I think I can speak for most Americans (and as someone who owns stocks) fuck the shareholders.

Technically they don’t gain money no, but they get:

1. To move or dispose of product, making sales look better
2. Free marketing, both in people having the drinks and to say “look we did a charity”
3. To pay their taxes with effectively free money, because they take the product that they made for pennies, and count it as a “donation” at full price. Meaning that all the “profit” they would have made on markup goes straight to paying the taxes instead of making the money and paying taxes on the money they already made.

It’s why a company donating their product is always better for them than a regular person donating cash. They are effectively still making money it’s just this time they are making money specifically to pay off their taxes.

That’s weird

Not to mention a lot of eggs in one basket. They’ve built in a lot more redundancies now yeah, but all it takes is a hit to AWS and a shitload of the internet is just DOA. Yeah you can argue about protections and data centers or whatever, but still. It’s one big nest in control of one company, no matter how well they guard it, it’s still a risk, technical, ethical, or whatever.

The old in Japan have that problem. There have been other studies that have shown that you get people have significantly less problems with it. Japan has always been insular, but their politics and older age groups have always been more stagnant and less accepting.

Basically, don’t throw the whole country under the bus when it’s just the old farts that don’t want things to change.

Also sounds like you had a crappy realtor. If you’re using a realtor, get them to work for you, that’s what they’re for. Give them the specs of the house you’re looking for, sure, but they should be calling you with listings, vetting the homes before they show them to you, handling negotiation relays and inspection setups, etc.

Just general advice, yes you pay them, but if they aren’t working for you, pay someone else.

The thing I tell people is that as a parent, you are going to put maybe a few hours into blocking them from getting to stuff. They are then going to spend as much time as they want trying to get through it. You can dig through concrete with a spoon if you’re patient enough.

Educate them, and give them access when they’re responsible enough

I mean it was already overpriced for what it was, and it was only really good/popular during covid. A lot of people now will either go to the gym for classes or just get a bike without a $12-$49 monthly fee. I just can’t wait to see how long until they lock the wheels without a subscription

A smaller switch would be a terrible idea. They’re already pushing so hard to have mainstream games on the console, and those games have UI elements that can only get so small before they’re useless. You’d have to develop your UI around being used on these tiny screens, which either takes extra work or leaves big screen users screwed.

A smaller screen switch would basically be relegated to phone games, and all other games would lose a lot of detail to size