So this work, which is joint work with Juan Garay and Ángel Oscarllas, we study properties of the Bitcoin protocol in a setting where the hardness of proof of work changes over time to accommodate for changes on the number of parties. It is based on previous work where we study the protocol in a static setting where the number of parties was fixed. And the core of the Bitcoin protocol was abstracted and for the first time we provided a proof and formal analysis on its properties. We also showed how to build applications on top of the Bitcoin backbone protocol like on sensors and of course a robust transaction ledger as in Bitcoin. There were follow-up works with model variants and extensions where additional properties of the blockchain were studied or different network models like the partial sensors model and also on the next talk we'll see simulation based security. Now all the above works assume a fixed target which means a fixed hardness in the proof of work puzzle and this is not how Bitcoin works. So in reality Bitcoin employs a target calculation mechanism and every now and then it adjusts the hardness of the proof of work to accommodate for changes on the number of participants. And in this work we provide a formal analysis in this dynamic setting. We also show how properties we proved in the static setting carry over to the dynamic setting and there is also a new analysis methodology which simplifies all the proofs in the static case. So the model we work on is the fully synchronized model so time is divided in rounds. All parties that participate in the protocol are equivalent and the power of the adversary is expressed by the number of parties it controls. The honest parties act independently but the parties controlled by the adversary can collaborate. Communication is done by broadcast and the adversary can send a message only to a subset of the parties and it can also reorder a party's messages which as we see later it gives him certain powers. And also the setting is anonymous so you cannot even decide if two messages come from the same party. So we are going to study a distributed algorithm and the main object is the blockchain so this is the data structure that each party has in its private memory and we're going to focus on two ingredients of the blockchain. The first is that it's hard to generate a block so the hash value of a block has to be less than some target value t. Note here that by calibrating, by adjusting the target value t you can adjust the hardness of the proof of word, the hardness of generating a block. Another ingredient is that for a block to extend the previous one it has to contain its state, it has to contain its hash value. So both of these properties make the blockchain tamper resistant so what we should keep from these properties is that the adversary cannot really manipulate existing blockchains to change the data on some blocks he should change all subsequent blocks and so it takes a lot of work or discover a collision of the hash function and we model the hash function as a random oracle. Also recall that you can adjust the hardness of the puzzle by adjusting the target t and so without loss of generality we're going to think of the inverse of the target as the difficulty of reducing a block. So this is the algorithm so every party participating on this has in its memory a blockchain and what it does when the round starts is the following. First it listens to the network for blockchains that were broadcast by other parties in the previous round. From the collection of these chains it's going to pick the longest one or the heaviest one so actually the first longest one and this is where order matters because the adversary has a longest chain and it's longer than the parties then it can force the party to adopt the adversarial chain. After choosing the longest chain the party now is trying to extend it and this is really modeled by a Bernoulli trial where the probability of success depends on the target t or that the block should have. And finally if the party is successful in this Bernoulli trial or if it just got a longer chain from the network in the end this new chain is broadcast to all the users. So let's visualize this with an example. So initially everybody starts with an empty chain but later on the non-sparking might compute a block so a white block is a block computed by the non-sparking. Later on maybe on a single round both the non-sparking end the adversary compute a block so in this case a fork is created so the asterisk is supposed to mean that you have non-sparkings on both of these chains the upper one and the lower one. Another thing that can happen is that the adversary can compute a block and not announce it to anybody so he can keep it to himself and then say later on when an honest party extends the upper chain he can broadcast it at the same round and maintain the fork similarly here or the honest parties, two honest parties may compute a block on the same round and this way they just fork by themselves. So this can continue this like so, so in the end you can have a picture like this so what I want to take from this picture is that this is not a good picture so we have three chains of longest length in the end with honest parties on all of them and the two upper ones have a very large fork so this would keep parties from having an agreement on what the block chain is they have completely different views and it makes it hard to build a cryptocurrency on top of this so such a picture will be much better so we still have a fork but it's very small so this is a property we want from Bitcoin and in particular if we are building a transaction ledger what we want is that if at any point some transaction is confirmed by an honest party then from that point onwards every honest party will find this transaction at the same position in the ledger so this property we call persistence another property is that well you want the transactions eventually to get into the ledger you don't want the adversary to have the power to stop the transaction from appearing but we will be proving properties of the block chain so we want to express these properties as properties of the block chain so the sister property of persistence is common prefix property which basically says that any two parties the block chains of any two parties share a large common prefix or otherwise if two parties prune a few blocks from the end then they end up with the same chain another property is the chain quality property so this means that if you look at a large enough sequence of blocks in the block chain then you will find among them enough blocks that come from honest parties they're not going to be all adversarial and finally the chain growth property so in Bitcoin this basically says that if the honest parties compute 100 blocks then their chains will have grown by 100 blocks the adversary cannot stop that so now let me review the proof of a common prefix property in the static case where you have a static fixed number of parties so as we've seen what we don't want we don't want large forks so here is a large fork and let's see what bad things this fork implies what bad events so the key observation is that if you have if some block is complete is computed at a uniquely successful round so at every round the parties engage those Bernoulli triads if at a round exactly one honest party computes a block then we call this round uniquely successful so the observation is that if say the fifth block is computed at such a round a uniquely successful round then any other fifth block in any other chain should have been computed by the adversary so after this observation the proof is almost done because what you can do is you can pair up honest blocks with adversarial ones so for each block that is computed by an honest party at a uniquely successful round you can find a corresponding adversarial block and after setting up some rounds appropriately you end up with the fact that a large fork implies that in a certain set of rounds the adversary got as many solutions as the uniquely successful solutions of the honest parties so the moral of this is that if the proof of work is really hard so in every round you have a small probability of success then your successful rounds is almost as many as your uniquely successful rounds and so if the adversary has less than half the power then this is a low probability you're just comparing two binomials so the chain of bounds as exponentially as more probability and you're done so however in the dynamic execution if you just keep the target fixed and the number of parties starts increasing then your block production rate is going to get closer to 1 the probability of a successful round is going to get closer to 1 and the persistence breaks and the comma prefix breaks well the proof breaks but also if you have a lot of honest parties you think singularity solutions on any round they're going to fork by themselves and also the problem is block production rate drops to 0 because then well liveness is here and no new blocks get generated and in reality Bitcoin strives to maintain a constant block production rate about 1 block per 10 minutes and the way it does that is exactly by adjusting the target T and if you think about it you'll realize that you want to do this in a distributed manner so what can you do so a natural thing that comes in mind is to set the target of the next block by looking at your previous how fast your previous blocks were computed so we'll see details about that later for the moment note that in this setting now with each block we associate a weight, a difficulty which is 1 over T so the harder to compute the block the higher the difficulty it is so the higher its weight in the chain and now parties follow the heaviest chain instead of just the longest one and so let's see the comma prefix how much of the comma prefix prove carry over to this setting so again let's see a long fork but this time let's think of the chains as a continuous accumulation of difficulty and let's see the same observation hold so imagine some difficulty at some point 8.3 on a chain so let's say the difficulty on point 8.3 on a chain was computed at a uniquely successful round it belongs to a block that it was computed at a uniquely successful round then difficulty 8.3 at any other chain has to be provided by the adversary it has to be in a block that was computed by the adversary so as before this allows you to show that a large fork implies an inequality between the difficulty accumulated in uniquely successful rounds by the honest parties and difficulty accumulated by the adversary but then how do you show that this is a low probability event so in the static case this was easy we were just comparing two binomials so chain of bound would give you the low probability of this event in the dynamic case now you really have two martingale sequences so if you condition if you stop at any time execution you still have those Bernoulli triads but the probability of success depends on the actions of the adversary it depends on the targets you have and those depend on the actions of the strategy of the adversary so it's not clear how to proceed you have to prove the target calculation works and keeps the probability of success about constant okay so let's see now how Bitcoin actually does achieves that so what it does is that at every some constant number of blocks that's AM blocks you have to recalculate the target so if you have a chain with a multiple of M number of blocks then you have to calculate the target for the next block and informally what it does is that it looks at the last time blocks so this period is called an epoch it looks at how fast the epoch was computed and if it was computed faster than you want you just make the proof of work harder if it was computed slower you make it easier and if you think about it there is a very reasonable thing to do so you say okay I look at M blocks and I want my block production rate to be F so every block should be computed in about one over F rounds so M blocks I should get them in about M over F rounds but say my epoch was finishing delta rounds then because when block production rate is small the F and T are linearly related approximately it makes sense to set a new target to increase it by a factor of delta over M over F so if it was finished 1.1 times faster you're going to increase the target by decrease the target by 1.1 now interestingly if this is just you do there is an attack so Bajak I think in 2013 posted a paper on E-print with an attack in this case in which basically the adversary ignores what the honest guys do and he just builds an epoch by himself finishes an epoch by himself with fake timestamps so the timestamps show that it's like the epoch has finished very quickly which would mean that the next target should be really small so the next proof of work should be really difficult with a very high difficulty and then if the adversary is very lucky and he succeeds in computing a single block very quickly he can create a very large fork so if you do some calculations this can be shown to work with constant probability but Nakamoto knew this so this is not what Bitcoin does so Bitcoin uses the same formula exactly with the only difference that if this formula says that you should increase your target by a multiple larger than 4 then it says you should stop there so you shouldn't do more than 4 or you shouldn't decrease your target by more than 4 that's it so this stops Bajak's attack because you can't, you should wait longer until the hardness has increased by as much as you would like the problem now is, that arises is that if the parties increase very quickly in say a period of an epoch then target calculation won't catch up so you increase by a large factor and you are adjusting the target like they're increased by 4 in the end you're going to fall behind and the question then is what kind of security can you prove in this situation and it seems that you need to assume some bounds on the fluctuation of the number of parties and the theorem we prove is like the following so we say that if in a certain number of rounds the number of parties do not fluctuate too much by factor of lambda then all the properties you want from Bitcoin still hold under of course assumption that the adversary still has a minority of the hash power and that your initial parameters will set properly so how does the proof go in a very high level so we show that if you start with good parameters then every chain ever adopted by an honest party enjoys the following properties one it was never abandoned by honest parties for too long so every now and then an honest party was trying to extend it from these then you can show that the time stamps are about accurate so the adversary has not produced has not managed to make you adopt a block which has a very which has a time stamp that is way off of the recreation time of the block and then using the above you can show that actually the calculation points are very good so they give you a target which is close to the ideal one which in turn gives you that all the blocks in the chain you adopted have good targets good targets meaning that the block production rate for this target is where you want it to be so to sum up you can show that any block in a chain adopted by honest parties has accurate time stamps and good targets and from these then the old proof in the static case can carry over to the dynamic case so now how do you implement how do you follow this proof roadmap so the problem here is that these statements are kind of interleaved together in a proof so one uses the other and if you try to do a probabilistic analysis it seems that you condition you create conditional probability probability space is that you don't understand the structure very well and the way out of this was to define the notion of a typical execution so we define a set of typical executions which basically contains all executions where our random variables are concentrated around their expectation and having defined the typical set of execution and proved that it contains almost all executions under the probability measure then we can do proofs in a combinatorial manner without considering probabilities at all so for example for the static case where you know the probability of a success of the block production rate is constant is f you can just use the chain of bound to say that any sequence that has a number of successes concentrated around the expectation is typical but how do you do this in the dynamic case so to appreciate the difficulty let us consider the following game so suppose you are playing a game with an opponent and at each round the opponent is choosing a probability p and then you flip a coin you engage in a Bernoulli trial which has a success probability p and if there is a success you gain 1 over p so this corresponds to the difficulty that you compute when you are successful or if you lose with probability 1 minus p you lose 1 over 1 minus p so this defines a Martin game but note that the adversary is deterministic you can think of it as deterministic but it's also adaptive so at every round the adversary can look at the past and decide what's the new probability in your Bernoulli trial so how do you define the typical set for this one so the problem is that so how large a set of rounds should you look into the probabilities could be very small and maybe you should look at the largest set of rounds and the solution gives the following result which you can find in a survey by MacDarmin called Concentration which we, well we shouldn't we shouldn't pass all of this right now but let's look at the final statement what this says is that if you have a Martin game like in the stochastic process before the game we just saw then what you can say is that the event that you don't have concentration and you have small variance small sum of conditional variances is very small in other words either you have large variance or you have concentration so using this you can define the typical set and then the proof at a very high level goes as follows so you show that if you start with a good execution but somewhere in the way your block production rate is not where you want it to be then concentration was violated why the variance was small which is a small probability event by this year so finally just some pointers for future work is that so our bounds we get are not good for the real-world parameterization of Bitcoin so it would be interesting to improve the analysis and get some tight analysis another thing which is interesting is to study it in the case where in the partial synchronous model where there is a delay on the messages and another question is to study the target recalculation mechanism one could think other things he could do to recalculate the target so is the best one so that's all thank you thank you for being here


President of the United States. These proceedings with the Color Guard from the National Guard Armory of the District of Columbia, followed by the National Anthem. You may be seated. And now to present the honorary chairperson of our 40th anniversary United Negro College Fund dinner is my privilege to present the President and Chief Executive Director of the United Negro College Fund, Dr. Christopher E. Edley. Thank you, Mr. Congressman. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome one and all, the delegation. Our guest tonight has used his stroke of the pen to issue an executive order on black colleges, which gives us great hope. But equally important, this administration has provided direct assistance to private black medical colleges, how it should last month for Black College Day. A few months ago, he made a TV public service spot for the United Negro College Fund, urging the nation to support us. One of the largest gifts UNCF has ever received was recently received because a business executive heard our guest's urge support for black colleges in a private setting of austerity. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my privilege to present to you your honorary chairman of this dinner and the president of the United States. Thank you. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you, Christopher. Edley for that kind introduction. And thank you all for a heartwarming reception. It's a pleasure to be here tonight with Effie Berry, who chaired this dinner, and with so many friends and supporters of the UNCF. Nancy and I consider it a high privilege to serve as your honorary chairpersons. And I know that she would have been with me here tonight, except they've got her down in San Antonio, Texas. Politics may make strange bedfellows. They're kind of breaking some up now and then, especially in campaign years. But Vice President Bush has other things in his mind, as you can well imagine, but he asked me to give you his regards tonight. The United Negro College Fund has met a great deal to George ever since he became an organizer for the fund during his student days at Yale. Education has always had a special place in the hearts of black Americans. Great figures like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington grew up at a time when, in many parts of the country, it was actually against the law to teach black children to read and write. Yet they overcame these injustices to become among the greatest educators our nation has ever seen. In our own time, no less a figure than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stressed the importance to black Americans of good education. Dr. King said, we must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. And he understood that no activity requires more discipline or confers greater dignity than the training of young minds. Education has meant so much to black Americans because for so long they had to fight for it. Just a few decades ago, almost one American in 10 lived a life that was separate and unequal because of the color of their skin, excluded from public life and from many of the professions. And throughout those hard years, millions of black Americans saw education as a shining hope for advancement. And it was the colleges you worked so hard to sustain, Tuskegee, Spelman, Fisk, and so many others that turned that burning hope into a blazing reality. I remember how, during the war, I narrated a film. I was in the Air Force myself, but they kept track of what my occupation had been before. I narrated a film about black pilots being trained at Tuskegee Institute. They were brave young men, and one of them would go on to become a great general, a great patriot, and a national hero, Chappie James. I'll never forget how impressed I was by their esteem for Tuskegee and by their deep love of learning. And I slip in here a little bit and tell you that I'm extremely proud that just recently they made me an honorary member of the Tuskegee Flyers. Now, that's quite a step for a former lieutenant of horse cavalry.  For many years, you in the United Negro College Fund have served these colleges and universities with just that true loyalty and devotion. You've provided these schools and their students with millions of dollars in crucial funds. You've played a vital role in enabling their enrollment to grow by some 10% in the last 15 years. And each year, there are 45,000 students on campus who are either receiving support directly from you or attending colleges that you help to maintain. Now, that's a record of which you can be mighty proud. Our administration joins you in supporting our black colleges and universities. In September 1981, as you were told, I signed Executive Order 12320, committing the federal government to increase its support of historically black colleges and universities. In fiscal year 1982, these schools received federal assistance totaling $564 million, and in fiscal year 83, we increased that level to $606 million. Just as significant, my Executive Order are also called on the federal government to encourage the private sector to give these vitally important schools still more support. The self-reliance and opportunity that we want for America's black colleges and universities are just what we want for all our black citizens, indeed, for all Americans. We're working to create enterprise zones to help disadvantaged Americans, especially those in our inner cities, to get off welfare and onto the economic ladder. We're supporting the youth employment opportunity wage to help teenagers find jobs. And across the board, we're striving to create vigorous, long-term economic growth. We believe that opportunity builds prosperity and that prosperity means a better life for individuals, for families, and for the institutions, like black colleges and universities, that Americans cherish. A genuine opportunity society. That's what we're trying to build and that's what the United Negro College Fund is all about. Just think, the black colleges that you support have awarded degrees to half of all black business executives and 85% of all black physicians. And your support has been vital to nearly half of these institutions. One of the most profound aspects of your work is to help black and white Americans come to realize that in Dr. King's words, their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. No, we can't walk alone. So much of our country's future lies in the dreams of students who depend on the United Negro College Fund. They're dreams of opportunity and prosperity. They're dreams of becoming doctors, lawyers, and statesmen. They're dreams of breaking new ground to the limitless frontiers of science, technology, and space. Together, let us walk into a bright future where all these precious dreams can and will come true. Thank you, and God bless you all. We're very grateful to the president and I will escort him out in just a moment. I just want to say to all of you that this has been a very busy day for him and he still has an exciting evening ahead of him and we want him to see the beginning of the event that he's attending, so thank you. But I just finish with one thing. You were kind enough to refer to my going to a small college but I also had to work my way through that college and I had one of the better jobs that I've ever had in my life. I washed dishes in the girl's dormitory.


If this is just a weasley way of trying to apply two trans identification, a greater standard for justification than exists for any other term or concept. Any time anybody ever uses a word in the definition, it leads to an infinite regress. Something that's cool is something that's cool. I don't think you're going to find a better definition than that. I've heard a lot of trans activists say, well, if you can't define chair, then we don't owe you a definition of man or woman. There would be no Shakespeare. We would all be limping like zombies through the streets. Not only is it circular, it's viciously circular. I think there is utility in referring to trans men as men purely for harm reduction purposes. But I also think it's true. I think that, in fact, the reason there's utility in it is because it is true. The only thing that I care about is the argument from self-identification. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I don't think it's circular. It turns out, most definitions, if you get to the root of them, are pretty impossible to nail down, right? You've probably heard of, or maybe even seen the Vsauce video, what is a chair? Turns out nobody can define what a chair is. By nobody, I don't mean not just internet people or people who do the debate circuit.  It's a matter of what's useful to us. Okay. So are you endorsing this self-identification? I know you mentioned you don't see it as circular. So a man could be somebody that identifies as a man? Of course. Okay. So I will address the argument from circularity first. So while it is true that at a certain point, we run out of words to describe things, and this can be seen if you ask somebody, well, what does that mean? Well, what does that mean? Well, what does that mean? At a certain point, we run out of words. And when we do run out of words, what we do is we point to things within reality, as we just start pointing to particulars. Let me try to derive a universal, like with triangles. We start pointing to acute obtuse triangles and trying to see what they have in common. That is how we take that idea. Now, the problem with saying a man is somebody who identifies as a man is that not only is it circular, it's viciously circular, because if somebody were to ask you, Vosch, a man is somebody who identifies as a man, what is that? What is a man? I could point to myself. I'm a man. I could point to other men. There are billions of them. I could point to lots of them. I love pointing to men. Okay. So if somebody asks you, what is a man? I don't think you would need to point, because you seem like we still have words left to give. So if they were to point to two men, like, these are both man. What do they have in common? Would you do this with a chair? I think we would do that with anything. That's how we come up with categories is that we look at what things have in common. But the chair argument, I would say, I've heard a lot of trans activists say, well, if you can't define chair, then we don't owe you a definition of man or woman. The first thing I would contest with that is, well, you're the one that made a claim about men and women. When I never made a claim about a chair, I never claimed a stool as a chair, I never claimed a bed as a chair. Yet, trans activists do claim that trans men are men and trans women are women. So when you do claim for the truth of something, you do need to define it. The second argument is that just because something like a chair doesn't really have something that we give thought to. If you're engaging in this debate, you're engaging in the gender discussion, I'm going to assume that people have given thought to it. We didn't give thought to the gender thing either. I don't think it's particularly important, but you're also making a claim. I could be out in the park. I could point to the bench or maybe a bit of a stone outcropping that I could sit uncomfortably and say, ah, a chair. You could insist rigorously that it is not a chair, that it is a bench or an outcropping or some other thing that is like, but not like a chair.  The only consequence of this would be the calories we burn by yelling at each other. It's a meaningless discussion because at the end of the day, a chair is just a general term we have to describe a thing we sit on. People's specific boundaries will expand or contract based on their preferences. It's like arguing whether or not a pop tart is a sandwich. They're deliberately meaningless questions. This is why I do not like the circularity argument definition in a purely like linguistic sense at the root of all things. They're all circular. We generalize a concept and the worth of a term is how specific an image we can evoke. How useful is it? But there's no truth value in any of these terms. We make the terms. If we want, we could split the term chair and just say the term. Terms can have true value. Like for example, before humans came into existence, were homo sapiens came into existence. Do you think gravity existed? Well, sure. Do you think gravity as a concept existed before the word gravity existed? Yes. We gave term to the concept. Yeah. So we just recognize that concept, some force among these large masses of objects and we put a word to it. So that's with any concept. But that's a concept first of the word itself, not created. But that's a truth value to a universal concept, not to the word. The word gravity, the truth, if one were to say, for example, no, gravity can refer to this, that the other, but not to this particular phenomena. Actually, gravity doesn't specifically refer to the way, say matter interacts with dark matter or the way light bends around black holes. We're going to re-term this. It'll be a different word. There would be no truth value with that because again, we made the word gravity. The fundamental universal concepts remain the same. Biological sex remains the same. But experiential phenomena, the way we term and define things, we build those boundaries. And when it comes to, especially when it comes to something that's defined relationally, socially, like gender, there is no discovery of gender. Our understanding of it has changed enormously over time and between cultures even today. So the idea that we're discovering and giving name to some kind of fundamental truth is just not the case here. We're all winging it. And I don't think we should wing it in ways that are exclusionary or harmful. If we are having a discussion on an arbitrary concept, we should lean towards ones which give greater understanding and lesser harm. Yes. So with the man as somebody who identifies as a man, lessening harm or whatnot, I would still argue that when you say a man is somebody who identifies as a man or anytime anybody ever uses a word in the definition, it leads to an infinite regress. Whereas if we don't have words at all, like say we both couldn't speak or communicate, we would still have our senses to point to things. So that's discreet. Right? At a certain point, all you can do is discreetly point to things. Whereas if you define a man as somebody who identifies as a man, who identifies as a man, who identifies as a man, it ends up being infinite. There's no way to ever come to a close there. This doesn't mean anything. What does it mean to be cool? See, you can find synonyms for what it means to be cool. You can find lots of them, in fact. But in reality, at the end of the day, we all learn what it means to be cool by being shown examples. And despite that, the examples we're shown are the highest level of arbitrarity. What was cool 50 years ago is not cool today. And what is cool now will not be cool 10 years from now. So we're talking about a concept, coolness, which everyone has some understanding of, which exists all over the world, which is fully social and which can be referred to only through direct example. I don't like, see, there's infinite regress thing. This is something that I did not learn from reading linguistics, but I did learn from the internet debate pro circuit. I think this is just a weasley way of trying to apply to trans identification, a greater standard for justification than exists for any other term or concept. Because I just don't think that we do this for other things. The infinite regress of coolness, who cares nerd? What's cool is cool. Yeah, so what other word besides man and woman do you define, who use the word in the definition? Use the word in the definition? What do you mean? You said a man is somebody who identifies as a man, which uses the word man in the definition of man. So what other words besides man and women do we use to define themselves? We could just say like a man is somebody who identifies with the gender role associated with masculine behavior, but not exclusively. If you want to like avoid the word man, that is purely a semantic argument. Okay, because I can construct an infinite number of definitions for man that adhere to my understanding of what a man is without actually using the word man. That's just a word game. But if you talk about like how much are we actually advancing or understanding of the concept, well, whether or not you have synonyms because cool has many synonyms, they're only synonyms. And a synonym does not give you an understanding of a word, right? Like you don't learn what cool is by learning what the term rad means. And because when you read the definition for rad, it's like, oh, rad. Oh, that means that something's sick. Well, we're not learning anything. We're just finding extra words here. Would you say that something is cool if it identifies as cool? If it's identified to be cool, then certainly. Identified or identifying? Well, something can't identify as cool because coolness is a concept, not a person. So it would have to be identified from outside. Yeah, I think that's just comes into my other thing. Like there's no feature of reality you obtain simply by identifying as having such. So I don't know why this thing wouldn't be true for man. But that's not the infinite regress argument. Now we're talking about whether or not self-identification is a valid metric for social claims, but infinite regress is something that would apply to the term cool as well. Because outside the description of synonyms, you kind of have to just point to real life examples. Well, is it cool to do this, is it cool to do that? I think we identify things as cool if we show some type of enthusiasm or friendliness towards it, towards the noun, then we call it cool. That's not what cool means, and you know it. I think that's like the literal definition. Being enthusiastic. Yeah, I mean, I can check really quick, but I think that's actually the definition. Wait, wait, do you think that people use the term cool by looking up the definition of cool and going, oh, well, I mean, I can look really cool. Yeah, well, enthusiasm just means that it brings you some type of amazing sense. It doesn't have to be like enthusiasm in the way that you're describing it. When you describe something as cool, you just have a preference towards it. You like it. But liking something and it being cool are not even remotely the same thing. And anyone who uses the English. That's why I defined it as having friendliness or enthusiasm towards a noun. That also isn't really how we use towards a noun. What do you mean? Like noun is person place thing idea. So like, wait, thinking that like liking a thing would mean that thing is cool. Yeah, you could call it that. Absolutely. If you like a water bottle, that water bottle is cool. Do you do you really think that's how people like people's understanding of the term cool is just a sit in him for when they like a thing? I I didn't just say when they like a thing. I said, when they show enthusiasm towards a noun. Show enthusiasm. Give me a can you give me a counter example? Sure, absolutely. We can acknowledge that things or people are cool, despite not liking them like the cool kids in school, who we actually quite dislike because they're unapproachable and standoffish. We can say that things are cool, even though it's an act and like the act is not something you personally enjoy. Like I think that skateboarding is cool and a kind of like post ironic like sunset overdrive. Wow, look at how hard you're trying sort of way. But I have no personal affinity for it and find skateboarders quite annoying, actually, what is or isn't cool is an incredibly see the interesting thing here. And I think that anyone watching will understand that when they think of the term cool, it goes beyond, you know, liking a thing. Is that by trying to concretely define coolness, all you've done is robbed it of its coolness, you've taken a worthwhile and useful English term and you've crippled it in a in an attempt to bring it in line with the absurd standards you hold for gender definitions. In reality, if you were to similarly cripple every word of the English language, we would all be dead men. There would be no Shakespeare. We would all be limping like zombies through the streets. The fact that these words are fluid, that they have meanings and definitions that we kind of pick up on and pull and twist and play with. That's not only English. That's literature. And to have all of that white decide in going, no, a man has to be. No, it can't be regressive. It has to have this specific definition. We don't we don't apply these standards to anything outside of scientific technical definitions, like what grain of soil constitutes an acceptable range for like apartment construction, stuff that we decide the boundaries for. We don't do this narratively. I would say like with cool, we don't define something that's cool if it's called cool. Now, to make the use mentioned distinction a little bit clearer, cool must refer to something, right? Maybe it's maybe it's not something we like. Maybe it's just something that we attribute to something other people like either way, notice how when I said that I didn't use the word cool because using the word in the referent creates an uninformative definition. See, we're dead men right now. This is death. You're killing cool right now. It's a murder. And this is evidence for the police. Well, no, no, no, I know I know I mean it. I think we can move off of it if you want. But like, no, but I mean it, though, like, I don't think you believe what you're saying, right? Because like here, you know what's cool in American culture?  But American culture broadly doesn't find black people or black behavior cool.   So there's something countercultural about coolness. Something has to be brave, daring. It has to be evocative. It can't just be likable. Likeability, likability is Mr. Rogers. Okay, if you want to call it evocative, that's fine. It still doesn't mean cool is something that identifies as cool, something that is said that is cool. Well, I'm only talking about the infinite regress argument, not the identification argument. That's a separate thing. Infinite regress comes with using the word in the reference. So a woman is somebody who identifies as a woman, a man is somebody who identifies as a man. Something that is cool is something that people prescribe to be cool. Something that's cool is something that's cool. I don't think you're going to find a better definition than that. And trust me, linguistics have tried. I mean, linguists have tried. You can find papers on this stuff. These are not ideas that can be baked into a single definition. Do you think that, like, murder could be called cool? Absolutely. Yeah, there are tons of... Go read history. There are some metal goddamn murders that have happened throughout history. Yeah, they killed Julius Caesar, 57 people, stabbing him all at once. I don't know, that seems kind of cool and countercultural. Hell yeah. So I think maybe you show enthusiasm towards that idea and concept, but many others don't. And that's the way we define it. But there are lots of things that I think are cool that I don't like, for example. The Hugo Boss Nazi uniforms are widely regarded as being fashionable in the whole, like, evil, Sith, dark empire, black leather kind of thing. I don't find Nazis even remotely cool. If anything, that's more like cosplay. That's larping is cool. That's like, how do we make our horrible death soldiers look cool? But an effort was made, right? There's a reason they paid out for those leather uniforms.


Hello and welcome everybody Today, I'm going to give you a short overview on why your content might be trapped and how you can save it So let's get started When you first get to know WordPress the first thing you usually get to know is the editor For everybody who has ever used the desktop operating tool like M's work before this should be a pretty familiar interface You get immediate visual feedback of what is happening and it also looks mostly the way it will look on the front end But this is I mean, this is also one of the reason why it's probably so so easy to get started with WordPress but With everything easy and self-explanatory there are of course also some downsides So if you put all your content in the editor Everything ends up in one huge amorphous blob and then it is kind of trapped in the post-content field But why is that an issue? Let's have a look at an example So imagine you have this very simple portfolio website where each project has its own page And it's very basic just have a title the description and the name of the project manager for that project below So how do we do that in WordPress? Well, I mean you just create a new page type the description in and the editor put the name of the project manager below and you pretty much done and There works but now imagine that this site already exists for quite some time and you've already created a lot of those project pages and Now one of your project managers marries and therefore her second name changes And you want to have that on the website and update all the project so it has a new name How do we do it? Well, I mean you just open the page. It's just some text you change change the name for safe and you're done oh Wait, and then you realize you got to do that for all the other pages as well Which is a pretty tedious manual process of going through all the pages and changing the name and And in that process you also realize that when you type one a name so many times obviously typos happen And all of this gets you thinking this can really be the most effective way to go about all of this So let's give it some more thought So actually each person can only exist once so When one of those project pages is mentioning Jane The page is always talking about the same person right so What if instead of writing her name independently and repeatedly all over the website? We only created the person once and I only referenced it from all those project pages If we did that we we could only we would only need to change that personal details once and it gets automatically updated everywhere So how can we do that with workers? For a very simple example I'm gonna I just gonna reuse the workers users and create a very very basic short code That does nothing else than when you give it the ID of a user it outputs the name of the workers user it refers to and If we now replace the names with those short codes We're going from duplicate content spread all of our websites to a reference-based approach and Now we only we change the name once and it gets updated everywhere and just saves us a lot of time and Therefore improves the maintainability of our website enormously But we can still do better So up until now we've only put the name of the project manager at the bottom of the page by convention or now the short code at the bottom of the page and What if somebody isn't aware of that convention and for example puts the name on top of the description Also, what if we want to move the name? Maybe put it on top like globally for all the project pages after the fact Again tedious manual process of going through all the pages and moving the short code so what if instead of Instead of using a short code we added the the reference to the project manager or the workers user in that case As a custom field or post-mata to the project page By doing so we can hand over the The job of outputting the name at the right spot to our template and Now we have separated the content. What is the project manager's name? From the presentation. Where is the project manager's name shown on the page? And once the position is defined in the in the template We can also easily move the name for all the pages just by changing our templates And it automatically updates on all the project pages without any manual work So okay, it was a lot of information. Let's do short recap. So of what we have done. So first of all When we use references instead of duplicate content We only need to do changes once and they get updated everywhere. We have reference that content second when we separate contents and presentation Where the raw content goes in the database and the presentation is defined in theme We can now independently change content and its display without affecting each other and Finally, we're now also enforcing content structure and presentation Which among other things helps us keep consistent and clean Website and the great thing about all of this is that it works no matter if we're talking about 10 or 10,000 pages Although of course the bigger the site the more time it saves us But what is really important about all of this is that it's only easier if done from the very beginning Once you've matched all your content together inside the post content. There's really no easy way out again so think about that from the very beginning before you start building your website and Very simply put that is what you can call content architecture thinking about the structure of your content before creating it Okay, so thanks a lot for listening I know that my example was very simplified in reality You'd probably use custom post types and custom taxonomy and create a nice UI for all of this but I think I'm already short in time, so I hope you still got my point and Yeah, if you have any further questions, I'm gonna be at the happiness bar right afterwards and Feel free to talk to me anytime for the rest of the work and and yes Thanks again for showing up and enjoy the rest of work You


Dear students, I welcome you in the course of Leadership, Emotional Intelligence and CNMaking. This is module number 158 and we are going to talk about working across cultures. Remember that when we are working across cultures, we have to develop our cultural intelligence. Our cultural intelligence, we have to understand how different cultures have different emotions and moods. Now to understand different emotions and moods across the cultures, there are certain things that we need to understand. The first important thing is that people in one area can understand better how the emotions and feelings of the people there are, why they are doing it and what jargons they use. So natives of a culture are better able to understand the cultural context in which they are actually operating. Firstly, complication is created when you are moving across the cultures because one culture's jargon can be different from another culture's jargon. One culture's demonstration of the mood and the emotions can be different from the demonstration of the mood and emotions in another culture. So we have to be careful, we have to be vigilant that the culture that we are interacting with, how are the people of that culture's emotions, thoughts, how they are, how they are outgoing, do they belong to weak culture or do they belong to strong culture? Similarly, we need to keep in mind that the emotions are actually another language, that is another input, because of which the expression of your thoughts can change.  Because until we keep these things in mind, in the cultural discussions, until then we cannot develop cultural understanding, cultural intelligence. Now remember, when we are moving across the cultures, there are a few more things that we need to understand. For example, we will have to see that in our emotions and other people's emotions, where there is a gap, where there is a problem, what is the thing that cannot be expressed, what is the factor, what is the expression that is being expressed. And on the back end of this, there are a lot of psychodynamic developments, there are a lot of cultural factors that are done. And we should be able to diagnose the root causes of all those things. Another important thing is that cultural sensitivity is very important. Obviously, cultural sensitivity is subjected to the value system of that particular culture. Because under that value system, the cognitive aspects of people, the effect of them, the behavioural context of attitude, all these things must be being influenced. So we have to see the values, we have to be culturally sensitive and the culture in which the sensitivities are taken care of and control their demonstration is very important. Another important thing is that during all this discussion, we should not look at the value system of others. What is their source of value? From where do they get the opportunity to live their lives? What is the way of life for them? What are the important aspects for them? In those important aspects, things can happen, people can happen, places can happen. So we have to see how and why those people give value to a different context. Because until we do not understand their value system, we cannot understand their cultural factors. Another very important thing is that when you are encountering across the culture, then try to pick their jargons. Try to understand that the demonstration of your emotions and their emotions is different. And how should you react? Because until we do not control our reactions and we do not develop our reactions according to those cultures, it will be difficult for us to get optimum outcomes in negotiations and decision making. Dear students, remember that cultural sensitivity and cultural intelligence are very important things when we are moving across the cultures. Many things in our culture are easy for us. But when we go across the culture, we should use sensitivity and intelligence there. Thank you.


Hey again everyone, I'm Steve welcome back to Retro Tech So this is the Sony pvm 1350 and it sold yesterday on a auction on eBay And today I'm going to go through in detail on how to pack it up So hopefully after you watch this video, you'll have a clear understanding of how to properly pack this and Also how to not spend too much money on packing materials because you can easily spend a whole lot more than you expect to So first off, let's go ahead now And we're going to take a look at everything I bought today to pack up this 14 inch Sony pvm So here we are looking at the first items and the first thing I've got down here is just some easy start take This is heavy-duty particular brand is duck that I bought this package of four will cost $10 at Walmart pretty much about that price You may be able to find a little cheaper if you order it online This job is going to take about two rolls. So you're looking at half the cost of that for tape That is a good $5 in tape. I recommend that you get some kind of roller To put on the tape. It just makes the job a little bit easier The next item I've got is over here to the right That's these pool noodles and I actually ordered this pack of pool noodles from eBay is a five pack And it was just over $10 for the five packs So these noodles are $2 a piece and I'm thinking it's going to take maybe Two to three noodles at least so we're looking at about six dollars in noodles At least on this job. We might end up having to use more But we'll see we'll keep a good tally and then the next things I'm going to be using are actually some recycled items. I have from past shipping things So first you'll see this padding foam And this is just going to be smushed together as much as possible and wedged in between the packed pvm monitor and The box basically so you'll see that as we pack it how I use this is just filler mostly and Extra cushion inside the box and then something else I'll be using for cushion is packing peanuts and Again, this is just to fill in the voids in everything once we have it packed up We're just going to have a nice cushion pressure around the tube and the monitor and that could be done by using that So I recommend that you use any kind of Reusable styrofoam you may have from other packaging you can break that up and use it for this portion Because again, I have no cost in this this is from past shipping jobs the packing peanuts You're looking at maybe three to five dollars for that kind of a bag of packing peanuts The last item we're looking at is our box for today's shipping now This is again straight from Walmart is a 22 by 18 by 18 large sized box And it's a pretty decent box The good thing is is we're going to use two of them So you would never want to use just one of these boxes you want to use two of them and again these boxes are not expensive Thankfully, these are under two dollars a piece So again less than four dollars for both boxes, but we'll double box this up I'll show you how to tape it up properly double box it so they don't have the most protection possible And then it fits a monitor that's 14 inches fits really well inside this box So now let's go ahead. We're going to go back to the monitor and just start packing it up All right, so the next part of this job is going to be real simple We're going to start cutting up our pool noodles and just beginning with our screen cover it up and protect it nicely Especially around the edges and all the little buttons so we're just going to start with one pool noodle and You might want to get yourself a nice set of scissors that are sharp and work I'm just going to go here and measure this against the monitor and then I'll just cut it Make a little cut. You don't have to worry about cutting it right away But that way I know how long I need to make this and then I can just flip that off and then cut it again down here And that'll equal about to three equal pieces that I can use to cover the front of this monitor I've got the pool noodles cut into equal thirds and the last thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to cut them this way and Equally on the other side And we're going to get them in half And we're going to look to half every single one of these this was just a leftover So it'll be used as a leftover section to fill in a spot that we need Now you don't really want to get a lot of tape residue around this clean monitor And the way I like to start building the outside is to take these halves So we're taking one half here And then we'll just build this around the outside of the monitor to start with and Tape those together with just a couple of small pieces of pre-cut tape and then build a frame around the PVM like that and You may need to come over here and trim off some of these Corner pieces to make them all fit up correctly But we'll go ahead now and tape that up so we're not getting any tape on the actual monitor our top ring has been completely built and Again, I'm not taping anything. I'm trying to get a little pressure on it. Not too much Now I'm going to cut an additional four pieces like that to put around the bottom portion And then we'll start filling in the screen area With more cushion pieces that are cut into halves. The bottom ring has now been built with this yellow cool noodle I did add a couple extra pieces here in this corner and I'm going to add additional Padding in here that I have just those little pieces that I've been collecting I'm going to jam them in here and fill this area up and make sure I get a nice protection on these buttons We'll recommend that when you ship these you push the power button in that way It's not going to hurt it to leave it like that But you can just push it in that way nothing will hit it Hopefully and cause it to become damaged. That's one of the first things that does get damaged in shipping Now the bottom has been completed. I'm just going to show you what I've done so you can get an idea I've cut up these smaller leftover wedges pushed them in behind here to tighten everything up Especially in like these corners see how there's some you'll end up with a couple of spots Just wedge those extra pieces up in there tightly So you can protect your power button and all the other buttons up in front here in these corner Buttons and then if we swing around to the back I've done the same thing back there with extra pieces and I've gone over it with some tape and it's pretty tight Like that's what you want more just not as much give it doesn't have to be completely tight But it also loops around under The pvm frame so it's a good thing about those circular pattern is it's easy to get under there and actually have it protecting the bottom Just more packing that's Two noodles right there. So we're up to two noodles already It'll take at least two more. I might take the whole bunch to properly do this now here is the wrapped Monitor it's good nice and tight it's all the way around the sides up to the top and That was one more Noodle that it took so total we've got three full noodles already in this now the bottom It does come out a little bit more Because it's got more padding down here extra pieces plus the buttons are protected So in order to get some more padding up here I'm going to add a piece of padding that I have right here. It's just some Kind of thermal in their liner thing pad. That's real thin. It's extra So I'm going to triple it up like this and then I'm going to tape it up and slap it right there on the front here And then we'll get that wrapped up So that's just some extra cushioning and we'll start working on Filling in the top and we'll flip the whole thing over and fill in the bottom with padding and get it ready to box Here we have added that thermal liner cushion. That was just some extra stuff. I had around the house that Our cycle for this job, but it gave it some extra cushion. It's tightly Wrapped around on all sides to give it a little bit more protection So we got a couple inches of protection on all of this And it's really nice because now it's flush And it'll fit in there evenly in the box and be nice and tight So now I just need to build up the top here Which will be more of this foam and I might even use some more of this wrap on top of it and tape it over And then we'll go from there But I've got my top done and my sides and bottom done It's nice and tight. I did add the layer of blue Which is a noodle and then use some more of that Thermal wrap to just you know, give it a little bit more cushion now. I'm going to lean it on its face roll it around You're going to tidy up the bottom of the monitor now similar to what we did with the top Give it a little push Some of this stuff down there That way Just put some padding in here and it'll be ready to go And now the only thing left to do is flip this back On to its bottom here tape up this Flap here on front and we'll be ready To be done with the packaging The monitor is now completely wrapped And I'm going to be moving it over here into the box now the inner box I flipped it upside down and I went ahead and taped up About three slices of tape up here One on each side and then I went around it after that Long or this ways Going around it this way So it's taped in there nicely and that's just going to give a little bit of protection to this corner And I tried to squeeze it a little bit together Because what I'm going to do Next is slip the second box, which is just open not taped at all I'm going to slip the second box over top of this box Just slip this over top See what I mean how it will slide down here And then make a two layer box So now I'm going to continue to push this box down This way even Just about with that And we'll re-pack it up We'll put some tape on the bottom here Get this nice and taped up One last tip here when I tape up the bottom of this box I always tape an entire layer of tape On the entire bottom side of the box And then I go around the box again And the reason I do that is to protect the bottom One inch section of the box from Moisture penetrating into it And destroying the box as it's being shipped Just in case there's a lot of humidity or moisture along the way When I'm shipping it But other than that It's time to simply turn it over And get the packed monitor Now inside this box Now I've put down a thin layer Of peanuts and this is again just to fill in the voids when I put the monitor wrapped up inside here I try to peek it up a little bit in the corners at the bottom And then flatten it out at the bottom so you can have some peaks in the corner That way when you set it in you'll have a little extra Cushioning on the corners It's ready now to put our monitor in Now it's time to put the monitor in the box So just do that Fits in there very nicely Take a look See what's even in there And those peaks That'll give you a little extra protection in those corners But the next thing to do is to stabilize this inside this box here And that's where I can add my old pieces of foam That I showed you at the beginning of the video Scrunched up in these corners as well as I'll probably put a layer Along each side of the box to give it an extra layer of cushioning Now the sides are complete Very dense this stuff is I've just wedged it down in there as far as possible along the edges and the sides scrunched it up Made it nice and dense And there's no way that's shifting in the box and it's got inches upon inches of solid Protection the last thing I'll do Is put a layer Of peanuts right on the top of it Spread those peanuts out Make sure they get into those voids Coria and then Pretty much finished professionally packing You prove video monitor Now I've finished the box. Let's look at the final touches here. So this is the side that the screen's on Right here I've not marked that in any way. I just know it But as long as it stays this side up, it should be fine So that's the natural shape of this box. It's also got some handles built into it, which is really nice Just push those in and now you've got a nice way on each side to hold this box And I've added up arrows with the big sharpie A fragile sticker. Now you don't have to do this. You could write fragile and save some money And then I put a layer of tape here and then the middle and then at the bottom And then up top I taped it all up top added a fragile sticker on top this side up Something that I just drew on and made this side up I did have to add a single piece of cardboard that I cut out of another box To have that completely sealed in there. So it doesn't look like it's got a gap or anything because it's expanded out a little bit on the top But that's pretty much it Now we'll take it up to FedEx and we'll see what they say about how much it's going to cost to ship it I just got back from FedEx and now I've got the details here on how much it cost to ship As well as the total packing cost. So let's start with the packing Ultimately it cost me about 20 dollars total to pack this item So that's about 10 dollars in pool noodles about five dollars in tape four dollars in boxes And then maybe a dollars worth of packing peanuts And all the extra stuff that I used in there would have been Left over or recycled from other packaging that I had received. So that didn't have any real cost to it Now for the shipping costs this one was going from Tennessee to Minnesota And for FedEx ground shipment it cost 58 dollars to ship it insure it in every I give you some final tips here If you do ever have to ship a pvm, please be in contact with the person who's receiving it because there are guidelines for these Coverages when it comes to shipping something this valuable And this fragile So you need to make sure that you contact your receiver and that they know to keep all the packaging In case anything happens to the high item high value item in transit They must keep the packaging because then they can show that to FedEx or whatever the carrier is They're the ones that if they're going to assume responsibility you have to prove to them that you Did what you were supposed to in the packing Well, that's pretty much going to do it for today's video. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you next time with some more retro content


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com coming at you with a quick little sell-a-pack break to give away the final Three prism choice spots prism choice break number two number three already up on the shop if you want to run that back So here, but let's do the break first. This is number 385 Big thanks to these folks. They're the teams right there. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it five into three eight times one two Three and eight so eight for the names and teams teams and eight in final time Rockets up 63 57 at the half There's trail and trailblazers playing a little bit later time playing my Lakers So trailblazers down to the Celtics Darren. What's going on? I? Have not heard an update on Lucas ankle. I Thought I heard questionable for the next game We tried playing on it. I wonder if he's just gonna give it a go Here's the first half of the list right here Speaking of Luca guy has the maves Paul with the pelicans and Then guy with the grills too All right, no trade windows and little things like this Let's sort by column B Let's print. Let's rip. Yes. I'm I'm I'm hoping for a better Better Better late blazers Lakers game today Darren. I think game one You know Lillard did his thing, but the Lakers weren't competitive in game two the Blazers weren't competitive Like I want to see like let's see it's an ABC game. It's a network national TV game Let's let's let's let's put on a show Let's make it a close one Let's let's see an overtone an overtime game. Let's see an overtime game Maybe maybe Talon Horton Tucker goes off tonight. Huh? Nice another nothing earth-shattering here except for this Talon Horton Tucker Obviously Sean Maddock. No. Yeah, Sean Maddock with my Lakers. Oh ouch So don't just Darren according to Darren. He's saying that the update was Lucas ankle Popped out and was bad. Oh update on Lillard's finger dislocated and pop back in not a shooting hand, though He'll be fine He's just spot up and shoot right there you go If Talon Horton Tucker goes off tonight, that's probably not a good sign for the Lakers All right, so let's copy everybody's name get him into here. It's gonna be the top three after Five in that prism choice break top three after five one two three Four and fifth and final time after five times big thanks to four through thirty For giving this a shot and congrats to Chris Erickson Chris Erickson and guy Wow, I thought you were about to sweep it for a second Chris But there you go two out of the three giveaway spots ain't too bad guy You're into prism choice coming up in a separate video after this. I'm Joe. I'll see you next time