424: Strategic TP Reserve

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. How's your mood, Jason? My mood is interesting. Guess what I had to do last night. What's that? I had to go to my local liquor store and help with security and since because they're friends of mine.

And as soon as this stay in place order came down from the mayor of Los Angeles that said, hey, everybody's got to stay in now. And then Gavin Newsom says, Eric Garcetti, hold my beer and locked down the entire state. My friend had a panic attack because he's there by himself and they have no security, no protection or anything.

So he called a bunch of his guys up to come and help out. And I just I popped in for a minute because I'm not staying in a fucking liquor store in a rush because, you know, we're in a lockdown for a reason. So what I ended up doing was I gave him my my riot gun because, you know, if he's going to get robbed, he's going to get robbed.

That's not on me. But there are a lot of people that might just get a little rowdy and threaten him for things and try and steal things. So I gave him my paintball gun with my riot rounds and I'm like, here you go, brother. Go with God. I'm out. I'm going to go back home because this ain't my scene.

So, yeah. Everybody needs to calm down, please. This is a that kind of stuff isn't going to help. Everybody relax. I hope everybody is going to stay calm and relax. This is strange times that we're living in. You have 40 million people here in California all on lockdown. To me, this is not very different.

The last time I did anything that wouldn't be considered OK under lockdown was going to see you and recording a podcast. I've been living this life for a while now. It's so funny. They sent the list of acceptable activities and I'm like, that's pretty much everything I already do.

I think I'm OK. Yeah. So everybody calm down. Stay at home. Take walks. Walks are totally acceptable. Go on a bike ride. That's totally acceptable. You know, it was necessary. The numbers aren't great. We need to bash them down as much as we can.

So we got to do this. And my son is walking into the room right now. I feel like that North Korean guy. Hi, buddy. You can't find your purse. Oh, I think it's in your room. See, this is this is the new reality, everyone. We're learning new things about Brian's kids.

He's looking for his purse. Well, he has a little pouch he got from Hawaii that he puts things like chapstick in. So anyways, my wife just got him. So there we go. We'll try to do this podcast as best we can. Yeah, it's a it's a whole new world right now, everybody.

So it's fine. We're going to be fine. Stores are stocked back up. They're fine. The only things open are grocery stores and pharmacies and things of that nature. Don't go out if you don't have to take a walk to clear your mind. We're going to talk about all this stuff because we are going to do the work from home tips in this episode.

I just want to be clear what I realized last night. And I think everybody is starting to realize we have very rapidly in the space of a week learned that we have fair four very distinct elements of society that are absolutely essential. Obviously, we have the emergency services, your doctors, your nurses, your police, etc.

They're on the front line. Thankfully, they're mostly getting paid pretty well. They have decent health care. They are overworked in general and basically are drop dead tired in times of crisis like this. I have a couple of friends that work in health industries, a couple of friends that are nurses. They are freaking out right now.

So if you come in contact with any of these people, be nice and be kind. The second group, teachers and child care. Boy, if you have kids, you know that now because it's been a week. They are vastly underpaid. And if you have kids, oh, you know they're underpaid now.

I've seen a lot of memes and ideas going around going, teachers need to make a million dollars a year. And it's a crime that they aren't because this is hard. The next industry that we need, service industry, our bars and our restaurants, etc. They are underpaid as well.

They have no health care. They live off of tips. There is no safety net when we say shut down their businesses. They are screwed right now. And the fourth element, which didn't exist until recently, the fucking gig economy. They bring us shit so they can hopefully find it and drop it off on the end of the bridge.

They have no health care. They are barely making a living wage. And we are relying on them now. Basically, three quarters of the four, three of the four that we are banking our survival on right now are people that are barely surviving themselves. Good job, capitalism.

Yeah, there we go. There we go. So, tip generously, people. Tip generously. Indeed. In other people behaving badly news, which is, oh, God, keeps coming. The ROQ here in Los Angeles fired their entire morning show team.

This is the formerly Kevin and Bean show that was on the air for 30 years. And so, Kevin Ryder stuck around. So, it was Kevin in the morning. And then just unceremoniously, as all this was going on, they got a phone call and said, yeah, I think we're going to do something different.

We're going to take the show in a new direction. You guys, shelter at home and you're not getting paid. Bye-bye. Because there's no better time than to take away comforts that we've had for years. I mean, a lot of people have listened to his show for 30 years. So, that's awesome. Well done. I love Jimmy Kimmel's tweet.

He's just like, yeah, just what people want in a time of crisis to lose the voices of friends that they've relied on for 30 years or something to that effect. But it's like, you know, people in crisis want to hear their friends and people that they have come to rely on. Yes, yes. And that's honestly the only reason we're still doing this today because I would rather be in bed right now with a Pedialyte enema because I feel like crap.

Yeah. Well, I've got something to bring us all together. Not since Smash Mouth went insane on Twitter have we had quite a meltdown from a band. And it is bringing the nation together. The headline says, in a time of crisis, a panicked nation comes together to watch new metal band Trapped meltdown on Twitter.

Now, I don't personally remember this band, but I do like the little intro that they wrote here. Do you remember early aughts new metal band Trapped? Of course you do. They were on your high school wrestling team playlist and probably an extreme yogurt commercial or two. I've never heard of their 2002 hit single, Headstrong, but I wouldn't.

But they went full on nuts on Twitter the other day, sending out roughly 900 tweets in 48 hours, almost as much as our president. Jesus, 900. It accounts for over one fifth of their total tweet output ever. So they got in a spectacular Twitter meltdown.

The link is in the show notes with some of the highlights, so you don't have to wade through all of it. But it is a pro-Trump, anti-victim mentality tantrum from the Poor Man's Drowning Pool, which is another new metal band. It's a good joke if you know the bands, but I don't. Yes, because if anything can heal our fractured nation in this time of great uncertainty, it's watching Trapped absolutely lose it.

So it's very funny. I don't know if you've read some of these things. I haven't. No, I'll have to go through and check those out. It will give you a moment of zen. In the news.

As if everything isn't bad enough, all the memes are basically saying, hey, you know, our great-grandparents had to go to war. We just have to sit in front of the TV to stay safe. We might be losing our HD, Jason. Well, it's already happened in the European Union.

Netflix is cutting down the bandwidth by 25% to manage the surge. Yes. So Netflix will be coming in glorious SD on our TVs for the near future. Wow. Because we're all watching too damn much. That's great. Well, here's a pro tip.

Download everything from Netflix to your iPad or whatnot to then stream it to your TV. So if you, and especially if you have kids and you have to watch something over and over and over again, like Frozen 2 for the 7,000th time, just get a local copy and, you know, stay off the network.

Well, luckily Frozen 2 is on Disney Plus and they haven't throttled their bandwidth yet. And we have a new contender for eggs are good, no eggs are bad, perhaps. We'll see how this plays out. But over the past few days, social media has lit up with reports picked up by media outlets that taking drugs like ibuprofen or, you know, commonly known as Advil to ease the symptoms from the coronavirus could actually worsen the progress of the illness.

However, most infectious disease experts say there's no good scientific evidence at this point whatsoever to support that claim. So basically a tweet from the French health minister, Olivier Véran, over the weekend said not to take these drugs, that they make it actually worse.

This warning was also included in a bulletin from the French health ministry, which said that the patients should instead use basically Tylenol, not Advil. But the European Medicines Agency issued a statement on Wednesday saying it's monitoring it, we're looking into it, but there is currently no scientific evidence whatsoever establishing a link between ibuprofen and the worsening of COVID-19.

Yay. Okay, well, that's interesting. Yeah, so I don't know, maybe the French medical system has a lot of stock in Tylenol. Yeah, could be, could be. We'll be talking about stock shenanigans shortly. Alrighty then. And because it couldn't happen at a better time, Facebook has unleashed their machine learning and is blocking wrong news articles about the coronavirus pandemic, basically by blocking all news articles that we posted about the coronavirus epidemic.

I personally have had four of my posts put into Facebook quarantine, as it were. As of this morning, they have unleashed them all because, you know, they realized they screwed up really badly. But, I mean, talk about horrific timing. So it's basically a bug in their spam filters. And basically anybody that posted any news articles, reputable or not, got them blocked.

Well, here's the other funny thing. I got this one from YouTube the other day, that YouTube is sending all of their moderators home and that everything that is going to get blocked is going to be blocked by their artificial intelligence. And they admitted that their artificial intelligence isn't actually that good.

So there will be no human interaction for quite some time while everybody is still getting set up to work from home because, you know, they don't let people usually moderate from home because there are safeguards in place. So people can't, like, steal videos and things like that. But the fun part is, yeah, that they just said, yeah, guess what?

Our algorithms suck and your stuff's going to get blocked for any reason whatsoever that we just might not have any introspection in. So just bear with us. Yeah. AI is people. This is definitely going to prove it.

Brian, we're going to have some tips for the people on how to work from home from professionals. What do you got first? Well, first, we got a message. So this will lead us in pretty well. And I didn't want to save this for feedback because we're doing this right now. Bilbo wrote us, how do I keep personal life separated from work at home?

I feel like whenever I sit in my apartment, I can't get in the mindset that I'm at work and not at home. And then afterwards, I have a hard time separating from my work. Well, let's get into that. So we're going to go straight through and do all of our tips in general right now. Jason and I have both been working from home for probably almost, well, I've been doing it for over 20 years now, which is frightening.

You've been doing it for just about as long, if not as long. So yeah, we know how to do this, people. Now, a caveat on that. I know it's pretty much the same for Jason as it always was right now. Let me tell you, working from home with your wife working from home and your three-year-old is a whole different ballgame.

I'm still struggling with it. I'm sure most people are. It's hard. It's really hard. All these tips will still work. They will be helpful. But, you know, you got to have a certain degree of flexibility when your entire family is home and trying to do the same thing.

It is hard, people. It's a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. So let's get into it. The very first important thing that you will learn about working from home and making it work for you is scheduling, scheduling, scheduling. Everything is scheduling.

Keep it safe. Keep it normal. Keep it regular. Wake up at the normal time that you would normally wake up. Schedule out everything. Check your emails at a certain time. Check social media at a certain time. Don't do it all day long. Build in breaks and play times.

Schedule email checks. Like I said, schedule times that you're going to do responses. Take a full lunch break. If you can, take a walk. Walk down to a local restaurant. Well, I guess that's off now. There's no more than walking down to local restaurants to pick up food, which you could have done about two days ago.

But when that comes back, do that. Build in your chores into the day so you do not get distracted because you will get distracted. It's human nature. As soon as you hit a work task that you don't really want to do, you're going to notice the pile of laundry and you're going to go start it. Do not do that.

Build it into an entire schedule for your day. I cannot stress how important that is. Like if you wrote down, don't go down the pajama hole. Yeah. Dude, you can't do that. Dress for success. You have to.

If you start to go down the pajama hole, man, then the next thing you know, you're walking around naked in flip flops with, you know, half of a beard and smell like a, you know, just smell like a Greyhound bus. You need to not go down the pajama hole. Wake up and put on your regular big boy clothes or big girl clothes.

Yes, I 100% agree. I made a joke to my wife this morning that when we were both rolling out of bed, time to put on our clothes for the days that ended. Why? Don't do that. Get dressed. Get dressed like you're going to work. It's really important. It's important to keep things as normal as possible.

You need to create a home office somewhere. I know it's difficult. I know it's going to be hard, but you need to set up a space that is your workspace and you work from there and you only work from there every day that you are working from home. You go to that spot. Do not make that the kitchen.

That should not be the kitchen. That should not be the kitchen because you will gain 10 to 15 pounds during this time period if you do. Yeah, because the first thing, besides going down the pajama hole, you go down the snack hole and it's like, oh, I can just have a little snack. I can just have a little snack.

I can just have a little snack. And then the next thing you know, you look like me. So don't do it, people. Yes, we've all we've we've Jason and I have been through these traps. We know and I cannot stress enough. And this should be a no brainer. You do not drink during the day while you're working. Speak for your fucking self.

Well, I think it's important. Wait and give it. Give it to yourself as a as a as a, you know, gift for getting through the day. You can have a glass of wine or whatever a treat. Yes. Do not start doing it during the day because that is bad and people will notice. Keep your house absolutely spotless.

Again, building it into your schedule. Your schedule isn't just for your work day. Your schedule should be for your whole day. You need this now more than ever. You really do. You should work out at the same time every day. Take a shower at the same time every day. Build in going through your house and keeping it clean at the end of the work day.

You will appreciate it because nothing breaks morale more than sitting around in a dumpy place. And that will happen. It's spotless and my house is absolutely spotless because other, you know, you let one little thing go and then there it goes. It's out the it's out the window.

And then the next thing you know, you're on an episode of hoarders and they're wheeling you out of your house. But it's it's one of those things where it's like I can't work on a cluttered desk, period. And you can't think in a cluttered house. And the last thing you need right now is a cluttered house.

And I know I know for some people that might be the norm already that they have a very cluttered house. But since you're going to be there all the time, take care of it. Adulting. Be an adult. Pick up after yourself. You want to you know, you should be ready for a visit from the queen at any given time.

That's all I got to say. And this may or may not apply to you specifically out there. But if you're somebody who's kind of maybe an independent contractor or you're running your own show, now is the perfect time to set up a assistant email address that is not your personal or work email address and give general have general things go to that and check that less.

Also, it creates a sense of separation. You can kind of be a jerk using that assistant email address and have it not be you personally. Well, man, now you just gave away one of the greatest secrets of all time. Yeah, dude, you and I would not have survived without the fake assistants. Damn it, man.

Judy's such a bitch, man. I'm the nice guy. It's good cop, bad cop. Exactly. It is very good. Social checking in is extremely important as we're in these lockdowns and we are not seeing people in person. But again, schedule, schedule, schedule.

Build that into the day. I know it may not seem like a big deal to hop onto Facebook and check in and see what's going on and maybe write a couple messages to friends. Build that into your day. I found that come 4 or 5 p.m. is about when I hit my limits for work stuff and that's when other people seem to come online as well.

So I basically have just built in an hour at about 4.30 or so where I hop online and talk to people and stay in touch and it's a good thing. I would say, again, to people that are just trying to work from home for the first time, go easy on yourself a bit. I'm sure not many of you got anything done this week.

That's okay. That's to be expected. You are setting up into a completely new environment and something you've never done before. It will take some time. Give yourself a break. Realize you're not going to be as productive as you were at the office. It's just not going to happen. Your bosses understand that and know that too, or at least the good ones do.

And here's another pro tip that got me through many, many, many, many rough patches. Turn off the news for starters because you're just going to keep looking up and you're going to stress about that and then you're just not going to get anything done. But also, my favorite thing that I used to do, especially in the winters in Chicago when I'd be stuck in the house for seven or eight days at a time because I couldn't leave, find your favorite movie that you've watched a million times and just put it on loop in the background.

It is the background movie trick. And it's one of those things that, you know, like Shaun of the Dead has played in my house hundreds of times because I just have it on in the background. I love that movie, The Hunt for Red October. Absolutely. And it's just like a blanket.

You've got people around you. And this is mainly for a lot of people who are going to be working from home alone. And as what, you know, because I was a single guy working from home alone and idiot me, I moved to Chicago right before winter with a 300 ZX, 350 horsepower sports car, not realizing that those don't work well in the snow.

So I was literally stuck at home for seven days with no outside contact. And some of these tricks got me through it. And you're going to find if you get through this stuff and you have downtime, this can be possibly the most productive time in your life.

I wrote on that one time when I was locked down, I wrote blogrolling.com because I had nothing else to do. And I ended up turning it into a business and sold it. And it kind of launched my career. So and I also was watching a lot of tech TV at the time.

That's when I met Chris Perillo and that whole change the whole trajectory of my career, career, too, because I reached out to him when he had a problem. So I made friends while I was still stuck inside. You can still make new friends, which is kind of fun. You can. That's a really good point, you know, to to Jason's points that he was just making.

If you're not a movie guy, music and make sure that you're listening to albums that you know so well. Don't listen to new stuff. Don't listen to things that are going to challenge you or take you away. You basically just want a mental background going on. So any album that you know and love, put it on repeat.

And my I got to love Rammstein during one of those periods because I would just play Rammstein on repeat because it was in German. And my German is nicht gut. No, it's not. Exactly. So what it did was it didn't activate my brain parts where I was trying to listen to the lyrics.

And, you know, fortunately, with Rammstein, you can just, you know, grunt along with it in the good parts. But having something like that in the background that keeps you jazzed that you just, you know, so in and out, it just becomes, you know, it just but it keeps you going. And it doesn't you don't have silence.

You don't have that lonely silence because that's the fucking worst part is that lonely silence. If you're stuck at home alone for long periods of time. Yeah. And getting back to giving yourself a break and not not not beating yourself over the head. I've seen so many people posting, oh, my God, this is, you know, I'm going to work from home, but I'm also going to do so much self-improvement.

I'm going to I'm going to get in the best shape of my life and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. Hold your damn horses. Calm down. Slow your roll, guys. Slow your roll. This is going to be so challenging already. It's great. You should build in workouts. You should start doing that.

You should have some goals. To Jason's point, this can be a very productive time. Again, build it into your schedule. Don't go crazy with it. Relax and build build into your schedule something that you wanted to do. Say you've always wanted to play guitar. Say you wanted to learn how to draw.

There has never been a better time for this because everybody is stuck at home and the professionals that are doing this are doing live classes just to do it because they have to do something. There's never been a better time to pick up something. So build that into your schedule. A half an hour a day. Pick some hobby that you've always wanted to do.

Find someone online that's teaching it. There are people out there teaching it for free now. They are also going batshit crazy in their house and will appreciate the interactions with you. Never been a better time for this. I have Skillshare and I have Masterclass.

Those are the two things that I used when I need to learn something. And now you can just kick back and do it. And don't beat yourself up over this because, yes, it is going to suck for the first couple weeks, period. You're not going to get good at this for quite some time.

This is like any habit change. You know, it's going to take time and you're going to fail at it a bunch. That's why, to your point, Brian, people are like, I'm just going to, you know, self-improvement. There's a thing about self-improvement that nobody really talks about but has happened to a lot of people in the business.

And it's the snapback effect. And what it is is you try and try and try so hard you don't get there and then you end up worse than you already were because you have these expectations in your head. Don't sit around and read Tony Robbins for fuck's sake. You know, what you want to do is you want to find something that you want to be good at.

Not, you know, trust me, you're not going to become a fucking coronavirus influencer during this. But don't beat yourself up. And every now and again, just take a fuck it day. You know, if you don't have to work, sit around, eat some ice cream in your pajamas.

You get, you know, it's like a cheat day, but you could just call it a fuck it day. I call them mental health days. They're basically mental health days and you're going to need them. To that point, if you've got a manager, now be honest. Be honest with your bosses, with your managers.

Be honest with your co-workers about what's going on. Don't lie saying that you're working on a project if you haven't worked on it. This is, everybody's going to, everybody's going to get a little leeway right now. But it's really important for any business that everybody stays honest with what's actually going on.

If you are having a problem working from home, talk to your managers and bosses about it. They may have solutions. They may be able to help you out. They may tell you, go ahead and take two days off. Or they may say, well, I'm not going to, you've still got a job, but I need to take you off this project because it's critical.

Be honest with what's going on in your life, in your office, with your bosses right now. It's extremely important to have open lines of communication. Because they're also going through the same thing. So you might be able to commiserate and share some tips and tricks with them. Yep.

And if you've got office tools of communication like Slack or Teams or whatever, I would talk to your bosses about setting up a mindless chatter one. Again, schedule that in. But it's important. You don't have that water cooler effect going on anymore. And those are really important for office morale.

So create a virtual one. It's funny. In Jordan Harbinger's Slack, we actually have a side channel just called Jason's Dogs. Because I can just post pictures of my dogs and everybody can post pictures of their dogs and cats just for fun. Yeah. And it's a lighthearted channel that doesn't mean anything.

And you can post to it willy-nilly and it doesn't interrupt the business conversation. It's really good. And I do want to say, for me personally, the Pomodoro technique is what I live by. I do 40-minute work sprints and 20-minute non-works. So I don't think about anything work for that 20 minutes.

I go play with my dog, do something, clean the house, clean the kitchen, put the dishes away, whatever. But that 20 minutes is sacrosanct for me to not think about work. Because then when I come back for the next 40-minute sprint, it's all work. I don't think about anything else. It's like, you know, shut the door, Judy.

I'm busy. That technique worked wonderfully for me when I was working home alone. It does not work for me anymore, but I highly recommend it. Again, it's part of the scheduling, scheduling, scheduling. Build it in. 40 minutes and then for 20 minutes, have one of those tasks that you want to do. You clean up, you do some laundry, you start the dishwasher, you take a quick online course about guitar, whatever.

I've found the Pomodoro technique to be vastly helpful in the day. But let's quickly talk about people that can't do that. If you are a parent and you are staying home and you have a spouse that is working too, one of the things that we've quickly discovered, the educational system has done a wonderful job of quickly pivoting to online learning in a time of need.

But as every parent is discovering, you can't just let your kids sit there and do it by themselves. It doesn't work. You have to monitor. You have to be there. Particularly, I mean, that's true for even older kids. I've had a lot of friends tell me that have kids in high school. They can't just let their kids sit there by themselves and do the work.

They don't really do it. You have to keep your eyes on them. And what that means for you as a parent, hopefully not a single parent because then you're kind of screwed. You'll be working at night, I suppose. If you are married, if you have a spouse, what you need to start doing now, and this is what my wife and I are doing, is we're splitting up our days.

We're kind of using a Pomodoro technique to do that. Two hours, she's working, locked in the bedroom, in our little home office, and I'm taking care of the kid, doing chores, whatever. And then we switch off. So both of us get a chance to work throughout the day. You're probably going to have to do that if you're home with kids, with your spouse.

It's schedule, schedule, schedule. And don't change that schedule unless you absolutely have to. Conference calls and things like that, things will come up. But stick to the schedule as much as possible and divvy up your day, divvy up the childcare, divvy up everything. And speaking of being a parent at home, I have collected a ton of resources that I've learned from my friends over the past couple days.

A lot of these have been made free or opened up to help those of us in the direst need, us working from home parents. I have some sample schedules for kids from both the Huffington Post. I know they just collected a bunch of them. And the Khan Academy schedules for children from 4 to 18. Those will be in the show notes.

I have an entire list of education companies offering free subscriptions due to school closings. Many of these do require that your school reach out to the companies to get logins for your school system just for basic verification. And, of course, I'm sure they'll collect some stats and tracking to up their advertising in areas that really respond to it.

But whatever, it's okay. I have some different links all over the place that friends have recommended to me using stories to continue the learning at home from in educa. It seems to be really good. Khan Academy is highly recommended to have basically online lesson plans that students do every day.

I think they should rebrand it as Khan Academy. Yes, I think they should, too. So fancy pants. I've started using Scholastic Learning at Home, which is free for now. Day-by-day projects from pre-K through the sixth grade. I thought that's been great. You will need down times all the time.

Something you can do that is great is Operation Storytime, which is at StorylineOnline.net. These are celebrities and authors reading stories, and it has been wonderful so far. My kid has sat down and really enjoyed them. Like I mentioned earlier, there are lots of people just basically doing free classes online right now.

Little Rebel Classes on Instagram has been doing free toddler music classes from Toronto that Lucas has really been enjoying. A friend of mine recommended Jason Mesh's music, which is he's doing a daily kids music hour. All these links are in the show notes. Taking free drawing classes from famous illustrators.

There's a whole bunch of illustrators doing free drawing classes right now. That link's in the show notes. Lunch Doodles with Mo Williams. This was highly recommended as well. YouTube channel, free drawing classes. The Cincinnati Zoo is doing daily safaris on Facebook Live. These have been wonderful for the younger kids.

Lucas is really enjoying it. Every day they do a different animal. Little educational. You're watching the animal interact, walk around, eat. They've been phenomenal. Good for adults, too. Yeah, good for adults, too. It's been fantastic. And it's really important to wear your kids out, especially the younger ones, because you want them to get to sleep.

I'm fun dot com. It's kids classes from home. It's a mixture of yoga and different exercises and stories and all of that sort of stuff. I haven't seen that one yet, but it comes highly recommended from a good friend of mine. I did Cosmic Kids Yoga with my kid yesterday, and it was a lot of fun and it's very well done.

So all these links are in the show notes. If you are a parent out there and you found a great resource, please do let us know. We will keep an ongoing list going as long as we're stuck in this hell.

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Security? Ha! We're joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. Dave is also the co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, as well as the host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy, as well as surveillance and privacy.

So Dave, I was going to ask if you were hunkering in place, but seems like kind of not. Well, yeah, I'm still going into the office right now. And the thing is, I'm the only person at the office right now. So you are socially distant.

Yes. You're socially distant from your family. I feel like I'm broad. And emotionally distant. Yeah, well, you know, no more than usual. But I am, I feel like that guy at the end of the old radio broadcast for War of the Worlds, who's, you know, just by themselves and there's nobody else around, you know.

I don't see how long we can keep on broadcasting from here. Like, it's that sort of a thing. Now, the question is, do you wear the furry hat when you're in the office? It's an audio-only show, so no one knows. That's right. It's not a bad idea, though.

I could do that. Mike that thing up. I have to bring it from home. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you don't keep it on your desk? Man. Well, it scares people. That's the thing. I do. No, I seriously, I had it in here for a while. But I occasionally have guests in the studio, and they'd, like, come around the corner and be like, hey, I'm great to be here.

And I'm like, holy crap, what the hell is that thing? It's like, oh, that's my, that's, that's, and then it's a whole explanation. And it just took too long to explain. So, so it's at home now, scaring my dog. Very nice. Yeah, well, we, we were talking a little bit before we started hitting the record bar, and I believe we decided we're going to call this segment jerks and asshats and why we can't have nice things.

And because there's not too much security news itself battling around these days, but there are a lot of jerks out there. I actually went, got livid last night when all this news started to break. The first one broke a little bit earlier, of course, which is a Senator Richard Burr.

Who raised the virus alarm weeks ago because he knew about it and he told all of his private donors about it and let them all know and continue to make very benign statements in public and follow the party line as it were. And, but he, he, he knew and just decided not to tell anybody.

And we've also now learned, of course, that he's also managed to dump a bunch of stock, thus avoiding the stock crash. So insider trading basically, or more accurately kind of wartime profiteering in my mind. We then learned that a second Senator Kelly Loafer did the same thing, dump millions in stock after the coronavirus briefing.

And then a third Senator Scott doing this as well, dumping a bunch of his stocks. This one is GOP's Ron Johnson. So far, all three of them are Republicans. I have heard news that Dianne Feinstein has joined into these shenanigans as well. However, no news story has come out.

So it could have just been regular stock trading on her part. But there was a list of five senators, I can't remember the fifth one at the time, that have had stock stock trades immediately after being briefed on the coronavirus of four of them are Republicans.

Three of them have 100% made millions of dollars or saved millions of dollars by doing this. They should go to jail? Yes? No? I think they should. Absolutely. Yes. And it hasn't been that long that this has been illegal at all.

Yes. Like it used to be that senators and house folks, insider trading was loud. Or let me rephrase that. There was no specific prohibition against insider trading. Yes. And it was one of the perks of the job is that you would know things ahead of time and be able to make some money off of it.

Right. Right. And then my recollection is that there was a 60-minute story about it and that caused them to change the rules or actually make some rules that kept people from being able to do that. So hopefully this will be a good test of those rules.

And at the very least, these people should not be given the public trust. So, yes, resignation is in order, but jail time or prosecution would be nice. And I have to say I've been seeing a lot of people – well, there's always those people who go from zero to a million miles an hour.

And there's people who are just basically with one-word responses, guillotines, guillotines. Yeah. I have to admit I was one of those people, but I did not post the – I was just – those were the internal thoughts.

They did not make it out to the social medias. Right. Right. I did call for resignation. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So – yeah. I don't know if you guys have already touched on this week's show, but another groundswell that I'm seeing is this notion that this round of financial recovery should go from the bottom up, not the top down.

Yes. That is definitely a push I'm seeing. People are going, why are we bailing out multimillion-dollar companies rather than small businesses and households? Right. Yes. Right. So the one I saw that was Boeing is worth $70 billion, and they're asking for a $60 billion bailout.

Well, at that point, shouldn't the government just own Boeing? Yes. Yes. And, you know, at the very least, people are clamoring for if we do these buyouts, you do not get to buy back your stock because the companies have been doing stock buybacks as soon as they're back up and running again. Yeah.

Yeah. My favorite was I saw the video from the head of Marriott the other day, who we talked about on the last show, has been doing – actually, I don't even know if we did talk about it. I think I just bitched about it on Twitter. It all blurs together at some point. But Marriott's latest thing is they're doing a zero-hour employment rate, so they don't have to pay unemployment to the people that they're laying off to save the money and saying, oh, they'll have more hours when we come back from this.

But in the meantime, they're stuck. So now the CEO is coming out going, oh, well, we're not going to take any more pay for me and my other whatever, and the rest of the C-suite is going to take a 50% reduction in pay, and everybody else is getting fired.

It's like, okay, tone deaf much? I think Robert Scoble posted the – he's the one that actually posted the video of him, and he was saying that it was like, you know, this is the way you do great leadership. No. And my response was, bullshit, letting their employees go and putting them at a zero-hour schedule so they don't have to pay unemployment benefits is the lowest of the low, especially now.

I'm never staying at one of their hotels again because that's how we do it. Well, there's no lack of this going around. I mean, this is what the British government has done to basically every company and industry in Britain right now rather than declare a state of emergency and force businesses to shut down, in which case they would get insurance payments.

They've just said, we would prefer you voluntarily close, and that way you can't file any claims. Yeah. Yeah. So, by the way, here was Scoble's tweet about this, the one that enraged me. I've been involved in lots of social media decisions at corporations over the past two decades, and this is better at showing how to handle bad news, and it is bad, and demonstrate leadership.

This is how it should be done. Fuck you, Robert. You know, I've known you for years, but on this one, go fuck yourself because this is not good leadership. Do you actually like anything about him? Because anytime he's made it onto our show, it's been you saying he's an idiot, so. I guess he doesn't get the good news.

Well, I mean, he was caught up in the Me Too thing for a while. So, I mean, he's a nice guy. We hung out a bunch. He showed me my first Microsoft tablet PC the first night we met way back in the day. But, yeah, he's been hit or miss lately. So, Robert, man, dial in on that message a little bit because that one was a little bit tone deaf.

And you know what? If Marriott wanted to scrub their reputation right now and actually do some good, well, looks like we're going to need rooms for people soon. And there's a lot of homeless people that need to be quarantined. You have a lot of rooms. So maybe step up a bit and I don't know, do the right thing.

So, you know, being that none of the three of us are actually economists, did any of us study that in college or anything? Do we have any claims to having any real, like, deliberate knowledge of the economy or how any of that works?

How anything works? I certainly don't. To quote from the top, I am responsible for nothing. I have no responsibility. So, given all that, a couple of things I think we should talk about that I've been thinking about and I think it'd be fun to puzzle through together.

One is this notion of an economic pause. Right. In other words, to the degree to which we can just stop a lot of things, let's stop a lot of things. Let's stop paying mortgages. Let's stop paying loans.

Let's stop. And in my mind, I've been puzzling through this and I guess there are some things like food. There are things you have to keep, you know, the stuff needs to keep, money needs to keep flowing. But does this idea intrigue either of you at all or is it just silly talk?

I can't see a way that a full on real pause would actually work. I could see, you know, we're not going to, you can pay us our mortgages three months late and in installments when things get back to normal and all of that. But I mean, who knows? Because I mean, as you were saying, the spice does must flow.

And yeah, if we pause somewhere, how do we not pause everywhere? And if we pause everywhere, how do we keep on going? I mean, I mentioned this three episodes ago when we first started to talk about this before it got really big. And I'm like, right now, people who have the means and the mortgages and own the buildings should definitely pause everything and then just pick it up on the back end later.

And, you know, with a slow trickle to let people get caught up and don't start that trickle until things have recovered. You know, don't start like tacking on the corona tax right away. Let everything get back to normal because you can probably handle it.

So if this goes all the way, it's kind of like Brian and his self-driving cars. It kind of almost has to be everything or nothing, you know? Like, you know, give people tabs at Trader Joe's and let them pay it off over time. It's like layaway for survival, you know?

Okay, I need to go buy some eggs. Well, I don't have any money right now because I don't have any money right now because I work at a bar and I work in a tip economy. And since the tip economy is dead right now, I can't buy food. So let's have some kind of social net with the corporations who technically are, you know, nowadays the government for the most part.

Let them handle that and say, okay, on the back end, you just pay us back when you can and when things recover and we'll all get through this together and, you know, not be assholes about it. But yeah, I think a total pause is I think it would have to be like an all or nothing type of thing.

But it would be like the infrastructure to put that together would be just ginormous. Yeah, that's the thing. It seems impractical. But at the same time, we've got, for example, governors saying that there will be no evictions. There are things that we are using our emergency powers to suspend.

And I wonder how, if there are no evictions, then you, that you're essentially not having to pay your rent, but, or I'm not, I'm not saying people will, let me make sure, let me be clear that I'm on the good side of this.

You know, I'm not suggesting that people just stop paying the rent if they can pay the rent. Can you tell none of us are economists yet? Yeah. But my point is, yeah, exactly. But my point is that if you extended that to things like, you know, banks may not charge interest, you might just let suspend all of that stuff until we say otherwise, give everybody room to breathe.

The other one that I wanted to talk about was, I was listening to Marketplace earlier in the week. And they were saying that there are a handful of economists who are saying that the government should just print the money and not count it against the debt.

That just in this extraordinary circumstance, just inject the money into the system, send out the, you know, the checks to everybody. And yeah, it's going to cause some inflation, but in this case, it's probably going to be worth it.

Yeah. Because I just think of Zimbabwe when you said that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, that's the, that's the peril, of course. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. We are not economists, but I, some extraordinary measure is going to need to be taken.

There's just no way we're going to get through this without it happening. Right. It's not. So thank God we have a lot of faith in the people in charge. Well, you know what, though? I want to, I have to say that a glimmer of hope for me has been the leadership that we have been seeing at the state level.

And I don't know, it seems to me like you guys are seeing that in California as well. But here in Maryland, I mean, our governor has, and we have a Republican governor in a, in a Democrat controlled state. And he has stepped up. He is being practical.

He's showing leadership. He's doing, in my mind, everything that I would want or expect him to do. And that's been reassuring. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I felt, I feel pretty, I'm not a big fan of our governor here, Governor Gavin Newsom, but he has stepped up and done the right things and has been way ahead of, of the curve on this stuff.

Not as much as I would have liked him to be, but you can't have everything you want. That's the thing. That's why I said, you know, earlier in the show, I mentioned, you know, Garcetti did it here in LA. They've done it in San Francisco. And then, you know, Gavin steps in to do it because he wants the spotlight.

Not to, not to get into local politics, even over just the regular national politics, we're supposed to not be getting into, but anything that Gavin Newsom does is to become president. That is his goal. That is all he wants. So, you know, he will be presidentially shamed into doing the right thing as soon as possible because he wants to be president.

End of story. Yeah. Where's his reality show then? If he wants to be president. Yeah. Right. Right. But yeah, the thing about it is though, I've been talking to people in other parts of California who have been just, you know, completely oblivious to it. Don't believe it's a thing. And I've just been having parties at their house in different places.

So this actually did have a positive impact when Gavin finally stepped up and said, Hey, go home, which is important because, you know, it's, it has to be statewide. And that's why I still, I still shake my head at Florida. I'm like, what the hell are you people?

How are the spring breakers being sent home? They need to be quarantined in Florida. This is insane. What has happened there? I mean, seriously, anybody, anybody that has it on a barge in the Gulf of Mexico. I mean, you have like 5,000 20 year olds partying up on a beach.

Now they're all going to go home to their parents all around the country. Wonderful. What? This is, have you not seen 12 monkeys? Yeah. This is how it happens. People know books are going to be written for sure. By the way, I saw a really good post the other day from somebody who was a writer and an archivist and a historian saying, everybody, if you need something to do to pass the time, get some, you know, get a blank book and start writing a journal every day because those handwritten

journals, you can then actually send to the national archives. So historians in the future can actually see what happened, you know, while things are going on because, you know, digital records are going to, they fluctuate and you never know what's going to happen. And Twitter isn't really a good place to get everything, even though we know that's all going straight into the Library of Congress.

But still, like, you know, your personal experiences of what's going on, if you can have a written account of it to even pass along to your family later, because this is definitely one of those times where things are happening to people and everybody's got a different perspective and everybody's going through a different situation that it's worth doing to just sit down and write down, you know, for 20 minutes a day and just say, hey, this is what happened today.

And this is what I'm seeing. This is what I'm feeling. And then in, you know, future generations will have that to look back on if they have to go through this kind of thing again. Well, speaking as someone who has his work from home spouse and a three year old in the house, it would be wonderful to have that kind of time to be able to sit and journal.

I do not. So in fact, one of my friends put it in the bathroom, man. One of my friends, one of my friends texted me today. He's single, of course, and just living in his apartment. And he told me, I just ordered an Xbox in the Star Wars game because I'm so bored. And I threw my phone across the room.

So, yeah, you're the one that didn't know how to use a condom. It was intentional, Jason. It was intentional. Yeah. See, fathers have no sense of humor. That's the problem with children is that as soon as you guys have kids, you get no sense of humor.

Let me send my kid over to your place for one day and we'll see if you think it's funny. Yeah. It's not so much the fatherhood as it is the exhaustion. Yes, that's what it is. It makes it all just crabby all the goddamn time. Yeah. That's what it is. Yeah. Yeah.

So any security? Well, I mean, there's been some stuff that we've been seeing. We've been tracking lots of scams, of course. The phishing, most of the phishing traffic, not most of, but we're getting 10 times the volume of phishing traffic related to coronavirus that we were a week ago.

Right. So that's picked up. We're seeing lots of scams, existing scams that have shifted the center of their focus, the thing they use to get attention to this. Seeing lots of scams with things like, hey, our CBD product will cure your coronavirus, you know, that sort of thing.

I've gotten a lot of those in my email. Yeah. Playing off the uncertainty of that people, this new thing that is a miracle drug. And so that sort of thing. If you want actual good CBD, go to feels.com slash gog. Get your feels on.

Nice. Because I tell you what, that's the only thing that's going to get me through this. I have a stash and I am chill as a cucumber. Yeah. Yeah. Well, my oldest son is in that world. He works for a company that manufactures and sells CBD products.

And he was telling me that business is good. Yeah. And congratulations on his 21st birthday, by the way. Too bad you guys couldn't go out and celebrate. I know. I know. I mentioned that your birthday is on St. Patrick's Day. Oh, man. And it's your 21st birthday and all the bars are closed.

You've been waiting. This is the moment you've been waiting for your whole life, you know. It's interesting, too, because, you know, I was talking to my dad yesterday. He's finally gotten sent home from work. They shut down and the malls are closed. And he's like, I feel really bad for the people who have all these big, big plans that they've been planning and now have to put them on hold because he's been planning for two years now for a trip to France in September.

And he's going on a Viking cruise. Not really the thing that you want to hear about nowadays is going on a cruise. But he said that everybody at Viking has been amazing and they can cancel up to 24 hours in advance and get a full refund or a voucher to go on another cruise.

So apparently they're being very proactive in that space to say, like, look, when this is over, we want your business. We're not going to you know, we're not going to be dicks about it. And I'm like, if they are dicks, let me know. Their office is about a half a mile away from me. I can go firebomb them and put them in their place.

Yes, I can tell that CBD is working. I know. Hey, exactly. Imagine what it would be like if I wasn't on CBD. This is a fair point. You know, back to my son's birthday, we were joking before all this started to happen that we were going to take him out, you know, to go get a drink at the local bar on his 21st birthday.

And the bartender was going to see him walk in and was going to say, hey, Mr. McLovin, your usual. Excellent. Anyway, nice. I wanted to ask about ransomware. How's how's ransomware looking nowadays? Because I heard some tell that, you know, the the the cyber criminals are going to take a break right now and dial it back a bit while all this was going on.

But something in me tells that that it just doesn't sound right, that somebody who is a criminal who likes to take people's money would not use this as an opportunity. Yeah, there have been stories. I believe it's the folks over at CyberScoop have been in touch with some of the people who spin up these ransomware strains and they are saying that they are going to consider

medical facilities off limits for the time being awfully sporting of them. Yeah, thanks, guys. Yeah. Now, the speculation is that this is in their self-interest because they're afraid that if they do go after those sorts of things, that the local law enforcement, the hammer will come down on them hard in the midst of this.

There's a general thing with ransomware and a lot of this malware in general. I'm sure we've covered this before that in places like Russia, those those eastern European countries, the local law enforcement agencies tend to leave alone the local ransomware vendors and malware vendors as long as they don't go after local people.

Right, right. So to the point where many of these malware strains will have a sensor built in to see if your keyboard is Russian and if you're using a Russian keyboard, it will ignore you and it will not load.

So the trick is to get around ransomware. We all just have to learn Russian. Well, or just have a little dongle on your machine that emulates a Russian keyboard. That's what I say. Yeah, that's actually not a bad idea. I mean, it's not a crazy idea. Right. Yeah, you can connect multiple keyboards to a computer, so.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, there's talk that they're going to avoid that same thing where, you know, it's considered a good form to not bomb hospitals and things like that. They're saying we're in a global wartime stance against this sort of thing.

So, come on, knuckleheads, knock it off. We'll see. One more story I threw in here that is just why we can't have nice things. This puts a point on the ass hattery of this segment.

This ran on Ars Technica. Three New Hampshire plaintiffs sue to block coronavirus measures. I like, Ars has the subtitle in here, Live Free and Die of Coronavirus, which is here in New Hampshire. So, yeah.

One of the plaintiffs, Mr. Eric Couture, who wants to attend his services three times a week at the Baptist Church in Nashua, he says, Anyone can choose not to exercise their God-given unalienable rights.

We can choose not to assemble if that is our desire. What cannot occur is one man in a position of power deciding to strip us of our rights in the name of safety and without due process. Basically, Governor Sununu has said the emergency order is consistent with actions taken across the country and is clearly within the governor's authority.

So, like, basically the response to this is, no, actually, we can do that. We can. Here's why. And we're going to. And if you disagree with this, people will show up at your house, people who have guns. Good. Good. There we go. Yeah. Hopefully this just gets snuffed out.

This sort of nitwittery just needs to be snuffed out right now. You're not going to tell me what to do, people who. Don't get me started. I just have to say, Dave, I love you even more because you just used the word nitwittery, which I am adding to my lexicon right now.

Okay. Well, there you go. So my work here is done. So hopefully we'll be back next week with far less news about this damn thing. But something tells me. I think we might need a backup plan. Yeah, let's try and bring the light next week.

Although I have listened to the segment before, and that's tough. Yeah. Well, you know what? There's some comfort in routine. So just the fact that we're all out here continuing to do this when it might be a little easier not to, I think that's probably good for us and good for the people who enjoy listening to the show.

So something to keep in mind. Yeah. We do it for you, people. We always do it for you. In the meantime, I'm slowly falling asleep against the microphone. Yeah. Yeah. All right, gentlemen.

Well, do take care of yourselves. Stay safe and stay full of toilet paper. I will. I'll see you guys next week. Cops and doodads. Jason, I know how much you like single-serving websites, and boy, did I find the one for you. Although you're not really needing to worry because you have a metric ton of toilet paper.

No, no. Brian, I have the strategic TP reserve. Yes, you do. It's how much toilet paper. And you basically type, you put in the amount of toilet paper rolls you have, how often you go to the toilet per day. There's advanced options, including an average number of wipes per trip, sheets per wipe, et cetera, et cetera.

And it will tell you exactly how long you will last until you need to go out there and try to find a new roll. Okay, well, let's put this in because I know I have 68 rolls of toilet paper in the strategic TP reserve. And I take a dump, let's say, let's go with five times a day because I'm old and I have stomach issues.

Yes, you might. So my strategic TP reserve will last 218 days. Oh, advanced options. Do they have how many people in the house? Sheets on roll. People in household. Here we go. Current value, two.

Oh, I can't move it. I imagine that would just drop it in half. That's what I'm hoping. The problem is you can't, in the advanced, you can't actually say the differences. So you should have visits per day based on people because I live with a woman who pees every 37 seconds.

So that actually brings it down. I think so. With two people, I have 109 days. But with her, I think it brings us down to about a month. All right. Look, man, you got to think of these things when you're building these single serving websites. I'm telling you. That is true. And some good news financially for those of us that rely on Adobe's Creative Cloud, unfortunately, for our work.

They actually have rolled out sort of. I'm not sure if they really meant to do this. But you could basically get two months for free by now if you're an existing subscriber already. You sign into your Adobe ID on adobe.com.

Go to plans. Click to cancel your current subscription and click through all of that stuff while in the cancellation process. You will find an offers link and you should see the special discount. Click the offer and two months will be automatically applied to your account. I did this. It worked. I basically now get two months for free.

Thank you, Adobe. Thank you, Adobe. I'll be doing that immediately before the show comes out and everybody goes to try to do it. Although it's been on Lifehacker, so I'm guessing Adobe's probably aware of it. But I'm guessing that there's nobody home to actually fix it right now.

So take advantage of that. I think I will. I think I will. Now, this one comes in to the really dumb timing news. Apple has unveiled their new iPad Pro with a breakthrough LiDAR scanner and brings trackpad support to iPad OS.

It's like, guys, guys, you just unveiled what looks to be possibly the most amazing iPad you've ever made, which is great for working from the road, which nobody can go on. And we can't buy it from your stores because they're all closed.

Also, we have no money. Yes, that too. It's that new keyboard's like over 200 bucks. It is sexy as can be. But, I mean, the problem here is now that they're turning these iPads into basically MacBook Airs.

And I just got a MacBook Air, and then my MacBook Air works great. And the price point on the iPad is actually higher than my Air. So I'm like, why? Why would I buy this? This makes no sense. Why don't I just get an actual computer instead of something with iPad OS?

Because actual computers do a hell of a lot more than the iPad does. And the iPad is, you know, that's the layback device, not the lean-in device. So I don't know, man. I don't know what they were thinking on many levels with this thing. It's just so crazy. Yeah.

It's expensive. It's expensive. And just their timing is dumb. It's dumb. They could have pushed it. I do want to try this LiDAR support, though. It looks pretty cool. Yeah, it does. Closing shout-outs!

A massive shout-out to teachers and education administrators that basically reinvented schooling in a single weekend with zero guidance. Thanks again for nothing, Betsy DeVos. No doubt. And a shout-out to my brother, Greg, and his team.

They are still busy at work curing cancer because he's a medical physicist or an assistant medical physicist on his way to becoming an actual medical physicist. And since they are used to working with people with destroyed immune systems, it's business as usual for them.

Which is great because, I mean, that means that they can keep their schedule and keep getting patients through because, you know, they're dealing with cancer. It's not like, oh, we can't put cancer on hiatus. So it's really fantastic, and I'm really proud of him for what he does.

And a shout-out to our friend of the show, David Teeter. I got a message from him yesterday. His surgery went great. And hopefully he'll be back at home by Saturday recovering and just chilling. And we'll hopefully have him on the show at some point since he didn't make it this time.

Yeah. Just, you know, get out of there, Dave. Run. Run. You do not want to be in a hospital if you absolutely don't have to be at this point in time. All right, everybody. So stay safe out there. Stay calm. Take walks. Listen to classical music.

Do what you got to do, everybody. We're going to get through this just fine. Hang in there. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. 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 helps keep us going.

And if you can't afford it right now, don't worry about it, guys. We'll get through. But if you can, bring it on. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 424. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show, and get links to stuff we like. And while you're sitting around, send us some notes.

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