So yes, as I said before, I'm Maddie Reyes, and I also have content warnings for past and sexuality. It's not gonna be too explicit. I won't be showing any words that should be triggering or whatever this is the most explicit picture you'll see. But I also, I realized, this is the first talk I've given after a whole bunch of difficult things that happened, and I realized I've been emotional this entire evening. So I also might have an emotional reaction and if that's too much for you, I won't be offended if you have to get up and leave, so don't worry. And I also noticed that I think I'm the first person to be talking about games in particular. I am not the first person who comes from anywhere in computer science, and I know almost nothing about the tech industry besides what I hear in the news. So we're gonna take a turn for the artistic and I think some of this applies for technology as well, but I will be talking mostly about the games industry. So if I make any some wide generalizations that I can find completely just offensive, it's probably because I'm talking about the games industry. So we'll just leave it at that. And so because of that, yes. It's too late for me when it comes to the games industry. I recently left the games industry. I don't feel comfortable being in the games industry and I will not contribute any more to the games industry. This doesn't mean though that I don't create games and play experiences that I talk about them or I talk about advocacy issues within games and play. And I wanna make that distinction because I feel like right now, especially with kind of our first few speakers and also with a whole bunch of other kind of diversity in games topics, we're talking about how to get more diverse people into the industry. And I know that's a passion for a lot of people. I know that's important for a lot of people and I wanna hold that at the same time as this. But know that if I seem overwhelmingly dismal or fed up with things, it's because my personal journey has ended. But it doesn't mean yours in the past too. So there's just a little bit of who I am. For the past over about three years, I've been mostly a games critic, meaning I wrote a critical analysis of games and very often about social justice issues within the games industry. I've also become a game designer and I created both digital and non-digital games. And I've done a lot of speaking and I've also done a lot of conferences as well as hosting conferences and things. So I actually come from a unique perspective actually and which is why this title is called D.Va Ex Machina because I think the things that I've done in the games industry while I was in it was intervention. It was from a perspective that was very divergent and interdisciplinary. As you can tell, I was both media and development and event organizer at the same time as well as having some, a little bit of a toad in academia. So this is kind of what, from my perspective, how things are and are not working with diversity in games initiatives. And that's kind of what is gonna be the basis of my talk is the idea of what is diversity in games and maybe this is also applicable to diversity in tech. And kind of what I think people who are actually on the ground floor, grassroots activists are actually doing and what they kind of actually need as opposed to what's happening.  You see this, and I know a couple of us in the audience probably thought about this picture, but I do want to call myself out. I am kind of seen as one more visible people when it comes to diversity in games. I am an exception, I am not the rule. And I say that because I don't want people to think that everyone has the ability that I do. And that my process is what others should do to obtain some sort of success or whatever that may be. Because my journey, as you can see, has been a very painful one and one that I feel like others should not go through. And I also want people to, because I put my Twitter up and if you didn't see, so you can go ahead and live tweet me to keep me honest, is that I do speak from a place where things I say are very often tokenized and it's spread about to be the opinion of all people who are not white men. And I don't want anyone to leave this talk thinking that I speak for a group of people. I speak for myself. And if I make any of those generalized statements to definitely hold me responsible for them. So first, a first problem is that I want to say that diversity in games tend to try to tackle is how do we get more diverse voices in games? And this is kind of like the number one thing that has already been talked about, like how do we get recruiters out or are there people interested in whatever? And so first, this is gonna be kind of a trend and I'm gonna pose a question, then I'm gonna pose the answer that the diversity in games tend to put forward and then I'm gonna put the answer that my work has probably has signified. So for diversity in games, their answer is STEM, like, you might notice that I don't like this, the prom find creative way of expressing this. Basically, the answer is, start STEM education out of the womb, get it out into college, get women in their fifties into STEM, it's just like everyone get STEM education, get into the tech industry, and then games will be better. And so what this argument is, to kind of, as you can see my wonderful slide making skills, is that a whole bunch of things, what's that argument of get people into STEM really means is one that numbers are ethics.  It also means that the way that money is that money as in the way that people get to these numbers, which is what funding nine year old girls summer camp coding is the ethical thing to do. And that throwing money at all these other programs while not doing other things is a way to reach the standard. And also the companies themselves are our ethical standard. They are the ones with the money and the need to fill numbers. And so therefore they are basically the gatekeeper, the ethical standard that we need. And that is, I find that whenever I see things in the news now like Intel gives money to women and gains, and I'm like, oh my goodness, you know? So, I don't know about it. So now for my work, one of the main things that I want to article that I wrote is that technology itself is not the answer to getting people, more people into games is actually spreading and broadening the idea of what play can be is what is going to involve us. People are playing and creating games all the time, but it's not always a triple A game that is about shooting zombies, right? Like we don't need that population, we need our parity in electronic arcs for us to finish this problem. And so a couple of them, I just want to read something like as a quote from this article, it's low-fi digital games that do something other than fun. We can, I think that people are creating things that are not necessarily fun and consumer friendly that are not included that I think should put it through a valid game. Communal play, non-quantitative relationships, empathy, hidden stories in reality, and populating arc exhibits and things like that. And there's a whole bunch of things I wish I could get into, but I have way too much information. And so one solution that I, I'm just gonna read this out loud is the solution is needing more weird personal accessible game making tools, this is specific for technology. To broaden our artistic culture is to include people who make tools and give room for expression in them. And so right now, I'm pretty, people who are familiar with like DIY tools and things probably know about community and things like that. I looked at unity and like I probably cried for a week trying to use it and then stopped. And I can imagine that I was actually one of the people who stuck it out the longest, you know, doing that. But what it found is that there's a lot more room for tool creation to be an act of expression and to help broaden what games are going to be. Things don't need to be, you know, technically impressive.  You know, we're in 2015, you know, technical excellence does not have to be an aspect of video game creation culture. And so I think there just needs to be more ways that we allow people to get in, but not to get in doing the usual things. You know, how about like getting them to do weird things, you know, create tools that they have to wrestle with creatively and that they want to wrestle with, not, you know, trying to figure out how to do some multi-use purpose thing that, you know, even typical programmers can't wrap their heads around. So I think that that's a really important thing is that because I operate this because people who do have a technical background can help. You can make weird little tools in your spare time, hopefully, you know, to help people who can't. You don't have that technical background like me. If it wasn't for people who made tools, I would never have made a game ever. And that would be sad. So the next question is, how do we increase visibility of diverse voices?  How do we get them in headlines? How do we get them in all these things? And so there's two ways that I see that diverse voices are highlighted in the media and in the industry. One is when they're harassed and the other is when they are financially, so I found this time was powerful women in gaming. And my favorite part is like the little caption that the most powerful women have felt is like a category as if powerful women are trapped in some quantifiable way. You know, and things I do know people and have friends who are apparently powerful women, but as noted by this publication, but it's always by industry standards. It's who's founded a company and made a whole bunch of money or who's basically risen up quicker through the tech field than anybody else.  And I like to think I am a powerful woman in my own right, but I just don't go by these standards. As well, we only allow people to have space in our culture when they're harassed.  I don't know what that means for everyone else who's not, but basically here are kind of common things that I kind of see, interview requests about your abuse. For the last couple of months I've had just, you know, reporters just really want to know every bit of detail I've had about the abuse I've had for the past year and kind of the trauma that I have and the things that I'm just in this gory details of things. And that is the majority of, you know, the kind of presence I would have in the media if I was to allow that to happen. This is a powerful, also equals makes a lot of money. I haven't sold anything. Like my entire involvement in games has been selling nothing. Everything I have is for free and successful to everyone. And so my zero dollar sign is never gonna make it into 30 out of 30 or whatever, you know? Because that's what matters.  You know, and then of course after that is interview with us about how you're totally fine with the games industry. There's another kind of like counterpoints, you know, I'm pretty sure it's having the tech culture too, where someone's like, I've never been harassed, I don't get it, you know?  So if you have those stories, I mean, just get some dollar bills for that because people want it, you know? But everyone's not idle.  How about you tell everyone how wonderful the games industry has been? I am fortunately trying to get those people away because that's not true. The majority of speaking as an expert is our for being women, a woman in games. And that is having the majority of my speaking invitations at professional conferences have been about how I am a minority in games. Not necessarily about my work and not necessarily about things I do or a whole bunch of things. Just how is it to be a woman in games, you know? And after being some, like, I've been only in the industry for three years, but my three years has been a little bit different than other people. I've totally, you know, sped through it. I've been at many speaking gigs over the entire period of my short, I guess, career. You'd like to have the money. But it's tiring because that's all other people can see you as, as that woman in games. And you know, and you become this, like, like this object of like, okay, we need to get you, women, in games into these demographics and we're gonna put you here and you guys can find these things, yay, no, whatever. I know it's just, it's just this weird way that you are, you know, positioned and treated once you are identified as a woman in games.  So I mean, you can only be a woman in games while you're in it.  And of course, bikini armor, yes or no. Yeah, and that's insane. They don't let you have the ore, you know. I tried to do the ore. I said ore ones and they wouldn't let me.   And it's just always kind of like this weird, you know, kind of like, what's it called? Kind of like, like, Arbiter. A judgment on things. So people can don't have to think about the things that they're engaging with. Instead, they just ask you, woman in games, is this good, you know?  Yes, okay. So salacious, so through a piece on game making and local communities, I wrote, instead of answering through some larger, some larger phenomenon, like the neutral industry development, we can look at people around us. You know, the city and country we live in and the spaces we inhabit for a source of identification. I think the things that happen to us, like women in games, is because we're trying to have this abstract thing for a field. But I can tell you that the East Bay game developers are radically different from San Francisco game developers and all of us are radically, radically different from New York game developers. And it's just the people around us are already a source of difference and celebration. And I actually find what was so comforting to me about like, you know, events like these, is that we invite local community members who are having local problems or local solutions to be answering because, you know, then we can actually all understand each other and understand our issues. But I think this is a really important thing because very often we go to conferences or we're expected to go to conferences that are considered like central locations. We have a games developer conference which is happening the first week of March. It is the largest game developer conference. Everyone's supposed to be there. And it means something whether you're there or not and speaking or not. And the thing about it is that it's in San Francisco but it's almost the least Bay area like games conference that there possibly can be. We have a vibrant outdoors and pervasive games culture here that is completely absent from the games developer conference. Artists who are more well known for doing, you know, stuff on the margins and who live here like in the East Bay are primarily absent from the conference. And so it kind of, this larger culture kind of erases local culture. And I think that's a shame. And so for a solution I actually co-organize an un-conference. I'm not sure how universal that term is but basically it's where everyone kind of gets to speak and is not vetted. You just come up and speak for five minutes and you get your five minutes and it doesn't matter who you are. This is for last year. Actually this year we're doing it again not there but like completely for free but basically it's completely, let's say, a free conference. You don't have to have any credentials to speak at it. And as long as you follow our space rules you belong to this event. And I've heard so many things, so many different things at these sort of looser conferences and it's helpful connections between people that you can't have when you're speaking. Like right now you and I are not connecting because I am speaking and giving you knowledge from up high up here. But when you have a little bit more of an active, germinating thing like lost levels you start to notice that even if someone is an expert in a field they're talking right after someone who's completely new but their information is, you can't tell the difference of who is the expert and who's not. And I find that those two things are really useful. So what exactly are diverse games? This is where I might get in trouble, the next few questions I'm gonna definitely get in trouble by someone, but this is a question that diversity in games people need to answer. Like what exactly is a diverse game and what does it mean for there to be diversity in games? And so for the games industry it's mostly put a woman character into a usual slot that a man usually isn't in. And so this is from the last of us, we have a young girl who is possibly clear, sorry for spoilers, but she is just think she comes out with a gun and interact with things like that. It's just that same image of zombie apocalypse but now with a girl. And that is kind of tends to be the answer that tokenization is diversity in this way. And I don't believe the right answer because basically we don't get actual narratives or change in any other way. We just see different people and that's great but that means nothing else changes. So here's the way I put another thing that I wrote that I feel like helps change our ideas about games. This death of the player is kind of so much a death of the author. People are familiar with any literature which basically means the author's interpretation of the game does not matter. And I say well a player's interpretation of the game does not matter to you guys. Gamers are trained to expect certain things from games like explicit rules, goals, visual quality and of course agency. To put it frankly gamers are set up to be colonial forces. It is about individuality, conquering and solving feeling empowered and free at the expense of the world. And to me that is not my lived experience as I'm an organized person. I don't get to have those feelings. You're never going to get my experience if those are the things that need to be there in games. And that completely changes design as a concept. If you have these sorts of, if you have that mentality. I made a game, probably a game I made a game, Manichi which is kind of an explanation but not an explanation but a projection of an experience of mine. And it in its design is different to kind of echo the experiences and feelings I feel. Supercality, not having a clear choice, no strong cause and effect to a winning state. No, a whole bunch of these things that are not like I'm a minority and I have it that day and oh yeah, I got my love at the end. It's not like that. It's something in great and different. And finally, how can games aid social justice? And this definitely is very contentious because right now the kind of implication of diversity in games is, oh well if we have a diverse set of games then we will help make society better through this. And we usually see this through games like Gone Home if anybody's familiar or some other ones where people like seeing the narrative or there's like a queer narrative game who's having an exploration game and they're already buying a queer love story. And this is kind of the better of games. There's typically games like Match Three to Save the Rainforest and things like that which I don't agree it is good for impact. And this basically relies on the fundamental eat it. The consumer game, video game design will save us all. And this is not me being extravagant. This is widely pitched to businesses. There's a whole like a, what do you call, I'd spend so much time forgetting the word. Oh, gamification. Gamification is basically a business model. I just really want to just ban the work of my head. So gamification is basically a method of game design which is pitched to other people to say consumer game design is going to save the world. And this is done for nonprofits, it's done for every, you know, yes, let's get people exercising more. Yeah, it is, I don't think it works. And this is actually what I think is really interesting about what is coming out from more of these games. For instance, for my own personal experience, I talk about how like BDSM and Kink and the philosophies that are embedded in some of it kind of expand our idea to affecting other people's every politically. If we understand it play as exercising empathy through engaging context and Kink as a type of a play that deeply confronts life context, then Kink practices stand as a stronger model for engaging people with meaningful play. And then the overly instrumentalized and decontextualized outlook on games propagated by contemporary game design. So this basically means that we can situate games in real life and have a change instead of having some sort of abstracted model. And I did this with a game called Mission which actually you can find on my website that is actually a restaurant and pub crawl through the mission. And it's basically outlined through the lines but those are the bus routes of the mission that bus people from San Francisco to Silicon Valley. And I do it so you can go around and see how gentrification is affecting eating opportunities in the mission because I quickly found when I tried to live in the mission for a short stint that I couldn't afford a lot of options there. And I feel that people were actually on the ground doing things in real life that we can go ahead and do it. And so we're not done. I'm not saying that we are here on the old scene or have solved everything but I wanted to encourage people to continue thinking about these things and to question them because the games industry itself is not going to solve it and neither is our assimilation into it. Thank you.


Those interested in yoga will have the perfect opportunity this weekend. Thursday we spoke with yoga instructor Alex Rintel about free sessions this weekend. So yoga can help decrease anxiety and depression. It's a really awesome tool to use for any stress relief, things like that. It's an awesome exercise for your body, so any kind of body movement will be really helpful. It'll be in the Pikeville City Park right across from the parking garage. I don't think I'll have any signs up, but I'll be there. I'll be trying to weigh people in, people I see that have yoga mats, and I'm excited to see everybody there. The free yoga session will take place at the Pikeville City Park Saturday, August 21st at 10 a.m. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joel Chorjol.


Before sending your PCB design out for manufacturing, it's always a good idea to print out a one-to-one scale copy of it on actual paper. Yeah. It takes almost no effort and it gives you a physical preview of your board before committing to copper. It's surprisingly easy to overlook certain details while your design is still stuck on a screen. So place chips and connectors on the paper and make sure all the outlines and pin counts are correct. With a sheet of foam placed beneath the paper, you can even simulate mounting components. Check for any necessary slots or mounting holes and that you don't have two objects trying to occupy the same physical space. That's a good general rule. If your board has them, try using any buttons, knobs or displays. You can patch up any ergonomic oversights now instead of having to wait for a revision too.


Good day fellow investors and welcome to the weekly stock market news with a fundamental twist. Today I'm going to talk about general electrics meltdown, what is the fundamental reason behind that meltdown and how it can save you from future meltdowns in a lot of other stocks that have similar focus as general electric. Then we are going to slowly talk about demographics because it's a very very powerful trend related to long-term investing. Then we're going to shift on to governments debt and how the demographic story reflects in higher and higher debt levels. The governments aren't really thinking about the long-term debt situation except one government and then that government it's criticized about it. So let's immediately start with general electric. I can talk about general electric because a year ago a little bit more than a year ago I wrote an article about shareholder value destruction and how to spot that. And my example was of course general electric that was spending 21.5 billion of shareholders money on buybacks to push the share price higher even if their earnings per share was just 11 billion. As you can see a year ago the stock price was above 40 and now it is more than 50 percent lower. Why is it 50 percent lower? Because general electrics focus the management's focus is not on shareholder value creation and that's what you want to have when you invest for the long term when you are in pension fund where when you invest for dividends you want shareholder value long term creation. If a company sells assets to get to cash and the company doesn't focus on improving that assets they prefer to sell everything that doesn't have a good profit margin because they are incompetent. What do they do? They buy back stocks with everything that they have because they want higher stock prices to get higher options. Previous general electric CEO Jeff emailed he just wanted to push the stock price higher so that he can retire with a huge bonus. If he sent the company bankrupt he didn't care and that's the biggest problem of corporate America globally corporate problem is the management's focus not on creation of value but on buybacks. Let me show you what I wrote exactly a year and a month ago and that proved very very timely then. By the way these articles are published on Investive Daily which is an American investment platform that I write daily for. General electrics buybacks activity can be easily questioned as they spend 21 billion on buybacks while their earnings were 11.4 billion. General electric usually repurchases stocks when the stocks are expensive. Here we can see their buybacks are always done at extremely high price to book values. When the stock is cheap they don't do any buybacks of course logically. Then the CEO of general electric is paid 26 million a year of which 34% is in stocks. So he's so eagerly repurchasing those stocks to push the price even higher and decrease the value of his options. He retired he doesn't care anymore what's going on. What would you do if you were the CEO of general electric where your salary depends on the stock price and you have a 21 billion Canon that can be recharged yearly. That was my mistake the Canon can't be recharged anymore because there are no more assets to sell there are no more earnings because the value has been destroyed in order to push higher an imaginary stock price. So they didn't invest in the real business they invested in buybacks and destroyed a very very good company and this is just the first example of many companies in the future because the focus is wrong the focus is on stock price and not on value creation and the trouble of everything is that general electric and such companies are owned by pension funds so many many retirees dividend investors will see their dividend income fall their retirement income fall their retirement wealth fall because of what's going on with general electric now when the environment shifts and all other issues with all other companies that are doing the same come out then we will really really see trouble and what's going on with GEE is a problem of focus because management isn't focused on improving the business is just focused on buying back shares and spending as much cash as possible to increase the value of their options biggest problem in the global corporate environment second issue in the global not corporate but economic environment are demographics demographics are an extremely powerful force that evolves over the long term but that nobody likes to really look at because it's boring it's over the long term however it's extremely important here we can see the biggest risk of all deflationary demographics we can see that the US labor force growth has been really really slowing down so the trend is no longer your friend lower growth in labor force really led to the current economic recovery being the slowest in history never in history has the economy grown so slow as it is now this is because there is less people less labor force and even the growth that we have now is thanks to that similar situation is in Germany the country is about to see its peak in population and what's very important is that the population of people above 60 years is going to hugely increase really fast growth and the young population is going to decline which is where the value is created so that's something that will impact a lot of developed countries and they are solving that issue with debt a little bit more about that later now if we look at fertility rates across the globe we can see the blue a lot of blue in europe very low fertility rates a lot of red in africa very high fertility rates a mixed picture in asia however what you want is positive fertility rates above 2.1 which leads to higher population and economic growth higher economic development what's going on in india what's still going on let's say in china not that fast anymore but indonesia and such countries is really really good so we really have to think about how to invest in relation to demographics because the developed countries have one solution for what's going on except one country and that is debt this is the expected fiscal train wreck that will happen to the us the us is accumulating deficits deficits deficits and everybody thinks that is normal because every developed country is doing that so apart corporate craziness with buybacks this is governmental craziness with deficits this will put a burden on future generations there is no doubt about it if you see here when i was two years old the federal debt was 10 times lower than it is now and then you have one country that is saving that is thinking about the future generations that knows that there will be more older people so we have to save more now in order to have a good situation in the future and imf president says that germany has to spend more because it has surpluses it doesn't do what all other countries do which is take more and more and more debt so germany is trying to think about future generations and that's not good so that's really crazy since when saving thinking about the future protecting future generations really having common sense it's not good anymore what's good do what the us does would do what the ECB does take on debt debt debt and who cares about who is going to repay that debt in the future we're gonna print money and who cares so it's really corporate management is the trouble but also the government is the trouble everybody thinks short term which creates a train wreck that's getting bigger bigger and bigger as there is more debt in the world and as the corporations also pile more debt in the world what's very interesting is that us treasury holdings the foreign treasury holdings grow higher higher and higher so if those foreign institutions that hold those holdings hold those treasuries change their minds about the us then we could also see a shock so it becomes a story about sentiment that can put that can push interest rates higher and even further increase those deficits so the situation is really really crazy across the whole board nevertheless junk bond spreads are at the lowest since 2007 nobody is thinking about risk and i am probably very crazy because i discuss risks and often mention it however what can i say i must be crazy perhaps that's why you like watching these videos you never know and this what i found for the Deutsche Bank very very interesting the current refinancing of bonds is less than half of what it will be in a few years because all those bonds that have been issued now at low interest rates will have to be refinanced in the next few years and what if we see higher interest rates in the next few years if people start being afraid about this money about this constant debt about the focus on debt and on repurchases share repurchases if we see a recession so huge pile of risk piling up day by day day by day but nobody talks about it we on this channel will look at assets now how to protect yourself producing assets i'm going to talk about food and food stocks more in detail analyzing an old weather portfolio so that whatever happens because we don't know what will happen we are protected thank you for watching looking forward to your comments especially where i'm wrong i want to learn we have to learn here as a channel together as people that are interested not in being right or wrong but people that are interested in learning and the best way to learn is to be confronted with ideas so share your ideas where am i wrong what can happen everything that we everything that can add value to this channel i'll see you in the next video