Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I can’t tell. Is Alex actually in favor of the tariffs and how President Trump is handling things? Saying that you get used to things like he did in Zimbabwe like it’s no big deal?
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with the state of podcast finances you would think that they would not talk politics. I stopped watching after about 15 minutes. Too much politic-ing. I’m sure the advertisers that actually are still hanging with TWiT don’t want that either.
I’m done.
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I’m good with politics when tech impacts or is impacted by it. These days, tech is an ‘enhancer’ - it’s a part of everything. The idea of discussing tech for tech’s sake is good, but very limiting in practice.
With that said - Alex is one of the only people I’ve heard, outside of the Trump administration, who’s appeared to be in favor of what’s going on.
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Leo missed the fact that the differential privacy happens on your phone not on a server.
Saying that you get used to things like he did in Zimbabwe like it’s no big deal?
You do get used to things though. It has nothing to do with politics or the tariffs in general, it is just that we adjust to what is going on around us. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and was “used” to IRA bomb threats, so used to them that we ignored the dangers and got on with our lives. My father was nearly shot in Ireland, twice (once when walking back to the car with friends, the driver ran ahead to open the car and was gunned down, the second two men in raincoats walked past his car in traffic and then filled the car in front of him with lead) and we had visited a location in England where there was a bomb eplosion a day later, but we didn’t let that influence our lives.
Then, on 11.09.2001, I was working in sky scraper next to our sky scraper hotel run by a US chain in Frankfurt, right on the flight path to the airport when the planes crashed into the WTC in New York. We were a cosmopolitan office and we had people for over a dozen different countries. The Brits, generally, just carried on working, once the impact of the attack had worn off, while the rest of the office was busy checking themselves out of the Marriott across the street into non-US chain hotels around the city. Our attitude was, “the planes are now all grounded and if they were going to set off a bomb, they’d have set it off to coincide with the attack on the WTC,” so we just went back to a pretty empty hotel and had a drink to think on the memories of those who had died in America, then we went up to our rooms.
Likewise, we had employees in South America on assignment during times of hyper inflation and they said literally what Alex said, they kept their US traveller’s checks and cashed just what they needed to pay for the days expenses, but any cash they had over, they had to go to the bank the next day and get some extra zeroes stamped on them! They laughed it off, because the situation was so ridiculous, Germany went through the same in the 30s, people papered their walls with bank notes, because they were worth less than the wallpaper.
Another team was running the election in Angola, I was lucky, I was providing support back at base in the UK. They had a luxury villa “compound”, where the guards pointed to an imaginary line 100ft from the building and said, “if you go over that line after dusk, you are on your own,” if they drove out on their own, they had to radio in their position every 5 minutes. When the government won the election, the rebels claimed it was fixed and the team and their bodyguards had a running gun battle from the villa to the airport!
Nobody is saying it is nice, but we lived through those times, we coped with them, we got on with our lives. The tariffs won’t be fun, people will have to tighten their belts, they won’t be buying the latest and greatest tech, because it is new, they will be holding off on purchases until they are necessary, which is better for them and better for the environment anyway.
When the Ukraine invasion started, electricity prices sky rocketed and I swapped out my power hungry desktop Windows PC for a Mac mini - same performance for photo editing, but it used a fraction of the electrity to do so. We filled up the storage space in the cellar with food, water and candles, just in case, likewise we bought charcoal and a Dutch Oven that we could use in the garden, if we lost power for extended periods. In the end, it was just expensive gas and electricity and we turned down the heating and only used necessary electronics.
Is the situation with the tariffs stupid? Yes. Is it unnecessary? Yes. But people have lived through this and much worse before, and it isn’t as if it is a famine or a drought, this is just things becoming more expensive, so you learn to examine purchases and only buy what is absolutely necessary, you buy second hand or you learn to go without. Maybe people will set aside parts of their gardens, like we did in the past, for fruit and vegetables, or set up a chicken run for eggs, to offset price rises.
They only really covered the tariff stuff, which directly affects the topic of the show, so it is hard to ignore the facts. I think they stayed pretty much on topic, to be honest. As a non-American, I didn’t feel it became too political.
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I didn’t think Alex was offering an opinion. He just used his experience of Zimbabwe to show that people adapt, companies come up with workarounds etc.
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Perhaps. It is possible I mistook his lack of criticism as support.
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LOL, not just you. I thought the same thing as well.
I can’t imagine Alex is for the tariffs, as that hurts Apple.
As for the Zimbabwe thing? Entirely possible that his mindset is “Well, I didn’t have problem functioning in third world dictatorships when working overseas, so therefore, if the US goes that way, I don’t see what the big deal is.” Who knows?
The people most blasé about the drain the US is circling right now are usually the people who will be least affected until it’s their turn in the crosshairs.
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Absolutely agree…his point was that we get used to things, adjust and move on like they did in Zimbabwe!
“we” is doing a lot of work here given the huge spike in poverty, starvation, and disease that went along with those things that people just “get used to”.
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