Caesar 🏛️ Crosses the Rubicon 🌊

Julius Caesar

🏛️ Crosses the Rubicon 🌊 

Feb 1, 2019 - This video describes the the campaign of Julius Caesar in Italy, from January to March 49 BC, against the forces of the roman senate.
After crossing the Rubicon river as a rebel against the republic with one legion only, Caesar swift advance throughout Italy ended with the capture of Rome and the withdrawal of the senate and Pompey forces in Greece.
The events are based on Caesar's own account, with the chronology slightly modified in accordance to other sources and Cicero's dated letters from that period.

Julius CaesarCrosses the Rubicon

(52 to 49 B.C.E.)
https://youtu.be/aRl3lZL1e3Y

"Crossing the Rubicon" is an idiom that means that one is passing a point of no return. Its meaning comes from allusion to the crossing of the river Rubicon by Julius Caesar in early January 49 BC. The exact date is unknown. Scholars usually place it on the night of 10 and 11 January, based on contemporaneous messenger travel speeds.
The phrase made its way into American popular culture to describe a situation where there is no turning back.

Narrator : Christian H Miles ( https://twitter.com/christianhmiles )
Music by Filmstro
Please consider support our channel  at https://www.patreon.com/syntagma.

Comments

1. Excellent.  Accurate, eloquent and succinct.Perfectly narrated. I think this would readily lead viewers in to wanting to learn more about the historical detail.
2. Though familiar with the significance of "crossing the Rubicon" since a child reading history books, I never learned about the intricacies and strategies involved in Caesar's consolidation of power in Italy. I love the use of the unit animations to give us a sense of manpower as it ebbed and flowed on either side. Like a table top game with toy soldiers. Great job, and very engaging!
3. I have read several books on Caesar and the late Republic, but these animated events in this video really help me understand why and how Caesar fought or won battles in the Civil War.
4. They say a pictures worth a thousand words but each of your videos are worth at least a chapter of a book on Caesar!!
5. Incredible work! Sincerely, one of the best videos of strategy i've ever seen. The changing of maps, the narrator's voice and the own power of history combine into a really great video! Thanks for your work.
6. Fantastic animations, clear vocals (for once without howling music in the background) and great detailed information and commentary.
7. Wow this is great! I had no idea about any of this. I just assumed he crossed the Rubicon and a few days later walked into Rome…thanks for this. I was thinking when watching this, imagine what so many in the past such as Patton or Napoleon would have paid for such wonderful technology.  My ONLY suggestion would be maybe a 60 second lesson in the beginning from that wonderful narrator explaining a little better what actually led up to the Senate’s anger at Caesar that started all this.  Great job, thanks again & I can’t wait to see more of your stuff.

Caesar in Spain

Part 1

Rome to Ilerda

https://youtu.be/vdAmqjw-PAU

Aug 25, 2019  - 3d animation describing the events that followed after the capture of Rome by Caesar and the retreat of Pompey in Greece in march 49BC, based on Caesar's own account.
With Italy secured, lacking a fleet to cross the sea and follow his enemy in Greece, Caesar decides to take his army to Spain and attack Pompey's loyal legions located there.
Delayed on the way by the opposition of Masillia, Caesar sends forward his legions into Spain.
In June 49BC he resumes his march and joins his men at Ilerda, Both sides  engaged in a 2 months campaign of maneuvering, with Caesar facing attrition and major weather events.

• Music made with Filmstro
• Narrator: Christian H. Miles ( https://twitter.com/christianhmiles )

Comments

1. I watch Kings and Generals, BazBattles, HistoryMarche, Armchair Historian, Invicta, Historia Civilis and any other I can find, and yours is the best. Keep em coming and you WILL have over a million subscribers one day not to mention make a crap load of money.
2. "Armchair Historian" cover most timeline in history, art-work on important people to famous person in history, with model in animation + some face came.
3. "Invicta" cover more story, moments & facts, reinforced by a lot very nice art-work ( some time's simply but full of detail & colors ) from Ancient time to Modern day + some live footage.
4. "BazBattles" forcus more on bird eye views on event & battle formation, with detail terrain & weather in good quality while cover around Ancient time to late Medieval era (with some Game of Thorns)
5. "Historia Civilis" have very simple bird eye views but add some humor to his work, using lots of colorful "square" people and cover some Ancient Greece, then Macedonia & Rome history (so far)
6. "Kings & Generals" have ... "general" bird eye views perspective on event & battle, lots of art-work, using Total Wars footage, great narator, cover more timeline in history, sometimes showing battle in 3D, but with good quality overall.
7. ( I love watching all of there Channels video, but didn't know about HistoryMarche & just found Syntagma hours ago. Still, so far "Syntagma" have the most detailed & impressive 3D model, good looking terrain & transition to bird eye views. I really like the History of both Roman Republic & Roman Empire, and i can't wait to watched more video from this channel.)
8. I'm sorry for this unnecessary long comments, but I'm glad if you read all of them. I wish you have a good day & good fortune in your future.

  

Caesar in Spain

Part  2 

Turning the tide

Jan 7, 2020  The second part of Caesar in Spain series, describing the events from June and July 49 BC near the city of Ilerda, Hispania.
Unexpected weather events place Caesar in a strategic disadvantage against the Pompeian forces. Eventually, Caesar finds a way to cross the Sicoris with his legions,  turning the odds of the campaign in his favor.

https://youtu.be/7fdyqZip6G8

• Music made with Filmstro
• Narrator: Christian H. Miles ( https://twitter.com/christianhmiles

Comments

1. When’s part 3 coming out ? You do a great job explaining and showing us this amazing history
2. Man I'm dying for the sequel, some other channels have the whole Battle of Ilerda but I wanna watch it here in Syntagma. Superb production
3. Guys, even narratives employing minimalist graphics, like Historia Civilis
4.  release only 3 or 4 videos a year now, do you genuinely expect this channel, which pays even more effort in the graphic detail, to work any faster?
5. (Historia Civilis's video on the same event:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypYnqMnh8Ds)
6. I appreciate both channels for quality before quantity.
7. Such amazing quality... makes the wait definitely worth it.
8. There’s been a lot of these historic battle recreation videos as of late. My 2 favorite have been BazBattles and Kings and Generals. I can confidently say you are by far the best content creator in this genre, as you dive much more in-depth into a battle than other channels. Your story telling is exciting and engaging, the 3D animations are incredible, and you can’t help but get into the perspective of Caesar. It’s such a shame that your not posting more regularly as I can see you easily go over 500K subscribers. Might I suggest some click baits to boost your numbers by making some game of thrones battle re-creation. Please let me know if you start a GoFundMe campaign as if be more than happy to contribute for such incredible quality of work.

Caesar in Spain

Part  3
A victory without a battle

The third part of the Caesar in Spain series, describing the  maneuvering campaign of Julius Caesar's around the city of Ilerda and Iberus river against the loyal legions of Pompey,  July -  august 49 BC.  

https://youtu.be/FZ8jIa1jKto

Comments

1. This channel is a Jupiter’s gift to us common viewers ☀️ These videos are rare but so good 👍  Quality over quantity is what YouTube been lacking recently.
2. I’ve listened to this story told dozens of times in Caesars war commentaries audio-book. Feels great finally having a visual representation of the story.
3. This is probably my favorite of all of Caesar's campaigns and one of my favorites campaigns ever. Caesar defeating a large enemy army without ever fighting any major battle is absolutely impressive, and shows how good Caesar actual was.
4. I've seen this story on YouTube before, but never with such detail and such clarity as in your three part series. I never even realized before that this entire campaign was fought with basically no major battles at all. Crazy, though, that the Caesarians could take a defeat at the gates of Ilerda and make it seem like a victory because of how fiercely they fought.
5. These videos are absolutely amazing! The narrative, the graphics! Well done sir.
6. My only objection is that the music is a little to loud, in regards to your own voice.

Julius Caesar Trailer

2020  The trailer for the Julius Caesar series that covered the crossing of Rubicon river, the siege of Brundisium and the Ilerda campaign in 49 BC.

https://youtu.be/2UlLlgX4RPk

 

 Why Do We Say ‘Crossing the Rubicon’?

When Julius Caesar crossed this small Italian river, he established history’s most famous point of no return.
Gregory Wakeman * January 08, 2026

In January 49 B.C., Julius Caesar took a small step across the Rubicon River that would reshape the trajectory of Ancient Rome. Although the threshold was easy to traverse, Roman law decreed if any army crossed the boundary, it was an act of war. 

Why 'Crossing the Rubicon' Became a Modern Metaphor 

Despite occurring over 2,075 years ago, "crossing the Rubicon" is still used as a metaphor when someone makes a decisive choice from which they can’t turn back. The phrase that Julius Caesar uttered just before he took those steps, “The die is cast,” also commonly signifies an irreversible decision.
"Caesar was exceptionally good at crafting phrases that people remember. He was trained by rhetoricians who emphasized that you waste no words,” says Watts, who highlights that the famous Latin phrase, “Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered)” is also attributed to Caesar. 
Many people were “invested in Caesar’s legacy” and were intent on sharing his capacity to “distill the meaning of a particular moment concisely and powerfully" as propaganda, Watts explains. They probably “replicated that style and passed down things that Caesar either did say or things that he could have said.”

https://www.history.com/articles/crossing-rubicon-phrase-origins-ancient-rome-caesar?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

Yulan Magnolia Flowers🌷That Look Like Birds🐦

Yulan Magnolia Flowers

🌷  That Look Like Birds  🐦

 🌷 🐦

The flowers are those of the Yulan magnolias, a species that is native to China. The beautiful and fragile pink flower has a citrus scent, as well as a very long history. These flowers date back many, many years – having been raised for almost 1,500 years in the gardens of Buddhist temples.
The Yulan magnolias will often bloom in the springtime. And it turns out that when their blossoms appear, they have an appearance of looking like tiny little birds.
Native to China, Magnolia denudata, also called Yulan Magnolia or Lily Tree, was probably the first magnolia cultivated around 4,000 years ago.
Magnolia liliiflora is a small tree native to southwest China (in Sichuan and Yunnan), but cultivated for centuries elsewhere in China and also Japan.
Strelitzia reginae, commonly known as the crane flower, bird of paradise, or isigude in Nguni, is a species of flowering plant indigenous to South Africa. An evergreen perennial, it is widely cultivated for its dramatic flowers

https://youtu.be/njxAhO2aVik 

Flowers which look like Birds
Collection strange flowers that look like birds
https://youtu.be/-c6utR8vyvc

Yulan Magnolia Flowers

 That Look Like Birds In China

https://youtu.be/yj2Osw1Oozk
Yulan Magnolia Blossoms

Bird-Shaped Flowers
Written by Ivy  Nov 22 2021

 https://www.rayagarden.com/how-to-garden/yulan-magnolia-blossoms-bird-shaped-flowers-pictures.html

Yulan Magnolia

Magnolia Denudata

Magnolia denudata, the Lilytree or Yulan Magnolia is native to central and eastern China. It may have been in cultivation for around 4,000 years and has been grown in Chinese Buddhist temple gardens since 600 AD. Its flowers were regarded as a symbol of purity in the Tang Dynasty and it was planted in the grounds of the Emperor's palace. It is the official city flower of Shanghai.
The flowers are upright and cup-shaped at first opening out to resemble lilies. Their beauty is enhanced as they appear on bare branches in late winter to early spring. While quite hardy trees the flowers may be damaged by heavy late frosts. Given its long history in cultivation, Magnolia denudata is a parent to many cultivars.

https://www.heritagefruittrees.com.au/yulan-magnolia-magnolia-denudata

16 Types Of Magnolia Trees

Posted on Published: January 18, 2021 

Magnolias are a beautiful flowering plant. There are about 210 different varieties and species. Originally from Southeast Asia and North America, they have now been naturalized in almost every continent. They come in many different sizes and several bloom colors and shapes. They typically bloom from April to June. These plants are the main contributor to the happy pollinating life of bees. We love these beautiful plants, so we gathered a list of 16 gorgeous and popular varieties to share with you here.

https://gardentabs.com/types-of-magnolia-trees

Sea Level Rise for the Worlds Cities

🌊  Sea Level Rise 💦

For the Worlds Cities

 

💧    💧

🌎🌍🌏

Athens , Atlantic City  , Auckland ,  Baltimore ,  Bangkok , Barcelona  , Beijing , Belfast  , Berlin , Blackpool  , Bordeaux , Boston , Aberdeen  , Abu Dhabi  , Adelaide  , Amsterdam  , Bournemouth ,  Brighton  , Brisbane , Bristol , Buenos Aires , Cairo , Cambridge , Cape Town , Cardiff , Charleston , Christchurch , Copenhagen - Kopenhavn , Cork , Corpus Christi , Den Haag , Dublin , Dundee , Eastbourne , Edinburgh , Fort Lauderdale , Galway , Glasgow , Hamburg , Ho Chi Minh , Hong Kong , Houston , Istanbul , Jakarta , Kuala Lumpur , Lagos , Lisboa , Liverpool , London, , Los Angeles , Manila , Marseille , Melbourne , Miami , Mobile , Mumbai , New Orleans , New York , Newcastle , Nice , Norwich , Oslo , Paris , Perth , Peterborough , Philadelphia , Plymouth , Port smith , Portland ,  Riga ,  Rio De Janeiro  , Roma / Rome  , San Diego  , San Francisco  , San Jose  , Santa Barbara  , Savannah  , Seattle  , Shanghai  , Shenzhen  , Singapore  , Southampton  , Southend-On-Sea  , St Petersburg (Russia)  , St Petersburg (USA) , Stockholm  , Swansea  , Sydney  , Szczecin  , Tallinn  , Tel Aviv  , Tokyo  , Vancouver  , Venezia  , Virginia Beach  , Washington  , Waterford  , Wellington  , Weston Super Mare  , Wilmington. 

 

Lessons in Sea-Level Rise

This animation made with data from NASA Earth satellites shows how sea level has changed across the globe over the last 23 years. The red areas represent the highest sea levels while the blue areas represent the lowest sea levels. Globally, sea levels have gone up by about 9 centimeters since 1993. Credit: TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2 

 

Fake News 📰 Three 📻Historical 📺 Examples

3 Historical Examples of

"Fake News"

History is littered with examples 

where the the facts were altered to suit a specific purpose.
Scientific American 📰  Krystal D'Costa

 

“Official decrees” 

Have a long history of being manipulated.

In the video game Assassin’s Creed, if your notoriety rises high enough the town criers will start to warn people to be on the lookout for you. While your notoriety fades with time another way out of this situation is to bribe the town criers. Then they simply stop talking about you. News media is storytelling in one regard. We expect it to be truthful but it is always colored by perception either from the author or the audience. And it almost always serves a purpose. As such, “official decrees” have a long history of being manipulated. We know this manipulation to be propaganda; its impact can be far reaching and forever alter the course of history. 

Here are three historical instances where falsified facts left a mark.
 

The Donation of Constantine
As the power of the Catholic Church grew during the Middle Ages, conflicts arose between the Church and the European ruling class over control of the states. In a very handy move, the Church produced a document in the 8th century known as “The Donation of Constantine.” The document alleged that Emperor Constantine had transferred land and political control to Pope Sylvester I in the 4th-century AD because Sylvester allegedly cured him of leprosy. The Church would successfully use this document numerous times to assert control over various regions. It remained unchallenged until the 15th-century when analysis of the document itself suggested that it could not have been written in the 4th-century: the document made use of words that would have been unknown in Constantine's time (like “fief”) and employed sentence constructs that were uncommon to Constantine's Latin. The Church back-tracked a bit and drafted a document that declared its land had been awarded to it by Charlemagne, but this was never published. Opponents to the Church tried to claim civil law and civil jurisdiction, maintaining that even if the document had been true, it would have only been legitimate during Constantine's lifetime but the Church was already deeply rooted in these regions. Interestingly, even after the Document had been established as a forgery, some people continued to believe in its authenticity.

 

A Sanctioned Surrender
In the 1140s, the Hospitaliers of the Knights Templar were granted property in Tripoli that included the Krak des Chevaliers, a Syrian fort. It became a significant holding for the Knights Hospitaliers who were able to stage raids on the nearby Homs and grow their numbers into a sizable force. This prosperity would not last forever, however. Sultan Baibars had a serious bone to pick with the Crusaders in general (due to their support of the Mongols) and spent his life routing them out of Syria. In 1271 Baibars laid siege to Krak des Chevaliers. As was common to the time, when the threat of Baibars appeared on the horizon many of the surrounding villagers fled to the fort for protection. They took up residence in the outer ward of the fort. Baibars’ siege engines breached these walls first which allowed the Hospitaliers to flee inward. The siege came to a halt for a short period and culminated with Baibars’ men delivering a letter purported to be from the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller in Tripoli. The letter granted the Knights of Krak des Chevaliers permission to surrender. It was a forgery of course, but the Knights did surrender. Baibars spared their lives but seized the fort and converted it into a mosque.  

A Bag of Scalps

In 1782, Benjamin Franklin created a fake issue of a Boston newspaper. The main story was quite gruesome: it maintained that American forces had discovered bags of money and goods that appeared bound for the King, but included among them that included the scalps of soldiers and civilians. The bag of scalps included a letter addressed to the King asking him to accept the scalps as a token of friendship and loyalty. Franklin sent the newspaper to his friends, who forwarded it to their friends and soon enough the story had been republished in other colonial newspapers. There were signs the original document was a fake--the typeface, for example--but these clues were lost in the sensationalism of the information. The public was outraged. In this case, Franklin’s “news” added to the animosity directed against Native Americans and helped establish them as non-Americans who could not be trusted nor should be accepted in the new Republic. The story was resurrected at a later date as well as “evidence” of the depravity of Native Americans during the War of 1812. 

 

These are three examples, but there are countless others. Not to mention the cases where newspapers themselves created news to sell papers--the New York Sun was notorious for this kind of behavior and featured a six part series on fantastic lunar discoveries made by one Sir John Herschel. In all of these cases, there were signs of falsification but they were overlooked under the guise of authority. 

The trust we place in the written word hearkens back to the rarity and expense of producing printed material. Words become permanent on paper and take on a life of their own. Handing someone the Donation of Constantine or a letter from a Templar Grand Master has a finality to it. In that vein, there is also something about the sameness of the experience of print. The idea that different people can get a piece of paper that states the same thing is powerful. It’s equalizing. It’s easy to trust the information in this case because accepting that a huge group of people are being misled is, well, unbelievable. There isn’t a way to prevent fake news entirely but it starts with critical reading and conversations.

 

Krystal D’Costa is an anthropologist working in digital media in New York City. You can follow AiP on Facebook.

📰  📻 📰  📺  📰 📻  📰 📺  📰 📻 📰  📺

 Referenced:

•  Franklin, Benjamin (nd). “Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle,” [before 22 April 1782],” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified October 5, 2016, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-37-02-0132. [Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 37, March 16 through August 15, 1782, ed. Ellen R. Cohn. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, pp. 184–196.] Accessed Nov. 27, 2016.
  

•  King, DJ Cathcart (1949). “The Taking of Le Krak des Chevaliers in 1271”, Antiquity 23(90): 83-92.
  

•  Valla, Lorenzo (1922). “Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine,” Hanover Historical Texts Project, Hanover College, http://history.hanover.edu/texts/vallatc.html. Accessed Nov. 27, 2016.
  

•  Zielinski, Sarah (2015). “The Great Moon Hoax Was Simply a Sign of Its Time.” Smithsonian.com, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/great-moon-hoax-was-simply-sign-its-time-180955761/?no-ist Accessed Nov. 27, 2016.

 https://getpocket.com/explore/item/three-historical-examples-of-fake-news?utm_source=pocket-newtab

  📰  📻  📰   📺   📰  📻  📰   📺   📰  📻  📰   📺

 

9 False Rumors With Real-Life Consequences

 📰  📻  📰   📺   📰  📻  📰   📺   📰  📻  📰   📺

Hydrangeas 🌷 Magic

The Magic of

Hydrangeas

 

Aug 7, 2022  The big, bountiful blooms known as hydrangeas are abundant on Cape Cod, and available in hundreds of varieties. Correspondent Mo Rocca tiptoes through the hydrangeas, and talks with aficionados to learn the secrets for growing these showy summer shrubs. 

https://youtu.be/x2RPVDOiu-o

Comments
🌷
Oh my goodness! I am a Hydrangea lover. I didn't know they came in so many varieties. Beautiful. Now I have a good reason to go go visit Cape Cod.

🌷 When I lived in California they were abundant, but in Arizona they are few and far between. I never realized the PH of the soil had anything to do with the colors. 😊
🌷  My grandparents had hydrangeas in their backyard in the shade of a large oak tree.  When I was little I thought they were popcorn balls.  Then, I saw them on our trip to Washington State and they were so beautiful.  These types of videos are great!
🌷   Sao Miguel, one of the nine Portuguese Islands of the Azores archipelago, is the home of one of the world's largest displays of naturally grown hydrangeas. They bloom everywhere on the island, from mid-July into August, and provide the eye with one of the most spectacular sights of magic, beauty and joy I have ever seen. I am certain that the early Azores immigrants to Cape Cod, longing for the ephemeral beauty of their island paradise, are responsible for turning the Cape and Islands into the glorious summer dream we are privileged to see today.
🌷  I love these because they make for easy beautiful gardening. Even when not in bloom the leaves are beautiful and block the light from the soil under them rendering weeding virtually unnecessary.
🌷  I love them, they smell so sweet and are so pretty. The colors are so gorgeous and vibrant they make summertime so wonderful.❤️
🌷  I live in Asturias, Spain.  If you want to see the most beautiful and biggest hydrangeas come visit.   The climate is temperate and wet.  There are also beautiful calla lilies here too.
🌷   If you want to add color  to any area around your house Hydrangea can’t be beat. Now do a special on Hibiscus.
🌷 Que bello es la Naturaleza  🥰 🌺 🥰 🌹 🌷

Going Wild over Wildflowers

Jul 31, 2022  For many people Crested Butte, Colorado is a winter wonderland, but during the summers, there's another spectacular site that has people heading for the hills: wondrous wildflowers. The blooms are so celebrated here, there's even an annual festival. Mo Rocca visits this former mining town to learn why it's the "wildflower capital" of Colorado.

                🌹   🌺   🌷                

https://youtu.be/FWahAPfEfVE

Wildflower Season

Puts Colorado Beauty on Display

 in Crested Butte

It's wildflower season in Colorado and there's nowhere better to see them than the area around Crested Butte.

 9NEWS Anne Herbst takes us hiking.

 

https://youtu.be/hSGO3m2VI-

Comments
🌷
While it was lightly touched on in reference to the bees, this area and many others, are magical in their seasonal migrations. I could almost tell you the day without a calendar on birds, butterflies and blooms on my ranch farther south. Not as colorful but will always bring me peace.
🌷 So beautiful - Glad they have a no picking rule - Let the flowers live 💐
🌷 I now live in Argentina because my family lives here however I am so thankful I can still watch CBS Sunday Morning and many other stations. Beautiful flowers very healing for such a time as this.
🌷  I was just in Colorado last week and marveled at all the wildflowers. This segment was spectacular! I got to enjoy even more than what I saw in person. Crested Butte is on my list for next year’s travels.  Thank you.  👍
🌷  Dandelions are one of the first to flower! And because of that it is is very important for bees. Dandelions fill that empty space in time where it’s warm enough for bees to fly, but there’s very few flowers. Weeds grow first in spring and bloom first, and keep blooming! Try planting a set of 3 in your garden  🌹🤗

Nurturing the Magic of Hydrangeas

The big, bountiful blooms known as hydrangeas are abundant on Cape Cod, and available in hundreds of varieties. Correspondent Mo Rocca tiptoes through the hydrangeas, and talks with aficionados to learn the secrets to growing these showy summer shrubs.

https://youtu.be/Ln67TY0qd0A

"CBS Sunday Morning" features stories on the arts, music, nature, entertainment, sports, history, science and Americana, and highlights unique human accomplishments and achievements. 

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🌺🌹🌷🌺🌹🌷🌺🌹🌷🌺🌹🌷
Hydrangea Happiness: 

How to Grow Hydrangeas
Chose the right type of hydrangeas for your area, and these flowering shrubs will always make you smile.

 

https://getpocket.com/read/3695482713

Robots Steal Jobs 🤖Make Them Pay Tax

🤖 If Robots Steal Our Jobs 🤖

Maybe

We Should Make Them Pay Tax

Bill Gates is in favor of it.
By Laura Paddison - 06/01/2018

 Walk into this San Francisco restaurant and you are greeted with a wall of numbered cubbyholes with acrylic doors. Dotted around the room are tablet screens for placing orders. What you won’t find are any people serving. There’s no counter, no human to take your order or hand over the food. Instead, customers scroll through the menu of quinoa and rice bowls on the in-store screens or on a mobile app, tap in their order and wait for their name to flash on one of the cubbies, where their food will be waiting. 

This is Eatsa, an automated restaurant. Well, sort of. There are still humans preparing food behind the scenes. But the company hopes to eventually automate this process too.  

The concept restaurant, while it has had recent setbacks, represents another step in the onward march of automation. To some, Eatsa is a sign of innovation, providing people with fast, smooth service without the need to speak to another person. But for others, like San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, who represents the district the restaurant is in, “there’s a big question mark about what this means for us as a society,” she says. Not only what it means to have less human interaction but also what it will do to jobs.

Automation has been on Kim’s mind. “This is one of the biggest issues that is facing our country over the next decade,” she says. In response to her growing concerns about how it will play out in a city with one of the fastest-growing income gaps between rich and poor, she had an idea. Tax the robots and use the money to help stem inequality. 

The idea of a robot tax has bubbled up over the past couple of years, thanks to the backing of some high-profile figures, proposing it as a way of trying to prevent all the benefits of automation from flowing to a tiny slice of wealthy people.

Benoît Hamon — a socialist candidate in the French presidential elections last year — made a robot tax a plank in his campaign. Perhaps the most famous advocate is Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates. He told Quartz last year, “Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.” 

He says he believes taxing machines could slow the pace of automation, giving people a chance to retrain and giving governments time to put in place policies to protect people from intensifying inequality.

A robot tax has not been implemented anywhere. The European Parliament toyed with the idea but ultimately rejected it, concerned it would amount to a tax on progress and put the EU at a disadvantage. South Korea has probably come closest. With the aim of protecting workers, it implemented a halfway step last year by cutting a tax break available to companies investing in automation. 

In San Francisco, Kim’s suggestion is to extend the payroll tax to robots and algorithms that replace human jobs. Funds raised would be funneled into a “jobs for the future fund,” she says, which could pay for “workforce development and training for workers who have lost their jobs, such as truck drivers, retail and restaurant workers, even accountants and stockbrokers.”  

She also envisages using the tax revenue to tackle the low pay of many care sector jobs. “We do have these jobs which are very difficult to automate like child care and home support service workers that are currently jobs largely performed by older women of color.”

A February report from global management consultancy Bain & Co. supports Kim’s concerns about inequality. It found that the most vulnerable in society will be hardest hit by automation. It predicted up to 25 percent of American jobs will be eliminated by the end of the 2020s — equal to 40 million workers — and depressing the wages of many more.

“Today’s level of inequality already has prompted growing public concern and debate,” the report says. “It seems reasonable to expect that at significantly higher levels, popular criticism would intensify and increase pressure for social policies to address it.” Taxing robots is one of the possible interventions mentioned in the report. 

However, not everyone is in favor.

A key criticism revolves around the practicalities of implementing the tax. What counts as a robot, for example? While a factory line robot seems clearly to be replacing human workers, what about digital assistants? Or vending machines?

“There is no such thing as an individual robot, so you would be looking at something like the value created by robots, which is a heck of a difficult thing to define,” says Len Shackleton, an editorial and research fellow at the U.K.-based Institute for Economic Affairs.

He wrote a paper for the institute in May that set out why we shouldn’t panic about automation and artificial intelligence. The report criticizes the idea of a robot tax as “ill-judged.”

Automation offers huge benefits to society, he says, “and to try to hold this back with these kind of imagined fears — I call it a moral panic — it has all the classic things of witch hunting. ‘Let’s find the nasty capitalist and burn them at the stake.’”

In addition to the difficulties of applying the tax, Shackleton raises the point that it could not be undertaken in one country alone. “Certainly for any medium-size country like the U.K. to try to do this in isolation would actually be suicidal,” he says. “It would mean that nobody would really consider investing in this country in anything which involved producing goods because virtually anything could be classified as a robot.”

Kim is aware that it would not be a simple task to work out how to tax robots. “I don’t want to deny that there aren’t a host of definitional concerns that we need to tackle before we roll this out,” she says. That’s why she has spoken to a broad coalition of advisers, including big tech companies, to thrash out how a tax could work in practice.

“I think tech wants to be part of the solution. They don’t want to be the bad guys,” says Kim. “They don’t want to be viewed as the guys that took away everyone’s jobs.”

No one is suggesting robot tax is the sole answer to tackling the threat automation poses to inequality, but advocates say it could be a useful weapon in policymakers’ arsenal. Sergio Rebelo, a professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management who analyzed whether taxing robots could reduce income inequality, concluded that the tax would make sense.

“We find that when robots are relatively expensive, taxing them is useful in terms of improving the distribution of income between routine workers, whose jobs can be automated, and nonroutine workers, who benefit from automation.” But once robots become cheap, it’s no longer a useful mechanism. “At that point, the best policy is to provide a basic universal income financed with income taxes,” he says. 

Of course, a robot tax is not the only or even the highest-profile idea to deal with automation and inequality. A universal basic income, which would give everyone no-strings-attached money, has support from the likes of Elon Musk and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. There’s also the idea of guaranteed jobs — $15 an hour government jobs for anyone who wants or needs one — which has the backing of prominent Democrats, including Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

But, Kim says, these are not revenue-raising schemes. “Everyone has great ideas about how to spend money, but no one is actually proposing how to raise that money.”

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https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/robot-tax-bill-gates_us_5b0f030ce4b0be10a4882b63

September🍂 Holidays🍁

🍂  September  🍁

Holidays & Observances

Holidays & Observances to Make Marketing in September Memorable

Back to school and back to business. 

🏄 Vacations are wrapping up and now it’s time for the kids to hit the books and you to hit the ground running to finish the year strong.

Here are some themes to help you get back into the groove of communicating with your audience.

🍂Monthly Observances

International Self-Awareness Month: September-holiday-and-obs-pages

Getting to know you, getting to know all about you! How important is it for your target audience to know themselves? How does not being in touch with who they are affect their success? Tell them.

 

Shameless Promotion Month:

Whoop whoop! Tell your audience it’s “Shameless Promotion Month”. Fire up your social networks and promote your stuff, encourage others to share what they have going on and to support others. It’s a great buzz and community building exercise.

National Immunization Awareness Month:

Of course it’s time for back to school which means immunization time for many children. If you are a health coach or consultant, give your expert opinion. Do you believe immunizations are a good or a bad thing? Why or why not? Share your expertise and opinion with your audience and encourage feedback.

Women’s Friendship Month:

That’s what friends are for! I have met some amazing women over the years. Give you friends in your personal life and in business a warm shout out. Feature a short note to each of them throughout the month. It’s just nice to do sometimes.

 

Weekly Observances

Here are some weekly themes that may inspire you…

    Week 01-07 – Self-University Week

    Week 15-21 – Balance Awareness Week

    Week 15-21 -  Prostate Cancer Awareness Week

    Week 15-21 – Build A Better Image Week

Daily Observances

Daily observations offer great inspiration for engaging social media content…

    National No Rhyme (Nor Reason) Day: 1

    Labor Day: 2

    Be Late For Something Day: 5

    National Lazy Mom’s Day: 6

    Wonderful Weirdos Day: 9

    American Business Women’s Day: 22

    Dear Diary Day: 22

    Family Health and Fitness Day USA: 25

    Hug A Vegetarian Day: 27

    National Women’s Health & Fitness Day: 29

These are just a few observances and suggestions for creating content, there are many more to inspire great content for your audience.