FWIW, I agree with you. Unfortunately, we don't tend to elect people that will actually implement any sort of protection for the consumer.

My assumption is closer to accurate than the assumption that non-voters were supporting Trump. If they were supporting him, they could have voted for him. Most of the non-voters I've actually interacted with couldn't stand the idea of voting for either candidate. The assumption that a non-vote was a vote for Trump is just that, an assumption. And a bad one at that.

Freedom is for the monied classes. We are currently watching those monied classes instruct the government in removing rights from the non-monied classes a little at a time to see how far they can push that line before people snap. I have doubts that they don't have a plan in place to crack down on those they view as their lessers when that line finally gets crossed.

It's been reported that just north of 65% of the population even participated in the vote during the 2024 election. Trump received just under 49% of the votes. 49% of 65% translates to roughly 32%. That's not half of the country.

There's a lot of sadness in all those statistics, but it's not the sadness of "half of the country supported / supports Donald Trump."

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.

Unless the company does something really cheesy like overprovision, then run those extra cells first over the warranty period, and only then use the whole pack, the degradation curve of a car battery pack is surprisingly linear. linky
linky

Yes. In the grand tradition of revelations that elicit a collective shrug from anyone who has ever glanced at a corporate tax strategy, it has come to light that Microsoft has directed a considerable share of its earnings toward locales with more accommodating fiscal policies.

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?

The Republican Party has abandoned Capitalism for Plutocracy long ago. So has the Democratic party. You're incredibly naive to be voting for the uniparty, either side of it.

Your hypocrisy is palpable.

This. There's a big group of /. moderators who just downvote anything that supports Musk, but the man has accomplished amazing things, and this petty, sour grapes nay saying is kind of pathetic.

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.