Are we live? Hello? Hi! Hey stampers! Welcome to Stampin' Chat with Stampin' Jill. Usually she says Ann Aubrey. But I'm not Jill. I'm Beth. And we are here with you today so happy to be part of the Stampin' Jill creative team. And we are going to stamp and play a little bit with the excellent eggs. I wish it was eggs. It's just excellent eggs, which is way cute. But we're going to play with this bundle from the current mini catalog and come up and show you some cute samples. Yes. So it has the stamp set that has a few eggs and the little bunny and... Super cute sayings. Great sayings. Very fun. I love the font of them. And then the dyes that has... There's three sizes that you can just cut out. And then there's this cute, like, designy kind of dye. And then the bunny. You can cut out the bunny. And then you have these three. They're kind of like... Oh, they can cut the eggs like in half or do whatever. I've had some fun with those. I didn't know that's what they did. So I used them a little bit different. So we'll just want to... We'll show you a couple ways. Yeah. So here we go. Here we go. I will start... You start stamping. I have been playing with this set. I played with it a few days ago. And then I've been playing it with it pretty much this morning. And Beth just sat down to start playing with it. Yeah, and I'm playing very, very... She's so silly. I have... I already have some samples. That's what... And her samples are really, really cute. So here is my first one. Look at those cute bunnies on there. Yeah, you have to tell them where those flowers came from. All right. She asked me about the flowers. I just drew the flowers. I thought... She just drew them. I thought the egg was cute. I wanted some little flowers. There aren't any flowers in the set. So I drew them. She just drew them. Here are some chocolate bunnies. Hello, Spring. Did you cut out those and put them on that card? Did I? Oh, yes. Yeah. So I used the bunnies from these that I cut out on the back of here. If you can see, I just have pecan pie behind the bubble bath. And then I just used them on here. And I have more left that I can use. Cute. They're chocolate bunnies. I know, right? That's really cute. Right? Yeah. Okay. And then here is some eggs. Happy Easter. So I colored the egg. And then this is that cute, like, designy egg that's in the dye. It's really, really cute. It is really, really cute. Yeah. I think there's more you could do with it, too. Yeah. And then I colored this one the bunnies.  Super cute. Really cute. Yeah. Your color is ivory. So I've been playing with that. And that's those are what I did kind of the other day. And then I've been playing with it today, more with the dyes today. And I wanted to show some of the ideas I was doing. So I have this one that I'm going to do something I haven't gotten there yet. But this one was a lot of work I took. If you can see all of these pieces here, I cut out a bunch of eggs in just cute pastel-y spring colors. And then I cut using this zigzag. I just cut some of each of the biggest egg and then just line them up on that egg. And I'm going to do something like that. And then this one, I just cut out each of those colors in that cute little designy egg. And I love all the stitching look. I don't know how well you can see the stitching on these is really, really cute. It is super duper cute. So when every egg you cut out, I have to show you this one. So I just went through like went and cut out an egg. But it has, can you see, like, maybe you can't really see the stitching here? Maybe it just all has stitching around the edge. So it kind of finishes it off. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Maybe that's a little better. So this is on a colored one. It kind of finishes the egg off just perfectly. It's really cute. They're really super cute. Okay, so I wanted to show this idea though. So as I was cutting these, I realized like that it kind of cuts a little tulip shape that you can, you could make it into a tulip. So I used the three smaller eggs and made three little tulips. And this is what I did. So this, if this were a full egg here, I just lined up the two edges like the ones going down like this with the edge of the egg. Maybe you can see it better if I go over the white like here. Let's see. If you line up the point like here and here with the edge of the egg, it's going to be even. So I did that.  So I'm going to finish up that card. And oh, and then I did the scallop one, this one on the bottom for grass. And this one is the straight one. But let's see, I had, oh, this. So I just did them. See if you can see like four times in a row here. And then it gave me my stems. Just do them real close together. Cute. Clipped it off. So cute. You're so inventive. Kind of fun. It's just, it's fun. And I don't know, there's not a ton of dyes in it, but it kind of was fun to come up with a different idea. So I'm going to use Hello Spring on this. Okay, what are you doing? So I am using kind of a small card. I did like a four by four right here. But I, but I did a base for my card and then I used an embossing folder. I like, I use the same one that you did on one of your samples. I didn't even look. Oh, the dot. The dot is super cute. It's like springy and fun. And I didn't use that scallop dye for an egg. I just used, I thought it was cute as a border. So if you have like a three inch, it works like it will just cut it. I'm sure it was easy to line up though, right? If you want to do more. It was easy. So I just thought these colors were so fun. I kind of took like color inspiration from the light. Is it lighter than air? Yeah, lighter than air. Six by six designer series paper. Cause I thought those were such fun, bright springy colors and just have made a card. So I'm just going to put it all together here. Thinking of you. Stuff here. And this ribbon, I thought this variegated ribbon was cute, which I noticed you also used on one of your samples. Which one? The blue. Oh, yeah. It's kind of, yeah. Isn't that pretty? I feel like there's so many you could use it with right now because it is kind of like airy. Yeah. Right. We have, I feel like there's a ton of stuff right now. Yeah. So I was going to put that on too. Yeah. So we are, do you feel like you're haggard looking? I probably shouldn't say that about you. Just about myself. I feel like I'm super haggard. I know. We just got back from Houston. We were there for on stage, which was so fun. We got to see a lot of our stamping friends. Yes, it was so fun. And see the new catalog and some of the products in the new catalog. In fact, I have it right here. I can't open it. You could show them. But I can show the cover. Look how cute. Okay. It's so fun. Isn't it so pretty? Look at it like this. I want to go to that party right there. I know. And be friends with those people. There are some really, really fun products in that catalog that we got to see while we were there at on stage. I always want to say convention. Been around too many years for that. But yeah, we got to go and it was so fun, but it was kind of a, we got back Sunday and started working Monday. So just jumped right back in. Yeah, we have our virtual classes coming up soon where we've been working hard our, let's see, our registration closes tomorrow for it. Yep. We end tomorrow. Our classes are in April. So we've still got a little bit of time to prep, but our classes, yeah, our registration ends tomorrow so we can get our order placed. And we've 10 classes that we're doing this time. So we've got a lot to choose from, but that is a lot of stuff for us to prep for you. So we're excited about that. But we had to jump right back in after getting back from vacation and start working again. You know, I wanted to just sit on the couch for a minute, but no such no rest for the weary, right? Yeah. Okay. Now I have to decide where that's going. Maybe just down in the grass. Oh, that's cute. I love those colors. What's your green in the back? Um, soft seafoam and then granny apple green. Okay. Those look different together. Soft seafoam looks way greener next to granny apple. It does. Sometimes it's so light. Yeah. Yeah. The granny apple pulls out the color. I like it. Oh, and I was going to do, look how cute. I think I'm going to use, this is the Parakeet party metallic ribbon. Oh, and I think it'll look really cute. I think it looks perfect.  Do you know what it made me think of was, um, grout, like the grass could be in that. Oh yeah. Jill made a sample last week with tulips and it made me think of that because that we have that cute green, um, glimmer paper. Yes. That's true. I think the things in this that are really cute. They are cute. I feel like that's kind of, maybe I need to back it with something. Anyway, there's kind of the base of it with the colors. Just a cute little Easter thinking of you that you could use in the spring.  And then I've got this other one. I've been coloring my egg, just a little note card. I saw, we saw so many cute samples this last weekend. And you know, you get the idea, but more like the layout. Do you ever do that?  I want to try it, whatever. So fun to see so many fun ideas. Yes, it is. I know I can't, Easter seems so early this year. Yeah. Because it's in March, where that doesn't always happen. I can't believe it's only like two weeks away. Gosh, is that right? A week and a half even. Oh my God. Right? Yeah, I guess that's right. Which is really crazy. It does. Okay. And then I wanted to use some of these iridescent rhinestones on here. Okay, I want to use that. Maybe I'll use that on my other theme. And I'll stop just a little sentiment. The sentiments in this stamp set, where did they go? Over here. We're going to be. Hello spring thinking of you and happy Easter. They're kind of fun. They are cute. Yeah, they are. I love the scripty. Yeah. Or like the mix of them. They're kind of cute. Punchy punch here. Oh, cute. There we go. Way cute. That is fun. Cute. Okay. Now I want to figure out, I think I'm going to do something with this one. I don't know how. I think just centered. Cute. Maybe, can I use some of that lighter than airpaper? Yeah, absolutely. This has like a lot of these, what's our soft, subtle colors in it. It's fun though. It has like little pops of brights too. Yeah. I like it. I didn't technically use that. Hmm. Let's see. Let's see how this looks. Bubble bath. Cute if I did a strip of that. I used that. I used this one on this other card too because I thought it was cute with those bubble bath bunnies. So cute. I love this. Is this coastal cabana? Yes. Coastal cabana mixed with bubble bath. It's such a cute combo. That's kind of one of my favorite combos. That's really, really cute. I know. I like it too. Yeah.  Crazy girl. Actually, you're super cool. So we've had a ton of stuff happening with Stampin' Up this week though. I know. I wonder what people have heard or seen that's new. What are you the most excited about? Well, I love the catalog. We can't show you, but it is different than it previously has been. The layout's a little different. You guys, it's so fun because it shows off some cool techniques in there. It shows you how to use different products, which I think is really valuable for people who are going through to make things because sometimes I think you get this stuff and you get away from the class or the party you bought it at and you forget how to use it. So it might be pretty helpful to have those little tips right at your fingertips. Tips at your fingertips. Finger tips. Tips at your tips. And it's just a really pretty catalog. It is. It is. And it's, I don't know, I think it can appeal to all kinds of crafters, which I love. So I'm excited about that. I don't know if I love this, Aubrey. What are your thoughts on all those things, Beth, on things that are happening at Stampin' I think I'm excited about the last chance stuff. They just have given us that list so we can see what's going to be retiring in April, which is always kind of exciting because it's discounted. So you can get a good deal on it. That's true. And actually, I think Annalisa said this one, this Easter set is one of those. Oh, nice. Which it's not discounted though until April. So you have to wait until April 9th to get the discount. But it does give us a little bit of a head up because we know a couple of things. So we know that there are a couple of price increases also in the catalog, which is a bummer, but we don't have them very often. And so Can I use that yellow, lolly, lemon, lolly? This one? Paper. Oh, are you using it? No. Not that one. Oh, this is card stock. Yeah, you've got it. Thanks. Sorry. No, you're good. Continue.  Also with the new catalog, we found out that there are certain things that are going to be more expensive in the new catalog. So if you want to stock up on some of those things before the new catalog goes live, you could save some money like card stock is going up a little bit like basic things like card stock rates and that kind of yeah. So it's a good time to kind of figure out an order so that you can save some money that way. So I like those things. I like those ideas. But if you do want a catalog, we can start sending those out in April. We'd love to send you one if you don't have a current demonstrator. You can always leave a comment on this video, but we'll probably add a link in the comments of the video or even not the comments, but maybe like the description of the video where we have a form that you can go fill out and put in your address so we can send you a catalog because we'd love to do that for you. Yeah. Anyway, but yeah, lots of stuff going on. It feels a little overwhelming, hard to focus on one thing at a time seems like, but yes. It's always an exciting time of year. I know. And I don't know. Well, we, like we were saying, we have a lot coming up too. So we just have lots going on and thinking about, do we want to tell them what we're, the other thing? Well, it is in March, the thing we're doing in at the end of the month. I don't know what the end of March. Is it at the end of March or the end? Oh, the end of April. Oh, yeah. Do we want to tell them? I mean, I don't know. Is that something that we, do you think they care? I don't know. I mean, if they live in Idaho, they might care. I know. If you live in Idaho, we are going to be, oh, Leanne Smith just played with the set yesterday. Oh, Leanne, I want to see your samples. I want to see what you did because Aubrey is like going crazy with the dyes and I'm just stamping up a storm. So I'd love to see what you made because it seems like there's a lot of versatility in things to do. I know. Okay. She says, tell us. Oh, tell us. Oh, okay. If you leave them hanging longer, I don't know. Oh, I mean, we'll see you next week. I'm just kidding. So if you live in Idaho or near Boise, near Boise, Idaho, we are, we are going to Penner's, to Penner's conference. We are not just going. We are having a booth at Penner's conference. And we're teaching a class. We are. Yes, we're focusing on our kits. So we're not doing this kind of crazy stuff, but it would be really fun if anybody's in that area or close and you're planning on going to Idaho Penner's. Yes, please come meet us and watch our social media because we're going to be sharing discount codes. We can save you a couple bucks on classes or other things. Yay, Leanne. Thank you. We're so excited. We've never done such a big show before. Right. So, but we're really excited. Really excited. A little nervous. Aubrey's more excited than nervous. I'm very nervous. That's usually how it goes, though. It'll be fine. I have to bring Beth out of her nerves. Cute. Cute. I love this. I'm having springy. I think it too. I think lemon lolly might be one of my new favorite colors. It's kind of a fun spring color. We haven't had it in spring yet, right? It's such a great yellow. Yeah, it really is. Okay. So I, Aubrey gave me an idea earlier thinking I was going to do one thing and I am not. I just want to take and just see. I know we're running short on time, but I just want to see what this looks like and then I can finish up a sample because I was saying I wish it didn't take so long to color. So what if we stamp directly on the designer series paper? Ooh, that is cute. It's cute. So then you have an egg, right? Just like that. But then what if we take, oh, you took the pink. Do you have just a scrap of it? Yeah. Yeah. What if we take this one and stamp? You know, choose like a not super busy, maybe a little more of an open pattern so you can still see your design because this is just a really like a line already one. And then what if I take and like cut out little sections and layer it onto this egg and we can like mix and match. So cute. Yeah. So cute. Okay. I think that you should definitely do that. But I think that we'll have to go and post. Yes. The card because I think we've kind of, I know we've been going for so long. So make sure that you go to our Stamping Jills VIP Facebook group. The link is down in the description to see the stills, still photos of what we create today and jump on and grab this set. I know it goes discounted next month, but if you want it in time for Easter, go grab it today. Yeah. Yep. It's super cute. And I've been able to do way more than I even thought I could. Seriously, I can't believe the things you made. Kind of loving it. When in doubt, just draw your own image. When in doubt. If you're at that level, I am not. Oh man. Okay. Well, we will see you later. Oh, and a last reminder. Go and register for our classes for our April virtual classes. If you haven't done that yet, tomorrow is the deadline. Yep. We cut it off tomorrow. Don't forget if you do three classes or more, you get a $20 product credit with us. If you do 10 classes, you get free shipping in one of your classes free. Yes. So come hang out with us. It's so fun. Aubrey and I are teaching the classes. Jill's teaching one. So you'll get to see her a little bit. We do a Facebook page with live demos, giveaways, a card contest. It's such a fun weekend. We love it. Yes. We'd love to be able to connect with you. So join us for that. We'll put the link down there too so you can see, but make sure if it's been on your list to do you get it done today because it closes tomorrow. Yes. Okay. Okay. We'll see you guys next week and we'll see you tomorrow for Watch It Weekly Wednesday. That's right. See ya. Bye.


Welcome back to our lecture series math 1050 college algebra for students at Southern Utah University. As usual I'll be a professor today Dr. Andrew Missildine. In lecture 11 we're gonna start the first of actually like four lectures honestly about the topic of systems of linear equations. Lectures 11 and 12 will focus on the systems of linear equations. Lecture 11 will mostly focus on two by two linear systems while lecture 12 will focus on three by three linear systems. And then the next two lectures after that we're gonna focus on using matrices to help us with the systems of linear equations. So I keep on saying this word systems of linear equations what are we talking about here? So a system of equations without the necessarily adjective of linear here. A system of equations is a set of equations with common variables. So you can see example of such a thing right here like this right here is a two by two system of linear of system of equations it's a linear equation linear system we'll talk about in just a second. It has two equations we got this one right here 2x minus y equals 5. We have a second one here x plus 4 y equals 7. We have two equations and of course we have these two variables x and y. Alright and so you often describe a system in this case two by two to suggest there's two equations and two variables. You always mention the number of equations first and then the number of variables second so if one was describing an m by n system this would suggest that you're gonna have m many equations and you'd have n many variables in that system. Now we're not gonna do anything there that's that's huge but in theory that that's that's what this terminology is meaning here. So a system of equations is a set of equations with common variables here. A solution to a system of equations is any assignment it's an assignment to each of the variables such that each of the equations is satisfied here. So if we were to take like a single equation like an equation with one variable take something like 2x plus 1 equals 0. The solution to this equation is negative one half because notice if you plug in negative one half for x you're gonna get two times negative one half plus one as working with the left hand side simplifying that you're gonna get there a negative one plus one that does turn out to be zero which is the right hand side. The assignment that x equals negative one half that gives us a solution to the to the equation this is that's what it means there the assignment makes the left hand side equal to the right hand side. Now in a system of equations a solution would be an assignment of each of the variables because there might be more than one variable here using this example right here we would need an assignment for x and for y and that assignment needs to make the first equation true it needs to make the second equation true if there was a third equation it needs to satisfy that one and the fourth one and the fifth one and all of them. So a solution to a system of equations is going to be an assignment of all the variables which satisfies all of the equations in the situation. Now we're gonna be focused on systems of linear equations so we said so it's a system of linear equations of every equation in the system is linear that is with regard to the variable the exponent is always one so you don't see anything because we don't write exponents of one here but the variables always one and you never have products of these things together so this should be linear equations with multiple multiple variables mind you but it's gonna be a system of linear equations sometimes we call it a linear system for short. Conversely the system is nonlinear if there does exist a nonlinear equation inside the system. We'll explore nonlinear systems much later in this semester I should say in this lecture series but for now we're gonna talk about linear systems they're a lot more tame compared to what we can see for nonlinear systems. So let's discuss what is a solution to a linear system look like so we keep on looking at this example right here what I'm first going to do is take an equate or take a take an assignment that's not a solution like if I were to test the value say 1 comma 0 notice that if you put 1 comma 0 into the first equation and we're gonna follow the usual convention that if we call our variables x and y then if I write a point an ordered pair the first coordinate is the x-coordinate the second coordinate is the y-coordinate so if I plug in x equals 1 and y equals 0 that's what this means here x equals 1 and y equals 0 if you plug it into the equation the left-hand side you're gonna get 2 times 1 minus 0 is equal to 2 which is not equal to 5 that does not satisfy the right-hand side like so well sorry the right-hand side is equal to 5 I should I should clarify that the right-hand side which is 5 is not equal to 2 it didn't satisfy the first equation in fact if you check the second equation as well you're gonna get 1 plus 4 times 0 which is going to equal just 1 that's not 7 so again that is violated as well this is not a solution to the system because it didn't satisfy the equations in fact it didn't satisfy any of the equations now on the other hand if we did something like the following let's test the point this time I'm gonna take 0 comma negative 5 notice what happens here that if I plug in x is 0 and y is negative 5 if I plug that into the first equation I'm gonna get that the left-hand side becomes 2 times 0 minus negative 5 well that would simplify just to be 5 that is the right-hand side so that actually certifies the first equation but if you look at the second equation there if you take 0 plus 4 times negative 5 that's gonna give you negative 20 negative 20 is not equal to 7 so it turns out it didn't work on the second equation this is what's important about a solution to a system of equations that each equation must be satisfied by that assignment to count as a solution so now let's get to the point that was suggested here on the screen 3 comma 1 what's so special about that well it turns out this is in fact a solution to this system of equations if we were to plug in x equals 3 and y equals 1 into the first equation we get the following the left-hand side would become 2 times 3 minus 1 2 times 3 is 6 minus 1 is in fact 5 that is the right-hand side so the first equation is satisfied how about the second equation if I take the left-hand side there there's an x plus 4 y I replace the x with a 3 I replace the y with a 1 so we're gonna get 3 plus 4 times 1 4 times 1 of course is 4 3 plus 4 is of course equal to 7 that is the right-hand side and so Bob's your uncle 3 comma 1 satisfies the first equation and it satisfies the second equation those only two equations involved in this linear system and therefore it is in fact a solution so we have now demonstrated that this linear system has a solution and in fact it's the only solution to this linear system how do I know that well there is a very nice geometric argument you can make about this because after all our linear system which I know is no longer on the screen so let me rewrite it we had we had the equations 2 x minus y equals 5 that was the first one and we had the second equation x plus 4 y is equal to 7 these this is a linear equation both of them with two variables here if I solve for y into the first equation here you can move the 2x to the other side so you get negative y equals 5 minus 2x times both sides by negative 1 you're gonna end up with this equation right here you're gonna get y equals 2x minus 5 this is now the slope intercept form of that equation for which this is a as a little as a line it has a y intercept of negative 5 so while the scale on my x and y axis aren't included here we can assume negative 5 would be down here somewhere I mean as a slope of positive 2 so we're gonna go up to every time we go up one and so while this is drawn to scale I didn't label the scale you get a line that looks something like that that's why equals 2x minus 5 now if you take the second equation right here x plus 4 y equals 7 the same thing move the x to the other side you get 4 y equals 7 minus x divide both sides by 4 we end up with this equation right here y equals negative 1 4th x plus 7 4th 7 4th is a teeny bit smaller than 8 4th which of course is 2 so you'd expect a wiener set somewhere around here our slope this time is negative 1 4th so every time we go down one we're gonna go over by 4 and so you get a graph of a line that looks something like the following so I'm approaching this problem geometrically I can graph the solution set of this equation that's its line that's the graph is the line I can graph this equation the graph is the solution set to the equation so a solution to a system of equations is the simultaneous solutions of all of the equations so if the first graph is just an illustration of its solution set and the second graph is just an illustration of the solution set of the second equation this actually suggests that the intersection of the graphs will then be the simultaneous solutions to these two equations that's the solution to the linear system and when we graph these two lines we can see very clearly that there is only one point of intersection these lines only hit at one point and that one point of intersection has got to be 3 comma 1 because we've already determined 3 1 is a solution and geometrically there can only be one solution so that's got to be the unique solution this happens actually a lot when you work with linear systems we get this unique solution now if we want to think about this geometrically it turns out there are other options as well one possibility is that when you graph your lines you could you get a line like this one but you might also get a line that's parallel to it and so much that they actually never intersect whatsoever because parallel lines by nature are going to be equidistant they never touch they never intersect so it's possible that there is no solution to a linear system at least for this when you have two equations two unknowns because maybe there's no solution because they're parallel right so we can get zero solutions we can get one solution third and final possibility is you actually can get infinitely many solutions it turns out that when you graph the first line you get something like this but then when you graph the second line you get the exact same thing again it could be that the two lines completely overlay each other they overlap as is illustrated with this dashed line you see the yellow line and the blue line are overlapping and so you actually get every solution to the first line is a solution to the second line and as each line contains infinitely many points you can get infinitely many possibilities now it turns out that for a two by two linear system these are the only three options you either have no solutions a unique solution or infinitely many solutions as we explore linear systems in the future we start looking at higher dimensions like what if we start looking at three by three linear systems we'll do that in the next lecture we'll see that the same pattern holds that a linear system has only no solution one solution or infinitely many solutions


Good morning. So my name is Luke Heidecke. I'm with Selenia Incorporated. I'm a consultant with them for enterprise companies. I've worked in Germany for our customer there, and also now I work in LA for one of our media companies. I focus a lot on infrastructure automation, DevOps processes, cloud infrastructure, and then sort of the ways of tooling with organizations, helping them figure out tooling and processes and people's sort of skills necessary to adopt and move their applications into the cloud. So today I want to talk a little bit about the challenges of enterprise, the sort of issues with technical debt that we sort of encounter across various customers, the challenges of sort of gathering the state of the current baselines and ways to sort of look at planning your baselines that are going to be used in the cloud and then at some point perhaps into containers and things like that. I want to talk about sort of making sure that things are prepared and clear as far as the requirements and processes and things like that as you go forward. The next thing is really focusing on foundational images, identifying the various functional procedural and security requirements, and building those in layers, and then really decomposing those to reduce complexity, create a working baseline, and also talk a little bit about the strengths of immutable images, especially as you move towards containers. But also the sort of practices really lend well to clear working baselines with an enterprise environment in the cloud. The next piece is sort of taking that and growing continuous improvement, the cycle of capture, create, test, and iterate, making sure that everything is auditable, understood by all the teams, and manageable by teams in a clear automated process. So the customers that I've been working with, my colleagues have been working with, it's clear that there's sort of years, this burden of years or even decades of technical debt, the legacy of sort of past decisions and traditional sort of architectures, old operating systems, I'm sure any of you, my customers running CentOS 6.5 earlier baselines that have to be patched and built upon as soon as you install, there is instantly a need to update and change and modify something that was just freshly installed. So a lot, and I'm sure there's even older versions of that still running. I know that there's a lot of people and our customers that still have systems that are precious snowflakes that can't be touched and a lot of that is making sure that the process is automated and fast enough and reactive enough where people, application owners and development teams don't feel as paranoid or like they have to keep their babies intact for ever. Part of that is also sort of capturing the processes, the security, organizational, the sort of history of processes built up over time, not necessarily aligning with baselines within OpenStack, within public clouds, or especially within sort of Docker images, things like that. It's, I know, very difficult to sort of take those and align those various requirements and break them down into workable baselines that make sense with a fully automated image build. The other thing we've seen a lot also is documentation, not fully documenting, the document's not reflecting the current state because it's painful if it's not automated and sort of, especially new people or new projects spinning up, if the documentation isn't clear, it can be very painful for engineers. One of the pieces I noticed I saw on Twitter, the issue with sort of the 10X engineer, an engineer that comes in and does work and then they require 10 times more engineers just to kind of come up and clean after that engineer and figure things out in the future. So it's a lot of our sort of pain points for customers has been realizing that automating and fixing and documenting things from the start in a clearance concise manner, even if it means that sort of you're simplifying a little bit more than you think you have to, the initial release, it's really helpful and important that you have those processes from the start so you don't have to clean up and send the army of engineers and to clean up later for that kind of thing. One of the other challenges is the sort of idea of parallel and divergent baselines so that whether it's an application team, or other sort of operations teams or locations with an organization may be starting out with a common baseline back when 6.5 was first released in 2012 or I think actually earlier than that. And everybody likes the little Smith Lake system so we sort of see a lot of teams creating something on the baseline and then it gets handed off to maybe a security team and they do some manual installs and then it's sent back to another team and then suddenly it's diverged and the system hasn't even gone to production yet. So a lot of the stuff is making sure that within the tool chain and the processes for baseline creation that it's clear enough to all those teams and that everybody's held the same standards. One of the other challenges there is the timelines, so if those processes and tool chains aren't usable by all the teams, people start to make sacrifices and sort of the name of shipping it now and you need to make sure that those tools all sort of take that into account and that organizational oversight that there's the control of baselines and these images is maintained in sort of orderly fashion that's common across all the teams that might be collaborating on this sort of thing. The next piece there, so the requirements. Really taking and decomposing what you have in your stack currently, what you're moving into the cloud or if you're fortunate enough to be able to do Greenfield deployments. Some of our customers are just doing Greenfield deployments like microservices and Kubernetes and they're giving sort of a good opportunity to have a new Greenfield deployment where they're sort of taking, they're leaving their legacy systems and they're saying, okay, that's maybe still a data source, maybe still some other backend systems but we're going to really make sure that our new systems are focused on the best way to do it within sort of the microservice compute environments that they're trying to implement for tomorrow. So taking the various application containers, application dependencies, environments, environmental configurations and locations and things like that, breaking those down as functional requirements. And then it goes into security. So making that part of the integrated process. That's a lot of the problem that we also have at a customer, especially in finance and government and et cetera is this mountain of security requirements that need to be integrated into an overall baseline and instead they're treated as a layer on top and not considered as far as the sort of systematic approach to baseline creation. So making sure that those are decomposed, that you look at, there's a common understanding of what the requirements mean and this goes for all of these pieces and really looking at implementations that make sense for an automated cloud deployment. And then from there, really, we look a lot at things like making sure that host-based firewalls, whether it's SC Linux or App Armor with Ubuntu, making sure that those technologies are also thought of in a systematic approach so that you're not sending it off to the security team just to do a bunch of work that those are really automated and included in the baseline as well. The next piece is sort of the procedural, making sure that a lot of our work has been with customers figuring out, things tend to be, some of these decisions seem to be in silos where it's the network team or the engineering team that comes down from high and decides to do a tool or a component within the baseline and not keeping in mind how it's actually gonna be used within development tests, the entire sort of application lifecycle into deployment. And that goes kind of in the monitoring management to seeing, really evaluating the tools that you're using to make sure that they can be installed in this sort of fashion and that they're common throughout the systems. And if it's not something that can be common within the application stack that it's not used or that you look, evaluate a different tool, that goes for logging metrics or even security monitoring, et cetera. So from there, I wanna talk a little about how we've worked with customers to decompose that second and start building into a usable cloud image. So the big thing is starting with the minimal set of, for your baseline, whether you choose Red Hat, Buntu, making sure that you go with the minimal and it's that sort of, Buntu was talking with some of the snappy stuff also, really only using what you need to use for what you need to have as dependencies for the rest of your application stack. And that the baseline should be portable across functions so that you're not having a baseline for every single application or functional team that you really, through that, reduce the complexity so that you're not having to maintain you can focus efforts. Part of that there too for us has been recommending customers really focus on separating out environmental and location configurations from these baselines. So not locking yourself into this is our West Coast or this is our Europe deployment but we have a single cohesive baseline and we store things maybe in tools like console or it's at CD, COPD also is another great tool. And this especially is nice if you're preparing now as our customers start using, sort of microservice, Kubernetes, et cetera is it lends itself well to those sorts of things also. Certainly Redis Zookeeper in the past customers have also used some of those tools but I think there's a lot of, it's nice if the tools purpose built for you in that regard. The other piece we look at is the reuse of components making sure that that single image catalog is focused by a team and then it's not spread throughout an organization and not siloed between use cases so that in a departmental baseline so that people can kind of flow between areas and you can focus on start going towards service teams and you're not having to relearn a lot of this thing as people move across the organization. And that kind of goes also into building for production so that as you carry these images through the application life cycle during development tests and production that there's no wasted effort in each of these teams all touching it. The next sort of thing is the baseline now making sure that you're not reversing changes in the future, you're not having to back out patches, things like that as you go forward. I could talk a little bit about the minimal Ubuntu images, minimal CentOS, Red Hat, going into some of the container operating systems like CoreOS, the project atomic tools like that but even if you don't choose to use those using that same sort of methodology where you take the very minimal set of dependencies for your application stack and then build from there. If you're not familiar, CoreOS and project atomic those tools are very container-focused where it has the base sort of user land set of services and everything on top that you build runs in the container. So that's very interesting but using that same sort of thought process of the baseline that you keep everything as minimal as possible and then build on top of that with your application stack. Again, building in security, integrated with the baseline, making sure that whether you use the S-benchmarks or other tools that those are built in and that those considerations are included from the start of your baseline that the security configuration team isn't held to a different or separate standard from the rest of the teams that are contributing to the baseline and application stack. And that kind of goes into the management and the testing being automated that you're not sort of layering something on like security and that that's not verifiable and every piece of this should be tested and should be verified after the fact. The manual steps that we've seen just makes for headache later with troubleshooting or developers and things like that. So it lends it nicely to that sort of idea of building for production. That also goes into sort of the integrity of images, building towards immutable images. It's a great thing within containers. Keeping things from the start and if you change your baseline, start thinking about redeploying services and it's rather than this constant iteration of a service that was deployed, not the service but an image that might have been deployed years past. It really sort of lends itself well to making sure that the integrity of the image and the system can be maintained throughout deployment. The other thing is the security updates being timely. So if these are all automated processes, automated installs and tests throughout the entire thing rather than sending off a VM to an automated test team that runs their checklist of 4,000 different tests and maybe only gets through a quarter of them, that these things are included as a cohesive continuous integration, continuous deployment pipeline. So that as new dependencies come on board, as new services come on board, that you don't have to wait around for the latest patches, the latest changes, things like that. You're guaranteed a fully automated pipeline there. So we'll go into next. Talk about creating that foundation, some of the tools we've used with teams and organizations that we have as customers right now. So the criteria for configuration management that I sort of like to think about as we talk, because we're very fairly agnostic about which tools, because organizations are different, there's different levels of language proficiency, there's different levels of if, for example, if you're a Python shop, it may not make sense to force in a configuration management tool that your developers and your admins and various teams are gonna have to use that might be Ruby. So focusing on the language, having a declarative language that says what it should be, not how to get there, so that it's clearly understood by all of the teams what the end goal should be. And that goes well to also being able to write tests against that, so it's very clear that make it so and then verifying that it actually is so. The agent list I mentioned, making sure that you can take that same configuration, that you're not changing how you install software or patches or configurations one way at bake time and then changing that and doing a different process and having to sort of duplicate those processes and some other system once it comes online. So you're deploying that and you're enforcing from the start of the build rather than having to maintain two different baselines or enforcing the same sort of configurations. And then with that, taking those configurations and making sure that it can be easily version controlled, that it's in a format you can check in to get, like SVN, whatever method you use, it needs to be version controlled and traceable back to when an image was created, what was the state at that time. Really treating everything as code, the infrastructure as code thing and then DevOps, it's really recommended and it really has helped customers to not have to, some customers have used systems that are very difficult to version control, you said do it one time, it's a lot of it's more legacy systems and really recommending, really we've tried to recommend customers to move outside of that sort of old paradigm and move to tools like Chef or Puppet, Ansible that can sort of lend itself well to this sort of deal. And Bash probably doesn't, yeah. Yeah, so if you move, his question was if you're moving towards immutable images, doesn't that kind of removes the need for that, those configuration management tools after the fact if it's immutable in the first place, exactly correct, but I think they're still at need for having that declarative language and not a mess of Bash to describe that is not necessarily understood by everyone. And as you sort of capture these layers of the images and you might move to Docker files and things like that, and you already have things deconstructed, it certainly is easier just to go to Bash, but I think there still needs to be sort of an emergence of a better way of describing some of these things. And we'll see how it goes. So it depends, if you're going to something like an immutable image with Docker, you might not have an agent running at all and it might purely just be sort of a check that the configuration is still as it is that you're not backing anything out. But in Cloud, if you're on an open stack and it's sort of a more traditional virtual machine environment, you may still have the agent running and force certain environmental changes. It's certainly not a bad way to sort of take configuration, template configuration files, if you even if you store key values in something like console or CD, still being able to sort of take some of those and insert those overlay some of those configuration settings and more traditional systems. We'll be interested to see how that kind of plays out the next year, six months, if there's better ways of taking some of those because my big concern is making sure that you're not duplicating effort, right? So if you're building a very base minimal Ubuntu image, making sure that you're not doing it in a different, you're taking that same image, using it as your base image for your Docker files. That's where the agent list sort of really lends itself nicely, is that you can still build that in the same fashion and reused if you're going in the Docker, et cetera, and hopefully there's better ways of doing that some good open source project, a little weekend project to sort of look at more declarative languages for describing some of the baselines. But I think if you do it right, especially with Docker files, you're not over complicating, you shouldn't be, if your Docker file or what you're laying on top of your image in microservices sense, if it's paged as long, there probably could be ways to simplify and minimize what you're actually doing to the image from there. So that'll be kind of interesting. Is that can I answer? Yeah. The other piece, yeah, testable. I'll go into some of what that means, but being able to make sure that it's clear, concise, that the end state is known and that your requirements are captured and that you're actually being able to verify what you put within the image. So I wanted to talk a little bit about, once you sort of have these things captured, you have your baseline declared, building it in an automated fashion, taking that information and building it for various clouds. Most of our customers all run some sort of hybrid model where they have an internal open stack cloud. They're running some things, like perhaps on Amazon or Google and now in Docker and wanting to make sure that you can make an image once and kind of carry it through. There's older tools, disk image builder is part of the open stack umbrella, Oz and really Packer is kind of identified as seems to be sort of the best tool for the job. The nice thing with Packer is that it's easily, that goes back to the easily understood templates, writing once and being able to build on, for VMware, Amazon, QCAUs, Google and Docker images, it really helps to be able to not have to, have scripts and automation for five different platforms. It's really easy for, it's been really beneficial for our customers to be able to use this tool. And the nice thing too is that the support of Vagrant, a lot of my time is spent on my laptop, whether it's traveling or the customer site and being able to take that same image and run it within Vagrant or within Docker and moved mostly to where it's like, all my local development and builds are done in Docker. Being able to use that same baseline throughout is really helpful so that, again, from the entire application cycle, you're using your same exact baseline and you're building it for production. One of the issues there too, oh, the nice thing is, sorry, we'll go back. It's the part of the largest CI CD pipeline is that a couple of customers when we first moved in and sort of were capturing requirements and talking about processes, the process of getting an image baseline that was up to date or for a new system was at best a week. And even if it's a few hours that I'm doing testing and I'm trying to iterate over and change something about the baseline, if I have to wait hours to figure out what changes happened, it's frustrating and my patience wears thin on it. So having that sort of automated process with something like Packer being able to build locally as you would build within a larger CI CD pipeline has been really helpful for us. The next thing is I spoke about testability, making sure that when you choose tools that they're testable. Using tools like ServiceSpec with spec infra, it allows you to take Ruby, RSpec tests and testing it's your infrastructure. So get information about your infrastructure, be able to take declarative statements like it must be have Apache installed, it must be running on port 80, it must have these configuration statements. That's all available within ServiceSpec and the kitchen CI allows you to take those ServiceSpec tests, run it in a test furnace that's runnable on, we run it on Amazon EC2, being able to do OpenStack, Docker, et cetera, and not have it be this sort of manual smoke test process. I don't know about you guys, but my days of running checklists like that and manually doing a lot of these verification steps are kind of over. The next piece, version control, just making sure that there's that level of historical information, that you can roll back images that you're not only saving the configuration that went into the images, but that you can also store your images in some sort of artifact repository. Even if you don't need to keep five years, but some level of rollback for at least what's in production to know what's running where and being able to recreate those sorts of environments is really nice. And also making sure that there's some level of image integrity is certainly nice. Tools like Artifactory, Nexus, we've also used for our Docker images and other baseline images have been really helpful with that. So from there, we really look at improving and iterating over improvement, moving towards the immutable application images, enabling the sort of zero configuration drift. It's very obvious if there's no changes to a baseline that there should be no changes and you can very easily report and audit against that. It's a great foundation for creating container images within Docker. And the more sort of automated these processes are and the more quick turn, the quicker turnaround that can be enabled really helps with decisions of pain points for how difficult is it to redeploy an application or a service? How difficult is it to move to things like A.B. testing where I'm bringing up another instance of a service with a new version? I don't want to have to wait around and I don't think most development teams that we've worked with certainly having to worry about how long it's going to take for new versions or new images to be created. That sort of timeline really affects some decision-making so the quicker, the better and the more likely teams are gonna actually be able to use these baselines. And as you're sort of getting the full test harness in, I've seen a lot of power being able to easily test what affects on the baseline, how it affects downstream images. So being able to compose your application stack, try it out with a new version of your baseline and then sort of easily see how that affects this version of Apache or any service that you might be running. So from there, I just wanted to talk about, again, remind, really focus on overcoming the baseline drift of having 10 different parallel baselines, reducing those sort of silos between teams and baselines, minimizing that complexity, considering the sort of baking process of when you first create an image, be very deliberate on how you're going to, or what you're actually putting in that baseline and making sure that there's the duplication and sort of simple configuration with those images is all thought about from the start and you're not having to go back and sort of rework endlessly. People want to sort of create the baselines and not have that be your entire career at some point. Using the right tools has also been really important to remind organizations, making sure that the teams that are going to be using these tools, the organization structure, the best practices for these tools are all sort of taken into account and sort of seems obvious at first, but making sure that the decisions, just like your applications and your team shouldn't be operating in a silo, that you really shouldn't be making the tool decisions in silos either, so making sure that at the very least that the operations, developer, tests, security teams are all taken to an account when choosing the tool chain. Automating and verifying, making sure that the configuration management is declarative, it's easily understood by the maintainers and the people that will be auditing these images, making sure that they're versioned and testable, and then really building for production, making sure that there's one image that's used that's easy, that meets the needs that can be used throughout the entire life cycle and not added on the last day right before production. And one of the things I wanna make sure you guys know, at 1.50 p.m. this afternoon, Seth Fox and Spencer Smith, also from Selenia, will be talking about Packard doing a demo on it, showing some example configurations. Hope you can make it, it's in Wakaba, and also the basic we are hiring. We do a lot of travel all over the world, consulting about the same sorts of problems. Love to talk with you and any questions? Got a little bit? Anything? Okay. Ah, so, yeah. So the question was, how many of our customers are actually looking, actually implementing the immutable images right now? The customer I'm working, really focusing on for the most part right now, is heavily invested in that, especially as they move to microservices within Kubernetes and Docker containers. They're very committed to doing that within the organization, to make sure that all the benefits are gathered there. So the obstacles of moving towards immutable images, making sure that requirements are clear, what needs to be, making sure that all the sort of invested parties understand what needs to be done, making sure that there's also buy off from the maintainers and the operators of, and I think as organizations move more towards the sort of service teams, rather than developer teams and maintenance teams and sort of separating them out, I think that's a really good step. And it kind of, as long as there's buy off, that the days of allowing people to come in with some sort of, one off bash script or hack together Python script to change something in production because it needs to be done right now, making sure that it's clear and it's enforced within the organization that that's not the way things are happening. So that's one of the biggest challenges making sure that for us that have since so far, is that there's buy off from the entire team and that people are gonna stick to it when even if it seems like challenging. But I think if people with automation, with that sort of verification, with a process that's agile enough and a set of tools that you can turn around quick enough, I think it becomes very obvious to teams really very quickly that they don't necessarily have to sacrifice that sort of tooling in the name of expediency as long as it's enforced, right? Anyone moving into a mutable approach without breaking the monolith? I mean, having big images, moving them into production and considering on the implications of frequent updates? No, we don't have any, I don't believe we have any customers that are looking at sort of, taking the sort of monolithic approach. I think even if you're not doing microservices, taking, we're not taking the monolith approach. We have a problem, we have a large legacy enterprise applications and they happen to be monolithic. Yeah. I think it depends on, if the architecture supports being able to redeploy, depends on the frequency, right? Of change and if there's a way to get, it depends, so many things are like, if the applications can support that, if the rest of, if the services downstream, if it's something back end, can the other services sort of accept that sort of way of doing things? Certainly if you have other tools or those monitoring agents that you sort of, in a lot of traditional enterprises, sort of collection of like five different agents running on a system for, your metrics, your logging, your, all these different things, some tools just don't expect that sort of way of doing things. So, but it'd be interesting to, yeah, interesting challenge. But I think you can still get like closer to that sort of deal, to keeping things immutable without, you know, there's might be compromise there. It'd be interesting problem. Is it a back end sort of application or? Okay. All in the same server or? Ah. Under the server. Under the, yeah. We're just for how monolithic. Interesting. Any other questions? Okay. Thanks a lot guys. Have a good one.


Hi and welcome to the session, I am Arsha and I am going to help you with the following question with sense. In figure 6.16, if x plus y is equal to w plus z, then prove that a of v is a line. So, this is figure 6.16 and let us now begin with the solution. We are given that x plus y is equal to w plus z and we are required to prove that a of v is a line. Sum of four angles or we can say sum of all angles round a point which is in case, in this case it is o and where the sum of four angles will be equal to 360 degrees then sum of all angles round a point is equal to 360 degree. So, we will have sum of these four angles x plus y plus w plus z is equal to 360 degree. Now, we are given that x plus y is equal to w plus z. Therefore, on replacing x plus y by w plus z or replacing w plus z by x plus y, we will get two times of x plus y which is equal to 360 degree. Hence, x plus y is equal to w plus z which further implies that x plus y is equal to 180 degree or we can say that x is angle B O C and y is angle A O C is equal to 180 degree. Now, this implies angle B O C and angle A O C form a linear pair consequently O A and O B are opposite ways and therefore, A O B is a straight line. Hence, we know that sum of four in this case or we can say that sum of all angles at a point is equal to 360 degree. So, with the help of this idea, we have proved the above question. So, this completes the solution. Hope you enjoyed it. Take care and bye for now.


Okay, it's time for our very first hot topic. Nigeria risks losing Africa's biggest economy status as Naira continues to fall, sending shockwave across the market, throwing many bank chiefs off guard. The currency crisis has shrunk the books by close to 50% putting pressure on the capital adequacy levels of the sector. We're about to discuss this now with Basil Abia of the Kwakor Research Institute. Good morning to you, Basil. Good morning to you, Basil. Good morning, my pleasure to be here. So good to have you. Well, capital erosion for banks as the Naira continues to fall and the pressure on these banks to beef up their capital base is on. Talk to us about how big a challenge this is for them. When you have a situation where the value of the Naira against the dollar has eroded by at least 50%, there's a price differential between the official window, that's the investors and exporters' window. When the price differential is between 60 to 100 Naira vis-à-vis what the price is in the black market, then obviously you know that the Naira is grossly overvalued and that's exactly what foreign portfolio investors have been saying for the last two to three months. And so in the context of capitalization of bank capital holdings, we're seeing that for most fact valuations for the entire banking industry has been caught by at least 40% if I'm trying to be very conservative. So you're having a situation where the entire valuation base of Nigeria's banking industry is being exposed for the devaluation of the Naira as against the dollar. And what happens is that liabilities, all of the bank holding liabilities that are based on FX, the holdings that are either denominated in the dollar or denominated in Euro or denominated in the one or any currency outside of the Naira, for instance. Those valuations are 50%, 60%, 70% lower than the U.S. say three to four months ago prior to the fluting of the Naira or the crawl pack or what CPN and other experts called the crawl pack. So what you're seeing is that based on Basel 2 and Basel 3 regulatory requirements and basically Basel 2, Basel 3 and Basel 1, they're just cute English or technical English for a global regulatory framework for banks where there is stress testing and then there's obviously the capital adequacy of the banks. So basically what that means is that banks have certain levels of liquidity that they mostly thresholds of liquidity that they most have, obviously mostly denominated in dollar to be able to stress prove them in case of situations where the financial industry obviously is nearing collapse. And I think what led to Basel 3 being instituted as a global standard was the aftermath of the 2008, 2009 global financial crisis. And you have a situation where most Niger banks adhere to Basel 2 and of course now Basel 3. And due to those capital adequacy frameworks, banks have to find ways for more liquidity injections. They don't prop up their liquidity injections, especially in the dollar base or their capital holdings in dollar base are not propped up. Then they are at risk of running out of their debt services. They have a lot of debt obligations. Most of those debt obligations are in dollars and pounds in euros. And if they're not able to meet those obligations, then they're nearing collapse or they collapse in that set. So investors' money is obviously exposed. The entire financial industry in Nigeria is exposed. That could lead to a crisis level. So we're seeing situations where certain experts, especially based in Lagos, are clamoring for an intervention from the CBN. As a matter of fact, last year just around November when there was some stressors on the narrow. This time he wasn't even floated by the exchange. He was still heavily restricted in that sense and heavily controlled by the CBN. But the CBN had to intervene with over 17.8 billion US dollars. Not obviously in that type of land but in the timeframe for the entirety of 2022, they intervened in the interbank exchange window with a total worth of about 17.8 billion dollars. And that's because they knew they couldn't allow the narrow against the dollar to exceed the resistant point of about 860, 870 narrow to a dollar. And what happened was just after that final intervention, the narrow was managed around the 700 range. And that's what has been the case until the narrow was floated and the devaluation happened last month. So yeah, the banking industry is at risk. They would obviously be in need for recapitalization. And that will obviously be based on CBN's direction regulatory direction. So we were expecting that banks would do some recapitalization. Banks are already finding creative ways, for instance, to prop up their capital holdings, especially the ones that are US dollar denominated. That's I think the explanation for what's currently happening. All right, well, reports also have shown that the liabilities have ballooned to over about 60%. The narrow is now 850. You know, when the floating of the currency came up, we thought that we'll see some sort of release of the dollar to be able to match up with the new policy. But I'm not sure if that's what we saw. Explain further on this. Am I right? First of all, yeah, you're obviously conventional economics with regards for an exchange. You expect that running is floated based on the framework of the free market, you know, demand and supply. You expect some form of investor confidence in the market. And that investor confidence is expected to draw in more foreign exchange, right? Well, in the context of Nigeria, there are lots of structural issues that we have to be able to face. And one of that is to be able to assure that when FX liquidity comes in, there is a seamless repatriation of the FX liquidity based on capital gains for those investments. So if you're an FBI investor and you're investing in the Nigerian equities market based on the news that the Nigerian foreign exchange window is now market based, you expect that whenever you want to take in your, and of course, FBI is very fluid in terms of the investment timeframe, you could invest in the equities market this week and next week you get your gains based on the volume that say you invested on certain equities for Nigerian banks and maybe the telecoms companies listed on Nigerian stock exchange. So you're expecting that by next week, you're expecting to get your returns, right? But knowing the formality with accessing FX in Nigeria with the CPI, CPI do not even have to date. They still don't have enough FX liquidity to meet all of the demands. We know that there's still a number. And a matter of foreign corporations, huge volume and units of US dollars. We know that there are foreign airlines close to 800, if I'm not mistaken, about 850 million US dollars, the highest in the entire country. So if CPI is not making or executing certain frameworks to ensure that first and foremost, this FX backlogs are cleared and with the news of this FX backlogs being cleared, obviously money follows where they know it can be retrieved, right? So you start to see those liquidity injections from investors faster than normal. That has not been the case in the last two months since of course the macroeconomic performance by the Tiffany Moore presidency kick started. So we're having this situation where even FBI investors are asking for more work from the CPI. I know for a fact that there was a Bloomberg article two weeks ago asking for the interest rates to be increased again to be able to account for our inflation rates that is moving around 22%, you know, 22, 23%. So with the NPR or the interest rate around 18.5%, you're expecting that maybe CPI could adhere to some of those cries, even though it is detrimental to increase the rate interest rate. Yes, yes, yes, FBI want, FBI investors are clamoring for an increase of the NPR to at least 21 to 22% to account for those high inflation numbers. I'm not sure that was the spirit of money. Where does that leave Nigerians then? Well, it means that credit availability in the real sector is harder. It means that consumers will have to bear the cost of how expensive debt or credit is in the Nigerian economy. It means that the production units in Nigeria's economy will struggle to access debt financing. And obviously production is, production starts to reduce. We've already noticed the production lag in the last two, three months as a consequence of the macroeconomic policies that have been carried out. We know that consumers are cutting down on their purchase or purchasing power, and on intensity obviously due to inflation and intentionally due to a reaction to inflation. So if you were buying, let's say we're buying food three times a day, you're cutting down to twice a day or sometimes once a day, right? That is obviously going to have a transmission effect and a multiplier effect in the larger economy.  And that obviously has a multiplier effect throughout the economy. And yeah, the economy is currently going through all of these price shocks as a consequence of all of these decisions. So that's the situation that we're in now. Even with the floating, unfortunately, the narrow is struggling. And the major reason why the narrow is struggling is that we don't have enough foreign exchange influx into the economy. Well, you know, with all this happening, one begins to have these fears for the narrow. I mean, when you remember Zimbabwe and some of these other countries, those currencies are so big, you fear that narrow may eventually get to that point. Is that fear justifiable or is just, how do you address the fear? Well, I'll be realistic. I don't think there's any need to be fearful of a Zimbabwe or Venezuelan happening. It's gonna take a lot more structural deficiencies, a lot more terrible policy decisions to reach that level. I think we have enough coverage. Even though we are currently at the lowest external reserve rates in over three years, the lowest that we've had in the last few years, news just dropped in very early this morning that our external reserves dropped to about three billion US dollars. And don't forget that we use our external reserves to prop up the narrow or defend the narrow. So if you're guessing where CPN is getting that 17 billion US dollars to be ejected in the foreign exchange market expressing the interbank exchange window is largely from our external reserve. So we have, I wouldn't say we have sufficient reserves, but we have decent enough reserves and we have the know-how from the CPN to be able to ensure that the narrow doesn't collapse at that rate. But there are warnings. The know-how, your confidence that we have that know-how. You're still having confidence in the CPN with all the FX backlog and all of these things that Nigeria has witnessed in the past eight years. You still have that much confidence in the CPN? Not much confidence, but I'm confident enough to know that the CPN aren't going to make more fullest decisions. They will probably continue to provide debt monetization and what I mean by that is basically printing more narrow for the federal government. They would probably increase NPR by maybe another 300 business points in the next eight months. That basically means that interest rate will be about 21% by the end of this year of around 22% just around what the FBI investors want. They would make some more bad decisions but they wouldn't make enough for us to reach a Venezuela situation. The Venezuela situation is when the federal government starts to nationalize assets, starts to ensure that foreign exchange means those are now very strict. There's no longer a crawl peg, but in fact, I would call it a board level type of command control economy where they are only disbosing FX based on their own discretion, no longer on any market framework whatsoever. So I do not think CPN is ever going to reach that level. I do not think that the federal government would reach any of those levels, but there's two legroom, if you permit me to say this, two legroom for more terrible policy decisions that would affect us. Before we could get to that. But not those Venezuela levels of crisis yet. Yeah, the last time I spoke with you, I asked how long you think you projected might take the market forces to live its time and things to stabilize. You said 12 months. Do you still have that same projection? Yes, I still stand by that. 12 months. I think my predictions are based on a number of factors. First and foremost exogenous factors. What I mean by that are that because the bulk of our economy is dependent on our oil exports or revenues from oil sales. I think that the global oil market would stick to those $70 to $80 per barrel numbers. So that's more than enough for us to continue to float as an economy. I also think that we're going to continue to increase our oil production levels. I think not that I think the data for the last month is that we did 1.4 million barrels. There's a probability that we would reach at least 1.6 million barrels before the end of the year. That's another factor. Third factor is that we've already removed a core factor of what used to hemorrhage our public boss. And what I mean by that is that we used to spend so much of our FX earnings on our subsidy bill. Now we've cut that out. This gives us leg room.  As you've noted last night. But I was seeing the FX though. I was seeing it. Well, it testament to all seeing the FX is that even though there's an FX scarcity, we had our highest FAC allocation levels. Yesterday, last night, states are getting more revenues than possible because of that FX subsidy bill being removed. And the more decentralized FX imputes are, the better the economic outcome. So it basically means that states now have more money to spend on capital projects and of course on recurrent expenditure like salaries. So I'm not betting on state governors to do the right things with this money. Unfortunately. I have more than enough sample sizes. Unfortunately. And the sample sizes that our state governors are largely not good enough. I've seen that from 1910 to now. That's enough evidence to base that judgment on. But based on a number of things that I've mentioned, the exogenous influence of oil prices, the stability of the economy due to the fact that we no longer have to spend those humongous amounts of money on subsidy, on paying for subsidy.  Yes, yes, I'm confident that in the next 12 months we'll see some stability. I'm not saying that things will get better. I'm just saying that on the foreign exchange window at least we'll find a price point that we can stick with. We found a price point early this year in January if I were at around 740 Naira per dollar. And that stood for six months. Obviously due to interventions by the CBN. I'm confident that in the next two weeks the CBN will inject some form of interventions again so that we don't pass the resistant points of about 816 Naira. So it goes back to around 700 or even just over in the early 800s. And if it stays in the early 800s for five, six, seven months, then that is at just every point. And the price discovery point is a bit of stability. There's no speculation. People in the markets know exactly what rates they're going to get it at. People know what the effects of the numbers are. 850. 850. Yeah, it's 63, some black market sellers are saying in Lagos and in Abutia. It is scary, Basil. It is scary. It is scary. Everything is, people can't even travel anymore. A lot of things are being affected terribly. It is scary to think that the Naira will remain at 850 or 64, more than one, two, three, four, five months. It is scary. But then we keep on... It could get worse as well. It could get worse. It could get worse. And so people are asking, what do you think will get to 1000 first? Is it the fair price or the Naira? Well, I don't think we're going to see 1000 Naira units in terms of value for either a full price or for the dollar. But again, I have not, these things are not, these predictions are not set in stone. You make predictions based on available data points, right? The available data points that I have, I think we'll manage just around the age of 50. Please don't discount the fact that I'm sounding this way to say that things are not terrible. Things are really, really terrible. I know personal stories. I see things. I know what I'm going through personally in terms of inflation affecting my pockets and all of that. I see the numbers on a daily basis. The economy is currently being battered. The price shocks are unbearable. No doubt about that. But what I'm trying to say here is, not to be post-confidence in the markets, but just explain in pure, in layman English, exactly what the numbers are telling me. As I mentioned, I mentioned the numbers with regards interventions that the CPN has made in the last one year. I mentioned the fact that exchange reserves have deeped to our lowest levels in three years. And I mentioned, of course, what the pricing is in the black market as well as on the I&E FX window. I&E FX window is about $763. If I'm not mistaken, the black market is $863, $870, depending on where you're getting your news from in Lagos and Abuja. So yeah, it's going to be a lot more of these problems, but I do not see PMS price going to $1,000. Hopefully it doesn't get there. Hopefully it doesn't get there. Thank you so much. Just some news as well. We're getting 27 million liters of PMS from Rotterdam this week. I'm not mistaken. Yes. Obviously, two more weeks for that to float into the market. I don't know how much of that volume will cost the pricing to reduce, but I do know that pricing will stabilize. Well, the importer has lamented the high cost of importing that fuel. The importer has lamented the cost of importing it and is clamoring for the fixing of our refineries as the only way to go. So there you have it. We'll wait and see how the arrival of this petrol would affect the cost of fuel in the coming weeks. Just to make my final point with regard to the importer to interest you and the entire audience to know that it took six Nigerian banks, six Nigerian banks, to provide the liquidity needed for that import. That's to tell you how terrible it is. Six banks to facilitate the importation of that vessel. So thank you so much, Basil Abiyah, for your time. Basil is of the Quaco research, and he's joined us this morning to discuss this very serious issue on our very first hot topic. Thank you, Basil. We'll be right back to give you our second hot topic.