Category: Me Myself&I

What would I do with “around” $44B?

Immediately start new villages made of 3D-printed 100% sustainable homes with radiant heating floors, hemp insulation and green roofs. You already know. I would give them a nice lot for people to grow some stuff. I’d subsidized rent, of course. I’d create a copy of Broadacre, only smaller.

Offices would be rare as most people would work from home. If not, there would be nice roads to use to go there where you could use a car or a bicycle, both being on different, astuciously designed  paths.

There would be downtowns, albeit small ones because only those work. A main street, stores, ta-da.

I think $43B would allow me to try that, and see how much better of a plan it is than what we currently have.

Then once I know this village works, I’d made more in very different climates, to optimize the sustainability of those homes; weather dramatically changes everything about a house’s needs and infrastructures around.

Once I have a cluster of solutions, I’d scale up.

That’s a good use of $44B, I’d say.

Or maybe as someone said, I would just give each American $1M and some change for us to chill while robots now and then produce.

Either way, it would be fun.

Pretty sure it doesn’t work anymore.

“They need to go back to being the #1 streaming content provider, not a movie studio.”

It’s war, y’all. Licensing is basically telling Netflix “You do not own shit, we do and you need to pay for it”. And Netflix said “no, we can make movies and shows too, that’s easy” and then it wasn’t easy at all, and people unsubscribed faster than pussycat.

Which makes me think of Netflix and games. Previously I thought that GaaS (Games as a Service) from Netflix was a mistake because games are so costly and take so long to make, eat so much bandwidth, with way less ways to know if one will be successful compared to TV. But now I’m thinking it might be worth it because of two things:

– Unreal and Unity. Two game engines becoming the cameras of video games and therefore, bringing an absurd amount of production problems down to the minimum.

– Games, contrary to shows and movies, are quite easily modified live. Fortnite, which is still printing money, is the poster-child of this. They analyze players data, decide to create something new for the game that will be shipped in a couple weeks, tested locally, then scaled up to the world. You absolutely cannot do that with shows and movies. Narratives and plots are super monolithic.

The problem for Netflix here is that there’s this thing called Game Pass from Microsoft which is killing it right now, there’s Steam, there’s Epic, Nintendo, Sony… And Apple and Google when it comes down to mobile games, that little market of a few billion dollars.

There’s no way in hell Netflix can battle tech giants, game giants and movie giants at once, while depending on them.

Back to DVDs? I mean, hey.

If you know DBZ you understand that we, the 1900s, are not in an ideal situation right there. No sir.

I can’t stop laughing.

People Shitting Their Pants From Lucky Charms Cannot Stop Eating Lucky Charms

I learned that iwaspoisoned.com is a real website.

People be addicted sometimes (sometimes).

There’s something that just doesn’t compute with capitalist economy.

We’re Grandpa Simpson, all the time 

It’s been all about growth no matter what for decades. But we cannot grow anymore, pretty much anywhere you look at.

If we do grow –say games industry- careers are limited in time (average career in that field is eight years, which will not be enough for your life/retirement) and space (there’s only a few studios which can sustain you an eight-year+ career, otherwise it’s freelancing and inshallah).

Progress in technology always offsets new careers, faster and faster. For instance, we kind of forgot about driverless cars, but they never stopped making progress. They’re about to reach the level needed to be deployed; any industry needing drivers is going to be impacted so, so hard in the next five to ten years. 24/7, autonomous vehicles? Just imagine how much it will disrupt the world.

Meanwhile business growth doesn’t answer anything about wages and Quality of Life; sure, everyone can start their little business that can grow into something huge, but nobody has the money to subscribe to everything that is subscription-based which turns out, is everything.

We can’t all start selling $60 white shirts while subscribing to patreons and podcasts and having four jobs. Numbers don’t add up, time being the first: there’s not enough time for all that work and hustle.

Sustainable small businesses –which are rare- die in the hands of growing businesses, which are aggressively suffocating those small businesses so, we lose this option all the time. The pandemic aggravated the issue tenfold.

What’s the end game for businesses? To sell to a megacorp? What megacorps are going to do? They’re already megacorps. These days they’re bored and don’t know what else to do; they’re done growing, they own everything and now they sit with treasure chests that are kind of useless because all the money in the world doesn’t change anything if it just sits in a tax haven. Megacorps make more money per year than some countries. That’s quite new, and insane.

I see programmers complain so much about app stores shenanigans and 30% cut etc. But that’s how those megacorps are printing money while customers try to sustain their businesses as best as they can. Meta just announced a 47% cut on in-VR sales. Before taxes? I can’t comprehend how things get worse. Nobody will be able to sustain any kind of business in VR with a cut that large so what’s the end game here?

We look like headless chicken running around with the only thing stopping us being a body slam.

It’s all messed up and absolutely unsustainable. We need to redistribute wealth better and slow down the economy for climate change purposes. We just do.

My face buying shoes:

All stores constantly LIE.

“Yes, we have this model”  No you don’t because now it says “unavailable” when I click on it.

“Yes, we have this model”  No, not in my SIZE.

“Yes, we have this model”  Yes, but in a different, shitty COLORWAY.

Soon I’ll buy a pair and as soon as I find them fine, buy immediately a couple more for the next years? What are you doing, capitalism? Where’s the choice of opting for comfort and buying the same things again?

Imagine McDonald’s having random Big Mac or French fries availability. “We have a Mini Mac, though, it’s the same, only different! And yes, it’s only 5 fries per person today, sorry about that”.

It would be dark real quick.

Maybe a couple pairs would be nice.

Caught up on Atlanta season 3. For now, I am torn about it!

First, it must be said that they probably met so many issues and hurdles shooting it over the past two years that it’s kind of a miracle that it’s here. Respect.

Second, I guess the fact that this season happens in Europe does make it colder. In every way.

Third, they have a formula now and they simply use it. That makes sense.

So, it’s not as special as before. We know the tone.

But I think what bothers me a bit, is the mix of real stories laced into the narrative. I don’t know. It seems dangerous. I understand re-writing the story of Devonte Hart but the real story is way sadder and still present time. I understand using the Tesla lawsuit as a trampoline to speak about reparations, but I feel like it’s way too close to use in a fictional world.

It makes me uncomfortable. I’m not in an adventure with Earn Al, Van and Darius, wondering what’s going to happen. I’m watching knowing what it is about. Ep 3 was too obvious to me. It’s less fiction and more Black Mirror, I guess.

I mean, near-future dystopia or dystopia have been a big market/culture for a while now.

But that’s less enjoyable to me. With this season I travel —feeling wise less and that’s an issue. I want to be back in ATL, wondering where we going, with a smile or a lolwtf??? on my face.

Shoutout to the sound design team as usual. Really great audio in that Ep 4.