So my beautiful people. I am back with another hour the ring video and today guys I showcase to you how you can get one of the best locking armor sets in this entire game Look how amazing this thing looks guys Has it gone people my name is DP Jane if you do enjoy the video I'll even I like really helps out and if you like what you see and want to see more be sure to subscribe So the Malik if armor is some of the best I've seen this I mean the arm the weapons keep getting better the armor keeps getting better Everything just keeps getting better guys. It really does so the arm itself as you can see on screen now people Looking pretty cool.  So the Malik if set the armor set is actually awarded for you defeating the end game boss of Malik if the black Blade and you'll see a gameplay that on screen now like I said, he is an end end game boss He's located within the dragon temple. I'm not gonna go into too much detail about what happens here guys But once you take him out things definitely change for the worse especially for me The a Malik if the black blade is an absolute beast of a boss had a ton of fun trying to beat him and Probably wouldn't without my summon. I'm not gonna lie to you Now once you do take him down guys You get the remembrance of the black blade, which we all know what to do with Which if you go to the finger reader in the round table can actually check out what's inside of the remembrance as you all probably know If guys if you go to a purchase tab what's actually here for you now guys is the ability to buy Sintaya Malik if armor set it will cost you a pretty penny But it's definitely worth it just to add it to your collection people and that's really how you get this thing It is as simple as that So yeah guys if you do enjoy the video leaving a like really helps out if you like what you see and want to see more out Don't ring be sure to subscribe and hopefully people I will see you on that next one


Oh, Jed McKenna, Jed McKenna. This guy, this author is probably the craziest author I've ever read a book from. This guy basically destroys your entire viewpoint of reality in this trilogy called the Enlightenment Trilogy. And what it talks about is deconstructing everything that you think you know and really leaving the bare essentials to what is true. Now the proposition in these books is that once you reach the very core, what is true after you've deleted all the other knowledge because you've proven it to be false, what you're going to be left with is truth awareness or non-dual awareness or enlightenment, however you want to call it. This book, this trilogy, I'm sort of hesitant to recommend it because on one hand it is extremely enlightening and amazing and it's going to change your life immediately. But the problem with it is that most guys and girls who read it, they just go very, very depressed for a couple of months. This is because these books sort of make you nihilistic, make you tend to start really thinking about your life, which is something that a lot of people haven't even done once in their entire life. And you really start deconstructing everything that you think you know and all the importance that you put on things and start seeing it for what it is, which is just subjective illusions, you could say.   This process, Spiritual Autolysis, it sounds simple. Basically, he says, you know, just need to write something that's true. Just keep writing until you write something that's true. And the problem is this process may sound simple, but it's one of the most excruciating things that you can do once you actually take the blindfold off and you start accepting reality for what it is, which is, again, just an illusion. So again, if you are interested in noble shit answers about how life actually works and a method to verify it for yourself, these books are just for you. But be ready, because most likely you are going to be kind of depressed, you are going to start losing motivation in life. There has to be that period of dip if you actually want to go through the transformation and start seeing life for what it is.   Until next time.


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel critical of Lord here So this be a video talking about the nun to once again I saw some of you guys interact with that video very heavily So here's an update for you and it looks like we now have the confirmation that at least Someone else who belongs in the makeup of a character is going to be reprising the character They're not being replaced like Jonathan Brick, but uh Bonnie errands will be back for the nun to as Valic the nun And again, I know a lot of you are Disappointed by the original movie a lot of you I saw in the conversation saying the same things I was saying the biggest compliments that movie had might have been a couple of the performances and the dated setting the gothic vibes it was giving off and just the overall effective atmosphere is able to establish for itself and That was really it and of course Bonnie errands as Valic She was amazing just like she was in the conjuring too, but it's just like something certain plot threads We're off-putting the narrative was a little disjointed and you know the cheap jump scares became a little bit excessive I from what I remember I again still need to rewatch this movie I still remember having fun with it, but walking away thinking like You know that they could have gone way harder with something like that like I would love to see them taking more Sinister approach like I stated in my other video. I would love them to take an approach like that Or just something that's more long how they treated Valic in the original movie of the conjuring to when she was first introduced But getting into how we learned that Bonnie errands would be worth would be reprising her role James Juan shared an update over on his official Instagram Stating that with the caption none to moving into production with Michael Chaves We know is gonna be directing the movie He directed the Curse of La Llorona and he directed the recent third entry in the conjuring main series the conjuring 3 The devil made me do it and he was welcoming back Michael and Bonnie errands to the conjuring universe And he shares some behind-the-scenes pics of her and make up choking him and just playing with him as the character of Valic now Whatever they decide to do with the none to That'll be something that is of course gonna be up to Akilah Cooper I know that I've already done a video recently where I stated that they said they had something teed up something That was a I guess fun and exciting and hopefully this is something that is actually fun and exciting I know that from the footage of what Megan was shown because she wrote that too that seems to have cornered a lot of positive reactions So hopefully she's able to come in here Bring this back to life because a lot of people think that there's no need for this. I saw people saying that in the conversation There's no need for this So this is definitely a situation where you will have a sequel surpass its original This is definitely I think something that's guaranteed It's not necessarily guaranteed that the movie itself would be better than the original but I think you have a strong chance of surpassing the original because of how regarded that movie is Considered as a failure or misfire But all in all With Bonnie errands being back, you know And with Akilah Cooper in it again She wrote Malik Akilah Cooper writing it. I meant to say she wrote Malignet Many of you might be split on Malignet I think she did a pretty good job there And if we can see what she has to offer with Megan and if that gives another positive reception That could light a fire under people being more hyped to see what she is doing with the nun too and how they factor Valak back into another new unique narrative What time period is this is going to be set in because I know at the end of the first one They managed to connect it to the original Conjury movie And how they how they did that I thought was very effective to the overall narrative that had been portrayed In the nun movie and leading up to that moment where we found out that big twist how it connected to the original Conjury movie I thought that was very clever. So if they were to bring Or maybe they actually could I just thought about this if they somehow were to bring back Ed and Lorraine Warren like maybe they do it. Annabelle comes home type of thing Basically at this point you of course be making stuff up just like with Annabelle Annabelle comes home But if they were somehow to like set us in a modern time if they want to do that and have us explore Valak through another experience with Lorraine Warren because again One of the highlights for me with Valak when we first met her in the Conjuring too Was the interactions with Lorraine Warren those two actresses Bonnie errands and Vera Farmiga They were just incredible in their scenes together Everything about it was just incredible the conviction and how they were delivering their dialogue and again with Bonnie being so incredible at portraying this menacing terrifying nun demon And then with Lorraine portraying this heartwarming Determined and courageous woman trying to save the lives of these of these innocent people You know, you just had a dynamic there that I thought was very A lot of great chemistry when those two were on screen even though for a lot of it It was mostly Lorraine delivering the dialogue There was some magic there. I just thought that those two had a lot of great chemistry With what we saw from them in the Conjuring too, and I would love to see Valak and Lorraine meet again I'm talking about like this is some big rivalry. They've only met once But they just had a lot of great moments together in that movie And the part where she actually was able to dethrone Valak by revealing its name and Exiling it back to hell. So maybe this is something where they'll be Exploring like Valak returning big and stalking Lorraine Warren once again And maybe a narrative like that could be something that to explore My guess is that is just something that's predating everything we've gotten so far Set sometime after the events of the nun to maybe set even prior to that I know some of you would like to see more of that gothic style See more of that spooky atmosphere established And I do think they should really capitalize on a less is more approach with the nun And go about it the way that they did with the Conjuring too Because at some aspects of the nun for me the actual movie we got feels like she was shown too much I do think there is power that you can create and a mystique you can create by talking something up And not having it on screen so much to the point that when it actually is on screen You are it's like a big payoff you have this setup coming from this dialogue of details And teases and glimpses of what is to come and then bam You get the payoff of this entity that is terrorizing everyone It makes them even more it makes their presence on screen more impactful. So I feel like that was a little bit Gone for an amount of times we saw Valak in The nun as opposed to the Conjuring too, which even still The way that character is utilized there is much superior than how she's used in her own movie So with the nun too knowing that Bonnie errant is back the most I'm just looking forward to his scenes some of this work She's able to bring to the character once again see that men is seen performance I know she can give because she honestly was the strongest aspect of that movie in terms of the performances Her performance as Valak was the best part not to say that the other performances again were not great Because Tysa Farmiga did her thing as well. Both of the farmigas they're great in this universe I know some people thought that maybe they might connect that character to Lorraine and they're related I don't think they're going to do that just because they're sisters in real life I don't think they're going to do that But let me know how excited you guys are or aren't about Bonnie errant's being back as Valak in the description in the comment section If you haven't already, of course, make sure you subscribe Turn on publication and remember to video in the description links for social media accounts on facebook twitter and instagram You can message me there, of course There isn't any movies news or reviews like me to cover in the future with all that in mind guys I will see you in the next video


Welcome everybody to the spring 2019 CNI member meeting. We have a great turnout this year and I'm delighted to see you all here and to welcome you or in some cases welcome you back to St. Louis. Some longtime attendees will remember that we did in fact meet at this very hotel about five or six years ago and it's nice to be back here. So let me add a special welcome to our international attendees. That is not getting any easier but it's wonderful that you all were able to make it here and join us. It's been quite a morning so far. I'll note we've had two rounds of our executive round table one yesterday afternoon and one this morning look at institutional strategies for migration to the cloud and we'll be producing a report of that hopefully in the next month or two and I think you'll find that very interesting reading based on our conversations over the last two days. With that I want to get on to why we're really all here and it's a tremendous pleasure for me to be able to welcome Kathleen Fitzpatrick. I got to know her back when she was at the Modern Language Association where she undertook the monumental and monumentally difficult task of trying to genuinely get the MLA to grapple with the fact that scholarly communication is transitioning into a digital world with all that that implies. Just being willing to step up and say I'm going to take that on is a pretty breathtaking undertaking that I can see she's laughing a little bit but anybody willing to take that on has my unmitigated admiration. She is now a professor of English and the director of digital humanities at Michigan State University and she's very recently published a lovely book which you may have read some about in the Higher Education Press with the beautiful title of Generous Thinking. It's worth noting by the way in one of these interesting coincidences that it's published by John Hopkins University Press which is itself a CNI member separate from Johns Hopkins University and they are actually raffling off a couple of copies of the book and there's stuff on Twitter about that if you're interested but just the sort of closed circle there is kind of wonderful. I'm not going to try and describe Generous Thinking because Kathleen will do that far more competently than I can other than to note that it feels like sometimes there are ideas that are just finding their time and one of them is this idea of collective and collaborative action as a way to deal with problems that seem to be intractable when you're dealing with them from narrow individual or institutional advantage perspectives and I think that the recognition of that spirit at that time is very much part of what I believe Kathleen is going to talk to us about today and with that please join me in welcoming Kathleen. Thank you so much. I want to start today by thanking Cliff and the rest of the CNI team for inviting me to talk with you today and for getting me here. I'm really looking forward as always to the conversations that we'll develop over the next course of today and tomorrow. So much of the talk ahead does grow out of the work that I did in my recent book Generous Thinking, a radical approach to saving the university. The book overall makes the argument that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university and the public that it ostensibly serves is going to require re-grounding our institutions and the work that we do in them in a mode of what I refer to as generous thinking, focusing our practices and our modes of communicating around building community and solidarity, both on campus and across our campus borders. Now the radical approach part of the book's subtitle grows out of my increasing sense that this necessary change is a huge one, that it can't be made incrementally and that instead it requires, as Chris Newfield notes in the conclusion of The Great Mistake, a paradigm shift because there is no route, no approach, no tool that can get us from where we are today to where we need to be. As Tressie McMillan-Cottum has noted of the crisis that she has seen growing in higher education today, this is not a problem for technological innovation or a market product, this requires politics. Now the problem after all begins with politics. The American public university that not too long ago served as a highly accessible engine of social mobility, making a rich liberal arts based education broadly available has been utterly undone. We are facing today not just the drastic reduction in that institution's affordability, but an increasing threat to its very public orientation. As rampant privatization not only shifts the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students and families, but also turns the work of the institution from the creation of a shared social good, a broadly educated public, to the production of market oriented individual benefit. And all the while we are also facing what Inside Higher Ed recently reported as a larger than typical decline in confidence in an American institution in a relatively short time period. And this falling confidence cannot simply be dismissed as evidence of an increasingly entrenched anti-intellectualism in American life, though of course without doubt that too. But rather must be understood as evidence that as I argue in the last chapter of generous thinking, higher education has for several decades been operating simultaneously under two conflicting paradigms. On the one hand an older paradigm largely operative within the academic community in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of knowledge. And on the other hand a more recent one in which the university serves as a producer and disseminator of market oriented credentials. Now the crisis in higher education today stems both from the incommensurability of these two paradigms and from the fact that both of them are failing if in different ways. Now as Thomas Kuhn noted in the structure of scientific revolutions the failure of a scientific paradigm as it becomes beset by anomalies for which the paradigm cannot account throws the community that relies on that paradigm into crisis. And the resolution of that crisis requires the discovery of a new model entirely one that can reorder the work done by the community and draw it out of what he describes as the period of pronounced professional insecurity that appears when normal science ceases to function normally. This crisis can only be resolved in Kuhn's model by what he famously called a paradigm shift. The cataclysmic transformation from one way of understanding how science operates to another. And my argument is that we are precisely in need of such a paradigm shift if higher education as we want it to be is to survive. So generous thinking explores this problem from a number of different angles. I'm asking all of us who care about the future of higher education. Faculty, staff, administrators, students, parents, policymakers, trustees, and more to reorient our thinking about the work of the university from the creation of individual benefit grounded in all of the competition and structures that structures every aspect of life in contemporary institutions of higher education to instead focus on the university's role in building community. So some of my thoughts here today grow out of this aspect of generous thinking, but some stem more pragmatically from my work over the last few years working on Humanities Commons, which is a nonprofit community developed and governed network serving humanity scholars and organizations. Humanities Commons attempts to instantiate several of the arguments of generous thinking. First, that higher education, along with the individual scholars and instructors engaged in it, will benefit from all of us doing more of our work in public, where the publics that we need to support our institutions can begin to see the significance of what it is that we do. And second, that institutions of higher education must do everything they can to resist and reverse the privatization that has overtaken them. Restoring service to the public good, not just to their mission statements, but to their actual missions. Only this return to a fully public orientation, even among those institutions that we call private, can allow us to build the kind of community that can sustain them. And part of resisting privatization, both for scholars and for their institutions, involves turning away from some of the externally developed and deployed systems on which we have become dependent. And instead, reserving our investments and our labor for systems and platforms and infrastructures whose missions genuinely align with our own, whose values mirror our own, and to whose governance we can contribute. We need collectively to turn our attention to the shared publicly oriented systems that we can count on to support us as we develop new modes of open knowledge sharing. Modes that might help higher education return to its mission of public service. But developing this form of community supported infrastructure will require some careful thinking about the relationships required to build and maintain it and the work that will be necessary So the stories that I'm about to tell are ones with which all of you are much too familiar. And in many cases with which you are far more intimately familiar than I am. I hope you'll forgive this. My usual audiences when I'm talking about this stuff are scholars and administrators who don't always have a clear sense of why community supported infrastructure might matter. In the examples that I'm about to cite help make that importance clear, right? So little moment of preaching to the choir and then I'll move on. Though the issues that I'm discussing of course long predate this particular moment that came into stark visibility in August 2017 when B-Press announced that it had been purchased by the Relics Group the multinational parent company of publishing Behemoth Elsevier. Now B-Press had of course been founded in 1999 by two members of the faculty of UC Berkeley's law school in order to provide open access publishing and repository services to institutions of higher education. So B-Press grew out of the academy and it was widely seen as operating with the academy's values at heart. As the B-Press website notes over 500 institutions have purchased B-Press services in order to disseminate and preserve the work being done on their campuses in openly accessible ways. And in one fell swoop those 500 institutions discovered that they were now effectively paying Elsevier for the ability to provide an open alternative to the increasingly monopolistic scholarly communication channels owned by corporate publishing Behemoths such as Elsevier. So what had served for years as a key piece of scholarly infrastructure built and run by academics for the academic community appeared to have been turned on that community. I mean it's not as though anyone had been unaware that B-Press was a commercial service all along but they were one of the good guys and the costs of outsourcing infrastructural needs to them had been balanced against the often impossible task of maintaining locally hosted repository and publishing systems. So B-Press provided what many saw as best of breed functionality at a reasonable price and it supported library's desire to connect the gathering and preservation of research materials with the ability to make them openly available to the world. But the acquisition of B-Press by Relics not only put libraries in the position of unintentionally supporting a growing corporate control not just of scholarly publishing but of the entirety of the research workflow from discovery through production to communication. And it also left those libraries anxious about their fundamental ability to control the infrastructures on which they rely in promoting greater public access to scholarship produced on their campuses. So as a result serious conversations have since focused on means of supporting open source academy owned and controlled infrastructure. This is not an impossible move by any stretch but it's harder than it might sound. Longstanding open access open infrastructure projects like archive might suggest some possible areas of concern. By every reasonable measure archive has been exemplary in its uptake its independence and in the ways that it has helped to transform the fields that it serves. But in some crucial ways archive has experienced what can only be called catastrophic success. A crucial paradigm shifting project whose growing annual operating costs and mounting infrastructural requirements have demanded increasingly creative mechanisms for the platform's support. So in 2010 the archive team at Cornell began the challenging process of building a coalition of libraries willing to work together to support the resource. But our institutions as we unfortunately know are largely unaccustomed to this work of cross institutional collaboration. For one thing they're far more prone to understand a resource like this as terrain for competition and for another the community building required becomes yet another form of labor added on top of maintaining the resources themselves. Now I do not know the extent to which such difficulties may have played a role in archives recent move from the library to Cornell Computing and Information Science. It's entirely likely that the move is a matter of infrastructural pragmatics but even so challenges of maintaining the kinds of cross institutional coalition necessary to sustain such a crucial resource remain. Another project with a different narrative might be found in the Sam Vera project. Recognizing that no single institution could possibly develop the full suite of systems on which institutional repositories today rely developers at a number of institutions come together to create a collective solution as the proverb and their website have it if you want to go far go together. But this distributed developer community like all such communities has faced some challenges in coordination challenges that have caused it as the proverb also reminds us to go more slowly than it might. Ensuring the ongoing commitment not just of the individual developers involved in the project but of the institutions for which the developers actually work is not an easy matter. So the foundation of the challenges that archive and Sam Vera have faced is the same challenge faced by any number of other projects and programs and initiatives sustainability. Now this is an issue I've been thinking a fair bit about of late as my colleagues and I have been working to make sure that humanity's commons might be able to thrive well into the future. And these attempts have in turn been encouraged by the funders and other organizations that have supported the network's development to this point. They too would like to see the network thrive but they can't support it indefinitely. We need they reasonably suggest a plan for demonstrating that the network will at some point be able to thrive. Now sustainability of this sort is tied up in revenue models in business plans in cost recovery. Sustainability is for a nonprofit entity forever tied to the kinds of economic concerns that are often very divergent from if not at odds with the nonprofit's primary mission. And as a result those nonprofits remain forever precarious. One small population can make the difference between survival and collapse. But sustainability broadly understood extends to domains beyond the economic. There is of course environmental sustainability in which we attempt to ensure that more resources aren't consumed or waste produced then can be developed or managed in the near term. There's technological sustainability in which we attempt to ensure that projects conform to commonly accepted standards that will enable those projects future stability and growth. And all of these forms of sustainability are important to varying degrees to providing for the future of nonprofit and open source projects. But there's another form that I think gets a good bit less attention and that I increasingly believe precedes economic or environmental or technical sustainability and the social aspect points not just to the determination of a group of people to support a particular project but to the determination of those people to support their groupness. Not just to their commitment to the thing they're doing together but their commitment to the concept of together in the first place. And ensuring those commitments are sustained is I increasingly think a necessary precondition for the other kinds of sustainability that we're hoping to work toward. So this notion of the role of community in community supported software and of the best ways of building and sustaining it raises the key question of what it is we mean when we talk about community. As Miranda Joseph argues in against the romance of community, the concept is often invoked as a placeholder for something that exists outside the dominant economic and institutional structures of contemporary life. A set of ostensibly organic felt relationships that harken back to a mythical pre-modern moment in which people lived and worked in direct connection with one another without the mediating forces of capitalism. Now community is in this sense, in Benedict Anderson's sense, an imagined relationship and even an imaginary one as its invocation is designed to yoke together bodies whose existence as a group is largely constructed. It's a concept often used both idealistically and as a form of discipline. A claim of unity that smooths over and thus suppresses internal difference and disagreement. And as Joseph points out the notion of community is often deployed as if the relationships that it describes could provide an antidote to or an escape from the problems created by contemporary political and economic life. But this suggestion serves to distract us, she says, from the supplementary role that community in fact actually serves with respect to capitalism, sort of filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. So we call upon the community to support projects that the dominant institutions of the mainstream economy will not. And this is how we end up with social network-based fundraising campaigns to support people facing major health crises rather than demanding universal healthcare and elementary school bake sales rather than asking for education. So community becomes in this sense an alibi for the creeping privatization of what should be social responsibility, pardon me, responsibilities. So it's important to be careful in issuing calls to build community. Calls like these issued uncritically not only run the risk of enabling the institutions that structure contemporary life to absolve disabilities for public care, but they also risk essentializing a highly complex and intersectional set of social relations. So treating those relations as if they were a single simple thing. But at the same time, there are some important uses for the notion of community that remain. Uses that might benefit from an analogy to Gayatri Spivak's strategic essentialism. And in these uses we might simultaneously recognize that our calls to community are flawed and in fact impossible, but nonetheless useful as organizing tools. We might thus begin to think of the call to community not as an invocation of some kind of organic unity, but instead as a form of coalition building, a developing solidarity. Now, solidarity itself is a challenged concept of course. There are some important questions to be asked about solidarity with whom and for whom. Women of color, for instance, have noted the extent to which white feminist appeals to solidarity reinforce white supremacy, demanding that black women put the issue of race aside in favor of a gender-based unity that overwhelmingly serves white women's interests. Leading author Mickey Kendall to establish the Twitter hashtag Solidarity is for white women. So I don't want to make it sound as though solidarity can serve as an unproblematic substitute for community, but I remain convinced that there are stronger forms of solidarity to be found. Forms that do not demand that individuals seeking redress for institutionalized injustices drop their issues and get in line, but that instead recognize that the issues of those individuals are all of our issues too and that we must stand together and support of needs that may not necessarily seem to be our own. And this is the form of solidarity that I'm seeking. A form that I am convinced is a necessary prerequisite for successful sustainable development of nonprofit, open source, community-owned networks and platforms. So what's the connection? For me, sustainability and solidarity connect through the work of Eleanor Ostrom. So Ostrom was not just as the UBS Nobel Perspectives website has it, the first female Nobel Laureate in economics. She remains to date the only female laureate in the field. Her work focused on common pool resource management. She argued fiercely against the conventional wisdom that the so-called tragedy of the commons was in inevitability, insisting that community-based systems and structures for ensuring those resources' sustainability were possible, provided the right modes of self-organization and self-governance were in place. So it's important to focus just a bit on what's meant by the notion of common pool resources. Resources are generally understood by economists to fall into one of four categories, based on whether they are excludable, whether individuals can be prevented from using them, and whether they are rivalrous, whether one individual's use precludes another's. So public goods are those resources that are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, meaning no one can be prevented from using them, and no one's use reduces its availability for use by others. By contrast, private goods are both excludable and rivalrous. They can be restricted for use by paying customers, and their consumption by one customer can diminish its availability for another. These private goods are market-based products, typically produced and distributed for profit. Club goods are those that are excludable but non-rivalrous, right? Those that are restricted to paying customers but not diminished by any one customer's use. And finally, goods that are excludable — I'm sorry — goods that are non-excludable but rivalrous are often referred to as common pool resources, and it is those resources to which the tragedy of the commons, the overuse of shared natural resources, can apply. Now at the root of the tragedy of the commons lies the free rider problem, which derives from the assumption that when individuals cannot be prevented from using commonly held resources, but also cannot be compelled to contribute to them, some number of individuals will avail themselves of the resources without contributing to their support. And as the number of free riders grows, the resources are prone to overuse and eventually become unsustainable. So the only means imagined to help prevent the tragedy of the commons before Ostrom was external regulation, whether through privatization or nationalization. But as Ostrom argues in her 1990 book, Governing the Commons, The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, this model, like other such models like the prisoner's dilemma, was based on a particular and particularly pessimistic view of human possibility, one that could not escape from its own metaphor. So what makes these models so dangerous, she argued, when they are used metaphorically as the foundation for policy, is that the constraints that are assumed to be fixed for the purpose of analysis are taken as faith as being fixed in empirical settings, unless external authorities change them. I would rather address the question of how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than merciless tragedies. So Ostrom's work explored ways of organizing collective action that might ensure the sustainability of commonly held resources. And while Ostrom focused on natural resources such as fisheries, the problems that she described and the potential solutions she explored have some important things in common with institutions of higher education and the nonprofit community-developed autonomy-owned software projects like Archive, like Sam Vera, like Humanities Commons, on which they should be able to rely. There are lots of examples of free and open digital scholarly platforms and projects like these, all of which face a common problem. There's often sufficient support available for building and implementing such systems, but there aren't funding programs designed to ensure that they can be maintained. And as a result, the tools and platforms accrue technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage, rapidly making the projects appear unsustainable and thus leaving them in real danger of obsolescence. Some argue that the best means of ensuring the sustainability of such projects is economic, eliminating the free-rider problem by enclosing the Commons, requiring individuals or institutions to pay in order to access them. But this privatization is in many cases the problem that community developed projects were developed in order to evade. So as with Ostrom's phishing communities, it's incumbent on us to find the right modes of self-organization and self-governance that can keep the projects open and thriving. So last summer, Brett Bobley tweeted a question about sustaining such projects. Numerous discussions and threads resulted from that question that are worth reading, but one that caught my attention in particular stems from this reply by Hugh Kalis, noting the institutional responsibility for maintaining these projects, about which I absolutely agree, especially when he moves beyond the economic into issues of labor and credit. However, as I argue in generous thinking, individual institutions cannot manage such responsibilities on their own. Cross-institutional collaborations are required in order to keep open-source software projects sustainable. And those collaborations demand that the staff participating in them not only be credited and paid appropriately for their labor, but most challengingly, that they be supported in dedicating some portion of their labor to the collective good, rather than strictly to local requirements. Which is to say that individual institutions of higher education must understand themselves as part of a community of such institutions. And they need to act in solidarity with that community. And this is why I increasingly want to argue that sustainability in open-source development has solidarity as a prerequisite, a recognition that the interests of the group require commitment from its members to that group at times over and above their own individual interests. What I'm interested in thinking about is how we foster that commitment. How, in fact, we understand that commitment itself as a crucial form of social sustainability. But getting institutions to stop competing with one another and to start recognizing that they have more to gain from collaboration than they stand to lose in the rankings is no easy task. And the privatization that has gradually overtaken them since the Reagan era has resulted in a fundamentally market- oriented, competition-based approach to everything that the institution does. And making the argument that this approach must be set aside is a huge part of what I've tried to do in generous thinking. And it's equally a part of what we're trying to instantiate in Humanities Commons. So a brief side note on Humanities Commons for those of you who may not be fully familiar with the project. The MLA is the largest scholarly society in the humanities, representing about 25,000 members across North America and around the world. Members who teach and study a very wide range of languages, literatures, and cultures. And as Cliff mentioned, my former employer with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we launched a social network called MLA Commons in 2013 in order to provide our members with a platform for communication and collaboration, both in order to extend year-round the kinds of conversations that take place at the annual meetings and to provide means for members to share their scholarly work with one another. Within about 30 seconds of launching, however, we began to hear from our members about their desire to connect with folks who were in other areas of the humanities. And so we started looking for ways to support those connections across fields. So with further support from the Mellon Foundation, we first undertook a planning process and then developed a pilot project designed to connect multiple proprietary Commons instances, each serving the membership of a scholarly society. Humanities Commons went live in December 2016, linking MLA Commons with Commons spaces developed for the members of the Association for Jewish Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies and the College Art Association. But beyond working with those partners, we wanted to provide a space where any researcher or practitioner in the humanities could create an account and share their work. And so we decided to open the Network's hub to anyone who wants to join across the disciplines and around the world, regardless of institutional affiliation or organizational membership. All Humanities Commons members can take advantage of all of the Network's features. They can create rich professional profiles, participate in group discussions, create websites and they can deposit and share their work in the Network's open access repository. And this future of the, I'm sorry, this fusion of the social network with the library quality repository means that not only is stuff being put into the repository and not only can the stuff be found there, but it's also being actively used as there's a community there that is actively sharing stuff in it. So while opening the Commons hub to free participation by any interested member or practitioner has significantly driven the platform's adoption and use. A little over two years later, we have over 17,000 members. It's created real challenges for our sustainability. Partner organizations have tended to see the value in paying to support the Network's services as lying in a benefit that they can provide to their members. And it's understandable as they need to provide their members with such benefits in order to keep their members paying dues. But this model transforms humanity's Commons from a common pool resource into a club good. One whose benefits are exclusive to those who pay. And some early interviews seem to suggest that many of the organizations who might have paid for the Network, if it were an exclusive service, see the openness of the hub as diminishing the Network's value to them, rather than recognizing that the Network effects of a larger, more open community will ultimately serve their long-term interests. So we've been working to develop a model that will encourage organizations and institutions to invest in the Network, to support it in an ongoing way, to recognize that not only do they belong to the Network, but that the Network belongs to them and its future depends on them. Making that case requires not just a working revenue model, but far more importantly, a compelling governance model. One that gives member organizations and institutions, as well as individual members, both a voice in the Network's future and a stake in its outcomes. As Ostrom argues, a path to sustainability for a common pool resource like Humanities Commons requires us to ensure that building the Network's community and enabling it to become self-governing is a precondition for its success. So the future of Humanities Commons, like the future of a host of open-source software and community-supported infrastructure projects, requires its participants to act in the interest of the collective, even where those interests do not immediately appear to be local. This form of solidarity is where real sustainability for academy-owned infrastructure and for the academy itself lies. My arguments to this end probably needless to say have a tough road ahead of them. I'm asking the university as an institution to undergo a fairly radical transformation, fully aligning its internal reward structures with the public mission that it claims to espouse. And this is where the need for a paradigm shift, for politics, arises. This conclusion reached by a study entitled how significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion and tenure documents. The answer, not very. The study demonstrates the extent to which, as the authors note, quote, institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work towards systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized. When we've all doubt got stories to tell that would support this conclusion. Stories that illustrate the ways that the kinds of collaborative work that might best support the university's need for a more open publicly oriented future goes on or under rewarded. Here's mine. Right around the time I began sketching the outline for this book, I attended a day long workshop on new models for open scholarly communication for which the provost at a large state research university had been invited to give the keynote address. And the keynote was extremely powerful. The provost described his campus's efforts to embrace a renewed model of, or mission of public service. And he emphasized the role that broad public access to the faculty's work might play in transforming the environment in which the university operates today. The university's singular purpose is the public good, he said, but we are seen as being self interested. Can opening our work up to the world help change the public discourse about us? It was an inspiring talk both rich in its analysis of how the university found its way into the economic and social problems that it now faces and hopeful in thinking about new possibilities for renewed public commitment. Or I should say it was inspiring right up until the moment when the relationship between scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion was raised. And then it was like somebody had dimmed the lights. We heard about the importance of maintaining prestige within the faculty through modes of assessment that ensure that faculty members are publishing in the highest quality venues, conventionally understood. So frustrated by this shift, I asked the provost during the Q&A what the possibilities might be for a very important, highly visible public research university that understands its primary mission to be service to the public good, to remove the tenure and promotion logjam in the transformation of scholarly communication by convening the entire academic campus from the provost through the deans, the chairs, the faculty in a collective project of revisiting. I mean really imagining all of its personnel processes and the standards on which they rely in light of a primary emphasis on the public good. What would become possible if all of those policies worked to ensure that what was considered excellence in research and teaching had its basis in the university's core service mission? The provost's response was more or less that any institution that took on such a project would immediately lose competitiveness in its institutional cohort. Now to say that this response was disappointing would be an understatement, but it was, if nothing else, honest. It made absolutely clear where, for most research universities, the rubber meets the road and why lots of talk about openness, impact, public service and generosity falls apart at the point at which it crosses paths with the more entrenched, unspoken principles around which our institutions are actually organized today. The inability of institutions of higher education to transform their internal structures and processes in order to fully align with their stated missions and values may mean that those institutions have not, in fact, fully embraced those missions or values. Or perhaps it's that there is a shadow mission, competition that excludes the possibility of that full alignment. The worst of it and the single fact that generous thinking is most driven by is that that provost was correct. As currently structured, the entire system of higher engineering is, I'm sorry, higher education is engineered from individual institutions to accrediting agencies, funding bodies and higher education press to promote a certain kind of competitiveness that relies on a certain kind of prestige. And any institution that seeks to transform the rules or the goals of the competition without dramatically altering its relationship to the system as a whole is likely to suffer for it. So what Chris Newfield has described as the mandate to compete all the time forecloses a whole range of opportunities for our institutions, making it possible for them to take any other approach. So what I'm arguing, both directly in generous thinking and indirectly through humanities commons is that the real threat to institutions of higher education today is not other institutions of higher education. Not our place in the rankings that order us. Rather it's the creeping forces of privatization that continue to undermine our public mission. So we are to reclaim that mission, to reclaim control of the work produced in and by the university. We're going to have to do it as a sector acting not just in solidarity with but with generosity toward both the other institutions to which we are inevitably connected and toward the public that we all jointly serve. If we are going to develop and sustain community supported infrastructure we have to become and genuinely act as a community. None of this will be easy but the alternatives which we have seen building over the last few years which will be far worse. And with that cheery note I'm going to say thanks. So we've got a bit of time for questions and I see that there are microphones in the aisles sort of though I can't quite see them. So if you have them please approach a microphone so that we can get that audible to everyone including me. I feel like I should address you as Elijah or something as I feel like you're a prophet in the wilderness. It occurs to me that part of the challenge in achieving what you're suggesting is that the institutions that are most prestigious are the ones that are most likely to be influential in a change but the irony of that is that they're also the ones that are currently winning by the current game and the current rules of the game. I wondered if you would comment on that in particular have you had any better luck in success with those who are not that level. Absolutely. I think that's a crucial point to make and it's one that's equally operative within campuses as well as across them trying to get the senior faculty of an institution to revisit policies and transform them can be quite difficult because they succeeded just fine at them. It really requires folks who are willing to step back and take a look at hierarchies on campus at the ways that resources are distributed who are willing to say maybe supporting the collective is more important than the fact that we have succeeded at this model. It's entirely likely you're correct that at this kind of cross institutional collaboration there is more to be gained from working with institutions that aren't at the peak of the rankings that aren't in the most elite budget strata of higher education. I do think that there are some consortia coming now as a member of the Big Ten Academic Alliance I think there's a lot of work to be done among state R1 institutions that are not of that top budgetary tier to really come together and think about what we can do collectively that none of us can afford to do alone. But I also hope that there's room in these kinds of collaborations for collaboration across layers of the institutional hierarchy for the state flagship R1 institution to bring the R2s, the regional comprehensives, the community colleges along in these collaborations because again there's a phenomenal amount of energy and goodness knows a phenomenal number of students being served as you start looking at these other kinds of institutions that we really need to support much better than we're doing. So, you know, part of what I'm hoping is to be able to appeal to some of those institutions that don't really have to collaborate because in fact they can do things pardon me, things by themselves to say yes but if you do look at how much of this you can help and if you help all of us you help yourself by sustaining the sector as a whole. Sorry, the lights are a little intense so I am having to see if there are other people standing up. Hi. Thank you. I feel like a lot of people have questions and maybe I'll ask one that's on people's mind or put out a thought. My name is Dale Askin with the University of Alberta and a lot of what you've talked about is universal but some of it applies specifically to the United States but with the one place for all of us globally collider in these rankings and I feel like the provost answer everything goes on the hill of tenure and promotion to die but really at the end of the day the rankings, we all make fun of them provost and president and private will roll their eyes about them but they are absolutely beholden to them and as long as they are in place and as long as the model behind those is driven by a single publisher who controls most of the data which controls the largest chunk of those rankings are we kind of just running up against an obelisk there? I'm curious what you think about the rankings I mean obviously not much I do think that the beholdenness of our higher administrations to those rankings is a really serious problem I mean insofar as there is good news on this side of the Atlantic is that we're not quite as beholden to them as they are right now in the UK things are even more intense there though I will say that I have this week a piece coming out in Times Higher Ed saying give up your rankings so we'll see if that does any good whatsoever I'm not holding my breath exactly but I do think that we need to start having some really hard conversations about what exactly these rankings are telling us and why we care about them so much which percentage of that ranking has to do with weird statistics like the acceptance rate among students applying to the institution which means that you climb the rankings not based on how well you serve the students that you admit but on how many you cannot serve so the more you reject the better off you are that's a real problem that we're valuing those kinds of metrics over other kinds of metrics that actually reflect on the values that we have and the mission that we have is a real issue at the individual faculty assessment level there's a project that my Dean Chris Long and a whole host of his collaborators have been working on Humetrix which is seeking humane metrics for the humanities and social sciences to say that we need to stop counting things just because they can be counted and instead really start assessing our work based on the actual values that we hold it's a heavy lift to try and figure out first what those values are secondly are they shared and third how then do you measure things based on values but it's only in undertaking that lift and really being to work on that incredibly thorny problem that we might get past the horrifying quantification of productivity in faculty life these days and I firmly believe this for institutions too that unless institutions come together and say you know what the things that we really value are how well we're serving the community around us the things that we really value have to do with our students and their personal but also social success out in the world after they leave us and that you know this is the point at which I sputter into ultimately saying we really need to find ways to have that conversation about leaving those rankings behind and finding some other way to do an assessment that might actually matter so I think there might be time for one more if there is one more there seems to be one more okay I'll take it that was fantastic thank you so this idea that one institution alone can't make the wholesale change that needs to be to solve what is a network and a collective problem I think it's really important and individuals can't solve it so I want to get your thoughts on what do you think about that middle layer is department or discipline specific networks and collaborations so what if not a random example departments took it at one school I don't know pick an R1 somewhere on the east coast were to actually be charged with creating plans for how to value the open impact of their scholars right and they did that planning in conjunction with departments across the country from all kinds of schools would that move us further than the top down or the bottoms up I don't know I hope it will I think it might I think there's something to be said in this and I think getting those departments to recognize the level of power they have in this matter is extremely important I've had this conversation not just with my dean but with other deans as well and with provost for that matter who have said that there's this perception among the faculty and including among department chairs that for instance on the matter of tenure and promotion standards you know whatever the department wants to promote that's great but once things hit the college level or the university level they won't support it in fact the deans and the provosts that I've talked to have said we really don't care that much we want to know what your standards are and we want to know that you're employing them well and fairly and rigorously but beyond that what your field values as scholarship that's awesome because deans and provosts are used to promoting architects right and they're used to promoting people teaching dance and they're used to promoting a whole range of things that has nothing to do with books and journal articles so if a department were able to come together and say you know what the form that this work takes we are way less concerned about than the impact that it has so for us what most matters is X Y and Z that has to do with the public impact that this work is having and they pass that up to the dean it is very likely that a conversation could ensue that could then have effects on the rest of that college so my hope is that yeah I mean I would love to hear more about this project at that hypothetical R1 institution on the east coast because I do think that this is one of those places where we could actually get some traction on some problems like these alright have a lovely conference thank you I couldn't ask for a better start to our discussions over the next day and a half thank you so much


Hello and welcome to the session. Let us understand the following question which says, the line y is equal to mx plus 1 is a tangent to the curve y square is equal to 4x if the value of mb to 1 by 2. Now let's proceed on to the solution. Given to us, line y is equal to mx plus 1 and curve y square is equal to 4x. Now substituting y is equal to mx plus 1 in y square is equal to 4x.


Hello and welcome to the Donahue Group, we're so excited that you could join us. We have a wonderful opportunity this month to speak on two separate occasions with Mayor Juan Perez of the City of Sheboygan. We have some interesting topics to discuss that relate, of course, to the city, but maybe there's some broader application as well. Joining me along with Mayor Perez today is our part of our usual cast, former State Senator Cal Potter and Professor Tom Paneski, math professor at the University of Wisconsin Sheboygan. I always say if I'd had Tom as a professor, it would have been a sad day for me, not being a math whiz. So in any event, speaking of math, we're going to be talking about budgeting and a former alder person, absolutely. So all of us here, one way or another, have been involved in governmental processes. We have sympathy for the mayor. And we have a lot of sympathy. Every day and in every way. I went to the Smithsonian exhibit on the Presidents, which is just a fabulous exhibit about all of the Presidents and their various times and whatever. But one of the buttons that you could get was from Harry Truman who said, this is a hell of a job. So I gave that to all my school board members when I was retiring. So I think you probably... I got one too. You did. I used to start wearing that all the time. But in any event, these are interesting and challenging times for the city. And what we're going to talk about in this show is part of the budgeting process for the city, because that's coming up. And I know that you're working on that. And it's a difficult time with limited resources. You've been conducting a number of listening sessions around the city and voting districts and also at service clubs in various parts. And we've asked you to bring your show, take your show on the road, but at least talk with us and the audience about some of the issues that are facing the city. I've been in a couple of those sessions and have found that the charts that you have used to show where our money is coming from and where it's going to be real interesting. So we thought we would just launch off on that discussion and see where we go from there. I think it's great. The citizen's budget process is actually a fulfillment of a promise that I made to the public when I ran for office. And the promise was that I would involve the community in some of the key decisions that are being made in City Hall. And one of those key decisions that is currently being made is the budget and the challenges of the budget. So what I did, of course, I worked with you and with Susan Hart and with Dr. Jack Westwall and put together a process, a citizen budget process together that will entail 16 listening sessions, some surveys, and then some evaluations of those surveys. The 16 listening sessions have been concluded formally, 16 listening sessions, two in each district, one in the morning, one in the evening, so everybody had an opportunity to attend. But I've also done, I would say, about six informal listening sessions and I have yet to make about two, three more. So total will be over 25 listening sessions, including this one here, that I will have gone out to the community and talked to them about what the budget process is all about, what kind of money we're talking about, what kind of expenditures, what kind of budget trends we've seen in the past, what kind of budget trends we can expect in the future. It's all part of that process of getting the citizens educated and involved in our budget. Okay. And I'm going to ask Cal and Tom just to chime in with questions and comments as we go along. But if you don't mind, Mayor, I'd really like just to, I just found these charts to be, for me, personally, real informative, just to talk a little bit about where our money comes from and kind of what the state of it is. Well, I'll talk about that, but I might add first that the citizen budget process, the 16 listening sessions that were held did not cost the city any money. The amount of work that went into preparing for it and the amount of work that went into holding the sessions cost the city no taxpayer's money. It was down on a voluntary basis. Obviously, I did them at night during the day when I do my job, but it cost, it didn't cost the taxpayer any money. I think people need to understand that. But when we talk in terms of revenue, we need to understand that it's 47% of our budget, of our operating budget, which translates to about a little over $33 million comes from the state in the form of state revenue sharing. State revenue sharing has been around for a little bit over 100 years, I believe, and some people are actually questioning should that continue or not to the point where now it's no longer called revenue sharing, it's called municipal aid. So that sort of sheds a different light into it. You take that with the state's recent legislation to cap our levy, cap that at 3.339%, and our levy actually makes 41% of our budget. So the state by capping our levy and by controlling our revenue sharing for the last two years and for the next two years, they in effect control 88% of our budget. So we know that we have no more money to budget to appropriate for whatever the needs are of the community. So we're pretty locked in with our revenue. So the tax levy essentially is what we pay. The tax payers. The tax levy is the money we get out of people's pockets. Yeah, the property tax. That's how I like to put it. We go in your pocket and get the money. I think Professor Paneski is going to use that. But I was going to ask your chart here on revenues. Is that for the year 2005? Because you're budgeting for 2006. But this was for the year 2005. And OK, so in the last four or five years, has state revenue always been at 47%? Or do you recall if it's been higher or lower? Well, there's been a fluctuation in the amount of revenue we get from the state. But for the last two years, it's remained stagnant. And we can expect it not to go up. We're not getting any more, but we're not getting any less in 2006 and 2007. So what we have to do is, as we prepare 06 budget, we almost have to look at preparing 07 budget at the same time. And the rest of the amount, 88% coming from revenue sharing and the levy, the rest of the revenue comes from fines and forfeitures. It comes from what is the other one? License and permits, et cetera. But the line share is 88% is pretty fixed. Now, we also have some revenue that comes to us in the form of the cable franchise fees. We get about $210,000 out of that, I believe. And that's under a threat of being disallowed now. There's federal legislation pending that may do away with the cable franchise fees, which will take away about $210,000 from us. That helps pay for this program. Yes, it does. As a matter of fact, the four of us made a tearful plea not so long ago, urging whoever is listening to contact their federal legislators. It's actually about $410,000. Right. So it is a substantial chunk of change for the city to bring programming like this that hard as it is to believe probably would not be a commercial success. $110,000 of that goes to pay for this cable television network. And $300,000 generally has been going for capital outlay, primarily squad cars. So if that is done away with, we'll have to make that difference from somewhere. Sure. We're not going to have that $300,000 to pay for squad cars. Sure. So that money is going to have to be shifted from somewhere else. So the money. And that barks you into looking at fees and other types of revenue because you just don't have any alternative, really. Well, we're going to have to look at alternative sources of revenue in the form of fees as investments or taxes, which is taboo right now. Everywhere I go, people say, don't you dare tax me anymore? We don't want to be assessed anymore. We don't want any kind of fees attached to any of the services that we're already paying for. So we're locked in as far as what kind of money we're getting. If I dare to even speak to work raising taxes or fees or assessments, the first thing I would do is do what I'm doing now and go to the public and let them have input as to what they feel about these things. And Wisconsin historically is not up to fees. Whereas in many other states, it's been a long history of water fees, garbage fees. You name it. But Wisconsin having revenue sharing to the extent it has and the high property taxes has institutionalized those two sources as being the bulk of the revenue. So now when you embark upon change, people don't always have the understanding or the empathy that you're locked in with 88% of your budget. Now where do you go? Exactly. Let's take a look at where the money is being spent right now. As we look at the chart, it appears that really the lion's, I'm sorry, not the lion's share, but more than half is for public safety. 52% actually goes to police and fire protection. Right now I know the chart indicates it's 113 employees, actually 130 employees that are there at the time that I got that information that may have reflected a previous amount of people that were working for the police department. The fire department 76, I think there are about 79 right now. But they're adequately funded in my mind and adequately staffed as the chart reflects. The other bigger chunk goes to public works. It's 21% and then 17% for administration, administrative costs. Now administrative is a tricky word because it actually really should be per statute of municipal government. And that involves a lot of other things beyond administration. We cover costs for the shanties, the senior center, the armory, municipal building, and things of that nature. All right, all right. Public works, does that include the wastewater treatment plant? No, the wastewater treatment functions on a separate budget. So revenues from there from the other communities are all separate. It's a separate budget. It's their own budget and they appropriated it. Likewise, the water utility. Likewise, the water utility. And the library, although the library gets a chunk of the levy, a third, generally. Right, but they have other sources of revenue as well. Fairly complex, actually. It is very complicated. For a lot of people, it's hard to understand. That's why I try to keep my charts a little simple and the discussion a little simple so I can understand it from a business standpoint. You've got so much money to work with. You've got so many expenditures. Can you balance? And that's what's called balancing a budget. And that's good for me, too. So what have the trends been? It looks as if we've charted here original budgets for major departments from 1996 to date. And it appears that the growth industry has been the police department, as well as fire to a lesser extent. Well, I think the interesting thing to note when we look at the trend from 1996 to 2005 is that traditionally the police department and the fire department have been receiving a little bit more money annually that has been budgeted for. And when we look at original budgets, that's the budget amount that's budgeted, not the actual amount that's spent. I was challenged on that point. I went back and checked actual versus budgeted. The actuals were a little higher. But I think the important thing to draw from that chart is that the amount of money that has been appropriated for fire and police, which is protection and safety, has gone increasingly up. But when that happens, one needs to understand that somebody's gonna take the hit because if there's only so much money to use and you shift some to give to someone else, somebody has a little bit less. And that chart will tell you that Public Works took a hit. And there are about 24 people short of their full staff status right now. Okay. All right, you know, if this were a high budgeted TV show, we'd have somebody here to switch the charts around. But I'm just, I'm gonna do that and hang on and you'll all be happy not to hear me talk for just a brief minute. Let me just look at one chart just so, you look at the Public Works chart, 1996. They're a little under $8 million, maybe seven and a half million. And in 2005, seven and a half million. So basically, it looks like they're flat across the board. And then if you look at the police, so about seven and a half million in 1996 to over 10 million. So that's a quarter, about 25% increase in the police department. So it looks like Public Works has been flat and the police have grown by about 25%. That's correct. That's what I thought, yeah. Make it exciting. Where is Bantlewhite when we need her? Just remove completely. So, you guys keep talking. Oh, all right. You had talked about what the history of revenue sharing has been in that chart that you just flipped over reflects what the history has been for revenue sharing. If you can keep it there. Revenue sharing has been an interesting history because it was Pat Lucy, particularly when he was governor in the 1970s who really felt that shared revenue was something that ought to provide property tax relief, not just be a shared revenue as historically as it began as sort of a percentage of what you paid in. It really was sort of a gift to communities that were wealthy because they got a lot back. And then when Pat Lucy came in, he saw in the 70s, particularly the decline of the inner city, Milwaukee, good example, white flight, decreasing tax base. And as a result, he tried to change the formula and he did. And it voted well for communities like Shiboy and Milwaukee and elsewhere who depended very heavily on that property tax and they needed some relief. So the formula as instituted by Pat Lucy at that time has been somewhat under attack over the years because there are communities that don't get what they think is their fair share in return. But in many cases, they have their own growth and affluence and they don't need it as much as other communities. So there's always a debate, I guess, between need and what you think you should get back. Well, and finding any formula that is truly fair. Number one, you have to agree on the values on which the whole system is based and people don't necessarily agree on that. And number two, then to figure out a system that's fair again requires, I think, a complex decision-making process that's really very tough. There's too many variables and those variables keep varying. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then the political wins going back and forth, it's hard. The chart up here reflects, Mayor, what you had said before about revenue payments remaining pretty, actually a fairly dramatic decline. You were on the council when that decline took place and is staying pretty stable right now. So... And that big drop was when the budget of the state was a great deficit. And we always told in budget letters that you can talk smart and cut the state budget, but when 75% of the state budget is local aids, the buck stops somewhere else and it isn't on the state level, it's on the local level. And that chart just dramatically shows what happens when you cut state revenues in order to balance your budget. But now we're seeing the same thing happen when 47% of our budget is state aid. And that goes away, we're in trouble. Because then you have to go to other sources of revenue and primarily the source you go to is people. The chart reflects in 0405 how it just leveled off and we know for sure it's gonna remain at that level for the 06 and 07, so we're not getting any more but we're not getting any less if that's any good news at all. Yeah, so it's not completely grim. The next charts I think really address the next one in particular. And I just, I think we're interested in your input on just what the challenges are that are facing. What appears to be a widening gap or at least a professor, a stable gap as you review the chart between expenditures and revenues. It's at least as I'm looking at it a fairly grim picture. Well what this whole citizen's budget process is about is again is to give the public an opportunity to provide input and to understand the budget process but also so that they can give us some idea what is that they hold more important than other things. That's prioritizing. When the governor came here about a month ago to NPARC he very eloquently and very passionately told us how he prioritized education. But by prioritizing education he'd de-prioritize something else and guess what, somebody took the hit and that means municipalities. So we have to do that too. We have to constantly be prioritizing. What is it that we're gonna hold more important than something else and put more money in there or the very little money we already have but when that happens, as I said earlier, somebody, some department is going to take the hit and that's just the way it's gonna be. What you see here though is to me is probably my most important chart because it reflects what's happening with our expenditures when they automatically go up every year but our revenues don't. And when you have that trend going and spiraling of revenues going up it creates a huge gap. The only way to balance is to bring your expenditures down or your revenues up. Yeah, you've got a little history, Mayor, 201, 202, 203. I thought the city was kinda to break even operating expenditures and revenues kinda zero out there but it looks like the expenditures before you came on board were always above the revenues all the way through even so there was a gap to start with. City was spending more that they could, that they took in for the last five years. And trying to go back and figure out exactly what happened it's not easy. And part of it I think is you talked about automatic increases, what's automatic? Well, steps in longevity in many instances salary and wages, we have premium shares, we have cost and energy, cost and gasoline, we have over six and a half million dollars in police and fire vehicles.  These expenses keep going up at an incredibly fast rate that our revenues can keep up with our expenditures and that's called a budget deficit.  We're not getting more money from the state or the levy so our expenses have to come down you cut services, you cut people, you got problems. That's healthcare costs, all your employees have not been less than probably 13% a year the last couple years. 12 to 13, yes. Yeah and those are good plans but they're terribly expensive, there's no good, even bad plans are terribly expensive these days so it doesn't really make much difference. But when you talk in terms of revenue we know that the only revenue we have is from the state, 88% come in from 47 from the state, 41% from the levy.  A lot of times when a couple gets in trouble and they need more money well they go out and borrow. Well the city has that ability to borrow also but we really can't in a way as you can see with a chart that demonstrates what our debt looks like it's gone increasingly up to a point where we no longer have a lot of borrowing capacity and that chart reflects $70 million which is about 3% or equalized value at 05 and we're allowed to borrow 5% maximum of our equalized value which is about 120 million but the council at some point in time before I became Alderman or Mayor, capped it, I don't know if you were there Tom but they capped it at 3% which is smart and I hope the council never violates at 3% and tries to up it. Just for our listeners, equalized value is essentially the value as set by the Department of Revenue for all the property in the city. Correct. And so we can borrow up to 3% of that value. It looks like we're getting there. But we're up there already, now granted our equalized value fluctuates up so we'll have a little room there and we pay off $6 million a year but that's where the police station is gonna come in so that's gonna take up that amount of money there and that's why we're trying to work right now with the police station cost we cannot afford $17 million police station that's all there is to it. I promise to people that I champion construction of a police station and I will continue to do that but it won't be at $17 million and I think everybody understands that. Right, yeah. What does in dollars, does one employee represent? Salary plus benefits or whatever do you have any number on that? $80,000, $50,000. It's no, I wouldn't have that amount. I can go back and find out for you though. Right now we're trying to set up a computer system where we can retrieve information that's usable not just retrieve it for any reason and a lot of their information just wasn't available. Now I was interested in our discussions about just the debt service, how much money we pay on the debt and I think a lot of us are used to talking about that in the national context because we know the payments on the national debt constitute what 26, 27% of the entire budget if I'm not mistaken, a huge amount of money. Right now, city residents are paying a fair amount of money for debt service as well. Are they not? Right, I think the chart that's around here somewhere reflects that of the $1.8 million increase in the levy. 20, it'll be about 59% when that police station is built, 59% of that is going to go automatically to pay for debt. So that does not include the fire station or the capital improvements. So when you add those two, 75% will go automatically to pay debt or with default on our loans. So what you're saying and I just think that this is kind of extraordinary is that that amount of money out of, and we're just talking the tax levy now which is that 41% figure, so 74 cents I think you just said for each dollar that we pay in our property taxes is going to go for debt relief? Pay debt. It's unconscionable. That's fairly extraordinary. 74%, I thought you said 75. 75%. If, if, depending on the borrowing for the police station. And we'll be talking about that in our next episode. Okay, wow, okay. Coming to attractions, you know, just like you get in West Wing, but right now, the amount is still quite high. 59 cents for every dollar. Right now, right now, 59 cents. And that's the- 23 for existing debt. Okay. 23 to 25 for existing debt. And then when you add on the police station, the fire station, and the capital improvements program will be up to 75. Okay, so that, that's a little crazy. That's my point. I think it's what people need to understand that we're facing some very serious budget times right now. And I need help. I need, I need to be able to turn over a budget to the council that truly reflects the will of the people. And you know what I can do is to get some feedback from the people. And that's what I want to do. As a, do you think if you, you're working on the budget right now? Are they not? Aren't the committees working on the budget or department heads? We just got done with the department head meetings. I think you recall how that works. And they have, you have a proposed initial budget at this point? Not yet. Not yet. Okay, so we don't, you don't know where it is at this point. No, well, we've still had some issues that were unknown from the state as to how they're going to handle our debt, our existing debt and new debt. So this formula was being put together on that, not to put down the state, but a lot of times the state takes our time and without regard to what, how it impacts municipalities. And that's just what we have to live with. I understand that. It's okay with me, where we're held back a lot of times. Okay. Well, I think this whole chart's put forth to the taxpayer that there's going to have to be some cuts made and that when you do make them, you don't have any choice. Correct. So if you want less taxes, you have to have less services. Every department is going to come and tell the public and tell us, tell the mayor and tell us we're more important. Police will say we're more important than everybody. Fire will tell everybody we're more important than anybody. Public works will do the same. Everybody is going to tell everybody they're more important. Question is, how do we strike a fair and equitable balance of the appropriations that we have to make so that everybody is okay and then we provide some sort of a balanced service to the community? Just as we close out, what is the schedule that the, your office will have the budget to the city council by what time do you expect? Yeah, and let's see, second week in November, I believe. Second week in November. And then the process is a prolonged debate or? No, actually the process, there's only one budget hearing and that happens during the council floor and then the budget gets voted on. That's why these soliciting sessions are very important. Time to talk about the budget is now, not when you get your tax bill in January. The mail in mid December. Right. We'll be talking about the citizens budget process, the listening sessions, what you've heard and what you're going to be bringing to the council in just a few minutes or in our next episode. But for now, it's been most interesting and charts away, here we go. And. Glad to be here. And remember what Harry Truman said. So thank you.