvel have used for ages, has lost both of them and have basically been in a state near-insolvency for several years.

There were appeals, but both Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay were both found guilty. Jeff Skilling got out in 2019 after serving 12 years and is banned for life from being an officer or director of a public company. Ken Lay may not have gone to prison or received a final sentence after being found guilty, but that was only because he died of a heart attack between when he was found guilty and when he was supposed to receive his sentence (as the U.S doesn't tend to sentence dead people).

Fundamentally this is all just part of her trying to deflect attention from the fact that her husband went to prison for embezzlement and her own reputation is badly tarred by this fact...

I wouldn't say that Boeing in particular has always been that way. There was a huge shift in internal culture after the McDonnell-Douglas buyout when what effectively happened was that the McDonnell-Douglas management took over the company and implemented their style of management. A style of management that lead to disasters like the DC-10 cargo door fiasco that caused several accidents, including what was then the deadliest air accident in history. Just because they wanted a door that opened outward just so operators didn't need to leave space in the cargo hold so the door could open, then botched the design, discovered it during ground testing before release, botched the kluge to fix it and had to fix it twice after launch.

The ultimate failure of the DC-10 and specially it's upgraded variant the MD-11 is the reason why Boeing eventually bought them out. With the 737 Max series the combined company is effectively just repeating the DC-10 cargo door fiasco.

I honestly don't blame Apple for doing this. Try to remember that it's so "in" to the point where you'll anger people if you don't officially support it, but actually means you should pay people the same regardless of their skills, experience, responsibilities and education. Under it you you either have to over-pay less skilled workers or under-pay skilled workers.

It's totally antithetical to the concept of equality that you have to at least pay lip service to if you want to come off as a progressive company.

Man is there a lot of entitlement in the comments here... The reason why salaries for tech workers in the San Francisco Bay area have been so high compared to the rest of the country since the dotcom boom has been the extraordinary cost of living in that area. When the reason for these absurdly high salaries goes away with people working remotely from much lower living expense areas goes away it's natural that the "Bay Area Extra" goes away with it.

It's got literally nothing to do with people being paid for the skills they provide. It's a living expenses extra being taken away when the reason for that extra goes away. You're still being paid the same for your actual work. What you lose is the living expenses extra and only because you yourself removed the need for it by moving someplace where it's not needed.

This is like the French when they go apesh*t because Macron got rid of unnecessary entitlements like an early retirement age of 40 for railway workers stemming from when it was so physically demanding that it would basically break you by that point.