301: Useful Idiots

This episode is sponsored in part by Privacy.com. It's like a burner phone for your credit cards. To sign up for free and get a $5 credit, go to Privacy.com slash GOG. That's $5 free to spend anywhere by just signing up. Privacy.com slash GOG. Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Okay, you sounded a little hesitant there for a second. I wasn't sure. We took an episode off, so I kind of forgot who I was. That happens. That happens. Podcasting does make the man. Yes, it does.

What'd you do over the break? Anything technical? Exciting? No, it was great. I did absolutely nothing. It was fun. Just family and didn't look at tech news at all. I did have to do a little tech research, which I'll get into a little bit later in the show, because we slide directly into Christmas, and I am the go-to gadget guy and tech guy for my entire family.

So there was some research and looking into various different things to buy for the kids and whatnot for Christmas. So I didn't fully escape tech hell, but mostly. Well, that's good. Yeah, it's usually over Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's like you and me both, we're tech support for everybody.

And it's like, why won't my Outlook work? I'm like, because you're using Outlook. Yeah, well, I'm already aware of the fact that I'm basically going to have to sideload YouTube into four Kindle, not Kindles, the Fire tablets, children's kids' Fire tablets.

So I'm looking forward to that Christmas Day. Nice. Can't you do it before you wrap them? I suppose I could. They're all coming here. Maybe I should just make a night of it this week and just do the hack and sideload so everybody can get on their YouTubes with their kids' tablets.

It's strange that you have to hack a Fire tablet to put YouTube on it. Apparently you do. That is the one thing that you cannot just get native YouTube support, so you have to do a sideload on it. So I have detailed pages of instructions. Okay. So over the break, I took a little step back and I worked on my personal website for a little while.

Oh, how exciting for you. I know, man. It was actually kind of fun. I kind of enjoyed it because I'm getting to know WordPress for business, which is what we're going to be moving GOG over here to someday. And it's an interesting product. You can upload your own themes, which is nice, but you can't edit them on the fly like you used to be able to.

You used to be able to go to the file thing and just basically hack on the theme in the interface. Right. So now you have to hack on it locally and then upload it. But I ended up just going with a theme from their packages because when you have a business account, you get all the themes for free, which is nice.

So you can stick around. And it was just kind of fun to go back into that. And so if you go to jpd.me, you can see the new site and there will be some new content up there. Maybe eventually. Who knows? Every time I sit down to write something for the blog, I'm just like, this again?

Really? Do I want to do this? Kind of would rather just go watch The Good Place and have a beer. Yeah. Work is hard. Work is hard. Well, I used to get paid for it. Now I don't. So it's like, ask for it. That's the thing, right? Like if you're not getting paid for it anymore, why bother? Yeah, seriously.

So I had an interesting thing with Amazon happen to me over the break too. I ordered some vitamins because I take my vitamins and I got the, you know, I paid for the $3.99 next day guaranteed delivery. Now it did not show up next day guaranteed.

It showed up the day after. Now in cases like this, shouldn't Amazon just refund you that fee automagically? You'd think. But they don't. 20 minutes of customer support to get my $3.99 back. Awesome. Yeah. Way to go, Amazon.

Just loving it. Well, it's kind of, it's the way of the world though, right? Like Amazon used to be really, really great with our customer service and Prime and all that sort of stuff. It used to be amazing. But now that they're the only game in town, screw you guys. We win. Screw you guys. I'm keeping your cash.

That's right. That's how it works. And I went and did the Instagram data dump because we had some other stories about that and how it was, there was a flaw in it and expose some people's information. But I'm thinking, ah, I could use a backup of all my Instagram stuff just to see what it was. So I did it.

I got it. It was huge. It was like maybe 60 gig worth of my Instagram photos. But the interesting part about it was when I opened up the folders, you know how stories are supposed to go away after 24 hours? They don't. Every single story I ever posted was in there.

Yeah. Well, as we know now, delete means set visibility to zero. Yeah. I was kind of happy, though, because now I got them all back in one easy to digest place so I can make a little, you know, movie and final cut with them and just have them all together because there's some stuff in there that I was like, you know, kind of sad that I didn't get because when I first started, I didn't have that save the camera roll feature on.

So a lot of the early days when when I got my little puppy Dino with him playing in my house and everything, I didn't have that. That was just all gone. So now I got him back. So, you know, sometimes not deleting everything can be OK, I guess. I guess.

Yeah. Well, yeah, we got a little follow up on your informed visibility API flaw that the U.S. Postal Service had, which exposed data of over 60 million users just by dicking around with the API. They fixed it. Oh, good for them. That's about it for the follow up.

OK, it did take them over a year, which is insane because the flaw was first discovered more than a year ago and they informed the USPS but never received war back. And of course, Krebs on security reached out last week and said, hey, guys, are you ever going to fix this? And so they finally got around to it and did.

Oh, well, public shaming works. That's the lesson. That's a lesson, kids. Yeah. That's the only form of customer service left is public shaming. Yep. Yeah. And great. Bring him back this feature because I like it so much. The Onion of the Week, I found this one on Black Friday. It was quite hilarious.

Horrified Nation wakes up on Cyber Monday to find Amazon Echo devices embedded beneath skin. And a lovely image with that as well. So check that out in the show notes. Yeah, but you know it's coming. That's the sad part. I know. It is a funny image. It's only kind of funny. In the news.

It's a time-honored tradition that the day before Thanksgiving, people dump their dirty laundry in the news because, in theory, everybody is just a turkey drunk and not paying attention and burned out, especially in this day and age, completely burned out by news. So we don't pay attention.

So on Friday, for example, the Trump administration released a report detailing how climate change will cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming decades. What climate change, you ask? Exactly. Exactly. I did read that. That was kind of a scary one. Oh, it's more than a little bit scary. And it's interesting how they're trying to downplay that.

But that is not the thrust of our show. No, it is not. We form around technology. And Thanksgiving brought us something wonderful from Facebook. They basically put out a blog post in which COO Sheryl Sandberg and outgoing head of communications Elliot Schragge said that everything that the New York Times has said about them being absolutely horrible, horrible people is 100% true.

And they're completely responsible for it. And all the backtracking that they tried to say about how they didn't know what was going on was lies. They knew. Everybody knew. Top down. Rotten. To the core. Facebook. It's bad. Yeah. And, you know, nobody's going to get punished for this.

Nobody's going to get punished. Sheryl Sandberg is going to stay forever and have her billions of dollars in stock options and just call it a day one time. And that'll be it. And again, no, no few, no more people have left Facebook according to my, my, my records here. So, yeah, nothing's, nothing's going to happen.

That's what, I mean, that's, we knew that was going to happen, but it's interesting that they actually put this out. I don't understand why they did this, but yeah, I mean, you know, at this point, why not just keep going with the lying? Yeah. They're not going to change anything. Yeah.

You know, so yeah. Why, why bother? Works for the president. The interesting thing about this, when I saw it, it just reminded me of the old West wing episode about taking out the trash, which is a classic that describes this whole thing, you know, in, in detail about why they put out all the crappy news on Fridays because nobody's going to be reading it over the weekend.

And if you haven't seen that episode, I highly recommend going back and watching it or just going back and watching all of the West wing again, because it will make you sad for a time when we were hopeful for the government. And there's an article in the New York times that I loved. It's called everyone wants to influence you.

Did you get a chance to read this one? I did. It's a pretty good article. I thought. Yes. It's pretty spot on to how everything works in this, in this new day and age, isn't it? Yes, it is. I particularly love this paragraph. Americans are at the moment preoccupied with Russia's capacity to manipulate us.

A poll last year showed 63% of Democrats and 38% of Republicans saw Russia's power and influence as a significant threat to the United States. But Russia is just one influence in a whole ecosystem of modern pressures. Now, this is the greatest list ever. Lobbyists, drugs, Facebook, covert agents, dark money, foreign agendas, dupes and double agents, fake news, bribes, threats.

These are a few of my favorite things. The fact that Facebook comes in at number three had me almost spit my coffee out when I read that. I was like, that is beautiful. It's just a fun read. So I highly recommend go checking that out at the New York Times. Link will be in the show notes at gog.show slash 301.

All right. And speaking of basically trying to influence you, a new study has come out via Ars Technica that it only takes a few seconds for bots to spread misinformation. Something we pretty much knew already. Yeah, but they did the math on it. And it's pretty interesting.

And the really sad part is that just fake news goes faster. Yep. Faster, farther, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information. Yep. And my favorite bit here is at the end. They talk about how influencers like celebrities and people with big followings can be manipulated into resharing some of this fake news because of social pressure and social capital and things like that.

So they see a bunch of their followers talking about this thing. Maybe they need to retweet it, too, so they can be on the bandwagon. And this guy from this Indiana study calls it the useful idiot paradigm. So basically, yeah, anybody with a big following is a useful idiot that can be manipulated and bent to their will to actually spread fake news.

I love this useful idiot is my new favorite. I that's good. We got to have a T-shirt for that. Oh, I agree. Grumpy old geeks, useful idiots. That's right. That's right. Now, we talk a lot on the show about the coming apocalypse, which, you know, the AI thing, which one, which one, which one, the AI thing and how, you know, it's going to basically destroy jobs or maybe it won't.

Maybe we'll all just be fixing robots. Who the hell knows what's going to happen? I think we have a pretty good sign of the way it's going to go in this particular story, though. GM is going to focus on electric and autonomous vehicle programs. And as part of that, they're laying off 15 percent of its contract workers.

They're shuttering five plants in North America and they're discontinuing production on six vehicle models next year. So as we move towards these autonomous programs and whatnot, there are less and less, less and less humans actually involved in the in the building and maintenance of these things. And more and more jobs are going away.

Yep. And it's interesting. Twenty five percent of these layoffs were executives. They actually didn't just go to the blue collar side. They got rid of twenty five percent executives, which is pretty interesting. The other interesting thing about this is Ford is also doing about the same thing.

Yep. They're shutting down a ton. They're basically not going to be making cars almost at all anymore starting next year. Most of their scooters. Yeah, not scooters. Unfortunately, crossovers and SUVs are where they're putting all of their money. And they're going to have like two cars.

That's it. Yeah. It's the end of an era. It really is. It really is. And maybe it's not a bad thing, given the way everybody drives these days. Yeah. I mean, I've got a I've got an escape, which is, you know, I guess technically an SUV. Yeah. And I love it.

I love the thing. But it's sad that, you know, the only thing that's going to be left is a Mustang and some little like weird hybrid vehicle that they're going to start making. So but yeah, this is the this is surprising to me that everybody is just saying, hey, you know what? Nobody's buying cars anymore.

So let's stop making cars. Yep. Well, OK. There you go. Now, going over to Russia briefly for a second here, Russia's Internet watchdog. Now, here we go. Roskomandzer. How do you think that's pronounced, Jason? Oh, Roskomandzer.

Harvey Menfridgensen. Yeah. Anyways, they're going to find Google for failing to remove banned websites from its search results. Now, apparently they have their own version of GDPR, I suppose, in Russia. And GDPR protect you.

Yeah. So they filed charges against Google and they could face a whopping fine of up to $10,000 if it's found in violation of Russia's laws. But it's 700,000 rubles. $10,000 to Google.

They don't give a shit. No. We spend more on coffee creamer on a like on the lunch rush one day. Yeah. Well, this is exactly the problem. I mean, this is the same reason why you don't see anybody really giving a shit about keeping data private. It's the fines are too damn low.

So Russia is reportedly planning to enact hirscher penalties for tech companies that break its laws in the future. Three sources told Reuters. Reuters. Reuters. Reuters. Reuters. Reuters. Oh, they got in the news business now. Did have to do a little plumbing around the house this weekend. So maybe that's why that stuck in my mind.

So anyways, they told Reuters that the country may soon be able to find firms up to 1% of their annual revenue in Russia found to be in violation of Russian regulations. So that's a step in the right direction, I suppose. Because, yeah, a whopping $10,000 fine to Google is basically like, it's not worth fixing anything at that price.

No, I mean, for the lawyer just to read the document probably costs more than that. Exactly. So I, as I mentioned, I had to do a little research and whatnot for the holidays. So I found a couple of links that I thought I'd show and throw into our show notes for anybody else that's getting ready to do a little holiday shopping.

How to choose between Google and Alexa in 2018. These are the two top dogs. They conveniently left out basically Apple's version. Yeah, nobody wants Apple. They said, you know, we didn't really use it. So this is a guy that used both for over a year. The TLDR on this is Google is better at natural language already, and it is catching up fast in all the other areas in which Alexa is currently ahead.

So it might be the way to go for your holiday shopping. Anything but a fucking Facebook portal, I say. So, yeah, seriously. Yeah, so if you don't mind being in big Google, that appears to be the winner, at least at the moment. Jason and I both have Alexas and we're quite happy with them.

So that's that's I might it might have been in a closet for months. I have not used my Alexa forever. Well, that's right. Yeah, your roommate can't stand them. So no, she's paranoid. So she won't let me put it in the house. I should put one in the studio so I can at least listen to the radio, which is interesting because I did see a stat this morning that, you know, like two percent of podcasts are listened to on smart speakers.

But most of the things that people listen to on smart speakers are the radio radio stations. Yeah. Yeah. It's basically the only thing keeping radio alive right now. I know I use it to listen to the radio. I listen to K-Rock HD two all the time. Yeah. And I figured out how to make my Sonos play K-Rock in the morning. So I use that for, you know, for that specific thing because I don't have a radio anymore.

Who the hell has a radio? I'm not going to go sit in my car to listen to Kevin and Bean, but I can make my eggs with my Sonos, which is nice. Yeah. So thank that. And fortunately, that move to radio dot com for them made it like super easy to set up. So, yeah, I just I don't know, man. I the Google Home thing.

I do kind of like their control panel. It's kind of nice and it doesn't have a camera in it. Yeah, it's a plus. I just don't want to go buy everything again. It's just it's expensive. I know we're in the ecosystem already. That's the problem. Yeah. And I've got my family in the ecosystem. Like I'm buying Echo shows for for all the family in Toronto now.

So we can all just, you know, call each other and do all that. So we're all in. It's too late for me to switch. Yeah, that's that's too bad. But I would like to play around with some of these things, but it's just it's cost prohibitive. Yep. Patreon dot com slash GOG. Just saying. And over at Engadget, they had an article called.

Do you really need a tablet? Now, I know Jason's answer is yes. You are a tablet dude. But if you read the article, the breakdown is for like for most people. No, you really don't need a tablet. But it's a good reading for holiday gift giving. They go through all the various ones out there. So thinking about getting one, give this a read.

And yeah, you know, basically their argument is phones are getting so big. They're basically tablets already. That's why I didn't want to get a, you know, an iPad mini because I put it next to my phone. I'm like, I'm going to spend 500 bucks on something that's an inch bigger than my phone. I don't think so. Well, when I finally upgrade, I'm not going to get a mini again because that very reason.

It's a little ridiculous. Well, that and the mini is that hasn't been updated in forever. And it costs a ton. You can get a new iPad 4 for less than the cost of a mini. And the, you know, the iPad 4 is basically an old 9.7 inch pro with just a few features removed.

We've got, we've got one of those at the house here. I got one for my roommate because she kept trying to swipe my iPad when I was working on it to look up crap when we're watching TV. I'm like, I'm just going to buy you an iPad. Damn it. And the 4 is really nice for the, you know, it's like after taxes landed, it's like 420 bucks for the cheap wifi model, which is all you really need.

Yep. And it's, it's a good, it's a good little iPad. I highly recommend it. I might be getting that. Yep. Yeah. Cause I'm, I'm keeping my pro because I looked into the price for getting a new one and it's just not in the cards for little old me for quite some time. Well, I mean, even if it was in the cards, I think it's outrageously overpriced for what it is.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it is ridiculous. It's 1500 bucks to get the iPad, the pencil and their crappy case, which I don't want. I don't want the case. I've got some amazing cases for my 9.7 inch. I've got this Logitech keyboard that uses the smart connector that is just genius and you don't have to charge it.

It's not like that Bluetooth crap. And I love it. I really love that thing. You can type on it just as fast as a full size keyboard. And I'm like, I, they don't have that for the new ones. And I'm like, ah, I think maybe I'll just wait because I don't have to upgrade it. My 9.7 works great. There's really nothing. It's some of the, you know, the multitasking features don't work as well because it's a little older, but it's still a fast little tablet.

Yep. So we have some interesting research coming out. Uh, researchers looked into wondering now that we have GPS is in our cars and our phones, everything has navigation built into it. Are these navigational capacities of our phones making us worse navigators? And the answer used to be yes.

Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. So it's been, research has established that mobile navigational devices such as GPS embedded in one's phone make us way less proficient wayfarers. Mobile interfaces leave users less spatially oriented than either physical movement or static maps. Handheld navigational devices have been linked to lower spatial cognition, poor wave, wayfinding skills and reduced environmental awareness.

So we're basically becoming one with our computers. Anyways, we are outsourcing so much of our, of our mental capacities and starting to rely on them, which necessarily, I don't necessarily think is a bad thing. Uh, at least until, you know, somebody drops that, uh, orbital nuke and wipes out all our devices and we're left our own devices again.

Yeah. At that point, we've got other problems, you know, this is true. Seriously. But yeah, I mean, we've talked about this. It's, you know, we, we basically offload these cognitive tasks. When was the last time you remembered somebody's phone number? You're like, you know, I used to know everybody's phone number that that's the common, you know, fallback on this.

And now it's just, it's falling over to everything else. It's like, yeah, I'll just Google it. Fuck it. Exactly. You know, I don't have to remember it. I got Google. Well, even, even go back to Indiana Jones, the, the third movie where he's like, I wrote it down so I don't have to remember it. You know, it's like, ah, that's actually a pretty good point.

So. That is a good point. And we're definitely there now. Yep. I miss the Thomas guide though. That was the best. When I first moved to LA, everybody was like, get a Thomas guide. You'll, you'll be able to get around everywhere. And I loved that book. Just being as late as probably 10 years ago. If you looked underneath the driver's seat of anybody's car in LA, there was a Thomas guide there.

Yep. Haven't seen one in 10 years. I bought one for nostalgia reasons a couple of years ago and looked at, look through it and then never used it again. Yeah, man. Talk about a company that missed the bus about making an app. Yeah. Yeah. No doubt. Yep. Well, Elon Musk says there's a 70% chance he'll move to Mars.

Can't be soon enough. Yes. Due to the number of recent number of breakthroughs that have made it possible, he said he has hinted before it'll be a one-way trip. He expects to move there 70% probability that this is Elon Musk. Yes.

And 80% bullshit ain't going nowhere. And Ohio is now the first state to accept Bitcoin for paying your business taxes. Oh, man. Well, you know, it might be a good move for Ohio if Bitcoin ever has a resurgence.

But right now, it is just tanked. It has tanked. So the money isn't going to go directly into Ohio's banks. There's an Atlanta firm, BitPay, that will convert the virtual cash to dollars first. And it's basically being done for shops that take Bitcoin so they do not have to exchange them in order just to cover sales.

But my question would be, find me a shop in Ohio that takes Bitcoin. Yeah, all two of them, maybe. Yeah, maybe. And this is a little bit of breaking news. Manafort, Paul Manafort, who is currently in jail awaiting his sentencing and is in a whole Stephen Heepa trouble right now.

Well, it turns out he had secret talks with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy. What? Yeah. No, surely not. Shocking, shocking. No collusion, no collusion. You're the colluder. I'm not a colluder. No, no, no, no, no, no collusion. What a fucking load of shit.

No collusion, my aching ass. That's right. He's denying it and says it's 100% false. But there are people that are, you know, close to the story that say that it actually happened. This comes from the Guardian. They kind of tend to do some research over there. They do tend to do their research and tend not to publish unless they're pretty sure about something.

Yep. And because I wanted to end on a high note and since we're going out of order this week because we missed our show for Monday, I found this at Gizmodo and I'm like, must have been a slow news day. Here's how long it'd take you to poop a Lego. That's right.

Relevant to my future interests. That really actually is. Turns out it's 1.71 days to poop a Lego head. One of the heads off the people. Now, this is a bunch of researchers who actually wrote a paper for it. But the funny thing about it is they were just taking the piss out of it.

And it's pretty funny. It says, even within the academic paper itself, a format where colorful language goes to die, the authors went out of their way to have some fun. To record their bowel habits before ingestion, they created the stool hardness and transit score, a.k.a. the shat score.

And afterward, they recorded the length of time it took them to pass their stool via their self-made found and retrieval time score, the fart score. Nice. Well done, scientists. Well done, scientists. And I can confirm that it takes between one to two days for Play-Doh to come out.

I can definitely 100% confirm that one because the kid likes to eat the damn Play-Doh. Okay. Colorful. Mm-hmm.

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Media Candy. Brian, this one comes home for you. Universal Music Group files a lawsuit against Poker News for infringing works on their podcast. So this is podcasting, which you are one of. And your wife works for UMG, doesn't she, as a lawyer?

She does indeed. In fact, speaking of coming home, she's been a bit late coming home recently because of this. Oh, she's actually working on this. Oh, maybe we shouldn't talk about that on the podcast then. Well, you can talk about it. Okay, well, it turns out this company, iBus Media, has been for years stealing music and putting it on their poker podcasts.

And they finally said, enough's enough, and said, we would like some money now. Please? Yeah. Because they were sent a cease and desist, and for over a year and a half continued to just keep putting music on it. Well, there's a reason that we don't put music on our podcasts anymore, except for music that either I wrote or a friend of the show, Andy Stochansky, wrote and gave to us.

Exactly. So, we don't count the first hundred or so episodes. Yeah, when we broke the law. Yeah. But, yeah, if you have a podcast, you really need to watch your P's and Q's nowadays because people are going to start noticing because podcasting apparently is a thing.

It is. It's a thing. That's why we're still here. That is. And speaking of podcasting, this is fantastic. Erlon Woods, the co-host of Ear Hustle, the podcast from San Quentin, the guy got his sentence commuted by Jerry Brown, the governor of California.

He's like, ah, I like this podcast. Let him out. Doesn't it kind of ruin the podcast now that he's not in jail anymore, though? I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I mean, what I really liked about this guy, and I think this is probably what contributed to it, because I listened to all of the episodes. It's a great podcast.

If you haven't heard it, it's fantastic. He was, you know, unapologetic about his thing. He was just like, yeah, I fucked up, man. I deserve to be here. I did something really dumb when I was young. I mean, granted, he got, you know, 31 years to life for attempted robbery in 1999, so he's done a pretty fair stretch so far.

And, you know, I'm very happy that he's out. It's a really good thing. I mean, he's got a career ahead of him in podcasting or audio production, hopefully, because he did a really good job on the show. And he, you know, showed us a really interesting side of prison that you would never get.

So I'm pretty happy about this one. This is a feel-good story for me. Nice. Well, going back to the holiday gift-giving thing, if you've got a music fan in your life, I've stumbled across this as pretty cool. The UK-based design studio Dorothy created a map of the United States of America made from over 1,000 song titles, from classic tunes such as Sweet Home Alabama to California Girls.

It's a vintage-style poster that will take you on a musical journey across the U.S. through the country's cities, rivers, mountains, highways, and landmarks. There's a handy A to Z list featured at the bottom of the poster detailing the names of the artists behind each song. And they've even made a 61-hour Spotify playlist featuring all of the songs on the poster.

Pretty cool. That is pretty cool. Oh, I love Burn Hollywood Burn. Yes. Straight out of Compton. Even better. L.A. Woman, I hate that song. What were you going to do? You can skip it on the playlist, of course. Of course.

And Dandy Warholz, one of my old favorite bands, has just released, well, they're releasing a new album in January called Why You So Crazy. I think we talked about the single on here before. What got me was it's the 25th anniversary of the band, and this is one of the bands that I featured on one of the very first websites that I ever did, which we called Ear Candy way back in the day.

And it makes me think, oh, my God, that was 25 years ago. Yeah. Getting old, man. Things are getting old. Things are starting to fall off. We're getting old. And speaking of getting old, Andy Stochansky, who we've already mentioned, a friend of the show who wrote our outro music, is back as a solo performer.

He's been writing songs for other people for around the last 10 years or so. He's just finished up an album, and he's playing his first show under the name White Elephant Orchestra here in L.A. on November 29th, which I believe is the day that this podcast is coming out at the hotel cafe at 7 p.m. Hopefully you can still get tickets.

Listen early, I'm sure. So, yeah, if you're listening now and you're in the L.A. area, get to the hotel cafe at 7 p.m. and see Andy play his first show in many, many years. Are you going to go? I am, so I will be there. Awesome. I wish I could go. That would be fun. But, yes. Dogs.

Dogs. Yeah. Yeah, I get you. And I watched a movie over the break. I don't know why I decided to watch it. It's an old one, but it's great. I re-watched Contact. Oh, it's a fantastic movie. Yes, a wonderful movie. Just really enjoyed it. I totally forgot that Matthew McConaughey was in this movie.

This is before I had actual hatred for Matthew McConaughey. So I was able to cast my mind back to when he wasn't so annoying and was still able to enjoy it with him in it. And it was just really good. It holds up really well. It's a fantastic movie. If you've never seen it, please do.

If you haven't seen it in a long time, give it another go. It was an enjoyable two hours. Yeah, yeah. And Jake Busey was really good in it. He was a good villain. Yeah, yeah. And I saw The Final Table. This is a new cooking show that came out on Netflix. It's kind of like MasterChef, but with real master chefs, not home cooks.

I am thoroughly loving this show. I've seen two episodes so far, and it's amazing. It is just a fun cooking show. That's it. And it's not like those ones with the home cooks where they get all flustered and sweaty. And it's like, oh, I can't manage my time.

I can't get it on the plate. These are pros. They know what they're doing. Yeah, everything on this show, I want to eat. I'm just taking notes. Like, man, that looks good. Everything looks good. Really, really good. And it's a cool show. And it's hosted by, I think, one of the managing editors from Bon Appetit.

And he does a really good job. You know, at first, I'm like, who the hell is this guy? But he works it really well. He works it really well. He's not like Gordon Ramsay, where he's like, you're stupid. Get the fuck out of here. He's just like, oh, you're out. You know? Don't be cool with it. And the way the show works is they go to country to country.

There's like nine different countries that they're going to go to. So there's like nine episodes and I think a finale. And so for the first part of the show, everybody cooks like the national dish. And then they've got three celebrities from the country or two celebrities and a food critic from that country. So then they taste those dishes.

And then they pick the people that are in the bottom. Those people have to, you know, cook for your life, you know, that kind of thing. But that final round is judged by like one of the best chefs in the world that is from that country. Gotcha. So it's like, you know, the final version is actually judged by a pro, not just, you know, a singer or a boxer or whatever.

And it's pretty cool. They have to end like, you know, the people from that last round, the celebrity chef guest judge picks an ingredient that they have to use. So it's kind of cool. I mean, I'm really enjoying it. This is like one of those things after I watched Narcos Mexico and then I watched another movie called Pimp, which was terrible.

Skip that movie. That was terrible. I just needed something happy again because I'm like, I just don't need any more death and destruction and killing. And then this popped up and I'm like, oh, I could watch this. It turns out it is fantastic. Excellent. At the library.

I read a book over the break too, which was very nice. That was a sit and read. Yes. I read the Singularity Trap by Dennis E. Taylor, the author of the Bobiverse that we all love so much. And I believe you read this as well. Yes, I did. What did you think?

I really enjoyed it. Once I got over the fact that it wasn't a Bob related. That took a while, didn't it? It did take a while. The writing style is very distinctive, but once I got into it being a completely different story, completely different universe, I actually really enjoyed where it went and I liked it a lot.

It was slow going at first. I will definitely give you that. I thought I was going to put it down and walk away from it at one point, but it's worth sticking with. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, no, it definitely picks up near the end. And I thought it was very clever. Very clever and very well done. It's a really good take on the Dark Forest, and we've been reading a lot of books about that recently.

It seems to be in the air that we're a little bit wondering what the hell is going on out in the universe at the moment. And it's a good take on it and really interesting. I don't want to spoil it because I really do think everybody should read it. So I'm very pleased that he was able to write something else that caught my fancy instead of just the Bob books.

So definitely an author to keep an eye on. Yeah, I was very happy about that. When I went into it, I was very trepidatious. I'm like, oh, God, please don't let this suck. Please don't let this suck. I hope he's going to be writing for a long time. And fortunately, it didn't suck. It was a great book. It did not. Yeah, that was a really, really good book. And I read Happy, Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine by Darren Brown.

Is it, though? It's, yeah, it kind of is. It kind of is. I suppose we're still here laughing. Yeah, we're still here. So there you go. That's rule number one. Are we still here? Did we wake up today? Okay. Are we going to have food today?

Perfect. Okay, let's move on. It's not the book that I thought it was going to be, but it is a fantastic book. Darren Brown is one of my favorite magicians. I've actually talked about some of his stuff on the show for his specials that are on Netflix. But he's a huge magician over in England.

I mean, he's like, you know, Penn and Teller over there. Right. And he just talks about, like, the history of happiness, why it's in the zeitgeist so much, and how you can actually hack it. And it's all about the stories that you tell yourself.

And it's a really interesting book. It's not short. It was like 12 and a half hours or maybe 14 hours on Audible. But I've actually gone back and listened to it again after the first time, because there's a lot of stuff in there that I really wanted to check out. So check it out.

Happy. Why, more or less, everything is absolutely fine. He's the antithesis of this podcast. I almost called us a website. Almost. Moran of the week. Now to explain why everything isn't okay.

I'm not terribly happy. Time Magazine has a great report on an Oxfam International study that they just released. The global economy created a record number of billionaires last year, exacerbating inequality amid a weakening of workers' rights and a corporate push to maximize shareholder returns, charity organization Oxfam International, said in a new report.

The world now has 2,043 billionaires. A new one emerged every two days in the past year. Why can't I be one of those? I want to be one. The group of mostly men saw its wealth surged by 762 billion, which is enough money to end extreme poverty seven times over, according to Oxfam.

So the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and we're fucked. Well, here's the thing. You know, when the revolution comes, they're the first against the wall. Except for the fact that they'll all be on their own private islands with all the guns. Right. That's true.

Shit, we got to go to New Zealand to get them. Yeah. So let's see. According to separate data compiled by Bloomberg, the top 500 billionaires' net worth grew 24% to $5.38 trillion in 2017, while the world's richest person, Mr. Bezos, saw a gain of $33.7 billion alone.

The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy, but a symptom of a failing economic system, says Winnie Biannima. Biannima. Biannima. Executive director of Oxfam International. The people who make our clothes, assemble our phones, and grow our food are being exploited.

Oxfam is calling on governments to limit shareholder and executive returns while ensuring workers receive a living wage. is also recommending eliminating the gender pay gap and raising taxes on the wealthy, among other suggestions. People are ready for change. They want a limit on the power and wealth which sits in the hands of so few.

Amen. Well, I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a new t-shirt from Clayton Cubitt, one of the greatest photographers that are working right now, and it's for Ban Billionaires. So if you'd like to not have any more of your money and give it to Clayton, here you go.

It's the Ban Billionaires t-shirt. It's very cute. Yeah. And in case we didn't think it was bad enough, having a celebrity TV host as president, Mariana Williamson is looking to make a presidential bid. Now, I'm hoping you don't know who she is, Jason.

I have no idea who this woman is. Good. Well, she's somebody that is basically mainstreaming hippy-dippy New Age spirituality goop-esque bullshit. Oh, God. One of them. Yes. In a post-Enlightenment world where STEM knowledge is culturally and politically dominant and abuse pervades our most prominent religious institutions, it's no wonder that many Americans are becoming less religious.

Yet, despite studies saying religion is on the decline, some surveys have found more Americans are now considering themselves spiritual but not religious. Collectively, these trends, when mixed with the rise of popularity in yoga, crystals, and astrology, suggest a future where such beliefs are no longer exclusively held by New Age hippies.

Now, spiritual teacher Mariana Williamson's bid for the presidency suggests that new agey beliefs, once fringe, are now thoroughly normalized. Yeah, that's not going to go very far. I, well, we said that about that. True, true. We have been wrong in the past.

We have been wrong. Oh, the Department of Crystal Energy is now going to be the DOE. Great. I mean, this is pretty, this is, I, I, yeah. No. No, everybody. Just no. Feedback loop.

We've got some new Patreon subscribers. Tina, Robert, David, Twilight Sparkle, and Twilight Sparkle wrote, hi, I just started listening yesterday during my graveyard shift. Continuing listening today and working my way through your backlog. Keep up the good work. There's going to be a point where you want to stop because there's a point of, there's a point of diminishing returns with that backlog.

I'm just telling you right now. Also ignore those episodes that have a copywritten music in them. Yes. All of those. And forget about the lady boys. Oh, that one was pretty fun, actually. Yeah, actually it was pretty fun. Well, it was fun for us. We were drunk as hell. Yep. Peter also wrote us over on Patreon.

Howdy, geeks. I still have a bit of work to do, but I figured you guys might be interested to see the progress I've made with my assignment in machine intelligence or artificial intelligence. Well, that is before it becomes self-aware and begins taking over the human race, like everyone keeps saying. What's the BB code tag for sarcasm again? Now, having covered most of the heavy hitting topics in my coursework, I would personally just pull up a lawn chair during the Skynet uprising and wait for a stray null pointer exception or missing curly brace to take the whole machine army to its knees.

Check out the post on my page for the video and more details. Bayesian network Java implementation. And we've got the link in the show notes. And as always, thanks for preaching the good word. The little person who makes the picture box in my office do internet stuff is, has been, and always will be just ones and zeros, no matter how much we pay the marketing team.

Happy holidays and stay grumpy. And over at PayPal, Mark sent us in a donation. Thank you very much, Mark. Thank you. Over on Facebook, Joe wrote us, wanted the perfect babysitter. Must pass AI scan for respect and attitude. And this is a link to the Washington Post. What an interesting use of AI to help parents hire babysitters.

Predictum's executives, Predictum, it sounds like a fake movie company. I know. Say that they use language processing algorithms and an image recognition software known as Computer Vision to access babysitters Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts for clues about their offline life.

So machine learning? Yeah. And I'm just going to put in a few links in the show notes here just for everybody there. One is to tweetdelete.net, which automatically deletes your tweets after a given time period, which I do, which is why if you go to my Twitter account at jpdef on Twitter and at jpd on Instagram, if you're so inclined, those things kind of go away after a bit.

And there's also a link to Social Book Post Manager because they can't say Facebook. It is a great little tool to delete old Facebook posts. Or you can just delete your Facebook account like, you know, I did. Yeah. Now, I would just like to point out, though, that I think that there is there needs to be a separation between you can still do your job, even if you post pictures of yourself drinking on social media.

I'm just saying, like, no, you can't. It's weird to me. No, you can't. No, I guess you can't anymore. I guess that's the world we do live in now. I find that sad. I find that really sad. So, no, you know, it is what it is. You should be able to make a separation between somebody's personal life and their professional life.

And that the fact that that's gone away is sad to me. But, you know, they're talking about kids. And I know, you know, what do you think about that? Because you have a kid. If you could vet all your nannies like this, would you? No, I don't think I would use this kind of service.

I would base it purely on what I base things now, which is word of mouth. Friends that have used them and trust them and know them. Good enough for me. All right, then. Over on Twitter, Anne writes in the time-traveling bird. Imagine if instead of a DeLorean, they used time-traveling electric bird scooters in San Francisco.

When this baby hits 8.8 miles an hour, you're going to see some serious shit. Literally. Love it. Charles Rodas just caught up with GOG 300. And you blame Amazon for the LIC NYC deal. One side of the deal is supposed to do what is best for shareholders.

The other side was supposed to do what was best for voters. Which side got it wrong? The side that was best for voters got it wrong. Amazon made a hell of a deal with their shareholders. They screwed New York City butt good. Literally. Yes, they did. And Virginia. Up the butt. In your butt.

Put the boogie in your butt. Butt, butt, butt. Put the boogie in your butt. Eddie Murphy's not finest hour, are you going to say? No, it was not. It was no Gumby, damn it. No, it was no Gumby, damn it. Or James Brown. Gonna get in the hot tub. Cool. Gonna make you sweat. That one was classic.

That is a classic. Oh, so Kate writes in over on Twitter, 30% off Snapchat spectacles. Thought you guys might want to take advantage of this killer deal. No, not really. But thanks for the link. Thank you. Yes. Paul writes us, the never-ending saga UK Parliament uses special powers to take Facebook internal documents.

This one's crazy. Yes, it is. This one is insane. So they couldn't get the documents from anybody at Facebook. So this guy was coming through the UK and they used their quote unquote superpowers to basically rate his hard drive and get the documents that they were looking for.

Yeah. And he originally said no and they came to his own tones like, well, you have two hours to decide and if you don't, we're going to fine you and throw you in jail. It's like, okay, well, that's not really much of a choice. And Facebook is like, those documents were under sealed by the court, so you need to not look at them and return them to our lawyers right now.

We'll see how that one plays out. But man, that was crazy. Yeah. I want to know what's in the documents. Me too. I really, really do. And my 6502 over Twitter writes in another failed Kickstarter for the collection. This is the Atari game band officially canceled.

Kickstarter backers may not receive a refund. I don't think that is may not will not will not should be. Yeah, they raised $500,000 and basically ran out of money. So how are they going to give you a refund? They're not. They shut down because they're out of money.

That means they're out of money. Yep. And Kevin wrote us. I think you need a T-shirt made up that says you can't make this shit up. I agree. We have some we have great T-shirt ideas. We just need people to buy them. Well, we need to design them first. And that's the problem. Yeah. The making of is the problematic part.

Yeah. Yes. We're developers, not designers, people. If you want to start. Maybe we can get some fan designs in and we'll crowdfund it. We'll accept them. Yes. Right film, sleep, repeat writes in. I think the closing paragraph is sublime.

And this is a an article from the register. Technical foul. Amazon suffers data snafu days before Black Friday. Emails world plus dog. I don't know what the world plus dog is is in reference to because I read the article and I didn't see anything else about a dog. But and here's the last paragraph.

Meanwhile, Amazon's customer service department initially thought the firm's own notification email to affected customers was a phishing attempt. A suspicious reader wondering whether the shonky, shonky looking email was legitimate, sent it to Amazon customer service, asking whether it was real and got the response.

The email you received wasn't from Amazon.co.uk and we're investigating the situation. We can't tell how phishers came to target your email address. And the whole point of this is that Amazon exposed people's email addresses. Right. Which is the whole point of the the breach, which wasn't really a breach.

It was just a technical fuck up. Yeah. But it's very funny. It is funny. And over at GOG.show, David writes us. Hi from the UK. Recently found you guys on Overcast. Love the show. Just added you to my Patreon patron list. I make my 13 year old daughter listen to you in the car under the false pretense that your show your show is part of my work and subsidizes her life.

She rolls her eyes a lot, but she doesn't turn it off. Smart girl. We roll our eyes a lot when we record this. Trust me. Oh, yes, we totally do. That's awesome. You found us on Overcast. And anybody, if you're listening to us on Overcast, there's a little star button next to the episodes. Like when you kind of do the disclosure, click on that star that gets us up in the rankings on Overcast.

So more people can find the show. We'd really appreciate it. Thank you. Ivor writes in. Now, this is what I call a real Black Friday sale, and it's a link to the 99% off sale from Cards Against Humanity, which was really funny. It was really funny. So I don't know. It's really hard to tell.

I can't tell if everything was a joke or if they actually had the stuff and were selling like one of each. Yep. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. We're going to have to do some research on that because I haven't had time to dig into it. But I did watch it when it was going on, and it was very funny.

It was. Very funny. He also sent a link saying, I'll take six, Johnny. This is a link to The Verge. Johnny, Ive, and Mark Newsom designed a $250,000 all diamond ring for charity. Absolutely no bezels. Well, actually, they kind of are, but.

It's funny. It's very funny. You don't get face recognition on this one, though. No, no. Ed writes in. Hello, Lord's Grump of House Geek. Can you share with your audience the things about Firefox you don't like? Inquiring Geeks want to know. Thanks, and keep on grumping. Would you like to take this one?

I was going to say, would you like to start, Brian? But I guess you already did. It's too slow. Opera is so much faster. That's really it for me. I mean, Firefox used to be my browser of choice, my weapon of choice, but it just got so bogged down in the last year or two. And it's a memory hog.

It's a big memory hog. I used it for a couple of weeks just to try it out. And the memory usage on Firefox was through the roof. It was just as bad as Chrome is. And if you look at the Opera stats for memory usage, it is just tiny compared to those two.

Even with Opera sending all of our information back to China, it still runs a lot better. Yeah, it does. It does. Yes, they can exfil your data 10 times as fast as Facebook can. Yes. And it's just kind of ugly, too. That's all. But yeah, because I like pretty software and Opera is a very pretty browser.

They did a good design job on it. But yeah, I just think Firefox is just it's it's a behemoth of just old shit, even that new rendering engine, which does work pretty. It's pretty snappy. But all in all, it still has too many flaws when Opera does everything I need it to do.

I am going to try out Vidalia soon just to make sure that that it was Vidalia, right? The new something with the Vivaldi. Vivaldi. Yeah, Vidalia is an onion. Yeah, that's the onion router. That's the that's what you run if you're going to tour. Sorry. And it's also literally an onion. It is literally an onion.

But yeah, Vivaldi, I'm going to give that a shot soon just to see if it's up to snuff. Now that you can do sync on it, I'm kind of jazzed about that. Yeah. And Quibble writes us that book Brian can't remember with the selling of canned air. I remember reading about that in a book called Freak Samora by Tom Dehaven. It wasn't really part of the plot line, though.

Anyway, happy holidays, you guys. Still not the book I'm thinking of, but I've given up. But thank you for continuing to try. Yeah, you're going to be getting those forever now. That's fine. Because people go back and listen to the old ones. Somebody might get it someday. Yeah. Reapers Gale writes in, appears one of the few places bike share was apparently working out has gone to shit.

And this is a link to a video on China Uncensored called China's Bike Sharing Disaster. It's a very funny video. And now that I watched that, I went and subscribed to China Uncensored because it is kind of like the daily show for China news. It's very funny. And the guy's pretty good.

Yeah, it is quite good, actually. So thanks for bringing that to our attention. David writes us more on journalism and deep fakes. How the Wall Street Journal is preparing its journalists to detect deep fakes. And this is an article over on neimanlab.org. It's pretty interesting, actually. So they get kind of into it.

And it's just going to be so much work. This is going to be really, really bad for news. I got to say. Anyways. Yeah. Well, I mean, what it's going to end up being, you know, going down to is finding original source material and doing image recognition on it to see if it's exactly the same as the original sources.

Yep. Exactly. We're going to have to use AI and machine learning to bust the AI and machine learning. That's how it's going to work. And Travis writes in, I'm having trouble remembering the episode you talked about stocks and buying small amounts. What was the company you guys used? Thanks so much for the show. I look forward to it every week.

That would be M1 Finance. And M1 Finance. Yes. Links will be in the show notes. Right now. And Brian and I do have, we do have a competition going to, both of our links will be in there. So you can see if you're on Team Brian or Team Jason.

So use the link that you feel most appropriate. I don't know about you, Brian. What are you up to on referrals so far? I've got about 10. People like you more than me. By a factor of eight. I only got two. I only got two.

I think it used to be a $10. They've upped it now. So if you sign up using either of our codes, you'll get $20 to invest. And one of us will get $20. Yep. Yeah. That's the only thing that's keeping my portfolio above what I paid so far. It's basically a stop loss leader right now because everything that I invested in has gone to crap.

So yes, your referrals are keeping me flush. Thank you very much. Yeah. My fang is not working out so well with that Facebook stock. That's the problem. Oh, yeah. There you go. I got to think about ditching that. Anyways, over at iTunes, Udro Poo gave us a five-star rating.

Simply the best. Happy 300th. Love these guys. Nuff said. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Udro. I'm sorry, Udro Poo. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback, your questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes to toss us a five-star and a snarky review.

And if you're on Overcast, definitely click that star button, please. It'll help us out. Closing shout-outs. Closing shout-out this week to Cesar Milan, the dog whisperer. Oh, wait. I'm sorry. He can contractually not use that name anymore because some assholes at a fucking TV network stole it from him.

But he made Bam Bam famous. So I posted a picture of Bam Bam in one of Cesar's trademarked backpacks, which actually is really nice when we're out on a long walk because we can put some water in there and some food and stuff like that. It's a very nice little backpack. You can check that out on Instagram.com slash JPD if you want to see the picture of Bammers.

But thanks to Cesar for pimping the Bams. That was nice. Awesome. And I want to give another shout-out to a friend of the show, Andy Stochansky, and his return as a solo performer. Looking forward to seeing his first show in many a year at the Hotel Cafe this Thursday or today. Awesome.

Yeah, today as it goes. And I would like to give a shout-out to the Customs and Border Patrol agents who continually make us look like assholes. Thanks. Thank you so much for over the holiday weekend tear-gassing women and children at the south border of our great country.

You really make us proud, you fucking cockstains. Well, that's one of the few times I'm going to agree with your bizarre cussing. They are cockstains. Until next time, I'm Brian Schoenster. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 301. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like.

Stay grumpy. It's James Brown's Celebrity Hot Tub Party. And now, here he is, the Godfather's show. And hot tub man number one, Jim Brown.

Sometimes I make me break out in a cold sweat. One, two, three, four.

Hot tub, hot tub. I'm full of water. I say hot tub. Hot, very, very, very, very hot. I say hot tub. Hot tub. Gonna get your hot tub. I'm gonna make it wet. Say hot tub. Drop a tub in the hot tub. Drop a tub with me.

Should I get in the hot tub? Yeah. Will you make me sweat? Yeah. Should I get in the hot tub? Yeah. Will you make me wet? Yeah. Well, well, well.

Hot tub. I'm gonna get in the water. Gonna make me wet. Yeah, I'm going to hot tub. Too hot in the hot tub. Burn my vest. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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