calabi

I thought your argument was:

 

 

That wasnt my argument thats a quote from someone else, but its true what they are saying, how do we know inflation is important, and they have the best way to measure it?

http://en.wikipedia....United_Kingdom)

Here it looks like they are calculating an average of the products. Thats not going to be clear or accurate, its being question and they are deciding policies on it. In my opinion using inaccurate or not fully understood information is worse than just going with your gut.

But what about business's making decisions on wages to do with inflation. One of those figures isnt actual inflation its the flow of inflation or whatever. When your deciding wages surely you need to be really clear about inflation, what exactly has went up and by how much, also you have to add all of them together. If inflation is 5percent across the board(which I know is highly unlikely, but just serves as an example). You cant just increase wages by 5 percent or a certain amount. You would have to increase wages by 15percent at least or some other higher number if all the things people buy has gone up by five percent. Otherwise your just asking for a gradual decline in living standards like we have now.

In my opinion there are simpler ways instead of tracking all the products, just track individual peoples incomes and outcomes. Get a distribution of people and find out the median values of the amounts they spend on bills food and essentials and how much disposable income, and track how much they change over time.

Jebus, man... You act like they're reading tea leaves or practicing astrology. You need to review what the prominent economists are actually sharing and doing and discussing when it comes to inflation.

 

http://krugman.blogs.../26/core-notes/

http://macroblog.typ...then-again.html

 

http://krugman.blogs.../26/core-logic/

 

Here's my problem, in a nutshell. You're not arguing against what people are actually saying and doing. You're arguing against what you THINK they're saying and doing.

I know exactly what I'm arguing about. In fact your posts support my argument that inflation isnt settled or clear.

Well... I think that we have pretty much nailed down what inflation is. But we don't exactly know why it is. And certainly not where it's going to.

Inflation is the increase of the average price level of pretty much everything. And that's being measured as you would expect: By looking at price levels of a lot of things, and taking a weighted average of their relative changes.

 

But I do think you have some kind of a point (and I risk repeating myself). There are multiple theories on why inflation is... and in fact, there are probably multiple good answers as well as multiple wrong ones. And we cannot seem to agree on which one is correct.

But it gets only really vague if we try to predict what the inflation will do in a few months from now... we're better at predicting the weather in 10 days from now than the inflation or the stock market.

We havent got an accurate measure of inflation.

http://news.bbc.co.u...ess/6266733.stm

http://en.wikipedia....mer_price_index

They still arent certain about exactly what they should measure. I know there are lots of arguments about it. There shouldnt be any questions, if they are going to decide policies on it. Look where we are today, peoples wages are far behind inflation.

http://www.thisismon...anged-1900.html

They cant have been calculating it that well.

How is that a valid argument? "I think economists haven't taken time to understand inflation, that they just assume stuff... so that's why I don't trust them!"

 

Seriously?

Have you looked at their evidence? How is that not a valid question? How can they even accurately record inflation? There whole theory is based on fallacious assumptions. If you assume too much then you end up looking like an idiot.

http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/milton-friedmans-methodology-a-critique/

Here's a great quote from Richard Feyman on Economics.

<br class="Apple-interchange-newline">One of my favourite people of the 20th century is Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist who, among other things, pioneered the study of quantum electrodynamics. In a fantastic documentary about him for BBC's Horizon show called "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" he said something I found moving and profound. He was talking about the "experts" he saw on TV and how although he didn't have any expertise in the area they claimed to have expertise in, he felt quite sure that they didn't know what they were talking about. He said this:

 

"There are myths and pseudo-science all over the place. I might be quite wrong, maybe they do know all this ... but I don't think I'm wrong, you see I have the advantage of having found out how difficult it is to really know something. How careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something. And therefore, I see how they get their information and I can't believe that they know it. They haven't done the work necessary, they haven't done the checks necessary, they haven't taken the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don't know and that they're intimidating people."

 

So if I apply Feynman's test and ask myself how hard most economists worked for their knowledge, I can't help thinking they haven't worked hard for it at all. I don't think they've worked hard to know what inflation is, or whether it can or should be targeted. I think they've just assumed it, and anyone can do that. As Feynman warned, they've fallen into the trap of fooling themselves. They've assumed that inflation can be proxied by the CPI because it's easier to do that, they've assumed that 2% is somehow the right rate for it, and they've assumed they're capable of setting interest rates at the 'appropriate' level

It doesnt help that the people directly in charge of the banks Benanke and Mervyn King dont have a clue about economics.

We dont really have fully functioning Democracies at the moment or ever, so arguing against what we havent had, is moot at this point.

People are generally stupid, its becoming proven that people will vote against their own interests. Science isnt just about teaching people things, some guy rote telling them things. That wont work, some other guy will come along and tell them something else. People have to be taught the scientific method, to think for themselves, to question things.

Why is this forum in know way like a science forum?, we have people with assertions that go directly against evidence.

I'm not sure if anyone grasped the deep concept I was trying to throw out in my earlier post. I wasn't merely suggesting that "computers are conscious" (which is nonsense), I only said that they can be "conscious". Awe... this will be frustrating to explain.

 

@Santalum

Sorry.

 

@calabi

Wow, just as I hypothesized! I've been classified "colorblind" my whole life, however from close observation I've doubted the common notion of what it meant. At least in my case, its simply a difference of the brain and how it developed, not of the eyes or of some birth defect. Now to think of it, the idea of a birth defect which somehow makes your eyes "unable to measure select colors properly" sounds very stupid. Great video. I'm glad to see this research has been done. I was actually going to try explaining the very same idea in the last post (to support some things I wanted to say), but I thought the concept would be too alien for anyone to fairly consider. This is a great relief. Thank you very much for sharing that video!

 

 

Yes, this must be everyone's initial assumption. Its considerably difficult to suggest otherwise, as I will explain why later (not in this post, sorry).

 

I had a dream last night. As I woke up this morning, I wondered particularly about how my brain represented the images and events which I "experienced" in the dream. Sometimes I dream very lucidly, where the dream seems indistinguishable from awake reality.

 

Have you ever had a dream which seems to last for hours of the night, yet you may only be asleep a short duration? You may even experience multiple epics within the same night. Then you wake up in awe with the feeling as if you just read twenty whole novels in a single night! I think this is easy to find an explanation for. Its simply because you "make up" and experience the dream much faster than you can experience awake reality. Due to hierarchical abstraction of information and memory, native experiences (generated by your own mind) can be iterated on the fly. While dreaming, your mind goes through a daft relay of connections. If your dream is full of nonsense, these faulty connections are found (by comparison with "axioms" baked into your memory) and corrected during the natural process.

 

During awake life, you're processing external information. Miniscule observations which may already have been well abstracted and classified into your memory will only bloat your experience, inconveniently prolonged by the persistence of uncontrollable time. When you read a fictional book, its not only necessary to read and understand the words, sentences, dialogue and apply surface-level comprehension. Most importantly, you are required to run this information through a much higher pipeline of abstraction and relation, in the act of "painting a picture" around the story. In contrast, this can all happen simultaneously during a dream. Because dreams are native and your brain is not trying to integrate external information as it usually does, connections are very lively.

 

Evidently, the information and process of a brain are merely the substance and mechanical throughput of a massive dynamic hierarchy.

I think there are cases where people are colourblind from things wrong with their eyes, like not enough cones or rods. Theres are lots of weird things, though, like there are cases where people whom are physically blind and yet really believe that they can see. They are conscious that they see, their brain just makes stuff up on the fly.

You should watch the rest of it its really interesting and pretty incredible if you think about.

I dont think we neccesarily experience dreams faster, although I have slept seemingly for only 30 minutes and had quite long dreams. I can be in my dream and be aware of all these other dreams that I've had previously, or I can create this huge history of other dreams. Its easy to create the perception of these huge narratives as long as you arent able to probe them too deeply, although it doesnt seem that hard to create on the fly just before you get to something, like you want to read a book, and each page writes itself just before you turn it. You can only be conscious of a few things at once, so perhaps its like the rest of your brain is holding millions of things ready to be presented to you at a moments notice.

Well OK.

 

Similarly looking at individual transistors in a CPU will tell you very little about how it all works.

 

The problem with unravelling brain function is that there is no systematic tool, as far as I am ware, for mapping neural connections given that one neurone has many hundreds of thousands of connections to other neurons. Where as transistors have only one input and one output.

 

A tool will have to be developed that some how averages the connections of one neurone to the next so that the complexity is reduced to something resembling the the very simple connections between transistors.

 

Until such a tool is developed it will be extraordinarily difficult to unravel and comprehend all the neural pathways.

 

 

 

With various robots and drones that these days have very powerful CPU etc and can process detailed images to distance measurements and obstacle avoidance ect, but that lack consciousness, they are never any where near as good as a human being.

 

The best military drones combine powerful computers and cameras etc with the consciousness of a human operator.

 

Perhaps an close approximation to a human with full processing power but no consciousness is a sleep walker who liable to walk in front of a bus or off the edge off a cliff. Without a conscious human operator, an otherwise autonomous drone is very likely to do the same thing.

 

It is fairly obvious to me from the various documentaries I have watched over the years that the powerful processing power of the human brain is useless without consciousness to bring it all together in a coherrent manor. And indeed that it is not possible to have this sort of computing power without generating consciousness by default.

 

Consciousness is as much an inevitable result of the functioning of a complex and powerful brain just as speed and sound are the inevitable results of a motorcycle functioning.

 

Perhaps consciousness is indeed unavoidable once you go beyond a certain threshold of computer (organic or inorganic) processing power. Perhaps this is a fundamental truth of the cosmos.

They've mapped a worms brain, and are working on humans but we are slightly more complicated.

http://web.mit.edu/n...in-mapping.html

Personally I dont think consciousness is just a matter of power, otherwise we would have already found it. Consciousness I think is like an abstraction, as Ben Bowan said, it doesnt work on raw data. But not just one their are many competing abstractions.

We dont see colours the same. Language can even effect our perception of them.

How do a group of transistors in a CPU, all firing in particular ways, result in a 'p' your computer screen in some cases and an 'a' in others?<br style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(248, 250, 252); "><br style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(248, 250, 252); ">Just because you cannot comprehend how firing neurones in our bain result in what we feel and experience does not mean that they are not responsible for it.<br style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(248, 250, 252); "><br style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(248, 250, 252); ">IF our feelings and experiences are independant of our neurones then why are their comatose patients, brain dead patients and brain damaged patients etc?

I'm not saying that they are not responsible for it, but I'm saying that merely looking at them may not tell us much.

We are not computers, we use computers which translate things into the way we see. But how does our brains translate things into the way we see.

I'm not sure what you are trying to get at with comatose patients and brain dead people. I'm not sure if I'm able to explain well enough, but maybe your example of the computer will help. There is no reason for us to be conscious, their probably is because we are, but we havent found that reason yet.

A computer doesnt see what it does, it creates these pixels on the monitor, all it sees(it doesnt see anything really) is the pixels which are just excitations of liquid crystals. You might be able to make programs that see patterns in the pixels, like faces but they arent really seeing the faces. Just an arrangement of elements that match to a pattern. We might be doing the same thing but we are not aware of it. Whether we are able to make computers that are conscious I dont know, until we understand our own I doubt it.

The simplified way we experience the world its weird.

There are people that are working on mapping the brain and all its connections. Consciousness perhaps results from complex cyclic behaviours. I'm of the opinion it might be fathomed. Like the world, the way you see it has to be inside your head. So you think your looking out of your eyes but your not, your looking at a simulation inside your head of what your mind has translated from your eyes. The pattern of the neurons that makes that doesnt neccesarily have to be the same though. Thats the way I think it could be done, how exactly your mind does it is the question.

How does neurons firing result in our experience? We've found the neurons that we experience when we see red. But how does firing of the neurons equate to what we experience? How does the result equate to the small mechanical process? Red doesnt appear as some activation of neurons. How can firing neurons create the differences between red and blue.

Our experience doesnt equate to the mechanical processes. You might be able to find where they are and what bit does what. But we dont experience anything the way these processes tell us we should. As some kind of zombie, that just responds. If you just look at someone elses brain they would not appear to be conscious.

Your not going to get the answer to this by looking at other peoples brains, or zooming in and examing things in minute detail. Some kind of new thinking or holistic approach will need to be taken, or maybe there is no approach and it is impossible.

A monetarist screed against economics textbooks. Okay. I'm not seeing this as a valid source, nor as a quality argument against what I've said above, but I suppose YMMV.

 

 

Another scathing book that seems to be arguing against a strawman:

 

"Keen builds on his scathing critique of conventional economic theory while explaining what mainstream economists cannot: why the crisis occurred, why it is proving to be intractable, and what needs to be done to end it."

 

How many examples of mainstream economists being right and accurately explaining the crisis would it take for you to abandon your understandable, but ultimately inaccurate narrative?

One.

I dont understand whats a valid source and why is it a strawman.

That's a nice narrative, but ultimately untrue.

 

I do, however, think that some viewpoints are trumpeted more loudly than others, primarily because they appeal to people's political ideology.

Is it? Because I'm not so sure.

http://bilbo.economi...t/blog/?p=17466

http://debunkingeconomics.com/

Do you mean deregulation?

Yeah, I meant regulation as in lack of.

It really does connect with reality. It's just that some schools of thought ignore that reality. You can't dismiss the entire field because one sub-population within that field chooses to make up ad-hoc explanations on the fly and then not change their approach when shown wrong.

Does it?, because I'm finding quite alot of evidence that it doesnt. The mainstream didnt have a clue about the collapse. About 10 or so people did predict it whom were mostly outside of the mainstream economics. It seems that most of them realised by just looking at the market and or their own theories. Nothing in the neo-classical economics has given them a clue about what is going on. The entire field is neo-classical economics, which seems to have no or little baring on reality.

I thought it was pretty obvious what the banks collapsed due to regulation. Its not a problem with the government per se but with the softly softly approach which let the people with lots of money create more money with these ponzi schemes. They had no limits set on them so, same as now they know they have a fall back so they'll probably end up doing the same thing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13032013

Science is not about finding single truths, so I find your comment a bit irrelevant. Science is more about using a specific methodology to form hypotheses, put them to test, discard flawed ideas, and continually refine our models of the universe around us. Science is a method to continuously improve our models of how the world behaves, and economics falls neatly into that category, even if there is "no single truth to be sought."

Thats the thing though, economics isnt a science because its so full of holes and isnt based on or have any connection with reality at all. It just appears to be a theory testing itself, against itself. They only have peer review with the current orthodoxy of neo-classical economics, no other alternate theories are allowed to be entertained. They dont discard flawed ideas, they dont even examine their own ideas closely at all.

I don't know if the balance you're talking about is the balance that I imagine applies. The way I've thought about it is that it's not a model that remains stable and balanced but rather a model that institutes the most freedom. That being based on the assumption that no one institutes ideologies that work to counter the process or establish control measures to manipulate the market. The generic model of the free market economy has its ups and downs, bubbles and recessions, but without manipulation remains the free-est model. It is when the market is manipulated that we have our worst reprecussions.

Thats the point some of theses sidelined economists appear to be making, the whole make up of our economy has been a series of bubbles and collapses. We've had temporary stability because we've inflated these bubbles to huge proportions.

The free market model that these economists has no basis in reality. They use utils, how do equate them to reality? The whole basis of their calculations, relies on a single individual, when you add a trifling matter like another individual the whole thing breaks down. You have to have a society of clones or something, for the price to go down when the market demand goes up, for it to not effect incomes.

http://www.btinterne..._news/Keen1.htm

Their whole basis of supply and demand is flawed.

http://www.youtube.c...d&v=E6Gb4tk-z_s

If that is flawed then their whole theory of the free market is flawed.

If you leave the market to itself you will basically never have a free market. I cant see how anyone can say that we have a free market now. In the real world with completely rational behaviour, you can have an increase in supply and an increase in the price, which shouldnt happen in a free market. The supply and demand wont always be equal, the whole thing breaks down.

I'm probably not very good at explaining because I'm basically learning it myself. But even if you look at a basic economics book, they say stuff without any basic proof. If you really think about some of it.

It says that in a free market, "If there is perfect competition, you dont have to worry about firms exploiting anyone because they just barely make enough money to stay in business". Does that bare out in reality.

For companies to keep lowering their margins, till they have close to no profits doesnt seem rational to me at all, but Economists would have you believe its true. This is just my opinion, but the prices where products reach are arbitrary for the most part. We dont have tons of exactly identical products which the free market requires. There are market pressures to lower the prices, but not as much as you would think, they never reach close to the bottom of where they should be according to these economists theories. How do these companies keep on making really good profits? You just have to look at the margins of profits they are making. The best strategy is for the price to stabilise at a one which these companies are happy to sell at not one which the market dictates.

If two competitors are fighting for a market they lower the prices till one lowers it beyond the others willingness to go any lower. The lower priced one will not suddenly get all the customers, they cannot suddenly meet the demand. They've lost profits for no reason, they might as well price up to the competitor. I dont see how lowering the price till either has almost no profits is a good strategy or see any proof of that in the real world, they will collude, even if they dont do it overtly.

I know companies, like Tesco's will push their milk suppliers, so they have almost no profit margin, but thats not a free market thats the complete opposite.

How long before ideologies creep in? That is the problem with testing an economic theory. It takes time, and during that time there is no way to keep out ideologies that affect that economic model in a way that does support the models intent. Just like the free market model that the US uses currently. If you look at the greek model for free market economics that the US economy was built upon, it wasn't meant to support subsidies and intitlements that are ever inflated and vertually unsustainable.

I've just been reading this guys website and have started reading this book:

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/

http://debunkingeconomics.com/

From what I can tell so far it looks like the whole basis of economics is flawed. The whole supply demand assumptions(there assumptions what do you expect) are false and they have to finick it to get it to work.

They model the behaviour of an individual and that persons buying habits and apply that behaviour to the whole of the economy, thats the basis of most of economics. They've never tested whether that really does apply to an aggregate of people. It seems it doesnt.

Even when I read I the Dummy's Economics book I thought things didnt seem right, they have this idea that supply and demand have to meet at this point, when really that has no baring on reality. They have lots of graphs which look great an ordered but have no baring on reality. Its like an incestuous affair, they only look at this theory and dont look at the world.

All the Neoclassical models do not have any ability to calculate recessions within them. Another thing we have the past to compare a theory to, if the theory matches up with what happened in the past and explains it then it should be a good contender for being correct. Neoclassical does not at all match up with the past.

Neoclassical basic tenent is that, the economy will balance itself, it will move towards a state of balance automatically there doesnt appear to be an explanation of why and how this happens. That games against the whole of nature, I dont think we know of any system that does that?

The whole neoclassical economics is an ideology, there's no oversight, no analyis no peer review. Its not a science at all.

The value of an economy is not the same as the value of the commodity used to trade within that economy.

 

 

 

 

One of the problems is the time lag between economic seminars and papers and the policy implemented by the policy makers. For the most part, policy makers don't use the most current economic understandiing, this is something we were taught many years ago, not least of which was by Keynes in his general theory.

I dont think it has anything to do with latest studies not being applied or anything. I'm pretty sure, there all just using the basic fundamentals to calculate these things, the flaw is the human element.

Talking about predictions and reality views. What worth is Economics if the IMF keeps doing this?

http://bilbo.economi...et/blog/?p=5366

I dont think the problem is economics, there are plenty of other people that are getting the right predictions. I dont know if its wilful stupidity or just stupidity, corruptness or whatever. But its beyond belief and it shouldnt be allowed to keep happening in this seeming time of science.

I dont believe a word of it.

So whom is the real you? Under Einstein theories isnt it said that all observation points are equal? You cant have one alternate you being the better you that makes the better choices, the universe would not work like that(I think)?

How can it be a choice if both choices are played out? Which one are you? How comes your existence appears to be contiguous? Is your perception and choices random? Just imagine the point at where the universes diverge where you make the decision between coffee or tea, and just really zoom into it, how comes theres no perception of it, its a pretty profound event? Or what if at that exact same time someone else makes a split decision event? Millions of people with millions of decisions all at the same time, you've got splits within splits all the way down massive amounts of energy and expansions.

Thats just a few questions I can think of right now, the whole thing gives me a headache. Maybe there is alternate universes for quantum events but not for us and our petty decisions.

How do you know how many boom bust cycles there have been in 3000 years? They have certainly lived there for that long but you can't assume that their civilisation has been entirely stable, happy and harmonious for all that time. They may have just been luckier than the esater islanders in disease taking a greater toll on their infants or the resource base being more substantial.

 

And any way. IF you read Tim Flannery's The Future Eaters you would realise that central highlands New Guinea society is far from happy and harmonious.

 

They had fringe dwellers in the surrounding mountains who preyed upon the farmers, i.e. canibals.

They had a well developed system of retribution involving entire families and multiple generations that no doubt took a signficant toll on young reproductive males in particular.

They was a high level of xenophobia between tribes and familes.

 

This as well as starvation, epidemics, war and genocide etc are mother nature's methods of population control and she will eventually take global human population control out of our hands if we fail to manage it ourselves.

I'm not talking about these people being happy and harmonious. I'm talking about stable as in not, exhausting resources.

Disease on these small populations did not effect these small groups like they do large populations. I dont believe there is any evidence of some magical disease that effected these small communities in some sustainable manner. Thats how the current theories go I believe. Disease's especially fatal ones are not sustainable in small populations. They either wipe the entire people out or disappear very quickly as immunity arises. Thats supposedly why alot of mayans(and other people) died from disease when they met europeans.

So your going to ignore all the actual evidence that they used resource control methods, and say that the only way these people survived on these islands was down to luck?

I'm not saying there probably was quite a few incidents whereby things got out of hand, but obviously they did not get too out of hand otherwise, they would have ended up as so many extinct civilizations.

Maybe Tikopia wasnt stable for 3000 years, but clearly since 1600ad, thats quite a while. New guinea has to have been pretty stable for a while because of all the different languages. Unchecked one population would have overwhelmed all the others.

I'm going of off what Jared Diamond says in his books Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse.

They solved nothing. Disease/lack of modern medicine and no ability to increase food production through technology has kept their numbers in check. Perfect ecological balance. Modern medicine and technology disturbs ecological balance, and the sooner westerners acknowledge this the better off we will all be.

If disease, lack of medicine was the only population controls then they would have still ended up like Easter Island. Why use population control methods like abortion, and infanticide if disease was already removing enough people? If they did not practice silviculture they would not have had any trees. They built irrigation systems, refined intensive farming systems where they had plentiful food for everyone.

I couldnt find any info on the web about the History of New Guinea, but heres another similar Island where the people have lived sustainably for about 3000 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikopia

The vast majority of humans are not educated in science, or more particularly ecology, and are not even aware that that they behave the same way as any other animal regarding reproduction and food supplies.

 

The human population has continually expanded and crashed in response to food supplies since it evolved. The latest in increase in food supply has resulted from oil derived energy but the 'oil bubble' is not going to last.

 

The vast majority of humans are no longer hunter gatherers/agriculturalists and are not living within their ecological means.

 

The only way that current populations can be sustained is by taking resources from distant parts of the globe, often from less technologically developed peoples.

 

New guinea people were not scientists, yet they solved these problems. Its nothing to do with intelligence that these problems are not being solved. People have to see that their is a problem. You can see that people are responsive to these things. The popularity of FairTrade food. Increase in recycling, and lots of other things. The main impediment is governments and companies.

Ecology 101 states that the population of any species will always expand to take up the available food supply and then crash when that food supply is exhausted. Humans are no different.

I dont know if thats an official law or something but I dont think its in our nature to just use up resources. Many Island peoples, New Guinea for one example have lived for 60,000 years or so with finite resources. They used many methods, abortions, infanticides, silviculture, drainage, fallow(as a few examples), to keep them sustainable in the environment.

Of course the country is screwed up now but thats mainly our fault. Maybe we europeans are inferior.

I agree about the possibility of new industries, but what exactly would they be and whom would pay for them?

It seems like you would need a dictator to implement some of these changes, to limit growth, and create new industries. Its almost a contradiction. Except that we already have governments and corporations whom function as dictators under the pretence of democracy.

I think we're already close to a limit. Private companies remove jobs from the economy through, either better technology or by eliminating the competition(buying up), and the possibility of any new competition.

I think the number of poor people in all countries will only increase. Even if their totally apathetic, the increasing burden of this will be too great for the countries to sustain.