Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burris. And back on Free Thoughts today is our colleague Peter Van Dorn. He's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of Regulation Magazine. Today we're going to talk about wages and workers. So start with, be deceptively simple question, how are wages determined? In standard neoclassical economic thinking, the factors in a market economy are paid what's called their marginal product, that is, assume a factory, assume a think tank, assume whatever kind of organization you want. And then imagine that you add, as we say in class, one more unit of labor or one more unit of capital. And how long would we continue to do that? And the answer in the class is, you would continue adding factors as long as the output from adding one more unit of savings or one more worker to your workforce, as long as the revenue produced by that augmentation exceeded the cost of those factors that you purchased in the market. So is this just like a price? I mean, is it the same? In effect, the way, as long as the output of adding factors to your organization, as long as the cost of those factors is less than the output they produce, you're making money. And so how long would you continue to do this? And the answer is until the marginal output equals the marginal cost of the factors that you have purchased. So, and again, in an introductory microclass, you would regurgitate back on the preliminary exam that factors in markets are paid their marginal product. So that's thinking about a business. We will employ workers and we will add a unit of labor up until it's no longer worth it to us for them to work another day at a certain wage. But how does competition between employers and also potential employees then factor in what the wage is? So I make believe I'm farming. And the history of the U.S. economy in the 20th century was all of our grandparents, especially mine, all of our great grandparents, maybe for you, but my parents actually were farmers. So everyone in 1920, well, not everyone, but 70, 5, 80% of people in the U.S. economy were farmers. And now it's 1.0 something percent. How did all that happen? And the answer is people were lured away. So the marginal product of a person on a farm, given that farm prices were declining and why were they declining? Well, the productivity, the marginal product of farms was increasing dramatically because of capital and technical innovation. So my grandfather's farm in the 50s, one of his cows produced 10,000 pounds of milk per cow per year and now dairy cows produced upwards of 30,000 pounds of milk per cow per year. Is that because of better equipment or better cows or both? Both. I mean, genetic and literally the breeding of cows, they've been bred to become milk producers and not much else. And then there are pictures of my father and grandfather in the 1950s using hand forks to shovel hay. Pitch forks. And there's a picture of my father on a tractor without rubber tires. You know, the steel tires. Steel tires? That seems like a really bad idea. Exactly. So the productivity of labor was drawn away from farming into doing other things, mainly working in cities, mainly in manufacturing or something like that before we switched to services because the marginal product of labor in that setting was much higher and thus their wages were higher. And in effect, farming had to compete and it couldn't. And so it just lost people over time because the wage rate for people in farming basically kept going down and the wage rate for doing other things kept rising. So markets reallocated labor and capital away from farming and towards other things because in effect, the value added of labor and capital doing other things other than farming was much more valuable to the economy than farming. So workers are paid, in this story, they're paid their marginal product. So if I am working at, say, a restaurant and if they hire me, I will create $10 in additional income for this restaurant minus whatever my costs to the restaurant happen to be. So total productivity is $10, then my wages will equal $10. Again, the margin, right? So there's assume everything's held constant and then you add one more cook or one more server and then the question is how much does the revenue of the restaurant rise? And again, we have to talk about marginal versus inframarginal. So define these for, since we're not a con of air and air not a con of gas. Inframarginal means everything before the margin, right? So firms keep hiring people as long as their output exceeds their wage. So actually, that's where surplus comes from, right? So workers actually make more than they are paid and the surplus goes... They produce more, you're saying? In effect, all inframarginal workers. So you have to worry, but wages are set at the margin. If I leave Cato and go to another think tank, again, we're nonprofits, so it's hard to make the metaphor work. But if we were in firms and we had sales and things like that, everyone's paid the marginal product of the last worker, even though if you're inframarginal, you're actually more productive than that, which is why the firm hired you. Now, this seems all very difficult to actually carry out in a very fluid fashion. What I mean is that workers... These aren't just particles that are being attracted to the biggest attractor without any friction in between workers. They're people. They're not just commodities. Yeah. And so they don't want to move and they don't want to retrain and they like their job and they have a personal satisfaction. All true. So it's not just they're letting you. So is the non-fluidity of labor an issue in this or something that we should be concerned about? Well, certainly the data show that American workers are moving around physically a lot less than they used to. And economists are quite well, have been exploring this and we certainly the number... Well, we know that. But it's a stylized fact that it's true, which is the fluidity and mobility of American workers seems to have dramatically declined in the last 30 years or so. What a stylized fact. That's a good question. I've heard you say this a lot too. Something that intellectuals use as an adjective for... Can we agree on the following facts? Okay. ...for purposes of discussion. Fluidity of labor has decreased. Yeah. It's our stylized fact. So I'm saying there's a bunch of papers out there whose sites I could provide that sort of all agree that something's happened. So we call that a stylized fact, which is I don't... That's a good question. We could have a free thought. Yeah. Just assume this. Where does stylized facts come from? And so that... I mean, the fluidity of labor, which I'm sure will come up more in this discussion, but that brings up this question where if it's not moving around much, then this seems to be a problem with... That breaks down the process that I described. Absolutely correct. I mean, just as in consumer markets, there's something called search. So if we have five or six supermarket chains now in the DC area, if everyone habitually shopped at the market near them and no one looked at the ads and no one at the margin shifted their behavior, then the supermarkets would have no incentives to change any of their prices. Same thing in the labor market, which is if this firm treats workers badly and doesn't pay them very much and people know that, but or the workers know that, but none of them change. None of them move. None of them go anywhere. And the firm can keep doing mistreating them, if you will. If again, all economics markets depend on not only the existence of choice, but the exercise of choice. In financial markets, we have index funds where I'm in the Kato 401k, you are too. We all learned from our financial columns in the Journal or the Times or whatever we read that ordinary people can't beat the market. The problem wasn't of us should index fund. Well index fund is just buying a random sample, well it's buying the complete market, market weighted diversified sample of all firms that are publicly traded. Well if everyone index funded, if everyone, I mean everyone, then stock prices have no meaning. Everyone's just buying the market every month. So somebody somewhere has to be an active investor. So you've asked the same question in labor markets or any market. We're all, when I used to teach a class, I said, why does the price of orange juice 250? Why isn't it 251? Why isn't it 249? The answer is, and I asked the class, do any of you look at the price of orange juice every week? No one would raise their hand. Why don't firms change the price? They're not searching. Somebody does. See if no one checks things out and no one changes their behavior, then all of this stuff we're talking about doesn't work. I want to segue on that point because actually, is the answer to the question, so people might do a lot of searching on orange juice, but in general, you go to your grocery store more often and things like this and the price might vary. So they're not jobs are the difference, but then you have people like, this is a segue, but like commodities future traders who are really looking at the price of orange juice, who are searching, who are making choices, more than your average consumer are, and they probably determine that we are, they are the margin. In other words, the reason prices vary and prices matter and wages vary and wages matter is that somebody somewhere is choosing and deciding and changing. We are all mooching off that behavior. If no one thought about changing or deciding, then this thing we call the market and the prices in them would actually be A stagnant and B have no meaning if you follow what I'm saying. So when we tell this economic story of where wages come from and this is why workers are compensated in the ways and to the levels that they are, one of the pushbacks is to question this notion of the marginal productivity, to say like, look, you know, that teachers are incredibly important and produce super valuable things, whereas the kids who played in the national championship game last night and are going to go on to get drafted in the early rounds are going to make an extraordinary amount of money, much more than the teachers and they're not really producing anything of value, you know, I mean, or that amount of fun is certainly not as important or valuable as what the teachers are doing. So there seems to be this disconnect between what we think of as productivity and what we think of as, you know, as value. This is the kind of question that makes Peter's head. No, no, I get it. I get it. It's it's economists care about and focus on how people behave rather than what they say. And ever since, I mean, I can remember discussions of voting in New York State school budgets are voted up or down every year by school districts. It's the only democratic part of New York State. I mean, New York is big government mostly and the legislatures corrupt and people don't have much of a say in lots of things. But school district budgets are voted on every year by every school district outside of city. So Buffalo Circus, right? They don't have votes. But what I'm calling school districts like where I grew up in upstate New York every year there'd be a vote. The budget would go before the voters. And every year the argument you just made would be put forth by the teachers.  And every year because of New York State politics and voters don't get much of a chance to protest their anger at things. They would vote down the school budget often and then the board would have to offer one at a time. All right, New York State losses, the taxes are this and the budget is this without your consent. But if you want sports, if you want after school music, if you want after school buses for your kids from varsity, if you want all this, you get to vote on it a line at a time and say yes or no till here's what the tax rate would be if we put this more into the budget. And every year the budget would initially get voted down and then they vote on it one at a time and they'd put it all back in because they realized they liked stuff. But they couldn't ever vote down or up on teacher salaries. The one thing. But again, people can move around, right? So some school districts in New York State are famous for quality and others are not. And when my brother moved to Maryland, the same thing, he said, he looked at all the SAT scores by zip code. And he said, I'm going to move here because here's the best value for taxes and value added in money. So enough parents take into account what's going on and then those districts spend a lot more on students than others. And Bill Fischel is an economist that Dartmouth has written about this in a book called The Home Voter Hypothesis, which talks about how parents sort themselves out across space by how much their school districts do spend and how much value added they think they get. So ironically, even though you said, no, they don't get paid as much as the coaches of football teams, but teachers don't have TV revenue. Yeah, I guess they could film their classes and whatnot. A lot of discussion has occurred in the last 10 years, I'm going to say, especially in the last, I would say four, about real wages stagnating. And especially with the election having just finished and talking about the struggling worker with Donald Trump and also Bernie Sanders discussed the struggling worker. And a lot of people talk about how wages are flatlining or stagnating. Is that true? A lot of what I bring to these podcasts is that when data, be careful of thinking that a data set with a label is actually measuring the same thing over time. So there's something called wages and it's produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and you can look up this data set and it starts in 1940, all these start after World War II. And then you can look at the time series and the label is the same. So it looks to the reader, particularly journalists, that we measure something called wages and they're going up and up and up and then somewhere, as you said, in the last 10 or 20, depending on how you count years, something's gone wrong, right? And then the stylized fact becomes part of the chattering class discussion. So the times and the post and so-called elite educated media keep saying over and over again that we all know something called wages, so workers as a percent of national income are getting less and capitals getting more and quote, we all know that and then we say, oh, we've got that new big book by Piketty and by, right? So and that sort of somehow that train, that train of discourse becomes very hard to stop. But there are some interesting papers by economists that I can describe, which I'll do now, which basically say, hmm, we need to correct four and this is four things. So first, the production and non-supervisory workers is technically the set of people whose wages are being examined by the BLS. Well, as a percent of the US labor force, that set of people is actually shrinking. So the percent of people, you and I, you and I, all of our Kato salaries are not probably in the BLS data set. And so, hmm, I'm not a capitalist, so how come? So the notion that something called the wage database is counting everyone we wouldn't think of as a Rockefeller, that's actually less true over time. So that's correction number one is... What kind of jobs that are more common now are excluded from the production and non-supervisory? The funny thing about these data sets is they're all produced by the government and economists all use them. But academic economists, and I put myself in that category as well, are remarkably uninformed about the mechanics of the gathering of the data for these data sets, even though we're all very dependent on them. The set of people who actually are very good at knowing all this are the economists in the BLS. And if you find them and they'll engage in account, I've met some of them at dinner parties and they go, oh, they spend their entire career is, oh yeah, I do the gathering of the data for the Midwest and this data set. And it's like, oh, okay, talk to me about what's... Sadly, that knowledge doesn't tend to enter the journals very much. I mean, it's literally an entirely separate, important occupation which is whose details are almost completely unknown to all of us who talk about these things, which is a sad commentary. So even... I know that is absolutely fascinating. I mean, so basically... We are dependent on the 1,300 people who gather the GDP and the BLS and the wage and the income data. And yet, they are not, to be honest, they're not considered the prestigious jobs in economics. And so what they do and how they do it is actually incredibly under known and underappreciated by the rest of the profession. And so I actually can't answer Aaron's question other than to know in general, the set of people you and I might be willing to call workers is less and less sampled by this BLS data set. But production and non-supervisory seems to be trying to get to hourly wage kind of workers. I mean, since these things were set up after World War II, it's certainly the case that the percentage of people in the US economy fitting that definition were higher. And the normative purpose of these data sets which is involved in the struggles between labor and capital and the New Deal and all of that probably infused the way these things were defined and how they have been not altered over time.  And I'll give you- That's a future episode. We just call the whole thing politics of data. A brief segue. When Reagan took office, David Stockman was head of, well, he was what, OMB? Stockman, you said, yeah. So there used to be something called the low moderate and high standard of living budgets. And I used to use them in class. Well, the low standard of living budget was very, very close every year to median family income. Well, that, so who was behind those data sets in the politics of data? And the answer was labor unions. And Reagan and Stockman, of course, did not, were not in that camp. And thus the data, those data sets were terminated by Stockman. I mean, you can go back and find these, the low, moderate and high standard of living budgets. And then early in the Reagan years, these time series just ended. So why data are the way they are and why they're gathered is certainly a scientific enterprise in part. But there's also a, particularly with wages and returns on capital, I mean, all that contentious stuff. There is a political component. And Stockman believed that ending the existence of those data sets would in turn undermine some of labor's attempts to increase wages beyond what Reagan thought was appropriate. She said there were four things. And that was the first. What's the second? The second is the difference between wages and total compensation. So employers over time, the composition of the compensation for workers has gone from almost all wages to much more benefits, and particularly healthcare. So the increasing cost of healthcare and the fact that employers for many employees pay a component of their health insurance costs and or healthcare costs directly, so healthcare going from whatever 5% of GDP to 17% of GDP, that's not in wages. That's not all of it. Some of it is in benefits and pension benefits and 401K contributions by employers and all of those things aren't in the BLS wage data set. So the second correction is to take a BLS data set, include all workers and not just production workers, and then include all compensation. And those data sets do exist, although they're much less prominent and not reported much in the media. That seems crazy that, I mean, one thing that we know in basic, I guess, labor economics, but just basic economics to some degree is that an employer looks at an employee as all the costs associated with that employee if they have to provide them in healthcare, if they have to provide them with different sort of mandates or if it's impossible to fire them, all these kind of labor costs, they just see them as this is how much it costs the firm to employ this person. It doesn't really matter to the firm that this is how much they take home and this is how much they get in benefits. The firm could care less. That could care less. Completely indifferent. So it seems to me, and I've thought this before and I'm glad you brought this up, that given the skyrocketing costs of healthcare, and I blame a lot of that on the government, and if we do have take home wages somewhat stagnating, but if last year I cost $6,000 to Cato for my healthcare and then this year I cost $8,000 to Cato for my healthcare, it's gonna be really hard for me to go and ask for a $2,000 raise because basically I got one even though I don't even know it if they have to provide me with healthcare. Correct. That could be a huge factor in- It has been. It has been. And particularly for lower wage, lower paid employees, healthcare costs as a percent of their income is much higher than it is for higher paid employees. So the so-called aggrieved workers that have been a subject of debate and discussion in this year's election, the lower your compensation, the greater this healthcare effect has been on your take home pay. So the lowest wage employees have been hit the hardest if their employers provided healthcare coverage, and of course for some at the very bottom, their employers never did or the employers never contributed anything to that, to that coverage in which case this argument doesn't apply, but when you do it in the aggregate and when we do this, when we put this up, you'll have links to, I can put in some of the papers that people can read to follow the charts and data that I'm describing. They'll see in the figures how much of a change this makes in the data. So third. Third, this is a little more complicated. This is, there are different deflators used to control for inflation. There are consumption deflators and there are in effect business deflators. So there's, what's going on in the US economy is that the rate at which prices are increasing for the things people make are differing from some of the things they consume. So particularly in manufacturing, because of productivity gains in manufacturing and world trade, the prices and thus the revenues to firms for those kinds of goods have been much more tamed. The price increases have been much less than for what are called non-traded goods. So education and healthcare in particular in the United States, which are non-traded goods. So like HGTV, so we brought up HGTVs before. Those prices are- HD. HD is opposed to buying houses. No, yes, okay. It's opposed to home and garden. HD TV, that's, sorry, I have a little bit of a cold, so those have gone down compared to at least that your brother is purchasing a $3,000 one, but then the other kind of goods. Is there, so what are the other names for those types of goods? Or is it just manufacturing goods? Well, it's often traded and non-traded goods, but basically this paper, which the link will be in the podcast by Bob Lawrence, the when you deflate workers pay by a business deflator rather than the CPI, much of the stagnation disappears. They go from, so the healthcare cost component adds something, but the real kicker comes from this way to treat inflation. And this is where some of our listeners may go, I don't buy it or whatever, but you'll have to look at the paper and- Well, I wanna translate what you just said into English, or at least English for philosophy majors and lawyers. So you have the CPI, the consumer price index, which is how you'd measure real, that's what you do. It's one way, so inflation has to somehow, so the CPI has a market basket of goods and it goes out and prices those goods every month. The physical quantities of those goods are specified every 10 years. Literally it's so many- Two pounds of flour. Yeah, literally, what's the cost of a hockey stick? Hockey sticks are in the Boston CPI, they really are.  Yeah, no, I am. Are snowshoes in the Minneapolis one? They're not in Seattle, right? These are literally physically defined market baskets of goods. In the market basket component, what people buying is updated every 10 years, but in between it's not. So literally every month the CPI is, people go out to stores in all the cities or all these regions that are defined. They're CPIs for every metropolitan region and then the US is just an aggregation of all of those. These are physical quantities of goods that are priced. The business deflator is a Bureau of Economic Analysis product from the Treasury Department, from the GDP data people, completely different. It is weighted by the, what people are producing, not what people are buying. So all the heavy machinery that's made by John Deere, think of all those comb, all those big earth movers that are then sent around the world to dig up stuff in Australia and China, those things are not in the CPI. I don't usually go buy a combine every 10 years. People aren't buying. Combines, yeah, trucks. So those things. But they're in what people produce. So the business deflator component of GDP is about all of that and the prices of those things have been not rising as fast as things like housing and healthcare. And so once you take that into account because the revenues to firms that are making those things are also not rising that rapidly because they face world competition, the payments to labor in those firms have not been rising as rapidly as the things that those workers actually consume. Does the difference in these, and so what we just look like if you control for one versus the other, does it change based on income? So we said that healthcare, because presumably healthcare is like, whether you're poor or rich, the amount it costs to ensure you is roughly the same.  Is there a similar thing where the kinds of goods that go into the CPI are more likely the kind of things that make up a larger portion of, so that CPI-related inflation is gonna bite the lower-income person harder than the higher income? First of all, these things aren't disaggregated by where you are in the income distribution. None of these data sets are. So the one, again, you remember the politics of data sets. So the one political element of inflation that is certainly discussed a lot is should the elderly be treated, should elderly inflation be calculated differently than inflation for the rest of us? Because they don't buy hockey sticks. Well, and they buy them. I mean, I'm being facetious, but basically, yes, yeah. And they buy healthcare. Of course. And since social security costs, social security cost of living increases are tied to the CPI, the advocates for the elderly, particularly AARP, argue that you should have pharmaceutical prescriptions and healthcare- And madlock episodes. And all included in the elderly. TV land, the price of TV land. Not Beyonce CDs, though. So madlock, yes, madlock, no Beyonce in the elderly CPI. That makes sense. But Aaron's point is correct, which is everything I'm talking about is for everybody on average, which means there are different people will be affected differently by this depending on how close they are or not to something called the average consumer or the average business who's experience I'm describing. That's correct. So in this third factor, the two deflaters, the sort of kicker is that this means that it's less stagnant. If you include this and the wages are less stagnant. In fact, of the corrections so far that I've described, this is where a lot of the action occurs. Using the business one as opposed to the CPI. Correct. And since this is quasi-mysterious and difficult to explain, this may be the most difficult to win over a non-econ nerdy or non-nerdy econ kind of. Well we have, I was looking at the graph now and we'll have the paper linked in. And so now we can move on to the fourth factor. The fourth people probably should be able to relate to particularly if they're users of computers and things like that, which is, so the output of people has, you have to in effect subtract depreciation is the argument of this paper. So if the capital stock, if all the stuff out there is lasting as long as it always did, neither shorter nor faster, you don't have to worry about this. The claim of the paper is that the stuff we're making now because it's computer, increasingly computer related, has an increasingly short capital lifetime. And thus the actual rate at which the capital stock of the United States is running out of gas, is depreciating, is actually increasing. It's a shorter time period. So buildings and lighting and all that still lasts 20 years, but software, computers, lots of, I mean, this booth we're recording in for all I know it's already out of date. I think that's true. For the most part, yeah. We were talking about upgrades just yesterday. All right. So see, the listener can relate to Kato, even Kato's audio room is depreciating rapidly. So once one corrects for this in the argument of this paper, there's been no divergence between the compensation to workers and the increase in GDP from 1970 through 2008. There is no puzzle to explain according to this paper. Since 2008, there is a divergence and that's even more, well, we can drift into that, but it gets more complex. It's more complicated and it's a kind of scary Luddite kind of argument which has been in the media which is are we getting to the point where the robotification of working life is to the point where there is insufficient demand for workers. We really aren't coming up with something for everyone to do. Economists have always thought of this as a crazy argument because human needs are endless and we can come up with, I mean, it won't be manufacturing but it'll be service-based but maybe the ability of people to demand things that require labor is in fact limited. Bob Lawrence, the author of the paper, will link to calls this labor augmenting technical change which took me a while to wrap my head around that but I finally figured out what he's saying which is the computers and software and things are making some labor so productive that it's actually decreasing the price of labor. It's making them so productive that we need fewer workers and that's the scary scenario which is we can't come up with something for everyone to do. The right has tended not to worry about that. The left has forever and the economist who wrote this paper is a center left, I would say but not rampant left, not like Piketty at all and thus this is an argument, I mean, at a minimum we have given his four corrections to the data. For him, everything's hunky-dory up until 2008 but even when you add his four corrections, the divergence between workers' total compensation corrected these four ways and total economic output diverges after 2008. So to reframe that or express that in the story that you told at the beginning of how wages are determined, does this mean that, so if I'm a firm and I've got a certain number of workers, those workers because of the technology that I have access to in my firm are so productive that it's not worth it to me to hire more people because basically it's gonna, hiring an additional person's going to increase productivity some but either not enough to compensate for their other costs or I'm not gonna be able to find a market for that increase. There we go, that's what it is. That's literally, we can make more stuff by adding more people because of this augmented technical change. However, we can't figure out how to sell it. Because there's only so many iPhones you can sell because once everyone has one, you don't need to sell more of them. No, again, this is my interpretation. Lawrence never says this. He just uses this term and I've been reading this paper over and over again for a year. I've been talking with Jeff Myron, my colleague about this script. And this is my, so we'll get listeners writing in and saying, Peter, you're wrong or you've missed this paper. But this is my interpretation of trying to translate his language into English. He does not. Like I just wanna clarify for Aaron's point that so if we're making all the microwaves with one guy sitting in a factory, pushing the button to whatever, start the machines and then turn the machines off and that's all the microwaves we need that the reason we can't increase that production function is because we don't need more microwaves. Is that basically, or other things too? Like that, but it seems like people adjust their own behavior on this though because isn't there some sort of that you get two microwaves or you put one in your bedroom or if they're super cheap, you might put one in your bedroom and you might put one in your kitchen. That's what I'm saying. I might have one in my office so I don't have to walk down the hall. Certainly I was on the television. With the televisions, exactly. I mean, I was thinking back to the future nobody has two televisions. Well, everyone, you have one that moves your house if they become that cheap. All of what you are saying has been the traditional economic critique of claims that ever since the Luddite concerns. I mean, this has been going on a long time in Western societies with industrialization which is we need to preserve jobs and economists have always said, oh, come on. No, no, no. The transition is difficult but everyone eventually will leave agriculture and come to do things like podcasts in a recording studio, right? We'll figure out other things to do and this notion of satiating demand and thus, these workers will be let go and then no one will hire them to do anything. I'm not saying I buy that argument. I'm just saying this is my interpretation of what Lawrence is saying. I haven't seen papers critiquing what he said either in economic language or my interpretation of it. I've talked with my colleagues about it. They too think I'm probably correct in interpreting, translating what he's saying into what I think has been a fear of some folks about industrial society for a long time and I'm just gonna have to say I leave it at that which is all your objections make perfect sense of it. It's exactly what I would always say in class. Economists have never, but he's a mainstream economist. He is not a Marxist. He's not an Iraqi economist. And he was at Brookings. He was at Harvard. So for this kind of argument to come from someone like him certainly got my attention. So I wanna get on to some of the things that we discussed when we were planning this episode. We have the wage stagnation issue, wages and workers quality of life and the level of wages has been controversial for a while. And there are some things that you hear people say about wages that are fairly common. One is that CEOs and bosses take money from their workers or that they could easily give back and that there's something askew with the compensation regime because the guy who makes the iPhone only makes, let's say not the one in China, but the one in Cupertino makes $35 an hour but Tim Cook takes home however many billion dollars a year that there's something wrong with that in terms of how their compensation is determined. What would economists say about that? There is a literature, a very vigorous literature on CEO pay and what's happened to it. Again, the term, stylized facts, stop, wait. That'll be the name of this episode. Stylized facts with Peter Van Doren. It is certainly the case that CEO compensation has risen dramatically. My reading of the literature is that this arose because of a crazy confluence of factors that no one anticipated and where some very smart people sort of got it wrong. And so briefly, go back to the early 90s, CEO pay became a political issue in the 92 election. President Clinton ran on a platform of doing something about it and in 1993, the tax code was changed so that the tax deductibility of executive compensation was limited under the IRS rules to a million dollars or less if it was cash. Well, then the stock options became the mode of pay and the 93 through 2001 period was one of the greatest stock booms in US history. And so looking backwards, and these stock options were not indexed to relative performance. So basically the rising tide of stocks inflated CEO pay tremendously because boards switched from paying people cash to paying people in stock options. The literature was supportive of that initially, but then Jensen and Murphy, two of the prominent people that argued in a famous paper that CEOs were paid like managers in the old days and let's say fifties and sixties and they should be paid incentivizing somehow. And they have completely, they have argued in the literature that stock options were a big mistake. People should be paid in stock, not stock options. Boards paid in stock options because they misperceived the cost of stock options to be free or low instead of redistributing from existing shareholders out there. So in that sense, the boom in the US economy, more of it went to CEOs than would have gone to shareholders if the pay had been in stock. And particularly stock that was indexed to relative performance. I mean, the whole economy boomed. And if you're paid in stock, no one should be paid the S&P 500, you're running one particular. So the question is, how's your company doing relative to other companies? All companies in the 90s were doing great. Remember, we had a budget surplus in the 90s. I mean, there was just, it was one of the most unbelievable booms. Looking backwards, productivity increased a whole lot. No one anticipated any of this. And because of this law and then the change to stock options rather than stock. And particularly stock that had to be long held, you just had people in this giant cash machine tied to the stocks in general. So it's not as simple as saying that they can just give back to workers in that sense, or that they're taking from workers, they're taking from shareholders. Probably, I mean, yes, in that phase. Quote, quote, taking, I'm putting it. There's a paper by a guy named Kaplan from Chicago Business School that says, since 2001, CEO pay has actually not been, it's not increased dramatically. And in fact, in 2010, CEO pay was at the 1998 level. It actually had gone below what it was in the boom. And there's also a skewness to the CEO, right? It's right hand skewed. So the average CEO pay is very different than the median. To be sure, the median rose, but the mean really rose. So there's some particularly egregious cases that skew the average. When you look at the median, things are less dramatic, though quite much higher pay than, quote, average workers. That's certainly the case. But it now appears to be the case that boards and academics are getting it. Stock options are now out, stock is in, and stock that has to be held a long time. I see Rex Tillerson with his appointment as Secretary of State. He's not supposed to be able to sell his stock. He's supposed to have a very long-term interest in ExxonMobil that matches the interests of equity holders of that company. And ironically, his government service, he's gonna be, I mean, they had to figure out this way to, he can't, under contract, he can't, he's not supposed to sell. So the board, if I've read correctly, actually has had to make him more short-term oriented in order to fit the ethics constraints of public service. So with all these questions about wages and the justness of them and who makes what and what they should make, and is there any sort of conclusion that seems obvious here where you say, oh, well, the government has a role or should be doing something about fixing this if someone perceives a problem in wages? One, I think one answer I have is when everyone asserts something, you should take a deep breath and look more carefully at data sets, how they're constructed, why we infer what we do from them and realize how complicated it is to construct a data set across time that's called consistent and measuring the same thing. It's not, it's not that easy. And the sad thing is, is that less informed discussion of data sets informs politics rather than more informed and I probably can't undo that although this podcast is an attempt to do that. Second, given that our discussion today, notice nothing jumped out in an obvious way for governments to somehow intervene to do something other than the cost of housing. I mean, remember what consumers are buying, the price of those things is going up a lot. And as you said, healthcare and housing, you see healthcare regulation as well as zoning regulation we've talked about in other discussions are probably the reasons for the prices of those things rising so rapidly. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Theresa Terrible. To learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.


Hi everyone, Sean with jaspyscasebreaks.com here doing 2021 hit parade football sapphire edition series five hobby Six box case break random team number one. We're obviously all card ship and we're looking for really crazy stuff like these This is a sales sheet. They have eight lists eight items on here. I Have yet to see a case where we do not hit a sales sheet hit. So if we hit one of these We're doing pretty cool 32 spots high risk high reward 2021 high hit parade football sapphire edition series five each box contains one sensational card That's either protected by a one-touch or a graded slab from PSA or Beckett What's included low numbered autographs and dual triple and booklet autographs one of ones PSA or Beckett graded autographs and PSA or Beckett graded rookies only the best make the cut for sapphire 50 hand numbered boxes produced They take 36 of those boxes out of the 50 they're hand numbered and put them into six cases of six boxes each the other 14 They sell separately individually through their website. I believe so like I said I have yet to find a case that does not have a hit a sales sheet hit at it Here is I'll leave that sales sheet open for myself Here is the list of customers from Gordon Phillips down to Jonathan liang and the dice or the The teams from the Cardinals down to the Washington football team Dice roll to randomize both lists and pair them up four and a four eight times eight the hard ways. Oh And if you're interested, we do have a second case of this that is posted in the site right now From the same series So Paul Norden down to Ryan golden eight times on the randomizer eight times of the dice and eight times on the teams eighth and final time Kansas City Chiefs Buffalo Bills Eight times the randomizer eight times on the dice And there we go Paul Norden with the Kansas City Chiefs Charles Wolfkill with Washington football team Matt Lieber with the Panthers Robert Flores with the Browns Jonathan liang with the Broncos Paul Norden with the Rams Dario Josh Kennen with the Giants Jonathan liang with the Raiders Dario Josh Kennen with the Buccaneers Ryan Golden with the Bengals Charles Wolfkill with the Titans and the Cowboys Rosario Carucci with the Eagles PJ McNeely with the Vikings Bears and the Texans Mike Tower with the Steelers Gordon Phillips with the Ravens Matt Lieber with the Patriots Robert Flores with the Jets PJ McNeely with the Colts Robert Flores with the Packers Matt Lieber with the Saints Paul Norden with the Chargers Jonathan liang with the 49ers and the Falcons PJ McNeely with the Dolphins Matthew Slade with the Seahawks and the Jaguars Roy D. Pietro with the Lions Jonathan liang with the Cardinals and Ryan Golden with the Bills Trade window is open Be careful about trades guys because there is no sort of no checklist on a product like this So it's pretty much a blind trade Here you go. Here is your list of potential trades Hello Eagles Give it a minute for potential trades While you guys are talking or thinking about trades at all like I said, we have two cases here We got to figure out which one we're gonna do for random team number one and which one we're gonna do for random team number two Which is in the store. This is case three out of six and this is case five out of six One two three on the dice for the case on the left four five six in the dice for the case on the right It's a one. So we're going case number three case five here will be for random team number two Which like I said is in the store now and can go Later tonight I think so gosh, it might be probably the next thing that sold out. I just got to go through orders and find out So back to the randomizer Doesn't look like there's any talks of trades. So Are we good just the print and writ? Last chance speak now forever hold your peace trade window going once trade window going twice trade window going three times trade window close So here's the case Let's pop this thing open So you can see six boxes 34 out of 50 So 34 out of 50 will start it Nice dino very nice Like I said, we still got a ton of breaks that are all very close to going tonight And it's still early. It's not even 10 o'clock on the east on the West Coast Share your hit nice one to start For Robert Flores and the Green Bay Packers tops chrome Aaron Rodgers rookie VGS 9 Centering was an 8-5 edges corners and surface all a nine Nice start for the Packers tops chrome rookie box 40 I We're going For Mike tower in the Pittsburgh Steelers Jerome Bettis six out of six two-color patch and auto from Panini one Jerome Bettis So good with the autograph that last loop always turned into a football That is from 2020 Panini one football The bus very nice one there Box 48. Yeah, we had him in a helmet the other night He might have one of the he might have the best I'm trying to think I don't think I can't think of any other football player that has as good about autograph is in There's some good basketball ones or some good baseball ones. I really can't think of a football and this is good We're going for Gordon Phillips and the Baltimore Ravens Lamar Jackson Don Russ optic rated rookie pink bgs 9 5 box 6 I Peyton Manning the sheriff on card auto Ring of honor 1998 to 2011 three out of five From 2020 limited football The sheriff Peyton Manning Indianapolis Colts PJ McNeely on card out of five auto there you go PJ box 18 10 out of 10 little new era laundry tag rookie cat patch autograph Brandon I youk From encased football that is for the 49ers and Jonathan Liang and Either either a sales sheet hits gonna be in box 27 or this is the first case I'm gonna see without a sales sheet hit. I don't think that's gonna happen I think we got the best for last in box 27. Let's see it Let's see There's been some real good stuff in here though. Let's see and it's Lawrence Taylor 1982 tops all pro rookie PSA 8 it is not a sales sheet hit So this is legitimately the first case I've seen without a sales sheet hit But we have some ridiculous cards in here Peyton Manning out of five Brandon I youk laundry tag auto Lawrence Taylor rookie Lamar Jackson rated rookie pink Aaron Rodgers tops chrome rookie There you go guys That's the break That was 2021 to hit parade football sapphire edition series five hobby six box case break random team number one Oh that New York Giants that goes to Dario Josh Kinnan. Don't even think I said that and there you go Another nice case second case in the store now Jasper's case breaks calm. I'm Sean. Thanks for hanging out. We'll see you next time


The prevalence of allergic and autoimmune diseases is increasing in developed countries, possibly due to reduced exposure to microorganisms in childhood, hygiene hypothesis. Epidemiological and experimental evidence in support of this hypothesis is accumulating. In this context, parasitic helmets are now important candidates for anti-allergic anti-inflammatory agents. Here we summarize anti-allergic, anti-inflammatory effects of helmets together along with our own study of the effects of schistosoma mansoni on TH-17, dependent experimental arthritis. We also discuss possible mechanisms of helmet-induced suppression according to the recent advances of immunology. This article was authored by Yoshio Osada and Tomotsu Konozawa.


Dude on card triple auto madding Lee judge and Rizzo For the Yankees Triple auto judge live and on card is kind of it's kind of surprising to me. Maybe not crazy surprising Congrats Yankees madding Lee judge Rizzo triple Dude, that's nasty show. Hey, oh tiny patch eight of 15 Dude unreal break for the angels Four color big show patch


no matter what display manager your distribution ship with, you can change it very easily. So the first thing that you want to do is install the display manager that you want to switch to. So if you want to switch to GDM, you would install GDM just like so, and then you'd enter your password and install. Once it's installed, all you'll have to do is enable the service, which you do with a line similar to this. If you're switching to LightDM, it'd be LightDM.service.  Now, because you already have a display manager installed, you'll have to use the dash F flag. You'd hit this, and it looks like this, and then you reboot, and then you will have GDM as your display manager. That's really all there is to it. Now, if you find that you don't like the display manager that you just switched to, you can obviously go back to what you were before just by typing in the previous display manager. So I was on LightDM, and I just do this, and I do the exact same thing, and now I've reverted the change. So that is how you change to a new display manager. If you like these types of videos, make sure you hit the subscribe button.


The Greengrocer mobile market pilot phase implemented by Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank in November 2015 aimed to improve access to locally sourced fresh foods in low-resourced neighborhoods. An evaluation was conducted, which found that residents of select communities observed meaningful improvements in produce consumption after the intervention. Specifically, homeward residents observed an average 13% increase in vegetable intake, days slash week, rates post-Greengrocer, while Clinton residents showed a marked increase in vegetable intake with an average 20% increase in serving slash day. The study also found declines in produce purchase from discount stores and supercenters alongside increases in procurement from Greengrocer, farmers markets, gardens, and other sources after six months. Overall, the preliminary work provides support that this mobile market serving under resourced areas was valued by consumers and showed increases in vegetable consumption in several neighborhoods, suggesting potential to reduce geographically based food and health disparities when scaled up. This article was authored by Tiffany L. Gary Webb, Tiffany L. Gary Webb, Todd M. Bear, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Well, I would like to call the meeting to order, roll call wise. I have Sheila Conroy, Jack. Julie Hauser is our guest again today and I welcome you Julie. Sarah Prudence, Art Susan, Michelle Waite, Michelle Priga, and Marsha Martin. It is my understanding that we are not being live streamed today. So there should not be any pollings. The public is now invited to be heard. Julie, do you have anything that you would like to share with us today? No, thank you. Again, I'm just here to hear what's going on and be up to date. Thanks so much for hosting me all the time. Well, we're very happy to have you and thank you. Has everyone had the opportunity to review the minutes from the last meeting? Yes. And are there any corrections or additions to the minutes? I move that we accept them as written. Do I hear a second? I'll second. I'm sorry, who made that motion? The motion was made by Susan and Michelle Priga second. Thank you. Business board membership. Michelle, are you updating us on that? I'm am and I'm hoping to get an email at some point this morning. The last I talked to Michelle Gomez and the city clerk's office, we had one application and that was Sheila Conroy. Thank you, Sheila. I had one inquiry, but that person lived in Lyons and so that person's not eligible to apply for this board. We have three positions to one of them is term limited and that's Jack. So Jack is not eligible to reapply. And then Michelle Kriga and Sarah Barry are both eligible to reapply. And if you get our weekly email newsletter, you know that we put in a blurb last Friday about both the friends board and this advisory board have openings. This board has the deadline of this Friday at five o'clock. So I will try and keep an eye on my email to see if I hear from the city clerk city manager's office about any updates, but perhaps Sarah or or Michelle or Sheila or others may have an update about that. If you if you excuse me, I have lost my visual, and I think I'm going to have to go out and come back in. Okay. I have a friend who said she had was interested in a position on the board and she said she had applied online. I will double check because that was a few days ago. So Sheila, I would recommend you wait until after this meeting and let's see if I hear back from the city clerk, because perhaps she did and I just don't have the update. Okay, thank you. So I'll just give you guys an update. I it's my intention to to not renew my my commitment to this board but I'm very seriously considering a position on the friends board. So I'm going to work with Michelle I don't know quite the details or how that when when that comes up but that's my intention right now. There are seven positions on the friends board that are available in 2021 and Ruth Waka is sort of managing that process that board does not have the geographic restrictions that this board does. I did mention that to the person from Lyons, but she was really interested in something else so I've connected her. I mentioned the AC to her, Sarah just so you know, but she had some other thoughts in mind so that's that's what I know and great. Michelle, we'd love to have you on the friends board as well. So other comments, questions. I am thinking seriously of resigning as precedent that would be very interested in the AC board. You will see later on our agenda that is something we need to talk about. Moving right along with your permission. I'll keep an eye on my email and get back with you about the application update. If that's okay. Any other input about board membership or positions for 2021. Okay. Moving on to reopening the show. Well, as of if you are following the trends and certainly some of the warnings and messages coming out of the State Department of Public Health, etc. And we're not going in the right direction so Longmont Senior Center will not be opening December 1 and we're going to continue to sort of move on a month to month basis. And we are making last minute adjustments in our winter go to reflect that meals on wheels is also not reopening the restrictions on restaurants and dining has also been changing and getting more restrictive so our staff is looking at doing another round of reaching out to folks who are not connected technologically we're going through our lists of folks and trying to catch back up with people. So we will not be reopening this year. Any other old business to discuss. Sarah you're on mute. Sarah did work. Did you have something that you wanted to share. Okay. I'm muted myself because the phone is ringing. Anyway, but to go back a bit to the positions for 2021 may I ask when that those elections will take place. Talking about the President and Secretary Sarah. Yeah. So those usually take place in January when we have our new board members. Yeah. So I think that if you had something happening January, February or March, we'd ask you to report somehow to me or to the board about that. And then I will follow up with Kathy Fedler about what happens after March. So I will do that. The AAC position is Sarah's been that represent representative for you all. Sarah, I don't know what your term is on that, but you and I are going to have to probably follow up with Lindsay or somebody about that. Okay. I'm sorry. I don't remember either when that term ends, but. Okay. Well, I think that if you, Sarah, if you continue in that role, then we in your role in your term with the AAC, which you can do as long as you live in Boulder County, or if you have to resign and or if Lindsay just reopens the Longmont advisory board. Roll. I will email her and copy you on that, Sarah. So we both get kind of what what's happening there. My recollection is because I've been through this once before. Is that I have to resign or well, you have to indicate that the board position is open. And then if I want to continue on AAC, I have to reapply and be reappointed as a member of large. Right. Or if you move representing your new community or however that unfolds. Okay. Then Jack, I don't know about sustainability. Where you want to go with that. Jeanine had been our alternate. But do you need to officially. Resign or are you going to stick with the sustainability committee? What are you thinking about that, Jack? You're muted. That's right now. Okay. I might apply to the sustainability board. I'm not sure yet. I have a couple of days to think about it. But that's about it, Michelle. All right. Thanks, Jack. And then, uh, Susan, if you want to continue on the, as the liaison to the friends. You would do that. Okay. And then our, if you are interested in continuing to kind of be that Latino coalition connection. That is fine. I will continue. Okay. And then the other note is that Janine would be interested in the AAC position. Depending on how that all shakes out. Is that right, Janine? Yes. Um, and so we'd be looking for a president and a secretary in 2021. We don't need to make those decisions today. But, um, But by December or January at the latest, we probably need to, to have that figured out. Um, Any questions. Concerns, comments about this. I guess that wraps that up, Janine. You're on mute, Janine. Pardon. There you are. Okay. Uh, under new business, uh, T care. So I'm, uh, very excited about this, uh, T care is a program, evidence based program came out of the University of Wisconsin. The state of California has really adopted T care. Um, as, uh, platform for case management for people who are caregivers of older adults. And the evidence base piece is really tied to reducing or, um, Eliminating a caregiver's, uh, Use of Medicaid to pay for long-term care. So the idea is, uh, By providing case management for caregivers who are caring for an older adult, you can reduce the use of Medicaid dollars for long-term care. So that's the evidence base piece of that. So Boulder County, aging services, the area agency and aging received, uh, several free licenses for the T care program. And there are several area agencies on aging in Colorado who will also be going with a T care approach for caregivers. Um, there is an assessment that the caregiver completes and then they are provided for care. Um, Brandy Queen and Melissa Lucino on our team will be getting free licenses and will be participating in, um, The, uh, program along with the Boulder County area agency on aging staff. Um, as most of you know, senior services isn't, hasn't really been involved in, um, evidence-based programs to this degree. So we're actually very excited to have the data to really demonstrate what are the services, the education, the support that really make a difference for, uh, family caregivers. So this is not for paid caregivers. This is for family, friends, non-paid caregivers, this program. So, um, we're excited to, to get involved, to be a part of the data, uh, collection and see the results. For me personally, um, I am hoping that we get some other evidence-based data besides the fact we've reduced Medicaid expenditures. But, um, uh, we'll, uh, we'll unfold that, I guess, as our data comes in. So very excited to do this in partnership. So yeah, questions, Michelle. Um, so let me just like from a 30,000 foot level. Right. Understand. So the idea is if they spend money to support caregivers, ultimately it enables, um, seniors or older adults to live independently for longer. Right. Is that kind of, Yeah. And I wouldn't go quite there. So if you, um, you take the caregivers would take this assessment and they determine kind of a risk level. Okay. And then they are provided with cases of, you know, in the long run, that would be Brandy or Melissa providing case management to those caregivers who hit that threshold. Um, and that evidence-based piece is that they are not using Medicaid for long-term care. I either not putting their family member or their friend they're caring for into a long-term care facility. Which is very expensive. So by hooking those caregivers up with other resources in home services, education, emotional support, case management. By surrounding the caregiver. Right. Those kinds of services. The hope is that they can continue to provide that level of care without putting that person into a care facility. Got it. So it's really supporting the caregiver. Okay. It's really focused on the caregiver. Yep. Yes. Prudence. So. I'm. Reduction Medicaid dollars. Okay. I guess my question is, is why would it care? I wonder if they've answered the question. Why would a caregiver not want to be paid through the state? To give care, but would do this. Freely. Um, in order. I mean, I just don't understand that. So the caregiver. There are, there are some programs where family caregivers get paid by Medicaid. Um, and to keep that person at home. This is really about. Placement and long-term care facilities. It's delaying or eliminating families from placing a loved one in a long-term care facility. Which is the highest expense. For Medicaid. Michelle, how does this. That with the home and community based services. Program. Right. It, it, it actually will, I hope increase the use of. In-home supports. So using Medicaid to pay a family member to keep that person at home using Medicaid. And so using Medicaid to pay a family member to keep that person at home using other dollars, including our personal care dollars through the county and through the friends to help people stay at home. So hopefully that's where the dollars are going is into. Remaining. Um, at home. Um, I think that's a great question in long-term care placements. Um, Jeanine and then Sheila. And I want to circle back to prudence because I'm not sure I answered her question fully. So Jeanine. Um, my question is basically. How many. You faded out, Jeanine. How many clients are we looking at that this might be helpful for. Um, I think that's a great answer to that. What we have, our approach has been is, um, we are serving a lot of people with our caregiver education programs now with our caregiver support groups. We offer to, there are others in the community. Um, We are really hoping to reach those caregivers who, um, we have, um, we have, um, we have, um, We know in what we heard from caregivers in 2018 is they really didn't think that a senior center was a place for them to go. For support in caregiving for an older person. So we recognize and we've been talking to Boulder County about the marketing we're going to have to do to reach those people. Um, we're doing this as a pilot. Um, I don't know if you can guess, but the assessment itself will limit the pool because you have to hit a certain threshold of risk to get into this program. Does not mean we're not going to serve you in another way, but for this. Program, there is a threshold. Sheila, and then I want to again, circle back to Prudence. Yeah, exactly. I'm thinking if a person is going to be on long term care, which somebody has to go into a nursing home. Exactly. The Medicare dollars will still be. A sign that they are currently to a care. Yeah. Hopefully that through the state area agencies on aging, we gather enough data. That we might be able to influence. that that's the evidence piece. Clearly, California has done some things and we'll be learning more about that. So it's to keep people at home as possible? If possible. Okay, thank you. Prudence, again, I just wanna make sure I got to your question. I think that I'm gonna look at California's numbers. Yeah. It just doesn't make sense to me that you as a caregiver are getting paid and you're getting paid to take care of your loved one, suddenly, you're not gonna get paid. Well, we don't know that, we don't know that, yeah. Okay. So it's really about placement in a long-term care facility. Right. And there are so many caregivers who are providing care who are not in that program, where they get a space. In-harm support services. Correct, right, right. Yeah, okay, I understand that. Okay, yeah, Art and then Sarah. And my understanding then that this really does not, is not primarily for those individuals who are already caregivers and are getting paid. It's more for those individuals that need the assistance but are not getting any of the services. Am I correct on that? Well, let me just say back up a little bit. So there are caregivers through home care agencies, et cetera, who families and individuals pay to come in and help with care. There is a specific program where a family member can get paid through Medicaid to take care of someone. Right. Those programs will continue, but someone who makes their career, who makes their primary employment as a paid caregiver is not who this program is for. And if someone is not receiving care, but needs that, then we just go ahead and refer them to Melissa or... Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, those referrals will continue. This program is really focused on family caregivers. So Sarah and then Marcia, yeah, Sarah. I guess my question is, does the person who is receiving care have to be Medicaid eligible? Do they have to apply for long-term cares under Medicaid? So as with most situations, people start out not eligible for Medicaid. So I'm caring for my mom, she has assets, there's no way she's Medicaid eligible. And we often hear about families having to spend down in order to become Medicaid eligible so they can then place someone in a nursing home. So hopefully we might interrupt that cycle to some degree, right? And really help caregivers utilize all the resources that they have perhaps in a more meaningful and lengthy way. Did that answer your question? So the family would, I guess my question is coming out of my concern that so many people who are family caregivers or friends taking care of a friend who don't know anything at all about services and they think, well, we just gotta wait until we spend the person's assets to a point where they can be eligible for Medicaid. And I'm not sure how they're gonna find out. This is like before, if you went in and you applied for social services help and it's clear you're probably to a point where you need long-term care, they make an eligibility determination. Are you eligible for long-term care of that IE nursing facility? When they send you to somebody to be assessed for HCBS services. Right. And so is this totally separate? Well, this is focused on the caregiver, not on the person who needs the care and is doing the eligibility. So when we are doing case management for the caregiver, there's gonna be an array of resources that we're going to be talking with that caregiver about, including the information about HCBS and long-term care and Medicaid. I mean, that is a resource, right? And some people are eligible right now for that without having to spend down. So that is one resource and an array of resources that we will be supporting the caregiver with. Yeah. Okay, Marcia, and then back to Prudence. Yeah. So just to see if I'm in the right idea, sorry. I'm thinking that this is a little bit analogous to the homeless services coordinated entry program where it seeks to connect people with services that they may not have known about. And the objective is to see whether that delays putting people in full-time Medicaid care. Correct. The idea? Pretty good analogy, yes, ma'am. Okay, thanks. Prudence. Okay, so we know that the one evidence is reduction in Medicaid dollars. Right. Do they have any measurement of both the person, the caregiver satisfaction as well as the person receiving kids satisfaction with the services that were developed under this program? So the data on that, I haven't seen the analysis of and I'm pretty confident it is focused on the caregiver, not the care recipient. I'll be curious to know more about that. And the other piece that we have a lot of questions about is how culturally relevant is the assessment tool? Because we want Melissa to work with our Spanish preferred clients and families. And so we are really pushing them on an assessment tool that's culturally relevant. So we're working a couple of different things, Prudence, and we're digging in to some of that other data. The primary evidence-based piece is the Medicaid dollars piece, which is not the whole picture, obviously. I don't feel like it is. And so we'll see how this shakes out and we want the culturally relevant component. There are some caregiver programs nationally that have not just translated their material into Spanish. They've actually done a deeper dive and made the programs more culturally relevant. Sarah. Yeah, again, referring to, I've been frustrated for years at my inability to convince friends that I know are caregivers and would be eligible for and benefit from lots of services to think they need them. And so they don't go to the senior resource specialists. They just think, you know, I can handle this myself. Right. And it's only when the money gets right that they start thinking maybe I better find out what's available. So it seems to me the success of this project is going to depend a lot on outreach. Absolutely. And a different kind of marketing approach, which we talked about at our meeting last week. When we reached caregivers the most is when we use next door as our platform. Not the go, not the web, it was through next door that we reached caregivers. And so we really have to think about that outreach and what that's going to look like. I totally agree with you. It will look a little different than perhaps how else we've done some of our outreach efforts. Because a caregiver of an older person can be a 22 year old college student, a granddaughter. It could be me, a full time working 61 year old. I think how old I am now, 61. So I think we have to think about that in what is happening in their lives and who they are and where they are. So it will be a learning. I'm excited for what we learn from this. And the other exciting thing for me is that the county, Aging Services and us, Lawnmine, we're really looking at the resources we put into caregiver programs and how to do that more efficiently and more effectively. Which I'm really excited about taking a look at all of our resources a little differently. So right now, for those of you who don't know this, the county Aging Services has two respite programs. One, a caregiver can apply and get up to $500 to use to give themselves respite from their caregiving role. And then there is a respite care volunteer program where volunteers can come into the home and stay with the care recipient while the caregiver gets a break. So you might wanna go bird watching at 5 a.m. You might wanna go out to lunch with friends, whatever it is. So we hope to kind of reel those programs and some of the others that are going on. So we have a better understanding of who's doing what, what's available and really look at the resources the support and the education from a kind of that 30,000 foot level. What all is available and how do we market it and make it more usable for our caregivers? Any other questions? More to come. I think you should next year, you should be saying, Michelle, if I don't bring it forward, what's the data saying? What's the data saying? I'm serious, what are we learning? So that's T-Care, that's what it's called. You can check out California or the University of Wisconsin because that's where it emerged was a professor and team in Wisconsin. Yeah, Michelle. You have resort, like what are you doing with the data? You have someplace you're sending it and they're doing the analysis and spitting it back out or you guys aren't being left to kind of make sense of it yourselves, right? Right, so there is some algorithms within the T-Care software package that will do a lot of that. And then Carol Cross from Boulder County, Air Agency on Aging is kind of our data guru. As many of you know, that is not my forte. And so between Carol Cross and Brandy, who loves data, I think we'll be able to start to put together a picture. Yeah, I'm not good at data. I'm sorry, it's just. You're good at so many other things. I don't know. Data is really important and then I have not, I've not been the best leader in that way. So I'm excited for this, so that's great. Any other questions at all before we move on to any other new business? All right, next on the agenda is reports. Michelle, do you have any reports to share with us about supervision? So a couple of things, I got calls from several people, including Marcia, about making sure older adults had a way to vote. And so the Longmont Housing Authority properties, there is some really nice community there and folks were taking care of each other, making sure people got to do their ballots, got turned in or mailed or whatever. We put out information about free rides that were being offered. And so we did not get any calls this year, which is pretty unusual from older people saying, I need to go vote. I think that folks were attending to one another and making that happen. So I want to say thanks, thanks to Marcia and to others. We kept pushing the word out and we really didn't get any calls about it. And it looks like people showed up to vote. So we'll see what those results are, right? Awareness has been so heightened, but it's just like people are, it's kind of magical, that's great. And people are taking care of people, which is really great. So that was exciting. The Long Island Housing Authority work continues to take up the vast amount of my time with the I am still managing the community managers. We are interviewing today, tomorrow and Friday for a regional asset manager as well as two community managers. So once we get that regional asset manager on board, my role will diminish. And that is probably a really good thing for a variety of reasons. So I remain absolutely in support of what city council and Harold and others have done in terms of stepping in, in supporting Long Island Housing Authority, my staff have done an amazing job. We are, as a team, really supporting the remodel at Aspen Meadows Apartments. We are moving people out of Aspen Meadows and into a local hotel while those units get refurbished and moving folks back. What has transpired to be the best option is Michelle works with tenant, so-and-so Amy works with tenant, a different tenant and each of us are doing sort of a hands-on approach to meeting that person, helping them get what they need to the hotel and then reverse that they will start moving back in next week. So we're pretty excited about that. And that has really been a huge team effort and very hands-on. And we're learning a lot about what people are living with and what supports and resources they might need in across the properties. Brandy continues to provide supervision and support at the suites, which is the Long Island Housing Authority property that is permanent supportive housing, primarily for people transitioning out of homelessness but with other, also others who have been housing challenged. So Brandy's been involved down there and it has really been an incredible learning experience and I believe we have been well-placed as a team to do advocacy on behalf of older adults. And so while it has been an unbelievable amount of work, it's been good work and I think we were in the right place to do that. So that's been happening. We have staff still doing some administrative support at LHA. Our custodial staff are still doing service, custodial work at other recreation facilities while we are closed. And Megan and Larry are really holding down the port in terms of programming. So everyone is very, very busy and all of us want to be opened and all of us want our customers back in the building. But that's not gonna happen anytime soon but believe me, your senior services staff are really amazing and doing fabulous work. And that is my report. And we also really glad to have some volunteers back. Thank you, Jeanine for coming back and doing some of that resource work. We are now trying to figure out how we're going to do income tax. We are kind of up against what AARP nationally is saying to their income tax volunteers. So we're trying to work that out and making sure we can do that. So that's kind of where we are. Any comments or questions? Okay, oh, Susan. So does it look like income tax will make it back in the spring? Yeah, so AARP volunteers came and got all of their laptops that we store for them. And the last word I heard, Susan, is it's going to be virtual. They will be providing assistance, but it's gonna be virtual. We are hoping that AARP allows some window because we definitely had people who needed to meet in person this last year. So we're waiting to find out what that window might be. And obviously it could be the kind of thing where we push the income tax deadline out to May or something. Depends on our leadership at the federal level. What happens with that? But we doubt though we'll be, we don't know. I shouldn't say we doubt. We're concerned that they may push out what in-person interviews till perhaps March, which would be really tough to try and get everybody in in a month. So that's kind of where we are. Yes, Prudence. How many people come in-person? To do income taxes? Mm-hmm, do we know? Oh my gosh, almost 200 in past years. And so for some folks, they don't have the computer link. And many of them have hearing difficulties and different reasons they really need that in-person. So we have offered to get face shields for the volunteers. We're trying to support that in different ways. So if they meet in-person, you can read lips. The other, yeah, go ahead.  However, I just read yesterday that there are masks that are clear that were invented by a woman who was deaf and they are medical grade. Very interesting because some of them aren't medical grade, but these actually, she has medical grade and non-medical grade. If you have information you could send to me, that would be great. That would be great. We also have the plexiglass we're using. So I know yesterday we had a meeting with a family, a couple of people and a resource staff. Everybody had masks, some people had face shields, plus we had the plexiglass in between. So folks are trying to do what they can do to minimize or reduce that risk. We're also really ramping up our technology program. We're gonna be buying Chromebooks. We have a list of four people so far who responded to the last newsletter, folks who would be interested in getting technology. And we're looking at Chromebooks and we would provide those two individuals. It would not be shared.  And we're also looking at making Wi-Fi available in some of the very low income Longmont Housing Authority buildings. So kudos to the city of Longmont for that effort. So we're trying to work the technology angle and still allow for those in-person needs as they arise. So it's kind of where we are. All right, you had a question, you're muted. Yes, well, when do we start, can the people start making appointments, if you will, for that? Is that right after the first of the year? So Larry is working with the AARP tax people right now and there'll be a write-up in the winter go. Usually we start making appointments about the third week of January. We don't know if we're making appointments for telephone appointments or what we're doing. If it ends up going that route, then we will definitely make space in the building for the income tax volunteers to come here and use our phones to make those calls. So we're still trying to figure out what those details are going to be. Thank you. Yep, I think that's it for me, Janine. Marsha. Thank you. Yeah, there was no city council meeting last night. Thankfully, we have the forethought to pick election night as one of the nights that didn't need to have a city council meeting. The outcomes of both the local and the state ballot measures I'd like to point out were by and large very favorable to the city. So the two city ballot questions both passed and I'm still not sure about some of the ballot measures at the state level, but it's looking pretty good. So other than that, I don't really have much news. Does anybody have any questions? No questions at all. Sarah, do you have anything to report for your area on IG? Yes, Janine, your sound is sort of garbled as I'm getting it. I don't know. I'm just not sure what. I'm going to go out and come in again. Yeah, I'm not sure. Just not sure. I have no report for the area aging council because we are not meeting in November. So there's nothing that I have new since the last report. Okay, is that any better at all? Much better. All right, now I'm going to put the video on. Hopefully things will stay. Sarah, I'm sorry, please continue. My report is that I have no report because November is a month when AC does not meet. Okay, Susan, anything on friends? We did meet. They're trying to finalize transfer of funds between the old bank and our new bank. Finances are healthy. So they're able to support senior services. The focus was on putting out the donation letter, the pandemic 2020 version. So that should be arriving two people shortly for the annual campaign. And the big item is all the vacancies that they will have to fill on their board and how challenging it is when we don't see each other in the senior center to recruit people or everybody's been charged with contacting friends who may be interested in filling the board positions. Your audio is gone. Okay, it's there, it's back. I don't know what to do at this point. Does anyone have any other comment or question at all? I just want to remind everybody the deadline for applications is five o'clock Friday. I just checked my email. I haven't received anything, but I will send an email update out to you all when I get that information. So you kind of know where we are in terms of board applicants. I will tell you that as always we do some special outreach and we have reached out to some of our Latino community members, Veronica and I. And so we have contacted three folks specifically and hoping one of them at least says yes. And we're doing some other individual one-on-one invitations. So hopefully we can keep that moving forward I do have two people that I'm going to do door knocking on today. Thank you. Okay. Michelle, do you have anything to report for TRG? I have nothing to report for TRG. And Art, anything on the Boulder County Latino Coalition? The only thing to have to report on that is Pete Salas did send out a text to all the people that he writes to or text to and informed them about the positions also. So I have to report on that. Okay. Longmont Economic Development Partnership, I have nothing to report. I will be sending them another email reminding them that I am interested at least in attending their quarterly meetings. I know they are going through some administrative transition. I don't know if that's their reasoning, but I will be contacting them again, reminding them that we aren't receiving notification of their Zoom meetings and that I would like to be involved in those. Jack, do you have anything to report on sustainability? Sure, can you hear me? Yes. Okay. The sustainability meeting took place on the 28th of October at 5.15. It was zoomed. They mentioned that some folks really aren't aware, but the Platte River Power Authority is the source for electricity for the city of Longmont. There was a guest speaker from Platte River Power Authority, a Trista Fugate. She talked about the resources plan for the new generating plant. They talked about a five-year action plan The goal by 2030 is to have no carbon used at the facilities that produce electricity. They talked about a problem with battery storage for wind and other energy. I asked if they had reached out to the German government, which I know has had pretty much excellent success in storing their power, especially from solar energy. They've done a good job, better than we have in increasing their battery capacities. The city of Longmont, the council is going to be meeting the 17th of November to talk about climate action. They talked about recycling to decrease CO2 in our atmosphere. They talked about trash programs, composting, and dumpster use for debris. And there was some talk about how are they going to use the, we do have a tax, a sustainability tax and our taxes here in the city of Longmont and for Boulder County and how that tax revenues was supposed to be used for staff and other things. Now they did not send out the minutes for that particular meeting, but it's forthcoming. So I should have it by next meeting and I'll be happy to distribute to the group. That's about it. I think the census is complete. Is there anything in addition to that, Sarah, that you've heard? No, no additional. Okay. Closing statements. Julie, you are invited to be heard or questioned. I have nothing. None. Okay. Jack? Yeah. May I say something about COVID? There is two things that I've read recently from CDC and Mayo and John Hopkins that might be helpful to the group. Do you mind if I mention it? Oh, please. Okay. What they were saying is some of the reservoirs for the COVID virus is in our nasal passages, in our sinuses, and also in our oral cavity. So what I've been using is something called a netty pot and I use this rinse. It's a saline rinse and I also mixed it with eight ounces of water, preferably distilled water, and also put in about a half a teaspoon of betadine. You could put it in the microwave but no more than about 20 seconds and let it cool down. Mix it up again and put it in each nostril. And that's been very effective against the coronavirus in your sinuses. And you could also use one of these. It comes in a package. You could use that in each nostril, four ounces for each nostril. The other thing they found out that is closer to my heart is you could use oral rinses that have alcohol in them only, not the ones that are non-alcohol. And that seems to be able to kill some of the COVID-19 viruses as well. And the, I won't say a bad thing, but COVID is gonna be with us for a while, unfortunately. And the more we can keep the reservoir of viruses within our bodies, the safer we'll be. Although the alcohol and the oral rinse does seem to slightly affect the enzyme processes when we digest our food, but I'd rather be safer from the COVID than worrying about my digestive processes. So anyway, I just hope that's helpful. And I use it personally, so I put it up to you folks to use it for yourselves or neighbors or friends. And I think it is helpful. Thank you. Thank you, Jack. I also use the Neil Med system. I'm a plastic bottle fan myself. Good. But it is good stuff. I never thought you could put betadine in it though. That's new for me. No, unfortunately, unfortunately, I had a recent ENT meeting with a physician and he suggested that and I looked it up and it seems to be a good product to use. It's been used for years. I remember when I was in the service they used to use it as a debridement for wounds and it's been found to be safe to use for the nasal sinuses and I'm using it. Yeah, that's amazing. I knew it as a topical. Yeah. Good stuff. So we all learned something. Thank you, Jack. If anybody has been to the dentist during this time and I've been, I think two or three times, what they have you do is they have you rinse your mouth for 20 seconds with hydrogen peroxide. And the first time I had to do it, I asked. I said, why am I doing this? And they said it kills, it's for their protection. So if I have COVID-19 in my oral cavity, which is one of the ways you can get it, it'll wipe it out. So that's another thing that the dentists are using it. So they have, you know, A&A has really, the ADA has really tested it. Well, that's why some of the toothpaste have peroxide in them as well. And that's been an old thing for ages. So you can alternate and use both. Right. You gotta protect yourself and anything that one could use, I think is important. And the peroxide is another good one. And that's good for wounds too, by the way. Yeah, thank you, Jack. Oh, you're welcome. Oh, I'm sure most of you are aware of the fact that the University of Colorado is doing a vaccine study. Actually in Loveland, you have to drive to Loveland. I am currently a part of that study. And if anybody is interested in participating, it's pretty intense. It does involve two years, although you can stop at any particular point in time if you feel a need to do that. I do have a website. And if anyone is interested, just let me know and I will be happy to share that website with you. And as I said, it is the Oxford vaccine that is currently being studied. Yes, Jack. I've got something important. If people are allergic to iodine, betadine isn't a thing to use right now. Right. Are there any other closing statements or any other things that we need to address on our agenda this morning? Yes, I have a question. Michelle, I know that the deadline for the senior board is Friday. For the friends board, is that the same time also? No, if someone was interested in the friends board, if they could get ahold of me in the next two or three weeks, that would be ideal. And then on November 24th, the friends will be talking about names of interested persons. And then through the month of December, we'll be following back up with folks. Thank you. You bet. Thank you. I should clarify, since some people talked about other boards that they might be interested in, that the Friday deadline is for all the boards that have to be interviewed and approved by the city council. Thank you, Marcia. I should have said something about broader than the senior center. So I assume that those interviews are gonna take place, I assume, is that correct? Yes. Yes, Prudence. Yes, one more thing about COVID-19. Colorado has an app called CO notification exposure. You can download it either in your Apple or your Android. It's in the Google Play Store. And what it does is that it informs you whether you've been in contact with someone who's positive. Yeah. Okay. Well, I thank you all very much for your participation this morning. Please stay well. And can I hear a motion for the meeting to be adjourned? I shall move. Can I second it? That was Jack and Michelle. That was Jack and Susan. Oh, Susan, I'm sorry, Susan. Okay. All right. All right. Take care. Thank you. All righty. Bye-bye. Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone.


Okay everybody, a little sneak peek inside our Week 11 case studies. This is an extra one that has been downloaded inside the course. Let's go through a couple of them here. So I have focused on the intraoral and the extraoral examination because I find that is what students struggle with the most. So let's go through a couple questions just to give you guys an idea of what's coming up. So let's do the first one here. So a 28-year-old patient visits your dental clinic, complaining of pain and swelling in the area just below their jaw line. On examination, you notice a tender and large mass on the left side. Which set of lymph nodes is most likely affected? The occipital, the auricular, the cervical chain, or the supraclavicular? These are always hard things to say. So feel free to stop the video if you need to think about it. I'm going to go through the answer in the next slide. So it's the cervical chain lymph nodes. So let's explain this a little bit for you. So I have the rationale down here. So the patient's symptoms of pain and swelling in the area below the jaw line are suggestive of an enlarged lymph node in the cervical chain. The cervical chain nodes are a group of lymph nodes located along the sides of the neck and under the jaw. This is very, very important. So which can become tender and swollen in response to infections or inflammation in the head and neck, even if you're just simply sick. This can happen. So going through the other ones in case you might have thought that was the correct answer. So the occipital nodes, that's not the answer because those are located at the back of the head. The auricular nodes are located around the ears. The supraclavicular nodes are located above the clavicle. So totally different. And they are not likely to cause pain and swelling in this certain area that we talked about. So anytime you go through a case studies question, while you're studying, if you say you were going through the answers A, B, C, and D, and you said to yourself, what are the occipital nodes again? I suggest stopping and going back to study the occipital nodes so you won't forget it if this type of question is asked on the board exam and same things for the other ones too. Let's say you didn't know what any of these were because you forgot to study the lymph nodes. Well, this is going to be on the board exam. Not this exact question, of course, but they love to ask about lymph nodes. So go back and re-study that if you had any problems. This is what case studies are meant for. They're meant to really test your knowledge and critical thinking. Would you guys like to go through another one? Let's go through a little bit further down the slides here. So a 25-year-old patient complains of a prominent band of tissue that restricts their tongue movement and causes a gap between the anterior lower teeth. What structure is likely causing this condition? A, B, C, or D. So the sublingual caruncle, the sublingual fold, the lingual frenem, or the submandibular duct. So same thing. If you're going through these and you go, shoot, what is the lingual frenem again? I know the other ones, but what is this one? Go back to your notes, study that. Have a look inside our modules because I have it right there for you and then you will be able to take a better guess, if you will, at what the answers are. When you're going through case studies, don't just pick an answer for the heck of it. Really put your mind in like a board exam mode. Think, okay, if I was writing the board exam right now, what answer would I pick and would you get it right? So feel free to stop the video if you need to think about the answer a little bit more. So the answer is C. So I explain it a bit too. So the patient presents of a prominent band of tissue that restricts tongue movement and causes a gap between anterior lower teeth is characteristic of a tight or hypertropic lingual frenem. This is a band of connective tissue that extends from the floor of the mouth to the midline of the undersurface of the tongue. When the frenem is too tight or attaches too close to the tip of the tongue, this can lead to a different condition. So I go through everything here for you. So you don't just get the answer, but I explain why the answer is the most correct. But also, I talk about the other ones too in case you did have that as the answer. So you kind of know where you went wrong and what you need to re-study. So I hope this helps you guys. Check out the rest of that case study. Good luck and let me know if you guys have any questions.