Franz

[Franz @fnz990]

@earlboykins Sugarcube is probably their most famous song. I’ve been listening to Nowhere Near from Painful quite a bit lately.

[Franz @fnz990]

@feelthefoom @ErikVoorhees @DissentFu Doesn’t change the fact that the small guy’s work and taxes contributed to Elon’s success. Still, I don’t think Wealth Tax is a good idea. US has other solutions. Can break the companies apart if they get too big. Has happened in the past. Also, China has done more for renewables

[Franz @fnz990]

I don’t miss fable. I’m fine with Opus and Sonnet. My usage has decreased anyways. My needs are writing heavy and they all suck at that skill. I get queasy when I let them do research. Feels like cheating and they’re not good at that either.

[Franz @fnz990]

@ErikVoorhees @DissentFu Well, he did if you consider the government loans and electric vehicle subsidies, and the government support for the development of Elon’s technologies. Let’s not pretend that industrialists don’t benefit from government. Governments run on taxes which the guy did contribute to.

[Franz @fnz990]

@fedejack @edwardge This is an era where geopolitical realities take priority over other needs. Indians will not want to shift their communications over to a monopolist with ties to the US security establishment.

[Franz @fnz990]

My first exposure to Verhoeven. Saw a censored version on TV. Because Arnold starred and I was a child, I expected it to be like Terminator 2 but, even censored, it was so much weirder.

[DepressedBergman @DannyDrinksWine]

Paul Verhoeven on whether the events that take place in "Total Recall" (1990) are real or just a dream:

"It is both. To be honest, that’s what I want. I made the movie in a way that it would be true on both levels, and I spent a lot of time to get that. If you want a scientific explanation, you know, of course, in quantum mechanics there is a very interesting principle, the principle of uncertainty, Heisenberg’s principle.

If you have a big object and if you try to measure the place of the object and the velocity of the object at the same time, the more precisely you measure velocity the less precise place gets. So that’s the principle. That means, of course, that there are different realities possible at the same moment. What I wanted to do in 'Total Recall' is to do a movie where both levels are true. I mean for me, of course, the film anyhow has to do with two realities, one being the reality of going as a secret agent to Mars and discovering that there is a problem, and solving the problem, which is starting the nuclear reactor and helping the guerrillas and destroying Cohaagen.

The second level of the movie, of course, is that from the moment that he goes into the Rekall chair ‘til the end it’s a dream, and I tried to make that second level work throughout the whole movie.

So there’s the dream level which starts when he gets into the chair and the thing is in his neck, and that would go throughout the whole movie, so in the next scene where they say, Oh, there’s a problem, there’s a big glitch here, that would be already the dream, of course. That’s where the dream starts. And the next scene where they are fighting and stuff would be part of his dream, convincing him that it is real, because there is a glitch but that would be part of the program. It would be built into the program to make him accept the fact that it’s real, but it’s a dream.

If you look at the movie, if you haven’t seen it, or for the second time, you’ll see that the whole program that’s set up at the beginning when he goes to the Rekall office and he talks to this guy who sells him the program on Mars, you’ll see that he gets everything that he wants: he gets the trip to Mars, he gets the girl, the exotic girl, he ki!!s the bad guys, and he saves the entire planet. That’s what he does. And that’s basically the dream.

Even halfway through the movie, you may remember, this other guy comes in, Dr. Edgemar, and tells him that he’s in a dream, that he’s still in the Rekall chair, and then Arnold says, “If I’m there, I can ki!! you.” And he puts a gun to his head and the guy says, “Sure, no problem for me, big problem for you, because you will be psychotic from now on because the walls of reality will fall apart. One moment you will be the savior of the rebel cause, the next moment you’ll be Cohaagen’s bosom buddy, but in the end—you will even have these strange fantasies about alien civilizations—but at the end you will be lobotomized.”

And then if you see the movie, you realize that all these things happen. I mean he is lobotomized at the end. That’s why at the last shot, when they are so happy and kissing each other, it slowly fades to white, which for me meant, “OK, there he goes. That’s the end-that’s the dream—they lobotomized him.” And all the other things happened, he finds the alien civilization, he rescues the planet, he finds the good girl, he k!!ls the bad guys, but it’s a dream. Now, of course you can see it as a reality, too. So at the end of the movie, getting to white means either it’s a happy ending or he loses his brains . . . which is probably also a happy ending, I don’t know.

That was basically what l wanted—that at the end there would be two possibilities, and they would be both true—for me they are both true—it’s not either one or the other. It’s not that either it’s a dream or it is a reality. It is a dream and it is a reality. And I think they’re both there."

(Paul Verhoeven's interview with Chris Shea & Wade Jennings, 1992)

P.S: On this day, 36 years ago, "Total Recall" (1990) premiered in Los Angeles, California, USA.

[Franz @fnz990]

@hthieblot Napster. Getting any song I want was like magic.

[Franz @fnz990]

@LoganDobson @pmarca They’ll hate it but still use it. The history of social media has given enough proof of this.

[Franz @fnz990]

@tszzl I’ll be afraid when its writing abilities improve. Right now the writing either makes me laugh or feel annoyed. Maybe that’s the danger. The feeling of disgust that comes with engaging with it.

[Franz @fnz990]

Remembering something from the dinosaur days here. Wasn’t Mirror (operated by Do Kwon of Luna fame) sued for offering something similar to bstocks?

[Wu Blockchain @WuBlockchain]

Binance Enters U.S. Stock Trading, Plans bStocks Tokenized Equities

According to Fortune, Binance will allow non-U.S. users to trade more than 7,000 U.S. stocks and ETFs with zero commissions and fractional shares starting at $5. Users can purchase equities using USDT, USDC, BNB and selected cryptocurrencies, with Nest Trading providing brokerage services and Alpaca handling custody, dividends and corporate actions.

Binance also plans to launch tokenized stocks, known as bStocks, in the coming weeks, allowing users to convert eligible equities into on-chain assets on BNB Chain as part of its broader push to become a “multi-asset financial super app.”

[Franz @fnz990]

@SayantikaSays Lived in a place like that once. It had its charms but Asia (East/ Southeast) and Europe are both better.

[Renaud Foucart @RenaudFoucart]

This supposedly "classic" book has an incredible number of hallucinated references. It's as if he's summarizing books that never existed in the first place.

[Franz @fnz990]

@ricwe123 Greed, then, was good. A billion people out of poverty and a fairly peaceful geopolitical actor that is also subsidising technology for a bulk of the world. What’s there to complain about?

[hansolar @hansolar21]

My go to song while trading on polymarket

[Franz @fnz990]

@TetraChad No it’s not. They behave because the government is very good at punishing if they don’t.

[Franz @fnz990]

@JacobQKnight The one about McDonalds was good

[Franz @fnz990]

Typical and expected behavior from a recent convert

[Christopher Hale @ChristopherHale]

NEW: JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, tells Pope Leo XIV to be “more careful” when “opining on theology.”

[Daniel Kaihatsu (開発 妥仁得) @KaihatsuYT]

New favourite clip from Japanese news just dropped

[Franz @fnz990]

Then why is Trump threatening the end of a civilization?

[*Walter Bloomberg @DeItaone]

*VANCE: THE MILITARY OBJECTIVES OF THE IRAN WAR HAVE BEEN COMPLETED

[Franz @fnz990]

Nukes? Hope not.

[Disclose.tv @disclosetv]

JUST IN - Trump on Iran: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."