77: CSS Trig, Cypress, and Software Testing Alternatives

Robbie Wagner: [00:10] What's going on, everybody? This is Whiskey Web and Whatnot.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:15] Sunday. Sunday. Sunday.

Robbie Wagner: [00:19] With your hosts, Robbie Wagner. Charles William Carpenter III. The third. Today we are just going to jump right into the whiskey. I don't know what I usually say before the whiskey, after the intro, and before the whiskey.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:36] Well, when it's just us, there's not much to it, right? I mean, we've introduced ourselves and, you know, at the end of the day, nobody really cares. So we have no guest for you today, sorry. But we are going to try an interesting whiskey and talk a little bit about some basic things and then about ourselves a little bit as well. Also basic. Depends on who you ask. Anyway.

Robbie Wagner: [00:58] I do like pumpkin spice lattes. Is that basic?

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01] And everything else. Pumpkin spice plus your Uggs are ugly. Today we're having a selection from the Orphan Barrel Whiskey Company. It is the Muckety Muck, which is just fun to say.

Robbie Wagner: [01:14] Muckety Muck.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:15] Yeah, Muckety Muck. Apparently, they've had a few of these. This is the 26-year expression, which I am excited about. I don't know if I've had I think 25 is the oldest whiskey I've ever had.

Robbie Wagner: [01:27] I think this is the oldest, yeah, we've had on the podcast, for sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:31] Yeah, it's 92 proof, obviously, a Scotch. It's going to be single grain, single malt. And it is from Scotland's Port Dundas Distillery. Robbie was just mentioning.

Robbie Wagner: [01:43] Dundas.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:43] Dundas.

Robbie Wagner: [01:43] Dundas.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:43] Get me a jammy sandwich. So, yeah, you were saying you like the story of this company. I don't know. Why don't you talk a little about the story?

Robbie Wagner: [01:52] Yeah. I think they're like I forget the name now. It was like Fable something. They have a bunch of different names. The thing they do is they go to distilleries that are maybe not open anymore, or maybe they are, but they kind of abandoned a line of whiskey or something, and they acquire these barrels and they'll revitalize them. So they'll do a very limited release. Sometimes they keep a few of them and age them even longer. So with the rhetoric that we'll do, at some point, once you can get those, there's like a 21, a 22, 23, 24, 25, 26. They just do like, every year so that you can see the differences in like another year in the barrel would make, which there's got to be diminishing returns, but we'll find out yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:37] From 20 to 25 years. Seems like pretty serious. That's the rhetoric, right? So is that bourbon?

Robbie Wagner: [02:45] I believe so. It was the one that was in that article that was like things that are cheaper than Pappy but even better. Yeah, I'm guessing it's bourbon.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:55] Yeah, makes sense. Pappy is a wheated bourbon. So it's at least got to be bourbon. Yeah. I don't know. I'm skeptical personally and because I just don't really care for bourbons that are over, like, 15 years or so, it tends to start to get really woody and like little needles on my tongue. Or something. I don't know. It's weird. Doesn't work for me. But anyway, let's hope this one. The Scotch is good. Old Scotch is good. I think it's got a lot of color.

Robbie Wagner: [03:23] It smells better than any Scotch I've ever smelled.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:27] Yeah, it has a sweetness, actually. Yeah, it was the color of honey, actually, too, which is interesting.

Robbie Wagner: [03:35] It smells a little bit like you remember the old SoBe drinks that were in like, glass bottles?

Chuck Carpenter: [03:42] Yeah, I kind of remember those.

Robbie Wagner: [03:44] It smells like one of those. I want to say like a dragon fruit one or something a little bit like that.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:52] Yeah, I was going to say something like kind of like a green tea with honey or something smells like to me. All right, I'm going to take.

Robbie Wagner: [04:00] Yes. A little bit of that, too. It does taste Scotchy, though. Very smoky.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:08] Really? Yeah, I definitely get the smoke. It's more on the finish for me, though. It's really light at first and it starts to come up later. Definitely no honey in the flavor. Rich mahogany.

Robbie Wagner: [04:22] It tastes like something toasted, like some toasted bread or.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:28] Okay, I was going to say maybe something more like a little bit of like a cigar kind of.

Robbie Wagner: [04:34] Oh, a little that, yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:36] So maybe like that sort of toasted leaf-like cigar kind of bit to it. Yeah, little smoke that's influencing the smoke for me some now, too.

Robbie Wagner: [04:47] It's kind of like you put some food in a smoker, but you didn't go overboard like you just did a subtle smokey. Sometimes a Scotch will be a huge campfire or like all peat or this one, I think, is very balanced and nothing is too overpowering.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:04] You know what I'm kind of getting? I wonder if this a little bit in the beginning, it's kind of like you ever pick a honeysuckle-like flour and eat some of that? Yeah, get a little of that in the beginning, but then the smoke gets serious and the toasty.

Robbie Wagner: [05:19] Yeah, I think this is probably the fruitiest sweetest Scotch that I've ever had. I'm guessing the extra smokiness just goes away after 26 years. I don't know. Goes back into the barrel from whence it came.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:34] Yeah. I wonder where they even derive that smoky flavor. There's a single malt. We can't call it Scotch because it's made here in Arizona. It's actually in Tucson. And they mesquite toast the malt. And so you get because mesquite is an indigenous tree to the desert and particularly in the Tucson area. And so, yeah, they'll get that and they'll smoke the malt with it, and it's a very interesting flavor. So anyway, I was kind of after that, I was like, where do they get the smoky flavor from in Scotches with that?

Robbie Wagner: [06:09] I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:09] Peat kind of makes sense to me. But smoke and it's regional, right? So you get peaty mossi kind of stuff in I want to say Islay.

Robbie Wagner: [06:22] I don't know how you pronounce that Islay, Islay.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:25] Islay, Islay. I'm sure it's probably not.

Robbie Wagner: [06:28] Islay.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:29] Islay. Yes. Highland Lowland, Islay, and another place, because I'm not a Scotch connoisseur, so I don't know. Anyway. All right, so in Scotches, I feel like I know where this is going to go, but what do you think on the tentacle scale? Scale not stale. They're fresh tentacles. One to eight in the Scotch range.

Robbie Wagner: [06:49] Yeah. I'm going to go bold, and I'm going to say this is an eight for Scotches.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:56] No other Scotch for you ever. Yeah, that's interesting.

Robbie Wagner: [06:59] Of the Scotches I've had?

Chuck Carpenter: [07:01] Yes.

Robbie Wagner: [07:01] This is the one I would drink.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:03] Yeah, this is the one. This is pretty interesting. But I had a 25-year-old McAllen once, too. That was pretty good. And I'm going to say it's like, this is good and interesting. I feel like that might have been better. So I'm going to give it a solid seven, seven and a half, if you're like, trying to up it. So this is pretty good, though. I'd come back. I'd suggest it to Scotch people. People who enjoy Scotch. Not just people from Scotland, though. Let me clarify there. So, yeah, I'm going to go with that with it. I liked it. It's got a little heat to it, though. A lot of times Scotches can be, like, strong flavor, but no burn or feel of alcohol. I'm having hard alcohol. I need to know it right. Let me know. Yeah. All right. So there you go. Muckety Muck. If you see it, you like it. Trust us. And I'm not giving you a refund if you don't.

Robbie Wagner: [07:57] Yeah. You probably won't see it. It's very rare and it's expensive, and I doubt it just shows up at, like, a liquor store. So you'd have to be going to some kind of fancy whiskey store or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:08] Yeah, or Total Wine or something. It was online at Total Wine. I saw that.

Robbie Wagner: [08:12] Was it?

Chuck Carpenter: [08:12] Yeah. I think it's 280 there here.

Robbie Wagner: [08:15] But do they have it? Like, you can actually get it?

Chuck Carpenter: [08:18] I think so. I think they did. Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [08:20] Not as rare as I alluded to. Sorry.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:23] So check your local Total Wine or online at dewinespot.com.

Robbie Wagner: [08:29] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:29] You're welcome, guys.

Robbie Wagner: [08:30] Sponsored by De Wine Spot? Not yet, but hopefully one day.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:35] Well, I'm in the prime barrel Discord, so I should say. Hey, listen to this podcast. We mentioned you for a second. Can I have a T-shirt? No.

Robbie Wagner: [08:42] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:42] $40.

Robbie Wagner: [08:43] I think for the many thousands of dollars we have given them over our course of knowing them, they probably give us a T-shirt.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:51] All right, well, there you go. I don't even care about logo T-shirts that much, but I just love, like, negotiating something for free. Oh, yeah. The last two cars I've bought, I've asked, okay, can you throw in a free T-shirt? And they do. They don't care.

Robbie Wagner: [09:04] Yeah. It's not about the monetary value. It's about, like, oh, I got something I wasn't maybe supposed to get. Nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:12] Exactly. Just anything that doesn't come. There's no welcome kit that they give to people when they buy a car. So I was like, well, I'm going to create my own welcome kit. Nice. Anyway, I guess I'm partially lying, but I'll get into that in some what not. We won't get into it here. We should talk about some kind of technical things.

Robbie Wagner: [09:33] Technical things? That sounds out of my depth.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:36] It probably is out there in Virginia, you guys. Technical for you is starting the tractor, but okay, well, that goes too far. Yes. I'm going to jump ahead to you.

Robbie Wagner: [09:50] The views of Chuck are not the views of this podcast.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:53] Hey, I'm from Kentucky. I am allowed to make fun of myself and my own so it's fine. Yeah. So let's jump ahead to your topic first because I feel like it's going to be a short one. It will definitely be CSS trigonometric.

Robbie Wagner: [10:10] Trigonometric functions.

Robbie Wagner: [10:12] Trigonometry. I'm not really sure what the official title is.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:16] I like trigonometric and it was like, oh, okay. Those things like sign cosign and other borrowers. Oh, wait, no, not that cosign. So yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:28] Ba dum tss.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:30] Basically some additional math functions within CSS. Yeah, which is fine if you want to do some fancy stuff and not have JavaScript involved. I'm guessing it's more, I don't know, animation. There's no way within a kind of quasi-static site, but being able to add some fancy dippity doppity.

Robbie Wagner: [10:51] The one thing I saw on the post on Twitter was laying out like this was an arbitrary example because you probably wouldn't want to do it. But putting images on, like a wave so if you wanted to display, say, 50 images and you wanted it to, like, look like a wave going up and down, you'd throw it in your sign function and say, that's the placement for these things. So then some of them would go down, some of them would go up. Instead of being like, put it at absolute position, ten pixels. You'd be like, put it at absolute position, sign, whatever. Then it'd be like anyway. I think the main thing it will be used for is fancy animations of like, instead of ease in out or whatever, you could say like sine or cosine of whatever, and get slightly different variations of, like, wave in and out type of transitions. And maybe there'll be some things for calculating angles and trajectories or something of different things. I forget all the trigonometry things, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:55] So do you think that there is a performance benefit to doing this in CSS versus manipulating those things with JavaScript?

Robbie Wagner: [12:05] My guess would be your benefit is the parse time of the JavaScript. So it's like they're probably roughly equivalent because those things are built into JavaScript too, right? Most of that is in math, whatever. So I think they would be fairly similar. But yeah, you wouldn't have to have that parse time as much. I think for whatever reason, JavaScript parse time takes longer than CSS and HTML from what I understand.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:34] Yeah, I guess it reduces like context switch as well. If you're saying I have this static site, I'm doing these things, animations within the site, not really adding any JavaScript. I'm already working in this really deep CSS file or file structure or whatever else, and I want to do some of these things. So I don't need to create classes that make it look one way in one state, one way in another state, and then hop over to another language and then come back and sort of like instead I can fluidly write these things altogether. I suppose that's a benefit developer experience. That's a hot thing right now. DX.

Robbie Wagner: [13:12] Yeah. I think to really understand what these things are going to be used for, we need some basic examples, like some Code Pens or something of where someone has done something cool. And we need to see what they do in Tailwind because Tailwind will definitely make this into utilities and be like, use this for this. And then we're like, okay, that's the thing it's supposed to be used for.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:33] Right. Interesting.

Robbie Wagner: [13:35] I just got whiskey all over my hand.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:38] Oh my gosh, you're cut off, sir. Just don't spill it on the board.

Robbie Wagner: [13:42] I don't have a board anymore.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:44] Oh, it's all software.

Robbie Wagner: [13:46] It's like an amp, I guess, but there's no sliders and stuff. So the board part, like you see on your board, is in software for me. So it's just like a bunch of inputs for me.

Chuck Carpenter: [13:58] Got you. That's less fun. It looks cool on my desk when I have like also speaking of on my desk, one note there, I finally set up a vertical monitor as a second monitor. Pretty excited about that. It's been like a long time that I wanted to do that.

Robbie Wagner: [14:17] How much YAML can you fit on it?

Chuck Carpenter: [14:19] A lot, actually. And the text is actually really big by default, so it's pretty great.

Robbie Wagner: [14:24] Nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:25] You pull it over from a 6k monitor to the 4K monitor and all of a sudden things explode. This is a little crazy.

Robbie Wagner: [14:34] Yeah, I remember when they would, like, before I was a Mac user and they would put out new Windows versions, or you'd get, like, a new graphics card or something, and you would, like, install some drivers, and all your icons would become, like, really, really tiny all of a sudden. And you're like, oh, my God, no, I can't read anything.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:53] But then they got smart at some point, and they were like, is this okay? Click yes. Otherwise, revert the change in 10 seconds or something, and it counts down. So that was clever. At least I can remember that being like, oof.

Robbie Wagner: [15:04] Yeah, I remember times when I would do that, and then it would be the wrong setting to where half the screen was gone. So I needed it to revert or I would never be able to click anything again.

Chuck Carpenter: [15:16] Right? Yeah, exactly. Things like, disappear into mysterious whatever place, and you're like, how do I get that? I can't force quit this. You restart and it brings up all your apps from the last session anyway, and so you're just still stuck.

Robbie Wagner: [15:33] Then you just throw it in the trash and buy a Mac. Then you're done.

Chuck Carpenter: [15:36] Turns out that worked out okay. Unless it's an iMac. Then you toss it on a chair behind you.

Robbie Wagner: [15:44] Okay, so this iMac, like my iPhone, would do ten times better than that iMac. And I don't understand how, because I don't think it was that old. Maybe it was maybe it was like 2016. Which I guess is getting pretty old now.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:00] Yeah, it seems kind of old. I can't even believe you could buy that.

Robbie Wagner: [16:05] Maybe it was 2018, I don't know. Three to five years old, let's say. But still, if literally all I want it to do is boot up and show me a Chrome browser and like, use it for podcasting, you would think that there's so little other stuff running on it that it would be sufficient even if it was just like an old processor and whatever. But no, it doesn't work.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:29] Yeah, it's strange. It's almost like it's broken.

Robbie Wagner: [16:32] It might be because it was refurbished too. I was trying to be frugal, and then when that didn't work, I spent many thousands of dollars on a real computer.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:42] And it's appropriate. It's a studio. So now you're in the studio with a studio.

Robbie Wagner: [16:49] With a studio display and a Mac studio in the studio.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:53] You've bought in 100%. Well, one time you decided to be frugal, and here it goes. Teaching you never to be frugal. You get what you pay for. Never be frugal. You get what you pay for. Speaking of paying for things, or at least companies trying to get you to pay for things all the time, let's talk a little about testing. Yeah, it's just like a large umbrella, and I'll narrow it down maybe, and then maybe we'll go beyond that or whatever. But just because I have recent experience, lots of past experience setting up Cypress and using that to do integration testing or end-to-end testing in an application. Believe a lot in that. Just because I think you fire up the real thing and you have it simulate things that the user would do. I guess it's not really simulation, it's really clicking through and testing the aspects of your application in a real-world, setting across browsers. Yay. Everybody wins. Seems pretty great. So it's been a little bit, though, considering the last client I was working with didn't prioritize testing for a little while and then eventually utilized Playwright was kind of unfamiliar to me and just didn't really fall into my purview to work on that. So I was like, I don't know, I don't need to learn another testing thing. Next time I need a tool, I'll reach for Cypress. Did reach for Cypress again in a Next.js application utilizing Prisma. So no like GraphQL or any weird stuff like that using the API routes just to do fetches right to the database. All fine and dandy have done that before also. But there's some weird stuff around. So you want to develop a little more in a black box. You want CI to have less things as failed points. So the thing that Prisma used to do, I guess this isn't Cypress's fault, but one thing was I thought was kind of a problem is Prisma used to allow you to swap out the kind of like the provider for the database. So it's like this project has MySQL but I would just want to do an SQLite, have a small local database on the fly, seed that, whatever else. They don't let you do that dynamically anymore. So then you have to create a whole second schema, maintain two schemas. Cypress is starting to run like a dog for a little bit. So there was a little bit of trudging over and changing some configuration stuff in their newest iteration or release. And then I was having problems just logging in and I was like, I'm going to write a simple login test. This is usually a good just entryway. You always have to be logged in. So for a couple of reasons, I got very frustrated there. It essentially was not logging in, it kept like throwing me back as if the login had failed. It's hard to debug from their runner, their graphical runner a little bit if you need to get underneath because of the irame situation, there's like Electron app and booting up this thing in an Iframe. Just got real frustrated there. So decided. Let's try Playwright. Ran through their CLI setup. It does a lot of magic stuff for you, including you can add a GitHub action that just works. That's nice. It's pretty fast to run the same test.

Robbie Wagner: [20:08] Is Playwright by Microsoft.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:10] It is. It's another Microsoft thing.

Robbie Wagner: [20:12] So that makes sense that it's easy to GitHub Actions.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:15] Exactly. So yeah, I'm sure that that's all on purpose. And then, when it fires up browsers, it runs headless natively. But then, if you say I need to debug fires up the regular browsers and brings up this thing called the Inspector. So it's the Playwright Inspector, and it's cool because it's basically just like your dev tools and as if you're putting breakpoints in your test but it just automatically just lets you step through each area of the test. You have a regular browser, so you have all your familiar tools there to look at network tabs and stuff like that and look at the state of your application through each step. Just like you can in Cypress, but with simpler tools that you're very familiar with. So I got to say I was pretty pleased with that. It was a fast setup. It was pretty quick to write the basic test. I ran into some similar issues around login and found out that there's some magic that next off needs to do before it's able to actually validate and create a new session. So learned that lesson too. Now the only thing I was kind of stuck on is Prisma and how I'm going to deal with since API routes end up doing things, sending requests in Web Workers, Service Workers, whatever to the database. Then I'm like, oh, I can't just use your basic intercept library to grab that and send back mock data. But we were talking a little bit earlier, and maybe the magic is mock service worker. I don't know, could be. Hadn't considered that yet. Yes, so I haven't tried that yet. So anybody who was going to tell me try this? Well, I thought of it.

Robbie Wagner: [21:59] Yeah. I've been having a lot of issues. I had mentioned this to you before. We were recording, too, that Cypress used to be kind of really easy to use. In my opinion. It just made sense. It was like easy to spin up. It was kind of a click-play, do the stuff. And now it doesn't quite do that as much. And when you need to debug it. It used to be like, oh, I knew there were some weird things around, like async stuff. Because if you try to do async await or something, it doesn't work because you have to do like, a Cypress git instead of a document dot query selector or whatever, because of all the magic it does. But the docs would help me with that, and I would be able to find all the examples and whatever. And now their site basically doesn't even show docs. It's like, would you like to pay us money and log in, and then maybe we'll show you docs? I'm exaggerating a bit because there are docs eventually, but they're heavily promoting don't make it an easy go-to Cypress is it dot IO, I forget whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:05] That sounds right?

Robbie Wagner: [23:06] And then be like, oh, look, here's the docs. It's like, hi, I'm Cypress, and we're a company, and we would like you to give us money. And, oh, yeah, we made a testing tool as well. I guess the docs are somewhere. So I had a lot of trouble because we use it for Shepherd, and we'll occasionally hit a major upgrade, and it will fail. And then I'll have to go digging for why. And, like, the latest time I had to do that, the docs were just of no help to me because I couldn't find the things that I used to be able to find interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:36] You haven't hit up the docs for a little while. Essentially, the way I set up this time was just look at a previous project, bring over some configuration stuff, install and start firing up things. And then it was like, oh, well, this stuff is old. You need to migrate to the new configuration and whatever else. Yeah, it was a little less intuitive. I'm glad that they helped migrate. Instead of just saying, all your shit is broken, figure it out. But yeah, I did find that a little bit frustrating and then having to change a few things to upgrade. So yeah, it's strange that there wouldn't be more exposed documentation, but I guess part of what you're paying for is support. I don't really know what you get. I guess you get better reports and logging, too if I recall correctly. If you go on a plate, yeah, you end up getting a lot smarter of those things. I don't know. I mean, I guess, right? They're a business. They're trying to find ways to lock you in, incentivize you, but they also should just teach you how the tool works instead.

Robbie Wagner: [24:39] I think also if they didn't change anything and kept everything very easy to access and just kind of were like, hey, you've visited this page five times now. That must mean you're using Cypress a lot. Would you like to maybe sponsor us on GitHub or something? I think I would.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:58] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [24:59] I guess it's not as bulletproof of a business model, but it feels heavy-handed to me to make it like this thing that we got everyone using is now still kind of free, but we're going to give all these hoops for trying to use it. It's like a rug pull. It's like, oh yeah, we got you all invested. And then no. So I'm not a big fan.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:25] Interesting. Well, yeah, I mean, like I said, to one degree, I can understand. I'm sure they took investment and have to have a profitable business at some point. But yeah, I'm sure they have plenty of businesses and enterprise-level clients who got really deep, and then to keep going, they got to pay a bill now. So that's an interesting bit, and I don't know if I see the value add 100%, but I guess I haven't used it at that kind of scale. So perhaps there are reasons why others would be incentivized, but the other your developers who are evangelizing the tool, using the tool, I mean, I guess we're in a special place as consultants were like, yeah, we evangelize this tool for as long as it works for us. But if you start making things harder, we're not trying to also sell your tool and force people into that tool. It looks like some of the things they do in the upgraded for-free plans are around flake detection, so flaky tests detection, Jira integrations, and you get email support.

Robbie Wagner: [26:34] Don't they have like a dashboard or something like where you can opt-in to make it kind of a SaaS product and upload your snapshots or something?

Chuck Carpenter: [26:44] And I did do this one time, so I think you add a key and basically maybe say it's GitHub Actions, and there's like a package that will connect to their cloud product, and then it will share some resourcing there and then give you reports back. Yeah, so that's part of what you get.

Robbie Wagner: [27:04] So it's not a bad offering. I don't know. It felt like it was so easy to use before and just like I was frustrated. I forget, was it our website that we use, Playwright on the Astro rewrite? Maybe because I wanted to use yeah, I think it was because you wrote the testing docs and mentioned Playwright. I think some in there for that. But anyway, I had tried to use Cypress and just gave up because it took me more than an hour to figure out, and I was just like, that's not worth my time. So, yeah, I just used Playwright, which had its own issues of, like, I didn't use the Inspector, so I was like, this is impossible to debug. How do I know? And I was talking to Nick about it, and he was like, oh, well, you don't need to debug it because you just tell it to click a thing that exists, and it'll click it. I'm like, well, what if I don't know what the thing is at the time? I want to be able to pause right there and be like, what's the thing? What's its current selector? Or does it exist or not exist for some reason? But it sounds like you can do that with the Inspector.

Chuck Carpenter: [28:15] Yes, exactly. So you can, and it's in a little bit more native environment, so that is nice. Yeah. I just confirmed if we did use Playwright on our rewrite, our Astro rewrite. But you mostly did that setup and everything there, so I kind of forgot. Even though I wrote the docs for Astro and Playwright on their site. That's right. I'm a contributor. Yeah. So those docs are trash, apparently. Don't listen to me. Clearly, I drank too much and have a short memory. Yeah. I think that with those additional tools, like Playwright is looking like a pretty nice player in the space. They're not economically incentivized in the same ways, but not that that's a bad thing to make money. I don't want to seem like I'm bashing just for that reason or whatever else. I just found some challenges and found it difficult to get past them and figure out the reasons why in Cypress and I pivoted and in this instance, I just found Playwright simpler to get me the answers I needed and give me the same result. Right. I don't think this necessarily means that I would rush to other projects and convert, like if it ain't broke kind of thing for now, but yeah, I don't know, maybe they'll just push each other in some ways.

Robbie Wagner: [29:30] Yeah, I think, again, I'm not against people making money. That's fine. But I think maybe my frustration is. That I'm a casual user, so I use it like once or twice a year versus daily for my job.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:43] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [29:44] So I think anyone that might use it daily, what are their pricing tiers? I don't even know, but if it's.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:51] Like zero, 75, 300.

Robbie Wagner: [29:54] If it's like $5 to $10 a month.

Chuck Carpenter: [29:57] Yeah, well. See, it's more than that. So I think it jumps to, like, 75 pretty quickly.

Robbie Wagner: [30:03] Because what I'm getting at is, as a professional developer, if a tool is helping me every day and you say it's going to cost me $10 a month, okay. As long as I don't have 400 tools that I need to pay $10 a month for, that's probably not that big of a deal. Like, I'm fine giving some money back. I know you spent a bunch of time building this, that's fine. But if it's meant to be something you can pull off the shelf and quickly get up running with and easily access the docs, and then the paid stuff is supposed to be added on, then the docs need to be surfaced quicker and more easy to use, right? Like it used to be. I had no complaints about how it was like two years ago or whenever before they started making money off of it.

Chuck Carpenter: [30:51] I guess they got everyone locked in, and then they're like, by the way, we're going to limit some stuff. I don't know. I guess the cloud product is like the big thing, and support tiers is probably what you're accessing. So there's the community version, and then there's email support and beyond. It kind of reminds me of all zero in that way. So it's like this as a service, and support is a big part of that. And if you're dealing with the community, you're going to have mixed results. I mean, it's another version of Stack Overflow that's scoped, so that's different. We do have to give kudos to them, though, for advancing testing in that way, like advancing integration testing and stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [31:36] Like outside of Ember, you couldn't do anything like this in other frameworks. And this was like bridged the gap there of like, I want to see my test, and I want to see the steps, and I want to be able to stop at each one and be like, oh, this is happening, and this is happening. And that was unheard of. It was like, oh, use Jest. And it kind of renders stuff, but not really, because it's like all server side, and it's similar to the Playwright model, except I guess I don't know if there was a Jest Inspector or not, but it was like there was no way to render the thing and see it, which is like sometimes important.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:11] Jest is its own unique beast in the sense that it was like a unit testing framework adapted for some component-level testing and then tried to push forward. Beyond that. You have Selenium Web Driver, which was like the real back-in-the-day, OG One. But it was easy to have flaky tests with that. But it could control things in the dom, so those elements were there. And then there was, like, Puppeteer for a minute, which I guess I feel like I read once that Playwright is based on Puppeteer.

Robbie Wagner: [32:43] Yeah. I mean, by naming convention alone, I would think.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:46] Yes. Right? Yeah. So it's just an enhancement in that. So I guess the game is moving forward. You get some more tools with which to write tests, view ear tests, debug ear tests. They're incentivizing tests, by the way. Don't use Jest. Just garbage.

Robbie Wagner: [33:05] But do write tests.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:07] Do write tests.

Robbie Wagner: [33:07] Because if you don't, you'll be sad.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:10] Do Vitest. Yeah, but is it Vitest? Vitest. Vitest. Vitest.

Robbie Wagner: [33:16] I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:16] All of a sudden, German. Vitest. Vitest. Auf Wiedersehen.

Robbie Wagner: [33:23] I actually am German. I just don't know any German.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:25] Oh, yeah. Auf Wiedersehen would be one. I don't know, just because I remember that YouTube album. I was in Germany once, and Schnitzel. Beer. Which is I think you pronounced beer, but it's like B-I-E-R or something weird like that.

Robbie Wagner: [33:44] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:45] I like the food. I grew up in a very German area, so we had things like sauerbraten and schnitzel, and I don't know all the stuff. Lots of potato pancakes. Oh, so good. With apple sauce. You know, the right way.

Robbie Wagner: [34:00] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:01] Sour cream and apple sauce. I don't know who picked that, but so it works magically.

Robbie Wagner: [34:05] That's interesting. That that is so, I knew nothing about that. That's the correct way or whatever, but so my mom always made if we had extra potatoes or grits, she would put them in, like, a cup, put them in the fridge, and then slice it and fry that. So it's, like, maybe similar to what you're saying. And we would put apple butter on it.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:28] Oh, yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [34:28] Which I guess is kind of similar.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:30] But yeah. Although apple butter is just Southern. Just very southern. And the fact that you had grits in your house, again, very Southern.

Robbie Wagner: [34:37] My mom grew up in Tennessee, so.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:40] Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. My mom loves apple butter. It's, like, one of her favorite substances. Aside from bologna, somehow. Fried bologna sandwiches and apple butter separately.

Robbie Wagner: [34:50] No apple butter on fried bologna sandwiches.

Chuck Carpenter: [34:52] Not that I've ever seen. No. Luckily. Right. With mustard. She does love mustard, too. So there's, like, a blend there. I'm a big fan of all mustards. My brother hates mustard. Doesn't like mayonnaise or mustard.

Robbie Wagner: [35:04] I don't either.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:05] I don't understand. These are, like, the best condiments known to man. I'll fight you.

Robbie Wagner: [35:10] No, it's weird. I hate that I don't like mayo, but I don't. It's in 90% of sauces.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:20] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [35:20] So it's like, oh, you go get aioli of any kind. Sometimes they're okay. It won't be heavily mayoy, but a lot of times, it is. And it's, like, gross.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:30] What are you going to put on your fries in Holland?

Robbie Wagner: [35:33] Ketchup?

Chuck Carpenter: [35:34] Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I guess they would have kept I didn't even bother to find out. But you instead have those like sardine things. I think they're called herrings or something. I don't know. Have you been to Holland?

Robbie Wagner: [35:47] No.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:47] One of their snacks is like this little tray, and you get like these little herring fish. They're like big sardines or whatever, and you dip it in onions and then eat the fish. Yeah, I'm feeling like you wouldn't have this.

Robbie Wagner: [36:01] I don't know how I feel about. I mean, I like to dip it in onions part because I love onions, but I think that just says this fish is not that good. We want to cover it up with all of these onions.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:13] This fish is great, completely covered up. And you could put anything in that. Yeah. Anyway, you probably have that over the fries, though. Oh, and the bitterballen. You'd have those too. They're like these, like fried little mashed potato balls and you dip them in this brown gravy. Oh my God.

Robbie Wagner: [36:28] That sounds good.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:30] Yes. We could just talk about we should switch. We should have a food podcast. It's mostly just about eating food, less about making it.

[00:36:38.300] - Robbie Wagner

Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I don't get to eat that much variety where I am because I'm not going to cook, and we live in the middle of nowhere.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:47] See, that's the problem you have. I do cook at least once a week, usually once a week, give or take. Sometimes I got a pizza oven. So I do pizzas on Fridays once a month, and then usually on Sunday, I'll cook something like a cassoulet. I did that once. What did I do recently? I don't know, but I'm planning on my next one. I was thinking about doing Paella, actually. I've never done that.

Robbie Wagner: [37:15] The commitment.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:16] It is everything I choose ends up being some kind of commitment for some dumb reason. I'm always like, yeah, I want to make whatever, blah blah blah. And then it's 4 hours or so. What I made recently is just because it was after the holidays, and we had a ham bone. So I did, like every year I do a navy bean ham bone soup.

Robbie Wagner: [37:34] Oh yeah, that's the stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:37] That is the stuff. That's like serious good. I can have a bowl or so, like a bowl and a half of that, and then just not eat the rest of the day. It's crazy how filling it is.

Robbie Wagner: [37:45] Yeah. I also like doing that with like green beans. Just have a big pot of green beans, and it's like then I feel like I was being healthy because I ate a vegetable even though it's 90% ham.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:57] I was going to say that is the funniest thing. So when Sarah and I moved cross country from Arizona to DC. We stopped and had dinner at a Cracker Barrel. I mean, because you got to.

Robbie Wagner: [38:10] It's exotic.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:11] Hash brown casserole. I mean, fantastic. Anyway, so she loves green beans, and she ordered green beans, and she got them and was distraught that they were like soggy and there was bacon in there. And she was just like, what is this? That's how you have green beans? What are you talking about? What is this? Somehow we hadn't really intersected this part of our relationship where for her, green beans are just like they're blanched and lightly fried with a balsamic glaze or.

Robbie Wagner: [38:38] Almondine.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:39] Almondine or something. Like they're crunchy, basically. And I'm like.

Robbie Wagner: [38:42] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:43] Crunchy beans, gross. And she's like, bacon beans, gross. That are like mushy. So anyway.

Robbie Wagner: [38:50] I like both. Depending on my mood.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:53] I like both now at this point because she likes them that way, I've made them in various ways where they're like skillet, seared, and whatever else. But yeah, at first, I was like, I grew up eating them that way all the time. My grandparents cooked very Southern, and so cooking green beans with some pork butter, whatever, in a slow cooker was a normal thing.

Robbie Wagner: [39:14] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:15] I missed that a little bit, actually.

Robbie Wagner: [39:17] Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is just like, well, I think it's also different. Green beans, they're less quality of bean. So it's like, let's cover it up with good flavors versus. They're different. They're both good.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:33] That or it's just like my grandparents would have this, like, giant tub of lard for cooking and everything. Took that, and it was like, well, I don't know what we're going to do. We got to fry it all. We got to mix it in. They'd make biscuits in the morning with that.

Robbie Wagner: [39:51] I think we talked about that on a previous episode where all of my grandmother's recipes start with get out your jar of bacon grease and put some of that in the pan. And I'm like, you just have enough bacon grease to do that on demand.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:08] So fun fact, maybe I said this in the previous podcast, so sorry. For those taking tally, I absolutely have a container of bacon grease stored and use that from time to time. Yeah, I mean, that was your cooking oil for a lot of stuff. It's a nice slice start. Plus, I have some cast iron. I have a cast iron Dutch oven and a cast iron skillet, and a good way if it's been like some of the season gets pulled off. If you can't cook bacon in it and you have some bacon grease, you could actually just heat that up for a while and wipe it down, and that'll help reseason.

Robbie Wagner: [40:45] Yeah, for sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:47] Fun fact.

Robbie Wagner: [40:48] Tell me about your sim racing journey.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:51] Well, first of all, let's preface it with this. You mentioned a Windows machine, and for any IRS agents who may be listening, that expense was absolutely for a Windows testing machine. Don't worry about the video or graphics card or any of those extra things.

Robbie Wagner: [41:09] That's for Web3 project testing.

Chuck Carpenter: [41:11] Web3 project testing perfect. Exactly. So aside from that, a secondary potential use of said thing is sim racing. Yeah, I've been very interested in sim racing. I tried a sim racing setup at the Porsche Experience Center. Obviously, that one is bonkers, batshit crazy, probably $30,000 rig there. So that's probably not where I'm going, at least not as of now. If I get obsessed, we'll kind of see what the next five years take me. But I'm like, how do I approach this? Have something for gaming anyway because Stadia is going away, and I just can't seem to find a one-for-one replacement. So I'll just use the GeForce now set up. And EA has like a subscription thing too, so I need a PC for gaming. It just comes down to it that you can try to make it work on a Mac, but emulation, VMs, all those kind of crazy hacks end up taking a bunch of your power too. So then you're just not getting the same experience. So I had to give up and go into Windows. So yeah, just trying to look at the base setup that I could. So a good graphics card, ideally, eventually you can enter like four real circuits and competitions and all this kind of stuff. The Porsche Club of America has a setup through iRacing, and that would be all very cool. Again, I just want to try it and do a little more than you might on a PlayStation or something. But although you can actually, with a PlayStation, use some of these controllers and setups too. There's an Italian game, but it's on Steam. It's called like Assetto Corsa, I think it is. And they have a wide range of cars, and it's sort of like your need for speed, but much upgraded. So I'm going to try that. I got Logitech wheel and pedal set. I got like a little shifter too, so that like some of these vintage cars you can drive, you can feel like you got a shifter. And it's an interesting. I found a company that does, like, I think, so you can buy these crazy full rigs. It's this big aluminum set up, and you have like a race seat in it, and you have a surround of screens and all that kind of stuff. But I don't have space for any of that. But let's say down the line I want to get there. I found this company that you can basically buy a setup for holding your steering wheel, your pedals, your shifter, and all that. And then it has this interesting thing where you can actually just use an office chair and just has this little lip and then locks it in. And so it's just like a holder for that normal monitor. Or what I'm going to try is in VR streaming. So I'll do VR streaming. I'll have that set up an office chair and then, like, nice controllers, and it's like, kind of the best of both worlds. It has like a small footprint and gets me into it, but they'll say down the line, oh, I'm into this. I want to set up the whole deal. They'll let you, like, there's like pieces you can buy and eventually assemble, like, a full-on race rig.

Robbie Wagner: [44:04] Interesting.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:05] I'm pretty excited about that. I haven't tried it yet, but definitely excited to go down that path.

Robbie Wagner: [44:10] Yeah, I would be interested to play something that's like real-life feeling. I feel like I've always done the ones that arcades and stuff where they purposefully are really difficult to drive because you're like maybe it's because it's like trying to simulate you going really fast. Although you don't seem like you're going that fast or something. But the steering wheel will shake at you a lot and all that crap. So it would be cool to see one that's theoretically more like real life and see how that drives.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:44] Yeah, because you can get the wheels and the wheel motor things that will give you realistic feedback, and you can have tension on the pedals that's more realistic. And then people will get ones that actually kind of move around in hydraulics or whatever too, and you get like a rumble and all those kind of things.

Robbie Wagner: [45:03] Why does Porsche not just have you can use your car because you can do that in the Tesla? There's like racing games, and you have to use the actual steering wheel. But I never have done it because I feel like I would look like a dumbass. Because the wheels will move. It's like your wheels will actually move when you're doing this. And I'm like, that would look really stupid if you're watching me.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:26] Can't you just do it in your garage?

Robbie Wagner: [45:28] Well, yes, I guess, but the only time I play games on is, like, for charging or, like I'm waiting for Katelynn out in a parking lot somewhere or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:36] That's funny. That's true. Yeah. I don't know. I hadn't really considered it, but I don't know, I wouldn't care because you're the one in the Tesla Charger sitting next to, like, whatever, Chevy Volts or something or those Mustangs. What do you think? You are a Mustang fan. What do you think of the machine?

Robbie Wagner: [45:54] I'm on the fence. I think it's nice-ish like, as an EV, if you do away with the fact that it's a Mustang, it's fine. I think Ford has, I mean, really, nobody with Tesla has, like, a good charging network. It's getting better for everyone, though, and Tesla is going to be opening theirs to everyone. So that's kind of once you get rid of that point. I'm just always still upset that they called it a Mustang because I feel like it was a cash grab at Mustang fans or to make it more hip for younger crowds. Or whatever. And it's not a Mustang. If you had made an actual electric Mustang, I'd probably buy it. But you didn't. They will eventually, because everything will be electric. But I think everyone's competing in that. Like, am I an SUV? Am I a car? I don't know. I'm kind of a hatchback, and I'm an EV.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:49] The crossover space, I call it the crossover space. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of competition there.

Robbie Wagner: [46:54] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:55] That's what I like about mine, is it's more like a little more like in the wagon range of things. It's not really trying to be a crossover or EV or whatever else. Although the Macan EV comes out, I think, this year. I know they're taking orders now. That'll be a rate SUV.

Robbie Wagner: [47:10] Yeah, we saw what's the bigger one? Cayenne.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:14] Yeah, that's not an EV.

Robbie Wagner: [47:16] No, I know, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:16] They have a hybrid.

Robbie Wagner: [47:17] But we saw just a normal one, like, on the road, and Katelynn was like, oh, that's a nice looking SUV. And I was like, well, if they make an EV one, we could look into that. But as of now, no.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:28] Yeah, they have a plug-in hybrid. So not terrible. Not for you.

Robbie Wagner: [47:33] No, I mean, there's enough real EVs right now that it's just like they may not be the exact car I want, but I'll just wait it out.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:40] Yeah. What about your Rivian window? What does that look like? Because mine is July to September right now.

Robbie Wagner: [47:46] Yeah. Ours is like April. They sent me an email a couple of days ago that was like. You need to lock in your configuration now or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:54] Same.

Robbie Wagner: [47:54] Which I did not do.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:57] Womp womp. I did it.

Robbie Wagner: [47:58] I assume they'll tell me when I actually really need to, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:02] I just want to lock in my purchase price because it's $20,000 less than they're selling now.

Robbie Wagner: [48:07] Yeah. So we've decided we don't want the Rivian, and we may still buy it to just try to flip it. But my preference would be just to find someone that actually wants the pre-order and ask them what options they want and basically just give it to them. I don't really care that much.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:29] Yeah, I wonder how that works.

Robbie Wagner: [48:30] So I've been trying to get my dad to, like, he might want the truck so we could convert it to the truck and do that.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:37] You'd probably get it sooner, actually, if you switch to the truck because that's been in production really well. I've started to see a ton of SUVs around here now, though, which was interesting. I've seen a couple saw the first one about a month ago, and now I've seen probably six, so a lot of different colors, too. I was like, oh, I thought they were doing run-offs, cut by color in region, that kind of thing. Well, I mean, I saw a white one. I don't know. We're mostly leaning towards not wanting to keep it, but flip it or, yeah, I guess give it to someone else in line. It's not a terrible, terrible thing to do. I'm not sure where you'd get connected to like your dad makes sense. I don't know anyone in my network that would want it that I know of, but I guess I can advertise that. Yeah. So tweet me at Robbie. No, I'm just kidding.

Robbie Wagner: [49:28] No. RW Wagner 90. If you want a Rivian, just yeah, send me a message.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:35] You might hook it up.

Robbie Wagner: [49:37] Yeah. So I think the thing that is going to be nice is the R1X.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:42] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [49:43] So it's going to be like, I don't know exactly how big, but I think from what I understood, more like Range Rover sport size, and it's like luxury. They're going to upgrade all the stuff. It's going to be really fast. All the stuff that Tesla tries to do with like plaid mode and whatever. So that, I think, could make people not want the other ones because they're like, this cool one is coming out. I don't want the truck or the SUV. I want this crossover or whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:14] Yeah, I haven't even heard of it.

Robbie Wagner: [50:16] They announced it not that long ago. Maybe a couple of months ago.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:20] They send me so many emails and really neglected to maybe they're trying to not cannibalize their own sales.

Robbie Wagner: [50:27] Yeah, maybe they didn't send me an email about it. I saw it in like a news posting.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:33] Whoa that looks cool. That looks very overland. Ready, though, too. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's interesting. I can see where they're like. It's like the next version of their adventure vehicle.

Robbie Wagner: [50:48] Yeah, but yeah, I don't know. We only have two garage bays anyway, and soon we won't have a house at all, so.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:56] Yeah, let's talk about that.

Robbie Wagner: [50:59] Yeah, we.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:00] Your house is getting repossessed. That's how bad business has gotten. I mean, the recession is tough. That's why Robbie really needs to get rid of that Rivian because he needs something to live in.

Robbie Wagner: [51:10] We're actually all going to live in the Bronco when it gets delivered soon. Perfect.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:15] Resto-mod.

Robbie Wagner: [51:16] Yeah, no, we were out of the house yesterday for the whole pictures and 3D tour and all the stuff they do when you're listing your house. And so it's going to be like coming soon. I think this week, I think the 12th, and then goes live the 19th. I guess there's always a thing now of coming soon first or whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:37] Right. Generate interest sponsored by Redfin.

Robbie Wagner: [51:41] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:41] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [51:42] Redfin. Do you want only 1% fees? If you buy and sell with Redfin, we'll reduce your fees to only 1% from the buy side or from the sell side. I guess I was getting confused.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:54] Yeah, that's kind of nice, actually.

Robbie Wagner: [51:56] Yeah, so we've used the same Redfin agent every time we've sold our house. So that's four times now with the same guy.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:04] Saving money can't hurt.

Robbie Wagner: [52:05] Yeah, we should get a repeat discount at some point, right? Like bulk pricing. Maybe.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:11] I don't know. The sponsorship should cover most of that, I think.

Robbie Wagner: [52:15] Yeah, that's true. But yeah, we're not sure where we're going to go. We don't know if it's going to sell soon, so we're like, we don't want to try to find something right now.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:26] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [52:26] In case it takes six months to sell or whatever, but there's a whole bunch of things that could possibly happen. We're looking at renting in Alexandria, maybe stay there like a year or two, and then Great Falls is the eventual destination.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:41] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [52:41] So we'll either find something to buy there that we think we really love and could refinance, or we'll rent in Alexandria, or we've started throwing out just whatever because it's like, well, if we're renting, why not Chicago or like wherever right?

Chuck Carpenter: [52:57] Because it's fucking cold. Have you been to Chicago?

Robbie Wagner: [53:01] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:01] Where are you going to live in the winter?

Robbie Wagner: [53:04] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:04] But I see what you mean. You've got options. Like you could.

Robbie Wagner: [53:07] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:07] Go rent somewhere for a while and come back. Although isn't it like one year, you have to take any profits from a sale and put it into other real estate? Otherwise, it's.

Robbie Wagner: [53:18] It's capital gains.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:19] Yeah, capital gains.

Robbie Wagner: [53:21] Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:21] So it's one downside.

Robbie Wagner: [53:22] I don't know, I ignore all of that because I just assume that I'm going to owe a ton of tax regardless, as we know from you're a patriot running a business.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:31] That's why.

Robbie Wagner: [53:32] Yeah, I don't know if we've complained about this on the air before, but I just hate that everyone that's like a billionaire pays zero tax, and I can't get out of that and have to pay tons of tax. Just sucks, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [53:46] Like, where is the line where you start getting to where how much do you make where you're like, I can actually get out of tax now? Where is that line? I don't know where it is. It's not upper middle class, for sure.

Robbie Wagner: [53:58] No.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:59] Well, I don't know. Your dad has done well. Has he ever hit the line where he can reduce or not pay taxes?

Robbie Wagner:[54:05] No.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:06] So not good either there. So it's like, where is it? You just have to be like multimillionaire billionaire status, and then all of a sudden, you're free of burden corporations. Also.

Robbie Wagner: [54:17] I think it's like 10 million plus in the bank account. Not like investments and property. Like cash. 10 million in the bank, I think, gets you the fancy lawyers that are like, oh, I like that. Let's get you out of tax, and you can give us all the money.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:34] Yeah, let's 40 shell companies. And there you go. Because from what I understand is if you just put it into the economy, it trickles down to everyone else. So totally fine.

Robbie Wagner: [54:45] Yeah. If I spend money on a bronco, everyone that's working minimum wage jobs gets a cut of that, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [54:51] Yeah, of course. Yes. Because then you're buying gas, and we've seen that that doesn't make anyone rich. Right?

Robbie Wagner: [54:59] Oh, yeah. The money from gas goes right to the working American. Not overseas at all.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:04] Yeah, exactly. There are definitely no nation-states that are investing in real estate, in athletic teams, in tech. No, definitely not.

Robbie Wagner: [55:16] Fun fact, I did see that the entire car market was down whatever percent. Like 10%, let's say. But Rolls Royce was up 6%. And they have sold like 6000 something in the past year or something. Which sounds low, but when each one average cost is like 520,000.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:37] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [55:37] It's a lot of money.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:38] Yeah. It's an interesting thing that they continue to sell so many, too, because I don't know if this is still the thing, honestly. I knew one person in life ever who owned a Rolls Royce, and this was, like, in high school, a dad who had one. And he'd had it for like 25 years. So he obviously didn't pay $500,000, but he had like a 70s rear end went out, and Rolls Royce flew out a technician, shipped the part there, and on site, changed his rear end because it had a lifetime warranty. Wow. The life of the original purchaser. Your car was guaranteed to work.

Robbie Wagner: [56:13] How it is. Is that why they're so expensive?

Chuck Carpenter: [56:15] It turns out I don't browse the Rolls Royce site very much.

Robbie Wagner: [56:20] You don't?

Chuck Carpenter: [56:20] Even if I had the money for a car like that, you know me. This is not the direction I'm going to go. I'm not like all about boujie.

Robbie Wagner: [56:26] Oh, yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:27] My dream car is a 918 Spider. Like, I want one of those. That would be the whole I made it and pay no taxes, I guess. Yeah. And it's a hybrid. It's fucking awesome. There's nothing wrong with that car. Everything about the car is wonderful and perfect to me. So anyway, I'm not going to buy a Rolls Royce. I did work for a company whose owners had quite a bit of money, and they had multiple cars, and they had a Rolls Royce and a driver that would bring them to work in that Rolls Royce. When they brought that car, of course, if they brought other cars, there were various options. But yeah, they had a driver, and then onsite, he was a former Ferrari mechanic, retired, and would drive for them and then do some stuff to keep their cars good.

Robbie Wagner: [57:13] Yeah, that would be my I made it moment. I have a Rolls Royce and a driver.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:18] Yeah. I have this car, and I've never driven it myself. That really says something, I think.

Robbie Wagner: [57:25] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:26] Well, my recommendation is that you start a multi-level marketing company. That's the only hint I can give you.

Robbie Wagner: [57:33] We'll start a new LLC, and it will be.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:36] Ship Shape supplements or something.

Robbie Wagner: [57:38] Ship Shape coin.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:39] Ship Shape coin, yeah. The problem is that all of those people, lots of them other than the endorsers, have these pseudonyms on the internet. Right. They're like, that's true. Harry Ape. And Harry ape disappeared. Oh, no shit. He disappeared with $3 million.

Robbie Wagner: [57:56] Millions of dollars.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:57] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [57:58] Okay, so we'll start being less public about who we are and get some fake names and get that going.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:06] It's too late, Robbie. We are so famous now.

Robbie Wagner: [58:08] That's true.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:10] I don't know where we could go.

Robbie Wagner: [58:11] Millions of listeners, they'll find us.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:14] I don't know where I can go. As long as I don't talk, I'll probably get away with it. Right. Because people don't really know our faces but our voices worldwide.

Robbie Wagner: [58:23] Yeah. You walk into a Waffle House and say, like, hey, can I get the all-star combo? And they're like, is that Charles William Carpenter III?

Chuck Carpenter: [58:33] I like. The Swedish passport breakfast, I think, is what I used to get. Oh, man. It's been a while since I've been doing IHOP. Lingonberries. I mean, between Ikea and IHOP, I just can't get enough.

Robbie Wagner: [58:45] We've gone off the rails, and we're overtime, so let's end it here. If you liked it, please subscribe. Leave us some ratings and reviews. We really appreciate it. Hit that five stars, and it will really help us out, and we will catch you next time.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:02] Thanks for listening to Whiskey Web and Whatnot. This podcast is brought to you by Ship Shape and produced by Podcast Royale. If you like this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or two and leave us a rating, maybe a review, as long as it's good.

Robbie Wagner: [59:18] You can subscribe to future episodes on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more info about Ship Shape and this show, check out our website at shipshape.io.