Guten Abend Berlin! Guten Abend Deutschland! Guten Abend Europa! Guten Abend to all of you who are watching the live screen, that's live streaming, hoping that something good is beginning here tonight. Guten Abend, even to those few people who are watching the live stream, fearing that something good is happening here tonight. Yes, Europe will be democratized or it will disintegrate. This is not a scare tactic, it's a fact. The European Union's disintegration is happening. New divisions, new walls are springing up along the borders of our nations, inside our societies, in people's minds and hearts. And yes, it is scary. But in our video, as you saw, we chose to depict this reality with soothing images, almost bland images, images that look a bit like a commercial. At the moment when we want that if democratization does not proceed, the European Union will disintegrate. We didn't show you images of electrified fences, discord and misanthropy, but we showed you a beautiful opening yellow flower. Fear is not our weapon, in sharp contrast to Europe's establishment, that rules through fear. Our weapon is reason mixed with liberal doses of hope and endless determination. And our radical message is very simple and is directed, not necessarily to those of us who are in the folks' unit tonight, but it's directed to those who are probably not watching the live stream, they are exhausted after a long day's work, they are depressed, they are watching some reality show on television trying to drown their anxieties and forget about their trials and tribulations, those who doubt that their rulers know what they are doing but they don't know where to turn to and they don't believe in politics. It is them, the majority suffering in quiet desperation that we must reach out to with a perfectly simple radical message. Democracy was bleached out of the European Union's decision making process. The demos has long ago been taken out of democracy and this is why the European Union is disintegrating tonight, today, now. If we do nothing, the European Union's reconstruction will lead to a version of the 1930s. This is why we need the search of democracy to prevent this. We have a historic duty to do so. We have a duty to the future to be able to say in 20 years time we were here and we acted when we were asked by children and grandchildren what did you do to stop the post-modern version of the 1930s. Now this is why we refuse to retreat into our nation states. This is why we, who are the European Union's greatest, harshest critics, we say that they return to fortress Germany, to fortress France, to fortress Britain, to fortresses everywhere in Europe. It's going to make life everywhere in Europe nastier, more brutish, and I fear, shorter. As Rosa Luxemburg once said, without democracy, life in every public institution withers away becomes a caricature of itself and bureaucracy rises as the only deciding factor. That was Rosa Luxemburg. It's what happened in the Soviet Union, as Rosa feared. It is what is happening to the European Union today. Earlier today a journalist asked me in the conference, Janis, you failed in Greece, you are a minority in Europe. How can you hope to change anything? I replied, throughout last year, it is quite true that in the Eurogroup I was in a minority of one. Even if you are in a minority of one, the truth is the truth.  Our societies, our Europe, our planet. But let me share a feeling with you. Tonight, I don't feel I'm in a minority. Not in the folks mood. Tonight in this magnificent temple of progressive politics and culture that is providing us so generously with a historic home for our first tentative step. Tonight we stand together, united. We come from all over Europe. We spend the whole day today in deliberations. People from the north, the south, the east, the west, the core, the periphery, the clave countries, Catholic countries, Protestant countries, and the north of those countries which is Catholic in its protestations called Greece. From across borders, from different party lines and with different views of the good society. We are united, however, by these differences. We have gone beyond the campaign for solidarity with Greece, with Ireland, with Portugal. We are here in solidarity with Europe. We are here in solidarity with the peoples of Europe. With a majority of Europeans whose instinct, even if they are not here tonight, even if they don't care about our kind of politics, nevertheless whose instinct is telling them that there is something rotten in the European Union. That a great deceit is threatening their lives, their future, their communities, the very idea of Europe as a realm of shared prosperity. The great deceit, right in the heart of our disintegrating European Union, is very simple. We have a top-down political decision-making process which is being presented as apolitical, technical, procedural, neutral. Why? To deny Europeans democratic control over their money, finance, working conditions, environment and communities. How did we allow as Europeans who cherish democracy? How did we allow this to happen? The answer lies in the origins of the European Union. Friends, ladies and gentlemen, the European Union began life as a cartel of heavy industry. You know what it was called? The European Community of Coal and Steel. Later it co-opted auto industry, the farmers, large landowners, through the common agricultural policy and so on. It was a cartel determined to fix prices. And to redistribute the profits of that cartel through bureaucracy located in Brussels. And you know, like all cartels, whether it's the European Union, OPEC, all cartels have administrators who see genuine democracy as a threat to their authority. Patiently, methodically, a process of depoliticizing decision-making was put in place. National politicians were rewarded handsomely for acquiescing to this depoliticization of political decisions in Brussels. And anyone who dared oppose this process of depoliticization was labeled un-European and was treated like a jarring dissonance, like a nuisance. The price of this deceit was not merely the end of democracy, but also a vicious circle between authoritarianism and economic crisis, just like in the video. The more they asphyxiated democracy, the less legitimate their political authority became. The less legitimate their political authority became, the stronger the recession. The stronger the recession, the greater their need for more authoritarianism. A never-ending circle. Now, what is fanaticism? Allow me to define fanaticism. It consists of redoubling your efforts when you know you understand that your project has failed. That's what fanaticism is. Exactly what a European Union has been doing. It's establishment since 2008, our generation's 1929. Now, this is why Europe is the sick patient of the global economy. This is why we have not recovered as a European Union economy compared to the United States, China and others. This is the unseen process by which Europe's crisis is turning our peoples inwards against one another, amplifying pre-existing jingoism and xenophobia. The privatization of anxiety, the fear of the other, the nationalization of ambition, the renationalization of policy, the end of the narrative of shared prosperity, the portrayal of democracy as a luxury reserved for the creditors. This is the vicious cycle that is destroying Europe today. But enough about them. Let us now talk about us, shall we? Who are we? What is the end? Are we a left-wing movement? What exactly are we up to? I don't know about you, but I am proudly left-wing. But it is important to think that the end is aiming to be much more than that. Let me remind you, those of us, especially who are of an older generation, and remember the 70s and the 80s. Back then, liberal Democrats and people of the left, like me and some of you, would indulge in heated debate, heated argument, on whether capitalism is compatible or is not compatible with democracy, whether capitalism is a prerequisite for democracy or an enemy of democracy. These were the debates we used to have with liberal Democrats. But events in Europe have made this debate obsolete. The reason? The European Union's establishment, in order to build the single market and the eurozone, has explicitly rejected the basic principles of liberal democracy. Certainly of social democracy. Remember, this is quite well known, about a year ago I was told in the first Eurogroup that I attended as the elected finance minister of a member state of the European Union by a certain gentleman whose office is not far from here. I was told elections cannot be allowed to change the economic policies that the previous governments of Greece were committed to. What a great gift to the Chinese Communist Party, who believes the same. Not about Greece, but about economic policy. Now I have a question for any genuine liberal Democrat of the center-left, the center-right, the right. Can you live with this idea that elections cannot be allowed to change anything? Is this consistent with your principles about democracy? I don't believe it is. So we intend to build a broader coalition that embraces even liberal Democrats, especially liberal Democrats, who understand that liberal democracy has now been jettisoned from the heart of Europe. Are we radical?  But we are radical in a manner that liberal Democrats must also be in order to remain liberal Democrats. Friends, when you are right, you can never be too radical. And when you are wrong, you can never be too conservative. So this is what DM is about. A broad coalition of Democrats, radical Democrats, left-wing Democrats, social Democrats, green Democrats, liberal Democrats. The purpose of which is to put the demos back into democracy against the European Union establishment that sees people power as a threat to its authority, just like the video, the way the video began. Now at this point it is important to clarify this. Our harsh criticism of the Brussels and Frankfurt bureaucracy does not extend to the many, many good people working there in these institutions. In a sense, what we are calling for, the democratization of the European Union, is a prerequisite for their own emancipation. Working for the people, not against the people, working for the people with their informed consent would be a wonderful change for the European Union staff currently unable to do so, constrained as they are, within an authoritarian pseudo-technocratic straitjacket. Now what do we mean when we speak of democratizing the European Union? How will this help arrest its disintegration? Our immediate priority is full transparency in decision-making. A few rays of light are capable of piercing the darkness inside the rooms in Brussels and in Frankfurt where important decisions are made for everyone. So we begin with a very simple demand. We demand the live-streaming of the European Council, of echo-fing of the Eurogroup meetings and we demand at the same time full disclosure of trade negotiation documents, publication of the Minister of the European Central Bank, like the American Central Bank or the British Central Bank do, nothing too radical, very soon after those boards meet. And we are going to start the campaign beginning tomorrow morning, as part of which we are going to ask the President of the European Union Council, the President of the Eurogroup and the President of the European Central Bank immediately to start throwing rays of light in their deliberations to be live-streaming their meetings and publishing minutes. And if they don't want to do this, they must answer to European citizens what are their reasons for not wishing those who pay their salaries and vote them in, supposedly, why shouldn't they know what arguments are being used and what decisions are being made. This is an action for tomorrow, for the day after, for this week. Something can be done immediately. In the medium term, our priority is to present as dim after very long and serious deliberation amongst all Europeans who want to join us in that deliberation. We want to present detailed policy proposals for Europeanising and therefore stabilising the crisis of debt, of banking, of extremely low investment. Germany today has the lowest level of investment in the last 45 years. This is a scandal for a rich country where interest rates are negative. So we are going to be presenting fully-fledged comprehensive proposals on how to stabilise the crisis of debt, low investment, banking, poverty, which is rising almost everywhere, fuelling nationalist movements and misanthropy, as well as migration. There is no contradiction in saying that we need to Europeanise the solution to this crisis of debt, banking, of low investment and so on, while at the same time suggesting that this Europeanisation and efficient addressing of this crisis and of these forces of deflation and stagnation, there is no contradiction in saying that this process of Europeanisation is consistent, not only consistent but enabling in the process of restoring national sovereignty, municipal sovereignty, sovereignty to parliaments, to city councils and to various communities. There is no contradiction there. It is a fallacy to think that Europeanising realms like those must come at a further loss of national sovereignty. The opposite is the case. The deeper those crisis, the less sovereignty the Bundestag has, the less sovereignty the Greek parliament has, the less sovereignty the city of Berlin, the city of Barcelona, the city of Lisbon has. Looking further ahead, our longer term goal, once Europe's various crises have been stabilised, is to convene a constitutional assembly where Europeans will deliberate on how to bring forth by 2025, that's the 25, next to the end, an authentic European democracy, featuring a sovereign parliament that respects national self-determination and sharing power with national parliaments, regional assemblies and municipal councils. And to do this, we have two or three years to establish a constitutional assembly where representatives elected from across the breadth and width and height of the European Union debate what constitution we want to run and rule over the affairs that are common throughout Europe. These are our goals, but how do we organise ourselves in order to achieve them? We consider the model of national parties which then form flimsy alliances at the level of Brussels, European parliament, to be an obsolete system. While the fight for democracy from below is necessary at the level of municipalities, rebel cities like Barcelona, La Coruña and so on, it is never very less, you feel insufficient if it is conducted without an international strategy throughout Europe. European democrats must come together first, forge a common agenda and then find ways of connecting it with local communities and at the regional and national levels. We are allergic to lack of transparency, to opacity. We have learnt the hard way that hierarchies breed authoritarianism even amongst comrades. We opt for a horizontal organisation based on self-organisation, extensive use of digital platforms, town hall meetings around particular themes leading to pan-European gatherings like this one for particular themes like for instance economic policy, sustainable green development, migration and so on and so forth. And in other words, aims to provide the infrastructure for a pan-European coalescence of green radical, social and liberal democrats. What its members will want to do with this infrastructure that we are trying to set up, how our deliberations will manifest themselves in terms of actions and electorally in our cities' region states at the level of Brussels. All this we shall be deciding collectively. It will be complicated, but that's life. Another journalist asked me today how did we intend to keep bad people out of DM? It's a good question. The answer is only through the gatekeeping function of our manifesto. Its clear statements of principle and aspirations is the magnet and the filter. We don't believe anything else is needed. We have four principles in our manifesto. Out there you can read it. First, no European people can be free as long as another's democracy is violated. Second, no European people can live in dignity as long as another is denied it and it is crushed by depression. No European people can hope for prosperity if others can't share in that hope. And fourthly, no European people can grow out basic goods for its weakest of citizens without human development, without ecological balance and without a determination to change society, not the planet's climate. These are our principles. As for the aspirations that drive us forward, we are inspired by a Europe of reason, liberty, tolerance and imagination, a Europe that is made possible by comprehensive transparency, real solidarity and authentic democracy. We aspire to a democratic Europe in which all political authority stems from Europe's sovereign peoples. A transparent Europe where all decision-making takes place under the citizens' scrutiny. Today we have transparent citizens and opaque governments. We must reverse this. We aspire to a united Europe whose citizens have as much in common and cross-nations as within them. A realistic Europe that sets itself the task of radical yet achievable democratic reform. A decentralized Europe that uses central power to maximize democracy in workplaces, towns, cities, regions and states. A pluralist Europe of regions, ethnicities, faith, nations, languages and cultures. And a egalitarian Europe that celebrates difference and ends discrimination based on gender, skin color, social class or sexual orientation. A culture of Europe that harnesses its peoples' cultural diversity and promotes not only its invaluable heritage but also the work of Europe's dissident artists, musicians, writers and poets. A social Europe that recognizes that liberty necessitates not only freedom from interference but also the basic goods that render one free from need and from exploitation. A productive Europe that directs investment into a shared green prosperity. A sustainable Europe that lives within the planet's means minimizing its environmental impact and living as much fossil fuel in the earth. An ecological Europe engaged in genuine worldwide green transition. A creative Europe that releases the innovative powers of its citizens' imagination. A technological Europe pressing new technologies in the service of solidarity. A historically-minded Europe that seeks a bright future without hiding from its past. An internationalist Europe that treats non-Europeans as ends in themselves. A peaceful Europe de-escalating tensions in its east and in the Mediterranean acting as a bulwark against the silence of militarism and expansionism. Never forget we don't forget that war does not determine who is right but who is left. An open Europe that is alive to ideas, people and inspiration from all over the world with its defenses and borders as signs of weakness that spread in security in the name of security. A liberated Europe where privilege, prejudice, deprivation and the threat of violence all those wither allowing Europeans to be born into fewer stereotypical roles to enjoy even chances to develop their potential and to be free to choose life, work and society. Is DiEM utopian? Well, maybe. But let me tell you this it is far less utopian than the establishment's attempt to hang on to the currently disintegrating anti-democratic cartel-like European Union. And in any case our utopian movement is the only alternative to the terrible dystopia unfolding before our eyes as the anti-democratic European Union disintegrates. Friends the real danger is not that we shall aim too high and miss. The real danger is that we train our eyes on the floor and end up there. So tonight I will celebrate but from tomorrow morning let's shake Europe gently compassionately


On Wednesday, Florida's Republican Governor Rick Scott officially declared his state's opiate epidemic a public health emergency. This after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared a national opiate epidemic. For more on this, we are joined by Sam Kinones. He's the author of Dreamland, as well as a journalist, former LA Times reporter, author and storyteller. And he joins us today from Los Angeles. Thank you, Sam. My pleasure. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. I want to ask you about this opiate epidemic, and I'm really playing devil's advocate here. But when I see the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, saying there's an opiate epidemic, I'm suspicious. And I think back to the crack epidemic. I remember in the 80s, crack was insurmountable. And we locked up a lot of people of color because of the crack epidemic. When I hear of Governor LaPage of Maine, complaining about people of color coming in to his state in Maine to have sex with our women and then sell them drugs, specifically opiates, I'm suspicious when I hear that there's an opiate epidemic. Is there an opiate epidemic in this country? There certainly is. It's based on deaths. The number of deaths have surpassed the number of first of all, surpassed the number of traffic accident fatalities back in Nevada, sub-2008, I think it was. And just recently, of course, they surpassed the number of deaths due to AIDS at the worst year in 1995 of that epidemic. Cars getting safer? And are we curing AIDS? Yeah, that's part of it. But it's also in the history of modern America. We have never had a year when there's another accidental form of death that overtook automobiles. So that's part of it, certainly. But these are hitting stratospheric new levels for the country. And again, of course, in 2015, there were more deaths due to opiate overdoses than there were deaths due to AIDS in 1995. So the reason for calling it such is because it is the worst drug surge we've had in modern America if you're measuring by the number of deaths due to overdose. That's, I think, where people are coming down on this. Can you give me a number? Oh, I can't remember what the latest numbers are, but it's in the tens of thousands. We're talking about 35,000, 37,000. I think it was. The numbers I don't have the numbers handy. But it's very significant numbers of people. And truthfully, I think that's an undercount. The reason I think that's an undercount is because a lot of this is happening in small counties, counties that don't have really good death investigation systems. They have coroners. They have who are also maybe funeral directors. Maybe they're also ER docs with a full-time job. They don't have a lot of money. They don't have budgets for testing everybody who toxicology reports. I think there have been reports out that somewhere, perhaps between 20 and 30% of the deaths that actually should be counted are not. So it's likely that it's an undercount. But nevertheless, we've definitely had an enormous increase in deaths. And these track almost step-by-step. They track with the amount of opiate painkillers that have been prescribed by doctors all across the country since the mid-1990s. You can see them, the two numbers moving in a lock. Right. I want to get to that. The number of opiates and the number of people dying. Right. There's a twin story in Dreamland. One about the gangs who deal opiates and then the cartels, the illegal Mexican cartels. I want to get to that in a second. I just want to push back on this for a second about people of color and the need to lock them up. Because that is the twin story. There's, is it Purdue Pharmaceuticals invented OxyCotin? And then we have the Mexican drug cartels who are dealing their own OxyCotin. So I want to break this down. Are people dying more from heroin overdoses or OxyCotin overdoses? OxyCotin is called the Wilbilly heroin, right? Right. It depends when you're talking about. I think for the first part of this scourge of the epidemic, I would be very comfortable calling it an epidemic. It was mostly pills people were dying from. And I think one of the things that happened was that this affected, this is all virtually all white people, number one. It's very important to keep that in mind. All the people getting addicted, I would say 90% are white. This happened for a long time in Appalachia and certain Rust Belt areas. That's kind of where the ground zero for this whole problem was Southern Ohio, Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, places like that. What years are we talking about? Beginning in about the mid 90s, 96, 97, 98 and really running up into the 2000s for sure. And we're talking about OxyCotin addiction that bled into heroin addiction. Yes, but it was really OxyCotin addiction that people were dying from that. And that was, opiate prescribing was rampant. It was without any thought. It was and huge amounts. We unleashed an unprecedented amount of opiates on the country in the form of prescription painkillers. First, the smaller doses would be Vicodin and Percocet and mothers like that. But really it was OxyCotin.  The other drugs Vicodin and Percocet contain Acetaminophen or Tylenol. These are combinations that prevent you from really developing an enormous tolerance and daily habit to these drugs because as you do that, you're destroying your internal organs. And so people didn't really die so much of that because it was very hard for you to get up to very high tolerance. It would be very dangerous for you. But OxyCotin includes none of that for the first 14 years of its life until 2010. And so it takes people to very, very high tolerances. And that's where it gets very dangerous. And people begin experimenting with too much. And that's also, however, why people begin then looking for substitutes because on the street, if you can't buy this from your doctor, your doctor cuts you off, your insurance cuts you off, whatever, you have to buy this on the street. It becomes very expensive, a dollar, a milligram, and you're usually up to 200, 300 milligrams a day of this stuff. That's when you begin to look for very cheap substitutes, equally potent or more so, but cheaper, much cheaper. And that is where Mexican heroin enters the picture. We would not have a heroin problem today were it not for OxyCotin. That I think is very, very clear. We would not have the kind of heroin problem we have today were it not for very cheap heroin coming from Mexico. We would not have this problem say back in the 1970s when a lot of our heroin was coming from the Far East, from Turkey, from Burma, from Thailand. It got here weak and cheap and expensive. It was not really much of a substitute for high levels of OxyCotin, but Mexican heroin comes to our country very, very cheap, extraordinarily cheap, and it's very potent and now very prevalent as well. And so as people began to get up to those very high levels, began to look around for a cheaper substitute, and they found it in very cheap Mexican heroin. And this is a story that has repeated now all across the country. But for a long time, people were dying mainly from prescription pills in combination with other stuff, maybe also Xanax, Benzos, and that kind of saying, but they were dying mostly from that. Now, as prescribing has somewhat tapered off, as the pill mills have been shut down, these kinds of things, then now it's heroin that people are dying from from Mexico. In your book, Dreamland, you cover the cities in America that are being devastated by this epidemic. And you've also spent years, I believe you lived in Mexico from 94 to 2004. Right. I was doing all kinds of stuff down there in Mexico, covering economics, politics, a lot of things, but you you learn a lot just roaming the country. What is an opiate? It's a drug derived from the opium poppy, which is the first drug, I believe, that humans as a species, we as a species, harnessed as a first plant, I'm sorry, that we as a species harnessed as a drug. Going back thousands of years, I mean, the first production of the center of opium poppies was thieves in ancient Egypt. That's where we get the opiate seeding comes from that. And through the years, through the centuries, the millennia, really, we have figured out that these drugs are enormously wonderful pain killers, merciful pain killers, truly, and then also extraordinarily enslaving addictive drugs as well. And in the 1800s, we come up with, we derived morphine out of that, out of opium, and we also come up with the hyperdermic needle. And at the end of the 1800s in Germany, they create the thing called, that they eventually called heroin. And that becomes, that really has no use in medicine. It's only survived, heroin is only survived because of the underworld. It's a magnificent drug, drug traffickers. It's, it's very cheap to make. It's easy to condense. It's easy to dilute. And when you get it, it's unlike other opiates, it sends you up and down very quickly. So you have to be buying heroin two, three, four, five times a day. So as a trafficker, you have a customer who buys from you over and over in a one day, one day period. So that's the goldmine right there. Now, for a long time, opium was, was, was opium products were mainly smoked. It was only because of traffickers diluting the heroin that we began to actually inject it. And that began really in New York City with Italian mob type traffickers, diluting the heroin so badly that you had, you could no longer really smoke it. Normally you can smoke the stuff. An opioid you can smoke and then that's opium. And that's a better high than heroin because it hasn't been watered down. No, it can be, it can be the same, the same kind of high. If heroin is the molecular structure of heroin, what it does to your body, to your brain, I should say, not your body, what it does to your brain is it takes it high and then crashes you very similar. I was a crime reporter during the crack years. That's what crack used to do. That's why crack was so wonderful for, for, for, for, for traffickers, for dealers on the street, because they knew that every guy that they, they sold to was going to have to buy from them three, four, five, six times a day. And that's first came opium. Is that correct? Then came morphine. Then came heroin. Opium is something you smoke. Then they isolated it down to morphine, which is something you inject. And that has medicinal values. What is the difference between an opium high and a morphine high? I'm not sure I could tell you that, honestly. I don't know anybody who has an eye on both of them. Is there anything medicinal to smoking opium? If you're in pain? I think it's a, it's a pain killer. If these are all pain killers, that's, that's their main function. That's their main beneficial use to, to humankind. They don't have, believe any other medicinal. If you're in a hospital and you're dying of cancer, smoking opium would relieve the pain. Theoretically, yeah. They wouldn't give it to you, but yeah. They would instead shoot morphine into you, which would relieve the pain. Yes. Actually, morphine now comes in a pill. So it's not shooting anybody, but yeah. And very cheaply too, by the way. It's wonderful, very cheap pain killer. 10 cents a pill or something like that. And you get addicted to both? I, yes. Right. You can, Sheriff. You can get addicted to it. Is it psychologically and physiologically addictive? Or both. Both. But certainly physiologically addictive. That's the difference here. Physiologically. They change, they change the brain chemistry in a significant way. That brain surgeons would be far better. Neurosciences would be far better able to, to describe to you, but certainly that's, that's, that's what opiates do. Is morphine used for end of life issues? In other words, if you're going in for major surgery, they're not going to give you morphine because they're afraid you're going to become addicted to it. Is that a fair statement? Uh, no, I mean, soldiers have been given morphine for, for many, many, many, many years. I think, I think no, it's, it's, I was, I just had a heart attack and I was given a morphine, you know, during my operation. So I think morphine is still very much in use and as well as should be. So these are good drugs to use in certain situations. What about the, so did you find it addictive? Did you, do you crave it? No, I just had very little amount and they didn't give me any to take home. Okay. That's a big difference here. Okay. And you're saying that heroin came from the streets of New York City. This is fascinating. You're saying that heroin came from the streets of New York City because the mafia was watering down. Well, no, it was invented by Bayer in, in Germany really. The, um, it's a long story, but basically it was invented by Bayer in, in Germany. It then was pervaded by doctors as a non-addictive painkiller. And it was used in a lot of, uh, the, the elixirs, I guess you might say at the late 1800s, early 1900s until they began to feel realized that it was really addictive. And then it becomes more, uh, the, the, the cost and benefits of heroin, the costs are far outweigh the benefits. And so it really should have been pushed to the back of the shelf, figuratively speaking, and left it, right? Well, um, it, it wasn't because, um, the, the underworld discovered it. And in, particularly in New York City, that's where all the heroin manufacturers were when the drug was legal. And it, it remained as kind of the center and it began to get a lot of the opium from the Far East. Once again, why was heroin more attractive to the mob than opium?  And heroin, uh, takes you up high and down within a space of a few hours. And so at each crash, you need more. Um, and so you are, uh, creating people who need to buy your product three, four, five times a day. At the same time, it's very easy to conceal. It's very condensable, which is one reason why bikes, for example, a wall will not stop heroin from coming through the Southwest border. It's very condensable. It's also easy to cut so you can, you can take a kilo and cut it into three, four kilos and it will still be able to be sold. And then at the same time, um, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's easy to, you can cut it and make a whole lot more money than you have done, than with, with, uh, with other drugs. So you're creating a faithful, I would say enslaved, uh, uh, uh, customer base. It's very cheap. It's condensable. It's easy to, to make easy and cheap to make. And all of this was, was why this drug that really we should not even be talking about in medical terms, there's no reason to ever use heroin. I don't think there's other drugs that do better job of killing pain without the risk. Right. When you say they're able to cut it, in other words, they're, they're putting diluted. They're diluting it with like baby powder or whatever. Yes. I see. Okay. And the heroin epidemic blew up, you say, in the sixties, the seventies, when did it, I mean, we've had various surges of heroin, heroin use. Charlie, Charlie Parker, uh, was, uh, for example, was one of the great purveyors of heroin in American, uh, underworld culture or, or demimone culture, uh, because, uh, he was such an amazing saxophone player is horribly addicted, died at 35. His body looked like he was at 55 at the time. Uh, Charlie Parker created a whole world of jazz that, that in which people began to use, uh, heroin because bird did. If everybody were allowed to grow opium in their backyard and could have pure heroin, would it be safer? Would they be less likely to overdose? No, no. Well, no, they would be more likely to overdose. It seems to me that they would, they would, uh, well, you would see this though. You would see people who sought and did, and thought about only heroin, talked about only about heroin, thought and did nothing, but, but their lives, their entire lives revolved around heroin because every day they had to do it four or five times a day. And this is what distinguishes heroin addicts from people who are addicted to other opiates. Other opiates don't take you up and down so quickly. Methadone, for example, um, very gradual thing that they can lead you throughout the day. It's still very addictive, but you don't end up talking about dope all day long. You can actually function as a, as a human being in the world instead of constantly, this is, this is the, the common denominator among all. Uh, heroin, I actually just want to talk about dope all day long. They have no interest in anything else. It's just as big kind of the most boring people in the world basically is because all they want to do is talk about the next time they buy dope or what good dope they had or where to get the next dose. Well, I've heard that Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died from a heroin overdose, and Lenny Bruce, who died from a heroin overdose. One narrative is that they were able to function on heroin that Philip Seymour Hoffman was able to do death of a salesman every night. Well, sure.  You can, you can, there are, there, yeah, sure. People can function on it, but you must always be doing it all day long. Okay. I just want to make sure I understand what heroin is before we get to oxycontin. The image in the movies is the guy shooting up, vomiting, passing out. I've been told that's not really what chippers do that they, that they use heroin and they get through the day and they're able to write novels and there's a lot of that. I think every, I would, would, you know, I think Charlie Parker was a perfect example of that, honestly, that, that here was one of the most creative improvisational minds of our, of our century. And he was a slave. He was a slave to that drug and he, and a lot of younger guys got it enslaved to it as well. I'd be hard-pressed for me to say that he was more creative when he was on, was on, when he was on dope than he would not, than he would have been had he not been on dope. Obviously I'm not pushing people to try heroin. I just am suspicious of drug wars and, you know, Eric Clapton wrote Layla on heroin. And my question is people are enslaved to alcohol and people are enslaved to heroin. Alcohol, you can live longer because you can go to a bar and grab a quick drink and then go back to work.  No, I think it doesn't destroy your body. It destroys, it controls your mind. That's for sure. I think that you, you, you need it. You have, you feel this overpowering need for it. You can never be far away from it and in some sense, you know, yes, there's, there are a lot of similarities between alcohol or cigarettes, too. You know, you need, when I used to smoke many, many years ago, I kind of, I needed a cigarette every whatever it was, every few minutes, every half hour, whatever it was, you know, with, with, with heroin, you need, you need a fix all the, all the time. And it's, I believe it to be a more overpowering addiction. I've actually read that cigarettes are as addictive as heroin. I guess the question I have, and then I want to move on to oxy cotton. My question is, I was told as a kid, don't ever try heroin.  And I just wonder how addictive heroin actually is.  That's what I wonder. That's a very, that's a, that's a good question. My feeling is, though, that these are remarkably enslaving, enslaving drugs. They are, there is no, I do not believe, I grew up in the seventies when you could recreationally use marijuana and that kind of thing. And those are some other things you could kind of recreationally use. I don't believe in the recreational use of these drugs, of the opiate class of drugs. I don't, I believe that it is so dangerous. It's more like kind of Russian roulette. And when you get addicted to this stuff, it's, it takes years to get off. It's, that's the thing. It's, it is so scary. It is so mind controlling. Basically, it's an enslavement. Cigarettes are also, I can tell you, kind of an enslavement as well. There was not a sense of, I did, I was not going to overdose on nicotine and die. Right. What I understood is that Lenny Bruce O. Deed and Philip Seymour Hoffman O. Deed, because they knew that the heroin had been diluted. So they didn't know how much of it to shoot. If there were a regulated heroin in America, if you knew what you were getting, then you would know the proper dosage. That's possible. That's, I suppose that's possible. Again, I'm not defending. I'm an alcohol.  I hear what you're saying. I'm not defending this. I suppose that is, that is, that is, I suppose that is possible. It, to me, feels like a, I've just seen the remarkable enslavement that this creates. And, it is one of the great threats to personal freedom in America today, if you ask me, is the opiate widespread availability of opiate class of drugs. Not only that, but it turns everybody who uses them into the most boring, the most sheep-like people. Yeah. It's a very scary, scary thing. Unlike cigarettes and un-really like alcohol, too. It's a very scary thing to see how listless people who are addicted to heroin can become, and how very desperate, very quickly, people addicted to alcohol. I know that there is an opiate epidemic. I'm not arguing with you. And I'm just playing devil's advocate here. I do believe on a gut level. I have a friend who lives in Vermont, and she was telling me, we have an opiate epidemic and we have to hire more police, because people from New York are coming into Vermont and dealing heroin to our kids. And it just sounds like the same song I've heard over and over again. There always has to be a boogie man for the police to ask for more money. We always have an epidemic. It's always a crisis. There are always toe tags in the morgue that can be traced to a specific drug so that we can give money to the police and lock up more people of color. It just seems to be the same song over and over again. You mentioned 50,000 people dying each year from opiate overdoses. More people are dying from medical malpractice in hospitals. More people are dying from guns. I mean, we choose... No, that's not true. That's not true. 30,000 people kill themselves every year from guns, right? Yeah, and that's exactly right. That's what it says. The more people die from this, then from guns. And we have outstripped in many states homicides and suicides. Do not equal a number of people who have been dying from this. How do you measure an opiate death? Does it have to be an overdose? Yeah, that's what they're measuring. Sometimes it can be poly drug use. It can get a little fuzzy. What exactly killed the person? Was it Xanax? Was it a huge amount of boxy cotton or was it alcohol? But basically, I think what they're seeing is that this is killing people across the country, off coast to coast. I'm just raising this possibility. The police see what they want to see. They write down what they want to write down when somebody dies. And when they're pushing for funding because of a certain problem, i.e., opiates, that's the new thing now. Okay, he died from an opiate. He died from an overdose when, in fact, it could be a lot of things. The police, first of all, aren't doing this. It's coroners who are doing this. It's medical examiners who are... Police don't have any role at all in saying why a person died. There's a group think among coroners. You don't know coroners. You don't know coroners, if you say that. No, that's not true. There is a problem. I would say that it's not a perfect system. But the problem would tend to lend itself to undercounting, not overcounting. The real problem is that across the country, see, this starts in areas, rural areas, areas without a whole lot of budget. Small counties, states with way too many counties. Kentucky has 120 counties. Now, what does that mean with regard to this? It means that in every... There's 4 million people in Kentucky. We have... And in California, we have 58 million... 58 counties for 40 million people. So in the Kentucky context, for example, what you get are doctors who are overworked. Doctors who have regularized, well as this responsibility, they don't really want of being the coroner or the medical examiner. They don't have budgets. They also have... In these smallish counties, you can get certain influences, people begging. You see the deceased parents in church all the time, and they come up to you and say, you know, can you really lead out that there was a needle by his side or the real cause of death? Can you fudge it somehow? This kind of thing. This starts because... And is kind of covered up. Because I think we have a medical examination, a death examination system in this country that is really underfunded or depends on counting. So some counties have a lot of money. They do a good job. Other counties don't. They don't do such a good job. And so that is really where the problem lies. It's not that the police are telling the coroners you have to say something about how this guy died that's nonsense. That's baloney.   And that is really what's what's going on in all this. To me, we have undercounted, if there's anything, the number of people dying from the stuff. I want to get to OxyCot in a second. We're talking with Sam Kinyonez. He's a journalist. He's been with the LA Times for years. His book Dreamland is the tale of America's opiate epidemic. It was published by Bloomsbury Press, rave reviews from Salon, Christian Science Monitor, Kirkus Reviews, and the people who work on the show have been trying to get you on it for a long time. And I thank you for taking time to do this. I don't want to belabor the point about not trusting numbers. When you don't have an answer to how somebody died, one of the easiest things to say is, oh, overdose. Next. No, I mean, no, when you do have an answer, again, that's not how this works. People do toxicology reports. They come up with a number of drugs that are in the system. Opiates are a big part of that. That's how you make that determination. You're not just winging it. Sometimes, sometimes they do when they don't have money for those toxicology reports, which is why I'm saying that frequently these drugs are, as a cause of death are undercounted, not overcounted. By the way, you're right and I'm wrong. I mean that, but I just like to play the devil's advocate.  It depends on who you talk to. Well, let me ask you about that because I believed that we rely too about the crack epidemic, that they said that crack is the hardest thing to kick, that you can't kick crack. Once you smoke it, you're addicted forever. And they discovered that that wasn't true, that it wasn't as dangerous. Well, it is horribly difficult to kick. I was a crime reporter during the crack years, and it is no joke. It is probably easier to kick those than opiates. I would give it that. Will you be addicted for the rest of your life on crack? No, you can get off of it. But my God, I saw many people struggle and struggle. And it was brutal. Right. It was not a not a damn joke. Okay, so Rush Limbaugh, I guess 13 years ago, 12 years ago, was arrested in Florida for illegally purchasing and using hillbilly heroin, OxyContin. He was able to do his show every day. He was taking like a handful of pills every day. Right. When did OxyContin begin? 1996 is when they released it for the pharma, the company that makes it released a drug in 1996. And it got, what makes a difference from other drugs is that the way it was promoted, promoted to doctors very, very aggressively, almost like over-the-counter medicine to doctors, giveaways, claims that this was virtually non-addictive when you used to treat pain, all of that kind of stuff. And that's really what set that drug apart. Apart from the other thing that I mentioned earlier, which is that this was an opiate without any abuse to turn it involved. And that was a crucial, that combination right there turned it into this major juggernaut of a drug, $36 billion, I think, was a figure I saw of sales of OxyContin since 1996 when it came out. And it, again, turned people into the kind of addicts that drugs up to that point had not. But also have to say that these were years also when doctors rethought completely how they prescribed this stuff. They completely rethought how it was supposed to be prescribed and they began sending huge amounts of these drugs home with people. That never ever happened. That did not happen before, like say the mid-90s roughly. And that is also a big part of why we got a whole nation of people strung out on this stuff. A nation of people strung out on OxyContin. Nobody should feel any pain. Nobody has to deal with the truth. And how did that manifest itself in the 2016 presidential election vis-a-vis the 2012 presidential election? I think in a lot of areas where Donald Trump needed to win in order to become president, you can take a look at those areas, those counties. We talk about Ohio, talk about Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, those swing states. And you take a look at the counties where he won by 65, 70, 75 percent as opposed to Romney the four years before. You know, with 49 percent. So all what a lot of those counties have in common is widespread opiate addiction. And not just widespread opiate addiction, but widespread awareness that they now have a big problem with opiates. And these are counties that we're doing actually fairly well. If you just look at the very superficial unemployment numbers, they drop from 2010, you could see drops from say 14, 16, 18 percent down in 2016 to five, six, seven percent unemployment. Of course, that hid a real somber reality, which is that a lot of people were too strung out to even look for work. And so they weren't counted. But also you would think with numbers like that, that people would be more optimistic. What lends itself to a feeling of foreboding and pessimism is the fact that everybody knows somebody now who's strung out, even if maybe in their own family hasn't touched their family. Everybody in that community knows somebody, the pastor's kid, the quarterback, whatever it is, workers on the line where you might work. And this lends itself to a kind of a feeling of like things are not going well. It's a kind of an opiate malaise, I think, that really, I believe was a crucial, crucial, I mean, essential component in why Donald Trump won states that put him over the top, those five states in particular that I mentioned. It's a problem all over the country. But if you look at the counties where he won really big in the state of Ohio, the Lingepin of all this, you look at the state, the counties that he won really big by 70, 75%, all those counties have horrible, horrible problems. They also have problems with unemployment, a whole bunch of other stuff. But one of the common denominators is opiate addiction. I think Trump in many ways is like Oxycontin. He's the drug. Well, what he has been is, in my opinion, these pills offered an easy answer to a complicated problem. The complicated problem was the mystery of human pain. How do you deal with it? It's a true mystery. The pain in the human body. How do you deal with that? Medicine began to say, we have one answer for everybody. And it's an easy one. It's cheap. Hallelujah. And it's called opiate painkillers. And we just blast everybody with it. And that's what happened for 20, what's been doing after 20 years. They're taking for psychic pain as well, right? I mean, that's where a variety of things. There's so many examples of this. You can go on and on and on. Right. But the same thing I think is true of some of the policy prescriptions he's come up with. Primarily, the wall to solve all our problems of drug addiction and immigration. That's the same thing. This seems to me to be, again, a simple silver bullet magical solution to a very, very, a set of very, very complicated problems that need to be dealt with in an adult way and not at a childish level. Right. Sam Kinones is a journalist. He's former LA Times reporter. His latest book is Dreamland, The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic. We didn't even scratch the surface. Thank you for your time. My pleasure, David. Have a good day.


Thanks everyone for coming too. This has been a big effort putting on this conference And it's really fulfilling for me to see so many people show up here, and I'm glad everyone's here and enjoying it Thanks Okay, so basically What I wanted to do in this talk is essentially just give an overview of this issue. I'm gonna try to provide Sort of like a map or a framework. I'm not really. I'm not really trying to Advocate or anything for one specific thing I just kind of find this concept interesting and there's a lot of it gets into lots of little nitty gritty connected details so I think it's Just like touches on various things basically the background context is You know back in November when Bitcoin ABC and the various teams released their plans for the road map those things in there that you know Everyone kind of seems obvious like let's raise the block size limit again And let's reactivate op codes But then there was this this other thing written in there Let's move towards canonical transaction order. Maybe removing the ordering current order rule As a first step, which seems kind of like I think a lot of people weren't really Aware of this or it seems kind of like it just came out a left field like what is this this topic? Why are they talking about this? So that's basically what I'm gonna try to go over today kind of like touch on what this is all about It's an interesting topic because it gets into all kinds of details of how how things work in the theory and also just how it's implemented This is my kind of mental concept Hope you guys can understand this diagram So basically the little blocks the little squares are supposed to be transactions and at the top That's kind of like what I guess we'd probably imagine what the blockchain looks like it's a bunch of Transactions they're put into merkle trees the merkle roots in the block header the block headers all point back to each other forming a chain And that puts a time stamp on transactions But there's also another way that the transactions are connected together each transaction has Pointers to the outputs from other transactions so that when you spend the money It points to where that money came from essentially so this this proves that it's essentially a I guess I call it the causal DAG in this diagram It's a it's a directed acyclic graph So it's it all goes in one direction and it's proves that you know when you spend the money It's based on where the money was before and then it all has to All has to prop all has to make sense in time so you can't spend the money if it wasn't there previously and These are all connected through through hashes of the input of the outputs and the transactions and so on so basically the way that the way that the transactions are validated currently is That's what that big black arrow represents It essentially just scans through and Then you have a you have a UTXO So you know all your unspent outputs and you scan through each transaction one after the other and say like okay This one spends these outputs those exist so this is valid and we move on to the next one and so on and so forth so Basically what the effect of that is is that If you think about how if you look at the lower level where they're connected together in a causal way You can't you can't rearrange one You can't if you come to one like if you change the order of two of one that spends the other When you if you just scan through linearly like that when you get to it You'll say like oh this this output doesn't exist So therefore this is invalid and then the whole thing will fail so What that means is that the transactions there is that there's a partial ordering Enforced in the in the Merkle tree like in the top part so that those transactions They don't have to be Like you can change the order of the ones that aren't dependent on each other in a causal way But the ones that are have to be in order. So it's basically this partial ordering requirement And it's it's basically unclear Like it's something that's essentially due to how it's implemented. There's no real reason why the Why the transactions should be in order other than that if you don't do it, you'll fail when you validate it so If you start and this becomes if more important when you think about how do you parallelize this like right now I'm talking you scan through linearly one after the other So what do you want? What do you do if you want to parallelize validation? It's sort of a it's sort of a little weird Weird it seems backwards, but but the way you can do it is if you want to batch I just so to two batches here, but you in theory could have many batches So you just take bunches of transaction The first thing you do is you just add the outputs in you don't check the inputs So you can do that in parallel you can have the UTXO set in all your little parallel Processes you can just add the outputs to the UTXO then you can do a second parallel Process where then you go go back to the inputs and check all the inputs against it and you can and you can It's basically something that's parallelizable And then there's right now you'd have to do a step three if you wanted to do this Which is to because those two steps Don't check that order that I talked about so you could have transactions in the in the Merkle tree Where the one that spends the other one is before it like it's to the left there in the Merkle tree So basically if you do it this way that's step three the only reason You would do that is so that the old way would also still work But if you're going to do it this way it makes no sense like it's just a completely pointless step And it's and it's linear like you can't parallelize that because it's it's this causal chain So you need to check it. It's like a time-dependent thing. So you need to check it Through time. Oh, yeah one note the way when you add these when you do it this way when you do the outputs first and then connect the inputs after You're not explicitly checking that the inputs come from a previous thing A previous transaction But the only way it couldn't is if you break to the shaft 256 So you're basically assuming it's like a sort of an additional assumption, but I mean, I think we can Assume that shot 256 is valid or else we have bigger problems um Okay, so basically up till now I've said, okay, let's get rid of this order requirement We'll we'll just put the transactions in any order you want and you can parallelize the thing So what does canonical order mean like canonical means there's a there's an order that it has to be in It's not this partial order So that so that sounds kind of contradictory like I've just told you guys Hey, let's get rid of the order and then you can parallelize it now. What what's this canonical order we're talking about? um Basically the canonical order Would be an order. I guess I guess what I say here is the cause what I call the causal order That depends on the relationships between the transactions. So it's if you look at two transactions You don't really know what order they would go in unless you knew the relationships between them And if one spends the output of the other so That's very difficult to To do in parallel Whereas if you have a sorted order like if you have transactions say they're sorted by the hash of the transaction for example You can just look at two transactions And say yeah, but you're looking at just those two We know that they're in the correct order with respect to each other Or you can have two sorted lists and say this list and that list um Are in the correct order because we can just check check that The ends that you know, if you know it's all in order within it Um It's very easy and it's easy to combine them also. I think that was all I had to say there So why would you want to do this basically? um The advantage of it is that You don't have to deal with there's several advantages Which is interesting like the main one that a lot of people talk about is this block block propagation because If you do this if as long as you have the set of transactions You don't need to know what order they're in That's why I wrote in this box. It's kind of a weird way to like the way you can think about it If you want to is canonical order For anything where you're where you're not building the merkle tree You don't have to worry about the order So there isn't it's just a set of transactions and the only time you you need to think about the order Is when you're doing the part that the order depends on for everything else it doesn't matter So when you're trans transmitting them across the network All you have to do is provide the information of which transactions are in the block and then every time they will the The merkle tree will get built the same way and will have the same route Another interesting thing about this is I mentioned the sorted aspect So this allows proof of absence. So for example, if you know the transaction ID Of a transaction you can prove if that transaction is not in the block You can provide a compact proof that that's not in the block Um, so you can basically look at two adjacent transactions In the merkle tree and if if one is higher and one is lower Then the value that you're concerned about you know that The value that's between those is not there because that's the only place it could be because it has to be in that order Um, so this is useful for things like sharding Or or fraud proofs where you might want to Um have compact proofs of of absence of transactions Um, anyway, yeah, I guess my I guess this is what I'm talking about like For most things it just means you don't have to worry about ordering So for block propagation and stuff like that it removes all that The only time you have to worry about it is when you're validating when you're validating the way the merkle root Is in is in the header Okay Now i'm just going to touch on a few minor details One thing is what should the order be? The merkle tree is built out of transaction hashes So you hash the all the information and you you know, and then you combine it into a merkle tree Um, one sort of interesting thing is you can think like well, should that be the order? Should you just order them by the transaction hash? And you could like it's just in our it's just a arbitrary number basically and it's There's something but if you look at things like In the like for example thomas who just presented His mal fix proposal That takes apart these two concepts of the transaction hash and the id Um, so if you go to that maybe I should just flip to that other slide Like if you go to this one the bottom part would be connected by the id because that's the part where you need the id You need a unique identifier of each transaction But for the but for the blockchain you want the transaction hash Of all of all the data in the transaction Um to be to be what's used to build that tree because you're time stamping the information So you need to have proof that that information existed at that point in time Um, so anyway, so you can basically separate these two concepts of the the transaction id and then transaction hash And maybe it makes more sense to order it by transaction id Because that's what the trends if you're going to do absence proofs That's what you want to be able to prove is that the inputs Are absent. So anyway, there's just that's just one of the details Um I think i'm almost done So I guess I guess kind of my conclusion is that It's unclear like right now everything works fine. This is more of a Of a laying the groundwork kind of thing um It's sort of unclear. There's various options one option is okay. We'd maintain the status quo We have this partial ordering which is causal it seems sort of Not the most elegant thing, but it works and it's easy to make it we could easily scale, you know Probably many orders of magnitude With the way things are now You can do the removing the ordering Which allows you to parallelize Or you can move to this canonical ordering Um I mean the and the downside I guess is that the the easy the simple sort of naive implementation If you remove the ordering then that doesn't really work anymore. You have to do some kind of Parallelizable Method and to do yeah, and the other thing is it's kind of interesting It's one of these things where it seems like it touches on random unrelated areas like block propagation Um And these fraud proof ideas. So it's it's one of these things that it seems like it's a Sort of fundamental building block type type of thing So it's just sort of like one of those things that's kind of a sign that Maybe it's an interesting like an important thing to think about and it lays the groundwork for a lot of stuff that we might want to do in the future Anyway, I think that's all I have to say for now. Anyone has any questions? Thank you Anthony that was awesome Questions from the audience for Anthony And I have a quick question. Okay. So what inspired you to look at block ordering? Um, and then canonical ordering as as you know, partially inspiration for this presentation like what happened I don't know. That's a good question. I think I just find the I just found it interesting as a concept I just like to understand how how it works and Um, yeah, I don't know. That's hard to say It's more just out of my own interest in understanding how it all works And when I heard heard talk of it, I was like, what are they talking about? Basically Yeah, pita. Would you hear thanks for the beautiful presentation You mentioned that this is mainly laying the groundwork for now. Yeah But if I could Ask you to look through your own crystal ball What would you think would be the commercial applicability of this? There has to be A specific specific reason why this is of interest to you well I mean the applicability is that it allows potentially massive scaling in the future. Well, like You know, we're talking if if we're Masked like a hundred times a thousand times or whatever or more than current transaction rates. That's basically What this would enable So you could have like things like parallelizing maybe sharding So where you have You know, you can break up Instead of having one node that validates everything you can have nodes that validate subsections and can prove Or can at least prove if there's a problem in the subsection that they're validating So it's basically what can allow a bitcoin cash to scale to you know Like a hundred times visa levels or something like that type of thing Maybe I don't know it's there's different opinions on it. So I'm just trying to like kind of explain the concepts But I think it's there's a lot of interesting ideas in there Hi On that point actually I think another way to think about it is in terms of the complex computational complexity Of the scaling In terms of something like big o notation for example, so this feels like it could actually change the big o complexity of verification Do you Feel the same way or have you looked at that at all? Well, it reduced I mean it it lowers it down because it makes you everything and I'm not sure about Like basically right now it's like oh and like as you grow and this would lower most things down to Like oh log n or something like that. Exactly. That's what's exciting about it. Yeah, that's so so basically Yeah, that's exactly that's basically kind of I guess another way of answering the previous question is that it once you get Like like once you get to a certain level, it it allows you to keep growing Um without massively running into resources Yeah, any other questions um Miners change the 32 bit notes to um get the The resulting hash and they can run through those 32 bits incredibly quickly and then to Further change that they change the orders of the transaction Will this ever Change that how will miners be able to do that? Well, I mean you would just need to do something else other than changing the order There's lots of ways you can change something in the Merkel in one of the transactions um Okay, I mean you could put it I mean, I don't know I can think of like random things off the top of my head But yeah, they would just have to grind something else you could So I don't I don't know. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, that that would affect that. That's for sure Anyone we take the last question of the day Who wants the last question of the day? Come on now. I can ask it. So do you anticipate this being something that's uh, relatively easy to switch to a bit coin cache or should it be deployed on, you know Something else to try it out. I mean, I don't think it's that I don't think it's Conceptually it's not that hard to do It's just a matter of making sure it plays well with with all the pieces that connect in there Like for example, this doesn't affect spv clients at all. Everything is the same. It's just the transactions I mean are in a different order, but when you get your merkle treat merkle paths to them and all that stuff That would all be the same um I mean, obviously it's it's like a fundamental change to what's to how things are working So you'd have to test be very careful and make sure it's well tested and implemented but Conceptually it's not it's nothing too crazy. So I don't know if that answers the question, but And with that, let's give a round of applause to Anthony ziggers and our honor plus us. Thank you very much


This paper presents an original method for detecting and delineating citrus trees using unmanned aerial vehicles based on photogrammetric digital surface models, DSMs. The approach uses an orientation-based radial symmetry transform to handle the symmetry of the trees in the DSM and builds influence regions of each tree to accurately delineate individual canopies. Two efficient strategies are also presented for filtering out erroneously detected canopy regions without height thresholds. Experiments on eight test DSMs reveal that the proposed approach provides superior detection and delineation performances compared to state-of-the-art approaches, supporting a balance between precision and recall measures. This article was authored by Ali Oskine OK and Asli Ostarichi OK.


Let me begin by thanking the president of the King's College Old Boys Association, Alaji Kashim Ibrahim Imam, for the invitation to speak at this 111th Founders' Day celebration. For decades, King's College has produced many of Nigeria's and indeed the world's brightest and best in practically every field of human endeavor. And it's an honor to join you in celebrating 111 years of that excellence with you all here today. While saying this, I lay aside all rivalries and all old quarrels between my school and King's College. I certainly will not take the bit that Pastor Itwa laid out for me by raising these questions of rivalry to be impolite on a day of celebration such as this to even sound competitive. To this theme education the way forward is not about looking back. I think that it's about bracing for the future. Although these days speaking of the future is almost irrelevant because before you complete the word the so-called future has actually arrived. But let me set down a few thoughts that might help in thinking through the issues. First is that we must recognize that our main endowment as a country is neither crudel nor any other material resource. It is our people. Nigerians are our greatest asset. Second, our economic aspirations and our capacity to compete in the global economy will depend on how effectively we're able to educate our people, how effectively we're able to empower them to fulfill their potential. Our human capital reserves determine the quantum of useful foreign direct investment that will come into our country. The emergence of local innovators, the growth of productivity, and even the eruption of an entrepreneurial revolution all will depend on the quality of education that our young men and women have. Third, the national conversation on education will be futile unless it also addresses the concerns faced at the lower levels of our society. The problem of out-of-school children and the huge deficit in education of girls. Fourth is a point of utmost importance and it is that we need a laser focus on productivity, on character and civic education. Fifth is a related point and it is quite clear that we have to change both the substance of education and also the method of educating our children. This is because this generation of young people need to be prepared for a world that thinks, operates, and rewards differently from what we were accustomed to. I'll elaborate only on the fourth point. I think our educational design and content must take into account our current moral and social circumstances, our physical and mental constraints as a people. We are gifted as Nigerians with a confidence, resilience, and mental equity that is by any standards exceptional. This is probably best demonstrated in how we excel, even in other countries in sciences and medicine and even politics, but our attributes do not free us from what Edward Banfield was, what he described as the moral basis of a backward society and this is the self-interested family-centric society where often the public good is sacrificed for personal or parochial benefit. So education must lift the mind of the young beyond self. It must teach the primacy of community, of the good and the well-being of the collective over self. Every nation that has prospered has come to this point and has had to accept this as norm. One of the strong points of the education that many of you and I received was character, moral and ethical behavior, hard work, diligence, trustworthiness, self-denial, honesty, truth, fairness. Even in today's severely compromised moral environment I must say that I've come across and worked with many from King's College who have demonstrated the strength of character that a well-established moral compass brings. No developed nation has managed to skip this point and succeed. There must be, as a rule, a prevailing moral standard. Corruption or deviance is the exception, must be the exception, not the rule. Secondly, and here I will just for time conflate the thoughts of Papa, of Bahfemiah Olo, and Professor Oloomidea Kisoy, a professor of architecture, where they argue, and I as I've said am conflating their views, that our education must imbue both skills and the mental magnitude required for creativity or productivity. Creativity is the capacity for value added in the transformation of material. Material in this sense may be either abstract or as in for example the notes of music transformed into melody or physical as in cotton transformed into fabric. The wealth of a nation is after all not in the material resources available in the land but in the productive capacity of the people. The way in which or the way in which the people are equipped to add value to whatever it is that they find. And the matter of productivity or creativity as a path to recognition and success is not a light matter. It is fundamental to the development and wealth of a nation and its peoples. So our learning environment must emphasize ideation and introspection, thinking, minds trained to think from conception to actualization.  When people are nurtured in the notion that rent seeking or the preventable capture of wealth or benefit by access to power is the path to success then the society will not prosper. If you will capture all the resources everyone else will be poor on their way there. On the other hand when young people are taught that creativity and innovation with a business and personal culture of integrity, hard work and diligence will find huge rewards then the foundations for the good and prosperous society is laid. So where productivity is not the path to success but capture then corruption is inevitable. Corruption is symptomatic of societies that prefer a path different from creative and productive enterprise to wealth and success. Finally there is a matter that I believe we must address and it is with the challenges of government investment in education. The truth is that government resources alone cannot drive education especially of the quality we know our nation needs. Many of us who have had the benefit of high quality education secondary education have seen how in one generation our schools have become a depressing shadow of themselves. We can bemoan the problem for another generation but nothing will change if we are not prepared to invest our resources in changing the narrative. I believe that KCOB for example have between them the resources the connections locally and internationally to set King's College on the track to being one of the best secondary schools in the world a status that it had barely four years four decades ago. The best schools in the world are beneficiaries of the commercial or altruistic investments of private individuals and corporations. All that is required is the will the funds will follow. Let me again congratulate you all for these 111 history-making years and wish King's College a much greater 111 years ahead. Thank you very much. God bless.


10 Things You Must Do Before Becoming An Entrepreneur An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew, hoping he'll quickly learn how to chew it, says Roy Ashe, co-founder and president of the American company, Lytton Industries. Starting or building a business is like planting a flower. It requires you to invest your time and money. Also, you must take care of it while expecting nothing in return, at least for the first couple of months or a few years. However, when your startup blossoms, it makes all the patience and hard work worthwhile. Little Wanda Jessica Herring, founder and CEO of Stella and Dot, said, you have to see failure as the beginning and the middle but never entertain it as an end. Have you ever wondered why a good number of startups fail and eventually cease to exist after only a few years of being launched? Well, one of the main reasons is the lack of expert startup advice founders receive. In this video, I'll share with you 10 things you must do before becoming an entrepreneur. This I believe will help you become a successful person. If you are new here, consider subscribing so you won't miss other interesting videos like this. 1. Identify your mission Before you commence the execution of all the great ideas in your head, you need to identify your mission in order to execute properly. Identifying your mission is an amazing motivator and it draws you to your goals than you pushing yourself towards it. Amber Hurdle said, your mission statement outlines why your company exists. It doesn't have to be all fancy pants, just a clear statement of what you do. So, identify your mission means stating in clear terms what your company intends to do, the services you intend to provide. 2. Save a lot Once you have your goals, vision and mission all sorted out, you want to save a lot of money for execution. Don't start your business with the presumption that you will get funds right out of the gate. Note that it is a bad idea to think that once you start running your business, it will generate enough money for the successful running of the business. Remember Jessica Harian's advice? You have to see failure as the beginning and the middle but never entertain it as an end. Of course, you can try pitching your ideas to a few investors who might be interested. However, you can't fully rely on the possibility of being picked or not. Hence, they need to save a lot so that you can fund your business. 3. Learn how to sell Sales are about the most important thing in business. After all, we all go into one form of business or the other because we want to make some money, right? Hence, you will have to learn how to sell and market your product. You need to be able to communicate clearly and effectively to your customers, investors or whoever you are dealing with. You can read books, attend conferences and seminars, seek advice from mentors and other successful entrepreneurs on some of the best marketing methods and strategies to make a business thrive. 4. Network and build great relationships Meredith Mahoney said, Know where you want to go and make sure the right people know about it. Robert Kiyozaki, an American businessman and author, said the richest people in the world look for and build networks. Everyone else looks for work. Marinate on that for a minute. Networking with other people increases your chances of exposing your business to the right audience. For example, have you witnessed the situation where a friend calls you to say, Hey, can you recommend a good content writer or a good food vendor and the likes?  5. Educate yourself with finance You need to learn how to manage your finances and separate your business account from your personal account. For instance, say you get one or two investors who are willing to invest in your business. A financial plan or document are a few of the requirements that they'll need to determine if they want to go ahead or not, so make sure you read up on how to effectively manage your finance. You equally consider getting help from a mentor if you have one. 6. Learn how to take risk Taking the step of becoming a businessman or woman is actually a risk in itself. I mean, who likes the idea of living a job with a guarantee of a stable income for a venture that is built under the possibility of survival. I'm sure that doesn't sound like a fun thing to do. However, that is the first risk every entrepreneur should prepare his mind to take. As an entrepreneur, you need to not only face risk head on but actively embrace them. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn't. 7. Build your audience That you're doing the exact business as your friend doesn't necessarily mean that your audience is the same. You have to build your own audience. However, in building a brand, you should understand that you are a brand so whatever you post and do online is part of the parcel of your brand identity. To build your audience, you can start by publishing content that is near and dear to you and share it with people with similar interests. The essence of doing this is to build a following that will be receptive to the products and services you will be offering when you become an entrepreneur. 8. Learn how to research Life is all about growing, so is business. You need to keep improving your product, your marketing strategy and everything else involved in your business if you want to remain relevant in your industry. This means that you have to keep researching from time to time about what's new and trendy. 9. Discover your strength and weaknesses Discover your strength as far as your business and content strategies are concerned. Think back on the last time you were complimented or praised on a certain skill you possessed or something you did that got you noticed. Once you have discovered this, leverage on it and make it world-class. 10. Learn more about your industry and others Now that you have everything figured out, research as much as possible about your industry such as finding out the top individuals in your industry, the moving trends and every other thing there is to know. Take time to study the things that are working and the things that aren't. This information will help you position your business in the right place. Once you have these 10 things figured out, then you are ready to start your own business and begin your journey to entrepreneurship. Thank you very much for watching our videos. We would like to give you another interesting video for you to enjoy next but before then, our team will be very happy if you can like this video and share it with your friends on social media. If you are new here, don't forget to subscribe so you won't miss other interesting videos like this. Look at your screen now to see two other videos we handpicked for you to enjoy next. We love you.