So we're going to go to lunch right after this. And I recently learned that lunch is two hours long, which is enough time for wine and a nap. So I'm now convinced that Spanish conferences are the best conferences. Very excited for that. I'm also glad that I went right after that last talk because a lot of those same techniques I'm using in my project here, we're not going to talk about them at that lower level. But if anyone's wondering, can this actually be used to do anything, the answer is yes. So my name is Nick. I'm a web platform engineer at Opower, which is a small company in Washington, DC. And we're trying to save the environment by convincing people to use less energy by sending them personalized reports about how they use energy. And so far, we have prevented over 6 million pounds of 6 million tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, which is equivalent to taking a million cars off the road for a year. So we're excited to have hit that milestone. But completely unrelated to that is procedural content generation, which I'm going to tell you about. And when I tell people that's what my talk is, the first question I always get is I know what those three words mean, but what do they mean together? So that's what we'll first explain, why is this relevant. Then we'll look at the specific techniques and tools that we have to actually make this stuff work. And then finally, I'll walk you through a project that I did using these tools and tell you the lessons that I learned and the best practices that I came up with out of that. And this is a very big field, but my goal is to inspire you and to give you a sense of what's out there so you know where to get started if you're interested in pursuing this further. So what is procedural content generation? Well, it's creating content algorithmically and content can be anything that humans want to consume. So music or text or art, video game assets. And it's generally a non-deterministic process because the big power in this is, let's say you're making a level for a game. If you write an algorithm that makes good levels, you can have infinite replayability. And there are a lot of different things this is used for. Games is the first thing people think of, but I was actually surprised to learn that a lot of journalism that we read today is generated by computers. And we'll discuss more of that in a moment. It's also just a totally new mindset when you're thinking about these problems. When I'm at work, sometimes I spend days wondering why these run plugins aren't talking to each other and stuff like that. And this is just totally different so it was a nice mental break to explore these new ideas. And finally, because there is sort of this artistic bent to it, you end up working with people who you might not normally work with as a programmer. And I just find those projects are really fun and are good for the growth of everyone involved to work with new types of people. And just to clarify, this has nothing to do with FORTRAM. There are people who have heard this title and thought that I was gonna tell them about how to use FORTRAM and COBOL to make video game levels. Not at all true, so just to get that out of the way. Procedural content generation is actually a great place for functional programming, which is my favorite style. So a big application of procedural content generation you might all be familiar with is Minecraft. As you may know, when you're running around in this world, it's generated for you on the fly. And the total world is 10 times the size of the earth. And it's producible by this indie game company with 10 people when they started. And it's pretty amazing that they can produce content that so many people get so many hours of enjoyment out of. The flip side is something like Grand Theft Auto, which with $256 million is the highest budget video game of all time.  But even there, they're getting help from computers. So this is a program called SpeedTree, where you put in some parameters and it will produce trees for you. And this is a much nicer way to generate your forest than crafting every polygon by hand. And this book, which is an interesting book about computers in general and the way we use them in society, the authors are arguing that humans and computers work best together when people really try to focus on what are computers best at and what are humans best at. And so in this case is a good example of that because computers are best at creating this very well-defined asset that we can use a lot of. And that frees humans up for the higher level tasks of is this a fun level to play on, is the user gonna get lost or frustrated, et cetera. But it's not just for games. So as I was mentioning earlier, I was surprised to learn that a lot of text is generated by computers as well. And there's a New York Times interactive survey I found or quiz where they put up snippets of text and ask you if it was written by a human or a computer and we're gonna do a few questions here. I'll see what you guys all think. And just to set expectations, I got 50% of it right when I took the quiz, which means I am no better than a coin toss at figuring out the answer to the question. So here's the first one. A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles from Westwood, California, according to the US Geological Survey. The trembler occurred at 625 Pacific Time at a depth of 5.0 miles. So who thinks a human wrote this? Who thinks a computer wrote it? Now, very cleverly, you guys might be thinking, it would be weird for it to be a human given what this talk is about. You're correct, this was generated by a computer. Let's try the next one. Apple's holiday earnings for 2014 were record-shattering. The company earned an $18 billion profit on $74.6 billion in revenue. That profit was more than any company had ever earned in history. Human? Computer? This one is a human, specifically that guy. Last one. When I in dreams behold thy fairest shade whose shade in dreams doth wake the sleeping morn, the daytime shadow of my love betrayed lends hideous night to dreaming's faded form. Human? Computer? Room's about split. It is a computer. This is one of the ones that I got wrong. So this is one company and there are many others who have their business around generating this text and essentially what you do is you send them a JSON blob that has the details of your event. So your earthquake or your financial report and they will generate natural language to express that information. And just like with GTA, this is not necessarily going to replace all human journalism, at least not in the near future, but there are several key advantages. These stories can be generated within seconds of the event occurring. For humans, that's not really practical. You can also personalize the story for each reader. So just like everything else we do on the web is targeted to us, you can have certain details that be accentuated or diminished based on what that reader's interested in. And sure, you could just dump the data into D3, but natural language can be a better way for some people to understand things. And so financial reporting is one place where you see a lot of this. And also sporting events, both major league sports and smaller scale endeavors. And it's not cost efficient to have a New York Times journalist writing a story about a little league sports game unless that journalist happens to have a kid on the team. But with an algorithm, you can produce a story about the game that still is of some value to people. And so that is a cost efficient way of doing it. So now that we know what procedural content generation is and what we can do, how do we generate it? Well, procedural content generation is similar to machine learning where there's a general problem of with machine learning, it's we want to learn about some data set, we want to classify new examples. Same thing with procedural content generation, there's no hard and fast set of rules, but there are some things that people have found work pretty well. And a lot of these are defined by a lot of complicated math that is difficult to get through in a half an hour talk before lunch. Fortunately, we live in JavaScript land where there's a node module for just about everything, which was probably the node module you're going to use is written by sub-stack, but not all of them are. And so these are some modules that I use in my project and mostly found them to be quite reliable. And so just to tell you about a few specific types of these tools, you saw several different types of noise on the last slide. The reason that we have noise is so we can have non-determinism that has some sort of structure to it. So you might just say, okay, we want there to be randomness, let's just call math.random. Well, what you're going to get is the white static of the TV on the wrong channel. It will be random, but it's completely uniform. And that's actually not a great way to model things in the real world because you don't see that very often. So we have different types of noise that are defined by their mathematical properties to have sort of shapes and patterns you can recognize a little bit. And this makes it easier to use them in your project. So you can see that Perlin noise looks like it might make a good elevation map for a terrain maybe. Veroni noise is often used for cells or geographic borders or things like that.  You pick a bunch of points and then you draw lines between those points such that every point on that line is equidistant from two other points. And that's where it produces this structure which looks nice for various applications like geographic boundaries. Another technique is the L-System which is a form of grammar-based modeling. And L-Systems are really powerful for when you have something you're trying to model that is hierarchical in nature. So you might have a tree and the tree starts with a trunk and then it goes into the thicker lower branches and those have thinner branches off of them and then there are leaves. And the way that you define that progression is through a grammar. And so the L-System is given by three components. The alphabet which are all the things in our language that we're producing. The start state which is just a member of the alphabet and the production rules. And this screenshot is from the demo of the L-System node module. And you can see it's generating this fractal plant-like structure. And so as an example, we have an L-System that has these three components. The alphabet is X, F plus, minus and brackets. The start state is X and the production rules are X becomes all of this and F is doubled. And so you could easily look at this and wonder, well, what are X and F and plus? Like that doesn't have any meaning to me. That's correct. It has meaning to the rendering side. So the L-System is basically a contract between the grammar that you're outputting and however you're going to render it. So in this case, our renderer does have meaning for this language. You can see F means draw forward on the canvas and everything else controls the rotation and where we are on the canvas. And so you're able to output a sequence of these characters that creates this fractal structure off to the left. And for an example of that, we would start at time step zero with the start state. And then we have the production rule that says X is replaced by all of this. So that's what we do in time state one. And then in time state two, we again go through and we see, okay, F gets replaced by two Fs. This X gets replaced by all of this, et cetera. And so you just keep working your way through the string making those replacements and you do as many time steps as you want until you're happy with the way your output looks. And here's an example. Visually, you can see we start with nothing and then each time step, the structure grows more complicated. And so that's the basic L system, but you can add some more features to make it more powerful. One is non-determinism, which again is important so that we can generate lots of different things and not just a single form. And so here what we're saying is instead of always transforming A to B, we're only gonna do that 30% of the time and 70% of the time it'll become C. You can also have context sensitivity. So saying if A is followed by C, then make it into B but otherwise don't. And you can also have parameterization where you attach a value to the grammar symbol and you pass those values through and you can define rules in terms of them. So when X is equal to zero, then A becomes B, when X is equal to one, A becomes C. This is valuable because it lets earlier stages in your generation have an impact on later stages without making your grammar hideously complicated. Another tool we have at our disposal is the Markov chain. And a Markov chain models a non-deterministic process where the next state depends on the current one. Or more simply, it's a game of shoots and ladders. I don't know if this was part of all of your childhoods but it's an incredibly tedious game because literally all you're doing is computing a Markov chain. There's like no decisions to be made. You just are cranking through it. And so the way that the chain works is you have a set of states and then you have transitions between those states. And just like the L system, it is a time-based system so you move through it in steps. And so what this says is let's say we're in state A. For the next time step, there's a 40% chance we'll go to E and a 60% chance that we're gonna stay at A. And when we're in E, there's a 70% chance we'll go to A and a 30% chance that we'll stay in E. And so you can use this to generate structures. If you think of the thing you're generating is a good fit for this. And so you'll actually see a lot of Twitter bots where people are generating text this way. And so what they do is they read in a lot of text and that tells them what the states are and what the transition probabilities are between each word. And then they just run through the chain to spit out some sentences. And there's some pretty amusing examples of this on Twitter. One that I learned about recently is called Erowid Recruiter. Erowid is a message board where people talk about their drug experiences and the recruiter part is LinkedIn Recruiting Spam. So it combines both of these and it outputs things like this. People who are all tripping quite hard decided to sit on and in the redesign of consumer reports. So the Markov chain can produce some funny and some absurd things. And the reason that this looks the way it does you can see that there are phrases that are meaningful. So like people who are all tripping quite hard. That's a good phrase. And the redesign of consumer reports. That's also good. But when you combine the two globally it's meaningless. And this is a direct consequence of the fact that the Markov chain is only looking at the previous word to determine what the next one should be. So it has no way of knowing that the sentence it's producing makes no sense. And you can increase the number of steps back in time you're looking at but that does get computationally more expensive depending on your data set it could be impractical. And if you increase it too much then eventually you get to overfitting where let's say you're looking 10 states back in time. It could be that for a given 10 words there's only one way to continue. And then you're not generating new things you're just picking out arbitrary sentences from your input and that's not very interesting. But the other big reason that Markov chains are failing to produce compelling text whereas the stuff we saw earlier like the news stories actually was a lot more realistic is that the Markov chain has no way to know about semantics. It's only learning about the syntax but it doesn't know what to say. Whereas with the financial reports we're telling the computer what to say we're solving the hardest part for it. And so this brings me to my next point which is do we still need designers and artists and people or can we just program them out of existence like so many other jobs have been programmed out of existence. My answer to that is absolutely yes. Even in a game like Minecraft which is heavily algorithmically generated you can still see the intention of the designer in what is produced. And another example of this, this is my brother he's a drummer, musician in Los Angeles. And a while ago I asked him I was like so computers can make music. Maybe we should make music with computers.  But the fact that if I were to do it by myself it would be very bad indicates that it's not soulless because the human is still involved. You still need someone with musical talent to make a good music program. So we definitely still need designers even though we have all these cool techniques to amplify their designs. So my project was to generate a city. Apparently we have a very urban theme today for the talks. And I wanted to make a map and I wanted to display it somehow. And so my first question was how am I gonna visualize it? And I wanted to just be able to drop it into some visualizer and not have to spend a lot of effort on like the rendering side because I wanted to focus on the generation. So the first thing I looked at actually was visit cities because I saw it on the agenda and it looked really cool. However, it seemed like it wasn't really trying to do what I wanted to do. And I didn't wanna spend all my time hacking it apart to do what I wanted to do. So then I looked at Mapbox which is a much more mature product and I just spent all my time hacking that apart instead. Mapbox is pretty nice. I did have a fair amount of pain with it, but then the next question was what format should I produce? And there are a dizzying array of different ways to represent geographic data. Ultimately I went with GeoJSON because JSON sounds like something that would be good to use from JavaScript. And there's also a really nice open source library called turf.js which does a lot of the geographic calculations for you. And this was important to me because I didn't wanna spend the time on that. I wanted to do the generation side of things. And I also found this site to be really helpful for debugging. You can just paste your output right in there and you can see what it looks like. And this is really important because if you're just looking at the JSON file, you're not gonna be able to figure it out. With a lot of these projects you need a visual component to see what's going wrong. So the start of my city was just a box. But this does not look very much like a city. So I used iterated subdivision to divide it into a smaller set of city blocks. But this still doesn't look very much like a city because there's no city in the world that's just a square grid of uniform size. So then I introduced some simplex noise and my algorithm was divide the box into a smaller section if the noise value for that box was high enough. And so this produces that dense urban center and then the outer lying areas are not quite as populated. And the other thing I did to make that happen was the requirements for the noise were lower towards the center. So I'm trying to bias it towards having like a city center feel here. Next I saw that the perimeter of the city doesn't look very natural because again it's just one giant box. So I applied a rule that would remove all of the grid sections above a certain size. And that made the perimeter look a little more natural. And then I decided that no city in the world has all blocks of the same size, like even within a size category. So I merged some of the blocks together and this again creates a little more of an organic look and it makes things look a little more varied. And then because most cities aren't built on a perfectly good grid system, I perturbed the streets. I took the points and I just sort of wiggled them around a little bit to give it a slightly more natural look. And one thing that was important was making sure that the size that I was moving was relative to the size of the box, to the size of each grid square. Or else you could quickly have things get totally distorted. Additionally I had different thresholds for the smaller grid squares versus the bigger grid squares so that I could fine tune how I wanted it to look. And then I added a river using a Veroni diagram. And so the way I generated that was I drew the Veroni diagram over the map of the city. I picked a point that was on one edge and then I just kept walking over the diagram until I was exited at the other edge. I just created the river and then I added a lake. And the way I did that was I took Perlin noise and I put it over the whole city. And I found the point that had the highest amount of Perlin noise and then I just expanded outwards from there until I met some threshold. And so that creates this sort of water fill effect. And additionally for both the river and the lake I went back and I removed the city grid squares that were on top of it. And it works out well when you have like a bunch of small grid squares that are right next to the water because then it looks realistic like the way that people do actually tend to build things right on the water. And the next I added some parks and the way I did that was for each grid square I looked at its size relative to its neighbors and within a certain range of ratios I just designated those as parks. So this was where I stopped. This was my final output. And obviously there's a lot more work to do if you want this to look like a totally realistic city but I felt this was a pretty good balance point in terms of getting my fee wet and understanding how this stuff works. And I learned a good set of best practices and lessons that I'll share with you next. I use TypeScript for this project which I'm very happy with. TypeScript like any other new tool does have a bit of a learning curve but after you get over it it does give you a lot of value. Here you can see that I'm getting both type safety and some ES6 features like the fat arrow function. But the big thing that drove home for me how TypeScript is useful is when I'm programming ideally there's only one thing wrong with my program at a time. And what that means is I stop and run the code every time I've written enough lines that I've probably introduced an error. So like maybe every 10 lines I have to stop and run it and see what it does. With TypeScript the number of lines I could write before I introduced an error at least one that wouldn't make it pass compile time was expanded and so I found myself spending more time writing code and less time switching back and forth to make sure it still worked. And I often had the experience of going to see if it worked and then being pleasantly surprised of like wow that actually worked the first time I kind of wasn't expecting that. And that's because of the support that TypeScript gives you. Another thing that's very important for this is using a seedable randomness source. And what this means is that instead of just using math.random you give it a seed which is like a string or some starting value. And the randomness is generated based on that seed. And so for the same seed you'll always get the same values. Without this it's basically impossible you'll just go insane trying to debug this because in science you can only change one thing at a time to know what is having what effects. And so if you change your algorithm and then your output looks totally different if you're using math at a random you have no idea if that's because you just got unlucky with having a different set of random numbers or if your algorithm is bad. And so by keeping the randomness the same you're able to debug it a lot more effectively and then when you would go to production with this you would use a random seed and then the whole thing would be end to end random. Another benefit is that this lets you do automated testing if you are generating something different every time that's basically impossible. And it lets you produce error conditions. So if one of your users produces something that looks really weird they can send you the seed value they used and you can reproduce that exact state as opposed to just saying like well I guess I'll hit refresh a bunch of times until math.random does the same thing for me that it did for them. And the node module that I used for this is called alia I guess that's how you pronounce it and it's worked totally great. It's also very helpful to be able to log everything and here what I'm doing is decorating the output with information about how it was generated. And this is very useful so when you're inspecting your output when something looks weird you can understand why in a way that like just doing console logs it's harder to connect the two. It's also very important to be able to configure everything and so your life will be a lot easier if your configuration is pulled out from your code instead of having magic numbers floating around everywhere and it's super easy to tweak them. And the reason for this is that having good parameters is completely essential. You can have a really interesting algorithm that is torpedoed by awful parameters. And one way that I torpedoed myself was when it was generating the lake. So as you may remember with the lake we have Perlin noise and we're taking a sample of it for the city grid and then we're trying to find certain points to generate the lake accordingly. And the Perlin noise is defined over an infinitely large area so we're just taking a subset. But when I started I was using latitude and longitude and on the scale of a city those numbers actually don't change very much. And so instead of getting a nice section like this I was just getting a tiny little section and so what that produced was a map of colors where the color represents the value of the noise was basically all the same. So then I applied a coefficient to try to zoom out but this was zooming out by too much. You can see this basically looks like the white noise static because the resolution of these points we're sampling is too low for the size. So then I found a good coefficient that was right in the middle where you actually can see those patterns that we care about. So the lesson is that you have to have a way to test your parameters and to configure them correctly because otherwise your life is gonna be really painful. Another important lesson is that you should use the right algorithm for what you're trying to do. So this is a map of Seattle and you can see a lot of Seattle city grid is north, south, east, west except for this cool area where it shifts and it is going along the waterline. I wanted to add something like this to my city grid but it was fairly difficult because of the algorithm that I use and the data structure I was using. And in fact, a lot of things were fairly difficult because what I was doing was I had a big box and I was just subdividing it into smaller and smaller boxes when you wanna go back afterwards and merge the boxes or perturb the corners or do a shift like this. It's very hard because you need to sort of reconstruct information that you didn't save originally. So if you just have a big set of polygons then finding neighbors is an order n squared operation which is incredibly slow. So if I were to do this again I'd like to use an L system to generate the city grid as a grammar. And I think this will also work nicely for having a hierarchical structure where you can say okay you have the city center and then you have the big highways coming off of that and then that leads to smaller roads, et cetera. Another important lesson is to pick your output carefully. So as I said at the beginning I really wanted to just drop my output into a renderer and have it look good. And Mapbox has a lot of built in mapping templates and styles to make your content look good but for whatever reason I didn't produce the output that Mapbox was expecting. I had my own special snowflake output and so that meant that I had to hack Mapbox's styles to work with what I had done. So if you are not interested in doing that you should be conscientious about having your output be well formed. And finally Async is not as helpful here as it is in other places because our program is totally CPU bound. And Async only helps with IO because the idea is that the event loop would be blocked waiting for something but instead it can do other tasks. Well if it's CPU bound the event loop is always busy. So you can't really get that easy parallelization that you can get with other problems. And if you wanted that you would need multiple Node.js processes which would be possible but is a little more painful. So those are my lessons and now that you guys have seen this I'm excited to see what you all will make. Thank you.


Today, the Supreme Court announced two more decisions that demonstrate just how ideological and illegitimate they've become. And in a moment, you're going to see that I'm not just saying that because I'm angry since both of these decisions affect me personally, but legally speaking, these cases make a mockery of the judiciary, and you're going to see why. So in a 6-3 decision of Biden v. Nebraska, they struck down Biden's student loan forgiveness plan. So if you were one of the millions of individuals counting on $10,000 to $20,000 worth of student debt relief, they ruled that that's unconstitutional. Now at the end of this video, I do have an update about what Biden decided to do in response to that. But before we get to that, we also have to talk about the other decision. The 6-3 decision of 303 Creative v. Eleanus. And as Harvard Law's Alejandro Carbio put it, they made this legal now, literal discrimination against LGBTQ people by businesses. And she adds, there is literally no practical way for the court to distinguish the difference between saying, I won't design a site for gay couples and I don't design a site for interracial couples. This opens the door to legal racial discrimination. So today, this dangerous new precedent opens the door to a very scary and discriminatory world. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself because the first thing that you should know about this case is that it was based off of nothing. Literally. The business owner, who is the plaintiff, wasn't even asked to serve a gay couple. That's right. Because as Slate's Mark Joseph Stern explains, the case 303 Creative v. Eleanus was manufactured by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian law firm that opposes LGBTQ plus equality at all walks of life. 303 Creative is a for-profit Colorado business owned and operated by Lori Smith who opposes same-sex marriage. No same-sex couple has ever tried to hire Lori Smith to create a website for their wedding. Represented by ADF, however, she filed a preemptive lawsuit demanding a First Amendment right to turn away any same-sex couple who request a wedding website. So the case is built entirely on hypotheticals and there is no real record to speak of. Justice Neil Gorsuch's 6-3 opinion for the court got around this problem by insisting that Smith faces a quote, credible threat of enforcement because Colorado acknowledges that it will enforce its civil rights law. He went on to declare that Colorado seeks to compel a speech Ms. Smith does not wish to provide, speech that would be quote, celebrating marriages, those of same-sex couples of which she does not approve. The state insists that it would not compel Smith to actually design a wedding website but merely to sell a pre-existing template to all customers. Gorsuch simply dismissed this claim while simultaneously criticizing the state for its ostensible eagerness to punish Smith and other anti-gay business owners. So let's pause right there and just let this sink in. This bigot wasn't even compelled to design a website, but yet the court was so eager to greenlight discrimination against gay couples that they agreed to pretend like the state wanted to compel her to design a gay wedding website when the state itself insisted that that was not the case. It is beyond comical that this is the decision that they reached and that they even took up this case to begin with because, again, they created a new precedence out of nothing, out of thin air. I mean, it's not the judiciary's duty to legislate, but that's effectively what they're doing here. This is judicial activism in its purest form. And what this does is it creates a First Amendment exemption so businesses cannot be compelled to creatively express messages in support of same-sex marriage if they don't agree with it. In Western rights, in the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent, the opinion is quite literally a notice that reads, some services may be denied to same-sex couples. Exactly. This is textbook discrimination concocted from a state law that wouldn't have even required compelled speech.  But it's not really that simple, right? As HuffPost explains, civil rights groups are already raising the alarm and response to the broadness of the ruling. The court's decision opens the door to any business that claims to provide customized services to discriminate against historically marginalized groups. The decision is fundamentally misguided, the ACLU's legal director David Cole said in a statement. In other words, it's not that simple and this is only the beginning. Perhaps a clothing store owner could say that selling women's clothing to a trans woman is tantamount to them being compelled to support trans people or them designing clothing for trans women is tantamount to them supporting something that they don't agree with. Perhaps a food vendor can deny services for a gay wedding as well because the creation of food can be maybe interpreted as an expressive art form and by serving that gay couple they feel like they're lending support to homosexuality and in her dissent, Sotomayor brought up this very concern. She cited various examples of recent anti-gay discriminations during continues, including a funeral home that refused to cremate and hold a memorial service for a gay man is a memorial service expressive conduct now shielded by the Constitution. Perhaps so. And that's exactly the problem. Can a subway sandwich artist say, I don't want to serve this gay couple because me creating this sandwich is a work of art and I don't want to express support for homosexuality. You see, it's it's not so simple as to say, oh, well, it's limited discrimination. Once you open the door to discrimination, it's only going to lead to more discrimination. But let's assume for a moment that this is strictly limited to artists and it doesn't get twisted and manipulated or expanded by conservatives. That's still discrimination. Period. If you deny service to a gay couple that you would not deny to a straight couple, that is textbook discrimination. So what should be the solution for this particular web designer if her worst nightmare comes to fruition? Well, if a gay couple asks her to design a wedding website for them, she doesn't have to do that, right? She can deny that service to the gay couple. But that means she also has to deny the same service to straight couples. Same with bakers.  I mean, imagine if a baker said that they only want to make a wedding cake for white couples and black couples but not interracial couples because they're against racial mixing. I mean, that would obviously be discriminatory, right? So when you change the marginalized group in question, why is it suddenly acceptable behavior? If baking cakes for some couples is going to be an issue for you, then you simply have to refuse service to all couples to avoid discrimination. Wedding cakes cannot be a category of services that you offer if this is going to be a problem. But the court is saying, actually, discrimination is OK. It's OK. Go ahead. And Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion, bent over backwards to split hairs and justify discrimination here.  Stern continues, Gorsuch in response tried to draw a line between discrimination based on status and discrimination based on message claiming that the First Amendment only protects the latter.  She was refusing to express a message about sexual orientation that she does not believe. Free speech does not cover status-based discrimination unrelated to expression, he wrote, but it does, quote, protect a speaker's right to control her own message. That distinction favors Smith because she says she will serve gay clients, just not those who are getting married. Sotomayor replied, this logic would be amusing if it were not so embarrassing. Quipping that on Gorsuch's logic, a racist hotel could argue that black people may still rent rooms for their white friends. Right, and her dissent was incredible. Opening the door to discrimination obviously is a terrible idea, not just for queer people, because guess what, it goes both ways. LGBTQ plus business owners, now all of a sudden cannot be compelled to express creative support for heterosexuality or cisgender people and presumably religion as well. So, good jobs, Godus, good job. But moving on, so they also struck down Biden's student debt relief plan, saying that he overstepped his authority, and this entire case is, again, absurd because the plaintiff obviously did not have standing, but the court went out of their way to argue, actually, they definitely do have standing. So, as Mark Joseph Stern explains, Chief Justice John Roberts' decision in Biden v. Nebraska blazed past a clearly insurmountable standing problem to scold the president for even trying to use the law according to its own plain terms in order to offer mass debt relief in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. He also chastised Justice Elena Kagan for her, quote, disturbing suggestion in dissent that the majority had gone beyond the proper role of the judiciary. The decision boils down to the Chief Justice's obvious disdain for student debt relief, which is perhaps why he interpreted Kagan's criticism as, in his words, a personal affronts. The biggest question in the case was whether anyone could establish standing to challenge the program in the first place. After all, the federal government itself holds this debt and no one is obviously injured by the government helping somebody else by erasing their debt. In a separate case decided on Friday, the court unanimously held that two people who opposed the plan had no standing to sue. Missouri tried to get around this problem by fixating on Mohella, a corporation created by the state that services student loans. The Missouri Attorney General asserted that Mohella would suffer financially because of Biden's plan, which turns out to be false, and that the state itself could represent its interests in court. A key flaw in the reasoning is that Mohella is an independent entity from Missouri that could have sued to defend its own interest, but refused to do so and even refused to help Missouri represent it in court. State officials had to file public records requests to obtain key information because Mohella did not want to participate in this case at all, unbelievable. Roberts didn't care about any of that. Mohella is an instrumentality of Missouri he wrote and Biden's plan will cut Mohella's revenues, again, provably false, so according to Roberts and the court's five other hardline conservatives, the state had established standing. Oh, okay, they established standing, I see. Listen, if you get the feeling that they're just making stuff up as they go along, you'd be correct. They're not adhering contrary to popular belief. They're not adhering to a judicial philosophy. They're simply making a decision based on their own reactionary ideological views and then they make up the legal rationale to justify their ruling. That's how this works, it's how it's always worked. But I mean, remember when conservatives said that they were against activist judges? Well, it doesn't get any more activist than this, but it's okay so long as they're issuing decisions that Republicans agree with. So that's why I told you at the beginning of this video that this court has lost its legitimacy. It's not just sour grapes because both of these decisions affect me as a gay dude with student debt that qualified for cancellation like I qualified for the 20K. And now I don't get that. Now discrimination is permissible against me. So it's not just that I'm angry because I am. It's that they have no legitimacy, right? These decisions are legally hollow. But with that being said, this ruling is not surprising and in response, Biden, he called out the hypocrisy of Republicans who supported PPP loan cancellation in a press conference where he talked about this decision and he also made the following announcements. First, I'm announcing today a new path consistent with today's ruling to provide student debt relief to as many bars as possible, as quickly as possible. We will ground this new approach in a different law than my original plan, the so-called Higher Education Act. That will allow Secretary Cardona who's with me today to compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances. This new path is legally sound. It's gonna take longer than in my view, it's the best path to be managed to providing for as many bars as possible with debt relief. I've directed my team to move as quickly as possible on this law. Just moments ago, Secretary Cardona took the first step to initiate that new approach. We're not gonna waste any time on this. We're getting moving on average, it's gonna take longer but we're getting at it right away. Second, we know what many borrowers will need to make their hard choices, which their budgets are being strained out when they start to repay their monthly loan payments this fall. You know, we know that figuring out how to pay these added expenses can take time for borrowers and they might miss payments at the front end as they get back into repayment. Normally, this could lead borrowers to fall into delinquency and default. But without their financial security, it would hurt their financial security and that's not good for them or the economy. That's why we're creating a temporary 12 month what we're calling on-ramp repayment program. And now, this is not the same as a student loan pause. It's been in effect for the past three years. Monthly payments will be due. Bills will not go out and interest will be accruing. And during this period, if you can pay your monthly bills, you should. But if you cannot, if you miss payments, this on-ramp will temporarily remove the threat of default or having your credit harm, which can hurt borrowers for years to come. Because the Department of Education won't refer borrowers. And the reason why that will work, they won't refer borrowers who miss payments to credit agencies for 12 months to give them a chance to get back up and running. So rather than using his authority under the HEROES Act, which is what he did originally, he is now pursuing debt cancellation through the Higher Education Act, which is good news. I just wish that he did this from the get-go, right? But regardless, we don't know how much he's planning to cancel, but this is the correct path. Now, he also announced a 12-month program, as you heard, whereby if you miss payments, you won't default. But here's the thing. They're gonna strike this down again. It doesn't matter if you pursue the correct legal path because there is no correct legal path for this rogue, far-right Supreme Court. They will strike it down even if you have the legal authority under the Higher Education Act to cancel student debt. So what do you do? Well, you just cancel it all. If you create another means-tested program, you give Republicans the opportunity to legally block it by challenging it in the court.  We know this because this is how student debt cancellation has gone before. Once it's canceled, you can't uncancel it. So if he's serious, he would cancel it all. But I don't think that that's gonna be the case. But regardless, we'll have to wait and see. If he pursues $10,000 to $20,000 worth of cancellation under the Higher Education Act, that will be challenged as well. Will it be struck down? Probably so. Either way, we are basically fucked, and I just love how they announced the most unpopular opinions and then they duck out for the rest of the summer.  It's just predictable, but this court doesn't care about you. It doesn't care about any of us, and this country is falling apart because these Republicans just refuse to help normal people. They only want to help large multinational corporations and billionaires. Because again, PVP loans, that's A-OK, student debt relief for mostly people who make less than $90,000, $70,000 a year. Unacceptable. That's how they feel about you.


How about this man white geometric Katelyn Clark 5 of 5? Dude Holy cow Jesus. That's a big end. That is a big card. It is a big in Neil


Hello, I'm Javier Hernandez reporting from Washington. A federal judge speaking for the judicial conference told Congress that the future vitality of the federal courts is being jeopardized by inadequate compensation for federal judges and judiciary executives. Testifying before a House subcommittee, U.S. district judge Brock Hornby used stark terms. We believe that the federal judiciary is at a crossroads. If the current situation is not checked, we believe that pay compression is going to threaten our ability to recruit and retain experienced professional judiciary employees as well as talented judges. Chief Judge Philip Proe testified that judicial employees are honored to be in federal service and make a daily contribution to our government process, and for that they deserve fair compensation. I know that members of Congress surely feel the same way, but so do our probation officers, so do our pretrial services officers, so do our clerks of court and deputy clerks of court. Judge Hornby said four factors point to the immediate need for increases in salaries of federal judges and judicial executives. Judicial salaries purchasing power has declined since 1993. Judicial pay is not keeping up with compensation in the private sector, even among not-for-profit organizations. No mechanism for periodic salary review is in place, and judicial salaries suffer from pay compression and pay inversion. Yes, when judges take the job, they know there's going to be the sacrifice, but they expect to be kept equal. They don't expect that they're going to fall behind. That fear of falling behind made it difficult to find a replacement bankruptcy judge earlier this year in Nevada. When the net was cast for applicants, I talked to a great many lawyers, members of the bankruptcy bar, excellent lawyers who told me that they would not seek the position even though they would love to do it because they couldn't afford that economic downturn that they would face. Judge Hornby feels that that perception among talented lawyers may have a negative impact on the judiciary. Do we want only people who are committed to public service on the one hand and only people who are independently wealthy on the other, or do we want to maintain our tradition of having a diverse judiciary of people from across the board? In their testimony, the judges pointed out that since 1993, compensation for federal judges has risen 23.7 percent. In contrast, compensation for general schedule employees has risen 57.5 percent. Reporting from Washington, I'm Javier Hernandez.


Hello, buddies. There's a few things going on in this video. I'm gonna take you thrifting with me I also hit a yard sale where I walked in and they had stuff priced, but there was a free table So I grabbed some stuff off the free table. I offered to pay for it, but she would not take my money. So I Got it free I'm gonna talk about those items in this video and then I also picked up something from Chozen Goods resellers eBay store and I'm gonna unbox that and show you guys what I got. So stay tuned for all of that. This is kind of a It's got multiple things going on in this video. So ultimately I am sourcing and I'm gonna show you what I found. Thanks for watching Hey, fellow buddies. Thanks for watching Amazing, right? All right, let's get started Okay, I think I just saw snow seriously snow. I'm getting ready to run into the retail store It's right next door to the Goodwill bins. So I figured I'm here. I might as well run it Okay, so almost always whenever I go to the Goodwill bins the retail store is connected to it So why not hit both right? I will say the last time I went I didn't have a full day to source I had something else I had to do that day So I did not go to this store that day, but I feel like if I go once a week I don't find a whole lot of new stuff. Do you guys feel like that? I know some people go to the same Goodwill like two or three times a week I'm usually like once a week per store But I don't know am I missing out and should I go first thing in the morning? Do you guys have any tips for me and other resellers? The best time to source how you source when you find the best deals And if you don't want to give away your secrets in the comments, no worries But if you want to share feel free to do that down below. All right, so I checked out the Christmas stuff pots and pans I don't Typically pick up pots and pans. I'm not super knowledgeable in them and I don't like the big handles It makes them awkward to ship and finding a box So I know I'm missing out on money and I should definitely do my research in that category But it's just a category I often skip and I know some of you are going to be like no look at the pots and pans So if you sell pots and pans, let me know in the comments some of your favorite brands So I can be on the lookout. All right, so I'm kind of looking at the glass you guys know how I feel about breakables, but I do scan them and Especially for the video Sometimes you guys see things and you can help educate me since that's not really my thing and you can see I'm walking right past it And I'm heading to my favorite spot the toys and they had tons of games this time I did not pick up a whole lot today But I did pick up some stuff. So we're gonna look at what I did pick up. I Do look at the games anything that's sealed I'm gonna definitely comp that out and even if it's a bread and butter and it's sealed I I oftentimes will pick it up if the price is good now One thing that I will tell you about games before I tell you that I did grab this guy He is toothless from how to train your dragon. I do have him up for auction He's pretty cool So back to the games one little tip I can give you is if you sell on Poshmark Put the games on Poshmark because the shipping is going to be cheaper over on Poshmark because it's a flat rate Price I think it's like almost eight bucks So if you put it on eBay, it could be closer to like nine to twelve dollars to ship a game depending on how heavy it is When you get into that three pound weight and with the size of it It can really get up there. So Poshmark is a great place to put board games If you don't sell on Poshmark and I also like Mercari I have links down below and you guys can sign up with those and you get a coupon when you sign up and I get a coupon and I use list perfectly to cross post if you want to learn more about that I have a video down in the description and if you decide you want to use it after you watch that video You can use coupon referral code Bolo buddies all one word to get 30% off your first month I've been using it since 2019 and by having my items on multiple platforms I make more sales because some things are really saturated on eBay. These were new old stock I visit Star Wars. I'm not really sure what it was, but there were a bunch of them I think they had $12 on them and they were not selling. I left those behind. I didn't even comp them Would you have looked up comps?  I have sold them before I typically Sell them in small lots or in bulk. They don't really have a lot of value Individually so here we are at one of my favorite spots at this Goodwill I have found some big money Bolo's in this store a lot of their items are 99 cents If they're not marked their plush is 99 cents, which is a fantastic price for plush Now some of them are priced higher like the bigger ones or what they think is special But 99 cents is great And I think the three that I pick up today in this video were 99 cents each this big old tigger I did look him up. He is from Winnie the Pooh And I feel like Winnie the Pooh is more long tail than some of the other plush I pick up. Let me know what you think in the comments. He was really big I think he had a function I did comp him and for some reason I left him behind so the comps must not have been that great But he's giant so I was kind of surprised and I think he does something This is a Star Wars figure, but the condition was not great So I do look at tags. That's gonna give you maybe the date of an item or A brand those things help you look stuff up. This guy had I don't know what on him Sometimes plush is just nasty. I don't even know why some of it gets donated to be honest I'm not sure what that was on there this little guy I'm not sure what that was. Maybe I should have looked that up little panda bear that is so cute and a Shoe So was somebody hiding the shoe? I always find stuff in the plush like somebody's hiding it and they're gonna come back for it But I don't know why they just wouldn't buy it Somebody said maybe a store employee so that they can buy it when they get off work. This is a boys bear It's Noah. I don't typically have my tape measure in the first photo But I accidentally deleted the first photo and I already put it in the plush bin to be Inventoryed so I just haven't got back down to grab it to do a new photo and to be honest with you That just might stay my main photo This Mickey Mouse. Do you think somebody made that sweater for the item or do you think that's original to the Mickey and How do you guys do with Mickey Mouse plush? For me if it's Disney Store, I pick it up. If it's another brand. I'm more I Comp it and I'm more selective I feel like the Disney Store items do better and sell quicker not to say the other ones don't sell You know sometimes things can be a jackpot and you throw them back in the bin because you didn't look it up You know, I've done that Alright, look at that little guy little Snoopy So so cute so as I'm going through here if you see something that you would have picked up that I put back Let me know. This is a Disneyland Bear I looked up comps. It wasn't going for much. I think it was a 99 set item Would you have picked this up or left it behind? I think I saw some of them that had on like clothing like a shirt or something Alright, we're gonna keep looking here This one I think is one of those doodle things like you're supposed to color on it I've been seeing a lot of those lately a lot of them are colored on but that one did not seem to be I think that other one right there to the right Also is one of those this guy. I looked up comps on He probably would have been a good bread and butter sometimes with plush people are just looking for specific animals Let's say They had their child has they're into a certain animal and they really don't care about the brand They just want the animal. So that's another reason that plush is a great bread and butter because brand does not always matter The ones that are typically high dollar are usually a good brand, but you know, it just really varies Let me know in the comments. What is your highest dollar plush sale? And that brings me to something that I just thought of if you guys are not in my Bolo buddies Facebook group head over there What I do is I invite my Facebook members to share a Bolo in the comments of a post and then I feature your Bolo's in a video So it's really fun if you want to have your item featured in a video Definitely go check that out. There is a link to my Facebook group down in the description of this video All right There are a couple more items that I grab here I did grab this guy if he would have been in better condition. I could have got more for him where you push the button He has a little bit of wear But stay tuned because we're gonna talk about the items that I ended up finding and I'm gonna show you exactly how he works I had no idea when I bought it. I knew it did something But wait until you see my delight when I figure out how it works. It's so funny and so cute All right, let's see we are this is one of the sections that I really like in this store What they do is they pull out like three or four of these carts And it's usually the items that they have just brought out from the back that they have not put on the floor yet And that was Toy Story 3. Maybe I should have looked that up Let me know if you guys know in the comments. These are some Puma shoes I don't typically pick up pre-owned shoes because I don't want to clean them I know some people are killing it with shoes and if you're one of those people talk me into it Talk me into selling shoes in the comments All right, let's see. We are gonna head over to this other cart here. I do find one more item This is a connects. I do pick these up from time to time that little green motor on the front can go anywhere from $8 to $12 sometimes people get a little more if they get lucky But definitely pick those up at you if you see them. I recently found one at the Benz. This looks like a wine cooler Maybe what do you guys think would you have picked that up? I'm thinking that might have done well on Poshmark, but It kind of looks I don't know like the top of it. I don't know it just didn't look perfect to me So I went ahead and left that behind but I did think about it for a minute. All right Here we have stitch and he is a cute little Disney store plush So as I said, I do pick up Disney store items. He'll be a nice bread and butter He's got on the little Christmas hat there. I did check this guy out. I have sold this big brand before I decided to leave him behind But definitely look up that brand if you see it some of them can do pretty good. All right. Here we go okay, you guys, so I was heading up to the Benz and I saw a garage sale sign and I stopped and the table said free. So of course I Grabbed a few things. I tried to give her some money because I feel like I can make some money on this stuff But she would not take it but I kind of just collect stickers like this whenever I see them I won't do anything with them right away. I have a whole collection and eventually I'll probably lock them up like maybe put letters together or I don't know I've got a big box, but it's just gonna go in my hoard for now. I Did find this it's Bucillas. It's originally from odd lots, but I do believe it's older. I don't know if it's Vintage or not, but It was on the free table. So I went ahead and grabbed that I'm looking for a date Just not seeing a date. Usually it's like down on the bottom, but I can probably look it up by this number So I'll get that listed. I'll take these tags off And I've never seen it with an S. See how it's Bucillas Now this was the thing that caught my eye. I have sold these before Memory book with white refill pages. So it's got this little thing which connects into a particular type of book So it's gonna need to be this particular book. I can probably scan it and figure that out I did not comp these again. They were free. Here's this. It looks like so I got one two Three that were sealed. This one was not sealed, but it seems to have everything It's still got the little thing here and then it's got all of this paper So this is not a photo album. This is white paper Scrap book inserts. So I am curious to see what those sell for. I will either sell them individually or I will sell them In a lot. I haven't decided Okay, what is this? So Choosing goods reseller Carissa one of my friends I was looking through her eBay store and I wanted to purchase somewhat something from her to show her some support and There was this item that I had seen her pick up in a thrift haul and I was kind of like why on earth would she get that? I just thought it was like a silly little item Just not something I would pick up but I kind of razzed her about it a little bit So I was looking through her store and I'm like I'm totally gonna buy that So I'm gonna unbox this and show you guys what I bought From Choosing Goods reseller. Stay tuned And you can see right here It says look and I don't know if she drew this or her husband drew it because I bought this when she was in the hospital So she he either took her a box and she made me a picture or he drew it So we all want to know Chris if you're watching this who drew the snowman. Oh my goodness packing peanuts All right, let's see what we got here. Oh Oh We have a card if you have any issues with your purchase, please contact us ASAP and give us a chance to make it right Wow cute card. I love that All right, let's see what else we have in here. Oh I'm so excited. Oh goodness me. She sent me three. Oh my gosh, they're beautiful They're like what do you call that where they change colors? They're rainbows. I love them Thank you, Chris. I love these Super super excited about those I will put those with my collection of stickers that I'm gonna Eventually do something with Okay, so I wasn't sure how big this guy was but I think he's bigger than I thought so let me get him out of the paper here Stay tuned Okay, so this is in one of her thrift with me videos and for some reason I did not remember it being this big So this is hilarious, but I did ask her. I'm not I wasn't sure if she did it if she would sign the top and She did it says chosen goods reseller 2022 and it's a little cute snowman Okay, I have to admit it looks way cuter in person than it did in the video I was totally confused by why she got it For my best friend Courtney Love Carissa. Oh, that is so sweet We have become really really good friends. She is a great great friend If you guys don't know chosen goods reseller go over and sub her up, but how cute is he? so I told her I wanted her to sign it for when she became famous and That I was gonna get this out every year at Christmas. He's a little patchwork I don't know if it's ceramic or what but I'm gonna put this down with my Christmas decorations and pull it out at Christmas, so pretty fun little item. Let me know what you guys think in the comments Okay, Carissa. Thank you so much Love my stickers. Love my snowman now for a little recap of what I got at the thrift store today It wasn't much, but I think I got a few good things. So let's look at those close up All right, so I ended up picking up this little guy. I'm trying to think of what movie he's from I cannot think of it. Oh What is it? But anyway, it's a Disney store. You can see right there. It says Disney store He's just a little guy, but he's Christmas. I thought he was kind of cute and I think I can sell him He was 99 cents at the Goodwill. He is probably gonna be a bread and butter unless There's something I don't know about this guy. So Just a little cutie there. The next item I picked up is this little Boyd's bear I do pick up Boyd's plush if I can get them for a dollar or less There are certain Boyds that go for big money. I have a video on that if you haven't seen it Definitely go check it out. So, you know what to look for. This is not a big money one that I know of However, it is Noah's Ark and there is a series of Noah's Ark plush So I'm thinking he may do okay. I only paid 99 cents for him So I'm thinking he'll at least be a bread and butter. So a little cute plush there The next item I grabbed was This little guy and I think his name's Tom. I don't know if it's like supposed to be from Tom and Jerry or what? There's the little tag and if you push his hand It does that I think that's all it does or maybe it needs a battery Because it just that's it So I'll have to research him see if maybe he does something else. Oh wait, it lights up there I do not sound like that That is so funny. Oh My goodness, okay, that just made my day. I had no idea it did that Okay, so I guess when the hand is lit up Okay, so now it's probably recording and you can see it's got some where there where oh my goodness. I love it But he was $5 and even if he doesn't work, I think I can make my $5 back in a little bit His name is toothless and he's from the movie how to train your dragon and he's pretty big So he will probably be kind of a pain to ship I paid $4.99 from him the three plus for 99 cents each and that's all I got today from that thrift store Be sure to check out the description of the video like comment share and subscribe. Thanks for watching


case for Nick Carter master detective yes it's another case for that most famous of all man hunters the detective whose ability at solving crime is unequal in the history of detective fiction Nick Carter master detective tonight's curious adventure the unwilling accomplice or Nick Carter and the mystery of the society burglar well lieutenant what's new and interesting well well if it ain't my old friend Nicholas Carter him that used to be a detective here what do you mean used to be sure my boy tell me how does it feel to be old and retired oh come now Riley I get it a little peeve because I've turned down those few cases you've offered me lately it's not a few separate cases Nick it's all been the same gang I'm sure of it the slickest bunch this department's ever been up against we need your help Nick look at this came over the wire only this morning another society rubber quite a hole yes my boy quite a hole seventy five thousand dollars in gems right out of the vault when you say now Nick really I think you're right looks like the same hand in every job well well I suggested for your criminal you look for someone who's accepted in the homes of society and it's just about the greatest safecracker in the country as well oh thank you Nick that's a very great help I'm sure I'm sorry Riley but really I'm not interested you know I don't take a case and that's what in the name wow that was close that stone missed you by inches sure somebody's trying to be in me now is it well I'll fix that wait a minute wait a minute Riley that isn't it this seems to be a little matter of communication communication yes look there's a note tied to that stone well no hand that over here here you are and let's see what it what is well I listen to this Nick my dear Lieutenant Riley since the jobs I have pulled off lately have so completely mystified your department may I suggest that you call upon the services of your very good and able friend Nicholas Carter it won't help much of course but at least I'll then have an adversary more worthy of my talents you see I'm very in the pattern and going on to much bigger things today it has been the national loan and trust company it is not only theft but murder as well well Nick what do you make of that very interesting interesting is it why the cheek of him the national loan and trust company he says and murder he says we're dealing with a conceited maniac give me that phone I'm going to check up on this unless it's now 5 30 on Saturday afternoon Riley I doubt that you'll find anyone at the bank ladies gentlemen here to see you they say it's most urgent well what are you waiting for show me in yes sir yes let me to introduce myself I'm Butler Pierce and this is Miss Olive Belden my fuel say I'm pleased to make your acquaintance now what can I be doing for you you can help us find Miss Belden's father he's missing oh mission yes it has been gone for hours and I'm beginning to fear something dreadful may have happened oh excuse me this is Nick Carter miss Belden and mr.  Carter would you would you I mean isn't your alarm somewhat unwarranted your father hasn't been missing very long I take it that's true mr. Carter only three hours to be exact but under the circumstance what miss Belden means mr. Carter is that it seems as if her father had disappeared into thin air how do you mean mr. Pierce well the last time she saw him it was through the living room window from there she could look out over the court into his private office at the bank and when she bank did you say bank mr. Pierce well yes olives father is Wayne Belden president of the national loan and trust company did you hear that Nick the national loan and trust company yes rally they're not a minute to be lost come on let me get this straight miss Belden you say your father came into his private office here through that special passageway that leads from the house to the bank that's right mr. Carter father often spent Saturday afternoons here writing letters I see and there was no one else in the bank at that time no this is Saturday you know and is after banking hours of course when was the last time you saw your father about one o'clock mr. Carter he was sitting in his desk here writing a letter when I looked through the window again a few hours later he wasn't there sure he hadn't returned to the house positive I'd have seen the passageway opens right into the living room where I was reading what happened when you look for him it wasn't there well just about then mr. Pierce called on I told him about father's absence and we both went to look for him I see about what time was that oh about four o'clock so you you both went into the bank as soon as you missed your father yes we found mr. Belden's office just as you see it now then we looked all through the bank there wasn't a sign of him anyway now wait a minute all of you what was to prevent mr. Belden from walking right out the front door of the bank as easy as that that's not very likely lieutenant he was wearing his house slippers at the time and he had no coat or hat oh and not only that Riley you see this letter here on Belden's desk he was writing it when something interrupted him you notice anything peculiar about it well no he accepted he broke off in the middle of a sentence more important than that Riley he stopped in the middle of a word Belden was interrupted very abruptly oh that must be the cashier now hello mr. Cook come in I almost fell tonight got here just as soon as I could this is mr. Carter and lieutenant Riley now what's all this I hear about mr. Belden disappearing that's right mr. Cook but I've an idea he'll soon be found what do you mean by that mr. Carter I've asked mr. Cook to come down here because as the cashier of the bank he's the only one beside mr. Belden who knows the combination to the large vault and I want that vault opened immediately but that's impossible mr. Carter the large vault operates on a time lock it can't be opened until nine o'clock Monday morning we can't wait that long it must be open now I'm sorry mr. Carter that's impossible then I'll do it myself what it's impossible I tell you give me one hour and we'll see how impossible it is you don't seem to be having much luck do you mr. Carter don't you worry about that mr. Pierce I never saw the lock yet that could keep its secrets from Nick Carter very long not that kind of luck lieutenant why there isn't anybody in the world a good why haven't she did it there we are gentlemen I told you so Pierce really look there where is it Nick there in the corner yes miss Belden your father's been murdered how's miss Belden rally no she's all right now Nick mr. Pierce took her back to the house good well mr. Cook have you finished examining the contents of the vault yes mr. Carter and you were right there has been a robbery fifty thousand dollars is missing well I'll be just as the note said Nick remember theft and murder yes rally but the theft I'm sure it was just an afterthought mr. Cook did mr. Belden have any enemies why not that I know of what you tell me about mr. Pierce what you mean well was he friendly with mr. Belden oh yes yes quite they were very good friends they'd known each other for years and was mr. Pierce in the habit of visiting mr. Belden in his office at the bank oh yes yes very often he had an account here at the large one I might add mr. Pierce you know is a very wealthy man indeed yes what's that you've gotten your hand on Nick oh this is it's part of a cufflink rally with a very interesting stain on it a fresh blood stain where'd you find it Nick in the dead man's hand but there was no blood on the body he was done in by a crack on the skull there was no bleeding exactly rally undoubtedly the murder is on blood probably tore his hand on the broken edge of the cufflink in the scuffle do you want me for anything else mr. Carter oh no thank you mr. well good day oh mr. cook one more thing yes tell me is mr. Pierce and the habit of wearing his gloves indoors his gloves why why no never but wait come to think of it he was wearing them just now wasn't he yes he was well thank you mr. thank you very much founded patsy this is the strangest case I've ever worked on well you've certainly been acting strangely Nick pacing up and down muttering to yourself I just isn't a shred of evidence anywhere patsy as far as I can see no motive whatsoever yet I'm positive that Butler pierces our man that he's not only the murderer of Wayne Belden but is also the society rubber that's been battling the police for months now but Nick he's a rich man and Wayne Belden was one of his best I know I know patsy but it still adds up to Butler Pierce look he was thoroughly familiar with the bank thoroughly familiar with Wayne Belden's habits he called it the Belden house after the crime had been committed he wore his gloves indoors which might have been to conceal a bad scratch from a broken cufflink he arrived at police headquarters immediately after that stone had been thrown through the window but Nick miss Belden was with him when he called to see Riley surely you don't think he could have thrown that stone no patsy but his chauffeur could have while we're entering the building his chauffeur yes it was he who set me thinking on this line originally what do you mean by that patsy I got a good look at that chauffeur and I'm sure I've seen him somewhere before a long time ago and he wasn't on the right side of the law either well it all sounds like a big hunch to me Nick yes you're right patsy it's just what it is a big hunch although I have to admit your hunches are usually pretty good patsy I feel so sure this hunch is right I'm going to play it for all this worth well what are you going to do I'm going to start playing it right now let's scuppy for me we're going calling on Mr Butler Pierce you're taking a long time opening that safe Nick and it's a tough baby scuppy but I almost got it now oh I sure hope so Nick I don't think Mr Pierce would like to come home and find us here in his library and at this stage I grant you that would be a trifle embarrassing but when I get through ah I did it now let's see what we have here look at this boy it's full of jewelry and it's the real stuff yes unless I miss my bet every piece of it I'll enter the description of some stolen gem well let's see what else now uh-oh what's that Nick what does it look like it looks like a package of bills all big ones too exactly what it is scuppy let's see how much all right boy look at those thousand dollar bills fifty thousand dollar scuppy the exact amount stolen from the bank well of course it could be a coincidence yes it could be but I doubt it this doesn't scuppy we don't have to speculate any further this letter I found on the drawer here clears up everything listen to this dear butler this is a warning to you to permit you to escape if you care to do so I have definite proof that you're a thief and on Monday morning I shall place that proof before the proper authorities you have until that time to escape signed Wayne Belden gosh Nick yes scuppy gosh and there we have the motive for Wayne Belden's murder so your hunch was right after all Nick the rich mr pierce is nothing but a thief and a murderer scuppy oh look Nick you better get out of scuppy it just came to me what butler pierce's chauffeur is really jim martin I knew I'd seen him before jim martin I never heard of him Nick no that was before your time I tangled with him many years ago on the west coast one of the cleverest cracksman in the business he could open almost any safe I could oh so that's it he and pierce have been working together yes pierce with a front and real brains while martin supplied the technical skills so to speak oh I see well what now Nick scuppy yeah I want you to clear out of your quick take Wayne Belden's letter with you get it to Lieutenant Riley immediately and tell him to pick up jim martin oh well what about butler pierce don't you worry about him scuppy I'm staying right here I want to tackle butler pierce myself good evening Nick Carter what are you doing in my house waiting for you mr pierce what do you want I want you to be reasonable and not make any fuss this isn't the water pistol I've got in my hand have you gone mad what in the world are you talking about it's no go pierce you can drop the act I took the liberty of going through your safe oh so that's it you're pretty clever at getting into safe aren't you yes as good at it as your pal jim martin I see well I guess I underrated you Carter no pierce you overrated yourself perhaps what's your next move my next move is to turn over to the law a thief and a murderer turn around get your hands behind you uh-huh so there is a scratch on your wrist just as I expected there I guess those handcuffs ought to hold you for a while sit down in that chair and stay there oh hello Riley this is Nick oh yes Nick what is it Riley I got the murderer of Wayne Belden for you butler pierce butler pierce Nick are you sure you're not making a mistake quite sure scuppy should be at my headquarters any minute now with all the proof you want from pierce's home he's sitting in a chair right behind me with a pair of handcuffs on him I'll expect you to oh Nick are you all right he's coming to now patchy how do you feel Nick oh I'm all right I guess oh rather my head yeah that was a nasty bump you got my boy oh I'll take it easy Nick here give me your hand can you stand up all right boy yeah I guess I'm okay now what happened your guess is as good as mine patchy all I know is that I had butler pierce in my hands and now he's gone that's too bad Nick hey look at the safe it's empty naturally it would be good to leave all that evidence lying around yeah that's a good thing we got that letter at least yes but the important thing is to find pierce he must be pretty clever Nick getting away from you like that yes patchy he's all of that more you got away this time but I'll bring him to justice if it's the last thing I ever do well Nick we got Jim Martin anyway picked him up late last night good work Riley that's half the gang anyway yeah now if we only had butler pierce yes but I think it's gonna be a lot easier now with Jim Martin in our hands what do you mean got an idea Riley if it works it won't be long before we catch up with Wayne Belden's murderer well Martin we meet again yeah been a long time ain't it Carter yes but I never forget a face Martin no matter how much has been changed I must say though the doctor did a pretty good job on you but it just isn't quite good enough yeah you're a smart egg all right I guess the boy knows that by now it's a pretty keen one himself Martin I had him but he got away yeah boy he sure is a slick one and I thought when I had the cuffs on him say you didn't make the mistake of trying to hold him with a pair of handcuffs did you yes why there ain't a pair made that could hold butler pierce he's a regular whiz maybe so Martin you're in a pretty tough spot murders serious business murder honor you're barking up the wrong tree Carter I didn't have nothing to do with that but you did open the vault at the bank sure like I don't know all the job for Pierce after he paid the way but murder that ain't my racket maybe not but it'll go a lot easier with you Martin if you play ball meaning you know where Pierce's hideout is sure what about it they want you to help us put the finger on him now you want to know me better than that Carter that's what I thought you'd say I have a proposition for you Martin you help us track him down we'll set you free the answer is still the same I'm no stupid well Martin we're gonna let you walk out of here anyway what do you say to that I say it won't work Carter what do you mean listen I'm on to your game you're gonna set me loose so you can tell me that is because that's the last thing I'd ever do and I'm telling you that right now and yet Martin that's exactly what you're gonna do lead us right to Butler Pierce who would be off your nut I wouldn't even try to go near him in fact I'd do everything I could to throw you off I know that Martin and yet inspire yourself you're going to help us catch Butler Pierce uh quirk yes sir any mail for me today name's Martin James Martin just a minute I'll see oh nothing mr. Martin thanks hello Martin you expect you a letter from someone who are you I'll give you one guess that ought to be enough oh you must be the guy that's following me one of the guys Martin I'm scubby Wilson I work with Nick Carter I'm glad to see you you know I've been getting sort of anxious the last few days to know what you guys look like yes I can understand that must have been quite a strain on you knowing that you were being watched every minute of the day and not knowing who was doing the watching yeah it was sort of getting me down a little well that's what mr. Carter was figuring on I guess oh yeah not a good it's gonna do you never know Martin hey I can't figure this thing at all oh you're not supposed to Martin no you just keep on having a good time that's all you bet I will and as for Nick Carter you can tell him for me whatever his scheme is it ain't working see how do you know it isn't working I haven't led you to Pierce yet have I pal no not yet but you will you're nuts too you're all nuts good good night good night oh but Martin uh knowing Nick Carter as I do I don't think we're the ones that are nuts well Nikki don't look like that little plan of yours is going to pay off does it now be patient Riley just a question of time at all but but Martin's been on the loose now for over two weeks how much longer we got to wait Nick as long as necessary who are we now yes Rana you agreed I'm positive but we're doing it's a one sure way of getting on Pierce's trail I sure don't seem very positive to me you've got plain clues men and detectives out looking for him haven't you well sure we set out a general alarm just as soon as Pierce got away from you have they brought him in yet well no see what I mean my way is slow Riley but it's sure well Nicole I can say is I wish I was as sure of that as you are if we don't get Pierce this way they've got it laugh me right out of the department using a valuable men and time just keeping an eye on his counter that should be behind bars this very second he will be Riley just as soon as we got Pierce too they keep him company uh police headquarters lieutenant Riley speaking yeah yeah he's here for you Nick yeah thanks for that oh oh yeah scabby yeah oh you did it okay that's fine scabby good work so long scabby well rally it looks like this is it yeah what happened did Martin finally get in touch with Pierce no rally it happened as I expected the mountain came to Mohammed who did what unless I'm very much mistaken Pierce has finally got in touch with Martin oh is it it's me Jim oh don't you recognize my voice hello Jimmy wow who are you may I come in uh look lady I'm afraid there's some mistake you got the wrong party there's no mistake Martin holy mack at you Pierce yes it's me gosh boys I've seen most of your disguises but this beats them all really look like a woman thanks hey you shouldn't have come here though boys it's dangerous yes Martin very dangerous for you what do you mean boys I don't like a squealer Martin a squealer me hey you got this all wrong have I never ratted on anyone boss I wouldn't start now not even to save your own neck you were in this thing as deep as I you know all right I know that but whatever gave you the idea I'd rat on you what gave me the idea oh I get it you mean why am I on a jail well honest boss this wasn't my idea Carter let me go you see he that's enough Martin think I'm a fool let you go just like that well I won't be so generous stool pigeon hey what are you doing for us no I ain't gonna use that get on me guess again squealer you're making a mistake for us please you gotta listen to me let me tell you how it happened oh my can you listen to me and I'll tell you Carter didn't have a thing on me not a thing do you understand yeah sure then he spotted your ugly mug put two and two together I didn't think anybody'd recognize that pan of yours anymore but somehow Carter did so he had you picked up and what he got out of you must have been plenty I swear to shut up why else would Carter have let you go I don't know I'll tell you why because you spilled the works Martin spilled the works and got your freedom for it no that ain't why they let me go it was all a scheme they had what are you talking about sure boss they told me they'd let me go if I steered them to the hideout but I wouldn't do it not me no so they let you out anyway yeah yeah that's it okay squealer I've heard enough now no boss no shoot Nick you're not the gun right out of his hand Nick Carter yes mr.  Pierce I based my plan on the belief that at bottom you were not so clever really and how do you mean that because instead of doing the really clever thing getting as far away from here as you possibly could I felt sure that your personal vanity would lead you to expose yourself to almost any risk in order to get the man you thought it betrayed you all gangsters react that way you can hardly consider me a gangster mr. Carter at heart that's exactly what you are and that's what I counted on so you had it all figured out yes I also counted on your pal Martin doing exactly as he did after we let him go we laid low for a while you prayed at what we were going to do but after a few days of that he got bored doing nothing just as I figured he would made a lot of money out of jobs you two did together and now we wanted to spend some of it so we stepped out visited the high spots stayed at a fine hotel so I heard yes I knew you matter of fact I counted on you forget we let him loose and had paid him well for squealing on you well pierce you put two and two together all right but you got the wrong answer and the wrong answer you got is going to send you to the electric chair is the end of the road for you mr. Pierce mr. Carter I gotta take my hat off to you really Martin and to what am I indebted for this great honor oh you said I'd lead you to pierce and I said I wouldn't you made me do it you even know what I was thinking all the time I did it yes Carter you're cleverer than I thought you were thank you gentlemen I'm very happy I can't say the same for you too this has been another of the strange adventures of Nick Carter master detective which are brought to you regularly at the same time each week by W.R. Mutual oh what's your story going to be next week Nick the title of the story that I want to tell you next week really gives you the clue to the whole thing I call it the corpse of the cab oh you mean I suppose that you're going to tell us how the corpse got into the cab who the corpse was and so on is that the idea that's the idea mr. Scott but it's not nearly as simple as it sounds when you tell it there were no clues on the court no means of identification at all that isn't quite true Patsy it would have been literally true if you hadn't been called in on the job you know Lieutenant Riley was completely down yes but I'm not sure just how little it takes to stump my friend Riley completely anyway mr. Scott if Nick hadn't been able to apply a little real deductive reasoning to the few bits of evidence he could find the case would still be a mystery I know that well Patsy however that may be I can assure you that next week's story will keep you guessing right to the very end and until then so long folks so long everybody and so long do you both Nick and Patsy in the strange adventure you have just heard Nick Carter was impersonated by Lon Clark Patsy by Helen Choke scubby by John Kane the story was written for Nick Carter by Ralph Burkey original music was played by Luke White the entire production was under the direction of Jock McGregor next week at the same time listen to another curious experience of Nick Carter entitled the corpse in the cab or Nick Carter and the mystery of the murder in the park this story is a copyrighted feature of street and Smith publications incorporated the return of Nick Carter is produced in the studios of WOR and is broadcast over most of these stations every Saturday evening at seven o'clock eastern wartime and don't forget the adventures of Nick's adopted son Chick Carter are broadcast over most of these stations Monday through Friday at 5 30 p.m. eastern wartime this is mutual