Okay, good morning. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech and we have Eric Gilley joins us today from Unite Here Local 5. Welcome to the show, Eric. Aloha. Aloha. Boy, you are the man. I mean, if there's anybody central covering all the bases in the tourism industry, in the hotel and hospitality industry, it's you. You must be working your buns off right now trying to keep everything together. How's your day going? Well, nothing bad happened so far today. How many members you have out there, Eric? How many members who are in distress? Well, we got thousands of members simultaneously unemployed in a huge unprecedented meltdown of our industry here and across the country. And our union, of course, represents people across the mainland as well. So we've had, let's put it this way, we spent three weeks helping our members do cross-testing their unemployment. The state system was woefully unprepared, crashed, still crashed. And what you see the state workers now doing, to get online and help people process, we've been doing for weeks. And so, basically, our union has, for most of the past month, been engaged mostly in social service, essential worker work. And my staff has been working on behalf of the state to do those things. So I think we've been able to register our members that we had a big load. We had to reorganize our staff and distribute calls out to people's homes and be able to return thousands of phone calls and work people through, you know, sometimes difficult online processing in the face of crashing of systems and so on. And so, we've been mostly working on trying to take care of the folk and see what we can do to help them salvage something of their lives. And we're mostly through that piece of the unemployment assistance because we've managed to get most of our members done.  Am I right to say that the phenomenon that has been so often described, namely that people do not have a safety net, they don't have money in the bank, they don't have resources that will carry them for more than a few weeks. Is that true in any substantial part for hotel workers? Yes.  The truth is, most of our members are now laid off from multiple jobs. And so, you know, nobody's making it great in Hawaii on, I'm proud of the amount of wages and benefits we've been able to generate for our members. But the truth is, people still have to work two or three jobs to get by, and now they don't have two or three jobs. So, it is a, you know, it's a, you know, it's a collapse of people's hopes and dreams and expectations.  And many, many thousands of people, thankfully not yet including most of my hotel members, are out of medical benefits as they prefer. Have they been terminated? Is that what the hotels did? Well, none of our hotels have said people are terminated. We've had different things. We've suspended operations, we're closing the hotel. They're effectively closed, except for a few places. And in some cases, they took away people's badges and, and locker keys and, you know, we're scratching our heads. But truthfully, I'd like, I would like it to be true that you say that I'm in the middle of everything. The truth is, these hotel companies are not engaging with us in any meaningful way at this point. So we, you know, they are not paying medical into the trust fund. They are not employing people or paying people's wages. They basically just closed down and threw everybody on the street. And, and we are now ensuring them in providing health and welfare insurance out of the reserves that a health and welfare fund, because the hotels who are the employers in the fund have refused to put any money into covered people's health and welfare. So we're burning our reserves. And how long can you keep on going like that? Well, that's a good question. And many things depend on it. You know, for example, our reserves are held in various investment vehicles.  However, that's unpredictable, obviously. And selling investments to try to go to cash is also unpredictable at this point. Or you'd end up locking in losses and so on and so forth. So the value of our reserves is obviously a concern. The burn rate of the reserves is also a concern. Because in essence, we're providing medical benefits for people with no income to support that.  And so this question of how long this goes on. And it's a question of how well we control control costs. And a lot of those things are hard to tell right now. Obviously, we are fortunate in that our trust fund is self-insured so we can just pay claims. So in other words, we don't have to pay premiums for most of our members on a monthly basis. And obviously right now with many medical services restricted, dentists are closed and so on and so forth, the number of claims is probably much less than usual right now. But we won't really know until the billings come in and we can add them all up. Am I right to conclude that if somebody is sick, somebody has a coronavirus among your membership, you're covering medical expenses at least for now? We are covering medical expenses for our members, yes. And we have already taken action to do so through September. So I believe that's probably the most security of workers in Hawaii in terms of their health and welfare benefits. Other unions and employers have paid medical through May, for example. But our employers haven't paid anything, even though in some of their other operations where there is no trust fund with the union members having saved up these reserves, then they've paid directly and insured people through May. But at the same time have refused to put anything in to cover our members. It strikes me as worth a question, namely you have hotels and other institutions in your group of employers of all sizes and shapes and kinds. Some of them are local obviously, some of them are national, some of them have very shallow pockets and they can't go on without revenue. Others have deep pockets and they can't. But are you saying that all of them have somehow magically come to the same conclusion? They're not going to pay these benefits, they're not going to keep the health benefits going, they've all decided the same way? With one exception so far, I'm happy to say the Lake Ikki Resort is a small hotel, it's a Korean-owned hotel. And they have committed to paying enough hours in to pay the minimum number of hours in to maintain medical at least so far. And so because our members work on it, our fund has a tail if you will. So people have several months of coverage which the fund now has to cover in any event that was the structure of a fund. So nobody had to do that. And in fact, the employers have taken advantage of that since the fund reserves are covering our members, they've decided that they don't need to put any money in. And of course, on a short-term strategy, okay, maybe, but without any money coming in and money going out, sooner or later we run out of money and are unable to ensure our people. And that would transfer thousands and thousands of people somewhere. There is no way that Quest or any other insurer can match our efficiency. We have our own network of contracts with hospitals and providers and we're self-insured. So we can pay claims and do the most efficient expensing of people's health and welfare benefits of anybody out there. But we need money to come in in order to keep doing it. And right now we don't have money coming in. And so of course it's concerned since it's not clear when or how hotels will reopen, how many workers will go back to work by when, when they do go back to work, how much money will be generated from it for their benefits in that regard. But I don't anticipate that hotels will suddenly resume with 98% occupancy and everybody working. So we have to have resources to cover our people over the long term. And the truth is, I find it despicable that the employers have chosen to, in essence, rob, steal our reserves, which workers have put aside through their own decision-making by consciously awarding more of their available money to health and welfare over the last 10 years. And we built up these reserves. And this was all workers' decisions to defer part of what otherwise would become wages. And now the employers are stealing that and evading their responsibility to the workers they just laid off. I'm very disappointed with the industry. And I would point out that this is a function of our rotten capitalist system, if you will. Our owners are the biggest of the big. The owners of the hotels are big, huge REITs. They're big, huge equity, private equity companies. And they've been sipping at the public trough all these years. And now they're in Washington trying to grab all the candy falling from the federal pinata as trillions of dollars of federal money. That's what they're concentrating on, is how to get money for themselves. And really, none of them really care about us. And that's shown in the congressional legislation. Nothing for health and welfare so far. What about the individuals? Are there any federal benefits coming out of the 2.3 trillion to your members? Are they getting checks? You see any checks, Eric? Well, I've heard that some people have received stimulus checks. It's hard for us to quantify that and figure that out. We hear of people having gotten some. Obviously, the additional unemployment insurance, the additional $600 a week, that's obviously of help when people receive it. I don't think anybody's got that additional amount yet. And the fact is, if you're laid off of two jobs, you only can collect so much on employment. And so even with that extra money, people are certainly becoming poorer and poorer. Well, I want to return to the point about what happens on the restart. As and when and to the extent there is a restart. The first question I have on that is, and we touched on this before the show began, is there should be, I think there should be a discussion around the table on this between labor and management about how things are going to restart. Because the industry, and we can cover this too, will not be the same. It'll be different. So has there been any meetings, any discussions around the table? Have you been brought in? Because certainly you're an essential element of any restart, no? Well, certainly I would agree with you on that. Right now, the hotels are magnificently unresponsive in fairness to them. They've laid off their HR departments and the people that we usually deal with. And in fairness to them, everybody's shook up and dislocated by this. And their numbers are in a trash can too. Obviously hotel revenues suddenly shutting off affects everybody. And so management obviously is affected as well. And they've been laid off as well as hotels have closed. But the truth is we've been, it's been very difficult to get discussions going with the hotels. We attempted here to get to engage our big chains, the Marriots and Hilton's. And in essence, because we are one union and we have similar identical issues in all of the cities we operate from the East Coast over to Hawaii and in Canada too. They basically wouldn't make a deal with us on a local union basis. And so we attempted and are attempting to meet with them on a national basis. And that so far hasn't gone anywhere. So I would, I think the industry is basically kind of in shell shock and in denial in certain amount. And perhaps naively think that they can just sit tight. Certainly the reopening is an important piece. You know, for example, I think it's nuts that the city still is advancing permits to build more hotels. That right, right now? Yeah. And okay, that's what they do, right? You know, developers do it in permits, but the argument to put a new hotel from January to now is completely changed. Obviously we shouldn't add new inventory when we will have a hard time filling up the hotels we got. And the truth is some hotels probably won't reopen. We don't know what their plans are. They don't know and aren't telling us. And so we've, you know, we're kind of in a limbo. But that doesn't mean that we should leave the question of reopening to the side. And so we are engaging in discussions and I'm encouraged that, you know, that we will be part of discussions in regard to that because I think it's very important reopening the hotels in this COVID environment means that we have to embrace the fact that our clientele and their needs have substantially changed. We're not going to get a lot of resort guests in this year. I just don't know how that can happen. What's a resort guest there? A resort guest is our usual guests. You know, someone who comes on vacation and wants my ties and tour groups and parasailing and all that stuff. And none of that stuff is available right now. And that's not what our current guests need. What our current guests are basically essential workers and people who are seeking lodging in the pandemic and they need lodging. Individuals need lodging if they're going to quarantine away from family to keep their families safe. And healthcare workers need lodging, you know, when they travel to assist other areas to try to contain outbreaks. And essential workers need lodging. And that's what we do. The problem is we're not set up to do, to serve that kind of guest right now. Instead, I think hotels are moving too late to, you know, to really address the needs of these new guests, which is primarily a place of security and safety that they can rest and recuperate or that's a great way to start the startup, to prepare for the startup. You know, repurpose the hotels to the business that is at hand, that is essential workers' business. I don't know how you feel about this, but potentially homeless business, all the people who need lodging. And that way you have some staff coming back to work it. You have the hotels are staying in operation, if you will, which is good for them. And that helps them ramp up, as in when the resort guests start coming back. Am I right? Well, yeah. And I think even the resort guests are going to have different needs now. And we're going to have different needs. Resort guests, you know, when they start coming back, when we start allowing them to come back. Right now, obviously, the state is doing everything they can to discourage, you know, tourists from arriving. And for obvious reasons that we all can share. So the question is going to be, you know, when are people going to be allowed to travel? And under what conditions should Hawaii let people in? And also, what conditions are other places going to insist on Hawaii being in order to receive our guests back home safely? It won't do us any good if our safety protocols are insufficient to, for example, to satisfy the needs of Japanese tourists, because obviously Japan could just quarantine them all coming home if they don't feel that we are a safe environment. So that, you know, we need to really concentrate on that our Hawaii and our industry need to be perceived as a place of safe refuge for guests, whether they be essential workers or when travelers go, you know, I can tell you, I'm a guy who traveled a lot up till the end of January. And I'm not unhappy that I'm not traveling that much now. But when I go to a hotel room, I'm not going to want to see a bedspread. I'm not going to want to see a duvet. I'm not going to want to see skirts on the bed. I'm not going to want to see roads hanging in the closet. I'm not going to want to see, you know, five pillows on the bed that I'm not sure when they were last washed. Those are things that I think any discerning traveler are going to be looking to see. And so, but so far, many of those measures haven't been taken even by the hotels that are operating. And there's only a few of our hotels that are operating, and we are attempting to address the safe operations in those places. Well, how do you do that? How do you address the safe operations in those places? I mean, now and as we go forward? Well, look, I mean, I think there's many aspects to that, and it affects the operations of the hotel, you know, from check in to check out and in between. But let's put it this way, I think there's certain things you can do now that need to be done in order to enhance safety. And the first thing in my view is, you know, you get stuff out of the room that can't be efficiently cleaned. And you don't put things in the room that you're not going to launder or throw out upon check out. Got it. And that's not what they do now, right? That's not what they do.  And now the germs could be a lot more dangerous. So, you know, we've got to be able to wash everything.  But the fact is, to have a safe hotel, you have to have both workers and guests safe. You know, there's no safe hotel if workers don't have the proper protective equipment. How do you do that? How do you make it safe for one of your members in a hotel that's still operating or in a startup economy later? What do you do for him? Is it masks? I mean, are you interested in testing? Tell me about how you would protect your workers. Well, first of all, you know, there's any number of guidelines out there, the CDC changes theirs all the time. It appears to be kind of politically influenced, you know, if the Trump administration didn't do a good job getting masks, the CDC says, well, you don't need those N95 masks after all. So we, when we, when we had to make a decision, meaning the union and our allied entities that we, we set up a quarantine station for the state. And we went, you know, we went as far as we could to practically to guard people up for cleaning. And so yes, I mean, the minimum is, is a mask and gloves, but we didn't stop there. You know, you also are well advised to wear safety goggles to keep, you know, safety glasses to keep things from splashing your eye. In the case of the quarantine station, which was intended and is housing homeless people in response to earlier question. We had plastic face masks and we have Tyvek suits as well. And so, so basically the worker can clean that room, a guest checkout room, you know, and, and can clean it with basically full covering and then take off that protective equipment when they're done cleaning the room and work with a uniform that doesn't have stuff on it. You know, but that's not what hotels are doing right now. We're gathering information. Most of the hotels currently operating are not under local fives contract. And I don't have any particular right to demand information from them. But we're gathering what we can. And hotels have not been consistent in providing masks or a sufficient number of masks. I don't think people have, you know, hotels haven't let the room sit for 24 hours in some cases they have, but I'm not sure that they're all doing that. You're supposed to do that so that the thing can settle. I think, you know, we are gathering information on this, but it's not easy because nobody is saying to us what they're doing exactly. And our information requests for our own employers are just sit there because nobody's looking to that somebody should do that if it's not going to be you because you don't represent those hotels or workers in those who could it be? Could it be the governor? Could it be the mayor? Could it be the hotel and watching, you know, industry association? You need to bring somebody in to make sure that they are providing information so you can structure a reopening with that information. Yeah, absolutely. There should be some intervention and some, as I said, our whole community depends on the perception of travelers that we're in place. So I don't think there's too much of this that we can do. The question is, are we doing too little? And we should address that. But absolutely, yes, there needs to be some understandings and guidelines about hotel operations as we resume. Absolutely, there has to be testing. The notion that we don't do public testing and that testing is something that we should reserve for special cases is not correct. And the fact is, healthcare workers that we also represent should be tested every week. So social hotel workers be tested. We're taking care of those people who are sharing the same building with everybody's germs. They're worried about us as well. I mean, healthcare workers are going, you know, they're worried about their own health as well as guests. And so we have to address this in a comprehensive way. Hawaii needs clear standards. We are doing our best to help develop them. And we are in discussion with some people that want to talk about this. And we do hope to attract the attention of somebody. Let me ask you one last question, Eric. It looks down the end of the tunnel here. A lot of people, I mean, obviously the hotel industry is the most important industry in the state. It's the engine of our economy. When you close it down, you're closing down our economy. It's that simple. When you're opening up, you're opening up our economy again. And so I really have one major overriding question here. We need to establish a reputation in the world about offering coronavirus-free tourism. We have to sell our cleanliness, if you will, our non-virus industry to the world. Then people will come back without fear. So clearly, we're going to have to fold that into the restart, our own special Hawaii restart. So my question to you is, what do you see at the end of the tunnel here? What do you see as the state of the industry, the differences in the industry, both on the hotel side, the management side, the capital side, and on the labor side when we get through this? I know it's an early question, but I wonder if you have thoughts about how this is going to evolve, what it's going to look like later? In terms of Hawaii, I think there were many legitimate questions before this started about how much is too much. I think there's opportunities here as well. This is a chance to reboot tourism and to find other things as well so our economy isn't so dependent on tourism. We're in the industry, but it's obvious to anyone looking at Hawaii today or Vegas or any place that is dependent on tourism that we need a broader base. This is an opportunity for us to do those things. This is an opportunity for us to really decide together how many tourists should be here and preserve our quality of life for our residents. This is an opportunity to do that as well. As you said, we have a good reputation as a healthy place and we should pound that in and make sure that we have our share of tourists. But to be a healthy place and to have confidence that we're receiving tourists from healthy places, people need to be tested. People need to be tested. That's just simple and yet the government's not doing it and it's crazy. Unless we can operate a good regimen of consistent testing so that people know if they're sick or not, which people don't know right now. 20% of COVID positive people have no symptoms, can't get a test under current rules. They can't know if they're sick, they're contagious. We have to have testing, testing, testing and we have to have it in our hotels, our healthcare industry in order for us to be safe. If we're not safe, how are we going to market ourselves as being safe? And we will need our guests as well. I can't imagine the state should just open its doors to everybody. How are we going to know if people are sick or not? And they need testing in those places too. So if tourism is going to resume, yes, we have a chance to reboot it. I would like to start re-envisioning what Hawaii looks like and should look like and can be. This is an opportunity for us to rethink things. But we're not going to get any business back, not safely unless there's widespread testing regimes, not just here, but in the places we're getting our tourists from. And so this is just an emerging issue. The testing issue is controversial in the sense that the federal government, the state government are all saying, we don't really need that much testing. But they're just wrong on that. And they're justifying the policy based on the lack of testing kits and the refusal to spend the money to do the testing. It is expensive. But unless we do it, we don't know who's sick. We can't contain contagions, blooms. We can't assure anybody that this is a safe place to come. And so they should get over this. The state and the federal government should get over this. Let's get real testing done on a mass basis and especially focused on our essential workers who need that right now in order to protect themselves and their families. Yeah. And with that, we can preserve our reputation as a healthy place. We can restart our tourism sector and we can therefore restart our economy. There's lots more to discuss, Eric. I hope we can circle back and cover it as this goes forward. That's Eric Gill. Unite here, local five. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks a lot for having me. Don't go hard.


The governing side of the lower house on October 11th tabled the security interest in movable property bill. St. Lucia's micro, small and medium size enterprises are now in line to benefit from what Prime Minister Hon. Philip J. Pierre considers to be revolutionary legislation that has the potential to open new doors that leads to increased access to financing which can facilitate business development and expansion. Before, the only thing that you could have used as an asset was property, real property. These are the only things you could use but not all businesses have access to real property but not all businesses have real property. So what this bill will do is this bill will allow you to be able to use certain assets as security. The Pierre administration's security interest in movable property bill paves the way for St. Lucia's mom and pop shops, startups, entrepreneurs and the self-employed to secure the capital and funding needed to take their businesses to new heights. Let me give you an example Mr. Speaker of what assets that you can use as security or because of the process of this bill. You can use Mr. Speaker accounts receivable. If somebody owes you money, you can use it as an asset. Inventory and raw goods, industrial agricultural equipment, agricultural products, very important for the military culture, you can use your crops and your livestock as security. Because of this bill, bank accounts, intellectual property rights, durable consumer goods and vehicles. All these can be used as security because to secure finance Mr. Speaker. That will cause increased access to credit for all sectors. Business expansion stimulates hiring, increases commercial activity and spurs economic growth. The security interest in movable property bill has the potential to be a game changer for St. Lucia's private sector, giving all market participants improved options for credit and loan financing. From the office of the Prime Minister, Rihanna Izidou.


Welcome to Digital Asset News, the top stories in crypto and bring out a bite-sized piece. So today, just like the thumbnail suggests, everything changes for Bitcoin in seven days as it becomes the legal tender officially for El Salvador. So we'll take a look at what that means and what the ramifications are for the El Salvadorian people on top of what that means globally when this all works out. On top of that, take a look at Cardano smart contracts are going live on the test net tomorrow, and they'll be going live completely in September 12th. And then finally, we'll take a look at pro baseball or major league baseball or MLB here in the United States is going to be minting NFTs through tops cards, and it's not on the platform that you may think it's going to be. So we'll take a look at all those things. But first, take a look at what's going on the market today. Not too bad. Almost 2.1 trillion. We're just kind of fluctuating that area. So not a big deal. I'm just happy that it actually held, and I'm actually pretty ecstatic about what's going on leading into September and all this good news. Daily sentiment drops a little bit 46 out of 100. And we're using trade the chain for sentiment analysis just so you know. And then as far as like coins and price goes to the biggest winners today in 24 hours, well, XRP is up 3% and watch out 14% for Polkadot. And Solana was on a tear this morning, but it's just equalling out but still looking pretty good. Hex is down 2% that 12th spot. So good for all you hexologists. I know you guys love it when I even mention the word hex. Hex. Chain link is at 5%, 2% for Stellar. And again, this is the trade the chain sentiment analysis. So if we begin to sentiment, I mean, if you're beginning to trading, I mean, it's great to have no technical analysis and also fundamental analysis. But it's also good to have the trifecta in your toolbox, which is sentiment analysis. So over the next hour, I'll look for these to really shoot up Rary, governance token, DeFi money, scale, waves, keep network, grin, and Orion protocol. Interesting. So that's what's going on in the market. Let's jump in today's top story. And we're going to go, we're just going to talk about this El Salvador and everybody was super excited about this. And I'm still super excited about it. And I really kind of just fell to the wayside. But I think we really need to realize that, hey, in a week, this is going to happen. And the entire government is going this way. Now, how big is El Salvador? Well, the total population is 6.45. And then there's different numbers that go through there. We're talking about children and, you know, of age, adults or whatnot. So we'll say around between 4.5 and 6.45, depending on what you're counting. So not a small country. And they actually just released this today, a matter of fact, on Twitter. And it talks about actually, I'm sorry, yesterday, and it talks about what's going to happen on the 7th of September. Now, it's all in Spanish, my Spanish, I'm better at speaking Spanish than understanding Spanish. That was much better at that here in El Paso. But real quick, this is what's going on for the piece. And I'll just say like this, that pretty much what they're saying is, hey, look, it's going to go live on September 7th, you're going to have Bitcoin or cash, they can kind of roll in whatever else you can buy whatever you want. And you're going to put it on this, I'm going to blow this up so you can see what I see. This is the Chivo CHIVO app. And what it's talking about here is it's saying, hey, we want you to use this app. And you can use pretty much whatever app that you want to, and we're going to keep this going for prices, dollars and pensions, that'll be in US dollars. But for everything else, you can use the Chivo app. And that's what it's going to be as far as like transferring and getting paid in Bitcoin. You can, when you get paid in Bitcoin, you can immediately transfer it over. That's fine. You can use whatever different app that you want in Bitcoin. But if you use the government official Chivo app, we're going to give you $30. Now, in an article we're going to look at pretty soon, it says $30 in Bitcoin. In the video, it sounds like it's just $30 US dollars in Bitcoin or $30 USD. Whatever it is, let me just tell you this. If you are living in El Salvador, okay, and someone says, I want to give you $30 just to use this app. Well, we have that here in the States. We have it, you know, for Voyager, we have it for Coinbase. I mean, I don't know, Coinbase, Binance and things like that. Well, not even Binance. Well, Binance US, I suppose. All the different ones that are out there. But if you're in El Salvador and your gross income per capita in 2019 is $4,000 and someone says, I'm going to give you $30 just to use this app. I'm pretty sure you're going to use it. Regardless if it is the government app or not, $30 is $30 and you're making $4 grand a year. That's all I'm saying. So I think that was a smart move on El Salvador as part. And they're going, hey, look, use our app and we can track everything that you do on the blockchain. And that's just, that's really what it comes down to. And again, it just talks about you can do, you know, buy whatever you want to and so on and so forth. So also in the video, it talks about how you're able to, there's no fees to process the payment. There's no fees for remittances. I think that's the big thing of why they're doing it like, look, if you want to send money back to your family here in El Salvador, just send it on the Chibo app and you can just send it without any type of like Western Union crazy high fees or Wells Fargo or whatever banks that are over there because you know they charge crazy high fees just for remittance payments. So I think this is going to go swimmingly well. Now the thing that concerns me personally is what is going to actually have to go on when we're talking about with the IMF. And here's talking about remittance payments again. So let me just move forward. The thing that I was questioning actually was how much is actually, did El Salvador actually purchase for Bitcoin because they have to purchase Bitcoin for everything to be sold and purchased and everything else. And then of course, if they're going to pay people in Bitcoin, so this is from a deli hodl and says El Salvador to buy an estimated 135 million worth of Bitcoin. And this was back on June 27. So right away, this has already been priced in. This isn't the big thing. This isn't the big thing. It does say here if all four and a half million Salvadorians out to receive the free Bitcoin, it could instantly grow the Bitcoin user network by two and a half percent. According to the president, one of the central reasons is introducing Bitcoin as legal tender, of course. So when you have something like this, the big thing that it really comes down to is all different types of countries in Central America, South America, poor third world countries, as you call them. They're going to look at this pretty hard. And they're going to say, look, if we can have a lot of our citizens who are completely unbanked, if they're able to get into Bitcoin and just use an app and then be able to store wealth in an app, as opposed to going to the bank where they have all the fees, where they're not actually doing much for our citizens. Anyhow, I think we're going to go for this on top of the fact that if you have people who move out of our country and they go throughout the world into other countries like United States, like Canada, wherever else in the EU, and they are sending money back to family, friends, relatives, whatever else. And it's crazy high remittance fees. Well, let's just have them do that in Bitcoin and for no fees as opposed to using a bank, doing a wire transfer, spending 20, 30, 50, whatever, how much dollars it actually is, waiting all that time to actually go through. And oh, not to mention the fact that there's also a failure rate for remittance payments. So as you send all the money back to your family and they're like, oh, we didn't receive it, that's kind of a problem. So I think what's going to happen is that everybody's going to take a look at this. If this works out pretty well, you're going to see mass adoption in all types of countries. And they're going to take a real hard look at this. And if that happens, what do you think is going to happen to the price of Bitcoin? And not just Bitcoin, maybe other cryptocurrencies and digital assets as people are like, why do we need these central banks? And why do we need all these different banks that are just pretty much robbing our citizens of money here and there? And then not to mention the fact about DeFi, decentralized finance, digital IDs and everything else. So let me understand about that in the comment section. Let's move on to our next piece where we talk about Cardano smart contracts. So in a nutshell, there was a great video. It was put out by IOHK. And what it talks about here is everything that's going to go on tomorrow and tell September 12 all about smart contracts. So let's just take a listen real quick. Well, let's start with where we are right now. Lutus is ready. The Daedalus wallet is ready. Everything is all packaged up. And as of now, it's been confirmed that we are ready to hard fork to the Cardano testnet on Wednesday, September 1. Once we've hard forked the testnet, then we can start testing everything that was inside that package we just updated in a live production environment. We'll be running our own tests and inviting others to test as well with the main goal being to test for stability, security, testing that the foundational code to write smart contracts is working properly, and all the other miscellaneous things that need to be done to ensure that we can confidently hard fork to the main net. This is also the time in which 140 exchanges will be switching from Alonzo Purple to a live production environment in preparations for the main net launch. So what is the main net hard fork? It's currently set for Sunday, September 12. And this gives our testnet partners roughly a week and a half to ensure that everything is running correctly. And there are no fundamental bugs or issues that for security reasons could mean the date needs to get pushed back. So that's where it's said right there. And these are interesting times. So what's going to happen tomorrow? Testnet. I'm going to give it about a week, a week and some change to see if they can break anything as they invite more people in. And if they can do all their checks and balances and make it to the end and go, yes, all the things that we did, all these peer reviewed papers, all the testing that we've done, all the time that we've taken. And now we're at that finish line. And we've tested it rigorously. Yes, now we can go live with the main net launch on September 12. If they can do that, and this happens, expect the price of Cardano to skyrocket. This is just investment opinion, not investment advice. Do not put your life savings and sell your kidneys to put it all in Cardano just because some YouTuber said that the price might go up on a main net launch. But for me, I can tell you, this is part of the end of a very long journey for Cardano. And we'll see if they can do exactly what they said they could do. And this is on top of the fact that Charles came out just last week and said, look, we had a go-no-go meeting, round robin table meeting, and all our checks and balances went green light, green light, green light, all things that we thought could go wrong, did not go wrong. And we are pushing forward to the Testnet. Here we are, the Testnet. We're going to push forward and hopefully main net launches for smart contracts, which could lead us into DEXs and decentralized finance. Imagine what that would look like. All right. So that is that issue for Cardano. Also, I found a little piece I'm going to actually link this in. This was from Pat at Amdreamer and he talks about Cardano wealth distribution. Let me blow this up so you can see it. And it's all about the amount of wallets that people have and how much Cardano they're actually holding. And I got to tell you, if I'm looking at this pretty correctly, we've got a lot of people with just a thousand, a 10,000, 10,000 to 100,000, 19, 26%, but it really drops off after that. There's not like four wallets that control 50% of everything. This is a pretty looking good, decentralized type of wallets. Now, it is true that some people like myself have more than one wallet floating around. Maybe you got three, five, 20, I have no idea. But just take a look at this. You can take a look at other projects. And there are still wallets, five, six or seven that control the majority of all the different tokens. And that, my friends, is not a good plan because all those people can just start dumping. And yeah, let me just think about that in the comments section. And let's move on to our last piece, pro baseball and NFTs. And this was just a quick one. It's tops, tops and veils. Tops is when I was a kid, I used to collect baseball cards and tops was like the only player around. They've been with the Major League Baseball for two decades plus. And they are saying, hey, we're going to do an NFT series now minted on Avalanche blockchain. So real quick, I'll just wrap this all up. Tops is averaging Avalanche blockchain after the company was using the Wax blockchain for projects like Garbage Pail Kids, which is something I remember as a kid too, and Godzilla series. And then it says the site removes the need. This is the top site removes the need for special wallets or token apps and provides a single location to buy, sell and explore official licensed tops NFT collection. Here's the website itself. So we actually did a deep dive, deep dive on Avalanche. And I said it was going to be big. I've been, I've been delving into this for over six weeks. And I finally got one of the team members, Jay Kurahashi, Sofu on, and we went over everything that has to do with Avalanche and why I think it could be great. But one of the big things that I talked about was that they're doing a two-fold bifurcation. They're looking for to get into heavy into the private blockchain sector, retail people like you and me, and also the private blockchain sector, governments, Fortune 500 companies and stuff like this. So when you have something like them going after two different ways, that's double your pleasure, double your fun, because they can dip into much more of a market than say another different type of cryptocurrency who's only doing public blockchains. And hey, I know if people don't like it, but guess what? Sometimes government and Fortune 500 companies have stuff they don't want to reveal. So maybe they need like a little private blockchain. I think there's room enough for everybody. Anyhow, that is it for that section. Also, if you want to take a look at the deep dive, I'll link that in the link in the description below. Also, just so you know, over on DanTeachersCrypto.com. If you just scroll over to staking up here, they were two, we have two staking pools, Cardano and Abax. And we got Abax, it talks about how to actually stake with the Avalanche blockchain. It's pretty simple. The only problem is is that they have lockup periods between two weeks, two months, six months a year, but it is a lockup period just so you know. And I explain all that in the video right down here. So that's it. So look, that's it for today. And if you made it all the way to the end, I want to say first of all, thanks for sticking with me all the way. I appreciate it. If you like that type of video and you found some value, give it a thumbs up. That helps tremendously. Also consider subscribing, loving to talk about our time sensitive. And that's it for right now. So thanks so much for watching. I appreciate it. And we'll see you in the next one.


Hi, I'm Zor. Welcome to Unisor Education. We continue talking about nuclear reaction. In this particular case, we will talk about something which is called fusion. This lecture is part of the course called Physics for Teens, presented on Unisor.com. I do suggest you to watch this lecture from the website because, first of all, every lecture has notes, which basically, like a textbook, dedicated to this particular material in this particular lecture. All the lectures are obviously logically related to each other, and there is a menu which basically guides you how to go from one topic to another. The course contains many problems and exams, which you can take as many times as you want. The website is completely free. There are no advertisements, so everything is concentrated on your studying. So I do recommend you to use it. And then there is a prerequisite course called Math for Teens on the same website, which basically presents all the information in mathematics which is needed for physics without mathematics. It cannot be actually studied successfully. Okay, now, talking about fusion. Well, first of all, let me just briefly remind you that we did talk about nuclear reaction called fission. Fission is when we split a nucleus of, let's say, uranium-235 or plutonium-239 into pieces. Now, what happens in this case, which is extremely important, pieces into which the nucleus of, let's say, uranium-235 is split has the total mass less than initial nucleus of uranium. It's called mass defect. And the problem is that this extra mass, which seems to be disappeared, it's actually converted into energy, which is based on the famous formula of Einstein, which connects the total amount of energy concentrated in mass as mass times square of the speed of light in vacuum. So, this defect, mass defect, which seems to be like disappearing mass, is converted into energy. And that's how we're using this energy in peaceful, for instance, for nuclear power stations and not so peaceful with atomic bomb cases. Now, the fusion is in opposite reaction. So, fission is splitting a nucleus of a heavy element like uranium or plutonium. Fusion is getting two pieces together into a bigger piece. Now, there are certain cases when during this procedure operation, whatever it's called, we will have exactly the same effect, mass defect, which in theory can be used for producing energy. And the first example I would like to start with is the very simple one. You have a hydrogen, but not just just a hydrogen, an isotope which has one proton and one neutron. So, we have two different particles, neutron and proton. It's called deuterium. And then we will add another one called tritium. We have one proton plus two neutrons. It's still hydrogens because it has only one proton. So, electrically, the nucleus has electric charge of one unit. But the number of neutrons is different. In a regular hydrogen, this is regular hydrogen, one proton and that's it, no neutron. And obviously, electron around the orbit. Now, this is about 99.8% of all hydrogen which can happen in our environment. Now, this one, the deuterium, is the rest, which is like 0.02% or whatever. And this one, tritium, it does not really occur naturally. However, if we have these two atoms and they can be actually created in some physical conditions without talking about this, then there will be a very interesting reaction. It will create a nucleus of helium, alpha particle, which has two protons, these two protons, and two neutrons, which makes the total number of particles in the nucleus 4. And one extra neutron, which has no electric charge. So, basically, this is an equation, number of total particles, 2 plus 3, 5, 4 plus 1, 5. So, these are two isotopes of hydrogen and this is a nucleus of helium, alpha particle. So, this is a reaction which actually can happen. Let's talk about mass. Okay. 2.014 plus 3.016, this is 5.030. This is helium 4.0015, nucleus 1.00867, total 5.010. Okay? So, what do we see? This is difference. So, the results are lighter, if I can say lighter, has less mass than the original. So, where does this thing go? Here. This is the mass. That's how energy is released. So, great. So, why don't we do it and create energy from hydrogen? Hydrogen seems to be the most abundant element in the universe, the simplest one. Well, there are some problems. So, let's talk about problems. So, the first problem I have already described. The problem is this one, the Ethereum is very, very rare. It's kind of 0.02% of the total, but still we can do it. We can still extract the Ethereum from the water, for example. Now, it needs some energy, but it can be done. Now, this one should be created artificially, which is not easy, but probably can be done. And it also requires energy. Well, so the first question is, does this energy which can be released greater than the energy which we have to really spend to create these two? Well, it is greater, but that's not all the problems which we have. The most important problem is that this reaction requires something like 100 million degrees, let's say on the Kelvin scale. That's a lot, 100 million degrees, that's a lot. Plus pressure, sufficient to get these two nuclei close to each other. So, a huge pressure and huge temperature. So, that's the difficulty. Now, the physicists aren't working on this, don't take me wrong. Now, there are at least two different kinds of installations which are trying to create whatever is necessary conditions for this thing. Until very recently, the amount of energy which we need to produce all this, including temperature and pressure, exceeded the amount of energy which we can extract as a result of a fusion. But recently there were a couple of experiments where the net result was actually positive. But it's a good sign, but it's not really ready for production. Let's put it this way. At the same time, if we want to do something without any kind of control, that we can do because something like atomic bomb, which is based on fission of uranium or plutonium, can locally create temperature and pressure needed for this thing. And so-called H-bomb or thermonuclear bomb has been actually created. So, some bomb related to this fusion has been created and the temperature and the pressure were first created by atomic bomb based on uranium or plutonium. And that caused the reaction of these components to fuse together and release a huge amount of energy. So, this bomb is much more powerful than atomic bomb or A-bomb. So, A-bomb and H-bomb. A is atomic, which is uranium based or plutonium based, and H-bomb is based on hydrogen. Okay, but that's the bomb. I mean, we don't want to talk about bombs. We don't want to use them. We don't want to have them. We need a peaceful way of producing this energy in a controlled fashion. And that's what physicists are actually working on right now. At the same time, there are naturally occurring conditions sufficient for reaction of fusion. And these are natural conditions which exist in all the stars. Because the energy of the stars, like the energy of our sun, is based on this fusion reaction. Now, there are many different fusion reactions. Whatever I was just talking about is just one particular example. There are some others. And one of the reactions which can be observed, well, observed probably is not a good word, which happens in our sun, is slightly different, but it's still the fusion reaction. It's just a little bit different. And here it is how it's done. So, sun is burning. So, there is a temperature and there is a pressure inside. So, the first reaction which happens is just a regular hydrogen, two different nuclei of hydrogen, based on the temperature and the pressure are fused together and they create a deuterium. Now, there is a disbalance here. So, the total number of particles is correct, but we have one less electric charge, right? This is proton, this is proton and this is only one proton. So, where is exactly the other charge and how it's done? Well, apparently one of these protons converted into a neutron and positron. Positron is anti-electron. So, anti-electron, electron is negatively charged and anti-electron positron has a positive charge. So, that's where the extra charge goes. Plus some neutrino, some other weird particles which don't have any electric charge, don't have even mass. So, this is the first reaction which happens. So, now everything is in balance. This has positive charge of one plus one and here also one plus one. Now, this is very light. This is anti-electron. It doesn't have a unit mass. The unit mass is heavy particles, proton and neutron. So, we have before two and now two. So, everything is in balance. Okay. Now, that's the first reaction. Now, what happens then is this deuterium is fused again with regular hydrogen reducing helium. But not just the regular helium, the isotope of helium. Helium has two protons and two neutrons. Now, this one has only one neutron and that's why it's isotope. However, it's helium because it has two protons. Now, the next one is two helium are producing regular helium plus two atoms of regular hydrogen. Now, two plus two is four. So, we have a charge of four. Two plus one and one. So, that's four. Total number of particles, six, three and three. This is four and this is one and one. So, we have the balance. So, that's what actually happens inside the sun. And energy is released here, here and here because if you will put all the masses of all the components, we will have mass defect here. So, this is lighter than this, this is lighter than this, this is lighter than this. So, energy is released on all kinds, on all transformations. So, this is what happens in our sun. So, net result is from these two atoms of hydrogen. We have one atom of deuterium, then deuterium plus another. That's three atoms of hydrogen. Now, one, two and three produce one atom of helium. So, two of these, now it's inside this, we have three transformed nuclei of hydrogen. Now, it's two of them, so it's six. So, out of six hydrogen nucleus, we have helium and two back generated. Net result is we consume four atoms of hydrogen and produce one atom of helium. So, basically what sun does, it burns hydrogen producing neutral helium. So, that's basically the source of energy. Four atoms of hydrogen produce one atom of helium and that's basically how the sun is working. Now, there are some other reactions of fusion and fission as well, which I did not describe. Just because they don't seem to have a practical purpose, because the mass defect may be very small, or mass defect is instead of positive energy, it consumes energy, so it's negative. So, it all depends on different things. But in any case, there are other reactions which do happen, for example, inside the sun or during the explosion of A-bomb or H-bomb. So, all these reactions are kind of lesser of importance than whatever I have described, but they do happen. So, the universe is messy. I mean, whenever something like sun burns, all kinds of things, all kinds of transformations actually happen. So, these are kind of main ones and that's why I have described them. Okay, so that's how sun is working. I do suggest you to read the notes for this lecture and good luck.


The paper presents a comprehensive review of enhanced oil recovery, EOR, technologies, and their potential to increase final recovery factors in various types of reservoirs with a focus on sandstone and carbonate formations in turbiditic reservoirs, offshore and onshore fields, discussing risk and rewards of EOR methods including recent trends such as CO2 injection, high pressure air injection, HPI, and chemical flooding along with an overview of CO2 EOR project economics. This article was authored by Vladimir Alvarado and Eduardo Menrique.