522: Ray Banned

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm grumpy. Okay. Well, hopefully. It's just such a, it's such a, I don't want to be sexist, but it is a man-woman thing. My wife has taken over our upstairs office. She's working from home now. I'm actually going into an office. I've started my job.

So we've got, you know, we've got a Logitech mouse up here and we've got an Apple keyboard up here. Now the Apple keyboard, I can understand, you know, there's just, there's just an indicator on your screen that tells you if the battery is low. So, but the Logitech mouse glows red when the battery is getting low and I have not been up here for a week.

We'll see how long this mouse lasts, but it's, uh, there's no power. Uh, she did this to you before. I remember. Somebody does not like to plug things in. Well, back, back in, back in Santa Monica, we were both, we were hot desking that thing. So I was in and out all the time. So, you know, that was on me as well, but this one's a hundred percent on her.

Okay. Uh, first world problems. First world problems. I've got a lot, I've got a lot of those 99 first world problems and my mouse is way down on the list. Oh man. So I was going to, I meant to put this story in last week and, uh, I had, I had spaced on it.

So I'm going to talk about it this week. Um, a friend of mine is a driver for Uber Eats and, you know, we make fun of the, the Ubers and the lifts and all of that stuff and the door dashes. And then, uh, you know, she came over and sat down and showed me the app and showed me how much money she makes, which is, I, I was stunned.

I was flat out. Absolutely stunned. She's pulling in about five grand a month. If you hustle, you can do it. Yeah. And she's hustling so much that she, and she enjoys it. She actually really, really has fun doing it.

So I'm like, Hmm, I have lots of free time. Maybe I should try. Oh boy. You're not a people person, Jason. Hey, you know, uh, you just leave it on the doorstep. You pick it up at the place and you leave it on the doorstep. There's not much people interaction anymore.

There's nobody in your car. Got to drive around the restaurants. Uh, yeah, but then I see how that works. They, they, you know, have special places set up. You go and say the name, they hand you the bag and you run. That's it. But, uh, yeah, I, I then came to my senses and said, you know, uh, no, it's not, it's not the people part.

It's, I hate driving in Los Angeles. Well, yeah, there's that, you know, even if it's still in the neighborhood, cause you know, the, the area I'm in, uh, Woodland Hills and Calabasas and, you know, maybe even Malibu, that's where she makes the big bucks. Apparently Malibu tips are fantastic. Um, but.

Here's the thing though. Here's the thing. We're looking at one side of the equation here. I need a costs versus benefits analysis. I need to see how much she spends on gas. I need to see. $60 a week. Car insurance. I need to see, uh, wear and tear.

I want, I want two years worth of study on this. Well, you're not going to get two years worth of study on this. She's only been doing it for a couple of months, but yeah, yeah, wear and tear is not that bad. Uh, it's got a lease and, uh, yeah, she spent about 60 bucks in gas a week, which isn't too bad.

Um, cause one, one delivery can pay for that if you get a good one. But, uh, yeah, it was just interesting because she spent the last 25 years selling insurance and, you know, make pretty good money. She's obviously taken a hit and pay to do this, but likes it a hell of a lot more.

And that, that switch over to work when she wants and, um, you know, a little bit less money, but a little bit more freedom and peace of mind, not hating her job has, you know, turned her into a much more pleasant person. It's great. And one of the other things though, that I thought you would find very funny, there is actually a prop 22 calculation inside of the app itself.

Of course there is. She gets, since it has been repealed, she actually makes more money. Go figure. They do this calculation every week and bring everybody's, um, numbers up based on how many hours they work to make sure that they meet the minimums required.

And, uh, I just got a chuckle out of that. I'm like, see, prop 22 was shit. It was shit. As we all know, uh, Rick wrote in a little followup here. I own the soundtrack to the hitcher. And when I tried transferring it from my laptop to my phone, it would say unavailable in the United States. I put the album in a playlist and now I can play on my phone.

This workaround seems to work on all my unavailable in United States albums. So I guess you can playlist it stuff, I suppose. I don't know. Um, you know, and we also got a handful of, look, here I am playing killing in Arab contacts via Twitter and other places with zero documentation.

Show your work, people. Know what service I used, what country I'm in, am I using a VPN? If you're going to say you can see it, you've got to do the basic zero level of debugging here, people. Help us out. Yeah. Give us a screenshot.

Come on. And, uh, Barrett wrote in from the big surprise, another billionaire wants to go to space instead of helping out here on Earthfile. Steve Wozniak has shared a video about his new space startup. Uh, he tweeted 10 whole words. A private space company is starting up unlike the others.

Except for the fact that it's a private space company that's trying to go up into space, which is exactly like the others. Yeah. I mean, what's different? Do you get to, do you have space segues? Just play your space segway polo, Steve? There is no information whatsoever about this other than a lot of word salad that somebody put together in a fancy video.

All right, Steve. We'll see you. See you. See you later. See you. Although he was married to Kathy Griffin, and I got to say, if I was married to Kathy Griffin, I wouldn't want to get off this fucking planet, too. She's actually quite funny sometimes. Sometimes. But sometimes.

In the news. What was that old meme, lock up your daughters or whatever? You better hide your Bitcoin, hide your daughters. That's where we're at. Lock up your women and hide the fried chicken.

Okay, well, there's that one, too, because the Biden's SEC is ready to regulate cryptocurrency. It's finally getting the approach that it needs to get and the lookout that it 100% needs to get, and mostly because Coinbase has tried to take things a step too far.

It's somewhat involved. I think Martin over on our Discord channel, who's Mr. Stock Guy, would probably understand the ins and outs on this. I did not so much. But basically, this guy, Gary Gensler, who is running the SEC right now, who has taught a class on cryptocurrency at MIT, so he certainly understands this stuff, has found an in to go after cryptocurrency and actually try to start to regulate it, which I say good.

And the problem, of course, here is, just like anything else, when we've moved fast and broke things, nobody really, there's no cohesion about anything. The IRS is classifying crypto as property. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission is saying it's, or sorry, the IRS is classifying it as property.

Did I say property? And then the CFTC is considering it a commodity. The SEC is basically saying there may be securities, depending on the facts and circumstances. So first, you know, step one, define things. Figure out what the fuck it is.

Yes, I think that's a good step. So we'll see what happens here. But yeah, as we know, regulation will bring a drop. But I think it's good in the long term. Yep, it should be. It should be. And they can start off with these guys. This is a great one from yesterday.

They put up a fake press release that Walmart was going to start taking Litecoin for their online purchases. Now, they even got this link to from the verified Litecoin Twitter account, whatever that means, whoever is the verified owner of the Litecoin Twitter account.

And it got onto a press release service, which spiked the price of Litecoin, spiked it up pretty 25%. That's what it was. It went up from 178 to 220 and then back down to 178 after the subterfuge was revealed.

But I thought that was a pretty funny one. Not bad. Well done. The one thing I really don't understand is why anybody is using crypto to purchase things like, say, at a Walmart. I get purchasing illegal things. That's kind of what it's for.

But why would you go to Walmart when you could use a stablecoin called the US dollar, which does not fluctuate wildly? Why would you spend some of your crypto, which may rise in... This is like the guy that bought the Domino's pizza for like the equivalent of $30,000 now. I think it was $30 million.

Jesus. Yeah. It was a lot. The first pizza purchase, I think they came down to about $30 million a pizza if you'd have kept it. That's amazing. So I don't quite get why anybody would even want to do that. But I'm practical.

I've been watching my ETH over the past week because I got my flu shot last week and it kicked my ass. So I haven't done my NFTs yet or anything like that. I've just been sitting in bed going, this sucks. But I've been watching my ETH and remember when I bought it, I bought $250 worth.

And then by the time the transaction finished, it was worth $235. Some point during the week, it was worth like $295. Now it's worth $248. I'm like, why would anybody buy anything? Like you said, it's like... If you're going to speculate at all, just hold it.

Yeah. Don't buy stuff at Walmart. From the time that you enter the amount and press go, it could have either gone up like 10% or down 10%. Then what happens if it goes down 10% in the checkout process? Do you have to give them more?

How does this work? It doesn't. It ends up being a very expensive package of diapers. Yes. Oh, I forgot. I have to rethink how money works actually to make this fit my worldview. Yeah. I'll get right on that. To understand the ramifications of the NFTs and how it's a changing valued marketplace that will have great growth potential in the future.

For 12 people that are gazillionaires. And a hat tip to Adelante for this one. Apple must ease app store rules U.S. judge orders. This is following on with the... We talked about the changes that Apple was decided to make just because they were legally told to.

So they struck down some of Apple's app store rules on Friday for good in all sectors. I guess that originally they were only opening things up in some sectors. So everybody gets to basically put a button in their app now that you can click to to go to an external source to do a different payment system to get around Apple's payment system if you want.

But apparently most people are saying that this is probably a good thing for Apple in the long run. Because it'll just still be easier with Apple and they're not going to have to make the drastic changes that Epic was pushing for. Yeah. And I think the big thing that Apple's very happy about is they were not classified as a monopoly.

Yep. I believe so. They're very happy about that. They're like, see, we told you we're not a monopoly. And they're not. There is another app store. That's bigger, actually. It's much bigger. Oh, I guess I suppose we should say Apple will be at this point have announced a whole bunch of new phones.

But who gives a shit? Yeah. Yeah. That's going on in about an hour. So I don't know if I'll be watching that or not. I'm just going to go back to bed. They're actually filming on my street today because, you know, everybody apparently loves to film on my street. So in a couple weeks or months, I don't know.

But if you're watching the TV show SWAT, season five, episode five, we'll be featuring my lovely neighborhood and parking sucks today. Thanks, guys. Awesome. Yeah. I thought this one was fun because we always talk about the robots are coming for your jobs.

This is actually happening in Texas. And it turns out to be a really good thing for the one restaurant owner. Yes. It's always a good thing for the restaurant owner who no longer has to pay employees. Well, the problem he had was he could not find any employees to pay. Everybody was leaving and not coming back.

So he said, fuck it. I'm buying a rover. I'm renting a robot. He went to rent a robot. So he didn't even have to pay for them. And so they trained up the robots as it takes about 90 minutes to train up the robot to get it to, you know, take food to the table, apparently. And his business has actually gone up from even pre-pandemic times because people apparently like the robots.

So it's pretty, it's a pretty good story, I think. And, you know, if you gotta, if nobody wants to work. That's true. And you want to keep your place open. Yeah, exactly. It's like, hey, you know what? Once your federal, you know, funded vacation ends and you want a job again, you might find out that you don't have one because you were lazy and the robots took over.

Well, you see, the robots aren't forcibly taking us over. We're doing it to ourselves. Exactly, exactly. And in information that will shock absolutely no one, Facebook has been giving misinformation researchers misinformation. Go figure. Who'd have thunk it?

Who'd have thunk it? So those misinformation researchers have been relying on data Facebook has provided to them may have lost months or even years of work because the social network has been giving them flawed and incomplete information on how users interact with posts and links on the website. Gee, do you think that was a mistake?

Yeah. Well, they're saying it is, but of course it's not. There's no fucking way. Of course, this is the biggest thing. This is the worst thing for Facebook right now is the misinformation calls that everybody's doing on them. So, gee, wow. Amazing that researchers looking into it on Facebook got incomplete information that basically fucked up their entire research.

Shock. Yep. Yeah. Way to spike the punch, Facebook. You got caught. Yep. And Tesla has rolled out full self-driving. And beta with more confident decision-making. Okay. Nothing gives me more confidence than something called full self-drive beta.

Beta. Yeah. Let's, let's. First off, this is a bold move given they want to investigate Tesla right now based on the false claims and the wording on these things. Secondly, why the fuck are actual moving vehicles on the goddamn road testing beta software? I know.

And, and, and, and being tested by, you know, the unwashed masses who are not software engineers and wouldn't know what they're doing anyway. Yes. No. And related to some comments we had on Twitter, probably aren't aeronautical engineers and understand autopilot doesn't mean autopilot.

Yeah. Because it's the word. Anyway, don't get me started. Don't get me fucking started. And Google gave user data to Hong Kong officials despite a moratorium promise. They vowed that they would no longer directly respond to Hong Kong authorities data requests after the Chinese government imposed a security law in June, 2020, but they made some exceptions.

Now I kind of understand this. They did three out of 43 requests from Hong Kong authorities in the second half of 2020. One was an emergency where life was at risk while another two concerned human trafficking. So they said, you know, none of this had to do with national security. These were immediate need things that couldn't go through a process, et cetera, et cetera.

The problem here. And if Dave Bittner were here with us this week, I think he would agree. And I would have put this in the set in that section is now it's Google that is making these decisions, not anybody overseeing anything, not any government entity, not a legal entity, just Google that decides.

Just Google. Just Google it. Just Google it. I bet if Google people Google whether we should release this information. I'm sure that there is somebody there Googling. Maybe they used Bing for this one. Perhaps, perhaps. And finally, for the news, Barrett sent this in.

Interesting, but I still don't want to go back to using Flash. And this is a news story going around because it's been the 20th anniversary of 9-11 recently. Some of the most iconic 9-11 news coverage is lost. Blame Adobe Flash. Flash was big at the time. So there are all kinds of interactive presentations and news reports and timelines and all that sort of stuff that was all done in Flash that came out at the time.

And, of course, Flash is now gone. And I don't think we blame Flash. We can blame the organizations that didn't go back and rebuild them. Yeah. I mean, come on. Nobody's crying about shockwaves. Because this is a pretty iconic event that occurred. Yeah. This is pretty important reporting that should be archived forever.

So rebuild it. Yeah. Or, yeah, you know, just do a playback. Save it for your CD-ROM. Like we used to do. Like we used to do. Of which probably none of them are. I don't even have a CD-ROM player anymore. I have one somewhere. I don't know where it is.

It's in a box somewhere. But, yeah. Yeah. I have this one USB Chinese CD drive just in case. I bought it. Oh, I was going to rip some music theory CDs for a music theory book that I was reading.

And then it dawned on me, I hate music theory. So I never even ripped the CD. So this has been sitting in a box for eight years. So there was a good quote in here from some sort of expert. I can't quite really remember who. But this is something you and I have talked about, too. This is really about the problem of what I call the boneyard of the internet.

Everything that's not a piece of text or a flat picture is basically destined to rot and die when new methods of delivering the content replace it. I just feel like the internet is rotting at an even faster pace, ironically, because of innovation. It shouldn't. I think we would both say ironically because all the great unwashed masks are on it now.

But there's that. There is that. Let's go back to microfiche. That shit's still around. Yes, it is. I've never done that. Let's put the internet on microfiche. Yeah. I've never done that. I always wanted to. I always saw it on TV. I've never gotten to play with one of those machines. Oh, man.

I totally like my public library right by where I grew up had it. And I used it a couple times for like high school reports. It's really cool. I know it's cool. I just never got to do it. I was like, man, that is so neat. Watching them fly by. I'm like, how the fuck do you find anything in there? But yeah. Microflash.

We can put it on Microflash.

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, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead.

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Now at QVC.com.

Media Candy. Jason, I have never gone from elation to pure disappointment faster than when the Picard Season 2 trailer came out. Is it Season 2 or Season 3? Is it Season 3? I think it's Season 3, yeah.

Season 3. Okay, the Picard Season 3 trailer came out and, oh boy. Yeah. Time travel, contemporary Earth. Danger Will Robinson. My God. I think Picard's going to make Lower Decks look good now. It's, come on, man.

I'm like, where are the whales? Where's Spock walking by with his headband? Where's the punk rocker playing his punk on his Ghetto Blaster? Yeah. This is all the worst sci-fi tropes known to man. It's lazy. Lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy.

I mean, hopefully they can pull it off. Hopefully it'll be interesting. But as far as a trailer goes, as a Star Trek fan, as a sci-fi fan in general, this is everything you don't want. And they're bringing back the Borg Queen. I mean, they're throwing the kitchen sink at it. I don't know.

I don't know. I mean, I'm a fan of the Borg Queen. I loved, obviously, First Contact. But, yeah. It's like, how much crap can they throw at the wall before none of it sticks? Come on, guys. You can do better. I know. We'll have to wait and see, but it is not a good look.

And speaking of the Star Trek Lower Decks, I've continued to watch it. The last four episodes were legitimately exceedingly funny with insane, small, tiny Star Trek callbacks that were just awesome. Okay. Very funny. Oh, my God.

The world has turned upside down. I know. That's why. Right now, given the trailer for Picard, I'd prefer Lower Decks. All right. All right. And another trailer that came out, The Matrix Resurrections, which, again, I'm going to hold out hope, but this feels like The Force Awakens.

Let's redo the story. It's fine with me. I'm going to go to the theater and watch this with a big bucket of popcorn and a smile on my face. I love the trailer. I'm like, this is going to be a stupid movie. It's The Matrix. I don't care. I don't care. We'll see.

It looks good. I mean, it looks good. It looks legit good to me. Yeah. I think most of the movie's in the trailer, but it still looks good. Yeah, me too. Yeah. We'll see what happens. And I talked about the show behind the attraction on Disney+, which goes behind the attractions, and I really enjoyed it.

Five more episodes have rolled out, so good times for that. And in other Disney news, they have basically said from now on for the rest of the year, all remaining 2021 movies will debut in theaters first. They're going to give it a 30-day window, approximately, or a minimum 45-day theatrical run, except for the animated musical Encanto, which will have a 30-day window.

So if you want to see some of the... They don't really have anything too huge, except for, I guess, Marvel's Eternals, but there's no big Disney kids movie, because that's where I think the uproar would be, because kids don't have vaccinations. We're not going to theaters with them. Yeah.

Yeah. And I did hear some good buzz about the Shang-Chi movie. A friend of the show, David Teeter and Chen, went and saw it twice already and said it was fantastic. A lot of people say it's very good. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that. And after everybody kept writing in telling us about Clarkson's Farm, I went and I watched the whole thing last week, because I was sick and stuck in bed, so perfect timing.

I thought it was basically better than anything that they've put out on the Grand Tour. I watched the first episode, and I loved it. It's great. I can get around to watching more of it. It is way better than the Grand Tour. Yeah. My only complaint is that it's too short. It's only eight episodes.

It could have been 80 episodes. I could have just sat in bed and watched a live stream from the farm, as far as I'm concerned. But I was also wrong. I thought that they had canceled it. I thought I had seen on Twitter that they had canceled it, but they had not. It has been renewed for season two. So that's good. Yeah. Unfortunately, I have to wait until my wife is asleep to be able to watch this one, because she hates Jeremy Clarkson.

Never used to, but because he punched down to the producer when there was that brouhaha. Oh, yeah. She was like, I'm done with this dick. Well, he is a dick. That's kind of what makes him cute and cuddly and funny. But yeah, his town is not very happy with him, because apparently, because they're doing season two now and apparently a bunch of Yahoo top gear fans are kind of screwing up the town, drag racing through it and crap like that, because they are top gear yahoos, you know?

Yeah. Well, there you go. Go to the territory. Take the good with the bad. So into the night season two just dropped on Netflix. I watched the first one. God, it had to be like two, two and a half years ago. It was basically like the sun was destroying the planet and they were on, these people were stuck on a plane trying to, you know, stay ahead of the sun.

Kind of like the Langoliers. Yeah, I watched that too. It was really good. I didn't know season two was out. That's great. Season two just dropped. The first 10 minutes did not hook me, but I thought maybe I was in a crappy mood. So I just turned it off and I'm going to try it again tonight. Okay.

Well, that is one I can watch with my wife. She loved it too. Okay, good. Yeah. Yeah. I was very excited when I saw that that was out. So I will definitely be, we'll review that next episode. Apps and doodads. So Brian, last time I talked about a new app called Mecco, which lets you, it basically turns all of your newsletters and moves them over into an app reading experience.

And what I have found is two things. One, when all my newsletters get moved into a different app that I have to go launch to read the newsletters, I never read the newsletters anymore because I never open up Mecco. Think of all the time you're saving. And the other part was, I didn't miss them.

Exactly. I didn't miss them at all. Exactly. I was actually going to talk to you about removing me from the forwards and all the mailing lists that you have signed up for Group Real Geeks because I never read them. I know. I just like, oh, the only one I read every day is the top 10 tech things you should know from Business Insider.

That's the only one that I get that I read every day. The rest of them couldn't give any shits about. I stopped reading podcast news, podcast advertising news, every other bit of news because I get a lot of newsletters. And it turns out my life is actually better not waking up in the morning and having a ton of newsletters in my inbox to make me go, oh, shit, I got to read all this.

Nope. Turns out you don't. Oh, so thank you, Mecco. Not good news for all those mailing list startups out there. Oh, yeah, man. It's like the only one that I still will read. Like I said, I had the Business Insider one and a friend of the show, Chris Lockhead's Category Pirates because they put in, they make books.

They're writing books and they're pretty interesting. But yeah, the rest of them, I'm like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I even unsubscribed for some of the ones I was paying for. I'm just like, you know what? Don't need it. Sorry. Don't need it. Yeah.

Nope. Well, if you're a motorcycle rider out there, you might want to leave your phone at home if you've got an Apple iPhone or at least one of the new ones, because apparently the high amplitude vibrations, specifically those generated by high power motorcycle engines transmitted through handlebars can damage the phone's cameras.

And this damage can be permanent. So Apple's recommending that you do not attach your iPhones to your motorcycles. For mopeds and scooters, you can buy a vibration dampening mount to lessen the risk of damage. But if you've got a motorcycle, get a different GPS device. Okay.

Putting an iPhone in your blender, also something you shouldn't do. You can put your heart in a blender, but not an iPhone. No. Shout out to the Eve 6 guy. Funny on Twitter. Graziella and Barrett both wrote in about the Facebook Ray-Ban smart glasses.

Normally, I mean, do we need to talk about this? Nobody fucking wants this. Yeah, shortly. Very quickly. Nobody trusts Facebook about this. Nobody wanted them in the first place. I guess the only difference here is it's really hard to tell, so you don't know who to punch in the face.

Well, there is a little LED light that you can, you know, I don't know, put a piece of tape over or some black nail polish. But that is apparently a violation of their terms of service. And who's going to police this? The internet police. Or wait, the IoT police.

Yeah. No, silly. I did get an email from LensCrafters this morning saying that they are in stock and I can come get them now. And I'm like, they're going to be in stock forever. Yeah. So nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody wants these things.

Well, creeps. I'm sure a couple of kids might get them, but the kids aren't on Facebook anymore. So yeah, just creepers. Old creepers. Silly, silly, silly. But Roomba. Are you a Roomba guy? Yes and no.

I like the theory. They don't have good AI. They're shit. If this is the best robots can do, we're going to be safe for a thousand years. And they take a lot of effort to keep them clean. And if you've got a place with stairs, you need like eight Roombas. So, I mean, I had the original Roomba and it sucked.

It sucked because it literally did not suck. Everything would be on the floor when it was done. So I'm not a, not a huge Roomba fan. I actually gave mine away to a friend of mine, Jason Shoup. I think he still has a problem. Roomba has exactly one use in our household anymore.

My wife sheds hair like no tomorrow. And after she takes a shower, we used to, we leave the Roomba in the bathroom and she starts it up after she's done with her shower. And it goes through and picks up all her hair, does nothing with kids, like kids mess, forget it. And like I said, like I have a four story place now, so I would have to have four Roombas.

Oh yeah, yep. So the, the big issue with the Roombas, you don't have a dog, so, or a cat, uh, dogs used to poop on the floor and then the robots would get in the poop and cover your house in poop. Well, apparently they have now fixed it. They have pet waste detection.

They're offering customers, they're offering customers the pet owner official promise, aka poop. So yeah, you, back in the old days, you would not want to unleash a Roomba in San Francisco with all the man poo. So I don't know if this works with man poo.

It couldn't be worse. No, it couldn't actually. Yeah. So a little, uh, more vacuum follow-up, uh, my Dyson, my Dyson V11 oversize. This is the greatest thing I've ever purchased in my life. Again, this is why fuck Roombas, get a Dyson stick.

They're amazing. Oh my God. I, I, as an experiment, I took my, what I thought was my super ding dong, really nice vacuum cleaner. It's like a $300 bagless vacuum cleaner. I vacuumed the entire house and then I unleashed the Dyson. And it picked up a bunch more shit, right?

I had a full tank. Yep. I had a full tank. There was so much dirt that was still trapped in the carpet. Because, you know, we have... Best vacuum I've ever had. Yeah. We have 14 feet in this house, 12 dog feet and four human feet. So, or 16 feet then. No, I can't do math today.

Math is hard. Math is hard. Yes. We have, uh, 16 feet in the house. Uh, so that's a lot of dirt. So I vacuum every day now. I don't have to worry about the cords. Takes 10 minutes to do the whole house. I feel very zen doing it. And, um, it has helped with, you know, some of the allergies we have.

Cause you know, no matter if, even if you're not allergic to dogs, enough dog fur, you're going to get some sniffles. So I, I, I cannot, you know, say enough about this thing. Oh, and by the way, they sent me two. Whoops. That's amazing. You're so lucky. Uh, I, I'm keeping, I'm keeping the second one up on a shelf, boxed, ready to go back if the Dyson police call and say, Hey, uh, we screwed up and sent you two.

But I don't think legally I have to return it. So. Probably shouldn't have mentioned that on the podcast. Eh, who's going to, who's going to come? Nobody's listening. Nobody. That's the, that's the point. Nobody's listening. Oh God. And I bought something this week. I've got the 125 inch cable cover, large cord, cord cover on wall cable management, cable raceway kit for Mount TVs, wire hider, cord management, cable concealer for home office,

8X L 15.7 W 1.18 H dot 0.6 CMC dash zero two dash white. Say that 10 times fast. Well, I figured here I am, I'm moving into a new house. I'm setting everything up for good. I'm going to be here a good long while time to take care of the wires for once.

And it's beautiful. It is beautiful. It is worth the effort. Apparently though, your cable to recharge your, your mouse and your keyboard didn't fit. Well, I haven't gotten up to this room yet. It's a slow process.

You know, I've just, you know, I've got like, you run the extension cord because the outlets are never exactly where you want them to be. So, you know, you run them all over the house and they're ugly just sitting down there. You put a little time and effort into this. It's like they completely disappear. Also great for kids because cable's gone.

Nothing for them to yank on. Yep. Yep. I'm definitely going to be investing in some of this. We're repainting the house inside. So once that's done. Perfect time to do it, man. Yeah. It looks so good. Like I just stand there and I admire my wall. Yeah. Yeah.

We've got, we've got a lot of cables because, you know. Yeah. Because. Guy stuff. Lots of guy stuff. I want to talk about cooking stuff though, real quick. Sure. I was, I was making some gourmet sabsi and tadik, the crispy Persian rice, which is amazingly hard to make.

Right. And we have many Persian friends and we, we, we tried to do it in an old stainless steel pot that was from like literally 1940. And they're like, dude, you got to do non-stick. Come on. You got to get non-stick. So I was looking at it and I swear in the picture that they originally sent me, these are very, very rich Persians.

And they had a whole set of Le Crucet Dutch ovens. Love that. Different sized. Yeah. So we're like, which one is that? And then he wrote back and he's like, well, those are our fancy pots. But I actually make it in my T-Fall five quart Dutch oven, non-stick black for $24.99 from Target.

So it works a lot better. So I'm going to save the $370 on that Dutch oven. But I got to say when I was talking to you about it, because you said that you are, you're a Calphalon guy. For the pots and pans, yeah.

Yeah, I used to be, but I live with savages who don't understand that you can't use metal utensils on your, you know, $1,000 Calphalon set. And I've had so many of them ruined by savages, literally savages. So a while ago, made the switch to stainless steel.

I would kick out the savages before giving up my pots and pans. I tell you what, switching to stainless steel was one of the best things I ever did. It's great. It is great. I got a bunch of made in stuff. I got a blue carbon stainless steel frying pan that basically you can, you know, cook a Ford engine in and it'll be okay.

I season them myself. I don't like for that one. It's kind of an analog between cast iron and stainless steel. So you have to season it yourself. They come, you can buy them pre-seasoned for another 20 bucks. I'm like, it takes 10 minutes. Just put some oil in it. It's shoved in the oven. Come on. Come on, people. And I've got another saucer that I got that is, it is the best thing I've ever had.

The stainless clad saucier. It's not cheap. It's 110 bucks, but it also indestructible. Like, you know, run the thing under the water, put a Brillo pad in there. Boom, done. Bob's your uncle. And I don't have to worry about anybody screwing it up.

So just in my food nerdness, like I said, I've been crazy sick all week. So my brain isn't working right. So I'm like, hey, let's talk about pots and pans on Grumpy Old Geeks for a minute. Why not? Why not? I'm just going to say, man, yeah, go stainless. It's great.

We're on of the week. There's a new kid in town, Jason. All right. Yet another attempt at a social network. Oh, God. What's this one? Well, I was hoping they were going to continue in the hello, hello vein, but no, this one's called Minus. All right.

Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts for life. When you can reply to a post as often as you like, every time you add to the feed, it subtracts from your lifetime total. When you reach zero points left, that's it. No exceptions. Okay. Who?

Who? Just like life, Minus has limits. Who thought this? Try it out today. Oh, God. Yeah. Sure. Okay. This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of in my entire life.

It has some pluses here. Hold on a second. The feed is reverse chronological, not algorithmic. Okay. Post timestamps are vague. Nothing is monetized. There are no likes or follows or noisy notifications or, you know, any of those things that make a social network worthwhile.

Make it good. Yeah. The site's only visible metric counts down, showing how many posts you have left. This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life. Oh, my God. What will you say or make when freed from infinite demand, Jason? I'm going to make nothing.

Because... Try it out today and see what online interaction feels like on a social network designed for less. I'm going to just go ahead and not do it at all. I'm minusing minus. Yeah. Zero divided by zero. It's fucking dumb. Man.

I looked into it a little bit and it's kind of... I think it started off as like an artsy programming project and I think they're trying to spin it into... Maybe we can make some money off this. How? There's no money. It just says there's no... Nothing is monetized.

How do you... But that should be very attractive to all Silicon Valley investors. They like it when companies don't make money. That's true. How much money can we... Minus is the thing in front of your bank account. Exactly. They should get lots of funding. Wow. I mean, you know, we have come up with some bad ideas in our times because we like alcohol and we buy domains all the time for stupid one-off ideas that we never ever make because we sober up the next day.

I think these people just have... They got to be bit bros with an unlimited alcohol budget because... I mean, honestly, this thing probably took like six hours to build. Yeah. Oh, my God. It's not like they're worried about traffic.

Oh, man. Well, this one... This next moron of the week, I just... I fell in love with right away. Pinterest accused of not paying female co-creator. So back when Pinterest went public in 2019, Christine Martinez's...

All of her friends sent her congratulations because they thought she was going to get rich because she worked on Pinterest way back in the day. Well, Christine didn't get anything in writing, didn't get any stock options. She just got a vague promise from two of the founders saying that we'll take care of you.

They took care of her. All right. This is Pinterest. This site that is... It's about stealing ideas. On an industrial level. This... I mean... I... I... And you thought they were going to pay you? I still can't...

For the life of me, understand how Pinterest exists. I really don't... How has nobody sued them? I'm sure people have tried. They probably have better lawyers or more of them. And it's probably most of the staff. But they say, you know, there's a form that you can fill out, Brian, and say, hey, my images are on Pinterest.

Please take it down. I did not give you permission. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've never gone through that process because I... It's a waste of time. But... And I think that's how they, you know, they expect people to react. It's like, oh, my work is up there.

Yay. I'm getting... Yay. I'm getting exposure. Exposure. Yay. Woo. Woo. Yeah. Gets us nothing. Yay. So I guess Christine did this for exposure, too, but she is suing them. Look, having spent, oh, God, how many years working in the music industry right now, there is a big difference between somebody saying they're going to pay you and having a contract in which they have to pay you.

Right. In California, you know, verbal contracts are... You can run those through the law. They are legitimate contracts. You can try. In which case, this would literally be they said, she said. Exactly. Yes.

You need at least a napkin contract here, people. Yeah. Ms. Martinez, 40, was never formally employed by Pinterest, nor did she ask for a contract. She was not given stock, though she said Pinterest's founders had verbally agreed to compensate her many times. Okay.

Now, why? Why would you not take a job with them if you are so integral to the creation of the product? Why would you not get a piece of the get-go? Uh, no. This is just flat-out ridiculous. Flat-out ridiculous.

And she thinks she's going to get a dime out of them. No, she's not. She probably will. She'll probably get a small settlement. They'll throw her a bone. Yeah. A few mil here, there, you know. But in reading, you know, this article, this is over at the New York Times, the management in C-suite at Pinterest is, they're pretty shitty.

I've forgotten how many times we had news stories about how sexist they were and basically racist and not paying people and, you know, they're kind of a horrible company. Yeah. You know, and this is of all the companies that should be run by women. Yeah, seriously.

Come on. Seriously. And this next one I found, this was over at the Guardian. It's one of their long reads and I found it, I found it just, I was just giddy with this one. The disastrous voids of Satoshi, the world's first cryptocurrency cruise ship.

So, what does that mean? So, a bunch of crypto bros like to hang out in San Francisco and they, you know, they wanted to form their own, you know, form of government, a new level of democracy and they wanted to do it at sea and they've been trying for, you know, well over a decade.

Well, you'd have to do it at sea because if you're on land somewhere, you're not going to be able to be your own country. Right, right. So, they wanted to do Seastead. And for years and years, they've tried and it's never worked and never worked until someone had the great idea, said, hey, let's bootstrap this thing.

Let's buy a cruise ship. Let's put it on the blockchain. So, they bought this cruise ship and turns out it's hard. It's hard to run a cruise ship. It's expensive to run a cruise ship and this thing barely made it out of dock before the whole thing crumbled and was sold for scrap.

Awesome. That's the TLDR. But I highly recommend giving this a good long crapper read. It's a funny story. These people just have no idea. This comes under more money than cents. It really is. Here's the thing. People have way too much fucking money now.

More money than cents. More money than experience. More money than anything. These kids that just hit this boom, they have... I just... Yeah. I mean, it's... Seriously, it's like you're scratching your head. It's like you guys just don't...

They don't have to do anything for the rest of their lives. You know, they've already cashed out probably most of their crypto or keep buying more and then doing scams with Litecoin and Walmart. Who knows? But, you know, people aren't meant to have this much leisure and power and no life experience or common sense.

So, you know, they got what they deserved on that one because, I mean, it was so silly. They didn't even check to see if the licenses were going to hold to even take the ship out of port. Turns out they didn't. It's like, you know, when you buy a ship, you're supposed to check the seaworthiness certificates.

And, you know, if you have those, you're seaworthy. If you don't have those, you have to take it back to its, you know, port of origin, have it dry docked, have it checked out, get new certificates, which is what they did because as soon as they signed the contract, all the seaworthiness certificates has expired.

They were stuck with a boat they couldn't do anything with. And it's, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a day just to buy gas for these things. I mean, this was a 700-room ship. It is huge. If you see the picture of it in the article, I'm like, oh, shit, that's no joke.

And it was 30 years old. Come on. Just fucking Christ. I love it. Actually, you know, these are just great stories. I like people losing money. It's good. I know. And it's so funny because I was talking to a friend of the show, Chris Lockhead, yesterday, and he's like, you guys should really have a segment on your show that's like uplifting tech.

I'm like, do you have any? Do you have any? Because we can't find any. I'm like, our superpower is to find tech stories and tear them apart because we see the end game. He's like, oh, yeah, but Amazon is, you know, buying or sending people to college now.

I'm like, where's the rub? When's the other shoe going to drop? Amazon is not going to send people to college for free if they're not making money on it. Instead of sending people to college is they could pay them well enough that they could pay for their own college.

Yeah, something like that. Interesting. What a concept. Amazon, where you get free pee bottles and not a living wage. But I digress. I digress. Moving on. Closing shout outs.

Over at Patreon, we've got nobody and just a lot of people lowering their pledges. We had a couple of people up there, so that was nice. That was nice. That was nice. It's evening out and we've plateaued. We've Patreon plateaued, apparently. Yes, we have. I guess we could try OnlyFans.

We could. We could. Oh, have you heard anything about them? Oh, wait, they're sticking with porn. Yeah. Yeah. Have we heard anything? I don't think so. Yeah. Over at PayPal, we have Andrew, Ralph, Natalie, Mark, Miles, Linda, Jens, and Andrew. Thank you all so much.

And over the tip jar, we've got Theodore L. with a $10 sub. And he writes in, Legos. When my kids were Brian's son's age, I had a rule that any Lego set that came into the house had to be built by dad first. That lasted for about a decade. My wife realized that out of everyone, I was the one that wanted the Legos, so began buying my own sets.

Now my middle son began to make the Lego sets too easy to build, so I started buying him the Mega Bloks Halo sets. He enjoys the video game still, because we found out that the instructions are way more complicated and the piece is much more detailed. So every Christmas, I buy him another set just for that challenge, and every Christmas, he curses me.

Well, thank you, Theodore. We got a $10 sub from Anne Q, and a $50 donation from Chet R. Thank you very, very much. Thank you. And over at iTunes, Fruitcup, who is a friend of mine in real life, wrote in, Wow, you guys are dorks.

If the internet had a porch, you two would be sitting in your rocking chairs complaining about the metaverse while the rest of us are enjoying our blind bliss. You son of a bitch, I'm in. And I know he listens to the show when he's drinking, because I get a lot of Instagram direct messages from him. Okay. And Axel Schultz writes in, five stars from Canada, B.C.

I reinstalled this app just so I could give the grumpy old geeks five stars. Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much. And I was on Harry Duran's podcast this week. I don't even remember what I talked about, but if you want to go check it out, he calls it a brief history of podcasting with Jason DeFilippo.

There will be a link in the show notes for that. I'm guessing you talked about podcasting. I'm guessing so. I never remember anything that comes out of my mouth after we're done recording, period. I know. And it's so funny because you always ask me, do you remember talking? No. Yeah.

I don't. I have to go back to the show notes and search because I'm like, I can't remember that one. Oh, well. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Shulmester. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on and we'll love you forever.

You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies. It's easy and absolutely free. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 522. Goddamn. 522. That's a lot. From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode as well as links to our swag and Discord channel if you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans.

You can also 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 review and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars. Stay grumpy.

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

From beauty and fashion to home, culinary and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.