This is Carl Hoppe, extension livestock specialist there at the Carrington Research Extension Center, part of North Dakota State University Extension. Today I'm welcome to visit you about feeds and alternative feeds and cost to gain. This is for backgrounding cattle, and this is the fall of 2022. We're going to be looking at our new crop calves. As we always place them on feed, opportunities exist to feed calves, put weight on calves, and hopefully make a little bit of profit when we're feeding calves. It'd be wonderful if we could make a lot of profit, but one of the things that drive profit is the price of feeds. And unfortunately, feed prices continue to follow the corn price, and if you look, as we'll see in a few slides, the corn price is moving higher here to year. So our feed costs are moving up as well. Even though cattle prices have increased somewhat, our feed prices are moving up as well. Let's just take a walk down memory lane. In 2017, the corn price was $2.88 a bushel, and alfalfa hay was $80 a ton. Putting weight on cattle was actually low cost back then because of the price of corn. Of course, at that time, we thought corn was actually price kind of high, but it was $2.88 cents for October of 2017. Later, the corn price moved up $0.20 to $3 on a penny for bushel. Again, our feed costs all creeped up a little bit, but that was still manageable when you're looking at $3 bushel corn that drives the feed price. In 2019, prices of grain went up another $0.30, slowly cranking up, and of course, the rest of the feeds followed suit as well. Now, in 2020, prices moved a little bit. I believe we had the pandemic at about that time, and you can see the rest of our feeds just kind of follow through. But at the beginning of 2021, the price of corn went from $3 up to $5.75. Alfalfa hay is now at $175 a ton, grass hay at $125 a ton, wheat meds at $190, and maybe soy hulls $165 and corn size at $55. Canola mills at $255 as well as dried stillage grains at $230 a ton. Now, this is the year of 2022, and if we look at the prices, our corn price has gone up again at $6.40. Alfalfa is $1.70, and all the rest of the prices has creeped up as well. It slowly happened, but over a five-year period, we certainly did increase our feed prices. Not quite double, but about 90% of what the value is. And of course, this year, across North Dakota, we had another difficult year with varying degrees of drought. We had a lot of moisture in early May, but as the rest of the season turned out, we might have had a good early hay crop, but as the season progressed, our hay crops decreased. Some places received rain, so it had a good silage crop, other places, not so much. So again, your costs are always based on production and the amount of dollars you've got into it. Everybody has their own unique cost when it comes to pricing feeds that they raise on farm. Today, I tend to focus on feeds out on a market value price, what you could buy it for or sell it for, and we do rations according to that. We do have the opportunity to buy feed in North Dakota. We have a lot of crop processing plants across North Dakota where they produce co-product feeds. Our biggest producer across the state would be the distillers grains, which would be from corn ethanol plants that ferment corn into ethanol. And the byproduct is going to be distillers grains, either dried distillers or modified distillers or even wet distillers. And they actually have a product called corn syrup, which has nutrition analysis, very similar to the other distillers grains. We actually have wheat mills across North Dakota. They're priced very competitively and are available. You prefer to have a pelleted form rather than a mill form in those things. If you're in the Red River Valley, you have access to sugar beet pulp. That pulp is very digestible in a backgrounding ration. Unfortunately, high freight costs kind of reduce the availability of how far you could chip that and still have a competitive feed. If you notice, the western part of North Dakota doesn't have access to all these feeds, like the central or eastern part of North Dakota does. It's not near as available. But like everything, you can always truck it wherever you need to if it is cost effective. These are our co-product feeds in North Dakota. We have five distillers plants. We have five wheat mid plants, flower plants that have wheat mids as a co-product. We have a soybean hull plant. Soybean or the crushed soybeans, hulls are a byproduct. In a few years, we're going to have a couple more plants that have even more byproducts available. We do have a plant that produces wet corn gluten feed, but most of that is already priced out and sold into the Minnesota dairy market. I talked a little bit about beet tailings and beet pulp. There is potato byproducts if you're close to a potato processing plant where they make French fries and hash browns and the like. And we do create quite a bit of meals. High protein meals across North Dakota. For looking for cost comparative, usually the cheapest source of protein is going to be distillers grains. But let's visit about that in a few minutes. When feeding a calf, we figure a 700 pound calf would eat about 3% of his body weight. Now on a dry matter intake, that'd be a little bit less than that, about 2.7% of their body weight. So if we're looking at a 700 pound steer, he'd be eating around 17 to 18 pounds of dry matter. Now, even though we feed feed, we kind of measure by the amount of energy that they consume. They either need 57 megacals a day or 14.12 pounds of TDN, and they need a crude protein in the ration that's up to about 13.1%, crude protein. Now I'm doing some calculations here, and I'm doing the energy cost of what it costs to feed cattle, as well as what it costs to feed protein. But my point here is that the energy cost is the biggest single driver of costs in feeding a calf. So any way you can get energy at a lower cost, that'll still put gain on calves, is going to be your advantage. Now there's an anomaly to all this thing, and that is if we just purchased the feed for energy, it'd cost $1.99. We purchased the feed for just protein, it only costs us $1.43. But in reality, when we purchase the energy, we actually get protein coming along with it at no charge. So you start doing the math, it turns out to be that the amount of protein the calf needs is 0.33 pounds per day, and 1.74 pounds of that protein comes along with the energy that we've purchased. So we need to buy supplemental protein of about 0.59 pounds. The cost of protein is $0.44 per pound of protein, which means that we spend an additional $0.26 a day just to get the protein needs to the calf. So my point here is that energy costs about $2 a day. Protein costs are only $0.26 to increase the protein content of the ration up to where the calf needs to meet its requirements. I do like to make a point about water. Water is definitely needed for our calves, and at $0.02 a day, that's really a minimal cost. Some places where water might be higher than that, but still when you're looking at $2.25 or $2.50 a day for feeding a calf, water at two pennies certainly isn't a big factor. So be sure to have plenty of clean, fresh water available for calves. I calculated here the feed cost per pound of nutrient. I've got three, four feeds that I selected, canola meal, wheat mince, corn grain, and dried distillage grains. That's DDGs. So if you look across here, I'm trying to do the math on an as-fed basis, and that's how you would buy it. Canola meal as-fed would be 38% crude protein. Energy content is 62%. Corn is quite a bit higher than that, but canola meal has a lot of fiber in it, and that's why it's quite a bit less. Cost per ton less or this month is $3.25 a ton. Cost per pound calculates at $0.16. Cost per pound of energy is $0.42, and that was for protein. And the cost per pound of TDN is $0.20. You can do the same math with wheat mince, and again it's 17% crude protein on an as-fed basis. 75% TDN on an as-fed basis, and the cost per ton is $200. That means a cost per pound of only $0.10. And when we do the math for cost per pound of crude protein, it's $0.58. The cost of energy, or TDN, with TDN cents for total distilled nutrients, ends up being 0.133. Corn grain the same way. That's $6.40 a bushel is $228 a ton, and we calculate out the cost per pound of energy, and it's $0.14.9. If you look at the cost for crude protein, yes, that is on the miscalculation. That is what it is, because we don't buy corn for its protein content. We buy corn for its energy content. It's actually low on protein, but as you can see, one of the cheaper costs of TDN. Now, as I look at the dried distillers grains, they're usually priced very competitive. So if you look at a cost per pound of crude protein, there are 0.469 cents, 46.9 cents, which is actually a little bit higher than canola milk. But if we're looking at cost per pound of TDN, it's 0.145. So what I find interesting here is our co-products are actually priced fairly reasonable when it comes to cost per pound of TDN. But as we're trying to calculate the extra energy and ration, we can't just make the ration totally on wheat mids or DDGs. We have to blend it with other feeds. And I'll talk about some different targets of gain and the types of combinations that we need to make that type of gain in a little bit. As you can see here, if we're looking for protein sources, canola milk is the cheapest source of protein. If we're looking for TDN, the co-products in corn are by far the cheapest sources of energy. Let's talk about some feed issues that are unique for the fall of 2022. I always like to point out that we should sample our feeds and feed test. Then take a court sample of your feed and send it to a feed diagnostic laboratory. If you don't know of one in North Dakota, please contact your local county extension agent or myself. I'm Carl Hoppe and at the Carrington Research Extension Center. And we can align you with a company that does feed testing. We usually would do NIR, most recent costs that I ran across would be $21 a sample. That certainly can save you in balancing a ration that has the adequate energy and protein, as well as calcium fosters needed to make cattle grow. Now, we should test for nitrates that's in our forages. Some of our annual nitrates might be high in nitrate nitrogen. It's always good to check that out, especially when you have a season like this year where it rained early on. But once July came around, it was hit and miss for rainstorms. That can always lead to higher nitrate nitrogen as long as you blend it with lower feeds. As long as you blend that with feeds that have a lower concentration of nitrates, you can feed these higher nitrates with low nitrate feeds. I have found out that our test weights for corn this year has actually been pretty good. It turned around and rather than having light test weight corn like we do in numerous years this year, it's actually pretty heavy test, which means we're going to have good TDN values in our hay. Feed quality has always depended upon when it's cut. I usually ask the question, was a hay cut in June, July, August, or September? And obviously as the season goes on, the hay quality decreases. So your best haze are put up in June and then it decreases as the plant becomes mature as time goes on. You can test for nitrates as well through feed tests and that's a minimal charge. Now, some more issues for fall of 2022. We do have continued high feed costs. Like I said earlier about our feed costs are about 90% higher than they were two years ago. I don't believe our cattle prices are 90% higher, but that's one of the issues we have to deal with. If you're looking to buy any co-products or even feed, be sure to source supplies early. It appears supplies are available, but they might be sold out over the next two weeks and you just can't buy it on the spot market. Always plan ahead. Freight costs are high this year because fuel costs are the highest they've been for a while. So be sure to consider freight costs when you're hauling it any distance at all. And grain prices are high. That's just due to international demand. And like I say, hay prices always follow the corn prices because you're buying energy and corn sets the price. Well, here's some rations that I have for calves. This particular first ration is a grass hay diet that's 13 pounds, basically two-thirds grass hay, one-third wheat mitts, and they'll do about two pounds a day gain with a decent grass hay that's of 62, 58% TDN. Your feed conversions are 10 to 1. You can see the ration energy content. And the feed costs per day is $1.51 or costs per pound of gain is 75.5 cents. Now, if we pick up the average day of the gain to 2.6 and use a little bit of alfalfa hay with the grass hay and throw in a little bit more wheat mitts, we can lower our feed to gain and take less feed to put on a pound of gain because we increase the energy density in the ration, and now it costs $1.73 a day, but our feed cost per pound of gain is 66 cents. Usually, as we increase rates of gain, our cost per pound of gain decreases. Here's another ration using less grass hay and more wheat mitts, and now our goal is 2.8 pounds per day. It doesn't seem like there's much difference between 2.6 and 2.8 pounds per day gain, but if you look at the far right-hand column, you can see where feed costs per pound of gain are 5 cents per head per day less, excuse me, per pound less, but with the same feed costs for the cattle. So it's worthwhile to bring calves up on feed and target their gain to know where your most efficient cost per pound of gain is. Well, that's one set of rations. Let's look at some more. Here's one I use alfalfa hay and corn silage. 1.8 pounds per day gain.  Our feed conversions, that's because corn silage is so wet, it takes a lot of feed to put on a pound of gain on an as-bed basis. That'd be a lot different on a dry matter basis, of course. Feed costs per pound of gain is 83 cents. That's the highest we've had so far. That's because of the feeds we're using. Corn silage and alfalfa hay, and it's only 1.2 pounds per day gain, isn't necessarily a cheap ration. Now let's go to another ration. It's going to be 2.6 pounds per day gain using grass hay at 6 pounds, alfalfa hay at 4 pounds, corn grain at 2, and wheat mids at 8 pounds. Those combinations balance nicely for a 45 megacal ration, and our feed cost per day is $1.75 with our cost per pound of gain at 67 cents. But just think, we just changed those proportions a little bit and went from 6 pounds of grass hay to 4 pounds of grass hay, and went from 2 pounds of corn grain to 6 pounds of corn grain, and decreased our wheat mids from 8 pounds to 6 pounds. We could have a 3 pounds a day gain. Our ration would be a 50 megacal ration, and the cost would go up at $1.89, but our cost per pound of gain would actually be the lowest of these three different examples. Now here's another set of rations. Some people in other states would use alfalfa hay and corn grain, alfalfa hay is the queen that provides protein and the ration is rough each, and corn grain obviously provides energy. So we're doing a 2.3 average daily gain. Our feed cost is $1.94. That's like most expensive ones so far today at 80 cents per pound of gain. Now again, that's using corn at $6.40 a bushel and alfalfa hay at $175 a ton. So that's a pretty good quality alfalfa hay and priced accordingly. Well, here's another ration we used just a little bit of alfalfa hay and 11.5 pounds of corn grain, but we had brought out an extra protein supplement that would supply extra limestone of the ration as well as trace minerals and vitamins that go along with a normally balanced protein supplement. You see our feed to gain is better. It takes less pounds to feed to put a ton of gain. Our gain goal here is 3.2. Our cost is $2.56 a day with a cost to gain of 80 cents. So while it costs more to do a 3.2 pound of gain, our actual cost of gain is only 80 cents. Now if you go to another ration just below with a 3.5, you can see our cost to gain gets down to 0.72, but our costs per day still keep going up. It's a real challenge trying to figure out what rates of gain our calves need without getting them too fleshy and decreasing value when we sell these calves after backgrounded calves. The goal usually is around 2.8 pounds per day gain. Here's another set of rations. We're using grass hand distillers grains. 1.7 gain per pound a day would be similar for a good heifer-growing ration, and this would cost a dollar 56 a day, but our feed cost is 0.86 per pound a gain. Now if we increase a little bit of corn grain in the ration, our gain goes up to 2.8, and our feed cost is 65 cents per pound a gain. One of the cheaper ones we've had, if we go down to the next level, we've just picked it up to about 3.4 pounds per day gain, and we got a 0.59, even though it's one of the most expensive ones at $2 in a dime a day, our feed cost per pound a gain is lower. This is a real challenge. If you're going to finish cattle, you need to have an idea of where your feed costs and feed efficiencies are and where your targeted rates of gains are to get your growth. Let me just talk about rates of gain goals. If you're doing less than 2 pounds average daily gain, we're either looking at growing replacement heifers or growing calves for the grass market. It works really well. If you're going to do that and be successful, you either have to have a real market swing for those calves when it gets to Mimei and people want to pay extra for grass cattle, or you're trying to set cattle up so you can market the grass you have as a low price way to put extra weight gain on calves. A little bit of insight there. Whenever you're trying to put cattle out on pasture, make sure the rates of gains in the feed yard are less than what the rates of gains will be out on pasture. That way the calves will continue to keep growing on pasture when it's available. Now, a lot of our pastures would like to produce an average of 2 pounds per day average daily gain over the summer. But as the summer progresses on, the value of our feeds get less, and it takes more, our feed conversions or rates of gain just get poorer. Now, medium rates of gain would be somewhere between 2 and 3 pounds per day average daily gain, and that's a great way to grow cattle without adding extra body condition or fat.  Now, if some cattle are progenically predisposed to handle higher rates of gain, you won't see them get extra fat, they'll just grow. And another point here is if you're looking for grading in a feed yard, as long as we keep the weight on, usually our grades will maintain themselves or if not better.  If they get fleshy after 120 days, certainly don't put them on 3 pounds per day of gain, probably 2.5 to 2.8. If the calves have got some real growth characteristics to them and some frame, they might be able to handle higher rates of gain for a shorter period of time. Know your calves, know the propensity for gain and the compensatory gain that can happen and manage them accordingly. So, now let's just talk about targeting gain with a balanced ration. When you do that, you get your better gains and your better feed efficiency.  What's our goal? Are we trying to put 3 pounds a day guy, 3 pounds average daily gain for 60 days? That's 180 pounds. Or are we looking to do a 1.5 pound average daily gain for 120 days? That's 180 pounds again too. So, there's different ways you can manage cattle. That's the beauty of backgrounding. It's up to you to decide how you want to manage these, how big the calves come in, what your market date is, look at the futures, and how that plays into it. But the one thing I always try to work on is that when we look at our feed costs, that dictates just where we are at when it comes to putting on our cost per pound a gain for feed. Floor rates again just delay marketing of calves when they get to the same weight. So, that's a great way to change or get cattle into a different marketing window that might have a higher price view. If you're looking for co-products, I certainly provide a co-product list to our county extension agents in North Dakota. I believe it's on the website that you found this video. You can certainly look at what that is. If you're going to be looking for feeds, it's always a great idea to contract them during the summer lows, although some of our ethanol plants have decided we don't contract anymore just because of the way things have worked out over the past few years. Maybe that'll change in the future, but always be cognizant of that. Location and freight costs this year are almost staggering at how they've increased. So, be sure to do costs for feed delivered to the feed yard when you're pricing it. A lot of my examples are priced FOB at the plant, and we just work that way. So, if you're looking at high-fiber and protein sources for backgrounding calves, that's really our co-products. The starches have been milled out of them, so it's high in fiber, which is usually a fermentable fiber, and they're high in protein, so it's a good source of extra protein for your calves. I always like to encourage we have the feeds available in North Dakota at their price competitively by all means, please use them. Let me just sum up by saying good rush and provide great results, especially when you have good feedbunk management. I always like to comment that when we're looking at feeding calves in a feedbunk, I like to look at the slickbunk theory. That's where we get the best gain of calves at about 90%, 95% of full feed intake. So, how do we do that with a group of calves? We just kind of want to make sure the feedbunk just gets slicked up when it's time to feed the calves again. They're looking for extra feed. Of course, when you're starting calves on feed, it's always good to keep them a little bit hungry just so you can pick out who the sick calves are, the ones that may not be feeling well, and when they're not feeling well, they usually don't come up to eat right away. So, good way to find out calves that need a little extra attention, maybe antibiotics. Bedding, I've always found out it's a lot easier to keep calves from getting sick than it is to treating them after they've gotten sick. So, if it needs bedding, they have a comfortable place to lay down on. By all means, please do that. A little extra comfort there when calves are just placed on feed, certainly works. Of course, water is always different. Please clean it out and get it clean.  And of course, our water bowls always get a little bit dirty. Caves don't like to have multi-feeds when they're young. Old cows can handle some multi-feeds calves that can create a digestive upset in calves. So, please consider about reducing giving multi-feed to your calves. Like I said earlier, it's always good to keep calves healthy in one way to do that. Make sure they have a good environment to sleep in, windbreak, bedding, feed provided at the same time every day. Cattle are creatures of habit. They like to be fed at the same time. When you increase the energy density of the ration, do it slowly, and you can use something called a step-up ration. That's where nutritionists will have a certain megacal ration after the calves are adapted to that ration. They'll step it up to a higher density energy ration. And that's what they call step-up, and there might be several steps to that change in feed delivery. By all means, please use a balanced ration. You just can't kind of swing it and think you can make it happen. Just by saying, I think our feeds are about this good this year, we're going to feed them that.  Grass doesn't necessarily put on a lot of weight in the fall time. So they at some point have to either find out what a higher power, excuse me, a higher energy feed, more power feed to put weight cane on the calves. And of course, we've got to think about our weight cane goals. And usually a better weight cane decreases our cost. Now, if we want to improve our feed efficiency, we can use ionophores, bovetech remensin. They certainly provide a 5% to 7% improvement in feed conversions. Implants, that'll increase average daily gain and improve feed conversion as well. If you had coxidiosis, you might want to include something. If you've ever put, let me put it this way, if you've ever had coxidiosis, you will add things to the feeds. You don't have to deal with coxidiosis. Dequinate or impolium work really well, prevention. Ionophores do provide some control. So, in summary, in fall 2022, feed prices are high again this year. And like always, higher average daily gains usually have the lowest cost per pound of gain. I provided a whole bunch of rations for you to consider and there's even more combinations you can have based on what type of feed resources you have. Remember, co-products are high in protein which is great for backgrounding calves. And they're high in fiber which prevents acidosis in calves and can balance a good ration. So, good feeding management leads to good calf gains.


Thank you so much for sharing your lecture with us today, Dr. Resnick. At this time, we will open the floor for any questions from our audience. So we do have quite a few already in the Q&A chat box. What is your feeling about HIZ and disc disease, chronic versus dramatic? I see this so commonly it appears that they are chronic. So again, like that, you're talking about high intensity zones. Is that what they, is HIZ they said? Yes. Yeah. So basically, that was a classic term that we used to use for right signal involving the annulus fibrosis of the vertebral disc, particularly posteriorly, which some people suggested might in fact predict that there was going to be a disc vertebral dis-displacement. I have not seen that particular finding as very useful in differentiating among the various inflammatory diseases or infectious diseases or degenerative diseases of the intervertebral disc. Thank you so much. How to differentiate degenerative form from trauma vertebral collapse and settings of trauma? OK, well, trauma is a very interesting aspect of things that occur at the disc over a people junction. One of my interests has always been, for example, what is produced as schmall's nodes or cartilaginous nodes? And probably one of the most common causes of that relates to micro trauma occurring at the disc over a people junction, allowing this material to enter the vertebral body. And that's why I suggested perhaps the Anderson lesions that we would see in ankylosing spondylitis might be explained by schmall's nodes, particularly if you have facet disease, you have an unstable spine, you have abnormal motion at the disc over a people junction. And so schmall's nodes may enter into the vertebral body. I don't think collapse vertebral bodies is something that I think of very often with any of the conditions that we spoke about today, degenerative or inflammatory in nature. Thank you so much. How to differentiate dish versus AS and the criteria? Yeah, it was interesting. There have been many articles written about dish since we just used that term back in, I guess it was in the 1970s when I was about five years old. And basically, we came up with some criteria that people have debated since. And one of them was, in fact, the involvement of four contiguous vertebral bodies.  We also emphasize, in fact, that you didn't see infararticular bone fusion in dish as opposed to ankylosing spondylitis. But there have been articles since that have indicated that the degree of bone fusion may occur in dish could be at one particular disc over people junction early on. I'm sure it is. And in those cases, it can be difficult differentiating it from ankylosing spondylitis. I think early on it would be difficult. But once you get to the pattern of flowing ossification, I think it becomes easier to separate it from not only ankylosing spondylitis, but psoriatic involvement of the spine as well. And then finally, with regard to the SI joint, most patients with dish who have fusion of the SI joint, when you study that with CT, you'll see that it relates to osteophytes around the periphery of the joint and not bone fusion in the central aspect of the joint. So that allows you to distinguish it from ankylosing spondylitis. Thank you. Does the shiny corner sign occur only in AS? That's interesting. The answer is no, because what it relates to is an anthocytus. And indeed, anthocytus can be seen in psoriatic involvement of the disc over people junction reactive arthritis as well. And in some cases of degenerative disc disease, the pattern of bone sclerosis, for example, an inter vertebral osteocondrosis may not be diffused, but may involve a corner of the vertebral body. But in general, it's a great sign. It's a great sign, particularly when it's combined with squaring of the vertebral bodies and early syndesmophic formation. When you have that combination, I think you'd be pretty sure you're dealing with ankylosing spondylitis. Thank you so much. Is the stepladder appearance of rheumatoid and any way related to facet joint involvement? How are facet joints impacted in rheumatoid? Yeah, and that's a good question. I did not get into a discussion of facet joint disease very much in this lecture, but clearly many of the diseases that I spoke about will in fact involve the facet joints. For example, osteoporosis of the spine may predominate within the facet joints with now and bone sclerosis and osteophytes. And certainly degenerative diseases may involve the facet joints and posteropost disease, for example, Bastrup's disease. In ankylosing spondylitis and in rheumatoid facet joint involvement is common and can be significant. And some people believe that it is an early manifestation of ankylosing spondylitis that the facet joints are involved prior to discovertival involvement. In fact, there's a link between facet joint involvement and discovertival changes in ankylosing spondylitis. When you have bad facet disease, the abnormal motion that occurs at that discovertival junction may prevent syndesmophile formation from occurring. Syndesmophiles predominate where you don't have a lot of facet joint disease. Thank you so much. Do you grade SI joint disease with MR? We do, I kind of mentioned that we do not use MR a lot in our practice, our clinicians for sacroiliitis. And fortunately, a lot of the pictures that I showed you were sent to me from some of our previous visiting scholars from Brazil where they were doing a lot more of MR. So we are not doing it. Now, I happen to think, again, you remember, I grew up in the age of conventional radiography. And I think if you get AP views of the sacroiliac joints angled about 20 degrees toward that head that elongates the sacroiliac joint, I think we're pretty good at diagnosing early sacroiliitis in those particular diseases. Where I think MR is most useful is in following patients with sacroiliac joint involvement during therapy, because you can see a decrease in the inflammatory reaction and the change to that fatty infiltration that I talked about. Thank you so much. Have you seen psoriatic arthritis without skin lesions? Yes, I have. I also have seen cases where the clinician says there's no skin disease. We see imaging findings that suggest psoriasis. The clinician goes back and finds a little patch of psoriasis, perhaps the hairline, that he or she did not notice before. But you can have the skeletal abnormalities before you have obvious skin abnormalities. Thank you so much. There's been some debate about what represents the best MR sequence for identifying SI joint erosions. What do you believe is the best sequence? So as I said, in the cases that we've done and based on the literature that I've read, I think you should have two particular sequences. One would be a T1 weighted sequence. The other could be either a stir sequence or a fat suppress fluid sensitive T2 weighted sequence. And I think you should do that in two imaging planes, as I mentioned, in the coronal plane to the sacrum and in the right angle to those planes. Now, there are reports that it might be valuable to do larger field of view imaging, including a whole body imaging because of you can pick up endocytus, which is common in patients who have spondyloar apropathy. You can pick up the facet joint disease, et cetera. But we have no experience in the whole body imaging in patients who have ankylosis spondylitis. Thank you so much. Can bone mastasis be T1 and T2 black without bone edema? Is because you say that again, please? Yes, it's kind of bone mastasis. The T1 and T2 black without bone edema. Is that bone metastasis? Yes, I just can't pronounce the word. The answer is yes, but unusual. All right, I think, as you know, we think of carcinoma, the prostate in particular. I know there's a long list of other primaries that can lead to sporadic metastasis. But carcinoma, the prostate, I had seen examples where there is mainly low signal on T1 and T2 weighted images. And so the answer to that is yes. But in most cases, there is, in fact, a reaction around the metastatic deposit that will have high signal. Thank you very much. Is spondylitisis and introvertible osteocrondosis the same entity? No, I hope I made that clear. Introvertible osteocrondosis is degeneration. It is degeneration that begins in the nucleus propulsus of the introvertible disc. And spondylitis is an inflammatory reaction, which is totally different. Thank you so much. How to differentiate an imaging infection from early unilatera sacrolitus? OK, I think they want to know, and by that question, is an infection, discovertible infection, simulate discovertible changes in spondylitis? And the answer is yes, it can. For a number of reasons, some of which I kind of illustrated that the Anderson lesion can look very much like infection. So infection can look very much like an Anderson lesion. And the improper fracture healing that occurs in late stages of ankylosing spondylitis can look a lot like a discovertible infection. So the answer is yes, there are overlapping features. And what I found most useful is to study elsewhere in the spine. Now, I've got to be honest about it. I have seen over the years ankylosing spondylitis of the spine with a discovertible infection as well. But when I have a patient with ankylosing spondylitis with a rose of disease and a discovertible junction, I favor it as not infection. If the clinician says, well, we're really worried about it, then we'll go ahead and biopsy or aspirate to prove it is not infection. Thank you so much. And I appreciate you bearing with me with my pronunciations. How do you refer to rheumatoid changes of the C spine versus multi-level degenerative spondylitis, an OA? Yeah, so once again, I'd love to tell you we have rules that will make 100% accuracy in all of these differential diagnosis. But if I tell you that I am lying, I certainly have cases where I struggle. And I think I certainly can struggle in patients who have rheumatoid involvement, involved in the cervical spine that can look like degenerative disease of a disc. But one of the interesting aspects that I look for that I tried to emphasize was that some patients who have rheumatoid who have discovertible erosions, beginning at the joints of lusca extending across the disc, will not have prominent osteophytes. And because of that, if I see extensive discovertible erosion without any osteophytes, I always think of rheumatoid arthritis as a possibility. So again, in degenerative disease, remember there are two types of degenerative disease that I call the interlaseous space. Part of that space is occupied by a synovial joint. Degeneration within that joint, the sacroiliac joint, is called asterothorosis or asterothritis. The main features are joint space snarling, vacuum phenomena, and a sclerotic line or a small band of sclerosis, particularly on the ilio aspect of the joint, combined with osteophytes. And I showed you one that looked like carcinoma, the prostate metastatic develop. When we deal with sacroiliatus, there is erosive disease. There's initial widening of the sacroiliac joint. The band of the sclerosis is border and less defined. And I think those features, in most cases, will allow you to make a differential. Now, I can tell you a couple other points about that differential. I did not talk about osteitis condensants, ilio. And as you know, that's classically a disease of multiparous women, kind of rarely occur in men where you get very well-defined sclerosis, triangular in shape on the ilio aspect, with little or no sacral involvement. So I think in those cases, sometimes you run into a differential with ankylosing with sacroiliatus. And then one other point I would make, if you read the recent literature over the last five years of the value of MR in diagnosing sacroiliatus, you will see many examples of other diseases that on MR can simulate the sacroiliatus of ankylosing spondylatus. So there is a differential diagnosis for the MR imaging features. And I'll give you one example. Post-pregnancy, the mechanical changes that occur in the sacroiliate joint on MR can simulate sacroiliatus.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we will discuss a question which says that which of the given functions have larger maximum? f of x is equal to minus 3 into x minus 3 whole square plus 2 or f of t is equal to minus 8 t square plus 16 t. Now let us start with the solution of the given question. Here we are given these two quadratic functions that is f of x is equal to minus 3 into x minus 3 whole square plus 2 and f of t is equal to minus 8 t square plus 16 t. And we have to find that which of these functions has larger maximum? Let us see the first function that is f of x is equal to minus 3 into x minus 3 whole square plus 2. Now we know that vertex form of quadratic function is given by a into x minus h whole square plus k where vertex that is coordinates of vertex are h k. Now comparing this given function with vertex form of a quadratic function we have h is equal to 3 and k is equal to 2. So vertex of this function is given by the ordered pair h k that is the ordered pair 3 2 also here you can see that a is equal to minus 3. Now as a is equal to minus 3 which is less than 0 so graph of a given function will open downwards and vertex will be the maximum point and while coordinate of the vertex will give the maximum value of the function. Now here you can see while coordinate of the vertex is 2 so the maximum value of the function is equal to 2. Now let us take the second function that is h of t is equal to minus 8 t square plus 16 t. Now first of all we will express this quadratic function in vertex form by method of completing the squares. So this implies h of t is equal to now here first of all we will make coefficient of t square 1 and this we will take minus 8 common from where these terms and it will be minus 8 into t square minus 2 t the whole. So this implies h of t is equal to minus 8 into now where within the vertex we will add and subtract square of half the coefficient of t so it will be t square minus 2 t now half the coefficient of t is minus 1 so its square is 1 so here we will add 1 and we will subtract 1. Further this implies h of t is equal to minus 8 into now here t square minus 2 t plus 1 is t minus 1 whole square minus 1 and this complete well. This further implies h of t is equal to minus 8 into t minus 1 whole square plus 8. So we have expressed this function in vertex form on comparing here we have h is equal to 1 and k is equal to 8. So vertex of this quadratic function is given by the ordered pair 1, 8 also here you can see that a is equal to minus 8 which is less than 0. So graph of this function will open downwards and vertex will be the maximum point and while coordinate of the vertex will give the maximum value of the function now here while coordinate of vertex is equal to h so maximum value of the function is equal to 8. Now we have obtained that the maximum value of the function f of x is equal to 2 and the maximum value of the function h of t is equal to 8 thus the function h of t has larger maximum now let us see this graphically here this red curve is the graph of the function f of x and this blue curve is the graph of the function h of t now here this point is the highest point of this red curve and this point is the highest point of this blue curve clearly you can see that the function h of t has larger maximum than the function f of x so this is the solution of the given question that's all for this session hope you all have enjoyed this session


Hi, I'm Bob Howell at The Street, and I'm here with John Gassman from Gassman Financial Group, and we're talking about the House Republicans' tax reform plan, what stays, what goes, and how you might plan given what stays. John, welcome. Welcome, boy, that's a hot topic. The good, the bad, and the ugly about it. We have a lot to talk about, but we have a lot of time. I'm all yours, and we could debate all we like. We could debate all we want because one of us will be proven right or wrong, perhaps. Yeah, because this is not law yet. This is all proposed, and it's subject to change. Absolutely, and we always know from any tax legislation we've ever gone through, what's proposed to what ends up ultimately being the law could be black and white, could be totally different, could be gray. Right, so let's start with what's proposed before we get to black and white and gray. So some of the big things are the tax brackets. We have a narrowing down to four tax brackets, five, some people might say. So talk, walk us through these tax brackets and how they work. Well, you know, the problem is with the tax brackets, as we have now, we have quite a few, and the highest is 39.6. According to the proposed, well, whether it's really going to be 35 or there's going to be an uptick for the 39%, I think that's where we end up, and that's what ended up coming out in the House proposal is you're really going to end up with another 39.6 that surtax that'll apply for the millionaires. And, you know, the way they're looking at this is they haven't proposed all the brackets yet. So it's hard to say exactly what the impact is. But I think for a lot of people, based on just the brackets without the deductions, there'll be a lot more room for people to really reduce their tax burden considerably. So one of the things that the president and House Republicans have talked about is this notion that the average family will save somewhere around $1400 per household in taxes. Any thoughts? What's average to you is not average to me. You know, I deal with a lot of very high net worth individuals. So I think that spread may be a lot more in terms of tax savings, because as we talk about reducing capital gains rates, as we talk about, you know, maybe the reduction of the brackets, and at the same time the loss of some of the itemized deductions, I think we'll end up probably in the same place, or there may actually be for the uber-wealthy a tremendous tax cut. For the middle class, I don't think there's going to be much of a cut. I think they're going to actually owe more money overall, because the state's going to grab more money, social security is still going to grab more money. I don't think it's the panacea we are all painted, that the picture is painted as. That's a little bit dismal, but one thing that's not dismal though is the notion that AMT goes away, and as we've talked about, you know, the desire for tax simplification, this removal of AMT goes a long way towards simplifying things for people. Absolutely. You think about the AMT and what it's done, there are probably millions of people that are subject to the AMT, more so than the actual regular tax itself. And explain briefly what the AMT is for our listeners. So basically, the way it works is there are two systems, there are two parts to this tax system. There's working through the regular marginal tax brackets, you know, you work your way up and your income gets taxed at a certain rate, you know, and some of its tax at a 15 percent, a 20 percent, 30, 35, you know, so on and so forth, till 39 percent. The AMT basically says, listen, whatever you've done on the regular tax side, you have all this income, you've got all these deductions, medical expenses, real estate taxes, unibond interest, all of this. We're going to take away quite a bit of it, and we're going to give you a flat rate of tax. We're going to give you a basic exemption, right? And it's either 26 or 28 percent. So when you really think about it, what the AMT does is say you're in effectively paying 26 or 28 percent versus marginally, you may be in the 39 percent bracket, but your effective tax rate is really 28. So what happens is the AMT is there to catch people that are not paying in to the system enough tax. So by them doing away with that, it'll lower a lot of people's tax bills. But at the same time, what are they doing? They're taking away a lot of big deductions, state and local taxes. So for people that live in New York State, New York City, people that are living in California, people that are living in New Jersey, very high tax states to do away with that deduction, that's pretty significant. To cap real estate taxes at only 10 grand, that's going to lower your deductions. And you look at some of the other things, you can't deduct your medical, there's no casualty losses anymore, you can't deduct maybe your tax preparation fees, this will put accountants out of business. That's not a good thing for you. Well, I do mostly financial planning, so it's okay. But you know, the bottom line is the AMT is there to capture all these people that have not paid enough tax. And once they take that away, I think the tax will actually go lower. Interesting. So there are lots more things in the proposal, one of which is no change to capital gains and dividends. They still tax at the same rate as they were before. Correct. Very good for investors and that will allow investors to deploy their capital in more strategic ways. So I think keeping the capital gains rates, the rate will apply, will be different because again you walk up the brackets, there is a 0% capital gains bracket, there's a 15, there's a 20. But if they do away with the net investment income tax, that's a 3.8% Medicare tax, that's a big boom for investors. Right. On the Medicare surtax, so it really only affects about a very small number of Americans, right? I think the number is, I've heard maybe around 5 million or so, give or take. Well, I have 500 of those 5 million as clients and it affects every single one of them. So again, depending on what the average client is, our average is paying that tax. Yeah. Okay. So we mentioned standard deductions and I think what it's probably worth noting that the standard deduction is increasing from what it was as well as the child tax credit. Right. And for some people that's a good thing, right? Yeah, I think. They've never qualified for the itemized deductions. 100%. How many people really itemized deductions is kind of small, maybe it's 30% of the population that actually file an income tax claim some sort of itemized deduction, but for most of middle America, they're claiming a standard deduction and they're claiming exemptions. So when you take the standard deduction and you're taking the exemption, you're combining it now into this new proposed number, for those that have a lot of kids, it's going to hurt because they're not getting the benefit of all their children, all those dependency exemptions. For those that are, you know, married couple. You know, we had four kids, we benefited. We have four kids. Right. But remember, the AMT heard us because it did away with the deduction for it. So it got phased out. So again, depending on the client and their situation and their facts and circumstances will be the determining factor of whether or not this is good, bad, or ugly. So it's really a case of not making a blank statement about this is good for all Americans. You can't. Right. There's no way anybody can say that. Yeah. And no one can say necessarily who it's bad for in particular, except in certain cases. I think there are some general rules of thumb you could look at, but without knowing all the facts, it's too difficult to say at this point. Yeah. So let's go back to the some of the itemized deductions that we're losing where there's the limit on state and local tax. Like you mentioned, the high tax states will will not benefit. These are by and large lose states. Right. If you're living in Florida, you don't have to worry. Right. If you're living in New York state, New York City, where the tax rate could be like 12%, this is going to be very painful for a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. I write about retirement. And one thing that I know is that for the older populations who are itemizing deductions and itemizing their medical expenses, this is going to be painful. This is going to be very painful. And I can't begin to share with you the number of clients that I have seen that do make significant money. But unfortunately, as they've aged, you know, long term care costs have affected them, you know, and that could be, you know, in the state of New York, you could be spending between 80 to 150,000 for long term care. Needs. And if you don't have a long term care policy and now you don't have that medical deduction, that's painful. And you're able to deduct that. You can deduct it. But you have to get your home health care. Absolutely. The thresholds and the limitations. Absolutely. And then you talk about Medicare premiums, you know, not just Medicare A, but the drug plans and everything else, those costs have gone up dramatically. And then for those that are purchasing long term care insurance, which is a deduction subject to certain limitations, that's getting more expensive. So to lose the ability to deduct all of these expenses, that's going to be felt by a lot of retirees. And what's sad about it from my perspective is we're now beginning to see all these studies come out and say how much one needs to have set aside at retirement to pay for retiree health care expenses, which is $250,000. Absolutely. Which they lose in deductions. 100%. And that, as I said, probably one of the most painful aspects for retiree. So mortgage interest goes away if you're your homeowner? Well, there's a cap on it. Right. So right now, you know, you could deduct a million dollars of mortgage interest plus home equity line of $100,000. According to the way the rules are proposed, anything after November 2nd, the cap is going to be reduced to 500,000 for primary residents, right? And there's no home equity loan interest that you could deduct anymore. So that's going away. So that will be grandfathered, you think? For those who have ELOX already? I'm cautiously optimistic and praying that yes, I believe that'll be okay. But it's for the new people that are buying places. And what that does is for the people that are buying vacation homes or second homes, that's going to have a major impact on their ability because how do most people buy a second home? With their home equity, right? They finance it, either home equity or they're taking out a second mortgage. Right. Now it can't deduct it, it's going to go away and it's going to affect the real estate market dramatically. Speaking of things that are affected dramatically, I think there's a provision in there about alimony not being deducted going forward. Right. And which I also imagine that it means that it's not being claimed as income either on the other side. Right. So people that were in a very high tax bracket that were getting a deduction, you know, and getting this big tax benefit, and they're paying their spouse who may be in a lower tax bracket, they're losing that tax arbitrage. Right. So that is going to probably create a lot of issues for those in having matrimonial issues and lawyers I would think would be jumping on this to protest this because it's a big part of the negotiation of how much is alimony, how much is child support. But now if it's all the same and there's nothing to it, it's going to be a problem. Right. So does that mean that in the future that folks, divorce lawyers and their accountants have to sort of look at equating what the pre-tax law effect would have been versus the post-tax effect to say, how do I equalize the alimony? Yeah. And that's always been an issue for matrimonial lawyers is looking at the assets first. How do you divvy up the assets? How do you equalize the assets? And then figuring out the payout from the working spouse to the non-working spouse to pay for support and other obligations. So it's going to be an interesting, we live in interesting times they say. Yeah. It's a great curse. But it keeps us in business. It's job security. Absolutely. Changes in the tax will keep all accounts in business. And financial journalists. So what about the 121 exclusion? We should explain what it means. So the 121 exclusion is basically, it's a provision in the tax code that allows someone or a single person or married couple that has lived in a home for two out of five years to basically exclude $500,000 or $250,000 of gain from taxation. Provided they've lived in their residence? Provided they've lived in it for a certain prerequisite, for a requisite period of time. Now they're changing that to five out of eight years. Longer. Right. So you have to, it's no longer two. Now you have to live in the house for five years. And that impacts those that have sort of flipped homes. Think of the person that has a vacation home. So they move from their primary to the vacation home. They live there for two years, and then they flip it. What do they do? They exclude the game because it's been a primary residence. Then they live in their primary residence two years. They flip that and they're done. So they've probably gotten a million dollars of tax relief, you know, tax benefit. Just by flipping homes. Right. So this provision is basically curtailing the flippers from being able to flip properties. And by doing that five more, five years, you have to live in the property. So that's one element of the provision. It does harm people though, right? Some people who honestly buy a home and have to go into a nursing home or sell their, or downsize or whatever the case might be. You know, it's interesting that you said that because there are provisions in section 121 that allow, under facts and circumstances, for people that maybe don't meet the prerequisite of two years, right? They don't meet that timeframe where they can still exclude a certain amount of it based on, you know, change in jobs, divorce, death. There are certain exceptions to the rule. I don't know whether or not that's going to continue. Well, that will prevail. So that's something that I think a lot of us have to look at. The other part of section 121 that's kind of fascinating is that once your income goes above $500,000, then the exclusion begins to get phased out.  It was whole. But now once your income goes above that threshold, it could be phased out. So it could create problems for those, and that's where timing of sales are going to be really important to consider or manipulate your income in such a way or strategize. How much income can you have in certain years and look at tax bracket planning? Yeah, tax bracket planning is going to become the buzz phrase of the 2018 year, I think. Most definitely. Talk a little bit about some of the exclusion, the elimination of fringe benefits for employees. There seems to be a plethora of them from dependent care to tuition. Yeah, adoption credits. I mean, I had a client last year who was adopting a child and under this new provision, that would be then away with. I mean gone. Educational benefit programs that are provided by firms or companies to their employees. I have somebody that I want to put through a graduate program. I can exclude a certain amount of that from income for them. I could deduct it. Now that's going to be repealed under this proposal. Dependent care benefits. In order to allow both spouses to work at a job or at a company, that will be done away with. That's a $5,000 and that's real money because you can either claim a credit or you can claim a tax deduction. That's worth maybe $2,000 of tax money in your pocket. So for them to do away with a lot of these deductions is really going to impact how much does an employee walk home with in their paycheck. Moving expenses is another one. How common is it in the bigger companies where an individual is asked to move to a different jurisdiction for the company's benefit. And once they do away with the moving expense deduction, that's pretty significant. So there are a lot of these fringe benefits that are basically just going to be zapped and disappeared if this becomes law. And I'm hoping that it doesn't all become law. I think there's a good chance that it does. That there'll be some horse trading. Yeah, lots of horse trading. Horse trading around $5.29 and Coverdales or not? Well that's another great question. So right now there are all different types of college educational credits provided. There's Coverdale, there's Lifetime Learning Credit, there's the Hope Scholarship Credit. Basically all those are going to be combined into one, the American Opportunity Tax Credit. So that's okay because I think most people, that's the credit that they really want. It gives you the best bank for the buck. And I think ultimately the $5.29 plans will continue. I think that's the best savings plan that's out there and it'll continue to be one of the best savings plans. So I don't think there's anything going on in the rules on the $5.29 plan except for, remember $5.29 plans are for college, for university. But now the Coverdales or the ESAs, I forget which one it is, allows you to pay for elementary school and high school. So $5.29 plans will now have a provision if it passes to allow for not only college but also for elementary school payments or high school payments. That seems reasonable. Very reasonable in a way. I could go with that. So what doesn't seem reasonable though is the notion of Roth recharacterizations going away. Disappearing. Ta ta. Right. So and that's bad for folks who've done a Roth conversion this year. And they've lost money. And they've lost money. I don't have any clients like that because the market has been going through the roof. Lucky them. Right, lucky them. And I'm okay with that being repealed. That's one of those that... Financial engineering to those who can afford to know how to do it. Yeah, absolutely. All right, we'll take that one. What about the gift and estate tax? We look at a six-year phase out. Oh my God, that's another huge one. Did buy estate planning attorneys? No, I think, listen, everybody should have a will. Everybody should have a trust. It has nothing to do with the tax consequences, whether it's the federal or the state, who you want to leave your money to. How do you want to leave it so it's protected from creditors and other invaders is the reason most people should have a will. The notion that the exemption goes up to... But the point that they're going to double the exemption per person from roughly 5.6 to 11 million, that's pretty significant in terms of changing the landscape of how people plan. So single, five and a half million they could leave free, go up to 11, marry a couple that's 22 million. Estate planning basically now will sort of fall at the wayside. I think what's more valuable, what's also important to understand is the estate tax and the GST tax, generation skipping tax, will be phased out or eliminated, but the gift tax will remain. So people have to still wonder, but again, you could say, Bob, hey, with 11 million dollars or 22 per couple, who really cares? And I'd say, you're right, but you have to look at the states, because some of the states have gift tax at lower rates. So you have to watch the state. And the other thing I would share is as you talk about the estate and gift tax exemptions, estate and gift tax will disappear, gift tax will remain, but step up in basis. And this is a big one for a lot of people. Mom and dad own assets that they bought a long time ago. They have built-in capital gains tax because the assets have appreciated over time. If they did away with that, that would be herculean. So the fact that they're not repealing the step up in basis rules really gives people a lot of play, that they can receive assets, estate tax and income tax free, if it falls below those specials, which to me is like, that's like a present, that's mana from heaven. Yeah, I don't know a person in the world that could do cost bases on my grandmother's AT&T stock, by the way. Yeah, ma belt split in two and they told two friends and so on and so on. So I don't, I agree with you. And then by 2024, it goes away completely. Correct. So the state tax is no more. Correct. If it goes through. And that's federally. The states will have their own set of rules, which you have to be mindful of. All right. So your best guess about what survives and what doesn't and what people might do given what survives. Yes. So what's going, so I think tax bracket simplification is going to happen. So I think that that's a given. I do believe that in terms of what's going to go, mortgage interest will probably stay with some adjustment to it based on your income. I think property taxes will stay, but with some adjustment based on your income. My guess is that the mortgage mortgage interest we covered, the real estate taxes, state and local will stay depending on your income tax bracket. They may phase out some of it. You know, charity, that always is going to stay because if you're willing to plan a gift, the government is willing to forgive the tax. And what they've done in this proposal is they've actually increased the amount you can give away to charity. There's a 50% limitation, meaning you can only give away 50% of your HCI. But according to the proposal, you can give away even more up to 60%. So they are trying to push people to give more charity because the more charity people give, the less the government has to support those organizations. So I think that's going to stay, nothing's going to happen there. I think itemized deductions, such as employee business expenses reimbursement, I think that's going to disappear. Investment advisory fees for those of us that manage clients money and we collect a fee for that, that's going to stay. You know, if you generate income, you get to deduct the expense associated with it. So those are some of the itemized deductions I think we'll say. Medical, that's a tough one. I'd love to see it stay, I think for the retirees. But again, if they can figure out a way to adjust it to the income, you know, the more income you make, the less you get to deduct, I'm okay with that. I just don't like the idea of hurting retirees, the people that need it the most. So I think that will probably be adjusted. What else could I think of? I think IRAs, retirement planning and that type of stuff, that's all going to stay. Your ability to contribute to your 401K, that'll stay. Pre-tax, Roth 401K, that'll stay. Your ability to contribute to IRA, the government doesn't want to pay for your retirement. They want you to fund your retirement. So I think that will all stay. I do think they will change, and I think this will come up in the horse trading, is maybe, you know, right now there's a cap on how much of your income is subject to social security tax. Medicare tax, which is another piece of the tax, that's unlimited. So we pay 6.2% social security tax and 1.45% for Medicare tax. 1.45 is on your whole W-2 form. The 6.2 is capped at about 120,000. I could see them raising. I could see them raising the cap and making it unlimited for social security tax based on the income you make. And that would be beneficial for social security because now you'd be funding social security. So that has a lot of merit to it. And again, for the retiree, as I think about it, I think they're going to ultimately change the way who will collect social security. I think they're going to go to a system where it's needs-based, not based on your age, not how much you've put in. It's really going to become a needs-based system. If you need it, you can have it. If you make more than a certain amount, you don't get it. That's a tough one for a lot of people to swallow. So that brings up one last question, which is, as you think about the societal need that you've just sort of expressed, maybe rich folks don't need to receive social security and give it to the folks who do need it, who didn't save or bad circumstances or whatever the case may be. This proposal seems to say as much about tax simplification as it does about social policy. It rewards certain types of income. It discusses who can be a beneficiary of a 529 plan in ways that have never been discussed. So just talk a little bit about maybe the social goals that you see in this plan that people need to be aware of that might not be, it's not the tax of it, it's the socialness of it. And again, I'm not going to get into who voted. I was just about to say, I don't let's not talk about who voted for who, but with everything out there, the tax code is so big. It's so voluminous, and it is hard to understand. It keeps a lot of guys in practice. To the extent they can simplify, no it won't be on a postcard, how much did you make, pay it all back, that's not where the code is going, but to the extent that the government can push some of the burden down to corporate America for taxes, that's less money that the government has to pay for social programs. And think about it. If you have a look and I would strongly suggest anybody who fills out a 1040 form, pick up the instructions, look at the last page of the 1040 booklet, and in there you'll see a pie chart, and that pie chart shows for every dollar of tax, where does it go, goes to pay military, social, Medicaid, Medicare, so on and so forth. The less money that the government has to pay into those systems, because now that's why the raising charitable contributions, the less money they have to put into that system, the better off they are that they can expand growth in corporate America, entrepreneurialism. That's like one of the great things about this proposal is you want to form an LLC? We're going to cap that tax rate at 25% depending on your facts and circumstances. So the government doesn't really want to manage all of this. They want to push down some of the effects of this where we're really responsible for our own retirement, for our own social and welfare and wellness programs. And that's where I think ultimately a lot of this is directed. But again, it does benefit certain people. Right, seems to reward those that are job creators versus those that are income takers, I guess. Yeah, no, 100% income makers. Right. Anything else that we should talk about before we close for the session? I think just as we go into the year end, there are some benefits. And again, I know you focus on the retiree market. The QCD is a big tax deduction that a lot of people should look at. Those that are over 70, don't forget they have to take the required minimum distributions by the end of the year. If they don't, what happens? 50% penalty on the amount that you don't take. Exactly. So the ability- Plus you and their income tax. Right. So the ability for people to direct money from their charity if they don't need it and they can fulfill their RMD, I think it's a great opportunity. And that's one thing, again, you could see just based on what the government is proposing. They're not doing away with some of these charitable contribution ideas. The strategies are still there. I would tell everybody don't forget, RMDs qualify charitable deductions. That's my big one for people in retirement. Great. My guest has been John Gassman from the Gassman Financial Group. I'm Bob Powell for The Street.


so that helps. This is my first conference. And yeah, really, I can't see anything. Amazing. I will talk about typography and exhibition design, but first, since you have no idea who I am, I thought I'd do a little introduction. So yeah, I'm a graphic designer. I live in New York, but for the first 25 years of my life, I lived in Siberia and I decided to just show you instead of trying to explain. It's kind of on the opposite side of the globe from where we are now, and that's this vast area part of Russia. And the town that I'm from is like one of the bigger cities out there, and it's kind of like smack in the middle of the whole Eurasian continent. I would ask if anyone else is from there, but I don't think it's worth that. So when we go down to the street level, that's what it looks like, and it's not a staged photo. And then, you know, I know you probably have heard many things about what it is like, so I decided to put as many gifts on here to see if it crashes my laptop, but it works. So yeah, just to clear the air, it's all true, and it's all real. Okay, yeah. So I've been fortunate to work on some amazing projects, although I haven't been in the business for a very long time. So one of those is, we find a system for whole transportation systems and whole city. Then some bespoke mapping projects for campuses, schools and hospitals. Some smaller wayfinding and signage projects for cultural institutions. Some more fun typography-based illustrations, and just as a side note, this is a special issue on Russia, back when we didn't talk about Russia every day. And then on the side, as a kind of a fun project, I tried to figure out some things with type, still figuring it out. So today, I wanted to talk about typography and exhibition design because that's one of the things that interests me a lot, and of course, no talk is viable here without a historic introduction, so when I started looking into this, I can realize that that's a very relatively new thing, having any type or having any text in the exhibit. So that's how it used to be when we were just starting out with this idea of having objects and having paintings in space. And it's a lot, and it's pretty overwhelming, and there are lots of people in fancy dresses. And if you ever wanted to check out kind of what museum might look like in the 1800s, you should go to Sergeant Sohn Museum in London, which remains unchanged from how it was in 1833 by the Special Act of Parliament. This is on the other side of the Atlantic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when it just opened. Again, a lot of people in fancy dresses just kind of mingling, and it's pretty hard to see what the art is, and it doesn't look like they're paying too much attention to that. Then something happened, which is really interesting to me to figure out. This is the first exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York when it opened in 1929. So I don't know about this couch, seems like questionable thing to have, but you can see that already the walls are white and the paintings are spaced apart a little bit. And then next thing, this is only two and a half years later, the Museum of Modern Art, the couch is gone. But that's not the thing that I wanted to point out here. If you look carefully next to the paintings and the objects, you'll see those little rectangular pieces with type that probably has artist's name and the title of the artwork, and probably something about what gear it was made at and all of that. And we didn't go back. And this is, I could not mention everything that was happening in the world at the same time. Russian avant-garde and Bauhaus and some of the similar movements trying to push what was possible to do in terms of reproduction of photography and infographics and typography at a large scale. And also we never really went back. So now every time you go to an exhibition, you'll probably expect to see a title wall of people crowd in front of and then you'll see a little section text that explains what's happening with the movement or with the historical era that they were talking about. And every, every object has a little text next to it. Those were revolutionary changes that brought on, for example, the expansion and the invention of the profession of the museum curator. So now we have those people who kind of decide what's going to be on view because museums have such vast collections that they can't show you everything like they used to. So now they just select some works and explain them to us. So then my hometown that I'm from had only two museums, one art museum and one historic museum. So when I moved to New York four years ago, I was kind of amazed to find out that there are according to this Wikipedia article there are 212 museums in New York City. Yeah, we have a lot of things like subway issues and small overpriced departments and we have a lot of museums as well. So I decided, as I was preparing for this talk, I decided that I would kind of go around and see what's happening with typography there and try to measure it and try to maybe have some conclusions for you. And I focused on the body typography because there is just so much stuff going on with all kinds of display and title type. So this was some of the photographs that I took during my research and I managed to go to 13 museums over a period of six weeks and they had 44 exhibits in them, 44 that I selected and all of them, 11 were permanent and 33 were temporary which I think reflects kind of the state of business there. And I put together the spreadsheet it was like all the sizes and everything that I kind of was interested in finding out about and there are some pretty interesting facts I thought like for example in this 44 exhibits there was only one use of slab serve. I thought those were popular but not so much but when I ended up kind of with this spreadsheet there was no revelation at the end and there was no like a big conclusion that I could tell you and say like wow no one knew that before now we know. So I kind of, the more I was going to those museums the more I kind of started thinking about the bigger trends and how that relates back to my work and what I can make of that. So I came up with kind of three notions that I wanted to talk about in the second part of my talk that I expressed in three words and the first word is word system. I was pretty surprised that only four of those 13 museums had some underlying structure for how they organized like those little object labels throughout the museum. And you know for me as a person as I'm sure a lot of you are I kind of when there is something that's a few points off every time or something that's just very very different from you going from one room to another it's noticeable so I was immensely satisfied when I found the museum that didn't do that they had one underlying system for that and that made me think of this one project that I worked on in St. Louis for Washington University main library there. Orlin Library has an amazing collection of objects about five and a half million different objects including everything from ancient coins to big costumes so they were doing a renovation project and one of the issues that they were encountering is that they wanted a system that made it easy for curators and the librarians to create exhibits easily without having to go through all the steps every time and having to figure out and reinvent the wheel every time. So this is what they had obviously had to show that this is what the team that I was on came up with this is a 60 foot long case and we figured out the system that was kind of a kit of parts we had pedestals and we had the back panels and we had different lifts and magnetic panels obviously it's pretty complex but the thing that's interesting is the way that you could standardize the way that the graphics appear in it. So we decided to limit everything to this prefabricated system that exists and kind of we chose the three levels of hierarchy so that already dictated what we're going to do. We used we had to use a type that was already licensed and even the colors were pulled from something that they already had before but in a I think more logical or interesting way this is just condensed universe and like a modern cut of basketball that has a pretty big X height. So the reason kind of why we were doing it is we were trying to achieve this modularity and making it easy for them to maintain the system. So I made this style guide for all the graphic labels that they could have. The goal of this is that I made templates for them for every every scenario that they could imagine in every color. So hopefully this exercise just helps them every time they need to change out the exhibit they go through this they figure out what they need and then they just input their content into a template and it's easy and they can divert their resources somewhere else. The second notion is idea of identity. I noticed that a lot of exhibits these days have to do a lot of like work to figure out the marketing strategy and make it recognizable and make make their exhibit kind of an event and a thing of itself. So I was pretty surprised when throughout my survey I saw there were 16 out of 44 exhibits that were kind of doing this thing in a very definitive way one way or another. By identity I kind of mean that in a way where there is either a special type treatment or custom type or some way that the type is rendered in an interesting way like hand painted or three-dimensional. So a couple years ago I was also working on this exhibition for San Diego History Center down in obviously San Diego. They were making an exhibit about history of Jewish heritage down in California and the basic notion of this was that people who came there fleeing from persecution as soon as California became a state in 1850 they made this place their home and they adapted to it and they changed the place as well. So a lot of the content was very place-based and even the name for the exhibit that they came up with was Celebrate San Diego. So we did this concept sketch and I was very kind of concerned about how the letters looked so I thought this is a good opportunity to do something that's interesting and I looked a lot at kind of what Hebrew might look like as printed or as hand-lettered type or written with a nib. There were lots of restraints functionally because we kind of determined that we need as much space as we can get because these letters would have to have exhibits on the other side because that's what we were using them for. We were thinking that he needs to have a base and it's an eight foot square and then also we were thinking it's probably going to be made out of two sheets of MDF that's four by eight feet dimension. So I had to figure out how to do the counters and if I could ship the counters or not. So this is kind of what I ended up doing with them. So the fronts where this images and the backs were the content and this is what came back from the fabricator which is pretty exciting because that's how the Bezier curves translate into Creole MDF which is really exciting and I was going to say that this is kind of the biggest probably way that I would ever see my lettering because it's total 10 feet tall with the base but the screen is actually I think about the same height so maybe that tops that. Yeah this was also very exciting because they made it you know they made the lettering out of real material. While they were doing that I did this logo and so I had to draw additional characters for that and then I was kind of like well I really have that many characters why not make it a type. So no one has asked me to do this I kind of just like sat at my desk for a long time and tried to figure it out and how it was going to work and the client was like oh okay can we have that. So obviously it's unusable for any of the actual body text so we had to kind of follow through on this kind of broad Nib idea and use something from Indian type foundry it's called Bratness which I think worked pretty well but I do think that you know this kind of is an interesting study of what an identity of the show could be if you actually build the letters and the third and the last notion is this idea of expression. It makes me think because I have a regular kind of graphic design background when I started doing exhibitions it always made me kind of confused why some of them don't try to have the content of the exhibition reflect on how everything looks and I know like there are multiple reasons for why that happens which I can't go into now but basically I think this is a bit subjective but 25 out of 44 shows in my research did that one way or another. Sometimes it gets very subtle like for example when you're doing the show on painters of a certain time period you just use type that was cut during that time period so it gets pretty subtle but this year earlier this year the same clients and the history center came back to us because they were doing a show on history of gay lesbian and transgender community down in California and they got a hold of amazing archives they had just really powerful photographs and they had a lot of the early protests and pride marches and people fighting for equality and fighting for their rights so we thought this was extremely powerful on its own and we would just use their house typeface which is calisthenics and kind of try to have the images pull all the weight but then it seemed like it just was very plain and very uninteresting so I had one night to do this and I thought why not try so I tried doing this and I had in mind that square types that I showed you just few minutes ago because they kind of kept it and were using it but mostly I was trying not to have any round shapes because I knew I would be very frustrated and translating them into actual outlines in the type software so I only had this and then I kind of left scanned it and left and then I spent kind of the rest of the night doing making this and it's definitely like it's not perfect at all and it's not even the right word that's how it looks in the layout but I thought it was interesting enough and even if it's there is a one percent of the power of those protest posters that I showed you before in this or emotion or anything close to that I thought that would be really cool some more of it here and I heard here today that imperfections are good but the client didn't think so they yeah they they said we don't think that any respectable institution would ever go for some things sloppy like that and I don't actually know if that's not true so I can't say that it's not true maybe it is but rejection is good too so now I have this thing maybe I'll use it somewhere else and this is what they ended up with and I just kind of thinking about this I think I just do it for love so I don't need any external kind of like client saying this is great or not I will keep doing it anyway and maybe after I do 20 times or 30 times or 40 times I'll come back here and you know it will be better but I will keep doing it anyway that's it