I hadn't even considered this, but I think you're right. Microsoft doesn't really stand to lose anything by getting rid of the console hardware at this point. They probably realized the income brought in by selling the hardware isn't even worth the marketing costs, the need to provide warranty coverage, etc. etc.

Everything they sell to play on X-Box can run just fine as a native Windows PC game, and there's a convenient Microsoft Store included in every copy of Win 11 for people to shop in and download the titles.

Yeah... this would be my bet, honestly? Most of the other suspected causes mentioned are really things you'd be hard-pressed to pin as things only the millennials would be predominantly exposed do. Ultra-processed foods, for example, are consumed in large quantities by Gen-X -- because they were the "latch-key kids" who got used to the whole idea of fending for themselves at an early age. As a pre-teen or teen trying to fix their own meals, they turned to all the fast/easy solutions available to them and it became ingrained as the way to eat, over time. Circadian rhythm disruption? Come on now... You're going to tell me nobody ever worked odd shifts until they came along?

The glaring issue is stress.

If you bought one of these things, you deserve it. :)

This reminds me of a story too. I was working at a place just rolling out Microsoft Office 365 and the whole 2 factor authentication thing. We started looking at the devices people had registered for MFA. Obviously, you mostly had various smartphones and a few people even used iPads or other tablets. But this one guy had a Samsung smart fridge as his device. He explained that, "I work from home and have a desk in the kitchen. So it's easy to confirm the authentication from the refrigerator screen. And this way, I know I won't just lose it someplace like I might lose my phone!"

But seriously, I really dislike this trend of making basic home appliances Internet connected and/or computerizing them needlessly. My old Black & Decker 4 slice toaster finally gave out on us last week. I was shocked by how much a new toaster costs now! I was expecting to run out and grab something for maybe $20 or so? Nope! Many of the highly rated models are well over $200! The cheapest I could find was about $45, for one at Costco that has 2 digital strips down the front. One side lights up with icons of toast, in various levels of darkness, and the other depicts all the different foods you mgiht toast; bagels, waffles, pastries, toast...

We got it home and tried it out, and guess what? When you select toast with a darkness of "3 out of 6", shown as a medium brown? It absolutely burns it! The lightest setting just ejects warm, untoasted bread. I couldn't find any point to a setting on the thing other than the second-lightest one! Highly inaccurate. All of this seems really unnecessary, when the light/dark knob on my old toaster worked just as it was supposed to.

The machines that can run Windows 10 but not 11 really have no legitimate reasons they're incapable of using 11. It's generally artificial barriers put up by Microsoft because the chips lack a feature or two they're trying to make a new standard.

In a few cases, it's literally nothing more than an oversight! My co-worker was just telling me about a specific model of Xeon CPU he's got that has some long "sub-model" vs a simple model number like 5360 or 5500 or what-not. It has every single function in it that Microsoft says is needed by Win 11, yet you can't put 11 on it. Why? Only because Microsoft neglected to list its specific model/sub-model in its database it uses to determine the machines capable of installing 11 on them.

If they want all these people off Windows 10, they could design 11 so it runs more like 10, with a few of the features disabled that require the instructions the older CPUs lack, when it detects those processors.

Apple did this with iOS multiple times already. A new iOS version still runs on older phones but with a few features disabled if those specific features need the newer phone's CPU to work.

On one hand, every parent of kids or teens today has to feel the struggle with social media influencing their journey to adulthood. Sometimes it's just a harmless fad that generates a ton of sales for some useless toy or gadget. But often, it's about the added complexity of a world where their "friends" can be people anywhere in the world who they only communicate with online, and who parents are often powerless to "vet". It's about questions of "bullying" and how far an institution like a public school can really reach to address it, when it starts happening online. It's about uncertainties of whether all the "screen time" creates real mental or physical health threats.

But when it comes to technologies like a chat bot? I don't think there should be these legal expectations that they do such things as guiding people to other resources to get help for the issues they talk to them about. I don't even think the authors of these chat bots necessarily considered the idea a pre-teen would confide everything in one and treat it as their "only true friend"? As a rule, they're harmless as long as they're not actively suggesting adult or illegal activities, so giving them "age ratings" of 12+ makes perfect sense.

Troubled kids or teens need to be given REAL help and warned away from relying on automated AI solutions.

Ha! Same thing I thought. The reality, whether you're talking New Orleans or anyplace else is -- the money gets spent to repair and protect the areas that bring in the most continued wealth. Racism has nothing to do with this.

If you have an area that's full of tourist traffic or that continually draws in the super-wealthy for amenities like the great golf courses or waterfront or ?? You've got an area that generates enough revenue, it cost-justifies having to rebuild there occasionally when natural disasters strike.

Everyone else is living there at their own risk, really.

To be honest, I noted LONG ago that "withdrawing cash from out-of-network ATMs likely has a fairly big cost" and tried to avoid it. I never kept up with exactly what those fees were, after that. I simply learned to plan ahead better. If I need cash, I tend to take it out from my own bank or credit union and if I need it broken up into smaller bills? I try to spend it someplace that has to give me cash back on the purchase.

Last I checked though, most big credit unions are part of a cooperative network so you can use any of their ATMs without any fees (at least up to, say, 20 transactions per month).

Can we step back and look at a slightly bigger picture? I mean, come on.... if Trump had anywhere NEAR the amount of influence some of you pretend he does, we'd already be a very different country than we are. If anything, the fact he's been elected twice now and if I turn off the news, I hardly notice anything is different in my daily life tells me the President is far more of a "figurehead" than I used to realize.

No .... if anything? I think America may be experiencing a recession/recovery cycle that's more shallow and quicker to complete than what we had in the past. For example, we rebounded quickly from everything that happened during COVID, despite unprecedented factors there that harmed small business.

People are generally still afraid of any perceived downturn, but some of that stems from what they know happened in the past -- when a recession was deeper and longer-lived.

America is very much a service economy today, with manufacturing a distant second. That tends to stabilize things to some extent (at the cost of creating more jobs that don't lead to higher-paying career positions). EG. You might have fewer people making 6 figure salaries as tool and die experts, but you also have more people who earn a steady, predictable income doing retail sales or restaurant work, or might be self-employed as a handyman or painter. The rapid changes of supply and demand for hard goods doesn't lead to mass job losses when factories close, etc.

... This seems more surprising than the usual claims of a toxic workplace, because it comes out of Apple -- a company I thought was "all in" on these feel-good topics like diversity.

On the flip-side? My personal experiences throughout my life tell me it's FAR from uncommon for people who make careers out of coaching or fitness activities to be some real jerks who mouth out their biased feelings at any opportunity.

So not much to go on just based on this small blurb and stats like 10+ employees complaining about him.

I will say, I just completed a mandatory training about "workplace harassment" and it was over an hour of going to every length to itemize all manner of perceived wrongs. Total overkill, no matter how valuable one thinks the idea of annual training is on the topic. Some of the topics were just laughable, like the section reminding us of phrases not to use, to prevent offending indigenous people. Can't refer to any impromptu meeting as a "pow wow" for example, or talk about "circling the wagons". Honestly just people searching for things to imagine are offensive. (Circling the wagons was a legitimate term for the method American settlers used to protect their group while traveling. It's quite the stretch to be offended by its usage because you're a Native American and it somehow triggers you.)

But bottom line is, most of these statistics you're quoting are utterly ridiculous and not based in any kind of reality.

"Gay people are 47% of the population" ?!? Has anyone here experienced that in their own daily lives? Are roughly half of your friends or family gay? Do you run into that when trying to date people, that about half the time you ask someone out, they reject you because "Sorry, but I'm gay/lesbian."? I'm not sure if you're trying to accuse Republicans of spreading this lie as a valid statistic, for the purpose of increasing fear and hatred? But even if that's your claim, that's just plain nonsense. Nobody except the hard-core extremists with a twisted world-view would accept it as reality, and they're already saying and doing "off the wall" stuff.

No, I don't buy that one.... not completely, anyway. Always gotta be an "anti Trump" theory for everything that happens, though, right?

I know where I live in the Midwest, electricity prices have just gone up, up, up, ever since the Biden administration pushed the "clean, Green" agenda and power companies took steps like dismantling a perfectly good, working coal-fired plant near us. Then they dumped money into a big solar field in the middle of the city, where approval seemed to be rammed through City Hall despite most residents feeling very negatively about it. (This was a perfectly good chunk of land for a local park or other such use, and now it just looks unsightly.) Our governor decided, back then, to enact a "clean air" rule that forced power companies to build out more solar farms (or wind farms, though those haven't really made a lot of sense in most of the geography around here), and to shut down plants burning fossil fuels. (In reality, this typically turns into more of a scheme where the power company gets to decide if keeping the fossil fuel burning plant is profitable enough for them or not. If it is, they just pay out penalties to keep the status-quo, and that in turn funds small kickbacks to people with solar panels; SRECs.) Of course,. he conveniently wrote said legislation so it would retroactively go into effect in stages - making bills increase incrementally at least a year after he signed it into law. Helps make it harder for people to directly associate what he did with what they have to pay.

Capitalism itself has very little to do with this. There's no reason a power company can't just charge the biggest energy consumers a far higher rate, so everyone else's rate stays the same. It's the nature of it being a "public utility" that people have little choice but to pay for what's being provided. I mean, if it's TOO high, then someone can opt to build their OWN power generation facility. But that's rarely cost-effective or sensible. (In fact, they do this now when they find it convenient. Fast DC chargers for electric vehicles have such high rates to use them mostly for this reason. Power companies charge a "demand" fee on top of normal electricity generation prices on these, because of their sudden and relatively large power draw off the grid.

the push for Hydrogen was largely driven by the U.S. military and the fascination with it providing clean water (could be used for drinking water for troops) when large vehicles were driven around in the desert. Supposedly, they were behind some of the funding and pressure on GM to research and develop it.

No telling how much or little truth there was to that one? But I never saw Hydrogen as the way forward for vehicles owned by residential consumers. If you want to successfully transform things so we have options other than gasoline/diesel fuel for them, I think you have to really focus on one clear solution. Battery powered vehicles were already making progress, and they were a good fit for people putting PV solar on their roofs, too.

Existing gas stations are increasingly accepting of the idea they can invest in a DC fast charger or two on their lot, but they don't want all new Hydrogen fuel infrastructure to invest in as well!

As it almost always goes -- this legislation restricting direct vehicle sales from manufacturers is only around today because the car dealership middle-man is a powerful money-generating force, and most auto-makers seem to prefer it stays in place.

Tesla got their "carve out" because they had the money to throw at getting made an exception. Rivian should automatically get the same treatment, but we don't live in a country where laws are applied fairly to all.

In many ways, a dealership network acts as a shield to absolve a manufacturer of direct responsibility for dealing with their own defective products. Take Kia as a great example. They've been producing defective engines across a whole line of vehicles for something like 10 years straight. Most managed to hold up through their "generous 10 year, 100,000 mile" warranty but failed soon after it. The landscape is littered with Kia Souls with major engine failures. But dealers act like a filter, putting up barriers to getting them replaced or repaired, despite the manufacturer being legally forced to issue a recall. They'll tell people, "Sorry.. but the recall is only valid if we get this specific diagnostic code from the code reader. Yours isn't showing that one." Each time, the owner has to go to corporate and fight to try to get their engine replaced -- and corporate will counter that the dealer informed them the issue wasn't one indicative of the specific failure that's being recalled. Eventually? SOME people get their vehicles fixed, but a substantial number of others give up the fight, writing off their maybe 8-10 year old vehicle as trash and they buy something else. This constitutes a huge savings for Kia corporate.

It's tougher for manufacturers doing direct sales. They can still reject people for warranty work, or claim recalls don't apply. But now, there's nobody else to blame. They can't just get the customer mad at "Sellum Quick Auto Sales". Now, the wronged customer's response is to never buy from their brand again.

This just signifies the end of the era of "fashion model" as a lucrative career choice?

I'm not a fan of AI getting used in marketing/advertising at all. But that's mostly because I find most of it can still be picked out from reality. When they try to create new animated characters or mascots, for example? The AI attempts I've seen, so far, just have this set of features that clue you in that they aren't original drawings by a person. With people, they may be getting pretty good at starting with an AI generated person and letting a real artist Photoshop it to fix it/clean it up so it passes as real. But mostly, we're still used to seeing the people with odd numbers of fingers or toes and other AI mishaps.

When they get this honed to perfection? Yeah, it's not going to make a lot of sense to pay real humans to model clothing for your average sale flyers or online ads. The value will still be there for a popular celebrity figure to wear something in an ad, because then you're buying that association with their fame. But I think most models should come to grips with the idea the gravy train is reaching the end of the line.

Ok, my title is half joking. But seriously? We've collectively gotten so used to just doing everything by pulling up some smartphone app, I think we've forgotten when it's a proverbial "sledgehammer to kill a fly".

Dog walking is a lot like babysitting. Used to just be a real basic job you'd pay a neighbor kid/teenager to do when you needed it. Cash payment direct to the person and nobody messed with things like taxes on it or some middle-man wanting a cut of the proceeds.

What next? Uber snow shoveling for your driveway?

It's really just not a viable business model to take these simple chores people want done and try to build apps around them. But worse yet? It accelerates the pace of society not communicating with our own neighbors around us.