Hello, welcome to NewsClick. We have with us Professor Nancy McLean, who is a professor of history at Duke University. She has come out with a new book that's called Democracy in Chains that exposes the right-wing Americans who are hell bent on seeing that democracy is destroyed and see that the fruits of democracy don't reach all the population and equality remains a dream. So we have with us Professor Nancy McLean. Welcome ma'am. It's nice to be with you. So this democracy in chains, can you give us a brief, a small brief about how you began with this project and how you think it is. I mean the reviews in the media are very positive. Everybody is saying it's a must read book. So can you give us a background of how this book and this project developed? Sure. This book is the story of the ideas that are being used to guide the effort by the radical right. And by that I mean the billionaire backed radical right in the United States to transform our political system and our legal system. That right is led by a man named Charles Koch, a multi-billionaire with a multinational corporation that operates in 60 countries. And they have applied, I learned through my research, the thinking of a U.S. economist named James McGill Buchanan, who was the first U.S. Southerner to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. They've taken his ideas and turned that into a technology to enchain our democracy, to make it so that it will not be responsive to the will of the people. You said the Southerners were unhappy with the judgment which made it illegal to have separate schools for the African American children and the white children. And with that judgment, they were not happy and from then the right wing started to think that we have to do something so that there are roadblocks, so that there is not proper integration. Do you think that was the idea or why do you think that was... It's kind of a longer story than that. In the United States, in the 1930s, the Southern white elite, which had a system of racial capitalism, a system of capitalism that depended on subordinating most of the working class and particularly African Americans, that system was partially undermined by the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the labor unions in the 1930s and so forth. So they were already on edge and didn't like the involvement of the federal government in their social matters, in their economy and so forth. And then in 1954, the Brown decision that outlawed segregation in public schools came on top of that. So this Southern white elite was very determined to keep the national government out of its affairs to protect that system of racial capitalism. And so it was in that context that this James Buchanan moved to Virginia and saw what was happening, how the elite was feeling embattled and responded to that. But it is just not James Buchanan. It's also intellectuals from the other developed worlds who were part of it. And you mentioned that they met in Switzerland. I mean, can you throw some background on that? Yeah, there is an organization that was started in 1947 called the Mont Pelerin Society, which is the main neoliberal organization, thought collective, some people have called it, that brought together people who were certainly against communism and fascism, but also were more focused on fighting social democracy of the kind that existed in Western Europe and in a more diluted form in the United States with the New Deal. And so that organization involved Friedrich Hayek, most famously who convened it. Milton Friedman attended the first meeting and was involved for years. And of course, James Buchanan, the person I wrote about, joined the year after he came to Virginia and started working on these school issues with the Virginia elites. So from the beginning, they started targeting the policies or how did they go about, because it's a political project where in the public discourse, it is not popular. I mean, to say that people will not accept such reforms that undermine education or health or even for that matter, housing or even voting rights. But how did they go about unleashing their project from behind the curtains? Yeah, what you point out is so important that this is not a popular project. This is not a project that most people would support if they knew what they were getting. You know that you wouldn't have any social security. You wouldn't have public schools. You wouldn't have public health, etc. This kind of completely privatized corporate world. And so that's why the story that the book opens with, I think is especially important, because it shows that their first breakthrough moment came with this white racist response to the Supreme Court's desegregation decision. And it showed, the story I tell shows that these neoliberal economists were willing to take advantage of that white supremacist response to Brown in order to move this on popular agenda. And that's something that we're seeing in the United States right now where this causes again using strategic racism in order to get people to vote for its agenda, which they otherwise would not. You also mentioned that they started targeting institutions, delegitimizing them. And you said that if media shouldn't report the failures of capitalism, but they should definitely focus on the failures of public institutions and legitimize them and push for privatization. And do you think they also had any other such deals, I mean, so that the people were not aware of what was actually happening with their policy recommendations? Yeah, so part of the story that I tell in the book is the story of the building of a whole institutional infrastructure to move these ideas. So in our country now in the United States, there are literally hundreds of organizations working on parts of this project. There are national organizations. There are organizations out in the States. There are campus bases of this project with affiliated faculty. You also have several related organizations in India, too, if you want to get into them. But anyway, so that organizational infrastructure helped them to move these ideas. So this guy, Charles Koch, for years invested in libertarian thinkers in the Academy and beyond has helped build up organizations like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society and so forth. So all of these organizations then have dozens, at least dozens in most cases, sometimes hundreds of employees. So there's a lot of people working on pushing this agenda out to the public and coming up with laws, coming up litigating through the courts, pushing their agenda through the courts. So it's really, it's very powerful. You had mentioned that actually it's a threat to the Constitution as well because the provisions in the Constitution are being undermined by plan. And you said that civil servants and judicial officers were being trained in their thought process. Can you throw some light on this? Ultimately, this cause wants to transform our legal system in the United States and amend the Constitution in order, essentially, to make it impossible for the government to adopt the kinds of public policies that citizens push for over the course of the 20th century, workers movements, women's movement, the civil rights movement, environmental, all these groups pushed government to act on problems that people saw and to spend money addressing those problems and this cause wants to make it impossible for that to happen. They're actually pushing for a constitutional convention in America, the first constitutional convention to be convened by the states since that document was ratified in 1787. So it's an incredibly radical thing. And at that constitutional convention, they would essentially put what one person is called locks and bolts on our Constitution so that it doesn't work for the people. Now, as part of the movement toward that, this particular school of thought developed by James Buchanan has also tried to discredit government over the years, right? And to say, essentially, to spread a very pervasive cynicism about government and about any public sector actors, whether labor unions, civil rights activists, public health workers, et cetera, to say that they're only seeking their personal self-interest. They're not really working for the common good or the public interest, as they say. It's a lot more elaborate than that, but that's kind of the core gist of it. These ideas have now become quite pervasive in the United States. When Donald Trump, our current president, speaks of the swamp, that's language that comes from this cause. Okay. But the background for this you had mentioned is that they had targeted, I mean, for undermining democracies functioning, they have targeted public employees, then they have targeted adult vote franchising, then they have targeted the public education system by handing it over to the corporates. And also that there is a link between industry and academics that is taking place in higher education, where public good is not discussed, but there is a discourse that government is only catering to people who don't pay taxes who are... Yeah. Yeah. Can you throw some light on this? Yeah. Yeah. So this libertarian intellectual cause that I wrote about is the source of a language that is now pretty widespread of makers and takers, they call it. So the makers would be like the corporation people and business people of different kinds, and the takers are the rest of us, right? People who need things like social security payments or, you know, retirees who need social security or people who depend on public schools or, you know, anybody else who relies on government and taxation, they call takers. And this man, James Buchanan, that I wrote about, actually used an even uglier language. He spoke of parasites and predators of wealthy taxpayers as the prey. And so these ideas have been used to discredit everything from public schools to environmental protections to public health measures. And so it's very serious stuff. And it's also become a technology to change power relations in the United States. So, for example, we just had a big Supreme Court decision this past week that will undermine public sector labor unions, the unions of teachers and nurses and firefighters and so forth. And those are our main powerful unions at this point in the United States. So there's that. And they're also trying to weaken those unions so that they can privatize public education and put it into the hands of profit-making companies. You had mentioned in the book that if things are not working out, change the institutions that make market policy-oriented programs difficult. Yes. So this cause is trying to undermine all of the things that, all the ways in which people have used government as a kind of countervailing power against corporate dominance. And so we see that in many ways. I mean, the most obvious is weakening the collective power and voice of workers, right, through labor unions. But they are also trying to defund groups who get federal contracts for various things, you know, to provide for things like public health. So there's a lot of effort to do that. And going back to your previous question, too, this libertarian cause and particularly this one particular donor, Charles Koch, who is the kind of strategic thinker behind all this, they've been investing much more on campuses in the United States. So they now are giving money to 350 campuses. They do have very powerful centers in a number of places, including one institution that I write about, a public university called George Mason University that's right across the river from Washington, D.C. So with a campus based like that, with organizations that are designing these policies that are promoting them, that are training people, they have access to power in Washington, D.C. in order to move this agenda. But how did Charles Koch take control of this project? Because if you see, you had mentioned that James Buchanan at the later stage was embarrassed to be associated with Charles Koch. How do you think Charles Koch took control over this thought process or the project itself? Yes, that is really, really an interesting thing. And I'm glad that you raised that because it shows how instrumentally this cause treats people, even its own, you know, loyal workers get pushed aside in the end. But Charles Koch is one of the richest people in the world. That's how this happened. So I believe his net worth is four to five billion now, his personal wealth. And he has been investing in this libertarian cause since the 1960s, so for more than 50 years now. And through that process, he has been very single-mindedly looking for ideas that would enable a breakthrough, that would enable the imposition of this libertarian system in functioning democracy, but against the will of the people, right? And so he supported hundreds of literally hundreds by his own count of libertarian thinkers looking for such ideas. And finally concluded by the mid-1990s that he had found those ideas in James Buchanan School of Thought, which is called Public Choice Economics. And so at that point, they began turning these ideas into a weapon, basically, into a strategy, an operational strategy for how to undermine the 20th century state as social movements had shaped it to reflect the popular will and things like workers' rights, environmental protection, civil rights enforcement and so forth. And so the way that that was done was to train a cadre, and he spoke in Leninist terms. He actually read Lenin, Charles Coke did, on the advice of one of his grantees, developing what they call the hardcore libertarian cadre of intellectuals and operatives who would be steeped in these ideas, who would be able to go into other institutions and into larger organizations and move this agenda and build even larger organizations, bend large organizations to their will. So if you look at the Republican Party in the United States now, it is an example of this process. What we have seen is that this relatively small libertarian cause by changing the incentives and the penalties in the Republican Party has bent one of our major parties to the will of these extreme right-wing donors. And the way that they've done that is to fund what are called primary challenges against any Republican and elected officials who don't carry the line of these organizations, who don't do the will of the donors, they scare them, right? They make them think they're going to lose their office, and then those elected officials do what the donors want. And that is happening on issue after issue here from health care to immigration policy to the tax bill to the Supreme Court nominations. Yeah, you had mentioned health care, where you had mentioned in your book about cancer causing or there was lead or some water, there was lead in the water, and when there was a person who was complaining and people were complaining about lead in water, there was a propaganda that said that there is nothing of this sort, people are just reporting and that research was not undermined. And only they had to take it to another state to prove that there was a major health crisis happening, can you? Yeah, so this libertarian cause is concerned about money and deficits and governments overspending. And so what they have done in the state of Michigan is to pass legislation that says that any local community, any local city or town that is overspending is in the red will essentially lose its power of self-government. They will get what is called an emergency manager. That emergency manager is kind of like a dictator, right? There's no accountability to the people, there's no election, there's no anything. And so at this point half of the African Americans in the state of Michigan are living under these emergency managers, these dictatorships. And in one community, Flint, Michigan, which had been an auto town very hard hit by the decline of manufacturing, they got one of these emergency managers and the emergency manager in order to save money, rerouted the water supply for that community away from good water to really bad water, water that turned out to be filled with lead.  And that was connected to this cause built by Charles Koch because that in Michigan they had pushed for those emergency managers that would be unaccountable to the people. Yeah. Similarly, I mean you had mentioned that they also pushed their agenda through pseudoscience and also, I mean, are there any such examples of where science or fake science is used to propagate their ideas among the white population? Oh yes. Yeah. So along with the wider fossil fuel industry in this country and Koch industries is based in fossil fuels, they have promoted climate science denial and they have promoted climate science denial to such a degree that they've actually led the public in America to believe that there's a debate about what's happening to the planet that scientists don't agree, which is ridiculous because like 97% of scientists know exactly what's going on and that we only have a short window of time to act to save the planet and all the people who will be harmed by this. But this Koch, excuse me, Koch lead cause is so dogmatically hostile to government, which is the only body strong enough to deal with this problem, that they are trying to deceive people about the science. And they've had such an effect on the Republican Party, as I was saying before, with their, the way they've changed the incentives and the penalties that by 2013, I cite the statistic in the book, by 2013, only eight, 278 Republicans in Congress would admit that climate change was manmade. That's astounding. I mean, that's discipline, right? I mean similarly, they have their influence internationally as well. You had mentioned that the Pinochet regime took some of Buchanan's inputs on how to run their economy and can you, I mean, share some of the readings or material that you came across on this issue? Yeah, so lots of people on the left know that Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist, went to Chile to advise the Pinochet dictatorship on how to combat inflation. Almost no one, including in Chile, understands that James Buchanan later went to Chile in 1980 to advise on a constitution that would enable the dictatorship to lock in all the things that they had done that were unpopular while the people were suppressed so that they could keep those in place when the country returned to elections and a representative system. And so Buchanan went in 1980 and advised on what is now called the Constitution of Liberty. And that Constitution of Liberty, all these years later, almost 40 years later, is still preventing people in Chile from reversing the privatization of social security, from reversing the privatization of education that made Chile's higher education system the most expensive of OECD countries. So it's been referred to by Michelle Bachelet, the previous socialist president, as a Constitution of locks and bolts. And it prevented her from delivering on the reform program that had led her to win an election with two thirds of the people backing her, and she couldn't act because of this Constitution. And that's the kind of Constitution that is being pushed in the United States and in other countries by this Koch network. They have something called the Atlas Network now that operates in more than 90 countries with over 450 affiliates. So I looked up yours in India and it's the India Institute, the Center for Public Policy Research, the Center for Civil Society, and the Amritsar Policy Group. So you have four groups that are pushing this Koch agenda. Alright. I mean, like everywhere else, even you are worried that there is a concerted effort of weakening the checks and balances ingrained into the Constitution. And that they are trying to, I mean, undermine the Constitution. Can you give some examples how the Constitution, which you said, even James Madison now would be embarrassed to, I mean, see what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. What they're doing with the Constitution is really interesting and quite frightening because already the U.S. Constitution is the pro-property rights Constitution out there of any major country in the world and it has what political scientists call four veto points. Whereas other countries, they might have one veto point, maybe two, a couple have three. We're the only one with four. So it's very hard in America to get government to act on the will of the people because of all those veto points. But these guys, this billionaire backed libertarian cause thinks there's not enough veto points, right? They want to put still more barriers to the people being able to use government for purposes that people think are important. So they want to amend our Constitution to include things like a balanced budget amendment, which would say that like every year you have to have a balanced budget. And people think that's good. Everybody's heard that analogy with household budgets, you know, and they say, what's the matter with that? But what they don't understand is that that would undermine programs like Social Security in our retirement system. It would undermine our medical care programs and others. So they want a balanced budget amendment. They want to put it in our Constitution that voters must show a photo ID in order to vote. They want to undermine the 17th Amendment to our Constitution, which allowed the people to choose U.S. Senators or U.S. Senators in Washington used to be appointed by state governments. Then with the 17th Amendment 100 years ago, the people won the right to choose their elected officials, right? These guys want to restore that power, take it from the people and restore it to the state governments because they know it's easiest for corporations to capture those state governments.  They have 10 Liberty Amendments they've come up with. That's what they call them. And together they would radically alter our country, which is already, you know, it's a haven for capitalism.  And yet they think that's not enough. They want to make it even more pro-corporate and take more power from the people. Now we're coming to the end. In the end, you had expressed that we are moving towards a stage where white supremacy wants to gain control over capital. And Calhoun, who was the founding ideologues of this movement would, I mean, be happy or that we are moving towards a racialized economy where white supremacy would take control of the society. Is that what? Well, actually what I talk about in the book is property supremacy, which has echoes of that white supremacy, right? And there's overlap, but these people would definitely not say that they're trying to promote white supremacy, right? They would say that they're supporting property rights and economic liberty. But in a country like our country that was founded on slavery in which production by enslaved people was the most pro-capital form of capitalism, you know, from the 1830s to the 1860s. And in which people were held as property, it's really impossible to separate that extreme property rights thought from white supremacy. And what I found in my research that was really interesting to me was that some of James Buchanan's own colleagues, allies in this struggle, described this 19th century property rights supremacist, John C. Calhoun as a precursor to Buchanan's thought. This man, John C. Calhoun, who said on the floor of the U.S. Senate that slavery is a positive good, right? And who wrote too long treatises reinterpreting our constitution in a way that would let him and his class protect slavery from democracy. They said that Buchanan's ideas had the same, and this is a quote, purpose and the same purpose and effect as Calhoun's, even though they tried to treat slavery as though it was irrelevant to Calhoun's thought. But basically, you know, I agree that both of these men seek to so radically transform representative government as to handicap it, except where the richest people in the society agree with everything that it does. That's their standard, this unanimity standard. And that would be the destruction, as James Madison said, of free government everywhere is what he said about John C. Calhoun. So it is incredibly radical, right wing radical, and it would transform our society into a place that few people would recognize. And I don't think almost anyone except these billionaires would want to live in. Ma'am, your book has been doing rounds in the media across the world. It has been getting positive responses. Can you share some of how people are reacting to this book? Is discussion happening and can you share some of those things with us? The book came out last summer, and essentially since then I've been traveling almost every week to speak to varied audiences who are interested in this story. And what has really excited and impressed me is that across sectors of progressive politics here in the United States from, you know, people in the labor movement to community organizations, to environmentalists, civil rights groups, feminists, senior citizens, all of these groups are understanding that we are at an emergency moment for our democracy, right? That this is kind of an all hands on deck emergency that things are being done that are very frightening and that are very dangerous. And so it's been really exciting to me to see how people are understanding the threat and the problem, that they're also understanding that what they've been doing has not been working, that people need to work together more, need to be thinking more long term, need to be building bridges among organizations and taking ideas more seriously and so forth. And so it's really been invigorating to see that. And I'm getting a sense that that's happening in other places too. You know, people write to me from various countries and ask about this project in their countries and, you know, of course there are these groups that are out there pushing this agenda. So I'm really getting a sense that, you know, it's kind of the 11th hour, it's late, but I think that we are getting it. And I think people are understanding it. And I think that this can be stopped if the mobilization is powerful enough and thoughtful enough and informed enough to bring people together to challenge this. Thank you, Professor Nancy for taking time and talking to us. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I don't care. Thank you for watching NewsClick.


It's time to talk about Star Wars again, even though I'm always telling everybody to shut up about Star Wars. Anyway, as you can see here, there's an old R2-D2 toy, and this is one of the originals from when the toys were first released.  It's hardly a step above a Fisher Price toy, although it's impossible for me to have kept the label clean over the years. I mean it would have yellowed no matter what, unless I kept it in the original package, and even then it would have yellowed I'm sure. But the year Star Wars came out and these toys started coming out, I wasn't yet keeping the boxes for everything. So yeah, the box for this is long gone, and I didn't buy any other Star Wars toys in this line because they were junk. I hated them. His head turns, and it still has a little plastic spring in there.  When the first movie originally came out, there were no toys. Nobody had anticipated how successful the movie would be so there was no toy deal. And so all the advertisements in the comic books, and once the movie was a hit the comic books were full of advertisements for Star Wars toys, but the advertisements were just drawings, just really bad sketches made by the advertising departments. I'm showing you some samples of them here. So when the toys finally hit the shelves, I think they made it onto the shelves by Christmas of 77, or maybe they were late, I don't recall, I didn't like the toys like I said. They hit the shelves and they were real disappointment. We were used to having 12 inch GI Joe dolls. The Star Trek toys were 12 inch GI Joe's. The six million dollar man were 12 inch. The Planet of the Apes dolls were 12 inch.    So thanks to the popularity of Star Wars, that's why we don't have proper action figures anymore.


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we take on a lot of legacy artists or like tens of millions of followers and it's like if I'm a if I'm a marketer like an e-commerce marketer where I help you know new new e-commerce brands makeup t-shirts whatever build up their revenue I'm looking at your socials and I'm determining what's the captive audience here and how much you know should this business be making if it's 500 there there are e-commerce brands of 500 000 followers who are making well over 10 million dollars annual revenue but if you see an artist with 500 000 followers the presumption is not that they're making 10 million dollars you know and so we that's like our agency wouldn't exist if that weren't the case we entirely an arbitrage of how much the music industry expects a following to generate in terms of dollars and how much we as marketers know that that should be the case if we're doing proper extraction of that value


One of the most significant features of our planet is the fact that 70% of its surface is covered by an ocean. In raw economic terms, the goods and services provided by oceans represents more than 20 trillion US dollars each year. Coral reefs are one of the jewels of the ocean. Despite representing less than 0.1% of the Earth's surface, coral reefs generate 29.8 billion US dollars each year in terms of net benefits and support an estimated 850 million people, many of whom depend on reef organisms for their daily protein. But the biological bounty of our oceans is dependent on the temperature and concentration of carbon dioxide. As you will see, what appears to be small changes in ocean acidity, as measured in pH units, in combination with rising temperatures, can have a huge impact on ocean ecosystems, which ultimately affect millions of people. As humans have added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, an increasing amount has been absorbed by the upper layers of the ocean. This has caused a phenomenon known as ocean acidification. So far, around 30% of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by humans has been absorbed by the ocean. Once carbon dioxide dissolves in the ocean, a number of chemical reactions take place. Up front, there's an increase in hydrogen ions, which manifests itself as a reduced ocean pH. Then some of those hydrogen ions react with carbonate ions to form bicarbonate ions, thereby reducing the concentration of carbonate ions. Now carbonate ions are important for calcification, the process by which marine animals and plants build their skeletons and shells. Hence any decrease in carbonate ions makes calcification much more difficult. So adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere decreases the pH and the concentration of carbonate ions and then this then leads to a decrease in calcification and a range of other negative effects on the calcium carbonate balance of coral reefs. Another part of the chemistry associated with ocean acidification is the fact that it takes tens of thousands of years to reverse. The only way the ocean can get less acidic is from the erosion of materials from rocks on land that are washed into the ocean. It's sobering to think then that the bad decisions that we are making today when it comes to ocean acidification will have consequences for at least the next 300 generations of humans. How are we so sure that the ocean is acidifying? Well, the theoretical chemistry behind the effective carbon dioxide on oceans has been known for at least 100 years. Based on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, ocean pH should have decreased by 0.1 units since the beginning of the industrial period. This may seem like an impossibly small amount of change but the pH scale is exponential. A 0.1 decrease on the pH scale translate to about a 26 percent decrease in carbon ion concentrations dramatically changing the availability of this important iron. Ocean acidification has been confirmed by measurements taken by oceanographers. Here is just one dataset confirming those chemical changes in the ocean as a result of rising carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide in the ocean, shown in blue, is rising as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, shown in red, is increasing. Ocean pH, shown in green, is steadily decreasing. This is what science has predicted. Studies of past ocean pH are also giving us some interesting insights. Ocean pH, it turns out, has been stable for a long time but there have been periods in Earth's history when it was lower than it is today. This is a figure that pulls together our understanding of how ocean pH has varied over the past 400 million years. The green and the blue lines are from the past with the decrease being due to high levels of CO2 in those earlier atmospheres. When you compare those periods with values from today, shown in gray, you can see how different the world's oceans were at those earlier times. Note however that the red line shows where we are headed if we continue on the current carbon dioxide emission trajectory. Talk about back to the future. It's also crucial to note that the rate at which we're changing ocean chemistry is extremely high. There is now overwhelming evidence that the current rate of change in ocean pH is faster than any other time in the past 65 million years if not the past 300 million years. Now given the well-known sensitivity of marine life to changes in pH and carbon at iron concentration, this represents a serious challenge to the biology of life in the ocean. And this is a challenge that we've been exploring at the University of Queensland. In an experiment with Associate Professor Sophie Dove and our research team on Heron Island, we've exposed small sections of coral reefs growing under different scenarios of the future. That is under different amounts of change with respect to temperature and carbon dioxide. Some of our tanks were exposed to a reduced emissions future, others to conditions consistent with the business as usual future that we're currently on. We've also looked at what would happen if we had not polluted the atmosphere with carbon dioxide in the first place and this treatment we refer to as the pre-industrial treatment. This is essentially the world that Darwin and other early scientists saw. We compared each of these treatments to present-day treatments. This is corals growing under current conditions. Take a look at these videos to see what happened in the four treatments over the course of several months at Heron Island. Well as you see the top two conditions are pre-industrial and present-day treatments maintained healthy corals and other organisms. The bottom two conditions however reveal a complex set of changes. With mild increases in carbon dioxide and temperature, typical of a reduced emissions future, only a few corals and other organisms survived. It's not pretty but reefs like this may well be able to recover if we stabilize ocean conditions in the long run. In the business as usual future, in the bottom right however, where carbon dioxide and temperature increase dramatically, no corals survive. This is a future where the marine resources that support people today will have largely disappeared. Looking back over the geological record it's apparent that corals have survived periods of Earth's history when conditions were warmer and more acidic than today. Now this can lead to the myth that things are okay because coral reefs were eventually returned. However this is very misleading. It ignores the fact that recovery after a mass extinction event takes a very long period of time. For example the last mass extinction event that took out the dinosaurs also affected corals so strongly that it took coral reef ecosystems about 10 million years to recover. 10 million years is about 40 times the length that our species has been in existence on this planet. Many scientists believe that humans are driving another mass extinction event from which it will also take a similarly long time to recover. So try telling that to the tour guides on the Great Barrier Reef that there's no need to worry about climate change because coral reefs will eventually come back in a few hundred generations. So in summary there are real concerns about ocean certification based on real-time experiments models and lessons from the past. Given this it's very puzzling why some people focus on the name ocean acidification in order to distract from the issue. This particular myth says that because the ocean is not acidic and that it is not going to get acidic anytime soon ocean acidification must be a lie. This myth is a misrepresentation of the situation. To understand this distraction let's have a look at the pH scale. As you can see basic or alkaline conditions range from 14 down to 7 on the pH scale and acidic conditions range from 7 down to 0. The pH of the ocean is approximately 8.1 so it's correct to say that the ocean is not acidic. However we know from direct measurements of the ocean that the pH is decreasing which is referred to as acidification. We are essentially taking an alkaline ocean and are moving it in the direction of acidity. Now this is just like adding cold water to a hot bath and calling it cooling but the bath will still be warm even though we've cooled it with cold water. Consequently saying that ocean acidification is a lie is a misrepresentation. It focuses on semantics rather than the physical reality of ocean becoming more acidic as carbon dioxide floods into it from the atmosphere and this completely ignores the fact that ocean acidification is a really big issue. While we have much to learn the evidence shows that the changes that we're inflicting on the ocean and its biology and the hundreds of generations of people to follow are potentially very serious and represent an experiment that we should not be conducting on ourselves let alone our planet.


Single-atom ruthenium catalysts on defective nickel-ion, layered double-hydroxide nanosheets, show superior HA and OER performance in alkaline media for efficient sustainable energy conversion. This article was authored by Panlong Zhai, Mingyu Xia, Yunzhen Wu, and others.


Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Eric Holm, Carmine Bailey and Vince Power. Coming up on DTNS, Tim Stevens is here to explain why the Unreal Engine is in the new Mustang. Plus, is it the end for auto shows? And why the matter standard is just… it's got a disappointment. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, September 16th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Upstate New York, I'm Tim Stevens. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chan. Tim, thank you for joining us today. It's good to have you, man. I'm really glad to be here. Well, I'm glad to have you alongside. Sarah Lane's out today. She'll be back on Monday, but let's start with a few tech things you should know. Uber discovered a security breach Thursday and has taken several of its internal communications and engineering systems offline. It's investigating the incident along with law enforcement. I'd like to say no customer information was affected. There's no evidence of that yet, but their investigation isn't done. An individual told the New York Times they breached Uber by using WhatsApp to contact an employee and convince that employee to log into a fake Uber site, which then used the entered credentials to log in immediately to the genuine Uber portal. The employee in question apparently authorized MFA. So when they logged into the fake site, the MFA got pushed, whether they authorized it right away or they got tired of it alerting them, it depends on who you ask. But they allowed the person in. So there was a second factor, but they socially engineered around it. Once in, the attacker found PowerShell scripts that an admin had created to automate logging into various sensitive network enclaves and used those to access multiple production systems, Slack management, Uber's endpoint detection and response portal, among others. The attacker may also have accessed Uber's AWS and Google Cloud accounts, as well as its bug bounty program, which has since been disabled. Intel first released its Pentium chips in 1993 in a seller on brand in 1998. Chips under those brands will still show up on low-end laptops often in models of Chromebook. Intel announced it's replacing the Pentium and the seller on brands, or maybe more accurately, it is deleting them. Processors that used to carry the name will now just be called Intel processors starting with the 2023 notebook product stack. For now, Intel will continue to use the core EVO and VPRO brands for its own processors. Hey, that's so silly. Calling your chip just Intel processor, that's like calling a daily tech news show, daily tech news show. Truth in advertising, right? Apple warns that there is an activation issue in iOS 16.0 that could prevent iMessage and FaceTime from working properly on new phones, like, you know, the brand new iPhone 14. Apple has patched the problem in iOS 16.0.1. A lot of folks are getting their new iPhones today, though, so if the new phone prompts you to install the new version 16.0.1 during setup, you'll probably be fine. If it doesn't, go update it right away. If you're still having problems, Apple has posted steps to take if the problem persists after installing the patch. Security company Vectra identified a risk in the way Microsoft Teams on the desktop stores authentication tokens. Apps built on the Electron framework for Windows, Mac, and Linux store the tokens unencrypted. That means if an attacker gets access to your network, it could use the credential to impersonate you on apps associated with teams like Outlook and Skype, two which are pretty common apps used for some pretty important business stuff. Microsoft said that it will consider addressing it in a future update as it would require a much bigger breach, i.e. network access, in order to be exploited. In other words, if you have a network breach, you probably got some bigger problems to worry about. Yeah, I'd still like them to patch it. I would too. And promise to patch it? Yeah. I get what they're saying, though. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden is raising the alarm again on the latitude that U.S. Custom and Border Protection agents have to access U.S. citizens' devices at the border. I mean, if you're not a U.S. citizen, they can do whatever they want, but they can kind of do whatever they want with U.S. citizens' devices as well. Border authorities are not required by law to get a warrant in order to access the content of any electronic device. The Washington Post reports that in a briefing with U.S. Congress, CBP said its officials access around 10,000 devices a year, which is a low percentage of the number of people crossing the border, to be honest. But it's a lot of devices. And they add data from those devices to a database. 2,700 CBP officers have access to that database. Current rules require a border agent to have at least a reasonable suspicion that a traveler is breaking a law or a threat to national security in order to copy data over to that database. I cross the border a lot. I'm lucky to say this never happened to me, but I do always make sure that all my devices have some charge because I know that if they don't turn on, that can cause some problems for you. Alright, if you're not subscribed to Stacey Higginbotham's Stacey on IOT, and you care at all about smart home stuff, go now. Subscribe to StaceyOnIOT.com. Her latest newsletter is called Five Ways Matter Will Disappoint Users at Launch. It's an excellent piece because it sets you up to understand that the promise of matter is not lost just because it's not all there at the beginning. She explains what will and will not be there. If you read it, you can get ahead of most of the complaints people are going to have after matter launches. A lot of people are going to be lobbing softball bombs at this thing. The short version though is that the Connectivity Standards Alliance is trying not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And they're going to push out a 1.0 version of the standard that's more limited than what the promise of matter has been up until now. Here's the short version of what Stacey says. You're going to be able to turn light bulbs and smart plugs on and off real easy. That's going to work great. Everything else is where the problem comes in. First of all, some stuff is not included until a later version of matter. So video cameras, appliances, video doorbells, vacuums, robot vacuums, none of that stuff is going to be in version 1.0. That is not going to be part of matter. And of the stuff that will be included, your smart plugs and your light bulbs and such, matter is not going to support all the advanced features. So if you have a smart plug that does electricity monitoring, that's not going to be supported by matter. If you have some sophisticated recipes for mixing and matching, the garage door goes up when you come home and then the lights go on inside. That stuff's probably not going to work. Multiple brands of devices in a complex routine, probably not going to work. You're going to need an app a lot of the time. In fact, you're probably going to need the devices app for installation at this point too. And while you technically will be able to use matter on Google, Amazon, Apple or Samsung hubs, the features that will work across those platforms are going to be limited. If you want those platforms more advanced features, you're going to still need compatibility and stay all in the same universe for a while. Adding a light bulb or two should work great, but if you add a lot of them, you may also hit a limit of what it can handle. Now, none of these are permanent. This is not the way matter is designed to work. Matter is going to update to solve these problems over time. It's just going to be limited when it launches. It's capable of doing more. It just needs time. As an educated consumer, I know you and I out there understand that standards evolve. USB is more capable now than it was when it launched in 2001. So it doesn't surprise me that matter is going to be the same, but not all consumers are going to think that way. Tim, what do you think? Can matter survive what looks like might be a disappointing launch? Yeah, I definitely think it can. I've actually worked on a few standards of bodies over the years back in my software days, and I know that it's really difficult to get these things moving at all. So I do think it's important for them to get something to market and then to continue to evolve with the market, because otherwise they run the risk of having the market kind of just continue to run away without them. Frankly, I think that matter doesn't really have the kind of awareness within the general consumer base at this point that's going to disappoint that many people. Certainly for folks like us, we're going to be a little bit disappointed that it's not going to be amazing out of the box, but I think as long as expectations are being set and as long as they can continue to evolve and so that Amazon and ZigBee and everybody else are engaged in developing the standard, then yeah, I think this is a good thing. But absolutely, Stacy's piece is really fantastic. Everyone should read it if you're interested in this. And frankly, I think they should print this out and put it in the box of every matter device, because I think people should definitely have their expectations in the right place. Yeah, I think that's a great idea. It's a great point that there's going to be a lot of loud talk in a small area about the disappointment of matter. But the fact is that a lot of folks out there aren't going to realize what it is. I think the only danger they run is if people see the matter logo on a box and someone explains to them like, oh yeah, matter, that means it'll run on anything. It'll all interoperate. And then they get it home and they have a problem and it won't do a thing that they want. They may not trust that in the future as it does get better. But I'm with you. I don't think that's going to be fatal to it. I think you're going to have a lot of people writing very long Reddit threads about how disappointed they are with matter and that might be the worst fallout. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, apps will be updated. I have smart devices that their apps haven't been updated in years, so I'm not surprised too that this is going to take a while for everything to proliferate. Yeah. It may take a while. That may be the biggest downside is I want it now and it really may be five or more years before it really gets to the point where it delivers on all of its promises. Nick with a C in our chat room is pointing out Wi-Fi A sucked at launch. No one remembers Wi-Fi A. Everyone remembers 802.11 B, not 802.11 A, because 802.11 A didn't work. So yeah, this is not new. This is new and I don't think it's as bad as it sounds. But Thursday, Amazon announced a new feature for its smart devices called Customers Ask Alexa, where you can have brands answer your questions. That might sound bad. Like if I ask how to get a pet stain out, is it just going to be the Bissell vacuum manufacturer telling me use the Bissell vacuum manufacturer? It's not unlike crowdsourced answers that Amazon has provided since 2018. If you don't know, there's something called Alexa Answers. And in that one, users of Amazon add answers to other users' questions. It's crowdsourced. In this new Customers Ask Collection version, it's the brands themselves providing the answers. It's just a special way for brands to be able to see questions related to their products and offer answers. Brands that register with Amazon Brand Registry can see frequently asked customer questions and then provide answers. Brand answers still go through content moderation just like any crowdsourced answer would to make sure that there are viable answers that are useful. Answers are also attributed to the brand and the brands are not paid for providing answers. This is merely a way for them to service the customers. It's not at this point a revenue generating thing for Amazon or for the brands. Customers Ask Alexa will launch in October in a limited rollout. All eligible U.S. brands will get support later next year and then eventually it'll expand beyond that. Users will see responses in the Amazon search bar starting later this year and then it'll come to Echo Devices by the middle of next year. So, my first reaction when I saw this, Tim, was like, oh great we're going to get a bunch of useless answers telling me to buy a product but it sounds like maybe it won't work that way. Yeah, I think this could be helpful in the long run. You mentioned moderation. I'm glad that they're making that kind of front and center because when Alexa Answers launched, there were some definite breakdowns when they came down to moderation. There were a lot of very, very bogus answers that go through and some of them were even dangerous. So, I'm glad that'll be part of it. But honestly, I mean at this point if you watch any given DIY program on PBS or whatever else, there are always products being injected into all those explanations of how to do anything. So, I think people are pretty used to it at this point. It doesn't necessarily have to be a hostile thing. And from a brand standpoint, it actually could be really useful data for them to see what kind of questions and problems people are having. And I can even see this expanding into like how to put together your new table kind of thing where you're getting guidance from the manufacturer, something like that. So, I think there are some interesting applications here. I'm glad that for now it's not a paid thing, but I will be shocked if within six months Amazon doesn't flip the switch on that. Yeah, as it is set up right now, I will give them credit. This is the best of both worlds, right? If IKEA wants to let me be talked through assembling the Billy bookshelves, that's fantastic. That could be amazing. Or even with an Echo show, you know, give me some diagrams and help like that. Who is better able to tell you about their product than the maker of them? And manufacturers benefit from helping you get the most out of their product. So, they're invested in giving you good information. That said, Amazon is invested in selling you things. And yes, providing you great support through the Amazon Echo will probably have a halo effect of making you want to buy more things through Amazon. But Amazon would also like to sell you more things directly. And I can't imagine there won't be some change to this policy down the line that changes that. My only hope is that wouldn't devalue the answers. If the answers stay quality, I'm even okay with some money changing hands. But it makes it harder for those answers to stay quality once the money starts flowing around. Yeah, at that point it becomes whoever's got the deepest pockets will be providing the quote-unquote right answers, even if they're not the best ones. And really, you know, you may roll your eyes at that out there. But if Amazon does that, then the Echo won't be as valuable and people won't buy the Echo. And thankfully, this is a competitive marketplace. There are other, you know, there's Google Home. There's Siri. There's even, you know, Samsung, Bixby could make a comeback if Amazon got really bad, right? So there's pressure for them not to be bad is what I'm saying. Does that mean there's still hope for Cortana? I don't think so. I feel like Microsoft turned a corner on Cortana. And they're willing to sell you that to put in your product. So I guess in that respect, there might be more manufacturers take advantage of Cortana. But it feels more like it's an enterprise service. I'm still sad about that. At this point. Yeah. I know. I had high hopes for Cortana as well. It worked. It still does. Folks, we would like to hear what you would like us to talk about on the show. I would say a majority of our top stories at the top of the show were from our subreddit today. So thanks to everybody out there who are submitting those stories. You can join them, submit stories and vote at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. The Ford Mustang has been an automotive icon. It went into production in 1964. And we are about to see, in fact, Tim just saw the 2024 model that is 60 years later. You got a chance to see that model. There's some interesting tech going on in the new Mustang. For instance, why is it running the Unreal engine, Tim? It's actually pretty interesting the tech that they built into the dashboard. There are two displays, a 13.3 and 12.2, if I remember correctly, inch displays that are kind of integrated within a unified bezel. And in the middle display, kind of the infotainment display, which is tilted toward the driver that they kept saying is a fighter-influenced design, you can go through your vehicle settings and you get some visualizations that are a lot like you would get if you were going through sports and motorsport or Gran Turismo 789 or whatever. Whatever your adjusting suspension brakes, engine performance, those components within the car are highlighted with kind of a cool, rate-traced design. It looks really good, actually. High-res graphics inside of the center console are pretty cool. And then also on the gauge cluster behind the steering wheel, they've actually recreated the Foxbody Mustang gauge cluster in 3D. And you can project that onto the gauge cluster to make your fancy new Mustang look like a 1980s-era Mustang. And presumably, I would be shocked if they don't offer other gauge cluster packages for purchase down the road. But right now, anyway, there's Foxbody in there. So I think that's a pretty interesting application of this consumer-grade technology gaming software in a car. And it looks really, really good. I'm actually impressed with that. I had the compelling pitch to say the setup screen from Forza where you can pretend to own a race car can be in your actual car that is also kind of a race car. Yeah, absolutely. And it looks just as clean as it would on an Xbox or PlayStation. Yeah. Now, we talked recently on DTNS about the desirability of physical switches versus touchscreen controls. Sounds like some of those are going away. Yeah. Ford is keeping some of the major controls with physical buttons and knobs. There is still a volume knob, for example. But the HVAC controls for your temperature, your climate control modes, all of those have now been absorbed up into the touchscreen. There's no way to get to them through buttons. Ford said they did this to free up room in the center console. So there's a little cubby now below the display with wireless charging, which is nice. But if you want to adjust your heated seats, that kind of thing, you're going to have to go tap into a couple of menus to do so. This is commonplace. This is what everybody is doing. I still like buttons in a lot of places. And again, there are still a fair few buttons in the Mustang, but many fewer than there were in the sixth gen, in the last gen Mustang. Is there any voice control in this Mustang? Is it all console? There is a bit, yeah. It's fairly straightforward. It's nothing really advanced, like a Google Assistant kind of thing, like Volvo has in their cars, for example. But you can do navigation through voice and a few basic controls too. Now, I see you hearing us talk about the Unreal engine in the dash, says, when do I get to steer my car with a game pad? Well, you could park your car with a joystick, apparently. Why does the parking brake, the handbrake, look like a big joystick? Well, so the handbrake is inspired by drift culture, basically. And so what they wanted to do was to give the car a modern handbrake. And pretty much every handbrake on a modern car these days is digital.  It's not like the old ones we pulled up and it ratcheted into place, and you pull the button. And so Ford wanted to bring a modern parking brake to the Mustang, but they still wanted you to be able to pull the handbrake and get the car sideways if you wanted to.  When you go into race mode and you pull on that thing, it locks the rear wheels and will kick the car sideways, letting you slide it around and make big smoky burnouts, basically. So they wanted to give you drift power in a silly-looking joystick on the center console, basically, is what that is. So, I mean, you tell me, as someone who's covered cars for a long time, how do they adjust to that line of, like, this is an illegal thing that you can now do with this feature? It's actually very surprising to me that they would put this feature in this car that exists only for the purpose of getting the car sideways. There's no other reason to have this. You can option that into the car. If you don't get it, then you'll just get a button to engage the parking brake on a normal car, or like you would on a normal car. And so I was surprised. Yeah, there's really no legal way to use that. So it would only be really on a racetrack. But then again, the last generation Mustang had a line lock function, which is designed explicitly to help you do big smoky burnouts. And that was in the last generation. So they do have a history of doing this kind of thing. Well, when you take your new 2024 Mustang out on your private ranch and do smoky burnouts, let us know how it goes. Now, among all this tech, you have not mentioned that this is an EV because it's not. This is a gasoline-powered car. Right, and that's actually a little bit surprising. We had fully expected this to be at least a plug-in hybrid. The rumor or word on the street was that it was going to be some evolution of the Explorer's plug-in hybrid technology or something else that would basically turn it into an all-wheel-drive car with an electric front axle and a traditional gasoline-powered rear axle, a combination of gas power and battery power. But just a few days before the unveiling, the word kind of broke that that was not going to be the case. And so what we actually have here is a pretty minor mechanical evolution of the old Mustang. Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, says they're doing this because they think that as everyone else goes to electrification, that the Mustang might be the only gas-powered sports car left in the markets. I think that's maybe being a bit optimistic for them either running into some unforeseen engineering challenges or more likely them simply deciding that because they have the Mach-E Mustang, which is fully electric, that they've kind of got their green cred in on that side so they don't really have to worry about that so much on the Mustang anymore. I don't know for sure, but that's just me speculating. And the Mach-E is very different than the traditional Mustang, so maybe they don't want to have to try to compete and merge those two lines, would that make sense? Yeah, it's entirely possible that there's still a lot of debate raging whether the Mach-E is an actual Mustang and I don't think we really need to get into that. But yeah, certainly the Mach-E is a crossover SUV versus the Mustang, which is a two-door sports coupe, so probably the more that they keep them differentiated in the product portfolio, probably the better for them. And for Star Trek fans, we're saying Mach, M-A-C-H-E, not Mach-E, not the rebellion in the Badlands. You saw the new Mustang as part of the North American International Auto Show, right? Yeah, which is interesting because that show has been evolving a lot. The North American Auto Show used to be in January, it was right after CES, it was really struggling for years because CES was kind of drinking its proverbial milkshake as it were with more and more auto companies choosing to go to Vegas instead of Detroit. So it had been a few years. It moved to the summertime to avoid the CES bump and then COVID happened, which was not great for the North American International Auto Show. So this is really the first big North American auto show we've had in a couple of years and it was not as big as it used to be. There was a lot of empty space on the show floor, which was kind of sad to see and just a lot of manufacturers chose not to be there. It's similar to what we've seen at CES and E3 in the past, but it was a pretty dramatic example of the shifting ties for the auto show right now. Yeah, it is similar in that you see car companies doing their own announcements now, the way that Apple and Sony and Microsoft do their own announcements, Samsung. It has not led to the total demise of CES. It certainly has put E3 on the brink. We'll see if it makes it back. Do you think this is it for auto shows? Are they irrelevant now? I wouldn't say they're irrelevant, but they're struggling. Auto shows traditionally have served three audiences and those three have kind of been like the legs on a wooden stool. On one hand, there's the media. There's new car launches. So car companies will unveil their new whatever at auto shows and we'll write about it, and that's good for the industry. They also serve the consumers. Unlike your average CES or E3, auto shows are typically open to the public. So whoever wants to buy a new car can go to these auto shows and check those out too. And then also they serve the industry. So if you want to partner with a new supplier for some sensory car, you go to an auto show and you sign that deal. Now, though, consumers are largely shopping and they need to go to an auto show anymore. And because, like you mentioned, manufacturers are following the Apple Q and doing their own events off-site, that also diminishes the impact of these shows for the media. So that means that really they're only serving the industry and the industry can just have those meetings on Zoom. So it is unfortunate, but the auto show's importance is whining for sure. You would think that the ability to get in a car would make it more resilient to that, but it would be interesting to see. People are showing a willingness to buy a car on-site on-scene, much more so than we've ever seen before. I bought a car in 2020 from Carvana that was delivered from Atlanta, Georgia to my house. I never went to a dealer. There you go. Tuesday this week, LA police were called out to high school on what turned out to be a hoax, but while treating it seriously and investigating, they put up crime scene tape to deter bystanders. TV cameras on the other side of the crime tape. So they weren't too close to any possible incident. Again, nothing happened. However, a serve robotics delivery robot which makes deliveries for Uber Eats rolled right on up to the crime scene tape. One of the camera operators standing there, watched it hesitating and flashing red lights and eventually raised the tape for it. I think it took pity on it and let the robot roll right on into the crime scene right past the cops going along its merry way. Autonomous robots are almost always supervised by humans. Any of these sidewalk robots usually have somebody over viewing them. They can over view multiple robots at once, but the idea is to intervene if there's a problem. Serve has a policy that their robot should not cross police tape, which is why the robot autonomously paused. However, the spokesperson for Serve Robotics told Gizmodo that the robot's human supervisor mistakenly thought it was being waved through and so gave the robot the go ahead. My guess is, this is not what they've said, is that when that camera person raised up the tape, the supervisor, maybe they were distracted, maybe not, just looked at that and said, oh, I guess they're letting it through. Okay, great. And let it roll on through. So, Tim, we were talking earlier, usually the debate on autonomous cars is about how they would deal with vague situations like this. In this case it was the human that didn't deal very well with it. Yeah, this is very different than the typical trolley problem that we're always debating. This is a case, yeah, where the human operator clicked a button and said, yeah, go ahead and it went right through, but this really deals with the question of contextual cues which human beings are very good at reading and which robots are really not so good. So, we're talking about autonomous cars, how often have you been at an intersection waiting to turn, you see a pedestrian, you make eye contact with them, the pedestrian assumes you see them, they go ahead or maybe you use your hand to wave somebody to go through the intersection, that kind of thing. Robots can't do this and they by default can't really understand what you mean. So, that's why some of the companies fall back to human operators and when the human operator screws up, yeah, then things get kind of comical and satirical. This reads like kind of a jokey episode of Black Mirror to me where like the delivery drone rolls through and you know, scoops up the murder weapon secretly and attaches it to the bottom and then continues rolling on with like tire tracks of blood behind it or something like that. That's all I could picture in my head. Thankfully, that's not what happened, but I could absolutely see a Black Mirror episode like that, for sure. Alright, let's check out the mail bag. Rick wrote us an email called Does Tech Gatekeep Labels? Good morning, DTNS team. First, I'd like to say thank you for the concise and understandable proof of work explainer. It helped a lot on a topic I was definitely knowledgeable on. Thank you, Rick. I'm glad you appreciated that. It got a lot of good feedback on that episode. Second, I finally started seeing articles comparing the Apple Watch Ultra to some of Garmin's offerings in earnest. Some of those reviews make some sort of remark that the Garmin isn't actually a true smartwatch, but rather a fitness tracker. I feel like this occasionally happens with developing tech segments. Do you think this is simply a result of a market leader establishing an ideal of what a product category is and that sticking, regardless of how muddied the waters get for a while unconsciously or not, is it a result of marketing? Is it even a bad thing? These are great questions, Rick. Tim, what do you think? Yeah, they are great questions. I remember when the iPhone first dropped, there was debate about whether the iPhone was a smartphone because it couldn't do a lot of things that you could do on Windows Mobile or whatever. To me, it's ridiculous that because Garmin is a fitness-focused device therefore it isn't a quote-unquote smart phone. You can do a lot of incredibly smart things on a modern Garmin device. So yeah, I think it's an interesting thing, but ultimately I think it's up to the owners of these devices to kind of tune that stuff out, frankly. If the device does what you need to do, if it's smart for you, if it's improving your quality of life, which Garmin devices would do for a lot of folks, then who cares what the label is personally? That's what I think. I think what happens is the reviewers are trying to be fair, and so they may not be trying to throw Garmin under the bus so much as saying, well, Garmin isn't meant to be a smartwatch. It is meant to focus on fitness, whereas the Apple is meant to be a full smartwatch. So there are things that the Garmin doesn't do because it never needed to do those, to capture its market. I think that happens. And it's less gatekeeping and more like trying to say, well, these are coming from different areas. Expectation is setting that kind of thing. Well, Tim Stevens, thank you so much for being with us today. I know you've got a new sub-stack out there. I've been enjoying it quite a bit. Tell folks more about that. Thank you, yeah. I'm just kind of stretching my legs a little bit on the writing side and trying out some new things. So yeah, check out my sub-stack, timstevens.substack.com talking about everything from electric cars to management techniques and that kind of thing. And then always on Twitter, Tim, underscore Stevens. You can find me there too. And thanks to our brand new boss Sergio. Just started backing us on Patreon. This could be you on Monday. But today it's Sergio. Sergio getting all the love for backing us on Patreon. We're always very appreciative of our long-standing backers and our new backers alike. So thank you, Sergio, for being along for the ride. Welcome to the club. And stick around Sergio and all patrons for the extended show Good Day Internet. We'll be talking more with Tim about stuff. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more about that, dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back Monday with Lamar Wilson. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech New Show were created by the following people host producer and writer Tom Merrill, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker Roger Chang, producer writer and host Rich Strafolino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coontz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding, our Mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottis One, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Rotterama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. 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Okay, I know that they wanted to do dark, but... Ooh! That's a hot mug, guys! I actually went out and bought this. It was $15. And I haven't watched a DC animated universe movie in a while.  I'm gonna actually make these characters different.  It's unfortunate too, because I was watching every single animated movie that was coming out. I was buying them. If it was not me, it was my dad. We were enjoying these movies right up until I moved out. And then Gods and Monsters just kind of was this turnaround. This film does kind of take a few things from a sum of the animated movies that have come out, if I'm correct. Obviously, they borrow from Flashpoint. They borrow from Justice League Dark, because John Constantine is kind of the main character of this. And what happens is, honestly, what would actually probably happen going up against Darkside if he knew you were coming? A lot of people die. And I'm not talking about humans. I haven't seen this much death on screen or on the page, if you were to say, in a comic book form of well-known and a huge cast of superhero characters since Marvel's zombies are chronicles or whatever that was. I read it when I was 20. I thought it was like, oh, who will live to the end? And then in the end, they kept on redoing its lore. I don't know.   Now, if you stop here for the review and go and watch it yourself, I totally understand because it's exactly what I did actually. Jeremy Johns was reviewing it and I watched it up until this point and then I said, okay, I'm going to go watch it myself. And I made the joke earlier about it being dark and this is kind of like the dark that Zack Snyder, I swear wishes he could do, but it's also a bit much. It's a bit too much if I can be blatantly honest. We're seeing characters being ripped apart on screen for the reason of to just watch them die. Yes, there are some losses that are felt, but nothing hits you as hard as what happens in this opening battle. Everything afterwards is like, oh, I'm surprised he's not dead yet because from the track record I've seen for this movie, he's not going to be around for long. It's a tug and go. I've seen people absolutely love this.  If you want a real fun time, go and look at the user reviews for this film on IMDb.   It doesn't help when we have people like this and complete vocal arguments of insanity like this. If it isn't obvious before, this film is rated R and I'll actually give it credit. It deserves the R. It's not just because there's an F bomb in here, like graphic content. This is gore on the level of the Dead Space animated movies.  I think the thing that really turned me off of the DC films for a while was that they were trying to say that they were rated R when Killing Joke was not warranted for it. Justice League Dark wasn't warranted for it. The voice casting in this is decent. There are some very good exceptions. The guy who voices Constantine is the same guy who was the actual actor of him in the live action show, the very short-lived one. He's great. He's phenomenal.  Frickin' Candy Man as Darkseid and it's not as good as I thought it would be. And this leads me into my issue. Aside from Constantine, everyone kind of seems like they're reading their lines. Even Rosario Dawson who is a great choice, in my opinion, is the voice for Wonder Woman. Everyone's just so men, this entire thing. I feel that there was a lack of experience with the directors. And if you look at the directing credits, there's two guys. One of them has never directed anything. He's always been an assistant editor or assistant artist, but he's never directed anything. And the other one directed Batman Hush. And then one of the writers is for Batman Hush.  Essentially what they tried to do is what they did with Gotham by Gaslight, which that twist made no sense either. So lacking experience doing shock value for shock value sake is definitely evident in this film. There are parts that I enjoyed.   It was giving me that. It was giving me that shock value for sure. The story's kind of, um, oddly enough, it actually even needs more time. This film's only about an hour and 20 minutes long, but there's so much happening. There's so many people who are dying. There's so many things going on. For instance, I'm not going to spoil who dies, but there's a significant character. Never gets a line, appears, and then dies. And at the end of the movie, I was absolutely flabbergasted. I was like, wait, you're alive?  I didn't mind the Damien Waynes arc in this either. He was not too bad. However, it ends with Pokemon bullshit. I enjoy some aspects of it, but at the same time, I can't excuse just the level of ridiculousness that happens in it. There's definitely a lack of a directorial experience, shock value for shock value's sake, and it needs to be more filled out. However, I did like the ending, and I'm probably liking it for the exact reason why a lot of people are hating it. It's the ballsyest thing to do, even though whatever they do the next one will demitigate it most likely. In the end, I'm going to give Darkseid Apocalypse a three out of seven. You can watch this. It's entertaining, but I'm not ever going to. I don't know. You could watch this while drinking. Yeah, there's a drinking game for every single superhero that dies. Take a drink. You'll be dead. Anyways, guys, that's all for me. If you enjoyed this review, leave a like and if you're interested in more subscribe. Otherwise, see you guys next time. Thanks for watching the video. My name is Knitz, and you might remember me from the animated cult classic TV show, Undergrads. It's been a while, but I'm happy to say the click is finally getting back together in an all new movie. Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, but we are still asking for your support to see any and all updates about the upcoming undergrads movie. Be sure to check out and like the bring back undergrads Facebook page. And with any luck, we'll see you guys soon.


Hi everyone, Shawn with jaspyscasebrakes.com here doing 2020 Panini National Treasures Football. Two box, half case break, random team number 19. Obviously all card shipped. This is the half case first half of a full case break. So here is our list of customers. From David Garcia in the spot he won in that mosaic, filler number 67 back up to Paul Norden in the first spot purchased, and the teams from the Washington football team back up to the Arizona Cardinals. Dice will randomize both lists and pair them up. Four and one, five times. Fifth and final time. Christopher Gerard, William Susscher, five times on the teams. Fifth and final time. From the Jaguars down to the Broncos. So five times on the teams, five times on the customers, five times on the dice. Christopher Gerard, Jaguars, Matthew Shearer, Washington, Kailin Min with the Titans, Joshua Idlitz, Browns, Falcons, Robert Flores, Raiders, Bryan, Susscher, Bears, Matthew Shearer, Dolphins, Robert Flores, Colts, Andrew Martin, Chiefs, Joshua Idlitz, Eagles, Robert Flores, Saints, Joshua Idlitz, Viking, Steelers, William Susscher, Giants, David May Cowboys, Joshua Idlitz, Buccaneers, Matthew Shearer, Bills, Chris Detillo, Jets, Nicholas Riesinger with the Ravens, Joshua Idlitz, 49ers, Christopher Gerard, Lyons, David Garcia, Seahawks, Sean O'Leary, Panthers, Rams, Cardinals, Andrew Martin, Patriots, Paul Norden, Bengals, Robert Flores, Texans, David Garcia, Packers, Kailin Min with the Chargers, William Susscher, Broncos. So that's the randomizer results. Trade window is open. We got to figure out which two boxes we're going to do. So here is your full list for potential trades. If we don't hear any potential trades, I'll probably just close it up after we figure out which boxes we are, but that's up to the chat. And here is the case. So I'm going to pop this thing open and we'll figure out which two boxes we're going to do. Sealed case of National Treasures football. Seattle is for trade. Seahawks up for grabs. So Camino, how are you? So there are the four boxes from this case. Top two are going to go to the left. Bottom two are going to stay on the right. One, two, three on the dice for the left boxes. Four, five, six of the dice for the right boxes. And here's the lucky dice. The six. So we're going with the right boxes, which is the bottom. This here will be for random team 20, which is already in the store, guys, 20. So anybody else, any potential trades? Camino's got the Seahawks, like I said, up for trade. If there's nobody else in the chat looking to trade, I know, let's see, right? Then we're going to go ahead and close it up and go. What do we got for you, David? Why is the Nick Cam not working? I don't know why the Nick Cam's not showing, but so what do we have opportunities for you? Packers, Jordan Love.  All right. So it looks like there's no talks of trades. David, so let's close it up. We'll get you something. So here are the boxes. We got a printing plate right on top for one of our base. So that's cool. Printing plate. That is number 19 for the Vikings. Adam Thielen? Adam Thielen, one-to-one. Minnesota Vikings. What's my list? There's the final list for us. Minnesota Vikings is Joshua Idlitz. Derek Henry, 99 out of 99 for the Tennessee Titans and Kailin Min. James Connor, 5 out of 99 for the Steelers, Joshua Idlitz. Tim Brown, Relic, 51 out of 99 for the Raiders and Robert Flores. Randall Cunningham, 2 out of 25. Little three-color patch there, a little bit of green in the bottom right corner. Hard to see on video, but it's in person. You can't miss it. The Kelly Green. Eagles, Joshua Idlitz. AJ Brown for the Titans, 15 out of 25. Kailin Min. Our first auto is Jeff Saturday, 2 out of 25 for the Indianapolis Colts. That is Robert Flores. Got a redemption. TJ Hawkinson, Jumbo Relic, 11 out of 49 for the Detroit Lions and Christopher Gard. That's the redemption. But right behind that, 56 out of 99. Two-color patch auto. Jordan Love for the Packers and David Garcia. There you go, David. Congrats, man. Little Jay Hart. Nice patch. And the redemption. Rookie Patch Autographs Midnight. This is the parallel that's out of 20, I believe. Card 194. James Morgan. That is the New York Jets and Chris Detillo. Might not be the name, but has a very nice parallel there.  That's the first midnight parallel I think I pulled this year. I like those a lot. So we've got an auto right on top. First up is Willie Roof, 1 out of 25 for the Saints and Robert Flores. Hall of Famer, Willie Roof.  I remember him. AJ Green, 19 out of 99 for the Bengals and Paul Norton. Little Jumbo Relic, Devin Singletary for the Bills, Matthew Shira.  Jeff Saturday, Willie Roof. Hall of Famers. Layton Vandrej, 4 out of 99. Cowboys, David May. Nice two-color patch, Teddy Bruceke. That is 5 out of 25 for the Patriots and Andrew Martin. Another two-color patch, Michael Gallup for the Cowboys, 20 out of 25. David May. And Cooper Cup, 10 out of 25 for the Rams, Sean O'Leary. Brian Edwards, 3-color patch. This is the crossover rookie patch auto. 6 out of 99 for the Raiders and Robert Flores. We got another redemption. And wow. Not one but two Jordan Love. 2-color patch on the left, piece of the football on the right. 2 out of 25. Jay Hart, Jordan Love. Packers, David Garcia. There you go, David. If one Jay Hart is good, two is better. Come on, Joe Burrow. Please don't be James Morgan. Rookie patch autograph. Card 190. Could it really be? Oh, Lynn Bowden, Jr. Is he a dolphin or a raider on this checklist? I'm assuming at this point he's already a dolphin in this, but let's just double check. Let's pop over here real quick. Go root break checklist. 2021 national treasure, 2020 national treasures, basketball, football. Can't speak. I team. Lynn Bowden, Jr. Lynn Bowden, Bowden. Dolphin. That is rookie patch autos and parallels. Card 190. Miami Dolphins. So Miami Dolphins, that's going to go to Matthew Shearer. There you go, Matthew. Your Lynn Bowden, Jr. RPA redemption to finish off the break. Very nice. Two Jordan Loves in there. I like the quarterbacks. Kamiano's happy. And there you go, guys. That was the break. That's 2020. Padini national treasures, football, two box, half case break, random team number 19 from jaspyscasebreaks.com. I'm Sean, second half of the case, random team number 20 in store, jaspyscasebreaks.com. Thanks for hanging out. We'll see you next time.


Welcome to this lecture 25 in ground water hydrology. In this lecture, we will be covering this ground water salinity and samples followed by graphical representations of ground water. So now, let us discuss this. Let us start with this ground water salinity. See almost all ground water contains salts and hence has salinity. And this salt content varies from so this is less than 25 mg per liter to 40,000. So, this is in quartzite spring in quartzite springs 40,000 mg per liter in brines or which are there is a strong solutions of salt, common salt or here. So, this salinity, this type and concentration salts varies with environment then movement that is the movement of salts as well as source from where these salts originate. So, the generally salt concentration in ground water. So, this ground water GW is abbreviation for ground water is much greater than salt concentration in surface water. So, the reason is obvious because in case of ground water the flow velocity is much less. Reason is greater exposure soluble materials in geological state whereas, in case of surface water it may not happen and therefore, especially when the surface is almost impervious. So, in that case, so there will not be any exposure to soluble materials and therefore, the salt concentration will be much less. And here, so the soluble salts in ground water soluble salts in ground water. So, they originate from primarily from rock material solutions and here, so among the anions, so the most common anions are bicarbonates. So, this is derived from CO2 that is released by organic decomposition. On the other hand, the salinity also varies. So, this is the primary anion, anions or HCO3 in ground water, primary anions in ground water or HCO3 and salinity also varies with this surface area of aquifer comma solubility of minerals or mineral solubility and obviously, this contact time. So, each one of them when there more, so then obviously, the salinity also increases and so the salinity is the highest when the ground water movement is the least, is the slowest and generally, so therefore, generally salinity, so it increases with say depth, because as we go down, so the ground water movement slows down and hence the salinity increases. So, this common, this one is the say, suppose this is the ground, so this is the ground level and then, so this is shallow depths, so this is the and then, so this is the, so deeper depths. So, at the shallow depths, so there will be bicarbonate salinity or say HCO3 waters, ground water and at deeper depth and at the deepest depths, so here this is a chloride ground water, so in between the remaining salts filter. So, now, let us go on to the, let us discuss other factors, say for example, this precipitation, this the precipitation which falls on ground, so contains small amounts of dissolved minerals, so once this precipitation reaches ground as precipitation reaches ground, so it reacts with soil minerals and rocks and here, so the type of mineral dissolved depends on the chemical composition, chemical composition of rock, physical structure of rock and also it depends upon the pH and the redox potential. So, these are the four factors which decide the type of mineral dissolved in ground water and here, so this carbon dioxide in solution, so this is assists in solvent action, also solvent action of water and results in the downward movement of ground water. So, in areas with large ground water recharge, say for example, in alluvial streams, channels, artificial recharge areas, so in these areas, so the quality of infiltrating ground water, infiltrating surface water, so this largely influences ground water quality and here, so this locally absorbed gases from gases originating from magma contribute dissolved mineral minerals to ground water. So, this conate water that is soluble compounds of marine sediments that is water with soluble compounds of marine sediments has high mineral content because it is derived from water entrapped in sedimentary strata. Now, let us briefly discuss the geochemical cycle of surface water and ground water, so this is taken from the source, so the USGS water supply paper 1469, here this case, so this is there is evaporation and this evaporation, so and here there is condensation and of course, so here there is atmosphere and while condensation, so here in this, so here it gets nitrogen, oxygen, N2, O2, CO2, so these are dissolved then, so here there will be precipitation and from precipitation, so a small component will go into atmosphere and part of it will move and major part of it will move downwards and here in this precipitation, so this precipitation gets added with, so this is retention in mountains, so here this is it gets added with CO2 dissolved in soil, CA calcium, sodium, magnesium, bicarbonates and then it also gets added with sulphates and it also this conate water, so all these things and then it results, so eventually it is moving as runoff and this part of runoff, so here this is evaporation and again after evaporation it goes into atmosphere then, so here part of this runoff also goes into what is called this soil water, so this is and again in this soil water, so this is CO2 will get added then soil minerals, then carbonic acids that is H2, CO3, then colloidal, Fe, Al, silica, SiO2 etc and again say from this it goes through the, so the soil water is absorbed by the plants and here, so this is transpiration and again say from transpiration it goes into, so this atmosphere and here, so these are the plants and part of it, so here this is the, so this, so after this evaporation, so what are left are the chlorides, sulphates of Na, sodium, magnesium, calcium, so they also get carried and here, so this, so here you have the runoff, so this is and from this runoff you have this to soil water and again, so this is here you have the precipitation and so this part of runoff, so this goes to this ocean outflow and this is here there is ocean and so this part of runoff, so this goes to ground water, so here this is soil water, already you have discussed this soil water and below this soil water we have this ground water and from ground water also there is, so this is the effluent seepage which goes to this ocean outflow and of course there will also be, so subsurface outflow to oceans and this is, so this is the ground water and again, so this the soil water as well as ground water both are absorbed by plants and so from this plants, so this transpiration and again, so it goes to, so this atmosphere and of course from this soil water also, so part of it, so this is evaporation, so from precipitation also, so there will be some evaporation and so here you have this atmosphere, so here you have the atmosphere, so this is the geochemical cycle of surface water and ground water, so now, so this the salts added to the ground water, salts are added to ground water by soil weathering and also by rainfall erosion, so this excess irrigation water contributes substantial salts, substantial amounts of salts, so the moreover the soluble salt materials, I am sorry soluble soil materials, fertilizers, this selective salt absorption from plants alters the salt concentration, the salt concentration in the percolating waters, so we may find high salinity in soils and ground water of arid regions where rain water leaching is not effective, so similarly in poorly drained areas there will be high salt content, so these poorly drained areas, so they are generally referred to as bad lands, so because of poor drainage with low agricultural productivity, so this is how the salinity in soils varies, now we will discuss about the samplings, so the ground water samplings and here, so in the ground water sampling, so this is for quality analysis, so generally the samples are taken in Pyrex glass bottles or this polythene bottles in say 1 to 2 liters is sufficient for normal routine analysis, so this samples need to be stored in cool places for laboratory analysis for prompt lab analysis and samples need to be taken only after ground water pumping for some time, so with each sample records related to well location, sample depth, casing size, then date, sampling date, water temperature, order, color, turbidity say other operating conditions need to be taken down, need to be noted down, so for organic and radiological constituents special sampling and storage techniques are required, storage techniques specific to the ground water pollutants need to be employed, so if the time gap between sampling and analysis is short, the analysis is more reliable, so this temperature analysis related to this temperature, pH, alkalinity, dissolved gases, so is done in the field itself, so cations like Fe plus 2, plus 3, ferrous ferric, Cu, then aluminum, manganese, chromium, zinc are subject to loss by adsorption, samples taken from wells penetrating stratified aquifers may yield different results, different solute concentrations, so in such case, so it is it should be possible to obtain water samples of ground water meeting certain criteria, certain quality criteria, on the other hand samples in individual strata could be entirely could be totally unacceptable because there is only a single strata and then, so it may not be representative, so now we will go to the graphic representation of ground water quality, so here in this graphic representation, so this can be through vertical bar graphs or it can also be through tri-linear diagrams or it can be through radiating vector diagrams, circular diagrams or semi logarithmic diagrams, now let us briefly consider the vertical bar graphs for ground water quality representation, so these vertical bar graphs may have, so these vertical bar graphs and this is taken from M in 1970 and here, so this is the, so this is, so there will be a reference number and in this, so here it could be, so this could be sodium and this could be magnesium, so this could be calcium and likewise, so this could be sulphate, so this could be carbonate and bicarbonate and, so this could be chloride and nitrate like that, so here, so there will be multiple this vertical bar charts, each showing the concentration of different components and then, so each one of them, so there will be a reference number, so next we will go to this tri-linear diagrams, so this tri-linear diagrams essentially, so here there will be three triangles, so the left triangle will have the cation concentration, so this is Na plus k and here this will be Ca and the right side, this one will have anion concentration and here we have the and in between, there will be a diamond shaped diagram which will have which is a combination of both is left triangle and then right triangle, so this is So4 plus Cl, sulphate plus chloride and here this is calcium plus magnesium, so this is a sodium and this one and so like that, so this is a tri-linear diagram and so this is taken from this again from the same source that is hem in 1970 and next it is the radiating vector diagrams, so in case of this radiating vector diagrams, there will be the radiating vectors whose length represent, so this is vector length representing concentration, so in this case, so there are say this is Na Mg Na plus k Mg then HCO3, so we will continue this in the next class, thank you.