Donnie joining us this evening, obviously one of the most important and influential voices in the Irish business community, so a really good opportunity I think for also the Institute but also for you know the members of the Young Professionals Network to give a chance to listen and ask some questions. And if this is your first time to the Young Professionals Network I'd like to welcome you and if you didn't get an email about it and you found out about it through a friend or Facebook and you'd like to be on the mailing list and join up to the YPN and just send me an email at keyin.mccarthy.ia.com and I'd be more than happy to sign you up for future events. But I'm just going to hand it over now to Donnie McVoy, I'm sure everybody has a pretty good idea of who he is. He's the CEO at Ibeck, the representative body of Irish businesses and previous study worked in the ESRI and the Central Bank and has also held some post-teaching in Oxford, Trinity and DCU and as I said he's a very important voice in Irish business so we're really happy to have him here. So I'm just going to hand it over to Donnie and then we'll have a question-answer session after. Thanks very much Keene, given it's small enough I might actually stay sitting down if you don't want. So thank you very much for the introduction and first thing I'd like to say, I'd really like to encourage this Young Professionals Network. I think it's a crucial issue to have, you know, people who are interested but also kind of the intelligent minds that you bring to the problems of our society. I'm going to mention some of the problems tonight. There are a better class of problems. These are affluent problems but there are problems nonetheless and may require more innovative solutions than some of the old thinking that my generation brought because one of the features of the generation that's currently holding kind of the incumbent positions in our society is one that was kind of rooted in a very narrow, small open economy, grateful for anything kind of economy and finding it very discomforting to be where the Irish economy is right now and I'm going to give some of the facts around that. Those of you who might have heard me speak before is that I tend to use quite a fair bit of data in a way like a drunk user lamp host, you know, more for support than for illumination but hopefully there'll be some illumination as well. So as Keene kindly introduced me, I've been an economist for about 30 years both in academic teaching and research institutes and in fact I'm old enough to have been in the ESRI in the early 2000s where we kept missing the boom. We'd say there were 30,000 houses built in the 45, then we'd next year say we'll get caught again, we'll go 49, it came in at 71 and we missed it all, we up to 93,000 houses and of course we're in a very different context today where we're still, you know, depending on who's measuring, we've a much bigger population, much bigger demand for housing and yet we're probably about a quarter of that kind of housing stock, just as one particular measure. I might, you know, in kind of an incoherent way, I might just throw out some kind of stats that I think that might be interesting to see Ireland as kind of a very different economy right now, one that is actually dealing, I will contend with the problems of uber affluence, right? That really sounds very strange given that we've had a diet of austerity, you know, everybody had a keeping down with the Joneses kind of thing going on for a while and suddenly there seems to be a break where there's a keeping up with the Joneses phenomenon coming. So the Irish are very mercurial, easily overjoyed, easily depressed and treat both conditions with alcohol. So that dichotomy I think is kind of catching people out. I think the economy is in, what my title of the talk is, is a model of substance and I use the word substance very deliberately for a phenomenon. I think a phenomenon that we haven't fully grappled with is the fact that Ireland is now a resource economy and I'll try and give some expression to that on what resource I'm talking about. So to kind of peel it back a little bit, to give the kind of my version of where I think Ireland got here historically and why we're a particular peculiar outlier in Europe and how that may manifest itself in some of the kind of big future of Europe debate, which I think is the crucial thing. That's why I think this group and this network is so important because I think this is the front here. We need to start thinking about that future of Europe and Ireland's role and leadership role in that future of Europe. But first we must look at our past and so the unique thing about Ireland and the unique thing about generations of Irish people and Irish citizens is that we are fairly unique in the world. I think we're the only place on earth that have a lower population today than in the 1840s. So there's 1.1 billion people in 1841 when the census was taken and the island of Ireland, as everybody in Ireland knows, was over 8 million people, just a little bit over 8. What people probably don't know, there's only 17 on the island of Britain on the same census note. So that if Ireland now had grown in the same prorata, there'd be 32 million off those on the island of Ireland and today with North Anselt we're still shy of seven. So it's pretty unique in a deep population story. Now the corollary of that of course is you've got a huge diaspora which you know we say is a great thing to have and it is a great thing to have but actually it's a second-order good thing to have. Think about it. It's kind of a failure in many ways is that you have a lot of migrants out there but it's actually fundamentally an economic failure. So that's always a good place to start you know as economists have a bad base and so it's one of the things that I've enjoyed in Ibog. I became CEO in the summer of 2009 and it was bad. So he could use to send me a mass card rather than congratulations for taking on the role. But actually in 2009 with my economics hat on I could see that the turnaround had already occurred. Okay so let me just kind of unpack this a little bit. We depopulate. We are correlated not same by causation but we are absolutely correlated with United Kingdom which is a big comment about Brexit. Correlation between our two societies is that Ireland in the 20th century pretty much underachieved in the way that Britain was in its decline during the 20th century. And in fact for those who kind of ignored and lots of Irish people do ignore the United Kingdom willfully. Fail to recognize that the 1980s turnaround both joined the European Union that's clearly important for both societies. And remember the reason why Britain joined is because when they went to the beaches of Spain they noticed that the Germans and Italians were wealthier than them and they couldn't figure out like in a one generation how these people who lost the war were supposed to be devastated had more blink you know had better watches better cars better living standards they kind of went what's gone on why have we you know lost out maybe something got to do with this European Union EEC kind of lark and that's that's an important point I'll come back to because I think that may be something that will emerge in your lifetime in your professional lifetime the next 10-15 years as to the want to come back piece. So when you go into the 1980s very transformative was the whole tature revolution this infiltrated Ireland in a way that's never really acknowledged and I would argue there's only a proposition that Ireland actually has got right wing tendencies doesn't have any left wing tendencies of any significance. Sociologically Ireland is more a petty bourgeois right wing Christian country and that involves things like petty bourgeois are obsessed about property rights and the use of the education system to change social class. So having set off in Tume CBS it's great to be at a Georgian house nearly in Belvedere not quite there but near enough to Belvedere a kind of an iconic school. So in that kind of right wing petty bourgeois use education change social class this was very much a function of our agrarian society because the thing that gave rise to the population was not that we had the famine yes that was a bad thing to happen we haven't starved for 200 years right so a massive event really searing event but in itself could be overcome that doesn't explain the depopulation the depopulation is explained by missing the industrial revolution and the reason why the island of Britain gets exponential growth is it's obviously the cradle of the industrial revolution and of course no small part of this kind of sociological musings that I'm having right now is that the north of Ireland actually does have a little bit of industrialization and it has a manifestation of bourgeois and proletariat in the way and particularly on religious grounds you would see quite a significant landowning bourgeois who use education but actually use it on the other island go to be educated in Britain and never come back and then a proletariat that was connected now three generations four generations away from the actual industrial hub of shipbuilding and textiles but not using education in a way that the Catholic petty bourgeois just like their fellow Catholics in the south have used in the north right I just kind of leave that hanging out there but it's a sociology can tell a lot I had the advantage of taking one module on sociology in Galway back in the 1980s and it was our current president Michael D Higgins that thought to me and as a 17 year old I was particularly fascinated by those chapter on deviance which there wasn't much deviance material in tune with the 1980s so I was a particular student of this chapter so I can officially say I've heard my deviance from the president of Ireland and the thing I say here can be can be attributed to a bad education but on that kind of sociological interpretation that had manifestations more recently as to why the Irish didn't burn the bond loggers why why the Irish weren't revolting and rising up it's because sociologically Irish people are a bit like the bull my cave in the field they're absolutely absolutely properly right noters right and a big stick and start wheeling around if anyone starts to come after their property rights and that that aspect means that that virtue or that flaw depending which way you look at it means that Ireland is great for globalization because you can trust the Irish not to steal your intellectual property or your tangible assets if you're an Intel or a Microsoft or a Pfizer or an Allergan the people who make the Botox all the Botox in the world is made down the Westport for instance you you're pretty sure that if you go to a board of directors and say you know one of an idea I'm going to put our most valuable product and I go to find you know a fairly peasant island on the edge of Europe and I don't think these guys are going to steal it that says a little hurl that's a crucial hurl you know you think about going to the edge of Russia still a member state of the EU that those countries while they're evolving historically they still have an ambiguous history around property rights and between swings between communism and collectivism and so on in a way that people underestimate that sociological underpinning of the Irish business model which is for all economics clear property rights who owns it is a transferable is it enforceable is it exclusive is it universal these are the absolute underpinnings of all economics not taught enough in our economics course but the underlying principles of any contracts and so on is that pristine property rights issue and so huge advantage to Ireland and to Britain is this property rights and non-codified and a world is changing I'll come to that in a moment as well common law is actually a great advantage that you can interpret given the way a world is changing rather than stuck in a codified system so you get to the mid 1980s and tacharism has a number of facets here all I'm getting at is that Ireland is correlated with the United Kingdom not saying it's caused in fact I think they're both caused by something different which is globalization and being ready for it but just for instance on tacharism our trade unions are left basically look to what was happening to their sister unions because the trade union movement tend to be two island type structures certainly in all island in the case of congress and they could see that their trade unions were marginalized by tacharism and the great miners strike of the area today and so the Irish version says we'll be extinct here in the way our colleagues in Britain are unless we find another way and the other way the social partnership the idea to have influence by being involved in a kind of a centralized wage bargaining tripartite structure that became social partnership and social partnership for all its ills had a really good mechanism at its heart and what it did was it anchored wage expectations in a way that they're not anchored today and I'll kind of come to today in a moment in the absence of having some kind of social dialogue or structure having some kind of norm set for wage expectations or for the distribution of resources around the labour market we run into some kind of trouble and I kind of articulate that as well I'm just kind of conscious of time so put your hand up at any stage I'll stop so the British influence if you track what happens in Britain and I like to kind of say something nice about Britain apart from the madness on which they've now gone on to is I left Britain in 1996 I left University College London and as Keane said I'd lectured in a couple of places Oxford and another which which was City of London Polytechnic which became the London Guildhall University so it's kind of the spectrum of the universities if you told me in 1996 that British universities could stay in the top 50 universities in the world I'd have made the biggest bet that I could muster at that time that I would win that Britain would not manage to stay I'd give you Oxford Cambridge but they wouldn't be in the top 10 they were in terminal decline a toucher seemed to have given the debt now by making all the polytechnics universities as well around 1989-1990 so devalued the currency as the elite universities felt everybody could call themselves so UCL where I was was particularly perturbed because there's no university a central Lancaster but today in mostly tables you will see that British universities will be four of the top 10 Oxbridge UCL and Imperial College and they tend to rotate and in fact you know if you get into the top five sometimes depending on the particular ranking on any given day of the week you could even see three out of five can be British yeah there's been usually American Harvard Stanford City of London the financial institution never its really long history in a world is much bigger and much more globalized has it ever been more dominant even when Britain was the empire it is now by far the global city for finance and and London itself even though short time since I left in 1998 I don't hope that's not correlated my leaving and it's it's emerged is really a metropolis of you know it's one of the global hubs it actually is far superior to anything in the United States right it really has even taken like the wonders of high rise New York New York does not compete actually with the breadth of which London has a globalization true globalization footprint so London contestably up to up to the point of Brexit could actually be the number one city in the world in terms of any measure of globalization that you might want to put together in some kind of weighted average and then the world's sport that is football I didn't mean to come here to give the pro-british view of the world but I want to say is our story is very correlated the good things I'm going to say about Ireland are really correlated to this is that football is the world sport and and now there's no place more peerless in terms of the money you know when I was younger in the 80s Italian football was really big and German football was coming for a while and then fell back that Spanish football was the big place for a while you know Europe seemed to be moving around and the British just kind of hoofed it around the place of the big muddy field and Irish players got to play in big clubs Irish players unfortunately now can't get when in any essence of the premiership because it's truly global and the money is there and that thing's gone stratospheric and what you'll find is the common denominator in all these kind of three bits is globalization and you know not just British people but the fact that lots people can't be to the city or to universities or to the premiership but probably the great achievement of Britain was their Olympic performance like the fact that Britain came second only 65 million people in a near eight billion world with behemoths like China and India and Russia and you know Brazil come second in the Olympics is amazing you might say we should have a role on drugs but they were all on drugs that's the point everybody it wasn't a wasn't a unique national characteristic they're good when they get going they're good at stuff right and so they're going to be a big loss to us because the correlation we've had with them is that both islands became hobbies of globalization and so in the in the recent times kind of getting up to the point I wanted to talk about this substance idea is that Ireland started to move up the value chain some of you are too young but if you were around in public discourse in the year 2000 you would really have a pain in your dirty air from hearing the words we need to move up the value chain we need to you know the capital and call the centers and so the good news is for your generation is that Ireland has moved up that value chain in a way that's just been spectacular and in a way that our official measures of activity don't capture this new economy so the capital deepening the capital labor ratio the capital deepening that went on in the last 10 years is unsurpassed i would contend in any country not about our system that's nowhere near there's nothing comparable in Ireland in the last 10 years in terms of the amount of capital intensity in terms of the machinery and so on that's gone into the factories that ibeq represents and ibeq at the start is you said represents Irish business but because the business footprint in Ireland is so global ibeq is actually of its type the biggest representative organization in Europe and it's just saying to Cain that this is actually acknowledged in Brussels more significantly we launched the future of Europe document which will come back to the institute to do a bit more of and so who came along was the president of the European Parliament to Jani launched it and the summing up was Barney and in between we had commissioner Ketainan and commissioner Hogan also contributing and the reason is that the business model in Ireland is a very potent symbol of the success of Europe in a way that we have to start giving expression to a lot more and what i mean by that is everybody talks about Ireland kind of be the poster child for austerity that's actually to miss what actually happened right it's a convenient coexistent narrative but it actually is not actually what occurred now what occurred is this kind of build of globalization to the features i talked about about the societies and sociology the missing industrial revolution is great if you can miss out on it it's bad for the generations that went before but if you're the modern generation you're not dealing with brownfield sites you're not dealing with proletariat working class communities that you know have built up lots of angst over lots periods of time with lots of social unrest so in other words you're not dealing with the north of England right you're not dealing with some of those pressure points that became expressed through brexit you're dealing with kind of greenfield to move to the next phase next generation of industrialization and so Ireland has moved from 2000 up the value chain into this industrialization now unfortunately here in Dublin there's both a Dublin guilt and a Dublin ignorance going on about what's happening in the rest of Ireland all right the guilt is you know we're rich here up in Dublin quite i think you know the towns down in the west of Ireland there's just you know tumbleweed going down because the shots are closed and the post office is closing down and people have emigrated and their parents think they've gone to Australia but they've actually just come to Dublin right they went to Australia for about six weeks and they've returned so it is clear that the west of Ireland is is flatlining in terms of population in some counties have to have marginal decline and it's gangbusters on the east coast and that's something we've got to deal with as a society we need to spread that around and can do that but what's been missed in Dublin is the industrialization of the western seaboard if you go to any size town on the western seaboard and if you don't know this don't worry about it because it's a it's a blissful ignorance of media Ireland and official Dublin Ireland if you go to any sizable town in Ireland you will find a major industry and you won't find a major legacy industry you'll be looking at cutting-edge industry so last Monday I went to Letterkenny. Letterkenny is absolutely humming it felt to me like the Galway of the 1990s that's significant companies there one is called Pramerica 1,300 people Zeus across the road with 400 United Health which is changing its name to Optimum I don't think it's somewhere around 800 and also expanding now in Dublin Medi size company and the MedTech you know so in one industrial park and I didn't go downtown to see other kind of multiplier industries and it's kind of captured because it's got a good Letterkenny Institute technology you know it's good people want to live in their community a lot going on it's near a city like Derry's quite close etc and most Irish people wouldn't know the fact that Letterkenny is much further from Sligo town than it is from Belfast what's your geography like you think Letterkenny is beside Sligo psychologically I think it is up there somewhere is that the heartlands of where you know economic activities happening if you come down the western seaboard you come down to Sligo or Donegal town Donegal town small town Abbott really huge industry Abbott split into Abbott and Abbott so Sligo's got Abbott and these guys do the inner tubings for medical devices which would go around the earth and the moon I think something like eight times we had all their production of inner tubing and for the world Param amazing kind of factoids of industrialization North Mayo Allergan makes all the Botox in the world Baxter Coca-Cola make all their concentrate there and coke have put in the most state-of-the-art it's like a jewel looks factory if you the next phase for coke is you will choose what type of coke you want so you won't be just offered Diet Coke or the three whatever versions you will go like the jewel looks paint pressure buttons and if you want to be more of a worse than coffee you'll be choosing the various combinations and they will make the robotics that you can imagine in the production process it might just stop there maybe in my hometown which is tomb tomb de Valera back in the 1930s when we didn't have industrialization tried to force an industry into the west of our the sugar factory right why you would take sugar no natural growth of sugar and beaten but you know you're forced to socio-economic and it's peak 200 people worked in that factory as peak the tomb herald which reports I get it every week it's editorial and it still talks about that you know the tomb has been left behind because the sugar factory's gone since 1992 or something and yet all the pages of people going out to socialize is from a company one company is a few of them there but one company called value what I lived in she was an embryonic it was called connet electronics value is a french company which took over the Irish company it does the onboard systems for parking your car the cameras the sensors 1,200 people were there population of tomb isn't much bigger than when I lived there but that factory is 1,200 not 200 people and it's not the only company and Galway is just down the road which is the European hub now of medical devices industrialization has happened on the western seaboard it's kind of unknown to Dublin and therefore why would you put any infrastructure over there why would you connect up the second and third biggest city with a motorway for instance there's nobody over there what would they be doing between cork and memory finally they've come around to it but actually you've got to take the orbital motorway system around because a society is not just about commerce ours has succeeded with lousy infrastructure what would be like if you actually had modern infrastructure and motorway is 20th century stuff right so it feels like you know people say I don't build roads build broadband the answer is do both right because a motorway is actually but society as well it's about grandparents been able to see the crunch in two hours not to have to take off with an eight hour trip down the dingham and trying to work out what hospitals were along the way in case you lost the will to live so on the on that kind of premise sorry I got a bit long I'll just finish off on this is that we had the seeds of a great flourishing and we're building up when we're coming a wealthy society in a european context we're moving into that kind of better end of the european member states on the back of hard yards capital labour and we used our structural funds as you know for education not from motorways unlike the portuguese and the spanish and the cohesion now we don't have the motorways we need to kind of counteract that and get back you know we did the education piece first which was good smart track talent but what was the game changer and this is the game changer about this resource to end on this point is corporate taxation the thing that we're you know guilty of as a crime so I think about thought expert if the iron islands suddenly becomes wealthy all right and they're blinging all over the place their helicoptering and they're going on great holidays and the university the iron islands of inish moor is going up the university rankings uh it's a how the hell do they do that there must be a crime going on out there right that's what people think about aren't like how do these irish depopulated you know in contrast even to their northern brethren up to the 50s and 60s were so poor and continually making mistakes and crashing their economy every now and then how do they suddenly take off because when I google Ireland and I'm in the Czech Republic or I'm doing my fourth class project down in Montevideo in Uruguay and nothing about Ireland but the teacher asked me to you know when I was when I was in 1970s used to write the embassies and they'd send you a poster or something you know I mean it was kind of like a three or four week gig you have to find out something about Uruguay there was no place to find out you worked out there might be Uruguay you know consulate in London you have to write to them and hope they send you something and then you'd come back with your homework about five weeks later now in this google world you put it on you just later on tonight put an income per capita right and if it's modern if it's it's up to date you will find our in the top 10 countries in the world in income per capita and you kind of go well I know the others you know that'll be the United States and Germany and Denmark not at all they're way bad the other countries you'll find in the list will be Macau Brunei Qatar Monaco Luxembourg and it's kind of inconvenient for people who've been poor and having kind of poor modes they find yourselves in this grouping and then you kind of go I don't know those figures must be wrong so don't like the numbers we can get a new measure but problem is when you ask the Irish households and we have asked them in the last year tell us how much you spend every week so we give them a household budget survey because we're not trying to get the weights for the consumer price index we give them two weeks a diary 10,000 households over the full year so it's a really best kind of sample you'll get it's not just a box pop it's it's really significant we're going to report our alcohol consumption but you can correct that you know we only seem to drink about a quarter of what this is we're producing the whole market but anyway um you get over our biases we spend a lot on coal we heat the house well on a technology we don't have anymore but anyway um they love the coal in Ireland but what they also bring forward is uh income so self-reported Irish households uh now two years ago as it happens uh 1,100 euros per week is the average household income in our disposable income 1,100 euros the average household is 2.8 people so call it three so it's about 20,000 euros per head regardless whether it's three years old or 65 years old now put that context of looking for four or five euros for water charges against the 1,100 on average just to give you the sense of naughtiness between not being able to reconcile our situation with reality is this is why we're in this top league the question then is where did the money come from and the money comes from the model of substance because what happened in Ireland is that what they always this is all got the Ireland success is everything got to do with starbucks all right so you you guys now got a line of things that you're going to be interesting in a pub after this with starbucks is the big story for Ireland and nothing got to do with starbucks in Ireland in 2012 starbucks in the uk were shown to be paying no corporation tax to the british government yet they're opening a shop oh you know a bit like in the simpsons when homer goes into one starbucks shop and there's another one opened up across the road he crossed the road wasn't on there and he wasted his time crossing over one and opened up he had the same phenomenon going on in in in the uk they were everywhere but paying no corporate tax and then thankfully the executive in starbucks did something that has changed our lives in Ireland they decided to get themselves a self-administered tax amnesty they decided to write a check i think for about 17 million sterling and metaphorically but nearly literally a cycle passed the treasury intrude in the front door there was nothing to say one was for it was just money sent in didn't say it was because we made this amount of profit it was just a check and this egregious behavior gave rise to was born a camera and saying this has now gone too far we're going to have to do something about corporate taxes globally and obama was a willing participant and so they got the g20 to agree to do something about corporate taxes they asked the oecd which is quite an unusual move the oecd no great taxation pedigree to do the work and this became known as base erosion profit shifting and we were in ibeck were involved in this and i know nothing about accountancy even though the commerce degree but i wasn't very good um and i went to these meetings in paris and no idea what was going on but i knew that it was going to be an absolute game changer for arnold because what was happening was you have to show substance where you've got your tax pledge and so you couldn't show that in the bermuda islands you couldn't show what it came in on it wasn't big enough and it wasn't part of a european union didn't have any credit and it also didn't have globalization it didn't have a common law legal system didn't have it did have a common law legal system in the carabine it was a bridge dominion and where'd you go if you have to go somewhere with substance you look around european union looks like the richest place on earth lots of customers there and they'll be off your back so head for the european union and where to land in the european union land where they speak english and where it's uh anglo saxon and where it's easy to lift and shift and i got a common law legal system going back to the property rights arnold and britain and so the two beacons that were attracting this type of mobile capital was arnold and britain and so i'll give you an example of something that didn't happen by way of an example is phyzer phyzer is one of the top 10 companies in the world phyzer attempted twice in the last five years to become european twice is attempted to become european first of all i'll attempt to become british through the asterix zenikah deal by inverting through the asterix zenikah vince cabell and his great wisdom uh decided to put the mockers on that in the coalition government and camber and osborn have initially been cheerleaders backed away because of the general election come phyzer in 2016 attempted to become european again by becoming irish through going through allergen the people that make the botox and obama changed some of the tax rules just before the election which stopped phyzer so phyzer nearly became an irish company bring its balance sheet but phyzer was the only one that got blocked the others have come so for instance ingersault rand is an irish company a censure is an irish company metronic huge b-mots of medical device companies irish in 2015 the corporate balance sheet in ireland in that single year when tronic and some of the aircraft leasing companies all came into ireland in 2015 this is the intangible assets but it is substance in the modern world this is actually more valuable than oil because oil can run out it's exhaustible by its its nature of its properties intellectual capital is not exhaustive it can be renewed it can be enhanced it can be renewable that balance sheet increased by 40 percent in a single year 40 percent and a balance sheet growing by that has an extraction of pnl which becomes a flow measure which is gdp irish gdp increased by 34 percent not 26 26 is what economists talk about the volume in money where business people live what was the money growth was 34 percent so the economy grew by one third in a single year as a result of finding this modern day equivalent of oil and what do we do as a society we decide to disown it we don't like the measure gdp anymore we want a gni star even though gdp is the legal mechanism to measure an economy it is what we have the european stability mechanism which was to respect european fiscal rules which in themselves are driven off the ratios to gdp so while it might be inconvenient to use gdp it is actually constitutionally as well if you take it to its full extension what underpins are measures of what we have to do in our european context normally economies can't grow by one third in a single year economies that find a resource can and do and so when you find the resource you've got to behave differently you cannot allow the resource like a family winning the lottery it'll destroy you if you don't know what to do with it if you know what to do with it you can make generations wealthy even though the initial windfall has kind of passed through you make yourself smarter you have infrastructure and so on we are in that cost right now we have found the modern day equivalent of oil these are intangible assets just like oil they could they could run out they could move location and therefore you've got to take that money and behave like a resource economy you take the money put it into a sovereign wealth fund and you do stuff like one thing buy your way up the university rankings it's absolutely unconscionable that society as rich as Ireland is allowing its universities to slide all the way down the university rankings for the want of money it's an easy proposition you buy your way up you work out what the metrics are it doesn't mean the IQ of the country goes up or anything like that but it is a measure you know we could even bribe our way to win the Eurovision if we you know could get into the military wait sorry I'll stop at that point but just to say the tragedy is we are blowing this massively I'm incredibly having been optimistic when nobody else was I'm incredibly pessimistic right now I'll recover I'm just feeling really bad because I'm observing in the last few weeks the mother of all splurges the amount of conspicuous consumption in terms of being out of the country on foreign holidays and not near shore holidays really expensive stuff and very expensive holidays and the extent of which we're only past quarter one and I know people who are on their third holiday the week skiing after Christmas and the week during the midterm and then of course with the weather event which also took another week out of the production and the costs are rising and we are losing competitiveness and so what happens in society is that when you find the oil the oil sector can afford higher wages higher rents and absorbs those costs in the product in the productivity so it doesn't pass down higher prices those who live beside it have to compete with them for workers for rents have to pay the higher costs can't absorb it in productivity they don't have it have to pass down higher prices become uncompetitive and then everything becomes disaster when the good stuff runs out you're left with an economy that's uncompetitive unless we do something dramatic about taking the money and into the infrastructure and what do we get with a great plan what have we heard about it the spin the closing down a strategic communications unit are we certain that anybody's actually doing the bit that's supposed to be done but like the last comment I make are now current t-shirt got very annoyed with me one day when he was virtually a minister for health saying we'll be the best children's hospital in the world to be paperless it's also currently childless you know you gotta do you gotta do stuff and do it fast and when you're this rich and we are this rich you gotta stop worrying about efficiency you've got to become effective first efficiency is a second order issue I can guarantee you I would build the most efficient children's hospital in the world on paper I just want to build it but it only cost a half a billion when I cost everything when you live in the real word you gotta actually do it and put up with the fact it's going to be three times the cost because that's where the world is going right now we don't have people aren't running out of people and so part of our construction is we'll have less of the real stuff and it'll cost more but you know what we still need the real stuff sorry we're not way too long but there you go


Brewers win! Brewers win! Congrats CC! 500 wins with the Brew Crew. Where to go Brewers? Where to go CC? Go Brewers!


and we are live. All right, thank you for joining the ethereum.org community call. For those of you who I haven't met, my name is Sam Richards. I'm a web developer at the Ethereum Foundation and I work primarily on ethereum.org. Also on the call is Josh Dyer, contain Kim who are contributors, members of the team as well. And you'll probably hear from them shortly. So I sent a link to the call agenda and notes in the Zoom chat. I believe it's also on the calendar invite if you wanna follow along. I can also share my screen just to go through some of these updates. So just to give you a format on the agenda today, we're basically gonna spend 10 minutes or so, just given quick updates on what's been going on with ethereum.org since our last call and then really spend the majority of the time kind of opening the floor to open discussion from you guys. What questions do you have? What feedback do you have? What feature or content requests do you wanna see on the site? Really hoping to use it as a time to get feedback from you guys. So I will share my screen. No, I want this issue to be on the presentation. It's in the mix and if you want to have a little screen, can we go on that, let me know if it's true. There's a lot of background noise on your mic and that sounds like someone talking in the back. Oh, I'm so sorry. I haven't realized that I'm on music. No problem. It's okay. Good to see you in that. Nice to see you. Yeah, for sure. So first up, we're just gonna like cover some followups from last time. One of the main discussions from our last community call on March 25th was really around just like content suggestions. Primarily, there's a lot of discussion around an Ethereum 2.0 page. Unfortunately, I can't say that's live yet, but we have made some pretty solid progress on it and are hoping to have that live within the next week or so. And that should be a really high value page. We've seen a lot of interest in that from the community. Pages that we did push live, we have added an aboutetherium.org page, which you could check out. That gives a lot of like granular look into what are the specific tasks we're working on? What's next in queue? What have we recently pushed to the site? Just one more avenue for you guys to follow along, get an understanding of like who's behind this and how you could get involved. We also launched an introduction to Ethereum improvement proposals and a page about the Ethereum Foundation to help give some clarity between, what is the difference of the Ethereum Foundation versus Ethereum itself and how that fits in. We've also done a lot of updates to existing pages. So yeah, if you haven't checked out the site recently, definitely encourage you to go check it out. Quickly going through updates on our end. So we recently published a blog post last week. You can check out the link here in the agenda. That covers I'd say the bulk of, what we've done over the past month. But just to cover the highlights, happy one year anniversary. Ethereum.org actually did relaunch just over a year ago. Crazy to think how far it's come. And I think we got some really great plans for the next year. So excited about that. In terms of development updates that I'll cover, just wanted to make note. We've also started essentially publishing releases on the website. So if we were to follow that link to GitHub, here you can see like the pull request by pull request updates that we're making to the site each week. So if you are eager to follow on or add input create issues, like this is a really good way to just see how we're progressing. I would say the contributions we made that generated the most buzz the past month was definitely adding IPFS support to the website. So any like that browser or even like a brave browser, any browser that supports ENS, you can now browse the site at ethereum.eath, which is pretty neat. We've also added a dramatically improved site search, which makes it really easy to find any content that exists anywhere on our website. You'll be able to search and find pretty easily. Lastly, we did just finish a really solid content audit with a group of developers from the community. We've dubbed these Tiger teams, which I believe is a NASA term, which is really just recruiting very specialized experts. In this case, it was various builders in the Ethereum ecosystem and got them to do like a deep dive feedback evaluation of the website, specifically focused on developer content and onboarding. And we got a ton of great feedback from those folks that will be pushing to the website soon. I think the major themes that we took away were just like, what is pretty obvious in hindsight, but really just focusing the content and gearing that towards user journeys. So instead of just like a landing page for all developers, creating a traffic control of sorts of like, hey, are you new and looking to get started? Here's where you should go. And here's resources to get up and running with the Ethereum stack. Are you an experienced developer looking for specific tools? Here's a place you can go to find the latest and greatest on that. So more to come on that, but wanted to give a shout out to the folks who helped us out there. And if you guys are interested in ever like participating in one of these content audits, it is something we're trying to do regularly. So feel free to, you know, hit us up on Twitter. I can drop in my email at the end of this and definitely don't feel free to reach out. Feel free to reach out and get involved. Other major area I'll throw it over to you, but we've been having a lot of great progress on the translation program and we have some updates there. Thank you, Sam. Can you hear me? Yep. Yeah. Thank you for contribution in the translation program. So I don't know like how many of you are already part of the translation program, but I know that Zhang is making a really great contribution in the French translation. And we really appreciate that. So yeah, like since we launched last October, we dated like a 23 language in Eastern York, and I'd like to expand our support to the other communities with a different language. So yeah, we set a goal for the quarter to supporting like over 30 language and yeah, like we're looking for more native speakers of Vietnamese, Thai, Danish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Finnish or Ukrainian. So if you are interested to join that will be very appreciative. And yeah. And also to love to hear more feedbacks and opinions on the translation program. So just briefly sharing our main focus at the moment as to recruit more volunteers from different language groups, including the seven languages that I mentioned earlier. So I've been reaching out to the like, original communities and event organizer to advertise our program in their country. So if India and East Bank have been helping us a lot to spread the world in their communication channels like Twitter and Facebook. So it was very effective to recruit a few volunteers. And we would like to connect with more community members that we don't have connection with yet. So if you know any please don't hesitate to reach out to me. And another thing is to keep volunteers motivated and make them feel appreciated. So that the remote volunteering work is very limited to show our show our appreciation and keeping them motivated to continue their work. So over the six months that yeah a lot of people joined and like 80% of people contribute on the first version like a version 1.0. Yeah, like now we only have like 20% of the participants that still keeping their contribution in the version 1.1. So I'm struggling to figure out how to motivate them to continue their work. So if you have any idea or feedback will be very appreciated. Great. Thank you, Tane. And yeah just to give some context on like how big of an impact. I think the translation program has. So if we look at like the first three months of this year. So.org had a little over half a million visitors. And we've seen the share of translated content just continue to rise in terms of like overall page views. You know we started rolling out the program in August. I think in October it was 3% of total page views. It was 12% and now we're at a point where over 20% of page views on the website are to translated content. So I think that really just speaks to just how important the program is at a whole and it's really exciting to see just how global of a community at the name has. Please feel free to reach out to us if you do have ideas or connections to like any organizations involved in technology, or just, you know, information access. I think if we can partner with the right communities like we could definitely hit our goal of translating 30 languages total. You know by the second half of this year. Okay, so last bit on the updates just looking ahead versus what we've done so far. I would say the theme is definitely just more of the same, like we'll be focused on more translations of the content content updates and design updates to the pages that exist on the site. And I would say we're really just starting to focus on and we've gotten a much better understanding of specific user journeys and like how to optimize towards those. So what I mean by that is like, initially we had this idea. Okay, yeah, we should talk about Ethereum wallets, because people want to learn about that. And we're learning, hey, we can actually like set goals around how many people actually like visit the website, view the wallets page and potentially like download a wallet and get using it. So focusing on like, what are specific user journeys that people are trying to accomplish and like how can we enable them as easy as possible, and start measuring against that. So we're just starting to get a lot more intelligent about how we think about content generally on the site. More new content. I'd say a big area of feedback we've gotten from you folks on calls like this, and doing, you know feedback interview sessions is just the need for more native content on the site. And more control over the translations, keeping that content fresh and up to date. So we'll really be focusing on how can we expand that how can we collaborate with more community members. I think, you know, shout out to a net who's also on this call, I feel like a big success story here was launching the introduction to EIP page I mentioned. That kind of happened organically in a telegram chat, we're talking about ways that we could improve the EIP process. Some other community members suggested adding a page on a theorem.org. I created a GitHub issue for it on our GitHub and a net volunteered to like lead with a draft of the content. And over the span of two weeks, you know, a handful of us were able to draft the page shared on the GitHub issue, and eventually deploy to the website. And now like, I think that's just a great example of how community members can get involved and like solve a need. And we'll definitely be thinking about you know how can we like continue to empower that how can we like create templates that just make it super seamless for someone to come in and nominate a page or actually draft a page itself. Lastly, along the theme of like looking for more translation program volunteers, we're going to be thinking through like how what are fun and exciting ways that we can give contributors acknowledgement and like give them public recognition. So one initiative we've been working on and hope to finish shortly is a collaboration with the PO app or Pope. I don't know how to pronounce it protocol, PO AP protocol, which issue NFTs, primarily for events. So we're going to be issuing tiers of NFT tokens to give to website contributors. And I think that's just an exciting way to kind of dog food the technology that we're working on.  Oh, I'm actually getting this tangible thing that I can show people, and it's completely unique. Chase just wrote something in the chat. Have you considered get coin grants for translations in the languages you're looking for help them. That's a really interesting thought. You know, we have. So we've used get coin bounties a lot in the past for specifically development work. And we've experimented with it a bit on content. But a get coin grant may be an interesting take on it. I was actually I was I was thinking about bounties. Actually, okay, got you got you. That's a really interesting topic. Yeah, and I would be curious to kind of open the floor to get you guys take on it. I think what's tough is up until now like our translation program and most contributions on the site have been like completely volunteer based. And it's been really great to see just like the number of people who have done it on their own, like, good will essentially like I think there's over 400 people in our translation project team correct me if I'm wrong. All those people have committed their time and energy for free. If we were to suddenly create bounties. I could see both sides of it I could see it's totally justified certain communities it's just harder to find people who have the time and energy and capacity to do this. I could also see potential conflict where, you know, previous volunteers might feel slighted in a way of like, hey, I contributed this stuff for free. And now all of a sudden these folks are getting paid to do so. I was curious what you guys think about that. I should just note maybe to so just know behind the scenes we we do work with a professional translation firm. And so all the translations that are done by volunteers are also like quality controlled by a transition firm. Sometimes when there's like gaps in one that's mostly done. They help us kind of fill in fill in the dots. So it is possible that you know we might expand the use of that firm to to kind of get languages done more quickly. We're trying to strike a balance between, you know, we want to make sure that that the website is available in as many languages as possible so that it's more accessible. But we also know that like being able to contribute to the site in this way is a pretty meaningful way for people to get involved in the theorem in the first place. And so we want to make sure that there's, you know, people have the opportunity to be like, oh, you know, I made a meaningful impact on making a good theory of content available to my language community is a thing we wouldn't want to kind of stop happening. So yeah, providing additional financial incentives for translators is something we're definitely looking into and would consider, but hasn't been like immediately on the horizon, but hopefully that background kind of gives you more context and how this all works. Yeah, any other thoughts on this point, I'm not sure if you have something to say I think you're muted right now. Okay, I can speak. Well, the occasional contributors there's a swarm of contributors who. Well, who translated the site in many different languages, but many of them are occasional. And then you have two or three guys who do. Two or three guys who do most of the work for a given language, maybe one, maybe only one who do 80, well, it's a perrito 80 person 20 person. You see, and these guys who the men guys got to keep it to keep them get to incentivize them and not only when NFTs or whatever. But with. Well, it's a whole package. See, you got to have them interested to keep them interested so that they contribute more and financial incentive incentivization is. Well, it's, it's a small part of that package, but it should be there too, I think. Okay, that's my point. Yeah, thank you. I think that's a really interesting perspective. Like, I can tell you, I frankly haven't looked into it to you and I don't know if you've done this analysis but looking language by language, I would be interested to see to your point john of like, is it one or two people who are doing the large majority of the translation, it probably is a few select people. So I do wonder if, yeah, whether it's just engaging them one on one individually and just like making sure we're acknowledging them and like asking for feedback and getting them excited in some way, whether it is, you know, public accolades or NFTs or financial incentive. It probably is worth keeping those, those like power users if you will, engaged. And also, sorry.  Yeah, I had a discussion with john last night about the translation program and yeah like Sam, you're right that the high quality translations were conducted by a few or just one key translators. And they usually complete the translation in a short period of time. So, yeah, I guess they like a higher performance is achieved because translators have more ownership and the risk of responsibility for the project. And if somebody already done this, the, like one documents that they try not to involve and translate within the same document. So, I think, yeah, this is good to find like those key translators and maybe yeah, like, giving our like, let's say incentive or the recommendations to those people. And also, these key translators, you could give them specific tasks. And huge events like translating the whole site, etc. The community events. But during these events you can detect the guys, the new guys, the new interesting guys who will, who, well, you want to keep them. And it's a detection system also. Right. Yeah, I think that I mean that's something that seems worth looking into and experimenting with like we don't know for sure what will be the ultimate motivator of these folks. I think if anything it might be worth just, you know, reaching out to these like power users power translators interviewing them, seeing what it is that motivates them, like maybe it is payment of some form. Maybe it is like giving them additional responsibility. Like maybe it's like, hey, we saw you've done a lot of translations, you've done a great job. The professional service doesn't even edit your content because it's so great. Maybe we can somehow give them a status like give them the ability to review so that like they become the maintainer of the French translation and or the Danish translation.  It's something that shows progress on their end. Just an idea. Cool. Any other thoughts, open questions, discussions? Why are you guys here? What were you looking to get out of this call? What was exciting disappointing? Yeah, really looking for just any all feedback or input. We definitely don't need to stay the whole time. I would suggest we just ended early this month. I did drop in my email at the bottom of the notes document. Understand, you know, public zoom calls aren't always the best way to gather input from people. If you do have ideas or feedback obviously like GitHub issues are a great place to like, you know, suggest ideas and track progress of those. Feel free to hit us up on Twitter, email us directly, whatever, whatever makes sense to you. And thank you guys for joining and really appreciate you getting involved. John, thank you for your translations. I'm sure the French community appreciates your work. Yeah, thanks, John. It's great to, you know, we often don't get to actually meet the people who translate the site. So we appreciate you joining the call. It's good to kind of put a face to a username that I've seen in crowded before. Well, Taiyon told me to come over, so I came. It's a great suggestion. Awesome. Great. Cool. Thanks so much. Thanks guys.


Hey everyone, this is Gabrielle with Oxmerotic Group. So today I am here at Oxmer Toyota. I am inside the 2019 Toyota Land Cruiser. I have Chuck Schumann over here. He's hiding. I don't know if you all can see him Hi guys, but Chuck's gonna go over some of the interior features of this vehicle. Yes, very frigid day So this thing's packed with technology and just all kinds of cool stuff One of the things I want to point out because this is a bigger profile vehicle But this has an automatic button where you can actually fold these side view mirrors in So that's automatic, fold them in and out. You can have that as soon as you turn the car off It automatically folds them in. You also have blind spot monitoring on the window That's the little symbol there to the left-hand side and that will give you blind spot monitoring and also rear cross-traffic alert for when you're in Reverse and so all kinds of safety features. This has Toyota Safety Sense P So you've got a multi or you got a camera up here and on the front is a multi-millimeter wave radar So this gives you lane departure. It gives you dynamic radar cruise control Pre-collision with pedestrian detection also has automatic high beams. So basically your high beams are Always turned on your lights turn to auto So as soon as it's dark your lights come on and if there's no headlights or taillights in front of you it automatically kicks on So really cool features there now the lane cruiser's heritage is an off-road vehicle So there's all kinds of like very fun buttons down here for taking this thing off-road So your electronically controlled transmission power button changes the way that the car shifts you have Electronically controlled transmission in second gear basically it's your snow button It's gonna start you out in second gear a little bit slower rotation turn off traction control This is full-time all-wheel drive, but you can also force it into four high or four low You can also lock the center differential to make sure the power is going 50% to the front end to the back It's also has crawl control and multi terrain select. So a very off-road capable vehicle With a ton of luxury like I've got the heated steering wheel on right now These have heated and ventilated seats for passenger driver even for the third row you've got four-way air control So passenger driver and then the back as well Which also has heated seats and you can control that so your passengers can be comfortable as well Because it's just a ton of luxury in this Lot of safety features as well, and then it's a very capable off-road I don't know who's gonna be brave enough to take a car this expensive off-road, but if you're ever gonna go anywhere This is the way to get there Navigation AM FM. It's in tune premium. So you've got navigation built in right here. It was put in the destination and go home control you got Home connect so you can program up to three garage doors or gates and then also SOS connect So you actually have this safety thing for three years when you buy this car If you need emergency services, you can push that and contact them if you get into a wreck with airbags deployed I'll automatically contact them. So this thing is just decked out loaded with all kinds of cool stuff Birds-eye view I'll show that real quick gives you a 360 degree view of the vehicle for when you're taking off or backing up So I'm just packed with technology and cool features Awesome, and then there was one more feature that we wanted to show one too, right? I don't want to forget that one the cooler box here That's awesome. Actually has a little cooler. So you can put sodas in there or whatever. Yeah, that's cool Very convenient Not on a day like today when it's 16 degrees out, but yeah, we need some coffee All right, well, thanks so much Chuck. All right, you guys now if you have any questions regarding this vehicle Please feel free to let us know the best phone number. It's<PHONE_NUMBER> You can also visit our website's oxmertwayota.com and I will have a link to this this vehicle that we just went over It'll have all the details that Chuck went over and also have the pricing in there, too So thanks you guys for watching and stay warm. We'll see y'all soon. Bye. Bye guys


Well, there's been so many. I would think that in today's day and age because of the wireless revolution and the ability of people all around the world to connect to each other over smart phones, that that is our current most valuable contribution from the ITU.


Moving on to other parts of Africa, Mali's army chief ended a three-day visit to Rwanda Thursday as a country seeks to strengthen bilateral defense cooperation. Mali and General Humad Dehra has concluded a three-day visit to Rwanda. The chief of the general staff of the Mali Enhamped Forces was received by his counterpart Gen Gen Bosco-Kazura at the Rwanda Defense Forces headquarters in Kigali. A statement by the Rwanda Ministry of Defense says, if bilateral defense collaboration was on the agenda, the discussion between the two men tackle different aspects of cooperation in human resource development, military training and welfare.