Republicans have long maintained that their decades-long crusade against LGBTQ plus people isn't actually driven by hate Contrary to popular belief rather they're fueled by their compassion for homosexuals and their desire to see them stop sinning also, they want to protect children and protect women sports and women and Traditional marriage they just want to protect a lot of people not gay people, but a lot of people, right? They never just really come out and say what they're really thinking that they hate us But one lawmaker in Florida did just that because as LGBTQ nation explains state Representative Jeff Holcomb was speaking on Monday on the floor of the Florida House of Representatives about a bill to urge Congress to get Rid of the woke social engineering and experimentation practices in the US military Yes, you want to think about the military my number one complaint is usually that they should stop Droning brown people in other countries that didn't attack us, but for this individual this egghead right here I mean Jesus Christ he He thinks that you know the vocation of the military is is bad And he's gonna try to make the case for that in this video that we're about to watch But as you watch it pay very close attention to the blonde lady in the background and listen very carefully because you are Going to hear audible gasps as he admits What he does here as he says the quiet part loud labeled as racist and discrimination Without an ant without a response Isis the Taliban and al-Qaeda those are the folks who discriminate We bombed a building in 2017 Like we never usually do we bombed it because they threw homosexuals off that building our terrorist enemies Hate homosexuals more than we do They're the ones who discriminate our job in the military our Navy creed I'm committed to excellence and fair treatment of all that's what we learn in boot camp That's what we drill into ourselves each and every day while we're in boot camp.   So at least we're not killing gay people aren't we merciful Yeah, very merciful, thank you. Thank you so much now for additional context LGBTQ nation explains Halcombe was speaking about Florida SM one three eight two Which would have the state of Florida send copies of a text to President Joe Biden and other federal officials Demanding that the military stop engaging in quote woke social engineering and experimentation practices This is so fucking stupid The bill cites the military's opposition to racism in the workplace and the facts that openly gay and bisexual men and women Have been allowed to serve in the military and quote the ban on transgender individuals serving in the military was lifted as examples of woke military Policies, I'm sorry, but aren't you the folks who argue that combat readiness was really important and distractions Should be something that are minimized. I mean isn't racism a bit of a distraction. Isn't that going to kind of? Destroy relationships in the military when we need them to be cohesive I mean, this is what you all argue, right? But no, it's bad now to say hey gays can serve openly now. We're not kicking them out for being gay We're no longer doing trans witch hunts and Because of that their woke Now more about Florida his speech comes after years of attacks on LGBTQ plus people's rights from the Florida state legislature Including the state's infamous don't say gay bill It's ban on transgender students participating in school sports and it's most recent bill to allow doctors to refuse care for LGBTQ plus people so states like Florida they propose and pass so many anti LGBTQ plus laws that it's hard to keep up with them So only a fool would think that they don't hate LGBTQ plus people But it's just so interesting to me that they're just saying the quiet part loud Even if it was a Freudian slip for them to say it to hear them say that they hate gay people that is Very entertaining and I like that they're doing that because I think that that helps us because they're just kind of exposing themselves We want them to not hide the ball I want them to be more explicit because that turns off the normies But even when they don't explicitly say what that dipshit said It's clear that they hate us and it's getting increasingly hard for them to hide that fact Not just in Florida by the way because last week Alex Bollinger of LGBTQ nation reported about Kansas quote Kansas Republicans enacted one of the most regressive bathroom bills in the nation after the state legislature Overrode Governor Laura Kelley's veto leading Kansas House of Representative Speaker Dan Hawkins to proclaim himself quote Just giddy quote getting that women's bill of rights was truly the icing on the cake Hawkins said after the body voted 84 to 41 mostly along party lines to override Kelley's veto the state Senate voted 28 to 12 to override her veto so the cruelty is the point for those unaware and their disingenuity is just crystal clear because this same party who is Stripping away women's rights women's reproductive health care They're passing bills under the pretense of protecting women It's just it's comical at this point and if you're a trans person or LGBTQ plus person is watching this I know that it's easy to feel bogged down by all of these stories because it just feels like everybody hates you and It's easy to feel that way when the bigots are much louder than ever before You know and there's a lot of bigots with power passing law after law restricting your rights by the way, we're up to 471 anti LGBTQ plus bills introduced in 2023 alone With more to come for sure, but I mean overall Understand that despite all of this noise society is Changing even if it doesn't feel like it because remember just because the biggest bigots also happen to be the loudest people That doesn't actually mean that they represent the majority Let me tell you what I mean a new morning console poll finds that after weeks and weeks of right-wing hysteria over Bud Light's partnership with a trans woman a majority I repeat a majority of beer drinkers Actually feel very or somewhat favorable about companies that hire trans spokespeople with 19% of Americans not really knowing or caring about the situation and just 28% of people are mad about it and a plurality of Americans by the way also support trans inclusion with regard to other industries that Includes 50% in beauty marketing 51% in entertainment That's a majority 49% in pharmaceutical commercials and 46% in auto and all of these numbers are only going to improve for LGBTQ plus people Since younger generations are substantially more supportive of inclusion than older generations and younger people are the future My point is that as much as we all fixate on anti LGBTQ plus hate myself included and as depressed as that may make us feel I mean it gets me bogged down as well.  This is all temporary That's not to say that racism is gonna end and homophobia and transphobia will go away. This is going to be a battle for The entirety of humanity's existence, but it is gonna get better and that's one thing that we can all look forward to


Welcome to today's D5 render tutorial. In this lesson, we'll learn about light sources and how to use them in D5. We'll continue using this 3ds Max model, but first, let's take a look at the four types of lights. Point lights. They work just like the sun, emitting light in all directions. You can add them to the scene by pressing the shortcut key, 1, or you can find them by using add lights. Click on it and you'll see all the axes, x, y, and z surrounding the light. Click and hold one of the arrows and drag the light source in that direction to move it along the x, y, or z axis. In D5, you can press V to toggle between the scale tool and the move and rotate tool. You can use the scale tool to scale things up or down. Hold shift and drag along the axis to copy the model or light source in the direction of the arrow. Or you can select the object, then press Ctrl D to copy it. To copy multiple objects, hold Ctrl and use the left mouse to select all the objects you need. If you want to group these objects, press Ctrl G and a group will be created in the object list. Press Ctrl Shift G to ungroup them. Click and drag the square in between to move the light freely in the scene. That should help you correctly place light sources, so let's look at the light parameters. They're here on the right sidebar. Here is where you can adjust the intensity and attenuation radius of the lights. These parameters have a default maximum value, but if they are not high enough for you, you can enter a higher one. Attenuation radius controls how far the light spreads out and only objects within this range will be illuminated. You can also enter a value higher than the default one for the attenuation radius. The light source radius affects the softness of shadow edges or fall off. The larger the value, the softer the edges will be and vice versa. It has a maximum value of 10 and does not support entering a higher one. Visible in reflection, controls whether or not the light source appears in material reflections. Turn it off and there will be no reflection of the light source. You can also use the slider to adjust this more precisely. You can also adjust the color of lights. With temperature, you can set the color of the light just like what you would do in real life. Another method is to freely adjust the color of light sources by setting the RGB, HSV, or hex values. Next are spotlights. Many of the parameters are the same as for point lights, so I'll skip the ones mentioned before. Applying IES files. An IES file is an industry standard data file that describes the distribution of the light data measured in the real world. You can use any of the six built-in IES files in D5 or click customize IES to add an IES file of your own. The cone angle is also adjustable. It controls the cone angle of the light coming from the spotlight. D5 also has strip lights and rectangular lights. They are both in fact rectangular lights. The only difference is with their initial parameters. A strip light is a rectangular light with a large initial aspect ratio and a specified barn door length. A rectangular light is a planar light with an equal initial length and width and a barn door length of zero. The difference between both light sources lies in the values of the barn door parameters, which can be adjusted with the slider. The barn door angle is the angle between the imaginary barn door plate and the direction of the light's normal with values, ranging from 0 to 90 degrees. With a relatively small barn door angle and a greater barn door length you can see that the rectangular light looks a lot like the kind of light used in a photography studio. Give these a try yourself. We've covered all the types of light sources available in D5. Now I'll show you how to create the lights. If it's a daytime scene you're wanting to create, artificial lights will often be used as supplementary lighting. You can add a rectangular light for each window and scale it up or down. I tend to make it a little larger than the window and have it maintain some distance from the window. Next is setting the lights color. You can refer to the parameters I'm using here. When all your lights are in place, group the supplementary lights for each window. Let's say we have four windows on four walls in this room, then there will be four groups of lights in the object list. This is so we can adjust the lighting for each window separately. Using this method, we can get the correct balance between the light and shade in the scene. If we decide to have a light directly on this face, then the lighting should be brighter here. Also, let the sun shine through this window so the natural light can have a photorealistic effect. To emphasize the desk in the scene, we can add a spotlight. Please note that since it's a daytime scene, we don't want the spotlight too prominently displayed, which means it's better to avoid too much intensity. Now, let's try to see what's still missing. As you can see, there are many glasses and metal materials in the scene. In order to add highlights, we can place several spotlights around them. Set the attenuation radius and intensity parameters lower, because only a little bit of highlights go a long way. Okay, that's it for today's video. Now that we've gone through all the lighting in D5 render, you should experiment with your own scene and create and adjust the lights for yourself. By the way, D5 widget now has included a stage light and projector, so definitely check them out as well. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson.


Let's talk about now pollinators, bees and other pollinators. You know, we're talking about having a great garden, a productive garden. And to have a productive garden, we need to be full of activity by our pollinators. And so tonight we're going to learn about how to attract and keep those pollinators in our home landscape. And to do that for us, we have Todd Wyman, the Cass County Horticulture agent. A beekeeper himself. So let's welcome Todd to the forums. A lot of times we'll get asked on honey beekeeping. If you're in full gear, is it possible not to get stung? I think I've been stung every time and it's just what it is. So I want to get that clear that I've been stung a lot. So if I start shaking, it's because of that. The talk I have tonight, I have a talk that is from Russ Bryant. He did a lot of work with native bees and trying to find out information on them. There really isn't a lot out there for our native North Dakota pollinators and bees. There just isn't a lot of information. There is information on regular honey bees and other types of creatures, but there really isn't a lot.  But I will skip certain parts, but we'll go through it and go from there, I guess. Skip that. With all the honey bee talk and such, there's a number of different good things that basically come from honey bees, but also from the other pollinators too and we're going to focus more on those tonight. The pollination of our plants for our food supply is in trouble basically. 95 agricultural plants benefit from that. It's $1.5 billion. There's a lot of, our way of life is affected by pollination of these little bees on flowers and also our food sources and there's some problems with that. And we're going to kind of get into that a little bit. Another thing I'd like to point out is that some of these insects are becoming extinct and some are extinct. There's 128 native pollinators that they have names for and such, but there are more out there that they don't. And in many cases, what will happen is these will actually become extinct before they can name them and they just won't be around. Some of them might have an old one in the collection and say, what is that? And they figure it out, but there aren't any more. And it has to do with a lot of different things. Why would that matter if we don't have the cute little gray one with the little polka dots on it? These insects have a venom in them that they're thinking is good for a lot of the diseases we have, HIV, AIDS, cancer and such. And so if those insects disappear, they're really, it's near impossible to create that venom from just chemicals and such. This is not me. If this was me, I'd be the person fully dressed, completely engulfed in the suit with extra gloves. I don't like to be stung, but it happens. So I'd be the guy over on the right, dirty suits, completely safe, standing furthest away from everything. The other two guys, I've met guys like that and at first it's good, and after a while they all get stung and they do actual bee dances. So when I say when you work with any of these bees, suit up. One major thing to think about is that the bees like flowers and if you have a monocrop where it's just one solid field of, for example, corn or what have you, you don't really have any of the prairie flowers in there. Sometimes it's not even weed. The fields are clean. There's nothing but one thing. And if you were to eat, for example, if you were to eat just apples every day, apples are good, but if you only ate apples, as far as the diet of the bee, it's kind of a poor diet. So multiple different flowers. And some people say, well, what can I plant? What is the best flower to plant? And I always say plant multiple species. You don't exactly know that they're going to eat one thing over another. You can kind of guess. But as far as if you had 50 different flowers in your garden versus two, I would say you'd have a much better, healthier bee population. And this decides, of course, I've had honeybees and mistakes happen.  And it was because of that.   The study by Russ, he wanted to find out two different things from this. He wanted to see if there was a comparison or if there's a difference or what would be the importance of having a lot of floral diversity or having a very good nesting environment. And a lot of the bees we have in North Dakota are ground bees. And so fertile soil, sandy wound soil, and I've seen them all at Absaraka. I've actually walked into them and got out really slowly. But, you know, there's a lot of different kinds of environments that they can have. And so he wanted to see, is it the food source or isn't the environment or both or neither? What would you find out from this study? And I'll get to that toward the end. And I think you might be a little bit surprised by it. You did some studies here. Some of you probably across the state have been to these towns or actually live in these areas. And you can obviously read what it says. But there are different studies that were done where he did this. CRP or Restored Prairie, I think most people know what that is, versus Native Prairie. And if you can look at, and you can see on the pictures here, you'll see that the Native Prairie has a wider diversity of forbs, different herbaceous flowers. The CRP, it's not just one system, but it does not have a diversity as the Native Prairie does. This is a picture of Russ, obviously before he started this thing. He's nice and clean. He's not, you know, it's just a picture of Russ out there. And these are the blue vein traps that he used to capture the insects in the area and do counts. And you can't really just go out there and count them because obviously they move. But if you capture them in this trap, you can, you'll know. Native Bee Catches, he did this over a two-year period. On the CRP, you can see that for the 2012, I don't think there's a point right here. Anyways, for 2012 and 2013, for the first, for 2012, the CRP had 7,232,000 bees trapped. And then in 2013, 4,011. And you get it to the Native Prairie and it's a very almost exact number. It's 5,662 versus 5,659, almost insignificant number of that. So it's very interesting as to, if you look at the CRP, there's a great difference in the numbers in the Native Prairie. It's more of a stable environment. I love the picture of this bee. I just, you know, I'd hate to have one that size, but I love the picture of it. And if you look at this closely, you'll see that the different types of bees and how many he had. This bee right here was one that he said, they call it the bigger bee. And it's a, well, I can't even hardly say it. Alas, alas, told us. I said it earlier, but I'm not going to try it again. But this is the most abundant Native Bee. And if you look on the top left, you'll see that that's where the range is. It's close to 8,500 compared to the others. There's a number of different tools that were used to do this. And some of the science behind it is quite fascinating. And some of it's kind of boring for me anyways, because I mean, I don't think I really get the full gist of it, but I'll do the best I can to keep it at a level that you'll appreciate. And if not, thank you for not falling asleep while I'm talking. If you look at the pollination, they checked three different types of needs for the pollination model. He needs land, different pollinator species, and what kind of land. And he kind of went through this a little bit. The crops that you see there are actually crops that people grow, not really wildflowers. And he went through the different types of what the bees did with that. As far as, well, let's skip this one. Inputs and outputs. Basically, a common sense type of thing is that you would need both. Nesty Habit and floral source maps. And you have a good pollinator habitat, but that's not really scientific. And so he went a little bit further with that and checked it out. Here's just a picture of all the part of south, or North Dakota, excuse me. And from space, kind of not really much there. But if you look at on this one here, here you show the areas of high quality where everything was great. There's a lot of pollinators in the blue and in the red. It's real poor quality that they have a very difficult time surviving there. They just weren't very many there at all, if any. Here's a little more of a differentiation. Again, floral resources versus potential nesting locations. One thing that he did find with this is that the better the floral, the more diverse floral population that he had, the more native species he had, the more bees. Even if the ground was perfect for nesting, if you didn't have the floral, there just wasn't very many bees. And so if you think, well, both are necessary. In all reality, it would be better if you had to choose one to have a higher floral place than an actual place for them to drill holes and to live. That's what I got out of this, and it would probably be very interesting. Here, I kept these slides in here mainly for the pictures of the bees. They're quite beautiful and fascinating. And in the end, he'll combine it all and we'll go through the objectives. But for this here, if you want to take a look at them, and if anyone has very good Latin knowledge, Tom, no, no, it's aga postaman, I believe, melisodes. If you look at these creatures, they're just fantastic and beautiful. Last you'll gloss them. Bumbas are a bumble bee, obviously. And they're not as fun to actually pet, as you might think. Here, the information was gathered and combined. And basically, if you have poor quality habitat, for example, poor soil and poor nesting, you still have a lot of pollinators. And that was the big thing that I pulled out of this. And I thought it would be quite fascinating because I thought, well, if they're not there, if they can't really build a good nest, they probably won't be there even with the flowers. But that's not what I got out of the study. And I thought it would be quite fascinating with that. Obviously, if you have from this, if you had a lot of different diversity in your plants, the bees just did well, regardless of the habitat, the types of soil. If you look on this map in North Dakota, the best place to find these would be out in the southwest corner. Kind of on the eastern side, it's like a sea of red. It's just quite unbelievable what isn't there versus you get more to the western part of the state. And I guess that kind of makes sense if you get more into the monocrops and such. I'm going to jump ahead here. There's a ton of people who I talked to about this so I can understand it. And I'd like to thank them all, but that would take about five minutes and so thank you. If you look at this here, a lot of people want to build things. And if you're like me, you want to build things, but you really don't have the skill, and so I just pay for it. You can make these. This is a little nesting box. And I'm just going to read off of here. It's basically a 4-inch by 4-inch nesting box. And you want untreated wood. And if you don't remember anything at all, you want to use untreated wood. And you want to drill holes in there. And in here, he has 3-eighth-inch holes and 3-inches deep. And these have done quite well for him for bees. Also wax-free parchment paper in there. And I'll show you some of the pictures of bees that moved in here. He had this by some Elfalfields in North Dakota. A little closer look. You see there's a little bee in there just kind of doing its thing. Probably not wanting its picture taken. And then he pulled one out and a little closer look at it. And it has its arms pinned down. So it can't really wave at you, but you can see like, hey, I don't think he's too happy, but something to think about, I guess. You can build these things and have success. I've seen kids do this, too, with straws from different types. You can buy the straws, or sometimes kids will get a bunch from a restaurant. It's like, oh, great, now what do we do with these? And they've made different types of homes with those, too. You might be wondering why I have this Western Prairie Fringe War Kid picture on here. It's a very rare, beautiful plant that's found here in North Dakota. This is a collection that I brought and I have over there behind Scott's. You can look at it, but don't touch it because it's very difficult to make these collections a lot of time and effort. If you look at all these creatures here, they are all associated with this. This plant. So if something were to happen to this plant or some of these pollinators, you break a cycle and the others would soon cease to exist. You got your sinks moss up on the top right, some of your weevils on the left feet on the plant. They all are hooked into this plant in some way or another. And so I find that to be quite interesting and how delicate things are. Here are some, people always are, what's the difference between honey bees and bumble bees? Well, bumble bees are bigger, but that doesn't help. You take a look at this. We have some worker bees up there in the top, honey bees and in the bottom, just some regular bumble bees. And I have those also here. It looks like my time is about up. Here's a picture of butterflies in North Dakota. The actual butterflies gardening in North Dakota. This is a publication that you can only get online now. So if you want it, you need to print it off yourself. And wonderful publication and beautiful pictures goes through a number of different flowers for attracting pollinators. So it's like, well, I wish you had said something about that. If you pull this slide up, you'll have a ton of different flowers that attract beautiful butterflies and you can read on that. So it looks like I got a few minutes. If anyone has any questions or some of you probably are still awake, you want to get your shirt asked me. And what can we do in our gardens to help the bees? How can I bring bees just to have a diversity of flowers? Or what else can I do? I would say if you did a diversity of flowers. And also if you could get back on spraying down some flowers. Some of these things that, well, I really don't want any type of insect around and I spray my yard and I kill everything.  You want to keep that in mind. Maybe even time of day, if you were to spray. If you spray at night and people think there might be something wrong with you or maybe you get different neighbors or something. But a lot of places that are conscientious will try to spray some of their things at night when the bees are inside. And so that's something to think about too. Because then you won't get the chemical directly onto the bee just really about the residual. Yeah, just the residual is not right on the bee. Correct. So why do beekeepers put their hive so close to roadways? They're heavy. I don't know. You can't really... If you're like me, I'm out of shape. You know, maybe 100 pounds of box when they're full. So you see me carrying three or four and all. Maybe half one. And they're heavy. And also so they drive them out there and if they're closer to the road, then it's a lot easier. That's why I do it. You know, the night time way in the back you have to drive through holes and things to get out there. That's right. To compromise. How about the butterfly service pollinators of tree fruits or vegetables? Butterfly service pollinators also. For example, the sphinx moth on there. You run about fruits. You find them everywhere on grape vines and other vines. Also you'll find those in different types of flowers. They don't necessarily just pollinate one type. I know certain species do. But as far as exactly which one only pollinates, for example, apples, I don't know. How about, do you know if cities or communities in our state have laws or regulations about having a bee hive in town? Even if you are allowed to have a bee hive in town, I would suggest not to. People have been sued for that. And many times it wasn't even their bees or even a bee that they've lost. And so I would not recommend it even if your town said, yeah, we're going to give you free bees and put them out there. I would try to make a friend out in the country somewhere and do that versus having them in town. Unless you like a lot of headache, then have them in town, yeah. But what if a colony of bees moves into the ground by my home? Is there a way to encourage them to move on? Collin of bees, yeah. To have them move on versus to just kill them all. Killing them is pretty easy to kill them. But as far as having them move on, you can make it a little miserable. Maybe turn the water hose on a little more, make it nice and muddy. Just make their environment somewhat miserable. I don't know. I don't really know how to do that. Maybe walk through there and see what happens to you. No, I don't know. Let's talk about, we get a lot of these questions in the fall and the confusion about bees versus wasps. And people think there are bees that are attacking them or bees are nesting in the ground where it's actually germinial jackets, for example. Can you talk about that? Yeah. A lot of times people will think it's a bee and it really is a wasp or something else. But these are somewhat docile. I've had these before, obviously. And then sometimes if it's a gentle hive, not worn gloves, put your hand on there, they'll crawl on you. Then other times they'll sting you.  A honeybee, for example, can sting you once.  Or a wasp, they're not going to just go away. They'll just keep coming. And so wasps, you can, you know, wasps also, their populations are more intense in the fall. And then that's when we get these bees, so-called bee questions. You get all these bee-like pests coming after us in fall, looking for food. And these are actually wasps that are causing aggression. And there are ways to control wasps in the ground. They're like, just use the insecticide that we don't want to use to protect the bees. We just use them because that's the wasp weakness, like carburetor 7, just sprinkle some of that dust in a wasp nest at night. And that's a good way to control wasps. I'd have somebody else sprinkle it. I wouldn't do it myself. I'd have somebody else do it. They're tough. And then there's traps for them too, but trapping them is kind of, that's just kind of fun because there'll be thousands and you won't even make a dent. Pray for frosts and then it'll all stop and start up again. It's fun that people recognize that bees are a positive. Bees are docile. We need bees and we should not confuse them with those fall wasp problems. It's true. How about bumblebees too? You can get right up to a bumblebee. And as long as you don't, oh, that's really nice. They'll leave you alone. They don't care. They just don't care about you. But if you actually touch them, they care a little bit. They call it sitting mosquito spraying. Is that harm bees? We're going to know what they're using. The mosquito spraying, though, I'm actually kind of for that. I'm not a big fan of West Nile virus. And many times, in fact, when they spray, in almost all cases, I've ever seen it that night, there's also other things you can do too, like mosquito dunks, the bacillus, thern genesis to kill the mosquitoes. You throw a little chunk in the pond and it just takes care of it. The thing I read, it's supposed to be safe for everything they drink except for the little larvae or mosquitoes. I like BT a lot better than a lot of the things. But if I had a choice, I would say I'd rather have no mosquitoes and a few dead bees than both. The BT applications that they use to kill the larva are mosquitoes. That's a bee-friendly product. The bacillus thern genesis is a bee-friendly product. One of your nurses will carry that. They'll say, can a bee in small tea? Well, you know, just follow the directions. That's a whole other topic we could have as far as city-wide mosquito spraying and what is the true efficacy of that, which is actually very, very limited. What do you think about a metacloprid? Have you heard about that controversy? A metacloprid, the common soil drench that we're using more and more in our home landscapes and some of the risks that's affecting our honey bees. Have you heard about that at all? I haven't heard about it. Have you talked about this? No. A metacloprid, I'll talk about for just a few seconds here just because there's a question on it. A metacloprid is a very common soil drench now that we use to get a systemic action to kill pests, the boars inside of trees, for example. And a metacloprid is very powerful for many types of insect pests on several different types of crops. But there is data now that's a general concern about a metacloprid and these other neonicotinoids, or new nicotine products that are affecting our bee populations. Bees get exposed to these systemic chemicals when they work the flowers and the bees, it reduces their foraging activity. There's also evidence that they may confuse the bees that can't find their way back home. So as a general rule, Todd, would you say that you should only use insecticides when absolutely necessary from a bee-friendly perspective and try to talk? I think you can easily overdo it. For example, you see one insect out there, it's on your garage and you quick spray everything and it's dead, and you could have just taken a fly swatter and squashed it and been done. I think there's a lot of overkill with the pesticides, sure. I mean, there's time and place for them, and yeah, they're important in some cases, but if you don't have the problem, why treat for it? If there's nobody around that even has this type of whatever insect it would be or whatever concern it is, why treat for it if it doesn't make sense. If you have the problem and you follow the directions and take care of it, fine, but you don't need to do.  You don't have to do the rest of the yard, you know. We just have a couple of questions. Do you know about what the life expectancy of a bee is? It depends on who you talk to and also the queen, like a honeybee, I know more about those, I think, anyways, than the native bees that, you know, the queen bee. I've heard up to five years, but realistically, maybe a little bit less worker bees, a lot less, drones only over the summer, which are the male bees. That's pretty much in a nutshell. It's not exact. It's not. As far as, like, your wasp and such, my understanding is that there's, you know what, 80,000 whatever flying around. You get a good hard frost. The queen is the really intelligent one. She burrows it and hides until spring. Everything else dies, and she starts over. One produces thousands. As far as lifespan, theirs is one season, except for the queen can survive longer. As far as how long? I don't know. You know what that would-and-be nest that you showed? All those leaf-cutter bees? They were leaf-cutter bees. Correct. Yeah, very good eye. Yeah, very good. They're alfalfa leaf-cutter bees. Okay, and... They're a form of creature, too. Sometimes you'll get different types of leaf-cutter bees on your roses. They'll make a little C-shape on there or a half moon, and you quick want to spray for it.  It doesn't really harm the rose, but a lot of times people will spray for that.  It was unnecessary, so... The queen in that box that you had a... You had a... I don't know. I don't know. That wasn't mine. That was Russ's box, so... You just put up the box and the bees find it, or do you have to... Yeah, if they... You know, we talked to them about it. He said to take, and it's brand new wood, take a propane torch and scorch the outside of it just a little bit, and kind of... They like that if you burn it a little bit, and they're more attracted to it than not. Something to think about. Yeah, it's fun to burn stuff.  If you're allergic to a honeybee, you're allergic to all bees. I'd probably say not. The venom is, in my understanding, different with the different bees. When you get stung by a honeybee, it's almost like a heart-like muscle that pumps the poison into your system, and if you don't get that stinger and poison sac out, it'll pump that right into you. People say, oh, I'll just get it, and they grab it, and they squish it, and they basically pump it in faster. They squish the sac and pull it out. You use like a credit card, or a spoon, or a dull knife, or have somebody help you and just scrape it and flick it out versus grabbing it and squishing it in. Not as good. So as far as if the bends are all the same, my understanding is that they're not all the same. You have 128 different species. If they're all the same, that'd be unbelievable. I imagine they're probably all somewhat different as far as chemical. I don't know what. It won't take any chances. How about, I think, do wasps and hornets, are they pollinators? Yeah, I've heard that they can, yeah, do some pollinating. They're mainly a predator, though. They like to, well, for example, one life cycle that you might find with them is they'll find a spider, inject it and knock them out, basically, and they'll lay eggs inside of it. The eggs will hatch out inside of it.  Another one is they'll, once in a while, if you watch, if you just sit and watch and don't move, you'll see a little tiny wasp dragging a huge spider back into its little hole, and they'll drag it back in there, and they'll basically put in a coma, lay eggs around it, and they'll larvae hatch out, and they eat the spider alive, and then they start up again. So, they're a very interesting thing. They don't like, oh, let's have some honey from these guys. No, you don't get honey from them. They're more of a predator type of a creature.  I almost guarantee there's no bees there. Bees don't like hamburgers. I don't know if they do, but I'd rather have some honey. Okay, that's it for our questions on bees, and before we call it quits for tonight, we can just open it up for a couple minutes here. Does anybody have any questions that weren't addressed? In any of our sessions, we can, Todd's a jack of all trades. He can help us answer any questions. If anybody has a last question that they want to ask? What's the general acreage of Absoraka? Absoraka, general acreage. Tell me if an 80 acres comes to mind, but I really don't know. I don't know. 50 acres. Is it 60? Yeah. The average is 37 acres, and the remaining acreage is 26 acres. The question with the size of Absoraka is over 60 acres. Any other questions out there? Todd, did you have a...  It's almost as if you have to go more than once, and what I do is I kind of focus on maybe evergreens, or I'll focus on birch or whatever, and I find that enjoyable. You can try to go through it all, but it's almost like running. There's just so much out there, and so I would say that definitely worth a person's time more than once to go out there. And about the honeybees, are the introduced species out competing or native ones? Introduced species, you mean the honeybees? They've been around for a long time, over 100 years. I really don't know how long they've actually been here. I wouldn't say that they're out competing. No, I wouldn't think so at all. I want to go with honeybees. In a nutshell, what would you recommend? I want to have some more native bees in my landscape, Todd. What should I do? Well, more flowers. And if you only could plant one kind of flower, sunflowers seem to attract tons of bees if you go. Well, diversity, right? But if you could only do one, just do a sunflower. No, do a diversity, but if you have a chance and you get some really big creatures, a sunflower, a nice big yellow head, walk up to it and look, you'll probably find 10 or more different species of bees on there. And they're all getting along. Sometimes they'll push against each other to get the best whatever, but yeah, and everyone will have different, well, they won't all have different, but there'll be so many in a sunflower field you'll just be amazed. So if you have a good camera, that'd be good.  The honey bees are kind of lazy compared to the, like the bumble bees, they start later in the day, they don't like it when it's raining, they stay inside, so they just, there's a lot of jokes I could say, but we're being taped, so they're not. Because I usually put myself in trouble as far as what kind of worker I am. So milk leads a good one, especially for the monarchs. And that's another fascinating topic all together, just life cycle of a monarch. Wow. And then it's like, well, it's a weed, what's true? I don't really want to do it. I don't really clip off the pods.  I'm going to plant a lot of different flowers, because they all have different bloom times. I always want a source of pollen for my bees. I want to minimize the use of insecticides, because insecticides are bee killers, right, in general. And especially stay away from any persistent insecticides. Maybe you put up a BNF box, it wouldn't hurt.  Okay, last chance for any questions before we shut it down for tonight? Somebody want, Tom's home phone number? I have that. No, I don't. No, you don't want that. Oh.


At one time I was a member of the Texas Transportation Museum also, but we had some differencing of opinions as to how things should be pursued and I decided that it wasn't in my best interest to just stay with them. I have some photographs that are with the museum, the San Antonio River Heritage Museum, as acquired from the Institute of Texan Cultures and we have paid for those so that we can use them in events such as this. So anyway, these are some of the old depots that were in San Antonio during the time of the Hatties Street Bridge being built and also the explosion on March 18th in 2012, or not 2012, hey, you are back. 1912. This is Sunset Station with engine number 85 next to it. Getting to the boiler explosion, here's the Elmendorf Depot, which the city of Elmendorf sold to someone. They don't know who it was, they don't have the invoice, and so they have no record as to where it went. Here are some of the photographs, and I'm going to pass this around so that you can look at it, of the boiler explosion itself. What I'm going to do, I've got three different accounts of that explosion. One by F.A. Schmidt, which Mr. John King and I were discussing earlier, or kite, sorry. We're discussing earlier that his father may have been a contributor to Mr. Schmidt in writing this document. It's a very interesting read, but I'm going to also take the time to read what the Texas State Library and Archives Commission has on their website. The Great Southwest Strike was not the last incident in Texas that showcased the dangerous working conditions and labor unrest in the railroad industry. The caption of this photo reads, view of the wreckage caused by what was supposed to have been the explosion of the boiler of a passenger locomotive in the terminal yards of the Southern Pacific Railroad in San Antonio, March 18th, which killed 26 men outright and seriously injured many others. Most of the men killed were strikebreakers employed by the shops of the company situated closed to where the explosion took place. Railroad work was extremely dangerous. Nationally between 1890 and 1917, a staggering 72,000 men or employees were killed and over 2 million injuries were on the railroad tracks themselves. An additional 158,000 were killed in repair shops and roundhouses, just like the explosion in San Antonio. The total casualties from this period are more than combined the casualties of every war fought by the United States. Steam boilers were a particular hazard. Since the beginning of the steam area, there have been literally thousands of explosions. It was an everyday occurrence then. Some of those horrific loss of life. Back in 1865, the steamship Sultrana exploded with a loss of 1,238 lives. Most of them Union POWs just released from Southern prisons, so dating back to the Civil War. In 1905, the naval gunship Bennington exploded killing 62 sailors and an explosion at the Brockton Shoe Factory in Massachusetts killed 58 and leveled the factory. Explosions of railroad steam boilers took place on a regular basis. On the morning of March 18, 1912, dozens of men at the Southern Pacific yard in San Antonio were working around an engine of the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio railroad. These men were firing up the engine to test it and ready for the train for service. One of the interesting things about this is that that engine had just been wrecked in Seguin back in December of 1911. So they had taken the locomotive, brought it from Seguin to San Antonio to rebuild it. The railroad was very good at taking scrap materials or damaged locomotives or rail equipment and rebuilding it for future service. And the reason why is because the materials that they used were expensive. You know, we think of a pound of steel not that expensive nowadays, but the thing is that in order to process that steel from the ore, the entire process, that adds up in dollars. Let's see here. At 8.55 am, the boiler exploded, sending the engine and many tons of railroad parts flying in every direction. The pressure wave and flying debris leveled the nearby railroad shops and ripped out into the neighborhood, snapping trees and smashing into homes. As the explosion spin itself scattered metal and human remains rained down for blocks in every direction.  The force of the explosion could be felt for miles. Just like what we had discussed earlier, 20 miles away it could be heard. Well, in one of these accounts, they talked about someone on the west side of downtown being able to feel the percussion wave. It was the worst railroad boiler explosion in U.S. history. Back at the train yard, survivors were trapped under fallen buildings and debris and in danger of being burned alive as fire spread through the wreckage. Remember, you've got a steam locomotive. It's got a fire in the fire box creating that steam from the water that's being pressurized in the boiler. San Antonio firefighters and police and military personnel and railroad workers frantically worked to free the survivors and fight the fire. Eerily, an engine damaged in the blast that was near 704 had its whistle bent open and screamed for two hours as the boiler pressure subsided enough to shut down the noise. The final toll, according to this document, 26 killed and about 50 injured and about 10 men unaccounted for and presumed dead. In the days that followed, speculation focused on the labor troubles at the yard. Six months earlier, boiler repairmen, copper fitters and other craftsmen, machinists, et cetera, who maintained the locomotives had gone on strike and had been replaced by strike breakers. Some of these strike breakers came from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Jersey, all from the northeastern parts of the country where steam was very, very popular and prevalent in its use. Most of these men were from out of town and knew to their jobs and many were working under assumed names. The assisted foreman at the yard was so sure of the trouble that he openly carried a pistol. Many people were convinced that the boiler had been sabotaged. From today's perspective, the sabotage theory seems unlikely and the probable cause of the explosion is thought to be a combination of human error and mechanical failure. I've read another account where, like Mr. Houston mentioned, the two pop-off valves, is what they call them, were in a locked position, meaning that they would not operate as they were required to. So naturally when that pressure builds up, something's got to give and it's the boiler. Another thing about how the railroad employees lived, like Gary said, that they lived in areas close to their work, a lot of the homes were paid for by the railroad for their employees to live in. And this was common throughout the nation. In fact, if you look at what Mr. Pullman did, he was a car builder who built a lot of the passenger cars that were used in American passenger trains across the country. He built an entire city up in Illinois where his cars were built and had all of his employees live in that community. He had a school for all those employees' children to go to school in and were educated in. And it was just a common practice for that type of living condition in those days. I'd just like to take a couple of minutes to let you know about the San Antonio Railroad Heritage Museum. We're kind of the new kids on the block. We've been around since 2006. We are a 501C3 organization now for profit charity. We are new enough on the block that we don't have a place to hang our hat and call home yet. We are working towards that goal. But one of the things that we, as Gary mentioned earlier, one of the major projects that we have is the maintenance and future restoration of the Southern Pacific locomotive number 794, which is currently at the beautiful sunset station. We go out there and work on mechanical parts of it. We've been inside the smoke box, which is the silver part of the locomotive in the very front of it. Looking at the tubes and flues that go through the boiler, where all the steam pressure would be, we have a professional steam locomotive rebuilder working with us. His name is Scott Lindsey. He runs a company called Steam Operations Corporation out of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. He has rebuilt 38 different steam locomotives since he started his own business and was brought up working in the Norfolk Southern Steam program. But anyway, if you'd like to, pardon the bun, get on board with us. We'll be grateful to have you as members of the museum. You can fill out a membership application off of our website at www.sahm.com. Thank you for your time, ladies and gentlemen. Enjoy your weekend.


So now you have moving, change of residence, moving in with your partner. Alright so let's take a look and see what's going on here Virgo. Are you moving, someone moving in with you, you moving in with someone else, buying or selling a home in January, renting, leasing, let's take a look here, okay. So there's the home card, four of one. Some of you are going to be moving in with a partner. What's the strongest message here, celebration. That's like homecoming. It's even an energy of like a housewarming party, that kind of thing. Somebody may be wanting to move in with you, you moving in with them. Let's take a look, okay. So you have the page of wants and yeah, the eight of wants. There's going to be some communication happening in January. This is all fire. Look at that.  There's someone, this great idea. Let's move in together real fast. Let's get married. Let's do it all. Hold on. I'm feeling January 12th, they just said. There might be a conversation. It's either moving in together or you, some of you might be moving home. I feel like it could be the end of this, maybe over the weekend, something starts happening or someone's either you're, maybe you're moving home or someone's moving home with you or is moving out and is moving or changing their residents. You'll hear about this over the weekend. It's going to happen pretty quick. This can be about travel as well. So there could be communication about traveling like a distance, like there's a distance of moving in, changing residents to like a long distance kind of thing as well. All right. Let me see. But yeah, for the most part, I feel like you're going to get some communication from someone in regards to moving in together. Okay. There's a magician. For some of you, this could be a Gemini that this involves, okay, but there's definitely like, oh, somebody's got plans. They're going to tell you their ideas, how things are going to get paid for, what's going to like how we're going to do this with bills and split things up. And yeah, it's going to go quick too, even with the eight of ones. This is an eight Cupid's arrows to me. So it could be a love thing as well. You could hear somebody's leaving to move in and they're getting married or they're getting into a long term relationship or they're moving in with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Right. Like it could be someone connected to you. Like it could be your kids. There's two pages there. However old they are. Okay, or it could be one or maybe your kids are going to move in together. You have college kids or something like that. Why is there? Yeah. The nine of sorts is why is this here? Oh, my God. Why is the nine of sorts here? Oh, OK. If someone's moving out Virgo that you have a connection with family wise, you might be a little anxious about it or sad, maybe just because you'll miss them. I'm not seeing a breakup here or anything like that.  I don't feel that at all. This could have something to do with family because we do have family cards here, the four and the 10. So there could be somebody moving in with a grandfather or an older male or a father figure. That kind of thing is playing out here as well. It's interesting. So I feel like over the weekend, there's going to be some talk, if not actual movement about this. And it may not even be you who's stressed. There could be if it's someone moving out that lives in your home, it could be them that's a little bit stressed or a little bit anxious about making the move. But I don't think it's like horrible. I think whenever there's a change, sometimes people just, you know, some people go with the flow easier than others, right? But for you, if you have somebody, if there's like you're moving in with someone, Virgo, nine of sorts, you might have your typical Virgo worries like, Oh, what if it doesn't work out? What if, you know, we struggle? You know, Oh, there's a sign that you might be just worried. What if it's not like, what if it's too expensive? It could be you and another person that you're with, maybe going and purchasing some real estate or house or like there's a little bit of anxiety there too. Okay. I don't think it's really a bad thing. I just feel like it's, you know, you worrying about the what ifs, you know, what if this makes our relationship harder? Or what if we take on too much, you know, or what if living together, you know, it doesn't work out and, you know, we're like actually like Virgo, stop, stop. Like if you're, if that's you, if you're that Virgo that's like in the what ifs, oh my gosh, like don't, don't because you're going to, you're going to, then it's not going to work out. Okay. Expect the best hope for the best. How does that thing go?  Is it hope for the best but expect the worst? I don't even know if that's, I don't even know if I like that. But anyway, yeah, there's some concern.  All right. So I feel like those are your worries. Honestly, I feel like things are going to work out. There's going to be actually more money, less expenses for you as a single. If you're single and, you know, if you're just paying the bills out by yourself or you might find a really great deal. You could be out looking and might feel like you're not going to find anything. It's going to happen. There will be a change of residence. So something is definitely showing up on the 12th of January. You might even just be like stressing if you have to move home, but I feel like it'll just be a temporary, like a stepping stone. You might not want to, but you might have to. But also, yeah, let's move on. Let's see what else is coming up here for you. Okay. There's the two ones. Wow. And the Wheel of Fortune. So the decision that you're about to make or that you're going to make about changing residents or moving or someone's living with you, it's in your favor. It's going to listen. It's going to work out. It's going to be okay. Right. I do see you kind of like, all right, I got to make this decision and the Wheel of Fortune is all about timing. Right. So I feel like Virgo, if you time it right when it feels right, don't, don't make a decision about moving in with someone, if it doesn't feel like not emotionally, but intuitively right to do it. The timing will come and then you'll be able to then you'll know what you need to do. All right. So it did say Gemini earlier. So now we have the first court card, Gemini Libra Aquarius. So it could, there could be a connection to an air sign regarding this situation. Okay. Romantic interest, family member, colleague, whatever it might be. Okay. If it's, if it's anybody else who's moving out, it's going to work out for them. It's a good thing. If it's, if it's, if it's a romantic partnership, moving in together, it looks like it's going to be fine. It's going to be okay. And if it's like, if you have like a roommate or something, if they're moving out, you'll be fine. If they're moving in, you'll be fine. Virgo, I just feel like everything's like a little bit of effort put in on both sides. If it's changing residents and downsizing or upgrading, it's going to be okay. Either way, something's going to come through. Right.  So I feel like that's a message, you know, don't worry, be happy. Don't worry, be happy. Yeah, it's going to be fine. You're going to be okay. Um, so I feel like for some of you, you're already like, maybe you're already married to this person and it could be moving the kids in. It could be just the two of you moving in together. Could be a relationship. It's going to be okay. There's Aquarius. So we're getting a lot of air. I'm picking up a lot of air energy. Could be buying some real estate together. Okay. Now you've got the king of cups, cancer, Scorpio Pisces here. So they could be attached to the situation as well. Let's see. Okay. Five of sorts. Ten of ones. Getting rid of all your, your burdens. Right. Okay. So listen, here's what I'm thinking. Um, this big move is going to change everything in your love life for the better. I don't know how it's connected, but everything in your, your love life for some reason is going to improve drastically because of some kind of moving or resonance change. Um, that kind of thing. Like I said, I'm not picking up a split here because the lovers is here. It's actually, it's going to get better. So your fears and worries just kind of feel to me like just your typical fears and worries. Virgo will like worry themselves to sleep. They'll worry themselves into like a rabbit hole. Um, because Virgo, it's mostly because Virgo will think of every single scenario, how something can turn out, how something will work, how something could go. Uh, Virgo is like a little strategist, you know, the problem is that sometimes you get so deep into your thought process that you miss the big picture, right? And then life comes down and just throws you for a loop and then you're kind of like humbled by that, right? Don't ever think it, you know, just get yourself in a, just look at the facts and the evidence if you're going to do any of this overthinking or trying to make a decision and then, you know, put a time limit on it, like set an alarm so you don't get lost in the thing, just kind of like, I just feel like the message here for you is to just go with the flow. I feel like everything's going to be okay and it's going to work out no matter what. Your love life is definitely going to improve and look, there you are, clean and pentacles or it's a connection with a Virgo Taurus Capricorn. Um, I don't feel like this is a new love. I'm going to have to say that as far as romance goes. I'm not picking up any new thing happening here. So this could already be, if you don't have a romantic partner, this may have to do with a family member friend or a work colleague roommate or something like that. Okay. Um, if it was a new partner coming in, um, and they want to move in with you and you just met, I would run like hell because that's creepy. You're like, no, I'm sorry. I don't even know you. Nope. This is where my door ends right here. You can't come in with your bags. F out of here. Unless you're that, if you're that, hey, listen, I'm not going to judge. You all do what you need to do, but I feel like if this is something that's been on the plate, on the table, um, I feel like things are going to be okay. I really do. Um, but I feel like for some of you, you got to get rid of this burden and just cut it out. You know what I mean? Like if you look at this, I'm seeing this person here.  They're like, Oh, what about this? What about this? And there goes like, get out, get out, get out. Getting ending the struggle of the burden and just let things flow, but be aware of where you're going, right?  Make sure your eyes are open so you're not going over the side of the waterfall, right? You can go with the flow, but you need to keep your, you need to keep your wits about you. Everything's going to work out. This is all going to be fine with this whole moving in the other, changing residence or, you know, whatever it is. Okay. I can tell you, like I said before, your whole, like your love life is going to improve because of this. You guys, thank you so much for watching my readings. If you'd like to get a personal reading, please feel free to click the link in the description box below to go ahead and follow that link and book your reading. Please remember to book, subscribe, like, do all the great things.


Pow, what's up everybody once again it's Bram and Sean and I have a very special episode for you guys today because I sat down with George Fockes of MyContractExplained.com where you can get your contract explained in simple basic terms if you're having struggles and troubles. Now, for this sit down we went into three contracts that a lot of artists come across because there's popular music services of AWOL, Amuse, and United Masters and there's seven interesting things that I pulled from our long sit down where you can get access to the whole thing in the description. But the seven things that I'll go through in this video, they're crazy, they're kind of crazy or interesting to say the least. So let's go ahead and get into it. Number one. So this is like material that they can collect from you. So like this is information that they have the right to collect from you. So they can digitize and encode the recordings and related materials to digital files including any related processes such as fingerprinting to make any necessary modifications to the recording. Fingerprints? Why exactly? I mean that just seems a little bit too serious. But let's get into something that's a little bit more serious. So they may make material changes to the agreement according to their own discretion. They will let you know via email or within their own service whether the agreement has changed but they do not always notify you in advance. In these cases if you didn't know the agreement changed simply by continuing to use their service you have now involuntarily accepted their changes officially. So that's another important point is that if they change the agreement and you don't know that they changed the agreement but you still keep using their services that counts as you accepting the new terms of agreement. I just love the fact that they said involuntarily officially. Right. No, I think actually I might add that. Well I mean that you said that. I like that because that's what actually, that's what's happening what is, is yeah. Essentially, yeah. Yeah. Involuntarily, officially, yeah. Now that clip spoke for itself and that contract that we were reading off of in that clip was the MUSE contract but pretty much all of them have some version of that. So that's something just to keep in mind at the very least because man I mean what's the point of signing a contract if the thing can change without you knowing. So let's keep going. Five. Company shall have the right to exploit the user content in any manner here under free from adverse claim and without any obligation to make any payment of any nature to any person or entity other than the amounts payable to you here under. So what this means is that essentially they figure out a way to exploit your user content in some way other than what is described in these conditions. They essentially don't owe you for that new exploitation that they've discovered. So for whatever way that they decide to kind of make a profit from your music, if it's not explicitly described in this agreement then they don't actually owe you anything from that. All right. So this is interesting for a few reasons. So let me break it down like this. Then I get it like anybody who's like yo man they can figure out how to make money with my music and I not get paid that's crazy. I know a lot of artists aren't going to like to hear something like that. But it does list quite a few scenarios and it's something that most people would see and say yo these are pretty much all the ways that I'm looking to make money anyway or I don't know of any scenarios what didn't get covered. But when you even think about it, MP3s didn't always exist. So we had times where it was tape cassettes, people were phasing out of tape cassettes and moving to CDs. MP3s weren't on people's mind so you might be getting CD revenue and tape cassette revenue and all the other things that come top of mind for revenue at that time that are available when MP3s come out. Eventually the company is saying yo we might find this new medium, this new route and start making money this way and you aren't necessarily able to get the benefit of that financially. That's a weird aspect and loophole in the contract. It seems pretty interesting to see something like that listed but it's not completely foreign in the music industry because there's contracts where you might say yo man we're in the United States. Why do y'all say in the entire universe? There's terminologies like that in some contracts where it's saying universe, not United States in another country or another country or the world, no the entire universe. They're factoring for all these aspects for a reason and that language is there for a reason when it comes to the rights that the company gets. But I move on, let's see what's next. That'd be a fair enough assessment. Yeah, pretty much, yeah so essentially that latter part of that comment and it's going to be more important. Once submitted for potential delivery to third party, user no longer has rights to that content or the right to grant other third parties any rights to that content. So basically the content that you give to the company to deliver to a potential third party as soon as it's actually submitted, the user doesn't have any rights to that piece of content that United submitted to a third party. Now again that's something that might rub artists the wrong way and I understand that perspective but on a business side of things, you don't want to be able to make a promise to one of your partners, let's say the NBA, NFL, Coca-Cola, whoever saying that you have the rights to use this and pitch this to them well all of a sudden you might be in the background as an artist pitching this to a competitor. So once they start to pitch things, they withhold rights like there's an understandable side from a business perspective because that just helps them stay understanding with whoever their partners are. That's just one aspect of it and I should mention that all of these things should be looked at from multiple perspectives when you read contracts. One you want to read it on the most literal level that you might interpret it at but two you want to get as cynical as possible and most lawyers are going to get cynical with it because although some things might not be likely, although some things might not be the intent of the company or whoever you're doing a contract with, it's kind of in the best interest to be cynical because it still might happen and a lawyer is all about like hey let's create insurance. So this particular situation right here, I understand again from a business perspective where look that's kind of protecting themselves and how they deal with artists but the artist again, of course you can have plenty of reasons where you might be salty in losing your rights. That's just what comes with it though. Are you going to pitch? Do you want to put in serious work to make brand deals happen and things like that? It's your own. Yeah, you retain all your ownership but AWOL reserves the right to decide not to distribute specific music if they don't want to or if they deem it inappropriate or unsatisfactory. These are vacant rooms so again these could mean anything and they could basically take your song and if they deem for whatever reason that you shouldn't be credited for whatever reason they can choose not to credit you for one of your best work. Alright so the only thing I want to focus on from that particular clip is language like inappropriate, unsatisfactory, reasonable. What do they mean? You don't really know. It's objective language. So a lot of times you want to watch out for stuff like that in your contracts because it allows people to do things where you can't necessarily move against them because it's up for interpretation and likely the people who have more power, better lawyers could win in those scenarios against you because they know how to twist and turn all the knobs that happen when it comes to legalese. So point is if somebody intends for something but happen to use subjective language, figure out what they mean by it, make it more specific to what is actually supposed to be saying versus leaving it ambiguous or hey maybe you're on the side where that ambiguous language benefits from you so you don't want to do it whatever right but just understand that subjective language could lead to positives and negatives. So we got two more of these seven crazy, slash weird things that you should be aware of in these particular contracts. Here's another one. So I marked this part later in this paragraph. They give us the statement additionally, user acknowledges and agrees that company receives many submissions, some of which may be similar or may be similar to content being independently developed by company and company is free to work with artists with similar submissions or proceed with developing its own content without any obligation to user. So I thought that this was an interesting section to include because if you think about what they're saying, essentially what they're saying is that basically in the event that they consider or listen to your music but choose not to go with you as an artist and then two weeks later you find out that United created their own artist that sounds exactly like you, looks like you, is your brand basically but it's just a different name or a different artist then that's completely fine and they're allowed to do that. You can't really, you can't really sue them for that or rather they make you legally acknowledge that and agree with the fact that the company receives many submissions some of which may be similar. So in the off chance that you see an artist signed with United right after you and you notice that this artist literally is your exact brand and you think some dirty dirty plays might have happened in the background, right here it's legally telling you that you've already acknowledged that this might happen and you have nevertheless agreed to this agreement so that's a little bit of a sketchy move. Alright I already know a lot of people are going to hear basically the interpretation that George had right and I get it right that doesn't sound too cool from an artist standpoint but from a business standpoint I can completely get it like these types of distribution services or just companies that are dealing with a lot of artists this is particularly the United Masters contract and all these contracts are completely public by the way like I wouldn't understand any other way to actually deal with something like that actually because you're dealing with a lot of artists on your distribution service you don't even necessarily know who all of them are probably because there's a lot of artists that are coming in you're not day-to-day working with each one individually so if some of them happen to be similar you don't want to be liable to have to deal with that right maybe they go against each other if they have something going on but that has nothing to do with you you're not taking part in that necessarily part of business of course the language does allow you to do something intentional but just generally speaking that's something that could just be there for the crazies who are looking to come at a big company because they have money and they see other things that are varying on the platform so many artists have similar music they just do so I don't know on that one but last but not least and before I get into this last one which is extremely important for you guys to just just see and think about that most people do not consider I just want to make sure I thank George Fockes for doing this if you want to get a contract explained to you in simple language get understanding of loopholes and things involved go over there to my contract explain but without further ado here's the last clip it's an important one y'all for this specific agreement any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with these terms of service or the breach termination or invalidity thereof shall be finally settled by Swedish courts with the Stockholm district court as the first instance unless otherwise provided by mandatory law the thing about this is obviously alright this is Swedish court a wall is what is it London my British court or something who's the either United or a wall was British court is American is it's American okay okay so yeah a wall but we'll and we'll get into that when we talk about the a wall one but I'm saying that just because there's different courts and different laws and I think we assume because everything is global we have access to these things in different places and it feels native you don't you're not thinking oh I'm doing dealing with a company from X but if something goes down that's when it gets real where you have to actually deal with it in that place that that company has chosen right to where things matter and where they'll litigate things because if you even if you look at a situation like ASAP Rocky he got arrested in Sweden over the summer right the way a lot of things were getting handled we're confusing for a lot of people looking from an American lens like okay this isn't going how we thought it should go obviously of course there were some other related things where you might be getting information out of context but the point is understanding that these different courts do have different laws and different norms right so whatever seems to be right exactly from what you're used to might not be the right way they have a different right way so some of that could determine how you choose to deal with the company will it hope to deal with the court in these situations no but just understand that that's where it could go