Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of The Silicast Podcast, hosted at podfeed.com, a technology podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, January 1st, 2023, and this is show number 921. Well, happy New Year! And as you can tell, I have my annual laryngitis, but don't worry, you are not going to have to listen to this voice for 40 minutes. Last week, I happened to accidentally record all of the remaining I'm Still Using It segments, only to realize the show was far too long, so I was able to take four of those segments and I moved them into this week. Also, Joe from the Northwoods helped me figure out how to extract those segments from Hindenburgs so that we could have them played this week. Graeme Shepard is back with a recording about his photo workflow, and trust me, his voice is way better than mine. But that still left me reading about 15 minutes with this voice. When Joe from the Northwoods heard from me that my voice was gone yet again, she stepped up and pulled forward to this week a recording she'd planned about her new Schlage Smart Lock. It takes a village to get this show off the ground, and the Nocella Castaways are the best village around. Well, let's start off by hearing from the Nocella Castaways the last installment of the I'm Still Using It series. Michael Westbay is up next. I'm Still Using Ingress. Playing Ingress? Anyway. Hi there, Nocella Castaways. Michael from Yokohama here. It all started around the end of 2013. I was thinking about what my goals would be for 2014, and was really thinking that I needed to commute. I'd been working from home since around 2004, and it was becoming clear that I would only leave the house to open and close the shutters in the morning and evening. A commute in the morning and evening seemed like a good way to begin and end each day. And if I could lose some of that tire around my waist, so much the better. Meanwhile, I was very jealous of all the techies playing Ingress that I heard on the various Twitch shows. But it wasn't available for my iPhone 4s, and I didn't know anyone from whom to get an invite, so I started plotting out what my commute might look like. Hmm, well, I did have a Nexus 7 that I mainly use for reading. I also had a portable Wi-Fi hotspot for when I took my Macbook out to the park to work. Ingress was then released out of beta shortly before Christmas, so I signed up and quickly looked at this scanner, which showed that most of the area I lived in was green. That's the enlightened. So I went with the blue faction, the Resistance, to have a good challenge. The whole idea of a commute became moot. I would go out, after lunch, exploring all kinds of places. Shrines, temples, a statue here, a monumental plaque there. Where a green-controlled portal was, I went to either attack or gather items to level up. In the first year, I lost 20 kilograms, just running around the five kilometer radius from home, capturing portals and creating fields. I went from huffing and puffing to get up the hill behind Shomyoji, a nearby temple, to being able to climb the more direct stairway with hardly a pause. And I ran into a lot of people also playing the game, especially around Shomyoji. They all had similar stories of weight loss and a general feeling of overall better health. I've tried the other Niantic games, Pokemon Go, Harry Potter, Pikmin, but I never stopped playing Ingress alongside them. That's really fun, Michael. The only time I'd ever heard of Ingress was when Pokemon was introduced, and all of the Ingress kids were all, we were there before it was cool, you know. Anyway, it sounds like you're having a whole lot of fun with it, Michael, and I'm glad Ingress is still there for you. Stephen from New Zealand is up next, with a quick little entry to I'm Still Using It. He wrote, I'm still using my 13-inch MacBook Pro from early 2013. I love that it has MagSafe and an SD card slot. It has a massive 8GB of RAM, paired with a 250GB SSD, and there's still 72GB unused. It has had one battery replacement, and it still goes well, although it can't be upgraded beyond Catalina. He signed off, in Maori, the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand. And I'm going to try to pronounce it myself. Na mihi. Well, I think it's amazing that you're still using a Mac that's nearly a decade old. I'd like to know how many people can still say that about their Windows machines, right? Continuing from Down Under, Rose from Tasmania sent in her I'm Still Using It. By the way, Rose is the one who coined the term no silicast away in the first place. She wrote, I am still using Type Styler by Strider Software from typestyler.com. I've been using it for about five years now, maybe even longer. In 2009 is the year Type Styler returned after the major Mac OS rebuild, so I may have been using it for 10 years. I use about 10% of the functions of this app, but I will still use it as long as Strider Software keeps updating. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I won't update my OS until Type Styler is updated. Now that I've retired from paid employment, I volunteer with several community groups. As I love graphic design, I design placards, badges, what you call buttons, leaflets, event posters and such. Type Styler offers an amazing, if somewhat bewildering array of options for each aspect of your project. Starting a new project, you're offered eight templates, page, poster, banner, CD, bag, box, 3D model, and video. And I've barely scraped the surface as they say. Type Styler is Mac OS only for $59.99 and a 30-day fully functional free trial is available. Well, thanks for this, Rose. While Type Styler's interface certainly harkens back to an earlier day in UI design, there's something comforting about a user interface that isn't always moving around on you and changing all the time so you can't find what you need. Thanks for sending this in, Rose. To finish up our I'm Still Using It series, I've saved Tom Merritt for last, who delivers his story in his own unique way. Oh, K120, a poem by Tom Merritt. Oh, Logitech K120 keyboard dome over membrane star of my typing. My spelling is not your fault for you always respond to my wishes, not others. Blame auto correct, not you. Oh, K120 of 2012 release. Where did I get two of you? No matter.  OK, 120 companion of my fingers, take down this ode to you so that others may know your greatness has no bounds, except those imposed by Anzai or ISO. No ergonomic break for me, no clack clicks, nor silent presses. Do you make the noise I need to know that you will always be there? Oh, Logitech K120, ten years of service, more to come with typing soft or loud as a drum on my desk. You yet sit proud to say of you, I'm still using it. Well, I think that was a very fitting to the end of I'm Still Using It. I'm not saying you can't send in more if you don't want to or if you want to, I should say, but oh my gosh, Tom, that was absolutely epic. Well, I am super happy to announce Chris Stearns as our newest patron of the PodFeed podcast. Chris took his hard earned dollars and he went to podfeed.com slash Patreon and signed up to contribute a monthly amount that show the value he gets from the work we do here. Lister John also sent in a donation and he did it in a different way. He did it by going to podfeed.com slash PayPal and did a one time donation. To be honest, though, he does this from time to time. So it's not exactly a one time thing. My favorite part is how he writes nice things to me when he donates. Thank you so much to Chris and John for their continued support of the PodFeed podcast. A few months back, I reviewed Photo Reviewer, a superb app for triaging photos and teas that I might just talk about where it fits in my workflow in more depth. So right now I'm going to try to explain my workflow clearly with some extra detail on the raw processing with DXO software. To be clear, I'm going to talk about how I deal with photos from actual photo shoots taken in raw on my Micro Four Thirds camera. For me, this is normally bird photography, but it certainly is not my everyday photos that are on my iPhone. The problem I'm solving here is wanting a workflow that optimizes six things. Import raw photos, triage many photos with the ability to zoom in and compare sharpness, process the raw photos with great image quality, particularly regarding noise, help me cope with the huge numbers of files and their archived backups, edit the photos in a non-destructive manner and enjoy the photos where I want them with my wife. And it needs to be financially sustainable as a head towards retirement. For me, that means no subscription model pricing, but that's personal to me. Step one is to get the photos onto my computer. For this, I can just open Photo Reviewer and use its import dialog and get going. The images are copied to the correct folder and I can move on to step two, which is the actual triage I described before. This triage puts all my photos into either the vetoed or the approved subfolders. Now I want to get onto the processing the approved photos, which is step three. I finished with Photo Reviewer, so Command Q quits the app. And with that, it triggers keyboard maestro, which starts another script. The script first checks to see how many approved photos there are in the approved folder, then asks if I want to process them. I click Yes and the script opens the approved photos in DXO Pure Raw 2, my raw developer of choice. DXO make two interesting products, Photolab, now at version six and Pure Raw at version two. I have a particular problem with my photography in that I like taking photos of birds and I like walking in the jungle, which means very little light. I also said I like walking, so I have an amazing little micro four thirds camera with a 300 millimeter lens on it and a 1.4 X extension on it. This gives an incredible 840 millimeter equivalent focal length that I can use handheld all day, albeit limited to a max of F 5.6 and therefore high ISOs. I want to squeeze out the most from this setup, and I'm constantly looking at new cameras to see what their ISO is looking like now. I'm sorely tempted, but then I think again about what the software can do for me. I found that for much less money than a new camera, the magical algorithms from DXO can remove noise so effectively from my raw images that I have easily gained a whole stop from the best I've managed before. And I'm only using the auto settings. Not only can DXO remove noise exceptionally well, but it does so without losing detail or color definition from the image, at least of my level of caring. What I get from this is, like I said, a whole extra stop. Which I spend by pushing my default ISO on my Limpus OM-D E-M1 to 3200. That's pretty high for this camera. I shoot with it all the time. Every single photo. Even in daylight. The images have beautiful color, smooth bokeh, and great detail. So there are two flavors offered by DXO. Photolab is a library software and I used it for a while for the trial period. Trying to like it, I just found it too prone to error with tags and other things. Maybe it's just my propensity to tinker with things. But I found my changes were getting mixed up and I just felt like I was fighting the software. So I abandoned that and now I use Apple Photos as my library by adding all my bird photos there once they have been fully edited. But that's still to come. Instead I use DXO Pure Raw 2, which has none of the library features, but is instead simply a processor for raw images. I haven't played around with everything it can do. I just use the basics. When you install the software, it installs the standalone app and asks if you want Finder integration. I found I didn't ever really want to initiate things from the Finder with no interface, so I didn't choose that option. All I do is open the raw files in Pure Raw 2, click process photos and then click process, making sure the right options are still selected. These options are to use the slower, deep prime for noise removal, do the optical corrections and save as a DNG file in a subfolder. It takes about 6 seconds per photo on my M1 Air, but even with 100 photos, that's barely enough time to get myself a cup of tea and it only needs to be done once. So my photos are processed now and I have folders and subfolders with photos in them, so I need some file management going on. Step 4 is file management. Let's recap. From GERGE I had raw photos in an approved folder and raw photos in a vetoed folder. Processing did not change this, but created a DXO folder in the approved folder with DNG versions in there. When I quit DXO Pure Raw 2, another keyboard maestro script is triggered and this one does my filing for the approved photos. In another part of my computer I have a folder named Photography and a separate folder called Archive. The keyboard maestro script renames and moves the approved DNG photos, the ones that are processed in Pure Raw, to the Photography folder and the original approved Raw photos to the Archive folder. Possibly to never be seen again. Next up comes Hazel, which is watching three folders for me. It watches the Photography and the Archive folders and moves anything that appears into a subfolder. Have these quite shallow so inside are folders with year-month as names. So 2022-11 and 2022-12 for example. This gives me enough of a file system to find things and should be pretty future-proof. Hazel also watches the Vetoed folder, which has all the photos that I really don't want to keep. When they get a week old Hazel clears them out for good, which gives me enough time to correct any mistakes I made. Step 5 is editing the photos. As I have little time, this is usually just cropping and color editing perhaps. Like I said, most of my photos are birds and so it is usually not possible to set up the framing exactly right in camera, so I usually crop in some more. This could be done anywhere, but I really like the Affinity apps and so I am doing it in Affinity Photo 2. The photos I kept are not all good, they are just what I chose to keep, so I will open the ones I actually like, do some editing, then save the Affinity file back into the same folder as the DNG, and export a JPEG to another folder called Exports. There is no folder structure in there, just a flat collection of photos. These are my pride and joy, the photos I want on my lock screen, in my photos widget and on my desktop. So, they get imported into the Photos app. But I have a problem, and the solution I am not sure will scale well, so if you have any bright ideas please let me know. Step 6. Importing into the Photos app is simple, I can just drag the image in or use the share sheet or other methods I am sure. The problem is that sometimes I re-edit an image, and importing it will leave me with two copies, which is not great. The solution I have implemented uses keyboard maestro again. The script looks at all the photos in my exports folder, then searches through my photos library for images with the same file name. When it finds one, it adds the photo to an album called To Delete. Once done, the script adds all the photos to the Photos app, and opens the To Delete album for me, and selects all the images. I can then look to see if there is anything wrong, and if not, I will manually delete all the photos in that album. It works, but it is clunky as anything, and I really want a better solution. But in the end, I have solved my workflow problems. A photo reviewer imports my photos, and lets me triage them. DXO Pure Raw 2 processes the raw photos with, I think, the best denoising software available. Keyboard maestro and hazel move the photos around and file them neatly for me, with useful file names. Affinity Photo 2 lets me do my final editing. Apple Photos lets me see the photos, and exposes them for me in a delightful manner. This workflow may not suit everyone, but I think the steps are important for anyone who does project type photography to consider. Keyboard maestro is perhaps a bit clunky for what I am doing here, and Affinity Photo 2 has plenty of competition. But I really want to emphasise that I believe photo reviewer DXO Pure Raw 2, Hazel and Apple Photos are arguably the best software anyone could use for the functions they serve here, and I highly recommend that anyone into raw photography gives them a look. That was terrific, Graham. I really like the flow that you do in explaining each of the steps with it. You know, I've heard a lot of great things about DXO from Alistair Jencks and from Steven Getz. I just wish I took more raw photos that were compatible with it. I don't think they support raw photos from the iPhone yet, but when they do, I think maybe that could start to be a lot of fun. But I love how you use all these different tools, especially Hazel, to manage your workflow. And thank you so much for having your voice in this recording instead of mine. Hello, this is Jill from the North Woods. I've been interested in home automation for a really long time. When I was a kid, my dad and I used to talk about it all the time. He was very interested in setting up the X10 old school home automation, but he knew it would cost a lot of money in the 70s. But now automation is so low cost, easy to do, and powerful. So it revived my whole interest in it. I have some good animations going. I have the hue system for lights and picked up hue motion sensors, which are fantastic. They make the whole house more like Star Trek and easier to use than ever. In addition, I have morass plugs, a garage opener, ring doorbells and cameras, and Amazon voice devices. Echo B controls my thermostats along with some sensors. I even set up my bird so that he had automatic music with different genres at different times on sono speakers and automatic lights that simulate natural daylight. He has temperature sensors, so if the house gets too cold or too warm, it'll heat him up to keep him healthy. He also has his own rain camera. I have some morning routines, bedtime routines. I also do automations that make my house look like there's always people in it. Not only that, I've also tried automations if my house got too warm, a series of fans would automatically come on and try to cool the house down. Mostly I try to keep my bedroom cool so I can sleep at night. But also, I have a Schlage lock that I ordered back in November of 2017. It's called the Schlage Z-Wave Connect Camelot. I was excited about it. It works with Amazon devices so I can order the door to be open. It also interacts with the smart things hub. It allows me to use if, this, then that to provide myself with a button on my phone and my watch to open up the door. I love this lock. It works in cold times. It works every time. It's very secure and well built, allowing me to pass codes to friends and pet sitters. The funny story is I had a cat sitter who I hired many times. Then I got this lock. I was at a conference and she was supposed to come to my house on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Wednesday rolled around and she still hadn't been to my house. So I texted her and asked her if she was planning on coming. She said, oh no, no, I've been coming to your house. It's just that I haven't been able to check in via the app. I replied, well that can't possibly be true because the new lock texts me every time the door is unlocked and the door is locked again. And the door hasn't been locked or unlocked since I left on Sunday. It was a big pause. I waited. She finally says, I'll be there in a few minutes. Before I installed the lock, I don't know how many times she actually came. I talked to the pet company and that was that. But then other frustrations started to pile in. While I loved my lock, it didn't have an app. It didn't work with HomeKit. And to set the settings on the relock time or the alarm, it required a bunch of different pin codes that you would put in to set the time. Nothing complicated about it, but you'd have to find the manual, figure out what the pin codes were, and then make the change. Half the time you tried it, somehow you got an extra digit in there, then the formula would error. So it was a bit frustrating. The second problem is SmartThings Hub is so limited with its ability. While I hear if you're good at programming, you can do many interesting things with it, but I just was never interested enough to try anything. So without doing that, the system was limited to only the things I could get from other apps, like if this and that. The last problem was I used if this and that to communicate between devices. So I started relying on it to set up automations with the same device. A while ago, they went to a subscription model and they said they had a forever price and I could pick whatever I wanted my subscription fee to be. I didn't do very complicated things, only used it a little, maybe 20 formulas. Very simple. So I set the price to $1, but then they came back and said, we're going to set a limit of only 10 items, 10 formulas, so that if you want more, you must upgrade and pay more. That wasn't exactly what I thought I agreed to regarding a subscription fee. So I started cleaning out my formulas. I could get it under 10, but then it just wasn't useful enough to make it worthwhile. I switched a lot of the formulas over to using the Hue app, which is really good and comes with a lot of formulas. Morass too, which has a solid app for automating their devices. It also seemed that services were pulling out of if this and that. For instance, Morass, for their garage doors and their small plugs, decided they were no longer going to support if this and that, and they were going to remove all functionality. It didn't really help me and my whole fan automation I had going to keep the house cool. And then the last thing is there were some weird bugs. The Halllight, which is right outside my bedroom, started coming on and off at all sorts of different times. 4 in the morning, 5 in the morning, 6 in the morning. It used to be that I had a outside motion trigger, but then I couldn't get it to stop. There were bug formulas that were causing it to happen ever since then. And since it was the only service that used that light, I tried to remove all the formulas, I removed the links between if this and that, then I denied it permission, and nothing seemed to fix it. Finally, when I removed the lights from the Hue system entirely and re-added them to Hue, that broke the chain. That was annoying, and at that point I just wanted a new system. I never used Helmkit before, but since I was already invested in the Apple world, why not give it a try? Is it me or is Apple just taking over my whole life? So then I tried to get everything into Helmkit as best I could. See what would actually just start working. Less things to deal with, less apps to deal with, and probably more secure than the SmartThings Hub, or if this and that. It just seemed like less worry. And in the world of security, when you're talking about things in your home, having less is more secure. So the first step is, is what I moved over what I had. Hue immediately took over and went to HomeKit. That was great. I had a few morass plugs that weren't HomeKit enabled, so I bought a couple of additional ones that were HomeKit plugs to do more complicated things like that fan situation. I left the older plugs to be for more simple things like the bird light and other automations that didn't need to be detailed. Alson suggested I try the home grid, so I set that up. I found ring and morass plug-ins, so all those devices came in too. Pretty nice. Now I have a lot of things in one place. But I also found out that I needed to have a hub in order to do more sophisticated formulas. I had an old Generation 2 iPad Pro, and I set that up to be my hub. Then one day I left the house with it not plugged in. Battery is pretty run down. All of a sudden my automations went away when the iPad died. I thought I needed to do something more permanent. The HomePod mini would be a perfect option for that. Also, it sounds from various articles that functionality like matter will only be available on HomePod midis and will not come to iPads. So there I ordered the new HomePod mini, and now I have a brand new hub that can do much more. The whole project is starting to come into focus. The Schlaglock was the very last piece that was an outlier to HomeKit, so I started researching locks I could buy. Many of the other locks had issues that I wasn't willing to deal with. I really wanted the Schlaglock. For one weird reason or another, Schlaglocks weren't showing up at the typical nerd sites. I thought maybe they sunset the entire line. But Alson sent me an article showing me that Schlaglocks with HomeKit were one of the best HomeKit locks out there. Why couldn't I find it? So I started looking around and realizing that they are a well-known lock company, not a technology company. Most of the places they sell at are Lowe's, Home Depot. The only place that had them in stock, in the color I wanted, was build.com. I didn't know much about them, but it's primarily for contractors and people who are putting up houses. In checking out the features and trying to determine what was the difference between this new lock, compared to the lock I already had, it turned out that the locks are almost the same. The dead-ball part was the same, and I wouldn't have to remove that from the door. The part I did have to change would be the parts that contain the battery and the keypad. To get the features I wanted, and here's the important part, it's the Schlag and code plus touchscreen. Plus is the thing that makes it important. The one I had was the Schlag connect, which connects to Z-Wave. They have another lock level called encode, which allows you to use the app they produce, and it's pretty darn good too. It's a little bit more expensive at the connect model, and then the third stage, the encode plus, which makes it HomeKit enabled, is even more expensive. So while I wasn't looking to spend more money, this was the last piece to the entire puzzle. It felt worthwhile to be done with all the nickel and diming technology I had, all over the place. Not knowing who these people were at build.com, but you know what, the lock came two days later. On the third day, one of the coldest days of the year, I decided to install the lock. It took about a half hour, the instructions were good. The lock was very familiar to me compared to the one I already had, so I was impressed. The important thing to know is the Schlag and code plus lock you must set it up first in the Schlag app. Once you do that, it will give you access to additional features, such as settings when it comes to the brute force alarm. If someone tries to bust down your door, it starts to holler, the automatic relock time so you can set it, so that if you unlock your door within 30 seconds, one minute, it can relock your door again. You never have to remember.  In my neck of the woods, it's because they forget to lock their doors. It also has a relock button on the outside, and a locking mechanism on the inside. So I was glad to have that setting inside the app, where I didn't have to figure out a coding system to get that change made. Now it's changed to a number I like. It still works with Amazon devices and my HomePod mini, so I can use voice commands. The nice thing is they have a way inside the app to connect to HomeKit. And there it is, the last piece of my home automation HomeKit puzzle is finished. Considering that Schlage isn't a nerd brand, their app is great. Their technology is great. Everything connected right away. What will I do with my old smart block? I plan to put that on the door between the garage and the kitchen. It has the nice pin code on it, and I don't have to use a smart things hub because I don't plan on opening that remotely. That will make it easier for me to get between the garage door and the kitchen pretty quickly without remembering what I did with that stupid key. And all the features are in one place. Nicely, HomeKit started suggesting automations it could do for me, such as shutting things down in my house if I'm the last person to leave the house.  I don't even have to think about it. It also has a key method and a keypad. I have automations that will open the door for me, or I can do the one-tap method with my phone or watch, which opens the door, which is pretty handy when you're trying to get a bunch of bags of groceries inside of your house without much fuss. So now I'm happy with my HomeKit, and I'm looking forward to so many more automations. The smart thing hub is gone, and other integrations are no longer needed. And I rely less on Echo devices, and they've been annoying me a lot lately. So what are my next steps? First, I plan on learning a lot more about home automation and HomeKit. I spend the holiday binging on podcasts and videos on automation. I look forward to getting into the matter standard, which will bring all the automations together. Second, I ordered some NFC tags that I placed in various locations. My friends had some confusions about how to get my lights on and off. So I made an NFC tag for them with a bird picture on it and called it Bird Visit, so they can either say the command out loud, if they remember it, or tap their phone, and it'll bring up all the lights, everything they need to check on my bird while I'm traveling. So this is a new avenue for me. I'm really excited about it. If you have any ideas for home automation, just let us all know on Allison Slack Channel. Again, this is Jill from the Northwoods, and you can find me at smallstepspod.com. Well, I love how quickly you convert to new tech, Jill. Steve and I were talking in the live show here about how amazing it is that you just sort of just, okay, I'm going to get rid of IFTTT, and I'm going to go with HomeKit, I'm going to change these plugs out for these plugs, and I'm going to put in this lock instead of that lock, and I'm going to get the HomePod Mini and change which one my hub is. That's crazy how fast you do that stuff. It's quite a change, but it all makes sense. By the way, for those listening, Jill mentioned Maros plugs that weren't HomeKit compatible. I want you to understand that Maros does sell HomeKit compatible plugs. We learned that from Stephen Getz, but they also sell some that are not, so really pay attention. Matters should help fix this problem, but for now, pay attention when you buy because you want to make sure you get the HomeKit compatible ones. Well, as I've mentioned a few times, Steve and I are going to Antarctica on January 17th, so Bart and Alistair are doing the shows while we're gone. I really, truly need you to send in recordings before we leave to help them do the shows. They're doing us a huge favor by doing the show, so please, please, please help them out. You must have got some cool tech over the holidays, right? Do a recording of what you got and why you like it, what problem does it solve? If you can do a script for a blog post with links, that really makes a big difference and makes it great for everyone if you can do that. We will likely have zero internets while on the ship to Antarctica, so you have to send them ahead of time. They have to be to me well before January 17th to be shared with them. I'll probably give their email address as closer to the time, but for now, send them to allisonatpodfeet.com. I thank you in advance for your contributions. Well, I bet you're glad to hear that you're not going to have to hear this voice anymore for the rest of this week. Did you know you can email me those contributions at allisonatpodfeet.com? If you have questions or suggestions, you can send those on over too. You can follow me on Twitter at podfeet and you can find me on mastedonatpodfeet.com at chaos.social. And if you want to join in the fun of the conversation, you could join in our Slack community like Jill told you to at podfeet.com slash Slack where you talk to me and all of the other lovely no-cellicastaways. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com. You can support the show at podfeet.com slash Patreon like Chris did or with a one-time donation like John did at podfeet.com slash PayPal. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, hopefully next week I will have a better voice to do that. Head on over to podfeet.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic no-cellicastaways. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed.


The Ministry of Health is continuously working to keep citizens safe from the COVID-19 virus by improving its response measures to quarantine. More in this report from Funnel Neptune. The Ministry of Health is well on its way to improving its surveillance of people on home quarantine through the introduction of innovative technology, the introduction of the two electronic monitoring devices, the bio-intellicent biobutton, and the amber wristwatch is expected to come on stream on January 18, 2021. Acting national epidemiologist Dr. Donald Gomez explains the purpose and benefits of the biobutton. The biobutton is a disposable, one-time use body sensor about the size of a quarter, designed to be worn on the left side of the chest. It is small and unnoticeable. It monitors the vitals of quarantine persons who may be at high risk for developing COVID-19 disease. It also provides continuous temperature, respiratory rate, and heart rate measurements to the user. In so doing, it enables the early detection of potential cases. Dr. Gomez also spoke on the capabilities of the amber wristwatch. Through its geofencing capabilities, it ensures that persons wearing the device remain within the confines of the home as per home quarantine protocols. It also allows for the monitoring of vitals of the quarantine individual. This means that should persons develop symptoms during their quarantine period, this would be detected by the Department of Health. Through improved monitoring, this device will aid in the nation's COVID-19 response plan by limiting the spread of the disease as it helps to ensure that persons remain at home during their quarantine period. The biobutton will cost US $100 for the 14-day period, and the amber wristwatch will cost US $75 for the 14-day rental. Reporting from the Communications Unit of the Ministry of Health and Wellness, I am Fano Neto.


In outside Africa now the US State Department says that the Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has tested positive for COVID-19 according to the White House spokesperson Jen Psaki. The President Joe Biden is not considered a close contact of Blinken. The Blinken who earlier met with Swedish Foreign Minister Arne Lind, rescheduled a speech beaded to outline US policy towards China. That Secretary Blinken has tested positive for COVID. The good news is that he is fully vaccinated. He is boosted. He is experiencing only mild symptoms. He will quarantine at home. He will follow CDC guidelines. I know he very much looks forward to returning to the office, returning to his full schedule, and returning to the road just as soon as he is able to do so. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


I'm Dirk Holmans, Co-President of the Foundation and Director of Oracle's The Flamish Green think-tank. As we learned yesterday during our first talk, people are following these talks from all over Europe via live stream on Facebook, which is great. And so you also can follow it without having an account. As we want to make it an interactive session, you can put questions through chat on Facebook, but you can also do it on Twitter using the Jeff Europe account. As I said already yesterday, I really want to repeat this. The corona crisis is of course in the first place a health crisis, which has to be dealt with in the best way. This is priority number one. But the crisis is also changing our societies in profound ways. It has resulted in a huge economic crisis. Therefore, it is really important to have a better understanding of the impact of the crisis. How does it affect people living in different parts of Europe? When you're living in Sweden, Belgium or Spain, this really can make a difference. Next, we want to explore how we can imagine a better world after corona. And organizing a better world after corona, we have of course already to do it today. I'm very happy to announce two inspiring speaking today. We have Philip Lombards, who is co-president of the Green's AFI group in the European Parliament. And we have Mar Garcia, who is Secretary General of the European Green Party. Mar, I will start with you. The corona crisis is now already affecting several months our societies. It is clear we have to handle this crisis on a coordinated European level. Of course, every country is different. But I think it's clear that only by working together, we can manage it in a very effective way. And especially, I think for Greens, who are really fighting for more cooperation, more solidarity in Europe, these are very special times. So, from the position of the European Green Party, how do you deal with this crisis? Hello, Dirk. Hello, everybody. First of all, thank you for the invitation. Thank you for also such an inspiring virtual table. Both Dirk and Philip are people that I look when I very often search for inspiration. So, here's what my contribution, yeah. Well, you've also asked me to speak about from my Spanish perspective. I think that I will combine a bit both. I think there are still many open questions about how the post-COVID will be. Where we need the most clarity about is, will there be a vaccine and when will it be available? But also, along, etc., of questions that we do not know today about the evolution of these virus. These are not minor issues for anybody, but especially for those countries must hit by the highest numbers of deaths in Southern Europe, like in Italy and Spain. Let me remind you that according to the World Health Organization from ADATA from the 21st of April, the sum of those infected from France, Italy and Spain represent 20.3 of the total increase and 37.7 of those killed by the COVID worldwide, 37.7. So, those countries, France, Italy and Spain are the three countries whose governments have imposed the strictest confinement. I can explain a little bit more how, as you were pointing out in the beginning, how different it is to be confined in Spain than in Belgium, for example, or in Sweden. But in that sense, I have the feeling the confinement down here is going to take longer and will look pretty different from other countries as the actual confinement has already been. So, when will these answers be available? Really matters, because that will shape in a major way our immediate future, our way immediately after the health crisis is a bit over, yeah? What we do know is the negative health, economic and social effects this crisis has brought, and they are the ugliest the current generation have experienced. So, if you apply common sense to those negative effects, we need to apply unprecedented measures to overcome them, yeah? The shaping of these measures and thus the recovery plans will be the battlefield on my understanding the Greens should aim to influence. I will focus now a bit in my Spanish perception of this crisis. I rarely do that since my responsibility is to represent the European perspective, but I will do so today since this is a bit what you asked me for. This crisis has arrived when the consequences of the big recession caused by the 2008 financial crisis are still very, very present within the Spanish society. Let me illustrate that with some figures that the human greed and the casino economy brought us. We reached level of unemployment of 27%, 55% of youth unemployment. Our public debt went from 36% in 2007 to 93% in 2013. Currently, we are at 95.5. The risk premium rose 600 points and rescuing the Spanish banks costed the magic figure of 63,000 billions of euros, which is approximately 6.3 of our GDP. The subsequent austerity measures brought us a level of poverty, exclusion, social inequalities, very painful social costs that it has been lengthy discussed among the Greens. These memories are still very, very present in our societies. It is still remembered and acknowledged what does budgetary stability mean or the frivolity about the extravagance way of spending of the South that some manifested. Unfortunately, this is the main voice many Spanish citizens have associated to the European Union the last decade, a recipe that was diagnosed through the, was digested through the pedagogy of pain. If we translate the perception to the current crisis that hints GDP drop of 10% and unemployment rent rate of 20% and an increase of the public debt of 10% over horrible figures I mentioned, what the Spanish envisage to come is just a disaster. But let's shine a bit of light. It's obvious that this crisis is not going to last forever because nothing does. And that we are soon going to start a new phase that will require a new setting because too many things are different, too many things have changed. Already what the European Council with yesterday is far from what was the framework only three months ago, the framework that we all were aware of. I hope that Philippe Spains a little bit more about this. For me, there will be no return to the previous normal, there won't be a back to business as usual. So when we talk about recovery, what is at stake in my humble opinion is something that it sounds pretty big and it is actually pretty big. I think that it's what it's at stake is the political reordering of the economy, the political reordering of the economy, not only at a national level, but also if we are able to address it at the European level. Because let's be honest, yeah, there is no way to pay in the short term and with the economic rules that were in place until three months ago, the public spending that will be necessary to face this crisis. Hence, the question will be who will define and which are the new rules in place. I think there is two options basically. The one built only taking the national approach built by narrow provincial mines that understand nations are the only elements to take into consideration when designing the recovery plans and that what is needed is to return to what we had before. For the one that understands that the way forward must come through a united, a common strategy that's strengthened us to face future crisis because let's not forget that we have a scientific proven crisis in front of us and that's the climate one. This one that comes from the ones that understand that we need welfare states set for the 21st century. As for the first option, what this pandemic has already made us all aware of is our extraordinary fragile nations. We've been very fragile as member states. We have been dependent on large global production and distribution change which were not able to guarantee access to the goods that were needed in key moments. We just need to remember the amount of shameful newspaper articles about EU member states competing and speculating in the international market for medical equipment. I think that today the concept of a nation that cares is no longer viable detached from a European caring framework. And in that sense I believe our societies are for the second option and here is where it comes also my positive note. Unlike the period 2008-2014 in which we the citizens were victims or in the best cases passive spectators of the financial crisis and its consequences, in this health COVID crisis citizens are proactive protagonists, active characters of the film. But then we were forced to assume the lowering of our salaries, the reduction of our hospital beds, the decrease of the number of teachers for our kids without having a chance to intervene beyond what we already did which is voting and some of us did vote for a change. Today though I think that is different and that and that is very important and key. Today it is the citizenship, the one that has taken the option to consciously follow the confinement. Our societies have very clearly understood that it is an act of responsibility to be confined. We wear masks and gloves to protect our neighbors. We give up visiting our loved ones to protect them. We have kept our kids at home depriving them from socializing, from mixing with their friends and we have done that aware, thoroughly understanding, complying, everybody complies with the restriction and recommendations of the authorities. Let me just illustrate this difference on the perception of a regular citizen with an example. In 2008 and on a citizen felt that the deterioration of the welfare state of the public services of the labor market in an individual way. A kid accord the personal needs of each person's daily life. Today I think or I believe this is no longer the case, the threats to our public health and to our welfare states are perceived and acknowledged in a collective level, in a collective way. I think that this is no longer about me not having access to a hospital bed or an operation when I need it on the time that I need it. This is about our health system. This is no longer about my child having two hours less of class a week. This is about the education of this whole generation. In this crisis, the COVID crisis, citizens are active contributors to the solution. While in 2008 and on, they were passive victims. It's a very, very important change, I believe. And this is why I think that we've seen, we've been able to witness so much solidarity also along this crisis. We have the clapping that goes all over Europe every day to thank the workers from the many sectors at eight o'clock. We have massive support of people to provide neighbors with necessary food, shopping facilities, people allowing homeless to stay in their empty apartments. I've also witnessed that. Citizens contributing to local business in order to help them overcoming their sales rock. So I believe that this crisis has also shown the honest solidarity of human being in a generalized way. But to summarize, what is at stake at the new is the new normal, the new rules. And citizens have played that part. It's now time for politicians to play their role. But these politicians will be faced with a society that has memory, that is fully aware of the seriousness of the situation, that has been active and solidarity at its most, and that has a comprehensive social perception of what is really important when life is at stake. So the definition of this new normal, of this post-COVID normality will have to take into consideration all these. And I think it's going to be about values. The battle that we're going to have to play is going to be an ideological, a purely ideological one, about which values are the recovery measures going to mirror. And I think that this is where we Greens are best placed. We bring along the values our societies are ready to embrace, because they're the best recipes to become resilient, sustainable, and just. And in that debate, Europe, the role of Europe is going to be at the very center. The recovery measures cannot be like the ones that were used and put in place in 2008. I'm convinced that they will not be the same, but the Greens have to fight for a recovery plan that also highlights our priorities. I think that until now, we have been able to highlight two issues that nobody dares at that stage of the crisis, dares to contradict. A joint European response to the crisis is needed, you know, and the confirmation that COVID is a new symptom of the main and more serious disease that afflicts the planet. And that it's unsustainability. So just to finalize, I mean, I believe the only possible way forward is that one committed to solidarity, sustainability, and shared progress. I very honestly believe that the public opinion is going to back our proposals. And at least from a very humble position, this is the endeavour of the European Greens. Thank you very much for this first answer, and I think it's already very informative. We need a political reordering of the economy. It will be a more collective response. There's an emphasis on values, the values we choose will guide the way we will rebuild our society, our economy. I think that's very clear. I just was informed that Philippe will join us within a few minutes. So let me ask you, meanwhile, this question, Mar, having said this, that we have to steer on values. How do you look at the European Commission? How have they dealt until now with the crisis? Well, I think that they have not tried their best, to be honest. I mean, von der Leyen herself already publicly admitted and apologised to the Italians at the very beginning of the crisis, the Italian call for solidarity. So I think that one illness of this current European Union is the lack of strong leaders with a clear plan on how to bring this European Union further. And I think this has been something that this crisis has shown, the way the answers have been addressed until now. So I wish that the current European Commission shows a bit more of this leadership and this clarity on what type of recovery plan they want to put forward. I believe they're going to present it next week, if I'm not mistaken. So very much looking forward to see what they come up with. There's, of course, already a plan on the table for some months. It's the Green New Deal. Some parts of it, like from to fork, seems to be postponed a few weeks. Should this Green New Deal be kept on the table reinforced? What role should it play? My humble opinion is there is no way this Green Deal can be postponed. Because if something has proved this crisis, is that we are not prepared. We were not prepared to face. I mean, I was reading also an interview from the minister of, from Spanish minister of technology saying that by far we didn't have a plan for this. Well, we should have a plan for facing the climate crisis. And that should be the Green Deal. We Greens have been advocating for very long time for this plan. I think that there is no more excuses not to have it ready. Okay. Thank you for this comment on the new Green Deal. Philip, if everything goes well, you can hear me. And of course, as the co-president of the Greens, if our group in the European Parliament, you have been following how the European institutions, the commission, the council, the parliament has reacted to the crisis. But I can imagine that for quite some people, it's not very clear what happened and week after week, what were the reactions. So I know it's a difficult question, but could you inform us how Europe reacted until now? It depends on what you call Europe. I mean, if you call that the European Union, there's at least three major institutions in the European Union. Let's start with the commission. Well, the commission has been taken by surprise as we all have. Obviously, we should have reacted, I think, more strongly at the beginning and probably put restrictions to our intercontinental travel. But anyway, I will not point any fingers to anyone because at every level, people were taken by surprise or did not basically get an idea of the magnitude of the pandemic before it became too late. Let's face it. So a blame game is not really interesting. Now, I heard many criticisms about the lack of reaction of Europe, citizens writing to me and expressing frustration. There's two sides to the response. The first side is an institutional one. When it comes to public health and health care, the competencies are at national level. That's fact. So the European Union is not a federal state which has the levers that allows it to impose its direction to 27 member states. That's not how it works. And by the way, there's a parallel here between the pandemic and the asylum crisis. Many people were angry at the European Union for lack of a common response. But then again, asylum and migration are mostly member state competencies. So I could say that basically, if you really want Europe to act, then the first thing that you have to do is to give Europe, European institutions the levers and transfer the competencies there, and then you will be able to judge whether you like the actions or not. But that's only one side of the response. The other side is what has been witnessed by the components of the European Union that is the member states. So yes, indeed, the competencies were in their hands. But when you listen to the prime ministers and heads of states speaking, when the crisis started and when measures were taken, actually every single head of state and government took decisions pertaining to its own country. I mean, when Angela Merkel spoke to the Germans, the word Europe was not mentioned once. And I asked Emmanuel Macron the first few times he addressed the French population. He did not even mention Europe. So basically the message, the implicit message of each member state is we are on our own. We are on our own. And the actions taken by a number of member states, like precluding export of medical equipment from one member state to the other, just confirmed the general perception that actually member states are not showing solidarity. And now we had a council yesterday, which was another of those meetings where this lack of solidarity becomes blatantly obvious. So that is maybe the more fundamental reason why people are not happy about Europe. It's because governments in Europe prefer to play their own game. And that's a fact. I mean, facing such a crisis, I mean, if at European level the leaders, as they like to call themselves, I mean the heads of states and governments, like to call themselves leaders, if they do not send a very clear message, dear fellow citizens, we are in this together and we are going to come out of this together and backing up that strong statement by strong actions. If that is not coming, then you may come to wonder, and I know that many in Italy, in Spain and in other countries feel like that, why do we have a European Union to start with? In such massive crisis, basically it's everyone on its own. And so I do believe that, and that was again, abundantly yesterday, the heads of states and governments do not believe that we are in this together. I would say there's diversity, of course, around the table. And let's face it, you may like Macron or not, but at least he's been very outspoken in the Financial Times and in his statements that this is a time of truth for the European Union. But the fact is that between saying this and building the coalition to force solidarity to happen, there's a gap. And I mean, France here should have teamed up with Spain, with Italy, so you would have the number two, number three, number four economies of the Eurozone to basically corner the so-called virtuous states who are not that virtuous at all, and basically create tension within the council. And you know the way to do that is to basically say, okay, well, we need to react together. If the 27 don't do it, then there will be a coalition of the willing doing it. And I do believe that that will have governments like the German government, the Dutch government seem twice. Because then they will start realizing that the risk is a breakup of the Eurozone, a breakup of the European Union. And then they will maybe come to realize that actually it's not a matter of showing, I would say, charity to one another. It's a matter of common interest. And that is what is totally lacking. I mean, you still hear very much, and especially when you listen to the Dutch finance minister Wopke Buxtra, who is coming from the Christian Democrats, the terms he uses are moral terms. It's like they are the virtuous ones, and they are the lazy ones or the sinners, basically. And then that creates the opposite discourse in the south, where basically they call those countries or those governments as the egoists, the people who cannot show solidarity. We should get out of this moralistic debate. This is a matter of common interest. But the fact is that most of the heads of states and government do not see the response as a matter of common interest.  They feel this. Meeting after meeting, they realize that solidarity is not forthcoming. And if solidarity will be forthcoming, everyone will realize because of the duration to take the decision that this will be a reluctant solidarity. It will be a food dragging solidarity. And if this is what Europe is about, then I understand that many people will want to turn their backs on Europe. This is an existential challenge to the European construction. And we have to realize that. I'm proud to be part of a political family that has grasped this. Because again, if you speak with Greens, not just in the south, but in Germany, in Finland, in Austria, et cetera, they, we all sing to the same pinch. And this is what we're proud of. But then again, we represent 10% of the European population. So, well, we need allies. Okay. Thank you for this first response. You described very well what is lacking at the European level. I can imagine the Greens are developing their own proposals, their own package. What kind of package we need to really install responsibility of common economic recovery plan and solidarity plan also from the financial point of view? Well, first, the first issue that, well, the first question that you need to answer is a size. Because in such circumstances, it's obvious if you want keep our economy from collapsing, and if you want to give ourselves a chance to reorient it, well, you need massive, massive investments. And here we're talking about mobilizing between 1 and 2 trillion euros, that is between 1000 and 2000 billion euros, right? Now, you might say this is enormous. Well, actually, the GDP of the European Union is between 13 and 14 trillion, right? A year. So we are not talking about something that is out of our reach. It's perfect within our reach. We need to mobilize that. Now, second thing is who needs to mobilize that? Let's be clear, it won't be the market. What this pandemic does is reminding us that when vital interest of society is not the market, it's the state, it's all democracy that has to take over. And so there's hierarchy between the two. The defense of the general interest is the task of democracy, not the task of the markets. And therefore, you need leadership from the governments at all levels, I mean, European, national, regional, local. And there's a parallel to be drawn with the new deal of Roosevelt. Basically, the economy had collapsed, and it was only the initiative of the state that kickstarted the economy again. So the state takes the initiatives, I mean, the governments take the initiative, the size counts. So between one and two trillion, three, it has to be for the long haul. You cannot just say, okay, let's do an effort for the next two years. We are gone for probably a decade of reinvestment and reorientation. And that has to be funded by long-term debt. What? Debt? Yes, debt. Of course, debt.  And just to take an example, and that's another one that came 10 years after the meltdown in 1929, and that's World War II. I mean, when the British government decided to continue the war against Nazi Germany, they did not reflect in the sense of can we afford it? Or is it good for the economy? Or do our budgetary rules allow for that? No, perception was this is a vital threat to all societies, and therefore we will do whatever it takes. And you know what? The war debts of the British government that they were incurred during World War II were finally reimbursed in 2008. So we have to go for the long haul. And the final point, and this is again where the hands of states fall short, it has to be collective. It cannot be individual member states borrowing in order to do their part. It has to be done together. And there I would say it's a matter of solidarity, of course, because when there's divergences within the eurozone, within the European Union, not all member states are in the same fiscal position in the same economic structure are impacted the same way. I mean, when 10, 15% of your GDP depends on tourism, you are not in the same position as if 20% of your GDP depends from the wood industry. So I mean, you are not hit the same way. And therefore, if we leave it to member states, I guarantee you, don't forget the eurozone crisis, the tensions within the eurozone will explode and it will lead to the explosion of the eurozone and therefore the European Union. It has to be together. Now people say, yes, so that the lazy ones can benefit from the good signature of the virtuous ones. No, that is not the thing. Of course, the collective signature of the European Union is of good quality. But it has to do not just with the fact that Germany is on board. It has also to do with this thing that has played in favour of big financial multinationals in the past, but that should play in favour of the European Union that is being too big to fail. Together, we are too big to fail. And therefore, that gives us strength in the financial markets as well. So collectively, we can do it. But then again, if we go separately, I bet you the European Union is living its last decade. Because not only not only we will basically create this unity and create divergence within the European Union, but I know a number of people outside of the European Union who will just blow on the flames and try to aggravate the situation. Look at how Xi Jinping is acting. Look at how Vladimir Putin is acting. Look at how Donald Trump, I mean, they wish the solution of the European Union and now the British government would very much like that. Because they can go back to the traditional geopolitical action of the United Kingdom that is divide the continent and play one against the other. Frankly speaking, we've been there before and we don't want to get there again. Okay, thank you very much. Maybe, Philippe, another question. You talked about the Council yesterday, which was very disappointing about the Commission. What is the role of the European Parliament at this moment? Let's face it, and now we realize it even more. I mean, democracy is about not just voting stuff, it's about debating, deliberating. And there, let's face it, when human beings cannot meet with one another, well, deliberation is made more complex. And yes, of course, we can use tools such as this one.  And therefore, yes, the parliament is at the moment on a slow burner. We are, well, aching to get back to work, but we are touched by the pandemic, all the same as anyone else. So at the moment, the parliament is indeed trying to have its voice heard, we adopted a resolution last week, but then again, working at a distance does not allow you, well, as I said, to deliberate, but also to express positions with all the nuances that you need to be exactly to the point. And therefore, well, we will be heard, we will work again on legislation and there will be a lot of legislation to adopt in the next few months. But bear with us for the moment, because, well, as long as we cannot reconvene physically, it's going to be quite difficult. And that's the case for every parliament. Now, there's a risk and inherent risk there for democracy. Because indeed, in many member states, and they factor at the European level, the executive branch has special privileges in crisis situations. And the risk indeed is that you weaken every day more the other branches of government that is a judiciary and the end of legislation. And in some member states, it goes further than that. It's weakening the media. It's basically putting the parliament out of business. And this is one of the risks of this crisis is that the natural tendency of executives to grab power will of course play at the maximum in a crisis situation. And we need to get back to a more normal way of functioning with checks and balances, which are at the heart of democracy. Okay. Thank you very much. Also, this physical meeting is of course quite different from this virtual meeting. I mean, it's quite different from a physical, but we are happy that we are receiving questions from people over all over Europe. And, Mar, there's a question for you here. Somebody writes, I was very happy to hear you believe we need welfare states fit for the 21st century. What is your vision for them? Yeah. Okay. Sorry. I think I'm messing with the microphone also with the host. So sorry about that. Yeah. Well, what has been also seen after the consequences of how the 2008 financial crisis was dealt with that I was mentioning before is that the circumstances in which the different member states have faced the current crisis have not been exactly the same. And this is not entirely due to the way the member states were handling their welfare systems. I've always pointed out that the different historical circumstances all over Europe have also had an influence on how the democracies have arisen. I mean, the fact that the central and northern European cities were developing their democracies in the 50s and in the south countries we were on the dictatorship and only 20 years after we were able to solidify our democracies have had an impact, of course, in the development of their different welfare states. But what's on top of, let's say, the development of the democratic and welfare systems, we had to support some of the countries was the consequences of the austerity measures that were applied. And when I think about the 21st century welfare states, I believe of well-funded, as Philippe was mentioning, well-funded governments, well-funded states that are facing and have the priority of fulfilling the needs of the citizens in order to develop their lives at their best. So I believe that a reordering and reshaping of the different public services needs to be done because the last round of the last 10 years have been about privatizing and prioritizing market-oriented decisions rather than the fulfillment of the citizens' necessities. Okay, thank you. Philippe, there's a question for you. What will happen to the green European deal during and after this corona crisis? Well, actually, I'm an optimist, but I think that, of course, there will be resistance, but guess what, there was already resistance before the pandemic. But actually, I do believe that in the perspective of the green transition that this crisis offers opportunities. Let me explain. Indeed, when the pandemic struck, you had a number of players screaming that, you know, this was not the time that because of this pandemic, we should postpone. Who were these people? Well, the people who before the pandemic were already saying that. It's exactly the same people. So they just found a new alibi, a new excuse to back up their conservatism. What I didn't see really are new players coming to the front saying, well, we were in favor, but now we change our minds. This I didn't see so much. Now, interestingly, the European Commission which decided to put a European Green Deal at the heart of its policies as firmly, well, stands squarely behind the European Green Deal. Now, don't mistake me. I mean, obviously, the European Green Deal proposed by the Commission is insufficient in any ways incoherent. I mean, having your European Green Deal where you say, don't change the trade policy and you don't change the common agricultural policy is a bit of a weak Green Deal. But actually, there's a lot already in the Green Deal, but indeed, the common agricultural policy and the trade policy are not covered and they have major importance. So we need to fight to expand the Green Deal. But at least the European Commission has given absolutely no sign to back up from that. Now, if you look at the parliament, the parliament has reaffirmed and that was, to me, one of the main elements of the resolution we adopted last week. The parliament has affirmed its majority position of making the Green Deal at the heart of our recovery strategy. So I would say on that side, we are covered. So where is the problem that were, well, where it was before the pandemic with the member states? And you can think of a number of member states who are actually actively resisting to the Green Deal.  And hey, hang on one second. Look to Germany. I mean, Germany has been one of the major stumbling blocks, again, any serious climate action in Europe, despite the perceptions.  Therefore, we will still face these oppositions, obviously. But there's also a coalition of member states who want to be ambitious on that. Now, that's the institutional aspect. Why do I say that I believe that the Green Deal stands more chances to happen? I mean, the Green Deal. I mean, the ecological and social transition. Why do I believe that this pandemic helps? Because it is shaking our societies very deeply. I mean, many things that have been considered common wisdom in decision making circles have become suddenly much harder to defend. For instance, that the market always knows best. Well, we know it's not the case. That the global scale is always the scale. People now speak about relocalization and not just the Greens. That efficiency is everything. Well, actually, efficiency, maximizing efficiency is always to the detriment of resilience, that is the ability to withstand shocks. So, on many aspects, things that were considered common wisdom have been proven false. And I would just like to take, again, the example of Emmanuel Macron. I mean, Emmanuel Macron was elected on a platform in social and economical terms that was totally neoliberal. So he wanted to bring to France the neoliberal reforms that were made elsewhere. I mean, tax reforms that favored the rich, reducing the public services, trusting the market for everything, adapting France to globalization. One of the first speeches of the same Macron, who is a neoliberal economically, after the beginning of the pandemic, he praises public services. He praises resilience. He praises relocalization. He says globalization is going too far. You might think, hey, hang on. This guy doesn't believe anything of what he says. Probably not. But the fact that he feels compelled to utter these things means that, in issue, public opinion has shifted. And that is original discourse, pro-globalization, pro-rich, pro-inequality, pro-market against public services, that this simply doesn't make it again. And if he wants to win, he needs to change course. Now, how credibly is that? I leave to the French citizens to decide. I wouldn't believe him too much. But the fact that he has totally changed discourse shows that something is playing, or at least within the political class, that those who were the defenders of the status quo of neoliberal globalization feel on the defensive. And you know what? When they feel on the defensive, I go on the offensive. And that's what we are going to do the next few months and years. Okay, thank you. It's a bright explanation. We have other questions. One question for Ma is that you also see with the corona crisis rising extremism. And how should we fight this also negative evolution in society? Well, I didn't exactly say that, or at least I don't recall it. But I do have pointed out two options that I believe that were the only possible. The one that, you know, took the member, the states, the nation-state as the element in order to build the recovery plan. And that understood that a shared common progress was needed in order to build that upon. I mean, the extremisms have been there for the last decade, or even longer. And unfortunately, they took a bigger space than we would have liked it. But I've also said it, and that was before the crisis. It's still valid. Now, they failed to achieve the majorities that they wanted in order to become the majoritarian, let's say, field in the European Parliament. That Phillips is not much better than me. So despite the sizes of the different groups have changed, they didn't manage to win, let's say, the battle against the idea of the Europe that we dreams fight for after the European elections. Okay, thanks. And I have another question. I want to ask you. Somebody's writing that we shouldn't only focus on Europe, but of course, other parts of the world like Africa are also very hard affected by the crisis. And so, how could we as Europe play a role to build more global solidarity with these other regions that are really under dire shock? I would mention two things. First, there will be a need of debt restructuring and debt cancellation. Because obviously, the economic shock that will come to Africa will be even more destructive than what we have known. And it comes on top of the plagues that have hit Africa in terms of autocracy, war, resource exhaustion, climate change. So the pandemic comes on top of that. And they are much less well equipped than we are materially to face the things. So we will need financial help. The other thing is that there will be a big battle once medications and vaccines exist against the coronavirus, because as you know, the pharma industry, they are basically rent seekers like any other multinational and they want to milk the cow. And especially when there's an emergency, they want to get a windfall from that. And there we will need to be very strict in terms of lifting intellectual property rights on those medicines. Sorry, life comes before profit. And there, the European Union can do a lot if it wants to. But then again, it's going to be at the expense of previously orthodox economic thinking. Again, I do believe that our faiths are intertwined between Africa and Europe. And we have historical responsibilities towards that continent. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but we cannot just look the other way. We will need to play an active role here, together with the African Union knowing full well that governance issues will stand in the way that we are not dealing with a host of democracies while functioning institutions. But anyway, life comes first. And we will need to do our part. Okay, thanks about what the ideas of the Greens are for these new welfare systems and how this is connected with the relocalization of economic production. And I think in Spain, in Barcelona, we already have some good examples of it. And you can combine this with, let's say, the initiatives, the solidarity of people producing their own mask and so on. So what could be the role of more local production and local communities in this? I'm going to also ask Philip to jump on this, because it doesn't belong to me to explain a little bit. Maybe Philip, you can give a hint of this recovery plan and measures that the Greens are already discussing to face the post-COVID, where these issues are hinted there. I was pointing out, and that doesn't have to be that much about exclusively the recovery, at least that to Philip. But what I was also pointing out, and I would like to underline because Philip has hinted about these holy ideas that are now being questioned is a bit what I was mentioning when I was pointing out the level of generalized solidarity that has been on the ground in our communities. That is probably what I believe that is making the politicians questions the holy truths that were until now on the ground and ideologically assumed and is making people like Macron delivering this change of this message. Nothing to do with the real localization question, but I wanted to just comment before what is probably going to be the last question. Okay, thanks. So then we go to Philip for this question on industrial policy. Yeah, well, it's not just industry policy, but this issue of real localization is very important, because this is also a place where the national populists have a field day in the sense that they will say we can only rely on ourselves if we want to be resilient. And there may be a temptation to say, okay, let's do everything local, and so we will be self-reliant. But actually, if you think in terms of resilience, that is not the best way to achieve resilience. I mean, shifting from everything global to everything local makes you vulnerable as well, because if you are hit and basically you live on the sort of island, well, basically you cannot call upon others to help. So isolation from the rest of the world is not the best recipe yet. Full-scale globalization isn't either. So we really need to again get out of this simplistic world view where efficiency is all an efficiency measured by profit. Bigger, longer, further, faster is always better. For some things, you need the scale. I mean, you may like or dislike airplanes, but if you want to build an intercontinental airplane, no, every country will not design and build such things, right? So you will need to do that at several places in the world, but you don't need one aircraft manufacturer in Belgium and another one in Luxembourg and another one, etc. You get my point. Conversely, so for some activities, global is the right scale. But let me take food. I mean, what sense does it have to import milk powder in Europe from New Zealand? I mean, exactly at the other side of the planet. What sense does it make to import in Europe beef and pork meat from Canada, as was agreed, as part of the CETA trade deal?   You know, the original Common Agricultural Policy was about basically food sovereignty, giving Europe the ability to provide its own food. That doesn't mean that you don't exchange food with the rest of the world. There's stuff that you can grow in other parts of the world that you can't grow in Europe, okay? But most of it, you are self-reliant. And that's obvious. Well, now we have a Common Agricultural Policy that drives efficiency for the European farmers to be able to sell on the global markets.   And that is where you need a drastic change, of course, and bring the Common Agricultural Policy back to its original goal, which was ensure food sovereignty for Europe, not at country level, but at a continent level. So again, it's not Belgium should be isolated, but the whole market is basically in union. That's how it should be. Because actually, Europe is not that big. It's 2% of the land on this planet, so it's quite small. But we should be able to basically be self-sufficient in terms of food. And again, that doesn't mean that you cannot import bananas from Central America, no problem. But this is a sideshow. The main show is basically we make the food that we need. And that increases resilience. But then again, it's not like that for every domain. Another good example that, well, the crisis made me aware of is that for basic drugs, such as paracetamol, so a simple painkiller, Europe is 100% dependent from basically India. Does that make sense? Hang on one second. I mean, resilience comes, of course, from reducing the complexity of a system. And indeed, when you reduce it, well, basically, you make it sturdier, but it may be less financially efficient, but that's life. But also, multiplying the sources that indeed, well, maybe we can still import paracetamol from India. But maybe not all of it. Maybe we can do some stuff locally and import some stuff. And then the more sources you have, the more resilient you are too. But again, to me, the critical thing in terms of policymaking is not so much the distance argument. It's the resilience argument. So the idea that, yes, you need to make trade-offs with efficiency in order to be more resilient. Of course, having multiple sources is costlier than having only one. Well, you might dispute that because you may have competition and that may drive prices down. Again, having a local supplier, it may be more expensive, but then again, you can rely on it. Look at this issue of masks now. We are receiving masks from China, which are basically not up to standards. Yeah, of course, because they see a business opportunity and they think some producers think that they can sell junk to Europe. And given the emergency, junk will be sold at good prices. Well, if you have several suppliers, well, maybe you will be in a better position. So we should really... How should I say? I mean, I'm not saying that we should forget about that issue. The point is that in all things, the neoliberal revolution of globalizing to simplistic solutions, maximizing one thing, profit, efficiency, and there we should be smarter because the world is complex and you need to think with the complexity of the world and say, okay, yes, we can strive for efficiency, but there's limits to what we are going to accept in terms of losing resilience. It's always, I mean, all decisions in our lives are trade-offs. We need to find the right balance. And I believe that what Corona has shown is that all societies were totally and still are totally out of balance. Okay. More resilient and basically your immunity system works better. Okay. Thank you very much. I see we're without noticing our time is almost up. I would like to end with a more personal question. All of us in this Corona time are restrained of doing some things we normally do. And so there are certain things we miss. And so my question for you is, what is the first thing you will be doing once the restrictions in place are lifted? So Ma, what would you do? Well, I'm going to be very simple, yeah, because I do have my kid away for medical reasons. Sorry, but the very first thing that I'm going to do is to go and search for him. That's quite clear and obvious. I really wish it can happen very soon. Philippe? Well, very much the same thing. We will bring you all the family at one place, either in Belgium or in France and meet again. We have half the family here and the others are scattered. We're going to bring them together and celebrate. Okay. Thank you. I think this is really something we bring the families back together and celebrate. And yeah, as I said, let's hope it won't take too long. And I will not try to make a summary of this very inspiring hour. The thing that I think two points were really crucial is one, we need a political reordering of the economy based on values such as care and solidarity. The second point is that instead of our economy being based on the efficiency, we really need to start from the point of resilience, how to build a resilient economy, how to build a resilient society. So, Mar and Philippe, I really want to thank you for this special kind of interview. For the people who have been following this, thank you very much. If you really appreciate these kind of talks and you want to allow us to make more, you can make a donation, which would be very much appreciated. And you can find the link in the chat. And I'm happy to already announce you the third session next week, which will be on feminism in post-corona times. So thank you for being with us, and I wish you all the best for the weekends. Bye. Okay, we are not live anymore. So, I see Philippe is already gone. Okay. So, thank you very much. It was great.


Okay chat here it is resident evil 7. Hey baby. I just wanted to say hello and I love you. Oh good news I'm gonna be coming home soon. I cannot wait to be done with this babysitting job and come home to my loving husband. I love you Ethan I miss you so much I'm sending tons of kisses. I'm gonna make hello fresh for dinner whenever you get home exclamation point hello fresh. You were right I did lie to you I shouldn't have All I can say is if you get this stay away from the voodoo Hey, it's uh, it's Ethan. What's up here at the other night? Yeah, yeah, no, I'm good. I'm good. Is it kind of chompy? She's not dead. She's alive. She's back. I don't know look I don't know how but she's back.  Where is she? Yeah, v-sync is good for streaming Dolby, Louisiana I know I know but what if it is her? I have to find out what happened. Oh gross Wait, how are we moving in the background? But this wait, what is happening? Wait, what happened? Dude literally every game I play literally every single game I ever play. I will break it every single game Oh good. This house looks totally normal and not scary at all. I think I have to explore Except her gift Where did she come from?  This looks so cool They put a bird in here Aspen gold thingy for the five dollars get out of my house. Thank you upstairs or downstairs Dude every time I see this I think of visage pt like this this in every horror game There's like this image right here Every single horror horror game. There's this image Real height. Thank you for the tier one Let's go up derelict house footage derelict my bowls Dude this game is scary. This game is way more scary than Resident Evil 8 was like it's already terrifying Woman that gives us picture. Wait woman on bed man But who took the picture behind him? Looks like the owners Oh Dolby haunted house rehearsal. Oh, so it's fake. This isn't real Oh, what did you find this guy? Give me a break Pete. Hey, I only work with professionals Speaking of which make sure the sound is right this time. I don't want to repeat of amarillo. Oh I thought I was watching a video. We have to make a change. Wait.    Why am I going down there after I saw the video of what happened? To save your wife. Hey, no No same thing the bodies are gone I farted It was just a fart Okay, I'm sorry daddy.  I don't know yet. Wait. Is that a human? We saw a picture of a woman Earlier in the bed with a man, but somebody took a picture behind her who took the picture Okay, whatever. We'll do it. God. I found you. It's me. It's ethan. Are you all right? You shouldn't be here What do you mean? You contacted me. No. No, I wouldn't Did I did anyone see you did he see you Who else is here? What the hell's going on? Daddy's coming. We need to go Daddy we need to go now Wait, why does she look so scary? Where are you taking me? someplace safe.  I haven't seen you in three years three years Three years Has it really been three years? What is this place? What they do to you? Not now We need to get out of here first man You shouldn't know where you're going. Thank you raft. They must bring me food through here I remember Is my wife a crackhead? This is it remember this room There's another door here. I'm sure of it. We'll close this Well, I just got an achievement for closing that door We're gonna be a family Now that you're here. Wait, what? There's another door here. I'm sure of it. Wait, what? We gotta get out of here. Just stay here. All right I'm gonna have a look around Wait, is this a burger shot doll? Wait, what?  Is that a lindy's bathroom?  Ah, what the hell? Do I keep clicking? Do I keep clicking?   What just happened water saved water healed me.    My name's Zoey This should be a way out through the attic Wait, she's gone Okay, we gotta get up to the roof. But where am I gonna find a fuse? I've looked in like every box that I've seen so far Uh, can we turn on the lights? Oh, no What? Where did you even get that? The cupboard? I don't have any water Handgun ammo No, where do I go? Where do I go? Where do I go?  F me in the air. Okay. I can't figure out where to go The ladder is this is mine. We're gonna move this away from you To make sure you don't use this anymore. Oh my gas