Hey everybody, what's up? It's Rob Dotson. Welcome back to day two of the Chrome Dev Summit. I am joined here on the floor by webmaster extraordinaire Paul Kinlan. Paul's also a member of the Chrome developer relations team.  So can you give us like a preview of some of the content that you're going to be covering in your talk? Yeah, so what I'm talking about for what's new and what's next in the web is like why the web is good, why we still think it's a platform that you should deploy on, and why you should be building for the web continuously and deploying to it. So one of the things that we're talking about is obviously the why, but also kind of some of the brand new things that are coming to the web. There's a whole bunch of brand new APIs that are kind of like landing inside the browser, not every browser at the same time. Yeah, it's a bit of a problem sometimes. But they really enhance kind of like the capabilities of the platform. And I'm trying to talk about why we should be like still pushing on the features on the platform, and actually just trying to build the great experiences. And then I kind of look at some new APIs, which are kind of like a little bit of showbiz as well. So what are some of the new APIs that are a little bit showbiz? Some of the new APIs that are showbiz. So one of my favorite, actually it's not really showbiz, but I really like it. So like there's the Canvas Capture and Media Streaming API. So like one example I've got is recording from a WebGL Canvas and then downloading it. Like we've never been able to do that on the web before and like you could do that, upload it to YouTube. Really great little API. And then obviously things like WebVR as well, which is going to land soon. So for folks who are interested in learning more about that stuff, what's like one place or resource where they could go to kind of dig into that stuff? So developers.google.com slash web, that's our home, right? That's where we try and tell developers how to build for the web, how to build best, like following best practice as well. And then if you go to slash updates on that as well, then you get all the new things that are landed on the platform as well. So if you want to know what's good, what's good? If you also want to know what's kind of coming on the platform as well, the update section as well for that site. Right on. Awesome. Paul, thank you so much for being with us today. We'll do it again. We'll do that again. Oh, yeah, it feels good. Thank you all so much for watching and be sure to stay tuned for more from the second day of Chrome Dev Summit. See you.


Guys this is rich from rich to be live at my villa take a look at this You want to see rain? This is rain when it rains in the Dominican Republic. It rains. Here it comes See it the Sun will be back shortly. It's just a little sun shower. It happens pretty occasionally This is rich From rich to be live reporting from villa 613 Casalinda, this is what it looks like when it rains in the Dominican Republic. I rip part of people. I'm out


According to the Global Burden of Disease study, diets high in processed meat like bacon, ham, hot dogs, lunch meat, sausage may kill off more than 100,000 people every year, mostly due to heart disease, but also cancer and diabetes, resulting in millions of healthy years of life lost every year around the world. And it doesn't take much. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that if Americans could cut down to an ounce a week, thousands of annual cancer deaths could be averted. But that's on a population scale. How can we better understand our individual risk? Though the NutriRex panel and the Annals of Internal Medicine meat papers I've done the last few videos about discarded their own findings using their numbers, a reduction in bread-and-processed meat consumption is associated with 13% lower risk of premature death. What exactly does that mean? Like, what does a 13% increased risk of death mean? To get a better handle on it, let me introduce the concept of microlives. Acute risks, such as riding a motorbike or gumming skydiving, may result in an accident. A good way to compare such risks is with a unit known as a micromort, defined as a 1 million chance of sudden death. I did a really fascinating video about it recently. However, many risks we take— don't kill you straight away. Think of all the lifestyle frailties we get warned about, such as smoking, drinking, eating badly, not exercising, and so on. So the microlife aims to make all these chronic risks comparable by showing how much life we lose on average when we're exposed to them. A microlife is defined as 30 minutes of your life expectancy. Why is that? Well, someone in their 20s, a 22-year-old man or a 26-year-old woman, may have, on average, about 57 years left. That's about 20,000 days, or 500,000 hours, or a million-half hours. Aha! So that's how they define a microlife— a reduction of one of the million-half hours we may have left. Here's some things that would, on average, cost a 30-year-old man one microlife. Smoking two cigarettes, drinking two pints of beer, or every day they live, 11 pounds overweight. See how helpful this can be in terms of comparing risks?  If it's unthinkable to you to have so little respect for your own health that you'd light up twice a day, maybe one cigarette in the morning, one at night, then it should be just as unthinkable being 11 pounds overweight. Alternately, you can compare life-extending behavior. For example, eating at least five servings of fruits and veggies a day may add an average of four years onto your lifespan for men and three years for women. That's up to twice as beneficial as exercising every day. But check it out. Exercise for 20 minutes, and you add an hour to your life. Two microlives. So for all those who say they don't have time to exercise, it's like a three-to-one return on investment. Give 20 minutes of your life to get 60 minutes of life. Beyond that, there's a bit of diminishing returns, but exercise an hour a day and get back more time than you put in. Okay, so what about the meat? Each burger is associated with the loss of a microlife. So it says if each burger were taking 30 minutes off your life, so lifespan-wise, one burger appears equal to two cigarettes. If it wouldn't occur to you to light up at lunch, maybe you should choose the bean burrito instead. And processed meat is even worse. There's a couple of equivalent ways you could say it. Imagine two people who are identical in every way, except that one eats around 50 grams of processed meat a day which is like one large sausage or hot dog or a few strips of bacon. And the other eats none. Eating that single serving of processed meat every day is expected to take about two years off the length of your life.  Or you could think about it on a day-to-day basis. Eating a bologna or ham sandwich every day, just two slices of deli meat is expected to take around one hour off your life each day. Don't think there's ever enough hours in a day? Well, you may have effectively one less, depending on what you pack for lunch. Alternately, you could think about it in terms of effective age. Eating 50 grams of processed meat a day is expected to add around two years onto your effective age, meaning basically give you the annual chance of dying of someone two years older. In summary, wrote the Chair of Nutrition and Harvard and colleagues, the Nutri-Rex meat recommendations suffer from important methodological limitations and involve misinterpretations of nutritional evidence to improve human and planetary health as a side bonus. Dietary guidelines should continue to emphasize dietary patterns low in redden processed meats and high in minimally processed plant foods, such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and legumes, beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils. Let me end with a quote from Dr. Dean Ornish about the Annals meat papers that suggest that people should continue to eat meat with abandon. His lifestyle heart trial was one of the many studies the meat panel ignored and showed that a plant-based diet and lifestyle program could reverse the progression of even severe coronary heart disease, the number one killer of men and women. The control group actually made modest reductions in meat comparable to those in the Annals review and showed continued worsening of their atherosclerosis. I take solace, Ornish said, in knowing that the light drives out the darkness. But these days, the light has to be very bright indeed. Caveat emptor. Don't be fooled. Your life may depend on it.


Item █ SCP-2535 Object Class Safe Special Containment Procedures SCP-2535 is to be sealed off from the public under the cover of health and safety reasons. A team of at least two agents is to be stationed in an adjacent building for observation purposes at all times. Where possible, the interior of SCP-2535 is to be soundproofed. This material generated within SCP-2535 is to be collected and disposed of daily. Description SCP-2535 is the former two-story Hewler Packard Branch office building located in the Zhejiang District of Hanzhou, China. It contains an intricate network of electrical and biological components of unknown origin. In particular, covering the walls of the entire first story of SCP-2535 are 63,512 of the USP-2.0 standard A sockets embedded in semi-regular intervals of 20 cm in a grid pattern. Each socket is connected to a network of wires running throughout the walls, consisting of strands of copper intrawoven with human optic nerve tissue and encased in a keratin sheath. For reasons unknown, the temperature of each USB socket as well as out of the wires remains at a constant 47.6 degrees Celsius, regardless of external temperature. Furthermore, despite being partially composed of biological material, the wires are not exhibited at any sign of decay or deterioration since initial containment. These wires branch out from clusters running vertically throughout the load-bearing pillars of the building and terminate in a room located on the second floor, presumed to be the former server room. The room is currently inaccessible, as its only entrance has been obstructed from the inside by what non-intrusive imaging methods have determined as they continue with solid biological mass. Ballistic means of ingress have been deemed unnecessarily destructive and thus have not been attempted. The inside of the room, like the utter anomalous electrical and biological components of SCP-2535, constantly emits heat at a temperature of 47.6 degrees Celsius. Personnel within the vicinity of the room occasionally report to smell ozone and sulfur emanating from within, along with loud printer noises. 317 of the USB socket and power outlets of SCP-2535 have been connected to HP-brand USB 2.0-compatible electronic devices. Of these, 20 possess anomalous, possibly ecto-entropic function. See below for details. The remainder have been catalogued and moved to the adjacent provisional observation site 2535 for storage. Five former employees of Hewlett Packard's Hangzhou Branch are located in various rooms within SCP-2535. The bodies of these five individuals are in an anomalous state of biological suspension, requiring no sleep, water, or food despite being perpetually conscious. They have remained virtually unchanged in their states in the initial discovery and acquisition in April 2013. Any attempt to extricate them from their predicaments appear to be physically impossible, as the devices binding them are unable to be unplugged or disassembled by any means whatsoever. The list of employees within SCP-2535 consists of Gwo Ping Ping, former branch manager of the Hewlett Packard Hangzhou Branch. Gwo was located in the bathroom nearest to the receptionist's desk on the first floor. His head has been forced into the feed tray of a continuously operating USB 2.0-compatible HP DeskJet-1112 printer plugged into the wall. Although this would be fatal to an ordinary human, the remainder of Gwo's body continues to kick and thrash as if in pain. James Gwo Young Soon, former assistant branch manager of the Hewlett Packard Hangzhou Branch. Gwo is located in the employee's pantry on the second floor. His body has been secured vertically to the wall via 92-20 inch USB 2.0-MM cables. The actuating unit of an HP DeskJet-2540-111 printer has been similarly secured to Gwo's lower jaw via 5-10 inch USB 2.0-MM cables. Attached to the arm of the actuating unit is a single HP-10 black original ink cartridge. The actuating unit has been modified to run on USB power sources and is itself plugged into a USB socket being an adapter. It continually rams the ink cartridge into the Gwo's throat at a rate of one stroke per second. The ink cartridge is hypothesized to contain an anomalous amount of ink, as it has yet to run dry. Gwo himself is partially conscious and responds incoherently to vocal stimuli. Angel Lee Hewman Former Human Resources Department head of the Hewlett Packard Hangzhou Branch. Lee is located in her former office on the second floor. Similar to Gwo, she has been secured to the wall via 89-20 inch USB 2.0-MM cables. Another cable of indeterminate length has been inserted into her lower abdomen via a 5mm wide fistula. It continuously vomits a stream of thermal receipt paper from her mouth and appears to be in great distress as a result. Her abdomen is slightly distended. It is inferred from palpitations and announcements of the sounds produced from her abdomen that are the fully operating HP-USB single station thermal receipt printer located in the vicinity of her jejunum. Wang Liang Former IT Department head of the Hewlett Packard Hangzhou Branch. Wang is located near the water cooler on the first floor. He is secured in a standing position against the wall via 37-20 inch USB 2.0-MM cables. Pressed against his body are 12 HP ScanJet 200 scanners, all in continuous operation. Beside him are the HP DeskJet 1112 printer attached to the wall, also in constant operation. However, instead of paper, it produces A4-sized sheets of human epidermal tissue matching Wang's skin tone. Wang is conscious but unable to respond coherently due to his near constant screaming. Chen Yupeng, trainee technical writer, Chen is located in the branch manager's office on the second floor. His body has been fitted inside the paper tray and backup paper tray of an HP Laser Jet Pro 500 multifunction printer, which have been plugged into the wall via a standard power cable and a 3-feet USB 2.0-MM cable. An aperture has been cut into the side of the printer, from which his head protrudes. The printer alternates between producing copies of the HP standard print quality diagnostic page and the HP Laser Jet 500 technical repair manual. Since discovery is not run out of paper or ink, Chen is unconscious and displays signs of severe blood loss. These five individuals were reported missing in May 2013, one month after the closure of the Hangzhou branch office due to international downsizing measures. Additionally, a Canon PIXMA E480 printer is located in the janitor's closet on the first floor. It bears human teeth marks and dents across his exterior, along with chemical damage indicating application of concentrated liquid bleach. Since his discovery, it has been attempted to print a 91-page document to no effect, as this paper tray appears to have been improperly loaded, such as the top most sheets have crumpled up and jammed the feed mechanism. The scenes of the Canon PIXMA E480 periodically leak human blood. Data matches out of Yan Xiaoxia, a creative consultant formerly under the employment of the Hewler-Packard-Hangzhou branch, who were reported missing at about the same time as the five Hewler-Packard employees.


Welcome to another Digital Supply Chain Institute Insights episode where we are hosting Alexander Fernandez, CEO and co-founder of Streamline Media Group, and where we would like to deep dive into a very, very interesting and sexy topic of metaverse and video games, but not only about it as an entertainment, but basically as using it for enterprise as a tool. So this is maybe something which is very unique and interesting and also having in Digital Supply Chain Institute a metaverse and video games design and development company is a very interesting thing. So in that sense, Alex, thank you for being with us. Thanks for having me, Marco. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and the rest of the DICA leadership and membership. Alex, let's deep dive immediately into the topic. So having in mind, you know, your video games and the metaverse design and development company, where do you see metaverse role in supply chain? Yeah, I think that it comes in three very distinctive areas. I think the first one is basically helping to take all of the metadata that actually exists between the partnerships and the different stakeholders and helping them visualize that and really understand where things are at any given point in time. The second thing I think it helps in is in change management and basically connecting generations together, helping them understand how and why the business was built and then bring in the fast thinking innovations of the younger generation. In this case, the baby boomers are retiring. Gen Z is coming online, being able to help connect them together and understand all the various aspects of the business is also a piece of it. And the last thing is in the form of digital twins and the opportunity to basically help physically based companies enter the digital world and create new value. In terms of creation of those digital twins and the ability to interface with new markets and new demographics they haven't before seen. Having in mind that you share the things in between the generations, I think it's a very interesting thing which we are seeing now, you know, with the lack of talent on one side and on the other side, not only lack of talent skills for the next level of supply chain transformation. How do you see that methods can, you know, link talent, which is the talent from let's call it supply chain 1.0 to supply chain 2.0. Yeah, so I think really where this came in into play really and we're seeing in real life is what happened when the pandemic reached fever fever pitch. We saw a breakdown of supply chain we saw a breakdown because information wasn't readily available, and people had to really start thinking about things in a meta layer and that ability to effectively use your imagination to understand where things were really an a four dimensional space was very difficult and effectively what we know as video game developers and really as people who grew up with games is that gaming teaches you how to take a bunch of different data points that don't seem related and help you interrelate them correlate them and help you start to perceive what can happen next by understanding that information but also understanding really what the rules of the game were in this case the rules of life so to speak. So ultimately what we're seeing here is that multiplayer gaming in the metaverse help teach people not only how to analyze that data correlate that data, but how to operate within actual long distances without actually ever seeing each other. So in this case of how to form a team rapidly deploy expertise understand information and then make the best decision possible with the information they have. We expect that life will continue to be volatile. We think that the volatility will continue and will only increase which means people's ability to actually adapt to a fast changing world and really to work cohesively as a team will become the new standard and ultimately multiplayer gaming metaverse visualization, all of this is going to come together to help make that happen. So all you shared Alex is very, very interesting and you know, collaborating with you as digital supply chain Institute. I know that you have been engaged in very interesting trials in a sense of the change management right because the elements you mentioned they can be part of the change management and they can link as well the context in between the generations. So your view from the experience you have there is can metaverse and video games, lay the role in the new way of change management and basically bring the change closer to those who need to implement it and then leave it. Absolutely. So I mean it's a simple thing that you know if if you really think about it we learn through play. And the reality is that multiplayer gaming and effectively change management. What you're trying to do is basically take locked in notions of behavior and change them through simulation change them through repetitive. Let's say playthroughs so that people understand and build new knowledge and new muscle in ever changing circumstances now multiplayer gaming allows you to do that because generally it happens within a certain timeframe two minutes five minutes, 10 minutes, scenarios change but players stay the same. Ultimately what you're doing is just practicing and really practice makes perfect so ultimately we're visualizing that and working with the very stakeholders to help make that change management, not only stick but understandable because I mean let's face it we've all been in the boring meeting where a consultant comes in brings out a PowerPoint and we're like wow I don't want to listen, I turn off, but if you change that and put something that's fully interactive, fully immersive in their hands, you start to see people smile, they start to talk, they start to get into it and that is the exact thing that happens where you look at children, they start to talk, they start to chatter, they start to figure things out. Ultimately that gameplay and play brings through the ability to learn and that's exactly where we want people to be especially in today's world where everything's fighting for their attention. So in the end gaming really reinforces these behaviors that we want them to have to build that muscle to be able to be adaptable in this new world we find ourselves in. What you shared definitely brings Metaverse and video games towards much more than entertainment, it brings as a cohesive connecting tool for people to co-own the transformation or the new part of the processes which are created especially in traditional segments like supply chainies so we'll definitely follow that together and see the results of these kind of integration because this is something which is very very practical. And having this in mind, what you would advise companies interested in starting the journey in Metaverse and video game in the traditional industries like supply chainies as part of the enterprise. So I think the first thing to do is get an understanding of your core demographic and who it is you're trying to reach out to, and it's not just the external demographics also your internal demographic. How many millennials exers Gen Z's are you planning to bring on board, and how many of your boomers are retiring. I'm sure you're going to find out a lot of your boomers are starting to sunset, leaving this gaping hole of talent and know how that you need to address quite quickly but then you have to address that demographic of your boomer up sorry of your millennials your Z's and your exers and give them something to do that basically captures our mind and their attention so ultimately what I look at is this is that once you know who those people are, you look towards establishing a kind of a reverse mentorship where you can have the retirees come in help out with the people that are still there help transfer that knowledge through simple things like playing together and using these multiplayer games to help them games like Switch or even games like Fortnite. At the same time, I would also be looking at this from a marketing activation perspective. In the end of the day, we know that we're going to still have to capture the attention of perspective partners. So what we do is we build programs that effectively are enshrined with our KPIs of what we're trying to do from a marketing perspective and build out an activation. Let's call it a quarter activation or a 12 month activation that allows us to start bringing people into our version of what we believe our metaverse needs to be. Now, of course, not every company knows how to do this. So you got to go out and find people who are willing to help you make this happen. But beginning that process of just thinking about it is going to start pushing you in that step forward and I would just say like this Marco. Everyone just needs to remember 1994 and think about from 1994 until 2022 the rapid amount of change we saw with the penetration of the internet and the reality is in 94 it was very difficult to imagine a world in which we'd get into strangers cars thinking it's a taxi. We would do remote health, or that we would basically get, you know find true love and get married because of things like Tinder, but we can argue about the tender, but you get what I mean. In the end of the day, all we need to do is see what has happened and realize it's happening again, just at a rapid clip, so we can't afford to ignore it we need to jump in and move fast. So, understanding in, you know, moving things fast as you mentioned and trying to see a common thread, you know, a red thread through all the things we have covered so far. There are definitely two things which are resonating with me. One thing is related to what you have said at the end now you know look at to 94 to 2022 you know how the things changed for the customer right and and that's the notion of the new customer but one more is emerging, and it's emerging as a new employee and that employee doesn't mean that it's only Millennial Gen Z or Gen Y right. It means that you know for the employees who are you know before these generations, they can also acquire you know the knowledge or related skills in order to advance forward together. In that sense, I would like to pick your brains because I think for the audience it will be very important to hear it from a fast growing industry as yours. We can see more and more companies realizing that college degree isn't necessarily the best indicator of you know, hiring an employee right your industry where you are has been one of the first to recognize that and as well to show the value of it if I can put it that way. It's just a trend, it's a reality in that sense so the question is like do you do you see more companies, you know, doing away with college degree requirements going away from it in a bit, and for potential employees and then what advice do you have for CEOs, similar actions of course we do understand that it's not same in all the industries, but how do you see the trend of you know, moving away from a bit general knowledge towards skill is affecting your industry and you see it in the future. I think that's a really, really good point. I think that most knowledge and most industries are vocational. We decorate them by putting degrees around us and yes I do believe education and college and university. It is good for you. However, in the case of the games industry in the case of high technology. The pace of change is so quick that it's very difficult to codify that and arrange that in an educational format that remains relevant change in my industries every three to six months. All right, a book about that. Good luck. So I think what ends up happening here is that most CEOs and basically most companies understand that it's a fight for the most talented workers and finding that talent no matter where they are in the world, no matter how talented they are or not. That's the key of winning. So as we start moving forward in this new future and really this new world where you're looking for this basically those high, those high learners, people that pick things up quickly and can disperse that within the organization. There are still industries that will require degrees like you know obviously a medical practitioner I would want them to have some form of a degree but even then doctors are using games to train themselves and brain surgery so we can question how long that education needs to be. I think that ultimately in the end where this world is going to go to is that we will have people that have learned the vocation and then go back to school later in their life. It's like what the MBA used to be.  So what I think will happen here is that our vocational workers are highly skilled workers will come in, they'll work for a couple years and then we'll be like you know what, let's go finish your training. Let's go do targeted programs at universities that cater towards professionals who don't need to learn things that they've already learned on the job already know just out of the natural talent, but let's finish the frameworks. Let's create that final polish that's going to take them to the next step and it's going to unleash their capability. That is where I think I see the role of the university really going to. That is the finalization of years of knowledge acquisition and practice, rather than let me prepare you, and then hope you remember this in 30 years, because you won't. I mean the reality is you just won't. So ultimately in the end of the day will make that paper worth something more because it's applied through work, and then you get that after the fact. That's ultimately how I see this going. I really like Alex what you shared in unlocking the personal, let's say genius in a way. And what I what I took from it is in a way that, you know, we should not be afraid of video games and metaverse and we should not see it just as a distraction. It's not up to the business leader to decide to utilize it in the business manner to create the business value which is not entertainment but basically more engagement more learning and even retraining. And if I may conclude with that with the notion which I got now you know thinking forward to what you have said, it's not that we should fight our kids to play less video games but we need to sit with them. And then see how we can together apply it towards more learning or transformation. That's well said and I mean I think in the end you you've hit it on to something that if we encourage our children to keep trying, you unlock their capability to not give up. And if in the end of the day we agree that the world is changing so rapidly that challenge is just the nature of life, then we need kids that stand up and keep coming back, even when it looks impossible. Because ultimately in the end, so much will look impossible in the coming years that we need resilient people, and that starts with learning how to play, learning how to lose and learning how to come back again to win ultimately in the end. That's really what we're teaching our children. So let's stay with the notion that you know we'll together make things possible. Retrain train and you know create a new reality which will benefit also Alex thank you very much for your time. I would like to thank everybody for joining us for this digital supply chain Institute insights, and we'll come back with more interesting topics and we'll stay focused on as well exploring things in video games and metaverse industries.


have come to believe that if high involvement captures high intensity then that latter construct high intensity may be a better more direct measure of problem gambling. So the next slide. I actually authored, co-authored a paper with a couple of Swedish colleagues where we formulated this argument and we used data from a very large survey that was done in Sweden in 2008 to test these four hypotheses that you see here. And the results were very, very interesting in Sweden and it seemed to me that we had a great opportunity here in Massachusetts with our baseline survey data to actually replicate that analysis and see if the results were similar or different because each of those scenarios would be very informative both in Massachusetts and internationally. So the study that I'm presenting today we sought to improve our understanding of the relationship between problem gambling, forms of gambling, gambling involvement and gambling intensity, specifically in the Massachusetts context. And we tested these four specific hypotheses. I won't read them to you here in the interest of time because we're going to be revisiting them a little bit later in my presentation as we look at the results of the analyses. So the next slide describes our methods. The analyses were based on data from the baseline general population survey and the baseline online panel survey. Both of the surveys were conducted in Massachusetts in 2013 and 2014. The eligible population was Massachusetts adults aged 18 and over. The two samples were administered the exact same question. So we had two different samples of Massachusetts adults but they had answered all of the same questions. So we had the same information from all of them. For this particular analysis, we only include people who had gambled regularly that is once a month or more on one or more of the eight major forms of gambling that we asked about in the surveys. We used the PPGM to determine problem gambling status and we looked at gambling involvement as the number of gambling formats in the past year and gambling intensity. We used highest frequency of participation as a proxy for time spent because we hadn't actually asked individual questions about that in the surveys. And then for money spent, we used responses to questions about how much people had spent on each type of gambling in a typical month. So a little bit more information here is that or one caveat is that the information about specific casino games was not collected in the Massachusetts baseline surveys. So we didn't ask them separately about table games versus slot machines. However, the majority of casino gamblers in our Massachusetts surveys gambled in Connecticut and Rhode Island, both of which offered full service casinos with thousands of EGMs and hundreds of table games along with sports betting, horse race betting, bingo and Kino. And we know that in the U.S. EGMs or slot machines account for between 65 and 80% of casino revenues. So moving down to our first hypothesis. Our first hypothesis was that problem gambling would be more closely related to some gambling formats in Massachusetts than others. And indeed, we found that the proportion of the individuals experiencing gambling problems was substantially higher amongst those who engaged in some gambling formats. So hypothesis one was supported. In particular, regular participation in betting on casino games, bingo and sports were especially associated with problem gambling in Massachusetts. And just to give you some context, the study that was done in Sweden found that regular participation in EGM gambling, casino table games, poker and bingo were the formats in Sweden with the highest problem gambling rates. So what this graph shows you is that, for example, amongst past year casino, I'm sorry, monthly casino gamblers, the problem gambling rate was quite high at 26%. Almost the same amongst monthly bingo players and then sports betting and private betting again had quite high problem gambling prevalence rates amongst monthly players. So moving down to hypothesis two. Can I ask a question? Yes, of course, Enrique. Just go back a little bit to the prior page. I just wanna conceptually make sure I understand and I understand why we have only the casino aggregated in the one bar because of the timing that we made the survey. But if I take a parallel to the lottery, all these other forms of gambling at the beginning, lottery, jackpots, instant scratch daily, daily is the daily games of the lottery? Yes, that's the Kino game. Right, just help me understand conceptually why in the aggregate all lotteries lower that any one of the other ones by themselves. Right, so all lottery is an aggregate of the large jackpot, instant scratch and daily games. Yes. But it's important to understand that because lottery play is differential across those games. So the large jackpot lottery games are by far the most popular followed by the instant scratch. The daily Kino games, participation in daily Kino games is quite a bit lower than it is for other lottery products. But the prevalence of problem gambling amongst that small proportion, even of lottery players is quite high. I'm having trouble with that too, Enrique. I'm having trouble with that. It's a weighted average of sorts. It's a proportionality, I suppose. Yes. Because the populations are different. But doesn't this make this graph hard to digest because isn't it under-representing the impact of lottery overall? I guess because you're separating it out when we think... Yeah, I think the way to sort of look at this is to understand that there is some overlap amongst the problem gamblers that are in these different groups because as I'll get to in a few minutes, these are not mutually exclusive problem gambling prevalence rates. So the folks who are problem gamblers in casinos, a proportion of them are also in the problem gambling bars for all lottery and then all of them, of course, are in the problem gambling bar for any gambling because that's the largest group. It's got the largest denominator. Okay, that's helpful. Yeah, okay, thank you. Yeah, I think you may have answered the next question but let me put it this way. Imagine that we were trying to desegregate the casino and we were only concerned about two slots and tables. Okay. And if there was a... And tell me if this is correct or the type of reasoning. If there was an equal proportion of players in slots and in tables, that we would see the similar, the same amount of problem gambling rate or not necessarily. Well, if the casino denominator, that is the people who played at casinos, if they were made up equally of slot machine players and table game players. Yes. It's not guaranteed that you would have the same prevalence rate for each of those because they're, well, yeah. You're right, Enrique. If it was equally divided, if it was 50-50, then the prevalence rate would be the same across the two types. We know in the United States that slot machines are far more popular and generate more revenues than table games, which is opposite from Macau, for example. So, you know, I would not want to stake my reputation on those bars being exactly the same if we disaggregated for type of game. Yeah, and I was just interested in trying to make a simpler example conceptually for us to visualize. If you only had, let's say, two games, slots and tables, and we were comparing, they were evenly distributed, would we be likely to see the same rate? But understood, let's move on, I think. Yeah, very helpful, though. I'm glad you asked the question, Enrique. Thank you. Okay, hopefully I'll be able to shed a little more light on just some of these other hypotheses. So let's move down to hypothesis two, Mark. So hypothesis two was that problem gambling would be positively related to high involvement of gambling. And indeed, we found that the number of gambling formats, which is what is displayed on the x-axis, so this shows problem gambling prevalence rates for people who only engaged in one format monthly, those who engaged in two formats, those who engaged in three formats. And for some reason, no matter how many times I tried to copy this graph, the plus sign kept dropping off the four. So this is four plus gambling formats monthly on the right hand side. We did a number of additional analyses, which I won't go into. They have statistical names like Spearman's correlation and ROC analysis, but we did determine that. And as this figure shows, the proportion of regular gamblers experiencing a problem increases linearly as the number of monthly gambling formats increased. So as a statistician noted, this is a beautiful line. So that means that, or what this shows is that our second hypothesis was in fact supported in the Massachusetts data. Moving down to hypothesis, oh, I'm sorry, moving down to the next slide, I want to just note that the hypothesis was supported but with an important caveat. What this figure shows is that the overall percentage of individuals not experiencing or experiencing a gambling problem across the number of formats. So you can see here on the left, the estimated proportion of non-problem gamblers and the estimated proportion of problem gamblers amongst individuals who engaged in one gambling format. And similarly, across two gambling formats, across three gambling formats, and here I was able to get my plus sign in. I have four plus gambling formats. What this slide shows is that among individuals not experiencing gambling problems, 45% gambled on only one format. But as the number of monthly gambling formats increases, the proportion decreases. So from 45 to 34% to 13% to 7.5%. It's not quite, but almost the opposite story for people with gambling problems. It increases from about 16% among those who only engage in one format. It jumps a little bit to 28% amongst those who gamble in two forms on a monthly basis. But if you smooth it out, it's a linear increase rather than a linear decrease. So you can see amongst individuals who gamble on four or more types of gambling on a monthly basis, about a third of them are actually experiencing gambling problems. And why am I, here we go. And Rachel remind us what was the cadence of involvement for you to make it into any one of these categories for months? Once a month? Once a month or more often, yes. Okay. So yeah, there is that important caveat that there is a small but substantial proportion of people who experience in gambling problems who actually are only engaging on a regular basis with one gambling format. So that sort of unpacks or loosens the relationship that many people have posited between heavy involvement and problem gambling to an extent. So moving down to hypothesis three. So hypothesis three was that involvement in gambling would be positively related to intensity of gambling. So that's the idea that a better way to assess sort of heavy investment in gambling might be through assessing the amount of time and money a person spends gambling rather than limiting it just to the number of gambling formats. And so we did a statistical tests using gambling intensity measured in money and frequency, which would be a number of days in the past year that a person or in the past month, excuse me, that a person has gambled. The relationship was not as strong as it was in Sweden. We think there's a number of reasons for that. So while not as strong as the results in Sweden, the results from Massachusetts do suggest that there is a positive relationship between involvement and intensity. I think that if we had been able to disaggregate the casino gambling into table games and EGMs, we might have found a stronger relationship because that was where the strength sort of of the positive relationship in Sweden kind of emerged. I'm sorry, somebody seems to have a car alarm going off in my neighbor. Okay. I don't hear it, Rachel. Oh my God for that, because they seem so great. I'm sorry, they're having a protest in my neighborhood. That we welcome the exercise of some- On my street with honking horns. Are you sure you can't hear that? You can continue. I think we can all hear you just fine. And I understand it's a distraction for you. That's fine. I'm sorry, that was terrible. No, I support their right to protest, but I wish their timing had been better. Okay. Finally, this slide. Oh, I'm sorry, Mark, if you could move down. So this is the thing of beauty that we ultimately created from Massachusetts. This is our last hypothesis, which was that gambling format would mediate the relationship between involvement and problem gambling. And indeed that is what we found. So I'm going to explain this graph to you a little bit because the first time people look at it, their heads just explode. It's very colorful, but it doesn't immediately make sense. What this illustrates is the proportion of individuals experiencing gambling problems among those who regularly gamble on a specific format across groups of increasing invoices. So this first, the green line is casino gambling and you can see that it stands out a good bit from the other gambling formats. What this dot here, the first point on the casino line represents is the problem gambling prevalence rate among those who only gambled on casino games. So that's only people who had gambled who gambled on a monthly basis on casinos. Second point on that line, which is over the two, the second point represents the problem gambling among those who gambled regularly on casino games and one other gambling format. And then the next dot here above three is the prevalence among... Just give me one moment. I feel redemption from yesterday. It's not mojo or chipping. No, wait, for a moment. Just for a moment. Well, Rachel, I had to do the same thing yesterday, so. Really? Thank you. What I found in my neighborhood is making my dog just absolutely cuckoo crazy. Okay, so third dot. Third dot, thank you. Thank you, Chair. The third dot is the prevalence rate among people who gambled monthly on three types of gambling and the fourth dot is the prevalence rate among people who gambled on four or more types of gambling. So you can see that the casino, the prevalence rate amongst monthly casino gamblers, regardless of how many other formats is substantially higher until you get to four or more. It's interesting to see also that regular beta participation at the highest proportion of problem gamblers among those who participated regularly in four or more types of gambling. And except for those who participated in casino and sports betting, prevalence of problem gambling for all other gambling formats was below average among those participating vaguely in three formats. So overall, this was basically this exercise controlled for gambling format and involvement simultaneously. And that was the unique aspect of the Swedish study and that was why I felt it was worth replicating or trying to do the same analysis in Massachusetts. So moving down to... So moving down to... Before we move on, are there any questions on that particular slide? I think you did just briefly cut out, Dr. Volberg. The bingo line, did you address that? I'm not sure if you... Yeah, the thing I wanted to draw attention to on the bingo line was that it does have the highest prevalence of problem gambling amongst monthly bingo players who do three or more other types of gambling.   Interesting. Thank you. Other questions on that? Okay, thank you. I do have a question. Sorry. I was gonna ask it earlier or later, but might as well. Is there something about the life cycle of a game, Rachel? If I look back at the arc of, let's say, bingo versus casino gambling, one is much newer, the other one has been with us for a lot longer as a society. And so is it possible that there's an effect of whoever remains in any particular game is likely to be more a problem gambler just by virtue of longevity of the game? Or a longevity of the player. That's sort of a confounding issue that bingo like horse racing trends quite a bit older in terms of the demographics of their players. And you'll notice that we don't have horse racing on this graph and the reason for that is because of the very small number of people that engaged in horse racing on a monthly or more frequent basis. Similarly for online in our Massachusetts data, we don't have enough people in those cells to be able to look at those data with confidence. Right, but I know that there's a disproportionate, so slightly higher from other studies that you've made, you've done in those groups, slightly higher risk in aggregate, not just probably gambling, but when you're putting at risk. Yeah, that's true. And I've argued in a couple of other contexts that there are these older, more well-established or longer established forms of gambling, certainly in the United States, horse racing and bingo, that have been around for many, many years that people very much associate with a social network or with, they have their gambling friends, the horsemen or the regular gamblers on horse racing. There's a whole culture associated with that, similarly with bingo. So that's another piece of the puzzle there. Right, yeah, I know, I mean, I think that's happening, that's beginning to happen to the slot player, both aging and a life cycle, I think, throughout the country where younger people are engaging in a different format, unlike their perhaps older parents. Yeah, I remember, I did adult and adolescent surveys in Nevada about 20 years ago. And we hypothesized that both the adults and the adolescents in Nevada would have much higher gambling rates and much higher rates of problem gambling. And it worked out okay with the adults, but the adolescents had very substantially lower participation rates and lower problem rates than any of the other jurisdictions where I had done adolescent surveys. And in sort of talking to young people about the results over a period of time, it's pretty clear that kids don't wanna do the type of gambling that their parents are doing. It's very uncool. Are there any other questions about this beautiful graph? Thank you, Rachel. Okay, let's move down to the conclusions. Okay, so this study was consistent, as I mentioned, with other research showing that casino gambling, in the case of Sweden, it was especially EGMs, but also table games. And we can't unpack that for Massachusetts, but we can say that casino gambling in general may be an especially problematic gambling format. And with the introduction of casinos in Massachusetts, we are looking forward to the possibility of examining whether and how relationships that we've identified here may have changed. We are quite excited about the follow-up general population survey that will be fielded not immediately, but in the fall of 2021, we hope, when we would strongly recommend that a follow-up online panel survey be added at a relatively low cost in order to be able to replicate this particular analysis, but with the added benefit of being able to disaggregate EGMs and table games. Another direction that we are interested in pursuing perhaps in the future is using these data to explore relationships when controlling for age or race or gender or socioeconomic status. And then I believe this is almost, well, this is my next to last slide, is the next one, Mark. So this study, I believe underscores the importance of focusing both policy and regulation as well as problem gambling services and particularly prevention in Massachusetts on casino gambling. I think there is a suggestion in these data that pending sports betting legislation may need better safeguards and funding for problem gambling prevention and research. And I think my concluding point is that while we know that the online environment is riskier, we also know that it's more amenable to technological interventions and I've written a number of occasions about using the online environment and designing basically gambling problem prevention seat belts and airbags as online gambling is made available to people. So one last slide, because this was an academic study, we of course have to acknowledge that there are some limitations. These are cross-sectional data, which limits our ability to make causal inferences. For that, we need longitudinal cohort data. The data does not distinguish between physical and online participation in specific formats and different forms of access may mediate these relationships that we've identified. And then finally, despite the large data sets that we had, some of the groups were quite small and associated with large confidence intervals around the estimates. That's the main reason why we didn't include horse racing and online gambling in our analyses. And then last but not least, Mark, my last slide tells everybody where to go to get the article and how to cite it. Excellent, Dr. Volberg, questions. Commissioners, because of just our formatting or perhaps, Mark, you can take down the PowerPoint now. We can... Well, actually, I actually have a question. Oh, did you want to go back? Yeah, I had a question on the page of the conclusions. Yeah. So sorry. I'm so sorry, I was just about to catch myself. No, no, that's quite okay. If, Mark, if you can go back to the second page of the conclusions right there. You know, I'll plug, I wish... We'll get this presentation to our friends at DPH because that's... There's many implications in terms of policy that concerns them as well. I will just first make a comment and then ask you, Rachel. So you are very familiar with the Game Sense program that we have by statute at the casinos where we hope to have the most intervention in real time on casino players, which you seem to suggest at least directly in your conclusion here in the first one. I'm wondering if you follow that logic to what also happens at the casinos to the Game Sense program in terms of eventually being able to sign up people to the voluntary self-exclusion list. Does that mean that if you take away one, let's say one of the more risky behaviors, in this case, casino gambling, does your risk go down? In other words, from your graph where you had the sliding up graph where you went from one to two to three and four plus, all of them trending upward, is it possible to, once you take one, to come right back? I'm not thinking of anyone individual, but does that thinking translate? So I think what you're asking Enrique is at the population level, if you remove a form of gambling from the mix, does that move all of the prevalence rates across the multiple involvement down? I wasn't thinking about the population level. I'm not suggesting let's say that now we shouldn't have casinos. That's not gonna happen. I'm thinking if you are in this soft population of gamblers that engage in multiple ways, where as the number of your engagement goes up, your risk goes up. And again, maybe that's the answer to the question. I'm thinking more individually and you're thinking more population. But is it possible that a group of people that make it into the voluntary self-exclusion after having engaged in the casino, one of the most risky as you show here, now you've removed that one form of gambling? Does this distance to reason that then the risk or that group goes down? In other words, is it intuitively your graph made it the more you gamble, the more your risk goes up? In other words, from left to right, is it possible to ride the curve backwards? So at the individual level, we know that problem gambling can be episodic. And so people use voluntary self-exclusion or they change their own gambling habits, maybe without any other kind of interference. Usually when they sort of become concerned about their own involvement and intensity of gambling. So we know that there's a lot of sort of in and out, but as you'll recall, one of the limitations of this study is that it is cross-sectional. I think it would be very, very interesting for someone to take a look at the relationship in the magic, in the cohort data between changes in gambling participation or number of gambling formats or to use this approach even to try to understand how people's gambling changes from wave to wave of the cohort study. I think that would be an even better way to answer the question that you're asking, which is if somebody stops one form of gambling, but they're still doing three other forms of gambling, what happens to their problem gambling status? Yeah, I'm reminded of early, early on in my tenure as a commissioner, I came to see a recovering gambler, speak, did one of those testimonials that the mass council puts together that are so powerful. And somebody asked her a question that is very relevant to this study. I think they asked her, is there any particular form of gambling that you think did it for you because she was doing a number of them? And she made the great analogy. I thought at the time that I think still holds, which is that I was also, this is what she said, I was also an alcoholic and my preference was Scotch, but I could have any kind of drink at any given point. Right. That would do it.  Well, I would respectfully disagree with you. If we go back to slide number 10, Mark, if you want to share that slide, basically what that slide shows is that there's a very substantial proportion of problem gamblers in Massachusetts who are only gambling on one or two formats. So this is going to be up to hypothesis two. Yeah, this one. You can see that 16% plus 28% of the problem gamblers were only gambling on one or two formats. And most of the people who were in... Wait, let's see. Yeah, no, this doesn't tell us about specific gambling, types of gambling that they're doing, but this tells you that a very substantial proportion, so 30 plus 15 is about 45%, a little less than of problem gamblers in Massachusetts that we surveyed were only doing one or two types of gambling. So it's not just the breadth of gambling involvement. This very clearly shows that there's something about specific formats of gambling that are associated with problems. In other words, is it fair to say, if you're thinking, if you take the VSE and you take out Casino Play, you're suggesting, Enrique, that they're going to find another source of gambling, but Bingo may not be their thing just because Bingo's the only other alternative available. Well, there's a lot of lottery games. There are a lot of lottery games, right? So the lottery is more intuitive than Bingo, fair enough. So that's what I think, Rachel, you're saying that that's not necessarily the case, that they won't get the satisfaction of gambling from just another form of gambling where, so alcohol is not necessarily a great analogy. Yeah, I mean, gambling and alcohol are analogous in lots of ways, but this is one of the ways that they're not analogous. Interesting. There are very specific groups of people that are attracted to specific types of gambling, whether they're gendered, whether they're age-related, whether they're class-related. It's very well documented across many jurisdictions. And so someone who has a strong preference for sports betting, for example, they may do lottery playing, but that's just like something that they sort of do on an impulse occasionally. But their real thing is that they think they're really good at betting on sports, and that's what they're enthusiastic about, and that's what they're intensely involved with. Perhaps you saw the article, I think it was in the globe, maybe this week where the younger demographic had shifted because sports betting wasn't really available, but now they were doing the sort of micro-investment in the stock market. Day trading and trading. Yeah, the day trading in the micros. So they weren't going to the lottery convenience store and buying lottery tickets. They were now shifting to a different challenge. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's sort of where the alcohol gambling analogy falls apart a little bit. Interesting. Not all gamblers are going to be equally attracted to specific types of gambling. Thank you. No, I think, again, some of the insights from these type of studies, I think, leave us to programs like the Game Sense program where if we engage in conversations with people and we know that they're regulars when it comes to slot play, but we also know, for example, that they play the lottery regularly, we have one in three chances, I guess, if I'm reading this graph correctly, right? 27% of that person being a problem gambler just by knowing those two data points. Is that a first statement? I'm sorry, I wasn't quite able to follow. So you're talking about the 28% of people who engage, who are problem gamblers, who engage in two formats. Right. Right. Oh, maybe that's the key, who are problem gamblers. Let's take ourselves to the Game Sense program. We have a lot of casino visitors and we engage with them regularly. Right. And let's say I am a Game Sense advisor and I'm interacting with somebody who I happen to know, they come regularly, they come at least once a month, which is part of your study here. I don't know if they're problem gamblers or not, but they come here regularly. I also then know that they're regular lottery players. Right. So then you know that they are gambling on two formats. On two. And if I know that that second format, they're also engaging in monthly. Yeah. Now, can I transport ourselves to this graph and say, this is a person who won out of three, 28%. I may be, without asking them any more questions about their gambling participation or expenses, I may be engaging with somebody, you know, one out of three people who may be a problem gambler. Is that the right way to... Yeah, I would make it one out of four because I would round down to 25%. Okay. But yeah, that is a good takeaway from that for a Game Sense Advisor or a Game Sense Program. And similarly, if the Game Sense Advisors are finding out about all of the other forms of gambling that people that they're talking to do on a monthly basis, if they identify that they're doing four, but three other types of gambling on a monthly basis, in addition to the casino, then it's a one in three. That's a 34%. Yeah, one in three. Rachel, I hadn't thought about this, but are there combinations of gambling that would indicate greater risk? Because there are a deeper analysis of this that you could say that casino gambling combined with daily lottery or sports betting is actually the combination that has the greatest risk. You know, we thought about that as an analysis mark, but again, we ran into sample size problems. When you start carving this two and three and four plus groups into casino and horse racing or casino and bingo or each of those specific ones has to be disaggregated. And we very quickly ran into a cell size problem. So it's a really intriguing idea. I can talk to the team about maybe trying to figure out some way to do it, but it would be too much. But it would be challenging just for statistical confidence in your statistical results. Rachel, this is Bruce and just to pick up on Mark's point, and I know you're talking about the conclusions around sports betting, but you give sports betting a high degree of prevalence up under hypothesis number one. And that among everything across the scale is the illegal part. Is that tend to show a riskier behavior and that somebody who's willing to, you know, do that kind of betting transaction illegally is probably a riskier or more problem gambler? That's a really good question, Bruce, but I'm not sure that these data really speak to that. I think because sports betting, well, yeah, in Sweden, it was online poker, where'd it go? In Sweden, it was EGMs, casino table games, Bingo, and online poker. And the data that we collected in Sweden was actually collected right in the midst of the poker fat, you know, like craze. And Sweden did not have online poker available to its citizens through its gambling monopoly. So these were all offshore sites that were marketing to Swedes. So, you know, we've speculated at the time that there might be something similar to sports betting in the United States where, you know, there's sort of this change that's going on. It's rather uneven jurisdiction by jurisdiction. So, you know, sports betting is legal in New Jersey, but it's not legal in Massachusetts. But people living in Massachusetts are like, well, you know, if it's legal in New Jersey and, you know, why can't I do it or what's so wrong about it? I'll just go, you know, find a way around, you know, the federal laws. So, you know, there was a similar sense in Sweden of online poker was incredibly popular. It was all over TV all the time. And there were a lot of young men in particular in Sweden who got very, very deeply involved in online poker playing, but it was all with these offshore operators who weren't regulated. And we think that was one of the reasons why that particular form of gambling was so closely associated with problems in Sweden. So I think there might be something similar going on with sports betting in Massachusetts, but I can't say for sure. Okay. Thank you. Other questions for Dr. Wolfer. I can add, I thought this was an excellent report and presentation. Thank you. Thank you very much. And important work for us to kind of pause and think about really what is core to our mission. So thank you. The timing was just right. And unfortunately in terms of today's schedule, not, but in terms of our overall agenda, really important other. No, thank you very much. Rachel as usual, very insightful. Thank you. Well, thank you for the opportunity to present. I was, I was really so proud of the work that, that my colleagues and I did in Sweden. And when I told them that I was going to try and replicate it in Massachusetts, they were very, very excited. And when I finally sent them the link to the article, we had a great back and forth about, you know, the differences between Massachusetts and Sweden. But I feel like that's something that I really just really enjoyed bringing to Massachusetts and, and to the gaming commission in particular is lessons that I've learned, you know, over 35 years of gambling research, but more specifically, you know, doing work with international colleagues and bringing it back to Massachusetts and trying to see, you know, how it sort of manifests here is, is really, really a, an honor and a privilege. Well, thank you. Thank you. And we experienced whatever, if it were either a celebration or a protest, we experienced it with them. But it was not, but it was not disruptive at all. Thank you, Dr. Volver. Thank you, Mark. Mark, are you all set? Yes, I'm all set. Thank you very much. Actually, if I could just say one thing, this tease up an agenda item that we'll, we have next week where we begin talking about how the data. Several years has incredible value in, in a whole host of ways. Thank you. And we're looking forward to that. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. He throws up, but he's talking about the data access project. Right. For next week. Yeah, you just broke, but we, we, we, we were aware of what you're up to. So. Thank you. All right. Then. Thank you so much. And we'll move on. To another really important discussion. Item number seven on our agenda. We're going to put it in the chat. We're going to be starting with the meeting. We're going to start with the meeting. Derek, I'll let you introduce. Um, And. Kathy, could we get a five minute break? Sure. They make sense. I will stretch because this is really important for us to be hydrated. And, and, um, I, I had to, I had some sunlight challenges. So maybe I'll be a group on that too. Great. Thank you. We'll do five minutes. I think Derek reserved about a half an hour or so for today's discussion. So we should be looking at some kind of a conclusion around three 30 or so, not in any way to hurry that discussion, but that was the original. Five minutes will return. Thank you. Do we have all five of us. Commissioner Cameron. I'm here. Thanks. Hi. Hi, commissioner. Commissioner Zuma God, commissioner Stevens, commissioner Brian. Great. I see Derek and team. We'll reconvene meeting. Number 308. Continuation of. A good long day. Thank you, everyone. Good afternoon, madam chair and commissioners. Good afternoon. Before I start on the presentation, I'd just like to take a quick second to thank and recognize what an excellent job the it team is doing. And implementing the transition to the cloud. You know, and we all talk about it in our groups. It's easy to focus on the things that are in inconvenience right now. But I think it's just as important to recognize the amount of mission critical items that are working seamlessly and in the background. But we don't take notice of and may take for granted. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to Katrina and our team. Thank you. This is no easy task you're undertaking. And doing it in a completely remote environment makes it that much more difficult. So now on to the item on the agenda, the FY 21 budget recommendations, which I know you've all anxiously been waiting to get to. It's taking a while to get here, but we are all ready for this. And I'm going to go ahead and get into the agenda. And Agnes Bolier and we're here to present to you. Staff's recommendations for the FY 21 budget. I'll just try to, if I pause a little bit, I'll be trying to move the memo as we work, work along on it. We're recommending a collective 39.7 million dollar budget for the gaming control fund, the racing oversight and development fund, the community mitigation fund and the public health trust fund. The community mitigation fund. The community mitigation fund. The community mitigation fund. Funds. 93 FT ease. Six contract positions. And I just want to point out that the budget we're presenting does not include estimates for the racing capital and promotional trust funds. Nor does it include funding for the grants from the community community mitigation fund. The 39.7 million dollars. Is composed. Of the following. 225. Let me get up there a little bit. 32.25 for the regulatory and statutorily required costs of the gaming control fund. 2.68 million dollars for the racing oversight and development fund. 170,000 in funding for the community from the community mitigation fund, which I'd like to point out, this is the first time. We're recommending any spending of administrative funds from the community mitigation fund. 3.62 million dollars from the public health trust fund. The MDC's office of research and responsible gaming. The gaming control fund. Is composed of two areas. The MGC's regulatory costs, which are directly within the control of the commission. And the statutory assessed costs of the expanded gaming act, which we do not have control of. Both costs of the responsibility of our licensees to pay. Page three of the memorandum breaks out the regulatory costs, which are 26.7 million. And the statutory costs are 5.5 million. And include funding for the attorney general's office, the alcohol beverage and control commission. And the Commonwealth assessment for indirect costs. The gaming control budget. Overall is a 4.5% decrease from FY 20. Currently approved funding levels. And on the regulatory side, it's a 5.28% decrease from our current funding levels. Page five of the memorandum illustrates major funding variances. And the following is a list of major changes. Now, one thing before I get to the list of major changes on page five. Well, we are down 5.28%. From our currently approved level. We are down closer to 10% from what our maintenance. Funding level was. So we started this process back in January before COVID-19 hit. And, you know, people are looking at what it would cost to maintain current levels of service. As we go through this, you'll see just from where we are right now in FY 20, we're down quite a bit. And in some categories. So under payroll, we are down 9.8%. Or approximately 957,000 in salary and fringe funding. We're from the 20 levels. This is a 10% decrease in our FTE count. It's achieved by not backfilling vacant positions. You'll see in the memoir, it's two gaming agents and enforcement council, a license reciprocation verification coordinator, an open source specialist, the ombudsman, a staff attorney, a help desk position and a chief administrative officer. We're building in some anticipated turnover savings and associated fringe benefits. And there's also no funding for raises built into the FY 21 budget. I also want to point out the, you know, where we stand right now. If you look at where we started off FY 20, we're at about 8.2 million proposed for, for salaries right now where it's 6.6 million. For FY 21, we're proposing that's close to a 19.5% cut from where we started last year.  We have used turnover savings and attrition to fill in some of the costs we've experienced so that we didn't have to increase our assessment on licensees. For the first time, we've shifted 1.25 FTEs of funding and associated fringe and direct cost of community mitigation fund. That also helped to reduce the AA. We've reduced our travel and training budgets by approximately 66%. We've reduced the legal costs to the minimum required by our insurance policy. We do see a slight increase in public safety costs. And there's also a slight increase in IT spending for our shift to the cloud. The racing division, division budget for FY 21 is decreasing by 2.67%. This is mainly a result of the administrative positions. We're not backfilling that would have been charged off a piece to that division. Finally, the research responsible gaming office of the MBC, of the MGC will be funded from the Public Health Trust Fund for the second time in FY 21. Let me get down to that. And funding for this office has been reduced by 26.5%. That number is correct, 26.5% from the approved FY 20 budget of 6.29 million. The FY 21 proposal is down to 4.62 million. With most of those reductions coming from the Game Sense Program and research contracts. However, funding for the research manager, a position that was approved in FY 20, which we cut, is also cut from this budget and represents a 33% reduction to our staff in that area. So there's a lot of information in the backup documents, but we did hold two by twos to update on some of the details. So, you know, I know we're, we're moving rather slow on this meeting. So I will move on to the, the assessment piece, which is another main issue and is, is not clear this year. MGL Chapter 23K, section 56, as well as 205, CMR 121, require the MDC to make the following annual fees and assessments on category one and two gaming licensees. A $600 fee for each slot machine approved to be used at a gaming facility as of July 1. And an annual assessment that's the difference between the projected spending for the game and control fund and the projected revenues. And finally, not less than $5 million to be deposited in the public health trust fund. Due to the uncertainty of the timing of reopening of licensees, needing a revised approved slot count for July 1, and not knowing the number of gaming positions that each facility will open up with, we're unable to provide the normal chart that we'd have that would show how much each licensee would be paying for that $600 per machine fee, as well as what their proportion of the remaining assessment would be. What we can tell you is licensing is projecting about 750,000 revenues. And if you use 23K, section 56, basically the licensees are responsible for the difference between revenues we're projecting to bring in outside of them in our spending. So that would leave $31.5 million for the licensees to pay for that slot fee assessment. Yes. Can I just interrupt? Because I'm not sure if I'm seeing on the screen, if you're following. I'm sorry. Thank you. Yep. That just would be helpful. My apologies. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for correct. Thank you for correcting me. I'm reading from my notes and not following along in the memo. Thank you. Just will help us follow. Thank you. Absolutely. So that leaves $31.5 million. So I'm just going to say that the licensees will pick up of our budget, whether it be through slot fees or through the assessment process. The big piece I want to point out is the $5 million that was required under 23 K as well as well as 801 CMR 21, the public health executive committee met. And is trying to provide some. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what the timing. Relief on this. So they're looking to basically delay the first quarterly assessment of the $5 million. Until either the very end of FY 21. Or the very beginning of FY 22. So they have said that, you know, out of the $5 million, they'll try and pull in 3.75. They'll try and pull in 3.75 to provide a little bit of relief. So if you combine all of those together, you know, the licensees are responsible for a 36.5. Or if you go for this revised amount and then roll the other 1.25 into the beginning of next year, 35.25 million in assessments. Timing of payments was a big issue. So, you know, I think that's why I moved back really quickly to say the whole process we went through was, was very difficult this year, given all the uncertainties, but it was also helpful. I think staff came to the table. Understanding the, the circumstances that the licensees were, were experiencing. I think licensees came to the table with an understanding that. Well, they may be experiencing very difficult times. We still have a job to regulate. So they had some very good recommendations during our meeting with them on May 26. Some very good ideas of how we could reduce our, our spending levels and they had a few requests. They asked us to consider for the first time, breaking the annual slots fees at the smaller tranches, either quarterly or monthly. We usually do that on an annual basis right up front. And then they asked us to continue billing the assessment on a monthly basis, which we've been doing for the last quarter of FY 20. So, you know, I, I put that in our conclusion that, you know, we're asking the commission to contemplate that. If you were asking for an opinion on that, I think that we would prefer to see quarterly payments of the slot fee. So that we do get some money up front and we're not worried about bouncing payroll and as well as getting two months up front of the assessment and then going to a monthly billing structure and continuing to review that throughout the year. We do have some agencies that rely on ISAs from us, the attorney general's office. So we'd need to provide some funding to them too. So by doing this, I think it balances the request, the licensees, the fees that we've received from the commission. As well as being responsible to ourselves and our partners that rely on these funds. Let me see. So I'd just like to say thank you to the staff, division and bureau heads, licensees, commissioners, and especially the finance and HR teams, Jacqueline, for coordinating and generating loads of information. And especially Karen and commissioner, and the commissioners that have been working with the commissioners to help with the public budget, especially meeting with licensees as well as internally with staff and helping me to explain it to, to people when I couldn't do it in a, in a plain terms way. At this point, if the commission has any questions, we can field them now, or if there are no questions or comments. Everyone just wants to be done with this meeting. So I'm going to turn it over to the commissioners and the commissioners, and I'm going to turn it over to the commissioners and the commissioners to email for public comment and return back to the next public meeting for vote and or adjustments. Before we begin, I do. I also personally want to thank Derek and team and commissioners and commissioner and, and, and interim executive director Wells, because they were very patient with me early on as I, as I sort of slide my way through the process. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. I think that has been very complicated by all of the circumstances that the entire Commonwealth is facing. I have one, one. Issue that I'd like to address. I don't know if my fellow commissioners have any others, but I'll start, you know, one of the, the largest items of our expenditures is with respect to our, our. I know that we have monitored that in the past. I've been fortunate enough to sit down with captain Connors and he's gone through his process. And I know that commissioner Cameron has done that very, very carefully. I am wondering if I could ask commissioner Cameron and commissioner of Brian to maybe do that kind of review to support captain Connors over the course of, you know, the next year because it is such a significant part of our work in the budget. And just so that we can have some kind of a regular reporting, it will give captain Connors, I think, an additional reporting, you know, so that he has somebody to speak to if there are any challenges. Madam chair, that is not a problem at all. Happy to assist. And as you mentioned, we've been doing this for a number of years with, with captain Connors, looking at those numbers, looking at ways to frankly have savings and, and, and deciding where our public safety costs should really be and are effective. So happy to continue to do that. And I would like to thank the team, the finance team as well. These could not have been easy discussions with licensees and other stakeholders. So I think this year in particular was so challenging. And this is a really good work product. So thank you. Thank you. Commissioner O'Brien. I'm sure that you and commissioner Cameron can coordinate, but I just think that that would be really helpful process. So thank you. Yeah, that's fine. I'm happy to continue helping on that. And I get, I was briefed in one of the two by two is by Derek and team. And thank you to everybody involved. I know they worked really hard on dealing with something in a really tough time. So I appreciate the work. Thank you. Commissioner Stebbins. I think maybe you were going to speak. Yeah. Thank you, madam chair, just to, to jump in and to, to thank Derek and the team. I know Derek and over the years is we were growing staff as we were opening casinos and hoping to get to a steady state where we might be able to balance out some of our costs. And appreciate the great work. Derek has done to finally start achieving. I'm sure what is some of his goals with respect to our budget. As we talked about in the two by two is I personally have a concern about using some of the community mitigation funds for some administrative costs. I think we can have a discussion about that next week when we, when we vote on the budget, but. I would suggest perhaps having a separate vote. On that because that's kind of a policy change for us going forward before we have a vote on the full budget. It might warrant a little bit more discussion. Derek exactly what that policy issue is because you are sending the budget out for. You know, for comment and we want to be fully transparent about that. So perhaps the timing is if you could just elaborate briefly. On that, I think it was a $170,000 shift. So thanks. Correct. We're shifting off 170,000. And it's a, it's approximately 1.25 FT's. And it is the staff. It's part of Joe Delaney and part of Mary Thurlow salaries. They work on that program on a daily basis, not just on giving out the grants, but as well as administering it, tracking expenditures, getting the reports in from the grantees. And, you know, the statute does require us to administer the funds. We have sent over to. To the Comptroller's office as well as a enough to get that appropriation set up for payroll to be charged to it. That is that has been approved. But commissioner step is correct. It is a policy discussion, which is why we're putting it up as a recommendation. You know, most grant programs do pay for the administration of the funds. You know, we had talked about doing this in the third quarter. When we made a lot of reductions and we decided to come back and give it a better attention during the fiscal year budget process. So I think it's completely appropriate to have a, have a deeper conversation. You know, it is 170,000. We can move it back to the game and control fund. And then that just gets absorbed by the licensees as part of that assessment and slot fee payment. But it, I think there is some merit to charging off the costs associated with administering that program to the program, especially now that it has a steady stream of income coming into it. While it may be reduced completely understand, but it is a steady stream of income coming from the gross game and rather than us. And just, just. One second. Commissioner Stebbins, please. And Derek brings up a good point. I certainly appreciate. What we're up against and kind of thinking outside the box. So I'm not necessarily. Saying that I don't agree with this recommendation. I think there's some things we need to consider. Certainly flow of money into the. Community mitigation fund for next year. This might not be the best year to do it. As well as making sure that we're. Sympathetic to the fact that, you know, there's. Allocations of the money that stay in region B. And there are allocations of the money that stay in region A. And being fair that if we do this, there's fair distribution of that funds from. From both of those accounts. Yeah, I think it would be done proportionately by taking, you know, taking of the fund. I, I, I, as it's been alluded, and again, it's, it's good to talk about it. And we'll talk about it in the next meeting as well. But it seemed keeping with our practice in other areas. This is something that we propose to do. And our prior executive director didn't want to pull the trigger. Last year. But there's parallels to the public health trust fund racing.  So it's, I know it's not easy. It's not, you know, I don't think it's, it's significantly short changes that the fund. But I know that, you know, it's a, it's a difficult year. I want to touch base on a couple of things. I will just chime in quickly again, something that we might not have to decide today, but one of the things that Derek mentioned as a, as a bit of an open question. I think I would, when it comes to the quarterly assessment. In this year, I would be in favor of making the quarter assessment to have a working capital, if you will, for the first quarter and then move back to month to month, just like we did at the end of this fiscal year, move back to month to month after the first quarter, as they, you know, as they have asked. The reason being is that we have a number of obligations and ISAs like Derek mentioned, and it's important to have, you know, the ability to make those commitments with cash on hand. But again, that is, that is subject to discussion and we can, we can decide on that separately. And the other thing, maybe I don't want to confuse more, I think Derek outlined it well, but the slot fee in my mind has been, not in my mind, the slot fee has been a topic of discussion with licensees and where were I, one in which I think there are at times a little bit of confusion, meaning that if by July 1, that there's no slots operating, which may or may not be the case, that they might then not have to pay that fee. And to me, that's where the misunderstanding might be. If that's the case, then the balance, which is the rest of the approved budget, would still have to be assessed on licensees in proportion to the prior, the previously approved gaming positions. So to me, there's not a difference. It's a bit of a difference without a distinction, unless the thinking is that we will not assess that fee and eat the difference because we're not doing the balance. And that's not what I suggest we should do. If that were the case, then we would need to find additional savings somewhere in the budget. Okay. If I could just ask Karen on that matter, if you could follow up with Todd and see if there's additional guidance from a legal perspective on that. No problem. Thank you. And a key point to that, which commissioner Zuni guy and I have talked about is this, actually the ability to assess on a prorated basis, the $600 for how, how long the flop machine will be in use. And in the past we've, there've been no machines in use and we've assessed that fee on what was actually approved. So if we wanted to go back to what's currently approved, but not operating, there'll be a much higher number. So, you know, there are a lot of issues to discuss with Todd about this, but more than happy to have those discussions and hopefully we'll have some sort of initial numbers before we come back for the meeting in July. Can you remind me what, which, what the date is the July 2nd that we're planning on? Or is it later in the month? Derek. I don't know when that next meeting is Karen, do you have that next meeting? Schedule has the, you know, because the 25th is an extra meeting. So that's regularly scheduled cadence would be on July 2nd. Yeah. That would be the one because we'd want to put this out for public comment and give it time to. Okay. Okay. Is that enough time for you for that? If the public comments go out. Now it's July. Okay. Yes. Can I make another point? Yes. Just just in terms of what the budget does not include. Which I think is also important to at least consider. We're not assuming that there will be furloughs or the need to do any kind of really work out scenario. Let's say with, with some of the, of the contracts that we have a rent, for example, or the contract, the central monitoring system. I don't think we're there yet. Certainly not there. But I did want to mention that in this environment, the longer that the casinos remain. The longer that they're closed. The, the, the more likely that the, the, the event is in which one licensee might say, I have no indication that anybody's at this point, by the way. Let me preface that. But the likelihood increases that somebody might say, I can simply, I know I owe this assessment, but I may not be able to pay it. For now or for the time being. And that's something that it's important for you to at least, for us to at least mention it. Consider it as a possibility, not a large one, but one with implications in the budget discussion. And again, that, that has significant legal implications as well.  Right now, our, our, our licensees are, have, we're working very collaboratively and it's been very significant work done on the budget. And we thank you for that, Derek and team Karen and, and Enrique. Navigating this at, you know, remotely difficult circumstances. Thank you.  What Enrique is pointing out, but he does bring up the what if scenario and we have to walk through that. I do want to report that the licensees, all of them have paid the April, May and June assessments. So we have our full funding in the bank for FY 20. Yeah. And by the way, this is perhaps bringing my risk assessment hat because we're going through that process as we speak. And in that format, you know, for, for our internal group in that format, we have the low probability scenarios with huge implications. This is one of them. There's high probability scenarios with high implications. And this is not one of them. But it's, it's something that, that it's a decision that we would have to react quickly in the big and confines, et cetera. But one that we at least all, all my fellow commissioners need to at least consider. Thank you. Do we have any other questions or comments? Excellent job. Derek, this is our first step in the process. And we're very interested to see what public comments we receive. Thank, I know the entire team. I see Agnes there. I know Jacqueline and Doug. Sarah, your entire team. Thank you so much. It's all part of the effort. I'm leaving out someone. All right. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. I think that that is our last item on today's agenda. We will not. I'm making an executive decision. Fellow commissioners return. To community mitigation. I see a thumbs up. At least one, at least one. I think that, uh, I think that that topic deserves our really, you know, focus attention and it's been a long day. So, uh, to give, um, that our, um, proper consideration will hold. I don't have any. Oh, sorry. Madam chair. I, um, I see Mr. Corey wanting to speak. And it's entirely at your discretion to, uh, to give that opportunity to anybody. I didn't see Mr. Corey asking to speak. Mr. Corey, just so that you understand, um, when we have public meetings, tip, we don't typically, um, have the public, uh, um, make presentations on us as part of our agenda. However. You have been here the entire day and it would be really unfair, um, for us to, to disregard, uh, your, your increase. So, uh, Thank you. For the, for the, At least to create a precedent of your, your, um, Uh, willing to hold us out. We, we will allow you for a brief comment. Thank you. Madam chair. I just wanted to, uh, request that now that you, but, um, accepted the application of, uh, Plain Ridge Park as timely and, uh, sufficient. I would like to hold over, uh, Um, I would like to, um, I would like to request to the harness horseman with regards to the renewal of their license for the time in which you will be actively considering, uh, the renewal. Our presentation on our request with regards to that matter. Certainly. And you did submit the letter and, uh, that's in our records. We, as you heard today, um, we have a schedule for the deliberations on the remicenture. So, um, you'll be aware of, um, Our schedule and I'll make sure that, uh, Dr. Light down is in coordination with you. So, um, again, my apologies if you had intended to speak on that, but again, I did not. Oh, it's, it's, it is a challenge. It's, I must say on these kinds of items, the virtual is a challenge to otherwise the virtual is pretty easy, but it is hard to see people raising their hands. So my apologies. This has been very informative. Uh, so I've enjoyed it. Well, thank you for sticking with us. And the, and the, uh, the work that has been done recently between, uh, Chris McElaine and, uh, HHH and E has been extremely encouraging with, with the, uh, work, uh, with commissioner Cameron and Dr. Lightbound as well. So, uh, we're so appreciative of that, uh, as well. As well. Thank you so much. Well, we like that. And, and I did feel that Tuesday's session was a very positive session. And, um, I'm hoping that every voice felt heard. So thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you, Mr. Corry. Bye-bye. All right. Um, uh, our next item is actually, if we have any commissioners update, is the update any updates? Okay. I'm seeing all knows with that. Um, I want to just thank the entire team, everyone for their patience. We just had a little late start, but it was a really, um, you know, great business operations, uh, meeting. We got a lot done and, um, I appreciate everyone's effort. Uh, you know, people who are still on all of you have contributed today and every day. So thank you. Appreciate it very much. And stay safe. With that, do I have a motion? Motion to adjourn. Thank you. Commissioner Karen, you couldn't jump in there fast enough. And I'm not even going to ask for further comments. Karen. Hi. Commissioner O'Brien. Hi. Commissioner, uh, Zunica. I thank you everybody and especially to the finance team and, and, and Mark and everyone. Great job. And commissioner Stevens. Uh, thank you also to the team and, uh, happy father's day for all the fathers out there and I vote aye. And I vote yes. And again, thank you everyone. Be safe.