because it's time to dig into more unanswered questions. You've been doing this division by division. We kicked it off yesterday in the NFC East. Now we go to the NFC North. It's their turn. And I want to start with the Bears. You know, I love Chicago. It's where I grew up. I love the direction. The team is headed under Ryan Poles. I love it all. They're not yelling. What's the question? I want everyone to yell at me today. Get to the question. Here's the question for Chicago. Is Justin Fields as good as we think? That's what it is. Plenty of reasons to be excited about Justin last year. We saw some awesome runs. They were explosive, highlight, real throws, big-time fantasy performances, but the Bears still finish with the worst record in the NFL. I'm not saying that it's Justin's fault. I think the Bears roster was super flawed, especially when it comes to receiving core and the offensive line. I don't think that's that case anymore. Take a look at these additions. Oh, this makes my heart sing. The Bears made the trade for DJ Moore. They spent their first round around tackle Darnal Wright to straighten the O-line. They add Robert Tungian, Deonti Foreman, Nate Davis. Listen, they took some skilled players in the middle rounds as well. So GM Ryan Poles, he's gone all in to try to support his guy. And that is a wonderful thing. And it's exactly what you want to see as someone from Chicago or if you're just a Bears fan from anywhere. But it really puts it all on Justin. That's true. Listen, we've surrounded you with all the support you need. If you can't thrive here, tough, okay? So while last year, the feeling was kind of, you know, we know this team isn't going to be a contender right now. We just want to see good things out of Justin. That was the whole, that's all I wanted last year. Now it's time to start winning some games, beating some W's in that column, okay? And that's about way more than stats and it's about way more than highlight reels. And I will say this, I believe in fields and I do think Chicago found their quarterback and has him. But there are things that need to be proven before we can remove the think from the equation and consider Justin one of the upperclassmen of the quarterbacks in this league. All right, let's try this again. Now take a look at, you guys can tweet the show, by the way, at Up an Adam show. And we would love for you to do that. I love getting tweets during the program. So thanks for joining us this morning. Let's take a look at Detroit. Let's go up there to Motor City.  But that actually isn't my question for them. Start yelling at me, God. What's the question? Get to the question. Come on. It's not about Jared Goff, come on, I love you. I just love everything about you. It's not about Jared Goff. It's not about that, do you know anything? He deserves a lot of credit. This lion's team does, they finished in the mix while having a 30 second total defense. Get to the D, get the question. Okay, I'll get to the question. My question for the Lions is this, did they do enough to help the defense? The defense was so terrible. Listen, let's look at here. They made some big moves, okay? These are the defensive additions. Landing CJ Gardner Johnson in free agency. They get corners, Cameron Sutton and Emmanuel Mosley and they address all three levels of the defense in the draft. They get their mammoth linebacker, Jack Campbell out of Iowa in the first. They got it, Brian Branch, who I love, the first little friend of the show, DB. Out of Bama, that's the second rounder for them and a big nose tackle, Broderick Martin out of Western Kentucky that they took in the third round. But their decisions weren't non-controversial, okay? There are people questioning the move to draft running back Gibbs out of Alabama, 12th overall with cornerback Gonzalez on the board. Gonzalez, of course, went to the Patriots. Or I don't know, like, do you wanna draft a linebacker like Campbell when there were other premium positions available? Question mark, we will see how the moves pan out but if this Lions defense, man, if they're even in the middle of the pack when it comes to the whole league at any point this season and this offense, which was top five, continues to be top five, the way it did during that seven and two stretch that they had, to end the year, I think there's a really good chance we do see the Lions claim their first division title since 1993 and I believe, Connor, tell me I'm wrong, that the Lions odds are over at Fanville Sportsbook right now, if you wanna get down on it early and have a little fun, the Lions looking down upon everybody else below them in the NFC North, including the Packers. So the Packers, they're going through, I mean, they're going through it. They're going through major transition right now, Aaron Rodgers is gone, but it doesn't mean they're going to be irrelevant this year, right? What's the question? What's your question? Hold on, it's a friendship that's had five losing seasons guys, only five losing seasons in 31 years. So what's the question? Get to it. The question is pretty obvious. What is Jordan Love? Baby don't hurt me, baby don't hurt me no more, okay? What is Jordan Love? He's probably the biggest mystery. I would, I would behoove you, what is that? I would like you to find a bigger NFL mystery this year and tweet me, add up and add up show. What is the bigger mystery? Jordan Love is it. The question is clear, okay? So stop yelling, the question's clear. I think people are underestimating the impact that the answer might have. There were celebrations. There were like colors confetti and T-shirt guns around the NFC North when Rodgers was traded to New York. But fans did not learn anything from far to Rodgers and that situation that happened, come on. I'm not saying Love will be as good as Rodgers, but he's a talented guy, okay? He's a good quarterback. He went the first round for a reason and this roster still has a ton of juice. This standoff doesn't happen between Rodgers and the Packers and the Jets. The trait doesn't happen unless the Packers are completely comfortable with what they've got. And Goody pulled off a complete overhaul of Love's weapons, okay? He snags a receiver, Jane Reed in the second round. He gets a couple of tight ends. He got Tucker Kraft, Luke Musgraves, second, third round picks there and two other receivers later in the draft. I'm just saying there's not one team in this division that has proven enough to overlook the Packers. I will say that and I love the Lions. And the Vikings were really exciting last year and Chicago's got the good things happening, good things coming. Nobody has made it a shut book case that the Packers are just not going to be at the top. So that's what I would say. The question is. All right, finally. There's gotta be a question. Oh, there is a question. And this is my, I wanna handle this a little gently. This is a tortured fan base. It really is. Last year's division champs, the Vikings. They've gotta be so pissed. Fandal Sportsbook, Lions at the top. Jared Goff led Lions are leading. Like, what are we doing here? It was a big year for Minnesota last year. It's an even bigger one in 2023. They have not won back-to-back NFC North titles since 2008, 2009. Get to the question. Call them on, Jake. So you just throw paper ball at me? My God, I see the flashbacks. The seventh grade Matthew Nierman used to wear a bread farmed dress. We're not going down that thing. This kid used to wear a Packers jersey and used to throw things at me in class. So this one's for you. About the Vikings, though. My question for Minnesota is. Get to it. Are the Vikings good or are they? They're good. What is the good? Yeah, listen, despite their 13 and four record, the analytics did not love the Vikings last year and the Giants bounced them in the first round in the playoffs. I don't know if I've ever seen the 13 team win get so little love.  But before we pin it all on her cousins, the passing game was the biggest strength of this team last year. This team's biggest issue came in the run game. They were 27th and, by the way, on defense where only the Lions were worse and they weren't able to do a ton to improve this offseason because they only had six picks in the draft and they lost some key vets like Patrick Peterson and Adam Thielen. So while last year they were a trendy pick to win the North and they followed through. This year it seems like everybody's on the outs. If you look at the updated odds and here they go and you can see where it all shakes out over if you wanna have some fun on Fandall Sportsbook. This is after the draft now. The Vikings are tied with the Bears for the longest odds to win the division. Minnesota, are you gonna take this disrespect?  This is a contract year for court cousins and if a playoff run doesn't happen you may be closing in on that R word, the rebuilds in Minnesota. Courcousins, historically, does pretty well in a contract year, so we'll see how it goes but those are my questions. Great questions. Thank you for the NFC North. All I wanted was for Drew to yell at me. I said in the production meeting if he starts yelling we will make my day but he didn't, he's just smiling. And he says, you're lovely, you're beautiful. All right, we'll be back. We've got Sean Serania on the program. You see him on run it back, you see him breaking draft news for the NFL and now he's here with us on Up and Atms, we'll be back.


ill use up the remainder of the $30 million bond. Unfortunately, that's not all the stuff that needs to be fixed. These plants were last upgraded in 1990 and essentially most plants have to be fully rebuilt or fully replaced, renewed every 25 years. And so there are additional numbers that we are working on planning on bringing to you so that you understand the full impact of what that can might consist of. On the drinking water side, we've been focusing a lot in the recent three to four years on water main replacement. And our next capital improvement plan while we'll also have some components for water main replacement because we've got to keep going on, we've replaced about 7.7 miles of our 110 mile distribution network. We will be, we have bids out on the street right now to replace, to reline another mile. But you guys can do the math and we still have a ton of pipe to target. What we also have is a very beautiful but very old 1867 water reservoir pump house that you see shown as well as the roof on our 7 million gallon reservoir that is off of main street across from UVM. And that pump house has very much reached the end of its life. And so we are in the current stages of putting some numbers together to look at what it would take to retire that station, though keep it as a backup. It's also a historical landmark and build an entirely new pump station. This is one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure when it comes to being able to feed the hospital. It's what pumps the water from the reservoir up to the high service tanks, the elevated tanks which then provides the pressure to serve the hill section as well as the hospital. There's also new regulatory targets that I mentioned the Lake Champlain Phosphorus Plan that tertiary filter is going to help us meet and exceed what our requirements are but it will come with a cost. We also aren't done with our combined sewer reduction projects. In particular, our integrated plan is showing that to reduce the frequency of the combined sewer overflow at the Pine Street point which discharges into the Pine Street Barge Canal and then goes to the Lake Champlain, we're looking at a fairly large tank that is currently proposed to be placed under Callahan Park to the tune of I believe about $6 million. We have great hopes and dreams about the ARPA and the Build Back Better Stimulus funding. We've been trying to communicate to folks that what we need is funding, not financing. Many times folks get them confused and tell us, oh, well there's all this state revolving fund money and they forget that that's still that money that has to be paid back. It still goes against our debt capacity. We're also looking closely at the potential of rearage support that could be coming both from the state through the VRAP, the Vermont Emergency Rental Assistance Program and then the SEDs are also trying to establish a program similar to LIHEAP, it's called LIWAP that would help incumber in rate payers with their bills. And we'll talk about it more on the 24th but the next turn of the wheel on our affordability program is really trying to figure out how to bring bill assistance specifically to renters because our current mechanism and the mechanism that most water utilities use across the country doesn't necessarily reach those customers. And with that, I will take some questions and stop sharing. Great questions for Megan. Yes, President Tracy. So with the combined sewer reduction, I'm just curious as to, you mentioned like a big tank as a solution. And one thing that I recall from prior presentations was that you had noted that in the old North End in particular, you noticed a reduction in CSOs as a result of the deployment of a variety of different rain gardens across the neighborhood. And so just wondering what kinds of, like if you're gonna continue to expand those and within this budget, how much you have allotted for expansion of rain gardens across the city. Great question. So your first question is with regard to the sort of our bigger combined sewer overflow project, the challenge with the Pine Barge Canal and the contributing drainage areas that the soils in that general area are not as conducive to infiltration project which gets water off the system. As many of you know, we are doing a very large combined, green stormwater infrastructure combined sewer reduction project in a neighborhood that is above and which will is going to provide benefits and overall reductions to this overflow point. But in order to really knock it out of the park and make this thing stop going off, on a semi-regular basis, we would be controlling it to the five year storm. So it is expected statistically that we would only have a discharge once every five years. That being said, our long-term control plan does have, I don't remember off the top of my head but it does have several million dollars continuing to be invested in green stormwater infrastructure because we believe when and where it's appropriate and when and where the soils in particular are good that it is one of the best things that we can do because of the co-benefits. I frankly, you know, disappointed that we have to be looking at tanks but when you look at a lot of the innovative combined sewer utilities like Philly, it's almost always a combination of gray and green in order to meet our regulatory goals. So we're about to do construction for the south end GSI CSO retrofits and we're now going to be turning our attention for design and then construction of another suite of green stormwater infrastructure CSO reduction projects in the old North End to further help those, there's two CSOs that are on that side but we will use the old North End sandy soils all day long if we can, it's my favorite place to work. Yeah, please do. I've heard great feedback on the rain gardens that have been coming out that have been installed in recent years.  So I really like to see continued deployment of those. Well, just green space, you know, there's places in the old North End that are unfortunately still a little bit of a concrete jungle, you know and anything we can do to increase the green space helps. Absolutely. And this project was funded by a grant that Megan's team received about a million dollars that's funding both the south end stormwater and the old North End stormwater program. So we're trying to find other people's money to the maximum extent possible. Other questions for Team Water. Yes, Councillor Jang. Thank you. Yeah, a couple of things. And I think the first one is about, you know rates are going up left and right. I think, you know, BED is asking you asking as well. And I was just wondering if you have started internally to look into the feasibility study between combining those two utilities into one. Are there any benefits for, you know, savings? And was just wondering where you are at, especially for you Megan too. Sure. We've had conversations about whether or not we could see economies of scale on the billing side of things and some of the administrative functions. And one of the early challenges we came up against is that BED and water resources have very different customer bases. Often the BED customer base is the renter. We have a high degree of renters in Burlington and because of how many meters we have in a structure which is usually one in a multi-unit structure that it's usually the property owner paying the bill in the case of water, wastewater and stormwater. So we are continuing to discuss where efficiencies can lie. We have not had a focused effort on looking at merging the two utilities. The BED is regulated by the PUC. Water resources is not. So they are animals that are regulated very differently. Thank you. Yes. And the other element is about Megan, Dettra Megan, what you shared about the sewer filming, you know, rebates. And it seems it doesn't belong to the city but have you look into the city owning that technology and operating it for everyone? We have enough work to even just fill in our own pipes that we do own in the main. And I believe, you know, the technology to go into the smaller diameter pipes is a little bit different. So it isn't something that I've looked at at this point. It's also important because it's private infrastructure. It gets complicated having city staff going into and potentially damaging somebody's private infrastructure then it gets into who's gonna repair it. So at this point, we feel like it's going to be more seamless to have a contractor that the homeowner hires and then we provide the money so that they can, you know, I don't want any, I want people to just know is my sewer line in good standing? Or do I, you know, it's one of the reasons that I keep on having backups because the joints are all cattywampus. And do I need to start putting money away to think about replacing that in the future? Because a lot of what we're hearing from people is not just the size of the job, the cost of the job but that it becomes that an emergency, right? All of a sudden your sewer line fails and you have to have a sewer line otherwise you can't use all of the things in your house and we don't want people to be in that situation. It's the first step. The second step would be, you know, finding money so that we could actually help people either through 0% interest loans or perhaps grants to actually help them proactively replace their sewer lateral but we don't have that at this point. Baby step. And thank you. If people wanted to find out information about this is on your website? Not at this point, because I'm waiting for you guys to approve the budget and then we will make that information available. You know, it would be effective July one. We don't have money currently for it. Okay, thank you. Maybe, okay. Thank you, incredible. Additional questions for Megan or Chapin, right? Thank you, Team Water. Thank you all. At least water and store water. Just Team Liquid. Thank you all. I mean, I know you guys sit through so many of these so thank you for staying awake and continuing to pay attention and ask really good questions. It means a lot to us because we love the stuff and we work really hard on it. So thank you. Thank you. All right, friends. We do have the police budget which will be a part of our regular Board of Finance meeting on Monday night. So I encourage you to come to that. Those materials will be posted as usual tomorrow but in advance of that, our last but certainly not least of these four fabulous nights, insurances, and I am delighted to turn it over to Rich Goodwin so we can talk about insurances before we wrap up. Rich, take it away. All right, can everybody see my screen? Yes. Beautiful. For the eight people that remain, I will do my best to get through this as quickly as possible. I have three caps that I'm going to go through and I think I can get through it in the next five to six minutes and then let's open up the floor for questions. I'm going to start out with retirement first and for the record, I am the retirement administrator city. I am very fortunate that I have the HR team that provides support for the benefits of our retirees. I also have a great payroll team that is providing the support that's needed to answer questions of our retirees. When I build the retirement budget, high level, it's generated from the actioner. The actuary says, okay, you need to raise X amount of dollars. We don't care how you raise it, just do it. The piece that's not in the presentation but I want people to be aware that the retirement department services more employees and ex-employees, retirees and active employees. So more than any other population in the city and it's looking at the numbers on that and our retirement actually serves our department 2,340. So it's sizable in nature. So at a very high level, here's your retirement budget, 2022. And just going down the line here, there are different funding sources for retirement. It's only three. One, it's coming from money from our employees. Two, it's coming from money from our departments. And three, it's coming from the dedicated tax on your tax bill for retirees. So high level, we get $12 million from the various departments. And you've already seen the budget. This is just the summary of the money that is being charged to each individual department. Go down a little further. Then we get employee contribution. Excuse me, I apologize. I actually turned my fan off so you could hear me and I'm roasting, so I'm gonna try to get through this. So $4.4 million is actually coming out of employees checks that are eligible for a future retirement benefit. You can see that's $16 million. And then you have some payroll expenses for administration of retirement. And that's basically the payroll team, not a large amount of money, you can see. You got miscellaneous expenses.  And it's what I pay for retirees. And it's the sizable number. It's about $18.5 million. And that is paying for 800 to retirees. So for the retirement budget, you can see that my revenue is 16 mil and my expense is largely driven by the monthly pay, monthly retirement checks I generate. It actually generates a shortfall to this fund by $4.3 million. Can you say, how was that funded? And what happens is at the end of the year to make the retirement fund whole, we actually deduct or divest about $4.5 million out of the investment portfolio to make this whole. This allows us to maximize our returns and basically make this one whole. So that's the retirement fund. For what it's worth, I've talked to a number of actuaries, financial staff, and they actually said this $4.3 million is very attractive. It only represents 2% of the total investment portfolio. That's the retirement. I'm gonna go to health and dental. Now, a lot of people don't understand this concept, so I wanna put it out there, that we have a health and dental fund and we have a work is compensation fund and we just break that out so that we can track it and manage it. But the reality is if these funds have problems, it's gonna impact the profitability for the city, because it rolls up into the consolidated, audited, financial report. So this is what we got going on here. For the record, based on the contracts, the employees are responsible to pay for 20% of the actual cost of health insurance. And the other 80% is actually paid by departments. Those are the two funding sources for this particular fund. So again, we're getting money from all the departments and seeing all the presentations. And you can see out here, getting $10 million for that revenue stream. Go a little further down. We're actually taking out of the employees checks for this benefit and provide. That's about $3.5 million, the SQ revenue stream. And then what we do very simply is we show the expenses for managing this. Again, you see the HR team is basically getting a credit for their work and providing oversight to all the benefits for the city. And then down below here, here is the amounts that we have for expenses that were projected. This is information provided from Hickok and Boardman and they give us their best guess. And they basically leave it on us. The biggest piece you can see here, this is a wild card. You get $11.6 million in health links for the city. That's huge, that's enormous. And example, if that number was to come in $1 million over plan, then the general fund would take a hit at the end of the year for a million dollars. So you can see, I believe that $11.6 million is reasonable. Giving an idea is that I was looking at my numbers this morning and my claims for fiscal year 21, it's $9 million. You got five weeks left in the fiscal year. I'm thinking it's gonna come in about 11 million. So there's an opportunity for some savings as a result of doing better than the plan. But I believe the $11.6 million is solid and not to scare anybody, but I'm very confident that for fiscal year 2023, we're gonna see probably a 10 to 15% increase in our claims. And a lot of us got to do with the catch up for COVID, a lot of people not going to doctors, but for this particular plan, if the projections are correct, it's a wash, it's a balance, it's gonna break even. That's what we want. That's health and dental. Let's hit the work as well, probably one of the easier ones. So I'm the insurance administrator for the city. And what I'm not saying is that I'm very fortunate to have the support of capital. We work great as a team. And the reality is that we shoulder this together. And let's take a look at this particular fund. So what I have in this fund, this is another good example. If we're off on a liability insurance and our work is comp claims, it will have an impact on a level of profitability. So funding source number one, we get $1.9 million that's coming directly from the various departments. We get, I call it nickel dime, some participate in charge for life insurance from the various departments, not a lot, 200. And then let's get into work as comp. And we're actually budgeting, that we're gonna get revenue. And this is solid because we build the model that regardless of staffing, we're gonna charge these departments an expense, which guarantees that we're not gonna have a shortfall in these revenues. So looking at the work as comp and miscellaneous insurance, a revenue stream that's about 4.5 mil. And then here's the breakout, here's the detail of the expenses. So again, we have an employee that's providing oversight to this insurance fund with benefits. And then we have miscellaneous expenses that are provided by our insurance broker. And looking at these numbers, they do a three year historical look and they basically make a determination what the various funds need to pay. And then lastly, if you look down at it, you get some miscellaneous expenses down. This is the big piece. I guess to call it the wild card is I'm putting $1.5 million for work as comp. You'd have a terrible year. I don't know, but I believe that number is solid. Again, if this is above or beyond our projection, it's gonna impact the city's bottom line. So I'm always looking at, or Captain and I, we're always looking at these funds and looking at it, making sure it's being managed. We have an understanding of how this is coming together, but it could have a severe impact on a level of profitability for the city.  I'm looking at about a $118,000. And for its worth, that's nickel dine because what's this number gonna come in? And there's a lot of different factors, but between the health dental, right, which is good by 60 genes. And the work is comp, we got about a 118th, talking millions upon millions of dollars here. This seems like a reasonable game plan that we can get through the dispute. That's all I got. If you have any questions, go ahead. Thank you, Rich, for your kind words and your careful analysis as always. I am going to stop your screen sharing just so I couldn't, well, I can't. Could you stop your screen sharing? Thank you. Why about that? No worries, I'm more worried about you having water. Any questions for Rich? No question for, not a question, but just a comment. And I think also the detailed explanation and the pose, I think I really appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for saying that, Councillor Jang. Anything else before we adjourn? Do I need a motion? I probably need a motion to adjourn. No, okay, is there any objections? Let's just wrap this thing. Let's call it adjourned at 808. Thank you guys so much for hanging in. Please enjoy three nights without Board of Finance. And I look forward to seeing you on Monday because of BPD, it's gonna be at 5 p.m. again. So I'm sorry, one day we'll start at 5.30, but we'll see you at 5, have a great weekend. Thank you.


Nearly a half century ago, at a Senate hearing on nutrition, a Dr. Neisel from Tufts suggested that sugary breakfast cereals should be banned in the best interest of all concerned, particularly children, perhaps not surprisingly, since he was a professor of dental medicine. A dozen different foods and beverages were ranked for their karyogenic potential, their cavity-causing potential, by implanting electrodes in the mouths of study subjects to measure the amount of acid produced in the plaque between their teeth after eating a variety of different things. And the two breakfast cereals they tested topped the charts. If you drink some sugar water, the pH on your teeth plunges within minutes into the acidic danger zone and stays there for an hour, eating away at our teeth. Caramel is worse. It sticks your teeth, so it stays longer down deeper into the acid zone. But check out the breakfast cereals. It goes down and stays down even two hours later. We've known about the cavity-causing potential of pre-sweetened breakfast cereals for decades. A dozen such cereals were put to the test to measure the level of tooth-dissolving acid produced by the strain of bacteria that causes cavities. As one might expect, the cavity-generating potential was found to be related directly to the sugar content of each cereal, though frosted mini-weats was an exception. Despite having 40% less sugar than cereals like fruit loops or frosted flakes, frosted mini-weats caused the greatest calcium demineralization, a ranking second only to the now-defunct powdered donuts in cavity-causing potential. A study of 28 different cereals concluded that unquestionably, the sugar concentrations in these 28 cereals were sufficiently high to qualify them as dentally dangerous. Looking to be good corporate citizens, General Mills took their super-sugar crisp, which was 44% sugar, and reduced the sugar font size. Then caring about children's health so much, they removed sugar altogether from the name. Kellogg's cares, too, though sugar smacks is apparently where space energy comes from. It doesn't sound as wholesome as honey smacks. Same cereal, healthier name. They did remove sugar from corn pops and frosted flakes, I mean, well, from the front of the boxes. And cookie crisp? I think the fact that it's made by a dog food company says it all. But General Mills protests a study they did in which teens were randomized to receive free cereal delivered to their homes or not didn't seem to get any more cavities, proving breakfast cereal is harmless for your teeth. Anyone care to take a guess at the study's fatal flaw? The kids in the control group were free to just have their parents buy their sugary cereals from the store, and so both the experimental and the control groups may have been eating the same amount of cereal, but with the only difference being that the experimental group received its cereal free and the control group had to pay for it. What did the General Mills researchers have to say for themselves? Dietary control so rigid as to exclude the ingestion of cereals by children would be difficult if not impossible. But then it's not a control group. That's like this Kellogg's funded paper saying, yeah, if we didn't feed kids sugar, then we could virtually eliminate cavities, but this ideal is impractical, so let's take the middle ground and come up with all fruit loops with marshmallows. But at least they're fruit-shaped, or at least fruity-shaped. Observational studies have also failed to link breakfast cereal consumption with cavity prevalence, though, or incidence. This is presumed to be because eating it with milk helps clear food particles from the mouth, though frosted mini-weets did lead to the same sugar retention in the saliva 10 minutes after intake with or without milk. The other cereals were cleared out faster. Sugared cereals are often eaten as snacks by kids, though, without milk. And 10 minutes after the ingestion of dry, sugary cereals, you're left with nearly 50 times the sugar residue in your mouth compared to swishing the sugar down in liquid form. It is inconceivable, conclude the researchers to contest the fact that frequent between-meal ingestion of foods like high sugar cereal is dentally hazardous. Whether or not mealtime eating of sugared cereals induced cavities is not the point, because kids snack on them between meals, they have a marked potential for dental danger.


This study examined the effects of genetic variants associated with Alzheimer's disease, AD, on gene expression levels in different brain cells. They found that certain genetic variants were expressed differently in different cells, suggesting that the effects of these variants may vary depending on which type of cell they are expressed in. This could help researchers better understand how genetics affects the progression of AD. This article was offered by Logan Bray's, Sifo Mu, Ricardo de Oliveira Albinas, and others.


Are you ready for this, Len? I'm ready for this. Because the story is that Darren had something else to do today. But really, we just kicked him out for John's birthday. Yeah, that's right. He's missing a big day. It's a big day. It's a big day. Big day. All right, here we go. This is a public DTNS announcement. A message in English will follow. Welcome to the show with daily technological news with Tom Merritt and guests. Yes, I'm a media producer and also one of Tom's bosses. You can also get through to getting $1 or more in the month on PN.com. Happy birthday, sir. Thank you very much, Tom.  The only way I know how, reading out tech headlines. Correcting my physics. Thank goodness.  I really appreciate that, man. I really do genuinely enjoy these times that we get to work together. To me, this is a birthday present. Thank you. Good feelings all around. Len Peralta joining us as well. I'm going to illustrate the show. How you been, Len? Good. It's my birthday too. Wait, really? Yeah. It's really things I couldn't. I didn't know that. I thought you already had a birthday this year. Yeah. That's one of the strange things. That's weird. I just like to celebrate multiple birthdays. I'm a multi-birthday type of guy. Sorry about eating there for a second, but these chocolate-covered almonds that my wife got on a bet over the MBA are just too delicious to resist. Yes. Let's put a plug in for Mally's candies here in Cleveland, Ohio. I hope you're enjoying them. Dark chocolate-covered almonds. Delicious. Delicious and nutritious. Tell Mally thank you. They really are. Adele. I'll tell Adele. That's Adele Mally. Thanks, Adele. Let's take a look at some headlines now. I'll try not to smack too much as I tell them to you. Geekwire obtained a company memo sent by Sacha Nadella to Microsoft employees revealing the company's new mission statement, which is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. I can't disagree with that. He added that the company could achieve the mission with three interconnected bold ambitions. One, reinvent productivity and business processes. That's Microsoft Office and stuff. Two, build the intelligent cloud platform. He's all about the cloud. And three, create more personal computing, which in his description talks a lot about devices. In a related story, someone created Satya Mania t-shirts at Teespring.com slash Satya Mania. None of the proceeds will go to this show, but you should go buy one anyway. The next web notes Lenovo is looking for feedback on whether it should build a new ThinkPad with a classic ThinkPad look. The laptop would have modern components in the classic design featuring the old rubberized paint, the classic multicolor ThinkPad logo, and the whole thing would be 18 millimeters thick. So thinner than the original. Of course they didn't. You know why this happened, Jonathan? Why is that, Tom? Because I just bought a ThinkPad earlier this week before they made this possible, which I might have bought anyway because we don't even know if they're going to do this. They're sort of seeking feedback, trying to get some press around the idea. I'm a big ThinkPad fan. If I'm a fanboy about anything, it could be about ThinkPads. They're so well designed, so rugged. They served me so well for so many years. And I love this idea about having a nostalgia ThinkPad. Although sometimes when companies go nostalgia, you wonder if that maybe means they've run out of ideas. I don't know. Right, right. And I'm a big ThinkPad fan too. That was my work computer, I think two computers ago. It was just incredibly reliable. Not necessarily a sexy looking machine, but if it's going to turn on when you need it to turn on, that's good for me. I think, yeah, I still have my ThinkPad T42 by my side at all times, just in case. Running Windows XP. Physics World explains the work of Nicola Alec and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, that could double the capacity of fiber optic cables, no small feet. One limit on fiber optic cables is noise. Now some noise comes from the amplifiers that they need to use to boost the signal every 100 kilometers or so. The other problem is caused by the power of the signal that introduces some noise. The higher the power, the more noise. So you can't just boost the power to make the signal go farther because you're adding more noise. However, that power based noise is nonlinear but deterministic. It is a nonlinear but deterministic function that can be calculated and adapted to. The problem is that the laser frequencies drift a bit as they send the signal. So nobody could factor out the noise because of that drift until now. The researchers use something called a frequency comb. Basically a signal that acts like a ruler that shows what the frequency of the laser is, no matter whether it's drifting or not. That way you can boost the signal, then factor out the noise based on the frequency comb, and that means the signal can be at a higher power. That means it can travel longer, use fewer amplifiers and carry more data. Researcher is published in the journal Science. Now get that right, Jonathan, because this is way over in your area of things. Yeah, the basic idea here is that there are two things you can do to transmit optical signals a very far distance. One is that you use amplifiers, but as Tom pointed out, that can introduce noise into the signal, making it more difficult to get data cleaned through. Or you can boost that power so you don't need as many amplifiers, but that introduces noise because the refraction of silica is not perfectly linear. That's where that noise comes in. That's the deterministic one. So yeah, you got it right. It is incredibly complex stuff, and honestly we can talk for an hour about it and not even get close to a deep understanding of it. It would take me several days of non-stop talking. But the upshot is this frequency comb sort of gives them a baseline, which helps them do all the calculations and everything without getting into the base of that. And the upshot of that is we get faster fiber optics if this works in practice, right? Right, and that is fantastic. I mean, you're talking about much more throughput. So your data throughput is going to be phenomenal getting this new technique working. So that's pretty awesome. Next, we have a report about Engadget reporting the second generation FLIR-1 thermal camera. It will be available for iOS devices with an Android version shipping in July. It's a standalone device with its own battery that attaches by the lightning port or micro USB. You can pre-order now for $250, and the first generation, which will come in an iPhone, in phone cases will sell for $150. This would be really useful if you are curious about if your house has a draft, if there's any place in your home that you might need to address, especially here in Atlanta when we're getting crazy heat waves. It's really important to be able to track that stuff down so that you're not spending huge amounts of money on energy bills. Oh, that's a great idea. Just sort of looking for cracks, thermal cracks basically. You can use it for heating as well in the winter, find out where your heat's coming in and going out. Sometimes if maybe you smell smoke, you could use this to be like, okay, is there something overheating in the walls or is it just somebody tarring their roof down the street? There's all kinds of things you can do with it. Will it give you night vision? Well, I mean, anything that's hot is going to show up, so sort of also kind of gives you night vision. So hey, why not get a FLIR 1 thermal camera add-on for your phone? 9 to 5 Mac, notice that the Apple Watch is coming to the Netherlands, Sweden, and Thailand on July 17th. Congratulations, folks. The Apple Watch is on sale today actually in Italy, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, and Taiwan. The next web reports that OnePlus will launch its next phone, the OnePlus 2, which I suggest should just be called the 3 for short. On July 27th, the device will have a USB-C port, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 version 2.1 chipset under the hood, and it will run OnePlus's Android-based Oxygen OS. The OnePlus 2, seriously, really the OnePlus 2, will launch with a VR experience usable with a specific cardboard viewer. You'll need an invite to buy one. I mean, the 2, the OnePlus that... There's too much math in this story, Tom. Go to the next one. You just need an invite by the phone. TechCrunch reports that Tumblr has launched TumblrTV showing trending animated GIFs one after the other in a full-screen viewing mode with play, pause, forward, and backward at tumblr.com slash TV. Trending GIFs are determined by a variety of factors, including the freshness of the GIF and recent engagements. They are only pulled from Tumblr itself, but that's okay because Bill Eager, Tumblr product engineer, said GIFs are a core feature of Tumblr. He probably said it with a straight face, too. The next web, one of my favorite sites, because it's the one I'm reporting from over and over, reports that OneWeb has closed a $500 million million funding round to build a satellite system to provide affordable broadband services across the globe. Airbus will build more than 900 satellites for the project, 648 of which will be launched, and the rest kept as spares. OneWeb plans more than 65 launches starting in 2017, including 39 from Virgin Galactic and 21 from Europe's Ariama Space, boy, my reading ability has been hit hard today, including our using Russian-made Soyuz rockets. The project is slated to launch in 2019. Yeah, so add this to SpaceX's plan. We're gonna have a sky full of satellites being on the Internet at us. Yeah, that's pretty exciting, actually, to have that in all sorts of regions, even the remote ones. It's really exciting stuff. And a follow-up, Apple told TechCrunch, quote, we are not removing apps that display the Confederate flag for educational or historical uses. And in fact, they followed up with TechCrunch and said they are working with developers to quickly get their games reinstated to the App Store. So it appears there was a mistake in how they went about netting those apps that they wanted to remove. Yeah, this is obviously a very sensitive subject, and it's one where you have to delicately balance the actual portrayal of this. Are you using it in a historical context where it's meant to educate and to inform?  This hits home for me because I live in a state where until, fairly recently, until 2003, we had the Confederate battle flag on our state flag. We no longer have that. We still have the first flag of the Confederacy on our state flag, and it's something that I really want to see addressed at some point where we can not forget about it or cover it up, but move beyond it and keep it in mind to make sure we are guiding ourselves in the right direction. And the tech side of this is it's always tricky when you start to censor where you draw the line, and it's always tricky when you have as vast of an App Store as Apple when you try to net certain things, you will end up accidentally netting other things. And this is not a news story, but this is the most recent example of that. It doesn't seem like Google removed as many or any, I'm not sure, of the historical type games and apps, but we haven't heard any response from them. Time now for some news from you. These come from our subreddit, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Get in there and vote. Let us know what stuff you want to hear. There's like around 500, 5000 people actively subscribed. Well, I say actively.  And if you want to get in there and either submit some links or just vote on the ones that are there. Merely Jim, I bet you're more than that. Merely Jim shared that a senior U.S. official has confirmed to the Daily Beast that attackers access the intimate personal details of government workers found in the adjudication information. It's a file compiled on employees and contractors applying for security clearance. That information includes details about sometimes workers, sexual partners, drug and alcohol abuse, debts, gambling compulsions, marital troubles, any criminal activity. Three former U.S. intelligence officials told the Daily Beast that the adjudication information effectively turns into dossiers on current and former government employees. White House officials previously acknowledged the breach of information found in Standard Form 86, but it wasn't confirmed how extensive that is. I filled out one of these one time. When I was working for Alameda County Search and Rescue, I had to get background clearance because Department of Homeland Security oversaw that. And they asked you to say, let us know anything you think could possibly be an issue. It won't disqualify you from getting clearance, but if we find something that could be an issue that you didn't disclose, that will automatically disqualify you. So these forms will have things that people just think, well, this may be an issue, so I better put it down. I use drugs at this date. I was caught cheating on my wife at this date. I got busted for POTA at this date. And that is the kind of stuff that you might put on these security clearance forms, but you would certainly not go around broadcasting to everyone and could be used to blackmail people or to embarrass them, et cetera. Yeah, and on top of that, the adjudication information includes polygraph tests where people are asked very difficult questions and sometimes you could either be giving off false positives. We all know that polygraph machines are not really reliable when you get down to it, but the point is that those questions and the answers are all part of that file. And this is all about getting those security clearances that you were talking about, Tom, but the higher in security you need to be, the higher clearance you need, the more information they're going to have on you. So the people who are at the most sensitive positions within various governmental agencies are the very ones that the hackers now have the most information about. So this is a catastrophic hacker attack in the sense of how much information we lost. I mean, as the article points out, in previous attacks you could rebuild systems. If a system had been compromised and people knew how it worked, you could strip that down, rebuild it. It would be a lot of work, but you could do it, but you can't rebuild people. Yeah, absolutely. Dylan Northrup in the chat room points out clearance doesn't care about what you did usually, just whether that can be used to compromise you, which makes an attack that steals this kind of data directly opposed to the reason it was collected in the first place. So it is, like you say, very unfortunate and in some cases possibly dangerous that this information was not protected better. Next, Star Fury Zeta sent us this in-gadget report on Audi's partnership with a German team called Part Time Scientists. They're competing in Google's Lunar X Prize. Audi says it's providing four-wheel drive tech as well as expertise in lightweight construction and piloted driving. In return, the rover will now be called the Audi Lunar Quattro Moon Rover. Google's Lunar X Prize offers a $30 million prize for the first team to get a rover to the moon, cover 500 meters of it, and then broadcast high-definition video back to Earth as it goes. More, more, please. More of these kinds of partnerships, more efforts. I can't wait to see this succeed, whether it's the Audi one or something else. Yeah, this is the stuff where you see these kind of... We're in an incredibly exciting time, right? I mean, I often, when I read back on the space race, I think about what it must have been like to have been alive during that. That's before my time, really, is the space race. So, you know, reading the reports, I miss out on that. But then I think I'm now in a time where we're seeing not just privatized space companies that are really pushing some boundaries, but also we're seeing citizen science getting involved in space. And it blows my mind. It's incredibly inspiring to me. Yeah, I grew up as a very young child where moon landings were a regular thing. I was born in 1970. So, you know, there were moon landings happening all the time. And then suddenly when I got old enough to really appreciate them, they stopped. That kind of sucked, which is why I love seeing the fact that even if we're not doing that one monumental task, there are so many interesting things being done on so many other fronts, like you say. And finally, Goal Kick submitted the Ars Technica story clarifying that despite the headlines you will see in almost every major news outlet around the world, two self-driving cars did not almost crash into each other. What did happen was that a Delphi self-driving car was about to change lanes and noticed that another car ahead of it was moving into that lane so it did what you would do. It waited until it was safe to change lanes. The car ahead of it just happened to be a Google self-driving car and that brings us to our main discussion today. John Absmeyer, the head of Delphi Local Lab, was talking to Reuters about this and he told the story and then Reuters wrote it as had a close call on a Silicon Valley street and then not using quotation marks, wrote as the Delphi vehicle prepared to change lanes, a Google self-driving prototype, cut off the Audi forcing it to abort the lanes change, Absmeyer said, although again, not a quote. Kristin Kinley, a Delphi spokeswoman who was at the interview with Reuters clarified to Ars Technica, our car did exactly what it was supposed to. Our car saw the Google car move into the same lane as our car was planning to move into but upon detecting that lane was no longer open, it decided to terminate the move and wait until it was clear again and then Google's Courtney Hohn told Ars Technica, the headline here is that two self-driving cars did what they were supposed to do in an ordinary everyday driving scenario. So Jonathan, why is it so compelling for Time Magazine, CNBC, PC Magazine, the LA Times, the Daily Telegraph to all write, cars almost crash, cars nearly collide when that's not true? Tom, I'm going to give you two headlines. You tell me which one you're going to click on. Okay. Robot cars battle it out on the streets of California or robot car does not collide with other robot car. Yeah, I'll go you one better. The Guardian's actual headline to the Guardian's credit was two self-driving cars avoid each other on California roads. Which is not very compelling, I get it. Yeah, if there were headlines of all the times I avoided people, you would just be, wow, Jonathan really spends a lot of time making sure he doesn't run into folks he doesn't like. No, this was, I am so thankful that there are outlets out there that did the due diligence to see what is the actual story here because I think it really illustrates some important things to keep in mind. One, that autonomous cars are still really amazing and they are on the way. This is a triumphant story because it's a story about how a car was able to recognize that dynamic conditions would mean that it could not do what it had, quote unquote, decided to do and it altered its behavior because of that. That's exactly what's supposed to happen. So that's really exciting. And also, it made me go and look. I was curious because I remember for the longest time we talked about how Google self-driving cars had only been involved in two accidents. That was the story forever, right? There was one where it was under manual control and a person had a little fender bender and there was one where another driver rear-ended a Google self-driving car but in both cases the autonomous car wasn't to blame. That number has skyrocketed. Do you know how many accidents there have been now? I can't remember the exact. We did talk about it before. I want to say 17? No, 11. 11, okay. Yeah. 11 accidents. Out of all the years these self-driving cars have been on the street, there have been 11 accidents. So wait a minute, from 2 to 11, Jonathan, that sounds to me like a six times multiplier, 600% increase in accidents. You know, Tom, I'm not going to dispute your facts there but what I am going to say is that in every case it was not the cars at fault. It wasn't the autonomous car that was at fault in the accidents. But one of the things that I saw is perhaps these cars are being what some people call too safe. That they are designed to avoid accidents to such a great extent that in a few cases they might actually end up causing an accident or at least other people may end up getting in an accident with that car because it's not behaving the way a human being would. Which is really interesting to me. Well, that means we're really learning about that now. It's pretty close to the way my mom drives, honestly. But I know what you mean, which is there's a certain vocabulary, for lack of a better word, to the way people drive. And having lived in multiple places around the US, it's different in different places that people are used to. For instance, in Texas, I never got used to the idea that people just constantly drove on the left side of the freeway even at slow speeds. Whereas in Illinois, we all stay on the right until we pass and then we go around. And so a self-driving car isn't necessarily adapting to that more amorphous, usual way of driving standard that we have. Sure. And some of the examples I've seen one person said, hey, if you're driving in China and you want to take a left turn in a busy pedestrian area, if you're not aggressive, if you don't actually start making your car move out there, people are just going to keep on walking in front of you until the end of time. And a car that is designed to specifically avoid pedestrian accidents at all costs, which makes sense, is never going to move.  Well, it's that vocabulary that we're talking about, right? Where you know that when you move forward, you won't hit the pedestrians because you know that the behavior in this location is the pedestrian is waiting to see you move before they will stop and that they will stop. Yeah. And so that becomes a new question. In fact, I'm seeing that there's this emerging study now between the behaviors of these autonomous cars and actual human beings. That's the next nut to crack in the autonomous car behavior because they are demonstrably safer than human drivers in nearly every kind of condition you can come up with except when it comes to these really difficult to define situations where humans can intuitively understand what's going on maybe they don't like it very much, but they understand it, but a machine may not. Is that a temporary problem? I think so. I think it's absolutely... Eventually, the end result, if we get it figured out, is that all the cars or the vast majority of cars in the road are autonomous, in which case they all know how each other's going to act. They don't have to figure out what some random human's going to do. Well, I think even before that, we're going to have some more algorithms that are essentially learning algorithms that will end up being able to interact with human drivers more seamlessly. I've read studies where you don't even need to have a majority of autonomous cars on the road for this sort of benefit to emerge. As low as 20% of the vehicles on the road can be autonomous and you're going to start seeing a decrease in accidents and faster travel times. I'm so excited about this as well, also as being a non-driver, having a car that could potentially drive me around that's not just Uber. Fantastic! That points out to me that most of the issues with autonomous cars have to do with the transition. How do we get to 20% safely? How do we get to a point where we can say, yes, Jonathan Strickland can get into a self-driving car without a license? Now it'd be like, well, you better have a license just in case you have to take over and it causes issue. But eventually I think we get to that point where the cars are driving more safely than us and they're driving themselves more often and you just have to have a very basic notion of what to do in some very unusual emergency situation. The same way you do when you're on a train car, when you're on a subway and it says on the wall, in case of emergency, here are the three things to do. Yeah, in fact, there's largely a philosophical thought experiment that is very popular in AI specifically with autonomous cars, the trolley experiment, everyone's heard about this. The trolley experiment being there's a trolley, it's heading toward disaster, you can save the trolley by throwing a switch but then it's going to kill somebody else. So do you throw the switch killing this other person but everyone on the trolley survives or do you not throw the switch, the person lives but the trolley ends up colliding and people on the trolley could die. The same thing is true when designing an autonomous car. If you design a car, what happens if you're in a situation where there's an oncoming vehicle, perhaps it's lost control and your vehicle has two options, either go to a collision with that oncoming vehicle or swerve into what could possibly be a sidewalk with pedestrians. It's a theoretical scenario but it's one that you actually have to answer and it's not the cut and dry answer. It's hard for us to answer as humans what we would do. It's one thing for us to answer in some sort of on paper exercise and another thing to do face that in person and so having to figure out ahead of time what we think a computer should do in that situation is a thorny issue. But again, it's an edge case and one would hope if we get enough self-driving cars in the road the number of oncoming cars headed straight at other cars would reduce below a rounding error. But yeah, that's a really, really good point. Yeah, and again, I think that these cars are definitely the future. It's one of those things that I'm very much looking forward to for multiple reasons, not just for the selfish reason that I'll be able to get around without having to depend upon other people which would be phenomenal. It would be a big burden off of all of them but also just the benefit of the reduction of accidents, the reduction of people getting injured or the loss of life. That is something that I really am excited about too because despite my grouchy exterior, I like people. You like people on the inside. I do. What would you do? Would you throw the switch?  I'd throw the switch. I want to know who's over there. Do you also want to know who's in the trolley? Yeah, I want all the information before I make a call. You want to conduct a survey first. Is it Neil deGrasse Tyson over there? It's a whole different situation. That's already got the chat room talking. I just stop and go backwards. I'm in there already. There's someone behind you. You can't stop and go backwards, which is how that works. It is a very thought-provoking thought experiment. And apropos. Let's get to our pick of the day. Marlon, the guy from Trinidad, wrote in and said, my pick of the day is Jonathan Strickland because it's his birthday. Happy birthday, Mr. Strickland from Trinidad and Tobago. Thank you. I was worried it was a spoiler by putting it in there. And then we also had Jenny notice that Stephen Colbert's new Colbert app, C-O-L-B-R, and the accompanying podcast is going strong. The app is iOS only, but all the content also lands on ColbertLateShow.com. It's the podcast that Jenny loves because it's a look inside the ramp up for the Late Show launch in September 8th, and it's not just all the jokes that you see in the videos. After all the years of hearing Stephen Colbert the character, talk as a writer and comedian, speaking with his longtime creative collaborators, the podcast is also available solo, wherever you subscribe to podcasts. You might want to check that out. She said to me on Slack earlier, it's the closest thing to being inside a writer's room that you can get without actually being inside a writer's room. I just jumped in just to tell you that it's pretty incredible and it's also really smart of Stephen Colbert to transition himself from what we know him as before to what he's going to be on the Late Show and if you want to listen to that process evolve, you're going to love it. ColbertLateShow.com. There's a T in Colbert though. Remember that. Send your picks to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can find my picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks. A couple of emails before we're out of here. Nate from the Windy West bench. Did he write bench of the Salt Lake Valley? I guess that's the thing. Or it's a typo that I don't know what it was supposed to be. The Windy West bench of the Salt Lake Valley. He was like, it was great to hear you cover John Brodkin's piece on Vivint. I live in one of the first neighborhoods where they rolled out wireless broadband service a couple of years back. When their salesmen stopped by, I signed up right away eager to have an alternative to Comcast. I experienced those early stability problems Brodkin mentions in the articles and I couldn't keep my home connected to the hub home even though I was right across the street so I ended up having to go back to Comcast. Because their technicians couldn't solve my connectivity issues though Vivint had no problem letting me out of my two-year contract and my neighbors who serve as hub home report that the 28 gigahertz connections they have are pretty stable so if they improve the 5 gigahertz home-to-home connections they've got a viable service on their hands and Brodkin's article implies that they've been making software updates constantly. Nate says, even though I didn't stick with Vivint myself when I called Comcast to sign back up I told the rep I was in a neighborhood that had Vivint and I was able to negotiate a comparable price on my new service. Yay for competition! Did you read about Vivint, Jonathan? No, I had not heard about this until I just, you know, read the email. That's really an interesting approach one that I would welcome in my own service area. Yeah, if they can work out the kinks and make it more reliable which it sounds like they were making progress on and Vivint themselves said, yeah, when we first rolled it out we were running into all kinds of reliability issues but we think we've nailed them down and we're fixing them. That could become a really interesting way to bring another ISP very easily without having to dig up the ground into lots of neighborhoods. Yeah, it's a really innovative approach. I think it's pretty cool. And Jonathan Strickland is willing to serve as a hub home Vivint to get free internet for life. Got a beautiful rooftop. It's fantastic. You do. I just want to compliment you on your rooftop that is just waiting for three antennas from Vivint to sit atop it. I'll be able to see where you are staying when you come to DragonCon from my rooftop. From your rooftop. I'll be at your house if you get Vivint. I'll use that internet. Aperva commented on our blog at DailyTechNewShow.com about an LA Times story which describes how drone flyers have been disrupting firefighting efforts in Big Bear Lake.  Aperva says this is an example of a consequence that is ignored or quickly dismissed by drone enthusiasts pushing the FAA to rush rules for allowing more drones. While the early enthusiasts might be involved and know all the rules, most new users will not be as responsible. The vast majority that will take this up as prices drop will be knuckleheads. This is a legal term now. We're ruling regarding a man who pointed a laser to plane who will not know the rules or care. Their first thought will be, won't it be cool if I could get an aerial video of the forest fire? And it is a definitely a fair problem, Aperva. My personal reaction though is that this is more of a reason to get those rules nailed down because right now it is legal for anyone to go fly a quadcopter and the rules are in flux. People may not want to look up the rules like you're saying, but they also will see like, oh, the rules haven't been nailed down yet and interpret that to mean there are no rules. Yeah. This is what happens when technology outpaces the legal system which happens all the time is that we come into situations sometimes life or death ones that really paint the picture that we need to sit down and work out a framework on when things are allowable when they aren't so that we can avoid this kind of stuff. Anyway, the FAA is working to put these rules in place. The rush on them has been that they had missed deadlines that they said they were going to hit. It does sound like they're going to have the rules by the end of the year and the knuckleheads don't care if the FAA rushes the rules or not. The knuckleheads are out there flying those drones around fires anyway without working with the firefighters to make sure that they're clear of any areas and not causing any distraction. I don't know that putting the rules in place faster or not really affects those people. In fact, like I said, I think it actually could help if the rules were nailed down so that folks could educate others and maybe try to keep the knuckleheads at bay. But a perva, thank you for that. It was a really insightful comment and I appreciate you posting it up on the blog. You can do that at DailyTechNewsShow.com Well, thank you, Jonathan Strickland. Pleasure, as always, man. It's good talking tech with you. Oh, it's fun to be here talking tech, science. It's the stuff that I get excited to get out of bed in the morning for. We were lucky to have some good sciency things to put in there as well. And if you like those kinds of stories and if you like those kinds of explanations of how things work, go check out howstuffworks.com check out the tech stuff podcast, forward thinking. Jonathan's doing all kinds of cool stuff. Yeah, I'm even on a show with yesterday's guest, Ayaz. But that's not where you're going to learn how stuff works other than how we don't work. That's called podcast without pretense. Yeah, it's a podcast without pretense, back-to-back special on DailyTechNewsShow. And I believe am I remembering this wrong or did Ayaz say you guys got an episode coming up soon? We do have an episode coming up soon. We like to watch really bad movies on Netflix and test how long we can watch them with no distractions present. Because we're all aware that when we watch stuff at home, we usually have a computer. Second screen thing going on. No second screens are allowed. You write down how far you got. And then we discuss the movie. We're now adding a new feature. We review the movie in voice to text. We copy that transcription over into Google Translate translated a few times and that becomes the official review of the movie. That's amazing. That's artificial intelligence right there. Well, that's the only guy we have. Twitter.com Jon Strickland, J-O-N-S-T-R-I C-K-L-A-N-D and Len Peralta. You have been busily illustrating this show. What have you come up with? Well, you know, I wanted to do something nice because it is our friend Jon Strickland's birthday today. I hope I did something good here and I'm trying to mash up today's topic, the self-driving cars and Jon's birthday. This is how I envision Jon Strickland planning on spending his birthday. Of course, you just have to add more ladies to this picture. Self-driving cars.  The strict man is a real horsepower behind the wheel suckers That's what's going to happen. It's your new job there, Jon. So, happy birthday to you. I love it. I love it so much. You have to go and check it out. There you go. Happy birthday, Jon. Thank you. LenPeraltaStore.com to see what Len comes up with and of course, if you back him on Patreon, you get digital versions of this stuff just given to you if you back at the right level. Patreon.com slash Len. Thank you so much. It is coming up in a second. I almost jumped ahead because the most important people to thank in every episode is the bosses that make this possible. We have 5,052 of them now and we thank every single one that they saw some value in the show and gave some value back. You guys are the best. DailyTechnewshow.com slash support if you want to know how to become a boss if you're getting some value out of the show and you'd like to give us some value back there's many ways to do it if you're not a patron that's okay. We kind of hope you become one if you want to keep listening to the show but you don't have to and we understand that not everybody is in a position to do so. There's also the DailyTechnewshow.com store which has mugs and t-shirts and might even have another t-shirt after Nurtacular comes up. We got some stuff in the works. So check that out. Our email address now I'll say it is feedback at DailyTechnewshow.com We'll be back on Monday with Veronica Belmont. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program. Good show everyone. What should we call it? Oh, I have ideas. That's amazing. I was just going to ask for ideas. I was just going to ask for ideas. I was like, I was just going to ask for ideas. Oh my gosh. All right. So the chat room actually has ideas. We've got number one near miss journalism as in M-I-S-S. Do I get that? They talked about the near miss of the cars and we're like saying really it's the journalism sort of near missing. Oh, I get it. I like it. I'm always so sensitive about journal. Like who's beating up on journalism? We've got the thin pad from Tinbeck. Comb the fiber. I like that. One plus two does not equal three. Oh, I really like pow to the moon, Audi. To the moon, Audi. You're all so good. I know. And a lot of them are tied. So go if you're watching live showbot.tv. Get in there and make some votes. Do it. Oh my gosh. Self driving Kobayashi Maru test. Are you kidding? That's so amazing. I don't believe in the no win scenario. I don't believe in the near miss scenario. The trolley car near miss scenario. I don't believe in the trolley car scenario. I will save them all. I am Captain Kirk. I'm going to say I might need to start live streaming tech stuff because coming up with titles is after you've recorded a show you're like my creativity is all gone. Yeah, because like talked about cars. Fire bad tech stuff part two. It was actually a discussion of GE, but you know. I like doubling the speed of light. Yeah. It's not accurate, Tinvec, but I understand metaphorically what you mean. The speed of light is actually a constant. Only in a vacuum. That's true. That's true. We're not in a vacuum. It's a fair point. Fair point. It's through various media. It changes speed. Yeah. I just did a horror digging episode about how photons can actually have momentum. Self driving Kobayashi Maru test. Are you just voting over and over, Jenny? No, you can't. You actually can't. No, I know. Actually it's pretty good at stopping that. Wow. Yeah. To the top. To the moon. Self driving Kobayashi Maru test. I think that might be our winner. It's good. I'm done exporting. So that is now the title. Self driving Kobayashi Maru test. I'm always in favor of the Star Trek Brother Con reference. From the center of a dead planet. Very good. Come on. My favorite. Actually there was someone who wrote the line for me and they had me deliver it in the Ricardo Montoban way where I was this was one of the few shows where I actually used a teleprompter. So I think it was what the stuff and the line was it's very cold in space. Oh. Oh. Russ Pitts and I used to do Wrath of Con Theater on our sketch comedy show. That's awesome. We just have the one Kirk Con interaction scene as if played by the cast of Seinfeld or Ah. Can we bring that back? Cause that sounds amazing. Sure. Just get Russ to sign off. Oh my goodness. Yeah it was good. I'm not saying we performed it as optimally but I love the idea. That is great. The theater I love so much here the stage theater I love so much they had a show a couple years ago called Wrath of Con the musical but it was C-O-N and it was kind of a send up love letter to Dragon Con specifically but it was amazing. It was so good. That's fantastic. Yeah. There was a part where the hotel staff has a meeting and they're treating it like they're going into war because of all these geeks that are going to descend upon the hotel. The hotel manager is like the drill sergeant that'll jack it as he's walking down addressing a staff and one of the actors plays a brand new employee it's his first weekend on the job the same weekend that Dragon Con comes to the hotel and later in the play they find him and he's mangled on the floor and they're trying to ask him what happened so they're having the really heart-rending death scene in your war movie type thing going on and the sergeant's like what happens? I was in the middle of a Star Trek argument they asked me who's my favorite captain Kirk or Picard I said I like them both and the sergeant's like the Jane Ways came out of nowhere and it was that line the Jane Ways came out of nowhere that I was like this is the most brilliant play I've ever seen that is amazing God, there's so much amazing art that goes on that we'll never get to see even with the internet I wish I could find a way to just live cast that this is a good thing we have copyright law to protect people right to Picard it's why I go to so much live theater here in Atlanta I love the ephemeral nature of it of course if I'm ever in a nice dark corner that no one can see maybe I'll just periscope the next play oh yeah it's like a snapchat of performance I like that we said it at the same time Jinx! you owe me a coke alright well I won't see you guys next week so have a happy four have a happy independence day weekend yes it's going to be very busy or as I call it change of dependence day when we illegally separated from the crown you would I mean you gotta be different I'm not saying the united states shouldn't exist I just think they should have gone through the proper channels I'm kidding sort of by the way before I go I just want to show everybody who is watching in the live stream that here's Scott Sigler's Picard oh nice just remind people you can get these cards at my online store for all the star.com just ordered some for who is he supposed to be oh snap I've got that in my office at home who was he supposed to be he wanted to be Joffrey or those made by loan shark games they were the game is called epic vs awesome which isn't even out yet but it will be out soon and these are the expansions set for it so wow alright man thanks for being here as always you too thank you so much everybody and happy birthday John I hope you enjoyed that thanks Lynn I loved it I did I'm always such a thrill to me whenever anyone who has artistic ability wastes it on me it's fantastic I like to think that I put it out into the ether just let it out it is much appreciated well great you have a nice day with your ladies tomorrow and enjoy the weekend everybody be safe alright alright hi Lynn I'm doing show notes I'm pacing oh Roger's here I see Roger Chang Roger I'm doing the show notes what's he doing I just saw him show up in the dock oh in the dock I don't see him in the hangout though yeah I'm doing show notes and posting posts do we still have a John Strickland here yes I'm out of the pictures he's thinking about his birthdays all his birthday parties I was going back and looking at the chat realm because I forgot that I had it up and I was just re-experiencing everyone's feedback I do that sometimes myself I'm like whoa boy I really was dumb wasn't I okay everyone's really super awesome I love the community here it's fantastic good peeps and we say that off the air too we actually I'm really impressed forward thinking has been very fortunate with that too because that's largely a YouTube community but it is one of the most thoughtful communities I've seen on YouTube we get our share of folks who come in just to post first or they posted something if they don't like a particular topic they're not shy about it but for the most part people have been really thoughtful because I was worried at first about having to moderate YouTube comments but I don't have to moderate anything it's all done pretty well yeah it's really awesome yeah no I've seen other communities that have some they require a lot more active moderation and all communities are different that's my experience I've been involved in communities that need a lot of intervention I've been involved in others that just don't get going at all they just don't really get any momentum and all kinds in between I did a show I did a special video for how stuff works that was about me so it was about professional wrestling and I love professional wrestling so I was thrilled I got to go behind the scenes I got to go under the ring I got to talk to wrestlers it was fantastic but going into that I knew the comments on that were going to be a slightly different set than the forward thinking comments still really awesome people for the most part but yeah very different very alive vibrant commentary I've called a jabroni by more than one person so the strict man by the way is the name of Len's drawing today it's so amazing oh great preview oh no wait go back no I'm talking I am talking to myself sorry I'm doing show notes out loud it's okay I am I am actually out of the post now ooh I know what to do yeah I can get right in there we're going to get a jump on the weekend we're going to get a jump on a weekend but stay tuned for current geek with Scott Johnson of myself later today immediately following the Jonathan Strickland hour of karaoke power


Every cell in the body is programmed for health, but why would it cause an ailment? The problem is being generated from within, so finding access to this has many steps to be taken. Human ailments are of two different kinds. There are infectious diseases and chronic ailments. Infectious diseases happen to the body because an external organism invades the system and causes certain trouble, which has to be dealt with medication. But chronic ailment, what it means is our own body is creating the problem. The disease is being manufactured in the system. This is common knowledge that every cell in the body is programmed for health, but why would it cause an ailment? Something very fundamental has gone off balance, or there is a certain level of misunderstanding within the system itself that instead of creating health, it's creating ill health. And we may be incubating this misunderstanding in so many different ways. When I say misunderstanding, not misunderstanding or understanding of your mind, on the cellular level, on the elemental level, there is a misunderstanding. So these things can be altered just by bringing about a certain balance in the system, activating a certain level of inner energy and accessing the innermost dimension of who you are, which is the very maker of this body. The very maker of this body is within you. When this is so, if there is a repair job to be done on this body, should you go to the manufacturer or to the local mechanic? Because the problem is being generated from within, it is very important that an inner solution is found for this. The inner engineering process is just about this, that you find access to this deepest dimension of intelligence and competence within ourselves, which is capable of generating this body, creating this body from what kind of material.  So there is that dimension of intelligence and competence within this. If only you found access to that, health is not even something that you have to struggle with. So finding access to this has many steps to be taken. The simplest step that one needs to take is that one becomes open to the possibility, first of all. Thinking and understanding that for all the problems that I have, there is an external cause and there's an external solution is a very foolish way to approach the whole process. For ailments, chronic ailments like diabetes, hypertension, cardiac ailments, asthma, allergies, obesity, eating disorders, and many of these kinds which are all essentially generated from within, all these things can be quelled from within. If only we are willing to pay a certain level of attention to the innermost dimension of who we are. Inner engineering is a powerful process of approaching the inner core of who you are in a scientific manner and this is definitely a way to create a healthful life.