Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| Test test test okay talk for a second bruce hello hello hello okay sounds good okay oh.
|
Bruce:
[0:07]
| Boy this is the first time i've done a video version you've uh you changed since the last time i was on.
|
Sam:
[0:13]
| No i i remember seeing you last time but you're right it wasn't the we didn't do anything with the video it was only like we saw each other but like right now like this this is going out live if nobody's watching, but it's going out live. And, and then I will, I will probably still put some highlights on Tik TOK. Uh, although we'll see, like, I don't know if I'll do that forever. Cause it's once again, one of those things like when, like when we, like when we did Facebook, maybe I'll save this for the show. Anyway, let's do this.
|
Bruce:
[0:49]
| That's fine. I have a Tik TOK channel too, and I can, uh, I can share them online. mine.
|
Sam:
[0:55]
| There you go. Okay. We can just get started if you want. You know how it works. I'll, I'll rely on you for topics since you're the guest.
|
Bruce:
[1:02]
| Oh, yep. So like, don't tell you now or what?
|
Sam:
[1:07]
| You can surprise me unless you think it's going to like, like throw me off the edge and confuse me. And then, okay. Then you can surprise me. It's okay. Okay. So let's, let's get this thing started and then we can go. Okay. Here comes the music. Welcome to Curmudgeons Corner for Saturday, February 1st, 2025. It's just after 3.30 UTC as we're starting to record. I'm Sam Minter. Yvonne Bo could not make it this week. This weekend is his birthday. Sunday is his birthday. He's going to be old. And his family's doing stuff with him. And he's got stuff going on even tonight.
|
Bruce:
[2:11]
| He's going to be old?
|
Sam:
[2:13]
| Oh, yeah. He's going to be very old.
|
Bruce:
[2:16]
| Old.
|
Sam:
[2:17]
| Very old. He was already old. He's going to be very old. And as you can hear we've got bruce with us who has uh joined us before on a number of occasions let's see i should check real quick when was the last time i just i just yeah i think that's right i i actually just i just changed my thing to have your current date it was, May 31st. Our May 31st show is your last time on. And so for those of you who are not familiar, if there's any such person out there, when we have a guest host, I give the guest host a lot of preference over picking the topics. We'll still sort of do our first segment being a little bit less newsy. And then after that, two segments of other stuff, but I'll pretty much let Bruce pick. He has not told me what he wants to talk about. I told him not to. I told him he could surprise me. And so, yeah, so that's, that's, that's the plan for the show. And I expect Yvonne will be back next week. So Bruce, to start out, you got any non-newsy stuff you want to chat about or updates on, you know, how, how, how's life since last May?
|
Bruce:
[3:28]
| Oh, very good. Very good. There's a number of things I could talk about. I went on a cruise and with a family, had a lot of fun.
|
Sam:
[3:36]
| Did everyone get sick? Did everyone get sick?
|
Bruce:
[3:38]
| No, everyone was fine. Okay, because that's the rep for cruising. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[3:43]
| That's the reputation cruises have.
|
Bruce:
[3:45]
| Yeah, well.
|
Sam:
[3:46]
| Whether it's COVID or the flu or just colds or diarrhea or whatever, that you go on a cruise and everybody ends up sick.
|
Bruce:
[3:53]
| Well, the worst thing that happened was one of the kids got a sunburn. Oh, okay.
|
Sam:
[3:57]
| Okay.
|
Bruce:
[3:59]
| The main thing I wanted to mention is, as you know, every year when you do your predictions.
|
Sam:
[4:07]
| Your predictions. Yes, you beat us.
|
Bruce:
[4:09]
| So a number of years ago, and I've done this ever since. I guess it's got to be for the last seven, eight years maybe.
|
Sam:
[4:17]
| Wow.
|
Bruce:
[4:18]
| On my personal blog, I copy. Give the link.
|
Sam:
[4:24]
| It's contrarianconformist.blogspot. Am I remembering right?
|
Bruce:
[4:26]
| Yes, something like that. Yes.
|
Sam:
[4:28]
| Blogspot.com.
|
Bruce:
[4:29]
| Yeah yeah i still use blogspot.com which is like so old but i'm too lazy to go with a more modern blog site but but anyway yeah every year i i copy basically all the same questions you have and i compare myself to you all and normally i do about between the two of you i Okay. Better than one or worse than the other. But this year-
|
Sam:
[4:57]
| You beat both of us.
|
Bruce:
[4:58]
| I beat both of you. I'm quite proud of myself.
|
Sam:
[5:02]
| What were the biggest topics that you consistently improved on us on?
|
Bruce:
[5:07]
| The topic that I really shined on was the Congress, the predictions on Congress. I got everything correct except for one of the predictions. Wow. So, and then also I did really, I got everything right on Asia, the Americas, global predictions. Mostly I did very well on Europe, Middle East, all the international stuff I did pretty good on. The things I did poorly on was the presidential race.
|
Sam:
[5:42]
| I think we all did poorly on the presidential race.
|
Bruce:
[5:44]
| Yeah, that was, it was quite a surprise. I don't think we knew that it was going to be a crazy year. Yeah. But nobody could have predicted what actually happened. And hey, we all came out. We survived. Well, maybe, well, I guess we're living in the consequences of it now. We'll talk about that later.
|
Sam:
[6:02]
| Yeah, yeah.
|
Bruce:
[6:03]
| Yeah, but yeah, I was, my grand total was 76 correct out of 124 predictions and that's 61.2%, which is, I think, like maybe four or 5% better than y'all.
|
Sam:
[6:18]
| Yeah, we had like what, mid 50s, high 50s, something like that.
|
Bruce:
[6:22]
| Which is worse than what you normally get. So I took advantage of a bad year.
|
Sam:
[6:26]
| Yeah. I mean, it was our worst ever. Our worst ever. Well, I'm pretty sure it was our worst ever. Like I said on the show where we reviewed results, the first few years I did this, I just did it on paper. And I'm sure I've shoved those pieces of paper somewhere. They may even still be in my office here. But if you forced me to find them, it would be a significant effort of time to find them. But everything for a long time now has been in a spreadsheet that I just have. And so I'm opening it right now to tell you, yeah, the actual final percentage for us was 50.7 for me and 54.1 for Yvonne. So an average of 52.4. And you got what, 60 something?
|
Bruce:
[7:17]
| 61.
|
Sam:
[7:18]
| 61. So almost 10 points better than us. So congratulations, the grand prognosticator. There, I could say the word.
|
Bruce:
[7:31]
| As my kids would say, I've got a big brain this year.
|
Sam:
[7:35]
| Big brain. You know, I'm thinking of the old Johnny Carson skit, you know, with the turban and everything. Everything so that's very cool anything anything else no that's that's it, Okay, well, I got two things. One that, you know, I was starting to say something to Bruce before the show, and I figure I'll say it now. I had mentioned, like, the fact that we're posting video clips on TikTok of highlights, because the thing we use to record has like this AI thing that you push a button after you're done recording, and it finds like, usually about 12, like, clips that are usually about a minute long, but they can vary from 30 seconds to a couple minutes.
|
Sam:
[8:27]
| And then you can adjust them manually that it thinks will be interesting. Now of those 12, usually I can find four that actually do seem interesting. Like, and to me, like the things I want to like make it interesting to post on TikTok or something is like, I want a back and forth between me and the co-host. I don't want a monologue with one of us just talking as an example. Sometimes it'll pick like, hey, maybe it was an interesting minute, but it was all Yvonne, and so I'll ignore that. Or it was some random side topic that we actually only talked about for that 30 seconds, and so I'm like, eh, that's not a good highlight. But I can usually pick four And I post them and it's kind of interesting because first of all, according to the stats that TikTok gives you, like each one of these clips that I post gets something on the order of, five to ten times as many views as the podcast gets downloads every week well that's just an now here's the thing though if you look the average length of one of those views is like two seconds so this is not like i.
|
Bruce:
[9:44]
| Didn't know i gave you those stats that's interesting.
|
Sam:
[9:46]
| It does give you all kinds of stats if you go look in the stats it tells you like you can see the actual curve of drop off and they're like you know most viewers drop off in the first three seconds look here to see what happens and it gives you the percentage that actually watches the whole thing to the end. And that's usually like five to 10% actually watched the whole thing, but it also like the comments are usually assessable. Like it's, it's like mostly people clearly trolling like that. And of course the, the one minute clips are taken out of context. So like it may be them saying something about what we said that we actually addressed on the full show. Like, but you haven't thought about this or whatever. And if you actually listened to the whole show, we actually spent five minutes on that, but it wasn't in the one minute clip, you know, and, and, and, you know, you know, just people, people trolling that they're, and mostly, mostly the trolls are clearly like of the MAGA type orientation. There are occasionally some, some other folks and there are occasionally some serious comments on one occasion. There was like a clearly a mega person and a lefty who just decided to have a whole long argument in our comments.
|
Sam:
[11:07]
| Well you know it started it started out relevant to like whatever we had said but by the end they were just yelling at each other and so you know it is what it is but like the thing is it takes me on top of my normal process to put out the podcast maybe an additional half hour to put these things out and so over time i i actually find it kind of fun so i'm still doing it at a moment and I've been doing it maybe a month and a half now, but I figure I'll give it three months because then after that, like really the whole purpose of doing this in the first place, well, my son, Alex bugged me about how I should do it for months before I actually did it. But like the whole point is theoretically get put more people to listen to the actual show, you know, and of course, like years and years ago.
|
Sam:
[12:00]
| We still have a Facebook page. I still mention it at the end of the show and stuff like that. But we actively promoted the Facebook page. We paid money for Facebook ads. We built up. I think the Facebook page has thousands of followers. But it gets no traction. The way Facebook works, even if you have thousands of followers to a page, your stuff won't necessarily surface to the people who've followed it unless you pay to promote the individual. Individual posts, which we are not doing. And so, but, but for the first couple months, we did, we, we, we promoted people to the page and we promoted whatever. It had zero effect whatsoever on actual downloads of the podcast. So like I left it up, but I'm like, I'm not going to spend effort here. I'm certainly not going to pay the money anymore.
|
Bruce:
[12:53]
| It shows that for, for that purpose, Facebook ads, we're not doing what they're.
|
Sam:
[12:59]
| Supposed to What the Facebook ads did was what Facebook wanted them to do. It would boost your follower count. It might boost, you know, views of the Facebook page, but it would not take people off Facebook to something else. True. You know, and then, you know, so, okay, maybe it was doing what Facebook was wanting. It wasn't doing what I wanted. And for TikTok so far, we haven't seen any noticeable change in our trends on our downloads. It's the same as it's been for years. So I'm like, is it worth the extra half hour? It's kind of amusing. So maybe it is a little bit, but it's, it's certainly not like getting, getting any promotion that actually like helps. So I'm like, eh. Do I really want to spend the time and effort and thought, especially like, you know, Facebook got the reprieve, which technically speaking is not legal even, which, you know, I won't get into all the details of that conversation, but like there was a mechanism in the law to do a 90 day extension, but it had to happen before.
|
Bruce:
[14:07]
| You said, you said Facebook, you meant TikTok.
|
Sam:
[14:10]
| Oh, TikTok. Sorry. Yeah.
|
Bruce:
[14:11]
| TikTok, TikTok, TikTok. The Facebook.
|
Sam:
[14:14]
| No, whatever, you know, no. Now, TikTok got a reprieve, but what the law actually allowed was a 90-day extension, but the 90-day extension had to be before the deadline actually ran out, and there had to basically be certified that there was a deal in progress that was almost certain to happen. So the timeframe expired, so the 90-day extension wasn't in play anyway, but Trump basically just promised that nobody would enforce it and so it's sort of partially back like if you've already got the app you can continue to use it but it's still not in the app stores and so it may very well go away again at the end of this or may not there are a number of possible deals i've.
|
Bruce:
[15:03]
| Been hearing or seeing headlines here and there that there there's actually some they're more open to being sold.
|
Sam:
[15:10]
| Yeah, I have heard that too. But every report I've seen that says that has been sort of second or third hand. So I don't know how much to trust it. Also, one of the things they've said is that even if they sell TikTok the brand and TikTok the users and all of that, they're not selling the algorithms. Which is what a lot of folks seem to think is the reason that TikTok behaves differently and has a different vibe than the various other Instagram reels or whatever, which haven't gotten the same level of attention. Now, of course, there are other people who say that it just feels different after it came back, and maybe they've already changed the algorithm and blah, blah, blah. And they did add some new options in the settings that you can apparently mess with to affect what's in your feed. And so they have done some things post coming back. But who knows? It's all people speculating. It's not anybody who knows is not talking. Like, yeah, the people who know are quietly doing the things they're going to do. And we'll find out when we find out. But, yeah, so I don't know.
|
Bruce:
[16:27]
| I would be sad if they sold. I hate to see that the government force them or bully them into selling and then them actually doing it. I'd like to see some other outcome. But unfortunately, the Supreme Court didn't rule the way that I really thought that they would. But we'll see. I mean, oh, well.
|
Sam:
[16:46]
| I mean, and yes, there are all kinds of like I feel like the law was very much ill considered and not the right way to go. But I'm not necessarily sure that the Supreme Court was wrong in that saying, you know, Congress does have the power to do that, which I think is a different question than should they have done it. But either way, then there's the other issue of even though it's for a result I'm actually happy with, which is TikTok is still on, you know, is it okay for the president to blatantly ignore the law in the kind of way that he's doing? Anyway, we're, we're verging into newsy stuff. So the, uh, of, of, of just say, you know, I may, you know, I may or may not continue posting the Tik TOK clips. If any of you listeners have an opinion on that, let me know, cause I'll do it. If people like it, like that actually listened to the show.
|
Bruce:
[17:47]
| Um, I, I do see them pop up on my feed, but I follow you on Tik TOK. So, um, I, and yeah. If she do do some posts from this, I'm looking forward to seeing the comments.
|
Sam:
[18:02]
| I generally speaking do four clips from every show. There's one show I only did one because it was actually the one where we talked about the TikTok ban because I put it out after TikTok was reinstated and things had already happened. So I just like a lot of the clips that came up with were us talking about the TikTok ban. And it was all sort of outdated by the time I was even posting it. So I only posted one from that show, but every other one I've posted four. But I feel like I'm, except one, the most recent one, I actually posted five. So at first I was trying to very religiously, I'm going to post four on every show. And now I'm like, I'll look at the 12 it gives me and I'll post the ones I like and I'll ignore the ones I don't like. And I'm not going to hold myself to a number because there were a couple of times where after it generated the 12, I didn't like four. And so I messed with it and made it generate more, too much work, too much work.
|
Sam:
[19:01]
| The only other thing I was going to mention, and this is also a, Hey, listeners, give me your thoughts on this is I am finally after many months, I think the last time was also last May, finally logging all the stuff that I've, movies I've watched, books I've read, et cetera, in the last like nine months. And so I will once again have a backlog of those and the option to start doing media reviews again here. And so the question, well, two things. One, I am looking, I have not finished pulling the stuff and counting and seeing how many there were, but it is looking like I may actually be averaging more than one a week, which would mean I would never catch up by doing one a week. So the questions here to the audience are A, right? Do you want to hear that back at all? Like, did folks even enjoy the media reviews? Because if not, I don't have to do them at all. If I do do them, you know, do I try to do more than one so I actually catch up?
|
Bruce:
[20:14]
| I'm looking at the list and it's a fun list.
|
Sam:
[20:16]
| Oh, yeah. Some of these are already on our, like, on our Commudgeons Corner plaque. On our Commudgeons Corner Slack, I've already started to put in some of the ones I've watched. I'm working my way backwards from now to last May. So I've got a couple months more of these to enter in before I actually am ready to start talking about them.
|
Bruce:
[20:37]
| So you're saying, I'm looking forward to your reviews on a lot of these. So my vote is yes, go through them and do, and if you need to do two a week and do them quick, you know, make them, make them two, make them one minute reviews.
|
Sam:
[20:52]
| You know, we say that, but you know, I fail constantly. constantly. I'm like, okay, I'll do a quick review. I'll just do the thumbs up, thumbs down, then I'll be done. And then like, boom, like before you know it, Yvonne and I have talked 30 minutes about like some stupid movie from the eighties or something. And, you know, and there we are, but yeah, no, we got, we got a bunch of these, but like, I I'm looking and, you know, January, January, we've done more than one a week. December was more than one a week. a lot november was more than one a week october was less than one a week you know but but as september was less than one a week but august was more you know so i think the average is going to turn out to be more than one a week if i ever want to catch up and like keep up so i don't know so anyway tell if you're out there i give all the ways to give us feedback at the end let me know your thoughts do you want reviews if so would it would you be upset if there was more than one some weeks, you know, anyway, that's it. That's all I got. So unless we got anything else on either of those things, Bruce, I'll take a break. And when we come back, we can have your first more serious topic.
|
Bruce:
[22:06]
| Good. Now's a good time. I got to answer the door. Okay.
|
Sam:
[22:10]
| Go answer the door and we'll be back right after this. Okay. We are back. Bruce timed it perfectly. Okay. Bruce, what's your first topic of the day?
|
Bruce:
[23:15]
| Okay. So I want to, well, the big news this week is that air crash. And I think definitely Yvonne should be talking about that. So I'm going to leave that to him. I'm looking forward to hearing his evaluation next week.
|
Sam:
[23:29]
| And we had a second one just a few hours ago too.
|
Bruce:
[23:32]
| Oh gosh.
|
Sam:
[23:33]
| Well, it wasn't a commercial airliner. It was an air ambulance transporting someone who'd just gotten life-saving treatment in Philly, and they were on their way back to Mexico via somewhere in the Midwest, and it crashed right next to a mall outside of Philadelphia.
|
Bruce:
[23:51]
| Oh, gosh. Wow.
|
Sam:
[23:53]
| So, seven people on board, and I've heard mixed reports whether people on the ground were hit, but there were many fires on the ground, houses and cars.
|
Bruce:
[24:03]
| I think it'll be better for Yvonne to do that next week because there'll be a lot more information available.
|
Sam:
[24:08]
| Yeah, yeah.
|
Bruce:
[24:09]
| But in the meantime, I think we should do a tech topic. Okay. Deep Seek. This is a perfect topic for me because it's right up my alley.
|
Sam:
[24:19]
| Because you did or are you still working at an AI place?
|
Bruce:
[24:26]
| I worked at an AI company about a year and a half ago. After I left Ocean Gate, I worked at a company called Bright AI.
|
Sam:
[24:33]
| For those who don't remember, Bruce was at Ocean Gate, which is the place with the sub, you know, that had the thing happen. Yeah, we've talked about that on the show before. Go ahead, Bruce.
|
Bruce:
[24:43]
| Oh, yeah. You know, actually, you know, since my last visit, there was the Coast Guard review of that.
|
Sam:
[24:52]
| Of Ocean Gate.
|
Bruce:
[24:53]
| I didn't even think about that. But. I should give you a quick evaluation of what my take was from that.
|
Sam:
[25:03]
| Okay, go ahead. Do Ocean Gate update first.
|
Bruce:
[25:06]
| Let me give you a quick take on what was the cause of the accident, of the implosion of that sub. Okay. I'm not going to get into the deep sea. Basically, there are two systems. There were two systems that we designed into the sub to monitor the health of the carbon fiber hull. One used ultrasonic acoustic sensors, and the other used strain gauges to detect movement or the deformation of the hull. And those two combined would be able to detect if the hull was flexing beyond its linear range. It would move like a spring, and when it came back to the surface, it would come back to its original shape. And the acoustic sensors would be able to hear if there was any breakages that were beyond a safe amount. And when we did test hulls and when we tested this system out, it worked very well in predicting when the hull was not healthy, long before it actually failed.
|
Sam:
[26:27]
| And so with the test hulls, you actually tested the failure on a bunch of them?
|
Bruce:
[26:32]
| I tested the failure on multiple one-third scale hulls. So in the 2022 expedition, there were three years of expeditions. The one that I went on was in 2021, then I left the company, and then they had another set of expeditions in 2022, and in 2023, that was the year that it imploded. Toward the end of the expedition in 2022, they had done several successful dives, but on one of the dives, as they were coming to the surface, they were almost at the surface, the hull emitted a very loud bang it was so loud that it could be heard on the surface and the stockton who was who was very he was all he was very positive minded he always liked to justify things and we had to kind of keep them reined in but he just made the assumption that, it was not the hull, that it was the hull settling within its metal cage. It was not a problem.
|
Sam:
[27:47]
| Right.
|
Bruce:
[27:47]
| But during the Coast Guard... Review or testimony last september they showed the data on those sensors during that event and clearly it shows that the hull changed shape and it was a permanent shape change that and and after that event the the hull was behaving differently and so but they but because they were they just disregarded that or i don't know what happened because i wasn't there suppose for some reason they decided to keep diving the sub even after the sensors showed that there was a problem and so basically.
|
Sam:
[28:31]
| The stuff the safeguards that were in place to tell you when the hull had an issue and was no longer safe had gone off they got the alarms they decided uh we don't care.
|
Bruce:
[28:44]
| Exactly yeah you can design a system to warn but you can't design a system that forces it not to work or not forces people to not make a wrong decision so after that bang they did a dive that, either that week i think like like the next day and it was fine they did one more dive even after that and went down came back up no problem that was the and those those two dives after the bang were the last dives of that year fast forward to the third expedition in 2023 the first dive where they went down at a deep dust, it imploded. So like we saw in our testing, if there's an event, there's plenty of time between the event and the actual failure. That's what happened, and they just ignored the warnings. They ignored the warning. Now, there has been no report from the Coast Guard, But that's my evaluation. I'd be surprised that they didn't come to the same conclusion.
|
Sam:
[29:54]
| So what was the report that was released then?
|
Bruce:
[29:57]
| There was no report yet. They had their testimony. But as far as I know, they have not come out with a final report of the accident.
|
Sam:
[30:06]
| Okay.
|
Bruce:
[30:07]
| Yeah. So.
|
Sam:
[30:08]
| So, DeepSeek.
|
Bruce:
[30:10]
| DeepSeek. There was a huge shock to the AI industry this week, or I guess about a week ago. Chinese company came out with their own AI model and testing over the last week has shown that it is comparable to the performance to open AI chat GPT.
|
Sam:
[30:35]
| And their most recent, most powerful models too, not just.
|
Bruce:
[30:39]
| Yeah. And so it was so shocking that it caused a huge dip in value of NVIDIA, which is the company that provides...
|
Sam:
[30:53]
| At least according to initial reports, there are some people who are out there doubting it, but it was done much, much more cheaply for a couple of different reasons. One, due to export controls, at least in theory, China is not allowed to have NVIDIA's best chips. So they were using some of the previous generation. And in order to do that, they had to do all sorts of optimizations. Which I've heard subsequent reporting that, you know, the American companies have been thinking about some of those optimizations as well, but hadn't really bothered with them because it's easier if you have access to hardware and money to just throw hardware at it than it is to do optimizations. And so the end result of this is that it was something like a hundred times cheaper for the results they got to train this thing, maybe even more. And then I saw something subsequent that an American research group has managed to do something at a smaller scale, but using the same kind of techniques, even cheaper.
|
Bruce:
[32:06]
| So they report that they did it for $6 million, which is kind of like the pizza budget for some of these other companies. and American companies doing that. It's really interesting.
|
Sam:
[32:21]
| The AI initiative that was just announced by the Trump administration was $500 million, I believe, for building major data centers out and blah, blah, blah, etc.
|
Bruce:
[32:35]
| As a logical engineer, I can tell you, I can totally understand what has happened here. The when when you go to an engineer or engineering team and you tell them that there's no limitation on them they can spend whatever they want and have as many resources as they want to accomplish a certain task they will take everything and that's why you're seeing these you know like x, x's ai's they're putting up like a hundred thousand cpus and and meta has like another hundred thousand cpus in these data centers to to generate these models and to to and so i can just imagine that they they just ask for what they want and they get what they want and so they they have no sense of, efficiency. And I can understand because they want to get a quick result. And when you have these powerful NVIDIA processors, you can come to a solution very quickly. In the last three companies.
|
Sam:
[33:44]
| Well, and this is an example, like this is writ large because of the scale. But you see this play out all the time, even on your home computer, right? I mean, because people who are writing software, take advantage of the hardware they have. And the fact that like at this point, you know, hard drive, I'm not, not even using the right term. Storage is cheap. Most of it's no longer spinning platter hard drives anymore. Storage is cheap. Memory is cheap. CPU is cheap. You know, where Moore's law has been doing its thing for years and years and years. And they, on the one hand, they always want to push these things to the limit. But it also incentivizes people not to bother with the optimizations because they don't have to. And so you get things like we've got computers that compared to computers from 5, 10, let alone further back in time years ago, are amazingly powerful. But like your day-to-day activities, like browsing the web or something, feels the same as it did, like speed-wise. it takes just as long to boot up your computer. You know, if you're, you know, sometimes when you're like typing in a word processor, it still has trouble catching up with you as you type.
|
Bruce:
[35:10]
| As right now is, is, you know, it gets pixelated and, and I've got fiber to my house. It's still, it's like.
|
Sam:
[35:16]
| Yeah. And I don't, I don't have the fastest connection in the world, but I have more than enough for like multiple HD video connections, you know? And, And yeah, and all these things where it's just because the, the bang for the buck is not in optimizing the little things and making it, you know, so, you know, when you have the option of like, oh, we don't have to worry about like making this super efficient, the hardware is good enough, it'll be fine. And the hardware will get better over time anyway. And then we can push it harder and harder anyway.
|
Bruce:
[35:52]
| So I have examples of this. The last three companies that I've worked for have all used these NVIDIA modules to solve problems. And in every case, it's been overkill. These NVIDIA modules, they literally, so just the modules are about that big. And it's got the processor and memory and the supporting logic around it. And you can build a system around that. And it has very powerful tools that they provide.
|
Bruce:
[36:26]
| And there's no other company out there that even comes close to providing that much computing power for the wattage that you consume. And so it's, but they're very expensive. It's literally $2,000 for this little module. And and so it's very easy for for a startup company to say you know let's let's use these and get to a a working prototype right away and and i can do that but then what happens when you want to start selling more of them then it gets super expensive and that's when i was at boeing they had this we're designing this system this image processing system for the triple seven freighter and it was way overkill there we were literally doing something that you could do on a mobile phone but they were making it so robust and working 100 of the time in all possible situations they had a the development cost was going to be 50 million dollars for this imaging and and so finally when management came out and said oh crap that's way too expensive and so So they basically threw away two years of work.
|
Bruce:
[37:45]
| And basically the whole time that I was at Boeing was basically down the tubes. And then I ended up getting laid off from there. And then I come into the company that I'm in right now. They basically are wanting to do the exact same thing. It's an NVIDIA board in a box on an aircraft. And I'm like, this is overkill. And then what they're doing in my current company is much less than even what they were doing at Boeing. So I'm like, this is way overkill. So at least I'm able to go into them and say, let's do something a little bit less expensive. We'll, we'll see how it works out.
|
Sam:
[38:22]
| Yeah, I think, I think those are examples are everywhere. And like that, I mentioned on the show last week, there's a personal project I bought a domain name for, and I'm just starting it up. And the, I have not gotten anywhere significant, but the first thing I wanted to do was just put up like a splash page, like an HTML page with an image and some text as a placeholder before I put anything in. And of course I'm, I'm, you know, I know this project is beyond my technical skills. So I'm, I'm using AI to, to help me. And like, if I was going to do the splash page myself, I would write an HTML page using HTML one O technology that's been around since the, you know, late 1980s, early 1990s. And it would be fine. And it would render on everybody's computer just fine. It would, it would work on my phone. It would work everywhere.
|
Sam:
[39:13]
| And of course this, this, you know, the thing is telling me, no, no, no, we need all this framework and all this stuff. and blah, blah, blah. You know, and I know I like, I want to do more than the splash page eventually that may need some of this complexity, but like, I ended up spending like hours and hours and hours just getting to stupid splash page to work. And I'm like, using 20 year old technology, I could have had this up in like less than five minutes. I'm like, why, why, why is any of this needed? You know? And I don't know. I'll, I'll find out when I try to make the more complicated stuff if I really needed this. But it's frustrating.
|
Sam:
[39:53]
| So anyway, back to Deep Sea.
|
Bruce:
[39:55]
| Back to Deep Sea. So you mentioned the chip embargo that we have or the export restrictions to China.
|
Sam:
[40:03]
| Looks like it backfired.
|
Bruce:
[40:04]
| It's backfired big time because we have unintentionally given their engineers a tighter goal and forced them to be efficient. and they went ahead and did it. And so by forcing them into a limited engineering space, they've actually come up with a solution that's better than what American companies have been able to come out with so far. Now, will American companies catch up? Yeah, sure. But it'll be a game of catch up.
|
Sam:
[40:35]
| And also I'll add like, This was foreseeable. First of all, technology export controls, generally speaking, have never worked for a variety of reasons. One, this effect. You give them an incentive to either figure out how to do something more efficient in this case or develop their own technology from scratch. Like, you know, I am actually shocked that, you know, it's only a matter of time till China can natively build its own GPU chips that rival anything that NVIDIA has.
|
Sam:
[41:16]
| You know, there are ways and, you know, things will get around the export ban anyway. There are ways to do that. I mean, if you remember when they were trying to like keep people from exporting encryption technology and then people were printing it on T-shirts and stuff because the code was so simple and it's like, you know, it's just idiotic. And like the, I remember the one way it actually got to Europe or whatever, the first, there was something that was more than a t-shirt, but like that was the specific law was written. So exporting the, the, the stupid thing was you couldn't send it electronically, but somebody figured out that the law didn't cover if you printed it out. So somebody actually printed it out and mailed the big sheaf of paper, and then they scanned it on the other side. And it was not against the law. And it was not against the law. It was just idiotic. And so, but it's like, eventually, if it's worth doing, it will jump that gap, no matter what legal stuff you put in there.
|
Bruce:
[42:27]
| And so it's interesting that all the previous debates that were going on about AI are kind of like out the window. All the concerns about copyright infringement.
|
Sam:
[42:39]
| Oh, well, OpenAI is throwing a little fit because they say that DeepSeek used their stuff.
|
Bruce:
[42:45]
| They're getting a dose of their own medicine. But, you know, it's like there may be copyright restrictions on training for U.S. AI companies. but the Chinese companies aren't going to care. They're going to suck up all the copyrighted material they want. And, and I don't, I think that was kind of a, a red herring anyway, because it's like, there is a, a common practice in the U.S. called fair use. And I think the way AI companies are using a copyrighted material is fair use.
|
Sam:
[43:18]
| Well, in the U.S., the fair use argument is going through the courts right now in various lawsuits related to this. The one I can think of off the top of my head is the New York Times and a consortium of other news and other information providers sued OpenAI, and they might have sued others as well on exactly this issue. OpenAI's defense is fair use, et cetera, et cetera. And their argument is essentially what they do is remix the things in the same way any other artist does. Like if I draw something in the style of person X, I've done it because I've consumed that person's media. I've looked at it. I've read it, I've whatever. And so if I am then going to produce my own creative output, of course it is, it is influenced by everything I've ever read, seen, listened to, et cetera. Now the arguments are at some point you get too close to the original material, blah, blah, blah. But like, you know, it, it's going through courts. We'll see what they say. And of course we, We're going to have the same issue we always have, both with legislators and with courts trying to deal with tech, which is the decisions are going to be made by people who have absolutely no understanding of the technology whatsoever.
|
Bruce:
[44:45]
| But like I was saying, that's all out the window anyway, because there's this big loophole. Any foreign company can generate their models, and then we use those models. So it's like it's putting american ai companies at a disadvantage that they have that they, It can't use copyrighted material if that becomes the case.
|
Sam:
[45:04]
| Well, this is the kind of thing where all of the arguments that were made about TikTok are going to apply to DeepSeek potentially as well. So you could have Congress trying to ban use of DeepSeek as well. And the thing with all of this is, and yes, it could be used to suck up your data. It could be used for all kinds of nefarious purposes. But at the same time, it just seems incongruous with the basic values of this country to be saying, I'm sorry, Americans, no, you can't have access to this.
|
Bruce:
[45:38]
| Yeah. Basically, they're putting these restrictions on because of what could be done, not because of what is actually being done.
|
Sam:
[45:52]
| And that's one thing I heard some of the legislators who are willing to talk about it, and one of them was AOC, about the TikTok ban. She voted against it. But one of the things she said is, yeah, we had classified briefings on this, and I can't tell you what was in the classified briefing for obvious reasons, but I can tell you that it was not particularly impressive. It was not anything that backs up all the hype. And just like the public statements, it was mostly about what could happen, not about things that are happening.
|
Bruce:
[46:29]
| Yeah. So it turns out that AI is not as hard to do as we initially thought. It's not going to be a huge draw on power. It's not going to be a huge amount of chips.
|
Sam:
[46:43]
| Well, I'm not sure that is true. What will happen is if you find all of these efficiencies that you can bring, then imagine what you can get out of it if you throw the same amount of power you were going to throw at it without the efficiencies. So in these kind of scenarios, becoming more efficient has very rarely resulted in actually using less. It results in getting more out of the same or more than you did. I forget what they call it. There's an actual name for it. One typical example is just in traffic that if you build more lanes in a highway to relieve the traffic jam it doesn't actually make traffic move more smoothly because more people will use the road and fill up the new capacity.
|
Bruce:
[47:34]
| Yeah well but at least we know that we can get most you know we can i think it's asymptotic you know as you get as you pour more and more power to it it's you know, a lot you may get a little bit better but not a whole much better but.
|
Sam:
[47:50]
| Well this is this is the value this is of course the whole ar i ai argument from the people who are you know pushing the, highest like the view the the craziest views of like the singularity and all this stuff rely on the sense that once you get to a certain point you can have the ai design the next better version of the AI, and then they start cycling faster than humans ever could, and it races to infinity in terms of how smart the AIs are and what they can do and everything. But I think the counter to that is what you said, and maybe that'll happen, but what we've seen in all sorts of other spaces is the asymptotic behavior, where it gets harder and harder and harder to extract that next bit of value.
|
Bruce:
[48:42]
| Yeah. So I think that the real value is going to be not in just the basic AI models. It's going to be on the services that sit on top of AI, like what Microsoft's doing and what, and there's various other companies are doing to take, that are sitting on top of OpenAI or ChatGPT to, that are actually more than just chat or just answering questions. So that's where they're going to be able to make some money. Because the original idea of OpenAI was that it was going to be open source for safety. And they were not originally planning on making hundreds of billions of dollars off of it. And I'm actually glad.
|
Sam:
[49:28]
| And they had designed a corporate structure to try to force them not to, in fact, to keep it nonprofit, et cetera. And then like a year and a half ago or whenever, That was that big battle at OpenAI, where essentially people realized, what the hell are we doing? We could be multi-billionaires. Yeah, yeah. I'm hoping that that's all that was out the window.
|
Bruce:
[49:50]
| Yeah, I'm hoping so. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[49:52]
| But yeah, so we'll see. I think there's also just like most of these other technological waves, it seems like the general pattern before is it's not necessarily the first movers who end up being the ones who make all the money. You often have a first wave that is trying to be bleeding edge and essentially flame out. They spend all the money. They don't succeed in making a profit. They eventually go out of business, but they leave behind an infrastructure that's picked up by the second wave. And the second wave are the ones who actually end up building technologies that become ubiquitous and end up being the next major trillion-dollar companies.
|
Bruce:
[50:43]
| Yeah, sure.
|
Sam:
[50:45]
| So we'll see. And this has, like a lot of other technological waves, there's potential dangers associated with it. There's all kinds of things that could go wrong, could go badly, but also all kinds of things that could be super positive. You know, you, you really could, if you have this asymptotic explosion, you know, you really could have like some successor of chat GPT just one day saying, oh, you wanted a cure for cancer. Here it is, you know, et cetera, you know, you know, just, just go in and ask, or maybe, maybe you don't even have to ask. It just says, oh, this is what you need. And of course, the science fiction stories have been written for over 100 years now about what if the AI decides the best thing for the world is to get rid of the humans.
|
Bruce:
[51:41]
| Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have my doubts on both of those. Yeah, knowing that these are essentially really advanced autocomplete programs, it's not just looking at statistical and the text completion.
|
Sam:
[52:01]
| They are some of the most recent ones are that is one layer of the technology they're adding other things to but the argument i always come back to is that you know in the end you can't convince me that i'm anything more than a really advanced autocomplete myself so at a certain point can you tell the difference and once you can't tell the difference does it matter.
|
Bruce:
[52:23]
| Well and that's why we have the the turing test which and which is kind of a subjective test in the first place, you know, when I was younger.
|
Sam:
[52:32]
| These things now have passed the Turing test. They passed that level a couple years ago now.
|
Bruce:
[52:37]
| And we, and I mean, you know, when I was much younger, I always thought, oh, wow, that's a very bright line, the Turing test. Well, now it's not as bright as we thought.
|
Sam:
[52:49]
| Now, although still, like, at this point, like, you can generally eventually tell. Like, if you have a relatively lovely.
|
Sam:
[52:59]
| Insightful person who knows what they're doing, but you can't necessarily just pick an average person off the street. Now you can, you can potentially fool that average person off the street in a specific area, but eventually these things start going sideways. Like if you try to have an extended conversation for a long period of time and you're like, that's what's going on. But on, on images and stuff, now you see people all the time being fooled by AI images on Facebook and stuff yeah especially if you get video and video now like the video's gotten good enough it's it's fooling people i saw on my facebook feed like today something with like some seal or something that jumps onto a boat and the person like helps rub the barnacles off it and it's this wonderful heartwarming story and whatever and you're and like i look at it and i'm immediately like yeah that's clearly ai but i know lots of people are like oh look at that heartwarming video about the seal you know yeah and um it's turning apart with things and it's getting harder and harder like even if you do know to tell the difference like even a year ago it was clearly obvious the video was not like real now you have to pay attention in another year or two like you might have to be an expert to tell the difference. And, and then after that, you might not be able to at all. You might be able to fool the experts.
|
Sam:
[54:25]
| And it's, and so like a lot of things that, you know, people used to be like, well, like it's what's true. Show me the photo, show me the video. Well, that's going to be harder and harder and harder. So.
|
Sam:
[54:42]
| I keep wanting to do one, one, one thing that's on my to-do list that the technology now exists for is the voice cloning. So like, I want to, I want to clone my voice and Yvonne's voice and like drop in a break one day as a surprise to Yvonne. That's a conversation between the two of us. That's completely made up and get his reaction. Because my son here, one of the things he does routinely in ChatGPT is when he wants to have a discussion, he asks ChatGPT to generate a dialogue in the style of Curmudgeon's Corner with Yvonne and I talking to each other. And so I want to throw some of those in. But right now, the technology, like I can clone my voice. I can clone Yvonne's voice. Technically speaking, I have to have his permission to do that, which is whatever. but yeah, he might.
|
Bruce:
[55:33]
| He might sue.
|
Sam:
[55:34]
| Yeah, he might sue. But then if I want to generate a cut and right now, right now I can really easily take a script for each one of us and generate the voice, but I can't do, I can't give it a script with both of us and have it automatically switch back and forth. I'd either have to do each of our parts independently and then edit them back together myself or write, do some scripting to, to, to do the combination, which, you know, at that point it's work. And at that point I don't want to do it anymore because like it would take too much effort. So I'm waiting for it to get even easier than it is today. But, but yeah, this it's, it's, it's getting scary good and it's getting better faster. And, you know, so we'll see.
|
Bruce:
[56:22]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[56:23]
| Okay.
|
Bruce:
[56:24]
| Pretty good for this one.
|
Sam:
[56:25]
| So let's take a break then. And when we come back, your second topic, and then we'll wrap it up after that. Here we go. Okay here we are again and.
|
Bruce:
[58:20]
| I do use this mug.
|
Sam:
[58:22]
| Excellent bruce is holding up their curmudgeon's corner mug uh we like it i i i i am i'm using i use mine regularly as well i now have two one at work and one at home there you go and and one with a crack in it that i use as a pencil holder or something.
|
Bruce:
[58:42]
| So what I wanted to talk about is a libertarian take on the Trump presidency so far.
|
Sam:
[58:50]
| Okay. And I can see like right off the bat, I see some tensions there potentially that I love to hear your take on in, in terms of on the one hand, I'm sure you love the idea of reducing, you know of hey let's shut down huge portions of government and but on the other hand doing it in sort of authoritarian style ways probably rubs wrong and some of the other stuff but what do you think what's going on what's the take.
|
Bruce:
[59:22]
| Yeah i there's a number of things that i am happy with a number of things that i am very mad and upset and disgusted with i can we can do a lightning around covering those things, but since you mentioned the cost cutting, you know, a traditional, normie Republican way to cut government would be to give notice and to have like a study group that would come out with a report of saying what parts of government could be cut or what could be kept. But no, what Trump's doing is he's saying, cut everything, and everyone would then have to come to him and justify their existence. It's basically flipping the script 180 degrees.
|
Sam:
[1:00:11]
| Now, the fundamental problem with that, of course, well, there are many problems with it, but the one I'll point out right now is that, That's actually illegal. Now, he doesn't care, and maybe nobody will do anything about it. But in our system, Congress determines what the government spends money on, not the president. And there's, in fact, specifically a law that prohibits the president from not spending the money that Congress has allocated that was passed in response to Richard Nixon trying to not spend money the Congress had allocated. And so to just decide, hey, this money that has already been authorized by Congress has already been specified for a specific purpose, X, Y, Z, and just say, well, we're not going to do that.
|
Sam:
[1:01:03]
| Violates the way our system is supposed to work in terms of separations of power and who decides what. And essentially, the presidency over the course of the history of the United States has essentially already, with Congress's acquiescence essentially, taken over the power to make war, which was given in the Constitution to Congress, not the president. And if we get a situation where the president ends up just ignoring the money directives out of Congress as well, then essentially, essentially we're completely neutering Congress and saying, okay, yeah, we, we want a unitary executive who once we elect them can just do whatever the hell.
|
Bruce:
[1:01:48]
| Yeah. And I'd agree that that is what he's doing is against the law, but on the, on the flip side, and I hate to use this as, you know, to say, Hey, well, the other side has been doing the same thing. Why can't Trump do it? Because like when Biden wanted to forgive loans, he decided to, to just spend the money right off of executive order. And then he was sued, and he lost in the courts. So that may be what happened.
|
Sam:
[1:02:15]
| As recently as last week, Yvonne and I were saying the Democrats should play hardball too and make the courts reverse them on those kinds of things rather than preemptively decide not to. Because as you said, Biden did that in a couple places, but there's so many more places the Democrats could have. The Democrat normal response is, sorry, that's just not possible. So we can't try that. But that doesn't, and it's sort of my take on that is, yeah, the right thing to do is to try to go through the system the way it's supposed to. But when the other side is playing hardball, you got to play hardball too. But at the same time, do I want to end up in a universe where I we are concentrating power even further. I think one of the main insights of the U.S. Constitution that is extremely frustrating in terms of actually getting things done, but also extremely wise, is the distribution of power across multiple power centers rather than concentrating it all in one place.
|
Bruce:
[1:03:35]
| And over time, that power has moved over and into the presidency. And maybe the silver lining on this would be that Congress, maybe Trump will push this too far. And Congress, probably not a Republican Congress, but maybe a Democrat Congress in two years, will say, that's enough. We're going to rein in the president, well, the presidency, not just its president. You know, they've tried to rein him in by impeaching him. Well, that doesn't do anything. The way to rein in the power of a president is to actually pass laws.
|
Sam:
[1:04:13]
| Well, the problem is to do that, you either need super majorities or you need to get rid of the filibuster. And if you're doing things the president doesn't agree with, you need to be able to override a veto as well. So you need veto proof majorities. But what you're describing is exactly what happened after Richard Nixon. Basically, the Congress, after Richard Nixon's resignation, went through a whole bunch of areas where they identified abuses by the executive, not just by Richard Nixon, but by Johnson and Kennedy, too, and passed laws to make those things illegal. And most of those have held up in court. One of the things that we're going to find out with Donald Trump pushing all of these things and doing things that are blatantly against the current law is will the current conservative Supreme Court actually end up ruling that, you know, those laws constraining the presidency were unconstitutional to begin with. And so, of course he can do these things.
|
Bruce:
[1:05:20]
| Yeah. Yeah. So, well, we'll have to see how that plays out.
|
Sam:
[1:05:24]
| So before you move on to the other topics, cause I'm sure you want to talk about immigration and some other things, what, what's your overall take on that balance though, in terms of like, you know, are you, are you more worried about Donald Trump sort of exerting dictatorial authority on all kinds of areas. The other would be like, you know, firing all kinds of civil servants who are supposedly non-political, blah, blah, blah. Or are you more happy about, hey, he's going to cut the shit that I thought wanted, that I wanted to cut for my entire life.
|
Bruce:
[1:06:02]
| I'll be honest. I'm happy that he's cutting and whatever way he does it, I'm fine with that.
|
Sam:
[1:06:09]
| So this is an interesting libertarian position to me.
|
Bruce:
[1:06:13]
| Even if it's chaotic, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:06:14]
| But chaotic, but like dictatorial. Like, so you would be willing to trade. Like, I will take the smaller government, even if the exchange is a massively increased presidential power for, you know, somebody basically saying, okay, they can do whatever they want, including all kinds of abuses of the type you're probably going to talk about next when we talk about immigration.
|
Bruce:
[1:06:41]
| The powers that he has have already been established by earlier presidents anyway. And so he's using it.
|
Sam:
[1:06:48]
| He's trying to expand them much further. And the question is, does that succeed?
|
Bruce:
[1:06:53]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:06:55]
| So you'd rather have a small government dictator than a large government democracy.
|
Bruce:
[1:07:03]
| That sounds like an oxymoron to me. A small government dictator. This means a government that is smaller, less powerful, an FBI that has reigned in.
|
Sam:
[1:07:12]
| Oh, he's not reigning in the FBI. He's doing exactly the opposite.
|
Bruce:
[1:07:17]
| I don't know. He's been a victim of the FBI. So I think that he's going to reign that in.
|
Sam:
[1:07:21]
| Oh, no, he's not going to reign it in at all. He's just going to make sure it's his tool to use in the way that he wants to.
|
Bruce:
[1:07:27]
| Yeah, we'll see.
|
Sam:
[1:07:29]
| Okay, I'll let you move on now.
|
Bruce:
[1:07:31]
| Anyway, he made... During the Libertarian National Convention, Donald Trump and RFK Jr. Spoke, and that was an unprecedented thing. I don't know if it has ever happened at any political party. Where a candidate in the other party.
|
Sam:
[1:07:49]
| Well, I think there are some minor parties who have done weird things like that, like the Constitution Party in New York and some parties that normally don't run their own candidates anyway, but end up endorsing one of the major candidates.
|
Bruce:
[1:08:02]
| So the Libertarian Party made a deal with Donald Trump to release Ross Ulbricht from prison. Ross Ulbricht, a lot of people may wonder, who is he and why is he so important? He was the founder of what was called the Silk Road. It was the first Bitcoin, like eBay, that used Bitcoin back around 10, 12 years ago. And he and of course it was used for trading drugs and and all kinds of illegal things it was if you wanted to buy a hit person.
|
Sam:
[1:08:39]
| That's where you would go yeah.
|
Bruce:
[1:08:40]
| Uh yeah and that's what that's what he was accused of but he was never convicted of that he was simply convicted for establishing this uh this this marketplace and he was made an example of and he was sentenced to Two life terms plus 40 years, which was way excessive for a crime like that.
|
Sam:
[1:09:05]
| And so- I would agree that's excessive. I probably think he deserved some time, but that seems excessive.
|
Bruce:
[1:09:14]
| Yeah. So Donald Trump not only released him from jail, but gave him a full pardon. And which was beyond what was even asked for by the Bloomberg sharing party. And, and, and, and also just, and didn't do it just quietly. He did it very loudly, put, put it on his social media. And so that was a very good thing to do. He saved this, you know, this still relatively young man from having to spend the rest of his life in jail. So I think that the Gaza ceasefire, I'd like to credit Trump for getting that done.
|
Sam:
[1:09:53]
| I think on that one, even the Biden folks agree that his influence was helpful. You know, basically, he provided a type of pressure that the Biden folks could not in terms of threats he was making, but also just in terms of having the relationship with Netanyahu that wasn't overtly adversarial. And by the way, for those criticizing Biden from the left, yes, the relationship between Netanyahu and Biden was overtly adversarial, even though he was still providing weapons and some other stuff. But those two people hated each other.
|
Bruce:
[1:10:40]
| I like to think that Obama was even more adversarial with Netanyahu. I think Obama would have handled the situation even better than both Trump and- Maybe, maybe.
|
Sam:
[1:10:54]
| But frankly, it was the kind of thing where it's a Nixon goes to China kind of thing where there was no way that that deal was going to happen under Biden, if nothing else other than to spite Biden. So a new person coming in, and especially someone like Trump coming in, could force it to start. I still have doubts about its long-term success, but to start with, yeah, the wheels were oiled by Donald Trump coming on.
|
Bruce:
[1:11:26]
| I have real doubts as to what did Trump promise Netanyahu in order for him to do that? Because just a few weeks ago, your predictions, one of the predictions y'all make was, you know, will all the IDF, I think this is one of the questions I put in there, will the IDF fully withdraw from Gaza? You both said no way. And I said no way in my prediction. And they're fully withdrawing if they haven't already, which is a shock.
|
Sam:
[1:11:53]
| I thought that was a partial withdrawal, not full, out of certain areas.
|
Bruce:
[1:11:58]
| Did you see the video where the Palestinians are all in mass moving back to their homes in North Gaza?
|
Sam:
[1:12:07]
| Well, yeah. I did see that. And maybe I just haven't been paying attention about that. I thought that was certain areas that were being opened, not all of the Gaza Strip, no Israeli presence, which I don't think that's true.
|
Bruce:
[1:12:22]
| From the channels that I've been following, they're saying it's a full withdrawal, but yeah, double check on that.
|
Sam:
[1:12:29]
| Even if that's true, I don't think it'll stay that way.
|
Bruce:
[1:12:32]
| Oh, yeah, I agree. I'm afraid. My fear is that once the hostages are released, that they will go back in either that or they'll do to the West Bank what they did to Gaza. And they'll flatten the West Bank also, which is horrible. And this touches into one of the things I'm just horrified by what Trump has said, that he actually has proposed that the Palestinians be moved into Jordan and Egypt. And he actually used the word clean, not even having the self-awareness to know that that's ethnic cleansing, which is anathema.
|
Sam:
[1:13:15]
| I think it's even giving him the benefit of the doubt saying he doesn't have the self-awareness. If he doesn't, he's stupid. I would say maybe he doesn't know. But the people around him who he's listening to that cause him to talk that way, they absolutely know.
|
Bruce:
[1:13:34]
| I don't know what more Israel could do to Gaza. I mean, any additional bombs they drop on there are just going to make the rubble shake. Right. There's nothing left. But the people are still there, and they will not leave. And Egypt and Jordan won't let those people, won't let the Palestinians in because if Jordan and Egypt were to let them in or to accept them as refugees, the people would rebel because the Egyptians and the Jordanians, they are absolutely ashamed for what their governments are doing to enable Israel to do it.
|
Sam:
[1:14:21]
| And even if not, it would destabilize those countries in other ways. But frankly, even if you said, hey, let's find some uninhabited piece of land that's nice and let's move them all there. I mean, certainly you from a libertarian perspective, you're forcing them against their will to go somewhere they don't want. You are confiscating what was their property. I mean, first you bomb it to hell and then you take it and, you know, to build condos or whatever. You know, this is, you know, ethnic cleansing is considered, you know, tantamount to genocide for a reason. Because you are uprooting an entire society and trying to kill it, essentially, even if you just displace the people. And in the meantime, you are violating core human rights about self-determination.
|
Bruce:
[1:15:19]
| Yes, absolutely. So on other topics, you all talked about DEI last week, and I'm actually happy that they're closing the DEI offices and the government. Now, does that mean that I'm against DEI policies? No, I think DEI itself is a good thing, but I don't see any need for there to be actually people who are employed to implement DEI. It should just be an abnormal function of HR.
|
Sam:
[1:15:51]
| Well, but yes, there were people who specialized in that that they're getting rid of, but what they're doing extends far, far, far beyond that. They're, you know, they're, they're firing those people, but they're closing down even things like, you know, no, you can't have, you know, the women engineers affinity group. You know, you have to remove any references of this to you from your signatures of you.
|
Bruce:
[1:16:20]
| I agree. That's going beyond removing the, yeah, your pronouns on your emails. I don't do that, but I don't disparage anyone for wanting to put that on their emails.
|
Sam:
[1:16:34]
| But I mean, every day, they've put out information with more restrictions on exactly what people can do, even self-organizing employees. Basically just, and of course, they've requested people to report on other employees who are still discussing this stuff in any way, shape or form. You know, the restrictions have been greater and greater. And also, by the way, so far, one of the reasons for the cuts, like we're going to stop funding for X, Y, and Z that they've given is specifically this. We're going to stop funding any grants for 90 days while we can review them to expunge anything even slightly DEI related. And then we'll turn back on some of the ones we like. But like one of the core excuses is we have to review them for DEI to make sure we remove all that and no money is going to that whatsoever.
|
Bruce:
[1:17:39]
| Yeah, that's getting extreme. I wouldn't agree with it. I've seen also where their organizations are actually removing documents that have certain key words, removing web pages that have certain words. That's getting into the top.
|
Sam:
[1:17:57]
| One of the things I saw earlier today was there's been an order to, I forget which part of the government this was, but they were ordered to change all their documents that mentioned LGBTQ and remove the T and Q. They were allowed to keep the LGB part.
|
Bruce:
[1:18:21]
| Okay. Yeah. Like I was saying, I think it's getting into thought control. I don't think that's, that's not good. I am also, I'm happy that they are making federal workers go back to the office and work back in the office. I think that's, I was actually recently in Ottawa and they have the same issue there. There's, there's entire buildings that are fenced off because there's no workers in them. But I normally would have workers.
|
Sam:
[1:18:51]
| But why not solve this by going the other modern way? close the buildings, sell the buildings, and let people work remotely.
|
Bruce:
[1:18:59]
| If it can be done remotely, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:19:03]
| Most of this stuff, I mean, the thing we found out, and of course you've got me on a pet peeve because I'm forced to go into office five days a week now and hate it, but one of the things the pandemic showed is that, Almost all of these white-collar jobs can be done fairly well remotely. At most, you might be taking a 10% hit or something like that that you can make up for by closing all these buildings and maybe even paying people slightly less. But you could gain all kinds of efficiencies. And if everybody was distributed, you help with traffic. You help with boosting the economies of places outside of major cities. There are all kinds of advantages to let people be everywhere, but you have to lean into it all the way. This seems completely retrograde.
|
Bruce:
[1:19:57]
| Well, you have to remember, you're talking to somebody who would prefer that there not be any government workers at all.
|
Sam:
[1:20:03]
| Well, yeah.
|
Bruce:
[1:20:06]
| So I would prefer that if it pushes them to leave their jobs, all the better. And that shrinks government, all the better. Although, even if they were to get rid of all federal workers, the biggest chunk of money that's being spent at the federal level is entitlements and military anyway, which wouldn't be touched by.
|
Sam:
[1:20:29]
| Yeah, like on our Slack lately, Yvonne has mentioned several times, if you did fire 100% of the federal workforce and eliminated their salaries, compared to the overall budget deficit, it's still a really small amount compared to everything else.
|
Bruce:
[1:20:47]
| Yeah. So it's all window dressing. The hard work, of course, is dealing with the entitlement crisis and with the military spending.
|
Sam:
[1:20:59]
| Which you can solve. The best way to solve the entitlement crisis, Bruce, is raise taxes. Taxes are too low.
|
Bruce:
[1:21:11]
| I would not agree with that. I would say that it would be to allow people, instead of taxing people and giving the money back to them, just let the people keep the money themselves and reserve entitlements to only the poorest of the poor, keeping people off the streets. There's there's no reason why we need to be taxing people to give assistance to people who are the wealthiest segment of our of our population which are the retired people in this country the wealthiest well yeah i mean.
|
Sam:
[1:21:48]
| As as far as.
|
Bruce:
[1:21:50]
| I you.
|
Sam:
[1:21:51]
| Know my position because we've talked this about this before as long as you tax them more than they're getting back i'm actually fine with that, I don't care. It's the net that matters there. And the easiest way to get an overall net that makes sense is to not have the extra bureaucracy associated with determining who gets the benefit and who doesn't, but just give it to everybody and tax it back from the people who can afford it.
|
Bruce:
[1:22:18]
| Yeah, that still gives too much power to politicians. It gives them a tool that they can that can control society with how much money they're taking and giving to people in different groups that they like. If you get the government out of the loop entirely, then civil society can take care of itself, charities, and helping people involuntarily rather than by force.
|
Sam:
[1:22:43]
| Yeah, that's failed over and over again. But anyway, move on.
|
Bruce:
[1:22:47]
| Okay. He has banned the creation of a CBDC, at least while he's president.
|
Sam:
[1:22:53]
| Sorry, a what?
|
Bruce:
[1:22:54]
| A central bank digital currency. Oh, okay. That would be basically a government, a federal reserve version of Bitcoin. I'm glad that he is stopping four and eight, at least pausing it, and it's including everybody, even Israel is having to- There were two exceptions.
|
Sam:
[1:23:18]
| Egypt and what other one? I forget the other one, but there were two exceptions.
|
Bruce:
[1:23:23]
| Maybe it is Israel or maybe- It might.
|
Sam:
[1:23:26]
| Have been Israel. It might have been Israel and Egypt. I forget. Egypt was definitely one of them, but I forget what the other one was for sure. And then there's already been some backtracking on that where they've said, oh, but this certain class of stuff, like if it's life essential, blah, blah, blah, will continue. But there's been some reports where even some of that has stopped. Like there are all kinds of like, I, I just shared on the curmudgeons corner slack, like a couple hours ago, there's some like health program in Sudan or something that's primarily funded by us dollars that combat some disease or other. And they literally are, their funding goes week to week. And so they, they, they were ordered to stop all activity whatsoever. They have not stopped all activity. They're violating that order. However, they'll still run out of money and supplies within a week if this isn't rescinded for them. And then, like, whatever kids they're taking care of will start dying.
|
Bruce:
[1:24:28]
| So what will happen here, and this is what I'm hoping to see, is that those programs that are most vital, most necessary, those will... Bubble up to the surface very quickly, and then those will get reactivated. Those that have the highest level of justification will be able to be justified and get back online. But those programs that aren't well justified, that are not having a good effect, not having a good result, then those will be the ones that will remain.
|
Sam:
[1:25:03]
| Well, so far, what's actually happening is the courts are saying that this overt suspension is illegal because Congress mandated that these funds be spent. And then this will undoubtedly go through the courts. And then the question is, what will SCOTUS do? So it probably, and I think that that's the point of a lot of these exercises right now, is for the Trump administration wants to push an expansion of executive power above and beyond what it currently is, force it to SCOTUS, and they're gambling SCOTUS will side with expanded executive power in more places that they don't. And they're also doing so many of them that the idea is, hey, we're going to try 400 of these things. SCOTUS can knock down 300. We still will have gained in 100 places and expanded in those areas.
|
Bruce:
[1:26:01]
| And one more thing that I'm happy about, and you're going to be very upset about this, is I'm glad that he has released all the protesters from January 6th.
|
Sam:
[1:26:11]
| Yes, I am upset about it.
|
Bruce:
[1:26:13]
| Except for the violent ones. The violent ones, I think they should have done it.
|
Sam:
[1:26:16]
| Well, out of the 1,500, the violent ones were about 600. So...
|
Bruce:
[1:26:21]
| Hmm. Okay. Well, I didn't know it was that much.
|
Sam:
[1:26:24]
| It's that much. And even at like, I saw somewhere the, the breakdown was something like, and I don't have the numbers in front of me, so I could be off by a few hundred in either direction, but it was something like 1500 total, about 600 of them were violent in some way. So that includes, they were beating on somebody or broke a window or whatever, but it wasn't necessarily serious injury. And about 100 were the ones that did serious, grievous injury to police officers and such.
|
Bruce:
[1:27:03]
| Well, I don't know what they define as violence. I don't consider vandalism violence.
|
Sam:
[1:27:08]
| But— Yeah, I don't think that—I think I misspoke there. The 600 were violence against people, and the 100 were caused serious injury.
|
Bruce:
[1:27:21]
| Okay. Yeah, so those—.
|
Sam:
[1:27:27]
| But most of the ones who were in the nonviolent category, too, by the way, were already out of jail. So they got their pardons to expunge their records, but they'd already served their sentences or most of their sentences already anyway.
|
Bruce:
[1:27:41]
| Yeah. So on the con side, I'm embarrassed as an American that President Trump is trying to gain control of Greenland and Panama and joking about annexing Canada and renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali. And it's it's just it's it's so stupid and I I really don't think it will go anywhere but it's just embarrassing I would it makes me not want to travel especially to Denmark with a passport or to go or you know I have I have colleagues that I interact with frequently in Canada and.
|
Sam:
[1:28:32]
| Well, the question on these, like, I don't think he's going to literally invade these places. But on the other hand, you know, the question is, does he really try to exert, you know, economic pressure tariffs and other things specifically with the goal of exerting more control? And Greenland, both of these are weird as well, because if you look at it, like, the U.S. Has air bases all over Greenland already. We have all kinds of mineral rights all over Greenland already. Like, and Denmark has specifically said in response to Donald Trump's posturing about Greenland is like, we could do more. Do you want another base? Do you want more oil drilling? What do you want?
|
Bruce:
[1:29:16]
| We can talk. Maybe that's the end goal. Maybe he doesn't really want – maybe he'd like it if he could get it, but getting more – Well.
|
Sam:
[1:29:25]
| So far, so far apparently the report out of Denmark is that when the Danish prime minister or whatever came back with those kind of counteroffers, Donald Trump was, no, I don't care about any of that shit. I just want it. And so, you know, so if it is a negotiating, the one like rational thing to say on both of these is, okay, he's posturing to get more of this stuff. Or maybe in Panama, he wants like not just equal treatment with the rest of the world in terms of how much passage costs, but he wants a special deal for the U.S. And he's going to try to influence or whatever. But at least so far, he has not seemed to actually be making that kind of negotiation. He's just saying, I want it.
|
Bruce:
[1:30:14]
| Yeah. I think Panama is even less likely to succeed because the Panamanians, they've already built a secondary canal that's wider. They've invested more. You know, it's like, it's not. It's not our canal anymore.
|
Sam:
[1:30:34]
| And they've widened some stuff and they're working on another one. There's not an open second passage yet, but yeah, it's there. They've, they've done all kinds of infrastructure improvements since the 1970s when, when Carter agreed to give it up, let alone, you know, a hundred years ago or whenever the damn thing was built.
|
Bruce:
[1:30:54]
| And there's, and there's Panamanians that are living there. It's not like Greenland where there's only 50,000 people there and easily walk in.
|
Sam:
[1:31:05]
| There you go. There's your swap. Have all the people in Gaza move to Greenland and give Gaza to the people who live in Greenland right now. Just force them all to move.
|
Bruce:
[1:31:14]
| The first thing Trump could, he could at least be, set a good example and offer the Palestinians to come and live in America. If you really wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza, you just, hey, have them come in and be Americans.
|
Sam:
[1:31:29]
| Give them Cleveland.
|
Bruce:
[1:31:31]
| Yeah. Yeah. Or West Texas.
|
Sam:
[1:31:37]
| So speaking of that, I know you're working your way down the list. Yeah. What are your thoughts on immigration and the mass deportations and all this kind of stuff?
|
Bruce:
[1:31:48]
| I'm so upset about that. The immigration problem could so easily be solved. And we've talked about this before, where very easy compromise would be to say to all the illegals, you can get a green card, but you can't ever vote if you just pay a $10,000 fine. If what they say is right, that there's actually 10 million illegals here, you take 10 million times $10,000, that's quite a bit of money. What's that? Like $100 billion or so? uh that would be your.
|
Sam:
[1:32:28]
| Your solution is say you can be a legal resident but you don't have a path to citizenship.
|
Bruce:
[1:32:32]
| Exactly let them stay you know i'm sure that anybody who's facing being deported would be happy to take that deal i think even people who aren't facing that would be happy to take that deal because well the thing.
|
Sam:
[1:32:48]
| Is and you and i have talked about this before on the show So the fundamental difficulty here is, I mean, you and I think, you know, freedom of travel, freedom to settle where you want is actually important. Like, yes, there should be open borders. I think at the very least to me, like the default should be, of course you can come unless there's a really fucking good reason not to.
|
Bruce:
[1:33:11]
| Yeah. Only if you have a criminal record of Fujifilm.
|
Sam:
[1:33:15]
| Yeah. And even then depends on the crime, honestly. Like I don't, I don't care if they had a traffic ticket or, or shoplifted 30 years ago, you know, but the thing is like, I look at it and say, illegal immigration is a supply and demand problem to solve it. You make the immigration easier. You let people come in legally.
|
Bruce:
[1:33:40]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:33:41]
| Easily. And that's not the problem.
|
Bruce:
[1:33:43]
| But the problem is the border and it would, it would stop people from coming in illegally.
|
Sam:
[1:33:48]
| Yeah. But the fundamental, the fundamental problem is these people, it's not actually illegal immigration that they care about. It's immigration period. End of story. They don't want people in the country who don't look like them.
|
Bruce:
[1:34:04]
| And they will vehemently say that they are not racist about it, but it is clearly a racist attitude. Because they're totally fine with white Western Europeans coming and settling in America. Yeah. But those dirty Mexicans, they don't want to have anything to do with them.
|
Sam:
[1:34:27]
| And Donald Trump specifically, apparently, really likes the Eastern Europeans too. That's where he's gotten two-thirds of his wives.
|
Bruce:
[1:34:36]
| Yeah, true. But yeah, it's just sickening that we are, We need immigrants. We need these people to come regardless of their skill level. We need the whole spectrum of low-skilled to high-skilled people. I've worked in high-tech industry, and clearly when companies in America are not able to hire people in the U.S., then jobs just get exported. We can either import people or export jobs. And companies clearly have been exporting jobs to other countries to do their manufacturing. If we had open free immigration for the last 50 years in this country, we would be so much richer. We would be rich beyond belief because those factories would be here in America. And we would be dominating the world because we would have a growing population but bruce bruce.
|
Sam:
[1:35:46]
| We'd also be a lot less white.
|
Bruce:
[1:35:49]
| And i love ethnic food, i love chinese and thai and mexican and indonesian food it's like there's just so much richness in this country and all the and i yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:36:08]
| The culture too i was that's what i was going to say it's not just like the food or anything. It's like, it's actually so valuable to hear all of those other perspectives and those viewpoints on life. And, and, you know, the old concept that you used to, like there, there used to be like what a schoolhouse rock songs on like the melting pot and stuff. The whole idea is that when you bring folks together, you end up something with something that takes the best parts of all of them and you gain something from that. And, and I think that's the, but right now what you have is this, the, the, the xenophobic tendency here and racist tendency is just, we're scared of the other, we're scared of the other taking over. And so we're, we're doing everything we can to resist that as we've talked about on the curmudgeons corner slack a little bit too, though, so far in terms of raw numbers, we're not really much different than where we have been the last couple of years in the Biden presidency. The difference so far is.
|
Sam:
[1:37:20]
| Is how it's presented. I mean, Donald Trump is pushing them to ramp up even further. And if he succeeds, maybe we will see numbers that are significantly bigger than prior years. But right now, it's not about like how many deportation flights there were. It's instead of paying for tickets on commercial airlines, we're spending much, much more money to send them on a military plane. And by the way, we're going to have Dr. Phil go on a ride along taking video. So we're we're making all sorts of video of the arrests of the detentions to make a show of the whole thing. So we're just making it a lot more visible and, you know, we're scaring a lot of people.
|
Sam:
[1:38:03]
| And, and, and now, you know, they've said so far, you know, we're going after the worst criminals first and all that, but there are more and reports, more and more reports coming in that along with, Yes, some people who are significant criminals. There are lots of people who, other than their status without documentation, have been living good beneficial lives and paying taxes and all this kind of stuff. They're being swept up along with it. There are American citizens being swept up, too, that have only been able to prove that they were, in fact, a citizen after the fact. And we're just making a show of it right now and scaring people. And that's entirely the point of it right now. But Trump is insisting on quotas that are rising. And once you put in the numerical quotas and saying you have to arrest this many people per time period, then of course, you're going to just get whoever they can catch.
|
Bruce:
[1:39:03]
| Yeah and anyone and and we don't have a a national id in this country no it's you are not required.
|
Sam:
[1:39:13]
| To have an id at all.
|
Bruce:
[1:39:15]
| Yeah and so if uh if if some someone stops me on the street some police that if any you know what's what they called ice stops me on the street and asks me to prove that i'm american i i'd have to go home and get my passport but if i didn't have a passport i'd have no way of proving that and so and i'm not i would i would say probably a minority of americans have a passport so which is the only way here.
|
Sam:
[1:39:42]
| Here in washington the enhanced driver's license will also prove citizenship because you have to produce that documentation to get one.
|
Bruce:
[1:39:49]
| Oh yeah well i've i have been disobeying and i am not getting that enhanced driver's license.
|
Sam:
[1:39:57]
| Of course you are. Of course you are.
|
Bruce:
[1:39:59]
| I am not complying with the real ID. Because they passed that law 20 years ago, and they still have not required the real ID in the airports. Yeah, they keep pushing back the deadline. Yeah, they keep pushing back the deadline. Supposedly this year, they are finally going to put their foot down and say, yes, you actually have to do that. And when that actually, when that day comes, then yes, I'm going to have to get my passport and use my passport to go to travel within the United States, which is ridiculous. But no, I don't want the enhanced driver's license. Real ID.
|
Sam:
[1:40:37]
| Yeah. I mean, but this is exactly the kind of thing, though. If they really want to get serious about deporting all the illegals, you're going to have to require some sort of ID of everyone.
|
Bruce:
[1:40:48]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:40:48]
| You know, this is where these things escalate. I mean, well, there are many places where they have the potential of escalating, but this is just one of them. Now, you know, I don't have the same revulsion against the idea of a national idea as you do, but at the same time, you can see where these things can easily escalate to, oh, no, we can't tell if you're a citizen. Okay, we're going to have to make a mechanism where we can. Oh, now that we have that mechanism, you're going to have to provide that proof for all of these kinds of normal everyday activities. If you don't have this proof, you can't do this, you can't do that, you can't do this. You know, that that's where these can ramp and they can ramp relatively quickly, depending on all of these things that we're talking about, about, you know, does Trump get away with extending executive power in such a way that, you know, he can declare things by decree.
|
Bruce:
[1:41:45]
| And that's when the pendulum will swing back the other way, and immigrants and immigration will be more favorable. The thing that was so frustrating to me during the election was to see Biden and then later Harris adopting Trump's policy of anti-immigration. And it would have taken bravery to stand up and say, no, we are a nation of immigrants. I want more people and we need to allow more people into this country.
|
Sam:
[1:42:19]
| That was clearly one of them. There were several other issues as well where the campaign took the – and I blame a lot of the Obama-era consultants who were brought on. I keep saying September was a turning point and this was part of it.
|
Sam:
[1:42:37]
| That where they really decided that their only way to win was to convince Republicans who felt a little bit queasy about Trump to come to their side. And so in order to do that, they watered down what the Democrats really believe about a variety of issues and tried to come up with wishy-washy, middle-of-the-road positions that at the same time sort of tried to move right to get some of those swing voters over. Where, and I think the end result of that was you didn't convince any of those people to come over, but you convinced some Democrats to stay home. And that made the difference.
|
Sam:
[1:43:25]
| Whereas I feel like in a lot of places, like you get all these people trying to triangulate about the middle, because sometimes that technique does work. Arguably, that's how Bill Clinton became president. But at the same time, I feel like the right way to go about it is to really own your convictions and double down on it and be like, be honest about your conviction convictions because people appreciate the honesty, whereas they can smell that fake a mile away. And like that's part, I mean, that's the Trump strategy. Both times he won, he wasn't going after the median voter or trying to get swing voters. He was 100% about activating the people who were excited about him.
|
Bruce:
[1:44:11]
| Yep. Amazingly. And he's gotten more and more popular with every election. Trump did.
|
Sam:
[1:44:17]
| Well, in terms of absolute number of votes, yes, it went up each time. In terms of percentage, it went high, down, and then up again.
|
Bruce:
[1:44:27]
| Now, five years ago, I really thought Biden was campaigning on being the most pro-immigration candidate in a long time. And I really thought that he maybe he got it maybe he would understand to to reduce illegal immigration you increase legal immigration that just seems like a such a simple thing to understand but for some reason the politics doesn't allow it and yeah i.
|
Sam:
[1:44:55]
| Mean and the fundamental reason for that is because you have at least 50 if not more of the population who really they don't care about legal illegal The only thing they care about is please don't let anybody else in, especially if they're brown.
|
Bruce:
[1:45:15]
| Because, yeah, there are people that they see someone who looks different from them and that core monkey brain, tribal instinct kicks in and they don't like people around them that don't look like them, which is just sickening.
|
Sam:
[1:45:34]
| Or don't think like them or don't worship the same God or don't want anything that like makes them feel fundamentally like, hey, this person threatens my sense of self and my sense that I'm the one who's right and best in the world. And especially, by the way, they don't like the sort of menial labor immigrants either, but especially successful immigrants. Those are the ones you have to be the most scared of because they're taking over. And just to be clear, I am mocking and pretending to be the other view. I am not saying that on my own view.
|
Bruce:
[1:46:20]
| Any other any other.
|
Sam:
[1:46:22]
| Trump actions you want to rattle through.
|
Bruce:
[1:46:24]
| Uh no that's all of them that's all of them so okay.
|
Sam:
[1:46:27]
| Well i guess that brings us to the end bruce.
|
Bruce:
[1:46:31]
| Yeah for now i'm happy to do this again and yes i i'm i'm it's glad it was fun to to kind of go over a whole bunch of different issues with you and yes there are certainly areas we disagree but i i like to think that that your special skill and my ability why also skill is to have these conversations without animosity and without taking it personally i.
|
Sam:
[1:46:59]
| Think you know.
|
Bruce:
[1:47:00]
| Within limits i.
|
Sam:
[1:47:02]
| Mean you do this in a way that i can do this there there are certainly certain positions that if someone had and was adamant about and presented in a certain way i would have a hard time and i would have to stop. But even strongly held positions I disagree with, if the other side is sort of speaking rationally and actually talking about facts and not making stuff up and not doing personal attacks, then yeah, it's good to have the conversation. It's just so much of the time, the, you know, it seems like arguments are disingenuous and, you know, or, and, and aren't that kind of argument and instead just go off the rails into, you know, things that just don't work.
|
Bruce:
[1:47:56]
| Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, uh, people just get too animated about these things, but, but yeah, I think rat cross aisle conversations are definitely need needed and there needs to be more of that. And that's one of the main reasons why I like participating in the, in the Slack channel, because it's a way for me to get out of my bubble, and to hear what the left point of view is. And I like to, I have to admit, I love being able to throw in my dig in there every once in a while. And I point out things that the left does wrong.
|
Sam:
[1:48:35]
| Well, I admit certain times, like I'll let the others, certain times I see something that you put in there and I'm like, okay, he's just trolling. I'm going to ignore that. If the others want to engage, they could do it. I'm just going to ignore that because he's just looking to get a rise out of us and i'll i'll ignore it.
|
Bruce:
[1:48:51]
| I will admit i was bothered a little bit a couple weeks ago there was a bit of a conversation where i saw some really strongly anti-religious comments and i had to respond and i needed to because i'm i'm as you know i'm a religious person and i i think that i couldn't let those those anti-religious comments just sit there. I needed to defend it.
|
Sam:
[1:49:18]
| I'm anti-religious, but I try to be quiet about it most of the time, as long as the religion is harmless. I'm like, I don't care what you believe, as long as the belief doesn't cause you to be harmful to other people. And at that point, I'm like, whatever. Otherwise, it's like, I'm like, it's your business if you're delusional.
|
Bruce:
[1:49:39]
| Yeah, I fully agree, especially when religion tries to use the power and force of government to achieve their means. That's absolutely wrong.
|
Sam:
[1:49:51]
| Right. Okay. Let's wrap this sucker up. Everyone, as you know, go to curmudgeon-corner.com. You'll see all our transcripts. You'll get all our old shows, all the ways to contact us. A link to our Patreon if you want to give us cash. We talked a lot about the Patreon last week. I still owe sending out the cards and mugs that we talked about last week. I'll get to it sometime. I promise not too long. I'll get to it. Oh, Bruce is showing his cat for anybody who sees videos.
|
Bruce:
[1:50:23]
| This is Mittens, our cat. And she doesn't like to be held, but she loves to rub up against me.
|
Sam:
[1:50:30]
| We should have more pets on the show. Anyway, hello to Mittens. Anyway, as you all know, at various levels on the Patreon, you can get those cards. You can get mentioned on the show like happened last week, you can get a mug at $2 a month or more. Or if you just ask, you can get invited to our curmudgeons corner slack that Bruce and I have been talking about conversations going on there. Uh, you know, Bruce is on there. I'm on there. Yvonne is on there. A variety of other people are on there. We've had a couple new people join in the last couple of weeks. So it's good to have more folks.
|
Bruce:
[1:51:04]
| Uh, and you know, uh, you and Yvonne are so onto it about posting the latest news. If there's breaking news, I actually go to the Slack channel first because I know that that's where I'm going to get the news first. Cause you all, you have a race to see who can get the news, who can get that link on there first.
|
Sam:
[1:51:29]
| Today, I posted something five hours after Yvonne had posted it and he yelled at me and was like.
|
Bruce:
[1:51:34]
| Haha.
|
Sam:
[1:51:35]
| Shame on you you're five hours late and then another person came in three hours later and posted the same article again.
|
Bruce:
[1:51:42]
| So yeah it's.
|
Sam:
[1:51:46]
| A lot of fun you should join us if you aren't there already and that's it hey bruce do you have something from the slack you'd like to highlight for.
|
Bruce:
[1:51:54]
| Oh yes let's see well that we've not talked about already well i think there's some really good links in here about the accident in dc and and so and there's some really good discussion and and yvonne has been throwing in their knowledge you know what he's been gleaning from these articles so it's a really good primer for for me to know what's going on so yeah i think there's some really good discussion at least on that.
|
Sam:
[1:52:25]
| Yeah and so depending on what breaking news happens in the next week. We may ask Yvonne to talk a bit about this crash in DC where the helicopter hit the regional jet. There have been a couple other things. Like I mentioned at the, what I call an air ambulance. There was, there was a six year old kid who just finished treatment and they crashed into a residential area next to a mall apparently. But, but that's relatively small and actually private jets crash all the time. There was one in California from a few days ago, I think. And I, you know, commercial flights, it's really rare. Like it's been is 2007. I think they said the last one in the U S was. And then the last one that was bigger than this one in terms of number of dead was like 2001, you know, so commercial accidents are very, very rare at this point, private, not so much. They still happen all the time. And helicopters, helicopters is like the most dangerous way you can travel. I remember on the curmudgeon score slack, like last year or something, somebody pulled up the numbers and it's significantly more dangerous even than motorcycles you know it's just.
|
Bruce:
[1:53:43]
| Full disclosure the current the company i work for right now.
|
Sam:
[1:53:46]
| Yeah helicopters or.
|
Bruce:
[1:53:50]
| Makes helicopters we do final assembly on helicopters.
|
Sam:
[1:53:55]
| You know it's just it's a natural part of like trying to make something shaped like a brick fly you know so no anyway Anyway, that's it. Thank you, Bruce, for joining us yet again. It's been fun. And, every time you come on, I worry that we're going to get into some big argument or something. But like you said, we always end up having a nice conversation. Anyway, thanks, everybody. Have a good week. Stay safe. Yvonne should be back next week. We'll see you next time. Goodbye.
|
Bruce:
[1:54:59]
| Bye, Alex.
|
Sam:
[1:55:01]
| Oh, did you hear him? Okay. He heard you. okay bye Bruce we'll talk to you next time I'm hitting stop.
| |
|
