Hello dear listener, just a quick heads up.
There's a little bit of audio issues with this episode,
kind of, sort of, it doesn't really impact your ability
to understand what I'm saying, but it does happen.
And I just wanted to acknowledge that up front.
Thanks for bearing with me.
I did my best to cover it up.
Okay, bye, but also, hi, because here's the episode.
All right, here it is.
Hello.
The radiation from the sun illuminates a world
in which stuff has happened.
So what's up?
Okay, but dogs though, specifically golden retrievers.
It's the 155th anniversary of the golden retriever,
the breed itself.
They were made in Scotland, apparently.
I didn't know that.
And so there's like a massive gathering
of like a bunch of goldens in Scotland right now,
like the hundreds of them,
just sort of, lolling around in a field, being goobers.
I have linked a video in the newsletter for today.
I highly encourage you to watch it.
Apparently they were bred to be hunting dogs
that were specifically fit to be
in the Scottish Islands climate.
And for some reason, that means they have to have
a very good, floopy tail.
Okay, dear viewer, hold on to that thought.
Just keep the idea of a bunch of golden retrievers
rolling around in a field in your head
for the rest of this episode,
because we have to talk about Texas.
Texas has absolutely no chill.
Right now, quite literally.
But I'm not here to talk about heat waves.
I'm here to talk about fascists.
Texas is one of those states that's like really trying
to beat the forefront of the fascists.
And they've been really hard
with this anti-abortion bullshit.
So despite the vast majority of Americans
being against a total abortion ban,
Texas is still pushing to try to do that.
And now just stories are racking up of women
having to carry unviable pregnancies to term,
only to be traumatized or potentially killed by them.
Doctors don't know if they can perform a surgery or not,
because they might get sued or sent to jail
or fined a hundred plus thousand dollars for doing medicine.
And so now women and rights groups and doctors
are coming together and demanding from Texas,
fix your shit.
There's a massive lack of clarity around the laws
that they currently have on the books there,
because they're just trying to do whatever they can
to just stop it from happening, period.
But that doesn't work.
And we understand that it doesn't work.
But they don't care because they're fascists
and just want to abuse women.
And so yeah, there has been a request to a judge
to stop these laws so that we can figure out
what the fuck we're supposed to do about them.
Like, how do we make sure that our citizens
aren't dying from extremely preventable things?
Jesus Christ.
Greg Abbott can eat actual shit.
Like, there's very little left to say, like, fuck him.
I'm getting very tired of talking about fascists in power
who cannot reach climax unless they're using their laws
to abuse citizens.
But hey, good union stuff.
Let's talk about that.
So while the writers are on strike
and the actors are now striking and UPS might strike
and there was the union that was formed at Sega
and a whole bunch of other unions coming together,
very, very cool.
And now Warner Bros. and Cartoon Network employees
are possibly forming a union.
They have filed a petition to do a vote
and hopefully it'll happen.
It's kind of like the Sega union.
It's like an interdisciplinary union of just everyone.
People across all types of jobs at these companies
are all upset with them.
It's not one job.
It's all of them.
Maybe treat your employees better.
Wild concepts.
Hey, what's up?
Do you want to talk about something?
Do you want to talk about the Federal Reserve
and their new instant money transfer program?
Oh yeah.
Sorry about that.
Yeah, the Federal Reserve is launching
an instant money transfer program.
This is a big deal and way, way overdue.
So in the US, we are bad at everything.
Other countries have had instant money transfer available
at any time of the day, any day of the year for a while.
And now that's coming to the US
via a thing called FedNow.
It is a service run by the Fed that allows banks
to transfer money instantly at any time.
Think about like a wire transfer
and how it takes like multiple days.
It's just gonna be like boop.
Boop, you've got money.
All that shit about like,
oh, your funds will be settling your account
in two to three business days.
Gone, that's going away, hopefully.
So that's cool and way overdue.
But hey, dear YouTube and podcast viewers and listeners,
allow me to expand on this topic in a tangent alert.
Tangent alert.
I used to work for a financial technology company.
They refer to themselves as FinTech
because they're very cool.
I'm proud of the work I did there.
I think it was helpful to like help people
like democratize moving money around.
That's cool, that's helpful and all that.
It also shouldn't need to exist.
There's a whole bunch of companies out there
whose entire business model is,
we're gonna try to simplify moving money around
because there is no good method
for people to just instantly transfer money safely.
And so their product is,
we're gonna make it easier to move money
and we get a cut every time you move money.
Think like PayPal.
That's not who I work for, but stuff like that.
Now all these companies would have their own way
of doing things.
A lot of them would just spend a lot of time
doing the grunt work nobody would wanna do.
Some of them would just have a big pool of money
that they just kinda had in one big account
and moved it around and just allocated it
to make instant transfers.
And then you've got PayPal, which is literally a bank.
Now, yay, competition in this space is good,
except it's also not really good
because they're all trying to solve the same problem,
which is a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place
and all of their solutions are not good for the consumer.
If you have money that you want to move for some purpose,
you shouldn't have to pay money to move it.
You should be able to move it.
It shouldn't require a third party to come in
and be like, we're gonna take a cut
to make it slightly less hard to pay people.
Like what the hell is the point of having a central bank
if it's not being a central bank?
This is actually kinda cool
and it's gonna shake up the fintech industry.
And I'm very glad that I don't work
in the fintech industry right now
because they're probably not very happy
or they're gonna find a way to like keep people confused
about how to actually use the FedNow service
and so on and so forth.
But we're gonna see some changes here soon, very hopefully.
Moving on, Russia has been shelling Southern port cities
in Ukraine after their deal
to not bomb their grain exports has fallen through.
Russia is saying that this is retribution
for the destruction of a strategic bridge that they had
and I don't see it because this retribution
is going to negatively impact a bunch of countries
that depend on those grain exports for food stability.
So it's less retribution
and more we're gonna make a humanitarian crisis.
Again, I don't think Putin cares though
because Putin himself is a humanitarian crisis.
On this day in 1969, humans walked on the moon
for the first time.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin hopped out
of their little spacecraft
and did a little bit of like this kind of move.
And they were like, that's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind
and we will spend the rest of our lives
arguing about whether or not he was saying
that's one small step for man
or one small step for a man, the moon lightning round.
It is official the dolphin emulator for GameCube
and Wii games will not be coming to steam.
That doesn't mean you can't get it.
It's been widely available on the internet for a long time.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who I try very hard
to never have to actually talk about on this show,
showed naked pictures of Hunter Biden in Congress
as part of a hearing.
The president of Stanford University is stepping down
after controversies around papers that he authored
that seem to have a lot of inaccuracy.
Wildfires continue to rage around Athens
in addition to obviously Canada
and several other places right now,
but they're working on it.
Thumbs up.
I will say at time of recording,
Trump has not been indicted again,
but he is almost definitely going to be indicted again
in like the next few days or weeks.
A first generation iPhone has sold at auction
for 190,000 US dollars.
Speaking of which, Apple is reportedly making
a chat GPT competitor or their own sort of like GPT
like AI thing is just rumors.
Game company Blizzard is going to start bringing
some of their games to Steam,
starting with Overwatch 2.
You know that game that everybody loves.
After rolling out their ad supported tier,
Netflix has killed off their basic tier.
You have to have the ad supported tier
if you want to not pay much money.
And finally for today, Google is reportedly demoing
to multiple news outlets, an AI tool to write news articles,
which totally won't go bad.
There's no way this is a bad idea.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode
of Stuff Keeps Happening,
head to stuff keeps happening dot online
for sources, bonus content, and a credit
for one free oil change on a vehicle of your choice.
But it can't be your vehicle.
My name is Ndewerence, I'll be back on Monday.
Take care and be well.