Automated Transcript
Ivan:
[0:02]
| Hello. Okay, now I can hear you. Okay, there you go.
|
Sam:
[0:04]
| Well, good. That's exciting.
|
Ivan:
[0:06]
| Exiting.
|
Sam:
[0:07]
| Exiting. Okay, bye!
|
Ivan:
[0:11]
| Well, I don't understand this word, exciting. I don't... this English...
I mean, what the hell, man?
Exiting, excite... I don't... Stupid. Is...
|
Sam:
[0:22]
| I... I don't know. I... I would like to say that...
|
Ivan:
[0:26]
| Why is exiting and exciting? Wouldn't we pronounce the exact same way?
I mean, really in Spanish, they would be.
|
Sam:
[0:33]
| Well, yeah. In many, in many languages, spelling actually relates to how you pronounce things, but not usually in English.
|
Ivan:
[0:41]
| Yeah. In, in, in, in Spanish it's, you know, directly. Yes, that's correct.
|
Sam:
[0:48]
| So, uh, so what do you want to talk about? I'm thinking we might be back to a lightning round type week, unless There's big topics that you think.
|
Ivan:
[1:00]
| Yeah, no, it sounds good.
|
Sam:
[1:01]
| Okay. Um, so three rounds, two topics, each one from each of us, and that'll be the game.
|
Ivan:
[1:11]
| Okay. Game game.
|
Sam:
[1:14]
| Yeah. And we will win the game.
|
Ivan:
[1:18]
| We will win the game.
|
Sam:
[1:19]
| We will. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:21]
| If you say so.
|
Sam:
[1:24]
| Here we go.
Welcome to curmudgeon's corner for Saturday, July 8th, 2023.
It is just after three UTC.
I'm not going to translate time zones this time around. I'm Sam Minter and Yvonne Bowe is here. Hello, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[2:00]
| You're not translating time zones. What the heck's the matter with you?
|
Sam:
[2:05]
| You know, I could translate into time zones where neither one of us is present.
|
Ivan:
[2:12]
| Oh, I, that, that I'm sure it'll help everybody. What time zone do you want to go?
|
Sam:
[2:16]
| Right now.
|
Ivan:
[2:17]
| Right now, it's what?
|
Sam:
[2:18]
| Where? It is 12.05 PM on Saturday, July 8th in Tokyo.
|
Ivan:
[2:25]
| Whoa!
|
Sam:
[2:27]
| It is 10.05 PM on Friday, July 7th in Lima, Peru.
|
Ivan:
[2:33]
| Wow! It is 8.35 AM in Mumbai.
|
Sam:
[2:40]
| There you go. On Saturday, the 8th.
|
Ivan:
[2:42]
| On Saturday, yes.
|
Sam:
[2:43]
| Yeah. Are there any other places that we want to discuss?
|
Ivan:
[2:49]
| Uh, it is, uh, 10 0 5, uh, PM, uh, today in Bogota and it's, uh, 9 0 5 PM and San Jose, Costa Rica.
|
Sam:
[3:00]
| Let's do one of the odd ones in Adelaide, Australia. Ah, it is Saturday, July 8th.
Now at 12 36 PM.
It's one of those half hour time zones.
|
Ivan:
[3:12]
| Wait, Adelaide has the half hour bullshit?
|
Sam:
[3:14]
| Yes. God.
|
Ivan:
[3:18]
| I realized that, well, I said, well, what am I saying? Mumbai, I read the time, 8.36, they also have the half hour.
|
Sam:
[3:24]
| Here's one that's off, Kathmandu, Nepal.
It is 8.51 a.m. on Saturday the 8th.
|
Ivan:
[3:33]
| Wow.
|
Sam:
[3:34]
| So that's like 45 minutes off.
|
Ivan:
[3:38]
| Wow.
|
Sam:
[3:39]
| From everybody else, practically. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[3:41]
| I mean, yeah.
|
Sam:
[3:43]
| Or 15 minutes if you go.
|
Ivan:
[3:46]
| I mean, this, you know, I, you know, since a lot of, you know, we have quite a lot of technical staff and a lot of our IT companies that comes from India.
I am sure that probably these half hour and 45 minutes, they were like, man.
I'm sure that's one of the reasons why they they may have been so keen on participating on a software project like, hey, let's build a calendar function.
So we can fuck it like, you know, because I do all these like cross time zone calls all the time.
|
Sam:
[4:23]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[4:23]
| And the only way for everybody to really have it straight at what damn time the meeting is, is you're sending a damn calendar invite.
|
Sam:
[4:33]
| Yeah. Well, yeah, because that'll because the software will correct it to everybody's local time.
|
Ivan:
[4:37]
| I'll show you whatever the hell your damn time is. Yeah. OK.
And it's it's really, you know, the only easy way to send the meeting out to everybody and, you know, have everybody, you know, showing up at the right time.
I mean, I remember the time before, I mean, I worked in it at HP before we started using Outlook calendars.
Okay. I mean, hell, we were using Lotus mail for when I first joined for God's sakes and yeah, it didn't have calendaring.
And I remember that, you know, we would send out meetings and we, we do, uh, back then conference called numbers. Okay. OK, you know, for this kind of stuff.
And, you know, we sent an email with the information. But, you know, you have to know, you know, we have to tell you, hey, this is an X hour at your time zone.
OK, you know, and here's the dial in. And they would have to put it on their calendar and then they would have to figure out, OK, great. It's it did have the rare occasion where somebody got the time zone confused.
I mean, it invariably happened. You know, of course, not as bad as the person that.
Arrived at the wrong hotel for a meeting when we set up a meeting.
They went on vacation. We had to change the location and they showed up at the totally incorrect city, let alone the hotel.
They were at the wrong fucking city. OK, trying to check into the hotel.
We did have cell phones back then, at least, thank God. Some that worked. Not that great.
And, you know, we're like, we're fighting out, oh, so and so forth. Oh yeah.
They're at the, and by the way, the difference was they went to Cancun where we originally were having a meeting and we did the meeting at some other town in Mexico, not Cancun. Okay.
|
Sam:
[6:30]
| Yeah. Anyway, um, this week there are a bunch of things that happened, but we're, once again, we don't have like the really big things that we want to do, like whole large segments on, so we are once again, going to drop back to, we're going to go lightning round style, so we're going to do three rounds in each of those three rounds, Yvonne will pick one topic, I will pick one topic, the first two are going to be our later frothier things for our butt first, and then two with, I guess, more serious stuff. It doesn't have to be like serious.
|
Ivan:
[7:12]
| We should do an all from very, very serious.
|
Sam:
[7:15]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[7:17]
| You say maybe even glum, glum, glum, glum.
|
Sam:
[7:22]
| There's a word for you.
|
Ivan:
[7:23]
| Anyway, yes. The word that we don't use all the time. We don't use glum.
|
Sam:
[7:28]
| We don't use glum all the time.
|
Ivan:
[7:30]
| We should use a glum more.
|
Sam:
[7:32]
| I mean, even when people are talking about things that are sort of glum, they don't usually say glum.
|
Ivan:
[7:37]
| They don't say glum. We used to use glove more glove needs to make a comeback, as a word, not that, you know, not that everybody should be glum.
No, no, no, no, right. No, no. We don't want people to be more glum.
|
Sam:
[7:55]
| Well, last time we brought back Socko.
|
Ivan:
[7:58]
| So maybe, well, we got Socko back. Yes.
|
Sam:
[8:01]
| And, and so this is the glum show.
|
Ivan:
[8:04]
| I love Socko. This is the glum show. Yes.
|
Sam:
[8:08]
| Okay, fine. Okay. Okay. So we know, uh, because I'm still catching up and we'll be, you know, cause you know, I also keep watching more.
So whether or not I'm watching more faster than we're going through these, I think is, uh, I don't know, probably cause I don't think I watch a movie every week, but mine's going to be a movie again.
So do you want to go first with something non-movie or should I start out with a movie?
|
Ivan:
[8:32]
| No, let's start with a movie. Let's start with a movie. Let's, let's jump into.
|
Sam:
[8:36]
| Okay. Well, the next movie on my list, I watched in April was Apocalypse Now from 1979. Oh my God. Wow. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[8:44]
| Have you seen the movie? I have, but long, long ago.
Oh my God.
In the eighties. Yes.
|
Sam:
[8:54]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[8:55]
| I have not seen it again. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[8:57]
| And just to, let me just check to make sure I'm correct on this.
Um, yeah, This was another one from the AFI Top 100 Movies of the first hundred years of movies.
It was number 28 on the list.
I do not think I had seen it before. I mean, I knew a couple of plot points.
I maybe had seen a couple of scenes, but I do not think I had watched the whole movie from beginning to end.
The book was based off of The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
I remember being assigned that book in high school, but I do not remember actually finishing reading the book either.
I remember talking about it in school, but I do not remember actually reading the freaking book.
So if any of my high school English teachers are listening, I'm sorry.
I did not properly read the book. I just.
|
Ivan:
[10:10]
| Cliff Notes?
|
Sam:
[10:11]
| I, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't, I think maybe in my entire school career, I bought like the Cliff Notes once.
And, um, the rest of the time, if I didn't finish something, I would sort of just bullshit my way through based on like what kind of conversation was happening about it and guessing what happened in between.
Um, and, uh, listening to the other discussion of it in class and blah, blah, blah, and maybe skimming a little bit in the book. Okay.
I don't know. But anyway, yeah, Apocalypse Now.
The quick summary, I guess, is that someone was, the main character was sent to go get this one officer who'd gone rogue and, And, you know, it's during the Vietnam war, but they were, the officer who went rogue was in Cambodia.
So they had to go up the river to catch them and do whatever.
Uh, he was assigned this task sort of unofficially because, uh, he was supposed to go and I guess kill the guy.
Um, but, uh, anyway, it follows his adventures as he goes up the river.
It's, you know, a, Yeah, it's got a whole bunch of like horror of war kinds of things and the like crazy juxtapositions and things like that, that, uh, you know, where you have people doing, um, doing things that would be humorous if they weren't in the middle of a war, you've got people that are barely sane, you've got war crimes and atrocities happening, you know, all this kind of stuff, you know, I'm, I'm reading the Wikipedia page, it says, Apocalypse Now is today considered one of the greatest films ever made.
It was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
It won some awards when it first came out, nominated for eight Academy Awards, blah, blah, blah.
I'll give it a thumbs up. It's not really my kind of movie, But I will admit, it is the kind that...
I shouldn't say it's not my kind of movie. It is one of those that is actually affecting.
It keeps your attention the whole way through. Um, uh, you know, it's.
I it's shorter than I, than I thought it was. It's like, um, well, no, no, no, nevermind. I was reading the wrong number.
Um, it's 147 minutes. Uh, so it, it is a lengthy, it's a lengthy movie.
Uh, but it is one of those that, you know, it, it is compelling.
It, it gets you. And especially like when some of the war crimes are happening, you're like, Oh my God. And, um, you know, there are a lot of awful things that happened in this movie.
Um, but you know, it's a war movie. If a lot of awful things don't happen in a war movie, it's not really a war movie.
|
Ivan:
[13:24]
| Not really a war movie.
|
Sam:
[13:25]
| Yeah. I mean, I guess there are some comedies that are sat in wars and things like that.
|
Ivan:
[13:30]
| And certainly good morning Vietnam, but even like a dad, that was a comedy, um, you know, uh, uh, uh, bad things happen. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[13:40]
| I've never seen, I've never seen that one. Oh my God.
|
Ivan:
[13:44]
| Well, add it to the list.
|
Sam:
[13:45]
| Yes. Add it to the list for sure.
|
Ivan:
[13:47]
| Um, but I, you know, at some point maybe you'll retire is what I'm thinking and you know, I'm going to do is we will have some, yeah, we'll go.
We'll have a fucking watch, but we'll, we'll, we'll know. I I'm not, I won't go up there. No, I'll drag you somewhere. I don't know.
I I'll, I'll bring you here.
I'll have you visit. There you go. And I will watch, you know, like a thousand movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll just pull up a whole bunch of movies and we'll just like, okay. All right. Okay. Let's, let's go through this list. Where are we on now?
|
Sam:
[14:19]
| We'll rent an actual theater and have a movies. Sam has never seen film festival.
|
Ivan:
[14:25]
| That doesn't actually sound bad. I heard that renting movie theaters is not as expensive as you would think.
|
Sam:
[14:31]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[14:31]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[14:32]
| Because they're, they're, they're having trouble filling the places.
Cause everybody watches stuff at home now.
|
Ivan:
[14:37]
| Right. So, you know, we just go rent the damn theater and we're like, okay, production, fire it up. And now that they, because they serve food and stuff at these places, right.
|
Sam:
[14:48]
| At some of them, some of them.
|
Ivan:
[14:49]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we can get food and stuff. Yeah, I like this.
|
Sam:
[14:54]
| Yeah. Anyway, thumbs up for a pop up.
A pop up, but thumbs up for Apocalypse. Now it's a heavy movie.
It's not a light watch. It's a long movie, but it's worth seeing.
It's it's good filmmaking.
It's a classic as you know, it was on the AFI list of the Top 100 Movies of the 100 Years and won all kinds of other, well I guess nominated for a bunch of other awards. And yeah.
I don't want to say much more without spoilers, but I mean, I guess it's 1979, but yeah, I still don't like giving spoilers, even if the old movies, but you know, um, I think you could, you're, you're giving a fair warning spoiler alert.
|
Ivan:
[15:45]
| It's a 79 movie. I think we can stand a spoiler.
|
Sam:
[15:50]
| Stand a spoiler. Um, okay. What's a good spoiler to give then?
Um, no, what's one that you wanted to mention something that you know well i didn't actually have one in mind oh well but i could look i could look for a lot well you don't have to i mean if you didn't know i thought maybe you had something in mind that you wanted to nah but there are some classic scenes like the the i mean the one that i think i recognized clearly even though i had not seen the movie, uh, was the one with the helicopters in the morning and the guy saying, I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
And, um, there's a lot around that that makes it sort of make more sense in context, but, um, yeah.
Anyway, good, good movie. Watch it. It, again, it's not like a fun movie, but it is a good movie. If that makes sense. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[16:46]
| I mean, I, I, I'm having difficulty like, you know, putting the words fun into this movie, it's, you know, yeah, not really, yeah, not fun, but it's, but it's, you know, it's I mean, a good movie.
It doesn't have to necessarily fun. It could be a it's a drama.
It's a story. Yeah, maybe, you know, maybe you may wind up sad, you know.
Um, you know, somebody recently shared, uh, a scene from a movie.
Um, uh, and it's a scene that if people have watched a movie, they know what a scene it's near the end of the movie. It's a movie called Ford versus Ferrari.
|
Sam:
[17:29]
| Um, I've not seen that. Also, you'll add it to the list.
|
Ivan:
[17:32]
| There, there is a scene at the end. That's very sad. Okay. I'm not gonna, I'm not going to spoil it because that movie is relatively recent, But it's one of those things that if somebody put up something in a car group, we're talking about this and it's like, look, I mean, I'm sorry, but all of you to say that you didn't start crying when this happened or lying.
And they're right because I just seen the movie was on TV the other day and You know, it's it's just terrible and you know It's it's based that that that that that movie is based on a real story And so the scene that happened there wasn't just a, It's what happened. OK, for real.
And so it's it's it's worse, OK? And so, yeah, I you know, but and and that's a movie that I give a wholehearted thumbs up. It was well made.
Now, included some people that I. Yeah, truly, I mean, you know, people that I admired in in car racing, including some that I, you know, some that I met in person.
I mean, to that to that extent, you know that I went through the trouble of going to meet them in person. And so, you know, yeah, I anyway.
So, yes, movies don't have to be fun. No, some of them. Some of the a good movie.
|
Sam:
[19:00]
| Some of the best movies are not fun at all.
|
Ivan:
[19:04]
| At all. No, no, not at all.
|
Sam:
[19:06]
| They are the ones that sort of reach in and pull your heart and grab it and throw it on the floor and stomp on it. Yeah.
You know, some of those are incredible and leave you wiped out.
|
Ivan:
[19:20]
| And you know what? But they are not movies that that unfortunately, I cringe at watching it again because of.
One of the actors involved, unfortunately, the movie American Beauty, have you watched that one?
|
Sam:
[19:36]
| I believe I have seen American.
|
Ivan:
[19:39]
| Oh, thank God. Oh, I think.
Fortunately, the movie has Kevin Spacey in it. Yeah. You know.
I mean, who is a brilliant actor, but at the same time, it's just I know that some people don't have an issue separating the art from any other reputed bad acts, but I do.
I mean, so that movie is not a happy movie.
|
Sam:
[20:07]
| Yeah, I am wrong. I was thinking of a different movie. I have not seen American Beauty.
|
Ivan:
[20:12]
| Well, that's another one for your list. Yeah. Jesus, this list.
For God's sakes. to help.
Fuck. I'm fucking listening. I mean, literally, we're going to have to wait until we retire, but we're just going to be like, okay, here we go.
We got to, all right, where's the theater? Let's go.
Queue up the films. Just bring us food. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[20:35]
| Now, I will note also, you know, the other day you mentioned watching the new director's cut of Star Trek, the motion picture versus the original and how they actually shortened it and improved it a little bit, uh, apocalypse now is one of the ones that has a couple of additional versions.
I think the one I watched was the original.
There's also one called the redo version, redux, R E D U X and the final cut version.
Uh, there's no Wikipedia page on the final cut version, but the redux version was done in 2001 and added, added an additional 49 minutes to the movie, making it a running time of nine minutes, making it a total running time of 202 minutes. Wow.
I did not watch that version.
|
Ivan:
[21:34]
| That's that's, that's a long movie.
|
Sam:
[21:36]
| That's a long movie.
|
Ivan:
[21:38]
| I like, I have, you know, I, but I will say that if it's a good movie, just, just to be clear, that's three hours long, that's, this is 202 minutes is almost three and a half.
|
Sam:
[21:52]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[21:54]
| But I've watched three hour movies, you know, but what I'm saying is that if the movie is good, three hours, 20 minutes.
Yeah, I'm happy with a movie that's longer.
If the movie is really good, I mean, like right now, come on, we, we, we watch, although here's the thing, you know, these things we binge watch this.
|
Sam:
[22:14]
| Yeah, that's what I was about to say. That was, that's what I was about to say.
If you give me a four hour movie, that's fucking awesome.
Okay, great. I want to see it, but could it be a four episode mini series with an hour each? Could be.
Because I'll be honest, I'm probably not actually going to see the four-hour movie in the theater.
I'm going to be watching it at home, and I'm going to stop and take breaks several times.
I'm going to use the bathroom, I'm going to get snacks, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. I probably won't even watch it all in one day.
I'll watch part of it and then be like, okay, I'm done for tonight.
Pick this up tomorrow, you know, like if it's that long, I mean, it can still be good, like, you know, a three hour movie, a four hour movie, even, but the idea that someone's really going to sit down and watch it from beginning to end without pause, I think gets kind of unrealistic the longer it gets.
I mean, and that's why in the olden days, they actually had intermissions in the middle of movies where you would go to the bathroom, you would get your snacks and you'd come back.
|
Ivan:
[23:26]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[23:26]
| Indeed. You know, and that makes sense.
If you've got a long movie like that, you better as fuck have an intermission, you know, if, if you're going to expect anybody to watch it like in theaters, as opposed to where they can pause at any time and do whatever.
|
Ivan:
[23:42]
| Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So thumbs up, right?
|
Sam:
[23:46]
| Thumbs up for apocalypse now. And it, you know, and honestly, it's, it's been, you know, it will be good to catch up on these because when it's a few months later, sometimes the memories fade a little bit, but I believe overall, it was one of the ones where, yeah, it does get you, it compels you, you want to watch it.
Um, and it's just well done. Like it's a well done movie. And so yeah, thumbs up. Okay. I'm done. It's it's your turn, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[24:14]
| It's my turn. It's my turn that, um, I'm trying to remember, um, what the hell we've talked about recently.
|
Sam:
[24:26]
| Well, I will tell you if we've already discussed it. Oh God.
|
Ivan:
[24:30]
| Well, um...
Yeah, well, yeah, I know. So I did not. It's in the list here.
So we didn't talk about it. Let's stay on the movies, shall we? OK.
|
Sam:
[24:45]
| All right.
|
Ivan:
[24:47]
| So I put down another movie that I watched. Never say never again.
|
Sam:
[24:51]
| Oh, yes. You teased this last week, actually. Or you actually actually used to use it like two weeks and three weeks ago.
And then you said you were going to cover it next week and then you didn't.
So now several weeks later, it's time. Yes, yes.
|
Ivan:
[25:06]
| So so let's let's talk about it. So Never Say Never Again, OK, was a movie that after Sean Connery had retired, OK, Roger Moore was James Bond, OK, for for several movies.
There was some issue with the rights where somebody was saying, Hey, I We have rights to this you know of Ian Fleming story okay and an independent company decided to do this.
Movie never say never again there are legal problems or whatever and for whatever the hell reason after Sean Connery had retired he had been like.
You know, whatever, um, you know, out of being bond forever, he came back to do this move. Okay. Um, it's, uh, I will, I will do some spoilers.
|
Sam:
[26:10]
| Warning on this spoilers.
|
Ivan:
[26:12]
| Spoilers. Uh, so what, what year was that movie?
|
Sam:
[26:15]
| This was, uh, 83, 83.
|
Ivan:
[26:17]
| Yes. Um, the whole, the movie starts with this entire thing where, um, The bad guys specter is this organization that appears in many other Bond films as the bad guys. Okay, all right. They are just this evil conglomerate evil ink basically, okay, in the Bond movie.
|
Sam:
[26:43]
| Right, okay.
|
Ivan:
[26:43]
| And because they are, they're organized and stuff or whatever.
And so these guys, they decide that their next endeavor, they want to steal two nuclear bombs from the U.S.
Military. And they're going to do this by somehow stealing them during some cruise missile tests done by the U.S.
OK, where they managed to change the dummy warheads into nuclear, you know, nuclear bombs.
And it's so and they threatened that they're going to put these bombs in a couple of different places unless they get.
A huge huge huge huge ransom ok alright.
And so the movie starts from there and whatever what there's a couple of very interesting scenes you know action scenes that are done.
A couple of actors and actresses that became very famous or Barbara Carrera.
She did an iconic like evil woman role in this in this flick.
OK, it was a time when bomb women were like for many years, just dumb blondes in movies. That's all they were. They were there just to look to look pretty and be for the most part dumb.
And she was just oh my God. She was just an amazing evil person in the movie and that was great shot goddard did a great job of the movie the locations the filming was really good the plot.
I'm. And it still holds up okay it's a crazy thing what are the cool things about this movie okay is that there is a yacht that is used in the movie. back then.
|
Sam:
[28:40]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[28:41]
| That was originally commissioned and built by Adnan Khashoggi, the arm, the very famous arms dealer. Right. Okay.
|
Sam:
[28:49]
| Involved in the Iran-Contra affair, if I remember correctly.
|
Ivan:
[28:52]
| Yes. Who, by the way, sold that yacht to a well-known person that became president of the United States.
Donald Trump, it became the Trump princess, okay, for a brief time.
At first, it was called Nabila, and they used it for filming.
This, at the time, was one of the biggest mega yacht that existed.
This thing, it's still around. The thing looked thoroughly modern.
I mean, it was just, it looked cool then, and it's still, the style works today.
That yacht is it's still so enduring that even after Trump sold it, the guy that owns it is a prince. Oh, God.
The the Saudi prince bin Talal, he bought the yacht and he still he still owns it. OK. Called Kingdom Three. OK.
Like right now, if I remember correctly, Kingdom five K.R.
According to the five K.R. Yes, Prince, all we'd been tall, all who very I mean, he was very known in the investing industry in the U.S. He for a while was the largest shareholder in Citigroup.
OK, and other investments that was very famously detained by MBS when he detained all the rich people in at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh in order to basically shake them all down. I vaguely remember that.
|
Sam:
[30:15]
| Yep, yep.
|
Ivan:
[30:17]
| So he was one of those there, you know, but but yeah, but that yacht is still there and it appeared in that movie and played a played an important part in the in the plot itself.
And so I watched it again recently.
I'm wondering, does this movie hold up? And I will say that that's one of the that's that's a Bond movie that still was 30 plus years later holds up very well.
Very entertaining. I like the thumbs up very, very entertaining watch. Okay. All right.
|
Sam:
[30:49]
| This is so what you're telling me, I have not seen this movie.
I don't think, but what you're telling me, I get added to the list.
What you're telling me is this is one of those fun movies.
|
Ivan:
[31:00]
| This one is fun. Yes. This one is entertaining.
|
Sam:
[31:03]
| Absolutely.
|
Ivan:
[31:05]
| Okay. Yes. There's another guy that appears in the movie. Oh my God.
That has got to be one of his first roles. Mr. Bean. He's in the movie, too.
|
Sam:
[31:16]
| Oh, Rowan Atkinson.
|
Ivan:
[31:18]
| Yes, Rowan Atkinson is in the movie as an embassy embassy attache in the Bahamas. OK.
You know, there's there's a few people, you know, Kim Basinger's in the movie as well.
This actress, you got Sean Connery, you got Rowan Atkinson.
That's you know, it's it's a pretty good cast. They did very well, it was beautifully filmed, but it's entertaining, you know.
Watch it.
|
Sam:
[31:48]
| And it's a rogue James Bond movie.
|
Ivan:
[31:52]
| Yes. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[31:52]
| Okay. But more, but more James Bond than, um, there's, there's, I was just looking it up while we were talking.
There's some people who try to claim that the Sean Connery character in the movie, The Rock, which I have also not watched, is actually a retired James Bond.
|
Ivan:
[32:21]
| I don't see that.
|
Sam:
[32:25]
| Didn't didn't didn't really. You can look up articles about like, you know, theory and claiming that.
|
Ivan:
[32:31]
| Yeah, yeah. But it doesn't. Hey, I watched a rock.
|
Sam:
[32:35]
| I that really didn't didn't make you feel like it was now the James Bond character.
|
Ivan:
[32:43]
| No, no, not really.
|
Sam:
[32:44]
| Okay. Are we done with movies for today?
|
Ivan:
[32:51]
| Done with the movies.
|
Sam:
[32:52]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[32:54]
| Well, our Cisco Lieber segment is over.
|
Sam:
[32:56]
| Yes. Cisco and Lieber sign off.
|
Ivan:
[32:59]
| They're all dead, right? Yes.
|
Sam:
[33:02]
| I believe they are both dead now.
|
Ivan:
[33:03]
| One of them. They're both dead, right?
|
Sam:
[33:06]
| I think so. You're checking right now. I presume.
|
Ivan:
[33:09]
| Presume. I know, but I was just trusting your judgment.
Jesus goes dead. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[33:21]
| And he burns is dead. Come on.
|
Ivan:
[33:22]
| Yeah, they're both dead.
I thought some doubts. That sucks.
|
Sam:
[33:32]
| You know, I watched that show.
I didn't know! You know, I mean, back in the day, like the movies.
|
Ivan:
[33:40]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[33:42]
| And then they, they had a renamed version of it.
Like when they, there was a contract thing and then they continued doing it with a different name.
Like if I remember right and blah, blah, blah.
Yeah. So yeah, it was, it was at the movies from 1982 to 1986 and then it was just Cisco and Ebert from 86 to 99, uh, cause they like move their production company or some whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know how that stuff works.
|
Ivan:
[34:11]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[34:12]
| Anyway. Okay. We are going to take a break, and then on to, like, other thingies. me.
Bop a doodle.
|
Ivan:
[34:23]
| Thingies! Thingies! We have thingies!
|
Sound:
[34:31]
| You're listening to this podcast. Do you like it? No! Do you want to support the show? No!
Well, after you have subscribed to the show, followed us on Facebook and told all your friends they should be listening to, what else can you do? I won't subscribe!
You can help fund our Patreon at patreon.com slash curmudgeonscorner.
Patreon is a way you can throw us a few bucks a month to help out with the expenses of the show.
You know, web hosting, equipment, a little bit of advertising to promote the show, and maybe every once in a while some much needed sedatives for Yvonne.
At different contribution levels, you can get a mention on the show, a curmudgeon's corner postcard, or even a curmudgeon's corner mug.
Fun stuff! Not fun! In any case, the contributions help tell us that you enjoy and appreciate the show.
I really, really hate curmudgeon's corner! Are we worth a buck a month?
No! Five bucks a month? No!
Or if you are nuts about us, maybe even more!
One hundred billion, billion dollars, even though you don't have anywhere near a billion dollars.
If we're worth anything to you at all, send it our way at patreon.com slash curmudgeons corner.
Alex hates, really, really hates curmudgeons corner. That's what you mean, isn't it? That I hate curmudgeons corner. But I really do. Okay.
|
Sam:
[36:11]
| And I guess it's my turn again, huh?
|
Ivan:
[36:14]
| It is indeed.
|
Sam:
[36:15]
| So I'm going to steal the most obvious topic.
|
Ivan:
[36:19]
| Oh God.
|
Sam:
[36:22]
| And that is the wonderful world of text based social media.
|
Ivan:
[36:29]
| Text based social media. Is that what we're calling it?
|
Sam:
[36:31]
| I don't know.
|
Ivan:
[36:32]
| You know, no, that is what people are calling it the last few days. Yes.
|
Sam:
[36:36]
| Yes. I guess there are two parts of this, and they're all related.
It's Twitter versus Threads.
And I guess Mastodon's in the mix up there somewhere. But starting out, like at the beginning of last week, we had Twitter continuing its meltdown.
Anyway, like regardless of whatever Threads was doing, Twitter was doing stuff last weekend.
They were blocking access to Twitter if you weren't logged on.
They were rate limiting.
And you know, like you could only view a certain number of tweets before you just had to be done for the day, I guess.
|
Ivan:
[37:20]
| Um, yeah, there were like 600, like, yeah, it was really low. Really low number.
|
Sam:
[37:27]
| Yeah. I mean, and they were lowest if you were a new user and then if you were a regular user, they were a little bit higher. And then if you were, if you were paying and they were even higher, but it was still kind of low, even for the paid tier.
Um, and supposedly, you know, there was, there was some back and forth about exactly why this was what Elon said was, this is because of bots and scrapers and all these folks degrading the surf, the degrading the service, and they had to just like, Tamp down everything to like get control of things again.
Now there are a couple of things. One, people pointed out that if it really was just sort of a automated scraping kind of issue, there are ways to more selectively block those things as opposed to just slowing everything down.
But then people also pointed out that.
Twitter's contract with Google expired because they weren't paying bills, they didn't renew it, and so Google was cutting them off, so they had capacity issues too.
But the bottom line is that between... You know, and both of these things, like the you can't see things if you're not logged on, they have reversed that, you can now see tweets without logging in again.
It was like that for like five days or something, I forget exactly how many days, but it was a few...
|
Ivan:
[39:00]
| It was a number of days. It was crazy.
|
Sam:
[39:02]
| Yeah, it was a few days. Um, and then I, I don't know if the, if the rate limits have been completely lifted now, but they are higher than they started with at least.
Uh, so they backed off a little bit and I guess things are kind of more stable, but I keep hearing about like problems with like the latest I heard was something about the, if, if you're accessing, um, via the web or via the desktop web stuff, That was still unstable.
Um, you know, so they, they, they've been having some issues.
Anything to say about the issues before we talk about threads?
|
Ivan:
[39:40]
| Well, the thing is, uh, we talked to, well, at least no, no, we both talked about this, uh, going back to when he took over Twitter, where, yeah, he came in and with a chainsaw just started cutting through people without understanding anything about the operation.
And my experience with these kinds of complex systems is that because they involve so many.
Interconnected develop software developments that turn into the one product.
Yeah, they, one change somewhere winds up breaking something else.
Some changes are documented that well, or how certain things work.
Is it every, not everything is written down where there is a book where you could look up L how this was coded.
And so when you get rid of all the people that did that and understand it and I've been maintaining it.
When you start breaking shit, you're going to get to a point where you don't know what the fuck you did and why it's happening.
|
Sam:
[41:13]
| Frankly, that would be the case even if you just fired the people and didn't do any of the other crap Elon is doing, that would still be true.
But you start layering on top of that, like not paying bills and all the crazy decisions he's made about moderation and everything else that scares people away, like he shut down data centers.
|
Ivan:
[41:37]
| He, he, he stopped paying bills for, you know, hosting.
He stopped paying bills for a whole bunch of shit. I mean, you know, uh, it's just man, you know, it's like a Jenga piece, man. At some point you're going to take out the wrong piece.
|
Sam:
[41:57]
| Well, and so far, like, to be fair here, Twitter has had a bunch of outages, but they've always been able to patch it back together.
So yeah, you know, I feel like the end of Twitter, when it comes, if it comes, I'm assuming at some point it will, will not necessarily be the irretrievable tech breakdown.
Instead, it will be the slow descent into financial implosion.
|
Ivan:
[42:32]
| Well, here's what happens with these breakdowns. Almost all of these, there's some way to get around it.
Somebody smart enough can figure out a way to get around it.
The way that they're usually doing it.
Is by doing some other jury rig repair because they have no idea what the fuck was done at first in the first place so you wind up just well okay so A isn't talking to B fuck this I just gotta code this to talk to A to B and cross my fingers hopefully this works and move to production without even testing it for one second because you've got no time right because you're usually a problem right now where you've got this psychopath chairman CEO who I'm sure is breathing down their neck because something is broken.
|
Sam:
[43:21]
| Wait, wait, wait, wait, Yvonne, he's not CEO anymore. So presumably chairman, I said chairman, you said chairman slash CEO. Oh, well, yeah, you threw CEO in there, but he's not CEO anymore.
He is just the biggest investor or whatever. So presumably has nothing to do it anymore.
|
Ivan:
[43:41]
| Oh, well, the biggest investor.
|
Sam:
[43:43]
| Yeah, but yeah, I mean, because he's not the sole owner, he's got all kinds of investor, but anyway, the point is the new CEO should be handling everything. Right? Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[43:51]
| Uh-huh. Yes, of course. She was really on top of everything this week.
|
Sam:
[43:56]
| We didn't hear a damn word from her. Did we?
|
Ivan:
[43:58]
| I think she issued some meek statement at some point, but I do think that the deal is the one we've been hearing from still correct. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[44:07]
| Like he he's been like tweeting about it and saying shit and.
|
Ivan:
[44:11]
| And he slowed down, you know, a bit since she brought her on, but with the clusterfuck and you know, with other stuff happening, he just took back the microphone.
Yeah. You know, and you know, there was another outage today as well.
I don't know if you saw that. I shared that.
|
Sam:
[44:35]
| I did see, I, I mentioned that earlier, there was something, something going on with the desktop stuff.
|
Ivan:
[44:40]
| Yeah, and that was another outage today, okay?
And the outages, I don't know if you saw, listen, the outages have been becoming more frequent and worse.
|
Sam:
[44:52]
| Okay. And even when it's not completely out, I've heard more reports of things not working.
|
Ivan:
[44:58]
| Yeah. Just things not working.
|
Sam:
[45:02]
| Like the site is up, but like, like I saw someone mentioned that for a lot of people for, I don't know, a few hours, it wasn't like extensive.
Like you could re you could read stuff, but you couldn't reply to anybody for a while.
And then they fixed it. And then, you know, but it's just, everything's glitchy.
And then people were complaining too. They like, uh, they shut down the version of tweet deck that everybody liked.
Tweet deck is the sort of the pro interface to Twitter that they provided.
That was actually somewhat like what I used to like in tweet bot is chronological.
You had multi columns, you, you could configure a whole bunch of stuff and people really loved it.
Um, there they have had lunch for a while, a new version of it that everybody hated, They left the old one up so you could actually pick between the interfaces.
They, they turned off the old one completely in the last week.
And so all the people who relied on it were like upset, you know, but I mean, at this point, how has anybody surprised, I'm surprised the new version is even still up, you know, and he's not just going to use the regular one, you know?
Yeah. Anyway. So. Elon's self-destruction of Twitter continues, but there's still a lot of people hanging on.
A lot of people didn't like the alternatives that were out there, but then Meta just launched this thing called Threads.
And threads is basically Meta's Twitter-ish thing, but it has the immediate advantage over every other Twitter alternative out there and over Twitter itself that if you have an Instagram account, which basically everybody in the universe does practically, about a a billion, a billion people, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, something like that. Not quite everybody, but you know, it's a lot of people.
If you have an Instagram account, you basically click, click, click, boom, you're all set up on threads and ready to go.
And so they launched this thing, and apparently there was a little bit of pent-up demand from people who were unhappy with how Twitter was going, but couldn't get an invite to Blue Sky and thought posts were stupid.
|
Ivan:
[47:36]
| That was the thing you got and because that's the one thing that I found stupid.
First of all, Blue Sky, this whole thing. Well, because there was another one before Blue Sky that also needed an invite was there. I can't remember.
|
Sam:
[47:50]
| I can't remember there.
|
Ivan:
[47:51]
| There was this whole invite only thing to me was like, what kind of bullshit is this?
I'm like, this is so dumb. Well, I, I, I, those I just, you know, which I never is one reason.
I'm one of these guys. I, you know, I remember when I, I used to like going out a lot to like, uh, clubs. Okay. If the club had a line that I couldn't just pay off somebody to get in, fuck it. I'm not going the hell with this.
|
Sam:
[48:20]
| I'm out. I apply that to almost everything. If there's a line, I'm like, screw it.
|
Ivan:
[48:25]
| I'm out. Forget it. Unless I, I never went on a line to get a fucking iPhone, for example, fuck this. I'm like, look, mail it to me when it's ready. I'm not doing that.
|
Sam:
[48:35]
| I admit, I did do that once for like a Mac OS update that was coming out.
It was like a little party. It was kind of fun. But other than that, no, I, yeah, yeah. And I would not do that today.
|
Ivan:
[48:47]
| By yeah, I, I, I'm just, you know, and, and I'm like this thing, I need an invite.
Fuck all of you. I'm not doing this shit. I'm just not happening.
And then, and then, and then by the way, and then, you know, I've never liked Jack Dorsey, I think he's a, I thought he's a fucking dickhead.
Okay. And then the last straw recently, okay, was that fucker endorsed RFK Jr. Yeah, I'm like fuck him.
|
Sam:
[49:13]
| Anyway, Blue Sky, the invite thing was, I think, for two reasons.
One, it's very much, from everything I've heard, is sort of alpha-ish.
They don't have all the features they want in there yet, and they weren't set up and ready to scale, so they were letting people in intentionally slowly so they could figure things out as they went.
And also to build hype. It's always to build hype as well. So anyway, there were, you know, the people couldn't get an invite to blue sky.
People were turned off by Mastodon because it's too complicated and it's too much work and you know, and they don't understand how to sign up.
And even if they sign up, then in order to get something, you have, you have to do all the work on Mastodon. You have to go find people to find and you have to do all the work.
|
Ivan:
[50:02]
| I mean, I will say that it's definitely, you know, I've onboarded to both.
I do like Mastodon, but it's not easy.
|
Sam:
[50:11]
| Um, uh, like there's, there's, there's no question.
There's no question. The whole idea about Mastodon is you are in control of everything.
You go find people, you follow those people, and then you see what those people post or you follow hashtags or whatever, but it's on you.
You have to do that. you have to build your experience.
And my own experience on Mastodon, I did not find it satisfying at all until I was.
Following at least 500 people and in order to find those 500 people, I had a lot of work.
It took work. It took searching for things and finding people and following accounts that pointed to other accounts and like, you know, aggressively following anything that looked interesting.
And I used some of these Twitter migration tools that let you scan your Twitter list and find people who were other also on Mastodon.
On, it took work and it took me probably a couple months of aggressively working on it until I found the experience even remotely satisfying and I'm now at like 1,200 people I'm following or something like that.
Now I'm fairly satisfied, but even now if I am checking in the middle of the night, I'm like, God damn it's slow.
|
Ivan:
[51:35]
| You know, and, and, and, and speaking of, of, of Elon Musk doing more stupid shit.
|
Sam:
[51:40]
| So he tried to, and then we'll get back to threads eventually. Yeah, go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[51:43]
| You know, yeah. Uh, you know, and, and other people have been doing, he, he earlier today decided to sue a law firm that had worked for Twitter for their bills.
|
Sam:
[51:54]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[51:56]
| He sued he, he, and by the way, this is a really good law firm.
Okay. And I, I am just like, look, if I'm, if I'm the chief partners of the law firm, I have to be just absolutely laughing my off. Okay.
Because you want to talk about the biggest waste of fucking, you know, really you, you want, it's like, I I'm trying to find the equivalent of like you as an entity, the dead suing a law firm, I, you know, because of their legal bills to you.
I, I don't, this is so dumb.
|
Sam:
[52:37]
| Yes. Anyway, the point is there are all these people that wanted to get off Twitter, but for one, one reason or another, the various alternatives out there weren't for them, um, threads launches makes this trivially easy to get on.
They structure it right now. Like there, there is no, like, yes, you can follow people, but the.
The feed is 100% algorithmic right now. There's even, I saw some people post some tips on how to change things to see the people you follow first, but you still mostly see algorithmic stuff. Even if you've done that. Um, and.
Oh, it, by the way, it lets you automatically like follow all the people that you followed on Instagram and vice versa and stuff. So you have a built-in social graph if you've been using Instagram much.
Mine is pretty small because I barely ever used Instagram. Like I'd be lucky if I opened it four times a year, but the, I actually, you use Instagram, but it's not just that I use Instagram.
|
Ivan:
[53:44]
| I actually followed a lot of people, both on Twitter and Instagram. Okay.
|
Sam:
[53:50]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[53:51]
| So, so to me, it was pretty handy.
The fact that it was able to pull those and it also did something that there were a number of people that I had been following on Instagram that I also followed on Twitter, but you know, that we're not on mastodon, right?
Right. And so all of a sudden, all those people that I, you know, had not seen much from Twitter, okay?
All of a sudden, they're all, all of a sudden, I got them all, I have them all back!
|
Sam:
[54:23]
| Yeah, I mean, I, I posted about this too and mentioned it in our curmudgeon's corner slack.
I posted on Mastodon. This was the first thing within, within minutes of opening up the app.
I mean, the first thing I joked is like, I literally like saw like half a dozen things from you, Yvonne, like the instant I opened it up, it's the first thing it pushed at me was a bunch of Yvonne crap and I'm like, I'm like, okay, whatever.
But then in the next few minutes, I immediately saw some people that I used to look forward to seeing their stuff on Twitter, but they have not gone on Mastodon, and I saw them engaging in there already, and I'm like, I miss these folks.
For whatever reason, they never found Mastodon compelling. They never moved over. They stuck with Twitter to the end, and all of them were expressing joy that they had somewhere else to go.
Because I don't see how any of them could have failed to recognize the deterioration at Twitter.
And so there's this huge demand for something Twitter-like that's not Twitter, but also doesn't have the various perceived and or real deficiencies of the other alternatives that were out there, what, what Facebook slash Meta has done here is make something brain dead, easy to get into and structured in such a way that you immediately, immediately have a full feed full of stuff because it is, it is the people you've followed from Instagram.
Plus they're, they're pushing all kinds of stuff algorithmically out there.
So like I was instantly seeing all kinds of brands, all kinds of other stuff, you know, boom, boom, boom, it was all there. Now.
I, you know, one, one thing I, I sort of, they say they're going to add a timeline.
That's just people you follow.
Um, and we'll talk about Federation with mastodon in a minute too, but they say they're going to add that, which might make it something a little bit different.
But for now, the way I, I see actually the comparison, um, well, I've seen a lot of people saying it's just Instagram without the pictures.
Um, and I haven't used instant gram enough to like figure that out, but.
I see comparisons with Tik TOK as well. Like for, for Tik TOK, like, yeah, they have a followed tab, but I've followed relatively few people there.
And don't go to my tab of people.
I explicitly followed very often because for the most part, if they've posted something new, it will show up in my algorithmic feed and the, the quote unquote, joy of Tik TOK is discovering all this stuff that you may not have explicitly followed.
And their algorithm is good enough that it very quickly picks up the kinds of things you like, and you're interested in blah, blah, blah.
And I feel like threads is kind of going for that a little bit.
Um, and that maybe if I, the more, maybe it's one of those things where the more you use it, the more the feed will be tailored to the stuff you like.
I don't know. I haven't used it quite enough for that, although I have been checking in on it several times a day just to see.
Uh, so far I don't feel like I've used it enough to like, it's not, I'd say the ratio of stuff I'm interested in to stuff I'm not is low right now.
Like there's a lot of crap that I'm like, I don't give a shit about any of this, but maybe if I used it more, that would improve.
Um, but the, the bottom line though, is like, you know, we were talking about how Mastodon is hard. You have to put work into it to get value out of it.
You don't have to do that here. And you saw all kinds of people like expressing joy that here's this thing.
I see all these people I like, I see all this cool stuff. I can interact with it. And it was easy and not Twitter.
And how many, there are over a hundred million now, I believe, like have already signed up for this thing. And it's been out like what 48 hours at this point.
|
Ivan:
[58:39]
| Not even not even not even 3636 hours.
|
Sam:
[58:42]
| Um, and, and by the way, it hasn't crashed.
|
Ivan:
[58:49]
| Yeah, the load of getting 100 billion people Look, I love Macedon, but...
13 million people, and many of the servers were getting crushed.
|
Sam:
[58:59]
| Yeah, because Mastodon also was having a big spike of people from all the problems Twitter was having over the weekend.
And if you were on a smaller server, most like I am, yeah, like I, I, my main account, my Apple smear account is on on Mastodon that social and it's the biggest one.
And I did not notice any issues there whatsoever.
But my election graphs account is on newsy.social and it's a relatively small one. And it did not go down, but I noticed it was way backlogged.
Like there was somebody who sent a message and they tagged both the election graphs account and the Apple SMAE account, asking me some questions about how I calculate the numbers and what certain things mean on election graphs and blah, blah, blah.
And I love to get that kind of feedback And I'm like ready to answer it, but I only got the alert on my Apple SMA account. And I'm like, what's going on.
And then I checked over on the election graphs one and just looking for.
Posts from Apple SMA because election graphs follows Apple SMA.
And I noticed that the most recent thing was like hours old, you know, and, and it had none of my most recent stuff. And so what was happening was the smaller server was just backlogged.
It was and I eventually got all the notices from that guy who was asking questions over at election graphs, but like two hours later Whereas I got it instantly over on the apples may account on mastodon dot social and so I answered on the one that got it first and then Retuted it or whatever from election graphs later, But yeah, because one of the things that you know the zealots about Mastodon are all excited about the fact that, you know, well it's federated and there's all kinds of servers and there's no central control and blah, blah, blah. This is one of the downsides.
Is that, you know, your experience varies highly wildly based on which server you're on and, and in specific there, they're like a lot of the zealots are like, don't get on the big servers.
You want to be on a small server specifically for your community. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:20]
| The problem is, and look at, I, and I've been tolerating that, but like my small server, the issue that, that is, that is a constant is that the way that you were experiencing it, I regularly have like right now at this hour, it's caught up. Okay.
But I regularly during the day we'll have a two hour delay.
|
Sam:
[1:01:44]
| Oh yeah. See that to me, like that's I'm done. You know?
|
Ivan:
[1:01:51]
| I mean, and I've been tolerating it because it because it catches up and then it, you know, it swings back and forth.
But but the other day we were at a delay of like eight, nine hours, and we had a period of like eight hours that the server went down and the administrators talked about it.
Look, I, it's one of these things that I'm torn because I, I do like the small server and there's a few things about it that are cool, but at the same time, I mean, you know, I'm even donate and you know, I'm not doing it even for free. I've donated money.
|
Sam:
[1:02:28]
| Yeah. I, every server I use, I'm donating a small amount. I'm not donating a lot, but I'm donating it a little.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:34]
| Right. And, and, and it's just, you know, it's.
It's hard, you know, for a small operator to keep a service like this up.
|
Sam:
[1:02:46]
| And yeah, because it's almost all people running things as volunteers.
Yeah. And, you know, even the larger servers don't have that many people working on them.
You know, it's so yeah, yeah. I mean, this is one of the downsides.
And I'll mention one of the I'm way off from the original intent of where I was talking.
But one of the other things that's going on in the Mastodon world is that Threads has announced their intention to federate and interoperate with Mastodon.
They say that it's not live yet. They hope to have it out later in the summer or perhaps the early fall, so a few months out.
Which I thought was great.
My immediate impression on this is like, I've used the threads interface a few times and I really have a bad reaction to the fully algorithmic stuff.
Except like, like I was saying, TikTok is a completely different animal and maybe they're getting at something like that.
Maybe that I could get into, I don't know, if it got a lot better at identifying exactly what I was interested in, maybe that would be okay.
But my take on these tech services is that I want to follow specific people and see what they post and see what they post in order, damn it.
And if it's not that I get upset. So what I'm like, if they, if threads in fact, interoperates with Mastodon later this year, that would mean that from my preferred Mastodon client, and they're like a dozen out there, I prefer ivory, but part of the benefit of that ecosystem is you got a whole bunch to pick from you pick one.
You like, but, uh, I could potentially from my preferred Mastodon client, um, subscribe to people on threads and see their posts and interact with them.
And they could subscribe to me.
So like I could take my little Mastodon account and I could get all those people on threads could follow me and have me included in their feed on there.
And I could be picked up by threads algorithms and in inserted into the algorithmic feed too, without doing that from threads. And that would all to me seems really, really cool.
But there are a whole bunch of server admins on Mastodon who are.
Really upset about the idea of threads interacting with the Fediverse at all.
And there are some, I think all of them, are sort of saying, saying, even the big ones are saying, okay, we will federate at first, but we're going to keep them on a really short lease.
We're going to watch moderation stuff. And if they're causing a problem, we're going to defederate and block them off immediately once there's a problem.
But there are a whole bunch and a lot of smaller server admins who are saying, we're going to preemptively defederate from them.
We're not going to allow meta to ever come anywhere near us because we don't believe they're going to, they're not going to do moderation up to the standards that they want to have.
Which is basically, they never want to see anything offensive ever, you know, as far as I can tell.
And yeah, And, you know, in, in the exchange I had on Mastodon about this, some server admins jumped in and said, look, it's not just sort of the philosophical concerns. It's also purely practical concerns.
Like if you're a small operator, like we were talking about, um, and you've got full Federation with a hundred million freaking users over at threads.
Um, and, and you're not happy with the moderation that threads is doing and so there there's stuff coming onto your server that you want to shut down.
Um, you might not, you might not just be able to handle the volume because the alternative like is they're like, do you really want us to deal with reporting and dealing with individual accounts from threads one by one?
We may just not be able to physically do that. If there's enough of a flood of bad content, We'll have no choice but to just eliminate threads entirely.
And I want to put one more thing on this picture. In addition to the people who are preemptively not federating with threads on their Mastodon servers, there's also a group who are saying they will defederate from anybody who does.
And so like the big guys right now, like Mastodon Social, where I am, have said they're going to federate it first and see how it goes.
But if all these little guys start cutting themselves off from the big guys who are doing that, you're basically going to split the whole mastodon universe in half or in some kind of fraction, and it's, it's going to start losing potential value too. So I don't know.
I it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. And people keep bringing up like Facebook's, um, and Microsoft earlier, the, uh, uh, what embrace, extend, extinguish philosophy.
And are like, they're afraid that they're going to do that with activity pub, which is this, the protocol behind the Fediverse.
Anyway, that was a tangent, but where were we?
|
Ivan:
[1:08:20]
| Not, I mean, we were talking about, well, yeah, it's text based social media.
|
Sam:
[1:08:26]
| Yeah. It's it's part of, yes, it's exactly.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:29]
| You went, it's why you're the one that went and exactly.
So no, we were not going to off on a tangent. It's an issue.
And it's an issue right now, you know, with this launch of threads and, Look, the one thing that I have to say directly is that in terms of a commercial launch of an app, it's probably the most successful launch of a new app.
Ever. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:09:01]
| Yeah. I mean, people, I mean, just the number of, just the stats of downloads on the app store and number of new users and all this kind of stuff, it's a rocket.
Like, yeah, it's, it's incredible. And of course the reason they can do that is their piggybacking off Instagram.
Like if they weren't able to do that, it would be harder, but because they make it essentially like, oh, you have an Instagram account. Boom.
You have a threads account too. Congratulations.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:28]
| You know, and the other thing is that what, what has made it a mushroom really quickly Is that for social media to be useful, you need the people.
Exactly.
|
Sam:
[1:09:45]
| It's all about that.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:46]
| Right. And because so many people joined at once, it immediately became useful.
|
Sam:
[1:09:53]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:54]
| Unlike like when we were talking about how difficult it was going to mass it on and And how it really took me, wow, at least a month to make it like, yeah, somewhat useful.
It took me months.
|
Sam:
[1:10:09]
| Yeah. Me too. of aggressively and actively working on finding people to follow. Yeah. And again, like.
Maybe maybe tech geeks like us will will bother to do that But the normal person and this is the no back you got all the time First of all people like that whole choose a server thing at the beginning lots of people God Yes, gone before they even did that and the people who did get past that Got in and saw a blank screen because they weren't following anybody and right and maybe they followed a couple people But then they're like this is so slow.
There's nothing going on Well, duh, you followed two people, right?
And you're not gonna get fed stuff and you're not gonna get fed stuff and to to me Like these are all advantages.
I don't want to see shit from people. I don't follow I don't want to see things out of order.
I don't want things shoved at me I want to pull, you know, I want to select what I want to see but I recognize that's a lot of fucking work to curate that and And most people aren't thinking like that.
Most people want to log in and immediately see interesting shit.
And Threads gave them that.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:27]
| Yep.
|
Sam:
[1:11:29]
| And TikTok gives them that. You know, all of these services that are set up that way, that it's, they, yes, they're social, and yes, like who you follow feeds into the algorithm, but they're primarily.
You log in and it shows you that it shows you shit that it thinks you're going to be interested in and how well it does.
That is going to be a big part of the success or failure of it, but it's not about like it's not like an RSS reader or a mastodon or whatever, where you are going out and saying, I want to see X.
No, instead it is you log in and it says, do you like this?
Do you like this? Do you like this? And based on your interactions, it's going to theoretically at least give you stuff more and more like what you're interested in.
And that's where I would say 95 to 99% of people out there, that's what they want.
They don't want to like work at it. They don't want to think deeply about who they're following. They just want to see interesting shit and boom, there you go.
And again, I think how well they do over time will depend a lot on how good their algorithms are for what they shove in front of people.
Um, and how quickly those pick up, you know, just like, like I said, TikTok's awesome.
Like within like a few minutes of scanning through it, it, it'll figure out like some things to shove at you that it thinks you like because you spend more time looking at them and whatnot.
Um, and if they do that right here, the same thing will happen here.
I don't know you, It sounds like you've used a little bit more than I have.
Is it starting to like do a really good job at that? Like, again, for me, it's kind of doing a crappy job right now.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:22]
| It is showing me a lot of stuff I'm interested in, but I, you know, and I have to admit that I, well, let me do this test. Let me see.
According to my app usage, how much have I wound up using this?
|
Sam:
[1:13:38]
| Oh, I'll check mine, too.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:39]
| Okay. All right. So, so let's see, where, where are we here?
See all activity. Okay, great.
Uh, right now it's what, it's my number three, you most used app.
First I have Facebook, then Safari, then threads.
|
Sam:
[1:13:58]
| Ah, okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:59]
| So let me look, look at me, this my ivory usage right now, because I do use both is half of what, how much I use threads.
|
Sam:
[1:14:08]
| Interesting. So, oh, let me, let's day this for, for the week.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:13]
| Yeah. Yeah. Let me, let me see for the day. Let me see for the day. Hold on.
I'm going to, for the day is only 17. Yeah. The only, the day is only 17 minutes for me.
|
Sam:
[1:14:24]
| So no, no, look, look at week because that whole thing launched, I have spent 47 minutes total on threads since it launched. As of when.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:34]
| Well, okay. I have spent two hours and 30 minutes.
|
Sam:
[1:14:37]
| Okay. out of me.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:41]
| And like- I spent an hour and 27 minutes on Ivory.
|
Sam:
[1:14:46]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:46]
| Now I do look at my web client this week so far on ivory.
|
Sam:
[1:14:51]
| I've spent 19 hours and 13 minutes on ivory. Jesus.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:53]
| Now I will say that once again, that I do use my mastodon my, my on the, on the web, uh, uh, also. Oh, okay.
|
Sam:
[1:15:04]
| I do. I do that too, as well. Like I still use mastodon on the web when I'm at the desktop, because I agree, doesn't have live streaming yet.
And on the desktop, I really want that. Yeah. Um, but okay.
So let, let's do this test, Yvonne, both of us open up, uh, threads right now.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:24]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:15:25]
| And see, well, first of all, I've got notifications. I got, uh, two new people followed me since the last time I opened it, but I'm going to my home screen.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:34]
| I have 26 followers right now.
|
Sam:
[1:15:36]
| Oh, how, where do I even find that? I have 13.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:39]
| The bottom right.
|
Sam:
[1:15:41]
| Yeah, I've got 13. Okay. But I'm going to the top of my feed right now and seeing.
Okay. First thing, not interested. Second thing, not interested.
Third thing, not interested. Fourth thing. Eh, nah, it's acceptable.
Fifth, not really interested. Six. No. Seventh, maybe I like the seventh is okay.
Um, eighth, no ninth, maybe.
And then 10th.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:12]
| Okay. I I'm, I I I'm seeing the first, my first few right now, we're not interesting, but I got one that, but, but I got one here right now on Robert Reich about the delivery apps and tipping that we were like, we were talking about.
|
Sam:
[1:16:29]
| Yeah. I, I saw, I, I think I saw his post about that on mastodon earlier, but No, out of my first 10, I looked at the first 10, I'd think it's got about a 30% hit rate of ones that I was kind of interested in.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:46]
| I will say that, look, I went and I just scroll earlier.
I had been on a whole bunch of stuff that was interesting. And I think that it's still like learning of what the hell, because I'm, I'm like blocking some stuff and I'm saying, no, I don't want this.
Yes. I want to follow this. No, not this.
And so it's taken a while, but, but now it's starting to, you know, um, This last refresh, not, I'm scrolling further down.
I'm finding a lot more stuff that I'm, that I'm interested, um, on then the first ones that it just suggested to me first.
|
Sam:
[1:17:21]
| Um, yeah. And I presume that stuff will get better and I presume, you know, it'll do a decent job of it. We'll see. Like I will keep trying it.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:32]
| But I heard also how it's, it's going to, uh, you know, Uh, some of the, you know, the, the chronological thing they said it, they will, they said that's coming to, yeah, they said that's coming.
Um, so they've said that a lot of things are coming and you know what they were saying today, one thing that I was reading is from the, for the guy that launched, they said, you know what guys, this is basically out of beta, like right now we were, we, we were, you know, we wanted to get it out fast and grab the moment.
|
Sam:
[1:18:04]
| Right. You know, and the guy who's running the project has been active, posting comments about how it's going and stuff, and he has emphasized the federation with Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse to a degree I think even the Fediverse folks didn't expect.
Like it's right there, like in, in the splash screen you get when you first sign up, it explains about how they will be adding interoperability with Mastodon and stuff like that.
And that's where I'm actually excited again.
Like I, I'm not like thrilled with the app as it's structured right now.
I'm sure it'll improve, but if it gets to the point where I can sit there in ivory on Mastodon and follow people and vice versa, then I'm like, excellent.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:59]
| Sounds fantastic. I mean, what the hell is that? The like exactly.
|
Sam:
[1:19:04]
| You know? And I understand the people who are like, yeah, but threads is going to allow people to be more abusive than they would on mastodon, blah, blah, blah. Okay. I understand. I, I understand.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:15]
| Here's the one thing I, I, my experience recently with made a, uh, moderation.
|
Sam:
[1:19:23]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:24]
| Because I, one of the things that when I, when I left Twitter, why the heck I'm spending so much time on, on, on Facebook is because I've been using a lot of Facebook groups, right.
Um, you know, certain things that I like.
|
Sam:
[1:19:36]
| Groups are moderated by people within the groups for the most part.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:39]
| No, no, no, but there are also, there's also an automated layer as well.
There's an automated layer. And there's also a layer from, from, from Meta that is supervising the groups because the groups get shut down. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:19:50]
| I mean, if they don't do it, if they don't do it well enough, then they will get things imposed from above.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:55]
| I have been on, there were a number of groups that I, that I was on that started just spinning out of control.
And they just, they couldn't bring them to heal and look, man, without, without say or or warning, boom, just delete it, gone.
And, you know, the, the tools on there right now, um, forget about, it's not just the, the, the moderators.
Yeah. If you use certain language, if you say certain things, man, it will flag your, it will flag your ass.
|
Sam:
[1:20:39]
| Yeah. And, and I think, I think the main friction is actually coming from a lot of of mastodon servers who basically their tolerance level is close to zero, and even things that routinely happen on Facebook that they still don't like.
And you could argue some of these. And I think some of it is political stuff.
Some of it really is people saying that anybody with an even slightly conservative point of view shouldn't be allowed to talk.
And I'm like, you know, it's no.
And, and I understand things as well about like being a safe place for gay and trans people and things like that. Absolutely. But at the same time, you can't live in a pristine bubble where. Yeah.
Where you never encounter anything negative. I think that's too high a threshold.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:37]
| No, I, I, I look, but I, I understand.
Um, that you want to, uh, block, uh, intolerant intolerance and hate.
|
Sam:
[1:21:49]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:49]
| I'm all for that. Yeah, no problem.
|
Sam:
[1:21:51]
| Well, and, and the thing is basically what these, these people are saying, and they've got evidence to back it up is just that met as threshold for what they will take aggressive action on is higher than theirs, you know, I mean, I get that, But, you know, and, and, you know, they're, they're gonna, they're going to decide individually, right.
You know, like, and this is one of the federation things, a bunch, a bunch of them will outright refuse to federate with threads, some of them will, and we'll see what happens.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:27]
| But look, here's the one thing about it by federating, what you're allowing is people to. Uh, view?
And subscribe to certain content there now look i don't understand what the big difference is between doing that and if a user uh on your server starts you know spewing garbage that you don't want what's the difference from them like bringing it from somebody in threads that them publishing it themselves you would shut down that person anyway regardless Yeah, I think, like I said, I think they're worried about the volume of it.
|
Sam:
[1:23:09]
| They're worried.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:10]
| I just don't see how it, it, it really impacts the volume on their end.
Unless it, unless the number of users on their end really increases.
And unless the user base that they are having, which one of the things that talked about that user base is usually more, uh, on the left side of things.
Uh, and conscious of that. So they're not going to be bringing that stuff over.
My whole point is that they, those users would need to be bringing that over.
|
Sam:
[1:23:46]
| They're, they're worried about people, brigading people and things like that, to like someone say, someone saying, go harass this person on this small server.
And suddenly they've got hundreds and hundreds of abusive posts to deal with and things like that.
The other thing, by the way, which I, I understand how that could be problematic, especially if, if, if Meta...
|
Ivan:
[1:24:07]
| Oh, but we've had that with servers that have been brought on and federated that then have had to be fucking like thrown off. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:24:14]
| Yep.
Well, and the problem with threads, though, is that, you know, like you said, in a number of sort of Fediverse cases, they just shut that server off.
But if you just shut that server off for threads, you're removing 100 million people. You know?
|
Ivan:
[1:24:35]
| No, but it's like if somebody is also getting harassed, you can actually block that account from getting comments and things.
|
Sam:
[1:24:42]
| Yeah. Yeah. It depends on the tools available on mastodon and I understand they're not quite as robust, but yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:49]
| Anyway, but the other thing people have an issue of, of a growing pain.
|
Sam:
[1:24:55]
| Yes. Because the problem is you mentioned being in beta mastodon is older, but in many, many ways, it's clearly in beta too. There are all kinds of them.
There are all kinds of features that are just obviously there yet.
Some of them are ones that Mastodon is resisting and it's like, come on guys. Like search.
Like, yeah, there are all kinds of people who are like, you can't have search.
Cause then you could find our shit.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:26]
| Uh, it's like, sorry.
|
Sam:
[1:25:33]
| You know, I know you can search hashtags. the fact that you can't search the full texts of posts is just ridiculous to me. There are all kinds of other things in terms of like weirdness with replies.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:47]
| Oh, how about the fact that I can't share a post, you know, re, re, repost something.
|
Sam:
[1:25:53]
| Oh yeah. Yeah. Quote, quote, quote toots or whatever. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:57]
| And, and like a couple, a couple said about that, which that doesn't, oh, we can't allow that. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:26:06]
| Now, now that is on the roadmap for main mastodon and several clients have Added it already. Ivory has not yet, but it's on their roadmap too.
Um, but yeah, that, that pisses me off all the time.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:20]
| Cause there's, I mean, that was just retarded.
|
Sam:
[1:26:22]
| There's all kinds of things where I want to share something, but I do. Yes. I want to add my comment to it. I want to add some context.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:30]
| Like I don't want to just boost it or favorite. I want to share the fucking thing. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:26:35]
| Cause I want to say something. I like sometimes a plain old boost is fine, but sometimes you want to say, hey, this thing is stupid, or hey, this thing is really awesome, you know, or something more complicated to it.
And they're like, well, you could reply, but I don't want to talk to that guy necessarily.
I want to talk to the people who follow me to tell them my thoughts, you know, anyway, the other thing that just to move on to the last thing about this, and then we should move on.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:06]
| Last thing.
|
Sam:
[1:27:06]
| Yes. Well, I'm sure it'll come up again. But the other complaint people have is a threads privacy policies.
And they point out that basically when you install the app, you give it access to fucking everything, you know, on your phone.
And they contrast it to like Mastodon, which asks for like nothing.
But, you know, and I recognize this, but it's pretty much the same as what you give Instagram or Facebook today.
It's like, and yes, I understand that's a big distinction.
But, and a lot of people are upset about that and I, I would prefer not to as well, honestly, it.
Most people out there years and years ago have determined they don't give a fuck and They are absolutely happy and thrilled to give away all this personal information in exchange for a fun free service that you know, they just get and don't have to pay for yep and You know a lot of these folks who are worried about Federation and stuff are also like well they'll be able to suck in all our content and use it to, to train AI's and stuff like that and blah, blah, blah.
They can do that anyway. Sorry. They can do that anyway.
And you're on the internet. I'm sorry. The interwebs, uh, people noted that Google changed their terms of service like a couple of days ago to say that basically if you've got anything out in public on the internet.
Yes. They're going to use it to train AI models.
I can do about it. Sorry.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:47]
| It ain't anything you can do about it.
|
Sam:
[1:28:49]
| I mean, yes, you can potentially put like robots files on your websites to tell Google, please don't index my site, but, but you want to be found, right?
|
Ivan:
[1:28:59]
| Well, come on. You're you're, you're, you're you, you, you, you are the original pay perpetrator of the crawler that went and like was crawling up people's asses, trying to find stuff and then created a national security crisis.
I mean, you know, I don't know what the hell can you be bitching about anyway? You are the criminal.
|
Sam:
[1:29:21]
| It's been a couple of years since this was mentioned. So since you've brought it up, I have to explain.
Yes, I worked for a short time early in my career at an air force contractor. you, And one of the things that I did at that Air Force contractor, like we maintained a couple of websites for the Air Force basically.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:44]
| And I now this is understand the year that this was what, 90, 94, 595 96 somewhere around somewhere around mid nineties, mid nineties anyway, there weren't a lot of websites that they were ramping up, but here's the thing. Yeah. compared to the other ones.
|
Sam:
[1:30:05]
| Here's the thing. I set up a link checker because one of the things I wanted to do was to just make sure like the websites we were responsible for didn't have any broken links.
Cause that's the thing you had to worry about and think about back then and kind of still do. But you know, and so I downloaded some web crawler software that basically you gave it a website and it would check all the links on that website.
And it was fine. would send a little email report or whatever that said, Hey, you found these broken links. You should go fix them.
Um, as part of testing that crawler, um, a friend of ours from college named Eric has, uh, had set up a website that was basically a list of the first 100 commercial domains that were ever registered for domain names, the first 100.coms because you know, that, that wasn't that many years before this. Right.
Um, and, and so as part of my testing, I had this little web crawler test his website too.
And, and it would, um, yeah. And, and, but, and so of one of these hundred of the first 100 was bath iron works, By the way, which now redirects you to GD Bath Ironworks.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:27]
| Okay. But yes, still works.
|
Sam:
[1:31:30]
| It was like biw.com. Dot com.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:32]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:31:32]
| Um, so yeah, now apparently part of general dynamics anyway, here's the thing.
So once a week, this thing would kick off and it would check all the links.
And one of the links it would check was biw.com for Bath Ironworks and Bath Ironworks did not actually have a website at that point at all, but here's the thing.
Bath Ironworks makes submarines, nuclear submarines, nuclear submarines for the U S Navy.
And their security people noticed that once a week at almost exactly the same time, there was one single HTTP ping to biw.com.
Even though they did not have a web server running. And so they launched an investigation and the fucking FBI or whoever the hell it was, came to my place of employment and they did not actually interview me directly.
They interviewed my boss and was like, we are tracking this security event.
Somebody's trying to hack into Bath Iron Works, blah, blah, blah.
He laughed in their face because he knew what they do.
He he knew I'd set up this crawler. I showed it to him and blah, blah, blah. So he almost immediately knew what was possibly going on.
I think he came to me and was like, do you know anything about Bath Iron Works? And I'm like, no.
Anyway, yeah, so that's obviously they did not arrest me. I did not go to jail.
I actually kept my job as well.
But yeah, that that's that story.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:21]
| So, you know, so the so the thing is that, you know, you have experience with trying to crawl the internet to dig up for information.
Okay. And it's happened since the beginning of the fucking internet.
I mean, there is a fucking internet archive that is preserved.
Almost. I mean, Jesus, almost every damn web page that existed out there, a copy of it and all the different versions to go back in history, to look at it.
So people go like right now going, Oh my God, they're going to use all that info to train AI.
And I'm just like, what the fuck do you think that it's all there, but saving every goddamn time. And look, we've been using it, scraping it, doing it for information in every way.
AI is just an evolution of, of that now, for God's sakes.
Right. And so it's just the concern to me is just so stupid.
They're going to scrape all my shit for him like, fuck man, I mean, you're not going to Google and just type your fucking name in there.
I mean, you go to all these sites that about looking up people, you just type their fucking name and they come up with everything about you.
What political party, where you've lived, every address you've got, blah, blah, blah. I mean, come on.
|
Sam:
[1:34:43]
| I might ask you for a couple bucks, depending on which site you find, but yes.
Yeah, I, I honestly, I understand some of the concerns and, but I'm sorry that that train passed a long, long time ago.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:06]
| Oh, time ago. I mean, we're, you know, a long time ago.
|
Sam:
[1:35:10]
| Okay. Now, Yvonne, technically speaking, that was all my topic and it's your turn, but I'm wondering if we should just, as both of our topics and take a break and come back with you more.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:23]
| Let's take a break and let's come back, shall we?
|
Sam:
[1:35:25]
| Okay. We will be back after this.
|
Sound:
[1:35:29]
| Do do do!
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And frankly, he seems at least a little smarter than either of the hosts of Curmudgeon's Corner.
Honestly, it's Ridiculous how endlessly talented and phenomenal Alex Emzula is.
That's how great his YouTube channel is.
A L E X M X E L A dot com. Yes. Do do do.
|
Sam:
[1:36:35]
| Okay, here we are. So let's consider that last one was just both of us.
Yes. Why don't we, and so one more from each of us, you go next.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:45]
| Well, I, I will bring up a, I will, okay. I will bring up two.
Well, one is just a brief comment and then I'll go into the subject.
|
Sam:
[1:36:54]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:55]
| That I've got. Um, uh, one thing is that I stopped by my mom's house, uh, today.
And, uh, you know, my mom, I don't know.
She, she really likes to like, uh, make me feel special. So she made me a molten first.
She asked me, do you want ice cream? Okay. Well, and I'm like, well, look, I got vanilla bean, French vanilla. I got, okay.
Okay. Look, French vanilla.
Well, how about I make you a molten lava cake?
And then I put the fresh ice cream on top of the molten lava cake.
Okay. So you can have, and I'm like, well, shit, this sounds really okay.
Fine. You sold me. Okay. Can I just say that it's quite nice to show up and to get this delicious fucking molten lava cake chocolate with this excellent ice cream on top? But I didn't have to lift a finger.
Nice. Yeah. So so anyway, I want to bring that up. But aside from that, I was going to bring up something just probably not spend a lot of time on this, but about Haiti. Okay. Okay.
And the reason I brought this up is because one of my friends from high school, he's from Haiti and he his father.
Well, we knew this after he died. We didn't realize this is grown up. He was an accountant.
We didn't realize that the reason he had fled to Puerto Rico was because the dictator Duvalier, he had worked.
For the administration doing bookkeeping, and for whatever reason, he was afraid of the things that he knew about.
|
Sam:
[1:38:39]
| Oh, I remember you mentioning this guy before, I think.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:42]
| Yeah. And, you know, and he was he was He basically he knew that they were trying to assassinate him, and he decided to flee and he fled with his family to Puerto Rico.
His father passed away, but his mom is still alive now. His mom had some serious health issues, and it impacted her cognition and other things.
And for whatever reason, I think just because of how her memories were impacted, most of the memories that she had about her life were the memories about her being in Haiti, and she wanted to go home.
She didn't want to stay in the U.S. with either all her kids live in the U.S., New Jersey and Ohio and in Kansas, if I remember correctly, the three of them.
And so she she went back there and she has been there.
And the reality is that money wise, a good news is that whatever money that they had, she had some savings goes well, a hell of a longer way there.
But the health care situation, you know, getting she could get the best health care available there.
But man, the health care situation is problematic to get certain treatments that you would take for granted like right now over here And her health situation has been deteriorating.
And we think that she may be on her last days, like right now, unfortunately.
But she does. And, you know, I talked to him like, look, can we bring her?
For treatment, it's like now she just she just doesn't want to go.
She wants to be treated at the hospital. she was treated when she was a kid, which is there in Port-au-Prince.
And it's like, you know, I was like, look, we'll put her on a fucking plane.
We'll get she's suffering from a fib. So look, we'll fucking put her on a plane ticket to Miami. She's like, no, but she doesn't want to go.
There's one of those things where that's the situation. But the one thing that I wanted to bring up about this is that, you know, because he went there recently and look, we've known that's in the news security situation in Haiti has been bad.
Okay. You know, we had about the last two years, the president was assassinated.
They haven't had an L duly elected president in a while.
And I don't know if you saw news reports that happened in recent time where criminal gangs have been basically roaming Port-au-Prince and terrorizing just about everybody. And a lot of people basically got fed up.
And basically, they went out of the streets and started just murdering the criminal gangs. And I mean, in gruesome fashion, because they were just done.
They were just done with these thugs, just scaring the shit out of everybody.
And so one question was that people have been asking, obviously, is they have they made this thing safer?
And what he what he was able to tell me because he spent enough time there recently is that.
And he's had to visit a couple of times is that. The people really pissed off, went out and did this, which I mean, the many of the attacks were gruesome against these gangs.
I'm not going to say they they were, but that.
Everybody expressed that, and he noticed that the level of safety amongst the people has been better than it's been in years.
But it's just crazy that it had to Get to that point that people just had to take.
I mean, you literally just take arms and the violence into their own hands in order to be able to fend their homes and their safety.
But but he told me flat out. The situation in terms of.
You would think treatments that we take for granted, if you have a fib, for example, look, take you to a hospital to do this treatment for a fib that is a it's you know, it's outpatient care.
You're in, they do the treatment, you're out the next day, whatever, whatnot. They shock your heart, your gun, you know, whatever.
Impossible to get in Haiti. Impossible. Can't do it.
And other things like that, for example, that we take for granted and that it's just a continuous wave of emigration and.
Still not with a government that's in place, But for whatever reason, the people just finally got so fucking fed up with with gangs of thugs, saying the violence that they they rose up and they basically just decided, look, we can't take it anymore.
And they just think murdered a lot of the gangs. Wow.
But it's it's very fucked up that that's what it came down to in order for these people to guarantee their safety.
And we forget that Haiti is in such a brutal situation and they're so they're not that far away.
But I just wanted to bring it up because my Richard who listens to the podcast by the way, so I know you know, probably like.
Hi Richard. Yeah, so I'm sure that I'll probably like berate me over incorrect things that I just said, but you know, or something I hope I wasn't I tried to be Gerald Decker, but you know that you can report that definitely there is some.
Uh, an improvement in at least people's daily lives, like right now that came from that happening.
So that's a good thing.
Still no long-term solution to what's to the situation in Haiti.
Uh, like right now, but at least people are safer right now.
At least that's a plus. Thank God.
So, well, and like, but I just wanted to share that, but you know, because it's just not in the news, even though it's, yeah, I was about to say that.
|
Sam:
[1:44:52]
| That it's, it's one of those things where, you know, U S news is so U S centric with, with a couple of exceptions of things that get attention.
Um, and I mean, obviously if you look for it, you can find the news, but you're not, yes, you're not going to stumble across the latest events in Haiti, unless you're going to look for it.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:16]
| I it's just, but it also, the thing is, I, it's not even just the U S I just, you know, people are just ignoring the situation in Haiti on a global basis.
You know, and that situation was created by the colonizers that came in the past and basically left the situation with a dictatorship and other things, you know, in place and basically a pillaging of the economy that that happened for decades and decades and decades and, you know, left them in a bankrupt, fucked up situation that they have never been able to rise from.
Corruption, then that massive earthquake over a decade plus ago, a series of foreign interventions over and over.
And just nothing, nothing has really fixed the situation.
And it's just it's just a horrible situation for individuals and they look, they I was in the Dominican Republic, which is, you know, same island.
Just, you know, they share, you know, they split the island in half, Espanola, and so many Haitians are just crossing the border there because the situation in the Dominican Republic is so much better economically and safety wise, et cetera, than than there that they, you know, they basically have been flocking over there.
But they would just, you know, he just tried to emigrate everywhere.
We have a lot of them here in South Florida, also in the community, you know, in Puerto Rico as well.
Just about everywhere. But I just wanted to wanted to, you know, situation, everybody ignores.
And I just wanted to bring, bring up something about it because, you know, it's still ongoing, but at least that is a development that maybe not the way that you want to get to it, but at least the, you know, that it's brought some, a sense of some more peace and calm to the people there that, you know, need it at this point.
|
Sam:
[1:47:16]
| Okay. Um, my turn for one last or should we, you got, you got something, you got, Cause I had one that was really huge and you had the one that was smaller. So, okay.
So where is the even number?
|
Ivan:
[1:47:31]
| All right. So I don't know one. Okay. I wait, I got, I got one.
|
Sam:
[1:47:34]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:34]
| No. Okay. All right. Go ahead though. All right.
|
Sam:
[1:47:38]
| Which one do you want me to talk about?
|
Ivan:
[1:47:40]
| Well, I was going to ask you about the fireworks fail.
|
Sam:
[1:47:43]
| Uh, okay. Uh, let me, let me quickly do the fireworks fail.
Like you quickly did your lava cake and then I'll do, I'll do.
I want to talk about return to office because, you know, Oh, okay.
But first fireworks fail.
Um, this year. Like we, you know, Our family usually goes to see fireworks.
It's something we have done on a regular basis for many, many years.
We've missed a few years here and there.
We, you know, pandemic caused us to miss a couple.
We used to go to the displays further south of where we are in Bellevue, Washington.
Last few years we've done stuff here in Everett.
So this time around.
My last year we went in Everett, but we were like delayed throughout the day, whatever.
And we arrived really late. Okay. And so we, and it was one of these places where they have shuttle buses to get you to the park where they're having it.
Cause there's not enough parking on site for the crowds they expect.
So you go to the community college and you park there and then you get a bus and you you go in last year we were running so far behind that we were like arriving at the actual park just like 15 minutes or something before the fireworks were supposed to start that bad well it was because like as soon as we get there's no place to like sit anymore like it was like standing there before the fireworks started well yeah but here's the thing like last year the first thing when we we got there, I wanted to immediately find a spot where we were going to stand or sit or whatever to watch the damn fireworks and just watch the fireworks.
The rest of my family was like, we want food from the goddamn food trucks.
Okay. But we did not have time to get food from the fucking food trucks.
You were talking about lines, right? And how like, yeah, your reaction is if there's a line, I turn the fuck around. Well, you know, at these kinds of events, the food trucks have fucking lines, okay?
Anyway, so, like, I'm like, I don't want any food, just, you know, well, I might have given in order, I forget, but like, they went to get in line and, By the time they were close to the front of the line, the fireworks were already starting.
Okay. They, they came back out like with the food, the fireworks were going, everyone was standing up the place where we were near the food trucks did not have a good view. The fireworks were obscured by a big tree.
I, and I'm like, and there was no way to like, get to someplace where there was a good view.
So, cause all you saw was the tree and people's backs.
And meanwhile, they came with the food and I like spilled my food on my shirt or something like and I was like This is bullshit.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:45]
| I this is good. You're going great. You're doing great.
|
Sam:
[1:50:47]
| I just sat down. I'm like fuck this I'm sitting down on the floor here.
I can't see any way fuck it, you know And I was just pissed and annoyed and blah blah blah.
So this time around I was like, okay look it we can go to the fireworks if people want to go to fireworks, but But my one condition is we get there early enough to not have any of that bullshit.
Like when, when we used to do it down in Bellevue, we got there like many hours early.
We just spent the whole fucking day there. I didn't feel like that was necessary, but at least get there in time to like claim a place and calmly get food and hang out a little bit before the fireworks and stuff.
And people basically agreed to that, and I was like, fine. Now, in the morning this year, since my wife is a politician and all, we were walking a goddamn parade, okay?
There was a July 4th parade in Bothell, which is not that far from here, and the local Democrats had, not a float, but they had a little banner and some people walking behind, and since my wife is an elected official, she was there and she was going to give out these little bead necklaces to people, blah, blah just you know red white and blue.
Crappy little things, you know, the kinds of things they throw to people at parades.
Anyway, so we go there. And so there's this whole thing. We have to go there.
We have to go into the staging area. We have to wait.
And then at an appropriate moment, we go through our thing and like we walk the like mile long route of the parade or whatever it was.
It probably wasn't even a full mile, but whatever. It felt like a mile.
Um, and, and it's, it's, you know, Yvonne and I also had this conversation about temperature and what each of us is comfortable with, but like it was 77 degrees, which doesn't sound like much you're melting, but it was, there were no clouds.
There was direct sunlight. So it felt hot. You were in it for a long time.
I was not happy about this. There were all kinds of people around.
Once the the parade started, my wife and my daughter were giving out these little necklaces and immediately fell behind.
So they weren't even with the group anymore. So I'm with the Democrats, like walking in the middle of the thing, waving my hand, doing a little queen wave thing. I'm like, I'm nobody.
I'm not the elected official, but they're nowhere to be.
My, my wife has nowhere to be fucking seen. She fell way behind because she was like giving things out to everybody and everybody wanted them.
And so they were going slow. So I'm getting frustrated. There are people everywhere.
I am not a people person. I do not like crowds. I do not like people.
Um, I, you know, I, I went go to this, this kind of thing, like support my wife, but I'm not like having fun or anything.
Um, and so like, by the time that was over, like, I was like, I don't know if I want to even go to the file.
But you know, I went home, I cooled down, I had some food, blah, blah, blah.
And I was like, okay, I'm okay. I like we, we can go like, I was like this whole time. I was like, I don't really need to go to the fireworks by the way, but if people want to, I will.
And my wife was kind of in the same spot actually, but my son, Alex wanted to go. He wanted to see the fireworks. It's part of our tradition.
He likes them. He wants to go. He usually videos the whole thing and blah, blah, blah.
And, um, so we, we leave about an hour later than we wanted to leave, but we still got there in plenty of time.
This is taking longer than the cake story, isn't it?
|
Ivan:
[1:54:39]
| Yes. Way longer.
|
Sam:
[1:54:43]
| Richard Doff is may have to wait for another show, but, uh, anyway, we get there, uh, in, in enough time, I get my little spot.
We get to put out our chairs and a little, like, you know, we get a little area where we're sitting and I get there and they go and we get food and the whole thing and it's all going well and blah, blah, blah.
And we're, we're kind of having an okay time. I'm sitting there on my phone.
Alex is sitting there on his phone.
Um, we're, we're eating a little.
Stupid food truck food. Like I had a hot dog and like shaved ice and blah, blah, blah.
You know, it was, it was, it was good. Okay, and then it finally gets dark and we're we're in Yo, Seattle is north and it's summer. So like dark is like 10 o'clock.
Okay so we're you know again, it's starting to get dark and Then it's like okay, the the fireworks will be starting in just a minute. They have a countdown three two Two, one.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:44]
| Two, one.
|
Sam:
[1:55:45]
| And then the music starts and it's all like the patriotic music is going and stuff.
And nothing's happening.
And then everyone's sort of looking around and I'm thinking, well, maybe the fireworks start with the second song, you know, and then like there are a couple like there's like maybe three fireworks that go off and I'm like, oh, it's starting.
And then there were only three, you know, and then it stops again.
And the music keeps going and music goes to the second song, the third song. And then it's like, yeah, something's going on.
Oh, and by the way, the way Everett is located, there's a, uh, these are being shot off from a barge, uh, in, in, in the bay next to the city and across the bay. There are other towns and you can see like their fireworks.
Like across the way, way off in the distance. Um, but there was nothing happening and nothing happening.
And then the guy comes on the announcer, you know, on the megaphone or whatever.
It was like, there's been a problem on the firework barge. They're looking into it. Thanks for your patience.
And okay, we're, we're just hanging out. Um, and, and people start to leave.
Uh, and the, the, the, it's getting late.
I'm assuming it's getting late. It's, it's now like 10 30.
Um, and you know, you can, the smell of marijuana starts coming across the field as well, like where we are.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:20]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:57:21]
| Um, and, uh, and, and, but people start getting antsy.
A lot of people are starting to leave and you can see people streaming away.
There's sort of like, there's some core people who are like, fine, we're going to wait, we're going to wait however long it fucking takes.
We want, we came here to see fireworks. We're going to see the goddamn fireworks.
And then there are a lot of other people saying, fuck this, I'm out.
After almost an hour, I think it was 45 or 50 minutes, they did come on and announce that there was.
An irreparable issue, and they have determined that they cannot proceed with the show and sorry, everybody, goodbye, goodnight.
And then everybody took off and yeah, we got home shortly after midnight Uh, after like waiting for the boss, how many fireworks fired, maybe three or four actually went off.
So, and you know, there's a new story in the paper later.
And of course my wife being elected and official was texting back and forth with, uh, with like city government people about like, what's going on.
Do you know anything? Blah, blah, blah. And they didn't know anything either at that point.
And the next day it became clear, well it became clear, there was a vague statement issued that basically said it was a software problem and it affected the main computer that controlled the fireworks, but also their backup was also affected.
Um, so I dunno, they said they extensively tested it before, but obviously something didn't happen.
I, I speculated, you know, at the last minute, somebody like fucked up a semi colon or something and it just, you know, some stupid software, but the people that were on site weren't able to debug or whatever.
Uh, I'm sure they found the problem later, but obviously too late.
Uh, the company who does the fireworks was very sorry and they're refunding the money the city paid and blah, blah, blah.
Uh, you know, so, but you know, thousands of people came out.
Oh, and there was also a little bit of controversy. Like the park where we at was where we were at was the biggest location where people were to hear this.
And we heard the announcement on the PA. There were like four other smaller parks where people were also gathered and they got no announcement at all.
They, they had no, they weren't told what was happening at all.
So there was people were pissed about that too.
Anyway, fun, exciting fireworks. And like I said, I guess, uh, my return to office story we'll have to wait for another week.
Yep. Yeah. It's just like, yeah. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:04]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[2:00:05]
| Let me just, I will sum it up in one sentence. It sucks. It still sucks.
It sucks to just the way I thought it would.
And it's not really useful. There are a few positive aspects of being in the office, but they are way outweighed by the negatives. Anyway, some other day.
And I'm not the only one who thinks that. It's just not, it's not effective.
Anyway, that's it. So let's wrap it up. Hey, everybody, go to curmudgeons-corner.com.
You can find our archives. You can find our email. You can find our Facebook.
You can find our mastodon.
We have not set up a curmudgeonscorner threads account yet. I don't know if we will, but, you know, hey, if they ever federate, you'll be able to follow that from threads, too.
Anyway, you can find all our contact information, you can find our archives, and of course you can find our Patreon, where you can give us money.
And if you go there at various levels, you can get us mentioning you on the show, us mentioning you on the show, Yeah, we'll ring a bell, we'll send you a postcard, we'll send you a mug, all this kind of fun stuff.
And, um, at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us through all the other ways we mentioned, we will invite you to our curmudgeon's corner slack where Yvonne and I, and a bunch of others are chatting throughout the week, sharing news stories, chattering, sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing, Chattering, chattering, chattering, chattering.
|
Ivan:
[2:01:41]
| Oh, is it chattering?
|
Sam:
[2:01:42]
| Shattering? I don't know. I'm confused. Anyway, it's a lot of fun.
You should join us there if you don't already. Just just pop us a note.
So, Yvonne, how about one thing from our curmudgeon's corner chat chat slack that we have chat slack slack, whatever, you know, it's it's all the same fucking thing.
Anyway, uh, how about one thing from there that was fun and interesting and exciting that we have not talked about on the show?
|
Ivan:
[2:02:13]
| Huh? Well, you shared, and I know you started talking about a little bit about your, uh, uh, return to office, which sounds like you're having so much fun.
Chart of my first six weeks back to the commute grind.
|
Sam:
[2:02:29]
| Yes. This is what prompted it.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:31]
| Yeah. Yeah, he, he has been spending an average round trip and, you know, and I, you know, I used to spend something like this before and I don't, I don't understand how I did this, but an average of two hours and 25 minutes round trip from my driveway to my desk per day, I go to the office.
|
Sam:
[2:02:52]
| Yay. Yeah, that was, that was the average of the first six weeks.
Cause of course I keep a spreadsheet and, uh, it's highly variable too, which is the thing I mentioned. If you have it in front of you, Yvonne, you have the numbers, but like, yes, it's, yes.
|
Ivan:
[2:03:09]
| It, it, it, it went from what, uh, you know, you had a, a morning commute that varied from 49 minutes to one hour and 53 minutes.
Oh my God, that's unconscionable.
And an afternoon commute from 47 minutes to one hour and 21.
I, I gotta tell you, I, I mean, I, I had a commute when I used to go to Miami from here to the city.
That, uh, on the short end could be 40 some odd minutes, but man, I never got to an hour 53, the worst was an hour 30, but man, an hour 53 whole man.
|
Sam:
[2:03:47]
| Now I will give, I will give two pieces of data that make that maybe not quite as bad, but still pretty fucking bad.
One is on some days that amount has included and probably the 153 day Starbucks has included five minutes to go through the Starbucks drive through five or six minutes to go through. So subtract that out if you want to be purist about it.
|
Ivan:
[2:04:12]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[2:04:13]
| But you know, like I'm gonna be in the car for fucking two hours.
Give me a goddamn coffee. Okay. And a snack, you know.
But also, currently, I am still my reserved parking, which, by the way, at my company, you have to pay for. I pay a monthly fee for this parking.
And I paid for it the whole fucking time we were working from home during the pandemic.
But it is the building I used to be in before the pandemic. I changed internal positions a couple times during the pandemic.
And so I'm no longer in that building. So I'm parking in one building.
And so that commute time includes 10 to 15 minutes walking from the building where I park to the building where I work in addition to the drive time.
Now I did this week get notice that my name came up on the wait list to move to the actual building I work in for parking. And as of August 1st, I will actually be able to park at the building I work.
|
Ivan:
[2:05:20]
| Oh, there you go.
|
Sam:
[2:05:21]
| So that should, well, I say it should save 10 to 15 minutes, but it's actually not 100% guaranteed that my 10 to 15 minutes of walking from where I parked in my other building is actually slower than the amount it would take to drive from one to the other in the middle of traffic.
Oh, so we shall see. Um, but yeah, and, uh, um, more on RTO some other time, but the, the other thing is just like, after all that fucking commute.
I still spend most of my time in rooms by myself or with one or two other people who aren't necessarily people I work with directly.
And I would still say almost every one of my calls, most people are still fucking at home.
And, and like, there are always a scattering of people in the office, but then lots of people at home and it's like, what the fuck am I even doing here or four.
And so like, I don't know what my tolerance will be to keep doing that.
Now, when you do encounter people that are in the office that you actually work with, sometimes you get good conversations out of that. And I do enjoy them when they happen, but they're actually still kind of rare.
And most of the time you go into the fucking office and you're still doing conference calls anyway.
And or doing work by yourself where you're not interacting with other people.
And so it's, it's just, it's just stupid, stupid.
And I know there are reasons for it are not.
There are, there are other reasons for it, but my experience so far has been stupid. Your mileage may vary even within my company.
The experience is apparently very different depending on which organization you're in, which building you're in, et cetera.
So, but my experience is that 90% of the time, the two and a half hours I average on the the road are just deadweight that serve only to make me unhappy and don't provide any significant value to either myself or the company.
Um, but that 10% is real. It's not like there is no benefit.
It's just, it's the trade-off sucks.
Anyway, I see you pick that. And so you get, ended up getting a mini version of the RTO stuff anyway.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:55]
| I, I, I still got it anyway. So we got everything. Okay. All right. Done.
|
Sam:
[2:08:00]
| Well, we're out of here, right?
|
Ivan:
[2:08:02]
| Yes, we're done. Yes.
|
Sam:
[2:08:04]
| So everybody have a great week. Uh, hope you didn't like suffer any major injuries on the July 4th holiday.
And, uh, we'll talk to you next time.
|
Sound:
[2:08:42]
| Goodbye. Bye. Okay.
|
Sam:
[2:08:43]
| ♪ Okay, everyone go home. Bye. Bye.
| |
|
