Passenger Seat Radio Episode 2012-12-12

Topics: Frys Rant Continues / Drone Madness / Evil Car Lights / Virtual News Network and Fixing the News /// Hello folks this is Shane are Monroe you're in the passenger seat with me passenger seat radio it's December 12 2014 you're on my 13 mile commute to work Welcome to the show actually I'm running a little bit behind today the joys of early morning Fridays so you know I was thinking about the okay let me start from the beginning so I went to frys yesterday Fry's Electronics which you know I have a love hate relationship with and I was picking up a gift for Secret Santa at my karate studios party on Saturday so picking up a secret santa gift map if you follow the show if you listen to my rants you know that frys Electronics is it's a contradiction, because it's literally it literally has the best selection and price on pretty much everything that a 35 to 45 year old guy would want electronics, computers, components, movies, music, appliances, TV, I mean, they sell it all. I mean, everyone knows what best bias I imagined Best Buy twice as big as two thirds the price, that's what prices The problem is, is in order to maintain those low prices, I'm just guessing they have to hire Well, first of all, I don't think they necessarily hire in competence, I think in competence comes with the job because nobody, you know, save two or three people that exists in the entire building can make any sort of decision, you know, anytime something slides outside the norm of just bringing up a purchase and sending people on their way another person has to be involved. And they keep the segregate this responsibility to a multi tier level. So that while the cashier doesn't have the power to override a price, right, so they scan it, it comes up as $15. And there's a tag on the box that says 1295, because it was a return or whatever, they don't have the power to override that they have to, you know, customer service call. So that person that they call over, they have the power to do X, Y, and Z. And that's it. So they're really more like a cashier. Plus they're not a manager, they're really just cashier to point out, right? So they have the power to override the price. But they can only override the price up to 15%. If it's any higher than that, then they have to call customer service and the next tier comes out, it means for a horribly inefficient store. If you want to hear all about it. I recorded an ad hoc kind of just show a couple episodes back it should still be she'll be a speaker so check it out. I think it's just called fries ran it's not even label it's a passenger seat radium, understanding that you know, fries will make you fucking mental couple years back and I've told the story on the show. You can look it up that we bought a bunch of shit from them, and they fucked it up as per normal. Let's see, here's the thing. fries is essentially like the bad McDonald's. Okay, so given a given neighborhood, right, there's at least two McDonald's but you can get to from your house. They're about the same distance apart. Maybe one's a couple blocks more. There's always one of them. That's the quote good McDonald's and there's one. That's the bad McDonald's. The bad McDonald's happens to be the one on your way home from work, right? So you typically will stop there even though you know for a fact that these assholes will fuck up your order. Now the only question is, How bad do they fuck up your order? And who gets fucked? Right? You're bringing home food for the family who gets fun right? We seem to take turns sometimes my son doesn't get what he wanted it to get missing something from my order. My wife gets tomatoes put on it even though we're not supposed to have two minutes there's a good McDonald's and then there's a bad Well, they're all probably bad McDonald's but there's one that's less bad. So frys is always the bad McDonald's. I don't think I've ever gone in there a single time and had a 100% smooth transaction, the more complicated the transaction, the more chances are likely you will encounter a problem, right? So here's, here's how you do not encounter a problem. You walk into the store with no return. You walk into the store, you buy a product that is not on sale, it's not in their weekly ad that has not never been returned, right? It's under $10. Take that walk straight to the register, pay with cash and walk out the door. That's the only way that you're really going to be even close to guaranteed a decent experience the fries because as soon as you deviate from any of those things, you are setting yourself for an estimated problem. But I want to sit here and bitch about fries. Old Time. My point is, fries has the shit that you want at the price you want to pay. And you have to go in understanding that you're going to get fucked over. And if you're not going to get fucked over, you're going to wish that you'd been fucked over and just left. Because typically speaking, what happens is a huge gigantic waste of your time. It's not so much Oh, well, they're not going to give you the price. They just got a call 17 people over and have a committee before you get the price right. Or they've got a vet it with the banker upstairs, you know, like Deal or No Deal, especially if you try to match an internet price. only measure all internet prices yet, go ahead and try that. If a difference is more than like 12%, it will take an act of God to get that approved. So then you have to start thinking to yourself, what's my time work if I'm literally down there for an hour to buy a micro SD card that was normally 1499. But because of the on sale with promo code it is 799. It's an hour of your time or seven bucks. That's the part you have to ask. It's very disturbing. So anyway, back to my story. So I went ahead and got our line of work, see the sound they get you because it's on your way home from work. I get online at work during the break. Of course, not on company time. And I knew exactly what I wanted, I found the best price the best deals that I wanted for the product. No promo codes only using those as a last resort these days, put them in my shopping cart and did the online pickup, right? This should be so fucking easy. This should be the easiest way possible. They almost don't need humans for this, right, you going to give them the order number, they walk over to some place where all the order numbers are listed numerically are sorted or something which I know they don't do. See, given the order number that you want, you know, they walk back to get your product you pay you leave never works out that way. So this time, here's what's funny. They send you an email with the order number and tell you in the email present this order number they never asked you for the order number. Never. Not once. They're like they're like so what's your name? And it's like, well, if you pulled up my order number, you'd have my name but whatever. So you give me your name. And then they're like, well what is it that you order so the funny talking about what is that I ordered? Pull up the fucking order number and you'll see exactly what I ordered. Better yet. You don't really need my name or what I purchased you need the order number that I was instructed to give to you that you could walk back to the shelf and find the number Don't you have an organized you know by last name fight. My last name is Monroe that begins with me go over to the go over to the shells. Look under em. Can't be that many there right now for their small objects here. Yeah, I think it's the most inefficient thing I've ever seen. So she, of course, so of course, you know, she's like, okay, I'll go get it. So she's gone. Three, four minutes. She goes back so I can't find it. Customer Service. So then they drag some other person over. Then they go hover over a computer somewhere. Oh, by the way, that's when they take the order number. And then now you see her watch. She's literally walking around like she's looking for in fucking easter eggs on Easter. Like, like, literally, I swear to Christ. If you were to take an Easter basket with grass and a couple of eggs already in it and put it in her hand while she's walking around. It would look absolutely positively normal. I don't understand. I really don't. You put me in charge there in a week and have that place fixed. But anyway, so again, I'm there for you know, 1520 minutes trying to get some simple King product by the way that I pre ordered. It's not like I walked into the store and said, Hey, I want one of these. One of these one of these. Can you help me find them now? I ordered them. They told me they were ready for pickup. And here's the order number you again. I mean, it should not be rocket science. Anyway. I don't know where I was going with that damn story. Shit. Alright, so yeah, another fun fries experience. If nothing else, I really did have another segue off of the fries story. But all right. Well, maybe it'll come to me in a minute. Oh, I know what it was doing so well. I'm in fries. Every now and then. If I go pick something up. I'll walk around a little bit. See if they have any. Because a lot of a lot of times, they'll have close outs where you know, they'll just have a rack. What the fuck is going on here. Like 17 people outside. There's a truck pulling something Amai. I thank you. Unbelievable. I really got to get a dash cam. Anyway. So I'm walking around fries, looking for the clothes out clearance return tables, and everywhere all over the fucking store. Like in every department, not just in toys are not just where you would think they would be. But like in every department as you're walking around. drones. Small drones. Big drones. Cheap drones. Expensive drones. Drones of cameras. Drones without cameras. It's like a doctor soon story. The the study of the cam belly drones were drones with me. I'm sorry. I was trying to make that work. And I didn't work out my bed. Anyway. So I'm rocking around what the fuck is going on. So I went back to the office and was talking to my my officemate, and he, he's great for conversation. I got very lucky. So we started talking about drones. And so we were chit chatting. And he's like, you know, there's really nothing good that can come up this and I keep thinking to myself, you know, there's so many things that drones would be great for, you know, obviously, the big thing now is, is Amazon wants to use drones to deliver packages, right? So instead of one day shipping, you could get one hour shipping, right? How cool would that be? But, you know, the more we sat and talked about it, the more that I think drones represent a bigger threat to social order than pretty much anything. You know, it's like right now, the only thing that the news can talk about is who's finger Bill Cosby was in in the 60s. Right? That's all that's all the news but if you start thinking about it, and South Park, you know, bless out parts soul for being topical, few episodes back, they had a drone episode that sort of touches on some of the things we were talking about. I mean, you have to imagine a life or imagine the possibility that there are little flying objects constantly in the air above. I'm not talking about a plane at 30,000 feet that you don't see. see or hear. I'm talking about noisy buzzing little drones that by the way, you don't need a license to fly you know, all of these I mean, there's literally no regulation on these things at all obviously. Exciting go to frys right now and buy a three foot by three foot drone, right? This thing's got away, like, what, 20 pounds, something like that. You take a drone? And how much damage could you do with the drone? Let's start with that. Let's talk about what you could do with a drone to cost great a bodily injury and property damage. It's significant, right? First of all, we require that people get a license to drive a car right by credit drove a car. But the reason we license people drive cars is there inherently dangerous, they can cause great bodily harm or death. And they can cause immense property damage very easily, I might add, but with drones, some fucking 13 year old kid can get a drone and fly it around the neighborhood flight into your car, damaging your car flying it into a window of your home they could The list goes on and on. I mean, you really don't have to dig deep to figure out how drones can be abused just simply as destructive toys right hey forget about getting your your house at your toilet paper and on Halloween there's going to fly a drone into your front you know in your front window be much more fun cause a lot more damage of course any item can be abused. But as my friend said Nothing good can come from this Amazon it's already told is already demanding that the FAA Ben to its will when it comes to using drones to deliver packages. And if the FAA will not roll over Amazon will take their shit and go to some other country and do it there. I don't like that. I don't like a big corporation looking at the government saying hey, you don't like it? Tough shit. We're going to do it anyway. I don't like the government being dictated by big to buy big business. But that's beside the point. My point is, this is going to start setting precedents. I don't want the skies filled with drones over my head. All right. And as dangerous. I mean, think about. I mean, it doesn't require anything thing to cause great bodily harm or damage with a drone. In fact, I would say it's going to become the norm. You think that I'm trying to think of one of those common instances where you always hear about damage from most amateur, you're going to hear about this every day, it'll become so commonplace that a drone killed some guy that a drone trash some Mercedes that a drone broke into the window somebody has this will become so commonplace news that the news will just stop reporting on it. And we will live in a world where drone accidents or drone impacts part of day to day life. You know, you live over in the Middle East, you know, something's gonna blow up that day. You don't know when you don't know where. But it's, it's, you know, standard operating procedures, something will blow up before the days over now, in America, we're gonna it's essentially going to be, hey, before the days over, somebody's going to be killed, or their cars going to be trashed or a train is going to get derailed. I read a story the other day, just the other day, and we're not even in drone hell yet. It was said twice a day, a drone almost hits a commercial airliner. Is that what you want, you want to be flying back from seeing grandma in Tucson and have your plane taken down because some fucking 13 year old kid got a fucking hundred and $50 drone from Fry's Electronics with a promo code I'm telling you. Now, on the other hand, I'm going to take devil's advocate, I think drones are Armageddon. But on the other hand, I think drones can be fun. I think I was thinking about all the great uses for drones, you know, this is after we got rid of the doom and gloom talk. And we decided maybe there was a place for drones. And I've got great ideas, folks, I'm telling you listen to this. This is my first idea. And I guarantee somebody will use it. And I won't see a single fucking royalty check. Like every one of my great ideas to get pilfered. The doggy drone, you get up in the morning, the last thing you want to do is take the fucking dog for a walk. Right? Did the drone to do it right? Send the drone out to walk the dog is that genius? I think about it. You get up in the morning, you walk to the front door, you know, you fire the drone up, you attach the dogs leash to it. You can either sit over your cup of coffee at the kitchen table and walk the dog with the drone or the drones already got a flight path. Man, you've already taking the dog for a walk of the drone following you. The drones recorded your path now you can take the dog for a walk around the block and you're not even there. Drone does the enslavement of the human race. Right. It's coming. We're almost there. All we need are things like doggie drones, right? What else can you make a drone do for you that you don't want to do? Right? I'd say take out the trash. But then you have to have the drone in the house. He wants to have that big noisy thing in the house. But I want you to consider you could have the drone water your yard, it could be like a Roomba. For you know watering your yard don't have. To have sprinklers tache the host of the drone, the drone, a water your yard, right, I'm telling you drones could take over, you know the slave jobs of humans. Let's see. That doesn't help us out mean we already have kids graduating from high school that can't read, write or do basic math. Hell, let's remove one more thing they have that they would inconvenience their life of sloths and selfies and binge watching of fucking house of cards. Let's let's give them another way to avoid doing any sort of work. Hey, we got the we got the drone that'll run the the lawn more for you. We've got the drone little water the yard for you. We got let's see. What else could we get the drone to do? And you know and even worse yet, hey. interested in what your neighbors up to want to see what his backyard looks like to send the drone over. Believe me. The concept of personal drones is so close. And has so is so rife for abuse. That's kind of cool the car behind me. He's headlined headlights look evil and I wonder what kind of car that is. The headlights are like right out of Amityville Horror, I swear to God, it looks like there's an evil car behind me. Plus, they look like halogens. So they've got that. Oh, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm coming to stop maybe. And get a better look. Hang on a second. I know it's talking about drones. But do those headlights look fucking evil? I gotta figure out what kind of car that is. Maybe I'll let him pass me. They are really evil headlights. I expect to see frickin you know john, bro. And running around. Interesting. Anyway. I won't dwell on the scary headlights. But they do they look evil shit. I try to take a picture. I don't. I don't think it would work. Plus a copywriting right next to me. probably wondering why I'm talking to my phone. Alright. So yes, we were talking I mean, literally, you know, even with the pluses of getting your Amazon shipment other and there wasn't just passing wasn't short sports car convertible. Maybe I can catch up to it. I'm just curious what it is now. So we can look it up. Yeah, I think I think you know, Armageddon is coming. And it'll all be around drones. And here's the fun part. Media hasn't talked about. hardly at all. If any. There's like, absolutely no one talking about this problem. And it's coming. Speaking of the media, I've decided that there is no longer on any side of the fence on either side of the party line. There is absolutely no reputable news source available anymore. Whether it's Fox, whether it's CNN, whether it's MSNBC, whether it's it doesn't matter. I was watching a couple of different concerts, videos. And it's true, you can look this up. This is not something that's made up by the conspiracy, quote, nuts. Look it up. Our all of our news sources are controlled by very few key individuals, key groups, it would be so easy to keep the masses of humanity ignorant or distracted by any sort of a given news push. I mean, man, I mean, it's not like we we have anybody, even the great BBC is, you know, considered the corrupted news source. At this point. There's no way to get any real news now. Nothing that has not been filtered approved. slanted. So I propose this a while back, I'm going to propose it again, because I've got the details kind of ironed out here. And once again, someone will steal my idea and make millions of dollars. And I won't even get a check. But so I call this the virtual news network. And what it is, is it's an app for the cell phone, I'll even let I'll even let Apple have one. And what it is, is, it's an on the scene news reporting app. When you see something happening, right, you see a car crash, you see a fire, you see whatever, you snap a photo, caption it, you know, you pick from keywords and tags, that sort of thing, right? And it immediately publishes directly to an interactive map. So if you want to know what's going on, in downtown Phoenix, you open the map up, you go to Phoenix and anybody's app who was pinging this sort of news and information you can see, see, and you can drill into that, that virtual news source, right, so now you're getting the news from the scene. Now, granted, everybody has their own little bias, right? So if I went up to, if I went up to say, that sign that I posted the other day one a murder somebody become a cop, the guy that was holding that now, I may have a personal slant on that, right. So when I post that I may add my slant. But that's okay. People are people. And I guarantee you that there's a good portion of people that follow my slant, just like there's people who believe in the in the agenda of Fox News. There's people who believe in the agenda of cnn news, but here's the cool part, the dot that you just clicked on, because that guy, I reported that news, everybody within a two mile radius of me had an alert on their phone that said, hey, there's news potentially happening? Would you like to add to this? Would you like to add more Would you like to be part of this, then those people get involved. Now you've got 50 people covering the event, instead of two new stations right now, your chances of being able to get the full quote, 360 degree view of a given issue or given story is a lot better, right? And so you'll be able to tag people who have similar viewpoints as yours, right? Those will be the ones that give you preferential pop ups. So my point is, is the real news is always available everywhere, all the time, everybody's got a cell phone, everybody can run apps. Now, everybody has the ability to contribute to this, and people are doing it now. Only they're doing it in a way that does not bring it to the masses. They're posting it on Twitter, right? They're posting on Instagram, they're posting it on Google Plus, they're posting important news and information, but not in a way that the people can get to it. Not everybody's on Twitter. Not everybody's following you on Twitter. Not everybody's using Google Plus we need a methodology where if you want it you can get it from one location and it's completely rods completely unfiltered and you know the opinions of the people are going to sneak in there. But you can always go to the next guy and the next guy and the next guy and the next guy you could literally and you could fly to any location you want to know what's going on in downtown Manhattan right this minute news right now. Yeah, bring up the map Yes, zoom into Manhattan you start clicking on you click on news dots Plus, it could be addictive as hell to right so so you know, as long as I mean somebody's gonna have to right the app and maintain the infrastructure and all that stuff. Those guys are gonna have to make money somehow. So you know, they're gonna have to run little ads or something inside the app in order to compensate. But in reality it cannot be a company that will filter alter or block or keyword blacklist any sort of item it has to be by the people for the people what do you think virtual News Network I think it's the future I think it's the only way we're going to get any credible information about anything anywhere I don't know just a thought Alright folks, I've got to stop and grab a drink here. head off to work Hope you enjoyed the show this is Shane or Monroe passing your see radio. We will see you next time.