Hello, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today for a discussion on two very important topics that are actually very closely linked, wages and inequality. Now, these are issues that affect the global economy, but they also hit very close to home. They have an immediate impact on businesses and families, and we are here to discuss fair wages and how we can better close the gap, wage gap. I'm Abba Patrai. I'm the economics correspondent at The Washington Post. And before I move on to our panelists, I'd like to just note that ensuring fair wages is a priority for the World Economic Forum and is part of its good work framework. If you are on social media and are tweeting about this or Instagramming, Snapchatting, what have you, please use the hashtag WEF22. All right. I would like to introduce our distinguished panel, starting with Neela Richardson, who's the chief economist at ADP, which is a payroll company in the United States. Next to her is Jean Pascal DuVersor, who goes by JP. He is from the Czech Republic and is the CEO of Homecredit, which is a consumer lender throughout the world. And all the way at the far corner there is Mauricio Cardenas, who's a former finance minister of Columbia, who is now at Columbia University. All right, so I would like to start with you, Neela. I would like to rewind to just the beginning of the pandemic. What were wages doing before COVID hit? What were we seeing in the United States in terms of wage growth, in terms of inequality, and what impact has the pandemic had? It's great to remember, right? So before the pandemic, I'll bring you back to that lovely time period. The US was enjoying 10 years of economic expansion. And there was a lot of good things about that expansion, but the secret of it was its tortoise-like pace. It was really, really slow. And inflation was really, really low. And so it was able to jump over business cycles for a decade-long expansion. What's also notable about that expansion is it took a really long time for wages in the United States to actually see growth. In fact, they stagnated. And the perplexing issue was, why weren't wages taken off despite this long expansion? The Federal Reserve, for all of its power in reducing interest rates, still was trying to generate some kind of wage growth, particularly at the lower end of the wage scale. And they largely succeeded. As the economy was entering into this period, right before the onslaught of the pandemic, that's when we were starting to see gains at the low end of the pay scale. But if I could just go back even prior, more theoretical, to the pandemic, wages really grow for three main reasons. And you saw them all play out in this three-year, two-year period before, during, and hopefully at the tail end, most places, and eventually all of the pandemic. One, they grow because of productivity enhancement. That's grade A growth. That just raises the standard of living for everybody. It's the kind of wage growth that even companies cheer because it raises profits. It raises household lives and children's lives all over the world. And so that's the kind of growth we want to see. The second reason, wages grows because of composition. And that points to how uneven the pandemic was during the onslaught. It really hit low-income jobs and consumer-facing services the hardest. And so the net effect was wages looked like they were growing really fast, particularly for women who were hit very hard by this pandemic when, actually, we just lost a lot of low-paying jobs. And then the final reason wages can grow, and this is something that is particularly acute in the United States, where we have what's been coined the Great Resignation, 11 and 1 1⁄2 million job postings, over 4 million quits, and pronounced labor shortages. They grow because of competition. Companies are competing for talent. Both of those latter two are not good sources of growth, and they actually lead to inflation. So as I hope we talk about wages on this panel that we're particularly cognizant of why they grow, we see at ADP, I'm their chief economist, about 20 million wage records a week, and we pay about 38 million workers around the world. And so when it comes to wages, we have this unique perspective about how this unevenness played out, and particularly who was hardest hit. And as we'll hopefully talk about, it's those low-scale professions pointing back to productivity enhancements. That's the challenge when it comes to inequality. Perfect.  Can you tell me about what you're hearing from them, what are you hearing from their clients, and how do fair wages play into that? So it's complicated to sit on an economical discussion between two economists, not being an economist by background. So what do we see? So home credit is active in central Europe, in CIS, which right now is not a very popular place to be investing in. And in Southeast Asia, if you look at central Europe, for example, over the last 20 years, the wage growth you've seen is tremendous, is absolutely tremendous. And as Neda was saying, it's on the back of a fantastic economic transformation, leveraging qualified labor force and driving economic growth, all of that in the framework of a very strong legal and social framework, which was given to that region by the EU, unnoticed achievement, but a very strong point. So going back to the point, we see there, and we see also in the risk cost on the consumer lending, extremely low risk cost and very strong demand for lending, because that's what people do. They get good income, then they see they get borrow, and basically make today their life better based on tomorrow's income. Southeast Asia has suffered massively during the COVID, but is rebounding extremely quickly, I have to say, extremely quickly. One of the reasons I think is that people they are earning and spending directly, so as soon as the economy has restarted, they had to restart. You have no massive resignation in Southeast Asia. People are back to work because they need to feed themselves, go to school, and there is no massive resignation effort. And there you see right now a very strong increase in demand for lending.  And I'm going back to one of the point, which is wage inequality, the best way to solve it from my experience as an employer is to have good productivity, to have labor laws that are ensuring that you have no social dumping, and strong economy, and then basically wages go up very quickly. Perfect. Mauricio, we've heard a lot about the growing wage gap. How do we fix it? Well, that's a big question. Let me start by saying that this idea of a very tight labor market, that salaries are going up, there are not enough jobs.  It's not a global issue. I come from a region of the world, Latin America, where we have unemployment rates in the double digits, and where the pandemic was devastating for the labor market. And the problems that we're dealing with today is essentially low wages, high unemployment, and not to that today, the food crisis, because food prices are going up as a result of the invasion of Ukraine. So all this makes this a really important topic. When things grow, when problems grow so much, it's also the opportunity to fix them. They become more visible, they are more apparent, and we understand them better. So underlying this situation, and if we rewind prior to the pandemic, what we had in many parts of the world, including Latin America, was very high levels of informality. And the main difference in a job that is in the formal sector versus one in the informal sector, everything else equal. Same person, same gender, same job is that the informal job is paid much less well. And what happened with the pandemic? It amplified that. It exacerbated that problem, because the informal jobs are the jobs where more personal contact exists, people that work directly in contact with others. And those jobs cannot really be digitalized, or you cannot do that through Zoom. So the wage gap increased. The informal jobs were lost, salaries in the informal sector were compressed, and therefore we have a situation where we really need to make sure that we push employment and salaries up. One, you ask how? How are we going to do this? Well, it's really about allowing businesses to generate more jobs, to generate employment. So rather than taxing the payroll, which is something that many countries do, especially not in America, we need to tax other sources of income. We need to tax capital. We need to tax not the activity of generating jobs. That's one element. That's something we need to stop doing. And the other aspect that I think is fundamental in this equation is have gender-based policies, because it was women that were most impacted by this. So we should not be afraid, and I say this as a former finance minister, of creating stronger incentives, more benefits for the generation of formal jobs for women. This has to do with tax issues. This has to do with stimulus packages. This has to do also with scaling. We need to provide more scales. And we should always emphasize the gender dimension, because there is a double wage gap. The formal versus informal, men versus women. And if you're a woman, and you work in the informal sector, that's the worst condition, and we need to fix that. Perfect. Along those lines, Nila, you talked a bit about the uneven hit at the beginning of the pandemic. Can you break that down a little bit for us? Who was most affected in terms of lost wages by income, by gender, by race? And what has the recovery been like since then for those groups? A lot of my remarks on that will overlap nicely. We're both economists, so that's not a big surprise, different lenses, though. Just to pick up on that male-female wage gap, for example, we found that in our data, women were 46% of the US workforce, but took 53% of the losses. And those losses were really acute at times when the pandemic waves were shutting down social infrastructure like schools. So we saw that in September of 2020, women left the labor market at four times the rate of men. What that meant for wages is the gap actually narrowed. It went from 80% gap, women making 80% of what men made, to 83% of a gap now. Well, that sounds like good news. It is not, I assure you. The reason why that gap narrowed is because so many low-income women and consumer-facing industries lost their jobs. Let's talk about these consumer-facing industries because they're part of the social infrastructure. They are child care, education, health care. You need these social infrastructures in place to get full participation of the labor market. And so when women are hit hard, it's not only bad for the family and for the woman. It's bad for the society because those services that are so critical, especially in advanced countries with aging populations or in countries that need specific informal health care and child care services. So that covers pretty much the globe, am I right? Women are needed to show up at work to help support families and growth. And then if I could say a little bit about where the pockets of wage growth are happening because that's been a big story, this idea that there's this wage price spiral about to be unleashed that will push inflation even further. Actually, where we're seeing the wage increases is in the bottom quartile of the wage distribution. That is the only quartile that is currently seeing year-over-year growth of about 8% that's keeping up with inflation. But we can't just look at growth rates. Levels are important because in that lowest quartile, that's under $2 an hour. That doesn't even come close to buying a gallon of gas. So inflation distorts even good news. We're finally seeing wage growth. But real wages are declining, and they're declining quite quickly for even the middle distribution. And so that issue about skills and enhancing those skills leading to a more productive worker and a growing workforce is the solution. And how to get there, I think, is pointing back to your comments, a combination of business and government cooperation to have a real jobs opportunity and upskilling for low-wage workers. Perfect. JP, we hear a lot about fair wages or a living wage. Can you talk a bit about how we should be thinking about these concepts? What consideration should go into them and how do we get to that point? I'm gonna take the point of view of an employer and probably I share that with you people here on the tables. For me, fair, and by the way, it will echo some of the things you said about women. For me, fair wages are wages that are A, not dependent on gender or race. That's one first point, which is omitted. So we now, for example, in our group, are measuring position by position, the composition of woman versus man and reducing the gap progressively, which is quite complicated, by the way, to do for different reasons. But the second thing also, we're looking at the representation of, as exactly as you said, of women by different level of the strata of the organization, because that's where the biggest gap exists. It's just through the composition of where they go into the pyramid. And there as an employer, if you're going back to your question, the notion of you want to have fair jobs, you need to have HR policies, which basically are allowing to take into consideration maternity leave, I mean, very simple. Single mother with kids, somebody needs to care of the kids that are after four because they are.  And it's rather complicated, I have to say, but if you really collectively as a management team put yourself behind this, there's a lot of things that you can do. If the state on top of that helps by having the right policies, having the right infrastructure, having the right type of vacations and financial support, then you can, it's also easier to do it. For me that's a good point. You raise another question, what's a fair job? What's a fair salary? I think as a business here we have the moral obligation to say that a fair salary is not the lowest salary you can get using competition. Now there's a limit to that because if you do that and you're out of job, out of the market you haven't achieved anything. But there's something where you need to be thinking about your presentation. I mean, isn't it amazing that after all of these years of globalization, technological value creation, everything, you still have this discussion? And why is that? Well, it's very simple. It's because the bargaining power was not on the side of the low-skilled employees. As simple as that, you just had competition through technology, through on-price cost of environmental pollution, through reduction of supply chain improvement, you can basically put into competition a Czech manufacturer, employer, or blue collar against the Chinese, against somebody in Namibia. And then it becomes quite complicated. And unless you have super productive infrastructure, very high quality rule of law, you don't have the right to acquire investment in the country to basically create the jobs that can compete. That's probably one of the issue you have in Latin America where you're lacking the raw productivity to basically compete against the most, the better jobs things, better jobs, paid jobs, sorry. Perfect. Mauricio, you were a government official for a long time and I'm wondering if you can tell us a bit about what types of policies have been most effective, what countries and companies are doing a good job at this? Well, both NLNJP touched on a very important point, which is productivity. Salaries cannot really go in a different direction than productivity. Really too, in the long run to increase salaries, you need to have productivity improvements. So then the big question is, how do you enhance the productivity of a country? What are the key elements there that will allow or enable firms, corporations, small firms to increase productivity? And I guess the list is long, but top in my list are issues related to competition. Make sure that there is enough competition. Make sure that there is adequate provision of public goods, say IT, roads, that electricity, that corporations from the very large to the very small firms can actually benefit from. So productivity is a key element here. Let me bring into the conversation another element, which I think many times in this type of discussion is the elephant in the room, which is the minimum wage. Because minimum wages could be kind of like an easy way out of this problem and say, well, let's raise the minimum wage and then we'll fix the salary problem. And I think we have to be very mindful in making those recommendations because that depends a lot on the institutional setting, on the economic context. So for example, if you're in the United States, certainly raising the minimum wage, it's something that will be positive from a distributional point of view. Allow segments of the population, less skill to basically earn a higher income. But in countries where already 50%, as in my country, Colombia, of the workers earn a salary that is below the minimum wage. Below the minimum wage. That means the minimum wage is not a minimum wage. It's something that is mandated in the law. There's a decree that says this is the minimum wage. But employers at the end in the informal sector end up paying less than the minimum wage. If you raise the minimum wage and you think you're gonna do good because you're gonna basically improve incomes, you may end up producing just the opposite result. You may end up sending more people to the informal sector. So it's not simple. It's not easy solutions. It's not about just saying, we have this aspiration, we're gonna do this. And to me, this points in the direction of something which is even more important, which is this is not just about regulation. This is not about norms. This is not about laws. It's a lot about the way the economy functions, the culture, the organization of companies, the respect for the rule of law. So we need to work in a very comprehensive way. This is not just about fine tuning here and there. It's about really the whole system. So my sense here is that we need to raise salaries, but to do that, we need to have better institutions, better enforcement, and also on the side of employers, more incentives for the employer to hire formal workers, pay both minimum wages. And I think that's doable. When I was finance minister, I thought about this and I said, well, let's cut some taxes that are paid based on the payroll. Contributions that employers had to make based on the payroll. And let's convert that into profits taxes or VAT, but let's not do it thinking in terms of the payroll. And it helped. It did help a lot. That there was a significant reduction of informality. So you have to create the incentives for business to operate and generate the jobs and pay them well. I'd like to zoom out a bit to the global picture and this is a question for any of the three of you, but we're at a point where a lot of companies are rethinking globalization. They're talking about maybe moving their manufacturing facilities or sort of reimagining their supply chains. And that has a big impact, of course, on where jobs are located or how much they pay. And I'm wondering how that might impact sort of the inequality that we see from country to country and from sector. I can try that one. And then if I may, I'd like to talk about the cost of living adjustment as well. There are two trends that keep labor markets from being completely local. One is demographics, meaning that in rich countries, you have this issue that a lot of workers will soon be retiring if they haven't already due to the pandemic. So the aging of the workforce, especially in key sectors, like bus drivers that carry kids to and from school or accountants is a real problem that could be solved by immigration, but it could be solved by a new economy that isn't as dependent on location. And so the second trend that you really see emerging, especially after the pandemic is this idea of digitization, e-commerce. Now, most of the jobs that we're talking about can't be done remotely, but what is also the case is that businesses, if they haven't already are going to accelerate, are investing in labor-saving technologies. And that is the future. And so what's on the horizon is whether more of these labor-saving technologies replace jobs instead of enhance jobs. And the only way to prevent that from happening globally is to make sure that low-skilled workers have product of enhancements. So those technologies actually help them do their jobs better, which leads to a better profitability for their companies and leads to more growth in wages for good reasons that we've described here. And so just to put some numbers around it, over the past 30 years in the United States leading up to the pandemic, the bottom 10% of workers in terms of wages, their wages grew about 1.6%. The middle, about 6%. The top 90%, anyone want to guess? 300%. Hundreds. Okay, 37%. That's huge. But it was big in comparison. It's big by itself. And that's because you see that skill premium at the high end. The skill premium was the source of the inequality. And so that goes back to the original point that that skills premium needs to not be a premium any longer. And then the final question I wanted to address is you can't look at wages in isolation. There's also this cost of living component. And we tend to think of these as two separate roles when they're actually related. The fact that there is shortages in supply, shortages in affordable housing, shortages in access to education and childcare and internet means that the cost of living is rising and we're not doing anything to control those costs. So part of having a living wage is making sure that we have a livable community and neighborhood by investing in schools, childcare, broadband and infrastructure that makes it easier to work. And not so challenging to make up that lost income. Now to, from a business perspective, what you ask is a question is, I can see that it's gonna have the following implication. One is you probably will have less foreign direct investment in the countries where a lot of the supply chain was invested in. And that's not gonna be good news for these countries. I can see probably some good news for the lower income part of the countries where you have reshoring but I can see impact on the inflation which might very well eat up all of the increase in labor that you will get. Now to your point about the skill, the skill premium, I think we've seen over the last 30 years some mental shift in what was acceptable in terms of genie coefficient or difference between salary for very senior talented people and less talented people where all of a sudden it is okay to grab if you're the top 10% of a corporation to grab part of the profit you generate not because of your own work but because you're leveraging equity, because you're leveraging scale of other people. And the minute that happens then obviously you're unleashing a potential for increased compensation for very senior people which frankly speaking at when you look at it as an investor is not justified because it's sheer luck. It's obviously if you're the CEO of a very, very large corporation you can be paid 10 million because of the fraction of everything that is spent it's nothing but it doesn't mean it should be worth 10 million it's just still you're selling your time but that mental barrier has been broken and by now you face this question how can you even imagine you're hiring somebody that wouldn't be paid at least as much? And that's basically just been driving what you saw as difference in increase in compensation for the talented people and the less talented people that are only selling their time. So if I may have a take on your question which is at the end of the day the extension between the global and the local and with the promise that we're seeing today in a very complex situation of the world today are we moving into the local and therefore would that mean more opportunities for jobs and salaries? And if you think about the crisis of today what we're having is a whole new generation of crisis you know the COVID crisis the food crisis today the climate crisis and they get compounded by the way they're all interrelated and they can become catastrophic. And one of the responses to this new generation of crisis is well we're going to rely more on our own capabilities that's the reshoring aspect or nearshoring our neighbors or now the word and I'm sure you covered that speech in the Washington Post by Diana Yellen the secretary of the Treasury of the United States she was talking about French shoring so it's like well now we're gonna rely on this group of countries that we know they're not gonna start a war with us because they're suppliers of these key strategic products. So I really think this age of super optimization is like you go for the cheapest source of every single item in your value chain. It's over. The super optimization is not gonna stay there for one reason because super optimization does not build resilience. It's not resilient. You need to have ability to adapt to these shocks to these very uncertain, unpredictable events. You need resilience. Now we value much more resilience than two years ago before the COVID. So in building resilience you have to work with your communities. You have to work with your employees. You have to make sure that you have to worry about their entire well-being because that's what makes firms succeed. And it's not about super optimizing you know, making sure that every item, every element, every component of your value chain is outsourced to the most efficient one. No, this is about making sure that the whole structure is operational. Perfect. We have about 10 or 15 minutes left. So I'd like to open it up for audience questions. Does anybody have a question? Hi, thank you. I deeply appreciate this conversation. I just wonder whether you think there is enough attention to the topic as an issue that particularly with the talent, you know, with the talent scarcity is paid attention, you know, like it's discussed. I very, very particularly, I care about Latinas in America, US Latinas, 9% of the population, there are 31 million people and the least paid in the entire country. Not even Latinas know that there's such a deep gap. And the disparity of the wages is not so much in the lower income as much as in the higher income. So I don't think necessarily there's a magic bullet, but if there's any, you know, like in a way outside of, you know, like in America being what it is, if there's anything that in particularly, in particular you can address about like corporate recommendations that could be addressed based on business case in favor of, you know, like based on what they, companies would like to see for retention of talent that right nowadays is an issue. If I could say a word about that, because it touches a very important issue and close to me. You know, everyone is talking about these days about ESG, right? ESG as a metric, ESG as a new standard, ESG is the word of the day or the acronym of the day.  It's a G for governance, but the social dimension is there. So really companies that want to abide by high ESG standards, they need to make sure that the social level, and it includes for example, the labor force and how they remunerate and what are the practices and the scales and the differences between the top and the minimum paid jobs in that corporation. I mean, all of that has to become evident. So we should take advantage of the fact that ESG involves metrics. So you have to measure and you have to show. But let's ensure that those metrics include, for example, issues of how do you remunerate, how do you pay everyone that is working with you, including, you know, different groups. And make sure that you're doing something about this because what you're talking about is really an example of double discrimination. If I could pick up on Mauricio's point, I think that benchmarking is so critical to progress. But benchmarking without accountability is just an exercise in futility. You need some kind of accountability and hopefully the investment community is one. But another one is young workers. If you look at the data, you see exactly your point about where the gaps are the widest. Women represent about a quarter of senior management even though they're roughly 50% of the workforce in the United States. The gaps get wider as women age as they become more tenured and experienced relative to where they begin their careers that doesn't help them in this pay gap. It actually makes it worse. And it doesn't matter if a woman is in an industry with a lot of other women, like in education, the gaps are one of the widest in education between men and women. It doesn't matter if it's a highly lucrative field like finance, another place where the gaps are really wide. So you can see the gaps in every angle. So the benchmark's important, but what's equally important is accountability. I came originally from the tech world and they would always put out these statistics on their diversity numbers. And I used to call it the brotherhood of the lowest common denominator. It was almost like there was this comfort in knowing that every company was not making progress. And so it's not our fault for not making progress. And I think that accountability was missing. It's coming from investors, but it's also coming from younger workers. When we survey workers around the globe, there is a huge value on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and pay equity. And so the future of the workforce really values this and young people are voting with their feet when they have that opportunity. They are only supporting companies and working at companies that reflect their values. And so I think that's another source of accountability, which can help narrow the gaps in the future. Perfect. Any other questions? All right, in the front row. Thank you. Maybe more, three reflections that I'm struggling with from a European perspective. And so it's more a question, what would you do about it? Or do you see that happening as well? The first one is that I see middle-class jobs are quickly disappearing. So we end up with the high premium jobs, and we end up with low-scaled, low-paying jobs that there are numerous. The second one is it's not just about salary, at least not in the Netherlands and France where it worked as well. It's also about scheduling. It's about culture on the work floor. It's about being able to combine different jobs. So basically the whole package. And the third one is the gap that you're talking about is not just along salary. It's also along contract form. Because a contract form really makes it for people that they are actually insured against illness, that they build up their pensions. And that's where I see the biggest gap at the moment. Yes, in salaries as well, but in contract form. So basically what we end up with is a huge, a number of low-scaled, low-paid flex workers and then some very high-paid people with a fixed contract that are able to pay out bonuses. And what you see as an effect for the middle class is that not even though they see their own jobs disappearing, they have to fear that they will fall down to that level of low-paid, low-scaled jobs instead of being able to upscale to those higher-paid jobs. Reflections. And thus a struggle how to solve it. Where you stunk us all. Yeah, just that reflection, it's not an answer. It's a reflection. In today's world, and we haven't talked much about that, you raise the point, especially after COVID, people want flexibility. People want to be able to decide when and how to work, work from home, go to the office. Flexibility is now much more value than in the past. But our labor codes are not very good at that. They're not really made that we're not designed for providing that type of flexibility. So people that want flexibility, especially low-skilled, they really have to go to the informal sector, which is not good. So we need to redesign our labor laws. So we keep protection. Protection is fundamental. But at the same time, providing of flexibility. I think that the new job market it's going to be a job market where the workers would look not just at the compensation, the salary, but will look also at their ability to adjust, to organize their lives in a way that doesn't compromise their remuneration. The flexibility factor is key. And we see that workers are actually willing to trade off a little bit of wages for flexibility. But I also think for the middle class, at least in the United States, what's also missing is wealth creation. And that used to come from a house. The fact that you had four savings through a 30-year mortgage into an investment vehicle called a house that you lived in actually helped build the middle class. And now the middle class can't afford that house. And before the pandemic, there was a real issue about labor mobility, which also helps close gaps when you have a mobile labor force. And for a long time, the US actually enjoyed that. But that slowed recently because you couldn't afford to go where the good jobs were being produced because it was too expensive to live here, lived there along the coast. My hope is that we've broken up some of the geographical barriers to mobility, not for every job, especially not for clerical jobs, maybe not for certain middle management jobs, but that there is not, you're not pigeonholed by your location. And if that's the case, then hopefully there will be more opportunities in terms of upscaling. I do think for the middle class, the key question is how do you adapt to the future? Because the job that you have now is likely to change and it's really going to be, again, that partnership between government and business and adapting that level of worker to the new economy that's coming. But that is, by the way, it is happening. I was, and we see it in our business, the salary for IT workers, IT developers, tech people in small cities has matched the level of salary in the big cities, just like this. Because anyway, they work remotely. They work via Zoom, they work via team. So for this type of people that is happening extremely quickly, and for the time being, it's playing to the benefit of the people in the lower paid region. It might, at some point, play differently because with technology you can close shore if you really wanted to. It's unfortunately not going to help for the customer facing lower paid jobs in the restaurant and all of this. I, by the way, totally echo with you. I think the problem with the middle class hasn't been that the job disappeared. Is that what you could afford with these middle class salaries before is not there anymore. Because government have been under, investment infrastructure has been under investors because schools, public schools are becoming lousy. Therefore you go to private schools. Well, before, at least in Europe, you would basically get a standard service for that. And therefore middle class person could save and buy your house. So I don't know if this job disappeared or just in French with a properization or an impoverishment. So yeah, that's the word I was looking for. Impoverishment of the middle class. Perfect. Well, thank you guys all for joining us and thank you to the panelists for a great discussion.


Welcome, everyone. I believe we are on time now to start our webinar. Let me introduce myself first. My name is Rodrigo Silva. I'm the communications manager at Koji Tati Press. We have organized this webinar in the context of the International Open Access Week 2023. This year's motto is community over commercialization. And we wanted, of course, to introduce to our audience, to the world, Koji Tati Press institutional membership program. So this is the structure of the webinar that we have ahead of us. We're heading for more or less an hour. I'll start by presenting, as I said, institutional membership program at Koji Tati. So where do we come from, where we are at now and possible steps for the future? And then we will be hearing from three speakers, three representatives from three institutions that have been longtime members of Koji Tati Press. We welcome Louise Otting from TU Delft in the Netherlands, Sena Toivola from Givas Gila University in Finland, and Agata Gebert from Gises in Germany. I would like, first of all, of course, to welcome our speakers to the event. I'll give a little bit of introduction to our speakers before they go. So let's start our event. I will now share my screen with you. And for those who don't know, I would like to start with a bit of context about Koji Tati Press for those who don't know. So Koji Tati Press was born in 2014. OK, so we are a fully open access journal publisher with four journals all in the field of social sciences, as you can see. Media and communication, politics and governance, social inclusion and urban planning. A fifth journal is to be launched very soon in 2024-2025 in the field of Ocean and Society. As you can see, we are a very small open access publisher, although well established with less than 10 years. Since we are here to introduce Koji Tati Press institutional membership model, I think it's important for us to start first with the financial context, so the financial background at Koji Tati, so that we can then jump ahead. So an important information that you have to know in advance is that we at Koji Tati Press, we have no private or public funder behind, which influences, of course, our financing model, which is based currently in two pillars. An article processing charge for every accepted manuscript for publication and the institutional membership membership program. So right from the offset in 2014, we realized that this article processing charge model would itself pose like a challenge and obstacle for many researchers worldwide to access funding to publish an article with us. As we all know, there is an imbalance worldwide, a geographical imbalance and imbalance per field of study when it comes to access to open access funding. And we knew that this would limit the access of many high quality researchers to publish their research fully open access in our journals at Koji Tati Press. And so we launched this institutional membership program right from the beginning again, 2014, that goes as follows. The institutions that are members pay a flat fee in the beginning of each year and all the affiliated researchers can publish fully open access in all our journals without incurring article processing charges. From the feedback that we receive, of course, from authors, we know I know that we have some researchers in our audience today. This is beneficial for all the agents, for the authors, because it allows them to focus only on the quality of the research without having to worry about open access fund publications, bureaucracies concerning their European projects, etc. And for the libraries as well, the main target of today's webinar, because it actually simplifies the process. There is a single payment in the beginning of the year. And as I sometimes joke with this, but it's true, you only listen, you will only hear from us again in the beginning of the next year for the renewal of the membership. And in the meantime, throughout the year, there is no paperwork and no bureaucracy involved. So this is in a nutshell how the institutional membership program at Koji Tati works. Let's look at some numbers now to know where we stand. So as I said before, and have I shown in the last in the last slides, of course, the growing quality of the journals, the optimization of the editorial process throughout the year has led to an exponential growth of our members, considering that we are less than 10 years old. I remember when I started working in Koji Tati Press in back in 2016 as managing editor, we had only four institutional members. And today we have 84 members from all over the world. You can see the top three by country in the in the slide. But I would like you to take a special attention to the last point that I had in the slide. So it is important to note that most of the members, the majority of the members, they see an actually an increase in the number of publications after signing a membership with us. This happens, for example, with T.U. Delft or Gizis, that whose representatives are here today. That happens is two of the examples. I know that in the audience, we have colleagues from, for example, Tvent or IO University. This happens the same with them as well for your information. And this information, this increase in the number of publications after the membership is important for two reasons. First of all, as I said before, it alleviates the financial pressure on the libraries since they do not incur in APCs. But the membership also serves as an opportunity for affiliated researchers to publish more and more high quality research in our journals, democratizing the system. So making it more accessible for everyone. So it's important to so it opens the door without any financial constraints to more researchers. So it's important to focus on the opportunity as well in the future for the membership, for the researchers of the member institutions, but where we are at now. I mean, some of you might be asking, yes, but how much you might be asking? Let us look at the numbers now to know where we where we stand. So this is where we are today, even in our membership. We made an effort to make a fair offer of membership for universities with different sizes, from different geographies, because actually financially sustainable does not mean the same for everyone. OK, so this is currently the cost of our institutional membership, which is divided by the number of people in the institution and the human development index. We did not invent this model. Some other institutions use this this formula. And now that we have taken a quick look at the numbers, I would like you all to pay special attention to the cost of the article processing charge per per except article for publication. So by comparing the number, it is clear that by the second accepted article, the institutional membership is already more beneficial in terms of financing. OK, and this happens with many universities that are with us today in the audience. This happens. There are also others that whose researchers collaborate with us very regularly, but haven't joined the institutional program might benefit from it, for example. So it's clear that by the second article, the membership becomes financially more sustainable for the institutions. I did not want to put the link here, but I will paste very shortly in the chat the link to more information about the membership where you can see all the members, you can see all these numbers again. So some of source some sources for you to consult. Let's look at the future now. OK, so where do we. So what's the next steps for the future? Where are we heading? So as I said before, the growing quality of the journals, the feedback we've been receiving. Actually makes the publisher confident on the rising number of new members within the next years, as the list is actually updated regularly. The desired outcome in the future would be would be a scenario that we had a sufficient number of members that would allow us to make submissions APC free to all authors being from a member or not. So this means sustaining the editorial process only with membership support and abandoning the APC model altogether. Of course, this is a long term strategy, a long term look, which would also imply perhaps a shift in the way some libraries, some funders, for example, look at supporting open access initiatives like the ones we have, for example, focusing more on the sustainability of the model, the benefits for authors and readers. Again, as I said before, the opportunities for new collaborations, for more submissions, for more quality research, financial transparency, issues of financial transparency, which we pride ourselves in and focus, for example, less on how many articles were published by their authors only as the single factor to decide whether to subscribe to membership or not. This is, in a nutshell, I'm getting close to my time. I would like to listen also to our speakers. So let me just wrap my presentation up, OK? So question of the process, as I said, we have this institutional membership model as an alternative financing model to the article processing charges, and we have at this right from our offset in 2014. So this is a model with growing interest from both the authors and the libraries, which is proven by the exponential growth of the number of our members in nine years. And this growing interest is because the system, the model is more financially sustainable. It's much simpler in terms of paperwork. It's transparent and, of course, contributes to a fairer publishing landscape. I have given my email here for everyone who wants in the next few days to follow up by email or follow us on LinkedIn. I am available to clarify any questions you have in the in the next few days for follow up, and I am terminating my presentation now because I'm pretty sure some questions are rising. We want to listen from our speakers, and I will start by introducing our first speaker, Louis Otting. Again, thank you. Louis is the collection manager of TU Delft, the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Louis negotiates with publishers about subscriptions and publications, manages the collection budget and open access funds and heads also the collections team. Louis and the colleagues offer several services to support researchers and staff at TU Delft in practicing open science and publishing the research output in a sustainable way. And as open as possible. So without further delay, Louis, the floor is yours. If you can make it in your mind. Thank you very much. I'm trying to share my screen now. But as these things go, they always give some glitches once it's most important. I'll try again to share it. If everything's great, you should see my presentation now. Could you give me a thumbs up? If that's still the desktop. That's quite annoying. We'll try again. Yes, now we can see. Here it is. Wonderful. So my name is Louise Otting. I'm indeed working at Delft University of Technology. And it's been a very steep learning curve. My background is from the public libraries. And since about three years, I'm now working at an academic library. Also, my information is in this first slide as well. Should anyone have questions later on, feel free to contact me through email or through LinkedIn. I've been asked to tell a little bit more about the challenges we have as a library, but also what is happening here? The challenges we have as a library, but also concerning publications, of course. So one thing we are very proud of at our universities that we have managed to get a very high percentage of open access publications. This is helped very much by the situation in the Netherlands where we have a law that allows us to retain the rights to short scientific works. And after an embargo of six months, we can make those articles, those short scientific works available through our repository. So this is indeed why we were able to crick up that percentage in open access to our research output. Of course, we are also looking in other ways to be as open as possible and to practice open science. And as a library and as someone who manages the budgets, it's very difficult to make this sustainable. We see an enormous rise in the cost of article processing charges that are not in any way related to a rise in the number of people working here or in the number of articles that are being published. There's a disconnect somewhere there. And we are doing our best to make this as transparent as possible and to negotiate with publishers and try to find more sustainable ways of working together. So we need to track and forecast budgets. And as you can imagine something like this membership program, it's very helpful because it has a very clear cost that you can predict that you can rely upon. With the system where we pay per publication, we see that the APC prices can be all over the place and that sometimes even during agreements, the prices change significantly, which makes it very difficult to get that budget under control. So this is one of the reasons that we are very happy with this model. But as you can see as well, if you look at the dark blue and the light blue combined, because in the dark blue there's quite a lot of open access costs as well, the cost rise significantly throughout the years. And we do not see an end to this rise at the moment. We see several concerns within the publishing landscape, financial I've already touched upon. But also in the well-being of our researchers, the publish or perish is real and is felt by many of our researchers. The stresses are very high. And this is because it's become for publishers, it's become a model for profit. So they sometimes put even more pressure upon our researchers to keep publishing, publishing, publishing, because that'll bring down the profit that they are looking for. So it's not just a financial concern that we have, but it's also an innovation in the well-being of our researchers in the efficiency. Sometimes time is very important for other articles that might be less important, but now the pace and the quality is mostly in control of the publishers. And if there is no sense of community or of direct personal connections, then it can be difficult if those ideas are different from each other. And of course, morally as well, we feel that the world faces many big challenges and in order to face them, we will need to share research output with each other so that we can build on each other's output and find solutions for these challenges. We try to create more awareness with our authors, with our researchers. We created a dashboard, for example, to show them a little bit more on the publication costs and also on the options that they have. And as you can see, Kojitajo has a very high citation in our dashboard to a low cost. So this is some of the places where we say, look into this if this is a rise venue for you to publish. This is something that we'd like to promote to our researchers. They can filter down on these dashboards to see within their field what their peers are publishing and where they lie upon the high or low cost, the high or low citations. And we hope to add a lot more alternative metrics to these as well. So we'll keep extending this dashboard. There is a link, if someone would like to have a look and see what it looks like, I'll make this available to you all. But this has helped authors become more aware because most of the costs are being borne by the library, so they often don't have a real feel of what's happening. And it's good that we can, that those publishers that we have a good relationship with and that we feel aligned with our open access values can become more visible in this way as well. So where we have our concerns in the publication landscape, we also see that this membership program actually has an answer to some of those challenges. So we see that they're very stable and predictable costs that make it more sustainable to publish open access. We see a big willingness to collaborate with us and we see that he has a strong open access vision that aligns with our vision for open access. And also it relieves the stress from the researchers that they're being pushed to publish more for more profits because the cost is stable. It doesn't matter if they publish three papers or eight papers, they do publish more but that's because they have a very good experience and they can publish at their pace when they need it because the early release of the articles is also mentioned by our researchers as something that they are very happy with. And of course the emphasis on the quality, not on the growth, we see some other models where you get an enormous rise in the number of titles and in the costs that the quality goes down and we see that at this publisher this remains very stable and that it's community driven if there are new titles being added and it's being done very carefully and not 50 titles per year for example. So that gives us as a library a lot of trust as well that we can collaborate with this program and that we can keep supporting this program. The freedom to share reuse and use at all stages of the version of the article is also a very strong point in our opinion. Which makes it a very good collaboration. Researchers are happy. We see an increase in publishing. They mentioned that it is because of their good experiences and from the library point of view we are very happy as well. So we would definitely recommend looking into this model. Thank you. Thank you, Louise, for the presentation. I remind the audience that they are free to ask questions in the Q&A format. Share some comments in the chat if you are free to. If I bid my job right, you are all able to do so. We're going to be listening now to our second speaker, Senna Toivola. Senna is an information specialist at the operation at the Open Science Center at the University of Givaskilla in Finland. And Louise, Senna specializes in open access publishing support. And Senna, the floor is yours. Thank you, Rodrigo. And happy Open Access Week to everyone. I'm going to share my screen. I hope you can see it now. Here we go. Yeah. So yes, my name is Senna Toivola and I work as an information specialist at the Open Science Center of the University of Givaskilla, Finland. We are located in central Finland. And this year we are celebrating the 160-year history of the university. We have six faculties covering diverse disciplines. And I myself represent the Open Science Center that is a unit consisting of the University Library and University Museum. And among library and museum services and science education, we provide a wide range of open science and research services on publishing, research, data management, responsible metrics and open education. The Open Science Center has been an active promoter of open science for more than a decade now. Our publishing policy emphasizes the importance of open science and it sets guidelines for publishing at the university. For example, it is required that all research publications are self-archived in the university's digital repository. We do encourage researchers to choose open access journals for their papers if suitable and affordable options are available. The university complies with the Finnish Declaration for Open Science and Research and is committed to make all scientific publications open. So what are the main challenges that we are facing when it comes to open access funding? We have identified two significant problems. Similar to those that Louise introduced, they are research evaluation and the prevailing culture in scientific publishing. And the increasing costs. To provide some background on the topic, I'll tell you a bit about the Finnish Publication Channel classification system called the Publication Forum. It is a rating system that is used to evaluate the quality of journals and publication channels are evaluated by panels. And each panel is formed by discipline-specific experts. They use a three-level classification to rate publication channels, three being the highest level and two leading level. Zero indicates that the publication channel doesn't meet some of the criteria of level one, which is called basic level. The Publication Forum classification plays an important role in the funding model of Finnish universities. The universities receive funding from the Ministry of Education and Culture and a portion of their core funding is determined by the number and quality of publications they produce. The quality of publications is assessed using these publication forum levels. And this brings us to the first significant challenge associated with OA funding. Open publishing does not reward researchers enough. They have the pressure to publish in order to maintain a position in the academic community. The more you publish, the better if you get your papers accepted in top journals, even better. So researchers tend to prefer high-impact journals. And in the Finnish context, journals that have been rated level two or three by Publication Forum. And these journals often are either not open access or they charge expensive publishing fees. And as long as the funding model and research evaluation are based on journal-based metrics, this won't change. And that is why we have to direct attention towards responsible researcher evaluation. The other major challenge in open access funding is money, of course, and according to the latest monitoring, Finnish research organisations spent over 21 million euros on transformative agreements and over 4 million euros on separate APCs and BPCs on publications that the agreements did not cover. And this is quite a lot for a relatively small country like Finland. And Finnish organisations agree that the current cost level is unsustainable. So these are the topics we are struggling with. And next I'm going to talk about the membership programme. We've been a member for five years now. And media and communication and social inclusion are the two journals that researchers from the University of Yvaskylä have published in. We have 12 articles and a book review. And our researchers have worked as editors as well. Not all researchers have funding for publication fees. And Koshitatio offers potential publishing channels for them. And I'm one of the team members responsible for answering researchers questions regarding open access publishing. And in my experience, they have been very few inquiries from researchers concerning the membership. And I take that as a good sign. The other workflow seems uncomplicated. And compared to all the effort our transformative read and publish agreements require, almost no administration is needed. We don't have to verify our researchers' affiliations or approve article requests. And it saves us time. We appreciate that articles are published under a CC by license. And thanks to the license, the final published versions of articles can be self-archived into our institutional repository. Finally, I contacted a couple of researchers that have published under the agreement. And the feedback was very positive, as you can see. The authors pointed out things like good collaboration, excellent communication, clear author guidelines, streamlined publishing process and high quality reviews. And last but not least, not having to take care of APCs. It's very nice to hear that our researchers have been dissatisfied with the membership. And so are we at the Open Science Center. So thank you. Thank you, Sena, for the presentation. We are also very happy to hear the feedback from the researchers at Give Us Killer, of course. We will now jump to the final speaker. I got to Givert. I got to start at her career as a co-editor of a scientific journal and gain some experience in medium-sized publishing houses. Since 2009, she works in the area of Open Access, being responsible for the biggest repository for the social sciences SSR. She has the team library and Open Access at Gises, Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Next to Lassem Singh, she advises the staff at Gises on their publication strategy. I got, if you could unmute as well, the mic for the presentation. Sorry, you can see my, I still have to do the presentation. Yes, we can see it. But you see those, and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Thank you very much for the introduction. I'd like to add, actually, I'm also at the moment head of the whole department, Knowledge Exchange and Transfer, which had three teams. That's the team publication, the team training, and the team library and Open Access. And I'm responsible for assigning an open science strategy to the whole institute of five different departments, which encloses Open Access, Open Data, Open Methodology, and Open Source for the software development. Now, I'll give you a short introduction into Gises as such, and then I come to an end the conclusion of why we participate in Koshy Tazio's institutional membership program. Now, Gises and relevant numbers, we are very small, compared to all the universities that have been presenting. We have five research departments. Oh, first of all, let me tell you, we are an institute of the Leibniz Association in Germany. Now, Germany has four different research organizations. The Leibniz Association holds institutes about 100 that provide infrastructure services to their respective communities. So the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Gises would offer infrastructure to the social sciences. We have five research departments, about 218 publishing scientists. We publish about 150 journal articles a year, 45 in hybrid Open Access, rising because of the transformative agreements, 25 in genuinely open access journals, and about one to three articles in the four Koshy Tazio's journals. There might be one a year, there might be three, there might be none a year too. When it comes to Open Access at Gises, we have two objectives. One is to encourage our staff to publish Open Access, but also offering Open Access publication possibilities. But at the same time as an infrastructure institute, we need to encourage changes in the relevant publication systems in our communities. Now, Gises started in 2018 by offering a disciplinary repository, which is so far the biggest repository for the social sciences in the field, and offers services for self-archiving, but is also turning into a publication platform for Diamond Open Access. In 2012, we introduced our first Open Access policy that provided advice, funding, and infrastructure services to our staff to publish Open Access. In 2019, as everybody else, we started with the big transformative agreement and deals that have so far opened a lot of publication options in the hybrid journals, but whereas frankly speaking, these agreements do very little impact on the Open Access transformation in our fields as the flipping that was promised with the transformative agreements doesn't actually take place. We also encourage and other initiatives, engage in other initiatives of which Coach Itachiou's institutional membership program is one main feature. Through Coach Itachiou, we enable and encourage our staff to publish Open Access in genuinely open access journals beyond the hybrid journals of the big publishers. By paying a yearly membership fee, we also pay less money for the articles as we would if we would pay APCs. But I come back to close this up. We also engage in Koala, which is a consortia that fosters collaborative funding for open access journals and book series by academic libraries, research institutions and associations, and provides also provides an alternative to the dominant APC model where articles are paid for individually by authors and the institutions. And the last thing is we also engage in Enable. Enable is a joint together of publishers, libraries, book traders, repositories, and other stakeholders to engage in cooperative open access publishing. Now to sum this up, and this really is my last slide, but it's important to sum it up why we participate in Coach Itachiou's membership program. It enables us to offer our staff to publish comfortably in four open access journals with no individual APCs. But it also enables us to offer an open access publication option in a small and medium-sized publishing house that is still very important to the social sciences and humanities. Thus we contribute to the necessary publication diversity that threatens to get lost with the big deals of the transformative agreements and foster open access transformation in the publishing sector in the social sciences and humanities all together. So beyond ensuring comfortable and less expensive publication options for our staff at GIZIS, we also contribute to a fair, sustainable, and diverse publication system in the social sciences. Thank you very much. Thank you. I got for this presentation as well. We have reached the end of the presentations. I have a question here that seems has been answered, but I will make a quick follow-up as well on the question that was answered. The audience can still make some questions if they want, and our speakers are always free as well to cut me off and make and ask questions to each other as well. We have a question here. I'm going to read it because this webinar is recorded and people, when they watch it after, it's important to know what the answer was, the question was. So the question is, is it only institutional membership that is provided? What about personal or group membership? This is because there is a possibility that an institution might not show interest in registering or might take a long time to decide. I will follow up on this with two different ways, although the answer is always no. We do not have person or group membership. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes after the interest shown by an author to subscribe to the membership, the institution is either not interested or takes a long time to decide, depending on the internal processes that go. Alternatively, what we do sometimes to overcome a little bit this problem is to sign the membership either with an institute inside the university, for example, or a department because sometimes they have also the funds to make these kind of memberships. However, our preference is always the institution as a whole, as it opens more opportunities for more people and not some departments or institutes inside. The second idea is, we do not have personal or group memberships because this would put the focus of the finding in the researcher as a person. We do not want to do that. So our idea is to have the collaboration with the institutions as a whole to allow the researchers, as I said before, to focus only on the research and not having to deal with financial bureaucracies with the publisher. This is how I would answer it. I believe we have no more questions. So I think we have these three presentations, which were very useful to complement my presentation in the way that we have three different geographies, three different sizes, a little bit more or less common challenges though, which is important. I believe speakers and I will be able to some follow-up after this. Some final information before we close the webinar. So a recording will be available for everyone to watch. So we will notify all the participants when the video is on. I am available to clarify any questions by email, as I said before. If you have in the meantime in the next days, then while closing, of course, the server will pop up. Let us know what you thought if you want. It's not mandatory if you liked the webinar, if it was useful, if it was clarified or not. And I would like to, again, thanks to Louise, Sena and Agata for being here today and of course to our audience for being with us today. Thank you very much. Well, do we go there? Actually, one more question in the FNA section. They're asking about how, what Kokchitatsu's viewpoint is when it comes to peer review and publishing research data related to the article. The vision does. Yeah. Thank you. Question. Your vision is that I've come to abandon this much. Regarding more open exercise prices, where it's got just a viewpoint when it comes to open peer review and publishing should be related to the article. Okay. So in the question that you press, we only publish research articles that have not been published elsewhere. For now, we only use a double blind peer review. There is no intention for now, no plan for now to change this model that has been working with a high quality insight. So we have several ways to also guarantee, of course, that this peer review is well done. Something that we can perhaps think in the future, but for now it's not in our plans. Thank you, Agata. I've completely missed it. So again, thank you everybody. Thank you, Louise, Sena and Agata. We'll be in touch, everyone. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you.


What's going on everyone? Got a brand new movie review for you guys today and today I'm discussing the 2018 version of Suspiria was easily one of my most anticipated films leading into the fall season one being you got Luca Guadagnino directing it He made call me by your name last year I adored call me by your name is one of my favorite movies of last year and now I'm finally getting to see his Reimagining of Suspiria now. I have not seen the 1977 version. There's a couple reasons for this one I didn't watch a trailer for this movie. I didn't read the synopsis I knew who was in it and I knew who directed it But did not know a single thing about this movie didn't know what it was about Didn't know what the story wasn't gonna entail and I didn't know anything about the original either and it did this on purpose I do plan on watching the original because now I am like so obsessed with everything that's Suspiria And I want to get more into it. I want to see the original. I want to see this one again but I also Am gonna make this review very vague I am not gonna give the synopsis because I want you guys to go into the film like how I did and Understand everything that I found out about it. I want you guys to go into this movie with the lowest of Knowing anything possible That's the best way to experience this movie and even when I walked out afterwards. I actually said to myself I kind of wish I would have known a little bit more about it, but now thinking upon it. I Don't this film is very unique in the way that you experience It's one of the most unique experiences that I've ever had watching a film in a theater And a lot of that comes to the being that the way that Luca Guadino directs it tells the story and the way that he shot The film there's this film would not work without his direction and I do understand if someone comes to me and says I absolutely hated this movie. I'll totally get your aspects. I totally understand why you hated it But also if someone comes to me and greys with me and they're like, I totally love this movie I'll totally agree with them and understand why loves Suspiria.  I was obsessed with the characters I was obsessed with the world that Luca Guadagnino Developed into this movie and all the symbolism and the hidden meanings that are obviously in this film that I want to delve Into I want to analyze the hell out of this movie and keep going into detail about it again It's a unique experience that I've never had in the theater before at least not in a very long time And it's one of those films that I even though I know I didn't know every single thing about it And you're not gonna leave the theater knowing everything about it It's things that it leaves open for you to follow and figure out for yourself and to think about this is a very much a film that Deserves and needs all your attention span. You can't be pulling out your phone looking through it You can't be talking to a friend throughout it This is a film that I think if you were even Intrigued to see and to give a shot to give this film because you have to give yourself to this movie This is a two and a half hour run movie This is a two and a half hour movie that you really need to give yourself to put away all distractions and watch it The theater experience is probably the best way to experience this movie One of the biggest reasons of that being is the fact that there's no distractions in theater Hopefully if you don't get anyone knowing in your theater But I could never imagine watching this film at home and it being the same and this film had me in a Mesmerizing trance where I just couldn't look away. I was so obsessed with everything going on And it's been stuck in my head for the last few days usually I go home I review the film right afterwards, but no I sat on the film I thought about it and I sat to myself and said man I really like this film and then I started talking about it more I'm like, man, I really love this film and that's where I'm at now Me my friend got out of this theater, which I do recommend see it with a friend because me my friend started talking about this and Me and her just had a lot of the same opinions But we are just keep going back and forth and the way that we just got so obsessively talking about it It kind of was like we are talking about religion because there's so many different things going about religion I'm not gonna get into that obviously, but it's crazy what this film has done to us And it's crazy what it's done to other people that I know that I've talked to and discussed this film with Unique in that aspect and again how the story is told again It's not just Luca Guadagnino's directing that just makes this film superb because this directing is excellent The way that he shoots the film is very much an old classic horror film The way that he just moves the camera the way it moves around the way he sets the camera down It is outstanding what the guy is done with the camera in here And it really goes back to that Italian horror that we do get and yes This is a horror film, but it's not scary. It's not like I'm out of my seat scare No, it's very much psychological on it screws with your head again It's screwed with mine to the point where I'm still thinking about this movie There's imagery in here that you will not forget.  I was like wow This is a lot of blood again. It doesn't feel overly grotesque It feels like it fits the tone of the movie and everything that's going on within it But the film would be nothing without its performances and I mean my god my god Dakota Johnson is Excellent in here. She gives easily the best performance of her career so far I mean she's at a very short Filmography with not being in the best films, but she's outstanding in here till the Swinton's always great But honestly the big stand-up for me was Mia goth. She obviously appeared in that cure for wellness I think last year and I really liked her in a cure for wellness I the film itself was just fine for me, but I found her to be so intriguing in here And then this film she's even better. I cannot wait to see what she does next. She was great A lot of you guys are probably saying all that that's a long runtime two hours and 30 minutes It is and at times you do feel it, but there was never one point in the film where I wanted to walk out There was never one point in this film where I was like, okay, I'm ready to leave. I can't do this anymore Again, I just felt mesmerized and tranced and I will understand if you hate this film And I'll understand if you love this film It's a very different and unique film that it's not for everyone definitely not for everyone It's hard for me to recommend on that But I think if you if you yourself are looking for a film to go watch in the theater and have a very unique experience about Suspiria is your movie. It's unique. It's enchanting. It's mesmerizing. It's obsessive And at times if you think the film's bad, you probably think it's boring horribly made horribly acted and all that But I don't think any of that. I find this film to work on all levels It's easily one of the best films of the year and it gives Suspiria an A plus Spirit itself, I really do think it's a masterpiece. There isn't one scene I would have taken out There isn't one thing I would have removed from the film. There isn't one thing I would have changed I can't imagine any other director reimagining the original and not wait to rewatch this film and also Watch the original and see all the differences and see everything that Luca took into changes Because this film it's something and it's gonna be stickling me for the rest of the year guys What do you guys thoughts on Suspiria? Have you guys seen the original or you guys excited for the new one? Let's talk about it down below in the comments Curious here you guys thoughts on this one. Of course. Let's be nice Please if you didn't like this film, please tell me why I totally understand why and if you love this film Just as me, let's talk about it Let's have a lovely discussion down below in the comments or maybe a very bloody discussion Let's see how it goes if you're new here hit that like and subscribe button because I do tons of movie reviews like this Plus you guys go hit up see how much on films also down below because right down there You guys can get into advanced movie screens. You can check out some movie news and even some movie reviews But guys, of course until next time stay classy You


AFCC begins extradition process by obtaining arrest warrant for former Petroleum Minister Desani Alisson Maduike. Group demands release of panel report on a number of extrajudicial killings. We'll also have off the press where we'll look at the headlines that made it to the front pages of some of our national dailies. Very good morning to you and thanks for joining us on the breakfast this morning. My name is Nyam Ghul Aghgaji, so Wednesday frenzy and we do hope that you're having a wonderful time. Whatever it is, may today be kind to you. And if you're going to work, whatever part of Lagos that you are, we hope that you're going to find the means of transportation to get there. Thank God there are trains that will move around or that have been moving around right now to convey people from mile two to Marina and back and making up to seven trips or more. But we would also like to thank the government for making sure that the BRT buses are moving quite early nowadays. You know, sometimes we were complaining that they do not move on time. So if you need to get to the office on time and you have the opportunity of taking a BRT, maybe because of the time that they begin, it will deprive you of that opportunity. But right now, there are people who move, for instance, from Ojodubega to CMS, to Balinday, to other places as early as 5.30, and that is commendable. What is left now is that there should be more routes for BRTs to apply for people to enjoy. For instance, you're going to Bariga and the farthest you can go is maybe mile two or something like that. And if you cannot get to Badagri, not Bariga, Badagri, if you cannot get to Badagri by BRT, that means the people who will take you from mile two to Badagri might exploit you. And all the benefits that legosians are enjoying by boarding BRT, they may not enjoy on that axis. That's not really fair. So something should be done about it. There should be more buses and there should be more routes for the buses to apply. Okay, so there are some things that happened that we can say are top trending for us. And one of them is that the Chief of Army staff has ordered an investigation into allegations of troops' poor feeding. Remember that the Chief of Army staff, Lieutenant General Tohari Lagbaja, ordered this investigation into allegations of poor feeding of frontline troops in the Northeast Theater of Operation. The Director of Army Public Relations Brigadier General Onyema and Wachiku made this known in a statement on Tuesday in Abuja. And he said that the welfare of troops has been given premium by the present leadership of the Nigerian Army and was one of the vital pillars of the Chief of Army staff's command philosophy targeted at motivating the force. Wachiku also assured the public and all Army personnel that a thorough investigation would be conducted to get to the bottom of the claims. He said the Nigerian Army had always prioritized the welfare of troops, including their nutrition, adding that it has a comprehensive feeding system of troops, especially those serving at the frontline. He, however, acknowledged that there may be isolated incidents where lapses occur, but assured that the Nigerian Army is committed to addressing them. And according to him, an internal investigation has already been initiated to ascertain the truth behind the allegation, promising to thoroughly examine the supply chain, the quality of food provided, and any other factors that may have contributed to the situation. And that's why he stressed that the Nigerian Army remained committed to transparency and accountability and would not condone any form of negligence or misconduct from their personnel. And he called on personnel to report any grievances or concerns they might have regarding their feeding arrangements through the established channels for feedback, assuring that prompt action would be taken to address any legitimate complaints. He also declared that the Army would continue to be resolute in the fight against insurgency and other security challenges and would ensure that its soldiers were provided with the necessary support and care to carry out their duties effectively. We do hope that they have also upped their game in terms of allowances for the day. There was a time that we were hearing something like 500 Naira a day, which was raised to about 1,000 or 1,002 or thereabouts and so on. So it's like in football, a lot of people say a lot of people who play or players who play outside Nigeria are more committed to their clubs and not to the Nigerian national team. That is because they are confident that even if they get injured, even if they die, even if anything happens to them, they are sure of something getting back to their families. And that is not the case with the Nigerian football federation because you might be a national hero and then die so poor and if something happens to you, that is the end or that might be the end of your career, your life and any kind of prosperity that could have come to you. It could be the same thing with the Nigerian Army. We do hope that something will be done about it to get more commitment from these people who protect our territorial integrity, who protect our lives and property and doing even more. They should be in the bushes protecting our people but they also do a lot within the society that maybe the police cannot do so their duties are even more than they are supposed to be. The police is supposed to take care of the civil society and they are supposed to protect our territorial integrity and remain there but that is not the case for our Nigerian troops. They are fighting Boko Haram, they are fighting Aiswap, they are fighting so many people and then they are still fighting internal conflicts within the country. So the government should be deliberate about it. We also know that NPA has ejected policemen from barracks. Residents get 200,000 Naira each. There is this report that there is anxiety among the police officers who reside in the Nigerian Port Authority barracks in the sunrise, apapa area of Lagos as they have been asked by the NPA authorities to exit the premises within two weeks. It is being reported that the barracks have been sold and that residents were paid 200,000 Naira each to leave the premises while the policemen were initially given three months to vacate the barracks. The deadline had been reduced to two weeks which did not go down well with the affected persons. Now the fate of over 200 occupants of the barracks is uncertain while police authorities are being asked to intervene. Now I am asking why did they eject them? They are saying that they sold the place, they sold the place to who? The police barracks sold to who? Because it is bought by the government itself. And then 200,000, what kind of a house will that get? The average mini flat now, which is a room and palo, having a big name, just a room and palo, like Nigerians would say room and palo, self-con. You cannot get it for 200,000 except maybe you are getting it at some place like Badagri or you are going to the outskirts of Lagos. You are going to some places in Ogul state like Ibafor, you are going to Moway, you are going to so many other places that you can get accommodation. But if you are saying Lagos stayed 200,000 accommodation for the year, I am not sure you can get that, that will be comfortable for you and your family. And this has been established by the government. So who did they sell it to? Who is making this money? Why is it just 200,000 Naira that is going to be given to these people to settle them? How much were they paying when they were staying at the quarters? And if they were not paying anything or they were paying so small, that means it was part of a welfare package, so to speak. And now they are being driven into the wild as it is with 200,000. Will this 200,000 be given every year? We will still get the details from what is happening and why this had to be taken, this decision had to be taken, but we do hope that these families will not be stranded and they will find somewhere to lay their heads. And then OAU students protestation hike is another thing that really interested us and we wanted to talk about. The students of Obafemiah, Walla Walla University, Oshun state have staged a protest against the hike in school fees. The students who stomped the varsity premises began the protest early Tuesday morning, carrying placards reading, when I pay 20K at the Borough money, where you won't make I see 90K. So from 20 to 90K now. The other one was hashtag fee must fall. I cannot afford to drop out, fee must fall. My mama, the self-fulful, my papa, the ride-or-cada, where you won't make I see 90K, fee must fall. So those were some of the placards they were carrying. The sexual general of the university student union, Kimboni Obafemi, confirmed these adding that the students populace does not agree with the current institution fee. The students union on September 26 urged students of the institution to suspend payment of tuition fees following the slash in fee hike by the management of the institution. A statement by the public relations officer of the university, Abiodun Olarumaju, stated that the management reduced the fees after a meeting held with the students. Olarumaju had said that the students union leaders were adamant, insisting that the fees should be reduced by 50%. The vice chancellor professor Adebayo Simon Bamiere, however, stated that the challenges initially announced have been reduced but not by the 50% being demanded by the students unions. He added that the university management had agreed that the payment can be made in two equal installments. The sector general of the university student union, however, revealed that the reduction by the school management was instead 15%. Obafemi also revealed that the students union had written to all respective banks to halt the acceptance of fee payments from any student until a better resolution has been achieved, adding that they might have to shut down all activities on campus and progressively on all campuses throughout the country if the school authorities remain silent on the issue. And I think it's just a psychological thing that authorities use most times to do what they need to do. If they were paying 20,000 Naira as school fees and then they now said 90,000 and everybody was afraid and saying reduce and then they reduced to 45,000, that means they have still increased the school fees by more than 100%. So 20,000 to 40,000 is 100% already and then they say 5,000 on top. And that is in the time or at the time when rents have gone up. Not all the students live on campus and so if you were living in somebody's house and you were paying 100,000 for the one room that you were staying and now it is 150 or 200,000 that you're paying, the school fees have gone up 100%. The rents have gone up 100%. The food that you eat every day has gone up 100%. And so where lies the solace for the common man in Nigeria? I know a lot of people who have dropped out of tertiary institutions because of this. I know that some people will come out and say education should not be cheap. If you need to go to school, you have to be ready for it. And trust me, 80% of the people who will be saying that may have had free education sponsored by the country and they will come out and say that. So why not leave the choice in the hands of the people who want to either go to school or not go to school? And by the way, how much are we doing about vocational trainings in Nigeria? I don't know if we're doing enough because even our institutions do not even have something to make practical learning a thing at all in schools. And then we're telling people that education is cheaper than ignorance. So you have to pay if you need to go to school. I don't know how that is a good thing to say in a country like Nigeria, a country is not great by just the number of people that it has. A country is great by the number of people who are educated enough to make a change. So if South Korea is not as great as we are or is not as populated as we are or North Korea and they are advancing in technology more than we are, there could be a greater country than we are. South Korea has invested about a billion dollars in AI training. How much has Nigeria done to invest in AI training? China is trying to invest in AI training to the tune of over 200 billion dollars. How much is Nigeria thinking about? And the future is technology. And then we're not talking about it. We are making education so expensive that only the people that can afford it at exorbitant prices can go to school again. So we are making our majorees out of our children from North to the South. And I don't think that is going to be a good thing. But hey, I'm not a policymaker. Those who make policies and make laws for us think about it. Because when we have more people on the streets trying to, using the Nigerian word, hustle, we may find it really terrible in the future. But that is not our portion. That's a Nigerian thing. That's not our portion. So we hope that something will be done about it, especially education. Now we heard that the budget will be better in education from now on. But we also know that student loans that the set will come up in September. I haven't heard much about it. If something is being done about it, but I haven't heard. And so many Nigerians haven't heard. So the presidency should come up and tell us what is happening. How have people begun accessing these loans? And what is the criteria? Did they adjust anything in the criteria? Because what they told us before was not practicable at all. So it was next to having nobody going to access that loan. So they should be open to us. And let's see how we move from there. It's still the breakfast on Plus TV Africa. Another thing that interested us was the fact that someone in the presidency, in a committee that is supposed to be, let's just say, someone in the presidency said that we should pray as Nigerians that refineries should never work. Refineries should never work. That is the chairman of the presidential fiscal policy and tax reforms committee. Taiwu Oyudili says that we Nigerians should pray, that refineries should never work. And what he said was that the incompetence of the people who will run it, the way it will be run, will make fuel to cost even more than it is costing right now. And a lot of people have come out to say that is a very cheap excuse. So if you feel that there is incompetence in the running of that thing, why not privatize it and make the private individuals run it because they will do better? Why not put the mechanisms in place that will check the people who have been running down our institutions in our country, Nigeria? Why not be more proactive? For instance, the other time we were talking about the fact that if you go to the UAE in just a single room, there is a screen of about 250 feet that monitors every blessed drop of oil in that country, where it's drilled from, where it goes, where it has reached at any particular point until it is the final product that goes to the people and everything is accounted for. They know how much is spent, how much is gained and everything. And that can be affordable. That can be affordable by a country like Nigeria. But hey, nobody wants to think about that because we just feel, oh Nigerian people, they will do X, Y, Z. Why not try and do something that will check everything? For instance, I remember a time when the governor of Cross River State, now it's in every state, the governor of Cross River State said there was not going to be payment by hand anymore. Everybody will be receiving payment through banks.  If he were not governor, I'm thinking they would have beaten him up for bringing such a thing. Because people who were paying by hand, you will not have change for everybody who is collecting salary. So you will be dropping a hundred naira that change was not available to give to you. You will be leaving five naira that change was not available to give to you. And at the end of the day, the people were feeling fat. And some people that may not be available to collect their salary for one thing or the other, for one reason or the other, had their salaries cut and all that. So he said, okay, we are going to go electronic. Everybody will be paid through the bank. We'll be doing verifications through the bank. The uproar was terrible. But at the end of the day, people started enjoying it. Nobody missed a cover from their money. So there are things that we can do. And knowing that technology has come to stay, AI has come to stay, everybody is talking technology. Why not think about technological ways or some other innovations that will make sure there is no wastage in any of our national assets? Well, that was what he said. And if Nigerians go on their knees to pray and pray that our refineries should not work, I wonder what we will be praying to work in Nigeria because whatever will be the result or the reason for these things, these refineries failing and not producing optimally and doing what we're expecting it to do, will also enter into every other institution. So Nigerians should just fold their arms. Or Nigerians should just fold their arms and say that Nigeria has gone bad. Nothing can be done about it. Well, that is his own opinion. And we are entitled to our own opinion. But Nigeria must work. And we have to put our hands on deck, all of us, to make sure that it works. So ask yourself, what are you contributing to the growth of Nigeria? It's still the breakfast on Plus TV Africa. We'll take a break. And when we return, we'll be looking at the papers. Stay with us.


Hi there, I am Gary LB. Welcome to our podcast. You are listening to Northseq Storytime. You always wanted to know more about the stories behind Northseq CTF? Well, our talented scenario designer, Eric Boivin, will tell you the story of Northseq Toria. Hello, this is Eric and welcome to episode 2 about Northseq Toria, the theme of the Northseq 2021 CTF competition. This time, let's talk about magic. Northseq Toria is a medieval world where computer technology is somewhat similar to what we have today. People live in castles and wooden houses. They rely on blacksmiths for building their tools, but for some reason, there's also computers. And how? This is when magic comes in play. When designing a scenario for a fantasy universe, there's no need to explain everything. This technology is even hard for us to understand that use it every day. So, instead of trying to explain it, we simply use a word for it. It is magic. In Northseq Toria, computers do exist, and people don't really need to understand how it works. This allows us to create a CTF using modern technologies, which are relevant in today's infosec. By using a layer of mysticism, we're mimicking somewhat the power that skilled technicians have with technology. And we see it in our everyday lives. People that are skilled with computers have access to incredible power, just like magicians that wield the arcane arts. In Northseq Toria, most of the population is highly unskilled and uneducated. Even the king himself has no understanding of how these things work. For computer practitioners, calling it magic helps to put an aura of power around what they do. They sure understand it's not magic, it's just a series of code and algorithms running to do computation. Our participants do understand this, but the medieval persona they are representing understand this as well. This is something unique when running a team CTF. It's important to understand that the participants are in this setup, and why are they doing these challenges? In our case, participants are magician apprentices. In Northseq Toria, technology is not really regulated, but still the king needs to have people he and the nobility can trust to handle the kingdom's technology. And security is a key concern. At the start of the CTF, we immerse directly the participants into this by inviting them to join a series of beginner friendly challenges named the Wizard Academy. This school of magic is a series of beginner challenges, helping newcomers to the CTF. In Northseq's tradition, we don't say in advance the categories of challenges. So if an application weakness is a mescal injection, we don't actually let the participants know about it, they have to discover it. This makes the Northseq a very challenging CTF, which can be difficult for newcomers. So the magic academy is perfect for this, because this time the challenges are actually team. Whether it is for cryptography, cross-site scripting, or reverse engineering, the participants are aware of what class they are enrolling into. At the end of the magic academy, we have one of the four main characters in our story. Her name is Elmira. She's the head royal wizard, working directly for the king on all technology matters. Her practices are trained to help to defend the kingdom by finding security flaws in its systems. During the competition, she will provide various challenges to the participants. She's a very mysterious character, covered in arcane tattoos and writing in a very mystic way. She embraces the role of the magician and is interested in bringing the participant on a path to enlightenment. One of the missions that she provides is through a data science track. Elmira brings to the magician's attention that an old foreign acquaintances of her is using alchemy and is looking for an apprentice. This challenge is actually a data analysis track required to do analysis of a massive data set and to understand the pattern of a buttonet or a north sector term, converting lead into gold and thus creating alchemy. This is one of the many challenges that Elmira will be showing to the apprentices. And that's it for today's insight into North Sectoria, where today's tools are viewed as magic. And for now, time for my own magic trick. Until next time, I will disappear! Thank you so much Eric for sharing with us all that's behind the curtains of the CTF team. Stay tuned for the next episode!