What is going on guys, welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here. Today I bring you another Destiny 2 video and today I bring you this simple quick guide on how to turn the Tangled Shore new public event, the Criall part, into the heroic version where you fight and defend Palace Siege Breaker. But before we do that guys, every month I'm giving away a fully customisable controller for if Xbox or Playstation is in any way in the world. To be in with a chance of winning this sexual controller, simply drop a like on the video, leave a comment down below, make sure you are subbed and follow the gleam link at the top of the video description. Also guys, I have an exclusive Gambit emblem code to give away, to be in with a chance of winning that also, just drop a comment down below. Winner will be picked over the next week and contacted via direct message here on YouTube. Good luck everybody. Ok so the Tangled Shore is pretty damn epic with it comes a new public event in the game called the Criall part. Now it's quite straightforward, defeat two waves of enemies then take down Palace Siege Breaker, done. But hey, that's not what you are here for and that's not what this guide is for. You want to know how to trigger the heroic version. Well that's quite simple also and you are more than capable of doing this completely solo, although that probably ain't gonna happen because the Tangled Shore is kind of run with all kind of new players because it's basically a new to the game so everybody's here. So actually getting into a public event solo is probably gonna be more difficult than that. But either way it doesn't really matter. Ok so start the public event, you will first need to defend the pod from two waves of enemies. This part is straightforward and simple. What happens next is the public event boss appears from the pod like the Ark and Pruise from Destiny 1. Here you have to take down his health until the pod emits freezing gas which freezes the floor and if you stand in it it takes down your health also. When this happens look at the pod and you will notice small vents begin to smoke. Shoot these small vents and what happens then is it spawns these kind of balls. These you need to pick up and throw at Palace Siegebreaker. You need four in total to be thrown at him so a couple of rotations at least should be enough.   He then freezes in place and basically becomes a control point which you have to stand in and defend. So standing in it is needed to progress this heroic public event. Defending all the way up to 100% before the timer runs down and the heroic public event is complete. To be honest guys it's one of the easier public events in the game in my opinion so I hope this guide helps you out. Remember if people are in the area and don't know how to trigger the heroic version by shooting Palace they can easily ruin your chances of triggering the heroic version because once his health gets too low without any orbs ginned and thrown at him it's near impossible to then go on and trigger the heroic. So a warning guys watch out for newbies to this planet you might be thinking they are helping but in actual fact they ain't. But yes we have come to the end of the video guys just a quick reminder every month I give away a fully customizable controller for either Xbox or PlayStation sent anywhere in the world to be with a chance of winning this controller simply drop a like on the video leave a comment down below make sure you're subscribed to the channel and follow the gleam link at the top of the video description it's fast simple and legit guys but on that note I am out hope the video helped you out and hopefully I will see you on my next one.


This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you listening right now. Thanks so much. Maybe you're James C. Smith, or Miranda Janell, or Justin Zellers, or our new patron Barry, who I'm pretty sure isn't really new, but they told me he's new. So welcome, Barry. On this episode of DTNS, longtime VR skeptic Allison Sheridan tells us why she's finally on board, thanks to the Apple Vision Pro. Plus, CNET tells everyone when it will and will not use AI to write its content and an effort to stop hard drives from going to waste. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 6th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Straffolino. And this is Allison Sheridan of the PodFeed Podcast. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Hey, did you hear password manager? One password finally launched its public beta PASCII support? Whoo-hoo! Yay! I know a lot of you were waiting for that. All right, let's see what else is new in the Quick Hits. After filing a lawsuit against Binance on Monday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, friends call it the SEC, continued its crypto crackdown filing a lawsuit against Coinbase in the southern district of New York. This lawsuit alleges the crypto exchange acted as an unregistered broker across its trading platforms and wallets seems to be becoming a theme here. The SEC is also suing over Coinbase's program that let customers earn a return for participating in proof of stake blockchains, arguing that investors had no protection from loss in those accounts. In a similar move, the Alabama Securities Commission alleged that Coinbase's staking reward system violates Alabama's security laws. Coinbase now has 28 days to show why it should not be ordered to cease and desist from selling unregistered securities in Alabama. Microsoft agreed to pay the U.S. Federal Trade Commission $20 million to settle charges it violated the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act or COPPA if you're into the whole brevity thing. The FTC alleged that from 2015 to 2020, Microsoft violated COPPA by collecting phone numbers and advertising consent from children setting up an account before it asked them to have a parent finish the setup process. It also allegedly failed to delete the collected information if the parent didn't get around to finishing the setup process, holding onto that data a big no-no. Microsoft has already updated its account creation process to ask for birth date first, so get around that, and then will resolve its data retention policies to keep in line with COPPA. Gigabyte issued a firmware update to resolve that security issue with its motherboards. We told you about that last week, researchers at Eclipseum found Gigabyte's firmware updates lacked proper authentication mechanisms and were downloaded over unencrypted connections, which resulted in the possibility, the potential for man in the middle attacks that could put a backdoor on a system. Gigabyte says the update added verification checks for any firmware updates and that it now uses encrypted HTTPS connections when connecting to a server to download an update. Linda Yackerino tweeted, it happened first day in the books. It's a pretty clear signal she started her new role as Twitter CEO unless she got a new gig over the last four weeks. Elon Musk said on May 11th that Yackerino would start in the role in about six weeks, so it's looking like she started work about two weeks early. Ah, she's not the Yackerino on time. She's the Yackerino early. When Apple releases a new operating system, there are always a few devices that it considers too old, too old to begin the training for the new operating system. Apple doesn't stop providing security updates for those older devices, but they don't get the current OS. So time for the roll call of devices that can't get the next generation of Apple's OS coming this autumn. iPhone 8, 8 plus iPhone 10, 5th gen iPad, first gen 12.9 inch iPad Pro, 2017, 2018 iMac, 2017 MacBook Pro, and the MacBook, the just MacBook. Good news for watch owners though, anything that is running WatchOS 9 will be able to run WatchOS 10. And good news for everybody, apparently Apple is granting everyone access to the developer beta of its iOS, macOS, and WatchOS 17 updates. Just go look at your settings. But of course, installer beware, that is a developer beta. The actual public beta was not supposed to come until July. And who knows, Apple may have pulled that back by the time you hear this, I don't know. Can I throw in one quick yay for the fact that the the iPad mini 5th generation did not get dropped? It's still there. Hey, good for the iPad mini. It survived. It's too fast. They couldn't catch it. All right, let's get to the CNET publication of guidelines, how it will use AI in its stories. If you are unaware, last November, CNET started publishing articles with staff bylines that when you clicked on the staff byline would say this article was generated using automation technology. Futurism wrote a story about the practice on January 11th. A whole backlash ensued. CNET changed how they displayed the disclaimer. Then they said they were going to stop using the AI stuff. Well, now CNET has posted a memo called How We Will Use Artificial Intelligence at CNET. The tool it uses is called Ramp, which is a name for Responsible AI Machine Partner. I would have called it. No, I wouldn't. I see why they dropped the AI out. Never mind. All right. Here's what they said in their post. CNET will not use machine generated images or video as of now, unless they're doing a story about them, then they'll use them as examples, of course, but they're not going to make their own graphics using mid-journey or anything like that. Product reviews and testing will all be done by humans just as it was before. Here's the big one. No story will be written entirely by a machine. They are saying parts of stories may be written by a machine. They gave some examples. They might use tools that sort and analyze data so they can go through larger amounts of data than a human could. Pricing, availability. They talked about doing some geo-location to make that stuff work for you in your location, show you just pricing and availability and stuff like that to create outlines for stories that would suggest where a story would go, analyzing existing text to just kind of give recommendations and things that a writer could use or not, and to generate explanatory material that then would be edited and fact checked, et cetera. How does that make you feel, Allison, to quote Blade Runner? Well, I actually really like this. I think this is just kind of a maturing of how we look at these tools. And what I've become aware of is there's a lot of people who have really good ideas, and they can express them perhaps verbally, but they're not actually great writers. And so the ability to use these tools to help you develop even in your own style to develop what it is you want to say, using AI, I think that's actually a really valuable thing. So instead of having a clumsily written article by someone who actually knows what they're talking about, this can be a better combination. Jill from the Northwoods did a great piece on the Nocella cast with a blog article about it where she does her podcast on the Small Steps podcast. She talks very articulately and has these great podcasts, but she's not a good writer. So she had the AI just create the blog post for her, did use whisper to do the transcript, but then she goes through it by hand. She goes through it and checks it and makes sure it's saying what she wants it to say. And then it creates the opening little blurb for the beginning of before the blog. And it does it really, really well for her. And she's obviously very, very hands on with it. But it was that perfect combination where somebody who speaks well maybe does it right. Well, it can be a good combination. And I think there's nothing wrong with a company like CNET doing something like that as well. As long as like it says it's human interaction with it, I think. Yeah, I really hope the emphasis here then is if you're going to be doing this and part of this was it was like, this will allow us to cover more things, right? If we're not spending human hours doing things like pricing and availability, like doing, like if we can just very quickly have like spec comparisons and stuff like that, that'll allow our writers to be doing this. But I really hope this does is empower its editors and hopefully this leads to them continuing to employ like top tier editorial talent because that's what really puts the onus on here, right? Is to not just to make sure that your facts are in order, but to add that element, that human element of style and of readability and that kind of stuff beyond just this, you know, just the mechanical nature of writing. But like my problem, I guess, with this is like all of this has a loophole that's, you know, that's about the size of Wisconsin that they can drive through because they can update this and they don't have to publish the blog. Okay, that's why I think this is horrible. AP, Bloomberg, Buzzfeed have all been doing machine generated content and haven't had the problem seen it has seen it has these problems because they lost people's trust with the way they were using it. They were using it for SEO optimization. They had a but they had 70 articles about half of them had factual errors. This is not a series of guidelines that says here's what you can expect. This is a series of promises of like, Hey, we might use it for stuff like this, but we promise not to be bad. Frankly, it doesn't I don't care if they use machine tools. All I care is everything was fact checked. Everything was edited. If you used a machine and in part of the generation of it, great. And that I think that all I need is those two things. And they did say that in here. But frankly, this is more of a marketing post than it is a series of journalistic integrity ethics statements. And that's what bothers me about it. I guess I was wrong. I feel terrible now, Tom. No, no, no, that's just me. You don't have to feel terrible. If you still feel good about this, I'm glad. Keep your editors great and it will be great. All right. Well, when you save something to cloud storage, whether that's your AI generated article or anything else, it most likely eventually gets saved to a common old hard drive. Despite increasing drive density and complex technologies like compression and deduplication, data centers still need to use thousands and thousands of these drives to store all of your precious data. Most of the time when they reach an end of warranty, they're just pulled out. Even if they're fully functional, it's not worth them to keep running. They'll just pull them out, put a fresh one in there. Most data centers hire outside firms to destroy these drives and the reason data security concerns, it has sensitive data on it. You don't want that falling into the wrong hands. Well, the BBC's Sean McManus wrote a piece about the circular drive initiative or CDI, which is trying to reduce this e-waste. Well, data security is often cited as the reason for not reusing drives. As Rich just said, CDI Secretary John Michael Hans notes that this is often an overly aggressive risk management strategy. However, Hans notes that IEEE published standards for sanitizing storage last year that provides the way to make drives unreadable without wholesale destruction. Yeah, so I'm fascinated with this. Usually we're always on the side of security, right? Like, yes, trust no one, get your risk as close to zero as possible. Here's a downside of that. If you get your risk as close to zero as possible, it's wasteful and it may be unnecessary. You may be overdoing it. The IEEE stuff that Allison just referred to involved clearing the data. That's where the data is deleted, but you can still recover it, especially if you're only deleting the tables.  Purging would be making it not possible to get the data. Either you do a lot of overwrites, 10 or 15 overwrites, or you just delete the encryption key. If the drives are encrypted to begin with, you delete the encryption key. And then if they're properly encrypted, they're gobbledygook and nobody can read them. That to me is the best one. And then the other one is destruction, obviously. If you shred them, sometimes you can still recover bits and pieces, burning them or melting them are really the only way to make sure that nobody's going to get anything off that drive. Ceramic and ball-peen hammer does a real good job, but maybe that's just like shredding. Yeah, it's like shredding though. If there's a little bit of it, they might be able to recover something. Again, when we're talking about getting as close to zero risk as possible, I feel like that encryption key is the solution here. Delete the encryption key and then send that drive off to be wiped and reused. These drives are still very useful. Even when you get past actually reusing the drives, there's heavy metals inside these drives, so if you want to be able to get to that too. Even if you want to melt the platter in a mechanical drive, you could recover a lot of other elements and things that could be reused out of that. That's a great point. And there's a difference here also between risk management or risk avoidance versus security. Because security is all about compromises. There's usually not like a 100% secured, 100% insecure option. It's an entire spectrum of things of being like, here is what is likely to affect me. Here is what is worth our time to investment. Whereas risk management is something on your accounting table that you are accounting for that you can insure against and stuff like that. So that is the difference in how this is being treated. Because I'm sure if you talk to a lot of security professionals, they would, with the right controls in place, obviously you want to make sure that there is a process of handling all this using a trusted vendor or something like that. But there is not a security reason strictly speaking that the vast majority of these can't, maybe in very sensitive industries, defense or something like that. Maybe that would be called for. You're going to have potentially targeted nation states that are going after that. Like you said, Tom, when a disk is shredded, if they want a very specific piece of that platter, that could still have some value to it. But from a security standpoint, the actual risk of these is going down. In fact, we've seen much more security risk from routers getting out that haven't been wiped, that have entire network maps with credentials and stuff like that on them. Those aren't getting destroyed. Those just get sold on eBay. And if people missed it, the reason this is a problem is because a data center doesn't want to use a drive that's out of warranty. The drive may last 15 years past its warranty. But once it's out of its five-year warranty, the data center is like, well, I'm not going to get made whole if that fails. So I'm not going to use it anymore. And then the question becomes, what do you do with it after that? And if it's still a perfectly good hard drive with lots of life left into it, Backblaze says that drive failure rates for these drives after 60 months in service range from 0.41% up to 5.27%. But for some non-critical uses, that's even tolerable. Yeah. And in a lot of cases with these refurbished drives, those are coming with warranties from that company anyway. So as an individual, one, you are not putting the same amount of strain. I mean, if you're putting this in your NAS, maybe you are putting it under a ton of strain. But for a lot of consumer use cases where you're writing to it in bursts, not constantly for surveillance or NAS work or something like that, you are not putting nearly the strain on a mechanical hard drive that you would be if you were a hyperscale data center or something like that too. Yeah. So circular drive initiative is doing a good thing here, which is providing some pressure to do the right thing. Because I get where if there's no benefit to reusing the drive, destroying it, it fulfills your risk management strategy and keeps your security level close to zero risk, I get why you would do it. So there needs to be a little push from the other end to say like, Hey, but you don't need to do that. Let's give you some motivation there. Folks, if you have thoughts about this, maybe you work in a data center and you're like, Hey, but there's one other thing you need to consider. Let us know in our Discord. You can join that by linking to a Patreon account. Just go sign up at patreon.com slash D T N S. Hey, did you hear there was an Apple announcement yesterday? Really? Yeah. It was mostly about MacBooks from what I understand, but they also announced this there were some desktops too. Yeah, but they also announced this Vision Pro mixed reality headset. Did you hear about this? Yeah. Well, the first round of journalists have now reported on their impressions of the headset after a quick test drive overseen by Apple. They didn't get to take the thing home yet. The overall reaction seems to be it is a solid piece of hardware and Apple has made great strides in the engineering. Eli Patel over at the Verge had a pretty representative evaluation. He says Apple seems to have solved some of the trickiest hardware interaction problems with VR headsets, motion control, latency, things like that. A lot of the things it does are no different than what the Quest does, but this does them very well. It has not answered what the Vision Pro is for yet. None of these people who took it for a test drive had any more insights on that. The Verges Tom Warren actually wondered what makes it a pro at all given that most of Apple's examples showed home use and consumption and pro is usually for business use and creation. Further clouding the picture is the news that the Verge reports Apple just acquired a company called Mira. Mira makes AR headsets for the US military as well as the Mario Kart ride at Nintendo World if you've done that. So I don't know if this means Apple's gonna make some specialty hardware for amusement parks and armies. I have no idea. Allison, we know what the headset is now. We got a fair idea of what it can do. You have been very skeptical about VR. Do you want this? So my skepticism about VR specifically as opposed to AR has been that I don't see what problems it solves. And what I saw yesterday to me solved a lot of problems and more in the AR space than the VR space. And I don't need it to be perfect. I don't need the headset to be light. I don't need it to be perfect vision, the sound. All of those things are technical problems that will work their way out. What I've been having my issue with is why. Why are we so excited about this? What I saw yesterday though was a combination of things that like you said there's pieces of this that have been in other other headsets. Probably the single biggest thing I was excited about was being able to sit down, plug it into my Mac where by the way you don't need to use the battery pack because you're plugged into the Mac and gets power there. And all of a sudden I've got a 75 inch monitor or I've got spaces open. So I've got two giant displays in front of me and I've got the space that I've always wanted. Everybody wants a bigger display, but they're very expensive. And of course this costs a fortune, but let's let's set price aside for that.  The fact that they did these demos in somebody's living room, that doesn't matter at all. They were doing real work. They were doing presentations. They were doing FaceTime videos or Zoom calls, that sort of thing with the headset. And those are businessy things. I mean we do it for fun too. But I felt like all of these pieces started to come together that were more of solving real problems. Now like I said, I don't need it to be light. I don't need it to be perfect. Technically it did need to be perfect. I am dubious of my ability and anyone else's ability to look directly at say the notes icon floating in space in front of me and then tap my fingers just once, not twice, to open it and have it move out into a separate window. I heard a lot of people, I think you guys said it on the show yesterday, was, oh well, Apple will do this really well. But how many times have your fingers kind of double tapped? That is one of the things I addressed in his review, which is like, yeah, he's like, that worked really well. It worked better than any other demo he has seen, where he could have his finger down on the sides and click them. And Apple's hardware still noticed it, knew it was a click. And the predictiveness of where you're looking and it knowing what you meant. One of the things he said he audibly gasped about was that he started talking to a person and it knew he was looking and talking at that person and made them appear. Because that was a question Steve and I were having was, was how would you be switching back and forth between being able to see people in real life? Yeah, one of my complaints about the headsets is you're isolating yourself from your family. If you're home alone in your own house and nobody else is around, that's great or you're on an airplane and you don't want to be with any other people. But how does it work when you're with other people? And that that's why it is important to have that high resolution screen and that low latency pass through because it allows you to just see the world around you normally. Because Allison, what you are describing is like the dream of the hollow lens. Like, I mean, I remember the first time I saw that demo, I remember I was I was working at a desk job and I was in an office and I was and I had two terrible low res monitors and all I could think of when I saw that hollow lens demo, I was like, yes, I can have these two giant virtual monitors. This makes perfect sense. We can if we're all wearing these, then we can have like shared displays that we can all see and all interact with. And this is the dream of that where it's like, okay, they figured like someone figured out, okay, here's how we can do a very immersive field of view. We'll like just go so overkill on the resolution that even though you're looking at a subset of that 4k panel, it probably works out to about 1080p. That's good enough for for like a lot of of those use cases. But it's like that to me, this is why this feels almost like this almost feels like the first gen Apple watch where it was like, okay, we figured out the platform like we figured out. We're figuring out like the paradigms with which we are going to interact with this new product. We kind of don't know how the software is going to work out. Here's like I message from your Mac in a little virtual window. That to me is not convincing. But I also know in gen three, there's going to be a totally they're going to revamp that concept totally when they like figure out the the sort like the software elements of that. But like, you know, the like this is like the tapping and stuff like that being very reliable. I am not surprised that Apple has that figured out. It kind of reflects what we've heard from Mark German and others of Apple saying like, we don't have the killer app. But we like Apple knows how to make a good consumer product that other than Siri, that works reliably. Yeah, and I think you're right nailing it on the head. And that's why I don't I'm saying I don't even care about the hardware details all that much. It's it's the vision of what it can do and how it can do that. But do you need $3,500 of machine to do what you're talking about? Like it if you're just plugging it into a MacBook, you don't need to have all of that hardware that's running apps and everything. So that's just the one piece that I talked about that excited me. It's a lot more than that. Obviously, it's okay, but you're also excited about some of the other stuff. Oh, yeah, all of the things that it can do the home theater.  And that's that's obvious. That's worth the $3,500. But I really again, I want to set aside the $3,500 that that's going to work itself out the the hardware details, they're going to get better over time. And they have been getting better and better. And they're not, you know, maybe they're not perfect yet. I did want to say one hardware thing Lauren Good did a review of her experience with it. And she said when she took the headset off, her face felt cool, which is a huge thing, not sweaty. However, she said her face was very tired. And I think that's something, you know, that as the goggles evolve into something lighter and easier and and maybe this new company that they bought that does the heads up displays for the for the military might help with that. But those things can all those can all work themselves out is they have a vision of things that wasn't I'm going to play games. And that's it or I'm going to do exercise. And that's it. In fact, it wasn't even about running around the room. They're not the first one to show using a headset as a monitor. Facebook meta meta did that too. Yeah, sure. It's all the pieces together. Yeah. A couple of couple of notes here to add before we we move off of this in case you didn't hear it because they weren't in the in the announcement yesterday, the Zeiss lens for corrective vision will be sold separately. So on top of your $3,500, if you want to have those corrective lenses in there, you're going to have to buy those separately. And when you want to plug it into power, you plug the battery pack into a USB C adapter into the power. So when when Allison wants to plug it into a Mac, that that's how that works. All right. Well, one of the notable things not mentioned though, by Apple in its Vision Pro announcement was the metaverse, the old metaverse. Well, Bandai Namco walks where Apple fears to tread. The toy company announced the Tamagotchi Uni, its latest virtual pet gadget. The device looks like the Tamagotchi you're probably thinking of. And then it connect to Wi-Fi, letting owners play together in various online venues called the Tomaverse. And in case that's too subtle, Bandai Namco said it's the metaverse of the Tamagotchi world. While these devices connect online, there are no direct player-to-player chat options. So you're it's not like a chat client or anything like that. The Uni also includes a wristband, so you can wear it as a conversation starter and presumably as a watch. It's available for $60 shipping July 15th. See, now this is why you listen to the Daily Tech News show because everybody else is missing the lead story here, right? Because they're off talking about Apple. This is the stuff we need to know. Finally arrived. And Tamagotchi is the one. I just want to configure Wi-Fi settings on the Tamagotchi screen. That sounds like a double life. People are very excited about the fact that this has Wi-Fi. I looked at some subreddits and the fact that it's got Wi-Fi in it is the big revelation. And if you don't know, Tamagotchi kind of had a comeback in 2004, I think, and it's been going strong ever since. So yeah, it's not just for the 90s anymore. Tamagotchi Uni. But when do we get a Tamagotchi young? I don't know. Let's check out the mail. Well, on-device security is much better for privacy, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. With all of Apple's talk about processing data on-device, that's kind of their whole thing. Technomanche, aka Marquet from Nova, put forth a couple of examples where on-device means less convenient. He cites Google's now playing feature. That can identify songs around you and that keeps a record of that. Mark writes, I discovered that there is no method of transferring this data from device to device. I was hoping this was resolved by the time I upgraded to the Pixel 7. No luck. Now I have two pixels, a 3A and a 5A, with almost two years each of now playing data. That's not recoverable. And then he was also talking about Google Wallet on-device cards, and Mark's local metro system requires the cards to be tied to a device. But Mark says, unfortunately, when my Pixel 5A screen died, there was no way to disassociate that card from that device. Basically, the local transit authority support team told him that he would need to add a new card to a new device, transfer the ballot to the new card, and then disable the old card. So the old security versus convenience, very much on display there. Sorry, Technomanche. Neither one of these are disastrous, but it does show that security, again, two times in this episode, security does cause there to be other problems. There is a balance there. I feel like with the transit authority, that's like if you lose your card, you're going to have to transfer the balance. It's essentially what happened when the 5A screen died. I mean, I hope their Starbucks card transferred. I hope that was okay. Well, the rewards. Let's forget the money. The stars. Yeah, that's all kept in the cloud insecurely though. That won't get hacked in five minutes anyway. Don't worry about it. Big thanks to Allison Sheridan for being here as always, Allison. What you got going on these days?   But yes. It's amazing now. Well, this afternoon, I have scheduled to have basically what is possibly the interview of a lifetime on Chitchat Across the Pond, but I'm not going to tell you who it's with. I've been trying to arrange this for a year and a half, and it's supposed to happen today at five o'clock. It should be published today. If it doesn't, you're just going to hear the sounds of sobbing. But if I can pull this off, this is going to be amazing. So keep an eye out for my podcast, Chitchat Across the Pond Lite, which will possibly have an amazing interview today. We expect an award-winning episode. I can't wait. I hope so. Patrons stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. We're going to be talking about Apple news coming for the New York Times, where it lives, crossword puzzles. Apple, what are you doing? Remember, though, you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. And if you desire to find out more, you can do so at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We shall return tomorrow with Scott Johnson. See you then.


Hello, and welcome to this video. My name is Ricardo, and today we're going to talk about the OpenShiftServer logic, which is the new feature that we have on the OpenShift serverless for Red Hat. So for this quick demo, I will introduce you for the project, what we have, the features of the upcoming component that we have and why you should care about workflows in general. So the first thing that you have to do is to download Visual Studio Code and this extension, the CodeG2 serverless workflow register that will enable you to create your workflows and deploy them as an application on Kubernetes cluster or OpenShift, of course. The first thing after downloading Visual Studio Code and the editor would be also to have to download and install in your machine Java, Maven, and also the KN CLI and Quarkus CLI command line interfaces. So in this machine, I already have Quarkus installed. Also we have KN command line installed, Cubicodo, and Maven as well. So I will let all the resources and links and how to install this on the description of this video. Okay, so the first thing after setting up your environment and have the editor set up, you should create your first project, your first workflow so you can, in order to create your workflow, deploy it on the cloud. So the first thing, using the KN workflow command, I can create my project, which I call my first OpenShift serverless logic. So this project will be created for me. Oh, all right, have it. So let me first remove it. All right, so let's create again. So yeah, like I was saying, you create your first project by using KN workflow create and a meaningful name for your project. After that, the only thing that you have to do is to use the Visual Studio Code and open this project. So my project here, I created under documents, my first OpenShift serverless logic. And if you're familiar with Quarkus, you see that it is just a regular plain Quarkus project, but there is no Java code nor anything like that. The only thing that you have to care, it is the workflow file that we created under source main and resources folder. So the bootstrap CLI would just create a blank workflow that can work in here, as you can see. But yeah, I have a more interesting one that we can use as an example, so you can start playing around with it.  So first of all, this workflow language, it is an open source specification. And under the CNS CNCF umbrella, it calls CNCF serverless workflow specification. So it's meant to be used by serverless infrastructures to define workflow constructs. And with that, you can actually create your functions, define functions, define events, orchestrate services, orchestrate functions, everything under the Knative or OpenShift serverless platform. So everything that you have deployed on your cluster, you can, in a sense, orchestrate and play around with it using these constructs and using these workflows. So since you have the editor installed in your VS Codec IDE, you can easily play around with it. So as you see, on-site copy and paste, on-site pasted my workflow here. The workflow will generate this nice view here that you can follow around. And there is a few constructs in here. I will let the commentation in the description of the video, so you can take a look at the docs and see how that looks like. But it is pretty easy to understand. So let's take a look at the states. So we have the first one that we call a sweet state. That is basically, you have to choose your path, either if it is a language I selected was English or Spanish. Then depending on the condition or the result of this conditional, I go through a different node here. So I can go with the great in English state, if it is English language, or I can go into the great in Spanish state, if it is a Spanish state. At the end, I will concatenate this, the hello world and we will finish up and wrap up my workflow. So let me just change this to the Boolean value. So this language here, it is JQ. So it is a pretty popular language, expression language that you can use to manipulate the JSON data that you have within your workflow. So basically, serverless logic will work with JSON in its sense. So you have to push a JSON content to the workflow using HTTP or cloud event on the OpenShift serverless platform in the form of JSON data. So your JSON data is running within the workflow. So you can play around with it and select anything, do a few transformations in your data using JQ. It is pretty powerful language. So let's try to take a look into it and see how that works. In my terminal, I have here my project. So I'm in the root of my project and I'm going to use the Quark CLI to bootstrap the project and see how that would look like on my machine. So let's try to build that first. It can take a few seconds to wrap up since it is the first time that I'm doing this. We bootstrap the project.  When you type Quark's Dev in the CLI, there's a few features and services that Quark will create in order to have more meaningful experience for your development cycle while you're in local. So yeah, let's try to access the application now. It should be available in the default, normally, usually the default port that we have, right? That is localhost88. So when every OpenSheepService logic project will have a swagger interface available. So once we create the project, you can see that my endpoint is named after my workflow, like JSON grid here and you can see in here the ID of my workflow with JSON grid. So I have this interface that I keep playing around and we can try it out this application. So what I have it is like the input of my workflow that is expecting the language as you can see and the name, right? So let's put my name here and I can easily just execute in here and I will create a new instance of the workflow and we should have a reply with my information and the grid in here. So as you can see, something is really weird, right? We have the greeting attribute here but no name, nothing like that. So what can be happened? Let's take a look. What we have is that once we finish the workflow, when we start the workflow, the workflow will just go here, choose the path since I chose English, go with English and then grid person and we'll execute this function here, what we call grid function and this grid function is just a sees out type of operation meaning that I'm just, you know, printing in the console the information that I have here, the expression that I have here, that is the greeting and the name attribute and as you can see here in the console, we have the message printed in the console. So it is not like the experience that I wanted to have, right? So let's try to play around a little bit with this and see what we can accomplish. So one of the things that we have in the workflow, it is the ability to do some sort of manipulation in the data that I have. So let's go to this grid person state, there is an operation state and I will add here the state data filter attribute. As you can see there is to provide me an intelligence that I can play around with it and also as I receive the information, my workflow goes here into this state.  So this state will output something here, you know, we will output as the expression that I'm going to add here without the runtime to do. So in this expression what I want to do is concatenate my greeting and my name. So I have right here, it is basically the same operation, the same expression that I have here.  So you see, I don't need to be there again, I don't need to do anything. I just do the change that I need to do in my editor and I click on execute. So Quarkus will take every file that I've changed in my project and will do the change for me. And it will be with only the things that I've changed in my project. As you can see, the result of the workflow data, it is now the right greeting. So that's how we do. So let's say I want Spanish instead of English, so that's how that looks like. It will look like the message now it is. So look at this, the JSON workflow. So it is like a different message based on the language that I have here. So I stretch to something even better. What about adding a new condition in here? So instead of only English and Spanish, I'm going to do Portuguese as well.  So let me go and use Portuguese instead. So let me copy and paste would be way easier by Portuguese. Yeah, way better, instead of just clicking there. So I have English, Spanish and Portuguese now as options. And then instead of transitioning to greeting Spanish, I will transition to greeting in Portuguese. So as I have greeting Portuguese, I have to have a state that transitions to greeting Portuguese. So I have English in Spanish and I will also have greeting in Portuguese. That can be, I know how to type the same sentence in Portuguese as well. It is like this, hola, JSON workflow. Save my file and I will do the same thing again. Execute. Quarkus will just be with the new file that I've just changed it. And here's my reply with Spanish because I didn't change my language. Let's try now. Yeah, it works. So if I change to something that doesn't exist, what happens in this case is that I go for the default condition. As you can see here in green from chosen language, I go to grade in English because it is my default transition. Or if I wanted to go further and make it, I don't know, maybe a little more. You know, either for my users instead of typing the entire name, I just use the language code. So same thing, I change, I save. Of course I need to change the here as well. My request, I do the request again. And reply is over here. Nice. All right, so we have everything and we've finished our work in the local machine.  I wrap up, finish my work. And now I wish to deploy this application on Kubernetes. Or on OpenShift, or any kind of Kubernetes flavor really. But for the OpenShift StriveLogic, we're going to use in my local environment, I'm going to use Minicube just to evaluate if I am doing everything correctly and it works. Okay, native. So I'm going to access my internal hash string here. And I'm going to use code to workflow instead of create. Now I'm going to use build instead. So, sorry. Okay.  Dev.local means that I'm pushing the image to my local registry so I can, you know, I don't need to use any kind of external resource to push my image. That would just work. So let's build that. So the CLI will just take all the project information that I have here. The information about the image, the information about the project, and we'll create an image and push that to my internal registry of my Minicube. So, okay, we're waiting for a couple minutes. Okay, 35 seconds only. But I forgot to add one thing, actually. There is a, this file here, the application properties that you can do a lot of things with that and configure your application the way you want and do more advanced use case. In this case, I'm going to do it is just to add the option to add that nice interface of swagger also in production. That means that that interface is by default. It is only added in Quarkus Dev mode. But in this case, I'm going to add here just to have the option to play around with the interface also in the cluster. So let me build that in. Hopefully we now have the layers and we'll take less than 35 or not. Oh, yeah, this is the nice feature you can just spend here and the workflow will just rearrange together. If you're new visualization depending on the resolution of your monitor or anything like that. All right, we have the image and we can take a look into it. Yeah, it is here. Just create it. All right, the next thing now that we have to do is to see if we have a namespace, a proper namespace to deploy our application. So I'm going to create one.  I'm going to call it demo. All right. So I'm going to set the namespace to demo. So it would be easier for me to deploy things and get my pods and everything. I don't have pods. As you can see, let's use KN to try to see if we have any service deployed. No, we don't have any service. So let's use KN to deploy our workflow. So the common is pretty simple, like KN workflow deploy. It will take your image, your project that you just built and push it and deploy it directly. Into the KN, into my namespace. So let's try to take a look to see if we have, yeah, we have, it is provisioning. Let's see. Well, it is already here. So if I click in here in this address, in this endpoint, I should be redirected to my swagger interface. But now in the cluster. So what I'm going to do now is try to access the application right now in the, in the cluster. And if you go to terminal when you try to see if you have any pods. Let's see there. It is running as a Knet service deployment. So if I do the same thing, like what we are trying to do now, let's try to do another, you know, request, but now using language Portuguese. Let's try name here. Name in Ricardo and execute it. Yeah, it's working. But now working on Kubernetes. So that's all for this video today. I want to show really how you can get you started with your first workflow, how you can deploy it on Knative. And I will leave in the description everything that you need to set up your environment and to understand this workflow DSO, but it's really, really simple. Really using intelligence of the editor and the visualization tooling that we have here. Everything would be much, much easier for you to understand and to create your own workflows. I intend to record more videos, more advanced videos and teach you how you can actually call an external service or an event or anything, you know, using for a use case, more complex use case as well. All right. I hope you enjoyed the video. Like and subscribe. See you. Bye-bye.


Hi, it's Bridget. Welcome to Above Life Channel. The purpose here is to inspire your spirit and to fill you up with hope. In this week's Weekly Channel we have, we are going to be talking to Freddie Mercury and Jim Hutton. Now Jim was a partner with Freddie for the last seven years of his life. They were in a relationship together and he lived with him. So we are going to have a conversation with hopefully the two of them together today. So welcome Jim and Freddie. How does it feel to be together right now? Because I know in other videos when I've talked to you and done some channeling with you that you're not really together right now in the afterlife. Can you guys talk about that? I mean how does that feel? Freddie says that it feels, I think it feels weird for you, for those of you who will be fans and who will want to know. Which I understand, he says, I understand the needing to know that part if we're together or not, but he says I don't know how it feels for Jim, but it feels just quite natural to me. And Jim says, yes, I agree. I agree. There's not any anger or hurt feelings or any of that sort that some of you may think that I was angry at Freddie or that I felt betrayed or discarded. And none of that's true, none of that's true. I mean there's a natural part of our relationship dissolving that, yes it was quite hurt, but that was my own grief and my own feelings of loss. Not as in the public eye as much as of course Freddie himself or as Mary either and the bandmates and the Queen, but I'd much rather prefer a more quieter life. But being human you do have emotions and feelings, but those things are easily resolved when you shed the body and become spirit once again. It's nice not to be sick. It's really nice not to be sick. Jim, that's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Now I understand that you wrote a book after Freddie died. I saw that I think on one of the interview things that or comments might have been a comment here. We have a playlist for Freddie Mercury channeling. If you are watching above life channel, make sure you check out the playlist for Freddie Mercury. But Jim, I understand you wrote a book. Is that true? Yes. Yes. And it was about your life with Freddie. He says my life was Freddie. Yes. Yes. And he says there was a healing process for me. I needed some time to process things and to get some perspective and let some things take shape. And I wasn't quite ready to do things on my own again. It had been a good chunk of my life. Almost a decade I spent with Freddie Mercury and to go from being with Freddie it's life after Freddie is not easy. It's quite different and much more as Freddie would say boring. And then Freddie says dull life without me so dull. He says unimaginative. And I see Freddie with a cat on his lap. So Jim, did you like cats? I'm going to ask you that. He says you have to like cats if you're going to be around Freddie. That's a simple rule that is definitely understood. You can't just tolerate the cats. You have to love the cats to be around Freddie. He says, all right. And so and he said he shows me I think he may have had one or two that were his own or he had two cats of his own or and I don't know if it was before they weren't were together or after Freddie's death that there were two cats that I see with Jim. Gray and white it looks like one that has a lot of white but I might have a little bit of gray and then there's another one. I see somebody. Okay, so there's is there a cat named Sheba. Do you guys know is there a cat named Sheba because I say Sheba Sheba Sheba. I think it's Sheba. It might be Sheva. Sheva or Sheva Sheva Sheva. Not sure but I see that Jim and just mentioned that and then So, okay, so the two of you. All right. So how would you describe your relationship in the afterlife now since I know that I've channeled you and you haven't really felt together connected. What's there is there a reason for that or what's the deal because a lot of times we think that when we die, we go into the afterlife and we're united with our family and our loved ones and all that. So why aren't you guys together if you were in a relationship and a committed relationship and a love who you guys loved each other. And Freddie says it's not like that. It's not like that it's not the same and it's hard to it's hard to define this but in a way that people could understand but we have our paths have crossed here and we have been interwoven to some degree but we're very much individuals and there's no and then he's Jim steps up and says there's no karma between us. There's no debt that needs to be paid. There's nothing owed. There's respect and he says, you know, kindness. There's an understanding here and so and that's as simple as that. So Freddie, did you love Jim? Would you say would you in love with Jim? And then Jim says he loved the idea of me having someone here and around I think is is more what to Freddie's liking. What do you think Freddie? I think that's accurate. I never wanted to be alone. I never wanted to be alone but Jim was such a wonderful man and such a wonderful companion and confidant. It was quite lovely. He's very domestic. He's a very good caregiver and he says I mean that in the highest regard and the best compliment. It kind of feels like you guys it kind of feels like Jim maybe grounded Freddie a little bit is how it feels. So in the movie I know that the movie Bohemian Rhapsody which was a loosely based on the life of Freddie Mercury and Queen Jim we saw the relationship that the two of you had as depicted in the movie. How accurate was that? Would you say I mean I know the timing of your meeting and all that kind of stuff was probably just interpreted and it wasn't maybe accurate but he says yeah well I think a whole new generation deserves to know Freddie. Like the Freddie we know like I know the generous and impulsive and fun and very sensitive person that he was and I think he's a legend. He's a legend that it's sometimes hard to see legends as people and I think the movie itself gives the opportunity for that and then there's a much more deeper reflection. As for our relationship I don't know how do you think it was how do you feel it was depicted. He looks over at Freddie and they're going to talk about it here let's see. And Freddie says well not much was shared you know like I know he says so it wasn't very accurate you know we did get in fights we got in arguments and things and but mostly it's when you know he didn't see things my way and I like things certain way and I don't like to be told no or what to do and I like to be free to do as I please. And I know that's going to sound rather pompous and quite arrogant of me but freedom is part of my nature. It's how I live. I can't be held to a normal person's standards you know. Some of my they're talking about OK so Freddie says he shows me an image of some of their their his favorite times were just quiet moments just him and Jim just hanging out just you know just being like at home or it kind of looks like a cabin. It looks like another place and it's by the water I see that place and just kind of relaxing like like normal people would do you know and he says kind of like tourists you know like on holiday he said kind of like that he says were we just relaxing you know and there's nothing that has to be done and you're sort of forced into relaxing and Jim says and that's a true statement by Freddie Jim says you would have to force him to take a break he would get into these states where he just could not relax and not settle down and not you know he just didn't live life the way normal people lived life. Everything was different for Freddie and to know him you had to understand that and be an acceptance of that. And so when he actually had the opportunity to have quiet time where he wanted it. Most of the time he did not want it quiet but when he had quiet time it was very special and it was special to be around him then. But he did have dark times too and I'm not sure that I could speak to that or that I should speak to that but maybe Freddie will perhaps. So were there challenging times in your relationship Freddie that you'd like to share with us in an effort to help other people in their own relationships perhaps or to understand in a more broader context your life and the complexities of it. Well yes I do now nowadays you would probably diagnose me with something you know like depression or things. I would not say that I had anxiety or anxiety. Sorry my tongue is getting a little long yeah anxiety but depression. Depression yes yes depression. I would never I would not admit to that but I would say that you know it's funny because before the end of my life I would say that that would be something you could notice about me. But nearing the end of my life you wouldn't see that. You might see some sadness in my eyes recognizing that I could feel my body dying and I think it's a right to be sad in that case. But I never was depressed about dying about knowing I was going to die that did not make me depressed. So many other things I felt depressed about earlier on prior to that time I think it's important for people to know that. And I know that depression is a very real disease and in fact in your times now he's saying Bridget in your times that there are many generations that will know it differently and perhaps be able to get assistance or help in other ways besides self medicating as I and many others have done and continue to do this day. And that's well documented he says. Tim do you have anything in particular that you might want to share about the relationship the three of you had with Mary. Specifically thinking about how after Freddie's death you were we actually like kicked out of the house or what can you talk to us about that a little bit and again I don't want to gossip I'm not interested in gossiping and I'm not asking you these questions because of the sensationalism of that. I'm asking you these questions because of the relationship that the two of you you and Freddie Mercury had and people have asked to hear from you and to talk to you and I think that that's that that you would provide really valuable insight. So can you talk about that the relationship with the three of you you know Mary and you and Freddie he says Mary was always the third person in the bed. He says to be quite direct it I knew I could never hold a candle to her the relationship that Mary and Freddie have is very very special and to this day and you can see it if Mary speaks about Freddie you can see the love. And I can't compete with that I never expected to and to be honest with you I didn't expect my relationship with Freddie Mercury to last as long as it did. Would it have lasted longer if he would have lived longer. I can't say he says I think so I would like to believe so but I don't know I don't know. Nowadays if you you can be married you know it's legal to be married. Well at least in the United States it's legal to be married at least for right now who knows politics and all that stuff ridiculous politics the out of the bedroom politics. Feel free to comment on that.  Jim Jim Jim Jim all right focusing focusing Jim he kind of laughs he says no I rather like that he says I rather like that I like that about you he says I can see why Freddie likes you. Yes the truth should be told he said the truth should be told yes it should be. So were you jealous of Mary or were you angry at Mary what he says it's hard not to be jealous of her but she's she's rather a nice person he says it's really hard to not like her.  You can't have it no one could ever have it it's not possible because because Mary is his love and he made that quite clear and I've always known that. Did you see did you feel like second best I mean to be quite frank with you did you feel that way. No no not usually he says not usually Freddie never made me feel like second best. He never he never compared us or or made me feel like that at all he always made me feel welcome he always made me feel appreciated. Freddie's Mercury is very loving I would like people to know that very loving very loving and he's quite loyal to his friends as well. And so Jim were you his friend or his lover I was both I was both but I wasn't surprised when Freddie left the house and to marry I wasn't surprised by that. I mean he was generous with me as well he was generous with me and I think that her wanting me to leave was simply because it was painful quite honestly for her. I think it was very painful for her to know that he wasn't there anymore and it kind of felt like I was in Freddie's house and it was hard for her I think to move on with me there. Okay okay that's understandable that's understandable. So how did you feel about her did she make you leave yet well he says well it sure certainly looks like that doesn't it from the outside looks like that and I would have to say yes. And so it wasn't your choice it was not my choice but it wasn't my house it wasn't my it was my place that I lived with Freddie and being there without him would be kind of like a it would kind of be like a museum or something you know it's everything about it was Freddie Mercury. So I don't know I don't know how it could have been different maybe she could have waited I would have appreciated that she could have waited a bit of time before and I didn't make it easy for her either I did because I wasn't ready to let go I wasn't ready to go. So I didn't make it easier because if he's making me feel like there was a court thing situation like I don't know if the courts were involved or there was lawsuits involved and he says he says yes there were some some complications he says two things and they really don't want to discuss that I don't think that that will help anyone. Okay but you're a spirit so spirit talks about anything or everything so from a spiritual level he says oh he says but you notice the difference don't you right now. We are talking to Freddie and I are both talking to you primarily me talking to you in a way that the human viewers can understand and will recognize us. And then through this they will be able to understand perhaps through this conversation some pieces of their own lives that they have yet to address or deal with or maybe give them some permission for their own healing which is is the point of all of this isn't it. Is that the point Jim? Yes healing he says healing. Healing I feel like he's like this kind of guy that would like start a mission in Africa or a nonprofit or go overseas and you know do I feel like he kind of global it's kind of the energy I feel and wanting to expand on outreach and that kind of a thing. That's how it feels to me you guys. Healing is part of his purpose is that your purpose in the afterlife indeed it is he says indeed it is is that was that part of the reason why you came into Freddie Mercury's life yes indeed it is yes it is yes indeed indeed it is indeed it is yes. Part of Freddie Mercury's healing perhaps was helping him to feel loved as he let go of life. He says that's quite beautiful that's how it feels to me the energy that the two of you it's just a supportive energy you guys it's very supportive. Again I'm talking to Jim Hutton and Freddie Mercury about the relationship and the human life that they had and so you guys can understand it as well and and appreciate the relationships that you have in your own life right now. He says you know thank you he says thank you for having having me and letting me be a voice says I appreciate that you know so often I'm mixed in with others and I he says I appreciate it I appreciate having a voice and to bring a message of healing that's that is the point that's the purpose of all of this. So Jim are you reincarnated yes I am I've been on many missions he says yes right now currently yes I am currently okay so he's been in and in and in and I understand that you were HIV positive too as well yes I lived with AIDS for many years. And I feel like you died of something else was it like a cancer or something different he said something complete he said yes something different he said yes yes I want to say oh I could be wrong about this I'm like seven years is what he says. So I know they were together for seven years but did he die seven years after Freddie or in a year with a seven in it or a seventh month. Seventh month will be what July seventh year after Mercury's death will be 1998 1998. No I think he lived longer than that what was in 1998 that's interesting or seventh month so it could be July seven years seven years I don't think that's just a reflection of the relationship I think that means something else seven. Interesting if you guys know as viewers we please post what you think it might be in the comments below I appreciate that very very much. I appreciate your engagement and your value-added comments are always welcome here on the above life channel. Thank you so much Jim and Freddie for being here in this weekly channeling video I hope you guys have enjoyed it. I hope it's inspired your spirit a bit given you some hope because this is your life this is your life so live it just live it. Thank you for watching.


The Cardinal Police Command's mission to rescue all kidnapped victims through intelligence-led policing and rigorous patrol seems to be working with the rescue of three victims. On 12 July 2021, the operatives of the command alongside civilian JTF on routine rescue patrol around the forest of Xiong'en Gaya Village of Chikung, LGA of Cardinal State, stumbled on three kidnapped victims, roaming the bush extremely exhausted and weak. The victims were safely evacuated and rushed to police clinic Kaduna, where they are currently being resuscitated and will be subsequently handed over to their immediate families. During the course of investigation, the three victims were identified as Zahara Dean Ibrahim Nurah Nuhu that were kidnapped recently along Kaduna Kachia Road and Ibrahim Aniya, one of the students of Bethel Baptist Secondary School, Kujama, that were kidnapped the previous week. The command promise is to be relentless in ensuring that more victims were rescued within the shortest possible time. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Why won't big corporations do what's right for America unless the government practically bribes them? And why is the government so reluctant to regulate them? Prior to the 1980s, the US government demanded that corporations act in the public interest. For example, the Clean Air Act of 1970 stopped companies from polluting our air by regulating them. Fast forward to 2022 when the biggest piece of legislation aimed at combating the climate crisis allocates billions of dollars in subsidies to clean energy producers. Notice the difference? Both are important steps to combating climate change, but they illustrate the nation's shift from regulating businesses to subsidizing them. It's a trend that's characterized every recent administration. The CHIPS Act, another major initiative of the Biden administration, shelled out 52 billion dollars in subsidies to semiconductor firms. Donald Trump's Operation Warp Speed delivered over $10 billion in subsidies to COVID vaccine manufacturers. Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act subsidized the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. George W. Bush and Obama bailed out Wall Street following the 2008 economic crash while providing about $80 billion in rescue funds for GM and Chrysler. And federal government has been subsidizing big oil and gas companies for decades to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Before the Reagan era, it was usually the case that America regulated rather than subsidized big business to ensure the well-being of the American public. The Great Depression and FDR's administration created an alphabet soup of regulatory agencies, the SEC, FCC, FHA, and so on, that regulated businesses. Corporations were required to produce public goods or avoid public bans like a financial meltdown as conditions for staying in business. If this regulatory alternative seems far-fetched today, that's because of how far we've come from a regulatory state to a subsidy state. It's becoming politically difficult, if not impossible, for government to demand that corporations do anything. The government still regulates businesses, of course, but one of the biggest things it does is subsidize them. Just look at the growth of government subsidies to businesses over the past half century. The reason for this shift is corporations now have more political clout than ever before. Industries that spend the most on lobbying and campaign contributions have benefited greatly from this shift from regulation to subsidy. Now, subsidies aren't inherently bad. Important technological advances have been made because of government funding, but subsidies are a problem when few, if any, conditions are attached, so there's no guarantee that benefits reach the American people. What good is subsidizing the healthcare industry when millions of Americans have medical debts and can't afford insurance? What good are subsidies for oil companies when they price gouge at the pump and destroy the planet? What good are subsidies for profitable semiconductor manufacturers when they're global companies with no allegiance to America? We're left with a system where costs are socialized, profits are privatized. Now, fixing this might seem daunting, but we're not powerless. Here's what we can do to make sure our government actually works for the people, not just the powerful. First, make all subsidies conditional so that any company getting money from government must clearly specify what it will be spent on so we can ensure the funds actually help the public. Second, ban stock buybacks so companies can't use the subsidies to pump up their profits at stock prices. Third, empower regulatory agencies to do the jobs they once did, forcing companies to act in the public interest. Finally, we need campaign finance reform to get big corporate money out of politics. Large American corporations shouldn't need government subsidies to do what's right for America. It's time for our leaders in Washington to get this message and reverse this disturbing trend.