 yourself. Yeah. That's like a baby's toy. How unusual. Yeah. I think that is more pronounced in the Bay Area. But, but I think yeah, I think that's the wave. You want to wave watch to replace your midterm elections? Exactly. No, I think. And part of it is also the good news is that, like I was the premise here is that I just think food in general is just really good. And part of it is the internet and part of it is, you know, now nigh on a decade of really popular like food network content and like, Well, I don't mean to get political, but also, you know, globalization. For whatever else you think of it, it has made it easier to get all the ingredients you need. Right? You're not just relying on on local farms. At the same time, local farms have gotten better at saying, Well, hey, we can grow ginseng, we can grow heirloom tomatoes, you know, we can grow these ingredients you want. So the combination of both of those means you have a whole lot more high quality ingredients to choose from in more places than you used to. Yeah. Also, if you take out the idea of freshness for certain very, very few certain things, by and large, the kind of like eat local things kind of fallacy. Oh, shots fired from just a rubber. Yeah, okay, don't don't at me. But it's bad for it's bad for farmers. And it's bad economically. Oh, man, you're just asking for it. The young American at gmail.com. Yeah. So yeah, it's gonna be like, Oh, hyper local foods. We got local foods is a bad idea. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, you know, no, actually, I would disagree. We got two minutes before the show. Okay. Bad bad for whom? And that's that's the big question. We also haven't tested there as connection because she's I could have as the as the descended the restaurant tours, I can have this conversation all day. Yeah, no, I think Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah. Cool. No, no, to sum it up, that is a little bit trolly, obviously, but I think the best thing is where you can get the freshest, best price for everybody from the farmer to the restaurateur to the distributor. These things tend to you know, I mean, our perspectives might be a little skewed because we are in a region, not just in the US, but the world that is is heavy on produce. Yeah, I mean, leafy greens, citrus fruits, nuts, a ton of ton of fresh stuff. All right, we should probably wrap this up before we completed the show. Is everybody ready? Yeah. Yes. Good. We're gonna. Hey, actually, I think you all are on iPhones. Are you not? Except for Roger. I am an Android. I will never switch. I don't know if you have the equivalent, but I was going to pull up my own screen time stats. Oh, it might, but I don't think I have the app. Okay. Yeah, I can pull that up. There we go. All right, we'll compare those during the show. All right. I'm ready to rock. In, I don't know, 10 seconds, 10 seconds work for everybody. Yeah. Who? The Muppet Show who produces everything in the back. It's the Muppet Show. Two, one. Thanks to everyone who supports independent tech news directly. If you're not already become a DTS member right now at patreon.com slash DTNS. This is the daily tech news for Thursday, December 13, 2018 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane from Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert Young. And from a location that's undisclosed, I'm producer Roger Chang. Listen to previous episodes. Don't ruin it. You know what? This is a time of year when a lot of people are hiding behind their screens. Try to get away from family or to just keep up on family events or all kinds of things. And of course, screen time has been a huge area of focus for criticism of and defense by phone makers and a lot of other technology makers. We're going to talk about ourselves. Not you. But are we going to get this? We're going to turn the light back on us. The judges shall be judged on this episode. Let's go with a few other tech things you should know. Some more screen news, of sorts. Samsung announced it will show off two versions of its Notebook 9 pen at CES. The fingerprint sensor has shifted to an easier place to use without hitting arrow keys. Either of its two Thunderbolt 3 ports can be used for charging now, but it only has one USB-C 3.1 port, a micro SD card reader, and an audio combo jack. No HDMI and no USB-C A. The 15 inch device will include Nvidia GeForce MX150 graphics card, although no pricing was announced for either that or the 13 inch model. Google's family link app for parental control on Android phones now works on Chromebooks. Parents can whitelist apps and websites set screen time limits, remotely locked devices, and monitor usage. And Qualcomm filed a request with Chinese courts to ban the current round of iPhones. That's the 10R, the 10S, the 10S Max. If you recall, Chinese court ruled Monday that the older versions of iPhones, from like the six through the 10, violated two patents from Qualcomm and banned the sale of those, although Apple has continued selling them, arguing the latest version of iOS does not infringe those patents and round and round the patent wars go between Apple and Qualcomm. Let's talk about some peace, though, being declared. Justin. Back in 2015, Amazon removed the Chromecast from its online store, saying its new rule was to only sell streaming devices that supported Amazon's own Prime Video. But today, Chromecast are back a year after Amazon announced it would change course and sell them again. Third Gen Chromecast and Chromecast Ultra sell for $35 and $69 retrospectively, with Prime shipping discounts available. Well, you know, a lot of people cried fell about this back in the day because Amazon said, well, you know, it's got to have Prime Video because that's, you know, that's our thing. But Amazon can dictate where Prime Video goes. So folks were saying, well, it's not so much that the Chromecast is not capable of doing that. It absolutely is. You just want to sell more fire sticks. Yeah, takes two to tango, right? If Amazon doesn't make an app for the Chromecast, or make its app work with the Chromecast, then Chromecast can't do anything about it. On the other hand, Amazon could enable that. And then Chromecast say, we want to block it. That's not what happened. But I'm just saying it does take two to tango here. Chromecast seems to have always been willing to do this. Now, Chromecast selling in the Amazon store is different than Prime Video working with with Chromecast. As far as I know, the Prime Video app still does not have a Chromecast button. We'll see if that eventually changes. And between 2015 and 2018, there's been a market uptick in people saying things like monopoly, anti competitive behavior about companies like Amazon and Google. These are big decisions that they need to make sure that they stay on the right side of. It is not a question of if it is a question of when there becomes more political viability in looking to challenge the holdings of the Fang companies. So there I am when you say that I'm imagining the conversation in the halls of Amazon between Sarah Prime Video and Laura Corporate Law Attorney and Sarah is like, come on, no, I need to put more pressure on the Chromecast. And Laura Attorney is like, you know, we just can't let to do this anymore, Sarah. I'm real, I'm real sorry. Sarah, I'm sorry. I was like, is it me? Sorry. Yeah, I was a bad pick. Apple announced it will build a $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas and build extra offices, build out new office space anyway in Seattle, San Diego, and the Los Angeles area. Almost a year ago, Apple said it was going to look for locations outside of both California and Texas. Those are the two states where most of its employees work. The new Austin campus is a 133 acre site, roughly a mile from an existing site. Well, that's still in Texas. It will support 5000 additional employees with the possibility to expand to 15,000 workers eventually. Meanwhile, CNBC is reporting that Apple hired almost 15 medical doctors to find answers to real medical problems and use Apple tools to help people deal with them. So it's our Apple report of the day here. On the one hand, we've got Apple with their own take on the Amazon HQ. They didn't get the tax breaks for these things that Amazon did by doing like a big publicity blitz. But what their aim was wasn't that so much as showing how many jobs they're bringing to America right now. And that's what they're going to be able to point to with these expansions. Sure. Obviously, Austin has its own exploding tech sector. And the existence of these jobs is something that will continue to be both a boon and a controversial topic whenever we discuss them. I think Austin, specifically for somebody who spent a fair amount of time there recently has exploded population wise. And it is very much straining under that pressure. You know, the traffic is really, really bad. And some of the infrastructure is not quite there for it. But then on the other side, when Amazon moves to New York City and Washington, D.C., which is a big city that theoretically could get bigger. Now the problem is, no, you should have moved it to someplace that doesn't have these kinds of jobs here to be had. So I think this makes sense for Apple. But to your point, I think it's good. They kept it a little quieter. Yeah. And there were 6,200 jobs in Austin already. So this is just taking something that was already big and saying, hey, we're going to expand. It's kind of a natural thing for a company that is vying to be the biggest valued company in the world to do. You would expect that. Hiring on the medical doctors, though, and keeping medical doctors employed really interesting because it's an example of Apple saying, let's do something because we think it will have the result we want in our products, which is let's just fund doctors to do stuff. And I feel like that's kind of what they're doing with music as well. When they buy a label, like let's fund musicians, let's fund doctors, let's fund journalists. They hired a bunch of journalists to work on their news app. Let's hire the people who do the thing that feeds our features. It's an interesting tactic that only someone with an Apple amount of cash could do. Well, especially if you think about some of the new features that Apple Watch version four has, for example, you know, you got a heart murmur, well, that watch might be able to tell you that, OK, well, what if there's some sort of discrepancy and Apple has a doctor that is employed by the company who has great credentials and is able to, you know, provide more information about that or or maybe squelch an issue. It is odd to me that that Apple has hired, I don't know, upwards of 50 doctors. And I'm sure they're in in various different fields. But but yeah, it seems to be something that they're they're going pretty deep into. I would I would say that that your your heart monitor point is kind of what they're looking for is is, hey, look, that this was a big thing. It got a lot of great press. Certainly it sold me a watch because I bought one for my father-in-law who has who has heart problems. So they want more of that like, hey, this iPad, what can it do for your diabetes? They'll save your life. Yeah, exactly. They want to they want to be able to say their devices are saving lives more and more often. Time for a browser update. Privacy-focused browser Brave has joined Vivaldi, Opera, Google, Chrome and soon Microsoft Edge in migrating to Chromium. Most of its user bases made the switch already. And it says you should see a 22 percent speed boost. Previously, Brave did use the Chromium page rendering engine, but that was it. They've now transferred on to the whole platform. Brave users will be able to use Chrome extensions, but they will not get access to integrated Google-based features like account login, sync and search suggestions because they are privacy-based. Also, Opera announced in a public release of its Web3 ready Android browser. It's got its built-in cryptocurrency wallet. So you can download that for Android now. It supports Ether and any token using Ethereum's ERC20 standard as well as collectibles like CryptoKitties. They use the ERC721 So this is something that I've certainly noticed the trend, but it seems, you know, overwhelming at this point that Chromium has kind of just become the new standard in web browsers, right? Yeah, we talked about it when Microsoft officially announced that they are switching to Chromium. I both love and hate this. I wish everyone was switching to Mozilla's platform because that is a true open-source foundation accountable to no one. Chromium is open-source. I'm not trying to undermine that, but it is controlled by Google. I think the more of these companies that get on the Chromium platform, though, the more pressure there will be for Google to stay out of it, to sort of maybe even eventually spin it off and into a more independent foundation that isn't so dependent on Google. And you could see the equivalent of a hostile takeover by Microsoft happening at some point in the future possibly as if they just put more and more people working on this browser. Yeah, yeah. It is just kind of fascinating, though, that sort of took that stance, although this has been a very profitable thing for Google in the past, right? With Android being open-source. Well, we've got all kinds of roundups. We've got an Apple roundup. We've got a browser roundup. We've got another one. Oh, Tom, it's time for a food delivery roundup. Instacart will start removing 1,415 workers out of 76 whole food locations in February. A source tells Recode that it will reduce Instacart's revenue by less than 5 percent in the last year and a half. Instacart has signed on with Kroger Aldi, Sam's Club and Walmart, Canada. And Postmates VP of Robotics, Ali Kashani, has led an effort to design and build his own delivery robot called Serve. Wired has a profile on it. It's about a meter high and has an anthropomorphic face, including blinking eyes, a touchscreen on top for status messages and LEDs around its body so that it can use the signal which way it intends to go. Postmates plans to use it to pick up and deliver either end of a trip while a car takes it from place to place. Delivery will begin in Los Angeles. I don't know. We keep hearing about these. Like, wasn't Amazon going to have a bunch of delivery robots all over the sidewalks? And we all talked about this about a year ago, like, oh, and people are going to deface them. Starship. Starship. I hate it when Amazon gets everybody's mind share with their publicity stunts. But Amazon made a video once, never did anything. Starship has been out there actually delivering things on their robots in the United States, in Estonia, in the United Kingdom. But now we're actually seeing a real competitor in Postmates coming up against it. And Amazon, yeah. I mean, they pretend. Well, all right. OK. I have not seen a Starship robot. It doesn't mean that they're not all right, that's right. You know, out and about in the world, you know, on the Estonian streets. But but the Postmates thing is interesting because as somebody who is very fond of her food delivery and I use Postmates, sometimes I use Ubreeds depends on where I'm getting it from and what the prices are. But the you know, if you see somebody who's delivering your food and they're on a bicycle rather than a car, because you can see that within the app, you have the time I'm like, man, now it's going to come cold. So this sort of thing is it really matters what this whole kind of last mile is. Yeah, it does make sense that the car would probably do the lion's share of the delivery. So where is where is this AI robot? I think no, I think this is genius. So so the robot gets dropped off dropped off by a driver at a restaurant to do the waiting. That driver goes on to something else. They're done. The robot waits instead of a bunch of people waiting, the robot waits for the food to be put into it. Soon as it gets the food, it signals the nearest driver to come get it and drive it to the drop off place. Got it. Then the robot gets out and delivers the food to you. That driver can go on to something else. And then as soon as you've taken the food out, it calls the nearest driver to come get it. So instead of drivers wasting a bunch of gas looking for parking or just wasting a lot of time sitting around when they could be making other deliveries, it puts some efficiency in the system. I think I'm a hundred percent for this if this robot can take my food up to my apartment instead of calling me and making me come downstairs. And if a robot can get up my stairs, well, Postmates deserves all the money. I mean, I got an elevator that I forgot. Oh, you just got to get into the door. My big question before we leave this topic is, is this the future for Instacart? Can remember Postmates does lots of things. It doesn't just do restaurants. It can do groceries as well. Could it get so efficient? Could these robots scale up? They'd have to scale up a little to give Instacart a run for its money delivering food. I don't know if I have the answer. It's just something I'd like to see them actually in use first before we start having them take the Starship ones were definitely in use in D.C. BioCal used one in Redwood City. So they've been there. I'm not. Yes. Not everywhere. Yes. And let's do it in the playoffs. Before we move on, I just a little note on Instacart. Clearly when Amazon bought Whole Foods, the Instacart situation was was not long for this world. Yeah. But I was I was I was surprised to hear that this would supposedly impact Instacart's bottom line by less than five percent because the Instacart Whole Foods relationship was was the only one that I knew of that Instacart had, although clearly there are others, I think I said, at least I'd like to imagine, I said at the time that all the other grocery stores are going to be as scared as Whole Foods is as Instacart is of losing Whole Foods and they'll all team up and maybe that will be Instacart's salvation. And it seems like that has happened. Well, there's a prediction show coming up, Tom. Stock Trading App Robinhood launched zero free three percent interest checking and savings accounts claiming that it has more U.S. ATM coverage than the five biggest banks combined. That's like B of A and Wells Fargo and the like. The card is a MasterCard debit card and it's issued through Sutton Bank and starts shipping on December 18th. This is genius. This Robinhood company is either going to crash out horribly or be the thing that everybody else should have been doing while it was doing it because no cost transactions on stocks was a big deal and their premise had always been we're lean. We're leaner than E-Trade, Scott-Trade. You know, Scott-Trade isn't around anymore, but TD Ameritrade any of those places, which is why we don't have to charge you fees. We'll just make money on the interest. Now they're saying the same thing about banks. They've got a little bit of a deal with MasterCard we'll just share some of that revenue. But they're mostly saying we're lean and we'll make money off of reinvesting in the savings just like any other bank. But we only have a few hundred employees and that's all we need because we don't have branches. Yeah. I mean, I think that this is often times when you talk about disruption, which has become such a buzzword. I don't know exactly how much it means anymore. But the to me, it is how few people do we need to do something? How radically can we do it? And how much does our success redefine the market around us? And with the other idea being, OK, if everything is inefficient, then the change will be more thunderous than it would be if it's if it is an efficient business. And I think that, you know, stock trading and stuff like that has been a fairly static stable kind of industry largely because you don't want radical crazy things happening when you're talking about investing your money, right? In general, the brands that we trust, they have commercials during golf and they involve a wealthy older couple talking about their grandchildren, right? Like the very marks of stability. So I'm sorry, Justin, I couldn't hear all those reasonable things you were saying over the 3 percent interest I'll get not only on savings, but also on checking. Yeah, no, it's great. I think that that's that's really, really smart. And I think that that we are kind of long overdue for this kind of thinking when it comes to banking. I mean, look, I remember I switched to ally literally just because they promised that they would just reimburse all my ATM fees because you don't have ATMs. And it's like credit union does that too. It's that little thing where it's like, oh, wow, like, you know, I can get this, I can get a decent interest rate and I can have something that affects me on a daily basis. 3 percent interest is a very, very, very good number. Now, BioCal in our chat room who works in the industry says, I'd like to see what ATM networks they support. I imagine that he knows there would be a way to claim they have more coverage and still not have very good coverage. Right. Is it MasterCard's coverage or something like that? And I think, Tom, your point is, yeah, does this whole thing, you know, spectacularly flame out because it's too good to be true. Is it too hard to get, I don't know, normal person who just wants their money to be safe in an institution that they've heard of and has been around for a century, you know, to switch over to a company where it might sound really good now, but are they going to be around in five to 10 years, which would be one of my concerns as well. I mean, Robin has been around for longer than I thought they'd be. I heard about him a couple of years ago from a friend of mine. And I didn't think they'd still be going in here. They are. So who knows? BioCast says he's going to look into this for us. So hopefully, if he finds anything, pass it along. A cow is on the case. We'll pass it along to you. Folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytech headlines.com. Now, this is a press release news story. I just want to make it clear we wouldn't normally cover this, but it made me think about something. So I'm going to tell you about it anyway. I saw the story that vitamin water is running a contest where it'll give someone one person $100,000 if they can go all year without using a smartphone or a tablet. They'll give them a 1996 era cell phone. And if they can be verified that they haven't touched a smartphone or tablet theirs or anyone else's, they'll get $100,000. If after six months, they just can't stand it anymore. They'll still get $10,000. And only one contestant is going to be chosen January 22. But that made me think, man, this has become a marketing tool for companies. Like, hey, we all know we should cut down on our screen time. And we all know it's really hard to do. I will give you $100,000 if you do it. And so instead of just talking about like, hey, how bad is it that people have screen time issues? I wanted us to be introspective here on this show ourselves and play along at home. Do you think you have a screen time problem? Because the problem with anything like this is usually going, yeah, people need to cut down on that. Of course, I don't have that problem. Sure. Justin, let's start with you. How do you think you fair with your screen time addiction? Well, Tom, what do you say? We just go to the numbers. I will I will I will show you yours. If you show me. You're at sea on the disk personality assessment test. I see. All right, here we go. This according to my iPhone for the last seven days, a progressive rolling jackpot of five hours, 22 minutes per day. What? What says over the last five hours, 22 minutes per day. Sarah, you you were surprised at the amount up or down. I'm one hour, 34 minutes per day. Oh, yeah. No, I am on my computer a lot. Those are rookie numbers. We need to get those numbers up. Because I was like, Oh, God, you know, I'm spending an hour and a half looking at my phone every day. Please, Sarah, but I have you know, you're just doing a lot more on your phone than I am. I thought I was real good. I'm right here in the middle of about three hours and nine minutes per day. No, my my my phone is the gateway to my entire life. You know, I think screen time is something that is is a very, very tricky thing to talk about. And obviously, there are very clear examples of where this can be harmful and younger, developing minds. I think that there is a tendency to insomnia. There are those elements there. However, I do think that it is at its heart a misleading statistic, because there is a difference between farting around on your phone, which is something that I definitely do quite a bit. And doing business on my phone, which I also do quite a bit. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, it adds every addict about the thing they don't want to give up, though. Well, but all right. So look, I have what's your most used Instagram Twitter and it's it's it's and it's embarrassing too, because it's like, OK, well, I'm averaging 54 pickups picking on my phone per day. Yeah. Most of those are going to Instagram. So even though yes, there is work being done on my phone. Absolutely. Although I really do prefer to sit in front of my laptop for most things when I'm just kind of doing my money through Friday work. Clearly on my phone, I'm not really doing that much work because I have that's big for those. This is interesting. I have 50 pickups per day, but I have significantly more time spent. Oh, yeah. I have 128 pickups per day. That's that's a lot. Justin, Robert Young and I could pickups pickups. I mean, you have to figure screen time in there too. But I think pickups is one of the things where it causes stress because you're like pick up, look, look, look, oh, interrupt, interrupt, interrupt. You know what I mean? I mean, I mean, the vast majority of my day by myself, like, you know, me too. Yeah, but I guess we all do. I have a problem. I sit alone with my animals. Yeah. Yeah. You have birds. We have dogs. Episode of the new show. Oh, my God. I mean, but well, but I also think that this is misleading because, you know, I'm giving you a hard time. You're just better at mobile than I am getting things done. You know, sitting in front of a computer. I mean, I'm not being counted into all of their stuff. I'm certainly better at Twitter as I've spent 10 hours and seven minutes over the line. Oh, my God. Justin, I love Twitter. I spent an hour, thirty one minutes on Twitter over the past seven days. Oh, man, I have spent very little time. In fact, I've been actively avoiding Twitter these days because it's just, I don't know, it's soul crushing. But I look at some of some of the apps that I don't even want to name some of them. I'm like, Sarah, you need to put it out there. I'm not. I am ashamed. But I'll put it out there. My number one app is Pocket Camp, the Animal Crossing game. OK. I thought you meant Pocket Cast. So no, no, no, no, no. Pocket Camp, four hours and thirty minutes on Pocket Camp because the phone for me is a deal with a emergency and or relax and entertain myself. Yeah. So Pocket Camp is number one. Number two is Feedly because I use this to look at the RSS feeds when I'm preparing for the show quite often. Then Safari, which is probably concomitant with that. Then Twitter, then BBC News, which is my news source every morning, hour and twenty five minutes. Amazon, because it's Christmas time. And then you talk, which I just installed last week because I'm teaching myself a foreign language on there. So I look at these and I'm like, yeah, I think that's all OK. Yeah. So mine are this is this is the top ten here. A Twitter at ten hour, seven minutes. These these are a week, a week's worth of statistics. Safari, four hours, four and a half hours. Shopify, three hours. Look. Oh, yeah. Solid three hours of work that I spent on Shopify. Hearthstone, two and a half messages, two and a half. Instagram, an hour and a half. Yeah. And then they get into you know, it's most interesting in my stats. And it's funny. I we've had this feature, but I really haven't looked at it in great detail until we decided to all do this on the show today. I am very anti-notification. I have notifications turned off for almost everything because I just can't stand it. And I do find it very distracting. However, that being said, I average around 109 notifications per day. Oh, man. Now, it doesn't mean that I'm, you know, I'm, you know, if I get an Instagram notification that somebody DM'd me like, I'm not necessarily always going in there. Does it mean that it's, you know, triggering an action necessarily? But, but it, but it is there. And, and that surprises me because I like to pride myself on, oh, yeah, notifications are always turned off. I just do stuff on my own time. But that's not really true. I have 227 notifications per day to per day. Oh, wow. I have 53 per day. Well, Tom, aren't you just so much better than it? Well, I lost. Notifications is the biggest cause of stress out of your phone. Yeah. This is what I agree. Because screen time doesn't mean the same thing as Justin pointed out for everybody. It's not just screen time. It's like, is that the kind of screen time that's causing stress? And I think this conversation is having a positive effect by showing like, hey, you could have a lot of screen time but low stress because of the way you're using it. Yeah. So most of my notifications are Discord, which I do need to kind of keep an eye on and tend to garden with the communities that we've created there. I probably could use less notifications in inbox, but, you know, then WhatsApp as well because we just started a new business. My messages, Slack and Patreon, they're all work related. And then the NHL. That's my number four. You know, my, my, my, I feel like there are certain times where I'm using my phone or a laptop or a computer of some kind to the point where I'm like, yeah, I got to get away from the screen. And then there are other times where I, I feel, you know, I've been reading books and looking at nature and, you know, which kind of depends on the day. However, I do find that for example, I took my dog to the dog park yesterday and I just forgot my phone. I don't know. I left it on the table and didn't realize it until I was there and I was already there. So I was going to be there for a while. And it was like, I had such a hard time just like sitting there and like dealing with life without the phone, just knowing that I didn't have it. And that's the thing that gets me the most. It's not so much that I needed it for anything. It's just that as soon as I realized it wasn't there, I was super stressed. I could not relax. And that's that's a little weird. Yeah. Hey, what one note on this vitamin water thing they said they want to give a 1996 cell phone, the most popular cell phone in 1996 was the Nokia 81 or 8,110. 8110. I don't know how 8110 right, which had these slide case. So as before they went to the full candy bar, they had the slide case just in case you were might be worth doing just for that. Yeah, I don't want to roll with something or other in 1996. I had no phone wasn't. Yeah, it was. Yeah, there were no cell phones and it was probably about 400 pounds. Thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. Sometimes there are Nokia stories and sometimes there aren't. You can submit your own stories and vote on them at Daily Tech News Show dot reddit dot com. If you hang out on Facebook, we'll hang out in our Facebook group. Why don't you Facebook dot com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. What's in the mail bag, Sarah? Well, you know, if you listen to DTNS, but you aren't familiar with Good Day Internet, which sort of wraps around DTNS in its own candy case of sorts, we got a real nice email from Hal who said, if you don't listen to GDI, just take my word for it. Thank you so much for entertaining and brightening the day of this lone desktop lawyer, always a beat friendly and clean banter. And then I get informed. What a daily pleasure. Not to toot our own horn too much, but I thought, well, that was real nice. Thank you, Hal. Yes. And thank you also to Justin Robert Young for being with us today. Two days in a row, in fact. Well, I guess I'm a lot of order. It's coming up at the end of December. But what's been going on since we saw you last week, Justin? Oh, Sarah, I'm so glad you were asked. Folks, I've been, you know, of course, staying on my political grind with politics, politics, politics podcast and my free political newsletter at freepoliticalnewsletter.com. So you can go ahead and sign up for both their new episode yesterday talking about all of the craziness that is currently going on with the Mueller investigation and some international flair as Europe is going through some things they are in their feeling, as the kids say. And a macron pole dance as well. So there it is. Yeah, we go we go across the pond for and prime minister. No, president Emmanuel Macron presidential approval pole dance. Yeah, check it out, folks, freepoliticalnewsletter.com makes my day brighter. It can make your days brighter, too. Also, if you're an associate producer of patreon.com slash DTNS, you've got a new column from me encouraging you to declare notification bankruptcy. If all this talk about screen time got you like I need to do something, I've got a plan for you to manage your notifications. Check it out. It's at patreon.com slash DTNS. If you've got feedback for us, well, we've got an email adjust for you and that is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're also live Monday through Friday. Join us if you can for 30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with no silicests. Alison Sheridan talk to you then. Show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants.com I'm in the club. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Yeah, man, I've my my my column today tells everybody to go in and just take turn all your notifications off. Don't leave it there. You know, you can immediately go back and turn messages back on and anything else, but turn them all off and then go make a considered decision to turn them on. Yeah, I am probably a little looser with my my notifications than I would otherwise like to be, but I will say that part of the only app that ever really I felt like ruined my day, stressed me out was Facebook. And I eventually wound up coming to an uneasy truce with them in that I allowed the app to live on my phone because I had too many other stupid little things that I had authenticated through Facebook and was just annoying to like download it and log in and then authenticate and then delete it. So I have have it on my phone, but all the notifications are turned off and I have never made a happier decision in my life. I think that notifications are something that you need to earn, you know, all apps and services need. And they're one of the leading causes of stress from your phone. They cause cortisol to rise. There's been studies about that, like they they are the thing that will stress you out and you won't realize it. You won't know why you're feeling stressed because well, it's like something happening on the shoulder all day, you know, you get a reward. So it's like someone's tapping you on the shoulder to give you a cookie all day, right? Because you're like, Oh, yeah. But then yeah, after the end of the day, you're going to be stressed out because you didn't get anything done because someone kept giving you cookies. You also be really big because you ate all those cookies. You know, and this is I don't have a solution for this because they're just going to do it anyway. But Facebook is certainly not the only offender, but the the most annoying one. And that is just like rando email notifications that I've for sure turned off a million times in the past, but they just find like a new way to to pose it to me. Like, yeah, young just liked Tom Merritt's photo where I'm like, yeah, email, they get they get by any decision you've made every single time I unsubscribe and Facebook says, OK, fine. And then they just I mean, it's just if it wasn't so big. And yeah, it's and we've we've complained about this so many times in the past. So I know it's a bit of a broken record. But if it wasn't something that I felt I had to use to keep up with people in my life that I love and work, I would flush it down the toilet real quick. The key is to shift as many things as possible to active checking where you check it because you think, oh, I should check Facebook, not push checking where it taps you on the shoulder and it's like, hey, let me give you a cookie. You know, and I'm actually pretty good about like Facebook. I'll I'll check it in the morning. Every morning, I will open up a Facebook tab and just routine. That's fair. Yeah, it's just, you know, I'm kind of, you know, figuring out what's been going on in the last 24 hours. But otherwise, any notification from Facebook throughout the day on any platform is I mean, it fills me with rage because I I want so badly not to get them. But they do it anyway. Roger, did you get a chance to pick a title while we were chatting? I was looking at vitamin waters, 100,000 K replenishment. I'd be a little long. It's a little long. Yeah. Screening our time is my second follow-up. Yeah. I mean, some pun on screen time. Screening our time. Screening our time. Yeah. All right. I'm like, you know, I am a I'm a vitamin water fan myself. I don't know about the rest of you. There's only two flavors I can stomach. There are two flavors that I like more than the others. I wonder if we have the same ones. But but it but it's funny to me that vitamin water would be like, we'll take back the night. We'll give you money for not using your phone too much. Drink vitamin water as if you couldn't do well. What about health? Right. I think that's their pitch. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Vitamin water is healthy, which it really isn't. Honestly, it's very sugary that's why they're going to fry like but vitamins, but we put vitamin in the name, right? Right. Right. Yeah. You find out they're just grinding up Flintstone's chewables into like I think that would be healthy. That would actually be better. In fact, yeah. Higher and I don't know. I'm a Flintstone's kid. Chug, chug, chug, chug. But yeah. So, Roger, I like the the it's like the X X one that has the it's dark, like Blackberry pomegranate, acai. I like that one. I like that one and I like the the punch. I like the sort of whatever sort of that like the equivalent of the Gatorade lemon lime of the revised vitamin water because it's mature in it. It's well, what about the free version? What's what's the replacement? Hmm. So close. I'd probably be able to check that out. Something toxic. Well, no, because a lot of times they use malatol or one of the actually it's actually artisanally refined cancer, small batched small batch cancer, literally some guy goes through all the diners and order something that just picks out those little sugars. Yeah. Those equals and it's local. It's local cancer, which is poor over. I see you want to get back to this conversation where you're trashing local food. No, I just think it's an overrated concept. And I think now I think it's a misunderstood concept. There's there are some benefits to local food. And in a lot of cases, it is provided ingredients to restaurants that they wouldn't have had access to otherwise and in in fresher situations. I think it's overemphasized. I think there's there's some really good benefits to being able to have places that are really good at growing things, grow them if they don't grow well near you. And we've gotten we've improved on on one of the big mistakes that large growers made in the past, which was growing things so they look good, but didn't taste good. Yeah. And that was one of the things that the local movement helped push. And I think locally grown food was great for that because it pushed those markets into to making better food. So I think there's a lot to be said for locally grown food. I'm not trashing like the that you should. I don't mean you as the evil villain. Yeah, from far away, but just that it as a rule. Again, it's like everybody should do what's best for their customers and for their it's a little bit. It's a little bit like gluten free. Gluten free is real important if you have a gluten allergy. Most people don't have gluten allergy. Sure. And gluten free if you don't have a gluten allergy, doesn't do anything for you. What I what I find incredibly cynical is when they they label a product on gluten free and it will be. But it's like a product that wouldn't have would never have had gluten. It's like it's like dried apricots. Well, yeah, these are gluten free. Yeah, yeah, there was some deli meat. I got the other day and it was like no hormones, gluten free. I'm like, although I mean, maybe maybe they use gluten as a preservative in some meats or something. That's all that matters. It sells and people who are gluten free are like, oh, look, that says the thing I am. Right. And I've known folks who still do who do have severe gluten allergies and have had, you know, health problems totally turned around by going gluten free. I don't have that. I mean, I could eat pasta all day. And I don't think it really makes much of a difference whether I do or not. But I still do get like a weird sense of like entitlements, you know, right? For example, there's a there's a place near where I used to live that had this gluten free pasta. And it was really good, like mac and cheese, basically. Yeah. And I would always get it. And I would always feel a little more superior because, you know, I had this like bowl of gluten free pasta that didn't make any difference. No, it didn't make me any healthier. And in fact, it was covered in cheese. So it wasn't good for me at all. But but yeah, I think that that's what it's about for people without allergies. Now, if you have allergies, I do want everything to be labeled gluten free that's possible because, you know, if there's gluten snuck into your deli meat and you didn't know that can cause your life to be miserable. One of the contributors to the show is gluten free and their life is much better since they figured that out. Oh, yeah. It's a real thing. And I'm not trying to trash that. Oh, no, no, no. It's not a thing that applies to anyone who isn't allergic to gluten. It's not like a general health thing. It's gluten-free's explosion as a health trend has resulted in some kind of very unfortunate side effects for people who actually have I think it's silly exesies, right? Is the thing that is affected by gluten because a lot of these items that are being marketed toward people who are health conscious about it do contain, you know, whatever amounts that the FDA allowable trace amounts. And it's like, if you actually have the disease, that's a problem. And if you don't want it as gluten free, that has it's gluten free. Yes, that's that's annoying. That's well, that's that's the thing with nuts, right? That's why a lot of packaging now indicates whether or not this was also processed, you know, with, you know, with products that have contained nuts or milk or whatever. Yeah, I had a friend. My my my cousin is super allergic to peanuts, and she asked one time specifically, like, this has no peanuts, residual, whatever it's like, no, straight to the hospital. Heather Frank, my co-host on Have Such a Good Day, another podcast that I do is allergic to hazelnuts. Now, you might say, well, how often are you eating hazelnuts? But it's in so many dessert stuff, especially stuff that's chocolate. I don't know why. Just I don't know, it's something that gets put in there a lot. So it's turned into something that because her allergy has gotten worse, she's gotten older, which happens to people sometimes that she's she has to be, you know, if you're having, I don't know, somebody gets a piece of chocolate cake for dessert at a restaurant. She's are there hazelnuts in it? And half the time, the server's like, no, why would there be hazelnuts? But there often are. They're red bear. Yeah. Yeah. But it's kind of one of those things that's like, actually, it's in a lot of stuff. You just don't necessarily know that until you have a problem. It's one of those ingredients that's used as a substitute to make something appear more healthy by being all natural. Like, hey, we're going to substitute. I remember there was a case about a kid who was allergic, who got like a severe allergy to something was eating. It was like a pastry. And they're trying to figure out the doctors are trying to figure out was and it would turn out it was the dye that they used. And then it was all natural. It was all natural because it was ground up beetle shells, like a little insect, and they ground it into a powder to make the food the blue color. And he was allergic to that. And it's like, oh, you got to stay away from that for now. Which is, I mean, isn't that like that's, I don't know, what the book was, Fast Food Nation or something, you know, where it was like, make sure that you know next time you see natural flavoring, that it's ground up bugs. Well, I think in many cases is actually true. But I mean, that's the sort of thing that's going to turn people off. So that's the thing. It was like buzzwords like organic and natural. I mean, they're just a catch all term, like cyanides and naturally occurring compound in apple seeds. No one's going to, you know, you could technically leave that in and call it natural, but not going to be good for you. Granted, you would have to eat a lot, like a lot. Also, a tree will grow inside of you if you eat too many seeds. Everybody knows that. No, because my teacher told me when you go to the bathroom for number two, it comes out. Well, your teacher is OK. Fine. My teacher, I had a weird teacher. That's funny. My dad told me, my dad told me they'll pass through you. It was a very elegant way of explaining. She just said, like, yeah, when you go to the bathroom to go, you know, yeah, it's going to come out. Because I think I think my grandpa made the joke about watermelon seeds. Like, well, you know, a watermelon will grow inside you. And I was like, really? Oh, my, you know, my dad was like, no, no, they'll just pass through you. And I'm like, oh, yeah, give me some more watermelon seeds. And I want to see that. See, I never, well, first of all, not eating watermelon anyway. So I'm not going to eat watermelon seeds, but other kinds of seeds, especially in apples, right? Apple slices, you know, seeds. I remember thinking, like, is there some, like, huge problem where kids are swallowing so many seeds that parents have to tell them that a tree is going to grow inside of their body if they don't stop doing that? I think my grandpa is just not a swallowing. Yeah, I would assume part of the body horror gas lighting that just comes along with being a parent, right? Like, that you just are allowed to lie to your children about something horrifying happening to them? Well, or maybe it's because you think your kid's going to choke on the seeds. So it's just probably more of the health problem, right? Yeah, right. Or that a trigger. Yeah, I think it was just like people think it was funny to see the reaction that kids have when you tell them that. Yeah, they're stupid. These give me like chewing gum is never going to spend your stomach for decades. Remember, if you swallow gum, it's going to be in you. Yeah, it'll be in there for seven years. I think red meat, somebody told me the same thing. I mean, red meat, it stays in your gut for decades. Yeah, that was the whole like, we're not actually evolved to eat meat. We should all be eating root vegetables. Just root vegetables. Really, it was rude vegetables. Really, just vegetables. They give you the just give you the finger in five o'clock traffic. Rude. Those are usually the root vegetables. Come back here and say that potato. Exactly. Some some some rutabaga, writing your bumper and playing music with your windows down. When did I say you had a rutabaga? Oh, God knows. I mean, I'm sure I have had one going back to the food. It's probably something I had in a restaurant. Yeah. No, I'm sure I had pop rock and they called it another name even longer and more complicated than rutabaga. That's my that's my favorite. That is something that definitely happened that did never happen to me until I came out to the Bay Area was having to Google the menu before I know what the hell they're talking about. Well, going full circle, though, going full circle to what you were saying earlier about more fine dining type options in more places. When I went back in August to my 30th class reunion, it was in a brew pub near my hometown, which you may be like, oh, OK, Tom, whatever. I mean, not not something on the radar at all my entire life growing up. The bars were all in the county and they were all dive bars. They were all, you know, country music dive bars. And those still they're still there. Len Joe's is still rock and strong. I didn't get to go. I ducked out too early, but, you know, that stuff still exists. But there's also this. There was a winery north of Greenville. There's a there was this brew pub in Pocahontas. They're, you know, there's there's and they aren't just brew pubs. They're the brew pubs. They're gastropubs. Like they have these, you know, nice meals that that they serve. And it's it's yeah. I there's a lot of factors involved in that, I think. I yeah, my my guess would be that it's just easier than ever to know how to cook good food. Like the resources are there. The bill is there. Like it just it it does not take much for you to look up and try to keep cooking things until your friends are like, oh, wow, that's delicious. Man, you're a good cook. Just put butter in it. That's all I need. Yeah, you're good to go. No, yeah. You want something to taste good? Butter goes south with me very fast. But it tastes good for everybody. I'm just saying it's so much of this passing through to say, yeah, yeah, Roger, what would you I had? I've had food allergies since I was a kid. When I was a kid, I could not drink any dairy products. I could only drink soy milk. Oh, really? I was allergic to eggs, strawberries. No, but you're not anymore. I grew out, grew out of some of my allergies and I gained other ones. No butter roasted hazelnuts with the side of watermelon for this crowd. Oh, watermelon. I love it. No, Sarah hates it. This is not all about you. Is it an allergy or is it just a taste? So I'm not allergic to it. I just don't want it. It's horrible. It's like eating mud. Well, not like eating mud, but it's folks watching video. Thanks for sticking around. Hope you enjoyed the show and folks on audio. Please continue to stick around. There's more to come.