417: Death, Taxes, and Streaming

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. Brian, guess what I'm doing this week? A lot of podcasting. Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. But I'm doing something new. I'm actually doing something new. I'm doing a live stream with Eric Hundley of the Unstructured Podcast on Thursday, the 27th.

That'll be at 2.30 PST. That's PM, not AM. Thank God. 5.30 EST. So you can join me at jpd.me slash live if you want to get there. Like I said, that's February 27th for 2.30 on the West Coast, 5.30 on the East Coast.

And it's just an AMA kind of thing. Eric's going to moderate and anybody can show up and ask me anything you like. How exciting. I might show up. Wait, I already know everything. I'm fine. That's right. Brian knows everything. Well, I know everything about you. We've been doing this seven years.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. You know even more than it's been on the show, which is scary. Yeah, a little announcement. I got my new gig this week that I teased on Twitter. I am now the editor and audio producer for Christopher Lockhead. Couldn't work for a nicer guy.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like working for me. Not even slightly. Come on. We like to swear and we like to drink. And it's good enough. All right. Well, congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, I'm working on his shows, Follow Your Different and Lockhead on Marketing, which is fun.

So I've already done ones in the can and be coming out soon. And the really cool one is I got to do the two DEA agents that Chris interviewed from the show Narcos that was based on the first season going after Pablo Escobar. Right. Fantastic show, I got to say.

So definitely check those out. And another little bit here. I've talked about Calm the Beast with our friend Dan Nitro Clark a bunch. We shut down the show early this year to rebrand it, get everything done. And it's coming back this week and it's going to be called The Gladiator Way.

If you're already subscribed, which you should be, everything will flip in your feed for you. If not, go to GladiatorWay.com and you can get all the links to subscribe and that'll be coming out soon. Our first guest is Sam Bakhtiar, who is a really interesting guy, really interesting guy.

So that's going to be a fun show. Excellent. Well, look at you. Yeah. Look, man, I've been down for a week and a half with the damn shingles. So now I got to like double down and get back to work. All right. Well, I got a bit of follow up. This is why we can't have nice things, Jason.

You know that wonderful, awesome story about the wine drone delivery to the Australian couple that was quarantined aboard the Diamond Princess Cruise? Yeah, my heroes of the week. Well, they were faked it. Well, they didn't even fake it. They didn't do anything.

They just made it as kind of a joke. And I don't blame them. I think it's quite funny. And here's the deal. They did it on their personal Facebook page. It wasn't like put out as a news story or anything like that. It's just people saw it and shared it. And journalists did not bother to do any fact checking.

Nobody called the wine company to see if they actually had drone delivery. Nope. Nobody needed anything to run with the story because it's all just about the clicks. And it's a great story, which is how it ended up in our show. But yeah, they did not get a drone delivery of wine. They got it from their cabin steward and they just thought it was going to be a fun thing to post, which I can see that.

I've made similar posts in the past of ridiculous things that didn't really happen as a joke. And everybody just ran with it without bothering to check a damn thing. And that sucks. It does, doesn't it? Because it's such a good story. Yeah. That's one of those ones I really wanted to be true. Damn. Well, it's not.

We have to come up with a new internet rule. The rule of if it's too good to be true, it is. It's called the internet. That's true. So I saw this one over at the Atlantic and I thought of you. It's called the Crookedest Team in Baseball. And yeah, it's a pretty good pick down.

In baseball history. In baseball history. Yes. And I love this beginning. In 40 years of covering sports, I've never seen athletes so mad. I'm with them. Every single guy over there needs a beating, the Atlanta Braves outfielder Nick Markakis said. If someone cheated me out of winning the title, I would be fucking irate, LeBron James tweeted.

They should be out of baseball for the rest of their lives, Hank Aaron said. And the shocker here, is Hank Aaron still alive? Yes. Yes, he is. Wow. I was amazed by that. Is that like the last time you actually paid attention to baseball? Was Hank Aaron playing? Pretty much.

When you were a kid, yeah. Shocker alert, Nolan Ryan is still alive too. I used to have his baseball card. I was, I mean, my, the peak baseball for me was the, the Willie Stargell era pirates where they were just on a tear and just world series after world series.

And that's when I got to see them. And I still have the little bat. My grandfather bought me. It's a little tiny bat and it was big for me. It was like a full size bat. So I was like a wee little kid, but I got to see Willie Stargell play. So that was really fun. So yeah, that was peak baseball for me, but yeah, there's just a laundry list of things in the Atlantic here talking about what, what should happen to them?

Well, what's happening is nothing. So that's the problem. Yes, it is a problem because again, you, uh, if you don't punish people for cheating, nothing will stop them from cheating. Exactly. That is just human nature, especially with the amount of money that is on the line here.

Yeah. This is a precedent setting event and you know, MLB has just really shit the bed. Yeah. The commissioner of baseball is not doing a very good job. He should be oustered immediately. We need to get somebody else in there. It is. It's just ridiculous.

I mean, it's, it's been proven. They're admitting they did it. And the fact that they're just out there playing and there's no consequences whatsoever. Well, you know, now that I'm thinking about it more and more, as we know from our security segment and on the show, there's never consequences for doing anything bad, is there?

So this is the same as the tech industry. It really is. And everybody's asking why you're talking about baseball. Well, this is actually a tech story because they did use cameras to actually transmit stuff back to the dugout. So there, there is our loophole. There, there is absolutely nothing illegal or against the rules about stealing signs.

You just can't use technology to do it. And I guess, yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess their cases could be said that we didn't use technology to, to transmit to them. We just use trash cans. Yeah, but they use cameras. To get to the trash can. To get to the trash can.

To get the signs, to get to the trash can. There's also, it hasn't been proven yet, but, but there is suspicion that some of the players were actually wearing mic'd wires, not so they would like buzz to give them signals about what, what pitch was coming. Um, and there are cases that, that I believe they were busted.

The Astros were busted for this or the Red Sox. I can't remember which, uh, but one of the teams was, uh, getting signals sent to them to an Apple watch that they had in the dugout. So it is a tech story. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You know, the law of unintended consequences. Yep.

Yeah. There's no technology in baseball. That's right. In the news. I saw this over at Business Insider, Brian, and I wanted to get your read on it. Netflix insiders share how they feel about its internal post-mortem emails that detail why employees were fired to their coworkers.

So apparently if you get shit canned at Netflix, it's weird. I have never in my life worked with any organization that explains why they can people. That's what, this is so weird, isn't it? It is strange. You know, you do the scuttlebutt, you have the, the water cooler talk.

Maybe your manager takes you aside and says, blah, blah, blah, this or that happened. But to codify reasons for firing and, and to just, uh, to share them with the entire company is strange. You know what it reminds me of?

It reminds me of that scene in Good Omens where Crowley walks into his little garden every now and again and picks the plant that's doing, doing the least well, walks away with it, comes back with an empty flower pot and sets it down. And it's like, everybody take note, grow, you know, it's just like that.

It's what the evil character does. Not the good one. That's, that's the thing. Uh, there are better management styles to lift people up than to scare them. But the thing is, I, apparently Netflix is one of the greatest places to work. Does not sound that way to me because this, uh, I don't, I don't, is, is it a generational thing, Jason?

Are we just too old now? Are we old school? Is this, is this what the kids want? Is this the corporate environment that we want? Is it, is it an extension of living your entire life on social media? So you need to know everything. All information must be available to you. Is, is that what this is?

Yeah, I guess. Because it just feels wrong to me. I, I, I wouldn't, I, I'm about to go into a position as management and I would never implement this practice. I would never even consider implementing this practice. Well, maybe you should. Maybe I should. Yeah.

So, uh, blind and anonymous workplace networking app found in a survey of its users that 75% of Netflix employees said the emails helped shape a better workplace culture. So do we, do we have examples of these emails? Have they been released? I would be interested to see how they're worded.

Yeah, that's the one thing. I don't know if, uh, any of have actually been, uh, been thrown out here. Uh, there are a handful of fireable reasons that are commonly cited in the emails. So we've got repeated coaching, meaning the employees received feedback for their super, from their supervisor and failed to make substantial changes. Communication issues.

Communication is one of the 10 core values outlined in Netflix's culture memo and struggled with insert value from Netflix's culture deck, such as candor. Um, I guess what they're doing is saying that they, they codified a list of reasons you could get canned.

All right. So it's almost like a, it's a choose your own adventure list. Yeah. I'm thinking like a, like a Chinese menu, one from column A, two from column B, one from column C. All right. I mean, I, I suppose if it's as vague as that, uh, but it still feels icky and weird to have like, to have it so specific to a person that way.

I, I don't, you know, we always, uh, remember it back in like elementary school or whatever you'd hear, this is going to go on your permanent record. And then we found out that really wasn't a permanent record. There is now like this stuff can be released, right? This stuff can get out there. It's data.

We know this stuff doesn't stay internally. What if this gets, you know, what if you're at your, you're, you're, you're getting ready. You're going in for an interview for your next job and they pull up the email that says everything that you did wrong at Netflix. Yeah. That's kind of creepy, right? That's creepy. Yeah. And I love this.

The postmortems are typically written by managers in collaboration with human resources and go out to the fired employees department. But sometimes they go out to the whole company on accident and, uh, I'm sure that they, they left one person out of that chain. Guess who that is? Uh, the person that actually got fired?

No legal, you know, legal is, is proofreading these things. Yeah, that's true. That's true. So I, I, you know, this could be just a way that they cover their ass to make sure that they don't get wrongful termination lawsuits. It really could be genius for that. Even then they should really keep that internally.

They should, that's, it shouldn't go out to the whole company. Yeah. But they say it's usually is supposed to go out to the fired employees department and sometimes it has gone through the, the company wide list serve, which I still love. I love this. They still have list serves. Which is great. Um, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's creepy, but you know, apparently we could be wrong here because it says the survey says 75% of Netflix employees, which could be, you know, people who just want to suck up to management, you know?

Yes, yes, we just fired your, we just fired your friend and colleague. What do you think about this email? You like it, right? Yes. Yes. We love it. Yes. Very good. Thank you, boss. He deserved to go. He deserved to go. Or that 75% is just the HR department.

Yeah, that too. That's definitely possible. I, yeah, I, I, you know, what we have also learned doing this podcast for a long time is that 75% of people can easily be wrong. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I, I'm not a fan of this. I don't get it. If, uh, if you're out there listening and you, you really like this, please do tell us why, because I don't, uh, I don't see how this is helpful at all.

Yeah. And if you work at Netflix and have seen some of these, feel free to shove a few our way so we can see what they look like. Yes. And, and if you like it or not, I'm curious to find out if anybody actually that works at Netflix listens to the show, but also if they're, uh, if they're on board with this policy. Yep.

There you go. All right. Streaming, Jason. We've been screaming about this for quite some time. There's a really. Screaming about streaming. That's right. There's a really good wrap up over at Slate right now. Welcome to the streaming wars. And I've got to give props for the opening paragraph here. Begun, the streaming wars have. Worse and far more harmful than the cable wars of years past.

And with the new content wars will come a fresh internet hell. And, uh, the article goes into great length about, uh, how we're all basically getting screwed, like we talked about, about how we're going to have to sign up for 17 different services to watch one show we like on each service. Uh, and more so than that, thanks to our good old buddy Ajit Pai at the FCC, uh, there's no net neutrality.

And ISPs are also making deals with all these content companies or a straight up buying them and, uh, there will be throttling. Oh yes, there will. So if you want to watch Disney plus and you're using, uh, an ISP like Comcast or AT&T that owns HBO, they may throttle your Disney plus and give you free HBO and make sure that you get that looking beautifully.

Yay. Yeah. I mean, you got, you got free Disney plus for a year because you're on Verizon, you know, and free Apple, uh, Apple plus, not that anybody cares if you bought anything from Apple. Well, yeah, the Apple TV plus thing, uh, I got it. And like I said, we'll talk about this a little later that, uh, there ain't shit on there.

No, there, there really isn't all that much. So, uh, this is pretty good read. I mean, and it talks at the very end, it talks about something that I think you and I have, uh, foreseen as well and unintended consequences. Uh, piracy is back on the rise for a long time.

Yes. For quite a long time, it went down and now it has come back up and it has come back up because there are 17,000 different services that we have to pay for if we want to see one thing. And I, I, I pirated discovery for the first year because I wasn't going to pay for CBS because it only had one show I wanted to watch and this is happening again.

So it has come back up. And, uh, as they point out in the article, which is exactly what we've pointed out all the time, the best way to defeat piracy is not to do copyright filters or harsh puniments, punishments or anything like that. It's to make things cheap, easy and legal to get to.

Yeah, exactly. Piracy immediately. Yeah. The problem with all this now is the, the bifurcated nature of streaming services. Everybody got greedy and wanted to start their own when there were just a few of them and you only had to pay a few bucks a month here and there, then piracy was going down. But now, no, you have to buy seven different services just to get what you want. And you know, once, once the, once the, you know, the streaming wars are over and the big

consolidation has begun again, you know, which, you know, is coming. There are already people out there trying to bundle all these services, just like traditional cable did. And a lot of these companies that are trying to bundle our traditional cable companies. So, you know, we had it, we had a sweet spot there for a little while and then everybody just shit on it because they saw the golden ring. Yes. Yes. So we're going to spend a lot of money for a little while and then it's all going to consolidate and we'll still spend a lot of money. Yeah. Here's the thing. It's going to

work. Death taxes and streaming. That's, that's our life nowadays. Pretty much, pretty much. This last one in, in the news, Brian is for you because I know you love these things inside the collapse of Daiquiri's $300 million bet on AR. Ooh, I could really go for a strawberry Daiquiri.

I haven't had one in years. I think all of the ex-employees of Daiquiri probably could too. Now we've talked about AR and VR on the show and just we've crapped on it enough that we don't have to go back down that road because it's just not there yet. And people are spending way too much money trying to build this stuff magically. And, uh, and I love this, but ultimately the demise also has a lot to do with factors that aren't all that unique to Daiquiri. Making hardware

is difficult as is inventing products for a use case. Nobody yet wants. There it is right there. A use case. Nobody yet wants. That's the problem with AR. It's cool. It's neat. But the problem is nobody wants it. You know, there's a way that this stuff all used to work. You would have places like Bell Labs or Microsoft or incredibly well-funded large companies that actually had products and

made money. They would develop A&R divisions and they would develop products that way. What didn't happen is 10 people didn't get together with an idea that was kind of half-baked, no idea how to actually build it and then get millions of dollars of funding to go out and fuck up.

Well, to that point, Microsoft does have an AR division. Yeah. So, and, and they are actually selling product with, I really want to try one, but man, that dev kit is expensive. Actually, what I meant instead of AR, I meant R&D, research and development. Yeah. I know. You're a music guy. A&R is R&D in music.

I don't want an artist and repertoire in my head. I don't know why. I do. It's okay. I went with it. I, I correct you enough. I'm, I would, I'll let that one slide. Thank you. And I like this. It says, like Daiquiri, Magic Leap and Microsoft have also more recently pegged their hopes for AR's commercial success to enterprise use cases, betting that companies will buy hardware at price points out of reach for the average consumer. That means they can't make this shit cheap enough because it's just not good enough yet. And they can dumb it down for enterprise because

enterprise is not entertainment. When you go into entertainment, things have to be really, really good. But for enterprise, you get a, basically you get some Excel sheets overlaid on your vision when you're looking at a skew on a, on a rack, you know, that's, that's a pretty natural development of any technology as it would start at that level. And as it gets better and better, it ended up becoming consumer based, you know, I'm the fact that they're trying to cut out these steps is why a lot of these companies are failing.

Right. Especially Magic Leap, which is, I guess, looking for more funding even. Well, of course they are. They've must have, they've, they've got to be burning through money at an insane clip and there's no product. There's, there's no revenue stream. Well, you know, their revenue stream right now is the dev kit. That's their only revenue stream and probably licensing deals to get content onto the platform. But look, Daiquiri had $300 million.

They failed. Yes. Not, not surprising because when you look at somebody like Magic Leap, $2.6 billion in funding with a B and they still don't have anything to market. So these guys were just dead out of the gate. So the company's been basically just chopped to pieces and sold off and Snap actually bought some of them. So we can see some, some of the AR coming to the company's testicles.

I mean, spectacles coming anytime soon. Now I do not need AR testicles. Nope. Look, there's no doubt that AR is going to be big. It is. It's just, it's not there yet. It's right next to driving, self-driving cars.

Well, I actually, I mean, it's funny you mentioned cars. Cars is one of the first use case scenarios I can see for AR, you know, an AR, an AR dash screen. So you're not staring at your phone. You're actually looking up and getting all your information that way and including entertainment. But, you know, we've got to figure out the balance there so you don't drive off a cliff. But that is definitely one of the best use case scenarios for AR right now. And certainly a way to get the mainstream public into the concept of AR. Certainly much better than Pokemon Go.

Yeah. And I guess some of Daiquiri's divisions did get sold off to automakers for- Yeah. That totally makes sense to me. To work on that. Yeah. Yeah. What you really need to figure out, and this is, I think, key for doing automotive AR, everybody has to see something different. And we've talked about a company that is working on that, which is pretty cool if they can make it work. Because I, you know, if my kids can sit in the back and watch the Lion King on the windshield or on their window or

whatever, but nobody else sees that and somebody else can watch something else. And this is a good use case for people driving down the freeway watching porn in the back of their SUVs, which is a common sad occurrence around here. But yeah, it'd be nice that you, if you can actually, you know, target different things to different people that just might be different glasses with different frequencies, which isn't really, you know, the best way to do it. But I don't know. It's interesting.

It's interesting. It's going to be a long time, but it's 10 years out before anything consumer. Like this is 10 years out, self-driving cars, 20 years, 20 years out.

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With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. The trailer for Westworld season three has dropped and I cannot wait. I cannot wait. It looks awesome.

Good. Yeah. I was pleasantly surprised by this show when it came out. I didn't know what to think about it. Season one was phenomenal. Season two raised the bar. Season three is looking even better. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to see. This is the last season, correct?

I think so. But who knows? You know, it's the last season with that team. It's the last season with that team. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the Nolans basically have buggered off to bigger and better deals. I think the Amazon and they, but they got let, let on to work on this for HBO while they were in transition, which is good. I good. Thank you, Amazon for not screwing that up. So yeah, it's, I think it's going to be interesting. It's a really good looking trailer. I mean,

a really good looking trailer. Yeah. Yes, it is. And speaking of things that have dropped better call Saul season five, is it five or six season five? Okay. Five is out now or is it starting now? So I watched a half of the first episode last night because the wife then had to go to bed. Good. Can I'm so happy they're back. It's such a good show. And I really enjoyed the first half of the first episode. I'm so glad you put this in here because my DVR didn't pick it up for

some reason. So I'm like, Oh, somebody's going to Sweden. Go grab the first two episodes. Cause there's, there's two out now, but the second one is, Oh yeah, it was yesterday. That's right. So Sunday drops on Mondays episodes. So, uh, yeah, I've got my DVR didn't pick it up either because I caught up on the show on Netflix. I never actually watched any of them as they streamed. So I had to add it to my DVR list as well. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. This was just a like mana from heaven for us.

Cause we're like, we're out of stuff to watch. We've got one episode left of another show I'll talk about in a second. And then I saw this and I'm like, jackpot. Well, I have a new show for you to watch Jason. Uh, I've been hearing about Dracula kind of vaguely, uh, which is Netflix's new thing.

And, uh, I was like, eh, I don't know. And the reviews seem to be fairly split down the middle. And I was at my, uh, my local watering hole a couple days ago. And one of my old friends and favorite bartenders there, she said, you need to watch Dracula. And I said, really? And she said, yes, some people hate it. I've effing loved it. Go try it. And I did. And I effing love it.

Okay. Okay. It's really good. And I bet you didn't know this, Jason. Do you know who did the show? The team from Sherlock. The team from Sherlock. And it feels very Sherlock. Good. Good. I've been, I've been kind of putting this one. I had it in the pocket, you know, it's like for one of those days when I've got three and a half or four and a half hours to sit down and binge through something, I've been saving this one. So I'm glad that, glad that you like it. But yeah, when this originally came out on the BBC,

I grabbed it from Sweden and just had it on my thing. And then I saw it was on Netflix. I'm like, okay, delete it from Sweden. I'll just watch it on Netflix when it's ready. But I'm glad you liked it. I'm really glad you liked it. I am halfway through the whole thing. I made the mistake the first night. I did not check the time and did not realize that it was Sherlock-esque in that each episode is a mini movie and there are three of them. So I thought it was going to be like 45 minutes long.

So at 2 a.m. when I finally went to bed after watching the first episode, I was very tired the next day. But then I got halfway through the second one last night. You're going to love it, Jason. You really are. Okay, cool. Hopefully they don't have Sherlock syndrome where episode two of any given season is crap. That was always Sherlock syndrome.

No, it hasn't happened yet. And there's only three. So there aren't as many as Sherlock did. Sherlock was always seasons of three. No, it was always three, one and a half hour episodes. Yep. It's been so long. I don't recall. That's one that's worth going back and watching, except Skip Hound of the Baskervilles. Yes, that one was horrible.

Oh my God, that was so bad. Well, so far, the second one is pretty good. Not as good as the first one was, but still good. So it's dodged that bullet. It's all good, man. Or wooden stake as it was. All right. I've been watching Narcos Mexico season two with my roommate and we're on episode nine with one to go. I was hoping we were going to finish it last night so I could have a full review, but so far, just as good as the rest. I really love this show. It is absolutely fantastic.

The entire Narcos series has been incredible. Excellent. I have a feeling this is one of those things I'm going to probably get back to watching 10 years from now when I can use the AR dash screen in my car to see it. Could be, could be. And I got a little bit more follow-up here on Stephen Fry's Seven Deadly Sins.

Have you been listening to this podcast? I have not. It's on my list of to-do, but I've just been a little busy. Okay. Well, it's almost done. He's got one more episode to go, which is Sloth, but he just released the episode Wrath. And I've listened to it three times now because it is just that goddamn good. And I love it. He even brings out the Google Goggles reference from the old days.

I think I mentioned that to Kevin Rose on the episode when you weren't here. And he was like, no, I never heard of that. Well, Stephen Fry has, and he used it. And it was good. It's a fantastic episode. I just love it so much. You have to listen to it, and then we can talk about it later. I don't want to really get into it too much. But the one thing about Stephen Fry's Seven Deadly Sins that caused me as a professional podcaster, a huge amount of wrath. And this is my wrath on behalf

of Stephen Fry. I have not listened to a single episode with an advertisement in it. There are ad breaks where they have music that leads in, and then Stephen comes right back. Whoever is doing this, oh, wait, it's ACAST. That's who's doing it. There are no dynamically inserted ads in here or any ads that Stephen reads. Nothing. And it says, Seven Deadly Sins is brought to you by our esteemed friends

at The Economist. Not one ad for The Economist in any episode I've ever heard, which means that they are just leaving money on the table. Well, I also, or it could be, well, they're definitely leaving money on the table one way or the other, even if my theory is true. This could be a similar situation with No Such Thing As A Fish, where the ads are UK-based. So maybe they're being like geoblocked

and not being played to you here in the US. Because, you know, No Such Thing As A Fish always has, you know, text UK number to get your free copy of The Economist. That's weird, because I get American Economist ads. So I can buy, I can get The Economist from No Such Thing As A Fish in the US from their ads. So maybe I have my VPN on when I download the

podcast. It could be, you could be, you could be accidentally British. So I get, yeah, I get, I get normalized. I get Blue Apron ads on No Such Thing As A Fish. I get all sorts of Americanized ads. Really? I always get UK ads. I never get American ads. Interesting.

That's really odd. That's really odd. I wonder if you subscribed to a different stream that was like the UK stream. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. I love that show. Anyway, so yeah, this is really kind of bugging me that Stephen Fry, who does such amazing work, might not be making the money that he's deserved on this show, which means he won't do any more. I just want to make sure he's getting more shows. I think he works for money these days. I think he chooses and does the projects

that he wants to do. And you can't really expand on The Seven Deadly Sins. Yeah, you can't. Maybe he can do The Seven Brides and Seven Brothers. Could be. But I just, yeah, he just, it's all, it's theater reviews. Stephen Fry reviews theater. But I mean, this show is just so fantastic. It's worth going back and listening to episodes multiple times. But, and you can get through them faster because there are no ads.

I would listen to Stephen Fry reading the ingredients lists on a box. Yeah. If you get Calm.com, the app Calm, he does one of their go to sleep stories. That's just like ridiculously boring, but it's in his voice. So you fall asleep faster. It's great.

Jesus, the Expanse books are long. I was a little torn about putting this one in here because unfortunately the, the guy did pass away, but I can't, I can't, I was with you. I'm with you. I can't not because of why the reason he passed

away. So we, uh, unfortunately bad Mike Hughes died in a rocket crash. He's a self-taught rocket scientist and self-avowed flat earth conspiracy theorist. He died Saturday morning during an attempt to launch a homemade rocket outside Barstow in San Bernardino County, California. According to news reports, the rocket was his attempt to prove that the earth is flat because he hoped he'd get up enough to see that there was no curvature.

Now here's a problem with this story that you missed. Uh, well, I mean, they were filming this for discovery channel about, you know, home rocketeers. Uh, but, uh, Mike Hughes's buddy and his publicist came out and said, yeah, we did that whole flat earth thing just to get press. He wasn't really a flat earther. We just were doing that. So we'd get somebody to come out and watch him do it.

And that's, that's been his shtick for a while. It wasn't real. So that's the problem. Wow. We keep striking out and moron of the week last, you know, last year hero last time was fake too. Yeah, I know. We have a fake flat earther. We got a fake flat earther. What are you going to do?

Uh, I don't know. Well, don't build your own rocket. Rest in peace. Mad Mike Hughes, not a flat earther. Feedback loop. Over at Patreon, we've got some new subscribers, Jamal, Nathan, Juwa, and Funday Poppet Show. So thanks guys and gals. Thank you. Over at PayPal, we've got Andrew Ryan, Tom, Mark, David, Joe, and Peter. I noticed a difference in the naming conventions here from Patreon to PayPal.

A little bit. Yeah. And Peter writes in avid fan from Sweden. Love the show and being an old web designer that bailed at about HTML 4.0, but still keeping one foot in the tech world. You inject a huge breath of fresh air in today's circus. Thanks for the great work and stay grumpy. Thank you very much, Peter. And Fabian writes in, is also a contributor. He says, paying up for the last 12 months. Stay grumpy. We shall, Fabian. Yes. And a couple of those donations in PayPal were quite

generous, including Fabian. So thank you so much. Thank you guys. Thank you so much. Over at Twitter, Moss 6502 gave us a couple of tweets here. My phone hotspot is named FBI van number, number, number. Home name is Dr. Who reference. I like the idea of renaming like a car. I had the T-Mobile family mode in my kid's phone, mostly for the limits. Teenagers have poor impulse control. I recently switched for just screen time. I give him the opportunity to grow and demonstrate trust.

I tried to now use find me, find my, but I have to admit I check when he's on trips. My cars and my parents' cars have the automatic gadget. Not sure what that is. Oh, it's a thing you plug into the fuse port, like that diagnostic port. No, it's a diagnostic port that they plug into. So it's a little box that phones home and gives you all of the different stats on the car, speed, distance, and that stuff.

Okay. My parents are still independent, but I like to check up on them. Yeah. Like I said on the show, when we were talking about it, I totally understand the impulse. And it's funny because I set up my mom's Eero home network with my phone rather than get her the app because she would never know how to do it. But I do feel weird when I get notifications that like somebody has joined the network. Like I know when her friends are over visiting her, it feels weird to me.

So I'm trying to find this one. It's called Life 360. That's the one I was talking about that my friend uses to track her daughter, who is now 17. So she's got one more year of using that app legally. Well, I've got more than a few years before I have need of anything like this. So we'll see what the, what the tech is like at that point in time when my kid gets his own phone.

Yep. And, uh, this next one is, uh, Spassaniac. Spassaniac? I can't really tell. Spassaniac. Check this out. Huh? Spassaniac. Spassaniac. Gesundheit. Grumps, check this out. It's hilarious. And it's, uh, this motherfucking website. I, we have covered this on the show before and it is fucking hilarious. So go check it out. And he ends up with, of course, deliveroo.

Yes. And whizzabuzz writes in, this is India's ruling political party intentionally using deep fakes to reach out to people in other languages. And it's a YouTube channel. Uh, leader speaks into, yeah, it's, it's a little weird. It's, it's a officially sanctioned governmental deep fake video.

Yeah. It's, it's definitely interesting and it's not good. It's not good. It's a terrible deep fake. Yeah. Yeah. Steven writes in Venmo did what with my data? My location was shared when I paid with the app. And this is a link over to USA today.

Yes. And they talk about how a lot of people have ditched cash, not me. And instead use smartphone apps and Venmo to pay for goods and services for the app is free. It takes just a second to initiate and finish a transaction. You don't have to write a check or pull out cash. It's great. But as you know, there's no such thing as free. And the author of this story then does a deep dive into finding out all the data that gets sent out and sold. Uh, she, she, I think it's a she maybe, uh, well, I'm just going to go with she, she discovered this week that when she

opened PayPal owned Venmo to pay her personal trainer and make sure to click private yet the app recorded GPS location, home address, trainer's name, and sent it off to braise a third party data collection firm. Think about that for a minute. Use the app to pay your bill and it returned some company you've never heard of now has your address and associations. How icky is that? It's supremely. It is very, I don't have Venmo. Uh, that definitely does appear to be a thing for a bit of the younger generation. My wife always tells me that her younger colleagues, like when

they go out for lunch are always like, send me a Venmo, me the cash for it. And she's like, I have PayPal. Can I send it to you via PayPal? Nope. Yeah. I've got it. I've got it because I've got, I've got a lot of people who want to like, you know, just clients who will Venmo me, Venmo me their payment. And, uh, I prefer, prefer, you know, ACH payments. Cause I don't have to pay for the processing fee, but, uh, yeah, I've got it on my phone just to have it. I've got Apple cash

on my phone. I got PayPal, all that stuff. And not once has anybody said, Hey, can you Apple cash me that? I know. I do wish people would start to use that because we know that they're pretty decent with their privacy and data. They're probably not selling it like Venmo does. Yeah. I mean, I've got, I, since I have the Apple credit card, I get my Apple cash account just keeps rising because it's all the cash back from everything I buy on it. Right. And I use it. I use my Apple

credit card daily because it just, all the places I go, I just, you know, boom, it's done. I just tap my watch or slap the card in and it just works. And I get, I get actual cash back right there. The nice thing about Apple cash, which is easy is you just hit one button and it transfers it to your bank account. Yeah. Which I then send back to Apple to pay for the bill that I just paid for. Now Gabbo sent us a link that made me think about you, Jason. Now we know that you started your, your IT and

your, your tech career working at a Kinko's, uh, manning a station, doing graphic design and all that stuff. And I think Jason, you're about to go full circle because, uh, Gabbo sent this link saying, wonder who else will try this best buyer. We work. And it's a link about Staples opening podcast studios in six Boston stores. Staples latest ploy to get people into its retail stores is podcast recording boosts. So they're going to put little boosts in there and Jason, you should apply because

they will have people on hand to give them professional advice and help them do their own podcasts. So once again, full circle started at Kinko's and then at Staples. Yeah, that ain't going to fucking happen. Here's the thing. A 60 minute session will cost $60 and the dedicated in-store specialist. Oh yeah. We'll be on hand to help with any recording issues.

Customers will have access to discounted hosting and distribution through Spreaker and cut rate editing through. We edit podcasts and they're going to have a road caster pro, uh, road microphones and sure headphones. So they're probably just bought the, the road caster pro with the new, uh, road mics, the podcaster mics, uh, which aren't very good. I got to say the road caster pro, uh, the greatest fucking thing in the world as we've talked about. My name is Jason. Don't use that mic.

Yeah. Seriously. B Y O M bring your own mic. Uh, yeah, no. And it's 60 bucks for a, for a 60 minute session. Uh, yeah, that ain't going to happen. We'll see how this goes. I'm guessing not well.

A third in command writes in Q the, well, if you've nothing to hide the brigade, and this is a link over to sky.com, Google users set to lose EU protections on their data due to Brexit unintended consequences. Yeah. Google plans to move accounts of its British users to a U S U S jurisdiction, making it easier for sensitive information of tens of millions of people to be accessed by UK authorities. Hmm. Hmm.

Let's see how that plays out. David tweets us. Why did you not like for all mankind? What's your general thing about Ronald D Moore? Some people seem to cream their pants over anything by him. Uh, look, Ronald D Moore is, is a really great writer. He's done great work with Star Trek. Uh, he created BSG, Battlestar Galactica, one of my favorite shows of all time. And then he completely ruined it by the last episode and not having any cohesive story, not having any plan, even though

the tagline for the, I'm not going to keep doing this. Go watch, go listen to any other podcasts that we've talked about this on. Uh, and I, for all mankind, I just didn't get into it really. Um, I watched two episodes of it, found myself not caring. So, yeah, it's one of those things where if there was literally nothing else to watch, I would watch it, but I've got so much in the queue and I'm, I'm okay right now. Maybe sometime I'll go back to it, but, uh, I'm just not,

I don't know. I, I don't know. And for me really, after the way that he ended BSG, I just, I refuse to watch anything that he does anymore. And it's just paid for by a streaming service. Granted, it's Apple, but I don't trust them to not end the show properly. And I know my big shtick was always, if you don't watch the show, they're not going to get the ratings and then they're going to cancel it.

So, you know, just give up, just give up and go crawl in a hole. But I don't know. I, I wasn't that into the trailer. I didn't, it didn't really grab me. Yeah. And, and I tried to watch two episodes and it didn't grab me at all either. So done and done. Yeah. And Brian with a Y writes in Facebook, dark mode, cure mode. No Morrissey mode, maybe, but how about Depeche mode? He wins the internet. How did we fucking miss that? I have no idea. When I saw that tweet, I just hit myself on

the face and I was like, how did we miss that? How did we fucking miss that? Brian, you win the internet. Yes, you do. Thank you. Send us your address. You get a sticker. Yes, please. And over at GOG.show, Mark writes in, Hey guys, I just wanted to suggest you watch dark on Netflix. There's two seasons. I know, I know your rules, but there's a third season coming and they announced it will be the last and final season. So we'll get a conclusion to this amazing story. A plus it's German. Also, if you guys are into comic books, I say graphic novels, even if you haven't read lock and key,

it's amazing. And Netflix ported it to the screen and first season came out beginning this month. They did a great job. And he says, PS, thank you for your answer about the security system. A couple of weeks ago, I have a pit bull. So I feel as safe as if I had a Rottweiler, Weiler, I am assuming that's Rottweiler. Yeah, no, that's what I said. Get a Rottweiler. Like Bam Bam. It's just that having a camera system recording outside activity just in case would be great. I'll dig a bit more and to find

some more info. Alrighty. All right. Yeah. I, well, if lock, if they, if Netflix did a good job with lock and key, then maybe I'll just watch the show and skip the comic books. So it's a little easier. Now getting back to, uh, Battlestar Galactica, Amanda writes in with a link to Battlestar Galacticast.

I know you guys have issues with Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica. That's mostly Brian, by the way. I loved it. And I wasn't pissed off by the ending as much as he was. I was still pissed, but not bad. But the following podcast is a really funny, and it also might answer one burning question you probably have left about the series. Tricia Helfer and Mark Bernardin are hysterically funny and occasionally alcohol influenced. Oh, a drunk number six. There you go. In our talking about the series

episode by episode with guests from the series and no small amount of irreverence. This is a sci-fi sponsored gig. I'm sorry. That's Siffy. Siffy sponsored gig, but it is, yeah, is actually still fun. So you might want to gamble a listen when they get to the last season as Ron Moore is a regular guest and might be able to answer that last burning question about how Battlestar ended. Namely, what the fuck was Ron Moore thinking? Geeky love to you both. I might just go listen to those just

because I know Brian's not going to. Nope. Yeah. I don't generally get into the behind the scenes thing as much because I kind of like, I like the product. I don't want to, you know, see how the sausage is made all the time, but it's been long enough where I am kind of curious about what the fuck Ron Moore was thinking. Well, you let me know. Report back to me. I'm not, well, I don't listen to the behind the scenes stuff. Anyways, I'm definitely, I'm tempted to listen to this because I love the show so much and I would love to hear them talking about each episode except for the finale. But it

would make me sad just to hear Trisha Helfer and not see her. She's gorgeous. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Yep. And Joe writes in, I wanted to get into photography as a hobby. After talking about this with a family member, they gifted me a Sony a 5,000 camera with two lenses. Is this a good camera to start with? Love the podcast. Grump on. Not really. Not really. I mean, if you just want to... Hello, my name is Jason. Don't use that mic and don't use that camera.

Yeah. Well, I mean, if you just want to like, you know, take pictures, it's fine. But if you want to learn the actual art of photography and the science of photography, you need something that has dials with manual mode. And this is basically a really nice point and shoot. That's the thing.

We call them in the business, PhD cameras. Push here, dummy. That's about it. You're not going to learn what apertures and f-stops are and shutter speeds and the correlation between the two along with ISO to actually how you create a photograph. So if you want to learn about photography, you can do that. But it's really better if you have something that has manual controls. But if you just want to take pretty pictures, great little camera for sure. Cool. Sherman writes in, hey, geeks. Not sure if

you've heard, but just in case you haven't, here's a PSA. Owning your own vehicle is so 2019. Nissan is already getting with the times. And this is a link over to The Verge. Nissan launches a subscription service starting at $699 a month. What's your car payment, Jason?

$200 less than that. Yep. Mine is about $200 less than that too. Yeah. And I have a very nice Ford Explorer and you have a BMW. Yes. Not a Nissan. Yeah. I don't own it. I technically mine's a lease, but I do plan to buy to own or lease to own. Okay. All right. Yes. But I just, I don't see the math working out for this stuff. And there's a reason that they're pushing it because they, the math works out for them. It works out for the house, not for

the customer. When signing up, customers will have to pay a $495 membership activation fee in addition to the first month subscription costs for whatever plan they choose. There are different levels of plans at different costs, depending on the types of car. They do get unlimited vehicle switches, which is kind of cool, uh, as well as delivery, cleaning, insurance, roadside assistance, and regular maintenance. Um, as somebody that has had a car for many, many years now, I can tell you that getting to the dealer to get a regular maintenance and all that sort of stuff can be

really quite the pain in the ass. Sometimes you just want to go to the Jiffy Lube. Well, yeah, I mean, for oil changes, I just go to, you know, look at Jiffy Lube type place, but for actual, like, you know, 10,000 mile, 15,000, whatever the different maintenance packages are, I take it back to my dealer. I just go and drop it off. They give me a ride home and they drop it off when they're done. I got no problem with it because Ford, you know, Ford service is fantastic. And the thing about switching cars all the time, screw that. I got

the car that I've been dreaming about for, you know, 10 years. I finally have one. The last thing I want to do is, is switch out my car. It's customized to me. Damn it. That's exactly what I was thinking. Yes. I've got, I've got my car so dialed in. It's, it greets me by name. When I step in my chair, my chair goes exactly where I want it to go. Everything swivels and moves. Look, my wife and I are significantly different in height. So we have presets for both of us. And as soon as we get in

the car with our fobs, it's all set and it automatically adjusts. You would have to read, there's so, so much customization in cars. Now I can't even imagine having to reset everything every couple of days, but this is, this is not meant for us. This is exactly, you know, they're trying to appeal to millennial consumers who are less inclined than previous generations to own or lease their own vehicles. They don't care about having a car. In fact, they'd rather just be in an Uber, but this is another way around it. So, um, the efforts have run into interference from dealers

who see subscriptions as undercutting their business model, rightfully so. I just don't think the math works out financially. I think you're, you're getting, you're getting hosed if you do this. Yeah. And what we found out is, okay, people who don't want to own cars and live the Uber lifestyle. A lot of these people don't even have driver's licenses. So you're, Oh, I don't think they did their, their market research on this at all. I mean, Porsche has a subscription model, but

they're Porsche, you know, if I want to Porsche every now and again, or just to, for my daily drive and I want to be able to swap around different Porsches, I can afford that. That's not something that this is Nissan for fuck's sake. Come on. Oh man. Even if, even if Ford did this, I wouldn't do it. I just, I want to own my damn car. Yeah, me too. All right. And Matt writes us, I think he really wants us to discuss this story because he wrote us and he tweeted us about this morning

grumps. Will you be covering the slick wraps hack in an upcoming show? How they apparently ignored a security experts warning. And the first people know about it was when the hackers sent emails to customers with their full address and phone numbers. Um, yeah, so I looked into this story. Slick wraps is a company that develops skins for Apple devices like the iPhone and Mac. Uh, they had, um, some bad stuff going on with their, with their website. Uh, there was some problems and, and something that needed to be fixed. Uh, but this one guy took it upon himself, uh, a security

researcher who goes by links on Twitter, who has now deleted all of his tweets. Uh, he tweeted them a ton of times saying that there was a vulnerability in its site, uh, linked to the create a skin feature. Uh, he informed, formed them about the data breach on February 15th and attempted to get in touch with the company several times over the course of last week as outlined in an article shared on medium that has now been suspended by medium. Uh, links had his emails ignored and was even blocked by slick wraps on Twitter after attempting to inform the site about the security vulnerabilities.

The says in this article that his interactions were not exactly polite and he was dealing with customer support staff that were clearly confused about what was going on based on the now removed medium article. Uh, but they did ignore the multiple warnings about its poor security before the data breach. However, February 15th, today is February 25th. Uh, 10 days is often not a lot of time for a big company to take care of things. So, uh, slicker apps are really a big company.

Well, no, but I mean, you know, well, that can also be a problem too. If it's a small company, what it may be, they didn't even, the security guy didn't even find out because it was going through customer support and they didn't know what the hell was going on. And I'm just saying, it's not a lot of guy. It's not, or maybe not. I'm just saying it's not a lot. Links did not give these people a lot of time before he decided to publish his article detailing the problems. So then the hackers got in, he's saying he did not involve himself in any way with that, but with the medium

post suspended and all of his tweets deleted, he may be in some hot water for the public way that he disclosed the vulnerabilities in the site. I personally see this as vigilante. Like he didn't really approach this well. He was pissed off and, uh, let his anger get the best of him. He should listen. He did. Yeah, he did. But there's, there's another side to this, which I thought was pretty fascinating. I saw a couple of security researchers post about slick wraps as well. And I didn't know

about the breach until I saw this slick wraps is apparently creating fake Twitter accounts and using bots to actually pump up their, their image in the Twitter sphere saying that slick wraps is great. Going to love them forever. Blah, you know, just all these gushing reviews with, uh, an account with zero followers and following zero people. And it's like, okay, come on, come on guys. You really

screwed the pooch on this. So I think, I think everybody here is to blame for something. I think everybody sucks in this story. Yeah. Everybody here sucks. They just call it suck wraps. Ben Sisko writes in, stay grumpy. Candle touch. The first smart connected real flame candle with a tap on your smartphone. You can now magically light up a real scented candle. Just what I want. Hackable

fire in my home. Everybody wants. And I swear to God, we've, we've, we talked about somebody that was doing this before. So I don't believe this is the first smart connected real flame candle. Maybe it'll be the first smart connected real flame candle if they actually meet their goals and actually ship.

Oh, that's right. It's on Kickstarter. Oh, the world may be burnt down by the time this thing actually ships. Yes. And Richard writes in thought you'd like to see this from the BBC. And this is an article about Barclays, which is a big bank over there. Scraps big brother staff tracking system. And this was pretty creepy. Yep. So the bank introduced a computer monitoring system last week, but faces stiff backlash from the staff. Uh, they said that the axing, the system was a response to colleague feedback,

uh, but would not say if it's permanent. It's a software company called sapience, which claims to create unprecedented transparency within companies. So basically it records absolutely everything you do at work. It determines when an employee goes offline for periods of time. Uh, the tools used to monitor people's effectiveness of the time at their desks. So Silky Carlo, director of privacy campaign group, big brother watch said intrusive monitoring deprived staff of privacy in the workplace.

So his name is Silky Carlo, by the way, which is pretty awesome. Great name, right? Managers would never get away with breathing down employees. Next personally monitoring their screens or logging toilet and water breaks. She said the availability of technology to monitor staff in this way does not make it any more acceptable. And I do agree with that. So glad that there was pushback and they stopped using the system. Sleep too little writes in to start. I started on episode one in overcast. Wow.

Just wow. You two sounds so young and mildly grumpy. I drive a tractor trailer. So I have 11 hours of driving in my day to listen to podcasts. So I started from the beginning four episodes in, and I love the backstory for GOG. I do think I need to find moose drool. Now moose drool is no, you don't. It's terrible. It's terrible beer. Moose drool is terrible. Uh, one last thing. Would it be better

or easier for GOG if I swap from PayPal to Patreon? Stay grumpy. Uh, it's up to you. Honestly, uh, you know, it's the whole thing about releasing shows without ads. We'll probably end up doing on Patreon because for us, it's, it's like a no brainer. I make the shows without ads anyway. So we're just going to start publishing them there since, uh, it's not going to really dig into our ad revenue since we have so few Patreon subscribers, you know? Um, so yeah, it's up to you. We get the money no matter

what. And the, the fees to us are exactly the same. Yep. So whatever's easier for anybody who's donating is, is what I say at this point. All right. And Chiago writes us, Hey grumps, TLDR scientists are doing it right. Go learn about how modern drug discovery works. So he takes us to task for, uh, some of our comments in episode 414 when we were talking about the AI used for discovering drugs for coronavirus and has a very lengthy list about how that's exactly the way it should be

working. So, all right. Thank you. We stand corrected. Okay. Uh, and he's from Portugal. Well, thank you very much. And no sec writes in about those fact checkers. Facebook has hired. Australia has 17 million Facebook users and seven Facebook fact checkers. Wow. Yeah. They, they got into the math on this, which is pretty crazy. So, uh, uh, between those seven, uh, fact

checkers in Australia, they've completed 222 fact checks since April, 2019. That's about one check every one and a half days on average. So yeah, not a lot of fact checking going on anywhere. Awesome. And Bladabert writes in, I am the creator of the unofficial subreddit. I created another account to be dedicated as a bot that checks the RSS feed for new episodes and submits them as links to the subreddit.

The idea was twofold. One, to learn a little more Python and two, to give people a place to chat or rant about your episodes, sources, and content. As a father of three, I barely had time to create that much. I am perfectly happy to add in people to the sub to manage it or transfer it over to you guys. My apologies. If I stepped on any toes as a side note, you guys are awesome. Please keep grumping on.

Uh, you didn't step on any toes. We were quite flattered. So thank you for doing that. Uh, but as we've talked about, there wasn't ever any interest, so you can keep it. Yeah. It's all yours. It's all yours. I was going to give you the official one if you wanted it, but it sounds like nobody, ain't nobody got time for that. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, if it, yeah, the offer is still out there. If anybody wants to take over the official grumpy old geek subreddit, be, be our guest. The

nobody has been banging down our door to have us on Reddit. I mean, in this almost seven years, we've been doing this. We have gotten a full total of wait for it. Zero requests to start publishing shit on Reddit. Yeah. Uh, so yeah, we're, we're good. We're good. And Nate writes in, in a recent episode, four one, four, maybe Jason mentioned having a hard time keeping track of recurring donations on PayPal. Remember to breathe Jason. I thought no way they don't support that.

And went looking, but I admit the PayPal activity tab was definitely lacking. And he sends us a bunch of stuff on the recurring payments profile report and, uh, how you can get some stuff through the developer, the developer side of things. And, um, so thanks for that. We appreciate it. And, uh, I looked into it and what's really weird as a, as a company for PayPal to offer these, these advanced, uh, things, but you have to request them. They don't just give them to you. So

I'm going to put in a request and see what happens if the PayPal has a long history of never, ever getting back to me. So we'll see what happens. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, you can, yeah, it's, it's one of those things where, you know, if we could automate it and get like a, a readout in a spreadsheet where we could see who's up to date, who's not that way we could, you know, build some kind of system to get people to do it. There are other services out there by the way that I'm looking into that do let

people donate and we can create private feeds for, but the thing about it is they all cost more than we would be getting through either Patreon or PayPal. So we would actually be getting less and doing more work. And also, I don't know about you, Brian, no, I don't know about you, Brian, but I, I, how many emails have you gotten about anybody complaining about the, uh, or desiring the ad free feed versus the ad feed? Um, none. Yeah. So, I mean, if it's something that you guys are

really, really interested in, uh, like I said, I will probably end up doing it on Patreon just to do it. So it's out there. So if you really care about that, you can get them through Patreon. But for the most part right now, it's like, uh, yeah, the process of trying to do it for PayPal people is just going to be too, too, too involved. Yeah. And it would, it would require us to write code.

Ooh, we know we're not doing that shit again. No, thank you. Yeah. And Lars writes us, uh, I can't remember what I had for breakfast today yet. Somehow I can recall Jason making an offhand comment several months ago about bug splatters on his windshield being less and less over the years.

Love your show. And he sends us a link from the Guardian. The car splatometer tests reveal a huge decline in number of insects. There've been two studies on this. So sometimes when we say shit out of our ass, it is correct. So the research adds to growing evidence of what some scientists have called an insect apocalypse, which is threatening a collapse in the natural world, which is not good.

So there was two surveys. The first was in rural Denmark, used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance of insects. That is not good. The second survey in the UK County of Kent in 2019 examined splats in a grid placed over car registration plates known as a splatometer. This revealed 50% fewer impacts than in 2014. Uh, the research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if they're less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that

modern cars actually hit slightly more insects. So there's interesting, less insects. That's funny. Cause that's the one thing that I was thinking about. I'm like, okay, maybe modern aerodynamics would just bounce the bugs off, but you know, you guess you're going 70 miles an hour. There's really not a whole lot of time to move a bug out of the way. Yeah. But yeah, that's exactly about what I've seen. 80% because it used to be. Yeah. I'm about to take a road trip,

so I will have some firsthand, uh, acknowledge. I'll tell you how many bugs I get. I got to get one of these splatometers. Yeah. You need a splatometer. Uh, see if BMW has one for you. Um, you're going to Palm Springs, right? I know I'm going to a Phoenix. I'm going to go see a Dodgers training game. Yes. Yeah. Those trips from when you get outside of LA and start to get into the desert. That's where I used to have the most insects. And now like if I would go from Los

Angeles to San Francisco, just coming over the hill on the five coming out. Yeah. Just on the grapevine. I'd have to stop at the first gas station, um, and, and wipe my windshield off. And I was inundated with bugs when I got out. Now I get off there, no bugs, no nothing. It is creepy. I mean, it's, it's really scary. It is very, and we've got one from Michaela. America has an extremely disturbing sex toy problem, which is a link to an article over at inverse.com.

And she gives us her comments on it. Why you'd want regulation in the sex toy industry. There's like none right now, which has made an interesting sub market for sex toy reviewers being more necessary. But these people have to put the most sensitive parts of themselves on the line for content. So I can know whether a vibrator will become a bacterial cesspool, even after I clean it properly, because the material is wrong. This article I've attached is explains it pretty well,

though. There's a paragraph in here that gives the why, but not the why for that. Why the reason sex toys are so poorly regulated is because their manufacturers take advantage of a simple labeling loophole that categorizes the vast majority of sex toys as novelty items, which unlike medical devices or foods aren't subject to mandated testing. This allows manufacturers to skirt all medical regulations and freely sell untested products. The reason they're labeled novelty items is so that they can be sold in and shipped to

certain states because shocker, church and state separation doesn't actually exist in some places. And she goes on to say, dear government, let me buy my fuck toys in peace. It's hard to date and or hook up when you work an overnight or weekend shift. But please let me be able to buy said fuck toys without worrying if they will poison my vagina. Thank you. Regulation, Jason. I'm big on regulation.

It's funny. I used to know a lot of sex toy reviewers when I lived in San Francisco because there seems to be an inordinate amount of them there. And yeah, because I also hung out with Violet Blue, who's a very big sex blogger. So I know that there is a there is a definite market for people who review these things. And yeah, it can get kind of sketchy sometimes. So I guess you're right, Brent. We need regulation on our fuck toys. That's right. And you've got a link here that Eric Hundley, I guess, sent us. I haven't seen this one. It's a YouTube video. So it's a YouTube

video from George Hotz. Fully self-driving cars are a scam and Silicon Valley needs to die. I'm putting this in here for anybody that wants to go check it out. It's like over 20 minutes and I didn't have time to watch it before I put it in here. But Eric watched it and said it's right up our alley. So I'm guessing it's right up our alley for our audience. So check it out because I love the title. Silicon Valley needs to die. And over at iTunes, we have a five star rating from

Swornat. It says, one of my go to feeds in the morning. I only discovered this podcast a year ago, and it quickly became one of the two default podcasts to start my morning. The other being never not funny. It's concise, funny and informative. I'm a bit older, but I still share most of their cultural references, except recent music, which I lost track of around 1990. I've been using computers since the time share teletypes in my high school math office using yellow punch tape to save programs running the Moonlander and Star Trek games in the mid 70s. Nice. After suffering with all sorts of

operating systems, especially Windows, I finally got my own Mac 15 years ago. Thanks to Jason and Brian for all the laughs and entertainment. P.S. Even though I'm writing this on iTunes, I listened via the best podcast app in the world. Overcast. I've tried them all and I star everyone. Thank you.

Thank you very much. And the next one comes from Nathan Tinsman. And he says, proof I'm not alone. This is another five star. I may not agree with some of the political opinions of the hosts, but I can agree with most everything else. This is by far my favorite podcast. It has been a highlight of my week during some really rough times. The balance of news, commentary, tech and occasional politics, tech related. See, he gets it. He's amazing. A true class act and a true pleasure.

Thank you, gents. Well, thank you, Nathan, for not unsubscribing in a hate rage like some people do because we don't agree on some things. Yes, we appreciate that. And one of the best things about doing this podcast is when we hear from you guys and you tell us that we helped you through a rough time. Thank you so much. That's immensely gratifying. Yeah, we really, really appreciate it. We're glad we can actually help someone do something. Yeah. 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 if you're on Overcast, mash that star button. Just a reminder, I am doing that live stream with Eric Hundley from the Unstructured Podcast on Thursday, February 27th. And this is a 2020. If you're listening to us in the future, it's 230 PST

and 530 EST. And you can just go to jpd.me slash live for the link. Or if you follow me on Twitter, I'm sure I'll post it up there a couple times and you can do it from there and check it out. You know, I don't generally do things on camera, so I'm sure it's going to be uncomfortable. But hey, what the hell? You know, I might have to have a few white claws for this one. So you might get drunk, Jason, on the live stream. Oh, and I want to give a quick shout out to a friend of the show,

Andy Stochansky. He's actually going to be on the show on the next episode. So if you have any questions for him, he does our outro music. He's a musician played with Annie DeFranco, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're going to talk a little bit about how tech has changed in the music industry since he started. So if you have any questions for Andy or about the music industry, get them to us basically today, the day this comes out, because we're going to record a bit early because of all of our schedules. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To 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 g.show slash 417. Not sure what area code that is. I figured you were going to look it up. I was going to. I should have looked it up. That's how I had a thing going now. Damn. Drop the ball. 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. 417 actually serves the Southwest quadrant of Missouri. So hello to any listeners in Missouri. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings,

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