So much available, so little to watch

In a comment to my blog post reviewing the film The Penguin Lessons, commenter jimf wrote:

I understand it was an offhand comment that had little to do with the post, but I can’t agree that Netflix has “seemingly infinite options”. I find the vast majority of Netflix content to be virtually unwatchable. The majority seems to be either mindless filler or hopelessly violent “action” pictures, or worse, stars Adam Sandler. Most of the comedy specials are flat and predictable. And good luck trying to find any classic pics made prior to 1960.

I actually agree with jimf. After all, I did not say that Netflix had “seemingly infinite good options”. The trope of people wasting their time surfing the site, trying and failing to find something that they really want to watch finally settling for some dreck just to kill time, has become a cliche.
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The corrosive spread of tech company mentality

One of the aphorisms guiding tech companies is to ‘move fast and break things’. Rewards accrue to those companies that are first out of the gate with something new and so products are rushed out without being fully tested, the assumption being that any faults can be corrected based on feedback from consumers. In other words, the people who buy the early versions of the product serve as so-called beta testers, whether they want to be or not.

These situations rarely have life-or-death consequences. With most things such as devices and apps, usually the worst that can happen is that the users are annoyed or frustrated with the glitches but are willing to tolerate them as long as they get upgrades that purportedly take care of the problems.

But there is now an increasing area where tech-based products are being marketed as solutions for things where that tech culture attitude is not suitable, with sometimes dangerous consequences. I wrote recently about AI systems being used to try and treat the problem of loneliness by acting essentially as therapists, sometimes giving dangerous advice out of misguided attempts at being supportive. This can have tragic real-world consequence such as one case where a ChatGPT chatbot urged a teen to kill himself. The family is now suing Open AI, creator of ChatGPT.
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Yet another school shooting

A shooter killed two people and injured 17 others while they were at church on the opening day of a Catholic school in Minneapolis. In reading the news report, I was stuck by this towards the end.

There have been more than 140 shootings reported in elementary and secondary schools in 2025 thus far, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database.

More than 140 school shootings so far this year? That is insane.

One has to wonder why these people target schools. One reason may be that it is a soft target. But with added school security, there are even softer targets like shopping malls, parks, and other open public spaces. Perhaps the shooters had bad experiences in schools as places where they were bullied and intimidated and otherwise made to feel inadequate, leaving them with feelings of rage against the institution and all who are there, even if they were not directly responsible for their unhappiness. Also, killing children, especially younger ones, garners much greater media attention, which momentary and posthumous fame is what some of these killers seek.

At least some people are realizing that platitudes are not an adequate response.

Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, who has led Minneapolis since 2018, said earlier in the same conference: “Children are dead. There are families that have a deceased child. You cannot put into words the gravity, the tragedy or the pain of this situation … Those families are suffering immense pain right now. Think of this as if it’s your own.”

He continued, visibly angry: “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church.”

But Trump of course, who I doubt ever prays, came out with the prayers trope saying “Please join me in praying for everyone involved!”

It will not be long for the transphobes to exploit the fact that the shooter is reportedly transgender, in order to obscure the problem of the easy availability of guns that leads to rampant gun violence.

Local news, Kare 11, confirmed the shooter’s name was Robin Westman, 23. Westman grew up in Richfield, and Westman’s mother worked at Annunciation school in some capacity. Westman applied in Dakota county to change their birth name from Robert to Robin because they identified as a female, per court documents obtained by the Guardian. That request was granted in January 2020.

It is a sick society that does almost nothing to prevent such tragedies.

The horrifying revelations in The Tesla Files

The Tesla company is very secretive about the cars it produces. In particular, it is very reluctant to release information about their safety records. While the company blocks attempts to release records on its crash records, a whistleblower has released what is being called The Tesla files based on internal records. The Guardian has released an edited extract from The Tesla Files by Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden that was published on 24 July that reveals horrifying details about the kinds of crashes that Teslas have been involved in and how that information is suppressed. The article says that what the files reveal is that it is perfectly reasonable to be mortally afraid of these cars.

The most disturbing thing that I read was that Tesla collects vats amount of real-time data from its cars all over the world but the existence of this data was being kept secret from regulators. When any of the cars crash, this data would be invaluable to investigators looking for the cause but many do not ask for it, presumably because they are unaware that the data exist and even when they ask, the company stonewalls, leaving the victims of the crashes and their families frustrated.
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Exploiting people for ratings and profit

Because I do not watch TV much, there are huge swathes of popular culture that I am oblivious to. Well, not completely oblivious, because I do read news sites and come across news headlines about things that enter into the periphery of my consciousness so that I know that something is going on and may even be aware of the people involved without knowing the particulars. For example, I knew that there was some kind of public feud between two rappers one of whom was Drake while the other’s name escapes me but did not know what it was about. I could look it up of course, but I wasn’t interested enough to bother.

I am also aware that there are a vast number of reality shows out there but have never watched any, though I know that some of them involve squabbling housewives and others involve people trying to find romantic partners while yet others involve some kind of survival tests. I was aware that in their quest for ratings, the TV networks and the show’s producers go to some lengths to create drama among the participants, even providing them with scripts or prompts, so that the word ‘reality TV’, implying that the shows are organically evolving with the cameras being just passive observers, is really a joke. Since the shows are taped well in advance and heavily edited before broadcast to create various storylines, they have to be filmed in secret and the participants are sequestered so that they cannot meet with their families and friends and are bound by confidentiality agreements so that surprises can be sprung on viewers. This isolation likely increases their sense of vulnerability. It is only long after the shows have been broadcast that people start revealing the often brutal and abusive conditions that prevailed while the filming was going on.
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The strange second summit on Ukraine

After the damp squib of a summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump said that it was up to Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to work things out between them. It was never clear that Putin had agreed to such a meeting and it seems unlikely that he would. Then it was announced that Trump would meet with Zelenskyy at the White House tomorrow (Monday) again with no clear statement about what purpose it would serve, other than perhaps to tell Zelenskyy that he had better make a deal with Putin that gives up territory that Russia has already seized. He could just have easily conveyed that through other channels.

The map of the current state of affairs is below and the mood in Ukraine is strongly against such concessions.

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The summit that wasn’t

The meeting between Trump and Russian president Putin in Alaska yesterday has left observers scratching their heads. In the past, summits between these two major nuclear powers the US and Russia (or the former Soviet Union) would have a clear agenda and be preceded by weeks of detailed negotiations between lower-level officials, down to the drafting of the final joint communique to reveal what had been decided. The summit itself would be for the principals to sign off on what had largely been already agreed, with the addition of a few relatively minor features. The idea of a summit so that the two leaders could just shoot the breeze was unheard of. While the two of them just chatting and getting to know each other better was of some value in lowering the temperature and reducing the risk of nuclear war, it was never the main point of those earlier meetings.

And yet that is what this summit ended up being. Originally scheduled to last six hours with lunch in between, it was reduced to just three hours with the lunch omitted. Instead of a joint communique being issued about the decisions that had been made, followed by a press conference with journalists asking questions, there were just 12-minutes of statements, nine by Putin and three by Trump, that consisted of just platitudes and revealed nothing at all and allowed for no questions.
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Film review: The Penguin Lessons (2024)

I just watched this charming film starring Steve Coogan and Jonathan Pryce. I don’t know what made me pick it from the seemingly infinite options that the streaming service Netflix provides, since I did not know anything about it. It was just on a whim, probably inspired by the fact that Coogan acts in interesting films, but I am glad I did so. Coogan plays Tom Michell, a teacher of English who takes up a position at an exclusive private school in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the 1970s. This school, whose headmaster is played by Pryce, is modeled after elite private prep schools in England and its students come from the wealthy ruling class. In the film, Michell is an itinerant teacher who is a loner and not politically active, seeking only to keep his head down and not get involved.

The film is based on a memoir by Michell and is built around the central true event, in which he rescues a penguin he found on a beach that was littered with dead penguins because they were covered in oil from a spill. But there was one that was still alive and Michell cleaned it up. But then the penguin (named Juan Salvador by Michell) refused all Michell’s efforts to guide it back into the wild, clearly seeing him as its life-long friend. So he smuggles the penguin back into his rooms at the school whose policies prohibit pets and tries to keep its presence secret while he tries to get the zoo to take it. His housekeeper and her granddaughter, who is her assistant, discover the presence of Juan Salvador and befriend the penguin and help him with its care.
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DOGE savings exposed as a fraud

Elon Musk boasted about how much money would be saved by DOGE’s actions but a new analysis finds that it achieved just a tiny fraction of the claimed savings.

Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion.

Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.
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POLITICO’s findings come on top of months of scrutiny of DOGE’s accounting, but the magnitude of DOGE’s inflated savings claims has not been clear until now.

Even so, President Donald Trump claimed hundreds of billions of dollars had already been used to reduce the federal deficit. The former head of DOGE, Elon Musk, initially promised the organization would reduce the deficit by $2 trillion. Many in Trump’s Cabinet have also celebrated DOGE’s efforts, including his secretaries of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture.

DOGE’s savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out.

Counting this “ceiling value” gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers.

“That’s the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,’” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anything that’s been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.”

Lies, smoke, and mirrors. That is what the Trump gang is all about. When the next numbers for the deficit come out without any significant change, expect Trump to fire those who put out the report and put in some stooges who will give him the numbers that he wants, like he is trying to do with the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But you can deny reality only for so long. It keeps requiring more and bigger lies to continue. What we are witnessing is a natural experiment to see how long a government built on lies and deception can function.