Welcome to the show, it's me, John Park. It's time for John Park's workshop here on Adafruit Industries Global Transmission Networks and Broadcasting System. And I want to say thanks for joining us over in the chats. I see we've got some people over in our YouTube chat. Hello, hello, as well as the, what's this thing called, Discord. If you want to join the Discord chat, and that's the place to be, especially if you're somewhere over on, I don't know, Twitch or Facebook or somewhere like that where there does not seem to be as much chat going on. There are probably people watching there, but the chat is probably happening here the most on our Discord. You can head on over to Adafruit.it slash Discord and just look for the live broadcast chat channel. And that's where these good people are. Hello. So, let's see, what else is happening here today? We've got a coupon code for you for today, if you want to save a little money on some stuff from the Adafruit store. I've also got a product pick of the week recap to show you. I've got a brand spanking new Circuit Python Parsec to share. A little project update on the next iteration of cat meowsic synthesizer MIDI keyboard action. This was the first one. Who knows how deep this series will go, but this was the first one and the guide is out for that one now. So, you can go check out the guide on adding your own line out. I've got two of them on here, I got ambitious, I actually wanted some photos of using the 3.5 millimeter stereo out, so I added that, but there was my original quarter inch jack. So the guide is out if you want to go and do that. By the way, a thought I had could be kind of a fun mod. I don't think I'll do this one, but a fun mod on these would be get yourself a $30 guitar pedal. One of these Donner brand or Amazon branded, you know, Amazon makes guitar pedals. They're clones of a few common pedals. I think they have an overdrive and a fuzz and a distortion. They probably get a little more expensive as you get into reverb and things, but fuzz pedals are really cheap to make, so integrate one end of this. That might be kind of fun. They just come in, they're those little slim kind of pedals. It might be fun to try to just add fuzz right to the thing and add your buttons and knobs right there in an LED. Integrated effects. Why not? I'm a cat piano. But I'm done with that one for now, but we'll be looking at the MIDI, a little update on the MIDI meowsic that I'm adding the accelerometer to the ice cream cone. Spoiler alert. I got the ice cream cone open. It was not easy. You probably won't want to do it, but we'll look at it anyway. And I'll also give you a little intro and preview to an upcoming project, which is going to be a hexagonal beehive keypad kind of thing using low-profile kale chalk switches. So I've got some stuff to show you on that. And hopefully some PCBs coming in on Monday to start playing around with it. So we'll talk about that. Let's get into it. First of all, this is the Adafruit store. Just go to Afruit.com. It's the first page. It'll come up. You can head on over there and look for fun, interesting stuff to get. And if you want to get yourself a nice discount, then just type in this coupon code on the way out. It is ToastyToes. Toasty-toes. And that will get you 10% off. That's good until midnight tonight, East Coast time. And that is my coupon code because I have a nice heated floor mat to put on my concrete, poured concrete floor here that keeps my toes warm. Even here in sunny California. It was raining earlier today. It's sunny again. The slab is so cold. Have I told you about this? I got, like, Wayne's Rubber heated floor mats. And it's about a 20 or a 30-degree difference. I checked with, like, a little no-contact thermometer. It just warms it up just in that one little spot. And no matter what HVAC you've got going, you're never going to warm up these concrete garage floors. So my toes were always cold. Now they are less cold. So Toasty-toes is the coupon code that will save you 10% today in the store. Let's see. What else have we got going on? The product pick of the week show. I do that one on Tuesdays. And I like to take a product, often a new product, in the store and give you a nice half-off, usually, half-off discount while I do a little 15-minute song and dance on it and show you how it works. Do a little demo. This week's product pick was a really cool one. And boy, this one sold out quick. This was this Reverse TFT Feather, the ESP32 S2. Let me give you a little recap. It is the ESP32 S2 Reverse TFT Feather. This is the 240 MHz Tensilica processor on here. We've got 4 megs of flash. We've got 2 megs of PS RAM. This can do Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, but this can do Wi-Fi, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. It has the native USB. It has a USB-C on it, which I love. One of the nicest features of it is this panel mount option that you've got. And you can see there's the 4 little mounting holes, so I've mounted it into a little case that I made. I cut this out of acrylic on a laser cutter, and it gives me a kind of a neat little way to very quickly add an ESP32 S2 Feather to your ORAC project and mount it all in one. Here you can see it's just sort of a temporary solution here and the jacks aren't connected up to anything. It's sort of a proof of concept. It is the ESP32 S2 Reverse TFT Feather. It just won't stop. By the way, I do want to say apologies for complaining about cold toes here in California because I know there are some areas in the country and the world that are slightly colder than Los Angeles right now, so my apologies to anyone. Greg Billings says you're in Michigan, huh? I bet you need to keep your toes warm in Michigan. Yeesh. I hope you're all doing okay with your ice storms and whatnot. Let's see what else. How about let's dive into Circuit Python Parsec. All right. Let's get set up here. I'm just going to get my coding window up. All right. For today's Circuit Python Parsec, I wanted to talk about unpacking tuples. First of all, what's a tuple? A tuple is essentially a kind of list in Circuit Python and it is a list that can, it's a variable essentially that can contain multiple entries in it.  In this case, I have a magnetometer. It has this command I can ask for the, what is it? Ls, the list to mdl.magnetic. If you ask for, hey, what's the value of that? What it returns is this tuple. So it contains multiple values. Sometimes I just want one of them. Let's say I want to, I have a little magnet here. I want to just be measuring the value on the y-axis of this thing. I don't need to get a bunch of different values to fuse. I just want to know one value. So I want to ask for, hey, not dot magnetic. That's what the library tells me to say, but I want to say I just need to pluck one of those values out of there. I need to unpack this tuple and just get one of those values. So the way I'm doing it right now, you can see I'm saying magnetometer reading is equal to this list to mdl.magnetic. That's returning a tuple with a length of three. So I can say, hey, what's the length of this tuple? It tells me it's a length of three. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and comment that out. One way to ask for these individually would be this. I could say, okay, I'm going to make a variable called magx and say, give me the magnetometer reading index zero and another in index one and a third one in index two. But in this case, I can cast them all at the same time, which is really convenient. Then you can do things with the different values that come back. So if you've ever seen this kind of notation before, it's actually three variables. Magx, magy, magz, those could be any variable names, is equal to, and then I say whatever that tuple is. So that tuple returns those three values and casts them into the three variables. So now if I go ahead and rerun this code, let's see, I've broken something. Let me just ask for it right here. There we go. Okay, so now you can see I'm casting the magx, magy, and magz as the three values that come back from unpacking this tuple, which is the list to mdl.magnetic. Now I'm just dealing with one of those by name. I'm saying, hey, go ahead and just print the magy. And so now you can see if I take my magnet and start hovering that over this little magnetometer here. I can reverse that and get those values to increase and decrease as I move that around. So that is how you can unpack a tuple inside of CircuitPython. And that is your CircuitPython parsec. All right, so, and hey, hello, I just saw a couple of other people join up in the chat. Hey, DJ Devon3, good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. Okay, so let's see. Before I forget, because sometimes I mean to do these multiple times in the show, I forget. I will say again, our coupon code today, if you want to get 10% off, actually I know DJ Devon3 is a good proponent of saying, hey, you can find these coupon codes throughout the week. So don't panic if you miss one. Here's the one for today for my show. It's 10% off. Just type in toasty-toes, toasty-toes, and that'll get you 10% off over in the store. The actually the next thing I want to do is actually take a quick look at the new guide. So I mentioned the Miowsic Cat Piano. So this guide came out and it's actually a pretty quick and easy one because we're not doing any microcontroller stuff. There's no code, two-page guide. So I've just got a little image of the finished guy there running the Miowsic into a guitar pedal and into an amp. And then I list out the parts that you need. You've got options here, by the way. I used, as you saw before, both a quarter-inch mono jack as well as an eighth-inch or 3.5-millimeter stereo jack. In mine, the stereo jack is helpful if you're going out to little, like, stereo Bluetooth speakers that have an aux in that kind of thing. Those will only come out of one speaker if you use a mono jack, like the second one I have listed here. So internally, I just shorted the tip and sleeve, or rather the tip and ring, essentially left and right connections inside of that. It's got three tabs on it, so one's ground and the other two are sharing my audio output from the Miowsic. The rest of the parts there, you can pick those up. Make a decision between those two or get yourself a quarter-inch jack. We don't sell any of those, so you can go find one. I actually have a link here to, I think, in the build page, which is the only other page, I have a link to the place where I got both the foot switch, pedal switch that I'm using, stomp switch, as well as the switch craft, really nice open frame quarter-inch jack. Those are from Love My Switches, which is a nice resource for guitar pedal builders, but also for people doing other electronics stuff. So Guy'd have got a nice little fritzing chart here, diagram here, as well as the schematic, with a little imaginary part there for the Miowsic's audio out, so I could connect it to something. Removal of all 21 screws, you've seen me do this on air before a couple times now, I think, and then identifying the audio out you'll need to find the ground, which there's ground lines in various places, the easiest one I found was the center common pin on off switch on the piano, and then the speaker connection where the audio line goes in is where you'll be splicing in basically the rest of the circuit. There's a few sub-assemblies to build here. I think I pre-made these on the show, so you didn't see me put these together, but I like to make these little assemblies with easy connections until I'm ready to finally solder stuff down. In this case, most of it I just left as these easy connections that actually ended up working out. At one point, I thought I had a little bit of noisey connection, it turned out I had a bad potentiometer, so I actually ditched that one. There was just a pot that somehow had gotten really noisy and crunchy, so I ditched that one, but using the DuPont connectors worked out fine for these connections. And there's a little circuit being put together on our little Mint-Tin perma-proto, nice size board for this type of build. You don't have to use it, you could go sort of dead bug or air-wiring things if you want, but in this case I went and put it on a little perma-proto. Some little indications of how I drilled those out. You can get stepped drill bits or you can just work your way through progressively a couple sizes in soft plastic.  That's fairly big, I think it's like a quarter inch. Something like this, a little tapered reamer is great to have. I don't know where I got this. I've had it for years and I also put a ton of sugrub on it at one point to make it a little, I don't know what I was reaming that required that much force, but it is nice. But these are great. It's essentially I think five or six blades running around this way and you can tape off or just place your finger at the diameter you want to go to and just work your way in. That's actually what I used for most of those holes on there. You've also got choices since we don't carry those stomp switches and those stomp switches are overkill because it's actually three position or rather three poles of dual position. I just put in the guide, one of our typical toggle switches, single pole dual throw. There's the addition of both my quarter inch and then later that 3.5 millimeter. For these potentiometers, let me see if I can grab one. These usually will have a registration tab on them to prevent them from spinning around. Since what you do with the potentiometers turn it, just gripping the shaft with a nut and maybe a couple washers usually isn't enough. You'll see there they have those, let me switch to a down view. Nope. There it is. Boy, this is very, sorry, this is very, very warm exposure or color balance today. There we go. That's a little normal looking. You can see here this little tab on the pot. Sometimes you'll see build instructions and say, oh, just go ahead and snap that off, which is fine in some cases, especially your pot is mounted in something like a PCB, but in this case it's just wires running off of it and so the danger is that the whole thing gets loose pretty easily. So don't snap that off. Just make a hole for it. What I did was I first made the hole for the pot shaft and threading there and then just lined that up, put that into the outside of the case and made a little mark next to this, actually just scored up the paint.  So you don't really want to snap those off if you don't have to. You can see it actually in this image right here, that's the little hole. I don't know if I ever cleaned that up, I think I did. There was a little bit of chipping of the paint when I poked the hole in from the inside out. That's the downside, you will see that little hole, maybe you could paint over that if you wanted to fill it with some putty. And then put that all back together. Hopefully those images will be clear enough for people to make the mod and then I got a little demo there. So that's the little recap of the learn guide there and I would love to see people do some of their own mods. Like I said, there's more you could do with it, it would be really fun to integrate super cheap effect pedal or two inside of there so the thing has effects built right into the cap piano and then just plug it into whatever output you're using. Alright, let's see. So next up, speaking of cap pianos, so last week I got into adding an accelerometer so that we can adjust either a pitch bend or some other CC value with that little ice cream cone.  The next step is wiring and integrating that accelerometer into the whole retraction mechanism. So over here, oh wow, that is really that camera get bumped or zoomed. It's really missing the top of that. Oh, there it is. Alright, it just got way, that window got very big. Right, one second.  There we go. So first of all, ice cream cone, if we look at, this is the, this is the one from the line out mod one. As you can see, there's a little retraction lock there. This is on a little spring loaded reel like similar to a retractable keys, dog leash, tape measure. So this is on the wire, which has two lines running up to a little microphone in there. And this little microphone is essentially glued shut. There's a dome on the top, and then there's two halves here. So these are not easy to get open. Odds of doing it without just totally ruining it are fairly low. Oh, geez, sorry, I never pushed the fix to the camera positioning. Hold on one second. Hey, there we go. So, yeah, I'm still slightly decapitated. Getting there, zoom that camera out just a little bit. Sorry. That's the wrong way. That's better. Okay. So odds of getting these apart kind of low, what I did was I went in. So this is what it looked like to start with. I first used a little metal sort of spudger tool, both a really thin sort of flexible one, and then a slightly thicker one. You can see these are actually from one of these iFixit kits. I think this is one that Adafruit sells. I have a couple of these in my shops. So I went through here and I could feel that I was essentially breaking the seal of a little bit of glue and paint probably around there. This is a painted bit here. It's actually funny, by the way, now that I've started to get very familiar with these meowsics, if you look online, you'll see a couple of different minor color differences in some of the buttons on different models. And also this cone is painted in some versions. There's all of these little molded details in here. I don't know how well you can see those little molded details in here. You can't see them much, right? In some versions of this, those are painted up in darker colors as well. So anyway, I went through, broke that seal a little bit, then got in there and really carefully, you could see a seam line in the ring here and a little bit in the orange part. I actually went through with a exacto, mounted this thing so it wouldn't slip and I wouldn't cut my hand open, and just very slowly worked my way through getting down in, then I went in with a chisel, just so I could get a little bit of force on that. Eventually, I could tell I had that mostly open, but there were pegs in there that I had to cut, actually cut with the exacto blade. Two of them were on each side, got it open far enough to pull the dome off, then I could see inside. So these two pegs are what got cut. The one on the bottom I didn't have to, I was able to kind of wiggle that one out, so I don't know if these ones were glued in there. I think they were, there was also one little drop of glue there. Anyway, you might ignore this entirely and just forego this, 3D print this thing, drill some holes into it, I don't know, but I did manage to get one open fairly, in fairly good shape. So what was in there? This little microphone, which has a little rubber, like a lastimer, shock casing around it, that was shoved up into the ice cream scoop there like that, and then this little bracket held that in place, so unscrewed that, pulled that out. This ended up breaking this a little bit. This is the cable it was on, so one end here was soldered into the board there, I just desoldered that, pulled that off. The reason this is kind of snapped up here is that there was a nice little strain relief that I was trying to see if I could yank the wire through, but I think it got molded in place, so there's no, so this just kind of popped off when I pulled hard enough. I was hoping to reuse this, maybe I could probably slice this in half and reuse that, which goes at the base here, I believe like this, to give really good, like, way heavy engineering here to keep kids from breaking it, strain relief on the mic wire. So that's kind of a goner, maybe reusable. The mechanism that it winds into, so wire goes through this little cone holder here, this little hole at the bottom of that, so cone is all the way, I've got these backwards, but all the wood ends, so that gets, when it gets retracted, cone will sit there like that. And then this is the spool that the wire gets wound around, has this spring that you would twist a few turns before setting it in place there, and that's what gives it the retraction, pulls that out as you grab it. It stayed pretty intact, so that shouldn't be too bad, and it's got a nice little post molded into the base here that this fits over. There's the little retraction button, lives in there like that, and that pushes against this little hinged release that allows, that's what this is locking against that allows this to fly forward again. And then there's a little cover for the whole thing that'll sit on top of it, one way or another. So what I wanted to do is figure out, could I make a cable that'll work well for my accelerometer. So there's my STEMI QT accelerometer, and it's what the MSA 311. So this is running over I squared C, we've got pins on there, you can solder to, we also have STEMI QT ports on there. So I figured up here in the ice cream cone end of things, I can probably mount this right inside of the cone, just using one screw, it'll stay in there, and that means we'll get a fairly consistent, this isn't gonna be flopping around in there, we'll get a fairly consistent orientation for that, which will be kind of nice, you'll have, you have to find certain pitches for it, but tilting it, we can probably get a consistent orientation. I will probably feed this through and maybe tie a little knot or use a zip tie for some strain relief here, or maybe I'll find a way to reuse this nice little guy here. And then on the other end, what I did was I soldered a STEMI QT, sort of half of a STEMI QT cable, so that can just plug into the board, and that's just nicer when assembling something like this that's gonna get fed through some things to not have to solder it in place. So what I used here was some RJ14 wire, and I've lost the ends to it, but this is essentially two-line telephone cable, so there's a few different specifications for these, there's like, I think the RJ11 is the two-line, RJ9 might be the the handset line, which has actually a smaller connector on it, modular phone connector on it, but this is, I believe the RJ14, someone tell me if I'm wrong, I always get some of these mixed up, but this is meant for two phone lines, essentially, when you had two different lines in your house, it was often running over this, and so this could go from the wall to the phone, and then the phone could have a button for picking line A and line B, so four conductors. Snipped the ends off, turns out this was some really nice stranded copper wire per connection, look at these here, these are some nice stranded copper wire, not that nonsense kind of foily stuff you sometimes find in these not twisted pairs either, so this has the has the potential to work well for I2C. I was a little concerned, this is a pretty long run, this is about three feet, I chopped off here, which is actually longer than I think the microphone started with by maybe a foot, so this is a little excessively long, but I figured, yeah let's just try that, I can cut and re-solder this end pretty easily, and then I'll be able to have, I kind of need a little bit of a longer run because I'm going to be mounting the KV2040 that's doing all of the reading of the keyboard matrix and sending out the MIDI and all that good stuff, that's gonna be mounted up in here where there's a nice space I think, so I needed this extra bit of run, because normally the mic just goes right here, so otherwise that may, we'll see that may spool nicely around this, this is a bit thicker wire, so I could end up being in trouble with that, we'll see once I put that together how that works, but it would be cool, if not I will bail and I'll just have a short little slack run that can come out, I don't necessarily need the the mechanism there, so let's test this out, this is, I was originally running over one of these nice 400 millimeter long, it's the longest ones we have, this could be too long of a run for I2C and then what you can do is start lowering the frequency of the I2C channel, it's a fairly simple command when you're setting up the I2C device to say, hey let's just use this at a lower data rate and then we can get accurate reads again and let me just switch back over to this camera view here, a little down view, oh yeah, somebody's got real big, there we go, put this side there, put this in frame, so what we'll do actually, let's bring up, I'm going to plug this in, should be able to put a little print statement in or just look at a MIDI output viewer and see what kind of info we get, yeah, in fact let's do that, so what I'll do, let me just open up MIDI monitor and I'll add a little window of that here, second, let's see what view can that go in right here, yeah, so let me do a screen capture, always tempting fate to add screens to this while it's running but not good, I've got another one I'm going to add later too also for the keyboard project, so let's be tempting fate here today, let's change that from a monitor to a window, thank you, DJ Devin3 looked it up, it is RJ14 for the four wire four conductor telephone cable, okay, so what you'll see there is the MIDI output of my KB2040, so I'm reading the accelerometer data of this board and then I'm unpacking a tuple and I'm just grabbing one axis of it and then I'm mapping that to be a range of 0 to 127 of these MIDI CC values, so if you look at, I'm going to go ahead and clear, oh that's huge right now but you know I'll leave that huge for a second, so you should see that's living at about 64 and then as I tilt it go down to 0 up to 127, what am I rolling this here, yeah, okay, so let me push this view so you can see both at the same time, so oh man that thing got weird resolution wise, let me try to make the software happier, that's better, okay yeah, so you can see here running over like three feet of telephone cable and it looks good, it looks stable, you can see here if I just rest it, it's just staying at 74, let me try to get it totally flat, there we go, 64, right, so just sitting there on its own, it doesn't seem noisy, it seems responsive, let's see if we can, I'll attempt fate further, let me open up a piece of MIDI software, I'll close that window actually, let me take that off of there, I'll just run Helm, free open source software, let me pick a lead keyboard sound here, monster lead, what does that sound like, okay, that's great, that's good enough for what I'm doing, so getting the long length of cable there, still I squared C was happy enough with this, in this case, not always the case, but worked well, didn't have to change the frequency of the I squared C or any of that stuff, so okay, so Todd's saying you shouldn't see noise on the data from a long I squared C run, just the bus will hang in your sketch will halt, well that's no good, okay, so I will do a lot of testing before I publish this, but if I need to I can drop the frequency of the bus and hopefully prevent that, I think we also may still have, there was a Adafruit product that was a I squared C terminator, which helped with long runs, but it's looking like I won't need that, in fact, let me show you the, just because I'm having fun tempting fate here, I'm going to add this and switch this window over from just being the MIDI data to being the Helm software view, because it has a nice visualizer of the filter that I was adjusting there, so I think it won't update super fast for the broadcast, but if you see that peak, a little mountain peak looking thing, it's actually very responsive here, but the frame rate isn't going to be great in broadcast, so that's what that accelerometer data is being mapped to right there. DG73 said, I think the terminator was for Ethernet, no it was I think just a general purpose I squared C terminator, I demoed it using Ethernet jacks, but you could, I don't think that was a requirement, that was just if you wanted to use a longer cable, you could add that terminator. Another suggestion, Cgrovers says a shielded four conductor USB cable may work as well, yeah that would be a neat one to try, there's some nice thin flexi ones that might be more flexible than this this PVC coated phone cable here. All right, yeah so that's that's what's going on with that, I just wanted to give you an update on where that build is going, that'll be the last thing I'm adding I promise, so I've got reading the keys, reading all the buttons except for the volume and tempo buttons that are built on the bottom, I may look and see if I can scrape some traces and and steal those as well. I've got a 3.5 millimeter TRS MIDI output and then we can also do USB, yeah over in our discord by the way thanks Todd posted there's a link to that active terminator extender thing I was talking about and with that I did I think a 50 foot run of 100 foot run of ethernet cable with cat5 cable or something like that and had had success with iSquare C over a very very very long run out of spec run of wire. Let's see oh hey pixel over in YouTube says if Adafur could do free shipping instead of 10% off that would be awesome, we do actually have some free shipping at I think we have some free things at different order sizes I think these are the ones that are still in effect if you head over to let's go to the main site here I can find you where'd you go is that you if you go to Adafruit.com slash free not fee free you'll see the deals and more so $99 or more in your order you get a free permit proto half size breadboard for $149 or more you get a kb2040 $200 or more you get the free shipping if you're in the US and then $299 or more you get a free bbc micro bit v2 these stacks you'll get all of them if you get the top one and that there's a question here about it how many do I get you get them all so if you spend $200 or more and you're in the continental us you can get the free us ups ground shipping and the kb2040 and the permit proto breadboard and I believe you can still stack this 10% off I don't know where the freebies happened before or after the the coupon honestly so that's maybe maybe that's answered in the in the questions in here but I'm not sure about that one so let's see so next up I wanted to talk about upcoming project and for that I want to show you I'll go back to the down shooter here and so key switches right we're all familiar with these nice cherry mx style these are actually kale box whites that I have here but these are keyboard key switches mechanical key switches we have linear we have clicky we have uh tactile and that size of key switch is great for certain things it's also kind of honking huge for other things if you're trying to do low profile uh keyboard things low profile sequence or things button input numpad calculator what have you um so there are a couple different manufacturers who make some pretty nice low profile key switches and one that I really like that we have here is this kale chalk choc like chocolate I think I don't know why they call it that but there you go um so kale chalk let me first of all I'm gonna try to focus this and boost that exposure a lot there we go try to focus that a little better too that's good so you can see here it has some similarities and some differences uh first of all just the footprint of it is pretty similar pretty similar size which means you can have a very similar typing experience on it as far as the size of the keycaps and the distance between keys which is great so this is good for making something that sort of lives uh in a in a place somewhere between a sort of laptop keyboard and a full size mechanical keyboard uh however the profile of it is quite a bit lower so you can see these both sit there on the board that's the base of them and the chalk casing if I press the switches down uh is I don't know roughly half the height something like that maybe a little smaller even uh of the cherry mx um and so we've carried these in the store for a little while they look pretty similar on the bottom too right but they are not compatible so you can see here the the pins are in different places uh there are some registration posts that I think are standard on chalk that are maybe optional on cherry mx or not even there at all so you get these three registration posts on the chalk there so you've got to account for those and then we just have essentially a completely different placement of the switch pins there so up until now we have not had a nice easy way to use these so I went and built a footprint for these in fritzing so that I can make some PCBs I can share the footprint for people who want to make their own PCBs we'll probably end up making some some stuff with these eventually but I wanted to try to build a little hexagonal uh sort of beehive themed keypad little seven key keypad so let me show you a I'm going to bring up fritzing here and I'll have to add a window so please bear with me for a second and I'll show you what the footprint kind of what that entails making the footprint uh a little bit I'm not going to go into great detail here as well as putting together a PCB using that so I will load up this fritzing document here and that's probably a good size so let me add a new screen capture and I'll show you there was an inspiration for this which was a um hexagonal key switch that was part of a keyboard as well as a like a device uh that looks really cool to have hex shaped keypads so I'll show you that too let me just fix this window that's become a black hole that's fritzing window there we go B board got a little smaller my view a little smaller here off to the side okay so you can see there's there's a few steps involved here so first of all Lamora asked me if I could make this with underlit neopixels underneath the keys and if you look again actually for a moment at the key switch you'll see there's a window molded into the bottom so that's designed to have a little underlit neopixel coming through and then shining under your keycap uh similar to you can see on this cherry mx there's also a little window so that's a kind of a standard thing in these um by the way you'll also notice it's a completely different stem so you cannot use cherry mx style keycaps that have that little sort of cross shape in them they instead have this little robot face two prong electrical outlet looking tooth thing uh designed so it's completely different different style of uh of keycap that'll fit onto that uh so you can see one of the one of the things involved here was I made a little breadboard icon uh sorry a bunch of this is not routed here so it's kind of a mess of wires uh but so so in fritzing you have these three views you've got your breadboard view uh you've got your schematic view and you have the pcb view so I've made a little breadboard view and I have these two sort of coming off to the side so you can see what you would connect to uh then I have a zoom in on just one of these I have a schematic these by the way I'm going to fix these up there's a really great uh fritzing forum user named van epp who I asked some questions sent the part and they made some suggestions and fixes to to get things onto the grid I had not built uh the schematic parts on the grid and and did some other weird things so I'll hopefully be using or modifying that that version he sent to to fix mine up uh and then there's the pcb view of this so what I'm going to do let me turn off pretty much everything and then try to just turn on my parts here okay so we're part and let's see and silkscreen top okay that's a little easier to see uh so this part now has a few things going on uh these are measured uh based off of the data sheet uh they have you can kind of ignore this green and now blue sort of connection here that's not real that's just an artifact of of fritzing not liking my having a through-hole part and a smd part kind of combined into one uh but these three yellow circles in the middle those are going to be drill holes that will just allow those plastic pegs to set on the circle up here is the hole for the reverse mount neopixel which even though it is rectangular uh it's a pain in the neck to make a cutout in a part that is rectangular it's also more likely to get weird when it gets sent off to the board house so I think I've made a hole it's four millimeter hole I think it's big enough to clear everything and still allow the part to be soldered down uh and then what you're not seeing is the pads which are actually on the bottom um so if I look at that's adding the bottom layer so those are the four pads for the neopixel so the neopixel has data in data out uh current voltage in and ground uh so I have those four parts on the bottom side of the board and then I have these three hole through hole um pads for the legs of the switch on the top and bottom uh side of the board since they're through hole uh so that's what the part looks like in uh in close up this is the idea for the board here um sorry zooming is being very slow and fritzing uh so let me turn on let's see I'll leave that off uh the traces I needed a couple of um vias to get underneath some overlaps uh and there's the ground fill copper layer on the bottom but essentially it's going to look like that I have uh I sent off to jlcpcb to get a set of five of these made and they're supposed to come on monday so cross fingers they'll work if anyone sees some obvious problems let me know but I'll also be testing these out on monday um dj devon three s does this design use the led as the diode for a diode matrix it does not know I'm just using um I have a cutie pie uh mounted on the bottom that's what these holes are here and I put it at like a 30 degree angle to kind of match the hexagon um it has enough i o for me to just do direct seven seven gpio switches and then one data line for the neopixels that'll be underneath those there so no diode matrix necessary for this one but you could you could do a diode matrix and make a huge board out of these um so the other thing I want to show you is the incredibly cool keycaps that were the inspiration for the whole thing let me um let me grab one other window here and show you how this whole thing started here open up no here uh so this is a midi controller uh the same builder also makes a macro pad similar to what I want to make uh they made it with I think 10 nine switches um and kind of this hive shape almost uh so what I wanted to do is just make a seven key like you saw my design there so seven keys sitting inside of nesting nicely inside of each other but these keycaps are gorgeous so uh look you get this nice uh beautiful design I'll have you can see actually there's underlit neopixels under those and I'm guessing that's they're going to look pretty similar uh in mind because of where where they lie on the chalk switch there uh this builder also created uh their their name is sol s dash o l is their their online handle uh they're a designer and creative technologist living in Milan um they made these keycaps uh had them manufactured and for sale um I got a couple packs of them they turned out to be like the last two packs I could find anywhere on the internet but uh noe is going to actually already has modeled a 3d model uh it's very similar that'll work for anyone who wants to print their own uh or do them in different colors or can't find these that they'll probably come back in stock but um so that's going to be uh oh is that a 12 key thank you for for counting properly I didn't I didn't look at it closely um so yeah so mine you can just imagine a little seven key section a little hexagonal section of that uh is is what I'll be building and then you could use it for anything you could use it for um the idea behind this one I'm pretty sure is to do isomorphic keyboard which is a term in um music keyboards where there is a very different relationship between notes than the typical semitones of a of a piano keyboard uh instead you can do things like have um only sort of complementary notes next to each other and and uh you know minor versions heading this way and major versions heading that way I don't know a lot about them but but I've I've played around with like iPad versions of them over the years so I think that's what the idea for for this designer was was to do a midi controller that has this sort of unusual non piano style layout uh mine we can kind of do anything with it'll be usb hid and hid midi uh possible with it um so we're we're uh excited to to be getting that going once I get uh boards in I'll put those together probably show you the a build of them if they work or if I can bodge them enough for them to work next week uh and then uh kind of flush out a bit more of a design and uh the Ruiz brothers are going to work on keycaps and and some case stuff for it as well so we should have a cool collaboration on these uh these hex key keypads hex pads um that actually have seven but anyway uh that's uh that's what that's looking like right there so far um I may share some tips on the fritzing side of things I can't remember if I've shown part making I I did a guy actually let's go and look let's go let's go learn I I need to I need to remind myself did I show how I think I just show how to make a pcb um let's see what was that project called the pico midi modal midi keyboard whoa not found let me reload that I don't believe you modal midi it's gone why is it gone if you search a name click a name go to view all and let's see if this is a alternate route to finding the thing there it is I can see it please be there yay it's there um right where is it I I sure thought I showed how to build this and I think you have a different guide I really swear I had a huge section on oh wait is this it now I have to go through this guy sorry ah 21 key pico keyboard it was similar but not the same okay here's the one uh so making a custom pcb with fritzing so if you look up this one diy pico mechanical keyboard this will show you how to get um yeah I I had built a part but I didn't show you how to build the part did I yeah we're just importing the part here yeah so I may if people are interested I may do a little write up on building that part or another part from scratch it is a complicated part I may simplify it and just do the switch adding the um led maybe a bad idea I'm my I'm still out on that because because there is no one part you can buy that has that integrated so it may be better for me to just put them at a proper offset in or in their origins so that you can snap them both to a a course grid and they'll be in the right spot for each other that may be the better way to go because um fritzing really doesn't like me trying to have that bottom pads and top part based on how it's built um but it's kind of cool because the fritzing part is essentially just an svg and you can build it based on naming and hierarchies of the svg file which you can do an inkscape or an illustrator or just by straight editing the svg file and depending on naming and hierarchy a lot of the work gets done for you by fritzing there's also a parts editor in fritzing that works really well for certain things it kind of fell apart once I tried to get very complicated with this this mashed up part but uh yeah let me know if people are interested in seeing that I know kikad is very popular eagle cad but uh you can also do these things in fritzing which is kind of cool all right so that is gonna cover it that is uh that is what i'm up to thanks everyone for stopping by one last time i'll say if you want to get 10 off in the store today type in toasty toes toasty dash toes uh in the in the coupon code on your way out you get 10 off on your order all right thank you everyone for hanging out for a different industries i'm john park this has been john park's workshop and look there's lars


Hey everyone want to take a few minutes to update you on all of our closed trades for the month of November Another good month for navigation traders total profit $3,837 with an average profit per trade The Lula over $213 all 18 trades this month were winners for a hundred percent winning percentage We traded six different strategies including short strangles iron condors our newest strategy Iron duck the reverse iron duck weekly double calendars and some earnings related iron ducks Now if you want to follow along on these trades on these alerts our membership is open to new members currently Just go to navigation trading comm slash pro dash member and you can check that out We are doing a 14-day trial for just a dollar you get full access To all of our courses as well as the alerts and you can try that out for just a buck to see if it's a good fit for you Let's jump over to our performance page and check out where we're at your date. So if you click on the Running total here. You'll see for the year total closed trades $22,182 with an 83.7 percent win rate We've closed 141 trades for 2019 with an average profit per trade of $157 And like I said that winning percentage of 83.7 percent So continues to be a great year on the same page if you scroll down Here's all of the trades for November and then if you keep going we post all the trades winners and losers Going all the way back to when we first started posting in June of 2017 if we take a look at our trades for November you can see we're trading these with anywhere from one to five Contracts so pretty minimal contract size so you can trade these with a small account all the way up to a very large account I had one member message me and said he made over $52,000 in November So you can really scale this at any size account if we jump into your membership area Here's what it looks like you'll see you have all the different strategy courses So if you wanted to go through and look at all the different Strategy courses including short strangles iron condors all the step-by-step video courses on how we trade these strategies are In your membership area and then if you want to check out the alerts that are posted Here's the closed trades which we're talking about today And so let's just go through these a little bit to show you what happened in November Starting with the first so our first closed trade was in Shopify ticker SHOP We did an earnings iron duck So they released earnings and we held this trade through the earnings announcement So for just a few days booked a small profit of 98 dollars on that trade Only did one contract as you see there next trade another earnings iron duck in Google and booked a small profit of $82 there. That's what we call a beak profit hit that duck right in the beak So just a small profit next trade was a short strangle in oil booked a nice profit of 540 on that one Did a short strangle in 4 slash 6 B Which is the British pound did have to make one adjustment But by staying mechanical booked a nice profit of 250 on that trade in SPX We did an iron duck booked a profit of 110 in Roku We did an earnings iron duck hit that one right in the duck head for a nice profit of $440 in Booking which is booking calm used to be price line did an earnings iron duck there booked a profit of 202 in RUT the Russell 2000 we did a weekly double calendar and Booked a small profit of $45 on that one We were able to squeak out a little bit of a profit with price kind of moving against us on that one IYR did an iron condor booked a nice profit of 212 in XRT We did a short strangle did have to do one adjustment But still booked a profit we're able to manage back to a profit of $78 on that one in Tesla did an iron duck for a hundred sixty dollar profit in RUT came back and did another weekly double calendar booked a nice profit of 255 and SPX did an iron duck for profit of 115 in Amazon had a really nice iron duck for a profit of 575 in Target did a iron duck over earnings booked a profit of 26 squeaked out a little profit on that one in EWZ did a short strangle booked a nice profit of 248 in Tesla came back to Tesla did a reverse iron duck booked a small profit of $81 on that trade and Lastly did another iron duck in Google with a nice profit of 320 Right now is a great time to be trading these strategies and like I said if you want to check it out Just go to any page on our site at navigation trading calm There's a big orange button that says pro membership trial in the upper right hand corner You can click on that and try it out for 14 days for just one dollar December looks to be setting up for some increase in implied volatility So the trading should continue to be excellent And as always if you have any questions send us an email at info at navigation trading calm. See you on the inside


Our next caller is Caroline from Colorado. Hey Caroline, how can we help you? Hi, I recently finished running anabolic and I tried to be in a calorie deficit for the last half of the program. But toward the end my nutrition fell pretty inconsistent. I'm in college so it's kind of hard to stay on track all the time. And right now my goals are more centered on strength and mobility as well as just like figuring out what to do with my nutrition. I have a history of disordered eating so I kind of realized that the whole like cut bulk approach is probably not the best for me. So I guess I just wanted to ask you guys what your advice is for where to go from here in my workouts as well as how to like reign in my nutrition when everything feels all over the place. Very, very, very good question. I'm going to ask you a few more questions Caroline. Just get more information from you. What do you notice when you put a lot of focus on your nutrition? Do you find yourself swinging strongly from end to end?  Yeah, definitely. Okay, so the advice I'm going to give you may sound counter-intuitive but in my experience with situations like yours, I think this might be the best thing. I think you should not focus on your nutrition. Now that doesn't mean you're not going to try to eat healthy and all that kind of stuff.  And when it comes to nutrition, I want you to bring awareness to how the food makes you feel. So try to eat in ways that improve your strength and your health. And that's about all the focus you should place because in a situation like yours, the more you focus on nutrition, the more elusive it's going to get. The more you start to develop this bad relationship with food. Caroline, do you own our intuitive eating guide? I don't. Okay, that's a must. So I'll have Doug ship that over to you. And then my other recommendation because you did say strength and mobility. You could run anabolic again but my recommendation would be to move on to performance which is the natural progression from anabolic which is heavily mobility focused. And there's a lot of unique exercises that a lot of people are not familiar with. So take your mind off of the nutrition stuff, focus more on strength and learning new exercises. And then doing the mobility days on your off strength days and then intuitive eating as the main focus of any sort of nutrition focus at all. I think would serve you really well. Yeah, Caroline, do you think that you're somebody worth taking care of? Absolutely. Okay, that's what I want you to focus on.  When you're taking care of that person, you're not going to be overly strict, but you're also not going to be overly indulgent with them, right? So, you know, like I have kids and sometimes I let them have cookies and but a lot of times I don't because it's not good for them. Sometimes it is good for them to have one. Other times it's not. And that's because I care about them and I take care of them like I care about them. That's the focus I want you to have with your nutrition. I don't want you to focus on calories, macros. Oh my gosh, I ate a cupcake yesterday. Oh, I ate too much today or I didn't eat enough. Putting too much focus on nutrition is probably not a good idea for you right now. Instead, focus on how you feel, taking care of yourself. And then if you need to place your focus on something, focus on your performance in the gym. More often than not, it'll point you in the right direction because it's hard to eat in a way that makes you unhealthy and improve your performance. So if you need to focus on something, focus on performance and that should help. And then of course, taking care of yourself and that should start to direct you in the right way. Okay, awesome. Thank you guys so much. No problem. Yeah, that's the irony of having issues with food is that you think, oh, I have to deal with these food issues. Let me focus on them even more and it makes it way worse. Yeah, I kept thinking because I remember my college experience and I was going to ask her about the dorm life and having to eat at the cafeteria all the time. But then that's going to just reiterate the focus of just trying to scramble and figure this whole nutrition thing out when I think your advice was great in terms of relieving her of that stress. Well, it's so nice that we're getting questions where people are honest enough to admit this. Yes. Because honestly, most of my experience with clients, you don't get that the first encounter. When you first meet clients and they're telling you about their goals, it's very surface. You rarely get somebody to be like, oh, by the way, too, I have a little bit of an eating disorder or a challenge there. They don't even mention that normally. It takes like a year of training someone before they open up. Yes. So it helps us be able to advise better because not knowing any better, I would tell this person, oh, let's start tracking food and let's see where your calories are and start getting them to focus on that. But it's important that for people that are listening, I know we talk a lot about and I talk a lot about how much I think tracking calories and food is so important to learning. But there's always an exception to rule. This is an exception to rule. When you have somebody that has had eating disorders in the past, that could be the worst thing to actually advise them to. Yes. And again, I want to make sure I say this on the podcast very clear. Obviously, none of us are therapists in that field. If you're listening and you're somebody that really has an issue with nutrition in that particular way, the best thing you could do is work with a therapist or counselor who is experienced and qualified in that arena. But again, it is very interesting. It's one of those things. It's like, you know, putting hyper focus on nutrition causes more anxiety and stress around nutrition, which then causes you to do the very things that you're worried about in the first place.    So oftentimes just taking your focus off of that, placing it on something else and then just constantly thinking how can I take care of myself. A lot of people are unaware they have this issue too. Oh yeah. And as they've seen success, you know, just because you track your way, you measure, do these things and you have a streak of six months of getting in great shape doesn't mean this potentially isn't a problem for you also. You know, so I think that's what's tough is a lot of clients that you get are unaware that they even have this on or off the wagon type of issue. They think that's just how that how this process goes. Either I'm focused on a goal and I have a wedding or I have Vegas in a couple months and I'm dialed in and then and or I'm off. And that's a lot of times the problem.


Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you for inviting me on this cold evening to London That's global warming obviously what we are Experiences here Indeed as you have already I Will talk a Bit about economics, unfortunately, I must say That's the bad thing about this lecture. The good thing is I'm not talking about traditional economics, but alternative economics so you will see that there are different approaches and I think these different approaches are extremely important the other bad thing about my lecture is that I Mainly talking about industrialized countries and even my own country Germany a bit That has two reasons one is that The data situation in many developing countries Unfortunately, and the unfortunately is with great emphasis is not very good So that for things that of the kind that I try to show to you It's very difficult to find the data for developing countries or the region. We are mainly here interested in the Oriental and African region that is in particular very difficult to find reasonable data But on the other hand, I think there is a Core of economics that is universally applicable and I try to talk a bit about what is university Universally applicable and what not because there are several things that are not applicable at all the other reason why I'm talking about industrialized countries and Germany is that Germany has gone through a unique experiment in the last 15 years and I would like to quote today's Financial Times About this German experience and then I going to to discuss and analyze this experience a bit So the Financial Times as many newspapers all of the time all of the place all of the globe more or less every day say German German For better or worse many Germans feel that they were duped into supporting the euro partly as a price for German Unification within a unified euro they have justifiable pride in the success of Germans own economic policy of the last two decades First in absorbing the East German wreck and later restoring the whole country's competitiveness So far reaching labor market reforms Does it sound familiar to you labor market reforms? That is what we are preaching what not we are but Some international institutions are preaching to the whole world that you need labor market reforms that you need flexibility of the labor market to Be successful in this in today's world in the globalized economy. This is the title of my Presentation namely, is it possible to have inclusion and participation in a world with flexible labor markets? And the answer will be no But this is not bad. This is good because The only thing we have to do then if the answer is no the only thing we have to add is that we need a new economic theory Not more but not less than a new economic theory at least a macroeconomic theory So this is the topic of what I'm going to Present tonight and I very much hope that it's not too much economics for all of you because you may not be economists and you may have only Marginally be marginally been touched by economics in the past, but nevertheless, don't worry and don't be frustrated It's not not very difficult the most important economic things are quite straightforward and understandable So I very much hope that everybody can benefit from this lecture so First of all what we are talking about this today's world is a very peculiar situation And this is again the industrialized world We have family income expectations in the industrialized world in the three big industrialized regions in this world Japan the Euro area and and the United States And why do am I starting with family income expectations? Well because we have reached for the first time a level of family income expectations that means the expectation of an average family in these regions That is extremely negative for a very long time and we have not only region in one region, but we have it in all the three regions So if you take together the United States the Euro area and Japan and you look at the overall GDP You find a peculiar thing and you find that For these three regions the famous exports everybody's talking about exports and trade Exports do not count very much. They're only eight or nine percent of the overall GDP Investment is very low around 10% So what is the bulk of the GDP of these three regions? Well, it's very simple. It's consumption It's mainly private consumption private consumption accounts for something like 80% And now if you look into the future of these three regions, you see this is up to January at least in Not in January to October last year. So If you look into the future of these three regions, you find that we are in a very specific situation Namely in all these three regions that are waiting so to say for growths to come that are waiting for a new Recovery to come in the next days. So to say everybody's waiting in Is on the financial markets everybody everybody is waiting now for the final signal that the recovery is there in These three regions you find that for the most important component of global of production and and income for private consumption the Signs are extremely bad. They're extremely bad. And why is that? Well, that is for a very simple reason Take the United States. We have a we had a Slowdown not a slowdown, but we had something close to a depression of a sharp recession in the United States In the course of the financial crisis in 2008 What happened during this financial crisis recession? Well as usual in these kind of recessions unemployment went up Unemployment went up in a in a country in a country And that is important to emphasize in a country where wages have not risen for something like well 20 years or 30 years depending a bit on the measure that you take Where the average real wage the median real wage has not risen for 20 for 30 years so we have a situation in the United States where The income expectations have been bad already long before long before the crisis then came the crisis the crisis increased unemployment and what is the solution then What is the way out? So now if you start look at neoclassical Economics, which is still mainstream economics, which is a dominant part of economic theory all over the world in all other International institutions with the one exception or maybe the two exceptions of Angtard and ILO Well, you find that the very simple recipe for overcoming such a Recessionary period in the United States. Well is flexibility of wages But wages are extremely flexible already and wages have never risen. That's the crucial crucial point wages have never risen before Going into the crisis was not a process that was accompanied by rising wages But the other way around it was a process that was accompanied by falling wages the falling wage share Nevertheless unemployment rose Though this fact this simple fact alone shows that something is fundamentally flawed with the Mainstream economic theory because the mainstream economic theory would only allow always only allow Unemployment to rise when wages are rising more than justified But wages have never risen and unemployment is high. So what happens now in the United States? Well, a very simple thing the United States are trapped They are trapped by high unemployment that puts enormous pressure on wages If wages do not rise Consumption will not rise if consumption will not rise growth will never recover At least as people as long as people keep their savings ratios constant What you have seen in the last two quarters in the United States was again a dramatic reduction of savings ratios So despite falling disposable income in the United States We have an increase of consumption But as the savings ratio is again down to three percent or something like that that cannot last forever So they are trapped in a in the so to say self-made trap They they produce this trap by their by their claim to the labor market that the labor market should be flexible And you see even even in this extremely highly flexible US labor market people are trying to to to So to say push out the unions even more although they are hardly existence in many areas so What happened this extremely flexible labor market leads into a situation where the United States cannot get out of the recovery and This is shown in the in the economic policy. So to say desperation that you have there you see Fisker policies anyway blocked for political considerations But if you look at monetary policy monetary policy has done something in the United States that Every reasonable person would have called three years ago something like socialism or communism Because what has the the Federal Reserve done? They have fixed the interest rate that they are asking From the banks for three years in advance This is a planned economy. You see there's no flexibility of prices anymore No flexibility of the interest rate anymore. So they have explicitly explicitly the Federal Reserve was hardly recognized in the rest of the world Unfortunately, but I was sitting close to Ben Bernanke in the last meetings of the IMF in autumn and you could feel his desperation You could feel his desperation about the situation because they did not know what to do anymore So they fixed it for three years in last summer But now they have even extended it to four years four years absolutely fixed nominal short-term interest rates in the United States This is the end of price flexibility And the interesting thing it's it's justified. It's justified because this is my main thesis here What we are talking about if we're talking about successful economies if we're talking about successful development Then we have to talk about inflexible prices Not about flexible prices, but inflexible prices What we need is just the other way around then the mainstream economic theory teaches us And we have to turn we have to create an economy where prices the main prices at least the macroeconomic prices are Rather inflexible, but quantities are flexible What the mainstream teaches us is that quantities are rather rigid, but prices should be flexible So at least for the for the lower income part the low-skill part of the of the population Rate wages so to say never rise so people can be happy if they get jobs by cutting their wages That should be sufficient for any kind of progress But it's not it's not and this shows quite clearly in my view that it cannot be we have gone into This problem some time ago I'm showing two or three charts from the trade and development report 2010 Where we have dealt with that question explicitly the question of labor market flexibility in Developed and developing countries because the paradox is what we have seen in the last Years not years, but decades. We have seen falling wage shares in many countries of the world Despite the fact that unemployment rates are high and getting or getting even higher and the most recent paradox as I've said was after 2008 so But the the crucial analytical thing of this work that we have done in 2010 was in my view this chart Unfortunately, I show it to you for developing countries, but as I said the data are very poor for developing countries But it's more or less It's more or less the same only for the developed countries the the structure the Relationship the correlation is much much clearer because we have consistent data This data shows something that is so to say breaks the neck of mainstream economic theory if you interpret it correctly because it shows that the mantra the idea the ideology that Employment has nothing to do with growth is wrong Because neoclassical economic employment to you would always say well It's not important whether you have 5% growth or 3% growth or no growth at all There's always a wage rate There's always a wage rate in this world if your prices are flexible enough at which you can have full employment There's always a wage rate. So just go for flexibility of wages Flexibilize your labor market Get rid of the unions so that you have individual contracts at best And then you're under in the best of all worlds then you will have no problems with with unemployment anymore This chart shows that it's plainly wrong You have for all the big industrialized countries in this chart. I think we have G7. It was G7 For the big industrialized countries you have the world is just the other way round Then you need growth to stimulate employment even in the United States This chart is absolutely clear and cannot be challenged It's absolutely clear that you need growth to stimulate employment. So it's a never never is wage flexibility sufficient sufficient to stimulate growth and stimulate In in stimulate employment. It's just the other way around if you have too much wage flexibility You will get into the situation in which the United States are now namely that through the falling wages You do not get the stimulus of demand that you need the stimulus from the from the workers demand and from private households Demand that you need to get a growing economy and get catching up in developing countries So this is extremely crucial to take note of and it is supported by another by another very clear Relationship that we have that we find for developed economies this time and for developing economies Exactly the same at least for a selection of developing economies where we have data namely this chart shows that Inflation which is an important constraint for many developing countries and has been the most important focus of economic policy in the so-called washing consensus Times of the last 20 30 years that inflation is not is not a monetary phenomenon That is again, what every good economist believes that inflation is a monetary phenomenon That is what monetarism has taught us over over the decades Milton Friedman and others have taught us that Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. It's always too much money. They said too much money chasing too few goods It's not true. It's not true at all money supply or what they call money supply. There is no such thing as money supply and no Normal economy. There's something like money supply. It's a fiction. It's just an idea. It doesn't exist Central banks fix interest rates and nothing else. So they do not steer in any way the money supply. That's one one One way to to justify this monetary phenomenon of inflation, but it's not not justifiable in principle So there is no money supply. So it's not money that determines inflation, but it's wages and Wages in relation to productivity. This is what this chart shows. Namely Wherever you go, you find that over Every Reasonable term short term medium term long term the inflation rate is determined by unit labor cost and more or less Nothing else in some countries very open economies You have some influence from imports and other things, but normally it's it's unit labor cost that determine inflation But if you meet like unit labor cost determine inflation Then it's absolutely clear that the Keynesian idea holds namely that you cannot by cutting wages you cannot even you cannot even get the The idea of the neoclassical TV going namely that you cut nominal wages and with the cut of nominal wages you get Real wages to fall and then when we rate wages for employment employment will rise It's wrong on two sides. It's wrong on the side of of say three four years you get a reaction of inflation to to wage cuts which Reduces at least significantly reduces the effect on real wages So that real wages are less cut than nominal wages But plus as I said before plus if you take the other effect that I mentioned before This is the so-called Keynes effect. I Allow you at the end to call the other effect the flasberg effect. That's okay So the other effect is that if you have falling real wages if you have falling real wages Then you have immediately falling demand and with this immediate falling demand You never get the kind of effects that the neoclassical theory And visages even if real wages fall but over the medium term We see that real wages do not fall but the only thing that happens is that you get lower lower rate of inflation So these two elements these two elements are absolutely crucial namely you have a Clear relationship between growth and employment as I've shown before you have growth and employment clearly highly correlated and you have Unit labor cost in inflation highly correlated if you put that together in a theory you will see that nothing More or less nothing of the neoclassical Edifice remains it will all collapse. It will all collapse and has to make place For a new theory, but why is it not happening? You may ask the question So why is not happening if it's so evident if it's so evident that these relationships told why are people still talking about money and inflation? Well for a simple reason for ideological reason because if and I have I fought this this the fight about this chart about the Relationship between unit labor cost and inflation in Germany for around 30 40 years. So something like that The other side so to say what what what does the other side do? They do not talk about it. They just ignore it They just ignore it They ignore this relation and continue speaking about Inflation as a monetary phenomenon because they know Once they would discuss that even they would have to acknowledge that there is a strong correlation that you cannot Fight inflation by by monetary policy and that would mean that you kill your own your own ideological Construct that you have built around you over the last 20 30 40 years including all the nice Gifts that you get from lobbyists of that part of the world so So one question remains then only one question remains in principle I cannot go into all of the details of this, but one question remains. So what is the How can then the the German success? The German success in the European Monetary Union that I've mentioned be explained This is the question of the Financial Times of yesterday. So why can a country that has Done exactly what the neoclassical theory asked them to do namely flexibilize their labor markets You may remember some people may remember to Germany five years ago was called the the laggard was the the The weakest country in the whole eurozone. So how can such a country come like Phoenix out of the ashes? and and dominate the whole of Europe in a in a in a short period of something like five years Well, the explanation is very simple But the explanation is exactly the opposite of what people like the leader writer in the Financial Times believe By the way, the only guy who gets it right in the Financial Times is Martin Wolf He took him a long time, but now he gets it right more or less So at least he is able to learn. That's a good thing so But most of the others not so what I want to demonstrate to you that my theory is absolutely right and the other theory is absolutely wrong by by way of the German example, so this is the most critical example for my Theoretical approach namely my own country has has done exactly what was asked for and is now is successful Whereas all the others are not so here's the simple explanation for that What happened? I'm preparing Germany with France and you see what happened Germany after a short while into the European Monetary Union had a quite strange development of the most important Components of of demand namely external demand, which is exports here Exploded so to say whereas domestic demand remained absolutely flat What does it mean? Well, that means on the one hand if you have flat domestic demand That means it shows exactly exactly what I said before Namely when you try to cut wages and that is exactly what Germany did Germany started to cut wages In the mid of the 90s when I came to the government I could interrupt it for a year or so But then I was fired and they went on with this kind of yeah Vice ministers are fired my minister left he could say I'm I'm leaving but I had to be fired So they fired me and then they could go on with this kind of policy. So What happened? They put an enormous pressure on the unions. They put They created what was called a tripartite agreement where the union leaders even agreed that from now on Germany would go for the experiment of cutting wages or having real wages lagging very much behind Productivity increase so up to that point Germany was really an economy where the real wages more or less follow productivity increase which created a normal normal domestic demand from that point on it was dramatically changed and you see Domestic demand in Germany never recovered So with this stagnation of real wages and it was really an absolute stagnation of real wages average real wages in Germany absolutely stagnated we had an absolute stagnation of domestic demand and That exactly proves my point that exactly proves my point Because if if the neoclassical say the substitution effect of neoclassical economics would have been there Then even on the internal demand you would never you would never see a reaction of internal of domestic demand to the wage restraint because because the neoclassical theory says and I had a long fight about this with the German Extremely neoclassical Council of Economic Advisers a couple of years ago and they argued well there can never be a negative demand effect of lagging wages behind productivity because the Negative effect of wages lagging behind productivity would always be fully compensated by the substitution effect Namely by more people being employed And they would have the income So per head the income the real wage would fall or would lag behind But overall the sum of real income would never fall and would never affect domestic demand. That's wrong That's absolutely wrong And this chart shows that it's wrong I show you a chart in a minute where I have tried well just for a sake of illustration What would have happened with domestic demand in Germany if wages would have risen? But the other thing what happened there's another effect that is for sure there You can't go back to Cain's famous I was what was it John John Weeks not better than me what was chapter 19 or so in Cain's the famous chapter about Unemployment and wages you can go back to that chapter. You can go back to Kaletsky or whatever you want. You will always find that all intelligent Cain'sians knew That if under certain external conditions One country cuts its nominal wages or its unit labor costs has lower unit labor costs than the rest of the world It will have for a time being at least a positive effect And what is that positive effect? Well that positive effect is an increasing competitiveness You increase your competitiveness because what you create with your falling wages or your lower increase of unit labor costs I show it in a minute you create so to say a devaluation you create a real a real a Fall of the what economists call the real exchange rate, which is a measure of competitiveness and This happened now under the specific particular conditions of the European Monitor Union The particular conditions of the European Monitor Union where that there is no Currency that could be devalued or revalued to compensate for such an advantage an absolute advantage Which has nothing to do with comparative comparative advantage or something like that But we could compensate for such an absolute advantage that one country is creating at the expense of its partners There is no reaction to that no way to react to that And only it is quite clear only after a long time you will realize The partners will realize oh something has gone fundamentally wrong and now here we are We are exactly there namely that the partners have realized that something has gone fundamentally wrong I come back to that in a minute. You see There are two effects that have to be clearly separated the one effect is the effect on external demand If under certain conditions, you do not have retaliation from your trading partners you can Beggar your neighbors by cutting wages This will create if nothing else happens a positive effect for the time being for a short time for a medium term depending on the on the monetary conditions on the overall exchange rate regime that you have but The positive on the internal side on the domestic side You will never have a positive effect and this is true for the world as a whole. This is true for Japan Euro area and and the United States together there can never be a positive effect a positive growth effect Coming from a wage cut or from flexibilization of the labor market. That is an extremely important Important point to be made so Let me show you what would have happened if you take make a very simple a very simple assumption, which is just a Calculation exercise you calculate that in Germany instead of stagnate domestic demand Consumption would have followed as in the past that can be shown quite nicely as in the past consumption would have followed The increase of real wages if there would have been an increase of real wages If wages would have followed the productivity increase of Germany That is this red line if the real wages would have followed the productivity increase and consumption would have followed the increase of real wages overall Under the condition that the external trade surplus is not there that external trade is absolutely balanced. We would have gotten in Germany such an increase of of consumption That would have been the consumption in Germany if we would not have had this real wages lagging behind Productivity, but we would have had real wages rising exactly with productivity So no distributive effect, but participation of the workers in the increase of productivity as before So to say a sharing a sharing of the overall income Between capital and labor a constant real a constant wage share and then if you Compare this to France you find Exactly what France has done France had This kind of policy France had I will show it in a minute. France had real wages following a productivity and This would have produced a consumption Exactly like in France. You may ask what would have that Implied for overall growth. Well exact again under these very primitive assumptions if you would have had higher consumption With a totally balanced trade. So no surplus in German trade then growth even under Otherwise sitarist paribus conditions would have been would have been higher Now the PowerPoint. Oh, here we go Sorry, oh, this is one too far. Oh, no my oh Something is fundamentally wrong now with the power point It's not working anymore Too bad. No, I show you on this chart at least you can see what I'm talking about. So what happened in emu What happened in emu? the non-participative German economy went into competition with the With the other economies where the the names have been changed. So look at the colors where southern Europe is blue France is is green and And Germany is black But there was a target There was a target to be followed inside the European Monitor Union and that was the inflation target There was an explicit inflation target inside the European Monitor Union and this inflation target was a Target of 2% this is the red line So if you compare and you look just to 2010 not up to 2022 that was Planned to be different in my PowerPoint, but nevertheless If you look at 2010 you see that there's a huge gap in the unit labor cost increase in Germany southern Europe and in France and This explained this is the core of the problem of the European Monitor Union. This is the core Forget about government deficits. They are a marginal problem The core of the problem is that we have a divergence of inflation rates a Divergence of unit labor cost and a huge gap in competitiveness. I do not want to go into The solution of this problem. I've painted here some charts to show how it could be could be solved It can only be solved only one word can only best solve by Dramatically changing the wage policy in Germany by having much higher wages for a number of years here in this example for ten years And the bit lower wages and the others if the inflation target is not violated if the inflation target is not This shows something Extremely important now. I stopped this because it's not working. I Come okay This shows an extremely important point Namely that Germany only under the extreme conditions of the Monitor Union where there was no Devaluation or revaluation possible. It could beggar its neighbors for some time This is now over as so to say Germans clients have exploited their their room of maneuver their policy space to buy German goods They are more or less bankrupt So the German policy of cutting wages was in so far successful as Germany was able to Produce the bankruptcy of most of its clients This you could call successful or not I would not call it a successful policy because the bill will come and the bill will be a huge bill and it will Be extremely expensive. Namely Germany will have to correct Fundamentally its whole its whole economic policy approach. So instead of being successful by Flexibilizing its labor market. It has done something that was One could call foolish policies that were only possible under the unique Historical circumstances of a monetary union. I want to mention another point. So my first point my first point is Flexibility of wages is wrong. What you need is Very stable wages and not wages as such but what you need is stable participation of wage earners in In the productivity progress in all economies of the world that is extremely important because this is A stabilizing factor. This is for economic reasons not for social reasons. I'm not talking. I'm an economist I'm not talking about social problems at all but For economic reasons, this is absolutely indispensable to have inflexible wages in a way that wages follow the productivity growth at least on the average we can discuss what is below the average in the during the discussion My second point that I want to make has to do with this chart The second point is about interest rates. I mentioned already that in the United States They have no fundamentally changed their policies about interest rates they have They have Fixed the interest rate at an extremely low level and for sure the level that they have fixed the policy Interest rate in the United States is much lower is much lower than the expected growth rate So the interest rate now is close to zero Nobody would say that the United States are not expecting positive growth rate. They're expecting two two and a half percent So they have Applied a rule that was never unfortunately never applied in most of the developing countries I've given you some examples. We have looked very carefully into that But the data situation is very very bad So we found some examples what wherever you look wherever you look you find over prolonged periods of in developing countries You find that the interest rates are too high to make it very blunt and simple Interest rates are too high if you look at Africa You have in Africa a number of countries a number of countries not only South Africa, but a country like Ghana country like Kenya Uganda John Weeks may have other examples in the discussion Where interest rates are all the time too high? so you have the funny situation that in many developing countries you have wages that are stagnating or falling because they're following the Flexibility the flexibility Proposal of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank You have but on the other hand you have interest rates that are much too high So interest rates that at least are much higher than anyone in the United States would accept Would accept them to be following the old rule. You know that Don't don't do what we do just do what we say so Please don't cut your interest rates down to a level as we have it, but just listen to our to our Dogma That we try to sell to you So this is this is extremely important And if you compare if you compare this with a number of Asian countries You see a dramatic difference. You see a dramatic difference. You see that in most of the Asian countries the Clearest example is China, but in also in many many other Asian countries You had it just the other way around in the Asian countries at least up to the Asian crisis of 97 These countries were able to support the economy by extremely expansionary monetary conditions in particular very low low interest rates So we have a squeezing of Developing economies from two sides from the wage side where nothing happens more or less Where meanwhile many countries have sort of say given up to to think even about participation of wage earners in in the overall success and this is particularly true if you look at the Whole region of North and Africa where there was growth in the last years in the last 10 years But it was not it was not shared with workers and that is why surely We see so much frustration there But that has also brought up made the economies of these countries extremely vulnerable Because they were just dependent on exports and they never had a stable domestic demand But the third point I want to make without showing anything about that here. It's going bit too far We have we have a third extremely important price We have a third extremely important price in this world a macroeconomic price. We have wages the wage rate We have the interest rate and we have the exchange rate. I Don't want to go into that but it can be shown again that here many developing countries are have so to say a third squeezing factor factor that deprives them of of Getting into a normal a normal development and to a catching up process. We have created a world We have written extensively about that if you look into our late last trade and development report 2011 we have a long chapter about it. We have in 2009 a chapter about that that is so to say my Citeram sends you since I'm an uncle We have created a world where developing countries systematically are threatened by over valuation of the exchange rate Because we have totally liberalized capital flows and with this liberalization of capital flows developing countries are easy targets for speculation with currencies the so-called carry trade I don't want to go into that but that is a factor that is extremely important in many countries even in small countries where you would not expect it. I just had a conference with ambassadors from smaller Latin American countries in Geneva This Monday and they confirmed that all of these countries there was not one country that would not be affected by speculation of hedge funds and other so-called banks what we call nowadays banks which is Hedge fund in disguise so to say that that are doing nothing else but to speculate in currencies and commodities and So they are Producing systematically systematically for the one simple reason that sometimes or most of time the inflation rates in the developing countries are a bit higher Then in industrialized countries and the interest rates are a bit higher than industrialized countries They're producing systematic over valuation of many countries and so to say Put a third break on the on the development success of developing countries That brings me to the conclusion and the conclusion is very simple The conclusion is very simple and straightforward as I said before a New a new development model and a new economic policy model and it applies really for developing countries as well as for developed economies a New economic policy model has to have certain characteristics, but the most important one it can be Boiled down to one sentence is that these macroeconomic prices have to be favorable for growth and have to be rather inflexible So what you need is a wage wage rate that Supports domestic demand by at least following productivity systematically over Any kind of development process Including in commodity producer producing countries where the productivity Progress very often is shown up in terms of trade gains So a terms of trade gains is exactly the same as a productivity gain and should be distributed among the people in that country where second where second you have a pro-growth monetary policy monetary policy that is Stimulating investment in fixed capital which needs in some countries even in developing countries now regulation of the financial market so that the people are Not using the money that the center banks provide to go gambling in international casinos so You have to have a monetary regime that favors growth in terms of having very low interest rates and having stable and low interest rates and interest rates that are Systematically below the expected growth rate the growth rate that you can expect and third and third you need for the third macroeconomic price the exchange rate you need at least a slight undervaluation or you need a a Justified Valuation of the exchange rate at least you have to avoid by all means an overvaluation of the exchange rate if you want to have a fair chance to avoid debt crisis and Permanent balance of payment threat on your on your economic in on your economic policy So the the policy concept The policy concept is just the other way around as the traditional one the traditional one says you use monetary policy To stabilize prices you use wages to stabilize the labor market and the exchange rate You just leave to the market and they will find the reasonable value That's all plain wrong in my view We need monetary policy to stimulate investment We need wages to stimulate domestic demand to to stabilize domestic demand and we need an exchange rate that helps to stabilize the external account this is Sounds simple, but it's a revolution everybody who's fighting on these front Fronts and frontiers knows it's a it's a revolution. We have no Up to this point. I've been sitting the whole last year in the G20 and believe me We discussed three points. We discussed three points in the G20 just as an anecdote as my last word From coming from President Sarkozy who really engaged very much at the beginning of last year in the G20 process We discussed the global imbalances. We discussed commodity market Financialization I've not gone into that but we have worked extensively on that so we can discuss it and we have and we discussed the a new global monetary order including the volatility of short-term capital flows and and exchange rates in These whole discussions in the whole discussion My colleagues from other international institutions were never willing never and there were six institutions There was the International Monetary Fund the World Bank the OCD the BIS in Basel and the so-called financial stability board from the other five International institution no one was ever willing even to discuss one of these Pieces of evidence that we have presented that we have contributed on the demand of the developing countries in the G20 group But they ignored it they ignored it from the very beginning they ignored every piece of it and just the best the best the best Proof so to say is that in the whole discussion about Commodity the financialization of commodity markets or speculation with commodities in the whole discussion about capital short-term capital flow volatility and speculation with currency in the whole year 2011 I was the only person ever from an international institution who would have used the word speculation I was the only person ever who used the word speculation from my colleagues on the International Monetary Fund World Bank and so on No one would ever would ever even use the word because that does not exist It does not exist because if it would exist if they would Acknowledge that this kind of there is this kind of evidence around As I said the whole edifice would collapse and that has to be avoided at any price. Thank you very much


At Forest View Middle School, there is a wait list to get into a popular after-school activity, the STEM program. Robotics, programming, how to do this, problem solving, working as a team. This is the future. You get science, technology, engineering, math. It's the future. That's what's changing the world. That's what the jobs are. The jobs are there. They need to fill them. These are the kids that need to be exposed to them. The program offers many different activities for a variety of ages of students and runs in conjunction with the sports seasons. It allows kids that traditionally don't want to play a sport to have another opportunity. In the fall, a Sphero and Robotics program is offered. The Sphero's movement is programmed by the students using an iPad. The programming is pretty hard at first, but once you get used to it, it's just fun. They don't drive the track. They program the robot to drive itself through the track. There is also a robotics team that competes in statewide competitions with Lego Robotics. The kids will be broken into groups of eights and then they'll work on the boards. They'll work on the project. Some kids will be focused on just the programming part. Some will be focused on the project. They'll be a combination of both, but they have to cooperate together to make it happen. The team is hoping to have success at their annual competition in Pryor Lake where last year they were just short of making it to state. Families really get into it. It's like sporting events where parents come and watch. Well, here they come and watch the kids compete in this. It is very important to the instructors that kids have the opportunity to be introduced to science, technology and engineering at a young age. We feel very strongly if you do not catch them before seventh grade, there's a decent chance that they might not understand this stuff and they might not say, oh, I didn't know there was an option for this. I do have skills in this area. I can take it to there and I can make a living at this. This is cool. And these are the inventors. These are the innovators. These are the people that are going to change lives. Reporting from Baxter with this week's Golden Apple, Rachel Johnson, Lakeland News.