shmed

You literally just proved it right

Microsoft is investing massive resources into the Sound Transit system. They just donated acres of land to the city (as well as a bunch of money) to add a train stop right next to their campus. Microsoft is one of the main reason the East Link Extension was funded (new train line connecting Seattle to Mercer Island to Bellevue to Redmond).

Microsoft has over a 100 massive data centers throughout the world. The carbon footprint of their head quarter is just a small fractions of the massive amount of energy needed to power the millions of machines Microsoft deployed across the globe.

About 50 people signed some petition (most of them weren't even working on hololens). Not much out of the 120 000 people working at MSFT

R&D is not just "research", it's also "development". All money spent on engineering work count toward that 16 billion.

Yeah that's not true... Amazon's net income for the last quarter (ending on May 31 2019) was 3.561B, while Walmart's net income for the last quarter (ending on April 31 2019) was $3.842B

People don't rent out empty apartments on Airbnb... There's plenty of stuff that could be stolen out of an Airbnb

Cixin book covers those aspect pretty well. One of the main element behind his version of the Dark Forest theory is something he calls the "Chain of suspicion". He argues that in a world were communication is limited by the speed of light, there's no way to establish a coherent dialog during first contact between two civilizations that would allow you to completely trust the other party. If you cannot trust that the other party will not destroy you given the chance, then the only way for you to be guaranteed not to be destroyed is to destroy them first. Even if both parties want peace, there's no way for you to convince the other party that you want peace without also giving them the time to destroy you. It's basically a game theory situation where trying to go for peaceful communication is way too risky, and the stake in play are the survival of your civilization. It's also implied that civilization that played the "peace" card will simply get eliminated the moment they encounter someone playing the "destroy" card, making you much less likely to actually encounter a peaceful civilization.

Some people don't care about hoarding game discs or cartridge. I have drawers full of Nintendo Cartdrige, playstation 1, 2 and 3 discs, a few older xbox games, that I can't play anymore because the required console died, or they are back in my childhood home where I grew up. To be honest, I don't even want to play any of those games anymore, but if for some nostalgia infused reason I wanted to, I'd much rather they just be automatically available to stream on my TV or my laptop than having to spend hours tracking down all the required hardware for me to play a game that I'll most likely get bored with within an hour or two.

The same thing happened with movies, with some people wanting to hoard boxes and boxes of dvd, vhs or blurays, thinking that they are somewhat smarter than people who just pay some subscription (or digital rental) to stream whatever movies they want to watch when they want it, on the device they want to watch it on.

Surprising that the US consider themselves to have better social support than Canada and many other european countries.

I have a hard time believing IKEA is worth anywhere close to what the big tech giants are worth.

Luckily for Microsoft, there's many developpers that don't work on mobile. There's millions of developpers working for banks, governement, or other large organization, and many of them are choosing Microsoft technologies for their stacks. Mobile app had its gold rush in the early 2010s, but now Microsoft is investing into capturing developpers to use their cloud platform, and they are obviously doing very well in that area.

Really curious about where you got the data that Apple has 1 billion active user. I know they sold over a billion iphone overtime, but that's certainly not 1 billion different customers buying iphones. Also, I would assume a pretty big intersection of Mac or iPad users also own an iphone, so that wouldn't count as many customers either.