Beverage industry leaders took the stage at BevNET Live Winter 2019 in Santa Monica, California today, offering their insights into the importance for entrepreneurs to take risks and evolve, as well as the importance of knowing when to stand their ground and double down on the issues that matter most to them and their companies.

The event began with opening remarks from BevNET Editor-in-Chief Jeff Klineman, who spoke about the moral evolution of the beverage business in which social missions and sustainability initiatives have become a new norm and a new challenge for brands.

Right now companies and leadership teams regardless of category are of huge importance not just in business but with regard to social and moral leadership, and products are only part of these equations, Klineman said. All those success stories about purpose-driven entrepreneurs, all those Seth Goldmans out there, theyve reset the bar and added this new hurdle. Thats great. Its helped open the door for new products and ways of doing business, but now youve got to live up to that success and keep your moral position in mind.

In particular, Klineman highlighted the efforts of La Colombe co-founder and CEO Todd Carmichael, who earlier this year made headlines when he paid off the entire lunch debt for all Philadelphia public school students. His donation was initially rejected by the city government, but a public backlash led the city to reverse its plans to penalize parents of children with outstanding debt and accept Carmichaels check.

With that segue, Carmichael and Chobani president Peter McGuinness sat down with Klineman to discuss the value and risks of corporate social missions and why taking a controversial stance can be a benefit to your brand.

If youre trying to do lowest common denominator and safest and market to the middle, then youre nothing to anybody, McGuinness said. The more you stand for something, the more polarizing you are, you rally your base and your base loves you more and consumes you more. So this whole notion of playing it safe is really pathetic in this day and age.

But risk taking doesnt just apply to social missions. Carmichael and McGuinness also spoke about the need for brands to innovate and how fear helps fuels that pipeline. In particular, the duo discussed the rise of plant-based milks and oat milk in particular, which Carmichael said is now requested by 65 to 70% of La Colombe cafe customers.

According to Carmichael, fear helps create forward-thinking, cutting edge new innovations, while its absence results in me too products.

Next, Continental Grain & Arlon Investments operating partner Tyler Ricks delivered his rules for creating value with investors. His advised entrepreneurs of pitfalls to avoid, noting they should be wary of copying other companies business models if they dont make sense and of entering partnerships with private equity firms with over-aggressive timelines for hitting certain goals. Instead, they should keep it simple and try to stick to a limited number of tightly plotted routes to value creation and to qualify the components of that creation.

As Ricks encouraged brands to evolve their value creation models, natural channel distributor KeHE followed by discussing the companys own evolution into a next generation distributor. Katie Paul, VP of category management & growth solutions, and Alex Marx, director of growth solutions, shared how KeHE is embracing blurred categories, using new technology, and reaching out to the industry through annual events and showcases.

The pair also recommended brands be able to act fast and adapt to changes in the market. As channels distinctions and category differentiations continue to blur, its vital for companies to learn to fail fast and get back up.

Being agile, failing fast, taking the risks and pivoting by learning from those mistakes and opportunities that continuous evolution is whats going to keep you relevant in the marketplace, Paul said.

Next, Brew Dr. Kombucha founder and CEO Matt Thomas told the audience exactly how he managed to be agile, fail fast, take risks and pivot by discussing his brand journey from a small startup tea house chain to a $50 million nationally distributed beverage brand. Thomas discussed raising $45 in 2006 to open his first Townshends Tea location, scaling the companys kombucha business through debt-financing, and even putting his own home on the line for a bank loan to keep the business growing.

In 2016, Brew Dr. opened a 50,000 square foot brewery, putting the company on track to 100% growth in 2017, Thomas said. But the move also forced the brand to level up its team, making dozens of new hires across all aspects of the business to bring Brew Dr. to the next stage. While the expansion was necessary, Thomas noted it had it was a challenge to ensure the companys culture did not radically shift.

As we layered in these individuals with and a lot of times above our legacy employees, that was a real cultural struggle, Thomas said.

After the winners of BevNETs Best of 2019 awards were announced, , BevNET founder and CEO John Craven sat down with Person of the Year honoree Daina Trout, the co-founder and CEO of Health-Ade Kombucha. Trout discussed working with her husband and the need to set boundaries to separate the personal from the professional, the importance of creating space for new entrepreneurs to thrive and passing her success forward by offering young business leaders advice.

Im a big believer that what you feed grows, no matter what it is, she said.

BevNET Live Winter 2019 continues tomorrow, December 10, with a full lineup of speakers and discussions, as well as the final round of New Beverage Showdown 18. The entire event will be streaming live on BevNET.com starting at 12:00 p.m. ET/9:00 a.m. PT.

Excerpt from:

BevNET Live Winter 2019 Day One Recap: Ethics and Evolution - BevNET.com

6:00 AM PST 12/11/2019byLacey Rose

It was on the 15-year anniversary of Legally Blonde, back in 2016, that Witherspoon and producer Marc Platt decided there may be life left in their celebrated franchise.

"The response was so incredibly strong," Witherspoon recalls of a film that grossed $142 million and still has fans stopping her regularly to heap praise. "So, we discussed it and thought, maybe it's time to revisit."

Though they're still in the development stage of reviving the MGM property, both say that they're excited about seeing Elle Woods in her 40s and, moreover, that her sense of hope and optimism could be exactly what the world needs right now.

"I want to discover what age means to that character," adds the actress. "Aging, contemporary ideas, how things have evolved or not evolved."

Which is not to say she isn't daunted by the idea of returning to the iconic character, which catapulted her onto the A-list nearly two decades ago. She absolutely is, she says, "because it was so beloved and because you don't want to mess it up or do anything halfway."

That said, having had a similar experience with Big Little Lies, Witherspoon suggests she's more confident now that if "there's more story to tell, you're probably in a pretty good space."

This story first appeared in the 2019 Women in Entertainment Power 100 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

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Reese Witherspoon Prepares for Evolution of Elle Woods in 'Legally Blonde' Revival - Hollywood Reporter

New Atheism is dead. It was conceptually dead from birth, but now its stopped twitching. Ben Sixsmith at Arc Digital has a good article with a lot of insight into its demise. From New Atheism: An Autopsy:

To be sure, New Atheists could be very, very bad at arguing that God does not exist. There was, for example, Lawrence Krauss writing a book about how something can come from nothing while attributing material qualities to the latter. There was Richard Dawkins trying to refute the famous Five Ways of Aquinas without even attempting to understand their terms. (Whereof one cannot speak, groaned Wittgenstein, Thereof one must remain silent.) There was Christopher Hitchens striding into philosophy like an elephant onto an ice skating rink and saying:

the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator.

Why is it unanswerable? People have certainly tried to answer it. Answers readily came centuries prior to Hitchens himself, actually. Hitchens is free to take issue with Aquinas distinction between contingent and necessary existence if he wants, but hes not free to suggest no answers have been offered. How does the concept of the necessary being, for example, fail? Hitchens offers no sign of knowing what it is, because that unanswerable is not a logical conclusion but a rhetorical sledgehammer swung at the readers skull.

I know atheists can make better arguments. But the New Atheists never felt obliged to, because they were so confident in their own rationality that they never learned about the ideas they were mocking. If challenged on their philosophical ignorance as the philosopher Alvin Plantinga brilliantly skewered Dawkins here on this very point they were liable to observe that the average Christian does not have the theological sophistication of an Edward Feser or a John Haldane. True enough. But if Im on the street and ask the average believer in evolution by natural selection to explain it and declare Darwin refuted because monkeys did not turn into men, am I being scientifically honest? No, not really.

The primary autopsy finding here is that New Atheism was born dead. It was an intellectually vacuous vanity project from the start. Its vanguard was a coterie of dullards and narcissists who glanced away from their own mirrors only long enough to beg book deals. The arguments they made in their books were the stuff of comedy acts everything came from nothing for no reason, the universe came from quantum mechanics, which is nothing, acknowledging an intelligent Creator is an impediment to science, but asserting meaningless existence is a boon to science, we are meat machines, and you should pay attention to what we say, there is no good or evil, and if you think there is, youre evil, there is no free will and you should change your mind and agree with me, there is no guilt because there is no free will, therefore livestock management, rather than justice, is best for mankind, things change and survivors survive is a scientific theory, survival of the fittest explains why Im sad your kid has cancer, without evolutionary theory, we wouldnt understand that bacteria arent killed by an antibiotic that doesnt kill them, gene duplication adds new genetic information, and plagiarism is not permitted in my class, kin selection explains altruism, except that bacteria in a clonal colony, which are identical twins, arent altruistic, evolutionary biology is indispensable to medicine, so we should start teaching it in medical schools, evolution is the cornerstone of physiology and medicine, and maybe someday an evolutionary biologist will win a Nobel Prize, information is not detectible in nature, except in my book about it, the selective breeding experiments I designed in my lab are excellent examples of mindless evolution, the First Amendment prohibits questioning a scientific theory in schools, let me show you how undirected natural selection works in a simulation on the computer program I wrote, intelligent design isnt science, and its scientifically wrong (my favorite these two assertions are commonly made in the same sentence), the mind is what the brain does, but Im not a dualist, my assertion that your mind can have no contact with truth is true. The list is bottomless.

New Atheism never had a chance. It was intellectual vapor, and its practitioners were repellent fools. They were defeated by atheisms perennial Achilles heal: they were forced to explain themselves. Atheism never reigns openly and explicitly for long; it cannot withstand even cursory scrutiny. Heck, it cant withstand the scrutiny of schoolchildren witness the panicked litigation to prevent schoolchildren from asking questions about its creation myth.

But rational moral theism will not easily emerge victorious from this little fight. Paganism, not atheism, is the natural religion of unreflective men. We worship, and creation is full of beauty and mystery and ravishing idols. Pride and lust of eyes and flesh reigns in our culture, and Asherah poles are popping up everywhere. The Valley of Hinnom is our altar of child sacrifice, and we tithe in penance for our sins against Gaia.

As New Atheism stops twitching, another beast a rougher beast is rolling the stone from its perennial crypt.

Photo credit:Josh Adams-FordviaUnsplash.

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New Atheism: A Shipwreck of Fools - Discovery Institute

The story of downtown Cincinnati's current revival is told alongside similar tales from other cities as told by prominent urban planner Alexander Garvin.

In his new book,The Heart of the City: Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century, Garvin, an adjunct professor at Yale University, traces Cincinnati's renaissance to 2003 with the creation of the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC). He notes the targeting of Over-the-Rhine for redevelopment and the launch of the Cincinnati Bell Connector streetcar.

"The leaders of Cincinnati were convinced that for OTR to become a popular destination, it needed to be connected to the rest of downtown and its sports stadiums by light rail," Garvin writes. "However, streetcars were not needed to spur development in OTR. The revival of OTR was already well under way before the system opened."

Garvin joinedCincinnati Editionearlier this year to talk about his book and the role Cincinnati's urban transformation plays in it.

Listen to Cincinnati Edition live at noon M-F. Audio for this segment will be uploaded after 4 p.m. ET.

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'Heart Of The City' Profiles The Evolution Of Downtown Cincinnati - WVXU

Ozuna has done it again. For the third consecutive year, he debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's Top Latin Albums, this time, with his new album Nibiru.

Andon this weeks episode of Billboards The Latin Factor podcast, Ozuna talks about his three albums in interviews conducted in 2017, 2018 and 2019, at the time he released Odisea, Aura and Nibiru, respectively.

"Nibiru is something very difficult to explain because it is different," the singer says at the beginning of the podcast, which stops and goes back to his first interview with Billboard.

At that time, Ozuna used to write songs at any time. Honestly --any time, anywhere. The album described his history, his essence.

A year later, Aura arrived and established him as an urban artist.The set was born because his fans asked for a lot of music. Back then, Ozuna realized that he was famous. "You can't do many things you did before, go to the disco, go out with your children."

In November, Billboard met again with Ozuna, this timeto talk about Nibiru, which, according to the artist, is "a concept that was developed with time to find different producers and artists."

Listen to the Ozuna's 2017, 2018 and2019 interviews in the podcast below, and check out his musical evolution on Billboard.

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From 'Odisea' to 'Nibiru': Ozuna's Album Evolution, In His Own Words - Billboard

The adorable but ultimately pretty weak Pokemon Snom is a wonderful addition to anyones team at first glance, but once you realize its potential in battle isnt too high, youre going to want to evolve it. Snoms evolution, Frosmoth, is an awesome Pokemon that learns powerful moves like Blizzard very early on.

In order to evolve Snom, youll need to have caught one in the first place. Thankfully, Snom isnt too hard to run into. You can find one along Route 8 and Route 10. On Route 8, the Pokemon will show up in the overworld, making it pretty easy to spot if you know what youre looking for. On Route 10, it tends to only spawn in random ! encounters in the tall grass. Route 8 is definitely your best bet if you still dont have your own Snom.

Snoms evolution isnt as straightforward as other Pokemon. The level of the Pokemon does not matter. All that matters when evolving a Snom is friendship, as it will only evolve into Frosmoth once you raise its friendship level high enough. To raise friendship without doing too much extra work, just set Snom as your first Pokemon to be sent out during a battle. Dont actually let it battle, though, because if it faints, its friendship will be lowered. Instead, just swap it out with another, more disposable Pokemon as if you were trying to level up a Magikarp in an earlier generation of Pokemon.

If youre willing to put in some quality time with Snom, then set up your Pokemon Camp and start playing with it. Its pretty slow so the process might get a bit boring. To spice things up, try cooking some curry. If youve got a soothe bell, let the Pokemon hold it while youre out and about. Once youve bonded enough with Snom, all you have to do is level it up at nighttime and it will evolve into Frosmoth. It has to happen at nighttime otherwise it wont evolve.

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Pokemon Sword and Shield - How to Evolve Snom into Frosmoth - Attack of the Fanboy

Tim Cahill has analysed his evolution at Everton from central midfielder to a goalscoring threat that regularly terrorised Premier League defences.

The former Australian international is widely regarded as one of David Moyes' best signings as Blues boss, joining the club from Millwall in the summer of 2004 for just 1.5 million.

The midfielder went on to make 278 appearances during his time at Goodison Park and bagged an impressive 68 goals as he consistently proved himself crucial to the club.

But the role he was playing when he left Everton in 2012 was very different to the one he started out in.

Speaking to The Coaches' Voice, Cahill explained that he often played further back when he first joined the club to accomodate Thomas Gravesen.

Cahill said: "Tommy [Gravesen] was our luxury player, I knew very early on that in defence after play had progressed, there would be a possible overload in attack. I had to find myself playing alongside Lee Carsley when the opposition had the ball.

"I think the biggest thing is, when we could win the ball back after their attack, we could get the ball wide, Duncan Ferguson could show for Tony Hibbert.

"If Fergie was looking on receiving the ball then Tommy would be ready in transition but then I would be on the front foot looking for the ball in behind [to Arteta].

"In this instance it would be Tommy, Kevin Kilbane and Lee Carsley bringing up the back, I wouldn't make the box. But when this happened on the other side, I could then be the third-man runner to the back post or near post to hopefully score goals."

However, this role soon changed.

When Gravesen left the club, Cahill pushed forward into the No. 10 role he would make his own throughout the rest of his time at Goodison Park.

And the midfielder has lifted the lid on his thinking when taking up that position and how he would use it to his advantage.

He added: "As I evolved through the years, Tommy had left and I'd been lucky enough to convince the gaffer to move higher within the pitch.

"That meant I could then team up with the striker, whoever he was at the time.

"What I liked to do is, whenever we struggled playing out from the back, I used to pull out as a 10 onto the weaker defender. Before the game I used to look at the centre-backs - who was taller, who was stronger - is this defneder who plays on the left side of centre-back right footed or left footed? That affected the way I closed him down.

"What I predominantly wanted to do is that whenever Tony Hibbert was in trouble and couldn't get out I could go high, push the defender back, and I'd want the ball to my chest or to my head.

"I needed bodies so this gave a signal to the midfielders to be on the opposite side once the ball had travelled because nine times out of ten I would win the header, I'd bring the ball down, or the defender would just knock it in this area for the second ball which could then move us higher up the park."

That wasn't the only way Cahill would use his position to great effect, however.

The midfielder knew that getting the ball out to players such as Steven Pienaar or Mikel Arteta on the flanks, with overlapping full backs as well, would give him a great chance to get into the box and score.

"Another ball that was played a lot when we were much higher up the pitch was a diagonal, this was a ball which I loved from Bainesy, Hibbo or even a centre-back bringing it out," Cahill remarked.

"This also sent a signal when the team was quite high up, not because of my pace, but if I've received the ball on a diagonal with my leap onto it - if this was a centre-back I knew I could dominate I'd only want the diagonal from this side.

"If I was playing against John Terry, I don't want this ball at all, the percentages are that I'm not going to win it and they're not getting the knock-downs.

"The diagonal would come to me which meant Pienaar already knew to get on his bike, Bainesy knew that he could get the second ball, then for me to spin and make the box.

"I always used to find myself a lot higher up the park, affecting the play. I knew as a nine, an eight a ten, that once the magic was happening among these players [Baines, Pienaar, Arteta, Hibbert], that I would make one or two movements and they would know - and that would be me making the back post to score."

Excerpt from:

Tim Cahill explains his Everton evolution from Lee Carsley's partner to goalscoring machine - Liverpool Echo

Warren Buffett famously said, 'Volatility is far from synonymous with risk.' So it might be obvious that you need to consider debt, when you think about how risky any given stock is, because too much debt can sink a company. We note that Evolution Gaming Group AB (publ) (STO:EVO) does have debt on its balance sheet. But is this debt a concern to shareholders?

Debt is a tool to help businesses grow, but if a business is incapable of paying off its lenders, then it exists at their mercy. Part and parcel of capitalism is the process of 'creative destruction' where failed businesses are mercilessly liquidated by their bankers. While that is not too common, we often do see indebted companies permanently diluting shareholders because lenders force them to raise capital at a distressed price. Of course, the upside of debt is that it often represents cheap capital, especially when it replaces dilution in a company with the ability to reinvest at high rates of return. When we think about a company's use of debt, we first look at cash and debt together.

View our latest analysis for Evolution Gaming Group

The image below, which you can click on for greater detail, shows that Evolution Gaming Group had debt of 5.86m at the end of September 2019, a reduction from 6.94m over a year. But on the other hand it also has 141.1m in cash, leading to a 135.3m net cash position.

OM:EVO Historical Debt, December 14th 2019

We can see from the most recent balance sheet that Evolution Gaming Group had liabilities of 117.3m falling due within a year, and liabilities of 17.6m due beyond that. Offsetting this, it had 141.1m in cash and 121.5m in receivables that were due within 12 months. So it can boast 127.6m more liquid assets than total liabilities.

This surplus suggests that Evolution Gaming Group has a conservative balance sheet, and could probably eliminate its debt without much difficulty. Succinctly put, Evolution Gaming Group boasts net cash, so it's fair to say it does not have a heavy debt load!

On top of that, Evolution Gaming Group grew its EBIT by 67% over the last twelve months, and that growth will make it easier to handle its debt. The balance sheet is clearly the area to focus on when you are analysing debt. But it is future earnings, more than anything, that will determine Evolution Gaming Group's ability to maintain a healthy balance sheet going forward. So if you want to see what the professionals think, you might find this free report on analyst profit forecasts to be interesting.

Finally, a company can only pay off debt with cold hard cash, not accounting profits. While Evolution Gaming Group has net cash on its balance sheet, it's still worth taking a look at its ability to convert earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) to free cash flow, to help us understand how quickly it is building (or eroding) that cash balance. Over the most recent three years, Evolution Gaming Group recorded free cash flow worth 79% of its EBIT, which is around normal, given free cash flow excludes interest and tax. This free cash flow puts the company in a good position to pay down debt, when appropriate.

While we empathize with investors who find debt concerning, you should keep in mind that Evolution Gaming Group has net cash of 135.3m, as well as more liquid assets than liabilities. And it impressed us with its EBIT growth of 67% over the last year. So we don't think Evolution Gaming Group's use of debt is risky. We'd be very excited to see if Evolution Gaming Group insiders have been snapping up shares. If you are too, then click on this link right now to take a (free) peek at our list of reported insider transactions.

Story continues

When all is said and done, sometimes its easier to focus on companies that don't even need debt. Readers can access a list of growth stocks with zero net debt 100% free, right now.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.

We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.

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These 4 Measures Indicate That Evolution Gaming Group (STO:EVO) Is Using Debt Safely - Yahoo Finance

The UK strengthens its role as EU leader thanks to a flexible regulatory regime, a supportive government policy and strong interest from investors, according to a new study commissioned by the Italian Factoring Association

LONDON, Dec. 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --The United Kingdom represents the European hub of the FinTech ecosystem, with a total funding of 3,9 bn$, out of 6,9 bn$ in Europe (2018), according to a study presented today by Accenture Strategy and Assifact, the Italian Factoring Association.

Thanks to a less regulated scenario and a supportive government policy, the British FinTech sector is growing exponentially, attracting a large amount of capital. In particular, the number of larger SMEs using invoice finance and asset based lending increased by 13% in 2018.

Assifact and Accenture analysed more than 250 players (Incumbent, Fintech, Corporate and Tech Giants) in seven countries, with the aim of identifying the most innovative solutions and business models that are arising in the Supply Chain Finance.

More than 70% of analysed Fintech Fin and Tech Giants offer financing solutions for SMEs not covered by Incumbents due to a too high cost-to-serve. These players show further specialization towards specific targets and niches (freelancers, e-merchants, unserved).

While Fintech Fin are mainly focused on offering Invoice Financing marketplaces, Fintech Tech are more specialized on the realization of B2B "open" digital platforms integrated with corporates' management systems, enabling a further disintermediation from the banking players.

More than 30% of Fintech Tech leverage on digitalization, process automation and analytics to speed up and improve the service level provided to customers. Around 25% of Fintech Tech leverage on Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning Solutions to strengthen internal processes as fraud detection, while Blockchain has a lower adoption.

Alessandro Carretta, Secretary General of Assifact, said: "Italian banks and factoring companies need to improve their profitability by strengthening and evolving their operating and business model through digital transformation, service quality improvement and new products and services to customer segments not yet covered, either via internal development or the activation of partnerships."

Stephen Pegge, Commercial Finance Managing Director at UK Finance said: "Yes, there continues to be successful and competitive banks and traditional specialist firms that have longstanding relationships with clients but digitisation, innovation in products and new competitors mean there is now more choice than ever before."

CONTACT:Andrea Giannotti (Mr.) Director ReeNew PR On behalf of ASSIFACT Mob. +44 7825 892 640 Mail giannotti@reenewpr.uk

Giovanna Marchi Comunicazione ASSIFACT Press office Ph. +39 02 49722332 Mob. +39 335 7117020 Mail info@giovannamarchicomunicazione.com

SOURCE Assifact

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Accenture and Assifact Unveil Trends and Evolution of the FinTech Industry - PR Newswire UK

The gig economy plays a major part for many international business operations. Companies have realized the benefits of hiring freelancers or project-based contractors to perform tasks for their businesses as it comes with more flexibility, lower liability and fewer costs than hiring full-time employees.

As the gig economy continues to grow, due to greater demand and technological advancements, its impact on the world of business is also increasing, with unprecedented opportunities for freelance workers and companies alike. Below, 12 members of Forbes Coaches Council delve into the ways that the gig economy may change in the coming year, and how it may impact the world of business moving forward.

Forbes Coaches Council members weigh in on how the gig economy will evolve in the new decade.

1. A Shifting Landscape Of Employee Loyalty

"To thine own self be true" has never been more true than in today's world of work. In fact, in the resume writing industry we held our first-ever career portfolio resume competition due to the enormity of the side-hustle, gig-focus taking place inclusive of executives. Companies will need to be able to entice candidates with flexibility and part-time benefits to have a chance at retention. - Laura DeCarlo, Career Directors International

2. Expansion As A Result Of Growing Demand

Aside from just the Ubers and Lyfts, companies seek more flexibility in managing their fixed labor costs, so they're often turning to contingent workforces as a way to manage the varying labor demands. This will not only increase their demand for temporary or "gig" workers, but also for service suppliers that are willing to provide functional support for roles previously handled by internal staff. - Scott Singer, Insider Career Strategies

3. A Conveyor Belt Of Options To Choose From

The gig economy will evolve to become a conveyor belt of options so employers and businesses are able to develop customized ways to better cater to customer needs. Small businesses will start using gig services to generate efficiencies and, gradually, this will create opportunities for larger organizations to learn from the way small businesses use gig services. - Faisal Khan, 1ExtraordinaryLife, LLC

4. The New Workforce Optimization Strategy

The gig economy will continue to broaden its definition from sporadic, opt-in labor to also include more specialized high-end expertise and consulting. Companies will more deeply focus on how to best optimize a mix of both permanent and on-demand talent to achieve their profit goals. Some firms have created leadership positions focused on this very thing. - Karan Rhodes, Shockingly Different Leadership

5. Pending Legislation's Potential Negative Impact

The gig economy is thriving and is now a vital element of business agility and innovation. Although it has some downsides, a majority of the impact of the gig economy is beneficial. New legislation (CA Assembly Bill 5 - AB5) aims to address some of the downsides, but could inadvertently shut down the gig economy in the biggest state economy in the U.S. This is a critical element to watch in 2020. - Jim Vaselopulos, Rafti Advisors, LLC

6. Business Necessity Clashing With Legal Compliance

The gig economy will continue to expand. In order to attract talent, organizations will have to hire people for "gigs." There is just one problem. The IRS rules regarding whether jobs require an exempt employee, non-exempt employee or contractor are decades old. The need to compete will clash with compliance requirements. Businesses will have to lobby the government to update their regulations. - Brad Federman, PerformancePoint LLC

7. Unprecedented Opportunities For Those In The Gig Economy

As business growth continues, those operating in the gig economy are looking at unprecedented opportunity. Low unemployment means companies are stretched to leverage more deeply their arsenal of service providers. Independent contractors can not only raise their prices, but also enjoy more consistent relationships with their clients that should hold out through future economic downward trends. - Laura Camacho, Mixonian Institute

8. Chaos As A Result Of More Growth And Disruption

In 2020, the gig economy would continue to experience rapid acceleration and evolution, changes that would demand flexibility and adaptability. In this VUCA 2.0 world, businesses have become nimble and selective with what they focus on. More growth will lead to more disruption and uncertainty, so it's incumbent upon businesses to embrace VUCA 2.0 as the new normal and adjust accordingly. - Dr. Flo Falayi, Hybrid Leaders, Inc

9. Higher Demand For Project-Based Contractors

In 2020, you will have more people working as contractors for companies of all sizes. This will affect business as they hire more remote project-based contractors and freelancers to get the work done instead of hiring full-time employees. This trend will become more popular with workers as it provides more opportunity for them to live the lifestyles they desire by providing flexible work schedules. - Katrina Brittingham, VentureReady LLC

10. Increased Flexibility As The New Benefit

The gig economy is gaining momentum as people are placing a higher value on acquiring experiences rather than material things. This can have a ripple effect on other businesses in both talent acquisition and retention. The need to offer flexible scheduling, remote work opportunities and work-life balance will become even more important in 2020 to maintain an engaged and committed workforce. - Shelley Hastings, Synergy Empowerment Coaching, LLC

11. Accelerated Onboarding And Engagement

If you're a business hiring more short-term or freelance workers, how do you get them quickly onboarded and engaged? After you clarify role expectations, take time to ask questions like, "How do you most like to work?" or "What can I do to help you produce your best work?" or "What would have you really engaged in your work here, and what could inadvertently decrease your engagement?" Show you care. - Dr. Joel M. Rothaizer, MCC, Clear Impact Consulting Group

12. The Traditional Worker Role Fading Even Quicker

As Generation Z begins to enter the workspace, the traditional worker as we "know it" will begin to fade even quicker. Gen Zs have grown up seeing their parents work multiple jobs, take on gigs and become entrepreneurs. The gig economy will no longer be a trend, but the norm. The impact on businesses will either make them more agile and innovative or they will find themselves in a world of hurt for workers. - Shelley Smith, Premier Rapport

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12 Ways The Gig Economy May Evolve In 2020 And How It Will Impact The Business World - Forbes

As the year and decade draw to a close and we enter the roaring twenties, the power of creativity has never been more important.

2019 was the year of purpose and activism with creativity becoming a driving force for good.

The work which won big at Cannes Lions was overwhelmingly focussed on social good, with brands using their voice to stand for a cause beyond their own business.

Whether it be the climate emergency the world is facing, taking a stand for democracy, feeding starving children or championing diversity, the creative industry has used its talent to create change.

WPP AUNZ interim CEO John Steedman took on the anonymous trolls and PwCs Nicky Bryson joined forces with Youngbloods to help mentor the industrys young people with the launch of The Trenches.

This year also saw the industry try to find its feet following the WPP mergers of 2018 some working out better than others.

We were introduced to WPP AUNZs new CEO Jens Monsees who joined the holding company from BMW Group in Germany and saw a string of executives come and go across adland.

The year also saw some more mergers including BMF and Naked Communications, Switched On and AKQA, With Collective and Isobar and redundancies across the networks including one-year old GrowthOps.

It was also a big milestone for many including Saatchi & Saatchi and AWARD who both celebrated 40 years.

Weeks away from the 2020, we asked creative leaders to share what they predict 2020 will hold for the industry.

The Ogilvy Groupchief executive of Australia& executive partnerDavid FoxIn a world where common sense seems to have all but disappeared, I believe 2020 will see the marketing and communications industry re-introduce it back into the brand building debate. Common sense that suggests it is not TV versus tech, but TV and tech; its not about one-off tactical ads, but long-term sustainable brand building campaigns and short-term tactics; its not about pitching or not pitching, its about finding the right cultural and capability fit and working hard at it every day like in any relationship. It will be about understanding that building modern brands is a team sport and that sometimes uncomfortable collaborations will create the best work. The agencies, clients and consultants who get this will get ahead and win in 2020.

CHE Proximity chief creative officer Ant WhiteBrands will take responsibility for the impact they are having on the world. If the airline industry were a country, it would be the seventh largest polluter in the world. When you look at a brands footprint this way, it makes you realise that they need to start taking responsibility for their contribution to global warming and become part of the solution. With governments in disarray, and not acting fast enough to fix climate change, it really is up to brands to take action. They have deep pockets and mass reach. And its already happening. From KLM asking people to fly responsibly to grocery chains removing plastic bags. 2020 will see more brands sticking their neck out and owning the problem. I hope so anyway.

Thinkerbell co-founder Adam FerrierJust three predictions. 1. Accenture Interactive buys WPP2. Mutiny buys S4 Capital3. Creativity wins

DDB Australia CEO Andrew LittleThe more things change the more they stay the same and 2019 has been a testament to that. Bill Berbachs insights from the middle of the last century are more relevant today than they were when he uttered them. As an industry, weve become obsessed with change, but I see 2020 as the year that we will shift focus on the unchanging. It will also be the year that more brands commit to embracing the long AND the short of it with a handful of smart marketers already leading the way. As always, were set for an eventful year.

Wunderman ThompsonCEO ANZJohn GutteridgeAIand biometric data will drive brands to personalise customer experiences. 2020 is the tipping point in AI and biometric data. With an exponential amount of biometric data that were creating every second, AI will allow us to utilise this information to create an ultra-hyper-personalised experience and begin to predict customer needs. We can already see the beginning of this, as consumers happily trade-in data for better customer experiences. In fact, 75% of consumers use biometric technology already to simplify their life, whether its from using their Google Home to turn on the TV to facial recognition to open a banking app (Statista, 2019). It's this biometric data that will allow us to identify customer pain-points, personalise experiences, and with AI predict consumer needs.

Clemenger BBDO Sydney CEO Pete BosilkovskiMake utility, not just a sale. We are in the customer centric era, where brands will increasingly move from extracting value from customers to finding new ways to enhance the experience people have with brands. They will go beyond the products and services they sell to creating a form of utility that helps people in their lives. Brands that do this will solve problems for customers in a non-commercial interaction, and over time will only strengthen their engagement and relevance with customers - ultimately translating to future sales.

Saatchi & Saatchi Australia CEO Anthony GregorioA dawning realisation that you cant cost cut your way to success in an increasingly commoditised world and that creativity is the last legal way to create genuine business advantage.

Switched Ondirector, brand, social& content APAC Yash MurthyAt 10am last week, there were hordes of teenagers assembling outside the Enmore Theatre. Harry Styles in town? Some dire American YouTuber? No. Turns out K-Pop act Day6 were playing in 10 hours. As they danced and Tik-Toked their way through the day to pass the time, it struck me that the pop-cultural axes have certainly shifted. The regional influence on our art and food have long been apparent, but finally, from platforms to pop stars, I think 2020 is the year our commercial creativity draws upon the mainstream appeal of our continental neighbours. Were uniquely placed to seize upon it, and I hope (and believe) we will. Tik Tok, it's Asia o'clock.

VMLY&R CEO ANZJon BirdI see two overarching and competing trends the tug of war between technology and humanity which may be better resolved in 2020. Artificial Intelligence will continue to ramp up to make things more efficient. At the same time, Human Insight will be ever more valued to make things more compelling. Agencies that can balance both effectively and creatively will win. I also believe in Cannes Chairman Phil Thomas analysis of three keys from this years Lions: Access, Activism, Commerce. Considering those for 2020 - diversity and inclusion will be critical; having a purpose fundamental; and linking to a sale essential.

Apparent CEO Phil Smith20/20 presents as the year of hindsight? Look back to plan forward. Doing this would help move on from the tired focus of the "Year of " to the year of the business of our business. Customer insights driving effective and engaging creative solutions all of which deliver on client business problems. Done with the agility and speed of the market.

DDI managing director Caroline McLaughlin Bots become flagbearers of positive change. Anyone who hasnt cottoned on to the fact that bots are here to stay has been living in a dark cave. I foresee 2020 will be the year when the ingenuity of automation really takes flight, and this conversation moves out of the shadows. Its human nature to be resistant to unseen machines that may take your job so the companies that win big in this space will be those who seamlessly integrate automation but also embrace cultural initiatives that allow their people to reinvent themselves.

The Works managing partner Tom HarberWith the experience economy stronger than ever, 2020 will be the rise of the CXO. Data sophistication will win the day. Brands and agencies included. Conversation and voice will feature in more marketing plans. New pricing models will emerge and value based remuneration will get more air time. We will see an increased demand for outsourced inhousing. Human Centred Design will play a more prominent role in creativity. Despite best efforts to ditch the pitch, we will continue to get RFPeed on.

The Hallway CEO Jules Hall The 10s was the decade of understanding advertising effectiveness. Weve had seminal text after seminal text - from Byron Sharp to Binet & Field, Karen Nelson-Field, Orlando Wood and of course the ever-entertaining, but slightly foul-mouthed Mark Ritson, and all the rest. The researchers have spoken: Creativity is critical. 70% of advertising effectiveness is determined by the content rather than the placement. More importantly weve learned what qualifies as effective creativity. 2020 is the year the word will spread. The industry is realising that optimisation is table stakes. Creativity is the differentiator. The smartest marketers will invest in re-learning what has become too much of a forgotten art. Get ready for the fun!

Spinach CEO Craig Flanders2020 will be a very tough year for anyone trying to get your average Aussie to part with money. They want to pay less for the same stuff they bought a year or two ago, and want to spend less time figuring it out you should know, I bought from you before!. So we all need to give them the stuff they intuitively want, in an easier to find/acquire (or delivered) package faster than they could get it last year. And at the same time, making more margin to keep our shareholders at bay. Easy right? Well, yes it is if youve been planting the seeds to provide you marketing strategy with the ability to mass personalise.

Bastion Collective CEO Jack WattsRealising they can no longer shrink their way to greatness through cost cutting, brands will be forced to invest in growing the top line and communications/marketing will have greater priority as a result. Consumers will continue to gravitate towards brands that talk to them in their language, in their time and in their place. Brands will demand fully integrated communications solutions from agencies that can deliver the breadth of services. Traditional agencies and media outlets will continue to be challenged and make more drastic changes, creating opportunities for nimble agencies built for the modern communications world.

Town Square chief strategy officer Neville DoyleChange will be most notable in its absence. VR and AR are not suddenly going to transform our industry. Consumers are not suddenly going to want an in-depth relationship with their given brand of toothpaste on social media. TikTok, whilst infinitely entertaining, is not going to change everything (after all, its just Vine with better CX). And behaviour change will be something that we all strive for but rarely achieve (ask yourself, when was the last time you truly changed your own behaviour). Instead, those who continue to embrace creativity as a competitive advantage will thrive whilst those who dont will struggle.

Digitas CEO Adrian FaroukAccording to Gartner in 2016, next year we will all be having more conversations with bots than with our partners while I wouldnt go quite as far as this, we have certainly evolved our thoughts of chatbots as being more than just crap interfaces for FAQs. People are now booking dinner reservations, plane tickets, receiving boarding passes, sharing feedback and more, all through messaging interfaces. At Digitas, our clients are already experimenting with highly sophisticated conversational interfaces. This 2-way dialogue can be the best way to establish individual audience needs to deliver truly personalised experiences. These programs will span into next year and we expect them to be just the beginning.

McCann Queensland executive creative director Ben DavisTruth Well Told. Its as timeless as ever, and never more relevant than today. Next year brands will continue to redefine their identities as they navigate their way through the next phase of what has been a global purpose revolution. This year weve seen many brands criticized for rushing towards purpose-led work, launching campaigns that havent fit the truth of the brand or the relationship it enjoys with its customers. In a climate of mistrust and fake news, there has never been a better time for brands to stand for something. It wont be long however, before consumers reach a saturation point. This is the point where the stakes are raised, the point in which only some genuinely great work will hit home. Clever agencies will understand that sometimes its OK to just be fun, or funny, or undeniably cool, because that may be at the heart of a brands truth. When meaning works its genuinely wonderful! But it can only be successfully navigated by Truth.

Loyal co-founders Paulie Fenton and Joshua Hunt

DAYLIGHT Agency executive creative director Chris MitchellIf data could predict the future, wed all know the winner of the last race at Randwick tomorrow. But data cant predict the future. Yet. So, at the risk of sounding analogue, Ill have a go at my prediction based on what Im seeing in the marketplace. Prediction One: Companies who lose sight of their purpose will continue to fall into obscurity. Prediction Two: The global supermarket trend will continue with expanding private label ranges forcing remaining brands to survive on reduced margins. Prediction Three: Short term sales targets will reduce the ability for CMOs to invest in building long term brand purpose and trust. Prediction Four: Lapsed brands will make a comeback. Prediction Five: Agencies will need to ensure they talk value not price.

Common Ventures co-founder James CrawleyIve read the last few years of these and theres nothing I can say that hasnt been said. So I put it to you: 2020 will rock. We will all be nicer to each other. Agencies that churn less staff will win more work. Storytelling will continue to be the most effective part of what we do, although Im sure well call it something else.

Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au

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Creative agency predictions 2020: Creativity wins, purpose and the evolution of technology - AdNews

President Trump insists there was no quid pro quo with Ukraine but the phrase was not always synonymous with a shakedown. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

President Trump insists there was no quid pro quo with Ukraine but the phrase was not always synonymous with a shakedown.

A bit of Latin has been on the lips of many lately: quid pro quo.

The phrase has been broadly invoked in the House impeachment inquiry into President Trump and his interactions with the leader of Ukraine.

Trump and many of his allies deny there was a quid pro quo they say that Trump did not withhold military aid to Ukraine as part of an exchange for investigations that could help Trump politically in the 2020 campaign. (Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney admitted that link in a press briefing last week but then later walked back his comments.)

U.S. diplomat William Taylor's recent testimony to congressional investigators supports allegations that Trump withheld military assistance as part of a parallel and informal Ukraine policy.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has said that proving quid pro quo is not a requirement for impeachment, but the phrase has stuck.

"In Latin it just simply means something for something," says Ben Zimmer, language columnist for The Wall Street Journal. But, he notes, "I think that the political situation can't help but inform the way that we're going to understand this particular phrase, even though it's been in the language for oh, about 500 years."

An exchange not necessarily an equal one

Zimmer says the first recorded use of the phrase quid pro quo in English meant something totally different.

"In the 16th century, very often if you've got a drug from an apothecary, what you would be getting might not be exactly what you asked for," he says.

L'Etude du Procureur, The Lawyers Office, Plate III from the series The Trades, ca 1632-1633, etching by Abraham Bosse, France, 17th century. De Agostini Picture Library/De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images hide caption

L'Etude du Procureur, The Lawyers Office, Plate III from the series The Trades, ca 1632-1633, etching by Abraham Bosse, France, 17th century.

Instead of the quid you asked for, you got the quo. It sounds harmless enough, but Zimmer says it could lead to problems.

"Very often the drugs that were swapped out would lead to someone getting something that didn't work as well or could even be harmful. And so, this was a practice that people were scared of," he says.

That's where the idea of an exchange started. Fast-forward another century, and lawyers start using quid pro quo a lot.

"Lawyers love using Latin, and that was true way back in the 16th and 17th century, when quid pro quo started getting picked up to refer to an exchange of one thing for another and again, that in a legalistic context could be very neutral. It's simply one thing for another," he says.

"But this more negative connotation has always carried through that there is perhaps some sort of corrupt intents on at least one side of this mutual relationship, perhaps the motives are not so pure."

What about a favor?

If a quid pro quo by definition is something for something else, then what about the word "favor"? In his July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, President Trump asked him for a "favor." Trump insists there was no pressure.

Webster's defines "favor" as a "gracious kindness." There's no mention of expecting something in return. But that is not always how it plays out in real life.

"There's a quid pro quo built into every relationship every conversation. We talk in a certain way because we expect some response," says Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University. "I want you to like me, and so then you might be friends. Or we are friends, I want to stay friends."

People don't usually attach strings to the favors they do for family, Tannen says. But the further people get outside that circle, the more complicated the favor becomes, even between peers. At times, people may not even realize their own expectations for reciprocity.

It gets infinitely messier when there's a power dynamic at play. It's natural, Zimmer says, "when we are in this type of transactional relationship to think, 'Am I really getting the something of equal value here or am I being taken advantage of?' "

Tannen adds that how the trade-off is articulated or how it is not is key. "That's what I think we're dealing with often in public situations where people are caught on tape, say, making what we all know is a demand but not in so many words, so they can say, 'Oh no, that's not what I meant.' "

There is inherent drama in the quid pro quo. It's about relationships, it's about trust and power, spoken and unspoken expectations. The idea is everywhere in popular culture, and now, because of the Ukraine scandal, quid pro quo is everywhere in our politics.

Zimmer says gone are the days when it could be descriptive, or morally neutral.

"Now it's more like a shakedown. It's more like: You have to do this for me or else."

Marc Rivers and Steve Tripoli produced and edited this story for broadcast. Heidi Glenn adapted it for the Web.

View post:

From Simple Exchange To Shakedown: The Evolution Of 'Quid Pro Quo' - NPR

Are we alone in the universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke. By definition, probable events occur frequently, improbable events occur rarely or once. Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and life itself were unique, one-off events, and therefore highly improbable. Our evolution may have been like winning the lottery only far less likely.

The universe is astonishingly vast. The Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars, and there are over a trillion galaxies in the visible universe, the tiny fraction of the universe we can see. Even if habitable worlds are rare, their sheer number there are as many planets as stars, maybe more suggests lots of life is out there. So where is everyone? This is the Fermi paradox. The universe is large, and old, with time and room for intelligence to evolve, but there's no evidence of it.

Could intelligence simply be unlikely to evolve? Unfortunately, we can't study extraterrestrial life to answer this question. But we can study some 4.5 billion years of Earth's history, looking at where evolution repeats itself, or doesn't.

Related: From Big Bang to Present: Snapshots of Our Universe Through Time

Evolution sometimes repeats, with different species independently converging on similar outcomes. If evolution frequently repeats itself, then our evolution might be probable, even inevitable.

And striking examples of convergent evolution do exist. Australia's extinct, marsupial thylacine had a kangaroo-like pouch but otherwise looked like a wolf, despite evolving from a different mammal lineage. There are also marsupial moles, marsupial anteaters and marsupial flying squirrels. Remarkably, Australia's entire evolutionary history, with mammals diversifying after the dinosaur extinction, parallels other continents.

Other striking cases of convergence include dolphins and extinct ichthyosaurs, which evolved similar shapes to glide through the water, and birds, bats and pterosaurs, which convergently evolved flight.

We also see convergence in individual organs. Eyes evolved not just in vertebrates, but in arthropods, octopi, worms and jellyfish. Vertebrates, arthropods, octopi and worms independently invented jaws. Legs evolved convergently in the arthropods, octopi and four kinds of fish (tetrapods, frogfish, skates, mudskippers).

Here's the catch. All this convergence happened within one lineage, the Eumetazoa. Eumetazoans are complex animals with symmetry, mouths, guts, muscles, a nervous system. Different eumetazoans evolved similar solutions to similar problems, but the complex body plan that made it all possible is unique. Complex animals evolved once in life's history, suggesting they're improbable.

Related: 13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens

Surprisingly, many critical events in our evolutionary history are unique and, probably, improbable. One is the bony skeleton of vertebrates, which let large animals move onto land. The complex, eukaryotic cells that all animals and plants are built from, containing nuclei and mitochondria, evolved only once. Sex evolved just once. Photosynthesis, which increased the energy available to life and produced oxygen, is a one-off. For that matter, so is human-level intelligence. There are marsupial wolves and moles, but no marsupial humans.

There are places where evolution repeats, and places where it doesn't. If we only look for convergence, it creates confirmation bias. Convergence seems to be the rule, and our evolution looks probable. But when you look for non-convergence, it's everywhere, and critical, complex adaptations seem to be the least repeatable, and therefore improbable.

What's more, these events depended on one another. Humans couldn't evolve until fish evolved bones that let them crawl onto land. Bones couldn't evolve until complex animals appeared. Complex animals needed complex cells, and complex cells needed oxygen, made by photosynthesis. None of this happens without the evolution of life, a singular event among singular events. All organisms come from a single ancestor; as far as we can tell, life only happened once.

Curiously, all this takes a surprisingly long time. Photosynthesis evolved 1.5 billion years after the Earth's formation, complex cells after 2.7 billion years, complex animals after 4 billion years, and human intelligence 4.5 billion years after the Earth formed. That these innovations are so useful but took so long to evolve implies that they're exceedingly improbable.

These one-off innovations, critical flukes, may create a chain of evolutionary bottlenecks or filters. If so, our evolution wasn't like winning the lottery. It was like winning the lottery again, and again, and again. On other worlds, these critical adaptations might have evolved too late for intelligence to emerge before their suns went nova, or not at all.

Related: Greetings, Earthlings! 8 Ways Aliens Could Contact Us

Imagine that intelligence depends on a chain of seven unlikely innovations the origin of life, photosynthesis, complex cells, sex, complex animals, skeletons and intelligence itself each with a 10% chance of evolving. The odds of evolving intelligence become one in 10 million.

But complex adaptations might be even less likely. Photosynthesis required a series of adaptations in proteins, pigments and membranes. Eumetazoan animals required multiple anatomical innovations (nerves, muscles, mouths and so on). So maybe each of these seven key innovations evolve just 1% of the time. If so, intelligence will evolve on just 1 in 100 trillion habitable worlds. If habitable worlds are rare, then we might be the only intelligent life in the galaxy, or even the visible universe.

And yet, we're here. That must count for something, right? If evolution gets lucky one in 100 trillion times, what are the odds we happen to be on a planet where it happened? Actually, the odds of being on that improbable world are 100%, because we couldn't have this conversation on a world where photosynthesis, complex cells, or animals didn't evolve. That's the anthropic principle: Earth's history must have allowed intelligent life to evolve, or we wouldn't be here to ponder it.

Intelligence seems to depend on a chain of improbable events. But given the vast number of planets, then like an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters to write Hamlet, it's bound to evolve somewhere. The improbable result was us.

This article was originally published atThe Conversation.The publication contributed the article to Live Science'sExpert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Link:

Humans May Be the Only Intelligent Life in the Universe, If Evolution Has Anything to Say - Livescience.com

Whats next for the smart kitchen? What sort of new appliances will be gracing the countertops of the future, and what sort of technologies will power them? In short: What will it look like to cook at home in the future?

Thats exactly the question one of our panels tackled at SKS 2019. The discussion was led by The Spoons Chris Albrecht, who spoke with Lisa McManus of Americas Test Kitchen, Matt Van Horn of June and Steve Svajian of Anova about whats coming down the pipelines for kitchen tech. The full video is below, but if you want a few quick highlights read on:

The future of the kitchen is softwareSvajian argued that the smart kitchen space started out more hardware-driven, but has recently been shifting to focus more on software. Van Horn agreed. He said that in the early days of the company, people used what he called the primitive settings of the smart oven: bake, broil, etc. But now theyre using the automatic cook programs more and more. That said, the hardware [still] has to be great, added Svajian.

All tech aside, it has to workMcManus drove home the point that high-tech appliance are great, but they have to actually help people cook better not just look cool. We look at things that will make [cooking] easier and more accessible to everyone, she said. Things that are practical, that are functional.

The smart kitchen space right now? Good chaos.McManus summed up the evolution of the food tech ecosystem pretty neatly during the panel. It feels like a really exciting brainstorm, she said. Its good chaos. Svajian agreed, equating the space to the evolution of the Web in the late 90s. The law of entropy is real.

If you want to hear more about where these three insiders see the fast-paced evolution of the kitchen heading, make sure to watch the full video below.

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SKS 2019: The Kitchen Evolution is In a State of Good Chaos - The Spoon

Are we alone in the Universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke. By definition, probable events occur frequently, improbable events occur rarely or once.

Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and life itself were unique, one-off events, and therefore highly improbable. Our evolution may have been like winning the lottery only far less likely.

The Universe is astonishingly vast. The Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars, and there are over a trillion galaxies in the visible Universe, the tiny fraction of the Universe we can see.

Even if habitable worlds are rare, their sheer number there are as many planets as stars, maybe more suggests lots of life is out there.

So where is everyone? This is the Fermi paradox. The Universe is large, and old, with time and room for intelligence to evolve, but there's no evidence of it.

Could intelligence simply be unlikely to evolve? Unfortunately, we can't study extraterrestrial life to answer this question. But we can study some 4.5 billion years of Earth's history, looking at where evolution repeats itself, or doesn't.

Evolution sometimes repeats, with different species independently converging on similar outcomes. If evolution frequently repeats itself, then our evolution might be probable, even inevitable.

Thylacine (E.J. Keller Baker/Wikipedia)

And striking examples of convergent evolution do exist. Australia's extinct, marsupial thylacine had a kangaroo-like pouch but otherwise looked like a wolf, despite evolving from a different mammal lineage. There are also marsupial moles, marsupial anteaters and marsupial flying squirrels.

Remarkably, Australia's entire evolutionary history, with mammals diversifying after the dinosaur extinction, parallels other continents.

Other striking cases of convergence include dolphins and extinct ichthyosaurs, which evolved similar shapes to glide through the water, and birds, bats and pterosaurs, which convergently evolved flight.

Squid eyes evolved independently from ours. (PLOS Biology)

We also see convergence in individual organs. Eyes evolved not just in vertebrates, but in arthropods, octopi, worms and jellyfish. Vertebrates, arthropods, octopi and worms independently invented jaws.

Legs evolved convergently in the arthropods, octopi and four kinds of fish (tetrapods, frogfish, skates, mudskippers).

Here's the catch. All this convergence happened within one lineage, the Eumetazoa. Eumetazoans are complex animals with symmetry, mouths, guts, muscles, a nervous system.

Different eumetazoans evolved similar solutions to similar problems, but the complex body plan that made it all possible is unique. Complex animals evolved once in life's history, suggesting they're improbable.

Surprisingly, many critical events in our evolutionary history are unique and, probably, improbable. One is the bony skeleton of vertebrates, which let large animals move onto land.

The complex, eukaryotic cells that all animals and plants are built from, containing nuclei and mitochondria, evolved only once. Sex evolved just once.

Photosynthesis, which increased the energy available to life and produced oxygen, is a one-off. For that matter, so is human-level intelligence. There are marsupial wolves and moles, but no marsupial humans.

There are places where evolution repeats, and places where it doesn't. If we only look for convergence, it creates confirmation bias. Convergence seems to be the rule, and our evolution looks probable. But when you look for non-convergence, it's everywhere, and critical, complex adaptations seem to be the least repeatable, and therefore improbable.

What's more, these events depended on one another. Humans couldn't evolve until fish evolved bones that let them crawl onto land. Bones couldn't evolve until complex animals appeared. Complex animals needed complex cells, and complex cells needed oxygen, made by photosynthesis.

None of this happens without the evolution of life, a singular event among singular events. All organisms come from a single ancestor; as far as we can tell, life only happened once.

Curiously, all this takes a surprisingly long time. Photosynthesis evolved 1.5 billion years after the Earth's formation, complex cells after 2.7 billion years, complex animals after 4 billion years, and human intelligence 4.5 billion years after the Earth formed.

That these innovations are so useful but took so long to evolve implies that they're exceedingly improbable.

Photosynthesis, another unique adaptation. (Nick Longrich)

These one-off innovations, critical flukes, may create a chain of evolutionary bottlenecks or filters. If so, our evolution wasn't like winning the lottery. It was like winning the lottery again, and again, and again.

On other worlds, these critical adaptations might have evolved too late for intelligence to emerge before their suns went nova, or not at all.

Imagine that intelligence depends on a chain of seven unlikely innovations the origin of life, photosynthesis, complex cells, sex, complex animals, skeletons and intelligence itself each with a 10 percent chance of evolving. The odds of evolving intelligence become one in 10 million.

But complex adaptations might be even less likely. Photosynthesis required a series of adaptations in proteins, pigments and membranes. Eumetazoan animals required multiple anatomical innovations (nerves, muscles, mouths and so on).

So maybe each of these seven key innovations evolve just 1 percent of the time. If so, intelligence will evolve on just 1 in 100 trillion habitable worlds. If habitable worlds are rare, then we might be the only intelligent life in the galaxy, or even the visible Universe.

And yet, we're here. That must count for something, right? If evolution gets lucky one in 100 trillion times, what are the odds we happen to be on a planet where it happened?

Actually, the odds of being on that improbable world are 100 percent, because we couldn't have this conversation on a world where photosynthesis, complex cells, or animals didn't evolve. That's the anthropic principle: Earth's history must have allowed intelligent life to evolve, or we wouldn't be here to ponder it.

Intelligence seems to depend on a chain of improbable events. But given the vast number of planets, then like an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters to write Hamlet, it's bound to evolve somewhere. The improbable result was us.

Nick Longrich, Senior Lecturer, Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Bath.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Originally posted here:

We Could Be The Only Intelligent Life in The Universe, According to Evolution - ScienceAlert

Murder, violent crime, guns, gangs, rape, abuse ... the list goes on. Our nation is becoming more vicious, violent and vile, with some even young teenagers acting like savage animals at times.

Drug addiction and alcoholism are increasing. Families are disintegrating. Too many people seem to care only about themselves.

Should this surprise us? For the last 60 years, our public education system has taught that humans ARE animals, albeit evolutionarily advanced ones. However, the biblical principle is true: Dont be deceived: God isnt mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap (Galatians 6:7). Weve sowed the wind; now we reap the whirlwind.

The theory of evolution is foundational teaching in most primary and secondary public schools. Textbooks explain the science of evolution and the origin of the species. The alternate idea that God may have created anything is left to the home and the churches.

Intelligent design? Summarily discounted, disregarded and dismissed. Thankfully, some educators supplement their curriculum with additional resources and information which challenges evolutionary theory.

Higher education, the news media, and cultural elites take the theory of evolution for granted; a God-less beginning is assumed a priori. Thats how they teach, write, lead and operate. Only fanatic, Bible-thumping, religious nuts claim to believe that In the beginning, God created ...

We hear and read that it all started with a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago; that life on Earth began 3.77 billion years ago. Lifeforms have been evolving ever since. Random chance, natural selection, mutations (both good and bad), and eons of time have brought us to today. Humans evolved from lower order ape-like lifeforms to the superstar animal species we are now.

Lets ponder, if evolution were true, what would a few of the ramifications be? What would some of the effects of teaching only evolutionary theory be? Could some of the evil behaviors in our society be linked partially to the fact that our society is awash in teaching evolution in both public schools, higher education and news media?

Lets consider what might logically follow if evolution were true.

If evolution were true, then were an accident.

No more, no less. This earth we live on, everything we see around us, and even our own life is nothing more than a cosmic accident. There was a Big Bang and stuff went everywhere.

But just by happenstance, some stuff went to the exact right place at the exact right time with the exact right temperature and the exact right force and the exact right conditions for life to come into being. How fortuitous.

That first primordial life did a lightning bolt spark it? Volcanic eruption? Meteor strike? Who knows, but over the course of a few billion years, random chance produced mutations, adaptations and more which have resulted in us being here today.

The probability that this couldve all worked out the way it did is so astronomically small as to be non-existent, but scientists claim that given enough time and chances, anything can happen (put enough monkeys behind a typewriter and let them type for a few billion years and eventually one will produce Shakespeares Macbeth).

Scientists say the earth is about 4.54 billion years old, and a whole lot can happen in that amount of time.

Thus, humanity, people you, me, us are accidents and freaks of nature. Does that help your self-esteem and self-worth?

If evolution were true, we have no purpose.

If all life is accidental, if theres no perfect plan, only time and chance, then all life even our own has no purpose.

We arent here for a reason; were here for NO reason. Were here because nature flipped heads one billion times in a row. And then on the billionth plus one flip, the coin stood on edge.

Where are we evolving to and why? Who knows? Nature certainly doesnt. Scientists teach that evolution is unguided. Theres no unseen hand leading anything. When they say random, they mean random.

So, we await the next mutation, the next adaptation, and the next freak genetic accident. Were adrift in an evolutionary tide, except theres no tide.

Can you see how these ideas could lead to hopelessness and helplessness?

Continuing next month, well see that this thinking might cause folks to believe that life has no value, all life (whether animal or human) is the same, all events are random, death is the end, live for today, survival of the fittest, its all about me, all laws come from man, might makes right, theres no right and wrong only behavior, and were alone.

Or, we can listen to Jesus who said, Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me (John 14:1).

Gregg Nydegger is the evangelist at Christs Church at Monticello.

Here is the original post:

If evolution were true, then we are all accidents - Newsbug.info

The 1KP initiative, a collaborative effort of nearly 200 scientists, spans green algae to land plants, providing a framework for examining 1 billion years of plant evolution. Credit: Eric Zamora/Florida Museum

Plants are evolutionary champions, dominating Earths ecosystems for more than a billion years and making the planet habitable for countless other life forms, including us. Now, scientists have completed a nine-year genetic quest to shine a light on the long, complex history of land plants and green algae, revealing the plot twists and furious pace of the rise of this super group of organisms.

The project, known as the One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative (1KP), brought together nearly 200 plant biologists to sequence and analyze genes from more than 1,100 plant species spanning the green tree of life. A summary of the teams findings published on October 23, 2019, in Nature.

In the tree of life, everything is interrelated, said Gane Ka-Shu Wong, lead investigator of 1KP and professor in the University of Albertas department of biological sciences. And if we want to understand how the tree of life works, we need to examine the relationships between species. Thats where genetic sequencing comes in.

Much of plant research has focused on crops and a few model species, obscuring the evolutionary backstory of a clade that is nearly half a million species strong.

To get a birds-eye view of plant evolution, the 1KP team sequenced transcriptomes the set of genes that is actively expressed to illuminate the genetic underpinnings of green algae, mosses, ferns, conifers, flowering plants and all other lineages of green plants.

One hallmark of plant evolution is the frequency of genome duplication. Flowering plants are renowned for making multiple copies of their genome, which may contribute to the evolution of new gene functions. The 1KP project uncovered previously unknown duplication events in this group. Credit: Kristen Grace/Florida Museum

This gives a much broader perspective than what you could get by just looking at crops, which are all concentrated in one little part of the evolutionary tree, said study co-author Pamela Soltis, University of Florida distinguished professor and Florida Museum of Natural History curator. By having this bigger picture, you can understand how changes occurred in the genome, which then allows you to investigate changes in physical characteristics, chemistry or any other feature youre interested in.

One challenge was the projects sheer size, said study co-author Douglas Soltis, UF distinguished professor, and Florida Museum curator.

To look at that many genomes is unparalleled, he said. Its not a jump in technology as much as a jump in scale.

Sequencing transcriptomes requires freshly collected tissues, which is how Soltis found himself trekking through Gainesvilles greenery with containers of liquid nitrogen. Back at the laboratory, a team extracted genetic material from the frozen plant clippings and shipped the extractions to China for sequencing. All over the world, their colleagues followed suit.

Analyzing the sequences also required a reworking of existing software, which wasnt designed to handle such an unprecedented volume of genetic data, and without funding for the analysis, the researchers chipped away at the data as they had spare time.

But the labor was worth it, Pamela Soltis said.

The plant community got more than 1,000 sets of sequences, said Soltis, who also directs the UF Biodiversity Institute. Who could argue with that? All these branches of the plant tree of life have been filled in.

One hallmark of plant evolution and a feature rarely seen in animals is the frequency of genome duplication. Over and over again, lineages doubled, tripled or even quadrupled their entire set of genes, resulting in massive genome sizes. While the purpose of whole genome duplication is still unclear, scientists suspect that it may drive evolutionary innovation: If you have two copies of genes, one copy can gradually evolve a new function.

Addressing the frequency of whole genome duplication in plants was one of 1KPs goals, Douglas Soltis said. While flowering plants and ferns were already famous for genome duplication, Soltis said 1KP uncovered a number of previously unknown duplication events in these groups, as well as in the gymnosperms, the group of plants that includes conifers.

Other plant lineages took a different route, expanding certain gene families rather than copying their entire genome. This, too, is thought to provide new avenues for evolutionary development, and not surprisingly, the research team uncovered a major expansion of genes just before the appearance of vascular plants, land plants with xylem and phloem special cells for transporting water and nutrients.

But Douglas Soltis said gene expansions did not always correspond to major plant evolutionary milestones.

Theres not much of an expansion before seed plants appear or for flowering plants, he said. In fact, flowering plants actually shrank certain gene families, which may be a sign that they just co-opted existing genes for new functions.

Another surprise finding was that mosses, liverworts and hornworts form a single related group, confirming a centuries-old hypothesis that had been reversed in recent decades.

Wed done a partial analysis in 2014 that suggested these plants were close relatives, but a lot of people didnt believe it. These results underscore those findings, Pamela Soltis said. Its going to rock the moss world.

While the project refines our understanding of plant evolution and relationships between lineages, these data are also invaluable tools for advancing crop science, medicine, and other fields, the researchers said.

Identifying genes that have been duplicated in flowering plants could help scientists better understand their function, which could lead to crop improvements, Pamela Soltis said.

And because many plants have medicinal benefits, the genetic data offered by the 1KP project could lead to new discoveries that improve human health.

We focused on getting a lot of wild samples collected from plant lineages known to have important chemistry in hopes that people could mine this material for new compounds, Douglas Soltis said.

The sequences generated by the 1KP team are publicly accessible through the CyVerse Data Commons.

Probably hundreds of papers have used the data in ways we dont even know about, Pamela Soltis said. That is a super cool aspect of this study.

But the 1KP team has little time to celebrate its achievement. The next goal? Sequencing 10,000 genomes.

###

Reference: One thousand plant transcriptomes and the phylogenomics of green plants by One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative, 23 October 2019, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1693-2

Matthew Gitzendanner, Evgeny Mavrodiev and Grant Godden of the Florida Museum and Emily Sessa of UFs department of biologyalso co-authored the study. James Leebens-Mack of the University of Georgia is a co-corresponding author.

The 1KP initiative was funded by the Alberta Ministry of Advanced Education and Alberta Innovates, Musea Ventures, the National Key Research and Development Program of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Peoples Republic of China, the State Key Laboratory of Agricultural Genomics and the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory. Sequencing activities at BGI were also supported by the Shenzhen Municipal Government of China. Computational support was provided by the China National GeneBank, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, WestGrid and Compute Canada. Additional support was provided by the National Science Foundation, the NSF-funded iPlant Collaborative, the National Institutes of Health, German Research Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

The quote above from Gane Ka-Shu Wong first appeared in a joint press release published by the University of Georgia and the University of Alberta.

Read more:

1 Billion Years of Evolution Illuminated by Genetic Sequencing of 1,100 Plants - SciTechDaily

Plants are evolutionary champions, dominating Earths ecosystems for more than a billion years and making the planet habitable for countless other life forms, including us. Now, scientists have completed a nine-year genetic quest to shine a light on the long, complex history of land plants and green algae, revealing the plot twists and furious pace of the rise of this super group of organisms.

The project, known as the One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative (1KP), brought together nearly 200 plant biologists to sequence and analyze genes from more than 1,100 plant species spanning the green tree of life. A summary of the teams findings published today inNature.

In the tree of life, everything is interrelated, says Gane Ka-Shu Wong, lead investigator of 1KP and professor in the University of Albertas department of biological sciences. And if we want to understand how the tree of life works, we need to examine the relationships between species. Thats where genetic sequencing comes in.

Much of plant research has focused on crops and a few model species, obscuring the evolutionary backstory of a clade that is nearly half a million species strong.

To get a birds-eye view of plant evolution, the 1KP team sequenced transcriptomes the set of genes that is actively expressed to illuminate the genetic underpinnings of green algae, mosses, ferns, conifers, flowering plants and all other lineages of green plants.

This gives a much broader perspective than what you could get by just looking at crops, which are all concentrated in one little part of the evolutionary tree, says study co-author Pamela Soltis, University of Florida (UF) distinguished professor and Florida Museum of Natural History curator. By having this bigger picture, you can understand how changes occurred in the genome, which then allows you to investigate changes in physical characteristics, chemistry or any other feature youre interested in.

One challenge was the projects sheer size, says study co-author Douglas Soltis, UF distinguished professor and Florida Museum curator.

To look at that many genomes is unparalleled, he says. Its not a jump in technology as much as a jump in scale.

Sequencing transcriptomes requires freshly collected tissues, which is how Soltis found himself trekking through Gainesvilles greenery with containers of liquid nitrogen. Back at the laboratory, a team extracted genetic material from the frozen plant clippings and shipped the extractions to China for sequencing. All over the world, their colleagues followed suit.

Analyzing the sequences also required a reworking of existing software, which wasnt designed to handle such an unprecedented volume of genetic data, and without funding for the analysis, the researchers chipped away at the data as they had spare time.

But the labor was worth it, Pamela Soltis says.

The plant community got more than 1,000 sets of sequences, says Soltis, who also directs the UF Biodiversity Institute. Who could argue with that? All these branches of the plant tree of life have been filled in.

One hallmark of plant evolution and a feature rarely seen in animals is the frequency of genome duplication. Over and over again, lineages doubled, tripled or even quadrupled their entire set of genes, resulting in massive genome sizes. While the purpose of whole genome duplication is still unclear, scientists suspect that it may drive evolutionary innovation: If you have two copies of genes, one copy can gradually evolve a new function.

Addressing the frequency of whole genome duplication in plants was one of 1KPs goals, Douglas Soltis said. While flowering plants and ferns were already famous for genome duplication, Soltis said 1KP uncovered a number of previously unknown duplication events in these groups, as well as in the gymnosperms, the group of plants that includes conifers.

Other plant lineages took a different route, expanding certain gene families rather than copying their entire genome. This, too, is thought to provide new avenues for evolutionary development, and not surprisingly, the research team uncovered a major expansion of genes just before the appearance of vascular plants, land plants with xylem and phloem special cells for transporting water and nutrients.

But Douglas Soltis said gene expansions did not always correspond to major plant evolutionary milestones.

Theres not much of an expansion before seed plants appear or for flowering plants, he says. In fact, flowering plants actually shrank certain gene families, which may be a sign that they just co-opted existing genes for new functions.

Another surprise finding was that mosses, liverworts and hornworts form a single related group, confirming a centuries-old hypothesis that had been reversed in recent decades.

Wed done a partial analysis in 2014 that suggested these plants were close relatives, but a lot of people didnt believe it. These results underscore those findings, Pamela Soltis says. Its going to rock the moss world.

While the project refines our understanding of plant evolution and relationships between lineages, these data are also invaluable tools for advancing crop science, medicine and other fields, the researchers says.

Identifying genes that have been duplicated in flowering plants could help scientists better understand their function, which could lead to crop improvements, Pamela Soltis says.

And because many plants have medicinal benefits, the genetic data offered by the 1KP project could lead to new discoveries that improve human health.

We focused on getting a lot of wild samples collected from plant lineages known to have important chemistry in hopes that people could mine this material for new compounds, Douglas Soltis says.

The sequences generated by the 1KP team are publicly accessible through the CyVerse Data Commons.

Probably hundreds of papers have used the data in ways we dont even know about, Pamela Soltis says. That is a super cool aspect of this study.

But the 1KP team has little time to celebrate its achievement. The next goal? Sequencing 10,000 genomes.

Read more here:

Scientists Sequence 1100 Plants, Illuminating 1 Billion Years of Evolution - Seed World

If you are fleeing a country with just the clothes on your back and you want to take your savings with you, bitcoin is an excellent kind of safe haven, said Nic Carter, founding partner of Castle Island Ventures.

Youre happy to tolerate some of that exchange risk for the duration of the period in exchange for being able to store your savings in 12 phrases in your brain, Carter added, continuing:

From that perspective, its a great safe haven. But for a global macro allocator that cares about correlations and volatility, maybe its not as good, but its a lot of things to different people. Its kind of a heterogeneous asset.

Carter spoke with CoinDesk for one of the inaugural episodes of Bitcoin Macro, a pop-up podcast featuring the speakers and themes of CoinDesks upcomingInvest: NYC conference on Tuesday, Nov. 12.

Listen to the podcast here or read the whole transcript below.

The last six months have seen a growing dialogue between the bitcoin industry and the larger global macro community. No longer written off as some ignorable niche, increasingly people are asking: Is bitcoin a macro asset? Is it a safe-haven asset? How will it perform in the next recession?

Nic Carter is one of the most broad and heterodox thinkers in the bitcoin space. He learns in the open, shares what he thinks (whether it matches what the broader community wants him to think), is willing to change his mind, and always comes back to data.

In this episode, Coindesks strategy chief Nolan Bauerle chats with Carter about:

Nolan Bauerle: Welcome to Bitcoin Macro, a pop-up podcast produced as part of the CoinDesk Invest New York conference in November. Im your host, Nolan Bauerle. Both the podcast and the event explore the intersection of Bitcoin and the global macroeconomy with perspectives from some of the leading thinkers and finance, crypto and beyond.

Im here with Nic Carter, the founder of the data site Coin Metrics, a VC with Castle Island Ventures, a founder of that firm. And who was also Abby Johnsons personal advisor on Bitcoin for quite a while before he stepped out into the entrepreneurial game. So everyone in the industry knows you, Nic. So Im not going to spend too, too much time on your background other than that. This series of podcasts that CoinDesk is running in its lead up to Consensus Invests in November, seeks to bring some of our speakers together to answer a few questions about Bitcoin in the world today. These questions are really focused around its behavior on the global scene and in the global economy. And Nic, who has been working at this stuff for quite a while now, is one of the best people we could possibly get to participate in this podcast. So Ill jump right in with the first question, Nic. Is Bitcoin a macro asset?

Nic Carter: Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show, Nolan. I really appreciate that. On the macro asset front, I guess it really depends on your definition of sort of a global macro asset. To the extent that global macro is a strategy that involves kind of forecasting geopolitical trends and trading on that basis. I would say, absolutely. Some people would try and say, Well Bitcoin isnt big enough to be considered eligible to be a macro asset, which I think is a little silly. If you look at the, theres a really great set of data compiled by the guys over at Crypto Voices and they try and measure Bitcoin against other base monies, not against M3 or M2, but against just the base money.

And they find that its something like the 11th largest compared to sovereign currencies and gold and silver. By their measure, Bitcoin is the 11th largest kind of base money in the world. So I would say, its absolutely something of significance, even in its relatively small state and I think it totally, its buffeted by sort of political wins. And its also potentially, its emergence is also a response to some things that are going on in the world with central banks. So while it doesnt really have any meaningful correlation to really any other financial assets out there. I would say its totally a macro asset.

Nolan Bauerle: If I was to sort of translate what youre saying, from my point of view, you could really swap out the words macroeconomics for politics. I mean theyre quite similar. Were really talking about the politics, right? And theres no doubt that Bitcoin is political.

Nic Carter: For sure.

Nolan Bauerle: Which I suppose, de-facto raises it up to the level of being a macro asset because thats the whole point.

Nic Carter: Its sort of always had political goals, but sovereigns havent really cared about it until now. So if anything, thats the interesting thing about the year 2019. Maybe the emergence of Libra as well really piqued the interest of a lot of central banks. And they started to realize that cryptocurrencies and non-sovereign currencies were actually a meaningful trend and were not going to go away anytime soon.

Nolan Bauerle: And bringing us back to the world of private issuance of money that was so prevalent before the federal reserve in 1912 and was really common in the United States for 100 years before that.

Nic Carter: Absolutely, yeah, private money is and was the historical default and its only been a relatively short period of time that weve been on this latest kind of monetary regime. So you could say this is actually kind of a reversion to the mean.

Nolan Bauerle: So with all of this, I guess you could say uncertainty. Weve seen bitcoin behave in certain ways. So we can define it as a macro asset, fine because of whats around it, but its behavior really would push it into the threshold of whether or not its a safe haven asset. From its behavior, have you seen it behave as a safe haven asset, given all of the sort of tribulations were seeing today?

Nic Carter: Safe is probably in the eye of the beholder or the eye of the holder, I guess, to make a labored pun. So assets I would consider traditional safe havens are like treasuries, maybe gold, maybe the Swiss Franc, actual cash, the dollar, most of those things are pretty stable. Bitcoins realized volatility is many multiples of the most volatile of all those, which is gold. So just from a data perspective, its probably not behaving in purchasing power terms like the other traditional safe-haven assets. So my official answer on that is, we dont have enough data yet. Bitcoins only really been financialized for a couple of years. Insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

Nolan Bauerle: Safe haven to those who have no other recourse, I suppose.

Nic Carter: Yeah, so that was going to be the second part. If you are fleeing a country with just the clothes on your back and you want to take your savings with you, Bitcoin is an excellent kind of safe haven and youre happy to tolerate some of that exchange risk for the duration of the period in exchange for being able to store your savings in a 12 phrase, in your brain. From that perspective, its a great safe haven. But for a global macro allocator that cares about correlations and volatility, maybe its not as good, but its a lot of things to different people. Its kind of a heterogeneous asset.

Nolan Bauerle: Weve I guess you could say rumors of a real recession coming to America. Well see if it actually plays out. But of course, Bitcoin was predicted by a lot of people within the Bitcoin world to be a hedge against that. Do you think that Bitcoin can behave in such a way given conditions around our a recession or do you think it could start mimicking other assets in that environment?

Nic Carter: Its definitely hard to know. My intuition is that as it gets more integrated into financial markets, itll eventually come to be more correlated to traditional financial assets. Right now we realize correlations are still pretty close to zero. Although there has been some indications over the last six, 12 months that its co-moving with gold to some small degree. Bitcoin is not at its terminal stage of growth yet. Its still, I would say fairly early in its life cycle. So its just growing endogenously and it will continue to do so, in my opinion. So the real price drivers are almost to some degree, internal.

What Im trying to say really is that I think the main things that cause bitcoins price to grow is very much a function of its stage of development and the various thresholds its hitting, in terms of growth and infrastructure, adoption. I dont think its price is really going to be driven much by macro factors. For a while, whether it will outperform in a recession, is very hard to know. Some people have talked about an inflationary versus deflationary recession and it sort of depends what kind we get.

Its plausible to me that the US just undergoes kind of a Japanification, whereby you have extremely loose monetary policy, even looser than we have today. In an effort to kind of stave off any downturn whatsoever. And where the stock market turns into a political utility, if it hasnt already. And we just have an extended period of stagnation. That may well be the case, I know everyones expecting a recession right now, which makes me think maybe were not going to get a classic recession.

Nolan Bauerle: I sort of have fallen into this speculative point in this podcast twice in a row now. But Ive always been of the mind that the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym was really to have the type of experience or authority to say, Look what happened in Japan in the 1990s. And if you go back to the context of 2008 and what was going on then. Sort of a finger wag to say, Look, its now here.

Youve copied those exact conditions and you will now be perpetually stuck with a broken monetary policy lever and you cant pull on it anymore. And so youre going to have to print money and youre going to have to do along the lines of what you just mentioned, a Japanification of your economy. Is that what youve seen over the last 10 years? Is that where you see things continuing to go?

Nic Carter: I would be shocked if the Fed did anything other than continue on its current trajectory, which does sort of indicate that we would be going for more of an Abenomics, Japanese approach to a demographic slow down and just the end of the high growth era. Its really funny though, I havent heard that theory for the Satoshi pseudonym before. Its pretty good though.

Nolan Bauerle: Yeah, I remember reading it somewhere, honestly in 2012 or 2013 and I have never been able to find the source. But maybe I dreamt it. I dont know where I got it from, but I have been operating under that assumption since 2012. So maybe Im crazy, I dont know.

Nic Carter: I like the Japan case study, though, because its always a good rebuttal to the people that claim that the stock market always goes up in real terms. Theres this real cult of passive investing with the idea that the stock market will just reliably return 8 percent nominal, 6 percent real every year in perpetuity. I think thats asinine. And if you look at the Nikkei, I think it peaked in something like 1985 maybe and you just about broke even not too long ago if youd held the Nikkei from 85 to present, which is a great rebuttal to this notion that growth is permanent and the stock market always goes up.

Nolan Bauerle: And there are some pretty troubling qualities of the, lets say traders and investors using then Nikkei, its not as deep as it once was, thats for sure.

Nic Carter: And the BOJ owns a significant attraction as well, which is like, it seems to be a total distortion of the market.

Nolan Bauerle: Mm-hmm (affirmative), Mm-hmm (affirmative), to make sure it keeps rising.

Nic Carter: Yeah, its a market for these utilities.

Nolan Bauerle: So, Nic, youve had the pleasure and I think the good opportunity earlier in your career to spend a lot of time with I guess what we consider real Wall Street players, really the mainstream financial world was kind of where you got your start in this. Definitely working on cryptocurrencies, but within that environment at your time at Fidelity. And Im wondering now in your position with the VC that you founded, if you still are able to gather the narrative that the mainstream financial world has around Bitcoin and if youve noticed any change in the last six months.

Nic Carter: I think Fidelity was probably a special case in that they were very heterodox in their thinking, relative to the kind of traditional Wall Street firms. I was very, very lucky to start my career there or my second career maybe or my financial career there. They were already primed to be super open-minded to cryptocurrency when I joined because theyd spent several years, starting in 2014, educating themselves on the industry, on Bitcoin. And to some degree, I think all of the big firms, all of the big financial firms that engage with this stuff need to go through that fairly long cycle of learning before theyre ready to sort of productively engage.

And whilst theyre still in the midst of that, you see things like these permission blockchain initiatives, which dont seem particularly interesting to me at least. So my experience is a little bit colored by having been dropped into that already very open-minded environment. But I try and keep my finger on the pulse and talk to my friends that work with hedge funds, traditional allocators. I will say theres been a bit more openness to cryptocurrencies as an asset class. This is also been the experience of the folks at Coin Metrics and very close to, theyre noticing traditional institutions that arent publicly known to have any allocation or engagement with cryptocurrency at all.

Theyre starting to ask about the data. Theyre trying to get smart about how to value bitcoin or at least what maybe the drivers of its price are or what the usage of the network is and other kinds of top cryptocurrencies. So I definitely have noticed a bit of a shift. I think in 2017, institutions for the most part, were very unwilling to engage. There was the big issue with custody, market structure wasnt fully understood and theres still a lot of regulatory questions.

Nolan Bauerle: And a lot of assets to be careful about.

Nic Carter: Of course, yeah and I mean we actually havent seen much of that uncertainty resolved because the SEC has been really standoffish in terms of doing anything about the ITOs. A few of those boxes have been checked in the last couple of years. And I think also in 2017 there was a perception, a correct perception, that it was a heavily retail-driven market and no one really wants to be buying the perceived top, in a market thats very retail-driven. And I think thats changed as well. So theres kind of a growing awareness, I think a lot of what the Wall Street institutions are doing these days is a lot more definitive in terms of acknowledging that cryptocurrencies are real and here to stay.

I also think Libras announcement kind of moved the needle a lot. People really take Facebook seriously and Facebook, for all their flaws, were very earnest in their desire to create a new unit of account, a new non-state money, even if it looks to be rather centralized and problematic in some ways. But the fact that they had been messaging that they would be piggybacking on the infrastructure, which has been built for cryptocurrencies over the last decade, that kind of validates what weve been doing here, to some degree. Even if its a corporation that Im not a huge fan of, which is Facebook.

Nolan Bauerle: But it certainly ionized or has the potential to ionize a huge swath of the global population into the Bitcoin world. So I think that, that definitely got a lot of people paying attention.

Nic Carter: Totally, I think the jurys still out on whether Libra would be a net good or not if it launched. If there were some provisions to preserve user privacy, it could well be a net good. I know thats going to be a bit of a controversial opinion, but if given the choice to hold your savings and like the Indian rupee or the Nigerian naira or mostly dollar-backed Libra basket, which undoubtedly would preserve purchasing power better.

A lot of people would choose the latter and I think the effective outcome of that would be to kind of dollarize a lot of these developing world countries. Which is actually sort of hostile to the local governments and the local currencies. So thats another reason why Im skeptical Libra would actually launch. But its always nice to have another option, whether thats a somewhat permission coin like Libra or a preferable, in my view, something like Bitcoin.

Nolan Bauerle: But certainly it goes back to what you mentioned at the very beginning about the private money sort of reentering the scene and becoming the norm again. I mean, isnt that what its all about? Isnt it about that? Maybe this power of minting money and borrowing and all that. Maybe its inappropriate in general, which is what they were talking about back in 1912 when the fed was set up anyway. I mean those were the conversations they were having then. This power should not be given to politicians, who cant see past their reelection.

Nic Carter: Yeah, whether the algorithm is maybe one day Facebook would use their vast trove of data to pick some sort of non-discretionary algorithm for managing the money supply, which would be interesting. Or maybe well just have the very simple algorithm, which is bitcoins kind of asymptotic issuance, which eventually ends. The constant there is the ending of monetary discretion, which a lot of people have identified as this kind of ironically pro-cyclical force, even though its intended to manage the kind of boom-bust cycle of recessions.

I think in practice its done the opposite and its made them more intense and more destructive. So a lot of bitcoiners think absolutely no discretion whatsoever and capped issuance is the way. Maybe therell be another algorithm which emerges, which is more popular, but its sharing to me that for the first time in a long time, normal folks, all they need is an internet connection and they can fully or partially exit their local currency system.

Nolan Bauerle: So Nic, were coming to the end, our last question of this interesting conversation and youre a data guy. Youre known in the industry as a data guy. The service that you provide the industry with Coin Metrics, the free downloads, which I use regularly. And the more elaborate stuff, which here at CoinDesk weve piped into a long time ago because it is top, top quality. But youre also known for coming up with all these great new ways of understanding Bitcoins behavior from a trading perspective. So whats one chart or trend that youre really looking at right now that really has your attention? Other than the ones that youre creating yourself or I suppose you can actually come up with and I mention one of your own, if you dont mind.

Nic Carter: You know one thing Ive been paying a lot of attention to lately would be this notion of realized capitalization, which was devised as kind of an alternative to market capitalization. What you do is, you take the price at which each unit of Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency of your choice last changed hands and you add all those up. So instead of pricing all of the supply at current market price, you actually look and determine where each last Bitcoin actually traded and settled on the ledger and you add it all up.

And so you get, actually most of the time its a much more conservative view of market cap. And the interesting thing is the realized cap and Bitcoin just passed $100 billion, whereas market cap is somewhere like 150 160 billion I havent checked. And its actually at an all-time high compared with market cap, which is well below its all-time high. And one way that I think about realized cap is that it measures, roughly speaking, the average cost basis of your average holder.

Nolan Bauerle: It almost sounds like a blend of days destroyed and huddle waves. Like youre getting both of the good effects of those metrics and sort of seeing it blended together.

Nic Carter: Yeah, the intuition is kind of similar for sure. Which is why dont we develop a measure of economic significance, which is at least in part, indexed to the actual usage of the ledger, which is transparent. And a lot of people say that the transparency of Bitcoin is this bug and its terrible. And I mean its true when it comes to individual privacy for sure. But its also a feature when it comes to evaluating the economic nature of these things. And in the case of realized cap, it allows us to determine with a good degree of precision, where the market in the aggregate actually bought into their current positions. So its pretty fascinating to watch. And what it shows to me is that for the most part, Bitcoin holders are actually in profit because very little Bitcoin changed hands at those a really extreme heights back in 2017. And for the most part, your average holder obtained their positions at a lower threshold.

Nolan Bauerle: Fascinating stuff, Nic and looking forward to you joining us in November in New York City for Consensus Invest, where youll be speaking about more data.

Nic Carter: Thats right. Looking forward to it as well. Thanks for having me on.

Nolan Bauerle: Thanks a ton.

Enjoyed this episode? Id like to personally invite you to come to Invest New York in November. The event features not only the speaker you just heard, but an array of other amazing thinkers. Visit coindesk.com and click events or simply follow the link in the description. Thanks for listening and see you in New York City.

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PODCAST: Nic Carter on Bitcoin's Evolution as a Safe-Haven Asset - CoinDesk

In thePokmonseries, the final evolution is supposed to be... the one. You know, the most famous of any evolution line, the favorite. Whose favorite Pokmon is Charmeleon? It's just an elderly Charmander. However, there are some fully evolved Pokmon that just don't really stack up to the rest of its evolutionary line. Today, we're going to be taking a look at five of those Pokmon. We're also going to be looking at... you know, the just evolve them types. Let's get into it.

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Look at this birb. How could you ever make him grow? It's unacceptable. While Decidueye is cool... that's no justification. Rowlet is cool, confident, elegant, classy, empowering, every positive adjective in the book. Evolving Rowlet is basically just choosing to be a horrible trainer. There's no reason to do it. Besides, who wants to deal with Dartrix before even getting to Decidueye? Rowlet may not have the best stats, but just absurdly over-level him and that isn't an issue at all.

And then on the opposite end of fantastic starter Pokmon, we have Froakie. Froakie really isn't that great on his own... he looks... dumb. He's basically just begging for an evolution. Of course, he ends up as Greninja, who, despite an alarming amount of tongue, has a really neat design. Froakie isn't doing anything special at all, while Greninja is just out here killing it. If you find yourself introduced as aSmash Bros.character, you're certainly doing something right. Greninja is one you need to evolve into.

After you evolve Treecko, you find yourself with a Grovyle. Stop there. Grovyle has an absolutely amazing design, and is far superior to its evolution, Sceptile. Of course, Grovyle rose to prominence as its own Pokmon with its inclusion in thePokmon Mystery Dungeonseries. Grovyle is one of the few middle evolution Pokmon that is actually good, so maybe stick with it over the largely eh design we get with its evolution into Sceptile. Just look at this little icon. That high pony... Ariana Grande who? We only stan Grovyle in this house.

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You know who's a pretty cool dude? Staryu. You know who the coolest dude on the block is? Starmie. Starmie is literally just Staryu but a lil bit more everywhere it counts. It's got the same design with a few amped up features and a better color scheme. It still has that horribly offputting anime voice, so that's a bonus. Besides the design, Starmie is an absolute UNIT, still hanging on as a great part of the UU metagame seven Generations in. If you're choosing to use Staryu over Starmie (or both at the same time, which Misty did for no explicable reason), then you're really missing out on a fantastic evolution.

Bidoof looks like a great time, someone you go to hang out with when you see them at a party. Bibarel looks like someone that you cross the street to get away from when you see them. Bidoof has everything that Bibarel has, and so much more. There's really no reason to take Bibarel over Bidoof, considering how much you lose in the process of evolution. Look at that little face. Who couldn't love it? Bibarel better be the box legendary for theDiamond and Pearlremakes. Both box legendaries.

Sure, Flabb is cute, but it isn't a Pokmon that you're going to be sticking with. What you're going to want to do here is to evolve your Flabb into a Floette. That's a winner right there. However, that's where you're going to want to stop. Floette has everything it needs, and evolving into Florges is not part of the plan here. Just atrocious. Now, if we could get Eternal Flower Floette finally realised at any point... that's a good one. But until then, stick with your favorite color of Floette, not Flabb or Florges.

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Wigglytuff certainly has its own merits, let's get that clear. It is an absolute STAR in theMystery Dungeonseries. However, it really suffered a major loss, having its pre-evolved form being Jigglypuff. Jigglypuff is a singer, model and fighter, a triple threat. Wigglytuff does all of that too, but at like a B level. Wigglytuff is, sadly, just a downgrade from Jigglypuff in just about every way. While it isn't a total loss to evolve your Jigglypuff, there's simply no reason to do so. It's basically Raichu.

Salandit is really just another case of needing an evolution badly. Salazzle is a beautifully designed Pokmon, and its pre-evolution is nothing short of boring. Unfortunately, some - no - most Salandits don't have the ability to evolve, as only females can. As Salandit is a 75% male Pokmon... well. Good luck. Better yet, try shiny hunting this thing. An absolute NIGHTMARE. So many Salandits are just born for subpar-ness. What a shame.

Psyduck is another Pokmon that shows up its evolution in just about every way imaginable. Of course, this is mainly due to Misty's Psyduck in the anime. It was a water Pokmon that needed floaties to swim, did everything it tried to badly, and was absolutely adorable in just about every way imaginable. With this in mind, it just doesn't seem right to evolve your Psyduck into a Golduck. How could you ever do such a thing? It isn't right.

Of course, Eevee is one that you're always going to want to evolve, as that is its entire hook. Eevee has the ability to evolve into eight different Pokmon as of now. There's one for just about everyone, and it is likely that we'll see more in the coming years. Eevee can fit just about any archetype it needs with its various evolutions, so it's plain to see that you're not going to be keeping this one in its base form for long. Just don't evolve it into Flareon. The worst of them all by FAR.

NEXT:Pokmon: 10 Smartest Trainers In The Anime, Ranked

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5 Great Pokmon That Get Worse With Each Evolution (& 5 Weak Ones You Need To Evolve) - CBR - Comic Book Resources