The cry of the aging incel who cant get laid.

Not a woman, a man pretending to be a woman. Identifying as female has as much biological reality as identifying as a dog and pretending it does is just a childish agic thinking delusion of which most sane adults want no part.

Covid is an odd virus. It was lethal to a fraction of a percent of the population, nasty to a couple of percent and no worse than a cold or even symptomless to everyone else. I dont personaly know anyone affected by it so if I lived in some idiocy bubble like these people I could well assume it was a hoax.

The value I see in Xbox:

1) Their vendor agreements re: distribution and sales for games.
2) The OEM hardware channel profits/relationship.

Frankly? I see 2 options.

AMD is doing great. They're the only big players in the market I can see that understands how to grow a business instead of simply loot it. Xbox would potentially give AMD a big market leg up in their other product lines (namely, low power CPU/GPU). Xbox itself has always heavily depended on AMD hardware integration to run well. AMD excels at buying things and making them feed their entire pipeline - and that model works extremely well for Xbox.

It would just depend on what kind of deal they could get on the company, and Windows use (if they'd even want it).

Failing that... maybe Valve.They're already trying to turn SteamDeck and SteamOS into something that runs and works on everything. They've got obscene amounts of money. Xbox could be a great already-installed base as well as give them additional studios to make games for their platform. Though this seems less likely than AMD.

Considering how easy it is to port or support a game on Linux or Mac these days with WINE (with vibe coding), even Windows support seems a diminished quality for gaming.

I've personally taken 2 old games and made them playable on MacOS just vibing them. One was Homeworld, and the other was an indie game (the name of which I can't remember, but it was in the theme of Thief).

There was a time not that distant from now when Microsoft was getting a significant percentage of their revenue from gaming. This seems like they're slaughtering their sacred cow.

I can't see much upside for Microsoft in the future. They're basically moving cloud-only for most products, except for Windows itself. I understand how that works on the books, but I don't see how well that works for their customers. They're shrinking their market substantially to cater to larger and larger enterprises.

(THeir GPU investments have largely been a loss leader for their other cloud services... "data has inertia" or however that saying goes: storage, compute, and network activity on their cloud which wouldn't have gotten used if not for people moving data to the cloud to process it, subsidizes the discounted GPUs. All the cloud providers are doing this.)

Yeah, but why not? You're clearly not doing anything with the property. Might as well let someone get good use out of it.

Microsoft seems intent on destroying every one of their valuable properties with enshitification, trying to pull the last dollar out of existing products instead of innovating or providing anything for their customers.

As for Xbox being a loss leader... what are they smoking? The boxes themselves have been for a long time, that's just game industry economics. They've already divested from that, pushing the hardware cost onto manufacturers, which is sure to make the platform price go up. But the software side of that business? It's always been incredibly lucrative.

What have MS done, lately? The only things that come to mind are increased "vertical integration", pushing their customers to the cloud while at the same time increasing the licensing costs and decreasing the quality and usability of all of their self-hosted products. Managing Windows has become increasingly difficult, and once useful tools don't even work. The tools that do work, Powershell, usually don't even work, with constant drift across products as to what works and what doesn't.

There are further cultural observations to make specifically related to Xbox, but I'm sure that would get some people in a tizzy.

It isn't sociopaths which makes a product good, it's engineering.

France specifically, and Europe more generally, lacks the economic incentives to keep the best and brightest employed at frontier level work. The European "IT industry" is all but dead.

No, that clearly isn't what Jesus meant, and it's made excruciatingly clear that faith without action is dead. Heart condition -> action -> salvation. You can't omit a step.

That's interesting, because I've seen the exact opposite play out twice in our small local schools. There's a "measles outbreak", and they rush to blame the unvaccinated, but it's only vaccinated kids who end up getting sick.

I always preferred bayonet mounts over Edison screws. Thankfully 90% are the former around here. But I digress... I changed all my light bulbs to LED ones about nine years ago when we did some renovations and haven't changed any since. What the hell's going on with yours?

The wildlife in Amsterdam is very engaging to watch!

... in the UK the council replaced sodium street lamps with allegedly more energy efficient white LED lights and in the process turned the fairly dim but usable orange sodium glow into virtual daylight all night. We used to be able to sleep with the curtains open but not now.

I want to share my little perspective. I worked at a McDonalds about 26 years ago. For several years while in high school and a bit in college. It was near the Interstate, in Mitchell South Dakota. This means we were quite busy, quite a bit of the time. If a bus came through, and they certainly did, one of if not the most likely place it would stop is there. We were paid near eight dollars an hour which inflation adjusted is probably the same now. As a high schooler, we worked pretty hard. There were two or three kids faster than me but I certainly held my own. And I took personal pride in assembling a nice, neat burger, and not smashing it all to hell wrapping it up. When I go to most fast food restaurants now, its shocking how slower they are. In the years I worked there I saw the "quality" and freshness of food slip every year. The eggs not cracked and mixed, more things pre cooked, etc. We certainly didn't play pricing games then either so if you were busy, you just buckled down and got the food out as quick as you could. The best part is it taught me to do dishes and not grumble. Cooking got easier, and now I'm happy to rarely eat out. I go to a bbq joint, or whatever and almost always think to myself that this could've been better if we made it at home. Anyways, learn to cook. Make your own baked beans, bread, lamb burgers, whatever. It is worth the time and effort to learn. And get a smoker and a charcoal grill if you can. I'm still glad I had that experience; they were mostly all good people. But it certainly should've paid better.

I propose "The Bill Gates Maxim".

Anything Bill Gates proposes or theorized should be strongly opposed societally because he is either wrong, evil, or both, in his prognostications.

"Love" is not a complex emotional state, it's an action - just like belief is an action.

"I believe climate change is a real and dangerous threat" - but you still drive a car and go about modern life?
"I believe in Jesus" - but you sleep around and do evil to others?
"I love my boyfriend" - but cheat on him?

What you describe is infatuation, not love. Love is a decision you act on.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.