I’m assuming that “big pile of cash” is their emergency fund - Spencer implies as much when he says that it serves as an impediment to buying them out.

It’s not happening for Game Pass right now. If Microsoft hoovered up Nintendo and all the other companies, leaving Game Pass with little competition, they’d flip in an instant. Then you’d have not only Nintendo games for an overpriced subscription, you’d have Nintendo and everything else Microsoft bought for an overpriced subscription, where Microsoft can do whatever they want because only they have the rights to those games.

I’m not arguing Nintendo’s subscription services doesn’t suck ass, I’m arguing that Microsoft would do the same thing if they got their mits on Nintendo’s catalog, except potentially worse because they have more ‘exclusive content’ to lock-away in their garden and they can force their BS into Windows.

The ActiBlizz merger needs to be shot down and Microsoft Games needs to be forced to split off from Microsoft. This tactic of “Make all the money in one sector, then use that unlimited money to invade another sector, force small businesses out by operating at a loss, and then enshittifying the entire sector to a state worse than it was originally” has to stop - across all sectors.

If you can’t survive in your own sector on your own merits without money from Daddy Corpo, you deserve to die.

I also hate that Spencer talks like “sitting on a big pile of cash” instead of gambling it on the market is fucking stupid. Classic “NOW NOW NOW” American capitalism.

Why wouldn’t it happen for Game Pass? It’s happened for every new service. Start them with a great deal to undermine all competition because you can eat the cost and they can’t. When the competition dies, slowly start enshittifying it, until it’s as bad or worse than the original. Arguably Microsoft is already starting that process by killing off the $1 demo.

Microsoft isn’t going to pass up free money, and if anything this email conversation confirms that they’re drooling, waiting for the “fuck them over the barrel” stage.

Are they also going to alter their stance that Planned Parenthood and a children’s hospital aren’t charity?

My boss is the worst for this. We’ll be sitting on a call in our conference room and he’ll start clicking his pen. Or playing with his water bottle. Or slapping his lips. After seven years I haven’t committed murder yet, though.

Yeah, but there’s lots of people who might play the game that aren’t going to shell out for a PS5 for it.

Jordan Peterson as in “Being transgender is satanic ritual abuse” and “Transgenderism is a social contagion” Jordan Peterson?

Are you arguing in good faith or are you just a troll?

Yeah, the polycules I’ve met have all been hot messes that caused a lot of pain for everyone involved (and adjacent). At least a few have this attitude of “Monogamous people are prudes and need to open up, polyamory is HoW hUmAnS sHoUlD lIvE”. Maybe it’s just bad luck, but as a result I generally keep a bit more distance with my poly friends.

Yeah, more or less.

So…what are you supposed to take at this point? Because you’re not supposed to take the “nighttime” branded decongestants long term, and phenylephrine was recommended as an alternative to that.

What the hell does “mostly” mean? “It’s just a little screwing you over”

It makes me kind of sad to see so many people happy that the accent is going away. It’s good to have diversity, and the thought of my “native” accent becoming extinct makes me sad. I don’t want bad people to have a claim to an entire accent and culture, especially since the death of the accent won’t do anything about the bad takes. There’s a lot that good about southern culture - taking things slow, being laid-back in a world that wants you to run around like a chicken with your head cut off, and forming tight communities with the people around you. I just wish there was a way to reclaim that without feeling afraid that people would assume I support the bad parts, too.

Why would you use an accent when it actively gets you associated with idiots / racists / conservatives?

There’s a lot of people who have been hurt by Southern culture, so naturally they reject that accent. A lot of decent people reject the accent because they don’t want people to assume they’re one of those Southerners. There’s also the aspect that you end up talking to people outside your region a lot more often than in the old days, so you learn to switch it off because people outside your region might not understand you well.

All y’all is broader, but I’m not sure how to characterize it. Like if you’re talking to someone who is part of a team, saying y’all could ambiguously refer to the whole team, but all y’all unambiguously refers to the whole team.

Me

I’d add, though, that the ballooning of responsibilities over time is not unique to staff. Faculty have been increasingly pressured to take on more students, inflate cohorts and class sizes, bring in more dollars in a more competitive funding landscape, etc.

That’s fair, and I don’t want to see faculty cut either - you all do a shit-ton of work that I can’t even imagine trying to do. Fortunately our institution has class size limits and has stood firm on that for at least 30 years, but the rest is definitely still applicable here.

In the same meeting today where I met our new Associate Dean who is filling a newly-created position to chop in half another associate Dean’s duties, we were told there’s a reorganization and one of us has to “volunteer” to take on slew of new admin duties.

Ew, asking faculty to take on admin duties is really wrong - I’m sorry that happened.

How many staff could be hired if the “extra fat” from her salary were directly rerouted to staff compensation?

None, because we already had to promote internally because we couldn’t get someone externally due to pay / benefit reasons. We already can’t get anyone to take the positions we have, even at the current pay rate. I don’t know if that’s because our pay rates are already low, but decreasing them further would probably make it literally impossible to hire. We gave up on getting an Advancement VP, we’re 3 months with no bites on a VP of admissions and 3 months with no fin. aid director.

Maybe we’re smaller than average, but we only really have three levels of staff, and they all have different responsibilities that can’t really be put together. You have regular workers who do front lines jobs, department managers / associate VPs who manage the budget, staffing, and day-to-day management of each department, and then you have the VP level, which represents a collection of offices to the Board of Trustees and works on large scale initiatives across multi-departments. Do you all have more layers?

I wonder if a theocratic state built on a tyrannical religion almost isn’t worse, though…

I’ve not played Tactics Ogre yet, but that’s one of the next games on my list. I was going to start with Let Us Cling Together.

I always get wary of letters like this from faculty bodies. I don’t think my institution is in a unique position here, so here’s what it looks like from our side.

Our faculty flip their shit every time there’s any faculty department even proposed to be cut - no matter how small it is. We have multiple departments that service less than 0.5% of the student body, but they are never considered for cuts because of the political struggle with the faculty. The faculty point at the staff and say, “This must be their fault!” Staff are running vastly more ragged than faculty. In the last six months, we’ve had two different staff departments completely collapse and leave because they ran for so long on such shoe-string budgets, often running 33 - 50% short of staff. One staff member would leave due to burn-out. The next in command in the office, not knowing if that person would ever be replaced, immediately said “I’ve been doing two and a half jobs. I can’t do another,” and left. Then the next in command after them, then the next, until finally both affected offices were empty, all in the span of a month. And when I say “collapse”, I mean completely collapse. No retention at all. 0 people left. Every single drop of institutional knowledge in those offices are gone. We’ve got a third office heading that way, losing the VP and then the interim VP in three months. But no, staff must still be the issue.

Faculty always act like they’re god-sent and the only reason colleges and universities exist, but we’re in this together. Good luck teaching without any software support or classroom technology. Good luck teaching with no students because admissions fell apart. Good luck teaching when no one can afford to attend because there’s no one navigating the mess that is federal financial aid. Stop treating the staff like they’re ancillary fat to be cut. If anything, we’ve got a lot more faculty than we really should for an institution our size.

Now maybe that’s not what’s going on here…but the arguments they make sound almost exactly like the arguments the faculty here make, and I know they’re BS. Yes, our president is the highest paid member of the college, but she gives literally 100% of her pay back in donations every month. My boss makes just 10k more than me despite having 35 years more experience and exponentially more stress. We can’t get people to fill senior staff positions because our pay is so low and our benefits so meager. The only reason we got a CFO to come in and try to save us at all is because his entire career is saving failing institutions in order to maintain their history.

All that “Administration explosion” people keep talking about? Yeah, that’s because the systems needed to keep the school running have become orders of magnitude more difficult. You can’t do regular-ass, physical registrations anymore. All that data needs to be in a system and shipped off to the government, maintained in a very particular format and way. People don’t understand the massive amount of work it takes to keep a school regulatory compliant and running. I’m not saying that regulation is a bad thing - it keeps people from getting taken advantage of by for-profit “institutions” - but that comes with a real, tangible cost for each and every institution, and that cost is higher staff costs. No, you can’t just cut those staff and expect that work to get done. If you fall out of compliance, you lose your accreditation. You lose your accreditation, you lose federal aid. You lose federal aid, the whole institution goes bye-bye. I don’t care if you have Steven fucking Hawking teaching, if you don’t have federal aid, you’re done.

Staff have born the brunt of cuts here for decades - it’s time for the faculty to step up and take their losses too. We have to bear this burden together, or else faculty are suddenly going to find out that it turns out all those staff they mistreated and abused actually were doing 3x the amount of work that number of people should be doing.

And obviously, but I’ll state it anyway because someone will wander in and think I’m happy to see faculty “get their just desserts”, I’d much rather that we not have to cut anybody. As I said, we’re all in this together - I don’t want to see my colleagues suffer and lose their jobs, and the students lose the professors they love. But things are changing in education right now, and either we’re going to weather this together, or we’re going to fall to pieces.

Godot?