Hey guys, it's Isaac. Welcome back to the Daily Disciple channel.  It's not always easy. It's not always comfortable, but it's important. We can get in this space as Christians, especially of just wanting to be positive all the time and only show the positive aspects of our lives or only talk about them or think about them and show other people, oh hey, it's great being a Christian, it's all happy. And somehow in our minds we think that that actually is helping, you know, draw people to Christ by just being positive all the time. But I think we miss out on a big part of what the Christian life is when we only think about the positive and the happy. We got to think about the hard and the tough. What does Christianity, what does God have to say about those times in our lives? And part of being real, I think, is being real with ourselves about when we're going through those tough times or when we're having those hardships in our lives and identifying those and saying, you know what, this is happening.  Because that's just changing the outward, right? It's just changing, oh, we're putting on a face, that's just acting. And God doesn't want us to act. He wants us to be who we are and to be real with him about what we're going through. You know, when we're faced with the tough things in our lives, when we're faced with those things, we really have three options. We can pretend. And pretending, a lot of us are really good at pretending, we're really good at putting on a face like I was talking about earlier, putting on, you know, a performance like everything's all right, like our lives really aren't as tough as they may be.  We could pretend, we could honestly be the same way with God, not only with other people, but put on a face for God and say, oh, God, thank you so much for creating me, I'm just so happy right now and just wonderful and not being real with God in that way. We could pretend, or like a lot of people do, you could run, you could see, hey, wait a minute, life is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. And you run from God and you try to look for rest and satisfaction in other places. You try to look in entertainment or in distractions or in sinful pleasure that we may partake in. We like to look different places and we run from God when life gets tough. We don't face up to what we're experiencing, but instead we try to distract ourselves or experience, you know, pleasure or that kind of thing. We run. The third thing that we could do is believe God. Now, that's the toughest to do, but it really shouldn't be. When we think about it, believing God is actually, should be the easiest thing to do. Because when we think about who the most trustworthy person is, it is God. And when we think about who has control of everything of our lives, it's God. So believing him, believing that he has purposes in everything he does, believing that there is hope despite the way that we're feeling the tough things that we're going through, believing God, that should be the easiest thing, but it's not. It really isn't. But when we can be real with ourselves and with God and other people about what we're going through, about what we're experiencing, about the tough things that we have to struggle with, when we can be real about those things, I think God's going to begin to minister his truth to us, the fact that he is trustworthy, the truth that he is faithful. He is steadfast. He won't leave us or forsake us. He is there for us, even in our time of trouble. So that's my message to you guys this week. For me, yeah, life's not always easy. In fact, life seems to be more tough than it is easy. I don't know. Some people have a tendency to, I don't know, with different issues in their lives, and they let them overtake them. And I sometimes feel a pull towards that, a pull towards being overwhelmed, a pull towards being anxious, a pull towards being depressed, a pull towards letting the tough things in life get to me. And when I need to be believing God and believing that he has everything under control, and that doesn't mean that I'll feel better necessarily, that doesn't mean that all the tough stuff's going to go away, because most likely it won't. But it can re-center our focus onto where our ultimate pursuit should be and that is Christ. And if you get anything from anything I said today, take that last sentence. We need to be pursuing Christ about everything, not necessarily feeling, not just trying to feel better, but we want to pursue Christ. And be real with him about what we're going through. I hope you guys can be real and authentic with God. Thanks for watching, guys. If you enjoy or find these what I consider a hard-to-hard talk, talks with you guys online, if you find these helpful, let me know. I'd love to do more of them, but yeah, be sure to subscribe if you would like more videos like this and check out dailydisciple.ca for mid-week content, blog posts, videos, that sort of thing. I look forward to seeing you guys there and I hope you have a great day. Bye, guys.


So hi, I'm Kelly Jean and today I'll be talking about how to turbocharge your data science with Python or are Just kidding. I lied to you already. I'm gonna be talking about how to turbocharge your data science with Python and are But first what the heck is a data scientist? It depends on the company, but here are a few roles that you can have So for example, there's data science analysts and traditionally these are a data analyst or business analysts They focus on ensuring metrics are accessible to the right stakeholders and analyzing the health of the business They also use data to find areas that could be made more efficient or optimized and Then there's product data scientists So they partner with product managers and engineers to focus on product initiatives For example building models to improve user experience on the product and then there's experimentation data scientists So these are data scientists who work on things like AV testing and other experiments to measure the impact of changes And then you there's growth and marketing data scientists They focus on things like optimizing Google AdWords spend SEO analysis LTV modeling and other things like that and This isn't an exhaustive list of the types of data scientists you can encounter in the wild And these aren't mutually exclusive roles So many data scientists actually do Parts and pieces of the of these roles. It really depends on the company But what all these roles is having common is that they leverage data to Solve problems and gain insights And I realize that this is a very broad definition for a data science role but the rule really is that broad and I'm largely a product data scientist So I'm going to be focusing on working through that workflow of a product data scientist But before jumping into this workflow, what's our According to the our website it are as a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics Basically, it's a programming language built by statisticians not computer scientists. So it's built by statisticians Whose first name started with the letter R It has some differences with Python For example, you'll see indexing starts at one Not zero, but the syntax is largely the same So loops have the same general structure lists in Python Are called vectors in R and they have the similar properties that they do in in Python and Data frames exist in both R and Python and they share similar properties that make it a whole lot easier to work with data One big difference is that when typical typical people say Python they refer to a type of snake while for R they're referring to the letter in the alphabet and our and Python are Actually very similar when it comes to doing most data science work So there is this great debate. Should I use Python or R in data science and you see it pop up in reddit It's like R versus Python Python versus R I Should I learn our Python somewhat experienced programmer dot dot dot Is our better than Python or anything I started learning R half a year ago, and I wonder if I should switch You also get the opposite. Why do we need Python when R is so brilliant blah blah Which is fast and easy language for sentiment analysis on Twitter data are Python So you get the idea that they just keep asking our Python And there's also a lot of Twitter stuff, but I got tired of screenshotting So there's There's like to further emphasize that the two languages are very similar You also have a coolant packages in Python and R So as I mentioned we have data frames for both Python has pandas and numpy R has base R and when I say base R I'm saying you just need R without any packages And then you can use dplyr and R to do data manipulation Manipulation and then for plotting. There's Matt pop live see warm bokeh in Python and our has base gg plot to high charter For statistics, yeah stats motto in Python R has base for common machine learning models. There's second learn And are you actually needed a lot of different random packages to get the equivalent of second learn to have carrot JLM actually boosts, etc, etc for deep learning they both have tensorflow and You also have packages to connect the other language languages, so for example to go from Python to read in R in Python you have R pi 2 and others and then for R To get Python code in R. You have reticulate snake charmer, etc So when I'm asked Python or R As I already mentioned as a data scientist. I have both So I'll walk you through a modeling problem That is a pretty basic data science task that most data scientists have done at one point another in their career And I'll show you where I would use R and where I'd use Python So this modeling problem is just Given a binary response or a binary variable How can we use other features in a data set to predict that binary variable? so I have a New York City Dog data set that I found it's publicly available and it has things like the dog's name the gender things like the coloring the zip code and also a Feature that's whether or not the dog has been spayed slash neutered So I'm going to use this data set To build a model to predict whether a New York City dog has been spayed or neutered Before we jump into this problem I'm going to discuss when my typical data scientific method looks like So first there's ETLs so extract transform and load and what this means in general is You have data that is as clean as possible that can be readily explored So you want to get your data to that state and that's what you do when you're doing ETLs And if you're lucky you have a data engineer to do that for you instead Data engineers are great. They like to do those things as a data scientist I don't really like to do those things So hopefully your company has someone to do that Next there's pre-learning and What I mean by this is EDA exploratory data analysis any feature engineering so You might think okay, maybe if I do some sort of Transformations to a feature it might be more predictive. You can do this during this phase when you're visualizing the data and then the next step is learning so modeling your data or training your model and Data scientists will say this a lot. They're training. They're training the model and what they mean essentially is they're sending data through an algorithm or function to optimize another function And then there's post post learning so you've trained a model now You should definitely evaluate this model and see how it's doing on your data And you should probably document this and present it and when you document it You can present it to other stakeholders in a consumable format and If all goes well, then It's deployment time. So you can think of creating a microservice or a data science as a service to call the model in production So I'm going to focus on these middle three sections because That's where I think using R and Python is the most interesting Like for deployment, it's clear. You should use Python. You shouldn't be using R For ETLs. I don't really like to do any ETL work. So I'm not going to talk about that So I'll focus on these middle three Okay, so the plan of action for this dog dataset is To use the other variables a.k.a. Features such as the dog name gender etc to provide a prediction for whether or not we believe a dog is fate or neutered and The free learning I'll do an R and the rest I'll do in Python Okay, so the free learning this the EDA part It can be quickly done in R and we can easily share this if we use our markdown So by now you've seen a lot of presentations We've seen Jupiter notebooks and we saw how great it was so allows for reproducible analysis You can organize your code chunks It's easy to provide reports to others which you put in notebooks and our markdown is very similar But I would say one big pro for our markdown is that once you get a handle of the weird syntax in R It provides very clean visuals So I typically like not to use Python and I use our markdown. So let me show you a R markdown file of the dog dataset and So you can see I have So I have code chunks right here and you can see like to define a code chunk I just start it with three vac techs And then I'll end it the code chunks with three vac techs to show that that code chunk is done And what I like about our markdown is I can run each individual command So I can load stuff you'll see there's a green status bar that tells me where that Line of code is running at that point So I have the dogs dataset loaded. I can in the R console Just look at this dataset very quickly. I can do other stuff with this dataset So I can do a summary of it without affecting the R markdown file and like Jupiter notebooks, I can run the code chunk then I'll see a The output of that code chunk And I when I'm running say a big code chunk. I can see how it's progressing where it's stuck at Where it errors out at very easily and I can do what a thing what we call is to knit this document which is to essentially generate HTML or PDF So in Jupiter notebooks, you can do that similar process But with our markdown you can see okay right now. It's running the code chunk geography So if I see an error out there, I know where to look And I know what's taking a long time. So right now it's 65 percent complete. It's still running and What I get back So I don't know where my presentation went. I was on the note. Okay So I'll get an HTML document and What you'll see is like you have a nice table of contents. You have a header and where this comes from is in the R markdown file You'll see I start the R markdown with the yaml So I'm just trying the type title. I'm saying it's gonna be an HTML document. I have a table of contents and I Write content with markdown. That's why it's called our markdown you write in markdown and you get the This nice output That's very similar to Jupiter notebooks, but I think it's just for me personally more organized So I can see box plots if I want to include code like I can in Jupiter notebooks I can do that as well. I can include maps different visualizations, etc So you can see things like okay for Most people have just not put their dog name And that can potentially be some feature engineering that you can do is the dog name missing and things like that Okay, so ours great at doing that But Python is a lot better once you get to the modeling phase at least for me personally So Python plus scikit-learn Which provides the machine learning packages and the Cisco models that you can use to fit data is great And then plus pandas and numpy just makes it working with data and modeling data Just a lot cleaner for me and a lot easier than it would be in our So I can I've created you for a notebook where I've essentially imported pandas imported numpy and all these scikit-learn Helpers and functions so that I've loaded the data I split the data into training and test set. So this is just a pre-votes Function and scikit-learn and then you can immediately start Fitting your model. So here I'm running a logistic regression with an O2 penalty and that means I'm running a ridge regression And I can look at Different model metrics feature importance other plots So here I'm looking at the AUC score Which is a ML model metric that goes between zero and one If it should be Higher than point five if you're if it's less than point five you're doing something wrong so make sure it's above point five and What's great about scikit-learn is I can fit a bunch of different models. So here I'm fitting another logistic regression, but this time with an L1 penalty and I can essentially run the same function Because it has the same structure and features That the ridge regression had and fit another model and I can see do the same thing with a tree-based model a GVM And get the same sort of report without any additional effort so I can quickly fit different models and see improvements in my Scoring of the model very easily and very quickly So now I have two files though I have a file in R and I have a file in Python and It's kind of annoying because now my workflow is very separated out but Is there a way where we can connect these two languages connect these two files that makes it a much more smooth process and fortunately, there is So in my Juvenile notebook, I was actually reading the data by calling R and this was done using our pie, too So I import the package and I just have these few lines of code which is activating R and then I'm using this R function readRDS and reading in in our object in RDS into Python and then converting that last line is converting that RDS object into a pandas data frame and I can also do the reverse so in our Particularly in with our markdown with reticulate. I can easily run Python code by just specifying in the Code chunk header instead of saying R. I just say Python and then all of a sudden that code chunk will run Python So I can run a for loop and I can even import paper mail and execute Jupyter notebooks so I'm essentially connecting and automating my Jupyter notebook that I created to fit different models with my R markdown file and this allows me to Ensure that in my R markdown. I can actually report out the Python Models that I've built out and evaluated in Python in my R file So that's my talk and you can find the slides and the code at my GitHub Thanks


Your coca-cola bottler presents Claudia based on the famous play and novels by Rose Franken Brought to you transcribed Monday through Friday by your friendly neighbor who bottles coca-cola Relax and while you're listening refresh yourself. Have a Coke and now Claudia Mama Got any more safety pins Claudia take the pins out of your mouth They're in the little box on top of the dresser. I hand your form I suppose that means I'm to come in and give them to you. You're doing anything else. Would it matter? All right, here I am at your service. Thank you. You've got two pins. What do you want with more? I am experimenting. You are eh? I think that with a couple of extra pins I can get his shirt held down Look Claudia babies have been pinned into diapers for centuries two pins have always been enough Mama you trying to stop the wheels of progress? No, but I'm against fruitless experiments Oh, I suppose that's what every genius was told and he tried to find a new way to do old things Hey keep stealthy Hey mama, where are you going? Does it take two of us to pin on one diaper? I thought you'd be interested in watching how skillful I've become Come here now snookums. I'll just roll you over on your tummy roll is right.  Everybody makes a big fuss. Don't complain as long as he's healthy. He's very handsome, too I refuse to talk about it anymore. He doesn't care what you think. He knows his grandmother loves him doesn't he? He hasn't said a word When are you going to learn to talk funny face? Aren't you ever satisfied Claudia? I'm satisfied So satisfied.  This has got to stop. What has calling that child snookums Skeezix and funny face. It's time. We called him something. I'm calling him lot. Well, that's what I mean poor child He'll get shell shot.  We've discussed a name for him. I just last night it But it's not as easy as it sounds. My other people managed to find one. We are not other people So I'd rather not call him anything and call him by the wrong name No name would be wrong compared to what he's been hearing. Oh poor little scoogums grandma says you've got to have a name What name would you like? Oh, I don't think anybody be able to spell that the minute David comes home I'm going to see that he takes the bull by the horns can't decide just like that mama like what just like that You've got to think about it more. You have been thinking about it for weeks If you don't make up your minds just like that you never will well that child will get an inferiority Complex growing up without a name. He already has not and what's the matter with that? Norton. Oh Mama, I hope you'll wear it well and do it justice. He will but he has to have a front half, too Let me know when you've decided. I'll keep dinner waiting. It's your idea. So you have to help us your son.  We were just talking to you about junior Where do you think we are? I don't know where I think you are I suppose keeping that child from getting a decent day's sleep Oh, hello all hello you all am I going to get kissed? I thought you were telling me last night It's not sanitary to kiss. That is baby.  Hi, yes, ski boy. How you doing? He's doing fine and David listen before you do anything else. There's something mama says you have to do something else I have to do much more important than kissing Claudia more important to mama, but not to me darling I'm going to disinherit that grandson of mine if you don't give him a name this minute What does fatty need a name for for exactly that reason fatty? Terrible my grandson.  So what's the hurry? It's the principle of the thing. Well, give him a principle Claudia Yes, that's the principle thing. Where's your hat David? I'll cut up lots of little pieces of paper and put a name on each and you can pick one up Say that's a good way to do it seeing as well. We decide not a column is going to stay with him for his whole life It is a responsibility, isn't it? What's in a name a rose by any other name? That's fine for flowers, but not for little boys I'm not going to budge until we've dubbed him see mama. How do I happen to be called Claudia? I don't know just looked like a Claudia when you were born What's a Claudia look like like you?  I have a better idea a really modern progressive idea Now why don't we wait until it grows up then when he sees for himself what he's like you can choose a name for himself Well, we supposed to call him to till then blank. Mr. Blank not Yeah, it's all right with me. Thank you to your impossible. All right. If you won't help I'll decide all by myself.  Thank you Never call him by his name anyway, we won't I won't but I will we'll see Look at him. He's so Microscopic any name we give him will be too much for him. Well, let's try giving him a small name Then you grow up to be big and his name will be too small for him make it sound so complicated It is can't we find a nice medium-sized name, you know, so to keep one foot on each side of the road Compromise compromise. No. No, I don't like fancy name. No, neither do I don't think he's going to be a very fancy little boy He better not be Let's give him a name that'll sort of give him something to sort of live up to you know a name that has character Hmm. Well name one How's George George for him. No, no George is not how do you know he isn't anything yet. What are George is like David? Well by George would you mind passing me my monocle boy? I'll have another cup of tea I know some very nice George's I knew George once who's a truck driver truck driver No, no son of mine will be called George not. No, see what you mean. Uh, let's see. What about, um Henry Henry Henry You want him to grow up to be bald and wear rimless glasses and have braces on his teeth when he's stepping. I knew a nice Henry once I don't think your son looks like a Henry. What does he look like if you're so smart. Puddin head. Oh Fine fine Colin Puddin head. I you know, I rather like that Puddin head not There's a very nice ring to it. PH knot My hair is rapidly turning white clear through Well, let's let's try and pick a name with a little romance. Oh lots of romance such as Rabinol young the raven all north and how does that sound? Oh If I had a son called raven all he had to marry a girl called Georgiana and I don't think I could bear to have a daughter in law called Georgiana, but if he were called raven all he could swing a cane where a top hat and be ever so gallant Down upon the oh this might not be such a bad idea after all David be serious in two minutes I have to put dinner on or can't we sleep on it and what on dinner? Oh Comedian in the house. Yeah, we've been sleeping on it long enough so long that we've gone to sleep on the job We have to call him something mama's right house um Edward Edward who? Another comedian enough Move over David. I want to be the end man. Edward's a nice simple man No, it's not enough character. No bones in it bones. Well, he doesn't have any bones look at him He has no muscles either. How about a muscular name? No, there's something to say for having girls girls names are prettier Well, if you think you're going to force to pretty name on my son you're tooting up the wrong tree I'm not tooting up any tree, but I don't like Edward Norton Eddie Norton Ed Norton No, it doesn't sound right. What's the matter with David?  It's very humble of you, David Oh, not at all very conceited this boy has to stand on his own two feet He's not going to get by on his father's reputation. What reputation bad reputation, but I'm glad you straightened that out Oh, this is all very well and good, but we're not getting any place Okay, we get into the dining room.  That's all for the bees and there's char No, I know I know what do you know John? Oh, I love John But I hate Jack and all Johns are Jacks. Well ours doesn't have to be John John Norton It's not bad How do you like John Norton schoolgirls? You're very sleepy face. He doesn't like John. How's William? Oh, all Williams or bills. I don't like William, but I love Bill Silly Billy might call him Willie.  Just too bad. What about spud or bud or pud? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. What about Mickey or Ricky or Mike? Oh, he is not going to have freckles I forbid it not going to have a name at this rate David Don't you feel anything hitting you between the eyes only the back of my hand. Oh, I'm getting hungry now. Listen, you do Come on. Come on. Let's quit kidding. We know it's all settled. That is at least I know you do I do it's been settled for years and years and years If you'd stop and think for a minute mrs. Norton You'd know your son's name as well as I do I would Think darling I'm thinking yeah, you don't have to wrinkle up your face like that.  Robert I've always liked Robert. There's nothing particularly the matter with Robert. It's nice What about you mrs. Brown? Robert's nice name. You bet it's a nice name I hope my son can live up to it. You'll have a long ways to reach up David. I'm getting suspicious. You are mrs. Brown I just want to say I just hope my son will grow up to be a Fine a man as I'm sure Robert Brown was I didn't know you knew We'd be proud if you'd let us borrow the name of your husband mrs. Brown. Don't do this for me We're not mama. We're doing it for us For old sleepy face over there, then it's all settled and Robert it is Robert Norton I like the way it sounds. Well, Bobby, Bobby, what do you think about it? Well speak up speak up, man He's so impressed with himself.  Oh, I beg your pardon. Oh, man Bobby come to daddy Of course, I don't know firsthand But I hear tell that trying on dresses in warm weather is one of the world's most trying occupations And no puns intended yet women have to buy dresses Next time shopping is too much for you. Just look around for that friendly red sign and pause for ice cold coca-cola There'll probably be a co-cooler right around the corner waiting to help you shop refreshed What do you think of david's choice of names, mr. King? I think it's a very fine one. Mrs. Brown Robert Norton It was a lovely gesture on david's part to name my grandson after my husband Oh much as david won't admit it. He's pretty proud of that boy of his. Well, he is his father And much as he'll try not to act like his father. He'll end up just the same like all the rest of us You think so who I even think that someday david will even end up with the A picture or ten or so in his wallet of master bobby norton I'll have to see that to believe it. Well come around tomorrow, mrs. Brown. I most certainly will till then. Goodbye, mr. King. Goodbye, mrs. Brown Every day monday through friday claudia comes to you transcribed with the best wishes of your friendly neighbor who bottles coca-cola So listen again tomorrow at the same time And now this is joe king saying or of war and remember Whoever you are whatever you do Wherever you may be When you think of refreshment think of coca-cola More coca-cola makes any pause the pause that refreshes And ice-cold coca-cola is everywhere This broadcast of claudia was supervised and directed by william brown maloney And now here's a word from your friendly neighbor who bottles coca-cola


IIT Madras has one of the most burdened campuses anywhere in the world. The Honorable Prime Minister, Srinarendra Modi, graced the 56th Convocation at IIT Madras in 2019 to commemorate its diamond jubilee and saw some glimpses of the research contributions made by IIT Madras to the nation in technologies related to water, telecommunications and health care, among many others. As an Institution of Eminence, IIT Madras has embarked on a journey to take its research global and fulfill the Honorable Prime Minister's vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat. In a significant step towards realizing this goal, the Tamil Nadu government under the leadership of the late Honorable Chief Minister Porakshitelevi Dr. J. Jai Lalitha very generously gave IIT Madras 163 acres of land in Tayur village for setting up a research-focused discovery campus. The discovery campus will have 2 lakh square meters of built-up space in the first phase costing around 1000 crore rupees. The first major research center to be ready in 2021 at the Discovery Park is the National Technology Center for Ports, Waterways and Coasts. Being built with generous support from the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways over an area of 10,000 square meters, the center will house India's first full 360-degree bridge mission simulator. The center will also have one of the largest sedimentation and erosion management test basins capable of emulating the entire gulf of Kutch or the mouth of the River Hoogli. The Discovery Campus of IIT Madras will place Chennai firmly as an important destination on the global scientific and technological research map.


like bad day you know so frustrating to have a bad day when you're playing a divisional opponent who you're chasing in the standings Yeah, for sure, you know very frustrating, but when you're having a bad day is even it's even harder to find the answers right right right after the game you know that's also the frustrating part of it because at the moment you exit the game at the moment you're not sure and you don't have the answers right there so then you can address the issue whatever maybe what's happening during the game and just from your vantage point what happened on that error and did you think you might have still had had some time to get him there I wanted to be too quick there on that play that was really that's yeah that's what happened in that play I wanted to be too quick you know you fumble the ball and then you also don't want to make a bad throw because you're rushing it out there you know over throw the defender so just too quick


Hello, I'm Steve Nunn, President and CEO of the Open Group. Welcome to Toolkit Tuesday, where we highlight the various components and leading experts of the Architects Toolkit, a collated portfolio of the most pertinent technology standards for enterprise architects. During the series, I'll be calling on a number of recognised experts who will bring their particular insights on how to most effectively use the various tools in the Architects Toolkit. We'll have a mix of interviews, panel sessions and pre-recorded presentations along the way. While all standards of the Open Group are designed so they can be adopted independently of one another, the greatest value for an organisation can be derived when they're used in unison, for some of the parts should be greater than the whole. In the Architects Toolkit, we have collated a portfolio of the most pertinent ones for architects, together, all in one place. For most of these tools, certification from the Open Group is also available, so practitioners can demonstrate that they have the skills required and recruiters can take the guesswork out of the recruitment process, all backed up by our Open Badges programme. Chief of the Architects, when my eldest son was about three years old, he came home from a nursery school having learnt about the jobs that mummies and daddies did. He'd heard about train drivers, doctors, shopkeepers and teachers. And so he asked me when I came home what my job was. Without thinking I replied Chief Architect. He ran around the room excitedly proclaiming I was Chief of the Architects. Those extra two little words seemed at the time endearing and funny. Later on I realised there was real wisdom in that statement. I may have been the Chief Architect entitled but I definitely wasn't the biggest or strongest architect, just the leader of the team. It's a habit we develop. It's too easy to assume we need to be the most knowledgeable or to be the authority on every single architectural subject. Accountability may rest with us, but the captain of a sports team doesn't have to be the best player in all positions. Acknowledging this, I believe, leads to the best architectural team-built solutions. Hello everyone and welcome to the first Toolkit Tuesday of 2022. Wherever you are in the world I hope you're safe and keeping well and I hope that the year has started off well for you. Just a few housekeeping points before we get going. Those of you who are perhaps unfamiliar with the WebEx tool we're using today, please note that to ask questions of our speaker today, please use the Q&A channel. That's the Q&A channel and to find that if it's not on your screen already, go into the bottom right hand corner of your screen and click on the three dots that are there and Q&A will appear as one option, click on that and that will open it. So please use that for questions for our speaker, that's where I'll be looking for the questions. And please use the chat channel to chat amongst yourselves. And one thing I'd really encourage you to do, we like to do is let us know where you're joining us from. This is very much a global event and it's great to see where you're all from. So use that to say hi and where you're from and anything else you want to communicate with your fellow attendees. So without further ado, our topic today is Agile Architecture and particularly the Open Agile Architecture standard of the Open Group. And to take us through a brief summary of that standard and the topic in general, no one better than my long-term colleague, Mr. Andrew Josie. Andrew is VP of Standards and Certification at the Open Group, overseeing all certification and testing programs that we do. He also manages the standards process for us and since joining the company in 1996, Andrew has been closely involved with the standards development, certification and testing activities of the Open Group. He's led many standards development projects including specification and certification development for the TOGAF, ARCUMATE, POSIX and UNIX programs. He's a member of IEEE, USINIX, Floss UK and the Association of Enterprise Architects, the AEA. And today he's going to, as I say, take us through the Open Agile Architecture standard of the Open Group at a fairly high level given the time that we have available, but it's going to be a great session, I know. So without further ado, a warm welcome from the Open Group please for Andrew Josie. Welcome, Andrew. Okay, here we go. Hopefully everybody can see the right thing. Welcome all and thanks for joining me today. As Steve mentioned, I'm going to be talking today about Open Agile Architecture. That's a customer focused and product centered approach for architecting with agility. So it's obviously part of the architecture toolkit that we talk about at the Open Group specifically focused on architecting with agility. And at the end of the session, I'm also going to be introducing the Open Group's training and certification program in that area. So I'm going to talk you through a few topics and then we'll sort of wrap up with introducing the latest certification program we've introduced, which is on the topic of Open Agile Architecture. So these are the topics I'm going to cover in today's session. I hope they will take about 20 minutes and give us some time for some Q&A. We'll start by looking at what we mean by agile and what an agile enterprise is. We'll have a brief look at the standard itself and then we'll consider what role architecture plays in agile at scale and finish off, as I mentioned, with an introduction to the certification program. Let's start today by introducing agility and agile architecture as the context for this discussion about Open Agile Architecture. You see the first statement here, that's widely accepted as a given. I don't think anybody's going to disagree with that, that these days organizations need to demonstrate agility in order to remain competitive. But what we have been seeing is obviously this need for agility is often achieved at the expense of the benefits of enterprise architecture. So we've seen deployments out there that often take place without a strategic overview, without reducing complexity, without change analysis, without considering adaptability and so on. So that's what we want to address when we talk about agile architecture. So what do we mean formally by agile architecture? Here's a formal definition here is actually one that's taken from one of the Gartner hype cycle reports. And we mean architecture practices that embrace the principles and values of agile. So this is about achieving a balance between full agility and total planning. So it means that in this context, it means architecting using concepts such as minimum viable architecture, continuous architecture, intentional architecture and so on. And we'll look at a little bit of that as we go along in this brief presentation today. Before we jump in further, let's look at the standard itself, give you a bit of information what it is, where you can find it and so on. It's available in a number of formats, PDF, EPUB and available online. What I'm showing here on this slide is the online edition. You can access that directly if you go to pubs.opengroup.org slash architecture slash O-AA slash standard. And at the end of the session, I'll give you the location where you can download other formats and also find the URL if you've not been able to pick that up from the talk here. Let's look briefly at what the standard covers and its contents. This is one slide that really tries to give you the sort of the approach in a single slide of what we're trying to do here. So that's an approach to architect that scale with agility. It's directed at the experienced architect. It's not for beginners. It assumes a certain level of expertise. It provides professionals with architecture practices that embrace the principles and values of agile. So as we did with the definition of agile enterprise, that's exactly what we mean. So as we show in this figure, it's designed to support both digital transformation and agile transformation, hand-in-hands, so to speak, so you see the two hands going together there. What do we mean by digital enterprise and agile enterprise? Well, for a digital enterprise, we mean an enterprise that applies digital technology in a number of ways. So they could be applying digital technology to adapt or change the strategy of the enterprise, to adapt or change the product or service it markets, to adapt or change the experience it delivers to its customers, employees and so on, or to adapt or change its way of working. What do we mean by agile enterprise? An enterprise that senses change in its environment early and acts upon them decisively and rapidly. The standard itself is divided into two parts. The first is known as the OAA Core. You can think of this as the foundations as we show on this slide. So it's the foundations of the standard. It explains why an enterprise needs to conduct a dual digital and agile transformation. It explains what we mean by agile architecture development. It includes concepts such as intentional architecture, continuous architecture and how to add architect agile transformations. It also describes agile governance and has a set of 16 axioms for the practice of agile architecture. So they sort of laying down the guidelines, almost not quite the rules, but the principles, things that you should consider when you're adopting an agile architecture approach. Part two develops topics that were introduced in part one in greater detail. So it includes chapters on topics such as agile strategy, agile organization and software architecture. It includes content from a couple of different perspectives. So there's the perspectives of what the enterprise does, such as it introduces experience design, journey mapping and then the other perspective is what the enterprise is and it looks at product architecture and operations architecture as two examples. I want to move on now and talk about the characteristics of agile and the agile enterprise in the context of the open agile architecture standard. And by characteristics, I mean the properties and traits that you would see. So firstly, what do we mean by agile? Well, these are some quotes that I've taken from Forbes. Initially, they see that agile was seen as a set of practices relevant really for software development and I think everybody's familiar with the agile manifesto. And what we've seen is agile emerge more into a global movement that's gone beyond software into areas such as architecture as we're considering here at the open group. And that's really been driven by the realization that the only way for organizations to cope with today's marketplace is by becoming more agile. So really this is about enabling organizations to master continuous change and permitting them to flourish in a world that's increasingly volatile as we've seen sort of events that unfold such as the pandemic, something that we didn't expect and obviously a lot of enterprises have had to adapt very quickly and the more sort of agile enterprises have been more successful of that than perhaps others. So this has led to the concept of the agile enterprise. So in order to become agile, the enterprise has to make a few changes. You know, it has to shift from siloed work to into the interdisciplinary collaboration because what we found is that digital technology is the biggest impact when it's leveraged by cross-functional teams. It must empower decentralized decision making, enabling the enterprise to act faster. That's what we meant, making faster decisions, addressing issues and changes in the market. That's what we call in the standard business agility. That's what we call in the section all about what it means to be, to have business agility. In order to succeed as an agile enterprise, it has to often address the organizational and soft aspects. So we see organizational structures becoming flattened. We see autonomous cross-functional teams, often named feature teams or squads. We see cross-functional teams, team roles emerging. So you see communities of practice also known as chapters or guilds. We see techniques such as the inverse Conway manoeuvre being adopted to set up organizational structures. So these are all topics that we cover in the standard itself. What do we mean about accountability and management systems for an agile organization? Well, accountability in an agile organization is not about controlling people. It's about a two-way exchange where you agree to deliver something to another person. So in an agile organization, employees are accountable to their peers, their manager, their clients. Managers are accountable to their teams, the board of directors and so on. The management system basically cascades goals down at all levels of the organization and promotes a constructive dialogue. And the reward system recognizes individual performance while promoting collaboration. Let's now look at the role of architecture in helping us succeed with agile-led scale deployments. As I mentioned in the synopsis for this talk, you know, we talk a lot about big upfront design and things that need to change. And we'll look at that in a bit of detail now. So an important concept to understand when you're looking at agile architecture is the concept of emergence. In short, this is something that appears when a complex system operates. And in general, when we're dealing with architecture, we are dealing with complex systems. Simplifying it a bit, an example of an undesirable outcome is the pollution that results from running your cars. What we're trying to do with architecture is to develop systems that deliver predictable and desirable outcomes. To mitigate undesirable complexity growth, what agile architecting does is recommend using three levers. And the following three levers, there's modularity to facilitate team autonomy, increased resilience, standardization to facilitate product or operating model reconfiguration, and architecting for a built-in responsiveness to change. So that's, you know, if you can build in future-proofing your solutions, then you can be more responsive to change. One thing about emergence and favoring emergence doesn't mean it's impossible to steer the evolution of the enterprise. And there are techniques that we recommend in the standard such as setting up guardrails rather than mandates that help in that respect. So as I mentioned, although big upfront design is incompatible with agile ways of working, there are times when some intentional architecture is needed and valuable. For example, if you were setting up a business that wanted to support a fast international expansion, there's an example from the standard itself, questions that should be addressed by architecture would be along the lines of what activities you should keep centralized or decentralized, what scope and setup should local country operations have, etc. So as noted here, although intentional architecture, when part of agile architecture should focus on, so as noted here, though, intentional architecture should focus on the essence of a system. And what we see in agile architecture is a leaner approach generally over sort of traditional architecture. So we're combining intentionality and emergence. So in agile architecture, as I mentioned, intentional architecture should be simple, focused and compact, because it's likely to evolve. So it's talking about evolvability, which I mentioned on the next slide. So investing in too detailed a model would be wasteful. So there's a lot of the just enough architecture and we recommend that it be guided by guardrails imposed by governance rather than hard mandates. What do we mean by evolvability? So that's the ability for architecture to be changed or evolved over time. Over time, there are reasons for this such as the fast pace of change in the industry that you might be in. And in the standard, we provide a number of techniques and number of best practices that can be used to ensure revolvability. For example, as I've mentioned a couple of times already use of guardrails rather than mandates, but also things like continuous architecture, which facilitates incremental changes to the product or platform architectures. Architecture refactoring, that refers to architecture restructuring that occurs when architecture evolves. So these are some of the best practices that we include in the standard for how to adapt your architecture techniques to best support agile. Final topic I want to cover today is the open group training and certification program for open agile architecture practitioner. And I've got a few slides on this and we'll just talk through on this first slide what the target audience is for this practitioner certification. So basically it's for any role involved in digital transformation at an architectural level. So it's quite open in that respect. That includes people who consider themselves agile, business managers, digital managers, enterprise, architects, etc. The balloon there we have the sort of topic areas that we cover and I'll come back to that a little bit when we look briefly at the syllabus. These are the benefits of this certification program. It provides a standard approach for digital transformation. It provides best practices for digital transformation and digital products. Big emphasis on digital here with agility as we mentioned the two going hand in hand. It also provides an understanding of different types of agile architecture approaches and when you might apply them because there's more than one one approach that you can take with all these things. These are the takeaways for individuals as we see them so that you would come away with an understanding of the need for architecture with agility. The ability to apply best practices and we try to have a focus on the application of the standard in the course. So it's not just learning facts. It's learning how also to apply things and the ability to deliver agile architecture. As we mentioned in support of digital transformation and also to learn the common language between EA's and Agilis. So one thing that we do in the open group is obviously value highly is the common language. The common tax on them is this is sort of common way of speaking and getting the benefits from the standards by having been able to talk with your peers and colleagues in that common language. This is the course outline the syllabus. What we've done is to take 12 units and that take a slice across the standard so we're not following the structure of the standard which if you look at it really is some as I mentioned there's the foundation and there's an expansion of it. Probably it's more that's more like something you will dip in as a reference into the standard for referencing particular topics. What we've done there is to slice across that into a syllabus that will actually take you on a learning progression to give you all the best practices and the skills hopefully you'll need to take away to apply the standard in its best form. The Open Agile Architecture Practitioner exam is delivered by Pearson View. It is a closed book and as this is a practitioner level the past mark is set quite high at 70%. Training will be available from the open group accredited trainers. We've just recently launched the program and we expect to bring on our first accredited trainers shortly. We also have self-study materials available from the open group and its learning management systems. You can go to our shop and you can look up just look up for self for study materials and you can locate where we offer an online course. And as I mentioned at the start, lastly, if you want to download a copy of the standard, you can do so by visiting the open group library. Just tap in either O-AA is probably the simplest thing or Open Agile Architecture and it will give you a match of all the documents. So that's really what I wanted to wrap up today in today's session and obviously we'll be happy to take questions for the remaining time with Steve. It's obviously been a very brief introduction, a very brief skim over the top of a lot of topics. Not really much time to go into the detail that each of them deserve but hopefully you'll get the time to go and download the standard and take a look in more detail. Andrew, thanks very much for that run through. There's so much more you could have said and hopefully people will take the time to go and find out more by looking at the links that you've presented in your slides and we'll come back to that one more time. But let's get to some questions in the limited time that we have available. The first one that's come in here, is there a minimum experience requirement for certification? There isn't a minimum experience although we do as we say sort of we do recognize it's more for the experienced architect. Partly if you pick up the standard it assumes you have quite a bit of knowledge and sort of doesn't go down into it. It's not assumed it's written for somebody who's never thought about architecture before. It talk about a lot of techniques and there's a lot of references so it assumes you're going to go off and read up. It's not sort of designed as a this is your first introduction to agile architecture. It's sort of assuming you're more for the experienced professional should we say. Although there is nothing to stop anybody taking the course or anything there's no prerequisites to coming into the program. Thanks Andrew. So next question. What is the journey map for those who have Togaf 9 Foundation certification? And how does the Open Agile Architecture Standard and the certification program fit with the Togaf Standard, the Arcumate Standard and DP BOC? That's a question we get asked often. So what's the answer to that please Andrew? First of all how does it how does the Open Agile Architecture Standard relate to other standards like Togaf, Arcumate and DP BOC you mentioned? Well that's an easy one and really it's all about it's complementary. So it's as I mentioned during the talk it's one part of what is what is known as the Architect Toolkit. So which is you know our portfolio of best practices. You know the best practices for Agile EA delivery and EA supporting the Agile Enterprise. It's very complementary to the Togaf Standard. The two can be used together or separately very much down to the architect's choice. In fact I had one colleague tell me earlier I asked him this question. He said well consider you're a doctor and you would learn about lots of different ways to treat your patients. So really if you're an architect it's just part of the ways that you might treat. Let's consider your stakeholders, your patients in this example. And it really depends on the situation in the enterprise which techniques are best to use. You know it fits well basically with the Togaf Standard. You can use it with or without the Togaf Standard. But often it's best to use it together with the Togaf Standard. Together they make a powerful combination. Absolutely. About the Togaf Certification. Well again this certification is complementary. Obviously with Togaf Certification at the moment we have stepwise progression. So you can come in at foundation and you can go up to the higher level. With this one you're currently going straight in at the higher level. But watch this space is what I would say. Without giving too much away there will be some new additional options for certifications around digital and agile in 2022. I can't say too much more than that because we've not announced anything but we're working on a few things. And do you basically have to make a choice between the big upfront design approach and the more agile approach of the open architecture standard? Is it one or the other or what factors help you decide which you use? Again that's really about achieving the balance. So you've really got to look at your problem in terms of where the balance is. For some problems you do need to do a lot of big upfront design. We're thinking particularly where there's a lot of regulations in the industry that you might be working in. So that might be appropriate. Other times it's you can use a combination. It's really finding that balance between upfront planning and full agility. And that's really where the architect's job is to come in, is to actually use their experience to make that judgment. And what we're trying to do obviously with the toolkit is provide you with all the tools, the best practices. And the advice to help you make the judgment of whereabouts in the continuum of possible applications of the techniques to apply them. That's right. The skill is in knowing how to apply them right, obviously. And as we're reminded each time by one of our experts here at Toolkit Tuesday, Terry Blevins, it's all about delivering value.  So one more thing Andrew, a reminder, where can people get hold of the open agile architecture standard? Well the simplest place to go is to go to the open group homepage, go along the top right and you'll see the open group library there and just click into that and then just type open agile architecture or O-AA, either of those should find it. Fantastic. And then that will give you places where to read it online or to download the various formats. Great. Thanks Andrew. And a very warm round of applause again for Andrew Josie. Thank you very much Andrew. So that's it for Toolkit Tuesday this week. In two weeks time, we do these every two weeks, but in two weeks time the open group is hosting one of its quarterly virtual events. So I encourage you all to visit that, join us at that event. You can find out more information about that on our website. And we'd love to have you with us. A number of topics being covered there, architecture being one of them, but there are many others too. So I encourage you to take a look at that and hopefully you'll be able to join us. So the next Toolkit Tuesday though will be on February the 8th and we will have a guest speaker at that event. So something special and I hope you can join us at that. So on February the 8th, the next Toolkit Tuesday. Meanwhile, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for your questions and your attention. Thank you to Andrew Josie, our main speaker, and keep well wherever you are and see you next time. I'm Steve Dunn. Thank you for watching Toolkit Tuesday.


Hey guys, hello. So we are going to fill some purge boxes from Etsy Store merchandise, great merchandise. I'm just not doing the best at selling it right now. These are gonna be mostly embellishment boxes I'm gonna throw in some of my artwork paper clips or paper clusters or things like that where I can. And I'm gonna speed forward through the process of filling these boxes and then talk about how much of these and these medium, these are small flat rate boxes and I'm gonna do some medium boxes too. And then at the end we'll talk about how much they're gonna be and if you wanna support the free content on the channel and get some interesting embellishments and maybe some handmade art and all that stuff. How to do that, I'll be back. Bay, each one of these weighs about eight ounces. It's full of ephemera and stickers. A few pieces of artwork or paper clusters made by me. Some signed, some not signed. And so anyway, I'm gonna seal all the boxes up. If you order one, it'll be chosen at random. At the time of filming this, I haven't decided how much I'm gonna sell them for but the cost will be nominal plus shipping. So there's that probably somewhere around the eight or $10 mark. So I'm gonna get all these sealed like that and stacked up over that way and then we're gonna fill up the medium boxes. I'll be back.  Now the big, the little ones are gonna be much more affordable than the big ones. Like I said, probably around $8 plus shipping. The big ones are gonna be a lot more expensive because they have full of stamps and stencils. That being said, there's well over $100 worth of stamps and stencils in here but I am only gonna charge around $80 plus shipping. They are both in flat rate priority mailboxes so there is no other way to ship them other than that. And these medium ones do weigh about four pounds each. You saw me pack them, you saw what the contents were and I will be linking this video in the Etsy store description for both of these listings. So anyway, support the free content if you can and help me clear out some stuff out of the studio and the Etsy shop. Some of the stuff that went in these boxes was just out of the studio space. It just needed to go away. So all right, that's it for today. Please go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys.


Well good morning everyone. It's a great pleasure to be back at Jekyll Island. Some of you know that my wife and I met at a Mises Institute conference here at Jekyll Island almost 30 years ago. So thank you.  You might you might you might find someone. My my children have have begged us to come up with a better story, a more exciting story for how we met you know on a ski vacation at the Alps or something like that. But really what could be more exciting than thinking about the Leviathan state and how we might if not completely stop it at least to slow it down. So so I want to talk about Leviathan and how it relates to the corona virus situation that we find ourselves in. You know when all of this when things began to hit in in Europe in the US in March and we began to see travel restrictions and shelter in place orders and mask requirements and so forth. You know there was a lot of talk at the time that well don't worry about these things. These are these are temporary emergency measures that are required for this extraordinary set of circumstances in which we find ourselves. But don't worry it won't last you know pretty soon things will go back to normal. But even at the time I remember thinking you know if we look at how government has grown in the past it's almost always in these temporary emergency situations so called that we get new government policies, new measures, new restrictions on our liberties that quickly become part of the permanent a permanent part of the landscape. I was thinking in particular of the great book by Robert Higgs called Crisis and Leviathan about more about what I'll say in just a moment and decided to write about this. I noticed that this published a piece on Mises dot org back in on March 13th. So I was pretty much ahead of the curve in figuring this out. I have to confess that the title for this article Corona Crisis and Leviathan came from Ryan MacMacon and not for me. I wish I'd thought of that. But but I did have the idea to apply Higgs theory to the to the current health situation. Let's think more generally about how government grows. So Ludwig von Mises made a very important contribution, a number of important contributions to the study of government growth. One of his most important works in the 1920s was a collection of essays on government intervention published as in English as interventionism. Joseph Lerner has pointed out that while this book came out in 1929, Mises theory of intervention didn't really take full form until it was described in human action in 1949, at least in the German language predecessor to human action. But Mises offered a very specific theory of how government expands. And it has to do with the challenges of operating what Mises would call a mixed economy. So Mises, of course, provided one of the best descriptions or an analysis of how a market economy works. Mises also also produced his devastating analysis and critique of why a socialist economy cannot allocate resources to their highest valued uses. But Mises also explained how sort of a middle system, a so called third way system that was partly capitalist and partly socialist was also not feasible. Mises pointed out the logical contradictions of this so called intermediate state or interventionist economy, in particular showing how government interventions are not able to achieve their stated ends, their stated goals. Moreover, these interventions create secondary effects, secondary problems, which call for yet further rounds of government intervention to alleviate those problems, which then create additional problems calling for more government intervention and so forth. So you can't have a stable kind of mixed economy. Logically, such an economy is inevitably drawn in one direction or another. Either the restrictions will be repealed and you go to a market economy, or we're led down a path towards ever increasing government intervention. Higgs' book is offers a slightly different version of this thesis. Higgs points out that if you look at how governments have grown over time, what we don't see, we don't see a steady consistent increase in the size or scope or extent of intervention of government. Rather, we see these kind of discontinuous jumps. Higgs uses the metaphor of the ratchet. He calls it the ratchet effect. Government grows through the ratchet effect, right? You know what a ratchet is, that's a tool. You know, it only goes one way. You turn it this way and the screw turns when you release the ratchet, the screw stays in place. So you can only tighten the screw or only loosen the screw depending on which way your ratchet is set. And Higgs said what happens, the way government grows, is there some kind of crisis real or imagined, right? Which calls forth a new set of government policies, interventions, which are designed to alleviate the crisis real or imagined. Once the crisis is over, are those new policies and new interventions relaxed? No, they stay in place. Just sort of sitting around either becoming a permanent part of the landscape or sort of lurking in the background waiting for the next crisis to emerge. Higgs illustrates his thesis with a number of historical examples. In particular, he looks at how Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal interventions, New Deal agencies, were all sort of thinly disguised versions of World War One era predecessors. Right? Outside of, you know, this room outside of our circles, World War One doesn't, does not get as much attention as it deserves as an explanation for the growth of the Leviathan state. Most people who consider themselves pro-market or conservative or whatever will lash out at FDR and the New Deal for causing this huge growth in the state without recognizing that the New Deal is kind of a logical extension of World War One, according to Higgs, in this sense that, you know, to deal with various supposedly temporary wartime emergencies like, you know, food, we need to make sure that the right kind of food is being produced so that our, you know, soldiers in the field have adequate food supplies and so people working in factories producing munitions can have the right kind of food. So we set up this brand new federal bureaucracy, the food administration to control agriculture in the United States for the war. Well, we need to make sure that industrial production is being channeled into making bullets and aviation and tanks and so forth. So the government creates the War Industries Board. The War Finance Corporation is set up to nationalize the financial sector. The War Labor Board is created to mobilize labor and make sure that labor is allocated to the most important uses according to wartime aims and so on. You get the point. As Higgs demonstrates, once the war was over, the officials, the bureaucrats who were running these organizations, they didn't just all go back to their previous lives. They hung around in D.C. They stuck around sort of waiting for the next crisis to emerge, to which they could direct their talents. In a very illuminating section of the book, Higgs goes through the documents, the charters that created the various New Deal agencies, like the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the National Recovery Administration and so on, and shows that these charters were literally copied and pasted from the documents that had created the World War One predecessors, right? The NRA did not just spring forth, you know, from the brow of Zeus. The NRA was just a rewritten version of the War Industries Board in terms of structure and mission and purpose and so forth, right? So once the crisis is over, we don't go back to the old, we don't go back to what we had before. The temporary measures, allegedly temporary measures designed to alleviate the crisis typically become permanent. You know, why else does government only grow but never shrink? Well, I mean, you know, sometimes you have a phenomenon where the government government officials have already achieved some objective, at least by their own elite, or maybe by their own standards, they've achieved the objective.  No, they just stick around and goof off, right? They consume, as Bill Nascannon famously put it, they consume bureaucratic slack. They just sit around and goof off during the day on the taxpayer dime, because there isn't anything for them to do. Or even worse, they find new things to do, right? So called mission creep. I've written a little bit about this myself, like, you know, these private military companies, right? So private military companies were tasked with various objectives, you know, during the Afghanistan and Iraqi adventures, right?  No, they not only stick, they stick around, but not just to goof off, they want to find new activities, you know, for which they can use their talents. So they lobby policymakers, in this case, to intervene in other places around the world. Hey, we've got this capability, we have this now latent capability to go in and perform assassinations and extraordinary renditions and drone killings and so forth. We're not just going to let it sit idle, let's find a way to use it, right? So government policy becomes endogenous to these capabilities that were developed to address some other concern. And that can be even worse than consuming bureaucratic slack. But these are reasons why government only grows and never shrinks. Easy to find historical examples, examples from recent history. Right? Think about 9 11. Think about all of the policy measures that were put in place, you know, to protect us from the next 9 11 style attack. Well, of course, we got the Patriot Act, and we have, you know, warrantless wiretapping and indefinite detention without trial and extraordinary rendition and all kinds of other violations of our liberties that Judge Napolitano and others have written about very eloquently. Were those measures repealed? Were those measures scaled back? You know, once Osama bin Laden was captured? Of course not. Right? The NSA has continued to grow in its capabilities. And certainly in its budget, we still have, you know, the TSA, right? The TSA is here to stay. Those of you thinking that one day you will once again be allowed to bring your larger than three ounce bottles of shampoo on the plane through the X main machine. I'm sorry, but that is never gonna happen. Right? All of the changes that were supposedly to alleviate this emergency to deal with the emergency, they quickly became part of the landscape. And now, of course, we have a whole generation of people around the world who have grown up in this environment and don't know anything different than that.  Or remember the old days, old timers like me, when you can actually go to the gate to greet an incoming traveler without a ticket. Right? I don't see us ever going back to that kind of a world. Think about the financial crisis. Right? Remember the dark days of 2007, 2008, when markets collapsed, large financial institutions were teetering on the brink of insolvency. And we were told, well, the financial system is so fragile, you know, we're going to bail out AIG, you know, some other companies, big companies like Bear Stearns, we're not so sure about. Right? Yes, we recognize that using taxpayer funds to bail out a giant for-profit financial institution seems to go against, you know, our standard model of how a free market should work. But we have no choice because if we let one or two of these big banks fail, the entire global financial system will collapse. Okay. Yeah, some of us might be wishing for that day. Okay. But so what did we get as a result? Well, we got a whole bunch of things.  Now we have explicit ones. We had, you know, different kinds of bailout programs. And now, of course, the Fed buys all kinds of assets, as well as treasury bills and so forth. We've got, you know, QE and other so-called extraordinary financial interventions. Well, they're not extraordinary anymore. Now they're ordinary, right? You know, zero interest rates or negative nominal interest rates. You know, not only are these things now considered, you know, part of the Fed's toolkit. I hate that term, right? But now these are just standard elements of the toolkit to be deployed whenever they're needed. People have become desensitized to them, right? We just sort of expect that, yes, well, of course, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve System, Congress, the President should do whatever is necessary to maintain the stability of the financial system, forgetting that when some of these measures were introduced during the financial crisis, they were wildly controversial. And many people, not just people in this room, but many people said, well, no, that's not consistent with the charter of, that's not consistent with the Fed's charter and mission. Nobody says that anymore because the charter and mission have gone out the window. The restraints have been forgotten because once the Fed is doing these extraordinary things long enough, the extraordinary becomes the ordinary. Well, how does this apply to COVID? I mean, we could go through this list of various policy interventions that are supposedly alleviating the spread of the virus. Restrictions on movement, restrictions on assembly, so called NPIs, non-pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing rules, restaurant and bar, capacity restrictions, school closures, masks, et cetera, right? Locking down the entire economy or shutting down particular businesses or, as you see in some states, right, the governor or the legislature or the some top public health official, you know, choosing which companies and which industries can remain open, which ones have to be shut, you know, location tracking, right, for contact tracing. It wouldn't surprise me if we all have mandatory, you know, there's an app on your phone that will tell the health officials where you've been and who you've talked to. We already have that to some extent. Controls on information, you know, flagging unpopular opinions on COVID-19, as fake news, et cetera. You know, all of these things, even just in 9, 10 months, have become a little bit more like the new normal, if not quite, right? I think Thoe Bishop had an article on Mises.org the other day about so-called medical tyranny, right, the idea that the, you know, academic epidemiologists should have the power to make the decisions about our lives and how the economy is running so forth. You know, today people are, you know, people think these are weird, but how many years of having these kinds of measures, if not in place right away, but sort of on the back burner, waiting to be deployed before they become just part of the landscape? And, you know, I'm sure you would agree that even in states like Florida and Georgia that have fewer restrictions on movement and masks and so forth, right, even in those states, you know, if next week the governor or other officials were to announce, oh, well, gosh, we're looking at the dashboard here. We see a spike of, you know, so called positive cases. We're gonna, we're gonna revert back to capacity restrictions and partial lockdowns and this and that. We're gonna close the schools. You know, people will grumble, but most people are already sort of acclimated. They've already come to think as normal the idea that government officials can turn these things on and off. Oh, thank goodness. What a great, you know, in Florida, for example, which I think has done a pretty good job. You know, thank goodness that we have someone like Governor DeSantis who allows us to live our lives, you know, closer to normal. The idea that it's up to the governor and other officials to tell you what you can and cannot do for health reasons, that is now kind of the new normal is becoming the new normal. If you go back to Mises analysis of the sort of secondary effects of intervention, I think we can we can quickly identify things that we've seen even just in the last few months as they relate to COVID. So think about lockdowns, whether complete lockdowns, partial lockdown, school closures, business closures, etc. Right right away, these had a number of effects on the economy and society. Economic effects are most obvious, right? Business failure, surge in unemployment, crippling effects on economic growth and economic performance. What do we get out of that? Oh, well, we need a new round of government interventions to solve the problems created by this initial round. So we need more bailouts. We need we need to write a check to every American. We need to give checks to small business. We need to write checks to the airlines. We need to bail out the banks. We need to do more bailouts. We know we'll punt the costs into the future. So, you know, all this new round of subsidies is designed to alleviate the problems caused by the initial lockdown orders. And of course, from that we get a loss of economic freedom. We get reductions in productivity and loss of economic growth and, you know, reductions in overall well being. Okay, then what about, you know, school school closures? Right, you close the schools. Well, for public schools, that maybe makes education better. But in some cases, right for private schools, we have harm to our education sector. And you know, who knows what the long term effects of that will be less educated workforce, people more stressed out workforce, probably have a loss in economic performance. We have all the health problems associated with shutdowns. People can't get their cancer treatments, increased rates of depression, anxiety and so forth. You know, what kind of effects will that have? Well, oh, gosh, well, now we need more government intervention to alleviate all these health problems. We need socialized medicine, whatever. All of these things inevitably lead to a bad place. Okay. Oh, the pundits, of course, have already started their ideological campaign of explaining how COVID demonstrates government failure and the era of small government is over. I don't know what era that was, except maybe Jacksonian democracy as described by Patrick. Yeah, we need to do capitalism differently. And of course, the root cause of the pandemic has got to be climate change, right? We've got to work climate change in there somehow. So what do we do? What do we do about all this? Well, I mean, one thing I think is very important, we need to remind people that, you know, sort of wartime propaganda is wartime propaganda. Okay, we need to push back against the idea that all of these new sort of policies and procedures are okay and are necessary to combat this horrible crisis. We need to identify it as propaganda and resist it as propaganda. You know, don't let the new normal become normal. Resist the idea that the way things are now is the way things always have to be. And of course, we need to keep thinking about it and speaking about it and writing about it and supporting organizations like the Mises Institute that are working hard to make the world a better place. Thank you very much.


The St. Lucia National Sports Academy has continued its journey of success with the hosting of its first graduation exercise. Herma De Mark reports. Graduation often signals the start of a new journey. Such was the case for 15 students of the St. Lucia Sports Academy. The institution held its first graduation ceremony on Friday, 11 December 2020, since its transition from the Grosally Secondary School in September 2019. The principal of the St. Lucia Sports Academy, Delia Alcindor-Charles addressed the graduates and highlighted the significance of the prestigious occasion. Graduation, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the most important days in our school calendar. And you students know that it marks the conclusion of your secondary school journey that has nurtured you over the last five years. This is our inaugural graduation as the St. Lucia Sports Academy. You are the first cohort of students to graduate from this new and prestigious institution. And from what we have seen, you will make great strides and reach your goals. Also present at the graduation ceremony was Chief Education Officer Dr. Fiona Philip Meyer. She encouraged the students to excel in their future endeavors. Students, I congratulate you and I ask you not to limit yourselves no matter what you do. You can be the best bus driver ever. You can be the best small business person ever. You can be the best technician. You can be the best professional. Whatever it is, do not limit yourselves. The guest speaker for the event was Hillary Shalmine. During his inspiring presentation, he encouraged graduates to be prepared to make sacrifices to attain success. In the face of seemingly insurmountable circumstances, pioneers are not easily deterred, dismissed or derailed. On the contrary, they will remain resolute with the perseverance, determination and the tenacity to run the race to the end and to accomplish the task that has been assigned. Awards were presented to students who performed exceptionally well during their five-year ten-up. Amelia Luke captured several awards, including Best Academic Student, The Principles Award, Student of the Year and several other subject awards. Debbie Augustine was presented with the Best Overall Female Spots Award and the Best Overall Male Spots Award was captured by Dorian Augustine. From the Government Information Service, Hermione Mock reporting.


T. F. N. N. Headline news update. Hi everyone, Basel Chapman, the host of the Tiger Technicians Hour, coming up straight off to this T. F. N. N. Nune update that dows up a hundred at $26,550, just bumping into trend line resistance, technicals are still very good. Let's see where this goes over the coming two sessions, including today, so that'll be today and Monday afternoon, maybe going to Tuesday. Let's see how far I can go above this trend line resistance support right now as of the $26,390s on the more short-term look at it. The S&P is also up, oops, it was up, let's see what it's doing right now, it's up $243. It's struggling a little bit. I think there's a chance that by Monday, if we can hold, if the market holds nicely into the close today, last day of the trading week, we'll see because tomorrow's closed and just let me wish you all, if you are celebrating, a very happy Easter and Passover, so S&P has key resistance at $28,84. Right now, if the MACD is pulling back a little bit, it's still at 90%, that's good. There's a chance it could go just normally above $29,18, and then I think it starts a consolidation. In fact, I think technically it's starting the consolidation already. The QQQ, I was going to be very interesting, QQ led the way up a little week today down 10 cents at $187 was the NDX100 QQs Trust Series, made an all-time high yesterday of $186.07, ready, yep, that is, no, no, no, it was higher than that. I forgot to update it, that was at $187.93, $0.40 above the previous all-time high, very good action, weekly chart is still strong. IWM is trading right now down 25 cents. Once again, very weak, the Russell 2000 is struggling. Gold is kind of unchanged this year, it's down one at $12.76, but what really is interesting, certainly for us who are subscribers to opening courses will be long over a year. In the dollar, it is at $97.38, it has to break into the 98th and it has to do it fairly soon. If it does that, that monthly chart is really going to improve and then we could even have a longer timeout, it doesn't matter, but the fact that it would get there into a legacy in the dollar index would be very, very encouraging, looking out and the crew door right now is just stuck in that rectangle. I'll talk about it more in my program coming up straight after this.  Stay tuned, we'll be back, otherwise have a wonderful long weekend.


Hi everyone, Joe for JaspysCaseBreaks.com coming at you with a random number block randomizer for Immaculate Number 4 featuring these three teams right here, Jacksonville, Tampa Bay, Denver. Big thanks to this group for making it happen. There are the numbers right there. Let's go. Let's roll it. Randomize names and numbers, four and a three. Lucky seven times. One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. And seven. Jeremy down to Qing. And then four and a three, seven times for the numbers. One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. Then final time. After seven, we got zero down to four. Number zero gets any and all redemptions, including one of one redemptions. It's a rare occurrence, but something that's in the description that we have to kind of highlight because it's so rare that that happens. Jeremy with zero. Terry with two. Sean with nine. Alex with three. Brian with six. Peter with five. Jeremy S with one. Ryan with seven. Mark with eight. And Qing with four. Let's sort this by number. And coming up in the next video will be the break itself, JaspysCaseBreaks.com.


So today people we're checking out another new weapon to the game and it's called the Kielsen.  Also guys before we go any further for all your gaming needs no matter the platform you play on at amazing prices with great weekly deals check out G2A linked within that video description. So the Kielsen is a new dial SMG exclusive to mayhem 6 and above and it drops from Captain Tron to Panathenas and comes offering all elements so that is a bonus. It can drop in a variety of different variants too with some bigger mags doing less damage and vice versa and it also being able to switch between any 2 modes of full auto, semi auto and burst fire. This party trick is it's projectile stick then later explode. A little like the Claire variants but that's only crit shots this thing it doesn't matter where you hit the enemy. So this weapon like many of the mayhem 6 plus legendaries seems to be a super rare drop well at least for me anyway I farmed for so long trying to get a decent version of this but only getting those trash variants but a couple of powers of mine came through with much better rules which means I can bring you this video. So shout out to Carl's copy and James Doug 1997. So with decent SMGs in it's family like the Hawking and the Crader I actually went into testing this thing with a little optimism I mean for the most part these mayhem 6 and above legendaries aint being that great the monarch in my opinion being the best but I was kinda optimistic with this thing. Now looking at the variants I have really for an SMG on paper they all do quite decent damage lower mag variants I'll do do extra damage but it isn't considerably higher now although the damage is nice what stood out to me is this thing's fire rate that's quick even for an SMG and knowing that this thing's fire trick is pretty cool I knew this indeed could be a great great weapon so as you can see on screen now the initial damage of hitting a test damage roughly 50k I mean damage number here doesn't really matter it isn't really relevant but we see that the stock projectile also does the same damage upon exploding so that alone is pretty great it doubles up its damage. So experiencing this I had high hopes going into battle with this thing to test its power. So I went into the slaughter shaft on mayhem 10 usual build in which I test everything nothing in reality applying extra damage via my artefacts or class mod it's mainly just for reload accuracy and mag sizes so using this against some of the toughest enemies I can tell you guys is actually a very very capable weapon. This damage output isn't the best I've seen that's for sure but it's still very very good indeed I do feel however it's more of a weapon I feel people will look for rather than need. The additional explosions are nice and add a great addition in terms of damage output what I will say is look for a full auto variant or one that's semi auto if you don't mind spamming that trigger burst fires in my opinion take away a lot of DPS due to the pause between bursts but yeah I actually seriously like this weapon it's super accurate also in which you aim seems to help that even more it's got a crazy fire rate it's got a decent damage too I mean its mag size is obviously low but due to the additional damage being caused by the explosions it actually feels upon you using this that you are still firing during reload as crazy as that sounds because of the explosions and the delay with them but yeah I actually like this it's probably the best new smg we have now from the revenge of the heart towers and mayhem 6 plus so go get this thing again it drops from Captain upon a finesse an easy farm if you know what you are doing but on that note we have come to the end guys if you enjoyed the video leaving a like really helps me out if you're new around here want to see more boylands be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video I upload you can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button but guys thanks as always for stopping by hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one