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!
Agree with Cory and Iain about the mess that is BBC Sounds. Having a completely separate app to manage your subscriptions to podcasts and shows separate from your preferred podcast app is one thing. The other for me is their inability to support speaker groups on Alexa setups. So no multiroom, stereo or multispeaker setups with subs and stuff allowed. You have to crowd around a single speaker like in the olden days.
This has been the case since TuneIn was turned off over 2 years ago. Radio silence on a fix for over a year - they blame it on Amazon. But every other radio media group here has got their Alexa skills working with no issues 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2020/articles/tunein-update
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i always try to watch live and the one week i had to be elsewhere, happened to be the best twit of this year
thanks
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I agree with the fragmentation of podcasts, with Spotify and BBC being separate and not being able to listen to them in your favorite podcast app is not good. I have 1 app for all my podcasts and they are lined up one after the other, as they arrive. I’m not going to jump through the app-hoop, just to get one or 2 extra podcasts.
To the topic of nuclear power, it might have zero emissions whilst in action, but Gorleben has proven that we are totally unprepared to look after the waste, once we are through producing electricity with it. The “big business” attitude of maximising profits for the minimum outlay (the electricity providers and the waste handlers - the former chose the latter on who can do the job for the least money, not who can do it best) has shown that it is completely incompatible with nuclear waste storage.
The backhanders and local areas pushing themselves to get some of that money for letting the waste be stored in their area led to backhanders and a totally inappropriate area being chosen. Also, those “thousand year” containers were also built by the cheapest bidder and are failing now, after only 40 or 50 years. The combination of the 2 means that nuclear waste is leaking into porous rock and filtering into the water table…
When that came out, there was a sudden mad scramble to attribute blame - that first - and then try and shore up the area, so that no more waste could escape…
As long as we are blinded by the cheapest product for the most money way of doing things, we should keep our hands well away from nuclear power… It has to be handled in an adult way, not by immature idiots who are more interested in the profits now, than whether the Earth will be inhabitable in 50 or 100 years, let alone the 1,000 plus years that the nuclear waste will have to actually be stored.
The attitude of, “well, by the time that all goes to hell in a handbasket, I’ll have spent my profits and be dead, so it is somebody else’s problem,” is no way to run any business, let alone one that could make our planet uninhabitable - and nuclear is just the most prominent example, fossil fuels are doing the same thing in just a destructible way, but without it being immediately comprehendible to most people.
On a lighter note, I was listening to the bit on eSports and I have to say that they nailed it. It is the personalities that make it worth watching, for me at least. My son-in-law watches the DOTA championships, for example, but I can only watch an hour or so, then I’m bored.
On the other hand, I watch a bunch of channels of, mainly, GTA5 roleplay - some on GTA servers, but most on 5PD etc. which are real roleplaying servers, with people doing normal jobs, as well as police, fire, ambulance etc. and they earn money through their “jobs” in game to buy vehicles etc.
Whilst a lot of it is boring for those not actually taking part, the are a bunch of funny and charismatic players on the fringe, who don’t take it seriously, but think up extreme scenarios to provide some action for the more strict players.
I have a lot of fun watching Bay Area Buggs, Jeff Faviagno, CivRyan, DammitDave and Zack, as well as their more serious stuff, they come together once a week and do a modern equivalent of a Keystone Cops segment, which is usually hilarious and then they let off steam with a good-humoured firefight at the end.
Likewise, I love watching Failrace, Alex Day has built up a crew around himself and his channel is great fun. They have a bunch of more serious races, but often with silly limits set on them, for example, they build the worst cars they can (within certain limits) in Forza, then they are handed out to other players, so they have to drive what they are given and make the best of it - a 1,000HP Ford Transit with skinny tyres, for example - and then they go racing.
But the jewel of the channel is the monthly “Survive the Hunt”, where the crew have to hunt Alex down in GTA5. All maps, callouts etc. are disabled and he has to blend in with the AI traffic and either survive an “day” in GTA5 (about 45 minutes) or, currently, he has to complete a bunch of tasks that should make him stick out from the AI traffic. All the while, the rest of the crew are spread out throughout the city looking for him, watching the traffic for vehicles that screw up (difficult, considering how derpy AI traffic can be) and kill him, before the time is up.
It is his live commentary that makes it so much fun. The races aren’t serious and the various Hunts aren’t pure action, in fact there are long periods of him just trying to get across the map, whilst obeying traffic laws, but the commentary makes it compelling watching.
Buggs and the others do serious racing and simulation stuff as well, and I dip into that as well, but it is the fun stuff that has me coming back at the end of every week for a dose of fun. Likewise, I can’t wait for the start of each month to watch the next Hunt.
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I was wondering at the comment, that 3 political parties doesn’t work.
We have 8 main parties and some fringe parties, which usually don’t get seats in Parliament, but do get seats in local and regional councils.
That works very well, because there are checks and balances. No one party ever had a majority, they have to make coalitions in order to have a house majority.
The excesses of no party can be gotten through, there is always some compromise that works as a sort of sanity check.
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I have to second the whole extra app to listen to podcasts. For years I listened to Apple Podcast app, but realized there where other podcast catchers out there that actually supported other platforms and found one I like (Pocketcast’s) I’ve now been regularly using for over a year and find it’s hard to even go back to Apple for the one or two podcast I found there that I can’t ever seem to find on pocketcast’s. So I watch all the excellent shows through pocketcast which is what I listen to 95% of the time when I’m consuming audio.
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A solid, thought provoking show this week. 
Towards the end of the show, time mark 2:20:00, the panel was discussing whether the “open internet” has been a good thing.
Brianna specifically mentioned the stock brokerages, calling out RobinHood as an example of a bad-doer.
On the contrary, the Internet has made that a much better industry. Let’s rewind to the early 1990s and perform a stock trade. I buy the Sunday edition of my local newspaper, which has 3 pages of stock quotes from Friday in tiny type. I call my stockbroker’s secretary, who schedules an appointment for Tuesday afternoon. We meet. He tries to sell me some mutual fund or penny stock or other shenanigans and I have to insist that no, I just want to sell my IBM shares. The order is placed with the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. And oh, by the way, he charges me both a 1% per annum management fee and a transaction fee.
Modern technology lets me set alerts on news, and execute transactions in minutes instead of days from virtually anywhere. Yes, RobinHood uses high frequency trading strategies to take a small commission, but that is a vast improvement compared to how it “used to be.”
Also, to Cory’s point, there is a difference between a company being large and powerful, and being a prohibited trust. The line is essentially whether a company could theoretically harm competition, and whether they actually use that power.
I do think the government is more permissive to corporate consolidation than it needs to be, in the spirit of encouraging vigorous competition, but drawing that line in advance is very difficult. How is a bureaucrat at the FTC to know whether the right number of major book publishers in the country should be 2, 5, or 13? It may be doable to determine that they allowed too much consolidation post-facto, but by then the horse has left the barn.
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Yes and no, on the stock topic. Whilst it is quicker and easier for you to make a transaction, you are still the equivalent of a week behind the “big boys”, or rather the systems running the trades, and they are reacting to other trades, the whole thing has little or no relation to reality any more.
A rogue algorithm can pump or trash a stock within seconds, with nobody approving the trades, to ensure they make sense or that something hasn’t gone wrong - they are generally stable, but there have been several instances of runaway trades over the years, where new system or new algorithms were brought online, or 2 systems were reacting to each other and trashing stocks in the process.
I agree, it is quicker and cheaper for the individual, but they broke the whole system in the process.
As to big companies, it seems you are either a big company or nothing these days. Why do these big companies need to keep acquiring other companies? Why can’t those companies be left to make a go of it on their own. This, again, distorts the market and also the ethos of companies. When I was growing up, it was all about tradition, about goodwill and making sure you made quality products that would give you a good reputation and strategies to see that the company is still there in 10 year, 50 years, 100 years… Now, it is common to build up a company with no sustainable business model, sell it off quick and get out, before it collapses, I see it as a lack of pride in the companies they are making.
Technology has its good and its bad sides, size as well.
I have to say the discussion here really reflects the quality of the show itself. Thanks!!!
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