I don’t know how else to explain it to you. Microsoft is doing well on paper

These unprofitable divisions? This is the result of the layoffs. This is what happens when you stop doing the thing, and you start living in speculation land

Azure is a mess propped up by AI. The numbers don’t account for shuffling money around. It’s related to why every Microsoft product has ai shoved into it

And I’m keep bringing up gaming because their gaming division is the most egregious example of what I’m talking about. They’re the third largest game publisher, and they’ve played a huge part killing AAA gaming. And in doing so, they’ve killed their own revenue stream

Here’s the thing… Once an organization grows to a certain point, it takes on a mind of it’s own.

Decision making becomes fragmented. Details are lost between the decision and the decision maker

It’s impossible to manage 100, let alone 1000 people directly, so metrics creep in as a way to reward good performance (and maybe punish low performance).

And because we’re a hierarchial society, we further group into divisions and teams. The people who get the best metrics out of their teams are more likely to move up, the bad managers are more likely to be towards the bottom. And honestly, good lower management is mostly taking care of your people

So you’re more likely to get managers who don’t have the integrity to take a firm stand, so maybe when a worker realizes “oh shit, were leaking into the groundwater” it gets watered down to “we found a leak, but it won’t impact production” before it gets up to someone who could authorize a shutdown and fix

It’s possible for a company to do horrible things without any bad actors, and we do have plenty of bad actors around.

It’s possible to fight against this sort of thing through culture or policy, but the natural inclination is always going to maximize the metrics at any cost

Microsoft is dismantling itself to keep “doing well”. That’s my point

Their gaming division keeps acquiring and killing game studios. They’re killing off consoles, instead they’re going to sell prebuilds running windows. They’re scaling it all way back and releasing their exclusives, letting steam run the infrastructure, and milking all of their current IP, but not really making more

They’ve ended support for a ton of different product lines. Azure is a mess. Their desktop market share is falling too.

They’re all in on AI at this point, literally every tool they offer has it now. It’s not even opt in, it doesn’t require an account anymore… They’re desperate to inflate the numbers so they can project growth a little longer

What do you think happens when you continuously lay off your workforce and kill projects? When you stop actually doing things, and run a company based on speculation?

Eventually, the bubble pops.

What do you think laying off your workforce does? These are the people who produce the things that make money

For a clear cut example, Microsoft and gaming. They lay off entire studios the moment they release a hit

It costs like 18 months+ of salary to replace a role like that, and you’ll have to pay them more. It’ll make you a bit more money next quarter… But in 2-5 years when there’s no new game?

I don’t think they would’ve, they already had the market, and the attitude about privacy was very different back then

This also was before late-stage capital converted to endgame capitalism, back then they wanted to protect the cash cow. They cared about customer loyalty, because they cared about future revenue

Now? Companies are dismantling themselves for one more good quarter

Jesus was a revolutionary. He removed all weaknesses that could be used against the Jewish people, from temples to stockpiles to using money. He made the early church suck resources from an occupying force while giving nothing back, not even disobedience that could justify a crack down

In this process, he replaced many rituals with simpler versions that can be done without any special requirements. He reworked every ritual so that it couldn’t be taken away, it couldn’t be used to force compliance

Paul was a true believer and philosopher, his job was to sell it to the people. His words were canonized alongside the gospels because they were convenient when reframing Jesus’s teachings with the values of the Roman religion… Plenty less convenient writings were buried instead

Paul was a transitional figure who found himself in between the early church and unexpected gentile converts… He had to rebrand the rituals for a wider audience while keeping the core message. Nothing against the guy… He was in an impossible position and did his best

Lol, imagine if showers stacked. You could spend a week showering and then all filth just disappears when it touches you

But then, what happens to the filth?

The only way I see this working is if you shower, you just continuously wash filth off yourself. But then does it all just kick in when you walk out of the shower? Or maybe, you never become clean until you’ve washed a lifetime of filth off yourself, then you’re clean forever

I’m imagining every baby just covered in sludge, and after years of washing they become clean. Imagine your kid just never gets cleaner, and everyone just thinks you’re a terrible parent. Imagine cleaning your kid and they become clean way ahead of schedule

There’s some real existential horror here

Can you get more clean than clean?

Numbers are a human thing. The universe don’t care

Baptism is such a weird thing. It’s ritualized cleansing turned into one and done

You can get baptized as many times as you like, it doesn’t stack

Are teenagers animals we don’t understand to be studied?

Genuinely, yes. They’re the stage where humans stretch boundaries and react to the society they’ve been raised in

Teenagers want autonomy and support, but beyond that? To understand them you have to study constantly emerging culture, constantly changing language, endless subcultures and remixes