XBox? Cool. Everybody knows XBox as a brand is in flux, with a high likelihood of a large scale pull-back or having it altogether fold.

Sales? I've said this in other threads over the years, but when a company starts firing sales at any scale that's recognizable beyond "release low performers," there's something bad brewing in that business. The business world views sales as profit generation, providers, the most important, the best of the best. When sales starts getting slashed, the business is suffering, or preparing to suffer, a large amount of shrinkage of market share, or the decision makers are preparing to watch the market shift drastically in a way they aren't quite ready to address yet. Because if they were ready to address it, they would be retraining sales on the new market dynamic, and not slashing them.

This signals Microsoft is seeing some really dark times ahead. I'm sure I'm not the only one who doesn1 feel all that sad about that.

Yeah, the truth is by tying it to the government and promising to give money to the public, they'd be setting themselves up for some of that sweet, sweet "To Big To Fail" cash when the bubble begins to burst and the levee begins to break. That "giving money to the public" would quickly turn into "public must support us, or we can't support them," which would just as quickly become, "permanent government supplied subsidy for existing."

These sick fuckers won't be satisfied with draining our 401ks. They want *ALL* the money. Including that which the government uses to keep the military industrial complex lubricated.

I wonder what happens when we run out of game tokens for them to steal?

He needs all your data before he can spin up a compelling model. Musk companies work on his priorities, not yours.

The AI companies have decided that they are the arbiters, the owners, the collectors, and the disseminators, of all human knowledge. If it exists, they have a right to it. And *NO ONE* is allowed to stand in the way of that.

Something tells me Cloudflare is not going to be strong enough to stand up to the tremendous amount of clout these tech companies have managed to garner through pure hype-cycle bullshittery in the past few years. Which means it's time for a new web security company to spring up with the backing of the AI companies.

I look forward to watching the war between Clownfail and the AI Masters. I'm sure it won't cause a further erosion of trust in technology. LOL.

He's a mash-up of two things:

1. The last gasp of the actual Boomer generation, holding onto their hatred and trying desperately to prove, one last time, that they were the only generation that ever actually mattered.

2. The worship of the rich and rich wanna-bes that the Boomer generation still worship as if they were actual gods simply because they managed to gather more game tokens than others.

Donald spent most of his life wishing he was as wealthy as he projected. He's got a legitimate shot at making himself that rich now, and he's doing everything he can to reach that goal before he finally checks out. I wonder if he's a believer in the afterlife having a cover charge, or if he somehow believes leaving enough wealth for his family will save him from whatever terrible fate he was scared of when he started babbling about fearing not making it into heaven? Either way, he's definitely of the belief that more wealth makes a better person, and he's scrambling to set himself up to reach a little higher on that ladder before he's done.

He doesn't care at all about the consequences for the rest of us.

This one's pretty easy to understand from a sky-level view. He finally figured out how to make money off of Anthropic. Or their check cleared. Or both. There's only one thing Donald Trump cares about: enrichment. His own or his family's. Not yours. Not mine.

The era of "protect me mommy" kids have grown up thinking that corporations and governments are our parents, our friends, our protectors. They are now of the belief that only the juggernauts of the world can protect us from ourselves. The short version: Any excuse will do to gank our freedoms. Less freedoms = more safety. And we all know the meaning of life is having the illusion of safety.

Egregious attack on commoners: MUST HAPPEN NOW (age verification nonsense).

Mild inconvenience for business interests: This creates challenges that would be difficult to meet.

With the whole world focused on this "problem," it's gonna be a whole hell of a lot easier to ignore the problems that are actually having an affect on the population at large. Well done, owners. You finally managed to refocus every single world government on your problems exclusively, and given every government the excuse they needed to completely ignore their people. Let's see how that works out for us all long-term.

That money has been earmarked as "research" funding, and will be used to continue to prop up the tech companies and ex-governors while they pretend to care about the underclasses who are being disrupted. There's no room in the budget to think about handing any of that funding directly to those underclasses. They'll have to come up with their own grift.

The set-up sounds like a good way to grift a ton of money while stating in very technical terms that it's a really hard problem to solve. Essentially a very expensive, "Damn, I dunno."

Problem being, these completely disconnected idiots seem to be in charge of every major decision within the business and political world, and are determined to push every boundary until it blows up in all our faces.

The company got to save money while they had their little experiment by not paying their experts. If I were to take a wild guess as to how everything plays out, this will end up being a resetting of standard salary for such positions, lowering the pay scale. Because that time off will have made them desperate. And there's nothing companies love more than a desperate employee.

No wonder it's confusing. Business management hardly ever acts rationally.

But the producing company wouldn't be seeking those contracts if they expect prices to continue to climb. It's a bit of a conundrum, but the fact Micron is announcing these contracts makes me think the prices may be approaching peak, and they see some sort of decline coming in the next fiscal year or two.