410: Elite Buoyancy and Mass Despair

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Feeling better, Brian? Don't have that coronavirus? No coronavirus, although... Give it time. Don't spend too much time on the internets reading what epidemiologists think about this because, oh boy. Oh yeah, you will lose some sleep. Yes, you will. It's a little frightening.

And, you know, it's actually kind of funny. I talked to a number of people, a number of my friends both here and in Toronto. Obviously, my wife is of Chinese heritage and we had Chinese New Year over the weekend. And let's just say nobody really wanted to go anywhere where a bunch of tourist Chinese might have been congregating to celebrate the New Year.

I wonder why. I wonder why. Yeah. Yeah, you stay home this year. You stay home. Well, I got a little follow-up here. 23andMe has laid off 100 people or 14% of its staff, believe it or not. Yeah. Yeah.

CEO Ann Wojcicki says that she doesn't really know, but she thinks it might be fears of a recession. Bullshit. And also privacy concerns. You think? I'm guessing it's the latter. Yeah, I think everybody that – well, first off, the initial rush of this sort of stuff, two, three years it's been running and everybody that was super into it went out and did it.

I don't think it's just privacy. I mean, I think that's a huge part of it. But as we know, doing the show, a lot of people just don't give a second thought to privacy. I think a lot of it might be just how all the reports about how inaccurate all this sort of stuff is and how it doesn't really tell you what's going on.

And it's all just kind of second guessing might have a lot to do with it as well. Yeah. Yeah. Now, here's where the metal – or the rubber meets the road. The metal meets the road. That's – you're in a bad state. You need some new tires. You definitely do. What are they going to do since they're facing these declining sales?

Hmm. What would be a source of revenue for them? Yeah. I don't know. What do you think, Jason? Yeah, and what happens if they fold and everything gets sold in a fire sale like what happened to me with that last company we talked about? This is where – these are the concerns that I have with it.

It's like, okay, who's going to get it next? And, I mean, I know that the genie is out of the bottle because I did it. It's done. It can't – what has been spit into cannot be unspit into, as it were. It's interesting. It's interesting. I didn't know how much money they got. They had $786 million in funding so far.

Well, they were definitely the market leader, were they not? So they may not have been first, but they had the best marketing. Yeah, I think $500 million of that went to ads. Yep. So none of it to us. I wonder why. I wonder why they wouldn't want to advertise with us. Avoid all tech podcasts.

Yeah, no doubt. And I don't think we covered this when it came out because I'd have remembered it, I think. Or maybe not because with my 23andMe, I found out I have two APOE4 alleles, which means I'm genetically inclined to get Alzheimer's. But I also drink too much and don't remember these shows after we record them.

But this is from December 2019. Apple is offering free genetic testing to all of its Silicon Valley employees. Hmm. Yeah. They have this new company called AC Wellness. Yes. Yeah. Apple care for people. I'm guessing it's what it is. But, yeah, they're working with a company called Color Genomics to run the DNA of the people that work for them if they want to.

Boy, what could possibly go wrong with letting your employer have access to all your genetic data? Yeah, I know. Seriously. They say, by offering cutting-edge medical treatments like genetic testing, AC Wellness can help Apple recruit and retain talented employees. Hmm? Hmm.

In addition, although AC Wellness is technically a separate company from Apple, medical experts have speculated that it could help Apple quietly test new products or ideas without risking leaks. So the group's partnership with Color could indicate Apple's broader interest in the space. Hmm.

Now, I want to talk about the leaks for a second. Because earlier in the article, it says the people requested anonymity because they were not authorized to publicize the deal on their company's behalf. Right. Guessing that leak thing isn't going to work out too well for them. Nope. Nope. Not at all.

I'm curious. If anybody from Apple is listening to this, have you done your 23andMe test? Or your, I'm sorry, your Color Genomics test through Apple? I'd be curious. And if you did, why? And if you did not, why not? I wonder if there was any subtle pressure to do it as well. Mm-hmm.

Like, do you want to be a team player? We need some help with this particular product. Everybody else is doing it. You know what they could do, though? They don't even need your permission. And after you, like, absentmindedly run into one of those glass walls and leave your spit on the wall, they can just have a robot come by and pick it up and send it right in.

Yep. Yeah. Send in the swab robot. Yeah. So, it was funny. I was, you know, researching this article and, you know, Ann Wojcicki, who's the CEO, I'm like, how the, I can't remember how to say that name. And I Googled, how do you say the name? Well, I forgot that her sister is the CEO of YouTube.

Right. Yeah. I guess one's doing better than the other one. So, I found a YouTube video where Susan Wojcicki says her name. And I'm like, man, I wish everybody did this. I'm going to make one for me. Because nobody can say my name. De Flippolo. De Filippopapipio.

De Filipino was a lot of one. And de Hippo. I never have problems saying your name. I always have problems spelling it. I was like, it's like Mississippi. How many S's do I put in there? How many I's? How many P's? Two I's, two L's, two P's. That's it. Good stuff.

Some more stuff has come out about the whole thing going on with Away, the 2.0 luggage company. You know, we talked a lot about how the CEO, what was her name again? I can't even remember. Her last name is Corey, something like that. She quit because she was really mean to everybody on Slack.

And then she decided she was going to come back, but she was going to be co-CEO with somebody else. And then, you know, their chief human resources, chief Erin Grau, quit the day she came back. But what we're also finding out now, according to Recode, is that almost all of the senior executives were completely blindsided by this decision, which does not go well for somebody that was trying to make amends.

You know, one of the first things that you should probably do is tell all your immediate co-workers and top executives, hey, I'm coming back. Instead of just announcing it through the press. Yeah. Yeah. The fact that they found out through the article is pretty bad. Yeah. That's not what you want when you're trying to do the right thing.

Yeah. That's like, you know, finding out that you've broken up on a Facebook post. Somebody has changed their relationship status. In the news.

Super long form article over on the New York Times. This is an opinion piece. It is called You Are Now Remotely Controlled. And it's by Shoshana Zuboff. And this is basically, I wonder if the kids even remember. Oh, God. Those yellow books that distilled everything down.

Now I'm blanking out. Cliff Notes. Cliff Notes. You can't even remember Cliff Notes. Well, I have not been in school in an awful long time. This is the Cliff Notes version of her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. If you do not have the time to read the book, I highly recommend you read this long form article. This is all about how the rise of surveillance capitalism over the last two decades went largely unchallenged.

And, you know, how we were just supposed to go and do this. And I love her literary pretensions here. It's not so surprising that many of us rushed to follow the bustling white rabbit down his tunnel into a promised digital wonderland where, like Alice, we fell prey to delusion. So we celebrated these new digital services as free, but now we see that the surveillance capitalists behind those services regard us as the free commodity.

We thought that we searched Google, but we now understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned the connection is how social media uses us. We barely questioned why our new TV, or this is for you, Jason, or our mattress had a privacy policy, but we've begun to understand that privacy policies are actually surveillance policies.

So a lot of stuff that we've talked about on this show many, many times, I definitely need to go read this book. I tried. I own the book. That's right. I remember that. Yeah, I got about a third of the way through it, and it just was so depressing. Oh, this is that book. I did, too.

You started to read it, too. We bought Quote. That's right. And I got intensely depressed. And you know what? I got depressed reading this article, too. Yeah, so if you want to get depressed faster, go read You Are Now Remotely Controlled over at the New York Times. Yeah, awesome. I found this one over at the EFF, of all places.

Grindr and OkCupid sell your data, but Twitter's Mopub is the real problem. Woo, boy, on this one. Have you heard of Mopub before? I had not, no. See, Mopub is one of those behind-the-scenes companies that you never really hear about so much.

It partners with supply-side platforms, which are ad providers. They provide a delivery mechanism for real-time bidding on ads. So what happens is you load up Grindr, the SDK loads for Mopub, and it grabs everything off your phone, sends it to the Mopub server.

The Mopub server then throws it out to a bunch of people saying, hey, this is all the data we have on this person. Would you like to bid on the ad? Well, and then whatever comes back, they pick the one that pays the most and then send you the ad. And the crazy thing about this, this is what's mind-boggling. This all happens in milliseconds.

And, you know, you and I have built a lot of websites and things like that, and I've built a lot of, you know, really high-end, back-end technology things. And this stuff is just, like, amazing how fast it works. It is crazy. I've always been in awe of the guys that built these real-time bidding systems.

But the thing about this is, and they didn't even cover this in here. So when you're sent, when Mopub takes the data and sends it out for a bid, and it goes to these advertising companies, even if they don't get the actual ad to go to you, they're still getting a ping with all the data.

They don't even talk about that in this article. They just talk about how Mopub is the middleman here and they're the evil ones. So if you wanted to snarf up a whole bunch of data, you could just keep doing tiny, tiny little bids that you don't even want to win and just... Yep, slurp it all up, and then you find out what apps people use, and then you can profile them even more and sell that data.

Because, you know, they're even getting device IDs, which they can, you know, actually reconstitute your profile later and your shadow profiles and things like that. And easily de-anonymize you. Yeah. Yeah. You're not anonymous with this stuff at all. And so, yeah, so I love this.

You know, basically, these guys at Mopub are just being complete hypocrites, and they're saying, oh, no, Grindr was not using the service as they were supposed to be doing it. No, they were using it exactly as it was designed to do. Right. That's exactly it. So they kicked off Grindr while they're investigating, but there's still 55,000 apps or 54,999 apps still using the actual product.

Great. Yeah, and it's just one of those things. It's just, you know, the article is really good because it puts in layman's terms how the ad system works behind the scenes. And I highly recommend if you're even remotely interested in that stuff, go check it out. But, yeah, these big, big companies behind the scenes just have so much data, and it's not going to go away.

You know, privacy is dead. Get over it. We said it before. Steve Rambam, you the man. But this gives you an idea of how, you know, just how systematized the whole thing is. And it's just incredible. It's an incredible piece of technology. Yeah. Not a good one, though. Well, hey, man.

Keeps people employed, I know. But I'm trying to look on the bright side. All right. Well, let me destroy that. Yeah, go ahead. Let me destroy that with the next article I saw. And this is over from the Australian News. A growing sense of inequality is undermining trust in both societies, institutions, and capitalisms, according to a long-running global survey.

This is called the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer, which is now in its 20th year. It started right in the year 2000. It has found many people no longer believe that working hard will give them a better life. Despite strong economic performance, a majority of respondents in every developed market do not believe that they will be better off in five years' time.

This means that economic growth no longer appears to drive trust, at least in developed markets, upending conventional wisdom. As Richard Edelman, the CEO of Edelman, makes sense. I guess he named it after himself. We are living in a trust paradox. Fifty-six percent of the surveyed global population said capitalism in its current form does more harm than good in the world.

Most employees, 83 percent globally, are worried about job loss due to automation, a looming recession, lack of training, cheaper foreign competition, immigration, and the gig economy. Fifty-seven percent of respondents worry about losing the respect and dignity they once enjoyed in their countries. Nearly two in three feel the pace of technological change is too fast.

Australia recorded one of the largest declines of trust in technology. Australians were most worried about losing their job to the gig economy, followed by recession, lack of training, and foreign competition. The study also found a growing trust chasm between elites and the public that could be a reflection of income inequality, Edelman said.

We are now observing an Alice in Wonderland moment of elite buoyancy and mass despair. When you said trust chasm, I thought you said trust gasm. I'm like, hmm, a trust gasm. A trust gasm. It's funny. We're only three stories in, and this is the second callback to Alice in Wonderland.

Interesting, interesting. Now, I have to say the comments in Australia are so much better than in the U.S., and I know the internet is global, but the people reading this are definitely more locals because they talk about Australian politics. But they're very measured comments, and people make very good points. Who would have thought that from you Aussies?

Yeah, and I love this comment, and I tried, and I can't find attribution on it. It's very old, but it says, it's a poem. If you work and do your best, you'll get the sack like all the rest. But if you laze and sod about, you'll live to see the job right out. The work is hard.

The pay is small. So take your time and fuck them all. Because when you're dead, you'll be forgot. So don't try doing the bloody lot. Or on your tombstone neatly lacquered, these three words, dyed bloody knackered. I love that. This is a great, great poem.

And it goes back to, like, even before World War II, but I really couldn't find any solid attribution. Now, I do think that the Edelman study has significant flaws in the methodology to determine a quote-unquote informed public, and it is a bit fucking elitist, if I do say so. They say you must meet four criteria.

You have to be age 25 to 64, college educated, in top 25% of household income per age group in each market, report significant media consumption and engagement in public policy and business news. And basically everybody else is the uninformed public.

Now, I know people that fit that group right there. You cannot call them informed in any way, shape, or form. You can still hit all those criteria and be a moron. It didn't say anything about smart, just informed. Informed, yes.

Informed does not necessarily mean you make the correct decisions. Yeah, informed. Just look at our country. Yeah. What kind of news are they actually consuming? You know, there's a lot of leeway in here as far as what constitutes significant media consumption.

I, you know, consume a significant amount of media. Most of it's on Netflix, but. I was about to say Star Trek doesn't count. That's what I mean, but does it count as far as this article goes? Well, engagement in public policy and business news would give you a little bit of that indication. Maybe, maybe.

We'll see. I don't know. I put the entire, I put a link to the PDF of the trusted barometer report in here if you want to go check it out for yourself. And be more depressed. Moving on. All right. Amazon. We've had Amazon in the news quite a bit recently.

The most recent thing was the fact that some Amazon employees were openly criticizing business practices, which Amazon has said is a direct, direct problem for them. You're not allowed to do that because that will cause you to be fired. So he will have to go to HR and no, no complaining about the company in public.

But a hundreds of Amazon employees are going to risk losing their jobs in an unprecedented coordinated effort this week. They plan to openly criticize the e-commerce giant's business practices. This move is a direct challenge to that. So we shall see what happens.

It is it fair to silence Amazon employees who speak up, says the subject line of an email employee organizers sent to thousands of colleagues on several major company list serves and messaging platforms.

Using company resources to send a message of sedition is grounds for firing, in my opinion. Yeah, they shouldn't have done it that way. I agree with you about that. So they got the note. It asked employees to either write their own comments or to sign pre-written statements. I also hate the pre-written statement thing.

If you're going to stand up, stand up and use your own words about the company. Yeah, right. That either condemn or approve of Amazon's practices included those related to sustainability, immigration, and warehouse working conditions. Once organizers gather at least 100 such comments, they plan to post them publicly on Medium, which, again, not doing it on the company.

Wait, Amazon doesn't own Medium, do they? No, no. I feel like Amazon owns everything nowadays. No, that's still Evan Williams for now. So under their external communication policy, employees could be punished for publicly speaking. So they're going to do it anyways. According to reporting by The Washington Post, over 330 employees plan to participate.

Organizers did not respond to requests for comment. Okay, now this is an important part. This is from an Amazon spokesperson. Yes. While all employees are welcome to engage constructively with any of the many teams inside Amazon that work on sustainability and other topics, we do enforce our external communications policy and will not allow employees to publicly disparage or misrepresent the company or the hard work of their colleagues who are developing solutions to these hard problems.

Now, I've worked in companies where people get a bug up their ass and they go to the press and they go to the press and it really is annoying for the rest of the people in the company. I mean, I'm taking Amazon out of the equation. But if you're working for a company, you're working really hard, you're making stuff, and you've got a bunch of people who don't agree with the policies of the company and they just go shit on the company in public but are still employees, that would piss me off.

Right. That would piss me off greatly. So I can see why Amazon would, you know, draw a line in the sand and say, no, you can't do that. You cannot do that. And the organizers go on and say, but allowing a corporation to silence us on its contribution to climate crisis is a clear overreach of comms policy and effectively demands we give up our basic humanity and integrity in order to be employees.

Now, if you disagree with the company, offer solutions and not more problems or get a different fucking job. Sorry. I'm a little bit with you on this one. There is a reason that companies spend a lot of money on sustainability projects within their own companies and, you know, different task forces that are meant to deal with employee concerns.

And you should go through those channels first. We don't know what's been done that way. Maybe they felt that they've hit a wall and this is the next step that they have to take. But if they haven't gone through the proper channels, then, you know, that's kind of dumb. Yeah. Yeah.

And we just don't know what's going on there. But, yeah, come on, people. Look, Amazon has at least punched up their pledge to actually be, you know, using renewable energy by 2030, which is 10 years before the Paris Accord, which I think is 2040.

So they're trying. And I'm sure I'm sure it's the company's best interest to go renewable instead of, you know, just burning dead dinosaurs all day long because they're going to be taking over the world with their delivery services. You know, they're already everywhere. It's in their best interest to do it, you know, just financially.

So maybe these people are just aren't in the know. They don't they don't understand or read the tech news like we do and say, oh, there are actually people inside Amazon that are working on these problems. It might not be as fast as you like, but they're working on it. They're big problems. That's right. Now, I read this short story a little while ago called The Truth Is All There Is.

And this was written by what was her name here? Let's find it. Emily Parker. And this is a short story about a world in which everyone is happily chained to the blockchain. I don't know if you ever read this. It was kind of interesting. A little bit funny. You know how I feel about blockchain. So I never I didn't give it a second thought after I read it.

I never even put it in the show notes because I was like, well, it's just it's just a story. It's just kind of silly. But now Jill Carlson has written a rebuttal. She is an expert on the blockchain and she's responding to the short story. And I just thought it was really interesting because she's taking the view of you can't really trust the blockchain.

Right. Proponents say it can solve all of our trust issues. Can it really? So this this whole thing just gets into basically the TLDR on this is blockchains are still made by humans. Humans are fallible. Therefore, the blockchain is fallible.

Right. I like garbage in garbage out. And I love one of the lines is ironically, this technology that promises transparency and verifiability is presented as completely inscrutable. And it's not. That's what I love about it. Word. Yeah. Yeah. People are people are people.

And yeah. It's like worst song ever. They even hate that song. They refuse to play it live. Oh, well. So anyways, if you are a blockchain. Shouldn't have wrote it. Shouldn't have wrote it. Well, one of their biggest hits and made them a lot of money. Sadly. Anyways, the point being, if you're one of those people out there that just blockchain, blockchain, blockchain, and you're sick of hearing us kind of crap on it.

Go read this. It's interesting. It is. And speaking of interesting, we've had a lot of facial recognition talk on this show because there's a lot of it out there. We've had some kind of what I would consider to be victories recently with cities like San Francisco basically saying, nope, we're not doing any.

It's banned. You can't have it. We're not doing it. No police. No nothing. No facial recognition. London said, to hell with that. We're doing it. Hold my pint. Hold my pint. London's police department said last Friday that it would begin using facial recognition to spot criminal suspects with video cameras as they walk the streets, adopting a level of surveillance that is rare outside China.

This is a major development in the use of the technology that's set off a worldwide debate. Obviously, police departments contend that the software gives them a way to catch criminals who may avoid detection. Critics say the technology is an invasion of privacy. Yes. Has spotty accuracy. Yes. And is being introduced without adequate public discussion.

Yes. So, Britain has been testing real-time facial recognition for a few years. Now, this is what gets me. How does this happen? In the trials, officers were often stationed in the control center monitoring a real-time feed of what was being recorded by nearby cameras.

The system sent an alert when it identified a person who matched someone on their watch list. If officers agreed it was a match, they would radio to other officers positioned on the street to pick up the person. Last year, an independent review of a police trial found many problems, including its accuracy. Of 42 identifications made by the system, only eight were correct.

Eight. Yet. We're going to run with it, guys. Yeah. Look how bad the results are. Look how crappy it is. Look how many false negatives, false positives. Let's do it. Well, you know, the headline is, eight criminals found using new facial recognition system.

They don't say that there were 42 identifications. They don't say that they were wrong a vast majority of the time. So, yeah. It just boggles the mind how you can see that a system that is not ready for prime time, and they're just going to throw what I'm sure is hundreds of millions of pounds at this.

But, yeah, that was kind of my take on it. I'm like, shouldn't the taxpayers be pissed off? Yeah. I mean, it's not the civil liberty violations. It's the fact that they're spending millions of pounds on, you know, provably buggy as fuck software. That's what it is. I mean, it's provably bad software.

And I would like to say that when I opened this article on the New York Times on my iPad Air full screen, I posted a picture on Twitter, and you can see it here in the show notes, Brian. I pay for the New York Times. I use your login. I got the same page.

There are basically – there's a giant ad at the top, a giant ad at the bottom, and the only thing you can see of the article is the headline. And, you know, it's amazing. It is just flat out amazing. I just – I'm with you on that.

It's almost an outrage. It's like, why am I even paying? Why – well, I'm not. Why are you even paying? Because you can't even get to this point if you don't pay them. Yeah. So you pay for the – You pay to have ads given to you. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. Pretty much.

It's ridiculous. So check the show notes for that. It's pretty bad. Or follow me on Twitter, at JPDeaf. I do have a solution for the people of London, though, and it goes back to the movie V for Vendetta. Everybody just wear Guy Fawkes masks. Right. That's it. We're good. We're good.

Well, another story about the cesspool of ads that the internet has become. It took one day for Byte to be as spammy as the rest of the internet. So this is a – we all remember Vine. It was a thing for a little bit. God knows why. Six-second videos. It went down a couple years ago.

Twitter shut it down. Since then, the Vine successor has been in the works from co-founder Dom Hoffman. One would wonder why it would take two years from the co-founder to rebuild the exact same thing that he had already built once. Yeah, I'm guessing you have to – they said that there were some legal issues with it, which I can understand.

Yes. Because it's like, okay, I sold my company to Twitter and I'm just going to go build the exact same thing. Hmm. Interesting how that works. Exactly. Well, it survived unexpectedly. It was launched last Friday afternoon for iOS and Android, and it was immediately overrun by spam.

Of course it was. It's just hilarious how quickly this happens, though, right now. Like, it's the same gold rush thing that any time any new social media came out. You and I were a victim of that for a while. We quickly, like, signed up for different things and got our grumpy old geeks accounts until we stopped caring about new social networks.

Yeah, that's about it. I mean, I used to be able to get JPD everywhere, and now, nope, sure can't. It was already taken on this one. Because I went in last night and I signed up because I wanted to see it. I spent about four minutes on it and then deleted it because it's so bad.

It's so bad. It's the same videos over and over again with just different morons doing the same stuff. Yep. And God knows there are people all over Venice and Santa Monica shooting things right now, of course. So, shortly after it went live, users found that their videos were being flooded by spammy comments requesting follows, which appeared to be coming from automated bots with phrases like follow for a follow and follow me for old vines.

People are also going in and snatching up usernames, particularly those associated with prominent figures like settlers planting stakes in fertile land. So, somebody looked through all the Byte accounts and users appear to be squatting on handles that have prominent figures like Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Taylor Swift, and Tiger Woods.

The fact that you can easily change your account username will no doubt make it easier to seek out and occupy high demand handles. Right now, Byte isn't verifying prominence or notable users the way Twitter and Facebook do. So, yeah, brand new system and it's already been ruined. Yeah, well, the way Twitter used to, they don't do verification anymore.

Oh, that's trite. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Alt-Right, for that one. Yeah, it's just, it's kind of an annoying service, I'm sure. See, the thing about it is I was too old for Vine and I'm way too old for Byte.

So, don't really care. But, yeah, this is always going to happen. The real issue for Byte right now is that they waited too long and this thing called TikTok came along and that's where all the kids are and that's video. So, what are they going to do? Yeah. And, you know, they had more than enough time to build in safeguards to this and they didn't.

Yes. So, what are you going to do? Watch the shark fin. That's about it. Just sit back, have some chips and watch the shark fin. Now, I found this one over at Ars Technica and I couldn't believe it. Patreon can't solve its porn pirate problem. I'm like, huh? I didn't know there was a porn pirate problem on Patreon, Peter Piper said.

So, for five years, a company called Yiff.Party has basically been a place where people can go with their Patreon accounts, log in, and then pull up people that they pay money for to follow and cross post over so other people can get it for free.

All right. Sounds like the internet. It sounds like the internet, but I don't get it. I'm like, if you're smart enough to give somebody money on Patreon to support them, why would you just actively go steal it and give it to everybody else who haven't paid? Because it's kind of the same way that you paid for the New York Times and gave me your New York Times address, and then I pay for something else, and then I give you that login.

So, I'll pay for this porn. You give me that porn. Right. But I don't give it to the entire world. Right. That's a difference. That is a difference. And with those accounts, you can use it on multiple devices. Like my New York Times login, I think I can use up to three devices, which is exactly what I do. Yours, mine, and mine.

That's it. Exactly. So, yeah. But here's the thing. Apparently, a lot of it's furry porn. Oh. Well. Yes. Let's get our login from Dave. Exactly. Yif is a term in the furry community referencing sexual activity, but Yif.party hosts anything that falls under the category of lewds, L-E-W-D-S, of course.

I wonder if they have nudes, N-O-O-D-S. Hmm. Probably. That includes smutty cosplays, vanilla softcore, hentai comics, 3D sci-fi sex stills, plus whatever Patreon-hosted art stuff pirates dump there. So, yeah. Look. Look.

Everybody's allowed. I don't care what you do in the privacy of your own home, if you're not breaking any laws or anything like that, and if you're a relatively moral person. If you want whatever you're into, you're into. No problems with that whatsoever. What I am shocked by is just how many people are into this stuff.

Oh, it's pretty big. It's pretty big. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Good on you, I suppose. I just, I find regular people good enough for me. When I lived in Pittsburgh, they had furry con going on, and it was on the news. It was on the mainstream news there, and it was a three-day conference, and it was massive.

It was like over 20,000 people. But, okay, maybe I'm just being really naive here. But I would assume an awful lot of those people just like the dressing up aspect, and they don't necessarily sexualize it? I don't think so.

I'm pretty sure it's the other way around. Oh, young Brian, you have so much to learn about the world. You have so much to learn about anonymous sex on the internet. Or not. I think I'm good with my naivete. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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Media Candy. Now, Jason, you and I both use Amazon Prime Video. We're Prime members. There's all kinds of stuff in there. You know, we've watched Fleabag. We've watched Mrs. Maisel. There's a whole bunch of shows. Jack Ryan.

You watch Jack Ryan. I go through an awful lot of their kids' programming because of kid. And I feel like I've gotten pretty deep into the Amazon Prime Video catalog. But apparently, I have not. I had no idea that Amazon Prime Video accepts user uploads.

I know. I know. This is kind of cool. Huge amount of their content. Yeah. Huge amount. Some two-thirds of the titles on Amazon Prime Video are user uploads. Although, you would think that they might moderate those and be selective. Apparently, that is also not the case.

They welcome a number of strange videos. So, according to Ampere Analytics, Amazon Prime Video boasts 65,504 distinct titles, which is almost 10 times as much as the 7,177 on Netflix. 7,176 you have to scroll through before finding what you want to watch.

Exactly. Yeah. So, users who upload videos, according to the Wall Street Journal, also get a small cut of revenue based on how many people watch their videos. So, there's an incentive to upload even more. Or, I would argue, we get a small amount of revenue when you folks click on our links in our show notes.

It's not really an incentive for us to keep putting those links in the show notes because it is such a small amount of revenue that it's almost not worth it. So, there's all sorts of stuff in there. So, in this article, they talk about some of these wonderful titles. For example, Feast Your Eyes on Surprise Eggs, Learn Colors, Candy Baby Doll Bath Time, which could ostensibly be used to teach kids about color, but feels like a bad-ass and trip.

Of course- And an SEO title like none other. Yes. Well, it is Amazon, right? Of course, there are the conspiracy theories all over the place. Amazon has quite a few amateur-produced documentaries about what really happened on 9-11, including Dylan Avery's Loose Change, which I actually watched at one point. Well, I watched about 15 minutes of it before I went, you've got to be kidding me.

Yeah. I think I've seen part of that, too. Yeah. There's also a strange two-part series called Hitler and His Own Words, as well as the markedly more intriguing Third Reich, Hitler's UFOs. It answers such pressing questions about Nazi aircraft, like, was this really Nazi technology or alien technology being back-engineered by the Nazis?

Spoiler alert, it was just the Nazis. So they have policies in place for forbidding offensive and illegal content, but the company uses, of course, an AI tool and human reviewers to monitor the content, which, as YouTube knows, have to do when you have that many people uploading stuff all the time.

So, yeah, I had no idea that there was this deep well of crap underneath the veneer of shows that we watch on Amazon Prime. I think a lot of them are under documentaries, because I was talking to Jordan Harbinger the other day, and he's like, did you know how many documentaries are on Amazon Prime?

He's like, I had no idea. He's like, most of them aren't very good. They're really cheap and amateur, but there's a ton of them. I'm like, aha! Well, now we know. Now this article makes sense. They are amateur. Yes, they are. Yeah. I'm like, hmm, if I had any videos, I'd be slapping them up there, too. Hey, it's a free, you know, channel for people to watch.

It's pretty cool. Mm-hmm. If you, I mean, if you've got a movie that you want to get out there, that seems like a pretty easy way to do it. Except for the, always the problem, you can put it up on a platform, but how do you get people to find it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just, I mean, it's just, I like it because it's another free place to go do it where people already are going.

Yeah. And they're going, like, while they're watching TV. Like, I only use Amazon Prime while I'm at my television. I don't use it when I'm on my computer. Yeah. Same with me. I use the app on my TV, and that's it. Yeah. I never use, like, YouTube on my TV.

I only use that on my computer. So it's just another, it's another location for people to get engaged with your content. But yeah. So speaking of content, I have never heard of comedian Daniel Sloss. Nor have I. I ran across his show on HBO called Daniel Sloss X, because I was, we ran through everything on Netflix, so we're out of comedy, so I have to wait another week for 20 more to drop.

Right. So we watched Daniel Sloss X, and this guy, he's a Scottish comedian. He's young. He's still in his 20s. And it is some of the smartest, well-thought-out comedy I have ever heard in my life. We were in tears. And, you know, I have a pretty- He looks like a little baby.

Yeah. Yeah. He is one dark son of a bitch. I love him. All right. And even my roommate, who is a, you know, doesn't have the same dark sense of humor that I do, was just like, this guy is smart. So then I went back and I found his first two specials on Netflix. So he's got two hours on Netflix and one hour on HBO.

I recommend everybody watch all three, because they are fantastic. But start with the next Netflix shows, because then you can watch them in order and see his progression as a comedian. Gotcha. But man, this guy is one of my favorite comics. And unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to make it. He's playing at Largo in a couple days. Damn it.

Well, why can't you make it? Get off your ass. You bought a car. Use it. I can't. You're such a- You're so close to being a shut-in. It terrifies me. I'm not that close. I'm there. That's the worst, man.

All right. Well, I got to get you out of your house more before I leave, because then it's never going to happen. Well, I'll see you at Podcast Movement. We're both going to Podcast Movement in February. So I'll see you for at least three days there. Okay. Maybe two, because we're probably going to run out of stuff to do in two days. I think so, too.

It might be just one day. We'll see. Anyways, I thought you would be happy to know, now that I have paid for my CBS All Access, at least until the first season of Picard ends. I am working my way through Star Trek Discovery very quickly. I think I've got two episodes left in the second series.

So, all right, Jason. It's not bad. It's not bad. No, it's not. It's still not faring well in comparison to the first episode of Picard, because it just doesn't have that warm, glowy, fuzzy feeling. Apples and oranges, man.

They are. They are different things. Yeah. And these were made before they even announced Picard. So, you know, completely different beast. But I like it. And I thought season two was pretty good. I like it, too. One question, though, is how are they going to end this series and explain where all this technology went by the time Kirk sat on that chair?

So a few weeks back when we heard about the passing of Elizabeth Wurzel, who wrote Prozac Nation, made into the big movie, quite a celebrated writer in her own right, I was feeling a little nostalgic about her because she felt like one of those authors that, you know, I read this in college.

This was college type books. But I was like, I realized when I went to her Amazon page that she had written a lot more books than I thought she had. I had read Prozac Nation, loved it. I also read her book, Bitch, which was, you know, a bunch of essays about powerful women and how powerful women have been repressed throughout society and throughout the ages, etc.

That was a great book as well. Then I found a bunch of other stuff. So I saw one called More Now and Again, A Memoir of Addiction. It was $2.99 on Amazon Prime. Why not, right? That's cheap. I want to read one more of her books. And this is a chronicle of the time she spent writing, Bitch, after the success of Prozac Nation when, obviously, as you can tell, she got really addicted to drugs again.

And it was, I missed her writing style, I have to say. I still really enjoyed it. And it was riveting for a couple nights. I was just, every night I was up reading this going, wow, this is great. This is so amazing. What an incredible story. And by the third or fourth night I was reading it, I was like going, all right, we're getting more now and again.

And this is, she's just again and again. Same thing. She can't break out of it. Again, again. And then I looked to see how far into the book I had read. And I wasn't even close to halfway done. Oh, man. So the book went away. But.

Because I was just like, I can't. Because, you know, it's despair porn, right? And I was really enjoying it. And if it would have been half the length of a book that it actually is, I would have finished it and probably been really happy about it. But I just couldn't take it anymore. It was too sad and too long and too much.

So I had to stop. Okay. I'm with you on that one. If it is too sad, then walk away. Yep. And I have been trying to get into the William Gibson book. I'm just not in the headspace yet. So I think I'm going to take a couple weeks and go at it again when I'm in the right place for that kind of thing.

I just don't know. I start to listen to it. I'm like, this is going to be a thing where I got to think a lot. And it's going to take a while. Oh, man. Who wants to think? I know. It's fiction, man. I went for fun. I went pew pew pew. That kind of stuff. Everyone does not go to Gibson for pew pew pew.

No, you do not. You do not. So that's why I'm in the mood for pew pew pew. And once I've satiated that desire, then I'll go back to this when I'm feeling more introspective and ready to look at near future science fiction. Moron of the week.

I was a little torn about putting this in here because I almost feel that we need to give Goop and Gwyneth Paltrow the same rule that we gave Kanye West, which they can't make appearances in Moron of the Week anymore because, you know, they're perennial all-stars. Yeah, they're in the Hall of Fame. Yeah, they got enough awards.

They've got the EGOTs of the Moron of the Week. So we got to just cancel them out and do other people. But this one is so egregious. And we had a number of people send it to us, including Martin, who sent us one particular review of the Goop Lab, which is the new show that is on Netflix.

It makes you sound as if they're going to do things scientifically. And they try to do so in their own way. Like the Star's Wellness Brand, this whole show... This is from the article, which is great writing. Like the Star's Wellness Brand, this whole show is a demented peon to self-indulgence.

As for someone peddling health treatments, she seems alarmingly ignorant about anatomy. I can't even read this without laughing. There you go. I'll take it. She suggests you steam it, put jade eggs up it, and recently launched a candle that smells like it. But Gwyneth Paltrow seems to not know what a vagina is.

That's the takeaway from the Goop Lab. The Netflix series launched to bring Paltrow's lifestyle brand to a wider audience. The moment the High Priestess of the Pudenda's ignorance is revealed comes in the third of six episodes, entitled The Pleasure is Hers, courtesy of Betty Dodson.

Dodson is a 90-year-old New Yorker and old-school feminist who has been teaching female masturbation workshops for half a century. She lets Gwyneth speak about the Holy of Holies for a bit. Then she leans forward and tells her, the vagina is the birth canal only.

You want to talk about the vulva? That's the clitoris, the inner lips, and all the good shit around it. The High Priestess of the Pudenda is shook. She's shook. She says, I thought the vagina was the whole thing. It's almost as though she never had any idea what she was talking about. Yeah, so this show is a bit ridiculous.

I've read a number of other reviews about it. It's horrible. And I was listening to the Skeptic's Guide podcast, and they didn't get into her or Goop or anything specifically. They were talking about a completely different story. I think it was a woman in Australia who faked cancer and then faked that she had like a cure for it or something like that.

And the government smacked her down hard. And they were saying, you know what? We need more of that here. Netflix should – there should be a class action lawsuit against Netflix for promoting this crap, for putting the Goop Lab even up on Netflix. It's ridiculous. It's not science.

It's bullshit. They're lying. Yeah. No, it's bad. It's bad. I was going to hate watch this, but I don't know if I have it in me. I don't. I can't do it. Like, I just – I don't – I can't even – well, according to Netflix's new metrics that we talked about last week, I can't even have this on for like 60 seconds.

Otherwise, it's considered a view. No, Brian. It's 120. Come on. 120. Be fair. Be fair. Although, I do want to see the whole bit where she doesn't even know what a vagina is. I know. Well, episode three. Maybe it's on YouTube. Feedback loop. All right.

We got some new Patreon subscribers, David and Rubik's Tesseract. And Rubik's writes, because of this episode, I dreamt last night that I was walking through a long hallway of Furbies reciting Mein Kampf. Since I've never read that particular literary gem, my brain filled in the blanks, and their recitation ended up sounding more like an incels blog entry.

Thanks, guys. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to seek therapy. Thank you. We're having a very odd episode, Jason. We've had two Hitler references and two Alice in Wonderland references. Yeah. Let's see who's the winner by the time we're done with this. And over on PayPal, we got donations from Elwynn, Mark, Dstone, Scott, and Jim.

Thank you all so much. And over at Twitter, Anthony writes in, regarding episode 406 and Just Walk More, from one GOG to another, FU, not everyone is able-bodied as you. Scooters are great extra last-mile option, aside from regulation, helmets, et cetera. That's fair enough.

I think that's kind of understood in our discussions, that if you need it, if you're not able-bodied, that's fine. We're not worried about you. I'm worried about the 15 drunk frat guys piled onto one scooter slamming into cars. Yeah. And I don't, you know, I'm not going to, I don't know what you got, Anthony, but the able-bodied part, you need to be a little more able-bodied to get on a scooter because they're hard to ride.

You know, I don't see how the scooters are going to be better for people who aren't as able-bodied as people who can walk. I mean, I don't see where that crosses the line there. I don't know. Unless, honestly, I can't picture that one.

But welcome to your opinion. And yes, regulation, helmets, et cetera. Yes. Big on regulation. David writes, and humans are so screwed between this and Boston Dynamics. We're making damn Cylons. And this is a link to a short video of Disney's flying robot that can perform stunts in the air like stunt doubles.

Yep. This is a cool one. It's pretty old. It's been out for like a year or two, but it's fun to watch. Yeah, it's robots on trapeze. Right. Pretty cool. And cool, Rob writes in, I had to stop listening to you guys because you talked more politics than tech. We have so dialed it down, but now because you said that, fuck Trump.

Thanks, cool, Rob. Damn it. Look, we've dialed it down. You woke him up. It is okay. Whatever. Thank you for listening when you listened. I'm sorry we upset you. And you won't be hearing this since you stopped listening. So moving on. That's right. Adam writes in, hey, Brian, I'm sure someone's thrown this out there already, but I think Google Fi fee could be a good option for you to consider.

I've been using it for a few years now. I shall look into that. Thank you. And Bert writes in, as a GOG, the latest annoyance. When did inkjet printers become disposable? 20 years ago. At least. They waste ink every time they print, fills the collection sponge. Then after one and a fucking half ink refills, the sponge is full, has to go to the manufacturer to be replaced, costing more than a new printer.

Yes, we've known for years. There's an industry that could use some disrupting. Somebody make a decent printer. Or cheaper ink. It comes down to the ink. The ink is just ridiculous. And Quantum Leap writes in, who would have thought I'd ditch Apple Plus for Amazon Prime? Everybody.

Yeah. Saving the expense and having Picard over here makes even the toughest critics like me shut up. It seems I have everything I need with Netflix and Amazon. Yes. Well, you know, UK and Canada have a lot more consolidation of the streaming services. Here in the US, we have to buy one.

There is no one ring to rule them all here. We have to have like 25 rings and look like a Guido. Yeah, because Picard, you don't have to get CBS All Access to get Picard in other countries. I know it was in, was it the UK that I found it? And I was going to try and VPN in, but then I'm like, eh, I just want to watch it as soon as it comes out.

So here's my money. Take it. And over at GOG.show, Jake writes in, heard about this article the other day and thought you guys might like it. In its US town rejects solar farm amid worries it would suck up all the energy from the sun.

Yeah, OK, so I read about this and a little bit and OK, so maybe your concern about that survey earlier in the show is right, Jason, because because a retired science teacher, Jane Mann, said she was concerned about the rising risk of cancer deaths in the area, despite reports showing the cancer rates in North Carolina have fallen over the 28 to 2012 period, saying that no one could tell her that solar panels were not causing the cancer.

Except science, which you taught. Explains a lot about North Carolina. She was also concerned. This is the caliber of the science teachers. The science teacher was also concerned that photosynthesis would slow due to the solar panels.

Stopping the planets from growing in the solar farm fields because, you know, they're sucking up all this. Stopping the plants, not the planets. Let's get that right. I'm sorry. I want to know what's going to happen. I want information. Enough is enough. I don't see the profit for the town, Mann, said at the meeting.

This is a science teacher. Yeah. She taught a lot of children science. Yeah. I grew up in North Carolina, man. This is our problem. This explains a lot. I went to school in North Carolina. That's OK. Yeah. So there you go. Now you know, Brian.

Now you know what it was like. Unless the solar panels are over the fields. Jesus Christ. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe she was out in the sun too long and forgot how it works, how the sun works. Right. Well, maybe she just teaches vagina sciences with Gwyneth Paltrow.

And Chris writes in, just like grumpy old geeks always say, the S in IoT stands for security, IoT trouble, the Sonos example, and more. And it's just a link about more stories about how there is no security in the Internet of Things. Yes, that is correct.

And Aaron writes in, CVS length receipt, or receipt length. To minimize or completely stop that from happening, have the coupons or the whole receipt sent to your email, then filter CVS to trash. There is the solution to the problem. I haven't gotten a receipt in years. Well, that is a solution. That would take away the only joy I get from going to CVS.

Yes. Also, I wouldn't get my CVS bucks, which actually is the only thing I look for in that receipt. And I usually get a good chunk of money when I go back to CVS after a while. So those receipts actually make me money. So I'm okay with keeping the receipts. And they're funny. And Barrett writes in, when you guys were talking about the results, Google returns these days, I can only think of this clip from TED 2.

And it is a very not safe for work clip, but very funny. Yes. And here's the funny one, because it's the all black cocks scene. Now, I didn't have it playing in a window where I was watching it. I just heard it going in another tab. And I'm from Chicago.

So all I kept hearing was Blackhawks, like the Blackhawks. And the way they didn't pronounce it right there, their enunciation was off. So I'm like, oh, they're talking about the Blackhawks. And I'm like, oh, no, they're not. Then it was just funny. It was funny. The Blackhawks.

Ryan says, was listening to show 409 and also have an iPhone 11 Pro and AirPods with wireless charging and haven't had your issue. Now, it's interesting. I haven't had my issue recently either. I even had a half an hour phone call yesterday and didn't blip out once. So AirPods were listening to you. They were.

They were. But the one thing I did do was unpair and repair them. So that might have fixed the issue. Unpair and repair is the new. Have you tried turning it off yet? It really is. Have you cycled the power? Yeah. Don writes in, I'm left to wonder if the products that Clearview is selling is, in fact, illegal.

They are using photos that are scraped from social media accounts. Wouldn't the photos you took and uploaded be covered under copyright laws? A few searches seem to indicate that the original author of a photo who then uploads it would retain the copyright authorship while transferring a license to the social media company to use as they would like. One such example found.

Link in show notes. This would seemingly indicate to me that Clearview is violating copyright law unless they are in a partnership with each specific social media company they are scraping from. Well, here's the thing about that. They're not republishing the photographs anywhere. So there might be a loophole there because they're also just looking for metadata on the faces that, you know, they're scanning the faces, finding the points that they need for to reconstruct the face and then putting that into their algorithms.

So they might not even keep the photographs once they've actually scanned it and pulled the data out of it. And I'm guessing that they're not actually sharing the photographs with a third party. They're just sharing the data that they gleaned from those photographs. So, you know, a very good lawyer might make a case that without that, they wouldn't have a service and that they're, you know, they owe 3 billion people or, you know, the owners of 3 billion photographs some royalties.

But that is probably never going to happen. That would be it. That's a silly lawsuit, I think. But it's an interesting thought experiment. Yep. And booby writes in, hi guys. So I just made a list of stuff Jason and I have in common. How cool. One, portable mini disc.

Two, Ken onion knife. Three, skateboarding past four. Strong feelings for Saturday Night Fever. I love it. He loathes it. Ah, that's about it. Plus something else I forgot. Anyway, made a list of things I have in common with Brian too. Just to be fair. One, nothing.

I was thinking, now Picard is airing. We all know what Jason is going to call his next puppy. Hee hee, data. You guys are the best. I watch The Expanse because of you and also listen to Hacking Humans. Well, Bubby, I'm sorry. Sorry to burst your bubble, but Brian was the mini disc owner, not me.

You're down to three with Jason and one for me. Yep. Yep. And I've got a Flintstones theme going with my dogs here. Sorry. Yes. Just reverse sexuality. That's right. You know. Hey man, you're a modern guy. The polarity has been reversed. And David writes in, hi guys, to be frank, your recent episode in which you talked about the 1000 true fans theory and your number of followers really surprised me.

I can't believe you all keep this going. Me too. I was honestly inspired, humbled, and ashamed knowing you have put in so much work as I've listened over the years while receiving so little support. I rationalized that I was doing my part by supporting the sponsors. I am now an apostle for both Eero and Privacy.com and sharing the podcast with others.

But I decided to put my money where my mouth is and start donating at $10 a month as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for everything you do. You have introduced me to so much. The only thing I would ask is to hear more from Brian about how he manages technology for his son. As a techno-skeptic father with a daughter of the same age, I appreciate hearing about the challenges, tools, and solutions.

Lastly, I must say this is the first time I visited the website and made the mistake of clicking on the About the Geeks link. I could have done without attaching a face to your voices. This is why we don't do video. No offense. It's a dangerous thing. Yes. That's why I did. I'm glad I never watched this. No such thing as a fish documentary.

I'm keeping that one clean. I made that mistake. Yeah, you told me. It cannot be unseen. No offense, but you guys sound great and no visual depiction could have met my expectations. I feel like it has lifted the veil, and I will now be visualizing the mortals that you are whenever I listen, excluding, of course, Dave Bittner.

He looks just like you would expect him to. Did you see the picture of him in the suit or out of the suit? Thanks so much. I will continue talking about everything, how I'm managing stuff with my son, because, yeah, that is a big part of the show, and you're only going to be getting it from me.

So, Jason is not going to be having any children anytime soon. So, yeah, I'll keep up with that as things come along. That would require leaving the house, which I'm not going to do. Not necessarily. You can order in. Well, I was hoping that Bernie Sanders chick would ask me out on a date, but, you know, that didn't work out, because that's what happens.

Joe writes in, Brian often talks about his kid in tech. Well, today, my 16-month-old grabbed my iPhone and knew to press the home button to turn on the screen. Every time he did, he would look at me, and his face would light up with joy. He even held it to his ear and started babbling. I'm doomed.

Well, Joe, you're doomed, because obviously you don't have any password protection on your iPhone. How can a 16-month-old open it up with just a press of a button? Come on, man. So, I guess this is where I talk about my kids and technology a little bit. How convenient. Yeah, you're screwed, because once that Pandora's box has been opened, one cannot shut it.

Start limiting. Make it a bobble. Make it a, you know, well, 60 months is young, so just keep it away from there. But as you move along, it becomes a privilege. You do this, you get that. And that's the way it works. Mm-hmm.

And Tyler wrote in, listening to episode 408, and someone asked about what to use for recipes. I use an app called Paprika 3 Recipe Manager. It is available on computer, iOS, Android, syncs between all devices. You can put in your own recipes, pictures, descriptions, et cetera. Share recipes with other people or family.

Recipes are easily taggable and searchable, and you can pull recipes down into your collection from an inbuilt browser. Add a shopping list and can scale your recipes up and down with ease in the app. I love the app and store all my mom's recipes in it. I used that for a while, and I think I reviewed it on the show. Yeah, I remember that.

My one problem with it is the super convenient feature of just being able to paste a link in from a number of sites that have recipes, and it would just pull all the stuff in. Didn't work for the two or three sites that I always went to for recipes, so it got a little bit annoying over time, but I did think it was a really, really good program.

I just never went back to it, and at some point, I really do need to digitize old recipes, my mom's recipes, and all that sort of stuff, so maybe I will revisit it at some point. Yeah, most of the stuff that we do is handwritten recipes or just printouts from stuff. Yeah, right now I've got a binder full of women, or I mean, binder full of food.

That's pretty much it. We've got the same thing, and I've got a stack of Blue Apron recipes that have at least one or two things in there that were good that we replicate every now and again. Yeah. It's crazy. I actually, my roommate and I went through them the other day. The stack was about three and a half inches thick when we started to go through it, and that was about half of the ones that we'd originally gotten.

That's a lot of Blue Apron, I got to say. I've been through a lot, and that's kind of how we manage that stuff, but I'm just wondering if, is it really worth the time to go through it? Because I had Paprika 3 as well, and it may have been Paprika 2 back then.

And just the tediousness of going through and putting in a recipe when you don't know when you're going to use it was just like, I think it's, I just can't do it. I don't know. I think it's just one of those things that you have to do over time. You have to keep in mind that you've got this solution, and then when you make that recipe, when you're done with it, you put them in kind of one by one until you've cycled through everything.

The other problem I have with it is we know how these smaller companies tend to disappear. What if we put all of our recipes in Paprika 3, and then there is no Paprika 4, and then they go out of business? Yeah. See, and that's another thing that I was definitely worried about too.

So the way that I manage online recipes, things that I get in notes, Apple notes, I basically have a folder that is recipes. So anytime I get a link, I'll just throw it in here, or any kind of little thing, or just screen cap it, save it in here, because I've got, I mean, even right now, I've got a screenshot of Nashville Farmer's Market Succotash.

Fantastic recipe, I might add. But that's the way that I can go through, and it's still searchable because it's in Apple notes, and I know Apple's not going anywhere anytime soon. This one comes from Jason's DoorDash driver. Hi, Jason and Brian. I was reading the bios on GOG.show, and you are not listing the other 47 podcasts Dave Bittner now hosts.

You know, it's a pain to update that website, and since Dave's not throwing me any coin to do that, he can update it in damn self. Doesn't he have his own site? Yeah, exactly. There you go. I also was curious if Jason is still enjoying the freelancer life since he hasn't been producing the Jordan Harbinger show for a few months now.

It's exactly the same life. I just do it for different people. Yeah. And completely unrelated, I was curious if there are any passwords you do not keep in 1Password. My main 1Password password. Yeah. The 1Password password is not in 1Password. I was reading online.

Some people choose not to use a password manager for banking and financial accounts, but that seems counterproductive to me. Thank you for brightening my weeks for the past several years. It is counterproductive. It is counterproductive. That makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah. 1Password is like Frank's Red Hot. I put that shit on everything. Agreed.

Me too. This is from I Like Beer. I like this guy. This is for the bit man. You people are doing the Lord's work. I saw this in the news too. A group of furries stopped a domestic violence assault and helped police make the arrest. Link in the show notes. Pretty good. And Holly writes, in this article hurt me to read, the author does not understand the cost for a landline to be cheap.

This is an article at Forbes, why I'm not giving up my landline. I read this because my mom refuses to give up her landline. This is by Fred Maxwell. And I don't know who this is written for. It is under retirement. So I'm guessing for old people. There's no reason to keep your landline anymore.

The only reason to keep a landline is if you're worried about everything going down and you still want to have a copper cord. But who are you going to call? Because everybody else is using internet or mobile. That's it. So if shit goes down, that stuff's going off. There is another use case you're not thinking of.

And the reason that I have a landline here at the house and my roommate's mom has a landline at her house. really crappy signal. You know, that is true. Her mom has no cell signal whatsoever in Calabasas, California. RIP, Kobe. It's, yeah, they just can't get signal out there.

And which is crazy for the price of the damn homes. I guess, I guess when you, when you move into the better parts of Calabasas, your homes come with their own cell tower. But for a lot of people out there, they just can't get cell service. And if something happens, cause she's, you know, she's in her nineties, they, they want to be able to like, she can call and find out what's going on with her.

So it's, you know, the immediacy of communication is, is primal. They have to have it. My dad, who was in his mid seventies, just got rid of his landline finally, like a month ago. He's like, oh yeah, by the way, don't call the house. We, we finally turned off our landline.

I'm like, what, what? That was one of the only, you know, that was one of those points in the universe that I know was always going to be stable. And now it's gone. Yeah, I know. My mom has had the same phone number since I was born. I will never forget that phone number. And if, when it goes away, I will be sad. Yeah.

I mean, I still remember my grandparents' phone number from when I learned it when I was like three. They're long gone, but I still remember the phone number. All right. Over at iTunes, we have some five-star ratings. The first from gog.show slash nil, Grumpy OGs, the best podcast whose site ends with .show.

Now at least half the cost of the closest competitor. Features include Grumpy, ragging on e-scooter morons, ragging on C-suite morons, debating what makes a technology company, advice on grooming your nads, furries, and shout outs for funny reviews. Thank you, Neil.

And David Illum, 3737 writes in with a five-star, great show. I live in the UK and listen to the both of you all the time as I work in my office. I find I agree with just about all of your gripes. So what gets on your nerves gets on mine. Keep up with the great podcasts.

Many thanks. Well, many thanks to you, David. Thank you. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to gog.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review. And don't forget gog.show slash donate.

Toss us a buck or two. And if you're listening to us on the overcast player, click those little stars. We're still kicking ass and I love you for it. Closing shout outs. And it seems this has to be in every show right now, but RIP Kobe Bryant. This happened not very far from my house, actually.

And yep, sad day. Sad day here in Los Angeles. Definitely. I mean, I'm not a basketball fan at all, but even I had gotten to see him play once. Pretty great. Yeah. Never saw him play and seems like he turned his life around after basketball and was on an upward trajectory. No pun intended. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Support the show and keep us on the air. Go to gog.show slash donate. Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. Your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 410. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show, and get links to stuff we like.

Stay grumpy.

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