Someone else makes the hardware, Microsoft sticks a badge on it.

Then you pay for the subscription.

MS wants out of the hardware game because it's not paying for itself any more. With Sony blinking first and raising the price of the Playstation, Microsoft sees it's out. It can get someone else to build the hardware and just reap the profit from the software sales and subscription services. That was the only thing that made the Xbox profitable, the fact that they could get publishers to pay a per instance fee for the game (and pass that on to the end user) and then get the end user to pay a monthly fee for basic things like online access. However that's not bringing in enough money to pay for the hardware any more. This generation is over and both Sony and Microsoft need it to continue for several more years to make it profitable.

So they're in a bind... but don't worry, the brands will continue because it doesn't matter what kind of abuse Sony and MS dish out, console owners will bend over and take it like they always have.

Pretty much this.

By forcing everyone back into the office you're not going to force the workshy to start working, they'll just have to go back to their old, tried and trusted methods of avoiding work by walking around, having conversations, drinking coffee, going to Greggs and pointless meetings. In fact it's going to be a productivity sync as they love to drag others into their pointless meetings to make it look like they're doing something... which drags the productive people away from being productive.

Meh,

It's not like they could do any more damage to the franchise after the last few movies. The Blond Bond and grittyfication sucked all the humour and gravitas out of the series. Now they're left with a withered husk so they might as well see what they can do with it.

And the thing is, I liked Daniel Craig in his previous roles. He wasn't even the wrong actor, it was the role that had changed into something worse.

Also the NHS is good at leveraging it's buying power to get lower prices. Popular pharmaceutical Monjauro is £250 (soon to be more sadly) per month off the NHS, the NHS pays £122 for the same product and prescribes it for diabetes (which is what it's meant for, weight loss is a side effect of GLP-1s). Americans can expect to pay $1000 for the same dose, more if it's off insurance.

There's discounts, then there's discounts and then there's the NHS. When you're that big you can go and say "you know what that factory produces, we'd like to buy all of it". US insurance companies are nowhere near as good at negotiation and don't pass the savings on.

If you've ever had to deal with Lufthansa's customer service, you would not be surprised if sacking them and replacing them with AI agents noticeably improves customer service entirely by accident.

And I don't think much of AI agents.

With Luftwaffes famous anti-competitiveness, monopolistic designs, lack of customer service or even giving a shit, it's easy to mistake them for one.

They want to keep the brand, just get rid of the expensive hardware that doesn't pay for itself.

It's been the dream for a console generation to last 10 years, now it's a requirement as the hardware is sold at so much of a loss that you're not going to break even for years even when you're nickel and diming everyone for everything you can.

The problem with the loss leader strategy is that you have to make up that loss somewhere else, the bigger the loss the more you need to squeeze in other areas. Games get more expensive, subscriptions get more expensive, you require subscriptions for more and more features that used to be free. This leads to a situation where people get sick of being wrung out for money and just give up on the whole thing, which means you're not making back the loss you made by selling them the console to begin with.

Sony blinked by upping the price of their already old console to $700. Unlike Microsoft they cant subsidise their gaming division from more profitable divisions.

Computer hardware gets significantly faster every few years, so a 5 yr old console is going to start showing it's age... when you need it to sell for 10 years to make money you're going to have serious problems. I've long said that the "PC wannabe" consoles Sony and Microsoft make wouldn't last, they just cant compete with PCs and don't have the cheap, casual fun USP of a normal console. Also PC's have entered the console domain with the Steam Deck and unlike MS and Sony, the hardware is not being subsidised, so now the PC Wannabe consoles have to compete with an actual PC console.

I certainly hope not.

That's a countable noun so it should have been "fewer" brown people.

The UK is having more immigration than ever (the overwhelming majority is regular immigration, along the lines of 99%), but we're not getting the boom because we made it more difficult to sell stuff to closest ally and largest trading partner. The magical trade deals that Brexiteers promised never came... I wonder who could ever have predicted that.

Sadly for the UK, those who aren't learning from Donald Trump are planning to vote for Nigel Farage... A man who spends most of his time in other countries bad mouthing the UK.

Brexiteers will simultaneously argue that the bus never said "£350 million per week for the NHS" and that the NHS actually got hundreds of millions... With perfectly straight faces (well they have to be pretty straight to talk out of both sides of their mouths).

The big lie on the big red lying bus was that their £350m figure did not subtract the rebate we got from the EU, of the approx £17b we sent to the EU, we received back approx £5b in rebates and subsidies, including the £4b discount on the dues to begin with, so we never actually paid that and we got back another 1-2b in subsidies. Little wonder they're not missing us. All in all we did rather well in the EU and are doing terribly out of it.

The entire Brexit campaign was based on lies... It worked for them so they've kept on lying.

The thing is, as you get older you realise that the lottery isn't a tax on people who can't do maths.

It's actually a tax on hope.

Was it ever even alive?

If anything is purely Jobswerthian, an expression of underwater basket weaving, it had to be UX. Something invented so someone can justify getting a pay cheque without actually having any skills or qualifications.

And the reason it's done is because too many landlords (landleeches) were abusing the process and kicking people out when they thought they could get more money.

Well now that the hard work and cost of restoring and preserving the space shuttle has been done by someone else, they want the end product moved to Texas until more work has to be done on it.

A trip to the Udvar-Hazy museum out near Dulles airport is a must if you're in the DC area. Well worth the drive out there.

2 is pretty much what Airbus have done. Put as much commonality between models as they can, of course you can't simply "scale up" a A320 to an A350 because they're different aircraft with different characteristics but you can make the interfaces and procedures similar so that re-training is easier and faster. I'd be surprised if Boeing hasn't done something similar in the past.

A very, very long lead time for new aircraft designs is a normal thing. They aren't as simple as they were in the 60s and safety requirements are much more stringent.

Boeing is screwed in the short term but has a very good opportunity for the long term. There's been a bit of a shift with the way passenger aircraft are being used. The A320/737 families used to be for short haul routes, feeding people from regional airports into hubs, then larger jets (767/A320) would move people between hubs. Now the A320s and B737s are moving people between hubs. They've steadily gotten larger and increased range so that in many cases they're no longer suitable or economical to run shorter routes with less demand. Airbus saw this and bought the Bombardier C-Series program which became the A220 family. Both the A220 and A320 families are selling faster than Airbus can build them, which isn't the case for the B737 MAX, customers are only buying those because they literally cant get an Airbus.

Much like the Ford Focus, it got lardier and lardier with each iteration until the point where it wasn't a small car any more. The same happened with narrowbody jets, the B737-100 had a maximum capacity of 115, the MAX8 has a capacity of 210 and that's not even the largest model (the MAX10 isn't certified yet) which has a seating capacity of 230 which puts it into what the 757 or A330-200 carry. So much like Ford introducing the Fiesta as a new small hatch, Airbus introduced the A220 as the new regional airliner because the A320 was getting too big. As a result of this, there is no demand for the smaller widebodies like the A330-200 or 767.

So Boeing has a huge opportunity to create two new airliners. A 100-150 seat regional airliner to compete with the A220 and a 150-230 seat to replace the 737 and compete with the A320. Both jets can share a lot of components even though they'll have different engines. I'll bet that they'll still fuck it up though.