Having spent a couple of days in Miami earlier this week I could have written stories about the sad state of Florida. There were homeless people everywhere. Smell of urine all across the city. Poop on the sidewalk. And empty storefronts all along Lincoln road (which is a major tourism spot in south beach). Any horror story written about California can pretty much be written about Florida … but that story wouldn’t fit the Fox News narrative.

while I still can’t think of a need for the announced Apple VR/AR headset, one thing I haven’t seen many people talk about is Apple adding the Pro Tag to the product name. Usually Apple ads the Pro tag after several iterations of a product, here it’s in version one. This makes me wonder what the non Pro version will look like. My number one guess would be the outward facing screen will be gone in a plain/regular version. But beyond that I have a hard time to think of ways to cut cost while keeping it justify a price premium over Oculus headsets … in a way a non Pro version would have to be in the $999 price range I think to make it become close to competitive and be a success for Apple.

So I am not as old as Bill Maher but closer to his age, than I am to millennials. But I honestly don’t get his obsession and disdain of young people. He did this podcast chat with Dr Phil the other day where both of them, similar to the two grumpy old men from the Muppets, bitch and complain about young people. As if they and their generation where the shining example everyone should aspire to. They bring up how dumb young people are using videos of people asked mostly history or geography questions. Own example Bill Maher brings up is a person being asked “Where is Venice” responding with “Is it Paris?” … then he laughs how stupid the young person is and ends with “these young people don’t even know what a continent is.” … really and it looks to me like Bill Maher and his stupid generation doesn’t seem to know what a city or country is because the logical answer to Where is Venice, would really be either Italy or Los Angeles. Yes, Venice is in Europe but unless the question is which continent is a city on the logical next question would a city is in a county. But maybe they didn’t teach countries in school when Bill was young. Also making fun of random people, taken off guard had a long tradition. As a German I remember how all the way back to the 70s and 80s TV shows made fun of “dumb Americans” who didn’t know geography.
So Bill Maher, maybe talk to young people and realize how smart a lot of them actually are before you make yourself look like an old, angry, fool.

Like so many things the right-wing media, Twittersphere, and podcastspehere likes to propagate, the whole issue of wokeism is a non-issue. It is just a bunch of snowflakes bitching that someone is pushing back against their entitled and outdated worldviews, and I guess they never had to deal with people that challenged their opinions. This interview with Graham Norton nails it:

www.youtube.com/watch

Listening to a podcast the other day, one of the participants started to talk about the meaning of life. It all sounded pretentious. None resonated. But then I stopped walking and a thought hit me: “there is no meaning of life.” Life has no meaning. The universe doesn’t care. There is only one fact of life, and that is: we all die. Since then I have thought more about this and it feels pretty freeing.

Matt Levine writing Bloomberg’s Money Stuff column is brilliant. This opening of one of this recent pieces is

“The basic function of crypto is that you can buy cryptocurrencies with dollars and sell cryptocurrencies for dollars. I suppose there are other functions? But the main thing is that if you think Bitcoin will go up, you spend some dollars to buy some Bitcoin, and then if it goes up (or doesn’t), you sell it for dollars.”

The rest is here: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-13/svb-couldn-t-ignore-its-losses-but-the-fed-can?leadSource=uverify+wall&utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=mobile_web_share