And Zamfara State Police Command has arrested five notorious bandits who have been terrorizing the people of the state, as well as neighboring states of Sokoto, Katsina, Kebi and Kaduna. Addressing journalists, the state police public relations officer, Mohammed Shea, who said, one of the arrested bandits is a Nigerian who specializes in supplying sophisticated guns and ammunition to bandits. He said the suspects who specialize in high-profile crimes ranging from banditry, kidnapping, catarossling, armed robbery, and homicide have confessed to their crimes. The arrested bandits have confessed that they were the ones who kidnapped a younger brother of a prominent politician in the state, Dr. Daouda Lawal Dari, and collected 20 million dime around Zamfara.


So excited. Look at what came today. My order from nettrition.com, super excited about this order. Welcome back to my channel and welcome to my nettrition.com order that you just saw arrived. I am super excited. This is one of my favorite websites. I am not affiliated with them at all, but I love their website. Their prices are phenomenal and they have quite a large variety of WW friendly items. In fact, if you search their low carb section, there are dozens of items that are WW friendly and nettrition.com even goes as far as to put the smart points on the item. So you can see exactly how many smart points are in each item that you're purchasing. So I stocked up on some of my favorite things and I also found some new favorites. So if you want to see what I got from nettrition.com, keep watching. So here is my nettrition.com order. I absolutely love this website. I typically will go to the low carb section because a lot of the items that they have on there, you cannot purchase in the store and they are all WW friendly. Now some of the things I did purchase, you can purchase in the store, but I find them to be less expensive on nettrition's website. So I'm going to show you everything that I got and then I'm also going to tell you the smart points on the screen as well as the price so that you can compare between your local stores and what is offered on nettrition. If you spend $99, you get free shipping. So this order was enough to qualify me for free shipping. So let me show you everything that I got. So first I decided to give this milk ademia a try. This is a milk that is made from macadamia nuts. I was really excited. I've actually never seen this before. Let's take a look at the nutritional facts. So it has 50 calories in one cup. So I'm guessing I will put the points here on the screen, but I'm guessing it's going to be one smart point per cup similar to almond milk. But this is unsweetened vanilla macadamia milk. So super excited about this. I want to give it a try just to change a pace from almond milk. So I'll definitely let you guys know how it is. I also bought a full box of the quest birthday cake bars. You know, I love built bars, but sometimes I just want something a little bit different or maybe something that has a breakfast substitute. So quest works great for that. These bars are only for smart points of peace and the birthday cake is delicious. This is another item that I can find locally, but the price on nettrition is a lot cheaper. And that is the Lily's dark chocolate chips. These are amazing. You can have up to 13 chips for zero smart points or up to 39 chips for one smart point. That's crazy. You see me bake with these a lot in my baking videos. I love Lily's. A new thing that I picked up was this Sucran icing zero calorie sweetener. So I have been using the swerve sweetener and I'm just, there's a cooling effect to swerve. So I decided to give Sucran a try to see if I like this a little bit better for frosting. For those of you that do not have sugar free frosting in your area, this is a great alternative. This is zero smart points, zero. So on the back here, I'll show you guys, it has zero calories per serving. And here's what's in there. Eurythritol and then a little bit of stevia. That's it. So zero smart points to make frosting. So I definitely want to give this a try. I'm sure you'll be seeing this in an upcoming video. Also from Sucran Gold, I did decide to get, or from Sucran, I did decide to get Sucran Gold, which is the brown sugar alternative. Truvia brown sugar has points. This one does not. So the back here, zero calories per serving. Here's what is in this. So Eurythritol, a few other things and some stevia. So some malt and some, some coloring, some natural coloring to make brown sugar. So super excited to use this as my brown sugar substitutes.  Now I have purchased fiber gourmet pasta before. It looks like they've changed their packaging. It used to come in a box, but this is the light penne pasta. I love this pasta, you guys. You cannot tell, but it is low carb. It is so many less points, about half of regular pasta. And I'm not kidding. You literally cannot tell the difference. My husband has eaten it several times and not even noticed the difference. So it has 19 grams of fiber, eight grams of protein, has 23 net carbs and it's non-DMO. So on the back here in a serving, which is two ounces uncooked is only 130 calories. There's nothing crazy in here as far as ingredients go either. So definitely a good pasta substitution for half of the amount of smart points. So love it. Actually it shows you here. So fiber gourmet pasta 130 standard 210. It tells you the fiber. Look at the difference. And then of course the carbs for those people that do follow a low carb life. So I went ahead and grabbed the light penne. I also grabbed the light spaghetti and the light rotini. And then that way I'm stocked up on my pasta. And speaking of pasta, I did decide to give the carbonata pasta a try. I've heard about this all over YouTube and Instagram. I've never had this one. I've always had the fiber gourmet. So I decided to go ahead and pick up a package just to have on hand. So your nutritional facts on this one, one and a half cups dry, which is two ounces is 170. So remember two ounces of the fiber gourmet was 130. So this one actually does have more calories. I can't tell the difference with the fiber gourmet. So I'm really interested to see about this carbonata. And then here are your ingredients in the carbonata pasta. So pretty good ingredients again, just some flour, water, whole eggs, soy flour, definitely some good ingredients. So I am excited to give the carbonata pasta a try. I also saw these on there and I had to grab them. I've never tried them, but these are Scandinavian fiber crisp bread. Four grams of fiber and 20 calories per cracker. And look at how big this is. This is the size of a cracker, half of the package. So 20 calories, not bad. And then of course your ingredients are pretty, pretty good. So these Scandinavian crisp bread, I just wanted to try these. I thought that these would be delicious with some laughing cow cheese or even putting some of the Yarlsberg like Swiss cheese on it and make kind of a cheese and cracker. So I'm super excited to try these. Here's another thing that I am thrilled to have and that is the great low carb bread companies garlic butter pretzel. Look at this, you guys. This is a full size pretzel and look at this nutritional information. So this pretzel, there is one serving, which is one pretzel for 140 calories. That's it. That is it for a huge ginormous pretzel. So this is like a full size pretzel. I'm so excited. So I also went ahead on the pretzel train and grabbed the cinnamon pretzel. So again, I've never had either of these from the low carb bread company. This one as well is the 140 calories. So excited to give those a try. I thought those would be kind of a fun, sweet treat, especially the cinnamon one. You can even drizzle over some of your sucran icing, yummy. Now here's another thing that I've never seen in the store that I was super excited to have and this is nature's hollow sugar free honey. So a lot of recipes call for honey, but honey just is so high point that it makes your recipes crazy point. So I wanted to give this sugar free honey a try. So in one tablespoon, there is 30 calories. So it is still going to have, I'm guessing one smart point, but again, it will be here on the screen per tablespoon, which is a lot less than regular honey. Regular honey is one smart point per teaspoon. So I definitely wanted to try this. I don't know what it's going to be like, but I'll let you guys know when I do give it a try as well. I also grabbed these. These are my throwback. I picked these up the last time that I ordered from netrition and these are the sugar free chickosticks. If you were born in the 80s, the 90s, you know all about some chickosticks. These things are delicious. These are small little versions of the big chickosticks and these are only one smart point. Let's look at the back here. So you can have three pieces for 50 calories. So again, smart points on the screen, but a nice sweet treat. If you're looking for some candy and you don't have a lot of points to spare, they taste just like the originals. I also went ahead and grabbed some Joseph's pita. The only store in my area that sells these is Walmart and I do not shop there very often. So I thought since I was doing a netrition order, I would go ahead and pick up two packages of the Joseph's pita. One smart point per pita. I'm going to be using these for an upcoming meal prep. So you will be seeing those in use here shortly. This is another thing that I'm super excited about. So I am a Cheez-It fan. Love Cheez-It's. They're so high in points. Fiber Gourmet, same company that makes our pasta here. They came out with what is called a thinnable. Half the calorie cheese crackers. 12 grams of fiber, 60 calories, six carbs for protein. This is the sharp cheddar. Check this out you guys. You can have a serving of these thinnables, which is 30 crackers for 60 calories or I believe two smart points, which is insane for 30 crackers that are Cheez-It's for two smart points. So of course I had to pick up two packages and I also wanted to try the Italian for cheese. This one has 70 calories, but I believe that the smart points are going to be the same. And I like how they give you a breakdown here on the side. So let's take a look at this. So here's your breakdown between the fiber gourmet and the Cheez-It's. Look at the calorie, the fiber, look at the fiber difference alone. And then of course your net carb difference. So I am really excited to try these thinnables.  Again just nice to have some snacky foods on hand. So that is everything that I picked up from netrition.com. It is a fantastic website. I highly urge you to go and just check it out and see what they have available. Again free shipping with a $99 purchase. And of course you'll be seeing a lot of these items in my upcoming videos. So there you have it netrition.com haul. Thank you for joining me on this netrition.com haul. I hope that you enjoyed seeing all of the good stuff that I purchased. Also I'm super excited about all of my new finds and my oldies but goodies as well. So I urge you to check out netrition.com. It is a fabulous website with a wide variety of WW friendly items. So thank you again for watching. If you're new make sure you subscribe, hit the notification bell. That way YouTube will notify you every time that I upload a new video. Give this video a thumbs up, comment below. Let me know if you've tried any of the items that I showed you or if there are some items that you want to try from netrition.com. And I'll see you guys in my next video. Bye.


smoky outside I mean it's it's very cinematic so I don't want to complain too much she's got this vintage tea I got it from a girl a lot of people asked me it's just like American Thunder tea about to go hoop it's like my favorite t-shirt to hoop in I'm really weird when it comes to like apparel I wear when I play basketball all jokes aside this smoke is no joke and I'm running late so I'm with the all right so I just pulled up to the hoop session was in so much traffic the biggest dilemma in New York is do I pay $2 for a subway that can be 40 minutes or do I pay $25 for 20 minutes why not sometimes you just got a splurge for the convenience of peace of mind so for context I recently switched from being a developer evangelist to a developer advocate my primary focus has been the ownership of our dev phone the Tullio dev phone makes it a lot easier for you to test your Tullio applications especially when you don't have reliable or easy access to SMS and calling capabilities it uses Tullio products to send and receive calls in SMS from your local dev environment so essentially let's say you're doing a demo and you're using our API's show some sort of like communications application and let's say you don't have reliable service you can use a dev phone instead of your cell phone there's a few things that I've noticed since starting to program full-time again one imposter syndrome started to bubble up because I felt that I should have completed stories faster I've been relearning react after being someone experienced it was a challenge because I felt like there were a lot of concepts and react fundamentals like programming that I should have known also had to remind myself to be kind and I have grace and to just trust the process that over time I'll get into a rhythm so I bet you're wondering how AI fits into what I code in a day let me explain so we wanted to make our text input in our form for application to grow with the content inside of it and oddly enough HTML inputs don't like by default grow with the content inside of it which is just so weird considering that that will be such a common use case also notice that a lot of examples weren't very straightforward and the vanilla JavaScript examples don't directly correlate to react so honestly I figured why not just ask chat GBT it seems like a pretty easy question for AI to answer and it also would save me a lot of time which is something really viable as really the main person maintaining this code base at least the UI for the app so all I did was ask chat GBT how I can create a text input that grows dynamically and voila it responded with a solution in seconds with an explanation so I implemented chat GBT solution into a skeleton app to make sure a basic example would work then I implemented it into our app I didn't stop there my recommendation is after you get an answer from chat GBT or even like an answer you found on the internet is to try to figure out other ways of implementing it or just like simply watching a YouTube video and for me that was extremely helpful because I really wasn't sure what chat GBT was doing and I also want to make sure that I'm able to explain the code that I'm implementing and if it even makes sense using AI has saved me a significant amount of time which is one of its major benefits it allows me to be a more efficient programmer as a main person working on this product and working efficiently is crucial nonetheless this was really just a learning experience and we didn't even use a chat GBT answer as like our final solution we end up like removing our custom text input all together for the chat composer which is a component built inside our paste UI library framework that's really powerful and dynamic and gives us all the features we need and some so I figure why not come up here answer a couple questions in the ask me anything I posted on my Instagram story way too long so the first question is from underscore Nick Campos basically asking me how can I describe my journey in tech so my journey in tech I feel like was pretty traditional from like an educational standpoint majoring computer science graduated with computer science degree and got a full stack software development job as my first job but I feel like my path to where I am now went is like not very linear I meet a lot of people that jumped right into big tech jumped right into like a fan company and that just wasn't me or just jumped right into like some sort of tech company I joined a tech company but it was a small business to business tech company as a full stack dev then I realized I wanted to be a front-end dev and that they didn't have those type of job opportunities at that company so I transitioned to be a front-end web dev I really enjoyed it the problem was being a front-end web dev and digital marketing I was doing a lot of programming and just like kind of mundane work tedious work that didn't really help me elevate my skills as engineer so that's why I transitioned from that role to another role as a front-end software engineer and I really did enjoy that role it's just that I've always wanted to work for like a Silicon Valley based tech company and I also realized that my skill sets are beyond just being a programmer my passions go beyond being a programmer that's how I find out about developer evangelism and advocacy which is what I'm doing right now where I can make content and also do development next question is from Daniel LXES but what's your best tip for studying so I definitely wanted to answer this question because I think this is a really valuable for those of you all who are studying computer science software engineering or something technical my main tip is to not study on your own my first two years I remember I would study on my own I didn't have a study group and not only did I fail my first like course computer science course but I also really struggled and got really burnt out so my recommendation is to find a good group of peers especially peers who are smartening than you that you can learn from and that you guys can help each other especially when you're studying for exams one person studies this concept another person studies this other concept you come together at the end of the study session at the middle of the study session and talk about the things that you all learn or become kind of like a mini expert in and it also just makes learning so much more fun this question is from HGTP underscore DVNZT I can't pronounce any of these names I don't even know if they're pronounceable what keeps you motivated in general I was never the smartest person I was never the most talented I always felt like I had to work extremely hard to even be like a B to B plus student also growing up my mom worked so hard for us my mom had two jobs like most of my life so I just grew up seeing like hard work and for me like it goes beyond just being like motivated at this point it's just dedication one not only to my audience because I need to push out content for you guys because I wouldn't be here without you all and I like providing value but also dedication to myself and having something that I could say hey I was successful at this because I was consistent at it so really consistency and just dedication obviously like brand opportunities make me really inspired and really motivated but what gives you the most joy is like bumping into subscribers or people a part of my audience and person and them saying like hey I really enjoyed your content keep it up or someone in a comment section saying hey I sort of watch your videos X amount of years ago and I just landed a new job like that's what really motivates me because it's all about you and my dad also made sure that I could not be us and I cannot slack he made sure he pushed me academically and athletically and I'm forever grateful for him so it's really the combination of seeing my mom work multiple jobs you know my dad making sure I don't BS as a student athlete and then also understanding that I'm not the smartest person in the room I haven't ever been and I know I won't ever will be and that's really where the motivation comes from so that pretty much wraps up this video and getting out of my comfort zone and asking AI to help me with programming has really helped me like jump over that barrier of entry to getting more comfortable with using AI to help me become a more productive software engineer and obviously as like a content creator who also enjoys working on side projects I'm gonna be using AI a ton especially for those like edge like CSS use cases and at the end of the day I've been using it as a tool to help propel me to whatever finish line I'm looking to pass with that said that concludes this video I hope you guys enjoyed this video comment down below some ways you guys have been using AI be sure to give this video a thumbs up it helps out with the algorithm subscribe and hit the notification bell so you can know right away when I release videos I'll see you all soon peace


Hey everybody, Dr. O here. So how important is walking? Increasing physical activity by walking more is one of the foundations of my fat loss program for a reason because it works. I have failed you if you don't see that by the end of this course. You see there's lots of things that I recommend but walking is a big, big part of it. Intermittent fasting was the most powerful tool that I used to get into a calorie deficit. But walking and sleeping were the two biggest changes that I made early on in my weight loss journey. I will share a lot more about the link between walking and weight loss later. But there's a ton of evidence that supports the fact that walking is one of the most important things that you can do to live a healthy life. But can you walk your way to a longer life? Walking more will help you lose weight and live a better life but will it be a longer life? Are step counts linked to all cause mortality or dying for any reason? Let's dive in and take a look. So what does the science say here? Daily step count and all cause mortality. A dose response meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies, so a meta-analysis of study of studies. Seven studies, there were 28,141 total participants, 175,370 person years and there were 2,310 deaths during the time of this analysis. The researchers found that the rates of all cause mortality were about 12% lower for every extra 1,000 steps per day that people walked up to 17,000 steps. So if you increase your step count by 1,000 steps per day, your risk of dying of anything all cause mortality drops 12%. More than 17,000 steps per day is probably even better but there isn't much data to look at because most people don't walk that much. Who knows? 60,000 steps per day might make you immortal. I highly doubt it though, but at some point the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. We just can't walk 24 hours a day. But let's look at how powerful this is. Walking 16,000 steps per day was associated with a 66% reduction in all cause mortality compared to walking just 2,700 steps per day. So 2,700 steps a day isn't very many but it's not a lot less than the average American is walking. 16,000 steps definitely doable if you try hard. This means that you have a 200% higher rate of all cause mortality if you walk 2,700 steps per day compared to walking 16,000 steps per day. This is a massive deal. Let's compare it to a few things. Compare these findings to smoking. If you smoke, you have a 70-80% higher rate of all cause mortality. If you're obese, if you have a BMI of 40, which is morbid obesity or class 3 obesity, that's associated with a 74% greater all cause mortality risk compared to a BMI of 23. This means that you can make the argument that walking only 2,700 steps per day is more dangerous for you than smoking or living with obesity. It's difficult to overstate the importance of simply being on your feet and moving a lot, which is what we're here talking about. Do we really need to walk 10,000 steps per day? I just got done telling you that 16,000 to 17,000 steps per day might be optimal, but this might not be practical or even possible for you in the beginning. That's perfectly fine. Don't let these big numbers scare you. You can make a lot of progress with far fewer steps. Let me show you here. You see that the studies are plotted on these lines here. You have steps per day on the bottom and hazard ratio on the side. It is true that the death risk continues to drop with every step, but you can also see a point of diminishing returns. Most of the health improvements actually happen before we even reach that 10,000 steps. I think 10,000 steps is a fine goal for most people to shoot for, even though you could make an argument that more would be better. What are our key takeaways here? Walking is one of the most powerful tools you have if you want to live a long and healthy life. If you tell me that you want to live longer, one of the first things I'll tell you to do is to walk more or to sleep better. Those would be the two big ones for me as far as easy things to do. Easy being a relative term, I guess. What are our action steps? Begin by finding a way to walk an extra 3,000 steps per day. No matter where you're at now, try to increase it by 3,000 steps per day. Getting to 7,000 steps per day is where we see that change in our appetite. That's a really good early goal to shoot for. 10,000 steps per day is a great goal for most people. But if you want to aim for 16,000 steps or more, if you're trying to maximize weight loss and health improvements, this is the perfect time to start focusing on solutions. How are you going to get to 10,000 steps and beyond by becoming a neat freak? All the things we've been talking about in this course. All right. I hope this one helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.


Hello, I'm Andean Bowden, scientist, engineer, and member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Waste Confidence Directorate. Operating nuclear reactors generate waste, spent nuclear fuel. Waste confidence has historically been the NRC's generic determination regarding the safety and environmental impacts of storing spent nuclear fuel after the end of a reactor's licensed life and before it's permanently disposed, such as in a geologic repository. Many NRC licensing decisions rely upon waste confidence, including initial nuclear reactor licensing and license renewal. Waste confidence role was first published in 1984, and since then, the NRC has reviewed it to make sure it's up to date, and we have periodically updated the role. Last update was completed in 2010. The 2010 update was challenged in court, and the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that waste confidence did not satisfy the NRC's obligations with regard to the National Environmental Policy Act, and identified some deficiencies in the NRC's environmental review of waste confidence. In response to the court's ruling, the NRC is not issuing any final licenses that rely upon waste confidence until the court's issues are addressed. The NRC formed a special director to address the court's rule, update the waste confidence rule, and develop a generic environmental impact statement that analyzes the impacts of continued storage of spent nuclear fuel. We are completely focused on ensuring a robust technical analysis, keeping a transparent process, and providing ample opportunity for public involvement in which a broad range of views are heard and considered. The NRC's Waste Confidence Directorate is composed of about 20 staff from a variety of scientific and engineering backgrounds, including national environmental policy experts, rulemaking staff, administrative staff, project managers, communication experts, and legal counsel. Just a few weeks, the Waste Confidence Directorate will be issuing its draft generic environmental impact statement and proposed waste confidence rule for public comment. The public comment period will be 75 days in a row. During the comment period, the director will be holding 10 public meetings to discuss and accept public comments on the draft generic environmental impact statement and proposed rule. Two meetings will be held at the NRC headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. These meetings will be open for public attendance. Of course, they will also be nationally webcast on the NRC's website and will be accessible by telephone. The remaining eight public meetings will be held in New York, Massachusetts, Colorado, Minnesota, Southern California, Central California, Ohio, and North Carolina. The times, dates, locations, and registration information for all 10 meetings can be found on the NRC's website. We encourage participants to pre-register for public meetings. The best way to participate in the Waste Confidence Rulemaking is to review the draft generic environmental impact statement and proposed rule when they are published, and then tell us what you think about the documents by submitting your comments during the 75-day comment period. There are many ways you can submit comments by email, online at regulations.gov, by fax or by mail. The NRC will consider all comments equally, no matter how they are submitted. The NRC periodically sends out information and announcements by email to join the Waste Confidence email list. Just send a request to wcoutreach at nrc.gov. A great way to stay in touch with our activities is by checking out our website, which you can get to by going to www.nrc.gov, and clicking on the Waste Confidence Decision, which is on the left side of the page, just under spot. I'm Andy Mboden, the Branch Chief of the Communications, Planning, and Rulemaking Branch in the NRC's Waste Confidence Rule, and I look forward to your participation in the upcoming BRAF Generic Environmental Impact Statement and Proposed Rule Comment Period in the fall of 2013.


Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Santa Clarita. I'm Tanya Mulery and I'm the owner of Steamwork here in Santa Clarita. It's a community of entrepreneurs who have banded together, and WordPress plays an important role in our story. And so during the course of today, I want to talk to you about why WordPress, why have I been using WordPress for nine years to grow my business, how to find your first paying client with WordPress because I was hearing that a lot last night from some of the people I met at dinner, and then how to grow a WordPress business from that, and then how WordPress powers our community here in Santa Clarita at Steamwork. As Joe mentioned this morning, I met him at our public library because I was hosting WordPress Meetup which was handed down to me from another gentleman. He had moved to Las Vegas and I decided that this would be a great way to find people in the community that would be able to potentially become clients. That was one of the ideas, but also become resources to our growing agency and may want to get involved in our business community as we were starting to grow Steamwork. And just a little bit about me.  I was an investment banker, then I worked for MasterCard for ten years, pioneering lots of mobile commerce product development. So if you guys seen the Apple Card, so a lot of the infrastructure and tokenization of the card number was, that was part of my legacy, a MasterCard. And I moved out to Los Angeles twelve years ago to work for a startup and the timing was very interesting. It was the week that the iPhone came out and I had left this amazing job to move my family across the country for a VC funded startup, which lasted nine months right before the crash. And so what happens when all of your plans kind of fall out underneath you? Well, you try to figure out what are your skills and how do you put them to work? Now, at the time, I had no skills in this area. I had done product development and project management and IT, enterprise IT products. But I hadn't done that necessarily for local businesses, but I started to train myself. And my first client, somebody was saying yesterday that they got $200 for the first paid website. And I was like, oh, that's so sweet. How nice. I was so lucky because my friends were consultants and they gave me $9,000 to update their site. And I was like, wow, okay, that sounds like it could work. I'll figure that out for $9,000, right? And so that's when my freelance career began. And I started to, I think it was a .NET framework and I had to get in there and make changes to his site and figure it all out. And then I was like, there must be an easier way. So I started investigating the tools that were available at that time. I was looking at Joomla and Drupal in the very beginning stages. And then over time, I found WordPress and I fell in love. Why did I want to have a more, like instead of jumping back into corporate, why did I want to kind of go down this path? Well, I had, during my 10 years at MasterCard, I had three children. And my three boys now are teenagers, right? But at the time they were two, four and six. And I had just moved my entire family across the country to have a better work-life balance. And I was determined that I would have it. So I definitely poured my heart into learning this and mastering it as best as I could. Over the course of time, though, I've also supplemented my WordPress business with being a startup advisor and marketing resource. So I'm into growth marketing, growth hacking, if you've heard those terms. And I also teach digital marketing and app design at USC for the last seven years. So that's a little bit about me. By the end of this session, my goal is that you guys get to tap into your superpowers and figure out how your background can actually help you grow your agency, right? So do you feel like you have superpowers now that you know a little bit more about WordPress? Or does that sound like we have a long way to go today? We have a long way to go? I'm telling you that WordPress is a superpower, but also combined with your natural background in superpower, you have way more credibility than you're probably yielding today. Wielding, sorry, yielding. Wielding today. My kingdom for a dongle. I love it. That is a professional pack, I have to say. I found it like that. Excellent. You never know when you're going to need a weird new adapter. Right. I know. I usually travel with my, I'm going to just pack an HDMI everywhere I go. So nine years ago, I left a secondary corporate job I had at a digital marketing agency and the Omnicom family to start my own company. And that was the birth of what is now called Steamwork. And our anniversary is the 14th of April, so I'm like literally on the cusp of that. And we built dozens of WordPress sites for small businesses, big businesses, nonprofits, schools, and startups, literally everybody who has any type of commercial, a facing organization needs a website and WordPress is an excellent choice for that. And then I told you a little bit about Steamwork. So why WordPress? And these are, this is where I wish you could see these beautiful slides. But I think that WordPress provides a tremendous value for clients. First of all, with the plethora of creative themes, and if you're a designer, forgive me, but I do love relying on a theme when the budget is important, that it's so customizable, powerful, flexible and functional with its super SEO and it's easy to find support. I think one of the things that I don't love about the ethics of our industry is when developers or WordPress shops are trying to lock down the site so much that the end-user customer doesn't have control over their sites. I find that to be really a challenging ethical dilemma because really it's an asset for the business. And for my philosophy, respecting the rights of the client is always paramount. And so the freedom that WordPress can give to that client is that if they are working with somebody that's not great, they can go and find someone much more easily who can better support them and work within the ethical framework that is needed to rescue a project, right? So how many of you have worked on rescues before? Oh, yeah, right. So being that good actor and a see if maybe not so great actors can be a really good positioning because people do need help and support. People do disappear. And oh, man, I have... We could talk at Draconum later about all those stories. The other thing is just WordPress is super easy to pitch to clients. They've heard of it, right? Which is always a win that doesn't sound foreign to them. And it powers 30% of the internet. Everybody needs it. And most websites are kind of crap, right? So they lack focus. They're designed badly. They have no objective. They don't work well on mobile devices. So you can kind of spot a bad website easily and then be able to pitch a better option to them. And the thing is, especially when you're starting, it's important to remember that just because you think WordPress is easy doesn't mean your clients do. They are still completely overwhelmed with the technology. And you are the expert. You can position yourself as very valuable to this business. You can be their hand holder. And I like to call it the website whisperer, right? Because what you do is magical to them. They have no idea how it's happening behind the scenes. But you also have an obligation to treat that power with wisely. Okay, here we go. Yes. The other thing is WordPress is extra profit for you. If you are coding all these websites from scratch... Okay, I hope to strike that from the transcription. There was a naughty word. Okay, so you can get more done faster. You can get paid not only to design and develop it, but to maintain it, which if you're not doing maintenance contracts then you're leaving money on the table. You can get paid to build continuous content and to have a content factory on your agency. And you can also get paid for custom enhancements. Your customers can stay with you for multiple years. Always upgrading, always enhancing, staying on maintenance, needing more content all the time. You can become a trusted advisor and then get paid to do other projects, get involved with their marketing, get involved with their strategy, get involved with their advertising. But it kind of started with that get the foot in the door WordPress project. Is this reasoning for you guys? Do you do some of this too? This guy is like, I could give this talk. Let's go chat. Okay, so the last thing I would say in the why WordPress category is kiss.  And not the band, right? I like to say keep it simple smarty because I don't like calling people names, but that's okay. But keep it simple smarty. Don't be greedy. You're like your long budget crammed into one project. You'll overwhelm them. You'll lose the contract. Get paid quicker by doing the basics first. So in startup land, you have the concept of minimum viable product. Have you guys heard this term before? It's called MVP. M is in Mary P as in Victor P as in Peter. Minimal viable product. So get something simple done for them and talk about phase two, phase three, phase four, because it helps them understand that you're not trying to take advantage of them, that you're trying to get the important things taken care of first and that you can always make enhancements and work and grow with their business. It offloads a lot of the risk upfront from this project and this relationship, and it gives you a steadier pace for work as well as a steadier pace for income, right? So I think the temptation is, well, let me get the big, big projects upfront, but that's not necessarily the way to maximize your income. Okay. Ta-da. So based on how to find your first paying WordPress client yesterday, conversation, update your sales marketing and delivery. So first of all, you should have a good WordPress website at a minimum, right? Because people will check you out.  So if yours isn't working, if the links are broken, if the content's outdated, if your picture looks nothing like you today and you've got some things to update. So I would really make sure that you spend a little time on that and book out some time in your calendar on a regular basis to keep that up to date. And have the content flowing regularly. Website must haves. Oh, this is fun. This is good content right here, this blue screen. You can't get that anywhere else, guys. All right. Website must haves. You should have case studies, client results, right? How have you improved your clients' businesses? And testimonials. What do your clients say about you? Have they left reviews anywhere? Have you asked them for testimonials? Have you asked them to give you feedback on your project? Even if they wrote you a letter saying, oh, thank you so much. Our new website is great. Ask, hey, do you mind if I put that on my website and put a picture of your site and a link back to you? And that way we keep promoting each other and we keep supporting each other. So the deeper you make those links, the better off you'll be in developing your community of customers that can help advertise your business. If you've gotten good press, awards, or other trust marks, like maybe you've done an article in the Huffington Post or something like that, well, make sure you keep adding content to your site. If you have been named entrepreneur of the year, I can't remember what the name of the award was. I won a couple years ago. And now I'm thinking, that's not on my site. What's wrong with me? You should have that kind of stuff on your site because that enhances people's trust and that you're good at what you do, but also a good person. You've been recognized by people they trust. The other thing I would recommend is talk a little bit about the process. What should they expect when they go to work with you? How does your process work? Do you have a discovery session with them? Do you then go into a design phase? Do you then go into a development phase? Talk about the phases of your project. One thing I found is that people who are, especially people around the technical side of WordPress, they tend to overwhelm clients with the technical steps. And I would encourage you to not use jargon and not confuse them. If you're working with local businesses, particularly, and you throw a wireframe at them, they literally have no idea what that is. And they're like, why are you giving me boxes? This is not a website. I want a website. And so it takes a lot of education. But if you show them pictures of here's what I'm going to do first. Here's what I'm going to do second. Here's what I'm going to do third. This is what it means. This is the feedback I expect from you. At each of the stages of the process, the clarity of your communication will make them feel comfortable and they won't feel surprised or under duress. So I was working with one of our local WordPress resources here in town, and we were working with a local cake shop. And this woman is fabulous. She's been in business for 40 years. Unbelievable, right? A business success story. And we were really excited to do this website for her, for her anniversary, and she's been through a few different prospective firms to work with. And she finally was like, I feel really comfortable with you guys. But she gets overwhelmed when you present something that's just too much for her, or you ask her for too much content at the same time or too many pictures, or present something that's unfamiliar that she's just not able to process it. In the scheme of all the other things that she has to get done in her business. And so being really careful with how you dose out the updates and the content requests makes a big difference. And also make sure they can contact you. That should be on your website. I know that seems really like a dumb thing to say, but such a big mistake I see people make is if they cannot get to you, if you have no phone number, email, or web form, people can't figure it out, they move on. They go to the next person they find in their Google listings, right? So make sure they can contact you. So those items are trust builders and knowledge builders. And they are laid out on the slide very nicely. Okay, glad I did this. And thank you so much for helping to try to figure this out. I appreciate all the work you're doing while we're doing this. Okay, so the other thing is getting good at selling. Everybody hates the word sales, right? Okay, raise your hands.  Just a minute. I know it's true.   What if you used a different word? What if you just said that sales is service? You're just telling people how you can serve them. And seeing if there's a match. What if you actually changed it to this whole idea of servant, servant leadership or service to the client. And all you're doing is putting out a menu like a restaurant. And you're saying, here's how I can help you. I'm going to help showcase your expertise, products and services. I'm going to connect you to more customers. I'm going to help you deliver content. I'm going to get you found. I'm going to be your sales and marketing 24-7. And by the way, it's all going to work automatically. You don't have to keep paying me like you would pay a salesperson. That you would have to give a salary. And our maintenance contract is the fraction of the salary. Oh, oh, oh. So this thing is going to keep serving me all day and night 24-7, 365. Well, that sounds good to me, right? Doesn't it change the conversation when you stop thinking about, well, I just need the money. And I need, they have the money. So I need the money. So let's talk. It has nothing to do with the money. It has to do with the value you're delivering to the business and how their customers are going to find them and become deeper, longer-lasting fixtures in their business. So let's get good at service, not sales, right? Let's express our value in a different way. Okay. The next thing is to make sure in the process, it isn't about, like I said, selling. It's about asking questions. Good questions to ask is, what's a good client worth for you? Why? Because you can really get a lot of information about what their budget for their website might be. Okay. And here's why. What if they are an oncologist and a good client is worth, you know, $50,000 a year to them? I don't know what that number is, right? I actually haven't done an oncology site, but I'm just pulling something out of the air. More. More? Okay. Here you go. How much is a good website worth to an oncologist to get one more client? I'm a cancer patient and I know as a cancer patient you're worth at least $800,000 during your lifetime. Okay. So should they pay more than $2,000 for a website? Yeah. Very good. Okay. Good answer. Good answer. Now we're talking. How about a lawyer? What's, I don't know, a general litigator. What's a good client worth to a litigator? Not much as they could get, right? Do you think that a lawyer should pay, you know, at least a fraction of one good client? What if they got one more good client this year because they improved their website? At least. At least. Okay. So what if it's a different type of price? Like it's a restaurant, a burger shop or a restaurant. Now they are very dependent on having a steady flow of traffic, right? They need really good search optimization. They need really good access to their menu, maybe some ordering. It could be more complicated. What's a good day or a good week worth to a restaurant? What if they didn't have that good day or didn't have that good week? What happens to restaurants when they don't get the traffic? We've all seen, now in Santa Clarita, we have a foodies group on Facebook, and restaurants go out of business literally every week, right? So a restaurant is really dependent on having excellent marketing from day one, get butts and seeds, get people in the door. They need high throughput of those tickets to get through. So what's a good client worth to you is a really important way of getting to the value and stacking the value story for the client. It's like, what if you could use this, right? And it was attracting more clients to you. What if it got you one, two, three more big clients? What if it got you ten more good days in a year? What does that mean to you? And that's a way of getting out of the lowest price bid conversation and into the, this is how it's going to help your business conversation. What's the main job this website needs to accomplish for your business, especially going back to that MVP conversation? A website, especially when you're doing the first project, needs to go to one single focus. What is the outcome you want? And then the other things can be added in, but the singular drive to the end focus, is it getting a lead? Is it selling product? Is it getting to the point where they're making an appointment, right? Have one singular objective in that website. That is the primary focus. Get that chunk done first and then add other things to it so that you really get them to admit that upfront is super important. And if they get that, you actually help them prioritize that way. You've just added tremendous value to their business. And then also ask what they like or dislike about their current site. Many do have a website and many do have a bad website. So you can see what they've had and what worked and what didn't work. And then also inspiration sites, like sites in their industry or sites at businesses they've noticed that they really like the design of or they really like the functionality of. And always be listening. Objections are good. Objections in the sales process means they're engaged. It means that they're still deciding that they haven't said no yet in their mind. Objections mean that they're sorting through their own priorities and there's something else bothering them. So ask about the real concern behind the objection. If it's a time objection, what is it about the timeline that is still bothering you? What is it about the price that's still bothering you? What is it about the content limits that maybe somebody else was putting on you that you find objectionable? How can we figure out a way around that? And if you can get through their objections, you have the business. If you care about understanding and addressing the client's need more than you care about making a huge, like maximizing the first sale, you are going to have this business. Then you can agree on a scope, price and timeline for that first phase that works for everybody. Ta-da! Yay, my fonts are not right. It's okay, it's good, it's good. Look how beautiful they were, okay. Yay! Okay, so protect your scope. Scope creep is like my number one enemy in WordPress projects, right? Because people have ideas every day, because it takes time to build a site. And so really explaining to the client upfront the clarity of what's in the scope of this first project and what is not is super important to define up front and having a process for adding scope, which, you know, in enterprise software land, scope creep is the big term, right? You have to have a firm sense of what's in scope, what's out of scope, what's an additional project or an additional piece of scope. And then you write up another little sheet and say we're adding the scope, we have much money, you get them to sign off, because if you just keep adding things and try to build them at the end, chaos, chaos and terror, it's a rain of fire. I don't advise that.  You just don't want to be involved in that. You have to really, even if it seems like it's an emergency, even if it seems like it's the last thing, you have to be in control of this client relationship and explain how this can work.  And always be testing. Now, this goes for your own site. Always be testing your own site, but also their site because one thing that goes wrong as you're going to launch it and suddenly you lost all credibility, you just work super hard, so make sure that you have a good testing process at the end. Frustrated clients talk to other pretend clients. Always be good when somebody's talking about them online, congratulate them or warn them, hey, you've got a bad review, how can we address that? Let's talk about reputation management. Let's see if there's another service we can help you with and proactively respond. And the other piece of always be good when that's kind of fun is once I was referred to the retirees group for Lockheed Martin called the Stardusters. And this was super fun. It was, you know, a board of a dozen retirees, average age 70, but all engineers, can you imagine, right? The amount of detail, questions they had for me. And we're sitting around in a board-style table and I'm explaining WordPress to them, which, you know, this is not rocket science, but it is, you know, something that it takes a little bit to explain. And one guy's on his computer the whole time and he's typing and typing and I'm wondering, like, what's up with this guy? He seems so disengaged, but everybody else is asking awesome questions. And about halfway through the meeting, he goes, wow, I'm on page 10 and I haven't found anything bad about you yet. So he was live searching for me and my company name while I was interviewing with them. And that is the world we live in now. I did get the job. So they've been clients for several years now. Now their average age is 75 and we're still doing enhancements for them. They have a massive membership site and it's using Woo, commerce and Woo member. So it's just, it's really important that you keep your online reputation clean and make your proposals simple. How many of you spend a lot of time on proposals, like massive 15 page documents?  Where do they go? The price. They don't care about all that stuff you wrote. They really, really don't. So we're really overdoing it. I would say have a, you know, what to expect document and have a good contract, a good agreement, but all of that work to do fancy, beautiful proposals, simplify and streamline as much as possible because they just don't care.  I promise you. And you're going to be terrified the first time you send out a streamlined proposal. But when you win it, and when they appreciate the clarity with which you delivered it, you're going to thank me later. And you can, you know, tweet at me or something and say, that works. I can't believe it. So stick to the basics. Customize a bit to the client's brand and needs. Keep it short and sweet. And don't keep a hot lead waiting because you don't have time to produce a 20 page proposal. I promise you they're going to appreciate your clarity and your speed. Okay. Now, the other thing that I see as a mistake for people building is they spend a lot of time on consulting and educating. And that has value. If you offer to sit in a half a day meeting with a client to discover their needs and to come up with a requirements document for them, that has value. And you're going to be like, ooh, I don't know if I can charge for that time. And I'm telling you, they will pay for it if you position it the right way. If you say, listen, this is the goal of this time where I'm going to produce a document for you that you can then take and shop out to anybody that you want, but you'll also find out how it is to work together. Whoa. You just relieved all pressure and you might have gotten four or five hundred dollars for building that initial requirements document with them and meeting their team and getting to know them versus wasting your whole day and wondering if they're ever going to buy a project from you. And I hope that changes your lives a little bit because this discovery scope could be the way of actually winning more clients in the long run. They will appreciate that you didn't pay them, that you didn't ask them to pay for the full site before knowing how it is to work with you and before knowing what they needed and you'll improve your cash flow and your time management. Keep your terms simple. Now, some projects are small and some projects are large. I really have a hard time doing projects without a deposit. I would not do that. And, you know, having milestones is great in a larger project and really being clear about this is when the payments happen. Now, for some sites and for some businesses, it doesn't even make sense to have milestone projects. They don't understand what a milestone is. They just don't get that. And so sometimes I do it based on time and I'll say 50% now and 50% on this timeline and this date. And that is because managing their response to you is on them to be responsive, right? And so it's a tricky subject, but I have had a completion payment two months before they actually finished approving our content and that is just how we set it up at the beginning of the project and it's fair because they know that they're not responsive, right? So that's just a suggestion, but definitely make sure you get a good deposit upfront. You don't want to be doing a lot of work without knowing that they're going to pay you. If you're a theme-oriented person like I am and I have a friend that is vehemently anti-theme, so you might be in that camp too, but I love a good theme. I do not like, you know, I used to spend, you know, a couple hours going out and searching for the best theme and what makes most sense for this business and I could just really get wound up in this. And now I use one to three themes that we've used repeatedly and I just show different, you know, versions of them to see what the customer likes if they haven't already given me an inspiration site. But I do really like for them to give me sites that they like and features that they admire and layouts that they think are really great so that I understand their taste, their aesthetic, and that makes it a lot easier to give them something they love. Make sure you get that design direction approved. Lay out one page for them and say, do you like it? Versus... Oh my gosh. Getting the whole site done in one design and then suddenly, gosh, you know, they hate it. They need everything changed, right? And how do you keep communication flowing with a client?  I'm, you know, I'm committing to you. I'm going to use plain English as I describe things to you. We're going to have a good conversation. It's not going to be too techy because some clients are super afraid and they will really appreciate that. And then, three minutes? Is that what it is? Okay. Or does that mean that's a three out of five from the Russian judge? I don't know what's happening. Okay. All right. And help them understand what to look for in this stage you need. So growing the business from freelancer to agency, like if you're one person, you're doing everything, you're getting burned out, you're still on vacation, it's feast or famine, if you can't sell fast enough and deliver fast enough, as you start to grow, you may be able to take on more clients, six to 12 clients and get a more consistent workflow going. You start to specialize your resources and build teams around design, developing, account management, content creation. It gets to be a little bit easier but making that leap from to beyond. Now, the good thing is that you can find a lot of freelancers that are willing to work with you on a project basis and I recommend before you jump into all these full-time resources to have a more elastic staffing model and to find some really trustworthy freelancers who want to get business from you on a regular basis and tell people what to do. What you do. Always be sharing what you do and how you do it on client projects. Not just when it's slow because that's the tendency is like, oh, I don't have any projects next month I better start telling people what I do but always, right? Always have that as a steady drumbeat of your business.  We didn't get to steam work but you can ask me questions about that. Here's one of my best strategies. The ugly Betty strategy.   It's time. Okay, it's the last one.  They need you, right? Okay. I can put on my glasses and get braces, okay. So, that's one of the best strategies. I guess we'll open it up for questions and you can ask me like anything else that can go over other specialties here and tell you more about steam work. Whoops, the end. Do you need your website? Can you get your PowerPoint? Maybe, yeah, we can figure that out. I think they have it now. You want to ask a question? Sure. Yeah, for sure. We can do that. Yes. You know, how long did it take me? Well, as long as it took me to realize I didn't want to do everything by myself so I started to find a good crew of many given time four or five freelancers that I could rely on to be consistent in delivering a product. So I decided to do that early. I've been working with some of them like six or seven years at least and referred them on to other clients and everything too so that they got that steady work going too because as an owner of an agency you really do feel responsible if you can't supply them with enough work then you feel kind of guilty that you are not keeping them going but we have a lot of good people in our network now that we do some work too pretty regularly. So right now I'm not actively running a hardcore big WordPress agency. My business has shifted a lot but we still do WordPress and support our existing clients. Okay. So the goal of that phase is the requirements document that just gives you a detailed scope of what is going to be in the project and then estimates associated with it. So it's in a way it's helping them decide what a project should cost and how to communicate a good formed project to anybody else. So that document and they could say, okay great now that we flush this out give me three bids but most of the time they won't want to because they like working with you already. Does that make sense? So on a bigger project I think it's a super valuable way of if they're like well we're not ready we're not ready we don't know what we want to say well great why don't we do 500,000, 2,000 whatever the number is relative to what you think some projects could be 20, 25 it just depends on like how complex the business is do like a 10% project up front to get to that scope. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Oh yes. You were talking about design besides the client life. Yes. How do you balance that with if you determine that what's there? That's an awesome question and to show insight in the questions up front with the client to talk about the segments that they serve is really important, right? So especially the older woman who may not even know what websites are down you might know what features and what mounted feature are on it. Right.  Well probably because she's talked to thousands of 30 year old brides but does she know what that looks like from a web perspective? Right. So it's I have a phrase in my contract that I actually borrowed from another friend of mine who runs WordPress shop too and it was we reserve the right in our professional opinion to push back on you when we believe that you're you know making the wrong decision like we want to have that healthy dialogue or to get to the best outcome for you and to serve your clients. Does that make sense? I really do have that built into my agreement because I want to set that expectation up front that we know what we're doing we know you know what you're doing you make amazing cakes full stop like we honor and cherish that right but we know what we're doing because we've built you know hundreds of sites and we know what the trends are we know what works we want to make sure that we're doing the best job for you just like you know more about buttercream than I do we know more about WordPress than you do right so I do build that into it's an interesting perspective and maybe not something everybody's been comfortable or thought about before but when I saw that clause I was like that is getting adapted for my use because it's awesome okay that's it and that's it okay Russian judge says time to go this was maybe the weirdest talk ever but thank you for your attention and good questions


2023 may have been the hottest year on record. The global average temperature reached almost 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The climate crisis is becoming more and more tangible. It is forcing changes to the economy and the financial system, and therefore also for the ECB as the central bank for the euro. We just published our new Climate and Nature Plan for the next two years, and this is what we will discuss today. You're listening to the ECB podcast, bringing you insights into the world of economics and central banking. My name is Stefania Secola. I'm joined today by Irene Hemskeck, who's leading the Climate Change Center here at ECB since its creation in 2021. Welcome, Irene, and thanks for joining us today on the podcast. Thanks so much, Stefania. I'm happy to be here today and talk to you about the very urgent topic of the climate crisis and what it means to work for us at the ECB. Let's start from the beginning. The ECB's first climate action plan was one of the results of the big monetary policy strategy review that was concluded in July 2021. It was a big step forward. The first time we defined what we, as a central bank, can do to help tackle the climate crisis when it comes to monetary policy. There was, of course, a lot to do and a lot of work going on in other areas, in banking supervision and financial stability, for example. So in 2022, we compiled all our climate-related activities in the ECB climate agenda. Now, the time for a first review has come. Irene, what has changed over the last two years? Thanks so much for this question, and I think it's an important one. The first climate action plan that came out of the monetary policy strategy review was published in July 2021. It contained a long list of climate actions that we were planning to take on what are we doing with our corporate bond holdings, what are we doing with our macroeconomic projections, are we improving our statistical indicators to also have the data from climate change. And I can tell you today, we delivered at all fronts. So we have committed and we have delivered. Not only on our monetary policy operations or monetary policy actions, but also the reference you made to banking supervision, to financial stability, to also, we also did an assessment what is the impact of the bank notes that we use in our daily lives. So at ECB, we have taken action at all fronts and we just need to continue to do this. All these activities have shown all they come to the conclusion that we better take action now and invest in a transition, then leave climate change unabated because the cost will be much higher if we don't do anything and have the climate heating and the planet heating and face the consequences of that. So taking actions at all fronts, it doesn't mean that we're there. And I think we also have to be modest there. We have set steps and I think important ones, but we're definitely not there yet. So over the past half year, together with all the colleagues involved at ECB and the team, the climate change center team, we did a big exercise. We took stock of everything that we had been doing and we also looked into, okay, but what is it that we need to do next? And we didn't only look inside the organization, of course, we also looked into, okay, what are NGOs telling us to do? What is the agenda of politicians? What is, what are scientists telling us? What are academics telling us? So we really had a big stock take and also what are other international bodies doing, like the G20, G7, how are they approaching the topic? So we compiled all this information and we looked into, okay, what does it mean to us and where should we really be focusing on? So this is what resulted in the climate and nature plan that we just presented. We need to focus on a few areas where we see that really need more work. And that is how do we navigate through this transition? First, secondly, what are the physical impacts of climate change and how can we take that into account? And thirdly, and that's a new, very new topic on the agenda, that's how are we dealing with nature-related risks? And indeed, as you said, it looks like the climate crisis has become much more tangible. So you mentioned it, we see more heatwaves, floods and other extreme events are more and more frequent and devastating everywhere, also here in Europe. So what is the impact on the economy and the financial system? Yes, so I think in the introduction you mentioned, we're facing already 1.5 degrees global warming. This is basically part of the Paris Climate Agreement that we were trying to limit global warming to two degrees and put efforts to limit to 1.5 degrees by 2050. Today, we're 2024 and we're already facing these impacts. So this really affects the economy. So you can think of the wildfires in Greece. We have seen this will affect tourism. The low levels in the Panama Channel is a big traffic jam of ships, container ships there. This of course will also affect supply change of bringing the goods around the world. And thirdly, there is an impact of government expenses to deal with this. So it is key for us as a central bank to see how these kind of events affect the economy and also the financial system. So for example, we have been looking into what is the impact of food prices on inflation. So we looked at the heat in 2022 and we found out that it already contributed to 0.8 percent point to food price inflations in the Euro area one year after. Another example I want to give, if you think about the, I don't know if you remember it, but there were heavy floods in Slovenia in August in 2023, just a few days of heavy floods. The damage that has been calculated is comparable to around 5 percent of Slovenia's GDP. Just washed away in a few days time. This means that governments have to deal. And I'm just giving this as one example because Slovenia is of course not the only country facing these kind of extreme weather events. And then thirdly, the financial risk. So imagine houses in Europe that are in areas that are threatened by floods or wildfires. The value of these houses would go down, right? If you would buy a house nowadays in an area that is threatened by flood or wildfire, either you would negotiate the price to go down or maybe you would not even consider to buy it. Imagine a bank that has a mortgage based on that house and imagine the bank has a lot of mortgages in areas that are to houses in areas that are threatened by these kinds of events. This will cause financial risk for the banks that are invested in those areas. So there I think you see the impacts of the physical risk on the balance sheet of governments. You see it on the supply change of the economy. How do we really get our economy going and also on the financial risks for banks? Absolutely. And how does our climate and nature plan address this? And what can we at the ECB do about it? Well, a lot of the things that we do is of course finding out how does this really impact our work. I sometimes have the feeling that we're just scratching the surface because so many things are happening and there's so many transmission channels that are affecting us in many ways. But of course, we're going to see, we identified a few areas there where we're going to concretely work on. So we will expand our work on the impact of extreme weather on inflation. We're also looking into ways how we can improve the climate scenarios and our macroeconomic projections just to take this better into account. Another element is there, how can we make sure that we enhance the data to really support those analysis? So we probably have to work with other data to make sure that we know this. And lastly, and this is a very important point for me because we also have to look into the measures that are needed to adapt our lives and our economies to a hotter road with more extreme weather. How high are we building our coastal protections? How much will it cost? Who will pay for that? And of course, specifically, how will this impact our work? So we will be exploring more and more the topic on adaptation and resilience. And of course, this is essential for us at the ECB to know, but I think with publishing these kind of results and analysis, it will also inform policymakers, it will inform financial institutions, it will inform maybe listeners to this podcast about the impact of climate change that we are already experiencing and where we see it happening. Yeah, absolutely. And this is so important. And our plan also focuses on the green transition. We hear from many experts, and you mentioned it too, that the transition is already off track. So what can we do here? Yeah, that's a good point. And what I said at the ECB, we really try to do everything we can, but if we talk about green transition, of course, governments have the best tools in hand to make sure and guide our pathway. This is the economy we want to build. This is the way we should do. These are economic activities that we are going to phase out or not, and these are the subsidies we provide. So of course, the first and primary responsibility sits with them. But President Lagarde always makes this really, or she has done so in a few interventions, made a really nice comparison. We're all in the bus. We're all in the same bus. So governments are the drivers of the bus, but we're in it as well. It is up from now till the end of 2013. So only six years that we can meaningfully do something to bend the curve from the three degree scenario or hotter world scenario we're on now to bend it lower and bend it along the Paris Agreement. I think we're really in the last phase. There are last few years that we can meaningfully do something about this. Yeah, absolutely. So that's also why we identified as one of the focus areas for the new climate and nature plan, navigating the transition. So we identified a few actions that we're going to take. First of all, what are really the structural implications of such a transition? And then you can think of labor markets, so jobs will change. So how do we make sure that the labor markets are in good shape? What are, how are we going to meet the new supply demands? What kind of resources do we need for this transition? What kind of other structural changes in the whole value change, meaning from building something from scratch to the product that it's finally you can find in the supermarket? How will that work? So all these structural changes, this is something we're going to look much deeper into. So really the economic analysis on that. Another aspect, how are we going to finance this transition? Yes. So the European Commission estimated that it will require investment of around 1.25 trillion euros on average each year from now to 2030. And that is a lot of money. But where is this money coming from? It's not only the public finance, the governments who can pay for that. It's not only the private finance. And so how can we make sure that this finance is being unlocked? What are the barriers there? And how can we make sure that happens? So we're going to investigate deeper in like, what is the investment gap and what is the money coming from there? Sounds like everybody has to do really something in this. It's a huge, huge undertaking. So everybody's needed for this. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And we really have to look jointly together. Okay, what is the economy we want to build? And how are we going to build in what are the trajectories that we're going to invest in, make it happen and look for the opportunities and change a bit of mindset of we've been doing this for forever, let's change it. Okay, maybe we can do it another way. And that is as efficient. And what you already see is that the investments in the renewable energy and also the production of renewable energy is rising faster than expected. So there are luckily enough very good examples and promising developments at this point in time. And the last point I want to make on this is also like, and that's a bit what I refer to, like we're also in the bus. So, of course, we have to take into account the risks and the effects and we have to analyze it. But we also look into within our mandate, what can we contribute to the transition? So what we'll do is we'll also look further into what kind of considerations can we do in our monetary policy management instruments. We already implemented the tilting of our corporate bond holdings. So that means that we're investing more in corporates that have a better climate score to have a better in the transition to a net zero. We committed ourselves to review if there are elements to do, if we can do something about it. But here, what you said, we all have to do something at this front. Yeah, yeah. And you just mentioned monetary policy in this context. In fact, some have criticized DCB for keeping rates high, which makes green investment more expensive. What is your reply to this? I've read this, of course, but first I want to say that price stability is the best contribution that we can make to foster the green transition. So if we have prices stable and we keep inflation low, this is also very important prerequisite for any investments people make or the economy needs. But having said that, if there is a reason for us to reconsider any action that we can take, we'll do it. We have it in the plan. If we have anything that we see that we can do, which fits our monetary policy mandate, that that the data is available, that everything is there, we can reconsider at that point. Thank you. Thank you. And looking forward to see how this develops. Finally, something that caught my eye in the new plan is the addition of the word nature in the title. We recently spoke to executive board member and supervisory board vice chair, Frank Alderson, on what biodiversity and nature loss mean for the economy, banks, and therefore also for us as a central bank. And dear listeners, we'll add the link to that episode in the show notes for you. So how is nature reflected in the new plan? So nature is quite prominently reflected. So it's one of the focus areas of the new plan. So we see it really as an emergent topic that we just need to explore further. The top podcast you refer to already, I think, sets out really well on why it is important. But let me put something here or add something to this conversation here. We did some initial work on it at the climate change center at ECB. We looked into what is the dependencies of our economy on 4.2 million companies in Europe on ecosystem services like water, like land, like pollution or fresh air. And we found that over 70 percent of companies in Europe are highly dependent on one of these ecosystem services. At the same time, we know that the ecosystem serves so nature is degrading massively. So if you look at it, we just need to know more what is really the impact and how does it translate to inflation? How does it translate to financial risk? And here I also want to mention that at the supervisory side of the ECB, we've been looking into climate and environmental risks already for for a few years. Yes. So there also what are the financial risks that banks have from environmental degradation? Therefore, we included in the plan very prominently as one of the three focus areas that we're going to further explore what does the nature degradation means for inflation, financial stability and also for financial risks for banks. Thank you. Thank you so much for being our guest today. It seems to me that the key message here is it is urgent to take actions for all. I mean, there is not one actor that can say, OK, I've done my bit and here I stay. Irene, as you might know, I like to close our episodes by asking our guests for a hot tip. What do you have today for us? Yes, this is a great question and I have one tip and that is talk to strangers. And that's basically why I come up with this tip is because to fix the climate crisis, we all hold a piece of the puzzle and we need to work together and we need to look beyond the bubble that we are operating in and learn from each other where the opportunities and challenges lie. So what I've done since over a year now, every month, I try to talk to someone that I would not usually have encounters with, but I'm just curious to know what is it that you're facing on the green transition or the nature crisis that we're facing and how are you going to deal with it? And to give you a few examples, we had a great conversation with climate scientists. So Andrea, the climate scientist in the climate change center, we group together climate scientists and we ask like, what should keep us awake at night? Well, tipping points, like what is it that if the ice sheets melt and the sea level really rises or these compound effects, you have a drought and you have other complications there. So that really gave me insight. OK, these are areas that we need to focus on and the physical risk focus areas really also coming from that talk, right? But it doesn't it isn't always like just science. I also talk to the bakery around the corner, right? How are you facing the energy transition with your high energy bills and the food prices that you're facing? And he told me that he just bought this electric fan to do these deliveries and really saw the impact of the food prices already with the with the bread he's selling. So also like these things. And this month I'm going to visit the Port of Rotterdam to talk together with executive board member Frank Alderson to talk to some companies. How do you finance the transition? What are the hurdles you're facing there and what are the challenges and also the regulatory barriers you'll be facing? And this is just so important to get insight because we need to move so much more to action and we can't do it alone. So we need to learn from each other and get out of this bubble, talk to people, learn from them, get inspired and find solutions together. Thank you. And action starts from being curious. Don't hide that there is a problem and actually ask everybody around you how do they leave this? Thank you so much. Really, really interesting hot tip. This brings us to the end of this episode. I want to thank Irene Hemsgeck, head of the ECB's Climate Change Center for joining our conversation today. Thank you. Dear listeners, check out the show notes for more on this topic and you've been listening to the ECB podcast with Stefania Seicola. If you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. In the spirit of Europe, I'd like to end in Croatian and say, Dovigenia. Until next time, thanks for listening.


Hello and welcome to yet another episode of Maybe Nicolo is not that useless after all. Today we are going to talk about a merge request that I'm currently working on for plasma frameworks. Now, as always, this is not actually merged yet. I think it should be. I don't think why it should be pulled back. However, it is not finished. It could change. It could be discussed further from the visual design group. It is not final yet. I do think that there is important stuff to talk about. And well, funnily enough, it is mostly about the corners back yet again. But through that, I actually wanted to make the corners more rounded. And there's also now an outline. So let's go through that very quickly. Now, if you don't know what the corners back is for the plasma panels and for the plasma dialogues, then you should totally watch my previous video on the corners back where I talk about how about how I fixed it, because at the end, I also talk about the fact that there is an issue with it. And that is from the very latest version of plasma currently, people, especially with a dark panel, it's particularly noticeable, have a one pixel outline around the panel where they can see the wallpaper, which is bad. And totally, I should have, I should have said that coming. However, when I thought, okay, but that was weird because my patch was literally making taking what was currently being done in dialogues, as an example, because this is not kickoff as an example, this dialogue, I was doing what was done there and doing it on the panel as well. So I thought, why do we have this glitch in the panel when it is not there in dialogues? Turns out, it's also their own dialogues. Just people hadn't noticed that much yet. So how do we how do we address that? Okay, so I thought about it a lot. And eventually I give up, I give up on the idea that if we currently have we draw things with rounded corners, because we do like rounded corners. And okay, that makes sense. And at the same time, these things are transparent. So behind them, they need to have blur and contrast effects. The issue is that the mask for the blur and contrast effect is not anti aliased, which means it's going to be pixelated. Whereas the actual SVG corner is anti aliased, which means it's going to be smooth. And if you draw something smooth on top of something pixelated, you're going to see some places where you see the blur and the contrast effect. But there's normally should be hidden from the, you know, SVG, but it's not because it's pixelated and it bleeds outside. So there's no way to avoid that. I'm, I'm sad, I'm sad to say there's no way to avoid. So either let's try to do our best, our reasonable best to fix reasonable best. So first of all, currently the rounded corners in Katie plasma are so not rounded, like they're just few pixels rounded. And those pixels are few enough that when the mask is not anti aliased, it's basically a rectangle that that's how little rounding we currently have. So if we use a little more rounding on these elements, the issue will still be there, but it will be slightly less noticeable because now the blur won't be a rectangle. It will be a rounded rectangle, which is still going to be pixelated compared to the SVG, but at least it's not a rectangle anymore. It's some it's a step forward. Okay. Number two, now we have trouble that now we have for all windows actually, let me bring up Dolphin. You might notice that all of Dolphin now has an outline. We actually added, we, we I did nothing. Somebody else in Katie added outlines for Windows, which was pretty cool. You can find the author talking about that on Planet Katie. So I thought, okay, we can do the same thing in the bridge theme for Katie Plasma. So in dialogues, so, you know, here, we can make the same thing here. And that's actually going to help us hide the glitch at the corners because we're actually drawing an outline on top of it. And if you draw an opaque outline on top of a bug, then it's not there. Nobody will know about it. So did that work? Obviously not. Where's the issue? So in Plasma, in the Plasma theme, you just have two colors. These two colors are the color of the background, which is white and the color of the text, which is black. If you're using BriskDark, these two are inverted. So background is white and text is background is black and text is white. So I can just use these two colors. So if I want to do something gray, as an example, I have to draw something white and then something black on top of it. And then I can play with different levels of opacity. But I always need to remember then that whenever we switch from Brisk Light, BriskDark or Opposite, these two colors are going to be switched. So now there's a tough choice. How much light and how much dark and which one of the two should be on top of the other one? And how transparent should each of those be? And the answer is I tried some values. I don't know. Why is everybody looking at me? No, okay. So what I decided to go with is I actually only use white.  Now, this means that in Brisk Light, it's almost impossible to notice it. Like, I think I've enabled it right now. So in theory, you should notice, yes, you can see it. There is a white outline. It's almost invisible, but there is an outline. And if we switch to BriskDark, which I should probably do because it's where most of the exciting things are happening. But another wallpaper, thank you, this one. Okay, if I switch to BriskDark, now it's much easier to notice that here we do have an outline. Again, you have to zoom and YouTube will compress this, you know, but we do have an outline and we do have an outline here as well. That's the zoom in. You can see that there is a black outline. So where's this? Well, I cannot go to opaque with this. The outline cannot be 100% opaque as much as I would like it to be, because it's really going to be stark and noticeable both in Brisk Light and Brisk Dark. I need this outline to be a bit transparent. Otherwise, it looks bad. Honestly, honestly, it just looks bad. Which means, of course, that it's not actually going to cover the corners back, which was what I had hoped for. I was hoping for this outline to save me from the corners back, but if I don't make it completely opaque, then it's not going to cover, it's going to cover it partially because it's still somewhat opaque, but it's still transparent as well. So you still see that underneath the outline, there are some bugs that are going on. So what else? What else should I do? I tried more rounded corners, an outline and a field. So what else? So again, go watch the previous video if you haven't, because now I'm going slightly just slightly more technical, but here's the thing. So I've talked about how to address this bug at the corners. We take the mask and we make the whole mask one pixel smaller on each side so that this pixelated area instead of being on the corner is inside covered by the SVG, and so it's much, much less noticeable. That was the fix. However, this has the side effect of also making the mask smaller on top, bottom, left and right, because you're making it smaller by one pixel. That was the whole thing. And on things like the panel, it will mean that in the four sides of the panel, you will see the background in the one pixel on the bottom, top, left and right, because we are making the mask, which is blur and contrast effect, one pixel smaller. Sad. It's sad. It's a sad life. So what can we do about it? It seems like we have to choose between having the corners that don't look bad because you can see through them or having, sorry, I meant we can either have the sides that don't look bad because you can see through them or we can have the corners that don't look bad because they don't have like the pixelated area. We have to choose between the sides and the corners. So here's the thing. I've actually decided that we don't have to choose. Let me show you what I did. This is a trick, which is very cool. It's actually horrible. It's a hack, but I mean, if it works, it works, right? I don't know what else to do. So I actually reverted all of the patches that made the mask smaller. So just by this reverting theory, you should see again, the pixels, the white pixels at the corners in breeze dark because those were fixed by making the mask smaller. But look at here. This is the new mask that I'm working on. And you might notice it looks weird. The corners are smaller. So that's the point. I made the mask smaller on the corners, but only on the corners. So the panel is still going to be normal because these four elements, which are the sides, still have a normal size. But when you actually draw the corners, then you have the smaller element, which means that the corners will not have the pixelated area. So it's a win. We did it. We almost, almost did it. We never do it fully. Like, we cannot escape the corners, but it will always be us. So what did I do? What's the issue? I think I can show it to you if I managed to get some dialogue here. Okay, so do you see any bug here at the corners? No, look better. Let's zoom in. Actually, I don't see anything wrong with this, but it's because of the wallpaper. So it only, you can only see it on certain wallpapers because, you know, the color of the panel depends on the wallpaper. And so you can really see the bug only on certain wallpapers. Also, let's make it a panel floating so that it actually has corners and we can look at those. I think it was very noticeable with, I don't remember. Yeah, you can see it here. So if you, if you zoom in to the panel, you can see, you can see that the corners look funky.  And then the corners, there's this few dark pixels, which look funky. Why is that? Because in the corners, I make the mask smaller, which makes the pixelated area go underneath the SVG. However, even if this mismatch is less noticeable, thanks to the fact that it's underneath the SVG, it's still there. And SVG is transparent. So you can still somewhat see these visually broken corners. But I mean, if you zoom out, it's almost impossible to notice, almost impossible. That's the keyword, almost. It's slightly noticeable, noticeable, but only on certain wallpapers, like, I don't know, this one is fine. You can notice, you can not notice it, this one. Here you do notice it, but only on certain wallpapers and only on brisk dark. And I don't know, I can't do any better. This is as good as it gets. Also, as a side benefit, now the corners of everything are more rounded. Let me actually show that. Yes, these wallpapers. This border is more rounded. This text needs some margin to the left. I know these corners are more rounded. Everything is more rounded. Even if you, I don't know, change the volume. Look at here. Doesn't work. Look at here. Come on. Okay, look at here. This is more rounded than before. Everything got more rounded. Aren't you happy? Also, we also have outlines. I mean, everything's nicer looking now, I think less bags. Actually, the bag is only now noticeable if you're using brisk dark, if you're using certain wallpapers, and everything's more rounded and there's an outline. It's a almost win, win, win, win, almost. Anyway, if you jokes aside, jokes aside, if you do want to help me out, do this kind of things, and this is October's data, I haven't updated yet, but it's still like five years an hour. I'm doing this. It's a side hobby thing, and that's fine. But if you do want to help me out, pay for my expenses, food, I'm currently living alone in Sweden. So any donation is fully appreciated, and I'm trying my best. Thanks everybody for following, and see you tomorrow with yet another video of me.