Everything worthwhile in life is one through surmounting the associated negative experience. Hey there! Today we're tackling something really important. Something that isn't talked about openly that much in spiritual circles, because it seems to go against the whole positive vibes forever mentality. We've been talking about the importance of balance over here on this channel for what seems like eons now. But the thing is, it goes both ways. And just like negative emotions or the ego, it turns out, you can have too much positivity that ends up becoming toxic to you and your surroundings, especially when you put on a smile and pretend things are all just amazing all the time, even when maybe things are a bit challenging. It sounds weird, right? How can you have too much of a thing that makes you happy or secure? Well, without meaning to, a lot of the well-intentioned blanket statements that come along with spiritual groups like, everything happens for a reason, or it's all a part of the universe's divine love plan, or the big one, you create your own reality are actually rooted in ego traps that serve to deny the shadow aspect of our reality and cover them up with a blanket of false positivity. So all together now, let's heal some collective trauma and talk about the dark side of positive vibes. First off, what exactly is toxic positivity? Aside from an oxymoron that would even make an English major blush, generally speaking, most psychologists will define it as an excessive overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations that almost always results in the denial, minimalization, and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience. This idea was illustrated really well in that amazing short film called In Shadow, a modern Odyssey, showing how depressed people put on these big smiling masks to try and appear happy when deep down they are deprived of essential nourishing love. We see it a lot on Instagram today, with so many people putting up this perpetual vibe that they are so happy and just living the best life ever, all the time. I think it's safe to say that almost everyone who's ever been a part of some kind of spiritual circle has experienced this at some point, and I think it mostly stems from that belief of emotional hierarchy, that certain emotions have arbitrarily assigned value and are somehow better than other emotions. In a nutshell, there seems to be this belief that if you're spiritual, you can only feel love for things, because that emotion vibrates higher, and if you're feeling angry, jealous, or upset at someone or something, you're somehow less spiritual because of it. At the risk of upsetting some hardcore new-agers, straight up though, it's just not true. Look, I'll level with you.   Just like anything done in excess, when positivity is used to cover up or silence our physical experience, it becomes toxic. And as any good psychologist will tell you, by ignoring the existence of certain feelings, we fall into a state of denial and repressed emotions, which over time builds up trauma and gives rise to triggers. The existence of negative emotions actually has something there for us, a hidden message, something for us to learn if only we'll pay attention to it. In the words of the amazing Samara Quintero, the truth is, humans are flawed. We get jealous, angry, resentful, and greedy. Sometimes life can flat out suck. But by pretending that we have positive vibes all day, we deny the validity of genuine human experience. One of the darker sides of this whole thing has kind of become known as spiritual gaslighting, which is a fancy way of saying regular gaslighting with sparkly spiritual words and context sprinkled on like some kind of sour sprinkle sundae. And it's probably one of the biggest ego traps ever, and problems with modern spiritual circles. And yet, no one really talks about it very much. Some of the most common phrases you'll hear going around is stuff like, no bad vibes, oh just raise your vibration to manifest, or just use the law of attraction. And while these are usually rooted in good intentions, the problem with all of these is that this mentality sometimes can shame those who are not feeling that way. Or who are unable to do this, and at a core level it causes people who are struggling to blame themselves and think everything is their fault. Another part of this is the whole student-teacher dynamic. We all have spiritual mentors in one way or another, whether they're actual people, books, guides, or ourselves. Oftentimes, I found one of the biggest obstacles people need to overcome in self-development is this belief that someone is more sensitive, or has better spiritual experiences than them. It happens in plant medicine ceremonies too, where someone will have a huge visual experience and meet entities and see geometry, while another will have an entirely internal and visionless experience and then feel lesser or upset because theirs wasn't as trippy. Everyone comes from the same source, and we're all here to have the same experience, but differently. So why compare your individual experience with someone else's? Surely it's better to have your own unique experience, right? Don't get us wrong, we can totally understand that in order to have a better experience of life, you can shift your perspective to see more positive characteristics in the experience you're having. And this is very valuable to do, especially if we're rooted or polarized in a negative aspect of life. As we've looked at with the Seven Hermetic Principles video, one of the principles is polarity, and the Hermeticists themselves explained that you can change your frequency by polarizing yourself to the energy that you want to be in. At the same time, people like Bruce Lipton are making leaps and bounds in epigenetics research, showing the power that your beliefs and attitudes can have on your body and biology. I guess all that we're saying here is that if someone gets a serious disease or something, to outright just say, well everything happens in accordance with the universe or divine plan, or that you caused it with your negativity, can be both dangerous, rude, and toxic and facilitate disconnection and awareness between each other. Regardless of what factors it was, even if the person did do it to themselves, like say smoking or drinking too much or something like that, we can be in far greater service by helping them come to that realization themselves rather than just telling it to them. To force a positive outlook on pain is to encourage a person to keep silent about their struggles, and this just isn't healthy. At the same time, this is also true for behaviors or social constructs. Given the recent protests and civil rights movements regarding BLM and systemic racism, I've noticed a few spiritual influencers try to use spirituality as a means to gaslight the protesters. Blanket statements like, oh everything happens for a reason and you create your own reality can oftentimes be used as an ego trap by people in higher positions of power in a process called spiritual bypassing, which has this mentality of exaggerated detachment, emotional repression and, my personal favorite, angophobia. It's a weird phenomena in the New Age groups that talk about positivity. They argue that fear is the root of suffering, and yet they themselves often approach anger or other negative emotions in the same light, almost as if they're afraid of them. It's actually very weird to see. Now, maybe I'm reading too much into this and stretching for connections, but the thing is, by behaving in this way, dismissing the experience of aggression and trying to slap a fake smile or positive stance on it, and saying that people somehow aren't as spiritually awakened because they're angry or upset, we are complicit in oppressing and end up repressing or denying the pain and experience of oppressed. There's no denying that when you look at our society today, we're in need of a huge consciousness shift. We live in a world where the current systems indirectly contribute to mentalities and causes that destroy people's livelihoods, contribute to systemic racism, sexism and oppression, and leave millions around the world in poverty and starving every day. We aren't exempt from action just because we have a sense of universal love or think we're not like them. If anything, we have a responsibility to help heal the trauma. See, toxic positivity is a mindset that's used because people either don't want or aren't able to face the darker aspects of themselves. It's a phenomenon that tries to cover up someone's past trauma and triggers so they don't have to deal with them, and is often used when people are afraid to hold space for emotions or things that feel challenging. It's like turning away from our pain or finding ways to dismiss it or numb it out. Think about it. As emotionally mature as you might be, most of the time we don't know how to sit with and be present with difficulty or tough emotions. Despite what we might say, people don't often know what to do with someone when they're crying. Rather than turning away from people who are in a hard space, which includes ourselves by the way, we can bring understanding and compassion to this challenging stuff. Where self-growth is concerned, let's not reinstate harmful beliefs from shame-based structures of the past. They didn't work then, and they won't work now. And so with this, how can we recognize and effectively heal toxic positivity? Well, once you understand what it is, it's fairly easy to spot. You'll have people spouting off, just get on with it, style of quotes, about how the universe has a plan while at the same time minimizing other people's experiences. People might shame or chastise others for expressing frustration or anything other than positivity, or the big one, rationalizing the cause of their circumstance as being from other people's spiritual inadequacy rather than taking responsibility for their own trauma and issues. And in case you were wondering, yes, all of these traits also apply when speaking to yourself and healing your own emotional and spiritual wounds. One of the best ways to start healing the toxic positivity mindset is to shift your awareness into a state where negative emotions are okay. Understand that it's healthy to experience pain and sadness and make room to sit with and consider those feelings before dismissing or transmuting them. And instead of making blanket statements that are rooted in this kind of mindset, simply choose your intent and words more carefully, even more so when dealing with and speaking to yourself. If you're talking to someone else, one of the best things you can do for them is actually learn to listen. Sometimes people don't want an instant answer or explanation, they just want to be heard and received, allowing space to process what they're going through. Same thing with you, actually. Instead of telling yourself good vibes only, ask yourself, what's really going on? And if this is where you're at, if you're looking to heal some past experiences and entering into your heart to have more heart-centered relationships, both with yourself and others, we just released a new course on Spirit Mysteries in collaboration with the Personal Development School, where the amazing Thais Gibson will help you to do just that. So please, from the bottom of my heart, I encourage you to come and check this out and experience the change right now. Until then, stay positive. Oh, excuse me, wait, uh, see you soon. Toodles!


Bouncination is what you are on right now on your favorite youth channel, we call it white if I for thank you so much for being here, mazituna kupenda, tuna kwa appreciate.  Ami yem tiny, gani, indotiki tu masalamu, tuna kugotia, wewe, plasm, tyako, nakuru yako. Amani aze? That's true, yem aze, make sure people may be killed to maze to kondani each and every Tuesday and Thursday from Paka 645, make sure you tune in with your friends and family and kill them to bana usio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Vili na fa, venya ina fa. Alrighty, so I'm gonna be sending salams your way in a few to each and every one of you that are tuned in right here on the show, but right about now, we have to say ma, we're all about Kenyan music and we're all about promoting talent and we're all about recognizing talent. So Nilo Kati Tena, we have our second artist right here on the show. And of course he is a recording and performing artist hailing for my T5Four and he goes by the name Jesse Tino Africana. Wa pima kofii. Shijia. Shijia. Alright, thank you so much for making time. I know you were walking and you had to skip walk to make time for the show. So Asante Sana, how are you doing? I'm really good, how are you? Yeah, you can just like put them on. Yes. I'm really good, I'm really good. Yeah, we're fine. Thank you so much for making time to come to you. As always, luku imeweza, luku imen na shule. Thank you, thank you. So ule na jwa bivwa maul kumbebeba kladi nuku semei. Niktokawera bro, nazima. Sisi wa sani atu nanga mambo mingi. Aum nanga story mingi. Whatever comes in mind, ya okay ya. Ya, I want you need na flow. Sure. Alright, so talk to us, talk to us. Everybody has a background in music, so what is yours? What's your story? Tell us your story, where you started, arufike, where you are right now? Well, mziki kwa mgoi kwa raisi. And I thank God. I thank God because right now I can see the changes, I can see differences. When I started, I didn't believe because challenges il kwa moba. I started when I was in high school. Ya. By that time, pekiyake kusima matu niyende studio. For me, it was like, wow, ni tangi aji studio. Nai nakufanya ni ni, you know. Kwa hi kwa shida sana labda yama tumizi yama kudlipa, but piya shida confidence. Confidence. Confidence. So you have the talent, you have the resources. Kwa niya ukuna jamini? Shida nili woga flani yaw, watutani yaw na aji. So, but I'm happy now, you know. You moba kama dati. Ah, me to kama bali bro. Confidence imu himu. Second clue, we keep saying that. Ay, let's go. Confidence. Yes, bro. Ushama na nashina kakusima hi example. Kuna tu place, bro. Ayu mengia maali, ulem tu menye, kuna dem, remember, lakina juif. Laf kulu lak dem menye kidaga. Lakini confidence. Uwe zi mambia kitu. Confidence cells. And people need to know that. So, the fact that you overcome your fears, now may build your confidence, that's a great step. So, you officially started your music in 2021? Yes, yes. That's when you recorded your first song? Ya, my first song, ya. Called Zama. And I thank God it came successfully out, ya. Audio video, Ihaj made it. Yes. Ya, Ihaj. And you've been working with Ihaj a lot. Ukona mga mamingi na ya ya. You've worked with other producers like Vicky Pondis, but you had a lot. Mbona lakumuli kwa naile, miliwa kwa modzum, kengi ya na. What's the relationship between you? Badu tuni mga mamingi na ya, tuni na kufanya. Actually, he understand my style. And he's very good. He's a good producer. Ane ya tamboa kazi ya, kena jaya kazi ya? Piyatuna vibe kama mandugu. Nadyu wa sasa, una pufanya kazi na muse. You need somebody, you even vibe. Kawaida tukwa maisha, kawaida. Kusababu niki umpigia simu, ana shika raka. Niki mamii na namziki, ane takatufanya. Ane meet deadline. Exactly. Ya. He's okay. Alright. And are you under... Okay, I know you're under management, but are you signed? Your manager is a very good friend of mine, Joy. I know he's a student. I wish I had to him. So, how did that come about? We're not sure. But you're the one who's under management. I know him from a very different... He's a very good friend. He's under management. So, how did that come about? Well, me, I was signed and I'm in. I pay myself, my music bills, but I needed someone who can hold my hand. Because one of the staff has told me that he was in California wana hitajim tu mingine and I think maybe nita kuja kongezawatu under my management but for now Joe is the one and the way we met Joe is my family you know he's my family he's a family member so he's not my reiri brother but he's in my family in the sako so I know him very well I trust him because I know he knows me when I was small yes so I say when I do I want you to do this he's going to do it perfectly as I want so that's how we work we are good we love that we love to see that we love that we love that we love growth what's your plan how is that coming? well it's really good but I want to say this for the artist and producers there's a lot of challenges there in productions sometimes you want something and you tell somebody I want this but at the end of the day I don't know especially in the video video is some disappointments but well and good for the fans who are up to now when I come back they like my music they like your music, they like your sound but I know there's something I want to add them so everyday you learn your style is a little bit different compared to okay I don't want to say it's not Rumba really and it's not like Afropop so how would you define that it's a little bit different compared to what everybody else is doing it's R&B and soul music I just mix R&B and soul music so how did you settle on that because we are working differently we have our own sound what you want to do and you settle on that you know what you want to say we cannot just look the same let me kill them and that is how I want it I want to be unique I want to bring something because my music is music when I perform live and I believe I want to start performing live because I believe in band I play guitar oh you are guitarist I play guitar I just want to give live music sometimes I feel so bad when some people are saying tanzanime tu pita tanzanime piga muziki they should know that Kenya has great musicians we have best artists in eveni tu labdawao how to aminia, how to party so what do you think is the problem muna Kenyei na wasanina wasongi muna na danini nina panya tfiki mani tu na fakufika kimzik the biggest problem is that everyone is thinking that wasania wakena atasi wasania wakena I think you know mentality misani akuna pesa whatever you want to do so long as untajari buku include kuna say wataku understand wasewakua karibu kama akuna doa mahauna the day you have money they will understand you but most of the time how wataku anata kukufa amo anata kuku engage kwa gigs ako kwa kazi zako they are expecting money that's the thing as in minata kufi like tuki anakufanya kitu wana ni kama tunainua something iiki tunainua kiesho kama ni mziki kiguro ine na kupiana kazi ko atu wengisana mi ni kiguro na juo kuna watu but sasa iiyo tata kuzia anata ka umsot na ishie and when somebody want to work on something according to what you are going to give they will never do it perfectly because it will not trust the process atasai iku amtuna mi anga mimisani uki angalia to from body languages anika me kudarawa me kuchukuna venya me kuchukua so situna ona when you tell somebody do you know i do music kuna celebufla na ishie kudia kwa duka mahalpanya fanya kazi then when i was there alikudze anika kama bida ifollow yo na instagram rameo wow good rameo i do music from the look ni niyona ni kama hada agunu lizno faya mziki gani but from the look ni niyona there is an image now what i said i said that i need to work hard to bring something great because on my side na takani work hard differently very hard you want to have a platform because of time we don't have a lot of time we are going to be winding up soon so you as an artist when you start doing shows to expect live performance kutu imbisha sisi crowd kutu imbisha sisi crowd wawu wusha kwa pona live band you are guitarist so you are going to sing perform and you'll have someone on the keys and everything we should expect because you want good music live music first by the time, i am very important as a quick mat i have worked with quick mat well the show was not that perfect on my side what i wanted siku pata because ben to fanya zoi ziki dogo sana we had around 3-4 practices It was not enough for an artist. I picked someone, one by one, one by one. So it was a bit challenging, but well to the bigger shop. All right, cool, but you learned something. Uli jifunza kitu from that experience and next time you're going to do better, right? I will tell my fans that they should expect something big for sure. You're working hard. Yes. That I know, that I know. I've been seeing and from your music, that's why I asked you that, the evolution. Because I saw that grot kutangomia kwanza, I didn't know if we can actually see that you're working. Thank you. But something good. And of course, what are you currently working on? What's your next project as we wind up to ambient, my fans will expect me moving forward. Are you currently working on EP, album and we have a new song that is coming up? Yeah. Well, in the studio now I have two songs. I have Mamacita, Vikipondis. Oh, nice. Vikipondis, then I have Utu Saidiye, Iko Kwaihaj. It's a gospel song. This is why I did gospel song. To me toka kwa kovid, this on mambozote. We still need God. We need God. We do, every day. Atakama naimba mapenzi.  But you know. He's a greatest. Yes. So I had to say, kama machozietu, yabemufuki yamungu atu saibiye. So, ningo maflani, wa ingo ditu. Ningo ma personal kuako. It's a prayer. It's a prayer, but anyone who is in trouble can use it. They can relate to it. Inezamu hili, inezamu hili. Awesome. When it drops no jahom no api. Oku Kingslea ko apa, lajumata tiza kia. He's gonna play, we're gonna play it right here on Bounce Nation. Alright, so, supe anga watu chansi oku tumasalamu. So, if you have any shout outs, you want to send out to the guys at home. I love what you remind us of your social media and where people can find your music. Yes, tumo people all the way from Gongrod maze, I love you so much. I say Gongrod. Oh, na re, Gongrod. Ah, nice. Na re, ma places, what wanna talk as well. Exactly. Shout out to Gongrod. Yeah. Tema insumboine, ana kumdamse wa Gongrod. Shout out to you. Let me just say hi to my mentor, my boss. He's called Peter. He's one of the best man I respect him. Let me just say shout outs to him. Yeah. Awesome. And Jesse Icon, Afrikanana. That's where they find your music on YouTube. Jesse Tino, Jesse Tino. Oh, ok. Jesse Tino, yeah. Ok. Awesome. So, we're gonna be performing for us Tarimbo. Ok. In a few, you're ready? Tarimbo, going out to all the Bounce Nation fans. Ziya. Next time we'll have more time. Thank you so much for stopping by. Ok, let's do this.


All right, let us, let us begin here. That implies a social answer to the question, not a biological answer to the question. Yes. I'll begin by asking members of the panel if they have any questions or observations about Dr. Olashansky's talk. That was a wonderful talk, Jay. You're fantastic. And he leaned over to me just a minute ago and said, was my distinction between aging and disease clear? And I felt a little embarrassed for a moment because I said, well, actually not entirely. So I was going to ask him to explain it again. We pursued the conversation a little bit while we were waiting for things to start it. And he said to me, I said, would you focus on Alzheimer's disease? Is that a disease or is that aging? And he said, well, Alzheimer's disease has an ICD code. That means doctors can fill it in and get paid occasionally. And I said, oh, you mean the difference between aging and disease is a social one. So to a biologist, what's the difference between aging and disease? Could you clarify it for me? Okay. Well, first of all, let me emphasize one thing that I didn't point out in this particular talk. I did talk about this a couple of days ago. And that is if we could hypothetically come up with a cure for the three main things that kill us today, which we know is heart disease, cancer, and stroke, those three causes of death would then be replaced by three others. You remember the force of mortality, taking individuals out at those very old ages? The force of mortality would be a relenting force. It would not give up. And so three new causes of death would replace those that would be removed. And incidentally, we would only gain about 10 to 15 years in life expectancy at birth if we could hypothetically eliminate the three main causes of death today, heart disease, cancer, and stroke. And so the question is, what happens if you eliminate all of the main things that we identify that kill us today, which you'd add a few things to heart disease, cancer, and stroke, diabetes. And as I said, Alzheimer's does have an ICD code, an accident, homicide, and suicide. And what's left, and infectious diseases, of course, and what's left behind is senescence, is aging. And my guess is that many of the individuals who would be saved from dying from these major fatal diseases would instead succumb to either multiple organ failure, which is exactly what you see in animal populations, that are protected for a long time, multiple organ failure. Or my guess is you would see infectious diseases reemerge as these individuals, as their immune systems, senesce, or age, and they would succumb to an infectious disease. Did I answer your question? Dr. Selcoe? I wanted to touch on a different point. I found Jay's address most stimulating. And when I speak later on, I'll tip my hat in terms of whether Alzheimer's is a part of the aging process or a disease. I'll say now that I think it's largely a disease. But I was interested in one of the early curves you showed about the decline in birth rate and the decline in mortality at the same time, death curve, and how that huge bulge that we currently experience is narrowing down. And I wonder that besides the many other questions that your address raises about the relationship between disease and aging, that there becomes ironically an increasing imperative to extend the duration of life because the birth rate is falling so dramatically in some developed nations. And what I'm thinking of is that I've always been terribly concerned about population explosion, and I still actually am and worried about that. But I know that in Japan, there are good predictors that the population will decline from 110, 120 million now to 75 million within less than a century. And even in Mexico, the number of live births per woman is declining rapidly. So I wonder whether another reason for thinking of both approaches to extending the duration of life, both solving late life diseases and changing the aging process, if that's possible, is because we will in 300 years from now or 400 years from now run out of folks to manage the remarkable complexity of environment and structures we've created. Who's going to maintain structures? And if it is going to decline, as your curves predict, we're going to have to start cutting back on the number of dams we maintain, the number of electric plants we maintain, et cetera, et cetera. We won't need them number one, but we also wouldn't want to have them age themselves. You know, it's funny you should ask this question. When I came into the field of demography in the late 1970s, I came in principally for this issue of population growth, that difference between the birth rate and the death rate. And we knew, you know, the population bomb had just been published by AeroLik and a number of scientists were talking about the explosive population growth that was going to occur. And I went into the field in part to help to influence this dramatic growth in population size. And it was done principally through reducing, starting by reducing death rates and then the birth rate declined because there weren't so many replacement children. And then there were a number of other technologies that were used to help reduce fertility, and we succeeded. We achieved exactly what we set out to achieve, and that was zero population growth in some places and negative population growth. I was a member of NPG back in the late 70s in an effort to do exactly what you're saying might potentially be dangerous. And the recognition at the time was that we've achieved, I think it was roughly five and a half billion people on the planet at that particular time period, demographers, we knew back then that there was a momentum built into the age structure that ultimately was going to lead to a population of anywhere between 10 and 14 billion people by the middle of this century. And that's in all likelihood still going to happen. Remember, most of the population growth is going to be occurring in the developing world, not the developed world. We are seeing extremely rapid declines in fertility rates. We now have total fertility rates. For those who don't know, a total fertility rate is the total number of babies produced per woman in a lifetime. So the TFR, the total fertility rate throughout most of human history was about seven. About seven babies per woman. It declined very rapidly and replacement is 2.1. We are now seeing TFR's total fertility rates of about one to 1.2 in places such as Italy and elsewhere. And indeed, you're right. There in all likelihood will be this decline in population in the developed world. We probably won't see it in the developing world for some time. And I think it's a good thing. I think it is exactly what we set out to achieve a long time ago. And I'm not concerned that anytime soon we are going to see a small enough population that we have to start worrying about our fertility. I mean, we know we're already at 6.5 billion today. We know that is inevitably going to go up to at least 8 billion, perhaps as high as 10 billion, by the middle of this century, just as a result of momentum. Even if we continue to reduce fertility rates. So I'm not really concerned at all about that particular problem. And let me emphasize one related point. Because this came up when somebody asked me this question earlier about what would happen if we succeeded in achieving immortality today. Because remember, I showed you those birth rates and death rates. What if we became immortal today? Wouldn't that have a dramatic negative effect on population? We see a population explosion far worse than what we saw during the course of the 20th century. And the answer, surprisingly enough, is no. If we became immortal today, if we could somehow give a pill to everyone that would allow them to live forever, the growth rate of the population would then be defined by the birth rate. Whatever the birth rate is. And that's a simple percentage. So with a birth rate of 1%, it takes about 70 years to double. The same mathematics as the money in your savings account. With a 1% growth rate, it takes 70 years for your money, your $1 to turn into $2. It's the same with human population growth. A 1% growth rate leads to a doubling in about 70 years. In the post-World War II era, the doubling time, the growth rate was 4%. And the doubling time was about 18 years. Every 18 years, the population was expected to double. That's why we were so worried. If we became immortal today, the growth rate would be defined by the birth rate. The birth rate is less than 1%. In developed nations. In developed nations. So in the developed world, immortality would lead to growth rates that are a fraction of what they were in the post-World War II era. Surprise. Dr. Hayflake? Well, first let me congratulate you on a brilliant presentation. But I'd much rather hear questions from the audience than questions from the panelists. Okay. All right. Well, here we go. If longevity is key to reproductive capacity, why don't men live longer than women? Okay. Very good question. Actually, this question does indeed come up repeatedly. I'm waiting for one question I haven't heard yet and I hope you're working on it. Let me just say, last year my colleagues and I published an article addressed to this very issue, where we looked at the timing with which reproduction occurs both in males and females in the developed world and the developing world in high fertility populations, in low fertility populations, and ultimately reproductive output of humans. We define reproductive output as the number of babies essentially pushed out during the course of the reproductive period.   Now, of course, males are capable, some males are capable, at least in theory, of producing offspring much later in life, but it's the underlying biological similarities between males and females and the underlying biology and life and death that leads to the similarity in the timing with which this occurs. Here's another question. Does the innate toxicity of oxygen contribute over time to the inevitability of our death before the age of 120? The paradox is what gives us life for sure is death. Well, I'm going to defer the fundamental answer to that question to those who have far greater expertise on this than I. You know, the biochemists and the biologists, I do not consider myself. You know, Len would be very good at answering that, but I will say that that particular phrase, the very last phrase, was a particularly important one because we have said this in our articles, and that is as soon as the cellular machinery of life switches on, the body sows the seeds of its own destruction. We essentially produce the very chemicals that lead to the accumulated damage that ultimately is what we see as aging or senescence. Okay. I think we have a physicist in the audience here. Is senescence simply accepting or illustrating the second law of thermodynamics, entropy? Len, Dr. Hayfleck is laughing. The short answer is no because biological material like humans are open systems. We throughout our lives have access to food and oxygen and all of the other necessary elements for life, but we still age, consequently being an open system, the second law of thermodynamics doesn't apply. That's good to know. I thought there should be a little good news presented here. Can you comment on the relationship between extended longevity and distinct mitochondrial haplitites in Italian, Asian and Swedish populations? That's not a question for me. Well, the questioner is trying to make a link between extended longevity in certain populations and mitochondrial haplitites in Italian, Asian and Swedish populations. I don't know specifically the answer to that question, but the answer to any question posed along these lines is that we really do not have any fundamental knowledge about the determinants of longevity. And I'll say a great deal about that in my presentation this afternoon, so perhaps we'll postpone a more thorough answer to later. Okay, here's another one. Do you believe that you can predict the age an individual will live to? For example, in the Twin Cities Marathon, there was a 99-year-old who ran a 340 marathon. How long can he expect to live if we can? The short answer is no. It is not currently possible to predict the duration of life of an individual in spite of the fact that there are plenty of people out there telling you that they have a way to do so. It is not currently possible. The answer to this question, by the way, you said he was, what, 99 years old? In the back of my book, I have a table. And in the table in the back of the book is what's called the life table. And in the life table, we list the expected number of days of life remaining based on the number of years that you have currently lived. And in that particular case, I think a 99-year-old on average could be expected to live another, I think it was, it's about two to two and a half years or roughly whatever, about 800 days or so. Let me emphasize, by the way, the reason why I use days to answer questions like this is in order to emphasize that what's really important is the time that we have at the daily level, not at a population level trying to dramatically extend duration of life. I have given talks on this very topic before to groups of individuals, all of whom are over the age of 85. And I do inevitably open up the book and say, on average, men your age are going to live about 2,500 days. And I'll tell that to my father. And this might sound like a depressing conclusion. And in fact, I was delighted to hear that the men in these groups that I've spoken to and my father have also come up to me and said, Jay, you're not telling us anything we don't already know. We know we're not going to live forever. That's the reason why we're here listening today to this discussion of aging. We're here to learn. We're here to enjoy today. We're here to emphasize the day that we are living now because that's what's important. I was very pleasantly surprised to hear that it wasn't construed as a negative message and it should not be considered one. But with one last question here, I think we have an engineer in the audience. If we redesign the need to bend the other way, what would a chair look like? Well, this is a very good question and I will alert you to a story that's going to appear in, I think it's going to be in January or February. It'll be in the news probably. Well, it'll be within the next couple of months where my colleagues and I have worked very hard to redesign other attributes of the morphology of humans. And not only did we redesign the knee, by the way, we actually introduced a tail because one of the main problems was the lower back is really a disaster for upright locomotion. And so if you extend that tailbone all the way down to the ground, you make a number of other changes. And this is a discovery. I'm telling you now it's a discovery channel story on this very topic. You will see something that looks either much more like a kangaroo or a dinosaur. So if you look at all of the changes that we make in morphology and you add in in particular this extension of the tailbone all the way down to the ground, you're not going to need a chair because you'll be able to just lean back on your tailbone. I think we should probably have churned with that. Thank you very much.


Wave 2 of TKO Studios. Let's do this. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode here at We Can Geek them. Gio here talking with you guys about TKO Studios. They kindly offered me all of the Wave 2 trade paperbacks, collected editions of their new titles for me to review. I already did a video on Sentient, so I'm not gonna cover that, but for this video I'm gonna talk about the three remaining books because I thought they were all pretty unique, pretty interesting. If you want a more cool little discussion head on over to the Omnibus Collectors Network on YouTube, specifically Omnibus Live. We're all six of us reviewed the four books and we gave our thoughts and all that stuff. So a big thank you, like I said, to TKO Studios for sending this my way. This is amazing. Thank you so very much for very different titles. Evil of Extinction, you got The Banks, you got Sentient, and of course Pound for Pound. And I'm gonna start with this one.  Her sister gets kidnapped and things just escalate from there. It sort of felt like I was reading a B-movie, Quentin Tarantino-esque, Grindhouse type movie. The art in it is really, really cool. I really enjoyed it. Very bright, colorful, cartoonish, and extremely violent. I mean this is one of the more tamer images that you'll find in the book. But this exemplifies what I mean when it's big, bold, and just gorgeous to look at. I'd love the color palette in this book. It's all over the place. It's really expressive. By the way, that cover image is fantastic. At first I thought this was a wrestling comic but it turns out, you know, Underground MMA somewhat similar I guess. I don't know. The character, she is a badass and she's trying to save her sister from evildoers. It's south of the border, if you will, and it definitely has that grungy, grimy, action movie, B-type movie feel to it with over-the-top characters. And a story that just keeps escalating and getting crazy and crazier by the minute starts out fairly simple, fairly okay, and then it just goes full weird and bizarro gonzo style to the point where you have like huge obese overlord type scumbags, death cults, el monstruo as they call it in the book. There's a lot of swearing in Spanish which I thought was a little cliched and kind of stereotypical because oh you're doing like a Mexican south of the border type story so you better screw some lingo in there. I don't know, I didn't particularly care for that type of writing but the art is really cool. I love how you know flashback scenes get that sepia tone, different color palettes, really expressive action and characters. I don't know, I think it's a nice contrast between something serious and action oriented with the cartoonish sensibility. Now please do be, you know, please be aware this book is not safe for work. There is a lot of violence, a lot of, well not a lot but there is some nudity, drug usage and just foul language overall. Here is some more action so you can get a feel over the art in this book. The action is intense, it's very fluid, it's very expressive the way these characters behave on the page and the way they interact with each other. The dialogue is really smooth regardless of the swearing thing that I found kind of cringy. The characters, the way they behave with each other is very natural. Yeah just over the top bombastic B-movie type scenarios so if you like that I think you're gonna enjoy Pound for Pound from Natalie Chavez, Andy Bellinger and Danielle Miwa. Sentient already talked about it, you can check out my review on it because that was the most hyped book because of Mr. Jeff Lemire. A lot of huge fans out there eagerly awaiting whatever Jeff writes and I thought it was exceptional. I really liked it. I think Pound for Pound and Sentient were my favorites out of the lot but each book has something special so go ahead and check that video out. Very operatic dramatic space story with kids surviving in space that was pretty cool. Next up we have The Banks with a really cool looking cover but I unfortunately have to say this was my least favorite of the four books but there was still something to be liked. This is written by Rox Henke which I didn't know she worked on a Marvel comic. I thought this was the first go-around with comic book writing. She's more famous for novels and all that stuff and it shows because this does not really read like a comic book. I kept reading it as a script for a movie that you might watch at like a November or a January release that type of film. It's a bank heist involving a generation of bank robbers, the grandma, the mom and the kid, the young adult. She's in her early 20s and she works at a information bank thingamajig and there's a villain involved which relates to all three characters and why they wanted to pull off this heist and all that stuff. The premise is fun casual and interesting that I think a lot of people could get behind and read but unfortunately I don't think six issues was enough to get the point across you know. I think the story has interesting elements as you can see there's a lot of word balloons. There's a lot of dialogue in this and unfortunately one of the things I did not like the most about this series is the um it's the way the panels are then you know the art I should say. It's very staticky. All the characters just they're standing there and there's not a lot there's no sense of fluidity especially with it being a bank heist or a heist type comic story you would think it would be faster paced with the characters being a little bit more fluid. Unfortunately they aren't. Also some of the background characters are really trope heavy and kind of dull and uninteresting. There were a lot of times where I simply did not care about any of the side characters like for example right there you know that it's just static images. It doesn't have that movement that I would like like pound for pound that was uh frantic in the way it presented its characters but again it's a different story and I get it. The banks however you know it could have been a lot better if you would have given it more time to breathe because it's only six issues and by the time you're done reading it the final issue just rushes through a lot of stuff and it ends sort of in a dud. I think it could have been better. The concept is there plus they're trying to rob and I'm we talked about it on Omni Bros. They try to rob this guy who has Bitcoin. I'm sorry that currency does not work the way that they're setting it up in this book. I think that was a little bit lame. I suggested that this book should have been a period piece. I think if this was a late 70s early 80s thriller roaming a bank of like a multibillionaire in that era instead of modern times I think it would have been a lot cooler a lot better and would have left a better impression on a lot of people but for me unfortunately not not the best thing in the world. I did like Ming Doyle's art I think she really did a good job like the facial expressions and the characters they look really interesting you know the characters don't necessarily do the the best sensible things but the characters look great aside from the static stuff they really looked at the part and another thing you kind of see where the story is headed you understand what's as soon as you understand what's happening you can figure out the character beats you know page by page and what's going to happen at the end of the book and you know I get it people aren't that smart they do dumb things and you see this in this book with certain characters so you know it sucks because you have a really interesting concept that you could really explore because the story begins in the 70s and then you see the mom in the 80s and now the modern character in the 2000s I think that was really cool the way it starts and you shift through time as you see the three characters backstories develop I thought that was really interesting but overall you know just uh fell a little flat for me I think they could have explored it in a different way I think. Finally Eve of Extinction a horror book action horror basically if you mixed why the last man the last of us and zombie movies this is what you get it's pretty interesting in this book hurricanes have gotten deadlier as in real life and they bring about mass destruction but in this book it's a little bit different with sort of this virus infecting the men in that area where it rains and all that stuff and they get affected by rain it brought something that started changing the men in order to reach their stranded daughter two mothers must survive the hurricane and the horrors it unleashed I appreciated the take on the whole monsters and how they looked kind of bio-organic this parasitic entities they remind they really reminded me of the clickers and last of us stuff like that and just you know the story about a family trying to make amends with each other over past uh squabbles and series of events it's it it played beat for beat as a straight up action horror title you kind of figure out what's happening but it's still fun all the way through I really liked it because it's just a really quick scenario this is happening these characters are stuck in the middle of this thing and they have to escape and survive most importantly the art is uh by the way this is written by Sal Simone I think and Steve Simone and it's done by Nick Varela and uh Ruth Redman the thing with this book is that the beginning art in this is pretty interesting here is when you you see the virus starting to happen with the characters as the hurricane moves into Houston the characters reminded me of shadow line comics from image like the subdivision it has sort of that plain digital look not necessarily my favorite but I I grew to like it as I kept reading but unfortunately like for example here I really like the way the characters look I thought that was really cool but then midway it starts getting darker which is you know fitting because you lose power it's getting dark monsters and then by the end of it uh let's see yeah I can show you guys this real time the art changes I think I was fine with the beginning art all the way through I didn't necessarily want an artistic change halfway through the story but yeah if you like these sort of uh action horror zombie apocalypse type stories where they have to survive against that thing then you're gonna have a fun time maybe the ending uh could have been a little bit uh different but I liked it I thought it was perfectly fine and I stated on the broadcast with the omni bros that what I really the horror aspect that I really enjoyed was the fact that it's a hurricane and hurricane season you know June through November and it's one after the other after the storm passes what happens when we get another one if the storm is bringing about this change and this infection and all that stuff it's going to keep continuing other areas are going to be hit by it so I thought that was pretty frightening uh if you start thinking about it but I did like the characters I I appreciated that it's you know the mom uh is trying to make amends for what happened with her family and how you know uh she got divorced and her daughter is no longer speaking to her and now she's back and trying to fix things when all of a sudden this craziness starts happening and forces everybody to try and get along so that was fun a little cliche some would say but still fun overall this is my first experience with tko studios I thank them so much for the opportunity to read and review these things not only on the omnibus collectors network but on this channel as well thank you to tko studios you guys are the best I love these books they're gorgeous books the editions you know they're taller than a standard trade paper bag they're wider too the paper quality is great too they kind of smell a little funky but I didn't mind I thought that was pretty funny and I am very much looking forward to wave three I need to go back and read wave one because those titles looked amazing and and I'm in I really want to check out their stuff and I like the format of binging six issues you do that story and you move on hopefully some of these can be revisited like the banks I could see as a movie eve of extinction I don't know about that but sentient I could very well see a sequel comic in the future I think it would be great overall just a really interesting look at independent stories and just very lovely so thank you so much guys have you read these tko titles wave two let me know in the comment section down below thank you for liking commenting and subscribing that really means a lot to me you guys are the absolute best I love every single one of you follow me on your favorite social media platform Facebook Twitter Instagram all that fun stuff I have got to go I will catch all of you on our next video


This study investigates the charge transfer dynamics between two phases of a crystalline triazine-heptazine-carbon nitride hetero structure. The researchers use a combination of surface bimetallic cocatalysts and in situ photoemission spectroscopy to trace the S-scheme charge transfer process. They find that the S-scheme charge transfer pathway is reversed when the sample is exposed to light or dark environments. This reversal is supported by theoretical calculations, which suggest that the reversal is caused by the change in the energy levels at the molecules. Additionally, the researchers show that the S-scheme charge transfer can be used to enhance the efficiency of CO2 reduction reactions. This article was offered by Fang Li, Xiaoyang Yu, Yulong Liao, and others.


Hello and welcome to NewsClick. We have been reading in newspapers that there has been massive retrenchment in IT sector to discuss the issue we are joined by Kiran Janra. Kiran has been working among the IT professionals and has been organizing them for more than a decade and is also associated with forum for IT professionals. So welcome to NewsClick. Kiran, we are glad to have you on this platform. So what is this massive retrenchment in the IT sector that is going on and what are the reasons behind it? There have been retrenchments in the IT industry and the number is quite scary and at the moment we know that one of the important reasons for the retrenchments that is happening now is the automation inside the IT industry. IT industry benefited or employment was generated in the IT industry because globally there was an automation of the business and as well as manufacturing and other industrial processes. So primarily the job creation in India was completely dependent on the external factors like getting the business on the outsourced business model. So there is a shift that is happening now in the information technology services, they themselves are being subjected to automation and hence we see a job cut in this IT industry. And the second important factor is that globally also if you look at the various governments and the decisions that they are taking from the GA, which are primarily where the large section of our business comes from, all these countries have started becoming protectionists and once they become protectionists, they are also altering the way in which jobs really come to India. So this is the second important reason for which there is a reduction in the job. And the third reason is precisely the policy paralysis which has been stuck in India for the last three decades. So they have been only looking at creation of job opportunities just depending on the US economy rather than looking at how do we build it across in the Indian context. And these, so our complete industry has been or you could say the entire nation's skill set has been driven to serve the US market. If you look at this entire phenomena, is it a temporary one, a permanent one? And I mean, so what actually it is what the Indian companies not prepared for it? You see all these numbers that you are given that the media is giving two lakhs, 58,000, all these things are really originating from Mackinsey's report. Mackinsey came out and it started giving out a report saying that the entire Indian IT of the entire Indian IT workforce 50% of them might become redundant in the coming three years. And this is something very nasty. It is not true. We'll have to look at the politics behind such a statement coming out. Why did Mackinsey give such a statement? If you look at the people who came out of engineering colleges, the people who are graduating out of the engineering colleges or professional courses at the time of Y2K or maybe in the year 1994 to 96 and 98 so on and so forth, a certain their skill set and the capability was very less when compared to the graduates who are coming out. If you just take the mean of the students today, they would be at least four or five times more skilled than the students who came out then. And the IT industry, for instance, even the US absorbed everybody because they had an urgency to shift or come out of the problem of Y2K with given the computing capabilities of the computers being low end and the dependence on the main frames, all the workforce had to be shifted or pulled into US to really to save the Y2K problem. And they accepted the very low skill set employees at that point of time. And today they're coming out with a very nasty argument saying that Indian skill set is redundant, which is far from true. The thing is, you fairly come out and say that, yes, we are going ahead with the automation of technologies. And as a sense also, now you see even the entire automation of technologies is where really the concept of Intellectual Property of Colise. So all these automation of technologies, everything they have, they want the concentration to be in the US. Where does Google have its servers? Where does Facebook have its servers? The whole of data commodification or if it is the concept of the new kind of a capitalist capitalism that is really building out their own data, because today everybody realizes that anyone who holds control and data is going to have a control on the world. And that is where you see that all these new automated jobs are really concentrating themselves in the US. So this, when they want to really, there's a shift in the way in which things are operating. And now they wanted to, rather than speaking out the reality, this Indian IT workforce is being made a scapegoat. And even if you look at the skill set of the IT professionals, any conventional industry, when there is a phase shift of technology or when an engineer or an employee becomes redundant or he becomes, the complete new technology is introduced into an industry, there is a lag. At least there is a lag of 15, 20 years or 30 years. There will be either chemical engineering, drug manufacturing, or any of these things. But now you see, when you look at the IT industry, if you look at from the days of the Y2K, we have had three or four phase shifts of technology. And this generation, now you also, everybody is speaking out saying that the average age of IT industry is already 29. It means that people about 30 years, 35 years are significant in number in the IT industry, along with the new kind of recruits that are there in the industry. When there is a significant, the age group of 30, 35 essentially means that everybody has got an experience at an average of at least 10 to 15 years of experience in the industry. And everyone has gone through at least three phase shifts of technology. Nobody today is really working on the same technology the day he was really recruited into. So this phase shift of technology when the workforce has really upscaled or upgraded itself to the contemporary situation, you are coming out to blame the workforce, making them scapegoat, creating a very unhealthy environment to them, bringing their capability of really competing in the market tomorrow, giving them a baggage of a non-perfer. But these are very serious issues which needs to be contested also. So as you are explaining, it looks like a fairly permanent situation which is going to impact a large number of people. On one hand, the government has been continuously talking about scale India, make in India, and then we have this. How do you see it? What will be the impact of this on the Indian economy and the IT sector? It's not just the IT sector alone. We'll have to really look at what this government is speaking and what is it doing. When you look at the Indian part and Indian response, it is such an uneasy thing for the entire workforce who has really voted this government in. Of course, I don't want to get into the reasons was it right or wrong. But how are the things really translating? If you look at when an IT professional passes away in the US, all of them really jump into the bandwagon of creating sympathy factor, tweeting about Sushma Swara's tweets about it, Narendra Modi starts tweeting about it, all the IT ministers of the respective states tweet about the arrival of the dead body. And they try to intervene and see that they are someone who want to do a certain thing. Why is it that the Indian government is not really getting into the international parliament contesting these kinds of actions by the nations like US? The central government, not the Sushma Swaraj, not the Labor Ministry, not the IT ministry, not the Prime Minister have not even said a single word against this. It is a shameful thing. You just look at Ravishankar Prasad's speech, which is on record honorable IT minister on the day of announcing the digital India program. What does he say? He says that in a couple of years from now, you have, in a couple of years from now, you have the IT industry, IT import, sorry, IT importers with electronic components and services import into the India would be coming, which is 7 odd percentile now, is likely to go up to 35 percent, which will be equal to that of the oil deficit. We need to come out. So this problem definition has been given by the IT minister himself. So once you are clear about that, and you see the IT and also the industry captains came out, do a huge announcement of saying that. I remember that from the media reports, it was everybody placed 18.5 lakh crores of rupees into the Indian industry, saying that they will be setting up industry. But now when you look back and see, see the pathetic part of it, even the SIM cards which Reliance Geo has distributed in a massive way, they say about 100 million internet connectivity in less than a year, blah, blah, blah, blah. But essentially, whatever, all the SIM cards were imported from China. So there isn't anything that this government is really doing it. And they almost promised about expansion of huge data centers. India has got huge internet websites. So there isn't anything that is happening on the ground. You don't have Indian government is not really taking up. We all know how it happens. Even in the earlier days, there would be no corporate company would be coming forward and working in the interest of the Indian nation. So there needs to be a huge public spending that needs to be going into really building up this industry in the interest of India. It is not just about this IT professionals. And also this government has got a huge obligation. The youth of this country has voted for this government. And they don't even, and the dubiousness of this government is that the entire workforce in India, if you look at the engineering statistics, 1.5 million engineers are graduating every year. And how much of them are really absorbing into it. So this is a hollow program and there is a policy paralysis with the government. This government is just pursuing the same policies which Manmohan Singh has pursued being subservient to the American corporations, being subservient to the American nation and only looking at the outsourced business model, which is going to be very costly for the country. So Kiran, this would be my last question looking at the situation which is quite grim. What should be the response of IT employees, forums like forum for IT professionals? What should be the response? What's the way ahead? Our experience of working in the last few years has been that whenever there is been a case that IT professionals have organized themselves inside and collectively went ahead and taken on the corporations, the retrenchments have stopped. Either they were temporary or not, but at least the IT professionals, they were significant with praise. We had it in iGate, which the corporation does not exist anymore. We had it in the case of many other companies, which I would not want to name them now, but there have been instances. So IT professionals need to realize that, yes, we are individuals, we are selling our mental labor or human resources are the elementary things for this industry, and we have bound by the labor laws. We need to collectively organize ourselves inside the industry and we need to move forward with a certain interim demands, which are essential because we have been the well-generators to these corporations. These corporations have the moral responsibility. If there is a phase shift of technology, we are a generation which really went through three changes of the three or at least three variants of technology. Yes, there can be training programs inside the industry to ensure the pre-transition of people into newer projects. And also we need to realize that there is something called as an industrial dispute act, which says just in case, even in the case of layoffs, I don't think there are layoffs, but there are retrenchments, even the case of retrenchments of these kinds, just in case if a company needs to recruit someone else for a project, their law states that the people who have been retrenched from the industry should be given preferential treatment by taking them back into the industry. So it means that avoiding such a situation, if there are a certain tools like manual testing, for instance, automata, some of these areas where jobs are likely to go, in all these avenues, we should ensure that the corporations come forward and we build up sufficient pressure inside the corporations so that they don't really send us out. And we have our own voice inside the industry in any form that is possible. We need to organize ourselves in the form of unions, associations, whatever form it is feasible. And we need to ensure that there is transparency in the process and thereby stop this mad retrenchments and this narrative has to be countered. The narrative that this is an industry of non-performance or underperformance or redundant people has to be countered saying that this is not our problem. This problem is because of the policy paralysis on the part of the government, on the part of the leadership of the industry where both have failed in showing sufficient leadership skills despite we generating three times the salary that I take home to you.  And if you don't have a solution, yes, we have a solution and we'll come out with all those solutions, we'll have to implement it. This is the voice that the IT professionals inside the companies need to organize themselves and we are very much in touch with the people, we are in touch with thousands of people and many of them are in touch with us. We are going to work together, work with everyone to ensure that this kind of a narrative is defeated. Thanks a lot Kiran for giving us your time and as these things proceed, we'll be coming back to you on such issues. Thanks a lot. Thank you,


So students in the previous module, we talked about the design principles for the cloud environment. And we are covering 10 design principles. In the previous module, we talked about the first five design principles. And in this module, I will talk about the next five design principles. So what are the design principles that we will be discussing in this module? Because design principles are listed in the module coverage as follows. So you can read and you can see the design principles which we will be discussing in this module. So what I will do is that for each of these design principles, for example, with reference to automation, security, encryption, which is also related to security, and a tier-based this also relates to security and encryption. And of course, the technical debt, technical debt, which is similar to the financial debt in analogy. So that I will also discuss and share with you. So let's go and more deep study. Automation is good, but human implementation. Now we discussed in the previous module that the system is not feasible to be monitored manually. Now the system is monitored automatically. That's what the Amazon Web Services does. And not only the system is monitored automatically, but the actions, the human, but this human implementation should not be there because then it is not 24-7. So that human intervention is not there. This is also automatic. So we have this monitoring and we have this implementation. Both are automatic. Both are automatic. And these are the tools used by Amazon Web Services, CloudWatch, Autoscaling, Elastic Beanstalk. Through these tools, the implementation is also automatic. So it has efficient. Now what can happen is that the resources can fail, hard disk can fail, servers can crash. Now because of this automatic implementation, in case of failure, resources can be added. And when there is load, then more resources are added. So in case of failure, the resources are added. And when the load increases, the resources are added. And all of this is done automatically. So why it has to be automatic? Because the approach is a multi-tiered application. Now when you have a complex six or seven tiered application, for that you need tools. Automatic tools are required. That's are there in Amazon Web Services. Security design prevents. Now people ask about the security of the cloud. Now of course it can happen theoretically that the administrators of the cloud use their privileges in a way which compromises the security. Improper use, that is possible. Users have to recognize their responsibility. Now for example, if I place my documents in a locker in a bank, the bank is responsible after I lock the locker. But if I leave the locker open, no security of the bank can secure or can ensure the security of the contents of that locker. So there are certain basic guidelines which the user has to follow. Partition the application. And multiple tiers so as to ensure security groups. And implement these shields depending upon how the application is going to be accessed. And implement security measures which you can do more in the next slide. So how you implement those measures, you use encryption. But it is again vulnerable to malicious insiders. If your data is not encrypted, it's not encrypted. There may be malicious insiders who with their malicious intents would like to look at your data. So you have to encrypt your data. You have to lock your locker. You don't have to share your password of your ATM card. You don't do this. And recognize the excess vulnerability. And when you encrypt your data, then it becomes useless to anybody with nefarious intentions. So you use the encryption in two ways. When the data is in transit, you use the secured socket layer. And when the data is at rest, it means it is stored on the hard disk. Then you use encryption. And the private key is at your premises. The data is at the cloud, but the private key is with you. So you ensure the security of your data. Tier based design increases the efficiency. It increases the security also because you have tiers, you have levels. So you ensure a check and balance from going from one tier to another tier. And that is how you secure your application. And of course, the another advantage of multi tiered approach is efficiency. When you design your application, when the load is changing, you add or remove your processing power, your computing power, so that your computing resources are not sitting idle. And even if you start with a single instance, you design your application in such a way that it can be divided into multi tiers and it can be distributed for efficient use for efficient results for efficient application. And finally, the technical debt, same as the financial debt. If the code is inefficient, okay, then it will be hampering the efficiency. And one will have to work on that code to make it efficient. So that is a technical debt. How you can go about resolving these issues when the interfaces are well defined when it is cleared how the application is going to be called and how the application is going to call what are the input-output interfaces and different application portions can be updated, can be worked upon, okay, with the proper architecture without disturbing the entire application and by improving the working of the entire application. This you can achieve. And remember, if it's large mingled course, which is called as specification also, this is difficult to understand. It is difficult to modify and you should ensure that you are not doing this, okay. So avoid this technical debt. If it's not, even if it's not a cloud environment, it's a non-cloud environment, don't do these things. These things should not be there. It is a high cost of fixing these issues. That is all I have for this module. Thank you very much.


First of all, I suppose the fact that we have an ETS is due to a substantial extent to the skill and stewardship of Avril Doyle, who's with us, and who steered the thing through a very fractious process in the European Parliament. So I think we should give Avril a round of applause. I'm going to dwell on two stories. I suppose one is the European story and where we're at and what the thinking is about what to do, and then talk a little bit about our local situation, the carbon tax specifically. I have loads of slides, but they'll all be available. So I'll be galloping over some of them with hardly a pause, so don't get alarmed. If you're a nerdy type of person who wants to know more, you can go back and look at them. Acknowledgements first. I stole some slides from Martin Howley and Paul Duffy. I went to their presentation on Friday and immediately loaded up my memory stick, so I'm very, very grateful. Luke Redmond helped me as well. The key conclusion, I suppose, that I have concluded, I think, that we do need an intervention, and I'll make that case on the price of the allowances. How to do that is still a very, very open question. I think for us there would be two dividends, two very significant dividends. The first is that it will reduce the public service obligation for wind energy. And if we're serious as we are, I think, about becoming a major exporter of the wind-based power, it would help a lot to have a price wedge that would make it an attractive and sustainable export. Also, we have a big problem here in that we have a very high carbon tax relative to the allowance price now, and that's extremely inefficient economically at several, several levels, and narrowing that gap is very, very desirable. For the European Union, the gas revolution in the States, as we all know in this room, is pushing a lot of cheap coal into the global economy, including obviously the European system. And there is quite an issue now in terms of coal attractiveness in the electricity market, and a higher carbon allowance price would help. It won't bridge, but it will narrow the incentive strongly. In terms of how the price floor is very attractive to economists, because we love the idea of essentially of a tax. And a price of 20 euro a ton, for example, as you say, is a floor price. It's not a runner, in my opinion, because essentially it will be seen legally as a tax. It will require unanimity and therefore can't happen. It creates other issues, of course, that you have a lot of allowances then that are surplus to what you need and what you do with them or what happens to them. The volume, then, is the other choice to influence the volume. The back loading, which is the current proposal exactly, but kind of an options analysis by the Commission, is a bit peculiar in my opinion. The idea, as a lot of you will know, is to essentially auction much less in the first few years than is planned for, and to hold the surplus over and push them back into the market from 2016. You get, of course, a price increase initially because people need to buy allowances to cover their emissions. But, of course, then it will be followed by price collapse. So I don't see that really being a useful approach. The question then becomes permanent reduction, but how and when is the question. And one possibility is to link to the more binding non-trading emissions cap. The trouble there is, of course, that that bindingness is becoming less and less. For example, the latest evidence we have in Ireland here is that our overshoot on the current projections will be only 1.7 million tons. It was several million tons two years ago, and that presumably applies elsewhere as well. Another option that doesn't seem to have got any traction in the policy system is to just add another sector to the ETS, which would be road transport. Give road transport a very tight cap and just put it in, and that would have definitely have a price effect. The second local kind of conclusion is that we're likely to go up to 25-year-old tons from December because the government needs the money, basically. It's a nice symmetry. Each five euros brings in about 100 million into the ex-jacker, so it's not a trivial. It'll be running close to half a billion euros from the tax. Obviously, to me at least, it should be extended to coal and peat. It's not a big revenue generator. Basically, we're stymying the wood market at the moment by refusing to tax coal and peat. It means a solid fuel market, basically, is skewed against woody biomass. The other challenge we have, as I'll show, we've had this rather dramatic change in the peat composition in Ireland because of the way we recalibrated the VRT, the vehicle registration tax and the annual tax. The ex-jacker is very annoyed about this because revenues have collapsed. So the trick for the next budget will be to recalibrate that so that it brings in a lot more money but keeps the carbon incentive intact. So I put in a bunch of references here. I cite Barbara's paper here on environmental effectiveness. It's the definitive paper in this area. I did a survey of the literature a couple of years ago and surveyed 50 scholars and they put her paper on top as the definitive paper, so it's no mean achievement. Of course, I put my own thing on top here as well. The latest thing in the academic world, by the way, is citation. It's no longer the number of publications, it's the number of citations. And you'll notice now that every academic cites himself or herself utterly incestuously and gratuitously. So I'm being part of that noble tradition. I won't dwell on the... Anyway, I think it is important to have the references for those of you who want to. As Barbara said, we've had abatement, we've had a little bit of innovation, but basically the price we've got is not supporting step change in technology. Interestingly, when you go back to 2007, when the package was proposed, the price projection taking into account the access to international credits and the renewable energy targets and assuming all of those would happen as they are happening, the price was estimated to be about 30 euros. So it's quite dramatic really what has actually happened to the price. The best laid schemes and so on, as Robert Burns puts it, this is now... Luke Redmond gave me this thing. This is the price. These are average annual prices. And you see in 2008 it was over 20. 2009 is a drop below 15. And of course the actual price now is dropped down to about here. So there's this kind of secular decline in price. So we're miles away from the 30 euros that the modeling in 2007 had predicted. The commercial sustainability argument I think is an important one, new generation. The other key problem for the commission, you see, they have set aside 300 million allowances to support carbon capture and storage. The assumption was that that would bring in about 30 euros a ton and that would be enough to fund... At current prices of course, essentially carbon capture and storage is dead in the water because the resources don't even come close. I won't go through this quote, but it's a piece that's a quote from Kenneth Matthews. I'd be interested in people's views on whether his proposition is true. But essentially he says that with a 20 euro price, wind would be commercially competitive in the Irish market. If that's true, it's really very, very significant. It means if we can get that price up to that point, we won't have to subsidize wind and we have a real export opportunity. The coal dependency is interesting. You can see Poland has 87, nearly 90% basically coal dependent and so on. Polish friends tell me now, and coal is mentioned in Poland, people cross themselves. It's replaced the Virgin Mary as the latest kind of religious icon. But it's really, it's just an enormous preoccupation. But you see even ourselves, this is interesting, are very coal dependent at the moment and as is Germany. Hei makes this argument basically that in Germany, I've asked him for the data but he hasn't given it to me yet, but a lot of the old plant in Germany now needs replacing. And at the present time, the logic of replacing it with coal is absolutely compelling because you can buy forward now at very, very competitive prices in coal plant. And of course, if that happens, if the German plant turns over back into coal or not back into coal but continues with coal, then of course it makes everything else very difficult. These data probably aren't visible from the back, but it's essentially the recession that Barbara has, I suppose there's a few, this is the verifiable emissions, 2100 down to 1.8 billion big, big drop in emissions. GDP growth rate essentially, if you take the minus, this is the European Union, minus 4.3 in 2009. If you add all these numbers up, we're a negative growth really since 2008 and all the prospects are international. Credit use, huge increase. So I think the data you have Barbara might be a little bit on date that has gone from 82 up to 252 million. And there's a whole bank of that stuff in the pipeline apparently. So essentially you have this big, big surplus building up here in the system. So the recession really is the key, absolutely definitive explanation for what's been happening relative to what was projected in 2007. I want to, these are the Irish sorry case here of financial liabilities where at 81.8% of GDP basically. And the US is slightly above us, but the rest of the Eurozone is still, still we know us. The big supporters for intervention or power gen, and there's this very interesting quote from Kite from Ian, he says, before the ETS climate change was a threat, but actually we realized it's one of our biggest opportunities. I think this is, if we decarbonize, we can spread into other areas and decarbonize them. I don't know what he means by that, but it's significant in that essentially the biggest player in the market now and what your electric says Europe does basically. So if you're looking at the real politic of it, I think you're going to. Both the other sectors are very happy with very low prices. I wouldn't want to hold out to them. This is the member state, the kind of political dynamics. You have very big players in favor of intervention, but you have Poland and Slovakia in particular, virulently opposed and others worried. I mean the big worry always with any civil service is that government never does anything quickly and it never knows when to quit. So once you open the box, God only knows where the thing will end up. So a lot of countries are worried about that. These are the commission's back-loading options. They presented three. I love Henry Kissinger's quote where he says, every time I ask for choices, I'm always given three, two absurd ones and the preferred one is always typed in the middle. And if you look at the commission proposal, it fits exactly Henry's interpretation. If we act on their proposal, of course, we'll get a price bubble, then we'll have a collapse. There's a view in Europe when you talk to people that this is kind of a holding action and that they'll do this as a fix and then do other things, plan B to follow. I've talked about this before. The trouble with allowing the net allowances into the system, essentially you create one cap rather than two and you probably won't get enough constraint to have the kind of effect on prices. The road transport inclusion I think is much more interesting and it deserves more attention than it's got. And of course the preferred environmental solution is just to take allowances permanently out of the system and just park them forever. The Oak Wind Institute is typical of the kind of thinking that's going in the think tank world. Take out 1.4 billion for at least a decade, increase the annual reduction to 3.9%, and don't allow any growth in complementary credits. External credits and that would kind of bring you up to about 20 Euro a ton. Interestingly the legislation on energy efficiency as you know has a provision that encourages the commission to intervene or to propose intervention in the event that energy efficiency implementation essentially reduces the price dramatically and the modeling shows that that could happen. The minimum allowance price I've explained why I think that's a bad idea and turning quickly to our local situation I think we have probably a better story to tell in the whole climate area than we give ourselves credit for. The GDP link seems to be being broken so we've had a lot of emission reduction because of GDP reduction of course but it seems to be more significant than that. We're doing some interesting things on policy intervention. I won't dwell on that sad story but this is the kind of GDP picture this is from Paul Duffy's data. So you can see basically the very dramatic break in trend basically from 1990. You have the same pattern with per capita emissions. The very striking gap in emissions relative to electricity output which is driven of course largely by their renewables. This is the carbon per unit of electricity generated dropping from 0.9 in 1990 to 0.49 so almost a 50% drop per unit of electricity consumed. This is the fuel mix which you'll all be familiar with. I'm a bit surprised all these numbers appear as I press buttons. This is a technology I'm not. This is our ETS emissions and you can see the steady decline basically minus 9.2%. Carbon tax we brought it in December 2009. The rate has gone up to 20 and it's probably going to go up to 25. The coverage is all non-traded except agriculture and solid fuel. We're joining, I misspelled Lutheran. I'm embarrassed to say that but we're joining the virtuous Lutherans because of course this phenomenon France is in here incorrectly actually France doesn't have the carbon tax. So we have joined the Lutherans as the carbon tax leaders in Europe. And the price effect is very significant. This is for every five euro increment. You can see with natural gas it's nearly a 2% change in price. So in other words with a 25 euro price you get a 10% increase. So everybody's burning natural gas to heat is paying, will be paying 10% more because of the carbon tax. It's a bit lower for kerosene which surprises me but that's what the data tells us. And we are getting a consumption or a response that we have a big improvement. This is the climate corrected data and you can see that the per household consumption has been dropping quite significantly once you correct for climate. So 2010 for example was the coldest winter for decades so you get a bubble so you have to adjust for the climate. What we don't know is how significant the carbon tax is but it's definitely having an effect and of course it would have a much bigger effect if we taxed peat and coal because essentially we're cross subsidizing solid fuel at present. The transport changing the VRT and iron road tax as again most Irish people here will know the outcome has been quite dramatic in terms of the new car fleet where the emissions per new car are 22% lower than before the change. And this is the kind of liters per 100 kilometers performance and you can see that it's a kind of a secular decline in the private car fleet. Of course correlation is not causation. I love Stephen Leacock's quote when he says when I state that my lectures are followed almost immediately by the Union of South Africa the banana riots in Trinidad and the Turco-Italian War I think the reader conforms some opinion of their importance and we academics are very prone to make these leaps of faith about correlation. This is what I've already said basically that we have these two dividends if we fix the price. The choices of how to do it I think the only ones that make sense really are to bring transport into ETS or to permanently take stuff out of the supply side. If we keep going this is the worrying thing before I start looking at the data I would have been a non-intervention person but the commission document makes a pretty strong case that if we keep in recession which is quite likely for the next two years with the backup of supply the price could go down to zero. So I would say there's at least a 50% chance of a zero price in ETS if we don't do something. So my judgment would be that the costs of that outcome are taking a significant risk of that outcome are higher than the uncertainty costs of intervening to essentially manipulate the price. Carbon tax we need to extend it really. I'm surprised again that the wood-based lobby doesn't seem to have agitates. Look at the household consumption data for Ireland that the SEAI have. You can see everything has been falling except wood and peat. It stayed stable and that isn't an accident. It's happened because the price and conditions are supporting that. I've made that point. So thank you very much indeed.


What an amazing musical tour around the globe. Let's thank again the composer and the performer. He takes us around the globe and demonstrates the resultive art, but in a different way. The words were written in the 14th century by Hafiz, Iran's greatest poet in Shiraz. They were translated to German by Hans Betke in Berlin. They were composed by Viktor Gullmann in Prague. We rehearsed the song in our home near Jerusalem, and we're going to perform it here in New York. You should know that the Nazis did not like at all Viktor Gullmann, and for two reasons. First, his grandparents were Jewish, and second, he composed atonal music. The Nazis avoided atonal music. In fact, they'd lumped together Afro-American jazz music and Jewish avant-garde music and art, and labeled both as degenerate, as this entartanted, as this atrocious, racist and anti-Semitic Nazi poster shows. For the Jewish grandparents, the Nazis have sent Gullmann to the concentration camp in Dresdenstadt and then to Auschwitz, where they gasped, but his music lives on with us. So let's enjoy some degenerate music to the words of 14th century Hafiz.


How do BIP 47 reusable payment codes work? Now we go to the completely other ends of technical questions. This is not an easy one to explain. BIP 47 reusable payment codes are basically the technology behind what is known as PANIMS, or private anonymous channels. What PANIMS and private anonymous channels with BIP 47 allow you to do is receive a payment from someone... where essentially the sender and recipient's address are encrypted in such a way that nobody knows who they are sending to. An anonymous payment is essentially sent from one person to another. The way it works is very complex to explain, but basically what it is, is this. Alice and Bob want to pay each other using this kind of anonymized payment channel, or payment code. Bob sets up what's called a PANIM. What this PANIM is effectively is a hierarchical deterministic wallet in which Bob publishes a digital blob... that is a public key and chain code under a pseudonym. Let's say Bob calls himself Satoshi Nakamoto and publishes a PANIM for Satoshi Nakamoto, which has within it a public key. Bob is monitoring output transactions to that public key. Now, Alice could just pay that public key. The problem is then that everybody who knows which PANIM belongs to Bob would be able to see all of those payments... and at that point track all the payments to Bob, and that's a problem. If there is no secure mechanism for Bob to get information out about other addresses they want to get paid on, this is a problem. How do payment codes work around this? Alice constructs a special transaction that sends to one of Bob's addresses, which is called a watching address, sends what's called a notification message. This is not a payment, instead it's an up-return output. It's a data output that contains 80 bytes. What these 80 bytes are, are the basis for an elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange. This is the part that's really difficult to explain, which is what Diffie-Hellman key exchange is. Diffie-Hellman key exchange, a technique invented in the 70s, allows two parties to construct a secret key... based on their knowledge of each other's public keys, in such a way that no one can intercept that secret key... and the two parties can use it to communicate with each other. This is what's actually used for VPNs. When you do a VPN, what you use is the public key of the VPN provider and your public key... to set up a secret key that's used in that particular VPN channel for that period of time as you use it. Alice uses Bob's public key that's embedded in the Paynim, the identity payment code, and constructs a secret key. That secret key is then used for both Bob and Alice to generate temporary Bitcoin addresses... that they can make payments to each other back and forth, so that no one can know which Bitcoin addresses these will be without having access to the shared secret between Alice and Bob. Once Alice and Bob have exchanged this shared secret through posting these notification transactions, they can now exchange up to four billion payments between each other that appear to be going to... seemingly random Bitcoin addresses that each of the two of them can generate for each other... without anybody being able to associate them back to the original Paynim. What you have essentially is a single public address, which is the Paynim, the pseudonym public key... that Bob publishes for Alice to pay. That's the only thing that's public, and the only thing that can do is be used to establish the secret payment channels... that then allow Alice and Bob to exchange payments with each other in a way that's invisible to the rest of the blockchain... and can't be associated to the rest of the blockchain. If you were to watch Bob's address, you would be able to see Alice's notification, but you wouldn't be able to decrypt the blob, because that's encrypted to Bob's public key. You wouldn't be able to see the response that Bob sends back, because that's also going to be encrypted. Once they have a common secret, they'd be able to send on completely different Bitcoin addresses... payments that you would never be able to associate back to the Paynim. So, a very public identifier, hey, it's me, pay me here, followed by a series of very private transactions... where they're not associated at all with that public identifier. So, what do reusable payment codes solve? They solve a situation that, in order to be paid by people out there, if I wanted to get paid by people, I would have to post an address. In fact, I already do that. I have an address on my website, one Andreas, three BAT, etc., which people can send donations to and give me gifts. The problem is that everyone can see all of the gifts going to that. So, if I make a public address available, then I also make all of the payments that public address available. I can't do a public address with private transactions, except I can with reusable payment codes. I would be able to post a very public ID that everyone can send payments to, but none of the payments are visible to anybody else. Because all of the payments are sent based on these privately negotiated, elliptic-curved Diffie-Hellman key exchanges that happen using the Paynim. I hope that was a good explanation. It's a very difficult topic to explain. If you look at the BIP 47, the BIP, the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, it has some very useful charts and diagrams... that show the time progression of the notification payments and subsequent payments, and which addresses Alice and Bob are watching... in order to establish this series of secret Bitcoin addresses between them.