We are now on the two hudred and twenty-ninth show in the current series of Tuesday Topics. That is quite a number and I need to thank everybody involved for enabling us to be around as long as we have. It is difficult to come up with topics that are new and exciting and your help deciding on subjects is certainly appreciated! It is my plan to try to find some guests to help us understand the current state of Medicare and medicaid and to explore some of the options that people have chosen and why. If we are going to succeed with this topic we will need to hear from folks who have explored the options that are out there! I hope to get somebody who has worked on this issue on resolutions and with AAVL. I have done some work on the topic and I know there are lots of questions out there! Is plain Medicare better for some people? If so, why? What do supplements provide and what do they offer? Is medicaid getting harder to get? What is the difference in states which have extended medicaid coverage? Are Federal dollars contracting for medical support? What has the impact of this change been and what should we do about it? What has your experience with both medicare and medicaid been like?

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Tuesday Topics concentrates on employment once more. October is Disability Employment Awareness Month (DEAM), and during this Tuesday Topics program, we consider some of the advantages and disadvantages of having a designated month to focus on this issue! We spend much of our time, however,  on the connections between artificial intelligence and the employment of people with visual impairments. What's helping? What's not? How can we better support visually impaired people and the employers who hire them to thrive in a rapidly changing workplace? How can employers guard against AI discriminating against potential employees with disabilities and why should they? What legislation might help? Are there other barriers besides AI that we need to work to break down? What message should we seek to share this month? Kayla Bentas, Tanner Gers, Brock Kitterman, Peter Altschul and Sara Freeman Smith provide particular expertise and experience to these issues and we welcome them as guests!

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In the past Tuesday Topics has explored the White Cane Laws! It is once more October and White Cane Safety Day is October 15. We would like to explore how the law has operated; what value does White Cane Safety Day have and for whom; and how we might make things better for pedestrians who are blind! Are pedestrians who are blind as common as they used to be? Where is the White Cane Law publicized and by whom and why? When an accident happens how is it treated? These are just some of the questions we want to explore!

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We have unfinished business! We spent time identifying many of the myths that people who can see have about those of us with visual impairments! We promised to explore what we should do about these myths!  Do public service announcements work? Should we do training ourselves at the local level? Has the Americans with Disabilities Act had an effect? Is this issue something we just can't fix? There is another question that is out there as well! Do we have myths about people who are not disabled? Are our expectations inappropriate? Are there people who are blind who behave in ways that encourage myths? We could talk about superheroes and folks who behave in ways that most of us find embarrassing! Do those two groups have an impact?

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THIS week  we want to explore what you think is the most egregious myth that is out there about people who are blind! There are lots of them but we thought it would be fun to put together a list of our top candidates for the myths that people who are not blind have about people aro are! Some of those myths make us better than we are! Some clearly point to areas where we don't measure up! I could list some but that would be cheating! Put together your own list of the top fallacies and falsehoods that those of us who are blind or have low vision are saddled with by those in the sight dependent world!

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It is generally recognized, though it isn't said often enough, that many people who are blind are overweight and sedentary. Recent research and statistics suggest that people with vision loss also experience a range of mental issues which limit their ability to function well in a complex society! We want to explore some of the resources that are available to deal with both of these areas of concern! If people are not physically capable they are not likely to be able to perform jobs well! If there are no outlets to explore the range of mental dysfunctions that we already know make job-seeking difficult, people will be paralyzed and limited in terms of what can be accomplished. ACB has recognized that both these problems exist! What is being done to ameliorate both issues? How can people get help if they need it? How do you create motivation to make things better? What can all of us do to build an attitude that will encourage? Pam Shaw will join us to explore what the mental health group at ACB is doing! Leslie Spoone and Koni Simms will come to share with us what the "get up, get moving" project is offering to those who choose to take advantage of what it offers! Join us and share what you do to become more active and more aware of your emotional and psychological status!

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We are just past Labor Day as this edition airs! We have devoted lots of programs to employment and it didn't surprise you that we offer another one. I think this one will be different! We have explored in the past what our Employment Committee is doing! We have talked some about the barriers to employment that exist but we haven't heard a lot from people who are seeking jobs! We also haven't invited those of our listeners who work to tell us about how they got their jobs. While some of our team are retired now, all of us have worked! We will tell you a little about how we got our jobs; how we kept our jobs; and how we moved from one job to another! Then we will ask you to talk to us about your efforts to find jobs! What worked and what didn't! How have things chaned for job seekers? What do you find hardest in the job search arena? If you are discouraged, why is that and what are you doing about it? There are lots of other questions we will explore but you get the idea! We need to hear from people who have gone through the employment mill to understand what works and what doesn't! A program that we did almost two years ago explored "big data" for people seeking work who are blind. Clearly the unemployment rate was not 70 percent but it was very high! More important, the number of people who are blind who are simply not in the labor market is huge. Some claim mental health issues; others multiple disabilities; still more allege family issues! At the heart of these statistics is the fact that unemployment is much more difficult to evaluate than the "seventy percent" fallacy suggests! We discussed those statistics. It is our hope that this show will encourage people to tell us about their barriers to job seeking! Do they lack training? Are they afraid of losing more than they gain from work? What would it take to make them look again? We hope we will hear stories from people who have succeeded but also stories from those who have not! Unless ACB understands the problem it cannot solve it or find ways to make it better! Maybe this program will help!

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Tuesday Topics will once more take to the various platforms where it can be heard. By then hurricane Erin will be long past concern but there will probably be other depressions to depress us by then. How should people who are disa4 handle emergency preparedness. What do those words even mean! What ought we to do in order to get ready for an emergency. Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wild fires and tornados are just some of the likely candidates for emergency creation. If evacuation is required how should people who are blind respond. Should we register with county programs? Should we go to shelters? What do we have the right to expect at shelters? What about guide dogs? What about medication? What does being prepared look like for people who are blind? Those are some of the questions we will explore next time on Tuesday Topics!

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Tuesday Topics, for the first time, experienced technical issues at the beginning and at the end. Our podcast, when it becomes available, will include as much as we can. We were disappeared six minutes before nine PM and that cannot be recovered. We will be back bigger and better than ever next week and apologize to everyone for the difficulties we had this week. From 7 to 9 PM on Tuesday August 19 we will once more take to the internet and clubhouse and alexa devices and phones and ACB link and lots of other spots we are not even aware of. When did you perceive yourself as different as a blind person? This question applies mostly to folks who were born blind or lost vision very early. It also applies to people who lose their vision! When did you feel like you were no longer "normal". What triggered that feeling for either group? Was there a time when you perceived yourself as inferior to those who did not have a visual impairment? Why was that? What about you felt less than "cool"? Did others encourage your sense of difference? How did they do it? What did you do about this sense of lessness? Does it still exist? Has ACB helped? Has ACB hindered your sense of self? These are some of the questions we want to explore next week but we need your input!

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Tuesday Topics will be exploring new technology. What were some of the new items seen for the first time at our convention this year? What did people buy and why? Can we see any trends in the new technology? When there are several products that are somewhat similar, how should we evaluate the differences? We would welcome it if some tech people came to talk about new products. We are more interested in those of you who were persuaded to buy tech and how you are liking what you got!

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