November 17, 2022 • 34 mins
Elon Musk allegedly fires Twitter employees who criticize his decisions. A billionaire is calling for Google to stop paying its employees so darn much. Amazon gears up for corporate layoffs. And Chinese gamers will soon lose access to games like World of Warcraft and Hearthstone. Plus more!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
And how the tech are you. It's time for the
tech news for November two thousand, twin d two and
(00:26):
I didn't have a news episode this past Tuesday, which
means we've got a little bit of a Twitter backup
to get through because things are still going bonkers over there.
Starting off in Twitter b E. That is, before Elon,
the corporate culture encouraged internal criticism. Some would say criticism
was tolerated to a fault in fact, but the point
(00:49):
is Twitter employees were never punished for criticizing company leadership
or policies. Well, that's very much changed. One engineer, Eric Fraunhofer,
who had worked for Twitter for eight years and got
involved in a Twitter conversation with Elon Musk in an
effort to correct what he saw his Musk's errors regarding
how Twitter operates on a technical level, has been let go.
(01:14):
He has since said that Musk was just completely wrong
about Twitter's technical operations and so he was stepping in
to actually provide the real answers. Musk did not care
for that critique, and fron Huffer was fired. A couple
of other employees were similarly let go for doing similar things,
and the following day some Twitter employees expressed support for
(01:37):
their former colleagues, and they too were shown the door,
which led to a lot of Twitter employees going back
and scrubbing their various accounts uh messages on like Twitter
and Slack and that kind of thing in an effort
to not hire Sawon. I guess, And according to Casey Newton,
who does an incredible newsletter each several times a week
(02:01):
actually about tech, about two dozen folks were affected by
these firings. Some other outlets are reporting even more than that.
So the word seems to be you don't criticize Elon
Musk or you'll get canned. So I guess the free
speech absolutist has his own thoughts about the kinds of
speech that shouldn't be expressed. Though, to be fair, free
(02:23):
speech has never met You're actually free from the consequences
of what you say, only that you are allowed to
say it. So yeah, I'm being a bit cheeky here. Anyway,
Several of the folks fired had been at Twitter for
nearly a decade or longer, which is bad news for
a company that recently purged about half of all employees
and still needs to get stuff done. As for those
(02:45):
left behind, well, they have a tough decision to make. Today.
Elon Musk has issued a deadline. Twitter employees must fill
out an online form to indicate whether or not they
will be willing to do grueling work at long hours
or else leave the company. Musk alerted employees to this
yesterday in an email titled a fork in the Road.
(03:08):
So they have until the end of today to fill
out the form. And y'all, this is smelling awful, similar
to a loyalty pledge, which is given me seriously bad vibes.
But for some a Twitter, this could be the push
they need to determine if they in fact want to
stay at the company and try to transform the platform
or hack just keep it running while working with half
(03:29):
the personnel, or if they'd rather take a chance and
make a big career change, which is tough in a
market where you're seeing lots of layoffs across big tech.
It could be that Musk is actually looking to further
thin the ranks of Twitter though much of the analysis
that I have read suggests that such a move would
be risky because it's already going to be hard for
(03:50):
the remaining staff to just keep things going while also
creating the projects that Musk wants implemented. On a related note,
Elon Musk had to appear in a court in Delaware
to defend his fifty six billion dollar compensation package at Tesla.
We'll talk more about Tesla in a second. This lawsuit
(04:11):
came from Tesla shareholder Richard Tornetta, who accuses Tesla and
Elon Musk for leveraging a compliant board of directors to
create an insanely lucrative compensation package from Musk while hiding
crucial information from shareholders who were encouraged to sign off
on this compensation deal, which they did. In his testimony,
(04:33):
Musk said he intends to find someone else to run
Twitter in the future, but later that same day, which
again was just yesterday, he said it would take some
time because he wants to hand Twitter over once it
is in a quote unquote strong place. Well, considering how
things have been going for Twitter over the last couple
of weeks and the amount of ground that's been lost
(04:56):
as various advertisers have pulled back from the platform. It
may take a long time for Twitter to be in
a strong place, So why would Musk talk about Twitter
in a trial that's really about his compensation with Tesla. Well,
several Tesla shareholders have shown concerned that Musk is far
too distracted by Twitter to lead Tesla effectively. According to
(05:20):
The Wall Street Journal, Tesla board member James Murdoch has
said that Musk has someone in mind who would serve
as CEO of Tesla as well, indicating that perhaps Musk
is thinking of handing control over to another person. Musk
says he thinks of himself now as a leader, but
as an engineer, something that I think fron Hoffer would
(05:41):
take Umbridge to. Anyway, this trial will be decided by
a judge. It is not a jury trial, so a
judge ultimately makes the decision about whether or not Tesla
and the board of directors misled shareholders. Uh interesting side
note that that judge is Chancellor Kathleen McCormick. She happens
(06:01):
to be the judge who was also overseeing Twitter's lawsuit
against Musk back when Musk was still trying to back
out of his acquisition deal. That was the trial that
ultimately got called off because Musk ultimately agreed to buy Twitter.
Speaking of Tesla, the US government has released data showing
that Tesla has identified two additional car crash fatalities connected
(06:25):
to its driver assistance systems, but details are a bit scarce.
One of those two accidents happened nearly a year ago,
so it's kind of shocking to get word of it now.
But both happened in California. Both involved some form of
driver assistance modes being engaged. But the NHTSA, the National
(06:48):
Highway Traffic and Safety Administration uh OR authority rather doesn't
distinguish between autopilot and full self driving, So I don't
know which mode was actually in operation for either of
these crashes. It could have been one or the other.
The n h t s A categorizes both autopilot and
full self driving from Tesla as s A E level
(07:11):
two on the Driving Automation Scale. Now remember that scale
goes from zero, which has really no active driver assist features.
It could have warnings and stuff like that, but it doesn't.
It doesn't really take over control of the vehicle, and
then you go all the way up to level five,
which is where you have a fully automated vehicle, where
(07:33):
you know there are no controls for humans at all.
The whole thing is is is vehicle operated. But level two,
where both autopilot and full self driving are still requires
human operation and human attention. Since July of two thousand
twenty one, almost all of the fatal accidents involving driver
assistance systems that have been reported to the nh T
(07:56):
s A have been Tesla vehicles or have involved Tesla vehicles.
But the NHT essay also points out there's not a
standardized approach across all automakers, all car manufacturers on how
to track crashes that involve some form of driver assistance
(08:18):
system in them. So, because there's not a unified and
standardized approach here, you cannot definitively say that one brand
of car is inherently less safe than another. So while
you look at this this set of figures and you say, wow,
Tesla's a driver assistance systems have led to some terrible accidents,
(08:41):
I mean that is true, but it doesn't give you
the full story because we don't have a unified version
of metrics and processes so that we can definitively say,
all right, this company seems to be doing something far
more effect active and responsible than this company. We can't
(09:03):
really do that because it's not a level playing field,
because we don't know all the different methodologies used to
track and report this data, which makes it not really
that useful. In my mind, I think we need to
create standards that that need to be adopted by the
entire industry in order to have a better view of
(09:23):
what's actually happening. I know I dump on Tesla a lot,
but I don't think it's fair to draw a conclusion
that Tesla is inherently worse at this than other companies
when we know that there's not a standardized way to
actually get metrics on all of this and some more
(09:44):
bad news for Elon Musk, this time stemming from SpaceX.
So this past summer, five SpaceX employees signed off on
a letter that called on the company to acknowledge and
condemn Elon Musk's behavior on Twitter relating to a news
rep art that SpaceX had settled a sexual harassment lawsuit
out of court, one that involved Musk and an employee
(10:08):
of SpaceX. So these five employees, who's who wrote this
letter saying Elon Musk's behavior was unacceptable and the company
should call him out on it. Then found themselves out
of a job, and the following day around twenty engineers
had to attend a meeting in which a Tesla VP
named John Edwards allegedly equated the letter to an quote
(10:29):
unquote extremist act. That loyalty pledged thing I mentioned about
Twitter seems to apply to Musk's other operations, I guess anyway.
Some of these employees say that the letter ultimately led
to nine people getting fired from SpaceX. Eight of them
have now joined in an effort with the National Labor
(10:49):
Relations Board or in l RB to bring unfair labor
practices charges against SpaceX. Moreover, this issue seems to add
to this this perception that Elon Musk very much does
not like having his authority questioned or restricted in any way.
(11:09):
It's not a good look. Is kind of authoritarian in
its approach, and again, like having someone being very flippant
about a sexual harassment lawsuit being dismissed doesn't come across
great either. Anyway. That's all the Twitter slash Elon Musk
(11:30):
stuff I have for now, So that's good. When we
come back. We'll move on to totally different tech news.
We're back. Sir Christopher Home, a man who came from
humble beginnings to rise to billionaire in the world of
(11:53):
financial trading, has some stern words for Google, or specifically
Google's parent company, Alphabet. So Hans Hedge Fund, which is
called t c I, has a massive steak in Alphabet.
It's valued at around six billion dollars billion with a B.
(12:14):
And Han recently sent a letter to Alphabet arguing that
Alphabet one has too many employees, to it pays its
employees way too much, and three it wastes too much
money on projects that don't drive revenue and accrew huge losses.
So he's calling for Alphabet to downsize and eliminate employee
(12:37):
positions that he feels the company has, you know, too
many of. He's saying that there are too many people
working there and they're not doing enough work. That this
is inefficient and costly and should be addressed quickly. Moreover,
he wants to see the folks who are at Alphabet
make less money, because Alphabet's median salary is somewhere je
(13:00):
shy of three hundred thousand dollars a year. That's according
to filings with the SEC, which is a big old wow,
like the median salaries around three hundred k. Wow. Now,
I imagine that doesn't include like contractors and that sort
of thing, but still three d k that's a lot
of cheddar. And you know, Hans thinks it's too much cheddar,
(13:23):
as more cheddar should be going to the billionaires like him.
I guess. I mean, I get that Alphabet's compensation is
well above that of the competition, but I find it
hard to be on the side of a guy who
literally has more wealth than most people, including myself, will
ever come close to hard to side with the super
rich guy, you know. But anyway, he also wants to
(13:46):
see subsidiaries like Weymo get the old Google treatment and
get shut down. Weymo is Google's self driving vehicle company,
and Weymo, he argues, has lost billions of dollars while
other car manufacturers have kind of backed off of trying
to make autonomous cars reality. He cited some various initiatives
(14:09):
that had previously been launched and since abandoned and says
Google should do the same thing. So will Alphabet capitulate
to his demands? Well, the tech industry as a whole
is definitely slimming down due to various economic pressures. Because
we're in that ding dang durn economic uncertainty that we
(14:30):
still have not really named. I think we're gonna skip
recession and go straight to depression personally, but anyway, it
would not be surprising to see Alphabet make a move
like this. We know that Google has been pulling back
on hires and also has started to restrict things like
(14:50):
company travel, so it would not be surprising to see
Alphabet make that move, especially since we know so many
other companies in the tech space are are doing that.
In fact, while we're on the topic of layoffs, let's
talk Amazon. Just as we're entering the frenzy of the
holiday season, though maybe the season will be less of
(15:10):
a frenzy due to the aforementioned economic uncertainty, Amazon is
following the band and has begun to layoff employees. Some
reports suggest that these layoffs could reach around ten thousand
jobs total. The company started by laying off employees who
are working in the hardware divisions, which produces stuff like
(15:32):
Amazon Fire, Amazon Echo, the Kindle, and devices with Amazon's
personal assistant, whom I will not name so that you're
smart speakers don't talk back at me because they're mean.
You should have a discussion with those smart speakers about
their behavior. Words can hurt anyway. It's just a super
(15:52):
tough time at the big tech companies right now with
so many people being let go. And I can speak
from experience, it fights to get laid off around Thanksgiving.
I had that happened to me at a former job,
and even seventeen years later, it still stings. The cuts
at Amazon are mostly targeting corporate staff and might amount
(16:14):
to around three percent of the total workforce, but the
company's warehouse divisions are unlikely to see extensive cuts. That
makes sense. We are getting into the holidays, there's going
to be a lot of activity in those warehouses, so
it makes sense that the cuts were seeing are going
to be on the corporate side, not necessarily the warehouse side.
CNBC reports that Amazon has sent out a voluntary severance
(16:36):
message to some employees, giving them the option to take
a severance package and leave the company voluntarily rather than
risk being laid off later down the road. Those employees
will have until November twenty nine to make their decision,
and if they take the package. Their employment with Amazon
will end on December twenty three. By the way, I
(16:57):
saw that Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, has dedicated to giving
away almost all of his wealth two various charitable organizations
and efforts. And I saw that someone had posted clearly
he was visited by three spirits, So good on you.
I wish I had your name in front of me,
because that was a great joke and I really laughed
(17:20):
when I saw it. Okay, let's talk about Netflix, and
Netflix has announced a change to how subscribers can manage
access to various devices. So previously cutting off access revoking
access to devices was an all or nothing deal. You
could revoke access to all devices you had signed into.
(17:42):
Let's say you did something silly like let's say you
went to stay at an Airbnb and they had a
smart TV, so you logged into your Netflix account and
then you left the Airbnb, but you realize you forgot
to log out of that smart TV, so your account
is still active on there. Well, you could revoke access,
(18:02):
but the problem was it applied to every single device
you were logged into, so you lost everything, which meant
that you had to go through the whole process of
getting access again for the stuff you actually own, like say,
your own television or whatever. Well, now Netflix is letting
users get more granular. You can revoke access to specific
devices while you retain it everywhere else. It also gives
(18:25):
users the chance to shut down access to their account if,
for example, they lent it to say that no good
mooture of a cousin of yours or whatever. Maybe I'm
projecting anyway, because Netflix will be instituting a sub account
charge for users who let other households also access their accounts.
(18:46):
This move lets users nope right on out of that
by cutting off the access. So instead of Netflix saying, hey,
we noticed that this other household is using your account regularly,
sometimes at the same time you're using the account, so
we're gonna charge you a monthly fee to have this
additional uh feed go out, you could say, you know what,
(19:09):
I'm just going to revoke that access and I'm good.
I'll just pay mine and then they can go and
get their own Netflix account. So that is going to
be an option to although really Netflix is pointing more
at the case I mentioned where you've perhaps traveled somewhere,
logged into Netflix, forgot the log out and you wanted
to revoke access that way. Anyway, the feature is now
(19:30):
live to all Netflix users, and may the odds be
ever in your favor. Meta is making some changes to
what Facebook users will display in their profiles. Starting on
December one, Facebook is going to remove some fields that
are currently active in profiles. Those fields include religious views,
political views, the interested in field, which in this case
(19:53):
the interested in relates to sexual orientation, as well as
the address field. All of those are to go away
starting December one. Meta has not yet shared what prompted
this decision, like, we know what's going to happen, but
the company has not yet said why it's made this decision.
I think it might be to mitigate issues like harassment
(20:16):
that could potentially be part of it, but the company
has not said for sure. Ever. Note, the note taking
app that burst onto the scene in two thousand eight,
announced that the mobile developer company called Bending Spoons will
acquire ever note early next year. And Evernote made a
pretty big splash when it first debuted, But honestly, I
(20:39):
had not heard very much about it over the last
several years. Apparently I'm not alone. They kind of fell
into semi obscurity. I mean, the people who love every
Note continued to love every Note, although from what I understand,
the service made some changes that upset a lot of
users before backing off of those changes. But this announcement
said that this upcoming merger will allow every Note to
(21:02):
make quote accelerated improvements across our teams, professional, personal and
free offerings, which is fantastic news for lovers of Evernote
everywhere end quote. Glad to hear it. I would like
to see folks continue to be gainfully employed and be
able to work on a on a platform that they
really believe in. Also, I want to say, bending spoons
(21:23):
is a pretty funny name. Just makes me think of
your ee Geller and the Charlatans who claim that they
can use psychic powers to bend spoons, when in fact
the psychic powers are actually their hands. Okay, enough of
my skeptical critique. We're gonna take another quick break. When
we come back, we have a couple more news items
to get through. Okay, this next story is pretty upsetting.
(21:54):
Israel has deployed robotic guns on guard towers in the
West Bank. The guns use artificial intelligence to identify and
track targets, but are actually fired remotely by guards who
are stationed inside these guard towers. So while the guns
are using computer assist aiming, kind of like what you
see in video games, especially video games that allow players
(22:17):
on console to go up against PC gamers, because you know,
console controllers don't have the same level of speed and
precision as a mouse and keyboard, so often console players
get a little aim assist boost where the computer helps
guide those crosshairs just a little bit so you can
get hits. This AI does effectively the same thing, but
(22:40):
to a real world gun, not a video game gun. However,
a human being still has to fire the gun, so
the guns are outfitted with what Israel refers to as
non lethal ammunition, which includes stuff like tear gas and
sponge tipped bullets. I think non lethal might be a
bit aspirational there. Let's say that they are intended to
(23:02):
be non lethal anyway. The location of these guns is
around the Palestinian refugee camp, which has led to criticism
that Israel is using Palestinians as targets to train its AI,
while the Israeli government claims that the guns are there
to protect both Israeli and Palestinian lives activist Issa Amro
criticized the tech and said that the possibility that could
(23:24):
be misused or even hacked, which is terrifying, puts thousands
of lives at risk. Even if it's never hacked. The
fact that people could think that such a thing could
happen means that you've got this this tool of fear
there right Like it's terrifying to think about. So you
don't even need the hack to happen for it to
(23:45):
already have a negative impact, not to mention that, I
think just having a robotic gun as a negative impact
on the face of its full stop. Meanwhile, Omar Shakir,
a leader at Human Rights Watch, warrens that using AI
assisted weapons with a remote ire could put Israel on
a slippery slope toward becoming quote a powder keg for
human rights abuse end quote. We've seen several robotics companies
(24:09):
recently pledged to never develop any sort of weapons systems.
But while that's reassuring, we also know that military is
around the world, including the United States military, are working
hard to do just that, to build robotic platforms for weapons,
and that you know we've seen that with drones. I mean,
that's one robotic platform that has weapons, but we're seeing
(24:29):
it across multiple implementations now, and you can kind of
understand why. I mean, there's this desire to create weapons
that keep your own soldiers out of harm's way. Right
this way, you're not putting your soldiers lives at risk.
But critics really fear that a use and implementation of
robotic platforms will lead to more conflicts around the world.
(24:51):
There will be less resistance to getting into armed conflicts
if you're thinking that your side doesn't really risk any losses,
and that can see widespread human rights crises as a result,
which is the big reason why I'm dead set against
robotic weapons platforms. Intel launched a new product called fake Catcher,
(25:14):
which is designed to detect deep fake videos. Now. According
to Intel, fake Catcher has a nineties accuracy rate in
detecting deep fakes. The product looks for tail tale signs
of face and landmark manipulations, you know, movements that might
be too subtle for humans to really pick up on,
but that indicate a computer generated the image or video.
(25:34):
It even looks for really small indicators like how our
veins change color as our hearts pump blood through them,
which is kind of creepy. And there's a growing concern
over how deep fakes could be used to push misinformation
campaigns or to smear someone by posting fake content of them.
And of course there's also the terrible world of deep
(25:57):
fake adult content, where innocent people have had their images
used in this kind of adult content without their consent,
and that can lead to really harmful situations, everything from uh,
you know, professional impact to mental and emotional trauma. So
it is important that we have tools developed that are
(26:18):
good at detecting deep fix Of course, the flip side
of that is that we often see this as a
seesaw kind of approach. Right. As tools get better at
detecting deep fakes, deep fakes get better at evading tools,
and the process continues. Activision Blizzard will be suspending several
online games in China due to a failure to reach
(26:39):
a licensing deal with Chinese game company net Ease. So
let's break this down really quickly. Net Ease is a
game's publisher and distributor in China. Blizzard has partnered with
net Ease to bring certain titles like World of Warcraft,
over Watch two, Diablo three, and more to the Chinese market,
but this lie something. Agreement expires every so often and
(27:02):
then comes up for renegotiation, and apparently the most recent
negotiation talks broke down as Blizzard failed to reach an
agreement for certain titles. Other ones will remain unaffected because
they're under separate agreements. So after January twenty three, games
that include World of Warcraft, Overwatch two, Diablow three, Hearthstone,
(27:24):
Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft, and Warcraft three Reforged will
become unavailable in China. Other titles like Diablow Immortal will
continue development in China because, as I said, they were
part of a separate deal that was already signed. Apparently,
some of the obstacles blocking this deal centered around not distribution,
but the ownership of intellectual property and and player data.
(27:48):
So Blizzard says it's working to find alternatives to bring
titles back to Chinese players, but there's no telling on
when or if that will happen. Microsoft has made a
move that will likely send at least some corporate leaders
to throw a tantrum. The company has introduced games in
its Microsoft Teams product in an app called Games for Work.
(28:09):
So the games include a bunch of casual titles, stuff
like mind Sweeper, Solitaire, that sort of stuff. But they
also have multiplayer capability, so it allows employees to match
up against their coworkers in various games. So you can
go up against someone else in a game of Solitaire
to the death. Okay, I got a little carried away.
(28:30):
It's probably not to the death. Microsoft says that their
data shows employees who play games together for forty five
minutes are then more productive than those who engage in
other team building activities. But based on how some bosses,
particularly in the tech space, seemed to be obsessed with
monitoring employees, I can't see this going over well at
(28:50):
a lot of places. Nope, work is supposed to be
oppressive and joy list, so forget about games. Maybe I'm
just projecting now. To be clear, I'm being facetious. I
still work remotely. I have not been pressured to return
to the office, and as long as I keep regular hours,
everything's pretty cool for me. But I realized that my
(29:11):
situation is kind of an outlier in the tech space,
and that stinks. I think tons of companies actually really
benefited from employees working remotely with more autonomy. Anyway, the
game's app is available now, and Microsoft says it will
soon be updating the service with more features and more games.
So maybe you'll end up playing games on Microsoft Teams
(29:33):
with teammates occasionally when you're taking a break, which sounds
kind of cool to me. Finally, Upside Foods has received
pre market consultation approval from the Food and Drug Administration
in the U s a k A the f d A.
And why the heck am I covering a food story
in tech stuff? Well, Upside food makes chicken. Like. This
(29:56):
company doesn't butcher chickens and then sell the meat. It
makes chicken meat. That's right. Upside Foods is a company
that makes lab grown meat, meaning the company harvests animal
cells but doesn't slaughter the animals, and it cultivates those
cells and bioreactors to make lab grown meat. The FDA
(30:17):
approval is an important step towards bringing this product to market,
though there are several other steps that have to happen. First.
For one thing, the lab will require an inspection from
the United States Department of Agriculture a k the U
S d A, and then the FDA will actually have
to inspect the real food produced before it could be
sold in the US, so there are other regulatory steps
(30:40):
that have to be made, but the f d A
pre approval stage is a necessary and important step. Also,
Upside Foods will have to take some time to scale
up production if it passes all these inspections, it's not
going to be able to go into mass production right away.
And in fact, the company plans to provide lab grown
chicken only to fancy schmancy restaurants when it starts off,
(31:04):
so there will definitely be a huge up charge in
the beginning because you'll have to travel to some pretty
exclusive restaurants to get a bite of Upside chicken. And
that makes sense because the process to grow the meat
is itself incredibly expensive. In fact, analysts estimate that once
it hits market, lab grown meat will be maybe three
(31:26):
times or more expensive than your typical butchered meat, and
I'm guessing that's gonna be a massive impediment to its adoption.
They might be a massive impediment even to get into
grocery stores. I don't think most folks can necessarily afford
to triple the amount of money they spend on meat,
even if they are comforted by the idea that no
(31:47):
animal died to provide that meat, So I imagine this
kind of gradual rollout is one that can lead to
reductions and production cost over time. Personally, I'm all for
the lab grown approach. I you think that it's going
to take time to perfect it so that things like
taste and consistency are really on par with what you
(32:08):
would get if you were buying fresh meat. But the
idea of being able to do that without harming animals,
and also being able to scale back the livestock industry,
which is a huge environmental impact on our world right.
If we're able to scale that back significantly, that would
be a huge, huge wind as far as fighting against
(32:31):
climate change. So there are multiple reasons to really be
on board with lab grown meat. Um, but it's gonna
take a while for us to get to a point
where it becomes cost effective. When it starts off, it's
gonna be so prohibitively expensive that only super fancy pants
people are going to get a chance to try it. Um.
(32:52):
If a fancy pants restaurant that serves lab grown meat
wants to invite me to try some, I'm happy to
do it. I just can't you know, I can't take
out a loan to have an appetizer. All right, That
wraps up this episode of tech Stuff News. If you
would like to get in touch with me, tell me
about something you would like me to cover in the future.
(33:14):
You can do that in a couple of different ways.
One is to download the I Heart Radio app. It
is free to download, free to use. You can just
navigate over to tech Stuff by putting that into the
search bar. You'll see tech Stuff pop up. There will
be a little microphone icon there. If you click on that,
you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds
in length. If you like, you can let me know
and I can use that that voice message in a
(33:36):
future episode. That'd be great. If you don't want me
to just you know, you don't have to tell me
you just leave a message. I'm never going to include
a message unless I'm expressly told that I can, or
if you prefer, you can reach out to me on Twitter.
The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text
(34:03):
Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts
from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
And how the tech are you. It's time for the
tech news for November two thousand, twin d two and
(00:26):
I didn't have a news episode this past Tuesday, which
means we've got a little bit of a Twitter backup
to get through because things are still going bonkers over there.
Starting off in Twitter b E. That is, before Elon,
the corporate culture encouraged internal criticism. Some would say criticism
was tolerated to a fault in fact, but the point
(00:49):
is Twitter employees were never punished for criticizing company leadership
or policies. Well, that's very much changed. One engineer, Eric Fraunhofer,
who had worked for Twitter for eight years and got
involved in a Twitter conversation with Elon Musk in an
effort to correct what he saw his Musk's errors regarding
how Twitter operates on a technical level, has been let go.
(01:14):
He has since said that Musk was just completely wrong
about Twitter's technical operations and so he was stepping in
to actually provide the real answers. Musk did not care
for that critique, and fron Huffer was fired. A couple
of other employees were similarly let go for doing similar things,
and the following day some Twitter employees expressed support for
(01:37):
their former colleagues, and they too were shown the door,
which led to a lot of Twitter employees going back
and scrubbing their various accounts uh messages on like Twitter
and Slack and that kind of thing in an effort
to not hire Sawon. I guess, And according to Casey Newton,
who does an incredible newsletter each several times a week
(02:01):
actually about tech, about two dozen folks were affected by
these firings. Some other outlets are reporting even more than that.
So the word seems to be you don't criticize Elon
Musk or you'll get canned. So I guess the free
speech absolutist has his own thoughts about the kinds of
speech that shouldn't be expressed. Though, to be fair, free
(02:23):
speech has never met You're actually free from the consequences
of what you say, only that you are allowed to
say it. So yeah, I'm being a bit cheeky here. Anyway,
Several of the folks fired had been at Twitter for
nearly a decade or longer, which is bad news for
a company that recently purged about half of all employees
and still needs to get stuff done. As for those
(02:45):
left behind, well, they have a tough decision to make. Today.
Elon Musk has issued a deadline. Twitter employees must fill
out an online form to indicate whether or not they
will be willing to do grueling work at long hours
or else leave the company. Musk alerted employees to this
yesterday in an email titled a fork in the Road.
(03:08):
So they have until the end of today to fill
out the form. And y'all, this is smelling awful, similar
to a loyalty pledge, which is given me seriously bad vibes.
But for some a Twitter, this could be the push
they need to determine if they in fact want to
stay at the company and try to transform the platform
or hack just keep it running while working with half
(03:29):
the personnel, or if they'd rather take a chance and
make a big career change, which is tough in a
market where you're seeing lots of layoffs across big tech.
It could be that Musk is actually looking to further
thin the ranks of Twitter though much of the analysis
that I have read suggests that such a move would
be risky because it's already going to be hard for
(03:50):
the remaining staff to just keep things going while also
creating the projects that Musk wants implemented. On a related note,
Elon Musk had to appear in a court in Delaware
to defend his fifty six billion dollar compensation package at Tesla.
We'll talk more about Tesla in a second. This lawsuit
(04:11):
came from Tesla shareholder Richard Tornetta, who accuses Tesla and
Elon Musk for leveraging a compliant board of directors to
create an insanely lucrative compensation package from Musk while hiding
crucial information from shareholders who were encouraged to sign off
on this compensation deal, which they did. In his testimony,
(04:33):
Musk said he intends to find someone else to run
Twitter in the future, but later that same day, which
again was just yesterday, he said it would take some
time because he wants to hand Twitter over once it
is in a quote unquote strong place. Well, considering how
things have been going for Twitter over the last couple
of weeks and the amount of ground that's been lost
(04:56):
as various advertisers have pulled back from the platform. It
may take a long time for Twitter to be in
a strong place, So why would Musk talk about Twitter
in a trial that's really about his compensation with Tesla. Well,
several Tesla shareholders have shown concerned that Musk is far
too distracted by Twitter to lead Tesla effectively. According to
(05:20):
The Wall Street Journal, Tesla board member James Murdoch has
said that Musk has someone in mind who would serve
as CEO of Tesla as well, indicating that perhaps Musk
is thinking of handing control over to another person. Musk
says he thinks of himself now as a leader, but
as an engineer, something that I think fron Hoffer would
(05:41):
take Umbridge to. Anyway, this trial will be decided by
a judge. It is not a jury trial, so a
judge ultimately makes the decision about whether or not Tesla
and the board of directors misled shareholders. Uh interesting side
note that that judge is Chancellor Kathleen McCormick. She happens
(06:01):
to be the judge who was also overseeing Twitter's lawsuit
against Musk back when Musk was still trying to back
out of his acquisition deal. That was the trial that
ultimately got called off because Musk ultimately agreed to buy Twitter.
Speaking of Tesla, the US government has released data showing
that Tesla has identified two additional car crash fatalities connected
(06:25):
to its driver assistance systems, but details are a bit scarce.
One of those two accidents happened nearly a year ago,
so it's kind of shocking to get word of it now.
But both happened in California. Both involved some form of
driver assistance modes being engaged. But the NHTSA, the National
(06:48):
Highway Traffic and Safety Administration uh OR authority rather doesn't
distinguish between autopilot and full self driving, So I don't
know which mode was actually in operation for either of
these crashes. It could have been one or the other.
The n h t s A categorizes both autopilot and
full self driving from Tesla as s A E level
(07:11):
two on the Driving Automation Scale. Now remember that scale
goes from zero, which has really no active driver assist features.
It could have warnings and stuff like that, but it doesn't.
It doesn't really take over control of the vehicle, and
then you go all the way up to level five,
which is where you have a fully automated vehicle, where
(07:33):
you know there are no controls for humans at all.
The whole thing is is is vehicle operated. But level two,
where both autopilot and full self driving are still requires
human operation and human attention. Since July of two thousand
twenty one, almost all of the fatal accidents involving driver
assistance systems that have been reported to the nh T
(07:56):
s A have been Tesla vehicles or have involved Tesla vehicles.
But the NHT essay also points out there's not a
standardized approach across all automakers, all car manufacturers on how
to track crashes that involve some form of driver assistance
(08:18):
system in them. So, because there's not a unified and
standardized approach here, you cannot definitively say that one brand
of car is inherently less safe than another. So while
you look at this this set of figures and you say, wow,
Tesla's a driver assistance systems have led to some terrible accidents,
(08:41):
I mean that is true, but it doesn't give you
the full story because we don't have a unified version
of metrics and processes so that we can definitively say,
all right, this company seems to be doing something far
more effect active and responsible than this company. We can't
(09:03):
really do that because it's not a level playing field,
because we don't know all the different methodologies used to
track and report this data, which makes it not really
that useful. In my mind, I think we need to
create standards that that need to be adopted by the
entire industry in order to have a better view of
(09:23):
what's actually happening. I know I dump on Tesla a lot,
but I don't think it's fair to draw a conclusion
that Tesla is inherently worse at this than other companies
when we know that there's not a standardized way to
actually get metrics on all of this and some more
(09:44):
bad news for Elon Musk, this time stemming from SpaceX.
So this past summer, five SpaceX employees signed off on
a letter that called on the company to acknowledge and
condemn Elon Musk's behavior on Twitter relating to a news
rep art that SpaceX had settled a sexual harassment lawsuit
out of court, one that involved Musk and an employee
(10:08):
of SpaceX. So these five employees, who's who wrote this
letter saying Elon Musk's behavior was unacceptable and the company
should call him out on it. Then found themselves out
of a job, and the following day around twenty engineers
had to attend a meeting in which a Tesla VP
named John Edwards allegedly equated the letter to an quote
(10:29):
unquote extremist act. That loyalty pledged thing I mentioned about
Twitter seems to apply to Musk's other operations, I guess anyway.
Some of these employees say that the letter ultimately led
to nine people getting fired from SpaceX. Eight of them
have now joined in an effort with the National Labor
(10:49):
Relations Board or in l RB to bring unfair labor
practices charges against SpaceX. Moreover, this issue seems to add
to this this perception that Elon Musk very much does
not like having his authority questioned or restricted in any way.
(11:09):
It's not a good look. Is kind of authoritarian in
its approach, and again, like having someone being very flippant
about a sexual harassment lawsuit being dismissed doesn't come across
great either. Anyway. That's all the Twitter slash Elon Musk
(11:30):
stuff I have for now, So that's good. When we
come back. We'll move on to totally different tech news.
We're back. Sir Christopher Home, a man who came from
humble beginnings to rise to billionaire in the world of
(11:53):
financial trading, has some stern words for Google, or specifically
Google's parent company, Alphabet. So Hans Hedge Fund, which is
called t c I, has a massive steak in Alphabet.
It's valued at around six billion dollars billion with a B.
(12:14):
And Han recently sent a letter to Alphabet arguing that
Alphabet one has too many employees, to it pays its
employees way too much, and three it wastes too much
money on projects that don't drive revenue and accrew huge losses.
So he's calling for Alphabet to downsize and eliminate employee
(12:37):
positions that he feels the company has, you know, too
many of. He's saying that there are too many people
working there and they're not doing enough work. That this
is inefficient and costly and should be addressed quickly. Moreover,
he wants to see the folks who are at Alphabet
make less money, because Alphabet's median salary is somewhere je
(13:00):
shy of three hundred thousand dollars a year. That's according
to filings with the SEC, which is a big old wow,
like the median salaries around three hundred k. Wow. Now,
I imagine that doesn't include like contractors and that sort
of thing, but still three d k that's a lot
of cheddar. And you know, Hans thinks it's too much cheddar,
(13:23):
as more cheddar should be going to the billionaires like him.
I guess. I mean, I get that Alphabet's compensation is
well above that of the competition, but I find it
hard to be on the side of a guy who
literally has more wealth than most people, including myself, will
ever come close to hard to side with the super
rich guy, you know. But anyway, he also wants to
(13:46):
see subsidiaries like Weymo get the old Google treatment and
get shut down. Weymo is Google's self driving vehicle company,
and Weymo, he argues, has lost billions of dollars while
other car manufacturers have kind of backed off of trying
to make autonomous cars reality. He cited some various initiatives
(14:09):
that had previously been launched and since abandoned and says
Google should do the same thing. So will Alphabet capitulate
to his demands? Well, the tech industry as a whole
is definitely slimming down due to various economic pressures. Because
we're in that ding dang durn economic uncertainty that we
(14:30):
still have not really named. I think we're gonna skip
recession and go straight to depression personally, but anyway, it
would not be surprising to see Alphabet make a move
like this. We know that Google has been pulling back
on hires and also has started to restrict things like
(14:50):
company travel, so it would not be surprising to see
Alphabet make that move, especially since we know so many
other companies in the tech space are are doing that.
In fact, while we're on the topic of layoffs, let's
talk Amazon. Just as we're entering the frenzy of the
holiday season, though maybe the season will be less of
(15:10):
a frenzy due to the aforementioned economic uncertainty, Amazon is
following the band and has begun to layoff employees. Some
reports suggest that these layoffs could reach around ten thousand
jobs total. The company started by laying off employees who
are working in the hardware divisions, which produces stuff like
(15:32):
Amazon Fire, Amazon Echo, the Kindle, and devices with Amazon's
personal assistant, whom I will not name so that you're
smart speakers don't talk back at me because they're mean.
You should have a discussion with those smart speakers about
their behavior. Words can hurt anyway. It's just a super
(15:52):
tough time at the big tech companies right now with
so many people being let go. And I can speak
from experience, it fights to get laid off around Thanksgiving.
I had that happened to me at a former job,
and even seventeen years later, it still stings. The cuts
at Amazon are mostly targeting corporate staff and might amount
(16:14):
to around three percent of the total workforce, but the
company's warehouse divisions are unlikely to see extensive cuts. That
makes sense. We are getting into the holidays, there's going
to be a lot of activity in those warehouses, so
it makes sense that the cuts were seeing are going
to be on the corporate side, not necessarily the warehouse side.
CNBC reports that Amazon has sent out a voluntary severance
(16:36):
message to some employees, giving them the option to take
a severance package and leave the company voluntarily rather than
risk being laid off later down the road. Those employees
will have until November twenty nine to make their decision,
and if they take the package. Their employment with Amazon
will end on December twenty three. By the way, I
(16:57):
saw that Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, has dedicated to giving
away almost all of his wealth two various charitable organizations
and efforts. And I saw that someone had posted clearly
he was visited by three spirits, So good on you.
I wish I had your name in front of me,
because that was a great joke and I really laughed
(17:20):
when I saw it. Okay, let's talk about Netflix, and
Netflix has announced a change to how subscribers can manage
access to various devices. So previously cutting off access revoking
access to devices was an all or nothing deal. You
could revoke access to all devices you had signed into.
(17:42):
Let's say you did something silly like let's say you
went to stay at an Airbnb and they had a
smart TV, so you logged into your Netflix account and
then you left the Airbnb, but you realize you forgot
to log out of that smart TV, so your account
is still active on there. Well, you could revoke access,
(18:02):
but the problem was it applied to every single device
you were logged into, so you lost everything, which meant
that you had to go through the whole process of
getting access again for the stuff you actually own, like say,
your own television or whatever. Well, now Netflix is letting
users get more granular. You can revoke access to specific
devices while you retain it everywhere else. It also gives
(18:25):
users the chance to shut down access to their account if,
for example, they lent it to say that no good
mooture of a cousin of yours or whatever. Maybe I'm
projecting anyway, because Netflix will be instituting a sub account
charge for users who let other households also access their accounts.
(18:46):
This move lets users nope right on out of that
by cutting off the access. So instead of Netflix saying, hey,
we noticed that this other household is using your account regularly,
sometimes at the same time you're using the account, so
we're gonna charge you a monthly fee to have this
additional uh feed go out, you could say, you know what,
(19:09):
I'm just going to revoke that access and I'm good.
I'll just pay mine and then they can go and
get their own Netflix account. So that is going to
be an option to although really Netflix is pointing more
at the case I mentioned where you've perhaps traveled somewhere,
logged into Netflix, forgot the log out and you wanted
to revoke access that way. Anyway, the feature is now
(19:30):
live to all Netflix users, and may the odds be
ever in your favor. Meta is making some changes to
what Facebook users will display in their profiles. Starting on
December one, Facebook is going to remove some fields that
are currently active in profiles. Those fields include religious views,
political views, the interested in field, which in this case
(19:53):
the interested in relates to sexual orientation, as well as
the address field. All of those are to go away
starting December one. Meta has not yet shared what prompted
this decision, like, we know what's going to happen, but
the company has not yet said why it's made this decision.
I think it might be to mitigate issues like harassment
(20:16):
that could potentially be part of it, but the company
has not said for sure. Ever. Note, the note taking
app that burst onto the scene in two thousand eight,
announced that the mobile developer company called Bending Spoons will
acquire ever note early next year. And Evernote made a
pretty big splash when it first debuted, But honestly, I
(20:39):
had not heard very much about it over the last
several years. Apparently I'm not alone. They kind of fell
into semi obscurity. I mean, the people who love every
Note continued to love every Note, although from what I understand,
the service made some changes that upset a lot of
users before backing off of those changes. But this announcement
said that this upcoming merger will allow every Note to
(21:02):
make quote accelerated improvements across our teams, professional, personal and
free offerings, which is fantastic news for lovers of Evernote
everywhere end quote. Glad to hear it. I would like
to see folks continue to be gainfully employed and be
able to work on a on a platform that they
really believe in. Also, I want to say, bending spoons
(21:23):
is a pretty funny name. Just makes me think of
your ee Geller and the Charlatans who claim that they
can use psychic powers to bend spoons, when in fact
the psychic powers are actually their hands. Okay, enough of
my skeptical critique. We're gonna take another quick break. When
we come back, we have a couple more news items
to get through. Okay, this next story is pretty upsetting.
(21:54):
Israel has deployed robotic guns on guard towers in the
West Bank. The guns use artificial intelligence to identify and
track targets, but are actually fired remotely by guards who
are stationed inside these guard towers. So while the guns
are using computer assist aiming, kind of like what you
see in video games, especially video games that allow players
(22:17):
on console to go up against PC gamers, because you know,
console controllers don't have the same level of speed and
precision as a mouse and keyboard, so often console players
get a little aim assist boost where the computer helps
guide those crosshairs just a little bit so you can
get hits. This AI does effectively the same thing, but
(22:40):
to a real world gun, not a video game gun. However,
a human being still has to fire the gun, so
the guns are outfitted with what Israel refers to as
non lethal ammunition, which includes stuff like tear gas and
sponge tipped bullets. I think non lethal might be a
bit aspirational there. Let's say that they are intended to
(23:02):
be non lethal anyway. The location of these guns is
around the Palestinian refugee camp, which has led to criticism
that Israel is using Palestinians as targets to train its AI,
while the Israeli government claims that the guns are there
to protect both Israeli and Palestinian lives activist Issa Amro
criticized the tech and said that the possibility that could
(23:24):
be misused or even hacked, which is terrifying, puts thousands
of lives at risk. Even if it's never hacked. The
fact that people could think that such a thing could
happen means that you've got this this tool of fear
there right Like it's terrifying to think about. So you
don't even need the hack to happen for it to
(23:45):
already have a negative impact, not to mention that, I
think just having a robotic gun as a negative impact
on the face of its full stop. Meanwhile, Omar Shakir,
a leader at Human Rights Watch, warrens that using AI
assisted weapons with a remote ire could put Israel on
a slippery slope toward becoming quote a powder keg for
human rights abuse end quote. We've seen several robotics companies
(24:09):
recently pledged to never develop any sort of weapons systems.
But while that's reassuring, we also know that military is
around the world, including the United States military, are working
hard to do just that, to build robotic platforms for weapons,
and that you know we've seen that with drones. I mean,
that's one robotic platform that has weapons, but we're seeing
(24:29):
it across multiple implementations now, and you can kind of
understand why. I mean, there's this desire to create weapons
that keep your own soldiers out of harm's way. Right
this way, you're not putting your soldiers lives at risk.
But critics really fear that a use and implementation of
robotic platforms will lead to more conflicts around the world.
(24:51):
There will be less resistance to getting into armed conflicts
if you're thinking that your side doesn't really risk any losses,
and that can see widespread human rights crises as a result,
which is the big reason why I'm dead set against
robotic weapons platforms. Intel launched a new product called fake Catcher,
(25:14):
which is designed to detect deep fake videos. Now. According
to Intel, fake Catcher has a nineties accuracy rate in
detecting deep fakes. The product looks for tail tale signs
of face and landmark manipulations, you know, movements that might
be too subtle for humans to really pick up on,
but that indicate a computer generated the image or video.
(25:34):
It even looks for really small indicators like how our
veins change color as our hearts pump blood through them,
which is kind of creepy. And there's a growing concern
over how deep fakes could be used to push misinformation
campaigns or to smear someone by posting fake content of them.
And of course there's also the terrible world of deep
(25:57):
fake adult content, where innocent people have had their images
used in this kind of adult content without their consent,
and that can lead to really harmful situations, everything from uh,
you know, professional impact to mental and emotional trauma. So
it is important that we have tools developed that are
(26:18):
good at detecting deep fix Of course, the flip side
of that is that we often see this as a
seesaw kind of approach. Right. As tools get better at
detecting deep fakes, deep fakes get better at evading tools,
and the process continues. Activision Blizzard will be suspending several
online games in China due to a failure to reach
(26:39):
a licensing deal with Chinese game company net Ease. So
let's break this down really quickly. Net Ease is a
game's publisher and distributor in China. Blizzard has partnered with
net Ease to bring certain titles like World of Warcraft,
over Watch two, Diablo three, and more to the Chinese market,
but this lie something. Agreement expires every so often and
(27:02):
then comes up for renegotiation, and apparently the most recent
negotiation talks broke down as Blizzard failed to reach an
agreement for certain titles. Other ones will remain unaffected because
they're under separate agreements. So after January twenty three, games
that include World of Warcraft, Overwatch two, Diablow three, Hearthstone,
(27:24):
Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft, and Warcraft three Reforged will
become unavailable in China. Other titles like Diablow Immortal will
continue development in China because, as I said, they were
part of a separate deal that was already signed. Apparently,
some of the obstacles blocking this deal centered around not distribution,
but the ownership of intellectual property and and player data.
(27:48):
So Blizzard says it's working to find alternatives to bring
titles back to Chinese players, but there's no telling on
when or if that will happen. Microsoft has made a
move that will likely send at least some corporate leaders
to throw a tantrum. The company has introduced games in
its Microsoft Teams product in an app called Games for Work.
(28:09):
So the games include a bunch of casual titles, stuff
like mind Sweeper, Solitaire, that sort of stuff. But they
also have multiplayer capability, so it allows employees to match
up against their coworkers in various games. So you can
go up against someone else in a game of Solitaire
to the death. Okay, I got a little carried away.
(28:30):
It's probably not to the death. Microsoft says that their
data shows employees who play games together for forty five
minutes are then more productive than those who engage in
other team building activities. But based on how some bosses,
particularly in the tech space, seemed to be obsessed with
monitoring employees, I can't see this going over well at
(28:50):
a lot of places. Nope, work is supposed to be
oppressive and joy list, so forget about games. Maybe I'm
just projecting now. To be clear, I'm being facetious. I
still work remotely. I have not been pressured to return
to the office, and as long as I keep regular hours,
everything's pretty cool for me. But I realized that my
(29:11):
situation is kind of an outlier in the tech space,
and that stinks. I think tons of companies actually really
benefited from employees working remotely with more autonomy. Anyway, the
game's app is available now, and Microsoft says it will
soon be updating the service with more features and more games.
So maybe you'll end up playing games on Microsoft Teams
(29:33):
with teammates occasionally when you're taking a break, which sounds
kind of cool to me. Finally, Upside Foods has received
pre market consultation approval from the Food and Drug Administration
in the U s a k A the f d A.
And why the heck am I covering a food story
in tech stuff? Well, Upside food makes chicken. Like. This
(29:56):
company doesn't butcher chickens and then sell the meat. It
makes chicken meat. That's right. Upside Foods is a company
that makes lab grown meat, meaning the company harvests animal
cells but doesn't slaughter the animals, and it cultivates those
cells and bioreactors to make lab grown meat. The FDA
(30:17):
approval is an important step towards bringing this product to market,
though there are several other steps that have to happen. First.
For one thing, the lab will require an inspection from
the United States Department of Agriculture a k the U
S d A, and then the FDA will actually have
to inspect the real food produced before it could be
sold in the US, so there are other regulatory steps
(30:40):
that have to be made, but the f d A
pre approval stage is a necessary and important step. Also,
Upside Foods will have to take some time to scale
up production if it passes all these inspections, it's not
going to be able to go into mass production right away.
And in fact, the company plans to provide lab grown
chicken only to fancy schmancy restaurants when it starts off,
(31:04):
so there will definitely be a huge up charge in
the beginning because you'll have to travel to some pretty
exclusive restaurants to get a bite of Upside chicken. And
that makes sense because the process to grow the meat
is itself incredibly expensive. In fact, analysts estimate that once
it hits market, lab grown meat will be maybe three
(31:26):
times or more expensive than your typical butchered meat, and
I'm guessing that's gonna be a massive impediment to its adoption.
They might be a massive impediment even to get into
grocery stores. I don't think most folks can necessarily afford
to triple the amount of money they spend on meat,
even if they are comforted by the idea that no
(31:47):
animal died to provide that meat, So I imagine this
kind of gradual rollout is one that can lead to
reductions and production cost over time. Personally, I'm all for
the lab grown approach. I you think that it's going
to take time to perfect it so that things like
taste and consistency are really on par with what you
(32:08):
would get if you were buying fresh meat. But the
idea of being able to do that without harming animals,
and also being able to scale back the livestock industry,
which is a huge environmental impact on our world right.
If we're able to scale that back significantly, that would
be a huge, huge wind as far as fighting against
(32:31):
climate change. So there are multiple reasons to really be
on board with lab grown meat. Um, but it's gonna
take a while for us to get to a point
where it becomes cost effective. When it starts off, it's
gonna be so prohibitively expensive that only super fancy pants
people are going to get a chance to try it. Um.
(32:52):
If a fancy pants restaurant that serves lab grown meat
wants to invite me to try some, I'm happy to
do it. I just can't you know, I can't take
out a loan to have an appetizer. All right, That
wraps up this episode of tech Stuff News. If you
would like to get in touch with me, tell me
about something you would like me to cover in the future.
(33:14):
You can do that in a couple of different ways.
One is to download the I Heart Radio app. It
is free to download, free to use. You can just
navigate over to tech Stuff by putting that into the
search bar. You'll see tech Stuff pop up. There will
be a little microphone icon there. If you click on that,
you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds
in length. If you like, you can let me know
and I can use that that voice message in a
(33:36):
future episode. That'd be great. If you don't want me
to just you know, you don't have to tell me
you just leave a message. I'm never going to include
a message unless I'm expressly told that I can, or
if you prefer, you can reach out to me on Twitter.
The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text
(34:03):
Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts
from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
TechStuff News
Host
Jonathan Strickland
Popular Podcasts
1. The Podium
The Podium: An NBC Olympic and Paralympic podcast. Join us for insider coverage during the intense competition at the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games. In the run-up to the Opening Ceremony, we’ll bring you deep into the stories and events that have you know and those you'll be hard-pressed to forget.
2. In The Village
In The Village will take you into the most exclusive areas of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games to explore the daily life of athletes, complete with all the funny, mundane and unexpected things you learn off the field of play. Join Elizabeth Beisel as she sits down with Olympians each day in Paris.
3. iHeartOlympics: The Latest
Listen to the latest news from the 2024 Olympics.