TwinIon

I'd rather have the Coen Bros make it. Bumbling idiots doing crimes is right up their alley.

Not the most exciting live stream so far

Certainly a Hollywood studio wouldn't resort to any shady business to keep actors making movies.. Josh Brolin M.IMDB.COM Josh Brolin in Hail, Caesar! (2016)

This should not have taken nearly so long, and seems like an easy win. I really hope people remember the GOP holding this hostage for purely political reasons. Mostly though, the necessity of this bill just makes me sad. My uncle was a regular at the VA from the day he got back from Vietnam to the day he died. It had never occurred to me that he would have to prove his illness were related to his time serving or not. Seems like if a vet gets cancer it shouldn't really matter why.

I had thought that the NY case was (and should be) a criminal one, but apparently there is a criminal case in addition to this civil one, though the Post mentions that the criminal investigation may be stalled. I have to admit that I find it rather confusing what is and isn't a criminal case in a situation like this. I think of civil cases primarily being between two private parties, so when the government is going after you for tax fraud, it's odd to me that it can be a civil case. Also, Trump just has so many crimes it's hard to keep track of which investigations are which.

The Crime of the Century - 8/10 A two part doc by Alex Gibney focusing on the companies behind the opioid crisis that matches the high quality you expect from a Gibney film. The film isn't revelatory for anyone who has read up on the subject, but it's still an excellent case for putting the blame pretty squarely on the drug companies, especially Purdue. Even knowing most of the info beforehand, it's difficult to watch and not get angry. Angry at the pharma companies reaping profits while destroying lives, and anger at a government and political system that allowed them to do it. Again, I've read enough on the subject that most of the film wasn't exactly new, but I found the film helpful in laying out the timeline of the whole crisis. Somehow I hadn't realized that OxyContin was only developed and sold in the 90s. I also wish that the doc would have spent a bit more time on Fentanyl, but that's a personal preference in that I have read less about it and it's the core of the current crisis. Overall, a worthwhile watch, if you don't mind brewing some more hatred in your heart.

The thing that I keep coming back to is the idea that adding friction to the system will reduce the number of guns out there. There's nuance to any given part of the process that can be picked apart as useless, but for someone like myself, that would like to see fewer guns out in the world, I'll take any amount of added friction as a small win. Some non-zero amount of bad outcomes will probably be avoided because of that waiting period, so why not. The GOP loves to make arguments about how each little roadblock won't make any difference when it comes to guns, but seem perfectly happy to add every possible obstacle to receiving money for food or medical care. The latter is because they know very well the cumulative power of bureaucratic friction to affect outcomes. Make people jump through enough hoops, and you'll have fewer people that make it through to the end. When dealing with large numbers of people, it's only natural. I don't think gun buyers in general, the suicidal, or even criminals are unnaturally well motivated. Add more friction to the system and fewer of those people will have guns.

I'm often not a fan of big corporate welfare type deals, but I'm mostly ok with this one. The amount being spent isn't even enough to keep up with TSMC alone, so it's not like this will suddenly make the US a global leader, but it should hopefully add some additional competition and geographic diversification to the industry. Plus, while I know it'll take years before we see any results of this, the far downstream effects should be good for any number of industries.

My first thought was that I hope this raid was about something more than just taking documents he wasn't supposed to. On the other hand, if there is going to be some kind of legal case against Trump, possession of classified documents that he shouldn't have feels very open and shut. I've been very pessimistic as to if Garland and the DOJ would charge Trump under and circumstances, since it seemed so hard to pin specific crimes on him, but this might be so clear cut that a charge might be plausible.

I honestly buy that to some degree. I find it perfectly plausible that the new combined parent company would axe the project sight unseen, looking entirely at the financials, but it makes more sense to me that they'd at least consider the state of the project and early feedback. Don't get me wrong, I have no issue with any of the creatives on this film, but they were far enough along that there should have been some indication as to if the film would be great. Maybe it's a case that the early audiences and execs couldn't see the potential in its unfinished state, but it at least makes more sense to me that they considered it a lost cause when killing it.

I have little to add to the consensus that this is a perfectly acceptable Disney+ film. Mostly harmless, a couple ok gags, but a film that I'll quickly forget about.

I quite liked this for all the things that I expected it easily could have been but wasn't. I feel like if Ron Howard made this movie twenty+ years ago, this movie doesn't come out the same. It could have been bombast, instead it's quiet. It could have been entirely focused on the white saviors, instead it spends time with the locals and their contributions and sacrifices. It could have been showy, but instead it's understated all the way through. This was a complicated story, and things were going to be cut one way or another, so I can't fault them too much for what they decided to lose. I think overall they did a good job of balancing where to spend time and what things to show. As an experienced diver (who has only ever done a couple very open wrecks and never any small caves), I think they did an overall good job with the diving sequences, but I still wanted them to feel even more constricting. I'm not entirely sure what they could have done, just that I feel like it wasn't quite harrowing enough. I've done dives where the visibility dropped to a foot or less, literally unable to see my hand in front of my face. It was very temporary, lasting only a few minutes, and I was in familiar open water during the day, but it was the kind of claustrophobic situation that I know they experienced far worse in that cave. I don't know how you film the feeling of groping blindly through a cave with zero vis, but I don't feel like Howard quite nailed it. I think there is a place for narrative films of events that may be better covered by a documentary. Howard's own Apollo 13 is maybe the best example of that I can think of. This film coming out so close to a a documentary while also being so somber probably hurts it in the short term, but I think it will be looked back on fondly, even if it eschews spectacle for humility.

Absolutely didn't clock that this was directed by Dan Trachtenberg until I turned it on. I very much enjoyed it. It's beautiful, tense, and has some great tense sequences. An easy recommendation if you have Hulu.

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$4.1M seems like a reasonable penalty in a vacuum, but given that we now have some idea how much he was making, it doesn't seem like nearly enough.

It's a complicated tale and not really a single decision, but GE's reckless acquisitions and diversification took one of the worlds largest and most profitable companies and turned it into a shell of itself. It went from a founding member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average to being kicked off in 2018. They were worth $600B at their height and are worth ~$80B now. If you want a single decision point, I'd also point to Nokia not adopting Android. Really they went from struggling with their own OS to their ill fated partnership with Microsoft, that lead to the company being broken apart and sold. What was once a $150B company commanding 30% of the entire mobile phone industry became a running joke of repeated failures that couldn't stay in the business. Nokia had a good shot to be to Android what Samsung currently is, but now they're a relic.

Having Gaga on board makes this more interesting for sure. I wasn't as in love with Joker as many were, but it was an unique take on the character. If Philips is really trying to do something different, I'm excited.

The only thing that these otherwise clueless lawyers have bought Jones is time, which may be enough if Jones' accountants are better than his lawyers. None of the legal strategy (in the broadest sense of the term) here seemed to be around actually winning. If all their stalling has bought enough time for Jones to hide his assets (legally or otherwise), they may well have done enough. Of course, with this colossal screw up there's now a potential perjury issue, but I have no idea how that works. Does the DoJ need to decide to press charges for perjury? Is that a difficult case to prove, even with the evidence we've seen so far?

New Coke is a fun cautionary tale, but it hardly affected Coke as a company. If anything the lasting legacy of New Coke is how classic Coke shot up in sales in the wake of it. New Coke looked like the worst business decision of all time for all of 77 days, after which Coke cemented it's dominance over soft drinks in a way that hasn't changed since.

I understand that if you have HBO Max, HBO, and all the other companies that Discovery and Warner now own, there must be some overlap that could probably be cut, but just gutting HBO Max seems like a terrible idea. I don't know how closely linked the HBO Max shows were with the HBO shows, but they've had some great shows over the last couple years. Station Eleven, Tokyo Vice, Hacks, Peacemaker, Our Flag Means Death, Minx, and Harley Quinn have been some of my favorites.

Yahoo turned down an offer to buy Google for $1M back in 98. That's got to rank up there. They even failed to buy Google a second time in 2002 for $5B, which would still have been an incredible deal. Texas Instruments had a promising employee who they paid to get a Phd in electrical engineering at Stanford. He thought that TI should build semiconductor fabs to make chips for other companies. TI decided against it, so Morris Chang left and went on to found TSMC.

I'm kinda surprised that the US can still fly a Reaper over Kabul. I would have thought they'd need something that flies higher and longer.

I remember a bunch of people hypothesizing about this kind of device when the Steam Deck was announced. I think there's a market, but it's a nascent one for the moment. The most surprising thing to me about this is that it's not in a partnership with Microsoft, and that makes me nervous about the price. All the console manufacturers (and you can even throw Valve in there with the Steam deck) make their money on the back end with software sales. If Logitech doesn't have some kind of deal in place with Microsoft and everyone else, it's hard to imagine the price being compelling. However, I don't think such a deal is entirely out of the question. That's basically the business model for most video streaming devices. Fire TVs, Rokus, Apple TVs, all want you to sign up for HBO, Disney, and whatever else through them, so they get a cut of your monthly fee. If hardware makers like Logitech could arrange a similar deal, they could probably make a compelling device at a decent price. I suppose that's likely what the Tencent partnership is about, but Tencent is such a sprawling conglomerate, it's hard to know exactly what kind of deal they've made and what of the companies they're invested in will be involved. Riot games is partnered with Microsoft to stream everything on Xcloud. Epic has their own store, but no streaming service I'm aware of. I suppose if Logitech could get a cut of cosmetic sales on Riot games, that could be something, but who knows. Overall, the corporate deals behind this device are much more interesting to me than the actual device.

I've been reading through some of the books in the Expanse series, while also re-watching some of the show. I very much enjoyed the show, but I'm finding some of the changes to be questionable. Enjoyed the first few books quite a lot. Book four is fine, but I'm not enjoying it quite as much.

I was not a fan. Peele's direction and the (mostly) excellent acting felt almost out of place with how otherwise pedestrian and boring this turned out to be. There's no there there, if you catch my meaning. It's got some interesting visuals, but the tension that was so exquisite in Get Out is entirely lacking here. I think some of the ideas that they've got here are interesting, but they're not explored particularly well. Peele's films have been getting steadily worse. I really hope he can get a better script and put out another great film.