I'm Luke Bisbee and I'm here to talk about unlocking infrastructure financing. As someone who works on the engineering side of infrastructure, one of the things I guess that struck me most, governments around the world have effectively run out of money to spend on these large-scale infrastructure projects. Three trillion a year expenditure on infrastructure globally and a one trillion dollar infrastructure deficit. How is it that we're going to actually stimulate private investors to get involved in these projects? One of the things that keeps coming up is the various risks associated. One of the things that prevents the public-private partnerships is a lot of the unknown risks, both the economic risks and the political risks that go along with that. Public-private partnership makes sense not only from a, we've run out of money point of view, but it also makes sense because of the various skill sets of the players involved in a public-private partnership as well as the various motivations or incentives that are in place. The private sector, very efficient, can run projects, manage projects, manage the funds very efficiently, do what they do best, and of course, in a large-scale infrastructure project, you can generate income for that private partner, but you also have the government who have a vested interest in the performance of the infrastructure that's created in the long term. So basically, you use the incentives and skills of both parties in the best possible way.


This past month a phenomenon known as a blue moon occurred and people were asking me what is a blue moon? Does it turn the moon blue? How do you observe a blue moon? Well in this space pod we're going to talk about that and also some of the other moons that are in our skies to be able to see. This is your space pod for August 7th, 2015. It's a common misconception that the moon actually turns blue during a blue moon. You see a blue moon is basically an extra moon in the calendar year, 13 full moons instead of 12 full moons. Although the modern idea of a blue moon, two full moons in the same month is actually a misconception, but it's one that we'll go ahead and roll with. Although the moon can appear to turn blue in color, this requires extremely fine particulate, usually smoke from a nearby fire or ash from a volcanic eruption. Conversely, a black moon is when two new moons occur in one month. Interestingly, the month of February will never have a blue or black moon since it's only 28 days. The next misconception is actually a fairly recent one and that is the tetrad of the four blood moons. You see there's been a perpetuation of this idea that four total lunar eclipses in a row, occurring from April 2014 to September of this year, is suddenly going to cause the end times to be ushered in and lots of bad things are going to happen. Because of this, the general term blood moon has now been used to identify lunar eclipses since every total lunar eclipse turns the moon a reddish color. This is due to scattering of light that filters through the Earth's atmosphere and eventually falls onto the moon.  Wet moons occur during its waxing crescent phase. The moon appears to be a bowl or in the shape of a smile and this leads to it also being called a Cheshire Moon. A wet moon is routinely visible in the tropical latitudes of the Earth. Anywhere else on the planet we'll see them based upon the positions of the Earth and the moon in our respective orbits. Super moons are when the moon is full at perigee, or the closest point in the moon's orbit to the Earth. Although they can be a little bit brighter, there's no real noticeable difference in size or effect from the moon being approximately 50,000 kilometers closer. And just for fun, let's review the phases of the moon. We've got new moon! When the moon is between the Earth and the Sun with no apparent illumination, followed by waxing crescent, waxing indicating the phase of the moon is getting larger. Then we arrive at first quarter. Well named since it's a quarter of the way through the lunar cycle. Waxing gibbous continues to grow the moon until we reach full moon. Waning gibbous is next, waning indicating that the phase of the moon is getting smaller. Then third quarter, also well named as we're three quarters of the way through the lunar cycle. Then waning crescent with just a sliver left. Then back to new moon. And once again through the phases. Thanks for watching this space pod. I'm Jared Head. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to us on social media. And we can't make these awesome space pods without the support of our Patreons. Thank you guys! And if you got a little extra, maybe help us out a little bit and donate to that Patreon campaign. Good stuff. So, until next week, keep exploring.


There we go. All right Good welcome said so it is we're on noon. I'll call a meeting to order and Are there any anybody on the line for public comment? Nope. I don't see anyone Terry. I Bob Bob Chep Fletcher is planning to join us as well. I don't see him in here just yet I just did that in case the board had any final questions for counsel, right? We'd move on to the special Talmudian warning and ballot when Bob joins us and Somebody either Ted or Jeff if you would Find the motion that was suggested by counsel in the email that was sent to you earlier So are you ready to go earlier today or earlier last week earlier today? There was a okay I Drafted something based on Bob's comments. Oh Yes, I've got it. Okay Move to resend blah blah blah. Yeah. Yeah Okay, so we are on the I don't remember three the Talmudian So if you have a sort of a reader's digest version of where we're at Sure, and I might turn this to Bob so we had a dialogue after the meeting Friday night To look at the language from pertaining to really make sure we're addressing that the water fund users will be paying for this debt Service over time and as Bob's recommended some changes in that for adoption today to make sure we're doing that correctly Bob, maybe you could speak to that for a moment for the need for revenue based bond structure versus a general obligation Based structure and see if the board has any questions Sure, can you hear me? Yeah, okay Good afternoon It typically Well, let's put it this way. There are two basic forms of bonds. There's a general obligation bond There's a revenue bond revenue bonds can be issued only for utility type projects Water system being one so if you issue general obligation debt it is the responsibility It is the ultimate responsibility of the taxpayers to pay for that debt In other words, you can be compelled to use your taxing power to raise enough revenue to pay the debt when it comes Do if there are not not other sources of funds available to do that A revenue bond on the other hand is payable solely from the revenue of the utility and There's no obligation to go back and there's no right to go back to the taxpayers to get the debt paid so The typical form is a general obligation For these things, but and that's that's where we started last week Over the weekend, I got Eric's email Indicating that no you will prefer to be on the revenue side and to make this a revenue obligation when you When you move from the geo general obligation side to the revenue side the form of the resolution changes the ballot form changes so that the voters understand Precisely what what is being voted on so we've prepared for you this morning edited ballot edited warning and an edited necessity resolution which now Reflect a revenue-based debt obligation as opposed to a general obligation Clear as mud, right? Actually that was very helpful and I'm glad you explained it because I have a much better understanding now what I really like about this is in a sense the Willis and residents who are not on the water system are very well protected from having to incur a cost Due to this bond or this project. Is that correct? If you move to the revenue form of debt obligation, yes, then The all of the all of the debt will be paid from water system revenues The thing that you shouldn't lose sight of is even if this were a geo debt You could still pay that debt with water revenue But Ultimately if the water system were incapable of generating enough revenue to pay that debt as it came Do you could turn to the taxpayers on the geo side in this scenario the way that we've gone this morning? To be able to do is rallying pipes You're a lot of Bob What's that I check You you froze there for a second. Oh jeez. I'm sorry All right, he's happy Yeah, how far did I get did I get to the good part? I? Think so the last paragraph The two issues no very helpful. Thank you very much So I'm looking for a motion. I will move to rescind Specifically override and no longer have in force or affect the adoption of a necessity resolution special meaning warning and Form a ballot for a November 3rd 2020 bond vote passed on August 21st 2020 for the lamp light water line and water system replacement project Further I moved to adopt the revised necessity resolution special meeting morning and form a ballot for the lamp light water Sorry water line in water system replacement project as presented second We have a motion made and seconded. Is there any discussion on the motion?  I think that ends the discussions on the business we need to take care of So unless we have to sign it though, right? We do but when do we need to do that? I Checked for the town clerk today, and she was gonna double check with the state But to our knowledge, we just need to submit the The language today through the portal for the ballot question and then I so could bob about this earlier We can we could have the board sign this later this week So it doesn't appear to be any pressing deadline today for for a signature. Okay Yep Just send me a friendly reminder if you don't mind Eric or I'll forget sure. Thank you Good that is sure of the business for today. Thank you all for attending and hopefully we won't meet until next week All right, Eric. Thank you Bob. Take care. Have a good afternoon. Thank you


Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Scott Hepburn, Bjorn Andre, and Jeff Wilkes. Coming up today on DTNS, new AI tools include video, plus the future of Stadia is not excellent. And what if your vinyl record player could also print music? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, September 29th, 2022. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Well, we have a lot of stuff to talk about. Some of it meta, some of it not meta. But first, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Financial Services Platform Square publicly launched its tap-to-pay solution for iPhone, at least for US-based sellers for now. It requires Square's app and works with all iPhones, going back to the iPhone 11. The feature was in testing with a select group of retailers since June, and previously merchants had to purchase some hardware from Square in order to collect payments. Australian officials are calling for stronger privacy laws following last week's breach of customer data for 9.8 million current and former Optus customers. The Australian telecommunications company has not yet released info on which systems were breached or how it occurred, although Optus CEO Kelly Brayer Rosmarin claims that the breach was the result of a sophisticated attack. The Australian government is working with Optus to conduct a criminal investigation with the Australian federal police in cooperation with the American FBI as well. Amazon's Epic streaming TV service will be rebranded as MGM Plus next year, with the change going into effect on January 23, 2023. Mark your calendars. Don't be alarmed. Amazon closed the deal to acquire MGM for $8.45 billion earlier this year in March. I have always wondered at what point we will stop renaming things Plus and it is not today. Not today. Not today. Microsoft is discontinuing SwiftKey for iOS, although it will be available in the Apple App Store for one more week. If you don't have it yet, now's the time. Users with SwiftKey installed will still be able to continue using it as long as it's not uninstalled. SwiftKey on Android will continue to be available and also supported. Figma announced its agreement to purchase Interface Design Tool Figma earlier this month in a $20 billion deal and has now said to Bloomberg that Figma's freemium model will remain as is after the deal is approved by stakeholders and antitrust regulators. A lot of assumptions there, Adobe. Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky said, we don't want to fix something that's working really well. Also, Figma co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Dylan Field said the app will remain free for educational users. There's been a lot of concern about what this will look like post-acquisition, so I think Adobe trying to get out ahead of perhaps some ill will there. Well, on yesterday's show, we had a lot of fun with creating chatbots. We've also talked a lot about the dolly ability for AI to create beautiful works of art that are actually not created by humans, but maybe seem that way. This is, I don't know, somewhere in the middle. Meta has a new AI generation tool called Make a Video that lets users type in a description of a scene.  This would generate a short video that matches that text. As the Verge describes it, the videos are pretty artificial. They don't really look real. There's some blurring. There's some distortion. But they do give a sense of what's possible. In a blog post, Meta said, quote, generative AI research is pushing creative expression forward by giving people tools to quickly and easily create new content with just a few words of lines or text.  Now before you get too excited and say, this is so great, clips are only five seconds long. They don't have audio, and it's also not a public tool. In fact, Meta said it's not going to release anything besides some cherry-picked videos that look pretty good, that publications like the Verge have access to. Meta does say it's publishing a paper on the Make a Video model and plans to release a demo of the system at some point. Yeah, of course, Meta isn't the first to attempt AI video of this sort earlier this year, researchers from Tsinghua University and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence released their own text-to-video model named Cog Video. But in Meta's case, Make a Video is using training content sourced from two data sets, WebVid 10M and HD Villa 100M, which together contain millions of videos spanning hundreds of thousands of hours of footage, including content from sites like Shutterstock and Scrape from the web. So probably the same kind of concerns that cause stock photo services to ban AI generated content might crop up here whenever these hit more mainstream use. Make a Video currently outputs 16 frames of video at a resolution of 64 by 64 pixels, which if you're keeping track is tiny, but then a separate AI model boosts that to 768 by 768, which is, I mean, that's kind of coming close to 720p there. But Justin, you've had a look at some of these. I mean, it's a closed system right now. We're only getting kind of the best outputs. Like, where, I guess, where are we? Are we in, when we've seen the same road with AI generated images, still images, is this, you know, how far down the road are here? And what's Meta's plan with this? Well, their plan right now is to put out a press release to prove that they have hired people to research into AI. When I initially read the story. We made unicorns run on the beach. Look, when I initially read this story, I was like, Oh, OK, well, this is Facebook doing what Facebook does, which is take a popular feature on another website and put it on their website, because they're there. They've seen enough traffic of those kinds of images being shared on on their platform. So let's have a way to have people do it and maybe even do a cooler on this side. The problem for Facebook is that moving into the world of image generation takes you into the very tricky and thorny world of whether or not something looks too real. And for a site that has spent as much time talking about misinformation and whether or not something that is false can get around the world two times before the truth puts on and choose that that brings them into a troubling area here as for what they want to do with it. I don't think they're going to do anything. I think that they just want to prove that they are researching this in the way that a lot of people are. I don't think that image generation and video is going to be the height of what AI does, but I do think over the next year, everybody is going to have to be in the AI game because it is going to fundamentally reshape very soon, almost all technology, you know, taking, you know, taking away the sort of like, how does this, you know, signal the end of humanity for a second?  It's, you know, it's too good. We can't have robots making art. If you take that away for a second, it's like, what exactly would this be good for? This kind of feels like the next generation of gift jokes to me.  I don't exactly like, I don't, I'm not seeing this far enough in the future to know why this is like dangerous, at least coming from Metta, a social network company. Well, look at it like this. In terms of how it can be dangerous, we've got a lot of situations that are very serious that people talk about and share pictures and videos with on Facebook. I'm just going to name two off the top of my head that are happening right now. The impacts of Hurricane Ian in Florida and the Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory out there in Europe. If in these highly charged moments, a video of something that is not true shapes conversation or has any kind of reaction, then it's on Facebook that they generated it there, not just the fact that they spread it there. In terms of where it can be applicable going forward, you know, I've been watching a lot of political advertisements because we are only 40 days away from the midterms and that's my job. But I was remarking the other day that like, wow, political advertisements all look a lot better since the advent of cheap, high resolution video libraries. And it will only look better when you can generate these images via AI in the way that you can now with stable diffusion and Dolly too. Well, and that's kind of where I like just even looking at the samples they provided, the two ones that look best to me and kind of the cherry picked ones they had was like an artist like brushing on a palette, you know, kind of mixing that around and a horse drinking from a stream. And I can definitely see this, Justin, to your point, being like the on demand B roll library that you would need instead of going to, you know, Shutterstock or whatever service that you have. But then the other thing is looking at what tools like Dolly to can already do, right? Like some of the integrations that they're doing there. Some of the amazing results that you see, one are like feeding baseline images and then using that to like, hey, make this images Mario look like he has angel wings and looks like a monkey or something like that. I don't know. But then like, and that's what like giving it those hooks allows it to get better wholesale creation. I think for video, maybe still a little ways off, although obviously there's everyone's kind of racing for that as the next milestone. But I think if you can have those kind of tools where you can plug in existing video and then either expand it or just with kind of text based commands or be able to just kind of enhance things kind of on the fly. I think that is much more on the horizon than kind of wholesale creation as fun as that can be of, hey, there's unicorns on a beach. In very different meta news and news that isn't really all that specific to meta earlier this week, a non meta created Instagram client called OG app, which offered Instagram feeds without ads or content suggestions from random people was removed from the iOS store. The app had over 10,000 downloads at the time it was taken down and had reached 50th on the most downloaded section before being removed. Nine to five Mac reports that the OG app team had their personal Facebook and Instagram accounts banned and a meta spokesman said, quote, this app violates our policies and we're taking all appropriate enforcement actions. The OG app remains available at least for now on the Google Play Store.   So I don't know what the company was expecting. But boy, do the OG app people have things to say about this?  You you have created a product that people don't want. We have created a product that people do want. It is very obvious, you know, why not work together rather than, you know, just shutting us down. And you could I mean, any app that's like, we are for the people. You know, if you violate terms of service of a company of this size, you're not really going to have a different outcome. But I still sort of, I don't know, I feel like I got to support the little guys. It reminds me of the early days of, you know, weird third party Twitter apps that did all the things that Twitter didn't do that I wanted Twitter to do. This really reminds me actually of another kind of like hearkening back to a golden age of of of networks and stuff like that. Of I remember years ago, there were servers that were come up unofficial servers that were hosting classic versions or old versions of World of Warcraft, wow, and Blizzard kind of brought the hammer down on a lot of those and shut them down. And then they released, wow, classic to kind of still serve that need. And I see a lot of similarities. I mean, wow, a game with a very strong, extremely strong social network seeing some stagnant growth and going, hey, why don't we people want this nostalgic experience, let's sell it back to them and make some money on it. I think, you know, 10,000 downloads, not a lot. Admittedly in a day and it was boosted by a TechCrunch article that was had some pretty glowing coverage of it. I think that, you know, if there is if there's enough demand to it, believe me, I mean, if if Meda could figure out how to monetize it, they would, the problem is they're seeking to stay on this growth path. And the way to do that is not by catering to millennials that are kind of bored with the app. I mean, I would say Meda's response to this would be like, Oh, is this something you want, then pay us five dollars a month and then we'll just like strip out all this stuff that the other company has been doing. Like, look, that's like saying, you want to know what people hate the most about the grocery store that they have to pay for their items at the end. So I'm opening a grocery store for the people where you can just take things and leave. Instagram works on creating tonnage so you can sell ads on top of it. That needs to be what it is. It's the reason why they wouldn't do or they would have to really, really be careful about what they would price any kind of ad free experience. This is a business wise, a stupid gesture because they just violated the terms of service and they probably harmed their careers as developers as a protest to say that the world of infinite growth that is only going to get more and more algorithmically polluted with whatever be real or tick tock clones you want to jam into a product that people already have engaged with. That I think is the more interesting societal trend when it comes to people's engagement with stuff like Instagram. And that's what this is a protest for. Mm hmm. Well, you might have thoughts on this, you know, maybe you're on the side of the OG app. Maybe you're saying, no, they can't do things like this. If you have thoughts, if you have thoughts on anything you'd like us to talk about on a future show, a great way to let us know is in our subreddit. You could submit stories and vote them up at dailytechnewshow.reddit. Dot com. Well, everybody, settle back. We're going back in time. OK, let's set the mood. Remember back to the heady day of July 29th, 2022. It was a simpler time. Of course, Sarah, you remember it. Oh, it was beautiful. They announced the date for the Twitter Elon Musk trial. The days were longer back then. The grass was greener. Things just move slower. And we all remember when the Google Stadia Twitter account replied to at Blue Fire Demon 44 that quote, Stadia is not shutting down. Rest assured, we're always working on bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro. Well, it turns out a lot can change over the course of two whole months because Google announced that Stadia will shut down early next year. Like the lost verse of summer lovin here are the details. Users will have access to their games library through January 18th, 2023. After that, the service is going dark. Google isn't leaving customers entirely out to dry. However, it will refund customers for hardware, games and add-ons purchased for the service. It expects all refunds to be out around the same time as the service shut down. Of course, the fate of Stadia has been a bit of an open question for a little while now, despite Google's protestations this summer. Many considered the writing on the wall for the service way back in February 2021. When it shut down its internal development studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment. At the time, Stadia GM Phil Harrison said, given our focus on building on the proven technology of Stadia, as well as deepening our business partnerships, we've decided that we will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team. In today's announcement, Harrison said Stadia had not, quote, gained the traction with users that we expected, unquote. It was quick to add, though, that the tech powering Stadia isn't going anywhere and will be used across other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play and our augmented reality efforts, as well as making it available to our industry partners. I submit to the panel, true or false, cloud gaming is bad and consumers hate it. Well, consumers are definitely having a hard time picking up stuff like Stadia. What I do think is important is that Google, you know, maybe a little bit of lip service at this point, but Google saying, Stadia has a role within Google. We can use this. We can have fun with this as a consumer product. The way it was rolled out was always a little head scratchy. I mean, from the very moment that it was rolled out, people were like, oh, maybe cool. And then more and more, especially over the last, I don't know, year plus that we've been talking about it, more and more, it was like, who's using Stadia? And I know our gaming folks who are frequent contributors to the show, more and more said, I don't know. I mean, it's not, there's nothing wrong with it. It just isn't that great. Well, you know, Justin, I think that is the key question here. And I think what Stadia always had the problem with and that perhaps Microsoft and, you know, certainly Microsoft doesn't necessarily have this direct problem is comparing cloud gaming to PC gaming.  It may not be good because when you're when you're dealing with that, there are a very different set of expectations versus that versus a console experience, which we kind of all have accepted. Yes, I'm not going to have all of the latest graphical bells and whistles, but it just works. I can fire it up. It, you know, I have to download a patch or something, but it'll work fairly quickly as opposed to PC gaming, where there is this all this emphasis. Everything is customizable. Everything is about, you know, maxing out your FPS and that kind of stuff. So I do think that for when you don't have that that kind of console expectation to set, you know, customers mindsets on, I do think it always will fare badly or at least compared to, you know, the latest PC games. I mean, certainly, though, for all of the the failings of Stadia and it's it's always it probably is just Google's reputation for killing. Services, right? They've always been skeptical of Stadia in particular, but I don't hear, you know, Microsoft is, is, you know, going all in on this. Nvidia is certainly investing a ton of money into their cloud gaming. So I mean, there's a lot of money in it to succeed, whether, you know, I do think the consumer confidence in it at this point is an interesting question. But a lot of money from who? Because all the players that you announced have one thing in common. They sell cloud storage, except for admitted, except for Nvidia, but the three biggest players in it are Google, Microsoft and Amazon. And they're the three people that launch cloud gaming systems because they want to be able to leverage the fact that they have an inside track on this idea. It has always to me seemed like a solution waiting for a problem. It did not feel that that gamers were desperate for it. They there was a lot of wait and see, boy, it'll be cool if it is great. But it wasn't because the product is bad and consumers don't like it. I I would I would interject in that you're think I think you're taking a very broad approach to cloud gaming. Yeah, aspects of our bad Stadia's pricing model was ridiculous. You pay full price for the game on top of the subscription. It's like signing up for Netflix and then every movie or TV series you watch, you got to pay that to pay to watch that particular movie. It pricing wise, it makes no sense. And I think Google was basically kind of half-heartedly kind of losing interest in it anyway, because it wouldn't to get into it at the stage of Microsoft has gotten gotten into. You have to have invested a great deal of time and money developing, not just the underlying infrastructure, but you got to develop a broad base of content as well as consumers. Microsoft has managed to do that for what, 20 years. Same way that Netflix has managed to cultivate viewership based on its DVD subscription model that they could slowly transition over to a streaming one when they even when they had a very poultry. And I mean, very they had like 30 movies at one time. And that was it and a couple of TV shows. No one wanted to watch, but it was there in those first. And because they had the mind share, people associated Netflix with movies in the same way that people associate Microsoft or at least Xbox with video games. Google stated that there's no there's no PR. There's no, you know, consumer awareness of what that means. And so when people say, right, Amazon or Amazon Luna. I mean, it sounds like either a clothing brand, a dairy brand or a car brand, right? You know, it's there's nothing about it that screams at you. This is about gaming. And I think part of the problem is that you you need to spend an equal amount to build out that portion as well. And here's to be good. And the product wasn't good because look, UFC made a deal with ESPN Plus to be their exclusive streaming home. And when they have a pay per view, despite the fact that you pay $3 and 99 cents or whatever you pay for ESPN Plus, you still got to pay full freight on that pay per view the way you would over a cable subscriber or another online option. That product works for those consumers. This one has not. And and you're right, Roger, you're right that all of these things are are certainly impediments to this thing getting off the ground. None of them are insurmountable if the product is what they promised. And it hasn't been. Here is what was also a bad product. Google Glass, you know, it is alive in the enterprise. Google Glass, if we take Phil's statement and we say, given our focus on building on proven technology of stadium, we will be as well as deepening our business partnerships. We've decided we will not be investing in a consumer experience, AKA we're going to white label this. We're not going to do AAA, but we're going to take this tech stack and offer to companies, maybe large streaming providers that want to build out a large gaming platform. I don't know Netflix companies like that that want to be in the game streaming game and not on the triple A level, but on something where they compete a lot more and they can do that down the line and make a ton of money, not put their name on it and have the whole Google, you know, killed by Google stigma attached to it as well. Well, listen, I know we're a little far out from holiday season and getting the gift for the person who has everything, but I've got a contender everybody. Swedish brand, Teenage Engineering, which makes electronic music creation hardware, if you're not familiar with them, they're very cool, has introduced something called the PO 80 record factory that lets you cut vinyl records at home and then also play them back. So it's a record player, but also a vinyl creator. You just plug an audio device into the 3.5 millimeter check. You start recording onto the vinyl itself. Maybe you made some like weird electrode music in Pro Tools, you know, you can feed that into the 45 and then print it. And then with the included five inch blank records, you can get about four minutes of audio per side at 33 RPM, three minutes per side at 45 RPM. Anybody who is familiar with records knows that, you know, those are the little ones, but there is an adapter. If you want to cut a seven inch record, it's all powered over USB. And you might say, hmm, it sounds kind of familiar. Teenage Engineering teamed up with Japanese designer Yuri Suzuki, who previously built a similar concept. So this is come to fruition. You might say, sounds great for me. What's the cost? It's kind of affordable, actually. The PO 80 record factory is available for $149. Now, that only includes a few uncut vinyls. You're going to have to buy more of them if you really want to go ham. But this is fun. Let's just let's just call it what it is. This is fun. Well, and especially for Teenage Engineering, not known for making the most affordable electronics. So no, no, I was actually sort of surprised by the price.  I don't know the possibilities of this, I think are like really cool. And it looks like I love the cuteness of that idea was reflected in your delivery, Sarah.  But no, I really, I love the idea. Like if, if, if I were five year old Sarah, the idea that I could, you know, could back then my house had a lot of vinyl records, you know, record player, you know, tape cassettes existed, but, you know, we had a lot of records. The idea that you could you make one of your own and either, you know, just enjoy it yourself or maybe give it as a gift. So cool. Very cool. All right. Well, I guess I'm the only one who cares about this group. I love it too, sir. Hey, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Let's do it. This one comes from Mark. Mark says, first time writing in, but I have been a listener since the Buzz out loud days regarding your discussion yesterday about medical pictures. My wife used to be the medical photographer at a hospital in Canada and was instrumental in making up the photography policy for the hospital at the time. This included the requirement of signing, you know, patient consents, digital storage procedures, et cetera. Her biggest battle by far at the time was staff using personal cell phone cameras to take pictures of injuries or wounds without consent. So you can figure out from there how images may end up on the internet. Love the show and all the best from starting to get chilly in Northern Ontario. And yeah, this is coming off our conversation, you know, from that that we had in yesterday's show about, you know, there are a lot of lot of not necessarily like a breach of medical data, but just stuff that gets taken that ends up being somewhat public information that may inform an AI in the future. And we should all know a little bit more about that. Absolutely. Yeah. Should the the the long legacy of shadow IT and AI may haunt us for years. In deed, a man that will not haunt us unless he wants to is Justin Robert Young. Justin, you're a busy man. We're so glad to have you on the show week after week. Let folks know where you've been up to latest. It is spooky season, after all. I have a show called We're Not Wrong with myself, Jen, Bryony and Andrew Heaton. We have a great new episode out. I hope you guys download that. But I forgot that I also had another gigantic thing to plug. My production company, Dog & Pony Show Audio has a brand new prestige audio series that is very bingeable.  Will Saddleburg hosts, don't explain every brilliant or every every tired cliche in any movie you've ever seen at one time started as a brilliant breakthrough idea. And will tracks the history of one such of those old tired genres, the rock star biopic from Lady Sings the Blues to Ray Walk the Line and even Elvis, which came out this summer. Will explains the entire story of that genre, why we love it, why it's so predictable.  I think you're going to really, really enjoy it. Don't explain from Dog & Pony Show Audio. That sounds freaking cool. You know who else sounds freaking cool? Brian Rowe, who's one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support, Brian. Truly Brian, Brian, Brian. Oh, this could be you tomorrow.  Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We affectionately call it GDI. You can catch this show, though. DTNS is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 20 hundred UTC. And you can find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. We're doing it all again tomorrow. Talking 3D X-rays in color with Dr. Nikki Ackerman's and Len Peralta. Draw on the stuff. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


FAO's strategic framework for 2022-2031 focuses on a common shared vision and reflects FAO's commitment to partner with the entire UN system, to transform agri-food systems to be more efficient, more inclusive, more resilient and more sustainable. This will lead to better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life. Leaving no one behind, and will take us closer to achieving the world's sustainable development goals. In South Sudan, FAO, the World Food Programme and the United Nations Office for Project Services, UNOPs work together to support small holder farmers by establishing agricultural markets. Such initiatives help to promote inclusive economic growth and reduce inequalities, contributing to a better life for all. One of the sectors that requires partnership is the area of food security. We cannot attain the sustainable development goal of zero hunger alone. The UNDS reform provides an opportunity to cut across the whole development agenda in order to bring the best competencies, the unique competencies that each one of the players of the UN system brings to the game, and make them work together. Let us work together to achieve the more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable agri-food systems for better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life for all, leaving no one behind. One FAO, one family, the United Nations family. Together, we are building a better world.


Hi everyone, a big welcome back to my channel. So today is going to be the second video I have filmed this year talking about anticipated releases. I filmed one earlier in the year talking about January to April releases, and this one is going to be about May to August releases. I don't have quite as many books to talk about in this video, but the quality is we have some literary fiction, some poetry, some translated fiction, some historical fiction. We have a ton of indie publishers and a couple of really big releases as well. I'm so excited about all of these books. I've already read like five of them. A big, big thank you to all of the publishers who have sent me advanced copies of these books.  Let's get into the books. Going in date order, the first book that came out on the 13th of May by Apollo is The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper. This is a historical novel set in ancient Pompeii following the story of a young woman named Amara and a few of her friends who are enslaved in a brothel. Now this is probably the least typically me book on this list, but for some reason the premise just got me. Every now and again I love reading something that is set in a totally different location or different time period to one used to. I fancy something a bit more plot driven, a bit more high stakes. That is exactly what this book is. I'm currently actually about halfway through this one and I'm really liking it. It's fun, it's vivid, it's weirdly feminist for the time period, you've got to love it. I'm really excited to see how much I end up enjoying this one in the end. Also released on the 13th of May by Fleet was Slug by Holly Mcnish. This is a kind of hybrid book. It is comprised of poetry and short stories and short essay collections all exploring Holly Mcnish's experiences with grief and family and sex and self-love and parenthood. Holly Mcnish isn't a poet that I had read works from before but she is a poet who I'd heard tons of good things about and really wanted to read. I have already read this one. I started reading it basically as soon as it came through the door and I was immediately hooked. I absolutely loved this. It was everything I wanted it to be. I was here primarily for the poetry but I loved the mix of other mediums as well. This is insightful and touching and kick-ass and just a really cool unique reading experience. I think so many people are going to adore this one. I will talk about it more in my next recent reads video. Next up coming on the 20th of May by Nine Archies Press is Boy in Various Poses by Lewis Buxton. This is a new poetry collection by one of my favourite poetry publishers ever. This one is a debut collection exploring all of the different types of boy you can be. It explores transgressing boundaries, bodies, sexuality, vulnerability and mental health. I adore Nine Archies Press. I am always up for reading their poetry but this one in particular caught my eye. I'm fascinated by gender and societal expectations and conformity and non-conformity. I have already read this one. It was really really great, funny and provocative and touching. I'm really excited to talk more about this one with you all soon. Next up coming on the 27th of May by New Ruins Press is Absorbed by Kylie Whitehead. This is a particularly exciting one because it is the first book coming from a new imprint named New Ruins Press which is the baby of dead ink books in Liverpool and Influx Press in London. The imprints aim, I believe, is to explore and push the boundaries between literary and genre fiction. This book in particular follows the story of a woman named Allison who when she feels her partner slipping away from her literally absorbs him. I was so up for this. I love experimental books, weird books especially when they're literary. This concept of literally absorbing the people you love is genius. I have, of course, already read this one and I'm very pleased to report it was really good. It's dark and comic and explores really cool themes like female insecurity and body horror. I think New Ruins is onto some really cool stuff here and of course you can hear my full thoughts on this one in my next recent reads video. Coming on the 3rd of June by Dead Ink Books is The Hierarchies by Roz Anderson set in the not too distant future. This is a literary dystopian novel exploring AIs and synthetic humans.  This is supposed to be dark and humorous, exploring humans talent for exploitation more so than technological advancement. This sounds really cool and very me. I am fascinated by A.I. and the philosophy behind it. What with the recent publication of Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Clara and the Sun? I imagine this book is coming out at a pretty good time. Really excited to see what unique things this one has to offer. Coming on the 10th of June by Fourth Estate is Still Life by Sarah Winman. This is one of the big releases that I mentioned at the beginning of the video. This is a big release generally for Fourth Estate and just publishing generally but for me personally this is about as big as it gets. For those of you who don't know Sarah Winman is one of my favorite authors of all time. Her novel Tin Man is one of my favorite books ever. I could just live in her writing. When I heard that she was bringing out a new book I was beyond excited and I am so overjoyed to have received this proof copy and to have read this before publication. Opening in 1944 in Tuscany, Still Life follows a story of two strangers who meet Ulysses, a young British soldier, and Evelyn, an older female historian. The novel then follows these two characters' lives as well as the lives of the people around them over the next four decades in both London and Italy. Obviously I have already read this one. It was so beautiful, so masterfully crafted, so richly charactered. I just can't. Amazing book, so privileged to have read this early. I love it. Full thoughts on this one coming soon. Next up coming on the 18th of June by Fly on the Wall Press is Modern Medicine by Lucy Hurst. This is another new poetry collection, this one exploring the weirdness and discomfort of bodily suffering through experiences of illness and medicine and disability. Fly on the Wall Press are actually a new indie publisher to me. They seem to be working on some really cool stuff. This collection in particular had me as soon as I read the premise. The idea of pain, especially female pain, and how we view it and react to it and treat it absolutely fascinates me. It's something that I really want to read more about. This just seems like a really cool and unique idea for a poetry collection. I'm really excited to dive into it soon. Coming on the 24th of June by Arrow is, oh this way up, The Mismatch by Sarah Jaffari. This is a new literary novel following a British Iranian new graduate named Soria, I believe. She wants to get her first kiss out of the way. She then meets a quintessentially British rugby playing lad, perhaps some romance blooms. This just sounds delightful, very character focused and literary, which is totally my thing. Lighthearted and entertaining, but also with more serious themes, I'm guessing. I think this could be a really fun read. There is some hype around this one on Twitter at the moment as well, so I'm excited to give it a go. Also coming on the 24th of June by Bloomsbury Circus is, Animal by Lisa Tadeo. Another big release and one that I am particularly excited for. This is the first novel from Lisa Tadeo, the author of Three Women that came out a couple of years ago. I loved Three Women when I read it. I thought it was insightful and intelligent and really well written. Naturally I was very excited when I heard that she was bringing out her first novel. I believe this one follows the story of a young woman who witnesses some violent act by a man. She then flees New York and ends up unraveling some horrific event that happened to her while she was a child. I don't know much more about this one. I think they are keeping the premise purposefully vague, which I am here for. I imagine it's going to be dark and raw. I've heard that it is filled with female rage. Very intrigued. I'm going to be starting this one really soon. Also coming on the 24th of June by Influx Press is The Service by Frankie Mirren. This is another literary novel following three different women whose lives converge when brothels in London start being rated. We have Laurie who has a young daughter and who works illegally in a rented flat. We have Freya who is a student who makes money through being an escort, and we also have Paula, a journalist who has a lifelong campaign against prostitution. I hear that this one has dystopian vibes despite the fact that it isn't actually a dystopian. It is said to be shocking and deeply humane, challenging conceptions of sex and women's bodies and entitlement and power. Everything about this one sounds fab. I cannot wait. Coming on the 8th of July by Zafra is Recutation by Lex Croucher. This is a historical regency era romcom following the story of a middle class young woman named Georgiana who goes to live with her dreary aunt and uncle. There she meets the wealthy and enigmatic Francis and falls into the upper echelons of debauched regency society. Again, this one is not my typical kind of read, but it just sounds so fun. It's being marked as for fans of Bridgerton, which is genius. Obviously, I also absolutely adore Jane Austen, which this is boldly comparing itself to as well. I'm going to be picking this one up really, really soon. I'm hoping for an entertaining wild ride. Coming on the 5th of August by Viking is The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. This is a new novel by the fab author Elif Shafak.  That is all I know. It is all I need to know. I first read Elif Shafak a couple of years ago when my friend Laura recommended me Three Daughters of Eve. I absolutely adored that book. I've wanted to read more by her ever since, so I was super excited to hear she was bringing out another new book. I just love her characters and her writing and her themes. She's so fab. I think this is going to be illuminating and rich and beautiful. I can't wait. Also coming on the 5th of August by Faber and Faber is In the Country of Others by Lila Slamani. As with other Lila Slamani novels, I believe this one is translated from French, but for the life of me, I cannot find out who the translator is. I can't find that information anywhere, which is bizarre. Perhaps this one isn't translated, perhaps it's written in English, or perhaps it's translated by Sam Taylor, the translator for her other two novels. If anyone has any insight about this, please do let me know down below. So this is described as an interracial love story between a Moroccan soldier who fought for France in the Second World War and a spirited young French woman. I believe the novel is set over 10 years, leading up to Morocco's independence in 1956. So you may or may not know that I am such a fan of Lila Slamani. She is one of my favourite translated authors. I didn't actually know that this one was coming out until, like last week, I somehow almost missed it. I just adore Lila Slamani's delicious writing and the dark psychological tint to her novels. This one sounds a bit different to Adele and Lullaby, a bit of a foray into historical fiction. I'm here for it, I am very excited to give this one a go. And the final book coming on the 24th of August by double day is The Women of Troy by Pat Barker. This is probably the biggest release on this list. This is the sequel to the incredibly popular Iliad retelling The Silence of the Girls that Pat Barker brought out a couple of years ago. Still focusing on the same main character, this one takes place. After Troy has fallen, the Greeks are trying to travel home victorious, but the gods have been offended, people. This is a very exciting one. I am so happy to have received this proof. It is absolutely gorgeous as well. I loved The Silence of the Girls, didn't we all? Pat Barker is such a fab writer and this type of feminist Greek myth retelling is so delicious, so on trend. I'm intrigued to see where this one goes, I'm intrigued to see how much I like it compared to the first book. I will be reading this one very soon indeed. So there we have all of the books that I am most excited about coming in May to August. Please let me know what you think of any of these books. Do they sound good to you? Also let me know if there are any other exciting books coming that I haven't included on this list that I need to know about. I hope you're all doing really, really well. As always, I very much look forward to hearing from you in the comments and I will see you all soon in another video. Bye everyone.


Thank you, Tony. Thank you to Wyder and to the ILO for the invitation. Obviously, Isabel has laid out a lot of detail and proposals in her presentation. And I don't want to cut into the time of Andrea. I think this is his opportunity to some extent to present his work. And I'm also very wary of well-dressed Florentine gentlemen who can stab you in the back with a stiletto before you know what's happened. So I will not cut into his time here. And what I'll just try and do is to provide some thoughts about Unktad's long-standing involvement in the debate on inequality and development. And hopefully in the process address some of the issues that Isabel began to flag in her presentation. I mean, Unktad is 50 years old this year, as many of you may know. And inequality is hardwired into the Unktad agenda. I mean, it was very explicitly identified in the final act that actually led to the creation of Unktad 50 years ago to which member states agreed back in 64. And to quote from that inaugural act, economic and social progress should go together. If privilege, extremes of wealth and poverty and social injustice persist, then the goal of development is lost. And that was part of our inaugural thinking. I think it's important to recognize in that context that this is not really a poverty agenda. It's not really a social deprivation agenda. And Unktad was never really about poverty eradication in the way that became defined post-1980. It was very much a development agenda. It was about how you combine resource mobilization, structural transformation, technological progress, and economic inclusiveness into a kind of virtuous circle in which productivity growth, employment creation, and economic and social security were mutually supportive ways of lifting a nation from rural poverty to industrial and post-industrial wealth. And of course the Unktad position was that you can never rely on markets or private firms to do that for you. And that the state and intensive policy intervention have to be an integral part of triggering and maintaining that kind of virtuous circle. And within that, the inequality story is an important part of the challenge. I think it's interesting that Raoul Prebish himself returned explicitly to the issue of inequality and development in the first Prebish lecture that Unktad organizes. It was in 1982. I say that partly because we have our latest Prebish lecture tomorrow in Unktad, which is a public lecture to which all people are welcome. It will be given by Raphael Correa, the president of Ecuador tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock. And he's going to talk about development as a political process, which I think is very much in the Prebish tradition of emphasizing a kind of political economy perspective on the development challenge in which growth and income distribution are key elements of the story. In 1982, Prebish presented the first lecture which was entitled The Crisis of Capitalism and the Periphery. And I mean, it's a surprisingly contemporary piece, actually, when you read it. Essentially, Prebish argued that, as he was looking at the world, that the North, the advanced countries, were facing a threat of what we would now call, perhaps, secular stagnation. Low rates of productive investment, slow growth. And he attributed that to a combination of slowing technological progress after the rapid benefits of technological opportunity after the interwar period were disappearing. And what he called the social power structures, which were skewing income distribution towards the elite and running the danger of what he saw as over-consumption and under-investment. And in a world of under-investment, the danger was that this would create an environment of low productivity growth and rising social tensions. So inequality, that story of inequality was very much, he understood in the early 1980s, was very much part of the challenge that was facing advanced economies at a time when many people were not talking about the issue. Obviously, he was responding partly to the policy options that were then on offer in the advanced countries, essentially some variant of monetarism which was sold as a way of addressing the adjustment, of undertaking the adjustments required to deal with the social imbalances. Obviously, Prevish did not believe that monetarism could solve the problems of over-consumption and under-investment. And indeed, they would almost certainly make things worse in the advanced countries, but they would also, this advent of the kind of monetarist neoliberal agenda would also pose very significant problems to the developing world. And he warned then that he saw the possibilities of rising inequality in the south, along with an attempt to use market forces and abandon the earlier growth strategies of greater state intervention as a real danger that would derail a more inclusive growth strategy in the south. And to a large extent, I think Prevish, with the rise of neoliberalism and structural adjustment programs in the Bretton Woods institutions, I think Prevish, to a large extent, was proved right. And obviously, it's subsequent work in the 1980s and 1990s was very much looking at the way in which adjustment programs and neoliberal policymaking had led not only to poor growth, productivity and transformation performance, but also to growing inequalities and social tensions across the south. And we've never tried to attribute that to a singular policy position, such as trade liberalization. I mean, the discussion of whether trade and finance can cause inequality. I mean, the answer, obviously, is yes, it can, but maybe it doesn't either. I mean, the point about most of Anten's work is that policies never come in the singular version. They always come in packages. And it's the interdependence of those policies that you have to look at to understand the possible impact of development programs on productivity performance, employment creation, and economic and social security. Certainly, we've done work in Anten that shows that contrary to the kind of utopian projections of a too-good, too-factor, two-country world, which you can combine with Stolper-Samuelson and factor price equalization and the Rabinski theorem to generate win-win situations in an ideally functioning model, we've tended to show that, in fact, trade liberalization in the real world has certainly caused wage decreases and job losses in many parts of the developing world. So at the same time, we are fully aware that countries like China and East Asia have used trade, including elements of trade liberalization, to generate episodes of very rapid and sustained and, to some extent, inclusive growth. So there's no either or answer to the question of the role of trade and financing in inclusive growth. And a lot of UNCTADs, I hope a lot of our work in the 80s and 90s was trying to present a more balanced view of the policy challenges that developing countries faced in a more challenging, open global economy. And I think inequality was part of our agenda, but we only kind of revisited it in a more explicit, the inequality development challenge in a more explicit way in our 1997 Trade and Development Report. At a time when no one else was really looking at the inequality question in the development agenda, and neoliberalism, this was before the financial crisis in Asia, and neoliberalism was still in its heyday and promises of convergence across and within countries was still very much the order of the day. And poverty was a problem of the marginals and that you had to treat poverty as essentially as a welfare question. And there was no discussion of the links of inequality and economic growth in the development agenda of that time. And so I think the 1997 Trade and Development Report was a fairly seminal attempt to reintroduce the inequality question into the development agenda. However, we did it not through the kind of perspective that Isabel presented in her presentation, a focus on household measures of inequality. We essentially returned to the prebiased tradition of focusing on functional income distribution. That is the distribution of income between wages, profits, and rents. And we noticed then in 1997 that there were clear signs of wages lagging behind productivity growth, particularly in the advanced economies. And that could store up potential problems. I mean, the flip side, of course, of declining wage shares is rising profit shares. And rising profit shares can be part of a dynamic growth story, at least for some time, to the extent that profits are being reinvested in productive investment. That, in a way, was Prébish's story back in 1982 that the success of the Golden Age of Capitalism partly was that you had a social contract in which relatively high stable, but relatively high profit shares were being invested in productive investment, which allowed productivity to increase for new technologies to be absorbed and for real wages to rise. I mean, that was part of the Golden Age story. What changes, at least in the interpretation that we had in the 97 Trade and Development Report, was the rise of unregulated finance as the dominant form of globalization appeared after 1979, 1980. Although the ideology of neoliberalism and the kind of win-win policy predictions that it makes is essentially based on the classical trade model, the two-by-two-by-two neoclassical trade model, trade was not the big story when it came to contemporary globalization dynamics. The really big story has been and continues to be the dominance of unregulated finance and unregulated financial institutions in shaping the dynamics of the global economy. We argued back then that this kind of financialization story is one of the reasons why you get the breakdown of the links within this virtual circle between increased profits, higher investments, and wages essentially matching the productivity increases that accompany a sustainable growth process that you saw in the period after the end of the Second World War. And so we did a lot of work in that context. The 97 report I think remains, although we have not really revisited it in a systematic way, I think it remains a fundamental template for the way in which we look at the kind of imbalances that we've seen emerge under finance-led globalization over the course of the last couple of decades, and I think continues to provide a major challenge for the international community if it is going to be serious about tackling issues of inequality, secular stagnation, and weak job creation. So that was our story in 97. Interestingly enough, the IMF in 2007 reduced its in its world economic outlook. I think its first attempt to come to grips with the issue of inequality and globalization 10 years after, UNCTED likes to think it's ahead of the curve, I guess. 10 years is long enough to suggest that we were certainly ahead of the IMF on these issues. So the world economic outlook essentially visited this question in 2007. Very kind of conventional neoclassical approach to the nature of the challenge. As they reflected at least a growing literature amongst academic economists, recognized that inequality was emerging as a problem, essentially they interpreted the nature of the problem as a question, is it caused by trade or is it caused by technology? Essentially a pattern of technological development which was skewing incomes in favor of those with certain types of skills and threatening the livelihoods of those with inappropriate skill sets. Not surprisingly, I guess, the IMF came down essentially in favor of the technology story. We looked at the technology story in the 1997 Trade and Development Report. We didn't find it a particularly convincing argument back in 1997 and we don't find it a particularly persuasive argument today but that was their story and the beauty of the technology argument for the neoliberal agenda is that you can recognize the problem but you can't really do very much about technology. You want new technologies. New technologies are good. They're obviously productivity and enhancing. Anyway, you can't stop new technology. That would be a Luddite agenda that the international agencies should not be supporting anyway. So you have to kind of grin and bear it and invest a little bit in education which is essentially the IMF kind of agenda when it comes to dealing with the inequality challenge at least in 2007. Trade was not a problem, obviously, from this perspective. Trade is always generating a positive impact on inequality, essentially favoring labor-intensive producers in the South and their empirical evidence that they present in the 2007 report essentially backs up that story Interestingly, they do find in that story where technology is the driving force that FDI and increased FDI flows from their empirical evidence that they present in that report does emerge as a major factor in explaining the increase in inequality. Obviously, most foreign direct investment tends to be more technology-intensive than at least the dominant technologies in the host developing country and therefore the FDI technology nexus tended to offer one reason one explanation for why you had seen growing inequality in both the developed and the developing world post the early 1980s. Funnily enough, if they'd have bothered looking at the historical evidence and, of course, by this time a lot of people had revisited a lot of economic historians had revisited the era of globalization before 1914 because the period between 1870 and 1914 was itself a period of fairly intensive globalization and so you got historians like Kevin O'Rourke and John Williamson doing work on that and their findings are pretty sensible and not properly examined by the IMF but they always found that trade was not a big factor in explaining the growing inequality which was part of the story between 1870 and 1914 so trade was not much of a story the one factor that always emerges from that period as leading as having a positive impact on inequality is, of course, large movements of labor and unlike the current era the period before 1914 was characterized by very large very significant movements of labor so they've always insisted that was a major positive factor on reducing inequality and, of course, they found back in that era that international financial flows were a major factor leading to growing inequality so the major force in leading to inequality before the period of 1914 was international capital flows and the IMF, other than the FDI story essentially ignores the role of unregulated finance as being a factor in the story of growing inequality so that was a major difference between our interpretation of the inequality story after 1980 and the IMF story and we've tried to link that to in subsequent work in subsequent trade and development reports we've tried to follow through the story to try and show how financialization has continued to act as a force of declining wage shares as a phenomenon that has continued not only in the developed world over the last 10, 15 years but has also become a feature of many developing countries since the mid-1990s I guess this is familiar work to an ILO audience I know Stockhammer has done work for the ILO on tracking the continuous decline in wage shares I think Stockhammer quite rightly sees trade and technology as probably secondary explanations of that declining wage share he puts a lot of emphasis on the growing weight of financialization as a major factor in causing the declining wage share and a subsequent literature I guess again everyone has been familiar with has been to try and show how this combination of the increasing weight of the financial sector and financial incentives the growth of shadow banking and other forms of evolution of the modern financial sector has led to growing inequality has led to slow growth you've got the work of the IMF now recognizing that there is a link between growing inequality and slow growth the links from financialization to vulnerability and crisis which has been undertaken by people like Joe Stiglitz and Jamie Galbraith the recent book on the House of Debt is another manifestation of that the work on perverse incentives by people like Rajan that again has linked this combination of growing inequality particularly understood from a functional perspective rising financialization and weak economic performance and growing economic vulnerability and UNCTAD has tried in its own various ways to contribute also to that discussion and to warn developing countries that there are signs in their own backyard that they are reproducing some of these features that led to the crisis of 2008-2009 in advanced economies and that there's a major policy challenge ahead for developing countries to ensure that the financialization trend that we saw in the advanced countries after the early 1980s does not derail growth prospects ahead for the developing world interestingly I guess I'll finish that because it speaks to something that Isabel talked about which is the growing interest of this kind of inequality story in the IMF, the World Bank, the G20 has now made this an issue people like Mark Carney and other central bankers have begun to worry about the links between financialization and growing inequality the Pope has made some fairly bold statements about this I'm sure that George Clooney and his beautiful wife have also made statements about this challenge so I mean it's become part of the discourse now of contemporary policy making but what we, Janet Yellen for example in terms of the slow recovery in the United States has recently made an interesting statement about whether a heavy reliance on unorthodox monetary policy has actually contributed to the rising inequality in the US that we've seen since 2010-2011 so this is, you know, it's now it's certainly on the minds this link between finance inequality and poor economic performance is certainly on the minds of policymakers I think what is surprising at least when I was at the bank fund meetings is just how few policy suggestions serious policy suggestions are on the table to tackle this this seems to be a lot of good intention but almost no real proposals and as Isabel pointed out when you actually look at IMF programs if anything they're pushing in the opposite direction and in a funny way it's not rocket science I mean we know, I think the chart from Piketty to some extent shows that we know why the new deal worked we know why it was able to control the extremes of inequality that had led to the crisis of the 1930s we know that strengthening labour regulation giving greater power to trade unions works as a way of A, controlling finance and B, bringing about a more stable relationship between the supply and demand sides of the economy we know financial regulation works we know it works we know Glass-Steagall was a major reason why we didn't have banks that were too big to fail for most of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s we know that redistributive policies we know these work but there's no real acknowledgement of this in the discourse that we hear in the G20, the IMF, the World Bank and that's a worrying state of affairs when it comes to advancing a more progressive agenda the IMF is working with the ILO in the G20 to try and do just that we have our own global policy model that is able to present a credible alternative in terms of expansionary demand side policies capital regulations and control of financial markets and redistributive measures and that's a policy combination in our interpretation and use of this model to deliver more stable and rapid growth not only in the advanced countries but also in the developing world and we are worried that this kind of agenda still finds it difficult to get traction


Tired of long-term commitment plans? Then Appalachian Wireless has the new plans for you! No credit checks, no contracts, and most of the features of Postpaid is Forward Pay, the simpler way to do wireless on the region's premier cellular provider. And it starts as low as $19.99 a month with unlimited talk and text. We are you. We are Appalachian Wireless. On Tuesday, April 18th, the University of Pikeville Bluegrass Ensemble and Jazz Band will be performing at 6 p.m. in Booth Auditorium. This will be the first concert performance of U-Pikes Jazz Band. The directors of both bands share their thoughts on combining the two genres for one concert. I think the fusion between Jazz Band and Bluegrass is great, because a big part of Bluegrass's improvisation is stolen directly from Jazz. So it's great that we have both of those two genres of music together in the same place. We're fairly excited about it. And this is actually the first year that we have the Jazz Band at the University of Pikeville. We did a trial of it in the spring of last year, but now this is its first time as a full-fledged ensemble in class. So it's in the style of a big band, so you know kind of think swing music and a lot of improvisation is what we've been working on. And I think it'll be a good show for tomorrow night. The musical stylings of U-Pikes Bluegrass Ensemble and Rock Band will also be present during Hillbilly days. You can listen to the Bluegrass Ensemble at the courthouse stage and the Rock Band at the Harley-Davidson shop. I think in general it's very important to us in the music area to be really involved in the community as much as we possibly can. So we're really excited to have some performance opportunities during Hillbilly days. On Friday at 3 p.m. at the courthouse stage, the Bluegrass Ensemble will be performing at that time. And you'll probably hear us leading up to that point. We're going to kind of run around Hillbilly days and perform just sort of flash mob style, set up, play, move, set up, play, move on our way to the courthouse stage at 3 p.m. And we also have the Rock Band performing on Friday of Hillbilly days at 6 p.m. over at the Harley-Davidson shop. They're doing a dinner and a drive-in for that event. And so we're going to have the Rock Band paired up with Zoe Howard, who is one of our students but also getting on a singer and a guitarist. So she's going to be pairing up with us. And she's the lead singer for Yellow Line, correct? That's correct. That's right. We're reporting for Mountain Top News. I'm Nick Colum.


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