Hi everybody, I'm Jen with opensource.com and I have a brand new top five articles of the week for you today, September 16th. At number five, three open source alternatives to PowerPoint. Looking to give a presentation? Want to use an open source tool to design it? Well, check out these three open source alternatives to PowerPoint from Jason Baker. At number four, to gamify or not to gamify community. This month, Jonah Bacon looks at a bunch of accomplishments to learn how gamification can help onboard new community members. At number three, Linux helped me grow as a musician. Antoine Thomas started using Linux for everything, especially making music. Read on in our latest My Linux Story. At number two, the rise of the shareable document. Using open document formats could create a domino effect where more and more work is modified and shared. Stephen Ovadia explains. And finally, at number one, why would a company not in the business of software development create an open source program office? We look at four big reasons in, four big ways companies benefit from having an open source program office by John Mark Walker. That's it for the top five this week. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope to see you next time. Have a good one.


What's up, everyone? It's your girl, Kenza here from Lane Sports Cards, and I'm repping a couple personal boxes here for Chad C. We've got two 2022 Panini Mosaic Choice baseball boxes, as well as a 2022 Bowman Chrome baseball hobby. All right, we're going to start with the choices. Good luck. Crazy. Of course, Joseph, thanks for hopping in. We've got Silver, Charlie Morton, Mosaic Rookie of Jackson Coor, our Choice Exclusive Jesse Winker for the Mariners, and Clayton Kershaw, Dodgers, Mosaic Rookies of Colton Welker and Rodolfo Castro. First auto up. We have a Lars Nupar on the red. Nice color match there, Cardinals. Lars Nupar. And second auto, going to the Padres on the red, a Reese Nair. All right, let's see a Black and Gold out here. Black and Gold's our number to eight, or a Nebula. I have not pulled a Nebula out of here yet. All right, Silver Rookie, T.J. Friddle, Nikki Lopez Mosaic, our Choice Exclusives Rookie, Rookie's Gabriel Arias, and a Willie Adams. Mosaic Rookie, Wander Franco. Nice one there for you, Chad, and a Jake Berger. Auto time. We've got a Alexander Wells Rookie Auto. Alexander Wells, Orioles. And last auto for Mosaic. We've got red, gray, deepen, Cubbies. All red autos there. There you go, Chad. Solid boxes. Now time for some Bowman Crow. All right, Bowman Crow time. Tucker, Shades of Greatness, Colson Muckammer. We've got Blue Rookie of Jeremy Pena. There you go, Chad. 73 out of 150. The Blue Rookie. Very nice. Rookie of the Year. Quavo Walker, Detmer's Box, and we've got Purple, Patel Marte, D-Bex, 229 of 250. Juan and Prito. Lewis, we've got a Morbell for the Rangers on the first auto. Nice. Nick York, Cabrera. Two some more color. So far, so good on color here. Manning, Vladdy, Rookie, Shades of Greatness, Refractor, O'Neil Cruz. Dela Cruz in Catholic. Got Shimmer of Averson, Artega. White Junior and Mendez. Berger, Moreno, Berra. All right. Second mini box here. A minute queue. All right now, everybody. About 30 minute queue. Shortest it's been for the morning so far. Again, we're ripping till three o'clock, so a few more hours. We have Speckle, Ezekiel Tovar, Rocky. 216 of 299. Rocks, Baker and Zavala. Zavala, make you hollow. Sheets, Marte. We've got a Logan Cerny for the Phillies on the Bowman first auto. Logan Cerny, Linus Hassel, Carson Williams, Shades of Greatness and Victor of Lonnie White, Junior. Crow Armstrong and Volpe. Maybe India. We've got, it came to the league of Henry Davis. Love this insert this year. It's cool. Jay Allen and Frillick.  Ashby, Ezekiel Doran, Paulino and Lorenzo. That'll do it for your baseball boxes there. Solid Boxes, Chad. Thanks as always for hopping in and we'll get these cards right to you.


The following is a presentation of TFNN. Trade what you see with Larry Pezzavento, toll free at 1-877-927-6648 or internationally at<PHONE_NUMBER>. Now, Larry Pezzavento. Okay, looking good, Billy Ray feeling good, Lewis. Well, I got a bunch of questions this morning from you folks, and we're trying to answer them as we go along. The first chart I've posted is what I usually do is the long-term chart on the DAX. And you can see the patterns that have completed up there with the big ABCD patterns occurring. And then if you take a look at the smaller timeframe, the market's down a little bit today, looking at that ABCD on a shorter timeframe. Now, the reason why that is important, if you see that chart in the DAX, all you have to do is to go in last night and you'll be able to see exactly what happened with the E-mini S&P. Let me get this up here. When we hit the 30, can you believe these numbers? 33-36. Folks, on August 16, 1982, they started trading the CME at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The S&P pit opened, and they couldn't get anybody to go in the pit.  I got to be in the picture in the pit like I was doing something, but there was really nothing going on. I don't think they did more than 20 or 30 trades that day, but the S&P was trading at 103, folks, from 103 to 3300. That's how much that thing has jumped since 1982. So that's just a little bit of history that you may or may not be interesting. But you'll notice that that pattern is exactly the same as what happened in the DAX. That's just a shorter-term pattern. And they happen just about everywhere. Now, if you take a look here, we see exactly the same thing in the NASDAQ. We'll get this up here to take a look at it. You'll be able to see that same pattern. And the high so far in the NASDAQ got up to, I think, 9,240. We're a tiny bit under that right now. One of the questions that someone asked is, how does this market compare to what happened with the dot-com bubble in 2000? There's no comparison. The dot-com bubble was a once-in-a-generation or once-in-a-lifetime thing that you'll probably never see again. I mean, we're talking 20 years ago, but these companies didn't even have sales. All they had was possible sales, and they were doubled in price. And this went on for just about two years, from 98 into March of 2000. And then in March of 2000, on the 24th of March, that's when the top of the NASDAQ came in. At 5,000, and here we are at 9,000. So you can see the move that we've had, but the market went from 5,000 down to 1,000. After that dot-com bubble popped, and the market broke into 2002, and then the market changed direction. Getting back to 2002, this was the SARS epidemic. I was in Guangzhou, China, where it started. During that time, and I did not know anything of what was going on. I was there for 10 days. I spoke at three universities in Guangzhou, and then I went on to Wuhan, where this coronavirus is right now. And all during that time in 2002, we never heard anything. There was nothing. The reason why I'm bringing this to your attention goes back to the next thing I want to talk about, and that is data coming out. In 2003, I was in Beijing, and I was giving a speech to the graduate students there, and one of the professors took me over to the economics department, where they issued all these reports, pretty much like our—I can't remember the name of the department it is, but it's where all the reports come out. The professor, Andy, told me, he said, look, these reports are ridiculous. And I said, why? He said, well, they make them up. He said, the numbers don't even—he said, they can't possibly fit. He said, but you can't change them. He said, because this is what we have to go on. And he told me what the number was going to be before it ever came out, and it was within 0.001% of exactly what it was supposed to be. So when you hear things in the news, and believe me, remember yesterday, I showed you how four companies control the media, and when you toss in Google and Facebook, I mean, they control it all. And that's why you see so much fake news and stuff out there. So be really careful about what you listen to and what you think is right.  Now, today, on Davos, you know, I love to look at that show, because I've been to Davos, and it's just an incredible place right there in the middle of the Alps, colder than a grave digger's butt, but it's really pretty cool. But when you listen to every single person that was on there, it just gave a rosy outlook. There was not one person in there that said, gee, you know, maybe we're a little extended here. Nobody, not one person. In two days that I've been looking at this, that anything even remotely, and Ray Dalio, who's usually quite conservative, was very, very bullish, and Paul Tudor Jones was on, and it was very, very bullish. And they're right. This thing might go up for another year. I don't know. What I do is when the market moves, I just try to look at the patterns that allow me to enter and don't have to. I don't have to risk very much. We went short on Sunday night at a very nice price of $33.28. The market broke down to $33.08, and we ended up being out of that trade and break even. And may or may not have been a big one. I don't know, but that's just what I have to do. I look at the patterns, and you see them just over and over again, and that's what you're really, really watching. But we're accelerating today. I did want to bring up the Dow because it's been a tad weaker. I'll bring this up to show you what we're watching here just a second. Yeah, and folks, let me ask you a question. Bring us to your attention. Nine people have died in Wuhan when this coronavirus started. Do you realize that there's 1.4 billion people in China? They talk to us about nine people. Well, something is going on here. It must be very, very serious. And the reason why is we've got the Chinese New Year starting on the 25th into that new moon. And so that's a big thing. China is going to be closed for three or four days. And you've got 300 million people in China who will be traveling over that time frame. So this is what they're concerned about is the fact that this thing might be very, very... They don't have a cure for it, of course, but it might be very, very... move around quite a bit. So travel can really mess things up. Also, just for your information, is that they're out of these face masks that they use for covering your mouth and surgery and stuff. They're out of those. You can't buy them at Hong Kong. They're completely out of masks. And so I don't know what it is in China, but the people are scared and they probably should be. Well, I remember SARS was pretty much supposedly destroyed the world, but it actually didn't. So just remember that what you hear in the news is really quite amazing. In fact, when I heard Donald Trump today talk about the Dow should be 10,000 points higher, I said, by golly, that sounds pretty good. I remember Irving Fisher from Princeton University was talking about the stock market in September 1929 and said it reached a permanent high,<PHONE_NUMBER>. Keep those cards and letters coming in, folks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, corn's been holding up pretty good. We had a breakdown of beans we'll talk about in just a little bit, but this is an interesting pattern here on the daily chart. You can see up around, we're 9 cents higher this morning, folks. We hit 591 in the wheat, but what we want to do is to go in and look at it on a little bit longer time frame. We'll just get this March wheat up so you'll be able to see it and you'll be able to see that we are completing a beautiful ABCD pattern up in this area. So we should pay close attention to that because it's when we've been very bullish wheat, as you know, we got out of it, of course, quite a bit lower of 570 or so, but now we're up into that 590 level. And so it looks like it's going to be very interesting to see if that's going to be, look about to see that's going to work. David has posted a really cool quote here, one of my favorite authors, Mark Twain. Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. And that's what I got out of that thing at Davos today is that everybody was just, it was almost like, and not only that, but I was very impressed with the fact that President Trump was so well-received considering he's got so much on his plate and, you know, under impeachment over here. And so it was really quite amazing. The fact that the stock market is this strong is a tribute to our economy and we'll see. But the problem that I see is the, you know, how people understand what the Fed is. And here's where we have some great news for you, folks. Let me get this up here. This is a chart that I posted yesterday from our good friend and colleague, Shane Smollion, from the Wolf Trader. And we are going, debt is, you're right, Marshall, debt's where it's at. But you'll notice here that we are, you know, time where the Fed is still pumping. But Shane is going to be our guest, I believe, next Wednesday. We're going to have him on for the whole show, I believe.  We're going to have an active day that day because that's a day that we have him on plus some other things that are going on. So we'll make sure that we'll be real well-prepared for that. All right. The next one, we talked about the wheat. We got that taken care of. Now let's talk about Mr. Elon. Oh, we want to do the, want to do the footsie here. Wow, this is the footsie weekly chart. Here again, you see the Gartley pattern that is here. It's actually backed off from that level already this week. In fact, it's only been the U.S. markets that have been going nuts.  Ours might go up forever. If it does, that'll be probably a good thing. But when forever is over, that's when you have to worry. So we'll do one at a time. Let's take a look here at Tesla. I wanted to get this up here because it's very important. The reason why I think this is important, you notice here the 1.618. Tesla today folks is trading at, I believe 375. It's up $30, $30 higher than the 1.618. Now remember, we went from 547 all the way down to 498. Remember, we dropped that and then bada bing, bada boom. News comes out and he goes crazy. And then today, Mr. Trump gave him a very glowing report of how well he's doing. And he has to be a genius. I mean, this company was almost ready to go bankrupt about two years ago. And here it is now larger than Ford and General Motors combined. That's just amazing. $100 billion value. The only car company in the world that is bigger than them is Volkswagen. And that has a lot of different divisions. So who knows? In that little book only yesterday that talks about the things that was happening during 1929, people don't recall this, but there were over 2,000 automobile companies folks. And during that time, of course, it got down to three a little bit, a few 60, 70 years later. But that's neither here nor there. But if you stop and think what was happening during the 30s, folks, we were having electricity. My gosh, we were having refrigerators that you didn't have to put ice on the top. We had the telephone. Oh, my gosh. And we had the radio was starting to explode. And just shortly after that, the television came in in the late 50s. So this was a time that things went crazy. And yet the stock market gave back 90% of its value in 1929. I'm not saying this is 1929. I'm just saying that the market's a tad bit a little bit overexuberant. But hey, you can stay overexuberant for a long time. So we'll move on here and talk just a little bit about one other thing that I think is pretty important here. I posted the chart at Tesla. I wanted to make sure I did that. And I did that one. What was the other one? Oh, this is the one I wanted to mention. This is the one that's, if you like Fibonacci boys and girls, this is the one because it's either going to fish or cut bait on this one. This is the coffee. We've been talking about this for well over a week, well, two weeks probably, but watch this 111. We've been here now for three days at 111. This is either really strong support at 61% or its distribution. So keep an eye on the coffee. If you bought it at 111, your stops got to be at like 109. You've got to risk two cents in coffee, which is roughly $700. So that's the only way you can do it. The good part is you don't have to own a coffee plantation. You can just buy a future.  You don't have to worry about somebody sharecropping it or anything for you. So you actually own it. So that's what we're watching in coffee, whether that's going to mean much or not. We have to wait and see. If you remember, yesterday we were talking about the soybeans and wanted to make sure we get up here. Oh dear, just a second here. I wanted to correct that. Where is the soybean? Yeah, here we go. Here's that soybean chart. And I want to get it up here to give you an idea here. Here is the soybeans. You'll notice we said it had to hold that 19 level and it didn't. It broke below it. Now we're trading at 9.19 again today. But that's basically a risk-free trade if you're going to do something like that. Because this market actually rallied about almost 20 cents up to 9.36 before it reversed. And that's what these numbers and patterns tell you is how much you have to risk. They do have some predictive value, but it's the question there. It's some. It's not all the time. You have to absolutely remember that. Here's a, David posted a short history of financial euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith. Well, I really liked him. When I was in Indiana, he spoke there several times. One of my, I've told this before, but it's worth it. He was speaking to a graduate class in MBAs and he said, you'll learn more about going in and shorting a contract of soybeans than you ever will in two years of graduate school. And basically what he was referring to, it'll teach you about money management and risk and assessment of risk. And that's what he was referring to. He actually studied a great deal of, and I didn't know this until much later. He studied a great deal of John Michelle's work from the dimensions of paradise. So that's really, I'm going to do the Japanese yen next. Marshall, as soon as the break comes back, I want to do the relationship between that so that, you know, that's what we'll be watching. So anyway, we'll get back to you with this, the thing with the Japanese yen and gold and also in the stock market because there's a lot of talk about that. And I think we've got one more thing to cover. Let me post a chart here for the gold and we'll talk about that when we get back to the, for the break. Larry Pezzavento has just announced a special 90 minute live webinar taking place this month for subscribers to his Fibonacci 24-7 trading service. On January 29th from four till 5.30 p.m. Larry will be covering how to read supply and demand and how in combination with his trademark ABCD patterns, you can control risk and maximize profit in today's algo dominated markets. In this live 90 minute webinar, Larry will cover a hidden in plain sight trend change pattern that gives you early entry into the trend, how to find and update the key harmonic numbers to trade against in futures, forex and stocks, how to translate three go to patterns into supply and demand and how to use them for entries, the continued importance of the opening price in 2020 and how to use the time of day when taking a position and for entry into longer trends. Sign up now by clicking on the newsletter tab on the front page of tfnn.com and select Fibonacci 24-7. Sign up today. 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Don't miss out on this incredible new piece of software. Get your copy of the Art of Timing the Trade Charts today by visiting tfnn.com. This segment is brought to you by Think or Swim. For more information, just click the Think or Swim banner on the front page of tfnn.com. All right, folks, we're back. And I posted a chart of the Japanese yen versus the US dollar. And overlaid on that is the price of gold. What's interesting about this is you can see that there's a very high correlation. And we also have that Japanese yen has a high correlation with the risk-on formula that they have whenever the yen is in a position where it's strengthening. What happens is that the market usually, stock markets usually rally because people borrow against the yen because it's at zero interest rates and they can take that money whenever that story happens to be. I'm a technician. I don't understand the fundamentals of it. But that's it. But what's interesting about this is you're seeing a divergence here now where the yen is moving one way and gold is moving the other. That's highly unusual. And here we are at a time when we're completing a whole bunch of patterns. I don't know what that means, but all I do know is if gold can get above 1575, then it's got a chance to turn bullish. But right now it's still in that negative spiral that we see because of that last five-day rally that we had that ended yesterday up at 1569. Then we dropped down to 1564. Hold on. Something's beeping to tell me, ah, that's it. That's what I wanted to hear. Hold on one second, folks. I have to be able to do something here. Very interesting today to keep an eye on the... Hold on one second here. Sorry. It's to keep an eye on the bonds because we're at a very, very critical level in those bonds up here at 158.25. We just took out those highs last week. We need the bonds to get moving rapidly. Rapidio otherwise is going to be a bigger drop than what we might have thought. So let's keep a very close eye on that. I hate to repeat that because you get these things in your vocabulary. Like, repeat that, or I'm only going to say this once, you know, that type of thing. And I say it more than once, whatever. We've had a question about natural gas, and I really... I'm going to cover natural gas right here, just right now. Remember, we're searching for a bottom here in natural gas. And believe me, when I say searching for a bottom, I don't mean loosely because we've had some really wild swings here since Sunday night. Let's get up here and take a look at natural gas. You'll see Sunday, on the 19th of January, we broke down all the way to this level right here, which was down. We were down $2,000 in natural gas, folks. And now we've gained 1,000 of it back, but we had a rally up to 195. It rallied 12 cents. It came down to the 61% retracement, 187. We're now trading at 191. What I'm watching for on this 15-minute chart is a really clear ABCD pattern and a fib point. Because if I get that, that's all I need to know because I can read the charts clearly because that's the sum total of all the buyers and sellers. That's not a problem. But if I see that pattern, much like we looked at in the S&P last night when it was at $33.35, you'd have to risk more than $0.03 on that, folks, because the $33.35 was a 1.618 expansion of the interday move so if it gets above that, the 1.618 has failed in Bada Bing, Bada Boom. You know, it's no good. Look what's happened to the 1.618s in Apple and Google and they destroyed them. Tesla, all of them have been destroyed. And Google gapped above the 1.618 level. So you have to think that these stocks could certainly be in a meltdown situation. We don't know, but the good part is nobody else does either. So what you really want to watch is to see how the overall situation gives you risk control. That's the whole thing of what we're really watching in here. Yes, oil is, after we hit, I think we've talked about this several times. Let's just review the oil market here because it's another one that here you had the most bullish possible things here. Get this up here to see where we are here. And I got this put up here so it'll be able to see it. Here's oil. You'll notice that that 57 level is so critical. We're trading below 58 now, 57 and change. Below 57, folks, is not good for the oil market. The reason why is you completed that big ABCD move up there when we had the thing that's been two weeks ago for heaven's sakes with the Iranian situation, whatever that was. Now that's not even in news anymore. Now we've got the flu, whatever. And here again, you've got these four companies that control all the news. Disney, Comcast, Telecom. I can't remember the third one or the fourth one, but they basically have control over the network. So whether free speech is going down the sidelines along with gun control, I don't know. All I do know is below 57 in the crude oil is not very good, especially after a three-day rally that really went nowhere. That's all I'm looking at. So I hope that helps, but it certainly doesn't look very bullish. And believe me, folks, no problem, Terry, happy to help on. Remember, Terry said, thanks for your thoughts on natural gas. That's exactly what they are, Terry. They're thoughts. I'm just looking at the charts. I have never seen a natural gas, well, I've probably seen a natural gas canister, but I don't know anything about it. The fundamentals, I don't know the contract size. All I know is $100 a point. And that's all I really need to know. I don't really need to know more than that. Just like Curly from City Slickers, he always held up one finger and he says, what does that mean? He said, do one thing and do it right. And that's what you try to do. The difference, folks, between when you first start trading and someone's been trading a long time is when you trade and realize that you're wrong, the older trader versus the guy that gets started, the neophyte, the difference is the older trader, he gets out of his losses faster. And that's the real difference. The fact is there's a quote that David used just the other day that I thought was pretty cool. And where did I write it? I even wrote the darn thing down. Where did I write it down? Oh, put it in the file. In other words, it's the man who loses the quickest is the better, the one who loses the fastest because he gets out of his position. So it's all about risk control, folks. No one can tell you what's going to happen next. Some people can think that they do, but not necessarily it's going to happen. That's a main thing to keep in mind as we're looking at these markets. I wanted to cover another one of the markets that we've been following for quite some time, and that is the hog market here. And we'll get this up here to tell you where we are here. We're trading around 75 right now. We almost made that exact 786 again, but it's holding as long as hogs can do that, but that's fine. Here's another example. When we had the Asian hog thing, you know, hogs were going to go up forever. And what did they do? They dropped in half. So be really careful with the news. And that's, if you read that book, Reminisances of a Stock Operator. I mean, that's just, it's just unbelievable. Oh boy. Oh, Crude's at 57.15. Thank you, Bob. That's a very nice thing to say today. Okay. That's good. Below 57. Watch it real close because it's either going to stop right at 57. And we'll see. Someone alert me if we get below that level. I'd like to, I'd like to know that. And we'll see a little bit here. Okay. Let's move back here. Yeah. 57. 50. Wow. We really got a, well, let's take a quick look at this oil, just, just why we can keep an eye on it. Hold on a second. Alrighty. We're making a big ABC down here. Let's do the hourly chart here quickly, folks. And I'll push it up and we'll, we'll see where we are. Oh, we're almost at the 786. That's that key number. Let's get it up here. And then we will see why we're looking at it. Oh, we have just broken it. Let's take a look at this when we get back from the break because this is at the moment of truth.  According to bankrate.com, the best rate for a four-year CD in the country as of February 20th is 3.1%. A $50,000 investment at a normal four-year CD rate of 3.1% would give you income of $1,550 per year or $6,200 over the four-year period. That same $50,000 investment in the Tiger First mortgage program would give you $3,500 per year or $14,000 over the four years. What should you prefer? $6,200 or $14,000 of interest on your investment. 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The funds are designed to be utilized only by sophisticated investors such as traders and active investors, distributor for side fund services, LLC. The Bull Bear Trading Hour with Tom and Tommy O'Brien. Next. Okay, folks, let's get up here. We'll take a quick look at this oil market. I want to bring it to your attention here. If you'll notice here, as we look at the longer-term chart here, this goes back over the last month or so. This is just a 60-minute chart. You see the low we made down there, 55-20. Then we had the thing with the Saudis. It rallied $10, and now we've given it back. Now we're breaking below the 78% level, folks. That's a very, very, very sign. And when you add to this the fact that if you just took a look at what our prediction was using AI, you'll notice that this was for a move down and we're now breaking. We're going to be below 5,700. It looks pretty closely through here. What I watch on these smaller-term charts is I watch how it repeats over and over again. And when you see that repetition, that gives you a chance to be looking at either being a buyer or seller. That's the real main thing. You notice when the market opens, as soon as the stock market opens, the algo traders come in and start buying, and they push it up very, very quickly. They're controlling the market a lot, folks. You've got to pay attention to that opening price in everything, not just the stocks. But when the market opens, that's when those orders are coming in, and that's what makes it pretty exciting as we look at some of these things unfolding here during the day. Let's keep an update of where we are here. We got as low as didn't do anything. If we get below 33.28 today, there might be a down day, half of a down day in the market, but we'll have to wait and see. Someone's asked me a question about the situation with gold. I mentioned it before. We need gold to get above $15.75. Right now, it's acting like it's making some type of a bottom in here, because yesterday's low was exactly a $618 of the move that we had from $15.43 up to $15.69. We pulled back right to the $618 at $15.48, and now we're trading about $10, $11 higher, so it's held that level. If it can test it one more time, then it's got a real chance. Those are just a few of the things that we want to be watching. I think that's what I would be paying attention to if I were a person that watched these markets closely, which I do. I do not watch them 24 hours a day, folks. I know you get those of you that subscribe to 24.7, they'll get things in the middle of the night. That's because I get up because Mother Nature, as you get older, the gravity part of your body as water goes downhill, as they say. Then when I come back to look at the prices, I can see if anything's really exciting. That's when I was watching the S&P last night up at that $33.36. We'll see if, in fact, that's going to be the case. We'll do one thing at a time here as we come through, and let's take a look here. Oh, you know, folks, I just want to reiterate, paying very, very close attention to the Treasury bonds. We're trading at 158.24. We've been as high as 158.26. That's a really key level. We took out the highs of the other day, and we'll see if that's going to mean anything. I know that everybody's watching the longer term. Let's just get this up here so we can look at this longer term chart on the bonds. And I wanted to show you where we are. Just give me one second, because there's a lot of people that are... This is a weekly chart. Yeah, well, you know, I've got one of those... Hold on a second here. I've got one of those new smartphones. You'll notice here in the long term weekly bonds, we did make a 382 retracement down there, so that has potential to be pretty bullish. But right now, it's taken nine days to move... This is weeks. It's taken eight weeks to get out of that low. That doesn't tell you that something's going to happen. But anything below 156 in those bonds would really, really be bad. We're trading 158.25 right now. So that's why we're looking at it. The top of the bonds was made four years ago, folks, up at 176. Then we made a 78% retracement with open interest dropping. By the way, open interest in all of the stock indices yesterday, and then that big up move, all open interest was increasing. So there was no indication there was short covering in there. But we've had a lot of short covering in the... Over the last month or so in the S&P, because we were at 3 million open interest, and now we're at 2.7 million. So we lost 300,000 contracts somewhere during that December going off the board. So that's what we're keeping an eye on here as we look at a few of these other things that we're paying attention to. Okay, we've got the oil trading at 5709. We're about ready to break below 57, and that's going to be an interesting thing, because we've already broken the 78% level. So we need to watch that closely also. Alrighty, let's move over here to just a little bit. Here's why I'm so interested in the bonds. There's a little tour here of what I'm watching. This is the forecast that I'm looking at today, and you'll see here that sometime around 10.30, let's say 11 o'clock, right around 11 o'clock, which is about an hour and 10 minutes from now, these bonds might start to move lower. We've taken out the highs the previous days and also last week's high. And if it doesn't keep charging ahead by 11 o'clock, that's going to tell you that they're selling coming in and you want to pay close attention to that. All right, someone's asked a question about the Euro. God bless these calls. Keep coming in, Al. I'm sorry to keep you swamped, buddy, but what can you do? What can you do? All right, let's move over here to the Euro. It's always a fun one to watch, and there it is. This is where I think we're going in the Euro. It is down to the 110. In fact, I think we're pretty close to there right now. I think that's pretty much where it's at, because I haven't updated it yet, because we've been coming down quite a bit. I believe we're really close to 110, 11070. I think that's where we are. Someone has to check it for me, but that's where we're headed. That's where the U.S. dollar will decide, you know, which direction it was going to go. And if you looked at this U.S. dollar chart, we highlighted that when it was happening, and the fact that it made a beautiful 382 retracement that took five days to complete, and then it exploded to the upside and it's continued to go higher as we speak. So that's what it looks like in the Euro. We're seeing the same thing. We're having a little bit of strength in the British pound. It's holding up relatively well. But the Australian dollar backed off, the Canadian, all of them, the Japanese yen, you can see it's having some trouble at that 110 level. That's another thing that's a little bit troubling of what's going on in somebody's market. So let's see what's happened. So we'll see. But tomorrow, okay, we're getting really close to it, Bob. Yeah, we're very close to that level in the Euro right now, so we need to be watching it in this next day or two. But I think the ones to key on today is the bond market, of course, and that's the one that I focus on because that's pretty big money in there. Remember the bonds trade about six times as much as the E-minis, open interest? So it's a big market and that's where the debt is. So we'll watch that. Tomorrow, we'll have Storm and Norman Nixon. He played for the Lakers. Storm and Norman Winsky will be our guest from Astro Trend. Is that what you say? Astro Trend? And then on Friday, we'll have Tom Hougard as our guest. That's what I'm planning. He's back from vacation, so hopefully if he's got the time, he'll be able to do it. But the main thing is we've got Shane Smollion next Wednesday, the 29th, and that'll be a really interesting show because he's got so much stuff that is, that is useful that it's really a lot of fun. So let's take a look.<PHONE_NUMBER>. Author of Mastering Probability. And for the last 12 months, Timer Digest has been tracking my newsletter signals which have earned me the ranking as their number one market timer in the nation for the S&P 500 for the last 12, 6, and 3 months. Timer Digest also ranks me as the number one market timer for gold as well. The fact is, markets can be timed and I'll teach you the exact set of tools that I use that has transformed me into one of the best at what I do. Sign up for Mastering Probability today by clicking on the newsletter tab on the home page of TFNN.com and get immediate access to workshops where I take you step by step how to use an extraordinary set of tools as well as provide great market calls too. Sign up today. If you haven't checked out the newsletters page of TFNN.com, what are you waiting for? All of the TFNN newsletters are informative, up to date, affordable, and must have for every trader looking to gain a competitive informational edge in today's markets. TFNN newsletters cover every aspect of the markets to offer you the very latest in market news. Plus, new subscribers get to test drive our newsletters risk-free for 30 days. From all aspects of the markets, including stocks, bonds, metals, commodities, and tech, there's a newsletter to fit your needs exclusively from TFNN. Stay informed each day you trade and get the competitive edge to help you stay ahead of the game. Visit our newsletters page by going to TFNN.com and click the newsletters button near the top of the page. TFNN.com Educating Investors Since 1984, Basil Chapman has been using the Chapman Wave methodology to advise traders of his expert market opinion. While originally hand-drawing charts from the late 1970s into the 1980s, Basil noticed that prices under most circumstances virtually always had a certain number of legs to the upside before declining sharply. Later, Basil found that computer software which included the standard market technical indicators enhanced the degree of accuracy in calling price turns as well as market trend calls. Thus was born the Chapman Wave sequence. Using the Chapman Wave methodology along with other indicators, Basil Chapman advises his subscribers of his expert market opinion each market day with his opening call newsletter. Right now, you can get a two-week free trial to the opening call Basil's daily trading newsletter by visiting the front page of TFNN.com. Cancel it anytime during that trial and pay absolutely nothing. Get your two-week free trial to Basil's newsletter of the opening call today by visiting TFNN.com. This segment is brought to you by Think or Swim. For more information, just click the Think or Swim banner on the front page of TFNN.com. Okay, we're back folks. Let's get back into this. Yeah, the bonds, watch the bonds at 11 o'clock folks. If they're under 158 24, that's going to be very, very negative. In my opinion, of course, opinions are like armpits. Everybody has one and it usually smells. Let's take a quick look here at another one that hit a really nice number here this morning that we follow quite closely here is the British Pound. As you can see, we got up to that 1.3150. We've only sold off about 20 or 30 pips in that level, but that's telling you if we get above the 1.3150, it could be quite bullish and if you look at it really closely from where we were on the 20th, you'll notice that it's made a really nice ABCD so it tells us we got some resistance. You'll notice that these dark black lines you see coming down, those are just the harmonic numbers in the British Pound. It keeps repeating over and over again over a whole period of time. You can see that it's been falling exactly the same time and then once you took out that high, it changed the vibration and that's what it does. It either expands or contracts and that's why you want to pay attention to harmonic numbers because they do expand and contract, but they do it in the natural part of the market. What I'm saying is we have a harmonic number in gold that is, say 34 half of that is 17 and you can see that the harmonic number is about $11 in gold and that's for the shorter term training of course but that's it. I know I was never a Laker fan. I was a fan of the Boston Celtics number 33 Larry Bird from French Lick, Indiana. Got to meet that guy a couple of times at his birthday party. He was born on December the 4th but his parties were on July the 4th because the Celtics were always playing in December so we had a big party next Gibson's farm catfish fry and everything. Okay, let's move on.  Al, you're going to have to turn off the radio show here for the board. We're no more people calling in today so we'll watch it closely. Anyway live every day in an attitude of gratitude my friends and may God bless and try to do something for someone that doesn't have as much as you and you'll feel a lot better. May God bless. Thank you.


Hey, everyone, welcome back to Chicago. TheCube is excited to be live on day two of Ansible Fest 2022. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here, having some great conversations. A lot of CUBE alumni, a lot of wisdom from the Ansible community coming at you on this program this week. You know, John, we've been hearing stories about the power and the capabilities and the collective wisdom of the Ansible community. You can feel it here. There's no doubt about that. It's Ansible is nothing, as Stephanie Chair said yesterday, it's not a community. And the significant contributions that it makes over and over again are its fuel. I mean, the power of the community is what drives Ansible. It's going to drive the future of, I think, cloud in our next generation, modern application environment. And it's collective intelligence. It's a production system at the end of the day. And I think these guys have harnessed it. So it should be a really great segment to talk about all the contributor work that's been done. So I'm looking forward to it. We've got two great alumni here to talk about the contributor work, how you can get involved. Please welcome back to the CUBE Carol Chen, principal community architect at Red Hat. Adam Miller joins us as well, fresh from the keynote stage, senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you on the CUBE. Great to be here. Thank you. So we've enjoyed your keynotes, Adam, and what you were talking about on stage. The Ansible contributor summit, that summit, you guys have been doing what, this is the seven? You've had seven so far in just a couple of years? Well, we had seven virtual contributors. Seven virtual, this is the first Monday, was the first in-person. The first in-person since the pandemic, and actually the 15th contributor summit overall. 15th overall. Talk about these contributor summits, what the contributors are able to do, and the influence that it's having on Ansible, Red Hat, and what people are able to do with cloud at the edge automation. So our community contributors have always had ways to influence and contribute to the project, but the contributor summit is really a place where we can get people together, preferably in the same place so that we can have really great dynamic conversations and interactions, but we also want to make sure that we don't leave out people who have been constantly online joining us. So this year, we are so happy to be here in Chicago in person, we've had about 60 to 70 here joining us, and at first I thought maybe we would have one-third of the attendees joining online because about 30 to 40 people signed up to join online, but in the end we have more than 100 per people watching our live stream. So that's more than half of the attendees overall were joining us online. So this really shows where the contributors are interested in participating. Right, from around the world. It's been interesting, it's been since 2019, since the in-person Ansible Fest in Atlanta now, we're in Chicago, we had the pandemic. Couple interesting observations from our side that I want to get your reaction to, Adam Carroll, and that is one, Ansible's relevance has grown significantly since then, just from a cloud growth standpoint, developer, open source standpoint, and how people work and collaborate has changed. So your contributor base in your community is getting more powerful and scope in my opinion, like as they become, have the keys to the kingdom in their respective worlds as it gets bigger and larger. So the personas are changing, the makeup of the community is changing, and also how you guys collaborate is changing. Can you share what's going on with those two dynamics? I think that power dynamic is looking really good. How are you guys handling that? Yeah, so I mean, I had the opportunity to represent the community on stage yesterday as part of the keynote and talk to this point specifically, is one of the things that we've seen is the project has had the opportunity to kind of grow and evolve. There's been certain elements that have had to kind of decompose. From a technology perspective, we actually had to kind of break it apart and change the architecture a little bit and move things into what are called Ansible Collections, which folks here are very familiar with, know and love, and we've seen a lot of community work in the form of working groups coalesced around those organically. However, they've done so in kind of different ways. They pick tools and collaboration platforms that are popular to their subject matter expertise audience and things like that. So we find ourselves in a place where kind of the community itself had more or less segmented naturally, in a way, and we needed to find ways to kind of heal that fragmentation. It's by demographics or by expertise or both. Mostly expertise. And so there was an open source technology called Matrix. It is an open source, standardized, federated messaging platform that we were able to use to start to bridge back some of those communities that had kind of broken off and made their own home elsewhere on the internet. So now we're able to, for example, the Right the Docs organization, they had a group of people who was very interested in contributing to the Ansible documentation, but they had already self-organized on Discord. And what was interesting there is the existing team for the Ansible documentation, they were already on internet relay chat, also known as IRC, and Matrix allowed us to actually bring those two together and bridge that into the other Matrix channels that we had. So now we're able to have people from all over the world in different areas, in different platforms, coalesce, and cross-pollinate, yeah. And you're meeting the contributors exactly where they are and where they want to be, where they're comfortable. Yes, yeah. We always say we reach out to where they are, so. And much in the way that Ansible has the capability to reach out to things in their own way and allow that subject matter expertise to, because the technology has the potential and possibility and capability to talk to anything over any protocol, we're able to do kind of the same thing with Matrix, allowing us to bridge into any chat platform that it has support for bridging, and we're able to bring a lot of people together. And how's that, what's the feedback been on that so far? I think it's been very positive. For example, I want to highlight that the technical writers that we have contributing via Discord is actually a group from Nigeria. And they've also participated in the Contributor Summit online, virtually, joining us on the Matrix platform. So that bridge that really helps to bring together people from different geographical regions and also different topics and arenas like that, so. What were some of the outcomes of the Contributor Summit, the first in-person in a while? Great that you guys were able to do seven virtually during the pandemic. That's hard, it's hard to get people together. There's so much greatness and innovation that comes when we're all together in-person that you just can't replicate by video, you can do a lot. But talk about some of the outcomes from Monday. What were some of the feedback? What were some of the contributions that you think are really going to impact the community? I think for a lot of us, myself, and through the fact that we are in-person and meeting people face to face, it helps to really build the connections. And when we talk about contribution, the connection is so important that you understand this person a little bit about their background, what they have done for the Ansible Project, and just generally what they're interested in. That builds the rapport and connection that helps further collaboration in the future. Because maybe on that day, we did not have any contributions or anything, but the fact that we had a chance to sit together in the same place to discuss things and share new ideas, roadmaps, is really kind of a big step to the future for our community. And in a lot of ways, we often online, the project has various elements that are able to function asynchronously. So we work very well globally across many time zones, and now we were able to get a lot of people in the same place at the same time synchronously, in the same time zone. And then we had breakout sessions where the subject matter working groups were able to kind of go and focus on things that maybe have been taking a little while to discuss in that asynchronous form of communication and do it synchronously, and be in the same room and work on things. It's been fantastic. Well, developers, they take to asynchronous, like fish to water, it's not a problem, but I do want to ask if there's any observations that you guys have had now that we're kind of coming out of that one wave of the pandemic, but the world's changed hybrid work environment, steady state, so we see that. Any observations on your end on what's new that you've observed, that people are gravitating through sort of pattern of styles, or same old self-governing, or what's new? What have you seen that's coming out of the pandemic that might be a norm? I think that even though people are excited to get back in person, there are things have changed, like you said, and we have to be more aware of there are people who think that not being in person is okay, and that's how they want to do it, and we have to make sure that they are included, so we did want to make a high priority for online participation in this event, and like I said, even though only 30, 40 people signed up to join us online initially, so that was what we were expecting, but in the end, more than 100 people were watching us and joining participation in discussions. I'm sure the on-demand consumption would be good too. Right, yeah, so I think going forward that is probably the trend, and as much as we love being in person, we want this to continue that we take care of people who are, has been constantly participating online and contributing. You're meaning, again, meaning folks where they are, but also allowing those members that want to get together to collaborate in person, I can only imagine the innovation that's going to come, even from having part of the back. Right, and not to continue to harp on the matrix point, but it's been very cool because Matrix has the ability to do live video sessions using another to open source technology called JITSY, so we're able to actually use the same place that we normally find ourselves congregating and collaborating for the project itself in an asynchronous and somewhat synchronous way to also host these types of things that are now hybrid that used to be all one way or all the other, and it's been incredible. The integration has been fascinating to watch how you guys do that, and also with theCUBE, we've been virtual too.  Hey, if you want to be on Discord, be on Discord, why not? And we do still have our asynchronous forms of work through GitHub, we have our projects, we have issues, we have our Wiki, we have various elements there that everybody can continue to collaborate on, and it's all been very good. Speaking of festivals, Hacktoberfest is going on. Not to be confused with Octoberfest, that was last month. Talk about how the Ansible project and the Ansible community is involved in Hacktoberfest. Give us the deeds, Carol. So yes, Hacktoberfest is an annual thing in October, so October, Hacktoberfest. I think it's organized by Digital Ocean for the past eight or nine years, and it's really a way to kind of encourage people to contribute to open source projects, so it's not Ansible specific, but we as an Ansible project encourage people to take this opportunity to, you know, a lot of them doing their first contributions during this event. And when we first announced we are participating in Hacktoberfest within the first four days of October, which is over a weekend actually, we've had 24 contributions, it's 24 issues fixed, which is like amazing, like, you know, just the interest and the momentum that we had. And so far until I just checked with my teammates this morning that we've had about 35 contributions so far during the month, which is, and I'm sorry, I forgot to mention, this is only for Ansible documentation. So yeah, specifically, and that's also one thing we want to highlight that contributions don't just come in code in, you know, kind of software side, but really there's many ways to contribute and documentation is such a great way for first time users, for first time contributors to get involved. So it's really amazing to see these contributions from all over the world and also partly thanks to the technical riders in Nigeria kind of promoting and sharing this initiative and it's just great to see the results from that. Can you double click on the different ways of contribution? You mentioned a couple, documentation being one code being the other, but what is the breadth of opportunities that the contributors have to contribute to the project? There's so many. So I actually take care of more of outreach efforts in the community. So I helped to organize events and meetups from around the world. And now that we're slowly coming out of the pandemic, I've seen more and more in-person meetups. I was just talking to someone from Minneapolis, they're trying to get people back together again. There are people in Singapore, in Netherlands, from pretty much, you know, all corners of the globe, wanting to form not just for the Ansible project, but the local kind of connection with the people in the region, sometimes in their own language, in their local languages to really work together on the project and just, you know. You have to create a global network. I mean, it's like Ansible Global. Yeah, exactly. You can create local subnets, not to get on networking networks. Right, yeah. Backbone. Yeah, one quick thing, I want to touch on the Hectoberfest. I think it's a great opportunity for existing contributors to mentor. Because many people like to help bring in new contributors, and this is kind of a focal point to be able to focus on that. And then to the other point, it's been extremely powerful to see as we return, these sub-communities pop up and kind of work with themselves. So on different ways to contribute. So code is kind of the one that gets the most attention, I think. Documentation, I think, is a unsung hero, highly important, great way. The logistical component, which is invaluable because it allows us to continue with our adoption and evangelization and things like that. Specifically adoption and evangelization is another place that contributors can join and actually spawn a local meetup. And then connect in with the existing community and try to help increase the network, create a new subnet. Network affects huge. And I think the thing that you brought up about reuse is part of that whole things get documented properly. The leverage that comes out of that just feeds into the system, the flywheel. I mean, that's how communities are supposed to work, right? Yes. That's what I was just going to comment on is the flywheel effect. It's clearly present and very palpable. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the program talking about the contributor summit, the ways of contribution, the impacts that are being made so far, what Hacktoberfest is already delivering, and we still have about 10 days or so left in October, so there's still more time for contributors to get involved. Thank you so much for your insights and your time. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. Our pleasure. For our guests on John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago, day two of our coverage of Red Hat Ansible Summit 22. We will see you right after this short break with our next guest.


Thank you all so much for taking the time to come here. Normally I sit there and I'm calling in a speaker, so it's quite unusual for me to be in the spotlight. This piece of research is based on desktop review, obviously, and some limited interviews. It is not as a consequence as Tarot was one would want and it was also not and did not look at the benchmarking in other jurisdictions which if you were to do a full piece of work which I may well do would involve an extra layer of research. The report is available on the EPS website for those of you who want to read it. It's designed to facilitate a discussion on regulation and better regulation which was very popular and very much to the fore up to about three to four years ago and as I would argue it's fallen off everyone's radar screen for varying reasons. Regulation is acutely important to any state, acutely important to the citizens of any state because there's one of the three formal levers of state power, taxation and expenditure being the other two. So we obviously spend a lot of time talking about taxation and expenditure and as you will see we spend probably a little bit less time talking about what is good and bad about regulation. Regulation covers the entire policy cycle from initial ideas to scoping ideas right the way through to the evaluation of implemented policy and the regulatory impact analysis comes in at the front end and also can inform policy revision at the tail end. There are 213 public bodies with regulatory power in Ireland and bear that in mind when I start presenting because you can well ask yourselves how many of these are actually DNAed to do or IA's which is the jargon for regulatory impact assessments. The basic argument is that good regulation is based on robust and comparative evidence informed by stakeholder inputs. The corollary is bad regulation. It's based on hunch going through the motions and involves imposing a solution without consulting anyone and there's a lot happens in between. You will be familiar, most of you, with what's called the regulatory impact analysis which is a system of vetting and approving policy options that was approved by government and implemented with great gusto and good effect to look at the likely impacts and effects direct and indirect of all legislation involving statutory change and also if it's responsible or IA's to looking at alternatives to regulation. So what it would typically do is to see whether a bill was justified or whether the same result could be achieved by perhaps not introducing legislation. The cabinet guidelines in RIA is dated from 2006 and they require as cabinet guidelines have a certain effect that all memos to government involving changes to the regulatory framework including significant statutory instruments and that's relevant to the implementation of EU directives. All of these must be subject to an RIA and that all options in an RIA must be assessed and all impacts must be assessed. These are cabinet guidelines. The cabinet also decided eight years ago that RIAs should be published and made available on departmental websites. So when I did my desktop survey I checked the departmental websites searching for RIAs. It is also a requirement of government that a cost-benefit assessment be carried out and quote, significant impacts result. So for every major proposed regulation it is also a cabinet requirement that a CBA be carried out in addition to a regulatory impact assessment or analysis. And very interestingly which I wasn't aware of up to recently till I did this research which by the way concluded last January is that an RIA is required within four weeks of the publication of every EU proposal and that these RIAs should be made available to the relevant ORACTAs committees. More about that and on. The RIA guidelines also apply to policy review which might involve stopping short of the introduction of legislation. So the disciplines and the methodology of an RIA also applies to policy reviews. The government initially had two types of RIAs which were the screening RIA which was sort of an executive summary RIA and full RIA and in 2009 abolished the distinction so there's only one type of RIA now. There's no distinction between screening and full. The guidelines also say that the RIAs apply not just to policy departments but to all government bodies and organisations of which as I said they're in excess of 200. The RIAs do not apply to finance bills to emergency legislation and to security and to some criminal legislation obviously. The key principles are fairly straightforward. They're set out in guidelines published by the Taoiseach's office in 2009. I'm not going to go through them all but every single RIA should cover these principles. The fact of the matter is they don't with some exceptions. The exception which is the current only just published bill for unlobbing which contains a very very detailed RIA one of the best I've seen. It asks a number of questions and responds for example as regards to the necessity test it says is the regulation necessary? Can we reduce red tape in this area? But bear this in mind that most RIAs don't answer these questions. It asks in relation to effectiveness is the regulation property targeted? Can it be complied? Can it be enforced? And proportionality? Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages? Fairly basic, you know, questioning and querying and because the lobbying bill was subject to so much detailed consultation it was easy for the Department of Public Expenditure to respond in this regard. On transparency, have stakeholders been consulted prior to regulating? Is there good explanatory material? Who's responsible? For whom and for what? Is there an effective appeals procedure? And these are standard questions that apply to every piece of policy review and legislation. Are there anomalies and inconsistencies? Are we adopting best practice etc? So the principles have been implemented in Ireland as an exception and I said the most recent one the lobbying bill was probably the only one that I could find of late that systematically addressed these six principles in detail. There also are stakeholder guidelines approved by government. A lot was made of these about six, seven years ago and effectively they say and they haven't been amended to my knowledge or abrogated that RIAs must be used as a basis for consultation with wide stakeholder involvement and that the RIAs must be actively disseminated to stakeholders. So in other words, if the government is considering legislation before it actually takes a decision it should publish its RIA to the wide stakeholder group get feedback and that feedback should inform the draft legislation that subsequently published. And ideally, which doesn't happen very often the views of respondents would be commented upon whereas typically up and recently all that happens is the list of respondees would be listed but their views would not be commented on on a one-to-one basis. Some general issues might be covered but generally speaking it has not been practice in Ireland with detailed views of individual respondees have been looked at. In contrast in the European Commission when you look at their RIAs if a major interest group expresses a view you would get a critique of the view and a conclusion as to whether and to what extent the views expressed are accepted or not accepted and what the rationale is. Also the stakeholder consultation states that all affected party should be consulted. Now it has been practice in Ireland that in some instances only those in a particular sub-sector are consulted. So in doing that there is a danger that those outside the sub-sector don't get involved and don't hear about the RIA much later. So what's best practice? Well the OECD has adopted conclusions on smart regulation. Ireland signed up to these you'll see the details in the appendix to my report. We also during our presidency signed up to EU conclusions on smart regulation which are the Competitiveness Council which are Bruton signed this in May 2013. Forfoss are on records that quote high quality regulation is a critical tool for competitiveness. The high level group on business regulation are also of that view. Another incident of best practice is the European Commission's impact assessments. What I do typically when I'm advising a client I look at and they ask me to review say the water reform bill I check is there a similar impact assessment for a similar piece of legislation at European level and typically the RIAs of the impact assessments at Brussels level are far far far more detailed and robust than their counterparts here in Ireland. Understandably with 28 member states and there are resource issues which I come to. Also in several jurisdictions including and also in the European Commission there are what are called independent regulatory policy committees which is a independent group reporting typically to the Prime Minister's office comprising of academics and policy people who look at the quality of the RIAs and have the option of criticising or sending the RIAs back to be redrafted if they're not off to scratch. This happens frequently in the European Commission and there have been several instances where draft RIAs didn't actually pass muster and were sent back for addition. So the RIAs should be conducted before and I quote the government's guidelines before a preference for new rules crystallizes so it is strict government policy supported by guidelines published and sent to the entire public sector that RIAs should be prepared before legislation is published. I'll stand corrected on the statistics bearing in mind this is desktop review but there were 137 bills enacted or submitted between March 2011 and January 2014 and I could find RIAs published in only a small fraction of them. 42% were the subject of an RIA but the figure is a bit near 50% it doesn't really matter this basically shows that the RIA guidelines are not being implemented across government departments. Related to this is the annual cost of regulation which the EU reckon is around 3.5% GDP on average across the United States. If you take that figure for Ireland it's 4.5 billion the government target is to reduce the minister of burden on regulation by 25% it's not happening we'll talk about that in a minute which would release a billion per year into the economy from SMEs and others who are trying to comply with legislation a very significant burden in terms of the compliance cost arrives in about 5% of legislative requirements so quite of legislation is an act that doesn't have dramatic impacts on business not one RIA and again I'll stand corrected has been conducted in Ireland at the level of detail carried out by the European Commission the impact assessments in Brussels typically run to 200 to 300 pages the best two that I have seen would be the legal services reform bill RIA, the companies bill RIA and the lobbying bill they're all about 40-50 pages they are excellent, don't get me wrong but they don't go into the level of detail that is typical of what happens in Brussels when a draft proposal has been initiated there's some very good examples of RIAs and the lobbying bill which I've cited the legal services bill RIA is a fascinating piece of research to justify legal services reform but it was only published three quarters of the way to the committee stage of the bill, it was not published when the bill was published it was not subject to public consultation in accordance with the government guidelines and if it had been published and debated at the front end of the bill I would imagine the legal services bill would be enacted by now because it made the case and makes the case for a thorough reform of the legal services profession but as I said it came into play and was only made available far too late in the procedures in the erotic committee and as a consequence some of the amendments at committee stage were blocked at committee level and were deferred for six months the idea of multi-disciplinary practices the harbours bill is a summary RIA it is not a full RIA so again while it's a very good level of detail about the harbours of the bill which is transferring harbours to local authorities the RIA is not at a level of detail that would be required under the cabinet procedures on the climate change and low carbon development bill no RIA was carried out on the other hand the NESC did fantastic rework on terms of the research but it didn't actually conduct or nobody conducted an RIA there was public consultation and there was an erotic committee but the erotic committee did not consider a regulatory impact assessment and still hasn't and there's no published RIA on that bill again if there is one I couldn't find it the company's bill again is best practice it was published there were subsequent amendments and the department of jobs, enterprise and innovation has published an up-to-date and revised RIA based on feedback that's what you're supposed to do so the RIA will change depending on feedback and obviously when new options are looked at good example is the green paper on energy policy complies and full with the stakeholder consultation requirements and presumably in due course that there will be an RIA not best in class is the water services bill setting up Irish water I couldn't find an RIA for this bill PricewaterhouseCoopers produced a fantastic report justifying that the delivery of water should be through a public entity but did not conduct an RIA and with the bill more or less gone through now I couldn't find anywhere again understand corrective somebody can produce it for me an assessment as to the pros and cons the effects and the administrative burden cost and impacts on the entire community including the business community wasn't published the forestry bill, a screening RIA was published well after the forestry bill went into committee stage the idea of a screening RIA was abolished six years ago and the bill quote says there will be no impacts or significant costs imposed as a product sector which is, I've done some work for that sector is absolutely baloney because the latest series of amendments of committee stage are imposing among other things a fine of a half a million euros for breaches of certain parts of the act or when it once is enacted the health insurance reform bill is a private members bill and doesn't have an RIA now you could argue that the Iraqis should be providing support for private members bills to initiate an RIA a regulatory impact assessment when the private members are mindful to put legislation forward the EU procurement directives huge impact we spend 9 billion a year on procurement should have been subject to an RIA they have, I don't know what it is and the RIA will be very relevant because there are significant impacts on business because business and SMEs are involved with procurement again, no RIA very recently the NAMA amendment bill was published no RIA the social welfare and pensions bill was published in the last 2 weeks I couldn't find an RIA and again bearing in mind that the guidelines state that within 4 weeks of the publication of EU proposals regulatory impact analysis should be prepared, I couldn't find one on the EU's 2030 goals for climate change and energy that should have been published and sent to the relevant Iraqis committee if it was, I couldn't find a record of it a policy review would be the better energy finance policy review again, great work going on it should be subject and producing an RIA if it is doing so, I'd like to see it I couldn't find it effectively talked about the minister burden on business the bottom line is the government has agreed to reduce the minister burden by 25% but the department that's primarily responsible for this the department jobs is doing the heavy lifting counting for 72% of the total target you could argue that the target which was 500 million initially is way way way below what the actual minister burden is and I did some consultancy work for the department as well in order to that so I love comparing what people promise for what they deliver and this is what was promised in the programme for government the column on the left states what's in the programme the column on the right are my views departments are required to carry out and publish RIAs before government decisions are taken that's a restatement of the government guidelines it isn't happening in the majority of cases the cost of government imposed red tape would be reduced as far as I can see only one department is actually making a significant effort regulatory enforcement agencies would be streamlined in fairness the government has introduced a statement on economic regulation but that concerns state companies and state regulators only it's a good piece of work and it isn't full compliance with the programme for government again it says RIAs would be prepared and all EU directives and be sent to the relevant OROCTAs committees I couldn't find one RIA sent to any OROCTAs committee when I was doing my searches if they do exist I'd love to hear from those of you who found them so this effectively tells me that the cabinet procedures on RIAs are not being fully respected I haven't found evidence of any major policy reform that's the subject of a full cost benefit assessment including water reform, property tax legal services reform because there's a list of 20 other major reforms underway I couldn't find RIAs on EU proposals which is a requirement of the cabinet against this the Department of Public Expenditure Better Regulation Unit as you know has been scrapped and all the people who are in the unit that went from the t-shirts to deeper have been reassigned so we don't have a better regulation unit the Department of the T-Shift Better Regulation Unit was best in class of its type when it existed we got accolades across the OECD for a fantastic piece of work and the way we addressed better regulation up to the time of the recent government where everything changed the focus now is on economic regulation which is quite different what the economic regulators are doing is assessing public sector impacts only assessing value for money and looking at the impacts on the public sector they're not looking at the impacts on the private sector so while it's a good initiative it is partly achieving public policy objectives there are quality issues with some of the RIAs I decided not to get into this in my work but we take a random sample of some RIAs some are pretty dreadful the quality is very, very uneven so my assessment is that the carrying out of regulatory impact assessment at government level is not a priority it's fallen off the agenda now the government has just initiated the T-Shift's office a document called National Risk Assessment last April and I've submitted this report because regulatory risk is an issue in Ireland and again if we're not implementing the basic rules of regulation what defines good regulation we have a problem so many policies are not based on robust evidence many policies are not informed by stakeholder inputs public policy guidelines happen but it is rare to see a critique offered of the views expressed and if so it's never done in public and options of alternatives to legislation really don't exist the programme for government primarily looks at legislating for X, Y and Z whereas not legislating or doing something on a voluntary or code or practice basis can actually achieve the same results the administrative costs and burdens on business are not been systematically quantified with some rare exceptions and to quote the high level group and business regulation RIAs are actually not informing government decisions they've been introduced to justify government decisions and that is not what's supposed to happen that is total no-no at OECD and at EU level there have been positive statements made last September about doll reform and to quote the T-Shift to bring civil society interest groups and experts into the logistical field at an early stage in the context of doll reform but a lot of what was promised is a toky at odds with the government regulations on public consultation and on RIAs and these regular guidelines have not been changed to reflect doll reform so you have a situation where an Iraqis committee can be looking at legislation or draft legislation in the heads of a bill and it doesn't have an RIA in front of it and it will go out to consultation with the policy maker, it's the legislator whereas the departments who are supposed to be informing policy have handed over responsibility for a lot of the policy making process not the legislation making process to Iraqis committees and the approach is not uniform for example the Iraqis committee as we know well in this house did fantastic work on climate change but the Department of Environment chose the root of the Iraqis committee to get consensus on climate change whereas the Minister for Communications and Energy has chosen the root of a green paper to get consensus on energy policy which is the opposite side of climate change so there's an inconsistent approach so strictly speaking if the Iraqis committee is to do its job and it is doing good work and some great examples of Iraqis committees own initiative reports they should be based on RIAs the high level group there's a H missing there somewhere the high level group and business regulation this is their quote and I think this is not me, this is their quote so a lot of what I'm saying is supported by the evidence of the government group which is social department representatives and major departments there's a patchy approach to commissioning and quality of RIAs departments are not carrying out RIAs or producing them late in the stage in the policy and the legislative process to justify decisions already taken that's the view of the experts in government this is a misapplication of the RIA process which is meant to guide policy developments and not be a tool to justify policy decisions that's a pretty serious criticism and some of the members of the group including IVEC have gone on record and have used even stronger language than that this other quote is the larger systemic problem appears to be the lack of centralized oversight given that the department of teaching is no longer involved in RIAs and the difference deeper seems limited again that's a slight understatement so what can be done again bear in mind that we're post Troika for the last two to three years probably other priorities we do need I would think a reintroduction of a smart regulation or better regulation capacity in government in most jurisdictions it is located in the Taoiseach's office or the Prime Minister's office it's in the secretary general of the commission so it is the agency that's responsible for policy coordination typically hosts a smart regulation unit it needs to be resourced if we're going to take this agenda seriously somebody should really and it's not for me to do look at putting pressure on government to consider the reintroduction of a smart regulation unit the cabinet guidelines on RIAs and indeed on public consultation must be updated we've signed up to best practice within the OECD and at EU level only in the last 18 months but we haven't changed any of the guidelines which are now eight years old to reflect what is best practice across Europe and the OECD I would go as far as to say that some of the draft legislation which were there's very significant cost benefit cost benefit impact requirement say the burden on businesses maybe 50 million euros a year you'd be required by law to carry out a CBA, a cost benefit assessment at the moment the guidelines are voluntary so it's not happening but for a major major piece of legislation that has significant impacts I think it would really inform a good debate in the Iraq the sandwich stakeholders if they could see what the cost benefits and what the arguments are but the high level group of business regulation doesn't have a mandate to drive this agenda it is driving the agenda primarily on the administrative burden on business and I think if they had resources they should be looking at the smarter regulation agenda the statement on economic regulation published gave allocated responsibility for regulation across major departments but dropped effectively leadership responsibility for better regulation and there is an argument if this agenda has been taken seriously and obviously only and seriously that some form of a small wouldn't call fiscal council for regulation but some capacity, independent capacity be put in place so that very poor quality or inadequate RIAs or those where no RIAs are being undertaken there would be an appeal court that can view the quality and the necessity of RIAs to make sure they're fit for purpose to conclude here's a few quotes again to justify some of the recommendations this is from the high level group a regulatory environment which fosters growth and investment is essential to economic recovery and job creation the regulatory environment is not working we're not getting the same bang for our book we're not being as smart we're not being as dynamic as we could be quote from ibeck an effective, efficient and appropriate regulatory regime is a prerequisite for the government's commitment to make Ireland the best small country in the world in which to do business so ibeck we're on board the action plan for jobs actually said something about it a smart approach to regulation balances cost etc so there's an awful lot of good intention that we must introduce smart regulation but the harsh reality is it ain't happening we have all the essentials in place we have the tools in place we wear best in class like what we were doing four to five years ago but all of that best practice seems to be cast aside for other reasons and i would argue finally that evidence based research must be central to the DNA of good policymaking not just in Ireland but elsewhere thank you chairman