Hi everyone, Joe for jasphyscasebrakes.com coming at you with our last filler break To unlock that tri-star NT quick hitter baseball mixer first the break. This is break number 16 Then a different dice roll will do the giveaway very big. Thanks to everyone here for making this happen so quickly. Thank you All the teams are in let's do it roll it randomize it three and a four seven times for names and teams one two three Four and seventh and final time There's seven three and a four seven times for the teams one two Three and seven in final time. All right. Here's the first half of the list right over here There's the second half of the list right here and let's print this out We'll do the break. We're gonna select a mini box right here, too That's the mixer. That's the quick hitter. That's gonna be in a separate video If you're looking for that use that die will go one two three for box a four five six for box B And it's three one two three box a this will will save for the next iteration of that mixer Break three. This is for break two mixer two again, here's the final printout hot off the presses one hit in each of these And each of these mini boxes should be on the bottom right here first one is will the thrill 41 out of 50 And we've got a will middle Brooks and we've got a recollection collection Canvas collection that is reproduction for vertical mentee Behind will middle Brooks is an autograph. Yes. It's Cecil fielder 79 out of 199. That's pretty cool. That's for the Tigers That's for Bennett and the Tigers nice All right Now let's flip back over here. Let's see who's gonna win those spots Let's grab everybody's names again You dice roll new list Let's roll it randomize it One and a four five times top ten after five Good luck one two three four and a one fifth and final time All right after five we can already see that will is in spot 10 so you're in will but from 11 down to 30 Thanks everybody sad times, but I appreciate you giving that give this a shot Top 10 are happy though will's already happy. He's in with at least one spot Bennett's got a spot. So does Peter Bennett Allen Bennett Stephen Kay will Allen and Bennett Congrats to the top 10 right here. You're in that the next mixer. We'll see you for that. Jasper's case breaks calm


Okay, I'm ready to begin. The topic that I've been assigned for this period, let me read it off to you. It is an Austrian critique of mainstream economics. So I'm gonna be talking about an Austrian critique of mainstream economists. I would say if we had a Venn diagram and here is Austrian economics and here is called the mainstream or the neoclassical economists, that there is an overlap. We Austrians have certain views that are unique to us. They have certain views that are unique to them. And then there's this overlap in between the two. And I'll be mainly speaking of this part where we disagree with them, but let me first say that there are areas of agreement. For example, most economists, whether Austrian or mainstream, favor free trade. Most economists, whether mainstream or Austrian, I think that the minimum wage law will create unemployment for unskilled workers. I think that run control will take resources away from residential rental units and make it worse for tenants. So there is an overlap, a great overlap. There's even an overlap in terms of econometrics. Some people, radical Austrians, not me, I'm a moderate, that's why they call me Walter Moderate Block. And Jeff Herbiner on this one is an extremist. He says that there's no use in Austrian economics for statistics or econometrics. And in my view, if what you're interested in is an empirical issue, well then why not? For example, the elasticity of shoes. We know that there's a downward sloping demand curve for shoes. And if we raise the price of shoes by 10%, we know that fewer shoes will be purchased. But how many fewer? 1%, 2%, 20%, what? What's the elasticity of the demand curve for shoes?  We're happy to go along with the mainstream people and say, well, if you wanna find that out, the way to do it is through econometrics or statistics or mathematical economics, there's nothing wrong with that. So we're not against math, per se, period. But we do have great reservations about it because a lot of math and economics, it assumes a smooth curve. Because if you want to get, I don't know, a slope of a curve, you can only, whatever it is, say price and quantity and that's say some sort of demand curve, and you wanna pick the slope of it, you have to take the slope. And you can only get a slope if the curve is continuous. And if you wanna differentiate or integrate a curve, it has to be a continuous curve. But we Austrians believe that there is no smooth curves out there that depict reality because economics discusses human action and human action is discreet. So you don't get curves like that, you get some sort of jagged lines in that regard. And therefore, we have great suspicion of it. For example, let me give you an example of that. Here is an average cost curve and average cost curve, quantity, price, and the mainstream think that the best place to be is at the bottom of the average cost curve. And if you have a downward sloping demand curve, which means you're not in perfect competition, well then the demand curve has gotta be tangent to the average cost curve at an inefficient point. Everyone following us? But Murray Rothbard in his man economy in the States says look, this whole thing depends upon smooth curves and what you're doing is you're letting the mathematical tail wag the economics dog whereas it should be the opposite. The economics is more important, the math is just a handmaiden of the economics for economists. For mathematicians, fine, but the math, you know, math uberallus for mathematicians, but not for us. So what Murray does is he draws the curve like this and then he says, look, here's an average cost curve, there's quantity, there's price and we can be at the bottom of the average cost curve even with a downward sloping demand curve. And the whole reason that you're not is because of a smooth curve assumption. So that's sort of completely backwards. So that would be just one example of math and economics where we Austrians disagree with the mainstream people. Those of you who are going to graduate school in economics, especially in the US, not so much in Europe where they're more Austrian, but in the US it's mainly math. I had some graduate student or a student who graduated from Loyola went off to graduate school and took one look at the micro text and it was all math and she didn't wanna do math for five years so she quit. I wonder about that, but that's a whole other story. Okay, so that's one area where we disagree and here I would say that getting back to this diagram, I'm gonna be going over many, many areas where the Austrians disagree with the mainstream and I'm going to take the Austrian point of view, I'm an Austrian economist and I'll be taking the Austrian point against the mainstream. Okay, I've got about 15 things like this on my list, I don't know how far I'll get through but I'll just keep pushing until we come to the end of the period. Okay, another one is this thing called the synthetic a priori. What's the synthetic a priori? A synthetic a priori statement is a statement that's apodically necessarily true and yet has something to do with the real world and this is one of the sticking points for me when I first was introduced to Austrian economics, I was introduced to it by Murray Rockboard. Just when I was finishing up my PhD at Columbia which was a logical positivist kind of a place, a mainstream place if ever there was one, my main mentor was Gary Becker, Nobel Prize winner and I was a logical positivist and I couldn't understand how that could possibly be, it seemed like magical, it seemed cultish, it seemed weird, it seemed ridiculous that there were actual statements that have to do with the real world and yet we know them absolutely for sure and we don't have to test them, we know them just by the logic of them. The way the mainstream sees this is there are two kinds of things and the two shall never meet. One is analytic or tuitology or a priori. Two plus two is four, the Pythagorean theorem, all bachelors are unmarried, men, things like that which are necessarily true but they don't impact the world. They're more how we use language, that sort of a thing and on the other hand there are empirical statements that do impact the world and do describe the world and do explain the world and help us understand the world. For example it's sunny outside or it's nice and cool in here but it's very hot outside or there are about 50 people in the room. These are empirical statements which are not necessarily true, you have to test them. Go out and look and see if they're right and they have to be falsifiable. We have to know what it would mean for them not to be true and never the twain shall meet so that there are analytic statements that are necessarily true that don't impact the world and then there are empirical statements, aposteriori statements that do impact the world, that do describe the world, that help us understand and explain the world but we have to test them and where do you get a statement that has both? Well we Austrians, not me originally but Murray Rothbard, Hans Hoppe, other Austrians have come up with a series of them. For example, if I trade you this pen for my watch it must mean that I value the pen more than the watch at least in anticipations right now and it must mean that you value the pen more than the watch more than the pen. Necessarily true. Why else would you do the trade? Now you might think that if you make the trade I'll give you an A in the course. Who knows? Or you might think if you make the trade I'll be your best friend. I don't know why you're doing it. All I know is there's something about this watch you like more than pen views, you're giving up the pen to get the watch and there's something about this pen that I like more than the watch otherwise I wouldn't give it up. This is necessarily true. I got into a big debate with, what was his name from George Mason, the guy that wrote about the irrationality of democracy, Brian Kaplan, got into a big debate on this and he wouldn't even concede this, that this is necessarily true. He kept coming up, well maybe people are lying or something like that. It's hard to deal with these people. I used to be one so I can sort of understand but they're fixed, it can't be.  They think it's cultish, it's religious and they dismiss us as religious cultists. Okay, so one is the gain from trade, the opposite ranking of two goods, there's a tendency for profits to be zero. A tendency, whenever you say there's a tendency you can't falsify it. I say there's a tendency for profits to fall to zero and right now profits aren't zero, some are positive, some are negative, some are zero. Well, that doesn't refute the fact that there's a tendency and yet we know there's a tendency. And there's also a tendency for profits in all industries to be the same, the same zero but at least the same because if they're high here and low here the resources will flow out of here and into here pushing down the profits here and pushing up the profits there until you get some sort of equilibration. There's a tendency for markets to equilibrate, we never reach equilibrium or the evenly rotating economy but there's a tendency for it. Others are law of margin utility, whenever the supply of good increases by one unit provided each unit is regarded of equal serviceability by a person the value attached to the unit must decrease, diminishing margin utility. Another one is the Ricardian law of association comparative advantage, whenever minimum wage laws are enforced that require wages to be higher than existing market wages involuntary unemployment will result whenever the quantity of money is increased while the demand for money is held is unchanged the purchasing power of money will fall. So Austrian economics is littered with synthetic a priori statements. Statements that are necessarily true and yet impact on the real world. The Austrian business cycle theory is a synthetic a priori statement, it's a much bigger statement, it takes a lot of premises to get it out and I'll talk a little bit about it, but that's another one. So these are a priori unfalsifiable and people like Krugman will say, well if it's unfalsifiable it's magic. So this is a crucial distinction between the two. Okay, another one is this thing about testability.  And what I was trying to do is here was my rent control variable and what I said is that the more rent control allows you the housing would be. Holding constant, what else do I have to hold constant? Well wealth, I have to hold constant. Anything else that might impact the quality of housing such as weather, you know if it's very bad, whether you'll have lousier housing than otherwise. And here was say good housing and what I expected was that this thing would be negative namely there'd be a negative relationship between more rent control and less housing quality. Holding everything else constant. That was my dissertation, roughly. There was a lot more but that was one of the points. And most of the time I got the right sign and most of the time thank God it was statistically significant at the five or even the one or two percent level sometimes at the 10 percent level but every once in a while I get the wrong sign. Don't ask, I got the wrong sign. And every once in a while the wrong sign was statistically significant. So how did Gary Becker react to this? Well if he were a neoclassical what he should have said was well you know maybe rent control doesn't work the way we think it does. You know I mean rent control is there's the supply, there's the demand, there's quantity, there's price, you put a maximum price on housing, demand is greater than supply, there's a shortage. The usual rent control story that you get in Economics 101. Becker didn't say that. He was too polite to say but this really what he meant to say, he meant to say block you more on, go out and do it again until you get it right. So what was testing what? Was my econometrics testing the supply and demand and rent control of which we all know and the Austrians and the neoclassists agree on that? No, it was the other way around. The theory was testing my econometrics. A very similar thing happened with rent control, sorry, with the minimum wage. Now we all know that the minimum wage is a very similar sort of thing only now we have wage and here we have the quantity of labor and if you put a minimum wage above equilibrium you're gonna have a surplus namely unemployment. So Cardin Kruger come out with this cockamani thing and there was some New Jersey and Pennsylvania, one of them raised the minimum wage and then Cardin Kruger tried to see if there was a difference in the unemployment rate for unskilled workers between the two because of this increase in the minimum wage and this is what Krugman relies on, this is what Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton relies on, Bernie Sanders, everybody loves Card Krugman on the left. So again, if Gary Becker and Newmark and other of these mainstream people were really logical positives, if they were really neoclassical economists, you see my thesis is if you scratch a good economist you're gonna find an Austrian whether they admit that they're Austrians or not. So what they should have said is well maybe economic law works differently in New Jersey. I mean it's pronounced New Jersey so who knows what's going on in New Jersey. Maybe the minimum wage story only works 95% of the time or 98% of the time.  What they did is first of all a replicatability. They called up the same people that Carden Kruger called up to get the information and they couldn't replicate it. So that's one problem.  The idea was that this is wrong and we're gonna get that Carden Kruger people but they shouldn't have done that. Only Austrians should do that. So I now am awarding these people honorary Austrian degrees. They're not gonna accept it but I'm gonna award them whether they like it or not I'm gonna pin the tail on the donkey. I'm gonna pin Austrianism on a lot of these mainstream people that are good economists even though they don't think they're Austrians. By the way, the reason we call it Austrian economics has got nothing to do with the economics of Austria. It's because the people who started it came from Austria, Mises, Bamba Vert, Manger, Hayek, Roland Austria. It's the same with Chicago economics. It's got nothing to do with the economics of the city of Chicago. It's rather that Friedman and Becker and Stigler just happened to be at the University of Chicago and had a unique look at economics. Okay, so we've now had two or three of the 15 or so elements and let me go on to another one. What else have I got? Let's talk about entrepreneurship. For Austrians, entrepreneurship is very important. Israel Kersner wrote a book, Competition and Entrepreneurship. Peter Klein, one of our fellow teachers here is a expert in entrepreneurship and specializes in it and emphasizes the importance of entrepreneurship was if you look at any mainstream textbook, what you're gonna find is land, labor and capital. And if you're lucky in the index, the word entrepreneurship will be there and it'll be one page. And if you're not lucky, they just ignored. I might be exaggerating a little bit, but not much. Whereas if there was an Austrian textbook and there are a few, David Gordon wrote one and there were a few others. Entrepreneurship is, I don't say the only thing, there are other, land, labor and capital are also important, but entrepreneurship is very, very important. The entrepreneur is the one who sees an opportunity and sets up a business. You know, and there is a debate between Murray Rothbard and Israel Kersner on this. Israel Kersner has this thing called a pure entrepreneur who has no capital whatsoever, whereas Murray insists that it's a capitalist entrepreneur and I'm on Murray Rothbard's side of this particular debate.  And if you borrow money from someone else, well, you had collateral with which to borrow it in the first place and you had some labor to go to the bank and ask for money. So I don't think that there's any free-floating, pure entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurship is very important, whereas for the mainstream, it's not at all important. Another is the difference between ordinal and cardinal utility. Ordinal cardinal utility is ordering. I like apples better than bananas and bananas better than carrots. That is legitimate and fine and that is a fine distinction and we Austrians believe in ordinal economics. We support it, it's a rational thing. It helps shed light on economic issues, fine. What is cardinal utility? Cardinal is counting. Udils.  Therefore, the carrot is three times as much utility as the apple. And the banana is twice as much as the apple and the carrot is 150% more enjoyment than this is nonsense. This is nonsense on a stick.  What am I missing here? Nonsense on something. I'm not sure what, steroids maybe. Okay.  Well, the importance of it is antitrust. Let me give you a little antitrust stuff which the mainstream loves and Austrians reject entirely, whereas the Chicago school is supposedly a free enterprise school and they have a sort of a moderate position. Let me get into that. So first I'm gonna draw the usual complicated curve. Here's the average cost curve. There's the marginal cost curve, hitting the average cost curve at the bottom point. You always have to be at the bottom point. Quantity price. Here is a demand curve. Here is a marginal revenue curve. We know that the perfectly competitive industry will be right there and we know that where marginal cost hits marginal revenue is where the quantity of the monopolist will be and he'll move his way up to the demand curve and that'll be where the monopolist will be and here is the price of the monopolist. How many people have seen this before? Good, okay, I'm glad that we're in sync. And now what do we have? We have profits. And here's the indictment of, on the part of the mainstream of monopoly. And one is that the price of the monopolist is higher than the price of the competitor and don't ask me why a high price is bad, but high prices are bad, don't ask. And we know that the quantity of the competitor, the quantity of the competitor is greater than the quantity of monopolist and quantity is good. So the more quantity and the lower the price the better and notice that monopoly is bad on both these counts and perfect competition is good on both these counts. The third one is, what's the third one? Profits. Profits are evil, we all stipulate that. Who could disagree, profits are evil. And the profits of the perfectly competitive is zero and the profits of the monopolist is this little box here, the shaded box, right, call it the box, the shaded box. That's profit and profits are evil. So that's the third indictment. And then the fourth indictment, the real biggie, the one that really sticks in their craw, the evil thing is this triangle here and this is the dead weight loss.   Well, you sort of wave dead weight loss at a mainstream economist that gets scared. I mean, it's horrible for them.  So this stuff about ordinal, you see, it's not only ordinal and cardinal, but before I'll get back to this in a second, but every time you have a diminishing marginal utility curve and there is quantity and there is price, sorry, this is marginal utility. Whenever you draw a curve with an axis, you're counting utils, right? So this curve from the Austrian point of view is illegitimate because it's quantitative. And we've said, to my satisfaction at least, and I'm sure most of you agree that ordinal is a reasonable way of looking at utility, but utils, this says that if you have this many units, X units, then the utils are X. And then if you have Y units, then the marginal utility goes to marginal utility Y. This is an exercise in cardinal utility, but this diagram here is even worse than cardinal utility. It's not only cardinal utility, it's interpersonal, it's even worse somehow. It's bad enough to say that I like carrots three times as much as I like apples, but it's even crazier to say, well, I like carrots twice as much as you like carrots. I mean, how do you compare? I mean, it's just crazy. So what this is saying is that we, the people, get utility under the demand curve. So let me be more colorful here. So the utility that we get is under the red, can you see that? Whereas what are the costs? The cost is the area under the marginal cost curve in blue and the difference is the dead weight loss. And what the monopolist is doing is cheating us out of stuff, cheating us out of the difference between QM and QC. Because if he was a nice guy, if he didn't want to create a market failure, which is a whole other thing, the mainstream loves market failure, monopoly, the public goods, externalities, unequal income. I mean, in order to get into the American economic review, you either have to have just math or you have to come up with a new market failure. They just love market failures, whereas for Austrians, no such thing as a market failure. They're imperfect people, entrepreneurs make mistakes, but that's not what they mean by market failure. What they mean by market failure is something that the government could step in and tell the monopolist, you know, produce a QC or will break you up or will nationalize you. Those are the three solutions to the problem. So this is an exercise in interpersonal comparison utility, namely they're saying that the buyers value it at the red area. The sellers, it only costs us at the blue area and yet it's not produced. Let me give you a real world example. Here we have Djokovic, who is the best tennis player nowadays, give or take. And Djokovic enters 15 tournaments a year. He really should enter 25. He's cheating us out of 10 tournaments a year, that dirty rat. And what we should do is use the antitrust against him and make him play more.  He only picks 15, but thanks to neoclassical economics, we can order him to play more and know that economic welfare will be enhanced because we value the extra 10 tournaments more than he disvalues it. That's sort of a reductive ad absurdum, isn't it? It's just barking mad. And yet that's the implication. Okay, now how does the Chicago School fit in on this? They're the free enterprise school.  And what they say is, look, antitrust costs money. True, who could deny it? You have to have courts, you have to have lawyers, this and that and the other. And sometimes the deadweight loss is bigger than the cost of pursuing it. In which case we should pursue it, get it? And in other cases, the costs of pursuing it are bigger than deadweight loss and we shouldn't. You see what free enterprises they are? They're saying just because you have deadweight loss doesn't mean you should have an antitrust suit.  I have a friend, Ben Klein, he was a professor at UCLA and he used to specialize in money. And then one day he told me, there's no money and money. You can't make much money studying money. Where is the money? Antitrust cases. Mises said to his wife, I'll be studying money but I'll never have much of it. That was a quote from Mises to Margo, Margo and his wife. Well, there's not really that much money and money. There's a little bit and people have done studies on just who supports the Fed. Yes, economists have been paid stuff down their throat with a lot of money from the Fed in terms of going to five star hotels here and there and being able to bring their wives or significant others. So there's a little bit of money and money but the real money is an antitrust. So here's the antitrust joke, it's a two-part joke and the first part is there were three Soviet prisoners and as prisoners do, people know you've been in prison, you talk to your buddy, why are you in jail, why are you in jail? And the first guy said I was in jail because I came to work late and they accused me of cheating to stay out of my labor services, okay, fine. The second guy said I came to work early every day and they accused me of brown nosing. You know what brown nosing is, okay. The third guy said I came to work exactly on time every day and they accused me of owning a Western wristwatch.  And then I told the other joke, I said there were three prisoners in jail in the US because of antitrust violations and as prisoners do, they were comparing notes and the first guy said I charged higher prices than everyone else and they accused me of profiteering and gouging. Second guy said I charged lower prices than everyone else and they accused me of collusion and cutthroat competition and predatory pricing. And the third guy said I charged the same prices as everyone else. It's hard to see how he did giving these other two guys but what the heck, it's just a joke. You know, you've got to give me a little leeway and they accused me of collusion and cartilization. The point is, no matter what you do, they can accuse you of antitrust violation.   But with antitrust, no matter what you do, they can get you. Poor Bill Gates, he was out there in the boonies in Washington state. Mining his own business, creating a nerddom and whatever he was doing. And he wasn't paying off the boys in Washington. By the way, I think seven out of the 10 richest counties in the country are all around Washington. It's just a coincidence. It's inexplicable why that should be. The money goes there and comes back minus a little bit from the boys in Washington. And Bill Gates wasn't paying off either. He was supposed to pay off both, like Donald Trump. He would pay off the Democrats, pay off the Republicans. That's what a good businessman did. So they launched an antitrust suit against them. Why not? They're gonna get them on something higher, lower, the same prices, whatever, they'll get them. Murray Rothbard went through economic history and he said there were certain presidents that were Morgan presidents and they would go after the Rockefeller companies. And then when a Rockefeller president got in, he'd go after the Morgan companies. It's just a crock. It's dead from the neck up. It's incoherent. No matter what you do, they can get you. And yet the mainstream love it. Getting back to an intermediate microtext, you got two or three or four chapters while there's Monopoly and then there's a Hearth and Dahl Index, there's Olicopoly, Duopoly, thisopoly, thatopoly, and then they just love this stuff. The more concentrated you are, the worse. You start out, well how did McDonald's start out? It was just one store, two stores. And then it spread out because they served the public and made a good product at a low price and they out-competed whatever was in the market. And now they can be subject to monopolization. So that's a sharp distinction between Austrians and mainstream. Tom Di Lorenzo has done a lot of good work on that. I'm not sure if he's speaking about this subject this time but if you read him, he's good on that one. Okay, what else do we have? Let's try transitivity and rationality and indifference. Another thing that the mainstream love are indifference curves. They're always indifference curves. Here is an indifference curve, there's a good one, there's good two, there's indifference curve one, and indifference curve two, and here's a budget line and here we have another budget line and we get a, what do you call it? Giffen good, the way you get a giffen good and the income effect and the substitution effect and all that stuff. The Austrians reject this entirely. Not entirely, it's sort of like chess for economics, namely irrelevant but fun if you're weird and you like this stuff, nothing wrong with it per se is a mathematical exercise but the problem is with indifference, there is no way to establish indifference. I bought this watch for 20 bucks, I demonstrated or revealed that I valued the watch at more than 20 bucks, otherwise I wouldn't have bought it for 20 bucks in the ex ante sense, ex post I might not value it at more than 20, it might not keep good time but at the time I bought it I valued it more than 20 bucks, more than. The guy who sold it to me valued it at less than 20 bucks, otherwise he wouldn't have taken 20 bucks for the watch. How can you establish indifference? You can't, now here I had another big long debate with Brian Kaplan on indifference because he wrote a thing, why I'm not an Austrian economist and one of the things was he loves indifference and Guido Holtzmann and I and about five others all attacked him in, I think it was the Eastern Economic Journal, they wouldn't publish any of our critiques, they only published his attack on Austrianism, well that's the mainstream, they don't like to have debates, because they lose. This reminds me of another story, I'll get back to this in a second, what happened was some jerks published in the article saying why is Austrian economics wrong? And the proof was there were fewer Austrians than there are mainstreamers. Can you imagine that? I mean this was a serious article, it was published in a journal, Sherwin Rosen, a Chicago economist, I think it was him published in an article saying that the proof that Austrianism is wrong is that there are fewer Austrians than mainstream. I mean can you imagine when the first guy said that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around and people said well you're wrong because more people believed the other way around? This is science, democracy, you take a nose count as to who believes what and that's the truth. So my co-authors and I said, look this is crazy and we gave all sorts of cases where the minority turned out to be right, but if you want an objective test of which is right we've got an objective test and we think that it's also wrong but we're trying to reductive ad absurdum. And what we said is that the last guy in the debate is the winner and we got all sorts of debates between Austrians and mainstreamers and we got like 175 debates and I think we had the last article and about 110 of them. So I said on that basis Austrianism is right. Now obviously that's just as silly, right? Because some people die in the middle of a debate and they can't reply so you can't say, well just because he died or he doesn't think it's worthwhile because you can't, look my articles are attacked by a lot of people and I can't reply to all of them. There are so many. So some of them get the last word on me. So we're not seriously saying that he who gets the last word in the debate is the winner but we're saying it's just as good as counting noses to see who is the rightful winner, who is correct in economics. Okay, getting back to indifference. There's no way to establish indifference because every time you do anything you establish preference. There's only preference.  You could have been in one of the other debates, one of the other presentations. You could have been out bicycling or swimming or sleeping or eating or God knows what you could have been doing but you're here. So you establish that you prefer this.  He tells me I have to do that. There's only preference. Look, here are two bottles of water and a lot of people pick, you know, which one do you want? And most people say, well, I'm indifferent. I don't really care which bottle. They're both perfectly good bottles of water. You see, the problem is that the word indifference is a perfectly good word in the English language and it applies to things like this and Brian Kaplan says, this shows indifference and I say, no it doesn't because what you're gonna do is you're gonna pick this one. Why did I pick this one? Well, it's closer. Well, maybe I picked this one, it's further away and I need the exercise too. I don't know but the point is you all have bottles of water, you all have things that are sort of homogeneous and you picked one of them, right? You've got a few bottles of water. Why did you pick those when there could have been others? Well, who knows? You just sort of close your eyes and pick a bottle of water but you pick that one, that shows you preferred it for some reason or other. Now look, we have a technical language in economics and we also have an ordinary language. Ordinarily, I don't have no objection to the word indifference. It's a fine word but as a matter of technical economics, it's all wrong. Let me give you an analogy from physics and physics work equals mass times distance, namely you have to move an object through a certain distance and that's what work is. Now suppose these are 20 pound barbells and I hold them like this. What's gonna happen? I'm gonna start sagging soon because it's hard to keep weights up at this angle and the sweat is gonna start dripping down my face and in ordinary language, we would say, I'm working. That's a good exercise. Instead of lifting weights this way, try this too. It really burns these muscles and it's very, very hard, even five pounds. Try holding five pounds for one minute and you're gonna be sweating and breathing heavily. So you're working. But in physics, are you working now? Because assuming it's rigid, there's no movement of anything, there's no work. So in physics, they have an ordinary language and a technical language. Well in economics, we can do that too.  There's physics envy. Physics envy is what economists have that wanna make economics like physics, like testable hypotheses and stuff like that, whereas we Austrians, there are certain hypotheses that are testable, namely elasticity of shoes, as I mentioned, but there are others, namely the synthetic, a priori, apodictic statements that are not testable. So to get back to indifference curves, the reason we reject indifference curves is because indifference is not a proper economic element. And then they're used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. They come up with Giffen goods, which means an upward sloping demand curve. But the whole problem with that is that when you have a demand curve, everything else is supposed to be constant. So along the demand curve, there's quantity, there's price, there's demand curve, income is supposed to be constant. If it's a true demand curve, namely ceteris, parivus, everything else is constant, including income. And if income changes, the price of this change is like in the potato case with Ireland, where potatoes were such a big part of their diet, and the price of potatoes moved up and down and that heavily impacted income, well, you're supposed to do a shift at demand curve. You're not supposed to move along at demand curve. So the Giffen good is nonsense. The Giffen good is beloved of the mainstream economists, and the Giffen good comes out of this sort of thing where the income effect is bigger than the substitution effect, that sort of thing. So, you see, a lot of times you might think, well, you know, noodles, big deal, but noodles have important implications for antitrust. And you might think, well, indifference is really unimportant, but it has implications for the demand curve. And the demand curve is very important because one of the big fights in the minimum wage fight is are demand curves down when sloping or not? And these Cretans, you know, in every other way, they'll admit that if the price of peas rises, we'll have fewer peas, the price of shoes falls, we'll have more shoes. When they wanna get rid of, what is it, the abortions, those abortion clinics, the states in the South, what they do is they raise the criteria up through the roof, you know, you have to have hospital attachments and all sorts of things in order to get rid of them. Well, that's what the minimum wage law is. Look, if the minimum wage law was so good, as Tom Woods said the other night, the first night here, why have foreign aid? Just tell Bangladesh to raise your minimum wage. Why have it at 15? Why be so niggerly? 15 is cheap skating. Why not make it 50 or 500? We'll all be rich. We can all make 500 an hour. I mean, the poverty, you know, with the stroke of Hillary, President Hillary's pen, we can all be fabulously rich, but she's only doing it for 15. What's the matter with her? She's against the poor, right? If I'm elected, I'll raise it to 5,000 an hour. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Okay, what else do we have here? Externalities, that's another biggie. The mainstream loves externalities, and what's going on with externalities? What we have here, education is the usual example that they use, and this is the quantity of education, and this is the price of education, and there's the demand curve, and there's the supply curve, and this is the actual amount, quantity actual. That's the amount that will be bought in equilibrium, and that's reasonable. Here's, remember, I drew the, what was it, the Venn diagram? That would be part of where we agree. This, so far so good. But then, what Milton Friedman and the other people who, other free enterprises who hate the market, what they say is, this demand curve is only private, private benefits, and there are spillover benefits on neighborhood effect benefits, or positive externalities, or external economy benefits. Namely, if you're educated, you're less likely to be a criminal, you're more likely to vote more intelligently, you're more likely to be a good neighbor, this young lady is shaking her head, I'll get to that part in a second, but I agree with you, it's all nonsense, but I'm trying to present the case the way it's presented in the textbooks.  You add them up. So what they're saying is this is private, but then there are also public benefits, and let's just say the public benefits are here, so that when you get the sum of the demand curve, you add this one and that one, and you get that one. Everyone with me? Namely, if we took the total demand, namely all the benefits of education, not only the internal ones that, I'll get a better job, I'll get a better spouse, I'll personal, I'll learn stuff, it'll edify me, whatever, but also the spillover benefits, by me being educated, I'll help you guys, and you guys aren't paying me, and yet I'm benefiting you, you dirty rats. You ought to have some respect. So anyway, so anyway, we now have a total demand curve, and this is the quantity, call it ideal. Namely, that's how much education we should have if we took into account the external effects. And what are we gonna do? Well, Friedman's gonna have his voucher system, or we'll subsidize education, somehow we gotta push us in that direction, and this is a market failure because the market only takes into account selfish, personal, individual benefits, we don't take into account the fact that we're helping other people. There's no charity. Kidding here, I'm trying to refute the thing. Obviously, we do take into account other people, or to put it in neoclassical terms, other people's utility enters our utility function. We are made better off when other people are made better off, especially if we like them, family members, kids, parents, whatever, friends. Okay, so that's the argument. What's the refutation? Why is this wrong? Well, just because, look, right now I'm smiling at you. See, teeth, smiling? And by the way, I take a shower once a month whether I need it or not. You people owe me.  Right, or give me some money because I took a shower a month ago. I mean, what kind of an argument is that? Just because I benefit you, I can charge you? And that's the logic of this, that I'm entitled to tax you so that I'll have more education because I'm benefiting you. That's crazy. I mean, if we apply this, I'm a big fan of reductio's ad absurdum, and a reductio ad absurdum is if every time you benefit someone else, you can charge them.  And this is nonsense on wheels or nonsense on stilts. That's the word I was looking for. Not on steroids, on stilts. This is nonsense. Okay, so that's one refutation. Another refutation is where did Bernie Sanders get all of his buddies for the minimum wage? I'll tell you where. The People's Republic of Ann Arbor, People's Republic of Cambridge Mass, the People's Republic of San Francisco, and what's true in all these places? Lots of universities. And what do they learn at universities? Most of them don't take economics, they take sociology, or feminist studies, or queer studies, or God knows what studies, black studies, and what they teach them is Marxism. So really what we have is a case of external diseconomies. What we ought to do is tax education, because we've got too much of it. We should move this direction. Too much education. So, there are problems here. When am I supposed to go from 11 to 11.45, or? Oh, so I'm finished. Until you're finished, I can keep going. Well, I can keep going. I've got plenty of stuff, but okay, let's do negative externalities, external diseconomies. The usual case there is pollution. So here we have supply and demand again, quantity and price. I'll just go another two minutes, because otherwise those greedy people will beat us to lunch. We don't want those greedy people to beat us. We greedy people want to beat them. Okay, so here's supply and demand, and I'm producing these wristwatches. And in order to produce wristwatches, I have what's behind the supply curve is costs. Okay, fine. And these are only private costs. And what are the private costs? Well, I have to pay my workers. I have to pay the raw materials. I have to pay insurance. I have to pay to buy or rent a factory. I have to buy machines to make the watches. Those are my private costs. What are the external costs I pollute you? When I produce these watches, out of my smokestacks comes pollution. It gets into your laundry and your lungs, and we don't take that into account. So this is the actual quantity. Quantity actual, but if we included all the costs, we would have higher costs. And therefore the optimal, quantity optimal would be less. And now we've got to move us in that direction, okay? And now we have a debate between Pogu, who wants to have taxes, and Kosu has Kakameni scheme that I don't have time to go into. And we have a government, just the government would just tell people, that hockey stick thing, we're polluting too much, and they would just say you can only pollute two-thirds of what you're now polluting. Murray Rothbard in the best article ever written on environmentalism, it's called Something Air Pollution. It was 1982 in the Cato Journal. The first half of it is just libertarian law on property and trespass. And the second party applies this to the pollution case. And I'll summarize the second part of it. And what Murray says is that in the 1830s and 1840s, what you had was a spate of environmental cases where some little old lady hung out her wash on the line and started out wet but clean, came back two hours later, dry but dirty. Or you had a railroad setting off sparks to the haystack of the farmer and burning the haystacks because of the sparks go 300 feet. And the plaintiff, the environmental plaintiff, would go to court and the court would pretty much uphold, not always, based on the evidence. This is not apodictic. This was an empirical examination. Did this guy trespass onto your property or onto your lungs or onto your haystacks? Sort of fire or whatever. And this led to several good things. People would use anthracite coal instead of sulfur coal, even though anthracite cost more, because it didn't pollute. And if it polluted, you'd get some plaintiff who would demand damages and injunction. And injunction is a letter from the court saying, you polluter, cut it out or we'll put you in jail. And damages. So the economy was moved in an environmental direction, a green direction, if you will. And there was even environmental forensics trying to figure out where this dust particle come from, from this factory or that factory. There wasn't much in the 1840s and 50s, but it was something. Now we move to the 1890s, 1900, 1910. And now we have the progressive period. Who was number one then? Great Britain. US wanted to become number one. Become number one, you need battleships, airplanes, tanks, guns, bullets, whatever. So the next time some environmental plaintiff came into court, the court said, yeah, yeah, they're violating your property rights. You're stinking lousy, selfish, private property rights. There's something more important than your property rights and that's drumroll, the public good. And what does the public good consist of? Of letting manufacturers run wild.  And that's why we had pollution problems and that's why we needed the Clean Air Act. But Murray's point was that if you could sue the environmentalist, the polluter, you wouldn't have this externality. So this is not a market failure, this is a government failure, a government failure to uphold the law like they did in the 1830s and they didn't in the 1910s. Thanks for your attention.


I feel very lucky to be here in Nairobi for these two days at the introductory workshop and launch of the new Ilri hub for antimicrobial resistance. It's a great opportunity. Well the major challenges of AMR are to do with what happens if we don't get it under control. According to modelling exercises, almost 30 million people will go back into chronic poverty due to the effects of AMR, which will severely knock off track the SDG on poverty, the targets there. The economic climate, the GDP of the world will be knocked back in a similar fashion to what happened in the 2008 financial crisis, which was severe. But rather than being a single event, this will be a continuous process because if AMR isn't brought under control, then these losses to the world economy will continue and they will get worse. So these are reasons why I think the issues of AMR are absolutely very, very important for everybody to take into account. And that doesn't take into account, those are economic issues, there are poverty issues, but there are also human suffering issues of avoidable deaths will increase and families across the world will suffer as a result of a problem which basically we've brought upon ourselves through misuse of antimicrobial drugs. I think the benefits of this hub are fundamental because AMR is a really complicated, complex and very wicked problem. It requires many different disciplines to work together, not only scientific disciplines from veterinary, from health, from environmental aspects, but also it requires a great deal of social science because it has to do with changing people's behaviour, changing farmers' behaviour, changing the way that people think about antimicrobials and the way that people use antimicrobials because antimicrobials are a very precious resource that we risk squandering as humanity if we don't look after them, steward them and make sure they're there to be effective for future generations. So the Ilri Hub can bring together all those different sciences that are required to work together, not only in a one health approach, but what I call a super one health approach, which brings in many different aspects, not only of hard science but of social science, which are all going to be needed in implementation of interventions to bring AMR under control, which will be context specific in different countries and depend very much on cultural factors, social factors, the way that people think and use antimicrobials will be fundamental to how we can change the way that they are used to be used more efficiently, more effectively and without promoting further rounds of resistance. I think it was very important for me to attend this workshop on behalf of the World Bank because this is an issue which concerns the World Bank greatly and has published various studies and exercises and modelling of economic impacts, et cetera, over the last year or so and is currently also working on AMR. Because the World Bank is a great supporter of CGIR and is a big client of the CGIR's research outputs and products, it's very important to show that support but also to be here to discuss with others from many different organisations and from many different countries how we can work together to support the initiative of the Ilri Hub on AMR going forward. So it's very important for me to be here apart from, of course, I love every opportunity I get to visit one of the CGIR centres.


The round table was about incorporating technology in formal and informal learning settings. And we're looking at, for instance, the learner's use of games in informal settings. And what we were talking about is absence, or the lack of locally relevant games in rural areas and in low-resourced settings, such that children end up playing games that are not locally or contextually relevant to their current realms of experience. And in terms of formal use of technology in class settings, we realized that what needs to happen is not to push content or applications into the hands of the teachers, but rather to empower teachers to incorporate technology into the existing methods and processes of teaching. What was interesting from the session for me is that while we agreed as all participants in the round table that technology in education is not a new thing, the truth is that technology has been present in education for a long time, starting from print to radio, television and so on. So the introduction of mobile technologies, tablets and PCs is not new. So when we're studying technology in education, we should be thinking of it as a new phenomenon. It's not new at all. So that's actually quite exciting that we can go back to that in the 50s and the 60s to learn how radio was used in education in the past and how we can learn from lessons in those areas. At the round table, as I said, we discussed a lot about creating and showing local content. So there was a person in the round table who represents the Rachel project, which involves what they call ground computing instead of cloud computing, which is like local Wi-Fi using Raspberry Pi. And I've been doing a lot of local creation, but they haven't really figured out the distribution of it. So I'm really looking forward to working with them and learning from what they did because the software is open source and we can appropriate it into our solution as well. So I'm looking forward to learning from the Rachel project. So it was exciting that there was somebody from the Rachel project available to talk to after the round table session.


Good afternoon, everyone. We have our quorum established. This is nice to see you two times during the course of a day And again, as a good practice, we're reiterating that given the unprecedented circumstances resulting from the global coronavirus pandemic Governor Charlie Baker has issued in order to provide limited relief from certain provisions of the open meeting law To protect the health and safety of individuals interested in attending our public meetings In keeping with the guidance provided this meeting will be conducted utilizing remote collaboration technology There's any problem with this Technology we will offer guidance on our website at lastgaming.com We'll call to order this meeting Thursday, April 29th 1 p.m Is First and only item on today's agenda is a commissioners update share with commissioner O'Brien we have We received on Friday a request through that first was directed at the independent monitor and then By win and then win did get in touch with Me and and commissioner O'Brien requesting that they get a very limited relief from the deadline that they Had with the independent monitor to to comment on the independent monitors report Independent thought it was very reasonable, but in turn It means that the independent monitor needed some relief from the April 30th deadline to submit the report so that date of that report it would would have been submitted tomorrow and They have asked for some relief commissioner O'Brien. Do you want to chime in now? Yeah, it was it was a very quick call. It was a reasonable request for a few days extension in terms of purely fact-checking And getting back Without moving the deadline Really we're the ones that lose time to be able to read because to stay on the deadline And accommodate that reasonable request. It means we have less lead time to get it potentially and then have it publicly presented so What seemed like a reasonable solution was to continue the deadline from April 30th to May 8th In terms of the deadline for the independent monitor submit the report to us And then we would hold a public hearing and presentation no later than May 21st Um, so it's a a couple of weeks moving out with Really eight days from April 30th to May 8th is really the deadline that we're voting on today Keeps in mind what everyone has been going through with the pandemic, but still moves the ball on this which Um, I think is very important to keep doing in spite of everything else that's going on Yes, as a reminder Last week was a particularly busy week on reopening issues in Nevada. And so When really just got a little derailed on their work and did ask very appropriately for additional time and the time frame that commissioner of ryan just outlined that works for the independent monitor and You know, we have been very careful to make sure that we don't interfere in any way with the process that they have They're very comfortable with this Do we have questions? Um, I think um, madam chair, you just answered my question, which was the eight days Is the appropriate time for everyone? It sounds like it sounds like that's acceptable to all parties involved and that It allows us to keep this moving as well. So I think you answered that question That everybody is in agreement that this is the proper time frame So that this request seems reasonable to me as well I should add that we are working on a plan with, you know, through karen on on how There'll be a proper briefing and those details will come through karen Is that there? I mean, is there anything else we need to add at this point? No, I don't think so Any further questions Commissioner Zunica? Yeah, I I'm just curious as to the next phase. I understand this is a baseline report and in the short term we can You know, we can get it done. It seems very reasonable to to allow for these few days to get it To the appropriate level for review, etc But I'm curious as to what has there any thought given to What this whole engagement means during a period in which the casino is closed Well, I think that The the short answer is to stay tuned because we have to see the report and of course the work has was conducted during the operations and I think You know, given what we understood the monitor was doing and their Obligations under their assignment it will be on operational procedures and policies that will be applicable once the The casino reengages So I think in terms of their findings we had asked for a six a six month baseline report And I think that that report that is will reflect This six months. I think our initial Correct me if I'm wrong anyone Commissioner Brian probably your memory is the best our initial date for submission was the end of February And then there was a slight request for an additional deadline being pushed out and then Then the operations were suspended So it's really quite timely commissioners in the gun it will have reflected on operations and our goal has always been that it will be It will address our concerns at the time of our just our decision Why we impose that Condition and that will be also a tool for the licensing. It was always meant to be helpful as well Without a doubt, I'm just curious as to whether they'll continue monitoring during a period of closure They are right now they have um, I think it would be fair to say they have suspended their work I think I'm sorry if that wasn't clear I thought we had reported on that before they had suspended their work So they're not incurring additional charges right now In terms of going forward after the report we haven't talked about that yet Yeah, that's that's all very clear. Uh, thank you Commissioner brine. Is that accurate? Yeah, that's accurate any other questions All right, um, do we have a motion because we do need to address the uh past deadline Madam chair, I moved that The deadline for submission by the independent monitor of the six month baseline report to the commission be extended From the current date of april 30th to no later than may 8th 2020 Um, and that the public presentation or hearing on the six month baseline report will be scheduled in later than may 21st 2020 So second second Okay, we'll do a welcome vote Uh commissioner Cameron. I Commissioner o'brien I commissioner zuniga I commissioner stephens I I vote yes, so that's five zero for that That deadline to be extended appreciate it very much. Do we have any other questions comments going forward? I know we're reconvening on friday on a different topic Okay Hearing none Do we have another motion move to adjourn second Okay, any questions or comments? Okay. Good. Um, we'll call about commissioner Cameron. I commissioner o'brien I Commissioner zuniga I Mr. Stevens I Chair votes yes Five zero Thanks, and thanks everyone for the efficiency today. We appreciate it and for particularly from Marianne and jamie to being so Uh nimble to be able to put these meetings really in motion. So thank you Thanks everybody. Thank you


Islam has a complicated and often ambiguous relationship with Judaism. One area has been their view of our scriptures of the Torah. Islam has sometimes found the teachings of the Torah to be problematic. For example, in the Quran, Surah 12, it states that Joseph brought his parents down to live in Egypt. However, in the book of Genesis, we know that Joseph's mother Rachel died long before the people of Israel came down to Egypt. Another example is that in the book of Exodus chapter 2, we're told that Yitro, Jethro, the High Priest of Midian, had seven daughters that Moses rescued at a well from shepherds who were driving them away. But in the Quran, Surah 28, we're told that it was two daughters that Jethro had that were rescued by Moses. Probably the most famous example is the question of who was it that Abraham was supposed to sacrifice at Mount Moriah. In Genesis chapter 22, we're told very clearly that Abraham was told to sacrifice his son Yitzchak, Isaac. In the Quran, Surah 37, the child that Abraham takes up to Mount Moriah is not named. Many Islamic writers, not all, but many Islamic writers assert that the child that Abraham was to take up to Mount Moriah to sacrifice was his other son Yishmael and not Isaac. So because of these inconsistencies and many other problems that Islam sees in the Jewish scriptures, the Quran seems to have contradictory assessments of the authenticity and reliability of the Hebrew scriptures. We find passages in the Quran that seem to affirm the importance of the Hebrew Bible, and we find passages in the Quran which seem to question the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible. Later Islamic writers also reflect this ambiguity, although the predominant view today seems to be that the Jewish people have not accurately preserved our scriptures and that the text of the Torah has been corrupted. Now to support this contention, some Islamic apologists cite a verse from the 8th chapter in the book of Jeremiah verse 8, which says the following. How can you say we are wise and that God's Torah is with us? Indeed, they made the quill for falsehood, the scribes are false. I'll read that one more time. In the book of Jeremiah chapter 8 verse 8, how can you say we are wise and God's Torah is with us? Indeed, they made the quill for falsehood, the scribes are false. And so based upon this verse, there are many Islamic apologists that insist that Jeremiah himself is telling us that the Hebrew scriptures have been corrupted. Now we'll see in a few moments that this translation I just read for you is far from clear. But let's first digest the attack of these Islamic apologists. Number one, let's think about this question. Why would Jeremiah here in this chapter, who is a prophet of God, why would he be declaring that the Torah was corrupt and unreliable? What would be the purpose of declaring that here? Is he saying that there was a conspiracy among all the scribes to distort the Torah? And if he is, what is the purpose of telling us this? Is it to warn us that we shouldn't read the Torah, that it's unreliable? Well, we'll see that Jeremiah says nothing of the sort. Jeremiah doesn't tell us that we shouldn't use the Torah and it's unreliable. Of course, by this time in history, by the time Jeremiah is writing, there were many Torah scrolls that were spread around far and wide. And it would seem to be almost an impossible feat for corrupt scribes to alter and corrupt all of them. It had to track down every single text and alter the text in order to ensure that we didn't have an accurate reading of the Torah. And finally, and this is worth thinking about, if Jeremiah really is a prophet of God, why would he announce that the Torah scrolls have been corrupted rather than simply launch a program to correct these allegedly corrupted texts? If he was a prophet, he would know what the actual text should say. But we don't find Jeremiah launching a massive program to find all of these corrupted Torah scrolls and to restore the original text. We're going to see that this idea that Jeremiah was telling us that the Torah has been corrupted is actually an impossibility. Because we'll see later on in the book of Jeremiah chapter 26 that he himself admonishes the people of Israel to follow the Torah of God. So if in chapter 8 he was coming to tell us that the Torah is unreliable and it's been corrupted, why would he later tell us in chapter 26 that you should follow the Torah of God? Similarly, we see that many other prophets that came after Jeremiah commanded the Jewish people emphasized that they are required to follow the Torah of God, the prophet Malachi, the last of the 12 minor prophets in the last verses of his book reminds the people to remember the Torah of Israel. And he doesn't warn them that the Torah of Israel has been corrupted and is unreliable. So to the prophet Nechemia in the eighth chapter of his book, who's writing long after Jeremiah, he read the Torah, the Torah of Moses to the people day after day, many decades after Jeremiah lived. And Nechemia didn't warn the people that the Torah he was reading to them was corrupted and unreliable. Rather, he writes that he actually read the Torah to the Jewish people and this is a Torah that God revealed through Moses. So what is Jeremiah actually saying in chapter 8? There's an old saying which says that a text without a context is pretext and that certainly applies to this example of taking one verse in the eighth chapter of Jeremiah out of context. So what is actually going on in the eighth chapter of Jeremiah? Really much the same, it takes place in other chapters of Jeremiah. The prophets of Israel came to rebuke the people of Israel. And so in Jeremiah chapter 8, he is reprimanding the people of Israel for their rebelliousness, for they're not obeying the Torah and not repenting of the evil that they had been doing. In this verse, the word Shekher, the Hebrew word Shekher, which can mean false or falsehood, can also mean vain or for nothing or for naught. We see this for example in 1 Samuel chapter 25 verse 21 where it says, Now David had said it was for naught, for Shekher, that I guarded all of this man's possessions in the desert, meaning it was useless that I did it. And that's what the word Shekher means here in Jeremiah chapter 8 verse 8. He's saying that although the people argue that they are wise and that the Torah is with them, that knowledge is useless. Jeremiah says, Why? Because they are rebellious and they don't fulfill what the Torah actually instructs. They were making the writing of the Torah vain by not observing it. So a proper translation or I would say a more accurate translation of Jeremiah 8.8 would be, How can you say we are wise and that God's teaching is with us? Indeed, the pen has labored in vain and scribes labor in vain. Their writings in a sense are in vain because the people are not following the teachings that the scribes recorded, the scrolls of the Torah they recorded. Now living in a time when cherished, long cherished, Jewish practices are being abandoned or challenged. For example, circumcision was almost universally practiced as a rite of passage by families, even families who observe very little else in Judaism. But in recent decades, circumcision itself is being challenged. Similarly, traditional Jewish burial has seen a dramatic decline in favor of cremation.


U.S. sends weapons to Ukraine. The United States announced the details of a new $2.6 billion military aid package to Kiev for the defense of Ukraine in the war against Russian forces. The package includes various types of ammunition provided by the Pentagon's Armory. It is planned to deliver them to the battlefield in a flexible manner. It is noted that $500 million of the aid will be provided from U.S. warehouses. Besides, the U.S. will spend more than $2 billion to buy an array of munitions, radar and other weapons for that country in the future. The White House announced as Ukrainian troops prepare for a spring offensive against Russian forces. Much of the ammunition will be taken from military stockpiles so they can be in the war zone quickly, including U.S. provided HMRs, Patriot Air Defense Missile Systems, Air Defense Interceptors and artillery rounds that Ukraine is using to defend itself. The package, like many of the previous ones, is pushing forward more than 155 mm artillery rounds as Ukraine burns through that stock fighting back against Russia's ground invasion. The immediate assistance includes anti-armor systems, small arms, heavy equipment transport vehicles and maintenance support. It is also noted that from the said $2.1 million, Nassams, surface-to-air missile systems, air surveillance radars and auto cannons for shooting down drones will also be purchased for Ukraine. The Pentagon said in a statement that the United States will continue to provide Ukraine with urgently needed battlefield weapons and long-term security support.


Good morning everyone and welcome to press conference four of EGU 23, which is the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union. I'm Jillian D'Souza, EGU's media and communications officer, and I'll be your host of today's press conference, as well as I will be facilitating all of the media interactions that will be happening during this week. I will shortly introduce speakers for today, but before that I wanted to add that each of the press conferences will be recorded live and streamed for journalists who are also joining us virtually. And the press conference will have time for speakers to make the presentations one after the other, followed by a combined question and answer period at the end of the briefing. So if you're joining us virtually, I ask that you mute your mics through the press briefing and we will then have you unmuted during the Q&A round at the end. I'm now going to go ahead and introduce our esteemed speakers for today. So our press conference is titled early warning for extreme events, earthquakes, droughts, floods and livestock disease. Our participants for today are starting from my right, Marta Hahn from the Swiss seismological service ETH Zurich. Then we are joined by Pedro Lima Alenzar from the Technical University Berlin Institute for Oncology, Germany. And our virtual speaker, who's number three is Frederick Hutoff from HKV and University of 20 Netherlands. And finally, we have Paola Nassisi from the Central Euro Mediterranean. So I'm sorry I'm mispronouncing all of these words. Come via mentee, climatici, less Italy. So we are ready to begin and we will follow the order that I just announced our speakers in. We already have your slides queued in, you have the clicker if you would like to begin your presentation, we will first hear from Marta. So over to you. Thank you. So hello everyone. I don't know about you, but yesterday, when I was going back home from here I got totally wet. So in the morning today I made sure to check Vienna weather forecast. Now wouldn't it be awesome if we could do the same for earthquakes. Unfortunately, I will not now look into my crystal ball and tell you the next magnitude of that and that will happen then and there. This is currently not possible. However, I think there is still some things that we can explain and that are worth looking into. For example, as we are here in Vienna, you're probably not so worried that a big earthquake will strike us now but if we were in Chile or Japan. It will be a different situation, I guess. So on the European scale, this is exactly what we have. This spatial variation is in seismicity rates explained by the European seismic hazard model that gathered a lot of historical and physical data. In this visualization, we see the space varying like, let's say probability or likelihood that an earthquake will occur in different places. However, if a bigger earthquake did happen now, first stage responders would probably be interested in knowing is it safe to enter this building and rescue us and so on. So there is a time dependent component to this and I think it is worth modeling and looking into and this is not something that I invented. In the US and New Zealand. Here we see for Italy, and in Switzerland within the Swiss seismological service, a model has been developed and tested that issues these time dependent forecasts for Switzerland. In these images we see that after magnitude 4.7 near Basel, the probability of another earthquake above magnitude 2.5 occurring in that area during the next day is much higher than normally. So, I just want to state very clearly that the European model is not meant to overrule any forecast issued by the national and regional agencies they're still in charge of their respective areas it's just meant to provide something harmonized baseline, such as the hazard model that we saw before. That does in a time independent manner. So in order to make this model we need data on the past earthquakes. This data is gathered by many different agencies in many different areas in different ways. We need different methods to account for this when making our model, but we need to know what these differences are so what is the precision that we record earthquakes to how low magnitudes are we able to detect and so on. Fortunately, this data has been gathered within the hazard model development. So we are using their catalog and the expert solicitations for these data properties that I just mentioned. And having this data, we establish a model so we use epidemic so called epidemic type aftershock sequence models this is also not something that I invented. It's been around for a long time. And the main strengths of these models is in explaining the aftershock behavior. So we know that after big event has happened it triggers another events those event trigger their own aftershocks and so on. So in these aftershocks we know that they decrease in time and space as we move further from the main event, and but they increase in number as the magnitude of the main event increases so magnitude six will have far more aftershocks than magnitude three. So these models ethos models are agreed upon by the experts worldwide to be suitable for issuing these forecasts. There has been an initiative by a CD that's with seismological service to gather the experts opinions and experiences in good practices. There is a national earthquake forecasting. There is a survey result shown here that basically says says that there is an agreement within the expert community. These models models are okay for issuing the forecast. So here you don't have to worry about much. It's just to say that we model these dots that is our data with these lines. I will explain that the number of aftershocks decays in time and space, as we move further from the main event and increase in productivity. But here in this third plot, you can see that the line is a bit below the dots, which means that our model, which is represented by the line tends to under forecast the number of aftershocks of the large magnitude events. And that we are addressing that has been observed in literature also before. Also one important modification that we want to make to our model is to make the background seismicity consistent with the hazard model that I shown in the first slide. So one of our products that we want to have is the operational forecasting which means that it's regularly updated and available online. So, one example of how we could we could visualize this is shown here. The plot on the left displays the expected number of events or earthquakes per time and space unit. We see that it's spatially variant and it changes from the left to right. What happened in the meantime is magnitude six in Greece and there is an mistake on this slide this was in 2015. Not so recent. So, here maybe you cannot see that much because of course this event doesn't happen doesn't affect anything affect anything in Iceland. But if we zoom in to this area. We see that the expected number of events above magnitude 3.5 has increased significantly in the area around the main event during the day following that event. So in order to make these forecasts as accurate as possible. We are working on some modifications as I said improvements to the model. We also observed the sequence that happened. Unfortunately recently in February in Turkey and Syria. This has inspired let's say the further work on sequence specific updating of our model. There's a poster on that that will be displayed on Thursday. If you are interested. So, that's it. Here are the links to the abstract of this talk that's also happening tomorrow and the poster on Thursday and my email if you want to contact me. Thank you. And now we will hear from Pedro when your slides are ready to go. Hi everyone and thank you for having me that's kind of my first press conference so I'm a little bit more nervous, so please forgive me if any mistakes. This I would like to present to you today some of our latest research together with Professor if a patent in the eco hydrology and landscape assessment department of technical University Berlin. And what we're interested is in developing a framework that can define better extreme events and we're looking specifically to droughts. We're talking here about forecasting but to forecast some event we first need to know what is that we are forecasting what is actually defined as a drought, or any other kind of extreme events like flash droughts it's one of the things that I'll be talking today. So we are kind of giving a step back and looking into the landscape of research and definitions of flash droughts and and seeing what it's actually a drought. So what you're proposing is a new framework. And the idea is that it's new framework is a way to improve our communication to the society. It easily takes into account personality because when droughts happen also matters not only if they happen and how intense. We also interested in seeing what kinds of threats are related to each type of drought or extreme event. And also to be able to adapt this definitions and frameworks to new and emerging extreme events caused by climate change. So, initially, what we observed is that the usual way to identify and to define extreme events, such as droughts, is very data centered. So usually researchers, they observe an event, and from that it is built into a model and then derived impacts and maybe communication to society. There's a maybe. And this is very meaningful and relevant information because if we don't do that we have nothing, but there is maybe a better way to do. We observe that initially when looking into flash droughts which is a new topic in the drought community, where if you look at this graph here, we have each role showing a different method to identify the same type of event flash droughts and what we conclude from this graph is that they don't agree quite often they agree sometimes but sometimes they just fail. And so it begs the question, which one is correct or any of them are correct for all of them. So what we propose then to try to conciliate this data with events and impacts as inverted pyramid of priorities where we first communicate and dialogue with community with society to understand what are the impacts of extreme events for their different users. So we use this knowledge to build our models assess impacts and thresholds sorry and then assess what are actual events, and then communicate back to the society. Okay, so for those impacts for this perception of impacts, those are the kinds of events that should cause trouble or hazard. So, into a little bit of an example of how it looks like. I'm going to talk about flash drought, which is different, different from the conventional droughts that are large areas and long periods of time. This is a short lived drought that's mainly occurring in the top soil. So you have a rapid depletion of so much. So we using data from Brandenburg, Potsdam in northeast Germany, and also the crop of barley, which is one of the main produce in the region. We built also a dashboard that you can go there and assess how is the historical production of grains in the region. And we want to then identify or define flash drought, considering this region, Brandenburg and this use barley. And this, what we can have is, let's say a producer in Brandenburg expects to produce around 5.3 tons per hectare of barley in a specific in any year that's kind of the goal of the general average historically. Maybe you have one producer that is very cautious and sees that if he produces if they produce less than 10% or, I mean, they have a loss of 10% of produce only 90% of expected. This is already an impact. But maybe you have another one who maybe has a better insurance, or it's just more prone into going to risky situations and see that an impact for them is a 50% loss. So these results, I can point out, but this will then derive different events. So we have a flash drought for the risk prone producer and to the risk avoidance producer are different, and they also are different from the off the shelf methods that we have today when we are trying to identify flash droughts and I try to represent that in that graph. So overall, you have less events that are perceived only by that are perceived by the high damage acceptance, high risk acceptance, and if for the low risk acceptance, you have much more events than the high risk, and also then the off the shelf, which is kind of And what is important just to close my talk is that this off the shelf methods they often, as I said, are very data centered so they don't take into account. What is the lens use what are the local conditions of the soil vegetation, and, and also often they are used at the just enough estimated by specialists but they are not necessarily derived from any urgencies. So that's what I wanted to point out. And in summary, we have your proposal in your method that improves communication and improves our understanding of water droughts based on impacts, and the society demands. He is also a way to contact me, and thank you for your attention. Thank you Pedro. We will now hear from our virtual speaker so Frederick whenever you are ready. Yes. Hello. Thanks for having me. First of all, I'm going to try to share my screen. I believe that now worked. Is that correct. I'm waiting on looking at your screen. Not yet. Oh, one more button click. I believe. Yeah, there you go. Okay. All right. Well, thanks. Well, hello, my name is Frederick Rudolph. I'm a researcher and consultant in the area of water management and disaster risk reduction. On behalf of my colleagues at HKV and University of Twente in the Netherlands, I'm going to present some results on a global approach for hazard forecasting. Yeah, something that we've been working. So first, some background on early warning systems. It's been all over the news at the recent COP 27 in Egypt. It was emphasized that a cost effective way to reduce the impacts of natural disasters, specifically floods is to invest in early warning systems. And, well, these can then warn vulnerable populations in time and emergency measures can be carried out to harmful impacts. So in the action plan, early warning for all 3.1 billion US dollars has been pledged with about one third assigned to observation and forecasting to achieve global early warning services by 2027. Now this is only a few years away, but surely not impossible. But if you realize that technologies for such systems are readily available and are being used at many places around the world already. Now the big challenge is to make these work everywhere. And this is really where it becomes difficult. In many of the most vulnerable countries various attempts have already been made to introduce introduce highly advanced technologies, but still early warning systems have not become part of standard operational procedures and also many times have not really left a lasting impact. And sometimes the problem is that such systems are not well aligned with existing operational procedures, technical or local technical capacities available data, etc. So what we think that is needed is, or yeah what we think that is needed to make a real jump forward is to establish a basic approach that works well everywhere. Not only that, but also that functions on globally available data that is not difficult to understand, or to operate, and from which you can grow and expand. Now here's an outline of our proposed approach. We establish static hazard maps based on terrain characteristics that's that's on the left here. So where possible we supplement these with experience from recent local extreme events. So on the left you see a landslide susceptibility map that we constructed based on terrain slope, land cover soil type and elevation. And we constructed a similar static map for potential flooded areas based on elevation and drainage network and that map is not shown here. So next, in the middle figure, you see real time or forecasted precipitation values and rainfall from global meteorological models. And this rainfall is of course the driver of the hazard. In this case for landslides but it works similarly for floods. And this information is actually available globally for the next 10 days, the global forecasting system. It's not ours but it's available. And on the right, we combine the static hazard map from the left with the, let's say real time or forecasted expected rainfall from the middle and emphasize those areas where landslides or floods may occur because of the actual rainfall conditions. Now and then places where potential hazards and rainfall quantities are high. Here, a certain combined threshold can be exceeded and that leads them to emergency. So there's your, your early warning. Now this type of calculation is actually very simple and can be done quickly on a global level. Essentially what we do is we immediately translate rainfall to different hazards, and wherever threshold is exceeded, you can then issue alerts or warnings. To just stress again, the information for this is available everywhere globally and can do forecasts for the next 10 days. And I already mentioned that this can be done for landslides and floods, but similarly also droughts and forest fires could be addressed. Now of course there's some need for disclaimer, detailed processes such as overland routing and smaller flow obstructions in the terrain are not taken into account, but to get a first indication of oncoming dangers under very extreme conditions. This is surely better than what many of the most vulnerable countries have available right now. And then another key characteristic that I want to point out which works very well in this approach is that there are no artifacts in the hazard estimates from artificial boundaries. First of all, by using global data sets, political boundaries do not play any role in the hazard estimates as they shouldn't. Next, for the case of flood forecasting, it is very common that advanced flow routing models take on boundaries of river basins. Now this makes perfect sense for minor flood events, but there are many examples known were under extreme flood conditions, water from neighboring river basins become interconnected. The example shown here for the Likungu River in Mozambique, where in 2015 flood waters extended all along the coast, even towards the Zambezi River Basin.  And here on the left, you see the actual satellite detected flood waters that occurred in 2015. Right here. You see our flood hazard prediction from global data. Now it shows that these agree very well. And the predicted flood extent would not have been possible with more advanced hydraulic flow models that are limited to these basin boundaries. Okay, then. Next I want to briefly show that our proposed approach can indeed also inform and help with early action. So here's an example for the Manambola watershed in Madagascar, where you can see that if you zoom in on the derived flood hazard map for individual communities. There's a quite distinct indication of vulnerabilities. In this image on the right in the blue areas you can see that certain parts of the community are actually affected by flood hazard, much more than others, and also that certain access roads. These are among the first crucial infrastructures to be affected. Now, early action of course has to take those aspects into account and focus on precisely those areas. Okay, then finally to summarize. So we propose a global early warning approach for various types of hazards based on readily available global data sets. We applied this to several test cases in Africa and Central America showing good results. The approach can easily be expanded to a global scale, because all the data is available, even allowing forecasts for the next 10 days. Next, based on the spatial extent of the hazards it's even possible to estimate affected populations or infrastructures or other assets present. So this still requires quite some work to get this done on a global scale, especially to define suitable alert levels for different places around the world. But we can confidently say that this is possible for a fraction of the pledge budget from COP 27. So my final message. So let's focus on developing such systems that work everywhere, and then gradually improve from there when better local information is available, and local capacity can carry it. Many attempts for early warning have failed in the past. And now let's get it right and make sure that early warning for all is indeed achieved within the next four years. Let's use what's available, what works already. That is robust and simple to set up and build upon. Thank you. And final comment I want to make. So obviously I'm not in Vienna at the moment, but I will be there in person on Friday. Also, thanks. Thank you Frederick. And now we will move on to our last speaker, Paula, we're just loading her slides in a couple of minutes. Thank you. I will introduce you. The main objectives of an early warning decision support system for disease outbreaks in the livestock sector. The livestock sector contributes substantially to the European economy with about 168 billion annually and the 45% of the total agricultural activity. Provide the diversity of production system with the 4 million of employees and 400 billions of European industries linked to the animal production. However, climate change with its variability and extreme events. The livestock sector in many aspects, ranging from animal well being production of milk and meat reproduction, but also diseases and their spread and food quality and availability. For example, very long period of high temperature combined with excess of humidity may affect negatively affect the animals because the perceived temperature would be very, very high. But also called extremes or extraordinary windy conditions could negatively affect food and the animal well being of course. In this context, the European funded project Sebastian aims to provide support for a more effective and sustainable management of the livestock sector in Italy. And in particular for cattle sheep and goat breeding. This is some numbers related to our project. We have a number of farms monitored in different ways and allow us to have a vast amount of data related to different different species of cattle sheep and goat. With about more than three millions of monetary animals that allow us to to to do analysis important analysis of this data with a lot of samples gathered. So the aim of the other project is to put together weather and climate data sets with territorial aspects, for example, the presence of vegetation around the farms. The slope of the soil, but also animal welfare indicators and sensor based data coming from IOT devices, sorry, installed on the animals to detect environmental temperature and humidity around the animals. The position of course, or it and the movement, but also the skin temperature. And these data are collected and summarized through advanced techniques using statistical indicators or machine learning algorithms. And to provide the user tailored information for the stakeholders for breeders, but also for researchers, policy makers, but also companies interested in this sector. And the main goal is, of course, to promptly notify breeders. When ads are those conditions occur. Now, just a brief video that nicely nicely summarized the main objective of the project. The production and products of animal origin make up 45% of the EU agricultural annual back. The livestock sector accounts for 36% of the total agricultural production. And this changes having a negative impact on livestock management. Changes are more valuable than extreme, and it is important to anticipate and mitigate the effects for employing suitable farming practices and planning to update the ever changing environmental conditions. In this context, the main goal of the Sebastian project is to deliver the support system for long and short term decision making. Sebastian is a tool and service work platform, gathering a huge amount of data about Italy, that is integrated, I'm on my sense, some time, thanks to the difficult indicators and machine learning algorithms. The aim of Sebastian is to cross them access and to use existing data indicators and tools as well as creating new ones. The other is geofacial material to pull up observational and environment data and statistics, new and reuse are the bread and butter of Sebastian bottom. Sensors can more is a well being in real time. Climate simulations and future projections over Italy are responded as a very kind geographical revolution that my data detector and remind different features of the vegetation structure. I want to make sure that you don't want the context. She goes for us, researchers, educators and features. I see deep companies and many more involved in the creation and testing of the Sebastian platform services. The main goal is a single point access to data services and informative content for you. So using livestock farming and free vegetation for environmental conditions and production units. Learning about approaching or projecting dangerous environmental circumstances. Data that are really seen throughout past years, revising updated risk maps and parasites, and he's asking us not last long time management in a challenging environment. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that. Very insightful presentation. I will move to the next part of our press conference, which is the question and answer round. So I open the floor to questions from journalists both in the room and those who have joined us online. If you have a question and you're in the room, I will hand over the mic to you. Please introduce yourself and let us know what your question is. If you are in the room, you have, if you are joining us virtually, you have two options. If you have a question in the chat or you can use the hand raising function on zoom, and we will come to you for your question. So over to you now. Do we have any questions coming in. Okay, we have one already. Hi, I'm Nicholas I'm a journalism students in the University of Paris and thank you for your presentations. So I have a ready, like general question for all of you. There's more and more cooperation between people working on different hazards as droughts or floods etc since some of them are quite really related like drugs can really like to heavier range for example in the Mediterranean so I was wondering whether some different hazards may come to cooperate a little bit more since the models are getting more and more complex, or is it so much special specialized that you don't even have the time to cooperate or to create like common models with other researchers. That question makes sense of course I can answer. I think that. Yes, it's, it is quite difficult to operate, but we have to because these topics are strictly related to each other. I was thinking to like the livestock sector, for example, it is that depends on droughts presented by Pedro before. And I think that the European Commission is investing to create more cooperation between these topics, and also between the infrastructure that provides support to this sector so yes, I think that we are going toward a more integrated solutions to support this diversity. Yeah, I mean, maybe I can just add on my colleagues and so there is indeed a pressing necessity to more cooperation, especially in the also when you not so new but the compound event realm of extreme weather when you have either fires or followed like sequential events, and these are just a cooperation for instance I work more with droughts, and maybe you have forest fires developed and after forest fires you might have storms that lead to higher land degradation, and then you have three different disciplines that have to cooperate together. So, yeah, I think that's what we are all walking towards but yes it's challenging with the current requisites of funding and all that. If you have any more questions. Okay one more. Hi. So my name is Caitrin and I'm with the EG press office. I'm not sure if this would be a question for Pedro or for someone else but I was very interested in the section of your presentation that talked about how inaccurate impact assessments can affect the accuracy of modeling. And I was wondering if this could also apply to other kinds of hazards like flooding, flood modeling. Well, it's a very good question. Yeah, the, what happened I was actually just having this conversation this morning was a convenient session earlier, and a colleague from the US talking about how farmers in a specific pixel from the US drought monitor have problems because that pixel is kind of unique, and it's not well represented by all the other drought definitions. So they often have hindered expectations and get frustrated because the drought monitor doesn't flag the regional impacts in droughts but then they go to their fields and see the vegetation suffering. And that's why we need to look at actually at least my point of view that we should first look at the impacts. And I mean that's not uniquely my view it's something that the community is being paying more and more attention. And I think that's in the floods. I will more advanced and well played than in droughts. Actually, some of the techniques that I've been trying to implement. I inspire from flood analysis. Thank you. I hope that answers your question. Okay, great. Do we have any more questions? I have questions from any of our virtual attendees. Okay, so if we have no more questions then we are ready to conclude our press briefing for today. Thank you once again to our speakers and even to Frederick thank you for joining us virtually and like he mentioned he is going to be in Vienna as well so if we have any questions for him interviews for our virtual attendees as well as in person. Please reach out to me and we'll be happy to facilitate this entire press conference is going to be recorded and will be uploaded to our YouTube channel later today. Thank you once again and I encourage you to check out our press packs, the printer and digital to know what our next press conferences are we're done for the press briefings of today but we have some exciting ones lined up till Thursday so to tomorrow and on Thursday. Thank you so much and have a good day.