DARE TO BE 100. BIG BET – HuffPost

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Huffington Blog DARE TO BE 100

In 1991 I wrote a book titled WE LIVE TOO SHORT AND DIE TOO LONG. The fifth chapter was entitled Aging is a Self Fulfilling Prophecy. That was 26 years ago when I was 61 years of age. Now at eighty-seven my prophecy is intact. I intend to live till 100. I still have unfinished work to do. Like Alexander the Great observed toward the end of his triumphant career there are still worlds to conquer.

I certainly find much satisfaction in what I have accomplished so far, but its not time yet to fold my tent. My fixation still is on erasing health illiteracy from the world. This gigantic task is the ultimate vaccine. Were we able to teach everyone how to fulfill their human potential of a hundred healthy years mankind would triumph. We die too soon. A major part of my personal strategy is to establish 100 years as our natural life expectancy. I have written extensively to this purpose.

I am of course interested in a bet that was placed by two of my gerontologist colleagues Steven Austad of the University of Alabama and Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois. Stimulated by an article in the journal Nature in 2016, that used demographic data to assert that there is a natural limit to human lifespan of about 115 years, Olshansky agrees but Austad doesnt. Citing current research on animals life extension by some drugs Austad sees no upper limit. Earlier in 2000 he wrote in the Scientific American, the first 150 year old person is already alive.

To address their claims in September 2000 the two endowed their wager that any one born before 2001 will reach the age of 150. As the invested fund value keeps growing the winner will claim a handsome reward. Neither of the gamblers expect to be around in 2150. But I am confident that Olshanskys descendents will heap a bonanza from Jays recognition of the finitude of human life.

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DARE TO BE 100. BIG BET - HuffPost

New ICBM Cheaper Than Upgraded Minuteman: Boeing On GBSD – Breaking Defense

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Airmen install a new cable run on an aging Minuteman III missile.

ARLINGTON: A brand-new ICBM may cost the nation more than $85 billion, but keeping the geriatric Minuteman will cost even more. Thats according to Boeing, the aerospace giant that began building the original Minuteman I in 1958 and has maintained the much-modified Minuteman III since 1970.

Minuteman III in silo

Sure, the company can reset the odometer on the Minuteman with yet another service life extension program (SLEP), Boeing strategic deterrence chief Frank McCall told reporters this morning. But its still a 1950s design upgraded over six decades with a mix of technologies it was never intended to accommodate. While parts of the guidance and propulsion systems date to 1993, for example, some parts are so old the original manufacturers have long since gone out of business. That forces the Air Force to expensively reinvent the wheel or, say, a 1961-vintage mechanical coding device.

So for about the same price as a rebuilt Minuteman, McCall told us, Boeing would rather build you an all-new missile. Thats what the Air Force calls the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. (Lockheed and Northrop are also competing). GBSD would get you better performance, he said, including against modern, precision-guided missile defenses, which didnt exist when the Minuteman was designed. (Back then, cutting-edge missile defense destroyed incoming warheads by detonating a nuclear weapon over your own territory). It would be flexible for a wide range of scenarios, whereas the Minuteman was optimized for a massive exchange with Russia across the North Pole. And even sticking with low-risk, proven technology, it would be decades more advanced than Minuteman.

The new missile would also feature a modular, plug-and-plug design known as open architecture that would make replacing components both for maintenance and upgrades much easier than on the Minuteman III. Most important, perhaps, the new missile would be designed from the start to last for decades until at least the 2070s while Minuteman was originally meant to last just 10 years. Between the open architecture and the build-to-last philosophy, McCall said, GBSD would be cheaper to maintain over the long haul than Minuteman.

Back in June, Gen. John Hyten, head of Strategic Command, lamented the time and money it would take to develop GBSD: $85 billion over 20 years for 400 missiles, compared to $17 billion in todays dollars over five years for the initial 800 Minutemans. The military-industrial complex needs to relearn how to go fast, take risks, fail, and try again, he said, instead of grinding along in todays bureaucratic, cripplingly slow acquisition system.

But as expensive as GBSD was, Hyten emphasized, it was still cheaper than re-re-rebuilding the Minuteman: You will have ended up replacing just about everything on the missile, which will cost you more (than GBSD), but nobody believes me. Now that weve heard more of the details from Boeing, maybe we will.

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New ICBM Cheaper Than Upgraded Minuteman: Boeing On GBSD - Breaking Defense

adidas and Major League Soccer announce extension of long-term partnership through 2024 – LA Galaxy

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adidas and Major League Soccer today announce the extension of their long-term partnership through 2024. Marking adidas largest investment in soccer in North America, the six-year deal makes adidas the official supplier partner for the League, its Clubs, MLS youth academies and youth affiliated clubs. Key to the agreement is an expanded focus on youth development to drive creativity in sports for young athletes. Financial terms of the agreement will not be disclosed. Sport is the epicenter of our culture and, in the U.S. and Canada, soccer is the most popular sport for young people to play, said adidas North America President Mark King. Our partnership with MLS puts adidas at the core of sport in North America, allowing us to make a positive difference in an athletes game and life. Built from athlete and consumer insight, we are looking to create the future of sport and bring new and different things to the game the world has never seen before. Focusing on athlete performance, adidas will outfit MLS teams and their affiliates with uniforms, footwear, training gear and sideline apparel. In addition to world-class innovation and design in apparel and footwear, adidas will provide the leagues official match ball. Major League Soccer has built a legacy with adidas that has been essential in the rise of our League, said MLS Commissioner Don Garber. adidas has been a major collaborator with us since the inception of MLS, and we are proud that our partnership with this globally-respected brand will continue to enhance the growth of the game in North America for many more years. We will work with adidas on innovative concepts to showcase the sport and our elite athletes, and we will intensify our mission to develop top North American soccer players for generations to come. The new agreement emphasizes investment in young athletes, deepening both organizations focus on inspiring and supporting the next generation of players. adidas and MLS will drive youth development and programming to help young soccer players create and shape their future. Through sport, we have the power to change lives, said King. We believe in the power of sport and its ability to create positivity for young athletes and their world. Through our expanded youth development program, well provide high-level competition and unique life experiences for athletes who want to improve their game. Recognized for being the fastest-growing sports league on social media, Major League Soccer will create an innovative, socially powered and localized content approach for adidas as part of the new agreement. A multi-platform content experience, the new adidas "Creator's Network," will allow for enhanced, in-depth storytelling through fresh local and national content from League supporters and influencers. adidas and Major League Soccer began their relationship at the Leagues inception in 1996 with adidas partnering with the Columbus Crew, Kansas City Wiz and D.C. United. In 2004, the organizations announced an exclusive all-league partnership that put adidas on every MLS team. In 2010, adidas and Major League Soccer extended their commitment, with a new focus on advancing soccer in North America through youth development. For more information visitwww.adidas.com/us/soccerandMLSsoccer.comand join the conversation onTwitter with@adidassoccerand@MLSandInstagram with@adidasfootballand@MLSwith#HereToCreateand #MLS.

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adidas and Major League Soccer announce extension of long-term partnership through 2024 - LA Galaxy

Teachers fear compulsory extended school days would damage pupils’ family life – TES News

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Teachers fear that any compulsory extension of the school day could increase pressure on pupils and damage their family life, new research published by the DfE has found.

Researchers carried out qualitative research in secondary schools to examine the attitudes of school leaders, teachers, parents, pupils and community groups to extended provision.

Their report, published today, says: Staff and parents could see some potential benefits to a [compulsory] extension, such as more time to engage with life skills and enrichment activities, improved relationships with teaching staff, the school as a safe haven, as well as support for working families.

However, the perceived negative impact on student pressure, fatigue, impact on family arrangements, student safety, as well as their involvement in activities within the community had much greater weight with parents and staff.

It says the majority of school leaders held a predominantly negative view of compulsory extension, both in principle and in practice.

And although some saw the value in the basic concept, they questioned how it would happen in practice. A small number were generally positive and supportive.

When the researchers questioned teachers, they found that concerns focused on the impact on the work-life balance of pupils, the extent to which participation should be intrinsically motivated or imposed, the impact on teachers and practicalities of staffing, and the potential of disruption to family schedules.

Staff and parents raised concerns that a compulsory extended school day could have negative effects on family time with children, as well as compromisetheir ability to engage in the local community.

And in focus groups, pupils said they believed the range of activities they engaged in would be narrowed, because they would have to give up activities outside of school if the school day was extended.

They were also concerned about their safety and how they would get home. The report adds: This applied particularly during the winter months, with many pupils expressing discomfort at returning home in the dark.

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Teachers fear compulsory extended school days would damage pupils' family life - TES News

Olympic Games face crucial turning point: The Japan News columnist – The Straits Times

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Wakako Yuki

TOKYO (THE JAPAN NEWS/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - The International Olympic Committee (IOC), facing a critical trend of bid city withdrawal, opened the way for a double award for Paris and Los Angeles as the 2024 and 2028 summer Olympic Games hosts. Los Angeles responded on Monday that the city would accept 2028 candidacy.

The fact that the IOC resorted to such an unusual measure suggests that the Olympic Movement today faces a historic turning point.

"Our discussions and decisions today will chart the course of the Olympic Games for the foreseeable future."

With these words, IOC President Thomas Bach began his speech to open the Extraordinary IOC Session in Lausanne, Switzerland, on July 11.

"Today, when people see that the government, the opposition, business and the sport community - in other words, the entire establishment - is united behind one project (an Olympic Games bid), then the people immediately have mistrust and conclude that something must be terribly wrong.

"Populist movements are on the rise. There is a profound change in the decision-making process in many Western countries. For all these reasons we had and continue to have a much smaller number of potential candidate cities," he said.

By giving Paris and Los Angeles, the two remaining cities in the 2024 bid race, the right to host the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympic Games, the IOC has found a way to ensure stability for the next 11 years. Emphasising this point, Bach secured unanimous agreement to the proposal.

However, establishing stability is not the same as solving the problem. It is necessary to focus on the root of the trend.

Why are there such strong public criticisms slowing down the Olympic bid momentum?

Many cities withdrew from the 2022 and 2024 Olympic bidding after defeats in local referendums or due to political decisions citing negative public opinion. Is the Olympic Movement coming to a crossroads? I listened to the views of the IOC members at the extraordinary session.

Many IOC members endorse the view put forth by Bach that today's political and social climate, the zeitgeist, is a factor. In other words, it is a view that looks for the cause in trends outside the Olympic Movement, not internally.

Europe, the birthplace of the modern Olympics, has been shaken by economic crises, terrorism and immigration issues.

Today there is less need for city redevelopment as many European and U.S. cities have matured, changing the meaning of hosting the Games. In the age of the internet, negative impressions move freely, making it easy for critical opinion and opposition movements to spread.

The public movements that led to the election of U.S. President Donald Trump in the United States, and to the Brexit decision in Britain, contain at heart misgivings toward the existing political and economic system and long-held values. The same adverse wind faces Olympic bids.

Hence the modern Olympic Games, which for last three decades have built and expanded their reach using a capitalist model and by gaining support from political and economic systems, are now prone to face criticism, often under the banner of "concern for cost."

IOC members often point out that the only Games cost for which the IOC has any responsibility are the operation costs of the organising committees, which are not on the rise and are almost all in surplus.

There is no doubt that the Olympics are a mirror reflecting international society and are influenced by present trends. However, if one were to look back over the Olympics' history, it may seem that the shortage of bid cities can be attributed to external factors in those particular eras, as well as overlapping incidents that have occurred during the preceding Olympiads. Two factors seem to affect the decline most: costs being out of control, and the damage to Olympic values based on ethics and ideals.

When in the past the number of bidding cities decreased to two or less, it was thought to be a warning signal for the continuation of the Olympics. For the 2022 Winter Olympic bid (won by Beijing in 2015) and for the 2024 Summer Games (to be voted on in September) only two cities remained in the final selection for each.

The last decline in Olympic history took place in an era that the late Juan Antonio Samaranch, who became IOC president in 1980, called "a challenging period which was labeled by critics as the demise of the Olympic Games."

The decade featured the terrorist incident during the 1972 Munich Games, the financial overrun of the 1976 Montreal Games (after this there was only one candidate city), and the 1980 Moscow Games that were hit by boycotts. The host city selection held in 1981 featured two Asian cities, Seoul and Nagoya (won by Seoul). Though the boycotts were an external factor, they damaged the philosophy set forth by the Olympics, and lowered their perceived value. The opposition movement in Nagoya at the time serves as proof of this.

The trend was turned by the commercialisation of the Games led by then-President Samaranch, and right after the financial success of the 1984 Los Angeles Games, the number of Olympic bid cities recorded a new surge. However, in the last several years, they have declined again.

Looking at the current situation in light of the past, a similar trend may emerge. There were reports that the total cost of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, which actually included massive urban development, reached 5 trillion (S$61.47 billion), an all-time high for either the summer or winter Games.

This, combined with the economic recession in Europe, scared off European candidates for the 2022 Winter Games bidding. The following year saw a damning revelation of systematic doping in Russia, together with the corruption of the former president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, then an IOC member.

These led to a loss of confidence in the fairness of competitions and damaged ethical values. For the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, Brazil's political and economic turmoil obviously played the key part, but the delayed preparations and financial challenges left a negative impression.

"There may be some of that reaction (rooted in current political and social trends), but I suspect much of it is the result of growing concerns about corruption and moral leadership," was the observation of Dick Pound, who led an investigation into the Russian doping scandal. "Sport has, to a considerable degree, allowed those values to become tarnished. If it can re-instate them, I believe that much of the current doubt or cynicism could be dissipated."

Using the 11 years of "golden stability" that will be secured by choosing hosts for both the 2024 and 2028 Games, how can the IOC restructure the Olympic Games and the bidding system? Bach responded that he intends to "increase the value of the Olympic Games."

By reducing costs, and making reforms that will attract more bidding cities, Bach hopes to establish historical proof in the examples of successful Games organisation, including Tokyo 2020.

He often says: "If you react to a challenge, your options are limited. We want to be the leaders of change, not the object of change."

So he did, at the end of 2014, when the IOC approved the "Olympic Agenda 2020" for reform, which already highlighted the need for cost reduction and changes to the bidding process.

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be the first summer Games under the reformed policy, expected to be the cornerstone of efforts to change the tide.

Paving the way for two cities to hold the 2024 and 2028 Olympics is another strategic cornerstone.

While putting on a strong face, the IOC can break the negative trend of cities withdrawing bids.

Furthermore, the two cities are expected to present "golden opportunities" for raising the value of the Olympic Games; Paris, where the modern Olympic Games saw their creation by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, and Los Angeles, promising another private-funded Olympic organisation.

What then?

"The rest is up to my successor," said Bach, with a big smile hiding the meticulous calculations behind it.

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Olympic Games face crucial turning point: The Japan News columnist - The Straits Times

Letter to the editor: Rallying behind Trump – South Strand news

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America is experiencing an extraordinary episode in the history of manufacturing opinion. Never has there been such focused determination to ruin an American president by the opposition party and the press that supports them.

Why is the Left dedicated to destroying the Trump presidency? Because Trump is the one person who says he wont submit to the world around him. He is the symbol of national sovereignty in the battle with globalism, and a symbol of the sovereignty of individuals We The People in the battle with steroidal expansion of government and government control.

The Left cannot allow the zeitgeist of nationalism or self-determination; a government party barreling toward socialism must quash both wherever they appear. They must cut off Trumps head and stab him to death politically and personally, just as Kathy Griffin and the Shakespeare players did in effigy. The American press, as part of that Leftist movement, is a vital tool in the mission to destroy anything and anyone that threatens their forward motion. That determined destruction clearly centers on the current President and his administration. Turn on network news, pick up a major paper, and there is no denying the collaboration.

Resist, Resist, Resist, they say. But what is the rest of their message? Rise with us to silence those who disagree? Rise to make american leadership less significant in the world? Rise to preserve uncontrolled government expansion and soaring national debt? Rise to redefine our military into an experiment in social engineering rather than a force to protect the nation and its allies? Rise to disdain American values? Rise to remove gender as well as excellence from our lexicon and the lives of our children? Rise to deconstruct the Constitution and ignore Federal law?

All those things were initiated and/or amplified under Barack Obama. Those things and more like them are what the progressive left, dragging silly liberals with them, stands for. The complete rejection of those things and those people by millions of americans gave us the Trump presidency. We can only watch and see which vision prevails, but if there is any hope, it lies in patriotism... in the continued commitment of Americans to personal freedom, and in the vision, personal strength, and determination of Donald Trump.

Hartley Porter

Ponte Vedra Beach, FL

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Letter to the editor: Rallying behind Trump - South Strand news

Should the Leading Online Tech Companies Be Regulated as Public Utilities? – Lawfare (blog)

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Should the leading online tech companies be regulated as public utilities? Maybe so, according to White House advisor Steve Bannon. His basic argument, according to The Intercept, is that Facebook and Google have become effectively a necessity in contemporary life. Thus far, the tech sector and Washington think-tank crowd have not grappled with that possibility in much depth, if at all. This post will provide a look at some reasons that leading tech companies today resemble sectors traditionally subjected to public utility regulation, and then consider some strong critiques of such a regulatory approach.

Historically, utility regulation has been more prominent where we see: (1) high market share; (2) a service that is vital for consumers; (3) a natural monopoly; and (4) barriers to exit by consumers. For the first factor, one can debate which market measurements to use, but Facebook and Google are unquestionably large. Both have billions of users globally. Google has about an 88 percent market share globally for search, and Facebook now reaches about 89 percent of U.S. Internet users. As to the second, online services are perhaps not quite as vital to daily life as electricity, but Bannon is likely correct to say that services such as search, navigation, and social networks are effectively a necessity of modern life.

The third factor appears more complicated; at first glance, tech companies are not a great fit with the traditional concept of natural monopoly, which economist William Baumol defined as an industry in which multi-firm production is more costly than production by a monopoly." Traditional utility regulation focused on sectors such as electricity, telephone, and cable: high capital costs to entering those markets meant it usually made no economic sense to build a duplicative set of power, phone, or cable lines to the home. For online services, by contrast, the cost of creating a new web site is trivially small, so new social networks can easily begin with an innovative approach and instantly get to the users home or mobile device. However, a network becomes more valuable as more people joina concept called a network effect. Network effects can readily exist for social networks, with sites like Twitter and Facebook increasing in value to each member as more users join. Strong network effects can create costly if not impossible conditions for new entrants seeking to compete with the market leader.

Lastly, as for barriers to exit for consumers, the government applied traditional utility regulation when consumers had no easy way to cut themselves off from a service, such as electricity or phone service. This condition may well apply to Facebook, Google, or other major tech firms. For Facebook, ending use would risk losing touch with friends, accessing news and emergency alerts, and quite a bit more. For Google services, logged-in users could lose access to some of the most advanced email, navigation, video, search, and other personalized services.

There are also compelling arguments against the view that online services today deserve regulation as public utilities. For online services, a competing service really is just a click away if the current service does not serve customer needs. In addition, antitrust experts emphasize the importance of leapfrog competition, in which a different company or business model does not compete head-on with the current market leader, but instead jumps to the next generation and displaces the incumbent there. This phenomenon has many examples in information technology. MySpace lost out to Facebook. Windows and Microsoft Office dominated the PC market for many years, but have no similar hold on todays pervasive mobile devices, while Google Docs and other cloud software services have successfully challenged Microsofts software license model.

More broadly, public utility regulation as a cure may be worse than the disease. A major deregulatory backlash followed the public utility regulation applied to numerous U.S. industries in the 1960s. Under President Carter, a progressive alliance of economist Alfred Kahn, then-Senate staffer Stephen Breyer, and Ralph Nader succeeded in eliminating the Civil Aeronautics Board and price setting for airline tickets, opening the way for discount airlines. Under President Reagan and afterwards, deregulation spread to many previously-regulated utilities, including energy, telecommunications, and other sectors.

Observers vary greatly in which of these deregulatory changes they favor, and my intention here is not to pronounce judgment on which of the changes was desirable. Instead, I suggest that the deregulatory movement had at least three insights that corrected for some of the earlier preference for public utility regulation. First, as airline deregulation exemplifies, the traditional public utility approach does not work well for markets characterized by innovation and rapid change. Second, the debate over proper designation of public utility status should cite more than a study of market failures to justify public utility or other regulation; instead, as Neil Komesar has ably argued, policymakers should look empirically at both government failures and market failures to assess whether regulation is likely to be worthwhile in a given setting. Third, even Democratic Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama have issued Executive Orders supporting use of cost-benefit analysis to proposed regulations (while recognizing the difficulty of quantifying important variables). Applying these three insights to tech firms, innovation and rapid change are common to the tech industry, government imperfections in regulation can be high when applied to cutting-edge technology, and the costs of regulation can be especially steep in industries that otherwise would continue to innovate.

In short, there are some reasonably strong arguments that the biggest online services today are similar to traditional public utilities due to their high market share, network effects, and difficulty for consumers to live without the service. On the other hand, the old public utility approach to regulation had numerous flaws, and does not adapt readily to high-innovation markets where competition is typically based on factors other than price.

Rather than fitting public utility models for electricity or airline pricing, the emerging calls for regulation bear a closer resemblance to some of the Federal Communications Commissions past efforts to use its public utility authority to regulate television content. The growing calls for online services to take down ISIS and other terrorist communications can be seen as an update to the FCCs prohibitions on profanity (George Carlins seven dirty words) and broader historical efforts to prohibit indecent content. The calls for limits on fake news can similarly start to resemble a modern-day Fairness Doctrine, where fake news is unfair and blocked, while real news is fair and goes out to viewers.

The efforts to regulate online services as utilities, moreover, are likely to advance more quickly in countries other than the United States. The United States is more laissez faire than the rest of the world and proud of and reluctant to interfere with American-grown tech success stories. By contrast, the European Union has been willing to take high-visibility actions against Google, in the right to be forgotten limits on what can be shown in search results, and in the recent EU antitrust order that Google must avoid prioritizing search results of Google-affiliated services.

In conclusion, those who thought public utility regulation was a thing of the past might want to reconsider what is likely to happen with respect to the largest online tech companies. Steven Bannon, in calling for public utility treatment, may be expressing something in the American zeitgeist, and other countries are likely even more willing to regulate in this area than the United States. For those who are familiar with the many problems of public utility regulation, the time has likely come to make more considered and persuasive explanations for the flaws of that approach.

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Should the Leading Online Tech Companies Be Regulated as Public Utilities? - Lawfare (blog)

Here’s where you can buy the "Equal Rights Now" tee you’ve seen almost every celebrity wearing – HelloGiggles

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Females Are Strong As Hell

If youve been on Instagram at all since November, then youve probably noticed a resurgence in politically-charged tees. Tees have always been loud statement-makers, especially in a political context. How clothing is made, what it means in relation to the zeitgeist, and what it represents are all inherently political, even though it may not always be obvious. And in case youre looking to wear your woke-ness on your sleeve with a shirt, then you may want to grab this Equal Rights Now tee featuring iconic feministsDorothy Pitman HughesandGloria Steinem.

The photo on this shirt, which first appeared in a 1971 issue of Esquire magazine, features Gloria and Dorothy with their fists up. Its a stern and timeless testament to everything the womens empowerment movement stands for: Intersectional equality on every front. Now, the famed photo is getting a DIY makeover on this shirt and furthering the demand for equal rights for all.

Thanks to everyone who supported our represent.com/equalrights campaign so far! Help raise money and awareness for the Equal Rights Coalition to finally pass the Equal Rights Amendment! #EqualRightNow

Giving some background on the amendment, Represent states,

The ERA still hasnt been passed, and the goal of this shirt is to help promote awareness so that it can finally be adopted. And for $24.99, you know your money is going to a good cause while also helping you spread the word about the importance of this amendment.

The shirts start shipping on August 25th, so prepare your bodies. Youll be able to wear these sooner than you think.

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Here's where you can buy the "Equal Rights Now" tee you've seen almost every celebrity wearing - HelloGiggles

How to smother a resource economy to death, starting with LNG – Financial Post

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By Joe Oliver

Last week, Canada received more bad news in its prolonged failure to export energy resources abroad. Petronas decided not to proceed with its $36-billion Pacific NorthWest LNG project, dealing a body blow to B.C. employment, economic growth, funding for social programs and revenue to First Nations. Understandably, the federal and provincial governments sounded defensive, characterizing it as a business decision based entirely on the decline in liquified natural gas prices.

However, Petronas had previously emphasized it considers the industrys long-term prospects, including costs, not just the current market. Furthermore, LNG projects are moving forward south of the border and in Australia. An initial project description was filed with the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) in February 2013, raising the question why it could not have been approved sooner when prices were higher and costs potentially lower. For the sponsor, it must have felt like death by a thousand cuts, with frustrating delays and ceaseless demands for concessions from politicians and regulators, as well as lawsuits from environmental and aboriginal opponents.

Norway green policies have not prevented it from exploiting its vast offshore resources

When I was minister of natural resources, our Conservative government legislated one project, one review in a defined time period, a significant regulatory improvement. Later, we provided an accelerated capital allowance for the projects facilities and extended export licenses. In contrast, the Liberal government denigrated the National Energy Board (NEB), politicized, duplicated and lengthened the consultation and review processes and broadened their scope. It is now considering the addition of social and cultural impacts, which would exacerbate uncertainty and delay.

Former premier Christy Clark imposed a provincial carbon tax and took her time in pressuring Petronas to commit up to $1 billion in investment over 20 years. For its part, the CEAAs numerous and onerous requests for information stopped the clock and added a one-and-a-half-year delay. Meanwhile, the B.C. NDP, later to form government, officially rejected the project. In September 2016, the federal cabinet finally gave its approval, subject to 190 conditions including a cap on carbon emissions. So, a lot of people contributed to killing the deal.

Lets put the project in perspective. Canada has enormous natural gas reserves (1,100 trillion cubic feet), enough for 350 years of domestic use at current consumption. It is just common sense that we export as much as we responsibly can, as soon as we can. However, according to the NEB, Canada will be a late entrant in the highly competitive global LNG market and the next several years will be critical to the development of the Canadian LNG industry. Unfortunately, only the $1.6-billion Woodfibre LNG project has any chance of being built in the next five years.

Canadas strategic challenge is that our sole customer, the U.S., has discovered vast domestic shale reserves. Its companies are buying our gas at the low Alberta border price and exporting gas at the higher Henry Hub price. A substantial oil price differential also exists between Western Canadian Select and international Brent. Our exporters only option is to pay U.S. pipeline tariffs and contract with Gulf Coast facilities. For Donald Trump, its a great deal. For Justin Trudeau, not so much.

That leads to Kinder Morgans $6.8-billion Trans Mountain pipeline extension, which would transport 890,00 barrels of oil a day to Burnaby, east of Vancouver, for export to Asia. The new minority NDP government promised its Green Party supporters it will immediately employ every tool available to stop its construction. To avoid being sued for bad faith, the government is cautious about how it handles permit approvals and its role in lawsuits launched by opponents. Nevertheless, its historical opposition was fierce and Green votes are crucial to keep it in power.

The$12-billionEnergy Eastpipelineis also encounteringNIMBYopposition. Itwould deliver 1.1 million barrels of crudefrom Western Canada toQuebecand New Brunswickfor refining, consumptionand export.

These are nation-building projects. Trudeau should look to Norway, whose passionate commitment to green policies has not prevented it from enthusiastically exploiting its vast offshore resources and becoming the worlds third-wealthiest country per capita. Canada is 19th.

In terms of safety, anewFraser Institutestudydemonstratesthat while global tanker shipmentsdoubledfrom 1970 to2015, spills plummetedby 98 per cent.Therefore, whena projects environmental impact hasbeenscientifically vetted,it is timefor the federal governmentto grab thenettleanduse all itsauthoritytoget itbuilt.Ambivalence doesnot cutit.

We urgently need a national campaign strategy and a federal champion to explain to Canadians what is at stake. Otherwise, time will pass without progress, lengthening a distressing record of lost opportunities. It would be an inexcusable failure for Canada to be the only resource-rich country incapable of exporting its resources for the benefit of its people.

Joe Oliver, chairman of investment dealer Echelon Wealth Partners, is the former minister of natural resources and minister of finance.

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How to smother a resource economy to death, starting with LNG - Financial Post

Experts talk automation in Acme – Traverse City Record Eagle

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ACME The people responsible for shaping the future of transportation have gathered this week at the annual Center for Automotive Research Management Briefing Seminars.

The five-day conference attracts major players in the automotive industry from around the globe. Speakers include Michigan Lt. Gov. Brian Calley and the director of Ministry of the Economy of Mexicos Trade and NAFTA Office. But executives from BMW, Toyota, Tesla, General Motors, AM General, Bosch, Mazda, Volkswagen, IBM, Nissan, ExxonMobil and Lear Corporation took center stage, along with experts from dozens of development companies and suppliers.

Governors Hall at Grand Traverse Resort & Spa was filled with business people in dark blue jackets and black pantsuits, all of them focused on one thing the future of the automobile. Transportation is big business on a global stage, and the industry is in the midst of a technological upheaval.

Gasoline and diesel displaced horsepower a century ago. Electricity now is pushing fossil fuels off the worlds roads. At the same time, computers are in the early stages of removing humans from the drivers seat. Thats the gist of this weeks meeting in Acme electricity and automation.

As seen here today, highly automated driving is no longer a dream, but a reality, said Continental North America President Jeff Klei.

He spoke Monday afternoon outside the resort, where two cars a Cadillac ATS and a Chrysler 300 fitted with autonomous technology created by Continental and Magna International completed a 7-hour, 300-mile journey, 92 percent of it without any human driver input. The cars began in Detroit, drove through the Detroit-Windsor tunnel to Ontario, returned to the U.S. on the Bluewater Bridge, then cruised northwest to Acme.

Klei referred to the technology installed in the cars as a cruising chauffeur. Technically, that level of automation is called Level 3 or conditional automation. The designation means the vehicle can drive itself in certain environments, such as on a highway. Human control is required at toll booths and in complicated situations like busy city streets.

Levels 4 and 5 are designated as fully automated, technologies in which a human driver never is required. Level 4 is limited to a certain geographic area, such as on a proving ground or within a certain pre-mapped region. Level 5 would allow a vehicle to travel anywhere.

Current technology cant provide full automation, Ryan Eustace, vice president of autonomous driving for the Toyota Research Institute, told the crowd in Governors Hall.

Theres a lot of top-down human awareness that needs to be built in, he said.

He described the constant stream of unknowns on the road pedestrians, animals, broken water mains, traffic cops, accidents, poorly-marked detours as the social dance of driving.

It will be years, he said, before the eventual goal of an automated car that cant crash (because it warns the driver or automatically intervenes to prevent a crash) becomes reality.

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Experts talk automation in Acme - Traverse City Record Eagle

Providing Industrial Robots with Senses for Automation – R & D Magazine

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In 2012, two inspiring Ph.D.s, kos Tar and Jzsef Veres, were studying bionics and robotics in the same class in college. The two started a project to build a two-legged robot. During this research and development, one of the focus areas was to develop the senses of the robot to create its ability to touch and feel objects to measure forces on its leg along the X-Y-Z axes. This led them to the development of a layered structure in which silicone would actually change its form under a greater load and made measurement possible in all directions.

Since that time, OptoForce has become a market leader in helping to bring multi-axial force and torque control with optical technology to a wide range of businesses and industries relying on industrial automation and robotics for their operations.

Today, OptoForce equips industrial robots with a sense of touch so that more tasks can be automated, freeing production from redundant, tedious tasks that are needed, and helping businesses save significant time and money.

The company, based in Budapest, Hungary with customers and distributors located around the world, recently announced the opening of its U.S. office to help companies across the U.S. and Canada.

Here are some of the company capabilities.

Optical Force Sensing

Optical force sensing measures deformation and deducts the applied load. Strain gauge technology has been the most prominent on the market since its inception in 1938. The principles havent changed much since that time, and so the primary limitations such as brittle structure, expensive manufacturing and heavy weight, has been constraining widespread application. Optical, silicone-based-force sensors, which were first commercially available from OptoForce, are now opening up new possibilities in automation for companies around the world.

3-Axis Force Sensing: OptoForce sensors have only one structure for measuring deformation along the 3-axes (X, Y, Z). In optical force sensors, photodiode measures the amount of reflected light, originally emitted by the LED. By comparing the measured values on the photodiodes, the acting forces can be precisely reconstructed, not just by the magnitude but also the direction

6-Axis Force/Torque Sensing: Six-axis sensors can measure the lateral forces along with the torques around the X, Y and Z vectors. An array of the three-axis sensors can be used to construct a six-axis force/torque sensor as well.

The OptoForce six-axis Force/Torque Sensors provide six degrees of freedom force and torque measurement and are designed for industrial automation applications that require human hand dexterity. The sensors are made to fit most of the currently used industrial robot arms and were developed so that integration with various interfaces is simple.

Available Applications

Typical applications are force control devices and also include assembly; teach in activities; crash detection; hand guidance tasks; fix and rotate; connectors insertion; peg insertion or pin-in-the hole tasks; used next to end effectors in case of grinding, polishing, deburring, finishing; and arc welding. OptoForce sensors provide a cost-effective yet smart solution. High durability and an unlimited number of custom opportunities resemble all of OptoForces sensor types.

More specifically, the following applications are examples of where robotics can take advantage of OptoForces sensors:

Presence Detection: The OptoForce Force Torque Sensor, along with the OptoForce Move application, fine tunes a Universal Robots protective stop function, so that even the smallest counterforces that are smaller than 10 N - can be perceived.

Center Pointing: The Center Point solution provides for an easy-to-find center point, even if the object has moved away from the original position.

Hand Guiding:It is possible to move the robot by hand on all 6 axes or by locking the movement of any selected axes for precise positioning. This is an easy-to-use for guiding the robot in a fast and precise way.

Path Recording: Using the Path Recording function of the OptoForce Hand Guide Toolbar can create a program within minutes so that any complex path can be easily recorded.

Polishing (Plastic and Metal): With this solution, you can remove the parting lines of plastic objects fast and easy. OptoForces polishing application provides high quality polishing, even with forces under 10 Newtons.

Box Insertion:The Box Insertion solution helps to insert items; for example, inserting a battery inside an electronic device with speed, accuracy, and simplicity.

Pin in the Hole:With this solution, robots can precisely fit or insert mating parts with very high tolerances. This solution helps to find the hole and place any pin into it in a fast and precise manner.

Stacking/Destacking:A force controlled application enables the stacking and de-stacking of products without needing to know the exact thickness and the height of the stack.

Palletizing: The force controlled application also allows the robot to stack products onto pallets. This can be quite advantageous for items that are hard to work such as cardboard boxes.

Metal Part Sanding:Force controlled metal sanding gives the robot the ability to precisely remove excess material from the machined surface. In addition to saving time and cost, it also reduces the health impacts to machine operators.

OptoForce sensors are being used by various companies on numerous projects around the world. A few real-world examples of where the sensors are being used include: a plastic parting line removal; an obstacle detection for a major car manufacturing company; and a center point insertion application for a car part supplier, where the task of the robot is to insert a mirror, completely centered, onto a side mirror housing.

The 6-Axis Force/Torque Sensors are available in two models: Model HEX-E and Model HEX-H. The main difference between the two is that the HEX-E has higher precision, while the HEX-H has lower deformation.

6-Axis F/T Sensor: Model HEX-E

Nominal Capacity

Deformation (Deflection)

Single axis overload

Fxy

200 N

1.7 mm

500%

Fz

200 N

0.3 mm

500%

Txy

10 Nm

( 2.5 )

500%

Tz

6.5 Nm

( 5 )

500%

6-Axis F/T Sensor: Model HEX-H

Nominal Capacity

Deformation (Deflection)

Single axis overload

Fxy

200 N

0.6 mm

500%

Fz

200 N

0.25 mm

500%

Txy

20 Nm

( 2 )

300%

Tz

13 Nm

( 3.5 )

300%

The Advantages of OptoForce Force/Torque Sensors

OptoForces HEX-E and HEX-H are sold through a global network of distributors primarily to systems integrator companies. The HEX-E and HEX-H hardware and software helps to shorten the systems integration time, as users have less programming to do when using the sensors, as well as the significant time savings derived from automating precision-oriented tasks.

During the research and development of its sensors, OptoForce took great strides to advance the capability of its sensors in contrast to existing sensors on the market:

Robust and Durable: Businesses generally have found it quite frustrating in robotics that many sensors tend to be fragile, and easy-to-break. OptoForce sensors represent regardless of the application durability and robustness. On numerous occasions, customers have stated that they have broken multiple, highly valuable F/T sensors manufactured by others over the years because of overload and higher impact forces. However, OptoForce has developed a highly deformative property of silicone to ensure its sensors guarantee precise measurements all the way up to 200% overload. Even after total deformation during 600% overload, the silicone regains its original form and is able to measure forces with the same precision, without any hint of permanent damage. This is because these sensors were built to resist sudden shocks.

Resolution:OptoForces sensors possess much greater resolution than other competitive offerings with a 0.1N or 0.001Nm.

Pricing/Value: Leveraging modern technological advances, the company has built sensors and can offer businesses a strong price and value for money. Its low prices give access to highly precise force/torque sensors to the marketplace.

Compatibility: OptoForce sensors received Universal Robot + Certification to validate its suitability for a product environment. OptoForce hardware and software components allow users to extend their force/torque sensing capabilities for those using Universal Robots or KUKA robots.

A Variety of Solutions: Depending on the application, there is a wide range of uses for both the 3 and 6 axis OptoForce sensors.

About the Author

kos Dmtr is the CEO of OptoForce. kos leads all strategic initiatives at OptoForce in helping customers save production time and money by equipping their robots with a sense of touch to automate tasks. He can be reached at akos.domotor@optoforce.com.

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Providing Industrial Robots with Senses for Automation - R & D Magazine

Automation May Lead to a Workless Future for Humans. Here’s How We Can Cope. – Futurism

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The Automation of Everything

To add to our apprehensions about the future, it seems were running out of letters with which to name successive generations: after Baby Boomers, came generation X, then Millennials (aka Gen-Y), who have now been succeeded by Generation Z.Whether or not one finds any symbolism, omen, or irony in this is beside the point. What is important to ask is: what kind of world will those born in the XXI century grow up in?

Will the automation of everythingleave many people behind, bringing despair and disappointment? Or will it urge humanity to redefine self-actualization? Will the realization of ones potential no longer be defined by career success or measured by net-worth? If and when it becomes unnecessary for a significant portion of the population to be working, will we be able to adapt our value system to allow for guilt-free leisure, encourage more creative exploration, and recognize the value of lifelong learning?

Just days after the e-commerce giant from Silicon Valley dazzled the world with the introduction of Amazon Go, it has made the first commercial delivery by drone. The fantasy world of tomorrow with flying cars and cashless stores seems to be turning into the mundane reality of today. This fantasy, though, is all too real for people whose livelihoods are threatened by it. Just imagining a scenario where the jobs of cashiers and retail salespersons in the U.S. are fully automated, we are looking at adding 7.5 million people to the ranks of the unemployed.

For comparison, since the beginning of XXI century, the American economy has been adding, on average, 0.8M jobs per year. Whether its Uber, Google, Apple, Tesla, or any other company that will bring a viable driverless technology to the market, it is not a matter of if but when. Here again, 3.5 million jobs in America could disappear in a heartbeat, should this technology become commonplace. Loss of just those two narrowly-defined professions could undo 14 years worth of job creation.

Beyond those vivid examples, a widely-shared blog on the World Economic Forums Agenda platform projects that roughly half of all jobs will be lost to automation in less than two decades. One could take solace looking at past experiences where some vocations fade away, but the new ones come in their stead. Many analysts argue, though, that this time will be different.If those predictions come true, and we are indeed heading for a workless future, now would be high time to kick off a policy discussion on how we must prepare for it.

Just as we intellectually recognize that the world of tomorrow will have much less employment, (or at least, much less of what we define as employment right now), the job-creation rhetoric continues to dominate our political discourse. This proverbial tomorrow may take a decade (or two, or five) to arrive. Undoubtedly, some version of it will and burying ones head in the sand is no solution. Focusing on the skills necessary to compete for the yet-to-be-invented jobs is only part of the puzzle. As the gap widens between population growth and automation on one side, and job creation to meet the needs of our machine-powered future on the other, we have to begin making serious adjustments to maintain social cohesion.

What if continued automation of work be it legal research, or medical diagnostics, or writing of newspaper articles delivers productivity gains that can be distributed among the population without the need for everyone to contribute in a traditional way? Should such future be imagined, it will require a major paradigm shift in how our society is organized, how we define contribution, where we find fulfillment, and how we draw meaning from our daily activities.

The first question, which is already being vigorously debated, is how can one support oneself when one is not expected to be working. Unconditional basic income, or digital dividend, is one concept thats gathering momentum. Some jurisdictions have either toyed with the idea or are piloting it. The political debate needs to engage the taboo topic of guaranteeing economic security to families through a universal basic income. writes David Ignatius for The Washington Post.

This novel policy proposal is often contrasted with welfare, with the resulting arguments being both for and against. The problem with that discourse is that its framed in terms of the current situation where policies are designed to discourage freeriding of some upon the efforts of others. What we should be considering instead is the circumstance where all humans are freeriding on the efforts of machines. The latter do not create demand, which in turn creates a serious conundrum for our economic system.

As radical as the universal basic income idea may sound, in strict terms, its a simple technical solution to a significant social problem. It would be far more difficult to imagine, let alone incorporate, a new value system where unemployment is not stigmatized. Adopting norms in a society where ones contribution is no longer defined by economic output, is a challenge of a different scale and complexity altogether. To address it before the societal tensions boil over, we will need a ton of courage, a lot of blue-sky thinking, and a great deal of policy experimentation.

We must begin by openly acknowledging and ultimately facing the reality. As political careers are made and broken on the promises of job-creation, it will require a great deal of courage for our leaders to take responsibility and initiate a frank debate on the possible workless future. To better cope with the uncertain future, well have to develop a new vocabulary to articulate the dilemmas we have yet to face.

It is also the intellectual framework within which we look at our economic systems that needs to change. Here we can start with redefining GDP to better account for non-compensated contribution (such as childcare and housekeeping) or better yet, move towards a wider matrix such as Social Progress Index or any other methodology that recognizes human contribution and progress in new ways. Perhaps we should also retire terms like labor productivity and, instead, refocus on measuring self-actualization.

One of the simplest, and yet also more complicated, questions to ponder in a world free of traditional employment, is what will we do with our free time? It would be good to ease our way into it by looking at the 6 Hour Workdaypolicies that Sweden is introducing to increase productivity and make people happier. Shorter work days will help prevent burnout and allow people a space to find other activities from which they can derive meaning. For those who are employed, a job isnt just a vehicle to earn ones living, it is a means to address the basic human need for belonging. Exploring how this need could be met outside of the workplace would be a worthy undertaking.

Given that the ambition of an individual today is often conflated with professional aspirations and then measured by ones career success, ambition of the future could potentially be viewed through the prism of building ones capacity for imagination and aspiration to learn, generate, and exchange ideas. Popularizing the idea of a sabbatical breaks in professional fields beyond academia (where it is already fairly commonplace), would help us in making this a smoother transition.

All of those efforts will have to go hand-in-hand with addressing the rising inequality and recognizing the Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Economy, where failure [to find a job after losing one] is a source of deep shame and a reason for self-blame.

The imagined future where humans may not have to work as machines will be taking care of ever-widening range of our needs and wants is not assured, but it is highly probable. We can debate the timeline and keep stuffing this difficult conversation into a can, so that we could kick it down the road. What would be more constructive, though, is delving into this debate headfirst, trying out new policies, learning from one another, and shaping our workless future to minimize its discontents. Our kids (the Gen-Zs) will thank us for it!

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views of Futurism or its affiliates.

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Automation May Lead to a Workless Future for Humans. Here's How We Can Cope. - Futurism

Automation To Blame – The Free Weekly

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Advice

Husband needs flashing arrow to keep towel off bed

My otherwise wonderful husband always leaves his wet towel on the bed (on my side!). Ive asked him to stop doing this countless times, but I dont think hes being passive-aggressive or anything. I think he just spaces out after showering. How can I get him to remember?

Soggy

Its good for a man to have goals, though ideally not one that involves growing a fern out of your comforter.

As you appear to understand, the problem isnt ill will; its I, Robot. The first time your husband wondered Where do I put this wet towel? perhaps at age 10 his brain said, Easy peasy just drop it right there on the bed. Sadly, it seems his superhero bedspread didnt pipe up: Supermans got a ton to do today, and flying your wet towel over to the hamper is not on his agenda.

Our brain is an efficiency expert. Figuring things out the first time around (a la what should I do with this towel?) takes a bunch of energy. But, as neuroscientist Donald Hebb pointed out (in somewhat more neuroscientific terms), as you do an action over and over, your brain goes, Oh, that again. The trigger for the action in this case, approaching the bed (while in a towel, ready to get dressed) becomes automatic. Automatic means theres no stopping to muse, Wait! I have a wife now, and shes threatening to Saran Wrap the bed. Theres only the old familiar launch code: Bed! cueing Drop wet towel here!

This automation thing with thinking removed from the equation is the reason nagging or even asking nicely before or after the fact is so often useless in changing behavior. You need to break in to the automatic sequenceas its in progress when he gets to the bed kind of like an air traffic controller coming in over the planes intercom: Attention Southwest two-two-niner

Interrupting the trigger sequence allows you to send a yoo-hoo to areas of his prefrontal cortex, the brains department of rational thought asking them to kindly wake the hell up and take over from the basal ganglia and other parts of the brains department of automation.

No, Im not suggesting you stand guard by the bed like one of those decorative architectural lions, waiting for wet towel time. And hiring one of those street-corner sign spinners would probably be both impractical and a little creepy.

To grab your husbands attention in a positive way, I suggest collecting cartoons (like one of my faves, Bizarro, by Dan Piraro) and leaving one marked Towel alert! xo on the area of the bed he turns into terrycloth swampland. (Pair it with a battery-operated flashing light if he ends up dropping his towel on top of it.) The cartoon should break him out of his auto-daze, reminding him to return the wet towel to its ancestral home, Ye Olde Towel Rack. (If there is something missing for the two of you in bed, it probably isnt mildew.)

Fame Fatale

Im a novelist whos suddenly getting successful (after 20 years of crappy jobs and rejected manuscripts). Every day, several people make this annoying and rather insulting comment to me: Dont forget about me when youre famous! This got me wondering: What keeps some people grounded while others let success go to their head?

Published

Of course youll stay in touch with your old friends. Youll have your assistant call them to see whether theyd like to come over and clean out your rain gutters.

The quality that keeps success from turning you into, well, Kanye East, is humility. People confuse humility being humble with being humiliated. However, humility is basically a healthy awareness of your limitations what social psychologist and humility researcher Pelin Kesebir describes as a down-to-earth perspective of yourself in relation to all other beings.

Thats something youre more likely to have when you make it at 40 after 20 years of working crappy jobs, driving a car held together with duct tape and hope, and selling your blood to buy a tuna melt. Contrast that with hitting it big at 17: Bro, I was just on my hoverboard at the mall, and some dude handed me a recording contract!

The cool thing is, social psychologist Elliott Kruse and his colleagues find that you can bolster humility by expressing gratitude appreciation for how another person has helped you. Expressing gratitude both inhibits internal focus and promotes external focus focus on others. This sort of wider view may help you keep any fame you get in perspective. After all, theres a way to live on in the hearts and minds of many, even after you die, and its by creating brilliant, spirit-moving art or by being a chinchilla videotaped while eating a Dorito.

(c)2017, Amy Alkon, all rights reserved. Got a problem? Write Amy Alkon, 171 Pier Ave, #280, Santa Monica, CA 90405, or e-mail AdviceAmy@aol.com (advicegoddess.com). Weekly radio show: blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon. Order Amy Alkons book, Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say The F-Word (St. Martins Press, June 3, 2014) at amazon.com.

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Automation To Blame - The Free Weekly

Brooks Automation’s (BRKS) CEO Steve Schwartz on Q3 2017 Results – Earnings Call Transcript – Seeking Alpha

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Brooks Automation, Inc. (NASDAQ:BRKS)

Q3 2017 Earnings Conference Call

August 2, 2017 4:30 P.M. ET

Executives

Lindon Robertson - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Steve Schwartz - President and Chief Executive Officer

Analysts

Paul Knight - Janney Montgomery Scott

Amanda Scarnati - Citi

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Brooks Automation Q3 Fiscal Year 2017 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this call is being recorded, Wednesday, August 2, 2017. I would now like to turn the call over to Lindon Robertson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Lindon Robertson

Thank you, Ash, and good afternoon, everyone. We would like to welcome each of you to the third quarter financial results conference call for the Brooks fiscal year 2017. We will be covering the results of the third quarter ended on June 30, and then we will provide an outlook for the fourth fiscal quarter ending September 30 of this year.

A press release was issued after the close of the markets today and is available at our Investor Relations page of our website, http://www.brooks.com, as are the illustrated PowerPoint slides that will be used during the prepared comments during the call.

I would like to remind everyone that during the course of the call, we will be making a number of forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Litigation Securities Act of 1995. There are many factors that may cause actual financial results or other events to differ from those identified in such forward-looking statements.

I would refer you to the section of our earnings release titled Safe Harbor Statement, the Safe Harbor slide on the aforementioned PowerPoint presentation on our website and our various filings with the SEC, including our annual reports on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q.

We made no obligation to update these statements should future financial data or events occur that differ from the forward-looking statements presented today. I would also like to note that we may make reference to a number of non-GAAP financial measures, which are used in addition to, and in conjunction with, results presented in accordance with GAAP.

We believe that these non-GAAP measures provide an additional way of viewing aspects of our operations and performance. But when considered with GAAP financial results and a reconciliation of GAAP measures, they provide an even more complete understanding of the Brooks business. Non-GAAP measures should not be relied upon to the exclusion of the GAAP measures themselves.

On the call with me today is our Chief Executive Officer, Steve Schwartz. We will open with his remarks on the business environment and our third quarter highlights then we'll provide an overview of the third quarter financial results and a summary of our financial outlook for the quarter ending September 30, which is our fourth quarter of the fiscal year 2017.

We will then take your questions at the end of those comments. During our prepared remarks, again we will, from time to time, make reference to the slides I mentioned available to everyone on the Investor Relations page of our Brooks website.

With that, Id like to turn the call over now to our CEO, Steve Schwartz.

Steve Schwartz

Thank you, Lindon. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. We're particularly pleased to announce the results from a very strong June quarter in part because the results that weve delivered, but more importantly because were able to demonstrate the earnings power of our business, which is made up of a portfolio of strong market leading technology positions and key growth segments of the semi-conductor and Life Sciences markets. A foundation that we strongly believe will continue to deliver going forward.

Revenue at $182 million was up 7% from March and up 23% over the prior year. Gross margins increased sequentially by 100 basis points to reach 40%, which is a very meaningful threshold for the company, and a heavy lift from the 32% to 33% gross margins we delivered in fiscal 2011, the year we first entered the Life Sciences space and began to restructure our semiconductor product portfolio.

The top line and gross margin performance led to a non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.36, more than double what we delivered in the June quarter one year ago, and up 27% from the March quarter. Growth came from both segments as we delivered our eighth consecutive quarter of growth in Life Sciences and semiconductor, which is riding the wave of strong momentum in the capital equipment space, also benefited from our expanding market share position in our key growth segments.

The part that we find most energizing is the momentum that weve established inside the company to continually ratchet down on costs and improve efficiency, while we advance new product development and sales activity to deliver top line growth. We continue to see more potential and thats what drives us even harder.

Today, we report on some of the highlights from the quarter and give color as to what makes us enthusiastic about the prospects from the very solid positions weve captured in two important markets. Ill begin my comments today with a recap of our Life Sciences business performance.

Revenue came in at a robust $37 million, thats up 6% from March and represents organic growth of 27% from the June quarter one year ago. And including organic growth and revenue from acquisitions was our seventh consecutive quarter of greater than 25% growth.

Bookings at $42 million had another $7 million to backlog, which now stands at $260 million. And though gross margin was slightly softer on mix, Life Sciences delivered $2 million of operating profit in the quarter even as we made additional investments to expand our global sales team.

Ill add just a few additional highlights from the quarter. Our automated storage systems business grew 63% versus prior year coming from both bio and cryo automation solutions we delivered to compound and bio-banks, cell therapy, and regenerative medicine applications.

In a particularly positive sign, our BioStore three cryo system bookings topped $2 million for the quarter with account penetrations in North America, Europe, China, and the Middle East. We had 26 new customers expanding our base across a broad spectrum of customers in the Pharma, Biotech, healthcare clinical, and academic end markets.

We also delivered on some important milestones that will generate future revenue. We launched BioStudies, a bioinformatics platform that enables customers to virtualize and visualize all of their global samples. And we received a first order from a major bio-bank by demonstrating the utility of this configurable sample management software platform.

We completed and commercially launched two new configurations of a BioStore III cryo automation products, one that stores a common Life Sciences industry standard sample container called an SPS rack and the other a variable temperature version of the BIII C for customers select the automated configuration and liquid nitrogen sample security, but would want the store at user selectable temperature set points anywhere between minus 80 and minus 190 Celsius. Initial units of both new products have already been shipped to a major customer.

In our consumables and instruments sector, we released a universal instrument that will allow customers to simultaneously cap and de-cap 96 sample tubes of various types and brands. This is the first in the market. And we just recently developed a new small footprint minus 80 degree C automated store that expands our customer universe to include those who need automated minus 80 storage, but for whom up to 300,000 samples is adequate storage capacity.

And at the beginning of last month, we completed the acquisition of Pacific Bio-Material Management or PBMMI, a highly regarded biological sample transport and storage company with customers that include Memorial Sloan Kettering and Mount Sinai Hospital, plus an a list of research and academic institutions that they won because of their high quality and outstanding service capability.

Along with the strong and talented team we had more East and West Coast geographic footprints and more than 250 customers that meaningfully expands our academic market presence. And with each sample under management, we have the possibility to deliver more value to customers from the broader portfolio of offerings that weve developed at Brooks over the years.

Our cold chain sample management portfolio is proving its value, as we provide customers with a one-stop shop for all of their cold sample needs. Were working to increase the depth and breadth of all of our offerings along the cold chain. Our new product development initiatives and the addition of PBMMI are all representative examples of this strategy in action.

In Life Sciences, our priority is growth. We continue to invest in new products additional go-to-market sales capability and acquisitions that allow us to grow in this important and expanding space of sample management. And although were focused on growth, were careful to strike the right balance to maintain profitability as we grow. This business has tremendous earnings leverage and we know that if we elected to slow investment for growth, we could deliver much higher profitability.

As a matter of fact, we maintain our position that the potential profit margin of Life Sciences is greater than in our semiconductor opportunity, but for now we believe that the best thing that we can do for shareholders is to continue to make investments to capture more of this market through targeted investments in organic and inorganic growth opportunities. We believe that were taking the right steps, and I illustrate with two examples.

First, weve meaningfully expanded our customer base over the years. When we started in the automated stores and services space, we acquired companies that gave us approximately 200 customers. At the beginning of fiscal 2015, when we acquired FluidX, a consumables and instruments company, we added another 300 customers. BioStorage Technologies came with an additional 300 customers and PBMMI 250 more bringing the number of customer relationships to more than 1000.

Over the past three years, this represents a five-fold increase in the number of potential opportunities we have to expand our cold chain offerings. Weve already started to leverage this portfolio to win more business at many of these customers who are eager to streamline their sample management solutions.

In terms of results, Life Sciences revenue for the first three quarters of fiscal 2017 was $105 million, almost equal to the $108 million of revenue we delivered in all of fiscal 2016. That represents 37% growth over the same period one year ago, and for the fiscal year-to-date bookings totaled $154 million, up 35% over the same period last year.

Were forecasting another strong quarter for Life Sciences and we expect to deliver double-digit sequential revenue growth in Q4 with revenue above $40 million and we expect revenue will continue to grow in every quarter of 2018.

Ill now turn to the semiconductor business, which remains our main cash and profit engine. In our semiconductor business, we set a number of new high water marks as we successfully tested our operational capabilities against another surge in customer demand. We delivered revenue of $145 million, up 8% sequentially and up 22% versus the same quarter one year ago.

Its important to note that this 8% quarter-over-quarter growth was net of reduction in our CCS revenue of approximately $5 million, due to the decrease in leading-edge foundry spending that some of our OEM customers have already mentioned. This makes the growth in our semi business all the more impressive as its driven mostly by 3-D memory capacity and advanced packaging.

Ill provide a quick update on these three growth drivers, starting with vacuum automation. The tremendous growth in vacuum process technologies, primarily deposition and etch led us to yet another record in vacuum robots with revenue up 14% from this previous record we delivered in March. These are unprecedented times and were reaping the benefits of our powerful market position in the vacuum automation space.

Year-over-year our vacuum robot business was up 56% and indications are that were in for a period of sustained strength in the equipment industry and that vacuum process steps that serve 3-D memory will continue to be in high demand into 2018. Our leading market position at more than 15 OEMs who supply vacuum equipment virtually assures that if any capacity additions are a benefit for Brooks.

In advanced packaging, we saw a 60% increase in automation solutions, from $9 million in March to more than $14 million in the June. Advanced packaging growth was driven by strong investment by Chinese OEMs, as well as increased shipments of 200 mm vacuum systems to support the unique packaging needs for MEMS, power, and plasma dicing markets. We also added to our share by winning the automation design for an advanced packaging lithography tool.

Looking forward, we see positive momentum for additional investment in leading-edge foundry to support integrated fan-out. The advanced packaging business is robust and the in the opportunities that exist are expanding to a broader number of companies, which are building lines to adapt these new technologies. As a result, we feel that were at a step change from the $40 million annual run rate that we sustained from most of the last couple of years to something that can be meaningfully higher.

The only part of our semiconductor business that was not up in the June quarter was contamination control solutions, which still came in at a healthy $20 million, but was down from record $25 million in the March quarter. This reduced level was expected as leading-edge 10 and 7 nm foundry spending, which drove extremely high shipments in December and March has subsided as that manufacturing capacity is brought online.

On the positive side, we believe we have one 100% market share for all 10 nm and 7 nm manufacturing capacity thats being installed and in these technology nodes ramp, so too will our CCS business, but were forecasting CCS to be down again in the September quarter by another $6 million to $8 million as leading-edge foundry spending is expected to remain low.

That said, we are counting on new factory capacity in China and the restart of foundry spending to be meaningful drivers of additional market opportunities in 2018 and our forecast, which are based on new fab capacity expansion plans are for CCS business to grow again in 2018.

Finally, in the quarter we also supported another jump in our cryo vacuum pump business, which was up 10% from the prior quarter and up more than 50% from the prior year as both ion implantation and PVD activity has strengthened. Our Polycold cryochillers business that supports applications for advanced displays was similarly in very high demand, more than double the level of the same quarter one year ago, and at levels weve not seen for several years.

We anticipate similar revenue for our cryo vacuum products in the September quarter. In total, we forecast our semiconductor business to be down approximately 7% to 8% at September, after our record June quarter, which included a couple million dollars of pull-ins to help customers who wanted more product in June, but even with the pause in September, well be very busy in manufacturing operations as we will be preparing for what we are forecasting to be some high demand quarters after that. So although revenue will be slightly less, well be no less busy in our preparedness for a strong demand outlook.

Overall, were extremely pleased with our performance. Were in two growth businesses that are supported by strong market dynamics in which we hold defensible positions that we continue to build. Our outlook for Life Sciences for more quarters and years of accelerated top line and margin expansion as we continue to build a growth engine centered in the sweet spot of sample management.

This market is exploding as bio samples are the key elements to support drug discovery, cell therapy, regenerative medicine, and cancer research. The demands for our capabilities are accelerating and our ability to define standards of handling and transport are going to be essential for our success and to the benefit of the industry.

In the semiconductor space, were benefiting from the strong growth in 3-D memory and all of the vacuum equipment that requires. We are well positioned for advanced packaging automation opportunities where we have shown our capability to capture share and were far and away to market choice for CCS solutions for wafer and radical carrier cleaning. All-in, we see another strong quarter in September, even with the pause in the semiconductor business. We remain extremely bullish about our position in both markets and we anticipate growth in the December quarter from both segments.

That concludes my formal remarks, and Ill now turn the call back over to Lindon.

Lindon Robertson

Thank you, Steve. Please refer now to the PowerPoint slides available on the Brooks website under our investor relations tab. To start the remarks, I would like to draw your attention to Slide 3, which is consolidated view of our operating performance. Our top line revenue increased 7%, sequentially to $182 million, driven by an 8% increase in semiconductor solutions, and a 6% increase in Life Sciences.

In the GAAP results, operating income expanded 27%, driving GAAP based earnings per share upwards $0.05 to $0.25 per share. Looking at the non-GAAP picture, adjusted earnings per share was $0.36 per share, an increase of 27% from second quarter. Non-GAAP gross margin increased 100 basis points to 40%, driven by improvement in the semiconductor segment.

At the bottom line, we produced 25 million of non-GAAP net income and 37 million in adjusted EBITDA. Comparing these results on a year-over-year basis to third quarter of fiscal 2016, revenue was 23% higher and our adjusted EBITDA has increased 93%.

Turn with me over to Slide 4 to start our discussion of segment results. The Life Science business grew 6% sequentially and 26% year-over-year with $37 million of revenue. BioStorage revenue increased 9%, sequentially, while the remaining core Life Sciences revenue grew 4%.Gross margins came in at 38%, 2 points lower than the prior quarter. Softness occurred on both the storage and the infrastructure business.

On the BioStorage services side, the result was driven by mix as genomic services revenue came in higher. Storage service margins remained very strong. On the infrastructure side, the business had certain projects driving a lower margin this quarter. We expect margins to return to 40% next quarter. In the third quarter, new orders in contracts totaled $42 million adding backlog to the business.

Year-to-date, Life Science bookings totaled $154 million, up 35% compared to just $114 million for the same year-to-date period in 2016. The fuel is there to continued organic growth above 20% year-over-year, and we will have the added benefit of our latest acquisition of PBMMI in the BioStorage space. They had $10 million of revenue in the past 12-months and are also growing. This latest acquisition fits the margin profile of our current BioStorage business that being about 40% to 45%.

Lets turn to those semiconductor business on Slide 5. This business accelerated with 8% sequential revenue growth this quarter. As Steve indicated, we saw some customers pulling product through in the final weeks ahead of our anticipated schedules. Across the product lines, we saw double-digit sequential expansion in vacuum robots and atmospheric robots and cryopumps and services and in our Polycold line. The offset bringing us down to 8% was in contamination control solutions, which was still above $20 million.

As we have shared previously, these systems sell for approximately 1 million each. So, the timing of the fab line expansions can cause a swing in our quarterly revenue. Based on our fab customer schedules, we anticipate another drop in contamination control shipments again in our fourth quarter and are rebounded in the 2018 calendar year, just as Steve outlined.

As the strikes some variability in our revenue lines well continue to give you visibility to the specifics, but I also want to emphasize the moment this business has provided. We acquired this business in 2014 for 32 million from an owner that saw 28 million of revenue in their prior year. In 2015, we had $44 million of revenue and in 2016 $52 million and we will be above $80 million when we finish 2017. We foresee another year of growth in our fiscal 2018.

The adjusted gross margins for semiconductor solutions struck above 40% this quarter. The value of our newest products and the reduction of fixed cost over the past 18 months have made 40% possible. The additional volumes this quarter had drove over the line on improved absorption of overhead.

Let me drop a highlight around this point. Our $10 million of expansion in the top line dropped through to operating income at a rate above 60%. In the year-to-date picture, our semiconductor revenue has grown 24%, and has dropped through to operating profit at a rate of 50%.

Lets turn to the balance sheet on Page 6. With the growth of the business, weve seen expansion of receivables and inventory. The increase in deferred revenue reflects the life science bookings that often carry advance payments. We finished the quarter with $120 million of cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities and no debt. We carried $49 million of this cash in the U.S. at the close of the quarter, which enable closing the $34 million acquisition of PBMMI at July without touching a credit revolver.

Lets turn over to Slide 7. Net income of $17 million drove cash flow from operations of $18 million. Were in our seventh year of paying a dividend returning $7 million to shareholders in this quarter alone. Capital expenditures were $2 million, bringing the total for our first three quarters to $7 million.

Cash from operations has accumulated to $61 million for the nine months ended June 30, rounding out free cash flow to $55 million year-to-date. In total, our cash balances expanded by $29 million since the beginning of the year to $120 million on this report. I will highlight again that this is prior to using $34 million on the acquisition of our latest BioStorage acquisition on July 5.

Slide 8 addresses the outlook of our fourth fiscal quarter of 2017. Fourth quarter revenue is expected to be in the range of $172 million to $178 million. Adjusted EBITDA is anticipated to be between $30 million to $33 million. Non-GAAP earnings per share is expected to be $0.27 to $0.31 per share. And the GAAP earnings per share is expected to be $0.17 to $0.21.

As we drive to this guidance, were very cognizant of the step change, our business has made in this past year. The annual numbers represent a 22% growth at the top line, the non-GAAP earnings per share is more than double the $0.47 we turned in 2016.

So that concludes our prepared remarks, so I will now turn the call back over to Ash, our operator, to take questions from the line.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Paul Knight with Janney Montgomery Scott. Your line is now open. Please proceed with your question.

Paul Knight

Hi Steve, could you put some color around the equipment versus the service size, the revenue in the quarter and any attributes on why maybe a little softer, was it capital equipment? And then lastly, the Pac bio deal was closed, correct?

Steve Schwartz

The Pac bio deal was indeed closed. So Paul let me give you a little bit on the quarter. So out of the 37 million, I'm going to give you a really rough numbers, the stores was about 20%, a little bit more 25%. The consumables and instruments was probably about 15%, and the bulk of the business was the services and the service combined. So when we look at the bio storage and service combined that was about half.

Paul Knight

Okay. And then you are offering genomic services as part of your strategy obviously, is that your fastest growing business?

Steve Schwartz

It turns out that all of the elements are growing pretty significantly. The genomics is a little bit, is not as steady. In the aggregate it is growing, but the samples that we provide to that are growing considerably. So thats a business thats still up and down for us, but year-on-year well see growth in the genomic services, but we find the activity there is sometimes budget -related and so there are bursts in that business, more so than the steady annuity that we get from the consumables and from the storage elements.

Paul Knight

And youve been posting somewhere in the 20s on organic growth, do you see that as a number thats ahead of this?

Steve Schwartz

We do. So for the foreseeable quarters we see that continuing to grow in the 20% plus range.

Paul Knight

Okay. Thank you.

Steve Schwartz

Thanks Paul.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Amanda Scarnati with Citi. Your line is now open. Please proceed with your question.

Amanda Scarnati

Hi thanks for taking the question. Just continuing on the Life Sciences business, Steve I think you mentioned that profitability could be greater than semi down the road, and what are the puts and takes to get there, is it adding more scale into the business, is it continuing to integrate the acquisitions that have been done or are there other things that are already in process that are helping to drive profitability up.

Steve Schwartz

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Brooks Automation's (BRKS) CEO Steve Schwartz on Q3 2017 Results - Earnings Call Transcript - Seeking Alpha

Audiologists, Emergency Managers and Occupational Therapists Face Low Risk from Automation – EHS Today

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How likely are you to be replaced by a robot or a computer program? It depends, according to a new report,How Vulnerable Are American Communities to Automation, Trade and Urbanization? Workers in data entry, telemarketing and watch repair are most likely to be targeted by automation, while surgeons...not so much.

The study, prepared by the Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER) and the Rural Policy Institutes Center for State Policy at Ball State University, found that the rise of automation and offshoring could extend such job losses beyond the factory floor.

Automation is likely to replace half of all low-skilled jobs, says CBER director Michael Hicks. More worrisome is that there is considerable concentration of job loss risks across labor markets, educational attainment and earnings. This accrues across industries and is more pronounced across urban regions, where economies have concentrated all net new employment in the United States for a generation.

The study also found that low risk of automation is associated with much higher wages, averaging about $80,000 a year. Occupations with the highest risk of automation have incomes of less than $40,000 annually.

The top automatable occupations, number of jobs and average annual salary includes data entry keyers, 216,000, $29,000; mathematical science occupations, 1,800, $66,210; telemarketers, 237,000, $23, 530; insurance underwriters, 103,000, $65,000; tax preparers, 90,400, $36,450; photographic process workers and processing machine operators, 28,800, $26,590; library technicians, 101,800, $34,750.

The leastautomatable occupations, number of jobs and average annual salary includes recreational therapists, 18,000, $45,890; emergency managers, 10,000, $67,330; first-line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers, 447,100, $63,010; mental health and substance abuse social workers, 117,000, $42,170; audiologists, 13,200, $74,890; orthotrists and prosthetists, 8,300, $64,430; health technologists and technicians, 102,200, $41,260; and hearing aid specialists, 5,900, $49,600.

While drafters, computer programmers, data entry keyers, statisticians and mathematicians and film and video editors were considered the most offshorable occupations, the list of least offshorable occupations closely mimicked the list of least automatable occupations, with the edition of the 6,800 oral and maxillofacial surgeons who average an annual wage of $233,900.

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Audiologists, Emergency Managers and Occupational Therapists Face Low Risk from Automation - EHS Today

Abolition Of Work | Prometheism.net – Part 35

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Featured Essay The Abolition of Work by Bob Black, 1985

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil youd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesnt mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By play I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than childs play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isnt passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for reality, the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously or maybe not all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marxs wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists except that Im not kidding I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. Theyll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists dont care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

You may be wondering if Im joking or serious. Im joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesnt have to be frivolous, although frivolity isnt triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. Id like life to be a game but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

The alternative to work isnt just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, its never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed, time-disciplined safety-valve called leisure; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.

I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, its done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or communist, work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.

Usually and this is even more true in communist than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee work is employment, i.e. wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR of Cuba or Yugoslavia or Nicaragua or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millennia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.

But modern work has worse implications. People dont just work, they have jobs. One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs dont) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A job that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who by any rational/technical criteria should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as discipline. Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace surveillance, rote-work, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions, they just didnt have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

Such is work. Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if its forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the suspension of consequences. This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; thats why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), define it as game-playing or following rules. I respect Huizingas erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel these practices arent rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who arent free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each others control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called insubordination, just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

The demeaning system of domination Ive described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes its not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or better still industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are free is lying or stupid.

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are youll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, theyll likely submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. Theyre used to it.

We are so close to the world of work that we cant see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the work ethic would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labelled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed (the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding) until overthrown by industrialism but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.

Lets pretend for a moment that work doesnt turn people into stultified submissives. Lets pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And lets pretend that work isnt as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing free about so-called free time is that it doesnt cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel dont do that. Lathes and typewriters dont do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, Work is for saps!

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and as a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts him- self in the rank of slaves. His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed to regain the lost power and health. Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to St. Monday thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancien regime wrested substantial time back from their landlords work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanovs figures from villages in Czarist Russia hardly a progressive society likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life in North America, particularly but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return to the colonies. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than West Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.) The survival of the fittest version the Thomas Huxley version of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist whod had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled The Original Affluent Society. They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were working at all. Their labor, as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schillers definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full play to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required. He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work its rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work but we can.

The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy Georges England in Transition and Peter Burkes Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bells essay Work and Its Discontents, the first text, I believe, to refer to the revolt against work in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bells end-of-ideology thesis signalled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smiths modern epigones. As Smith observed: The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations has no occasion to exert his understanding He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970s and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEWs report Work in America , the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner because, in their terms, as they used to say on Star Trek, it does not compute.

If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to 25 million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they dont count the half-million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year. What the statistics dont show is that tens of millions of people have their lifespans shortened by work which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their late 50s. Consider all the other workaholics.

Even if you arent killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto- industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly or indirectly, to work.

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters which make Times Beach and Three Mile Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, wont help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire. Historians like Eugene Genovese have argues persuasively that as antebellum slavery apologists insisted factory wage-workers in the North American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they dont even try to crack down on most malefactors.

What Ive said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves, is that work itself is inevitable and necessary.

I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. AT present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldnt make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

I dont suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isnt worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the tertiary sector, the service sector, is growing while the secondary sector (industry) stagnates and the primary sector (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to ensure public order. Anything is better than nothing. Thats why you cant go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasnt the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last fifty years?

Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend is out of the question. Already, without even trying, weve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage- labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two, it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork and provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called schools, primarily to keep them out of Moms hair but still under control, and incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid shadow work, as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because theyre better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.

I havent as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly theyll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps theyll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldnt care to live in a push button paradise. I dont want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised havent saved a moments labor. The enthusiastic technophiles Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B.F. Skinner have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than sceptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, lets give them a hearing.

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a job and an occupation. Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There wont be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy, it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I dont want coerced students and I dont care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.

Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although theyd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when theyre just fuelling up human bodies for work.

Third, other things being equal, some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people dont always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, anything once. Fourier was the master at speculating about how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post- civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in Little Hordes to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we dont have to take todays work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed.

If technology has a role in all this, it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. Its a sobering thought that the Grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that theres no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything, its just the opposite. We shouldnt hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris and even a hint, here and there, in Marx there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned form the often hazy heralds of alternative/ appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists as represented by Vaneigems Revolution of Everyday Life and in the Situationist International Anthology are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the workers councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though, than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, who would the left have to organize?

So the abolitionists will be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debaters problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.

Life will become a game,or rather many games, but not as it is now a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each others pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.

Workers of the world RELAX!

This essay as written by Bob Black in 1985 and is in the public domain. It may be distributed, translated or excerpted freely. It appeared in his anthology of essays, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, published by Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend WA 98368 [ISBN 0-915179-41-5].

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The Abolition of Work Bob Black

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Abolition Of Work | Prometheism.net - Part 35

Marcos jewels sale to push through even if PCGG is abolished – ABS-CBN News

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MANILA - The possible abolition of a government agency tasked with recovering the alleged ill-gotten wealth of the Marcos family will not affect its planned planned sale, a finance official said Thursday.

At least 3 jewelry collections of former first lady Imelda Marcos were valued at P1 billion at a re-appraisal by auction houses Christies and Sotheby's last February.

The jewels will be placed on the auction block once legal cases are resolved, finance undersecretary Grace Karen Singson said.

"I don't understand why everyone is panicking the cases are always handled by the OSG (Office of the Solicitor General), [while] the disposition must always be approved by DOF, so wala naman nagbago (nothing has changed)," she said.

Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno said last week that he favored the abolition of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, saying it was no longer necessary.

Former President Benigno Aquino, whose mother, former president Corazon Aquino, constituted the PCGG, said on Tuesday that the agency's work was not done yet.

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Daniel C. Marshall — High Forest Township – Post-Bulletin

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The memorial service for Daniel C. Marshall, 61, of High Forest Township, will be at 11 a.m. Friday, Aug. 4, at the United Methodist Church in Stewartville, with the Rev. Wane Souhrada officiating. Burial will follow at High Forest Cemetery in High Forest.

Mr. Marshall died unexpectedly on Sunday, July 30, 2017, of natural causes, in rural High Forest Township.

Daniel Collins Marshall was born on Oct. 15, 1955, in Stewartville to Roy and Betty Jo (Collins) Marshall. He grew up in rural High Forest Township and attended Stewartville schools, graduating from Stewartville High School in 1973. He enlisted into the Army serving for four years. Following his honorable discharge in 1978, he returned to Minnesota and attended Thief River Vocational School receiving his certificate in welding. Dan returned to High Forest and made his home on the Marshall family homestead.

He was employed with his Uncle Duane and sons at Collins Masonry for 10 years. Dan was then employed at Hormel Co. in Austin for 28 years until his retirement in 2014.

Dan was married on Sept. 11, 2010, in High Forest to Jo Lynn "Jody" Stuber (Street). The couple have made their home on the Marshall family homestead. Jody was employed as a nurse at Mayo Clinic in Rochester for 34 years until her retirement. She is currently employed as an equine specialist at H.O.P.E. (Horses Offer Personal Empowerment) in Rochester.

Dan was a member of the UFCWU Local 9 (United Food and Commercial Workers Union). He enjoyed the outdoors and was an avid deer hunter, fisherman, and liked gardening, canning ,cutting wood, mowing the yard and land conservation. He was serious about raising chickens, his pickles, Nascar and #3. He loved time spent with friends and family, especially his wife, Jody and his stepchildren.

Dan is survived by his wife, Jody Marshall; one stepson, Anthony Street of Rochester; two stepdaughters, Corey Street (Sam Benson) of Minneapolis and Ericka Street of Rochester; his mother, Betty Jo Marshall; and two sisters, Cindy Grundmeier and Debra Marshall (Doug Erickson) all of Hines, Minn.; and one brother, Bruce Marshall of Colville, Wash.

He was preceded in death by his father, Roy; and a brother, Tom Marshall.

A time of visitation will take place from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 3, at Griffin-Gray Funeral Home in Stewartville and one hour prior to the service Friday at the United Methodist Church.

Arrangements are with Griffin-Gray Funeral Home in Stewartville. http://www.griffin-gray.com.

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Daniel C. Marshall -- High Forest Township - Post-Bulletin

Want to empower patients? Look to technology – MedCity News

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From left: Ashley Reid, founder and CEO of Wellist; Dusty Donaldson, founder of LiveLung; Chuck Gershman, co-founder, president and COO of Kuveda; and moderator Howard Krein, CMO of StartUp Health

One thing is clear: There are a plethora ofstakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem. And in trying to bring everyone together, we often neglect to tie in the most important part of the equation: the patient.

In a panel at MedCity CONVERGE, a group of panelists touched on the significance of patient engagement, particularly in oncology care. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all three panelists have personal ties to cancer. KuvedaCOO Chuck Gershmans father was diagnosed with cancer, Wellist CEO Ashley Reids mother had breast cancer and LiveLung founder Dusty Donaldson is a lung cancer survivor.

Due in part to their experiences, they each formed their own organizations.

Gershman co-founded Kuveda, a company that utilizes analytics and genomics to create cancer treatment options unique to each patient. Reid founded Wellist, which works to ensure healthcare organizations are giving patients access to their nonclinical needs. And Donaldsons LiveLung seeks to spread awareness of and support patients with lung cancer.

While the startups go about it differently, they all share the same goal: to empower the patient.

Kuveda wants to do so through personalized medicine. This year, approximately 14 million people are going to be diagnosed with cancer globally, Gershman said. But only 200,000 to 300,000 of them are going to get access to precision medicine. The company wants to bridge that gap.

Wellist looks at patient engagement a little differently. It provides its clients (such UPMC Hillman Cancer Center) with analytics solutions and the tools to connect patients with supportive communities. We exist to be a one stop shop so patients and nurses can get connected to organizations like Dustys, Reid said.

LiveLung exists to advocate for patients and to end the stigma surrounding lung cancer. By working with cancer centers and nurse navigators, its primary mission is to serve the lung cancer population.

And for each of the companies, technology is one of the keydrivers of ensuring patients are engaged with their diagnosis and treatment options.

Gershman, whose organization is in the process of building a patient portal, neatly summarized the mindset of patients today: Its no longer the doctor is God.' Instead, theyre looking online to find information.

Donaldson agreed. Patients are Googling. Caregivers are Googling, she noted. The Internet is definitely a huge player. Websites not only serve as a tool for patients to find information, but also for survivors to share their stories and connect.

Whether through tech or other means, empowerment comes down to recognizing that each individual has different needs.

Patient engagement is really getting to the heart of the patient whos going through whatever theyre going through, Donaldson concluded.

Photo: Justin Lawrence

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Want to empower patients? Look to technology - MedCity News

Forget the Business talk: It’s Always Personal – The Good Men Project (blog)

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Embed from Getty Images We read a lot about motivating factors for entrepreneurs: having self-belief, never giving up, failing fast, continuing to look forward. And its mostly good stuff. But Ive found that sometimes there is something deeper. Something that supports these traits which is more personal and more impactful than just believing in oneself. Here are four things I have found having a meaningful bearing on our mental health, and ultimately our careers.

1. Its never about business, its all about whatever you love the most. For me, my children matter more to me than anything in business. I almost lost sight of that at one point. Not that I forgot I loved my kids, but too often I overlooked being present and showing it. Dont allow your stress and pressure get in the way of the one source of strength that will always be there for you. The ones who love you unconditionally.

2. Have a loving support network around you. Things will go wrong, go south, and be difficult to handle. Having those around you who will understand and offer compassion will give you strength to move forward. Sometimes a person just listening and telling you it will be all right is enough. The hug of a loved one, the compassion of a loving listener, the arm around your shoulder. It can have a profound impact on your decision making.

3. Be a strong co-leader of your family. Learning to lead in business means nothing if you sacrifice the opportunity to be a loving and strong co-leader for your family. You and your parental counterpart, regardless of your marital situation, are who your children look to when they experience the world. Their morals, their ethics, their care for others, their respect for others: They learn it all from you. You cannot hide from this. They are your opportunity to learn how leading impacts others. The most respected business leaders know this and treat their employees this way. They learn it in the most important place, their home.

4. Control doesnt matter. Cooperation and interdependence do. Supporting others in a way they say helps them be a better person, matters. Their love for you supporting them and vice versa, your acceptance of them as an individual with thoughts, feelings, and life goals, your humility to equality and the capable contribution of others, is what will produce trust and drive you all forward.

The feeling of success in life is unique, precious, and incredibly focusing. Nothing in business will ever fully give you this, even the feeling of accomplishment from signing a huge deal or selling your business. This only matters when you have someone to share it with. Someone you love, and someone that loves you and makes you happy. Someone who can say they are proud of you. Someone to acknowledge that your hard work has paid off. And when it doesnt, someone who can tell you will be okay will help you back on your feet.

Finding this contentment, this happiness, this love, will propel your courage, your confidence, and your self-empowerment in your career and your business. Whether its your life partner, your children, your parents, or your God. Success in our lives doesnt come from success in business or our careers, success in business comes from success in our lives. Be successful in your life. Photo credit: Getty Images

Dad of 3, Technology Executive and Advisor, budding Author. Nothing in my career matters if my family get hurt, so they come first. Always. They are my ultimate source of self-empowerment.

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Forget the Business talk: It's Always Personal - The Good Men Project (blog)