575: Regretted Attrition

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, you sent me a tweet yesterday that Shane McGowan actually liked and retweeted one of your tweets from Grumpy Old Geeks. Yes. So I said, hey, it's a really good day when Shane McGowan retweets your little podcast. And then he liked that tweet and replied to that.

I think he's like happy, Jason, but it's nice to see one of the posts that I put so much time and effort into actually get a little response. Exactly. No. Well on you. Well done, job. Well done, job. Well done, job. It's been a long morning already. My God.

Oh, Jesus. A little follow-up news. This comes from the AP. Basically, 10 out of 10 fatal crashes recently are all linked to Teslas. Yes, Teslas. And yes, the autopilot feature, which we have mocked incessantly for coming up on a decade now.

Yes. Yeah. Turns out the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration agrees with us. Yeah. Still not an autopilot. Still not a self-driving car. I do. This headline has a term I've not seen before. Automated tech vehicles. I don't mind that because that implies nothing.

Exactly. I had an automated tech vehicle when I was 16 because I had a six-disc CD changer in the trunk. That thing automatically changed CDs. It did. It did. I think my dad's, what was it, 1971 El Dorado had cruise control. So that was a kind of an automated tech vehicle too.

There you go. See? Automated tech. That's what we got. And that's it. This just in. Oh, ready for a bombshell, Brian?

Mm-hmm. Twitter tumbles as US Ways security reviews for Musk deals. Mm-hmm. So, turns out that I think Elon may have poked the bear, as it were, the last couple weeks when he started kind of getting buddy-buddy with Putin and tweeting his pro-Russia agenda, I don't think that really went over too well with the government because now they're saying, hey, you know,

you might be a little too buddy-buddy with these guys and we're going to have to look at all your deals because this Twitter deal, you have some folks in there that might not be very happy with the United States right now, like, you know, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and things like that.

So, yeah, Elon may have screwed up yet again. This is a pretty clear and dry case of the positives of staying in your lane. Yes, indeed. If only he had an autopilot car to keep him in a lane.

I know. Well, the SEC tried to keep him in his lane and that didn't really work. So, now let's see if the Treasury Department and the Justice Department and every other department that said, what the hell do you think you're doing? And this is, he's really shooting himself in his own foot here because he is still, by all accounts, going to be buying Twitter and on the hook for it at the price that he quoted.

And Twitter is just, I mean, the amount of money he's going to have to pay for Twitter is just skyrocketing at this point. Going up and up and up. To the moon! To the moon! To the moon! We finally got a tune. Yeah. So, and the thing that really drives me crazy about this whole, you know, Starlink, Ukraine, Elon getting butthurt about it type of thing, you know, he offered in the beginning.

He's like, I'm going to donate. And now he's like, well, maybe you should pay up. And then they're like, well, we have been paying up, but you still offered. And then he's like, well, Russia! Yay! Let's annex the Crimea and so I can get out of this deal.

He's making a lot of deals that he just wants to get out of, it seems. Yeah. And it's not going well for him. Yeah. It's not as easy as having a baby mama and walking away, is it, Elon? No, it's not. No. And the one thing that really got me about his Starlink tweets that really just rubbed me the wrong way, where he's like, well, all these other companies are getting, you know, millions and hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies, but I'm still

paying out of my pocket for the Starlink in Ukraine. I'm like, well, A, you offered, so shut up. If you didn't want to do it, don't offer it. And B, who's your biggest client for SpaceX? Who's your biggest client, Elon?

Would that be the United States government? I'm just saying. Look, again, like he did offer. You are also allowed to rescind an offer, but you do it nicely. You say, hey, U.S. government, who really wants this thing to be there?

I've been ponying up for a little bit. How about you just pay me moving forward? Because, you know, a defense contractor type thing. It's just he approaches every situation. I mean, we all know why. He's a rampant narcissist that wants his name in the news constantly.

So I guess he's getting what he hoped for. Yeah, he's definitely getting what he hoped for. I think the law of unintended consequences might come to bite him in the ass really soon, though. Yeah. Well, Elon's not the only one having a really bad, terrible kind of shitty week. So is Amazon. First off, well, I guess this is good for Amazon, I suppose.

An Amazon warehouse in Albany has voted against unionization. We have seen this going on. And of course, they are allowed to conduct anti-union campaigns that include discouraging posters and displays in prominent locations around the facility. I'd love to see pictures of those. They've also been accused at other warehouses of blocking pro-union pamphlets, retaliating against labor organizers, and generally interfering with elections.

Although, again, here we go. So far, working for Amazon, because they're not getting in trouble for it yet. They're just being investigated. And so far, stopped unionization. So they have occasionally addressed these concerns of workers by raising wages. But it does have the history of, of course, opposing reforms to working conditions.

Let us not forget peeing in bottles. Yes, yes. And if anybody that works at one of these Amazon warehouses would like to send me one of those posters, the anti-union posters from Amazon, please do. Just hit me up, jpd.me.

I will pay for shipping. And I will gladly hang that on the wall here in the office, because that would just be, wouldn't it be ironic? Yes, well, Amazon is also the subject of a fairly, I mean, this is a very long article. I'm going to try to get it down to just the meat here.

But my jaw dropped reading this. This is a big report that's come out. Amazon churns through workers at an astonishing rate well above industry averages, according to, and here's my favorite phrase that we've learned recently, a tranche of documents, marked Amazon confidential, provided to Engadget, and not previously reported on.

That attrition also has an associated cost. The worldwide consumer field operations is experiencing high levels of attrition, regretted and unregretted, across all levels, totaling an estimated $8 billion annually for Amazon and its shareholders. That's a lot.

They can't keep their employees. Right. $8 billion. For a sense of scale, the company's net profit in 2021 was $33.36 billion. $8 billion. Imagine if they actually had to pay taxes. Yeah, no doubt.

You know how many pee bottles you can buy for $8 billion? Man, they should really work on that. Yeah, same day shipping if you're a Prime member. Regretted attrition, which is workers choosing to leave the company, occurs twice as often as unregretted attrition, which is people being laid off or fired.

I suppose the regret here comes from the company's side of things. I was going to say, the employees are saying, fuck you. I don't want to be here anymore. That's, yeah. Yeah. So anyways, that's basically the bullet points there is Amazon cannot keep their employees.

It's costing them a crap ton of money. Like, this is well beyond coffee money, which is what normally we talk about on this show for these companies. It is a lot. It's 25% of their actual revenue. Yeah. In addition to that, the rate at which Amazon has burned through the American working age populace led to another piece of internal research, which cautioned that the company might deplete the available labor supply in the U.S.

in certain metro regions within a few years, meaning they will have hired and lost either regrettably or unregrettably every single person in those cities. Every one. I want you to throw your mind back to maybe episode two or three of Grumpy Old Geeks when we were sitting in your loft in Venice.

And I said that if they don't pay people properly, they are going to run out of people and nobody's going to be able to buy their stuff. I predicted this almost 10 years ago. Yeah. And it's finally coming to pass because they are basically going to burn through it by just being a crappy employer.

Yeah. And they are. And some CFO at some point should be sitting down and going, we've lost $8 billion. Surely we can give people a raise. And I don't know, maybe even let them unionize. And that'll cost us less than the $8 billion we're churning through right now. It's crazy. Cree, cree.

Well, speaking of billions, they're also facing a $1 billion lawsuit over claims that tricks UK customers into paying more. This is just casting my mind back to when we were not even kids. I mean, we were teenagers, if not in our 20s. When in the Austin Powers movie, $1 billion was a joke phrase and now it's just casually tossed around left, right and center.

So, yeah. The Guardian is reporting that lawyers are filing a class action lawsuit with the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal over claims the buy box tricks shoppers into paying more than they should. They're basically, you know, they're basically using the buy box to promote their own services and things of that nature rather than Amazon resellers and all that sort of stuff, which they've been doing all along.

One would argue it's not a trick unless you're not paying attention, but I'm glad that somebody's, like, going after them about this. They're gaming the system. But it's their system. It's their system. I'm like, it's their system. So, yeah. You don't have to shop there, you know?

Yeah. And you don't have to use the buy box. You can look to the side where they list the other options. Yeah. Yeah. No. Just learn how to use the system if you don't want to get gamed by the system. But it is, honestly, it's still their system. So, you do have the option of not actually shopping there.

Just saying. You also have the option now. Well, actually, Bird is giving you not the option to not ride their scooters anymore because they're getting out of Germany, Sweden, Norway, and several dozen U.S. markets. Okay. Good.

Please. Bye. See you later. See ya. Stupid company. It was the bane of our existence for five or six years on this show. See you later. Yeah. Don't let the door hit you in the ass. I saw I've got Lyft scooters everywhere around here. There's still scooters galore, but I haven't seen a Bird scooter in quite some time.

So, maybe that's a good thing. Yeah. There are none here. None rentable, anyways. There's a decent amount of people that ride electric scooters around here, but they all seem to be self-owned. Yeah. I'm seeing a lot more people that actually own their own scooters and own their own helmets, which is a good sign.

Yes, that is. What's not a good sign, though, is now Uber is planning to advertise everywhere. They have this entirely new advertising division because what they have figured out is that, well, this whole ride-sharing thing isn't actually making us any money, so let's try the advertising route.

Well, let us not forget here, everyone, that Uber has never been a profitable company, even though they've done every trick known to man to not have to have employees or pay people well or anything like that. They have never turned a profit. Not once. Not once.

So now they are releasing journey ads. Please, please stop believing is all I'm going to say. I do not like journey, and I would definitely not like journey ads, especially if the journey ads are about journey. So the crazy part about this is that they are going to offer their advertising partners full-ride exclusivity.

So it starts from the day you're born to the day you get out of the car. It is going to be a one-advertiser blitz, as it were. So, you know, if you get in the car and you start to get Heineken ads, that's all you're going to get until you get out and to your AA meeting, maybe, possibly, which would be kind of hilarious.

But I do wonder if they'll let you be able to set ad preferences for yourself and in your app now. So, you know, you know, yeah, exactly to your point. If, say, you're going to an AA meeting, you don't want to be served alcohol ads or things of that nature. I'm sure they won't. I'm sure they won't.

Absolutely not. So just keep an eye out for that. They are testing. They put tablets in cars in Los Angeles and San Francisco so they can keep the whole, you know, the whole thing going, the entire ride. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty soon they're going to partner with Oculus.

So when you get in the car, you know, they're going to strap a headset to your head and make you watch ads the whole way there. So we'll see. We'll see. If only somebody would invent an alternative to Uber. I don't know. Maybe call it a taxi. Well, we know how well those worked before Uber and now how well that they've worked since they've been eviscerated by Uber.

So, yeah, you might want to get a scooter. A scooter. Yeah. Pull your ass around. Well, the great quiet quitting trend seems to be getting louder. Microsoft has laid off employees across multiple divisions, according to Axios, making it the latest big player in the tech space to cut jobs in the face of an economic downturn.

They didn't say which divisions were affected or how many people had let go. But Axios says they were under 1,000 layoffs, which doesn't seem all that much, except for the fact that just a couple months ago, they laid off around 1% of their workforce or around 1,800 people. So, it's close to 1% of its workforce again that they're laying off.

Well, it's better than 75% that Elon is planning to do. So, I guess that's a win. I suppose. You know, one could argue Microsoft is bloated. All these companies get bloated at some point. So, these kind of cutbacks and restructuring are usually pretty well thought out, certainly at Microsoft's level.

Yeah, they've been doing this for a while. They kind of know how it works. So, Redditors have created millions of crypto wallets because Reddit did launch NFTs for their profile pictures and things like that. The prices ranged from $9.99 to $99.99.

They partnered with roughly 30 artists and released around 40,000 NFT designs. And they're all sold out. All of them sold out. Yeah, but I mean, that's like low price, no big deal, whatever. I mean, this didn't even have to be an NFT.

You could have just released a limited edition JPEG since anybody can right-click and save anyways. You know, whatever. I don't care. Yeah, I'm sure that there's a little widget on the back that makes it like some funny shape like they do on Twitter or some crap like that, you know. It gives you a little bit of prestige and Reddit is built on prestige.

I get it. Yes, it proves the provenance. I mean, it's like if you could pay for being verified on Twitter, which, you know, Elon might have to do to raise some money at some point. Tell me about it. And like I mentioned on this morning's boot up, please, if you're going to fire 75% of the staff, start with a verified team because they obviously don't do shit all day long.

Yeah. But I mean, I guess good for Reddit for raising a bunch of money. I mean, $100 for like a prime, you know, profile icon. If you're like, you know, a supreme Redditor. If you're a Redditor and you want the bragging rights, there you go. Sure. Why not? It's just like buying shit in games, right?

Exactly. It's like buying a sword. You know, I've spent just as much on a sword in Warcraft. Yeah, I have no problem with this. This is to me, even though you don't have to call it an NFT, this is an acceptable use of what an NFT is. It's not speculation. It's not fucking highway robbery.

No, it's not hundreds of thousands of dollars basically as a security, you know? This is – I'm buying a really cool profile design. Yeah. So, okay. Well, moving on. Kanye. Yeah. This came out on Monday.

So, Kanye is going to – or supposedly acquiring Parler, the quote-unquote uncancellable social media platform that was unfortunately canceled by Google and Apple. So, they keep using that word. You might want to – I don't think you know what that word means. I haven't heard much news about this since Monday.

Have you? No. Look, Kanye needs help. He is mentally ill. He – probably manic depressive. It's – this is well known. Parler needs to sell.

They have no way out. I think this is unfortunate. I think they're using him as a way to get money. I hope somebody close to Kanye that Kanye actually listens to is counseling him well on this, and hopefully it's not Elon. I think it is, sadly.

It's a sad situation all around. Yeah, no. It's – the problem with Kanye right now is he doesn't have anybody around him that will put the brakes on him and tell him to stop. You know? He had Kim for a while and ran that one into the ground. I'm going to actually – I'm actually going to market myself on LinkedIn now as a no man instead of a yes man to billionaires.

You guys all need somebody to tell you when you're being fucking stupid. And I am offering my services at a low, low cost of $1 billion per no. Okay. Well, I'll go in with $1 million per no, and I'll undercut you. But your no is worth less than mine.

I will just say no 1,000 times more than you just to get up to the same valuation. That's all. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This one is just really funny. I got this one from Futurism.

Most Facebook metaverse users have quit in a month. So it turns out that the attrition for Horizon World, pantsless destination, as we all know, pantsless for now, people won't stay longer than a month.

I won't stay more than five minutes personally, but yeah, it's not – they're really having problems with this. Zuckerberg needs to pull the ripcord. They have the exact opposite problem that Facebook had for a long time, which was, you know, critical mass.

Facebook had critical mass, so nobody was leaving it. That's starting to change. But none of these metaverse sites can get critical mass because nobody cares. No, it's stupid. There's no reason to be there. No. Nobody wants VR. I don't care how much money you throw at it.

I don't care how many new headsets you design. It's an unwanted technology. I mean, there is no killer app. There's just nothing except wearing a goofy headset that hurts your neck after a while and makes you nauseous. I mean, there's just – it's not there.

It's not even close to there. Self-driving cars and virtual reality will arrive around the same time. That's true. That is true. Always 20 years away. Well, meta had some more bad news. They've lost their UK appeal with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, which had ordered meta to sell Giphy after it lost its battle.

So they said, yeah, no, you don't get to keep that because you're hurt competition by limiting rivals' access to the GIFs, GIFs, and this cost them $400 million and now they've got to give it back. Well, you know, now is a pretty good time to do that because now that GIFs are quote-unquote cringe to the millennial crowd, over at The Atlantic they have an article called The GIF is on its Deathbed, which I thought was fairly funny.

Even though it's now built into everything and people use it all the time. Sure. Okay. GIFs have been around since CompuServe. The GIF is not going away. Your use of the GIF may be going away. Yes. That's fine because it is kind of tired at this point. Do you remember when it could have basically been a full-time job to make them?

I remember when it was a full-time job to make them. Yes. We made a lot of money making GIFs. I don't know about you, but the first GIFs that I made were actually with a text file writing the code to actually make the GIF. When there were no tools to make animated GIFs at the beginning and they first came out, we were writing code to actually create animated GIFs on the fly with masks and moving things.

Yep. But, yeah, that's how old we are. So, yeah, the GIF ain't going nowhere. It's a file format. Yes. Whatever. It's your shitty use of it that gets a little old. Anyway, kids these days. Kids these days.

Mm-hmm. Now, this one I put in here just because I love the name of the company, Unstoppable Domains. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, when an unstoppable domain meets a – oh, my God. These guys, they decided to sell domains on the blockchain like a lot of these people where you've seen like the .eth domains that link to crypto wallets and stuff like that that aren't actually real domains that are in DNS.

You have to use specialized services to actually have them translate. Well, these guys at Unstoppable – You know what, though? What? As dumb as all that is? Yeah. Still better than GoDaddy. Still better than GoDaddy. Hey, no shit about that.

Or what was the first one? What solutions? Network solutions. Network solutions. Network solutions was the worst. And then GoDaddy came along to steal their thunder by being just slightly better but still the worst of the worst. Hover.com slash GOG if you want your domains done right is what – that's all I'm saying.

10% off your first order. So these guys came up with the .coin extension, which, you know, still NFT type of crap thing. Well, apparently somebody else had also done .coin, so they decided to not do it anymore because there's no governing body for all of this crap.

We could do a .coin right now if we wanted to. It might not work, which most of these didn't work anyway. So, yeah. Did any of them actually work? I think they worked if you did the doohickey, you know? You had to basically put in your own DNS and your own resolvers and stuff like that.

So, yeah. It's just silliness all the way down. So I just thought it was very funny that somebody called Unstoppable Domains have been stopped. Stopped. Yes.

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Because you said something to me that I knew in the back of my head was absolutely and utterly wrong. Because we were talking about the Matrix reboot, and you said, yeah, Keanu Reeves shouldn't be doing 30-year-old reboots. And then it just dawned on me, wait a minute, he did do a reboot that was 30 years old and was one of the best movies of last year, which was Bill and Ted Face the Music.

Which I see that you put in the show notes because you picked up on the fact that you may have been wrong about that one. I watched Bill and Ted Face the Music because it popped up and I went, okay, all right, I'll watch this because I did enjoy the series.

I was properly primed for such a thing with just the right amount of wine in my system. This is an awful movie, Jason. It's a great movie. It's fantastic. It is fucking awful. It is awful. It is awful. It is awful.

It never should have been made. I stand by my Keanu. Do not return to any series ever again. Maybe speed. But that's it. Says the man who said Discovery was okay last season and stuck the landing. Ah, you're, no, no, no. Bill and Ted Face the Music was fantastic.

It was a perfect, it was a perfect wrap-up of the entire series. Had just the right amount of goofiness, snark, and heartstrings at the same time. I stand by the fact that Bill and Ted Face the Music is awesome. Awful. Okay.

Absolutely awful. Well, there is something, there are strange things afoot at the Circle K indeed, though, because in Florida they are going to start selling weed, which is just what the Circle K needs. Maybe this is just what Florida needs to fucking sort themselves out.

Well, here's the thing. You can still, you can go to any Circle K in the country and buy weed. It's just maybe not, it depends on if you're outside or inside. That's true. That's where I used to get my weed as well. Exactly. You know, some guy in a denim jacket outside who looks like he was, you know, like cut from Stranger Things Season 5 will sell you a bag of weed.

That's fine. But now that we live in a country where it's mostly legal, you can now go in and buy some at the Circle K. Yeah. I just thought that was fun. That was fun. Now let's get to She-Hulk.

We might be able to agree on something with She-Hulk here. What the fuck? Too far. Too far. Way too far. Yeah. Way, way, way too far. Funny. Sometimes, somewhat, maybe.

Funny, but at some point you do want some sort of like, is this, am I buying into this show? Is it a real thing? Do these characters matter? And then when you break the fourth wall that much, you just throw everything out the window. Yeah, as I just knocked my mic into my face, great.

Yeah, they totally like went way too far. The only funny thing about them breaking the fourth wall that much was when she was bitching about all of the Marvel stuff to Kevin. You know, that part was funny, I thought. But that was it. But it just takes you out of the show so you don't even care about the show because.

Exactly. Yeah. Because nothing matters anymore. No. Yeah. The suspension of disbelief is way too broken to come back to it from that. And you can, there are places in which you can do that. Oh, I don't know. Blazing Saddles comes to mind.

But you've got to be Mel Brooks. It's got to be a comedy where nothing matters anyways. And it's like part of the fucking comedy. Arguably, She-Hulk is a comedy, but still like, OK, so wait. But is she part of the. And this is where, you know, I don't give a fuck because I don't really care about the MCU or anything like that.

But if she's canon, then breaking the fourth wall is canon. And then does any of the MCU matter? No. Well, I could have told you no on that for a long time. No, none of it matters. I mean, it's still a good show. And the finale had the best line of all time where she talks about, you know, I smash things and sometimes I smash Matt Murdock.

That was fucking hilarious. That was pretty funny. No, that was worth it. That was worth it. Anything to get Daredevil back in the MCU, I'm happy with. I did watch a new movie. Well, kind of a new movie. I watched Nope this week. I've heard it's very good.

Yep. It is. I was cracking up. It was it was creepy in parts. It was it was it was it was good. I mean, it was solid good all the way through. I thoroughly and thoroughly enjoyed it. So a big yep on Nope, which is now streaming and you can get it to anywhere you want.

But speaking of things that make you go Nope, Warner Brothers has teamed up with Web3 startup Illuvio. To launch Lord of the Rings NFTs, which actually come out in about 13 minutes from when we're recording this. So they might be sold out by the time. Get my ring.

One ring to control all my NFTs. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's basically what they're doing is they're selling you access to the DVD extras from the Blu-ray as far as I can tell. So, uh, okay. I have 30 bucks. I mean, again, you know, these are like NFTs have become exactly what I said they were going to be collector's cards.

Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. I was going through their little display and there was one thing that they said that was, it was really bad. It was basically, they were saying that you, um, you have interact, like, you know, you have access to interactive menus or like, you know, some kind of like crazy menu system.

And I'm just like, it just reminded me of every 90s CD-ROM I ever had. And I'm like, why do I care about the menus? Why are you selling me that there are menus? It is 2022. And you're telling me that a digital product may have a menu.

This is, this is what you're selling me on? It's like Taco Bell going, come in for our menus. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't get it. I don't get it. So, uh, yeah, if you want to get it, go for it. Uh, yeah, we'll be available soon from WB movie verse. Yes.

Okay. Yeah. I will not be doing that. Um, we've been following the Netflix, trying to figure out how to crack down on sharing account password things for quite some time with their experiments and pilot programs running in Latin America. Uh, it is coming now to the U S it will charge customers and added monthly fee to people who share their login credentials beginning in early 2023.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions. The same ones I've been asking since they first started announcing this in Latin America. Um, but, uh, they're going to basically start to charge you for every listing on the who's watching screen. If they don't live with you again, how do we define that and how do we figure that out?

And what, if I'm allowed to watch Netflix on the go, what I'm traveling, how, how, how, how are you going to figure this out? Yeah. I mean, I have one person answers to that. No, I have one person on my now watching screen that is not in my house that I actually pay for a seat for that then gives me the money.

So it's being paid for what the, what the hell, I don't, I don't know how they're going to work this out. I don't know how they're going to do any of this, but we'll see. But they have an account migration tool that will transfer a user sub account data, including viewer history and recommendations and the like to a new independent subscription that's made.

So if you've been freeloading or if you break up with your significant other and don't want them on your Netflix anymore, they've made a nice little tool to move stuff over. Yes. Which they can all, which, which you and I can also turn off as the account holder. So if you want to hold somebody's account hostage who broke up with you, perhaps you can do that as well, which, you know, I'm all for, I'm all for.

But yeah, that tool would have been really handy for the past 10 years for people that have been on your account that you don't want to ever talk to or see again, but you still don't, you still feel bad about, you know, deleting all their recommendations. See, I just, I've never done any recommendations.

I don't care about my viewing history. None of that matters to me at all. So. Oh, I care. I care greatly. I know you do. You curate. Yes, I do. Very much so. Well, all of this may be for naught because apparently next Netflix is back to grow again.

So they're, they had a 2.41 million customers in the third quarter, which beat Wall Street and the internal forecasts. Um, they hope to get 4.5 million globally this, uh, this quarter again or next quarter. Um, yeah, I, I don't know.

It's like, you know, okay, it goes down. Let's panic. Let's do some stupid stuff. Okay. We're back. Let's take a break. Oh, let's panic again. Okay. Whatever. We don't have any hit shows that are, that are getting buzz online. Oh, now we do. And a bunch of people are back. Yeah. Netflix is just has to realize that they're just like all the other players.

Now they aren't bulletproof anymore. It's just like what, you know, you and I try to do with Paramount plus, uh, no good Star Trek programs on right now. Delete subscription. Oh, Star Trek's back. Renew subscription. Yeah. I was actually binging, uh, lower decks last night because I canceled my Paramount plus subscription and I need to get through it till it.

So there I get to watch them before it goes. Um, it's okay. I'm enjoying the show. Yeah. It's, it's not as good as the season. Like I think it got off to a strong start that followed up season two as the episodes are going along. It's the not as great again.

I, I, I think it's one of those writer's rooms things. We'll see, but it's still better than the first season. It's funny. Yeah. Anything's better than the first season. Come on. Uh, the DS nine episode was cute. I enjoyed that. There's a Sulu one coming. I don't, you haven't gotten there yet. It's quite clever. I felt, I started to fall asleep.

I heard it. I saw that he was at Kirk's place and I started to fall asleep. So I got to watch it tomorrow, but that looks good. What looks scary to me is the Christmas story sequel. Is Keanu in this one? Is he, was he in the first one?

No, he wasn't. Peter Billingsley though was in the first one and he will return as Ralphie. Right. And now he'll be a dad and it'll be the updated version of the story and it won't be as charming and it won't be as fun. And he'll try and have sex with his sexy lab assistant as he wears his, you know, no way to a different, different universe.

Nevermind. Um, universe creep, universe creep. Uh, yeah, I'm going to leave, leave the option open for this not to be horrible. So I'm not going to make any judgments. It will be. Yeah. I got a feeling it will be, but what are you going to do? It won't be horrible. It just won't be good.

Okay. Well, there's that. Yeah. Uh, what is good though, is, uh, I found these over at Boing Boing. They are, uh, these stickers. They're basically stickers that you put on glass and say directed by David Lynch. Uh, you can get a five pack for $8 and 49 cents from welcome to twin peaks.com.

I'd never seen these and I thought they were hilarious. And there's been a few good, uh, viral posts that have done that from some celebs and stuff. So yeah, very clever. Very funny. Okay. Yeah. Under 10 bucks. Check it out. Welcome to twin peaks.com. They're very good. Um, tick tock.

I saw, I thought this one was interesting because it's the way the headline reads and I'm going to, I'll read you the headline in a second, uh, is not exactly what they mean. Tick tock is raging the eight, raising the age requirement for tick tock live adding adult only live streams now.

So, so it's only talk. No, it's not only, it's not tick fans. Um, you still, you have to be over 18 years of age to go to a live, one of the live streams and to start one. Um, but you still are bound by the community guidelines.

So, you know, no nips, no twigs and berries, no, none of that stuff. It's got to still be a normal one, but what they're doing it for is like, say, Bill Burr wants to do a tick tock live and the 13 year olds out there going, I like Bill Burr. I want to see that. Well, Bill can say, no, you're a little too young.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This is just to, to be able to segment content for younger and older audiences, which is smart and most social media should be doing such things. But yes, that is poorly phrased. Yeah. Very poorly phrased. Um, so it's an interesting turn of events for, for the old tick tock.

Um, but they also appear to be launching a podcast app. So. Oh, great. Yeah. Why not? Just throw our poop at the wall and see what everybody else has one. Why not you? Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see how that goes. But, uh, yeah, I don't have high hopes for that.

We, we know how these things go and nobody goes to tick tock for anything more than 15 seconds. And so why would you want a podcast on tick tock? You wouldn't. We're going to have to do 15 second podcast, Jason. Okay. We're done. We've done 432 podcasts this morning. And I stumbled across this one through my work and it was just kind of funny.

I don't know if you were a dire straits fan. Certainly. I want my MTV was the thing. And then walk of life came out at around the same time, which is a great song. It's really good. Uh, this is called the walk of life project and the hypothesis walk of life by dire straits is the perfect song to end any movie.

And, uh, he, this, whoever this is, I'm guessing it's a, he not a, she, I don't know why just out of the blue has put the walk of life to the end of a bunch of movies and TV shows. And it works almost every single time. I gotta say. Yep.

It really works with all the Edgar Wright stuff that he's got up there. Really good. Yeah. You know, it's just, it, it does work. It does work. Same with, uh, uh, what's that green day song that they always play at the end of crap. Um, you know what I'm talking about?

That little ballad that they have. Oh, time of our life or whatever. Yeah. They play that all the time too. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sick to death of that song, but walk of life is still a classic for sure. And I did, I was looking around that, the website for there and they do have a flash plugin for part of it.

And I'm like, really? How old is this? I'm sure this thing was built ages ago. Yeah. But speaking of flash, queen unearthed lost 1988 track face it alone featuring Freddie Mercury. Cool. Yeah.

A new Freddie Mercury song. Believe it or not. Did you get a chance to listen to it? I did. It's not bad. It's not bad at all. It's not bad at all. So if you're looking for something to do today that is not walk of life inspired, or if you're not listening to a 15 second TikTok podcast, go check out the new queen track.

Apps and doodads. DuckDuckGo is back in the news, believe it or not. Okay. They have, they have a new browser out for the Mac, which is in beta, uh, with, uh, yeah, some more privacy features. Um, I don't know.

Are you going to try this thing? No. Okay. I was wondering if anybody was actually going to use the DuckDuckGo browser. I don't know anybody that is excited about this. Uh, no, I, I just, uh, I'm too, no, not interested enough.

Don't, I, I, whatever. You go guys. The biggest problem. Yeah. Just there's their search engine sucks, which is the biggest problem. Yeah. It might be private, but there's nothing in it. Just saying. So why, why do I want a browser that is tied into that?

I, I don't know. I mean, when they're, when somebody's saying to trust us this much, inherently, I don't trust them. I don't know why. Yeah. I know. Because, because we're Gen X. We're like, uh, we're being sold and marketed to fuck that shit. It's in our nature.

I know. I'm like, it's in our nature. Yeah. Where's the other shoe? What's, what's, what are you lying to me about? Where are you fucking me? About something. Yeah. You're fucking me somewhere. Where are you fucking me? Yeah. I just don't know. Um, so if anybody has tried that, uh, drop us an email, let us know how it goes.

But I think, uh, your grumpy old geeks team is going to be a pass on the old DuckDuckGo browser. They've got a, I mean, DuckDuckGo as a company has a fervent following. We're definitely going to hear from some people. It's like, it's, they're like Apple fanatics in like the, the early eighties. Hey, that's fine, man.

Go, you know, fly your freak flag. I don't care, but I just, I don't trust it when somebody is selling me this hard. Just the way it is. Uh, I found the site disc master, uh, which is a website to browse, browse vintage computer files from archive.org.

And, uh, they currently have 113 million, 84,317 files. Right. Including some gifts. Yes, they have some gifts on there. What I love though, is on the homepage, when you scroll down, they have the browser compatibility chart and they actually, uh, they, they rank it from abysmal to best abysmal being internet explorer 1, 1.0 to 2.0 and NCSA mosaic 1.0.

Uh, poor is next Netscape navigator 1.0 mediocre is navigator two to three good is actually Netscape communicator 4.0 plus. If anybody can find a copy of Netscape that actually runs nowadays, damn good for you.

I'd run that before duck, duck, go. That's true. That's true. Um, so it's kind of cool. It's a cool little site. I love how it's just old school. Yeah. It's really ours in there. And yeah, I remember there was a, there was a site that popped up maybe 10 or 15 years ago and it was kind of the similar, similar concept, but going back to the BBS days that had just had logs and logs of different, uh, different BBS files and text documents that made the rounds and all that sort of stuff.

It was really cool. Yeah. No, I really like this. And I just searched for spaceship warlock and yes, it does have the, the, the launch screen, which looks terrible at a modern computer. Absolutely terrible. And it's a picked, believe it or not.

Nice. Um, yeah, I remember spaceship warlock. Uh, I wish I could just get that whole game. Anyway, um, moving on to modern OS's and things like that. Uh, iPad OS 16 and Mac OS Ventura will be released on October 24th. All right.

Uh, do not upgrade to Ventura, please. Anybody who wants their computer to work the way it's supposed to tomorrow. I'm looking forward to iPad OS 16 though. I really am. We'll see if it works. All right. Yeah. Uh, and they did launch a very confusing line of new iPads.

Yes. Which nobody can wrap their head around, but the new M2 iPad pro will be out on the 26th. Um, I have the M1 iPad pro. Um, I don't know any reason I, for five years, I'm probably going to be using this and still not get to more than 30% of the processing, like, you know, power on it.

So it is, it's a fantastic iPad. You can get them at a discount right now. The M1s highly recommended. Just get one of those. Cool. And Adobe had their big event and they announced a whole bunch of stuff with their software. And speaking of like having software and using only maybe 30% of whatever it can offer.

I'm that way with Photoshop. They've added a whole bunch of stuff to this, including refined selections. And they're getting into the AI photo restoration and upscaling game as well. So putting those, uh, other companies that are advertising constantly on my feeds out of business shortly, I'm sure. So I finished the forever war book one by Joe Haldeman, fantastic little book.

I enjoyed it thoroughly. So of course I went out and got forever peace, the forever, forever war book two, uh, getting ready to dive into that one. And have you read this series yet? I have. They're very good. Okay, good. Okay. Phew. Um, yeah, although you didn't like Bill and Ted face the music, so, uh, damn, maybe they're going to be terrible.

I don't know. Yeah. Well, you know, obviously everything I say is crap, but yeah, those are very good books. Uh, and I've made it halfway now, 50%. I miss page titles on Kindle or page numbers on Kindle, like that would map to the actual books, but they don't do that really. So I'm 50%, 53% as of right now through Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The book is finally starting to click for me, just like the first one took me a while to get into this one as well, but I'm really enjoying it now. And, uh, now that my Dodgers are no longer in the sports ball tournament, I'll be reading more. So hopefully I'll have this done soon. It's very good though. I'm curious.

What, uh, what format are you reading your Kindle books on nowadays? It's the app on my iPad. Yeah. Okay. Just wondering, just wondering, cause I still have a Kindle paperweight that if I have to read a Kindle book, I much prefer to read on that just because holding an iPad for long periods of time still kind of hurts my hand.

But the, uh, the, the edges, the edges on a Kindle are much less, or they're, they're duller than an iPad. So my iPad mini digs into my finger after a while, but it's, I was just curious, since this is a big book, how you actually handle that. Right. I have a good case.

It's comfortable and, you know, strong wrist strength. Over at Patreon, we've got two new subscribers, Xiao Jing Yang and Skelly. Thank you very much. And we got a message from Lisa Liu up to my tier because you're my favorites.

I appreciate that. We're the same vintage of grumpy back in the nineties. I contracted with Apple to create a very cheesy Robert's day with the Mac OS and the user experience for their Spartacus computer also made amazing CD-ROM games, maybe like spaceship warlock. Uh, they said we want it to be like mist for BB King and Queensryche using hypercard.

Oh my God, a BB King and Queensryche hypercard stack? Love it. I love hearing your takes on today's media and tech. Y'all my friends in my head, Grumpon. Well, thank you very much, Lisa Liu. And that is so awesome that you made hypercard stacks for BB King and Queensryche.

That's awesome. Very nice. Over at PayPal, we've got Nathaniel, Dag, Edward, Andrew, Tom, Michelle, Brian, Jean, Deanna, Joseph, Mike, John, Tom, John-Andre, Andrew, Ramsey, Brian T, Thomas, Christopher, and Richard, who came in with the big 100 smackers.

Thank you all so much. Woohoo. Thank you, everybody. And over at the tip jar, we've got Karen, two Seans, and a Ross. Dress for less. Dress for less. In a review, I guess Skelly, yeah. In a review, Skelly jumped in over here as well, gave us a five-star review. Get your tech fix with a side of brutal black humor.

Love the podcast. Very South Park takes on the internet. The combination of brilliant insights and hilarious commentary makes your show one of my absolute favorites. Thank you. And we've got Clint Hoffman with a five-star. Great show that discusses current tech news, some security, unless there is something happening in the Star Wars universe.

Ain't that the truth? And a mixture of book and movie recommendations based on their personal experience. For those of us that have been around the block a few times, there are references to older technologies that highlight how far we have come from a capability aspect, but we are still stuck with dealing with humans. Damn humans.

Keep up the good work. Thank you, Clint. Thank you. And hopefully Dave will be back next week. He is off taking a personal day, so we'll let him have it this once, but he'd better be back next week because we got to talk about Andor. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister.

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 575. And there you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as links to our swag and Discord channel.

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