Okay, good morning, so my name is Jose Jimenez, I am professor at the Technical University of Catalonia and now we are going to try to downscale a bit, so this morning so we start with sea level rise, now with impacts and now we are going for adaptation. We are going to talk about adaptation to climatic coastal impact and with the special reference to relative sea level rise or to sea level rise. This is the what type of impact, so this is the result of a survey that we did the last year in the, in a, in an initiative for the GPI climate and GPI ocean, so we launch a survey between the stakeholders in Europe and we have about 200 respondents and we asked the people to identify which were the most important impacts related to sea level rise in the different bases around Europe, so here you have the resulphur or the basin, the North Sea, the Mediterranean, the Eastern Atlantic, the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Arctic and the last one it is the all the basin together. As you can see, so there is a high variability, so that when we talk about impact and we talk about adaptation, so there is a high variability even inside the same country. The most important, so when the people sink in sea level rise, so all the people sink in inundation, so the most important impact identified by all the basing was erosion, so what's the first one? So the second one was increasing the stone impacts and also damage to infrastructure and to private property and the third one was permanent flooded, so gradual inundation, so in Europe apparently, so gradual inundation or permanent inundation is not the most important impact and this most important impact have very much related to the indices that Ross presented before, that are sea level rise, coastal erosion and coastal flats, so that we are on the same way but we are approaching from a different standpoint. So in the same survey, so we asked the people okay, these are the impacts, so how your countries are adapting to this, so the first question that we asked is about the effectiveness of the sea system adaptation strategy in the different countries and the most answer or the most common answer was that they were insufficient, they were not effective enough according to their criteria and also we asked about the what was their opinion about the flexibility of the sea system coastal adaptation plans and again the most important is that they disagree that the plan where flexible enough in order to cope with expected variation in sea level rise, increase in sea level rise and so on, so then we have a problem, so then we have a strategy that's apparently according to the stakeholder, the stakeholder where researchers but also people working in governments, so from the 200 from all the bases in Europe, so this is quite representative, so then this is where we are, so we have a problem with adaptation. When we talk about coastal adaptation, so we are talking about adjusting to the impact and the potential risks associated with the climatic hazard but here mostly with sea level rise and essentially involves to implement a strategy to enhance the coastal resilience and to reduce the vulnerability, however we have to take into account that any coastal adaptation plan typically requires a long time in order to be implemented and this is a problem essentially because the current risks are getting worse, so just looking to the indicator that Ross presented, so the sedimentary coastlines are already rolling without sea level rise, the strong impact and damage are frequent and apparently they are increasing, so we are getting worse, so we require a long time to implement adaptation, so this is a problem and especially the problem is that apparently for the people say okay for coastal adaptation we need a lot of money, no you need a lot of time and this is a problem, so the most evident decline in resource for adaptation is not money, it is time, so if we delay in order to implement adaptation, so we have a very big problem and it is nothing, it is not related to money, it's related to time, okay, just to give you an idea, so here we have, sorry, here we have different typical coastal adaptation works and in blue it is the typical lifetime at the triangle in white, it is the typical implementation and planning time in order to implement this, so means that in just to give you an idea, so we require one third of the lifetime in order to implement at coastal adaptation, in the best situation where you have money and so on, so then we have a problem that if we don't start just now, so we have a future problem in coastal adaptation. How can we approach, so the typical approach is okay, what if, or what will look cool if this change is happening, so then with this, so we identify which is the impact and with this side, which is the response to implement it, however the new approach or the, no the new, so probably the most adequate approach, it is what we call the adaptation tipping point approach, so it's how much change are we able to cope with, so with this, it is which are the conditions that we are not able to maintain our objectives for the coastal, so and then when this occurs, so just to show you an example, so here we are in Italy, so this is a typical Italian beach in the Adriatic during summer, so all the surfaces are occupied by people, so the 11 percent of the PMB, the GMP in in the Mediterranean is coming from tourists, so then we have a problem if coastal erosion is taking place, I know we are expecting that silver rise is also going to produce an additional erosion, so here we have in the Y axis, so we have the recreational Caribbean capacity of the beaches that depend on the surface and in the Y axis, so we have silver rise, so we are going to identify when silver rise is going to produce a problem related to recreational Caribbean capacity, so for my country, for Italy, I am from Spain, but imagine that I am from Italy, so okay, my objective is to maintain the recreational Caribbean capacity at the 90 percent, if the Caribbean capacity decreased below the 90 percent, we have a problem in the economy, so here we have the expectation, this is the blue line, on how the recreational Caribbean capacity decreased with silver rise, according to the spectator ocean, here we have an additional problem, so here we have a line, but we have some shadow area around the line and this is the uncertainty produced by using different models to estimate erosion from silver rise, because we are not going to predict erosion, we are going to predict silver rise from what we presented this morning, very early morning, so oh sorry, we need a model to convert this to erosion and there is not a unique model, so we need different models and we have some uncertainty, so then when we go to our point, so we identify which is the expected silver rise that is going to produce this failure in the objective, so here it is okay, we require 50 centimeter of silver rise in order to have a problem, so now the time we have another uncertainty, so depending on how the silver rise will change, which is the scenario, so this tipping point will occur at different times, so just to give you an example, here we identify 50 centimeter silver rise for the tipping point, we go to the NASA tool that was presented this morning and we look for the side which is the time in order to obtain this decline in the objective, so here, oh I'm sorry, here we have the different, this is time in the x-axis and here we have for the different scenario and we have different times in order to have this tipping point, so we have an uncertainty in the prediction of the time and once we, sorry in the prediction of the silver rise, when we have the silver rise we have also an uncertainty on when this will occur, so this is a problem for adaptation, so when will start to adapt, I just want to illustrate which are the problem in adaptation, okay, so now we know when to do it, what to do, so here are the typical response or the different kind of response to coastal risk and silver rise according to the IPCC, so probably all of you know this very well, so here we have from, this is the current situational response, advanced protection, retreat accommodation and ecosystem, just to give you some examples, so this is for protection, so forget the table, so here protection means that we are going to do something very active in order to cope with the risk, with the coastal risk, with silver rise, so when we talk about coastal protection, so we think in two different strategies, setting in base and hard protection, setting in base, very flexible, hard protection, very robust and we can predict very well which are the safety level, problem, hard protection is very expensive, in many cases they cannot be affordable for poor country, setting in base, apparently it is very flexible, very easy to implement and here we have a very good example, but this is unique, so this is a protection strategy for silver rise in the Netherlands, so you will never, oh you will know, you cannot see anything similar to this in any different country, so here they put 21.5 million of COVID meter of science in six months in order to be protected for the next 20 years, of course you can do, but you probably this is very difficult to find anywhere, but this is a very good example and here we have the, this is what they did in 2011 and it is expected that this sediment will be distributed along the coast and will protect the coast for the next 20 years, so it's a very good example in terms of advancing time, so we are preventing the expected impact for the next 20 years, however all the sediment-based strategy with the exception of the Netherlands, they put the hand on the North Sea and there's plenty of sand, so we have to answer several questions before to say that our future adaptation will be based on sediment, so how much sediment do we need for the future? We want to adapt for the next 100 years, 50 years, whichever, so how much sand do we need? The second question is do we have sand enough and can't we afford, so then this, all of this is related to, we need to identify a strategic sediment reservoir in order to get all the results for to be adapted for the future and again we have a problem, so here we have in the x-axis we have time, this is the sediment volume that we have and here we have the two, that's the line horizontal, it's according to the available stock in your site and here it is the requirements of sediment according to the different scenario and again, we have an uncertainty once we've identified that we have a strategic sediment reservoir, how long this reservoir will be useful in order to get the sediment, so we have a big uncertainty in predicting the tipping point, we have a big uncertainty on how will this tipping point occur and now we have a big uncertainty, also which is the use of how much sediment we can use in the next 10 or 20 or 30 years depending on this, so this probably this is very much related to why the people is still going to refine the adaptation plan because we have a lot of problems in order to go from the global numbers to the local numbers, this is pure local, so in mind if we have this uncertainty with local numbers, so with the previous number that Ross presented and Ross was very clear in this, so don't use for local adaptation just to get an idea, it's very useful to identify the hottest spot which part of the country is going to be more sensitive or not, but once you go to adaptation you have to go to the local level, this is hard protection, the tains barrier, so how many countries of this can afford this and even the problem that this need to be updated and the upgrade of this for the new sea level so must cause a huge amount of money so that it is a huge amount of money to implement and now to update for the new sea level rise because the operating gates need to be a great in order to cope with the expected sea level rise so it will be also very expensive, so just to give you an idea about the two different strategies so now we will go to accommodation, accommodation it is also a very common adaptation strategy but normally this only or very effective for a small sea level rise so we are talking about everyone insisting and we are talking also to some small actions in order to accommodate to the new situation, this is an example for coastal flooding or for sea level rise where we are only changing the flood proofing type of building in order to accommodate to the size so this is what is proposed a different type by FEMA and here we have some application for a coastal area in the east coast of the United States and here we have also for Nigeria where this is here for the city of Lagos where we have floating house so then we are adapting to this but of course this is only adapting for very small sea level rise rates if this is the sea level rise rate is the magnitude is very high so probably this will not be longer useful so we move also to advance so don't accommodate let's go to advance so this is very much related to hard protection so the problem it is very expensive so we can cope with relative high sea level rise and the cost is too much so here we have some example this is one example for the Atola Island in order to cope with relative sea level rise so when we have a natural Atola Island so probably the Atola Island will be able to cope with some sea level rise but when we build in the island so and then we have a problem so we have taken out the natural resilient of the island so we have to cope with this and one example this is a proposal for the Maldives where they are trying sorry they are trying to rise the land so of course again so imagine how much time do we need for this and how much money do we need for this but this is it is an existing option in all the different options that we have this is for an Atola Island in order to avoid migration and here we have for also this could be could be easily implemented in very large cities so this is an example for Tokyo and where there is a progressive adaptation to the sea level rise and depending on the how the sea level rise or the local sea level rise is it is increasing so then there will be a moment in which the system adaptation is not the longer value and they go to advance where they claim it is land claim they rise the land and they build again this can be affordable in saying that the price of the land there it's very high so then we can use the land price in order to pay for this type of advance so of course this cannot be applicable anywhere but this is also an adaptation level then we go to something that nobody like retreat and retreat nobody like because probably it is the adaptation option with the largest social conflict associated so nobody want to live but here in some cases it's not an adoption we have no money to do the other one there is not let's say in a cost benefit analysis or even for finances so we cannot write we cannot rise our here we have an example of Fiji where there is a plan for migration for planet relocation so here we have different billage that has been removed or they have a plan but again here this is a warning so decisions to move one billage that was affected by sea clones and by sea level rise and so on take more than 10 years in order to go to a new position so then again time is very important here time is very important especially because you have to negotiate with the people and then you need a strong public participation in order to decrease the social conflict so this is for Fiji and here we have an example from Europe this is fully different so here we're not talking that the people are at risk so here they eat the territory at risk this is an example for UK where they have retreat in this area permitting that they to be flooded during a storm and so on so then they remove some protection they put protection in the back and now this area is free and it is evolving on the sea level rise and under storm without any problem and here we have an additional example for Spain this is this is our not a billage this is a campsite so this is not a problem so here the retreat means spatial planning where we define a new setback and say the campsite must be behind the setback so here we are retreating we are removing the expected damage for sea level rise of the storm so this it is avoiding the damage in terms of other to the sea level rise or to the coastal hazard and finally what is this the way so if we go to Europe say the Green Deal natural based solution please don't use natural based solution use natural based measure solution if they are solving the problem we don't know it's for the future so let's say ecosystem based measure ecosystem or natural based measures so we have different example the idea is to hope or to help the natural resilience or to promote the natural resilience to the coast to this coastal reef so remember that this means to enhance resilience so here it is trying to promote the natural resilience so we have some examples so here we have for Nigeria here we have for Spain where we are trying to restore the original ecosystem in order to be protected however take care so if we plan a man group so go to the literature in order to see how much width how much why it must be a man group forest in order to protect the territory against the storm surge this is helping this is not solving okay if you want to be protected by a man group against a big storm surge so probably you will require several hundred meter of why forest of man group so then imagine so we are planting man group you require time in order to let the man group to grow so then this is helping but this is not solving the problem now again time is important and this is for this is a coastal view in Spain or the also to try to improve the resilience again the impact of the storm again so we require time in order to permit the deans to be forced and also we require a space in order to put all of this so they seem that when we are going to use natural base solution one of the most important resource is a space in order to implement or to recover the forest or to recover the deal so here we have an example also for Spain so this is the April Delta this is an agricultural area that is affected by impact of storm and we are expecting a high impact of silver rise there and this is a plan where we are going to restore the natural area before agriculture took place there so we are trying to answer we are trying to restore deans wetland and so on but we're required to buy the land to the agricultures in order to produce this natural base measure to cover with the risk so it is natural based but we require also a space and this means also to be associated to retreat all this typical response so probably are not effective just by themselves so probably the the most useful approach is that we have to combine and here appear what we call it appear what we call it the adaptation pathway approach essentially it's a sequence of different response in order to adapt in a long time to different changing conditions so during one time so probably sediment base could be useful but for a given silver rise it's not the longer useful we have to change to a different type of response so then it is a sequence of different response that we saw before so then all the response that we saw have to be combined in order to define our coastal adaptation plan for the future so here you have sign example for rural and for urban so in the copy of the presentation so you have these and also you have all the reference there where you can find detailed information about that just to finalize so for all of these so we have also some constraint to adaptation and we have what we call a limits and what we have barriers limits are technical technological limits so there is not an adaptation option available to reduce the impact here when we say that there is no adaptation option means in a given time I'm maintaining the functionality so in mind so of course I can put a seawall very high in order to protect the even delta and sea level rise there is no technological limit for that it is economic but if I do so the delta is losing the functionality so it is up solution but this is changing the functionality of the coastal when we talk about technological limit is one adaptation option that this is going to change the system functionality that we want to maintain barriers are something that can be overcome with some info and we talk about economic barriers if the implementation it is most costly that the benefit that they're going to produce financing that mean that probably this economical or feasible but we cannot access to the money to pay for so economic and financing are very different and finally the social conflict so we identify in an analysis that we did for many counter for different country that the most important barrier was social and just to finalize the take home measures so sea level rise is going to continue to rise as we mentioned before the coastal impact that presented by Ross will increase in the future so coastal adaptation will be needed even that we implement very efficient mitigation plans so we will require coastal adaptation second the most important application plan for the future is coastal impact can be avoided by preventing new development if we don't develop the coast very close to the shoreline so we are avoiding future problems so this is a very good coastal adaptation the response to sea level rise and to the coastal risk will be much more effective we combine and sequence some plan according to how the conditions will change and finally adaptation typically required in order to implement several decades to be implemented so time is important if we want to be adapted for the future so we have to start now and this is all for now thank you for your attention


Well according to my My iPhone it is now 11 o'clock, so we're going to go ahead and start and I'm going to use probably every Single one of my 45 minutes here because this is a huge topic I Was trying to keep track this week of the various Debates on the Proposals for repealing and or replacing the Affordable Care Act and it's it's at this point looks like the Republicans, maybe you're going to pursue some kind of Skinny repeal. I think that's what they're Calling for something like that So I'm I'm actually not going to get into too much of the Current debates of the last few days Instead I'm going to look at some general principles about health care I don't really like the term health care because it What people mean by that is medical care But there are many many other paths to health besides what doctors nurses hospitals and so forth Can't accomplish so It's really we're talking about the medical care system Some of the biggest advances in human health came from things that we don't normally associate with doctors hospitals and so forth things like sewers and water systems that allowed people to get clean water and and Dietary improvements and other things that had a lot more to do with actually with with with markets and Economic progress in general. I want to cover a few topics and I'll just go through these as much as I Have time for the first thing I want to talk about here is drug costs You hear a lot of objections to Pharmaceutical companies that are charging what appears to be a huge amount of money for a medication Marginal cost producing this medication might be very low and Yet it looks like they you know, they did in fact raise the price to a Significant extent one of the examples of this is the EpiPen from last year Produced by a company called my land And if you start if you just look at the price increase on EpiPens From what used to be a what looks the most of us like a very reasonable price to what many people think of as an Unreasonable price you you see a lot of people saying well, you know This is the problem with the market see because you get you end up you see what free markets do you allow? Pharmaceutical companies to charge whatever they want and then they go and just jack up the price to this crazy level Well, if you do a little digging and you realize this is not really the market at work, right? This is this is something Totally different you read the details on this you see and this is from an article on the Libertarian Republic comm My land holds a patent On a type of design that meets specific legal Requirements, I think they mean foisted foisted upon schools for auto injectors Also, the FDA is reportedly barring competing companies that do manage to meet the same technical requirements By recalling their offerings based on higher Standards than that set for EpiPen or by asking them to undergo more arbitrary testing before true consideration is offered So there there are numerous barriers here to entry to competition in this market This is not a free market somehow resulting in these high prices This is a company that's managed to get itself established and trenched Thanks to government intervention like intellectual property laws the FDA and and in various requirements on schools Another case of this and this is one that I Have a I have a post on Mises org on this from a couple of years ago The pharmaceutical company Gilead which bought a patent for a hepatitis C cure called Sophos Bavir Which their marketing under the name Stavaldi they bought this patent for 11 billion dollars Basically buying the government's protection for their their for this product Protection against competition and they took the drug through the last stages of FDA approval And that they finished that up in 2013 and then made 12.4 billion dollars the next year from the drug now in the United States a course of treatment For this drug is $84,000 Now you you talk to Progressives about this kind of thing and they're just There's no shortage of outrage about it Jeffrey Sacks says Gilead should be held responsible Morally and legally for all of the HCV related illnesses and deaths that occur as a result of their unacceptable pricing policies Despite record-breaking profits Gilead continues to keep the price of Sophos Bavir so far above its modest production cost that millions of Individuals are unable to access the treatment they require This this is the kind of response you tend to get now what what Sacks is doing here He's not seeing patents as part of the problem intellectual property is being part of the problem He's he's basically saying well patents are basically a beneficial thing they encourage innovation But what we need to do then is use the patent as a kind of a leverage for the government to then Beat a company's prices down. Oh, you have a patent we gave you therefore You're going to lower your your prices Now what we find if we if we do a little digging on this is that in fact Innovation can be rewarded is rewarded in the absence of patent laws even where you have a Good that can be reverse engineered so a pharmaceutical company comes up with this chemical compound that they are then able to Test they test and they find out that this is this is useful in various therapies And what happens if somebody in another lab takes this this chemical compound breaks it down figures out What it is how to produce it and then comes up with a a substitute without having to invest all the hundreds of millions of dollars in Research that's kind of the argument that you see from for patent laws in this case Now there was a study In 2006 in the British Medical Journal Of the most noteworthy medical and pharmaceutical discoveries of history is just asking medical professionals What do you think is the most are the most? Important medical and pharmaceutical pharmaceutical discoveries, and this is the list that came up with things like Penicillin x-rays tissue culture ether anesthetic and so forth Only two of these Actually had anything to do with patents Thorazine as an antipsychotic drug sometimes use this to keep surgery patients calm going into surgery and Of course pill so this these are these are the only two out of the out of this list You can find more on this Mises.org there's this article by Nicolayson on on this point There was another study a Study done by the US Centers for Disease Control of the 10 most important medical discoveries of the 20th century None of them had anything to do with patents So why would this be I mean this it runs against what Most economists would think is is critical to innovation What we actually find is that there are some advantages to being the first Firm to come out with a new drug Nicolayson points out that large pharmaceutical companies may have a significant market share advantage after the introduction of Generics even after their patent expires after competing chemically Very close if not identical compounds come into the market. There are natural barriers to entry if you look at the survey of research and development labs 23 to 35 percent of the managers And company managers and R&D labs Said you know patent is is an effective way of getting a return on investment But 51 percent said it's trade secrets. That's really the important thing It's not necessarily easy to come up with a new production process on your own If that is guarded by trade secrets, even if you know the chemical compound producing this drug is not necessarily easy also a huge fraction of the returns sorry revenues from Pharmaceutical companies are coming from their marketing efforts not from their research and development wing So even if a competitor can manufacture a generic drug Very quickly it can be difficult to make a dent in the market dominance of an already established drug There's some data from India Which Nicolais and mentions which suggest that it takes about four years for generic drugs To enter the market. So that's a that's a significant period of time if you remember from the I think it was the Gilead instance with the hepatitis C drug In the first year after they acquired the patent they were able to recover all of their initial investment and and then some I Usually spend a lot more time on the FDA Then I will During the limited time I've got here, but I do want to mention this this very important barrier to entry in pharmaceuticals that has Resulted in higher prices in the industry If you go back to 1906 the only rule was that medications are not Contained substances harmful to health By 1938 the rules had changed to require that manufacturers had to demonstrate the drug was in fact safe and then in 1962 a very important change That drug manufacturers had to prove that the drug was safe and effective how safe how effective Well, that's up to the FDA to decide these things are not binary It's not that the drug is either going to kill you or it's going to cure you and most drugs have some kind of side effect That's important to consider so it's a judgment call really and leaving this to the FDA Means the FDA is incentivized to be over cautious in allowing you drugs onto the market They're subject to a lot of public criticism if they Admit a drug to the market that is that produces side effects But if they hold back a drug from entering the market It's hard to know exactly who would have been helped by that drug and therefore the Victims of their policies are harder to identify and have trouble Coming up with a kind of cohesive lobby against the FDA's restraint So prior to 1962 the FDA had to approve within a hundred eighty days Unless they were able to come up with some reason before then that the drug should not be allowed to the market but after 1962 the time constraint was removed and The drug approval process lengthened to something like eight to ten years in some cases Well meanwhile during this eight to ten year period people are suffering they're sometimes dying depending on the condition that the drug would have treated and So The testing cost went up drug companies now have to lay out hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to To test the drug to satisfy the FDA's requirements Most people will say well, you know, it's good to have safe drugs and not rat poison, but that's not really what's Being accomplished here Drug companies that sell rat poison would tend to go out of business Um very quickly Look at what happens to Chipotle when they have a small outbreak of norovirus among their restaurants and their stock tanks You don't need Government to make sure that Chipotle suffers from this kind of event. It's going to happen in the marketplace as it is Um a couple of examples of this kind of thing based on some studies One of these by a Nobel laureate george hitchings The antibiotic sceptra There was a five-year delay Introducing that to the u.s. Market. The estimate is that that cost about 80,000 lives People who would have been saved by this antibiotic During that five-year period who were not Beta blockers there's a an estimate that that lag and FDA approval may have cost a quarter of a million lives So this is not a trivial problem when the FDA Extends this testing period and increases the cost to introducing new drugs There are also other problems like its restrictions on existing drugs for which some new purpose might be found or new use might be found So for example aspirin A common pain reliever was found to Um Help prevent heart attacks, but the FDA says you can't publicize that you can't advertise that And they delayed the amount of time it took for aspirin to be Advertised as a potential help against heart attacks and that may have cost lives as well now most of us want to hear about the aca the affordable care act a misnomer I think but The affordable care act of course is in in all the news today and and it's it's a massive piece of of legislation So we need to understand a little bit about what it does Or what it tried to do First of all It says insurers have to cover all applicants without regard to medical history They have to set their premiums based mostly on geographic location called a community rating and age and not on gender and Importantly will come back to this not on most pre existing conditions It says everyone must obtain health insurance except those who are deemed unable to afford coverage and those religious groups that have had have obtained waivers Subsidies and state-based exchanges were supposed to help people in finding health insurance Employees employers with 50 or more employees had to provide coverage for employees working more than 30 hours a week or they had to face penalties Um, I talked to numerous people who say well, I can't work more than say 28 hours a week And my employer won't allow me to work more than 28 hours a week Uh, health insurance policies must cover certain services Um And may not have any cap on annual or lifetime benefits for an individual now, um The reason part let's work through the reasoning on this and and by the way bob murphy's got a great article On mises.org that you can actually he's got several on this topic, but there's one from about 2013. I think That gives you a good brief rundown of some of this All right, so if if you're going to be required to get insurance That's supposed to avoid this problem economists call adverse selection. So if I Hang out a sign and say health insurance for sale Here's the premium than people who are most in need of health insurance are going to be the ones who are first in line to sign up They are also likely to cost me the insurer the most money So i'm likely to go out of business very quickly unless I can sort this out somehow Uh, so if insurance companies must ensure everyone even those who are very expensive to cover Uh, then they would have to be required to cover certain things and not refuse To cover pre-existing conditions. This means that they have to Yeah, I mean you could say well i'm not going to cover expensive things. Um Uh, diabetes and multiple sclerosis and long-term kinds of conditions that that perhaps are are very costly, so that The law is trying to plug that whole Where an insurance company will say sure we'll we'll ensure everybody everybody without regard for Their um Their age or gender or whatever, but we just won't cover these very expensive things um So if if you require insurance companies to cover these things Then that would mean that the insurance companies if they're going to stay in business have to raise their premiums insurance then becomes very expensive So subsidies were built into the system Of course all of this, um It has become evident over the last few years if it weren't obvious before This has some unintended consequences first of all premiums went way up People said well given the the choice of paying this very expensive premium or this Somewhat less expensive penalty on my taxes. I think i'll choose the penalty and i'll go without insurance So you have some people particularly the healthiest individuals who said i'm out of here. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna uh take the insurance I'll just i'll just pay the penalty of course given that those are the healthiest people typically This means that the ones left who are being insured are Less healthy and therefore the insurance companies are facing an even worse sort of cost problem So the insurers began to pull out of the exchanges This is limited options in some cases There are in many cases there there's only one insurer left And it looks like in some cases that one remaining insurer may pull out. So If they find that they are unable to cover their costs, they'll just back out of the entire Market employers began to limit the number of workers working 30 or more hours per week in order to and and they Limited the absolute number of full-time employees in order to stay exempt from this requirement And as a result we've seen Some people who have been adversely affected either in reduced hours loss of insurance higher premiums And other problems as a result of this this law I was I can't say the new york times Quotes me very much But I was pleased to see brett sievens quote me and a former student of mine marine buff An article that we wrote for the journal of american physicians and surgeons a couple of years ago And stevens pointed out that the average family premium for well, he's quoting me here, I guess So I can say it the average family premium for employer sponsored coverage has risen by $3,671 And again, this article was written a couple of years ago. So it's gone up Still more after that point The benchmark Obamacare plan rose eight percent in 2016 21 percent in 2017 deductibles went up about 15 percent In some markets the premium increases skyrocketed up to 145 percent if you look at phoenix So this is this is not a not a small problem if you're trying to make health care affordable At least to some significant extent it's backfiring Of course the uh progressives are Very upset with any kind of effort to change the system Uh by backing off of of the affordable care act. So you have bernie sanders Tweeting that 36,000 people will die every year as a result of the repeal of the affordable care act Chuck schumer Says the republican plan to cut medicare medicaid and the aca will make america sick again And uh as as bob has said in in his Article of about three weeks ago on mises wire Libertarians don't really have to choose between property rights here and preventing widespread suffering The obamacare law actually caused more americans to die a lot of this that that um Bob used for for that article came from a study Uh by the manhattan institute by oran cas And cas says the best statistical estimate for the number of lives saved every year by the affordable care act is zero Zero, um, he says yes, it's led to some increases in medicaid enrollment But that has shown no effect on aggregate private insurance coverage A lower share of non-elderly americans had private insurance in 2015 than at the start of the recession in 2007-08 So okay, so medicare is expanded. Maybe that's a good thing, right? So i was um Watching a little discussion on facebook um trying to avoid getting into the discussion but watching it on Somebody talking an old friend of mine talking about medicaid and so forth and they were saying well, you know, this is this is good At least we've got more more people covered by medicaid if you start changing the law repealing replacing whatever then you're going to have problems with people dropping out of medicaid um However It doesn't appear that medicaid has had the kind of positive effect that we might assume Cas says where studies have found benefits from medicaid the effects appear for coverage given to expectant mothers and young children That could provide a strong argument for ensuring that those groups have access to medicaid coverage But the aca is not that policy Under the children's health insurance program those groups were already eligible for medicaid or a comparable program But in at the income levels to which the aca expanded coverage for other adults An identical 42.2 of children had public insurance coverage Before the aca's medicaid expansion in 2013 and afterward in 2015 The aca did not create access to health care for them nor would its repeal eliminate their access Now there's a there's a A lot of confusion I would say between medical care usage And health outcomes or health improvement Just because someone is going to the doctor or going to a hospital more often does not necessarily Translate into improved health and there are several reasons for this One is that medical care has Iotrogenic effects that is you go to the doctor The doctor can inadvertently let's hope do harm to you And we've seen this in In some cases where the medical profession has said well everybody ought to get tested for some, you know disease And a certain number of those tests are going to result in false positives They say you have the disease, but you really don't So the false positive you can't really tell that it's a false positive until you do something else And the more more Intrusive and invasive the testing and the therapy becomes the more likely you are to do harm So this has become a an important question for Broad testing for breast cancer or prostate cancer and so forth If you test a large number of people including people who are pretty unlikely to have that disease Then you're increasing the probability that you're going to do something invasive to either do a further diagnosis of biopsy or some treatment That could result in some kind of adverse outcome So that that's one possibility. Of course, every time you check into a hospital you're running at the risk of contracting something like MRSA or some other kind of infection And so that that's one kind of offsetting Factor also as I pointed out at the very beginning health is related to a lot of factors apart from medical care The more money you spend on hospitals doctors nurses testing Um therapies of various kinds diagnostic Approaches of various kinds the less money you have for some other things some of those other things would be beneficial to your health There's an opportunity cost there Um, so that's that's an important Consideration That the more we devote toward medical care the less we have for these other things There's a now infamous experiment Done a few years ago in aragon where aragon expanded their Medicaid service Um, but they didn't have enough money To expand it to everyone in the target group. So they they had a kind of a lottery where They enrolled um about 10 000 residents of the state And they then compared the health outcomes of those who were enrolled to the health outcomes of those in the same target group Who did not win the lottery and were not enrolled in medicaid? Um, and they found that indeed health care service increased, but there was no statistically significant impact on physical health measures Uh, they did find that it reduced financial strain for the lottery winners They did find that there was a lower rate of depression For those who were enrolled versus those who were not But it does not appear that the physical health of these individuals improved there may have been in fact better ways to accomplish the same Reduction and depression Been dominec managing editor of health care news and a heartland institute fellow Um commented that the moderate changes in depression found in the study from medicaid Could have been exceeded by having all of the patients adopt a pet Which significantly lowers depression? And reduces the risk of heart disease and also would have been a whole lot cheaper Um, I I have a couple of pets. Um I wouldn't say that they're cheap Every time I turn around we're paying somebody to cut the dog's hair or something but fur but It's uh, still I mean this is this is potentially cheaper with better results so Dominic actually said, you know, if you really want to care if you really care about people Being healthier not just feeling less depressed than one thing we could do is simply Make a cash transfer to these people And that might have a superior outcome to this this sort of heavily bureaucratized medicaid System I'm Getting this from bob murphy again. Thank you bob. I appreciate it. This is a Actually from the cdc originally but this shows the aca's expansion of coverage At the red line and the blue there is the age adjusted mortality rate per hundred thousand people from 2002 to 2015 The age adjusted part is us populations getting older and so For that reason alone you would expect to see an increase in the mortality rate So if you take that effect out, then what you're left with is a long term decline in the mortality rate Aca does not appear to have made a dent In fact, you see a slight uptick there at the at the end here And it's it's kind of hard to figure out what the ac might have done that's positive in terms of of mortality Let's talk about pre-existing conditions for a bit This is one of those things where in discussions that I have with With people about health care. They say well, you know, I'm I'm kind of pro market and so forth, but This thing about requiring insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions that sounds like it Maybe that's maybe that's one government intervention that would be a good idea So let's think about that for for a bit. What is insurance? Insurance is a contract between Two people or between a person and a firm Um, where a pays b To take on some or all of the risk that a costly event will occur to a All right, so let's suppose there's a 50 50 chance that a will develop a medical condition costing a hundred thousand dollars A has an expected loss of fifty thousand dollars On average if you do this a lot of times a would have an expected loss of fifty thousand dollars So a might be willing to pay b More than fifty thousand dollars to take on that risk if a values risk reduction Economists would say if a is risk averse if a doesn't like taking chances Then a might be willing to pay more than that expected value So by ensuring a large number of a like individuals then b can pay out $100,000 to half of its clients paying zero to the other half and collecting the Additional amount that that the a crowd is willing to pay to avoid risk Uh, so on average b is paying out fifty thousand dollars per client and is being paid for the service of risk reduction um alleviating the risk of of catastrophe for the a group And in fact what we see with with private insurance is private insurance gets a pool of people together that Pool that got together for some reason other than to get health insurance like an employee a group of employees at a firm And that group of employees is going to have some people in it that are really healthy and won't Won't have a lot of medical costs and other people that are Commonly sick and have a lot of medical costs So you're going to have some people that are expensive some people that are not the insurance company contracts with the employer and says we're going to ensure your entire group For the average cost of Um of providing insurance or taking on that risk plus plus some And uh that way We have a risk pooling the insurance company plays the averages Now let's suppose there's a 70 30 chance that a will develop a medical condition costing hundred thousand dollars So a has an expected loss of seventy thousand dollars b would require at least seventy thousand dollars to take on that risk Since on average b is going to be paying out seventy thousand dollars per client They're still being paid for reducing that risk of catastrophe So maybe you see where i'm going with this What happens if it's a hundred percent chance? So in other words, it's certainty. We know that we're going to have to pay this money out Uh b is going to require at least a hundred thousand dollars To take on that chance. It's not really a chance. It's a certainty Okay So a pre-existing condition is certainty of payment So the premiums accordingly would be higher. And in fact, there would be no real purpose in A buying insurance From b it's not really even insurance anymore. It's a transfer Okay, why would I write you a check for a hundred thousand dollars so you can write a check to somebody else for a hundred thousand dollars on my behalf There's no risk to be transferred here So it's an uninsurable condition And this is where the language in the healthcare medical care debate Is a problem because people talk about insuring for pre-existing conditions. It's not insurance Okay So if we require an insurance company to take on certain payments without increasing the premiums accordingly That is forcing the insurance company to make a simple Transfer It is not insurance. It is a mandated payment So how does an insurance company stay afloat financially doing this? Well, they would have to raise premiums on those other Clients that do not have those pre-existing conditions Now that means that these other people who are now paying premiums to the insurance company are having to cover Not only their own actual risk, but an additional amount for this transfer to other individuals within that That group who have a pre-existing condition that in turn Makes insurance less attractive for the people without pre-existing conditions Which possibly induces the healthiest people to drop out So we're back to adverse selection by requiring this transfer payment to people with pre-existing conditions We have the result of some people backing out of insurance altogether You could think of this as a kind of a healthy tax okay now if If you want a visual for this How much would you have to be paid to ensure this house against loss by fire? That house has a pre-existing condition Now I mean you you find some humor in this and I I don't want to be callous, I mean If you have a pre-existing condition and chances are A number of you in this room do It's It's a tragic thing. It's it's not an easy thing to To sort out how how should policy change? How would markets handle this? Are you suggesting dr. Terrell that that we just kind of cast these people off into the into the wilderness and And Provide medical care only to those people fortunate enough to not have any kind of pre-existing conditions. Is that what you're suggesting? And of course, that's that's you know, that's kind of a straw man I'm not suggesting that But I do think there are there are ways for markets to handle this kind of problem In fact, we've seen this happen With various kinds of insurance It is possible For markets to handle this largely through this Guaranteed renewability concept Basically, you are insuring your insurability Okay, so david hinderson Wrote that under the individual insurance that existed before obama care beneficiaries could buy guaranteed renewable health insurance If they developed a condition while insured they could still buy health insurance At a premium that applied to the whole pool. They were in when they originally bought insurance So it's not that you are left out without Any hope of getting insurance if you have this Kind of guaranteed renewability. We do this with life insurance all the time As well, so you buy life insurance You can you can have a kind of a guaranteed renewability built into this So your your life insurance term expires and now you have to go out and buy more life insurance, but A new contract, but in the meantime you had a health problem Emerge that is going to shorten your life expectancy Does that mean you can't get life insurance? Well, not if you have guaranteed renewability, which is a Not a not a prohibitively expensive Add-on to this contract What about What about people that are that develop these conditions when they're very young? Before they're on their own before they're even buying health insurance for themselves. How do we handle that? There's no reason at all why parents couldn't buy insurability insurance for their children even before they're born You could markets conceivably could could handle this kind of process through a voluntary contract-based system And pre-existing conditions don't have to mean that a person is just condemned to be without insurance for Medical problems And of course I should mention charity which is perfectly consistent with a with a free market That is useful in filling in The gaps in this Michael cannon wrote that in fact what we're seeing with the Affordable Care Act is A reduction in coverage for people with some expensive conditions and this was from a February issue of the wall street journal Got the link here. You can take a look at that later and He found a new study by harvard and ut austin found that the rules of the affordable care act penalized high quality coverage for the sick Rewarded insurers that slashed coverage for the sick and left patients unable to obtain adequate insurance Now there there are several other topics. I wanted to mention the pre-existing condition issue At some length because it's it's so current but Let's look very briefly in a couple of minutes. I've got left at medical licensure I had a question after one of my talks earlier this week about what do you do about fraud about quacks about people who are foisting off some sort of Quack therapy on people for money and and how do you handle that? Don't we need some kind of government intervention perhaps to license physicians and other medical professionals to prevent quacks from selling Their services and taking advantage of people's ignorance Now if you look at the history of the medical profession you find that in fact medical licensure hasn't really been the source of Improved quality of medical care. It has driven up costs a great deal Ronald Hammelway in the Journal of Libertarian Studies many years ago pointed out that before the Before about 1865 the profession Medical profession was unlicensed in the United States. Anybody could say I'm a physician Um medical schools were in in great supply. Many of them were privately owned Um students could gain admission to the best of them without difficulty Large people entered a large numbers of people entered entered medical practice um What happened is that the The ease of of entering the profession Led to a lot of competition And the competition means we have people practicing sort of status quo Medical practice and then we have heterodox theories that are coming up Regular medicine in the early 19th century. Hammelway says relied heavily on symptomatic treatment consisting in the main of bloodletting blistering in the administration of massive doses of compounds of mercury Antimony and other mineral poisons as purgatives and emetics followed by arsenical compounds thought to act as tonics This certainly killed large numbers of patients Two sets eclecticism and homeopathy successfully competed with regular medicine And were in great part responsible for the repeal of medical licensing laws eclecticism completely repudiated the therapeutic arsenal of heroic medicine And injected much common sense into the care sick and ailing Um homeopathy suggested fresh air sunshine bed rest proper diet and personal hygiene At least you're not killing people by poisoning them if you're doing that. Maybe you're Maybe the help aspect is is positive aspect of that is slight, but at least you're not Bleeding them out and poisoning them Uh, so hammer. We points out that by the 1870s Mainstream medicine thanks to this competition from from outside thanks in large part to the free Entry into the medical profession Mainstream had changed in response bloodletting had had diminished arsenic Doses had diminished And they'd added a few of the therapy suggested by some of these other Other approaches I had tons more as you might imagine. This is an enormous topic, but I am out of time I'll respect that and I'll be happy to talk to you later in my office hours If there's something you wanted to discuss that I didn't get to thank you very much


Enzyme-based biosensors are increasingly used in various applications due to their high sensitivity and specificity, portability, cost, effectiveness, and potential for miniaturization and point of care diagnostics. This review paper examines the principles behind these biosensors, which employ electrochemical, optical, thermistor, and piezoelectric detection methods and their applications in the literature. Additionally, strategies for improving the use of enzymes in biosensors are discussed. This article was authored by Hong Hiepeng-Win, Sun Hyak Lee, Uai Ching Lee, and others.


This video is part of a series chart. Check out the link in the description for the full playlist or at the end of this video. And today we're gonna be working with, again, Blender 2.78a. And today I'm gonna show you how to render out your videos. We've looked at how to edit videos, basically. So how do you render them out to a video that you can upload to YouTube or Daily Motion or archive.org. Let's go into our video editor here and I'm just gonna real quick create a little project. I'm gonna do stuff that we've already learned in other videos, so nothing new. I'm gonna choose two of my videos here. I'm going to grab these and move them up like that. I'm going to fade these videos just so we have something to render out. Crossfade, so now I can look here at home. And you can see me, see how it fades from one video to the other. I'm going to add in a color clip and I'm going to fade that. Add a crossfade. I'm gonna select my color there and I'm just gonna shift D to clone it, duplicate it, just like other parts of Blender, select this video, shift select that video. Add and I'm gonna say cross. And then I'm gonna set my video length to here, which is 225 frames. Otherwise it would render a lot of black at the end of this video we don't need. So there is my project. I just did and we have the audio playing here. There we go. So that's the short little video clip. Now we need to render it out. I'm gonna use this little window up here. I'm gonna change it to be our properties window, which is the same window you were probably seeing if you worked in the Blender 3D view. And by default it's set to 1080p. Let's go ahead and, but it's set to 50%. We wanna render out at full resolution since my videos are 1080p, we're rendering out 1080p. The frame rate has already been set to the same frame rate that my video clips were when I imported them, which in this case is 29.97 frames per second. Now let's, by default it's set to save as a still image. We wanna change it to a video. You have all these different movie options. I'm just gonna choose Xvid and under encoding I'm gonna say preset Xvid. And you have option to change here, the main thing you probably wanna change in here is probably your bit rate if you want something a little higher than 6,000. I usually go for 8,000, but I'm just gonna leave it at 6,000 now since this is just a test render. If you were to render it out now, well let's give it a name. I'm gonna save it to my temp folder, I'll just call it my video. And Xvitter.avi, if I don't put the .avi, Blender will automatically put it along with the frame start to finish. So I'm starting at frame one here going to frame 225. So it'll save it as my video underscore one underscore 225.avi, if I don't put anything. If I put the .avi, it won't add anything to it, it will just name it that. So something to think about. And then down here, if we want the audio to render, we have to select an audio format. I'll just choose MP3. Again you can change the bit rates and volume if you wanted. That's pretty much it. At this point we curl them up here and click animate and it will start rendering out our video. We're getting, you know, doesn't say how many frames a second, but saying each frame is rendering in .02 seconds retrain. That's it, our little clip is done. And then there, I usually use MPV or MPlayer to play the video, but Blender actually has a built-in player that I never really use. I hear we have control F11. That was pretty much it. The quality was a little low again. I probably would turn up the bit rate on that a little bit. But other than that, that is how you render out your videos. I do thank you for watching. As always please visit filmsbychris.com. That's Chris with the K. There's a link in the description. And there you can also go to my support section where you can support me through PayPal or Patreon at patreon.com forward slash milx1000. Please be sure to like, share, subscribe, comment. And as always, have a great day.


We know in Brussels how the work of the Institute as a thought leader in politics and international relations is impressive and therefore it's a great honour for me to be here. I'm a member of the judiciary but I'm not here to share with you legal comments. I have two basic messages for you today. The first one is we cannot approach the challenges of the future with the tools of the past. And the second one is new rules to harmonise the European Union legal framework are needed but much more is needed outside the legal dimension. Let me start with a personal comment to say that I had the honour to be in the business of regulating data protection processing for over 20 years. As academic, part of full-time, as a regulator, enforcer and now at EU level. And I had the unique privilege to be part of different generations of data protection approaches. And this is why what I'm saying builds on the basis of this experience. For most of this time, so more than 20 years, data protection has been treated as more as a technical abstraction, therefore on the margin of political discourse. Yesterday, I'm sure you would like to speak about this judgement and ruling by the European Court of Justice on a case concerning the very well-known commission decision. Perhaps less known in legal details but this is a farber, I mean data sharing made headlines in every major news outlet around the world. I don't recall EU data protection ever commanding such a level of global attention. So the timing and also location of this discussion is more than impeccable. I'm convinced that we are now at the crossroad point in time where low technology and public opinion seem to converge around a set of core principles and values. I will not introduce this discussion with detailed comments about the farber. But let me say that I suspect that for many of you the judgement was not a big surprise. The SHREM case needs to be situated in the distinct circle of jurisprudence which has put leaving flesh on the study skeleton of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Legislators, governments, businesses and citizens can be no doubt about the rights of privacy and to data protection are important and can be ignored. And please do not read the judgement alone. Two other important cases are to be considered. They come from two judgments released last week, the Beltimo and the Barra cases. Focusing on transparency, focusing on the challenge to ensure proximity and protection to citizens in a globalized world. But I'd like to touch mainly on three aspects of the digital ethics which we want to promote at the European Data Protection Supervisor. This is why I have adopted an opinion in September before travelling to the Silicon Valley. And some of the comments I'm making now builds on the observations and the impressions I had coming back. The first comment is what is the ethical dimension to data processing and why is it important. The second one is what might digital ethics would look like. And the third one is how do we build the consensus to get there. But let me to explain why we're speaking the ethical dimension, let me begin with a very brief overview of the institution I represent. I lead a very small institution currently composed of no more than 50 employees. We are likely to grow because of the reform. And like the organization which Ellen Dixon here in the audience leads, we are an independent data protection authority. So we are part of the group of regulators, but we are an independent institution. We are responsible under the European Union Law-specific Regulation adopted in 2001 for monitoring and enforcing compliance around the processing of personal data by all European Union offices, bodies, agencies, main and small entities included. For instance, the local agency which is established here in Ireland. But we are increasingly responsible for advising EU institutions, particularly Council, Commission and Parliament on all matters concerning the processing of personal data. More specifically, we have to ensure that when introducing soft and hard legislation, they take on board existing data protection principles. So we have been, my colleague and I, pointed in December last year with a specific remit of being constructive and proactive. And this is why in 88 days, this was our priority. We published in March this year a five-year strategy with our vision for the EU to be a beacon of best practice and forward-thinking for how people and information about them should be treated with respect and accountability in the digital society. We would like my colleague and I to be transparent, predictable and we would like to be evaluated in five years from now on a basis of objective key performance indicators about the results we will achieve. This allows me to come back to the main takeaway of my today's contribution. What is the ethical dimension to data processing and why is it important? As with the 18th and the 19th century industrial revolution and the genesis of the human rights movement, there is in my view a similar imperative now against big data to safeguard dignity in the digital revolution. Dignity was present in the Treaty of Rome as amended in Amsterdam and Maastricht. But now in the Lisbon Treaty is placed in a very different place. It has been upgraded. Dignity is considered by many as one of the fundamental rights and freedoms. But lawful oppressors may say that it's not exactly a right or a freedom. It's something more. Fundamental rights and freedoms may be subject to interferences which has to be necessary and proportionate in a democratic society to preserve or promote other fundamental rights and public interest. So the Lisbon Treaty doesn't speak about any interference on human dignity and we would like to reflect on this. So we know that ethics is an established factor in medicine and it's also driving notions of corporate social responsibility and environmental responsibility towards future generation. And my sense is that scientists and interpreters are realizing that the explosion of personal information and powers of computer artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality raises now more profound questions about what it will mean to be human in the future. What it will mean respect for the individuals who will be responsible and liable for decisions which will affect people in the daily life where we would like to be everywhere ubiquitous computing by using similar platforms, similar devices. Even the Pope Francis has written about the so-called mental pollution of the mere accumulation of data divorced from genuine human exchange and self-reflection. So in practical terms, I see now in closed services where there is a general reluctance for anyone to take responsibility for what happens to the data, nobody wants to hold the encryption keys. And many data controllers claim that they simply don't know where the data is. Surveillance is the business model of the internet. But most people have not subscribed to this. The European Union now is approaching a new strategy concerning the digital single market. And some players seem to be tempted to impose and import the West Coast approach where there is no principle of data minimization or purpose limitation where any obstacles to data flows are considered bad for innovation. And meanwhile there is a sort of a security rat-chat where it is now assumed that law enforcement and the security services to keep pace with terrorists and cyber criminals must simply collect, store indefinitely and indiscriminately all data available. We see this with data retention. We see it now with PNR which will be subject tomorrow of an important meeting of the European Council in Brussels. Security, which used to be a concept closely connected to privacy, is now deliberately left value and undefined so that it can be used to justify more and more intuitions into the private lives of more and more people. So in my view an ethical approach looks at the longer term implications for society and the individuals of this trend and seeks to identify new norms to prevent unintended consequences. But what might a digital ethics look like? The EDPS 2015 opinion on the ethical dimension outlined what we call a big data protection ecosystem, sort of an interdependency consisting of regulation, businesses and organizations processing information, engineers, designers and also individuals themselves. So it was a recognition that good laws are, as I say, necessary but unfortunately insufficient. So controllers need, in our view, to be aware and much more accountable for the impact of their business decisions on individuals. Let's think for a second to the Google Spain judgment of last year. Google were not providing a public or charitable service. They were making business decisions through their algorithms. They are driven by legitimate business interests. And these legitimate interests can be considered of course but they cannot take precedence over the fundamental rights of the individuals concerned by the data including the right to be informed. So technology in a nutshell is not value neutral. It is the result in my view of human ingenuity, reflective of the value system of those men and women. It is only now that people are beginning to realize the prescience of Lawrence Lessig's declaration around 15 years ago that code is low. In other words, that the rules and standards which are devised to govern cyberspace like the anonymity or traceability of individuals are at least as powerful as the formal legal framework applied by the court. The problem is that the internet which has emerged was devised by brilliant designers, scientists, technicians who did not necessarily understand or reflect or translate into practice on fundamental values like human dignity, privacy and freedom of expression. So we are starting to change that by bringing together legal experts and engineers will be crucial to the long term and exercise in terms of sustainability and competitiveness of the digital market in the EU. Our motto is that not everything which is technically feasible is as such morally tenable. So we are thinking on how we can introduce more transparency, how we can empower more individuals in a world where we would like to not slow down information and innovation but to allow people to be more in control of their information. We would like to see people treated more as individual, as human beings and less as users, consumers, subscribers. People are prosumers of content online and therefore structures must be in place to address power and information imbalances. But how do we build the consensus to get there? We aim to simply give a kickstart by pulling together data protection ethics advisory board at our institution. This panel will operate transparently, will be a resource for the EU generally and will include visionaries from outside the data protection community. I really count to have a preliminary result in no more than one year and a half and to organize an international event in 2017 to enlarge the discussion. Data protection authorities will play an important but not exclusive role in this area because they will have more resources, of course, they will have more expertise. Therefore we have to protect more accountability, independence, transparency and encourage capacity for forward thinking to be announced. Therefore we have to speak more as data protection authorities with one voice and we must be free as data protection authorities for unnecessary prescriptive procedures. We are insisting a lot to de-bure organize as much as possible requirements in the reform. We think that flexibility is needed in terms of formalities. Stop to the bureau privacy. Let's make a distinction in between safeguards to be implemented in an innovative way and a formal prerequisite which are not necessarily essential as such. And on a global scale we need of partnership at international level. Therefore we need to build bridges with other regions and countries where perhaps they have a different approach but values are shared. Of course this week the focus is largely on EU and US. One commentator on the Guardian on Wednesday said the Atlantic just got wider. But in fact we still have a great deal in common. US is still a strategic partner for the EU and therefore I think building now on this important judgment I think we should start with a new process which could be a platform for the rest of the world. I counted weeks ago over 120 countries with data protection laws and therefore Europe is leading by example but we are a minority. At the same time they are following more the European approach. Not in terms of a minority law but in terms of approach to the protection of individuals. So this is more or less the challenge and therefore it's simply a pleasure to look forward for our discussion and I thank you for your attention.


What exactly it means that God speaks to us? How does God speak? Does God have a mouth? Is there actual other actual voices coming out of the mouth of God? How do I hear a divine voice? Well, really no answers. But that is an irrelevant question. Because speaking is really communicating. When we communicate, we can communicate in many different ways. We can communicate in the easiest way by simply talking.  Provided I speak the same language as you. And provided you're familiar with my vocabulary, you can understand what I'm saying. You may agree, you may disagree, but that's what you heard. Then you'll judge that. I can also talk to you by means of sign language. Sign language provided that you recognize the signs. How I do that? So I do not have to speak with a physical voice. For that matter, I do not even have to use sign language. There's such a thing as telepathy, where I can read your mind and I can place, for that matter, thoughts into your mind so I can communicate with you on a completely non-physical level. Some people have that gift, very few, but it is there. So as long as this communication, the only problem with communication and revelation is many people think that they hear voices. Normally come across a person who claims to hear voices. What do we do? We send him to a psychiatrist. Hearing voices is the first symptom of schizophrenia. Is it possible that these people do hear voices, whether they hear them on a physical ear?  You can still today hear anything that has been spoken over the past 5,770 years. Once when mystics used to say that, people used to laugh, you're crazy. Today, of course, we know different. Today we know that speech is not just breathing, exhaling. Speech is a physical reality. When we speak, we create sound waves. Sound waves are real. They're physical.  They have a communication passing on a message. I don't care how it happens. What is important that we know that it does happen. So how does God communicate with man? Physical voice? Could you have picked up any of these revelations on a tape recorder? Frankly, I really don't know. But it's irrelevant to me.  I've seen from the past people skeptical when I claim that. I don't know why. Oh, you have a little faith. So, Anas, I'm going to prove it to you. And I'm going to prove it to you. I said, will each one, please, here, take a piece of paper and a pencil. And when I say, like, go like this, write down whatever comes to your mind. And then I do so, and you write it down. And if somehow I was able, everybody writes down exactly the same thing, and before you tell me what you wrote down, I'm telling you what you're going to write down, what you wrote down. Would you then believe that I have the power of telepathy? Not only that I can read your mind, but also that I can even make you think. You know, it's communicating. And how have you expressed that? Of course, you have no choice. Could there be some other explanation for that? Or the basic empirical level? No, there isn't. Is there some far-fetched possibility or you can come up with all kinds of theories? But technically, for all practical purposes, you would have to accept that. So maybe God communicates that way, that somehow he is able to put one and the same identical thought in everybody's mind. So how God communicates what is divine speech and all that is totally irrelevant to me. If, however, at a certain point, there is this communication, then this has as much validity as you seeing me standing here in a body in front of you and hearing my voice with you years, seeing me with all my emotions and say, yes, that I saw, that I experienced, that I heard. So the same would apply even if that is on the mental level. To get back to our topic, revelation is the ultimate and final, most important part of religion. Now, revelation can be in many ways. Sydney is a huge city. So is Melbourne and so is Toronto. And we have all kinds of very fancy, modern institutions for all kinds of purposes in which we provide for all the needs that the technology for literally everything. And we have factories, we have computers, we have hospitals, you name it, whatever society could possibly need, we have it. And in every society, of course, we also have some crackpots. At least those people that we like to call crackpots. Who do I call a crackpot? Anybody disagrees with me?  They have no intelligence. They can't see reality for what it is. How do I know? Because I know this is what reality is. He doesn't see it my way.  And especially when it comes to situations where somebody will suddenly pop up and say to you, guess what? I had a tremendous experience. God spoke to me. What would your reaction be? Short your shoulders? Never. Rachmond is prettier than this fellow.  And if he goes to psychiatrist, what's gonna happen? The psychiatrist's gonna examine him and he will claim to psychiatrist. Yes, I hear God's talking and God gave these instructions. God said this and God said that, et cetera, et cetera. And the psychiatrist sees he can't make heads or tails of this guy, he can't straighten them out. He's going to commit them. On the other hand, in Toronto at least, we have great respect for people like that. Like for practically no one else. And people come and claim that God speaks to them. We take care of them. They give them free room and board. Won't do it for anybody else. So obviously, we care about them. Moreover, people like that who claim that God speaks to them. Sometimes you may decide, did he really? Well, we have all different kinds of ways of testing things. We give them a polygraph test. Give them a tooth serum, who knows what else. And guess what, 90, not 99% of them pass the test with flying colors. They are speaking the tooth. Polygraph tests are accepted in many places in the illegal system. Which means if these people claim that God speaks to them, pass this test, and are telling obviously the truth that God spoke to them, you have to take the word for it. Since these people are telling the truth, I now have a dilemma, a very serious dilemma. And this gets to the very core of our pardon that we're discussing tonight. When I go to this hospital for the mentally, well, today it's called mentally challenged. Careful, so it can't be politically correct. And mentally challenged. And I go to room number one and I meet patient A. And I ask him, and he has passed all the tests. And I ask him, tell me what did God tell you? He will answer me, very nice that you come to ask. I've been waiting for you, it's about time. God told me to pass on the message to you that next time you worship, make sure you stand straight, feet together, hands from the fold down, close your eyes, stand there in awe and trepidation and worship God. Thank you very much. Then I go to patient number two and I ask him, what did God tell you?  Room number three, make sure you lie in your back. Room number four, make sure you're somersault and while somersault you say your prayers. Meaning in plain English, everyone will give me some kind of a different message. Whether it differs drastically, radically, or it differs only in minor details, doesn't matter. The messages are not the same. What do I do now? By everything available to me, they're all speaking the truth. By the standard that I measure truth, they're all measure up. But they are mutually exclusive. If I follow one, I have to reject two, three, four and everybody else. If I follow two, I have to reject one, three, four, five and everybody else. I really have only two alternatives. Accept all of them and then I really need a psychiatrist. Even I would admit it, you go crazy. Or the other alternative, reject all of them. There's no way I can determine who amongst all these claimants for truth is really the true one. There used to be a television show called to tell the truth. Where you have a panel of about four or five people and then you get, how did it go again? One or two people that show up on the panel or one of them even on. And you have to guess what this profession is. Something that I forgot the details. This goes back years and years. And you ask all kinds of questions. No, no, sorry. That is a person that you know the identity but you don't know who of these people or have this identity. And then you have to ask all kinds of questions, cross-examine them and figure out who it really is. It's called to tell the truth. Each one is causing going to pretend to be one of the same person. You have to figure out who is telling the truth. That television game is really based on reality. That television game is based on the pursuit of religion without those people knowing it. Because religion is precisely the same thing. You have a whole panel and not just two or three people claiming to be one and the same but having hundreds of people. You have a whole supermarket display of different religions. Each one claiming to be the one and only two one. Each one claiming I am the one and only way to salvation. I have for you the one and only two expression of God's will, how God wants to be worshiped. If you believe one, you have to reject all the others. If you choose another one, you have to reject all those. But all of them have exactly the same claim. How can you ever determine what religion to follow? So therefore the best thing to do is say, a plague on all your houses. It's impossible to determine. I don't have nothing to say to any of you. That is if we go by one of two things. Determine religion on the basis of what appeals to you. On the basis of that which you think that's what religion should be like. That's what salvation or a savior should be like. That's what the message should be like. And I heard this preacher and I heard this so-called prophet and I really like him as a really charismatic individual. And he's so beautiful and the message is so beautiful and so heart-stirring and so inspirational. This must be it. People are turned on by all different kinds of things.  So why should you go follow X, why not Y? Well, he turns me on. Yeah, so are you telling me that you are telling the truth and he's telling the truth? And that is essentially the problem with all religions in the world. They're totally meaningless, worthless. They're all basically claiming on the basis of a person an individual comes around, I'm a prophet, God has spoken to me, this is the message. If you accept any one of them, you're literally stuck with all others. Unless you can show that one of them has something unique, essentially different, objectively different than all the others. But in terms of who the prophet is or in terms of what the message is, you will never get it out of that. And therefore, religion cannot be based on faith. Did you hear what I said? Religion cannot be based on faith. With faith, you can adopt literally everything and anything on earth. From the most subtle and most sophisticated ideas all the way down to the crudest. On the basis of faith, I can give you the most sophisticated apologetics and analysis reason for the crudest types of behavior, Satanism or whatever you want. I'll show you how Satanism makes sense. It may not be popular, it may not be politically correct, but it makes as much sense as 99.99% of all the other religions in this world. The foundation and the basis is exactly the same. An individual showing up claiming I'm a prophet of God. I've been sent by God and this is the message. For that matter, they may even perform all kinds of miracles, supernatural feats. Every religion in the world claims that it has some of its founders or others of its prophets that perform supernatural feats. And they're correct? They're correct? Are miracles a criterion? Well, if he's not the prophet of God, how would he have been able to do so? Only God can give you that power to supersede nature. But then again, have the other religion doing the same thing.