You know what I'm saying? So, so the point that I'm trying to mail, you said that you pistol with somebody. I didn't even know nothing about it. No, no, no, no, no, some neighbors, some rappers, real big time rappers. And this ain't no cap. They know they is.  This is in Houston, Texas, like we're at the travel line. Yeah, we on boss talk one-on-one. One-on-one. Yeah, we gonna talk. I was, uh, we was talking, I was talking to a guy the other day. He did an interview. He said, yeah, man, I heard somebody tried to, uh, put a hit out on you in Texas, Texas in Houston.  They know they is. I ain't got to say their name. Correct. But guess what happened? I took the pistol from the niggas, whoop, pistol whooped the niggas and called them niggas the next day. You know what I'm saying? Me and, and I seen the niggas ever since then. We cool now. Yeah. You know what I mean?  You know what I'm saying?  You know what I'm saying? So, so the point that I'm trying to mail. You saying that you pistol whooped somebody. I didn't even know nothing about it. No, no, no, no, no. Some niggas, some rappers, real big town rappers, and this ain't no cap. They know they is.  But where did this happen? In Houston? In Houston, Texas. Oh, okay. Like when? At the travel line. Okay. So these niggas, what they did, they, they, they, they kept trying to give me to come to this one club. And so I'm telling niggas like niggas. They were from Houston? Huh? They were from Houston? No, the niggas from Kansas City. Okay. But they, they was plugged with the Houston niggas. You know what I mean? And some niggas in Atlanta. You know, it was Atlanta and Houston niggas, you know what I'm saying? I, I tell niggas now, niggas, I'm over here at a Chris joint.  Yeah, yeah. You know, he used to have Harlem nights. I'm at Chris club.  Yeah, I love all of them. I'm at Chris club.  I want to go to the other strip club.  He dead now. Yeah. Little niggas out of Kansas City. He died.   Grammy.  So he tried to pull me over.  I said, uh, yeah, man, I said that, you know what I'm saying?   And it's my man. So I'm like, yeah, that's my man. You know what I'm saying? All these niggas supposed to be my man. You know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying? So, uh, I, uh, I, I trusted this niggas. So he kept saying, man, this goes away and chill. So we had two little, little stripper chicks with us. You know what I'm saying? I knew the chicks and they were my chicks, but I knew them and they wanted the stripper chicks. I was like, okay, well, you know, I'll ride with you. Cause I was like, not ride with him in the strippers. I'll ride with them cause I knew him and he was in town. Yeah. So, uh, LaHomie, you know what I'm saying?  You know, like he was me mugging a lot.  You know what I'm saying?  So I'm, I'm peeping this thing.  You know, and the little, the little, little sister out of, out of Alton Illinois, a brief, brief shirt, she was with me. She had verified the story.  And the nigga, you know what I'm saying? He was looking, you know what I'm saying?  You know what I'm saying? And you ain't even addressed him at that point? No, because the nigga, the nigga that, the nigga, the nigga, the nigga that did it, me and him was cool. I met his mama, you know, we was in Kansas City, we was chillin', you know what I'm saying? I'm a nigga, you know what I'm saying?   You know what I'm saying? I was cool with these niggas. So I didn't think these niggas, and then, you know, Because in situations like that, you'll go to your apartment and be like, hey, what? These niggas, everybody know these niggas. These niggas are so means to record. These niggas have money.  Right. You know what I mean? So, uh, uh, but we went to the little weed nigga house. And, uh, at the projects before we went to, uh, Abrucia wanted some weed.  He tell her that this, y'all ain't gonna, she said we'll be back. She said, y'all ain't gonna make it back.  So, so, uh, so, no, it's crazy, man. This is, this is a boss.   So, you know what I'm saying? So I'm walking behind, walking behind me. That's how you got the spirit.  So we got in the room, we get in the room. Now I shouldn't have even came.  I shouldn't. Everything, everything told me, but I'm, I'm too, I guess I'm too gangsta.    Exactly. So you know what I'm saying? I don't feel, I don't have no fear of niggas. You know what I'm saying? It was karma. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was karma. It was karma in a lot of ways. You know what I'm saying? But you know, so we get in there and him and Breesha go in the back. So Breesha walked out and did it like this. Like, I don't know what's up with this nigga.  Right. He left the nigga in there.   I mean, this is, this is why I give praise to the man above because he prepared me. Yeah. He prepared me to not to trust his dude. Yeah. Everything his dude did, it was science. That's why I say size and symbols is for the conscious mind. That's right. So you know what I'm saying? He didn't buy him calling this particular person. You know what I'm saying? Which is the manager of another rapper. You know what I'm saying? A big rap time rapper.  So we get in the motherfucking place. And so the nigga walk at the, Breesha did this. He walked past. All I heard was click, click. Now, if he was there, click, click.  I'd be like, dude, playing with a gun. But I'd already got it all ready to prepare me that I was going to get killed. You know what I'm saying? He tried to kill me. So I jumped up and I, you know what I'm saying? The gun, the bullet went right past my grab. So I grabbed the grab on my other hand. Then you know, I did a little flip. Yeah. The nigga got him on the ground. Yeah. But you know what I'm saying? I was in, I was in shock because I know if I was shot. I said, so I was holding the nigga there and Breesha and the other chick, they were screaming.  Nobody come in knocking. We, it was a shot. So, so once, once we get the nigga on the, once I get the nigga on the ground, then you understand me, he was doing this. He was bending the gun and I was sitting there. I was, you know, just in, in some kind of weird. They tried to grab none and knock him out or something? No, no, I was shocked. No, I'm talking to the girl.   They getting out the way. They was screaming because they thought, you know, because you know, she was, she was real. So when I see the nigga put the pistol, I just laid on his chest and he powered shot again, missed me. Then that's when I went berserk. Then I pulled him, took the pistol. I pistol, I'll finish shooting him in the head. I said, I'm in Texas. I said, I got the death pill. They got the death pill.  So you understand me? You know, pistol on my car. You got much of a conscious thinker during all that adrenaline. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? You know what I mean? You know what I mean? You know what I mean? You know what I mean? You know what I mean?  I'm a real thinker.  I got to think about it. You know what I'm saying? So I'm thinking fast. That's how I was able to get the guy to die. I'm thinking, you know, I'm a chess player. So I'm thinking all the way through the whole process. So, so, so when I did shoot him, I called the niggas. I said, yeah, you know, I ran with him. You know, he'll tell you. I mean, he, he know who he is. But you know, me help says made up. You know what I'm saying? He a good nigga. You know what I mean?  I ain't gonna say what it was because they tell who it is.


Good afternoon. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers Politics in Hawaii series. I'm your host, Carl Campania. Today, we're going to be talking about the challenges that unions face today. But before I jump into that, I want to just thank everyone for joining me during their lunch hour. We are halfway through the day. We are in fact halfway through the work week. And many of us, I guess for many of us, halfway through the work week and through the day, but also many of us, most of us for that matter, got to enjoy a three-day weekend more time spent with our families. And it is actually thanks to our brothers and sisters of the union that we have those benefits. And more. That's the value. That's one of the values. There are many more, but that's one of the values, that's the history. Part of the history of unions and labor unions in this country is workers' rights, safety. We're having more safe work conditions. Having the eight-hour work day, the 40-hour work week, having a lunch hour, the ability to say, you know what, I'm going to go somewhere and grab a snack and then come back afterwards. You think that that's just common sense. And it's been a while now that we've had that. There's been a good number of years, several decades that we've had that. But we are at the precipice in many ways with what is perhaps the most dangerous and the most I'll call vicious Republican party ever at the moment that is going after and attacking all of our institutions. And we know for decades they've been attacking unions. They've been union-busting for decades or trying to. Well, this particular administration and this particular set of congressional Republicans are more cruel and are more focused on the power that they have achieved in maintaining that, that we as the working class people have much to fear. And we need to call back to those days when labor rights and civil rights and just human rights first started to be discussed and brought out and got to the point and reached the point where we are today. We cannot lose these rights that we have. We cannot lose these wages that some people have earned. And we need to raise the wages for many others. This is the basis of the conversation that we're going to have today. And I will welcome to the show and with really much excitement, I only welcome to the show Mr. Jason Bradshaw. Thank you. And Mr. Tyler Dos Santos Tam. Jason is, and we can get the full screen of everybody here, Jason is Executive Director of Political Director of AFL-CIO. And Tyler Dos Santos Tam is the Executive Director of the Hawaii Construction Alliance. Welcome to the show, both of you. Thank you. And thank you for the work you do. We, I understand, and I believe many of the people who watch the show understand the value of the importance of unions. But we also, as has been talked about on this show for over a year, recognize that there are challenges, recognize that there are challenges internally, challenges externally. The external challenges are the ones that we are ultimately worried about. The internal ones are stuff that we need to work on. Absolutely. Let's kick off a little bit. Let me start off by asking each of you to explain what you do in your respective roles and kind of what got you to where you are right now. So, Jason, I'll start with you. Well, as you saw, I'm the Political Director for the Hawaii State AFL-CIO. And what we do is we advocate for workers at the Hawaii State Legislature to fight for their rights. So we try to advocate for things such as increase of the minimum wage, paid sick days for all workers as an example, making sure that their rights are protected with workers comp or whether, through unemployment insurance, these are certain things that we try to do to protect their rights or try to expand their rights that we believe is important. We also focus on campaigns and elections. We support candidates who we believe support working families. And we go through that process and we try to ensure that we have a legislature that is willing to support working families. So that is our focus at the AFL-CIO. Okay, excellent. Let me, I have one person, because I have my little Facebook post, but I do a whole bunch of stuff on it. I had one person challenge this question. It's like, you know, they understand all the money that we give to our union bosses goes directly towards PACs, goes directly towards campaigns. And they pick their candidate and they don't let the rank and file have any input. I don't believe that's fully true, first of all, and I think that there are always conditions to situations that it's never, and my immediate question of them was, well, but it's always for a Democrat candidate who support unions, right? And the answer was, well, yes, but what would you say to, I guess, that challenge of the rank and file union members don't always feel like they have a say in what's going on? I don't know the truth of that. Well, I would say that for most of the labor unions, the PACs that are established do come from the rank and file. They are the rank and file members. So they have ability to sit on the political action committees. They have the ability to interview the candidates, ask questions, and make recommendations to the executive boards or to the staff or to whoever's in charge of determining what endorsement process should move forward. I think a lot of unions try to encourage their membership to get involved and make no mistake about it. I think some could do a better job, and some could try to figure out a way to get more involvement, but I don't think, well, I should state that a lot of them don't make the decision just from the top. There is a process where the candidates are interviewed. There is a process where a survey is sent out, for example, from some unions. They require them to fill out a number of questions on where they stand on a number of issues. The survey is generally provided to their membership. The membership has the ability to request where these candidates or the incumbents are on particular issues, and I think they try to make it as fair as possible when there is an endorsement for a particular candidate. Okay, thank you. I hit you with a hard one right out of the gate there. Something that was at least challenging, so sorry about that, and thank you for the answer. I appreciate that. Tyler, tell us, now it's your turn. Tell us a bit about what you do and what got you here. I'm the executive director of the Boyd Construction Alliance. We represent the Carpenters, Laborers, Simmons, Mason's, Bricklayers, and Operating Engineers Union, so it's the five basic crafts of the construction industry. What sort of defines these unions within the industry is that our members work for the general contractors, and thus they have some very common interests. We negotiate our contracts with the same contractors from the very large ones that you might see working on the tower cranes in Kakaoka or Waikiki, down to the small mom and pop quote-unquote contractors who maybe build custom homes or do sort of office buildouts, much smaller things like that. And so in the course of working together, they realize they have a lot of common interests, whether it's on the political front, making sure that the legislature is passing laws that help workers and protect them and ensure their safety. Whether it's messaging information to the members, they all have newsletters that go out, so we want to make sure they're talking about the same things. And when it comes to development projects that maybe will create work for them further down the horizon, we want to make sure we're being proactive and reaching out to these developers wherever they come from, whether it's the mainland or here in Hawaii, and making sure that they understand the importance of engaging with local workers, making sure that the money that they invest here in Hawaii stays here and circulates through the economy. And so my job is to kind of help those unions work together in whatever way they feel best serves their membership. Got it. Okay, okay. There's a lot going on there between the two of you. I was trying to invite a few other members from other unions to come in because I wanted to have a nice broad spectrum, but I really appreciate because you guys cover a lot of ground between the two of you. I was hoping to get an HTEA member here and want to hear a bit from them because it's a slightly different perspective with that. So perhaps future shows, certainly future discussions somewhere. So okay, what would you say as far as the state of Hawaii is concerned? Because there's a lot of people who go, well, Hawaii is a blue state, Hawaii is a union state, Hawaii is this that and the other just believe that how do things, there's no issues. There are issues. What would you say are some of your greatest challenges as far as unions are concerned in the state of Hawaii? Sure. Well, you know, one thing that you definitely point out is Hawaii is a very blue state and we have a lot of successes. I mean, we're very early on, you know, passing a workers comp law or prepaid health and things like that. But as a result of passing these laws in the early years of statehood, what we've discovered in the construction industry is a lot of the enforcement pieces are sort of stuck in the 60s and 70s. And so when we encountered an issue where mainland contractors were bringing in workers, they were calling people independent contractors rather than employees to skirt some of the labor laws, we discovered that some of the state departments just don't have the enforcement capabilities or the fines that are deterrent. So we went to the legislature last session and the session before to raise those fines and make sure that the state has enforcement capability. You know, our labor laws are only as good as the enforcement. And, you know, people are only going to follow the laws if there's a deterrent, right? So we want to make sure that that's strengthened. And a lot of these mainland states are seeing that eroded, you know, day after day in taking back these protections. And so we want to make sure that those are protected here. So I think there's sort of two challenges. One is making sure that our existing laws are well enforced, that workers are protected, and then also making sure that these things don't get clawed back. Sure. That's a big concern. And that's what we're probably going to talk about in the next segment, actually, is that clawed back process. So Jason, what would be some of your comments with regards to some of those local challenges? You are right. I mean, we're very fortunate in Hawaii to have a very blue legislature, right? In our Senate is all Democrats, right? All 25 members. So I would say our biggest challenge is really what's occurring at the federal level and what's potentially going to happen at the Supreme Court level for the state of Hawaii. You know, there is a case that potentially could be heard by the Supreme Court. And when I say potentially, very likely. And it's the Janus Viasmi case. Many of you may have been aware of what the Friedrich's case was about a year ago. The Janus case is identical to the Friedrich's case. In the sense that blue states like Hawaii or California, New York, Washington, will be impacted directly by the Supreme Court ruling. And if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Janus, then what will happen is in a state like Hawaii, for example, we will become a right to work state, at least for the public sector unions. And so in Hawaii, that would include unions like HGEA, HSTA, UPW, SHOPO, FIRE, and the professors. And basically what it does is that they get rid of the booed decision from the 70s and workers will no longer have to pay their fair share or their agency fees as they like to call it. So I do believe that is one of our biggest threats. And like you nailed it as well. We're on the verge of losing some of these rights that we fought for, you know, back in the 20s and the 30s. So we fought for so hard for, right? I think you saw it just recently in Texas where the overtime ruling, so workers no longer have the overtime rule. Obama's overtime rule was in, yeah, it just happened literally a few days ago where it was overturned. So now it's not a requirement to offer overtime or to pay overtime. I guess the number of hours is also a piece of that. We're on the verge of losing these benefits that I think many people work so hard for. And I think some of it is because maybe people take it for granted these days. They didn't, you know, it's been so long that you mentioned earlier, it's been so long since these victories were achieved that people just think, oh, we're always going to have the eight hour workday. We're always going to have overtime. We're always going to have the 40 hour. I think that's not necessarily the case. We have it until all of a sudden we don't. And then we go, what happened? And how do we get it back? And then that's a big, big fight. That's correct. Unfortunately, we are already at our break. So that goes really quickly. So we're going to jump more into the right to work and work. So let's get some, we'll dig into that. We'll get some explanation of that. Let's understand what that is and what that can mean in the next segment. So thank you again for joining us. Thank you. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers, Politics and Hawaii Series. I'm your host, Carl Campania. And once again, my guests today are Tyler Dos Santos-Tam and Jason Bradshaw, local union leaders here in Hawaii. So I'll see you in a minute. Dive Heart can help children, adults and veterans of all abilities escape gravity right here on Earth. Search diveheart.org and imagine the possibilities in your life. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers, Politics and Hawaii Series. Again, I'm your host, Carl Campania. And welcome once again to the show, Tyler Dos Santos-Tam and Jason Bradshaw, local union leaders. We have the Hawaii Construction Alliance and AFL-CIO. So thank you again for joining us. Thank you. And all right. So in the last segment, we were talking about specifically, towards the end of it, we got to write to work. And let's spend this segment talking about write to work and what that means. First of all, what that means when people hear it, what people think it means when they hear it, and then what the ramifications are. So first of all, write to work. The very first time I heard that, I'm from Chicago. So Chicago is a big union town. We know that. I'm Chicago Italian. I know more about it than a lot of people understand.  So that's how long I've been aware of all of this. But the idea of write to work didn't come about in the 70s. I didn't hear about it in the 70s. It really, I didn't start to hear about it until like, until into the 90s and then towards the 2000 when, when all of a sudden jobs started to be talked about as I moved from Chicago to Florida for a little bit. All of a sudden I was like, Florida's a write to work state. What does that mean? Write to work. That sounds like a good thing. I have a right to work. I love that. What does that actually mean? What does a right to work actually mean? Well, unfortunately, right to work is in 28 states now. So as you mentioned, it is moving more quickly in that direction. But really what it means is it means write to work for less. And not enough people say for less. What we have is we have data in the 28 states that do have right to work. Workers make lower wages. They have less benefits. They are not able to negotiate better benefits that these other states are able to do. And it is surprising when you ask people, like you mentioned, when you ask them, what do they think of write to work? Or what are your thoughts on write to work? And when we ask people, when we ask even potential candidates running for office, and many times when they don't know, they just say exactly what you said. We think it's great that people have the right to work. And it's stunning that they didn't really understand what it was. And the Republicans, I think, or the conservatives did a great job at messaging that to make it sound like it's a positive thing for the states. But the reality is when you actually look at the data, workers make less. They have less benefits in these states that are right to work. Yeah, exactly. Tyler, what are your thoughts? Yeah, you know, Jason's absolutely right. It should be called right to work for less. But you know, we can also call it by its real name, which is union busting. And it is all about weakening the power that workers have collectively. In these right to work states, people don't have to pay their union dues. And so the people that don't pay their dues end up free riding on everyone who does. And so for people like me, who's in the construction industry, that goes to paying for training and apprenticeship and all kinds of other benefits. And if people don't pay in, well, that goes away. And it also allows a lot of these companies that are non-union to underbid and undercut and skirt existing laws. And so that's why we really feel strongly that if right to work comes here to Hawaii, we need to fight tooth and nail to stop it. And really these sort of insidious ideas of calling the right to work, calling it this or that, you know, we need to scrap this from our vocabulary as well and just call it for what it is. It's right for right to work for less. It's union busting. And it's very ugly. When I first moved, I'm sorry, when I first moved to Florida and I learned and I heard about right to work, I'm like, right to work. Okay. Because of my background, I was like, okay, tell me more about what that means. And as it got explained to me, I'm like, Oh, right to work means you have the right to fire me for any reason at any time. And therefore I have no rights at all. So right to work does is a complete misnomer. It has nothing to do with the actual realities of what that employment status is. It is the right to work for less because now they don't have to pay you as much because they have just union busted. They do have the right to fire you because you showed up three minutes early today. You're not well employee and you're not well employee. And then so and I'll jump to that for a minute. As I mentioned earlier, Hawaii is a strong blue state with strong union presence. And yet, and you'd mentioned, I myself have been hired as an independent contractor. I myself more often than not get hired as an at will employee to work on construction related projects and try as I might and when I'm in those positions in project management role and otherwise, to bring in my union brothers and sisters, try as I might, I get pushed away, I get pushed back because nobody wants to they say pay the price of that. So I leave there because I have my opinion about that. But what I wanted to hear as far as you as are concerned, when someone says, Well, I don't want to pay the extra price. I don't want to pay the cost of union. What would you say? What do you say to that challenge to any non local developer or even local developer that doesn't want to use union labor? What is your statement to them? Well, I think we need to sometimes look at the union dues is sort of sometimes like insurance, you know, not a lot of times we don't like to pay for car insurance, you know, I mean, but you're glad you had it when you got into that accident, right, because that accident may have costed you 10, 15, 20 thousand dollars, but your insurance will be able to cover to hopefully they're going to cover it right. I think with with the union, that's exactly where it's at. It's insurance. They're there to protect you.  They're there to be able to negotiate better wages and benefits on your behalf. You can you can go through a grievance process. There's a number of protections there for you when you're paying your union dues and unfortunately in a right to work state, but many people don't realize is you don't have to pay your union dues, but the union staff has to represent you. And that makes it very challenging for the union. But certainly. Yeah. So, but that's the union busting. Exactly. So, but when it comes to Tyler, when it comes to a non-local developer coming in and say they want to build something in Kakaako and you say, that's great, spectacular, wonderful. How can we as a union help you develop and build that? And they say, well, we don't want to go union. Right. What do you say? Well, you know, a lot of these folks come in just looking at the bottom line, but they forget about, you know, what comes afterwards, how to make sure that your work site is productive, that your workers are well trained, that if something happens that, you know, you're going to be covered by workers comp and all these other things that you don't have to pay a huge premium later. And so we try to explain this to a lot of folks and in many respects, we are successful in doing that. But again, with this sort of messaging that comes from, you know, straight out of the conservative playbook here, a lot of that falls by the wayside. So we have to work very hard to sort of fight against that. Yeah, and that is. I mean, it's a corporateist perspective. It's understanding it only from the corporate level. Now, certainly at the union level, on the development side, when you're talking about your level of union, I guess, effort, it's, you also have to work with the corporations. You have to work with them and find an equal balance in there. Did you find that to be a struggle sometimes in these conversations and trying to make sure that the interests are being met? I think it's all about, you know, education and making sure that we can have sort of an open dialogue and open conversation with these folks. Frankly, there are some people who you're never going to convince. And that's fine. You know, that's just how it is. And we can fight against them. Or for those who are open, you know, with more open dialogue, I think you get further with honey than vinegar. But, you know, that being said, that's not the case against a lot of these people that, you know, want to push right to work, that want to skirt the law, that want to force their employees to become independent contractors so they can get around paying for their workers' comp, get around paying for their health care, get around things like overtime. And that's one of the things, when I get hired as an independent, the reason I set up, I eventually, at first I started being a contractor as an independent contractor. I'm like, okay, that's great because I make, wait, I'm not making any more money. I have to pay, wait a minute. So then I created, I started my own business. So therefore, I got to create a better situation. All right, so fine. I recognize how to do that. But then I have to make sure that I understand how to get into these contracts and how to make sure that what I'm being paid and all of that is being dealt with correctly. So to go back, so that's a big issue of that itself and knowing how to do that. And that's where, if you've got a union, if you're working with unions, you have support and help in doing that. You've got a whole team of people that are making sure that you're being paid appropriately in a certain scale and that the benefits and everything that comes along with that is being dealt with appropriately. And you're not on your own. And that's one way of looking at that. So, okay, let's go back to right to work. We only actually literally have a few more minutes left. Let's go back to right to work specifically. What is, you mentioned the Janus case coming up. When is that coming up? Well, we don't, there's no specific timeframe right now. We anticipate probably early or 2018. So we're thinking spring of 2018. Now, it could be heard as early as this fall. The Supreme Court hasn't made the announcement yet, but when they do, we'll be made aware. It's already been heard in the Seventh Circuit. The Seventh Circuit obviously ruled in favor of Ashmi. So now the right to work organizations are petitioning the Supreme Court to hear the case. And this was the, was Janus heard in Seventh Court or was that the Fredericks? Janus. Fredericks was heard in the Ninth Circuit. Okay. And that one, so just to get an understanding, that one, the whole scope of this, that one got heard and that one went to the Supreme Court. But at the time, the Supreme Court was eight members, right? We got, you hate to say we got lucky.  I mean, but because of that situation, the court was now four, four conservative liberal. And so the court ruled four to four on the Fredericks case. And so because it was a tie vote, the lower court prevails. So the Ninth Circuit prevailed. So at the end of the day, the right to work for everyone across the country didn't happen because they went with the Ninth Circuit ruling. But that may, will not be the case for Janus. Not for Janus, because we now know that Gorsuch is there and he's going to, we know, we know where he is on that. That's correct. So what can we do? We need to educate our membership. We need to educate the public and make them aware of what is potentially coming and what it means. I think, you know, we, we know the data, we know the statistics, we know what happens in these right to work states. And I think we just need to be prepared. And I think we need to understand the ramifications involved. Everyone needs to understand the ramifications involved that potentially Janus could lead to in states like Hawaii or New York or all these other blue states. So it's really education. And that's absolutely important. Educating not just our members, but educating the public overall. Yes. And trying to get a better, and that's where, that's why I started the show a little bit playing, by the way, this lunch break is brought to you by your local unions. And let's thank our unions. Let's realize the history of where we come from. And for me, that's, I mean, I'm a history major. For me, that's where I come from. Where did something begin? How did we get here? What was the value of it? And why would that value wane?  And that's what, as we get used to something, as you were saying earlier, we're used to have again now, it's never going to go away. And then all of a sudden it's gone. What do we do then? So that's what we, that's what we're facing is workers rights, safety conditions, wages. We've got just your basic 40 hour work week. We have all of these potential things that we take for granted that can slowly start to be stripped away. Benefits, having health insurance. One of the biggest costs of living issues we have as a country is health insurance. And people don't like to talk about it as a cost of living issue. They want to talk about it as a separate political wedge issue to keep people separate. When reality is it's a huge kitchen table issue. And then we're fortunate that we'd have the prepaid health act. So as long as you work more than 19 hours a week, your employer is providing you health insurance. But unfortunately, other 49 states don't have that. They don't have that. They don't have it. Exactly. And that's a huge issue. And in addition to that, that only counts if you're an employee. So if somebody says, well, you are an independent contractor, we have this agreement. We don't need to provide you with this sort of coverage. But if you look like an employee and are treated like an employee and all of that with sort of all the typical rules that would apply to an employee, then you're definitely an employee and you deserve that sort of coverage. And it's ridiculous for an employer to sort of claim otherwise when the facts are. And real quick, people don't realize it. But there are, even in the Hawaii legislature, they're trying to water down the independent contractor. They make it where it's easier for employers to misclassify workers to become independent contractors. And they are doing that. Well, then we see now, we talk about how blue of a state we are.  Okay, we need to explore that one. So thank you both for joining me today. There's so much more to talk about. And we'd love to have you guys come back another time and talk deeper into some of these issues. But thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for joining us. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers, Politics in Hawaii's Areas. I'm your host, Carl Campania. Thanks again to Tyler, Tyler Dos Santos-Tam, and Jason Bradshaw, local union leaders that we need to listen to, that need to hear from, so that we do not lose what we consider to be common sense, what we consider to be part of our daily life. We can lose it. And we need to understand that. So thank you for joining us. See you next time.


So after these short technical difficulties I'm happy to announce the last talk in this session. It's error implication in code-based cryptography and the code talk will be given by Alexander Nielsen. Thank you for that introduction. So I'm going to talk to you about attack but before we do that I want to go into a bit of background. So code-based cryptography is one of the major branches of cryptographic post-quantum research right now and we have a security based on the hardness of the code in random linear code. And the most famous example is the Macalese cryptosystem from 78. It has some problems with large keys but otherwise it's a very good system but the large keys is the reason why we have several variants. One of these are the quasi-cyclic medium density parity check and it has smaller keys and it attains this by using cyclic structures in the key matrices and it's a very simple encryption where we basically take the plaintext times the generator matrix and add some noise. The decryption is very efficient because we use a bit flipping decoding which is iterative. Unfortunately this gives us a decryption failure rate which is non-zero and we use this in order to perform an attack which I will describe in a few moments. But an MDPC code is a linear code with an arrow correction capability t. We have a length n of the ciphertext code dimension r which is the length of the plaintext and we have a row weight w in the parity check matrix h. Also we have that the length of the ciphertext is a small constant times the length of the plaintext. So for 8-bit security we have these parameters where the constant is 2. The ciphertext is 9602 bits long and we have length of the plaintext 4801, a row weight of 90 and the arrow correction capability of 84. So this means that we have about 99 bits out of 100 or zero. So this gives us a very sparse matrix but actually this is the reason why this is a medium density code. A low density code would have even fewer ones in the matrix. The secret key is constructed like this where each h i is a circle and r by r matrix. So for example we have for 8-bit security a secret key like this where each row of the sub matrixes is a secret representation of the first row. So that means we only need to save or transmit the first row of each sub matrix. And actually if we use the public key we only need the first row of the first sub matrix in order to reconstruct the secret key. So we will use this in an attack later. The public key is generate the matrix and it's constructed like this where i is identity matrix. And now we have everything we need in order to perform an encryption. So to encrypt the plaintext m into a plaincypitec c we only need to find or generate a random error vector with a handling weight less than or equal to the arrow correction capability of the code. And then we simply compute the plaintext times the generator matrix and add this error vector. To do encrypt we need a decoding algorithm. We call it psi h because it uses the knowledge of h in order to work. And we simply apply this to the ciphertext, remove the error vector and then we have the plaintext as the first part of the ciphertext minus the error vector. And these decoding algorithms used by mdpc are based on the original Gallagher bit flipping algorithm which is iterative it's very efficient but unless you take special care you can it's not constant time. So I want to show you first an attack before first published in Asia group 16 where the authors did a key recovery attack with about 250 to 300 million ciphertexts. This is for 8-bit security parameters. It was against the cca secure version of mdpc and they did this by discovering a correlation between the distance spectrum of the secret key and of the distance spectrum of the non-decodable error patterns. Now you might wonder what a distance spectrum is and it's works like this where we first have an error pattern at the top and then we have the corresponding distance spectrum DOB below where each index in the distance spectrum corresponds to a distance and the counters or the values of each precision is basically a counter of each distance. So we can see here that where the distance of three occurs two times in this error pattern. So each counter the value of each counter we call this a multiplicity because it determines the number of times we have each distance and now I want to point out that the distance spectrum of age zero is all that we need in order to perform a key recovery attack. So this is the target and it works like this. We have a reaction attack against the cca secure mdpc. We just start with a variable initialized to zero and we increment it for each round in the loop. We encrypt a ciphertext. We send the ciphertext to a victim. The victim decrypts it. The victim sends response back to our attacker and now the attacker only has to decide whether or not the victim suffered a decoding failure. If the victim could not decode the message then we save the distance spectrum of this error pattern that we used to encrypt. And then we repeat as many times as is necessary. So what we do is to combine all the distance spectrums of all the error patterns that did not successfully decode and it turns out that multiplicities are not uniformly distributed but they are distributed according to the distance spectrum of the secret key which we want. So this is how that attack works and of course we need manner samples but still a very efficient attack. Now the question is if we can do better and we shall see. We propose a new adaptive attack with or without side channels against the cpa secure version of mdpc. So we take the original attack and we add a new counter and we also need a first error pattern which is non-decodable and then we encrypt like normal except that this time we don't use a random error vector. Instead we use an error vector that is derived from the last known error vector that could not be decoded. This time if we detect a coding failure we save it to ej increment the counter, reset the eye counter and one of the differences is that this time we save the distance spectrum of the error vector regardless or not we detected a decoding failure. Also if the decoder is not constant time then we save the time measurements of the victim's decryption. We call this deriving of the error pattern the chaining method and we use it to amplify the decoding failure rates in order to get more information that we need to perform the attack. All right so the chaining method works like this where error amplification is gained by generating a chain on non-decodable error vectors and we basically we take an initial error pattern and we mutate it by moving randomly one of the non-series and then we try to decrypt again. If we manage to decrypt we indicate this with white circles and if we don't manage to decrypt or the victim fails to decrypt we indicate this with the red circles and we use that as a new basis and we get the chain. Of course this doesn't give us anything unless we save some information from this so what we do is to take the differences of the distance spectrum for each mutation so for example if we have a successful decoding then we save this differences of the distance spectrum into a new vector and we do the same thing we do decoding failures and also keep in mind that these are all vectors so we need an initial error pattern and we can do that by random like in the original attack or we can actually use the chaining method again if we have a non-concent time decoder and we can see here that by just measuring the time we can easily distinguish the number of iterations required to decode a specific pattern. This is for three different implementations and so if we take a random pattern we try to decode it and each time we find a new pattern that takes longer time to decode we save that as a new basis and we keep going until we find a new pattern that is not decodable and we use that as E0. Alright so let's look at the results. So we save or aggregate each distance spectrum difference into a new vector and we can see here in this graph where each data point represents a single distance in the distance spectrum that is set into multiplicity layers. So for example if we look at the blue ones we can see that these are the distances that do not occur in the secret key and if we look at the brown ones just above these distances as indicated by the x-axis occurs at one time in the secret key and then we have two times and three times and four times. Also we have seen that if we include the inverted information of decoding successes we can improve the results which means that we actually get information from each decoding and not only from failures. And now we have what we need to reconstruct the secret key. Alright so let's take a look at the amplification effect that I was talking about. So this is how it looks like with just random sampling. So the decoding failure rate is indicated by the horizontal lines and the red line is the best implementation where we have a decoding failure rate of around 10 to the minus 7 and if we look at the chain method we see that it has increased to around 10 to the minus 2 or something like that. Yeah, note the logarithm scale on the y-axis and there's more to say about this graph but I won't because it will take time. So just let's wrap up and just conclude that we have made an improvement of the original take by a factor around 20 to 30 depending on whether or not we use side channels. We have in a more general case shown that the low decoding failure rate might not be enough as a protective measure especially if we have side channels. Also we have seen that letting the attacker decide the error patterns is a bad idea. It opens up for attacks and also makes existing text more efficient. We show that by using the knowledge of a single non-decodable error pattern as leverage for generating more patterns. Of course this doesn't work for CCA secure schemes because they do not allow us to select the error pattern. And that's it. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any questions? This is not the case. I have a quick question. So your technique cannot be applied to the CCA secure version, I guess. But the original attack can. Thanks. Okay. If there are no further questions then let's thank the speaker and let's thank the speakers of all of the whole session and then we'll meet at 11.40.


The next important arithmetic operation is multiplication. So we'll start out with the definition, and our definition is going to be based on addition. So let's take two whole numbers, A and B, and I'm going to define the product A times B to be the sum of B repeatedly, A times. Now, the notation here may be a little bit confusing. This does not mean I have this thing, A times. What it actually means is that I have A, B's being added together. So in other words, when I'm talking about the product A times B, what I really mean is it's a sum of A, B's. Now, before we continue just a quick word on notation, this symbol is generally used to introduce multiplication. However, in different contexts, this symbol may be confusing, particularly when we start to talk about algebraic expressions, where this symbol, the Saint Andrew's Cross, looks a lot like the letter X, which we like to use as our unknown. So we've developed a number of equivalent ways of expressing multiplication, and so one of the common ways we have of writing a multiplication, we can also, if we must include a symbol, we can include this center dot, and more generally, we might just omit the symbol entirely. So all of the following should be regarded as completely equivalent A, Saint Andrew's Cross, B, A dot, B, and then finally just putting the two things to be multiplied together, A, B. All right, so let's take a look at a proof. Let's take a look at a typical problem proof for times 6 is equal to 24. And again, taking this problem apart, note that it is a proof statement, which means we're going to want to go back to the definition. So we can go ahead and put that definition down first. A times B is the sum of A, B's. And now we'll compare our problem to our definition. We see that A is 4. I'll go ahead and replace that. B is 6. I'll go ahead and replace that. And then I have the statement 4 times 6 is 6 plus 6 plus 6, and I'm going to take 4, 6's, and add them together. And so I can do that because the addition is part of the definition of proof, I don't have to go into too many details about how I find that sum, and I can just do the sum. So 4 times 6 equals 24. And again, the important parts of the proof we're going to show in green.


Really, the only coffee in the world? Well, your father says so, and your father knows best. Yes, it's Father Knows Best, transcribed in Hollywood, starring Robert Young as father. A half hour visit with your neighbor, the Anderson's, brought to you by America's favorite coffee, Maxwell House, the coffee that's always good to the last drop. According to the renowned Victor Hugo, no one ever keeps a secret so well as a child, which proves just one thing. In his long and colorful career, Victor Hugo never bought a birthday present for his wife. You know, when you get right down to it, that may be the major difference between Victor Hugo and our friend Jim Anderson. Jim bought a dilly of a birthday present for Margaret, and as a result, the White Frame House on Maple Street is literally crawling with secrecy, like this. But Father, I didn't know you didn't want me to take it. I told them distinctly, I didn't want it delivered until Monday. Where am I going to hide it? Well, there must be lots of places. Oh, sure. Name three places where I can hide a nine by 15 rug. All you need is one place. All right, name one place. Well. It's like hiding a hippopotamus. I'll be right in. Never mind. I didn't come down the stairs, dad. It must have been somebody else. What was? The hippopotamus. Nobody said anything about anybody coming down the stairs. But you said, what's that? It's mother's birthday present. The rug? She'll see it. I know she'll see it. That's why I. What kind of a surprise is it going to be if she sees it? But why don't you go away for a few days? You need a vacation. I do? Mother. She isn't here. Where do you think I ought to go? But don't ever ask me that again. Why can't we just put it in the attic? Mother never goes up there.  Just let me hide the rug in the attic, and that's where she'll live. How about Joe Phillips' uncle's farm? That'd be a good place. But I think it'd be a good place. For what, daddy? For hiding a rug. What rug? That rug. Oh. I didn't mean to hide the rug. I meant for a vacation. Who said anything about a vacation? You did. But let's start all over. Do I have to go out in the hall again? No, just the garage wouldn't be any good. She's out there 10 times a day. Daddy, how about in back of the furnace? Sure, and have the whole thing burn up. Daddy. Hey, I know. Why don't we unroll it and hide it under the old rug? Because it'll stick out a foot and a half on each end. That's why. Daddy. Couldn't we sort of fold it up a little?  There'd be a big lump. Oh, I don't know. We could tell your mother it was the body of an old friend. Father. What if she peaked? But. She'd find out it wasn't a body, and then what? But I've never mind. Daddy. What is it, Kathy? We better hide the rug, or mommy'll see it. That's a good idea. Thank you. It's a good thing we don't have to hide the billiard table. Bye. That's it. We're going to hide the billiard table? Bud, give me a hand with the rug. OK. Kathy, open the door to the playroom like a good girl. Yes, Daddy. What are you going to do with the rug, Father?  We'll open it up and lay it on top of the billiard table. Father, that's wonderful. Yes, sir. She'll never find it there. The door's open, Daddy. Thank you, kitten. All right, Bud.  I'll take this in. OK. Heck, I'd have thought of the billiard table. But I didn't know it was a green rug. It happens to be blue. Blue? She'll spot it right away. Whoever heard of a blue billiard table. We're going to put the cover over it. Oh. Hey, that's good. Thank you, Albert Einstein. Watch your step, Father. Kathy left her skates on the stairs. I did not. You certainly did. I certainly didn't. Never mind, Bud. Keep going. Why don't you two stop arguing? I wasn't arguing. You certainly were. I certainly weren't. All right, Bud. This is fine. Now put it down. Boy, is that ever heavy.  OK. Come on, Nothead. You take the other side. Isn't this fine? Then Bud and I can lift the rug. Jim. Oh, my gosh. Come on.  Hurry up, Kathy. I am hurrying. Bud. Well, it slipped, Dad. Well, pick it up. Jim, where are you? All right, Bud. Roll it up. I don't think it's going to work. It's got to work. Aren't you going to answer, Mommy? We'll send her a wire in the morning. Bud, there's too much on this end. Pull it down. OK. Father, the cover's getting heavy. Come on, Bud. Jim. Well, you said. It's all set, Dad. We'll be right up, honey. All right, the cover. Quick. Jim, what in there? Smooth it out and hurry. It's all covered, Father. Good. It brought me home from the market and I thought, what have you been doing? Doing? Why, uh, just, uh, uh. Sitting around. That's all. Well, you certainly sit hard. You're all out of breath. I'm not, Mommy. And I lifted the whole. I guess I didn't. Margaret. They're all in the playroom, Hector. Come on down. Never mind, Hector. We're coming up. Why, Jim? I thought you wanted Hector to see the billiard table. No. What? I mean, Hector isn't interested in billiard tables. Jim, have you torn the top again? Oh, no. We put it on very carefully. Oh. You put what on very carefully? Look, I gotta get home.  You didn't have to come down, Hector. We were on our way up. Work, we kid. You bet. Yes, sir. Well, dear, as long as he's down here, show Hector the table and let him go home. Heck, you don't want to see the billiard table, do you? Sure I do. That's why I came over. But it's just an ordinary billiard table. Jim. It's a minor problem. That's pretty good, isn't it, Betty? Full of old bodies. If a body meets a body coming through the billiard table. Is this what happens when you buy a billiard table? I don't know what's gotten into them, Hector. I've never seen them act so silly. I wasn't acting silly. I noticed that. I don't think so. But did you ever show Mr. Smith the pictures? What pictures? Any pictures.  I don't want to go upstairs with Fudd. Would you like to see how I can multiply? Eight times three or 24. Eight times four. That's enough, Kathy. But I know up to nine times. I said that's enough. Yeah. Honey, you know we're being very impolite. Don't you think we ought to offer Hector a cup of coffee? Jim. After all, he's a guest in our home. I came in for one minute to see the billiard table. Mother, I've got a wonderful idea. Let's go upstairs and make some coffee.  All right. If that gets a little dull, we can watch the linoleum. Golly! I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Golly! Come along, children. Let's all get hysterical together. Oh, sure. I'd rather do that than almost anything. I would, too. Say, Jim, I was talking to a doctor the other day. Wait a minute. I don't know if I should. You know, if you get these things early enough, well, a big help you turned out to be of all the times to show up. I wanted to see the billiard table. What's wrong with that? I couldn't show it to you. Why not? Because it's got a rug on top of it. Jim, this doctor I was telling you. You don't believe me, huh? Okay, look. You see? A rug. Okay, so it's a rug. That makes you all right, huh? I'm hiding it. Uh, yeah. Uh, look, Jim. Hector, it's a surprise for the living room. That's fine, pal. It'll probably tickle the heck out of the kitchen, too. Mr. Margaret, it's her birthday. Oh. Oh, well, why didn't you say so? I just did. Yes, Margaret? We'll be right there, honey. Come on, Hector. Okay. The kids are in on the secret, huh? They're all right. They won't say anything about it. Margaret might suspect something. Say, heck, how would it be if I hid the rug over at your place? Fine. We have rugs hidden all over the joint. Heck, got a closet full of pancakes, too. It'll only be until Monday, Jim. Why don't you just give it to her? How can you surprise anybody with a rug? Believe me, it isn't easy. Well, if you want to bring it over to my place, okay. Watch, watch it. Hiya, honey. Everything under control? Quite. I sent the little monsters into the den. Well, let's see what they're up to, heck. I, uh... Uh, just a minute, Jim. You go ahead, Hector. I'd like to speak to Peter Pan. Okay. I'll send up two red flares if I need help. I'll be right in, heck. Nice guy, heck. All right, Jim. What? What was all that hoopty-doo in the playroom? Hoopty-doo? Something was going on in the playroom. I want to know what it was. Well... Yes? There's only one thing I can tell you, Margaret. It's a secret. I see. After 18 years, we have secrets. Well, yes. I'm sorry, but, uh, that's it. All right, let's both have secrets. Next time you talk in your sleep, I'll take notes. Fine, you... I don't talk in my sleep. No? No. All right. Did I ever talk in my sleep? Last night? I did? That's impossible. Well, what did I say? You mean last night? Yes. It's a secret. There are enough secrets floating around the Anderson home today to keep the ordinary family supplied for a month. Well, what I have to say is no secret. My business is coffee. The Maxwell House coffee. Rich, full-bodied, truly satisfying coffee. And I honestly believe that if you enjoy really good coffee as much as I do, the coffee for you is our Maxwell House. You see, you just won't find that wonderful good to the last drop flavor in any other coffee. No coffee but Maxwell House. And there's a good reason for that. Coffee, you know, grows all over the world, and there are all kinds of grades and varieties. But mark this. Maxwell House selects the very finest, extra-flavorful varieties. The kinds that are grown only on the mile-high plateaus of Latin America. For example, fancy Manizales coffees are chosen for their fragrant mellowness. Superb mellons for extra richness. Choice Bucaramangas coffees for fine, full-body. And it is these choice varieties blended in just the right proportions that produces that world-famous good-to-the-last drop flavor of Maxwell House coffee.  No other coffee is made like Maxwell House. So if truly good coffee helps make your day a better one, start enjoying our Maxwell House. The coffee that's bought and enjoyed by more people than any other brand at any price. It's the one coffee that's always good to the last drop. It's a breathless moment later as Jim Anderson enters the den of the White Frame House on Maple Street. But this isn't the fun-loving, gay-spirited rover boy we left a minute ago. This is a grim-faced, invisibly shaken Jim Anderson, a man with a whole new set of problems. Like this. So there they were, see, with man on second and third. She would get away with it, and wait a minute, please. Look, why don't you kids go into the kitchen and help your mother? She'd just take this out. She said she was gonna scream. Well... Is anything wrong, Father?  I'd like to talk to Mr. Smith for a minute. Holy cow. Doubt of places. Hurry up, or you'll get kicked in places. Daddy! Come on, noodle-nose. Well, stop pulling me. All you do is pull me. We'll be in the living room when you want us, Father. Thank you, Betty. See you later, Mr. Smith. You bet.  Does she know? I don't know. What are you so worried about? Hector, there comes a time in the life of every married man. Jim! You know what I just found out? What? I talk in my sleep. Oh, for crying out loud.  That's a serious thing. Yeah, nuts. How would you like to talk in your sleep? About what? That's the trouble I don't know. Jim, look, a guy like you who's never done anything wrong in his whole life... How do you know I haven't? You mean you have? Naturally. You? Well, what if I talked about the fish? What fish? The fish you and I caught up at the lake. Only we didn't catch them. We bought them at the market. Well, they weren't biting. Oh, my gosh. Now what? The poker game last week. I lost $12. So? I told Margaret I lost $2.  Heck, you don't understand what this means. A man's home is his castle. His word is law. And then what happens? He goes to sleep and... Zowie, he's defenseless. When was he any other way? But I'll be afraid to fall asleep. There's no telling what I'll say. Well, didn't Margaret give you a hint?  That's bad. You know, I feel just like I'm going down for the third time. I can see my whole life floating by. See anybody we know? Heck, it isn't funny. It's the silliest thing I've ever heard. Is that so? I'm not afraid of what I've done because I haven't done anything, really. But what if I make up things? Well, what if I have a dream and I'm chasing Betty Grabo? I'm chasing Betty Grabo. I'm chasing Betty Grabo. Call me up. I'll join you.  All you want to do is make jokes. I wanted to go home ten minutes ago, but no, I have to hear about talking in your sleep and rugs. Jim, let go of my coat, will you? You'll tear it. What if I told her about the rug? Well, it's better than Betty Grabo, isn't it? Jim, will you please... Hey, wait a minute. I have an idea. If I talked about the rug, the kids will never forgive me. Why don't we find out? What? Look, kids can find out anything, especially from their mothers. So your kids try to find out if you talk about the rug. But I still won't know if I said anything about... And if you didn't talk about the rug, they'll find out what you did talk about. Clever, huh? In other words, I'm to make spies out of three innocent children. Good idea, huh? It isn't bad. Not bad at all. Well, this time I'm going to go before I get mixed up in anything else. Wait a minute, Heck. I'll take you to the front door. Okay. Look, Heck, exactly how do you think I ought to go about this? Just lay it right on the line about the rug you mean. Sure. So long, kids. See you later, Margaret. She can't hear you from here, Heck. I'll tell her you said goodbye. Okay. And Jim, you don't have to worry. Leave everything to the kids. They'll figure it out. I'll tell my kids. I'll probably wind up in Alcatraz. Well, you know what they say. Share, share, La Femme. What's that got to do with it? Who knows? I had one here in high school French. Well, I'll be seeing you, pal. I'll let you know what happens. Don't bother. I'll read about it in the newspaper. Sometimes I wish I had a job in a nice, quiet lighthouse. Did you and Mr. Smith get everything straightened out, Father? Be president. And they can too, can't they? I didn't say they couldn't. I just said I'd move. That's all. Kids, I've got something pretty serious to take up with you.  I'll wait a minute. I'm not sure I did. I said maybe. You mean you don't know? That's right. I said something in my sleep last night and I don't know what it was. Gosh. It might have been about the rug or it might have been about other things. What other things? Never mind. Father, that's awful. What did you do a thing like that for? Because I wanted to see if the bedroom had an echo. Oh. How could you tell if you were asleep? I... let's go back to the rug. Father. Yes? Would you mind if we... Well, I guess we shouldn't. You shouldn't what? Well, I was thinking. If some of us pretended we knew what you said mother might tell the rest of us and... No, you wouldn't want us to do that. Why wouldn't I? I mean, if you want to... You don't mind? I don't mind at all.  What's everybody talking about? I don't understand either. Look, bud, we'll go into the kitchen and you pretend you know what father said. I don't know what anybody said. You heard what father said last night. How do you know? You pretend you did. What for? Betty, I think you'd better try something else.  Mommy's coming. Jim. I'm right here, honey. Where's Hector? Oh, he said for me to tell you goodbye. He had to go home. Oh, dear. After I went to all that trouble. Come on, bud. It isn't fair and you know it. Huh? What did father say? When? Last night. Well, how do I know? Betty, it's no use. Maybe we'd better... Just a minute, father. Mother, if a boy hears what his father says when he's talking in his sleep, why, bud? Did you hear your father last night? Of course he did. Didn't you, bud? I didn't hear anybody last night. Bud, please. But I told you... Oh. You mean... Oh. Oh, sure. I heard him. I just remembered. Betty, believe me. Yes, sir. I sure did hear him. Boy, was he funny. Yes, dear. He was very funny. I'm glad somebody enjoyed it. What was funny about it? Well... Never mind, bud. We don't need you. Mother's going to tell us. Aren't you, mother? No, angel. I'm not. You're not? That isn't the sort of thing one band is about. Is it, bud? Gosh, no. And, bud, you're not to tell them either. Oh, you can count on that. We can count on what? I'm not allowed to tell. Jim, this whole thing is pretty obvious. What is? Using the children to find out what you said last night. Well... Good grief, Margaret. Is that what you... Kathy, please. But I know what Daddy said. You do? Why didn't you say so? Nobody asked me. Kathy, why don't you and I go for a little walk? Okay. Jim, she doesn't know anything about it. Yes, I do, Mommy. You couldn't possibly. You were sound asleep. Oh, I didn't hear it last night. I heard it this afternoon when you were telling Mrs. Hathaway on the phone. Oh. You told Mrs. Hathaway. I didn't know such thing. Well, you said something about Daddy. Don't you remember? You said, hello, Lucille. How's Laurie's cold? And then you said, my goodness. Isn't that all said? Kathy, will you please get to the point? I have to remember, don't I? Well, go ahead. Kathy. Then she said, you'll never guess what Jim and the children are getting me for my birthday. Margaret. Oh, dear. And then she said, Helen Phillips was shopping at Gormans. And she saw Jim go into the rug department. Holy cow. And then she said, Kathy, why don't you stop it? We've heard enough. Yes, Daddy. I'm terribly sorry. I didn't mean to spoil your fun. You knew all the time, didn't you? Yes, dear. About the rug? All that excitement in the playroom? Yes, dear. Oh, Margaret. Yes, dear. Happy billiard table. Thank you. The flavor of truly good coffee means a lot in your house, doesn't it? And naturally you want to enjoy the one coffee with the most in flavor. Well, it's because of flavor, wonderfully good to the last drop flavor that more people buy and enjoy our Maxwell House coffee than any other brand. And if you pour yourself a steaming, fragrant cup of our Maxwell House, you'll say this is the best coffee ever. Then count all the truly good cups you get from each pound. You'll agree, Maxwell House is today's coffee buy. This weekend, then, for the most in flavor and value, take home the familiar blue tin of Maxwell House with a big white cup and drop. Enjoy that real taste of contentment in the one coffee that's always good to the last drop. It's midnight in Springfield and an autumn moon hangs low in a star-swept sky. Maple Street is quiet and dark except for a small light in the bedroom of the Anderson Home. There, life goes on. Like this. Jim, won't you please come to bed? A little while, honey. I want to read another two or three chapters. You said the same thing an hour ago. I did? Well, it's a very interesting book. Certainly must be. Jim. Yes, Margaret. Are you and the children very angry with me? Of course not. We aren't angry at all. Then why won't you come to bed? Uh...  Jim, are you still worrying about that silly talking business? I'm not worried about anything. You just go to sleep. Come over here. Now look, Margaret. Come over here. Good grief. Treat a man as though he didn't have any... All right, I'm here. Sit down. Now, would you like to know what you said last night? It isn't important, but if you want to tell me... Well, you had the most peaceful smile on your face. Must have been a beautiful dream. Honey, please. Then you sighed and you said, so softly, anyone for tennis? Good night, Margaret. Good night, dear. You mean, one day I'm in love with strawberry jello? A swell dish. You bet, but next day I'm in love with raspberry jello. Another swell dish. It's all six delicious jello flavors. My wife loves jello because it's so easy to fix and so easy on the grocery bill. Easy to fix, thrifty to buy. That's jello. That's my love. How's your supply, folks? Remember, it's jello for red letter desserts. So off to the club where you go and reach for J-E-L-L-O. Join us again next week when we'll be back with Father Knows Best starring Robert Young as Jim Anderson with Roy Bargy in the Maxwell House Orchestra. In our cast were Rhoda Williams as Betty, Gene Vanderpile, Ted Donaldson, Norma Jean-Nilson, Herb Bygren and yours truly, Bill Foreman. So until next Thursday, good night and good luck from the makers of Maxwell House, America's favorite brand of coffee. Always good to the last drop. Father Knows Best was transcribed in Hollywood and written by Ed James. You will want to read an interesting feature on Robert Young in the current issue of Parade Magazine. Join Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons on NBC.


One of the first things I'd like to do is thank all our sponsors that helped us put together and provide input and money for today's event. I'm going to just read through the list. South Dakota Wheat Commission, Farm Credit Services of America, Wheat Growers, Mustang Seed, Monsanto, Prairie State Seeds, Next Level Ag, LLC, Millboard Seeds, La Crosse Seeds, Dakota Best Seed, Agronomy Plus, Farmers Eliacs, Mitchell, First Dakota National Bank, C&D Operations, Davis County Amplement, Scott Supply, CropTech, Ducks Unlimited, Aurora County Conservation District, Davis County Conservation District, Hanson County Conservation District, South Dakota Noctil Association, SDSU Extension, USDA and NRCS, and Pioneer Hybrids of Dupont, so let's give them all a welcome round of applause. Anyway, you guys, without any more, this is Dwayne Beck from Dakota Electric Research. This is just how we move wire. You can see there's wire on that irrigator. These are lateral moves that move straight. We also have pivots that go around, but we just have the wire running through there in those buckets. There's a rope hanging down with a fence post on it, and those buckets give it just enough weight that the fence doesn't blow and stuff like that. So that works pretty good. You do like Dan does, you get Cody to do it, and Casey, you know. But these are bar JZ cattle, and once we started moving, if they could hear the irrigator, you can see them. My daughter took that with her cell phone, so it was into the sun. You can't see it so good, but terrible place to work. It's kind of like here when you look out the window, but as soon as they heard that motor, the irrigation pivot motors run, and they're just a whir. They're not very loud, but they could hear them, and they'd come at a dead run. So we were actually moving out of corn stocks into swath grazing. I just had moved that pivot, and I was in the process. And then I've got the next set will show them moving from this field into the corn stocks. So we had a time, what we did is we swath grazed between, I'll show you all the quality and stuff, but we swath grazed between this oats and pea cover crop that was growing behind winter wheat and then corn stocks. And so we balanced the diet. That thing Ken was talking about is exactly right. It's exactly the thing we do with farm ground in terms of trying to build organic matter and feed them soil micro-oriented. It's exactly the same thing, and everybody wants to do turnips and radishes and clover and whatever. Well, that's not enough carbon.  And you've got to have the balanced diet. Now here the cows are moving. We've moved this lateral move down here. They're moving. You'll notice if you look closely, they mostly have collars on, and they have little fit bits on their feet. And what those collars do is tell you how much their head is moving up and down and eating, and then the fit bit tells you how many steps. And to be real honest with you, I haven't analyzed all that data yet, because there's just a mountain of data that we've got to take care of.  That's our area that they could get into when it got cold and crappy, and that's something you got to think about is windbreaks and stuff until we had that Christmas blizzard. That's what happened. Now I moved the pivot again, and you can watch them coming from back over here at a dead run down to this pivot. So they really liked the swathed pea stuff because that was the candy, but you also have to, it's like we're joking here, everybody's coming over and getting rolls, right? It's a bit too much carbohydrate. And those of you that had hamburgers, you got a chance because you had your protein, right?  So, Dakota Lakes Research Farm was owned by farmers, and actually the idea for Dakota Lakes started at the old steakhouse, down over the hill one night after field day in the 80s. And some guys said, well, we should have a research farm. And I just said, you don't want the government to own it. You want to own it yourself. Because the government owns it, you can never tell what's going to happen. And you got to have the government involved, and that's me to a certain extent working for SDSU, but we have to have the farmers own it, and Dan is actually our president now. So, our Board of Directors is important to us. I'm just going to be real brief today. The climate will change, but it will still be a continental climate. We'll still have cold winters here, relatively cold winters, cold and dry. Normally winters will have hot and dry summers. That's not going to change. Now, it's going to change a bit, but we're still going to be a continental climate. We're not going to turn into a California or a Florida. A bigger issue, though, and at least in your lifetime in the next 600 years or something, which is beyond our lifetime, degradation of the ecosystem will have more potential impact. And I just wrote one of those articles for Farm Journal that at one time we had the Cronins involved in. And now I've got a guy from Nebraska that I'm working with. But I talked about that, and especially as you sit along the Missouri River here. And one of the things I think about is all the people used to travel up and down this river and think of what they found when they came through here, and how is it different now from when it was when they came? And, you know, four or five hundred years or when Lewis and Clark came through. And it wasn't like what the Revenant showed, by the way. That was supposed to be here, but we don't have the big forests and stuff. We didn't have that much climate change in the last 200 years. But anyway, but what we've done is we took the land around Gettysburg and we took the organic matter down to half of what it was when we came here. And so it didn't hold as much water, and it wasn't as resilient as it should have been. And so when I taught school here in 1975 through 78, which some of you didn't know, but a lot of you did, she was a student, not one of mine, but she was a student. She's like a freshman when I left. But we had dirt blown over the road all the time. And we could only do wheat and summerfowl. And look at what's different now. And it's because we started to restore that soil to where it should be. And it holds more organic matter than it did in 1976 and not as much as it did in 1776. So this is the thing we need to look at. And that's the thing we talk about. And cattle, I think, integration plays a role in that. Ecosystems harvest sunlight, energy, and drive all other processes. Removing the products from the ecosystem reduces the energy available.  And haul the hay off and not bring anything back. It's one of the worst things you can do to an ecosystem. And so our north unit, if you're familiar with our farm, we've got a half section, a big half section plus a 40, five miles north. And it had been hayland for a guy from the 1930s on. Incredibly degraded ecosystem. And we bought it in 2000 and now we've got it somewhat restored. At least it's way better than what it was when we took over. It's better than the neighbor's pasture that's overgrazed. Right, before it probably wasn't. Nutrients are all the nutrients available for plant use or environmental services or have they been leached, eroded or transported from the landscape if you've got saline seeps and those kind of things. It's because your nutrients are leaving where they belong and going someplace else. That's fertilizer in those saline seeps.  That's what happened in the native prairie. Cover crops will help us balance our water cycle a little better, but they won't totally do it on their own. Ecosystems that leak nutrients turn into deserts. That's what's happened in North Africa and all these places. Think about Israel. The land of milk and honey. Climate hasn't changed that much in the intervening years. What happened is they degraded the ecosystem and you can read a thing that a guy by the name of Lottermilk wrote in the 1930s. It's just phenomenal what he found when he went to Israel and looked at what the soils are and what they should have been. But we're doing the same thing. A 120 car train of soybeans contains 400,000 pounds of phosphorus. Think of how many unit trains go out of Selby and all these little circle tracks here and there and across the United States and they're all going someplace like China. They're not going to send that phosphorus back to us. So we're mining. When we're doing that, we're mining. We're not farming, we're mining. We're going to send the soybeans out, send them across the road. February 20th, last Saturday, or last something like that, it cost $2.25 a bushel to ship corn to the west coast from Aberdeen. I had an elevator manager from Aberdeen talking to me on the phone and he says it's costing me $2.25 a bushel to ship my corn to the west coast. Does that make any damn sense? It doesn't make any sense to me.  And then they're going to feed animals over there with it and then their phosphorus is there. So we're spending that kind of money and then we're sending the phosphorus with it. A coal train contains 7,200 tons of coal but when you're digging up coal you're admitting to be a miner. That's what you do.  You know you're going to take it and it's just going to be gone. When we started farming and organic matter went down, it was the same thing. We took the organic matter out and gassed it off, right? And it would take at least one coal train per half section just for the top six inches of rain, I mean the top six inches of soil to take all the organic matter that we lost just out of the top six inches. One coal train per half section. So if we're going to restore two percent, I mean two percent in the top six inches if we're going to do that down to two or three foot just think how many train loads of coal we'd have to bring back in. It's amazing. So we're partially using cover crops to large extent to catch carbon in the air and put it in the soil. One of the things I talk a lot and Danny's heard me do this but when you ship out oil we're working with cold pressing sunflowers and soybeans and flax and whatever and we cold press it, we get the oil out of it. We got good meal. I gave Don a bucket of soybean meal that we use for a protein supplement. The stuff that's left when we press the oil out and now when we ship the oil out all we've shipped out is carbon dioxide and water. There's no minerals in there. And Mother Nature brings you back water, she brings you back carbon dioxide in the air and if we do it right she brings you back nitrogen in the air. We're not transporting anything. Now if we use those things here and keep all the minerals here then we cut down this big transportation thing in 600 years or 200 years or 100 years this transportation thing is just going to get a bigger and bigger and bigger problem. So there's our catching the nitrogen we call this catching release nutrients. I stole that from a guy in North Dakota but I got another one from Jay Fuhrer the other day. I didn't put it in but he said a light bulb did not result from somebody incrementally trying to make candles better. Right? We got to start thinking different. So I just keep trying to do what we're doing to do it a little bit better.  So 1970 the average wheat price was $1.37 a bushel. Average price of barrel oil is $3.39. Price of barrel oil today is just south of 60 bucks and wheat is about three and a half or four. Think about that. 80% of the total input cost in agriculture can be traced directly to energy. So incrementally trying to do better and better and still relying on all this energy doesn't make any sense because we're losing. Oil is going up faster. 120 years ago we essentially were zero. Don brought his dad down, John. He's 103. And he looked at the cows. You remember what he said? He said they're eating the swaths and he says well they're baling, they're hauling the bales and they're hauling the manure back out. Right? I'm going yeah, that's it. I thought that was pretty good. He got the essence of the whole thing right there. 120 years ago that was zero. 120 years from now we're going to have to be zero again, right? Now, today we're talking about grazing. Why? Hell and savory has been mentioned a few times and he talked about brittle environments or dry climates, right? Well, he's saying it's a hoof action. I think it's also in dry climate soil biology slows or stops during periods of low moisture. The rumen of grazing animals remains moist and continuing those biological processes. The processes in the soil are almost exactly the same as the process in the rumen. There's almost no difference. And somebody said, and I thought it was Darwin but I can't find the quote, but somebody called the soil the rumen of the earth. And if you know who that was, Cody, that was me. That was you that did that. It was after you left the school of mines, right? Yeah. But that's the idea behind grazing animals being important in dry climates or relatively more important in dry climates. In cold climates the same thing. Soil biology slows during times of low soil moisture or as low soil temperatures. The rumen of grazing animals are always warm. They keep it going during the winter. That's the role. We're cycling it. We're not getting rid of the organic matter, we're cycling it, okay? So here are some of our cover crops. Our oats and pea thing. We sloth it. The sloths have to be relatively big so they don't get covered up with snow. The Canadians are not worried about snow depth. You know, those cows that go out there in really deep snow if they can see it, they will drive on it. If it gets to be hard snow they'll just drive a tractor on it. Or a pickup and just to break the snow. But we had some pretty deep snow and it didn't seem to bother the cows a bit. That's what it looks like in the fall. You know, nice and green in there. It stayed green like that until basically we were done grazing. Until it was all gone. We had a couple fields where we had oats, peas and rapeseed. Winter wheat stubble was going to be seeded to corn in 2017. In this field in particular we had 7,700 pounds of biomass per acre, 18.2 percent protein and 121 relative feed value. 03, which was that pivot you saw. A little bit less biomass, not a lot. 17.4 protein, 115. Now, since Ken was here you saw me goofing with the computer because I went back and got some... He started using something I didn't have on there. So he was using TDN. So our TDN was 72 percent on these oat, pea, rapeseed things. Protein 17.4, that ratio is 4 to 1. So it's too hot. If all we did is graze that, that's too hot. We're just going to waste it.  You need to have some carbohydrate to go with it. So we were grazing these swaths at the same time we were allowing the cows to have access to corn stocks. Not corn, but corn stocks after harvest and that's how we balance the diet. And so one of the things if you're planning to do cover crops it'd be good to plan to have some source of corn stocks or perennial pastures or something like that you could use for your filler, so to speak. And that's what we did. We could vary the moves to make them go to the corn stocks and get full instead of just eat the oats. So this is the reason for grazing the material in association with low quality corn stock aftermath. At the end of the grazing period, mid-January, when Don came and got the cows, we had a few swaths left and went and pulled a sample out of those last swaths. 16.8, still 16.8 versus just 17-something. TDN is 65.1 and still had a relative fee value of 95. So we lost a little bit of quality, but not very dang much in that period. So I'm fairly confident in these here. Now if I lived, I grew up in Platt, which is just west of course, so in that area a little bit more fall rains and stuff, it might be a bit different, but in this country I'm not afraid of that thing at all. So what we did, here's a rope coming down from the irrigators. That bucket, there's two wires, one here and here, and yeah, we should have had a third. When it gets really iced up, you should have that ground in the middle. So we had a couple cows. I can give you the numbers. You'd move them back through the fence and they'd turn around and come right back through. I know this thing isn't going to hurt me because it's icy. Now here I'm moving, I said we should be moving perpendicular to the swaths. We just couldn't arrange it to do that this year, the way we had things set up. So we're moving like Larry was parallel to the swaths and it's not ideal, but we didn't have, we were done with this field before we had snow. We moved about every day and a half we gave them two swaths or 60 feet. And you can kind of see this, these are where the moves before. We didn't have a back fence here. We had water on this road and then there was corn stocks on the other side of the road. But then about every five or six days we would throw back fence in or some side fence so they couldn't get back and just loaf around back over here. Back there. They cleaned it up pretty well and you can see down through there the wheat stubble, this is 120 bushel wheat stubble underneath. This is the stubble from the oats. And they left the stubble, they ate the swath, they left the stubble, and then we had all the stuff from the crop that we had harvested laying down in there. So there's good armor there and you can see it's high quality stuff. And we did fecal sample and they haven't gotten those back yet. But we did fecal sample on a regular basis and we thought that worked pretty good last year when we did study to tell us if we're getting a little low on protein. There it's coming through corn stocks. On wheat stubble that would be seeded to soybeans we put in oats, germ and millet, brown, red, red, sorghum, sedan. And somebody talked about this, not quite as much biomass because it didn't grow into that late fall this year. You know, that sorghum stuff quits relatively early. Protein's a little lower, relative fee value is pretty good. That's what it looked like where the hay mill is just starting to head out. Oats is coming up through there. That's what it looked like in the swath. This is actually from a year ago. I took these and there we had the swaths running this way and we're removing the fence perpendicular to the swaths. And we had quite a bit of snow a year ago and they would just follow that swath just fine. You can't see where that swath is, but it's there. But that tells them there's a swath there. And as soon as you move that wire they'll just come to those spots and there's like 12 or 15 of them in the way they go. We like bigger buckets better than the small buckets. The five gallon buckets work better, actually. So these were bar JZ cattle, mature cows, various genetics. You can ask Don about that. Late second trimester. And we had a few opens in there. 60 day grazing period initial weight of 1392 pounds. Final weight of 1449. 47 pound gain. So I did that wrong. 57 pound gain. Typo. Typo, I've been looking at that. No, they gain more now. And there was a few that didn't gain. A couple of them lost some weight and there's some that did way better than the others, which is kind of interesting. But we did a 60 days, 47 acres of oat pee and six acres of that millet stuff and then 75 acres of corn stock. Swath oat pee, we shot for a grazing or what we had was a grazing intensity of 5 AUM per acre on those cover crops, the high quality stuff and then since we had more acres of corn stocks. Now we were doing these at the same time, so the average was about a two. Is really what you get out of that if you do it and then we just give them mineral and salt at lib. You can't possibly write this down in time. But they're going to have a copy but all I did is you just Google Swath Grazing Alberta and you'll get this. Now the government of Saskatchewan and Alberta and Manitoba have worked on swath grazing since I've been married and we've been married 29 years and we ran into this then. And one of the reasons they really did a lot of this, especially in the interim, is mad cow disease because if you lived in Canada and you're a cow calf guy 15 years ago an old cow, killer cow, was worth 7 cents, American. So you've got to take something out of your system in order to be profitable or you've got to get out of the business and this is one way they did it. And they did this couple of these large studies. Somebody showed something from University of Brandon or whatever. It was actually Ag Canada Brandon. It was one of the stations and they took a 600-cow herd and split it into three herds at 200. One set stayed in the feedlot all year. One set feedlot in the winter and they went out into perennial pastures in the summer. The other set at 200 just was in fields, grazing. Annual crops in production fields. The one that performed the best, they went in for five or six weeks and calved them. They went into the buildings. But other than that, they were out doing their thing and the best herd health, the best performance, the best whatever was the ones that were out. The new manager, the Ag Research Center in Rapid City, the western campus of SDSU, so to speak. The livestock people were Kenworks. The new person there, they were hiring. They were interviewing for that position. I was on the committee and we came down to the last two and I asked both of them the question, do you think there'll be feedlots in 40 years? What a curveball, right? If you're somebody applying for a job and some guy asks you that question. One of them answered, the one that actually got the job, immediately said no. And then the follow-up question is how do you change the way you do Ag Research in western South Dakota to get ready for the eventuality of not having calves go right to feedlots? Now, why do I think there probably won't be feedlots in 40 years, 60 years, whatever? Because you've got antibiotic resistance. You've got huge problems with energy to take, you know, do silage. I don't know what your silage cutting costs, Danny. A lot. I mean, that's the way you say that. And bailing and hauling and whatever. And then you have to try to haul the nutrients back out. And we saw the day to day already that if, in fact, cow peas in a feedlot versus peeing out in the field, it's a huge difference in terms of nitrogen. It's a huge difference in terms of phosphorus cycling. So we really don't have a choice. We need to get them back out in the field. I mean, it's not one of those things like we have a choice. It's one of these things that we're going to be forced to do it eventually, so we're better off to do it when we start. So that's a good place. These are really interesting videos. And Raleigh Leesman, who isn't here, but I hope to bring him today, but he's heading to Falls for the wrestling tournament. His son's in the wrestling tournament. And he didn't want to get stuck not being there. But he wintered 400 head of cows on 370 acres of corn. Failed corn this year. He wintered 400 acres of cows on 370 acres of failed corn. He had 370 acres of failed corn north of Blunt. Some gravelly ground got dry. And he wintered his whole herd there.  You know, I told him to build fences and stuff. He didn't necessarily do that, but they're still there. And he said, it's the most money you ever made from corn. And it failed. He got his insurance payment, right? Plus he grazed all these cows. He hadn't fed any hay or any silage all year. And I sent him this link. And then I started getting texts last night. He was watching these videos. And he sent me all these texts and commenting and whatever. And I'm going, OK. This picture was taken just on the outskirts of Lloyd Minster's Saskatchewan about 12 years ago. Lloyd Minster's Saskatchewan is right straight east of Edmonton. Long ways north, right? Long ways north, long ways north of the border, probably four or five hours north of the border. Right on the Alberta Saskatchewan border, the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan goes right through the middle of Lloyd Minster. So it's kind of like Pier Fort Pier only. There's not a river there.  They have been doing this for a long time. They grow corn just to graze. Now, more goats, more cows, more sheep. Why do you say goats? Number one meat eaten in the world is goat. Just so you cowboys don't get too arrogant. In Africa, all the little girls take care of the goats, right? 100% grass-fed ground beef. This was produced in Aberdeen, South Dakota by col-cows in Montana. Bring them to Aberdeen, feed them on cover crops and they're grass-fed because they haven't had grain. Interesting concept. Four bucks a pound. The world's supply of minable fosters will be exhausted in less than 120 years. And the people that have the minable fosters are not our friends. Probably even more so now. Use of perennial sequences or perennial cover crops will probably be necessary to get our nutrient cycling, right? Mother Nature does not do tillage unless it's a catastrophic event and she does not export nutrients. Okay? All tillage tools are soil structure. All tillage tools to treat water infiltration. All tillage tools reduce organic matter and all tillage tools increase weeds. And in Central, South Dakota, we all know this. I'm heading to Missouri next week. They don't know this. They're really slow learners in Missouri. Mother Nature does not care... What was that? Show me. Yeah, show me, right. She does not care which species survive or die, right?  The planet will be fine without us, and that will be without us unless we do something different. Bureaucracies, like universities, governments and corporations are operated by people with limited tenure. Some with shorter tenure than others. Whatever. That joke worked better last week. They have short-term goals, right? They're just thinking about three, four years. In society, landowners, farmers, family farmers, we need to have long-term research, and that's what Dakota Lakes does. Farmers and ranchers harvest sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water produced products we can sell. It doesn't make any difference. Some of this is human food, so we need to be aware of a nutritional issue and its off-site impacts. If we want to eat meat, maybe we should concentrate on growing meat. Instead of corn and barley, it goes to feed lot and feeds to animals. It doesn't make any sense. Peak oil is when you're half done with oil production. In the world, peak phosphorus, we've hit both peak oil and peak phosphorus already. Peak soil. When half of the soil is screwed up, we're probably past that. Nobody is panicked other than me. Take the E out of ET, take the T out of Kant, and remember that doing the right thing environmentally is almost always the correct economic approach in the long run. Think about that one. There. It's supposed to be snowing by now, Danny. I figured, does everybody be heading for the door? I made it really short.