Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| That sounded good hey how you doing good good good good good good good good good.
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Ivan:
[0:06]
| Good i'm feeling good i'm feeling great i'm feeling wonderful i.
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Sam:
[0:12]
| Am so glad feeling.
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Ivan:
[0:13]
| Good i'm feeling great i'm feeling wonderful.
|
Sam:
[0:17]
| I'm tired now commute but i just i just took a nap actually like i I got home from something and I was like, I got like an hour. I'm going to lie down and then I'll get up again for the podcast.
|
Ivan:
[0:35]
| So I, I mean, I was watching TV. Yeah. So you want to know the future? 25 years in that.
|
Sam:
[0:42]
| Shall we?
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Ivan:
[0:47]
| That's when I was trying, I was trying to turn this down, and I wound up doing the opposite.
|
Sam:
[0:54]
| You failed. You failed utterly.
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Ivan:
[0:56]
| Yeah.
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Sam:
[0:57]
| Shall we just go?
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Ivan:
[0:59]
| I mean, is there anything else that we can do? No. Okay, let's just go.
|
Sam:
[1:04]
| Okay, just go. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, October 5th, 2024. It's just after 2 UTC as we're starting to record. I'm Sam Materini, Yvonne Boas here. Hello, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:43]
| Hi.
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Sam:
[1:46]
| You know we're gonna do our usual we'll do our butt first of like you know non-newsy stuff and then we'll get into the news after that first segment picked by von then i'll pick the last one and yeah that's gonna be our normal agenda but i feel kind of lost to be honest here because for the first week in a long long time i don't have like media of like books or movies or tv queued up ready to go because you know i mentioned on last week's show i have to do that thing where i go through my phone to like log all the stuff i've finished in the last few months and i haven't done that so i've got no list and you know it's one of those things that like i let it go so long when i actually get around to doing it it takes me hours and hours and hours to like do it so, yeah i haven't i haven't done it so i don't know i have no idea what i'll even talk about You have no idea what you want to talk about. For the non-newsy stuff. I mean, I'm just confused and lost.
|
Ivan:
[2:44]
| How's the weather?
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Sam:
[2:45]
| It was okay today. It was nice. Now, this is one of those things where you will be like, oh my God, it was unbearably cold.
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Ivan:
[2:54]
| What was the high of?
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Sam:
[2:56]
| Because the highs are, let's see, it was 58. The high was 58.
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Ivan:
[3:04]
| Oh, fuck that shit.
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Sam:
[3:07]
| If I'm reading this correctly. And it'll be, the high will be 63 tomorrow. Morrow see now to me like you know this was perfect i loved it it was great weather this is what i like let's.
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Ivan:
[3:21]
| See what what is the name of that town that you live in right now.
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Sam:
[3:26]
| We're we're technically an unincorporated snohomish county between everest and milk everest everest you're near the everest i'm near the ever no no between everett and milk creek i.
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Ivan:
[3:38]
| Didn't realize i mean i thought that mountain.
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Sam:
[3:40]
| I am on the slopes of mount everest that's that's where i live yes i.
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Ivan:
[3:46]
| Would be i.
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Sam:
[3:48]
| I live i live at one of the base camps that.
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Ivan:
[3:51]
| Would be yeah that would be something but you know no no i don't i have no interest in climbing mount everest.
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Sam:
[3:59]
| Yeah no i have no interest in climbing any mountain that isn't just a relaxing stroll to get to the top. I could do a relaxing stroll. Or even a decent hike. I'll be honest.
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Ivan:
[4:13]
| You know, now that Asheville, North Carolina has been in the news because of what happened with the storm, personal story, and I guess that could be my first, but I used to go to summer camp around that area when I was little.
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Sam:
[4:28]
| Oh, okay.
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Ivan:
[4:29]
| I did that. I mean, it's the only... Away summer camp i did was a camp called camp highlander which is just right outside asheville and so did did you check.
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Sam:
[4:40]
| To see if it still exists.
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Ivan:
[4:41]
| Oh no the camp still exists i know it still exists because i had my nephews actually went to it a few years no i mean like after last after the storm i do think that i was looking at the location although i did you know it is.
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Sam:
[4:55]
| Reasonably possible that any random camp could have ceased to exist in the last like 40 years but.
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Ivan:
[5:01]
| Yeah i meant specifically this week they're still they are still in business but i i i looked at the map i don't they they are not they weren't in the path of the worst stuff okay surrounding that at least based on what i could see i could be wrong and there's been a you know some some areas of information has not been very uh complete so well yeah i mean this is one of the things I mean.
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Sam:
[5:31]
| We talked about Helene last week, but we were talking mainly about sort of the coastal stuff because there was still the areas that turned out to have been most heavily impacted in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee were still inaccessible and they'd lost power and communication. And sort of after we finished recording, it became more and more clear that those areas were actually the hardest hit, much more than along the coast.
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Ivan:
[5:58]
| Yeah i mean definitely that's been a case and you know i i was looking at a lot of the towns and places where they they spoke about that had the biggest impact one of them i'm talking about there is this very big artificial lake called lake which is on the river if i remember the the name and this this the river went past the town called chimney rock which we used to go very often on the way to Lake Lure, and I got devastated by that. So that area was very familiar in general to me. You know, and the mountains, I've climbed only very few mountains. I will say that the mountains I've climbed have been...
|
Sam:
[6:45]
| Now, let's be clear by what you mean by that. Like, have you climbed... Well, no, but have you climbed mountains that require special equipment? Or are we talking like a strenuous hike?
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Ivan:
[6:56]
| Mountains that there is no trail. And so therefore to make it to the top, they don't need specialized equipment because the ox, I mean, they're at about a few thousand.
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Sam:
[7:09]
| Are you using, you don't need, are you using row or no, no, no, no, but do you need like ropes and like the things you stab into?
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Ivan:
[7:17]
| No, no, no, but you, but, but, but, What?
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Sam:
[7:22]
| You have to scramble up rocks.
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Ivan:
[7:23]
| Oh, you have to scramble and grab onto stuff.
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Sam:
[7:27]
| Okay.
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Ivan:
[7:28]
| And it's not, you're not up a trail. Okay. It's not a simple walk. It took a lot of effort to get to the peak. And I did it probably twice around in the Asheville area. I will say that it was very difficult. The only other place that I did that was in Puerto Rico in order to make it to the peak of aljunque which they're actually on that one there are more trails but near the end there aren't and so you know while it doesn't require special equipment it's also not look if you can't if you don't if you can't move grab hold on to stuff you know basically sometimes in some places He says, go on your knees and like, you know, you're not going to get to that.
|
Sam:
[8:16]
| I get the picture. There are like several levels of this, right? There's like mountains you can get to the top just walking. There's mountains that require the kind of stuff you're talking about. And there's one that you need special equipment. Then there's the stuff that you need like ropes and the crampons and the thing. And then there's the ones that you need oxygen for.
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Ivan:
[8:35]
| Yeah. So I did also do around that area rock climbing. I will say, I despise rock climbing. It's a very scary endeavor. For that, we needed the specialized equipment and safety lines and stuff.
|
Sam:
[8:53]
| Right.
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Ivan:
[8:53]
| The easy rock climbing one... With a lot of difficulty, I was able to get to. There's another one that was very difficult, which I remember that some people got to the top. I don't know how they held. But I remember that I barely got up, like, maybe like 10, 20% up the way. And I'm like, okay, that's it. That's enough rock for me. This is scary enough. I'm coming back down. I'm just going to go back to camp. The hell with this shit. I'm not doing this. This is not worth it. But yeah, it was mostly around that area. And I will also say that the only places that I probably have like, well, not the only, but like 90% of the camping that I've done outside was around those devastated areas.
|
Sam:
[9:41]
| Right.
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Ivan:
[9:41]
| I will say that camping outside, you know, like in the middle of nowhere, like in a forest, whatever, is cool when it's not raining. I, unfortunately, for whatever reason, I don't think I'm exaggerating. More than half the time we went out to camp, it was raining. And camping when it's raining is absolutely miserable. But when it wasn't raining, it was a delight. The weather was nice. We got to pick blueberries in certain places. We made s'mores. We went to these natural pools occurring in the rocks. The streams up there, the water was so fresh and clear, you know, coming down from the mountain. Yeah, it was good. I mean, it was good. So I have very fond memories of that area. And like, actually, my brother went with me as well. And some other people in my family and friends, you know, it's very hard to see the devastation that they that has been wrought on the on the area and how people are are are struggling. And how, I mean, the death toll right now is, I mean, already they said it's up to 200 people.
|
Sam:
[10:56]
| Yeah, it's like over 220 at this point, last update I had. But the thing is, there's still lots of people missing. They're still finding people. The number is going to continue to go up from here. We're not at the top.
|
Ivan:
[11:09]
| No, we're not. No, we're not. We're not even close. But I did spend a lot of time up there. And I rather, despite some of the weather and stuff, I mean, I did learn. I mean, I learned to whitewater raft. I canoed. I was pretty good at that stuff. and we did we did all this stuff we did horseback riding we did water skiing we did uh i don't know we did uh but swimming diving i don't know why the hell we once had a fucking belly flop competition i don't know why the hell we do that i wound up having to do that that's awful it's painful yeah we had to do that we had we had mud fights i hate mud i despise mud i don't like mud people yeah no all like covered in mud from head to toe fighting yeah no i.
|
Sam:
[12:05]
| I this has never.
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Ivan:
[12:06]
| Now been something.
|
Sam:
[12:08]
| That i was interested in either.
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Ivan:
[12:09]
| It's so i know so we did these uh, we had a lot of different events i i will say what what interesting thing from one of those one of those trips so we also that was the trip that we took buses and we went to knoxville for the world's fair from there right okay because that was like nearby and so we did that and i also wound up that is where i wound up seeing the movie tron it was a movie that we were actually supposed to go see et which i think was out around the same time and we couldn't go go see it and i I was like, oh, we get to see Tron. Well, I didn't really want to see the stupid space alien movie. I prefer to one of my computers. So we got to go see Tron. And I was a lot happier with that.
|
Sam:
[12:56]
| I will say I don't have a movie this time, but, you know, and it hasn't been that long since I've seen E.T. It may even be one of the ones I add to my list. But I will say thumbs up to both E.T. and Tron. I like both of those movies.
|
Ivan:
[13:13]
| I think I eventually watched E.T. and I liked it. Okay, but my preference was Tron, you know, to go watch it. Yeah, they were both out in 82. So yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was the thing. It was either E.T. Or Tron and we wound up watching Tron. I was very happy about that. I think most people were not. That we wound up at Tron instead of E.T. But I was definitely happy about that. So, yeah. So I had a lot of fond memories from camp. A lot of shit happened. Even fistfights. Oh, my God. Why did we wind up getting into so many fistfights at that age? You know, fistfighting used to be more common. I think we talk about kids like right now at school, whatever. I don't hear that often, even from my nephews or whatever, about kids getting into fist fights at school. And I remember that back then. That was not an uncommon thing.
|
Sam:
[14:15]
| It probably depends on the school.
|
Ivan:
[14:17]
| I mean, but I'm talking like in general, you know, everywhere. I'm talking, I mean, Sam, I mean, we got into knockout, drag out, you know, punches, thrones, landed, black guys, black brutes, fights.
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Sam:
[14:35]
| Yeah. I only remember being tangentially involved in one of those ever.
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Ivan:
[14:43]
| Has Alex ever told you he's been in a fist fight?
|
Sam:
[14:46]
| Alex, have you ever been in a fist fight at school? No. He pretended to punch me, but I guess the answer is no.
|
Ivan:
[14:54]
| I mean, otherwise, you would have heard.
|
Sam:
[14:56]
| He was no longer pretending to punch me. He is actually punching me.
|
Ivan:
[15:00]
| Well, I'm assuming that if it would have happened, you guys would have heard about it.
|
Sam:
[15:04]
| I presume so. No, as far as I know, no, nothing like that.
|
Ivan:
[15:08]
| And listen, I told my nephews, you know, that's not very common. And I remember that back then, including in the U.S. or, you know, from kids I talked to in the U.S. or from where I was. and that was not that unusual an occurrence to wind up instead they.
|
Sam:
[15:21]
| Just all cyber bully each other.
|
Ivan:
[15:23]
| Right they cyber bully each other and and of course then the ones that get really pissed off wind up coming in and like with AR-15s killing everybody.
|
Sam:
[15:33]
| Yeah so no more fist fights and instead you get school shooters.
|
Ivan:
[15:36]
| Great good trade off good trade off yeah sounds like sounds like a plan but yeah so I don't know we had a lot of that happening horseback riding did a lot of horseback riding That was one thing. I wasn't too bad on a horse. You can't be on a horse. You're very allergic to horses, as we have discovered.
|
Sam:
[15:54]
| I have ridden a horse once in my life.
|
Ivan:
[15:57]
| Ah.
|
Sam:
[15:57]
| And it was okay, I guess. I don't know. I wasn't particularly into it. And this was like completely aside from any allergy issues. Just the actual activity of like, it was like, okay, this was a thing. I did it once.
|
Ivan:
[16:13]
| I don't have to do it again. I must admit, I did like riding the horses. But, you know, I don't know. But also horseback riding is not very convenient. You know, it depends where you're going. It depends where you're going, but also where you live. You know, we used to have stables with horses when I was growing up at my grandparents place that made it a lot easier. But I don't know. We got rid of all the horses. So when you don't have horses makes it very difficult to go horseback riding. So we, yes. Yeah. So, so anyway, so my anecdote was that, yes, I, I had spent a lot of my childhood around the area that was a couple of years of my, my, a couple of my summers when I was growing up in the devastated area, unfortunately. So I've been probably paying more attention to, to that than normally I would place because of it, because I just recognize a lot of the places that they are talking about that were affected by it.
|
Sam:
[17:10]
| So and the bottom line like i i mean yes there's been lots of devastation but also you know there were as people got connectivity back you got more and more people sharing videos not just of the aftermath but what was happening during as well and yeah just a lot of really scary stuff like i mean like you know somebody like in their kitchen and all of a sudden you notice that the water outside the kitchen is up past the window and then the window explodes inward with water yeah you know this kind of stuff and then you know and then lots of places that are just you know flooded up to people's chest height and people float houses floating down the river you know yeah all of this kind of stuff and some of them you've seen on the news with notes that hey you see that person who's on the house floating down the river this is the last known picture of them they're missing they're gone you know um or there was another where there was like a you know several people like on top of a house that then collapsed same thing gone you know and you know.
|
Sam:
[18:25]
| Yeah so and i've heard there have been a number of people as well that i've seen on tiktok that like normally post other kinds of content but turns out either are in western north carolina or know people who were and are, you know, like there was one that I was that, you know, I see regularly on Tik TOK who posts things about like, you know, Tolkien related content, you know, Lord of the Rings and all that kind of stuff. And she came on and was like, we're fine. We escaped, we got out, but my, my, my family is still there. They're okay too, but they have very limited connectivity and they have like, they're, they're running low on supplies and blah, blah, blah. Blah and like there have been people in my comments complaining that i haven't been posting my regular content and fuck you you know you know and stuff like this so yeah.
|
Ivan:
[19:17]
| Well okay so that was my uh, Buddy, first thing.
|
Sam:
[19:23]
| Your thing? Thing. Your thing? Yeah. Okay, so now I'm panicking. What do I talk about? What do I do?
|
Ivan:
[19:33]
| So the current temperature in Everett is 54 degrees. We have a forecast low of 48, and it looks like the humidity is 91%. This is quite high. Yeah, to be honest. visibility is 11 miles and and the temperature is four degrees below the average daily high that's expected okay feels like 54 sunrise at 7 14 a.m sunset at 6 38 p.m special that's good expected wind west at three miles per hour.
|
Sam:
[20:06]
| Okay so i'll alex is oh the air quality index is 25 which.
|
Ivan:
[20:12]
| Is very good apparently.
|
Sam:
[20:13]
| So i i am going to talk about something that alex has actually suggested and came up on our Commodions course Slack earlier this week. Last week I mentioned in passing as we were talking about other stuff that I actually do use AI tools regularly at this point.
|
Ivan:
[20:30]
| Ah yes, that came up in Slack.
|
Sam:
[20:32]
| Somebody asked me like what? This is still useless. And so I did say I am mostly using it for coding help. And they indicated, actually two people, both Bob and Greg indicated that they never had any success this is on our commissions corner slack on using these tools and it always cost them you know it didn't get it right and it caused them it was more trouble than it worth was worth basically and so i want to give a little bit of like what i've used it for successfully and the limitations on that and talk about it a little bit first of all like Like, for the most part, what I've been using it for the last few months is simple scripting stuff.
|
Sam:
[21:20]
| Like, where I want to have my computer, like, once a day, check some number, log it somewhere, and send me an alert if it's outside of some parameter. Okay? I do this for how old my backups are. I do this for how full my hard drives are. I do it for a variety of other things. And so, you know, this is fairly simple stuff. I'm asking to do it in a fairly, you know, fairly old technology, shell scripts or PHP scripts or whatever. And the total code it's spitting out is for the basic version is maybe a dozen lines of code. And if I start getting fancy and like, saying, oh, well, I want you to handle this special case and I want you to do this extra and I want you to do that.
|
Sam:
[22:13]
| Maybe it's a few dozen lines of code, but it's a single file with a script that does something fairly straightforward. But what it lets me do in that case is basically I can write a couple sentences in English language saying what I want And it spits it out. Now, does it get it right on the first try?
|
Sam:
[22:36]
| Sometimes, but more often I iterate. And I think one of the reasons I've been able to get useful stuff out of this is I don't come in writing a two paragraph description of something complicated I want. You start with something very basic. I start with something super simple. Just give me a script that does, that checks this number. And then I'm like, okay, well now I want you to take that number and log it to a file. Boom. Okay. Now I want you to also check that number. And if it's high, do this. Oh, and when you log it to the file, actually, I'd like you to tweak the format and do it like this. Like one little tiny step at a time, not like give it a whole set of instructions is this is how I've generally done it is one little thing at a time and slowly build up the functionality even there. When most of the time I've been doing this, I would actually end up fighting it because it would like, as soon as it got a little bit more complicated, it would sometimes add the new thing, but forget some of the old stuff and spit up and spit out a new, new script that would do the new thing you added, but no longer do what you asked before.
|
Ivan:
[23:59]
| Well, that kind of sucks.
|
Sam:
[24:00]
| And like you know sometimes it would be like well just change this code without giving you everything which okay fine but like if i'm my mode of operation was usually just take everything that had given me and cut and paste and replace the old script right and so once it started saying replacing parts of the old script with comments saying leave the stuff alone, that that method wouldn't work anymore you'd have to be careful and or i would have to go back into Tell it, no, no, please give me the whole script and do that. And, you know, that was, that was, it worked okay. But like I said, whenever it got complicated, it would start to get confused more. And so the late, and I've tried, by the way, I started doing this mostly with chat GPT. And then I switched it. I heard somewhere online, somebody said that Claude was better for this. So I started to use Claude instead. dead so Claude is chat GPT is for open AI Claude is from anthropic.
|
Ivan:
[25:01]
| How do you spell Claude C L O D or C L A U D E that one the okay the second one okay Claude Claude I'm like what is it an idiot Claude I don't know okay let's anyway so I.
|
Sam:
[25:16]
| I, I, people had said Claude was better. So I switched and was doing mostly Claude and it was better. It was better. But then more recently, and this is only just two or three weeks ago, I saw people talking about this thing called cursor, which is basically. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[25:33]
| So you mean cursor C U R S O R not C U R S E R, which that would be me.
|
Sam:
[25:41]
| Yes. C U R S O R. That's right.
|
Ivan:
[25:44]
| Okay. Got it.
|
Sam:
[25:45]
| Like the thing on your screen. Anyway, it's an integrated development environment. So an IDE that basically has editors for the files that also integrates the AI. So it lets you open up the files you're interested in and then talk to the AI in a chat window. But the AI can directly edit the files. So you can tell it which files to have sort of in memory, in context. And it will always have the current version to reference to and make edits to it. So before I had to keep saying, no, no, no, no, stupid. Here's the current version of the file. Please make changes to that and give me the new file. This way, it just makes the changes directly in the editor and does it with what's called a diff. So you can see exactly what it's changing.
|
Ivan:
[26:36]
| Okay, okay.
|
Sam:
[26:37]
| So like one of the problems, I was actually doing this manually. When I cut and pasted into my editor, I was getting so frustrated with what I was doing that what I was doing was constantly always asking my text editor to do a diff from the new version to what was saved on disk. And I would look through the changes because this is one of the things. I could not just trust it. And say, whatever it gave me, just use it. I would have to go in, look at the diff, see what it was doing, see if it made sense. And then if it didn't make sense, go back and tell the AI, hey, no, what you're doing is messing this up. Please try again or take this into account. And now with it in cursor, I could see those changes right directly in it. It was sort of automatic, and I could accept or reject each change. And it made it much nicer. And also it could handle editing simultaneously, several interrelated files. Like if you have several files that work together to accomplish things, it could handle that and say, you know, make these changes in this file and this changes in that file.
|
Sam:
[27:53]
| And it made it much more useful immediately than using these independently and in cursor you actually can it integrates with the others so like i'm looking at my cursor right now and it can use gpt 4.0 cursor small clod 3.5.
|
Ivan:
[28:10]
| Sonnet and write in what language mini 01 mini right on preview and code in which languages well.
|
Sam:
[28:18]
| I have i have done shell scripts php python and c sharp uh.
|
Ivan:
[28:24]
| Well i i was reading this week from a few a few different ones that you know related some development tools that i've heard some company that you know i i know very well has been developing and especially more related to languages programming languages where the expertise is like, The experts on that are not as available as they used to be. So think Cobalt. Yeah, Fortran, Cobalt, RPG, that kind of stuff. You know, stuff for IBM mainframe and stuff and so forth. And I can see how those tools could help people like somebody like me, for example, that knows some Cobalt. But I'm not, you know, I'm not that good. I was never that good with it. Okay. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[29:13]
| And this helps me.
|
Ivan:
[29:14]
| You know, be able to develop certain things where, you know, I could tell it to do, you know, I could be helping it, instructing it. I could check what it's doing. I know that what it's doing, it's right or wrong. And it could help me, you know, make changes to programs and so forth and so on.
|
Sam:
[29:32]
| This is a part of the key, too. Like, I'm mentioning the kinds of things I'm doing. I can get around this, but I am not a professional coder.
|
Ivan:
[29:42]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[29:42]
| Like this is not what i've you know i i've i've built various things sort of by trial and error you know i don't i i do not follow best practices i do not know you're not an you know i don't you know i don't jump in like if i have one of these things you don't have you don't.
|
Ivan:
[30:01]
| Have your dev test.
|
Sam:
[30:03]
| Yeah yeah production environments no i i do all the versioning.
|
Ivan:
[30:08]
| You're You're not doing your versioning, Sam, damn it.
|
Sam:
[30:12]
| Although with this cursor thing.
|
Ivan:
[30:15]
| One of the things is it's got versioning, yeah.
|
Sam:
[30:17]
| Well, no, it's not actually directly doing versioning, but it can integrate with the standard versioning tools and make it easy. So I'm like, maybe I should go ahead and set that up. And I'm thinking about it, whereas I never did before, right?
|
Ivan:
[30:28]
| Now you've got the ability to perhaps do it, you know?
|
Sam:
[30:32]
| Yeah, I mean, well, I always had the theoretic ability. i could have done it but it's just like it's always seemed like too much trouble right exactly but but if i can do it in a couple clicks okay maybe maybe that's fine hey look i know listen.
|
Ivan:
[30:46]
| I know companies okay all right right now that supposedly big companies banks or whatever that are they're making fucking changes to production without even thinking about it okay so.
|
Sam:
[30:57]
| Yeah yeah why would you do anything else i mean i do that all the time on my site exactly no no no one gives a shit about my sites is the difference right like right i mean i i you know i shouldn't say a quick tangent an election graphs note yeah i had a couple pieces of feedback via mastodon within the last few days and unlike what i mentioned like a few months ago there was some guy who like ripped me and said i was horrible and whatever no these are positive.
|
Sam:
[31:28]
| Well, no, that was like four years ago. And Nate Silver had a point, I admit, although he's an asshole. Because I've actually since then fixed the thing that he was complaining about. Well, he didn't actually complain about something specific. He just said, I had no idea what I was talking about. But it was in response to something that I later was like, yeah, okay, I'll adjust that. Anyway, no, but I had someone mention, I love election graphs and check it way too often, but he found a typo, which I fixed right away. It had only been live on the site a couple hours, but he found a typo and I fixed it. There've been a couple others where people have been confused by something and I've answered them, which is nice. But then most recently, and this sort of tickled me a little bit. Hi, I'm an undergrad in poli-sci at Iowa State. For one of my classes, we're looking at the electoral college as an institution and we're as a class project, making a website, making our own prediction of the Electoral College. I came across your website, election graphs, and I was wondering if it would be all right if I could include the Electoral College map on the website that we're making. Thanks and best wishes.
|
Ivan:
[32:40]
| No, screw you. Where's my money? Pay me. Pay me, you clown. Dance, dance, dance for me.
|
Sam:
[32:48]
| I, of course, pointed out that it was released under a Creative Commons license and he could do whatever he wanted as long as he you.
|
Ivan:
[32:56]
| Didn't make him dance dance you dance.
|
Sam:
[32:58]
| Clown dance i i didn't make him dance it's it's a you know a what is it an attribution non-commercial share alike license so i'm like yeah just do that anyway back to the other thing so here's the thing like no i'm not an expert at this if i i have coded a variety of these kinds of things that i've mentioned before, but it takes me a while. And every few minutes I'm looking up what's the syntax for that again. And I'm looking it up and I'm putting it together. And then I make stupid mistakes and I, I iterate and it just takes, this is a lot faster. Cause I'll like, I'll like put in my request and boom, it's spit out 40 lines of code in a few seconds that, and all of the code is perhaps straightforward. I probably could have done it myself, but boom, it just did it. I didn't have to. And then, and I didn't have to look up anything or check syntax or, you know, and sometimes it's like handling edge cases on its first shot out. Whereas I would have been like, fuck the edge case. I'll worry about it if it becomes a problem and it's already, but it's already taken care of. And, but then the thing that Alex wants me to talk about.
|
Sam:
[34:10]
| Is that he has been teaching himself game development in unity through going back and forth with chat GPT for the most part. So like he's been building out all kinds of games of like he's built a Minecraft clone. He's built a subnautica clone. He's built a couple platformer games. He's built like a maze game, you know, all kinds of things. He's building all kinds of things. And one of the things he wants me to do on a regular basis is like when he's working on this, he likes it if I'm sitting at my desk a few feet away also working on Unity game development. Because he's like, I'm learning this. You should learn it too.
|
Sam:
[34:51]
| Now, this is where the C Sharp I mentioned it comes in. Unity is a game development platform for those who aren't aware of it. It's one of the two biggest ones. What's the other one, Alex? Unity and? Anyway, it doesn't matter. Unity is one of the two big ones that lots of people use to develop games. And I'm talking like professional game developers use this crap. And, uh, you know, and I had no freaking clue. He, he, the first time he asked me to build a game, I built some stupid PHP or shell script to do a version of Flappy Bird in ASCII that was just rudimentary and dumb. Okay. I'm, I'm actually impressed with myself that I got it to do anything, but I, you know, and I did that one by hand, but no, he's wanting me to use these tools and use like, you know, a real something. And, and so I'm, I'm building this game and same kind of thing, building it up, starting out with something very stupid, very, well, look, I'll, I'll be honest. It's still very stupid.
|
Sam:
[36:01]
| I've been working on this thing for months it's still a very basic very stupid game but it's actually started to get somewhat like, actually entertaining to play. Like when I start playing, like it's got a high score list. Like I spent months building, just making the high score list work, but like, you know, I actually like play it and I'm like, Oh, a new high score. And I get excited. And if I don't make the high score, I want to play again. Right. And that's, that's a step forward. Cause like, and at first I dreaded these unity sessions because I was dealing with trying to get chat GPT to tell me what to do. And all of the problems that I was talking about before were happening with it, forgetting what I was talking about with it, you know, regressing and eliminating huge portions of functionality. Once I finally gotten them fixed, when I added something new, et cetera, but now that I'm doing it in this cursor environment that can handle multiple files open at the same time and show me the diffs every time it's just become a lot smoother and easier. And so is this still what I would choose to do. Like Alex wants me to do this an hour a night, every night. That's more than I am like wanting to do, but you know, it's less painful than it was. And I'm actually making faster progress. So in the last week or two, since I shifted my tools.
|
Sam:
[37:22]
| I've actually moved from it being a really stupid game that was painful and that I did not enjoy joy working on to having something that I actually like I've been having, I'll admit I've been having fun and I've enjoyed playing the stupid game. It's still a stupid game, but I've enjoyed playing it and I've been making progress and I'm like, okay, at some point I'll be like, okay, I want to share this. Let some people, let some other people play this and see how stupid my game is. See, see, see how well Yvonne can do it. Getting at the high score list on this thing, you know, I mean, literally, it's just a game that's basically about can you click on things quickly at the right times? That's it. That's, that's the gameplay, right? You know, but it's not.
|
Ivan:
[38:15]
| Not the first game at that. I mean, there's been a few of those. I mean, you know, but you know, I'm sure it's his own flavor of it, but yeah, I mean.
|
Sam:
[38:23]
| We my, my own flavor, my own flavor, even Alex's games are sophisticated and like 3d and like this stuff happening. Mine is like, you know, a stupid version of my face pops up and yells at you and you have to click it, you know?
|
Ivan:
[38:40]
| So that's really annoying. You know, I remember writing a game to play blackjack.
|
Sam:
[38:46]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[38:46]
| You know, you would bet money and it would accumulate how much it did. Blah, blah, blah. You would keep going until you quit. I wrote that in basic a long time ago. But I must admit that I have no desire in doing that again.
|
Sam:
[39:02]
| Well, you know, honestly, I had no desire to do it either. It's just it's something I'm doing with my son. But, you know, the other thing is the fact that so much of this can be me giving an English language description to an AI and it spitting out something that gets me 80% of the way there is making me think, you know, I've got a little scratch note file with three or four ideas of new things I want. Like, you know, a few years back, I built Wiki of the Day.
|
Ivan:
[39:36]
| Sure.
|
Sam:
[39:36]
| I've built the website for curmudgeons corner that takes the RSS file and builds a website out of it, blah, blah, blah. I've got a few other ideas of things that are like in my head. I'm like, Hey, I wonder if that could work where I have been before being like, yeah, that would be an interesting idea, but I don't have the coding skills to even like start. And now I'm like, you know, maybe, maybe I do because I mean, I still don't have the coding skills to start, but maybe I can start using the AI to sort of jumpstart me, build the framework, and then go from there and iterate. You know, so there are a couple of, and these aren't like super complicated ideas either, but there are things where without this tool, honestly, it's unlikely I would ever actually try. Now I'm like, once the election is over and I don't have like election graphs going on and we get to December, January, maybe I'll like take some of these ideas for a spin and see if I can build anything.
|
Ivan:
[40:35]
| Well, I will tell you that, you know, you've got your kid who's coding. I have a friend of mine who also has this kid doing all these intellectual pursuits. My son is very big into farting right now, as far as I can tell. And he thinks the farts are just absolutely hilarious. And yeah, I would say that's probably the thing that he enjoys the most right now is farting.
|
Sam:
[40:57]
| Yeah, that's nice. Well, just to summarize, I think that the bottom line on these AI tools is no, they're not perfect. No, they don't give you the right answer the first time around a lot of the time, but they make it easier to get started and iterate if you do not already know very well what you're doing. And so maybe for Greg and Bob, whose skills are undoubtedly better than mine at these things, maybe they would be a hindrance. But for someone with my level of know just enough to play around, but aren't really good at it.
|
Sam:
[41:34]
| There are a whole bunch of things already that I've done that could I have done without the help? Probably. Probably, but the reality is I probably wouldn't have bothered because it would be like intimidating to start of like, man, that's going to take too much work. I'm going to have to figure out so much. It's going to take a bunch of time. Whereas with this tool, I can just tell it what I want and it gets me close enough that I'm like, oh, okay, I can iterate on this for like an hour or two and have exactly what I want. And this can be like a project that i can do in an evening as opposed to a project that i would have to clear out a weekend to even think about you know and so it's it's enabling me to do things that i just would have you wouldn't have been able to do i i again i could have but it would have but i well i wouldn't theoretically but you wouldn't have because.
|
Ivan:
[42:34]
| It's too time consuming yeah.
|
Sam:
[42:36]
| Yeah, exactly. Like I would have said, this is too much. It's not worth the effort. Whereas now it's worth the effort. Now, is it worth the however many bottles of water per script that are being used to cool the data centers and all the electricity and blah, blah, blah. And I will admit, I have now paid for the monthly subscription for all three of the tools I I mentioned I am paying open AI and paying anthropic. I am paying cursor and, and it started to add up, but none of these companies are profitable yet. They're all like, they're all burning money at insane rates. They have yet to prove that this kind of task, this kind of thing can actually be a, a moneymaker without destroying the environment completely, but they're, but they're developing rapidly and this is right this is the whole thing of like they're in that land grab and we talked a little bit last week about lots of times the first mover companies aren't the ones that end up being the long-term successes but you know they're everybody's in the land grab right now of like this technology has lots of potential we can't afford to not be in it.
|
Ivan:
[43:50]
| No totally all right so okay so.
|
Sam:
[43:54]
| That's it that's.
|
Ivan:
[43:56]
| It let's go.
|
Sam:
[43:57]
| Talk about stuff and things okay we'll do a break and then we'll come back with yvonne's newsy segment and then we'll finish up with my newsy segment so here we go okie.
|
Break:
[44:10]
| Dokie here comes, It was just my internet being stupid. My internet being stupid is a new song we will make. Come on, I'm tired. What's wrong? I'm really tired. It's amazing. Let's get the show on the road. There's a road? There's a road? Oh my god, there's a road!
|
Sam:
[45:16]
| Yvonne's a bit overwhelmed hearing this for the second time.
|
Ivan:
[45:21]
| You know, yeah, yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. I just, you know, I just mentioned, you know, how my son is into farting. And this is kind of like, you know, I actually fully expect him to. I've been hearing some of the stuff he's recording. If I show him this, he might start making some of this.
|
Sam:
[45:44]
| There you go. There you go.
|
Ivan:
[45:46]
| Perfect. So, yeah. All right.
|
Sam:
[45:48]
| So give him GarageBand on his computer. He can get started.
|
Ivan:
[45:52]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got to get him. He actually has played a little bit with it, but I got to get him to get a little bit better with it. Okay.
|
Sam:
[46:00]
| Actually, there's some really good looping things for the iPhone or iPad where you just have six recording loops that you can record a loop and add special effects to it. And they're just continuously playing and you can layer them on top of each other. You can do some cool things really quickly with those. Alex used to play with those a lot. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[46:21]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[46:21]
| I need to find some of those recordings and add those as breaks.
|
Ivan:
[46:25]
| There you go. That's not a bad idea.
|
Sam:
[46:27]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[46:28]
| All right.
|
Sam:
[46:29]
| Okay, Vaughn, what's your topic?
|
Ivan:
[46:32]
| I'm debating here. You know, let me, okay, let's start with what the fuck is going on in the Middle East right now? Because it's been a week of shit going down. I mean, in between Israel.
|
Sam:
[46:52]
| Let me, let me add just a follow up. Cause last time we talked about the middle East, we talked about the pagers blowing up.
|
Ivan:
[46:58]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[46:58]
| And we were like, why now? Why are they doing it now? There must be more to this story that we don't know yet. And so the things that have come out since then are, well, a apparently Israeli intelligence had information that these pagers and the walkie-talkies were about to be exposed. So basically use it or lose it. Like they were about, they were on the verge of finding out.
|
Ivan:
[47:24]
| Figuring it out case.
|
Sam:
[47:25]
| There were, there were some people that were getting suspicious and we're starting to investigate. So the, basically the Israelis knew that if they let a few more days go by.
|
Ivan:
[47:36]
| The gig was up.
|
Sam:
[47:37]
| The gig was up. So it was use it or lose it at that point. And then also on top of that, once they did this, then it's like, okay, well.
|
Ivan:
[47:49]
| We declared war on Hezbollah.
|
Sam:
[47:51]
| Part two of the plan, we blow up the pagers, we blow up the walkie talkies. Okay. Then we got to follow up with, with airstrikes for anybody we missed. And then we got to do a land invasion to start cleaning up the mess. Yes. And so that's been the escalation there. And they killed a number of leadership people with the pagers and stuff, but then they killed more, including the top guy, with airstrikes. And then that's when Iran retaliated with their, once again, ineffective strike. And now we are currently waiting to see, okay, what's Israel going to do in response? And that's kind of where we are. And of course the Gaza thing is still going on the whole time. And it's connected in various ways.
|
Ivan:
[48:40]
| From the reports of what's been going on related to in Iran... After the aftermath of this is that their leadership has been in disarray related to what the hell did the iranian leadership the iranian yeah in iran that's why i was in the iranian leadership because this entire thing hezbollah has been for the most part a funded and, you know, creation that Iran really, you know, it was their instrument for them to be basically putting pressure on Israel, okay, from that front. Hezbollah also is not exactly well, you know, beloved. You know, one of the things that I was reading that people forget, they were supporting Assad in Syria, okay? OK, they were supporting him very aggressively. Now, let's not remember how many hundreds of thousands of people died in Syria with support from Hezbollah. Also, Hezbollah is not exactly. How do I say their methods of ensuring loyalty aren't.
|
Ivan:
[49:59]
| You know, they're not buying pizzas for people in order to ensure that they stay in line. In many cases if people are not you know happy so they're a bit you know very violent so there is this thing and the the thing is that shit they got decimated i mean from leadership structure on down this guy had been a leader of hezbollah for what 30 years long long time Long, long time. And not just him, but they got his lieutenants. And not just that, but this entire thing that Israel did with compromising their communications has made them completely paranoid about talking to one another, using any form of communication, which makes it very hard. I mean, I can't imagine saying, think about that if I'm at my company and all of a sudden they tell me, well, your phones are compromised, your computers are compromised, your apps are compromised, everything's compromised. So I'm like, how the fuck do I talk to my boss? What am I going to have to do? Do I have to get in the car and drive over there to talk to him? Am I sending notes? What the hell am I doing?
|
Sam:
[51:12]
| Carrier pigeon.
|
Ivan:
[51:13]
| Carrier pigeons, yes. So it's been very crippling in that sense, and Iran got left with, well, what the fuck do we do? And while the retaliation they did, which is a retaliation they had done before, which didn't prove to be very effective in terms of having any control, significant damage to israel from it other than i think one of the things that and i think they needed to do it because of that from a pr standpoint at home they need to be shown that they did something and i'm sure they could spin it whatever the hell way they wanted to obviously they'll tell everybody oh my god we decimated israel killed thousands probably i'm sure i don't know but i i see that from from that standpoint when you find out that they thought they were about to be compromised and i also think look this had been the planning for a while obviously this wasn't new and i also think that bb probably pushed forward with it in such an aggressive way because i'm pretty sure this proved to be popular for him at home to have done this and this is a guy like Trump that is also running to try to stay out of jail.
|
Sam:
[52:30]
| Yep.
|
Ivan:
[52:31]
| And so, and he figured that Hezbollah had so many people that hated it that in terms of that, well, we'll probably get away with this because everybody hates them anyway. And so I think that was part of the calculation. Now, obviously the concern has been what the hell is this going to do with a Middle East that right now has all of a sudden Israel going and attacking in Lebanon with the situation in Gaza. Now, here's the interesting thing aside from this. So the Hamas leadership, their leader, was saying that he was talking today that he's not looking for peace either. Right.
|
Sam:
[53:19]
| It seems like no one is, really.
|
Ivan:
[53:21]
| No, no. Yeah, pretty much, which is part of the problem with this. He has said that he's blocked the ceasefire deal and has been frustrated that Hezbollah and Iran have not come to his aid. So Hamas is really pissed off that they haven't come in and, like, you know, been all the way in on his strategy either.
|
Sam:
[53:44]
| Either and by the way.
|
Ivan:
[53:46]
| You know this whole thing you know this goes back to part of reasons why hamas did this they felt that everybody forget about israel that.
|
Sam:
[53:55]
| Everyone was ignoring them screwing them whatever we're like fuck you like israel we want yeah israel was making peace with saudi arabia and all of these other uh gulf states and like we need to get attention back on us like One of the things, too, I said nobody's interested in making peace. I did see one interesting statement. I think it was from the Jordanian foreign minister or something like that, basically, saying, you know, Israel keeps complaining there are no partners on the Arab side that want peace and want to recognize the state of Israel, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, look, I'm at this conference of Arab leaders right now. And I'll tell you right now, we are all here. We are ready to do that right now. So if we go ahead with the two-state solution for the Palestinians and make that real, and this gets to the, and I think he even said 1967 borders, right? And this is the fundamental core of the problem, which is that vision of what the future looks like is something that Israel is not willing to even remotely contemplate.
|
Ivan:
[55:03]
| Right now they're not contemplating that. That was on the table maybe like 20 years ago, 25 years ago, but it's gotten like completely pushed off the map. Yes.
|
Sam:
[55:15]
| Yeah. I mean, and this is one where like even the sort of, you can blame it on Netanyahu, but even like the populace at large, for the most, that solution does not have majority support.
|
Ivan:
[55:27]
| Well, of course. I mean, in large part.
|
Sam:
[55:29]
| Especially after October 7th.
|
Ivan:
[55:30]
| Well, it's a reason why Netanyahu has been leader for so long. Is it because it's just lost the support it had, you know, in the past?
|
Sam:
[55:39]
| And, you know, as we've talked about, there was a moment in the 90s where that looked right on the verge of being possible. Yeah. But that moment was lost. Yeah. And so what you have, like, in terms of the peace negotiations, for instance, you know, I've heard someone say, for instance, on the Hezbollah side, well, Hezbollah is not interested in a peace agreement. Well, the problem is Hezbollah wants an agreement that includes Gaza, not just what's happening in Lebanon. And in terms of Gaza itself, you know, Hamas wants a solution that involves Hamas continuing to exist. Israel's baseline statement is we want Hamas to be destroyed utterly. So, of course, you're not going to have like Hamas is not going to agree to a peace settlement that involves their own destruction. Right. And and so and Israel is not, you know, bending at all on their ultimate goal. They're not willing to be clear. It's not renouncing.
|
Ivan:
[56:48]
| No, I'm not renounced. Also, the elimination of Israel either.
|
Sam:
[56:51]
| No, no, they're not. So basically, yeah, you end up in a scenario where both sides are saying, basically saying, yes, we'll agree to peace once we have completely won.
|
Ivan:
[57:05]
| Right. Great. That sounds, you know, this sounds like a fight with a spouse. Yeah, let's try. Hey, I will. I will, you know, agree with you if you completely capitulate. How the hell does that go? Okay. You know, usually winds up in a divorce. Okay.
|
Sam:
[57:27]
| No, no, no. Yvonne, the answer is she's right. Doesn't matter. She's right.
|
Ivan:
[57:33]
| That's another.
|
Sam:
[57:34]
| That's how that ends.
|
Ivan:
[57:35]
| That's how that ends as well. Yeah. Well, you know, either winds up with she's right or winds up in divorce court, basically.
|
Sam:
[57:44]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[57:44]
| That's pretty much the only scenarios here.
|
Sam:
[57:47]
| Well, you know, this is one of those areas where like you, you kind of like you wish if, if like, if, if you had godly powers, you wish you could just take these parts of the world and just pick them up and separate them and put them on opposite sides of the planet and say, okay, leave each other alone. Time out. You, you have, you know, but you can't do that. Like you can't actually like lift up whole countries and move them. I just saw somebody and you can and you certainly can't move the populations because that's all the whole ethnic cleansing idea is like, oh, well, we'll we'll take you out of here and we'll move you to Suriname or something. No, you know, Siberia.
|
Ivan:
[58:30]
| I don't know. Whatever. Look, I just saw somebody make a joke and send out this but this map of the Middle East without without any of the borders drawn and just say, hey, you draw about better. And i'm like yeah well that's well that's the whole.
|
Sam:
[58:51]
| Fucking problem is that all the colonial powers drew stupid arbitrary lines a hundred and some years ago.
|
Ivan:
[58:59]
| Of course the problem is that all these fucking lines are always stupid arbitrary lines anyway it's like you know the fucking conflict listen i've got conflicts with like you know colombia and venezuela and yana and like Like Argentina with, you know.
|
Sam:
[59:17]
| Bring back the goddamn Ottomans.
|
Ivan:
[59:18]
| Yeah, exactly. Bring back the Ottoman Empire. That's really what we need. We fucking missing the damn Ottoman Empire. That really would, you know, would clear things up a lot. Yes. Why don't we have the Ottoman Empire back? Was the Ottoman Empire any good? I don't even know.
|
Sam:
[59:35]
| Well, it was one of those things where actually during its height, it was well known and for and they were tolerant they were a place where like all kinds of science and technology was flourishing there was real there were aspects of religious freedom even there there was all kinds of things at the height of the ottoman empire but like most empires as they went into decline things got worse and worse and there were problems and then And, you know, which is why the damn thing, like, fell apart in the end.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:08]
| Well, it was an absolute monarchy from 1299 to, I mean, you know, to 1876. And then there was some small periods of parliamentary constitutional monarchy. And then there was a triumvirate dictatorship, which is a kind of, you know, I really like the sound of that. I don't like conceptually what it is.
|
Sam:
[1:00:31]
| So Yvonne, who's our third? Who's our third? Who do we go with to finish our triumvirate?
|
Ivan:
[1:00:36]
| For a triumvirate? You know what? I'll draft back Rebecca. She wouldn't be good at a dictatorship.
|
Sam:
[1:00:44]
| Okay. Yeah, there you go.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:45]
| Yeah, Rebecca would be great at a dictatorship. You know, bless her, kick your or mine asses all regularly at a regular time.
|
Sam:
[1:00:52]
| You know, I am fine with the three of us being a triumvirate dictatorship for the world. We will start by the whole damn world is going to UTC. Damn it.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:03]
| That's the first act. I like that.
|
Sam:
[1:01:05]
| That's the first, first act. We're done.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:07]
| And the metric system.
|
Sam:
[1:01:08]
| Anyway. And the metric system. Yeah. SI units. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:12]
| And the metric system. And so, so anyway.
|
Sam:
[1:01:16]
| Anyway. Yeah. Obviously that is a joke. I do not actually want to be dictator of the world. Just to be clear.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:23]
| Just I don't really want to be dictator in a world. But, you know, but I guess the Ottoman Empire, you know, fell. And so now we've got this. But there's a long time. If you think about Jesus Christ, I mean, it's I mean, 1299, basically the 1922. Yeah, it's a long time. So but but yeah, but but we really, you know, did a terrible job of of whatever the heck we did after that. I'm sure that, you know, it was an absolute monarchy. I don't know. I mean, people were generally in the, you know, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. It was especially, you know, they lived in misery.
|
Sam:
[1:02:06]
| It was not alone in being an absolute monetary. It was not alone in being an absolute monarchy during those centuries. No, no, no, no.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:16]
| Not at all. That wasn't an outlier. That was exactly. That was a norm. No, but I do think that, you know, we forget that during that time period all across the world, unless you were royalty and you were in a royal class, you basically lived like shit.
|
Sam:
[1:02:33]
| Well, and even then, I mean, some people have brought up comparisons like, would you rather be in the bottom 20% income-wise in the United States today or be the king of France 500 years ago? Pick the bottom 20% today. You're still better off.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:58]
| Than the king of France?
|
Sam:
[1:03:01]
| Just imagine health care back then. Just imagine nutrition.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:05]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:03:06]
| Good cleanliness. Yeah. Yeah, okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:09]
| I mean, your life expectancy is low.
|
Sam:
[1:03:13]
| You're going to die by 40.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:14]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:03:14]
| Yeah. Pick the poor person today over the richest person in the world hundreds of years ago.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:23]
| That's true. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good point. It's a good point. Ah so so yeah the ottoman empire so well it's gone and so that's not the solution for the middle east so i listen my my whole my biggest concern with this whole thing is an escalation uh you know at this point obviously i would like to get peace at some point but look i mean hamas guy doesn't want a peace bb doesn't want peace nobody wants peace i mean you know hamas didn't want peace in the first place which is why they launched this one of the things i heard.
|
Sam:
[1:04:02]
| Someone mentioned i don't know a week or two ago like as this was spinning up i don't i have no idea who said this sorry it was some random person on mastodon but it stuck with me it's like a significant portion of what is going, like, what's the right way to put this? Biden's number one priority in dealing with the Gaza situation has been preventing escalation. You could say that's his number one priority in Ukraine too, by the way, you know, and that take on things that, That, hey, above all else, keep it from escalating further is part of what's pissing a lot of people off because they want to see more active intervention, more like force BB to do this. Or, you know, or on the Ukraine side, let's be, let them use the weapons more broadly inside Russia or whatever. And so, and there's a trade-off with, you know, look, it's an impossible situation. Here's the bottom line. It's an impossible situation. Like if you had Biden, let's forget Ukraine for a second. Let's, we're concentrating on the Middle East. Let's say he He went in there and right off the bat said, okay, we're cutting off all armed shipments to Israel. Well, okay, you've just given up all leverage whatsoever over the situation.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:30]
| Right, which is what we said.
|
Sam:
[1:05:31]
| Yeah. Maybe your leverage doesn't appear to be working all that great anyway, but if you did that, you have zero.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:38]
| No, I'm with you.
|
Sam:
[1:05:39]
| And then maybe you do get an escalation. And so, okay, you can envision, okay, the priority being getting the hostages out ceasefire. Okay, I understand that. But like, it puts a different spin on everything. If your number one concern is how do we keep this from spiraling into something where every country in the fucking Middle East is at war with each other. And that is in the realm of possibility here. And so far, the lid has been kept on that. And it's been horrible for Gaza.
|
Sam:
[1:06:14]
| And it ain't that great for Lebanon. And it isn't even that great for Israel. No but but so far we don't have an all-out war with everybody and you could see scenarios where that happens you know maybe some of these missiles from iran actually get through i mean some got through but there was no significant damage i believe there was one person killed and they they were a Palestinian. So the Israelis don't care, you know, unfortunately, unfortunately. And, and, But you could see a situation where maybe one of these missiles got in and actually did significant damage. Israel retaliates now in a way that seems disproportionate and other countries feel like they have to jump in. Or you just end up with all out land war between several of these countries. And Jordan feels like they have to get involved or Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
|
Sam:
[1:07:19]
| There are all kinds of ways this could spiral. So far, the lid has been kept on it. And if you are in one of the areas that is directly affected, it is horrible. The situation in Gaza for the last year now, We're two days away from the anniversary for the last year has been inexpressibly bad for civilians. Forget about Hamas for civilians, inexpressibly bad. The number of dead and injured and displaced is insane. And I, and I agree with the folks that it's, it's, it's disproportionate in a way that is not actually justified. Yes, Israel needs to defend themselves, but this is way past the boundaries of what a proportionate response would be. But it hasn't expanded. We haven't gone outside these areas. And to some degree, it's always hard to claim as an accomplishment the absence of a horrible counterfactual. But I think it actually is an accomplishment that it hasn't escalated. I don't know, but I, it's always weak sauce when you say, well, it could have been worse.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:37]
| No. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't nuke them.
|
Sam:
[1:08:41]
| I mean, it's, it's pretty damn bad, but it could have been worse.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:46]
| Well, we could have nuked a hurricane. Apparently, MTG says that we can control the weather.
|
Sam:
[1:08:52]
| Yes. Did you not see this? No, I'd seen this. And specifically, and you know, yeah, we can save this for the politics section. The bottom line is she thinks it's a Democratic plot to suppress votes in Republican areas.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:08]
| So we targeted the hurricane to go through the red areas.
|
Sam:
[1:09:11]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:13]
| I didn't know we were that smart. I mean, if we were that fucking smart, you know what, if we're that good, do you know the other shit that we could be doing to make sure that we win this fucking election? You know, I mean, you know how, you know, there's a lot of other shit.
|
Sam:
[1:09:29]
| Okay. Anything else you want to sum up on the Mideast before we move on?
|
Ivan:
[1:09:34]
| Ah, no, it's just, you know, every time we talk about this, it's just depressing. It's, it's, yes, it's depressing. It was just, you know, can we find a viable solution? No, no, there is no viable solution given the people involved right now that we could say, OK, this this has a chance.
|
Sam:
[1:09:58]
| You know, it makes the sort of colonial mind. I mean, we talked about the Ottoman Empire. We it makes the colonial mindset tempting. And I realize that probably would cause more trouble, not less. But it makes you want to say, screw them all. Bring in the UN protectorate. Take over the entire region and just impose peace by force for several generations. And hopefully it'll stick.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:25]
| And then we'll set back the borders. No, I get that. I mean, I don't know. Look, even one of the things that happened with the Iraq war and in Libya is that even with all the oppression that Gaddafi and Saddam did, many Iraqis and Libyans have both expressed, oh, my God, it was better than this fucking mess we live in now.
|
Sam:
[1:10:55]
| Well, and also what I just described is effectively what we tried to do in Afghanistan that we eventually got out of, which we, we sat there with troops propping up a, a government that did not have the level of, of native support to last on its own and sort of imposed a piece on certain parts of Afghanistan that we maintained in control. Control as long as we were right it didn't take it didn't take like if you were in the bubble that was protected during the time of that bubble you were okay for a while but in the end it's like you couldn't you couldn't sustain doing it forever and it was not really yeah in the end people have to control their own destinies you cannot impose from outside solutions like that It just, it doesn't work.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:56]
| Well, well, well, well, well. Look. After World War II, we did impose some of this on certain places that had been at war for a long time. But with quite a lot more resources than we would ever be willing to commit to that. I mean, let's be clear. The Germans and the French had been at war twice in fucking, you know, inside 40 years. And well, okay, so we occupied fucking Germany. We fucking partitioned it. we fucking you know basically purged everybody we created elections i mean well we purged everybody at the top one of the things that we that in there that we did that that we didn't do again was a lot of the administrative functions below that were kept which was the mistake i heard many talk about in iraq where oh well we have to debathify so we got rid of all the structures Well, and they argued that that was the biggest mistake and why there was so much chaos post the war.
|
Sam:
[1:13:01]
| Yeah. And to be clear, we still have a military presence in both Germany and Japan 80 plus years later.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:06]
| Right. 80 plus years later.
|
Sam:
[1:13:09]
| Now, we're not at war with either country. It's not a contentious relationship for the most part. But, you know, yeah, we're still it's not like we've never left. We've never left.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:21]
| Yeah so okay.
|
Sam:
[1:13:23]
| Shall we shall we take a break let's.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:25]
| Take a break.
|
Sam:
[1:13:25]
| We'll be back after this.
|
Break:
[1:13:29]
| You're supposed to say do-do-do. Do-do-do! Alex Zemzula! Alex Zemzula is awesome. Its videos are fun. And today, once again, we have one of our most loyal subscribers here to tell you how awesome Alex Zemzula is. I'd say, on a rate from 1 to 10, Alex Zemzula is awesome at, I don't know, 37? 82? he's pretty radical his videos are phenomenal they're full of creativity and they're so funny and exciting to watch wow what happened to your voice then Amy was that dad pretending to be you because the audio was distorted when it really wasn't because I told him to yes good job on remembering dad do do do okay.
|
Sam:
[1:14:27]
| We are back and so of course i'm gonna pick election 2024 and everything related to it for my topic can i are you surprised about the fucking election okay you know you.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:40]
| Would set this note related to what was happening in the year 2016 and what the cover of the new york times was talking about back.
|
Sam:
[1:14:49]
| Wait i did what oh yeah yes i remember this i remember that i forwarded i I forwarded some article or some note from somebody who made a point about that. When I share things, by the way, it does not necessarily mean I am endorsing him. It just means I think.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:03]
| No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I realize that. But the reason I'm bringing it up is because, you know, I realize, you know, one of the things that I know that he was complaining about the coverage of giving to Trump. But man, it's just the shit that has happened, like just in the last week that Trump has said, OK? Just the last week, he literally went on a speech last weekend and advocated a purge. And so, okay, so, and a purge, I mean, this comes from the movie called The Purge, okay, literally. That was like- Never seen it.
|
Sam:
[1:15:43]
| I guess I have to add it to my list now.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:45]
| Look, I don't think I've seen the whole movie, okay? All right? I think I flipped through it once when it was on one of those linear channels, okay? It was out like 10 years ago. But the main concept of the movie was that there would be one day a year when all crime would be legal, like literally all crime. So say on that day, if I wanted to murder you, Sam, I could do it that day and it would be legal.
|
Sam:
[1:16:15]
| OK, it'd be legal. Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:16]
| Yes. You know, I could not be prosecuted for doing that. And, you know, people are speculating the way that he talked about it. It's like, I guess he just watched this this week. So because now we're off Hannibal Lecter. OK, which I haven't heard him referred to like recently.
|
Sam:
[1:16:32]
| In a few little bits, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:34]
| Yeah, and now we're on to a purge where basically he wants a day that in the U.S. Where you could commit any crime and it would be illegal.
|
Sam:
[1:16:50]
| Just to be clear, that is not directly what he said. That's how people are interpreting what he said.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:56]
| No, no, no, no, no.
|
Sam:
[1:16:57]
| Wait, wait, wait, wait. What he said.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:59]
| Of a limited legal violence.
|
Sam:
[1:17:02]
| That all laws were suspended.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:05]
| And so the way.
|
Sam:
[1:17:05]
| The all laws.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:07]
| The way that. Yeah. The way he described it.
|
Sam:
[1:17:09]
| He just had a very violent day. Read the quote. Read the quote.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:12]
| Well, the quote. But yeah. And it was like, well, he described what the fucking purge was in the movie.
|
Sam:
[1:17:18]
| Yeah. He didn't go into that level of detail. He didn't say. He just said we could take care of the problem. problem with a day like a very violent he said a very violent day yes right he did not go through and it should be legal and blah blah blah blah blah but he didn't say all that he just said we could take care of all kinds of our problems by just having a very very very violent day to take right.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:42]
| Yeah so so i mean we're all speculating that he must have watched the purge in in recent days But but look, my whole point is.
|
Sam:
[1:17:50]
| Yes, you have a point.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:52]
| Yes. In our lifetimes, if any other politician would have gone on the campaign trail and advocated for this, I mean, the next day they would have been, you know. Their candidacy would be over.
|
Sam:
[1:18:11]
| There are so many things that Donald Trump has said or done that going back all the way to 2015, where if anybody else had said or done that thing, they would be gone the next day.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:26]
| It would be over.
|
Sam:
[1:18:28]
| Like there are hundreds of things in that category. Actually, thousands.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:34]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:18:35]
| And yet here we are.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:38]
| And yet here we are. It's just mind-boggling. And then during this week, add to that, his wife came out and said that she is pro-choice.
|
Sam:
[1:18:54]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:54]
| And I'm like, she hasn't been on the campaign trail with him for I don't know how long. She's written a fucking book and has come out gung-ho pro-choice. And I'm like, what in all fucking hell? I mean, when in ever had you seen the wife of a candidate, first of all, not appear for months because nobody has, you know, she's not made a single fucking, she didn't even go to the fucking convention with him. OK, right. I mean, and now when she comes out one month before the election, she is diametrically opposed to one of his primary accomplishments that he has, you know, you know, tooted his horn about during this campaign. Pain and she's basically just come out against them and it's like nobody cared either.
|
Sam:
[1:19:56]
| Well some people i've said i've heard talking about how actually this is once again trump doing five dimensional chess because it softens the republican position on abortion because hey look here's somebody who's pro-choice that is still presumably voting for her husband although Although we're.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:22]
| Not sure about that.
|
Sam:
[1:20:24]
| Okay. So let me get it.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:26]
| How the hell, how, what the fuck did we do wrong? What did we do wrong, Sam?
|
Sam:
[1:20:34]
| To get on this, like to deserve this timeline. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:38]
| What the fuck did we do wrong?
|
Sam:
[1:20:41]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:43]
| I don't understand.
|
Sam:
[1:20:45]
| Okay, just to clean up loose ends. First of all, the article that Yvonne was referring to was called Election Countdown, 32 Days to Go, Two Contrasting Front Pages from James Fallows, published on his sub stack on October 3rd. And it basically looks at the New York Times from when they were blasting the whole thing about the Clinton email scandal versus, you know, we had the unsealing of new evidence in Donald Trump's January 6th case. And it's a much, much smaller little thing on the New York Times. But I want to start with, as usual, the election graph stuff, just to give a poll update of where we are. So, first of all, we still have the same seven too-close-to-call states, essentially.
|
Sam:
[1:21:35]
| Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Those are the key seven, and they are still, as of this moment, 2% or less in margin. However, the main change since last week is, first of all, national polls, about the same, not any significant change over the last week. But in state polls in those particular states that I just listed, the ones that matter, there have been a bunch of good polls for Trump in the last week. And so we've moved from too close to call, but with a slight edge for Harris to too close to call with a slight edge for Trump at the moment. Because right now, in my averages, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina have all flipped over, are all now on the Republican side. North Carolina was before, but Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, I believe, were slightly on the Harris side when we talked a week ago. Now they're slightly on the Trump side. But I honestly...
|
Sam:
[1:22:47]
| The bottom line is they're still, they're right on the edge. Like the difference between a state being 1% on the Trump side versus 1% on the Harris side is really not that much. Like the very next poll that comes out can flip it back to the other side. Bottom line is they're still too close to call. Again, like with, if I took my naive method that I've used since 2008 of just do the poll averages and any state that's under 5% margin could go either way. That gets you a range. It does have right now, if everybody wins the states they're ahead in, has Trump ahead by 32 electoral votes.
|
Sam:
[1:23:30]
| But the range of possibilities is from Harris winning by 174 to Trump winning by 86. So massive range of possibilities that include both sides winning if you look at my probabilities which look at you know how far off polls were from the final results in the last four election cycles so 2008 2012 2016 and 2020 one thing that's happened is my i added a couple months ago a version of accounting for time left before the election, because before that I only had if the election was today. Those two have now pretty much converged. A month ago, there was a lot of additional room for change that basically said, hey, a lot can potentially change between August and November.
|
Sam:
[1:24:30]
| Well, now they're going like, you only got a month left. Things tend not to change as much in the last month so they're more saying like well you know okay what you see is what you're gonna get probably now, Things do change in the last month. Specifically, we all remember the last two weeks in 2016, the picture changed entirely.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:57]
| I'm sorry. 2016, at this point, like, you know, we had the Hollywood tape.
|
Sam:
[1:25:04]
| Yes, yes. Think like the right news event can like explode everything and change everything. In 2016, we're talking about crazy stuff happening right now. In 2016, we had Access Hollywood. We had the Comey letter. We had a drip, drip, drip of letters from Clinton emails or emails from Clinton. You know what I mean. You had a bunch of things happen that potentially would make a big difference. And the Comey letter specifically moved things quite a bit just in the last two weeks. So I'm not saying at all things can't happen. It's just the room for things to change is getting smaller because we just don't have that much time left. And the other difference is people have always said, you know, when people really start to tune in is after Labor Day. Guess what? We're now well after Labor Day. Like, so, you know, there's lots and lots of rooms for things to change around before Labor Day. But now things are things are settled down. If you if you look at my charts, there was this big move towards Harris when she first took over. But since then, things have just been bouncing around like within a range, essentially. Now, we are at the worst point for Harris at this point in the state polls since the first week she was in.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:28]
| But I will say that a lot of the polls that came out.
|
Sam:
[1:26:33]
| I was about to say this. Like, just as an example, let me let me give you the five most recent polls in Pennsylvania, who they were from.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:44]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:26:45]
| On message. Right. Patriot Polling, Emerson, Trafalgar, and Atlas Intel. Now, of those, Emerson is the only one that's sort of a well-known pollster. And they've been an outlier on the Trump side this cycle. They've been more Trumpy than other polls, even though they're a well-known, respected pollster. All of the others are small, little, no-name pollsters, some of which have known rightward leans.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:15]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:27:15]
| So it is very possible that the next batch of polls that comes out will be in the other direction.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:23]
| That's what I was saying.
|
Sam:
[1:27:24]
| And this is where I get to the whole thing of like all of these. Like if you're trying to make a distinction between the polls averaging out the poll, not just the individual polls, but the poll averages between having one candidate up by 1% and having the other candidate up by 1%. No, it's we just don't have that level of precision with since during the month of September. OK, we have had polls in Pennsylvania ranging from Harris up by six percent to Trump up by three percent.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:05]
| It's nutty. It's just nutty. I just it's nutty. And the thing is that as this era, the last few election cycles, has continued with the, how do I say, it's this entire partisanship that has been inserted into polling. Polling we keep seeing these swings now where it's oh wait we get all these polls from you know all these right-wing polls you shift election towards the other side then you get the other polls and you get some straight polls and there's also some partisan democratic polls as well that are aren't there as well and it really you know and i it seems to me that a lot of the times A lot of these Republican pollsters, they're synchronizing when they're launching all of these at the same time because they understand how the models work.
|
Sam:
[1:29:02]
| We did have a news article this last week that I really should have paid more attention to, but it was basically some evidence came out about Rasmussen in particular actively coordinating with the Trump campaign on what they were polling and when they were releasing it.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:19]
| Had to be. Had to be. It has to be. They're coordinating in order to launch these polls at the same time in order to give people, hey, look, look, look, we're doing better. We're doing better. And, you know, so I think that that's a lot of the bullshit that's going on. And so it's very, but like you said, the whole point is like, I, I, I've seen a, you know, a lot of the pollsters or whatever is that we are where we are, where it's a razor thin margin and we could be facing another fucking Trump term. It's a reality. It's just, you know, and it's all at this very.
|
Sam:
[1:29:59]
| At this, I had mentioned my allowing for time left was converging with the, if the election was today, but my bottom line, right, right now at this very second with my current poll averages, I I'm given, I'm only giving Harris about a quarter percent, like between, between 22 and 25% roughly. So I am favoring Trump, but not by an overwhelming margin. 25% ain't nothing. That's a decent chance. So it's still, I would consider a toss up unless unless that number gets down to like 10% or something, but like it's, it's still too close to call and it's very, very volatile.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:40]
| It's very volatile. That's the problem.
|
Sam:
[1:30:42]
| All of this depends. There are so many States that are so fucking close. It just, it's like, you know, if, if Pennsylvania, if, if like you said, if there are a few more polls that are, if we have another couple of polls that have Harris.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:58]
| It swings in the other way.
|
Sam:
[1:30:59]
| It swings in the other way. so i'm looking at this point at how much things are going back and forth and it's estimating.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:09]
| 25 other ones are like i was looking at the.
|
Sam:
[1:31:11]
| They're all over they have.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:13]
| It 54 hours 48 which is basically a fucking toss-up you.
|
Sam:
[1:31:17]
| Know you're.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:18]
| Looking at it i mean um.
|
Sam:
[1:31:20]
| And by and by the way like if my my thing is very very sensitive like if we get like it it was a week ago let's see i Let me not lie, I have the actual number here.
|
Sam:
[1:31:36]
| Here we go just comparing now to a week ago one week ago i had harris's shot at 50 now i have it at 25 right and it could easily go back to being 50 with just a handful of polls in the right states moving at the right direction yeah and so all we can really say is it's it's really it it I made the distinction last week, and I'll make it again today. It's not saying that the final results will be razor thin on election night. It could be either side winning by a decent margin. What it is is it's close enough that we don't have the skill through polling to tell the difference, to tell who's leading. We have to wait till election night. and it it could end up being razor thin and we're waiting for like a week to find out who won it could wind up being a blowout or yeah i mean like fuck like the the other part of this the average in florida is down to trump being only ahead by 2.9 percent harris could win florida if.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:50]
| Harris wins florida it's all fucking over this would be the craziest fucking outcome the fucking and the other one's Florida. I mean, you know, oh God.
|
Sam:
[1:33:01]
| As long as you don't do the hanging Chad thing again and everything's up to Florida and you mess up the election.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:07]
| This will not happen. I know you fixed it like 20 years ago.
|
Sam:
[1:33:12]
| But yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:12]
| But listen, the newer machines that we've got now, are, man, this is, you get, not just that you have the ballot, there's printed receipts. So you, if you want to go to a recount, you have the computer result, okay, tabulated. You have the scan result and a receipt. I mean, you have a triple, you know, triple redundancy here in Palm Beach right now. You know, don't fucking wait. It's happening. Okay. Okay, so we're covered on that. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:33:50]
| Yeah. So anyway, the bottom line is they're just so meant like all seven of these goddamn states and Florida, Florida is not that far off are just right. You know, we don't know. We don't know which way Michigan's going. We don't know which way North Carolina is going. We don't know which way George is, et cetera. Like, and that's enough that it could be, you know, a decent sized win for either side could happen.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:18]
| And of course, I'm seeing these stories. I'm seeing this story, how people are giving all red a chance to be Ted Cruz.
|
Sam:
[1:34:26]
| Oh, yeah. That one's within like a few percent to write at this point, like already still behind in the polling, but just barely.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:34]
| I mean, that would be holy shit. Honestly you know i despise ted cruz so much that that's one where if i got a chance to go over i had some time to go over to ted cruz and make fun of make fun of him in front of his face after he lost i would take that i would take the opportunity to do that.
|
Sam:
[1:34:53]
| So and this this also is that is.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:56]
| That too petty is that not is that.
|
Sam:
[1:34:57]
| Yeah yeah you can leave ted cruz alone no but go in.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:02]
| Front of his face and go say hey second loser.
|
Sam:
[1:35:05]
| I guess okay i it what was i you know you distracted me with this ted cruz stuff i had something else i was gonna say oh god well that's.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:17]
| That's that's an age issue it's not my fault.
|
Sam:
[1:35:19]
| But yeah don't blame.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:22]
| Don't blame me for this.
|
Sam:
[1:35:23]
| I i mean you you you you put in front of me the dancing image of ted cruz and i can't look away, anyway uh just just wrapping up polling i guess what one of the things that and i was looking for the exact quote i think i retuted it or whatever on maston but i can't find it right now is like, if if polling says that somebody is going to win by 20 and they end up winning by 18 nobody gives a shit you got the winner right yeah yeah but if it's the difference between saying one person is ahead by one or the other person is ahead by one it's the same amount of error but suddenly everybody cares and like oh my god polling is awful nobody knows anything blah blah blah no and uh.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:13]
| No and that's what and that's and you you've hit the nail right on the head that that's the issue that you've got right now that it's so razor thin that you can't even say you know with any certainty who will win because it's that close.
|
Sam:
[1:36:26]
| Right and yeah it and you know, We've been through before, like there are all kinds of reasons to think this time the polls are underestimating the Democrat, unlike the last couple of years. But and actually, if you if you if you started to waterboard me and asked me, I'd say, yeah, the polls are probably underestimating Harris right now. But do I have a level of confidence about that that I can say.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:58]
| Oh, yeah, to make me feel this is the bag. We're fine. Everything will be fine. Trump will be in jail next year. I can't say that. I cannot with any confidence at all say that right now.
|
Sam:
[1:37:14]
| No. Like, I look at that and I'm like, it's so tempting to start coming up with all the reasons why polls are probably underestimating Harris. But I feel like I cannot trust that I'm not just using motivated reasoning because that's what I want to see. Yeah you know i know so okay despite i'm moving on from polls to finish up other election stuff i mentioned what are the election stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:41]
| That we have we have we have.
|
Sam:
[1:37:43]
| We have the debate and the january 6th filing and all right there was a debate i forgot about that and i wanted to talk a little bit about turnout versus persuasion as well but let i guess chronologically the debate bait was first we had waltz and vance basically i at the time i called it sort of a draw you know, waltz seemed nervous throughout vance seemed really confident of course he was lying the whole fucking time but he seemed really confident um he also seemed he put on a nice act like and apparently that partially threw waltz off because like they were expecting him to be all combative, The usual asshole, I know. But every campaign always puts out that their candidate isn't that great at debates to try to get the answer. It's a VP debate.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:43]
| Nobody gives a fuck. Let's be clear about this. The VP debate, nobody cares.
|
Sam:
[1:38:48]
| Nobody cares. Nobody cares.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:50]
| Nobody fucking cares.
|
Sam:
[1:38:51]
| Somebody pointed out the biggest slam dunk moment in any VP debate ever was Lloyd Benson's You Are No Jack Kennedy. Did Lloyd Benson end up vice president?
|
Ivan:
[1:39:06]
| No, he did not. They got crushed.
|
Sam:
[1:39:09]
| No, he did not. And so he crushed Dan Quayle at that debate and made no difference whatsoever.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:14]
| Made no damn difference whatsoever. Not one iota, so whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:39:19]
| And I put this as a draw anyway, but a lot of commentators were saying, Vance was winning on points up until the very end, but then Walls did a knockout punch with the January 6th stuff. I don't know, maybe like he, he did have a good thing and they put it into some commercials and stuff, but bottom line is what you said. VP debates don't matter how the presidential debates usually don't matter very much. The, the, the whole thing with Biden this time around is the most consequential presidential debate we've ever had in our lives. Um, but usually debates don't matter, period. End of story. Regardless, at most, they give a temporary bump of a week or two. But yeah, and in this case, the VP debate was on Tuesday night, and Wednesday, the special counsel released their report, and everybody stopped talking about it immediately. So anybody, and, and.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:18]
| And, and they talked about the special counsel report for like 15 minutes.
|
Sam:
[1:40:21]
| Yes. And this is what I was going to say about the special counsel report. Like, first of all, like I predicted last week that we would, you know, there would be new details, but the fundamental story doesn't change. And that's exactly what we had. We have interesting new details. Like we have Donald Trump saying who cares or whatever the hell it was. He said when they told him about Mike Pence, he said, yeah. Yeah. And we have a more, more clear examples, like a deluge of them, you know, lots and lots of examples showing that Donald Trump absolutely knew he lost. We've got all kinds of things like that, but fundamentally the story doesn't change. And, you know, I, I tune, I turned on Fox news for a few minutes after this came on and, you know, basically that, that was the story is like, hey, this is old news. It's politically motivated. There's nothing really new here. And then 15 minutes later, they moved on.
|
Sam:
[1:41:19]
| CNN kept at it for a little bit longer. MSNBC kept on it for a little bit longer than that. But by the time we got to four or five hours after this, all of the news networks had moved on to other things. They would reference it a bit and they would still talk about it some, but they'd moved on to other things. They weren't doing wall to wall. And anyway, and, and the, the, the kind of voters that you might care to reach with it, aren't the ones that are paying attention anyway, anybody who's really paying attention to this stuff. I mean, part of the spin on Fox news was clearly, and I think they're actually right about this. They didn't say this explicitly, but it was sort of implied by the way they were talking about it is that anybody who really cares about this stuff was already voting for Harris anyway.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:05]
| Right. and.
|
Sam:
[1:42:07]
| Yeah, that's true. Now, we have talked about, like, does this demotivate any Republicans? Maybe on the margins, but it's so damn close the margins matter, right? So any little thing could make a difference. I did see a couple of focus groups, and we've made fun of focus groups and who they pick before and stuff like this, but at least one person saying that Vance's response on January 6th actually did make a difference to them.
|
Sam:
[1:42:39]
| He went out and would not admit that Donald Trump lost and that that made a difference to them as a voter. I don't know. One of the reasons to think Harris might be underestimated is this sort of enthusiasm gap where Republicans seem to be a lot less excited about Donald Trump than they were four or eight years ago, whereas people seem to be really excited about Harris. And so that's where this kind of thing potentially could make a difference is like just reminding people that this existed at all. And it's not so much the filing itself, but like Harris is putting it in commercials in swing states, reminding people about January 6th and including some of these new bits of evidence and things Trump or Vance have said lately and stuff like that. And maybe those commercials in the swing state will make some differences on the margins and makes maybe not convince any Republicans to vote for Harris, although there are anecdotal reports of a few.
|
Sam:
[1:43:46]
| But just, you know, make some of these disillusioned Trump people just stay home. And this is where I want to jump into the turnout versus persuasion thing. There is. The Harris campaign is still doing a lot of persuasion. They had joint events with Liz Cheney. Lynn is her mom.
|
Sam:
[1:44:12]
| Anyway, with Cheney, had a joint event.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:16]
| Not Dick.
|
Sam:
[1:44:17]
| Not Dick. Not Dick. But it had a joint event. So basically saying, hey, look, there have been a bunch of sort of Republicans for Harris that have been out on the campaign trail, basically trying to convince people, and speaking at the convention and blah, blah, blah, trying to convince Republicans that, hey, it's okay. You can vote for Harris and still be a good Republican. You you know trump is bad come on you know trump is bad you know the quote from the convention was, vote it voting for harris doesn't make you a bad republican it makes you a patriot or something like that you know and you you can go back to arguing about policy once the danger of trump is gone and and maybe you get a few republicans to defect that way but i think with, things mapping out the way they are, I think the, At this point, you got to do both. You got to do both persuasion and going for turnout. But I think the emphasis needs to be on turnout at this point. It needs to be get out the people who don't try to convince the people who voted for Trump the last eight years to vote for Harris. Maybe you'll get a few of them. So don't I shouldn't say don't try to. Sure, try to.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:41]
| But the emphasis should be on your energy on those.
|
Sam:
[1:45:46]
| Yeah, don't spend most of your energy on that. Spend most of your energy on getting out the damn vote, getting out Democrats who aren't like there are a lot more Democrats than excited now than we're under Biden. But there's still a bunch and you hear them whining on social media about like, you know, Harris's policy on Gaza and Israel, for instance, or, you know, she's not progressive enough for me or whatever, blah, blah, blah, or just people who like are convinced that their vote doesn't matter. So why bother get those people out? That's where I think you've got more bang for the buck going after those people than you have going after trying to convert Trump voters. And so, so, you know, we've got, let me, let me refresh my page as we are recording 31.8 days until, until polls start to close on election night. Right. And, you know, you're get out. The vote is where to do it right now. Like get those people to the polls who are, you know, leaning are leaning in a more Harris direction than a Trump direction.
|
Sam:
[1:47:01]
| But who may not be like who may be iffy in terms of are they actually going to vote and get those people to actually vote? That that's where the effort needs to be at this point i think and yeah that's what i got i don't know any anything else election wise to talk about no.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:25]
| We got nothing oh.
|
Sam:
[1:47:26]
| You mentioned you mentioned the purge day the one other thing and we've mentioned this before i just want to say it again his donald trump's ability to be coherent is continuing to be really really low, you know and getting seemingly getting worse as we get closer to the election and advance keeps pissing people off but it doesn't just like everything else it doesn't seem to be it's not like trump makes an incoherent speech and suddenly he loses five percent in the polls no no i mean he keeps confusing.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:00]
| Where the fuck he is what.
|
Sam:
[1:48:02]
| And it still can it still continues to be like if you to like moving to that national poll line. Well, not even, I don't know. Like if you compare now to a couple months ago, both Trump and Harris have improved a couple percent. If you look not at the margin that their actual percentage, I don't even know. I was going to say Trump is keeping his base support no matter what. And he is like most of the movement over the last few months has been undecided moving to Harris. It hasn't been Trump losing support.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:36]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:48:37]
| And that's part of why I say it's get, do the turnout stuff, get those people out. You know, you may convince a few Trump people on the margins, but that's, that's not where the juice is. Get, get people out and excite people more. And, you know, I don't know. It's, I feel like there was a lot of momentum when harris first jumped in and then it's kind of been static you know ups and downs that are like mostly i mean.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:06]
| She definitely is pulling better than where.
|
Sam:
[1:49:13]
| Biden was oh oh of course and like i said there's a lot of movement right at first it's been steady it's right moving from biden to harris moved it from biden is significantly behind, but if everything goes great, he can catch up. He still has a chance, but you've got to grit your teeth and maybe he'll win. Moved it from that to... This is a fucking toss up.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:39]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:49:40]
| But we haven't moved to terrorists. It's clearly leading and is, you know, and it would be a stunning if Trump won, it would be, we're not at the point. We're not at the 2016 point where if Trump won, it would be a massive upset and everybody would be surprised. We're, we're in a toss up scenario where it could go any way. And I, I really, really wish that, You know, Harris could pull a few more points out of this and be clearly ahead before we get to election day. But I'll be honest, my gut is that we're going to be in the same position, having the same conversation about how it could go either way on the show we do right before the election.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:25]
| I don't I expect that that is what we will do. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:50:29]
| Yeah. And as we talked about to like popular votes, a different question. I feel pretty confident that Harris is going to win the popular vote. That's not the question.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:37]
| Here i get what you're saying okay let's.
|
Sam:
[1:50:42]
| Close it up.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:43]
| Zip it go to curmudgeons-corner.com.
|
Sam:
[1:50:47]
| You can see all our stuff the archive of our shows you can listen to old shows please listen to old shows they're fun i i actually listen to old shows occasionally and you know i i get what what's interesting to me yvonne yeah even if i'm listening to a show from and like i'm now four years behind on like the oldest show i haven't listened to and the old the you know and almost four years it's like the oldest show i haven't listened to is like the show after, biden was declared the winner in 2020 oh gosh but i listen to old shows and one thing that's remarkable to me is that we'll be talking about something and i will think to myself oh here's where i'm about to mention this and then i do like and i don't remember the actual specifics of the conversation but apparently my brain is so similar because like i'm not replaying like my memory of the conversation i'm replaying like if i was having this conversation now here's what i would say and boom it's the same thing i actually said years ago and on occasion i Well.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:59]
| You're very consistent on your positions, basically.
|
Sam:
[1:52:02]
| That's right. Or there have been some occasions where I'm like, okay, Vaughn's going to bring up this story now. And boom, there you do. So, I don't know. And if you haven't listened to all of those old shows.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:12]
| Not a straw apple's made.
|
Sam:
[1:52:14]
| You know, hey, as a curiosity, go back and listen to some of our shows during the Obama administration or something. You know, and see what we were talking about. You know?
|
Ivan:
[1:52:25]
| I might just do that. Okay. All right. I haven't heard a replay of one of our old shows in a while. I have done it. Not recently, though. But I have done it for sure.
|
Sam:
[1:52:36]
| Okay. Anyway, you can find that stuff for recent shows. We've got transcripts as well. You've got all the ways to contact us. And, of course, you've got a link to our Patreon where we can give us money. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:49]
| I don't need to give money to myself. We're going to give ourselves money. Okay. We'll do that chase check fraud thing with our stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:52:56]
| Yeah, we'll do that.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:58]
| Right, I'm sure that won't get us into trouble.
|
Sam:
[1:53:01]
| No, not at all. We'll deposit everything we've got into the Curmudgeon's Corner PayPal, and then try to, not PayPal, Patreon, and then try to take it back.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:13]
| PayPal, PayPal, PayPal, whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:53:15]
| Anyway, for the Patreon at various levels, we'll mention you on the show, we'll ring a bell, we'll send you a postcard, we'll send you a mug, all that kind of stuff, or very importantly, at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us, we will invite you to our Curmudgeons Corner Slack where Yvonne and I and all kinds of other people, I mentioned Bob and Greg earlier, but there's other folks too, are chatting, sharing links, all that kind of stuff. So Yvonne, what is something interesting and compelling from the Curmudgeons Corner Slack this week that we have not mentioned on the show at all?
|
Ivan:
[1:53:47]
| I i i guess i'm i'm trying to figure out what the best thing from this is okay sure what about crowd size 43 foot nude trump statue erected along las vegas highway erected yvonne yes that's what the story says the tribute to the republican candidate leaves little to imagination okay Okay, I am a naked statue of the former president titled Crooked and Obscene was created in a fenced in lot next to I-15 north of Las Vegas, Nevada on September 28th. The statues resembles a frowning Trump and has arms attached to strings, allowing them to be moved around like a puppet. It it is made of foam covered metal rebar and weighs about 6 000 pounds probably closer to his real weight according to the rap the piece is a bold statement on transparency vulnerability and the public personas of political figures the creators who have not been identified told the.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:01]
| So we've got a naked Trump statue somewhere. It's like, this is our, this is where we are right now. This is I I'm trying to remember. I'm pretty confident right now that in any other election cycle, we have not had a six thousand pound massive naked statue of any of the presidential candidates.
|
Sam:
[1:55:26]
| I don't I don't know. I've seen news reports and pictures of other naked Trump statues going back probably to 2015.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:36]
| Oh, no, no, no. What I'm saying is of other presidential candidates, not Trump. Oh, not Trump. Not Trump, is what I'm saying.
|
Sam:
[1:55:43]
| Were there any naked Hillary statues going around?
|
Ivan:
[1:55:46]
| Not that I recall.
|
Sam:
[1:55:47]
| Naked Biden?
|
Ivan:
[1:55:49]
| Or Obama.
|
Sam:
[1:55:50]
| Or Obama?
|
Ivan:
[1:55:51]
| Or Bush. I don't recall.
|
Sam:
[1:55:55]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:56]
| Yeah, so that's one story.
|
Sam:
[1:55:57]
| You should start a collector's series of all the presidents and presidential candidates going back to the beginning of the republic. Naked.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:05]
| Naked. That sounds wonderful. The other thing is that we, on the curmudgeon's quarter slack, there's a couple of more things I'll mention. One is where two shuts down science experiments as power stores dwindle. It's crazy how far away it is and how they're still being able to build that plutonium to keep that damn thing going. Okay. And, you know, surprising that, you know, I know the issues that they have with doing something with nuclear, but damn it. But, I mean, it really seems to be the best way to power these damn things. Okay? You know? I mean, given how the longevity. And the next one is evidence of our complete stupidity and abject failure.
|
Sam:
[1:56:48]
| Our stupidity? You and me? Oh, yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:50]
| Yes. Ours. By some person, I guess, has this YouTube channel with 14.5 million subscribers. Subscribers as far as i can tell the only thing is is a video of somebody sitting down looking like they're studying and so it's just your companion that doing that is that.
|
Sam:
[1:57:08]
| What it is they they've got a series of these live streams that basically just is an animation of someone sitting at a desk we're working with a timer in the corner that every once in a while it takes a break or whatever and you can sit and work with it and blah blah blah and there's like music playing in the background and they've got different versions of this channel with just different styles of music, depending on what you're into and with different character. And I guess there are others that do different characters. This particular YouTube channel has the same character, I guess. But yeah, it's basically just an animation. I presume it's either a repeating animation or they've got an AI that occasionally jiggles it or whatever. But yeah, it's just a person sitting at a desk studying and they've got millions of people subscribed. And at any given time, if you look at the live stream, there are a few thousand people watching compared to let's see how many people are watching our live stream right now. Zero, zero, zero people are watching our live stream at the moment.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:04]
| We are such massive failures at this. Holy fucking hell. Jesus Christ. I mean, we're literally being beaten by just a fucking animated cartoon playing music. That's it.
|
Sam:
[1:58:22]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:23]
| They're not even saying anything.
|
Sam:
[1:58:25]
| But you get to sit and work at your computer with this person in the corner of your screen, so they're keeping you company.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:31]
| You know, I liked, not Clippy. You know, I liked the little dog.
|
Sam:
[1:58:37]
| Oh, yeah, because you could change Clippy to be various other characters.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:40]
| Yeah, I like the dog. I would like the dog back. I don't know why there's so much hate of that. I like the little dog. Give me my dog back.
|
Sam:
[1:58:49]
| Yeah, you know, you can just talk to chat GPT now.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:53]
| No, I want my little dog. Why can't Microsoft just AI-infuse the fucking dog and give it back to me?
|
Sam:
[1:59:01]
| There you go. They should do that. They can get on that. Well, you know, the new AI they're working on is basically operating under the premise of they're always watching your screen and will give you suggestions based on what it sees you doing. So I don't know how people will feel about that, honestly. But some people will love it.
|
Ivan:
[1:59:23]
| Uh you know i don't know i mean what the hell i mean look my fucking social security number is right now out there for for everybody my birth date my email my thing i don't understand how i'm not hacked more often given that i could just fucking google and find all of this in five minutes right anyway we're done but.
|
Sam:
[1:59:47]
| Would you feel would you feel good about the little character in the corner of your screen, if it really was responsive to exactly what you're doing on the screen at that moment. And more so than Clippy, not just like, hey, are you writing a letter? But like, hey, I see you're about to send that email to this person. You may want to change the tone of that because that might piss them off or something like that.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:13]
| I mean, I've actually had already, I think I've seen this like feature in some different places where I've done that. And then it's like telling me that. So, yeah, sure. I whatever.
|
Sam:
[2:00:26]
| What if it was like, hey, I noticed you like this kind of porn. Would you like some more over here? There's more of more of that kind over here.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:35]
| That's that's useful.
|
Sam:
[2:00:36]
| OK, there you go. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:38]
| I mean, that's useful. Sure.
|
Sam:
[2:00:40]
| I admit it is.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:42]
| So okay yeah but it's a little creepy it's.
|
Sam:
[2:00:46]
| A little creepy but you know.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:48]
| It's a little creepy but but i you know i don't know look look at the things that we're doing like right now and think about it like what the hell 20 30 years ago you tell me about what the fuck is creepy okay you know i mean everybody is dating online using apps i mean you know people when you go out to go date somebody you know you're basically cyber stalking them like right now because you can okay you know search everything.
|
Sam:
[2:01:16]
| About them first before you meet them in person.
|
Ivan:
[2:01:18]
| Yeah and i i went and i i was just i'm checking into my to this hotel like on monday that i haven't been to in a while and they have somebody and i'm like now like the stupid top tier guy at this hotel chain right right their guy that they have this guy that's assigned to cater to the uber elite guys he looked me up on linkedin i mean look and i'm like oh i'm like who the hell's this guy looking at my profile oh it's the guy from the hotel he's checking out who the hell i am right and i'm like i thought i'm like creepy and but also i thought well that makes sense you know so no in care of i thought you know that i thought that's not a bad idea right okay what's what i do before i go meet somebody buddy yeah.
|
Sam:
[2:02:03]
| Yeah yeah of course of course.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:05]
| So anyway anyway.
|
Sam:
[2:02:07]
| We're done we're done.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:08]
| Thank you.
|
Sam:
[2:02:09]
| Everybody for joining us for yet another curmudgeons corner stay safe have a good week we'll see you next time goodbye bye, okay that's it good night yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:51]
| All right are we uploaded we're really i'm hitting.
|
Sam:
[2:02:55]
| I'm hitting stop now here we go.
| |
|
