the think tech Hawaii's law across the sea program. Today we're going to go across the sea to the mainland and then inland across the Rocky Mountains to Denver, Colorado to talk with Miranda Vieira. We're going to talk to her about how law firms can thrive during the COVID-19 pandemic. Welcome, Miranda. How are you? Thank you for having me here today, Mark. I'm wonderful. And you're in Denver now and that's a few hours difference from us. Yeah. What time is it there? So it's 5 p.m. there. It's happy hour and it's not me. Okay. All right. So tell us, Miranda, what do you do as a legal marketing consultant? What is that entail? How long have you been doing it? And give us a general idea of what that is before we get into the details of thriving in COVID-19 pandemic. Great. So I'm the owner of Denver Legal Marketing. I've been in Colorado law for a little over 20 years this year, which is kind of rough to say out loud, but I opened Denver Legal Marketing about four years ago to focus on solo and small law firms. Their marketing health, their business development health give them some extra consulting support. So this, my strategies are based on decades of experience with lawyers in business to business and also business to consumer practice areas. I run a remote team from my home in Colorado and, yeah, full service marketing firm. And your clients generally are, it sounds like small and medium sized law firms and most of them in Colorado are, I mean, can you also advise lawyers outside the state of Colorado or do you do that? Absolutely. So my intention when I started Denver Legal Marketing was to work with solos and smalls here in the metro area, but I quickly found out that there are lawyers with the same exact problem all over our country. And so my client base is about 60 lawyers here in Colorado and their practices touch six different states. So they either have offices in other areas or are licensed in other areas. And a lot of this is beyond just Colorado. It's just how law firms and lawyers can market their services. So yes, absolutely. I do work with lawyers from all over the country and also have been contacted by lawyers in Israel. I mean, this is a relationship based business and it works similarly everywhere. Right. Okay. So things have changed quite recently and we're dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and what have you been doing? How have you been dealing with it? What have you found that law firms are confronting at this time with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic? And what have you been advising generally at this point? Yeah. So part one of your question, I have been in the house for about, I don't know, 30 days, maybe 40 days, running my business with my two small kids. And so when I speak to lawyers by phone, by Zoom call through Microsoft Teams, by text message, by email, we're all usually pretty much in the same boat. Everybody is in quarantine conditions and trying to run their business from their home. And oftentimes our kids are there too. So the unique challenges that I have seen lawyers push through and initially it was, how do I run a law firm on a remote basis? And now what I'm starting to see at least this week is what should business development and marketing look like from home. So now after the initial kind of pressure of how to pivot from a law firm environment to a home-based office environment has kind of worked out. Now they're wondering how do we pivot on the other strategies? Okay. And so you've seen kind of the change in the practice of law by people going to their homes and having to practice out of that. And generally speaking, I mean, how are lawyers reacting to this? And how are they feeling? What do you sense or what do you get from your contacts with lawyers? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think I've been really impressed by the lawyers that I work with on how they have reacted to this crisis. I think this is a time when our country needs leadership. And a lot of people look to the lawyers in their lives as leaders. And I have seen the lawyers in my community and in other communities really rise to that challenge, helping people understand their rights right now, understanding what their obligations are, understanding how to interpret the different loans and other types of assistance that are coming out kind of in real time. So lawyers have a unique role right now of leadership, specifically thought leadership, on how people should be acting and reacting in the times of this crisis. So I'm pretty proud of the lawyers that I know and seeing them kind of rise to the challenge with regard to their questions of kind of what's next. I am hearing a little bit of nervousness, I guess. Lawyers usually bill about one to two months behind. So they have cash reserves right now. And in the spring, the average law firm usually keeps about two to three months of cash reserves in general. So they'll probably be good through about summer. But where I'm really concentrating with my law firms is let's keep that business development pipeline moving. And so everyone is good in August and September and November. Let's just kind of keep the conversations moving with current clients. How do we meet potential clients, things like that. So their law firms stay financially healthy during this COVID-19 crisis. Okay, so that's kind of a general overview. And I have several Hawaii lawyers have sent in some questions. And I'd kind of like to specific questions about specific things. So I'd like to kind of start going through those if that's okay. Absolutely. And let's start with Attorney Tred Eierly who sent in this question. Basically, how to address clients who will be unable or unwilling to pay their bills or at least full bills. And Tred is an attorney with Damon Key, Leon, Cupjack, Hastrick, Lafferra. Okay. So this is a question that actually has come up before and has been presented to me as a marketing consultant. And so what I would assure your colleague is that lawyers have every right to be paid just the same as any other professional services vendor. And what I have been suggesting is rather than preemptively giving everybody just a discount or payment options or something like that, I would wait for your network, your community, your client base to reach out to you and say, I'm having trouble with these bills or wait until they are a week or so behind. And then you reach out to them and then individually address what sort of flexibility your law firm can have with regards to payments. So maybe you will accept credit card payments on an automatic draft of such amount per month. Maybe you are going to start moving your law firm toward payment tiers rather than an hourly commitment. So whatever sort of flexibility that your law firm is willing to do, I would suggest using this as really an opportunity to connect with your clients, get on their level and figure out how you can still maintain a relationship with them and still be paid for the services that you've provided. Okay. Maintain the relationship. Yeah. Attorney Dick Mosier of the Denton's law firm asks, any suggestions for best use of social media conversations? It seems to be an entirely different communications process. What are your thoughts? So I agree. He has really called out a big issue that everyone's dealing with right now because these, I assume he's talking rather than just social media calls, just video conferencing. This stuff can be a big mess if you've got people that aren't used to handling these types of remote meetings. And so what I would suggest is these run similarly to how your in-person meetings would. So keep them professional. I would suggest an agenda. I would suggest a hard start time, maybe a break period put into an hour, and then a hard end time. I would also suggest opening up all of your Zoom meetings or Microsoft team meetings with ground rules. So in this call, we will have these two presenters. Everyone else needs to put their microphones on mute or ask your questions in this amount of time that's provided for at the end of each segment, or maybe ask your questions in the chat box and we'll address them then. So really just kind of laying out what the expected behavior for these Zoom calls is probably the easiest way to control the chaos. So yeah, be prepared is what I hear you saying. Get prepared and send it out. Let people know what to expect. So the expectations are there. That's a really good, I like that. That's a good suggestion. Okay, one more question before our break. Hawaii Law School Dean Emeritus Lawrence Foster asks, you know, law offices deal with great deal of documents. Some need to be notarized.  Can we notarize without the client being in front of my notary? I mean, how do you deal with that? Yeah, this is a question we've been dealing with out here in Colorado, pretty much in real time, and each state is different. But I did check on what's allowed in Hawaii. And it does look like your governor recently passed some sort of initiative that allows for audio and visual tools like Zoom to be used. But it looks like the person signing the document has to be in Hawaii, probably the notary has to be in Hawaii. But they have had a little bit of flexibility when it comes to notarizing documents, especially, you know, documents that require wet signatures like wills and things like that. So I would assume that any law firm that requires documents to be signed is going to utilize technology right now, including, you know, DocuSign is a great software program that helps you figure out who is signed what, when they signed it, when they received it, and then figuring out maybe with your court recording firms or some other legal services vendor how you get that third party in the Zoom room on the Zoom call to make sure that documents are being properly notarized in this remote environment.  In other words, check what the rules are because the rules have changed. The rules of this game have changed. And so I just like you checked what's going on in Hawaii. We got to do that ourselves. So okay, all right, I get it. That's very good. We have some more questions, but we're going to take a one minute break right now, Miranda, and we'll get back in one minute after the break and start on questions again. Thank you. Hello, I'm Lillian Cumick, host of Lillian's Vegan World, the show where we talk about veganism and the plant-based diet located in Honolulu, Hawaii. I'm a vegan chef and cooking instructor, and I have lots of information to share with you about how awesome this plant-based diet is. So do tune in every second Thursday from 1pm. Aloha. Aloha and welcome back. We are with Miranda Vieira, a legal marketing consultant in Denver where I understand you've had some snow recently. Miranda, is that right? Yeah, spring is our worst season for this. Okay. Well, I'd like to resume some of the questions. Next question we have from University of Hawaii law professor Connie Chang and her question, really good questions, are there any specialty areas of legal practice that seem to be affected more or less by the COVID-19 pandemic? And if so, what is your advice to pivot in these areas, one way or the other, and how can lawyers market in these areas without appearing to be too opportunistic, taking advantage of bad times? Yeah, so those are great questions. I think the first one, which practice areas are being affected a little bit more right now, it depends. So I am seeing major spikes in practice areas such as, you know, trust in estates, people are starting to shore up their wills because the future is a little bit uncertain right now. I'm seeing spikes in criminal defense right now just because there are issues related to small business loans and people that have a criminal past. There are also early release issues, given the COVID-19 presence in jails, family law, how to, you know, co-parent in, you know, a situation with two homes during this quarantine. On the business side, I'm seeing a lot of business lawyers really put out thought leadership right now to their clients and their community proactively. People have a lot of questions regarding contracts and, you know, enforceability of different aspects of contracts. And they also have questions regarding their business and eruption insurance coverage. So I have seen the majority of law practices actually stay steady right now. Again, people need their, they need their lawyers right now because things are kind of out of whack. And lawyers are usually able to guide them to a place of certainty and understanding what their requirements are under the law, what relief they might have. So people need their lawyers right now. So with regard to pivoting, I am thinking that lawyers that are marketing and kind of business development savvy aren't really looking at right now, but kind of looking at the COVID-19 crisis as a whole, almost as a five to six month period of time. And when it comes to pivoting, we start to talk about recession marketing. So even after maybe our daily lives get back to normal, I think people will be a little bit more concerned with how they spend their money. And that's going to include how they consume legal services. And so savvy law firms are looking at flexible payment arrangements and tiers, you know, tier three different tiers for their services through packages and things like that. So that's how people are pivoting. And then the final one was how not to seem opportunistic, which I agree with. I think we are in a place right now where a lot of people are are in economic pain. Some people have lost family members.  I think all of us have experienced loss and grief in the past, you know, six weeks or so that we are necessarily sharing with everybody. And I do think that lawyers and law firms looking to market right now need to be understanding of that. So what I would consider is rather than looking at the next couple of months as a marketing opportunity, I would really look at it as a way to push out your thought leadership. You can do that through writing, webinars. You can do it through hosting, you know, town halls, just kind of being a leader in your community and sharing things that you know. And if people have questions that are not in your practice area, I would encourage lawyers to become connectors. You probably know lawyers that practice in, you know, family law or an employment law or some other area that you don't, that maybe somebody in your network could really use their help. So I think marketing right now and business development looks different. Okay. And I hear you also saying what you kind of said at the beginning is that people need lawyers and you're not, you're, you know, do it, do help people. And so that's good. That's good. You know, people need help and lawyers can provide it. Attorney Dick Mosier, his next question, was basically, you know, within the office, how do we compensate for office interaction from walking around, going to lunch, water cooler conversations that we no longer have? Yeah. So I think this is a great, this is another great question. So, so here's the thing, we're all separate right now, but, but we are kind of connected, if that makes sense. We are finding connections with people by email, and we're finding connections with people through social media and text messaging and things like that. So that's really what I would tell you how to preserve those connections in your community, at your law firm, right now in the quarantine environment is, you might need to actually set it on the calendar of we're going to talk for 15 minutes every other day and just, and just have a team meeting or a powwow or something like that.  So I think you can still have an authentic connection with the people that you work with. I think it's just going to have to be a little more deliberate than it normally would, you're not going to pass them in the hallway. And it might actually have more meaning because it is more deliberate. Okay. All right. Dean Foster's next question. Yeah. Again, kind of similar. Lawyers do a lot of physical networking, Rotary Club meetings, nonprofit boards, giving talks. How do you maintain those connections and still practice social distances? Yeah. So this is, this is an excellent question, because it really goes to the heart of what does business development look like for lawyers right now. And it is exactly what, what, what I've been describing. It is showing your thought leadership in a different way. And so you still can go to those Rotary Club meetings. You can attend their webinars. You can engage with their, their community members and share your thought leadership. You can attend board meetings. All of the ways that you have engaged with them in the past, it's just going to, it's going to have to be in a remote circumstance. But that being said, it's, it is easier to kind of not attend these things, because you, you feel like you won't have kind of the bang for your buck that you would in person. But I would actually encourage the opposite, attend more, because we have less interaction. And so we need to make more use of the time that we have in front of these people, just to remain relevant and remain top of mind, which is basically what you would be doing if you were in a room with them at a meeting or board meeting. So yeah, what I hear you saying too is just do it and do it, do a lot of it. Do a lot of it. Connie Chang has another question and it goes right to the heart.  Yeah. How much is, how much does legal marketing servicing and really what you're doing is coaching? How does it, how much is it cost? So it depends. So my marketing, my marketing firm customizes everything that I do for each of my clients. I charge similar to a lawyer, I charge hourly, except I charge in 15 minute increments, which allows me to build in a little bit of client management, social media work and kind of bigger projects for, for marketing firms are usually charged on a flat fee. And I do that same thing as well as kind of web design. And you know, if you're looking for a branding website, those things are usually flat fees. But I think that Connie brings up an interesting point. And this is something that has slowly started to kind of come into my world of what if somebody needs just kind of an in the moment marketing, marketing strategy just for the COVID-19 process. And my guess is that would be, it would be probably about two to three hours worth of work. So not, not a ton of work. And also not a ton of detail because we're not talking long term, you know, goals and kind of, you know, long term goals of the lawyer and the law firm. So I think you could probably get away with under five or $600 for a short term marketing plan that will hit, hit, you know, digital marketing, social media marketing updates to your website. And then also how to stay relevant in your community through cause marketing or maybe some of the other options that you might have. Okay. So, so contact you and we've been broadcasting your contact information. You can give them some type of an estimate at that time too, I assume. Sure. Yeah. And, and okay, Dean Foster has one more question. Let's what do we have from Dean Foster? Okay. All right. Well, this is a good one too. I like this. Justice delayed is justice denied. Our state and federal courts are making in Hawaii are making heroic efforts to maintain some critical functions, but so much is on hold both in civil and criminal courts. What can we do? So I hear I love this question and here's why I think this is again an opportunity for lawyers to really show leadership. So some of the options that they might normally have of taking things to court a day in court, getting in front of the court, that's not there, but you still have ADR. You still have, you know, different forms of mediation for dispute resolution. So justice might not be able to be in front of the court system right now, but you probably can bring your client to some sort of agreeable resolution if you look into the ADR system. When it comes to criminal cases and kind of family law cases that might, you know, necessitate a judge, again, mediation, ADR can probably can probably be a great solution, you know, as well as just kind of create a problem solving what the other attorneys involved. So thank you. So look for options. Don't just give up. Try to find what you can do. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now we got we have one more question from Professor Connie Chang. I'd like to put that up. Okay. She read another article you recently wrote about law firm branding and using tokens. I kind of like this one, even though it's not dealing directly with COVID-19, but it talks about marketing.  And then she asked, what are some of your favorite tokens? Yeah, I love that idea. So, you know, right now, mail, regular mail is one of the only ways that you can kind of exchange those swag items that promote your law firm. Maybe they have your law firm name. And so when you're looking at buying these things, my favorites always are the ones that are, they have utility. So, you know, the phone chargers that, you know, might be branded with the law firm name, but they actually work to charge multiple devices when I'm at the airport. I've seen law firms create pop sockets that have their contact information and even the types of cell phone. It's like where you can hold your credit cards and your license and things like that. I've seen high end clothing come out of law firms, you know, North Face type vests with the law firm name on it. I think the biggest thing is to not spend your money on junk. You want to make sure that people will actually use it and they won't just throw it away or give it to their kid when they get back from the conference. You want to make sure that it's of quality. This is an extension of your brand. And so keep marketing, I hear you saying, and looking for opportunities even at this time. If somebody wants to contact you, they can just get ahold of you in Denver. I think we put up your contact information. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, LinkedIn is probably one of the best ways to stay up to date on the thought leadership that I'm putting out. So, certainly find my LinkedIn profile. It's just my name, Miranda Vieira, and you can find all of the information that I'm putting out there on how lawyers can pivot on their marketing strategies right now. Okay. And just for our audience to let you know that we will hopefully, we got a lot more questions, but we're out of time. So we'll try to get at some of this on Miranda's LinkedIn and other published locations so that we can read it. And we'll try to get that out there soon. Absolutely. And thank you, Miranda. I appreciate your advice and nice to meet you. Nice to talk to you and hopefully we'll see you in Hawaii one day. I would love to lecture in Hawaii. Thank you so much, Mark. I appreciate it. All right. Aloha, everybody. Thank you very much.


Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to Wikibon's Action Item. We're broadcasting once again from the Cube Studios in lovely Palo Alto and I've got on the Wikibon research team assembled here with me. I want to introduce each of them. David Floyer, George Gilbert here in the studio with me. Remote, we have Jim Cabela, Stu Miniman and Neil Raiden. Thanks everybody for joining. Now, we're going to talk about something that is increasingly overlooked that we still think has enormous importance in the industry and that is, does hardware matter? For 50 years in many respects, the rate of change in industry has been strongly influenced if not determined by the rate of change in the underlying hardware technologies. As hardware technologies improved, the result was that software developers would create software that would fill up that capacity. But we're experiencing a period where some of the traditional approaches to improving hardware performance are going down. We're also seeing that there is an enormous, obviously, move to the cloud and the cloud is promising different ways of procuring the infrastructure capacity that businesses need. So that raises the question with potential technologies constraints in the horizon and an increasing emphasis on utilization of the cloud, is systems integration and hardware going to continue to be a viable business option and something that users are going to have to consider as they think about how to source their infrastructure. Now, there are a couple of considerations today that are making this important right now. Jim Kubilis, what are some of those considerations for that increase of likelihood that we'll see some degree of specialization that's likely to turn into different hardware options? Yeah, Peter, hi everybody. I think one of the core considerations of the edge computing has become the new approach to architecting enterprise and consumer-grade applications everywhere. And edge computing is nothing without hardware on the edge, devices as well as hubs and gateways and so forth to offload and to handle much of the processing needed and much increasingly it's AI, artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning. So going forward now, looking at how it's shaping up hardware is critically important, burning AI, putting AI onto chip sets, low-power, low-cost chip sets that can do deep learning, machine learning, natural language processing fast, cheaply in an embedded form factor, critically important for the development of edge computing as a truly end-to-end, distributed fabric for the next generation of application. So Jim, are we likely to see greater specialization of some of those AI algorithms and data structures and whatnot drive specialization in the characteristics of the chips that support it? Or is it all going to be just the fault down to TensorFlow or GPUs? It's, it has been GPUs for AI. Much of AI in terms of training and inferencing has been in the cloud and much of it has been based historically tier to four on GPUs and Vidya being the predominant provider. However GPUs historically have not been optimized for AI because they've been built for gaming and consumer application. However, the next generation, the current generation from Vidya and others of chipsets in the cloud and other form factors for AI incorporates what's called tensor core processing really highly densely packed, tensor core processing components to be able to handle deep learning neural networks very fast, very efficiently for inferencing and training. So in Vidya and everybody else now was making a big bet on tensor core processing architectures because Google's got one of the more famous ones they're TPU architecture, they're not the only ones. So going forward, we're looking at in the AI ecosystem especially for edge computing, there increasingly will be a blend of GPUs like for cloud based processing, TPUs or similar architectures or device level processing, but also FPGAs, A6 and CPUs are not out of the running because, for example, CPUs are critically important for systems on a chip, which are quite fundamentally important for unattended operation as well as attended operation in terms of edge devices to handle things like natural language processing for conversational UIs. So that suggests that we're going to see a lot of new architecture thinking introduced as a consequence of trying to increase the parallelism through a system by incorporating more processing at the edge, that's going to have an impact on volume economics and where the industry goes from an architecture standpoint. David Foyer, does that ultimately diminish the importance of systems integration as we move from the edge back towards the core and towards cloud in whatever architectural form it takes? I think the opposite, it actually is, systems integration becomes more important. And the key question that has been can software do everything? Do we need specialized hardware for anything? And the answer is yes, because the standard X86 systems are just not improving in speed at all. Why not? That's a long answer to that, but it's to do with the amount of heat that's produced and the degree of density that you can achieve. So the ability to control bits flying around the chip is going down as a consequence of dispersion of energy and heat into the chip. They're right, there are a lot of other factors as well. But the important thing is how do you increase the speed? And a standard X86 cycle time with its instruction set, that's now fixed, so what can you do? Well, you can obviously reduce the number of instructions and then parallelize those instructions within that same space. And that's going to give you a very significant improvement. And that's the basis of GPUs and FPGAs. So GPUs, for example, you could have floating point arithmetic or standard numbers or extended floating point arithmetic. All of those help in calculations, large-scale calculations. The FPGAs are much more flexible. They can be programmed in very good ways, so they're useful for smaller volume things. Asics are important, but what we're seeing is a movement to specialized hardware to process AI in particular. And one area is very interesting to me is to take the devices at the edge, what we call the level one systems. Those devices need to be programmed very, very intently for what is happening there. They are bringing all the data in, they're making that first line reduction of data, they're making the inferences, taking the decisions based on that information coming in and then sending much less data up to the level twos above it. So what are examples of this type of system that exists now? Because in hardware, volume matters, the amount of stuff you produce, the costs go down dramatically. And software too, in the computing industry, volume matters. I think it's pretty safe to say that. Absolutely, so volume matters. So it's interesting to look at one of the first real volume AI applications, which is in the iPhone X. And the Nvidia, sorry, Apple have introduced the latest chipset, it has neural networks within it, it has GPUs built in, and it's being used for simple things like face recognition and other areas of AI. And the interesting thing is the cost of this, the cost of that whole set, the chip itself is $27, the total cost with all the sensors and everything to do that sort of AI work is $100. And that's a very low bar, very, very difficult to introduce in other ways. So this level of integration for the consumer business, in my opinion, is going to have a very significant effect on the choices that are made by manufacturers of devices going into industry and other things. They're going to take advantage of this in a big way. So Neil Raiden, we've heard, we've been down the FPGA road, for example, in the past, data warehousing introduced or there was thought that data warehouse workloads, which did not necessarily lend themselves to a lot of the prevailing architectures in the early 90s, could get this enormous acceleration by giving users greater programmable control over the hardware. How'd that work out? Well, for Netiza, for example, it actually worked out pretty well for a while. But what they did is they used FPGA to kind of handle the low level data stuff and maybe reducing the complexity of the query before it was passed on to the CPUs, where things ran in parallel. But that was before Intel introduced multi-core chips, and it kind of killed the effectiveness. And the other thing was it was highly proprietary, which made it impossible to take up to the cloud. And there was no programming. I always laugh when people say FPGA because it should have been called FGA, because there was no end user computing of an FPGA. So that means that we, although we still think we're going to see some benefit from this, but it kind of brings us back to the cloud because if hardware economics are improved at scale, then that says that there are a few companies that are likely to drive a lot of the integration issues. If things like FPGAs don't get broadly diffused and programmed by large numbers of people, but we can see how they could, in fact, dramatically improve the performance and quality of workloads, then it suggests that some of these hyperscalers are going to have an enormous impact ultimately on defining what constitutes systems integration. Stu, take us through some of the challenges that we've heard recently on the cloud, or on theCUBE, at Reinvent and other places, about how we start seeing some of the hyperscalers make commitments about specialized hardware, the role that systems integration is going to play, and then we'll talk about whether that could be replicated across more on-premise types of systems. Sure, Peter. And to go back to your opening remarks for this segment, does hardware matter? When we first saw cloud computing roll out, many people thought that this was just undifferentiated commodity equipment, but if you really dig in and understand what the hyperscalers, the public cloud companies are doing, they really do what I called hyper-optimize the solution.  They build for every application, a configuration, and they just scale that to tens of thousands of nodes. So, like what we had done in the enterprise before, which was build a stack for an application, now the public cloud does that for services and for applications that they're building up the stack. So, hardware absolutely matters. And if we look not only the public cloud, but you mentioned on the enterprise side, it's where do I need to think about hardware? Where do I need to put time and effort? What David Foyer's talked about is that integration is still critically important, but the enterprise should not be worrying about taking all of the pieces and putting them together. They should be able to buy solutions, leverage platforms that take care of that environment. Very timely discussion about all of kind of the Intel issues that are happening. If I'm using a public cloud, well, I don't have to necessarily worry about, I need to worry about that there was an issue, but I need to go to my supplier and make sure that they are handling that. And if I'm using serverless technology, obviously, I'm a little bit detached from what that, whether or not I have that issue and how that gets resolved. Absolutely, hardware is important. It's just who manages that hardware, what pieces I need to think about, and where that happens, and the fascinating stuff happening in the AI pieces that Jim's been talking about, where you're really seeing some of the differentiation and innovation happening at the hardware level to make sure that it can react for those applications that need it. So we've got this tension in the model right now. We've got this tension in the marketplace, where a lot of the new design decisions are going to be driven by what's happening at the edge. As we try to put more software out to where more human activity or system activities actually taking place. And at the same time, a lot of the new design and architecture decisions being first identified and encountered by some of the hyperscalers. The workloads are at the edge, the new design decisions are at the hyperscaler, latency is going to ensure that there is a fair amount of a lot of workload that remains at the edge as well as cost. So what does that mean for that central class of system? Are we going to see, as we talk about TPC, True Private Cloud becoming a focal point for new classes of designs, new classes of engineering, are we going to see a Dell EMC box that says designed in Texas or designed in Hopkinson? And is that going to matter to users? David Ford, what do we think? So it's really important from the consumer point, from the customer's point of view that they can deal with a total system. So if they want a system at the very edge, the level one we want to do something in the manufacturing, they may go to Dell, but they may also go to Sony or they may go to Honeywell or NCR or Huawei, yes, Alibaba. There are a whole number of probably new people that are going to be in that space. When you're talking about systems on site for their higher level systems, level two and above, then they are going to be very, it will be very important to them that the service level that comes from the manufacturer, the integration of all the different components, both software and hardware, come from that manufacturer. He is organizing it from a service perspective. All of those things become actually more important in this environment. It's more complex. There are more components. There are more FPGAs and GPUs and all sorts of other things connected together. It'll be their responsibility as the deliverer of a solution to put that together and to make sure it works and that it can be serviced. And very importantly, to make sure, as you said, the works can be serviced, so that's going to be there. So the differentiation will be, does the design and engineering lead to simpler configurations, simpler change, accommodate the programming requirements, accommodate the application requirements, all that are approximate to the realities of where data needs to be. George, you got a comment? Yeah, I got to say, having gone to IBM's IoT event a year ago in Munich, it was pretty clear that when you're selling these new types of systems that we're alluding to here, it's like a turnkey appliance. It's not just bringing the Intel chip down. It's, as David and Jim pointed out, it's a system on a chip that's got transistor real estate for specialized functions. And it, because it's not running the same scalable clustered software that you find in the cloud, you have small footprint software that's highly verticalized or specialized. So we're looking at lower volume specialized turnkey appliances that don't really share the architectural and compatibility traits of the enterprise and true private cloud sort of cousins. And we're selling it for the most part to new customers, the operations technology folks, not IT. And often you're selling it in conjunction with a supply chain master. In other words, auto OEM might go to their suppliers in conjunction with another vendor and sell these sort of edge devices or edge gateways. And so that raises another very important question. Stu, I'm going to ask this of you. We're not going to be able to answer this question today. It's a topic for another conversation. But one of the things that the industry's not spending enough time talking about is that we are in the midst of a pretty consequential shift from a product orientation in business models to a service orientation in business models. We talk about APIs, we talk about renting, we talk about pay as you go. And there is still an open question about how well those models are going to end up on premise in a lot of circumstances. But Stu, when we think about this notion of the cloud experience provided or providing a common way of thinking about a cloud operating model, clearly the design decisions that are going to have to be made by the traditional providers of integrated systems are going to have to start factoring that question of how do we move from a product to a service orientation, along with the business models, their way of financing, et cetera. What do you think is happening? Where's the state of the art in that today? Yeah, and Peter, it actually goes back to when we at Wikibon launched the true private cloud research a little bit over two years ago, it was not just saying, how do we do something better than virtualization? It was really looking at, as you said, that cloud operating model. And what we're hearing very loud from customers today is it's not that they have a public cloud strategy and a private cloud strategy, they have a cloud strategy. One of the challenges that they're really having is how do they get their arms around that? Because today their private cloud and their public cloud, a lot of times it's different suppliers, it's different operating environments, as you said. We could spend a whole another call just discussing some of the nuance and pieces here. But the real trend we've been seeing and kind of the second half of last year and big thing we'll see I'm sure through this year is what are the solutions and how can customers manage this much simpler and what are the technology pieces and operational paradigms that are going to help them through this environment? And yeah, it's a little bit detached from some of the hardware discussion we're having here because of course at the end of the day it shouldn't matter what hardware or what locale I'm in. It's how I manage the entire environment. It shouldn't matter, but the reality is I think we're concluding that at the same time. I mean, we think back to, oh, back in the early days, oh, virtualization, great, I could take any x86, oh wait, but I had a BIOS problem and that broke things. So when containers rolled out, we had the same kind of discussion as, oh wait, there was something down at the storage or networking layer that broke. So it's always right, where is the proper layer, how do we manage that? Right, I for one, just continue to hope that we're going to see the Harry Potter computing model show up at some point in time, but until then, magic is not going to run software. It's going to have to run on hardware and that has physical and other realities. All right, thanks guys, let's wrap this one up. Let me give some, what the action item is. So this week we talked about the imports of hardware in the marketplace going forward and partly it's catalyzed by an event that occurred this week, a security firm discovered a couple of flaws in some of the predominant common standard volume CPUs, including intels, that have long-term ramifications and while one of the fixes is not going to be easy, the other one can be fixed by software, but the suggestion is, is that the fixed, that software fix would take out 30% of the computing power of the chip and we were thinking to ourselves, what would happen if the world suddenly lost 30% of their computing power overnight? And the reality is a lot of bad things would happen and it's very clear that hardware still matters and we have this tension between what's happening at the edge where we're starting to see a need for greater distribution of function that's performing increasingly specialized workloads, utilizing increasingly new technology. That's not, that the prevailing stack is not necessarily built for. So the edge is driving new opportunities for design that's going to turn into new requirements for hardware that will only be possible if there's new volume markets capable of supporting it and new suppliers bringing it to market. That doesn't, however, mean that the whole concept of systems integration goes away. On the contrary, even though we're going to see this enormous amount of change at the edge, there's an enormous net new invention in what does it mean to do systems integration? We're seeing a lot of that happen in the hyperscalers first in companies like Amazon and Google and elsewhere. But don't be fooled. The HPEs, the IBMs, the Dell EMCs are all very cognizant of these approaches and these challenges and these challenges and in many respects, a lot of the original work, a lot of the original invention is still being performed in their labs. So the expectation is the new design models being driven by the edge plus the new engineering models being driven by the hyperscalers will not mean that it all ends up in two tiers, but we will see a need for modern systems integration happening in the true private cloud on the premise where a lot of the data and a lot of the workloads and a lot of the intellectual property is still going to reside. That, however, does not mean that the model going forward is the same. Some of the new engineering dynamics or some of the new design dynamics will have to start factoring in how the hardware simplifies configuration. For example, FPGAs have been around for a long time but end users don't program FPGAs. So what good does it do to reflect the FPGA capability inside a box, inside a true private cloud box if the user doesn't have any simple, straightforward, meaningful way to make use of it. So a lot of new emphasis on improved manageability, AI for ITOM, ways of providing application developers access to accelerated devices. This is where the new systems and design issues are going to manifest themselves in the marketplace. Underneath this, when we talk about Unigrid, we're talking about some pretty consequential changes ultimately in how design and engineering of some of these big systems works. So our conclusion is lots that the hardware still matters but that the industry continues to move and drive in a direction that reduces the complexity of the underlying hardware but that doesn't mean that users aren't going to encounter serious decisions and serious issues regarding which supplier they should work with. So the action item is this. As we move from a product to a service orientation in the marketplace, hardware is still going to matter. That creates a significant challenge for a lot of users because now we're talking about how that hardware is rendered as platforms that will have long-term consequences inside a business. So CIOs start thinking about 2018 as a year in which you start to consider the new classes of platforms that you're going to move to because those platforms will be the basis for simplifying a lot of underlying decisions regarding where is the best design and engineering of infrastructure going forward. Once again, I want to thank my Wikibon teammate, George Gilbert, David Floyer, Stu Miniman, Neil Raiden and Jim Kabilis for a great action item from our theCUBE studios in Palo Alto. This has been Action Item. Talk to you soon.


my chefford on a bench like this and then use those metal covers. Probably shouldn't have bought them in the first place. But anyway, so I tried this once, kind of free hand with stuff. It looked awful, so I am not afraid to take things off and completely do them again. This time I used a lot of work on pieces of paper to get myself a really nice pattern. Then I traced that pattern on to my first piece of wood. I did some rough cutting. You can see I do a lot of relief cuts in order to do cutting on the bandsaw. I'm trying to cut my finger off on the bandsaw during this process, as you can see, the big wrapping there. A little trip to the emergency room, a little suturing and brace. Now I'm in the stage of getting back to normal. So anyway, working on my first piece, trying to get it perfect and sell a little various files and sanding and things and so now it's essentially going to be a template for the other pieces. The four pieces that go around the chain are one and one-eighth in thickness so that the chain fits totally inside of that. And then for the outside part I'm going to have these end pieces that are half an inch in width. So here I'm tracing the pattern on to the other three that I'm going to make and then that's going to go over a one-quarter inch hobby board that I got from Home Depot rather than trying to thin down to a quarter inch on my equipment. So working on these used a router with a round over bit. I wanted to get all of these end pieces to have a nice round over edge on them so put those in my new workbench and my new vices and man I'm going to love using this workbench. So do those round overs.  So I did that on my tenon jig and then I had to do a little fine tuning with chisels and things as I would try to dry fit them onto that board that's just to the right there. So got that all worked out sanded everything down 20 grit and then 220 grit and then I wet things down before I do the 220 so let's raise the grain. So here I'm figuring out where I want to put the screws or the plate that's covering the chains. This is the quarter inch hobby board from Home Depot Black Walnut. So get those attached properly spaced out in proper length. Quite a few efforts went into drive fitting the end pieces to this to figure out how long we should be. All right then on those covers they needed to have a little bit of a circle in them to complete the circle that was done on the end pieces. The end pieces themselves had a circle cut out using a two inch hole saw on the drill press and then this is just to match the rest of that. Well here's everything installed a couple close-ups to hopefully you can get a good idea of how these fit together. Again in summary you have the outside edges over the chains which are one and one-eighth width and thickness and then you have the one quarter inch plate covering the chains and then you have the end pieces which are a half an inch or most of them but then with a cut out to go over the one quarter insert plate. So let me ask you this, which do you like better on an heirloom polybench? These metal plates from Veritas or do you perhaps prefer these custom plates using real wood?


Welcome to the Hindu News Analysis for the date 11th of March 2020. The list of news articles taken up for today's analysis along with the page numbers of five different editions is displayed here for your reference. The handwritten notes in PDF format and the time stamping of all the news articles taken up for today's analysis is available in the description section and also in the common section for the benefit of the smartphone users. Let us now start our analysis. Now let us see an editorial which is titled, A Progressive System of Taxation. See, in this Union Budget 2020-2021, the Finance Minister has announced that India will revert back to the classical system of taxing dividend. And the author of this editorial has welcomed this move of the government. So in this context, today let us see what do we mean by dividend. Then we shall see the three types of taxing this dividend. The syllabus that is relevant to the analysis of this editorial is given here for your reference. First, let us understand what dividend means. We know that a shareholder is someone who owns shares in a company or a corporation. It simply means they own a stake in the company whose share they hold. So when the company is making profits, a part of this profit will be distributed to its shareholders. The regular payments that are made by the company to its shareholders is called as dividend. Normally if you see, there are three methods of taxing dividend which is prevalent globally. One is the classical system. The second one is the DDT that is the dividend distribution tax method which is also called as simplistic system. And the third one is the imputation system. Now in our analysis, we will be focusing more on this DDT system and the classical system because it is more relevant from the Indian scenario. First, let us look into the dividend distribution tax or the DDT method. See, DDT is the tax that is levied on the dividends paid by the company to its shareholders. DDT is usually taxed at source. That is the company which distributes the dividend has to pay DDT. Initially, if you see the DDT was at the rate of 15% plus surcharge and ses on the gross amount of dividend. And altogether it came around 20.3% and this 20.3% was taxed at source. That means the shareholders who receive the dividends were free from paying the DDT. And this is mentioned under section 115 of the Income Tax Act of 1961. You note that under DDT, the dividends are not subject to tax in the hands of the shareholders except for certain category of resident tax payers. If at all the dividend income is exceeding 10 lakh, then it attracts an additional tax at the rate of 10% and this is also as per the provisions of the Income Tax Act of 1961. So who are those resident shareholders who have to pay this extra 10%? It is given here for your reference. If you see, this DDT method was adopted in India since 1997-98. From this discussion, we can see that under DDT, there is no distinction between a small investor or a big investor. Everyone is taxed at the same rate since the companies pay the DDT on behalf of the investors beforehand. So since the company pays taxes, tracking of dividends and collecting the tax on dividend was much simpler and painless process. This is the reason why this method is also called as simplistic system of taxing dividend. But if you see before DDT, the dividends were taxed under classical system in India. After considering the advantages and disadvantages of the classical system, from 1997-98, India adopted the DDT regime. But if you see this Union Budget, that is Union Budget 2020-2021 has abolished the DDT and reverted back to the classical system. So what is this classical system? Here the dividend is taxable in the hands of the shareholder, that is the investor. That is the dividends from the companies will reach the investor in full. And then the shareholders are taxed as per their income tax lab. Here the concept is that the dividend that is received by the investor, that is the shareholder, is considered as a part of their income. And so it is taxed as per the appropriate income tax lab. So now the companies are free from paying taxes on dividend. The tax rate for the income tax labs is given here for your reference. Now what is the advantage of this classical system? The shareholders who are in the lower tax labs will have to pay lower tax. Also as the companies are now freed from paying the DDT, they will have more surplus money now. More surplus money means the companies can further invest in the business. And also more surplus money means the companies may pay higher dividends to its shareholders if at all they are willing. Now if there is more money in the hands of the shareholders who are none but the investors, they can be an Indian shareholder or a foreign shareholder. It will again boost the investments in the Indian capital market. So these are some of the major advantages of this classical system. But if you look at the disadvantage, the big investors and the big promoters have to pay higher rate of tax now under this classical system. So they will be at loss because they have to chunk a major portion of their earnings as tax. Also if you see majority of the shareholders in India are investing their hard earned money. Only few proportion of the shareholders are investing the money which they have inherited from their previous generations like their parents or grandparents. So for this large proportion of shareholders, any tax that they pay on the dividend is the hard earned money which they are foregoing. So to some extent this classical system discourages the new generation investors. If you see the next disadvantage, the foreign companies and the foreign investors in Indian companies are at advantages position than the Indian counterparts. This is because India has signed many tax treaties with most of the countries and these tax treaties limit the taxation on dividends to somewhere around 5 to 15% for the foreign companies and investors. And also in some case if you see the foreign investors can claim foreign tax credit in their home jurisdiction for the taxes that they are paying in India. It means that if a foreign investor has already paid the dividend tax in India, he or she need not pay tax again on his or her income in his or her own jurisdiction. So they can claim foreign tax credit in their countries. But if you see the Indian counterparts have to pay taxes as per the usual income tax slab. So you can see that the foreign investors are at an advantage here and the Indian shareholders that is the Indian investors are at a disadvantageous position. Now what the author tries to tell is that though this classical system of taxation has its own merits and demerits, it is a progressive system of taxation. This is the reason why the author tells that reverting back to the classical system of taxing dividend is a good move. So these are the two important types of taxation that you need to know and have clarity about. Now let us look at the third system of taxation which is the imputation system. See this system is adopted in countries like Australia. If you look at this imputation system, the dividend is taxed in the hands of the investors. They are also entitled to claim a tax credit for the tax that is paid by the company before the dividend distribution to the investors. Now what is the highlight of this concept is that it will reduce the income tax that is payable on the dividend that is received by the investors. So here both the company and the investors will pay the taxes but the investors can claim a tax credit for the tax that is paid by the company. But this system has its own complications. So it is adopted in fewer countries like Australia. This is all about the discussion of this editorial. To summarize this editorial we saw what do we mean by dividend. Then we saw three methods of taxing dividend. One is the simplistic or the DDT system. The second is the classical system and the third is the imputation system. We gave more focus on the first two systems because it is more relevant from the Indian scenario. Because at present as per the union budget of 2020-2021 the central government has abolished the DDT system. That is the simplistic taxation system and it has reverted back to the classical system. So try to have idea about both these taxation system with regards to dividend. This is all about the discussion of this editorial. Now have a look at the practice question. Let us move on to the next news article. Now let us look at an editorial which discusses about the difficulties that are faced by those persons who are excluded from the National Register of Citizens where they have to go to the Foreigner Tribunal and prove their citizenship. The syllabus that is relevant to the analysis of this editorial is given here for your reference. See as we know India witnessed huge migration surrounding the 1971 Bangladeshi Liberation War following this Assam which received the largest number of Bangladeshi migrants have witnessed huge protests. So in 1985 Assam Accord was signed to ease the situations. See there are two things in this Assam Accord which you need to know for today's discussion. One is that those foreigners who came to Assam after the 1st of January 1966 including the 1st of January and upto 24th March 1971 shall be detected in accordance with the provisions of the Foreigners Act of 1946 and the Foreigners Tribunal's order of 1964 and the names of those detected foreigners will be expelled from the electoral roads. And those foreigners who came to Assam on or after 25th of March 1971 shall continue to be detected, deleted and expelled in accordance with the law. So in order to hear the claims regarding citizenship the Foreigners Tribunal was formed in Assam. Now let us look at in brief about the Foreigners Act of 1946 especially we need to know the definition of who is meant by a foreigner. See as per this act a foreigner is a person who is not a citizen of India. And if you see this act provides wide ranging powers to the central government to control the entry, exit and movement of foreigners to and within the territory of India. So under section 3 of this act the central government issued an order called the Foreigners Tribunal's order of 1964 and the tribunal's objective is to identify whether a person is a foreigner or not. So this is the purpose of the Foreigners Tribunals. Now coming back to the editorial the author tells that the Foreigners Tribunals in Assam have seen two types of cases. One is persons against whom the reference has been made by the border police and second is persons whose names has been marked as doubtful in the electoral rules. Now section 9 of this Foreigners Act says that the burden of proof that is proving that a person is not a foreigner lie upon that particular person. So they have to provide substantiating documents in the Foreigners Tribunal and the Foreigners Tribunal will take decision of the citizenship accordingly. Here the author tries to tell that this procedure is not so easy as we think. He tells that those persons who are going to the Foreigners Tribunal are under unreasonable burden of proving the citizenship beyond doubt. We know that what defines ourselves as the Indian citizens is certain documents like electoral IDs, voters list which is bearing our names, then land revenue receipts, then a permanent account number that is the PAN card and then the ration cards and so on. But those people who are coming to the Foreigners Tribunals have to provide documents proving that their ancestors were in India prior to 25th of March 1971. So this is an extra burden on those persons and the author tells that their burden does not end there because the individuals have to validate those documents on their own by securing testimony from the respective issuing authorities. So they are having unreasonable burden of proving their citizenship. See we have one more legislation in India under the Indian Evidence Act of 1872. The burden of proof in any court of law lies on the person who seeks to make a claim or a set of fact. This would mean that before the Foreigners Tribunals the burden of proof should have been on the government because it is the government which is seeking to make a claim or a set of fact that certain persons are Foreigners. But what we saw was the reverse because as per the Foreigners Act of 1946 the burden of proof is on the individual who is referred to a Foreigner Tribunal. So the government sense that it is not good to place the burden of proof on the individual. So for this the central government framed the Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunal Act in 1983. And as per this act the burden of proof was shifted to the government from the individual. But if you see this particular legislation was struck down in the year 2005 by the Supreme Court when it heard the Sarbananda Sonowal v Union of India case. The Supreme Court struck this legislation as unconstitutional. It said that illegal migration into SM posed a threat to the security of the nation. And so this particular 1983 act was violating Article 355 of Indian Constitution. Now what does this article tell? It tells that it shall be the duty of the Union to protect every state against external aggression and internal disturbance. It means that the burden of proof should lie on the individuals that is the illegal immigrants. So based on this judgment the burden of proof again came back to the individual. Now based on this judgment only the Gauhati I court has ruled on various petitions confirming that majority of the petitioners are foreigners. You can see the statistic in the first pair of this editorial. So we know that now the burden of proof is on the individual. Now what the author tries to suggest is that a certain level of proof should be sufficient to discharge the burden. For example, a person accused as foreigner has to submit basic set of documents like voter ID, ration card, etc. Then the owner should be on the state that is the government to prove it wrong. So this is what the author suggests. Here if you see the author has quoted the words of political philosopher Hannah Arendt. This philosopher has said that to truly possess rights individuals often need to belong to a political community. It simply means that the right to possess rights is available only when the individuals become citizens or when they are citizens. Now why the author has quoted this because we often see rights as universal but it is actually not universal. This is the reason why the author tells that we must recognize a universal status of personhood of every human being independent of their nationality. And this is the reason why this editorial is titled as for a universal status of personhood. So to summarize what the author tries to emphasize is that those persons declared as foreigners shall be given an equal opportunity and a fair chance to prove their citizenship. So that it would significantly bring down the number of people who might otherwise have to go to detention camps or become stateless. For this he has suggested ways in the editorial which we saw now. So this is all about the discussion of this editorial. Now have a look at the practice question. Let us move on to the next news article. This news article is regarding the report given by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Petroleum and Natural Gas about the Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana. So in this context let us look in brief about this Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana. And then let us look at the concerns raised by the Standing Committee on Petroleum and Natural Gas. The syllabus that is relevant to the analysis of this news article is given here for your reference. First let us look at Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana. See this scheme was launched in the year 2016 under the Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. The objective of this scheme is to provide clean cooking fuel to poor households in the country. And this scheme aimed to provide 8 crore deposit free LPG connections to women belonging to the poor families by the year 2020. To know more regarding the details of the scheme, its target groups, we request our viewers to refer to the 13th December 2019 analysis. Now let us focus on this report that has been submitted by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Petroleum and Natural Gas. See this committee submitted its second report in Lok Sabha for the demands for grants made for the upcoming financial year 2020-2021. This report was presented to Lok Sabha and laid in Rajya Sabha on 6th March 2020. Now based on this report, this news article has appeared. Now as per this report, the target of 8 crore planned under this Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana has already been achieved on 7th September 2019. So this achievement is ahead of the target date. Now if you look at the maximum beneficiaries of the scheme, they are from the underprivileged sections of the society. Like schedule casts and schedule tribes, then the OBC communities and the minority communities. And this report has also said that implementation of the scheme that is the Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana has resulted in an increase of the national LPG coverage to 96.9% approximately 97%. Now let us look at the budget allocation made for this scheme. See the central government has allocated around 2724 crore for the present financial year which is 2019-2020. Later if you see the Ministry of Finance also made an allocation of an additional amount of 1000 crore against the demand of 2118 crore. So this remaining 1118 crore was allocated in the recently presented union budget. So we can see that there is a significant cut in the budget allocation for this scheme. This report also says that this Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana scheme is no longer in existence. So what we can incur from this data is that the present allocation will be used to meet the arrears of the amount sanctioned for the financial year 2019-2020. Now let us discuss the concerns raised in this report. See the committee has expressed its concerns over closing the scheme. We know that Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana and targeted women belonging to the poor state of the society like those belonging to the schedule cast or the schedule tribe households. Then those beneficiaries under Antyodhya Anna Yojana and then even the forest dwellers especially in the rural areas. But if you see there are many poor households among the general category who are living in the urban and the semi urban localities who also need to be covered under this scheme. Therefore this committee recommended that the scheme can be extended to cover the poor households in the urban and semi urban slum areas as well. So this will help to achieve higher LPG coverage of the population by providing connections to those households who do not have LPG access. The next concern which this committee has discussed is regarding the continued use of kerosene for cooking and household lighting purposes. The Standing Committee report says that till date only three states have become kerosene free. They are the states of Punjab, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh. So there are large segments of population in various states across the country who are still dependent upon kerosene for cooking and household lighting purposes. And we know that the use of kerosene poses more health risks. So this committee has stressed on the need for continuing this Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana scheme and then universalizing the LPG connections. So the central government and the state governments can work together to reduce the subsidy that is given to kerosene and promote LPG connections. So these are the concerns which have been raised by this Parliamentary Standing Committee on Petroleum and Natural Gas. And this is all about the discussion of this news article. To summarize we have seen in brief about this Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana and then we saw about the concerns raised by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Petroleum and Natural Gas on this Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana. Now apart from this also try to know about department related Standing Committees in the Parliament. If you remember we discussed in detail about department related Standing Committees in our 3rd March the Hindu News Analysis. So when you are reading such news articles also try to cover the related prelims aspect. So it will be some sort of revision for you as and when you see certain news articles. Now have a look at the practice question. Let us move on to the next news article. Now let us look at a news article which discusses about an emerging concept which is called as shared economy. Sometimes in other articles or in other newspapers you can see the term sharing economy or shared economy or shared economy. So it is interchangeably used. Now why we have chosen this topic for today's analysis is because UPSC is known for asking the emerging concepts. For example in the last year prelims you would have seen questions on wearable technology then on digital signature which are all slowly emerging concepts. So shared economy is one such emerging concept. Now this news article discusses about a report which is titled shared economy India story. This report has been released by the Maple Capital Advices which is a newly based investment bank. So in this context today let us see what do we mean by shared economy and what does India share in the shared economy as discussed in this report. The syllabus that is relevant to the analysis of this news article is given here for your reference. See in the present busy world the preferences on asset ownership are changing rapidly. You can observe the changing mindsets of the present millennial generation and also the preferences of moving towards experiential consumption rather than owning the assets. So this shared economy is now emerging slowly. In the water shared economy as per this report the shared economy is defined as a peer to peer based activity of obtaining giving or sharing the access to goods and services. So basically you share either the goods or services or you can obtain the goods or services or you can give the goods or services that you have for a temporary period. Now if you see this activity is done through the community based platforms and mostly it is through the digital platforms nowadays. Now this report as categorized the shared economy into four major segments. One is the co-working. Second is the co-living. Third is shared mobility and fourth furniture rental. See if you are an IT employee who daily takes a Uber cab or an Ola cab to your office which is located inside an IT park from the place where you live which is a furnished apartment.  So if you see some examples first then we will get an idea of what do we mean by the shared economy. We normally see big, big IT parks and buildings that house biggest MNCs, domestic companies, BPO's, startups and freelancers who are working inside a single building or a single IT park. These arrangements in which several workers from different companies who are sharing common office space or any environment is known as co-working. Now why co-working? This is because there is a lack of affordable quality offices with flexible tenures. So co-working makes the quality offices cheaper than the traditional leases. Also if you see there is no capital investment that is required for the buildings. So this is profitable for the companies because this will cover only the operational costs with no capital investment. Now some of the examples which I mentioned in the news article for co-working are office, we work India etc. Next let us look at co-living. It means sharing of living spaces. See we all know about this co-living for example like the hostels, PG accommodations, then the guest houses which are all certain known examples. But if you see they are all highly fragmented and unorganized. Whereas at the other end if you see there are highly organized IN service apartments like OIO life, ZOLO stays, Nestaway which are all examples of co-living. Now why co-living? Because if you see there is a dynamic nature of the job market and there is an increasing migration pattern of the people. So this has increased the demand for co-living space. Now co-living creates a sense of shared community feeling for the individuals in order to get adjusted to a new place easily. So this is all about co-living. Next comes the shared mobility. Initially as we saw some simple examples are the cab aggregators like Uber and Ola. Also if you see metro shuttle services come under this shared mobility you can take the metro shuttle off the city you are living in. Now why shared mobility? Because there is a very high demand for hassle free at the same time and affordable and easy option to travel especially in the urban areas. So this is what is driving the shared mobility industry. So this industry mainly caters to the need of the consumers who prefer access to vehicles rather than owning the vehicles. And also if you see it is economical and a viable alternative for an individual because it reduces the operational costs of owning a vehicle for regular use. Apart from the capital investment that an individual is going to make in order to buy a vehicle. So this is about shared mobility. The final segment that is discussed in this report is furniture rental. Here the consumers can rent furniture on use basis from the furniture rental companies like Urban Ladder, Pepper Fry, Furlanco or Rento Mojo. So why furniture rental because it gives a platform for the consumers to select from thousands of options that are available online and the consumers can select them by sitting at their home rather than visiting the shops. So it reduces the time and also the effort on selecting the furniture altogether. Again if you see there is no need of capital investments on furniture because furniture's assets are a highly depreciable asset. So this is about furniture rental. So all these four segments that we saw constitute the shared economy. This report tells that the shared economy as an industry has grown by 60% from 1997 to 2014 at global level. And it is estimated to reach a value of $335 billion by the year 2025. In India if you see this industry is estimated to be over $1.5 billion in the year 2019. And it is estimated to be about $2 billion by the end of this year that is 2020. And this report also tells that the population in Asia has the highest willingness to use the shared assets. And India's trend is also in line with Asia's trend. Now if you see the market size of the different segments of this shared economy, shared mobility has the highest market size. It is followed by co-working, then co-living and finally furniture rental. So this is in brief about all these four segments and their market size. Now what are the major drivers behind this shared economy? Some drivers have been mentioned in this report. One is the urbanization. With urbanization we know there is a lack of space but people are in want of certain services and goods. So shared economy will benefit the urban population. Next is the mobile penetration, nothing but the digital economy. And as we just saw the consumer preferences are changing like pay as you use option rather than a long-term purchase. So this is one more driver behind the shared economy. And also if you see the consumer prefer to rent rather than buy. This trend is especially seen among the millennials. So this is yet another driver behind the shared economy. And finally there is a realization that resources can be best utilized in a shared economy. So this is one more driver behind the shared economy. So this report tells that this shared economy industry is in a nascent stage and it has a high growth prospect in the near future. So this is an emerging concept. This is all about the discussion of the shared economy. To summarize we have seen what do we mean by the emerging term called shared economy. The different segments of shared economy and their market size. And finally we saw the drivers of the shared economy that is expected to have a high growth prospect in the near future. Now have a look at the practice question. Let us move on to the next news article. Now let us take up this practice prelims question based on this news article. Which is about a dolphin that was found washed ashore the coastal waters of the state of Tamil Nadu. This dolphin was identified as an Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin. Now let us look about this dolphin in brief. See this dolphin species is found in the tropical to warm temperate regions of Indian and Pacific oceans. And they entered the rivers, mangroves and estuaries. These dolphins are at risk because of the usage of fishing nets. Then because of the increasing pollution and even because of the depletion of fish stocks worldwide. So this is about the distribution and the threat to this dolphin species. Now also know about the protection status under IUCN Red List of threatened species. It is categorized as vulnerable under the IUCN Red List. In this context also know about the Ganges River Dolphin. It is India's national aquatic animal. It is found in the northern river systems of India. Its IUCN status is also endangered. So just have an idea about the Ganges River Dolphin. Also know that this dolphin is blind. Now if you remember there was a question which was asked in UPSC 2019 prelims about Aira with the dolphins as well. So just have an idea about the dolphin species that are located in and around Indian waters. Now let us look at this question on Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin. Two statements are given and you need to choose the correct answer. Look at the first statement. It tells that it is naturally found in the Indian Ocean only. Know that this dolphin is found across Indian and Pacific oceans from tropical to warm temperate regions. So the first statement is wrong. Look at the second statement. It is listed as vulnerable in IUCN Red List of threatened species. This statement is correct. Now you need to choose the correct answer. The correct answer is option B2 only. Now let us look at this question which is based on Sir Creek which is discussed in this news article where the former Pakistan Foreign Minister has shared his opinion about the signing of Sir Creek PAC in the year 2006 where Pakistan actually proposed to the former Prime Minister of India to sign this PAC. Now in this context what you need to know is where this Sir Creek is located. So try to know the geographical aspect. Know that Sir Creek is a disputed area between India and Pakistan. If you see this map the green line represents the boundary that is claimed by Pakistan but disputed by India and the red line represents the boundary that is claimed by India but disputed by Pakistan. So this area that lies on the border between India and Pakistan is disputed by both the countries. Also you can see Corey Creek in this map. Know that Corey Creek lies entirely in India in the Kutch Peninsula. So this is all that you need to know about Sir Creek. Now look at this question. The question is Sir Creek often in news lies on the border between. This is a direct question. The correct answer here is option C India and Pakistan. Now let us move on to the practice questions discussion session. Look at the first question which is about Foreigners Act of 1946. Two statements are given and you need to choose the correct statements. Look at the first statement. It tells that under this act the power to make orders with respect to all foreigners regarding prohibiting, regulating or restricting the entry into India is vested with the Foreigners Tribunal. This statement is incorrect because under section 3 of this act the power to make any orders with respect to all foreigners regarding prohibiting, regulating or restricting their entry into India is vested with the central government. It is not the Foreigners Tribunal. As per the powers given to the central government under this section 3 the central government notified the Foreigners Tribunal order and as per the Foreigners Tribunal order the objective of Foreigners Tribunal is to tell whether a person is a foreigner or not. Based on the documents submitted by that person. So this is the function of the Foreigners Tribunal. The overall powers is actually with the central government. So the first statement is wrong. Now look at the second statement. It tells that under this act the burden of proof is upon the individual. See section 9 of this act says that the burden of proof that is proving that a person is not a foreigner lies upon the individual. So this statement is correct. The correct answer to this question is option B 2 only. Now look at the second question which is on dividend taxation. Again two statements are given. Here you need to choose the incorrect statements. Look at the first statement. It tells that it is the tax paid on the dividend distributed by a company to its shareholders. Yes, this statement is correct. Dividend taxation is the tax that is paid on the dividend which is distributed by a company to its shareholders numbered the investors. Now look at the second statement. It tells that in classical system of dividend taxation the owners to pay taxes on the companies. If you remember during our discussion we saw that in the classical system of dividend taxation the owners to pay tax is on the shareholders or the investors but not on the companies. Whereas under the dividend distribution taxation system the owners to pay taxes on the companies. So this statement is incorrect. The correct answer to this question is option B 2 only since it asks you to choose the incorrect statement or statements. Now look at the next question which is on Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana. Two statements are given and you need to choose the correct statements. Now look at the first statement. It tells that the scheme was launched with an aim to provide clean cooking fuel LPG to poor households in the country. Yes, this statement is correct. Look at the second statement. It tells that it has been extended till 2021-2022 to achieve 100% LPG coverage in the country. Now this statement is incorrect because if you remember during our discussion we saw that in the second report that was submitted by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Petroleum and Natural Gas. It has been reported that the target of 8 crore has already been achieved on 7th of September 2019. If you see the aim of this scheme is to provide 8 crore deposit free LPG connections to women belonging to poor families by the year 2020 but it was already achieved on 7th of September 2019. Now what this Standing Committee suggested was that this scheme may be implemented in the urban and semi-urban areas as well. So it is just a proposal. There is no announcement by the government regarding the extension of this scheme. So the second statement goes wrong here. The correct answer to this question is option A 1 only. Know that this scheme was launched under the Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Now look at the next question which is on shared economy. The question is which of the following best describes the term shared economy sometimes seen in news. Now if you remember during our discussion we saw that shared economy may be defined as a peer-to-peer based activity of obtaining, giving or sharing the access to goods and services. Which is usually done through community based platforms especially the digital platforms. So here the correct answer is option C it refers to the sharing of goods and services through community based platforms. So the correct answer to this question is option C. With this we come to the end of the analysis of all the news articles taken up for today's discussion and also the practice questions discussion session. If you like the video press the like button, comment and share and do subscribe to Shankar IAS Academy YouTube channel for latest videos and updates. Stay focused and motivated friends. Thank you.


Hello, my name is Kendery, I am a fifth grader and I'm here with Rose Kent. And I'm Rose Kent. I am a veteran. I served in the Navy for nine years. What branch of service were you in? I was in the Navy. I started at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland as a midshipman, which is the rank or the title you get when you're at the Naval Academy, whether you are a boy or a girl. And I served for nine years and when I left the Navy I had the rank of Navy Lieutenant. Why did you choose to go into the military? I chose to go to the military because when I was in high school, during that period, for the first time, the Navy announced that they would open the Naval Academy to women. Before that, only men could go to the academy. And I was a bit of a tomboy in school and just the idea of going to the academy because it wasn't like just going to a college. Because when you go to one of the service academies, you have to do all the academic requirements of college. But you kind of have to major in Navy at the Naval Academy. Take a lot of Navy nautical classes. But you also have to meet a lot of physical requirements, running and obstacle course and pushups and that sort of thing. And you also have a lot of military requirements, marching with a rifle on your shoulder and going aboard ships in the summer for training. And when I heard about this opportunity, that I was open to women, it sounded like a real challenge to me. And I hadn't any military experience in my family. But my dad was a true patriot. He really taught me to love the country, our country. So when I heard about this opportunity, I just really wanted to go. How long were you in the military? The Naval Academy experience was four years. It started literally days after I graduated from high school. I went to boot camp. It was called Plebe Summer in the Navy. And that lasted all summer. And then I stayed at the Naval Academy for four years. And when I graduated, I received my oath of office and became an officer. And I served in the Navy for five years. So it was a total of nine. Where did you serve and like what countries and states? Well, when I was in the Navy, things have changed. And I think they've changed for the better because women today who go into the Navy can do just about everything that the men can do. So if you would decide to go into the Navy, and you'd do great in the Navy because the Navy likes bright young women, you could do whatever you wanted. You could go aboard a submarine. You could fly any of the Navy's, any of the jets. You could command on a ship. You'd go into the Marine Corps. But when I was at the Academy, although they let us into the Academy, it was still restricted as far as what they would allow women to do. So some of those opportunities weren't there for me. So when I graduated, the first thing I did was I was stationed in Washington, DC as part of the Navy's administrative board. And I served there for a few years. And from there, I went to San Antonio, which was a joint command, meaning all the branches of service were there. So most of the time I was in the Navy. I was really unsure. I wasn't a board ship. But I did have a few nice experiences, including one stunt where I was on a destroyer for four weeks, the USS Iowa. And that was really exciting. I flew over to Germany. I met the ship in Germany. And we came back to Norfolk, Virginia. And that was terrific. What was military training like? Military training, it was demanding. You know, a lot was expected.  It was summertime in Maryland, so it was so hot and sticky. And people were yelling at you a lot for a lot of things that seemed kind of silly in the time. But you learn as you're going through it. It's just really kind of a game that they play to see if you're tough enough if you can take it. So I found the training hard. But I also learned to really dig inside myself and to really rely on my classmates who became my teammates in the Navy. What machines did you use in the military? Machines. Well, again, I was more in administrative capacity, so I didn't do too much with machinery. But in my second assignment when I was at a joint command, that was a really interesting place. It was called the Joint Electronic Warfare Command. Nicknamed was called the Duke. But that was a little bit of the kind of spying, if you will, that goes on. At the time, we were in the Cold War, where we were really looking at Russia as a major threat. And so we did a lot of, we had a lot of ways to check on their equipment and their radars. So there was a lot of high-tech gear going on there. And a lot of it was classified. So we couldn't really talk too much about what we did. What did you eat while serving? What did I eat? Well, the Navy had pretty good food, actually. I think we were really spoiled. So I ate a lot of the things that I still eat. I ate a lot of ice cream. I ate a lot of good, healthy food. And I had a good amount of snacks, too, when I was standing watch. What did you like to do in your free time while you were in the military? My free time, I liked to run. I really enjoyed running. I did some road races and whatnot. I loved to write, which really led to my career now that I write children's books for a living. And I really did a lot of that in my spare time in the Navy. The Navy gave me a lot of opportunity to do that, even aboard ship. I would serve a watch on the ship, and then I would have a break time. And I would go and sit down and I would write stories. Did you earn any medals or citations? I did. I earned a number of medals. I served not during a period of combat. I certainly wasn't like the brave men and women today who have to deal with combat situations and their assignments. But I did earn a few medals when I left the service for leadership. Was serving the military a positive or negative experience for you? It was a really positive experience for me, Kennedy. I think it really, it taught me to dig deep within myself. And I think so many of the lessons I learned at the Naval Academy about dealing with some tough things carried on and stayed with me for the rest of my life. So it was really positive. I learned to believe in myself. I learned to work really hard and not use excuses because when you're going through that plebe summer kind of boot camp, the last thing you're going to do is use an excuse why you didn't do something because you get in a lot of trouble for excuses. So I definitely learned that. And I learned about relying on teammates, classmates, my peers because the Navy is just a gigantic team of everybody in uniforms.  What was the hardest part of serving in the military? The hardest part. I got some really good questions, Kennedy. Well, I guess in the beginning it was challenging because the Academy and the Navy were still really getting used to having women and they weren't quite sure what to do with us. So there were some challenges. For the most part, the people were terrific that I served with. But there were some people, especially early on, at the Academy that weren't too happy about women being there and they would give us a hard time, the women in general. And it was a tough enough experience to get through with all the challenges of the military demands and the physical demands, getting yelled at and trying to get your work done, marching on a super hot day in a very stiff dress uniform. But if you added to that the feeling that some people didn't want you to be there, that was hard. But again, those people were in the minority. What is your proudest accomplishment while you were in the military? I think serving my command in various capacities, one of them was kind of a sad experience, but I'm proud about the way we did it while I was serving in San Antonio. An enlisted chief who worked for me, he died very suddenly and unexpectedly. And it was very hard on him. It was very hard on his family. And he had requested, before he passed away, to be buried at sea. So we had to make that happen. And here we were in San Antonio, Texas, no ocean. And we had to figure out how to do that at a very busy time for the United States Navy. So it took a lot of logistics. It was a hard thing to do because we were all very sad because we really cared and respected this person. So I'm proud the way everybody pulled together and made this happen and really gave him a wonderful send-off at the end of his life. What is your favorite memory from serving in the military? I have many happy memories. I shared that I was aboard the USS Iowa, the destroyer. And I came back with a ship from Germany, from Kiel, Germany, the north of Germany. But those who aboard the ship for the longer amount of time, they had been on that ship probably maybe four or five months before I got on. So by the time we got back from Germany, when we came into Norfolk, Virginia, some of those young enlisted folks, they had families now. Some of them, their wives had given birth to babies. So when a ship comes back into port, it's just so exciting because the bands are waiting for them right there on the pier to welcome them on. And everybody comes on the deck of the ship.  And it's just an overwhelmingly exciting, proud moment to just have anything to do with the Navy. What is your job now? I am a children's book author.  How long after you finished serving, did you start writing books? It was a while. I left the service and I worked in Corporate America. I worked for a big food company actually. You might be familiar with some of their products. I work for Craft Foods, makers of macaroni and cheese, right? Velveeta, they make a lot of different products. But I worked for them in Chicago in their public relations department for a number of years. And I really enjoyed that. I learned so much about food, not just how it tastes, but the role food plays in people's lives, which later influenced the books I write because I write a lot about kids and food and foods they like. And then after I left Craft, I was a freelance writer for a number of years. And then I started having my own family and really loved reading with my children and wanting to have quality books out there for them to read. And that's when I started writing novels. Is there anything else you would like people to know about your military service? I'm just so grateful that I had the opportunity to serve this country. Sometimes I think they'll see a commercial on television for a military person or hear about the military and it just sounds so high and lofty, but there are just so many everyday wonderful people walking around who serve in the military or who could one day, and I want them to know what a wonderful experience it was for me and if they have any interest in it to pursue it because it's a terrific work that changes your life and it really helps you whatever you end up doing for the rest of your life. Thank you so much for letting me introduce you today. Thank you, Kennedy. You've been a great interviewer.