What's the difference between B-flex and color building bases on the market? Color building bases are in fact two-in-one products. They are a base and a builder, and they require a bit of constructing, they are not so self-leveling, and they also will require a separate gloss because they're not shiny. Oftentimes they also contain acid for better adhesion, and of course that means that they are a little bit more difficult to remove and they can damage the nail plate. B-flex is an all-in-one product, so base builder, tone, and gloss, and it's also very fast. It's extremely self-leveling, doesn't require filing, so it's really going to be your time saver in the subtle. By the way, it's acid free.


Well, my name is Oliver Gutierrez, I've been working for Red Hat Science last year. My main purpose there was to work on this project, Flick Commander, that it's intended to be a tool for deploying configuration profiles for users in big network deployments. So right now, the state of the art is that the large workstation deployments are really a help for the SITS admins. You know, you have to put the machines with their software, the operating system, all the configuration you have for every user in the network, so you have to take care of a lot of things. And right now, for deploying the machines, we have very good tools for configuration management systems like Ansible, Chef, Puppet or whatever. But we didn't have, well, we have some tools for doing this work, but they were very old or maybe they were custom made by the SITS admins. So the thing was we tried to fix the whole thing of deploying the configuration for the users. And our aim with Flick Commander is to make it easy to manage the profiles, to make it easy to add settings for whatever kind of applications you want for that profiles. And I see to deploy them in the network because right now, if you want to do that, you have to load some information from another place with a custom script, write the information in your home directory or whatever. So the idea is to have also a transparent experience for the final user because the final user is sometimes seeing some scripts running here and there or whatever and they notice that it's happening something, but they don't want to take care about that. Yes, they want to do the work. So in the part of making it easy to manage the profiles, we wanted to create a tool that with a graphic session you can create the configuration you want for your profile. For example, the financials profile would want to, for example, have some kind of settings in LibreOffice or whatever tool you want. So we were using Spice, Libre and SSH for technologies for that in a way that you create a template virtual machine with the base configuration of all your network and with that template machine, you have the base for starting to create the profiles you need. So from Flick Commander, the Flick Commander Armin specifically, you can connect using Spice to that virtual machine and just do the configuration graphically and then select the changes you want to use for them. I will go on that later. And for specific configurations like special programs or special things of the operating system like, for example, the highlighted applications, we are using web forms for specifying that because it's easier to do that directly in the interface and not to configure it in the graphic session. Easy to deploy because the idea is to have a minimal installation of software that can be just made to install a package and forget completely about configuring anything. So we just installed that in the client computers. The idea is to make them able to retrieve the profiles without any configuration. So the IT team just install all the computers the same way and the users get the profiles transparently. Well, basically Flick Commander has three parts. One of them is the admin where you create the profiles and you manage them. There is also the logger where its function is basically in the graphic session to lock all the configuration changes you are doing for later selecting the ones you want for the profiles. That's the client that is installed on every computer in your network deployment. Well, more or less is what I have said. The Flick Commander admin is for preferred management and it's web based. Right now it's a copy plugin so you don't have to install another infrastructure for using it. Just you can install it and use it in the usual copy stance you are using for network monitoring. And in the back end part we are using a Divas activities service for using it as a base for... Right now Flick Commander is deploying the profiles using an HTTP server. And that HTTP server is in that service. So we are trying to change that because we are integrating it with free IPA so in later versions it will disappear. The Flick Commander logger basically locks the configuration changes and transfers that changes to the browser for you to be able to select them when you are creating your profiles. It's a piece of software that needs to be installed in the template machine and will be only activated if you are starting that machine from the Flick Commander session. If you install for example it, you means install it in whatever machine it will not be any difference. The Flick Commander client is for all the machines you have in your network and it downloads the profiles but right now when we finish the free IPA integration that will be work free IPA to get the profile information, not Flick Commander one. It compiles all the profiles to generate a final profile because you can have several profiles that apply to the same user and it puts all the configuration changes you want in order to the final configuration that will be applied. Right now the support settings using Flick Commander are in the web interface and the non-software highlighted applications for the non-software tools to highlight several applications that you want to be displayed on the front page. Also the non-line accounts but it is in progress because we have time for passing the changes to the UI so we are on it. The lift session, almost any settings based application is support. Also LibreOffice is support and the network manager you can pre-configure VPN or Wi-Fi or whatever for have that network profiles already installed in the machines you are deploying. Well in future release the idea is to integrate with free IPA. We are almost there so I think maybe in the next, during this year we will end up having that option in Flick Commander and there are several enhancements we can do in the UI and for the user experience so I think this year we will keep that also. Well I wanted to do a short demo so I will try to create a basic profile and also I want to show you how the settings apply to another user so you enter your copied session and here are tools you have Flick Commander as a plugin if you install it you can install it as it is currently in Fedora so you can install it very easily. So here you have to configure the Libre Machine well the Libre Machine that will have the template virtual machine you will be using for creating the settings so I have configured it in localhost in this case localhost I put my username and you have to select if you want the system or the session mode for Libre so I use the session. This is an old setting that will be removed in the future but we needed it for special configurations where the Libre Machine is not the same where you are executing the copied thing so you have to specify the address of that and then I can install the public key for not having to put the password every time I am logging in the virtual machine so I put my password once for installing the public key ok it's installed so right now it is configured I save the configuration and now I can create the profiles for example I will create a test profile that is called test profile and the users that will apply is user for example so I can save it I have my profile here so I can edit it or delete or whatever so in edit this is one of the things we need to enhance in the UX I mean sorry it's very small maybe ok I will try it give me one sec ah ok yeah it's easier yeah you are right it doesn't work yeah I was trying to do it but it's not working I don't know if it is because I have the dialog open neither the here it's ok I think a bit less will be sufficient ok so I can edit the profile so I have these three buttons that are for adding settings to that profile this is one of the things we have to fix in the UX I mean so I can add for example normal line accounts for example the Google account with contacts and file synchronization mail for example or whatever so you have here the list of accounts that applies to that user profile well for this to work we need right now especially built normal line accounts it is in development so I can show you it working but the other things I can so the live session that it's because I am running out of time it's the most impressive one so I can just start the virtual machine session inside the browser this is my template this suppose that all the machines in the network are this type of machine so ok I enter with the user in this case the username doesn't matter in this case because you are creating the profile just that and every time you close this machine the configuration resets to the base template so for example I will open ShotWall and in ShotWall I will set up the background color I will put it completely white so ok so I save this setting and I have a button that is right now here because I did zoom in where I have all the changes that were taking place while I was in the graphic session so I will take this one that is the one I wanted to save to set you also have the LibreOffice changes you can make in this section and also the network manager ones here but for the sake of the talk it's easier just to show one ok so I have created my profile I have set up this setting so the next step is ok all the users logging in in their computers will get that setting well all the users called user will get that setting in the configuration so if I start a virtual machine I have here with the client installed let it boot ok I have the user profile so I enter and I have not configured it to do it automatically I will do it manually but if I execute the fleet commander client terminal and also I will put well I think I have to put the pseudo in front of it ok the fleet commander client executes and it starts to download the profile information from my computer because it is configured in the self computer and checks whether we can write the settings to the former deconf database so as soon as it is execute when I open Shotwell it will be white ok it's ok because usually it's grey well it's more or less this is the idea so if you create several profiles for several users etc. you will have that settings well set up for all the users in your network any questions or whatever this is my first task please be gentle yeah please ok no the idea is that right now we are using all we are ok sorry they are asking me what kind of integration is supposed to be taking place with free IPA so well right now fleet commander you create the profile etc. but you have to deploy it with fleet commander or an HTTP server because the profile information is saved in JSON files ok so our idea is to integrate it with free IPA so you just create the profiles and save them directly in free IPA so it's free IPA the one that is taking care what users apply, what groups apply etc. so SSD that is the other piece of the whole thing will download the profiles that only apply to that user that is logging in at the moment so the idea is to use free IPA for that yeah exactly yeah it makes easier for us to focus on make the effort on preparing the profiles and you know the proper configuration set for the user rather than trying to make to download the information check that is ok or whatever please ok you are asking that how fleet commander manage to the changes to the configuration are made by the users right now we ignored them basically if the user changed the settings ok the settings we have right now in fleet commander are supposed to be forced by the system administrator so if you change anything or whatever if it is set by the administrator it will be rewritten but you know the idea is to make some kind of policy for that in the future but right now the tool is very young you know what I mean any other questions? we have time have you considered Ansible for distribution as alternative for SSSD and IPA for cases where IPA is not used? yes but well it's they are asking that if we are considering for example using Ansible or another tool for deploying the configuration settings well instead of free IP and SSSD well yeah we can use it but the thing is the free IPA is mostly used in large works later on deployment and large environments so we suppose that the fleet commander will be also deployed in that kind of environment so it is easier for us to use a tool that is already there not trying to well that was our first well we were on that first so right now we are trying to finish that and later maybe use another thing please Steph sorry? the fleet commander will be a very high level with one line change okay well the question is the real question the final question is that if we are using BNC or iSPICE we are using SPICE no it's the master branch it's mainly I implemented the part for transferring the the settings using a custom channel and I used the SPICE HTML5 master branch for using it the best thing of using copied in this case is that we can use the route channels for not having to connect to a specific port we can use the same interface used for web sockets for connected really so we get rid of a lot of pieces of software that were you know failing points in that case are there more questions? no? thank you very much I will be around so if you have another question or want to talk to me you know just ping me thank you


This is the CheedyTech iMate. Today, we're gonna check it out. My name's Jim, and this is the Edge of Tech. So recently, my friends over at CheedyTech emailed me and asked me if I wanted to check out their new iMate device. It's a 270 by 200 by 200 fully enclosed 3D printer. So I checked it out and I said sure, I would love to check this thing out. They say it's capable of printing high temp filaments, which is awesome. I tested it with the included PLA Plus, which comes with it. And I tried some PETG, but my PETG was a little old and kept cracking. This has an advanced metal frame. It has a three and a half inch touchscreen, which actually works very well. It comes with not one, but two of their flexible magnetic boards. But as you'll see later in the video, I had some issues getting prints off. So you definitely wanna put something on this. These things stick like concrete. They're super good stick quality for PLA at least. It comes with a USB drive like this. It uses a silent motherboard with 2209 stepper drivers and also the Cheedy software, which is actually a rebranded Kira, but works super good. Cheedy says it has a new generation of nozzles, which helps overall printing. And this one actually came with two. Yes, I said two full hot ends. One that comes installed with a 0.04 nozzle and this one, which is a 0.02 nozzle. It comes with all the standard stuff you expect with a 3D printer, including a very, very stiff spatula that's pretty sharp. So I think they know that this thing sticks very well because this thing comes in handy trying to get stuff off the bed. Well, I was not able to get all of it off the bed. I'm gonna have to try more on this one later, but it does come with it. It comes with a glue stick, which later in the video I didn't think it did, but it does come with a glue stick. It comes with a flat head screwdriver and a nice handled Allen wrench, which is great. It does come with some replacement nozzles, which is awesome. And it includes some bed clips. Now these bigger bed clips you might wanna use for that really strong, strong filament that has a tendency to pull the magnets up. This will be your insurance and hopefully that won't happen. The manual isn't too bad. If you go through the manual, it walks through everything you need to do. Setting this thing up maybe took 10 minutes. It didn't take long at all. I think the longest part about setting this thing up was actually getting the stuff out of the inside because it all comes packed inside, which is very clever on the cheaty tech side. It does walk through your first insulation. It walks through your bed leveling, as you'll see right here. When you do that, you'll actually use this little cheaty tech bed leveling card that they send with it. It's like a plastic and they use this to bed level. It has the instructions right on the front and the instructions are on the screen when you go to the bed leveling tab. That is really cool. It actually walks you through it. It has three points. The front right, the front left and the back. And then once it's done, it takes you to the center and you set your Z offset from there. Very smart.  But they do use this little plastic sheet. It's kind of flimsy to level the bed. Just make sure your nozzle is not too hot. I actually was a little hot because I usually use a hot nozzle when I level and I was melting this a little bit. This does come with a small roll of PLA plus. This does say it's red, but it is clearly orange. So I think it's just mislabeled. So I don't know if this is really PLA plus. I'm assuming it is, but this is definitely orange as you'll see in the prints later in the video. But that's enough right now. Let's get some prints going and we'll start with the first one. So when we left off, I was just getting the test print started and that is this one right here. Now this is an interesting test print. It is a square with a little circle. It is mostly hollow. But it printed really well. But I noticed that this thing holds on the prints super, super tight. I had to peel this off and I was really afraid I was gonna break it. After that, I went on to the torture toaster. As you can see, it didn't quite make the cut because I broke the arm off here. I did that by accident because when I got done, it was so stuck to the bed that I had to peel it off. Even though that these flex plates, flex like this, it was not letting go. And as you can see on this one right here, there's still filament that I could not get off from that model right there. I tell you, this was amazing and super frustrating at the same time because stuff sticks to these beds. Now they give you two, which is amazing. I have one in here and one here.  And so what I did after this is I actually put some Vision Miner on it and I smeared that bad boy down with some Vision Miner, the Nano Polymer. I love that stuff. And then I did this vase, which came out absolutely amazing. This is the clock spring reciprocal vase and it turned out absolutely awesome. It came off really nicely once I put that Vision Miner on there. And I tell you, everything stuck. It was super fast. This thing actually prints super quick. Now with this, I actually used a slicer that came on board. It's the Cheedy Slicer, which is great, but it is actually a reskinned Cura. So that is even better because if you're familiar with Cura, you'll get on this with no problem. They do include, I believe, an S3D profile as well if you wanna use that. But the slicer that's included on the SD card worked great. So these are the three prints that I did try so far. The Torture Toaster, the awesome reciprocal vase and the only test file that comes on this card right there. Now, something they do include, and I mentioned this in the beginning, was a glue stick. I probably could have put the glue stick down and printed on this and had a lot better results of getting stuff off, but I didn't use a glue stick. To be honest, I've never used a glue stick ever. Bum bum bum. But I did use the included PLA Plus. It's red, and that's what you see here. To me, it says it's red, but it really looks pretty orange, and you probably can see that from the camera. I don't think this is red. I think it's mislabeled. I believe this is an orange filament. Otherwise, I'm in trouble. The other cool thing that they include that I did not play with yet is the point to hot end. I mean, I'm talking a whole hot end. They include this. It is a really cool thing to include, but I'm just kind of curious why they just didn't include the nozzles instead of a full hot end. But what's really cool is that it goes in pretty easily and they give you a complete hot end. So if you ever had any issues, you could actually use this hot end. It's a point to nozzle, so you could print really tiny nice stuff, but it'll definitely take some more time. But thanks for including an extra hot end. I always liked that. Matter of fact, I don't think I've ever seen a manufacturer include an extra hot end in any of the printers I've checked out. So there's a couple of things that I noticed with the printer that's a little bit different.  And that's to let the air through. This machine, unlike the Creality CR200B that we saw recently, this machine does not have any ventilation in the case. I believe that this is injection molded, and I believe they use this for another machine because if you look at the back of it, there actually is a pattern for a fan, but there's no fan in this. So that's kind of weird where you have to actually take off the panels from the sides and open the front door to print PLA and make sure it prints properly. But with that being said, I didn't have any issues with PLA. It's stuck awesome. The only failures I had was getting things off the bed, and you can mitigate that by putting maybe some glue stick or vision miner like I used on the bed, and then it probably won't stick quite as hard. As far as using this for ABS, I have not done that yet. I usually don't print an ABS, but because of this machine, I'm actually gonna try it because I see a lot of people had some really good success with that, along with that CR200B. So I'm gonna definitely try that. I did try some PETG. The problem is this PETG is pretty old. It's two years old, and it's super brittle. So it kept breaking in the hot end as the print was going down. So I'm gonna try some fresh stuff, and hopefully I can get that to work. I believe this thing's gonna print PETG with no issues, especially using their slicer. All those settings were already input. So that actually really helped. So overall, my thoughts on this machine, I've had it for a couple of weeks. I love the prints that I've gotten off of it. These included here. I love that it's enclosed, and I can print ABS if I really want to, although it doesn't have any fans or anything inside the case. I don't think that's gonna be too big of an issue when you're using the higher temperature filaments.  Take the top off, I forgot to mention that, and open the door. I don't think that's a big problem when you're printing PLA. You probably could get away with just taking the top off and the sides because I did that for this first print. I left the door closed, it was fine. But overall, very nice machine.  So definitely put something between your prints and this sheet because it'll hold it on tight. Leveling was easy like we saw. Everything else runs very well. It's direct drive, so that is really cool too. Would I get this? I definitely would look at this if I'm looking at an enclosed machine. I really do think this 3D printer as a whole is very nice. It prints very good. If I had the budget, I'm looking for an enclosed machine and I wanted to do the higher temp filaments. I definitely would look at this as an option because I do believe it's a great machine and it'll do very well. Well, I hope you guys learned something today and as always, keep printing. Hey everybody, give me that thumbs up if you liked the video today. Hit the subscribe button if you haven't done that already and the bell right over here to get notified anytime we go live on HotMakes or another great video comes out on the channel. I really appreciate you guys watching. You rock.


COV weapons it seems have gone from absolute trash to an incredible status. The best turn around for a single manufacturer I can remember in such a short time and it's thanks to weapons like this, the new COV pistol called the Hydrofrust. How's it going guys? My name's DPJ and today I bring another BL3 video. If you do enjoy it leaving a like really helps out and subscribe if you do want to see more. So this Hydrofrust I will straight up state is an absolute monster of a weapon. By far in my opinion the best COV weapon in this game and pistol wise it's up there people it really is. The thing about this weapon is a fact though it acts more like an SMG in the way in which it performs so if you are an SMG kind of guy and it's all you mainly use this weapon would be a great addition for you to switch to from your SMG when you run down that ammo and you will indeed feel at home using this thing. So this variant I have is the more Hydrofrust and as you can see its damages are too crazy 942x4 which is 3768 damage people and it doesn't end there. No not at all. What we also see is after every kill every second shot deal 200% shock or incendiary damage for 6 seconds. So in reality if you're firing a clip of 100 shots after a kill 50 or so shots deal 200% damage. What isn't really clear though if it's additional damage to the actual standard 100% damage which would make it 300% damage over that standard number. This I had to test and in my testings I found out people that it indeed was not the case. 200% damage is the output over standard as we see here or 4 shots at that target and roughly 6-7k damage. When the shot doubles up with that damage coming into play we see 14k so it isn't 300% but it's still great people as it really doesn't end there. You also get a chance at tick damage too coming into play from incendiary and shock and what we see is approximately 10-20 ticks of around that 2k mark. Ticks indeed seem to stack as you see here in that slow mo I shoot this enemy twice with that additional shot and we get 20 ticks so either the damage stacks or the tick stacks are pretty sure though it's the damage. So here we have a weapon which deals nasty damage as standard as it deals it in that cryo form and then after a kill it adds shock and incendiary into the mix so a single weapon here which deals 3 elemental types which is just lots of crazy. The only other weapon I can think that's similar to this which shoots a couple of different elements at the same time is a new SF Force which is an SMG I'm yet to cover and also an old bandfavor SMG called the Tsunami which I believe shoots kinetic which is standard as well as corrosive and shock which is just an amazing weapon I do miss it. Now as crazy as this weapon is and within my testing I truly felt its power I also wanted to test something else out when we get a kill with this and that shock and incendiary damage coming to play if you have said anointments on a weapon like the one I have you know 200% shock and incendiary damage bullets also double up as 100% of 200 is in fact 200 number wise so that's why I wanted to find out so for instance if a standard shot did 100 and then this 200% damage shot did 200 would this cryo anointment double up those 200 damage shots doubling them up to 400 or giving you an additional 200 on the initial shot meaning from base weapon damage wise we see a 400% damage increase from this anointment alone and this could be much much higher people as other anointments do offer more damage so I decided to test this out and why did indeed find people that this was the case the 100% cryo sentinel anointment double up on that damage and the additional damage output from this pistol incendiary shock wise which is just absolutely crazy and it's actually you know that when we see in play people this pistol is just capable of crazy things so what we have here guys they're top tier cov weapon they don't think those words will come in my mouth twice in a week but they have but people and it is a big but not the big but you like either as good as this thing is power output wise and dps wise it is seriously let down and I mean seriously let down by how quick it consumes ammo it is truly appalling now if you have any kind of means of countering this then you have one of the best weapons in the game right here it truly is that good but if you don't like me playing on zane then you are a little let down by the weapon because I do like using efficient weapons in my load out I mean this is efficient when it's got bullets but those bullets disappear quickly making it not efficient in the long run then I'm not sure if I would use this over let's say the maggie which is another pistol which is top tier I just ain't sure about that but like I said if you got a ways of countering the way this consumes this ammo then this is for you guys 100% I don't think of another pistol in the game I would pick over this but that's just me so yeah guys to hide your thrust is a serious contender while I think many of you guys will indeed love now if you don't know where you obtain this thing well it drops from a boss called shiver as the unscathed who's located within Neagle Nessai on xylagos and the root to this boss is location you can see on screen now quite easy to farm not so much as easier to obtain drop rate seen from me a little low but hopefully guys your luck changes here but on that note we have come to the end of the video if you guys enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out your new anti-humanity mobile lens be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video upload you can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button but guys thanks as always for stopping by hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one


sensei star I grew it for a little bit and to be perfectly honest I got rid of it and I didn't I just thought of it as kind of a boring afghan our friends is so mad at you right now I know I know that doesn't mean that I grew the one you know that's true later on later on one version at least became pretty famous and Luke is one of the people from Paradise Seeds he's refused to give any lineage or any information about it it wasn't offered for all that that long I don't think yeah it was not as regular seeds but as feminized seeds I don't think he's ever stopped offering it you don't think he's ever stopped offering it as femme yeah so I just meant I don't you know the regular seeds was what like it was like a four or five year period or something I don't even think it was a four or five year period I think he gave someone testers that was a friend that person reproduced them which caused him to say fuck that I'm only doing femme from now on


So welcome everyone here today and we're delighted to have an amazing set of panelists for our discussion and our exploration of open source program offices in EU government. Though I think we'll be hearing a few stories that go a little bit beyond the EU in this panel session which is fantastic to hear. And so I'm delighted to welcome you all here today, I would like to start by asking each one of our panel members to introduce themselves at Jacob perhaps you might like to start. Hi there, I'm Jacob Green. I'm calling in from Baltimore today. I'm the founder of Moss Labs, and I'd like to take this opportunity to most definitely thank the Linux Foundation for giving us all the opportunity to present the work and the collaborations that have happened so far. Thank you, Jacob. Sayid, you're also coming from across the Atlantic perhaps you'd like to introduce yourself. Hello. I'm say it's truly the city team for research data management at the libraries at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. I've been working with Jacob for quite a while now, and I lead the open source programs office here at Johns Hopkins. Thank you, Sayid. Philippe, might you introduce yourself please. Sure. My name is Philippe Barray. I'm a technical project manager working at the seat of Paris. Thank you, Philippe. Aster, could you introduce yourself please. Hello, everyone. My name is Aster Nomelline Carleberg, policy director with the Think Time Open Forum Europe in Brussels. And Neja, perhaps you could introduce yourself please for the audience. Hello, I'm Neja Lanois. I'm CIO of the City of Paris. Thank you. And my name is Claire Dillon. I work with Jacob in Moss Labs, and I'm delighted to welcome you all here today. And I know we know that the trends in open source have been incredibly positive in the last little while. But we have not heard as much about what the impact has been in municipalities and cities. I know that the City of Paris has had a large amount of experience with open source and has had great success with its project Lutess. Neja, perhaps you can give us some background information about your experiences with open source and Lutess. Thank you. The story began in the city of Paris in 2002 when the newly elected council of Paris decided to promote an open source strategy. And so they voted to share and to make free all of future open source software developed by the city hall. And they believed that public money should benefit other municipalities and administrations and therefore citizens would only pay once for the public code. And since this time, the City of Paris has continuously improved its OS software and at the same time has been making the source code freely available. And after having developed a very high number of open source information systems since this time, we felt in June 2019, we felt it was time for us to promote even more than before our open source strategy and applications. So in June 2019, we hosted an event with some of the key open source experts in the world, as well as municipalities, administrations to work together and to discuss what it would take for free and open source software to be widely distributed and used. We hoped that this summit would give an additional impetus to the OS community. Now we are in year two after the summit and we are contributing to various workshops in collaboration with universities and are partnering with other cities to scale tools and to share city services platform. As you know, one of the outputs of the summit was to develop OSPOS and maybe Saïd we talk more about it but since then GHU and Liro have already set up OSPOS and City of Paris is working very hard today on the subject. We are very optimistic that this will be ready shortly in spite of course of the difficulties due to the COVID pandemic today. Thank you for sharing that and Asia and it's wonderful to hear about your plans for the Paris open source program office. And I know that the discussions that you had in the summit in Paris has led to many collaborations from that community that were brought together there so thank you for that. Philippe, you have been involved in the practical side of implementing LUTES. Perhaps you can share some of your journey through that implementation. Through many solutions LUTES serves the city, have a bigger impact on citizens. I will not name all of our 250 digital services that are available of course for the Parisians but for instance participatory budgeting is a digital service that was launched in 2014 and that allows citizens to submit ideas to improve the urban living environment. 5% of the investment budget of the city which still represents 100 million euros per year is made available to carry out the elected projects. So this is half a billion euros that this platform can help distribute during a mayor's mandate. This is how in 2018 seven elected projects were citywide, 173 district wide and 51 for more working class neighborhoods. Most of the projects concern the cleanliness of the city, efforts dealing with climate change by finding ways to produce energy and reduce consumption. Then comes public health, all kinds of transportation, sports, you name it. Another impactful example would be Don Maru which is a mobile application to report incidents into public space by uploading a photograph and a geolocalized address. Depending on the nature of the incidents, whether it is graffiti or littering, the incident is automatically forwarded to the technical services within the city, providers and private partners to handle it. So users are given updates in real time. One last example would be our appointment booking plugin which allows people being received for a growing number of subjects without queuing and register for events and which was recently also it helped make it possible for surgery masks deliveries. That's fantastic and I think it's such a wonderful example of how open source can have a direct impact on citizens. And can you perhaps comment, Philippe, about the benefits of why choosing the open source way helped you in your implementation of the test. Using open source, I'll just run through open doors, but it ensures trust. The very main thing for municipality like Paris is to ensure trust with its citizens. When you set up a participatory budgeting and a point booking system or a tax simulator, you need to make sure that citizens trust you as a city so that they use the service and follow you in the digital way. Open code means anyone can deeply look at how things are done, that there are no bias and that equity is guaranteed. Having control on your digital services help us reuse our developments. We're not forced to pay again and again for the same things. And this means that we need to always keep in mind how to build in order to be reused. And this is a very cultural thing here at the city of Paris. So whenever we need to launch a new service, we only focus on what's new and reuse what can be. So this is how the participatory budgeting could be made in only a few months. And this is also how on October 1st, the city of Budapest launched its own PB project by hiring a whole team of one developer for the integration and hacks. So in a few months only, they were able to launch it. So this is also possible when working on standards and how fast the upscaling can be. That's fantastic. And I know I have heard many of the arguments around how open source can accelerate development, and that's been well established. But that point about trust is so important. It's one that I'm passionate about. We have had our own experience in Ireland recently of launching the Ireland covert tracker app. And that was built as and released initially as an open source project, which was done specifically to build trust with the privacy experts and advocates in Ireland. And as a result, we had a huge take up among the Irish population, which I don't think would have happened without the fact that it had been made available and transparent to those experts to look at. And when we think about all the challenges for digital transformation today for cities and that building trust with citizens becomes so important. And but you also talked about that collaboration opportunity across across national boundaries and it's fantastic to hear about your success in in having Lutess have impact in places like Budapest. But I know it's gone even further than that geographically speaking. And so based on the collaboration that you guys started it that summit in Paris and Jacob perhaps you can describe how Lutess has had an impact in Baltimore. I'm happy to discuss Baltimore. Baltimore is about to go through a digital transformation. There are a lot of the digital services. The city is looking at at putting into place. And some of us were asking the question, where is the opportunity for openness and transparency where is the open source solutions available for cities like Baltimore to choose from. And what that journey led us to the folks here at in the in the city of Paris, major and Phil, we're, we're, we're, we got connected to them and we had a tremendous conversation about their project Lutess. And it seemed very fitting that the both the technology around Lutess bringing that ball back to Baltimore as a solution, as well as the spirit and the passion of to see it see a government so committed to bringing open source to its citizens to try to get that culture brought back and made available to to both the cities, citizens of Baltimore, the constituents of Baltimore, and the cities in general. And that led us to a tremendous partnership to really say, let's look outside of Baltimore itself, let's say not not can we do everything on our own. We are part of a larger ecosystem, and that larger ecosystem is the open source ecosystem that many in this, this community, many of the people in the room will be viewing this at the Linux Foundation, that ecosystem that we've that you participate in at conferences at Eclipse conferences, and at many of the open source community events. That is that spirit of openness and transparency that concept of community that I think translates very well to the what we're trying to do. And a lot of the stakeholders are been trying to do in Baltimore for a for a long time. It was that kind of connection that the brought us to the participation with the help of Denise Cooper to launch the summit. And with with the nation and the city of Paris in June of 2019 to really explore the idea of where is the where is there an opportunity for the open source community, the open source ecosystem, all of the major players within the open source ecosystem to come together and try to have a collective impact for cities in general. It was, it was an amazing event, and we've seen a lot of great work come out of that out of that summer, that summit. One of the specific outcomes of that and realizations is that what we're talking about when we're talking about open source is not just the collaboration between individuals around code. It's the collaboration between institutions, the collaboration between institutions of governments and cities, universities, and the private sector itself as a microcosm of the summit where we all got together. What we saw is we needed to find a way for that kind of conversation for an institutional construct to exist to allow the that that spirit of collaboration to really have impact and to see tangible results. The Linux Foundation and the to do group have been great in popularizing this concept called the open source program office. The open source program office has been this construct that allows industry to best interface a corporate organization to the broader open source ecosystem. So we theorized, can we then not expand that construct to governments and universities in a more systematic and structured way to allow these collaborations that we saw happening at the summit in June 19 in Paris to occur on a much more regular basis. And we've had a lot of great success from that we've created a working group and you'll hear some of the stories very soon of some of the other auspice that have been brought together through this. So the collaborations that were already starting to occur from this and to see how using an Ospo has made it possible for the collaboration around the test for both the test to get worldwide exposure and collaboration, as well as for groups that have auspice to contribute back and it's a real concrete example of where the open source ecosystem I believe can come together through a structured way of collaborating around projects and that can have such great impact to the cities of the world. I'll turn it back to you Claire but before we do, I wanted to mention the scale of the challenge we're facing. There are 32,000 municipalities in the US alone. 32,000 opportunities for the benefits that the work that Paris has done to be brought over to benefit them, as well as an opportunity for all of the work of those 32,000 municipalities to transfer back over to Europe and elsewhere globally. That's the kind of collaborative ecosystem we're really trying to foster here. I think that's fantastic because what we've you know when we hear about the benefits of open source and what it can bring to citizens in terms of trusted citizen services. Then really the question is how do we scale that and what I'm hearing is that the construct of the open source program office in the context of cities and universities can really help build those pathways to allow those collaborations to happen much more smoothly and more often. And when you talk about that scale of the municipalities from a US perspective, we know that they're, you know, again taking that then and multiplying it by the number in from a European perspective and indeed worldwide. You can see so much opportunity emerge from that. And sometimes it's just about helping it along the way. And I know that your work in Baltimore and has actually been linked from from a city perspective or a local perspective to a university perspective in the form of Johns Hopkins who are who are, you know, based in Baltimore, and say it perhaps you can then comment about how you're part of this journey and how Johns Hopkins has been involved in the open source program office movement. And I'd be happy to do that clear. Thank you for all the reasons that we've just discussed. We, we felt it was really compelling and important to launch an open source program office out of Johns Hopkins. We believe it's the first Osmo in a research university in the US. And for all the points about trust community scalability, all of those are really critical and essential in terms of why we decided to do this. It is fundamentally a new way of collaborating. So universities in the US, certainly, but I think throughout the world have relationships with new municipalities in which they're embedded. In some cases, the US has these terms called college towns, these are literally municipalities that, you know, live and breathe because of the university being close by. The president at Johns Hopkins, for example, has stated that one of the core priorities for our institution is to work closely with Baltimore City. The expression he used was as Baltimore goes, so goes Johns Hopkins. Really conveying that sense of, if the city doesn't thrive, then the university will struggle as well and vice versa. But what I will say is a lot of those kinds of collaborations tend to be along a discrete one-way model, which is where the university says we have all these resources, expertise, capacity, and we're bringing it to you, the city of Baltimore, in this one-time event, in these series of town halls, in these kinds of, you know, sort of specific interactions. What's been so interesting and appealing about working with tests and a local community center here, the St. Francis Neighborhood Center, is we have a continuous relationship with them. We are working in an open way using this platform with the community center directly and frequently. They are on our Slack channel. So when we are talking about technical issues or language issues, which, you know, from our perspective, sorry, we don't speak French, I apologize for that. But all those kinds of things that you really are typically behind the scenes, right? You don't think about those sharing those kind of information with the people that we use the platform. But we think it's important to do so. The OSPO allows us to have an interface from the university to the community centers, to the municipalities, to partners in other countries. If I had to try and do this kind of work through the legal arrangements that typically a university would work on, it would not happen nearly as quickly and as seamlessly as it has. So the OSPO has basically allowed us to tap into the capacity and expertise within Johns Hopkins, reach out directly to our partners in Paris that have developed the platform, and engage repeatedly continuously, you know, in a very dynamic and respectful way with the community center that we use it. And we believe by doing so, we are basically setting up a model and sort of an example that the rest of the city's community centers can look at. And in many ways, it's a different form of interacting with the city as well. It's very different if the university and the mayor's office have a conversation versus community centers where people are directly using their services. And many of the services that Nezha and Trili describe are universal, right? And Don Marou is 311 in the United States context. But participatory budgeting doesn't exist in Baltimore. But I can assure you as a citizen of Baltimore, that is something we want, particularly now. So while the results will be different, the needs are very similar. And the approach of using this open source ecosystem that Jacob described has just been wonderful. I think that's fantastic. And I remember hearing some of the feedback from citizens of Baltimore. And there was one comment that really stuck with me when they were talking about how the benefits of open source. There was a comment about the idea that sometimes when you're an individual, that sometimes you feel that like, you know, institutions sometimes do tech for you. It's kind of like everything's built for you and you're just expected to accept it. But they made the comment that they felt that your collaboration, something technology was being built with them. And that that made a difference in terms of their wanting to take that on and the value that they saw in it. And because their participation in that way in your collaboration was so valued that it really meant that they felt ownership of that as well. And I think that's something that when we think about citizen services, we would all like to see more of. So thank you, Said, and congratulations. And Astor, perhaps we can come to you now because I know that everything we've talked about here, these trends have been emerging over some time. But I believe that there are there are changes afoot or at least there are new guidelines and things like that coming from the European Union and the European Commission in respect of open source. So perhaps you can comment on the reports you've been involved in. Yeah, sure. Thank you very much, Claire. You know, as a think tank, working a lot on open source and open source policy. I have to say that there's just in the last year or so, things have been moving quite quickly and quite dramatically in terms of the conversation. And I guess I'll start off a little bit just with a kind of grand and broad perspectives of the EU and the European Commission to bring it back down to the level of the city, the municipality and the citizen because they're all linked here. And I would say that there's been an awakening in the EU, and among many of the EU governments. And of course, in the European Commission, you know, they recognize that, you know, open source is widespread, not just in the private sector, which, you know, that truth we know. But, you know, if you look at any public administration today that has any kind of digital ambitions, open source is part of the conversation. It's that is the reality. At the same time, the Commission and the EU is concerned of Europe's place in the world digitally. Where are we in terms of competitiveness and impact. And this isn't a world of in unstable geopolitics, and there are trade tensions there are identified dependencies in the digital infrastructure. And I would say that these three things have changed the conversation in Brussels, and in many of the member state capitals, realizing that open source. It's not just a conversation on cost saving. It's not just a conversation about like agile, good software development and connection to communities while all this is very important. Open source is also a strategic nature today, the conversation and the way open source is looked at it's, it's part of the conversations of the big digital challenges that Europe faces. And having said that, you know, we see indications of that in many of the strategic documents I'll touch on some of these, but it's really more than just talk there are actually efforts and things being done. And, and the first one and we're quite excited about this I think it's on the 20th of October, European Commission is releasing the fourth iteration of its open source strategy. And this, and now this is a little bit of EU talk, but this has been upgraded from an internal strategy of the of the director general for informatics in charge of the IT infrastructure to a commission communication. So this is a document in a strategy that touches every single part of the commission. And a lot of the effort in this strategy is going to be to make sure that this is a transformational document that looks to see how the work within the commission can be changed in the sense like so horizontally in the organization to really change the way of working with digital in the European Commission. So this is a very brave and big step in many ways for the commission really showing that they are are pivoting in terms of how they engage with open source. And then, together with that, there's also something that we are very, very involved in open forum Europe. The commission in January this year commissioned an impact study of open source on, you know, the economy, but also digital independence and competitiveness, and this is expected to be released in, I think, January, and just to put this a little into context, it's a big report. I think it's probably going to touch on four or 500 pages of deep analysis of different case studies countries, economic impact models, you name it, it really takes the broad picture of open source in Europe. And this hasn't been done since, I think, 2006. And anyone who's been involved in the open source base would probably agree that things have changed quite drastically from 2006 till today. So we're quite, quite excited about this one. And, you know, just to give some hints on the 5th of November, we're going to present some of the preliminary findings, but there are significant effects that we've identified already on, you know, the anything from productivity benefits on companies that contribute upstream to labor productivity, and just the, you know, open source contributions as a driver for startup formation. So all these efforts by the cities and the universities have a direct link also to the economy. And in that sense also, this is really awakened the European Commission's interest in the question. Then there are so many different things, but just big efforts also happening in Germany and a lot of focus on this in their conversations around how they're going to digit transform digitally transform the country. There's also all place into the COVID situation and the recovery funds, you know, the new presentation or the way the European Commission ceases, we're entering the European digital decade. And 20% and this is something like 150 billion euros of the recovery fund that has been going to be invested in alleviate 20% of this is going to go into digital transformation. There are deep questions about what do we invest in. How do we invest for something that moves your forward that does it, you know, maintains independence maintains sovereignty and open source is part of every single one of these conversations and this is starting to really dawn on key policymakers in Europe. So, and then you just bring this then to the conversation of the hospital government, because as this infrastructure of delivering some of the key things that any kind of open source related policy, coming out of Brussels, this is extremely important. There needs to be an infrastructure, there needs to be a network there needs to be organizational construct that can absorb these priorities exchange give feedback on. Make sure that there's not just a report coming out of the Commission, but it's actually something that captures all of Europe reaches the citizens. And here, what Jacob said is so key in my view. It's having a quote unquote standardized organizational construct that can speak the same language have similar mandates that it can talk to each other in a way that Paris and Baltimore does that they understand each other. That is key to to any kind of policy roll out when it comes to strengthening and driving your digital transformation, you know, on a regional level on a country level because the truth isn't this is also a of anyone who's a player in Brussels, no city, no company, no country and not even I would say that Europe itself can do this alone. There needs to be these networks of collaboration there needs to be sharing. And I think that you know coming down to to all of these key priorities of the Commission and its systems and how they work for encouraging sharing and reuse of software code across Europe to cross border digital services and government, all this, you know, open source and open standards, it will be key to all of these conversations in order to, and as well as auspice in these organizational constructs to create this kind of cross border interoperability, because the question comes down to scale the questions ahead and the challenges are massive. And if the conversations are not about how to also bring this to scale. And they're almost not worth having the right there in the middle I see the Ospo playing a massive part for how the public public sector can engage in this. And also then interface, as Jacob said with research research universities with companies, and, you know, all of this comes into for a city in a region. We're very focused on the day to day challenges of its citizen to also be able to through this network, start thinking and talking about that effort that is done towards the citizen citizens or the in the city or in the region. The human costs only using one. That's great. But in doing this work in this network, we can also start talking about building things that massive European and to be honest global scale, and that is how all this I think fits together, and we can actually, you know, this is the practical effort of actually walking the walk of finding ways of using open source to solve your digital challenges. Thank you, Esther, and I think it's so important. I mean you talk about the idea that no one, no one, anything can do it alone. But but even when then you take the speed at which we now need to respond which I think, again, things like covert has really brought that into sharp relief that, you know, regardless of even if you think you can do it alone, you'll get fast enough to be able to respond to today's global challenges so so that the idea that that that interface can help speed that innovation. I think it becomes incredibly important so thank you very much. And Asia you you've heard now we've heard from Astor about the the plans for Europe and the policy changes and that are going to be coming out in the next while. Could you maybe comment on Paris's policy moving forward with respect to open source. So from a policy perspective and as we have just said, you probably know that there are several key factors which are very important for all the open source community but for city of Paris. So the first one and Philip spoke about it is trust open source established trust and transparency between citizens and public services. Then there is the principle of when we use public money we should therefore as far as possible provide public code. And must pay just once for public developments. We also believe that sharing and collaborating between cities and administrations and companies private companies bring more progress we use saving money and so on. And working together enables richer smarter flexible software developments adapted to the common needs of the local authorities and the common concerns of the citizens. There is no point in reinventing the wheel technically or from the business point of view. So we all have the same concerns and needs in the for example the local authorities and we can share very easily our software if we have the will to do it. So in conclusion cities have their own means to regain control over their digital services, including cost privacy control. They must work together in the right direction for digital sovereignty and independence. And that's why what we are going to launch again for the current mandate which is just beginning. And as you know we have a new team now after the elections and our future digital road maps is going to continue all the work we have already done. Because Philip has spoken about Lutess but we have also other open source systems developed and which are very, very useful during the crisis. Like for example the botany plant management system called Botalista and which was developed with the city of Geneva and which is now adopted by other international cities. We have also developed a digital work platform for teaching with other local authorities and it's now used by thousands of schools. Primary, middle and high schools and this was extremely useful during the COVID lockdown in France enabling schools to continue their classes remotely keeping students in contact with their schools. And we must not forget the infrastructure point of view because we are also involved in open source. For example our default navigator is Firefox and we enable our employees to use open source office tools such as LibreOffice even if it's not mandatory for them because it's difficult as you know. For our technical foundation we give always priority to open source tools like Linux, Tomcat, Postgres, Ansible, Kibana for our elastic search for our data platform which is also developed on open source. So we spoke about the digital services for the citizens but the infrastructure domain is also very, very, very important. So of course our most investment in Paris was Lutas platform but we have to be more general and develop and also think about all the other aspects. Thank you. Thank you, Nezha. And it sounds really exciting and I'm sure we're all looking forward to hearing more about the other open source projects that you have in Paris considering the great success in terms of the collaboration around Lutas. So thank you for that. Saeed, you also heard Aster's commentary about what's happening in the U and of course Nezha mentioned elections, we know that elections are coming up in the U.S. as well. But when we think about from a policy perspective at a global level or from a U.S. perspective, how do you see open source and Johns Hopkins role in terms of thinking about how open source can actually help from an economic perspective? I think it's a really important point raised in terms of open source as a driver for broader economic development workforce development and so on. And I think that the United States unfortunately from my perspective doesn't have some of the national kinds of frameworks or certainly global frameworks that you've heard about from Nezha and from Aster. But the reality is that we do have organizations such as the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering Medicine. We have the funders, the federal funders that get together with your interagency working groups and so on. And there's active discussion in these forums about the importance of software. So there's been a lot of movement in the open science and open scholarship arena around articles and data. But much more recently, there's a significant deal of attention and energy around software. So we are looking at the work we're doing at Hopkins and that's starting to happen in other universities as well as possibly ceding those conversations, keeping a very firm eye toward what's happening in Europe, and basically making the argument. A lot of the arguments that we've heard today, of course, apply very much in the US. And I think that's true independent of what the results of the election might be, right? We still have to think about COVID response. We still have to think about creating jobs. We still have to think about collaboration solutions at scale. So we're hoping in the US, we do a lot of things bottom up basically the universities form an informal network in many ways influence the work of the funders influence the work of the policy groups. And we're hoping that some of the things we're doing at Hopkins and starting to do that universities can provide a lot of that, you know, feedback and a lot of that expert advice that can craft some sort of policy response as well. Thank you. And I also want to say thank you from Ireland's perspective. I know, and as Asia mentioned, Liro, the Irish Software Research Center is has recently launched their own open source program of us. And I know they are looking forward to working with Johns Hopkins on various different collaborations and programs. So it's marvelous to see all these connections happening back and forth across the Atlantic. Philippe, perhaps I can come to you now and just say, you know, when you think about the future and you think about how from an implementation perspective you're moving these policy things forward. And what what do you see in the future for your role in open source. Well, as I said, we have to remember that we strongly believe at the city of Paris that most of our needs are shared by any other city. And since this project was open source, we've made efforts to grow the community to reach bigger impact on citizens. By opening our code to other cities, we secretly hope that they will contribute back so we can improve our digital tools, thanks to them, and also unlock even more value also for others to benefit from. So one of the outputs of the last year's open source city forum is that we are now working with the Johns Hopkins University. And which is a great thing. And as Nezha and say previously said, we're tight guys talking to each other and making this evolve and very quickly because we speak the same language. So they're contributing bringing expertise on the internationalization of the solution, since we've had never faced it before. So we hope this will also help in a broader adoption by cities across the borders. In the near future, we try to gather collective intelligence work with ethics and for the good of all. We're in a context, as I've said many times with low and decreasing budget, where more needs to be made with less. So more administrations or governments can come along, bring their expertise and instead of having 10 different solutions do the same things and found it as many times. We can be maybe more than 10 groups working on the best solution for all of us make services more complete quicker to reuse and also implement. So this is what to expect from open source and once again benefits from what's already has been paid for by public service for public services. So we at the city of Paris do not intend to do open source just by throwing some code on GitHub and call it open source. So let's make the difference between noun open source and the verb open source. That's why we're actively trying to grow our users and developers community. So it is sustainable and scalable now. Having examples of new cities great, but we would need at least a few more to really benefit from the community. And I look forward to seeing more people get engaged and I know that your approach and the impact that you're having on citizens should certainly inspire them to also become engaged. So thank you very much, Jacob will come to you now and you know you you were inspired by this initial collaboration to to think about the idea of encouraging this, you know the setup of more open source program offices. Can you talk to me about about how that movement's going and if people are interested in getting involved how they might do that. Sure. Let's start with I wanted to start with the name of Lutess. Lutess is the, from my understanding from the last couple years working with me John Phil Lutess is named for the, the town and the area on which Paris eventually grew out of it was the precursor name of the city of Paris before the city of Paris was the city of Paris. And I think that's very fitting when we talk about where this effort is going from that town of Lutess. And I think that we've grown this amazing city that we is known the world over called Paris, a city that is known for collaborations on many fronts, including climate change. And I look to say, can we not have a similar evolution for the collaborations that are occurring from the faces of this group right here. These these nascent collaborations that we've set up these nascent ideas about Ospo. I really look forward to the challenge that the, the summit in 2019 in Paris set before us. Where does open source go what does open source look like in five years. What is that interface, how do we have impact within five years, how do we have access to open source benefiting cities at scale within five years. Hopefully it doesn't take as long as it took to for the town of Lutess to become the city of Paris, as it will for us to achieve that goal. Well on our way from from various some very practical think of things to get this going. We've Moss labs have convened a working group. We intend this working group to be a global working group to allow that that collaboration to build those. So we invite cities, universities and research centers to come participate in this working group as as a as the concrete way for us to get our work done, and for us to grow this this community collaboration of institution to really have some of the, the, the impact that Aster and Saeed and a job and others have said that that have painted the picture of where we can possibly go with some of the greatest challenges that we face as as a global society. Thank you and if anyone wants to get involved in this working group. Who should they email or how should they contact you. Well, the working group meets every two weeks and the the initial on route to that working group is to send us an email at Moss labs, you can the easiest way to do that is info at Moss labs.io. Excellent. Well, and I think that that's been a marvelous tour of the journey that you all have taken for the last year and a bit. And I just want to say congratulations to everyone because it's been the impact that that that collaboration has actually resulted in has been huge by all accounts on in everywhere herds touch so thank you all for for that. And thank you for participating in this panel to share your story. And I hope that everyone listening and can gain inspiration from this about the power that something like an open source program office at a municipal level or in universities the impact that that can have. And I do hope you'll join us on the next part of this journey. So thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you after and thank you, Jacob. And I hope that we will all see each other in person again soon. Thank you all. Bye.


Hello and welcome to another edition of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. This week I want to discuss the Fitch Credit Rating Agency's downgrade of U.S. government debt. In their report they say, quote, the ratings downgrade of the United States reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years. A high and growing general government debt burden and the erosion of governance in the United States. Period. Well, a whole host of people came out against this ridiculing Fitch saying that it wasn't necessary that it was a joke and all the typical big government people came out against this. Larry Summers, U.S. Treasury Secretary, President of Harvard University, ridiculed the move on the part of Fitch. Paul Krugman said that it was correctly ridiculed by the media and that it doesn't make any sense. Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury, also said that it was ridiculous and that it was based on old data. Of course the Democrats blame the Republicans and the Republicans blamed the Democrats. The mainstream economic media basically agreed and said that it was unnecessary that this had been done by the S&P Rating Service fairly recently and nothing ever came of it. So is this a joke? Is this ridiculous? Is this terrible? Or is this the right thing to do? Is this a good thing? Question mark. Well, in today's podcast, I want to represent the other point of view to the mainstream political class and media approach to the downgrade of U.S. government debt. And first and foremost, I want to mention something that I had missed in the previous downgrade and in the debt ceiling negotiations that occurred recently. Instead of raising the debt ceiling as they have done dozens and dozens of times in the past, your government took an even worse step by simply suspending the debt limit. In other words, there is no debt limit right now. They can spend as much as they want. And we are without any constraint whatsoever on our government in terms of its spending and borrowing policies. So it's not surprising that the deficit this year is up to $1.4 trillion, a 170% increase. And there's more to come. Fitch and others see only a one-way trajectory of more and more deficits over the next 10 years. Fitch only claims three years. And this debt is going to be coming at us across the yield curve from short-term government bills in incredibly large numbers, up to 30-year government bond borrowing. So there's lots of supply out there. It's very sobering. The interest expense on the national debt is up 25% just in the first nine months of this year. We're paying $652 billion just in interest. So with no constraint on government spending, it isn't surprising that we would get this downgrade. The federal government is spending money handover fist for anything possible with absolutely no cuts and now no constraint on government spending and borrowing whatsoever. The Fed has been increasing interest rates, which is a monetary signal to the fiscal side, the spending and borrowing side to stop, to curb your activities. But that hasn't worked. Recently, the price of gold also sent a signal to Congress rising above $2,000. But of course, that was barely noticed by anybody. And when you look at the opinions of people about the Fitch downgrade, you see the good guys cheering on the downgrade, or the bad guys, the Keynesians, the big spenders, government politicians and so forth, ridiculing this measure. And it makes us wonder why without any constraint on government spending and government borrowing, what is going to happen between now and after the election?