LetMeEatCake @ LetMeEatCake @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Agreed. Anti-trust law has been whittled away at for generations. FTC cannot do anything about that.

Even the idea of picking their battles will quickly become a damned if they do, damned if they don't scenario. If they only go after the safer cases, they'll let through a ton of big mergers/acquisitions, which in turn will signal that those cases are OK.

The hope to keep things as they were has been over for years.

The hope to control how bad things will get will never be lost, as we can always put in the work to make things less bad than they would otherwise be. No matter how atrocious climate events get, they can always get worse — that's what we need to endeavor to prevent.

For clean energy, there's an enormous amount of progress that is going to unfold over the next 10 and 20 years. It should be truly transformative, not just in an ecological sense but also in an economic sense. It'll be a generation too late to prevent the greatest damage to our environment, but it'll be just on time to prevent things from being even worse.

At some point the focus for greatest impact is going to need to shift to ways we can accelerate the removal of carbon from the atmosphere or other methods of counteracting the heating effects. This isn't one we can solve by simply planting a fuckton of trees. It'll be a huge and expensive effort, whatever the solution is. A difficult one, too: going too far too quickly will give us the opposite problem of too much global cooling...

COD was the example you chose to highlight... It's also pretty damn close to it, here.

Activision: basically a COD factory only. COD has its own mobile version. Blizzard: Diablo, Overwatch, WoW. OW1+2 are on everything except mobile already. WoW doesn't make sense to move beyond where it is. Diablo is on everything except Switch, and has its own mobile versions. Presumably the lack of a Switch release is a hardware issue, as D3 was on Switch.
King: mobile exclusively.

Other than COD on Switch, which again Kotick all but committed to, what new platforms can they bring their games to? I'm not seeing it.

Every single gaming IP Sony has purchased pales in comparison to the sheer financial juggernaut that is COD. Purchasing Activision is bigger than all of Microsoft's other gaming purchases combined. There's a good chance it's bigger than all of the gaming purchases from Sony and Microsoft pre-Activision — combined.

As a gaming entity, Activision is in the same ballpark in size as Sony. Sony's market cap last I checked was ~$120b, but they also have a consumer electronics division, music division, movie division, image sensors division, etc. Without an acquisition markup Activision might be worth ~$50b today or so, and Sony's gaming-only value might be in the $60-80b range if I had to guess.

Activision-Blizzard has about 17,000 employees. Naughty Dog has 400.

Past acquisitions — by anyone — in the gaming market are completely and utterly incomparable to this acquisition.

I haven't seen anything from Microsoft to indicate this. What did you see from them that makes you think that?

COD is already on Steam and mobile. The only new one there is Switch, which Kotick all but committed to making happen if Activision remained independent.

That only happens if Microsoft cleans house, which hasn't been their MO yet. It could happen. It's just not certain to happen. There's no real reason to predict it will or will not happen in either direction.

Gamepass as it currently exists will be gone within a decade. This is the Netflix or Amazon model at play. Run service cheaply until it hits critical mass, then start ramping the price up to turn it profitable. You won't be getting unlimited $70 games on launch for $15/month for forever.

Even if the above is wrong: a successful GP will fundamentally alter the way games are made. Content is aggressively and constantly tweaked or changed structurally in order to optimize profit. You know why search results on Google are garbage? Because people found a way to take advantage of that system to make the most money; doing so pushed out the good results. Same reason why all the biggest youtube channels have the content creator making a stupid face in the thumbnail with a clickbait title. Same reason why film has moved towards cinematic universes lately, or why so many IPs have moved towards the TV format (its for streaming).

Consumer oriented content changes when the revenue model changes. If GP is influential enough, games will change to optimize for whatever method makes the most money there — and that model will not be the one that exists currently. If Microsoft pays them by hours of playtime, games will become bloated with more and more empty content or arbitrary difficulty. If DLC continues to not be included, more and more core game content will shift towards DLC that becomes more expensive. Etc.

Cementing Gamepass is anything but a "tremendous" benefit for gamers.

They're run more effectively than Microsoft has run their gaming division for the past ~15 years or so... Microsoft's gaming leadership has seen one of the most valuable gaming IPs, Halo, flounder again and again and again. They closed all their game studios and spent a whole generation with minimal first party exclusives, they did I don't know how much damage to Arkane with Redfall...

More generally, Microsoft's approach to leading their game studios is to leave them to run the way the studio was ran pre-acquisition. Activision-Blizzard is not going to see major changes to the way they run if this deal does go through (pending CMA). Microsoft will Activision to be run the way it is now, and only intervene if profits dip too much (considering Halo, though, that might take quite the dip).

I don't get the assumption that Activision is going to see some major cleanup from this. They won't.

Kotick gets rewarded by the deal going through. Billions of dollars from the sale. Worst case for him after that is a few hundred million from a golden parachute if he's fired. We have no real reason to think he will (or won't, to be clear) be fired though, so there's a very real chance this is full reward for him: giant piles of money and continues to get to run Activision-Blizzard, just with Microsoft bosses above him.

The deal going through isn't something you want if you hate him.

A lot of people speculate that Microsoft would try to work around the UK's CMA ruling against the merger by not publishing any Activision-Blizzard games in the UK.

To me that sounds like bullshit that wouldn't fly, especially since MS has so many of their own offices in the UK and their own critical businesses that could be impacted too. But I'm not a lawyer so take my "that's bullshit" with a heaping pile of salt. Although I haven't seen any lawyers speculate the above either, so take that with a similar pile of salt too. But that's the reasoning behind the statements to that effect.

Yeah you can usually turn it off, but it's still annoying.

I bought a mechanical keyboard that I otherwise really like. But it came with full RGB on it. I can disable the rainbow pattern it does by default with the software, but the manufacturer cheaped out and didn't include onboard memory for settings. I didn't realize this would ever be an issue so I didn't look for it when buying... The end result is that every time my computer turns on, my keyboard looks like it's trying to summon a leprechaun, and that only stops once Windows has loaded the software up in the background.

How many AAA games do you keep installed at the same time? I max out at maybe three, personally. Realistically I'd be more than content with just two: current game + next game.

The logistical cost to have separate connectors in two different markets would hit the multi-million dollar range. The financial benefit to Apple of not adopting USB-C in any given market cannot be that significant. It comes down to accessory license fees. Apple is losing that market with losing Lightning, but Apple's image would take a hit from bisecting their connector across markets ("It just works" being their reputation and all — any unnecessary complexity harms that).

It's really hard to imagine it being worth it to Apple to make USB-C an EU-only thing. I don't know all the numbers, so I'm not going to say impossible. I would be very surprised though.

Thought this was going to be a more specific complaint about computer hardware/accessories. So much of the high end stuff is just littered with bullshit RGB lighting. Coolers, GPUs, keyboards, mice, monitors, case fans, even fucking RAM sticks! It's insane.

For general appliances my complaint wouldn't be the single LED on it but the brightness. Like you I cover up the bright ones with electrical tape. It wouldn't even cost them any extra money to make it lighter. Just requires a different resistor value.

For the individual it doesn't matter what the company name is. It matters what they're paid.

I assume that's a reference to Mike Abbott, as he's a software VP at GM and used to work at Apple. He was only hired this year so I don't see salary data for him, but other "Executive Vice President" positions are paid ~$8.8m as of 2022. No idea what he was paid at Apple, but it's hard to consider a salary that is likely in the high 7 digits or low 8 digits to be a "proper fail." If it is, I would love to sign up for this kind of failure.

This is an area with huge promise for renewable energy in the US. We have utterly failed to build offshore wind farms up until now. Prior to the Biden admin, there had only been one attempted large scale offshore wind farm in the US. That was Cape Wind off Cape Cod in Massachusetts. It spent over a decade mired in frivolous lawsuits, all of which were defeated. The lawsuits "won" in the end by delaying the project so much that it was no longer able to obtain financing and equipment.

There's a large cluster of offshore wind farms going up in the area between Massachusetts' Martha's Vineyard and Long Island. Wiki has a nice map of their location.

This project (Ocean 1 and Ocean 2) are one of the few offshore wind farms in the US being worked on outside of that space. Although they're still in a generally related part of the US Atlantic coast, taking advantage of the ocean depth, terrain, distance to shore, and wind speed.

Some other major ones are Virginia's Offshore Wind, New York's Empire Wind, and Delaware's Skipjack Wind. There's also some sites off the coast of California that were leased out recently, but I do not know of any detailed plans for them yet.

I'm pretty excited to see progress in this field. Vineyard Wind in MA should be the first large one to come online, starting power delivery this year and finishing construction next year. It should hopefully be a major jolt of energy (pun intended) to offshore wind efforts in the US.

This engineer hasn't worked on anything cool lately.

Hoping to find a new job later this year and move onto something more interesting as a byproduct of that. Assuming that doesn't lead to me being drowned in meetings and emails...

which would allow poor remote communities in South America, Africa, and Asia access to the internet, which is practically impossible through any other means.

"Practically impossible" is a horrible way to describe it. It's not practically impossible; the solution and methods are eminently doable, they just aren't done (yet) because of cost in poor areas with relatively weak governments. Most of those areas will get reliable non-satellite internet in the years to come.

We can talk up the good of systems like Starlink without hyping it up as delivering something that is otherwise impossible.

Truthfully I don't know the answer to that question. I started trying to make an educated guess at it, but I kept finding holes in my thoughts: I got nothing.