Sam: Okay, I guess we're going. Let's do this.
Sam: Transcription by CastingWords
Sam: Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday,
Sam: November 30th, 2024. I am Sam Minter.
Sam: We, we, we, we, we, we do not have Yvonne Bowe here today.
Sam: Yvonne had a family medical thing happen.
Sam: He has posted on Facebook, so I guess I can say at least that his wife burst
Sam: her Achilles' hand. Like, can I even talk?
Sam: It was an, it was an Achilles tendon. No, I can't talk. No, I can't talk at all.
Sam: This is it. I might as well just hang it up. Forget it.
Sam: His wife had an Achilles tendon injury that he has been helping attend to.
Sam: And yeah, so she's, she's out of commission for a little bit and he's helping
Sam: out with everything required for that.
Sam: I did send out one of my little notes asking for co-hosts to,
Sam: as usual, all the people on the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack, people who have co-hosted before.
Sam: This is going to be a tough podcast. All of the people who have co-hosted before
Sam: and people who have said they might be interested, minus the last three guest
Sam: co-hosts, including myself.
Sam: So right now, that meant I excluded Pete and Ed, and I excluded myself,
Sam: but nobody else answered, so here I am.
Sam: All by my lonesome, as usual, when I do these completely solo,
Sam: I'm going to split this over multiple sessions.
Sam: As I'm recording this, it is, did I say it's, it's just after 2030 UTC on Saturday, November 30th.
Sam: And I'm going to record this first segment and then I'm going to take a break
Sam: and I'm going to record more tomorrow.
Sam: And then I'll wrap it up eventually.
Sam: I don't know. Oh, you know, when I do it solo, it's, it's just easier that way.
Sam: Like I don't have to, I don't, I don't know. I do a little bit,
Sam: I do a burst and then I'm like, okay, I'm done for now. I'll take a break.
Sam: Anyway, as usual, we'll do a butt first, which is less newsy stuff.
Sam: And then the other segments I'll do in a more newsy way, more newsy topics,
Sam: stuff like that. But my non-newsy thing today is a little bit of a complaint.
Sam: And this is a complaint against an e-commerce vendor who shall remain unnamed,
Sam: although you can probably guess.
Sam: I mentioned on the show last week, I think, I don't know, like I was replacing my microphone.
Sam: And the reason was I've had this Blue Yeti microphone for years and years and years.
Sam: And you know at the time i got it it was like hey this is one of your best sort of amateur grade,
Sam: usb mic like i i didn't want to deal with like the the connectors and stuff
Sam: for the whatever you call them the big connectors with the three things and
Sam: the blah blah blah you know the ones real pros use i'm like usbc yeah usb is
Sam: fine and i just wanted to hook up to my computer easily and blah, blah, blah.
Sam: And, and blue was considered one of the better, the blue Yeti.
Sam: I, before that I had the blue snowball and anyway, but it years had gone by.
Sam: And one of the things I like about the blue that.
Sam: Yvonne does not use, he can't stand it, is I use a wired connection to plug
Sam: my headphones back in so I can hear myself as I record live.
Sam: So like I can get a sense of, am I too loud?
Sam: Am I too soft? Is there a buzzing? Am I at the right distance from the microphone?
Sam: Which by the way, I am borrowing my wife's right now.
Sam: And so I don't have it like where I usually do. So I'm further from the mic
Sam: than I usually would be like over here is probably where I really should be
Sam: for the microphone for this microphone.
Sam: And you can hear like, there's a lot less echo around me, or maybe there's more,
Sam: I don't know a great way to say it.
Sam: I, my voice is fuller when I'm speaking this closely to the microphone.
Sam: And it sounds a little bit more like you would hear on like an actual radio show.
Sam: I don't know if you can, can you guys tell the difference anyway?
Sam: And this is me just speaking like further away from the mic.
Sam: Cause I I'm using a desk stand cause this is my wife's mic that I'm borrowing and it's easier.
Sam: Like when I have it on my little stand, I can put the microphone close.
Sam: You guys don't care. Anyway, the
Sam: point was the microphone was in general working fine, blah, blah, blah.
Sam: But the little thing where you hook in the headphones, the wired headphones,
Sam: the port had gotten loose to the point where it wasn't working anymore.
Sam: Like it had for a long time been, you had to like.
Sam: Put it in just right. You had to jiggle it a little bit to get a connection,
Sam: whatever. And I dealt with that for a long time, but it just gave up the ghost
Sam: and stopped working entirely.
Sam: So a few weeks ago, I had a show where somebody, and by somebody,
Sam: I generally mean my son, Alex, had messed with the gain on the microphone and turned it up.
Sam: And I didn't notice before recording because I couldn't hear myself because
Sam: this thing was broken. And I'm like, ah, screw it. I'll get a new microphone.
Sam: The point of this talk is not microphones.
Sam: The point of this is I ordered a replacement microphone and it's,
Sam: it's like, I went with the same brand.
Sam: I went with blue again, but their newer model, like instead of the blue Yeti, the blue X or whatever.
Sam: Anyway, I ordered it from this large e-commerce site who shall not be named.
Sam: And I didn't really pay much attention. I was just like, okay,
Sam: I'm getting it. I click the button, click the button, click the button, done.
Sam: So yesterday I went ahead to like set up this new microphone.
Sam: First thing I noticed when I take it out of the shipping box was the interior
Sam: box, you know, the actual product box was a little beat up.
Sam: I'm like, okay, whatever. That sucks, but it's just a box.
Sam: I don't really give a crap about the box. Like somebody obviously didn't treat this well.
Sam: But then when I started opening it up, I'm like, wait a second.
Sam: I started seeing, first of all, the little flap, you know, they seal these things
Sam: with the little plastic circle things that, you know, seal the box.
Sam: That was a little looser than I would normally expect. And I'm like, okay.
Sam: And I'd also, the same day I'd gotten some, some speakers.
Sam: They also had loose little flaps,
Sam: but like I opened that up and everything went fine, blah, blah, blah.
Sam: But I noticed this on the, the microphone.
Sam: Then when I actually started taking the microphone out, I'm.
Sam: I noticed scuffs. I'm like, wait a second.
Sam: This looks like, you know, this is a little thing.
Sam: There's one place where it looked like a sticker had been removed and it was
Sam: the little schmutzis from the sticker still there. And another place,
Sam: it looked like it had been nicked or something.
Sam: And then I found like there was a place with a large gouge.
Sam: And I'm like, what the hell? well and then
Sam: there and then i i actually took
Sam: it all out i plugged it in and then there's a place in the new one
Sam: they've got like some some little lights so
Sam: that unlike the old one there's like there's like a volume meter so when you
Sam: talk there's a little visual indicator of how loud you are so you can tell right
Sam: away are you being too loud are you being too soft speaking of which i talk
Sam: up here again really close to the mic do you guys like that do i sound is is it like some ASMR stuff?
Sam: Should I be like, and then I went to the store and the store was very nice.
Sam: And in the store, I went and saw the rabbits and the rabbits were very nice
Sam: too. Okay. I won't do that.
Sam: Anyway. And I just knocked the mic and hit him. Anyway, this,
Sam: this thing was clearly used.
Sam: This thing had clearly been used,
Sam: hit, beat up, stuffed back in the box, and returned and sold again as new Now
Sam: to be clear, at the e-commerce site I got this from,
Sam: you do have opportunity to potentially buy used versions of things at a discount
Sam: I did not do that I absolutely did not do that I ordered a new one This thing was clearly...
Sam: Returned and resold. Now, and I understand lots of places do that.
Sam: Like they, they, it's theoretically, they inspect returns, they see if they're fine.
Sam: And if they're fine, they potentially stick them back in the box and sell them
Sam: again when something has been returned.
Sam: But at least theoretically, they should pass some sort of really good inspection, right?
Sam: And even then, Frankly, I think at that point you should be selling it as a
Sam: discount, as nearly new or something like that.
Sam: But this one had clearly been damaged.
Sam: Now, I didn't actually try to record anything with it, but I did get it set up.
Sam: I did plug it in before I decided this is too much. Because I kept debating.
Sam: I am not one. I do not.
Sam: My, my just, I'm not built for returning things, you know, it's just so much goddamn hassle.
Sam: I mean, and, and, and like, I, I just hate the process and like,
Sam: I physically am bad at the process.
Sam: Like I, cause you, you have to like pack it back up.
Sam: You have to take it somewhere either, either to ship it or to a return center or something.
Sam: And it's just a hassle. And I don't like going through the hassle.
Sam: And to be honest, I also have that autistic tendency of like giving personality
Sam: to inanimate objects and being like, but would it feel neglected?
Sam: Would it feel sad if I sent it back?
Sam: You know, like if I was this microphone, on.
Sam: And here is my opportunity to like be used and loved and blah,
Sam: blah, blah. And yes, I've got a little scuff.
Sam: My previous owner abused me, but please love me.
Sam: Of course, I said something like that out loud. And so Alex,
Sam: my son, starts having some of those thoughts as well.
Sam: But I convinced myself, like after I found, like I was about ready to just say,
Sam: okay, screw it. A couple of cosmetic scuffs.
Sam: It doesn't really matter. I'll use the stupid thing.
Sam: But then one of the lights that I mentioned, like that was messed up too.
Sam: So the light looked wrong because like, you know how these things work.
Sam: There's the light and then they sort of, some of it is painted over in black.
Sam: So the light would be bigger, except they paint it just right.
Sam: So that only the part that's supposed to show shows, but like that paint had been scraped off.
Sam: So instead of the light being, you know, a really careful pattern that shows
Sam: you how, how loud you are or whatever, there was just a blob of light.
Sam: And I'm like, no, that would bother me every freaking time I looked at it.
Sam: Cause like one of the other scuffs was like on the back.
Sam: I wouldn't see it all the time. I'm like, eh, whatever I can live with that.
Sam: So I actually started the process of doing a return. I went to the webpage.
Sam: I typed in the reasons I filled, you know, picked the right thing.
Sam: And I was like, you know, whatever, I'm going to do the damn return and I'm
Sam: going to order a new microphone.
Sam: Oh, I will add, by the way, the e-commerce site that I bought this from.
Sam: Has all kinds of third-party vendors that sell through them as well.
Sam: And honestly, I had not been paying attention.
Sam: I thought I had bought this directly from the e-commerce vendor,
Sam: not through one of their third parties.
Sam: But then as I'm going through to the return process, I look carefully at the
Sam: invoice and no, no, no, no, no.
Sam: This had been through one of their third parties. And it was through some third
Sam: party that was like something,
Sam: something deal something something and i'm like this is
Sam: why it was something something deal something honestly i hadn't
Sam: even i mean i'd looked at the price but i hadn't done any price comparison i
Sam: was just sort of like okay this is a reasonable price for the product i'm getting
Sam: i i didn't like you know compare to the undiscounted retail price i didn't look
Sam: at other places i didn't So like,
Sam: you know, and it's, it's so easy.
Sam: Like they, they intentionally make it so that you have to be paying attention
Sam: to know if you're buying from a third party or directly.
Sam: And yeah, so it was like some third party. I'm like, okay, this is what happened.
Sam: It was sold through a third party that is specifically, their whole business
Sam: might be reselling return crap. I don't know.
Sam: Or maybe they do sell the new stuff, but then they have a very loose policy
Sam: about like, hey, just shove it back in and sell it again.
Sam: No inspections, no nothing, no whatever, blah, blah, blah.
Sam: And then deal with the returns when they happen.
Sam: At this point I was pissed. I was doing the return. I was ready to do the return.
Sam: I was all, all about like, I still, I still didn't want to do a return.
Sam: Like my, again, my natural inclination is that I would be like lesson learned,
Sam: pay more freaking attention next time and make sure,
Sam: you know, you're, you're buying from, you know, what you think you're buying
Sam: from and double check everything.
Sam: Like, and I double checked, like, did I accidentally buy a new, a used one?
Sam: No, I did not accidentally buy a used one. It was, it was supposed to be new.
Sam: Anyway, around this time, my son starts negotiating with me because he has decided
Sam: he does not want me to return this thing.
Sam: And I'm like, are you willing to pay for it?
Sam: And we negotiated. He, He ended up paying me 60% of my purchase price in order
Sam: for him to keep the damaged microphone.
Sam: Now, I know him. He is never going to use that damaged microphone.
Sam: We packed it all back up in the box because I was ready to return it.
Sam: I packed it all back in the box.
Sam: I told him that he either had
Sam: to take it to his room where i wouldn't see
Sam: it or actually hook it up to his computer and
Sam: use it that would be acceptable too otherwise i
Sam: would consider that he changed his mind and i would go ahead and return this
Sam: thing i think do you take it i'm looking around right now i think he did i think
Sam: he did eventually take take it to his room either that or he hid it somewhere
Sam: in my office where I cannot currently see it.
Sam: Anyway, I immediately ordered a new one. And this time I made very careful sure.
Sam: Like I wanted one directly from the e-commerce retailer that I was intending
Sam: to purchase from, not through one of their third parties.
Sam: And it was like 20 bucks more. But I'm like, you know, my intention here, yes, like,
Sam: you know, all things being equal, I would like to pay less, but all things are clearly not equal.
Sam: You know, the shipping, I almost accidentally bought it from the same third
Sam: party vendor that I got the first one from.
Sam: And I thought I was paying attention, but I wasn't.
Sam: I'm like no i
Sam: had to pay careful attention and make sure and
Sam: like look i buy all kinds of things and i've gotten all kinds of things from
Sam: third-party vendors before and it's been absolutely fine and especially for
Sam: cheap things who cares who cares like you know if i'm if i am buying.
Sam: Like, I don't know, like I, I, I buy, I buy everything online.
Sam: I go to the store for hardly anything, like, unless I am forced.
Sam: So like, I'll buy bottles of shampoo, I'll buy toothbrushes,
Sam: I'll buy toothpaste, I'll buy, you know, soap and toilet paper and all of this kinds of stuff.
Sam: And frankly, like for a lot of these things, will I care about the brand?
Sam: Usually I'll care about the brand, but will I care about the seller? Usually not.
Sam: Cause like, I don't know.
Sam: I suppose if you're worried about like tampering or something,
Sam: you don't want toothpaste that has actually been replaced with like,
Sam: I don't know, hemorrhoids cream or something.
Sam: No, that would be bad, but like, that's not what you expect.
Sam: Maybe I should expect, I'll check everything. Right.
Sam: But for those kinds of low dollar things, I really don't care.
Sam: Like if it gets screwed up, I'll be like, man, it was screwed up, whatever next.
Sam: And I guess like my threshold, like this, this microphone is.
Sam: Including tax and everything else was like $125 or something.
Sam: I think the first one I said was $20 cheaper.
Sam: Maybe this one was, it was $125.
Sam: And then when I got the, I want to make sure it's coming from the place I think
Sam: it's coming from, it was like $145.
Sam: And I guess that's above my mental threshold because I was like, this was a purchase.
Sam: I was looking forward to setting up this new microphone. and I was pissed off.
Sam: I was annoyed. I was like, I ordered a new microphone and this one is all scuffed
Sam: up and dented and damaged. And what the fucking hell?
Sam: So I was ready to return it. And honestly, I probably should have anyway.
Sam: I probably shouldn't have let my son buy it off me, but you know,
Sam: the way you learn how to be careful with your money is to actually make mistakes
Sam: and spend things on things you shouldn't.
Sam: Now he has no, shown no signs of actually, like this is allowance money, right?
Sam: So he's not like actually, and we give allowance a certain amount, just regular.
Sam: Like he, he theoretically could earn money from doing stuff,
Sam: but he doesn't, but we, we never required like chores for the basic amount.
Sam: Like there's a certain amount we give no matter what.
Sam: And so I don't think he's shown a lot of signs of yet learning exactly how much that stuff's worth.
Sam: The things we kind of charge him for, first of all, he'll buy his own stuff
Sam: online with his allowance money.
Sam: He will, another thing he does often is when we order out food,
Sam: like for delivery, I usually give him a dollar limit that I will pay for.
Sam: And if he wants to go above that, then I'm pulling it out of his allowance and
Sam: we have an allowance card. So that's easy.
Sam: It's all in an app. I pull the money back and forth and blah, blah, blah.
Sam: And yeah, so he'll do that. And there are a few other things he pays for on its own.
Sam: And typically the thing is when he wants something that we're like,
Sam: we don't want to waste our money on that.
Sam: We give him the opportunity to waste his money on that. And then that's all,
Sam: that's all on him, you know, and he can use that money, but he's still.
Sam: Spends his money on stupid stuff but you know what he's 15 whatever
Sam: anyway i let him buy the microphone off
Sam: me i i i was one click away from
Sam: doing the return but i was like you
Sam: know and if i had not ever said anything i am not because i did say something
Sam: like i wonder if the microphone will be sad if i return so maybe i set off this
Sam: whole thing but honestly i think he might have gone on that direction anyway,
Sam: because this is something where he and I are very alike.
Sam: So anyway, I ordered a replacement mic. It'll be here tomorrow.
Sam: But for the second week in a row, I'm using my wife's microphone on a desk stand
Sam: instead of on my little arm thing that I can put directly in front of my face more easily.
Sam: Again, I can lean into the mic and talk like this and use my,
Sam: is this a radio? No, that's a stupid voice.
Sam: Anyway, I can do the directly into the microphone NPR voice kind of thing, but I,
Sam: Let's not anyway. And, and I mentioned, I also got these speakers cause my,
Sam: my old speaker set that I, that I have on my computer,
Sam: not like speakers for the living room or something, but the speakers I had on
Sam: my computer had almost since I got them for, I mean, like these,
Sam: these were really, really old speakers,
Sam: like speakers I probably had for 15 years or more And the same brand and type,
Sam: by the way, that I'd probably had for 15 years before that.
Sam: But they were, you know, completely wired speakers.
Sam: And there was always interference because like, you know, my desk is a complete
Sam: tangle of wires of everything.
Sam: And, you know, if Yvonne was here, he like is obsessive about running all the
Sam: wires in really neat places and using like cable management stuff to make them
Sam: all stay completely out of the way in straight lines, not visible, blah, blah, blah.
Sam: My desk is just a tangle of stuff. And I actually like,
Sam: I can't stand when the cables are all like neatly routed and stuff,
Sam: because I want to be able to get in there and unplug things,
Sam: plug things back in, change things around at a moment's notice and not have
Sam: to worry about undoing things.
Sam: Like this woman that we have come help clean the house sometimes.
Sam: She's coming later today, actually.
Sam: Sometimes when she finds like, you know, the cables we have,
Sam: the charge cables we have plugged in for phones and stuff, like we'll wrap them up neatly and stuff.
Sam: And every time I find that, I'm like, ah, you've made them unusable.
Sam: I have to undo this before I can even use them again. And,
Sam: Yeah. Anyway, my desk is a complete mess of cables.
Sam: And with this wired analog cable, it meant that my speakers were constantly
Sam: doing crackling noises.
Sam: Now, if I was actually like turned up music or something, I couldn't hear the
Sam: crackling noises anymore unless I really carefully paid attention.
Sam: But whenever it was actually silent, that's when the crackling noises were just
Sam: all over the place. And I was like, I'm going to order new speakers.
Sam: And I finally ordered new speakers.
Sam: And these, in addition to the analog connection, they can connect via USB.
Sam: And they, so far, no crackle. I'm very happy about that. They're actually not
Sam: quite as powerful as the old speakers I had. They can't get quite as loud.
Sam: And it's absolutely fine when the air conditioner is not on,
Sam: but when the air conditioner comes on, because I have the.
Sam: My house has central air, but when my office, which is full of computers and
Sam: electronics and has windows that sometimes get sun, my office can heat up anyway,
Sam: despite the central air.
Sam: So I have a supplemental window air conditioner in here. And when that thing
Sam: turns on, then it's actually, I wish it was slightly louder,
Sam: these new speakers, but they're doing fine.
Sam: But the point is, the new speakers had even more evidence on the actual box,
Sam: like their little circle sticker things had clearly been taken on and off several times before.
Sam: And I'm like but that one like I opened it up and once I got it open and once
Sam: I got the stuff out and I couldn't see any problem with them and maybe there
Sam: was something invisible I don't know maybe there's a there's a dent or a scuff
Sam: or something I didn't see or didn't notice,
Sam: but for the most part they were exactly what I expected the microphone on the other hand.
Sam: Visibly damaged in multiple places. I'm like, I was so upset.
Sam: Anyway, the moral of all this is when ordering from prominent e-commerce vendors
Sam: that also sell products that are sold by third parties,
Sam: even if those third-party products are shipped from the e-commerce vendor themselves, pay attention.
Sam: Like sometimes they make it hard to pay attention, but pay attention.
Sam: And if you are intentionally choosing that, absolutely fine.
Sam: Absolutely fine. Like, like I said, in this case,
Sam: it was like $20 cheaper to like buy from the third party seller,
Sam: which is undoubtedly why they
Sam: were the one that was highlighted and the default and blah, blah, blah.
Sam: That's how that you know but and and and most of like i have not had this particular
Sam: problem before or maybe i just haven't noticed usually when i order new stuff i get new stuff but,
Sam: and should i i don't know should i report the seller or something i feel like
Sam: if i did the return that would kind of happen automatically but like i haven't done the return.
Sam: Anyway too too much work too much responsibility i ordered the new one it'll
Sam: be here tomorrow but yeah just pay attention know what you're doing especially
Sam: i guess we're we're getting into that holiday season.
Sam: As I record this, yesterday was Black Friday. And I saw some reports on,
Sam: I guess I'm saying the news,
Sam: but I saw it on social media, of course, that the physical brick and mortar
Sam: Black Friday ain't what it used to be.
Sam: Like I remember years ago, people going absolutely nuts.
Sam: Showing up at midnight, showing up at dawn crowds,
Sam: like people getting trampled, trying to get into the freaking store,
Sam: people running to the back of the store to try to get the deepest discounted,
Sam: like big screen TVs and crap and like violence ensuing.
Sam: I think that's dying down.
Sam: I saw a number of reports of people at like their local local big box mega stores
Sam: being like, it's quiet. It's not even crowded.
Sam: And that's probably not everywhere. But I don't know. I think that's a good thing.
Sam: I don't know. I'm I feel like for the last few years and I've bought everything
Sam: online for the Christmas holidays, like our family is not religious. us, but we do Christmas.
Sam: We have the upside down Christmas tree that's been hanging in our house for
Sam: several years. We do not take it down in between Christmases because it's too much of a pain.
Sam: At least that's my attitude. I think my wife would actually prefer that it come
Sam: down, but nobody has the willpower.
Sam: I mean, if she took it down, I guess I wouldn't object,
Sam: but i don't want to go through the effort and just leave it up like the way i look at it,
Sam: is why the hell would you take it down if you're just going
Sam: to put it back up 10 or 11 months later just leave
Sam: the damn thing up whatever anyway so it's just it we just keep it up we don't
Sam: usually turn the lights on when it's not actually christmas and we've talked
Sam: a number of times about like changing the decorations to match the season and
Sam: the holiday so we have an upside down tree all year long.
Sam: But like in the springtime, it would be like pink flowers and crap,
Sam: probably fake ones. Cause I'm allergic, but yeah, whatever.
Sam: And at Halloween it would be pumpkins and jack-o'-lanterns. I guess jack-o'-lanterns
Sam: are skeletons, pumpkins and skeletons and things.
Sam: And I don't know, like we could decorate it with effigies of me for father's day. I don't know.
Sam: Anyway, my point was,
Sam: my usual shopping habit has been to buy one item a day from December 1st through
Sam: until it's too late to actually buy anything more for Christmas Day.
Sam: And then split those 24-ish purchases amongst the family members I'm going to give gifts for.
Sam: But honestly at this point we have
Sam: we have too much crap in the house anyway
Sam: like i don't want more stuff for me honestly i've said for years like a few
Sam: years back alex got me this you know stand-up console video game thing that
Sam: plays tempest and centipede and a whole bunch of old like arcade games.
Sam: It's still sitting in the box. Cause I opened it once and looked at it and the
Sam: instructions like gave me anxiety cause they were so complicated.
Sam: So I put it back in the box and for every year since then, I've told my family,
Sam: the only thing I want for Christmas is for somebody else to assemble this damn thing for me.
Sam: And nobody's ever assembled it. So it's still sitting there in the box in the
Sam: hallway, but cause I don't need, like when I need stuff, like I needed this
Sam: microphone. I ordered the microphone.
Sam: I needed these speakers. I ordered the speakers. Now, to be honest,
Sam: it was getting close enough to Christmas, not for the microphone.
Sam: Cause I felt like I needed that right away. Cause I use it every week,
Sam: but for the speakers, I was like, you know, this is on my wishlist.
Sam: Maybe I should, it's after Thanksgiving.
Sam: Maybe I should just wait.
Sam: A month, see if anything, anybody buys this for me. And if they do,
Sam: then I won't buy it myself.
Sam: And then I was like, you know, usually people don't buy the things on my wishlist anyway.
Sam: Screw that. I'm just going to buy it. And that's the thing. Like if there's
Sam: something I need directly, I just buy it.
Sam: I mean, like my wife and I have a rule. We have a dollar limit above which we
Sam: will consult with each other before making purchases like, but small things do not even meet that.
Sam: I'm like, I need a thing. I buy the thing.
Sam: Like, you know, we're not talking to major purchase. That's going to bust a
Sam: budget or cause any heartache.
Sam: It just like, if I, if I need something, I buy something, you know,
Sam: like in the, and so gifts really at this point, like let's go,
Sam: often do something together,
Sam: you know, let's, you know, we, I don't know,
Sam: we can go visit somewhere, take a weekend and like do something we wouldn't
Sam: usually do even just like go to a restaurant that we wouldn't go to otherwise,
Sam: or I don't know, but things that aren't stuff.
Sam: Because at this point like and we're hoarders too
Sam: like let's just be honest my i am a
Sam: hoarder my son is a hoarder my wife
Sam: and daughter have adhd and decision paralysis on like stuff so like even when
Sam: they're ready to get rid of stuff they don't and there's constant stuff accumulating
Sam: of projects that are started but never finished but then you're like if you
Sam: pick it up you're like yeah but maybe I'll want to finish this project.
Sam: And no, you're never going to finish the damn project.
Sam: So we just accumulate. If anything, we need desperately to get rid of stuff.
Sam: We need to get rid of lots and lots of stuff.
Sam: There's lots of stuff that, and look, there is stuff that's sentimental value
Sam: that I would not want to throw out, but there's lots of stuff that just needs to be thrown out.
Sam: But the last thing we need is more stuff, more and more and more stuff.
Sam: So like I've been thinking, do I really want to do this by 24,
Sam: 20, you know, 24 ish new things to come into this house to split between the
Sam: people here in one way or another?
Sam: I'm not sure I do. And by the way, I say 24 things.
Sam: It's not like 24 expensive things. There's usually like one thing per person
Sam: that's like the headline gift that has a decent price tag to it.
Sam: And the rest of the things are small and just are sort of an indication of,
Sam: hey, I was thinking of you.
Sam: Here's the small thing that I thought it was cute, whatever.
Sam: But it's not like it doesn't have like a big dollar signs attached to it.
Sam: But even those small things, well, maybe even especially those small things,
Sam: if they're small things that like the person will be like, oh, that's cute.
Sam: And then put it aside and never use.
Sam: We don't need that in the house. You know?
Sam: Yeah. So I don't know. I, I, for the last couple of years, I've thought maybe
Sam: I don't do the one thing per day thing.
Sam: Like the last person who really, you know, my son as the youngest,
Sam: you know, there was still sort of the, Hey, the kid needs lots of presents.
Sam: They expect the sort of big Christmas festivity thing and lots of things to
Sam: unwrap and it's exciting and blah, blah, blah, but he's 15.
Sam: He doesn't, doesn't play with toys the same way.
Sam: You can't like, it's not the same as a seven year old or an eight year old where
Sam: you get them a bunch of toys and they play with the toys.
Sam: 15 year olds aren't the same. And I have no idea what to get him.
Sam: Like, you know, I used to have an idea of what toys he would like and what toys
Sam: he wouldn't. Now, I don't know.
Sam: I've asked him a couple of times, do you just want extra cash?
Sam: He says, no, he wants the damn presents.
Sam: But I don't know what, what again, and like he is definitely one where there
Sam: are piles of things from previous Christmases that he's never opened.
Sam: I mean, he opened the wrapping paper, but he never actually unboxed the thing
Sam: that was in the wrapping paper and used it.
Sam: Some of the things he has, some of the things he hasn't. And to be fair,
Sam: there are times that he has gone into his room,
Sam: found an unopened box of something that we bought him for Christmas five or
Sam: six years ago and brought it out and opened it and started using it.
Sam: So, but I don't know.
Sam: I kind of want to be done with the whole thing. Maybe say, okay,
Sam: everybody gets one thing. I don't know.
Sam: I don't want any more stuff. If any of my family is listening,
Sam: no more stuff. I have enough stuff. If I need stuff, I'll buy stuff.
Sam: Something that's not stuff, maybe. I don't know. How do you guys feel about
Sam: that kind of thing? I don't know.
Sam: Meanwhile, I think that's enough for a first segment.
Sam: Depending on what time of day that stupid microphone arrives,
Sam: maybe next time I talk to you, I'll be on the new microphone. Or not.
Sam: You know, because usually these things arrive later in the day.
Sam: You know and i thought about switching brands too but i didn't because it seems
Sam: cute i don't know like i like it and i don't know it's fine anyway yeah arriving by 10 p.m tomorrow,
Sam: who knows sometimes when they say arriving by 10 p.m it's like 9 59 p.m and
Sam: i hope to have finished recording by then if but you know sometimes they show
Sam: up in the morning yeah I, you just, you never know.
Sam: Am I done? Am I done? I am done for this segment and I guess come back after
Sam: some unknown number of hours has gone by and I will record another segment and
Sam: I guess I'll talk about news year stuff.
Sam: Newsier stuff. Newsier stuff. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.
Sam: Okay. Oh, and I realized the live stream, I'll fix this as soon as I had stopped.
Sam: Nobody's watched the live stream today anyway, but I noticed I forgot to change
Sam: the date on it. So it still says November 23rd.
Sam: I'll change it to November 30th, part one, once I'm done recording.
Sam: Anyway, you guys don't care.
Sam: What do you guys think about gifts and the holiday season and blah,
Sam: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I say this,
Sam: again, in a completely secular way.
Sam: My family does not deal with any religious connotations of the December Christmas
Sam: holiday, despite the name and the obvious religious origins of that.
Sam: It's just the annual upside-down tree and lights and gift-giving.
Sam: And obviously, I'm getting a little soured on the gift-giving part.
Sam: I mean, I like giving, I like giving gifts.
Sam: I like the ceremony of people opening it. We, we just have, we have all the
Sam: shit we need. We really do.
Sam: We, we, we don't need more and, and you know, or, or we just need the very strict
Sam: rule of like anything new that comes into this house, twice as much stuff has
Sam: to go into the trash or be donated.
Sam: I guess there's, there's a bunch of stuff we have that isn't actually trash.
Sam: Which is another thing that stops us from getting rid of it,
Sam: because donation takes work too.
Sam: And sometimes it's stuff that maybe people could actually use,
Sam: and sometimes I guess it is trash. Because even though it's still usable in
Sam: theory, no one's actually going to.
Sam: I was trying to start this break, but I failed because I got distracted by more talking.
Sam: Anyway, here's a break. backs yeah
Sam: for you it'll be like a minute or two for me
Sam: it'll be hours but i'll talk about serious
Sam: stuff i don't know like trump shit tariffs and
Sam: harris's you know paris's team doing an interview i don't know i don't know
Sam: blue sky maybe i'll talk about blue sky because i don't know the trump stuff
Sam: is just like yeah it's out there and the harris stuff is like do we really need any more,
Sam: retrospective, whatever, you know, there's some interesting things to talk about there.
Sam: But on the other hand, what's done is done talking about again, ain't going to help.
Sam: I guess maybe there's some lessons for the future in there, but maybe Blue Sky.
Sam: I don't know. I'll decide later. Here's the break.
Break: Okie dokie. Here it comes.
Break: It's just my internet being stupid. My internet being stupid is a new song we will make.
Break: The more the only balloon the problem,
Break: the problem the problem the problem,
Break: What? What? What? What?
Break: I'm tired what's wrong i'm i'm i'm i'm really tired you you you it's it's amazing
Break: to get the show on the road there's a road there's a road oh my god there's a road Hey.
Sam: Here I am. I'm back. Are you excited that I'm back? It's like,
Sam: as I said, it's the next day.
Sam: It is now Sunday, December 1st, just after 19 UTC.
Sam: As I continue this, and I've decided that I'm only going to do one more segment
Sam: because I'm doing some stuff with the family this afternoon.
Sam: And after I'm done with that, I want to actually just get this thing out.
Sam: So rather than do two more segments, I'm doing one more segment,
Sam: and I am just going to do a hodgepodge going down the list of things that we
Sam: had listed as potential topics and talking about whichever ones I feel like.
Sam: Whichever ones I feel like. I said feel like it. That's wrong.
Sam: Anyway, the first thing, and this is actually from a couple weeks ago,
Sam: and I think it's died down a little bit since, which is good.
Sam: But I, after Donald Trump won and Kamala Harris lost,
Sam: I was extremely disappointed to see a contingent of people on the left that
Sam: were going in for election denial conspiracy theories.
Sam: Like the same bullshit that we'd been criticizing the Trump side for, for years now.
Sam: Now, to be fair, huge difference.
Sam: Kamala Harris and her team and everybody related to them was having absolutely nothing to do with it.
Sam: None whatsoever. However, these people were like trying to send her team memos
Sam: and letters saying, you have to look at this. You have to look at that.
Sam: And they just, yeah, the Harris people ignored them, which was the right thing to do.
Sam: And, but I was seeing a lot of it on social media, specifically,
Sam: mostly I've seen a lot of it on TikTok.
Sam: But it was people being everything from people taking statements from the Harris
Sam: team and trying to do like read things into it.
Sam: Like Harris was giving out coded messages of hope and that, you know,
Sam: oh, she said this and that really means this.
Sam: And if you, if you carefully parse what she said, or if you,
Sam: some of them were practically like counting the number of letters and the words and crap like that.
Sam: Then there were other people talking about, you know, Starlink somehow being
Sam: involved. And there was a thing about like, Ooh, Ooh, Ooh, Elon Musk said that
Sam: he knew the results before everybody else.
Sam: This must be nefarious in some way. And look, it's almost certainly it's the
Sam: same thing as everything else.
Sam: Like he had folks with models, you know, exactly like the people who call things
Sam: at the major news organizations.
Sam: They have models that have like, that can take the results that have come in
Sam: so far and compare them to what the expectations were and make a prediction.
Sam: You know, it wasn't like, oh my God, he magically knows the answer before it happened.
Sam: You know, and basically there were, there were a variety of these of a variety
Sam: of different types, but the, the, the one thing they had in common was.
Sam: Is absolutely zero in terms of actual information or proof of anything, of anything at all.
Sam: And you can be damn well sure if there had actually been information about shenanigans
Sam: of some sort that would possibly have made a difference,
Sam: that Harris's election lawyers would have been all over it.
Sam: Mark Elias, who's like one of the preeminent election lawyers in the country, lawyers?
Sam: I once again can't talk. One of the preeminent election lawyers in the country
Sam: had been talking before the election about how they were all geared up.
Sam: They were ready. They had teams all over the country.
Sam: They were ready to contest anything that needed contesting, both election night things.
Sam: Look, there were a couple of polling places that got bomb threats.
Sam: And they had to close for a little while, and that could have disrupted things. But guess what?
Sam: They made sure that the polling places that were affected got to stay open late
Sam: so that everybody could vote.
Sam: It was all taken care of. There were other random election day things that happen
Sam: every single election of every single year.
Sam: Like, this is normal.
Sam: There was nothing that mattered. Trump won fair and square.
Sam: Straight up, you know, and, and, but there are all these people.
Sam: And I recognize like the, this is sort of desire to like not believe it.
Sam: And something had to have been, but no, no, no, no, no.
Sam: But yet you had this group of people who were fanning the flames of,
Sam: you know, something's going to happen on such and such date.
Sam: And, you know, Kamala has a secret plan. Again, Kamala.
Sam: Kamala has a secret plan. And come on, people.
Sam: Like I said, it has died down. And the big difference between this and 2020
Sam: is the people at the top fanning the flames.
Sam: I mean, hell, maybe even the people at the top believing it.
Sam: I mean, at this point, like, it seems clear that Donald Trump knew he lost and
Sam: was just fanning all this anyway.
Sam: But every once in a while, it seems like maybe he believes his own shit.
Sam: But, like, I think there's plenty of evidence that he knew he lost.
Sam: But that's the thing here. Like, there was no oxygen given to this from the Harris people at all.
Sam: Not from Harris, not from Walls, not from any of the campaign people,
Sam: nobody. Nobody else in the Democratic establishment was having one single word of this shit.
Sam: They either ignored people who said this kind of stuff or shut them down immediately,
Sam: which was the right thing to do. You know, just, oh.
Sam: Moving on, blue sky. I mentioned this in the last segment and people have been
Sam: talking about it, so I figure I might as well.
Sam: Blue sky had a big like for some reason like look people have been leaving twitter
Sam: slash x for a long time i mean the the the exodus began when elon musk took
Sam: over it has been slow but steady,
Sam: apparently the election results
Sam: were a big, I don't know, wake up call to some people. I don't know.
Sam: But all of a sudden, all of a sudden the exodus increased after the election.
Sam: And I've seen it specifically like in terms of more prominent people.
Sam: I mean, it's happened with other people too, but like you've seen it with the.
Sam: Celebrities and journalists and those kinds of folks who'd been hanging on to
Sam: Twitter, what used to be Twitter, finally deciding to get up and leave.
Sam: And they've decided that the place they're going is Blue Sky.
Sam: Now, as anyone listening here knows, I moved to Mastodon a long, long time ago.
Sam: I stayed on a little while after Elon took over, but my big,
Sam: moment was when they shut down to third-party clients because I used TweetBot as my client.
Sam: I never used the official Twitter stuff.
Sam: And so effectively at that moment, they broke Twitter for me.
Sam: It became impossible for me to use it the way I wanted to use it because yes,
Sam: could I have used the official clients at this point? Yeah, I could have, but I hated them.
Sam: And primarily because of what to a lot of people made Twitter, Twitter,
Sam: like, like my usage of Twitter through tweet bot was always the reverse chronological only,
Sam: only see posts from people that you follow and replies.
Sam: If both, if you follow both people, the, the, the person replying and the person being replied to.
Sam: And so like, and no ads.
Sam: The actual Twitter experience, the algorithmic feed was always like,
Sam: I could not look at it for more than a couple seconds without getting mad.
Sam: There were ways to get to the non-algorithmic feed, but they made it.
Sam: You had to do a couple extra clicks. You had to do this. You had to always do it and blah, blah, blah.
Sam: And it just, and And you still got the ads, I think. I don't remember. It's been a long time.
Sam: Anyway, that's the moment I left. And then over the course of the last couple of years,
Sam: people have been slowly but steadily leaving as the Twitter experience has become
Sam: degraded for the things that lots of people used it for.
Sam: You know, participating in various communities, real-time news, blah, blah, blah. uh.
Sam: Things I kept hearing, and I haven't been there, I haven't been there in a long time.
Sam: Things I kept hearing were the algorithm continuously shoving things in your face from Elon,
Sam: the ads being extremely badly targeted and all over the place,
Sam: the large number of sort of conservative right-wing folks that would get shoved into your feed,
Sam: even if that wasn't your orientation,
Sam: all kinds of things.
Sam: But apparently the election itself was a snapping point for a lot of people.
Sam: And a lot of people started moving elsewhere in the past.
Sam: Like, you know, there was a, there was a surge of people into Mastodon at the
Sam: very beginning of this process, but then threads came online and that's where
Sam: all the people were going for all, for many months.
Sam: And then, and, but then people started getting unhappy with threads too.
Sam: I mean, and by people, I put that in quotes. Obviously, lots of people are happy
Sam: with threads because threads set up a policy very specifically.
Sam: They don't want to promote news. So their algorithms are promoting sort of other stuff.
Sam: So the people who were at Twitter for news specifically weren't that happy with
Sam: threads for that. Now, threads also has a non-algorithmic following tab.
Sam: And there's news within the last couple of weeks that they're going to,
Sam: they're at least going to be testing, but they may be adding a mechanism to
Sam: let you be able to set that as your default.
Sam: Which would be nice right now. It always, when you open it up,
Sam: it comes in on the, I guess, unless you just left and are coming back.
Sam: And so it remembers your previous state, but like it comes in on the algorithm
Sam: tab and you have to like click over.
Sam: So like, I, I, I check threads probably a couple of times a day.
Sam: I like, I'm on Mastodon constant, like literally it's always on in the background.
Sam: Like I do not like when I'm on my, on my home desktop where I have a three monitor setup.
Sam: One of the monitors is always ivory, which is the people who made TweetBot made a client from Asinon.
Sam: It's the one I use. I always have it up on one of the monitors in a six column
Sam: view with several different columns with different slices of the kind of stuff
Sam: I want to see that's updated in real time so that I can just glance over there
Sam: and see what's going on at any moment.
Sam: And on my phone, I haven't looked at my stats yet, but it's got a,
Sam: if it's not my number one app in terms of screen time, it's, it's number two.
Sam: It's probably vying for TikTok at this point because it's a different kind of
Sam: usage. TikTok makes you watch videos and blah, blah, blah.
Sam: So anyway, the, but a bunch of people started moving and, and,
Sam: you know, Blue Sky was like, oh, look at how many new users we have.
Sam: We got this huge, massive influence, influx of new users.
Sam: And they were talking about how they had to do like, they had to jump through
Sam: hoops to make sure that her servers didn't fall over under the new load and all this kind of stuff.
Sam: Threads like raised their hand at one point and said, you added a whole bunch of new users,
Sam: but your total number of users total is still smaller than the number of new
Sam: users we added just last month.
Sam: You know, but the influx into Blue Sky has increased.
Sam: And the thing I've noticed specifically is...
Sam: All kinds of your, again, your journalists, your celebrities,
Sam: whatever, starting to say, come see me on Blue Sky.
Sam: That's my preferred place now.
Sam: And so I'd had a Blue Sky account for a long time.
Sam: Back when they were invite only, an old friend of mine, Rebecca,
Sam: sent me an invite to Blue Sky and I joined.
Sam: I think you can get in without invites now. It's wide open.
Sam: But i set it up and i followed a couple people
Sam: i made like i said my profile hey
Sam: my main location is on mastodon go see me there if you want to see me but which
Sam: is the same as what i have on threads i so far i've treated both threads and
Sam: blue sky as read only experiences like i i retweet things,
Sam: on Mastodon all the time.
Sam: I've got the election graphs and wiki of the day and curmudgeon's corner.
Sam: Mastodon accounts were automatically post things.
Sam: Like when I started recording this live stream, there was an automatic post
Sam: on the curmudgeon's corner Mastodon saying, hey, there's a live stream. Here's the link.
Sam: Click through it. And I went through the process of setting all that up.
Sam: For a curmudgeons corner for election graphs, which election graphs is now silent
Sam: for at least the next couple of years.
Sam: But, you know, and Wiki of the Day, they all have these automated stuff and
Sam: I'm personally on there all the time.
Sam: I kind of suck that I relatively rarely do original posts,
Sam: I sometimes do, but I'm bad at that.
Sam: My main usage is really just I see something interesting and I hit the Retoot
Sam: button or whatever they officially call it. I call it Retoot.
Sam: But anyway, so I actively spit things into the Mastodon world and I'm on there all the time.
Sam: For threads, I was checking in once or twice a day and I immediately ignore
Sam: the algorithmic feed, click over to the following feed and then scroll to see what's new.
Sam: For the most part, I'm not even, like when Threads first came out,
Sam: I followed a bunch of people.
Sam: Threads enabled partial opt-in federation with Mastodon.
Sam: So like some of the accounts I care about you can now follow them from Mastodon
Sam: even though they're Threads accounts.
Sam: And so I've done that with a few. And so for the most part, I'm not doing a lot with Threads.
Sam: I'm just checking in occasionally to see if there's anything that I missed that
Sam: somebody hasn't shared into Mastodon.
Sam: And sometimes there is. but
Sam: like you know most of the
Sam: accounts that would give me that
Sam: kind of i don't know i shouldn't say most of it i've got
Sam: a variety of accounts that have turned on their federation and
Sam: i follow them from mastodon instead threads very annoyingly just recently added
Sam: a 15 minute delay for that their stated reason is they've increased the amount
Sam: of time that threads users can edit their posts and they don't share it to Mastodon until the.
Sam: They can no longer be edited. Of course, Mastodon supports editing posts,
Sam: so that's not really an excuse, but for now.
Sam: And also, Threads, they've only partially done the integration.
Sam: Like, you can follow Threads accounts that have opted in from Mastodon,
Sam: but Threads people can't follow Mastodon folks or other Fediverse things. It's not just Mastodon.
Sam: Anyway and i had not been checking blue sky at all i had when i first got that blue sky account i,
Sam: i clicked in i set up my profile i followed one or two people and i basically
Sam: maybe checked in once every few weeks i've been trying to also check blue sky
Sam: at least daily now that there's this influx into Blue Sky.
Sam: And I've also been making a point when I see somebody promoting their Blue Sky account,
Sam: like either on TV or on a podcast I listen to, or a post on Mastodon that says,
Sam: go follow me on Blue Sky, or a post on Threads that says, go follow me on Blue Sky.
Sam: I've been trying to do that so that my followed feed in BlueSky can have more in it.
Sam: Because the thing is, if you're not doing the algorithmic thing,
Sam: and BlueSky, by the way, also has its sort of default is the following as well.
Sam: But one of the things that BlueSky is doing some interesting things.
Sam: First of all, they're theoretically federated, but not really like they've got
Sam: some centralized single points of data that are still like, yes,
Sam: they've, you can, you can set up your own blue sky server, but it's still dependent
Sam: on the centralized instance. Um.
Sam: They've done that, but they've also got – what their approach on algorithms
Sam: is one I think is actually very interesting,
Sam: which is, sure, algorithms can be useful, but we'll put it under your control.
Sam: So they've actually got like a marketplace of algorithms where you can like
Sam: any developer with the appropriate skills can code up an algorithm for use with blue sky.
Sam: And they essentially have sort of a marketplace of what they call feeds,
Sam: which are algorithms you can choose from. and you can add them.
Sam: You can have multiple feeds. So like at the moment I have my,
Sam: I have my following feed in blue sky.
Sam: I have a discover feed. Like these first few are all defaults discover feed
Sam: a popular with friends feed.
Sam: And I added a mutuals one, which is just an algorithm that shows posts only
Sam: people who you follow and who follow you back, but they've got others.
Sam: People have set up science feeds and arts feeds and news feeds and super clusters
Sam: for various communities.
Sam: Now, some of these are essentially what I use lists for in Mastodon and what
Sam: I used to use lists for in Twitter, which is a curated set of accounts that are related to a topic.
Sam: Mastodon also allows you to follow hashtags, which serves the same sort of purpose.
Sam: Some of these are just that, are just, hey, here are a bunch of accounts that
Sam: somebody is curating that are good for some specific topic.
Sam: But others are, you know, algorithmic in one way or another to try to decide
Sam: what to show when, have various conditions on it.
Sam: And the whole point here is, though you have control over that.
Sam: You decide which algorithmic feeds you want.
Sam: You add them. They have a special place in the UI so that when you are going
Sam: to that feed you know that you're going to it.
Sam: I prefer the reverse chronological, but I don't have a fundamental problem with
Sam: algorithmic feeds in general.
Sam: Even on my Mastodon usage, I go to sort of the popular and trending.
Sam: Thing tab feed whatever which is
Sam: essentially an algorithmic feed i go there a few times a day in my desktop version
Sam: it's one of the six columns i have up and and no no problem but i know that
Sam: i'm going there i know why i'm going there i it is a conscious choice on my part to look at that.
Sam: It is not sort of a feed that is manipulated by the social media company designed
Sam: to optimize specifically for engagement and to all of this kind of stuff.
Sam: Anyway, the point is of all of this, a bunch of people are going to blue sky.
Sam: Like right now, like my biggest problem with Mastodon is my main daily driver or social media.
Sam: I check all the others maybe once or twice a day.
Sam: But it still has what to me is a fundamental problem that a lot of the people
Sam: that I wish were posting there are not.
Sam: There are some holdovers who are still on Twitter.
Sam: There are a bunch that are on threads. Now there are a bunch that are on Blue Sky.
Sam: Some of them have indeed enabled sort of federated. There's a bridge for blue sky as well.
Sam: So for certain blue sky accounts, you can follow them via Mastodon,
Sam: but it's not universal, just like it's not universal for threads.
Sam: And so a lot of the people that I want to be following are not here, are not on Mastodon.
Sam: And so I have to, so I am going to these other places, but I haven't decided to like really jump in.
Sam: I saw one person make a post the other day that was basically,
Sam: I'll be on whatever social media that Tapbots makes a client for.
Sam: They're the ones who made Tweetbot and now make Ivory for Mastodon. And I'm kind of there.
Sam: I like the interface. I like the program that I use.
Sam: I like the way that it does things, I'm used to it.
Sam: If they made a Blue Sky client, maybe I'd be on Blue Sky more often.
Sam: If they made a Threads client, maybe I'd be on Threads more often. I don't know.
Sam: I also like the automated things I do for Curmudgeon's Corner or Wiki of the Day, Election Graphs.
Sam: Wherever I am most of the time, I'd want to set that stuff up.
Sam: And both Blue Sky and Threads have slowly been setting up.
Sam: They've got programmatic access too at this point so theoretically I know I
Sam: could do those things but I don't
Sam: relish the idea of going in and actually spending the time to do it again,
Sam: maybe I will at some point set up a blue sky for those various things set up
Sam: threads for those various things I don't know.
Sam: But anyway, Blue Sky right now seems to be the place where the growth and the
Sam: excitement is for the moment.
Sam: I've heard other people, of course, complaining that with the growth and excitement
Sam: comes people being abusive and various problems.
Sam: The other thing Blue Sky, by the way, does is their approach to moderation is
Sam: basically do it yourself.
Sam: They're basically like hey we will provide a
Sam: robust set of filtering functionality that
Sam: you can use including picking these algorithmic
Sam: feeds that i was talking about but other stuff as well and that
Sam: you know basically putting the burden
Sam: of moderation on the
Sam: customer filtering things so they see what they want
Sam: to see at least that was the original vision they have had
Sam: to do some moderation which i guess is one of the reasons jack dorsey left like
Sam: he was originally one of the people pushing blue sky but got frustrated and
Sam: i think part of it was because they realized that yeah you do have to do some
Sam: moderation you do have to kick some people off.
Sam: I'm watching i like as i'm talking here i've got my blue sky up i've been following more people.
Sam: I still don't like, if you rely on the algorithmic feeds, then I mean,
Sam: the whole point of algorithmic feeds is they make it really super easy.
Sam: Like you can jump in and immediately be seeing things you like and the algorithm
Sam: learns what you like and start showing you more of that.
Sam: I mean, that's the entirety of TikTok's magic.
Sam: Like people very rarely, like even, I mean, even I I very rarely go to my followed
Sam: feed, and I'm just on the For You page all the time on TikTok.
Sam: They make it very easy. But if you're not using algorithmic feeds,
Sam: if you're trying to curate a list of people to follow, then it takes some work.
Sam: You have to find the people you want to follow. You have to go through the process
Sam: of following it. And to have a robust feed that always has new stuff,
Sam: whenever you open the app, you have to be following hundreds of people.
Sam: Okay, hundreds may not even be enough, depending on your appetite for it.
Sam: I expect feeds that if I have left the app for a minute, I come back and I have new stuff.
Sam: There's no thought of keeping up with my feed and watching everything.
Sam: If you want a feed where you sort of keep up and see everything,
Sam: then, okay, you want to follow a couple dozen people maybe.
Sam: But if you want a feed that's always got new stuff, no matter what.
Sam: You want to be following hundreds, quite possibly thousands.
Sam: On Mastodon right now, I'm following 1,679. On Twitter,
Sam: I was following 5,000, exactly 5,000, because I kept hitting the cap and having
Sam: to remove people in order to follow new people, because I didn't have enough
Sam: people following me to follow over 5,000.
Sam: So I was capped, which was frustrating me before I left that place.
Sam: And, you know, so, and every one of those,
Sam: 1,679 accounts are accounts that at one point or another,
Sam: I made a conscious choice to follow, either because somebody retweeted that
Sam: into me, retweeted, reposted that in, in a way that I saw it.
Sam: And I was like, oh, that's interesting.
Sam: I'll follow them. Or in some cases they followed me. and then I looked at their
Sam: profile and then I followed them.
Sam: In some cases, you know, I heard about them from a list of people that were
Sam: like, hey, you should follow these folks. They're cool.
Sam: I seeded it by following people that I followed on Twitter that I could find on Mastodon, et cetera.
Sam: And so my Blue Sky and Threads feeds, if I were to use them as my main place
Sam: right now, are still very sparse.
Sam: And so I would have to spend time on them. And I don't want to spend time.
Sam: I don't want to spend time doing that on another place. I don't know.
Sam: And maybe I could solve that by, well, Sam, just look at the algorithmic feed.
Sam: But algorithmic feeds piss me off. And at least the manipulative sort of algorithmic
Sam: feeds that are non-transparent that I mentioned, the ones that are optimized
Sam: for engagement and everything else.
Sam: And you know people have repeatedly said
Sam: you know hey people say they want the
Sam: non-algorithmic feed but whenever we've tested it people spend more time on
Sam: the algorithmic feed they engage more on the algorithmic feed well yeah duh
Sam: that's what you're optimizing for that doesn't mean it's best for the person
Sam: watching it it means you're sucking in their time more and you know it's it's best for the company,
Sam: especially if you're selling ads on that feed.
Sam: But anyway, I guess everybody check out Blue Sky.
Sam: I'm Ablesmay on Blue Sky, just like I am practically everywhere else, A-B-U-L-S-M-E.
Sam: I'm Ablesmay on threads as well.
Sam: There's not much point in following me on those platforms because I don't post
Sam: anything on those platforms.
Sam: But if you are on those platforms and you are posting things.
Sam: If you follow me, there's a good chance I'll follow you back and I'll see your
Sam: stuff when I check in on those platforms. So yeah.
Sam: Okay. What else here? I, you know, I hadn't, you know,
Sam: I, I spent way too long on that, but you know, for some reason at this point,
Sam: I'm like more excited about talking about like blue sky and stuff than the other stuff.
Sam: Like, you know, I could, the next thing I could, I mentioned last week,
Sam: should I upgrade my phone?
Sam: I'm debating this right now. Like, you know, I've got an iPhone 12, 12 Pro Max.
Sam: The currents are the 16s. And I would, if I was going to get one,
Sam: I'd get the 16 Pro Max. They came out in September.
Sam: I, the 12 is what, four years old. I'm very much eligible.
Sam: But my phone still works. It still works fine there, you know,
Sam: I, and I'm eligible for the latest upgrade.
Sam: Or the latest version. I actually haven't updated to the latest version of the software yet.
Sam: Cause like I insist on keeping my phone on a universal time and they still,
Sam: even though they have stuff that keeps track of when your phone is active,
Sam: when when is not, instead of just doing the updates at a low usage time for
Sam: you, they do it at a, I think it's like two to four in the morning or something like that.
Sam: But two to four in the morning to me is two to four utc which is still a time
Sam: i'm active so it never succeeds in doing an update because i'm always active
Sam: at that time so i have to do it manually and i just haven't manually triggered
Sam: it yet i will at some point now i won't do,
Sam: i won't do it won't do the new apple intelligence stuff but it's unclear to
Sam: me how much i should care at this point. And it still works.
Sam: It's still fine. There's one app I use that in the last couple months has been
Sam: crashing a lot, but I think it's the app's fault, not the phone's fault.
Sam: Although I'm tempted to be like, hey, if I got a new phone, maybe that would get better.
Sam: Maybe it's like, get more memory and blah, blah, blah. I don't know.
Sam: At the same time, I look at some of the leaks of the iPhone 17,
Sam: which is still, what, nine months out, nine, ten months out,
Sam: and the leaks may not even be right.
Sam: But I'm like, that looks cool.
Sam: You know, can I wait another nine months?
Sam: Probably. Like, the last few times, at this point, like, I used to be on a religion.
Sam: I was updating every other year. I was updating every two years. I was updating my phone.
Sam: Then at some point, that slipped to three years.
Sam: Now I've gone four. And I think really at this point I'm at,
Sam: I replace when it doesn't work or it has to either break or there has to be
Sam: some new thing that I'm really jealous about the new ones on that I'm like,
Sam: Hey, they have this new feature.
Sam: I can't live without this new feature. I have to upgrade now.
Sam: On the other hand, the new ones have better cameras than the one I have.
Sam: The new ones will get the Apple intelligence.
Sam: And by new, I'm talking about 16 right now, not the theoretical 17.
Sam: But the one thing about the 17, the rumor is they are going to move from having
Sam: the cameras in a little square bump in one corner to a strip across the entire back.
Sam: And I can't tell you for years now how much the camera bump has bothered me
Sam: for being asymmetrical.
Sam: That you couldn't put your phone flat on a table and not have it wobble when you use the screen.
Sam: That has pissed me off so much. And one of the things I looked for in cases
Sam: is cases that would minimize that wobble as much as possible because they would
Sam: sort of cover up the bump.
Sam: But even anyway, the rumor is the new one's going to have a strip instead.
Sam: Anyway, I wasn't actually going to talk about like, I think I'm hanging on and not upgrading yet.
Sam: And the longer I wait, the more it makes sense to just wait till next September.
Sam: You know, I mean, I wasn't even going to talk about that.
Sam: It was just an example of as I go through the list, I'm like,
Sam: I'm, I'm more excited about the non-political stuff.
Sam: The political stuff is just sort of depressing still.
Sam: I mean, it is what it is. We'll deal with it. I mean, I have the,
Sam: the, all the January Trump's cases, the January 6th and the document cases,
Sam: the federal cases are officially dead now.
Sam: Officially, official, official, official, which is not a surprise in any way.
Sam: We expected that to happen once Trump won, but it's still depressing.
Sam: Like the guy is getting away with all kinds of stuff. And the New York case
Sam: where he's already been convicted and we were just waiting on sentencing.
Sam: I don't know that it's official official yet, but most likely sentencing will
Sam: just be delayed until he's no longer president.
Sam: I mean, best case scenario, best case, like theoretically, I guess they could
Sam: sentence him and then defer the sentence.
Sam: There's nothing happening with the sentence while he's president for sure.
Sam: But most likely they're not even going to do the sentencing until, what would it be? 2029.
Sam: Did I have that right? No, wait. Yeah, no, that's right.
Sam: 2029, January 21st, 2029.
Sam: The first that they might actually do this. Unless something really surprising happens.
Sam: The Georgia case is still on ice because of the Fannie Willis crap.
Sam: But most likely, even if that stuff gets resolved, they're not going to do anything with Donald Trump.
Sam: There might be a possibility that they separate out Donald Trump and go proceed
Sam: with the rest of the people in that RICO conspiracy? Maybe.
Sam: And for that matter, we've got cases in Arizona and Michigan that never included
Sam: Donald Trump related to all those shenanigans.
Sam: And I guess those are going to proceed. So those might be sort of the sleeper
Sam: hits of 2025 and 2026 is the progress of those cases against all of Donald Trump's
Sam: co-conspirators that are at a state level, so Donald Trump can't pardon them,
Sam: and that don't involve Trump himself, so he can't claim immunity either for
Sam: being president during the crimes or...
Sam: In the present, but it's still like this man's whole life.
Sam: I mean, we've talked about crimes he committed back in the seventies and eighties
Sam: and nineties as well. Nothing, nothing.
Sam: He's gotten away with fucking everything and it's going to continue.
Sam: I mean, I'd predicted for years that he was never going to see a day in jail.
Sam: I guess some of the financial stuff might continue
Sam: like he he may
Sam: end up actually forced to pay some money during his presidency
Sam: for something for you know
Sam: either the the civil case or the criminal case against his company one of those
Sam: things eugene carroll you know but he may he may be able to weasel out of like
Sam: getting those proceedings paused during the presidency too. I don't know.
Sam: And undoubtedly he's going to do more bad things, break more laws,
Sam: because he just doesn't care.
Sam: And at this point he's been proven that not caring is a decent strategy here.
Sam: But as president, you know, the Supreme Court gave him broad immunity.
Sam: You can be damn sure everything is going to be an official act at this point.
Sam: And, you know, we've determined that, you know, even if the Democrats took back
Sam: the House, even if they took back the House and the Senate, for that matter,
Sam: impeachment won't get you anywhere.
Sam: And if you wait till after he's out of office, chances are whoever's president
Sam: after him isn't going to have the willpower to go after him again. I don't know.
Sam: Tariffs? Yeah, tariffs. Trump's been going on about tariffs again.
Sam: We all know the direct effect of tariffs is increasing prices.
Sam: I've been hearing a bunch of his defenders talking about how...
Sam: Look, this is just a negotiation ploy. It's not about what would happen if the
Sam: tariffs actually came into place. It's a negotiation ploy. It's leverage.
Sam: And then he's going to get other
Sam: countries to do things, and then he won't actually need to do the tariffs.
Sam: And it's just a method of strong-arming people into doing what he wants them to.
Sam: And so don't worry about the actual effects of the tariffs, because that'll
Sam: never actually happen. And I've heard other people that go on about,
Sam: ha ha, yes, the price of imported goods will go up. We all know that.
Sam: But the whole point of this is that, hey, guess what? Now you can buy American.
Sam: And yes, that is the theoretical point of tariffs.
Sam: The reason they have always been tried is this whole, this protectionist notion
Sam: that you make the foreign stuff more expensive than the domestic,
Sam: then there's more incentive to produce domestically.
Sam: And, you know, domestic players will be able to come in and at a lower price
Sam: than the foreign competition, or if there are no domestic manufacturers at all,
Sam: they can ramp up and they can start to do it where they weren't doing it before.
Sam: Problem is, let's assume there's an industry that's already here in the U.S.
Sam: Typically, they're more expensive anyway.
Sam: Labor costs are higher here. So the reason that the foreign goods were selling
Sam: more was they were cheaper.
Sam: And so your price will still go up, even assuming the American thing is still
Sam: cheaper than the foreign-born, foreign-born, foreign-manufactured alternative.
Sam: But it doesn't always work out that way. I've been hearing in the last week,
Sam: a lot of examples of even during the last Trump administration,
Sam: when he put tariffs on certain appliances that we did still have domestic production
Sam: of appliances from Whirlpool, I believe.
Sam: And they raised their prices to match the new price of the foreign stuff because
Sam: they could, because, you know, that was the new price of a washer dryer or whatever.
Sam: And apparently there were tariffs on washers but not dryers,
Sam: but they raised the price on the dryers as well because typically washers and
Sam: dryers are sold at prices comparable to each other.
Sam: So you raise the price of the washers and, hey, look, you can get away with
Sam: raising the prices of the dryers too.
Sam: And so the result of the tariffs on appliances was not, oh my God,
Sam: now Whirlpool is selling so much more than they used to because they come in
Sam: cheaper than the foreign competition.
Sam: It was, hey, Whirlpool can raise their prices too.
Sam: So it's exactly what happens depends on the exact nature of the tariffs,
Sam: the exact industries, what the competitive landscape looks like.
Sam: But that's even when there's already domestic manufacturing in place.
Sam: If there isn't, then that has to ramp up and that takes years to,
Sam: You have to build factories. You have to get new supply chains.
Sam: The supplies probably come from overseas too and might be subject to tariffs as well.
Sam: Or do you build up, you know, new, do you build up domestic sources of the raw materials as well?
Sam: Maybe they're available. Maybe they're not. Like some materials we just don't
Sam: physically have in the ground in the right quantities here in the U.S.
Sam: To mine them ourselves or whatever.
Sam: But maybe you do that. But even then, the prices go up. And that's before you
Sam: even take into account retaliation.
Sam: So the main argument here, the one that's actually a good argument,
Sam: is the, okay, it's just a threat.
Sam: There won't actually be any substantial tariff increases because Donald Trump is going to threaten it.
Sam: Your various foreign countries, China, Mexico, and Canada have been talked about
Sam: most recently since Donald Trump specifically has been mentioning them.
Sam: They will capitulate on whatever Donald Trump wants them to,
Sam: or by the way, or they won't do a damn thing, but Donald Trump will declare
Sam: victory and say they capitulated anyway.
Sam: For instance, there was this back and forth with the new president of Mexico
Sam: where she said, hey, we're already doing a bunch of stuff.
Sam: And Donald Trump reacted with, look, they've agreed to do a bunch of stuff already
Sam: because of my tariff threat.
Sam: She was just mentioning the stuff they're already doing. Sorry.
Sam: Which is a lot, by the way.
Sam: Anyway, tariffs. That relates to, though, there's a phrase that I guess Rachel
Sam: Maddow popularized a few years ago, which is watch what they do, not what they say.
Sam: Yvonne on our Commudgence Corner Slack has also mentioned a variant of this
Sam: a few times recently that, like, basically, I'm not going to get all worked
Sam: up over the craziness that's being talked about right now.
Sam: About the tariff threats, even the cabinet nominations, right?
Sam: It's like, he's not president yet.
Sam: Let's wait till he actually starts doing stuff. And then let's see what he actually does.
Sam: Because I think we talked last week, he's super transactional, right?
Sam: And this is the whole basis of this tariff threat thing. He's not talking about
Sam: tariffs necessarily because he really intends to do the tariffs.
Sam: He is using it as a manipulative tool to try to get other outcomes.
Sam: And we also mentioned last week, by the way, exemptions from the tariffs are
Sam: important. And maybe he can get some stuff in return either for the country
Sam: or for himself in exchange for those exemptions.
Sam: But the point is, when you're dealing with someone transactional like that,
Sam: where there's no actual sort of ideological underpinning, really.
Sam: Things can change on a dime. He can literally be saying he's going to be doing one thing next week.
Sam: And the next week he's doing the exact opposite.
Sam: And he will, and to him, I don't know.
Sam: I'm not going to say what's in his head, but it's not going to be portrayed
Sam: necessarily as he's not going to portray it anyway, as an issue that was then
Sam: this is now this whole flip flop thing.
Sam: Never an issue with Donald Trump, because what he's doing is not about this
Sam: is the right thing to do because it is in some way the morally correct thing to do.
Sam: It is more about this is the right thing to do right now under these circumstances,
Sam: because if I do this, I'll get that.
Sam: And if those circumstances change in any way, shape or form,
Sam: then what the right thing to do is changes as well.
Sam: And look, there's plenty where I think that's actually the right way to approach
Sam: things, where things are situational and there isn't an overriding moral principle at play.
Sam: It's just how can you move things from where they are to something more like
Sam: what you want and you figure out, given the current circumstances, how do you get there?
Sam: But to me at least, there's a huge zone where there are moral principles at play and those matter.
Sam: And they affect what you consider to be possible and whatnot and what you like
Sam: yes you could get the result you want but the way to get there would be immoral
Sam: so you don't do it you know.
Sam: I'm gonna wrap up very quickly i gotta move on to other things but what else we got,
Sam: There was a peace deal with Hezbollah, Israel and Hezbollah,
Sam: brokered by the U.S. and a few others, seems to be holding so far.
Sam: Good, I guess. I mean, yes, good. I shouldn't say I guess there.
Sam: The I guess is more that the, I don't know, this part of the conflict didn't
Sam: even, I don't know, it feels like it didn't even have to happen.
Sam: Like it was, it was an extension added on to what was going on with Gaza that
Sam: seemed like it could have been avoided entirely, but good ceasefire, blah, blah, blah.
Sam: Still got to do the same with Gaza. Not there yet. The Biden administration
Sam: is continuing to try to make that happen.
Sam: I don't know if they'll get anywhere before the inauguration.
Sam: And after the inauguration,
Sam: you know, honestly, it is very possible that Trump will be able to get something
Sam: done here that Biden was not because Biden and despite all of the people who
Sam: wanted him to be even more so,
Sam: but Biden and Netanyahu were adversarial. They were not buddies.
Sam: Biden was trying to tell Netanyahu to stop.
Sam: Trump will not be telling Netanyahu to stop in the same way,
Sam: but there may be ways to end things like maybe it's full steam ahead.
Sam: Maybe it's let Netanyahu bulldoze all of Gaza and then start building the condos.
Sam: I don't know. Or also just naturally over the course of time,
Sam: Netanyahu succeeded in what he wanted.
Sam: And I mean, one of the reasons stated for the Hezbollah ceasefire was basically
Sam: that Israel had gotten what they wanted.
Sam: They killed huge numbers of the Hezbollah leadership and huge numbers of the
Sam: rank and file fighters as well.
Sam: And there was what was left was basically non-functional.
Sam: Maybe Netanyahu declares he got to that point sometime in late January,
Sam: February, and then, okay, we'll stop for now.
Sam: I mean, the Israeli position has always essentially been, we'll stop when we win.
Sam: And they're a lot closer to winning now than they were a few months ago or a
Sam: year ago. So there you go.
Sam: The Trump cabinet, awful as expected.
Sam: Yeah, Gates had to drop out, but everybody else is awful.
Sam: It's all people heading agencies that don't believe in that agency's existence
Sam: and are in it to cripple it.
Sam: For the most part, it is not, we want this agency to do this other thing.
Sam: It's not we have a policy difference with the previous administration on what this agency does.
Sam: It's we don't want this agency to do anything.
Sam: The exceptions to that rule are the Department of Defense, the Department of
Sam: Defense, and the Department of Justice.
Sam: The Department of Defense, you know, is all going to be about macho blustering
Sam: and all this kind of stuff.
Sam: You know, we've got the, I can never say his name, Hogarth, Haygarth, whatever.
Sam: The guy from Fox News who's been tapped for defense.
Sam: He's all about like, let's get rid of all the woke stuff. Let's get,
Sam: you know, let's, let's kick out all the trans people on day one.
Sam: You know, all of this kind of stuff that he says will make the military stronger,
Sam: that the people actually there right now disagree. But, oh, well,
Sam: there might be some cuts there, too.
Sam: But, you know, you got Trump talking about, hey, wanting to use the military
Sam: domestically. Ah, that'll be fun.
Sam: Trump's whole thing is to be so belligerently aggressive that...
Sam: Rivals internationally will just capitulate. And so you don't need to actually do violence.
Sam: It's basically, you know, the old, the old fashioned cold war mutually assured
Sam: destruction kind of thing.
Sam: But in, in non-nuclear terms, it's like we want to have such overwhelming force
Sam: that nobody will even think of messing with us.
Sam: And we won't have to actually use that force, which look, it's a strategy that
Sam: sometimes worked in the past.
Sam: But at some point, if you don't actually utilize that in some places,
Sam: then people realize you don't mean it and then it stops working.
Sam: So who knows? Trump did, you know, people's worst fears of Trump being involved
Sam: in places all over the world did not happen last time.
Sam: He did get involved in a couple new places. He did some stuff in Syria that
Sam: we weren't doing. He escalated the drone warfare all over the world.
Sam: He, he did some targeted assassinations. So it's not like he was,
Sam: you know, a pacifist or anything, but we'll see. We'll see what happens this time.
Sam: He certainly is all about, you know, we want to get along with Putin and,
Sam: and, you know, he wants to make friends with North Korea and all of these kinds of things.
Sam: So one, one, one way to get along and avoid conflict is certainly appeasement.
Sam: It sometimes works for a while and usually doesn't work forever.
Sam: And that's the potential solution to Ukraine as well, of course,
Sam: is just like, okay, fine.
Sam: I mean, when the invasion first happened in the first couple of shows,
Sam: Yvonne and I were talking about how eventually this will probably end in a peace
Sam: deal where Ukraine gives up some territory and promises not to join NATO.
Sam: It was the most likely alternative at the beginning. I guess it's now the most
Sam: likely alternative again.
Sam: There was a brief period in the middle where it looked like maybe Ukraine would
Sam: actually be able to push back more than they have.
Sam: But no, I think that's out the window now.
Sam: I think it's the most likely thing. I mean, Trump is of course exaggerating
Sam: by I'll be able to solve it on in one day.
Sam: But the most likely outcome as a relatively quick outcome is you freeze the
Sam: front lines where they are.
Sam: They make that the effective line of control.
Sam: And you tell Ukraine, sorry, you're never joining NATO, at least not in the
Sam: foreseeable future. And done.
Sam: Which, by the way, even before the invasion, Ukraine was being told no.
Sam: They were being told you could ask, but we're not doing that right now because
Sam: we don't want to aggravate the Russians. But whatever.
Sam: Okay. Oh, and Kash Patel for FBI. I think technically speaking,
Sam: the FBI director has a term that isn't over yet, but by appointing a new FBI director,
Sam: Trump is making clear that he is intending to fire the current FBI director
Sam: and put on a new one that is an absolutely insane election-denying thing.
Sam: Anti-FBI, anti-law enforcement person. So we'll see how that goes.
Sam: It probably matches up with, you know, because Trump got, ended up with Pat
Sam: Bondi for justice instead of Gates.
Sam: He's doubling down on FBI because his, his whole intention is to make this agency
Sam: into the tool of his retribution.
Sam: Like he feels like from 2016 onward, the department of justice was after him.
Sam: And so now he's going to go after all the people who were after him.
Sam: I mean, that's, that's his own words. That's what he says. Again,
Sam: we'll see what he actually follows through with and what he doesn't.
Sam: I mean, he never did lock Hillary Clinton up. Maybe he'll get to it this time.
Sam: Because because last time he kept asking people when
Sam: are we when are we locking up hillary clinton and they
Sam: kept putting him off because there was no actual legitimate
Sam: reason to lock up hillary clinton but as
Sam: we keep saying all of those quote-unquote adults in the room gone we don't have
Sam: any of those you know what i think i'll wrap it up there there was an interview
Sam: with harris Harris's campaign team on Pod Save America.
Sam: I did not watch the whole thing. I saw clips. It was pretty interesting.
Sam: Basically, her team knowing they were behind almost the whole time.
Sam: I mean, they kept saying they were underdogs.
Sam: Election graphs said they were behind the whole time.
Sam: Well, except a very tiny moment in September.
Sam: But not that tiny, a couple weeks. I should look it up. You don't care.
Sam: They were ahead for a little while in September, according to election drafts.
Sam: But they knew they were behind the whole time.
Sam: They knew there were certain strategies of throwing Joe Biden under the bus
Sam: that might have gained them a few points that Kamala Harris did not want to do.
Sam: There were a variety of other choices they made that they've been criticized for.
Sam: But, you know, like I said early in the show, I don't know that those conversations
Sam: directly help right now.
Sam: There are a number of things that any one of us could come up with that we would
Sam: say they should have, could have done differently.
Sam: We are operating from hindsight.
Sam: These folks were not.
Sam: And the worldwide trends were such that even if they had, they came close to
Sam: doing everything perfect.
Sam: They ran an excellent campaign. Could they have done a few things different? Maybe.
Sam: Is there some chance that some of these things could have eked out a win? Maybe.
Sam: But worldwide, the incumbent parties lost ground and.
Sam: And Harris did better than any of those other incumbents worldwide in 2024. So, okay.
Sam: Curmudgeons-corner.com. Go there. You can find all the ways to contact us.
Sam: You can find our transcripts, transcripts, old episodes and transcripts from
Sam: the last couple of years.
Sam: I have not linked our TikTok there yet. We now have a Curmudgeons Corner TikTok.
Sam: We do not have a Curmudgeons Corner Blue Sky.
Sam: I have not set that up or a Curmudgeons Corner thread.
Sam: Maybe some i don't want to have i don't want to have multiples one's enough right i don't know but.
Sam: Anyway you can get to our youtube you can get to our tiktok you can
Sam: get to all the ways to facebook email mastodon
Sam: all that stuff is there also a link to
Sam: our patreon where you can give us money we like
Sam: money right now we get 15 a month or
Sam: so from those of you out there who support us and we appreciate that
Sam: very much helps us every once in
Sam: a while buy new microphones and stuff when the old
Sam: ones die like i said you know things like
Sam: that but maybe someday
Sam: we'll have a meetup again we did that once a few years ago it was fun maybe
Sam: someday i don't know and yeah at various levels on the patreon we'll send you
Sam: a postcard we'll send you a mug we'll mention you on the show at two dollars
Sam: a month or more or if you just ask we'll invite you to the curmudgeons Corner Slack,
Sam: where Yvonne and I and a variety of our listeners are hanging out all week long,
Sam: and chatting about life and politics and news and non-politics and fun stories we see,
Sam: all that kind of stuff. It'd be great to have more of you.
Sam: So if you're not on there and want to be, go to curmudgeons-corner.com,
Sam: pick one of the ways of contacting us and let me know.
Sam: We'll get you invited. It's a lot of fun.
Sam: Yvonne would usually at this point give a highlight of something on the Slack
Sam: that we have not talked about on the show. I did not prepare one. I am bad.
Sam: Let me look real quick. Let me look real quick.
Sam: Go from the random category.
Sam: Oh, here we go. This is a new thing that Bob posted last night.
Sam: I have not read the article yet, but I will read you the headlines.
Sam: 94% of AI-generated college writing is undetected by teachers. Dun-dun-dun!
Sam: Which, you know, is not entirely unsurprising.
Sam: Like, I've read a number of things where they have these theoretic,
Sam: like, AI detectors, but the problem is the false positive rate is huge and false negative.
Sam: They're just not accurate at all. Like they will both detect lots of human writing
Sam: and say it was AI when it wasn't at all.
Sam: And they will miss a lot of actual AI writing. So they're basically useless.
Sam: And they can get people in trouble for not doing anything wrong,
Sam: which seems like a big problem.
Sam: But, you know, 94% of AI generated college writing is undetected by teachers.
Sam: And the subhead here, I'm not going to open up the actual article live,
Sam: but it says, but by and large, stopping AI academic fraud has not been a priority for most schools.
Sam: Look, the answer to this is like most things.
Sam: It's not that you have to detect and stop the AI writing. It's that,
Sam: hey, your method of evaluating whether students have learned the material by
Sam: things through like essays has just become obsolete.
Sam: You have to now do something else. Sorry.
Sam: And in many ways, the methods of teaching are sometimes obsolete as well.
Sam: Like, you know, I've mentioned before my son, Alex, who's just woken up and
Sam: showed up as I'm recording here is doing, is teaching himself,
Sam: you know, game development.
Sam: This is AI assisted. You know, he's using AIs to like, okay, how do I do blah?
Sam: And they will give him code and they will tell him and they will do things.
Sam: But he's still learning how to do it.
Sam: But it's AI assisted because it's a tool that's out there now.
Sam: And it would be stupid and counterproductive to pretend it's not.
Sam: But instead, you have to learn what it's good for, what it's not,
Sam: how to know when it's taking you in the wrong direction, how to double check
Sam: it, how to do this, how to do that.
Sam: And like if you were testing somebody on their game development skills, guess what?
Sam: You know, please generate this standard piece of code that an AI could spit
Sam: out perfectly in five seconds is not a good test.
Sam: You know and and there's
Sam: going to be a lot more in-person stuff obviously like where you want to know
Sam: somebody knows something you're going to have to not do it asynchronously you're
Sam: going to have to do it in in person or in a way that like lets you in real time
Sam: go back and forth with them Now,
Sam: AI is going to be able to do that soon, too.
Sam: Like, I can develop, I can do my AI clone that will answer for me and look like me and whatever.
Sam: Anyway, the point is, it is never a solution to sort of stick your head in the
Sam: sand, try to prohibit the technology, try to avoid the technology.
Sam: Oh, gee, no, you have to embrace it and figure out what the world's going to
Sam: look like with that there.
Sam: Which, by the way, another story I haven't followed, but Australia apparently
Sam: just passed a law saying you have to be 16 for social media.
Sam: That's not, it's not going to work. It's, I, I, I recognize the things they
Sam: may be trying to achieve with that.
Sam: It's not going to work. It's not going to work.
Sam: Sorry. It's going to have, it's going to have unintended consequences that they did not want.
Sam: And at the same time, it's not going to work to solve the problems that they hoped it would solve.
Sam: And hopefully Australia will be a nice experimental bed for that,
Sam: that will stop other countries from trying similar stupid things before it's too late.
Sam: So sorry. Anyway, I'm done now.
Sam: Thanks everybody. Like I said, I've got family stuff in the afternoon.
Sam: I'll get this podcast out sometime.
Sam: Hopefully Yvonne will be back next week. Hopefully his wife's injury will heal.
Sam: I mean, it's going to require some, some treatment apparently.
Sam: Maybe Yvonne will tell us more next week. But anyway, get well soon, Juana.
Sam: And we'll see Yvonne back next time. Thanks, everybody. Have a great week.
Sam: We'll talk to you next time.
Sam: And oh, it's December now.
Sam: So starting next week, I'm going to start bugging people about our year-end
Sam: shows that are coming up, predictions and stuff.
Sam: And I'll set up a Google Doc for people to give things they want us to do predictions
Sam: on. I guess I just started it now, but I'll start it for real next time.
Sam: Okay. Bye, folks. Oh, I was about to just hit the stop button. I need to hit the outro.
Sam: We need the song. Have a good week. Goodbye.
Break: Thank you.
Sam: Thank you. Okay, now I'm hitting spot. Spot? I'm hitting spot?
Sam: No, don't hit spot. Spot's a good dog.
Sam: Here, I'm hitting stop.
Sam: And Alex is hitting me. I'm hitting stop.