So here's my message to the Prime Minister. Prime Minister, take a trip back into your past. Take a trip back into your past.


All of our projects are interesting, but this one has an awful lot going on within it. This is a project that evolved out of a lot of experience in the region, working in South Africa, working in Mozambique, working in other countries, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe. And it's an outgrowth in a sense of that. In fundamental terms, we've partnered with the National Treasury to do this project and the Treasury is funding half of the project and wider is funding the other half. And this project, following that financing model, has two elements to it, two big elements. One is work that is more or less focused on South Africa and the other is work that is more or less focused on regional issues, regional integration, broad issues that are of interest to everybody within the region. On the first part, which is the South Africa part, we have a series of components, three, I think. The first is firm level analysis. And here we've had a tremendous degree of success in working with the Treasury and the Revenue Service to make available tax data, both personal income tax and firm level tax, over time to try to look at what's happening with firms, firm dynamics. We can also look at employment. These are big issues. International experience, spirits in Europe, Vietnam, other countries indicates that these data, once they're properly set up, are a real trove of information for what's happening within the economy. Sort of via this tax data that we've really learned that there are big variations in productivities across firms within a single industry. We can look at that. We get a notion of what happens to productivity if there's a policy change. And we can track with a tremendous degree of detail. So that component has been going. We have five teams of South Africans, two international teams working on the tax data. We have five computers sitting on the 20th floor of the National Treasury with these data sitting in them. And it's a tremendous amount of data. This will be a long-term effort and project will come up with our first outputs at the end of the year. Underneath this component, the Treasury works with a large, a big model of the entire economy of South Africa. And these models are very, very useful for lots of things, tax policy. We've used for carbon tax. We've used for climate change. We've used for energy and energy policy. And obviously one wants to have the best possible representation of the South African economy. And one of the things that you can do to validate the model, this is a good idea but rarely done, is instead of frequently we take the model and run it forward to see what might happen. In this case, we're gonna take the model and we're gonna run it backwards and see if we can reproduce what has happened and look at how well do we reproduce what has happened and what kind of parameters do we need to make that happen. This also allows us to do certain counterfactuals. Once we've gotten this model to reproduce history, then we could go back in history and say, well, what if we had decided to do A instead of B and what would the consequence potentially have been? So it becomes a potentially powerful tool for analysis. The third area in there is energy and their choices. So we've worked a lot with the government on their integrated energy plan, other elements of that looking at technological choices. How should there be a big nuclear build? How big, if there's going to be a nuclear build, how big should it be? What are options in the short and the long term? Is it possible to delay such that options remain on the table instead of committing big investments? And the Treasury is, of course, extremely interested in this. The size of these investments is very, very large. To do a big nuclear build could take 20% of total investment in South Africa for years, six or seven years in a row. So it's a major, major decision and the company that would do it is SCOM and the owner of that company is the Treasury. So the Treasury needs to know whether this is a good idea or not. So that's on the South Africa side. What we want wider to do is to serve as a platform for discussion of regional issues in Southern Africa. And one of the characteristics of Southern Africa is that South Africa is much, much larger than any of its neighbors. It's both larger and wealthier. And so there's a considerable imbalance there. And we believe that wider can provide a platform where we can have discussions, joint research with institutions and countries across the region looking at specific issues. Our thought is that specific opportunities for where there's gains for groups of countries or pairs of countries are one of the better ways to proceed. So we're looking in some specific areas and the ones that we're looking at are supermarkets. So there's been a massive expansion of supermarkets throughout the region. I wanna see what that has done and is this actually fomenting some kind of procurement within the countries? Is our Zambian producers now supplying South African supermarket chains? These kinds of questions. There's a big interest in the region in basically the poultry value chain. Oil seeds, energy sources, and then growing birds. There's large potentials in the region and these are quite raw potentials. So we're looking at that in Zambia. We'll move into Mozambique. We're also looking at mining and mining services. So there's a great deal of mining that's happening but there's a lot of need to keep the mining equipment going, design these kinds of things and how those kinds of opportunities are working out. The last is in transport and we're gonna focus on trucking and what we find is that there is the possibility for cartilization in trucking that trucking can be a real barrier and that actually certain relatively few regulatory changes or expansions can drastically increase the efficiency of trucking, the competitiveness efficiency of trucking and if we can do that for dry goods, trucking being the most common form of transport within the region, these could yield big gains. The final area that is also starting up is in bioenergy and the only way really to do a substantial bioenergy program is regionally. South Africa is a big market for fuels. It actually, if you look at for example, Zambia, it just really doesn't take that many hectares of sugar to provide the entirety of what you could mix right now or relatively soon into their fuel mix. So if you're going to achieve the kind of scale that you need, you need to link up with South Africa. South Africa also needs the region in this. They don't have the land or the water to do this at the scale that might be required. We have no idea whether this is a great idea or not, but we want to look into this particular option. Bioenergy is the fundamental attraction of bioenergy is its size, it's potentially very, very large and so it can justify the kinds of investments that everybody's talking about in terms of transport infrastructure and other items in order to get these kinds of operations going. It also has the possibility to link to agriculture and provide jobs in the region in Mozambique and Zambia potentially Zimbabwe, other places if you choose production technologies that are sufficiently labor intensive. So there's potential to do it right and there's potential also to not do it very well. So the question is with bioenergy is not, yeah, the question is can we do it well? We know we can do it badly, that's been proven. The question is can we do it properly? We have quite a few partners in this whole thing and this is part of the idea is to link people together. Our partners and the current and the ones that we're working on still to bring into this. Obviously we've linked up with the Treasury. I've mentioned that so we have the national Treasury in South Africa. We've also working with the Center for Computation, Regulation and Economic Development, CRED at the University of Johannesburg. In Zambia, we're working with the Endab Agricultural Policy Research Institute. They're working on both the poultry value chains and the bioenergy. Also in Zambia, we're working with the Zambian Institute for Policy Analysis and Research looking at the supermarkets initiative. In Zimbabwe, with the supermarkets institutes, we're working with the Zimbabwe Economic, Zeparro Policy Analysis Research Units or something like that. So they're working on the supermarkets initiative. We work with the Trade and Law Center at Down in Cape Town. They've been very involved in the nitty gritty of the implementation of the regional research agenda. We will also be linking up with Mozambican institutes. There is an agricultural policy research institute called SEPAG, which has a Portuguese name. There's also the Ministry of Economics and Finance we're working with in a separate group. We'll work with their Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources on energy and bioenergy. And we're working, there's a group called the Center for Economic Analysis and Management Studies at the University at Bordeaux-Mondland in Mozambique. On the bioenergy side, we also have a link with the Overseas Development Institute in the UK because they bring a certain degree of skills with respect to institutional arrangements for bioenergy production, because we want to understand these institutional arrangements in particular. This is one of the key elements, the labor intensity of the feedstock production, be it sugar or other items, that will seriously drive how the distribution of these benefits, of the value from this production is distributed. And if we can not only do it in a way that is economic, but also generating jobs and broader-based prosperity, then that's a bigger win. So that's something that we really want.


With the misstep of ledger coming out and doing everything with their firmware upgrade where they're able to Store your private keys for you and then pay $9.95 a month and then of course your private keys are everywhere people have been looking for an alternative to cold storage devices, especially with what's happened in Just crypto exchanges for example with Voyager and Celsius and FTX so some of these alternatives could be a product called LAPAL and This product itself is another cold storage device and it looks pretty good But I will caution you that with every single product out there. There is no 100% perfect product for you There are always some pros and cons in this video We're going to quickly as best as possible go over those so LAPAL itself It has three or four different different types of products and you can see here that it is air-gapped It's not it doesn't have connection to Bluetooth USB Wi-Fi or NFT. So it's pretty much Secure in that regard. It's got three different products itself You have a mini cold wallet, which is a smaller version of the Titan cold wallet What I like about this though is that it is a touch screen So I like that as opposed to the nano ledger Which everything is like these little buttons and sometimes a little bit hard and also it has the LAPAL seed phrase Which you can put in steel instead of running it down on Paper which would you put your mnemonic phrases on? And of course you have to download the app do that another good thing about this is it supports over 10,000 coins and tokens So I don't know how many there are out there for crypto or digital assets But that seems like the bulk of what you might want to store on your device So again the LAPAL I'm going to be using the Titan cold wallet. It is a hundred twenty nine dollars right now There's a discount of 169 And it's talks about easy to use air gaps and everything in between. So we take a look at this Let's talk about the positives well first positive is this is LAPAL from what I've researched on the internet has never been hacked. So that is a good positive in the pros category and They have an article about how difficult it will be is it possible to hack a cold storage device And they actually do say that it is possible and they they quote in a famous study done a few years ago on the famous hardware wallet ledger Nano s the hackers successfully accessed the account through a USB connection Proving that these connections can be a threat now. This was a video that I saw about a year and a half ago Maybe two years ago where it was an old Ledger Nano s and they had not updated the firmware and yes It was available to do that but remember for that to happen Those hackers had to actually have the physical device of the Nano ledger s or x In there in their possession. So if if that is something that concerns you then that could be it now I got to tell you. I don't know what kind of Home invaders are super hackers But hey anything's possible and it states even if air gap makes a cold wallet incredibly secure talented hackers can still This some of the wall and attack it directly what's great about Ali pal is that it has an anti-temper feature? So even if this does happen, which I don't know what universe this actually does happen Tremors will let the anti-temper feature Know that there is an attempt to hack the wallet and it will automatically self-destruct now It doesn't like blow up in the perpetrator's hands. It actually just kind of wipes out the information inside So that is a pro for Ali pal and then when I did this search I want to see if anybody had actually hacked in Ali pal and there was An article which talked about how somebody who had XRP on the Ali pal and it actually had gotten hacked And I took a look and I just had that I couldn't find anything else besides that couldn't find a follow-up But I did ask AI which this is Google's AI version called Bard kind of like chat GPT, but it can actually connect to the internet And it's actually free to use so if you want to check that out link in the description And it talks about how I just asked the question has Ali pal ever been hacked and it states in 2021 2021 there was a report of an LAPAL XRP wall being hacked However, this was not due to a security vulnerability in the LAPAL Titan instead the user's seed phrase was compromised Which allowed the hacker to access their funds again? I could not find this anywhere But this is what Bard gave me so take that with a grain of salt. So that's positive I believe and then also people are all also very concerned if the source code is out there Well, you can find this on github. I will link this in the description It's not from what I understand from the documents This isn't all of the code itself But it is a bulk of it in case people want to work with Ali pal and integrate it with Ali pal They can find this over here on github again links in the description. You can check it out yourself So those the pros and it looks pretty easy and it's a nice touch screen. It's very slick device and you know as a matter of fact The device itself Came with the Actually, they sent me three things. This is the original Titan They gave me the Titan mini which is very small and the seed phrase itself So thank you to Ali pal. But what comes with it is the actual device itself A cord which you can connect to The stand which is how you charge this and also there's going to be a micro Micro SD card, which is what you have to use To upgrade the firmware and that will be one of the cause or the cons and I will get into that into in a second But another thing that I kind of concerned me I might be concerned for some people not everybody But um, Ali pal limits it is headquartered in Hong Kong Uh, so Hong Kong is not part of mainland China as everybody knows It is two countries One system and they say that uh, that Hong Kong is separate However, it is amazing how things are kind of converged and that's just where it is also when I took a look at Who was behind Ali pal? I had to figure out. Well, how long has it been around if it was found in 2016 I don't think they rolled out a product in 2017 and when this is from a crunch base I'll link this in the description as well. And when I took a look at the founders Tong Chen number of organizations is one Haoning one David Tien one and I can't find any information about them Also, if you take a look at the about us page It doesn't list anything about the history Of who this is and where it came from but it does give a customer service address um phone number or excuse me Email and also the actual physical address, which is in huanxi hong kong So take that as you will and then also one of the other cons is like I talked about to update the firmware I'm gonna Play this this video. It's a minute long and uh, if after this you still want to check out Ali pal Well, I'm going to take This ali pal itself and I'm going to use my voyager account Which they just opened up transactions and we're going to take that bitcoin and put it on This ali pal. So just take a listen and this is how you actually have to update your firmware first You'll need to prepare a blank micro sd card if you purchase an ali pal titan cold wallet device It will come with a 16 gigabytes micro sd card Make sure the format of the sd card is f at 32 for the update to work Go to the ali pal official website and click on update at the top of the page Find download elastic firmware on the update page click on download And save the file on the sd card Do not change the name of the downloaded file or unzip it Make sure to keep the file in its original format Turn off the ali pal device take out the adapter from the box and insert the sd card into the adapter Connect the usb cable to the adapter with a power source Then connect the adapter to the ali pal device Wait until the charging sign appears on the screen then turn the device back on by holding the power button select settings Select update ali pal will automatically extract the file for the update But please do not disconnect the adapter after the extraction is finished Another menu will appear select start update and wait for the update to finish Yeah, so there you go And it seems like a lot of steps, but uh, it's just like everything else If you want to go through those steps and uh, figure it out It probably after a couple of times pretty simple stuff to do So now what I want to do is I want to jump into my phone and what we're going to do is we're going to take those Voyager cryptos and digital assets and they're going to Move them over into my ali pal wallet. So just as a reminder If you have any kind of crypto digital assets on on voyager, you are now able to transfer them out Unfortunately, it's only up to 35 percent because well incompetence So let's jump on my phone and I'll show you what I'm talking about Okay, so you're on my phone and I've blurred some of the things out obviously But what I'm going to do is I want to take uh bitcoin and we're going to transfer it over So when you click on that and you're actually into Um the app itself That's going to say hey before you continue to double check Make sure you're in the correct address for receiving wallet number two You've confirmed the receiving wallet is compatible Again, you don't want to send bitcoin to an ethereum wallet and vice versa and all those things in between You're aware and responsible for the applicable transaction fees again There's going to be fees because you know, they're not going to pay for that And then please know at all terms of the crypto transfer blah blah blah okay continue So here it's going to ask me how much do you want to want to send? I will always recommend that you do a test transaction first for everything that you do There is nothing worse than sending over a thousand dollars ten thousand ten million dollars worth of of a crypto And you're like whoops send it to the wrong address Or uh, there's just a a hiccup or a problem So always send a small test transaction first which we are going to do right now So I'm going to send let's take point zero zero one bitcoin, which is 30 dollars And see right here. It says tap to paste the bitcoin address So what I want to do is I want to go back to My ellipal wallet and I'm going to show you how this looks like. So let's jump in So first things first. I'm going to turn this on by holding this button right like so Let's say ellipal. I'll start to ramp up It's going to ask me for my favorite language. I'll pick English And now let's say download the ellipal app or you can go to this Uh url. I'll link that in the description as well But uh, just to think this is very simple. I'm just going to scan everything. So let me click on the scan ellipal 2300 ratings pretty good 4.8. We're going to click on get and then just download the app itself And here we are on the app. Okay multi-account and multi currency management Save transactions real-time tokens great Click on start of course. There's always Something to read over and of course do do diligence and read over it like I'm not doing and click confirm So it says here for your asset safety We're going to use ellipal cold wall manager asset connect to an ellipal cold wallet And now it's going to say please press the button to scan the ellipal app connection qr code And click on connect to cold wallet itself access the camera sure and then here we are Open this up Click on next I'm going to say create account And this will be the basics account name password. I'll do that right now So there we are.  I got my password. Don't forget that and we're going to click on create account And voila created successfully. Please back up mnemonics and we click on this backup mnemonic words This is where it's going to give me the mnemonic phrase Which you can put in there's a card that they attached To the product itself or you can put it on a stone book. That's where I put everything else So i'm going to write those down right now if I click on this button great So if you did everything right then it says backup successful and you're ready to go click on okay And here's where we get to pick all the different crypto projects digital asset product that we want to add to it There's bitcoin eath bnb bnb Smart chain xrp everything you can possibly think of is essentially right there So for this one, I'm just going to come up here. We just want to use bitcoin connect to app And here again app connection qr code. So what I want to do is go back to the app itself click on ellipal connection succeeded Not now and voila must have already scanned already. So we have bitcoin right there And here is our bitcoin address, which you can see at the very top 3h 72 blah blah blah blah blah so on and so forth. So what we want to do is copy This address and we're going to put this into voyager. So here we are again. We're going to tap to paste the bitcoin address Voyage like to paste from ellipel allow paste And 3h 7 blah blah blah blah and there it is We're going to click slide to send bitcoin Total amount we're going to confirm And of course you should always have some kind of two-factor authentication And I highly recommend you don't have text messages. They use something like google authenticator So i'm going to i'm going to copy that code in And i click submit transfer And i'll set your request to send blah blah blah check your email Which I will do right now and that should be it which in case you want to know what it looks just like this confirm with draw So voila, that is essentially how you use ellipal. It seems pretty straightforward But again for every different product that's out there there is a pro and there is a con to it I personally don't think that this is the way we're going to be using crypto in the next 10 years or so But for right now if you're looking for an alternative to ledger there are options. So that's it So look you like today's video give it a thumbs up consider subscribing I'm going to talk about it's time sensitive, but that is all Thanks to you for showing up and thanks to ellipal for sending me these devices That is it and i'll see you guys on the next one


Well, welcome. We're here at the Department of Public Works in Burlington, Chapin Spencer, and Lee Perry. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having us. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks. So we're going to talk a little trash. It's on the minds of some people, but I think in the next couple of months it'll be on the minds of a lot more Burlingtonians, right? Absolutely. How we pick up and collect our trash, recycling, and organics is something that is a fractured system currently, and I think there's a lot of interest in having a more seamless system for our residents. So, Lee, the city of Burlington does collect recycling, but not trash. Why does the city right now, why are they in charge of recycling? We took on recycling back in the early 90s. Initially, it was a bid process where we would bid against private contractors, and eventually we took the whole service over and have just continued doing it since. And then the question of having multiple commercial trash haulers has also been discussed at Public Works and the City Council for how long now, Chapin? There's been a number of studies about our current system, which is inefficient. We have four or so trash haulers, major trash haulers that are all circulating through the city. So a certain many residential street will have three or four different trash haulers on three or four different days. And what we want to do is look at how can we make it more efficient and have it so that customers in a particular neighborhood just know Mondays or the days that trash organics and recycling all get picked up and make it easy for the end user. So there's recently been a study conducted by the Department of Public Works or by a contractor. Tell us a little bit about that, how that started. Sure. And to more fully answer your last question is that there have been a number of studies about consolidated collection over the decades. In 2000, the City Council passed a resolution to have the city and the Department of Public Works look at consolidated collection. The study was done, but no action was taken by the city at that time. Then the Chittin Solid Waste District back in the late 2000s, around 2007 or 2008, restarted a region-wide conversation on consolidated collection. That ended in around 2015 and didn't go anywhere. We, thanks to a council resolution in 2018, have restarted this evaluation. We did it with South Burlington and the Chittin and Solid Waste District. And we are excited about the recommendations that came out of that study and are here to talk more about it. And were those recommendations just for Burlington or included Burlington and South Burlington and the region? It included Burlington and South Burlington, but the dynamics of each town had certain aspects of recommendations that would be specific to that town. But in general, it was a consolidated collection study for both towns. And you looked at a few options. The study includes just kind of recap the options and then we'll talk about what you thought was the best one. Leah, do you wanna do that? Sure. So the first option that we had done with our consultant was a franchised option where on a franchise system, the municipality would contract with multiple haulers to pick up all three waste streams. Then we did a study directed by our Transportation Energy and Utilities Committee to explore a municipal option where the city would collect all waste streams. There was another option, a third option, where the city would bid against private contractors similar to the way we used to do recycling. And then we came up with our hybrid option where the city would continue to do recycling and then contract trash and food scraps out to a private hauler. So that third recommendation is the one that this study basically puts forward? We are recommending the hybrid option, which is the one where we would continue to operate the recycling program and that we would franchise with haulers to do the trash in organics. And why didn't you recommend to go municipal? Create a municipal infrastructure and take all of that work up in house, so to speak. Right, I think if we step back and look at the good news is that there seems to be a fair bit of consensus around the benefits of consolidated collection generally. That regardless of which model, having four or five different trash trucks in compost collection trucks going up and down streets on multiple days creates more wear and tear on the streets, more traffic and more emissions. And so the good news is I think the community largely understands the benefits of consolidated collection. It certainly is the more common approach for how trash is collected around the country than our subscription based model in Burlington. So that's good. The question of how best to implement consolidated collection is what the community is grappling with now. The benefits of a hybrid system as we are proposing, we get the same benefits environmentally of the lower truck traffic and the convenience to the consumer same day pickup with a number of advantages. One, less capital costs for the city up front. We would not need to buy new trash trucks, a new building and set up the same large kind of company that would need to be built. It's going to be over $6 million. We've got a new high school and a number of other financial burdens that the city is trying to achieve. It's also going to be easier to set up. It's going to take less time to do a hybrid option, building off our existing recycling program, then to have to build a new business instead of what we project would be three to five years under a municipal setup. We can be launched, we believe in two to three years. So it's cheaper, it is quicker, and it also takes less of our innovation capacity, it has less risk to the city. If we go with a full municipal option, we have to go to the voters for a number of things. Voters may approve or disapprove, but that takes time and adds risk. If we want to set up an enterprise fund to manage this new business in the city, that will need not only go to voters, but to the Vermont state legislature, adding additional risk and time. We think the hybrid option is a great start. If the community over time wants to move to municipal, we can certainly do that. So the nice thing about the hybrid is it can work as a hybrid option, or it could be a stepping stone to municipal in the future. So I'm not sure, Lee, if you're the best person to answer this. But what are the haulers saying? What are you hearing from them? So we've had a fair amount of public outreach with haulers, and there is concern amongst the haulers as far as if we implement a franchise system, how do we limit a monopolization of the system? And we explain that can be broken down into districts and have only one hauler per district or maybe subcontract with other haulers to address that issue. And obviously the small haulers, there's a few of those in the area, especially the local compost haulers that we're going to be affecting their business by implementing the system. But I think it's fair to say that the haulers generally see more of a threat from the municipal operation because there would be no role for them at that point. The hybrid option that we're proposing continues our role as collector of recycling, but still has a role for the trash companies and the compost collectors in a more organized fashion. So why are members of the City Council Commission, there was a group of three and two of them recommended going municipal. What are the advantages of a municipal system? Why do you think that's being put forward? Sure. Going back to the initial piece of the good news is there's general consensus around consolidated collection. The DPW Commission did vote five to one in advancing the hybrid option. The City Council's Transportation Energy and Utilities Committee did vote two to one for the municipal option. Benefits that they saw was more city jobs that would be union positions and greater control that the City would have more ability to quickly change service levels or operations because we would be in direct control of that service. So I think the two major benefits that I'm hearing from the municipal proponents are that more union jobs and greater control. And less likely for the hauling franchise to be monopolized by one hauler also? Yes, I think that is something that they have articulated. You could also turn that around though and say that when you go municipal, you have monopolized the system through a public option. Yes, the public does run it, but once we set up a municipal system, it is going to be exceedingly hard to change that substantively because there's vested interest in keeping the union jobs, keeping the system going. So if the market were to change or the model to need to evolve, it can be more difficult once the city's institutions are in place to substantively change that. So what's the time frame for the City Council to make decision on this? So we are going back to the Council on the 9th of August for a recommendation. We have some questions that we have answers to to give them prior to that meeting, so maybe it'll help their decision. And we'll find out then on what decision and then go through our six months of community outreach to discuss service levels and really nail down what the public really wants out of an operation like this. So the City Council is going to decide on whether to go municipal or hybrid on the 9th? There is some discussion among the Council about delaying that. So I just heard yesterday from members of the Council, there may be some discussion of delaying the decision. Our hope is to bring the information and the answers to their questions on the 9th, but they may request more time and that is their prerogative. I mean it seems like, I mean you've been in the thick of it obviously every day and the study has been going on, but it's just really coming to the public attention now with the publishing of your study, right? Right, there have been public meetings and the study from our consultant GBB has been out for about a year and a half now. So there has been significant public engagement, but this when the rubber hits the road, when the decisions need to get made is certainly when people's attention gets heightened and we're at that point now. No, I imagine that might be a little challenging as a public worker trying to put forward initiatives because again, you're involved in it and the study is a year old, but now it's like, oh, hello, something's going to happen, something's going to change. Yeah, so to wrap up, the City of Burlington is considering new options for the collection of recycling trash and compost. And the City Council is going to take a look at the study and the work that DPW and the Transportation City Council Committee has been doing on the 9th of August and decisions are going to be made fairly soon. And if people want to weigh in at this point, what should they do? They can contact myself at my email address L Perry at BurlingtonVT.gov. They can go to the website where we have multiple items posted, the studies posted there, all the previous minutes of the meetings and all that information. And they need to attend, they need to voice their opinion and show up. You know, I thought the best part of the study were all the public comments at the end. I mean, it's fantastic to read because people do, they cover the waterfront of all the views. Absolutely. We have compiled all the public comments that received a date and put them in the public packets for the counselors in the wider public to review. Ultimately, this is a decision for the community. How best do we want to collect our trash, try to reduce the amount of trash and increase the diversion of recycling and organics? We want to be a sustainable community that's been a long held priority of this city. How we collect trash, recycling organics now is a fractured, inefficient system. Our hope is that through this process, we can do better. That's a beautiful ending, but I have one more question, which is the opt-in, I think one of the things about the public comments where people were concerned that they would be obliged, you know, for example, we pay 60 cents a week, we take our trash to the place. Are we going to have to pay $400 a year, whatever the equivalent cost is, to participate in this? And there's a recommendation in that study about that, right? The study says that we should evaluate the opt-out component of whatever model is selected. And one of the things we've been doing is reading the public input and hearing it. And we're hearing strong support from members of the public for an opt-out provision. A number of people such as yourself seem to have self-haul, and which is a cheaper way to do it if you have the time and ability. So it is very likely, unless we hear something dramatically different from the public, that we would be implementing an opt-out scenario. The downside of an opt-out scenario is the fewer people in the system, the more expensive the system becomes for the remaining folks. So there's a trade-off, but we're working through that with the members of the public and the council. Well, I want to thank you both for your work, for keeping Burlington beautiful. I think public works, it's almost invisible until things don't work. But actually, things are working pretty much most of the time in terms of water quality, street quality, trash hauling, I mean, all of it. So I just want to commend you because I know you've been working really hard to make that happen. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. All right. Well, it's been a pleasure, Lauren Glenn. Do want to encourage public, anybody who's interested in the issue of Consolidated Collection to look at our website, reach out, send us an email, come to the upcoming meetings. We want to hear from you. Thanks so much.


Hello, people of the internet! My name is Johnny and welcome back to Five Nights at Freddy's Security Breach. We just got done the daycare section of the game and now we have to try and escape inside of Freddy from the daycare attendant. Thanks. The animations are so good, I love it. Freddy! Let's go! I-I know they found me. Okay. So, we need to find a charging station. Hold up. Yup, there he is. So, I have no clue- Oh. Whoa, whoa, whoa! Wait, I want the gift bag. Oh, I didn't mean to. I just wanted this so bad, Freddy. I'm so sorry, dude. It's lower, I think. I don't know, but apparently they can't get to us in here, which is good. This looks like some party- ooh, gift. Hold up, Freddy. Hold up. I know we have like four minutes, but collectibles, man. I need them. Oh, that's sick. All right, Freddy, let's go. Me, bananas? Ah! I don't know where I'm supposed to be going. Sorry, Freddy. There's just a lot of collectibles. I want them all. Oh, no! Not you. Why are you in this game? Freakin' plush baby? All right. We need to find the recharge station, and I have no clue where that is. Whoa! Chill, chill, chill. Go away. All right, I feel like that's not supposed to happen. So, Steel Wall, I think you gotta fix that. Whenever I get jump-scared, I get kicked out of Freddy. I don't know if I'm supposed to be jump-scared inside of Freddy. I don't know if it's supposed to pull me out, and if it does, I get jump-scared then, but that obviously is a bug. Wait, I want to go to the GIFs. What if there's collectibles, Freddy? Freddy, the collectibles! Oh, wait, I might actually- What did I tell you, Freddy? What did I tell you? The Fredbear poster! It's called Old Poster. Huh. Super interesting, Freddy. All right, now, now let's get out of here. All right, I think I got all the collectibles. I'm just gonna go if I missed one. I don't care. I mean, I do care. I care a lot, because I really want to get all of them. But at this point, I think I just cutscene. I think I just gotta go. Oh. Uh, game? You good? Jesus. Benny! What? Hello!  Not anymore! Not anymore. What? What do you mean, not anymore? This is weird. Uh-uh. Freddy's different for a reason. Definitely. Definitely for a reason. Good news, the front doors will open in five hours. What did you do? Five hours. Do not panic. True. If we get separated again, you can always call me on your fuzz watch. True, isn't- As long as I have power, and I am able to reach you. Yay! The sun plushie! Dude, wait, Freddy, why do you look? Oh, press Q to call Freddy for help. Wait, really? So, let's try it. Let's try it down here. And see what happens. Freddy.  Okay. So, I'm just gonna go then, buddy. Where actually am I going? I assume it'll tell me- Oh wait, recycled pizza. Uh, customer complaint. The pizza we ordered was weird. Some pieces were different sizes or didn't fit together. Hmm, no, wait, have I heard this before? One slice even had a different toppings to do recycle. The old pizza from the trash. I'm never coming back here unless I'm given some sort of major discount angry mom. Obviously, that's a callback to, um, uh, what should we call it? Chuck E. Cheese. The whole Shane Dawson thingy. Oh!  Oh! There is also a fire escape in the third floor price counter. Uh! Take your fast watch. I will mark both locations on your fast map. Thanks, bro. The piece that you have no fast map. Yeah, I don't. You should be able to obtain one from the greeter on the center balcony. Huh, interesting. Monty's Gator Golf, Kid's Cove, Mazer Size, and Fazer Blast. What is going on? I'm assuming it's loading a new floor. Oh! Oh, yes, it is loading a new floor. Oh, this is the main atrium. Alright. Oh! I, please take this map. Take a map. Thank you. Uh, map bought? Thank you for the map. Thank you. Please enjoy. I will. Thank you. Free map. Free, free map. Hey. Uh, hey Freddy. I, I want you. I'm kind of scared. Hello. Oh! What did you take? The stairs? Where are you going? Freddy, I'm, Freddy, I'm right here. Freddy, I'm, Freddy, where are you going? Freddy, where, where are you going? No. No.  What a sight to behold. This is FNAF. This is a Five Nights game. What the actual heck? This is crazy. Good news. It looks like the door to El Chips is open. El Chip! Wait, what's El Chip? Oh, it's down here. Wait, is Roxy out here? Mangle's Quest. Wait. Wait. Why is Lefty here? Mangle's Quest is the name of one of the minigames in, uh, Five Nights 3 actually. So that's super interesting. Why is Fetch here? That's a Fazbear's Fright Book. Oh, no. Don't tell, oh, don't tell me. Scott. Scott, don't tell me they're canon. Alright, let's go to El Chip's Restaurant. Ooh, what's this? Foxy! Wait, this is Kid's Cove. Oh my gosh, Foxy. He's actually in the game, kind of. Oh, interesting. There's so many floors, dude. This is crazy. Wait, I have so many different things to do. Freddy talked about El Chip, and I kind of want to go there, so I'm going to go to El Chip. But I do have a safe safe. Okay, Freddy, thank you. What the... Oh my god, that's so weird. Oh. Wait, is Roxy in here? Oh, no. Wait. I'm going to be careful, because I'm assuming Roxy's probably in here. Alright, hello. Fizzy Faz Monti. Okay, so like an energy drink, I think. Ooh, distraction. Let's not do that right now. Mainly because I don't know if there's even anyone in here. Yo. That's not even in your hand, by the way. Just saying, dude. Let's head out this way. Okay. I'm hiding, Freddy. Okay. Whoa, look at this. This is crazy. A lot of staff bots. Oh wait, motion detected right here. Was that Roxanne? Because I'm assuming she's in here. Oh, yes she is. Yes she is. Alright, I honestly am just going to wing it. There's too many staff bots. So I'm right here. Roxie's right there. And a staff bot. Oh my god. This is crazy, dude. There's so many things. Hey kid, come on out. Oh god, oh god. Okay, there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of stuff. That's a bit mean. No, no, no, no, no, no. Alright, let me hide.  Oh, I'm so dead. I'm not. I'm perfectly fine. Don't know where I'm getting to though. Oh that? Oh that. So I just need to go down this hallway then. No, I need to... I'm so confused. Oh, it's all the way down there. Okay, shoot. I think this is it. Freddy, it's not... Freddy, you... Oh my god.  Oh, I'm so dead. Oh my god. Oh my god. I really have no clue where I'm going. But look at all these orcades that probably have some easter eggs that I'm missing. I can hide in here, but it doesn't look like there's any staff dudes. Whoa, whoa, whoa, look at these. Freddy in space. No way. Hey, that's Scott. Hey, the FNAF AORS skins. That's concerning. Aw, cool easter eggs though. Hell yeah. Alright, I think I need to get down here. Ooh, security puppet. I think I need to get down there. So past like one bot. That shouldn't be too bad. Really wish I could though. Alright, maybe a bit too real. Let's go. Oh, Freddy, are you kidding? What is that? What do you mean? Find another way in. Yeah. Oh, I see a vent actually. I see a vent. Where is that though? Oh, right here. Let's go. Oh no. Cut scene. Music man. What? Wait, wait, what? Oh my God. What the f- Music man? Why are you here? Also my save dude. Yo. Jeez. I see you. I see you, Roxanne. Is she sniffing?  Did she just look in there? Dude, that's so weird. Oh, you can see Gregory. Look at him. I am. Alright, so she's actually leaving. That's so weird. There's Bonnie. Zombonny. Like zombie. Okay, I'm tempted to go back and save but it's like it's so far away dude. Oh, there's a bag. I want it. Alright, new bag. Night shift.  Of course I got stuck in the arcade. Every time I exit the security office I get locked out.  I'm on the security team. Shouldn't I have access to everything? I swear those things are messing with me. This place is not safe. Give me my 100 and I'll go. Alright, it took a long time but I'm gonna save before I go see Music Man in the vent. BV's air adventure. Hey, that's also a FNAF 3 reference. So interesting. Alright, Music Man. I still don't know why you're here but I'm just gonna run. I'm not even looking back.  And I'm out of sprint. Oh my god.   Thank you, gosh. Alright. So here we... Hello? Here we go. New security badge. Knife safety. That's not a knife. What is that? Oh no. Oh god.  Oh, this is from the trailer. Wow. Oh wait, I have to close the doors. Oh god. Dude, what everybody does in FNAF 1. I'm shutting down everything. I don't care. Oh god. Okay, Roxanne's out there. Alright, they're both out there. So I'm definitely keeping that closed. Oh no, don't bang on the door. Dude. They're both out there. Wait. Oh, it affects both doors. Alright, so now they're going around. So now let's close that. And open this. Yes. Open this. Oh my god. And let's keep an eye on the camps. Look at Gregory. I see Roxanne. She's kind of just in the middle. Oh, Monty's out there too. So let's actually open this now. Right? I think Roxanne... No. No, no, no, no, no, no. I don't like that. How much longer? A minute? Dude. I can't last a minute. Alright, she's out there now. Monty's kind of just chilling. What? No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Bro, what? That's not fair. No, you can't do that. Dude. Awesome. They're both here. 30 seconds. I'm so close, dude. Oh, dude, I'm screwed. Nope. This is it. Oh, shoot. 20 seconds. I can't like hide anywhere. She was out in the hallway, but alright. I'm getting this actually.  So an arcade machine isn't turning off. This is basically what it's like. Oh, there she is. And there's Monty. Okay. So they're both going out this side. Okay, close that. Because they're out there. They don't see me, but I don't think they necessarily have to. Yeah, so she's coming over. And there she goes. Banging on the door. And they're both out there now. There goes Monty. So Roxy's left. I'm gonna open this, I think. Yes. Watch this side. Okay. Watch this side. Oh, oh. There's Monty, okay. Oh, oh, sweet. Uh, no. Actually, not really. Okay, so she's in the middle. Okay, Monty's out that way. Okay, we're doing good. They're both just kind of sitting around. Oh, wait, where's she going? Alright, down this way. We're actually doing very good on power. Okay, she's down there. Monty is as well. How much longer? A minute. Dude, we're doing so good. Alright, she's coming over. That's fine. Door's shut. She can't get in. And now Monty's coming. That's fine though. She's leaving. Okay, and Monty's gone. Just like that, he's gone. So now, let's open this. Let's keep an eye out. Over here. No. No. Alright, there's Roxanne. How much longer? Oh, let's go! We've done it! We've done it! Let's go! Pretty, let me save. Because they are still out there, I think. Right? Yes, they are. So now, survive until Freddy shuts down the alarm. I think this is where I'm gonna call it for now. And in next episode we'll go to Freddy and the prize area. Hey, six feet distance. So a very eventful episode. We saw El Chip's area. We survived Roxie. Survived Music Man, who's here for some reason. Not DJ Music Man, but Music Man from Pizza Sim, which is so weird. We saw a bunch of callbacks to the games, the books as well. Which is super interesting. And in next episode, who knows what we're gonna find. But thanks for watching, and I think I should be all good to do an outro. Yes, yes. Alright, thanks for watching, and I'll see you all on the flip side. Goodbye.


We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These words from the Declaration of Independence are familiar to many of us, and yet it took 143 years for women to get the right to vote and 189 years for black people to get the right to vote. And still today, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are still only words for many people. Here in Boston, life expectancy varies by 30 years, depending on where you live. In Roxbury, with many poor and black people, life expectancy is 59 years. In the back bay, wealthy and mostly white, life expectancy is 91 years. It's tough to have liberty when you are in prison. The United States incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 people. Our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most countries in the world. Millions of people in our country don't have health care, a decent job, good education, a home they can afford, and that makes it pretty hard to pursue happiness.  People today who are making the words of the Declaration of Independence come true. Hi. Well, we're really lucky to have with us today Cliff Cohen. Cliff is the Chief of Staff of the Service Employees Union. And Cliff, welcome. He's been doing union work for many years. He's one of those people making life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness possible, not just words for a lot of people. So welcome, Cliff. So we'd like to start. Tell us something about where you came from, where you grew up, and where your values came from. We always try to start there because I'm sure a lot of people would like to know this, both members of the union and just people in the public, like who are you and that kind of thing. It's good to be here. I was born in New Hampshire and lived there for a while and moved to Massachusetts. I grew up in a Jewish middle-class family. We didn't have much exposure to unions. I think my political activism was my parents would vote on election day and talk about Democrats and say bad things about Republicans, and that was sort of it. And then when I went to college, was when Ronald Reagan started the giraffe registration, and I got a little agitated and started organizing around that. When I went to some anti-intervention rallies, and when I was in graduate school, I got involved in anti-apartheid work and the divestment movement, and that sort of my political awakening and organizing happened gradually. It wasn't something that I was born into or was a big part of my childhood or adolescence, but it came later. But what led you to do that, say when you were in college, you got involved, you said, in the anti-apartheid movement. I mean, a lot of people, probably of your generation in college, that's kind of far away, South Africa. Like, why you? Yeah, I mean, just the stories that we read and saw on TV about what was going on in South Africa and how the horrendous living conditions people were under and how their political rights were, everything that we took for granted were being denied. People, because of their race, was just outrageous. There were organizers on campus that were helping people get involved. The key was that a lot of corporations were involved in profiting off of what was going on in South Africa. You went to a gas station and Shell Gas was the profits that you were giving them. Some of it was being used in South Africa. That's a connection that I made. But I was wondering, why did you give a hoot? A lot of people went to the same gas station and said, fill her up, buddy. That's cool. And to make a connection between filling your car up in Danvers and South Africa, where did that come from? I don't know if I have the answer. I was outraged by the injustice of it all and realized that we could make a difference by organizing. And that's how I got involved. You have some idea. I know you said your parents said nice things about Democrats and not so nice things about Republicans and went to vote. But I was wondering if you have some sense of where those values came from. Yeah. My family wasn't terribly religious. We went to the temple a couple of times a year. Maybe it's from the religious training I had that social justice was something that we cared about. But there was no activism in my family until I went off to college. But there was something in the religious training you had around justice? I don't know. I can't really pinpoint how it happened. Interesting. But it happened in some way. And you said there were organizers on campus. This was at Clark where you were? Yeah, at Clark University. It was mostly faculty who were organizing around the draft registration campaign. And then there were various, there were some left groups that were there doing anti-intervention work in Central America. So I remember going to getting on buses and going to D.C. in the early 80s around various, to stop various interventions that were happening in Central and South America. That's a long trip, taking a bus ride from Worcester to D.C. Long trips. And who interested you in that? Do you remember how you got interested? You said faculty, I know. I know there was a professor Ross who was involved. He was very involved with the old fashioned teach-ins that were happening around. Those issues were common on campus. So I think that's how I got involved. That's great. And then you've worked in the labor movement for a long time. Can you tell us a little bit how that happened? How you got into union organizing? Yeah. So I went to graduate school after undergrad and realized I probably should have taken some time off. So I got a job at a small psychiatric hospital in Somerville called Central Hospital where I was a mental health worker. A bunch of us got together because the conditions there were pretty bad. We made up $5 an hour. There was understaffing. It was unsafe for the clients and the staff. We sort of realized there were things called unions out there, which I didn't really know much about. But we actually went through the Yellow Pages and found a union. There is such a thing called the Yellow Pages or was 30 years ago. And found one that seemed like it was related to the work we did and we called them. And organized it came and we shot it out the hospital and figured out where everyone worked and developed a little organizing committee. And that really was the turning point where I realized that if working people got together and coordinated their efforts they could change things at work. Our organizing campaign got crushed. The company scared a lot of people, told them they'd be fired if the union came in. The hospital would close. They said they were going bankrupt and the union would push them over the end. So nothing, the campaign didn't succeed. But I sort of caught the organizing bug at that point and wanted to work organizing workers after that. And that's sort of set me off in that direction. And aside from the low pay you also said it was dangerous. I think you said you once got hit or something. Yeah, yeah. In a psychiatric unit when people are having a flare up of their mental illness, sometimes things can be unsafe. And there was not enough staff to keep them the client safe or the staff. So yeah, in those days restraints of people with mental illness happened more frequently. And so I remember getting assaulted and the clients assaulted each other. It was mostly related to not having enough staff on. And that was related to the way the company deployed its resources. So it was bad for the workers and it was also bad for the people with mental illness that they were themselves being hurt. Exactly. Right. And so why do you think the company was so reluctant or more than reluctant to allow the union in? I think it's the typical story that in companies whether it's a hospital or a factory, the owners, the directors have almost complete control over everything. And so when the work is organized and form a union, the company has to share some decision-making powers and that's a loss for them. I'm not going to shed a tear for them, but it's a loss for when you lose some power. And for for-profit companies, which this hospital was, it was a for-profit. Yeah, it means there'll be less money going to the, in this case it was a family that owned a couple psychiatric hospitals, they would have less money for themselves and so that's why they resist. Yeah, yeah. And so now tell us a little bit more. A lot of people don't know a lot about unions. What are some of the benefits aside from you mentioned about pay and safety that comes from joining a union or what can come if you're successful anyway? I mean a union is basically at its core is about solidarity of people at a work site or a company standing up for each other and protecting each other. So you do that through the bargaining process where you negotiate a contract so then everyone has clear rules about how you're going to be treated and it eliminates favoritism. If the boss wants to or supervisor is on theater a group of workers, the union contract is a way to, in people coming together through the grievance process is a way to resolve those problems. So it's financial advantages that a worker at a unionized company makes significant more than the same worker at a non-unionized company. That helps for life, liberty and pursuit of happiness when you're working three jobs to pay your rent. Exactly and then you have the opportunity to be treated with fairness on the job and so those the fairness and the economic advantages is why polls show that well over 60% of the workers in this country want to be in the union because of all those advantages. The problem is it's the legal mechanisms for getting a union are very complicated and way outdated. Right you mentioned grievances can you explain like what that means? You know you and I may know but a lot of people may not know give me like an example. So like example would be say there's overtime opportunities at a company or a work site the contract might say that overtime has to be given to the most senior person first or put out for volunteers first and just clear rules. That's part of the contract so it's not like hey I like Cliff so I'm gonna give him or I don't like Cliff and I'm gonna give it to him or whatever. Right. So if a company were to not follow that contract language then you can file a grievance saying that the company violated the contract and then most grievance procedures result in the end result is a neutral arbitrator will then issue a decision whether the company was violated the contract and then the company is bound to follow that arbitrary decision. Most cases don't go to arbitration but the fact is expensive and if the company knows that they're gonna lose they will they will then settle. Right so at least gives an opportunity rather than just going home and kicking the dog or your partner or something. In non-union places that if you raise issues the company's boss often says well if you don't like it you can go work somewhere else. Right exactly good luck with that right or yeah or lump it or yeah good luck. Yeah and I know your union SEIU the service employees international union have a lot of workers organized by the state of Massachusetts is that right? Correct yeah what's it been like organizing workers who are state employees? So yeah so we represent about 8500 social workers who work for the state in a variety of state agencies and you know that workers who work for the state are no different than workers who work for a private company they you know they want a decent wage they want to be treated with fairness I think with the social workers a lot of people go into the work for the state because they want to care for the abused neglected kids or people with mental illness and then they realize that that's their first avenue to coming to the state but then they realize that if you know if the caseloads are too high or there aren't enough workers in the office then they can't deliver the service that they want so some people get involved with the union because they want to improve the quality of service for the clients and but I think state workers are no different than any other any other group of workers. And how's the state responded I mean you mentioned the private company at the Somerville mental hospital which you know said we're going to close down and you're going to lose your job what's been the state's reaction or you know over the years you've been doing this. State workers got in this country states have to pass laws state by state to get collective bargaining rights and state workers in Massachusetts have had those rights in some time in the 70s before I was when I was still in high school and I think this you know a lot of managers you know would you know would rather not there be a union but they but it's a political reality and they learn to deal with it and but I think we've dealt with you know unlike private companies and state government you know the political parties sort of you know there's an election and a new person comes in to run becomes the new new head boss and but I think whether you're they're democrats or republicans they'll realize the union in the organized workers are here to stay so there's there's not a lot of you know there's not a lot of you know mercy like there is in other states yeah I know you also said a lot of people that you organize are social workers mental health workers who get into the workers they want to be helpful to people yeah and I noticed you've told me the union itself has done a lot of bargaining not so much just for the improvements for the workers themselves increase pay better vacation stuff that the individual workers like but what you call a common good I think yes you know so if maybe you can talk about that because I think that's something a lot of people don't know about you mentioned I think earlier you've worked with foster care workers and try to get the state to improve not so much life of the workers but for the the people in general can you describe that because that's I think really interesting yeah so I think it's a continuation of like the whole history of organizing is that people like people who have some strength and power if they don't sort of share that and bring more and help other people organize and get power then then you're isolated and you know just to go backwards a little bit you know in the 50s and 60s auto workers and steel workers use their clout to give to get state workers collective bargaining and in other in other states really and then and so continuing that thread you know we realize that you know state workers could do a better job serving their clients if we use some of our strength and power to improve services for people we we work with so in bargaining we've we've often pushed for for for example for DCF social workers DCF is the Department of Children and Families they help abused and neglected kids in Massachusetts and help help their families must be a tough job it is it's a it's very tough and so we've we've gone to bargaining and to try to raise the rates for foster families because there's a big problem in the child welfare world where foster families get very little resources to even though they're taking on kids to help resources like money to pay for kids you and I have both parents yeah children end up costing a few pennies I mean there are many lasting values but they need clothes you know right so whatever right cell phones yeah so we've tried to use the political strength of the union to try to raise rates for foster families because we know that would benefit the the families that we work with right makes the kids happy or pursue happiness it's hard when you don't have money to you know buy decent food for the kids you know exactly take them out for pizza once a while you know exactly and we've um yeah we're we're in bargaining as we speak with this state the Commonwealth of Mass we have similar proposals that deal with climate justice climate justice and racial justice that even though they're not technically you know traditional bargaining issues we're trying to use the the strength that we have to improve things in the community particularly around you know lots of different issues but the climate justice racial justice are two of the ones we're focusing on now and have you had success doing that like raising the wages or pay for foster parents I think we're making progress there there's more and more talk on Beacon Hill and in the advocacy community about the rates needing to come up we're also organizing foster parents and you know in a bigger way to try to you are yourself you know using your staff to yeah yeah talk to foster parents who aren't members of the union correct correct just to help them yeah yeah that's great help them get more strength and um yeah so I think we're make you know we're so we're using using our um you know the the leverage that we have to try to improve things in the community not just um not just for us at the bargaining table because yeah and um this year our union voted to um we put the question out to the members should we focus just on work site issues at the work site or should we get involved in in broader community campaigns to improve to uplift the community really and the result was overwhelmingly we should we should do both really fight at work and improve things in the community as a whole so we are we had an annual meeting this fall where it was unanimous to support a number of campaigns that not that don't affect just the members but affect their communities as well so this means our union members pay dues and can hire staff like you and other people so that means some of that money that they're paying goes not just to help themselves but could you describe a little more about that I mean that's pretty interesting what are the other areas they're trying to improve in the community so one is around racial justice another one is around climate justice so like we're like for climate justice a concrete example is where I'm involved in coal coalitions to divest state pension funds from fossil fuel companies oh really where we're working on you know it's more of a work site issue but encouraging the commonwealth to allow workers to work from home because the governor has said and most politicians have encouraged private companies to allow their employees to work from home occasionally or get off the road keep your car at home and so we're yeah so it'll help with you know the environment it will help with traffic jams yeah it'll help it'll help everyone right so so we're in bargaining now trying to convince the administration to allow state work you know they have like real clear numerical goals of how many state workers can work from home really each each year well that's great are there other areas you're doing that besides foster care and work from home there's health care reform you know we're all you know we've always been pushing for universal health care and making sure that everyone has access to affordable care there's education both you know the fact that your zip code shouldn't determine the quality of your education right we're doing a lot in student debt relief oh really you would tell me about that what's going on with that you said you got some money for yeah so we we recently settled a settle made an agreement with a commonwealth to create a training fund to train state workers in a variety of areas but but a a part of that money is going to be used for a million dollars to reduce student debt burdens first for our members so that that was just announced a couple weeks ago and we're in the process of rolling that out and then we have also secured two million dollars for scholarships for our members in their in their children and so that that that falls into you know the category of education justice and why do you think your members voted to do things because it was a vote I assume it's democratic if they decide where their dues money goes what do you think they decided to work beyond just the traditional you know I want more pay and better vacations and whatever else you know I think people understand that you know there are there are big complex societal problems that affect affect them every day and that the union by just focusing its attention on an employer can't you know can't solve all the other can't address all the other issues that are affecting a family a family's life so I think it was I can't say it was just common sense but it people I think people understood that there are bigger issues out there besides you know whether you know how you were treated at work and they wanted the union to be part of those campaigns and do you as a leader play a role in that and other staff people you know I mean obviously people are going to listen to you or the other elected officials how does that work well we have a union is we haven't talked about this too much but a union is a democratic organization where you know the members get to vote on who their representatives are and and who their stewards are and who the leadership of the union is and so we we have a conversation with with the various rank and file leaders in the union about these strategies and ideas and and you know it takes a number of years to sort of you know develop a campaign but over the last few years we started having these conversations and it was clear that you know a broad group of members in the union wanted to go in this direction so it's it's a lot of meetings a lot of discussion a lot of getting feedback a lot of surveying and some polling and you know a lot of a lot of hard work of people getting together and drafting resolutions and and talking about we have you know how far to support it you know democracy is what do they say the worst system except for all the others you know so before democracy there was a plague of taxes now there's a plague of meetings you know there's lots of meetings but that's and you have how many members eight thousand or more well totally we have almost twenty thousand twenty thousand because it's not just the state work as we represent um almost seven thousand human service workers who work at private agencies who contract with the state group homes group homes social workers we represent family child care providers who deliver really in their own homes wow and um that's a tough job yeah yeah yeah and uh a few thousand faculty at the universities in boston who are adjuncts or oh really they get paid really poorly yeah i mean i did that once i couldn't believe how little they were paying i mean it was crazy right so we only have a few minutes to end up but i i think what are the uh what do you think the most important lessons you've learned you've been doing this now for decades uh that you've learned both about yourself and about workers and organizing what would you say are those lessons i think i think the most i mean one big lesson is about i think about listening and and that um when you're talking to workers whether you're organizing a new you know a group of workers to form a union or or you're working on some other campaign it's it's very important to listen to people's stories what what they're concerned about and and um you're trying to connect those stories to the to the campaign that that were that you're involved in um uh you you uh you know for for people to take action to change the a lot you know the working lives that have changed their community um you know you you have to you have to know you have to listen to where people are coming from and then and then um you know help help um you know you know and then identify identify leaders you know who want to you know who want to take action to improve their situations so i think it's mostly about listening that that's what you've done for a long time yeah right i would say listen don't sell you know you can't have i got a union for you yeah you know it's doesn't really that doesn't work well no no people will say like yeah i've been sold toothpaste and cars and everything else but yeah so uh do you have any particular memories of things that were particularly uh over the years we only have like a minute left you know but uh things you remember where you learned this like you know listened don't sell and there any particular highlights that are important for people to know um it's um i you know i'm just thinking of the over the years there's been a lot of uh uh members that i've recruited to be activists and leaders in the union and um i i can't think of one in particular that that sticks out but um i think um i just just think taking the time to learn someone's story and um and um encourage and encourage their their development as a leader and um i think some people need a little pushing and um i think you know you know people don't generally naturally you know volunteer to do things i think people have to be asked and encouraged and i think just the fact of asking someone to play a role is is um you know can be very rewarding for them and and uh if you know sometimes if you don't ask nothing will happen so you have to you have to ask you don't ask you don't get yeah right no thanks a lot uh so i really appreciate your coming in cliff and letting people know about how a union like the service employees local 509 can help people get some life liberty and hopefully enable them to pursue happiness thanks a lot well thank you appreciate it


When I got the question if I wanted to come and talk on the topic of how to think about the economy, I was like, that's not a bad idea. I have a few things to say about that. Then I learned that you get a copy of the book when you enter the door. I really have nothing more to add. So I'll just stand here. Seriously though, there's a lot that we can talk about on how to understand the economy. And taking an economics course is probably not the right thing to do. So let me first just distinguish between the actual economy and how a lot of people view the economy. And you can see there's a thumb up and the thumb down. Just as a hint on where to stand on this issue. Okay, so one side is talking about the world as a scarce place where we don't have all the resources we need. We don't have all that are once satisfied already and so forth. We need to engage in production and exchange. And then we have the other side, the other view, which is strangely common where, if I can see this, where they envision or see the world as a world of abundance or post scarcity, you might have heard that, where there is really enough for everyone already. The problem though is that some people have taken more. I don't know why they would take more since there was already enough for them, but that's another matter. So there are problems in the world and there are exploitation and there's power and that's why the economy sees all these inequality and things like that. So in a sense, this is really the world of the view, a few of the world, where the world is a magical money tree. There's just money and stuff growing all over the place and you can just get it.  Okay? Well, if it is really a world or the economy is really a magical money tree where you can get anything you want at any time, there's really no problem, right? Nothing is wrong, which means that someone made it wrong. Okay? There's someone or something that caused all these problems that we see and what we need to do is get rid of this somewhere. And that's the analysis, right?  I have never met him, but I'm still a lackey of his. Okay? So this is the other side of the story, right? But if you look at the actual data, you might have seen this graph, which really runs only from 1820. But you see that the green are the people who are not poor and the red are the people who are poor. As you can see, something happened over the past couple of hundred years, something enormous. It was not due to completely free markets because they didn't exist, but it was due to an economy actually working and producing stuff and creating prosperity for all of us. Now, if you look at this and here's some lines just to show you, 1820, 10% of the world population were non-poor. I mean, we're not talking poor as in only making 750 an hour. We're talking poor as in starving, right? Now, 10% of the world population are starving. It's a huge difference, right? The question is, where the heck did this come from? How can we understand the economy and the world economy really that created this enormous prosperity for people? And this, that's the green arrow, that's the difference in 200 years, right? And it's not because parliaments voted one way or not the other. That's not what created it, right? It's something else that created it. Now, that green arrow is pretty big. The problem here though is that it's not really just that arrow even though it is big, but the graph is wrong. This has the number of persons. That's not true. It's really the percentage. What happened during this time? Well, this is the world population during this time. So, it's not like another 80% of the population was lifted out of poverty. The world population increased by a factor of eight. Eight times as many people and then only 10% of the people are poor. That's pretty enormous, right? And just to give you an idea of how can we understand this and when did we start studying this? Well, the Wealth of Nations was written and published right there in the beginning when it all started to take off. A much better book in my view, it's Human Action, was written later. So, you can see most of the population has happened, or the population increase has happened after that. So, the question of course is, how can we understand this? How can we figure out what the heck happened? Well, let's talk about the economy. What the heck is an economy to begin with? It's not that easy. So, I've asked a lot of people granted on Twitter, so you don't get the best responses. You do get a lot of communists though. Okay, so the economy, what is the economy? There's several ways of explaining the economy and these four statements are really explanations in themselves, but you can also combine them. Okay, so in one sense, it's all of us economizing. Each and every single individual trying to do as well as they can, satisfy as highly valued ones as possible, and of course, interacting and so forth with each other to do so. But we're really just trying to figure out how can we get the best life possible for myself, for my family, for my friends, and what have you. Another is engage in production. Why? Because if we produce, we're going to get more out of it because there is no magical money tree. We can't just pick the next generation iPhone from the tree outside our door. It doesn't exist there. There is no such tree. There is no nothing auto-magic about the world. And of course, there's entrepreneurship, as we know as Austrians, entrepreneurship is the driving force of the economy. It's what changes and reshapes the world and creates our tomorrow. That's how I usually want to think about entrepreneurship. It creates our tomorrow, which is a fantastic force to have on your side. Right? We can also think of the economy in terms of exchange. We're exchanging one thing for the other. Well, Marxist would say that, okay, so people like to exchange. Why does that matter? Because value is objective. So every exchange, we're indifferent anyway. Of course, we know that the reason we exchange is that we expect to be better off. In every exchange, value is created for the simple fact that I get something that I want more than I give up, and the same is true for the other party. So both people expect to be better off. That's why we exchange. Imagine a world population of some 8 billion people exchanging and no one trying to hinder them in doing that. There's a lot of value produced already there. Let's look at these four different types of descriptions of the economy and see what we can learn from this. So there we go. All of us economizing. Well, we know that human action is purposeful behavior. Mises teaches us this, right? All Austrians teach us this. So what is that we're actually doing when we're acting, when we're economizing? Well, we're choosing between ends to begin with. There are plenty of different things we could do. Plenty of different things that we value that we can do. You could do something other than be here today. You're not, which suggests to me that you figured this was a better use of your time than doing something else. You might be thinking of differently right now, but that's a different matter. Okay, so we're trying to figure out how to best pursue our ends and what ends to pursue. We also need to figure out how to attain those ends. How can we get the value out of the end that we're pursuing? There are different ways of doing this. It's not that easy. It's not that obvious. Okay, we also have to choose do we want to attain all of our ends right now or some of them tomorrow or maybe 10 years from now. So those of you who have kids, you probably plan a little longer into the future than next week. You might have a college savings fund or something like that, right? Across generations even. You're thinking of satisfying your wants and attaining your ends. Okay, so what we do then every day and all the time is to rank these ends and the means and try to get as much value as possible out of it. That's the economy. That's all of us. We're interacting of course doing this and we're learning. We're figuring out better and better ways of doing things and figuring out other things that we could do in other ways of doing them. Production. What is production? Well, the first statement might seem a little weird. Production takes time and then even weirder, namely that production precedes consumption. If you ask a Keynesian, this is mind boggling. They don't get it. And I've asked plenty of Keynesians, what do you mean production precedes consumption? And I would say something like, well, you can't eat a slice of bread before you actually bake it. And they go, what do you mean? Which is very odd to me, but that's actually true. So what they think is if you just give people money from the magical monetary, then customers having money means that they will just draw production out of producers. So you need money first and then you just get production automatically. Very strange. Well, in our lives, since we have ends that we want to pursue later on, we also engage in the savings. We don't consume everything right now. So we save. What does saving mean? Saving means that we invest in capital. This is still value that we have on hand that we invest in order to produce something in the future, maybe engage in longer production processes so that we can produce more outputs for the same inputs. Means we have to wait a little bit, but still might be worth it. We have this trade off over time. Of course, if we produce for others, well, that means that we can specialize. We can produce doing something that we're really good at, whether or not we like or want what we produce. But we're really good at it. And we can develop those skills and we can trade with others. And therefore we can gain a whole lot, because maybe I can produce something that you want a lot. I don't care for it much, but I'm good at it. Maybe I like doing it. Who knows. And then I can get a whole lot of purchasing power in return. Of course, there's entrepreneurship, which is my favorite topic. As an entrepreneurship professor, I sort of want you to not understand entrepreneurship a whole lot, so you can take my courses. But I'll tell you anyway. Entrepreneurship is speculation. It's really starting production right now in order to offer something later that people might want. You don't know if they want it. It's impossible to know. But you have a gut feeling, or maybe you have done a lot of research. You just know, or you think you know, you hope that you know that you're producing something that people are willing to pay for later on. What is later on? Well, it could be a week from a year from now, or it could be 10 years from now. So a regular new type of automobile takes five to 10 years from starting to design to actually having it in a dealership. Obviously, that is speculation, because who knows what people will want in terms of personal transportation in 2033? Well, I certainly don't, which is why I'm a professor. Okay, so entrepreneurship is also decentralized trial and error. You have all of these people who see all these opportunities and they pursue them when they think that they might be worth pursuing. When there is something that they think is going to be very valuable to other people so that they can produce it. Okay. Now, how do they just make this distinction? How do they decide this? Well, they start with thinking, huh, this I think will be very valuable to people. How valuable? Well, I think they will be willing to pay this much for it, so I can get this revenue in a year from now. And then based off of that decision, you decide, hmm, how much can I buy inputs for? How much can I pay my employees without suffering a loss? So you start with the value and then you select the costs. And by doing that, competing with others, you determine the prices of the factors of production, of all these inputs, you determine wages for people and so forth. Of course, entrepreneurs are also those who figure out their divisionaries. They think of new ways of satisfying people and new things that people might like, new ways of or even new values that the consumers don't even know they have yet. They think of those things too and they bet on producing it. So exchange. What is exchange for?  So exchange for purchasing power. That's the most common activity in the market for most people, right? You have a job, but you have the job not because you like going there. You have a job not because you enjoy working necessarily, but because you get an income. And that income means you have purchasing power to buy stuff that others have produced. Now this also means, of course, that entrepreneurs who fail are not a burden on society really because entrepreneurs who fail, they still hire people. They still pay their bills until they figure out that they can't sell what they thought they were going to sell. That still means they create jobs. So don't fall into that trap that a lot of people tend to fall into saying that, well, if we could only plan the economy better, as we didn't have all these failures, we would have more jobs. No, we wouldn't, because people still make money in businesses that fail later. They might not have a job as long, but that's a different matter, right? Okay, so businesses, they create new stuff and they make use of all the resources out there. They try to maximize the outcome based on the cost of inputs. Now, if you take all of these four things together, these four different descriptions of the economy, what do you get? You get the gang sign of economists, supply and demand graph, or what do you get? No, you don't. What you get, all of this really hints at that what we're talking about is a process. Nowhere at no point in time do they say that, well, this is the goal of the process. No. This is the outcome that we need to get to. No, because it's an open-ended process. We create future values through production. We don't discover the value that was already there, or try to recreate it. We create new value, create more value. Entrepreneurs engage in a decentralized decision-making on what value might be, what means it's referred to as a division of intellectual labor. And of course, if it is a process and it doesn't actually have a goal, doesn't have an outcome, you can't really plan it either. If it has an outcome, if it is a process that we know that this is what we need to produce, and we're all on the same page, then of course we can't plan it. We can maximize it and so forth. But that's a factor, not a process. So everything we know about the economy really is that it is necessary. It's a process. A lot of people acting, interacting, discovering stuff, producing things, figuring stuff out to what end, to all their individual values, to all their individual well-beings, not to some common end, except for just satisfaction perhaps. But that means different for different people. So let's look at the distinction. The factory is very easy. If we think of the economy as a factory, we already have a production process. We already have the defined inputs. We already know the outputs that we're going to produce. We can just put a manager there. It's easy to manage to tweak a little bit and make sure that we cut the fat and have less waste in the process. Easy. The problem though is that it is a process and the process is hard to understand. A snapshot of it, like that, it doesn't help. It doesn't give us a process. Even if we have a snapshot before and a snapshot after something happened, we still don't have the process. Is it a straight line from before to after, or is it a winding road? Well that matters, right? It said those are different explanations, a different understanding of what is going on. Typically if we study the economy using data, we look at before and after, and then we just assume that we know what happened because we just take the shortest route. Shortest route is not usually not what happens. And a lot of smart people make the mistake. They jump to conclusions. They think that they know what's going to happen because it's so obvious. Well the problem is that if you go through it step by step, it's different. You're going to end up in a very different place than if you jump to conclusions. So we need what Mises referred to as step by step analysis or step by step thinking. Okay. Now what is the step by step method? Well there's a quote by Mises there, but it really is reasoning through what would happen step by step as you might imagine. It's not it's not just saying oh before and after looking at the aggregate structure, the aggregate statistic, but looking at wait a minute, what does this mean for individuals? How do individuals react to this change? So I mentioned on previous slide that John Stuart Mill and David Hume made this mistake. They jumped to conclusions. So let's look at the mistakes they made and this is Mises talks about this in terms of the neutrality of money. Rothbard is very clear in many condominium states talking about this as well, but let's look at how they screwed up. So imagine that tonight the MMT ferry will double everybody's cash balances. So whatever you have in your checking account tomorrow morning when you wake up it's a double. Whatever you have in your wallet tomorrow morning it's double. Whatever you have in your mattress it's a double. All the Bitcoin and gold no. Just the dollars. Okay just the dollars. What will happen? Will all prices double? What do you say? That's a lot of answers to a simple question.  Because the problem here is that it's easy to jump to conclusions. Prices are this. One day while we double everybody's money well the prices are going to be double as well. That's what Hume and Mill, the mistakes that they made, that's not what happens. Because if you think about it prices are not auto magic, prices come out of people's actions and interactions. So what is going to happen tomorrow when everybody wakes up with more money in their bank accounts and in their pockets? Are they going to buy exactly the same things as before? No because you're going to have some people who might not have had enough for a beautiful steak but they go to the grocery store to pick up hot dogs or something and they say wait a minute I have a lot of money in my pocket. I can afford steak. So will they buy steak? The next guy too and the third guy. Of course with the carnivore movement everybody's going for steak. But that means that no one is really buying the hot dogs right? Everybody's buying the steak. So the grocer what is he going to do? Well he's going to place an order for more steak to begin with.  And then maybe if it's smart or the other grocer opens later he just glances at the other guy and says hmm I'll just raise the price of steak because then I can make more money. Well look at that. More money. Well the price of steak went up, price of hot dogs went down. How did that happen? What about over time? Well people have changed their behavior already right? They've changed their preferences. They behave differently. So our price is going to end up being exactly double what they were. Yeah sure if no behavior is changed and no ones are changed no preferences are changed. But we already changed those. So going through this step by step how would people actually react to this thing? It means that we get a very different outcome. Prices will not double. The price structure will be different and actually the price structure will be screwed up because now someone created more money. Now that's a problem right? Now if the economy is actually a process as we believe in here I think most of us. Is there any Keynes down here? No? Well what are the implications for economics? Well first of all we can't take the snapshots to generate theory. We can't explain what is going on in the economy by just looking before and after. We need to look at the actual path and go through the logic. It also means that we need theory first. We need theory to understand what the heck the data actually mean. We can't just look at the statistics and say oh yeah yeah let's just draw a line between these two and then that's the slope and then that's what happened. Now we need theory the understanding to tell us what actually was going on and why this other point is higher or lower or whatever it might be. Okay empirical data in fact can only help us get a greater understanding deeper understanding of the example the specific example or specific event in history but they can't really tell us anything about the theory because the theory is human behavior it's nothing else which means also that we can't really predict we can walk through step by step but do we know how many people with double the cash tomorrow will buy steak? No there's no way of knowing so we can't really say we can't really predict exactly what's going to happen. We can predict that people will change their behavior yes and in a certain situation we can predict that more people will probably do this rather than that and whatever else but nothing else. So in here of course Austrian economics is very different from many other economics which is pretty much empirical nowadays. Okay so what does this mean then for understanding the economy because I'm guessing most of you are not ivory tower economists like myself so you have other interests fine well what can we say about the economy well we know that it's an unplanned order it doesn't matter if it was in the Soviet Union or if it was in some hypothetical free market country it's still an unplanned order you can try to plan it but that just means you're going to be further away from where people would actually want to be right it's a decentralized process because you have all this decision making whether or not you centrally plan what people can buy they're still going to make their decisions themselves what you can do is sort of some matrix kind of thing and make people into batteries and feed them what that's a perfectly planned economy but let's not go there and I mean that let's not go there okay so the driving force of change is production trying to find value is production trying to figure out where people might be better off it's entrepreneurship without entrepreneurship the economy stalls the economy stops and the economy dies we also know that the economy cannot be maximized there is no such thing you can't maximize the process you can remove barriers and obstacles from the process but you can't maximize the outcome that doesn't even mean anything it's like maximizing the flow of a river what does that even mean what you can do if something is disrupting the river and this say it's a big rock or something like that you remove the rock but if the river wants to go somewhere the river will go there it's that easy so we know a whole lot about the economy we just need to explain it to people and I tried in what you might refer to as Paris Little Red Book if you get that joke no okay because unfortunately economic understanding is a very scarce good and I've I've realized this both online and in so-called meat space that people really don't get it and they would rather trust authority not mine but other people's authority on how it works and plan the whole thing and I think with a little bit of economic literacy just understanding that there's more of an organism than a system or a factory more of a process than a factory people will realize that well any regulation has a lot of problems comes at a huge cost unintended consequences and it's going to disrupt the river it keeps throwing rocks in the river it's going to take another path and it's probably going to destroy some things while it's going there so I think just a little bit of economic literacy means that we're going to take a big step forward and be able to change the world thanks