I wanna speak today a message that we as pastors do not like to talk about, but I think it's very important. Untold biblical truth about tithing. Untold biblical truth about giving. I believe that I have not preached a message like this before at Hungry Jen. I am really excited for it today. Christmas season is a time of giving when the wise men came and they gave their gifts, even though Jesus was no longer a little baby. He was already in the house, not in the manger, and but still the idea of gift giving is very, very Christ-like. Now for those people who may be watching or maybe you're coming here and your idea of why Christians are celebrating Christmas, we shouldn't be celebrating Christmas because it's a pagan holiday. It is a pagan holiday in its origin, okay? Why are we celebrating Christmas? Because it's not a pagan practice of what Christmas celebrates today. Unlike Halloween that has pagan roots, Halloween has also a pagan practice, not just roots. We're celebrating Christmas, not because we're ignoring the pagan roots, it's because of what it practices now. The songs are about Christ, the songs are about his birth, and anything that can expose the world to more of Jesus, we're up for it. Amen. If Halloween would have had pagan origins and celebrated life, love, peace, thanksgiving, eating turkey, everybody dressing up real nice, like they do it for the wedding, I will be the first person to join on the board. But because it doesn't present that where it originated and Christmas does, it celebrates something about Christ, the world sings about, you go to the mall and you hear about Mary, did you know? By the way, she did know. So I just wanna answer that question.  And so when we hear like that, when I walk in the mall, I know most of these people, they don't even know Christ, they sing the songs because it's the holiday cheer for them. It's about Santa and reindeer. But honestly, when I hear the name of Jesus, song in our malls, in our gyms, it gives my heart joy. I'm like, man, I'm for that. This is so awesome. We need to make Christmas great again. Come on, somebody, amen. Merry Christmas. Statistics says that more than one in four Americans, Protestants, gave only $0 during a year to a local church. So one in four Americans in Christian Protestants gave zero a year. From 1968 to 2005, giving to Protestant churches declined from 3.1% of income to 2.6% of income of an average regular churchgoer compared to those who say they're Christians, but rarely attend, give 6% of their acts after tax income. Pretty much overall giving drops in average Protestant churches, Christians life. The median annual giving for a Christian is $200 just over half a percent of their after tax income. Mormons give more than seven times more the amount of money as compared to their income than Catholics. About 27% of evangelicals give away 10% or more of their income. So in about a room of this size, about 27% of people from evangelical background give 10% or more. About 5% of Christians provide 60% of money to churches and religious groups. 20% of all Christians give 80% of all giving. So 20% of Christians are responsible for 80 to 86% of all giving that comes to local churches or charities. Among the Protestants, 10% of evangelicals, 28% of mainline folk and 33% of fundamentalists and 40% of liberal Protestants gave nothing. Now, and I can go on more and more, but I'm gonna leave on what would have happened if all the Christians would have donated. In fact, I'll read this. Christian Smith, a psychiatrist, an expert on American Christianity says, if we estimate that if we committed Christians in the United States gave 10% of their after-tax income fully, but no more than 10%. So just 10%, every committed Christian would just make a commitment to give 10% of their income. This would provide extra 46 billion per year of resources to which to fund needs and priorities. Here are some of the things these money could improve in Christianity around the world. 150,000 new missionaries and pastors in nations most closed to foreign religious workers would open. It would triple the resources being spent by all Christians and Bible translating, printing, distributing to provide Bibles to native languages of the 2,737 remaining people groups currently without Bible translations. We pretty much will eliminate people not having Bibles. We would finance the organizational infrastructure of major Christian research and advocacy organizing fighting against contemporary economic and sexual slavery worldwide. We will quadruple the total resources being spent by all Christians globally to evangelize the world. 5 million, so we would develop 5 million micro enterprise economic development projects in poor countries worldwide. We would have 1 million new clean water well drilling projects per year in the poorest nations. We would treat and prevent malaria worldwide. We would provide food clothing and shelter to all 6,500,000 current refugees in all Asia, Africa, and Middle East. We would quadruple the budget of Habitat for Humanity, the budget of World Division, which serves 100 million people in 96 countries. We would sponsor 20 million needed children worldwide providing the food education and healthcare. We will quadruple global Christian medical missions work. We would provide financial and debt management training to 200,000 US Christians per year who are currently in debt. Pretty much if Christians would just do bare minimum what the law in the Old Testament says, the amount that this could contribute to the well-being of the world honestly would be staggering. Like one of the things that you have to understand about Hungry Gen is we're embarking more and more on helping other churches, helping other missions. We've taken a church in Vietnam under our covering financially to sponsor and to help. 100% of Hungry Gen budget goes to the missions. Some of it goes to Tri-States missions. Some of it goes to when we go to conferences, when we're gonna launch churches next year, the internships, everything is missional in its focus. When we help the local people that are in need, when we help also with missions, when we help with all of these things, it goes to the world. So let's go now into the untold truth about biblical tithing. Here are four things you need to know about what the Bible teaches about tithing. Number one, the first mention of tithing had to do in response to God's victory. When Abraham gave first time 10%, it's interesting that we don't know and nobody knows for sure where did Abraham learn about the principle of giving 10%. There was no local church. There was this king named Melchizedek who is symbol of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Abraham goes and gets this huge victory with his army and with his band of people that he was with. And then afterwards the Bible says that Abraham tithed 10%. The first mention of tithing is the tithing of response to God's faithfulness, which I believe the real reason why many of us tithe, we say, God, thank you. And we're not buying anything. We're expressing our gratefulness. So the first mention of tithing, 500 years before the commandments, it was Abraham saying God, I acknowledge you as the source of my victory. The second truth about tithing or the second way of tithing was done, it was a way of promising God to tithe when I get a breakthrough. Now Jacob was the grandson of Abraham and Jacob did not tithe on the credit card, which is something I wanna mention. Okay, there are people who get so fired up about tithing that they tithe on their credit card. That's not wise.  And it's also not wise. Jacob is broke like a joke. He has nothing to his name. He's sleeping in front of the sky. He gets the vision of God. He sees the staircase of heaven. He sees God and his house is called Bethel, which is where he was sleeping. He slept on the rock, which there's a revelation there. You know, Jacob went to sleep on the rock. Delilah went to sleep on the lap of the, Samson went to sleep on the lap of Delilah. One woke up with the haircut. The other one woke up with the revelation. Come on somebody. And so Jacob goes to sleep on the rock and there he sees a vision of God and Jacob wakes up. He's like, man, this is the house of God. This is church somebody. And you know, and the first thing that Jacob says instead of saying, man, I'm gonna sign my kids for the kids ministry. I'm gonna enroll to serve. Where's the planning center app? You know, you would think like, hey, what is the next charge service? And the first thing Jacob says is God, the moment I got anything in my pocket or in my bank, I'm gonna give you 10%. That's weird. I'm like, I want you to see the connection. Charge. And he's saying the moment I get anything out, I'm gonna give 10%. No commandments yet. No law, no Moses, no coming with two tablets. None of this stuff. This guy has a vision of God in the sleep. Vision of the house of God wakes up and is first to response. The moment I got something, the moment I get something in my wallet, in my bank account, the moment I get my first paycheck, I promise to give God and to thank Him. Maybe that's where you're at. You broke, but you got a revelation. You're in the house today. You're like, man, I'm in the house of God, but I ain't got a job. I'm going through a very difficult time. You can make tithing as a promise. It could be a response like Abraham or it could be as a promise, like Jacob. Truth number three is the law of tithing. Now the law of tithing was something that when Moses took the Israel out of Egypt, they went to the mountain and God came in the mountain and gave Moses the commandments. Now a lot of these commandments, let's be honest, they were not given to America. They were given to the nation of Israel. A lot of these commandments had to do with real estate. They had to do with how to treat your employees, how to treat the land boundaries. It's pretty much like a code for living as a nation. And one of these commandments was also tithing. What many people don't understand is that there was not one tithe, there was three. There was three tithes in the law of Moses. The first tithe was to support the Levites and the priests. God said you would bring the first of your crops, pretty much like the first 10% of what you're making. And that would help to maintain, keep the lights on in the tabernacle. Levites and the priests, these guys actually did not work. All they did was to kind of worship, pray, cut videos and upload stuff on YouTube. And so all they did were they were working at the tabernacle for the things of God. And God's like, hey, I gotta keep these people so they can keep their families fed and have the roof over their house. So the 10% of everybody's Israelites went to maintain the work that was happening at the tabernacle. But there was one more tithe God was requiring of them and that is this tithe was to be spent on their travel to the festivals that Israel had. In fact, I'm gonna read this because many Christians don't realize there was more than one tithe by Israelites required by God. Deuteronomy chapter 14, verse 22 says the following. You shall truly tithe all the increase of your grain that the fields produce year by year.  But if the journey is too long for you so that you're not able to carry the tithe, they didn't have like UPS and FedEx at the time.   So the first tithe was you bring it to the temple to keep the lights on.  And if the journey is too far to where you're supposed to come where the temple is, then take your oxen, your sheep, your goats, your horses, everything as you're tied, go to the market, sell them, get the money, get an airline ticket, fly to that place. I'm using the modern terminology, they did not have airlines during that time.  So you can always tithe twice. You can tithe once to the church, second time you can bring your tithe and just spend it at the church coffee shop. I'm just kidding, this is Old Testament, okay? This is not, I see the coffee shop team is like, yes, yes, this is the Bible. But we have to start providing breakfast then. Not just coffee shop, if we bring this law back, but I'm talking about the Old Testament law, okay? I'm not saying this is what we need to do, I'm just giving you an example of what they did. The third tithe that people will require to bring as New Testament people in covenant with God, this tithe was 10% every 10 years. Excuse me, every three years. So 10% every three years, let's read this where the Bible says in Deuteronomy chapter 14 verse 28. At the end of every third year, you shall bring out the tithe of your produce of that year and store it up within your gates.  So the first tithe went to pay the bills at the temple. The second tithe went in on your travel to the feast and you would spend there with your family feasting, rejoicing, celebrating God. And the third tithe, God says, I want you to give this one every three years, 10%. So each year it would equal to 3.3%. You would set apart, you can set apart either each year 3.3% or just every three years, you set extra 10% apart and they had this like community almost like a place where you would bring that food, you will bring those resources for the immigrants, for the poor and for the people in your community to eat of your tithe, including the Levite.  And guess who was paying for that? Not the government, the people. So pretty much to say in the Old Testament, the tithing wasn't 10%. It was 23.3%. Each Israelite would give. So Mormons are a lot more closer to that than we because their standard is 20%, not 10. So but that was the law of tithing. So this wasn't just 10% bringing to the temple, it was also taking 10% to spend on my travel to the temple, celebrating the goodness of God and every three years I would give 10% to the widow, to the orphan, to the fatherless, to the immigrant and to a refugee, somebody that struggled and needed help. And that's what tithing was instituted. Number four, truth about tithing is Jesus talking about tithing. Jesus mentioned tithing twice. We see this in Matthew chapter 23 verse 23 and in Luke chapter 18 verse 12 and in both of those instances, he corrected legalistic abuse of tithing. Jesus didn't endorse it or discredited. He simply corrected legalistic abuse of tithing. Pharisees were so focused on make sure they give 10% that they ignored other important things and Jesus came and said, guys, you're missing the whole point. He says something that is more important than just giving your 10%, it's how you treat people. He didn't stop the tithing nor did he preach about it as often as pastors preach today. He would say, man, but if the way I'm gonna preach speak, the way I'm speaking about tithing today, my goal is not to get you to give more.  I'm not after your money. Plus if you make a decision not to give, there is no one in heaven or on earth that will take what's yours except the devil.   So does tithing apply to us today? Four things I believe tithing misses. Four things or four truths where I believe tithing falls short, where I believe that Christians should not focus on tithing. Four, first one, tithing was really a response of the nation of Israel to God who delivered them from Egypt. What Christians have is we have God who died for us. Like he didn't deliver us by killing an animal. He delivered us by letting his son die. Like the comparison, if I continue, these guys responded to a God who went crushing Egypt, killed the lamb and got him out from one country to another, I have a God in the covenant where he let his son die for me. So for me to just take that, I say, I'm just gonna do what they do. Like my response is different because what God revealed to me is different. I'm not celebrating a God who gave a lamb. I celebrate a God who gave his son. So I say tithing misses that. Yeah, Abraham God, a victory. You know what I got?  Yeah, Jacob had a revelation of the staircase. Actually, I know now who that staircase is. It's Jesus Christ. So I believe that the tithing misses the point because it was under an inferior law, inferior covenant. It was under an inferior response. What I have is it's mind blowing. It's crazy. The second thing that tithing misses is tithing was focused on maintaining the ministry in the tabernacle. I believe what the Lord calls the church to do is not to maintain the church facilities but to use the church to reach the globe. So the tithing was really, hey, let's keep the lights on. But the mission of the church is not to, hey, let's just keep the lights on and whoever stumbles into church will give him a gift basket. No, the mission of the church, as you saw me recruiting you to help us with the media ministry, we wanna reach the world. Israel was not given the assignment to spread their faith to other nations. In fact, they were given an assignment to stay away from other nations. We were given a job to go into every nation, every tongue, and every tribe, to translate the Bible into every language, to make e-courses, to write books, to write CDs, why? Go into all the nations and make disciples of all the nations of the world. So tithing was for maintaining. We got to multiply. So tithing misses that because it was given to keep the lights on. We are given, what we are assigned with is to be the light in the world, to be the city in the top of the hill. The third thing that I see tithing misses is, tithing misses the mark of discipleship. Tithing misses the mark of discipleship. Why? Because look at the discipleship model of Jesus. And because some people get really, really afraid. It was like, man, the Bible, Jesus didn't talk about this tithing, 100%. You're right. He didn't mention it for Christians. Make sure you tithe, he didn't. But I want you to notice what Jesus preached. He preached discipleship. And I want you to notice what discipleship requires. See, tithing, it's a legalistic system under the old covenant. Now, you can practice it without being a legalist about it. 100%.  Which is like, he died for me. At least I can do his live for him. Secondly, we're living with this big mission. We want to reach the world, not just keep the lights on in the church. And the third thing is the message of Jesus Christ is not these presets and these legalistic rules. The message of Jesus Christ is discipleship. For example, he says if you have two coats and somebody comes in and wants your coat, Jesus did not say cut 10% of your coat and give it to him. He says give your coat, that's 50%. That's discipleship. That's radical, that's scary. He comes to Zacchaeus' house and Zacchaeus is ripping people off left and right.  And according to the law, you have to return back four times more. So Jesus convicts Zacchaeus with his presence. Never tells Zacchaeus, hey Zacchaeus, make sure you sign up to Tithe for Jesus Ministries International. I do have a nonprofit number where you can get your tax deductions since you work in taxes. Zacchaeus, what is your next time where you're gonna set up your reoccurring giving for Jesus Ministries International? No, no, Jesus just comes by his presence. He convicts Zacchaeus' heart and life. And the first thing begins to convert in Zacchaeus' life is not his mouth, his job, it's his wallet.  And then he says this, because the law required, if you ripped somebody off, if you stole from somebody, give him four times more. That's what the law required. I want you to see where discipleship goes. He says, and I will give half of my income to the poor. Not to the Jesus' ministry, but to the poor. That's discipleship. Discipleship doesn't require even 20%. Discipleship is radical and discipleship is scary. That's why most of us would be comfortable believing in Jesus. We would have a difficult time following him because following him is not clicking a button on Twitter. Following him is not subscribing to his YouTube channel. Following Jesus Christ is, it's a scary thing to do.   Jesus, leave me alone. But the moment you begin to follow Jesus Christ, Jesus doesn't talk to you about tithing, why? Because he's trying to make you into a disciple. And the standard for discipleship is radical. There's not a percentage, it's a process. Where Jesus makes you just like him. And that could look different for different people that different seasons, but I'm gonna tell you one thing. It's a roller coaster. It's crazy. It's crazy. Which ruler came in? A tither gives 10%. Honors his mom and dad, doesn't kill, doesn't steal, doesn't smoke, doesn't hang out with those who do.  This is the guy you want your daughter to marry. Not the joker that she's dating right now. This would be the guy's like, why don't you like him? That would be that guy. And every dad and mom would tell their daughter to connect with. He comes to Jesus and says, Jesus, what do I do to get eternal life? And Jesus gives him 10 commandments and he's like, I've done them all. And Jesus doesn't rebuking, he's like, no, you didn't. Jesus, Bible says in one scripture, it says he loved him. He's like, man, where were you when I was choosing my disciples? I could have chosen one good one. So he does the tithing. He does the Old Testament. He does that perfectly. But I want you to notice how he misses discipleship. And the moment Jesus goes for the heart, because this has nothing to do with money, he goes for the heart. Because though he kept the commandments, he broke the first one. He had a different God and this different God was money.  And I want you to notice another thing. Jesus wasn't interesting to grow his ministry's bank account. He says, give it to the poor. And then after that, come and follow me. Follow me, not believe in me, follow me. Because you can believe in me and just do the tithing and everything. But if you wanna follow me, it's scary. It's radical, it takes self-denial. And the Bible says he was sad and he returned back. And we never heard from him again. In fact, we don't even know his name. There's no churches built in his name. There's no epistles written. I wonder what would have happened to him. He lived, see the tithing, you can do tithing and miss discipleship. You can do tithing and it will maintain the lights in the church, but we can miss reaching the globe. We can do tithing and we can miss discipleship. And the last thing where I see tithing misses the point. Tithing is focused on percentage, not on the presence. What I mean by that? With tithing, you have a percentage that you give. You don't rely on God to lead you to give. You rely on the law that you have chose to subscribe to. Now at first, some of you are kinda confused like, is Vlad against tithing? I'll get to that in just a second. I was a tither for a very long time in my life. Like a Pharisee tither. That verse where Jesus was rebuking for the abuses of tithing, I think it would fit my life perfectly because I was like very careful, make sure I tithe even to the scent. Usually didn't give above tithe and I make sure I didn't give below the tithe. I really believe in the verses in Malachi, Kirstah, you, ta-da-da-da. And I do believe that tithing brought a blessing in my life. Unapologetically, I'm gonna tell you one thing.  I believe in that, okay? I don't believe that you tithe so you can buy something from God, but I do believe when you tithe, you're gonna be blessed. And I was. About seven, eight years ago, I started to experience this thing where I started to feel leading of the Holy Spirit, to give radically, not just to the church or to the ministry though, it was including that to the other people. And it messed with my theology because I was so comfortable here. I developed a system in here. I am in control in here. I have a budget in here. I have a plan in here, five-year plan, three-year plan, two-year plan. And that is fanatics. That is, the other thing is scary. The other thing is unpredictable. The other thing is God takes all of your money and leaves you high and dry. That was my view. And when the Lord started to challenge me, not necessarily so that the church can have more money or other ministries, the Lord wanted to challenge me and he says, I wanna take you from devotion to me to being my disciple. I went through emotional, mental, little spiritual breakdown. God had to break down the blessing to give me the breakthrough. I started to discern his voice more than before. And now I understood why the Lord in the New Testament did not give us a law of tithing because he gave us the spirit to lead us. And he expects every son of God and daughter of God to be led by the spirit, more than to be led by the percentage. Because you can practice tithing and never develop a relationship with the Holy Ghost and feel safe in here without being sanctified in here. The presence of God is what a Christian should be led by. The presence of God is what Christians should live by. We should live by principles but be led by the presence. I have principles to fall back on. If he doesn't lead, I live by this principle. But I understand he didn't give me a spirit so I can live by the law. He gave me his spirit. Why did the Old Testament believers needed the law because they didn't have the Holy Ghost? I do. The lamb did not die for them, the sheep died for them. And because he died for me, now I have a reason to live in response as a disciple. Not to live responding to a death of an animal but I just give bare minimum. And I hope that I have this favor with God. God now he has my heart and it's radical. It's scary for people who love to have control of their life and use God to put a cherry on the top of their self-controlled life. Because it demands yielding control. It demands submission. It demands making him Lord and King of your life. And for some of us, that is difficult.  But the moment somebody comes in and says, I'm gonna take your life and I'm gonna run it for you and I live in another realm. For us it's like, are you kidding me? Nobody's gonna do that. And that is radical. And tithing becomes a safe backup, safe thing that we fall to, fall back on instead of living in a radical response for the grace of God. That's why the New Testament doesn't emphasize tithing. Because it emphasizes discipleship and being led by the Holy Spirit. So what do you do? How should we respond? Few things that I wrote down. One, make a decision to start with 10% to the local church out of your paycheck. Make a decision to start with 10%. Now, the people who walk around and say there's a magic, 10% is something, yes, it's a number for testing, but honestly, you don't see Jesus walking around and says it has to be 10% or it even has to be, I'm just giving you recommendation as a pastor. This is not required. I cannot give you one verse in the New Testament for the requirement. As much as I would want to and I live by it as a requirement for myself, but it's not what the Bible teaches us. It is recommended that we make a decision and I will have another teaching very soon where I will teach what Paul taught about giving. And it's very different from the Old Testament teaching on tithing. I know this goes death blow to some of us who feel like if you don't tithe, you don't have salvation. If you don't tithe, you shouldn't even be in church. I do believe that you should move forward from being a believer to being a disciple and it will radically, radically change your financial life. So start with the first. Start with 10%. If you never tithe before in your life, start with that first.  So start with this first. That's why Jesus preached discipleship to who? To Jewish people. They were used to with the first. They were used to on the first level. It took them higher. Today, I'm just gonna bring it to us. Start with this. If you've never lived consistently tithing, okay? Give you a challenge. Three months. Take a three month challenge and just begin to give 10% of your income to God. If in three months, nothing changes with your finances, your job, or you, stop after that. And if God asks you on the judgment seat, there's still the Vlad said it. Why? Because this is the only area where God invites you to challenge him. Even under the old covenant. So I just ask you, just throw a challenge. Three months. Because for some of you, this is very radical. 10%, that's a lot of money. And you need money. And an average American spends 110% of their income. Yeah? 110% of their income. So your goal would be to spend 70% of your income. And some of you, it will help you to spend by if you will start honoring and you will have a difficult time to cut back the spending. So I'm gonna ask you to get God involved in your finances by seeking first. Now, I can't tell you that if you give 10%, God's gonna get you out of debt and everything, but the Bible does say that if we put God first in our day, we know our day goes better. If that's why during the year we take the first month and we fast, why? Because we want the remaining of the year to be blessed. The principle of putting God first will work all the time. In Proverbs, it says that honor God with the first fruits and your vats will overflow with new wine and your barns will be filled with plenty. So there's the principle of putting God first. And that's what really, what tithing as a beginning stage is. Begin to make a decision. Say, hey, I'm gonna give 10% of my income.   Make it easier on yourself. Start with 23%, 23.3%. So whatever the help should get out of that, or those people who are gonna, I know they're gonna troll me on YouTube who are like, they look for any word on tithing and it shows up in their email and they go, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Common everything and so. Let me relieve you from your troubles. Start with 50% lezakias. You will feel better. You will be closer to God and you will be a disciple. So, but 10% is a good place to start. What if you start eight? Still fine. Why am I saying to start first, to give that first and to do that consistently for at least three months? Because if you do this sporadically, if you do just kind of whenever I feel like it, you don't develop it first as a muscle of a Christian discipline. Giving, as it's led by the Lord, it's also something that needs to be practiced irregularly and we practice that regularly by doing it. There's few ways that you can give to HungryGen, those of you watching or those of you who are here. You can go to the website, HungryGen.com, you can write a check to HungryGeneration, bring it to the front in the lobby or bring it during the week. You can use Venmo, you can use Cash App, you can use PayPal, you can use Crypto, you can use Stock, you can use Zell. So there's many different ways and if you have another way that through which just let Victoria know, we will create a login for that as well. The second one is I wanna encourage you as a Christian, as a disciple and as a member of this house, take a pledge to donate to our building fund above your tithe. We are trying to accomplish the building, we don't care about the building for the sake of building. What we care about is we need to house more people, we need to have housing for insurance and potentially a school for our students, school for our young ones. And so it requires resources and God wants to use our resources. All of us, including myself, we give above our tithe generously so that we can make this building possible. I believe God will one day send us millionaires and billionaires who will underwrite everything. But honestly, I don't think God will do that right away. The reason why is because then I have no room to be involved. God wants to make room for a guy like me, person like you, the widow, the single mom, the young businessman, for every person to be involved. God does things to get everybody involved and stuff. So make a decision. If you made a decision to give toward building fund earlier this year, and honestly, instead you just start building your own building and took that building fund to something else, I want you to prayerfully reconsider and fulfill your commitment. Number three, and this is the big one, give one time your most generous gift. This could be for those of you who have a business or who throughout this year, during this giving season, maybe for tax deduction purposes as well, where you feel like, you know what, during this season of giving, I want to give a one time, my most generous gift. You say, what should I give? This is the amazing part. Ask the Holy Spirit. Even concerning what I'm teaching, ask the Holy Spirit. If he doesn't confirm, because he lives inside of you, throw it out. If he doesn't confirm, and what I'm sharing is not in the scripture, throw all of that out. Because we don't live by what the pastor teaches.  Amen. So give one time your most generous gift. Number four, you did you know that you can support Hungry Jen by shopping on Amazon. This is the best news you've heard today. So husbands, let your wife shop. Let her buy you and herself a gift for this Christmas. Now, so this is how you can support Hungry Jen by shopping. Amazon has this service called Smile. See, it's crazy how the world also wants to give. Amazon gives certain amount of proceeds from every purchase that you make. They already do that, to charities. When you set Hungry Jen as the charity of your choice, then instead of those proceeds going to other causes, they go to Hungry Jen. So all you gotta do is go to hungryjen.com forward slash Amazon. Or you can just simply, no, there's no QR code, hungryjen.com forward slash Amazon. The moment you click on that link, it automatically goes to your app and sets us up as your donation. It's still same Amazon, nothing different. It's the same Amazon. The only thing is the small percentage that Amazon already gives to charities. But when you shop, that small percentage will be given to Hungry Jen. Number five, the last one. Maybe you're giving, maybe you're generous, but you have a gift of giving. You're like, man, I love the idea of finances. I love the idea of sponsoring. I would love to serve on the stewardship team. What is a stewardship team? For example, you can help input receipts. You can even help depending on also that will go through interview, help to input donations. One thing that I'm starting, we're starting next year, is when somebody gives one time, first time, we're gonna be sending them a handwritten card. Because we give handwritten cards to first-time guests. They make their way to church. But the Lord start dealing with my heart and he says, when people start giving, they're not just getting to church. Something is moving in their heart. And we need to start, not congratulating, but we need to start acknowledging that step they took toward their discipleship. Because discipleship is not just coming to church. Discipleship is when you begin to evangelize, when you go to small group and when you begin to give. These are the three things that these are signs. You're not just a church member, you're becoming a disciple. When you're bringing somebody with you, when you go into a small group and when you begin to give, and we wanna be able to celebrate that, we wanna be able to say, this is awesome. Because every believer, like we have it here, is a disciple maker. But you can make disciples until you first become a disciple. And so we're recruiting that team. We're also recruiting a team. We have people who donate largest sum of money for the building. We wanna be able to help them as well. Not cater to them, but at the same time pray for their needs. Reach out what they need as a help. Maybe they need help with their family or prayer for something. We also have a list of people in our church who are currently going through a difficult time. We wanna be able to bring them meals. We wanna be able to maybe come in and double check the utility that they cannot pay for, to check with the city if there's other resources that we can do. And we have right now one person that manages all of that. And this person is extremely very busy and it's swamp left and right. And so what we wanna do is wanna build a team of stewards, stewards who will come alongside with her and we can help both members of our church who are struggling, double check. Instead of just handing out money that we do a very thorough research on what's happening and how we can help them. So we can also reach out to members or new people that are just starting to give. Reach out to donors who are maybe giving above and beyond to be able to minister to them. Reach out with some of these tedious tasks that we have that take a lot of time but they're very necessary because everything has to be done in church in orderly fashion, especially in the area of finances. We might be in Pasco but we don't think and act on the level of ghetto. We're not a ghetto church. We're a kingdom of God church. And everything we do, we do with excellence and everything we do, we do with a sense of thing that glorifies God. So these are five ways that I wanna invite you to consider joining, growing your discipleship next year. I'm gonna tell you one thing. This is God's church. He took care of it. He will take care of it. Randomly, every few weeks, people send very large donations from all around the United States. If you think that, if you don't give, it won't be taken care of. I'm gonna tell you one thing. Think again, cause you're wrong. This is not just for us. This is to grow you in discipleship. Because in New Testament, it wasn't about the law. In the New Testament, it was about love. It wasn't about the percentage. It was about the process. It wasn't about this principle as much as it was about being led by the presence. Start with something that you are comfortable with, something that is according to your ability. Do it for three months. If you've done it already and you're faithful, tighter, I'm gonna ask you a question. What about asking the Holy Spirit to take you to next level next year? It doesn't have to be always in finances. It doesn't always have to be increasing your giving. Have you given to the poor? Have you given to people in need? Is there somebody you've been a blessing to because God has prospered you? Don't just be a person like the rich ruler or rich man whose ground produced great, great harvest and he kept getting bigger and bigger but he didn't grow in God and did not grow in generosity. Whatever that looks like for you, take the challenge this year. Tithing releases a blessing. Discipleship releases a breakthrough. Tithing releases a blessing. Discipleship releases a breakthrough. And I'm not saying you're gonna drive a Bentley. I'm not saying even the breakthrough will be that you're gonna have a better business and more money. What I'm saying with breakthrough is there will be something that will break through in your life. It will be evident to everyone. Sometimes it shows up in finances. Sometimes it shows up in opportunities. Sometimes it shows up in your family. Sometimes it shows up in salvations of other people. And sometimes, you know what it shows up? The places you sowed, you reap the harvest of souls being saved. Ultimately, that's what this is all about. Hungry Gen is the most generous church I personally have ever seen. We're not the richest church.  We always have. We stand on a building that's paid off. We have more people than the staff than most churches have on their staff. We're able to do more projects because of that. We're able to go into a bigger territory because of the prayers and because of the giving of Hungry Gen. But every few months, I wanna bring this message to bring that realignment to each one of us to keep our hearts pure and to also center us on the mission that we have and on the New Testament teaching of what the Bible teaches. Amen. Hey, thanks for watching this video. If you enjoyed this content and this was a blessing to you, would you help us and hit thumbs up so that it could help more people to discover this video? It cost you nothing but it can go a long way to help with the algorithm. As well as if you're not subscribed to our channel, hit subscribe, click on the bell so that you can be reminded each time that we upload videos. Thank you so much for being a part of this community. If you're interested in learning more about Hungry Gen, our internship, our conferences, deliverance, and so many other things, go to HungryGen.com for more information. And as always, remember, better is not good enough, the best is yet to come.


Okay, so one of the things that mini-constant LCI is meant to do is encourage people who haven't presented at free software conferences before to get up and do just that. Our next presenter is a functional programming geek from who's recently finished his Bachelor of IT at QUT, so he's also a local presenter which is rather good. Please welcome Brian McKenna speaking about F-Sharp. Well, that's up. All right, yeah, I just finished from QUT and I'm about to move down to Sydney to work for an Australian company called Atlassian, so check them out if you're into Australian IT. Is that better? Good. All right, so I'll just get strange to the talk because we don't have much time. So why am I talking about this now? Well, F-Sharp was first released around 2002, so it's kind of getting old, like according to programming language history anyway, so why would I be talking about it in 2011? Well, the old versions of F-Sharp up until November were released under this thing called the Microsoft Research Shed Source License Agreement. So that was not an open source license and you could download the source code, you could compile it on Windows maybe and it just wasn't, but you weren't allowed to distribute your changes or anything. It was only for personal use. November 2010, they released under the Apache license. So now it's completely open source, you can download it and redistribute it everywhere and you can make your own version of F-Sharp. So why would you look into F-Sharp? Well, it runs on the .NET platform, so that means it's portable. You can compile something on Windows, have it run on Linux, have it run on Mac, same binary format and it runs on all three operating systems. It's also language independent, so you can use F-Sharp with C-Sharp with Ion Python with Ruby with any language that runs on .NET at the moment. There's heaps of them. So you can look into that and try and integrate that with F-Sharp. It's functional object oriented, which is actually a trend these days. I've seen OCaml come around about 1996. Scullers come out, well, it's been around for a little while, but it's only gotten pretty popular pretty recently.  So F-Sharp's largely OCaml compatible. It actually is started off as camel.NET, but then it started making some mutations to language and kind of forked off onto its own language. But a lot of the basic syntax is still OCaml. So Microsoft has taken the concepts from F-Sharp like things like type inference, higher order functions, tuples, all these things, and they're put into their other languages. So they've taken all the good things from F-Sharp, put it in other things. So I think if you stay into F-Sharp, if you study F-Sharp, you're going to stay ahead of the curve and you're going to see that you're going to know things before they actually get into the mainstream. Great opportunities for parallelism because you've got immutable data and data sharing is pretty much the worst thing for parallelism. And something I like, which is it's white space sensitive, so it looks pretty nice. I like languages like Python and Haskell, so. Who here is the fan of Microsoft? Everyone, right? Benning's conference, Microsoft. All right. So it comes with a REPL. It's not one of those REPLs where you can't create classes or anything. It's a full REPL. You can create classes. You can create anything that you can do with the compiler. You can do with the REPL. So it's really nice to use. So start off with the actual language. It's multi-paradigm. So on the left here, I've got its object-oriented. So I've just got a little example. So you've got a person and he can shower or he can eat something. You can see down in the comments, Roger is showering. Roger is eating lobster. So it's object-oriented like you're probably used to with C-Sharp or Java. But then on the right, which is really interesting, is a full Quixel implementation. And I mean, that's only about 10 lines of code. And I think that's beautiful, really. I mean, you wouldn't be able to do that in a, just doing that in an object-oriented fashion or even like a procedural fashion. You can't make something that short and make it functional. So type inference.  With F-Sharp, it kind of guesses. It is able to infer what type every variable should be. What type every binding should be, I should say. So in the first example there, let A equals 10 is able to see that A is an integer and just uses that as the type. It's a strong type, so it's not dynamic. It resolves the types at compilation, but it does that through inference. So we've got a function there. So let Fx equals x plus 1, two string. That takes an int and gives you a string. So that's the type definition there. Gx equals x. It's got a dash A there. That means it's generic, so it can take any type and give you back that same type. You can be explicit, so we've got a h function there which takes an integer and gives you back that same thing. So it's able to infer that if it takes an integer, it gives back an integer. With the bottom one, it's got let Ix and the type is an int. That int is actually to that function, so it's able to infer that if it returns an int and it's only returning the parameter, then it's able to see that the parameter must be an int. So this allows for some significant code, list comprehension, so you've probably seen this in Python or I guess Ruby's got it. So you're able to just generate lists using short syntax. You're able to provide a step in the middle. So I've got 2.2.10. That skips every second one. And you're able to do with anything, so I've got characters there as well. And you can do complex... You can run functions inside of the comprehension. So there's a for loop and...  So it squares each number in that comprehension. That arrow is shortened for a yield. Yield just returns a value and assigns it to that list. And you can do that yield estimation mark. So that takes a list and kind of concatenates them all together and gives you back one big list. And you can kind of map... You can put them all together and you can generate complex comprehensions from them. They work for arrays as well. In all these examples, I've got lists, but fsharp supports arrays, so you can do it with arrays and you can do it with lazy sequences. Algebraic data types. Most of this talks going to be about the functional types, the functional parts of fsharp, because I'm assuming most of you are going to be into object-oriented programming or something like that. So I'm going to go over the functional parts. So algebraic data types are pretty big in functional programming. You've got tuples, which take... Which... The length is encoded in the type and the type of every part of the tuple is encoded in the type as well. So an int by a string by a string is different to an int by an int by an int. So you can't actually mix them together or you can't... It's all encoded in the type anyway. And a record is just pretty much a named type. So I've got... In that tuple, I've got 20, Brian, Brisbane. You can use it like that if you know what they mean, but if you want to kind of make it explicit what you mean by each of those numbers and strings, then you can make a record and say that they age 20, my name is Brian, and the location is Brisbane. Discriminate unions. So this is kind of a way of making like a single hierarchy. In object-oriented, you probably make an employee... You make an abstract class of employee. You make a concrete class of part-time and a concrete class of full-time. And they all... The part-time and full-time classes would be... would derive from the employee class. With F sharp, we've got discriminating unions. So we can just say that a part-time... Say that a part-time is a float and an end and a full-time isn't an end. And they're both employee types. So you can pass them around and you can pattern match on both of those. So it's just a short way of creating a single hierarchy. We have enums. They have to be fully qualified. So size.small, size.large. But they just work as an enum. And pattern matching is a big thing in functional programming. So we make a function called printItem. It takes either a sum or a none. And that's a type of option. So you can either give it a sum of three or you can give it a none or you can give it a sum of one, a sum of four or a none. And it prints out... In this example, it prints out what you give it. So we have a three, nothing here. We have a one, we have a four, so on. Higher order functions are a big thing in functional programming as well. So we've got a plus function, which is an operator as well. It takes an end and returns an end. Now we can carry that and say that the first parameter is five and assign that to another function. So add five. It takes a single parameter now and gives you back an end. So add five to ten gives you back fifteen. So it's a way of kind of reducing the amount of parameters that something takes and binding them to a name. This is an example of a closure in an anonymous function. So we have a function called createAdder. The best way to show it is through the add three line. So add three equals createAdder three. So what that does is it passes three as X in createAdder. Then createAdder returns a function that takes a Y and returns three plus Y. So then we can use that add three function and apply ten to it and we get back thirteen. So it's enclosed that X parameter inside that new function. We're able to compose functions as well. So for example, you'd probably write abs and then bracket X plus four in something. But we can get rid of one of those parameters and just have composed the two functions together. So we've got a left composition here. So it does an abs of plus four. So when you give it negative four, it abses out and then it pluses four to that. So you go from negative four to four and then to eight. And the same thing with the bottom there, except we're dealing with five and we're dealing with a right composition. So it does abs first, then it does the plus five to that negative four and we get back nine. To mutate something in F sharp, we've got to actually say that it's mutable. So it's got a keyword there. So you say this binding is mutable and then you can use this backwards arrow to mutate that. In the first example, in the comments there, I've got let A equals one and then I've tried let A equals two. It can't do that. F sharp just doesn't allow that. It's, bindings are always immutable unless you provide the mutable keyword. And then I've tried mutating A to make it two. I can't do that unless it's actually, unless the mutable keyword is used. So I've made an F function here anyway that takes an X pluses to that A mutable variable and stores it back into A and then it prints it out. So that works nicely. But you can't pass mutable variables around. You can only pass references around. So here I've defined a reference to 100 and there's a special syntax where estimation mark of the binding means get the value from it and the colon equals means change the value of that reference. Change what it's pointing to. So you're able to pass references around. The actual reference, the memory that it's pointing to is mutable but the value that it's pointing, the actual value that it's pointing to is mutable. So you can mutate that as you want. Munits of measure are pretty cool. This is pretty unique to F sharp. I haven't really seen this in many other languages. So you can annotate something as a measure and you can kind of use that in your program to say this is a measure. So we've got a float of m, so that's like saying we've got 10 meters. We've got 80 meters divided by 5 seconds. So that creates a new type of float meters per second. And we can add two. So we can make functions that take those measurements and it's type safe. So if you can't add one second to one meter, it just doesn't make sense. It's all defined by types. Lazy computations. In this example I've made a Fibonacci function. I've also made a time function, so it times any lazy computation. So what I've got here is I've got a Fibonacci of 35, so it takes about 521 milliseconds. As you can see, time lazy. But every other time that I've called it, it takes 0.001 seconds. So it doesn't actually compute when I say Fibonacci 35 didn't compute because I've got the lazy keyword there. It's when I do L.force up in the time lazy function that it actually gets computed. So the first time it gets computed and then it stores it in that reference. And then every other time I want to get it back, it's already there, so it takes 0.001 milliseconds. Milliseconds. There's a tricky subject of monads in here. F-sharp supports a special syntactic trigger to allow monadic computing. They call it computation expressions, which I think is pretty smart because it kind of gets around that whole monad thing. So to define a monad, you just have to create a new type, give it a delay definition, bind definition, and return definition, where delay just takes a function. Bind just takes a value in a function and return takes a value, and they all wrap them up and pass them to the next function in the chain. You probably won't understand that until this example. So here I've got, from the last one I've got, I'm defining trace equals new trace builder, so I've created a new instance of that. And now I can use trace as a keyword and I can use these new keywords, let, exclamation mark, and return. And in between each of those lines there, so in between let and return, code is happening. So that's a pretty nice way of, you know, running code in between each of your sequence of instructions. So down the bottom you can see you start tracing, it's binding to three, it's returning 3.14, and the actual result at the bottom there is 3.14. This is used in asynchronous workflows. You've probably heard about these if you enter F sharp at all. So you can define a, I've got Fibonacci here again. You can find that as a asynchronous computation, so it's printing out the Fibonacci sequence. You can run it in parallel and run it, then you can do the async.run synchronously and it'll wait for each of those. And you can see it prints out each one. Code quotations. You can, down the bottom you can see I've got an at one plus two times three and then another at. That is a, that's a quotation of F sharp code. So you can put any F sharp code. I could have put a function call in there. I could have put anything. And then I pass that to the two prefix function, which pattern matches on that quotation. So it sees that I've got a specific call to plus and then it prints, it gives back a string that puts it into prefix form. And it keeps doing that recursively until I get down the bottom there. I've got a comment that says plus one and it's put it into prefix form, which is pretty nice way of transforming your F sharp code into some other language or something. So I've actually seen quotations be used for like database query language. So it actually takes F sharp code, converts it into a query language and passes it up to a database layer, which is a pretty nice thing to do. You can actually extend modules and types. So here I've got a module and I'm putting a method onto it and I'm putting a concat map method onto it. And on the string type, I'm putting a first character member. So I just really quickly, I'll show this mono develop plugin we've got. So down the bottom you can see we've got an interactive version of F sharp running. So I can put in a value there, just press control enter and it will run down the bottom and it will give you back the type and give you back the value and you can then come down and use IntelliSense and that all works fine in mono develop, which is a really nice way of developing programs on Linux. So to compile your own, you have to use a recent version of mono.  Get it out from GitHub. Get F sharp from GitHub. Just make install it. At the moment F sharp is releasing in a code drop kind of fashion. So we can't actually see what F sharp has done since they've released it last in November. They're not accepting any patches from us. They're a really small team so I can kind of understand that. So that means when F sharp releases a new version, you have to go in and merge back in all those changes and it's slightly buggy on mono at the moment. If you download the version from Microsoft, you can actually run it on Linux and you can run it on mono, but it's a bit buggy. So I don't recommend that. I recommend making your own version. And you can help out. Thank you. So it's been good to see Pete tweeting about the talk during the talk. Are there any other questions for Brian? Oh, yep. With the definition of mono, did you have an F sharp there? What's the significance of the delay? Sorry, what definition of what? Of monads. Monads, yeah. Significance of delay. That's a good question. It is just passed in at the beginning of that workflow execution. So you can see it's just start tracing. So it just takes that whole, as far as I know, that whole sequencer is a function that gets passed into delay and we've just run it. Is that... Well, I'm used to the Haskell version where you only have bind and return to worry about, not delay as well. Yeah. I couldn't really tell you why delay is necessary, but it is in F sharp. Sorry. Nobody else? Okay, so if there are no more questions, Brian McKenna.


I am François Ribeau, head of Discovery Sports Events, the promoter of the Speedway Grand Prix, the Speedway GP. We are going to give you a tour, a backstage of our job as a promoter. Explain to you what we are doing to produce that type of event. We are in Warsaw, we have 54,000 fans behind me supporting the Polish riders and Discovery Sports Events is leading this. Around me I have kids, this is a really special day, because we have kids from Ukraine and Poland. We are inviting them at that event to give them a bit of a smile on their face. Some of them told me it was the best day of my life and this is look, the national anthem is going to start and look at what we are doing. Half of the stadium is Polish, half of the stadium is Ukrainian. This is something absolutely unique, we are unlocking the power of sport and this is what we are doing, we are super proud of this. So here we are, the racing backstage, this is the push-off area. All the bikes will come here and line up 4x4 before they enter the track. When they are there just before entering the track, we will project on screen their racing number, their classifications, even live telemetry. They are hard bits to see how they react before going on track. And Discovery Sports Events, since we became promoters of the championship we really try hard to elevate the presentation of the championship. So we have built new pit boxes which we are going to visit, come with me. So we have built from scratch 16 boxes which are going from one event to the other. It's a very good presentation, we are not so far from the MotoGP standards frankly speaking. Each rider has a box, they come with their 2 bikes, this is the bikes of the World Champion 2021. Each box is equipped with pit cameras over there to give a different experience on OTT to the fans. The riders are coming with their mechanics and so on but it's all branded with our sponsors. It's all equipped, it's all connected. The riders can follow the race here on screen. Today is a bit of a special day because we have invited in coordination with our friends from TVM Poland. We have decided to invite 100 kids from Ukraine to give them a good experience, a good moment. So they are going to stay the entire afternoon, they are connected with the riders, they can receive a car, autograph from them, then they are going to go to the fan zone and they are going to stay with us the whole evening. And I think it's something really we wanted to do, try to bring a smile on their face because those kids, they are all between 10 and 14, they have been suffering a lot. Most of them come with their mother only that stay sadly in the country. And look at them, it's really cute, they all have a cap and now I think they are going to the fan zone. It's not like MotoGP, there is no the likes of Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Suzuki. It's only a story between fans and riders and that story starts here in the fan zone. We are just three hours before we open the gates and all the riders are there and in the middle of that fan zone to give fans the opportunity to have autograph sessions with them, get a souvenir, get a selfie from them, play music, win goodies. We want to give them a good experience, that's exactly what we are doing. Logistics are absolutely key to the success of Speedway GP operations and the leadership of Discovery Sport events so we have 14 trucks like this. SGP is like a circus that we are moving from town to town. We are loading in those trucks 50 tons of equipment and 800 meter cubes. That's quite a lot of equipment and we have a logistics partner coming from Poland helping us to move all that stuff within Europe from one country to the other. So we are in the TV production area. Discovery Sport events is the promoter of the championship but we need someone to produce the world feed and we took the decision internally for the first time ever in the story of Discovery Sport events to produce Speedway GP world feed 100% in-house with the TV production resources and staff from our colleagues in Poland, TVN. Probably half of the Polish population have Speedway art heart but that proportion goes much higher inside TVN when it comes to Speedway. So we thought we could not miss the opportunity to give them the responsibility to produce the world feed which is going on Discovery Plus, which is going on TTV, which is going on TVN, which is going on TVN24, which is going in Denmark on our free-to-wear channels which is going on British hero sport, which is going in Sweden. It's a product which we have decided not to sub-license to keep the value inside the group and maximise the activation plan, the broadcast activation plan across OTT, cable and free-to-wear. This is really something, probably the first time we really thought about OTT and digital first and I give you a tour of how we are going to produce that world feed with our colleagues from TVN. Come with me. This is the broadcast centre. This is really a mix of TVN employees, Discovery Sport events employees. They are all going to produce the world feed tonight. We have about 40 cameras in total, trackside cameras, cable cam, rail camera, gymny jeep, steady cam. 40 different feeds will come into that broadcast centre. This is our live director, production manager. The producer is sitting behind and we are going to deliver that feed across the entire Warner Post Discovery Sports Network. It's quite an excitement to think that this is the first event that we are producing really 100% with in-house resources. It feels really special. So this is five o'clock. We are two hours before the start of the race. One hour before opening the gate, it's still very quiet. But two hours from now, 54,000 people will be watching the man sitting in that position. He's the referee of the competition. He's the guy controlling the starting procedure. Next to the referee, timekeeping team. This is brought by Discovery Sport events. So all the bikes are equipped with transponders. And we have two loops on the track. They are going to collect data and telemetry, so heartbeat, top speed, acceleration, reaction time. All those data is coming into the software here. It will be turned into TV graphics which will go into the TV compound which we have just visited. And will go on SGP app. It's a new app that we have launched. We wanted to improve the digital experience and all the life-scoring, all the telemetry will be available for our fans during the competition as racing is going. So exactly in the same fashion than the UCI Track Champions League, if you remember. There is a show caller. So the show caller is the one who is synchronized with the floor manager who is going to send all the riders on track on time. Synchronized with the live director, synchronized with the referee of the competition. And the show caller is following exactly a running order. We are exactly on the minute. The show starts precisely at 7pm and finishes sharp at 10pm. And the show caller is going to send on-screen all the information for the spectators. He is controlling also the sound environment. He is controlling what goes on the giant screens, on the jumbo screens to entertain the fan and keep them informed. This is a very, very, very important part of Discovery Sport events setup. That's something we brought to the competition again to elevate the fan experience but also the viewer experience. We bring our own equipment. We have developed our own software. We produce our own content. We have produced all the content in-house with Star Team at Discovery Sport. And they are going to push content across the evening and also be in control of the opening and closing ceremonies. Discovery Sport events is the host broadcaster, the producer of the Speedway GP World Feed. So we are just at the exit of the track and we will pick up the riders immediately after the performance to get their reaction, to get their feelings. So we will have a big reporter interviewing them live after each heat. And this is, I guess, where most of the emotion of the riders will come from when they take up their helmet. Joy, tears as part of the sport. This is the starting line. Everything starts and will finish here. A company from Denmark came six days ago to set up that 250 meters track below my two feet there is 5,000 tons of dirt to build that temporary track. And that track tomorrow will be dismantled and move on to Cardiff, our next big event in the Millennium Stadium. Discovery Sport events is bringing on each event that central stage. This is the stage we have built to run the opening ceremony, the closing ceremony. We have put a huge amount of big LED screens to interact with fans. So they will get immediately as the riders are crossing the line, they will immediately get the results. We are even going to do a firework at the end of the event. It's quite a big setup. It's two years that that event could not happen because of COVID. So I think tonight is going to be very, very special. With fans absolutely eager to come back in the stadium, have a good moment together and enjoy the best evening of Speedway.


The development of the beams package allows for efficient calculation of full three-dimensional electric and magnetic fields for any optical beam incident on an axisymmetric body using post-processing methods, without the need for additional time-consuming simulations. This article was authored by J. J. Kingsley Smith and F. J. Rodriguez Fortuna.


Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, narrated by James Foster. Negative and Positive Liberty Part 2 Before continuing with my discussion of negative and positive liberty, a few housekeeping details are in order. I recently learned that David Schmitz and Jason Brennan discussed conceptions of freedom over two years ago in Cato Unbound. The lead article, which appears to be based on the introduction to their book, A Brief History of Liberty, which I have not read, covers the issue of negative and positive liberty in more detail than does Brennan in Libertarianism what everyone needs to know. I therefore refer readers to that discussion for additional information about Brennan's views. I also recommend Tom Palmer's critique of the article by Schmitz and Brennan. It will become obvious, if it is not obvious already, that I agree wholeheartedly with Palmer's remarks. I would also like to call attention to Brennan's comments on the first three parts of my series. Although I do not wish to interrupt this series in midstream by responding to his criticisms in detail, I may do this later, I do wish to comment on two things. First, Brennan corrects my statement that no writings of Murray Rothbard are mentioned in these suggestions for further reading at the end of his book. He points out that Rothbard's For a New Liberty is listed under the heading Libertarian Anarchism. I stand corrected. My oversight was caused by relying on the index which gives only one listing on page 11 for Rothbard. Second, Brennan writes, At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what we call positive liberty. If, for ideological reasons, Smith and other libertarians insist on revising the English language so that only negative liberty counts as liberty, fine. Instead of positive liberty, call it ZLARP. My point is that a commitment to the value of ZLARP isn't an argument for Marxism, but an argument against it. I wish to make it clear that I have no desire to revise the English language. There have been various notions of positive liberty or freedom, some of which go back to some ancient Greek philosophers such as the Stoics, and Brennan's particular notion of positive freedom by which he means the power or ability to do something has a respectable pedigree in political philosophy as we find in the writings of Thomas Hill Green, a leading philosopher of the New Liberalism in late 19th century England. In liberal legislation and freedom of contract, 1881, Th Green defended what he called freedom in the positive sense. He contrasted this positive freedom with what he regarded as the anemic negative conception of freedom defended by classical or old liberals. As Green put it, the mere removal of compulsion, the mere enabling a man to do as he likes, is itself no contribution to true freedom. In one sense, no man is so well able to do as he likes as the wandering savage. He has no master, there is no one to say to him nay. Yet we do not count him really free because the freedom of savagery is not strength but weakness. The actual powers of the noblest savage do not admit of comparison with those of the humblest citizen of a law-abiding state.  Of compulsion by natural necessity he has plenty of experience, though of restraint by society none at all. Nor can he deliver himself from that compulsion except by submitting to this restraint. So to submit is the first step in true freedom. If the ideal of true freedom is the maximum of power for all members of human society alike to make the best of themselves, we are right in refusing to ascribe the glory of freedom to a state in which the apparent elevation of the few is founded on the degradation of the many, and in ranking modern society founded as it is on free industry all its confusion and ignorance, license and waste of effort among the most splendid of ancient republics. We shall see that freedom of contract, freedom in all the forms of doing what one will with one's own is valuable only as a means to an end. That end is what I call freedom in the positive sense, in other words, the liberation of the powers of all men equally for contributions to a common good. No one has a right to do what he will with his own in such a way to contravene this end. Green's notion of positive freedom played a crucial role in the overthrow of the negative freedom defended by classical liberals so it is understandable if modern libertarians are skeptical of efforts to incorporate positive freedom into libertarian ideology. Of course Brennan is aware of this history. His basic point is that to embrace positive liberty as an authentic kind of liberty does not necessarily mean that a government should promote positive liberty directly. Rather, positive liberty can be best furthered by the indirect means of free markets. As I noted in my last essay, the same point can be made and has been made many, many times with the straightforward argument that free markets produce the greatest material abundance for the greatest number of people. Why Brennan decided to make exactly the same point by bringing in the notion of positive liberty with all its attendant complications remains a mystery to me. Nevertheless, I have no desire to revise the English language. If some people wish to use freedom in the positive sense, so be it. But, as I also pointed out in my last essay, we should not suppose that positive and negative freedom are different species of the same genus. True, both go by the same name, but this should not blind us to the fact that positive and negative freedom signify different things altogether. The observation that the words freedom and liberty have been used in many different ways is scarcely new. No word has received more different significations and has struck minds in so many ways as has liberty. This passage from Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, 1748, was echoed several decades later by Edmund Burke. Of all the loose terms in the world, liberty is the most indefinite. And in 1895, the liberal historian Lord Acton said that liberty is an idea of which there are 200 definitions and this wealth of interpretation has caused more bloodshed than anything except theology. In his 1958 lecture and essay Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin followed Acton in referring to the more than 200 senses of this protean word recorded by historians of ideas, while noting that the meaning freedom or liberty is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist. Although Berlin did not originate the distinction between negative and positive liberty, or the terms used to describe this distinction, his influential essay played a major role in sparking a protracted debate about the distinction among modern philosophers. Ironically, perhaps, Berlin's defense of negative liberty and his criticisms of positive liberty led some critics to suppose that Berlin was defending laissez-faire capitalism. So Berlin set the record straight in his 1969 introduction to four essays on liberty. Berlin explained that he intended to clarify the meaning of freedom, not to defend negative freedom in all cases. In practice, according to Berlin, freedom understood as non-interference, like social Darwinism, was, of course, used to support politically and socially destructive policies which armed the strong, the brutal, and the unscrupulous against the humane and the weak, the able and ruthless against the less gifted and less fortunate. Berlin continued, the bloodstained story of economic individualism and unrestrained capitalist competition does not, I should have thought, today need stressing. Nevertheless, in view of the astonishing opinions which some of my critics have imputed to me, I should have made even clearer the evils of unrestricted laissez-faire. Since I am ignorant, perhaps blissfully so, of the bloodstained history of laissez-faire capitalism, I wish Berlin had done something more than mention economic conditions in Victorian England which, so far as I know, did not involve the shedding of blood. When Herbert Spencer and other libertarians argued that the poor should be able to spend their money and educate their children as they see fit, they engaged in an odious mockery of freedom, according to Berlin. The case for intervention by the state or other effective agencies to secure conditions for both positive and at least a minimum degree of negative liberty is overwhelmingly strong. Berlin concluded, the case for social legislation or planning for the welfare state and socialism can be constructed with as much validity from considerations of the claims of negative liberty as from those of its positive brother. We thus see that even defenders of negative freedom do not necessarily oppose economic intervention by government. It should also be noted that Berlin's conception of positive freedom differs substantially from Brennan's conception. Given the welter of confusion and disagreement over the meaning of freedom and liberty, libertarians should take pains to be clear about what they mean when they use those terms. They should distinguish what they mean from other meanings, and they should be extremely cautious about elevating other meanings to the same status as negative freedom within their ideology. Consider, for example, Martin Luther's celebrated discussion of Christian liberty. Based on Luther's theory of divine grace, which could not be earned by good works, this denoted an inner freedom from the spiritual demands of Catholicism. So what should libertarians say about Luther's notion of Christian liberty? Should we say, as Brennan does about positive liberty, that Christian liberty is a form of liberty, and should therefore be incorporated into libertarian ideology? Should we say, as Brennan does about positive liberty, that to embrace Christian liberty as an authentic form of liberty does not necessarily mean that a government should promote Christian liberty directly? I think not. We could pose the same questions about many different conceptions of liberty found in the history of philosophy and theology, but what would be the point of answering such questions in a roundabout Brennan-esque manner? What purpose would be served by embracing dozens upon dozens of different conceptions of liberty, as if each conception is on a par with negative liberty in libertarian theory? Rather, we should simply point out that such alternate conceptions are not relevant to libertarian theory in any fundamental sense. Period. Thank you.


As far as actually learning anything, at the end of the day, in our room, six weeks won't move, six weeks. So if we were working on a position, probably six weeks before we go on. This summer refreshment came in college. Big, huge transition from bottom wrestling from high school to college. It's a huge struggle for guys, for guys that have done it. We spent six weeks just on bottom. It's boring. But I can tell you this, they'll appreciate it. This time goes on because someone that's really good on top and you can get away and you don't have to worry about bottom. So we spent six weeks and that's why maybe we're not going to run through a thousand moves.  You're going to get a lot of thrown at you. So as we break these little things down in details, this cover in the head is probably the hardest, most critical thing to understand. There's a lot going on. And if you can't manipulate the body, then the cradle will never work in this position. I'm controlling where he does. So as I chop and I attack the head here, my elbow is staying low. But I'm also scooping it and pulling it up as this knee drops, if that makes sense to you. I keep pulling this in tight. I'm making his body bend this way where he doesn't want to. I see some of you guys do this and it's hard to understand the concept to get this knee to come up. If his knee never comes up, I could be pulling here all day long and if his knee never comes up, I'm not going to get a cradle. Alright, if I scoop this near side, which there's not a bad ride and there's nothing wrong with it at all, this is totally, it's a good ride and our guys do it soon. But I'm not going to be able to get a near side cradle off the scoop unless he falls to the mat flat and I get it. You know, that's a different concept. Alright, so there's, I see you guys trying different things and they'll all work. But this is a little different, sitting it up. So I chop, I attack the head, alright. As I attack the head, I come up high. I scoop the elbow down here. I start pulling it up to me. You can tell you that's tight. I want to pretend like I'm falling. Alright, so I keep everything pulling down. You can feel the pressure and all I'm going to do is release this tight waist because I know he's not going anywhere. I'll come underneath and get my lock. Alright, guys panic. A couple things we can turn and roll them through. Got stuff for that. Let's just say this guy panics. He goes flat. He's got good defense. He's flexible. Okay, and I scooped here. Alright, I'm going to do a walk around cradle. Guys aren't going to let me just, I don't know anybody in a big match that's going to let you clear this. They're going to toe hook you. You're not going to be able to get it. So what we're going to do is we're going to, I'm going to lock my legs around. Alright, I just lock my legs around his leg. I'm going to, if you notice where I'm at, see where I'm at. I start here. We go to the mat. So if I'm here in this position and I'm trying to walk around, he's locking me off.  Alright, perfect. Here.  And I'm going to scoop this here. This is a good finish. No matter how you get through a cradle, this is a good finish to have. Here. I'm going to scoop, lock, knee down, shift from my hips, right over. Here. Now I'm going to clear this. High leg out. Post it up. Take a big step. Re-adjust. And I'm pulling this tight too. Watch the finish when we're going to come back up over here. You're going to be, uh, feet up by the end of the dam. Alright, I get the cradle locked up on my ankle flat. I get this cradle locked up. Here. And this is what I'm talking about right now. This guy starts to wrestle me. He's not going to let me just give me yes. He's hooked me here. I'm going to clear this. So I'm going to clear this scoop. I'm fishing for it wherever I'm at. I know where it's at. Now I can pinch it. Here. Now I'm going to clear my hips. I basically lock my feet. Pull it to me. And I'll clear my hips. I'm going to show my foot through. I can't hook anything right now. I'm controlling the position again. I'm going to clear this now. I'm going to elevate. Keep me high. Here. Elbow comes too me tight. And I walk in normally. And he can tell you this is really tight, right? I'm not going to put my weight on it because I probably put it in the sleeve. Put it in the match and I'm going to pinch it. Alright? Yeah. Can you like to release it? Yeah. Turn here. So I get locked. I can't move the top. Because he came up. And I got my lock here. Right? Guy goes flat to the mat. Boom. I'm trying to do a walk on a trail. This is where I want to get. But he's stubborn. He's still hooking me. He's doing everything. Yes. Give me that. That's fine. I'm going to take that here. I'm going to turn my hips and start controlling the position. Yes. Then I'm going to turn right here. See this is where this is? Now I can switch my hips on. Well, here. These words, what I'm doing over here. I'm attacking. I'm going to clear this one. Look what I did with my shoulder. I let that slide out. I was over top. I'm in here. But I let that slide. Then I pull it tight. I'm going to go right over the top. That's all. Alright? Snake in that leg's critical. Let's go. Ready? One, two.


Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit, Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Bahrain in the Middle East. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here for the first time, covering Amazon Web Services, AWS's public sector, and the breaking news around their new region that they announced a while ago going to be deployed here in the early 2019 timeframe. In Amazon region, it really is a power source of digital. It has a track record of creating so much value and innovation, and I'm here with Teresa Carlson, who's the head, she's the chief of public sector. She's the head of Amazon Web Services Public Sector globally, except for China, that's a different territory. Teresa Carlson, great to see you. It's so great to have you here with us, oh my goodness. So I got to say, you told me a few years ago, we're going to really go international. We're doubling down outside North America. We're going to have Regis, Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, said the same, this is the strategy of Amazon, but the Middle East was your baby. This was something that you did this for a lot of time on, and a lot of decisions. Everyone wants to know, why Bahrain? Why did you choose this region, and what do you see happening, and how's it going? Well, you know, it's interesting because I have had a lot of people say why Bahrain as the first region that you put in the Middle East, because it doesn't seem like the first place somebody would choose, and the thing that kept coming back to me is, Jeff has always said we're willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time, and I think this is probably one of those times where people just didn't quite understand why Bahrain. Well, here's why. I met the Crown Prince, we talked about digital innovation and the economy here, and he immediately got that they needed to go through a digital transformation. They are not a country that has a lot of oil. They are a smaller country, and they really are a working class country that is looking for how do they have sustainment, and they've done things in the past around financial services that really got him going. They were kind of, they would spearhead things. And I think he saw the opportunity that this could help them gem-start the economy, and they could kind of be a hub for innovation. So they created the right policies around Cloud First. They created the right telecommunications policy. They were one of the first to deregulate. They had good pricing for utilities. They were friendly toward businesses, and they had kind of a culture that we felt could fit well with us, as well as our partner community. A couple of observations being the first time here. So thank you for inviting us and allowing us to cover you here. One, they're a learning culture. They speak multiple languages. Why not add programming to it? Software. Two, they like to move fast. They are just built a track in 14 months. They're not afraid to go faster. They go fast. That's Amazon. Amazon, you guys move at a speed of a whole nother cadence. And then two, I think my observation again, comparing to other areas as I look around, is that the percentage of the population of Baharanians is large. There's a lot of people who live here that are native and they're talented. Well, one of the things you said that I think is key is that they move fast. They're used to being frugal on how they do things and they're very scrappy. And that really fits with their culture. Because again, they have to do things different than some of the other Middle East countries that are not quite as rich. But they had this culture of really moving fast and they took down blockers like crazy. I mean, as we came in and we're making a decision on- Who are some of those blockers? Stumbling blocks? Are they more hurdles or are they? They were stumbling blocks, but we had to really come in and talk about why telecommunications policies and pricing had to change. Because in an old school model of Telco, there's a lot of just a lot of big charges. And when you have a digital economy coming in, if you think about you have a few transactions for a lot of money in an old school, in a new school world, you have millions of transactions for a little bit because you've got to be able to transact a lot. And that's the way your telecommunications industry has got to be set up. As well as you want it deregulated, they had already deregulated it. So they worked with us to open it up to set the policies. And now, but Telco, who is one of our major telecommunications partners here, is doing managed services on AWS. They've gotten all kinds of people trained. And it's just an example of how they look at an opportunity and say, we have got to innovate and make changes if we want to have a sustainment in the 21st century economy. And you guys are bringing a lot of goodness to the table. They're quick learners. They're smart. They've got the entrepreneurial vibe. They're not afraid to put some funds of funds together and get some professional investment going on. So that's going to level up the entrepreneurship base. The question is, when will the region be ready? How's that going? It's under construction.  Well, why would they need sustainable energy? They got oil. Well, they... Why burn it if you can sell it? That's what the British prime... Well, they do and they've had a new fine but I think they have to get to the new oil that they found. But they're not... I think what I understand they're not banking on that. They're going to bank on a digital economy. So they know this is kind of a guaranteed way to really grow what they're doing and bringing out outside others. There's two big elements they're doing. One is they're creating policies for data that allows other countries to put their data here safely and with the right laws. That is game changing. So that's one big thing they're doing. The second thing is they have this spirit of kind of teaching and training so they're getting other countries to come in and talk to them about what they're doing. And remember John, they're already moving the government to the cloud and they don't even have their cloud here yet. So they've done all their homework and they're already moving workloads into the cloud that they don't feel need to be here but they've looked at security design, compliance practices and they're like, we're moving, we're not waiting. They're cloud first. They're cloud first. Okay, so when do you expect the construction to be ready, ballpark? I know you can't probably give an exact date but when... We expect it'll be ready by Q1 of 2019. And we're excited it's going to be one of the most innovative regions. And by the way, I don't know if you saw I had a big star on the map today in my presentation. We have literally at AWS had a big hole in the world with no region in the Middle East or Africa and now we're going to have this region. So it is exciting and I know that the region itself is really anxious to get going. Well, not only are you an amazing executive. I've seen you work. I've seen what you've done. Checking the boxes, doing the hard work, getting down and dirty and doing hustling and scrapping but you also made some good strategic bets. This one really is successful because I think two things, you bring a region to the area for AWS. But you guys are doing it in a way that's partnering with the government. You're actually as industry contributing. And I think that's the case there that's going to probably be recognized down the road when people figure that out but that's going to be a great one. But the cultural win for you is pretty amazing. And I have to say yesterday I went to the women breakfast that you hosted. And I've never been at a women breakfast and I've been to a lot of them because I like to be involved where I get kicked out of a table because they need the space. So it was so crowded. Sorry guys, you're out. I got booted but I didn't leave the room. I had to just move on. They had workshops. Take a minute to explain the women breakfast you have because I think that was extraordinary and a proof point that the narrative of the region, women don't go to school, all this nonsense that's out there, take a minute to clarify this is a cultural shift. There might be some cultural things going on. Well, the women are here. Hashtag smart is beautiful. They are like amazing. And they are very educated. And in fact, 53% of the government workforce here are females at high level jobs too. They're not just low level. And I actually met with the king this week who told me that he was able, he has the first Supreme Court justice that's a female in the Middle East. And he said it was against culture, but he did it because he said this woman was so amazing and she was so talented and she fit the role. She had the job description down. And he said it's gone great. So the women here are smart. They're talented, they're educated and they actually get degrees in computer science. Here in Bahrain, 60% of the computer science students are females. Now, what is not happening is they're not always getting out and getting these jobs. And the second thing is right now, we're still working with them to teach the right skills. A lot of the skills are actually outdated tech skills. And I know John, you see this too, even in the US. You have universities that are still teaching the wrong skills for cloud. So we are working with them at the university and the high school level to actually teach and certify on the right skills. But the women are talented, they're amazing. There are some cultural things that we're kind of going to work together on, but there's really no reason we can't have an amazing and talented workforce of women here in the Middle East. We had Mohamed on who's the chief executive of the IGA, the information e-government authority. He told me that any citizen can get a certification for free in this country. Yes, oh my gosh. So I've never seen this. So our partner here, Tim Keen, who's like the labor fund about a year and a half ago agreed that any citizen that got a certification on AWS, it would be 100% paid for. And then we just announced today that they're actually also going to pay 100% of Bahraini companies that want to move to the cloud. They are serious about this. I mean, they are serious. And they are being a role model. And again, John, why are they doing it? They are doing it because they realize that they want to be a true digital economy and grow their businesses here and create new. They've got to move faster because they're smaller. They got to be scrappier. They got to be faster. They got to do things a little bit different. The other thing I want to point out, you can't really see it on the camera, but behind us you have essentially a mix of commercial and public sector. The show here is so crowded. Couldn't get into the keynote speech. Overflow room was packed. This is attracting everyone from the Gulf region here. Not just public sector, but commercial businesses. Absolutely. This is not a one time thing. This is a pent up demand is here. What do you expect is going to happen when the region gets here built out? Well, if you look at all the partners around, I mean, like you have Trend Micro over here and others, many of them have come because they're excited about us putting a region here. And Andy Jassy and I both have had many of our partners say when are you going to have a region in the Middle East? So we expect a lot more partners are going to come just like you. They're going to see the value of being here. But additionally, I don't know what we're going to do for a conference or summit because we've already outgrown the space. And you're right, we have delegates here from Jordan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, of course Bahrain, Kuwait, the US. So many different groups are being represented here. And I think also South Africa. We have some folks from South Africa. Well, theCUBE is here. We're making great observations and great commentary. I got to say that, you know, you even attracting amazing talent from the US besides theCUBE, General Keith Alexander was here. John Wood from Telos and all these partners, all visionaries can see the opportunity. This is important. You're not being misunderstood by the people who know Amazon. No, I agree. And you made a point earlier that I think is important which this, even though I'm kind of here for this conference leading it, this is not a public sector conference. It's a AWS summit. It has tons of commercial, tons of public sector. They'll think that's a little bit different when you get to some of these countries. They are more government led. So that is the reason it's important to have this relationship with government if you really want it. But you don't want to surprise them and you want to work with them to help make sure that they and the country are successful. Well, Teresa, it's been fun to observe and watch your successes continue to raise the bar, here in your job. This is a whole nother level when you talk about really filling a hole, you see a hole, you feel it. So I heard someone say that once in a motivational speech on it was you. You see a hole, you feel it. Oh, we got a hole in the Middle East, feel it. You have a region here. You got great success in Washington DC, CIA, other governments, congratulations. And thanks for all your support. Thank you, John, for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Live coverage here. We are here in Bahrain in the Middle East of CUBE's first time. I'm John Furrier, your host here, covering the exclusive Amazon Web Services Summit and covering the historic launch of the new region in the Middle East. This should change the game. This is going to be a digital hub. It's going to have impact to entrepreneurship, economics and society. We'll be covering it to CUBE. Stay with us for more after this short break.