June 15, 2022 | ± 4 minutes
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Table of Contents
What’s it like to use an Amex Centurion card?
Reddit is a goldmine if you’re looking for people oversharing what it’s like to be obscenely wealthy.
Today I saw a post about what it’s like to use / have / be controlled by an Amex Black Centurion – the ultra-elite invite-only Amex charge card that costs $5k a year.
The post itself is very long, but I’ve read it, so you don’t have to. I’ll share some of the highlights.
Things that are awesome:
- You get airport butler service for free. At international airports like London Heathrow and Amsterdam, someone meets you at the airport, whisks you through to the front of all the lines (literally lifting the red ropes for you), and speeds you through customs. A three-hour slog only takes 30 minutes.
- You also get a massive 50% rebate on all flights booked with the card. So this guy got five round-trip lie-flat tickets from Chicago to London for less than $2k each.
Things that are pretty good:
- When you book a holiday with the card, Amex assigns you a concierge to coordinate flights, hotels, transfers, changes to your itinerary, and so forth. This person is pretty helpful, but you do still need to do quite a lot yourself.
Things that don’t work well at all:
- Things aren’t joined up across borders. Every hotel, airport, and transfer service is run independently, and you get varying levels of service across them.
- Some stuff works great, but other things don’t work at all. Transfer confirmations come last minute, if at all; hotel perks that should have been complimentary had to be argued about… that sort of stuff.
So is it worth it?
In total, the guy says the $5k/yr card was worth around $13k for the entire trip, including flight discounts, transfers, and airport butler services. So if you’re the kind of person that turns left going into an airplane anyway, it’s probably a good buy.
Plus, you look like a boss every time you whip out the Amex Black, and that’s priceless really.
The Singularity happened, except it didn’t
Last week, news broke that a Google engineer was placed “on leave” after claiming an AI chatbot created by the tech behemoth was sentient.
The announcement came with some spine-tingling chat transcripts that made it feel a bit like our time as the dominant planetary species is sort of done. But it turns out the chat transcript was heavily edited and rearranged “for readability” and that it’s all a bit of a storm in a teacup.
Gary Marcus, founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company acquired by Uber, said it plainly:
Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent. All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean anything at all. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean that these systems are sentient.
This isn’t to say your nuclear bunker in New Zealand is worthless, but you probably don’t need it just yet.
Americans are desperate for normalcy
Airports and shopping centers in America are chock-a-block. Smashed to the rafters with people looking to get back to their normal lives and spend, spend, spend (whether they can afford it or not).
They’re so desperate to get back to the good old days that even a terrible, awful, horrible film like Jurassic World Dominion smashed through $143m in its domestic debut.
JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION – Wow, I hated that. That’s like a Batman V Superman level of shit movie. Put Colin Trevorrow back in director’s jail, he’s not good at it.
— Da7e Gonzales demands Trial by Content (@Da7e) June 11, 2022
It’s got one of the biggest fan vs critic score discrepancies I’ve ever seen on Rotten Tomatoes:
And I get it. I want that too. But maybe go see Top Gun: Maverick instead. It got excellent reviews from both critics and fans.
Or, if you count yourself among the 79% who love the film, you can get a Jurassic World Dominion limited edition poster for $50.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day
I’m not a broken clock.
Remember what I said last week about Bitcoin? Here’s a quick reminder:
Well, I got that pretty f*cking wrong, didn’t I?
Let’s check in to see how Bitcoin’s doing since I said “Bitcoin is back, baby (maybe)”:
Oh, it’s off nearly 50% in a week? Good to know… I did say “maybe.”
To be fair, Bitcoin is still doing better than Ethereum, and it’s just following the equity markets down (except moreso). But wow, was I wrong.
Everything is Awesome
In case you need some, uh, cheering up after what you just read, here you go:
Sorry about that.
But check this out – Stefan apparently had blue hair at one point.
What caught your eye this week?
Respond to any email, and you might get a shoutout.
Cheers,
Wyatt
