Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the No Silicast podcast, hosted at Podfeat.com, a technology geek podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias. Today is Super Bowl Sunday, February 11th, 2024, and this is show number 979. Back in the olden days, it used to be really hard to add descriptions to images, you know, when you're posting it to social media. You probably know that without an image description, people with visual impairments who use screen readers get zero value out of your posts, but you know, it was so hard that a lot of people didn't bother to include everyone. But nowadays, it's really easy to add alternative text for screen reader users. My latest screencast online tutorial is all about how to add descriptions to your images on Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Discord, and Threads, and for bonus points, I even show how to use Be My Eyes to write your alt text for you with Mona for Mastodon. I've embedded a teaser video in the show notes, but also a link to the full tutorial on Screencast Online where you can watch it with a free 7-day trial again over at ScreencastOnline.com. I always like to give the disclaimer, don't ever get the free 7-day trial because it lets you have access to all of the back catalog that's available, and you're going to want a subscription if you do it. But hey, I warned you, go over, check out the free trial, and you can watch my image descriptions for social media tutorial on Screencast Online. Chelsea Cook wrote in with a great question. She wrote, Do you happen to have any recommendations for MagSafe Stans, a very late to the MagSafe party having upgraded from an SE 2020 to an iPhone 15 Pro? I'd like one that could ideally charge all the things, but I'd like to know what my options are since looking at photos online isn't really feasible. She's visually impaired. Also, the horizontal ones, wherever they is just in a row, would take up way too much space on my desk. I've been eyeing the Highrise 3 from 12 South since I like that company, but getting two of them, one for the desk and one for the bedroom, is kind of pricey right now. But I just wait for Cheeto to get the full 15 watts? Well I think Chelsea's final question is the right answer. My answer to her question was to wait. But let's flesh this out a bit more so you have the context and even a better technical understanding of what's under the hood with these chargers and why the very near future will be much better than where we've been. Right now, iPhone users have a couple of different options to choose from, to quote unquote wirelessly charge their phones. Now wirelessly is a misnomer of course. There is a wire, but it just doesn't go into the phone. Let's ignore that for the purposes of our discussion. Now I'm going to be saying watts quite a bit. It's abbreviated with just a W. And let's make sure we all understand what watts means to you. It's not how much you can store in a device. It's a measure of how much energy can be poured into a device at an instant in time. This makes it the right measure for the speed of charging. And we're all pretty familiar with MagSafe devices if you're an iPhone user, they're magnetic and they charge an iPhone at 15 watts, which is considered fast charging. Now fast charging is another phrase I really find annoying, like how fast is fast? So Apple certified MagSafe chargers are super expensive. It's really easy to drop $100 or more. You can also find cheap magnetic chargers that sound like they're just like MagSafe without Apple blessing them. They're magnetic and when you stick your phone to them, the phone charges. But if you don't see the word MagSafe in the description, it's not going to charge your iPhone at 15 watts. They're limited to 7.5 watts. Keep in mind that price is not a reliable way to tell the difference between MagSafe and plain magnetic chargers. Chelsea mentioned the 12 South High-Rise 3. As she said, 12 South is a beloved company by Apple Fanatics, but even 12 South are vague about this distinction. You think that for the $100 cost of the High-Rise 3, that would be MagSafe. But if you look at the wording about it, they do not say it's MagSafe, and they don't show the charging speed on the spec sheet. However, if you look at the 12 South High-Rise Deluxe for $150, they do say it's MagSafe and they say it charges at 15 watts. The two chargers look like slightly different configurations of the same kind of device to charge an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods, but the non-Deluxe version does not have fast charging. Let's step back for a second and ask an important question. Do you NEED fast charging? Fast charging of batteries degrades them over time more than slow charging, reducing their overall capacity. This is true for every device from phones to electric vehicles that have batteries. You also might not be in that much of a hurry. Maybe you sit at a desk all day and it's easy to slap your phone on a charger for a top-up midday. But maybe you're a road warrior always on the run, about to catch a plane that you're going to fly, and when you need to top up, you need it now. Well, the non-MagSafe chargers out there use a standard called Qi, spelled QI, but it's pronounced Qi, and it's governed by the wireless power consortium. Apple never joined the Qi bandwagon, so MagSafe chargers are not under the Qi standard. The good news is that Apple have decided to give their MagSafe technology to the wireless power consortium to be incorporated into the new and improved Qi2 standard. According from the consortium's announcement about Qi V 2.0, the Qi V 2.0 standard consists of two profiles, the Magnetic Power Profile MPP, which is based on MagSafe technology contributed by Apple to WPC and branded with a Qi2 logo. I'm going to stop my quote for a second, it's QI2, slammed together the three letters, the two letters in the number stuck together, Qi2, and that's important. So they say that this Magnetic Power Profile MPP is branded with a Qi2 logo, and in enhancement, the second technology is an enhancement to the existing wireless charging extended power profile, EPP. That does not include magnets, but complies with the Qi V 2.0 standard. New Qi V 2.0 EPP products will be branded with the existing Qi logo customers know and use today. Let's break that down a little bit. We need to learn the new terminology. Magnetic Power Profile, or MPP, is what they're calling their implementation of MagSafe. They say if a device has MPP, it'll have the Qi2 logo. But there will also be Qi V 2.0 devices that don't have the Magnetic Power Profile. Those devices will not have the fancy new Qi2 logo, but rather the old Qi logo.  So this leads me to want to explain how this whole magnetic charging even works in the first place. For the electrical engineers listening, put your pencils down and just bear with me as I oversimplify my explanation so the audience doesn't go into a coma. First, we're going to talk about Faraday's law of induction. You may have heard people talk about a Faraday cage, you know, when they try to make a cell phone call inside of a metal elevator? Yes, this is the same Faraday we're talking about. But here's what Faraday figured out. If you take a coil of wire and you send electricity through it, it will induce a magnetic field. Okay, that's kind of cool, but what good is that information? Picture coiling a wire around some kind of a cylinder, like maybe a wood dowel to make it into a little spiral. So you pull the dowel out and you've got that spiral of wire. Now, if you stick a smaller magnetic rod through the middle of that spiral, if you send electricity through the spiral of wire, the magnetic field that gets induced will actually move the magnetic rod. They call this process the creation of an electromotive force. Now, this is a fun experiment to do with kids. When our son, Kyle, was 13, we helped him and his lab partner, Darius, do this experiment. Well, Steve and I tried to engender excitement in them of this amazing feat of electromagnetism. They reacted exactly as you would imagine to teenage boys to react, utter and total boredom. Well, we had fun anyway. Now, by the way, this thing I've been describing here, the coil of wire and the magnet inside it, that's exactly how speakers work. So you put electricity through the, well, I won't get all the way into it, but it is how speaker coils work. Anyway, keep going. Now that we understand that current can move a magnet, let me blow your mind. A moving magnet can induce electricity into a coil of wire. Yeah, it works in both directions. Grab that cylindrical magnet and move it back and forth along its axis and you can measure the electrical current changing in the wire. I love science. Well, we need one more piece of information for the story before I can connect the dots back to magnetic chargers. We've established that running electricity current through a coil of wire induces a magnetic field around the wire. Now we don't actually need the magnet inserted into the coil for this to be true. That was just kind of a way to demonstrate the electromotive force. If you take one coil of wire with current flowing through it and get it near another coil of wire, the first coil's magnetic field will induce a magnetic field in the second one and that will induce current to flow through the second coil. This works with both coils of wire flat as a pancake, as long as they're parallel and they're relatively close to one another. You can probably see where I'm going with this. With MagSafe and Cheath, the charger has a coil of wire in it and so does the back of the phone. We can plug the charger into main power, which causes electricity to flow around its flat coil of wire which induces a magnetic field in that first coil. When the phone is placed on the charger, a corresponding magnetic field will be induced in the phone and that will in turn cause electricity to flow into the phone, thus charging its battery. Now I put a screenshot from the iFixit video of their teardown of Apple's MagSafe charger into the show notes. I froze it at a point where you can actually see the coils and the magnets inside. I learned something really important by watching this full video. Near the beginning, they cut open the connector end of the USB-C cable and they show the circuitry inside the cable's connector. At this point, a light bulb went off for me. I have an Apple MagSafe Duo charger. It's a travel charger for the iPhone and the watch. It's been broken for two years, but after watching the video, I suddenly realized that since the cable on that MagSafe Duo is detachable from the device, maybe I hadn't reconnected an official Apple cable. I grabbed a USB-C to lightning cable I was pretty sure was made by Apple and my MagSafe Duo immediately came to life. Now, it isn't great anymore and definitely not if you have a case on your phone because this was designed before the huge camera bump on the newer iPhones, but I'm kind of able to smush it into a good spot to charge. And I was happy to know that MagSafe Duo I had been sitting looking at, staring at, angry that it stopped working. There was nothing at all wrong with it. That cable turned out to be important.  This magnet has nothing to do with this whole magnetic field stuff. It's there to align the phone's coils to the charger's coils. You remember the original Qi chargers without magnets? When you were never sure whether the coils were lined up, you'd wake up to a dead phone in the morning because you'd bumped it? That's because they didn't have magnets to align the two devices. Now, the part of this that I didn't understand before now is what magic sauce does Apple add to MagSafe chargers to make them so much better than vanilla magnetic Qi chargers? Steve and I did a lot of research and we can only infer the answer to that question. Evidently, Apple do a better job of aligning the coils, which makes the energy transfer much more efficient with less loss. MagSafe also has the advantage of matching the send and receive coil sizes. They make the phone and they divine the MagSafe requirements, so it's easy to make all the coils match. But generic magnetic Qi chargers work with all different phones, so alignment and size of the coils is not guaranteed. Now, there's a term in this field, pun not intended, called magnetic coupling coefficient. For a given magnetic system, if that coefficient was one, that would mean that 100% of the energy was transferred from one coil to the next. That's not possible because there's always loss, so it's a number less than one. We were able to find that the magnetic coupling coefficient for Qi is up to 0.5, so up to 50% efficient. That's the best you're going to get. When USB Type-C interface was created, it introduced native power capability of 15 watts. This means that if a Qi charger has a magnetic coupling coefficient as high as 0.5, then a 15 watt power supply will only give you 7.5 watts of instantaneous power delivery. Okay, now we know why it's 7.5 watts on the non MagSafe chargers. We were unable to find a spec that gave us the magnetic coupling coefficient for MagSafe, but we can back into the number. Apples say that to use MagSafe for fast charging, you have to use a 20 watt charger to achieve the 15 watts of charging. 15 divided by 20 gives us a magnetic coupling coefficient of 0.75. This higher magnetic coupling coefficient, along with allowing 20 watts, gives us our 15 watts of power rather than the 7.5 watts with vanilla Qi chargers. I was pretty depressed about these efficiency numbers for both technologies, because I thought about all of the wasted energy for zillions of iPhones across the world if we even use MagSafe chargers. But then it occurred to me to check with the efficiency of a regular USB-C cable is for transferring energy. I had a little trouble digging up the definitive answer, but the folks at Bachmann had a chart that said 60 watt USB-C chargers operating at DC 5 volts, 3 amps and 15 watts was 84.6 percent efficient. That's not that much more than MagSafe at 75 percent, so you're much better off in terms of energy efficiency using a MagSafe or Qi2 charger that will get you this of 15 watts. Now people often ask me how important is it to have a MagSafe case on their phone because the regular case still sticks to the magnet? Well, the farther away the coils are from each other, the lower that coupling coefficient becomes. MagSafe cases include magnets that help with the critical line alignment of the coils we talked about earlier. If you want the fastest charge with the least amount of wasted energy while having a case on the phone, definitely go for a MagSafe case and it doesn't have to be made by Apple. Having no case at all would of course be even more efficient, but for most of us that's not really practical. Now that we understand the limitations of Qi magnetic chargers versus the advantages of MagSafe, we can get back to why I told Chelsea to wait. When Steve and I were at CES, we were positively tripping over companies telling us about their Qi2 products. Remember that Qi2 is not proprietary and yet it contains MPP, the magnetic power profile that Apple gave to the wireless power consortium. This should break open the competition to be able to provide lower-cost 15 watt wireless charging. We may still have to have an eagle eye out though because you'll see Qi2, I'm sorry, you'll see Qi chargers out there that don't include MPP and those will not have magnets in them. Remember that. You can actually find a couple of anchor Qi2 chargers over on Amazon right now. They're already out, but I'd wait until Qi2 chargers are out there before investing in anything new. A lot of you know that my mother had macular degeneration and I actually have dry macular degeneration myself. I'm not yet going blind, but we don't know what's going to happen in the future, so I've got a lot of interest in blind accessibility anyway. And so I've now stopped by the VisionAid booth to talk to Taylor Spiegel who has a terrifying pitch that he's going to convince me to try on these goggles anyway. Let him tell you what they're in business to do here. Absolutely. So we at VisionAid were focused on developing mixed reality technologies, so headsets like this and how that can prove the lives of those with visual impairments. And so our first product is called Eye Disease Simulator. Oh goody, that sounds fun Taylor. It is exactly what it sounds like. We're on the nose with the name and it allows people to experience firsthand life through the eyes of someone living with eye disease. And it can be from the earliest stages of macular degeneration, for example, to the most advanced stages. And the idea here is really all about empathy and understanding. From medical students who are the future doctors and practitioners that are going to be seeing thousands of patients, can they better understand that journey as well as someone recently diagnosed as well as their loved ones around them. That's an interesting idea with the loved ones to be able to understand what you really can't do or where you're going to need help and what it feels like, huh? Yes, and we've heard countless stories of those where somebody might drop a pen and be able to pick it up, but then they also can't see the TV in front of them. And a spouse or a loved one is confounded by that concept and through being able to see the eyes of that individual can completely change relationships, dynamics at home, for example, color contrast of cups.  We've had people who the spouse has experienced it, went home, rearranged the house, got high contrast cups and their whole lifestyle at home, which is your everyday life, has improved as a result. That's a really interesting idea. I do remember my son Kyle making fun of my mother because we were watching the Rose Parade and my mother could barely see at this point and she said, hey, did you notice the water coming off the wheels on that cycle on the left side? And he's like, you've been faking all this time, but it happened to be something she could see out of the side of her eye because the center of vision was gone but not the side, but he still gave her a hard time. She had a good sense of humor about it though. Well, that's good. And we hear a lot of those stories and this, we began vision aid from our own personal experience. My co-founder's grandfather suffered from macular degeneration. We saw firsthand his trajectory and how his path was and we started to explore, well, what other technologies are out there that can help him and the entire family? And through that, we started developing, finding those gaps and developing our own technology. When we were speaking a little bit earlier, he mentioned that maybe if he'd been able to see a simulation of what his future was going to be, he would have gotten more medical care earlier and had things maybe slowed it down at the very least? Yes. With a lot of these diseases, macular degeneration, glaucoma, there's not a cure, but you can slow down his trajectory dramatically. And a lot of situations, if you're lucky, you can outlive the disease, if you will. So you'll never go legally blind. However, if you wait until, you'll say you have early-stage glaucoma, you can see just fine today, but they were able to detect it. You'll wait years in some situations to take your drops and to go into regular appointments until it's too late, until you can't see well and your vision will never get better. And the trajectory of that disease now means you're losing functional vision actively and more rapidly. I know two people who had early-stage glaucoma and were able to get a surgery, they did the drops and stopped being effective, but they kept at it with the doctors and they had surgery that actually has now stabilized it for now, at least. And with macular degeneration, my uncle did get the injections and it was probably like an extra decade that he was able to drive continuously and still read before it actually did progress beyond that. But he was quite elderly by the time it hit him really badly. And that's the goal in a way is to effectively outlive it and it doesn't just impact the individual but everyone around them, their whole family experience, the ability to have your own independence and be able to drive as late as possible as long as you need to. That's really our goal. There's great treatments and medications out there. We're one of the few companies who are building technologies to make your senses worse, but with a longer goal of improving quality of life and patient outcomes. So I think you're going to make me wear this virtual reality headset. And this is an audio podcast but also has video so I'm going to be describing in detail what I see. But one of the questions I asked Dr. Heatley as your advisor here and I asked him how you actually simulate what it is someone can't see because you can't see through their eyes. You can see the effect on the physiology, but you really don't know what they can't see unless they have a way to describe it to you in some way. So a little bit of this is generalization I think. Yeah, so there's obviously a body of clinical research of different ways to measure one's low vision or blindness if you will. One common misconception is that if you lose vision it's always just blackness or lack of vision. But a lot of the times take macular generation, you lose central vision. It's kind of like a blend of the colors of the environment around you. So it's more of a gray or the tones of, you know, if you're in a forest in theory it'd be different kind of blended colors of that green background of a forest. And that's part of what we're trying to get through is also create a gold standard of representation of these diseases because if you go on, you know, three different websites and Google, you know, what does it look like with glaucoma? You may get three different things and that inconsistency drives us crazy personally. And that's part of our goal there is, you know, we can look at things not only the clinical research but also let's say somebody has a lack of vision in one of their eyes.  Well that means that they are great candidates to help inform us on the accuracy of our own data because their right eye is experiencing the disease but they can still see our simulation with the left eye. And so we can do that type of research on our end to help fine-tune what diseases look like. Very, very interesting. Now you've got several different kinds of eye diseases that I'm going to get to be able to see. Do you have, is it retinopigmentosa? We don't yet. We're actually, that's the next disease that we're developing today. That's the one I don't, I don't have any feel for what they can see. So I'll come back next year and see what you've done with it, you know, when you're upstairs. Maybe I just am real curious what that one looks like. But I guess, is it time to torture me? Let's do it. So I think you may have to hold the microphone. I will. So when I'm talking, you need to hold it right up on me and then when you're talking hold it right up on you. That's perfect. I'll make sure the disease is on and then we'll swap rules. All right, terrify me. The disease is on, he says. The disease is on, you're looking at intermediate to severe stage macular generation. Okay. Okay, so yeah, that's interesting. I'm seeing a pretty annoying gray bubble in the middle where right now I'm looking directly at Taylor and I can't see his face. But if I look over towards Steve to the left, now I can, if I, it's kind of like when you try to look at a star and it disappears, but if you look away, you can see it. Yeah, I don't want to see this, but okay. So that's moderate to severe. What are you going to do to me next? All right. So one key notes with macular generation is central vision loss. That's your high fidelity vision. That's your color vision. And so that sometimes can be even at the smallest little blind spots in the center of your vision can take away a lot of your functionality, your ability to read, especially look at someone's in the face, your loved one in the eyes. You lose that ability. So not only independence, but a lot of the elements that make us us. And so this is macular generation. I'm going to make this one stage worse for you before we move on, if that's okay. That sounds awesome. Okay. Okay, I'm seeing the screen right now. So I don't think I'm supposed to be, am I? It is something that is okay. I'm going to actually navigate with that screen. Okay. So I just increased the severity to a late stage macular generation. So your center blind spot should be darker. It should be larger and you're relying more and more on your peripheral vision. Yeah, that's really interesting. So it's almost black in a lot of areas, but it's got blobby gray spots. And then most of the outside of his gray, and I'm seeing, you know, maybe 10% around the edges. Yeah, I could see how I could maybe walk through a room if I always look sideways, but that's about all I could do. Yeah, and people who have this disease have to train themselves over time to rely entirely on your peripheral vision, which is incredibly challenging. Yeah, it's really hard. It's really hard not to look at you. I have to look away in order to see you. That's interesting. Okay, what other torture do you have? So let's go ahead and introduce you to Glaucoma. Oh, goodie. I do know the one thing I understood that my mother was really experiencing something awful with macular degeneration was when they thought she might have Glaucoma, and that terrified her because all she had left was the periphery. So to lose that would have been terrible. Luckily they were wrong. Yes, and we do have the ability with our eye disease simulator to stack the diseases because that brings up a very good point, which is your eyes won't necessarily be symmetric and you could have more than one condition. But right now you're experiencing Glaucoma, and this is think of it as tunnel vision. So you're losing the majority of all your peripheral vision. So I'm noticing with this one with my left eye, I've got some central vision. The right eye has very, very little. Is that on purpose you've made it unbalanced? Correct. Something that's often overlooked is the asymmetry of one's eyes. A disease does not impact you the same on your left eye versus your right eye. It can progress differently. And so your mind actually does a very good job if you lose a part of your vision in one eye. The other eye does a great job accommodating in your brain to process that information. But it's really when those things like blind spots overlap that you completely lose that visual information. Wow. Yeah, this is terrifying, but I think it is good to try to understand it and experience it. Thank you. Of course. Thank you. All right. So if people wanted to find out more, oh, wait, no. You have another product that you also make, which is why the company's called Vision Aid, not Vision Terrify People. Make them scared to death. That is, even though that's a great name, I do appreciate it. Yeah. So Vision Aid started because our goal is to improve the quality of lives and aid the vision of those suffering from diseases. And so in a way, we do think Eye Disease Simulator is a Vision Aid in the sense that it can help through the right actions retain vision for longer. But our other product that we have in R&D right now is, we call it Vision Aid Air, but it's actually augmenting one's vision in real time. So think of it as similar experience you put on glasses, the mixed reality headset, but we now with the feet of the world around you can change that image in real time and help accentuate and improve your available vision. So for example, if you have a wavy vision, like that's a symptom with a lot of diseases, and it's warped. If we know where that is, we can, because we have the image, we can counter-warp that image. I'd say AI in that sentence. It's got to be some AI going to happen there. At CES, there's going to be a lot of AI, the kind of AI washing, but yeah, that can be part of the training just to make us go faster and we can customize that faster. I see AI really as an accelerant in that process, but really the fundamentals of optics are if you can increase the light saturation and delivery to your eyes, it can actually help reduce those blind spots that you saw a minute ago with like macular generation. We can change color contrast, higher contrasts, so that you can still have differentiation. So there's a lot that we can do to effectively put on a pair of sunglasses, if you will, and allow someone to have instant improvement in their vision. And so that's really our main dreamscape right now with Vision Aid is step one, we're going to make your vision worse, but really step two is augment that vision and improve it. People want to find out more about your work. Where would they go? VisionAid.io. You can find out more about all the products that we have both available today as well as coming down the pipeline. Well congratulations for the work that you do here. This is cool. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming by. Appreciate it. That interview was positively fascinating and they're doing really important work, but let's kind of cleanse our palates and move on to something a little bit more joyful. My family is a big fan of beer and in fact a big fan of Hoppy beer. And so I'm in the ExoBrew booth with Bart van de Kui. I got it. He's Dutch and we've been practicing the pronunciation here. And you've got an interesting product here that looks like maybe do something at home. What are you working on here? Yeah, what I'm working on is ExoBrew. It's a company like a compact device with a unique technology and we basically have a cloud-based platform where you can download unlimited recipes. That means you can brew 1.6 gallons of beer or kombucha or ciders and it's ready in three to 30 days. Oh wow. So describe this device we're looking at here. Yeah, the device what's here on the right of me. So basically it's one brewing device. It has a copper kettle. It has a transparent mesh done, that's what we call it. And on top you have a cylinder where you put in the hops. And basically what the brewing process looks like, you put the water in the copper keg, then you put the mesh in and the hops on top. It circulates so it meshes, it boils, it cools down and then when you're done with that you need to put a lid on the keg and then it starts fermenting. You can add the yeast, when after the fermenting it's done, that could be three or 30 days, depends on the recipe, and you can tap it from the same keg. Oh wow. So it's basically, we're not going to say curing because then we'd get sued for saying that, but it's not cake up quite, but we've got the hops. I like seeing the actual hops sitting in the top there, that's very cool. Yeah, that's what we want to do. We make brewing simple. You don't need any experience, just your creativity. But we do want people to feel the real ingredients. So we supply people with a brew pack. You have 15 different styles from alcohol-free to IPA, stout beers, sours, whatever you like.  It can create your own recipes. You can clone other recipes. You can make your own twists. This one that we have here on the right, get to the hop-ah. Get to the hop-ah. I've got to describe this to the audience here. The box says get to the hop-ah and it's a stylistic representation of someone who might look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's got the machine guns, but it's actually shooting hops out of it. It's a great logo, that's a great line there. So that's New England IPA. If you were to buy, get to the hop-ah, that's what you would be making would be the New England IPA. Yeah, that's one of the recipes that we offer. It's a New England IPA. It can be done in two weeks. So four to five hours brewing and then fermenting is two weeks and then you can tap the beer. Wow, that's pretty cool. So do you buy the, I forgot the name of the product, EXO brew and then you subscribe to get these recipes or what's the model? Yeah, the plan is right now because we started in Europe, maybe that's my Dutch name from. We sold 5,000 units in Europe. That's quite a lot and that's why we now in the US trying to expand here. The goal is to offer a beer subscription so you get each week or each month depending on your frequency. How much you like it? How much you like it, how many cakes you have. And then on the other hand we offer a pro subscription and that means you have access to a library. We have about 13,000 recipes there from other users. You can either create your own or clone the recipes, tweak it and then order your own ingredients from your local shop and then brew it on the EXO brew. Oh, that's nice. So you've got all the different variations you might want. And so how much, well is this available today then? We're taking pre-orders in the US right now. Okay. Chimping in 224, end of the year. Oh, towards the end of the year in 2024. Okay. And what's your price point going to be on the EXO brew? Starting is from $8.79. I'm saying starting because most people buy an extra cake. It's an extra $300 or buy a second or third one. Kids, the brew kits are $25. Starting from is not bad at all. Oh, that's great. You make 1.6 gallons. So that's an afternoon's beer, right? He said the price already. How much is it? Oh, how much do you make? 1.6 gallons. Yeah, 1.6 gallons on average. So like I said, about an afternoon's beer, right? Yeah. Preserves. Sometimes we get that question as well but most people drink 1.6 gallons at some friends and it's gone in a couple of hours. But let's say you drink it by yourself. The cake has a cooling at the back and then it preserves the beer up to three months. When it's in the EXO brew? Yeah, you need to keep it inside the vessel. It cools and heats. So it basically depends on your home temperature, your room temperature, what it needs to do. So the size of this thing, I'm going to estimate it. What is that, about three and a half feet, three feet at tall? Maybe a foot and a half wide and maybe two, three feet deep, something like that. So it's maybe not countertop. But it's bigger than your kitchen device. Let's call no brands. But we have people that put it in the kitchen. Yeah. Oh, I can definitely see that. Yeah. In the den or hobby room. Sure. All right. Well, this is very cool. So if people want to get involved then they want to find out about EXO brew, where would they go? Yeah, you would go to exo brew.com and then on the website you can find everything. Perfect Bart. I really enjoy this. This is very cool. It sounds like a lot of fun. Jonathan Wyman is our hero of the week. He went to podfeed.com slash Patreon and he pledged his hard earned money to show his appreciation for the hard work we do to bring you all of the podfeed podcast. Take a tip from Jonathan and you too can be the hero of the week. I'm at the WISP booth with yours, Castramans, and they have won a fine CES Innovation Award for accessibility and aging tech for their product. And we're going to find out right now what this product is. What is WISP? WISP is a real time assistive voice technology that converts whispered speech and affected speech into a person's natural voice, clear and natural voice in real time. Oh, wow. So if you've got a problem having lost your voice in some way, you'll be able to, what if you've never had a natural voice? So WISP is meant for people with throat cancer, for example, vocal cord paralysis, but also for people who started severely. I tend to stutter myself slightly and people who stutter severely, they are really fluent when they whisper. So that was the starting point of the story. Oh, that's a really interesting idea. So how does this work? What is the product? How does it work? Of course, it's a lot of AI, but we have an app. You can download the WISP app in Google Play and the App Store. You can download currently already, but at the start of CES, we will launch our phone functionality. So you can make phone calls with the WISP assistive voice technology in real time. Really? Even on iOS, they're going to let you do that. They let us do that, but it's with the WISP application. Oh, okay. You are making phone calls. Oh, I got you. Like you make a call through Telegram or whatever. You download the app, the WISP app, and you make the phone call. You're not using the phone function, you use the WISP app. Okay, all right. So we're going to do a live demo here, right? So this is an audio podcast as well as we're doing video. So we have a fine gentleman over here. We have Tatu. You're going to be whispering into a microphone. First, I'm going to listen to it because I've never heard this. So go ahead and put the headphones on me. He's going to make sure it's ready to go here. Okay, we're going to plop those headphones on me and he's going to whisper. He said, welcome to CES 2024. He sounds like he's speaking correctly. So hang on. While he's doing this, I'm going to move the microphone over so you can hear what he's actually sounding like, not what I hear. Hello, welcome to CES 2024. This is Tatu. I'm an AI researcher at WISP. Okay, so now we're going to take it up one more notch. I want to talk into that to make sure you're not faking because what I'm hearing in my headphones is a perfectly natural human voice. I do not hear whispering. I'm walking around in a circle. Wait, I'm going to talk to myself right now for a second. Okay, you guys can't hear anything. This gets really confusing because I'm hearing my own voice coming through the microphone. That is really freaky. Now what I noticed was that when I was whispering, it sounded exactly like Tatu's voice. That was not my voice that I was able to hear. But we can make your voice. There are a lot of recordings of your voice, right? Well, in my case, yes. We can make your personal WISP voice. Please send us files. Two, three, four, five minutes and we can make your personal WISP voice. Is that part of the app? So currently in the app, you can make, for example, voice recordings.  I'm doing a live demo with the app. I stop. It's getting converted. It's to meet you, Alison. I'm doing a live demo with the app. So this is my voice. I made it personalized. We can do it for you, too. Okay, well, we're not on the recording here, but that's something fun. So the app is called WISP. It's W-H-I-S-P-P. And it's available right now in the app stores, Google Play and all around. Well, we're going to have to check this out.  We start now with a 50% early bird discount. So it starts from $19.99 a month for a subscription based model. Okay, $20 a month. Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot. Hi, I'm George from Tulsa. And I started this piece thinking it would be a simple report about my new monitor and how it answers Alison's great framing question. What's the problem to be solved? Answering that required context. I could have begun with the five inch screen in my first computer, a 1981 Osborne 1, but decided to focus on my experiences beginning with OS X 10.0, which I bought on a 12 inch iBook Snow in 2001. While developing this segment, I discovered some Mac viewability settings that were new to me. I'm talking about them right at the top. So if you're only here for Mac stuff and not my monitor discussion, you could skip forward. In the interest of audio brevity, you'll need to visit Alison show notes for detailed instructions and links. I tested them on Mac OS 14 Sonoma. They may not all work on older versions. If you use two or more monitors, it's easy and useful to display the menu bar and dock on each screen. One nice feature is the menu bar's brightness increases on the screen with an application in use and dims on the inactive screen, which helps if you lose track of what you're doing where it's also possible to very, very slightly increase the menu bar size. I don't remember what version of OS X introduced the full screen mode. The advantages of which are said to be a bit more working space and more focus, less distraction. I do remember my reaction the first time I unknowingly activated it was, ah, what happened to my menu bar? How do I drive this careening car? Beginning in Monterey, it became possible to make full screen slightly less all consuming and keep the menu bar on screen. I'm putting in a link to how to do that in Ventura and Sonoma as they differ slightly. Screen scaling can make everything on screen either larger or smaller. It's possible to set different resolutions on different monitors and to specify their relative locations. Mac OS also provides more granular settings. Make text and icons bigger across apps and system features. Make text bigger for individual apps or system features. Make icons bigger for individual apps or system features. So enough of those public service announcements on with the show. Since acquiring my first computer in 1981, much of my work is involved creating, editing, and reviewing spreadsheets. The ability to usefully display two or more spreadsheets simultaneously has long been something of a personal holy grail. By usefully, I mean in fonts large enough to read. For most of my computing decades, even though Macs and Windows could display applications and open files in multiple on-screen windows, screens were just too small to display two readable files on screen. Thinking over just the Macs I've owned or had at work, I count two 12-inch Snow iBooks, two 12-inch PowerBooks, two 11-inch Airs, one 13-inch Air, one 13-inch MacBook Pro, two 15-inch MacBook Pros, a mid-90s Performa with 14-inch CRT, two 17-inch and one 20-inch iMacs, a variety of minis, and one 27-inch 2010 iMac. No wonder Apple is a trillion-dollar business. Only the 27-inch iMac had a screen that could, in theory, have usefully displayed two spreadsheets simultaneously. Here's an extract from my rant about that computer in 2010's No Silicast, number 287. It was a strain to read the system font when I pushed the computer far enough back on my desk to allow for keyboard and papers. Native resolution is 2560x1440, meaningless in the abstract. In reality, it means tiny font. Apple zombies call tiny fonts crisp. Pulled close enough to read, I was wiping nose grease from the screen. Can it get worse? Oh, yes it can.  I gave it away. Following that experience, I went back to running my 15-inch MacBook Pro, one of the last with the non-reflective screen, on a laptop stand connected to a 24-inch matte monitor. Then to a series of new and newer minis connected to dual ASUS 27-inch 2560x1440 iCare monitors with an excellent anti-glare surface. No mirror effect, no eye strain, no headaches. But as they had the same native resolution as that iMac, they had the same tiny font problem and required scaling. Dual 27-inch screens, even within large scale, will display two spreadsheets. Push two of the ASUS 27s together and their combined edge bezels create an annoying 1 3 quarter inch break. Not good for spreadsheets that stretch onto both screens. I certainly didn't center myself at the annoying bezel, but in front of the primary monitor on the left with the secondary stretching out to the right, the far right. Sure, they could display two readable spreadsheets, one on each monitor, but sitting centered in front of the left, the far right side is 38 inches away, too distant for my reading glasses to bring into focus. To actually use a spreadsheet that takes up much of the right screen, I had to drag it onto the left one where it covered the one there. Poof! So much for two, usefully at once. In Glenn Lidstone's post about getting the Mac OS toolbar on all screens, there's a photo of his workspace. He has three 27-inch monitors mounted in a wide U so his eyes are not far from any screen. With the ASUS 27-inch iCare monitors only $290 on Amazon, if you could copy Glenn's setup without rebuilding an office building as I would have to, the productivity benefits I'm hoping for might be achieved. Well, none of my current computers could do the job. In the Macverse, the 1299 M2 Mini Pro can. Three monitors for $870 and a new Mini Pro at $1299. As I keep talking, that $2169 total won't sound so bad. I tried 4K TVs. Best buys Insignia brand is only $170. Ratingscom, top 4K TV for use as a monitor, Samsung's QN90 series, QLED is $1098 at Amazon, and there's a range between the Insignia and the top rated one. My daughter with LASIK Perfect Eyes loves her TCL 43-inch 4K. She's able to run it in its native 3840x2160 pixel resolution and fill his screen with active windows she can easily read. She gets frustrated when she asks me to look at something and I have to confess I just can't see it at that resolution. I've become a juggler of reading glasses. One pair for working on a monitor that's right in front of me and two more each with increasing magnification to read fine and finer print on paper. Three weeks ago, I bought LG's ultra-wide 45-inch OLED with a 3440x1440 resolution. Note that's wide but not tall. The extremely non-reflective OLED screen is superb with deep deep blacks. LG claims a thousand nets of brightness. It's aggressively curved and sold as a gaming monitor. The curve provides a centorama-like surround experience in the videos and game demos I've watched. The aggressive curve lets me sit directly centered and the curve brings both sides close to my eyes. On my dual 27s, the far right side was 38 inches away. The curve on the LG brings it to a readable 21 inches. I'm able to edit many but not all spreadsheets side by side. Plus it's really great for whoppers. Those complex spreadsheets so wide they spread across two 27-inch screens because on the ultra-wide there's no annoying bezel in the middle. One surprise, no speakers. Not a big deal as I had good self-powered speakers already connected. The LG does have a headphone jack that will pass sound through, appropriate as I think most gamers use headsets. It also has an optical port that will transmit digital sound received via HDMI on to high-quality audio devices. I'm running it on Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3 which offers high DPI scaling from 75 to 200 percent. It also works well with my M2 Mini running Sonoma using many of the viewability tips I mentioned at the top. Currently priced on Amazon at $1,878 and best by $1,700, it's far more expensive than the top-pick 43-inch 4K TV or three-grade 27-inch monitors but not Apple's 32-inch Pro Display XDR that's $7,000 when buying the optional non-reflective glass and stand. LG and other companies introduced a variety of new monitors at CEF so prices may drop for some wide and curved screens though there doesn't seem to be an update for my LG that started shipping in April 2023. How about Acer's Predator Z57 with a 57-inch 7,680 by 2,160 pixel screen? Effectively, two 4K screens in one. Bring a powerful graphics card. Well as people in the live show said tonight we haven't heard from George in a long time and it's a real pleasure to hear from him again. I have a feeling George's solution is going to cost some people some money but I think it's a terrific solution. I have a large monitor it's not as big as George's but it's 32 inches and I have to slide my entire head back and forth side to side because the corners are at the wrong distance. I can't see the edges of the monitor so I think this is a terrific solution and I know a couple of other people who've gone with the wide format curved display and it sure is tempting. Well that's going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me like Chelsea did by sending me an email at allisonatpodfeed.com if you have a question or a suggestion a dumb question send it on over. Remember everything good starts with podfeed.com you can follow me on mastodon at podfeed.com slash mastodon and if you want to listen to the podcast on youtube you can go to podfeed.com slash youtube if you want to join in the conversation you can join our slack community where do you think that is podfeed.com slash slack you can go there and talk to me and all of the other lovely new silicastaways you can support the show at podfeed.com slash patreon like jonathan did or with the one-time donation at podfeed.com slash paypal and if you want to join in the fun of the live show like the great audience did on super bowl sunday just head on over to podfeed.com slash live on any sunday night at 5 p.m pacific time enjoying the friendly and enthusiastic no silicastaways thanks for listening and stay subscribed


So, we're very intentional about the terminology of cause selling. I just kind of wanted to share that with our audience today, and really challenging fundraisers to rethink about the work that you do and to really embrace the fact that you are selling. What you're selling is probably one of the most important items in the marketplace that you can sell, right? And that is a solution and idea that meets a community need. So, we lean in very heavily to the terminology of cause selling. And in fact, our curriculum and these eight steps really were created looking at the best of the best in terms of what's working in the for-profit sector around sales and sales strategies.


We got thing battle fighting in the Prime Pit looks like he's got like a bit of ability swing Like he's got some weird tracing around his uh You got stunned right there. Oh big butter boom the other reset Oh, he got a double kill off of one and then reset with the other Sareth gameplay always enjoyable to watch


I want to talk about the difference between two types of surprises or two types of contingencies. The one type of surprise is what is referred to as risks and risks we can ensure against. The other type of surprise are uncertainties, uncertain events against which we cannot ensure ourselves. This distinction between risks on the one hand and uncertainty on the other hand was introduced in the economics literature by Frank Knight, a famous book, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit that appeared in the early 1920s. Frank Knight was one of the big men of the Chicago School but has in fact, when it comes to this distinction, little in common anymore with what came after him. Later on, Ludwig von Mises made the same type of distinction. He didn't call it a risk and uncertainty he called it. There are two types of probable statements, one that he referred to as class probability and the other one that he referred to as case probability. This distinction that both of these economists made has its foundation in some work that was done by Ludwig von Mises' brother, Richard von Mises, who was a famous mathematician. He was also a member of the Vienna Circle, the Schlickkreis that I mentioned in my introductory lecture. Just let me say a few words just to introduce Richard von Mises to you. Richard von Mises was two years younger than his brother but was born in 1883. Mises was born in 1881 and Richard died in 1953. In my introductory lecture I missed Ludwig von Mises' year of his death. I dated that in 1981, in that case Mises would have been 100 years old. Actually he died in 1973. The 81 was just his birthday but 100 years before. That's why I messed up on that. Richard von Mises was a professor of mathematics at the University of Strasbourg from 1909 to 1919. Strasbourg at that time was part of Germany and was then lost to France after World War I and became a French city but it is still in character a German city. I will not blame Guido Hülsmann for this event that happened. Obviously he had nothing to do with this. He had to leave Strasbourg because it became French. In 1921 he was appointed professor of mathematics and director of the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the University of Berlin which was at that time probably the world's foremost university. He was a colleague of Albert Einstein who was the head of the Institute of Physics and he was the head of the Institute of Mathematics. When the National Socialist dismissed Richard von Mises from his post because he was Jewish actually at that time he had already converted to Catholicism but nonetheless the Nazis did not recognize something like this I guess. In 1933 Richard von Mises went to Istanbul in Turkey where again he worked until 1939 as a professor of mathematics and then he emigrated to the United States where he finished his career as professor of aerodynamics and applied mathematics at Harvard. His most important book dealing with probability theory was initially published in German translated into English, it's called Probability, Statistics and Truths. I should mention that for the theoretical part that I'm covering here I have also an article that was published a few years ago in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics with the title The Limits of Numerical Probability so if you want to deepen your understanding of what I'm going to say here I would simply refer you to this article. I have some sort of theoretical problems that I want to discuss and then I want to apply these theoretical considerations in particular to the problem of health insurance. So I begin with the slightly more difficult theoretical things and then I hope things will become clearer as I apply them to the case of health insurance. Let me begin by giving you an intuitive understanding of the workings of insurance and then delve into some theoretical problems a little bit more deeply. Any type of insurance involves the pooling of individual risks and it implies that to some of the insured more will be paid out than what they paid in terms of insurance premiums and to others less will be paid out than they paid in terms of insurance premiums but the decisive mark of insurance is that no one of the people who takes out insurance knows in advance who the winners will be the winner being those of course who get paid out more than they paid in and no one knows if he will be a loser that is if he will be one of those that paid premiums but nothing happened to them. So the winners and the losers are distributed so to speak randomly and every insurance does involve obviously some income redistribution but the income redistribution is random it is unpredictable no one knows whether he will be on the winner's side or on the loser's side otherwise if the winners or the losers could be systematically predicted the losers would not want to pool their risk with the winners but only with other losers. To give you an example let's say you are a professional football player and another person is like myself sitting behind a desk and then riding and look at the example let's say of an accident insurance now if an insurance would pool the risk of professional football players with the risk of those people who work behind a desk then you can automatically predict who the winners will be and who the losers will be. The losers will obviously be the people who sit behind the desk because very unfrequently do they fall over and break their neck whereas in the case of professional football players that happens to be some daily risk that can occur. So in that case it is easy to predict that the desk worker so to speak would say I don't want to pool my risk with the risk of a professional football player I rather pool my risk only with somebody who does a similar occupation that is similarly non-dangerous as my own. Now if we look at the market of insurance we would see that competition defined as free entry into the line of the insurance business competition between insurers would eliminate all systematic redistribution should it somehow exist. Unless of course the motive of voluntary subsidies on the part of the losers would be involved that is to say if I love professional football so much and they are so dear to me that I want to support them and I might want to insure myself with professional football players also but if this motive is not present then obviously what would happen would be that affirm that wrongly grouped people with different group risks into the same group that mixed people with objectively different risks in the same group would be outcompeted by other companies that realize that some misgrouping has occurred because the other insurance company noticing hey there are obviously significantly different risk groups involved here would be able to offer lower insurance premiums to the losers than would shift from the wrongly classifying insurer to the insurance that classifies people in the correct way and those football players would then be left only with other football players having to pay a higher insurance premium reflecting the higher risk of these people. So what we can say then is competition between insurers would lead to ever more and refined subgrouping discriminating according to the actual group risk and the premiums that they would charge would reflect this genuine insurance risk of people who fall in the same group and the price differentials that is the different types of premium charged would reflect this difference in risk that these various groups represent on the average prices would tend to fall and the discrimination could be based on all sorts of criteria that is something that insurance companies would have to learn in the course of time finding out that they made mistakes there are other insurance companies entering the market doing different types of discriminations charging lower rates or higher rates and so forth So this is as a preliminary introduction into how insurance works Now I want to come to the question of what type of risks are insurable what type of contingencies, what types of events, what types of contingency surprises are insurable and what types of contingency surprises are uninsurable and I begin with what is necessary in order to ensure something what type of surprises can be insured and there I want to begin by giving you first the definition of Richard von Mises The theory of probability that Richard von Mises formulated is usually referred to as a frequency interpretation of probability and he defines it in the following way First, it is possible to speak about probabilities only in reference to a properly defined collective Collective means nothing else but a group, a class of individuals Second, so unless you have a group, unless you have a class, every talk about probability is nonsense according to Richard von Mises Second, a collective appropriate for the application of the theory of probability must fulfill two conditions The first condition is the relative frequencies of particular attributes that is attributes are this occurs or this does not occur a person dies or doesn't die, a roll of six or a roll of seven or five my dies sometimes have seven things on it so the relative frequency of particular attributes within the collective tend to fixed limits I'll explain it in a second and the second condition is these fixed limits are not affected by any place selection I will explain that term in a second also that is to say if we calculate the relative frequency of some attribute not in the original sequence but in a partial set selected according to some fixed rule then we require that the relative frequency so calculated should tend to be the same should tend to the same limit as it does in the original set and then he says condition three is the fulfillment of condition two will be described as the principle of randomness was a principle of the impossibility of a gambling system and now I come to an explanation of this that makes clear what he has in mind here there he says imagine for instance a road along which milestones are placed large ones for whole miles and small ones for tenths of a mile if we walk along enough if you walk along enough along this road calculating the relative frequencies of large stones the value found in this way will lie around one tenths the deviations from the value point one will become smaller and smaller as a number of stones past increases in other words the relative frequency tends toward the limiting value of point zero point one this is the first condition that he has but then he says that is condition one is fulfilled however absent in this case is condition two because the sequence of observations of large or small stones differs essentially from the sequence of observations for instance of the results of a game of chance which is of throwing the dice in that the first sequence obeys an easily recognizable law exactly every tenths observation leads to the attribute large and all others to the attribute small the essential difference between the sequence of the results obtained by casting dice and the regular sequence of large and small milestones consists in the possibility of devising a method of selecting the elements so as to produce a fundamental change in the relative frequencies we begin for instance with a large stone and register only every second stone past the relation of the relative frequencies of small and large stones will then converge toward one fifths instead of one tenths the impossibility of affecting the chances of a game by a system of selection this uselessness of all systems of gambling is a characteristic and decisive property common to all sequences of observations or mass phenomena which form the proper subject of probability calculus the limiting values of the relative frequencies in a collective must be independent of all possible place selections so you realize with a milestone example if you choose a certain selection mechanism of using the members you get different limiting values and because of that there are so to speak laws that we can discover about the behavior of small stones and large stones whereas we could not observe anything like this when it comes to throwing a dice now for my purposes I want to just summarize quickly the fundamental statements that Richard von Mises makes now as a consequence of this definition of the range of applicability of the probability calculus first he says and is quite emphatic about it that the application of the term probability to a single event such as the probability of Mr. X dying in the course of the next year for instance is utter nonsense there is no class defined at all you can obviously not form ratios say 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 if something refers if we are dealing with an individual case you should realize from the outset that when you listen to a TV and various economists talk about the probability of such occurring the probability of such occurring like the probability of will the debt ceiling be increased they give you numbers obviously they have not the faintest idea of what probability theory is all about this is just bullshit there is of course a way to say something about how probable this sort of thing is but it is not based on probability calculus I can tell you the probability is 100% that the damn thing will be erased because they have done that all the time before but this is not based on long run frequency observation that I have made but simply by understanding how politics works and then he says the theory of probability can never lead to a definite statement concerning a single event second, Richard von Mises is equally insistent that the probabilities of the probability calculus are objective things empirical properties and magnitudes rather than subjective beliefs or degrees of confidence they are based on experience and further additional experience may lead you to revise the measurements and may lead you to a reclassification of various singular events into various collectives however only in referring to objective probabilities can the probability calculus ever be of any practical use and third and this is an implication of this he says he categorically rejects the notion of a priori probabilities no such thing as a priori probabilities exist again let me make clear what his criticism is of conceiving of probabilities is not as something objective, observable but of just degrees of subjective confidence as regard the subjective element he says criticizes John Maynard Keynes who is a subjective probability theorist Keynes for instance fails to recognize that if we know nothing about a thing we cannot say anything about it and its probability and then he notes that the peculiar approach of the subjectivists lies in the fact that they consider the statement I presume that these cases are equally probable to be equivalent to the statement these cases are equally probable since for them probability is only a subjective notion so there is obviously a difference between I think they are equally probable and they are equally probable and in order to find out whether they are equally probable we have to make observations we have to have data that show that they are and as far as the idea of a priori probabilities are concerned he says it is frequently held that if one plays with a perfect or correct coin, heads or tails and makes sufficiently large numbers of throws it is almost certain that the proportion of heads will deviate by less than one per mil from one half of all cases now with regard to this we only note that transition from the arithmetic proposition to this empirical proposition can be made only in declaring a perfect coin to be one for which the probability of both outcomes is one half and thus defining probability precisely in the way suggested by us namely as relative empirical frequency in long sequences so whether something is a perfect coin must be shown also by engaging in some sort of experimentation we cannot a priori know that the coin is whether the dice is indeed a perfect coin or a perfect coin or a perfect dice now getting a little bit easier Frank Knight on this question again Frank Knight explaining what risks are to which the probability calculus can be applied and which refer to events against which insurance is possible Frank Knight says if all changes were to take place in accordance with invariably and universally known laws they could be foreseen for an indefinite period in advance of their occurrence and would not upset the perfect apportionment of product values among contributing agencies and profit and loss would not arise now this is the same insight that you find also in Mises when he talks about general equilibrium or what he calls the evenly rotating economy I'm not sure if you have encountered this so far in the lectures but Mises there assumes what would happen if there is no change occurring anymore whatsoever and all future events could be perfectly predicted would there then be profits and losses and the answer that he gives no profits and losses would then disappear there would be still a uniform interest payment but profit and losses are no longer in place if there is no uncertainty in the world and then Knight continues however perfects foresight need not involve the ability to forecast every singular event and the absence of any kind of contingency or surprise for profits and losses to disappear Knight explains then it is unnecessary to perfect profitless imputation that particular occurrences be foreseeable if only all the alternative possibilities are known and the probability of the occurrence of each can be accurately ascertained even though the businessman could not know in advance the result of individual ventures he could operate and base his competitive offers upon accurate foreknowledge of the future if quantitative knowledge of the probability of every possible outcome can be had fore by figuring on the basis of a large number of ventures whether of his own business alone or that of business in general the losses could be converted into fixed costs thus for example the example will make it clear what he has in mind the bursting of bottles produced champagne or so that was the bursting of bottles does not introduce an uncertainty or hazard into the business of producing champagne since in the operations of any producer a practically constant and known proportion of bottles burst it does not especially matter even whether the proportion is large or small these losses become a fixed cost and even if a single producer does not deal with a sufficiently large number of cases of the contingency in question to secure a constant C in its effect the same result may easily be realized through an organization taking in large numbers of producers this of course is the principle of insurance as familiarly illustrated by the chance of fire loss no one can say whether a particular building will burn and most building owners do not operate on a sufficiently large scale to reduce the cost to constancy but it is well known the effect of insurance is to extend the space and to cover the operations of a large number of persons and convert the contingency into a fixed cost so this is Knight nowhere refers to Richard von Mises Knight could read German but I don't think Knight was interested in mathematics that much and Richard von Mises had come out with his main articles on the subject just a few years before Knight published his book but the idea is precisely the same only where the probability calculus can be applied where we have a collective where place selection is impossible only those things are insurable now Ludwig von Mises Ludwig von Mises says in order to be insurable something must be given that he calls class probability class probability obviously related to this idea of a collective that Richard mentioned interestingly even though Ludwig von Mises wrote his stuff much later than his brother did he does not refer in the sections that deal with his problems to his brother at all I indicated that two brothers had some sort of difficult relationship with each other so they might not have like to side each other he says the condition that must be fulfilled is the following I the insurer and the insured assume to know with regard to the risk concerned everything about the behavior of the whole class or the group or the collective of events but about the singular event me dying tomorrow, you dying tomorrow about the singular event we know nothing but that they are elements of this class we know everything about the class of males at age 62 for instance but about the risk applying to me as an individual falling into this class we know nothing except that I am also 62 and I am a member of this group for example I assume to know everything based on objective long run frequency distributions about the risk of hurricane damage to the residents of some specified territory about any particular individual and his particular risk I know nothing except that I am a resident of this territory for which we do have these frequencies calculated now you note the character of this definition the definition that Mises here gives first implies the absence of any systematic redistribution that takes place what I pointed out at the beginning about insurance if I know nothing about any particular person's risk except that he is a member of a group with such and such a group risk then all redistribution must be random must be unpredictable it also implies so to speak the homogeneity of all cases I know nothing that distinguishes other people who are 62 from me who are 62 as far as our likelihood of being dying in the next year is concerned and if in so far as I know nothing about a particular individual within a group except that it belongs to this group then in so far as they are homogenous this also implies that things that are insurable must have the character of an accident in order to be insurable events now then the question what types of surprises what types of contingencies are uninsurable and there Mises says that is the case if I know with regard to a particular risk some or all of the factors determining its outcome if I do know something about an individual case only about this individual case that has some influence or total influence on the outcome then we have a case of case probability in front of us and as far as case probability is concerned we can never make numerical statements because it is just an individual case now if we raise the question what types of events are of this nature that cannot be insured because we know something about individual cases then Mises is not always perfectly clear on this but the answer is that when it comes to human actions then we can say human actions are indeed always singular events why are they always singular events why can we not classify human actions into classes of events about which we have objective probabilities collected and the answer is for individual actions of course we always do know what the motive of this guy was what the reason of this guy was what the knowledge was that he had at this point in time what the knowledge was that he had at another point in time that is we have a method of place selection that is the method of place selection is the method of understanding people we can understand individual situations I can distinguish your action from the action of somebody else by knowing you by knowing your motives I cannot distinguish one stone falling from another stone falling because there is no way of me to understand what the stone is thinking if he is thinking anything at all so while accidents can be insured against actions that are individually motivated and driven by individual knowledge actions and the results of actions cannot be insured against but are something that falls into the realm of individual responsibility and this is a task of entrepreneurs so to speak to predict these sorts of things but not predict them according to objective probabilities now to applications as I said I have control over my actions you have control over your actions hence every risk that may be influenced by my actions is uninsurable and what is not controllable through individual actions is insurable provided long run objective frequency distributions exist and if something that was not controllable becomes controllable then it loses its insurability status with respect to risks of the type of natural disasters floods hurricanes earthquakes fires insurance is obviously possible because these events are outside of individual control I know nothing about my individual risk except that I am a member of a certain group of individuals on the other hand take risks like suicide or arson or unemployment or not getting up in the morning these are uninsurable events because I do have control over this I cannot insure myself against burning my own house down because I obviously do have control over this I cannot insure myself against becoming unemployed because I also have control over this whether it is big control or small control does not matter all that much you can always accept a lower wage rate for instance than you did before and you can become instantly unemployed if you kick your boss in the behind so there are many ways that you can affect the likelihood of being unemployed or being employed for that reason unemployment insurance is impossible that we have something that is called unemployment insurance means nothing governments always find nice words for things that are obviously completely different from what they really what they really are social security is another example that is obviously precisely social insecurity but they call it of course social security I obviously cannot insure myself against feeling ill in the morning and not wanting to get out of bed if I could insure myself against it I would pay the premium and I would always feel ill and not get out of bed I cannot insure myself against committing suicide tomorrow because if that were my intention to kill myself I would pay the premium my wife will be a millionaire tomorrow and I am dead insurance companies that do this sort of stuff will not last for very long in the market in all of these cases we cannot really say that I am a person and like all other persons I am afflicted by this risk of not feeling good in the morning and not getting up we know that we have control over this and we know that people do not fall into one and the same class but are different individuals and this sort of stuff belongs into the realm of individual responsibility and is uninsurable I can also not insure myself against making business losses because obviously it is easy as pie to make losses if I insure myself, make losses and then I collect from the insurance company I can also not insure myself against fractional reserve banking because if I can insure myself I will hold zero reserves and in that case my bankruptcy is guaranteed so no insurance company would ever take on a risk such as this so now applying this further to health insurance the immediate inside is obviously that health insurance is insurable only in so far as the health risk for a given group is accidental such as maybe accident insurance being stricken by cancer some bodily melt functioning and so forth but since most health risks and with the advance of medical technology more and more of such risks fall within the province of individual control very little in this field is actually insurable such risks again must be assumed individually and paid out of pocket or out of individual savings now it is noteworthy that in all recent discussions about healthcare reform this has been almost completely overlooked that there is no way that we can insure this type of stuff or most of it at least except for Mises early on in his career in his book Socialism he wrote this great foresight he said to the intellectual champions of social insurance and to the politicians and statement who enacted it illness and health appeared as two conditions of the human body sharply separated from each other and always recognizable without difficult or doubt any doctor could diagnose the characteristics of health and illness was a bodily phenomenon which showed itself independent of the human will and was not susceptible to influence by will now every statement in this theory is false he says there is no clear defined frontier between health and illness being ill is not a phenomenon independent of conscious will and of psychic forces working in the subconscious immense efficiency is not merely the result of his physical condition it depends largely on his mind and will thus the whole idea of being able to separate by medical examination the unfit from the fit and from the malingerers and those able to work from those unable to work proves to be untenable those who believe that accident and health insurance could be based on completely effective means of ascertaining illnesses and injuries and their consequences were very much mistaken the destructionist aspect of accident and health insurance lies above all in the fact that such institutions promote accidents and illness hinder recovery and very often create or at least intensify and lengthen the functional disorders which follow from illness or accidents I should mention to underline this insight that if you look simply at self-employed people on the one hand as compared with let's say ten-year university professors or in the German system life-guaranteed jobs if you look at how frequently they are sick you find a clear difference between them self-employed people keep working under circumstances where all ten-year university professors would long have turned in an application that for five, six weeks they would be unable to perform their duties which might be actually better sometimes if they wouldn't do that so as regard health one would expect that most risks are assumed individual and insurance would be limited to the strict accident variety of risk with strictly limited coverage and so forth now if we look at the present world then however we find some fundamental difference and to make it brief I'm running almost out of time here to explain what has happened in the current world is this due to various regulations of insurance companies two things have happened first insurance companies are by law prohibited from discriminating groups correctly that is people are pooled in groups who clearly belong into different groups in Europe if I remember correctly there was just some law passed that any type of difference in health insurance premiums for males and females would be outlawed despite the fact that there are significantly different health risks for males and females in existence which every actuarial would be able to tell you so and I'll give you a few examples of what sort of nonsense regulations there exist in this regard in a moment and the second thing is that insurance companies are not only legally required not to discriminate even though they know they should discriminate and group people into different groups the second thing is that insurance companies are also obliged to insure people against uninsurable risks a few examples of this huge amount of mandates I have not followed this sort of stuff closely anymore years ago that I looked into this in 1991 for instance there existed 992 regulations that insurance companies had to follow in order to be allowed to operate as an insurance company I'll give you some examples here treatment of alcoholism must be covered by insurance companies in 49 states even though obviously it doesn't apply to everyone in the same way Islamic people for instance drink very little alcohol they would not need this sort of stuff drug addiction in 27 states in the meantime I'm sure the numbers are even higher use of chiropractors in 45 put the address to the foot doctors psychotic shrinks in 36 states I mean I know people who love to go to shrinks because they always think that they have some ailment and I know other people would never in their entire life see the office of a shrink but the price must be covered of course for those who do go to shrinks all the time social workers the same thing in 27 in 22 states in 1991 in Georgia heart transplants must be covered by insurance companies despite the fact that again not all people are equally likely requiring a heart transplant in Illinois liver transplant in Minnesota very nice hair pieces even though it should be perfectly clear that I mean I know my father never lost his hair my grandfather never lost his hair I will not lose my hair so I don't need this but if I am insured I must cover that cost also in California marriage counseling that is of course a state where that is really very urgent very urgent topic pastoral counseling in Vermont and sperm banking in Massachusetts California also outlaws any type of genetic testing in order to determine whether you belong in this risk group or that risk group even though in many cases of course you can very easily determine by simple tests this guy must be in this group and that guy must be in that group there exist certain diseases that occur only if certain people have things that can be immediately determined by a genetic examination now what is the consequence of these mandates now what you can imagine is of course the price for medical insurance continuously rises as a consequence of this because all that nonsense has to be covered they are required to cover all of this what is then the consequence of prices for insurance premiums continually going up it is that more and more people will opt to drop out of insurance entirely because as I say look this doesn't apply to me why in the world should I just insure myself against having getting a wink paid by the insurance company why in the world should I insure myself against alcoholism if I'm not drinking a drop of alcohol not that that applies to me but there are people like this obviously so more and more people come to the conclusion hey I have to pay for all sorts of nonsense none of that applies to me and they drop out entirely what is then the consequence now those people who remain in the system of course must then pay still higher premiums so here we have a case of what Mises describes in the dynamics of interventionism one intervention leads to the next intervention and that leads to the next intervention so what do you do if people drop out prices even go up higher then you have to introduce compulsory insurance that is people are no longer allowed to drop out of this nonsense system they must be in there and what happens if the prices then continue to go up what then happens is eventually they will introduce some sort of rationing system that is then politicians will be the ones that determine what are good diseases that deserve to be treated and what are bad diseases that do not deserve to be treated that is the government then becomes like Dr. Kevorkian determining who can live and who must die and as you can see in the United States we are approaching this type of system quickly where it will be our beloved members of congress and senate and presidents and whatever they are who determine who is a good guy and is allowed to be treated and relieved of his ailments and who are the bad guys and who deserve to die thank you very much