Tangential Convergence

Hey it's us!

Gee, what's been in the news?  Maybe the Soviet Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Is this a reboot of 1918 or 1938?  (With credit to @docpinko).  We think it's more like 1918.

What is Russia's end game?  We don't know, what the hell do we know about anything?

Will this lead to the end for Putin?  We can only hope.

Putin has put his nukes on alert, it might be the only thing he has.

The Russians are the Cardassians, not the Romulans.

The book of Boba Fett makes an appearance, as does the Flu Trux Klan.

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We recorded this one at around 7pm EST.  

Some polls are closed, some are open, some people are still in line.  I conducted a completely (scientifically) useless twitter poll.  Many of our US friends voted in advance.  Many of them didn't have lines.  That said, my twitter following probably skews kinda white.  Still, it was nice of people to respond.

The lineups are a sign of a fragile democracy.  That said, a lot of people voted by mail. or in advance some other way.

This got us talking about democratic norms, transfers of power and all that.  Everything from the Algiers Putsch to President Clark in Babylon 5.  

Don't screw this up America.

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Originally Ken and I were going to hop on Skype and talk about reopening economies.

Then, the murder of George Floyd happened.

So, we couldn't not talk about that.  So we did.  Though, really, we agree that white people ought to be doing a lot more listening and a lot less talking right now.  We of course both agree that Black Lives Matter.

This of course is all happening during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So, is this 1968?  Canada is doing something like a UBI that people thought about a lot back then.  There are people in the streets who are (justifiably) angry.  There are even launches of spacecraft.

Of course our usual smattering of Star Trek, The Expanse and other sci fi was in there as well.  No tech really this time.

Stay safe, stay healthy, and, if you didn't hear us the first time BLACK LIVES MATTER.

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Actual t shirt that I'm wearing as I type this

We're back, and better than ever.  Oh and there's a plague and we're all working from home.

Also, Ken is now in entirely different city, so we're doing this over Skype for the first time.

So of course we're talking COVID, we're talking bubonic plague and other stuff.  Other stuff being the 1918 Influenza epidemic for example, and AIDS in the 1980s.

Babylon 5 is full of plagues.  Star Trek, every Star Trek series, is really chock full of plagues.

Hey wait, that's not a bad title, chock full of plagues, I think I might use that.

I don't think anyone is playing The Division currently.

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Live from MMPR 2019, it's Tangential Convergence!

Yeah, so I'm typing this up on the Sunday before we all meetup for the goodbye breakfast of MMPR. It was good fun.

It was Ken's first TC, and Tom's as well.

We talked about the history of military parades, what with the oddness of the recent July 4 parade.

The audio is ok, there was some music playing in the background, and it was a little loud.  Apparently also the audience couldn't hear us.....

We hope you enjoy the episode.

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Hey look, it's us!

Also, we streamed this one live.  Sorta cool right?  Of course we peaked at three listeners, still...

Evil Bond villain Elon Musk launched a bunch of satellites.  It's pretty crazy.

SpaceX is like the British East India Company, or the Company of a Hundred Associates.

Elon Musk may be odd, but, he never ran the Congo or anything.

Oh these satellites might change our night sky.

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OK, we're back after a long hiatus.

Ken has merged with a new kidney, and he's doing much better thank you.

We started out by talking about the SNC Lavalin affair here in Canada at the request of friend of the show, Tom Merritt.  We gave our impressions on the affair.

This got us to talking about fake news, and the recent BuzzFeed News Article about how the olds share more fake news.

Then we got to Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica.

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Hey, we're back!

If anything gets us back to talking it is overreach by a company with a bit of copyright!

I'm using too many exclamation points!

So, a guy who had bought a movie from Apple went to re download his purchase, and it turns out, he didn't really buy the movie.  He bought a license to download it, depending on its availability in the iTunes store.

Plus, the EU is going all crazy again.....

We talked Dr. Johnson, dystopias, the future of newspapers and the Peninsular Wars.

Enjoy.

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Yup, we're back.  Don't worry, we just took a little break.

So, today is Isabelle's birthday, so there's that.

Our topic though, is not birthdays, but, the recent fine the European Union has slapped on Google.  The deal here is, that if you make an Android phone, and you want to use the google play store, you can't fork Android.  I mean, you CAN, but then you don't get the play store.  The EU doesn't like this much.

This brought me in mind of the unequal treaties imposed on China, Japan and Korea (by Japan no less).

Mercantilism, Autarky, and even the future!

Oh yeah, the singularity is silly.

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Everyone sing along.  It's Tom Merritt's birthday.

Today, or tonight really, we're tackling a topic we've spoken of before, cloud computing.  Yeah, that was back in episode 12, that file is long gone....

Today at work there was a presentation about G Suite for education.  Hey the university gets google tools for free!  Also, no ads, and no data collected.  So that's cool, and that's why we're talking about this tonight.

What's the deal on those things that Picard signs?  Is he accepting TOSs?  Hey, wait, in TOS Kirk was always signing things!

We like the cloud stuff, and we're pretty excited about the whole thing coming to the university.  We also talked a bit about Luba Goy and Billy Van.

Hey, Isabelle took pictures of us!

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