Fy fydd yn gwneud rydw i, mae'n neud am gyfynnwys ar gyfer y Ffrens fel y rydw i'r Gweithgwrs Pwng Hwyl Gweithgwrs. Rwy'n ddod i'n ddod i'r cymhwynt ac yn rwy'n ddod i'r meyser ymddiadolion, mae'n ddod i'n fwy hŷ i ddod i'r fwy hwnnw, ac yn fwy hŷ at ei ddylch yn eu cyfnodol. Fy hoffi'n gwneud â'r byw, rydw i'n ddiadolion o'r fforddau cyfnodol. Felly, naddoddu gyda'r ffordd y tîm, i'r tîm ffordd o edrych, os ydych yn cyffredigol ar gyfer y rhywbeth a'ch fanalu'n gofyn hynny. Gwyddo'r hlynydd oedd yr meddwl, ac bydd yn ystod i gyda'r hynny yn ymgyrch. Felly gwirionedd ym yn ymdweithio'r ddwylliant, a fyddwn ni'n weld siwmur yma wedi'i hynny y dyma yma. A byddwn ni'n weld, gyda James Bowvard fy oedd ymdweithio ymdweithio yma ymdweith. Os ydych gyda'r cyfnod, ac oes iawn bethau'r stryd, yn ei wneud ar gyfer y teulu, yr adeiladau cymwylo yn ymddir i'r drwng ac mae'n ddinsig mae'n amser i'n bwysig i gydag ymddiol. Rydw i'n meddwl, mae'r mynd i'r mynd i'r mynd i'r mynd i'r drwng o'r µlau'r drwng. Yn ymddir i'r mynd i'r mynd i'r mynd i'r mlynedd wedi cyfnod i'r maen nhw, sy'n gylliannau cymryd. Felly, mae'n gweithio a'r prysau cyntrall, y ffilips, y monitorism, y cyntrall a'r budget 1981 sy'n cymryd i'r canionidau a'r gweithio i'r reis. Felly, mae'n gweithio i'r canionidau a'r gweithio. Felly, mae'n gweithio a'r cyntrall, y gweithio a'r meccanism, y euro, y cyfnodau cyfnodau a'r Brexit. Mae'n gweithio a'n gweithio a'n gweithio. We voted leave and the economy boomed instead. And they are wrong on trade policy. Their view in essence is that if prices go up, that's monopoly pricing, if prices are stable that's collusion, and if prices fall, that's predatory pricing. That's an old joke from course, but it's just too good to miss. But above all remember this. Policy analysis itself is just the cake. I think on the cake is the most important bit, and that's withering sarcasm. As James made this point in his brilliant lecture yesterday, one horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms. Ridicule wins every time. With that off my chest, I'd like to turn to my topic, which is my pet peeve monetary stimulus. Now, Mises, I'm going to get this thing to work, okay, that I think summarise it, that is from Emerson, it's a brilliant quote. But Mises taught us of the dangers of stimulus. Fiat money, let there be money he wrote, let the state create money and make the poor rich, and free them from the bonds of the capitalists. How wicked of economists to assert that it's not within the power of the state to create wealth by the printing press. Well, of course, I can't match Mises satire, but I never needed convincing because I lived through it myself. Now, around the time that Nixon took the US off gold, I was 12 years old, and I watched then as the UK embarked on a massive stimulus experiment, that the timing of the two events was not a coincidence. The economy boomed for a while so stimulus worked, it was just great. But then things went badly wrong after about 18 months or so. Inflation took off, then unemployment skyrocketed, and the country descended into strife. And the resulting strife led to horror of horrors, a hard left government that wanted to nationalise anything that moved. And mounting economic chaos, which culminated with the IMF bailout in 1976. So stimulus had failed big time. Now, the problem is a combination of bad economics and poor institutions. We're talking here Keynesian economics and a central bank issuing an unconvertible fiat currency. Now, an extra dollar bill costs almost nothing to produce, but you can use it to buy valuable goods and services. So the temptation is always to print a little more, and therein lies the root problem. The problem is how to control over issue, essentially the problem of monetary governance. Now this problem does not arise under laissez-faire because governance is provided by the market under the rule of law and the market provides our money and everything works just fine. The problem is then that we've unwisely, or they have unwisely, created a money monopoly and now have the problem of what to do with it. I believe Mary Shelley had the same problem with her creature too. Now, there are two alternative approaches to this problem. The first is to use the monopoly for some higher end. The second is to restrain it. Many of you will be familiar with the state theory of money, or chartalism. Money is a creature of the state and should be used as the state decides. To quote Keynes, the state claims the right to declare what should answer as money. It claims the right not only to enforce the dictionary, but to write the dictionary. All civilised money is beyond dispute chartalist. Now personally, I don't know about you guys, I've always found this passage absolutely abhorrent, horrified me. As Mises observed, this concept of money is clearly untenable. As he wrote, to ascribe to the state the power of dictating the laws of exchange is to ignore the fundamental principles of a money-using society. Now it's also clear that chartalism does not work. 300 years ago, the Scottish financier John Law embarked on a monetary experiment in France that foreshadowed recent central bank policies. This included money creation, QE, debt monetisation, low interest rates and audacious financial engineering. It worked for a while and then collapsed and large numbers of people were ruined. Now to quote one observer, so ends the system of paper money which enriched a thousand beggars and impoverished a hundred thousand honest men. Now Law's mistake was to think that it could manufacture prosperity by printing money. In the aftermath, difficult lessons were learned about the dangers of the uncontrolled issue of paper money. Over the period since, these lessons were repeatedly relearned and repeatedly forgotten again. So we had the asignats, we had the continentals, we had the inflations of the civil war and both sides of the civil war. And then in 1892, there's a lovely quote by Sir Robert Giffen who was looking back over these experiences. And as he said, for a good money is so very difficult a thing to get and governments when they meddle with money are so apt to make blunders that a nation which has a good money should be aware of its being tampered with. If only we'd listened to that. Now forward to recent years and we've unlearned those lessons again, yet again. Modern policy makers are fixated with the belief that inadequate macro performance is due to inadequate aggregate demand and their only solution is to stimulate demand. To a Keynesian with a hammer every problem looks like a nail. Now other diagnoses, other solutions such as the needs to address structural problems, to address tax regulatory reform and fiscal sustainability are ignored. Fundamental problems then remain unresolved and Keynesian policy makers are left wondering why their policies are not working as they expected. They also make a deeper intellectual error. Instead of seeing the monetary system as a spontaneous social order whose sole purpose is to serve its participants, they see the monetary system as something to be controlled for some allegedly higher end. So the interest rate and the supply of money are not seen as the products of markets but as control instruments to be controlled by a central authority. Analysis of the monetary system as a self-organising social order gives way to control and optimization analysis. How best to manipulate these instruments to achieve some central bank objective. So thank you very much Paul Samuelson. From this perspective more instruments are always to be preferred to less and the inbuilt constraints that protect a free monetary order like constraints against the over-issue of money are mere hindrances that prevent central banks doing as they please. Underline this error a deeper ones. They assume that they can understand the economy and think that if they understand it they can control it. Of course if they did understand the economy they would also understand that they can't control it. To imagine otherwise is a category mistake. It's a logical error. The point is that one cannot control a spontaneous social order as if it were a predictable machine. But nonetheless attempts to do so can certainly damage it. OK, so before the Fed interest rates and monetary aggregates were constrained by the gold standard. Once the Fed was established it began to manage the system and it's so doing to undermine it. To illustrate according to BLS data the US dollar had lost 83% of its 1914 purchasing power by the time the last vestiges of the gold standard were abandoned in 1971. Since then, thanks to the Fed, its purchasing power has fallen by over 96% relative to 1914. Now this is not a particularly good track record. Over time the Fed acquired more control over interest rates and interest rates are the most important prices in the market economy. And since 71 interest rates have been determined by the whims of the FOMC and have been far more volatile than before, the Fed's control led to wild swings as the Fed lurched from monetary... Let's see, there we are. Oh sorry, I must have taken that slide out. Anyway, the Fed's control over interest rates led to wild swings as the Fed lurched from monetary excess to restraint and back again, creating one boom bus cycle after another. And then fast forward to 96 and Greenspan famously warned of irrational exuberance in the stock markets before easing monetary policy to stimulate them further. The Greenspan put protected investors on the downside, encouraging them to buy more stocks and push up their prices. But market fundamentals eventually reassert themselves. The markets then boomed before crashing in 2001, only for Greenspan and later Bernanke to repeat the process to produce another stock boom and a housing boom, both of which crashed in 0708. The Fed then responded by stocking the biggest booms yet and in virtually all asset markets. And so you can see that in the chart. And for once of a better name, you can call this the everything bubble, because all the asset markets are doing just fine. But repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result the next time is literally insane, right? So the everything bubble is the biggest monetary experiment ever. So why wouldn't it also lead to the biggest ever collapse? Well, I suppose we'll find out soon enough. Now, one of the Fed's main responses to the crisis was to push interest rates to almost zero and they haven't changed much since. Zero interest rate or ZERP policies have a number of adverse effects. They encourage investors to take more risks to boost yields. Risk spreads are compressed, so true risks are not apparent. They encourage more borrowing and higher leverage. Many companies have used low interest rates to load up on debt they don't need in order to invest in equity markets via M&A or share buybacks that push up share prices even further. Low interest rates also delay restructuring by allowing zombies that would otherwise fail to continue in operation. And of course they encourage fiscal profligacy. So lots of zombies and lots of unicorns. They also reduce, low interest rates reduce returns to savers and big time too. The law of compound interest implies that sustained ultra low interest rates have a devastating effect on savers and pension funds. We're talking here trillions in accumulated lost returns. ZERP also reduces bank profits, especially when the yield curve becomes flat or inverted. The flatter or more inverted the curve, the less profitable, is bank's traditional core business of borrowing short to lend long. ZERP then discourages bank lending. There's little profit in from lending so the supply of loans falls. And so ZERP intensified the credit crunch instead of alleviating it. Now a second pillar of unconventional policy is large-scale asset purchases or QE. Now this programme saw the Fed's balance sheet grow from 490 billion to 4.3 trillion when the programme was ended. The stated purpose of the programme was to reduce long-term yields to encourage investment and spending and so boost output and employment, the usual Keynesian nonsense. QE was accompanied by the payment of interest on excess reserves intended to neutralise the flood of excess reserves that QE was creating. The combination of QE and interest on excess reserves is best understood, not as monetary policy per se, but as preferential credit allocation policy. This policy is a very bad idea. In the words of Larry White, QE is overreaching, wasteful, morally hazardous and fraught with serious governance problems. That's pretty bad. Now credit allocation policy is a kind of central planning in which the Federal Reserve substitutes its judgement for that of financial market participants. Fed directed allocation of funds to a declining industry, for example, just throws good resources after bad. An increase in political credit allocation reduces economic growth not only by creating deadweight loss, but also by incentivising unproductive lobbying efforts, and it's probably a whole lot more damaging. It creates tremendous moral hazard and an environment ripe for cronyism. All this buying achieved little benefit, except to Wall Street types who naturally loved it. QE was the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time. It killed the urgency for Washington to confront the real issue, which is the structural problems in the US economy. Of course the same goes for Europe. Now the failure of Fed policies is apparent from a whole range of indicators. I'll just quickly trot through a few of them. A slowdown in the economic growth rate, a fall in job creation, a fall in labour force participation, a stubbornly high, I think it's U6 unemployment rate, you'll discourage labour, and stagnant or declining real income. Now that's a real shocker, rising inequality, a slowdown in small business formation, a fall in savings. Most Americans haven't savings to cope with a major emergency. That's a real worry. Then we have a rise in dependency on state aid, and possibly the most damaging of all, long-term potentially, is a collapse in productivity growth. Now unconventional policies have not only failed, but they're not sustainable either. Now part of the reason is that central banks cannot eliminate risks. Instead they can only suppress them temporarily at the cost of making the eventual crisis worse. Central bank policies have smoothed out the smaller risks, the ones that don't really matter, at the expense of leaving the economy more exposed to the tail risks, and these are the ones to worry about. Historical experience also suggests that risks are greatest when measured spreads and volatilities are at their lowest level, and people start wondering where all the risks have gone. Remember late 2006, early 2007 maybe? The risks had all gone. But current policies cannot go in indefinitely, go on indefinitely, and the build-up of debt is unsustainable. So recent IMF data suggests that current debt levels are close to 250% of world GDP, well up on 2007, and this ignores a whole ton of off-balance sheet stuff, so the true figures are much, much greater. Higher debt creates a headwind against recovery and obviously poses a major risk to financial stability. When the next downturn occurs, many of these debts will not be repaid and we will be looking at defaults on a large scale. The bad news is that if current policy is unsustainable, it's not clear how the Fed can restore monetary normality. There may be no safe exit either. An exit strategy requires that the Fed raise rates to normal levels. I don't know exactly what that should be, but that's not really the point. The problem is how to raise them to any sensible levels without triggering a crisis. A rising rates would increase financing costs and impose a major strain on highly leveraged companies, many of which would be bankrupt, that's pretty obvious. Higher rates would also put pressure on governments and prompt bankruptcies, or should I say more bankruptcies at municipal level, and I think fairly certainly bankruptcies at state level. Let me look at Illinois for example. Furthermore, the potential losses are enormous. My back of the envelope, duration calculations, suggested a rise to normal rates would trigger losses of three to four trillion, and other estimates are higher. I could easily get higher numbers than that. These are only the losses to bondholders. Financial markets are now highly correlated and one might even say that the only asset that now matters is the 10-year treasury. A sharp rise in rates would then have major adverse effects on other asset markets and all the asset bubbles that the Fed has so lovingly blown would burst. Large pools of institutional capital have also become accustomed to strategies based on short-term returns and relative performance, risk parity strategies and so on. Such strategies produce steady returns and the appearance of low risk but leave investors highly exposed and prime the markets for the next black swan. And then they'll say we had no reason to expect this when it happens. The bottom line is that all assets are very much correlated so there is only one big bet out there, what you might describe as the everything bet. There's a kind of collective psychology that says that the Fed is in control. But this is an illusion. Furthermore, many of these exposures are poorly hedged. Many market participants have never experienced a decent hike in interest rates and they cannot design a hedging strategy to hedge against interest rate risk because interest rates have been so stable. In other words, they don't have the data to calibrate their hedges. Risk models are difficult to calibrate for the same reason and have a ton of other problems besides. Bottom line here is that the risk models can't be calibrated and are useless when it comes to anticipating the consequences of out-of-sample events. In fact, this is most important, risk models would worsen market instability should any trigger event trigger losses, the model-based risk management strategies would respond by sell-offs to get the risk numbers back down. Now, of course, that works for an individual company but doesn't work for the market as a whole. So this creates a positive feedback loop that would greatly intensify a downturn. We saw this with some of the strategies in 1987 but this would be much, much worse on a much bigger scale. Since then, risk management has become a whole lot more quote, unquote, sophisticated and this just worsens the underlying problems. Okay, so the Fed is then boxed in. It needs to raise interest rates to restore monetary normality but it can't feasibly do so and the longer it delays, the worse the underlying misallocation and risk build-up problems become. In the meantime, the choice remains what it always was, a bad downturn now or worse later and the clock is ticking. It's a quote, the punchline of an old Irish joke. I wouldn't start from here if I were you. Okay, so what do our Keynesian friends suggest that we do? Well, let's forget about the obvious solution that they never consider to abandon the Keynesian experiment, roll back the state, end the Fed, return to gold. No, no, we can't do that. Thank you, thank you. Instead, their suggestion is to double down. Basically, a whole lot more dangerous experimentation. So, would the economy, some lab animal, it wouldn't be allowed to be regarded as cruel. So, okay, let's go through these. The first suggestion is to ramp up QE and we're leaving aside that it hasn't worked already. This solution has already been tried big time and failed in Japan. Look at that red line. Japan entered the financial crisis with an already bloated central bank balance sheet which was roughly as big relative to GDP as the Fed's is today. It has since tripled more or less and as I say, note that upward trend. This enormous stimulus achieved little beneficial effect. Unemployment fell a little, but growth was negligible. Now, if QE on this scale didn't work in Japan, there's no reason to think it would work anywhere else. But that's possibly where we're going. Now, this policy had a number of adverse effects. First off, the Bank of Japan's bond purchases were on such a scale that it's cornered the market and has been struggling to find further bonds to buy. These purchases distort interest rates across the yield curve and mean that Japanese financial institutions are increasingly assessing bonds, have been for some time, based on their likelihood of being bought by the BOJ, instead of on the basis of their underlying credit worthiness. The Bank of Japan is well on the way to becoming the biggest shareholder in the country as well. It's gradually nationalizing the stock market. So the impact on bond markets and the impact on stock markets, both very worrying. Remember that stock prices are supposed to reflect the underlying value of a company and to be priced correctly, equities should reflect earnings and other fundamentals, not the whims of central bankers on a buying binge. Instead, the market is becoming detached from fundamentals and the BOJ is creating a ginormous bubble. Now, despite these failures, Japanese policy makers remain fixated on stimulus and Governor Corrodd's attempts at reassurance don't particularly reassure. Now, to quote a speech from a little while back, he said, many of you are familiar with the story of Peter Pan, in which it says, the moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it. Well, just to point out the obvious, Peter Pan is a fictional children's story. So, not very reassured about that. Okay, so the second wheeze is negative interest rate policy or NERP. The argument usually made is that NERP would stimulate the economy by encouraging people to spend instead of save, i.e. NERP is the extension of ZERP. But this argument fails to learn from ZERP's failure to stimulate and that it might not be the best of ideas is suggested by the fact that NERP had no precedence in nearly 5,000 years since Hammurabi. So, what has changed in the last few years to make negative interest rates suddenly a good idea after 5,000 years? Now, to me, that's a bit of a head scratcher. But it gets worse. NERP means that you get paid to borrow and you pay to lend. But if I have to pay to lend, why would I lend at all? It just makes no sense. If I'm an investor wanting a safe haven in a NERP world, where do I go? The answer presumably is cash. But cash then becomes so sought after that the NERPers, or the twerpers, or whatever you want to call them, the NERPers, want to abolish it. So that's really helpful. So another example of the weirdness of NERP was highlighted by Richard Rahn. If government can borrow at negative interest rates and endlessly roll over its debts, then it makes no sense to tax rather than borrow. That's an interesting insight. And he says, if this sounds a bit mad to you, then you haven't totally lost your grip on reality. Yeah. Now, to implement NERP is to enter a twilight zone in which nothing works as it should. If NERP were implemented, would it lead to people spending more as intended? Well, I very much doubt it. Preliminary evidence from Europe and elsewhere suggests that NERP in other countries is failing to encourage spending. But at a deeper level, it's difficult to see how a sustained policy of taxing bank reserves or deposits, which is what NERP entails, could stimulate since when is any tax stimulative? It makes no sense. That's what I mean about the twilight zone. Negative interest rates suggest liquidation, destroy the capital stock and cause a shrinkage in the amount of credit. Again, where's the darn stimulus? Worse still, sustained NERP would destroy the financial system. NERP would make banks core business models unviable, especially when the yield curve becomes inverted. However strong they might currently be and they are not particularly, especially in Europe, NERP will eventually bankrupt them. OK, so NERP would turn banks into loss making entities that must eventually fail. Defined benefit pension schemes would also become unviable as negative returns would undermine their ability to meet their long term commitments. Asset managers, hedge funds, even insurance companies would all become unviable. At the most fundamental level, negative interest rates are a dreadful idea because they penalise thrift and reward impetuousness. They are the epitome of institutionalised short termism in which we are encouraged to live for today when any reasonable person can see that we shouldn't. There's also a reason why historical interest rates have always been positive. It's called time preference. Negative interest rates are an offence against the law of time preference and to mess with that is to unleash monetary pandemonium. So why on earth would any rational person want to do that? But to NERPers, the zero lower bound is not a boundary to be respected and protected, but an obstacle to be kicked aside so omnisiant central bankers can ramp up their monetary experiments in a misguided attempt to gamble their way out of their own previous mistakes. Anyway, let us suppose, nonetheless, that the monetary authorities determine on NERP. They then run into an obvious constraint. If the central banks push interest rates too far into negative territory, then bank depositors and bond investors would switch into cash to obtain a zero return instead. A zero return is better than a negative one. A serious effort at NERP therefore needs to be enabled by blocking this escape route, i.e. by abolishing cash. Central bankers could then impose whatever negative interest rates they wanted, and we would have to put up with it. Yet those who would ban cash ignore the substantial costs that this proposal entails. It's not in their models, you see. An example that worries me very greatly is the impact on the extreme poor. In 2011, there were over 4 million people in the United States who live on less than $2 a day. These include the indigent and many who are ill-educated and mentally ill, i.e. the most vulnerable. These people are completely dependent on the cash economy. And to me, to deprive these people of the benefits of cash is simply cruel. There are also those who have chosen to hold much of their wealth in the form of cash, including many foreigners for whom US dollars are a protection against financial repression in their own countries. Banning cash would expropriate much or all of their wealth. It would also constitute a default. Once people get worse even, once people are forced to rely solely on digital currency controlled by the state, then all transactions would be monitored and only state-approved transactions would be permitted. You can see where I'm going. All financial holdings would be vulnerable to state predation and any remaining rights to financial privacy would be destroyed. There would be obviously a huge loss of civil liberties. The state would then acquire much greater control over everyone's lives, as if it didn't have enough already. With no other access to their money, anyone targeted by the state couldn't hide, couldn't resist, and couldn't escape. So, basically, they could be outlawed. You can throw people out of such a society where they have nothing to live on. Think of Will Smith in Enemy of the State, but we're not all Will Smiths who can fight the system and win in the end. So, what credible assurances do we have that innocent people will not be targeted in this way? Well, none at all. Once those powers are conceded to the state, we must expect proposals to use those powers to achieve other supposedly worthwhile objectives that our lords and masters dictate. Indeed, one of the reasons put forward for abolishing cash is to make life difficult for bad guys such as drug dealers. The suppression of cash then becomes a weapon in the wars against drugs, terror, tax evasion, and so on. You see, bad guys use cash, so we should ban cash to stop them. Okay, so by that logic, every single amenity that we all use should be banned because the bad guys use them too. Now, forcing everybody, but it gets even worse, forcing everybody to use state-controlled digital currency also makes it much easier for the state to pursue pseudo-economic policies in which it punishes anyone it doesn't like. Savors, rontiers, dissidents are obvious targets. The state then has the ultimate instrument for social control. Anyone who steps out of line gets whacked. And there is also the danger that the control apparatus would be hijacked by some group with a control agenda, socialists, fascists, whatever. Now, to me, this doesn't bear thinking about, but these dangers mean nothing to the cash-hating technocrats. You see, for these people cash is just another barbarous relic. Civil liberties too. Okay. Now, finally, let me come to the fourth Keynesian solution. The final solution to come out here. Sorry, I didn't even think of that. That was bad. So the final suggestion to come out with the Keynesian out of the Keynesian Barmy Ideas Factory is helicopter money. Okay. Now, helicopter money is often described as the central bank printing money and giving it away. Now, this description captures the essence of the idea, but it's a little misleading. In most proposals, helicopter money would involve the central bank buying or issuing, sorry, and giving away not physical cash, but a digital equivalent, like sending everyone a check in the post. The key is that central bank, the central bank issues additional base money that it gives away so people spend it. Or, in some versions, the extra money can be used to finance socially worthwhile projects that cannot obtain funding due to ubiquitous market failures, which we all know are all out there. Let me give you an example of these socially worthwhile projects. This one. Now, it's the archetypal bridge to nowhere. And I'm scratching my head thinking what use does that actually have? And actually, there is a use I can think of is that if you want to end it all in style, then that will do the trick. And then there's another one, which I think is a British version. See, we tend to do things on a smaller scale. You can tell it's Britain because of the grey sky and the rain. Okay, so in practice, although helicopter money is often couched in terms of the Fed printing money and giving it away, it wouldn't make political sense to do that. It wouldn't make political sense for the Fed to decide who the beneficiary should be. Such decisions are inherently fiscal in nature, and the government would want the ultimate say. So helicopter money in practice would involve the Fed crediting the Treasury's account, and the government would decide how it is to be spent. And that's basically how Bernanke sees it, and I think he's right about that. Now, helicopter money is closely related to, but distinct from, the policy of debt monetisation. Debt monetisation occurs when the Treasury issues a bond that it sells to the central bank, which pays for the bond with newly issued digital-based money. Now remember that large-scale debt monetisation has a very bad reputation. It conjures up images of the Weimar and other disasters where increasing reliance on debt monetisation was key to the slide into hyperinflation. What happens is that as inflation continues to rise, the government's tax collection machinery essentially ceases to work. By the time the money comes in, it's worth nothing. So therefore, the government becomes increasingly dependent on the printing press to continue to operate, and that's why the acceleration occurs. So thus the printing presses go into overtime and inflation accelerates out of control. So debt monetisation is a very bad policy, a very bad reputation. But bad as it is, I would suggest that helicopter money is worse. So I would ask you to ask yourselves what is the difference between the two? So this is the trillion-dollar question, or you might say the trillion-dollar coin question. So you might remember a few years ago there was essentially the proposal that the Treasury should issue a platinum trillion-dollar coin. And then, of course, maybe a few of them, or a few trillion of them, or whatever you want. So the idea was it would issue this coin, hand it to the Fed, which would credit the Fed with a trillion-dollars or so to spend. Now I think this is a really daft idea. It's a nice comment on it I came across. It's a trillion-dollar tooth fairy straight from the land of fiscal make-believe. That works for me. Needless to say, Paul Krugman thought it was a great idea because it would get around the federal debt constraints as if that served no useful purpose. You see, poking the eye to the Republicans. But this is just an argument of pure political convenience with no justification whatsoever in terms of any underlying first principles. But this trillion-dollar coin is exactly the difference between debt monetisation and helicopter money. Now, its advocates like to argue that helicopter money is just a technical policy instrument that can be finely tuned by experts like themselves, the same guys that couldn't fix the GFC. They play down concerns of uncontrolled money printing. As atavistic and exaggerated. But I would say that helicopter money is exactly uncontrolled money printing, albeit in electronic form. So the reality is that it provides Congress with a supposedly scientific cover story that amounts to a licence to spend without having to go through all that hassle and unpopularity of voting for taxes to pay for it. Now, David Stockman has a nice take on this. He says the people's elected representatives would relish this expert cover story for bigger deficits and the opportunity to wallow in the pork barrel. There is not a hardcore new dealer turning in his grave who could have imagined a better scheme for priming the pump. What makes helicopter money so insidious is that it relieves elected politicians entirely from their vestigial fears of the public debt and from the accountability that that imposes on future generations. Under the constitution, Congress and only Congress is authorised to make decisions about fiscal policy. Government spending, in turn, is constrained by the need for Congress to find some means to finance its spending decisions. It is politically costly for Congress to raise taxes. Legislators get flack and can lose their seats, and so it should be. To finance government spending, resources have to be extracted from the public using the coercive power of the state. It is therefore important that that power be heavily restrained. But under helicopter money, legislators would face the prospect of being able to finance their favourite projects at no political opportunity cost to themselves. Now, since that finance does have a cost, helicopter money would further increase the incentive to generate excessive government spending. Indeed, since helicopter money appears to be free and would in fact be free to the legislators who would make the key decisions, there would be no limit to the demand for such finance. Because remember, the supply of supposedly worthwhile projects to be financed at supposedly zero cost would be infinite. You cannot, so punchline, you cannot have rational policy spending decisions in a system in which finance appears to be free and legislators are spending money like it grows on trees. In other words, rational policy is impossible when legislators operate under the illusion of a free lunch. Now, put it this way, throughout history, governments faced the problem that taxes were unpopular. The pool taxes provoked the peasants revolt, tea taxes provoked the Boston Tea Party, and so on. Then somebody comes along with the bright idea of having found a tax-free solution that enables them to spend as they wish. This is, if you like, a fiscal holy grail. Now, that's really handy. But do we expect Congress to pass that opportunity up because they prefer the unpopularity of taxation? Well, even if they did, they wouldn't stay elected for long. We should then consider what would happen once helicopter money was implemented. If the policy is seen to have been a success, there would be pressure to repeat the operation, to repeat the success, of course. And if the policy is seen to have failed, there would be the cause to escalate the program on the grounds that it only failed because it wasn't implemented on a big enough scale. So a new political constituency would have been created, one which realises that there is free money to be had, and all they need to do is lobby for it. From their perspective, the money would be free as they wouldn't bear the costs. The most obvious such constituency is Congress itself, but one also has to think of all the special interest groups that might lobby Congress, i.e., everybody who might want free money, i.e., everybody. It's then very easy to imagine what happens next. If there's free money to be had, the enormous demand for it would soon follow, and there would be corresponding pressure on the Fed to repeat and expand the program. The sluice gates would be opened, and the remaining constraints against over-issue of base money would be seriously even irreparably damaged. A central bank that is throwing out money for free will likely lose control of the printing press.  You have massive QE, and the central bank buys everything up. Cash is banned, and there's no longer any financial privacy. NERP is implemented, returns go negative. The major financial institutions, banks, insurance companies, pension funds, etc., are bankrupted. The banks are taken over then as state-run utilities and old age provision becomes a state monopoly. A deflationary spiral is avoided by large-scale money printing. All policy, fiscal and monetary, is then driven by the illusion that helicopter money is free, and free helicopter money becomes the dominant policy instrument. All constraints to protect sensible finance and sound money go out of the window, and the value of the currency goes to its intrinsic commodity value, i.e. nothing. So I think Keynes and his deluded followers have a lot to answer for. The good news is that it does not have to end this way, but we have our work cut out to make sure it doesn't. We know the answers. Restore commodity money, end the Fed, roll back the state. And so we return to where we started, this problem of monetary governance. To quote Ron Paul, we need to take away the government's monetary power. The dollar's soundness depends on its being untied from the machine that can make an infinite number of copies of dollars and reduce their value to zero. It's as simple and as difficult as that. So thank you all and good evening.


Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco, Moscone, West, at the Professional Business Women Conference of San Francisco. This is the 28th year, 6,000 women, about 5% men here, talking about doing better in the workforce, inclusion, diversity. But this has been going on forever. Jackie Spears started it years ago, wow, almost three decades ago, and we're really excited to be joined by someone who's got some special tools to help people and really execute on this promise. It's Lisa Skeet Tatum. She is the co-founder and CEO of Landit. Lisa, welcome. Great to be here, thank you. Absolutely, so first of all, impressions of the conference? Have you been here before? What do you think? This is my first time. I can't believe I've missed it all this time. To be here surrounded by all these amazing women and the same mission, which is how do we help people succeed in women's nuclear in the workplace? So it's fabulous. Well, let's jump into it. Could you actually, as one of the keynote speakers said, it's really not a strategy problem anymore. It's an execution problem. Everyone kind of knows what they want to do, but how do you actually do it? In your company, Landit has a real specific solution to help individuals as well as companies. So give us kind of the background on Landit and what you do, how long have you been around? Sure, well first I want to thank LinkedIn for inviting us here to collaborate with them on this panel of personal brand, and particularly Jacqueline Jones and Ty Heath. They're fabulous, fabulous collaborators. But our goal at Landit is to increase the success and engagement of women in the workplace, while also enabling companies to both attract and then retain their diverse talent. And we realize, as you said, that it's not for lack of motivation or skill or track record, it is where do I start? Right, right. And so our goal and our quest for democratizing career success is to create a personalized playbook, one size fits one, for every woman to more successfully navigate. And we enable companies in a turnkey solution to invest in their women to essentially path them better. Okay, so let's, I love that democratizing business success. That's exactly right. From the individual side, what are some of the specific tools that you found that people were just lacking or they just didn't know or they just needed that extra assist? Absolutely, absolutely. Well, first it starts from being at an inflection point and that could be they're in a workplace or trying to figure out how to more successfully navigate. Maybe they're stuck, which is where I was. They don't know how to get out of it or they're looking for what's next. And the questions that come up besides where do I start is what is it that I want to do that fits with all of me? Maybe how do you develop your personal brand which our session is about? Cause most people don't even know the power of personal brand and the fact that it accounts for 25% of your success. How do I connect with a coach? It's one of the best kept secrets that most of us don't know. And then how do I manage my personal board of advisors? So a lot of people think about a mentor, but it's much more than that. It's about a mentor. It's about a sponsor. It's about continued education. So our goal is to knit all that together and essentially path you. Cause it's overwhelming. You think about, you get to one of these inflection points and you're like, gosh, I don't know where to turn. I don't know who to connect with. I don't know if there's quality. And I want it to be relevant to me cause there's a ton of information, but you know, we're all busy. I'm the mother, two teenage boys. And so I want things that are relevant to me that I can action on. And companies, when they look at the massive problem of wanting to retain their talent, they've tried lots of things. We give them one neat knit together turnkey solution where they know when they're winning and they can measure. God, there's so much things you touch down there. Absolutely. So I want to jump into a couple. What's the difference between a coach and a mentor and an advisor? Absolutely. So when you think of a coach, which again, most of us don't have because it's reserved for someone who's in the C-suite and we believe you have to bring it earlier on, but this is someone at outside expert who can help give you the framework, help hold you accountable, et cetera. So that is an expert hired person in your corner. When you think about your board. And let me just tell you. So like what type of coaches do generally? I mean, obviously if you're a CEO of a large company, you can hire the best of the best. That's exactly right. When you're not in your middle of your career, what type of coaches are kind of the highest ROI? And that's exactly what we address because in this notion of democratizing access, why should I be a CEO before I get access to that high caliber? So we went and we said, well, what do they get? And how do we bring that to anyone on the platform? So we're talking an executive coach.  So an executive coach. The exact same thing that a CEO wants, whether at a big company or small, that's what we want the women on landed. And are these people, so you've got a resource bank of these types of individuals. That's exactly right. All certified, very successful practices that believe like I do, that you got to democratize that access. You have to get someone, when they're at one of those inflection points, in order to move them forward. To stop saying, we have the largest number of professional, educated women, not fully engaged in the workforce. As we sit here today, workforce and they want to be. So that's one of the solutions. Your question about the board, if you think about a mentor, this is someone who you have coffee with, you talk to, you bounce ideas. If you think about a sponsor, this is someone who talks about you. Someone who opens doors, someone who can help you see possibilities. Or you think about a connector. Someone who knows everyone. My co-founder is CEO of Care.com. Sheila Marcello, she knows the world. So when there's someone who I don't know and I want to be connected to, I forget the phone and I call Sheila.  So you have the right ask of the right person. That's how you build your board, if you will, of which a coach is a component of that. Okay, then let's, so much, we could go for like two hours. Hopefully you have much going on for this today. Where are you going? Personal brand. So much talking about personal brand, obviously with Twitter and for famous people now, for good or bad, can directly touch with their constituents. For a mid-tier professional or early stage professional, what is building their brand and how important is it for people that just don't understand? Absolutely. Well, first of all, mid-career is too late to start thinking about your brand. I have teenage boys, I tell them now, we'll cultivate that brand. Whether you like it or not, you have a brand. The question is, are you in control of it? So some people say brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. I say the personal brand is what do people say about you that they want you in the room? So you have to cultivate that early on. So, but most people don't know the formula. It accounts for 25% of your success. And 25%, and what we realize a lot of time, people don't even know the mistakes that they're making, but it's holding them back. So it's not just about working hard and keeping your head down. It is what is the authentic message that you signal to the world?  They don't keep track of their accomplishments on a weekly basis. So they suffer from what we call life or last and first outs. When it comes time to negotiate, to do your LinkedIn profile, to advocate for yourself, you don't have any facts, right? So facts and information is power. Something so simple, end of the week. What did I do to further myself, my brand?  And that's one of the features we have to put on your LinkedIn profile. That's exactly right. And it's one of the features we have at Lander, which is every Friday you should be checking in. What did I do for myself? What did I do for my brand? What did I learn? And then when it comes time to do that profile, you can look at your repository and say, oh yes, I did add value.  Unfortunately, women often do. I'm focused on things moving their business forward. Well, that's like the classic, you know, busy versus productive thing, right? It's just sometimes it's so much easier to do busy work. That's exactly right. Many of us are guilty of that. Okay, so now let's flip the bit here. And from the employer's point of view, what are some of the things that they need to do better to help the women in their companies be more successful? And by extension, the company be more successful. Absolutely. So I think one of the biggest challenges that our clients face is that they don't have a turnkey scalable solution to touch more lives, right? So often when you first join a company, you get lots of love, lots of good snacks. And then in the middle, what we call the forgotten middle, not so much because it's hard at scale to offer the tools that we do. And if you make it through to the end, you'll get some things. But that's where you have the whole leaky pipe issues. So what they come to us for is whether it's your brand, your board, continuous learning, coaching, we knit that together in a way that's seamless. And we do it in a way that enables them to touch more lives. We have several multinational companies that have women all over the globe and they can have a common experience. But because we're technology, they can measure. So they can see the engagement. They can see the pathing. Right, right. So for them, it's a win-win. But it's all about, again, the power one size fits one. And you can only do that through technology with the appropriate human touch point. You start with the big program and then it gets customized or codified by the individual. It's driven by the woman, exactly. So the elements of success, the playbook, if you will, are common. But how it gets used, what it recommends, how it paths you is all about the individual. And that's the power of being able to, again, knit it together, powered by technology, but not forgetting that there are humans involved. Right, right. You got to have those touch points. It's interesting because people just get so busy at work. Everybody gets busy. You get busy yourself. The boss is busy. Everybody's busy these days. That's right. So is it suggesting like, hey, you should go to a professional conference or, you know, hey, you should be doing some of this? Or, you know, what are some of the little steps that make a big difference that people just are too busy to kind of pay attention to? Sure. So the best investment you can make is in yourself. And if you think about, you know, our sponsors within the company, whether it's their head of HR or development, it's hard for them to manage the careers of thousands of people, right? And so we give them the way to allow the onus to be on the individual, right? For them to invest and manage their own career. We want to do it. We just don't have the tools. Going to a conference, like this is a fabulous conference, but how do you knit things together in between conferences? Right? Because our goal is, I don't know anyone, myself included, that's only had one inception point. So how do we give you what you need when you need it? When you need it. That's exactly right. So how long has Landed been around? So we have been around out of stealth mode for about a year. Okay. Now, and we have amazing clients. We have women from around the globe. 20% of our users are international. It's all ages. It's all functions. It's all careers. And it makes my mom proud. No, absolutely. As she will be once she sees your CUBE interview. Exactly. So as you look forward, if we're to sit down together a year from now, what are some of your top priorities, both for you personally and professionally, but as well for Landed? That's kind of the next couple of big hurdles that you guys want to take. Absolutely. So we're on a crest for world domination, but it's good. But that aside, our goal really is to unlock the talent of women around the globe. So we want to touch as many lives, whether it's women coming directly on the platform, or as many companies as possible, and keep refining our products so that we're meeting our promise, which is we're going to give you again what you need, when you need it, and a one size fits one way. Well, at least I can't wait to watch the story continue to unfold. You got a great energy. Sounds like a terrific product. Thank you. Can men log in as well? They absolutely can. And I should say, we don't develop tools for women. We develop tools for success. We just happen to focus somewhere. Okay, good. Because I know I'm too busy to keep track of this stuff. All right, she's Lisa Skeet Tatum from Landed. I'm Jeff Frick and thanks for stopping by. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Absolutely. You're watching theCUBE from the Professional Business Women at California Conference 28th Annual. Thanks for watching.


Yeah, so I'm always honored to be here last year I was standing pretty much in the same spot and I talked about what we'll finally do when we get around to releasing an orator 3 8 So we got around to releasing narrator with 3 8 Turns out that's awesome. Also turns out. That's definitely not the end of the journey So what we're gonna do in the next minutes It's gonna like take a very very short look back at what we didn't touch in 3 8 Then see What the challenges for the current schedule are in the like very narrow sense the things that we see right now and then I hope we can project a bit about what has to be solved in the You know larger scheme of things and how we started to actually tackle that because honestly I've been at least at five panels where we discussed what awesome things should be done to the scheduler and Yeah, it's time. We actually do want a few of these so I wish my presenter was working so Who am I I'm gonna do this very quickly. I'm still a research assistant at Cal. We got a new logo. I Teach a couple of the exercise classes That might be the case because I'm kind of 25% of an institute and Yeah, we are like on one hand. We're still looking for a PhD candidates. So If you're looking for a job, you know apply a Few of my other roles include, you know Supporting at us and supporting their customers by supporting them with more grumpiness I'm also a freelance engineer but as you can imagine like with a full-time job here and a part-time job there and a Happy fun time nighttime job as chief architect of the radio project that might come a bit short here So What is the state of new radio, I'm obviously not Putting up a picture of you know radio which started as a project probably around 99 We don't know quite for sure. We know when the first code was published. That was a year later. I'm talking about three seven Because that's what a lot of people are still using so this is pretty much the same slide from me last last year Just that that slide ended here And since then we've released 3.8. So that's six year years of trying to keep an API stable Which means that actually there was a lot of useful development In the use space the application space. This is awesome This is something that we definitely want to foster again in the future. We don't want to break things Whenever we can we want to you know move fast, but don't break things. That's a hard problem actually So here I am telling you that way we're gonna do a lot of changes Not all gonna be easy and we need to write some code and we'll break some code But in the end everything will be fine. So please be on with me while I try to assure you So because I couldn't stop myself from actually doing that. That's exactly the same slide as the last year I've just you know Clean it up a bit on you know showing that we've done all this Like from three seven oh two three eight. Oh, that's only like three hundred eighty, you know change lines of code that Is okay ish considering that includes code reformatting Excludes all the white space that is actually a lot of work and it's pretty amazing that basically All out of three modules will be compatible with you know ready three eight. I Can't think of many that have like architecturally problems with Becoming three eight compatible. It's mostly mechanical Co-changes and the fact that your python needs to be python three if you want to be you know future-proof and not only work with 3.8 because as Mentioned before by andre. We're dropping python two for anything after 3.8 Which kind of is the right thing because python just dropped python two So but what didn't we change we didn't change anything about how We modularize Our scott so that's still like no radio runtime. I've got all the gr minus what f's modules in there And we're actually putting in more as 439 so We also didn't change really like what the project is about it's about CPU bound or CPU base Processing of software defined radio signals If it works for audio if it works for so now if it works for your favorite You know, whatever 1d signal fine But you know the scope of the project really is software defined radio at this point and Another thing is that we really didn't change the way we think about contributions So if you've got a patch you send it upstream we do this by with github by now We didn't do that with github when we started 3.7, but it's really like you know very mostly bug fix oriented code contributions and We're just now getting up to speed with how to Encourage people to submit code upstream and for example just code would be highly be a Candidate for you know upstreaming considering that it has a broader usage And a lot of people aren't really happy with the equalizer at our entry like if you I've just had a talk at either Right about people trying to Sink on you are packages won't work with the current equalizers because they're simply too slow Like your package is gone the moment here equalizer locks and The main thing is we didn't change the scheduler so now I'm doing This funky finger thing the air quotation marks. Why am I doing the air quotation marks? I think like everyone loves the new radio scheduler, right? I throw in my block it gets executed I don't have to worry about anything all I have to worry about as a developer of a signal processing Transformative step is take my code put it into a work function Which has an input buffer has output buffers and I just write stuff into the output buffer and tell the runtime how much that was right? So to understand why That's not the perfect way to do it. We'll need to you know Go a bit into the history and do maybe a very very very short Introduction to how great a scheduling works. I try to actually put everything in that Presentation then I realized I'd you know held such a presentation last year took one of them half hours Couldn't do that here. So we're doing this. There's a bit easier like originally Radio from the start was a single core oriented Framework why because 1999 there was no Easily available multi-core CPU machines that you'd usually have access to as a private person and that was what you know the developers were Ideologically aiming for so what it was it was take an abstract representation of a flow graph of a signal processing graph Flatten that graph. So that's a directive our second graph. There was no message Async stuff in there. There was just samples going around Then analyze that graph find the sources in that graph. That's rather simple. You start at any node You do a backwards search until you reach a root node and then you check whether you've you know, call out all your Tree all your graph nodes and if that's the case you're done So you find all the sources you call their work functions They produce samples in their output buffers and then you basically take these samples call the down like take one of the sources outputs Call the downstream block Let that ripple through the graph and you repeat that until you're basically blocked by Someone missing new input and then you go back one step back trace and run another iteration on that block So I hope that if I say something wrong like the editors of the project which aren't No, Tom's not here So I'm not saying anything wrong So we later renamed that I was around 2009 we said right or renamed that to a singer-threader scheduler Because we went in and you said that we said oh now that dual core even quad core machines are readily available cheaply available even Coming to norm. We want to like, you know have multiple threats and what we did was let's say we algorithmically simplified dummy fight even we just took every block Put them in their own threat Still discovered the sources call the sources they produce some data and then we just had like this message passing Thing where we notified all the neighbors of these blocks that hey something has changed and the individual block Executors and their threats would then go in and analyze what that mean and that usually man means that you start processing the samples Which is fine, you know, I can write it down in like literally four lines of C Like the algorithm to the C And that's fine problem is Like the average flow graph has more blocks than I have CPU cores in my machine And I'm less I'm not working for Amazon or Google. That's probably gonna stay that way so With that in mind we can see that okay, this is a very flexible extremely easy way of doing it and it leverages the fact that Operating systems are getting pretty pretty good at scheduling tasks when they're ready when they know that they have data available when they're not blocked on something and We can really see that the Linux scheduler at very least that's a decent job at, you know, finding heuristics of when to schedule watch But it's not, you know, it has simply no clue The linear scheduler has no clue about what the data flow is, right? There's only threads and some thread says oh I have a mute holds a mutex and we notified at mutex So some condition variable change some f mutex is calling suddenly you're in the wild You don't know who of these 15 threads to schedule next So this is fine. It works. It's surprisingly performant But it's also a bit depressing right because that means that we had this, you know someone thought about how to build that single thread scheduler and Then someone else like this the same group of people thought about how to build a multi-threaded scheduler And they started with the simplest thing that comes to mind and it actually like, you know But the hell of that because if you have four cores that's three cores more than you used to have and you know You can have a lot of inefficiency there So let us, you know, take a step back and actually look at what makes new radio signal flow actually tick And I like to call it a back pressure driven And with the threat for block schedule a parallel signal processing architecture meaning that while for example the file thing might still be Processing the samples writing them to a file The multiply cons block here in the middle might already be working on a next chunk of things Because that's the way it is like the signal source just notified multiple cons multiple cons did some calculations wrote to the output buffer and notified the file thing and in the meantime the signal source might have already been Notified by multiple cons that hey you've got some like I'm done you can do some more work for me Could you please so these two can run in parallel and in the end like in a stable situation all three Basically could run in parallel, but I said like no flow graph is as simple as that most have way more blocks than CPU cores So the the you perceive parallelism isn't actually there. It's just maxing out your CPU usage best case So Nope So That's why I put the scheduler in quotation marks, right? There is no scheduling of things We just tell everyone at every point in time that hey, I'm done or hey You've got so like I'm done you've got some more output to produce and as you can imagine like this has a bit of overhead in terms of messaging and it also Doesn't really qualify as you know informing anyone of the intent of your data flow Why is that important on normal machines? Well, if you've got like think of an old style CPU you only have RAM and Registers and that's it right so whenever you exchange a big portion of data. You always write that to RAM and get it out in the next block so Problem is that's not how modern CPUs work modern CPUs have caches and these caches are Inherently local so it would be very desirable that for example if I had a lot of blocks And this is just a part of my flow graph that three these three blocks would run on the same CPU core Why because then the output of that block would never leave the cache of that CPU core The multiply cons would then be called on data and cash and write to a cash Data for the file sync another thing is it's obviously beneficial if we just try to execute these in Sequence all over again. Why because then with lower cache usage. I can keep the same locality So we have no way of actually integrating that knowledge into the current scheduler Bad thing, but here's who we gonna how we're gonna solve it I'm running out of time so I'm kind of speeding up here so What we did in the past is we let it sing a threat scheduler die not because it was a bad scheduler But because we concentrated on a different one and then we added features that only the newer scheduler support So if you're using message passing in the asynchronous case, that's not a feature supported by the single thread scheduler Which is sad. It's not technically impossible to do that It's just you know, we never thought about that how to do that and how to come up with an architecture so we let things die and We also didn't Come up with a way of measuring how well our scheduler works while we were still Developing it, you know, it was all an afterthought. We we added control part to figure out when how many Milliseconds your block call took an average we measured We added metrics after the facts now the problem is if we're gonna do better than that We should be starting with metrics up front right because other than that. We might probably make things worse first so This is a bit of a trouble here because measuring runtime in a dynamically allocating Signal flow is a hard problem.  So the all you can do is either do statistics or Hope for the best And we are we're gonna change that and we see how that's possible so what we hope to do is is Right a schedule that's you know something we actually understand So we have this threat per block schedule and it's like fairly simple in principle like I've just explained I hope that their principle was kind of clear But it has like a lot of these states Is that block done? Is it block on input? Is it block on output? Is it you know currently processing something? What what we're gonna do when we say, okay, this flow graph is done now How do we flush out the remaining data in the in the in the data flow graph? We need something and that's pretty dear to a lot of people in this room. That's actually extensible We don't want things to be the single schedule that you want to use in radio You need a schedule for payload for workloads that look like a path I really like where I look at it and say, okay, the optimal solution to this is obviously, you know Doing it in in circles as fast as possible and Situations where we have things that look more like a network of graphs where packets might be sent around Even taking different routes through my signal processing Flow graph depending on what that packet contains, right? So if I'm decoding Wi-Fi and not all packets are data packets Some packets might just be needed for equalization purposes or you know initialization purposes They need to go down different routes. So that's something that the current scheduler architecture can't really do So we started to think about how to actually write a new schedule and the problem with that is How do you start doing that if you've got a block that does so much Everyone who's like who's who's already written a new radio block in this room can see hands So that's a little more than half of you So you really know that you know a radio block has this work function that takes an input and an output buffer or multiples of these But also you can have something like a forecast which you need if you have don't have a fixed rate from input to output It also can have like things to check whether the in number of inputs works with the number of outputs You offered it also has a lot of things that you don't really need to have like this Purity of essence kind of I want to process samples. That's a transformation between input to output But a lot of things that encapsulate the state of your signal processing but not from a signal processing point of view but from the You know data marshaling scheduling point of view. So that is a really hard problem that we see there why You know if I want to take that block and Scheduled it elsewhere be it like an add different scheduler type because I realized like this scheduler is not working out for that sub graph Or whether I want to say okay that block goes to AWS now It doesn't run on myself a computer anymore Receives low rate data and you know needs processing power that I can't offer locally. I can't do that with that It's not possible to you know actually transparently plug out a block and move it elsewhere because the block is so intensely Phasing with the scheduler on a basic basis that actually Fills with the internals of the scheduler that we know were documented as an api It's emergent behavior that everyone got used to like we're fixing a lot of bugs because Oh That's how people are using the scheduler interesting that should be working We did something it broke that and now we have to figure out a way to actually Make it work again because you know we try to not break user land so We needed a cut we needed to say okay, what's the block what is good about a new radio block and what's not necessary about the radio block and So we implemented a new block dot h. That's what we were doing at the hackfest at isa And that was really like that is a block that's tremendously Reduced compared to do your original radio block. It really only has a work function And instead of you know having Input items and output items pointers And then also parameter that tells you how much output items you can maximally produce But ignoring the fact that you have multiple outputs so that these might be multiple numbers And expecting you to actually you know tell the scheduler how much you consumed We kind of try to Put that Into objects that the scheduler Calls you with so that we are getting more like a functional interface Why because basically computer science tells us that lambdas are better to reason about than things that change the state of the world around them, right? so Especially if you're writing an fpga Implementation of something you don't want that fpga implementation to have to go back and tell the cpu bounce scheduler that hey I'm now producing 20 items That's nothing it should be caring about first of all and saying of how you just literally can't without incurring like an overhead That's probably way worse than doing the home computation on the cpu itself. So That's why we're trying to you know move away from the classical work thing Another thing is Right now people are writing two different kinds of blocks.  Into us and chronos messages because they don't really fit the I have a Contiguous memory buffer where I could write in samples paradigm and it also really doesn't fit that you don't want to Allocate these So that hopefully Allows us to have a single unified interface for both instead of having two different paradigms in the same Idea of how we we do work. So that's the block-centric view. This is what I would call the OOT module implementers view of things and then I've got um new um The scheduling interface so the scheduling interface obviously now gets a graph That's made of out of these connected blocks, right and it's still I know It's still a graph But instead of just you know distributing messages to all blocks that run in in a thread each We introduce workers like I mean web servers have been doing that since Around 1995 We just have one worker per cpu core and that worker is the owner of a couple of blocks that It executes so instead of sending messages to a block Executor we were sent messages about hey, I've just updated my output to a worker that worker will then Aggregate all the messages that it got while the main Work that it was currently executing was executing after that work is done Reorder if necessary and execute that So kind of imagine that as a queue with knowledge of what's done inside right so This is for cpu scheduler should pretty easily work because that's basically I mean if you're implementing a simple os that's exactly how we implement Scheduling threats you have a queue of that that should be doing stuff and then you check whether any of these had any update so that's easy but also That gives us a very clear interface of how to Communicate with other scheduling domains. So I'm introducing the concept of a scheduling domain. That's like hey I've got this cpu bound schedule. Hey, I've got to schedule that actually runs On a gpu or hey, I've got to schedule it actually runs on an fpj in on a data center somewhere else And all that it has to do is receive messages and the good thing about receiving messages is You're not really bound to having them in a shared memory space, right? You can do that over network Meaning that this is going to be transparent. We can simply zero mq that to you know your neighbor's pc And have that work. So that's What we're doing in terms of scheduling architecture So Could you press the next button? Yeah works So what what are we expecting from this? So I said like we'll be able to transparent remove blocks We'll be able to exchange schedulers and that's a big deal for us So that's actually where currently our main research is like we can Do awesome things in block? We can write the coolest equalizers But at the end of the day we're limited by the computational resources that we can usually utilize Yeah, and a lot of places we could basically have internet money, but we don't have internet bandwidth. So Yeah, we need to solve that And also we've been stuck for 20 years with basically the same scheduling paradigm And might just be the case that we need to just experiment get our fingers, you know A bit muddy on how to you know work things So I've got three minutes for questions And if anyone wants to leave if we could do that quickly so that I can shop off you So I don't know the order of things. So but I let the gentleman from So the metrics So So the like the question was how what what what would the metrics interface look like what could people do with that? And um, that's pretty easy like basically most of the metrics are simply Emergent properties of the messages that we're exchanging right so I could just say okay Splice that message to a observer and do that the hopes are that People who are into scheduling are optimizing based on what they can observe there Another hope is that we can just throw, you know phc students at that problem until it actually works And if that doesn't work, we still have machine learning So that's that's the one thing Yeah, the other thing is that we already have like I mentioned contrapoor we have ways of measuring performance They're just not utilized very well because they're you know, ipiy is very awkward I'm just gonna go ahead with you So the question is whether like real-time linux capabilities are beneficial. So bussy bluster wrote a paper on the influence of scheduling Strategies of the oscarnal for radio and you can actually increase performance if you're doing a bit more You know preempting guaranteeing latencies, but there's only so much you can do so Like basically real-time linux always does a trade-off between latency And rate and we're not willing to go that way. So I'm I'm sorry. I'm out of time Um, I'll have to hand over like I gladly hand over my microphone to the next speaker