Sir Gene Speaks

0017 Sir Gene Speaks

February 26, 2021 Gene Naftulyev Season 1 Episode 17
Sir Gene Speaks
0017 Sir Gene Speaks
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Well, I've spent the last 16 hours, I guess, watching testimony and the Texas power outage situation. But I think I'm going to go back to my regular format for this episode. Anyway, I've got some more on that. And frankly, I think you guys are probably tired of hearing about Texas weather. And the failure is associated with it. So let me jump into some news items from today. I have to see what we got. I'm sure everyone's seen the the tweets from two years ago, floating around that are maybe three years now. That Jen Saki had tweeted about what is the legal authority for strikes in Syria? Because it's a sovereign country. The irony of course, being that. Now she has to justify that as the spokes hole for the current administration. Oh Jen, how long will you last? My guess is she's going to decide to take a break and have a kid or something. I think she'll come up with some good female type reason. For leaving and who can blame her. She had a thankless job she's having to cover for ineptitude and downright craziness. That is the Biden administration. And even with reporters that are generally supportive of the administration, there is a point where even they want some answers to questions just to have something to print because. No one's watching or listening to them or reading them anymore because Trump's GaN. So, they're going to need something. And if Jen doesn't start providing it, they're going to start being more and more hostile towards the poor girl. Solar not, I think she's being mistreated. That's my take on her. Let's see, what else do we have do a quick run through these looks like Facebook is going to be rolling out some Facebook glasses, similar to the Google glasses that we saw. Oh boy. Now what? Four or five years ago? The the privacy invasive glasses that Google came out with, of course, that were soon banned at multiple locations and and sporting facilities. And. Bathrooms and whatnot. This time round, it looks like Facebook wants to give it a shot. And of course their version also has facial recognition. Now, if you get some benefits from the facial recognition, keep in mind, that's not the real reason these are going to have facial recognition. The real reason of course is for marketing so they can sell more data to their actual customers and they can sell that data by having you walking around. With a camera that they're controlling and recording everything you're looking at, including identifying people that you might be standing next to, or God forbid have at your house. I know shocker is that might be, at some point, people will just start ignoring laws and they actually have people over to their houses. It's already happening in Texas. It's I'm sure it's going to happen in other places before too long. Enough of that, let's move on. Let's see. Lady Gaga had her dog stolen, her$50,000 ankle biters. That's so sad. I guess it is. People like their pets, so I can certainly empathize with that. I don't particularly like the breed of dog that she has, which seems to be very popular in the Silicon Valley. Billionaire crowd as well. They all want dogs, or I guess their wives or girlfriends want dogs that are basically wind up toys that just poop everywhere. But what's interesting is because lady Gaga is lady Gaga. Ooh, the FBI is on the case. Yes. I wonder how many dog napping cases the FBI works every year. I wonder if this is going to be the only one that the FBI works this entire year, because clearly there's nothing for them to do what with Antifa and a lot of violent extremists in the country in general, know the FBI at this point, shouldn't be looking at, who's crossing the border from Mexico, which is no longer guarded that might actually want. To do America harm. No, they need to be trying to find the person that stole lady Gaga's dogs. And you know what they've so far established or at least are proposing that the theft of lady Gaga's dogs may have been politically motivated. Yes, that's right. It must've been conservatives that stole her dogs because only conservatives break the law. Everybody knows that. Liberals while hell even when they're burning down somebody's dealership, that's not really breaking the law. And we know it's not breaking the law because they instantly get cut loose after being arrested. There are never any charges for them. So clearly any dog thieves that might exist for this super important person known as lady Gaga and whatever you might say about her music. And I do think she's got a pretty good voice. I've just so over the whole celebrity culture here. These people are not worth anywhere near the amount of money they've been paid. They're generally people that you would trip over on the sidewalk. If we didn't have this crazy system of taking nobodies and bringing them up into the platitudes of both financial and a celebrity lifestyle. So hopefully as some silver lining. In disaster country here in Texas and the COVID country in general for the rest of the world, people are starting to pay attention to the celebrities a little bit less because once you start seeing what their bad life looks like, and you compare that to what the best days of your life look like, and then you see just what they look and sound like. Without a whole system in place to make them look and sound good. You start realizing that, Hey, wait a minute. Maybe these people really aren't who we thought they were. Not that they're pretending, but they are products that have been built up. They're just one of the ingredients of the products that they're presenting when they're performing and as performers they bring, what exactly. To the development of a country to the advancement of a country. It's not science. It's not production of goods. No. What is it? Entertainment. Yeah, so theoretically, a little bit of happiness, maybe from somebody watching a video, but just as much they also bring a lot of consumerism and a lot of money wasted on needless products that are manufactured in China. That. Frankly, I would look at all of Disney as being a big part of that, but certainly celebrities in general in this country what they're doing is they're promoting consumerism, which is damaging this country. The number of people in Texas that I saw videos of that are standing in pools of water. With freezing temperatures outside because their pipes busted and crying and saying, I don't know what to do. I'm scared that I will die. Literally videos, multiple ones of people like that. And you look around their rooms and you look at the decorations on the walls. You look at their, a large LCD TV sets. You look at what they did spend money on. And you realize that a lot of that spending was motivated by what, by the consumerism created by this of a celebrity. So I hate to I hate to be the grumpy old uncle here, but man, that's hard to feel sorry for somebody that instead of prepping for disaster. And having some food and water at their house or finding, Oh, I don't know, maybe a small generator to be kept in their garage. No, these people are still spending money on completely useless trash. That is being peddled to them by celebrities. So not too concerned about lady Gaga's dog, I'm concerned about the dogs and that they're going to be treated well by the people that stole them. Of course, I'm not horribly concerned about her getting those dogs back. And I'm certainly not happy that the FBI is spending their expensive time on things like looking for dogs these days. That is absolutely horrible. What else we got? Of course Beijing Biden decided to flex the military muscle. The industrial military complex needs to make some money and could they elected him after all. They're the ones that propped them up, brought a corpse in and made him president of the country because Trump wouldn't spend the whole lot of that money. The military wasn't putting in a whole lot of orders for military equipment. If they've winding down the Wars that they've been in and he hasn't started any new Wars that's not good for the complex. So Biden is absolutely what they've been waiting for and he wasted no time. So it's been now, what not? Barely a month since he was inaugurated and in that amount of time he's already started another war. Potential war to be fair, I guess. It takes more than one one strike to create a war, but certainly he's flexing his muscle and demonstrating that if there's an American. Base that has a firecracker thrown at it or anything really that happens regardless of who caused it, who ultimately was the instigator, whether it was Iraqis, whether it was Iranians, whether it was Syrians, it doesn't really matter because what he's going to do is go kill some Brown people somewhere. And I don't think it really matters a whole lot to him. Remember it didn't matter to Obama, didn't matter to Hillary. Killing Brown people is just part of what America does. And so once again, now Biden is taking up that time-honored American tradition of sticking their nose into the middle East, where it doesn't belong and killing some folks because that's what we do. We killed people overseas. And then we're shocked when when somebody's pissed off at us. How can that be? We're the friends of the world. We help everybody to start their own revolution said that sometimes it's people don't want to have to start their own revolution and the ones that do want the revolution, the ones that we were propping up the last time we were in Syria, of course, was ISIS. We created ISIS by our actions as the United States, and then we prop them up further with what we were doing. In Syria. Now I don't care if you like a Assad, if you think that he's been horrible to his people, that's fine. But there are a lot of countries that have presidents that a lot of the population doesn't like, you don't have to go very far in hell. You don't even have to leave the United States to find people 70 million of them or more that don't particularly like the current president. In fact, if we look at the stats right now it looks like about 16% of people who voted for Biden are now in polls saying they wish they hadn't they would like to take their vote back. Of course, there's no such thing. You can't get any votes back once you've made that vote once it's been recorded. But if you take those 16%, wow. Maybe it's not a, it's not the 70, 75 million people that voted against them now. You had the 16% of the 80 million that voted for him. So what does that's like a, another 12 million roughly. So now you're talking about a great majority of the people that actually voted in the last election. So about 90 million people. Don't like Biden as president, just one month. Into his term, just one month. Imagine what that's going to go to in three months or a year. If he stays as president, of course, I've been predicting that I gave him six months. So five months to go. We'll see how long he actually makes it. I know some people thought he wouldn't even make it a month. Other people think he's going to make it two years, maybe even the whole four years. And I've said this, I don't think Biden is going to die. I think Biden is going to just sort of quietly be retired. I think he's going to either voluntarily give up the position or they'll have a little vote and determine that. According to his doctors, they feel that maybe Biden's too stressed and in order for. Concern for his life and safety. We're going to remove him as president and bring the person that we truly always imagined bringing him as president, which is the first woman, the first theoretically black person. Not really, I guess Obama was already that, but certainly the first black woman president. So I'm sure she'll be the first Indian president, the first, every other minority can think of president. So she'll cover all the bases once she comes in. And it's just a matter of time. So by my estimation, we're looking at about five more months of Biden's ineptitude followed by another three and a half years of a commonly Harrison charge. We'll see how close I am to reality. Let's see what else? Jeff Bezos. Is doing everything he can to prevent unitization unionization. That's a tough word of Amazon, which is to be expected. He certainly didn't become a billionaire by allowing unions to form. And in general, I will say I'm not a fan of unions. I think they tend to do less for their actual members than they do for the people that are running the unions. They've also been a great way to. To take it legitimate money and the wash it, we know about the The organized crime ties that unions have historically had certainly not all unions and most members have nothing to do with it, but in general unions have been just as bad for this country as they have been good. And I think they were better in the early days of unions and have been worse as of late, but it's certainly their legal rights of workers to organize a union. If the vote is taken and the majority of the people are in favor of unionization and. Bezos is doing exactly what would be a predictable thing, which is trying to throw a stick into the works of unions whenever he can from changing the the lights on streets, going to Amazon warehouses to ensure that there are green lights all the way through to the last mile of Amazon, where the union organizers have gathered to stop at. Traffic lights to be able to hand out flyers while cars are stopped and waiting for red lights. Easiest solution. Amazon just buys the city off by the DLT off, whoever it is that controls the lights and get the lights to be set up in such a way that once somebody gets through within a mile of Amazon. There are no more red lights. It's all green lights. People can just drive on through. And, Oh, what do you know? They, the unions never got a chance to talk to him because of course the union organizers can't be on Amazon property to distribute their pro union material. So they're planning on doing it in the general vicinity of Amazon without being on the property. So much for that. Certainly the old rule of that, the person that has the most money. Gets to win the game is as true now as it's ever been. So as Cuomo been kicked out yet or not, let me see blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nope. Looks like he's still in there. So now he's got a sexual harassment charge. He's been he's well, he's certainly killed a bunch of people more than Taliban has this point. But looks like he's still in there hanging on. So I wonder how long that's gonna last. That's a hard to say. What else we got for stories coming up here? Oh, let's jump over to Europe. Serious. Some U E EU UAE, United Emirates EU European union. It looks like Benji Belgian government has found toxic face masks that can cause cancer. That is so awesome. Take people that have zero risk for catching COVID and let's do things that maximize their chance of actually getting cancer. And it looks like people were inhaling silver and titanium oxide particles. That could cause respiratory problems. Isn't it. The whole point of wearing these masks is to prevent respiratory problems that COVID causes in a tiny segment of the population of only people that are elderly and have other comorbidity factors such as having diseases or being grossly overweight. Yeah, I guess that guy with the writing, riding a bike, who's a messenger who's in great shape and an under 30. But it's covering his face with a mask. Let's just give them cancer. Why not never smoke cigarettes? It doesn't matter. We'll make sure you get lung cancer. That's the word we're living in right now, guys? It's horrible stuff. Critical race theory. And this is kind of an old story at this point, but I guess since I didn't talk about it, I'll just briefly mention, of course Coca-Cola has been caught with their pants down. Telling people to be less white and the images of the cute little polar bears drinking Coca-Cola cans and being painted with dark paint now are surfacing everywhere because the polar bears are clearly way too white. They're about as white as you can get. They're white from the tip of their tail to the to the edge of their black noses. So they do have a little bit of black on them, but not much. I'll tell you that. No good for Coca-Cola workers. That's that's the wrong color to be working for Coke. Hopefully some people will realize that working for companies that hate you is a losing proposition. Yes. Everybody's afraid of losing their job. Everybody's afraid of making a move in a crappy economy. That's universal. But ultimately working for a company that hates you well, that's almost as bad as spending money with a company that hates you. So the next time you order something from Amazon, the next time you want to buy a can of Coke, think twice. Think about that company. Think about what they think of you and maybe consider doing something a little different, a lot of people that I know. Had decided to stop shopping at places that don't carry the MyPillow from the MyPillow guy. Mike, I forget his last name. Because as soon as he came out with his video, a whole bunch of whoop businesses just have to jump the shark and a proclaim there. Wokeness by saying we will no longer carry his product. From what I understand now, I have never had one of those pillows. I've got some very nice pillows that I've been using for years that have a cooling function. And they're quite nice for this warm weather. But I understand from a few friends that have bought them, these are not super high in pillows. These are sort of better than what you'd buy at Walmart. But not like the Cadillac of pillows by any stretch. And you could tell it because if you look at the places that it will no longer be carrying his pillow, these stores don't cater to people that buy the Cadillacs of pillows. These are very average kind of average to low price point places. Let's put it that way. In fact, I think our local grocery store HEB here in Austin used to carry their pillows and they've now stopped selling those pillows. So. If you liked Mike's message. If you like what he's doing, do you really want to be giving money, spending money with an organization that hates you? Because they hate him. They're saying that what the man said. Is enough to cause them to not want to even be selling his product. They're not just simply disagreeing with what he said. That would be fine. You can do that and say, look, we don't believe in the message that the owner of this pillow company is bringing to the public. We think it's the wrong message. It's incorrect. It's an accurate, it's a false hood, whatever you want to say, but to go to the next step and actually say, we're going to. Make him poor by preventing him from selling his product through us. Yes. We're going to give up our own profits on these pillows because obviously they're buying the pillows wholesale. So they are doing something that's going to cost them money by not selling these pillows, but to them, the end result of keeping Mike poor. Means shutting down. His message is worth whatever loss and profit they would receive from selling the pillows. So think about that. When you're shopping, think about people that are willing to take a financial laws to stifle free speech. Are those the people that you want to give your money to surround with that? All that your money is the condensed version of the work that you do throughout your lifetime. So whatever amount of money you've managed to accumulate, whether that's a hundred dollars in your checking account, whether that's a hundred million dollars in your checking account, that money is the accumulation of the work product. That you've achieved to date. Now, if you won the lottery and you have that in your bank account God bless you. You're a rare person. If you want to Invega as well, you know what you actually kind of had to work for, that you had to spend the time and effort and energy and be there at the right time to get the amount of luck that you got to walk out of the casino with more money than you walked in. Most people walk out with significantly less money. But that's all it is. That's all money is. It's just a form of your work that is portable and condensed so that you can carry it with you and you can spend it all at once instead of at the slow rate with which you earned it. And so when somebody wants to minimize somebody else's ability to earn money, Just because they want to silence their mouth. That's pretty them. That's pretty damn big. And you got to consider those things. So, you know what, what's the end result, how many people are going to stop shopping at Amazon because of actions that Jeff Bezos has done. I can tell you just from personal experience, nobody, I don't know anybody that stopped shopping in Amazon. I'm still shopping at Amazon. I probably shouldn't be, but. I, there's not been enough done by Amazon to convince me to stop, but I'll tell you what I did do. I did some things that are certainly smaller than Amazon. I've stopped giving my money to Netflix. I canceled my Netflix last year. Enough was enough. They were clearly spending their money in a way contrary to my belief system. And what, if I miss the movies that are on Netflix. So be it. I can live my life. Having not seen a few things on Netflix. And I've been Netflix customers since the old days. I'll bet you, it was probably in 2005, 2006. Maybe even earlier than that come to think of it, but certainly for at least 15 years, probably more. And last year I just had enough. I decided to cancel them, did same thing with Hulu. I've done the same thing with a number of smaller store chains as well, where I just refuse to spend money because what I'm seeing them spend, the money that I give them on are things that are contrary to my belief system. And it's ultimately the biggest vote you can cast is not the vote for who's president guys. The biggest vote you can cast you cast every single day by determining where you spend your money. Now you got a bank, like, was it which bank was it? Chase bank that voluntarily provided all the details of their customers who happened to have traveled to Washington DC. They provided all those results. The FBI said look, we might have some bad people that are banking with us. So we'll happily give you. All their records, regardless of what they were doing in DC and why they were there during that timeframe. But we'll just give them to you guys sort through them, FBI, we know you can't get these records without having warrants, so we'll just make it easy for you. You don't need warrants. We'll just provide all those records to you with no need for a word directly. So you don't want to bank with chase anymore. If you got your mortgage through chase, it's going to be pretty hard. To try and get out of a banking relationship with them. Now, if you have a checking account or maybe a savings account with them, but no mortgage, while it might be a little bit easier, you can shop around. Most banks are just like every other bank. There's honestly very little benefit in having a checking account in one bank versus another. If anything, the local credit unions will typically have better deals than what the national banks do. So it may be better to go that route, but man, if you owe money to somebody, while you don't usually get to pick who you owe money to. So unless you want to refinance your house with a different bank and completely paid off the original mortgage, I dunno, that sounds like a complicated thing. So again, I'm not expecting everybody to just. How about an ability to do an instant reaction and say I don't like Bezos. I'm going to stop shopping at Amazon. I don't like chase bank. I'm going to pay off my home mortgage right now because I don't want them to hold that mortgage. I get it. You can't do that. I can't do that. Most of us can't do that, but it's all the daily decisions that you make in where you spend your money, that ultimately have an effect. On who's going to get that money and how they're going to be able to use it. So if we don't like what's happening right now, then we need to start looking at where that money is going from us. And whenever you make decisions that you don't make any considerations for what kind of company you're dealing with. That's probably a pretty good indicator that you should do a little more research and maybe you'll be lucky, right? Maybe you'll find out that the place that you're spending your money with supports your opinions and your outlook. And if you're listening to this podcast, I have a pretty good idea that your opinions will coincide with the constitution of the United States of America. Your interests will coincides with the interest of capitalism. So I now look, somebody might be listening just to see what this podcast is like, totally disagrees with that. They're not going to listen to the next step. So, so if you're a regular listener, then I have a pretty good idea of what your opinions are. Okay. They're probably not too far from mine. That's my guess. And that's probably why people have started donating money to this podcast, even though I haven't asked for any donations, right, sir, I have the little logos, the little QR codes that if somebody. Really wants to donate, they'll realize, Oh that's where it goes. That actually goes to PayPal so I can donate, but I've not mentioned it. And I'll tell you why guys, because in my humble opinion, I haven't provided enough. Long-term consistency yet. To justify asking for any donations for the podcast. Like I've only been there for a couple of months now. So in my mind, I was going to bring it up. Maybe, I don't know, at a six month point, something like that, maybe ask them and see how many people are getting some value out of this. So many people are agreeing with what I'm saying. People are maybe getting the details about the Texas weather that they were curious about, but nobody else was providing because. As we all know, reporters don't actually do any investigative reporting these days. All they do is pop open a Google search type in a search term. Do a little bit of copy paste, maybe tweaking a few words here and there. And, Oh, look at that. There's an article and it's an article that has a premise. And that premise is based on the quote that somebody else had. That was totally unrelated to the newspaper. And they're going to make up their mind purely based on the Google quilt. Which is what's happening in most articles these days that you read nobody's doing any research, nobody is looking at the raw data. I'll tell you what guys I am. Like I said, at the beginning of this episode, I've spent now two days at about eight hours per day watching the local state Congress interviewing a variety of folks from the power grid, the producers of electricity. They've interviewed the Texas oil and gas association. They've interviewed my local gas company here, Austin power, and they've interviewed A variety of folks to try and determine ultimately, who is to blame here. Where does that buck stop? And after watching these 16 hours give or take I have to say that I think my initial conclusion was ran into money, which is to say that while everybody's pointing a finger at each other and the gas guys are saying, look, our gas compressors are powered by electricity. And the electric companies didn't have us prioritized as essential utilities. So when your power went off at your house, guess what happened? Our power went off as well. And when our power goes off, those compressors are not compressing gas in natural gas lines. Then you listen to the electric companies, the producers, the generators. And they're saying we were doing everything that we could, we didn't have enough capacity. So, we provided as much capacity as we could, but then some of our plants ended up going down because they weren't receiving natural gas, the pressure in the gas lines, it wasn't sufficiently high. So we had to shut down plants because we could not operate at low pressure. You got two fingers pointing at each other. There they're literally pointing at each other there. So, how do you have a system where the electric grid depends on natural gas and the natural gas facilities depending on electricity to operate? I've mentioned before that in Texas, in the last decade, we went from having 34 or even 36% of our power generated by cheap, reliable coal. Down to about 12% of our power. I think it's between 12 and 14% of our power right now generated by coal and the the difference has been made up for in green energy in windmills. I should stop saying windmills. They're not mills in wind turbines. That's the proper term for them. So. When you have this and, granted there have been more natural guests, plants built right as a buffer because we know they can spin them up and shut them down fairly quickly. Although natural gas is certainly more expensive. The market for natural gas is not a controlled market. Unlike the market for electricity pricing can rise, but it hits a maximum of 9,000. Per megawatt, whereas natural gas pricing is totally dynamic. So as the need for gas increases, the price goes up, but it's literally coming from a national market. And so those prices are not backstopped at all. And a lot of people complain about that saying our costs for even generating electricity, they look worse. Sure we charged more for electricity during this cold weather, but our costs went from$25 to$14,000 for the same amount of natural gas because natural gas prices shut up as well. So all these markets had really sharp increases and I'm sure if you dig hard enough, you'll see exactly who was making off like abandoned. With all the high prices, but in a sense, they're pointing fingers at each other. So finally, one of the the Texas Congressman asked was this always the case? How were you guys always running these pumps, these compressors for natural gas and electricity. How did that used to work? And the same answer came up that I sort of already told you about the actual electrical generation itself. So what happened? The the compressors used to have backup generators now, backup generators are fairly small and they're typically on one generator per compressor unit. And so when they're running, which shouldn't happen very often, right? These are backup devices. So it should only happen in extreme circumstances. Like, like what we just experienced or maybe a hurricane coming through. But in those circumstances, the generator would kick in. It would provide backup power necessary for the gas compression. To continue. And of course that compress guests would not dip in its pressure and all the electrical generation would be kept running. So what happened? It turns out that those small backup generators they just pollute too much. So I guess they would upset Gretta Thornburg because it seems like Texas has been operating on the principle of, is this going to make Greta unhappy? And if it is, let's not do it. Coal plants. No. Gretta. Doesn't like coal plants. Let's not have any of those in Texas backup generators. That's no good. Red is not going to like that. They cause pollution. Let's just get rid of them altogether. Let's not do backup. Now. I should say that some of the backup. Compression generators are actually natural gas powered. Oh my God. Look at that. It's a miracle. Somebody figured out that if you're sucking natural gas out of the ground, you have a pretty much limitless supply of natural gas and you don't need electricity to be able to use a compressor. So having a compressor that uses natural gas to compress natural gas, which incidentally is what we do in the rocket business as well. That seems like a hell of a good deal. And so those stations, those in compression stations, they never went offline. And frankly, a majority of, even the electrical ones never went offline, but a minority. Of the compression stations did go offline because they lost power. They were not on the needed part of the grid as it were. They were on the single family home on necessary part of the grid, which was shut down for three days. So there are little bits and pieces that I'm finding out that are not making me super happy about this whole debacle in Texas. Another thing that came out of it totally unrelated to anything. Happening with the the grid going down. But it turns out that Austin power, which is the power where I live they, they collect more money than they spend. So they're operating at a profit while they're a non-profit, so they can't have a profit. So what do they do with that money now in some locations, like when I was living in Dallas, you actually get checks back from your utility company. For overages. So if you overpaid you along with everybody else overpaid compared to their expenses, they would actually send you a check for 10 bucks, 12 bucks, 20 bucks, whatever it was. And on a quarterly basis, you would get those checks coming in. And it's certainly way less than you paid, but at least it's something not in Austin, whatever overpayments happen. And by overpayment, I simply mean that their cost was lower than estimated, but they still charged you whatever the rates were. So they have money leftover and that money amounts to a little over a hundred million dollars per year. And so four times a year, quarterly. They make payments to the city of Austin, to the tune of$25 million roughly, and that money. That just goes into the Austin city general fund. What do we call that? Normally we call that a tax that is a, another tax that the city gets aside from sales tax. And aside from property tax, that is yet another tax that is snuck through. The overpayment for your power company, that is ridiculous. So money that you pay for having$300 electric bill, which is very typical in the summer. Electricity costs a lot during summer, but it turns out that out of that$300,$30 of that that was actually an overpayment and you don't get it back because the city of Austin gets that money for you. So now it turns out everybody that's paying for electricity in Austin is also supporting the general fund. And the general fund is used for such creative things as a campaign to to make sure that we allow people living in tents all over Austin, anywhere they want, because well the mayor would like that. He'd like to have more people living in Austin on public land. And if you're not understanding what I'm saying, it's basically homeless people. But so in Austin, the number of homeless people during the last decade has probably been multiplied by 10 X. There were always some homeless people here. Austin always had more homeless people than say Dallas, and certainly more than Fort worth, where they literally just kicked them out of the city limits. So there was, Austin is a liberal city. So you expect more of that. In the last decade, the number of homeless people in Austin, and they're not even calling them homeless anymore, what are they calling people in between homes or something, which is a total misnomer. Most of these people are simply dry drug addicts. They've not lived in a home. Four years, but what they are doing now is they're setting up shantytowns. Shandy towns in what used to be fairly nice neighborhoods shantytowns in downtown. Shantytowns just a few miles from my house. There's just tent cities. And you can imagine what happens when a bunch of people are camping. And doing drugs. They're creating a nuisance in a lot of different ways. They're creating a hazard because of all the needles everywhere. They're creating a hazard because when you're stolen and you're walking around where cars are driving, you're a lot more likely to get hit by a car. They're having a psychotic attacks and scaring people. You don't, when I moved to Austin, people actually would be walking down the sidewalks. Like people use sidewalks. For just walking on right now. You almost never see that people are just, I don't know. I don't want to say the word afraid, but maybe that's what it is. People that would have used the sidewalk to go from point a to point B, maybe just walk down to the store, get your groceries, walk back. They're not doing that anymore. They're not doing that because the sidewalks are full of homeless people standing right around panhandling and potentially looking for the next victim. And that's not just her hyperbole. I've seen plenty of attacks that are perpetrated by these these homeless looking people. I don't even know. Maybe they get in the car later and drive to their house. I don't know, but while they're harassing others, they sure look homeless. I know some people that used to give money to these bumps and I've. Told them, that's a bad idea. You're just encouraging bad behavior, but you know, bleeding hurts. But eventually I think everybody comes around to it and starts to understand that this is an endless you will be forever asked for money. And the more you give, the more people will start asking you for that money. And you were actually attracting them to live closer to you because they're closer to the source of money. So. Yeah, Austin's going down the toilet. And I think this whole power outage scenario really highlighted that for me. I dunno, I I'm a fan of Texas in general, but just watching Austin turned into a, just San Francisco really over the last 10 years, it's been painful. It's been painful to watch. It's been painful to be a part of it. And this is definitely not the city that had all the cool attractions that I saw when I first moved here. So I don't know maybe it, maybe this is the kick in the ass to actually start looking for what's the next place in Texas. I'm going to move to maybe it's Brownsville. I keep threatening to move even further South. And of course the advantage there is the space X facility and being a huge space nerd than I am. Being close to space, X would be pretty damn cool, but it's also the Southern most point of continental United States, not counting key West, obviously, and the keys in Florida. But other than that, this is about as far South as you can get. So, you're basically on the Mexican border. Which has both pros and cons. Let's just leave it at that. I think I've yapped up for long enough. I probably didn't get to nearly as many stories. Here's one last one, Mr. Potato head just got killed Mr. Potato head, which has been around for, I guess, close to a hundred years or 70 years, whatever it is. He stopped being Mr. Potato head. Now he's just potato head. He has lost his penis. It's losses, balls van. He is now just a potato and that's kinda sad. Neutering, Mr. Potato head an icon of childhood for the last, probably three generations of kids. I don't know if y'all know this, but the origin of Mr. Potato head was because they just sold the bits that. You would then stick into an actual potato. So Mr. Potato head, didn't used to be a plastic potato with a bunch of like eyeballs and ears and hands and mustaches to stick to him. It used to be just those parts, just the hands, just the ears, just eyeballs, just the mustache, just the nose and feet. And then you would actually take a potato from your kitchen, probably steal it from your mom. And then play with that potato and you can move around, like where are you stuck? His features make them look totally crazy. But it's not a him anymore. It's just a lowly potato. And that's sad. All right guys, hope you enjoyed this episode. I know it's a little wacky and I will get back to doing more news. I will also have more specialists to come and don't forget that. I will be on grumpy old bends in about two weeks as well. We'll definitely post about that in no agenda social and I'm sure I'll talk about, I'll bring it up right before it happens as well, but I'm looking forward to that interview. Usually I'm the one interviewing the same round I'll be getting interviewed. So it'll be fun. Take care.

Intro
Jen Psaki
Facebook Glasses
Gaga Dog
War!
Bezos Anti Union
EU Update
Coke Whiteness
Stop giving $ to people who hate!
Texas Power Update
RIP Mr. Potato Head
Wrap