Re: War, Confucious and the CBD
Ed, I am a private entrepreneur who must examine everything in order to survive, however you could help on this if when you say: Hi Ray, I won't comment on Marx or Keynes except to say that your library book has wronged them both. 1. you explained what you meant about the economists(Marx and Keynes) since you are one. I realize how arrogant it is of me to do this but please accept a civilian's questions. What form of massive government spending is sustainable over a number of years at great cost to the average citizen and yet remains popular? A defensive war perhaps? Keynes = government spending and where does the government spend more? in a war that demands life and death loyalty or prison? Not many would be as blatant or passionate in their questions as we civilians, but perhaps there is a bit of peasant good sense at work here. yes? 2. on the other hand, I want to share a story I was taught in college. My music history course in college taught us that all music began in monody (single melody) evolved through a parallel melody called parallel organum and became counterpoint and then melody and harmony. It began with church chants and ended with symphony orchestras moving out of tonality and into the brave new world of complicated atonality. It makes perfect sense if the world is only Western and began to sing 1500 years ago. Out of one million years of human music and expression, no body questioned that this history made ancient music out of music that was less than one thousand years old.But then the world got smaller and all of those communist universities began to explore the lead of Bela Bartok who became an expert in Hungarian "folk" music and wrote his own modern music around aesthetic ideas found in the folk music. These same ideas were atonal and polytonal and thoroughly up to date but they were truly ancient. The communist universities went out into the back country and listened to peasant women singing and improvising atonal music while they cut the hay in the fields. They played games that were as sophisticated as the most sophisticated modern music and they had been doing it for God only knows how long. But the point here is that although the official story made sense in the limited context of Europe and the church, it was inaccurate. They didn't even acknowledge the gift from the Gypsies with music that traveled with the Jews and blossomed into some of the 19th centuries most interesting and complicated scores. No, instead you got the simplistic jargon that ultimately made both Jews and Gypsies simpletons and parasites on the "true" aryan musical tree. But that wasn't true either. In fact they found those original church chants being sung in Yemen by Jews that had been separated from the rest of the world since before 2,000 years ago. So the chants were Jewish!After WW II the Jews became the excepted international group in the West while the Gypsies were outcasts. (They had to register with the police in New Jersey simply to travel and their banks were constantly raided and robbed by the police in the U.S., see the "Romany against the city of Spokane" over this and other issues of prejudice) Even though the Gypsies lost 75% of their population in Dachau, there is only one Gypsy representative to the Holocaust museum in Washington and they had to fight for that. On the other hand, although many of the original Communists were Jewish in Russia, the Russians embraced the Gypsies and made outcasts of the Jews. Gypsies had their theaters and were found in all of the performing arts organizations. They also were able to travel freely from one country to another while the Jews were actually prisoners in their own homes if they wanted to leave the country. My point to this story is that it was based upon models in the minds of people in the East and West and very little of it is based upon historical fact. Wish, but not fact. Now let us take your economic story. I can give you a lot of facts on this because I found that my research didn't match the official stories and so I had to dig. Both Lawrence W. Levine and Richard Crawford have written studies on much of this and I would recommend them for their erudition into the social contract that has created the current mess. I don't have time to fill it out and they have done it better than I anyway. Levine's Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard are called "Highbrow/Lowbrow, The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy In America" Harvard pub. and Crawford's work is described in the latest issue of the NEH Humanities magazine. He is editor for the NEH for the forty volume series of Music in America and is just finishing an earthshaking new American musical history textbook for University use. It will churn the butter. What I, of course like, is that he has documented the same discoveries that I have also made, but not from the place of the performer but of the scholar. You
Re: Cdn brain drain confirmed - in National Article - Jul 21 (fwd)
Report States: In Toronto yesterday, Allan Rock, the Health Minister, unveiled a $147-million program to discourage top Canadian medic researchers from moving to the U.S., where American researchers receive an average of $260,000 for their projects compared to $70,000 in Canada. Thomas: I recently read in the Ottawa Citizen of a scientist (Cdn) of international renown being given a grant to study something in health. In recruiting his team, it turned out that all were ex-Cdn's in other countries who couldn't wait to get back to Canada. Now, rather than the brain drain being a reflection of taxes, it may be a reflection of our branch plant mentality. Most of the big corporations in Canada, are branch plants of European or American Companies who are doing the essential research in their own countries. Our best brains want to be on the cutting edge, so they go where there is opportunity. Rather than reducing taxes, our government should be massively funding more RD and utilizing the advanced skills of those Cnd's who have left the country and want to return. Secondly, we should be putting much more money into Universities to develop RD so that our students have the chance to work with world class scientists on world class projects. Lowering taxes is not the problem in my opinion, lack of opportunity is the problem and that is a reflection of the decisions of government. Report States: The income gap between the U.S. and Canada is now an average of $7,000 and growing. Thomas: This points to an income gap, ie wages, rather than a tax problem. With a $.66 dollar, our wages are so low that it only makes common sense to sell your brains for $1.00 - dollar. Again it is the policies of the Federal Government and The Bank of Canada that has ruined our currency value. This has nothing to do with taxes and a lot to do with the $666 Billion dollar debt we are paying 50 Billion in interest on and which was primarily caused by ol Mr. John Crow and his anti inflationary fight supported by that paragon of Conservative values and American ass kissing the Rt. Honorable Brian Mulronney. The neo-con solution of lowering taxes will further reduce our ability to pay our debt which will make our dollar even weaker in the currency markets causing more talented people to leave. Report states: However, the IMD report gives Canada a poor score for high personal income taxe that it suggests discourages individual work initiative. Out of 47 countries, Canada is 35th for low tax rates, while the U.S. is ranked seven. Hong Kong is the star performer in keeping taxes low. Thomas: I would like to see how wide that variance is? Comments of the Conservative Party Scott Brison, the Conservative Party finance critic, said the Swiss report should serve as a wake-up call for the prime minister to take seriously demands from groups, such as the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, to slash personal and corporate income taxes. Last week, the chamber urged the government to cut taxes by $9-billion over two years or $1,700 per family annually. Thomas: If we are talking about $1,700 less taxes that poor people would have to pay, there might be some small merit in the Conservative critics thinking. However, I suspect that $1,700 is a statistical average which means the rich will get big tax cuts and the poor will see a very tiny tax cut. As to Corporate taxes, they are only paying 20% of the bill currently, why don't we just cut to the chase and let them be exempt from taxes all together. Then the can complain that it is the high cost of labour and they can lay off everyone and we can watch the system collapse completely. Report states: Despite Canada's poor score card on keeping well-educated people, the IMD yearbook gives Canada a high ranking for competitiveness. When overall competitiveness is factored, Canada ranks 10th behind Germany, Denmark, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Finland, Singapore and the U.S. Thomas: I guess if we are to take this statement seriously, it says that all those second rate Canadian Brains that stay at home are quite capable of giving us 10th spot in the world of competitiveness. Maybe allowing our best to leave the country is a humanitarian gesture, for if we kept our best at home, we might be the most competive nation on Earth - whatever that means. Report states: However, the IMD report gives Canada a poor score for high personal income taxes it suggests discourages individual work initiative. Canada ranked 35th for low tax rates, while the U.S. ranked 7th. Hong Kong was the star performer in keeping taxes low. Thomas: Now, let me see if I've got this right. Mr. Brain goes to work, but sometime during the day, he reflects on his personal tax load, so instead of finishing the equation he was working on or reading the report he was gathering information from, he suddenly is discouraged and his personal initiative drops and he takes his Playboy magazine out of his
Some sanity Planning
Title: Some sanity Planning Thomas: This, to me, is an example of the right use of planning. Not only does it work economically by reducing the taxes through lower spending, but it provides a hands on experience for the students of proper environmental design at a most effective and impressionable time in the life of future adults. Much of our knowledge comes from books and teaching/learning - true. And much comes from the environment in which we grow up. I know that much of my sense of what's right comes from my childhood on the farm, traveling across North America on family vacations, playing in schoolyards, going to government parks and camping. I try to replicate some of my memories for my children, but for many kids, it is daycare while mom and dad work, eviction from schoolyards because there is no supervision, TV propagating mindless social values such as Friends and The Simpsons. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde EarthVision Reports 07/21/99 LOS ANGELES, July 21, 1999 - The enormously expansive Los Angeles Unified School District is giving itself an expensive facelift - tearing out thousands of acres of asphalt at hundreds of campuses and replacing it with grass and trees. Each school, according to an article published today in The Los Angeles Times, is developing its own landscaping plan. The district is footing the bill of about $190 million, money that is partly from a 1997 school construction bond and partly from the Department of Water and Power's Cool Schools program. Concurrent to all the greening, the district has also launched a program it is calling sustainable schools, a term meant to suggest that each campus should produce its own energy, collect its own water and feed its own students. Although those lofty goals are not likely to happen anytime soon, The Times said in the article that each school will work hard to become less of a drag on public resources. Some of the options currently being considered are solar panels on rooftops to generate electricity, and cisterns to capture rainwater for irrigation. The district is even considering building tunnels under classrooms to bathe the students in air cooled to the constant 55-degree underground temperature. According to the article, the main inspiration for the Los Angeles initiative is the sketchbooks of Scott Wilson, a landscape architect and environmental visionary who is the founder of North East Trees, an organization that has planted thousands of trees across California's Arroyo Seco basin in the last decade. Associated Link: [1]North East Trees 1. http://www.treelink.org/act/mem/netree.htm 2. http://204.255.211.112/ColdFusion/news_top10.cfm?start=1
How interesting NAFTA may be found to be illegal!
Title: How interesting NAFTA may be found to be illegal! Thomas: The things you find on the Internet are truly amazing. I have not seen one word of this in the press or magazines I often review - and yet here is a time bomb that has been building while we have been worrying about Princess Di and JFK Jr. untimely demises. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde From: Mark Graffis [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thursday, July 22, 1999 Obscure Lawsuit Could Alter U.S. Trade Policy By EVELYN IRITANI, Los Angeles Times Trade advocates are bracing for a ruling by a federal judge in Alabama in a little-noticed lawsuit whose outcome could dramatically alter the way the U.S. has conducted its trade policy over four decades. Sometime in the next few weeks, U.S. District Judge Robert Propst is expected to rule in a labor-backed lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the landmark North American Free Trade Agreement. The case has attracted the attention of some of the nation's top legal scholars. Although a finding of unconstitutionality would not undo the 1993 pact, it could make it more difficult for the United States to commit itself to future international endeavors and cast doubt on the legitimacy of a host of other global agreements, according to Bruce Ackerman, one of the nation's leading constitutional scholars. It would destabilize the existing system of international law, said the Yale University professor. It would be difficult to declare NAFTA unconstitutional without calling into question our commitment to the WTO, the World Bank and many, many other economic arrangements. Such a scenario would also put the U.S. in the uncomfortable position of being committed under international law to a trade agreement that its own courts ruled in violation of its founding document. This is a Rod Serling plot, said Robert Stumberg, an international law expert at Georgetown University's Harrison Institute for Public Law. We [would now have] entered the twilight zone, where an agreement that is binding on the U.S. vis-a-vis the rest of the world cannot be enforced internally. The case itself turns on the relatively narrow question of whether NAFTA, which links the economies of the U.S., Canada and Mexico in a giant free-trade zone, is a trade agreement or a treaty. That question has historically been decided on a case-by-case basis as legal scholars and politicians debated when a pact has a broad enough impact to meet the higher test of a treaty. During the first 150 years of U.S. history, most of this country's major foreign policy commitments were forged through treaties, according to Ackerman. But after World War II, when international trade exploded, leaders began relying more heavily on some form of congressional-executive branch agreement rather than treaties to facilitate more commercial growth. Between 1930 and 1992, the United States ratified 891 treaties and 13,178 international agreements, the government said. The plaintiffs--the Made in the USA foundation, a coalition of domestic manufacturers and unions, and the United Steelworkers of America--argue that NAFTA's scope qualifies it as a treaty that, under the U.S. Constitution, required ratification by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, instead of the simple majority of both houses of Congress that favored it. The Clinton administration insists NAFTA is not a treaty but a congressional executive agreement, a common tool in U.S. trade policy that requires the approval of a simple majority of both houses. The administration maintains that even if the plaintiffs win their constitutional challenge, NAFTA would remain in place because the U.S. is bound under international law to honor its commitments to foreign governments. Under international law, we are not allowed to say, 'Sorry, Mexico, sorry, Canada, we didn't do this right,' Justice Department attorney Martha Rubio argued in court earlier this year. Given the stakes, a successful challenge to NAFTA is likely to be tied up in appeals for years as it wends its way to the Supreme Court, according to trade lawyers--and to create a long period of uncertainty for U.S. trade policy. This legal skirmish is just the latest effort by globalization critics to slow the Clinton administration's campaign to open markets around the world. With the U.S. trade deficit headed for another record year, unions and other groups are counting on lawsuits, shareholder activism and old-fashioned protests to draw attention to their concerns over job loss and erosion of national sovereignty. In spite of the robust U.S. economy and near-record low unemployment, the Clinton administration has had a tough time convincing voters that free-trade agreements such as NAFTA are in their best interests. The administration gives NAFTA credit for boosting trade between the U.S. and its NAFTA neighbors by more than 44% and creating at least 311,000 jobs. But the Made in the USA Foundation contends the trade agreement has cost more than 400,000 American
Re: War, Confucious and the CBD
And I would guess that in xxx years from now people will look back on the commuters, subway riders and busy busy people and say what? You mean people went into a Kafka/Mondrian environment and parroted the party line just to get paid. No wonder there is so little incentive to break the work/income nexus. arthur -- Was it not always thus? People do not recognize that they are living in a Kafka/Mondrian environment nor are they likely to in future. Occasionally they catch glimpses of it, but they quickly look away and focus on the steady and comfortable. Kafka is something they had to read at university, if they got that far and took arts, and Mondrian is something they see at the gallery, if they ever go there. Besides, given the horrors the world has lived through since the one wrote and the other painted, they are both really very tame -- hardly contradictions at all. And why should people want to see the work/income nexus broken? For most people, both are tolerable if not comfortable, and the nexus is deeply imbedded in our traditions. As workfare, it has now become deeply imbedded in our politics. The day of letting those snotty little welfare cheats take our hard earned tax dollars without pretending to work is over. Ed Weick
Marx, Keynes and Ancestors
Ray: I don't mean to complain or flame you Ed, but these stories are stereotypes and myths that have been used to put a group of people, who I don't feel deserve what they have, above all others. I don't feel flamed. I must say that I feel a little overwhelmed. I was only trying to make a couple of points. One is that neither Marx nor Keynes intended war to be an outcome of their theorizing. Keynes's advocated cyclical fiscal policy, meaning, essentially, that it was wrong for governments to be parsimonious during a recession and free spending during a period of inflation. Government's role is to stabilize. I don't recall ever reading anything by him or any commentary on him that increased (not 'massive' as you put it) spending during a recession should be on armaments or on warfare. Marx was concerned with the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. But, again, nothing I've read by or on Marx has ever suggested that once the proletariat has taken over, it should develop the weapons of war. Politicians have used the ideas of both men to fulfill their own purposes, but in doing so, they have often distorted them into something they were not intended to be. My other point was almost a question. We in the western world are now rich beyond measure. Even the poor live to a higher standard than was typical of the well to do a hundred and fifty years ago. Whom should we thank for this, if anyone? I suggested that we thank our ancestors who had no options but lifelong work in factories and mines. We have benefited because they were exploited. The fact that, in Marxist terms, they produced 'surplus value' that capitalists could then use to create more capital and exploit more of our ancestors has been fundamental to creating the wealth we enjoy today. I do recognize, however, that other things, such as the growing application of science to production and to daily life, were also important. I also recognize that our affluence has not come without growing environmental and social costs, and that capital built on the backs of our ancestors has not only produced abundance but also weapons of mass destruction. What is sad about 'progress', or whatever one wants to call it, is that something is gained but something is also lost. Some fifty years ago, the Inuit of northern Canada still lived migratory lives on the land. An anthropologist friend told me that on northern Baffin Island, where he spent a year among them, they had some seventy different words for snow. Inuit now live in fixed villages. They still venture out in hunting parties, but do not spend nearly as much time on the land as they once did. Many young Inuit can barely speak their language, let alone name snow in seventy different ways. In our Indian villages, I've seen old grannies scold children in the native language, which the children no longer understand, and besides, it's alright to ignore old grannies now. At one time, it was strictly taboo. The gains have been many. The ill-mannered children stand a much greater chance of survival to a ripe old age, being educated (as we understand education) and earning a good living than their ancestors of even a generation ago. Yet much that is irreplaceable has also been lost. That is the price people pay, usually without knowing it, for something they think we are getting without any real idea of what it is. Ed Weick
Green GDP indicator
Greetings, Many discussions on Futurework stimulate some of us to repeatedly interject that goods, services, credits, and debits are not nearly the whole picture. Here is an indication that the US leadership will have some of these ideas presented to them by a body widely recognized as authoritative, The National Acadamies. Steve Subject: Environmental Accounting Needed For More Accurate Picture of U.S. Economy WASHINGTON - A new National Research Council report has urged Congress to authorise the Department of Commerce to renew development of a "Green GDP" indicator which would track economic output and take environmental issues into account. The National Research Council said in a report published late last week the development of "green" economic indicators would benefit the United States which it claimed has fallen behind other countries in efforts to link economic growth and natural-resource consumption. http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/0309071518?OpenDocument
Re: War, Confucious and the CBD -- Mondrian and Kafka
Ed Weick wrote: And I would guess that in xxx years from now people will look back on the commuters, subway riders and busy busy people and say what? You mean people went into a Kafka/Mondrian environment and parroted the party line just to get paid. No wonder there is so little incentive to break the work/income nexus. arthur -- Was it not always thus? People do not recognize that they are living in a Kafka/Mondrian environment nor are they likely to in future. [snip] May I ask what Mondrian has to do with Kafka? The Kafka-[ab]world is all too much with us (I've spent much of the past year in a couple of the less extreme places where it is flourishing today on earth). But my understanding of Mondrian is that he was a kind of "mystic", and that the "austerity" of his art (not that his last few paintings, e.g., "Broadway Boogie-woogie", are all that austere!) was an expression of hopes and a vision of a good life, not fears and "consumption". I am not an expert on Mondrian (with one or two "a"'s in the last syllable), but I do find his paintings *hopeful* for a world of light (both illumination -- "Lux mentis lux orbis" -- and lightness, e.g., Nietzsche's notion that we need to "overcome the spirit of gravity"). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Marx, Keynes and Ancestors
Ed Weick wrote: [snip] My other point was almost a question. We in the western world are now rich beyond measure. Even the poor live to a higher standard than was typical of the well to do a hundred and fifty years ago. Whom should we thank for this, if anyone? I suggested that we thank our ancestors who had no options but lifelong work in factories and mines. We have benefited because they were exploited. The fact that, in Marxist terms, they produced 'surplus value' that capitalists could then use to create more capital and exploit more of our ancestors has been fundamental to creating the wealth we enjoy today. [snip] I certainly agree that our prosperity has been bought at the cost of great suffering in the past. The thought crosses my mind as I write this that, if the Capitalists were not able to dismiss the early period of capital accumulation (the Dickensian "world") as history, the process of capital accumulation in the FREE WORLD might not look all that much better than the Soviet Union's industrialization under Stalin. But I want to go off here in a different direction: I agree that, in "objective" measures, the poor today are "better off" than the rich in earlier ages. A feudal baron's abode didn't have heat, and everybody slept in one room, etc. *However*: I think this way of viewing the contrast is one-sided. For the feudal baron had *power* and *respect* and a arge measure of *personal agency*, along with his primitive living conditions. The present day American "poor" have none of these "human goods". I invite you to carry on this train of thought for yourself Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote (at the end of _Wind, Sand and Stars_) that poverty is not the real problem: He noted that orientals have long lived in filth and liked it. The real problem, he went on to say: Is the tragedy of "a little bit of Mozart murdered" in each of these persons whose cultural possibilities are foreclosed by their low social status. What is sad about 'progress', or whatever one wants to call it, is that something is gained but something is also lost. Some fifty years ago, the Inuit of northern Canada still lived migratory lives on the land. An anthropologist friend told me that on northern Baffin Island, where he spent a year among them, they had some seventy different words for snow. Inuit now live in fixed villages. They still venture out in hunting parties, but do not spend nearly as much time on the land as they once did. Many young Inuit can barely speak their language, let alone name snow in seventy different ways. In our Indian villages, I've seen old grannies scold children in the native language, which the children no longer understand, and besides, it's alright to ignore old grannies now. At one time, it was strictly taboo. The gains have been many. The ill-mannered children stand a much greater chance of survival to a ripe old age, being educated (as we understand education) and earning a good living than their ancestors of even a generation ago. Yet much that is irreplaceable has also been lost. That is the price people pay, usually without knowing it, for something they think we are getting without any real idea of what it is. [snip] Here, again, I would like to point out a different possibility. There was an article in the New York Times a few months ago (ref. lost) about one of the tribal societies in Africa, where female genital mutilation and other "native", non-Western, etc. practices still prevailed. This culture, the article described, is doing something different: The elders have gotten together and undertaken a thoughtful examination of all their customs and all the "Western" customs, and these elders are eliminating from their culture the traditions that no longer seem useful (like genital mutilation), and keeping the customs which still seem good. *Clearly*, however this endeavor turns out, their culture can no longer be considered traditional, because it is no longer holding to its traditions through unreflected habit (see, e.g., Edward Hall's _The Silent Language_), but rather is *choosing* its form of life thematically. Imagine if our society took a similarly enlightened attitude toward *its* ethnic customs: If we studied the stock market (etc.) and decided what parts of it were useful and what parts were not Enlightenment is not something "Western", but Universal. That it happened in the West, in classical Greece and late-Medieval Western Europe was like a meteor falling from the sky among these people. We have yet, for the most part although not without exceptions, to prove ourselves worthy of having received this gift, or shown ourselves good (or even: good enough...) stewards of it. "For the spirit alone is immortal." (Edmund Husserl) ...by which he was not refering to "spirits" (be they Medieval Roman Catholic, 20th Century new-Age, or whatever), but to the event of consciousness taking
Re: FW: Data media (was re: Charles Leadbetter)
pete wrote: "Thomas Lunde" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just recently, I was reading a posting about all the early computer tapes, discs, hard drives, etc that we are losing for two reasons, one the storage devices are deteriotating and two we are losing the disk drives, operating systems, formats, in which this knowledge was stored. [snip] Each time the data is migrated, the experimenters have to decide what data they feel is worth spending the time to copy, and of course, a lot is discarded. Does this matter? It's hard to say. One could reasonably argue that there is no earthly reason why anyone would ever want to look at old particle physics data tapes again. On the other hand, we still have the log books of experiments from two hundred years ago, and people still like to go back and look at some of the notable ones, those from significant experiments, or famous experimenters. But the people who do this are rarely doing it to check the data, rather they are historians of science or commentators on scientific method. Future counterparts would find very little of value on data tapes. [snip] Certainly astronomy is one science in which this does not apply. I believe contemporary astronomers are still using ancient Babylonian observations to help figure out where the stars are moving. Second, I would like to quote (from defective memory) something Enrico Fermi said ca. 1940, speaking of one cloud chamber photograph from about 1930: He said that had he paid better attention to a certain detail of that picture, he would have made one of his most important discoveries ten years earlier than he did. If the entropy of electronic documents gets bad enough, we may find ourselves losing our history, and becoming in an ironic way like our primary-oral ancestors: With only the present version of a past (bards' tales for them; recent computer files for us -- it is worth noting that the epic poems of primary-oral societies, through various poetic techniques of rhyme, rhythm, etc. implement powerful *Error Detection and Correction* coding -- very much like computer data). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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