Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome once again to Mises Weekends. I'm your host, Jeff Deist, and as we look back on our first year of the show, we decided to check the numbers and run the program with the highest ratings as we close out 2014. So based on analytics from YouTube, iTunes, and Stitcher, the number one show of last year is none other than Patrick Barron in this two-part interview on the end of US Dollar Supremacy. Patrick and I recorded this back in October and I'm sure you'll enjoy it, especially if you're concerned about what happens to the US Dollar and do all of our personal finances when said dollar loses its position as the world's reserve currency. So stay tuned for a great interview and we'd love to know what guests you'd like to hear and what questions you'd like asked on Mises Weekends in 2015. Let us know via Twitter at MisesMedia or by emailing weekends at Mises.org. The former French president, Giscard Destang, I'm hoping I'm saying that closely to correct pronunciation, said this in the 1960s. He termed the US Dollar status as the world's reserve currency as our exorbitant privilege. And from my reading of it, he didn't say this happily, he said it somewhat bitterly. So I'd like to get your thoughts in an overall sense of what the US Dollar status as the world's reserve currency really means. Well, actually that quote from Destang, I thought that I think probably Jacques Ruff, who was the, not sure I'm pronouncing that right properly either, but he was the great French economist who was of the Austrian school. And he is, I think he's the one who termed the Bretton Woods Agreement as conferring upon the dollar and American exorbitant privilege. Henry Hazlett, who is a well-known American Austrian economist who at the time attended the Bretton Woods Agreement or Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire in 1944 as a reporter for the New York Times was very critical of the agreement because he said it conferred upon one nation too much of a, too much power and it was too great a responsibility. And I think what he meant by that was it conferred too great a chance, an opportunity to cheat. And this is exactly what America did. So what the Bretton Woods did during World War II, because the US had been the arsenal of democracy before we actually got into the war two years after Britain did. We had been producing arms for all the allies. And we had a huge balance of payments credit that was being paid in gold. And over the course of the war the United States accumulated a huge reserve of gold. So we had, I don't know what the percentage was, but the lion's share of the world's reserve of gold in all the central banks. So at the Bretton Woods Conference there was a desire to return to a, to found money of some kind. So what they came up with was that there would be inter-bank settlement among central banks and the settlement mechanism would be in gold or dollars. And that the dollar would be pegged at $35 an ounce. So it's the Bank of England or the Bank of, well, it's just in the Bank of France. Since we're talking about the French, the Bank of France accumulated a lot of dollars because we were buying French goods, then the Bank of France periodically would present these dollars to the Federal Reserve Bank and would demand gold at $35 an ounce. Well, the central banks of the world didn't really, this is called the Gold Exchange Standard by the way. A private individual couldn't present, couldn't present the dollars to the Fed, but other central banks could. So it conferred upon the U.S. the ability to, if the dollars weren't presented for payment to cheat and actually start printing money, which we did. But periodically the banks would present some dollars. Over the years, the years went by especially into the 60s. It was Charles De Gaulle, who along with the advice of Jacques Ruff. And Charles De Gaulle was a hard money man. He was a gold standard man. They recognized what the U.S. was doing, and they said, you know, there's some cheating going on here. The U.S. is printing dollars and buying foreign goods. So in effect, we're getting pieces of paper that are not really worth $35 for $1.35 an ounce of gold, and yet we're giving the Americans good, French goods for that. So he told the Bank of France to redeem 80% of their dollar holdings, which they had counted as the same as gold at $35 an ounce. Well, this over time started what in effect became a run on the fit. And that is what drove us off the gold standard in 1971. I did some calculations just recently to see, well, what would we have had to devalue the dollar to gold? What would have been the rate if we had, if Nixon was to just taking us off the gold standard, had decided to just say, well, you're going to have to present more dollars to get your ounce of gold so that we don't run out of gold. And I calculated at that time it would have been over $400 an ounce, which shows how much money the U.S. actually printed in the, you know, since World War II. And of course, what really caused the big explosion in dollar printing was Lyndon Johnson's guns and butter policy of the 1960s, where he simultaneously fought the Vietnam War and introduced all his welfare programs that he called the Great Society. So the U.S. that was called a reserve currency. It was a sort of a technical term until we went off the gold standard. And so this technical term of reserve currency meant that central bank would hold dollars as reserves the same as gold at a certain exchange ratio. So it was a technical term. Now, when the U.S. went off the gold standard, it didn't mean that people would, central banks had no longer hold dollars. It just meant that they're technically the term calling it a reserve currency is just sort of an anachronistic name. And now central banks hold dollars just for the convenience of it. And sometimes they hold dollars, often they're holding dollars for the wrong reasons because they have bad monetary policy themselves, which we can get into. So Jeff, that's kind of a long winded explanation of what it means to be a reserve currency. Well, Patrick, today Hans Hoppe, among others, uses the term monetary imperialism to describe U.S. monetary policy. And what he means by that paraphrasing is that the dominating state uses its position to enforce a policy of internationally coordinated inflation in effect. So can you discuss this phenomenon a little bit for us? Well, what's happening today is all the central banks of the world are following the wrong monetary policy, which allows the United States to become a monetary imperialist, which means that we are papering the world with our dollars and we're buying foreign goods and we're giving people paper dollars that are worth less and less all the time. But we have to realize that this is an imperialism that only takes place because the other countries have bad monetary policies themselves. They allow it to happen. So here's an example. China runs a huge foreign exchange credit with the United States. And the reason they do that is because they're running a mercantilist economy, meaning that they believe that accumulating foreign reserves are good for their economy. Plus they want to, they think that they can export their way to prosperity. So they are giving more yuan for the dollar than would be the case in a non-interventionist market. If they did not inflate the yuan, then the U.S. importers who are trying to import Chinese goods would not get as many yuan for the dollar as they are now. And therefore, China wouldn't sell as much to us, of course, because their prices would be technically higher in dollar terms. If you're getting 10 yuan to the dollar, you only get 8 or 7 or 6 or 5, then it technically means that Chinese goods are more expensive. But the Chinese don't want that to happen. They want to keep their export industries going. So they are, in effect, they're printing more yuan and they're importing inflation. But they import inflation, you might say voluntarily. But so they're allowing the United States to be a monetary imperialist and export, export our inflation to them because they are rigging their own internal foreign exchange markets. If they didn't do that, then the United States would be quickly called to account. And we would see that our economy would go into recession because our foreign goods in the United States would become more expensive. Now, we can become a monetary, we can stay a monetary imperialist. The important point of this is only as long as the other countries allow that to happen. And right now we are seeing a lot of pushback in the world from Russia, China, the Arab countries, India, who are saying that, you know, we don't want to trade in dollars anymore. We don't want to settle our accounts in dollars because the dollar is becoming worth less and less, the US is expanding it. So they're searching for some way to do this, something that is more honest. So they've talked about actually using gold as an exchange. And I think that this is going to continue because the US is just, we show no inclination to stop our monetary imperialism because there doesn't seem to be any reason to do it right now because everybody's accepting the dollar, but it's not going to last. What happens with all these imperialism of any kind, whether it's monetary or military imperialism, it tends to expand and expand until it actually collapses. And at some point, you know, the rest of the world will realize that, in effect, the emperor has no clothes and they're going to say, well, that's it. We're not, maybe it'll be Japan or maybe it'll be China and Russia and India that will get together. Maybe Brazil will jump in there too and say, you know, we're just, we're not going to do this anymore. We're not going to use dollars to settle our foreign accounts. We're going to use some other currency. And if I could continue this thought, my hope is that one of the Western countries would be the one that would break this chain. And I was hoping, I am still hoping that it would be Germany rather than Russia or China or one of the Arab countries because I just think that Germany is a solidly Western law-abiding as a respect for property rights and it would reinstate the Deutsche Mark and over time, the Germans would not inflate the Deutsche Mark as the rest of the world are inflating their currency and that the world would start demanding more Deutsche Marks and that would put pressure on America to stop inflating the dollar. So this is what I'm hoping would happen and that this is how America's imperialism and monetary imperialism would end. Let's face it will end because it's bad for the rest of the world. The rest of the world realizes that getting off of the dollar is not going to be painless so they haven't been willing yet to endure the pain but the longer they put up with America's monetary imperialism, the harder it's going to be when they finally do throw in the towel and say, well, we've just got to do something else. So it will end and I just hope it ends sooner rather than later. Well, that's interesting. You talk about pushback by countries and there's a lot of angles to this. For instance, Asian central banks hold lots and lots of dollars so they have a vested interest also as exporters in propping the dollar up but they understand in a long-term geopolitical sense that having the US dollar dominate is not in their interest. We've heard recently about this talk among the BRIC nations potentially forming their own central banks. Patrick, would this be as simple as just opening more oil exchanges that aren't priced in dollars? I mean, could that be the beginning of the fall of the House of Cards? Well, I think it's already beginning and I'm not saying it's going to be simple but I don't believe that we're going to see that there's any kind of great sort of Bretton Woods type conference among the Russians and the Chinese and maybe the Indians and the Arabs. It's more likely that international corporations will start wanting to trade in something other than the dollar and this is already happening. I have it on good authority from some friends who work for a major, major American escort company on these coasts that their goods are being settled, their trades are being settled in yuan in Asia and that's because their partners want yuan and they don't want dollars. So I think already this has begun. So it may be something that's already beginning but it's just not on a radar screen and there's not a lot of statistics out there to point this out, to show us what is happening. But I think it's very likely that in many ways the United States has overstepped its bounds. I mean my god, our wars all over the world are being financed by printing dollars and so the dollar is losing its value so all the countries of the world such as China and Japan who each hold a trillion dollars of our actually they're holding trillion, a trillion dollars of treasury bills that they would exchange for dollars they're becoming increasingly nervous that their holdings of American financial instruments and dollar terms are depreciating as they sit there. So they don't like this, they don't really quite know what to do about it yet or like I said before they know that getting off of the dollar, ridding themselves of the dollar will not be pain free and they're just at this point not willing to accept the consequences of it. But it will be done because it was Herb Stein, Nixon's financial advisor told him, you know, if something can't continue, it will not continue. And he was right, you know, if American financial imperialism cannot continue then it will not continue. It's just when will it happen? Well, Austrian economists, we know that we don't like to answer any question that says when. Now, we both know that the rest of the world has to understand that the United States is never going to get its fiscal house in order. So does this mean in your view that the rest of the world understands that it's basically US military might serving as the implicit backstop for the US dollar? Well, and I think our military might is being called into question because our military might is dependent upon the strength of our economy and our economy is being weakened. I'm not very happy with, you know, with our military might. I think that our military might is being used up in all these wars. Again, I've got a pretty good authority because I'm an old Air Force guy myself that our Air Force is not as strong as people would like would have us or we would like to have others believe it is. We were using up our Air Force men. We're using up our airplanes. We're not replacing them. They're in effect. They're just being worn out. They're being spread in all over the world. To me, it reminds me of what I read about the British Empire. At the beginning of the end of the British Empire, they supposedly controlled 40% of the Earth's surface with very small military forces. And when someone kind of, you know, pricked that balloon, it all collapsed. It was shown that they just, they couldn't defend it. And I just wonder if we're not doing the same thing. In fact, I think we probably are. Well, I'd like to talk to you about how this process might occur. In other words, slowly or rapidly as a result of certain shocks. You know, Pat Buchanan wrote something to the effect that a collapse of a major fiat currency like the dollar or the euro will result in one of two things. Either one, a rapid return and all out return to local sovereign currencies of yesteryear. Or perhaps the imposition of some sort of monster global currency imposed by the IMF or the UN. So I'd like your thoughts on that. Well, if we, if there's some kind of a shock and it could be something that we don't really think is all that important at the time. But it turns out to be just whatever breaks the confidence in the monetary order. Then it could result in an attempt at sort of financial fascism and that the IMF would order us around in the Fed and the Bank of England and the European Central Bank, etc. would go along with this. But it would, that would not really be an answer. It might, you know, it might push us down the road even further. But it would not really solve any fundamental problems. It would just mean that we push the whole inflation problem from a handful of central banks that are inflating their own currencies to one international central bank that engages in complete worldwide monetary inflation. That's not an answer. That is just continuing the same rot. I don't think that will solve anything. But it could happen that that would be the next step instead of a step of returning to a more liberal and with a small L order of sound money, sound national currencies that are exchanged for the gold and or silver. That to me is the answer. That is the solution, which of course people in government don't like that solution because that means that they can't spend, their governments can't spend whatever they want. They, that means their governments have to be responsible to the people because they have to either tax the people or go to the people honestly and ask for honest loans. Well, they don't want to ask for honest loans and they, you know, because they would rather just print the currencies. So I don't really know if we can predict which of these, which of these things would happen. I, you know, I'm kind of pessimistic in that whenever there's some kind of anymore, whenever there's any kind of problem in society, no matter what it is, everybody looks to the government to cure it for them rather than to look to themselves or to say, well, what, you know, what is the, what is the market solution? What do people really want to do?  I hope not. I would hope that we by that time, you know, that people would have listened to people like Ron Paul, who was telling us all along that, you know, we're going down the wrong path and we've got to return to sound money because it's only sound money that can allow us to have a sound economy. And that's what we all want is, you know, peace and prosperity and we can't have peace and prosperity if we don't have sound money. I think that's what we're seeing right now. Well, you mentioned that a shock could occur that we don't really recognize as necessarily a hugely important event at the time. I'd like to get your thoughts on this idea of the collapse or potential collapse of the dollar in this sense. We have historical examples for instance, Germany, Argentina, where national currencies contained in a geographic area, let's say, have collapsed. But we've never had an instance in history where a worldwide reserve currency collapsed. What do you think it might look like, at least in the short term? Well, I think what might happen is that it would result in a huge inflation in the United States because a likely scenario would be that China decides it just is not going to hold dollars anymore and again, I want to make sure I understand it's not really actually holding dollars or holding Treasury bills. We're not going to hold Treasury bills anymore that we buy with our excess dollars that we get from our export economy. We're going to start phasing out of those and we're going to, so they say we're no longer, we're no longer going to take these dollars and buy Treasury bills. We're going to take these dollars that we're getting and we're going to buy American goods. People may say, well, that's great, buy American goods. Well, we're not really, at any given point in time, America is only producing so much. So if this flood of dollars, so if the Chinese say, well, we're not going to roll over our Treasury bills, we want dollars that we can spend, then the United States government would have two options at that point. They could say, well, we can print money, just print dollars for the Treasury bills and give it to the Chinese and then the Chinese will spend those dollars in the United States and cause a great inflation in the U.S. because it would be a great increase in our money supply or we can allow interest rates to rise so that Americans will start buying more Treasury bills voluntarily. Interest rates will rise, which will throw the United States into a recession. I think what they were probably just print money because that's what they've done all along. So I think a very likely scenario as likely as any is that central banks of the world decide to get the heck out of dollars. Just like the central banks in the world over a period of about four or five years from the late 60s into the early 70s decided that they wanted to trade in their dollars for gold, had to fed and that drove America off the gold standard. The same kind of thing could happen with central banks deciding they did not want to hold American Treasury bills, which represent dollars as a reserve currency anymore because they just don't trust it. That could cause a gathering, kind of a gathering storm, so to speak, of like-minded central banks. All of a sudden there is a run to get rid of your dollars and buy something of real value. Farmland in America, American stocks and bonds, goods and services, and just cause in effect a great inflation in the United States. I think this is a likely scenario and I wish it wouldn't happen that way, but unless we suddenly get monetary religion and get our budget in order, stop fighting all these wars and stop borrowing so much money and loosen up the American economy, get all of our alphabet agencies of the government that are stifling American industry unless we start abolishing those or rein them in, I think it's very likely to happen that way. You talk about the tremendous dollar holdings of the Chinese, for example, it seems that many people who bemoan US trade deficits, they don't understand that we have needed this huge outflow of dollars decade after decade, that's what a reserve currency requires, right, is an outflow of US dollars so that the rest of the world has dollars to use to buy oil, to settle international payments, whatever it might be. Well, I'm not sure that they actually need those dollars, they have used the dollars as a proxy for gold, but they can use other currencies. It's just whichever, so far, you know, when we look around the world, I will, what currency do you trust? You have to admit that, well, these currencies are not all that trustworthy, I guess the US dollars is trustworthy as any. I mean, I would trust the US dollar over the Chinese yuan, for example. I don't know what the Chinese are going to do with the yuan, I'm not even sure I trust their statistics over there. I'm not sure I would trust, you know, any kind of currency that the Russians would come up with. They would have a hard time, these countries would have a hard time gaining the confidence of the market. So this is one thing that keeps the dollar financial monetary imperialism going, is that there's no one else who has really stepped forward that is more trustworthy. But I get back to the group, country that I think is very trustworthy is Germany. The German bankers, if you recall, German bankers keep saying, they're central bankers, they are not in favor of inflating the euro. They want a sound, hard money. They want honesty in banking. And frankly, I would trust the Bundesbach more than I would trust the Fed. And I would love this, right now there's kind of a, there's sort of an unofficial war going on in Europe between the Bundesbach and the European Central Bank over whether the European Central Bank is going to be allowed to continue to inflate the euro at a higher and higher rate. And the Bundesbach is getting very nervous about this and doesn't want that to happen. My prediction is that the Bundesbach will win that war. I don't think they're going to allow the European Central Bank to inflate the euro. And because if the, but it looks like European Central Bank may just go ahead and do it anyway. And at that point, Germany, if they're smart, would leave the euro, which would be a good thing for them. It would be a good thing for Europe. And it would be a good thing for the United States to be a good thing for the world because it would start this cycle, this virtuous cycle of other central banks being forced to strengthen their currency because a major world nation, a major trading nation in the world has its own currency and is not going to depreciate its currency as much as the rest of the world. And so gradually, people would want to use Deutsche March to settle their trades instead of dollars, instead of yuan, instead of euros. So I think that is a likely scenario that could happen. And that's what I keep hoping will happen. And I'm seeing some encouraging signs out of Europe now that the Germans just are not backing down over this issue. Patrick, I'd like to get your thoughts on how elites view this issue and how the IMF might play a role. So the IMF issues special drawing rights, SDRs, which really just represent an exchange claim for currency among IMF member countries. But just as the dollar once represented a claim to money, and it wasn't considered money itself, could SDRs morph into an actual global currencies, at least if the elites had their way? Well, I don't think so. It could be something that is attempted in the Pat Buchanan thing where he said, you know, there might be a, there, the IMF might try to impose a world currency that would be a special drawing right and a re-denominant, you know, re-daming it and redefinition. I, as I said before, this is not a real answer. I don't think it would, I don't think it would be accepted by the world. The IMF is an anachronism. People probably don't realize the start of the IMF, but the IMF was also formed at the Bretton Woods Agreement or it was, it was voted to decide that the IMF would be formed at the Bretton Woods Agreement. And the purpose of the IMF was to make sure that the United States did not inflate its currency. Right. So the IMF failed from day one. The US just inflated its currency anyway. So the IMF has been searching for some kind of role ever since.  It's just meddling in world affairs, giving bad advice to developing countries that they should not listen to. All right. I just, I don't put a lot of credence in that special drawing rights are going to become the next world currency. Well, that's encouraging. But, you know, it's interesting to note that the left uses the term monetary imperialism as well. Often when we're talking about the IMF, the left means in the context that, that richer countries, economically richer countries are pushing huge levels of indebtedness on third world countries in effect. Well, again, the third world countries are following the wrong economic model themselves. No country can really force a bad economic policy on another country, I guess, as well. It's just that these other countries' elites find that it's good for them to inflate their currencies or to go along with the monetary imperialist. They don't have to do that. And they shouldn't do that. But there, so there is a Philip Bogus who wrote the tragedy of the Euro about, he wrote about four years ago and he updated the book a couple years ago. Philip Bogus made the point that there is more in common among the elites internationally than there are, than these elite have with their own people. For example, French bankers have more in common with the Italian bankers than French bankers have in common with their own French people. In other words, there is an international elite that are all living well, hold a lot of power, hold similar fallacious economic goods. They all, or economic ideas, they all went to the same colleges and universities and were instilled with the wrong ideas. So they are a very tight elite all over the world and they don't really have a lot in common with their own people and they're supposed to be representing their own people. And I think that this is a problem. So I'm not surprised at all that the elite of the world, they all would probably think that having a one-world currency is a great thing. But I don't think it would be good for their people and I think they're completely out of touch with their own people when they recommend these things. Well, Patrick, we've got the upcoming Swiss gold referendum. We know that Asian central banks, even Asian households, are buying huge amounts of gold. Do you think the elite will ever be forced to accept a role for gold in the international monetary system? Well, I think they could be forced by political forces, yeah. And this could be that there are probably a lot of, maybe some of our listeners who really aren't aware that there is a referendum in Switzerland. It's going to take place at the end of November, I think November 30th, where the Swiss will vote on whether their central bank, the Swiss central national bank, should repatriate all of its gold that is being supposedly held in central banks around the world. Not supposedly because no one will allow an audit of whether the gold is really there. But let's just assume that it is there. I think that this is the kind, this referendum is the kind of thing where the people are going to have their say. And I cannot imagine a Swiss government that would ignore this referendum if the Swiss people voted in favor of this referendum. I can't imagine that a Swiss government would last very long that said, well, we're just going to ignore that referendum. I think that they would probably do it. They'd have to do it. And this, maybe this is the international incident that triggers the whole thing, that triggers the whole sort of collapse of the monetary imperialism of the dollar and the inflation of the euro and the yuan and all the other currencies. And this might be something that would force the central banks to start looking to their gold reserves. And because it looks to me, it's referendums like these that tell me that there is a great well of knowledge embodied in the people that know that something is not right. And they know that gold is gold and they know that paper is paper and they would rather have their gold. The Indians certainly understand that. The Chinese understand that. And I think Americans and Europeans understand that, despite all the propaganda from the elite and in America and in Europe that, you know, gold is the, you know, what is it, the relic or something that should be a barbarous relic. Barbarous relic became sensitive. Well, it's no such thing. And it is not a barbarous relic. Gold is gold and paper is paper. And I think that perhaps this upcoming Swiss referendum could be the trigger. So I hope the readers pay attention to that and we'll see what develops. Well, one thing we know about gold, apart from its exchange value at any point in time or history, is that for many centuries, it has always been accepted as a form of payment across cultures, across countries, and across time. Right. Yeah, from time immemorial, gold has been used as money. It's accepted anywhere. We are not used to dealing in gold, physical gold, but we did up until the, you know, mid 20 or early 20th century anyway. And people knew gold when they saw it. They knew what it felt like. They knew what its weight was. They knew what it sounded like. You know, we see, you know, we'll see maybe in some old cowboy movie in America that, you know, somebody throws over a $10 gold piece to somebody and he takes it and he bites it. You know, well, that's what used to happen is, you know, it has a certain feel to it or they would stomp it on it when they would encounter it. It had a certain sound to it to know that it was really gold and not something, not some base metal. And gold has, you know, has other uses, you know, not only decorative uses, but it has the industrial uses. So there are, you know, gold. There's only a certain amount of gold. It's in the world at its extent right now. It's gold is mined every year, but in a very small amount because it's not a, people think that there's a big vein of gold like there's a vein of coal in the Appalachians or something, but that's not really what it is. Gold is small little particles that are in tons of earth and it takes a lot of processing to get the little bit of gold out and it's actually a cost to doing that. So when the, you know, when the cost rises too much then gold production slows down. So it's not something that can be manufactured easily. And this is why, you know, gold over the millennium has been accepted as a unit of exchange because it retains its luster. The only way to destroy gold apparently is to burn it. And all the gold that's ever been mined in the world that has not been burned or lost at sea at the bottom of the sea and some Spanish galleon is still in use. And even when they find a Spanish galleon that's been lost for several hundred years and they find the gold at the bottom of the sea they pull the gold up and it is just as good as it was then. It doesn't tarnish even if it's been in sea water for several hundred years. So I mean this is, this is the perfect unit of exchange that all societies have recognized from time and memorial. And, you know, why we, this is what we really need to return to is probably as a gold standard. Well, say we need to return to that. Nothing we wouldn't, I do not recommend that governments impose the gold standards, but that if there were a free market and money production that the people would recognize gold at least as one of the major currencies, gold and silver would undoubtedly be used as two of the units of exchange that would be accepted voluntarily by all the people of the world. Patrick, I would like to leave you with just one last question today. We've been speaking a lot about Germans today and German economists. I'd like to bring up another one, Guido Hulsmann. He's written quite a bit about the cultural consequences of a fiat U.S. dollar, for example, changing time preferences, discouraging thrift, even somewhat interfering with the family structure. As we finish up this discussion, let me just ask you, is the U.S. dollar also a cultural weapon of sorts that, in effect, Americanizes the world? Well, yeah, and I agree completely with Professor Hulsmann in this and that it's used to corrupt people. It's used to corrupt Americans. It's used to, and Americans use the dollar to corrupt the rest of the world. The dollar is used to corrupt Americans by our welfare system. It's just terrible what we've done in America by trapping several generations of people in a welfare system that is possible only because of the printing of the dollar in massive amounts. So it does. It has ruined its ruined families in America, and I'm sure that, as the dollar is used overseas as a reserve currency head, it has the same pernicious effect all over the world. But I think we have to look at where America's sort of cultural decline began. And it began with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs in the 60s that were made possible only because we went off the gold standard in 1971 and could be continued and expanded. And that is where America's cultural decline started. And we're seeing the results of that today. So yes, I think that the printing of any fiat currency in massive amounts allows the government to spend money to buy votes that has a terrible effect upon the cultural structure of the nation. And we're seeing that in America. That's a very good point that Professor Holman makes. So there you have it, the number one Mises weekend show of 2014. Thank you so much for listening all year, and thanks for being part of the Mises Institute in 2014. And again, if you have guests you'd like to hear on Mises weekends in 2015, let us know via Twitter or by emailing weekends at Mises.org. Have a great weekend and happy 2015 to all of you.


Reporting from Mombasa, Kenya, I'm Petty Officer Delaney Jensen. July 26, 2021 marks the beginning of Exercise Cutlass Express 2021. When you come here, one, you're going to get sharper. You're going to get better at your war-fighting trade here. You're also going to see and do interesting things when you come to Africa. But more importantly, you're going to share your training and experience. With your African partners, you're going to make them better. And you know what? They have experiences too. They're going to make you better. The training we gain and our partner nations gain is invaluable. We learn each other's techniques. We learn how to communicate with one another. Train like you fight. I think continuing this on is a fantastic way ahead. And we just gain so much every year that we do this. Thank you.


We will continue our discussion on theory of oligopoly, typically the oligopoly form of market structure and if you remember in the last session we discussed, this is the most realistic form of market structure, although when it comes to theory and when we talks about the determination of equilibrium price and output, it is it is not very certain like in case of perfect competitive market structure or monopoly market structure. So, in the previous session we discussed about the features of oligopoly and one of the significant feature of oligopoly is that when one price one firm decides the price and output, generally they keeps in the mind that what will be the rival's action with respect to the change in the their price and output. And second is even if they knows that there is interdependence, but sometimes they ignore or they suggest, assume the plan as such to be before and they never consider the revised plan into their action whenever they are fixing up this price and output. The different kind of models are there on the basis of that how what is the group behavior of the oligopolist. When they collude work for joint profit, generally we call it say collusive oligopoly and when they compete with each other on the basis of price or on the basis of non-price like other factor than price, it is called as non-collusive oligopoly. And in the context of non-collusive oligopoly, in previous class we discussed about the Karnat models. We discussed about the Stackelberg model and we also discussed about the King demand curve model. To sum up, we can say that Karnat model is one where two main outcome emerge from their one is always the individual firm thinks that they are not the rivals is not going to change their plan with the revised period, but practically that does not happen and that leads to a situation where may be one-third of the market is untapped, it is not being produced or supplied by any of this firm if it is a case of a duopoly specifically. And secondly, the second outcome comes from Karnat model is that when linear demand curve and the cost of production is 0, generally the monopoly output is half of corporate competitive output and duopoly output is two-third of competitive output. Then we discuss about the Stackelberg model and to sum up Stackelberg model we can say that it is a leader follower models, one firm gets sophisticated, they knows that what is the revised plan of the or what is the reaction function of the other firms, how they are going to react it and generally they also consider the reaction when they are considering their own price and output plan and in that process they become the leader and the other firm has to follow it. But in the long run, if both the firms try to be leader, they get into the price war and in the last firm it becomes a cartel when they feel that price war is not at all profitable. Here to note that oligopoly is they knows that the price war is not going to benefit the producer or the seller rather it is going to benefit the consumer and that is the reason if you look at they never get into price war and even if they are getting into price war they stop at a point, they stabilize at a point beyond which they feel that even they are not covering the normal profit what is associated to the product. Then we discuss about the king demand curve and king demand curve talks about two different kind of group behavior of the oligopoly one when one firm decrease the price other follows it and that is why we get the demand curve as the inelastic demand curve for specific firm because when others follow it there is no much change in the quantity demanded and they have to even if there is a change in the price the consumer they feel that the other firms also they have change their price say there is no significant increase in the quantity demanded of that particular firm. And the second type of group behavior is that when one firm increases the price other hardly follows it and in that case the firm encounter a elastic demand curve. So taking together this inelastic and elastic demand curve with respect to two situation one increase in the price and second decrease in the price the firm generally get a king demand curve which is king between two different segment of the elastic and inelastic demand curve. Corresponding to the king since there is a king in the demand curve we get two level of marginal revenue curve one with respect to the elastic segment of the demand curve and second with respect to the inelastic segment of the demand curve and since there is a king and we get two kind of MR curve in between there is a gap between two MR curve and generally the marginal cost fast through that segment where there is no MR curve and that is the reason even if there is an increase in the cost still the equilibrium price and output never changes. So this typical model talks about the price rigidity of the as a part of the group behavior of the oligopoly firm and how generally it affects the how generally it does not affect the equilibrium price and output. So this is about the price or the non-price competition in case of the non-collusive oligopoly. Today we will discuss about the collusive oligopoly we will talk about two kind of arrangement one it is a cartel and second it is a price leadership model and in both these cases it is a case of collusive oligopoly model where the firms join together in order to maximize the joint profit. Before getting into the model let understand what does it mean when you talk about collusion. So collusion when rival firms or all firms they enter into an agreement in mutual interest on various accounts such as price, market share. So it is a in a simple language to understand collusion we can say it is an agreement where all the firms they comes together and they jointly decide about the what is the price to be following the market what should be the market share. Two kind of collusion may happen one is explicit collusion and second one is the tacit collusion explicit collusion is one where a number of firms enter into such agreement formally and second is the tacit collusion is collusion which is not ever but still they are into the collusion and why this tacit collusion comes into picture if you look at there is no legalized version of collusion typically after the cartel if you will find out opaque as a cartel after that you will find out there is no legal form of cartel exist whatever the form of collusion exists that is in the form of tacit form. So one where formally they agree into a collusion formally they agree into a group and they work together for the joint profit maximization and output maximization and the other one is the tacit collusion where collusion which is not ever. So most commonly if you will find form of explicit collusion is generally known as cartel. So whatever the commonly found explicit collusion is known and cartel and what is the aim of this kind of cartel the aim of such collusion is to reduce competition and increase profit of the individual member. So obviously when they collude together work together for the profit maximization that reduces the competition and increase the profit of the individual member. So basically the individual firms those who are not able to get profit those who are not able to maximize profit they were now in a position to maximize the profit because the firms work for the joint profit maximization they fix up a price which gives at least some amount of profit to each of this firm. Government do not encourage collusion because it creates like monopoly and kills competition and when if there is no competition that reduces the generation of employment and income and reduces the also the innovation. So explicit form of collusion is generally known as cartel and what is the outcome of cartel if you look at the outcome of the cartel in the positive segment is it reduces the competition and the individual firm generally they get some profit out of it earlier who are not able to generate any amount of profit. Generally government or the authority they never encourage this form of cartel or this form of collusion because ideally when the cartel goes for a long period of time in the long run they act become a monopolist which is not beneficial for the consumer it reduces the competition it reduces the innovation it reduces the also to some extent the income and employment generation and that is why if you find authority they always put a restriction on the creation of the collusion or the creation of a cartel. So cartel as we know it is a direct agreement among the competing oligopolist with the aim of reducing uncertainty. Now what is the optimization problem for the oligopolist over here the optimization problem for the oligopolist stage is to reduce the uncertainty. Aim of cartel is to maximize the joint profit and how do they function they appoint a central agency to whom they delegate the authority to decide not only the total quantity that is the output the price but also the allocation of production among members of the cartel and the distribution of joint profit among them. So, the aim to form the cartel is to reduce uncertainty objective is to maximize joint profit and how do they function they generally appoint a central agency in the consultation with all the firms whom they consider as the central agency and what is the role of central agency. The central agency decide what should be the total market output who should produce how much what should be the total what should be the price charge for the product and also when the industry has a whole market as you will they are getting profit how it has to be distributed among the individual firms. So, the role of central agency is to decide about the price output market share of the different firm and also how the distribution of the joint profit will takes place between the different firms. Now, what is the prerequisite for here to the central agency the prerequisite for here if the central agency is to they have full information about the cost function of the firm and how it helps when we talk about the cost function of the firm how it helps because if they know the cost function accordingly they will allocate that how much amount they have to produce by each of this firm. So, it is assumed that all members and produce the identical product because if they are producing homogeneous product the difficulty again comes here that who should produce which kind of product and since we are assuming here that typically in case of cartel this is assume that all the firms they produce the identical product and the central agency they have the full information about the cost function of the individual firm which one is high cost firm which one is the low cost firm which firm is operating in which stage of the average cost the firm whether they are operating other decreasing portion of the average cost they are operating at the full capacity they are operating at the minimum cost of the average cost or they are operating at the increasing portion of the average cost cost. So, cartel aiming at joint profit the maximization it is one in which cartilization is perfect. So, we call about a perfect kind of cartilization per cartel M8 joint profit maximization. It is an arrangement by all members with an objective to maximize the profit and in such type of arrangement the product is essentially homogeneous centralized body decides the pricing of the product. Price is decided by the association or the central agency on the basis of summation of all firms cost and demand function. And in this case individual firms they are not the price maker, individual firms they are the price taker. And what price they take, they take the price that is decided on the basis by the central agency on the basis of firms cost and demand function. However, when there are large number of firms and size of market is small it is difficult to sustain cartel and there is a every possibility that some firms may deviate the cartel price and thus cheat among other members. So, when the market size is small and there are large number when it comes to the allocation of the production generally it comes very insignificant. And in this case generally the people the firms they get motivated to charge a different price and cheat other firms and in that way generally the cartel never sustain for a longer period of time. Because still the time that agreement is there the trust is among the firm is there that everyone has to everyone is just following the central agency guideline regarding output and the price till that time cartel will sustain otherwise cartel will not sustain. So, we will see that graphically when we talk about the summation of the cost and revenue decides the price or they identify the price or they find the price on the summation of cost function and the revenue function. We will see that how this price is decided how the price is going to followed by both the both the firms or may be the number of firms in the market and what is the allocation how the allocation takes place on that basis and what is the profit. So, we will just have a graphical explanation of this entire cost and output determination or the price and quantity determination in case of a centralized cartel. So, we will just take a case of a geopolitist to make it simple to understand. So, this is the demand curve this is the marginal revenue curve. This demand curve is the demand curve for the entire firm marginal revenue curve is the summation of the marginal revenue curve of all the firms. This is the marginal cost function which is summation of marginal cost 1 and marginal cost 2 and how the price is determined in the market. We take the point where marginal cost is equal to the marginal revenue leads to the of equilibrium price or equilibrium output. So, this is the Q and this is the P same P is going to followed by both the firms. So, this is the price that has to be followed by both the firms. So, we can call this as firm 2 and firm 1. We get the average cost function for firm 1 and we get the average cost function for firm 2. Then we get the marginal cost function for 1. We get the marginal cost function for now corresponding to this we look at this MR how this marginal cost function for the individual firms generally and on that basis we can find out what is the output level. So, output level is Q 2 here output level is 1 here this is the price this is the price. So, price is decided on the basis of marginal revenue and marginal cost and in order to identify the quantity because whatever the price determined that is followed by both the firm. Now, how the output will be allocated? Output will be allocated on the basis of the marginal revenue and marginal cost to 1 that will give the output level for firm 2. This will be the output level for firm 1. So, in that following this we get Q 1 is the level of output for firm 1 and Q 2 is the level of output for firm 2 and Q is Q 1 plus Q 2. So, how it happens in case of a profit maximization or a cartel aiming at profit maximization? The price is decided on the basis of the marginal revenue and marginal cost and that price is followed by all the firms in the market here specifically we have taken the example of Diopoly to make this understand simple and on the basis of the marginal revenue and marginal cost of the specific firm we are finding out the level of output. Now, what happens when this price is followed and this output is being produced by it? Now, in this case this is the price and corresponding to this level of output what is the cost? The cost is this much because this is the average cost this is the price. So, since corresponding to this level of output average revenue or price is greater than average cost the firm gets this much amount of the profit. Similarly, for this level of output this is the average cost this is the price. So, in this case also price is greater than average cost and that is why the firm is getting profit. So, whether it is a case of high cost firm that is a compared to both the firm if you look at firm 1 is the high cost firm and high cost firm still they are getting some amount of the profit and firm 2 they are low cost firm as compared to firm 1 and they are also getting the profit. So, the basic objective of the cartel gets fulfilled here that even if the cost function of the firms in the cartel they are in the different there in the different kind of cost function or there in the different level, but when it comes to the maximization of the joint profit all the firm at least gets some amount of the profit. We will just take a numerical to understand this that how this joint profit maximization happens you are taking a specific demand function and cost function of the firms. So, Q is equal to 160 minus 20 p and C is equal to 10 plus 0.3 Q square. Now, we find out what is the profit maximizing output and what is the total profit. So, we can find out Q is equal to 80 minus 10 p. So, we can get P is equal to 8 minus 0.1 Q total revenue is P Q. So, we get 8 Q minus 0.1 Q square marginal revenue is 8 minus 0.2 Q. So, marginal revenue is nothing, but DTR with respect to DQ and marginal cost is DC with respect to DQ. So, that comes to 0.6 Q. Now, to find out the profit maximizing level of output we need to follow the MRMC rule. So, MR has to be equal to MC. So, 8 minus 0.2 Q is equal to 0.6 Q simplifying this 0.8 Q will be equal to 8 and Q will be equal to 10. So, P is equal to 8 minus 0.1 Q. So, 8 minus 0.1 Q and that comes to 7 and total revenue is P Q. So, it has to be 70 and profit is total revenue minus total cost. So, 70 minus 10 minus 0.3 Q square. So, this is 70 minus 10 minus 0.3 multiplied by 100. So, that comes to 60 minus 0.3 multiplied by 100. So, that comes to rupees 30. So, this is the profit, this is the price and this is the quantity. So now, what are the problems in case of centralized cartel or any form of the cartel? The basic aim is to maximize the joint profit and that they do by finding out a price on the basis of the marginal revenue and marginal cost assessing the total cost function and total revenue function for all the firms. Now, what may be the problem when they are estimating the summation of the total cost or when they are estimating the summation of the total revenue for all the firms? So, there may be a potential problem that there is may be a mistake may arise in the estimation of the market demand. It may also arise in the estimation of marginal cost and whenever there is a existence of high cost firm, sometimes it set an obstacle toward the joint profit maximization. And if the cost curve of the firm lies wholly above the equilibrium marginal cost, profit maximization requires that high cost firm should close down which is not possible. So, a cartel may not also maximize for fear of government of intervention or fear of entry that is one more potential problem and also sometimes the cartel to maintain good image they may not maximize the profit. So, one is fear of government, second one is to maximize the profit and they feel that it is not going to create a good image for them and that is why they do not maximize the profit. Sometimes they feel that when they are maximizing the profit, when they are getting supernormal profit other firms may enter into the market. So, to make this is a entry barrier they generally charge a low price and they do not maximize the profit and also fear of government regulation they generally do not maximize the profit. So, as a whole when the basic objective is to maximize the profit, but there are certain problems or certain inherent problem where the cartel typically the oligopolies they are not maximizing the profit.


Mr. Hezekiah, who's your favorite comic book artist? I have like Barry Windsor-Smith, Simon Bisley, Mike Alred, Dave Stevens cover, Wally Wood, love Wally Wood, love Wally Wood. So recently, recently, who's... I don't, I can't remember anyone recent that I'm really into. The guy who did the artwork for All Star Superman with Grant Morrison, that was really good. I like that kind of artwork as well, a lot like Trippie. Bisley used to be my favorite comic book artist of all time for a long time, just because of, for multiple reasons, Lobo, but Slain the Horned God, Slain the Horned God series that he put out and the work he's done on Slain, Simon Bisley, phenomenal metal to the core, right? I love my metal comics.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's casebreaks.com coming at you with a random number block randomizer for this group of teams right here Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, MyClub, Liverpool, FC and Leicester City as well. This break itself is going to be in a separate video So if you're looking for that check our video list. That's how the number blocks work And big thanks to Robert and PJ for getting in on this one. There are the numbers here. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it Three and a four seven times for each list one two three four five six and seventh and final time Robert in the seventh spot right there Now let's assign you a number three and a four seven times one two three four five six and seven and final time Six down to five after seven so to PJ you've got all the numbers except for zero Robert you have zero so that means you get any and all redemptions Robert including one-of-one redemptions PJ you'll still get any live one-of-ones that pop in break number three Let's order these numerically here There you go. I'm Joe. I'll see you for the next break in the next video. Bye. Bye


Coming up on DTNS AI may rule the future of insurance adjusters, what the TikTok and WeChat bands mean in the United States and whether a ransomware attack has killed some. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, September 18, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland Ohio. I'm Len Peralta. Sorry, Len from a studio Colorado. I'm Shannon Morse. And I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty. Shannon and I were just comparing our foldable phones on Good Day Internet. We were also talking about grammar rules with Sarah. If you want that story, including some reminiscence about tech TV, you got to get Good Day Internet to become a member of patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple will open its online store in India, September 23 at apple.com slash I n bringing direct sales to the country for the first time. The store will be available in English and Hindi and physical retail stores are on the way as well. Cloud Flare announced a joint effort with the Internet Archive to share Cloud Flare's hostname and URLs with the Internet Archive's way back machine. So websites can be automatically archived. Cloud Flare is always online service, which stores a static version of sites to use in case of downtime will store pages in the way back machine and draw on the archive when needed. Cloud Flare users will need to opt in for that to happen. The Chinese version of TikTok is called Duyen and it has a tough rival. Kwaishu reports its short video service had 500 million e-commerce orders in August. Kwaishu reported 200 million 300 million daily active users, which means that users made on average at least one order. By the way, that's why Walmart wants in on this TikTok thing is there is a burgeoning e-commerce aspect to it. Kwaishu seems to have caught on in small towns and rural regions in China because its algorithm did not favor polished content from influencers and early e-commerce efforts have focused on farm goods like produce, which has made it more popular in urban areas where they don't get as good a produce. A bug in iOS 14 means that a new function will change your default at email and browser apps to reset to Apple software if you reboot your phone. How convenient. A Google Chrome engineer acknowledged the bug on Twitter but didn't mention any plans from Apple for a fix. IBM and Pro-Mare have launched an AI enabled robotic research ship called the Mayflower Autonomous Ship or MAS for short. The ship departed from Plymouth, England with no humans on board for six months of sea trials and research missions. On April 19th, 2021, it will attempt to cross the Atlantic following a similar route to the Mayflower of 1620. You can follow the autonomous ship's progress over at MAS400.com. According to documents obtained by Bloomberg, the European Union is considering a law that will prevent mobile device manufacturers from limiting access to embedded NFC chips in smartphones and other devices. In June, the European Commission launched an antitrust investigation into whether Apple unfairly blocks competitors from using NFC payments on its platforms. And even though it's not really technology, we have been updating you on vaccine progress because we all have an interest in it. Here's the latest. Pfizer says it believes it may have evidence that its vaccine is effective by the end of October. This would be before its phase three trial is totally finished, but it would be enough evidence to seek emergency use from US regulators. Moderna says it may have similar evidence in November. The US Department of Defense and the Centers for Disease Control have plans to start distribution of vaccines within 24 hours of regulatory authorization. Now emergency use wouldn't allow widespread use, but the first vaccines could go to healthcare and other essential workers. And then once it's approved for wide use begins the slow process of vaccinating all 330 million in the US and of course billions in the rest of the world. Although many vaccines are already being manufactured, CDC director Robert Redfield told a US congressional hearing Wednesday that vaccines may not be widely available to everyone in the United States until the second or third quarter of next year. Alright, let's talk about a somewhat disturbing story. German police have begun a murder investigation into the death of a female patient in Dusseldorf, who was about to undergo critical care, probably surgery, but they have very strict laws about what they can say. Some kind of critical care when the hospitals in systems in Dusseldorf were disabled by a ransomware attack on September 9th. The woman had to be transferred to a hospital 30 kilometers away for that procedure to happen because the equipment they were going to use wasn't available because of the ransomware, and she did not survive. Attackers of the hospital took advantage of a vulnerability in VPN software from Citrix. Citrix released a patch for a VPN vulnerability on January 19th. I was not able to verify that it was the same vulnerability, but it seems likely. So it could be that this could have been patched. The attack was reportedly meant for a nearby university as well. And attackers gave the hospital the decryption keys as soon as they realized they had accidentally shut down the hospital, but it was too late. If the investigation determines that the delay in care was responsible for her death, there could be other reasons why she died. She might have died anyway. They're going to look into that and try to determine was the delay in care the key thing that was responsible for her death, then the ransomware attack may be treated as negligent homicide. And if so, it would be the first ever death linked to a cyber attack. Shannon, this is a huge deal in the security world. It really is. We had heard earlier this year from one of the hacker groups that was doing a lot of ransomware attacks. They specifically came out, I believe it was on Twitter and said, we are not going to attack any hospitals, which is kind of an ethical code that you will often see with hacker groups is that they don't want to affect the actual lives of people in hospitals. They don't want to hurt anyone physically. What they do want to do is take money from people that they don't agree with, and that's generally the kind of attacks that you will see. So hearing that they say that they accidentally hit this hospital, and it may not have necessarily been the target could have some truth to it. But it's still the first time that we are seeing somebody that had potentially lost their life because of a ransomware attack. And that's a really, really big problem. Now I was looking at the Citrix vulnerability that you had linked to. And one of the things I was wondering is if they were using a VPN vulnerability, couldn't they tell based on what kind of information they saw that this is a hospital? Because depending on what kind of infrastructure you're trying to hit, you're going to be able to see different data from the attacker standpoint. And it doesn't really delve into the specifics of what an attacker can do other than just saying that they could remotely execute code on the gateway without needing a login. So I don't know if they could have been able to tell if it was a hospital or not. Or maybe this was just some kind of faulty mistake on an attacker's part. But either way, it shouldn't have happened. Would it have been possible for them to be trying to implant malware to exploit the vulnerability and it accidentally got forwarded to someone at the hospital instead of someone at the university, maybe somebody works in both places, which happens quite often? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like there's always the potential of some kind of vulnerability happening because of like, bring your own devices. Yeah, for example, if somebody works at the hospital, they got attacked at the university, they brought their own device into the network at the hospital that could have infected the hospital as well. So we're not really exactly sure. And I do hope that this investigation that they're implementing into this woman's death does give us some findings and give us some information about who was at fault, because I want to know, like I want to know if this was the same attackers that earlier this year on Twitter said that they weren't going to attack hospitals. I want to know if this is another group. No matter what it is, it's malicious.  And if they are not following in those same beliefs of, you know, we are only going to attack certain kinds of infrastructure industries, then there's no ethical standard for hackers to really live by. Yeah, this is going to have an impact no matter what if they find out if they determine that she would have died anyway, it's still going to have an impact just because of the headlines and because it started a conversation. If, however, they find out that the delay was key to her death and they go after these attackers for negligent homicide, it will have an even bigger impact and and cause a lot of conversations about, you know, what is an ethical cyber attack if you can't really control where your gun is pointed, which you know, could be the case here is like we didn't mean to hit the hospital, but it's just the nature of attacks that you can't always control where they end up. Yeah, I mean, from what I understand, Düsseldorf University and the University Hospital are next to each other. Yeah. Geographically. So it may have been like, all right, we're just, you know, we're just it's a whole, you know, certain area that we're attacking. But man, you know, the whole wish she could have died anyway, or she would have died anyway and are attacked mean much. That is a pretty bad argument. You know, it's that that's a tough one. Well, all right, moving on to something else, a little bit more curious. Yes, give us something else. All right, an app distribution agreement between Roku and NBC Universal expired at the end of August. All right. So Roku offered to grant an extension to allow NBC's existing apps to continue to operate under the old terms, while the two companies negotiate on the new Peacock service, NBC's Peacock service. Thursday, NBC Universal notified Roku, it wouldn't take advantage of the extensions and would pull its TV everywhere apps from the Roku store this weekend. Those are apps that give streaming access to cable subscribers of channels like NBC sports, sci fi and others. The dispute regarding Peacock is over ad inventory. Roku usually requires 30 percent of ad inventory to distribute apps for free, but says it had offered a lower split for Peacock. And BC says Roku keeps adding other provisions to their agreement. So yeah, this is a negotiation fight. It'll be interesting to see if the extra pressure of maybe having these apps disappear from Roku brings focuses the minds and brings them to an agreement. All the public statements about this are very emotional, very accusatory, like they're trying to harm consumers is what each of them are saying about the other. But well, consumers are who are being harmed. Well, sure. But this is a very cold blooded negotiation behind the scenes. I mean, in public, they want the consumers to get mad at the other side to put pressure on them. You if you get mad at one or the others of these, you are being manipulated for the purposes of getting. What's really here is the deals over and Roku said, all right, we'll soften our position. You can keep your you can keep your apps on here. While while we figure out this peacock thing and NBC said, no, the deal's over and under the deal, we aren't allowed to to have our apps working under the terms that we want. So, you know, why would we why would we continue to provide them have a deal? We don't have permission to have these apps on here. So yeah, it's nobody's right here, I guess is my thing like this is just two companies trying to see which one will blink first. Well, we were talking a little bit in our pre show meeting about this.  Yeah, what happens when the consumer calls the support line? Who are they mad at? Are they at their cable company? Probably the prime man at the cable company has nothing to do with this. Because they're like everywhere is gone. Logging in with my spectrum account. And it doesn't work because the app's gone. What happened? Yeah, I don't know. As a Roku user who keeps on losing access to all these really cool apps. I just want everybody to get along like the Care Bears. Yeah, I'm just tired of this drama. Yeah, well, moving on. Well, you would you might be forgiven for thinking like, gosh, it's Roku's fault, right? Roku is picking these fights. But remember, they're picking fights with companies that are all bigger than them. Yes. And so what Roku is trying to do is saying, look, well, all these agreements we have now are going to set the precedent for the next decade. And if we don't set it right, we could go out of business. Absolutely. It's in Roku's best interest to get the best deal as well. Don't forget that. I don't want Roku to go out of business. Well, the New York Times reports on a company called Mitchell International in San Diego that uses deep learning to train its system on image classification to process insurance claims for auto accidents. Customers who have been in an accident take photos of the damage and they simply upload it to their insurance companies app. Mitchell's algorithm then estimates parts and labor costs in seconds. The estimates are generally as accurate as an in person insurance adjuster as well. Now a London based company called tractable has a similar service that has settled more than $1 billion in claims in Europe and Asia. And lockdowns have made these kinds of services a lot more popular. Chicago based CCC information services, which makes apps for insurance customers, companies called Quick Estimate reports a 125% increase in usage since March despite a plunge in accident numbers. USA also filed a trademark on the phrase flash estimate, which it plans to market starting next year. Yeah, the most interesting part of this story to me was that human adjusters looking at pictures versus going in person were less accurate about what the damages were, which is bad for the insurance company, because then they have problems with the body shop. When they say like, well, actually, it's going to cost this much more. And then they have to figure out well, is the body shop right? Because if they are, then we have to cover it. So you would think, OK, well having an AI do it probably is going to be as good as the insurance adjusters doing it with photos. But the AI, this is the key point, got as good at it with the photos as the humans were in person, which means best of both worlds. You don't have to send a person out, which is costly and in these days exposes people to each other. But you got the same amount of accuracy as if you had sent somebody. That's that's pretty good. I've only had one experience where I've had to have a insurance person come out and look at my car to tell me how much something is going to cost and what kind of check I would get in the mail. And it was hail damage from a really big storm. So I could have easily taken a photo and just sent it to them as opposed to having to wait a week and then get somebody to come out to actually send me a check. It would have been way easier if they could just make the entire process digital. So since USA is doing this, I'm a USA user. I love the fact that they're considering marketing this thing next year because this will just save people so much time and potentially save insurance companies a lot of money as well because it'll be a lot more accurate. So I feel like they will be able to save money whenever they're sending out paychecks or sending out checks. Well, it's sort of like it's kind of like the grocery store model, right, where it's like self checkout. Oh, no. Well, there won't be any employees at the grocery store anymore. Well, no, there still need to be plenty of employees doing all sorts of stuff. This can be the first plan of attack. Yes, wherever, you know, when there's sort of like, hmm, OK, well, you sent some photos and there's still some discrepancy. Let's get an agent out there to, you know, to take this forward. That makes the most sense to me so that insurance companies can, yes, put people to better use unless they're needed in particular situations. Yeah, they said at least they had one of these insurance company executives in the New York Times article saying like, look, we don't want to fire our adjusters. We want to let them spend more time on the less tedious stuff that actually needs their expertise. And Roger was was pointing out in our pre show that he was in an accident that this wouldn't worked for because there was internal damage. So this only works for certain kinds of damage. It's not going to work for everything. And you can have your human adjusters saved for those really more complex situations. Then I think that's good. Bloomberg sources say that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has sent letters to League of Legends Studio Riot and Fortnite Maker Epic Games asking about their security protocols protocols in handling Americans personal data. Chinese company Tencent owns LA based riots. Also has a minority stake in Epic. Other U.S. companies that Tencent owned stakes in like Activision Blizzard may have also received letters. The committee is charged with reviewing transactions by foreign companies for national security implications. With tech companies it often has to do with the access to sensitive data. But lately has focused on simple amounts of data as well. Yeah just the amount. They're like it doesn't even have to be sensitive if you've got a lot of data. Then the committee is going to look at that too and say you know what maybe we don't want to have all that data in the hands of a company say in China that has been the political wind that has blown through the committee on foreign investment in the United States where they used to rule very rarely but we've seen them come up a lot more often because of this. And it shows the next step after TikTok and WeChat which we're going to talk about in a minute here. But the eye of Sauron of the United States is not done once TikTok and WeChat is resolved. It's going to start looking at Tencent's other investments. I really don't know if this is just the new way that this administration wants to do things or if there is a thing that China could do to take the heat off if it is just a negotiating tactic. It could be either or both to be honest. As somebody who is quite an advocate for freedom of like educated technology use, educated use as in like make sure you educate yourself on terms of service and what you're sharing what kind of data you're sharing before you accept all the agreements. I don't like the fact that they're that this is becoming a trend. I won't say that they're necessarily banning certain kinds or certain specific types of apps. But it seems like it's starting to become a trend. And you're right with this with our political or our specific government. And it's a it's worrying. It's a little concerning because I like to have the freedom to be able to use what I want. And if there isn't specific proof or evidence of some kind of malicious use of data, then give me the option to use it if I want to and allow myself to take that bargain with my own data. I don't want government hands getting involved in that. Well, too bad because the government hands are not moving away. Apparently. We're going to talk about that more in a second. That's why I said it that way. Get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes. There's so much to keep up on these days, folks. And just five minutes a day keeps you up to date. Subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com. All right, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be flippant. But here's an example of what you're talking about, Shannon, possibly earlier than I expected, the U.S. Commerce Department announced the details of what qualifies for banned transactions under the two executive orders affecting WeChat and TikTok. I thought we wouldn't get these till Sunday, but we got them today. Both WeChat and TikTok's apps will not be legal to distribute in the United States as of September 20th. So app stores will need to remove them, just like Apple decided to remove Fortnite. They'll have to remove TikTok and WeChat as will Google Play or any other app store. Now, these executive orders can be rescinded if the oracle deal is acceptable to the administration. So keep an eye out. This isn't the final word. But if conditions stay as they are now, that has to happen as of Sunday. Additionally, on September 20th, taking payments through the WeChat app will be illegal. So stores in the U.S. can't accept WeChat. That is often done for Chinese tourists to make it easier for them to pay. So that will not be allowed. For WeChat in particular, on September 20th, the U.S. is forbidding the following. Any U.S. company hosting any part of the WeChat app, a CDN service, providing service to WeChat. Any contracted transit or peering services. This doesn't mean that they can't transit the service, but any agreement that says, we'll give you peering as long as you give us peering back, right? Or we'll give you transit service if you pay us this much. U.S. companies can't do that anymore. And any use of WeChat code in other apps or services in the U.S., a lot of folks think this is a First Amendment violation because code is considered speech under a lot of precedents. But the idea here is to stop clones. To say, well, you can't just go take the WeChat code, put it in a different app, call it something else under a different company. So you can't use the WeChat code in other apps or services. This one's tricky. It doesn't seem to mean WeChat has to be actively blocked from the internet. They're not asking ISPs block the WeChat service. They're slowing it down. It means CDNs and transit providers can't work with 10 cent on the WeChat service, which would greatly reduce its reliability and availability, possibly to make it almost useless. Those same prohibitions will not apply to TikTok until November 12th. So basically oracles got until November 12th to get the deal done or TikTok becomes unusable as well. In summary, as of September 20th, you won't be able to download WeChat download WeChat and TikTok from app stores in the U.S. But if you have them already, you can keep them. They won't get security updates though. And WeChat won't work very well, but TikTok will still work as normal if you've got it until November 12th. A couple other notes here, US Magistrate Judge Laura Beeler ruled Friday that she would not issue a preliminary injunction against this WeChat order. She previously had said she might be willing to because the original executive order issued in August was a little vague, but said Friday, hey, now we have the details. It's not vague anymore. So she says this complaint is now moot. Further filings from the WeChat user alliance are expected to argue that it's not moot. We'll see if those come. Also, Instagram head Adam Moseri tweeted that quote, a US TikTok ban would be quite bad for Instagram, Facebook, and the internet more broadly. And in response, TikTok's interim CEO, Vanessa Pappas, the head of TikTok in Santa Monica, asked Facebook and Instagram to quote, publicly join our challenge and support our litigation. In other words, like, fine, if you believe that, we need your help. Of course, the president, as of this recording, has not yet issued his decision on the proposed deal for Oracle. It's expected at any moment. Oracle wants to become a trusted tech partner and minority owner in a new US-based TikTok company owned by ByteDance. The saga continues. I imagine we might have this all solved by Monday, but of course, then it's on to the next thing. How are you all feeling about this? Well, Shannon, I don't know about you, but I was late to the TikTok game, but I'm an enthusiastic TikTok user. I don't make stuff, but I watch other things, and I really like the app, and I'm not alone. It's a very, very popular app, and I just can't really think of, I have thought of, I was trying to think of, has this ever happened before some time where there was something that I liked technology-wise that was then kind of taken from me based on where I live? A lot of other countries and regions in the world are very used to this. I can't think of one. I really can't. I can think of apps or services that were available somewhere else, and then they came to the US eventually, or never did, but not something that was sort of taken away. So I just wonder what the creator backlash of all this is going to be like. There's a big creator backlash. I'm sure that it's going to happen quite soon too. There's a lot of people that are creators on TikTok that have not diversified, and just thinking of it from that creator side. There's a lot of people that are going to lose income, just specifically with TikTok, but also with WeChat, because WeChat has always been so internationally friendly where people can use it across borders. So there's a lot of developers, there's a lot of companies that use WeChat for business. So this is not only going to be hurting TikTok and WeChat, but it's also going to be hurting the people that use it as well for their own businesses. And I don't know if this was considered when they decided to put this ban in place. And that's very, very concerning, not just because that freedom of the internet, as I was mentioning earlier with the previous story, but also from the whole income aspect of like at all times in 2020, when we have a pandemic and they're going to remove these applications because they're based in a different country. And we're going to be losing the opportunities to conduct business because of that. Keep in mind, folks, when you're forming your opinion about this, and I'm not telling you what opinion to have when I say this, that it is not against the rules for the United States to ban an app. We ban all kinds of apps. They're apps that we all agree should be gone, child pornography, fraud, those kinds of apps. What's at issue here is the administration is saying, these two apps are just as dangerous to our national security and to your personal data as a fraud app. And therefore, yes, it's gonna have fallout, but it's because they're dangerous apps. Like they pretend to give you something good, but they're really supporting an enemy. And we can't allow that. That is the argument that is being made. And we could say the same argument about a lot of social media platforms. I mean, we have American platforms that do pretty dangerous things. But they are not under the supervision of the Chinese government. So there is a difference. Not saying it's a definitive difference and you can decide what you wanna think about it. I'm glad you added that comment, that there needs to be a definitive difference. There needs to be proof and evidence. All right, real quickly before we wrap this up, yesterday we reported that the Oracle Deals term sheet would create a company called TikTok Global based in the U.S. with its own board of directors. We got a few more details on that term sheet. Axios's Ina Freed has more details saying the term sheet describes three boards. A board approved by the U.S. government would oversee TikTok U.S. and include a security director and an independent data security expert with national security credentials, which is pretty much the description of a former CIA or NSA official. So the U.S. government would put a board to oversee the operations of TikTok in the U.S. while Oracle would operate it. A security subcommittee of that board would be composed of U.S. citizens with veto power over TikTok Global's security and data privacy decisions in the U.S. And then there would be a board of directors independent of ByteDance over TikTok Global. So a little more detail there for you to consider. If you have thoughts on the TikTok saga that will not end, or anything in general that we talk about on the show, please join the conversation in our Discord and you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, let's get away from TikTok. What's in the mailbag? Oh, Toby wrote in about Amazon.  Toby says, I think the only reason that Amazon is doing luxury portal stores, we talked about this on our show on Tuesday with the Snob OS podcast folks on their main site is to placate the legal action being brought on by the luxury brands against Amazon for allowing the sale of counterfeit goods by themselves and third parties. Man, Toby, if you hadn't put the word only in there, I'd entirely agree with you. It's not the only reason Amazon's doing a luxury portal. They think they can make a lot of money off this and so do the luxury brands. But I will give Toby credit. I'm sure this played a part of it. In fact, it may be the root of it. Amazon has been doing a lot of work with these luxury brands on anti-counterfeit. And I imagine that a natural outcome of all of that cooperation was like, gosh, couldn't you guys give us a better place to sell our stuff on your platform ourselves so we could just drive out those counterfeit goods? And that makes perfect sense to me. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Jeffrey Zilx, Steve Aya Darola, and Chris Allen. Len Peralta, ooh, man. Tough day for drawn news. What have you drawn for us today? Yes, as much as I wanted to draw TikTok, as interesting as it is, I wanted to kind of talk about the hackers who took down the hospital. I felt that that was, I've done TikTok, so I wanted to do something here. This piece is called Death Hack. Just like you would say life hack, this is death hack. And I think while I don't want to describe exactly what you're seeing, you really have to go check it out. It's, it depicts a hacker who realizes his awful mistake. There's some words that are kind of going down the side here, which are kind of indicating the situation he has created or they have created. And you just have to check it out. It's currently on right now at my Patreon. Patreon.com forward slash Len. Or also you can actually, if you're interested in purchasing this, it's at my online store at LenPeraltaStore.com. Oh man, that is, that's a chilling depiction of this. And editorial cartoon level, good stuff, Len. Thank you so much. Excellent, Len. Also excellent having Shannon Morris on the show with us. We always love to have you, Shannon, and let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Well, I always love being on youtube.com slash Shannon Morris. I am currently, I just hit 30,000 subscribers. So I'm currently doing a wifi pineapple giveaway of the brand new Mark seven wifi pineapple from hack five. I'm giving five of them away. So you still have time to enter. All you have to do is comment and comment on that wifi pineapple unboxing video and subscribe and you will be entered to win one of them. So thank you so much to everybody who subscribes to my channel too. I really, really appreciate it. Free pineapples. Free pineapples. Let's get it. Go, go, go. Also folks, don't forget we have a survey going on. We want your feedback. This is super helpful. We do it every year and it always makes the show better. So if you haven't done it already and thanks to the hundreds of people who have, but if you haven't, it only takes a few minutes. Head over to dailytechnewshow.com slash survey. That's dailytechnewshow.com slash survey. It's easy to remember. Thank you so much. And if you have feedback for us, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We'd love to hear more from you. We're also live Monday through Friday. Join us if you can for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Put it on your calendar and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back on Monday. Talk to you then. Bye, have a good weekend. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


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So, the calcide foot is going to be whichever foot is closest to the cow at the time. Today we're going to work the flag, so right now if I said her calcide foot, that's going to be my right leg. And we're going to talk a little bit about maybe what it's for, when somebody would tell you to use it, and how it can help you. Okay, so what about the herd side foot? Now the herd side foot, like I said, today we're working the flag, so this is going to be the herd side foot. Today is going to be the left, the herd is going to be back here and we're working the flag on our right, so this left leg is going to be herd side. So, Taren, can you work the flag and demonstrate while when you use the cow side foot and why you use it, and then you'll use the herd side foot. Just give a demonstration of how it can affect the cow and the horse. Right now, my right leg is herd side, I can use it right there, I can use it for a couple different reasons. Typically, when I use herd side, I'm going to try and hold my horse up, which means if we were coming across here and they fall away like so, I'm going to put my herd side on her and try and drive her up here, try and push her right out here, same deal coming this way if she was to fall off, so I'm going to put my left leg on her or herd side and drive her right back up here to where she needs to be, keep a hold to the cow. Now, if she comes out of there and she's leaning on the cow here, I'm going to put my cow side leg on her and drive her away from it.


Another important decision making process between you and your surgeon should be what type of implant to use. Currently there is the tear drop or otherwise known as the anatomical or the round implant. Well, they're both good depending on what your situation is. A lot of people today want upper pole fullness. They want this area to be full. If you get an anatomical implant, most of the implant is down lower. So you're getting more filled down here as opposed to the upper pole. A lot of my patients, they want upper fullness. So an anatomical implant would not be a great choice. The anatomical implant is a good choice for someone that wants a tear drop shaped breast. And if they're an A or B cup, it gives it a smooth transition from the top to the bottom.