My name is Sharif Finch, and this is my ink. Well, this particular piece means a lot to me. I got John 316. This is my only tattoo. And it's pretty much self-explanatory. It reads, for God so love the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. Y'all see this as a reminder of my faith and something that I would like to have with me everywhere I go.


It's a great pleasure and a distinct honor to welcome his Excellency Dr. Mohammad Jawod Zarif on behalf of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies, the Middle East and Central Asia, and to introduce him tonight. As the voice chancellor said, our center seeks to enhance understanding of the issues of the day as they relate to the Muslim Middle East and Central Asia. Over the last 22 years of its existence, we have hosted a number of distinguished experts and policymakers, prominent among whom has been the former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Dr. Mohammad Khatami, who delivered a public lecture precisely in this room seven years ago, as well as earlier the Foreign Minister, Saeed Kamal Kharrazi. Our speaker this evening is another imminent and accomplished statesman from the Islamic Republic. Dr. Jawod Zarif of course needs no introduction. He has been the public face of Iranian diplomacy and scholarly excellence for more than two decades. He is one of the most frequently photographed, interviewed, and cited diplomats, especially since the election of the reformist moderate Dr. Hassan Rouhani to the presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran in August 2013. As you all know, Dr. Zarif has gained worldwide respect for the nuclear deal that he concluded with the world powers in July last year. His emphasis has always been on engagement, negotiations, and resistance, and support of the search for a stable Middle East and world order. On a personal note, I met Dr. Zarif for the first time at the UNDP conference in Bangkok in 2000, which the former and late Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser had asked me to co-chair with Prince Nuruddin Suhanouk. Dr. Zarif was at that time Deputy Foreign Minister in the head of the Iranian delegation at the conference. He kept an elegant silence until the very end of the first day of the conference, and then when he spoke he impressed all of us with a brilliant exposition, clear, precise, and eloquent. This of course made me not only to have the highest respect for him, but also in seeing Dr. Zarif in action to recognize what a high caliber diplomat and scholar is like. I don't want to dwell too much on Dr. Zarif's formal biography, but to refresh your memory, let me make a few references to it. Dr. Zarif has served in Iran and various ministerial and policymaking capacities. The post that he has held prior to his current position include Ambassador to the United Nations, Chairman of the UNESCO Cultural Commission, Chairman of the Political Committee of the Non-Aligned Movement in Durban, Head of the Political Committee of the Organization of the Islamic Conference Summit in Tehran, and Head of the Executive Committee of the Islamic Interpolymentary Meeting in Tehran to mention just a few. In addition, Dr. Zarif has taught for more than two decades at the university level, including the Faculty of Law and Political Science at Tehran University. He has an impressive record of scholarly publications in English and Persian on various international issues such as multi-lateral diplomacy, international organizations, disarmament, and other political security issues. Ladies and gentlemen, I am very happy to inform you that Dr. Zarif has kindly agreed, although I haven't really asked you yet, but has kindly agreed to take a few questions after his lecture. It is with immense pleasure, therefore, that I call upon his Excellency to address us this evening on the subject of resolving crisis in the Middle East and Iranian perspective. Would you please join me in welcoming Dr. Zarif. Thank you. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. A very good evening to all of you, and thank you very much for that gracious introduction. It's so good to be so many old friends and to see some new friends in the hall. Let me first of all thank A&U for organizing this important meeting and giving me this opportunity to exchange some thoughts and hopefully to hear your views and engage in a dialogue with you on issues that affect our world today. They affect our world today regardless of where we live because we live in a globalized world. And if we really understand what we mean by a globalized world, we need to understand that in a globalized world we will either lose together or win together. The challenges and opportunities that are before us in a globalized world don't recognize borders, regions, ethnicities, religions. They affect us all. It's a tourism if we say today that you cannot protect your environment if others are polluting, emitting greenhouse gases. It's not too difficult to understand that if you have poverty in most corners of the world, prosperity for others wouldn't mean much. But it has been difficult for particularly policymakers to recognize one reality that our security is also interconnected. That we cannot have security at the expense of insecurity of others. It is impossible to live in an island of security in a turbulent, insecure ocean that is our world. If we needed any reminders, 9-11 was the reminder we all needed. The greatest military power on the face of the earth could not provide the most fundamental requirement of any nation state to secure its citizens. If you went to New York as I did a couple of weeks after September 11th, 2001, you see in the faces of New Yorkers with whom I had lived for so many years, a frightening posture. They were frightened. They saw anybody looking foreign and they would go and call the police that another suicide bomber is around us. It showed that with all the nuclear weapons, with all the power, the might, economic, military, political, media, everything you name it, United States had it, it could not secure its own citizens. So we all need to recognize the fact that security in our world is indivisible. We either all live in a secure environment or we will all be victims of insecurity. I guess those of you who remember Sydney last year know that ISIL is not a threat only to Syria nor to Iraq. It is a threat to people living in Sydney as much as it is a threat to people living in San Bernardino, as much as it is a threat to people living in Damascus at Deep and Aleppo. Because you cannot contain insecurity in one corner of the world. And if we begin to grasp that reality, then we will have to start looking at our problems from a different paradigm. I was happy to hear that my former boss, President Khatami, had the occasion of addressing this meeting here. At that time, he presented the idea of dialogue among civilizations as a new paradigm for international relations. Dialogue among civilizations was not simply a nicety, it was a requirement. And I had the honor of serving in the group of eminent persons on dialogue among civilizations and we produced a book called Crossing the Divide, which unfortunately was lost in the noise that was meant to start a war, the so-called war on terror. Unfortunately, our work came out in 2001, the year the United Nations had designated as a year of dialogue among civilizations, but that was the year that we started to start war on terror. So nobody wanted to listen to the fact that terror was the product of the insecurity of the feeling of deprivation, the feeling of alienation, the feeling of disenfranchisement without trying to justify it, just trying to understand it. Terrorism is the violent, in our view, perverted outburst of the feeding of people who have been deprived of the possibility to participate in a world that glorifies might, glorifies military power at the expense of others, glorifies security brought about at the expense of insecurity of others. That's where you have terrorism. When you, not meaning you, when somebody, whoever that may be, considers the killing of civilians in a fight against terrorism as what? As collateral damage, collateral damage, that is removing any legal barrier against the use of force. When people talk about all options being on the table, almost with impunity, as if we lived in the 19th century, as if we do not have a UN Charter that calls for avoiding, refusing, and rejecting the use of force unless in self-defense. People forget that and say all options are on the table. What are we inviting when we say all options are on the table? We are glorifying military force and by glorifying military force, those who do not have it, those who do not have the normal, usual ability to use symmetric warfare will use asymmetric warfare. It's all the product of a mentality that believes you can gain security at the expense of refusing to accept that everybody needs to live in a secure environment. And the recognition of that will move us from a concept of alliance coalition for security to the concept of security networking, where all of us need to fill the gaps in order to create a secure environment. In order to get there, we need to move from the paradigm that has dominated international relations for the past two centuries at least, the paradigm of exclusion, the paradigm of defining some outside, if you watch the movie, The Circle of Friends, so that you could exclude them. You could blame every problem on them so that their insecurity would not matter. We need to move from that paradigm to a paradigm that is based on inclusion, that unless everybody is secure, nobody is secure. And if you believe that's an idealistic representation of a world we need to live in, I tell you that's a very real possibility. We did it. We did it in the nuclear negotiations and we succeeded. Let me tell you how. For years, we had a nuclear problem. Iran believed that since it was living up to its commitments under the NPT, it should not be worried about what others say that it should limit its nuclear program. We had the right to have our nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. The United States believed that any even small nuclear program by Iran for Iran, in Iran, is tantamount to a bomb. And since in a perverted view of the world, they had defined having a nuclear weapon as equal to having security, they thought anybody in the right mind would try to go for a nuclear bomb. So if Iran had a nuclear program, it would be tantamount to having a nuclear bomb. So Iran wanted an unlimited nuclear program and the United States wanted, Gareth Evans knows, a zero enrichment option. And that prevented us from being able to resolve it because for Iran, success meant failure of the United States. And for the United States, success meant abandoning by Iran of its rights. We had objectives that were mutually exclusive. And although we had a plan in 2005, whose parameters were exactly the same lines of the plan that actually brought us to the end of the nuclear crisis, we could not resolve the issue because the two major sides of the problem defined their objectives in a diametrically opposed way as a zero sum alternative. If we were to win, the US should lose. If the US were to win or gain, achieve its objective, we had to abandon ours. What was the outcome? The outcome is easy, just simple arithmetics. When we started this coral with the United States in 2005, Iran had 200 centrifuges, hardly operating. When we started the negotiations in 2013, Iran had 20,000 centrifuges. So the policy of zero enrichment, the zero sum conception of US policy, enabled the United States to gain a sum total of 19,800 centrifuges operating in Iran, major achievement. Zero enrichment defined in a zero sum game led to the United States losing 19,000 centrifuges by Iran gaining. What did we gain? We went from a positive 7% growth in 1985 to a negative minus 6.8% growth in 2013. Zero sum inevitably leads to negative sum. If we define our objectives in a zero sum scenario, we end up reaping the consequences in a lose-lose situation. We can in fact change the way we define our objectives and see what we can gain. I've heard an example during the introduction to my speech a couple of days ago in Thailand and I saw it to be too reflective and illustrative of the issue. So I share it with you again. A boy playing football or something comes home thirsty, sees his younger sister having used every bit of water in the kitchen to make jam. Marmalade or whatever. But he sees an orange sitting on the table. So he says, I can take the orange and basically dress my thirst. Picks up the orange. Sister runs after him. I need the orange. So she grabs the orange back from him and being bigger and more powerful, he takes it back. Sister goes to her room crying. His mother comes in, says, what's happening?  Mother says, your sister wants it too. He said, okay, I'll cut it in half. She'll be happy. I'll be happy. That's a zero sum perspective. The best way, half and half. Mother says, no, go talk to her. Imperative of dialogue. He goes to the room. Does the sister, what can we do? I can cut the orange in half, you can have half. I can have the other half. And her sister says, no, I only need the peels of the orange. You can have all of the orange. Just let me peel it for you. I'll take the peel from my jab and you can have the orange. So instead of getting 100%, he gets 110% because somebody peels it for him. That's how the way we look at defining the problem can lead us to resolving it. And that comes through dialogue, through listening, through abandoning this practice of monologue that we politicians have been so used to, just talking, preaching rather than listening. So when we started the nuclear negotiations anew in 2013, having enjoyed six years for myself, six years of early retirement, other foreign ministers, can we start redefining the nuclear negotiations in terms that we can consider a single objective or common objective. And that's what we did. If you look at the JPOA, which was adopted in Geneva in 2013, within 100 days. And that was the most important ice breaker. We made it possible to have an agreement. And then the JCPOA, you see we have defined a single objective rather than two diametrically opposed objectives. Instead of repeating the American objective that Iran should never have a nuclear weapons and any nuclear program will lead to a nuclear weapon. As President Obama recently said in the Saban Center that if I had my way, I would not have left a nothing bolt in Iran's nuclear program standing. That's the zero sum that they were looking at. And instead of us saying it's all right and it's not of anybody else's business, we decided to define our common objective as follows. Iran should have a nuclear program that will always remain peaceful. Same objective. We wanted to have our nuclear programs. They wanted it not to lead to nuclear weapons. The way we defined the objective made it possible for us to reach a resolution based on a model that was available in 2005. Senator Evans knows that. We both talked about it in New York when he led the International Crisis Group. We talked about the same model. He reminded me of that as we were walking in. We had the same model. It wasn't operational because of the way we had defined the problem. We need to start realizing the fact that our destinies are bound together because we live in a globalized world and start redefining the problem. So instead of defining the problem in our region as Iran and Saudi Arabia are trying to gain influence at the expense of others, we have to come to the understanding, after having tried all the wrong options, that Iran and Saudi Arabia will suffer together if Daesh, ISIS, or the so-called Islamic state, which is neither Islamic nor a state, would take over Damascus or Baghdad. Not only Iran and Saudi Arabia will lose, but everybody else will lose. If we start redefining the problem, that Daesh is nobody's leverage, that if you see at this equilibrium in the region, the way to deal with it is not to try to harm your competition, but rather try to define possibilities that you can work together. And I believe we can establish that. I believe we can bring it about. If Iran and the United States, which called each other the great Satan and the access of evil, can find the possibility on one issue, we haven't resolved other issues, we haven't even tried, on one issue that was the most divisive was taking the region and the world to the brink of war. People were talking when we should take military action. If we could resolve that difficult issue, then why can't those people who call each other brothers and sisters cannot sit down and redefine the problems. Redefine the problems in terms that would be acceptable to everybody. All of us should accept a set of principles. Those principles include respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-intervention, then accept a set of confidence-building measures on commonalities, ranging from tourism to freedom of navigation, even to maintaining nuclear safety in the Persian Gulf, because all range of nuclear power plants are popping up here and there in the Persian Gulf as if it's a status info. But that would threaten the water supply there, so we need to work on nuclear safety together. Two tourism, cultural interactions, free flow of oil, stable oil markets, you know another zero sum perspective. You remember last year we were almost asking the Saudis not to glut the world oil market? Now who's hurting? Who's going to financial institutions asking to borrow money? Not Iran. It's Saudi Arabia. We live in a globalized world. You cannot gain at the peril of your neighbor. So if we start talking about commonalities, if we start developing common objectives, if we start trying to rethink, redefine our objectives, then I think all problems that exist in the world today can be addressed through a red redefinition of the problem. If you only could understand, just look at our own histories. Anytime we try to gain at the expense of others, at best it was a temporary short-term gain. It can't be a long-term gain. We need to realize that. We need to realize that otherwise we will live an environment in an environment which will be unbearable for all of us. And I'm happy that people realize that in Paris and agreed on some sort of very package. Of course there were given takes, unfortunately. We need to realize that unless we all consider terrorism, extremism, as a joint threat, doesn't matter where you live, what religion you belong to, it's a threat against all of you. If we all were to recognize that as long as a single nuclear weapon exists on the face of the earth, there is a possibility that extremists will have access to it. There is a possibility of accidental use. That nuclear deterrence is what, is what it stands for. Mutually assured destruction, which is what? Mad. It's mad. It's mad to try to gain security at the expense of insecurity of others. Because it's impossible. It cannot be achieved. We have a much better alternative before us. We tried it once. I hope we succeeded. I hope we can even further succeed on building on the nuclear agreement. I hope we can gain the most important prize and that is peace and security in the Persian Gulf region, which is our lifeline and we're willing to go the extra mile in order to achieve that. Because I think the other alternatives are too costly for all of us and we don't have to take those alternatives. We have much better ways. Thank you.


Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Johnny Hernandez, Hi Tech Oki, and Logan Larson. Coming up on DTNS, Tim Stevens tells us about tech to keep EV safe even after a crash, plus YouTube's bid to become your place to watch everything, and Amazon gives you more free music. Oh, nice. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 1st, All Saints Day 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Strafilino. From Tokyo, Japan, I'm Tim Stevens. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. What do you do it in Japan? All sorts of fun stuff. I'm driving cars around Mount Fuji. I went to a race track to see some beautiful Nissan GT-Rs and chasing down a bunch of cool features.  I love it. Well, we're going to find out a little bit about what you did in Germany now that you're in Japan. I almost said something I shouldn't say. Let's just start with the quick hits, shall we? According to a message from Twitter sent to publishers and seen by The Verge, Twitter discontinued ad-free articles at the end of October. Twitter included these articles in its Twitter Blue subscription. It's kind of a weird thing. If you were a subscriber, you got access to ad-free articles from select publishers. Twitter says removing the feature will let it focus on resources, on adding additional value for our members. And in a clue for what that added value might be, Elon Musk posted to Twitter on Tuesday that Twitter Blue could be $8 a month. Twitter included verification, priority and replies, mentions in search, which is essential to defeat spam, scam, ability to post long video and audio, half as many ads, and paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with us. I look forward to seeing the official announcement on any of that. In Sony's Q2, the number of subscribers to PlayStation Plus fell from 47.3 million to 45.4 million this quarter, despite Sony's launch of new tiers and perks for the subscription service. Despite subscribers going down revenue from network services, that includes PlayStation Plus, the now defunct PlayStation Now, and PlayStation Network advertising revenue increased 17% of the year to $794 million. PlayStation 5 sales are at 25 million consoles as of this quarter lifetime. So PlayStation's got easier to get and people stopped buying them? That's just ungrateful. People stopped subscribing to that. Alphabet's Waymo will expand its robo-taxi service in Phoenix to include trips to the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, a first for a U.S. autonomous taxi provider. These types of trips are big business for ride-hailing services in general, so it's kind of a big step. Lift-reported airport trips made up 10.2% of its total ride share in Q2. Waymo Airport rides will run 24-7 but be limited to the Trusted Tester program initially and use human safety operators as well. Waymo expects rider-only operations to start over the weeks to come. In the spring 2023 semester, Parsons School of Design will offer a class with Roblox to explore the intricate relationship between digital and physical fashion set in an immersive future. Parsons students will learn how to create 3D digital fashion with Roblox's toolkit as well as physical clothing. Roblox will collaborate with Parsons faculty on the course. Students will be able to sell items from the course at Parsons and in the Roblox Marketplace. Parsons big name in the world of design education so definitely caught my eye. Very cool. Search engine marketing firm SEMR Rush published a study showing that 27.6% of people are redoing their Google searches by either refining or extending the queries that they type. The data came from 20,000 anonymous users making almost half a million unique searches. 70% of people took less than 15 seconds to make a secondary click meaning they found what they were looking for probably. 27.6% needed to adjust their search somehow although they might have still found what they're looking for. And of those refining searches, 17.9% made changes to the search query while 9.7% clicked on an image from a carousel generated by the search. SEMR Rush noted keyword changes happened more on mobile at 29.3% over 17.9% on the desktop. I'm going to guess that's typos. On desktop, the study also found 25.6% of results were zero clicks either meaning the answer they needed was available right on the page they were looking at without having to click anywhere or they just gave up. Keep in mind the survey did not measure search satisfaction. It only looked at the behavior of the clicks hence the maybe it meant it could have meant all that sort of thing but it's interesting nonetheless. You can just get stars if you really wanted to but this remained within the YouTube TV app until now Tom. Yeah that's right Google's starting to bring down the wall between its serious TV quality content on YouTube TV and the wider world of YouTube. They've integrated movie and TV show rentals before but this is a step beyond that. The main YouTube app is going to offer something called primetime channels. If you go in the US to the movies and shows hub you're going to find more than 30 channels. You can get to it from the explore tab as well. When you add a channel this way the channels appear on your YouTube homepage next to your other subscriptions. So you can have a new Star Trek Picard and that might show up right next to Daily Tech News show and curry cakes from Incheon. Paid channels will integrate with their free YouTube channels so you could have stuff like AMC Plus content living alongside AMC's free YouTube channels for trailers and that kind of stuff. At launch the channels available on movies and TV show hub will include Showtime, Paramount Plus, Stars AMC Plus, Epic Shutter, Acorn TV, Hallmark Movies Now and a couple others. YouTube plans to work with partners to expand channels over time and will bring it to international users in the future. So Tim, are you excited to be watching your AMC Plus content potentially in your main YouTube app? Yeah, I think initially this is definitely a great move. It'll be much, much easier to add these channels to your subscription. Much like you can on Amazon now with just a couple of clicks you can get access to much better content without having to create a new username, a new password, type in your credit card number and go through all that to subscribe to Paramount Plus or whatever. I must say some of the selections are not that great though. I've never heard of dub channel. I had to go look at what that is and it turns out it's mostly Canadian made-for-TV movies and off-brand Cinderella. Wait, you just said it was not that great. Sounds perfect. Yeah, I'm getting excited there. But I must say, I wonder what this means for going down the road. I'm a little concerned that we are starting to go back into the era of conglomerations of premium access channels to the point where instead of paying the hundreds of dollars to our cable providers that we were years ago, now we're going to be paying hundreds of dollars to Google with forced packages and bundles and things that we won't necessarily want just to get the content that we want. I fear that we could be slipping back down to that dark, dark place that we just barely escaped. Let me assuage some of these fears potentially. Because I think we've always wanted cord cutting to be a way to save money and it can be, but it's actually not its biggest advantage.  And what this gives you is the ability to control your channels. So instead of having two options, pay a lot or pay a lot more, which is what cable gave you, you had to pay a lot to get most of everything and then there was a small tier you could pay more for. This says individual channels, you have control over them. You decide which channels you want. Now right now, like you say, the 30 channels are not all the channels you could possibly want, but it might be the template for that becoming the case in the future. So I think it is good to have this kind of control because this isn't the only place you can do it. You can also add these on Apple TV, on Amazon, on Roku, on Sling, on Hulu Live, on Direct TV Stream. There's lots of places to do this. So you have choice, you have control. And I think what's really interesting about YouTube doing this is there are more people watching things on YouTube than ever before from creator channels and so saying like, hey, you're going to watch Picard and you're going to watch Carey Cakes. Why not watch him in the same interface? Could be a compelling pitch for YouTube here. Well, and my question is when does the rest of YouTube TV start moving over here? Because I get having a dedicated TV app. There are just some subscribers that are just going to want, I just want a TV experience. I don't want all that crazy YouTube stuff, but I watch a ton of YouTube content as well as over the air or what have you, cable kind of related content. And so it would be really nice to be able to say like, hey, my cloud DVR, there's no reason that just can't automatically be a tab in my YouTube interface. Maybe that gets a little busy. Maybe it's still the YouTube TV app is the better experience, but there are so many shows that have analogs over the air that I watch that I'm having to go between apps on my Roku TV that would be just so nice to have that. So I hope this is a sign that the walls come down on this even more because I just want my entertainment, if I'm paying Google, especially if I'm a premium subscriber, I'm paying Google for all this stuff. Just put it all in one spot and make it easy, Google. Yeah. Well, they were having carriage disputes with Roku. They were putting YouTube TV available through the YouTube app on Roku. So there's precedent. They could just make it easy, make it all one app. Do it. All right, let's talk music. Amazon has long given Prime Subscribers access to a limited collection, around two million songs in Amazon Music at no additional cost.  You like two million, we got more. If you wanted full access to the whole catalog, which would be more equivalent to what you get from Spotify or Apple Music, you had to subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited. That's an extra $8.99 a month and gives you 100 million tracks, including new releases, exclusive artist back catalog stuff, stuff like you would expect from a full on music service. So it was two million for free, just, you know, as a taste. And then an $8.99 a month service. However rich, that's not the same anymore. It's not. Things, things, they are a change in much like the times. They are changing things up now offering some access to its full, or now offering access to its full Amazon Music Unlimited catalog to all Prime Subscribers at no additional cost. Prime Subscribers can only shuffle play songs from an artist, album or playlist, but you have access to that full catalog now. You can also stream personalized playlists. You can make, you know, make your own and listen to that as much as you want. And download songs for offline listening. However, a Prime Subscriber, I can't stream a song on demand or in higher quality with spatial audio, HD and UHD formats. Those are going to still be limited to Prime Music Unlimited. So the limited things are in the unlimited subscription just to be clear. So the limits are now on features, not on songs. Yes, the catalog is makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Amazon Prime Subscribers also going to get many of the top podcasts in their Amazon Music app without ads. Not all of them, but some of them. So shows from CNN, NPR, Wunderies, shows, ESPN, some Amazon exclusives, etc. The Amazon Music app is also getting a redesign and it'll include a new podcast preview feature. You can listen to some clips from episodes to kind of help folks discover new shows. It does feel like this is a way for Amazon to say, we know we raised Amazon Prime's price earlier this year. So we're going to give you something new, right, Tim? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the podcast up here could be really compelling for all Prime Subscribers. I think having access to premium podcasts ad-free would be definitely a win. And having access to that content is great too. I'm actually excited about the addition of really high quality audio here. This is on par with what Tidal is offering in terms of bit rate and having spatial audio as well. That's something that really only Apple Music is making a big deal of and if Amazon can make a big push on that front too. And that could make this a pretty compelling option for those who have their new Atmos setups at home and they want to have a little bit more music going through there as well as movies and things like that. Well, I think Amazon hopes that it will be compelling because that is the stuff that they are enticing people with the unlimited tier. And, you know, Tom, you pointed this out that the catalog is no longer enough, I guess, or they feel like enough to drive people solely to that. Instead, they're baking it in as a value add to Prime and say, listen, music, I always maintain music has so much more stickiness, I feel like, than video stuff where when you can unsubscribe to anything any given month, yeah, you can binge your House of the Dragon or whatever you have. And you don't need to keep that like on you. You don't need to feel like you can access that anytime whereas music has so much more repeatability and you want to have your same playlist and stuff like that. So I feel like it's smart if they want to keep people on that Prime bandwagon to do that. I actually did enjoy the weird, really tiny two million song things. I have two small kids and there was a ton of kids music on there. But that actually onboarded me to YouTube music because I still felt like Amazon Unlimited wasn't offering me enough of the integrations with some of the other smart home stuff that I had. So there are some other things that can push people into that. But if it was included for free, I probably would have figured out how to make do since, you know, if you're already paying for Prime, I do feel like that is a really, really interesting catch there. Yeah. I do feel that nine dollars a month is asking a lot for not a lot in this case. I mean, having you HD and spatial audio is great. But I think for most people, having access to the music is really what they want. And so that seems like a big ask for not a major return when you compare, you know, what you get, you know, from zero to everything on Apple music, that kind of thing. So I wonder how many people are really going to be willing to spend an extra nine dollars just for higher quality, just for streaming what they want to just for offline access stuff like that. Yeah. Well, the bigger one to me is being able to say, oh, I want to listen to Antifragile by Lucera Femme right now. Pick that. Right. That included with Prime Video. You can't pick that. You just have to listen to a playlist and hope it comes up. So that seems to be the bigger compelling paywall you'd run into that would make people pay. I just don't know how they run into that. You have to choose to be using Amazon Music in the first place, which probably means you know this is available through Prime and you don't have another music service. It just seems to be a, you know, you start to slice the potential audience pretty thin at that point. The interesting thing to me is how this compares to what Spotify is offering, right? The market leader, you know, in most markets when it comes to or in major markets, few major markets. I don't know why I'm qualifying this so much when it comes to streaming music because you have their ad supported tier and you're basically getting all the functionality of the ad supported tier, but you don't get ads. Like this is basically. But you don't get ads. Yeah. It's a, you know, the same thing with the podcast stuff like Amazon is going or Spotify is going super hard to expand their podcast offerings. But even for premium subscribers, when you're paying monthly fee, there is no way to get ad free stuff and they're throwing that in there with Prime where, you know, the cost of that is massed to a once a year payment for a lot of people, some people do monthly. I know on that one as well. So I think you have to look at it also in terms of how they're, you know, kind of going after the market leader there. And, you know, if you're looking at that, trying to get people to move over from someone that has the dominant market share, I think it's, it can be theoretically a compelling argument depending on how you listen. Well, folks, it's time to get our holiday gift card list in order. Each year we send every patron who once won a holiday gift card with exclusive art from Len Peralta. I think this year is his most beautiful art yet. I can't wait for folks to see it. If you'd like the card, make sure you're a patron. If you're not already and then check patreon.com slash pledges. Make sure we have your proper mailing address by November 15th and you'll get the exclusive DTNS holiday card mailed right to you from us. Thank you. Gasoline petrol powered cars have had more than a century to develop safety systems to prevent controlled explosions of petrol from turning into a fiery inferno during a crash. But EVs have different challenges. They are less likely to explode. They still can. They also can electrocute a passenger or a first responder. Tim recently visited Mercedes-Benz at their testing facility in Germany to look at what they're doing to improve safety in the EVs. Tim, what did you find? Yeah, it was a really interesting visit after their facility in Mendingen, Germany, which is this massive place where they have miles and miles of test roads that are all designed to replicate different areas of the country. They have miles of South Korean paint lines and road signs, American signs, Europe, everything else so that they can test all their vehicles and all the markets in the world that they're going to be sold in. But the main thing that they do there is really improve safety. And so we got a lot of demonstrations about driving on ice, avoiding collisions with pedestrians and things like that. But what was really interesting was to sit down and talk with their engineers about the things that they've been doing to improve the safety of their EVs, particularly the EQE sedan and the EQS sedan, which are coming to market now. And it's interesting because a lot of stuff that applies to a normal luxury sedan like stability control, traction control, that all applies here too. But also we need extra stuff to make sure that these cars are safe both before collision, in a collision, and then after collision too because if you think about a first responder, I had a conversation with a captain of the FDNY this spring and he said that when they're arriving to a car crash these days, they often don't know if a car even is an EV because they're not often clearly labeled. And if it is an EV, they don't know where they could safely cut without cutting into a high voltage line. So Mercedes-Benz is doing things like automatically disabling high voltage systems in EVs and routing their cables in a smart way to make sure that first responders are not at risk when they get to these cars. Yeah, I thought it was interesting, the sort of all the automatic protections. We're used to the ones like airbags that you talked about in your article. But having an automatic cutoff that says, we think we've been in a crash. Let's keep the minimal power on for displays and emergency calling features, but let's stop the battery from running power through those lines because like you were telling me earlier, even if they're well marked, you may not know they're there if they're crumpled under something. Right. These cables, the high voltage ones are the ones that provide power from the battery to the motors basically. They're orange, they're wrapped in Kevlar, they're very hard to damage. So in that case, the occupants are particularly safe. But when it comes to a first responder, they're going to bring out the jaws of life and they're going to start cutting that car up. So another thing that Mercedes has done is they've run a cable through the A-pillar, which is the the pill that kind of wraps the cable is cut by the jaws of life, then it also will immediately disable all the power in the car too. Again, adding more safety and security to make sure that nobody gets electrified. Yeah. And the batteries can also explode. They may not be quite as explosive as gasoline, but is there anything they're doing to prevent that from happening? Right. So there is a lot of advanced battery monitoring that's going on all the time. So each individual cell, there's a massive battery pack in the floor of the car, but that's made up of a lot of different cells. And the car can monitor the temperature of those cells to make sure that there's no thermal overload going on, which would cause the battery to potentially rupture and catch fire. So that's going on all the time. It certainly continues going on after crash. But they've also wrapped the battery in a honeycomb of extruded aluminum, which is this really thick webbing of material to make sure that if you are in a major side impact, that the car absorbs the energy from the crash and that doesn't actually then get into the battery pack and cause any ruptures there. So it's physically protected, but there's also a lot of smarts going into the temperature monitoring and management to make sure that the car is basically keeping itself safe. Because once those battery packs start to go up, they go into a thermal overload, which is basically once cell ruptures gets very hot, causes the next one to explode. And that's when we see these giant clouds of sparks from EVs when they've caught fire. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's a very dramatic, very scary thing. And all that you can do at that point is just start dumping water on it and wait for it to finally go out. Yeah, so better to stop it from happening in the first place. Absolutely. Yes, a little bit of prevention is a very, very important thing. Tim, with all of this stuff, obviously, safety is a product differentiator for an automaker, but is there... Have you heard any noise from Mercedes or any of the other EV makers about kind of safety standards, best practices? Obviously, like you mentioned, like the high voltage lines wrapped in Kevlar orange, but like something like that, even if they're not, not even talking about licensing, but just like standards. Is that out there? It's definitely one area that needs improvement for sure. Orange cables for high voltage is definitely standardization, but in terms of wrapping in Kevlar and things like that, that's definitely something that Mercedes is taking to the next level. But one thing that Mercedes is hoping to bring to the table is providing more information to first responders. Again, when I was talking with that captain from the FDNY, he said that they really don't have any standardized information from manufacturers. They don't even know where to look to find out where they can safely cut. What Mercedes-Benz is doing is putting a QR code inside the door frame so that you can walk up with your smartphone, scan that and very quickly get all the information that you need to know where you can safely cut and what the details about this car are. That is not a standard yet. The industry is really working to try to come forward and try to find a way to make it easier for first responders to figure out what they can do safely. But there's still a lot of opportunity there for improvement and I hope that that comes soon. Yeah, I mean, that's a perfect use case for augmented reality, right? If you had a properly working augmented reality headset that could recognize the car and then mark the places where it's safe to cut and where the power lines are, incredibly useful stuff. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. The last thing that I thought was interesting in your article was the thing they're doing to protect your ears during a crash. Tell me a little more about that. Yeah, so they're using what's called pink noise, which is basically static. If the car thinks that you're going to get into a crash, the speaker suddenly blasts out this pink noise, which is actually kind of scary. I heard a few times as we were going through these demos. And what that happens is it causes the inner ear to close a little bit and it protects your ear from the incredibly loud sound of the collision and the airbags going off as well. And it's actually proven to reduce hearing damage because oftentimes you'll hear people getting out of the car. They can't talk to the first responders, but they can't tell them if they're injured because they can't hear anything because of those airbags. Pink noise actually can save your ears permanently and also in the short term. Wow, that's crazy. All right, well, Tim is in one of the last bastions of fax machine technology, Rich. It's fast becoming one of the only places where you can find a thriving fax machine community. Yeah, you got a couple of business verticals, but Japan is really one of the holdouts and the UK is maybe trying to accelerate that their communications regulator, OFCOM, is putting another nail in the coffin of the facsimile machine. It's proposed changes for telcos to no longer require providing fax services as part of the Universal Service Obligation, or USO. Currently, two telcos in the UK are responsible for Universal Service, BY and KCOM. It's consulted on the rule change, finding it was appropriate for fax to be removed from the USO, given it's limited on going use. OFCOM expects to publish a statement on the changes in early 2023. It doesn't sound, at least from the BBC report we were looking at, that there is, you know, the groundswell of no, please save our fax service. I'm sure someone's upset about it. Tim, can you do us a favor and send a fax while you're in Japan? I actually don't have one in my room, but yes, I certainly can. I've been here in a couple of years. It's interesting to see there are, there's less forms to fill out. In fact, you know, when you used to come to Japan, they'd stick like a whole book of paper. They'd stick it into your passport, basically, and there'd be just minutes of them filling out forms in the back end. It's getting a little bit easier here, but there's still an amazing number of forms to fill out. Whenever you buy anything, the Japanese folks still seem to love their paperwork. Yeah. I know they're trying to move them on to a digital ID and that that's not going well. People are resisting that. So, yeah, interesting to see, but sad to see the receding of the fax. Cutting the infrastructure to kill the service. Soon it will just be a sound effect. In a movie, yeah. That's all people will know it from. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Yesterday on our extended show that the patrons get good day internet, Dr. Nikki was talking about her experience with the Haiku box. It detects bird song and can identify which birds are singing, said bird song. She also mentioned the Merlin app that can do this on your phone, and Steven Broomfield heard that and wrote in and said, a few weeks ago, while my wife and I were out walking our dog in suburban Denver, we heard this strange noise, like a high-pitched trill. I can honestly say that in the 50-plus years of living in this area, I have never heard this sound before. When we looked up, we saw that what we thought was a flock of Canada geese. The sound, however, was so strange there was no way these were geese. I then remembered the segment you did on the Merlin app. Within a second or two it identified the sound as the Sand Hill Crane. My wife gave me that oh-so-common look that says, you're such a nerd, but I'm glad you knew how to do that. Steve says, now we just need Google to build this into Android, like the now playing feature, which also comes in very handy for impressing my iPhone-carrying wife. Thanks for the nerd flex, Steve. Don't get to my ideas. I don't need Merlin being acquired. It's so cool. It's good stuff. Well, also good stuff is having Tim Stevens on the show. Tim, thank you so much for being on. This was awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me. Like I said, I'm not here in Japan. I'm really excited to be here and working on a lot of cool features, which you'll be seeing on a lot of different automotive technology publications in the next couple of weeks. Where can people check you out if there's one spot? Where's one spot that people could check you out? Definitely check me out on Substack Tim Stevens at Substack.com. Fantastic. And a special thanks to Louis St. Amour, who is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thanks for all the years of support, Louis. I mean, double thanks because Louis St. Amour is, and it's a thing, a supporter too. So Rich and I are well familiar with Louis from that show as well. So thank you so much, Louis St. Amour. It's good to have your name read over here as well. Of course, Louis St. Amour, one of the people who recognizes the importance of independent technology news voices out there. If you would like to be like Louis, support us. Patreon.com slash DTNS.  That extended show, Good Day Internet starts right now. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com Live, back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


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The next scheduled item of business is consideration of business motion 730 in the name of George Adam. However, amendments have been submitted very recently. In order to ensure that all members have adequate time to look at those amendments, I am going to move to topical questions at this time and then we will return to that item. I am glad that so many have turned up to listen to my very important question. To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to the reported comments by the general secretary of school leader Scotland that a reduction in budget will lead to class sizes increasing subjects being removed from the curriculum and a reduction in the number of teachers. I have my own perspective as to how pleasing it is to see so many people here. This Government has delivered the highest school spending and more teachers per pupil than any other UK nation. In Scotland, we have an overall pupil teacher ratio, which is the lowest in the UK at 13.2, compared to 18 in England and 18.5 in Wales. In our budget, we have sought to protect councils providing over £13.2 billion in the local government settlement for 2023-24. That funding package represents a real-terms increase compared with 2022-23, which enables a continued delivery of high-quality education for our children. As part of that, we will continue to provide local authorities with a specific funding of £145.5 million per year to support the school workforce. Investment education is at a record high with resource and capital spending of almost £200 million this coming financial year, one of the biggest rises in the history of this Parliament. Willie Rennie? I do not think that the minister heard what Jim Thule has said on Sunday. He was clear that this is direct evidence from the classroom. Teacher numbers would be cut, class sizes would increase and subjects would be removed. Is the minister saying that he is wrong? Minister. I do not think that Mr Rennie listened to my question. I thought that his question was predicated on the spending in the budget that we have laid out. As I have laid out very clearly, there is a real-terms increase. The education and skills resource budget is up from £2.9 billion to just over £3 billion. The capital budget has increased from £506 million to £566 million. The budget delivers a funding package that represents a real-terms increase compared with this financial year and enables the continued delivery of high-quality education for our children. Willie Rennie. I know what this means for the election promises that were made by his party last year. Will there be an additional 3,500 teachers and classroom assistants? Will the poverty-related attainment gap be substantially eliminated in primary and secondary schools? Finally, will teaching contact time be reduced by 90 minutes each week? We have laid out our manifest commitments, and we will look to take them forward. I can allow him to mention the Scottish attainment challenge, which is raised regularly in this part rightly, because it is an important issue. I can say that we will continue to invest £1 billion through the Scottish attainment challenge in this part, representing a substantial increase on last-term £750 million. That is specifically designed to tackle attainment gap and drive education recovery. As I have already mentioned, we are providing more than £145 million of additional annual funding to ensure the sustained employment of additional teachers and classroom assistants. We are doing what we can to make sure that we deliver for Scotland's young people at school. I thank the minister for his previous responses and welcome the continued investment in our education system. Can I ask the minister to advise how education spending in Scotland compares with the rest of the UK? I can hear the groans already, so clearly the tories already know the answer. Education spending in Scotland is £1,758 per person, which is over £300 more per person than England, £1,439 in England and £1,680 in Wales. We continue to support the recruitment of students into initial teacher education courses. The number of teachers per 100,000 pupils is 7,573 in Scotland, compared with 5,734 in England and 5,636 in Wales. I thank goodness for record levels in the block grant. It is not about inputs, minister, it is about outputs. Scottish education ought to be the gift that we give to Scotland's young people. With a promise of a better future yet under the SNP, there are now 900 fewer teachers. There are subject choices down, presentations at higher and stem, five-year low, dramatic fall in modern languages. We will now talk in the councils in central Scotland of shorter periods, shorter school days, a shorter school week, even fewer subject choices and rising class sizes as ratios are ditched and teachers are worried, more worried than they ought to be, about their safety in the classroom. It is hardly sunlit uplands, is it? Is the minister as embarrassed as he should be? I have to say that I am very proud when I go out to see the many achievements of young people, the length and breadth of this country supported by first class teachers. That is what I am proud to say that we have in Scotland. Mr Kerr did not mention that. Maybe he is not out there actually encountering what is happening on the ground in terms of the support that we have for young people in terms of the number. Mr Kerr has already made the point. I will reiterate it again. I thank Mr Kerr for giving me the chance to do so. We invest £145.5 million of additional annual funding to ensure the sustained appointment of additional teachers and classroom assistants. That is why we have the best pupil teacher ratios in the territory of the UK. I listened carefully to the minister's response. He clearly dodged the core question, which is around the manifesto commitments on which they were elected, 3,500 additional teachers and reductions in classroom time. Is it not right that the pledge to 3,500 teachers under this budget is dead in the water? I have responded to that question fully. We have laid out our manifesto commitments. We will work to take them forward. Rural schools have already seen whole subjects removed from the timetable. Surely the minister cannot be proud that, in parts of Scotland, you cannot take whole subject areas? That is not educational opportunities for all. How can it be right that my Dumfrieshire constituents, those at the likes of Moffat academy, have less opportunities today than I did when I was at school? You cannot be proud of that. I cannot attest to Mr Mundell's education, but I can. I will go back to the point that I have already made. If you go out and see what is happening in our schools and look at the area, I have responsibility for now. There is a much wider array of subject matter available in terms of technical qualifications at the senior level. I am pleased to see an increased range of subject matter and choice available to young people that, frankly, want to be available when I was at school. Mark Griffin What is its response is to the statement by COSLA expressing council leaders extreme disappointment with the proposed budget settlement for local government and its presentation lacking consistency with her partnership approach and their invitation to the Deputy First Minister to attend a special meeting. John Swin Despite the spectacularly difficult current fiscal context, the Scottish Government has increased the resources available to local government next year by over £570 million. I have also invited council leaders to work with us and other partners to design our services around the needs and interests of the people and communities of Scotland. That is how we will deliver sustainable public services in partnership. In addition to funding from the Scottish Government, local authorities enjoy a range of revenue raising powers that are not available to other public services, including newly devolved powers over empty property rates relief. Mark Griffin I did not hear very clearly where the Cabinet Secretary had agreed to join that special meeting with COSLA leaders, but hopefully that can be clarified next. The Government's claim on Thursday that local government would get £0.5 billion promoting a partnership approach unravelled within hours and, as I said at the time, little more than smoke admirers. The response from COSLA leaders unanimously across all parties and most significantly council leaders from the Deputy First Minister's own party was that this is another massive real-terms cut on council's core funding and will lead to socially harmful job losses and that cannot be taken more seriously. Services, as we know, will cease to exist. Asked the cabinet secretary on Thursday if he had assessed the cost to the NHS of cutting those preventative services and he did not provide an answer. So again, what is left to cut? Where is the impact assessment of what this austerity will do to the rest of Scotland's public services? The proper comparison of budgets, which Parliament expects of me as the acting finance minister, is from one budget to the next budget. Last year's budget to this year's budget, the local government finance settlement is increased by £578 million. Local government asked me, in the dialogue that I had before the budget statement, for an increase in their budget allocation of £1 billion. I was quite clear with local government that £1 billion could not be delivered in the current fiscal context, but local government was expecting a flat cash settlement that expected no more money. That is what they were encouraged to believe from the resource spending view of no more money next year compared to this year, but in fact I have delivered £570 million more. I think that that is a welcome settlement for local government. Mark Griffin has still no answer on the wider impact on Scotland's public sector landscape on those cuts, but on Sunday I heard the Deputy First Minister's comments about the need for reform and wonder where this Government has been for the last decade.  It is now wholesale cuts services ended. Officials in SNP run Aberdeen City Council have started looking at everything that council does. Social work, council tax collection, free school meals, dog control, health and safety, even the welfare fund, it could all be privatised, it could all be outsourced. Given what Aberdeen is considering, along with all other councils, is it not the case that this budget has not been used to reform, it has been used to dismantle local government? No, it has been designed to create sustainable public services with an increase in the local government budget, which was not expected but has in fact increased by £570 million. I have offered local authorities the opportunity to be partners in how we take forward the reform of the public sector. That was exactly what I did when we designed the Covid recovery strategy. The Covid recovery strategy was agreed with the local government and I look forward to building on that as we take forward the local government settlement, which I stress, is £570 million higher than local authorities were expecting. The proposed uplift in the local government settlement of £4.5 billion is a welcome real-term increase in investment in our public services and local democracy amid the modes of challenging budgets and devolution. The Deputy First Minister's reference to the additional revenue-raising powers available to the Scottish councils is important. Can the Deputy First Minister underline how local authorities are set to benefit even more significantly in the coming year of the engagement with the Scottish Government on a new deal for local government, which could provide new services of revenue and unlock fiscal reserves? I am very keen to take forward that approach, as is the Social Justice Secretary sitting beside me here. We have already embarked on those discussions with local authorities and we look forward to developing that work into the new fiscal framework. There are, of course, other tax-varying powers that local authorities have in relation to empty property relief. We are legislating in due course during this Parliament for the visitor levy bill. There are other measures that local authorities have at their disposal, but what they can rely on is a £570 million increase in their budget, which they were not expecting. Llyr Smith. Cosla has also put on record that between the time of its written response to the national care service bill and the bill's publication in June 2022, there was, and I quote, no meaningful engagement between the Scottish Government and local government. Does the Deputy First Minister believe that this, combined with the concerns that have been outlined by Mr Griffin, is a very serious situation when it comes to so-called partnership working with the two Governments and the effective delivery of local services? Cabinet Secretary. I frankly do not recognise the world that Llyr Smith is talking about. Let me just explain the dialogue with local authorities. I had several discussions with local government about the preparation for the budget, including discussions right up until the eve of the budget. I had discussions with all of the political leaders in Cosla of all political shades of opinion. My colleagues involved in the national care service have been involved in dialogue with local government, but I would stress that local government has made it quite clear that, because of their opposition to the national care service, they do not particularly want to take forward dialogue with the Scottish Government on those questions. When it comes to the wider partnership working, I simply cite to Llyr Smith the work that the Scottish Government took forward in partnership with local government, which agreed the Covid recovery strategy. It was a jointly agreed proposition. I chaired a delivery board with the President of Cosla, taking forward those priorities. I do wish members of Parliament would reflect the reality of what is going on, not the invention of reality that we get from the Conservatives.


to check out 12 gauge shot pattern, chokes and loads. A cylinder, a modified and a full choke. And we're gonna check out the shot pattern with each of those. Seven and a half shot, we're eight yards away. The cylinder choke has a very wide spread of a modified choke installed, the modified choke, a full choke installed, high velocity bird shot, very tight with a full choke. Triple-op buck shot with eight pellets. You can see the pattern there. Triple-op buck shot, modified choke. A modified choke, triple-op buck shot, full choke. Tighter yet with a full choke.