Welcome to Monet Cafe and a very merry Christmas. Today's pastel painting tutorial will be of some hay bales in the snow. In today's tutorial you'll be learning about blocking in a painting and why it is so important to block in those big shapes and values to begin with. I'll be sharing my product information along with why this new surface that I used, new to me anyway, was one of my favorites. I'll definitely use it again. We'll even be painting falling snow. So get ready to learn lots and here we go. Welcome artists to Monet Cafe. Today's tutorial will be of some hay bales in a snowy scene. I love hay bales. I don't know they just look artistic. This is actually an old painting of mine many years ago that I had shared on my Facebook group that's just for my patrons from my Patreon page and some of them said I would love to see the tutorial of this. Well it's so old. I had only done a speed painting of it. So I thought I would paint from my painting and recreate a tutorial of some hay bales in the snow. Now I am using a surface that I've never used before. Yes there are surfaces I haven't tried it before. You know I'm always experimenting and trying new things. This is called pastel premiere. It's a nice sanded surface. I like this color just because it's a nice kind of taupe color. And I am going to try to keep this a little bit beginner friendly. I know a lot of you beginners with art or soft pastel medium are very hungry to get lessons that are easy to follow. So I'm gonna try to do that. And we're gonna have a lot of fun. So let's get started. The surface I'll be using is pastel premiere. You can find it on Amazon and other places and it comes in different colors. I'll be using the color Italian clay. Also this paper does work with wet media. And it will accept as many as 25 layers of pastel. And for this painting I used almost exclusively this set of Jack Richardson pastels. They are the hand rolled pastels the landscape set. I love these pastels and the colors were perfect for this lesson. Also I'll have all these links in the description of this video. I did use a white charcoal pencil made by Derwent that I just basically used to sketch in the scene. So I'm painting from a painting actually my own painting that I did so long ago. I discovered that the original reference image I used was from a site called wetcanvas.com. They had a reference library where artists could share some of their own photography. And I recently happened to notice that artist Karen Margolis and myself chose the same reference image to create a painting from. Now she's a fantastic artist and I've learned so much from her. So that's just a coincidence and what can happen sometimes if you use copyright free reference images. Now you can see how simple this sketch is. It's basically just the hay bales, the horizon line, the big bank of trees to the left and the distant trees. And I just threw in a couple little suggestions of grasses there. So now what we're going to be doing is blocking in. And what blocking in means is to really just get in your biggest shapes and values. If you want a painterly and impressionistic feel, this is an important crucial first step in pastel painting. And here I've just blocked in the large grouping of trees with a medium value blue. I'm going to be darkening those up in a minute and now I'm adding the same blue to the distant trees and they will stay pretty much the same value as the painting progresses.  It's only $5 a month to become a patron. You support this channel and you get extra content. But some of that extra content happens to be my color notes. So patrons, I'll be sharing with you all of the colors I used from this set. You know the deal. You'll get lots of extra goodies. Now I'm using the darker blue because what happens with value is value just means lightness to darkness on a scale. And things in the foreground are typically, if you take a similar element, like a flower, let's just say it's a blue flower, it will be darker in the foreground than it is when it's far away. Same thing with like things like mountains or even trees. They are darker in value in the foreground and lighter as they progress into the distance. This particular pastel had a little bit of a rough or edges to it. So sometimes if you find that happening, you can just sand your pastel down on another surface somewhere before applying it. Now I will say that I really love this pastel premiere surface. It's the first time I've used it. I bought it a while ago and I had never opened up the package or used it. And I am so, so pleased with this particular surface. As I mentioned, I'm using almost exclusively this one set of pastels, the Jack Richardson Landscape set. And I find that exciting things happen when you limit yourself or restrict yourself to one set of pastels. And I chose this set of 40 pastels because it had a range of blues and cooler tones that I really loved. But it also had some of these exciting magentas as well. And if you have a set of pastels that has enough colors and a decent value range, I think you'll find it's rather fun to limit yourself in this way. A word of advice is to choose value over color. And what I mean by that is try to get the value accurate, meaning the lightness or the darkness of the element before color and choose that as a priority. For example, this magenta was the correct value of some of the shadowy areas of those hay bales. And it, but it wasn't, you know, like your typical hay bale color. But I knew they were warm. It was the right temperature as well. It was a warmer color and the value was right. Now I'm choosing this mossy kind of a green color. Again, based on the value, it is correct in the lightness or darkness that I'm trying to portray. And I'm still in the blocking in stage. Notice that at the base of the hay bales, that there is some shadow. And in my imagination in the scene, I can't remember the exact reference photo and what it looked like. Like I said, I'm painting from a painting. But there was some shadowy sides kind of to the back, the left, our left side of the hay bales. So I imagine the source of light was a little bit more up and to the right, just a little. And so then I can use those same cooler blues to represent those shadows. And shadows often are cooler. And in snow, you can definitely use blues and purples for shadows. Now this Jack Richardson set also had some really nice brownish warm tones. So I used that to first get down some of the lighter parts of the hay bales. And it's a little bit darker than it will be at the end result. But that's often how we paint with soft pastels is we choose our darkest layers, working them gradually to the lighter areas. And so I know that I can layer over this. The description of the pastel premiere that I was just looking at on Amazon said that it takes up to 25 layers of pastel. Now I wouldn't try to do 25 layers. I think it would get a bit too muddy. I purposely focused on this painting to keep it really fresh. I don't think I got more than I don't know, like six or seven layers. And some areas, it still showed the surface kind of peeking through. But I think that keeps it fresh when you don't overlay. But I know I have that confidence that I can layer over some of these values. Now this is not a pastel that's in that set. This is a Terry Ludwig beautiful dark kind of burgundy color. And so I chose that to compliment or be coordinated with the scene, the colors that I'm choosing for this palette. It's basically a darker version of that magenta that I put down. So I know there are still some pretty shadowy areas at the base of these hay bales. And so I'm just kind of just sketching it in lightly where some of those darker values are. And you'll notice that I'm not developing anything too specifically or detailed to begin with. That's another trick to keeping your piece very painterly and impressionistic. Resist the urge to get caught up or stuck on any one area too intensely. And if you find yourself doing that, just say, no, no, no, I have to move on. I have to work the whole. So I know that these shadowy areas are going to be, for the most part, in kind of the same places on these hay bales. I want to gradually lighten them up as they're receding into the distance. Remember values get lighter in the distance. I also knew that I wanted to vary the positioning of my hay bales. This painting would look very, I would use the word amateurish if they all were facing exactly like this front one. So I have the front one kind of turned a little bit towards the viewer with the front of it on the right side. The next one is turned slightly different with the front of it on the left side. This back one is kind of turned a little bit, a little bit more to the back. And then they're gradually going to get to where you can't even really see. You also want to vary the positioning of them. You don't want them like patterned. This seems a little patterned right here, but I'll add another one later that kind of breaks that up a little bit. What I just added there at the base of those trees. There was a little band of grasses that looked like there were some dried grasses, which were, in my imagination, the very same grasses that were used to make the hay bales before the snow came. And now I'm working on, there's a little blanket of snow covering each of the hay bales. I always seem to personify these things. They look, you're just cozy. And so this is back to why would I not be using white right here? But it's back to the principle of putting your darker value down first. There's going to be some little shadowy areas even in the snow. So I'm putting down this really nice, this is a beautiful gray. It's like a topi gray. And then I will layer my lightest layers on top of that. Now I'm just using a paper towel. There are various different things you can use to blend with on different pastel surfaces. I found the past the paper towel worked well to blend things in. I also tried later a piece of pipe foam insulation that you can get at any hardware store. It's a great blending tool. And I found that it did not brush off so much of the pastel. Again, I really loved this pastel premiere surface. I found that you can see the pastel falling off quite a bit there. So I would recommend the pipe foam insulation if you don't want that to happen. It wasn't bothering me all that much. I kind of liked the soft effect that I was getting. This is the second of the soft pastels that are not in the Jack Richardson set. It's a nice little lavendary type of purple. And I noticed this set, the Jack Richardson landscape set, along with many sets of soft pastels are lacking purples. I don't know why. Purple is one of my favorite colors. It's great for shadows. It's great for distant trees, distant mountains. And it's fun color. So I just wanted to sneak some of that in there. It was kind of going along with the same family of cool, cool reds, I would say. A cool red is a pink, leaning a little maybe towards purple. A purple is a warm blue. So not to get too much into color theory. But I didn't know any of the stuff when I first started, by the way, guys. So if I can learn it, you can learn it. Now I'm going to speed up this blocking in stage a bit. So the video won't be so long. The whole painting took me about an hour in 15 minutes, I'd say. So I don't want to make this video that long. So let me speed this up with some Christmas music. How about that? But this is just for the blocking in stage. I will be back to talk and teach more about the snow. Let me first take a little moment to ask you if you've liked this video so far. Click that like button. Subscribe to my channel. Leave me a comment. I love to hear what you have to say. And if you would like to get the extra goodies that I talk about, it's on my Patreon page. You can find me at patreon.com slash Susan Jenkins, lots of extra footage, a beautiful Patreon family, and you get the extra goodies I always mention. So enjoy this little section where I continue to block in this painting and I will be back soon. Well, that was perfect timing for the ending of that song. Here I'm using a paper towel once again, and you can still see how much of the pastel is falling off again. If you don't want as much to fall off, I did find that the pipe foam insulation worked a little bit better as a blending tool, but I really did like the soft effect. So I'm just blending it. I did like some of the textural feel of the snow, but I kind of wanted to get that softness as a base layer. And then you'll see me later add some of some more of the textural marks on the top layers. But it is giving that nice soft snow feeling. Coming up a few pastels here to show some of the warmer tones that I'll be using for the hay bales. I don't use all of these. But I wanted a selection of some other golden and brown colors to put in the grasses that I'm working on here and in the hay bales themselves. At this point in the lesson is where my Patreon only real time content will continue along with extra commentary. But don't worry, Monet Cafe, the version you're seeing here is only sped up slightly. You'll be able to hear some lovely Christmas music while I paint and don't go anywhere because I am going to be back at the end when I'm painting the snow with some tips on how to achieve that. Also too, I will have this original painting available in my Etsy shop. And also I will have prints and products of this painting available on my Fine Art America site. Feel free to recreate from this tutorial and share. But it's proper artist etiquette to give credit to whoever you learned or created the tutorial from. So you can tag me if you recreate from this. If you share it on Instagram, you can tag me at Susan Jenkins Artist. And if you're on Facebook, you can tag me at the Art of Susan Jenkins. Also, if you'd like to join the Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook, it's a closed group. You have to ask or answer a few questions to be admitted into the group. They're really easy. And it's a great art family. You can learn so much in our Facebook group. I think there's like over 16,000 artists in that group. So enjoy this. I'll be back at the end and Merry Christmas. Now, even though this is a snow painting and you would think I would instantly go for white, I have reserved my whitest white for the final strokes. You can see here I'm using a very light white. This is actually within the Jack Richardson set. But this is another white that's even brighter. I believe this is a small unison pastel. And it's just a really nice light value and a bright white. So I'm just sprinkling it on areas on the hay bales, and also little bits in the snow, just glazing it over the values that I've already put down. And while the general color palette is very cool, I did decide to add a little bit of warmth to the trees. I had previously added a little bit of the green. It's a darker kind of a muted green. And now I'm adding bits of those browns in the trees as well. It brings the painting together. This is called echoing color where you take color that's in one area of your painting and kind of echo it throughout the painting. And now the fun begins adding the falling snow. Now I've typically used a method for adding snow in the past. That's a little dusting technique. You can literally lay your painting down flat and use like a little cheese grater or a lemon zester and literally grate some pastel onto your surface. And then you can put a piece of tracing paper over it and you roll something really hard to make it set down into the pastel surface so it won't fall off when you pick it up. But lately I've been enjoying adding snowflakes by hand in a little bit of a random method with snowflakes. It's very similar to other elements in a painting. You want to make sure there's a variety of sizes and you don't want things to be too patterned. Remember there's going to be snowflakes that are close in front of certain items and then some that are very far away. So I didn't want to add too much. I wanted to make it like it was it had just started snowing again. Here is the final and I really did enjoy creating this scene even though it doesn't snow here in Florida. I really do like snow and especially snow scenes. So I hope this was a blessing. Stay tuned for my little message here at the end and Merry Christmas. Thank you so much for joining me in today's lesson. I hope it blessed you and it would bless me if you would consider subscribing to my channel, liking this video and if you would like extra content or just to support Monet Cafe consider becoming a patron of mine on my Patreon page. All right, artists until next time. God bless and happy painting.


I think the most important thing, and I think that comes from, in a way, the title of the conference, looking at the landscapes. I think you've done extremely well in drawing people together. So to de-silo a bit the discussions. Because I think there tends to be silo discussions. So I think we've had very good messages of hope on the global level from the Peruvian minister. I think we need that. I think President SBY pointed to the importance of regional cooperation. I think you've pointed out the importance of cross-sexual cooperation in government. And the triangle of course government, civil society and private sector. I think you've done extremely well in that. And yes, I mean we are committed to stay the course. I think on finance, I think the best guarantee for success is to demonstrate that we are succeeding here. And I think Paheru and his team, they are in the process of proving that we can and will produce success stories. I think in a way there is a bad and a good side to where we are at. This being a year of transition also in Indonesia. In one sense you could say it's unfortunate that we haven't been able to do even more during the years we've had a commitment. The good thing is of course that 95% of the funding is available to the incoming government. So I'm pretty certain that we will be able to work as well with the incoming government as was done with the sitting government. I think another important thing here, I mean you need hope and boldness. You need finance. You need technology and entrepreneurship. But you also need knowledge and I think that's where CIFOR has something very important. Let me just share one little story about how wrong it can go. If you have both hope, boldness, finance, technology, entrepreneurship, but not knowledge. The Vikings were very good at inventing things. They invented the best boats of their age. They had the finance to travel far. They had the boldness, they had entrepreneurship to set up farms. They went all the way to Greenland. What they didn't realize was that they didn't have the knowledge about the landscapes of Greenland. So they expanded, they expanded, and then suddenly somebody cut down the last tree and from there it went very quickly downhill. So we expanded there for 300 years and then it took 50 years before you had to leave the place because of lack of knowledge. I hope that that is something that you are providing us with here. So let us make sure we are not going to be those Vikings.


Hello and welcome to the applied improvisation network brain tank number three. This is number three in a series of what a think tank meetings to consider the current and future state of applied improvisation and the place within that of the applied improvisation network. We have a plan for a conversation of maybe 3045 minutes depending how it goes today. And if you are watching this on recording or participating in it live, you can also join in with a Google document which was promoted and posted with all the notifications about the event. I can share that as well. In the chat. There's Google starts on page 12 the session three section, though pages one to 11 are very interesting to read as well. The topic for today is how applied improvisation has developed and been tested in the humanitarian sector. And we guests on out we have guests on our panel of the Lena Rafi and Margo curl. And everyone else who's here, Frederick so far. We're very welcome. And we'll start by inviting each to say a little bit about your connection to applied improvisation and your connection to the humanitarian sector. Maybe just briefly by way of introductions. Sure. Thanks so excited to be here with you gorgeous people. In terms of applied improv. I think my first applied improv book that I read was by Robert low improvisation Inc. I started my company in 2007 met you Paul and said, please be my business partner teach me everything you know. Back I just looked it up in 2000. I started using improv for sustainability professionals and things like that because I saw that the mindsets of collaboration dealing with the emergent playfulness, even though the topics were serious that the process of playfulness was really useful. And I met the fabulous Pablo as far as from the Red Cross Climate Center in May 2012 at a D growth conference and what was really irritating was, we were put at the same time and his was like the one other session from that conference that I really wanted to see. And we ended up talking later and I sort of lovingly stopped him for two years to say please come to one of our conferences and then kind of we got to do more and more and we got this, I got to be the fabulous Marco. So maybe that's a little brief intro. That's a great start. Thank you. Margot, what's your connection to the humanitarian world and the world of applied improvisation. Well, thank you for the short introduction there, but you know, it's great to be referred to as fabulous before you even start talking. So thank you. Nice. So I have worked in the humanitarian sector for years now I work for the Red Cross Recrecent Climate Center, which is a reference center for the global Red Cross Recrecent movement. And it deals with the impacts addressing the impacts of climate change. So how can we make sure that people suffer less in a nutshell, and knowing that the climate is changing. Now, I think Belina captured it really nicely where she said, you know, it's even though we're dealing with entirely different topics, a lot of the processes that we are dealing with and can really benefit from applied improvisation. I think that's what we've seen over the last years. I was just thinking what was my first introduction. And I'm not actually really sure because I've met so many of you over the years. And I think Belina what you said is teach me everything you know I've always felt that in the presence of applied improvisation and facilitators moderators. So have had a lot of that and is of course, what you mentioned power has brought it to the climate center. And I think it's really started from, you know, working with little exercises to really shaping the way we, we moderate processes we design processes with lots of different stakeholders, you know, governments, researchers and bringing everyone together and really talking about difficult topics and doing that in a way where everyone feels energized and have an effective session. So that's a bit of my introduction. Thank you, Margot. Okay, well, my first introduction to improve, I'm going to say that first I started to learn theater to learn German, when I arrived in Germany. And then I fall in love with improve theater and I say, Oh, that's great. I'm sure we can use that professionally. So I did some research. And then I found yes, there is a group the applied in pro network and I attended one of the a and conference I can't remember if it was in 2006, seven or eight, where we met so quite a long time ago. And then I use that I was self employed I use applied improvisation for for different team building mainly but also developing skills. And then I must say I was completely dragged out of that so always interested in applied improvisation but not really using it, although I'm working in challenge and learning environment so it's really topics where we can really use it. From the amount of monetary and world, I'm not directly involved working in a big huge company, but my daughter. She worked for the for the food bank in London. So, so I'm aware and she's doing a master in political environmental or environmental politics and she's really a topic is social justice and all these topics. So, through that, I mean, I was interested before but even more now. So and when I saw your your post and it was completely by chance poll because the last few months I was not on LinkedIn a lot. And I saw that I say okay that's a good way to get back to the topic so thanks for the invitation in LinkedIn and thanks for this occasion. Welcome back. And my connection is with the applied improvisation network as a co founder back in the beginning of the century and being involved with it ever since and some of the most exciting things that we've done have been our interactions with the humanitarian sector, both AIM to Red Cross and at that organizational level, and also individual work that I've done as facilitator and designer for anything from cop climate talk sessions to working on insurance, new ideas and social justice social protection and prevention of sexual sexual exploitation and abuse so it's really profound and important things that this maybe seemingly frivolous idea of improvisation or improv can lend itself to. And it's a question that I've been thinking about recently is, is there a particular overlap of improvisation having a particularly good fit for the humanitarian sector. I would say that applied improvisation offers things like good facilitation and a neat set of activities, and that that would be useful for accountants bankers, and any other sector, they could all do with better meetings and bit more fun and ways of engaging with people and using games as a means of learning that that kind of diminishes our worth as a subset of participatory activities and experiential learning. Is there something more profound that connects applied improvisation and its possibilities with the humanitarian sector. I'm going to go to Belina again first for that. Right. Marco you catch anything I bit. I absolutely. Yes, I mean I think we're all here because yes but it specifically I think it's a mindset and a practice of under pressure, dealing with the emergent, accepting and building on what's actually happening. We're trying to navigate that with a solution focus mindset of like what can we use to move the story forward particularly tilted in a in a way that keeps people safe that that is adjusting quickly. The circumstances change so I really feel like improv in particular is beautifully suited for humanitarian is like the extreme application because it's it's designed to help us when we're afraid to be grounded connected and generous. The humanitarian sector presents very big problems, including emergencies that demand of a particular way of approaching them and dealing with them in the moment emergent adaptable and those sorts of things. I suppose we've all had some taste of that over the last year when our plans in comfortable Western world were suddenly disrupted to points that we just haven't imagined possible beforehand. And while that may not have been as extreme or difficult as many of the humanitarian crises and challenges it's given us a flavor of that. And we've all been improvisational in our response so it's foregrounded the skills and attitudes mind sets and techniques that might be best suited for us dealing with that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. I would agree with what Belina said.  So that's very much sort of the the emergency work the people in not superman capes but you know, they're they're running around in in high vis vests and dealing with with with disasters as they're happening and dealing with decisions quickly having to, you know, make make the decisions very quickly and having that mindset of using everything that's going on. I think it can be extremely helpful in in that situation. And the work I'm personally involved with would be more on the longer term processes where there's less of that pressure cooking pressure cooker sort of vibe going on, even though, you know, there's obviously there's a huge overarching emergency that we need to work towards but the processes of course have the possibility of taking a bit longer. But within that, what why I think this is particularly well suited is, is is I think why I said before is that very often we're dealing with bringing different sets of stakeholders together in really complex dialogues. It's very easy for processes like that for people to stay in their own corners and, you know, not speak each other's language, not get to the core of something and really stay separate. And I think what I've understood from applied improvisation so far in the processes that we've designed, you know, using your experience and expertise and and having tools at hand. And I think really help us soften those differences bringing people together and really come to a process of co creation, and that can, you know, start to address really complex issues. So I think that's for me, especially where there's a beautiful fit. Let's talk about Pablo Suarez a bit more. Because complex process. I think he made all of us a bugs. A dangerous man in many respects. So he saw these possibilities that Berlina was in front of him and I've quoted a couple of his emails from five eight years ago in the Google Doc where he says how inspired he was by coming to the applied improvisation network conference first in Berlin. 25th, no 2014 or 13. And then again, and we'll talk about what he did in Canada in Montreal, and that he immediately saw the possibility of applying the some of the ideas that he got as a way of making better connection connection in the way that you just described. I'm getting an echo of Frederick. Yeah, there we go. And he did this by, instead of doing conventional talk, he did activities and engaged people in it so that they were speaking at least from the same experience of that activity. And by doing something different and unusual it also got the attention. And I know that the Red Cross Red Cross and Climate Center has developed both before and subsequently a suite of games and activities and exercises, which are leaning towards being more improvisational in the sense of they don't require so much kit or set up and then it was complicated. They're easier to play with different numbers on the spur of the moment and get messages across. They teach concepts, they give people the idea of what something is about, and they teach them skills while you're doing the activity you're learning how to do something like talk more clearly to your neighbor or notice more of what's going on, or change direction quickly in a physical activity can be as simple as that, or can be much more complex and layered. So that whole development of games went on. So you had the idea which he bought to the conference in Montreal, that some of the things that we thought were important stuff to say in the world of applied improvisation didn't land well in the real world. So you couldn't just go with a message of yes and without some interpretation and contextualization, but talking about failures and mistakes doesn't go down well when those failures and mistakes are failures of life and important resource systems and huge amounts of spending. And that really helped to make a differentiation between what you might do in a workshop with safety of theater environment, and what you might teach in a workshop that's supposed to apply to the real world. And that's really at the heart of what applied improvisation is about. So I've rambled a bit there. Maybe you've got some comments on any aspects of that. Ask Margot to go first this time. It's so spontaneous. Wow. Yeah, look, I recognize all of what you're seeing here and I think I was actually there at one of the AI and conferences in England, in Oxford in I don't know what year 26, maybe, where we're probably had a really impactful session bring this point across about the dangers of yes and in a career and situation that we can't say yes to everything. Sometimes it's hard to know where the safety of others can sense so that's, you know, I still almost that feeling comes to it like comes up in my chest thinking about that session thinking that there are really some things in terms of framing to think about. I hear myself double as well now. So the whole point that you're talking about using games and activities to make more impact and get messages across I think that's not something that's new that's been started to do that for years and years and years and that's, you know, evolved from all sorts of activities where we're looking at the probabilities of extreme weather events changing so really technical things and then decision making under pressure and taking people through that experience to much simpler activities where there's lower level of skill required as the facilities are much more broadly applicable and really triggers interesting thinking. I don't know if one of the things that comes to mind is a snap sort of thing yeah yeah yeah but you know it's like an imaginary deck of cards. And then you know if you say the same number the first person to say snap gets a point and gets the deck of cards and then you can sort of apply that by then bringing in content it could be any content so it could be what do you think about when you think about climate change or whatever the topic is that you want to explore in that particular meeting workshop setting at that time. And I think for for me and for the organization is being equipped with a whole lot of these tools and approaches that you can pull out of your quiver. You know, whenever applicable to soften the process to make people more engaged and has just been extremely helpful with this and people you know come back years after saying I remember that and I remember thinking what happened and at the level of engagements just really really gone up and I think especially if you're talking about something like climate change which is you know not necessarily the most exhilarating topic because we're talking about processes that go on for years or decades. And so to to to make people engage with that things really important and I think having the tools to do that. Yeah, it's been very valuable. Did you want to go second. I think that's exactly right and it's, it's not only that the climate process is so drawn out it's that it's urgent and scary and I think there's something about navigating our way together. I think it's very joyfully in connection with something that is scary and very easy to kind of block out because it's too overwhelming. There's, there's real power in that. I feel the need to backtrack and explains just quickly why Pablo made us eat bugs and which is really magical about working with Margo with Pablo with with the team is that from the AIS side and I used to be on the board of course six years working with with Paul and stuff is that is seeing how beautifully you take exercises and really embed them into the different processes so it's the how is beautifully fit with the what you're trying to do. So, so, I remember there were several kind of pilot workshops like let's play games and let's work out what are these doing because it's never about just playing a game it's always we're going to pick a specific game so that certain mindsets are triggered certain behaviors are triggered. And so the how is part of the what because the traditional, both in corporate and NGO land of death by PowerPoint is such a waste and we don't have time to waste we need more effective meetings that people are really co creating solutions. And the reason he made us eat bugs was this beautiful session he did right before lunch, so we were all really great. And he talked about we all care about the environment. Here, he had an account, somebody from the economist fell out like here's the impact of different types of meat that a lot of people eat on the environment.  And I think that there's something about applied improv being very mindful of body and mindset and actions, which helps us to align the how with the what, in a particularly good way. And that's why he made us eat bugs is to say like okay if you care about this here is something that's outside of your comfort zone, which is actually applicable. Like you can do this. Yeah, and that felt very alike with him. The message is wrapped up in the design of the activity, literally in the case of bugs in chocolate. And the facilitators applied improvisers facilitating. We need to know what the game is teaching. It's very easy to take a game and think it's teaching one thing and the mechanics end up having it teach the opposite. I won't give examples now because maybe time for it, but you've brought me to think of some highlights of this relationship between the applied improvisation and the humanitarian world. For example, it's not just working with people who are the workers in the humanitarian world it's sometimes working with the populations themselves, displaced villagers and so forth I think you've worked that's been done in Manila. Right, and on the borders of Mexico and America where the improvisational activity is participated in by people who have been affected by some other some humanitarian difficulty or other. So, with that whole range of things in mind what are some of your highlights of that relationship where it's, it's worked well been effective and memorable for you. It's slightly more vigorous. No, it's, I'm just thinking, you know, me personally, I have, well, I'm just thinking how I use these sort of thing has the organization use these in on the frontline and most certainly I would say yes. And we've run all sorts of training of trainer sessions using games and activities for people in in all sorts of countries and to, you know, to really get to the population level, create contingency plans for disaster preparedness using activities and really getting people's to think sharply, cleverly, quickly on what's needed rather than having a sit down process that takes a long time. So certainly have used that over the over the years. And I think one of the highlights for me that comes to mind immediately now is, in addition to, you know, having used the applied improv principles and tools in in the design and facilitation of things and supporting others to in their design and the implementation has gotten to that level. I think, partly because of the experience we've, we've learned from the network from the applied improvisation side of things so really people come to us now for Hey, and how can we do this in a more effective interesting way. So that's interesting. And we've had the pleasure of together with Molina with Paul with some other colleagues, creating an online course actually calls participate and where we look at the effective design and implementation of effective meetings in face to face meetings, and have had fantastic response to that where you really take participants for free through principles activities, things tips and lessons on what we've learned over the years of how can we do this better. And that's been a real highlight for me. For you, Belina. I think the participate program was awesome. We also did a session in the Paris conference, like a pre session that was looking at humanitarian and applied improv and, and learned a lot through delivering that as well. I always think is the one you were talking about in the Philippines, and I got to visit him several years ago and really talk about. He was working with Mary Tyskovich was at FEMA at that point and a year after the biggest typhoon, they went and work with effective, effective communities on how do we make better decisions. If it happens again. And I remember him saying very, like extremely moving things of asking the participants in the morning like if it happens again, how confident are you that you're going to make good decisions and some of the more at the level of if it happens again. This is even a year later. I don't want to make it, I want to go like that. That's how traumatized they were and by the end of it. They were saying that was brilliant and now we feel more confident that we know what to do if it happens again. And we're ready to do that. So that was an incredibly moving project that that gave in Mary did. The practice of improvisation in a workshop setting is giving people life skills to be more in touch with their resources and to improvise better responding to the needs that have so at its core it's a really important skill for anyone and everyone. Again, as we've all experienced recently, least a flavor of that, and the recognition that these are core skills that people need is going to support more of that this sort of work happening. I mentioned also the Oxford conference, the AI and conference where we had two days of meeting between the humanitarian attendees and applied improvising 10 attendees to really talk about some of these things, get to understand each other's worlds and and develop some activities together. That was one of the highlights for me. Questions and thoughts have sprung to anyone's mind Frederick included while we've been speaking. No thoughts have sprung to anyone's. I was, I'm really interested in all what you say and I mean from from my experience on applied improvisation I can really see what you what you've done. And I've seen a video from some time ago I think I don't know where it was posted but I've seen a lot of public stories which which we're talking about. And yeah. No I don't have a specific question at the moment. Oh, too many. I have a reflection of now that we've been through various levels of lockdown and third waves and for me like all these different waves of pandemic that the ambient stress for us around the world has been incredibly high. To the point where like cognitive function is beginning to fray a little bit of our ability to do zoom conferences. So there's, I'm appreciating the joyful connections, even when we're highly stressed aspect of applied improv. More and more there's something a lot of people have talking to her like beyond the point of pretending. And they really want to have real conversations and they want to have joyful connections and not like happy clapping connections but like real meaningful nurturing connections and I think applied improv also lends itself to that. I haven't gone to the pandemic for over a year. I'm curious what Margot kind of sees. If you guys work under stress normally and then you have the pandemic stress on top of that sort of with your experience. Oh, and I see we have a new participant. Hi, sorry I just finished another session in the US. It's okay. Welcome. And I'm going to mute you for the moment. That's a very warm welcome. I'm just talking quickly here we went, I think through, you know, where humanity, the humanitarian world and applied improvisation have met can meet and a quick reflection here from Belina on the extra levels of stress that causes has brought and how we've experienced that. I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a very interesting setting, and I feel that the first month or two everyone was swimming and it was all chaotic and no one knew how to organize themselves at home and there were children running around and there was just absolute chaos for about a month or two. And then to me, it felt like the work pressure just went incredibly. It just, and it's because the whole world. I mean, I've been working from home for years and years already so very used to that. And everyone else was and planning in meetings and meetings and meetings. I don't know if you recognize this but all of a sudden I seem to not be able to breathe from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon or something and then you can get to your emails and then to actually some work and there was just that constant pressure and I think people felt under pressure to keep delivering the same amount of stuff so where there's no workshop organized in real life and now it's got to be the same amount of time and online and rather than really taking a step back and seeing where it was the actual objective that we wanted to achieve and can we do that in a much shorter, different, gentler way and so I have certainly felt that in my work but I don't think that's necessarily representative for the humanitarian work and I think that's probably a bit of what everyone's experiencing. Everyone there's this opportunity to rethink what we do and rethink the ways in which we do it and that the creativity of improvisational approaches can provide some answers and some radically different ways of doing things. So we all need to be at these meetings. How can we use asynchronous communication more effectively. How does going online suddenly give us access to so much more widespread expertise, even if we're losing certain things at the same time of human communication and there's these are all, in my view, improvisational related questions with good improvisational responses from principles of collaboration and principles of taking care of ourselves and each other. So just to add to that one one thing that has certainly come about in in the organization I work for so I'm Alison I work for the recross request and climate center dealing with the impacts of climate change around the world is the whole launch of this thing called virtually amazing. I mean, Belina is I think you are probably one of the people who's coined that in Paris, your journey, who where there was an applied improvisation workshop in collaboration with the humanitarian side on how to work more effectively online. And we've really taken that virtually amazing on board as a way of working. And really, I foresee long into the future and seeing, you know, can we prevent me things like do we have to fly everywhere in the world can we reduce that we not only, you know, make better use of our time but also not fly around the world and keep polluting at the same time. So have a smarter more effective way, where we really make use of the possibilities that the internet is offering us. So that's been really cool. If improvisation at its most basic making use of what we've got in a better ways creative novel ways responding to the pressures that we're under then making use of the world's resources seems like a very good idea. So, I think we'll close in a minute or two. Final thoughts, Belina. I'm glad you're having this conversation. I think it's a beautiful application for so many reasons to bring apply to impromptu the humanitarian sector. It just to boost personal resilience of the people who are in it. And who are having, you know, like importance strategic meetings and or on the ground and everybody in between. It's a sector that's dear to my heart, like here to help as I can. I feel really honored to be part of this, you know, like the AI and that has, I feel like what you co founded poll of a million years ago, whatever it actually was. You've been, you've been training people for now and beyond. The stuff that you were planning seeds for decades ago in different forms is helping people now and is going to continue to help people through climate adaptation, you know, disaster risk reduction, all sorts of other things. So it's just a joy to be part of the conversation. Thank you. Margot final thoughts for now. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think it's been an honor and a pleasure of the last years to to work together. I think one of my highlights, I can't remember which event this was, but there was this famous Canadian man who was there as well from whose line is I think, or anyway, I was mercury. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In a recent AI and events, and that was the only event that week after a whole string of zoom meetings, teams meetings, whatever meetings that really made me laugh out loud. So, especially at the time where there's such pressure and there's so much going on felt really elated and I think giving yourself the freedom to pause and to breathe in and to be inspired literally. What was fantastic. And, and, yeah, I think this is a fantastic reminder, being here with with you guys, and to that we've done some really cool things in the past, and there's plenty to be explored in the future. So really looking forward to that. Thank you there is plenty to be explored in the future. And you can get involved if you're watching this and want to be involved with the AI and the applied improvisation network, either through our Facebook group or our LinkedIn group, or through the website, which is currently under refurbishment but if you're watching this in centuries to come it will be up and running I'm sure. It's a dedicated body of applied improvisation for humanity within the applied improvisation network which still meets from time to time and makes things like the webinar that Margot's just referred to happen. And these brain tank sessions looking at applied improvisation in its various facets and appearances happens on the first, the second Tuesday of each month at this time, whatever that time is for you. And UTC time. So thank you very much for being here today and watching this session. I'm going to pause the recording now so that we can all say what we really think.


The proposed strategy involves the use of an inorganic 2D-CL terminated T3-C2, T3-C2-CLX, emzine to reduce the lattice strain in the CSPBBR3 perovskite layer. This results in a compressed and confined perovskite lattice, which is stabilized by the PB-Baxlash UF8FFCL bonds and the 2D-T3-C2 immobilizing the lattice. Additionally, the defective surface is healed, resulting in a champion efficiency of 11.08%, which is the highest reported efficiency for this type of perovskite solar cell. Furthermore, the unencapsulated device demonstrated nearly unchanged performance under 80% relative humidity and 85 degrees Celsius for 100 days and 30 days respectively. This article was authored by Ching Weizhou, Jelong Duan, Jendu, and others.


Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Joining us today for his third Free Thoughts episode is Peter Van Dorn, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of Regulation Magazine. Today we're going to be talking about net neutrality and the history of regulations of a similar sort. But let's start by just introducing the topic. What is net neutrality and why do people seem, especially on the internet, very upset and riled up about it? If you talk to consumer advocates and some law professors, law professors without an engineering background, they perceive, they want the internet to be something called free and where every bit, right? So the internet for those who don't know is a packet switched telecommunication system. And that is in contrast to the traditional telephone system which is where an actual line, a physical circuit, and is used by anyone who has a phone conversation whereas internet communication occurs in what are called packets, which is a set of digital commands at the beginning of which and in the end of which says, where is this command coming from, i.e. what computer? And every computer in the world has a unique what's called internet protocol IP address. And then after each command, digital command is an instruction of where, which computer this instruction is supposed to go to. But every component of a video or a conversation or anything done over the internet is broken down into millions and millions of separate packets, each of which is a command to do something, whatever that is, take this period and put it here or whatever, and directions about where, to what machine is that packet directed. So it looks less like talking to you via two cups connected with a string and more like sending mail. In envelopes with addresses. Well, it's mail where your letter is broken up into shreds. And then it also goes to some sort of central carrier then read often and then put back out somewhere else kind of like mail too. Well, every node in the internet is a computer and the computer takes each packet and sends it where the address says it's supposed to go to. At the final destination, the packets are reassembled by software and hardware back into whatever it is that's supposed to be. It could be an email, it could be a video, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So at its heart, net neutrality, at least in the legal non-engineering community is a concept in which the internet is supposed to treat every packet the same. Not give any preference, it's speed or like bandwidth. Right, there's just a packet, it's a packet, it's a packet. So a packet from a conspiracy website is treated the same as something from Facebook or Wikipedia or something like that. So it's this very anti-discrimination equality before the law kind of concept transferred to an industry whose engineering is not understood by the lawyers who actually make these kind of intellectual pronouncements. Beneath that is a, from a consumer point of view, most consumers don't care about this kind of equality before the law concept, but they care about and have gotten used to fixed monthly prices that don't vary. And this is just an accident of history in which in the late 90s we put so much fiber into the ground, fiber optic cable that we had beyond a glut. We had so much dark fiber out there. The streets of, remember Washington was ripped up and fiber was put down the middle of every street in every city, everywhere in the United States and much of the world. Therefore the marginal cost of giving away stuff, there was zero. So there was no point to charge for congestion. There was no traffic price. Yeah, there was no congestion, there was no nothing. So you just paid your $30 a month for your internet service provider and even if you used a ton of internet versus you went to one site once a day, that's the same price. So we now have a cultural problem which is a set of economic conditions that is not sustainable is, consumers have gotten used to that. And so consumer advocates see differential pricing particularly for video, so-called bandwidth hogging content. Consumer advocates often see that as a violation of something called net neutrality. Is that the concern? Because what you're saying is we have gotten used to paying a fixed amount per month for effectively however much bandwidth as we happen to use coming from whatever services we're using. But when I see net neutrality debates, the concern is not so much that say Verizon is going to start charging people who use more bandwidth, more a month. There's going to be overage fees, but that they're going to slow down or speed up certain traffic based on the provider's ability to pay, not the consumers. So Facebook might be able to pay more so that it's going to come across the lines to me faster than Twitter would no matter how much bandwidth I happen to be using. So first two concepts I got to, you're the good student who has gotten to concepts three and four that are part of some people's objections to the internet and then they think net neutrality would solve these perceived problems. The third is vertical integration between content providers and the pipes. And this is a- I think it's a series of tubes that you're looking for, yes.  And you might not have many options other than Comcast in your local area so you're kind of beholden to them. Consumer advocates worry about the monopoly access to the household, the last mile of pipe, and most economists and engineers are less worried about that thing because they see competition in the sense of satellite providers and DSL lines that they think of as adequate and many consumer advocates do not see those things as that amount of access as enough competition to prevent the mischief from vertical integration. This seems to be a product of, as you said, putting down a ton of fiber, having a proto-internet being not as much database, not having things like Netflix or people like that who can take up- or YouTube who can take up huge amounts of the bandwidth. And then, so the expectations of that and then deals that were starting to be made by companies to perfer certain thing and people saying, no, it had to be back to the level playing field that it was in 1995 type of attitude. This leads me to point number four, which is economists have a term for certain kinds of products and they involve what are called two-sided markets. So a newspaper, the classic old-style delivery of content vehicle is a two-sided market in the sense that it gets revenues from consumers and it gets revenues from advertisers. And the newspaper has to decide, given it's fixed and marginal costs, how much of those costs is it trying to recover from somebody called consumers and how much of the cost is it going to recover from something called advertisers? So forward to the internet, the internet, the back, the pipes, the people who own the fiber-optic system, both what's called the backbone, which is the main links around the country as well as the last connections to households. Those providers also are in what are called two-sided markets in that they have, they deliver something called content from content providers, Netflix or your, my email, to recipients called consumers. And the internet firms can charge more to content providers, less to content providers, more to consumers, less to consumers and they have to decide what maximizes profits and revenue from their point of view. And usually, as with newspapers, right, newspapers have always not been very expensive for consumers. I mean, we do, if the New York Times did not, if we saw the New York Times budget every year and then we divided, about a million people, well, now it's less, it's 800,000 and some odd people get the New York Times each day. Take the New York Times annual budget, divide it by 800,000 and by 365 and you'd get a rather high number. And you'd have a newspaper no one would buy or maybe just, well, $10 newspaper or something like that. Oh, I bet you higher. I mean, I mean, people, advertisers pay $140, $150,000 for a one-day ad that's a page in the New York Times. I don't pay $150,000 to get the New York Times every day. So Netflix is paying its internet provider to do all sorts of things to make sure that the content, the video that people see on their home computer screens is not bumpy, blurry. Getting video to work in a packet switch system is much more difficult than getting email to work because the video can't arrive at different times, whereas the email actually can. And by times, I mean nanoseconds, right? The rate at which these packets are sent by light along the network is the speed of light. So you can do a lot per second. But reassembling all the packets into a picture of a movie so that half the country can watch all this at the same time and it all works, turns out that's more difficult than email. So Netflix is paying internet providers to do all sorts of things that I won't describe in an engineering sense to kind of enhance the probability that when you see the video at home, it actually will work from your point of view. And the question is sort of whether or not that's fair to the consumers in some way. I'm a consumer and I like $8 and whatever it is a month that the Netflix charge for online viewing on top of the usual standard old DVD business model. That additional charge, if I had to pay for all the things that get that get it right, that Netflix is paying, it would be a lot more than eight, whatever it is a month. So same thing with Visa and MasterCard, how much of the charge is on consumers and how much of the charge is on merchants. And Visa and MasterCard have concluded that since currency is a free alternative, you can't charge consumers for using plastic. But this got merchants mad. They don't like all the costs being on them and they've gone to Congress and they've gotten political relief from some of those charges. And we're seeing an equivalent kind of struggle in effect in the internet. But again, the concern isn't just about fairness or costs to consumers about our internet bills going up to compensate for the bandwidth that Netflix or YouTube uses. It's about innovation and innovation based on kind of the unique characteristics of the internet because one of the things that has made the internet such a vibrant place for innovation is the phenomenally low costs of entry as a new business. Software is cheap. Web hosting is cheap. Programming has become, it's still not easy. It still is time consuming but the tools for developing websites and web services have gotten much, much better. So it's much easier to build things. And so a Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room can create Facebook with effectively no capital. But if suddenly in order to enter this market, he not only has to be able to build Facebook in his dorm room but he has to be able to pony up costs to Comcast and Verizon and Time Warner and all of these people in order to make Facebook fast enough, then that is going to create enormous barriers to entry for new firms and all of these amazing internet services that we have started off, a huge number of them started off as Zuckerberg in his dorm room as opposed to large corporations who have the money starting a new product. So we might cut off the vibrancy of the internet. You have stated the concern of internet neutrality advocates very well. That's exactly what they state. What they miss is that in effect economists would answer that the question is you're now posing a problem where there appear to be gains to trade between something called innovators and something called venture capitalists, right? Two questions. One is how well can the market work to put very young, talented people with no money in touch with older people with lots of money so that this innovation can be funded? That's question one. Question two, are there real cost differences between different ways of using the internet so that some startups in effect would impose large costs on the internet if those costs were just averaged out and so everyone's bill that's a fixed price per month would have to raise a smidgen in order to let this startup work versus the another economic conception of the way to fund these things is that the startup because of its use of the internet is actually in an engineering sense complicated and imposing real costs on the internet and thus the charges for that imposition should fall on them and then we're back to that's in effect the right way to price so entry barriers will increase but they're not made up. It's real. It's not like the internet provider is ripping off the new young entrant. Instead, we shift from the internet charges should be the way they are and they should fall on content providers that impose costs on the internet but we now then go to the first question I raise which is given those real costs how well will capital markets in effect fund these innovations and if that works out then there is no entry barrier in the way you describe because the capital markets will fund these things given that they will really add value. What if the ISPs are behaving less neutrally so sure they could say like look if you're using a ton of bandwidth or your startup is doing the kinds of things that cause congestion you should pay more. Okay but what if it's instead NBC and Comcast and NBC has its streaming video service and it would certainly prefer that people are using that and so it goes and just slows down Netflix a little bit to the point where all the people who are on Comcast get frustrated and they're like yeah I didn't like NBC's as much doesn't have as good a selection but at least it plays then we're not talking about things like you should pay for your usage. We're talking about ISPs being selective about who services get through based on their own interests. The economists, well you have phrased the concern of net neutrality advocates again very well congratulations. The two responses one is none of the three of us in this room are engineers and so I will not state the engineering possibility or impossibility of doing what you allege. Some of the articles I've read by those trained in computer science say this kind of differential packet handling i.e. we know Netflix's packets and we know our packets and we can slow theirs down and speed ours up and blah blah blah. I have read some things that say that is engineering impossible that the internet is not capable of doing that at this but I won't overstate that because I'm not enough of an engineer to know whether the things I've read are valid or not. Two I'll give an economic kind of intuition and then go to a completely different example and talk about it. Sears, at least my generation I'm old but Sears is where I go to buy appliances and lawn mowers and washers and dryers and I don't know if that's filtering down to young people or not but basically. They don't have washers and dryers. Okay appliances.  I've made it and that may seem archaic but anyway. So Sears owns and the Kenmore brand. It's own version. You see where I'm headed here which is to Sears have incentive to not sell or block the sale of Maytag and Westinghouse and all the other things that make appliances. The answer, if you've gone to Sears you know the answer is no they sell everything. They make their own brand but they know other people sell brands and they know that if they were to cut themselves off from selling other things that they don't have an interest in they'd make less money. So the question is is there enough internet competition particularly the last mile right the access to households is having a duopoly or an olagopoly rather than a monopoly. There's Comcast and there's the satellites and there's DSL and there's Verizon now in many many urban areas so most of most urban Americans have access to four providers. Is that sufficient competition so that the kind of mischief that you described even if it were possible from an engineering standpoint it's just not worth it because they can make more money by giving whatever content people want even if it's not the content they own. And that's an old story this idea of is there enough competition to make the market either efficient or efficiently nondiscriminatory or fair or something like that. That goes back to things that we've been talking we've talked about before on free thoughts and things that we've been talking about as a nation for hundreds of years. I have this quote here that I think is relevant to read from an article in regulation which we'll link in the show notes. It says 120 year old statement the paramount evil chargeable against the operation of the transportation system of the United States as now conducted is unjust discrimination between persons places commodities or particular descriptions of traffic. The underlying purpose and aim of the proposed legislation which is the 1887 act to regulate commerce is the prevention of these discriminations and it was begin about the lack of competition facilitating that kind of discrimination right. Americans have long been suspicious of transporters of things having any stake in an owning content any things they ship. So the laws governing U.S. railroads have never allowed railroads to own autos to own coal to all right so that the the big innovation in the world in the industrial revolution that really made so many things that we now take for granted possible was railroads. So railroads were seen as and all this language is still in the laws in the in the that we that elites use to describe these things I essential facility right is very big in the law that kind of thing. So we could go to our roads what would this is always an I think an interesting question for libertarians to think about which is how would we think about vertical integration between general motors. Let's say we had libertopia and we had a private world and we had private roads. What would we think of GM owning roads and would GM owning roads then not allow Chrysler cars to be shipped on GM owned roads right and in fact this is the same. And the next question would be well if there was sufficient competition for roads but they said well who competes for roads who competes for roads. So so notice that in transportation and now the Internet these ancient and they're not just us by the way in my research for this talk today. I read a book that described English and US common law as having lots of concerns about these things and judgments about these things common carriers that most of us are not aware of and think. Many libertarians think all the evils in the that is something called deregulation has now changed the way the legal and or political system think about transportation and or the Internet. And but there's all this concern before the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 I did. I read that there were lots of common law cases about access and about price discrimination and about cost recovery and about obligations which libertarians would find odd. I think now but the legal system we usually recommend for resolution of these kinds of concerns was from our current standpoint rather pro regulatory in a common law sense about not just letting the railroad and or the stage coach firm decide what they could do without any constraint. Yeah. And that's the common carrier provision in the classic sense which everyone kind of learns about in law school really judge invented to say your specific business now has different constraints than someone else's business who has the freedom to decide discriminate against customers and discriminate on price. You as a railroad or various certain things are now no longer allowed to do that. And the actual again there's economists have thought about what what is what's the natural monopoly that leads to the market failure that results in too little competition. And many have argued that it is the right of way it is the it's in effect the continuous strip of land that is free to be used as a conveyance channel. Be it for a canal or a road or a railroad or a fiber optic system that the right of way is the entry barrier. And then given the right of way do you want three or four parallel competitors in that right of way to get you to have to avoid your concerns about entry restrictions and things like that. And we could auction off you know how much would you bid for the right to run a railroad in this corridor. Now we didn't do that what we did is we gave away land to the railroads to subsidize their initial creation and operation so that we could settle the West. Again economists have sort of concluded that we probably settled the West too soon it was there was too little population density to actually warrant the development of all these systems without a subsidy of some sort. And lots of railroad regulation was actually about subsidizing not high density lines in the East but rather in effect very underutilized railroads say East of Ohio in the early days. We've been talking about common carrier regulation but a lot of the talk about the Internet they people end up saying it should be treated as a public utility. Is public utility regulation similar to common carrier does it apply more better to the way that we think about the Internet than common carrier. Public utility and common carrier regulation are I mean common carrier comes out of a transportation tradition public utility is usually thought of as natural gas electricity and water. And one can we have in the United States a mixture of municipally owned we used to have municipally owned gas systems I don't know if there are any more. We certainly have municipally owned electric and water systems but we also have private electric and water systems. And again they were thought to be the word natural monopolies IE if you have three or four or five of these firms operating in the similar geographic environment. The cost structure of these firms is such that given the demand for their output everywhere in that output range marginal and average costs are declining. And thus firms have incentives to keep lowering prices below their current cost structure so that they could survive if there were no other firms around. And that's the natural part of natural monopoly that the market could only support one firm doing these things in any given area. So they would set rates and stuff with a commission or something like that to guarantee a rate of return but not to charge too much. So the political response to the perceived and we can talk about what the data say about whether when economists have studied public utilities did they actually find these kinds of cost structures or not. But anyway the political system responded as if that were true and then limited entry gave franchises for the operation of electricity or gas or water in a given area. And in return for that monopoly franchise you then were subject to rate regulations so that you would not abuse that franchise and charge consumers too much. So that notion that the internet is an equivalent it has a similar kind of economics and that it ought to be rate regulated in that manner does indeed underline many advocates for something called net neutrality. And in turn there are economists who've written many for me in regulation trying to outline what the history of public utility regulation actually did in the United States in gas electricity water telephones. So what do we see with that do we see consumers helped out by the interstate commerce commission and public utilities regulation and all these ills that we created these systems for were therefore mitigated and everything was. Some consumer what what we see in every system that we had was entry barriers plus a system of transfers within the regulated system from some producers and some consumers to other producers and other consumers. And that political balance was necessary to keep political support going for the rate regulation in each of these so for example my kind of transfer for well I'll give you so in railroads in railroads there were what are called we had value of service pricing when railroads freight railroads were regulated. And that meant that prices for low value bulk commodities like a coal and grain and basically the stuff that farmers shipped from the boonies to the urban setting the prices for shipping those things were low. The prices to ship higher valued less elastic demand manufactured goods where the shipping costs were a low percentage of their total costs. So think think of shipping corn and the percentage of that total cost to the consumer that transportation would be then think of a car and think of the price to the consumer what percent of of that bill would be transportation costs. So basically you tax the shipping of manufactured goods over short distances on railroads and you redistribute the proceeds to keep the prices charged to farmers and to other bulk commodity long distance shippers. You keep that price low and that it was in accord with the populist sentiments of the over rural represented U.S. Senate and with it prevented sort of populist uprisings because remember many of the there was more competition in urban areas in railroads than there was in rural areas. So the monopoly pricing ability in rural areas was higher. So the rate regulation kept the prices down. It overcharged urban users and urban high value added shippers and that was politically stable for almost 100 years. Now what undermine and same thing in telecom telecom involved redistribution from urban phone users and businesses to rural telecom users in a similar fashion. And what undermines these systems is competition coming out and it wasn't competition in rail because that was regulated. It was trucks when trucks arrived on the scene in the 20s what they switched over. Well the high that you started to ship these high price urban things not by rail but by truck. Well then Congress responded by regulating trucks. Right. You have to squeeze and make sure no one escapes to make sure. Yeah. With competition and different behaviors when there's a tax and transfer system embedded in a regulation and there usually is. You in effect have to prevent tax arbitrage just like we're talking now about the corporate tax and tax evasion from U.S. corporations. The history of transportation regulation was we first did railroads and then we needed to do trucks because trucks were in effect causing leakage. And then we had to do barges water the whole barge transportation system started to take stuff away from railroads and that would undermine the tax and transfer system. Same thing in telecom right we had a breakout of microwave competition against the traditional AT&T landline system. And the courts ruled that the FCC did not have the authority to restrict MCI from competing for corporate business in a private microwave system. And that's just like trucks competing against railroads. So in effect the I hope well the articles and regulation that we've had basically goes through all the history of this shows how complicated it got. Particularly in telecom to try to create open access to the monopoly part of the network and create open access which is what the 96 Telecom Act tried to do. We don't even talk about the 96 Telecom Act now because even though it's still on the books everyone agrees it's a mess and it failed and no one cares anymore. So someday we'll repeal it but the internet may face the same kinds of things. Is this like a general almost regulatory law in some weird sense that it becomes more complex as you proceed forward because in situations like this you have one item of regulation that affects some people. But then it changes the behavior of the people they're affecting. So then you add more and then you make start making micro distinctions and it becomes far more political and then the regulators have a ton of power and you get captured. It seems like it's sort of like a natural ramping up effect you'd expect from this. And as long as everyone doesn't stay on the straight and narrow and just keep using the regulated utility regulated aspect and not going outside of it or trying to innovate around it. Because as soon as that happens you can either complexify the regulations think about Uber and taxis right or you can take them away. Again as I said earlier I don't see something called regulation as distinct from something called taxation. And in fact there are articles in the literature about how regulation is often a substitute for more transparent tax and transfer systems. The relevant word being transparent right that in Peter's world at least in class I always say it's always better to have explicit tax and transfer. I mean if we're going to do it we might as well tell the voters here's what we're doing. We are taking money from you folks to give it to these folks because we collectively have a normative view that that's an appropriate thing to do. And we then could have a discussion about it we could then have what philosophies would or would not support that kind of tax and transfer system. Americans are very uncomfortable having those kinds of discussions. Most politicians realize they would not get enough support for those kinds of discussions. But Americans are also hypocritical about it in my view and that most people want stuff even though culturally they'll vote for people who claim to be against taxing and transferring. What they're really against is taxing and transferring to people they don't like. They approve of transfers to people they think are morally appropriate given whatever their views are. So in the United States we don't have an explicit large state we have an implicit large state and it's all of this runs through much of it used to the regulatory system. But we have deregulated largely transportation and energy and telecommunications. But now all the old concerns are arising again in the Internet and so to people like me in the quote you read from a hundred and whatever years ago to anyone with any historical knowledge this is deja vu all over again. We are confronting issues about philosophy and taxing and transferring and we are not very good at that and we seem uncomfortable with it and I'm worried. I hope we don't but I'm worried that we'll end up with a obscure technique that what appears to be a technical system for regulating Internet access and things like that and pricing it. But in fact it will be a very disguised and complicated tax and transfer system that will end up not working and unraveling and doing bizarre things in the way you described. Let's maybe expand on those fears a bit or articulate them further by taking these lessons that we've learned these kind of laws of how or seeming laws of how regulations play out and see what would happen if the net neutrality advocates got their ways. So let's say that tomorrow the FCC or Congress or somebody passes creates regulations that say ISPs can't charge content providers differently can't treat traffic differently that they have to be fully neutral. What sorts of things would we as consumers see happen with the first thing you would see is that many things people value and think are really cheap. Would suddenly not work very well because all those in effect hidden payments by content providers that they now don't know exist. I mean the Internet the claim is that the Internet has been neutral from its very beginning and now is just in the last few years being corrupted by vertical integration and or some mischief of the sorts that you've described. But again is what the stuff I've read said it's really been not that way almost from the very beginning and so there's been much more complicated differential services supplied depending on what people needed. But again in the two sided market notion that economists have people who have a large stake in content know all this because they in effect have been paying to get it delivered in ways that made the consumers think of it as just as easy as email but in fact from the Internet's point of view it was not. But consumers still just pay there whatever a month and turn the thing on and it just works. So in a regulated environment where those payments by content providers were no longer allowed either there would be content degradation on the video viewing side of the sort that would immediately cause the consumer uprising. Or there'd be arbitrage and innovation in ways that I probably can't predict so that somehow content providers wouldn't directly be doing paying but they somehow would pay somebody who would pay somebody who would pay somebody and somehow the lawyers would say that's legal. I mean regulation is a game between two disciplines. I don't know if I said but as someone who has studied and been trained in more than one discipline what I see out there in the world is the world mostly of one discipline people and where they whatever they learn in college or graduate school they then inflict on the world. Not realizing that it might be completely different than what some other discipline would do given its perspective.  I see it every day as part of the problem that in effect the law with its use of words to specify whether you have or have not complied. And economists always see well I can draw an equation that says we'll call it this but it's really this and I'm going to fool you lawyers about all this. So at least the history of trying to control markets through regulation is basically this cat and mouse game between something called the law and its attempt to create neutrality among things it doesn't know much about.  If we see that you mentioned the workarounds that have been out of the right word the innovations in changing how the Internet has functioned ever since the beginning. It seems that one of the effects of putting in a regulatory regime that sort of defined one practice and a different practice and you can be in category A or you can be in category B and you can be in category C is that it would keep innovation down because you would be working within the categories you're allowed or possibly trying to work around it but then worried about regulation on that side. And then it would be a question of whether or not the regulation apparatus can keep pace with the innovation inherent in the market and that would seem to create a problem. Right. The good news is for those of our listeners who know this topic very well they will be screaming now at their computer saying he's not talking about the most famous and most important FCC decision regarding the Internet which is to treat the Internet. Internet as not subject to traditional telephone regulation and that that has been so that has allowed the Internet to flourish. They made this decision in the 90s or something. It was a series of court decisions that basically said well it was an FCC decision and then a whole series of court decisions that ratified that against people who thought that was wrong. That said something called computer enhanced services weren't traditional telephone and therefore the whole FCC apparatus of rate regulation and entry controls and all of that did not apply. Everything would have been crazy different. Crazy different. Yeah. Anyway I think there's a whole long history of all those decisions and again in the articles in regulation they're rehashed how we sometimes the court I've done in some of my previous lectures with you. We've talked or discussions with you. We've talked about Supreme Court decisions that have made the world totally bad. One of them involved natural gas regulation. But on the computer the decision to keep something called the traditional copper wire network regulated and then allow computer services to be unregulated. And that was just a reading of what the law would or would not allow according to the courts. We're really lucky in that because that basically allowed the system we now have to exist. And what some law professors have actually argued for and are now arguing in their net neutrality debate is really to change the way courts decided some 20 years ago on these enhanced services decisions. And to revisit those and then change those decisions so that the Internet is now under from a legal standpoint FCC traditional telephone jurisdiction. And then as you've asked me what would happen and I've speculated but boy no what's interesting is it appears that no regulators and no one in the business just people in law schools seem to want this to happen. But I can't find anyone else who does. How do we see most of the businesses themselves. That's an interesting I think question to pre regulation. Some of the fears that we may have and lessons we can learn from the past before regulation existing businesses living in unregulated world may resist it or may not want it. I think it's a bad idea after regulation they may retool their entire business model around the existence of the regulation. And then they probably wouldn't be in favor of deregulation like we saw in the 70s for example the airlines and the teamsters and the truckers who were existing under a regulated model were not in favor of open competition. They wanted that kind of monopoly grant from regulation and that's an important point here I think right regulation to try and fix monopoly problems can create monopoly problems. Right. I mean again mad men write the show has made everyone have a view backwards of what writing an airline was circa 1960 whatever. Well it was pleasant. It was people were beautiful. Everyone was affluent. The flight attendants were charming and the food was good. And what happened with deregulation is airlines have become greyhound buses and that's some it's not. Americans say it's unpleasant and they wish they could go back to what it looks like they're not willing to pay for it. Yeah. They can't if they're paying for it. Yeah. Well their airline I mean there have been a number of start up airlines that tried all business class service to Europe was one. That seemed and I looked at the price and I said yeah I think by the time I've never got it's bankrupt. So I mean I was reading yesterday. People are a piece about I think it's Singapore Airlines has a sweet class that twenty three thousand dollars and you have your own room and it looked pretty nice. But some of the high Emirates and Singapore are toying with the business model in which plutocrats basically pay a lot in fly long distances on there. But they're competing with an effect private and charters right. And so that what do we but you're right. I mean basically I don't need to answer your question because it was actually an answer. What do we fear in terms of sort of like recapitulate here like what do we fear what happened with regular entities in terms of consumer service price innovation. And you know how do we fear that net neutrality could do that. Well again for the list of articles you will list to accompany this discussion. People need to read those because they are a relentless history of how complicated telecom regulation was even for traditional telephones which were a less differentiated service than and then the Internet. In other words a phone call was a phone call was a phone call and phone call quality didn't vary much across a business use versus a residential use. They were packets going at light speed. They were millions of packets going at light speed. But to rate regulate an environment where quality of the outcome varies by the kind of thing the pipes are being used for. That's a regulatory nightmare and impossibility because once you set rates then the way firms will respond is the high cost services that you're not allowing cost recovery for even though you don't understand that. They will degrade the quality so that in equilibrium they still make money. If there's one dimension of service and it doesn't vary and it's simple you can regulate and you can have rates that are equal for everybody and not a whole lot of mischief occurs. But once quality of service varies across end users in ways that content providers understand but the end users don't. Then something called one price for everybody which sounds good to many Americans will cause an absolute disaster only they don't understand it. But that won't be it. I mean once that happened then again there'd be some mechanism that people firms content providers would use to kind of regulatory arbitrage around this thing because it would interfere so much that people would rebel. One of the articles by Gerald Fahl-Hauber in the bunch of regulation articles that deal with this. He was the chief economist for the FCC and then after that he's been teaching law and economics at Penn since then. He's a great article in which he said okay let's say it comes down to the question you asked. Then he said I would recommend if there really is a natural monopoly and if there really is competition difficulties of the sort we've described today. And some vertical integration occurs and then some content provider who's vertically integrated tries to not let the pipe sell the content of others that are not owned by that firm. He said he would rather live with that than a rate regulated environment because regulation preserves the status quo way beyond when it should and then innovation gets slowed and dulled. And he said a natural monopoly might be natural but there's technological change and markets change. And so the bad stuff from the monopoly which many of the questions you asked are what we've been talking about today. He feels in his gut that that wouldn't last very long whereas the mischief caused in a stagnant non-innovative rate regulated environment where the firms as you say got used to this environment like the protection like the entry barriers. We'd really be suffering from that from a much longer time even though rates might not rise as fast or faster than inflation. .


The Tribunal has heard with great satisfaction of the steps which have been taken by the Chief Prosecutors to make available to Defending Council the numerous documents upon which the prosecution relies. With the aim of giving to the defendants every possibility for a just defense, it only remains for me to direct in accordance with the provisions of the Charter that the indictment shall now be read. And the Charter of this Tribunal annexed that too hereby accused as guilty in the respects here and after said forth of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. And are they common plan or conspiracy to commit those crimes? All as defined in the Charter of the Tribunal. And accordingly, name as defendants in this cause, and as indicted on the counts here and after set out, Hermann Wilhelm Gehring, Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Robert Lai, Wilhelm Keidel, Ernst Carlton Brunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Drescher, Walter Funk, Halmar Schacht, Gustav Krupp von Bolland and Halbach, Karl Dönitz, Eric Grader, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Zafl, Alfred Yodl, Martin Bormann, Franz von Pappen, Atir R. Conspiracy, a. the Nazi party as party. Together with certain of its subsidiary organizations became the instrument of cohesion among the defendants and their co-conspiratives and an instrument for the carrying out of the aims and purposes of their conspiracy. Each defendant became a member of the Nazi party and of the conspiracy with knowledge of their aims and purposes or with such knowledge became an accessory to their aims and purposes at some stage of the development of the conspiracy. Be tough as the sole bearer of the foregoing and other doctrines of the Nazi party was entitled to shape the structure, policies and practices of the German state and all related institutions to direct and supervise the activities of all individuals within the state and to destroy all opponents. The acquiring of totalitarian control of Germany political one first steps in the acquisition of control of state branches or agencies of the state and party were permitted to operate without restraint of law. The Nazi conspirators conceived that in addition to the suppression of distinctively political opposition it was necessary to suppress or exterminate certain other movements or groups which they regarded as obstacles to the retention of total control in Germany. Before launching their aggression against Poland they appointed the defendant Funk, planning potential for economics. On 30 August 1939 they set up the ministerial council for the defense of the Reich to act as a war cabinet, if utilization of Nazi control for foreign aggression. First the status of the conspiracy by the middle on 10 March 1935 the defendant Gehring announced that Germany was building a military force. On 16 March 1935 the Nazi conspirators promulgated a law for universal military service in which they stated the peacetime strength of the German army would be fixed at 500,000 men. E on 21, 5 expansion of the war into a general war of aggression, planning and execution of attacks on Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia and Greece. 1939 to April 1941 individual group and organization responsibility for the offense stated in count two. Reference is hereby made to appendix A of this indictment for a statement of the responsibility of the individual defendants for the offense set forth in this count two of the indictment. Reference is hereby made to appendix B of this indictment for a statement of the responsibility of the groups and organizations named herein as criminal groups and organizations for the offense set forth in this count two of the indictment.


Did you have a top secret this week? I do, but did you want to do a recap or no? No, we don't have to do a recap. Okay, so I do have some, it's not out yet. Okay. Don't ask. It is. Thank you. Okay, so the first up is this little breakout board which I even designed on the Great Search. You're talking about getting these really cute new boost converters from TI. This is the TPS, you can't say it's under the fiducials, 61023. That's a little boost converter there. And this will give you five volts output from about three and a half volt input. So I made this little mini, like a micro power boost. It's like a mini boost breakout board. So you just have two to five volts in, five volts out, and then enable pin. Okay. And then I dropped it in my excitement. I'm also experimenting with Phil B on making little STEMMA breakouts. So we have, you know, the STEMMA QT boards which are 0.7 inches by one inch and has, you know, the quick connects on either side, which is lovely. It's a great standard that SparkFun came up with. But I also wanted one for analog and digital simple sensors, ones that just had like one pin. And so, you know, we have a couple items. We have like the STEMMA speaker that is the same three pin JST2PH. And we have these on a lot of our boards. It's just power ground and signal. And we have like a servo that has this connector. It basically just makes it plug and play easy. And, you know, this is great for I squared C. And then this is great for analog or digital. So the first board I designed, and this is the same, I was trying to keep the same size, the same one inch by 0.7 inch. It's not a game. It doesn't mean anything. It just happened to like the size. I think it's a good size. So you have the connector. You have a little on LED so you know it's powered correctly. And then this is just another analog temperature sensor. It's actually very similar to the TMP36 from ADI. But this is a surface mount version. You also see these cutouts again to make it more reactive to the temperature. And then on the back we have the instructions. There's a little typo. It should be 100. This is the prototype. And also you can solder to these pads if you want to not use a cast. Okay.