Automated Transcript
Ivan:
[0:01]
| Hello?
|
Sam:
[0:03]
| Hey.
|
Ivan:
[0:06]
| Rise and shine!
|
Sam:
[0:10]
| Shining, rising... There we go. Beep. Yes, it has not risen to the level of attention yet. You know, you notice because it's the closest one to here. Like, when it's the ones downstairs, you don't notice.
|
Ivan:
[0:28]
| Well, yeah, well, the other night, a couple of weeks ago, in the middle of the night, the one in our master bedroom at five something in the morning beeped a couple of times.
|
Sam:
[0:44]
| I think you mentioned this and Juana made you get up and fix it right then at that second.
|
Ivan:
[0:48]
| No, no, no, no. I mentioned in the past.
|
Sam:
[0:51]
| If it had happened.
|
Ivan:
[0:52]
| She would get to it. But then after we had that conversation, it happened.
|
Sam:
[0:57]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[0:59]
| But here's the thing. It didn't beep again. And I'm really confused with what the fuck happened with it.
|
Sam:
[1:05]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:07]
| I mean, it just... Did it... And then didn't do it again.
|
Sam:
[1:14]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:15]
| It's been weeks.
|
Sam:
[1:17]
| It decided it was okay after all. Or maybe it just died completely. No longer enough energy even to beep.
|
Ivan:
[1:25]
| Well, these have like an electrical connection.
|
Sam:
[1:30]
| Yeah, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:31]
| As well as the battery.
|
Sam:
[1:34]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:35]
| I'm wondering if there was a power flicker or something and it's just...
|
Sam:
[1:40]
| Flicker.
|
Ivan:
[1:41]
| Yeah. Anyway, but I thought that was curious.
|
Sam:
[1:45]
| Ah, yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:47]
| I noticed that you had not put any topics. I have put some topics.
|
Sam:
[1:52]
| I, yeah, I, yeah, it was, I was distracted this week, I guess. I don't know. But, yeah. Okay. Shall we go? Beep. Is that a yes?
|
Ivan:
[2:08]
| Yes. I think it was answering for me.
|
Sam:
[2:12]
| Oh, okay, okay, here we go. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, March 14th, 2026. It's just after 17 UTC as we're starting to record. And I have two things to say about that. One, it's 17 instead of 18 because of clock changes and savings time and all that kind of stuff. So we're actually doing this earlier than we normally do it when we do it on a Saturday. And so let me just, that is our abbreviated version of the daylight savings time rant. We don't have to like get deeper. And second is, of course, it is March 14th, which means it is Pi Day.
|
Ivan:
[3:16]
| Oh, it's Pi Day. Yay.
|
Sam:
[3:19]
| Pi Day. Yes, indeed.
|
Ivan:
[3:21]
| I mean, pretty soon it will be 15 hours.
|
Sam:
[3:25]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[3:26]
| So it'd be, you know, 3.14. Oh, well, on Eastern time, I guess. Yeah, true. 17. Yeah, we missed that.
|
Sam:
[3:35]
| Oh, well. Anyway, Pi Day. Go get yourself some pie. You know, I'm not a big actual fan of pie. Like, cake is fine, but I'm not a big fan of pie. They're very, you know, I'll occasionally have some pie, but it's not my favorite thing.
|
Ivan:
[3:51]
| Well, there is one pie that is one of my favorites. The pecan pie.
|
Sam:
[3:58]
| I will say that the pecan pie. I can't say I have a mental, like, you say pecan pie, and I'm sure I've had it at least once in my past, but I cannot bring to mind what that tastes or even looks like.
|
Ivan:
[4:10]
| Like Publix, the supermarket chain here in Florida, makes a fantastic pecan pie. And so the thing is that Publix has these desserts that they have pre-made. They have like, if you go and say you're going to have a little party or something or whatever, you want to pick up a dessert. They'll have like a shelf with like freshly baked pecan pies or apple pies. Okay. And a few other assorted things. But I have heard other people comment, just like I have, that the pecan pie is superb. I have had it many times. It is absolutely delicious. I am not one that usually will have a pecan pie from other places. But that Publix pecan pie here is quite, quite spectacularly good.
|
Sam:
[5:07]
| Very well.
|
Ivan:
[5:08]
| My other favorite dessert is probably, I don't know, not so easy to get in Washington State. But, I mean, usually the ones that I eat it either because I'm in Puerto Rico and it's available at the restaurants or like my family makes it. A cheese flan.
|
Sam:
[5:28]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[5:29]
| Not the regular flan, but the cheese flan.
|
Sam:
[5:33]
| Cheese flan.
|
Ivan:
[5:34]
| Yeah, and a cheese flan is, oh my God, that is just, that is, mmm, delicious. And I don't know, a flan is not a pie. I don't think it's considered a pie.
|
Sam:
[5:48]
| Is it more like a pudding?
|
Ivan:
[5:49]
| It's more like a custard.
|
Sam:
[5:50]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[5:51]
| It's more like a custard.
|
Sam:
[5:53]
| Yeah. Right. No crust.
|
Ivan:
[5:55]
| Yeah, so, no, no crust. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[5:58]
| Like that, the crust is what makes it a pie, right? You have a crust and then you put stuff inside it.
|
Ivan:
[6:03]
| Right, exactly. Right. But no, it's not a pie. It's a custard. It's not a pie. But you get the opportunity to try a cheese flan.
|
Sam:
[6:12]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[6:12]
| I highly recommend it.
|
Sam:
[6:13]
| I will keep this in mind next time someone is offering cheese flan.
|
Ivan:
[6:19]
| Or you're in a place that maybe, you know, all of a sudden could be, you went to, you know, many, even though I think it's more, I'm not sure if it's completely Puerto Rican, but it's very typical in Puerto. Well, I don't know if there's a lot of shared foods that Cubans and Puerto Ricans have. Okay.
|
Sam:
[6:37]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[6:38]
| I'm not sure if it's ours or theirs. I can't claim that. Ownership for it. I'm not sure, but it's very typical in Puerto Rico. But I'm not sure if we also share that with the Cubans.
|
Sam:
[6:52]
| That's exciting. Anyway, our usual agenda, we'll talk about lighter stuff like cheese flan and pie at this beginning part of the show. I'll do a couple movies. Yvonne may bring up something else. And then after our first break, we'll talk about more strictly newsy stuff, newsy stuff.
|
Ivan:
[7:15]
| Sam, so last week I got a call from someone that we both know in a panic.
|
Sam:
[7:23]
| Oh, no, I know what this is going to be about.
|
Ivan:
[7:25]
| Oh, I want it because all of a sudden they decided. And I, you know, I had I had heard people having horror stories and, trying to synchronize their files with Google Drive and losing data and it not being recoverable. I can't remember from where I read it, but I know I read about this, people online complaining about this. And our non-tech savvy, very risk-averse mutual friend for some reason decided.
|
Ivan:
[8:08]
| To try to synchronize all their files, using Google Drive now just to be, wait wait wait you can go into this later and then let me explain how this happened you can talk about this later all of a sudden she calls me that there are all these messages that all these files that she was freaking out about preserving, were tossed in the trash. The message said they were tossed in the trash. Problem is that when you clicked on the message that said that they're in the trash, and they weren't in the trash, okay? The fucking message kept saying, oh, all the photos are in the trash. You go in the trash. Nothing in the fucking trash. I mean, nothing, nothing.
|
Sam:
[9:00]
| Mm-hmm.
|
Ivan:
[9:01]
| I was driving. She is screaming. I just, I.
|
Sam:
[9:09]
| So you sent her.
|
Ivan:
[9:11]
| And then I go, no, no, no, I did not. Okay. I did not.
|
Sam:
[9:17]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[9:17]
| What happened is, look, I was on the phone with her an hour and a half. And on the screen, the thing is that the first thing I think is, well, you're Mrs. Backup. Where's your backups? Oh, yeah, I got the drive. It's sitting right beside the computer. It's not plugged in. I'm like, fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Lesson number one a time machine backup drive doesn't do backups unless you connect it and set it up to do the backups it can't it doesn't just it can't just sit to.
|
Sam:
[9:58]
| Be clear it wasn't it wasn't just sitting there it was still in the box unopened if i.
|
Ivan:
[10:03]
| Understand the box unopened yes in the box unopened doesn't do anything. Okay. So she has an old computer and I'm like, that was connected and synchronized. I thought, Hey, let's pull the time machine backup from that computer. Well, the backup was from October. I, I was actually, look, I spent a lot of time looking at it, I knew the files had, some had to be hidden somewhere. Because I went into the recents, and many of the files appeared in the recents listed. And I went and I'm like, show me the folder where they are. And it would open the folder and show the file, but only that one file that recents had, not the rest of them. It was really weird. So I'm realizing, look, there's something here where these files have been made invisible somewhere for some reason, at least a good number of them.
|
Ivan:
[11:10]
| But I did not send her to her. It said to her, what happened is that I did. I was like, you are in an earlier time zone than I am. I was, it was getting very late. I was at my parents' house. I, I, I'm like, I was with Manu the day that I took, that we took his cast off. Okay. Just last week, Manu got his cast off from surgery. Okay. So he's recovering very well. And I, I'm like, look, my last, my last thing was, you know what? Let me tell you something. I think you're fucked. And the easiest thing to do is just to restore what you have from October. And then try to figure out what you're missing. Okay? And I've had to do this before with a backup. I once, like, lost stuff. And the backup was a week or two old. And I just had, you know what? Look, I lost some stuff from recently. But I have to go back to that backup. And do the best with the rest that disappeared. You know? It is what it is. That's where I left it. I did not. Direct you to. But she did say, at some point she was going to talk to you, and I was like, well, it's getting very late. You're in earlier times, so I figured you could help. So what did you manage to do.
|
Sam:
[12:35]
| Sam?
|
Ivan:
[12:35]
| Did you manage to find these files?
|
Sam:
[12:37]
| Well, I found some. Here's a few additional things. So first of all, to be fair to her as much as I can, the... Look, what her thought process was she was installing Google Drive for something else in order to access some files. And it offered her the opportunity to also sync her desktop and her documents folders. And she's like, awesome, an additional backup of those things.
|
Ivan:
[13:11]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[13:11]
| So I will turn those off.
|
Ivan:
[13:13]
| Yeah, but here's the thing. And this is where my thing that got, I'm like, here's the thing. she has always been so cautious about doing anything.
|
Sam:
[13:23]
| Right well so he i.
|
Ivan:
[13:26]
| I was like so wait what that was offered you've asked about every fucking thing multiple times.
|
Sam:
[13:34]
| So why.
|
Ivan:
[13:35]
| Didn't you ask if that was a good.
|
Sam:
[13:37]
| Idea yeah yeah so here's the thing yeah fundamentally and and people get this screwed up all the time iCloud and Google Drive and these things are not backups they're not backups they are not backups they are they synchronize and whenever you have something synchronizing that means if something gets removed from one of the locations it gets removed from all of them so in some senses it actually makes your stuff less secure you know now it's distributed they have it in multiple it's safer against some kinds of things but what it's not safe and.
|
Ivan:
[14:19]
| Listen it's safer against like i've had the the experience where say my computer died right.
|
Sam:
[14:25]
| Yes it is safer What it is not safer against is something getting removed. Like you actually, you accidentally delete a file or you move something or, you know, cause, cause then it will propagate what you have just done everywhere else.
|
Ivan:
[14:43]
| Yeah. Oh, it's removed. Oh, great. Let's delete it everywhere. Everywhere.
|
Sam:
[14:47]
| Exactly. And also just as a general thing, I mean, it's much, much better than it used to. But synchronization used to be kind of iffy, you know, like it would sometimes work and sometimes not. It now is fairly reliable as long as you're syncing with one thing. Once you are trying to sync with multiple things at the same time, they can still get confused in a variety of different ways. So and by the way I will continue the story from where you left it off but I will not be able to finish it because she the last update I had from her was yesterday afternoon and there was more that she was going to, try to deal with tonight okay um so anyway here's the thing i i looked in a bunch of places and i was like it it looks like you know it looks like stuff is really gone okay yeah that's what.
|
Ivan:
[15:50]
| I that was my thing i kept going into different.
|
Sam:
[15:52]
| Places you know it should but stuff.
|
Ivan:
[15:54]
| Should be and.
|
Sam:
[15:55]
| Nothing was there the one weirdness that i noticed that led me somewhere and like i also spent several hours on on the phone and on screen share with her okay okay um you know so that so i am significantly abbreviating this story but one thing that i i noticed at one point that got me suspicious there were a bunch of empty folders that nevertheless reported they had multiple gigabytes in them.
|
Ivan:
[16:23]
| Oh what the fuck.
|
Sam:
[16:25]
| So you would look at finder and the folder would say you know seven gigabytes or whatever in the folder but you went in and.
|
Ivan:
[16:32]
| There was no no files showing up.
|
Sam:
[16:34]
| Right exactly so i i had looked at a variety of different things and i was like okay and also at the moment we later got it to work but at the moment i could not get her screen sharing to let me have control so i'd been reluctant to try this earlier but i'm like okay i i need i need you to go into terminal.
|
Ivan:
[16:58]
| You need control. Oh, you had her go into terminal. Okay.
|
Sam:
[17:03]
| Right. But I couldn't type. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[17:05]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[17:06]
| So I had her go into terminal and I was, you know, saying out loud, okay, now type L S space hyphen L A space. And now I'm going to need you to, I'm going to need the path to a directory. But luckily I knew, you know, you can drag that from finder into terminal instead of typing it. So I'd have her find the folder.
|
Ivan:
[17:32]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[17:33]
| Yeah. So like, if you've got a folder or a file in finder that you want to access in terminal, you can just drag that into terminal and the name of it will show up good.
|
Ivan:
[17:41]
| To know i.
|
Sam:
[17:41]
| Didn't realize.
|
Ivan:
[17:42]
| Okay all right.
|
Sam:
[17:43]
| So i had her do that i started looking and then i saw like i listed the directory of one of the empty directories and boom it's full of files whoa so i had her copy one of the files onto, i had her plug in an external drive you know copy it onto there and check it and it was there The file opened. It was successfully there. So I'm like, Oh.
|
Ivan:
[18:11]
| Fucking hell.
|
Sam:
[18:12]
| I'm like, okay, let's do this then. So I set her up from terminal to copy documents, desktop, and like one other place recursively, just copy everything it could find onto the external drive. Now this was going to take many hours. It would run overnight. So I let it run overnight, but I warned her as well. Like, Because we spot-checked a few things. There are still some things missing. And here is the other thing. And this applies to the time machine backups, because we ended up checking this as well. And, you know, if any of our listeners know better, feel free to chime in, because maybe Apple's gotten smarter. But it used to be the case. ICloud also does not play well with Time Machine, okay? Because fundamentally, Time Machine will only back up the files that are actually on your hard drive at any given time.
|
Ivan:
[19:10]
| You mean, okay, so let me see if I understand what, What you mean by this, because you've got an option for Time Machine, I mean, for iCloud Drive to either optimize your storage or to have all the files copied in both places.
|
Sam:
[19:26]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[19:27]
| Are you saying that if you're in optimized storage mode, basically, if the file is not, there's just an alias, but not the file, it won't get backed up?
|
Sam:
[19:37]
| Correct.
|
Ivan:
[19:38]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[19:40]
| So, and on her old machine, which was... It was set to optimize. It was set to optimize because there just wasn't enough space for everything.
|
Ivan:
[19:47]
| There just wasn't enough space.
|
Sam:
[19:49]
| Her new machine was set to download everything. But it hadn't finished. But the time machine backup had never been attached to it.
|
Ivan:
[19:56]
| Correct. And also, it hadn't finished downloading everything.
|
Sam:
[20:01]
| Correct.
|
Ivan:
[20:01]
| Because her connection is not that fast either. So, yeah. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[20:07]
| So, so anyway, so I was like, look, when we're going to copy over all of this stuff, but there's still clearly stuff missing. So we, we caught, you know, it went overnight. I talked to her briefly in the morning. She confirmed lots and lots of stuff was there, but there were things missing. You know there were things that just weren't there and then we checked her backups from like october same well same thing but the the problem is there because that one was on optimize, right just the fact that it wasn't in the most recent time machine backup doesn't mean it's not in any Time Machine backup. Because, you know, Time Machine lets you, you can look at last week's backup or the week before or the week after. So it's very well possible that some file might be in the backup from two years ago, but not the backup from last week.
|
Ivan:
[21:07]
| Right, but not in a recent one. That's right, correct.
|
Sam:
[21:09]
| So like to fully search for this stuff, you would have to comprehensively look through all the backups, not just the most recent one. Okay um and so i was like look i'll help you do that if if i have to so but i was like look your next step i'm sorry just just call apple like hope and pray, that they have a backup of your iCloud from before you corrupted it okay because and i guess we didn't say explicitly what happened was when she turned on iCloud the google sync Like, it just started deleting all kinds of crap. My best guess was it was deleting stuff that wasn't locally present on her Mac and making it not present anywhere. Like, it was deleting those aliases or something.
|
Ivan:
[22:01]
| Yeah, okay.
|
Sam:
[22:02]
| That's a complete guess. I don't know. I don't know exactly what was happening, but things were disappearing. And just hope that Apple actually has a backup. I'm sure this happens to people and they do whatever. Anyway, she eventually did call them. And we had checked, by the way, online on iCloud.com. We'd looked at it recently deleted. There was nothing there. But what Apple told her, hey, look, we used to do this all the time. We used to like, you know, we actually kept things for 30 days and we could restore. But we don't do that anymore. But, but they said the reason we don't do it anymore is because we made it available directly in iCloud.com. There is a restore feature. That, and we don't guarantee how long things will be available. Like it might, it might be a couple of weeks. It might be a few days, but as soon as possible, go check there. And I'd looked at the recently deleted, but I had not known to go look for a store.
|
Ivan:
[23:09]
| I did not. And she, she actually texted and asked me that. And I'm like, I, I'm like, I said, I didn't know about this.
|
Sam:
[23:16]
| So, so that That is the thing that she theoretically is going to be trying tonight and, and will be potentially screen sharing me again to see. And I'm like, well, cross your fingers, hope it's there because like, then, then you just like, you know, restore everything to the state it was in like three days ago or something. Of course, with her luck, there will have been a new backup made after the things were deleted and you can't get to the old backup or something like that. Um, Anyway, we'll see. But, you know, the moral of the story, as always, is backups are not backups unless you test or restore. And you have to take them seriously. And you have to sort of understand where things are going and why. And synchronization is not backup. It's not the same thing. and I'll say, I'm pretty obsessive about this too, but I have gaps too. Like I was just, I was going through an exercise the other day.
|
Ivan:
[24:19]
| Here it is. I just, by the way, I just went to iCloud.com and I just saw this and they do have this very prominent thing there that is called data recovery. And it says, recover files deleted from both iCloud Drive and other apps within the last 30 days or restore an earlier version of your calendar contacts and Safari bookmarks.
|
Sam:
[24:38]
| Nice.
|
Ivan:
[24:39]
| Huh. And it's... Okay.
|
Sam:
[24:44]
| Now, I will mention one other thing with her scenario, and I'm sure we've bored everybody. But, like, apparently there was stuff that was on Google.
|
Ivan:
[24:52]
| Well, we have a lot of nerds that listen to us.
|
Sam:
[24:54]
| Yeah. So what the fuck? But apparently there was also stuff on Google Drive. She apparently is on three Google Drives. One is a personal drive, and then there's one for one organization she's involved in, and there's another for another organization she's involved in. She connected all three of them and told all three of them to sync. Okay. And apparently things that were on those Google drives for those organizations that had nothing to do with her personal files also have gotten deleted. And I have no idea what was going on there or what to do about that.
|
Ivan:
[25:31]
| The thing is, I'm telling you right now, I had heard horror stories about the fucking Google drive synchronization. I probably shouldn't look for it online, but I had heard these and how it just basically made shit just disappear. And people were very frustrated that, you know, you would contact Google and whatever. And even though they say a whole bunch of different things about, well, you can do this, do that to restore. How basically you just couldn't. It was it was a waste of time. Well, you just lost the stuff.
|
Sam:
[26:05]
| Anyway, what I was going to say about myself is I am also fairly uptight about backups.
|
Ivan:
[26:13]
| I know. And that's the thing that gets me. She is very uptight about all these fucking backups.
|
Sam:
[26:18]
| But let me say, let me say, I, I, I am missing stuff anyway. Um, because, because of, you know, every once in a while I slip up, like, I'll, I'll tell you what I was doing recently. I was trying, I, I, I've developed, I set up a new way of doing stats for curmudgeon's corner downloads. Okay. And I was going to be like, okay, I will reconstruct the entire history all the way back to 2007 using this. I just have to like, you know, have it analyze the old log files. So I went looking for all my old backup log, backed up log files of curmudgeons corner download logs going back to 2007. Well, guess what? I've got gaps. Like, basically, 2007 and 2008, I have no record of whatsoever. Can't find them at all. In 2018 or 19 or something like that, I've got, like, a six-month gap, you know? And these are all places where I know what happened is at one period of time or another, I got slack. There was something that wasn't working, and I didn't. And I probably had an alarm going that told me, hey, your backup's old, your backup's old, your backup's old.
|
Sam:
[27:38]
| And I'm backing up the log files from the server that only keeps them for like a few weeks. And I let it go more than a few weeks before I fixed it. And so a gap ensued, you know, and so I can't reconstruct the entire history. I can reconstruct most of it, but I've got a few gaps. And i know other things over the years have probably gotten gone missing and there have been gaps at various points and there there was one time uh recently i i you know i i probably never gave the follow-up on this there was one of alex's drives that you know he keeps his videos on for his youtube channel that the drive died okay um but and i'm like it's okay i have backups I went to check the backup. The backup was old. The backup had like, was missing...
|
Sam:
[28:34]
| I actually went, I paid to restore the backup. The backup ended up having about half of what I expected on it. And I was like, oh crap, there's a bunch of stuff missing. And what am I going to do? So I looked into like disk recovery services. So I'm like, I'm going to like, I'm going to actually send this disk off, do disk recovery. One place gave me an estimate, but it was like insanely high. It was like thousands of dollars. And I'm like, I cannot justify thousands of dollars for this right now. I found some other place that was like going to be like less. It was still expensive. Okay. It was still many hundreds of dollars, but it was three digits and not four. Okay. And I'm like, okay, maybe we can consider this, but I will hold off for a little bit. I did a little bit of more research, different places. The place I got that had the multi-thousand dollar estimate, I found out had an online reputation of just gouging people for like, people are desperate for their data, so we're going to charge them a lot more. And there are other services that'll do the same thing at the same quality for better prices, et cetera. And so I did some research and I was finally ready. And it had been, it had been probably at this point, two to three years since the drive had died. And I was like, okay, I'm finally ready. I'm going to send this sucker in. And on a whim, I'm like, let me plug it in one more time just to see.
|
Ivan:
[30:03]
| Oh, get the fuck out of here. It worked.
|
Sam:
[30:05]
| It worked. And I'm like, holy fuck. And I immediately started copying everything off that drive onto a fresh drive. I restored everything. You know, it just needed a little rest. It was tired.
|
Ivan:
[30:22]
| It was tired, Sam.
|
Sam:
[30:24]
| Exactly.
|
Ivan:
[30:25]
| You know, we're all tired.
|
Sam:
[30:26]
| You know, and I had been, I had tried multiple, before I even thought about I'm going to restore to drive, I'm going to send it to disk recovery, whatever. I have, of course, tried everything. I had tried everything.
|
Ivan:
[30:40]
| That's absolutely hilarious.
|
Sam:
[30:41]
| You know, but like three years later, I plugged the drive in and kaboom, it's there. Holy shit anyway I got everything that's hilarious anyway okay whoa it's been 30 minutes should I even do movies should we move on.
|
Ivan:
[31:00]
| We could skip the movies for this week we did a whole bunch of movies let's go I.
|
Sam:
[31:05]
| Will preview what they will be for next time Murder by Death from 1976 have you heard of it.
|
Ivan:
[31:15]
| I've heard of it but I don't.
|
Sam:
[31:17]
| Think I've...
|
Ivan:
[31:18]
| Who is the stars of this movie?
|
Sam:
[31:21]
| Oh, let's see. Starring Eileen Brennan, Truman Capote, James Coco, Peter Falk, Alec Guinness, Elsa...
|
Ivan:
[31:29]
| I've heard of it, but I don't remember it right now.
|
Sam:
[31:31]
| Peter Sellers, Maggie Smith.
|
Ivan:
[31:34]
| I probably watched it, but I don't remember it right now.
|
Sam:
[31:38]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[31:39]
| Now that you mention all the... Yeah, it rings a bell now that you read the actress list.
|
Sam:
[31:44]
| And movie two, a small little movie that you have probably not heard of from 2002 yeah, Star Wars Episode II, Attack of the Clones.
|
Ivan:
[31:55]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[31:56]
| Yeah, obscure.
|
Ivan:
[31:58]
| Now, of course, that's a classic.
|
Sam:
[32:02]
| Yes. Anyway, we'll save them for next week. Let's take a break. I once again owe an Apple dream that I did not do because I suck. So instead, you get some other random thing. And so here's a break, and we'll be back, and we'll talk newsy stuff. Back after this. And we are back. Welcome, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[33:01]
| Okay, so, by the way, I did go in to the restore property there. It's got a list of files that I deleted.
|
Sam:
[33:12]
| Good.
|
Ivan:
[33:13]
| Recently. Delete it March 8th. Delete it March 8th. Yeah. It seems to be possible.
|
Sam:
[33:22]
| Good.
|
Ivan:
[33:23]
| That that could work.
|
Sam:
[33:25]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[33:26]
| Okay. so okay crossing fingers cross yes let's cross fingers okay and.
|
Sam:
[33:34]
| Toes whatever else yeah okay so what's our first actual serious thing of the uh week ivan.
|
Ivan:
[33:42]
| Hey how's that iran war thing going sam what i mean some people were making were making comments that it's a misnomer to call it the Iran War, but I am like... I guess because Iran didn't start it. Okay, I get that. Well, what should we call it?
|
Sam:
[34:03]
| The War of Northern Aggression? Oh, no, wait, that was what the South called the Civil War. No.
|
Ivan:
[34:12]
| I mean, it seems fitting, actually, but... The Trump War? The Trump-Epstein-Files War. I like that name. This should be the Trump Epstein files distraction war. Yes.
|
Sam:
[34:29]
| You know, on the one hand, I am fully on board with the idea that part of the motivation of this probably was distraction. But I think that also understates it. I think there... There, there's real stuff going on here.
|
Ivan:
[34:51]
| I think it's a motivator.
|
Sam:
[34:51]
| They're real, they're real people dying. It, it, it, you know.
|
Ivan:
[34:54]
| No, no, no, but, but I'm not talking, I'm not trying to minimize that in any way, but the, what I'm trying to do is like, the reality is that what is the driver that caused this stupid thing, this barbaric act to be done? I mean, there's a.
|
Sam:
[35:10]
| I mean, one, one of them is that.
|
Ivan:
[35:12]
| The other one is that he's, I don't know. Yeah. BB as well. Yeah. The BB War. There you go. BB's Revenge and Destruction Tour.
|
Sam:
[35:25]
| Look, in terms of how it's going, I think you've got... Different ways of looking at it. The administration would like you and the Israelis would like you to just judge it based on how much shit have we blown up. We've blown up a bunch of shit. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[35:48]
| That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, yeah, that we, we, I mean, yeah, we've blown up a bunch of shit, Sam, like a lot.
|
Sam:
[35:56]
| And, and, you know, Hey, that's a success in its own right. Right. And they can say once again, like they did a few months ago, that we have success as we've put them back decades. Let's be clear.
|
Ivan:
[36:09]
| We're not saying that's a success. You're saying that they claim it's a success.
|
Sam:
[36:14]
| Yeah. I mean, look, they can say just like they did a few months ago that they've ended Iran's military capabilities forever.
|
Ivan:
[36:23]
| Forever, Sam. for.
|
Sam:
[36:25]
| A few months anyway you know look and there's no question they killed a whole bunch of the leadership you know and in fact like one of the.
|
Ivan:
[36:36]
| Yeah and and has that improved the the leadership of iran is it is it now uh uh you know the kind of leadership that and i quote he he was saying And Iran's leadership goes out on the streets and kills its own people. And many people were saying, hey, is he talking about Minnesota? Is he talking about Iran?
|
Sam:
[36:58]
| Right. Well, before we even get there, let me state something else. We had talked about how much of the Iranian leadership was killed here. One of the things that came out about this is that there were people that we were actually thinking about as potential new leadership to take over that we thought we could work with better. We accidentally killed them, too.
|
Ivan:
[37:26]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[37:27]
| It's like we had people specifically pointed out that said, after we killed Ayatollah, hopefully this guy will become the leader and we think we can work with them. Oops.
|
Ivan:
[37:39]
| We killed them, too. We killed them. You know, a friend of mine sent me a, I think it was, it was actually today, talking about the situation that the word of the day is fucktangular. And it seems appropriate. Yeah, fucktangular. And it's a noun. And the definition is when a situation isn't just messy. It's fucked up from every angle. You fix one problem and three more pop up. Likely they're awaiting their turn. And this is, definitely, this fits the bill. Because they think they fixed stuff. All they've made is everything way worse. What is the improvement in the situation for the people of Iran? None that I can see. Are we safer, Sam?
|
Sam:
[38:34]
| I don't believe so.
|
Ivan:
[38:36]
| Nope. Okay. Right. Have we achieved any tangible success that you could point to other than the blowing up that you mentioned? We blew shit up and killed people. Yeah, we blew shit up. Is that a success?
|
Sam:
[38:54]
| Well, the problem is with answering that question is nobody's defined what the goals even are. So how can you measure whether or not...
|
Ivan:
[39:04]
| Exactly. You don't even know what the fuck we're trying to accomplish. So how the hell do you say that it's been... And, okay, I mean, the other problem is, what's the endgame? Like you said, nobody's set to success. Nobody's defined an endgame. And like right now, we're just, hey, we're just going to send more bombs. Just more bombs. ah, okay, and what now? And the other thing that shows the... The number of dead U.S. military compared to other military campaigns that have not involved boots on the ground is astoundingly high, okay? The other thing is just, it is very obvious that we have, once again, with this administration, they put in charge just people for their loyalty, not for their knowledge. They don't understand much of anything. They fail to prepare for any contingencies. Because if you were going to attack Iran, what was the number one threat that you should have prepared for?
|
Sam:
[40:27]
| Clowns.
|
Ivan:
[40:29]
| Oh, clowns. Oh. Flying clowns? That would have been interesting.
|
Sam:
[40:37]
| Yeah. The Iranians are known for their clown militias.
|
Ivan:
[40:43]
| For the flying clown. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, it's not the clowns. It's these dumbass fucking drones that they've been selling the Russians.
|
Sam:
[40:53]
| Oh, I thought you were going to say closing the Straits of Hormuz. Okay, we'll get to that in a second.
|
Ivan:
[40:58]
| No, or the Strait of Hormuz. It's my theory decided. Yeah, the theory decided that it's not the Strait of Hormuz. It's the Strait as the S-D-R-A-I-G-H-T, Strait of Horror Moose. I didn't realize that we had moose that were running in horror in the middle of the water. But anyway.
|
Sam:
[41:22]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[41:23]
| Well, no, the whole drone attack, which, by the way, also forced that closure. But the reality is that you're launching million dollar missiles against $50,000 or cheaper fucking drones. And that is just idiotic. I mean, the Ukrainians have developed, obviously, much cheaper ways of defending these, and nobody prepared for it. Nobody spent the minute preparing for it. You started this thing, it's just asymmetrical. We send these massive bombs. They counter with these smaller devices that are plentiful and cheap and can cause damage. Obviously, not the same damage as these massive bombs that we sent. But it doesn't need to be to to cause the fucking Strait of Hormuz to be closed. I mean, you closed off the oil traffic. Oil is now at over one hundred dollars a barrel. They keep saying, oh, you know, what was Pete Hex that said? Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, any ship can go through. The problem is just, you know, the Iranians are shooting. I'm like, I don't know shit, Sherlock, really? And I'm like, I don't know which tank or company. Is going to go and say, you know, hey, let's just go through there anyway.
|
Sam:
[42:52]
| Well, that's what Donald Trump said they should do. Just man up and go.
|
Ivan:
[42:56]
| Man up and go. Yeah. Now, today, he said something about that. Everybody should send their navies over there to reopen it. And that doesn't that doesn't. I mean, just because we send a whole bunch of military ships over there doesn't reopen it.
|
Sam:
[43:11]
| I mean, the volume of ships. Wait, someone pointed out like in the past, like in the 80s, I believe we did have a situation where at one point the American Navy and some others escorted some tankers through the state.
|
Ivan:
[43:24]
| But it wasn't it wasn't this kind of threat.
|
Sam:
[43:27]
| Well, no, here's the thing. Here's the fundamental thing. The reason why having American warships around the shipping was protective was the Iranians would be like, oh, if we hit the Americans, then the Americans will attack us. And so it's a deterrent.
|
Ivan:
[43:48]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[43:49]
| The Americans are already attacking. There's no deterrent there anymore. Right. There's no deterrent.
|
Ivan:
[43:53]
| But it was beyond that. Remember that back then the threat wasn't these types of drones and things and whatever. The threat was small boats that were approaching the tankers and attacking them with small weapons. The reality is that with the Navy being there, there were threats that could be easily disabled by these ships. The reality is... You know, they had fast boats that would go around and stop them. This threat was a lot smaller. This is, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of drones all of a sudden being launched by air against ships.
|
Ivan:
[44:37]
| And you can't just, just because there's, I mean, how many Navy, you probably, what I said is if you're going to want to defend these, you're probably going to have to, like, what, one Navy ship with the type of weapons needed to stop this, basically by tanker? Because most of the weapons that I saw that are effective against this are the type of closed weapons that these ships have to defend against threats that, you know, that use bullets, basically. All right? That is ideally what you want to do. You don't want to be using missiles or whatever. You want to be using guns. The guns only really work at close range. So that means that the ship, the Navy ship, needs to be right by the damn tankards escorting in order to be effective. If there is a significant gap between them and the other one, yeah, they'll be able to stop the Navy ship from getting hit, but not the fucking tankard they're escorting.
|
Sam:
[45:37]
| And there are two things there, too. One, we don't have enough.
|
Ivan:
[45:41]
| And we don't have enough ships.
|
Sam:
[45:44]
| Two, and I've heard this specifically called out as well, is that those defenses, you know, they're not perfect. And so the Navy is actually worried that if they did this, they'd get some Navy ships sunk as well.
|
Ivan:
[46:00]
| That's right.
|
Sam:
[46:01]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[46:02]
| Damaged, at least.
|
Sam:
[46:03]
| At least damaged. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[46:05]
| At least damaged. Yeah. It's not as easy as it sounds. My anti-strike. Rich.
|
Sam:
[46:11]
| So look, Again, like in terms of, there are a lot of folks on the right who were not enthused about this in the first place. And maybe we can talk a little bit about the divisions on the right coming out of this. But who are desperately trying to get Donald Trump to just declare victory and go home. You know, call it, we won, we succeeded, we got everything we needed, we're done. So far he is refusing now i see the speculation being you know that he's just he's still assuming, that any of the disruptions that are caught coming out of this will be short-lived, and the iranian iranians will collapse at any moment and it'll just be over in a couple weeks as he originally said.
|
Ivan:
[47:10]
| They have no incentive to collapse. There is nothing. What is the incentive that they have right now to...
|
Sam:
[47:19]
| Well, you know, kill a few more of them, you know, things change. But like, but the speculation is that if it doesn't collapse immediately, then it's only a matter of time till we do get Trump collapsing. And basically saying, okay, the stock market is down too much. Oil is too high for too long. This is my approval ratings are going down even further. Although I believe it was Tucker Carlson who said that based on his conversations with Donald Trump, he doesn't believe that Trump is actually seeing any of this. Like he is being completely isolated to any negative opinions about this like so nobody is telling him that this is unpopular nobody is telling him the negative things people are only telling him yes sir it's going great everything's wonderful and so he doesn't believe it but that at some point the pain will become obvious and he'll just like literally declare victory and go home He never will admit he was wrong, but he'll say, we've decimated them, we've destroyed them, everything's great, and we're done.
|
Ivan:
[48:40]
| Great. Fantastic. And so we wait.
|
Sam:
[48:48]
| And so we wait. So let's, you know, let's talk about some of that pain. Because this again, like the theme to intro it is that, and we talked about this last week, but it really, really does appear and more and more has come out basically validating this over last week, that the Trump administration really honestly thought that the Iranians would react in some sort of tepid, half-hearted way, maybe throw a couple missiles out with no severe consequences and be done in a few days. And that basically would just take it while we attack them and, hey, maybe the people would rise up and we'd have a new friendly government there. They really thought this. And so they were absolutely shocked when the Iranians actually fought back and attacked civilian infrastructure all over the region, et cetera. And now, you know, as we sit, the horror moose is closed. Price of oil has gone up significantly. What, it's almost doubled, hasn't it? Isn't it close to doubled at this point?
|
Ivan:
[50:06]
| Yeah, it was about $60, $70. It's over $100 a barrel right now. The thing is that...
|
Sam:
[50:15]
| Stock market's down too, et cetera.
|
Ivan:
[50:18]
| But the thing is that gas prices in the last 20 years, because of refinery capacity being significantly diminished, are far more sensitive to oil moves. And what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that 20 years ago, $150 oil, which we did get in some brief moments, okay, like it was well north of $100, caused gas prices at $4, okay? Now, $100 oil gets you $4 or $5 gas, just at $100, okay? And so the impact is way worse. Look, I'm looking at recent gas prices that were updated, like, on the GasBuddy app. I mean, regular is, right now, north of $4, like, in most places that I see that recently updated prices.
|
Sam:
[51:29]
| I think we're over $5.
|
Ivan:
[51:30]
| Yeah. As high as $4 at $80. This is for regular. I saw premium already at places at over $5, okay? In a lot of places It's You know It's crazy Okay And so This is something that You know Oh We didn't expect this But this administration Is populated by Idiots Who never expect anything to happen I just, You think people are thrilled that gas is at $4 or $5 a gallon right now?
|
Sam:
[52:08]
| I just checked GasBuddy here locally. The spread near me is pretty widespread for regular, from $4.45 to $5.49.
|
Ivan:
[52:21]
| Depending on which gas station you're going. By the way, I noticed that a lot of the lower prices on GasBuddy are gas stations that haven't reported prices recently. And so it's you know the lower.
|
Sam:
[52:32]
| Ones i just reported were 20 hours ago the higher ones were also 20 hours ago so.
|
Ivan:
[52:37]
| Okay so that's that's actually pretty recent but you're yeah but but yours are all over four dollars okay all right i mean yeah i mean it's just this is it's a shit show man i mean i i none of these guys expected any of this uh and let me just share it yeah I just shared this thing on Bloomberg where in December, Trump had this rally, and the background on the rally was lower prices, bigger paychecks. That was the banner. He was awed in December. How's that working out?
|
Sam:
[53:19]
| Look, you mentioned gas prices. One of the things is if we have a temporary spike that's like one or two weeks and then it goes back down again, fine. But wait, wait, wait. But here's the thing.
|
Ivan:
[53:32]
| But these spikes are never temporary.
|
Sam:
[53:34]
| Right. But if it is, then things will go back to normal. But like you said, they never are. But what people don't automatically recognize is the follow-on effects. Okay. Gasoline In the US A very high proportion of products Are transported by truck.
|
Ivan:
[53:58]
| Diesel prices are at oh my god the the price of diesel you think gas diesel has been over five dollars.
|
Sam:
[54:05]
| So the point is that what that means is because gas prices are high everything else is going to increase in price too because oh god guess what that thing you buy at your local walmart did not grow in the walmart parking lot it had to be it had to be shipped No.
|
Ivan:
[54:27]
| You're shitting me. So it isn't just a big farm outside in the Walmart parking lot growing shorts and, you know, T-shirts and, you know, sporting goods. There isn't like a farm section out there growing sporting goods. That would be quite interesting, I would say.
|
Sam:
[54:48]
| You've got the orchard full of basketball trees.
|
Ivan:
[54:52]
| Oh, my God. That would be wonderful.
|
Sam:
[54:56]
| What.
|
Ivan:
[54:57]
| Are you doing today oh i'm gonna go you go oh no do you like to pick apples no no no i go pick basketballs.
|
Sam:
[55:03]
| Yes anyway so this all has you know knock-on effects like you can't, and this gets me back to and i hate to be redundant but it's just this it's so stunning the level of ignorance and lack of foresight. I mean, this is what people have said about, you know, potential consequences of, Doing things in the Middle East, going back generations.
|
Ivan:
[55:41]
| All right, so, by the way, I checked the diesel price. The national average price of diesel has reached $492 a gallon today. That was yesterday. By the end of the weekend, we will likely see an average of $5 a gallon national average for diesel, which will likely re-accelerate inflation the longer it sticks around. And the revised inflation measures. Look, I just shared the news about it earlier this week. The PCE, which is the, oh my God, the damn, the PCE, it's the personal consumption expenditure index, which is basically what you're spending, not looking at prices, but how much you're actually spending. Okay. Are you having to spend more for stuff on aggregate? Okay. That went up 3.1% in January. Okay. And that's, you know, that means that for the same basket of stuff that you're buying, it's going up at an annual rate of 3.1%. That was like before this shock. Okay they revised fourth quarter gdp to be down 0.7 we are 100 percent in stagflation territory right now which.
|
Sam:
[57:08]
| Means high inflation low growth correct.
|
Ivan:
[57:11]
| Right that's.
|
Sam:
[57:14]
| Good though right.
|
Ivan:
[57:17]
| It's good if you're, like, half nostalgia for the late 1970s with, like, high unemployment, gas lines.
|
Sam:
[57:28]
| It was a good time.
|
Ivan:
[57:30]
| You know, interest rates over 10%. If that's your, you know, make America great again theme, then okay.
|
Sam:
[57:41]
| I'm sure that when Donald came up with that slogan, he was thinking about the Carter administration.
|
Ivan:
[57:48]
| Yeah, that was what he was looking at. It was the Carter administration.
|
Sam:
[57:51]
| Which, by the way.
|
Ivan:
[57:52]
| A lot of those things were not Carter's fault.
|
Sam:
[57:55]
| I mean, including, you know, Iran stuff, just to be clear.
|
Ivan:
[58:00]
| Including Iran, yeah. Fuck me. And by the way, a lot of that stuff was not Jimmy Carter's fault. He inherited a lot of this from the Nixon and Ford administration, from shit that happened before the Arab oil embargo, you know, other policies that were that were done in the past, the fucking hangover from the Vietnam War and all the spending happened with the Vietnam War. I mean, there was it was a bad hangover of an economy that he inherited. OK, with all these things happening at the same time. And and Iran. And fucking Iran again.
|
Sam:
[58:39]
| So I don't know, like in trying to predict the future for this, because Trump is so unpredictable, you have the whole range of possibilities here. You have him declaring victory and going home within a few days. And of course, people have pointed out, even if he does, Iran has a vote. You know, like Iran doesn't have to stop hostilities because we decide that we're done.
|
Ivan:
[59:07]
| Correct.
|
Sam:
[59:08]
| You know, that's very.
|
Ivan:
[59:11]
| That's totally correct. You know, I know that the, the, a lot of the countries in the Persian Gulf that are getting shot at are actively trying to make this stop. It's costing them billions.
|
Sam:
[59:26]
| Well a whole lot of the area i mean they were trying to build brands around how they're safe and friendly and they're not like the rest of the middle east they're like you know it's a good place to do business hell it's a good place to go on vacation you know all this kind of stuff and and that brand is somewhat diminished by drones coming in and blowing things up somewhat Look.
|
Ivan:
[59:55]
| Recovering from this will be quite painful for them. I mean, a brand, like you said, that had been tried to be cultivated over decades... Has been shattered by this.
|
Sam:
[1:00:16]
| So the happy side of the equation, I guess, is declare victory and go home and then live with the fact that you actually didn't make anything better for anybody. In fact, it looks like you probably made things worse. Like you killed some of the moderates that were potentially the hope for doing something better after the Ayatollah died naturally.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:41]
| And instead put into place somebody about venezuela and i was yesterday at the airport with my boss who is from venezuela by the way and he was we we were talking about this and you know what the you know what the deal is with venezuela and you know we've all forgotten about venezuela already okay by the way and how it's, It really hasn't improved as of now, the situation in Venezuela, even with this whole thing with them capturing Maduro. Has it really improved that he could go back to visit? No. As a matter of fact, one of the problems that he has, like, right now is that as many Venezuelans that are not in Venezuela is that they can't get passports. And if you try to get a passport i've seen people like brokering them and you have to pay like five thousand dollars for a passport and they can't they are not allowed to go home, without a venezuelan passport so these people are not can't go home.
|
Sam:
[1:01:49]
| Well look here's the thing and i know we've said this before we're always very repetitive on the show repetitive on the show repetitive on the show but donald trump's goal in venezuela was never to make things better in venezuela ever that wasn't part of his plan his plan was at best it was i want somebody in there that i can make deals with to benefit me me that's it that's it and you can argue that he's potentially achieved that. Like, is he getting something out of this? Like, you know, I'm sure he is. Right. And that was, that was the goal goal achieved. Maybe he's got something similar going on in Iran. Have we checked out what kind of deals Kushner's got going on yet?
|
Ivan:
[1:02:43]
| Yeah, I mean, I think that's always the first thing to look at is what the hell? What deals does Kushner have?
|
Sam:
[1:02:50]
| You know, anyway, the best scenario was the backing off, like, whatever. The worst case, of course, is we get sucked into something prolonged here because, you know, Iran continues to expand it. They have no reason not to.
|
Sam:
[1:03:08]
| And we continue to get increasing chaos that lasts for an extended period of time, like years, not months, you know, it'll probably be somewhere in between that. Who knows? But like, that's the range of possibilities here. I mean, I saw one report, I don't know if this was confirmed yet, but that Iran, you know, there were negotiations happening between the U.S. Administration and Iran up until like literally days before we attacked them, right? And I saw one report that basically said, look, the Iranians had realized that all Donald really cared about was... Or at least what they thought all he really cared about, was bragging rights to be able to say, that deal Obama did was shit, and I got a better deal. So the Iranians were actually starting to offer things that went beyond the Obama deal in the hopes that Donald Trump would just do exactly that. Obama's deal was shit. I came up with something better.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:22]
| I got a better deal.
|
Sam:
[1:04:23]
| Give me the Nobel Peace Prize again, please. You know, but that, no. Like, in the end, even though the Iranians were there and starting to offer stuff that was at least comparable and maybe better to the previous deal, the other voices got in Donald's head and convinced him that doing this would be better.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:49]
| Ah, nice. Well, I think, well, the voice that got to him was one.
|
Sam:
[1:04:57]
| You're going to say Bibi?
|
Ivan:
[1:04:59]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:04:59]
| I mean, I think he was definitely part of it, but I think we shouldn't pretend that there aren't a lot of folks on this side of the... Yeah, I think Bibi was very loud, but there are certainly people within his administration that were cheering that on. Now there were some that weren't like supposedly vance was not thrilled by this at all but was donald gonna pay attention to jd vance fuck that no of course not you know i mean and you know apparently there were people that were saying be careful donald straits of hormuz be careful donald iran can cause trouble be careful donald this won't be like your little attack before, this will be a big thing, and they were all just completely ignored.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:51]
| Well, so here we are.
|
Sam:
[1:05:54]
| So here we are. Anything else to say, or should we take a break and move on?
|
Ivan:
[1:05:58]
| Nah, let's take a break.
|
Sam:
[1:06:00]
| Okay. Break, break, break, break, break, break. And there's the end.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:56]
| Okay here's an interesting thing yes i i i had mentioned that when i went to uh on the slack i'd mentioned and when i went i got to miami all of a sudden me just well it was quite early in the morning it was 4 45 in the morning i'm getting to the airport i'm like seeing this qatar airways plane parked there and usually in a location where it's never parked and i'm like why the fuck is this plane parked here and i'm like oh you idiot of course it can't go home right uh but then when i got back last night there were two of them okay okay so i'm like what the fuck well i just saw that one plane did come down from london from from qatar airways to miami yesterday but right now i i checked to see what aircraft are in the air for Qatar Airways right now. There are two aircraft right now that, according to Flight Radar, are supposedly flying to Doha right now. I don't know if they're carrying passengers, but there are, yeah, there are two flights that seem to be trying to land in Qatar today. So I'm not sure if they're just risking it and saying, fuck it.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:21]
| Or is there a material change right now in the situation that is allowing this right now to happen?
|
Ivan:
[1:08:28]
| Because there's one from Dallas, and there's one from Miami. They're both heading there, according to the flight plan. And they're in the air right now. So I just thought that was interesting. But anyway, all right. So I had picked that subject. So what do you want to talk about, Sam?
|
Sam:
[1:08:45]
| Ah, geez. You know, you had mentioned... When we first started recording, I hadn't put anything on the list. Yeah. And there are two reasons for that. One, I will fully admit, I was not paying as much attention to this this week. I'm not going to give a full update here, but basically, I had my surgery thing on Monday.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:09]
| Uh-huh.
|
Sam:
[1:09:10]
| Right. And as it turns out, there's one more step I have to do. It's just a doctor's office visit in a few days, but there's one more step I have to do. And so I still have, crap inside my body. And it's actually hurt more this time than last time around. So I've been spending a lot of time just sitting, doing nothing, watching TV with the kid, trying to avoid moving because moving hurts. So I haven't been paying as much attention to other things. And also just, you know, this goes to what we were talking about last week. You know, okay, war in Iran. Okay, big. but other than that how many big stories have there been this week they're not that many i'm i'm looking at like you know google news right now scrolling up and down and like let's see i i on the home page okay i ran stuff i ran stuff we did have you know a shooting and a synagogue attack. So we did have that kind of stuff. We, we have, Hey.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:17]
| But I, you were, you know, I tipped an election.
|
Sam:
[1:10:21]
| I, I, I've thought about literally tipped an election. Okay, fine. Tell, I was going to talk about a few of these other things that are nothing, but since go ahead and do this one, then I can talk about more nothing.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:33]
| Basically, look, there was an election for mayor over here, the city of Boca, city of Boca Raton. Now, the reality is that this is a nonpart, a partisan election, the people we know, so theoretically, but no, but the reality is that I've been through these elections. Most of the time, there's no talk about the candidates have not in the past identified themselves as aligned, that they're doing this with the party or whatever. Most of the stuff that they do is pretty innocuous. But there was a controversy here related to a very big bill, a very big project that had been pushed by the previous mayor, who, he wasn't up for re-election, and he's actually in recent weeks declared himself as a kind of MAGA, I'm going to go MAGA-like guy, but he's more a rhino. And so he was going to run for the House under by the Republicans. As a matter of fact, I had no idea. Honestly, he had kept his political leanings pretty silent. I had no idea until recent times that he was even a Republican. Okay. I'd met this guy personally every time. I had no idea.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:49]
| But this development bill was passed by the city council downtown. A lot of people very loudly were opposing it. and a group of people were rallying, you know, people to vote against the development, okay? It was going to give a whole bunch of a big tract of public land, a 99-year lease to a developer. The city was going to make a significant amount of money, but a lot of people were opposed to the deal to the developer. And this caused, like, huge turnout. And when I'm talking about turnout is my wife, who ran a polling station, told me that in recent city elections, they had had, like, about a hundred voters show up.
|
Sam:
[1:12:32]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:33]
| In this one, she had 450 people vote in her polling station. I mean, like four times the normal amount of people. So it drove turnout significantly. This coalition that was pushing for, I guess, to vote against the development, also had put a slate of people to be on the city council, but not actually someone to run for mayor. They hadn't endorsed anybody. The guy who is a Democrat on there that I believe he had been on the city council, he was he had come out and was personally against the development. But what he had said is, look, this is the will of the people. It's being put up to a vote. If the people want to do it, I'm going to follow the law and I'm going to, you know, do what the people vote for, even though I'm personally against it. But, you know, but that was his position. The other two were for what actually now that there's the other guy who came in second place. He was also against the project.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:39]
| I don't know. He was a Republican. So bottom line is that the deal, so much turnout, the slate in the city council that the Save Boca Coalition, as they're called, put up, they all swept their seats. They won. Okay. They won the seats. And then for the mayor, the guy that won was a guy that I think a lot of people do was a Democrat and he won and he won. Well, the first count came out. It was by one seat, by one vote.
|
Sam:
[1:14:09]
| That was already a machine recount of the original count.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:14]
| Yeah, that's right. And I, shit, I didn't.
|
Sam:
[1:14:18]
| One vote. One vote.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:20]
| One vote. And I almost didn't go to vote. Because I was like busy.
|
Sam:
[1:14:26]
| There was only what?
|
Ivan:
[1:14:26]
| It was like 15,000.
|
Sam:
[1:14:28]
| 15,000 votes total. So this is like a relatively small election with not that many people voting to begin with.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:36]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:14:37]
| Still one vote.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:38]
| It was one vote. But I almost didn't go, Sam.
|
Sam:
[1:14:42]
| How would you have felt?
|
Ivan:
[1:14:44]
| Oh, my God. I would have been like, and I was voting for the guy, you know, for Andy Thompson. I was going to go vote for him, okay? I was like, no, no, no. I was like, no, fucking, I got to go vote. I got to go vote, okay? And so I went and I fucking went to vote. And when I saw that, I'm like, holy shit. Apparently a second recount that I think they did it came out that he was ahead by five so I guess he found like four you know four votes are you sure you'll have those in.
|
Sam:
[1:15:16]
| The right order and the five was.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:18]
| After the one and not the one after five was after the one yeah five was after the one.
|
Sam:
[1:15:23]
| That's still pretty close.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:25]
| That's still very close I mean occasionally you.
|
Sam:
[1:15:28]
| Do get these exact tie elections that they like do coin flips and crap for.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:31]
| Yeah, I don't I do think that people make an ad a lot about this being the Democrat Republican or a thing or whatever. I think that this election doesn't really didn't really carry that.
|
Sam:
[1:15:46]
| Well, the one thing I don't know, the one thing also, though, this was this was a final election, not a primary. Right. This is he's won.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:54]
| This is an election. This was the election. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:15:56]
| Right. And so what's what's interesting about this is another this is another one of these cases where you don't have. You know a rank choice you don't have a runoff you don't have a whatever because nobody got a majority here like basically and i know you say don't don't really count this as partisan because it's not quite the same thing but like if you add up the quote-unquote republicans they were way ahead there were more of them there were more but they were split and and this ties to i guess i I guess here's another topic that's related, since we're talking about split votes and that kind of stuff, which is the California governor's race that's happening right now. And for those who haven't been following that, California does have a primary.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:48]
| The jungle primary.
|
Sam:
[1:16:49]
| But it's a jungle primary. And so what that means is the top two candidates end up in the general election regardless of party. So, like, if the top two are Democrat, you have a general election with two Democrats. If the top two are Republican, the general election is between two Republicans. And so what is happening right there in California right now is the Democrats are actually somewhat—California is a very Democratic state right now. You know, they tend to win by large margins in statewide elections, but there are like a thousand Democratic candidates and there's like two Republican candidates, maybe three or four, but two big ones. And if you look at recent polling... The two Republicans are coming in in the number one and number two slots because all of the Democrats are splitting the rest of the vote.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:48]
| Oh, God. With what percentage of the vote? Like with 30%, 30%, 40%, 35%?
|
Sam:
[1:17:53]
| Less. Oh, God. Let me see if I can find some. I'll see if I can find some polling on this to actually get you. Hold on. Let me look. As I look this up. Let's see. Here we go. 270 to win. Blah, blah, blah. That UX sucks. Latest polls from RCP. Let's try this. Okay. So this one poll I'm looking at, well, just looking at the latest two polls, one has a Democrat in the lead, one has a Republican in the lead and it's not the ux is not helpful here but it has the the the leading candidate is just under 20 in these polls and with by the way something like 25 undecided okay so man so like people have been begging like democrats who are polling at like five or six percent to please drop out drop out.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:00]
| Drop out, drop the fuck out.
|
Sam:
[1:19:02]
| You know, and we don't have, I forget exactly when this election is, but it's coming up before too long. And so, yeah, the worry is that two Republicans, neither one of which could ever, ever, ever win in California normally, might be up against each other with the Democrats shut out of the general election in California.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:25]
| Hmm.
|
Sam:
[1:19:27]
| Now, 25% undecided, all they have to do is consolidate around some of the higher-ranking Democrats, and this problem goes away. So that may still happen. But still, you know, this is where, like, I like in general the idea of open primaries.
|
Sam:
[1:19:49]
| Jungle primaries, things like this where it could be Democrat versus Democrat or Republican versus Republican, and if that's what the constituency is. But the straight-up jungle primary, I think, is the stupidest way of doing this. Like, if you're going to do something like this, you want something like rank-choice voting or instant runoffs or something like that where you take the people at the bottom and you redistribute their support and you keep doing that until somebody has a majority. You don't just say, okay, top two in the jungle primary go against each other Because then you get this kind of situation where where the top two got like 17 percent and 13 percent or something like that and are not representative at all. And so I don't know. You may get some craziness here. I mean, I believe this is how Schwarzenegger won, too, in this kind of split where where the Democrats split and you ended up having a Republican sneak in. Now, in that case, you got a fairly moderate Republican. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not a crazy MAGA type. In fact, in more recent days, he's been very anti-MAGA.
|
Sam:
[1:21:05]
| But I don't even know about these people at the top. I mean, I guess you should look into it, but I don't know. Crazy stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:15]
| It is crazy stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:21:17]
| Okay. Should, should, should, should, should I find something else to talk about to finish things up?
|
Ivan:
[1:21:23]
| Uh, let's see. Uh, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:21:31]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:31]
| Because I picked that one too.
|
Sam:
[1:21:32]
| Yeah, you've been picking everything, you know, and I feel like I have a duty to pick something. And look, I'll be a lighter, fluffier thing again. Just an off news. Yesterday morning. It was announced that, and this hits one of my special interests, Alex and I, amongst the other shows that we're watching, we're making our way through Doctor Who. From the very beginning, the 1960s Doctor Who's.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:11]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:22:12]
| We're actually into the 70s at this point. We're into the third Doctor in the 1970s at this point. But it is somewhat famous that a significant portion of the episodes from the 1960s, the first and second Doctors in Doctor Who, are missing. Because the BBC, at one point, to save costs...
|
Ivan:
[1:22:40]
| Trashed them?
|
Sam:
[1:22:40]
| Yes. Well, not trashed. They reused the videotape. they're like oh.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:45]
| Yeah and that's a common thing it wasn't just a bbc that's a common thing that happened.
|
Sam:
[1:22:49]
| Yeah like a lot of the tonight show is missing for that same reason yeah a lot of american shows but you know basically they were like oh we we're we need to make this new show go get some scrap tape from that room over there and you know so they they taped over a bunch of these episodes so they're lost. And, you know, some were able to be recovered because they'd been distributed overseas and people found them in archives in Australia and Africa and wherever. But there were... It had been 13 years since the last one of these missing episodes had been found.
|
Sam:
[1:23:33]
| But yesterday, it was announced that two more were found. Two more of these lost episodes. Oh, cool. And as it turns out, this was not in some TV station archive overseas where these things were shipped for broadcast in some other country. This was a private collector who had had these in their personal stash along with thousands of other, you know, they were a collector. They were a collector of rare film and videotape and other stuff. And they apparently were reluctant to come forward while they were alive.
|
Sam:
[1:24:14]
| But once they died because there's some question on the legality of having possession of some of these things okay oh now now the bbc has said you know don't worry about it if you've got these things we'll be grateful to have them back just give them back you know but right but there's some question um anyway the guy died and his estate was going through his archives and got in touch with some film archival organization that's dedicated towards saving, you know, historical stuff like this. Okay. And they'd been going through his archives and finding stuff. And there may be other things as well in here, but amongst them were two of the archival, or two of the missing episodes. And let me be specific.
|
Sam:
[1:25:07]
| It was from 19...
|
Sam:
[1:25:14]
| Oh, come on. You know, if you're going to write an article about this, put the specifics in here. Let me find a better article. This one has some of the information, but not the specific information that I wanted to say. Okay. You know, websites suck. I go to another news site and it's full of pop-ups and like subscribe here and doesn't even have the article that I want. And okay. Oh, and I have to say I'm okay with cookies. That's important. Okay, these are from the third season from 1965. It's the first and third episodes of the 12-part epic called The Daleks' Master Plan. And so, like, more than half of this story is missing. Alex and I already watched this story. We watch reconstructions and stuff because people have made like take surviving snapshots and and put put put it together with because all of the audio survived because people at home would turn on their tape recorders and record the audio. So 100 percent of the audio survived from all of these.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:35]
| But it's the images.
|
Sam:
[1:26:36]
| But it's the images that were missing. And for some of them, they had like production pictures where, you know, there were still images available. And sometimes there were little clips because a clip was used in a trailer and the trailer survived. So there were a few seconds here and there. And so people have made reconstruction. So we watched the reconstructions of the missing episodes as we went through these. But anyway, so private collection, they found this. They're restoring them. They will be available to the public in April. And yeah so cool news i guess it's one of those things where you know people had people had been starting to give up hope that any more of these missing episodes would ever been found but would ever be found because there were 13 years but with this people are like you know they're probably more in private collections still out there that people are just you know they don't want to give them up while they're alive but once they die maybe they'll come to light you know whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:27:36]
| And, you know, so we'll see. Now, you know, these 1960s episodes...
|
Sam:
[1:27:42]
| You know, it's a, it's an acquired taste. This, you know, the special effects were horrible. The acting was not super great. Like, you know, some people, some of the actors were better than others. The plots were relatively thin, very slowly paced. Like this is a 12 part episode, 12 part story. Each episode is like 20 something minutes long. and, you know, these artificial, like, cliffhangers to draw it out. And, you know, Alex and I have been enjoying them because you can make fun of the things that are bad about it. But anyway, they found two new episodes. So that's exciting. And maybe someday somebody will find those Johnny Carson episodes, those, you know, early Tonight Show episodes, you know, or other things. But it is amazing to think about how, you know, these aren't that long ago. And it is hard to find some of this stuff. I remember there was another story in the U.S. And I forget which shows this impacted. But there were a bunch. There was some lady that just literally VHS taped everything she watched for like 30 years before she died.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:11]
| That's a lot of tapes.
|
Sam:
[1:29:12]
| That's a lot of tapes. She had rooms full of VHS tapes of like everything. And her collection her collection ended up being the only remaining like and, archive tape of some like critically important historical episodes of like several TV shows and some news events and some other stuff that turned out nobody was keeping this shit, but she was, you know?
|
Ivan:
[1:29:45]
| Look, I, I, I still, I remember that back then. And I, I, I, I, I don't know what happened with all the tapes that I made, but I, I had, collection of stuff that i taped that was there were several hundred tapes there okay of many different things like that and some of them were in one tape there probably had been like multiple episodes of things because the tapes were multi-hour tapes and so you know you you just wouldn't use one tape for something maybe i recorded four or five episodes of a tv show on on a tape or something. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You have a tape. What the fuck is on that tape?
|
Sam:
[1:30:26]
| I've got a case full of tapes here. I'm picking out two at random. Well, this one's not labeled, so who knows what that is. Let's find. These are labeled only with Roman numerals, so I don't know what those are. But the one I picked here, It has a November of 1988 edition of a TV show called World Monitor that apparently my dad was a guest on, and The Wizard of Oz taped off TV.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:00]
| There you go.
|
Sam:
[1:31:01]
| Let's see what else we got. Let me try to pick up another random tape here. Oh, that's off a camcorder, something with my dad. Oh, this one's a classic.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:15]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:31:17]
| November 26th, 1988. My appearance on the It's Academic game show in the Washington.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:25]
| D.C. area. Hey, we got to digitize that. Come on.
|
Sam:
[1:31:31]
| And also on the same tape, Dallas, the early years.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:36]
| Ha ha! Anyway, hey, we got to digitize that one.
|
Sam:
[1:31:41]
| I think, yeah, I think somebody else digitized that already, but I don't know if I know where to find it. I have some still pictures from it, but I haven't seen that video in a while.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:58]
| Of course, he also has these digital audio tapes of our old Curmudgeon Corner podcast somewhere, which, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:32:07]
| Someday maybe it'll be found or or you know maybe it was lost in a move someday i don't know.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:12]
| Like or maybe they or maybe we'll go put pop the tapes in like as happened with like old backup tapes that i i had that once happened i popped in the tapes that they were blank.
|
Sam:
[1:32:24]
| Right that would suck.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:25]
| Yeah all right well i think we we can end it we.
|
Sam:
[1:32:30]
| Can end it early we don't we We don't have to stretch it out to make our.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:34]
| Two-hour money. No, you didn't have things.
|
Sam:
[1:32:36]
| I was ill-prepared. I was ill-prepared. We did have that plantier guy making comments about how AI would marginalize, like, smart women or something.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:48]
| No, smart people.
|
Sam:
[1:32:50]
| Smart people in general. Well, he specifically called out women, too.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:54]
| Oh, he did. I didn't hear that part.
|
Sam:
[1:32:57]
| Oh, yeah, yeah. He was like, this will, this will enable the, this will increase the power of working class men and diminish the power of like those uppity women.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:15]
| Yep. Awesome, huh?
|
Sam:
[1:33:17]
| Very much so. Anyway, shall we end? Are you looking for anything new?
|
Ivan:
[1:33:25]
| No, no, we don't have anything. Let's just wrap it up.
|
Sam:
[1:33:28]
| You know, you were complaining just like last week or the week before about all these crazy weeks with so much happening.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:35]
| You know, I already picked a couple of subjects. It's okay. We can end it early.
|
Sam:
[1:33:39]
| Well, you know, but the thing is, like, I honestly don't feel like there was. I mean, obviously, the war in Iran is huge, but I don't feel like there was anything else really big and exciting. I was looking through lists of news, and I was like, I don't care about that. I don't care about that. I don't need to talk about that.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:57]
| Okay, that, you know, okay. So we can end it early.
|
Sam:
[1:34:00]
| You know?
|
Ivan:
[1:34:01]
| It's good. It's not a big deal.
|
Sam:
[1:34:03]
| Could go back to murder by death. No, we'll leave that for next week, like we said. Okay. Thank you for joining us for Curmudgeons Corner again. go to curmudgeons-corner.com. You can find all the ways to contact us. You can find our archives, you can find transcripts, you can find all that fun stuff. You can also find a link to our Patreon where you can give us money and at various levels, You can get us mentioning you on the show, us ringing a bell, us sending you a postcard, us sending you a mug, all these exciting things. Or at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask nicely, you can get invited to our Commissions Core Slack where Yvonne and I and others are chatting and sharing links throughout the week. So Yvonne, I guess for our one last thing, what's something fun and exciting from the slack that we have not mentioned on the show.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:00]
| Well, Sam went to the post office and there's a sign there, okay, about what to do to get your packages ready. Is your packages. Is your packages.
|
Sam:
[1:35:14]
| Yes, is your packages.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:16]
| Is your packages. And returns ready to mail. Tapped up. Packaged. Label tapped down. Written addressed. Tape is for sale on the retail wall. Please only service pets allowed inside. Thank you. So you tapped it, huh? Did you tap your packages?
|
Sam:
[1:35:37]
| I tapped it at the post office, indeed.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:39]
| Nice. Nice. Very nice, Sam. Very nice. Very good.
|
Sam:
[1:35:45]
| You know, they needed to see my package.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:47]
| Yes, they needed to see your package. Make sure it was tapped up. Another thing that I found kind of funny was that Musk actually somewhere admitted that his whole thing that he's done with XAI and how he's decided to try to make it into some kind of like unwoke chatbot. I guess it's led to an exodus of employees that he really doesn't have.
|
Sam:
[1:36:17]
| Surprise.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:17]
| Yeah, that they don't really want to work over there to do the shit that he wants XAI to do. How shocking.
|
Sam:
[1:36:28]
| You know, but isn't his whole mode of operation to fire everybody anyway? So what's the big deal?
|
Ivan:
[1:36:34]
| Well, the thing is that, you know, there's a thing of like him wanting to fire people. The thing is that he started this company himself. So he had been doing the hiring. The problem is that he can't keep the people he wants to keep.
|
Sam:
[1:36:48]
| Well then you know he didn't really want them after all right although apparently from what you sent over to the slack he is going through he is ordering people to go back through old interviews yeah for people that they turned down to reevaluate them and right maybe ask them to come after all.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:09]
| Yes it's so stupid i don't know how the hell he keeps any but i it's just it's just, It's amazing that any he runs actually runs.
|
Sam:
[1:37:25]
| Yes. And I don't know. There's just so much that right now I feel like, I mean, not only his companies, but other companies too, are trying to figure out a lot of things. Specifically in response to ai but also in response to trump also in response to other things and there's a lot of there's a lot of flailing going on i mean some of the stuff will stick and work some of it will not and i don't know it seems like we're it's a very chaotic time, and i feel like we're in for more chaos before things stabilize again i don't know.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:10]
| I think a A lot of it is just a lack of understanding what things are and what they can do and what they can't do and so forth. And, you know, and we have had like waves of tech that have been confusing in this way before. I mean, look, remember the dot bomb, the dot bomb, the dot, the dot, the dot, the dot com crash in part was because we kept building shit. We didn't really understand what the fuck we were doing. We're just playing with it. We didn't know what could make money, what didn't make money, what was value, what was not value. It was just a lot of that. I think that you've got a lot of that confusion in a lot of different places. And the one thing that I might take away from all of this shit that they were talking about recently, most people, is this lack of understanding that tools are tools. And that, you know what, if you give an idiot a tool, it doesn't matter how good a tool is, the idiot is not going to get value out of the tool because the guy's an idiot! It doesn't matter how good a tool it is.
|
Sam:
[1:39:20]
| But, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:22]
| But a lot of people over time, I mean, this is historical. Keep thinking that the tool will overcome the stupidity of the person there. I still remember this was a big thing in the 1980s with GM with robots. They were going to robotize the entire production line, blah, blah, blah. We're going to, you know, we're going to take the people out. This is the whole thing. And it turned into a fucking disaster.
|
Sam:
[1:39:49]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:50]
| It turned into a complete disaster where a lot of the robots had to be scrapped. Because even still, the robots depended on a proper process, somebody telling them what to do correctly, managing it, doing it. And in the end, the robots just were not that as efficient as they thought they would be. So it was but it was another thing where it's not that the robots didn't have their place. It's just that everybody overestimated what the robots could do and then wound up having to scrap a whole bunch of that automation because the automation turned out to be more expensive, wasteful, and stupid.
|
Sam:
[1:40:28]
| Well, and it's also a question of timing, too. Like, some things that were not actually practical and the best way to do things at point A in time, three or four years later actually were.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:43]
| Correct.
|
Sam:
[1:40:43]
| You know, because people were just getting ahead of where the technology actually was.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:48]
| Yeah, they were getting ahead. They were getting behind. It's one of those things. I mean, shit. Yeah, I mean, it's just engaging that. Look, it's part of what's happened with the EV industry like right now. It's not that electric cars are disappearing or like people. People get all the wrong impressions. Oh, my God, nobody's buying an electric car. That's not the case. That's not what's happening. It's a thing of like where the market is and whether you're trying to sell too many of them or too little of them. We had a period where there were not enough cars. There was more demand and prices went up. And now there's a period where all of a sudden the man does not cut up to where... Production is and so it creates these these issues with you know with companies right now where they're over you know they overbuilt and now they're scaling back and then i'm going to tell you right now with gas i can guarantee you one thing gas at this price guess what's going to get a boost yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:41:47]
| Like i i i'm i haven't i haven't pumped gas since i bought my car in july.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:54]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:41:55]
| And I'm quite happy with that. I don't miss it one tiny bit.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:00]
| Nope. My wife's just said the same thing. She doesn't miss the fucking going to a gas. I mean, she was always, like, horrible about running low on gas regularly. And that the fact that she doesn't have to worry about it anymore is just.
|
Sam:
[1:42:11]
| Like, so liberating. Yeah. And just plug it in overnight. I'm good. You know?
|
Ivan:
[1:42:17]
| It's here at home. And you just plug it in over there. And the car's ready to go. That's it.
|
Sam:
[1:42:22]
| Yeah. So. anyway.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:24]
| All right.
|
Sam:
[1:42:25]
| Okay. We are done. Thank you everybody for joining us for yet another Curmudgeon's Corner. Stay safe. Have fun. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Happy Pi Day.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:33]
| Pi, Pi Day.
|
Sam:
[1:42:34]
| By the time you listen to this, it won't be Pi Day anymore. It won't be Pi Day. But you know, we're recording it on Pi Day and that's all that really matters, right? Our experience is what matters, not your experience as a listener.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:46]
| Exactly.
|
Sam:
[1:42:47]
| Who the fuck cares about you? That's, it's all about us.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:51]
| Oh, actually, as a matter of fact, as I just finished saying that, there's an article like right now that came out on Bloomberg. Surging gas prices reignite EV interest. No shit. Maybe that's what Trump is trying to reignite the EV industry. That's what he's doing.
|
Sam:
[1:43:08]
| Well this.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:09]
| Is this is he's playing chess sam it's 5d chess that's.
|
Sam:
[1:43:15]
| What it is the 5g 5 5d chess theory that i heard about this is that he is intentionally raising oil prices because that will put additional first of all you know he relaxed some of the sanctions on russia uh so they could sell some oil so that helps out putin also the increased the increased oil prices will put a lot of pressure on europe and further weaken them and cause them to reassess their positions vis-a-vis ukraine and russia and nato and everything else and so and also while he doesn't like oil prices are not popular amongst the high oil prices are not popular amongst the general populace, he has a bunch of buddies who own oil companies who will enjoy the higher prices. And so that's what matters here. And that's the 5G chess that's going on here, or 5D chess, not G. 5G is a different thing.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:22]
| He'd probably play 5G chess, actually. What are we talking about?
|
Sam:
[1:44:25]
| So it's helping all the people he cares about. It's helping Putin. It's hurting the Europeans. It's helping his buddies at the oil companies. Done. There you go. Okay, we're done. Yes, sure. Okay, goodbye, everybody. We'll see you next week. We're out of here. Yeah, bye. Okay, that's it. Heading stop. Later, Yvonne. Have a good weekend.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:23]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:45:24]
| Bye.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:25]
| Bye.
| |
|
