Hey everybody, this is Brett, and today I am extremely excited to show you this brand new 2022 Jeep Grand Wagoneer. This is basically a Series 2 package with the Obsidian Group on it. It also has the Convenience Group, the Heavy Duty Toeing Group, and the Rear Seat Entertainment Group. We're going to go all the way around on this vehicle, inside, out. We're shooting this video in 4K today, so it's going to be a pretty long video because there's a lot of stuff to go over on this vehicle. First off, we'll start with all the specs. This one has the 6.4 liter V8 overhead valve Hemi engine. It has cylinder deactivation on it, 471 horsepower, 455 foot-pounds of torque. It's going to get you 18 miles per gallon on the highway, 13 city for an average of 15 miles per gallon. This one is in Baltic Gray Metallic, which the paint coat is PAS, if you were curious, and we're just going to go all the way around, check out all the options, all the new stuff on it, go over this beautiful interior on this vehicle, and just give you a really good idea of what this vehicle is all about. First off, this one comes with the 22-inch granite crystal painted with the black inserts on it. It's going to come with the Goodyear Eagle Touring tires. These are 285, 45-hour 22s, kind of an all-terrain tread pattern to them. We're going to check out the original window sticker just so you can see all the options before we really get in depth with this walk around. I'm not going to go over everything, but kind of everything. Base price is $97,995. You can see that it is a Series 2 4x4 Baltic Gray Metallic Global Black Interior. Has the Palermo leather-trimmed seats with massage, 6.4 V8 engine, 8-speed automatic transmission. Everything you see on the left there is your standard equipment, lots of safety features standard on this vehicle. Your optional equipment starts with the Baltic Gray Clear Coat exterior paint, which is 645. This one is the customer preferred package, 23T, which is $5,495.  Convenience Group is $37.95, which gives you advanced security alert system, night vision with pedestrian and animal detection, rear seat monitoring camera, or the FAM cam, and active driving assist system, intersection collision assist system, also has the heavy duty trailer tow package, which is $9.95, trail brake controller, the trailer hitch lineup assist, trailer hitch zoom, removable rear tow hook, black tow hooks, and heavy duty engine cooling, and the rear seat entertainment group, which is $21.95, gives you the Amazon Fire TV built in, and the 10.1-inch rear entertainment screens. Total MSRP on this vehicle is $113,120, and this is the most expensive vehicle I've ever videoed professionally at our dealership, so it's exciting there, three-year 36 bumper-to-bumper, and five-year 60 powertrain warranty. Your fuel economy is right there, 18 Highway 13 city for an average of 15, and it has not been rated for government five-star crash test ratings quite yet.  Also notice around the windows is all gloss black as well, you get the trim on the mirrors which is gloss black too, and there is a wagon-ear on the windshield if you're looking for Easter eggs. I didn't find a lot of them, but that is one of them. Coming around to the back, I do have the hitch cover off of this just so that you can see the towing package, you get the receiver hitch, the four-pin wiring, seven-pin wiring right there, and that hitch cover goes flush over that. You have the backup parking sensors, I think this is really cool they have, it's kind of like a honeycomb design there, it's got a little bit of metal flake to it, it just kind of looks really cool on the back there, you get the grand wagon-ear all in black with the chrome accents on it, the LED tail lamps, and we'll take a quick look at the back seats here, or the back storage area, this is of course a power rear gate. And there is your receiver hitch cover, this is your front license plate, these are the window shades that come with the vehicle, and under this really nice format is your cross bars for the roof rails, and then a cargo net, and then an audio kit dual channel, I'm not sure exactly what these are in here, but it's all taped up so I'm not going to open it. And then these seats do fold down, they are powerful, and you can see when the second row is back too far that it will actually just come right back up, and then to get those back up like so.  You get the quadra drive logo there all blacked out as well, Baltic gray metallic has a lot of metal flake to it, I can get it to zoom here just right, it's better when it's not on the lights or picture studio. You can see it has a lot of metal flake to it, it's really a cool looking color. You do get the capless fuel fill, which is really nice, never get fuel on your hands, and this one does take premium fuel only. You get the grand wagon-ear lettering on the side along with the American flag, looks really good. Notice how nice and smooth those power step bars come out, inside you get the global black interior with the Palermo leather seats, the light gray piping, these are massaging seats, and if you ever want to know what trim level you have, they always put it on the back of the seat, so this is a series two.  Your massage controls are right here as well as your power seats. You can fold these mirrors in, you have to turn that down, and then they will fold in automatically, and then when you just turn it back up, they'll go out. So that's how that works, really a cool design trim on these doors. This one has the ambient lighting, which lights up underneath the doors here, which I'll show you in just a second. You can see it on the dash here, which is really cool. Then we'll hop inside and take a look at everything that this vehicle has to offer on the interior, because it's quite a lot. So you get the big display right here. This is all digital, digital speedometer, and you can do all your different settings here. You can put a nav screen up your miles per gallon. The radio, your ride height, so this has the quadrilift system where it raises and lowers the vehicle, or the air suspension if you will. Just a really cool instrument cluster. You get the flat bottom steering wheel, the Grand Wagoneer logo on the steering wheel, information, and Bluetooth controls on the left. This is the button that helps you get to that five display screen there. Leather wrapped, I'm sure it's heated as well, adaptive cruise controls, regular cruise controls, and then this is active driving assist and lane detection. The button right there, you get that really cool. There's actually a little bit of texture to that material. So it's not just for looks, it's actually textured. Then your gear selector right there has the push button start. This is the Uconnect five radio with the big touch screen display. You also get displays down here. So this thing has a lot of screens in it. I think I counted seven screens with the instrument cluster. This one, this one, that's three. There's one on the passenger side as well. That's four. And then there's three in the back. So seven screens in this vehicle. It's pretty crazy. And if you consider the video camera that's in the rear view mirror, then it's eight. So really a cool system. This one has the suede headliner, the power sunroof with second row panel glass. And let's just get to this radio here because this is some really cool stuff. Of course, it's going to have the navigation system on it. And you can see that comes up nicely. You have your home screen, your radios, AM, FM, serious capabilities. You have your different media that you can do here, AM, FM, your phone with Bluetooth. And then you have your comfort controls, obviously for your heated and cooled seats. And then you can do your massage seats down here. And if you wanted this up, you just press that button and this folds open like so. That is your wireless cell phone charge pad. You get three USBs, three USB C's, an Augsjack and an HDMI plug-in for the passengers. So whatever they're doing on that screen, you can plug in an HDMI device and it can display up there. So really, really a lot of amazing stuff that goes with this vehicle. You have your phone controls here. And you have the FAMCAM, you have your different vehicle displays right here, the FAMCAM, the Surround View Camera. So you can see all the way around 360, your rear view, you get a wide view, wide view front, narrow view front, and then your backup camera. And then you can zoom on that receiver hitch. That's part of that towing package, the heavy-duty towing package. And you have your passenger screen. You can turn that on. You can turn it off. You can put the second row. It's very touchy. So it has the off-road pages here. You have your controls. You can turn the power side steps off. And then you have all your different apps. If you go to all, it'll bring them all up, Android Auto, Apple CarPlay. You can do those all wirelessly. Your massage seats, your mirror dimmer, nav, of course. You have the relax system, which is pretty crazy. And I'll show you the one other Easter egg that I found. So when you have this on, it has these relaxing ambient noise features on here. You can change all of these. And the other Easter egg I found is on here. If you look real closely, right there, it says 1963, which is when the original Grand Wagon here came out. So that's the other Easter egg I found on this vehicle. But you can do fireplace, the Aurora, which we didn't just have on the forest, which is kind of cool. And then you can topographic. I like this one. So a lot of cool stuff that you can do with that. And like I said, all the other apps on here, I wanted to get to that off-road pages there. So you have your steering angle, which you can see as I turn the steering wheel, that changes. You have your transfer case, rear axle locker, accessory gauges, pitch and roll, select terrain, your suspension for the ride height and everything, latitude, longitude, altitude, just an amazing amount of stuff that you can do with this vehicle. Then down here, your other controls, your eight-speed automatic transmission, lane departure, stability control, auto hold on, I'm guessing that's for your electronic parking brake, your hazard lights, your driving assistance, I would assume that that's what that is. Engine sensors, tow hall, and then trailer backup assist, I'm guessing. But anyways, you have that. You can close this. You have your Quadra Track 2 system with the Sport Auto Snow Sand Mud Rock. You have your lift system or the air suspension system. You can raise and lower. You have your terrain, select speed, control four-wheel drive, low anti-neutral setting for flat towing. You have the nice key fob here with remote start, it says grand wagon here on the back of it. You get cup holders right here and everything is in that textured metal design. And underneath here is your refrigerated glove box. When you turn that on, it'll start pumping cold air into there. That seems like it seals nicely. You get the leather-wrapped dash and that can tash tweeters up there. And the other thing I wanted to show you was the ambient light, color light, so you can choose your different colors and then that changes on the doors as well as underneath the dash there. And obviously when it's darker out, you'd notice those better, but you can change the bottom lights and the top lights to be different colors. So if you want the bottom ones yellow and these dark blue, you could do that or make them both yellow or red and yellow, kind of customize it however you want to do it. So a lot of really cool stuff. I can say these massaging seats are amazing. We'll take a quick look at the back seats because that is the other huge thing on this vehicle. This one has the second row quad seating. These back seats are heated and cool. You get the fire TVs, part of that rear seat entertainment system, and they work just like, you know, if you have an internet on your phone or like a hotspot or something, these can work exactly like your fire TV at home. You get two USBs, two USB C's back here, 115 volt, 150 watt plug-in, 12 volt power point. Here is that rear screen, which controls your heated and cooled seats as well as your rear air controls. And now the biggest thing with the Wagonier and the Grand Wagonier is the third row seats. So very, very roomy back here. And the thing I love most about the Wagonier and Grand Wagonier is the fact that I can sit comfortably back here and I can also come into the vehicle and get out of the vehicle very easily. You can see there's a lot of space to get through from that second row seat and it's really easy to get back here. And those step bars, I tell this to everybody, those step bars are nice and wide, so when you get out of the vehicle, it's very easy to get out. You get your seat control, you can lean this seat back, put it forward, that you're sitting in a USB, USB C, same thing on the other side. And this might help you see that seat go back better. So that's pretty cool too. And then you get the third row fixed glass roof back here. See that goes like so. And there's your fam cam. And yeah, just a really neat vehicle. We're going to do a final walk around, but check this out. So when I get out of the vehicle, it's really easy for me to step on this step bar because it's nice and wide. I'm not going to slip off or anything. USB seats go back like so, and then you can actually adjust them as well. Second row also has a nice big storage area. And you get these sunshades on the back as well, which are really nice. Child safety locks, of course, on the back doors. And I'll do a final walk around with all the lights on here. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today. And if you liked the video and it was helpful, give us a like, subscribe, and share on our YouTube channel, which is youtube.com slash summit auto. And once again, thank you so much for checking out the video. We got all those LED fog lamps, headlights, and running lights on this vehicle. Notice all the gloss black on these surrounds and grill. Really a good looking vehicle and definitely really excited to be selling these and proud to be selling these because they are so well made and just really good looking and so much technology and things to offer on this vehicle. Thanks again for checking out the video and to see more pictures of this vehicle. I want to borrow their 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, you name it. We got to go to that website right there, www.summitauto.com. All pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at summitauto.com. And if you'd like to see more videos, you can go to youtube.com slash summitauto. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. Click the bell notifications and you'll get updates on the videos we do each and every day here at Summit Auto. In fact, in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel in the upper left. A link to more wagon-ear and grand wagon-ear videos like this one in the upper right. Link to this vehicle on our website in the lower left and a link to one of our latest YouTube videos in the lower right. Click those, check us out and we're super excited to be offering this 2022 Jeep Grand Wagon-ear Series 2 Obsidian Package in Baltic Gray Metallic. Thanks again for checking out the video. Remember to like, subscribe, and share.


Teaching is who I am. I really think it's what I was put on this earth to do. Let's just go like this. Are you ready? Yes. What letter says? Letter M. Mrs. Scott, she had her very own unique technique on how to teach us. She made school fun. You have to get kids excited about learning. Doing something tactile where they can feel it really helps them internalize how they're supposed to form the letters. And once they're excited and feel like they're experiencing school, then you create lifelong learners. Something that Elizabeth says a lot is that everything's always going back to the children. What's best for the children? Kids are always at the center of every decision I make. And keeping that as my focus made it clear to me that we needed to come up with systems that look at who they are as an individual and not necessarily as a grade level or as a class. We have to set up reading groups with all of our different levels. I'll be tearing my hair out. I'll be like, Elizabeth, I need you to help me. She'll put it in front of her and she'll do it in literally five minutes. It's amazing to watch. This is what I would do. Tell me if it works for you. I'm an expert at recognizing quickly what kids need and designing interventions that work for them.  I don't know how we would get that accomplished without her. The intervention groups that Elizabeth runs are basically based around the student needs. So you'll have nine kids come to you? She is one of the people that looks at all the data. She knows their likes, their interests, their families. She goes above and beyond to really research that so that she knows what this whole child needs to move ahead. I had a lot of energy. When she said that I was turning and acting while she adapted to what I needed, then she helped me out a lot. Elizabeth, in her teacher leader role, is also an instructional coach. That is a huge position that benefits everybody. I have been struggling with guided reading. She makes herself always available, and she's very knowledgeable in what she does. And in all those hats that she wears, she gives you 100% of everything she does. There's nothing better than seeing that light bulb go off, whether it be with a little kid learning how to read or an adult saying, oh my gosh, now I understand how we make intervention groups. That's what motivates me. Whatever aspect she's involved with, her influence. It goes so much beyond just her classroom or even her individual school. It goes district-wide. And some of those initiatives have made an impact upon the entire Connecticut State Educational System. Working in a tough district as she is working in, what she is saying to others is, if you keep wanting to be better each and every day, you will reach excellence. She can move mountains with their reading. It's really incredible what she can do with a student and a book. I think every single person has the power to change the world a little bit at a time. If they do their part and we all do our little part, this world's gonna get better.


I think one of the key findings and insights that is not really coming as a surprise to us is that risk in today's environment are hugely interconnected. They always touch, you know, political, social, economical or real-world events. So the interconnectivity I think is what is one of the key thrusts today that the world is facing. Yet the report as such provides huge value for us. It's a great source of information, which is somewhat the very sound foundation for our own risk assessments and our own risk strategies. On one hand, on the other hand, it provides deep insights into, I think, risk situations of other industries, other countries, other societies. So it's a really rich, rich source of information to us. Just take, you know, as an example of the dark side, the London riots, where, you know, huge turmoil started. You look, for example, to the economic crisis in which we are in. It's full of interconnectivity. It started 20 years ago with an interest rate that was kept by far too low and had huge ripple effects on the real economy, on the financial economy and even on the society, not only in the U.S. and in Europe, but worldwide. We got some early wake-up calls, for example, beginning of this year with WikiLeaks that clearly shows you nothing is really safe and secured, and I think the dark side is highlighting this dimension of the interconnectivity. On the other hand, you know, maybe similar on another scale, the bright side, you look to the Arab Spring, where some of the internet and the interconnectivity, I think, brought to the surface a huge democratization and a lot of hope to a lot of people in the Middle East. I think a key challenge is that probably no single institution, no single government, no single body can really address the risk in a comprehensive way. What is needed today is really a collaboration on various levels. Governments need to work together with private public institutions. Individual companies need to work together with public institutions to really address root causes of risks that we face today and hopefully that we can turn them also into an opportunity. An individual company cannot address, for example, the huge challenges and risk with supply chain and supply chain interruption. There only a collective effort is really needed. So first of all, I think people need to be aware of the risk. There must be a deeper understanding, but we need then also to look to new forms of collaboration to address and then also to mitigate the risks and hopefully to turn them into opportunities. So I think the business community as such will play and has to play an enormous role. Let me give you two, three examples. For example, how the automotive industry is really looking to the risk of air pollution and the revolution that has taken place in creating new engines and creating new types of vehicles. I think that's hugely transformative and you find other industries that can really address some of the key risks also highlighted in the global risk report. And I'm highly confident when you look just to the sheer amount of wealth creation, the freedom that the world is enjoying today, that will continue. I think we need to address all those risks up front. We need not to be scared or feel intimidated. They always look huge to address, but I think with efforts, with joint efforts, where I think politicians, social institutions, economic institutions can work together, maybe joint forces also with academia. I think these are new patterns that will evolve to address the risks and hopefully turn them into solutions.


AI chatbots in science. You've heard about them. You probably used them too. I'm talking about chat tbt and other large language models that provide your chat prompt through which you can ask anything and the generative text model will then produce an answer. These tools have turned out to be remarkably versatile thanks to having very large models with more than one billion parameters that have been trained on more than 100 billion tokens or words if you will. The downside to this is that they're extremely expensive to train and have huge hardware requirements to run. I intentionally waited with making this video until the word hype had died down and I had an informed opinion. However it is a rapidly changing topic and some of the stuff I say is likely to be outdated soon. In this video I'll discuss whether chatbots are likely to replace Google, can help you publish, apply for funding, be your programmer or whether they're better used as an interface for other tools. RAI chatbots google 2.0. Large language models are great at summarizing and having been trained on the internet it's tempting to think that you can just ask chat tbt instead of doing a google search. However these models are difficult to update and therefore often have outdated information. Moreover they're prone to hallucination that is they can provide confident wrong answers they simply make up facts which is made worse by the fact that they provide no sources for what they're claiming. So in the end you're going to have to check all the answers you get from asking chat tbt which means that you're going to have to search for sources which means that you're going right back to google so it is no replacement. However they may be useful tools to help you come up with a better query for doing your search in the first place. RAI chatbots are useful for publishing. This is a controversial topic. A chatbot is not a person it cannot take responsibility and as such it cannot be an author and you should not copy paste text straight from chat tbt into your manuscript which people have already been caught doing. As I already mentioned chatbots can invent facts and if you ask for references it will also invent references that do not exist. So you should not use a model to write alone and probably not use a model to write anything from scratch since fact checking it will take more time than just writing it yourself. However it can still be a useful tool. Think about it as a tool for improving writing. Have it be your copy editor that goes through your text identifies problems and even suggests changes to make it better. It can also in the future I think be used to draft certain sections from detailed data. That is all the input is provided in a structured form so it doesn't invent things. This could be for example tool based method sections. Imagine that you have a tool with a graphical user interface like the string database.  Similarly I could imagine table based results. For example from an enrichment analysis you might choose the rows of particular interest and have the tool write a summary paragraph about these. You may also be tempted to use an AI bot to come up with ideas for your next grant. However since these models are great at summarizing it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that they are terrible at coming up with new ideas. So if you ask it to write a grant proposal for you it will almost certainly be rejected on grounds of lack of novelty. However I think chat bots could be used for reshaping rejected proposals for submission to a different funding agency and for writing certain required sections that are less scientific and just need to be adapted from other sources. Once you have a grant they could also be excellent for reporting filling in long forms writing the most deliverable reports which are often redundant with papers that you've written and may not be read by anyone. What about using your AI chatbot for coding? The underlying language model is typically multilingual and that includes programming languages. However it's not a programmer and if you ask it to write code it will often have many code errors. However new features like code interpreter allows the model to run the code and in an iterative process fix its own syntax errors providing you with runnable code although it may still give you wrong results. I think these AI chatbots are better used as an alternative to copying and pasting from stack overflow, as debugging tools to help you find mistakes, for code review to help improve your code, for code translation to move code from one programming language to another and finally for automatic documentation of your functions. Last but not least I think that AI chatbots are an interesting form of interface that can be used to interface large language models with code. This can happen in two ways. One is that the code can access for example chat GPT via its API and the other is that the model itself can access code like with the GPT4 plugins. Regardless of which way it's done this means that large language models can be used to interpret the input from users translating questions into for example database queries which can then subsequently be answered correctly using either a knowledge graph or by querying the biomedical literature. Large language models can also be used for output as I already talked about with the enrichment analysis. This means that they can be used to translate the results coming out of an analysis into human readable text for the user to interpret. This means that you can effectively wrap a resource with a user-friendly large language model. So what do I think will be the future of AI chatbots? It is famously dangerous to prophecy especially about the future and more so in a field with rapid progress. However I think it's safe to say that we will have even bigger models coming and that we're moving from large language models being standalone to large language models using tools to look up facts, provide references for what they're claiming and execute code instead of doing calculations within the model itself. There will also be a death of many of the AI tools that we currently have popping up because of AI becoming an integral part of other software. This will include your office package and your integrated development environment in which you make code. So in the future we will often not even think about it when we're using AI. That's all I have to say about AI chatbots for now. I hope you found this video interesting and if you did I suggest you watch this next. Thanks for your attention.


Authorities respond to Wednesday traffic crashes, High Waters forced boardwalk closure, Sheboygan County Coast Guard rescues distressed boaters. These and other local stories are coming up on this edition of Community News Review. This is Community News Review, service WSDS-TV news content provided by WHBL. I'm Maddie Fister and this is Community News Review for Thursday, June 18th, 2020. Both the Sheboygan County Sheriff's Department and Sheboygan Police were busy dealing with crashes on Wednesday night. In the city, Sheboygan Police were called to head on a crash at 17th and Indiana. Police say 36 year old woman was westbound on Indiana Avenue, dropped a contact lens and went looking for it.  She was briefly hospitalized and cited for operating left of center. The other car was being driven by a 30 year old Kohler woman and she and her 28 year old passenger were both uninjured. Meanwhile, on the city's north side, the Sheboygan County Sheriff's Department responded to a crash at the intersection of Highway 42 and County Road J around 930. Deputies say 18 year old woman ran the stoplight and hit another vehicle. She and the driver of the car she hit were both hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries. The 18 year old was cited for failure to yield at the right of way and operating without a license. An unnamed skilled nursing facility in Sheboygan County is currently the subject of an investigation concerning cases of COVID-19. According to the daily report from the Sheboygan County Division of Health Services, although the active investigation subject remains anonymous, the daily report did say that the Sheboygan senior community completed testing of all residents and staff for the coronavirus and one positive test was found among the 115 tested. Throughout the county, three more coronavirus cases were confirmed and another 272 persons were told that they do not have the virus. One of the 47 cases currently active is hospitalized. And besides the aforementioned skilled nursing facility investigation, another ongoing inquiry is underway at the Sheboygan County Church, identified in the media accounts as Pentecostals of Sheboygan County in Sheboygan Falls. That congregation has cooperated with the Sheboygan County DHS actions and has ceased in-person activities in favor of the virtual services. Statewide, 9,406 tests came back negative since yesterday while 256 or 2.6% of all tests were positive for COVID-19. That's now number at 712, resulting in a 3% rate of fatalities among the state residents confirmed with a case of COVID-19 and hospitalizations, now number 3,128. City parks and splash pads are popular with thousands of kids and families in Sheboygan and just in time for summer, those facilities are reopening according to the parks forestry superintendent, Joe Curlin, he said that's made possible by the county's transition to the second phase of the safe restart recommendations, but that does not mean that you can throw caution to the warm wind in this summer. Curlin did advise that those facilities are not cleaned or disinfected and use will be at your own risk. If you choose to visit playgrounds and splash pads, he said practice good hand hygiene by washing with soap and water or use a hand sanitizer. Federal and state guidelines still apply, so practice the now familiar six foot social distancing and limit gatherings to families or not more than 25 persons per group. US Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler was in Sheboygan on Tuesday to announce a new air quality attainment designation for Dora and inland Sheboygan counties. Appearing at Sheboygan South Pier along with Congressman Glenn Rothman and Tom Tiffany Wheeler and Wisconsin is definitely doing its part for the American environment and said the EPA would continue supporting Wisconsin community's efforts to further improve the health and economic wellbeing of its citizens. Wheeler's announcement officially recognized that the Newport State Park area now meets the federal air quality standards for ground level ozone, which would loosen restrictions that impede businesses and industries hoping to locate or expand here. Congressman Rothman applauded the EPA's decision calling previous interpretations of the Clean Air Act an error that saddled Lakeshore counties with responsibility of addressing polluted air that is generated elsewhere, but transported here by the prevailing winds. Non-attainment had been guided by a single air quality sensor located on the shoreline, but a second inland sensor added a few years ago showed clean air was the rule away from the lake. Rothman's comments were echoed by County Administrator Adam Payne and Sheboygan Mayor Mike Van der Steen, who also created businesses with expending a great deal of time and money to reduce their own emissions. Impacts from the High Lake, Michigan water levels have been evident along the shoreline and forms of disappearing beaches and bluff erosion. Now those impacts of extended beyond the shore has the city of Sheboygan has closed down a section of the river boardwalk from Parker Johns to priority sign. Superintendent of Facilities and Traffic Division, Mike Williams says that is needed to avoid pedestrians slipping and falling on the slit and the mud left by the fluctuating lake levels. Sidewalks and parking lot structures opposite of those river side buildings can be used to access those businesses until the city deems the boardwalk safe for all foot traffic. And finally the Sheboygan County Coast Guard was called to rescue three people in a boat that started taking on water just off of two rivers on Tuesday afternoon. The Coast Guard station got a call around six p.m. And they were told that the boat was about two miles from the shore, a 45 foot response boat and helicopter responded and they were able to get the three people in the partially submerged boat to shore. The three on the boat were able to use their cell phones to call for help and had flare guns to help crews locate them. The capstone or cap size boat was towed to two rivers and no one was hurt and all three had life jackets on. And that is our report for today. Join me again on Tuesday for more local news and information on Community News Review. News content for this program provided by WHBL in cooperation, WSCSTV.


Righty, Celebration Canada is an amazing event that is taking place currently at Canada's Wonderland and has been an event that has started since I believe the 2019 season. But correct me if I'm wrong. Celebration Canada is running from July 1st to the 9th and is from 12 p.m. to 9 p.m. and is included with park admission. It is one of many festivals that Canada's Wonderland will hold this summer. And to be honest, these are some of my favorite events that Canada's Wonderland puts on. The food is amazing. The entertainment is honestly so good. And this year is even better because they have an actual traditional indigenous performance by the Smoke Trail Singers. And I actually like thoroughly enjoyed it. And not even that, I'm thoroughly enjoying all of the entertainment performances that are going on in the Celebration Canada event this season. You gotta check it out. These events are highly underrated in my opinion from the food, the performances, the vibes, especially as the sun's starting to set with those nice bulb lights that they have hanging over. It's honestly like a really good vibe. Wonderland does really good with their events and you have to check it out. It is definitely family friendly. But I have to say, you gotta try some of the drinks that Canada's Wonderland has this season. They've added a Tundra Twist cider, which is one of my favorites. I get it almost every time I'm there. But yeah, this event will run from July 1st to the 9th, from 12 p.m. to 9 p.m. And it is obviously the biggest Canada Day Celebration event in the Greater Toronto area. It includes performances by the Smoke Trail Singers and a couple of other singers as well, like this lady on the screen right now. She was phenomenal, great presence in the crowd. And yeah, it's honestly really good. I would personally recommend either the Poutine or the Donner, hopefully I pronounced that correctly. The Donner is absolutely amazing, you have to try it. So definitely come out and check out this event. If you unfortunately can't make it before the end, July 9th, there are other events that the park is gonna hold on, a host between now and the end of summer. I'm really looking forward to some of the other cultural events that they throw on because they, again, I love trying food from different parts of the world and then just other food alternatives outside of Canada's Wonderland. Now, I will say that the food is included in your meal plan so you could try any of the food at their events with your meal plan, so it's great value. I will add though, just to be not biased, the portions are pretty small on some of the items. So just keep that in mind when you are using your meal plan. They are smaller than the in-park food options. But with that being said, definitely go out and check out this event. It is highly recommended by me. And yeah, I look forward to the other events as well. I believe Kids Fest is starting July 5th, so that's gonna be awesome as well. Anyways, thanks so much for watching. Have a good one guys, bye.


The Basement Shop dot com is the premier spot for the beefiest bases, acoustics, drum kits, even ukuleles with a wide variety new and used musical instruments and accessories from D-Drum, Luna, Dean, Specter, Warwick, Sadowski. Head over to TheBasementShop.com to find the gear you need to rock out. TheBasementShop.com. Johnson County Trail Town Committee held their first event of 2023, the Shamrock shenanigans trail ride and walk on Saturday, March 18th. Today is Shamrock shenanigans and what we have going on we're here at the Dawkins line rail trail and we're here today riding some bikes and scavenging for some St. Patty's Day stuff hidden along the trail and looking just to have fun and get outside. Despite a low turnout the event included a scavenger hunt and a contest for whoever was wearing the most green. It's the start of the season and in 23 Johnson County trails are the place to be. Johnson County Trail Town Committee is excited to kick off the season and is looking forward to their next event in April. For more information you can visit the Johnson County Trail Town Committee Facebook page. For Mountain Top News, I'm Kelsey Dean.


OK, good morning. So my name is Stefan Van Vana. I'm here on behalf of Tangent Animation, and I'm talking about volume rendering in cycles. And just a quick disclaimer, this is a last minute presentation. So the slides are done literally on the train here to answer them, and then completely redone last night. There will be mistakes and errors. The slides are pretty ugly. And since I did not have any time to actually build high quality stuff and render that super resolution, I had to do all this in my laptop in a hotel room. It's going to be low resolution programmer art. So we want to learn about volumes in cycles. What does everybody tell you about learning? You learn from your mistakes. So it's very obvious if you want to learn a lot about this, we have to make a lot of mistakes. OK, so let's do things wrong, right? This will be a very sad talk full of failure and misery and things just not working. This is not inspirational. There's nothing fun and exciting happening here. OK, volumes. What do you do with volumes in production? Somebody throws an open VDB file at you and you want to open it. Anyone tried opening VDB in Blender? Well, you don't, right? It's just what it does. It doesn't do it. OK, so as a developer, my to-do list now gets its first item, write an open VDB importer. I am aware of about three people, at least that I've written those. None of them is finished. So it's up to us to developers to actually finish that and finally get a full VDB import going. So taking one of these half working ones, I import an open VDB file of that bunny. And what happens when I render? It's an 80 megabyte file. And it takes 10 gigabytes to render. How come? What is happening? What is happening to all of memory? I open a debugger. I look at memory. And this is what I see. There's nothing in there. It's all empty. It's all zeros. Where do those zeros come from? Well, the bunny file, in this case, is 577 by 572 by 160 voxels by 483. That makes 160 mega voxels. If we expand that to floating points, we're ending up at two gigabytes of just raw data that's stored in that file for the entire bounding box. But because VDB is smart and actually does not store empty stuff, only the stuff that's important, it compresses that to 80 megabytes.  Massager. So both of it is just empty. And the bunny is still a tiny file. Disney released one of their cloud files from their productions. It's about 2k by 1.5k by 2.5k, which comes to 6.5 billion voxels.  Open VDB sources in three gigabytes. So clearly we have work to do. Another thing for my to-do list, write sparse voxels. Wait, there's a commit. Somebody did that already. And we didn't merge it. This is Google Summer of Code project from last year. And we Blender developers just did not merge it yet. Or polish, finish, and all that. So OK, one more thing for the to-do list, sparse voxels. Really? Do we have to do this? Yes, we do. OK, I'm here. My bunny is loading. And I can render my bunny. Finally, I get some volumes. What could I possibly ask more for, right? Well, two bunnies? Is that too much to ask for? Apparently, it is too much to ask for. What's happening here? Well, if you've seen Lucas talk yesterday about cycle sideworks, you trace a ray from the camera. It hits a bounding box. And then you make a decision. What is the frontmost thing that your ray sees? What's the first thing it hits? Is it bunny A or bunny B? Well, any. Any. It's random. Because those boxes are already exact same position on the up axis, it's just random which one it actually hits first. So cycles hits one, it takes a hit point. Registers, I'm entering this bunny volume. And from that on, it wants to spawn a new ray. In order to actually not hit the same thing again, it applies a tiny offset to the ray, moves it a little further like this, and spawns a new ray. What did we just do? We missed the other bunny. The other bunny is not even hit. We just skipped over that bounding box. Same thing happens again at the end. Again, we have the random decision of which one we actually hit. We don't know yet. Could be this one. Could be the other one. May not even be the one that we actually entered. And so we are leaving a volume that we didn't enter or enter a volume but never leave it. And yes, health breaks lose. Workaround for now is actually you can just move one of these boxes, just a teeny tiny bit, and it works. Suddenly, your problem is good. Still, this is something. It should not be happening. This should not be a problem. We just need to fix this by writing a better robust traversal. So anyone else working or anyone working with volumes may have also seen this problem. You have a volume, but it's just not dense enough. Somehow, it just doesn't appear. It's so thin. This one actually has a density of 1,000. I cranked up the density to 1,000. It's still half transparent, this bunny. Or you may have seen this. You have a smooth volume, but suddenly it gets a strong banding that appears out of nothing. Like this. This is a procedural shader that's perfect spheres on the inside. And you see this banding. Where does that come from? Who creates those bands? They're not in the file. They're not in the procedural. And you play with your ray samples. You increase samples. It takes much longer. And it still looks the same. This is our mystery parameter, step size. So what does it do to step size? If you've played with it, you notice maybe if you increase it, some other things get better. And it takes much, much, much longer. So with ray tracing, you typically just you trace a ray until it hits the surface and it bounces off the surface. And then it bounces off another surface. But in ray marching, for volumes, you have to do it in a different way. You actually have to take steps through the volume because there's something everywhere. You're not dealing with surfaces. You're dealing with the actual volume where everything has something everywhere. And the way that Cycle Streets is right now, it just slices it into bits and pieces. So it steps through the volume in a very sequential, very lockstep way. And every time it takes out a step, it looks up in the volume. What is my density? I'll take this as the density of my little segment that I've traced and just treat it like it was composed of these little slices. And if your slices are close enough and dense enough, then it actually works. Then you get the correct result that you would expect if your step size is too large. Oh, and you might still get away with it. You might still hit all the important features that I actually want to see. And it gets faster. That's great. And you get wider and suddenly you miss something entirely. Suddenly you miss half the features. Suddenly you skip over empty areas in your volume and things start missing or you get those bands that you saw before. So it gets thinner and you get banding. All right, so obviously the conclusion is we have to take our steps as small as necessary and just in a way that we can tolerate render time. Problem is we're not only moisten through it once. Shadow rays do the same thing and your ray may actually bounce in the volume. You may actually have indirect light.  You're doing tons of lookups and things get really slow. Well, maybe there's a way that we can replace those ray marching with what? So there's a different approach out there that's called delta tracking. That one, instead of taking lock step, fixed size steps, we actually randomize it a bit. So we break up the pattern and that way, yeah, you just don't get the bands anymore. And instead of having a step size that can skip over features, the step size is not suddenly based on your density. So you can take large steps and thin volumes, take smaller steps and thick volumes and you're without deriving the exact details, you're guaranteed to get the right result. So you take a step and then once you've taken that step, you make a decision, a random decision based on what happens.  Sort of feels like the random decisions, the rest of cycles already does, right? In lots of those paths racing, you just have random decisions of terminating or continuing a ray or like taking this way or that way when the ray splits. So it sort of fits in the entire, in the entire framework of path tracing. And so we continue like that, take different steps, different sizes, look up, do we scatter, do we absorb or do we transmit? You're on like that, this one is one that stops, so it returns a black pixel. Another one might go through, so it returns to background, this is fully transmitted. This is a ray that's been scattered a couple of times and actually receives some light. All right, well that sounds simple. So all we need to do is replace ray marching with a very complex, with a completely new written volume integrator, written from scratch, add a new density parameter or write something that derives a density from shades and voxels. And then hope that it's better than before. Sure, easy. And this is actually what half the industry is doing. So slowly you can see a lot of the major studios and render engines moving from ray marching to either a mixed approach or we're going fully to this new unbiased method, which is actually not a new method at all. It's something that physicists have been using, or sorry, yeah, that have been using in physics for neutron transport since they built atomic bombs. All right, so I'm done with bunnies.  This time I'm gonna use procedurals. Procedurals are nice. So I built a little volume shader in a render. 10 seconds, not too bad on my laptop. I can live with that, but it's still a bit boring. Need something more in there. So how about this shader? Just another note break pattern little, 35 seconds. Yeah, well some more nodes make it more interesting, right? I'm scared to press render, a minute. All right, so 10 seconds, one minute. Same sample code, same step size, like not at render parameters was just changing that little shader. All right, I popped the hood. I look at what is actually happening behind the scenes. Well, I am tracing, what is it, 10 million rays. And for that I need 160 million shader calls. So every single ray gives me 16 shader calls. And if I look at the actual statistics, I only spend less than 10% actual, like doing ray tracing and the rest of the time is almost entirely spent shading that thing. So the approach we typically use in 2D when our procedural is too complex is we just bake it to a 2D texture. Same thing we should be doing for voxels. If we can bake our shaders in 3D, suddenly we can make things a lot faster by just not calling the shader so, so many times. If you remember in ray marching, we don't just shake the thing once we hit it, but actually have to take shader calls every single time we take a single step through the volume. To-do list, yeah. I'm busy for a while. And since I was busy already last night and the night before, I couldn't prepare slides for every single thing on my even more to-do list.  We do not have currently, at all, motion blur for volumes in cycles. It's a big requirement for most production things. You want to have motion blur on the entire scene and also on you volumes, of course. A bit of advice. Do not combine clamping, branch path tracing and overlapping emissive volumes. It can give you headaches. And sadly, it is something that works as designed, works as intended, but just not in a pleasant way. You will get visible lines where those volumes overlap and you cannot get them away until you change one of these things. You can move to path tracing or ditch clamping. I have spent weeks, literally weeks, building workarounds for that. Also, what we need is important sample volume emission. Right now, you could have a giant volume data set with billions of voxels. A couple of them being very, very bright. Cycles would not know that there are some bright ones in there. It would just search for light anywhere. And most of the time, get nothing, only very rarely hit one that actually emits light. So that is something we would need to address. There's research and papers, how to do that. Nested volumes and dielectrics are a problem. If you apply world fog to your scene, that fog is inside of everything. Like if I put a glass of water into a foggy room, the inside of the glass will not only have water, but it will have fog as well. Some of you may have tried to render water in a container, in a transparent container. And then you have the problem with the overlapping boundaries. There's also methods of addressing that. We only need to go out and actually implement those in cycles. What I have not touched on at all is, besides OpenVDB, we have file formats, libraries and data structures, GVDB, which is an OpenVDB version for the GPU. There's OpenVKL that was just released last month as an alpha from Intel. Field 3D is an alternative for the OpenVDB file format. It also has features, especially for motion blur and production. So if anyone here is a developer that's feeling slightly bored and just doesn't know what to do with the month or half a year of time, feel free to reach out. I have plenty of work for you. All right. So not an interested pressing talk on a little bit of a high note. You can still do crazy good things in cycles. Despite all that, you can use the volumes and make crazy good things. There's a talk right after this one in the upstairs room by Gleb Aleksandrov about the volume stuff that he's doing. Pretty good stuff. And just a little bit to show off. This is the stuff that we did for people that had tangent for NextGen. This is all volumes. It's emissive volumes. There's fog, there's smoke, there's explosions everywhere. And we made this work despite all those limitations. And of course, let's not forget the Spring team that did something like this as well. The team from Spring did some really good volume work for their film. All right, so please don't be discouraged by this, right? So there's lots of open problems, stuff that we can do in cycles as developers to make this a lot better, make it render faster, make it render higher quality. But still, as an artist, you can make great things with it and please continue doing so. References. I did not fully pull these things out of thin air. There's, if you're interested in more technical details, these SIGGRAPH courses are great, like front to back introduction to all of these topics. They start from nothing until all the details and latest research. There's the OpenVDB publication that explains the whole data structure. There's this robust next-head traversal thing that actually solves the problem of coplanar surfaces, which we not only see with volumes, actually you can see the same problem with transparencies. If you just put two transparent planes in the exact same location, cycles will always miss one of them. And the spectral and decomposition tracking is one of the probably most promising approaches of doing this delta tracking in a very smart way. Without having to trace too many arrays and without having to do too many volume lookups. Thanks in the end, certainly go to Brecht.  And the work that Brecht has done on the volume rendering is amazing work. He was actually very good at keeping up with the latest tech as long as he could until he got distracted and pulled into 2.8 release stuff. Of course, thanks go to all the researchers that published their papers. I've just read tons and tons of them over the last couple of years of how people deal with all of these volume problems in production and in research. And thanks goes to all the artists at tangent animation that just really, really pushed at things with limits and always gave me new scenes to work with to bang my head over just to find out why things are not working the way they are. So with that, any questions? Or should I just cycle through my bonus slides and have more in-depth explanation of how things work? Is there any interest in just like popping the hood and going to more into like what cycle's actually doing? All right, bonus slides and it is. Let's use those five minutes. So if I take something simple like this, right, and I turn Susanne into volume, how does cycles actually determine what's happening? The easy way is just homogenous transmittance, right? I have a volume, it's the same density all the way through and I want to find out what's happening. So I take the beginning of the ray, take the end of the ray and I want to know like how much light does that in between swallow? How much is absorbed in there? And for something that's homogenous, that's the same density throughout this formula. There's a compact small math formula we can just plug in and it gives me the exact result. And after that, I just continue my ray and ray trace is normal. If I do the same thing for multiple intersections, I just do it multiple times, that's all there is. And what you get there is a noise-free result. That's the right thing for us, like low samples and no noise, that's great. Beautiful. Now once we add light to it, it gets a bit more complicated. I want to actually know how much light do I get over the entire area here? And suddenly there's more factors than just one ray length that come in. Like I need to actually know what is happening inside that triangle there. How does it overlap my susanne? How does it overlap the mesh and all of that? So for this, there is no closed formula. There's no single formula, I can plug in and get the exact result. So we do the same thing we do for usual path tracing. We just do a whole bunch of random things and hope it works out in the end. So I just pick a random point on its segment, I trace a ray to my light source and I again use the same front and back intersections, plug in my formula, and now I know how much light gets to that very specific point on my line. My do this again for a different point and another point, basically how many samples, whatever I'm taking. And I'll actually get light in my volume. I get single scattering for my homogenous volume and because I have to take those random decisions instead of just like having one formula, let's give me the output, I get noise. That's one source of your noise. For homogenous multiple scattering, when I actually bounce around, it gets more complicated. I pick my point and then I pick random direction, start a new ray. Same thing again from the new position, again pick a point, start a new ray, pick a point, start a ray, pick a point, start a ray and I end up somewhere. I may end up on the background, I may end up on light sources, I can then still trace my usual light connections as I did before. And now it's multiple scattering and that is much, much closer to what actually things like clouds and snow looks like. Snow is entirely multiple scattering. If you just trace this with one single scattering, it's a black sphere with a white half. And here now I have a lot of light going actually through to locations that were in the shadow before. Subsurface scattering is actually the limit case of this. So basically if I make this more and more dense then I'm actually ending up with what is approximated as subsurface scattering. If I make it extremely, extremely dense I would end up a diffuse rendering. So yeah, basically this is, because this is complicated and noisy to this long, we tried to avoid this for subsurface scattering for a long time and we used approximations where you basically had an entry point, an exit point and based on those two points you would just have a formula that gives you an approximated result of how much light would come through for. And the brute force subsurface scattering that was introduced recently in cycles. That is using a version of this that is very much optimized for subsurface scattering. But yes, it's the same thing happening there. And then things break apart as soon as we don't have a uniform density. Once we lose our formula that we had once we cannot use that anymore we don't know how to calculate this anymore. And that's when ray margin came in. As I showed before we just, instead we just slice it and treat it as a sequence of homogenous material. And that's how then that happens that we can still render these in cycles for transmittance. Same thing for the singles gathering then I end up with those many, many more slices and repeating it for heterogeneous takes me through multiple bounces, lots and lots of slices and long render times as I mentioned before. But still, stuff that we can render. And again, the step size that I mentioned before, our parameter is something that have a small step size, have a long render time, a decent result. I can increase my step size, it gets much faster. And this one I already lost a little bit of density. And as I go up in step size it gets faster and suddenly I lose my volume. Suddenly it disappears. It gets thinner and thinner. Or I can get really beautiful renders, increases step size and banding comes in. More step size and more banding comes in. So the challenge right now really is if you're doing lots of volume rendering in cycles right now it's just finding that step size that matches your entire scene. That makes everything that is in your view render properly. You may have something that's very dense and very far away and very detailed. And the unfortunate thing is that you have to take, to get there you have to trace tiny steps all the way. We don't have any per object, per location step size parameter at this point. All right, and I think at this point we're lining up for the next talks. I'm gonna call it quits here. Thanks for listening. Yeah, feel free to ask questions.


Good morning, everyone. 11 o'clock, Tiger Financial News Network Market Update with Basel Chapman. The Dow is up 63, 34,134. We took out the left side low of August in the Dow with an H2M pattern. This is where you could get a little bit of a balance, but the technicals are still so weak that there should be some kind of retesting. Certainly the $32,914, 200-period exponential moving average looks like. It's key support that has to hold. The S&P is actually even sharper up. The S&P right now is up 22. Also, having taken out the left side low of August in the arch formation, and it is up 21 and 43.51. Watching the weekly charts, the weekly charts are stored at the end of the day. We're going to be watching them closely today Friday at four o'clock, but so far they're holding very well.  Today is up yesterday. Today is up $333.361. IWM, the Russell 2000. It's been terrible, and even today it's up $63.177.70, but that weekly chart has gone to a sell mode in the IWM. Is that the Canary? I don't know if it's the Canary, but in the meantime, Gold had a nice move up eight points in 1947, and that's as the dollar is making you recovery highs, but this is exactly the area where you can expect to see some kind of resistance in the dollar and the crude oil still acting very, very nicely. It is up 47 cents today at $90.11. It hasn't taken out the left side high, but this is interesting that it's holding so well, and if you look at the TLT, it took out the left side low yesterday to having an up session to that $59.99 and $1.29. But wow, if it doesn't get going to the upside next week, then there's going to be a big problem. The yield's going to go quite a bit higher. So with that said, I'm going to go to the VIX index and tell you what I would anticipate. The VIX index had a sharp move yesterday, but hit the 200-period moving average, and now it's down $1.36. If today, the VIX index actually closes under 16, that's just saying you're going to have to wait for a really good, strong reversal with the VIX going up into the 20s, and then the market makes this major turnaround. We're not there yet, but at the same time, the VIX index is something to keep you on next week because it's going to be very important. Have a great weekend, I'll see you later, and thank you for great programming. Thank you for being here.


So Jimmy Dahl, who is a comedian, I guess, but has the show, has what a 650,000 subscribers, is quite, is a real lefty. And he does stuff in the studio, but he also does stuff in a stand-up club. And I'm going to show you this. Now, there's a lot of what he calls humor here, which I told you before, I find it difficult to, you know, criticize or deal with some of the humor, but we'll go through it. But basically the whole skit, the whole thing, is on Amazon.  And that's a theme. It's a theme on my critique of these videos. And we're going to continue that with Jimmy Dahl. And we're going to switch. There we go. Jimmy Dahl, the Jimmy Dahl show. Talking about Amazon opening grocery stores, and why, God, why it's bad. So here goes Jimmy Dahl. Zahn's back in the news, but I just want to give you a little refresher. I know, right? Give you a little refresher. This is from 2016, this article. It says report Amazon. Now, before we even get to this article, I just want you to notice, he says from this article. Article means, you know, like in the newspaper, like some supposedly objective source of information. Some place that where people or some institute that studied this and reported something, an article. But if you look here, it's clearly disclosed. So you can say he's not really lying, but it's from the Institute for local self-reliance. Okay.  So yes, let's analyze Amazon and start with a objective source of information. And all his data, all his information is coming from the Institute for local self-reliance. And you should look them up and see how corrupt that is. Now, if he'd use multiple sources, if he'd look at a number of different statistics, okay, then you could use them. But when you choose right from the beginning, and without telling your audience, it clearly, obviously, unequivocally biased, even Marxist organization, then come on. But nobody cares. Nobody cares. All right, here we go. Somebody says Jimmy's off, Jimmy's great. No, Jimmy is awful. He's horrible. He's terrible.  Stranglehold, how the company's tightening grip on the economy is stifling competition, eroding jobs, and threatening community. So Amazon has a tightening grip on the economy. Oh my god, it's strangling it. It's destroying the US economy. It's stifling competition. There's no competition to Amazon. It's unbelievable how uncompetitive retail is today. And jobs, massive losses of jobs. We'll get to that in a minute. And of course, it's threatening communities. I mean, actually, now that I think of it, Tucker Carlson would join the Institute for Local Self-Alignments because I think Tucker Carlson would agree with all these points. I mean, I could do a show tomorrow about Tucker Carlson's hatred of Amazon and he'd list exactly the same things. Left and right. What's the difference anymore? Sounds bad, but on the other hand, you know, I can get a Chinese dildo in under two hours. You know what I mean? But of course, there's a real truth there. Convenience. You can get stuff. I mean, his preference is maybe to buy a dildo, but I live in Puerto Rico. I get food. I get all kinds of stuff. Convenience. But let's laugh at that. Let's make fun of that.   Who wants convenience? I'm not willing to pay a price for convenience.  What percentage of his shopping does he do on Amazon? My guess is a lot. Right? I mean, that's my kind of dim sum. You know what I'm saying? I figured out a long time ago, it's really fascinating that the way to get a laugh from people is to talk about sex in these kind of ways. It's, you know, Lenny Bruce started this by saying the F-word. You all get a laugh when you say the F-word, right? Always. And it's fascinating. It says something about the psychology of the audience. So did you know that half of all US households are subscribed to the membership of Amazon Prime? Isn't that amazing? You know what Amazon Prime does for you? You pay one set fee a year under $100. You get free shipping two days. It gets to you in two days. And on top of that, you have a subscription to Amazon Music. Access at the marginal cost of $0 to every piece of music ever. And on top of that, and on top of that, you have Prime Video. I mean, some great shows on Prime Video, some good movies on Prime Video. What's the marginal cost of watching Prime? Zero. My only question is why not all US households have membership to Amazon Prime? What is wrong with the other 50%? I mean, something's wrong. It's terrible, right? Now, no, well, it doesn't take 10 days to ship if you don't have Prime. If you don't have Prime and you want free shipping, it takes 10 days, but you can pay for one day shipping, two day shipping, three day shipping. And indeed, if Prime is not good enough for you, you can pay for next day delivery and in some places around the country, you can get same day delivery. I mean, that is stunning. Stunning.  And the testament to that is in people's actions. I mean, we should celebrate that half of US households are subscribed. We should ask, wow, what an achievement. What did Amazon do to deserve that? Isn't that amazing that half of households? Now, let me just say, I don't believe that number just because I don't believe any of its numbers, because the numbers I've researched are all wrong. As far as I know, 91 million, the 91 million Amazon Prime accounts in the United States. Is that translating to half of US households? I don't know. But even if it does, I mean, it doesn't matter. All right, let's keep going. Let's keep going. Yeah, half of all online shopping searches start directly at Amazon. So half of the searches start directly on Amazon. By the way, the other half, again, number is wrong. It's less than half. It's somewhere in the 40%. But more importantly, is this, nobody actually knows because neither Amazon or Google actually released these numbers. So these are best estimates of different research firms, but nobody actually knows how many searches. But note that even when you search on Google for something, the next search you do for that same thing is on Amazon. So even though you might search on Google, you're probably going to buy it on Amazon. Why is that a bad thing? Ah, because we're told. Amazon captures nearly one in every $2 that America spends online. Again, not true. Many of the dollars that Amazon sells, the captures go to retailers who sell through Amazon. The actual number of how many dollars go through Amazon is in dispute. The highest figure I've seen is 46%, not one in every two. But even that is challenged. It's more like somewhere in the 30s. So it's not 50% of all online sales on Amazon or Amazon benefits from. And then there's a question of over 50%, over 50% of all the sales on Amazon actually sells by other retailers using Amazon's platform to sell. So Amazon is keeping in business, providing a high tech, amazing solution, delivery, technology, infrastructure, logistics to tens, if not hundreds of thousands of other businesses. It truly is amazing how beneficial Amazon, the Amazon platform is to other businesses who don't have to try to build that from scratch or try to use other platforms in many places, sell on Amazon and also sell on places like eBay. Why? It's kind of why. Amazon's increasingly controls the underlying infrastructure of our economy, underlying infrastructure of the economy. Now, what does that mean? I mean, underlying infrastructure of economy. I thought the underlying infrastructure in economy is like the Fed, which is everywhere, right? Money, money is an underlying infrastructure. What's the underlying infrastructure of economy? Is it roads? Does Amazon control those? Or is it warehouses? But warehouses aren't the underlying, but it sounds ominous. Ooh, this private corporation controls the underlying infrastructure of economy. Very, very scary. We don't explain what it means because it doesn't really mean anything. Amazon's increasing dominance comes with high costs. It's eroding opportunity and fueling inequality and it's concentrating power in ways that endanger competition, community life and democracy.  Really, it's eroding opportunity. It's increasing opportunity dramatically. Think of all the people employed by Amazon. We'll get to that in a minute, but think of all the stores that sell through Amazon. Think of all the new businesses that we created to serve Amazon. Think of all the construction that Amazon is responsible for.  Think of all the savings you have because of Amazon, although shipping costs you don't have to pay because you are on prime. And then think of all the money you save because you shop on Amazon and therefore could do other stuff that increased your opportunities. And is it fueling inequality? By making things cheaper for all of us, is it fueling inequality? Or is it actually reducing inequality of consumption, of standard of living, which is shrinking constantly, shrinking constantly. And it's concentrating power in ways that endanger competition, maybe, maybe endanger competition, community life and democracy. I have a hard time seeing the company as anything less than a new wave of economic dislocation. It's economic dislocation. That's true. It's like the automobiles dislocating the buggies. It's like the computer, not the computer, but Microsoft would dislocating the typewriters. Yeah, it's called drumroll. I need the special effect of a drumroll. It's called progress. It's called progress. And progress, progress always leads to dislocation. That's a reality. You can think about how you deal with that, but that's a reality. Jen, on par with the earlier collapse of manufacturing. Manufacturing today is higher than it's ever been in the United States. It just is doing it with less people. Again, technology dislocates people because technology replaces people. So, yeah, manufacturing is being dislocated, but we manufacture more stuff than ever. And yeah, small businesses are being devastated. Do you remember the days when we used to complain about Walmart? All the time, communities used to get together. We don't want to Walmart here. They'll dislocate us.  They hate Starbucks. Anybody who comes in and who's competes, that's the point, right? Anybody who actually competes with your local monopoly, businesses on Main Street is a dislocator and it's devastates. And small businesses that devastated so many regions of the country. By for instance, what kind of, so you know what they, by the way, that quote was not for some again. That was from the director of that institute. So again, an advocate, an ideologue, which is fine, but just let us know that rather than just saying it. So Amazon can actually operate at a loss, which is how they put borders out of business, right? So they sold books at a loss for a while until they put borders out of business. Well, they can't operate at the loss all the time because nobody would fund them if they did. They do operate at the loss much of the time. By the way, it's funny because the same leftists then argue that Amazon doesn't pay any taxes. Well, yeah, it doesn't pay any taxes because it operates at a loss. And it operates at the loss at whose benefit? Our benefit is consumers. They did the same thing with Zappos shoes. They did the same thing with that diaper service. They do it with. Do you guys like Zappos shoes? I mean, it's amazing Zappos shoes. I mean, you could buy 20 shoes. You can, they mail them to your home. You try them on and Zappos was a business that Amazon bought. It was a startup by somebody else.  The whole thing is free shipping. I mean, it's amazing. Isn't that cool? But instead of saying, wow, it's amazing. No, oh, they're doing it at a loss. So something bad is happening. How can you compete with a company that doesn't have to make a profit? You can't do it, but Bezos has figured out this way. Well, why can't you do what Bezos does? Bezos is not a magician to do it, to operate at a loss. For instance, here's some of the good jobs that get rid of UPS and the postal service. These are the good jobs. Yes, postal service jobs. I mean, I wish we could get rid of all postal service jobs, but really, this is the issue that Amazon is is now first without Amazon, the postal office, postal office would be completely bust. Amazon keeps postal service afloat. It keeps the postal service afloat. I've looked into this because everybody always says the government is subsidizing Amazon through the postal service. If that were the case, why is Amazon building its alternative delivery service? Because no, the post office doesn't subsidize Amazon. Amazon keeps the post office afloat. So all those post office workers should kiss Jeff Bezos' boots because he has preserved their jobs. And the same for UPS. UPS over the last 10 years or something like that has hired 100,000 people. Why? To service Amazon. And now Amazon figures, they can deliver it even cheaper than UPS and postal service. By the way, do you see what happened to FedEx when Amazon stopped using them? They got crushed. So you can't compete. You won a competition. Didn't you say you won a competition? Well, one of the features of competition, because he was complaining not enough competition, well, you know, you basically had UPS in the post office FedEx, the three delivery services, that's very little competition. I don't really think that, but according to these leftists, that would be very little competition. So why not instead of that have four competitors? And the fourth competitor would be Amazon. Now you'd think that Elizabeth Warren and Jimmy Dore and these leftists would celebrate that. More competition is good, they tell us. No, no, no, no, because it's Amazon, because they're successful. They won competition, but they won't lose the competition. They won competition that doesn't actually win. They won competition where you don't really add any value. They won competition where nobody loses. No, no, no. Everybody's a winner. Everybody gets a ribbon. This is like the self esteem movement. Everybody gets a ribbon. Nobody's better than anybody else. God forbid. They want egalitarian competition or they want what economists call wrongly, stupidly, unscientifically perfect competition. But that doesn't exist. And that would be horrific if it did. So yeah, UPS and postal service employees are going to lose their jobs if Amazon enters the delivery. And you know, one day drones are going to deliver all these packages. By the way, I think I got a drone for Christmas. That's going to be cool. Maybe I can do a show about anyway. It's going to be cool to play with the drone. Anyway, craziness. Must now compete with Amazon, which is developing alternative delivery methods. The company's low wage, precarious labor model threatens the jobs of low wage. Amazon raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour, just like Tucker Carlson wanted them to. They said, yes, Tucker Carlson, yes, so left us, we're going to raise our minimum wage at Amazon to $15 an hour. So it's not precarious labor model. It's not low wages. It's the wages you guys have demanded. Now they cut people's bonuses. They got rid of stock participation plans because you can't have both. But well, I haven't got my drone yet. I'll find out next week if I have the drone, but I think I got the drone unionized middle income workers at UPS and the US Postal Service. Those are middle income jobs? Well, good for them. Then the Amazon jobs to compete, they'll have to get people like that. And I'll have to, but maybe they'll be able to do it better. By the way, here it is, Los Angeles Times. Amazon will open three more. So it shuts down your store and it gets rid of company now. Oh, no, we're going to be a bookstore. There they are. They're opening brick and mortar bookstores, right? And by the way, have you ever been to one of the brick and mortar bookstores that Amazon has? They're very different than other brick and mortar bookstores. And there are not many of them. There's just a few. But they're unique experiences. It's a completely different model. To say they shut down borders and they're opening their own, I mean, there's truth to that and there's nothing wrong with that. Borders, by the way, who borders? Did you ever see, you've got email? You've got mail? You've got mail, I think it was called?  I mean, where does this end? I guess with local little stores everywhere, local little farmers, I guess when we return to subsistence farming, then they'll be happy. Then they'll be perfect competition. But yeah, there used to be lots of little bookstores. Then came borders and Barnes & Noble and competed away because they were more efficient and they created that. Now comes Amazon and competes borders away and we complain because borders were so wonderful. No, you guys thought borders was a disaster. By the way, from 2016 net loss of jobs since Amazon's opened. Doesn't say, doesn't say, oh, the source Institute for Local Self-Alliance Analysis. I did my own research and I looked and just July 29, 2017, so he could have found this article in the Financial Times of London. The headline is Amazon is creating more jobs than it destroys. So, you know, I don't know what the number is. I mean, there's no question in my mind. Absolutely no question that Amazon creates more jobs than it destroys. It's just the logic of it. But it's an empirical question. But it's so dishonest, again, to just present the one piece of data that confirms your biases and not giving any of the logic. How did this happen? Yes, people have lost jobs in retail. But what about all the other jobs? Not just, now notice, this is full-time, part-time and Tempe employees on Amazon Paywall. But what about all the jobs that Amazon created in companies that service Amazon? In companies that sell on Amazon? In companies that are subcontractors to Amazon? In companies that make the chips for Amazon products? And on and on and on and on you can go. That's the real analysis, not payroll to payroll, but you've got to look at the entire universe of jobs that were lost. And in that, if you do that, it's no contest. The number of jobs the financial times is absolutely right. Amazon creates massive numbers of jobs more than its so-called destroys through what's called creative destruction. 148,000 net loss. That's up 2015. That's four years later. It's got to be way more than that. So they're not creating jobs.   None of that is true. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. And nobody's going to challenge you. Nobody challenges these things. Anyway. And the company has gotten at least $613 million in tax subsidies since 2005. Now, what are those tax subsidies? People always say this, but what are the tax subsidies? Tax subsidies. Is that because they didn't pay taxes when they were losing money? Is that because they can deduct capital expenditures off of their taxes like everybody else can? What are these tax subsidies people talk about? I've never seen them. I've never seen anybody actually list them. By the way, the Huffington Post, he's just reading to you from the same story from the same institute that the Huffington Post is citing. There's no research here. There's no commitment to truth. This goes back to what I said about government. Zero, zilch, nada, commitment to any kind of truth. To actually finding out what is really going on in the world. They don't care. I mean, as you saw with Tucker Carlson, nobody actually cares. Do this to us. Isn't that something? Yeah. So by the way, then they bought whole foods, right? And this is what they said at the time. They bought whole foods, was it last year or two years ago? And this is what they said at the time. The grocery stocks are down on Friday, but they shouldn't be the only companies trembling. Google, Apple and even Uber are threatened by Amazon's growing holdover e-commerce media and same day home delivery. In short, Jeff Bezos wants to take over the world. And this is a very significant step in that direction. That's some slate magazine, another objective source of information and commentary. But no, I mean, I can think of the worst thing that Jeff Bezos is taking over the world, given the alternatives that we have today. But to them, any successful businessman wants to take over the world. They say the same thing about Google. They say the same thing about Apple. They say the same thing about all these people. And yet, all these people competing with one another. Does you really feel bad about... Okay, so you see the world we're living in, right? Okay, this is happening. And here's, he's now going to open grocery stores. They got a new one. Here it comes. Amazon is betting big. Once again, the tech giant just announced they're opening up their first physical grocery store. And it's right here in SoCal. The market will open up in Woodland Hills next year. The store will be branded differently than Whole Foods, which Amazon bought for over $13 billion two years ago. Then they'll plan on competing with Whole Foods because organized duopoly gives people a delusion. There's a choice. Yeah, but of course, what he's ignoring is the fact that Whole Foods sells very expensive food, sells to the elites, sells to the wealthy, sells to people who can afford it, sells to the full organic crowd. And what Jeff Bezos is doing is opening a regular grocery store with normal people. Normal people are normal people, but people with lesser means shop and providing probably a phenomenal experience. It'll probably be amazing. They'll probably be very, very efficient and very creative home delivery options. You'll be able to buy the groceries online in advance and pick them up at the store or have them delivered straight to your home. I mean, I'm sure it's going to be amazingly innovative. And of course, instead of being excited about that possibility, which is what any normal positive human being should be, you know, he is, of course, this is scary. Amazon is going to open a grocery store next to you. By the way, do you know how much Amazon sells of all retail sales in the United States? What's the Amazon's percentage of all retail sales in the United States on its platform? Like 4%, between 4 to 5% is the numbers I've seen. Because only 10%, only 10% of all retail sales are online.  And enough, a big enough number to destroy a lot of brick and mortar retail chains. But only 10% of retail sales today are online. Now I don't understand that because in my household, it's like 90%. So we're talking about Amazon is not just competing with Google, not just competing with, by the way, I didn't buy my drone on Amazon because there's a store in New York where I can buy the drone the same price as Amazon, they get free shipping and no sales taxes. So I buy there whenever I can. It's called BH, BNH, audio, video, stuff like that. So that's where I get my stuff, the electronic stuff, I don't get it on Amazon, because it's actually cheaper at BNH when you take out the taxes.  Haven't you noticed? That includes sales taxes, income taxes, corporate taxes, dividend taxes, capital gains taxes.  I know people like him think I'm a parasite, but the opposite is true. By the way, no more super chat questions, please, because we're not going to have time. Let's see, maybe we'll stop the Gibbido thing here soon, but let's listen a little bit more. Anyway, back to you. Now, here's Bob with the sports. Aspected to be more mainstream, while Whole Foods will remain more high-end. Job openings at this market were recently posted online. That can be, he doesn't create any jobs. No, no, nobody works for Amazon. Yeah, so gee, Jeff Bezos, now he runs, he runs the food, he doesn't have everything, all the food, all the food. How many grocery stores are there in the United States? What percentage of groceries will Jeff Bezos have even after he opens up the grocery stores? Like 1% of half a percent, one tenth of 1%? Yeah, but scare people, scaring fear, as we've talked about, fear is very powerful. He's got, he runs distribution of everything. He runs, he distributes a lot. Of course, it used to be Walmart who distributed a lot. Everybody was afraid of Walmart. Everybody's scared of Walmart, but Walmart, and there was nobody was going to compete with Walmart. That's the other thing that, you know, you think people would think about what they've said in the past. If in the past, you called Walmart a monopoly. If in the past, you said they control everything. If in the past, you said they deliver everything, they control the infrastructure of their economy. Then shouldn't it be embarrassing that 10, 20 years later when another company is beating Walmart, you say the same thing about that company without imagining a scenario where a third company in 20 years will be beating Amazon? No, that would require them to do something they don't want to do, that pundits generally left and right never actually do. That requires them to actually think. Think. People don't want to think. Online commerce, and he owns the newspaper. He does. He owns the newspaper. One newspaper.  That's all he needs. This is, what's that? He already has cloud computing, which is used for everything. Okay, so I have, so he controls cloud computing. I don't know what his market chain cloud computing is, but cloud computing is fantastic, and he saw it before anybody else. How many of you back up your computer anymore? I don't because I have it backed up in iCloud and in Dropbox and in OneDrive on Microsoft. I have so many backups. I don't even know which backup to consider, but it's all in the cloud. Everything's in the cloud. It's fantastic. It's amazing, and it makes Netflix possible. It makes all this stuff possible, and it's that appraising Bezos for that. No, no, no. Now he controls that one more part of it. All right, I'm going to skip a little ahead here because he just makes jokes about the cloud. Audience is a little smart, right? That's, that's his part.  And now I get, actually, Jimmy, the cloud computing, point of order, Jim, but because of cloud computing. It's a different kind of heckle. So here's what, and then, here's what Dylan Radigan has to say about it. You know Dylan Radigan, right? He told it, he told the truth about the banks on MSNBC. Now he has to do a news report from a lake. Now we go to Dylan Radigan, fresh on a fishing dock. The real issue in America is the concentration of resources in an incredibly small number of hands, whether it's Google and Facebook. I think it's Walmart and what was it, IBM and you know, Coaluminium and every decade has its concentration and the stereo about concentration and the stereo about monopolies and the stereo.  And the fact that they always have proven wrong means nothing to them. Zero, zilch, nada. Whether it's the two political parties in our political system or whether it's what's happening with Amazon, a beautiful vision, an incredible executive, an incredible executive, an incredible company. Why does he got to do that? You know why he's got to do that? Because he's standing on Amazon Lake. Now notice, the hatred, the envy, the nihilism, why can't you at least recognize the beauty of Amazon? The benefits that most Americans, 50% of Americans have prime, that most Americans, 50% of households, 91 million Americans benefit from Amazon, 91 million Americans are better off because of Amazon. But you can't appreciate that, you can't say a word, at least this guy says something positive.     And this is the thing the left hates. It's progress. This is the thing Tekka Carlson hates. It's progress, innovation, improving human life. We live in an age of envy, an age where people just want to knock success down.  The destruction of the ability for a truly competitive capital. Amazon is 4% of retail sales in America, 4%. There's lack of competition environment. So while it is impressive to see, and I have incredible respect for Jeff Bezos and what he has done, it is a total abdication of the authority of the antitrust commissions in this country to allow this level of consolidation of power to continue and it's reflected not only in our politics, but as we saw with the Amazon deal in our business. Unfortunately, that's going to change because the antitrust division has been empowered to go after Amazon, to go after Big Tech, empowered by a Republican president. And I think if you get the second term, I think you're going to see, or if a Democrat wins, it doesn't matter, you're going to see Big Tech in big, big, big trouble. Big trouble for the antitrust people. So we're living in the gilded age. We're supposed to have a Teddy Roosevelt come along and break it up.  See, they think, they think Obama was too, was too mellow. All right. I mean, that's just a taste. Let's see. Do big things.  That's what's happening right now. We're going to get to that later. All right.   He might not want convenience. He doesn't have to shop on Amazon. He can walk everywhere. I don't think he should drive, but this is what we are today. And again, I refer you, if you haven't seen my episode on Taka Kalsen, go see it because Taka Kalsen is exactly the same left and right. Both want us to return to villages. The right calls it small towns to have old line manufacturing jobs, although ideally we would connect with nature and go and farm, because that brings out the manliness in men and it keeps the women at home to do their thing, which is what so many conservatives would like to see. When I go back to small towns of farming, death and destruction, the collapse of civilization, that's what they're arguing for. That's what they really are about. And that's who we're up against. And you will not find a critique of what they're saying, a critique of what they're doing. Anybody who will critique both Kalsen and Dor, except moi, which is another reason you should support this show. Anyway, I mean, it's just nobody does it out there. It's so depressing. You think that the free market people, you think that the better conservatives, the better people on the right, the old free market kind of conservatives would be speaking up, would be talking up against this nonsense, but they're all silent. They're all silent. They're all afraid. That's the environment that we've created in this country. You've got smug leftists and smug rightists all condemning industry, condemning entrepreneurs, condemning success, condemning capitalism. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism, and impotence, and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought.