LetMeEatCake

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.

Adding in higher priced housing also decreases the pressure on affordable housing.

If there's 500 affordable units and 500 luxury units with 1000 people higher income housing seekers you're going to see those 1000 people rent/buy all of the luxury units and all of the affordable units. In that scenario, adding 500 luxury units will remove the higher-income pressure on the existing affordable units.

Boston needs so much housing that this will not be a panacea anyway, but I think we'd be surprised at the relative (though not absolute, due to aforementioned) efficacy of that 20% requirement.

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.

Leak / rumor is sourced off MLID. He's absolutely garbage as a source. Worse than a pure guess.

It could very well be correct, but there's absolutely zero credence to it based off the source.

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.

In my algebraic version, it's x.

Maybe easier to understand is if we use the numbers from the story?
As the top level comment sees it (which again is the most logical way to interpret it), the price starts at $20. Seller gives 50% discount to buyer to bring it to $10 (50% of $20 is $10 -> $20-$10=$10). Seller then adds a 50% markup because it's their birthday too, bringing it up to $15 (50% of $10 is $5 -> $10+$5=$15).

In my interpretation all of the math is being operated on the initial $20. So it's $20 minus $10 for $10 for the discount, then $10 plus $10 for the markup.