and welcome to the network service mesh introduction. I am, my name is Nikolai Nikolayev. I work as an open source technology lead in the open source technology center at VMware. And the session was announced to present us predatory codes, I didn't manage to make it so I'm going to do it on my own. We are both maintainers at network service mesh. So I'm going to do the introduction today on my own. Let's see how this works. Okay, so what we're going to discuss today is some of the tools that we have around networking and the cloud native networking. And we will try to discuss and demonstrate, I mean, in terms of how network service mesh works, how we are trying to solve these problems that we see. Network service mesh is a very, very core technology, at least the way that we perceive it. So whatever we are going to give as an example here, it's not the only application of this technology in this approach. So please come to me, I'll be around today, tomorrow. And if you have specific use case that you are finding like challenges, implemented it in a cloud native way, come and talk to me, talk to us as a community. We have a couple of friends here, also in China. Okay, let's see what the journey is. So today we're going to, as I said, share some thoughts about the cloud native networking. We are going to look at how Kubernetes Networking API does this as a good example. We also usually, if someone has seen our talks, we usually do this story type of stories that we discuss. And we usually have our friend Sarah and her problems. Today we're going to show another of our friends, which is Marcia and her multi-cloud application problems. We are going to also show how network service mesh works at a higher level. And of course, in the end, a couple of links. And I hope that we have time for Q&A also. So this is the cloud native definition as defined by CNCF. You probably saw it today, then show it at his keynote. It's pretty long. There's no point into reading the whole of it, but yeah, it's very well written. So please go and check it if you haven't done so already. But we have outlined a couple of points that we think are very important for the networking done in a cloud native way. So immutable infrastructure, I guess that everyone aspires to that and know that this is important. Loosely coupled system, like loosely coupling all the components that are implementing your functionality in a cloud native way. And minimal toil. I mean, minimal toil is an important thing. No one really would like to do more than they should. So let's start with minimal toil networking. So what that would mean. Essentially, people don't really want to think about all the details of networking.  People would not really want to think about subnets or out, I mean, you're not requesting a specific subnet. You want to consume some form of networking. That's on the conceptual level. And that's why we would like to call these network services. I mean, this is a famous terminology, but we would like to think that all the requirements for connectivity, all the aspects of connectivity are packaged in a single term called network service.  And then when you want to consume it, you want to refer to it by name, you just want, okay, I want my secure internet connectivity. This is a typical example that we give in our talks and one of our core examples in the project. But essentially imagine if you want to run your application in a public cloud and you want to connect to your office, you want to consume some form of network service that will get you the proper secure access to your corporate internet. Well, there are other examples given here, but we can continue with exemplifying this. Now, how Kubernetes is doing this, how Kubernetes networking is applying these concepts. So essentially from conceptual point of view, you basically get your layer 3 connectivity out of the box once the port is deployed and created, you get your layer 3 connectivity, you can do security with network policies, load balancing is there for those services and between the endpoints. And what one would really notice, you start looking a little bit closer, is that mostly most of these concepts are about inter cluster, like all the networking that goes inside a single cluster. There has been challenges about this before trying to overcome, but if you look at the plain networking that Kubernetes describes today, it's about inter cluster communication and connectivity. If you want to consume it, as we said, it's just there once you get your port connected, we have everything there and network policies and services are really easy to consume and to implement. When we talk about loose coupling, this is something that's very familiar to all the application developers when we start talking about microservices, it's essentially a way to abstract all your building blocks through some API abstractions and then you can build from these small blocks, you can build more complex functionalities and design patterns. It's a very flexible way to actually implement more complex functionalities, but if you look at it, historical networking has been very strongly coupled to the infrastructure and what we typically see is that your networking is coupled to your cluster, to your data center, if you're using a public cloud, VPC, et cetera, and you don't really have very much granularity and flexibility to the way that people would really like to do it at some point, if you start doing more advanced things. How this works with Kubernetes networking, yes, in general, you are decoupled from the specific implementation through the CNI, which is container interface, container networking interface. And on the other hand, it is also strongly coupled because you usually get one CNI plugin per cluster. You can do multiple CNIs, there are ways, but it's not really consistent and easy to do it. What you would also see is that there's a single edge which is typical for the entire cluster or even for multiple clusters, like if you are running in the data center using virtual machines, then you can very easily end up with a single edge of your multiple clusters sharing. And the granularity is not very fine here.  From the immutable infrastructure point of view, essentially your bots run on really high level, so you cannot really change anything particular from the point of view of the networking functions, other than actually they are obstructed through the Kubernetes and the CNI APIs. So your bots really cannot request any specific networking capabilities from the infrastructure and you cannot change that easily. So that's the check here in Kubernetes. So let's look at our example and the story that Marsha has to tell us. So Marsha is trying to implement an application that has some multi-cloud and hybrid cloud aspects. What that means is that essentially she wants to, she has workloads that are running possibly in a public cloud, in a private Kubernetes deployment, maybe some legacy virtual machines, and here we have some bare method deployments. Like for example, there could be some huge database running here already in your data center and you don't want to mess with it. So she wants all these things connected. Now, if you look from the point of view of networking, you'll find that each of these domains have their own ideas about how they do networking. So the public cloud have their own private CNI implementations, your own premises, Kubernetes deployment, you probably have some of the publicly available CNI implementations for private CNI implementations, virtual machines have their virtual networking and of course your bare method of physical networks. The usual way that you interconnect this is on a network to network direct connections, which is not very fine grade. Like I mean, the usual way that we do this is you just draw a line if you want to call it like this from one network to the other and then you assume that both networks are connected and then you have to put some filtering and additional work just to be able to isolate particular workloads and pods.  I mean, she has to work with all the things that are involved in setting up all these complex networking. But in the end what she really wants to do is to be able to connect her workloads only. So she wants to be able to declare and say, okay, my workload that's on the public cloud wants to connect to my workload that's on private cloud, virtual machine, bare metal, et cetera, et cetera. And that's one of the things that we are trying to solve with network service mesh. It's where it comes. We have this concept of virtual wires or some kind of obstruction of connections that actually will help her in this situation to essentially request a network service that will implement this point to point connectivity for her. Of course, under the hood there still be all the networking inter-cloud networking going on. But the network service being something that can be requested straight from the pot level actually will help her very easily to implement her distributed application. So that we said already essentially we have this Marshall sub connectivity network service that she can request and she can do that. From the minimal point of view, whatever we do with network service mesh and I have an example later to explain how this works. More or less it's essentially what she has to do is to just annotate her deployment manifest with this special label where she essentially requests a specific network service and then network service mesh takes over and actually provides all the connectivity from there. Of course, someone has to implement the network service before it's not working just magically out of the box. From the loose coupling, yeah, we already said that essentially you don't bind to your inter-domain connectivity, you bind to the couple from there and you have just your connectivity between your workloads. And from the immutable infrastructure point of view, essentially the way to enable network service mesh is to we have Helm charts or you just install NSM there. It works on top of Kubernetes. It doesn't change any aspects of Kubernetes. It doesn't use any special version of Kubernetes. It doesn't change the CNI, it doesn't interfere with it. We think that CNI does its job great for whatever it was designed. We don't want to mess with it. I know that there are some approaches people are trying to implement some various form of tweets, CNIs, et cetera, to solve some of these problems. Our approach is to kind of amend to that, to provide some extended capabilities based on our concept that we do with network service mesh. And of course it works with any CNI. And to prove that it works with any CNI, we are having our CI and continuous deployment, our CSED pipeline continuously running on a couple of public clouds, also virtual machines, bare metals, and also use kind, I don't know if you're familiar with kind but it's a really nice project to run your tests against with essentially on Kubernetes, you know, Docker. So with that, I can move on to how this thing works. And before we talk about how this thing works, how NSM works, I would like to talk you through a little bit to our definition of port, actually. NSM is, so NSM is three things, network service definition of JPC API and distributed control plane with minimum share estate. So starting from the last distributed control plane, this kind of resembles the approach that Kubernetes case with its Kubelet. So they are kind of local agents that are same, it's separated from each other. It's kind of distributed. They work on their own. This is what we do again. We call this network service managers. We run them as demon sets. Then the JPC API is essentially an abstracted way to describe, publish and consume network services. And then we have the definition of network service where we actually say that network service is not a single entity. It's essentially a composition of multiple functions and endpoints that are kind of bound together to a single network service descriptor. Of course, all these concepts and all these theories we have implemented in our Git repo, it's a Kubernetes-based implementation, but the overall architecture of the project is done in a way that the Kubernetes specifics are isolated in a separate module that can be replaced. So today we don't use much of Kubernetes except for its central storage like HCD. And we use it also for scheduling our bots that are actually doing the network service mesh. But other than that, we are not tightly bound to Kubernetes. So in theory, it should be easy to actually add all these other aspects of virtual machines, bare metals, and there's some interest in work going on in the community and discussions around these things. Also today, we use as a kind of basic packet passing as we call it forwarding component, forwarding plane, we use VPP, which is FDIO, Blue Foundation Project. But there's a work going on around implementing a pure kernel-only-based implementation, which will not depend on VPP. And it's not that we don't like VPP, it's just that we want to be able to demonstrate how the underlying forwarding plane is independent from NSM. We are not bound to any specific implementation. We want to have something that is bare metal, I don't know if they're metal baseline that we can just run each and everywhere without really relying on any third-party components. So a couple of slides to show how these things work in more details. So if you have your Kubernetes cluster, with let's say here, we have three worker nodes. The first thing that we do is that we apply our custom resource definitions. We define three essential CRDs, Network Service Manager Registry, Network Service Endpoint Registry, and Network Service Registry for the services. So once we deploy with Helm, for example, once we deploy Network Service Mesh NSM, it essentially deploys the Network Service Managers, which are the mandatory components. We also deploy alongside the forwarding plane, which in this case is VPP, but it's completely orthogonal. It can be deployed in other, by other means. But what's important here is that essentially Network Service Managers gets registered to the central registry. So they are very well defined, which Network Service Manager and which worker nodes it runs. Then the next thing is to essentially deploy the Network Service, which is, I will show it later. I have a slide, which there is some YAML file descriptor that tells us how the Network Service is composed out of the endpoints. Then we deploy the endpoints, which also get registered in the central registry. This is for the red service. We do the same for the blue service, for Network Service. And then when the client comes and wants to consume that service, or the red client there, it will essentially communicate to its local Network Service Manager. This local Network Service Manager is going to consult the central registry about what this network service is, what endpoints are implementing it, et cetera, et cetera. There's a selection process going on based on label matching. And then both Network Service Managers that are involved in this process are going to establish a point-to-point connection. And that's maybe one of the crucial things that we should mention here, that with Network Service Mesh, we don't do broadcast domains, bridge domains, any virtual switches or things like that. It's only point-to-point connectivity between points. And on the other hand, this Network Service Endpoint maybe would like to also chain, it was the term that was used in service chaining, but we would like to call it Compose here, but we can connect to the other Network Service Endpoint that actually implements the full Network Service as a whole. So in this case, this Network Service is composed out of two endpoints. And as you can see here, the first endpoint here, essentially is getting two new interfaces at runtime. This is one thing that Network Service Mesh actually uses as a tool to achieve its goals. We support multiple interfaces for ports and they can be requested and disposed at runtime, you don't have to restart your services to do any fancy things that just out there at the moment that you request the service, you just get your interface injected and you can start consuming it. Same, of course, goals for the blue service the client can come and you can consume all two services. One thing that I don't know if it's seen very clearly, but here on the bottom, we essentially have labels on the service request. So once connection request goes out of the port, you can have labels alongside it. Like you can say, I want to consume service version two and then it should be able, Network Service Mesh should be able to get you the proper service labeled with the proper labels. There's some label matching involved here in the picture. How the network service consumes on happens. So if you have your application container and you want to run it in a Network Service Mesh enabled port, essentially, as we showed before, all you have to do is to use our annotations format. And then there is a Tink, which is an NSM admission controller. It processes this deployment at deployment time at port creation time and it figures out what the service is. It essentially injects an init container there and this init container takes care to actually inject the interface for you and to ensure smooth connectivity and the consumption of the network service. Now, this is one way that someone can do things. We have more advanced ways. We have an SDK that actually you can incorporate in your application straight and actively request and manage your services and connections that your application is using. But this is the easiest way if you just want to consume something that it's out of the box, you don't even have to change your application. This is an example on the network service manifest. So this is how we essentially, this is the descriptor of the network service manifest. So the first thing that we have, we have our custom resource defined of kind network service. Then we have the service name, which in this case is a secure internet connectivity or it will be Marshares app connectivity. If we are talking about Marshares application here, then of course we have the payload type, which in this case is IP. Network service mesh is pretty much payload agnostic. So if you have seen our site or some of our slides, you probably know that we are claiming that we can do layer two and layer three connectivity. There's nothing really bound, there's nothing bound or hard-coded in the architecture and the design principles that we have that is binding us to any particular workload. So one of the use cases guys that were just before me here, they were discussing Kubeflow and Kubeflow is essentially a way to run TensorFlow in Kubernetes way, but on top of Kubernetes infrastructure, but they are limited to whatever the Kubernetes networking is giving them to essentially use TCP to communicate between the nodes. Now that's good, but if someone of you knows TensorFlow, there's also improved performance improvement based on using RDMA, which is a really fast way to communicate between the nodes. And one of the things that we are discussing with some of the members of the community is how we can essentially enable Kubeflow, for example, the talk RDMA being between the nodes. So essentially in that case, the service there would be payload, would be RDMA or I don't know, something else, whatever is needed there. So to continue here with the, you know, that was a smash descriptor, we have label matching for selecting the endpoints. This is essentially a match on the label that comes from the client requests. So in this case, the label match refers to ApiCos firewall, but it could be, they could be multiple label, they could be versions, et cetera, whatever people need. And then we have a simple routing, and then there's again label matching for selecting the endpoint. Essentially, each of the endpoints are labeling themselves, saying, okay, I am implementing version one, I'm implementing a firewall, I'm implementing a gateway. So given all this, this is essentially the basic rule for finding the way through the mesh and finding the way how to wire and to connect things within the network service mesh. And the last thing that we have here on the slide is a wild card. So essentially, if you don't specify labels, you can just use a wild card matching for default connectivity routing. This is more or less what I had to share with you. So we have our network, our site, network-service-mesh.io, we have our GitHub page, we are a CNCF Sandbox project since April. We are actively participating with some of the initiatives there. One of them is related to Telcos. This is another one of the aspects of network-service-mesh. There's some interest around this, how Telcos can be enabled to do cloud-native networking. If you want to connect with us on our site, we have the community sub-page. We have Slack channel in the CNCF Slack. We have a couple of calls during the week. We have mailing lists. It's all listed there. And I think that we have some time for questions. Yeah, we do have. But if you want to find me later, unfortunately, as I said, the other maintainer that was supposed to be here couldn't make it. So I'm the only one representative here on the project. I'll be later at our booth between 2 and 4 p.m. today and tomorrow and the CNCF answer bar near the end of the event. But if someone wants to chat and discuss their specific problems, I'll be there. And that's all from me. I guess that we have some time for questions, maybe. Yeah, we do. For questions. Hi, Nikola, great proposal, yeah. I have three questions, yeah. The first one is, in the Security and World Service case, and as you proposed so, yeah. And as client to connect and maybe client to the V5 World Service and the point, and the service and the point of view connect to VP and get it when the point and can be and connect to the service to the middle service and the point. For example, for V5 service and point, can we connect to the service or more service? Yes, yes. So there's nothing in the architecture that actually prevents you from doing that. It's up to the endpoint to be able to accommodate more incoming connections and how it will handle them. Now, it really depends on the application. So if you want to have the best scaling application, you can probably put some limits on the incoming connections and say, oh, okay, I cannot accept more than five connections for my CNA for my endpoint, or you can just let it run as much as possible to accept each and every request. There's nothing binding in the architecture here to tell you you should run only one interface or five or 10 or there. Okay, I see. But I think it's okay for technology, but I guess it's hard to manage the second number of service and point. For example, and the service point is that and we have two skills and maybe two more service or more service. I think it's hard for network connection. Yeah, yeah. So we have, that's probably one of things that is worth mentioning on this intro talks, is that we have a pretty complex auto-healing functionality implemented. There's some still rough edges that needs to be cleaned, but it works pretty well. So essentially what we have today is that at any point in time, because we are essentially managing the connections and we know what type of functions this endpoint is implementing, if the endpoint dies, we can essentially rewire you to another endpoint that implements the same function. And I mean, of course, if the endpoint is stateful, then it's up to you to have, I mean, to do the implementation of network service on the endpoint to have the replication of the state between the neighboring endpoint. But if it's stateless, then like if it's just a passive packet filter that just drops packets for some ACI rules, you can just be rewired and your service will just continue to work without really, okay, there's going to be some small glitch while we identify the endpoint and why we rewire it, but still it will continue to work. Okay, okay. Another question, yes. Why we use an immediate container for network service client to connect our service? Can we use another function? For example, we use a controller, yes. We just watch the labels of the, in the network service client label, yeah. I guess, yeah, she want to connect to the service and I just to connect to the source by him and put a controller and more by immediate container. Why we use that? What's the advantage and disadvantage of that? I guess that this was more or less inspired by the way that other guys are doing, like projects in the domain are doing similar things, like for example, I'm sure you know how the service mesh is like is to and linker, did they using not immediate container, but sidecar proxies sitting there. What you're saying actually makes a lot of sense. I would be, I would be, I mean, it would be nice if we can chat later about it, but yes, it makes sense, whatever you're asking. The way that we did it is we essentially have an SDK, so what we did is we just created the client, package it as a sidecar container and found that this works really well with an admission controller, but yes, of course we can go without it. We should be able to go without it. Mista is a high space for the novices, client to connect, no service for any container, but any container. Okay, we are in timeout. I didn't really get the question, but we can chat later. Okay, we can talk. Thank you. Thank you.


This block diagram illustration depicts a typical three-phase AC variable speed drive system. It has three main components, an operator control, a drive controller, and an AC motor. An operator control device provides a means to start and stop the motor and adjust the operating speed. The drive controller consists of a variety of components that work together to convert an AC input into a frequency and voltage output necessary to change the speed of an AC motor. Let's look more closely at the components of the drive controller. The converter or rectifier component consists of an array of fast-acting switches that convert an incoming AC voltage to a pulsating DC voltage. The intermediate circuit acts as a filter and consists of a DC bus and associated circuitry. This stage of the wave conversion serves to stabilize and smooth the pulsating rectifier output to generate a constant DC voltage. The filtered DC bus voltage then passes through to the inverter. At the inverter, an array of fast-acting switches convert the DC bus voltage into pulses at a constant magnitude that are proportional to the DC bus voltage. In a typical three-phase frequency inverter, there are six switches with a pair of switches for each phase. In each pair of switches, one switch generates the up component of the sine wave and the other generates the down component. The inverter output is not a true sine wave, but an approximation based on the application of pulse width modulation or PWM. The longer a switch is on, the higher the AC output voltage. Conversely, the longer a switch is off, the lower the output voltage. This duration of on time for each pulse is called pulse width. The time duration and intervals of these DC voltage pulses determine the synthesized AC output voltage and frequency. In a three-phase driver, the sine waves produced by each pair of inverter switches are 120 degrees out of phase to ensure efficient operation of the motor.


An endocentric compound refers to the combination of two or more words or phrases in which the grammatical head of the compound expresses its main meaning. Examples include information fatigue, arm chair and bank note. Information fatigue is a type of fatigue, arm chair is a type of chair and bank note is a type of note. Heads can be nouns resulting in nominal compounds, adjectives resulting in adjectival compounds or verbs resulting in verbal compounds. While the head defines the meaning of an endocentric compound, the modifier narrows that meaning, making the compound a hyponym of the head. In English, endocentric compounds are typically right-headed. However, they are also left-headed endocentric compounds, as for example, mother-in-law or commander-in-chief.


All right, guys, I think we're going to get started now. We have a number of medical school medical student presentations. The first one is going to be by Michael Simmons, who's a fourth year medical student from the University of Arizona. And I'm just going to talk about a unique aspect of the ARED's tribe. Thank you very much. As Renee said, my name is Michael Simmons. I'm a fourth year medical student from the University of Arizona. And the topic of my presentation today is investigating deep genotype-phenotype relationships in age-related macular generation. And for this, we use data from the age-related eye disease study trials. So let's see. Actually, I'm going to need to pull out a keyboard for one second. OK, my mentor in this research is Dr. Emily Chu, who's the deputy director of the Clinical Trials Branch at the National Eye Institute. My co-mentor is Dr. Zhang Lu, who manages the text-mining division at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. He and his team are responsible for the search functionality of PubMed. My research was made possible through the sponsors of the Medical Research Scholars Program at the NIH, which is a year-long residential research internship that I recently completed at the NIH. So of course, we're talking about age-related macular degeneration today. And this is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly. It's a chronic neurodegenerative condition that results in the progressive loss of the retinal pigment epithelium and loss of photoreceptors. Although there's no definitive treatment, we have made a lot of progress recently with anti-vegeta agents. And the age-related eye disease study trial and its follow-up, AREDS II, showed that the use of high-dose antioxidants and zinc delayed the progression to advanced stages of the disease. There's a very strong genetic component of AMD, and this is going to be the topic of our discussion today. So recently in 2016, the largest genome-wide association study of age-related macular degeneration was completed. In this study, Fritz et al. took 16,000 people with AMD as cases and compared them to 18,000 controls without AMD. And they looked at genes by with broad gene sequencing that segregated with the presence of AMD. You can see here in this Manhattan plot, so named because it looks kind of like a Manhattan skyline, that the x-axis contains various single-nucleotide polymorphisms arranged by chromosome. And the y-axis has p-values of the strength of association between each of those SNPs and the development of AMD. This study identified 52 individual SNPs or genetic loci that associated with AMD. And 34 of those were most representative, including complement factor H, which was the first gene ever to be identified in relation to AMD, arms 2, and it's accompanying gene at this locus, HTRA1, and the MMP9 gene, which is the first gene in a genome-wide association study to be found to associate with a subtype of AMD, that of wet macular degeneration. This finding here is what interested me most. It seems startling to me that it took the largest study ever to find any significant association with a gene and any of the subtypes. Because AMD is a very heterozygous condition, it seemed that we might have found other subtypes associated with specific genes before this. So we asked the question, are there differences in how these known genes discovered by the Fritz et al study? Are there differences in how these genes predispose to age-related macular degeneration? To answer this question, we developed a modification of the genome-wide association study construct, which we termed a deep phenotype association study. In this, we took a collection of people, in this case, participants in the AREDS II trial, and we split them into groups of cases and controls, not by the presence or absence of AMD or any other condition, but rather by the presence or absence of a specific allele. We then looked at a broad array of phenotypes found in the deep information in the AREDS study and looked at how one gene associated with many different phenotypes. This is opposite of what a genome-wide association study is, where they look at many genes in association with one phenotype. And we generated from this the familiar Manhattan plot. Although, I have to say Manhattan seems a little presumptuous for this tiny raffin comparison to the Fritz et al study, so it might be more appropriate to call it a Pocatello plot or something like that. So, what are the deep phenotypes that we looked at? Well, we took phenotypes that were measured by the central imaging center for the AREDS trials. And these phenotypes included things such as, or could be clumped into categories such as drusen with soft drusen, calcified drusen, reticular drusen and drusenoid pigment epithelial detachment as examples of these deep phenotypes. Autofluorescence abnormalities with irregular background autofluorescence, decreased central autofluorescence, geographic atrophy, including central geographic atrophy as a distinct phenotype. Pigment abnormalities, including hyperpigmentation or depigmentation, and the abnormalities associated with new blood vessel growth, such as laser treatment scars, hemorrhage characteristic of AMD, hard exudates, or visible vessels. We took each of these phenotypes and then conducted a pairwise chi-squared analysis between that phenotype and each of the known genes that were discovered in the Fritz et al study, the 34 independent genetic loci. Because chi-squared analyses need to take place on a one-to-one basis, or basically, they need to have binary classification of variables, we made the assumption that if a patient ever received a read of a specific phenotype, then they had that phenotype for sure. We also assumed an autosomal dominant model, meaning that if the patient possessed even one allele of the independently associated loci from the Fritz study, that would be enough to manifest in a phenotype in the patient. So from this, before I go into the data, I'd like to give you the baseline characteristics for we've gone for this study. So we took patients from the ARES II trial who had genetic testing, which amounted to 1,826 patients. Of these patients, about 1,000 were female. Nearly all were white, 792 had never smoked, and a little more than half had had some college education. This table here shows you that the various treatment arms of the ARES trial were represented equally amidst those patients who'd had genetic testing. And this last table shows you that the mean age of patients in our study was 73 years, and the average follow-up is about five years. This is the raw data from our deep phenotype association study. On the column, or the rows of this table represent each of the 30 deep phenotypes that I discussed earlier, and the columns are each of the 34 independently associated genetic loci. The table is a heat map with the various colors showing you the relative values or relative p-values of the strength of the association. Green cells had p-values that were greater than .05, and cells that were less than .05 were color coded from red to yellow, with yellow being the most significantly associated. For the rest of my presentation, we're gonna focus on just one gene and the various phenotypes associated with it, and this is the ARMS2-HTRA1 genetic locus, and the phenotype that was most significant in this locus was hemorrhage characteristic of AMD. I'm gonna show you the Pocatello plot for this deep phenotype association study, and you can see here the red line across, first of all, x-axis here represents each of the 30 deep phenotypes arranged in cluster by the different classification. The right side cluster, the first cluster is out of neo-vascular phenotypes, so you can see that there seems to be an association of neo-vascular phenotypes of the presence of the ARMS2-HTRA1 genetic locus. The y-axis is still inverse log p-values of the strength of association. The red bar across the top represents a Bonferroni correction threshold to account for the nearly 1,000 statistical tests that we performed and the increased likelihood of getting a false positive. Basically, we increased the threshold by which we would consider anything significant to make sure that we wouldn't consider too many things significant from performing multiple testing. The thing, only one phenotype passed our rigorous correction threshold, and that is hemorrhage characteristic of AMD, and this is the table from which we derived our chi-squared analysis and odds ratio. You can see here that there were 1,826 patients, just like we showed earlier, and of those, 423 developed hemorrhage characteristic of AMD. About 75% of those patients had the ARMS2 gene, and only about 25% did not. And from this data, you can see that there's an odds ratio with patients with the ARMS2 gene, about 80% more likely to have hemorrhage with AMD than those who did not. And the PVA for this was 1.17 times 10 to the minus sixth. Now, there's a known association between the ARMS2 genetic locus and carotoneovascularization, and it's common knowledge that carotoneovascular processes are more likely to hemorrhage than normal blood vessels. So we wondered if this association was simply related to the connection between ARMS2 and carotoneovascularization. To see if this was the case, we took all the patients from those with genetic testing who had carotoneovascularization and repeated the test in only that subset of people with CNV. We would expect there would be no association if ARMS2 did not predispose to hemorrhage because all these patients had CNV, so they should be equally likely to hemorrhage. What we found, though, was in fact that the odds ratio for hemorrhage, even in a population of people with CNV already, was the same. People were still about 75% more likely to hemorrhage if they had the ARMS2 genetic locus, which means that this increased likelihood of hemorrhage is independent of CNV status. And the p-value for this was still significant. So the next thing we did was we wanted to look at this association in a new subset of patients. Since this is a secondary analysis, it's likely that we might have beginner's luck to find a spurious association. But the AREDS trial, which preceded the ARDS2 trial, was a completely separate group of patients. From this trial, there were a few that were included in the AREDS2 trial and we excluded those patients. We also excluded all people who did not meet the inclusion criteria for the AREDS2 trial. So they had to have large drisnet baseline, and then we took of those only people who had CNV already. This is the table for that, and you can see that there were 748 people who met our inclusion criteria. 509 of these had hemorrhage, which is a bit higher percentage than the last one, and that makes sense because back in the 1990s when ARDS was conducted, we didn't have anti-vegeth agents, and so there was more hemorrhage in general than there is now. Of this 509, nearly 400 patients had hemorrhage with the ARMS2 variant. And the odds ratio was again consistent in this new subset of people with CNV. P value was still significant. And so from this we concluded that first of all, individual genetic variants do seem to exert specific deep effects on the development of AMD. Second of all, we found a very strong relationship between the ARMS2 HTRA1 locus and the development of hemorrhage characteristic of AMD. These are my acknowledgements, and I'd like to take any questions. Thank you. Dr. Brinsting. So can you talk about the challenges of the fact that AMD is a disease in evolution? So you're picking phenotypes that you know people who have bruising are eventually going to advance to the other disease. Does that, to more advanced diseases? Is that the problem or not? Actually, I think that this is one of the strengths, I think this is one of the strengths of our study and of the genome-wide associations that get concentrated in general. The connection between genes and phenotypes is kind of a black box. We know that genes are the building block for everything else in nature, so they've got to have some connection with disease. And that's what the genome-wide associations they enter really well. It says, we don't need to know anything in the middle. We can just say, is there an association between the presence of this gene and the presence of this phenotype? And that's what we've continued to do with this deep phenotype of the species. We don't know exactly how, for example, ARMS2 leads to hemorrhage characteristics of AMD, but without knowing any of the intermediates, we can say that there's a strong association between the presence of the gene and the presence of this fine phenotype, which is an advanced phenotype. I think that one of the reasons why we're able to find significant findings in it at any rate is because of the size and quality and duration of the agent. So I was without that, with just one-year study or a small subset of patients, we probably wouldn't be able to detect it because as a disease of aging, it would take a very long time for us to see the chronology of progression of phenotypes in AMD. Any other questions? Thank you very much.


I was wondering if you could tell us how long you were in North Korea when you were doing research for your book and how you were treated and what that was like and then whether you ever see yourself going back there or whether you could go back there. Sure. There's Kinsella.  Yeah. Rockstar. I was there for a week. I wrote a piece about it for Reason Magazine. Please don't hiss, which I'm very proud of. And that kind of launched my TV career because that article was what got Kennedy who at the time was co-host of a show called The Independence with Matt Welch and Camille Foster who is a good and cap and has the Mises slogan tattooed on his forearm got me on that show. I was there for a week. I could go back. Don't ask me how. A friend of mine went after I did.  So this has been six years and if you think about what you've done in your life for six years and realize that everyone person I saw in the street every grandmother every kid every teenager they're all still there trapped in one of things I didn't mention in my speech which I bungled at the timing of you don't have internal migration North Korea you're not allowed to leave your city and the place you are assigned to live is based on your family's loyalty to the regime. So the people who it's called Songbun the people who are disloyal to the regime or had an ancestor who was a property owner or a Christian or born the South were shunted to the Northeast and those were the last people who were sent food during the famine. So they use food as a mechanism of social control so I mean this is another layer of hell that these people are suffering under. I would not so I wouldn't go back how I did research for my book well all their books according to their mythology everyone in the world is obsessed with the Juche idea which doesn't make sense because it's only for Koreans but apparently we all want to study it somehow. So all their books are translated into many languages so I bought the entire library and I read all the Western books I read 60 books total to fashion dear reader and one of the jokes I have in my book which is true if you go in the bookstore you would think oh they only have books about buying about Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung that's not true. They have one book about Ri and Mo who is the North Korean Nelson Mandela who is held as a prisoner in South Korea after the Korean War for many decades. I have a question from Michael too. Your description of Korea reminded me a little bit of Eastern Germany in the 80s maybe same atmosphere but much more exaggerated so I was wondering is there possibility to escape from Northern Korea is the other people who try to get away and then maybe I could expand on the on the this theme rebellion escape trying to go against stupid laws against the governments maybe is a resource to try to enhance libertarianism and maybe it's an instinctive reaction to the world we're living in and maybe it's a glimmer of hope for for the future which seems pretty bleak according to your speeches of today. It is so again they have family punishment in North Korea so if you escape successfully your family is going to get punished for it and in fact anyone in North Korea who's a diplomat who's an ambassador their family has to stay behind the sausages to make sure no one gets any idea so this is a level of control of the North Koreans have. There's a very great book called nothing to envy by Barbara Demick and she talks tells this story one of the things they do like they'll bribe an official to get a death certificate so the person died a woman's family escaped or her daughter or something too and often you won't tell your mom or your child you know what I mean so no one will get in trouble woman is her daughter escapes and now she has to escape so she bribes the border guards with everything and now she's in the Chinese countryside wandering around and she comes across a farm and on the floor there's a bowl of rice and meat on the floor and she's stunned because she hadn't even seen meat in years and now it's on the floor for some reason then she hears a dog barking and that was her moment of realization the people in China eat better the dogs in China eat better than the people in North Korea so and then what they started doing the regime is brilliant in their evil so it used to be you could bribe the border guard and you escape now the regime said you can keep your bribe as long as you turn the people in so you try to bribe the border guard that goes in their pocket but now you're turned in and your family's in trouble as well so this is how they attempt to clamp down and I'll just add two more things very quickly if you're caught in China as North Korean and you're sent back you're gonna have very severe consequences so many women are caught into sexual slavery because they know they can't call the authorities in China and when they do get to South Korea and if every North Korean is automatically South Korean citizen they're treated very very poorly their accent is described as guttural that's like their hicks they're shorter their low status South Korea is very competitive country so it's a very dark path for them even in the best of circumstances yeah my name is Peter from Hong Kong I also have a question for Michael can you tell us more about the relationship between North Korea and China are they real friends well you know people in the world might see the missiles may be threatening the US and the free world but is it can it also be possible is a it poses a threat to Beijing you know because I really want to know the real relationship between these two countries because I suspect they are not real friends and and of course so please tell us more about that yes so the auto on beer story which I'm sure many familiar with he was a tourist that went to North Korea he stayed in the same hotel I did in the same floor because in the North Korean hotel it's segregated by nationality so our guards weren't allowed our guides excuse me weren't allowed on our floor and in fact their floor was jet black I don't even know maybe the windows are blocked out so they step all the off the elevator into darkness it was it was very weird when he died and there's actually some discrepancy about his death because his family said he came back tortured mutilated and the person who the medical examiner said that's not true when he died this was a very hard thing for China to defend because if China is wanting to be a world leader and a rival power to the United States it's you can't defend a kid you know goes to foreign country and comes back you know as a vegetable and by the way when you're staying there at that hotel it's nicknamed the Alcatraz of Fun because it's on an island in the middle of the Taedong River in the middle of Pyongyang and you're not allowed to leave it so there is a very big misconception that China can end North Korea tomorrow if it wanted to the idea that you can end a country with nuclear weapons overnight is it makes no sense there has been this huge tension but at the same time yet we can understand China doesn't want a US ally right on their border China doesn't want 25 million Koreans who have never used a computer who don't speak Chinese crossing the Tumen River and setting up a camp in Manchuria so China is in a tricky situation and North Korea isn't making it easier on them and in fact towards the end of his life why Kim Jong-un the one who was killed was passed over for Kim Jong-un the youngest son of the three he said look we could be like Beijing we can liberalize and Kim Jong-il said according to Juche idea that will work for Chinese people it won't work for us and if you want openness open a window so that's why he was passed over for Kim Jong-un who promised to stay the course thank you question for Stefan very interesting overview I'm sorry you kind of ran out of time because what I was really looking forward to was what we can take from international law as libertarians and you kind of started on that with the anarchy the kind of similarity between anarchy and international law and how that functions I'd love to hear a bit more about what we can take away from it yeah and I think that was that was one of the things that had me thinking about this topic in general although it's just an interesting topic but yeah so the fact when when people say anarchy is not possible you say hello look at the look at the world I mean we have not only Cousins point that within governments there's a type of anarchy right because the government personnel are not governed by a higher government they they constitute it but the nations of the world are in a state of anarchy with each other as well and it seems to work not fairly well it's not always totally chaotic so that's just one example of it that's what you can use it as an illustration of of how anarchy could be conceived to work and then the treaties and the way law is formed right by custom and by agreements between these sovereigns is I think a sort of a model for how we could envision free people living together to just follow up to that the concept of sovereignty which is at the foundation of international law any takeaways we can take from that we're you know in the context of international law it applies to countries but we could equally apply it to individuals and of course that yeah so that's the idea that we're in favor of radical decentralization and individual autonomy instead of the nation state but it's just an example of a system that I think can give some insights and it's a fruitful field to explore I think it can also highlight the deficiencies of the municipal law systems right so legislation based and so welfare positivistic I mean if you think about the UN system it's more like the articles of confederation in the US because they don't have really the power to tax the member states depend upon voluntary contributions which is more like the US was before the current Constitution and you know most people think that was an improvement we libertarians would think that was retrogression hi I'm Frank and I would like to ask Michael two questions one would be well more or less serious on what you consider will Germany put up on the list of wait wait sir Germany what now what would you what would you think of the United States why do you think the United States wouldn't put up Germany on the list of terrorists supporting countries because as you you mentioned that Kim the current leader in North Korea was minister for propaganda and agitation actually two of our leaders in Germany now are secretaries of propaganda and agitation have been at least in East Germany and this includes Angela Merkel so I was wondering well this is a very very you know striking similarity and yeah that pointed out for me is the importance of information and education and how even bad ideas rippled through continents and time so I was you know I immediately recall when this this lady or someone asked about could you escape like you could have escaped from East Germany this came to my mind now to a more serious question it's you talked about nuclear and that North Korea has atomic bomb how sure are you about this because I am very sure and here's how several reasons how we know besides I don't think it's regarded largely in dispute the question is how far those missiles can strike but Kim this there's a book that Kim Jong Nam the eldest son wrote it was a series of interviews he did with a Japanese journalist I'm probably the only person in the West who's read it and he talked about he wanted to denuclearize North Korea and this was a big source of contention between him and his father and another reason why he ended up being passed over and as you know he was recently killed so I think if he's even saying this I don't think it's really any question now the question is the size of the capability you know all these other things but I don't think there's really any dispute of their nuclear capability and I also think very importantly two more points there's no dispute that they would strike if they needed to and even if they didn't have nukes Seoul is just south the border it's a city of skyscrapers so if you're not hitting them with nuclear missiles but with the regular missiles the visuals alone is something out of a horror movie or like independence day or something so that's something you absolutely have to take seriously Jeff thank you for your speech and I appreciated your relatively empathetic tone towards zeitgeist libertarians and that we have to understand where they're coming from in the environment that they're operating in but I'd like you to expand perhaps on a comment that you made at the end of another presentation that I heard you recently give where you indicated that it's time to give up the remnant mentality for those of us that are seeking truth and the implications thereof no matter what so perhaps you could expand on a engagement a strategy yeah it's very very tough you can go back and find a I want to say maybe 1998 talk that Hans Hoppe gave at a Mises event in California called what must be done and I can send you that link or whatever so I think he gives a few prongs there and it's it's the eternal questions always very very tough everyone's got their opinion but my own opinion is that libertarianism as we know it is is dead we shouldn't kid ourselves that Trump and other things have come into the room and sucked a lot of the oxygen up versus 2012 we shouldn't kid ourselves that a few million people online can feel like something much bigger than it really is when you see Iran Paul go into let's say New Hampshire and get two or three percent of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire not you know some sort of generalized electorate so you know I believe in never confusing motion with action and I think libertarianism is in bad shape as a political movement and thus it's time for a realignment towards issue coalitions and more importantly really pushing breakaway movements and a lot of people don't like that because that smacks of some sort of nationalism but I'll take subnationalism over over the nationalism we've got now so I think the idea that we're going to convince 70 million people in America to vote for some national candidate is a is so daunting that it it's it's wearying and that we ought to be thinking more in guerrilla terms you know the you know moving around this force rather than trying to to meet it head-on it looked it sounded to me like France is nothing very special when the right parties are in or in power we are slowly progressing towards socialism and where the left ones are we were fast fastly progressing seems like sounds like at home what do you know the next elections in France and how should what should we look forward to is there any hope and and how where is the marilla pen fitting in to the picture I am sorry but I have to confess that I have some hearing problems and especially with English I have been told that the frequency of English is larger than for the French one so maybe asked by neighbor or whoever he can translate into French because I couldn't catch everything of okay okay thank you yeah about Macron or first let me begin with a anecdote recently I met in a in a meeting my my friend Vaclav Klaus who has been a president of the Czech Republic and he told me oh what do you think about your president micro and I think he he's right I have always been opposed to him it is he's a very ambiguous man very pragmatic opportunist he has no real convictions but we must not forget that he has been a minister of finance of one of the worst socialist politician Francois Hollande and certainly mean something and I have the feeling that he has some socialist reflex but when he was a minister of finance of Hollande he decided to to accept competition between buses and people said that it was it was purely utilitarian but people said that he was a liberal a liberal socialist and he has been presented as a liberal politician and he won the election maybe because the election has been manipulated the one who had to be elected was someone of the right was a real liberal and I was very sad that he could not succeed but there was a campaign against him which has been maybe manipulated by Macron but we do doesn't know anyhow I remember that even before he was elected I wrote an article in the French magazine the Figaro magazine in which I explained that Macron was not a liberal and I'm surprised that right now people still say that he's a liberal just because it is true that he made some reforms which can be considered as more or less liberal for instance on the labor market things that ought to have been done for long but there is a sentence of Macron which is which is very symptomatic he's used to say at the same time so he says one thing and the contrary and he believes both of them so he's doing some liberal reforms but mainly not liberal reforms and he has increased taxation he has increased regulations and so on and we we need some very deep and the rapid reforms and he's no doing nothing of what would be necessary so I'm very pessimistic about about this and I'm also also pessimistic because I don't see someone on the right we could be elected in the next election and we could do a real liberal policy as regards Marine Le Pen she it is said that she's from the extreme right just because she's against immigration but she has an economic program which is very close to the program of the extreme left and so I'm always annoyed when I hear that she's on the extreme right in my opinion she's on the extreme left or from this point of view she could have some success as a public opinion is on the left and I think that it's also because she is pragmatic it may be that many people who are confronted to immigration people are people from the from the left and so she gives them this possibility but anyhow there is no no probability at all that Marine Le Pen be elected and we may we may come back to the traditional distinction between the left and the right it is true that some people on the right try to get closer to Marine Le Pen maybe because the immigration problem do exist in France but there cannot be a coordination between the right and the extreme right for the reasons I just said my name is Michael McKay my question is primarily to Jeff but also to Professor Salon and Professor Stone my concern is how can we frame libertarian ism so it can be heard and I would welcome your comments about that to know if you forgive me I I've nothing very serious to say about this if you forgive me oh it's very difficult to answer because we have hopes that could be the avenir the future but I fear that it will be difficult for libertarianism to succeed anyhow I struck by one fact whenever I meet a young man or woman who says that he or she is liberal I ask how did you become liberal because it's difficult to become liberal in France I don't know if it's the same in other countries in Europe but anyhow in France and the answer in general is the following I had by hazard I had the opportunity to read an article or a book of liberal inspiration and I discovered that it was so coherent so logical rigorous that I was fascinated I became liberal and I have the feeling that it is true and that liberal ideas are so coherent that all people all ought to be liberals and why is it they are not it's real question I also remember that the Frederic Hayek said that whenever if someone is not a liberal it is only because he had not the opportunity to meet liberal ideas because he thought also that these ideas are convincing so we may wonder why these liberal ideas are not more successful it may be because their personal interest and people what we in our democracy is not only in France but in Europe the state is distributing privileges and subsidies and so on and people are fighting more for that and for ideas the first one who tries to fight against the state is not certain to to be successful so he has a cost and he may prefer to try to get some privilege that may be a reason and because of this vicious circle of statism it may be difficult for a real liberalism to to to exist but I may be wrong I hope I'm wrong was that interesting he mentions the intellectuals you know Murray Rothbard talked about this we can't just assume that the intellectual class has no self-interest that if they come across something they regard as the truth that they will you know loudly and vociferously go out there and promote it regardless of whether that affects their own employment or tenure or status within their community or whatever so that you know that was one of his critiques of Hayek's sort of top-down intellectual approach but I think at this point that the the best promoter of libertarianism will be competition you know some sort of breakaway movements the kind that Prince Hans of Liechtenstein is writing about and saying you know government wreath read thought of as more of a service provider and and subjects being thought of or citizens being thought of more as customers I think we have to see some success but I don't know there's there's some pretty horrific examples of why collectivism doesn't work in the 20th century you think that we could sort of point to that and say well maybe we should go in the other direction but it's this lesson that seems to be that we have to relearn every generation so I do think that single issue libertarianism is a lot easier sell than the whole package and I think that we should we should promote breakaway and secessionist and localist movements and and if somehow Trump manages to win in 2020 I think the left in the United States is going to go out of their minds and I think they are going to start saying no you know and I suggested this to someone I think it was last night at dinner with with Karen we you know take the take the nine counties that comprise the San Francisco Bay Area that's about eight million people all very very left-wing vote for Nancy Pelosi and let them let them do what they want let's take those nine counties with that's that's bigger than Norway they could have a single payer health care system collectively within those nine counties they could have absolute gun control they could have abortion on demand they could make Berkeley and Stanford free they could have steeply graduated income taxes they could have a wealth tax they could have the whole panoply of progressive wishlist right here right now and and as someone I'd be perfectly fine with that I wouldn't object to that in the slightest now some people in those nine counties would be harmed but presumably it's easier for them to move out of the bay area than it is to move and get a foreign passport so so why not let an experiment like that happen and I think what would immediately happen is a bunch of rich a bunch of limousine liberals in marine county if any of you know marine county would immediately leave with but nonetheless I'd love to see it I would absolutely love to see it and if Trump somehow wins I think they're going to be our progressive friends might be a little more willing to listen to that sort of thing I certainly agree that competition is important and that's why I have always been much much critical of harmonization in Europe harmonization of taxation of laws and so on we we need competition and maybe the ideal will be competition between small very small countries and let me ask something about North Korea but it's directed to the whole panel and Michael told us all of all things about North Korean regime and I see there there's a difference with the rest of the world just in degree not in kind like as he said the war narrative there they they have their own narrative it's like other countries in the world the personality quote is like we can see here in Turkey or even in the US with Obama as a hero and the state propaganda there in North Korea we have it in Hollywood as well and but as we don't have the free market option on the table and it is between nationalism and globalism and with globalism it came as the mass democracy and multiculturalism and it came as the and the North Korea I see a place of course with a lot of huge problems but it's not to surrender to the American imperialism that comes with the patent laws and everything that it comes with the US imperialism and my question is can anyone see or say something positive about North Korea yeah pays my rent which I think the people in this room would approve of I disagree violently with comparisons that the personality cult in North Korea is in any sense comparable to how Obama is being treated in America I mean you can regularly attack Obama you don't have to have his picture on your wall and your family is not going to be executed if you say the most virulent things about him the propaganda out of Hollywood which I'm certainly not a fan of is is not can be immediately challenged online and can be pirated and there's all sorts of different alternatives and besides propaganda from Hollywood they also make comedies so if North Korea had a few funnier movies I think life there would be a little bit better so yeah the root of what you're saying which does have truth to it I think is that and this is very much a libertarian concept is that human beings are human beings and that there are certain you know I don't want to call them urges or drives or tendencies that we all have and that happened throughout the years and in many ways the North Korean regime you know harkens back to Pharaoh and this idea of the god king but if you want me to say positive things about North Korea I mean the scenery is lovely they are very looking out for one another on a personal level which is something that the government fosters but which something refugees talk about regretting when they move to Seoul it's a very cold city in an emotional level so there's a few couple things you could say but you know the obvious answer is I'm sure you know as everyone else in this room knows if it was this it was a question that was asked of all the communist states if it's so great just open the borders and see what happens and I think you know the answer is a very clear what would happen in North Korea if anyone else wants to chime men feel free you asked one already that's cheating oh sorry I'm being racist okay sorry I didn't see him in my defense professor stone you touched on the the the parallel between the european union right now and the havesburg empire and you also mentioned that there is a possibility in which the nationalists of various countries would elect a majority of members of european parliament next year making victor orban the president of the european union um what will actually happen I mean is would this be the hope in which the european union will finally be reformed in a way in which say a typical moderate brexiteer hopes it will be reformed into or it will actually be the bureaucracy will fight back and even if all these MEPs were elected by these nationalists across the european across Europe nothing will change um yes um I mean I must say I was pretty incensed when I read that the european parliament had by very substantial vote condemned victor orban and it's obviously just done out of spite because you'll remember um you know three years ago when these refugees arrived I mean I saw them in the boat room and then I was on the boat and I saw them on coast the big island opposite and then I saw them in the station in Hungary trudging all that way to Germany where it is uh is that is that better thanks I mean I just thought this was utterly surreal this business of refugees now victor the we all know how the europeans respond to this kind of thing they have a dinner and then they think they'll make a decision in about six weeks and trudging on trudging on trudging on all these young men not from Syria one was actually from Haiti of all places and trudging in creating this this havoc in Germany and Austria on the way and victor orban responded but put up a wall which has done more to solve the whole problem than the europeans I mean they they could have solved it frankly quite easily another great achievement the european union is the euro 50 unemployment in Greece we all know that why not say to the greeks look you have a lot of empty islands in the aegean particularly southern aegean particularly a place called karpatos if you lease to us karpatos will pay your debts and then you do the australian solution to the to the migrant problem you process them of course as decently as you can but you can't have this kind of thing going on in every european country it's crazy now the european parliament and its wisdom condemned victor orban for that and so all terrible fascists and so forth which is nonsense and it um it teams up with look i'm sorry to go on about this but it teams up with another problem in hungary which nobody mentions and it's the gypsies rumour it's about 20 percent of the population in the east they used to get on tolerably well in hungary but one way or another it's turned out rather badly and the last thing you want in these circumstances is um norwegian indios paid for by George Shorosh turning up um causing trouble with the gypsies and we've got these rights and those rights and it's it's in response to this kind of thing that uh victor orban's got to get his gets his immense popularity he's not doing too badly i mean i think uh no you have to put it in perspective that hungary should have been the one that led from post-communism instead it's rather lagging behind and it's this is a situation which victor orban inherited now what does the wretched european parliament in its wisdom do it condemns him and uh i think the the the um shot of this is it's quite possible that the that group of mps will set up we know straightforwardly nationalist secessionist group in the european parliament and my point really is that the european parliament should not be operating at this kind of level if it were left as a kind of assembly of something like a council of europe it would have been all right but leave power with the national parliament this is where it this is where it really belongs and have delegations from them to some kind of european thing then the final thing is you know for the european union bless it to complain that hungary is a corrupt country i mean for the last 10 years or thereabouts the official accountants of the european union have refused to pass the accounts because they say there's so much money stolen and again decide Greece the greeks are wonderful really imaginative about it they have um you know i think they've invented a greek banana um so that they can get the sort of subsidies that the french give to the banana producers in martinique and this kind of thing everybody knows this about europe and for them to say you're corrupt hello now my point is i that you know europe when it was created uh was um i mean it's a 50s construction like the atomium in brussels if you remember it uh and if you just wouldn't start from here now uh you know um has valérie jisgar destin ever got anything right except stealing diamonds and he set up in his european constitution i mean it takes political science would tell you keep a constitution short you see paragraph one there's a country paragraph two it's language is the following um paragraph three you're sincerely the ideal constitution is the west german one of 1948 which is quite short it doesn't have many volumes and volumes about rights the european constitution when it came up actually has i think it's five pages devoted to the rights of the laps the samis were no supposed to call them now i have nothing against the sami the swedes too um the swedes uh blessed them right up to the 1970s were sterilizing about 100 000 laps on the grounds that they were rather small drank too much and made too many babies no so i'm in favor of the the the the old sami absolutely nothing to do with the constitution of europe and it's this is characteristic of what goes wrong with that organization i think there's going to be a backlash there already is i mean we can see it with theft of the electorate in pretty well every country obviously coming up we're going to be electing people who are objurets probably rather nasty some of them and and we'll see we don't want this to go on and they'll set up a block in that european parliament and the results will be quite ugly and the final joke is and the the results might be quite ugly and the final joke of course is that for uh uh victor orban himself they'll no doubt in their wisdom want a president of europe and will no doubt come up with some empty figure like yunkar expect him to win victor orban will be the president of europe if this goes on they're crazy have i said enough that's still on the question of the european union but to professor salin if we look at the history of the european union then we come to the conclusion that the whole mess in which the continent is working now is the effect of a combined action of two nations of the french nation and of the german nation or their politicians without mitera and call we wouldn't have had the the treaty of mastricht and the transformation from the european union to a political union without the french pressure to the trip against the germans after the unification we wouldn't have had the introduction of the euro we wouldn't have had the mess in the in the immigration policy if not for this lady godzilla and and berlin so i mean what uh what what really what what really is interesting now i think is is there any chance that the uh increasing differences between germany and france as an effect of the multiple crisis of the european union could bring to a glorious day where this whole socialist empire could be blown up first i would like to say that i do regret that it has been considered that the european union had to be had to to follow what was decided by france and germany because i think that french governments mainly tried to export to european union the bad policies that they were doing and and happily germany more or less agreed with that but i must say that in my opinion germany is not that far from what exists in in france and i do regret and i should say also i don't understand why the other countries in europe did accept this situation did accept this leadership of germany and france and especially especially i i would like that central and eastern countries of europe be more efficient in fighting against this leadership of german french leadership and frankly i don't really understand why it is so and ideally i am in favor of european union but not the one we have but what i call europe of freedom it is europe of competition of freedom without harmonization and i think the best integration is made by competition because it is the way people can coordinate one to the other so i don't want to to make a guess on the future because it is very difficult to to guess what politicians will do will there be a discrepancy between the the targets of germany and france i'm not certain of that not certain and because i think that the politicians both in germany and france are proud to give the feelings that they are the leaders of the of the european union what would be necessary would be that it change in the public opinion in all european countries in favor of this europe of liberties and i am not in favor of of a explosion of of europe i am once more in favor of european union because i'm in favor of free trade free contracts and so on and but i fear that it will be difficult to to get this sort of of europe so it's difficult to to guess and one specific point when there was what was called the greek crisis it was interpreted as a european crisis and it was said that european solidarity meant that other countries had to to help the greek government and people also said that the solution for for greece would be to go out of the european union and so there are several pressures in favor of this sort of policy in means in several countries in fact the greek problem was not a european problem it was a national problem with a bad public policy and there was no reason for other countries to to help and the solution for greece was certainly not to go out because i think that implicitly people who were in favor of the fact that greece goes out of european union were thinking that it could devalue but i consider that devalue is not a solution it is a bad solution and it cannot solve the problems such as the problem of excessive public expenditures so once more i don't want to to to make guess about the future of europe i can only have some wishes and wishes free europe my question is to jeff um considering the conquest second law how should we handle the site geisters and specifically those who are actually within our own institutions well i think we have to handle them by by boldly opposing them we have to never shrink from the the vision we have or from the truth as we understand it and and be bold i think compromise has been a one-way street if you look at the 20th century it seems to only go in one direction so i i don't think that's working and i think boldness is easier on the smallest possible level so hopefully that's where it's going to happen and maybe some of it will happen simply because large governments can can no longer do what they report to do they can't pay entitlements they can't keep the roads they can't prevent crime they can't prevent or they can't prevent unemployment so so maybe it's going to take some sort of unpleasantness to to force people into more local solutions but i think you know my particular focus day was on the zeitgeist libertarians and in that sense i think we should we should view them much like we view progressives or or neoconservatives or old conservatives which is that we're friendly we are but and we're willing to join them on single-issue bases but we're not willing to cede the the terms of the debate to them and and libertarianism is not about some jack kemp tax enterprise zone or something like that it's about something much more fundamental so to me that's not only better but it's a lot more fun and and and what you know why why be halfway well Stefan i'm looking for trying to look for some optimism here so i'm referring not to your talk but to a topic in your in one of your podcasts what about the chances for for some more freedom via technological solutions bitcoin or crypto contracts or i don't know self-driving cars stuff like that it's actually to the whole panel if you have an idea optimistic um well yeah i i try not to opine too much on bitcoin because there's people who are big experts on this um i do see hope in in that it's a challenge to state money uh the example of uber is a really good one i believe yeah and what you're talking about i've argued before that i'm skeptical of the libertarian strategy of winning by handing out pamphlets to your uncle or Thanksgiving dinners and you know it's just some people it's not going to work that way but we do have to have some larger consensus and how does that happen i think it can only happen somehow naturally or gradually my impression is that most of the people in the world now uh or more significantly more or aware of in general the dangers of centralized planning because of the fall of the soviet union and communism so that was a teaching moment we didn't have to go to school to learn that we saw it happen okay so we learned our lesson that way so my hope is that as we get richer and we are getting richer i believe uh as technology improves uh and as freedom maybe becomes more possible because of technology right i mean not to get too science fictiony but in the future you can imagine people having little nano swarm robot armies protecting the who knows i don't know so i just hope that over time people are richer and they see the benefits of living in in liberalism right in a freer society and so that it becomes a sort of gradual teaching moment sort of like the fall of the soviet union did so i can only hope that the the sort of stallion the horse the steed of the market that's underneath the little biting dogs of the state trying to slow it down i hope that it can outrun them finally i think it's a race and i hope the state doesn't destroy humanity right but humanity seems to keep progressing because knowledge does keep in uh increasing right we keep building our technical knowledge base technology seems to keep improving so our wealth will keep improving our ability to communicate will keep improving so that's my sort of optimistic view of things but it does mean that we can't really do it we just have to ride the wave uh we can keep the remnant alive we can keep championing ideas we can keep the understanding alive but i don't i don't see that if we have a much higher degree of liberty in 30 years 50 years that it's because libertarians were activists advocating for it or trying to start the libertarian party i think it will be because of a natural natural causes it has to take root for natural reasons i have a question to michael and maybe others too um concerning possible uh economical transformation of north korea especially regards uh res and a special economic zone uh earlier called rajin son bunk um do you consider it a purely experimental project to get a taste of western economy or more a potential basis to transform north korea's economy well i i mean what he's asking about is so there's a zone in north korea it's near the c of k song it's basically built by the south koreans uh to get to work there is highly coveted although i think the tax rate is something like 95 percent but even with that 95 tax rate that people who work there are doing very well for themselves it's extremely regulated because you don't want the north koreans or they don't rather the want the north koreans to have access to so much south korean information they they open these zones down they shut them down um every so often because they get too successful another example some of you might have heard of is with the vice magazine how these logging camps in russia which families go and or not families like men go and work there for pennies but they send all their money back to north korea and they still do well well by north korean standards even though they don't uh see their families for a very long time so the thing with what's happening with north korea now is you have these black markets in these different towns and they are effectively acting as proof of concept of the free market or quasi free market and how it works and what's it's what's interesting for north korea is that this is inverting the gender hierarchy these are often run by women and they'll have rice or whatever for sale and you'll have the cops the cops get a bribe which basically works like a tax and the the goods get to the consumer everyone knows where to get them although it's not officially stated and this black market system is you know throughout the entire country and it's a very effective mechanism to demonstrate capitalism now what i'm fine with and i'm sure most people in this room are fine with and it kind of touches on what jeff said earlier and what cancel us that earlier is uh i don't have to have someone say i'm a liberal or i'm a libertarian but if they intuitively are for free markets and they don't have a philosophy behind it and they're feeding their families and they're you know have a measure of limiting their lives that to me is someone who is converted enough that they don't you know what i mean and that's a very real accomplishment and that's a very real goal the goal for all of us i'm sure who are for liberty is to make sure people are secure in their person make sure people have access to food access to sell their labor and access to you know human rights including proper rights at a very fundamental level so the thing with the those economic zones yeah these are wonderful because first of all if the argument from north korea is that we're so wealthy well as i was saying earlier somebody south korea is so wealthy that they're exporting factories i mean the idea of a communist country you know you want to build as many factories in your country now that they're exporting factories and you could see how the machines are you could see they have electricity north korea does not have electricity for the most part so anytime you have a there's a big asymmetry i'll leave with this point between lies and the truth if someone tells you 10 lies and 10 truths this is not an honest person but if someone tells you you know 50 truths and 10 lies that's still not an honest person so when you have a government that's told you information from the time you're born until you're an adult as soon as you see two or three things very quickly until actually this edifice falls and once you lose the souls of the north korean and their belief in the state and its efficacy and the the leadership it's almost impossible to regain it and this cynicism which helps so much to bring down the soviet union and and eastern europe is really in my view what is currently bringing down the north korean regime


In the task allocation domain, we were looking for a mechanism which is paired to efficient anonymous and strategy proof. And in this module, we are going to give a very interesting mechanism which is known as the uniform rule. This was proposed by Sproumore way back in 1991. And here is the mechanism which is very interesting. So, let us without loss of generality assume that the sum of these peaks is less than 1, which means that the sum of the most favorite allocations of this task does not allocate the job completely. So, therefore, some agents have to be overloaded. Now, how do we overload? So, this mechanism starts in the following way. In this figure as we have done earlier, this is the complete task and this is 0th share of the task. So, on the y-axis, you have the share of the task. And these are different players, player 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in this case. And this red dots essentially a red horizontal lines essentially show that what is their peaks. So, these are the peaks for each of these agents. Now, uniform rule starts with the allocation of 1 for all the agents. So, this is something like a thread or a water level that you have given to all the agents. Of course, this is not feasible because now you have n amount of work where you can only allocate 1 amount of work. So, the water level now keeps on coming down. So, this is the idea or the thread that shows the total allocation of all these tasks is coming down slowly in the uniform rate from top. So, the first time it hits one of these peaks. So, let us say in this case this peak is hit, then that particular agent will get that peak. So, let us say p3 is allocated to agent 3. And for that agent, it has been finalized. For the rest of the agents, it keeps on falling again. So, maybe the next agent to hit is p1 and then that gets p1 amount of allocation. And in each of these stages as it is uniformly coming down, you are keeping a running count of how much of the total task has been allocated. So, that the whenever the sum of these tasks for all the agents equal 1, you stop at that point. So, the idea, I mean, you can get the idea very simply. I mean, it is just coming down the thread or the water level is coming down at an uniform rate and that is why the name uniform rule. Whenever it is hitting any of these peaks, that agent gets that peak. And for all the other agents, it is that uniform level. And that uniform level will stop as long as the sum of the shares of all the agents is exactly equal to 1. Similarly, when you are when the opposite situation is true, that is, some of these pIs is strictly greater than 1. That means, some of the most favorite share of the jobs is more than the total job itself. So, therefore, all the agents needs to be under loaded. So, that is, that is when we will look at the water level, but from the bottom, it is uniformly going upwards. And the moment you hit some of these peaks, you allocate that share to that agent and then move on. For the other agents, the water level or the thread level keeps on increasing. So, fair enough, that is the uniform rule. And it is very easy to explain pictorially rather than writing it. So, even though we are going to do that now. So, whenever you have the exact, the sum of the shares, the peaks is exactly equal to 1, then it is unsurprising. So, you just have to give each of these agents their p. The thing that we have just written, explained in the diagram above, that can be written in a little more formal way. So, you are picking the maximum between these two things. So, one is this, you can think of this is the thread level. So, the sigma mu of p is the final thread level where you are stopping. So, you can take a look at this. So, suppose the thread from top. So, this is the case that we have considered. And the thread stopped at somewhere here. So, by then all these three agents were given their favorite tasks and the rest of the two agents, agent 2 and 5 actually got this share of the task. And that is where all these shares has actually become equal to 1. You can see that this thread level, if you call that as mu of p, that thread level is the maximum of that particular player's peak and this mu p. So, mu p is the final point where the thread finally settled and it did not go down any further. For the other agents who speak was above that mu p, for them their peak was chosen. So, that is one way of writing the same thing. The uniform allocation rule essentially gives the max of these two quantities where mu p is nothing but this one. So, we are solving this max of p1 and mu such that this, the sum of these things become equal to 1. So, this is written in a more formal way. The easier way is to visualize using that figure. Similarly, you can also define the alternative case that is when the sum of these peaks is more than 1, then you are actually increasing from the bottom. Then you can similarly verify that this is going to be the minimum of their peak and that level, that water level where it settled finally. Now, let us try to argue why it is anonymous PE and strategy proof. Indeed, it is, it satisfies all these three properties, that is the theorem by Sproumore. So, the first two things are pretty easy to follow. We know that anonymity is when you alter this agent. So, if you go back to this figure, if we change the names of this agents, their allocation would have also changed. So, the thread level or the water level is not tied to any of the agents identities. So, as long as you have the same set of peaks, the corresponding allocation will get altered and that is the definition of anonymity. So, quite naturally, the mechanism is completely agnostic of the agent names. It is only tied to the corresponding peaks. So, anonymity is obvious. Pareto efficiency, we have already discussed this in the module before that whenever we have a Pareto efficient allocation, it must be the case that when the sum of these peaks is less than 1, the allocation should be overloading each of them and there should not be any situation where someone is overloaded, someone is unloaded, then that will never be Pareto efficient. So, which is true in this case. So, this mechanism actually gives everybody overloaded or at least its peak if the sum of the peaks is less than 1. Similarly, for the other case when the sum of the peaks is more than 1, then it gives at most their peaks. So, therefore, this mechanism is essentially Pareto efficient. Now, let us come to the strategy proofness part which is quite interesting. So, in the first case where the sum of the peaks is exactly equal to 1, there is nothing to prove everybody gets their peak. So, there is no reason to misreport for any of these agents. Now, case 1 is the case where the sum of the peaks is less than 1. So, this uniform rule is essentially over allocating the jobs, certain agents not for all agents. Now, because this is where the thread stopped. So, remember that this is the case where the thread was coming from the top. Let us go back to that example. So, the thread stopped somewhere here. Let us continue with that example. So, now in order to, so this 3 agents, so agent 3, agent 4 and agent 1, they have no reason to misreport their preferences because they have got their favorite share of the job. What can happen for the other 2 players, player 2 and player 5 is that if they could have reduced this allocation closer to their peak. But because this is the, it is picking the maxima of the thread where it stopped and the peak of each of these agents, the only way it can change this allocation is by reporting its peak to be somewhere above that thread level. And that is clearly a suboptimal because at this point it is getting, so because this preference is a single peak, so they always prefer something like this allocation more than an allocation which is even further away from its peak. So, the allocations fall monotonically from their peak. So, they will always dislike this alternative than the current allocation that they are getting. So, therefore, there is no reason and you can argue in a very similar way for the other case where you are increasing the water level or the thread level from bottom in the situation where some of this PI is greater than 1. So, there is no reason for any of these agents to misreport their peaks because the only way they can change the outcome is by reporting their peaks on the other side of that thread which they prefer less. So, that is essentially the proof where we essentially show that this mechanism, this uniform rule mechanism is a strategy proof as well. The converse is also essentially true for any deterministic social choice function that is, so it should be more formally written as a deterministic because we do not know about the randomized mechanisms. Any deterministic social choice function that is strategy proof, paired to efficient and anonymous if and only if it is an uniform rule. So, that is a result due to SPRMO. The proof is even more involved. So, we are not going into it. If you are interested, you can take a look at this reference. This is the original paper by SPRMO, a division problem with single peak preferences.