text:
Facebook's New Libra Digital Currency, Trust Issues (Many), and Sovereignty
Posted on June 20, 2019 by Lambert Strether
Readers, I confess that I have not followed the blockchain/cryptocurrency universe for awhile; at one time, I followed CoinDesk but sadly, I was not able to distinguish actual news from breathless evangelism, not to say calculated propaganda, so I gave up the unequal struggle. However, now that Facebook has announced Libra[1], which is a blockchain cryptocurrency at least for marketing purposes[2], I've brushed up on the topic enough do this round-up. Bloomberg summarizes Libra:
Facebook Inc. unveiled plans for a new, global financial system with a broad group of partners from Visa Inc. to Uber Technologies Inc. on board to create a cryptocurrency it expects will one day trade much like the U.S. dollar and inject a new source of revenue. Called Libra, the new currency will launch as soon as next year and be what's known as a stablecoin–a digital currency that's supported by established [fiat] government-backed currencies and securities [see Reuters on stablecoins here]. The goal is to avoid massive fluctuations in value so Libra can be used for everyday transactions across Facebook in a way that more volatile cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, haven't been. To come anywhere close to matching the U.S. dollar for utility and acceptance, Libra will need to be widely trusted.
As we shall see below, trust issues are key to the entire venture. Friend-of-the-blog Matt Stoller has an Op-Ed in the New York Times that you should all read; he expands on how the "partnership" may work:
As far as I can tell, Facebook aims to build a new payments and currency system using blockchain technology. Facebook is starting a subsidiary, Calibra, to "provide financial services" to individuals and businesses, including saving, spending and sending money. The actual standards for the currency will be managed by a nonprofit in Switzerland called the Libra Association. The currency will have its own central bank known as the Libra Reserve, and the board will be the committee of corporations that helped set it up.
Needless to say, a privatized Central Bank will take some time to set up (Bloomberg also says the Libra Association's Charter is not yet written). Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg:
We announced this early. We know this is a heavy, heavily regulated space. We need to talk to people, meet with people and that's what we're doing and we are then going to launch.
More trust issues. Here is the optimistic, evangelistic view of the venture:
Libra will introduce more users to Bitcoin than any other coin before.
2.6 bullion that are one step closer to learning about, buying, and understanding $BTC.
Thanks Zuck! https://t.co/TcuX7TgodY
— Luke Martin (@VentureCoinist) June 17, 2019
And the view of Libra's marketing team:
Why we think stable coin $libra will be big
1. No 3% merchant fee saves companies billions of USD/Yr
2. Instant secure settlement vs stolen cards/fraud saves billions
3. $Libra will be run by a consortium of 100 including facebook, stripe, uber, PayPal, MasterCard and Visa 🤯 pic.twitter.com/lCQq2wIGxC
— Libra News (@LibraCoin_) June 17, 2019
(I have to say I'm given pause by seeing Kiva, whose business model has been characterized as "controversial," besides "predatory" and a "farce," positioned as a top partner; see Thomas Frank for the virtue signaling zeitgeist of the microloans universe.)
Others are more skeptical. One rattlesnakedave (via):
Finally, a cryptocurrency with the ethics of Uber, the censorship resistance of PayPal, and the centralization of Visa, all tied together under the proven privacy of Facebook. Just what I've been waiting for.
As Hyman Minksy famously said: "Everyone can create money; the problem is to get it accepted." That places — absent force majeure — trust, and lack of trust, at the center of the Libra effort. Libra's trust issues sort themselves into three buckets: User, Technical, and Regulatory. I will look at each of these topics in turn, and conclude by considering (as Stoller does) whether Libra is a sovereign (wannabe or not).
User Trust
Should users trust Libra? The Financial Times poses the question concisely:
The final question concerns how widespread usage will be. Consumer privacy concerns mean users are already revoking Facebook permissions. If they do not trust Mr Zuckerberg's company with their phone number why would they trust it with their money?
One reason to answer no is that Facebook CEO Zuckerberg is a vicious and unrepentant crook and con-man, and has been since his days at Harvard. Famously, this chat session:
ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how'd you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don't know why
ZUCK: they "trust me"
ZUCK: dumb fucks
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
Further, in a world where the rule of law applied to Silicon Valley oligarchs, Facebook would already be a criminal enterprise. Bloomberg, "Facebook Wants to Know If You'd Trust It With Your Money":
Regulatory pressure on Facebook has never been greater. The Federal Trade Commission is finalizing an investigation into its privacy practices, which the company has said could lead to a fine up to $5 billion. Presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have called for investigations into the big tech companies and the power they wield over Americans' lives. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has said the social network should be broken up. Reacting to the Libra announcement, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, said, "We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight. I'm calling on our financial watchdogs to scrutinize this closely to ensure users are protected."
We don't let the Mafia print its own money, so why Facebook? Of course, to a corporation of Facebook's scale, $5 billion is just a cost of doing business. And Facebook's scale may neutralize its user trust issues in the privileged West. As Vox says, "Facebook may have too many users for its cryptocurrency to fail — even if you don't trust it":
[M]ost people I've spoken with in recent days believe Libra can be successful, largely because of Facebook's enormous scale. They've posited that the platform's unprecedented user base is the only global population that's big enough to organize around a single currency.
One obvious initial use case for a "global population" — "Facebook and its family of apps, which have more monthly active users than the populations of China and the US combined" — would be remittances. From the Financial Times:
Creating a "stablecoin" digital currency pegged to a basket of assets and a digital wallet that can hold it is well suited to the international remittance market.
And remittances are a nice little business to be in. From the World Bank:
In 2019, remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries are expected to reach $550 billion, to become their largest source of external financing…. The global average cost of sending $200 remained high, at around 7 percent in the first quarter of 2019, according to the World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide database.
7% is a pretty big cut if you're a "helper" in Hong Kong sending money back to the Philippines, so the remittance market would indeed seem ripe for disruption.
However, it's important to understand that Libra's architecture — very much unlike the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin — requires users to trust Libra, the central issuing authority:
Bitcoin's digital gold, but Facebook's Libra is the digital dollar—here's why that matters
[Bitcoin bull Brian Kelly], founder and CEO of BKCM and resident bitcoin expert on CNBC's "Fast Money," said there are some crucial differences between Libra and a cryptocurrency like bitcoin. With Libra, Facebook users will be able to exchange their dollars for Libra tokens, thus entrusting Facebook and its fellow backers with building a reliable ledger of all transactions, Kelly said.
"You have to trust Facebook that they're going to hold onto those dollars, they're going to keep track of the ledger, and that your token's going to be worth something. You go out, you buy your goods and services on the Facebook platform, whoever else is using it. Maybe Uber somehow is involved. And then you're left with the Libra tokens that are left over," he said.
That trust defines the main difference between cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Libra, Kelly said. Bitcoin buyers don't need to entrust a third party with their money or information, whereas Libra users will have to trust the company that has perhaps been most plagued by issues around trust and privacy: Facebook.
"This is about that trusted third party and, to me, that's the revolution of crypto, is that it is peer-to-peer. You disintermediate financial services," Kelly said. "So, when you talk about the differences between this and something like bitcoin, bitcoin is trustless. You don't need to believe that anybody's going to check that ledger; you can do it yourself."
That distinction may not matter to the Hong Kong helper; it may matter very much to users in the United States or the European Union. The pink paper's question remains salient: "If they do not trust Mr Zuckerberg's company with their phone number why would they trust it with their money?"
Technical Trust
Libra is not only a group of partners, a governance structure, and a currency: It is software that delivers financial services in that currency. Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal offers perspective:
I think Facebook is aspiring to be to Libra what Google is to the Android operating system. In other words, if successful, the right way to think about this is not as a coin or a cryptocurrency, but rather an open-source platform for building money-moving applications. Unlike traditional open source software, which anyone can in theory fork, modify or develop for their own needs, a monetary system must maintain some consensus on things. What is the unit of account? Who has the money? Who is allowed to issue it? And so unlike a normal piece of software, an open-source money system needs all kinds of governance mechanisms. But in theory, if Libra launched and gained momentum, you could imagine it as a platform in which anyone anywhere could write an app that moves money to anyone else in a fashion they please. Right now, there are numerous closed payment applications, but they're not interoperable. A person using Venmo can't send money to someone using Zelle or WeChat. The potential with Libra is that they could.
But should we trust the application developers? From TechCrunch, "The real risk of Facebook's Libra coin is crooked developers":
Facebook naturally has a huge target on its back for hackers. Not just because Libra could hold so much value to steal, but because plenty of trolls would get off on screwing up Facebook's currency. That's why Facebook open-sourced the Libra Blockchain and is offering a prototype in a pre-launch testnet. This developer beta plus a bug bounty program run in partnership with HackerOne is meant to surface all the flaws and vulnerabilities before Libra goes live with real money connected.
Yet that leaves one giant vector for abuse of Libra: the developer platform.
"Essential to the spirit of Libra . . . the Libra Blockchain will be open to everyone: any consumer, developer, or business can use the Libra network, build products on top of it, and add value through their services. Open access ensures low barriers to entry and innovation and encourages healthy competition that benefits consumers," Facebook explained in its white paper and Libra launch documents. It's even building a whole coding language called Move for making Libra apps.
Yet the Libra Blockchain itself is irreversible. Outside of custodial wallets like Calibra, there's no getting your stolen or mis-sent money back. There's likely no customer support. And there are plenty of crooked crypto developers happy to prey on the inexperienced. Indeed, $1.7 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen last year alone, according to CypherTrace via CNBC.
Of course, all financial systems enable fraud to some extent; the question is whether Libra enables fraud at scale; and one answer is that if enough developers are crooked, it will. But there's another reason for concern, more basic to the nature of computing.
Ken Thompson, the designer and original implementor of Unix (now at Google) embedded a Trojan Horse into his own C compiler undetectably ("the cutest program I ever wrote"), and so could log in as root to any system compiled with it. He concludes his classic paper "Reflections on Trusting Trust" as follows:
The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well-installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
At this point, we note that Move, the language in which Libra apps are written, has, if not a compiler per se, a bytecode verifier and a bytecode interpreter. Of course, I could have unknowingly slipped over the line into paranoid fantasy. However, consider that a Trojan Horse backdoor into the transactions of two billion people would be an asset of almost inestimable value to Zuckerberg and his posse as a form of primitive accumulation. And if you view the Libra ecosystem as a phishing equilibrium, if fraud can happen, it has already happened.
Regulatory Trust
Regulators, even in these benighted times, at the very least insist that regulatory forms be obeyed. Here I will consider, in the United States, the states, Congress, and most importantly, the IRS. Finally, I will consider the reaction international regulators.
I have heard that at the state level, the price of regulatory forbearance is a steak dinner. Certainly Uber has done very well for itself. And Libra is making progress:
Another tidbit on the regulatory side of Facebook's new #crypto project #Libracoin: Calibra has 7 state money transmitter licenses so far, the earliest from mid-April.
FB says it's working to get licenses in states that treat crypto as $$ equivalent (for licensing) pic.twitter.com/I1t0sMsy2k
— Lydia Beyoud (@ElleBeyoud) June 19, 2019
Congress has bestirred itself, though we will see what the outcome is. MarketWatch, "Senate banking committee sets July date to hold hearing on Facebook Libra coin":
The Senate Banking committee on Wednesday set July 16 as the date to hold a hearing centered on Facebook Inc.'s Libra coin. House Financial Services Committee head Maxine Waters on Tuesday said Facebook "is continuing its unchecked expansion and extending its reach into the lives of its users."
And Waters in the Financial Times:
"The cryptocurrency market currently lacks a clear regulatory framework to provide strong protections for investors, consumers, and the economy," Ms Waters said in a statement on Tuesday, as she called on regulators to "get serious".
As for the IRS, Lawfare writes in "Facebook's Cryptocurrency: Stop It Before It Starts":
A true cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin or Libra is considered property by the Internal Revenue Service. That means a gain of $1 due to volatility between when the cryptocurrency is acquired and when it is transferred to someone else is a $1 taxable event. And since any integration into Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp is under the control of Facebook, Facebook should probably file income tax documents and keep track of the otherwise difficult cost-basis math on behalf of Facebook's customers, like other investment brokerages do. The IRS needs to remind both Facebook and the public of these implications and requirements. Of course this would make Libra completely useless in the U.S. by increasing the cost of using it beyond any utility.
(See also this useful thread on Twitter and this white paper.)
And finally, the international reaction. From the Financial Times, "Facebook's Libra currency draws instant response from regulators":
The G7 working group will also consider how to ensure proper controls against money-laundering, according to a letter from Bruno Le Maire, the French finance minister, and François Villeroy de Galhau, the governor of the Banque de France. The French hold the rotating presidency of the G7.
Central banks and the International Monetary Fund will also participate, according to the letter, which was seen by the Financial Times.
(The surprisingly quotable Le Maire's initial reaction: "'It is out of question' that Libra 'become a sovereign currency. It can't and it must not happen.") The concern, quite naturally, is money laundering. Again from the Financial Times, "Four big questions facing Facebook's Libra coin"
[A]t the top of the list is money laundering. Before traditional lenders open accounts for customers, they must undertake rigorous background checks to ensure funds are not ill-gotten gains.
Facebook's plans allow for "pseudonymous" users able to create multiple accounts not based on their real-life identity.
"This approach is familiar to many users, developers, and regulators," its official documents read.
One UK official remarked: "This is particularly weasel-worded. We may be familiar with it but that doesn't make us comfortable with it."
Trust once more.
Sovereigns and Sovereignty
Stoller, in his Op-Ed, raises the question whether Facebook is heading toward some form of sovereignty (real, not metaphorical):
A permissionless currency system based on a consensus of large private actors across open protocols sounds nice, but it's not democracy. Today, American bank regulators and central bankers are hired and fired by publicly elected leaders. Libra payments regulators would be hired and fired by a self-selected council of corporations. There are ways to characterize such a system, but democratic is not one of them.
Years ago, Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that he doesn't think Facebook is a business. "In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company," said Mr. Zuckerberg. "We're really setting policies." He has acted consistently as a would-be sovereign power. For example, he is attempting to set up a Supreme Court-style independent tribunal to handle content moderation. And now he is setting up a global currency.
The way we structure money and payments is a question for democratic institutions. Any company big enough to start its own currency is just too big.
While Zuckerberg's ""Move fast and break things" does seem uncomfortable like an American-style version of fascist legal theorist Carl Schmitt's "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception," I'm not sure how Facebook, absent the coercive powers of a typical state, can be said to be sovereign. Also, Facebook relies on fiat currency created by states; it's not (at this point) seeking to challenge their respective national monopolies with its own global fiat currency. However, it does seem that as the liberal rules-based international order breaks down, various entities are attempting to fill the power vacuum (the ISDS system does this implicitly, just like Zuckerberg's "independent tribunal") and perhaps Facebook is morphing into one such entity. Would — say — the denial of Facebook financial services coerce a Hong Kong helper in the same way that the Hong Kong police would? Doubtful, but the future lies ahead.
LawFare writes:
Facebook however is committing to integrating Libra as the payment channel into its applications, bypassing the opportunity to integrate a more conventional solution similar to Venmo, M-pesa, Zelle, or ApplePay. Given a conventional solution would probably result in a payment channel rivaling PayPal's $2 billion a year in net income, this represents a huge opportunity cost. It only makes sense for Facebook as a moral crusade rather than a business decision: it seems intended to be exempt from any government's controls.
I find it unlikely that Facebook is engaged in a moral crusade of any sort. And I don't see how Facebook can exempt itself "from any government's controls" when the Libra is "backed by" fiat currencies minted by those same governments. Perhaps Facebook is taking the long view, and would prefer not to give Venmo et al. a cut. (But then why are they Facebook's partners? Friends close, enemies closer?) Perhaps Facebook is willing to accept the opportunity cost because it is in quest for some other very great advantage as yet unseen; the transaction data of two billion users would seem of sufficient scale (see the discussion of Trojan Horses above). The future, again, lies ahead.
[1] On Libra the astrological sign, Wikipedia: "The symbol of the scales is based on the Scales of Justice held by Themis, the Greek personification of divine law and custom…. The Moon was said to be in Libra when Rome was founded." A cursory Internet search shows that depending on his actual date of birth (disputed) the Roman Emperor Augustus has been said to be a Libra, which might have personal resonance with Facebook CEO Zuckerberg.
[2] FT Alphaville has a fine discussion of whether Libra is really a blockchain or not (no). "This is just one of a series of Alphaville posts on Libra coin, which we are calling Breaking the Zuck Buck, in which we will seek to show how nonsensical, pointless, stupid, risky, badly thought-out and blockchainless the whole thing is."
This entry was posted in Banking industry, Corporate governance, Currencies, Guest Post, Legal, Payment system, Regulations and regulators, Ridiculously obvious scams, Taxes on June 20, 2019 by Lambert Strether.
About Lambert Strether
Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism ("Because markets"). I don't much care about the "ism" that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don't much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess "deaths from despair," as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton's wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let's call such voices "the left." Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn't allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I've been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.
View all posts by Lambert Strether →
← 2:00PM Water Cooler 6/20/2019 The Two-State Solution Is Dead. Bloodbath Next? →
Darius June 20, 2019 at 3:38 pm
I think Facebook is becoming the state. Our federal state and local governments are becoming the vassals. The issue isn't trust. It's power and coercion. Facebook can install its own regulators and make it so we have no choice but to use this rent-extraction scheme to carry on with our lives.
Lambert Strether Post author June 20, 2019 at 4:08 pm
> The issue isn't trust. It's power and coercion.
As I wrote: "I'm not sure how Facebook, absent the coercive powers of a typical state, can be said to be sovereign." Buying regulators ins't the same as becoming the State, obviously.
jsn June 20, 2019 at 5:18 pm
Yes, but the IT Oligarchs have proven to be masterful hypnotists, their 1s and 0s reducing skeptical regulators to credulous enablers.
The question seems to be whether one of them can seize a physical state with its' apparatus of coercion in tact before the trance is broken.
Maybe that's why HQ2 of the Bezosphere landed in Virginia.
flora June 20, 2019 at 10:20 pm
"masterful hypnotists…"
Only because in the 80's and 90's politicians believed the talk that anti-trust enforcement could be eliminated because, they were told, the new digital technologies would automatically breakup or prevent monopolies forming, (think "disruption").
Today, it's pretty clear to even politicians that silicon valley has produced new price-gouging, too powerful monopolies. When even Peggy Noonan calls for tighter regulations on the too big tech powers, calls for their break-up into smaller companies, you know something has changed. The hypnotism has worn off. My 2¢.
OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL June 20, 2019 at 7:12 pm
Step 1 is to have Libra backed by fiat currencies, a basket of 6 supposedly. This gives them some regulatory cover to get launched.
Step 2 of course is to abandon this pretense.
mrsyk June 22, 2019 at 4:30 pm
Kongbucks. I need a samurai sword and a fast motorcycle.
Mike Gualario June 20, 2019 at 4:04 pm
Facebook has jumped the shark with this endeavor. The company who has as a business model, stealing your data and selling it, has now decided that instead of fixing that and making the one thing that was the original attraction to facebook, the feed, relevant again, the company is yesterdays news. If you use facebook you already know this.
Eduardo June 20, 2019 at 4:06 pm
Thanks for the links on Kiva. I had no idea. I thought they were doing good.
shinola June 20, 2019 at 4:32 pm
Not mentioned in the "technical trust" section, but I think more likely than back doors, Trojan horses, hacking or direct theft, is the possibility/probability that the platform developers could devise a way to create these crypto bucks outside the official bookkeeping for their own personal enrichment. Virtual counterfeiting.
JCC June 20, 2019 at 4:36 pm
M.I.T.'s Blockchain Newsletter isn't coming across as enthusiastic, either
https://go.technologyreview.com/150-libra-coin-vs.-the-state
"… it's safe to say the game has changed. Buckle up."
Synoia June 20, 2019 at 4:38 pm
Thanks, thats a really good artiicle.
ChrisAtRU June 20, 2019 at 4:40 pm
O Brother Bezos, where art thou?
(With thine own far better positioned vampire squid currency)
#WhatATimeToBeAlive
Harrold June 20, 2019 at 4:48 pm
Zuck missed the bitcoin parade by 5 years at least.
He's deep in his own echo chamber if he thinks users will give him their money. There is just no reason to.
People use Facebook to look at silly pictures of cats and organize ethnic cleansings, not buy groceries.
Jon S June 20, 2019 at 5:04 pm
Doesn't this just make Facebook a bank? You make a deposit, but instead of getting a check book, you get libra bucks. You transfer some libra bucks to your mistress in Berlin, and she exchanges them for Euro. So Facebook, like a bank, is essentially settling financial transactions. But what happens if there aren't enough Euro in stock?
Zuck as a Soverign. He's not reaching much is he? Back by thr good faith and credit of who excatly?
Especially the "good faith" bit.
What laws apply? Banking?
There was a time in the UK when "bank notes" were privatly issued.
If there was a run on the Libra, how would the currency's value be maintained?
> If there was a run on the Libra, how would the currency's value be maintained?
I would say the governments who control fiat would step in….
Summer June 20, 2019 at 9:49 pm
Why should it be "maintained"?
If that crap fails that should be a wrap for Zuck and all the fools who got in it.
Why do I say that?
Because the plan is to cause a crisis with all the other currencies and it be the only one standing.
NotverySmart June 20, 2019 at 5:19 pm
Company script at the company store, that's what this sounds like. But instead of the company workers it's everyone else who is subjected to the company script. Spending your own money to buy their money to spend it then at their store, it sounds like it's straight out of the gilded age. And when the customer doesn't like what they bought for whatever reason the refund will always be in the funny money. I'm guessing that if you put your money in that sort of system, you can never really cash out. I know that with video games for example people already do essentially the same thing. But now we might be talking about tangible goods, which puts an interesting spin on it. All and all Libra sounds like a finely turned money pit.
djrichard June 20, 2019 at 7:52 pm
I know that with video games for example people already do essentially the same thing.
Good example. Maybe a way to think of Libra then is as video game money, except more fungible. Yay? [I remember seeing the word fungible somewhere in connection with Libra so that seems to be the paradigm.]
In which case, how far can you stretch this? Matt Stoller sees the need to have some limits, e.g. for cross-border regulatory oversight, e.g. when it comes to sanctioning countries, maybe capital controls, etc. But what about "ordinary" stuff, the stuff that people engage in that they don't necessarily want to have gov eyes or facebook eyes seeing, e.g. transactions "off the books". Until that's possible I don't see Libra becoming a lingua franca that displaces cash. Who knows, once facebook gets people exposed to Libra, they'll start to seek out other crypto-currency eco-systems that are more private. Maybe?
Of course that's the same issue with conventional banking / credit card usage. But I don't mind them at least having eyes to my transactions that are "on the books". But I would certainly have qualms about letting facebook having visibility to even that.
Edit: but then I wouldn't be surprised if "off the book" transactions are already being done via video-game currencies, just masking them to look legit.
anarcheopteryx June 20, 2019 at 5:27 pm
Good roundup, thanks Lambert. It's the "absent the coercive powers of a typical state" part that really feels ominous to me, though. They already extract taxes from digital citizens in the form of human data/information, is it really so hard for them to develop a physical enforcement arm or co-opt an existing one?
The other scary thing is that I think people will actually use it and not think about it much until all their tokens disappear. I mean, imagine what happens if they run this for a few years and decide it wasn't such a great idea after all (RIP Google Reader)? Blockchain never really bothered me much because it was something people were largely doing as a hobby or speculation. But if people who *really can't afford to lose any money* (i.e. remittance-senders) buy tokens and those tokens become worthless, that is a much bigger deal.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef June 20, 2019 at 5:34 pm
Maybe Zuck should test this first in Russia.
urblintz June 21, 2019 at 9:22 am
DJG June 20, 2019 at 5:38 pm
Libra. Are they claiming to have named it after the Scales in the Zodiac?
Libra = lira, which is a common name for currencies still in use. This is going to get, deliberately, confusing. Or are these peeps just that un-original?
Stealing from Wikipedia:
"The term originates from the value of a troy pound (Latin libra) of high purity silver. The libra was the basis of the monetary system of the Roman Empire. When Europe resumed a monetary system, during the Carolingian Empire, the Roman system was adopted, the so-called £sd (librae, solidi, denarii)."
I note three countries, especially Turkey, that use a lira. And in some languages, lira is the word for the English pound (currency), because a libra was a weight, as Wiki tells us above.
> Libra. Are they claiming to have named it after the Scales in the Zodiac?
Quartz:
Ahead of the unveiling, Facebook explained to Quartz why the company selected the Libra name and symbol.
The name was inspired by the origins of money in Ancient Rome, where the Libra was a unit of weight used to mint coins, according to a Facebook spokesperson. Libra also evokes the French libre ("free"), the spokesperson added, and reflects the corresponding astrological symbol—the scales of justice, relevant in theory because the crypto is meant to make financial inclusion standard around the globe. The new crypto's symbol, a wave, "represents the energy that flows between us, the borderless nature of water, and the movement between people, places, and money," the spokesperson said.
The thing is, Libra is also a tampon brand—and an extremely popular one in Australia, which observers instantly pointed out on Twitter.
See note [1]. I thought the coincidence was interesting.
Jesper June 20, 2019 at 5:52 pm
The new programming language seems interesting, as for the rest then I have many doubts.
https://hackernoon.com/move-programming-language-the-highlight-of-libra-122a910d6e0f
So as often happens, consultants who knows (or can pretend to know) the new language might find well paying gigs. Or not.
ChrisPacific June 20, 2019 at 6:07 pm
Having read some of the critiques of this (Stoller's in particular) I can't help but feel that this is an attempt by Facebook to morph into a TBTF bank and benefit from the associated risk reduction to increase margins on leveraged tech adventurism of all kinds, in much the same way that Wall Street does for predatory derivative products and casino capitalism. If it was set up as described it would feature Facebook and the other validators operating as low risk/low margin infrastructure providers along with their decidedly not low risk/margin core business, which as we've seen before is a scenario ripe for abuse. I have not yet seen any mention of mitigation mechanisms for this, such as financial/business ring fencing arrangements like the ones that apply to telcos that own their own physical networks. Figuring out whether or not this is a real thing to worry about is above my pay grade – another question is whether this would end up being a full or fractional reserve system in relation to the fiat currency backing – but I think it's what Stoller is getting at.
Regulators are already promising to look closely at this. It's unclear to me whether this represents a genuine attempt to look out for the interests of the public or Wall Street protecting its patch. At present the two would seem to be pretty nearly congruent, so it might not be possible to tell for a while.
This jumped out at me from: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/technology/how-libra-would-work-for-you.html
Every time someone buys Libra, that money will be deposited into a bank account where it will sit untouched so that every dollar's or euro's worth of Libra will be backed by a dollar or euro in the bank, according to the Libra design documents.
With this as the next sentence
This is important because the bank holdings of Libra will generate interest that can be used to pay back the cryptocurrency's initial investors.
First have to laugh at the idea of the second bit, as if that's the profit model, as opposed to charging for transaction fees between users, and whatever other eco-system synergies they get up to.
Not to say there isn't profit in the interest on the dollars. But if they're going to generate interest on the dollars in reserve, then those dollars aren't in reserve anymore. They're loaned out. What if there's another GFC like in 2008/2009 and everybody wants to exit their "positions" and get their dollars back, will Facebook (or whoever the reserve is) be able to meet the redemption? A la https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/money-market-reserve-fund-meltdown.asp Seems to me that they're still at risk of correlation with the underlying.
There's a comment over at FTalphaville that goes deeper: https://on.ft.com/2x7rdYw
This is part of a series of articles, one of which addresses the point that Libra is committed to invest its reserves only in the safest of assets (specifically: "debt from stable governments with low default probability").
Most stable governments with low default probability have debt trading below zero yield at the moment. So, even if Facebook weren't culturally American, it would still have to allocate very heavily towards US Treasuries simply to generate enough yield on the float to cover costs.
To be relevant to potential users in Low Income Countries (excepting those with local currencies pegged to USD) it will either have to pass FX risk onto the end user (which is likely to trigger regulatory action banning it as a threat to local sovereignty) OR it would need to generate sufficient yield to absorb the x-currency risk… which it can't, because it's long low-yield sovereign debt.
Looks like a good series of articles by the way from what I've read so far.
Bob Haugen June 20, 2019 at 7:10 pm
Matthew Slater is a developer of Mutual Credit currencies which is sorta a community organizer currency. Here's his take on Libra: http://matslats.net/libracoin-conquer-world
Carey June 20, 2019 at 7:27 pm
Thanks for that link.
Looking at the marketing
I can understand the value to companies. But my understanding is that MC and Visa have agreements with companies that consumers pay the same regardless of whether they use credit cards vs cash. That said, I could imagine Visa and MC removing this policy when it comes to Libra transactions, so that the merchant as able to pass some of the 3% savings onto the consumer that uses Libra instead of credit card. So they would cannibalize one side of their business to capture it on the other side. Maybe?
I can see that having some appeal to my wife. Somehow she's always having problems with credit card fraud on her cards.
But then Matt Stoller brings up an excellent point in his article
As one travel agent told Congress in 1970 when opposing the right of banks to enter his business, "Any time I deposited checks from my customers," he said, "I was providing the banks with the names of my best clients."
The issue here is a trust issue as well. But not whether the consumer trusts facebook. It's whether the rest of the eco-system players trust facebook, to not compete with them. And maybe not to privilege some eco-system players over others – would there be a "net neutrality" regulatory apparatus?
3. $Libra will be run by a consortium of 100 including facebook, stripe, uber, PayPal, MasterCard and Visa 🤯
Still a walled garden at the end of the day. Hey Lambert, going to set up NC to accept tips in Libra?
It will be interesting to see if somebody's already anticipated a "hype cycle" diagram for this. For instance, what happens after the "trough of despair"? At that point it's less exciting to the point of being boring. And it's at that point where non-true-believers eventually capitulate because it's easier to capitulate than stay a hold out. I expect to be the last of the hold outs. Maybe when NC accepts tips in Libra, LoL.
Yves Smith June 20, 2019 at 11:24 pm
Instant settlement is terrible for buyers. This is one of the huge defects of crypto that hypesters try to depict as an advantage. If you buy something with a credit card, you can later dispute the transaction if there was a problem, like the shipment was wrong and the merchant wouldn't correct his mistake. You have zero recourse with final settlement save going to court.
djrichard June 21, 2019 at 10:44 am
Hi Yves, your post is giving me thought. At the end of the day, facebook would be the court. No different than how ebay, paypal and Amazon are the "court" for transactions which occur under their services. Basically if you want to continue doing business with ebay, paypal and Amazon, you have to abide their governance (and court decisions).
I could see facebook having a significant advantage though compared to ebay, paypal and Amazon. Presumably facebook will be a larger marketplace. Even when compared against Amazon, because Amazon is limited to physical goods and presumably facebook's transactions go beyond that.
And this has some interesting potential. Facebook can position themselves as the defacto ledger for consumers, their wallet and receipts all-in-one. Yes, ultimately people can see their banking account as their ultimate ledger, but they can't do conflict resolution of transactions through their bank. Same thing with their credit card as a ledger – the credit card company is not the final arbitrator when it comes to transactions effected through ebay or paypal or Amazon, etc. But as facebook displaces ebay, paypal and Amazon such that more and more transactions occur through facebook, then facebook becomes the final arbitrator. And once that happens, facebook wins the other side of that leg as well, it becomes the defacto ledger for most consumers. Again, their wallet and receipts, all-in-one.
All facebook needs to do is stand up the governance needed to resolve conflicts between consumers and merchants. And that should be a no brainer. Even facebook can be trusted by both sides when it comes to resolving conflicts in transactions.
Plenue June 20, 2019 at 8:04 pm
"I followed CoinDesk but sadly, I was not able to distinguish actual news from breathless evangelism, not to say calculated propaganda"
Oh that's easy. Everything in crypto is propaganda for scams.
Acacia June 20, 2019 at 9:09 pm
Nouriel Roubini weighs in:
It will start as a private, permissioned, not-trustless, centralized oligopolistic members-only club. So much for calling it "blockchain". Like all "enterprise DLT" it is blockchain in name only and an monopoly to extract massive seignorage from billions of users. A monopoly scam.
Edit: no pun intended w.r.t. "weighing in" on the scales of Libra ;)
Cal2 June 20, 2019 at 9:17 pm
"Facebook is becoming the state?"
"Busboy Nation" then.
Around here, San Francisco Bay Area, educated people don't admit to using Facebook, and certainly no longer trust it with their real secrets. Are gullible people an ethnic group?
Can you ever confide in someone who hangs the details of their life out on the social gibbet?
https://allthatsinteresting.com/gibbet
I believe that Facebook is going to become a social marker, like smoking, picking your nose in public or taking trips to Las Vegas. Just because lots of people do it, doesn't mean you should.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those that use Facebook and those who refuse to.
The first of the "Breaking the Zuch Buck" articles was an interesting read: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/06/19/1560920406000/Facebook-s-Libra-will-not-help-the-unbanked/
I was looking to see what the Fed Gov does in this space for welfare payments and found this https://fiscal.treasury.gov/GoDirect/social-security-federal-benefits-direct-deposit/directexpress/index.html . So they seem to be on the ball. You can even use it to get cash back from merchants. In which case, why can't the private sector hop on this same "bus"?
Anyways, if I'm Facebook, I would campaign for companies (small, medium, big) to pay their employees in Libra. Then it would automatically go right into the bank-of-facebook.
And if I can get the Fed Gov on top of that to payout in Libra, than it would be game over. Facebook wins. It wouldn't require the Fed Gov to adopt Libra as a fungible currency either. Presumably facebook would act as a gateway, accepting payout by the Fed Gov in dollars and converting that to Libras on behalf of those receiving the payment. Vice versa, presumably facebook could be the gateway to the Fed Gov for payment of taxes in the same way.
And as the winners that hoover up Libra want to swap their Libra holdings for US treasuries (so they can hoard that instead) presumably they would go through facebook as gateway as well.
If facebook can pull this off, it has a currency that parallels the dollar in the most meaningful ways for the main street economy.
Great post, Lambert. Thanks.
Lambert Strether Post author June 20, 2019 at 10:35 pm
RenoRich June 20, 2019 at 10:48 pm
> Technical Trust
> He concludes his classic paper "Reflections on Trusting Trust"
A tremendous paper. Thanks for reminding me of this classic 1984 piece.
We should be reminded that it applies to *all* code (Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, …) that we use ("trust") every day.
In fact, speaking from experience, I would argue that one cannot even trust one's own code (the phenomenon of "accidental correctness").
Given that, I am not sure this effort is remarkable in that regard. I already "trust" the programmers at Bank of America, Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and perhaps more disturbingly, several small credit unions.
I guess that makes me a risk taker.
> Given that, I am not sure this effort is remarkable in that regard. I already "trust" the programmers at Bank of America, Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and perhaps more disturbingly, several small credit unions.
But here, we create an enormous single point of failure* that is, moreover, owned by criminals whose business model is and has been stealing and reselling data from "dumb fucks."
NOTE * Or success, depending on your point of view.
RenoRich June 21, 2019 at 12:17 am
> owned by criminals whose business model is and has been stealing
Forgive me, but your comment reminds me of Wells Fargo (WRT $, if not data).
BTW – I am not saying I like (no pun intended) Facebook. I emphatically do not.
Ruby Furigana June 20, 2019 at 11:52 pm
Indeed, that is a tremendous paper! See also: quine and Bobby Quine.
It seems to me there's a very important difference between someone saying "trust me" and someone saying "I cannot be trusted".
Wandering Mind June 20, 2019 at 11:05 pm
I think that in order to analyze the implications of what Facebook is trying to do you need to have a theory of money.
Bitcoin's theory of money is straight out of Econ 101's "barter to gold" story, which is demonstrably false and therefore bitcoin is doomed to fail as money. It is instead an electronic commodity which mimics gold; an asset which is no one's liability.
On the other hand, If one combines Christine Desan's work with Perry Mehrling's use of balance sheets to help with analysis, then I think one can see money as a simply a particular type of debt.
Specifically, a creditor (e.g. the state) that has a very large pool of debtors is in a position to issue its own debt in exchange for real goods and services, if that debt has at least two characteristics:
1. The debt issued by the creditor will be available to settle claims which the creditor has against its pool of debtors.
2. The debt issued by the creditor is freely transferable and therefore any holder of the debt can use it to satisfy the holder's obligations to the issuer.
So, money is debt issued by a "500 pound gorilla" capable of imposing obligations on a large pool of people.
Government qualifies as this type of player and sits at the top of the money/debt hierarchy because it has the power to declare its own debt as the means of final settlement of all financial claims.
The banking system, seen as a whole, qualifies (loans create deposits, deposits = bank money)
Facebook in its current iteration does not. Facebook's own liabilities won't work as money because it doesn't have a large pool of debtors who are obligated to it.
Instead, Facebook is setting up at least two banks. One is the "independent" entity governed by outsiders which is issuing bank debt/money (Libra) which it promises to convert into government debt/money.
The second bank which Facebook is setting up, IMO, is Calibra, which is where Facebook expects most (all?) participants to park their Libra.
So, Calibra's balance sheet will have claims on the independent bank on its asset side and deposits due to consumers and others on its liability side. The deposits on Calibra's liability side are not Libra. They are promises to pay Libra.
Calibra is a subsidiary of Facebook.
One question is what powers Calibra will have (other than as a place to park Libra and process the transfer of its Libra deposits from one user to another). Will Calibra, for example, have the power (now or in the future) to make loans denominated in Libra?
Also, will there be other entities possible which are like Calibra, or will Facebook monopolize that function?
If more than one "Calibra" is possible, then it seems to me that it is inevitable that some of those other "Calibra's" are going to start making Libra denominated loans, which will expand the total amount of Libra denominated claims and, because there is the underlying promise to convert Libra into government money, a Libra banking crisis will also be inevitable.
This is all in addition to how the independent bank which will be taking in government money in exchange for Libra will:
1. Maintain something like parity between Libra and the pool of government money which "backs" it (thus the title of the FT series "Breaking the Zuck Buck"; and
2. Generate sufficient income from the "safe" investments it will make using the government money it has to cover operating expenses and return something to its original investors.
So, all in all Facebook seems to be out of its depth here.
Now Amazon, on the other hand…
Still waiting for the snarky rebranding. FaceBucks seems not to have made it. My own suggestion, "the Mark," has gotten no traction at all.
Acacia June 20, 2019 at 11:41 pm
I'll say it again…
(Family blogger)bux
pricklyone June 21, 2019 at 1:16 am
Probably hits too close to home, LS…
Everyone has an idea what "Marks" are to this little scheme…
Nice play on the name, though, props.
Savita June 21, 2019 at 1:40 am
So, what about a country, for example France, just declaring it banned for all of its citizens? Outright refusing it to be used within its borders, or by its citizens, or et cetera. Could a government by convinced of the need, and could it be possible to enforce?
Acacia June 21, 2019 at 6:28 am
How about China? Facebook is already blocked there and at least according to my sources there isn't much of a "payments gap" in the Middle Kingdom.
Something else to factor in when considering whether facebook may be able to achieve domination in this space. Have they achieved domination in other forms of human interexchange which come close to transactions, e.g. voice calling or even messaging / chatting for that matter?
I believe facebook can be used to place calls to people. But how much do people really do their calling through facebook? Why hasn't that become the dominant form of calling? Even ignoring voice calling, what about messaging / chat? Does facebook dominate that?
If not, what's been holding them back? I don't know because I don't use facebook, and I suspect that's part of the answer :-). But ignore people like me. What about people who are already on facebook? I suspect part of the problem is that since facebook is optimized to be a publishing platform it isn't the right context for communication. And it's not even the right context for "closing the deal" on transactions in contrast say to ebay and Amazon.
But even then ebay had its dalliance with voice calling if I remember right and that was a failure. So go figure. But I think facebook will need to solve that where ebay could afford not to. Since ebay was limiting itself to merchant transactions and I think facebook will be going beyond that.
Anyways, something to think about. Whatever the answer to that is, what's holding them back with respect to dominating these other domains, I suspect the same will be true for Libra.
djrichard June 21, 2019 at 12:27 pm
By the way, with alipay in China I have the impression that people use it more for "brick and mortar" transactions. I.e. scanning QR codes at a physical point-of-sale. Maybe it got more traction in PC-based transactions afterwards? I don't know.
And I believe alipay otherwise ties back to people's bank accounts. There's no new currency involved.
Can't speak to wechat. But I believe even wechat has more of a smartphone pedigree (vice PC-based interactions). I'm assuming they don't have a new currency either.
JEHR June 21, 2019 at 11:13 am
How empty Zuck's world must be that he has to create and control money as well as selling (others') data.
Savita June 21, 2019 at 4:15 pm
All that money. But does he have the capacity for intimate relations? People that like him and enjoy his company? Can he paint and sing and laugh? Go outside without his executive security detail watching every move? what's life all about, anyway?
Barry June 21, 2019 at 11:20 am
I think trust enters into it less than you might suppose. If Facebook and their consortium have enough power to dictate that all apps doing online money transactions with their platform must do so via Libra, and they make it easy for app developers to code and hard for them to code around; voila! Millions of Libra 'customers', not one asked if they trust it.
XXYY June 21, 2019 at 12:00 pm
At this point, we note that Move, the language in which Libra apps are written, has, if not a compiler per se, a bytecode verifier and a bytecode interpreter.
I would make the minor point that introducing a new programming language, on top of everything else, is another reason to suspect this endeavor will turn out badly.
Defining, specifying, developing tooling for, and supporting a computer language is a huge endeavor requiring extreme and rare expertise, a large ongoing staff, and years of patient hard work with thousands of bug fixes and dozens of releases before it is even close to right. Take a look at the effort that has gone into, say, Java, another fairly simple interpreted byte code language intended to run on multiple platforms; it's been under development for two decades with what I assume is millions of man-hours of effort. And it's still not that great.
The fact that this language will be devoted to financial applications means it will need to have absolutely no exploitable security problems from day one, a hard threshold to get over even for serious, experienced people and an impossible one for move-fast-and-break-things organizations like we are seeing here. I assume a big focus for hackers will be trying to find vulnerabilites in the Move compiler, bytecode, and interpreter; no doubt there will be thousands during the first years.
There is also the issue of educating and training prospective developers in the new language. This is a huge effort in its own right, with complex documentation and course materials that need to be published in many languages. Since no one knows a new language, the entire workforce will be newbies for the first few years, not a good prospect for success.
This. To elaborate, since Oracle took on Java in 2010, over 600 vulnerabilities have been found in the runtime environment. 2013 was a busy year, with 180 vulns discovered. As @XXYY says, tracking and crushing all of these problems is a big maintenance task atop a huge development effort. There will be bugs, some of which will involve users losing money.
Hope the VISA fraud department knows what they're in for ;)
FreeMarketApologist June 21, 2019 at 3:48 pm
And when will the name infringement lawsuit be filed by Calibra Solutions (https://calibrasolutions.com/) and maybe the data governance firm Collibra (https://www.collibra.com/)?
The correct way to pronounce his name is 'The Little Zucker' by the way. Stop this disrespectful Zuck buisness. I'd like to see new standards of decorum here.
denko June 21, 2019 at 4:17 pm
On the question of sovereignty, isn't it conceivable that, after Libra takes off, Facebook would cease to rely on fiat currency created by states and just issue Libra à volonté, showcasing a perversion of MMT? Would it then make monetary policy, e.g. worry about inflation?


text:
'use strict';

const ng = require('../helpers/ng');
const tmp = require('../helpers/tmp');

const existsSync = require('exists-sync');
const expect = require('chai').expect;
const path = require('path');
const root = process.cwd();

const testPath = path.join(root, 'tmp', 'foo', 'src', 'app');

describe('Acceptance: ng generate module', function () {
  beforeEach(function () {
    return tmp.setup('./tmp').then(function () {
      process.chdir('./tmp');
    }).then(function () {
      return ng(['new', 'foo', '--skip-npm', '--skip-bower']);
    });
  });

  afterEach(function () {
    this.timeout(10000);

    return tmp.teardown('./tmp');
  });

  it('will fail if no name is specified', function () {
    return ng(['generate', 'module']).catch((error) => {
      expect(error).to.equal('The `ng generate module` command requires a name to be specified.');
    });
  });

  it('ng generate module my-module', function () {
    return ng(['generate', 'module', 'my-module']).then(() => {
      expect(existsSync(path.join(testPath, 'my-module', 'my-module.module.ts'))).to.equal(true);
      expect(existsSync(path.join(testPath, 'my-module', 'my-module.module.spec.ts'))).to.equal(false);
    });
  });

  it('ng generate module my-module --spec', function () {
    return ng(['generate', 'module', 'my-module', '--spec']).then(() => {
      expect(existsSync(path.join(testPath, 'my-module', 'my-module.module.ts'))).to.equal(true);
      expect(existsSync(path.join(testPath, 'my-module', 'my-module.module.spec.ts'))).to.equal(true);
    });
  });

  it('ng generate module TwoWord', function () {
    return ng(['generate', 'module', 'TwoWord']).then(() => {
      expect(existsSync(path.join(testPath, 'two-word', 'two-word.module.ts'))).to.equal(true);
      expect(existsSync(path.join(testPath, 'two-word', 'two-word.module.spec.ts'))).to.equal(false);
    });
  });

  it('ng generate module parent/child', function () {
    return ng(['generate', 'module', 'parent']).then(() =>
      ng(['generate', 'module', 'parent/child']).then(() => {
        expect(existsSync(path.join(testPath, 'parent/child', 'child.module.ts'))).to.equal(true);
        expect(existsSync(path.join(testPath, 'parent/child', 'child.module.spec.ts'))).to.equal(false);
        expect(existsSync(path.join(testPath, 'parent/child', 'child.component.ts'))).to.equal(true);
      })
    );
  });
});

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
The 2022 Lexus RX 450h is a premium mid-size hybrid SUV. The model shown here has an optional F Sport appearance package that includes 20-inch wheels. (Manufacturer photo)
Cars and Me
Lexus RX 450h tradition is comfort, quality, fuel efficiency
The premium mid-size hybrid has new paint colors for 2022, and fog lights are now a standalone option.
by Mary Lowry
LifeCars and Me
After a significant updating a couple of years ago and the addition of some newly standard safety features for 2021, the Lexus RX 450h of 2022 freshens its paint palette with three new selections, and makes fog lights a standalone option rather than confining them within an option package as previously.
The new paint colors are Cloudburst Gray (in the Pacific Northwest we could call it Camouflage) and silvery Iridium for all models, plus Grecian Water (a striking blue) for F Sport models.
Exterior styling of the RX 450h premium mid-size SUV has evolved from its boxy origins to the sculpted but sleek design it now enjoys. The car's trademark comfortable ride, first-rate build quality, and hybrid powertrain fuel-efficiency have been carried over continuously.
For its hybrid power system, the RX 450h uses the same V6 engine as the non-hybrid RX versions, but recruits two electric motors for assistance in producing 308 horsepower and a fuel economy rating of 30 mpg city, 28 mpg highway, and 30 mpg combined. Premium fuel is recommended.
A continuously variable automatic transmission (CVT) and all-wheel drive are standard.
The RX 450h has roomy seating for five. A passenger in the middle seat of the second row gets shortchanged laterally, but that's the typical situation in mid-size SUVs if not every car ever built.
The cargo area can accommodate up to 16 cubic feet of stuff if the second-row seats are in upright position, and 32.6 cubic feet when those seats are folded.
My test car included the F Sport appearance package designed to give the RX 450h a more dynamic look, including sportier seats, steering wheel, pedals and exterior trim. "F Sport" badging is used liberally inside and out.
A center console touchpad is the primary controller for the 2022 Lexus RX 450h multimedia system. (Manufacturer photo)
A perfectly good multimedia system is standard on the RX 450h: 8-inch touchscreen, SiriusXM, nine-speaker Lexus audio, and Android Auto, Apple CarPlay and Amazon Alexa compatibility. It was upstaged on my tester by the optional Navigation multimedia package with a 12.3-inch touchscreen, 15-speaker Mark Levinson premium sound system, DVD and CD player, voice command, and the Lexus Enform app suite. It's a grand package grandly priced at $3,365.
The multimedia system's primary controller is a touchpad in the center console. It looks good, lending the console a modern and uncluttered appearance. But it doesn't understand the meaning and importance of user-friendliness, especially while driving. The touchscreen and physical controls took all the attention away from that touchpad during my week with the RX 450h.
Safety features are plentiful on the RX 450h as standard equipment. Just a sampling would include pre-collision system with pedestrian detection, dynamic radar cruise control, lane departure alert, automatic high-beam headlights, blind-spot monitoring, and rear cross traffic alert.
The sleek and sculpted 2022 Lexus RX 450h has seating for five. All-wheel drive is standard. (Manufacturer photo)
2022 LEXUS RX 450h F SPORT
Base price, including destination charge: $54,895
Price as driven: $62,450
Mary Lowry is a member of the Motor Press Guild and a member and past president of the Northwest Automotive Press Association. She lives in Snohomish County. Vehicles are provided by automotive manufacturers as a one-week loan for evaluation purposes only. Manufacturers do not control content of the reviews.
Axe throwing hitting a bull's-eye in Everett and Camano Island

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Real Syracuse Weddings Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Syracuse New York Bride & Co.
Couple: Bradford and Corina Setter Wedding Date: October 20, 2013 Location: Arrow Head Lodge, Brewerton, NY The Wedding Dress: Allure Bridal, style 2455 Photography: Kelsey White More Details: We love classic style and the outdoors. Our goal for our wedding was to blend the two. For my dress, I wanted an open back and lace. The ladies at New York Bride were able to help me find the perfect dress. I felt like it was made for only me. Nancy Lambert altered the dress and did an amazing job.


The Divine Service is the center of our life of faith in Christ. It is celebrated every Sunday at 9:00 a.m. The Sacrament of the Altar is celebrated on odd Sundays of the month and festival days. Wednesday evening Services are scheduled during selected portions of the year, as well as the Advent and Lenten seasons.
March 1, 2019 - Ripping cloth. Clinking coins. Tramping feet. These are just a few of the sounds of the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. For the midweek services of Lent—from Ash Wednesday through Good Friday—we will follow the passion our Lord through sounds and the stories they tell. Jesus goes to Jerusalem and to Calvary to give His life as a ransom for our sins. By His death we are saved. Join us for these services on Wednesdays at 10:30 a.m. or 7:30 p.m. May the Lord grant us to grow in faith and love in this journey with Jesus.
April 14 - Palm Sunday with Communion 9:00 a.m.
April 18 - Maundy Thursday with Communion 7:00 p.m.
April 19 - Good Friday 7:00 p.m.
Sunday, February 10, 2019 - "God's Glory"
Sunday School is held after service from about 10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. throughout the school year.
The Sunday morning Adult Bible class continues to walk through the Gospel of Mark. The current plan will be to use three Sundays for this study and interrupt one week a month with a one session topic of interest. Please join us for our studies. Read up on Mark and come with your questions. And if you have any suggestions for topics of study or interest please let Pastor Toensing know.
Catechesis means "Instruction in the Christian Faith." Catechesis begins when one inquires about membership in the Evangelical-Lutheran Church and continues in various forms throughout the life of a Christian.
Those desiring membership at St. John are asked to speak with the pastor. In order to receive the Lord's Supper, instruction in the Christian faith according to the Scriptures and Luther's Small Catechism is necessary. There is no fee or obligation for instruction.
Adult Bible Class, held Sundays after service in the basement.
Youth Study, for high school students; meets Sundays after the service.
Midweek School, for Grades 4–8 preparing to receive the Lord's Supper; meets Wednesdays during the school year from 6:30 – 7:45 p.m. in the basement.
Adult Catechesis (new member instruction) contact the pastor for the current schedule or to schedule a time.
The Church Office is open from 9:15 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursdays.


text:
New Single 'WATERFALL'
Born in a tiny fisherman's town, Spanish songwriter Leire (/LAy/ reh/) seems to carry the sea salt with her as she emerges onto the music scene with new single 'Waterfall'. London based, her raspy yet emotive vocals busking in Leicester Square brought her all the way to sharing the stage with Tom Walker, Rag'n'Bone Man, Gang of Youths, Jake Bugg and Travis for The Worlds Big Sleep Out. A childhood of country music in the car led her to bring Taylor Swift's melody lines and storytelling into her songwriting. Followed and mixed up with Lewis Capaldi's emotive pop influence and Charlotte Lawrence's mellowness and electronic pinch. She signed to Agapein Producciones SL at the age of 19 and released an album behind the stage name LeAnn Wilde.
In April 2020, she debuted as Leire with 'What We've Got', a song that describes the pandemic situation and relationships in this period of time, bringing up the positive side of it. In July, she presented her second single 'Box Of Chesterfield', a song about anxiety. In the very beginning of the new year she'll release her 3rd single 'Waterfall' a song about equality and diversity. Leire's first EP, named 'Me, You, This World', will be released later in the year, where she will put together songs that "tell the truth about society".
Leire - Leire - Waterfall (Official Lyric Video)
Leire - Box Of Chesterfield (Official Music Video)
Leire - Box Of Chesterfield (Lyric Video)
Access EPK
Do you want to know more about Leire's music and new releases? Do not hesitate and get in contact.
info@leiremusic.com
©2020 by Leire.


text:
Nanotechnology laboratory makes science more accessible to Moldovan youth, with EU support
This article talks about the National Centre for Materials Study and Testing (NCMST) at the Technical University of Moldova, which received €474,000 from the EU's largest Horizon 2020 programme on research and innovation for the development of biomedical nanotechnology and the training of specialists in this field.
The funding of science in Moldova has declined significantly in recent years. According to the Academy of Sciences of Moldova (ASM), fewer and fewer young people are deciding to seriously engage in research and build a career in science at home.
Nevertheless, there are still centres that attract young specialists in the Republic of Moldova. Using a nanotechnology laboratory as an example, this article describes how science can be developed in Moldova and why young researchers do not need to leave the country to achieve results.
One of the projects aimed to stop the brain drain and give young researchers the opportunity to advance their careers is NanoMedTwin project, funded by the Horizon2020 Framework Programme. Thanks to the project, the National Center for Materials Study and Testing has received over 470,000 Euro for development of nanotechnologies for biomedical applications and the targeted training of researchers in this areas.
How nanotechnology can change medicine
The NCMST focuses on nanotechnologies, is already known far beyond the borders of Moldova and is where the NanoMedTwin project (funded through Horizon 2020) is being implemented. In 2018, its team led by the current president of the ASM, Ion Tiginyanu, together with colleagues from other countries, created material suitable for creating microfluidic devices (which can help diagnose many diseases) and sensors for space research and micro-robotics. This material, created with the help of nanotechnology, is called "aerogalnite". This is the first inorganic material in the world that has both hydrophilic and hydrophobic properties, which means that it is able to repel and attract water at the same time.
According to laboratory staff member Dr Eduard Monayko, aerogalnite is a fully synthetic material grown in the laboratory. Scientists can give it any shape and size. It is biocompatible, therefore its absorbent properties can be used to carry out tests and diagnose diseases.
In addition to studying and improving aerogalnite, scientists are developing various nano-structuring techniques. That means they change the properties of familiar materials, applying the thinnest layers of other substances to them. Thanks to the EU-funded project, they can now continue this research and share its results with the next generation of students and scientists.
"This is a modern trend to give materials properties that we can control. They can be related to electrical conductivity or magnetic characteristics, for example," explains Dr Monayko.
His colleague, 30-year-old researcher Dr Tudor Braniste, proved in one of his works that gallium nitride is compatible with living cells. This means that cells absorb nanoparticles based on them and due to their magnetic properties, these cells can be moved. This discovery can be used in medicine, for example, to replace cells damaged by cancer with healthy ones.
All of this is possible due to the laboratory having the necessary equipment: an atomic force microscope, devices for measuring electrical properties, a laser system and many other devices.
The centre is the only one in Moldova with a scanning electron microscope that allows research to be carried out with nanostructures. According to Dr Monayko, it was purchased back in 2001 thanks to an international grant. At that time, it cost approximately €180,000. Today this device costs at least four times as much. The device allows materials to be worked with at the nanoscale (one nanometre is a billionth of a metre).
To obtain even more accurate shots and measurements, Moldovan researchers will now have the chance to work more frequently in laboratories abroad, namely those of universities that are part of a joint project within Horizon2020.
How university education is changing
According to Dr Monayko, today the centre of nanotechnology employs up to 15 people including graduates, masters and students, to undergo practical training.
"Usually we take second-year students. When the time comes to write theses, they are prepared, as they already have jointly published articles. When I graduated from the university in 2002, there were no such opportunities. We did our practice just before the thesis, and it was very stressful," the scientist recalls.
The centre's staff members are confident that the NanoMedTwin project will help to further expand the capabilities of students and young researchers. Students from the Technical University of Moldova, State Medical University and other research institutes will be able to take part in biannual courses on nanotechnology and medicine in Chisinau. They will be taught not only by Moldovan professors, but also by British, German and Swedish professors.
In addition, young researchers and employees of the centre will be able to undertake internships for three years in the laboratories of research institutes participating in the project: Hannover Medical School (Germany), the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (Sweden), the University of Bristol (UK), the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (Belgium) and EFPC Ltd (Israel). Researchers are also able to take one or several master's modules at one of these institutes, offering an opportunity for regular employees to develop the research that has been started.
For permanent staff of the centre, this will provide an opportunity to continue with the existing research. This way, they will be able to continue studying the properties and methods of application of the aerogalnite created last year.
Source: EUNEIGHBOURS website


text:
Posted on November 19, 2009 November 28, 2017 by admin
Top Words of the Decade (2000-2009)
"Global Warming," "9/11" and "Obama" are Top Words,
"Climate Change" is top phrase,
"Heroes" is top name
Austin, TX November 19, 2009 – The Global Language Monitor has announced the Top Words of the Decade, as part of its annual global survey of the English language. The Top Words were 'Global Warming', 9/11, and Obama followed by Bailout, Evacuee, and Derivative; Google, Surge, Chinglish, and Tsunami followed. "Climate Change" was the top phrase, while "Heroes" was the top name; bin-Laden was No. 2.
Read the the story in the London Telegraph
"Looking at the first decade of the 21st century in words is a sober, even somber, event." said Paul JJ Payack, President of The Global Language Monitor. "For a decade that began with such joy and hope, the words chosen depict a far more complicated and in many ways, tragic time. Nevertheless, signs of hope and renewal can be found in the overall lists."
The words are culled from throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 1.58 billion speakers. Since GLM's survey encompassed the years 2000 - 2009, the expanded lists included 25 Top Words, and 20 Top Phrases and 20 Top Names.
To see the Top Words of the individual years of the 21st century, go here.
Each List contains the word, phrase or name in numerical order and the year when the word, phrase or name came to prominence. For example, the word 'quagmire' is hundreds of years old but it came into renewed prominence in 2004, about a year after the beginning of the Iraq War.
The Top Words of the Decade from 2000 – 2009
Word (Year) Comments
1. Global Warming (2000) Rated highly from Day One of the decade
2. 9/11 (2001) Another inauspicious start to the decade
3. Obama- (2008 )The US President's name as a 'root' word or 'word stem'
4. Bailout (2008) The Bank Bailout was but Act One of the crisis
5. Evacuee/refugee (2005) After Katrina, refugees became evacuees
6. Derivative (2007) Financial instrument or analytical tool that engendered the Meltdown
7. Google (2007) Founders misspelled actual word 'googol'
8. Surge (2007) The strategy that effectively ended the Iraq War
9. Chinglish (2005) The Chinese-English Hybrid language growing larger as Chinese influence expands
10. Tsunami (2004) Southeast Asian Tsunami took 250,000 lives
11. H1N1 (2009) More commonly known as Swine Flu
12. Subprime ( 2007) Subprime mortgages were another bubble to burst
13. dot.com (2000) The Dot.com bubble engendered no lifelines, no bailouts
14. Y2K ( 2000) The Year 2000: all computers would turn to pumpkins at the strike of midnight
15. Misunderestimate (2002) One of the first and most enduring of Bushisms
16. Chad ( 2000) Those Florida voter punch card fragments that the presidency would turn aupon
17. Twitter (2008 ) A quarter of a billion references on Google
18. WMD (2002) Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction
19. Blog (2003) First called 'web logs' which contracted into blogs
20. Texting (2004) Sending 140 character text messages over cell phones
21. Slumdog (2008) Child inhabitants of Mumba's slums
22. Sustainable (2006) The key to 'Green' living where natural resources are never depleted
23. Brokeback (2004) New term for 'gay' from he Hollywood film 'Brokeback Mountain'
24. Quagmire (2004) Would Iraq War end up like Vietnam, another 'quagmire'?
25. Truthiness (2006) Steven Colbert's addition to the language appears to be a keeper
Also worth noting: 'Embedded' (2003) to embed reporters with US Troops
The Top Phrases of the Decade from 2000 – 2009
1. Climate Change (2000) Green words in every form dominant the decade
2. Financial Tsunami (2008) One quarter of the world's wealth vanishes seemingly overnight
3. Ground Zero (2001) Site of 9/11terrorist attack in New York City
4. War on Terror (2001) Bush administration's response to 9/11
5. Weapons of Mass Destruction (2003) Bush's WMDs never found in Iraq or the Syrian desert
6. Swine Flu (2008) H1N1, please, so as not to offend the pork industry or religious sensitivities!
7. "Let's Roll!" (2001) Todd Beamer's last words before Flight 93 crashed into the PA countryside
8. Red State/Blue State (2004) Republican or Democratic control of states
9. Carbon footprint (2007) How much CO² does an activity produce?
10. Shock-and-awe (2003) Initial strategy of Iraq War
11. Ponzi Scheme (2009) Madoff's strategy reaped billions & heartache
12. Category Four (2005) Force of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans' seawalls and levies
13. King of Pop (2000) Elvis was the King, MJ the King (of Pop)
14. "Stay the Course" (2004) Dubya's off-stated guidance for Iraq War
15. "Yes, we can!" (2008) Obama's winning campaign slogan
16. "Jai Ho!" (2008) Shout of joy from 'Slumdog Millionaire'
17. "Out of the Mainstream" (2003) Complaint about any opposition's political platform
18. Cloud computing (2007) Using the Internet as a large computational device
19. Threat Fatigue (2004) One too many terrorist threat alerts
20. Same-sex marriage (2003) Marriage of gay couples
The Top Names of the Decade from 2000 – 2009
Name (Year) Comments
1. Heroes (2001) Emergency responders who rushed into the Towers
2. bin Laden (2001) His Capture still top of mind for US Military
3. Ground Zero (2001) NY Times still will not capitalize the site as a formal name
4. Dubya (2000) George W. Bush, US President No. 43
5. The Clintons (Hillary & Bill) (2000) Looming on political landscape, though not as large
6. John Paul II (2000) Largest funeral in TV history attested to power
7. Obama (2008) Making an impact as the decade ends
8. Taliban (2000) Still the source of Afghan insurgency
9. Katrina (2004) Hurricane whose destruction of New Orleans is seared into minds around globe
10. Tiger Woods (2000) Top golfer earned about $1 Billion this decade
11. iPhone (2007) First product on this list
12. Paul Hewson (Bono) (2000) U2 Front man, NY Times Columnist, catalyst for African relief
13. Michael Jackson (2000) The King of Pop
14. Al Gore (2000) Nobel Prize winner, US Vice President, Climate Change purveyor
15. Saddham Hussein (2000) Iraqi dictator captured while hiding in a 'spider hole'
16. Enron (2001) Seems like another era since this giant fell
17. Bollywood (2000) Mumbai's answer to Hollywood
18. Facebook (2007) Another ubiquitous software product
19. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005) Iranian president since 2005
20. Vladimir Putin (2000) Russian leader since 2000
Also worth noting: 'Wikipedia' (2006) The user-generated compendium of all knowledge
The analysis was completed on November 16th using GLM's Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI), the proprietary algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet, now including blogs and social media (such as Twitter). The words are tracked in relation to frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum, and velocity.
CategoriesGlobal English Tags9/11, bailout, bin-Laden, Chinglish, Climate change, derivative, evacuee, global warming, Google, Heroes, Obama, Surge, Tsunami
Previous PostPrevious History of the Top Words of 2009 – 2000
Next PostNext Top Word of 2009: Twitter


Here's my first attempt at this style of knife, also my third knife. Also my first attempt at loading pics, lol.
Last edited by Jon Kelly; 12-22-2013 at 01:21 PM.
That's very very nice! Musta missed it when I was looking during chat tonight! Very pretty work!
Your third knife!? You definitely have a future in this game. Wish you had been in the Chat Room so we could all discuss this little beauty!
Thanks for the kind remarks. Although I am new to making knives, my years of experience as a lapidarist, silversmith, and wood worker have given me an edge when it comes to knife making. A knife after all is really a consolidation of all of those skills into one neat little package. That does not mean I have not struggled immensely in achieving the results displayed in that knife. I did everything twice, sometimes thrice and to be fair I have several baggies of knife shaped objects that were ultimately abandoned and relegated to testing, lol. While this knife is not perfect, it is a fair representation of my dedication to the art. I feel it's what you don't see when you look at a knife that makes it a thing of beauty. I look forward to representing and supporting the knife making community to the best of my ability as I learn and grow in the knowledge of this fine craft.
This was ment to be a "fighter" blade but lost the tip on the griz so i reshaped it a little. Im happy I did!
here are the two knives I have made so far since my budy and I built the forge to do HT .


text:
Q: How would I make Apache case insensitive for urls and case sensitive for parameters I've such url
www.mainsite.com/data/True  and www.mainsite.com/data/true
referring to to same url in this case it wont work  if "T" is CAPS , and some times the request will come with parameters
like
www.mainsite.com/data/True?Url1=YAA
www.mainsite.com/data/true?Url1=YAA

How i can overcome the case sensitive  issue for the url and not touch the parameters as the parameters is case sensitive  any way to achieve this ?
this not limited to this url i would like to do it for all url under  www.mainsite.com

A: Use [NC] flag.

Use of the [NC] flag causes the RewriteRule to be matched in a
  case-insensitive manner. That is, it doesn't care whether letters
  appear as upper-case or lower-case in the matched URI.

Refrences:
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/rewrite/flags.html#flag_nc

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
A Former Military Psychologist on the Afghanistan Massacre
By Bret A. Moore
The horrific and surreal rampage allegedly committed last week in Kandahar by Sergeant Robert Bales, which resulted in the deaths of 16 Afghan civilians, has turned many Americans into amateur psychologists. This is natural: We all desperately want answers for how such a terrible thing could have happened.
But the real answers are unlikely to be very satisfying. As a former active duty Army psychologist who spent 27 months in Iraq taking care of soldiers, I can attest that the oldest tropes about warfare are true: Combat is destructive; deployment in a warzone is enormously stressful. For the men and women serving in war, these aren't simply clichés—they are harsh realities that the rest of us have yet to fully reckon with. And they are realities that sometimes resist being explained by the language of clinical psychology.
In speculating on the sorts of factors that may lead to crimes like those Bales is accused of committing, let me first make a disclaimer: I have not evaluated the alleged shooter and I have no way of knowing what his state of mind was before, during, and after the event. Consequently, my thoughts are based on his behavior and not on his personality. (This may seem like an odd disclosure, but it is an important one that is too often left out by the many pundits opining on television and in print.)
It would be drastically wrong, not only morally, but also psychologically, to think of murder as a normal response to the experience of combat. But no one should be surprised if our soldiers' personalities change, sometimes drastically, after they experience warfare. Psychologists expect that anyone faced with the stress of combat—whether it's the witnessing of trauma, or the mere separation from loved ones—will show signs of anxiety, ranging from sleep disturbance to sadness. Indeed, the term combat stress is now used to describe the "normal" range of distorted reactions to the abnormal situation of combat. But combat stress is an old concept with a relatively new name. During the American Civil War it was called "soldier's heart" and "nostalgia." It was referred to as shell shock in World War I and battle fatigue in World War II. And then sometime around the Gulf War it took on the label of combat stress. The hallmark of combat stress is the transient nature of the reaction. It is generally believed that with adequate rest, support, and encouragement, the soldier will be able to return to the fight.
Then there are the many wounds that soldiers receive that don't show visible scarring. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has earned the distinction of being called the "signature injury" of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some studies have shown that up to 1 in 5 soldiers who served in Iraq have suffered a TBI of at least mild severity. Along with various physical symptom manifestations, it's not uncommon for TBI to cause fluctuations in mood. In more severe cases, it can cause more lasting changes in personality and behavior.
There is also PTSD, which is without question the most publicized psychological consequence of war. Although the disorder was documented as early as the 1600s, the formal diagnosis did not appear until 1980. Spawned from political and social pressures post-Vietnam, the diagnosis found its place in the Veterans Administration as a way to understand, categorize, and treat the thousands of returning veterans with severe psychological distress. There are several accounts in the psychological and medical literature connecting PTSD with violence, including murder.
But we should also be cautious about assuming any direct causality between these psychological conditions and the commission of unwarranted violence. Most PTSD cases involving murder have other contributing factors, such as alcohol intoxication or dependence, prior history of criminal and violent behavior, and co-morbid psychiatric disorders. In other words, it is impossible to determine if PTSD is ever the precise cause of violence or not. As a whole, in fact, the literature shows that those with PTSD have no more proclivity to committing murder than those without the disorder. As for TBI leading to criminal violence in the field, it is unlikely that any soldier suffering a TBI severe enough to alter personality and cause a dramatic shift in behavior would be deployed to a hostile environment. The contrast between pre- and post-injury behavior is typically very evident in moderate to severe cases of TBI, which would alert fellow soldiers, superiors, and medical personnel to the problem before it would have come to a situation like Bales'.
As I mentioned at the outset, it is normal to search for answers when we are faced with events that transcend our understanding of human behavior. The killing and death inherent in war is difficult for most people to comprehend. It is exponentially more so when the killing is committed by an assumed "good guy" and the victims are innocent men, women, and children.
But in the case of the recent massacre in Afghanistan, there is no neat causal box in which it fits. From my experience with soldiers, I can attest that PTSD, TBI, combat stress, relationship discord, alcohol abuse, or any other possible aggravating factor, in isolation, cannot account for the murder of 16 people. It is likely that a combination of factors led to the event—a "perfect storm" of combat, social, and personal stressors. As the final story plays out, we will likely see a picture of someone plagued by the atrocities of war, emotionally and physically drained, burdened by financial and relationship problems, angry at the system for being required to deploy multiple times, and consumed with hatred for a group of people culturally and religiously similar to those who maimed and killed fellow warriors. It will likely be a story that tells of more than one tragedy.
Bret A. Moore is a clinical psychologist living in San Antonio. He is the co-author of Wheels Down: Adjusting to Life After Deployment.
Politics, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kandahar, Robert Bales


text:
Lord of the Rings MMO Production Schedule Reveals Open Beta Planned by Early 2023
By Alessio Palumbo
It's been a while since we got an update on the new Lord of the Rings MMO (not to be confused with the existing Lord of the Rings Online). Originally announced back in September 2018 by Athlon Games, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Leyou, the game then saw the addition of none other than Amazon Game Studios as the main developer.
Now, following the recent acquisition of Leyou by Tencent, some documents regarding the company's plans for this Lord of the Rings MMO have become available via Leyou's official site. In this 'Game License Amendment' from June 5th, 2019, for example, there's a rather detailed production schedule.
Chrono Odyssey Is a New Fantasy MMORPG Coming to PC, Console and Mobile
Commencement Within three (3) months after First Amendment Effective Date
Summary Specifications December 31, 2019, which shall be the deadline for submission of the Summary Specifications to SZC
First pass art on races and classes June 8, 2020
Draft of complete game lore and
narrative January 11, 2021
Playable Prototype June 1, 2021, which shall be the deadline for submission of the Playable Prototype to SZC
Closed Beta September 30, 2022
Open Beta January 1, 2023
SZC is Saul Zaentz Company, of which Middle-Earth Enterprises is a division, in case you were wondering about that.
Of course, the schedule could have already been modified for all we know, but it is nonetheless an interesting frame of reference for when we can roughly expect to play the game. To be clear, these dates are for the PC version of the Lord of the Rings MMO, while the production schedule also plans for console versions to be 'content complete playable' within six months of the start of the PC Open Beta, and to have the commercial launch within twelve months.
We don't really know much about the upcoming Lord of the Rings MMO, other than the fact it'll be free-to-play and set 'at a time long before the events of The Lord of the Rings, exploring lands, people and creatures never seen before by fans of the Tolkien universe.' All of this suggests it will take place much earlier than the tales of Aragorn and the Fellowship, which is after all also true of the upcoming Lord of the Rings TV (also being worked on by Amazon), confirmed to be set in the Second Age. Stay tuned for more info as it becomes available.
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands Review in Progress – A New Beginning
Chris Wray • Nov 28, 2020
New World Dev Q&A and Updated Hands-On with the Reekwater Zone
Alessio Palumbo • Nov 26, 2020
Q&A with Naoki Yoshida on Final Fantasy, MMO Markets and Economies
Chris Wray • Nov 7, 2020
Bless Unleashed PC Beta Giveaway – Grab One of 5K Codes for Next Week's Test!
Alessio Palumbo • Oct 30, 2020
PSO2: New Genesis Showcases New Gameplay Systems At Tokyo Game Show
Kai Powell • Sep 25, 2020