Welcome everybody. So it looks like inflation came in pretty much as expected And it's not surprising because the Fed has been doing its darnedest just to lower these rates and Looks like it might be good for the market. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a look here at What's happening? And I got to tell you I know honesty. I do love how We have The different analysts that will come out and say no, no, it's gonna be high No, no, it's gonna be low. No, no, it's gonna go this way or that way and all honesty Nobody can be a hundred percent sure and this is a little articles that I picked up a little bit ago From this was yesterday and you can just see that some people of course It doesn't matter the analysts because they're always gonna go and say well This could happen and that could happen, but in all honesty again Nobody really knows and of course, this is what happened. So CPI it looks like an increased 0.2% seasonally ingested and rose 3.2% over the last 12 months and the big thing is is that? You know, we have seen a small bit of uptick, but it's not massively Damaging I think this is pretty much coming in at expectations and things are looking pretty good So What does this look like? Well right now? I mean in all honesty, I know people hate the Fed But in all honesty, they did a pretty good job So in August doesn't 22 we had a rate of 8.26 percent for inflation and they said all that time ago Look, we're gonna do what we have to do which they're tools that are supposed of course raising rates and of course for the Treasury stop printing money and Do a little quantitative tightening and then one from 8.26 percent to July to 2.97 percent I was happy and now we get that uptick of just point two percent So inflation is sticky. It will be hard. So when people talk about you know what? They should pivot right away. They should start raising those or they should start cutting those rates and I look at this I'm like, yeah, maybe not so much. So what did that do with the markets? Well If we take a look at the five day for the S&P 500, it's down a little bit But as of this morning a little bit of a rebound looking pretty good. Let's see if I can do the one day Hey, look at that markets happy Nasdaq is happy up a little bit as well and our markets not that much really so in the last 24 hours, we can see that bitcoins down everything's down a little bit by the last hour Still the same thing except for my favorite my new favorite coin dogecoin it's up a whopping 0.6 percent sheba unit 1.5 percent and Also, we take a look at the the DXY the dollar there was a little bit of a drop-off But it looks like it's not really a big deal 102.24 so Holding study, but it has come down over the last Six months or so of a high of 111 So the dollar has losing a little bit of strength and and all and all honesty I know people will say well, it's bad. It's not bad for Bitcoin if There's a nice little correspondence when when the dollar weakens Bitcoin goes up because it's a hedge against that right and We can see that over time Dixie goes up Bitcoin goes down but all the way back to 2013 When we had the Dixie at 83 Wow Then 2014 80 point one one Dixie goes down Bitcoin went up all the way up to from $13 to $1,100 Same thing here in 2017. Dixie went up in 2016 that it going down And also in 2018 Dixie went down Bitcoin Same thing over here. We can see in 2020 the 2022 Dixie goes up Bitcoin goes down Of course, that's what we're kind of stuck at right now and that's where we're at so the big question though is how does this work like untrue flation and This is why I Invited my friend Steven Ross to come on and explain what the heck is going on Steven. Welcome to the show. Thank you Thank you. Glad to be back. Oh, it's good always good Yeah, we got a little bit of a cross-reference there a little bit of the links mixed up But here we are talking again about CPI and what is we I don't think we've ever I don't think we've ever done this Where we talk about it live because this was just released Roughly two hours ago or so Yeah, so what do we got here Steph? What does it look like and then talk us through because you guys put out a report recently Which took a look like this Just talk about the highlights of what this means and where we're going. That's the big thing That's what everybody wants to know. We're we're we going is my are my bags gonna be pumped or not? I Don't know about that. I mean We we all want our bags to get pumped and I'm happy about the green candles that we've seen this morning Yeah, so that's that's pretty exciting, but you know all in all I think, you know We're we're in the summer holiday I think a lot of people are spending a lot of money everybody's employed and so as a result We feel comfortable and confident that we can afford going on a holiday because our longer term expectation is That we will be able to afford this holiday and we'll come back to a job That will allow us to pay off our credit card debt Savings are pretty high at the moment credit card debt is higher, but still as a proportion to savings. It's still pretty It's it's it's it's very it's it's we call it there people are revenge spending right now Right, I mean, I haven't spent for the last two years now I want to go out there and spend and draw down on those savings that I've accumulated over the last couple of years where I wasn't allowed to spend too much I Got you so so we know that it sounds like things are strong And the economy the US economy is stronger than what I thought I would actually do I really did think that we were gonna see more and who knows I mean, we're only in what is August 10th today So we still have that last quarter to go to see if we hit that recession or into also Q1 2024 but talking about talk us through Actually, I think it'd be best to talk us through this report that you had put out recently and I mean expanding on the things you already talked about I Mean we I mean I can go through it's a 13 page report right now I think everybody needs to read the full 13 pages, but You know the economy is growing. So the US economy grew Significantly in the last quarter from two percent to two and a half percent But that growth was really a result out of inflation, right? We think that the growth is because of the price increase in prices that has resulted in a Economic growth and that ultimately yeah, you can see there that ultimately has has created a bit of an illusion that we're seeing actual progress and productivity gains That said, you know where we see the price increases happening a lot has been in food the food space number one is hot Weathers has reduced the supply in food in the US and food is a big category in terms of spending Yeah, so you go here you go to Food and beverages right at the top And then you can see food is a significant component to that and we've seen an increase in food You can see that there at the end there in July all of July We had a big spike from June all the way to the peak in July Yeah, and that's really come because and by the way remember our data is in real time So what you're seeing here has at least a one month lead time to the data set that the BLS has Hey, yeah, so real quick so everybody So it's that's that's here this morning. Welcome Just you guys know there's a link in the description for a true flation TRU FLA Tion.com very simple to find it's a hundred percent free You can check it out and I like to take a look at it just to see where we actually are at as Opposed to the narrative that the Fed will give us and of course I mean some people don't trust the government crazy I know and some people do but I think it's it's best just to get a little bit of a different perspective So when we take a look at this it does help me to kind of figure out like did are we going too far? And what's gonna come next so Seven do me a favor like we talked about before but an overview of how you guys get this data so quickly I know you guys use chain link as an oracle to pull in that outside data, but you can just talk us through this Yeah, no, sorry. I just realized that we were going down We were already so far into the story that we didn't actually set the stage what we did is we built out true flation and true Flation was we felt that When the government shut down the economy printed a lot of money that inflation was gonna come and having Bureaucrats tell us not to worry. We got you covered and inflation's only transitory We just felt that that was not accurate And so we looked under the carpet and realized that it's very it's collected manually. It's with a one-month time lag It goes back six months and edits the data so how could we build and take a developer mindset and Provide transparency to the way the data is calculated and the way it's aggregated So we went out to now today. I think we have some 60 plus different sources of data You know, we have 30 there, but we have about 60 different partners that supply us with data sets We have our 18 million items that we track today True and of those 18 million items each item has three Individual price freaks so that we can ensure accuracy and reliability associated with one price for one item and then we bucket them into 12 categories or Multiplitude of subcategories that lead into the 12 categories that you see and that Build up to be the top line CPI and this gets updated daily So we pull this information daily not all data sets come daily some come with a weak lag Some come with maybe a month lag like real estate is a bit harder to get to on a daily basis and compile that daily But we actually now have that pretty much daily the housing market data The food data is very accurate Transportation comes in maybe on about a weekly basis utilities is real-time Etc. So we just have a whole bunch of different feeds and sources of pricing information and This is our methodology. So because we get the data real-time We have a very big difference between that of what the BLS announces and that what trueflation announces number one We also track 18 million items versus the 80,000 items that are tracked by the governments and Yeah, got you go on and on I mean there are lots of different value propositions But yeah, and that's why we have a differing number and we built it more to Reflect what we feel when we go to the supermarkets when we buy a new car when we go out there and and this Seems to be resonating really well with what people believe is more an accurate reflection of the truth Right, you know what like I mean, that's that's one of the points. I like about it because we know that Let's be honest. Yeah Jerome's not gonna look at trueflation He's just not gonna do it and then it could because he I mean he might but he's not gonna report on it That's for damn sure so I'm waiting for the day that somebody asks him after the you know when he comes out to press conference What do you say to the trueflation data? These are like, I don't know And then we're gonna hire for longer and he's gonna just go blow right past it but I gotta tell you like because When I think about it, I think to myself, okay Well, the feds not gonna look at it. So I'm not gonna base things on it However, when I take a look at it, I can see like you talk about So if the feds going to take a look at these outdated info, it's still info and they're doing a I gotta be honest I think they're doing a pretty reasonable job as opposed to a lot of different government Agencies so I gotta tip my hat to them. They're doing what they're supposed to do They're not gonna look at trueflation. But why I like to take a look at is go. Okay We know at some point these numbers are gonna hit them So it's like I'm I'm doing a run on On the Fed before the Fed really gets it So the Fed gets it they get this old outdated data old outsourced data And then when the trueflation comes or the data that they actually that you guys have right now At some point, they'll get that data and they're kind of move this way So if I look at trueflation, I see that the that the inflation rate is Going instead of going down it is going three four five six percent But the Fed comes in and goes no no everything's going down I know that in another month two months three months They're gonna get this data that you guys have and now everything's gonna get screwed up So that's why I like to take a look at trueflation because it feels like I'm kind of running on them a little bit faster Is that I mean is that pretty much reasonable to say? Yeah? No, I think that's that's an accurate reflection and that's how most people tend to use trueflation as a leading indicator To where the Fed is going to come out at But I mean given given your comment really early on was you know, I think the you know, believe it or not the government is actually aware of what we're doing and You know the US is way more transparent than any other government around the world And they're doing a really good job and at the same time They're also we for the first time actually received a request From the Bureau of Labor and Statistics to see how we could work together and how they could use our numbers And so we're pretty pumped about that and you know if they change their attack and seem to sort of want to Have more accurate fresh data versus stale data as we call it You know all the more we can help them achieve that would not be awesome Hey real quick before because I want you to sit in with me because I mean how Stephen how long have you been in the crypto space? It's been like like forever, right? No, I've been in since in cryptos in 2012 I got into Bitcoin. I Had a developer agency one of the developers wanted to get paid in Bitcoin. I then Checked it out bought my first Bitcoin and then was hooked immediately when I paid Across the other end of the world instantaneously at no fees. I then became the CEO of Bitcoin comm And I scaled that to 20 million wallets 500,000 merchants around the world that accepted Bitcoin Bitcoin cash and Ethereum as a payment for goods and services physical a Retail outlets and that was amazing, but that's when and we scaled Bitcoin cash to number four in Market cap it was all the way up there and the unique aspect around it was our payment rails We could settle payments instantaneously at nearly zero fees and And so that was really our pride. That was really what we did you could go into any merchant and We built out POS wallets as well On on a mobile phone. So in any country you could just download the app have it on a mobile phone And your staff could be walking around in the shop collecting money on their mobile phone Which would then get sent to your as a restaurant owner, for example, it would be into my wallet and Yeah, and the tip would stay with them, for example, and you could build all these functionalities around that So, I mean Stephanie. Yeah, I mean you've been around for quite some time You're most like a friend of a friend of the show Simon Dixon He's been in since he said he bought Bitcoin at $3 Good for him. Thank the future all stuff But so you've been around we've been around you've been around longer than I have and you've seen a lot of different things But remember back in the day when Roger Vera came out. It's okay We're gonna and I've had Roger on the show once for sure. Yeah, I mean But in 2017 everybody hated his guts, right? They're like, how dare he you know and go against Bitcoin So wait, I mean you've been there and seen how it all works out But how do you see the market going now because like it's way different than all the way back in 2012 2013 Where do you see things going and then then we're gonna get in I want to get into a couple articles with you about some the PayPal stablecoin and also Microsoft and a new a new crypto called Aptos. So how do how do you where do you see things going these days? so I think there's So, I mean what we when we set up crypto or when crypto was first established there was a big desire to separate state and money Right and and that was sort of the big the brouhaha. That was the evangelical move and You know today if you look at where we're at we have two systems running in parallel We have this new economy around financial services that is now greater than one trillion dollars from a zero Bitcoin startup to a one trillion dollar industry Is it separating state money not quite right? We're not quite there yet But I think what's Ethereum brought about was a whole change of separating governance from governments And so we have these two ingredients where we have our own currency and people are beginning to trust this money And you don't buy trust right you have to earn trust and trust takes time to earn and I think Bitcoin Ethereum these longer living coins have sort of established a trusted relationship with Society around the world right look at everywhere you listen Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin Ethereum Ethereum So those names pop up all the time and I think where we're at now is We need to decide do we want to create new systems? Leveraging the new money and these new governance tools, or do we want to make these systems work for the old system? and And I think we're at that inflection point, and I don't think we're clear on We're so lured by all the liquidity that sits in the old system Yeah, we're very reluctant to build out these new systems because we're worried about going to jail We're worried about you know Gary Gensler coming after us Right, it's like and and and I don't think we've decided which direction we're gonna go You know it's a good point because this thing that I worried about with this Bitcoin ETF And I've been very vocal on on the channel about it and it seems like and I know some people say well We need this Bitcoin ETF and that's true I mean it'd be nice to have a spot the ETF But remember when the futures ETF came about with the CBOE in December 17 2017 I mean pretty much crashed the market and the reason was because you know the traditional finance came in and said We're gonna short the living hell out of this and they did a great job. Let's be honest with this spot ETF Yeah, with a spot ETF. I mean people say it's gonna be great and everything else. I'm like trad fi There there is a reason why they're getting into it It's to make money off of it And it's it's a reason to gobble it up and I get worried about the kind of direction. We're going I see it I feel it it's like do we want to go down this trad fi route and numbers go up and everybody's happy Or do you want to kind of create this new system? moving forward so It concerns me Stefan it concerns me and and I hear your concern and I flip flop between The two opportunities right and and I think what's changed in a lot of this dynamics is also the I mean the US the rest of the world Yeah, it's tried to close out all the choke points which and We're trying to now build out regulated solutions using crypto and the blockchain e.g. The PayPal does your stablecoin, right? Old technology. I mean there. Yeah, anyway And then there's the rest of the world that you're still seeing innovation They're trying to innovate, but there isn't the liquidity outside the US yet in other currencies that people have faith in right? So right almond off ramp with the to the US dollar was critical And I think that choke point strategy that Gensler drove is the right one for protecting the incumbents And the fiat world right and it's made it it's made it really challenging for the rest of the world So much so that I think Bitcoin at the moment. Yeah, I mean I worry every second day, right? It's like really are we actually going to become a Technology that facilitates the incumbents or are we going to be a new whole new industry that provides much more? You know much more inclusive services more transparency, etc Yeah, exactly, you know, it's and then we'll get the article in a bit in just a second But I will say that I had yet Suwan. He is the founder CEO of Anamoka brands a weird guy Super super smart. Yeah, and he explained web 3 like I've never heard anybody explain it to me I mean, so I I'll I'll link the video in the description but one thing he's that stuck with me is he we talked about web 3 gaming and The people that in America versus the rest the world Asian market specifically and he said look he goes in Korea in Japan South South Central Asia Southeast Asia He goes everybody just accepts it that web 3 is where we're going and they use these these platforms And it's like not a big deal and they actually are they're actually welcoming to it He goes but in America is totally different and he says he goes over here We're trying to escape that mentality, but it's very difficult So over in in Asian markets and things like that He goes we're really focusing on over there and that's where the next liquid is gonna be just like what you talked about before So I'm like I'm like I didn't know the problem with me. I have a lot of problems But the problem with me is that I'm an American and I see it through an American lens So I am grateful for people to come on a show and say it's not just America Rob Which I know you think it is but it's not it's a lot of places over here Yeah, I mean and And I feel the US is very keen to So there's also conflict with a lot of the developer and the crypto ecosystem in the US right on the one hand We want to protect the US and protect the US innovation and innovation has to be in the US Versus actually I care about the innovation more than I do about my nationality yeah, and and and I think that's that's that's a conflict that a lot of Developers builders Crypto holders in the US struggle with right and I think one thing that Bitcoin has done really well. It has bridged that gap. There's no more innovation needed It is the innovation And so yeah, and so that's their view right and so but in the Ethereum on on on base on we still want to innovate We're so early on in the power of what On-chain smart contracts can do Decentralized databases. What can all of these things do? I think it's it's we still are at the nice, you know Early stage of that does the US want to be a part of that new movement and will it be governed by new brands? And I think you know, that's that's gonna be a Challenge to how to incorporate that and include that and be a part of that Exactly well said. So let's so everybody if you haven't known this is my buddy Stefan rust He's the CEO and founder of trueflation. There's a link in the description. You can check it out What I like about trueflation, of course, you can look at USA And you can also look at UK and see the inflation right there Fortunately a friend of the show guy coin bureau is getting rocked right now. That's a whopping almost 11.5 percent but hey much better than 21.75 percent just a little bit over a year ago or less than a year ago So I think things are looking bright over there. They've reduced it by half So congratulations and then to to get into today's two stories I just want to talk about and we just touched on this about regulation in America and where things are going and old traditional finance There's two things Maxine Walters says she's deeply concerned about PayPal's new stablecoin and then also there's an article about aptos labs Pridering up with Microsoft. So real quick. I'm just going to read this off. Stefan will get your thoughts in a bit If you don't know Maxine Walters, she is the top democrat on the house financial service committee And just like what Stefan had said, you know trying to Not get or not allow a a flight of funds outside and to protect the dollar. This could be an issue So Red Maxine Walters says she's deeply concerned that PayPal is choosing to launch its own stablecoin while there's still no federal framework For for regulation oversight and enforcement Walters know that PayPal has four and 35 million customers around the world More than the number of online accounts of all the largest banks. I didn't know that Let me just read that again. You know that PayPal has 435 million customers around the world more than the number of online accounts of all the largest banks combined. Wow so well That's a global business for you That is a global. I was just thinking about now. They're only going to launch this in the usa But if you have a stablecoin I'm assuming that and then you have your own wallet with PayPal You just are accessed cap access to all of the different dexes that are out there and do whatever you want to But we'll talk So given PayPal size and reach better oversight and enforcement of a stablecoin operations is essential or guarantee consumer protections Love that word and alleviate financial stability concerns Mostly for Dixie the dollar moreover the republican bill undermines the fed's role as our central bank making it harder to protect the economy against inflation Or support maximum employment if stablecoins are broadly adopted seven. You've been here for a long time 2013 How do you see this playing out and what do you think about the comments here with uh, miss walters Yeah, I mean the funny thing as well and and I'm I'm not a hundred percent sure but I'm about 80 sure that PayPal is working with paxos Yes, you're right. Right. So And remember paxos was taken to court for issuing the body nance the b usd the binary stablecoin And so why is all of a sudden packs and they were taken to court Also for the way that they were hosting and providing custodian services Versus minting the coins and doing the attestation for exactly there you go. Yeah, that's right. I forgot about that So do you think this is going to be the same thing that's going to happen again? They're just going to take PayPal to court and say hey, you can't do this I don't know. I'd say there's a bit of national bias there, right? The PayPal is the lesser evil. I know PayPal Um, they're my buddy. They helped me build out an alternative and the competing Coin to that of the b usd And yeah, we'll we'll give them permission to do that. I mean that that's the sort of you know, sort of maybe the you know The tin hat sort of thinking Oh, no, no, no not here. You're You're good to go All right, so but but yeah, I mean, I don't know I mean, I think it was using old code as well, right? So the solidity code that they were using they were using old framework and an old version of solidity They have control features. The admin has unlimited capability to mint new stablecoins So there are elements in there that thank god for the transparency, right that You know, we can see that and then that puts a cautious eye On to this new stablecoin However, that said it's their first attempt You know Who's to say they won't issue a second version a third version down the road an upgrade and then do a swap In and out of that pay usd into v2 into v3 down the road, right? I mean Right, who knows what's gonna happen. I will see yeah, I will say this they're They're doing a better job. I think already they're keeping their their funds separate From it's supposed to be backed one to one for the dollar. I think they're only gonna have the dollar I know like we just touched about and then real raid boss says PayPal is not evil. PayPal's not evil companies are evil. Sometimes they just do wacky things And I know when people say oh, it's awful because PayPal can they can they can freeze accounts and and they can reverse transactions Listen, if you look at most of the of the stablecoins out there They could do the same thing We just saw that with uh, there was an article we covered about cz finance Where they they halted a transaction on tether because of it was a hack and they found it which is good But you know What's to say they can't do anything else and that's also the same with usdc any thoughts steven Yeah, no, definitely. I mean I I definitely I mean the whole What I loved about crypto was it was immutable and it was censorship resistant anybody could participate in this And and the people didn't like the immutability But if you were an e-commerce in the early days of e-commerce if you remember you would sell things services on online And you people would pay with your credit card But then they would dispute the charge when they got the charge and then you as a merchant sold the goods And you didn't get your money because of the You know the claim the the actual owner of the credit card Disputing the that they received the goods That's right And and so all of a sudden for e-commerce this immutability was perfect So you would only be very cautious about paying. Am I ready to pay? Can I pay and I think especially if you're in the adult industry they were suffering big time from this right and Um, yeah, that that is also true Yeah, so so everybody just know that there's a little bit of there's a little bit of evilness As it were everywhere, but uh, nothing to take home with the bank and then lastly And if we talk about innovation and of course stephanie said it perfectly. He said, uh, we shouldn't get nationality It's all about the innovation should be over the nationality itself Uh, there was a piece that just came out. I was looking at the the charts yesterday And I saw that aptos was up big time. I go what the heck happened with aptos aptos labs Is expanding these tools and service using microsoft's ai tech So it looks like they're partnering up and in some way shape or form aptos surge uh, 15 percent Aptos is leveraging microsoft infrastructure to deploy new offerings that combine ai and blockchain using a new chatbot called aptos assistant Which will answer user questions Chatbot is powered by you know, this isn't as big of a deal as I thought it was by fusing aptos lab tech with the microsoft Azure open ai service capabilities We aim to democratize the use of blockchain enabling users to seamlessly onboard the web 3 Innovators that apply new exciting decentralized or dapps using ai and Okay, so they're just integrating with the ai Porsche to microsoft and we can see that If here's the thing about crypto if you're if you're playing the numbers This is the last 24 hours Never chase a pump Never chase green candles because I went from 778 out of 729 and today it's at 739 not a big deal, but over seven days If you knew that it would have been pretty great. You would have gone from 670 to 775 which is pretty good gains But again, don't chase pumps. Uh, try to find a Project that you believe in you believe in the community and just work yourself from there over the long haul things are better Stefan, what do you think? I I couldn't agree 100 percent, you know, so they're really Spot on I think they you know when I saw that announcement It's like, okay. They're moving it on to a sewer. Okay, great. So they're they're porting that across to their cloud system Microsoft needs to do something on their cloud business I think the cloud business isn't doing as well as that of google and that of amazon, but Neither here nor there and then using a chatbot Using an ai agent for chatbot. I mean, yeah, I think that's not really worth that innovation Or not really very innovative But to your point really I mean one thing that I I I love and I think all of us around the world really aspire to is The us was always known for innovation. It was always open to innovation. It was always open to new ideas new New thought process as and open to disruption. We reward disruptors. We welcome them and so as a result That has changed maxine waters, but you know, the whole democratic or the whole, you know, senate I mean the whole congress. I mean everybody there's 80 years old They're boomers paying to boomers servicing boomers, you know, it's like I mean it's like really we've missed the whole concept of Where and what did we stand for? We would go west, you know, it's always we frontier new frontiers new boundaries And if we can't go west anymore, we go into the internet, right? We create electricity We create mobile networks. We do all this innovative stuff How do we foster that innovation and build a nation where that innovation can flourish? That's really what I care about because the biggest time of innovation was during the dot-com days in the us And if you look that is when the first time the government had a budget surplus Why because people were paying taxes people were earning money. They were paying income taxes They were going ipos. There were salaries going around. So the economy was flourishing. Okay, there were a lot of scams in there There were a lot of bad duds in there But out of that came big brands like amazon ebay, which ultimately led to paypal Which which has bain tree, right and all these new companies that came out of that period Of biggest boom time out there which resulted in government budget surplus government budget surplus that's the thing though, but but Stefan what you talked about there was innovation and was allowed to flourish and I think it was law 230 which allowed the internet to kind of gain foothold and actually go forward the problem is now is that we don't have that We've got a a guy in in the sc in the uh, the scc gary genser who's pretty much said like look I think everything is security except bitcoin And i'm going to go after that for consumer protections because I want to be that guy I just don't think that we can get past it Especially in america and that's why everything's fleeing across the pond. That's why the you know the project we're doing Our lawyers already told us don't launch in in the us because it's a dead. It's a dead zone That's really it's it's really sad to see and it's it's mainly because the incentives are misaligned We've we've structured the incentive the incentives have somehow shifted towards rewarding the retention of power and not the disruption of power How do we shift it back to rewarding the disruptors and and the checks and balances in place? There's no more again. So does what he wants. He says oh now he's got a committee Remember he was on this interview and tv somewhere and and it's like oh xrp Oh, it's not only up to me and now he wants to go after a i saw an article the other day He's wants to go after ai now to our cryptos less important. I want to go after ai right and so Oh, it's just it's any new technology to make sure that he retains The power and everything needs to go through the sec So every little new widget you have to have a lobbyist You have to have a lawyer. You have to have you know Accountants you have to then do the filing. So you need a consulting firm to help you do the filing in the standardized format that goes through a archaic You know old computer that was built in 1950. So it can be read properly. I don't know. I'm exaggerating Stevin going on the rant watch out Okay, so so everybody we've gone 37 minutes I'm gonna go over a couple of questions and I understand what's gotta gotta get out of here at some points But uh, let's see. So d slice puts this up. He says aptos token unlock in a day and All right So maybe that was the the the point of the pump and the the announcement There's always something behind there's a story behind the story every single time I hear about this If you want to figure out the tokenomics and when the unlocks are there's I think there's a website called Just it's called token on unlocks.io. I believe but if you're Also looking you can go to coin gecko the one that I always use.  That's still not bad 51% for the community. I'll take that I've seen some ones where the community is like 10% the founders like 90 And then here's I'd like to look at an aptos right so aptos set up as a uh an equity company in the beginning and then outsourced the The question is who owns the ip? Is it the foundation that owns the ip or is it aptos equity company that owns the ip? So there is a website agave You can go to the usp to you want to say patent and trademark office. Let's take a look I don't know a lot of times when you take a look at these things. There's a lot of That are just a little bit off and it might let's see You can see you'll get stuff stuff like this like aptos california Here we go aptos corporation Yeah, see so so all the ip is going to the corporation So whilst they give away 60 of the tokens to the community The ip is not with the foundation. So what is actually the community owning? Oh, I don't know See that's that's the this is the thing the community may go back to maybe they're going to start a dow Maybe it's or maybe and this and what I just showed you guys may not be only that's actually correct because there's like a I don't know. Yeah, it was that was new york anyway, right? So yeah, probably so We can I don't know can mean well. Here's the unlocks first of all Yeah, what the date is august So june 23 I don't see any unlocks. No, I don't like that. I've got june 23 june 2023. That's gone july august september So this is what we have. October. There's something october october february. Yeah around there.  I think community and core so Now, well, that's what it is. How about this? And so says this is going back to Azura, microsoft and aptos like salana using chat gbt again if you integrate, maybe it's just Stefan remember remember the buzzwords back in the dot-com era you'd have like crystal light crystal light put like Or no nesty. It was nesty.com and their stock rose like 20 percent a day But they had nothing to do with it. So this might ai be careful with ai because they just put it behind their name It could just be another a pump This is a question for Stefan soft landing or hard landing Good question Very difficult to read. I I think we're gonna have a middle landing, right? I think we're gonna be in between Um, the two it sounds very boring. Um, not what people want to hear Um, I don't think we're gonna have a soft landing I think at some point the debt bubble is going to blow and I think they're just and I just I don't know when that is and I think when that blows People with crypto are going to be very happy Um, I I definitely tend to believe The balaji theory where Yeah, sort of, um Yeah, I think the hyper big coinization Is is definitely a trend There I think there's no accountability. There's no feeling for Whereas we all have to live by, you know, if we can't make the bills If we can't pay the bills, we have to file for bankruptcy. We can nobody's gonna give us a loan anymore If we don't have a credit score, we doesn't work How can all of these governments just get away with No accountability and the budgets are only growing and growing. It's not as though they're reducing Yeah, I have to agree. It's just and that's I know people will say well, that's a very boring answer Stefan told us, you know right there, but in all honesty, I like boring. I like boring because I don't Me personally, I'm just slowly playing the long game. Everybody knows this on the channel dollar cost averaging I don't see much activity happening until 2024 with the big one having an april moving into 2025 maybe 2026 So again, we'll all see So well Stefan we're coming up in almost 45 minutes again, everybody check out the website itself trueflation.com 100% free front run front run the fed Get all your data get all your data up to date because I don't think they do but Stefan Any last words of wisdom since you've been around since 2013 and the crypto space? No, I think you're you're spot on it's it's like, you know, the industry goes through ups and downs and every time each down has I call it sort of, you know, the tourists fled and we have a new bunch of immigrants and each time the community's grown and the community holds together, especially the ones That want to hold out and and really enjoy and and meet great people great new people that in this industry And they transpire In hard times So when the going gets tough the tough get going and the tough hold together and I think we're in That kind of an environment we have been my yeah, and and I think be wary of of any, you know, sort of New money coming in it's going to be a quick win, you know, just be cautious of that And there's nothing's easy in this world, right? If it's easy There's something wrong There's something wrong another thing is if if we're all thinking the same way someone isn't thinking so this is good to move forward All right, everybody. So that is it for today again trueflation.com Stefan welcome back to the show We'll have you on again as everybody seems to Like the things that you were talking about so everybody you like today's video like and subscribe all that good stuff And that is it for us. Thank you. Thanks Rob. Love it again. Okay guys. Good day


Lakeland Public Television presents Currents. Hello, and welcome to Lakeland Currents. I'm Bethany Wesley. Approximately 70 million dogs and 36 million cats are owned by Americans and kept as household pets, according to statistics from the American Veterinary Medical Association. But what about those animals that have no home? About 6.5 million companion animals enter U.S. animal shelters each year, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Locally, Great River Rescue is the shelter in Bemidji that houses homeless cats and dogs from the region, providing care for the animals as they seek their forever homes. Since its inception in 1977, the shelter has helped more than 10,000 animals. To help us learn more about Great River Rescue and its operations, I welcome to the program Brandon Musful, its executive director, and Terry Ball, its board chair. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having us. As we get started, let's talk a little bit about your roles with the shelter and how long you've been there. So Brandon, why don't you go ahead and start? Well, like you said, I'm the executive director, and I've been with the organization since June of 2012, so coming up on five years now. So did you come from a previous shelter? Nope. Was it just this work that interested you? Right. I am from the Minneapolis area, and I was completing my master's degree in public policy with the concentration in nonprofit management, and I was looking for work. And I saw the position description. I felt like it was something that I could do. It was something that interested me, and I applied for the job, and thankfully they brought me up here. Obviously like it if you've stayed so long so far. Yeah. Terry, tell us a little bit about what you've been doing with the shelter. I started volunteering about three and a half years ago after I sat through a full ASPCA commercial, and I was devastated that I sat through the whole thing, and I thought this is such a huge problem, and there's nothing I can do. And I just kind of sat on that for a while, and I saw an ad for level one volunteer training, and it fit into my schedule, so that's how it all started. When you first initially started volunteering, what were you doing? What was your work? I did callbacks for people that had recently adopted pets, and just to see how things were going for them, and if they had concerns, and ways that perhaps a shelter could improve. Oh, interesting. And so now you're the board chair? Yes. And so what does that role mean? You work with the board of directors? Correct. Meets how often? Once a month. So as we get started here, why don't you go ahead and introduce us a little bit to the shelter in terms of its mission, its vision, what your overall goals are? Yeah, so Great River Rescue is a companion animal shelter, so we focus on dogs and cats. Our mission statement is that we're committed to serving the best interest of the animals we strive to protect. So we're committed to helping these animals. And really our vision is a world where needless euthanasia doesn't happen anymore, where companion animals are more valued, where they have a refuge, where they have a home where they're well taken care of. Okay, so is it a no-kill shelter? That word is used a lot in terms of talking about shelters. Right. There are different ways to define shelters and rescues. We do consider ourselves a no-kill shelter in that we never euthanize an animal just to make space for other animals. We do have a euthanasia protocol, so if there is an animal that is suffering, we say irredeemably suffering, then we may need to euthanize that animal. Or occasionally if there's a very dangerous animal so that the public isn't safe, we may have to euthanize, but that's a very rare occurrence. So I mentioned in the opening, founded in 77, correct? Yep. Okay, and now we know that the shelter has gone over some different changes over those years. Do you want to talk a little bit about what happened with the name change that was fairly recent in recent years? Yeah, in 2015 is actually when we did the name change, it was the fall of 2015. The main goal of that was to help the public know and understand more who we are and what we do. The name Beltrami Humane Society was a little bit misleading because we're not part of the county. We're also not part of the Humane Society of the United States. We're a private organization. Although we're supported by the public, by the community, we're just a private agency. Okay. I want to move a little bit more into talking about some of the actual statistics, the work that you guys do over the years. So tell me on average, how many animals do you adopt each year? About 350 animals in recent history. That's gone up and down over the years. When I started, it was more like 250, but we're up to about 350 animals a year. Okay. More dogs, more cats? More cats just because there are more of them. Okay. How many do you house at a time in terms of the animals? Well, we have space for 45 cats and 25 dogs. 45 cats, 25 dogs, okay. Yeah, but typically we have fewer than that at the shelter. We oftentimes have 15 or 20 animals in foster care in addition to the animals at the shelter. But if we were to have that full set 45 cats and 25 dogs, it would really be very crowded. It would be stressful for the animals. It would be stressful for the people. So we actually like to have fewer than that at the building. Okay. Could you fill all the spots if you wanted to? I mean, is there enough need that you could stay busy booked all the time? Well, definitely for cats. There aren't as many stray dogs as maybe there used to be. Our goal is always to get them in and out of the shelter as quickly as possible. So if we did have 25 dogs, for example, that would probably indicate that we're not adopting them as quickly as we should. So that's a benefit as well. When we're moving them more quickly, they don't have to stay at the shelter. There's no reason for us to have that many animals at the shelter. How long on average give or take is an animal in the shelter before it is adopted? Yeah, the average for a dog is 30 days. For a cat it's 45 days. Now every animal is quarantined for 10 days upon arrival. So that goes into that average as well. And there are many animals that only stay with us 3, 4, 5 days after its quarantine time. Then there are animals that have more significant behavioral or medical issues. And they might stay sometimes 3, 4, 5 months. Okay. Is there a target range? Like is it dangerous or is it harmful to the animal if they stay too long? It's not good. Animals that stay longer become stressed. That can lead to further medical and behavioral issues. It's just better to be in a home. It's better to be in a home than it is to be at the shelter. And we do it the best that we can for them and definitely give them as much enrichment and attention as possible. But it's just better to be in a home. Your facility is located in Boonegee in the industrial park. Right. So do you only take animals from within the city or do you have like a coverage area or where do they come from? Yeah, we have no geographic restrictions on our services. So they come from all over northern Minnesota. Sometimes we even get calls from other shelters in southern Minnesota or even out state. And if we're able we help with that. But I'd say about half of our animals come from Boonegee in the directly surrounding area. But a good portion of the animals also come from Bagley, Blackduck, Wilton, toward Grand Rapids, really all over the place. Oh wow. Okay. Let's talk about the people who help make everything happen because obviously it's more than just the two of you. How many employees do you guys have? Right now we have nine employees. Okay. So you have a full-time, part-time mix of them? I'm full-time and I have one other full-time employee who works two different positions. Okay. And everybody else is part-time. Okay. And then give or take, how many volunteers do you have? On average every month it's about 30 volunteers that do various activities from socializing the animals to helping with cleaning and laundry to helping plan and administer events and doing things like board or committee membership. Terry, you've been a volunteer. How important is it or how, you know, you want to go in and you want to be useful. You want to do something that matches your skill set. So tell me a little bit about that. Like, did you have to fill out a questionnaire or how do they kind of match you up to something that's beneficial for everybody? At first I just told Brandon I was available for certain times and days and I would just do anything that was needed. And eventually Brandon developed a questionnaire to kind of match up the skill sets, what you like to do, what you refuse to do. Personally I'm allergic to cats so you're not going to see me working in the cat room. But there are plenty of other things to do. Fair to say that if somebody is interested in doing something you can find a spot for them if they call you with interest. Right, yeah, there's always more that needs to be done than we have time and resources to do. So, as like Terry mentioned, I mean she's allergic to cats and yet she's still found a way to become very involved. And, you know, sometimes at the same time there aren't things that are exactly pleasant to do but they need to get done. So we really appreciate people that are just willing to kind of do the dirty work too. Fair to say that all the training is provided and anything for if there was somebody who wanted to become a volunteer you guys work with them to make sure they're all adequately. Right, we have a monthly training and so you do have to sign up for that and attend the training and learn more about the shelter and the rules when you're going to be coming in there. Sometimes people, it doesn't work with their schedule but if they talk to us we always find a time to get you in there and go over the rules and make sure that you can be a volunteer. I want to move a little bit more toward the actual work, kind of some of the bigger picture stuff a little bit. So let's talk about, you know, what is it about a shelter that's important? What would happen if there was no shelter in town? Well, the animals wouldn't have a safe refuge. As we talked about earlier, I mean we save and care for and find homes for about 350 animals every year. Every one of those animals is spayed or neutered prior to adoption as well so that helps in our efforts to prevent pet overpopulation and the problems that go along with that. We also act just as a general resource for people. We take calls on lost and found pets. We do presentations with schools and groups of kids like Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts and things like that. So we help educate the public as well about responsible pet care.  A lot of times we don't have the answer. We say call the vet. But we at least give people some guidance. And the same is true with taking in animals. There's so many stray animals, animals that people end up with that they just can't care for. And we can't take all of them in. But we definitely try to give people some guidance and some resources. Is there a ratio or anything in terms of how many you get that are strays versus those that just need to be re-homed? Because for whatever reason a family can't care for them anymore? Yeah, but it gets complicated to define exactly what the situation is. I have some statistics in front of me. Last year we took in about 115 strays and then 177 surrendered animals. So we call that owner surrender when the person owns the animal and brings it to us. But that's where it can get a little bit fuzzy as to whether you are officially the owner of the animal. There was a lot of stray animals that maybe somebody has been caring for for several months. But it wasn't really, they didn't intend to be the owner of that animal. It just showed up. I want to go through the process in terms of what happens. So let's talk hypothetically. Somebody finds a stray, wanders into their yard. What should they do? Well, the first thing would be to figure out if you're covered by animal control. So if you're within the city of Bemidji and there are various townships, I don't have the list with me, but townships like Northern Township, Grant Valley, Frone, a lot of these townships do have animal control. So there is a number that you call and an animal control officer can pick up that animal or sometimes they have you take it to the pound. The pound is separate from the shelter? Yeah, so there are two pounds. One, the city of Bemidji operates a pound and then the animal care clinic helps operate a pound for various townships. So those stray animals would go there. If no one claims the animal after five days, then it comes over to us or sometimes it'll go to another animal agency. If you're not covered by animal control, then potentially we could help take that animal in if it's safe. If it's a friendly animal that's safe to handle and everything. If it is like a feral cat or just an animal that you can't handle, there are fewer options for you. And what we do is we always encourage people to call if they're in a township that has no animal control to call their township, council, their clerk, those people and let them know that there are stray animals out here. We really need to provide some animal control services. Do you have a good relationship with animal control where they will contact you if they find animals that they think could find a home? Yeah, we work very closely with the city of Bemidji and with the townships on animal control. And we always try to have space for them. But sometimes they'll extend that five-day period, for example. We might say, look, we don't have room today, but next Wednesday we'll have room. And so they'll hold on to the animal a little bit longer and then bring it to us afterward.  Well, they can call us. We don't necessarily have the resources to help with veterinary care for animals in situations like that. We, for example, we did take in a stray dog a few weeks ago and we found out that it had a broken hip and it actually is having surgery this morning. Maybe as we're doing this interview, it might be in surgery right now. So we do, and the money for that came from the community. I put out a plea. I said, look, this dog has fractured hip. It's going to cost $1,400. And people stepped up and donated so that we were able to do that. But our general operating budget doesn't cover stray animals in those kinds of emergency situations. If you do get a stray animal that's brought in, you said there's a 10-day quarantine period. Some of these animals, I would imagine, come in with behavioral issues. Does it sometimes take longer than those 10 days before they're ready to be made available for viewing for the public? Rarely. But especially on the dog side, you might come into the shelter and see a big red sign that says, staff only, do not handle. So a lot of times that's what we'll do is, the longer they stay in quarantine, the worse they might get. So it's better to at least get them out where they're in the open, where people can see them, where they can have more interaction. But yeah, we might put a warning on them and continue to work with them. And that's where volunteers really come in handy. We have specially trained volunteers that can work with them and help them overcome some of those issues. Earlier you talked about foster caregivers. What exactly are they and how do they kind of work into the whole process? Well, there's a couple different programs. One is our foster to adopt program. So a lot of people, they intend to adopt the animal, but we haven't had a chance to spay or neuter it yet. Because we do that at a local veterinarian and there's frankly more animals than they have capacity for. So sometimes we get backed up or the animals too young to spay or neuter. So those people will foster the animal and then officially adopt it after it's been spayed or neutered.  We will get cats that we intend to spay or neuter. We send them to the vet and the vet says, well, this animal is pregnant. So we say, okay, don't spay the cat and we find a foster home for it. So pregnant animals and litters of kittens and puppies, it's important to have foster care providers. And then when we have, for example, the dog with the fractured hip, the first thing we did is get it into a foster home. No sense having it stay at the shelter while it's waiting for surgery or recovering. So for injuries, we often will use foster homes. And then occasionally with behavior issues. Sometimes we find that it's beneficial for them to get into a home just to help work through that issue. I want to move and talk to some of the numbers. We've mentioned little pieces of the budget and stuff like that. So tell us a little bit in terms of your overall operating budget annual. Well, the actual number is about $225,000. And, you know, that money is used for the direct care for the animals, the vaccinations.   It's no big deal. But then there are animals that you have to send to the vet three or four or five times. Animals that stay longer. So the costs really mount on those animals. And then, of course, there is the staff that we talked about. So we do have a payroll budget and obviously try to pay people fairly for the work that they're doing. And it's a lot of work. My Kennel staff, you know, they come in at eight in the morning and it takes them four or five hours just to clean up every day to make sure everything's clean and sanitary. And then, of course, we have our desk person processing adoptions. We have our Kennel coordinator that ensures the health and safety of all the animals. So a lot of our budget does go to that. But most of that is direct animal care. And then, of course, there's just the occupancy fees, the regular utilities and insurance and things like that. We said earlier, you don't get funding from local units of government, correct? So where does your funding come from? Well, first, to be fair, we do get donations from various townships. So we really appreciate that. But overall, our funding comes from the community, from donations. About 50% of that budget is just through people sending in money, coming in and slapping $25 on the counter. Another 20% is from fundraising efforts, whether it's an event or, you know, we have doggie banks around town. People bring in their aluminum cans and we get funding from that. And then another 20% is from the adoption fees and other earned revenue sources. And the rest is grant money and in-kind donations. Terry, from a board's perspective, as you're out there and you've had different public events over the years, in fact, I think maybe there seems to be more in recent years. Do you hear enthusiasm from the community for the work of the shelter? Yes, I believe we do. And as awareness is built, you mentioned Great River Rescue and what's that? And it's a good talking point and it is positive. And you said that you put out the need for the dog with the hip. And so you know that there are people who obviously care about animals and want to take part to help in their own way. Yeah, I kind of laugh. It's not always that easy. His name is Vincent. He's a Chihuahua puppy. People were willing to donate for his cause. People obviously pay when they adopt the animals. So do the adoption fees reflect the cost to care for the animals? Not really. For example, it costs $75 to adopt a cat. It cost me $81 to get it spayed. So it doesn't really add up. The fee is there, yes, to help cover some of the costs. But it's also there to make sure that people are making a commitment that they understand that there is a financial side to owning an animal. We want everybody to be able to get a pet, but you also need to know that there are continuing financial obligations to owning a pet. And so the adoption fees help make sure that somebody's committed and that they're going to be able to continue to provide care. Do you feel like your funding has been stable enough that you rely on it year after year that you're in a good place? We're in a good place, but there isn't a second when I'm not nervous about it. What's the tricky part about nonprofits?  Right. A huge portion of our funding comes in the month of December and we're very grateful for that. But cash flow wise, we run on a deficit throughout the year. So a typical month is about $15,000 to $17,000 to run the shelter and we take in about $8,000 to $10,000. Which again is fine as long as the calendar continues to turn and reach the end of the year. That's where you have to get to. We've also seen, I know that you guys keep a list of wish list supplies and stuff. So is that a way for the community to stay involved in addition to hopefully just sending in $20 here and there, a way for them to feel like they're contributing toward the shelter? Right. People love to give in kind contributions and we love to get them. So that is another way to give. If you have lost a pet or you just have some supplies that you no longer need, you can always bring them to the shelter. Most of the time we can use them. Sometimes it's something that we can't use, but that's fine. We might donate it somewhere else. So yeah, we really appreciate that too. And then your physical facility itself. When was it constructed? Is it adequately serving what you need? The shelter's been in place since the year 2000 and it's a good shelter. But there's definitely a lot of deficiencies with it as well. A lot of things that make it a little bit inefficient in the way that we clean, sanitize, take care of the animals. So in a perfect world we would have an expanded shelter, a little bit more advanced equipment, things like that. I want to talk about the process of working with a family or would be adopted. So they come in, they take a look with the animals. Do you usually find that they adopt on the first time? Do they come back time and again to kind of make sure that they have a good connection with the animal? Is one preferred versus the other? Well we want to make sure that people are committed. So we actually have a one-day wait policy. So we don't ever allow someone to adopt the same day they come in to see an animal. So we just want to avoid impulse adoptions with that policy. But we really encourage people to come and spend time with the animals to come several times to make sure it's the right fit. It can be tricky because a lot of times people have other pets at home and they want to know, is this cat going to get along with my cat at home? It's really not fair to the animals to come to the shelter and just put them together and say, okay, see how it goes. So that makes it a little bit tough. But we always give people advice and suggestions for how to introduce them properly once you do get them home. So we do allow people to return animals after adoption, but our goal is to avoid that if we can. Are the employees and the volunteers there? Are they able to give advice and input in terms of, I have this breed at home? Is there another breed that usually works well with it? Yep. And that's where I love my staff who know more about that than I do. Going back to the beginning, my background is more in business. And I've learned a lot about animal breeds and animal caring things since I've been here. But we have a desk person, like I said, a kennel coordinator, a kennel staff. So they always talk with people about their situation, about their needs and about what animals might be a good fit for them. We also have our application, which honestly is more for the applicant than it is for us. It's just a lot of open-ended questions to make sure people are thinking about the right things before they take an animal home. Terry, have you been able to observe when a family is matched with an animal and kind of see how they connect? I have. There was a dog that stayed at the shelter for a very long time. And people worked with him to get him ready to be adopted. And I was actually there the day he went to his forever home. And it was very emotional, actually, the volunteer that spent the most time with him. We were all worried more about him than the dog going to a home. Well, listen, you guys, I want to thank you for joining me today and taking the time to talk about Great River Rescue. I thank you guys for joining me tonight. I hope you've learned a little bit more about the shelter. If you want to take this further and learn a little bit more, I would encourage you to visit the website here on the bottom of the screen. Please join me next time.


Perspectives. How have you changed? One. When I was a kid, I used to be very messy, but now I'm very neat. Two. I didn't use to collect anything, but now I do. Three. I never used to play sports, but now I like to keep fit. Four. I never used to worry about money, but I do now. Five. I used to have a lot of hobbies, but now I don't have any free time. Six. I didn't use to follow politics, but now I check headlines online every day. Seven. When I was younger, I used to care a lot about my appearance. Now I'm too busy to care how I look.


All right, hello, and welcome to the talk about manual SFFS share backups. My name is Robert, and I work at CERN as a engineer, fellow software engineer. And I mainly focus on storage integration into container environments and their deployment at CERN. So this is the agenda for the session. First, we'll have a look at what kind of storage we want to actually backup. After that, we'll briefly describe the individual components. Right after that, we'll have a look exactly how we want to carry out the backups, what is the workflow we would like to follow. After that, we'll have a peek into the future work that still needs to be done. Because as you'll see later on in the presentation, there are still a couple of blocker issues that we are facing, and those need to be resolved first. So I really take this whole talk more as a project update rather than a showcase of a final ready-to-use product. And in the end, we will conclude with the summary. So quickly about CERN itself, it's the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It's located in Geneva, Switzerland, at the Swiss-French border. It was founded in 1954, and its main mission is fundamental science, which means it's trying to answer such questions as, what is the 96% of the universe made of? What is dark matter, dark energy? What was the state of matter just after the Big Bang? And a lot more questions of this kind. To try to answer those questions, CERN has built these very large machines called particle explorators. The one you can see on the photo here is the largest of its kind. It's called LHC. It's of circular shape, 27 kilometers in circumference. And it's placed in a tunnel 100 meters below ground. And in this tunnel, there are two beams of protons traveling in opposite directions and being accelerated very close to the speed of light. And they are made to be collided with one another at another kind of huge machines. This one is called a detector that is then able to monitor the aftermath of the collision. And this is basically what the physicists then study and analyze at CERN. Those detectors generate huge amounts of data. And even after all the filtering is done, it's still tens of petabytes per year that needs to be stored and analyzed. And for that, we are running a private cloud based on OpenStack. This is a pretty recent screenshot of our Grafana dashboard. You can see we have around 460,000 physical cores, 87,000 VMs running on almost 8,000 hypervisors. We are also running around 360 Kubernetes clusters. We have OpenShift as well. But Kubernetes leads by far in the numbers. For storage, we have those kinds of numbers. Block devices around 3.8 petabytes, file shares, almost 900 terabytes, and object storage at around 48 terabytes. This is all backed by SAF. It's mostly application and user data. For things like physics data, machine learning models, we use EOS. This one picks at around 500 petabytes. But this also includes the table cives. So this is all a lot of data. But for the purposes of this presentation, we will only focus on the file shares. So that's around 900 terabytes. But not all of this amount needs to be backed up. Because pretty big chunks of this amount is used by CEI, by QA, by testing environments, and development environments. So we don't really need to back up those. So we did some accounting. And by some estimates, we have around 65 projects that are deploying 159 production Kubernetes clusters. And those then store around 74 terabytes of ManilaSFS storage. So that's basically the kind of numbers we are looking at. So I mentioned ManilaSFS shares. It's in the title of the presentation as well. So what exactly are those? So SAF is a scalable distributed storage system that we rely on heavily. It offers three interfaces for this storage in the same package, ObjectStore, called Rados, BlockDevices, RBDs, Rados BlockDevices, and then SharedFileSystems, called SAFFS. And this is the last one is what we are focusing on right now. Then we have the OpenStackManila, which is SharedFileSystemService for OpenStack. And it's the point of where basically the shared storage systems are able to interact with the OpenStack Cloud. It supports a lot of different technologies, around 35 of those, both proprietary and open source. But for us, the main use case for Manila or the main backend that we use it with is the SAFFS fellow systems. It also provides multi-tent C quota management, all very important features that we rely on. Then lastly, we have CSI. It's the Container Storage Interface. And it forms this, well, it's an interface between some storage system and the container orchestrator, for example, Kubernetes. And it allows storage vendors to write their own storage drivers and those drivers are called CSI drivers. And basically, it forms like a middleman between the storage and the orchestrator. So there is also some integration into the orchestrator themselves. You can create PVCs. And those PVCs are then fulfilled by whatever that particular CSI driver is doing. Both SAFFS and Manila have their own CSI drivers that we rely on in our container workloads. So let's take a look at them right now. So for Manila CSI, this is what the structure looks like. It's split into two main components. The first one is controller plugin that handles the cluster-wide operations, like creating volumes using the Manila service at that particular storage backend. And then the second component is the node plugin, which then handles all of the node local operations, like mounting volume on a node and then exposing it to the workloads on that node. The important thing to note here is that Manila CSI doesn't do the mounts by itself. It relies on other third-party CSI drivers that are dedicated to whatever file system we are using on that particular Manila share. So for example, in case of SAFFS, the workflow is basically this. When a kubelet tells Manila CSI to mount a volume, then the CSI driver asks Manila service what sort of information is needed to mount that share. In case of SAFFS, this is the monitor IPs, the root part of the volume and SAFX credentials. And those are then forwarded to the SAFFS CSI node plugin, which is a completely separate CSI driver. And it has the tools needed to actually carry out the mount on the node and then expose it to the consumer pod. So let's say we have a PVC with Manila SAFFS share. How would we go about backing it up? This is the workflow we would like to follow. So it consists of six steps, quiescing the application, creating a snapshot, unquiescing, creating a volume from the snapshot, then backing up this intermediate volume and removing it along with the snapshot. So let's break down those steps one by one. Questing the application serves two purposes. First one is that it stops or poses the application from processing any further requests. This is because usually you don't want to snapshot a live volume that's still being written to at the same time as you are taking a snapshot of the data that you want to backup. The second point here is that the application of which you are backing up the volumes, it might need to be aware of the fact that you are taking the snapshot because it might store some in-memory buffers or caches that haven't been yet written to the snapshot. So it needs to flash those caches and then you can take a snapshot of the volume. Otherwise, you could get inconsistent data. This is, of course, very application-specific and not all apps need that. Some applications don't. Some applications would even consider this disruptive because they might prefer availability and not being paused rather than having consistent state on the disk being snapshot. So we have created a snapshot now. Then step number three, unquesting the application means resuming it and making it available to process the requests again. And now we can actually think about backing up the data that we have just snapshot it. The problem, however, is that you can't really backup a snapshot. Because as far as CSI and Kubernetes are concerned, snapshots are these completely opaque storage-specific objects that you cannot really access. You cannot access the underlying data from within Kubernetes. What you can do, though, is create a volume from that snapshot. And then this volume you can actually mount somewhere and walk the directory structure and copy the files from it into your backup location, for example, an S3 bucket. So that's number four. And step number five is basically just copying the data into the backup location. And lastly, we can remove this intermediate volume and snapshot because they are no longer needed. We have written all of the data we meant to backup. For restoration, the workflow is much more relaxed in terms of number of steps. We just have to download the data from the backup location and into the original volume. And then we somehow round the application. This is, of course, very specific to each case. But in general, as far as the volume backups are concerned, this is what we would do. So what this means for Manila and CFFS CSI drivers is that as long as they have the capabilities to fulfill all of the actions we have seen in the workflow, users can choose whatever backup solution they wish to use. And as long as this solution also supports CSI and is able to execute this workflow, then we are good to go. We see that the workflow is very heavily reliant on snapshoting. And the good news is that both of those CSI drivers support snapshots and creating volumes from snapshots. The bad news is, however, that this operation is extremely expensive. That's because CFFS doesn't really know how to create a thinly provisioned volume from a snapshot source. So what you would have to normally do is to copy the files from the snapshot and into the target volume. And as you can imagine, that's very inefficient. So that's one of the things we've been working on for CFFS CSI is to have the ability to create volumes from snapshots in constant time. Technically, this is quite trivial because CFFS exposes snapshots right there in the volume in this special dot snap folder. And then the individual, then the subdirectories of this dot snap folder are basically the snapshots that you have taken. They are read-only, but that's fine. So what we do basically is just store reference to some particular snapshot, store it in the persistent volume object during the provisioning phase. And when it comes to mounting this volume, we just navigate to the correct snapshot and present that to the bots on the node. This feature is basically done. And it will be part of the 3.7 release of CFFS CSI, scheduled sometime next month. So that's good. Similarly, the same feature needs to be implemented in manual CSI. And in this case, the implementation of mounting the snapshot is even easier made by the fact that, basically, if this guy already implements the logic to mount CFFS snapshot, then manual CSI only needs to pass in the correct parameters to let CFFS CSI know that, yes, mount this snapshot. And that's it, basically. So in theory, this is very easy. In practice, this is also the time where we hit our first roadblock issue. And it's connected to the fact how CFFS exposes snapshots within this special.snap directory. And, well, because of a bug or incorrect handling of snapshots names, we are basically unable to access snapshot data within this.snap directory. So we are sort of stuck. At this point, there are likely already patches for this issue upstream. And it's being worked on. But right now, manual CSI cannot implement this feature. But as soon as this is done, we can move to the next step, which is then choosing the correct backup tool to carry out the backup procedures. Because what we are doing is implementing the functionality needed by the CSI drivers. The other part of the equation is to actually have some tool to actually execute the workflow of the backup. And that's one of the tools you can see up here. Some of them are proprietary. Some of them are open source. And the approach we are taking with our users is basically it's up to them whatever tool they wish to use. Because they differ in quality in the features they provide. And it's really the users who know their applications well, and they can decide what features are important for their use case. Right now, we are evaluating Valero. And it's an open source tool. It provides scheduled backups, pre and post backup hooks, data retention. So things that our users would be interested in. And actually, our colleagues from the Drupal infrastructure team, Edson, they are already using Valero without snapshots, though, because they cannot use them right now. And they were kind enough to share their experiences with us. So in general, Valero works very well for when you want to backup the cluster resource definitions or the objects. But as soon as you want to backup persistent volumes and the underlying data, day point two, that's when things start to get more interesting. So the rule is basically that if the backend storage system is able to upload the data to the backup location by itself and in the background without you having to deploy some sort of external tool in your Kubernetes cluster that does the copying for you, so as long as you don't need this tool, you're fine. And this is the case for EBS. Google persistent disks, Azure managed disks, and similar. There are storage systems where this is not the case. Ceph is one of them. And if that's your case as well, you need this external tool that does the copying from your volume and into, for example, S3 bucket. In case of Valero, the tool is called RESTIC. And so it does what I just said. Copying file system into an S3 bucket and also the other way around downloading the data from bucket into volume. And it also provides deduplication, encryption, all very cool features. But this is also the place where we see most of the issues. So the first one is large memory consumption. OK, this is not very visible. But so our colleagues from the Drupal in Fratin have seen peaks of even 25 gigabytes of memory on the note. But as of Valero 1.71, it's gotten significantly better. It's around 8 gigs. And but still, this is expected because RESTIC needs to do the deduplication. And that takes a lot of memory to keep the indices around. So it's understandable. But the problem is that the note on which the RESTIC pot is running might not be large enough to carry out the backup operation. At which point it just runs out of memory, it is killed, which brings us to the next issue that failed backups, stay failed. There are no retries. So when a RESTIC pot goes out of memory, it is killed. And then it is restarted because Valero deploys it as a demon set. So it is restarted like any other demon set pot would be. And you would expect that RESTIC would be able to continue where it left off before it was killed due to running out of memory. But this is not what we saw. What we observed was basically it just got stuck until the backup action timed out, at which point the Valero controller just moved on to the next backup item. And this all was done silently. We didn't see any errors only after the whole backup job finished, and that's when we could see the issue. But it wasn't a very good user experience. And then the last issue we have seen is scaling issues. And this is linked to the fact that Valero processes backup items in sequence one by one. And if you have a lot of PVCs and all of those PVCs need to be copied out using RESTIC, then you can imagine you might have some problems. So again, our colleagues from the Drupal infra team, they are managing around 1,000 PVCs for their infrastructure. They are fairly large. And they wanted to have daily backups. But because the time it takes to backup the whole infrastructure takes almost 48 hours, they literally cannot have daily backups. So where to go from here? It's not all that bad. Valero developers are working hard on improving all of those issues. You can see on their repository page the community is very active. And from what I could see, they are planning to improving their CSI snapshoting capabilities, hopefully also providing support for the backup flow we've seen a couple of slides earlier. After that, they are considering, I think, alternatives to RESTIC, for example, Copia. And I'd like to point out that RESTIC is by no means like a bad tool. Our SAF team uses it in their internal operations on millions of files. And it works just fine. It's just the nature of container environment is perhaps too volatile for it to be running. And it's nice that we get to see some alternatives for the cases where it makes sense. And because we were pretty curious about this comparison between RESTIC and Copia, we made some benchmarks. And those are very much just preliminary benchmarks on a small data set in very controlled conditions. So not really something to be taken very seriously. But it gives an idea of what things might look like once Valero receives this Copia support. So what we had was a volume with about 1.5 million files. It was just uncompressed copies of the Linux kernel. And it was the same Linux kernel. So all of the files were the same, using which we could exercise this deduplication feature and compare RESTIC to Copia really well. And as you can see on the numbers just judging by the elapsed time, Copia seems to perform better. It spends half the time of what RESTIC needs to have to complete both backup and restore. The memory consumption, there is even larger difference. I'm not exactly sure what's going on here yet, because it's quite significant. And the S3 bucket size is also lower in case of Copia, because Copia does maybe better splitting the data into objects. And it also does compression. So that's one of the reasons why the bucket size, in case of Copia, is smaller. And for restoring the story is very much the same. So to conclude, what we wanted to achieve was providing our users with the ability to have consistent backups. For that, you need snapshoting support. And sadly, right now, the snapshoting support is not there yet. But it's being addressed. So if you need snapshot support as well, you have to wait. And so do we. If you don't, and your application is not that sensitive to have maybe inconsistent state on the disk and that being backed up, then you're good to go. But also be mindful of the limitations that we have experienced. So pretty large memory consumption and scaling issues. But in the end, they are all being addressed. So we are looking forward to that. All right, so that's it. Thank you. And are there any questions? There is Mike, by the way. How do you quiet your applications? How do you quiet and unquiet your application? Because there is no native support in Kubernetes. There is none. But in Valero, you can run batch script that does whatever the application needs to be done for it to quiet. So the support is there in Valero. I'm just wondering why you're not using the SF support for snapshots. So mirroring to another SF cluster. If I'm not mistaken, this is not yet available in Manila, or is it? So we have Manila developer right there. No, SF supports mirroring the snapshots to another cluster. Right. But in some cases, you might want to back up to something else than SF. And in those cases, you might need to just have some general tool that does S3 bucket clone. Just saying it would save you lots of time. It was not clear when you do a backups here, right? There was one backup. But what about multiple backups, like schedule backups? Are they incremental, not incremental? What are these different tools provided in related to? So both RESTik and Kopia, by default, that's the only thing they can do is incremental backups. And on the restore side, do they restore all the content before they allow application start? It depends. But yes, in general, you first need to restore your data before the application is able to be resumed. Yeah, because one of the slides, you mentioned that almost 65 terabytes of data on one of the volume, right? So restoring that could take probably many hours. Yeah, well, there is no other way.  You need to first to get it back and only then continue. But there are tools other than Valero that enable you to define your own workflows. For example, this one, Canister, which I found was a very interesting project. You can define your own workflow. And if your application has specific needs, you can declare them in that workflow. And maybe that's the way. Thank you. Hi. What do you do with the application that you can't pause? Like, that's impossible to stop because you keep on processing. Well, then you might suffer from inconsistencies in the backups. But maybe having some backups are better than to have none. Maybe having inconsistent backups is just what you have to deal with. But yeah, it's an issue that we don't have clear answer to. OK. Thanks a lot for the presentation. My question would be, have you built any automation to verify backups? Like, to verify that you can actually restore the data after the backup? So right now, we are at the point of just evaluating this in our Kubernetes offerings. So we are not at the point of having a proper CI for this. But definitely, this is something we would be aiming to have. OK, I think we have actually run out of time. 35 minutes. Thank you for your attention and enjoy your lunch.


Welcome to the Remedy Force Summary Program. I am Nikhil Deshpande. I am a Product Manager for Remedy Force. In this video, we will understand the capabilities of the new Superbox in self-service. Superbox is a smarter and more efficient tool to search for information in self-service. It is prominently visible in the main panel on the self-service homepage. Since it is resizable, clients can resize it to enter longer search strings. It uses a more efficient search algorithm to return more relevant search results. Admins have some control over the order of search result tabs through an existing configuration. Search results honour entitlement of the client to relevant resources and show only those resources the client has access to. All self-service configuration from previous releases is honoured. Superbox automatically shows the first tab that has results. The user experience is also superior to the previous search box by displaying counts of search results in each tab. We understand that the most likely action for a client to perform when they do not find the information they are looking for is to submit a ticket. Superbox facilitates this action through a link to submit a ticket or a service request. Broadcasts are a new resource appearing in Superbox results. Active broadcasts enabled for display in self-service are displayed. The client has an option to view additional details of the broadcast such as the posted date and priority. Search results for self-help articles include only those records that are published and are enabled for display in self-service. All required types of self-help articles including custom types are displayed as relevant. Search results for service requests show those service request templates that are active and online. Rich text description can be displayed in the results. The rich text description field must be added to the request detail field set self-service service request detail. This is an existing configuration. Search results for common ticket templates include those ticket templates that are identified as common ticket templates. Ticket templates may be displayed in a separate tab or as part of the service request tab. This configuration is not new. A new configuration option has been introduced for self-service 3.0 to allow the client to submit a ticket from Superbox results. It can be set to submit a ticket or service request. If set to ticket, the search string is automatically copied onto the description field of the ticket at runtime. If set to service request, the service request template to be used must be set up during configuration. The service request template so configured must be online and active. It should be noted that entitlement of the service request is not checked at runtime. This is why it is critical that if this option is chosen admin service request template that all clients have access to and that is active and online at all times. Choosing the none option does not allow the client to submit a ticket or a request and the Superbox functionality remains limited to searching. Let us now look at a demo of the product. In remedy force administration, click on configure self-service incidents. You'll find a new option here called search result actions. You can set it to submit a ticket or submit a request. If you select submit a request, you must select a service request. I'm not going to choose a service request at the time. I'll set it to submit a ticket. Now let's go to self-service and see the user interface. I'm a client logged into self-service. As you can see, the search box that used to be in the left sidebar has now been moved to the main panel. Here it's now called Superbox. In the Superbox, I enter a search string because I want to request for time off. Now I'm a client logged into self-service 3. I can see that the search box has now been moved to the main panel and is now much bigger and it's resizable. I can enter a search string in the search box. Let's say I want to apply for time off. And I can see that there's a self-help article that is the most relevant search result. I can read the self-help article, maximize the window if needed. I can read the article, enter any comment if necessary. If this meets my needs, I'm done. I don't need to submit a ticket. Let's say I want to reset my network password and I search here. Here the most relevant results are in the service request tab and I can see that there's a template for resetting one's password. When I click that, it automatically pops up the submit ticket form along with the template. What if I wanted to request for a mobile phone? Here I can see that the service request tab returns a service request for iPhone 8. The request definition included a rich text description for this service request and the rich text also can be configured to be returned in the search results. I can invoke that service request. Now let me enter a search string because I'm experiencing performance issues on the payroll system. I don't find any relevant service request. The self-help articles return are also not relevant. So I clicked on broadcasts and here I can see a broadcast for a performance degradation. Upon clicking it, I can see that this appears to be a recently posted broadcast. It shows me the details and it also shows me the priority of this broadcast. If I don't find information I'm looking for, if I'm not satisfied with the search results, I always have the option of clicking on the submit ticket link. And when I do that, the submit ticket form pops up and my search string is automatically copied in the description field. I can enter other fields on the ticket form as necessary and submit my ticket. Thank you for watching this overview of Superbox.