Everybody, welcome to another exciting episode. My favorite episodes are always hauls. So let's do this. Welcome back everybody, and if you're new here, yeah, welcome to a week in Geekdom. At the end of every month, I like to do a haul video highlighting all the geeky stuff that I acquired. It used to be book only, like graphic novel haul, if you will, all the comics and whatnot, but I like and consume and get a lot of things that aren't necessarily comics, manga, anime, blu-rays, figures, video games, all that fun stuff. So yeah, it's a decent haul, and I'm gonna feature some really cool items. Like I always say in every video, if you want me to review a specific product or do a discussion video on it or whatever, leave a comment down below, let me know, and I will add it to my infinite Q-list, but I do promise it will move up in rank. I know I've gotten some comments in the past, and I am working towards them. I do keep a tab on everything that gets written on my comments section, so just hang in there, guys. I will get to every single item eventually. Just, you know, stuff happens. I also do wanna mention I didn't do anything spooky themed for October. That was, I'm gonna say 70% on purpose, 30% was just an accident. I was just too busy, and I did wanna do like a Halloween themed video, but on a show I was watching, and it just, everything piled on, and I just could not get it done in time, so I apologize. I will still do the video, it just won't be Halloween themed. We're starting off with manga because I like manga and it's super fun. I did get volume eight of Demon Slayer. I do have volume nine on the way. It just didn't arrive in time for this particular haul. We have volume 11 of that ancient, that ancient of the ancient Magus Bride, volume 11 right there, and a fan favorite, Berserk volume 40. Can you believe it? 40 volumes of Berserk, that is awesome. I got the loot crate, or loot anime variant of Black Clover. I don't know if you guys were aware, but loot crate went out of, or filed for bankruptcy or something like that, and another company picked them up and is remixing, rebranding, and restarting everything. So they had a huge blowout sale on all their leftover items at the loot vault.  I happened to pick up some shirts and whatnot that I cannot show right now, but manga-wise, I did get this. This is the, like I mentioned, the loot anime variant cover for Black Clover and soul leader volume one. This is, as you can see, it's a little bit different here with the name embossed. So yeah, soul leader volume one. Two shows and two series, manga series that I do wanna collect in its entirety one day, but it's cool that I have these limited editions of volume one. I like that. Speaking of the loot stuff, I like that it says toothpick holders. They're not toothpick holders. Let's just say that much. You open them up, and they're Scarlet Witch themed shot glasses. Sorry for the sensors, which look really cool. They're based off of James Robinson's Scarlet Witch run from Marvel Now. Was it Marvel Now? Something like that. Yeah, get that cool drawing and the logo. And the other one has a different design right there. That looks really awesome. Continuing with the haul, let's get into comic books or graphic novels. Hardcover wise, I only got one, and it is I Hate Fairyland volume two from Scotty Young. This finishes off the series, and I love how neon green this looks. I love it. The first one is Hot Pink, and I didn't want the varying covers because they were all black. And while they look cool, I'm a big fan of big colorful, splashy looking books like this, and it's just great.  I think I did a video on it. I think there is a review on it on my channel for the first volume. It's spoiler free, like I always do.  It's really funny and awesome. And Scotty Young is super talented, so I really love this. Next one, you know, the next home video that I do, circle back to this video, because it's somewhat related. Here we have unnatural volume three, and I don't even know, I mean, it is the book cover, and it's being sold in stores, so I think it's fine that I can show it, I don't know. But this is volume three of unnatural. I did do a review on the first one, and it's a very interesting, fun series. And I did get, I'm just gonna say it now, I did get the first volume of Beastars, because I started watching the anime adaptation. I loved it so much, I had to start collecting the manga, and I am gonna do that. So yeah, anthropomorphic animals, they're a thing now, who'da thunk it? Volume four of Monstrous from Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. And yeah, I'm not going to upgrade to the hard covers, because it's a hassle to get rid of my trades, and then rebuy the hard cover. This is still coming out in trades. I'd rather do this, and just keep getting the trade paper bags. And this art is something else. I love this series so much. I also did a review on volume one, you can check that out. This series is pretty cool. If you mixed early 2000s anime, like Last Exile, Wolf's Rain, but in a comic Western setting, you get something like it. You get something like Monstrous, a really cool fantasy series that I do recommend. This was the only superhero book I got. Here we have Wonder Woman by Greco, volume three. I have the first two. This finishes off that excellent run. And Wonder Woman and Cheetah happen to be two of my favorite characters in DC Comics. So that's pretty cool that we get them on the cover. And yeah, just really awesome stuff. Rucka's run on Wonder Woman is just fantastic. And it's great to have everything collected in one, just three books. That's pretty awesome. Video games. I don't know, yeah, I showed them off in the September haul for my birthday, but I did get Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening for the Switch. Really cool stuff. It looks fantastic. I know there are a lot of people that have done extensive reviews on this thing. Just a fantastic remake of a wonderful 90s video game. Movie wise, I got the 4K edition of Spider-Man Far From Home. And I love that it says at the bottom, no end game for Spidey. He's flying higher than ever. Thank goodness that the Sony thing, as predicted, went through and all that stuff that you heard in the news because it would have been really awkward considering the Stinger or the post-credits scenes in this movie and what they're setting up. So I'm really excited to re-watch this in 4K and et cetera, et cetera. Anime wise, I did get two titles. I think I have something else coming in. Oh yeah, I have a really cool box set coming in but I won't tell you what it is. I'm gonna do a separate video on it. So stay tuned on the channel for that in a couple days. That time I got reincarnated as a Slime Part One or I should say Season One Part One. This has the first 11 episodes and this is what I'm talking about. This is the thing I like and it just looks great on the shelf. And I do like doing the reversible covers. Slime action right there. One of my favorite series from last year and the manga as well is fantastic. Last but not least, with the anime stuff, I teased about it and I went ahead and picked it up because, you know, growing up, late 90s, when I was first introduced to anime, one of the first things I saw was, it wasn't Saturday morning, it was weekday mornings and it was Dragon Ball Z, Transformers Beast Wars, Pokemon, and there's something else I'm forgetting, regardless, and the fifth item, Sailor Moon. A classic of the animation of the pantheon of animator properties.  I didn't know about the history of the series, I really only, I knew about it on a superficial level and throughout the years I've read up on it and I've always been interested in watching the original stuff with the original voices and whatnot. So I said, you know what, I'll get it, I'll get it for the collection because I'd love collecting anime, as you can see this billy shelf is stacked with some of my favorite anime shows and I do, while I'm not interested in completing like a massive set of anime, I do wanna have like the bullet points of famous titles, your DBZs, your Giyas and Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, what else, Yu-Haku show, modern stuff like My Hero Academia, you've got Attack on Titan, you know what I mean, like the classics that people like Digimon, Death Note, Gundam, a little bit of everything, sort of like a brief history of anime and I wanted to add this, so I found this, if you can't believe it and I usually don't like to talk about prices on these videos, cause that's not the point but I got this for a steal, I got this for 40 bucks and if you look up the retail price on this, it is not 40 bucks. So you get the chipboard box, it's a little bit banged up near the bottom but I really do not mind cause it works, it's solid, comes with the first part right there, it's an impromptu unboxing that I was not gonna do but I'm doing it anyways, you get all the Blu-ray discs and the DVDs I think, 23 episodes and it also included this limited edition booklet which has a lot of cool stuff like episode guides and song lyrics, character design work and I assume these were posters or wallpaper or something but they look pretty cool in this size on this little booklet and as a bonus, the seller threw in to complete the set, the part two. So it has the slip cover and everything and the other 23 episodes that make up the first series or season and whatnot right there. So yeah, Sailor Moon, I don't know if I'm going to keep collecting the series cause there's a lot of Blu-rays to collect I think. Let me know in the comments if you want me to continue doing that cause I actually do wanna talk about it, I actually do wanna make a video on the franchise eventually, on my anime reviews and whatnot but this is a really cool collectible to have plus look at that shimmery goodness, I love it, this looks really awesome. But that's about it guys, that is the haul for the month of October. I think I was missing like five or six more books that were not featured and I think most of them were manga and there is two Blu-rays that are not featured on purpose cause I am going to do videos on them eventually or separately. As always, leave your comments down below what you thought of the haul if you want me to review something, let me know and thank you once again for liking, commenting, subscribing and being a part of A Week in Geekdom here on YouTube. It really does mean the world to me, I really appreciate your support. I'm honored to be honest. So yeah, once again, thank you, follow me on your favorite social media platform, like, subscribe, all that wonderful stuff, I'm probably repeating myself. Thank you so very much, I have got to go, I've got way too much stuff to replay, review and just geek out over. So I will catch all of you, our next episode. To do hauls at the end of every video, that's not it, dammit.


Okay, and obviously the question of automation and technology has become one of the key issues of our age Which is often characterized as a digital age in the sense of obviously one which society now dominated by smartphones By social networks artificial intelligence, and there's obviously a plethora of Revolutionary potential out there in terms of this technology The idea of driverless cars virtual reality 3d printing, you know All of this makes possible the idea of a world of super abundance and of a world of abundance of leisure time as well But as the title of this of this session suggests There's actually a lot of hope and fear at the same time in equal measure on this sort of question on the one hand You have these futurologists whose imaginations kind of run wild when they when they see the potential technology That's out there the possibility of thought full automation as it's called or basically an end to work But then alongside this there's also a lot of apprehension and anxiety on this question You see phrases like technological unemployment the idea that basically Robots are gonna take all of our jobs a race against the machine as it's sometimes been called And in fact this comes from the idea that obviously yeah We can see that jobs are being lost to machinery to technology to robots and so forth and Increasingly this technological change is happening It's such a fast pace that people are being left behind and unable to kind of keep up with this ever accelerating treadmill In fact there was one study done in Oxford I think Quite recently where two academics I think they they came up with an estimate that in America by 2030 Something like 50% of jobs currently existing could be automated away And that's a lot of that is not just the kind of traditional manufacturing jobs that have already been lost largely Not lost to China and to globalization but actually lost to to machinery and automation Not just those but also now a kind of sweeping Job losses through the you know offices through white collar jobs as artificial intelligence You know and these sorts of technologies make it much easier to replace People in accounting and even law firms and things like this These are the kind of jobs that are predicted to be under threat over the next decade And I think it's within this kind of context that you see the emergence of the idea of a universal basic income The idea of that just in brief is that it's an unconditional payment Made to every citizen regardless of their age their wealth or their employment status That's that's basically in a in a sentence what universal basic income means But what you see with UBI is that actually the opinions about it are equally as split as the kind of hopes and fears around technology and automation in general on the one hand you see a Section of the left in particular and progressives who kind of think of the idea of UBI as a step towards Some sort of fully automated luxury communism as the phrase has sometimes been used In other words a kind of a society where because of this technology we can fulfill Marx's maxes Maxim that everyone can work according to their ability and take according to their needs Some people see UBI is almost like a stepping stone onto that path And also it's been argued on the left that UBI in the very short term at least would would guarantee a kind of bigger Safety net of a better welfare state that workers could fall back on And this in turn would kind of Liberate them to go on strike more to or to be able to pursue other Creative paths and so what they would give work as some sort of better bargaining Position in the workplace against the bosses However on the other side you do also see a lot of people noting that this UBI Policy has been also proposed by some of the most ardent kind of libertarian right-wingers people who see it as basically An attempt to kind of get away with the bureaucracy of the welfare status They see it better to just scrap all the kind of public services and the and the means tested benefits and so forth and instead Just give a poultry amount to everyone Behind and use that basically as some sort of fig leaf behind which the kind of the general dynamics of capitalism the general Exploitation in the workplace can continue at full speed And in fact you have seen throughout history the idea of UBI being proposed by the right wing In fact Milton Friedman was was in Feynman favor of something similar and a negative income tax He called it but the idea was generally the same So I think the fact that you see on both these questions and automation in UBI Which are linked together through as I've discussed that I think it's The fact that you see the public opinion kind of split and the mood towards these things split I think it reflects the fact that in general there is not a a Marxist position really a Marxist approach taken in Analyzing these questions. I think what you often see is that the things like technology in UBI When the when they're talked about in in any of the kind of the mainstream press and so will mainstream commentators It's always from a point of looking at it in isolation looking at technological progress as some sort of Kind of process that the progress that takes on the place kind of independently of the rest of society is though There's just you know, obviously there is its own laws It's like there's there is there there is a kind of self-contained logic if you like within technological progress But I think divorcing this and the question of UBI as well from the general political Context within which we see them within the economic quite context within which we see them You arrive at this kind of confused and contradictory Position I think we have to really focus when we're looking at technological progress and economic demands like UBI economic reforms We we can't divorce them from these wider political questions We have to raise those political questions say you know at the end of the day as with all reforms Who's going to pay for UBI? Who owns and controls the technology in society in the first place and most importantly in whose interest are any of these things? Being brought about and I think to understand and answer that we have to go back and take a Marxist approach and look at actually What Marx himself wrote on this kind of questions? You know Marx was there very prophetic in many respects if you read his economic writings a lot of the Kind of discussions that are taking place today We're already answered in embryo by Marx in things like capital where he discusses as a whole chapter Actually dedicated to the question of machinery and already looking at this question You know you already had movements like the Luddites where with these these mass movements of kind of rebellions of workers against the machines Against the the automated looms and so forth the mechanized looms and and they saw that as a threat to their jobs And they smashed the machinery up that showing the kind of fear They had that these machines were going to take their jobs and it's very similar obviously to what we see today and Marx commented on those movements at the time and And what Marx said about machinery is is obviously we got to see it within its economic context Which is capitalism the system that we live in capitalism a system where? What we have is is a generalized production in exchange of commodities a system of production for profit and these commodities These products that are produced for exchange. They have a value They have a relative value compared to other commodities and that is dependent Marx says on the socially necessary labor time in other words the amount of labor time within a Historical epoch given the current levels of technology and education and so forth There is a value associated amount of a socially necessary labor time gone into creating these commodities Are the average time taken based on the kind of current levels of technology and technique? And the key to understanding this is obviously the fact that labor itself is the source of all value You know things don't have value if they don't require any labor time put into them and Marx didn't just talk about the labor of the actual process itself Also the labor contained within the raw materials and the technology that comes before Any any given production process in other words, you know There's all the all the commodities that go into producing new commodities the raw materials the machines all of these Transfer their value over into the new commodity Marx called it dead labor can congealed or crystallized dead labor from the past And in this respect machinery does not create any value itself But rather transfers its value onto the new product and so you know, it's it's human labor itself It's it's mankind's force on on its world around us that creates value and and the machines cannot produce any value and that's very key because as Capitalism is a system of production for profit and profit Marx explains is derived ultimately from the unpaid labor of the working class and And if machines therefore cannot create profit for the capitalists, you know it's only the the the The application of labor and the production of surplus value value above and beyond what's paid back to the workers in the form of wages That can create profits and that's a key idea that will come back to in a minute Now it's its competition obviously in the drive to make more profits that chases the capitalists Not only across the world to create a world market But also forces them to reinvest their surplus reinvest their profits into new machinery into new technology You know into new science and research and development and so forth And the aim of that is obviously to try and reduce the costs overall to replace labor with machines to increase the kind Of efficiency and productivity of production and if they can do that as an individual capitalist They can reduce the labor time of their products below that socially necessary average In other words, they can sell at a lower price than what's offered on the market out compete their competitors and And push their fellow capitalists out of business and so therefore that's the that's the drive if you like to to invest in In all of this machinery and so forth It's it's it's ultimately to try and to increase the productivity to increase the amount of wealth the amount of products that can be produced in a given amount of time and And that and as I say that's that's caused this this this in its heyday What was actually a very progressive process under capitalism marks actually if you see the communist manifesto He's full of you know full of praise for capitalism in saying it's it's achieved wonders faster passing Egyptian pyramids and Roman aqueducts You know he had a great reverence for for capitalism as a progressive system in its heyday that was this drive this Competition forcing the capitalist to invest and create the you know incredible wonders in terms of technology and a super abundance of wealth That obviously we see around us today The problem is and the capitalism because capitalism is fundamentally a system of private ownership Over this technology over the means of production by which wealth is produced The problem arises that this whole process of technological development of Investment in new machinery and new technology all of this process occurs in a very unplanned in a very anarchic way in a very contradictory way as a result Where you have technology being introduced not in the interests of society as a whole not in order to free up workers in terms of Their leisure time reduce the hours of the working week and reduce the burden on the working class But rather this technology is being introduced fundamentally as I said to improve Productivity from the point of view of the capitalist to improve their profits and and make them super profits to capture new markets That's really the basis behind all Drive for new technology in societies that the fact that it might along the way Provide some so sort of social benefit is is accidental as far as the capitalist concerned and And this obviously leads to the reason why you get these kind of hopes and fears about technology expresses the contradictory process of technological development of how it's introduced through this invisible hand through the market rather than in a planned and rational way and in fact the the capitalists themselves even have a term for this Schumpeter an Austrian Economist a kind of forefather of kind of neoliberal economics, you know a pair of kind of Hayek and these types He came up with the term creative destruction to describe how capitalism Progresses in this way. In other words, he saw What what capitalism would do is yes, it would create new jobs. Yes, it would create new industries But it would first have to destroy the old ones to free up labor to free up capital and so forth And therefore you thought the market was the best way of doing this it would allocate resources in the most efficient way and obviously just a look back at history shows how Utopia in this idea was and how divorce and reality it was, you know Look at look at what's happened in terms of obsolete industries like mining in Britain You know this was not closed down in a kind of you know in a calm Gradual way in which the workers were retrained and then moved into new jobs But rather you had the full force of the state destroying the miners industry closing down the mines And and trying to break the whole back of the labor movement and this it's and it's left obviously a scar of unemployment In these regions and the same is true in a lot of places today you see You know this in Wales right now for example the steel industries at Port Talbot closed down as a result of the glut of Steel that's produced on a world scale, you know this huge overproduction of steel actually That's found its way onto the world market and the jobs there cannot be kept in order to provide for other things other socially necessary things but rather just closed down and and those industries are left And that the cut those whole communities in fact are left behind So you see yes, there is new jobs and technology created But it's always for the benefit of the 1% if you like or even the 0.01% They're the ones who benefit from these productivity gains and from this wealth that's created and Simultaneously obviously millions are left behind a left on the scrap heap and a forced actually into very precarious jobs into very low pay And very low productive jobs. In fact, I think the fact that you see today These two things conditioning one another, you know on the one hand We've got these incredibly productive industries in terms of like the tech monopolies that kind of dominate a lot of the global economy today the Googles and the apples and the Facebook's of this world that are worth billions and And have been sitting on cashpiles of billions on the one hand They are incredibly productive in terms of the value Producing with a relatively small workforce, but it's a very educated workforce You know, it's a very elite workforce that's kind of plucked from the best universities and so forth and And they are earning a bomb, you know, it's not only the executives, but some of these very high-end workers there But at the same time the jobs that they've displaced the people Displaced by the the kind of technologies They're creating are going into this gig economy that is in fact run by the same Technology firms, you know, the the ubers and the deliverers of this world, which are actually very low productive jobs when you look at it Like why are we paying people to cycle around? London often like risking their lives given how fast they're going and ignoring all the traffic, you know That that that that is very low productive work, you know Literally back breaking work and on a very low pay as well So it shows you how the two things have conditioned each other the the productivity gains in the hands of the 1% Have meant to this general lowering of living standards and the degradation of work for the rest It's it's in fact the two as the two is I say condition each other because the the the what marks called the reserve army of labor That is created by by this kind of technological unemployment the fact that there are Machines that can work instead of Workers to do these jobs It obviously puts a downward pressure on wages in general alongside the political attacks on the unions the Globalization and the kind of competition of workers worldwide all of this is put a downward pressure on wages to the extent That actually it's now in fact cheaper in many cases to use an army of low-paid workers Then it is to invest in a machine in the first place Why re-kit your whole factory with a new productive process if you can just get in a load of people on zero-hour Contracts in an Amazon warehouse or something like that to just literally be picking up the the boxes and taking them from A to B That's that's that shows you how how these two processes condition each other and actually it's a process that marks himself commented on in Capital I think I think it's in chapter 15 the one on machinery if you want to learn more you can buy an excellent book over there called understanding capital by yours truly and Rob so And it's got obviously highlights all the sections in that chapter where marks talks about this process where he actually Predicts and says you know you can get this situation where capitalism itself Becomes the barrier to the deployment of technology where it becomes more Efficient if you like it becomes more More cost-effective rather from the point of view of the capitalist It's rational from their point of view to not invest in machinery to not invest in technology and to just use this army of cheap Labour that they've helped to create in the first place and this is all taking place obviously at the same time in the context of a general crisis of overproduction where you've got this This this vast glut of commodities produced on a world scale that cannot be absorbed by the market It cannot be absorbed by the workers themselves on the the measly wages and in fact automation and the replacement of wage labor with Machines exacerbates this process even further. There's actually quite a good I think unfortunately an apocryphal story, but nevertheless quite an interesting story anyway that Demonstrates this point where apparently Henry Ford he of kind of fame for creating kind of automation on a mass scale apparently He was being taken round one of his newly automated factories by a trade union rep and He point Henry Ford pointed at the machines and the robots and he said to the trade union rep kind of very proudly Ha, you know like I'm going to break the back of your union because how are you going to get these? Machines to play pay your union dues to pay your your union membership fees and The union rep just turns around quick as a flash and says yeah But how are you going to get the robots to buy your cars? And that's the point right under capitalism, you know the the the machines Producing this glut of commodities at the end of the day obviously with a human labor involved in it But very minimal, you know increasingly minimal amount of human labor But then how the machines don't need any goods to they're not buying anything They don't get an income and it's the working class which is seeing their conditions eroded over time attacked over time Finding itself increasingly difficult to actually buy back all these goods and in fact under capitalism The working class can never buy back all these goods because of the nature of capitalism and how profit is created in the first place as the unpaid labor of the working class and Expresses if you like the real crisis ridden the inherently crisis-ridden nature of capitalism But understanding that process I think also helps explain Some of these kind of seemingly paradoxical questions that have arisen today. There's a there's a very popular kind of kind of zeitgeist theme within a lot of the the kind of Financial and economic kind of papers and journals now and and it's increasingly kind of being raised elsewhere Which is this idea of the productivity puzzle? There's a lot of a lot of people in the press these days talking about Very clearly actually you can see it in the statistics. This is worrying the capitalists themselves worrying the kind of the ruling class Which is there is a general? stagnation actually taking place in productivity whereas in the past period in you know the 19th century the earlier 20th You had big innovations big technologies making huge leaps forward in terms of technology You know the electricity the railways things like this that massively boosted productivity figures And the last few decades not just since the crisis 2008 But even before that in Britain and America and other advanced capitalist countries You've seen a stagnation of productivity in other words reflecting the fact that You've got exactly this process. I'm talking about going on where it and it seems very paradoxical because on the one hand There's this fear that there's too much automation taking place that we're all about to lose our jobs to robots Already losing our jobs to robots and on the other hand we're being told well Actually, there's not enough technology because productivity stagnated and that the contradiction seems Precisely as it is it seems like a paradox and then that's why they call it the productivity puzzle and all the bourgeois Economists scratch their heads and come up with all sorts of mysterious Explanations for why this might be the case. Maybe it's a statistical error. They say or just some sort of measurement error But it actually comes back to this contradictory way in which technology is being introduced where there are massive Productivity gains and huge amounts of people are being you know made obsolete if you like from the point of view of capitalism But the point is they're not unemployed. They're not just left completely in the scrap They're forced into these very low productivity jobs like the gig economy as I said and that lowers the average productivity across the the whole the whole of Society across the whole economy And that's really the the the long and the short of this puzzle that has the the kind of bourgeois economists You know so confused, but it's very simple if you understand it from from a point of view of of capitalism and how capitalism works in other words it's what Marx describes very clearly as accumulation of wealth at one pole and accumulation of misery and toil at the other that's Fundamentally what this process amounts to and it reflects as I say the contradictory nature of technological progress under capitalism which Engels also talked about in His pamphlet socialism utopian and scientific which I think is also available at the back to buy And it's an excellent pamphlet where in the third chapter he talks about again the development of capitalism historically And he points out something very interesting. He says look There's actually within capitalism despite what the free marketeers always tell you about the free market being the most efficient system He put Engels points out within any capitalist firm There's an enormous level of planning that actually goes on just in the last session We were talking about this in terms of you know in any supermarket that the planning that goes on from the shops and the Supermarkets down to the farms and the factories in terms of you know knowing this kind of supply chain It's incredibly complex knowing how much to vote to order in and so forth of any product and all of that done by Customers themselves obviously you've got self-checkout machines another good example of automation replacing the the tillers who used to be there and And all of that going on It's an incredible level of planning actually when you think about it But obviously within the firm it takes place not to lower the hours of the workers That workers have to work or anything but to increase the profits of the capitalism and between different firms Engels points out Anarchy reigns you have the anarchy of the market where there's no planning at all and it's that kind of That dualism if you like that that contradiction that means that these new technologies and techniques Are not distributed that the gains of them the productivity gains are not distributed across the whole economy And it's within all of this that we see as I say this this so-called solution being proposed particularly on the left of UBI of the universal basic income Which is meant to somehow kind of recompense Obsolete workers and the 99% in society by providing them with some sort of basic unconditional income And it actually stems from an idea proposed long ago by Thomas Paine Who who said who proposed it as a as a basically a tax on the landlords. He said look the generating all this rent from the land and They should they should give some of it back and there should be a tax on the landlords tax on their rents and an income given to all Citizens and actually interestingly Thomas Paine raised it not as a as a revolutionary demand particularly But actually as a way of trying to co-opt the whole of society into the current status quo He said, you know, I'm not trying to get rid of the landlords and their and their kind of parasitic nature Rather, I'm gonna in order to justify having them there in the first place and stop people rebelling against them We're going to attack some of their rents and kind of co-op people in say look You can be a part of our society be a part of you know spear citizen in this in this land, but You know fundamentally the status quo will stay the same the exploiters and the exploited will still exist and I think that's very key to understanding the question of UBI today because UBI is not an automatically progressive policy, you know And in fact, there's no such thing as an automatically progressive policy or an automatically Progressive technology in society. We have to look at these things in terms of who's raising them and in whose interests I think if it was raised as part of a radical left-wing program as part of a general program To improve the lives of ordinary people to improve the conditions of the working class Obviously, UBI would be something that you would support if it was funded by making the rich pay for it by by providing a stronger safety net and Welfare state obviously like any reform we as Marxist would support that Marxist Do not you know reject reforms because they somehow maintain capitalism as there is unfortunately some ultra left types Who call themselves very revolutionary who think that you know You shouldn't even support reforms because it it wet, you know dampens the appetite for revolution or somehow accelerates Conditions to being so bad that you'll have people trying to overthrow capitalism even quicker No, we don't believe that as genuine Marxist fight for any reform Obviously point out that they can only be Guaranteed on the basis of a mass movement that actually goes to abolish capitalism and an over an overthrow capitalism and transform Society along socialist lines So as part of a general left program obviously we would support this as a stepping stone towards that as a Transitional demand if you like in that in that in that process to give confidence the workers to fight to change society But we've also got to see as I say that there's people on the libertarian right-wing who are raising this as I say to provide some sort of Fassad behind which the exploitation the status quo of oppression and an exploitation can continue And in fact continue at an ever greater pace because obviously it gives a veneer Improvement for the workers Meanwhile the bosses can continue to cut wages to you continue to have a austerity on public services and so forth And it doesn't do anything as I say to really challenge fundamentally that question of who owns and controls the power and the economy in society Now as I say some as I said earlier some people who've advocated UBI from the left They put forward it as a as a solution because they say well, you know, it will help people in the gig economy It'll strengthen their position if they're not having to worry about being made unemployed and losing their job and being made You know completely impoverished overnight if they know there's that safety net to fall back on that means they can fight to improve their Conditions it means they can not have to take on the most exploitative jobs and it will improve therefore the general push for better wages across the working class and We've got to say yes, obviously it would do that if it was introduced But you got to ask yourself, you know, this kind of chicken and egg problem here Who would introduce such a UBI in the first place? Who would who what how would you get to have this this nice position this strength and position for the working class in The first place obviously the only way you could introduce such a policy is as a is a as if the state itself introduces it And and what kind of state would do that would have to be a radical left government Putting it in place under pressure from below on the back of a mass movement and the point is that such a government Would already necessarily be In trying to improve workers conditions across the board It would be trying to strengthen the trade union laws strengthen workers rights and so forth and and standing up for workers against the big tech monopolies against the the big businesses and So forth and in other words that kind of economic gain of UBI Can not be divorced from the general question of class struggle of political struggle and political power And the other the other key point is obviously who pays, you know That has to be our question with any demand any reform if we're going to ask whether it's really Being introduced in a progressive way or not is who pays for it a UBI actually Would be enormously expensive and this is obviously raised as one of the criticisms from the right wing I think in Switzerland, they actually had a referendum on the question of UBI Which failed because the there was this hysteria raised about how much Taxes would have to increase and there's other studies that show that in America for example a 10% So at $10,000 a year basic income, which is hardly an enormous amount actually would result in a 10% Increase or 10 percentage point increase in terms of the taxes raised And you'd have to say well Who's gonna pay those taxes because it's very clear already under capitalism that the big tech companies the big Monopolies the banks of they're not willing to pay these taxes already as we've discussed throughout this weekend They're threats to withdraw their money And in fact the people who are most guilty of this tax dodging are actually often the tech companies themselves Like Google and Facebook which are kind of facing court cases over these things and the people who are trying to circumvent the existing Kind of workers rights are people like Uber, you know Look at the the battle that's going on in London right now about the banning of Uber It shows these companies do not respect workers rights They do not respect paying their taxes and they will do anything they can to try and dodge it And it's true. Obviously of the capitalist class in general. So you've got it within that context This crisis of capitalism and the and the big monopolies already Doing everything they can to avoid paying for that crisis. You're having the people on the left saying well Let's have an even bigger shake-up of the welfare state. It's almost kind of a double or nothing sort of approach and And it's and it's it's it's kind of quite utopian in a socialist and utopian socialist sort of sense They've come up with a nice blueprint and imagine it can just fall from the sky because it kind of you know This manner from heaven will just come in because it it makes so much sense in it. It'll benefit everyone and And it comes down to this idea really that somehow the austerity we're seeing the attacks We're seeing are just ideological that the Just the result of nasty capitalists and that somehow you persuade the capitalist to be less nasty to get rid of austerity to get rid of the attacks to Put these sort of things in place because they themselves might benefit a bit from it in other words. There's a reliance here with these kind of demands on On basically kind of a philanthropic philanthropic sort of capitalist, you know reliance on a benevolence of the capitalist class and And on the benevolence of the capitalist state to kind of carry these things out And it really raises again all the questions We've discussed this weekend already about the nature of the state and the capitalism and the fact that obviously It exists not as a neutral entity that exists to kind of protect the majority of people in society But rather in the words of Lenin is ultimately our bodies of men in defense of private property and defense of the the interests of the ruling class and And therefore, you know, you're not going to get The capitalist state, you know the Tory government or any kind of philanthropic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Introducing these kind of ideas as much as you might have the odd person here and there advocating it In fact, one person who has been quite prominent in this debate is Bill Gates Obviously one of the richest men in the world who's all in favor of giving some of his money away when it's on his terms But I imagine if anyone said right, let's nationalize Microsoft then he'd probably have a problem with that So it shows you how limited the philanthropy really is But what he has suggested interestingly is the idea that you should tax the robots to pay for this Oh, it's very nice. No, don't tax the rich. No, they can keep their money tax the robots Now that's that sounds great, but who are we taxing here? Is there is that are we gonna tax Wally? Are we gonna tax terminator? Like I mean, it's a farcical idea really like these Robots aren't walking around people who have an income that you can tax. There's machinery. There's technology Software in society including software made by Microsoft that is making people redundant because you know Why have why have a secretary anymore when you can have a word process or you know?  You know Computers and so it's a farcical idea and really the only thing it could possibly mean if it means any many It makes any sense at all is if you were to tax the profits derived from the machines and the people who employ them In other words to tax the profits of the rich But obviously that from a capitalist point of view would lead to the opposite of what's intended Because if you tax the rich you tax them for investing and making the process more productive then instead They're gonna rely not on investing in machinery But in on employing that army of labor that low paid labor that low productivity labor that I talked about earlier So rather than actually improving The situation for the majority people you'd end up with a situation where we had even more reliance on low pay and low Productivity in other words what it shows you really is these kind of reformist solutions to try and introduce these sort of reformist measures Always end up actually producing the opposite of what's intended you try and regulate capitalism You don't get a kinder form of capitalism. What you get is the worst of both worlds. You neither get the the kind of The creative destruction if you like of the free market Which the the the libertarians advocate nor would you have a proper planned economy in the way that we would advocate You get the worst of both worlds and it shows you always the limits of trying to solve these sort of problems and highlights the the the kind of dead end of reformism in these in these Processes the point we've got to make is you know, we're not against productivity and automation efficiency The problem obviously arises that the gains of automation only accrue in the in private hands and the losses of any lack of automation also That burden falls on the shoulders of the working class in the form of things like the gig economy And you see this similarly with things like the uber ban actually like the reformist approach in this situation where you've got uber kind of misbehaving trying to bully Local governments and so forth into accepting and bully workers into accepting poor conditions You know the the solution in London has just been to ban this company outright But what have you ended up with? 40,000 jobs potentially at risk and and what a service that's become quite vital to a lot of people has actually also Potentially under threat the the real solution is not just to ban these sort of companies, but say look they should be brought in house They should be brought into public ownership, you know We already have a transport network that actually is but although in Nominally in public hands the put the buses are still privately owned There's private contracts and a lot of the tubes and so forth But nevertheless, there's the potential to bring all of that into public ownership into public hands Why not have an integrated app that allows you to travel around London? On the tubes the bikes the buses and the ride hailing in the the cabs and so whilst also giving workers the right to unionize to form a unionized workforce that can fight for better conditions That would be the real approach to these sort of solutions But it's not raised by the reformist because it raises precisely the kind of questions They're afraid of tackling the question of ownership and so forth and that's really the central problem to UBI It doesn't concentrate on this class question on the question of who owns and controls the technology in society And actually interestingly Marx had this same kind of polemical debate with the reformists of his time Actually, he had it with a group called the lasallians who had produced this Gotha program that he felt necessary to critique And you can buy the critique of the Gotha program somewhere at the back as well I'm sure but in it is very it's very interesting He criticizes the kind of reformist socialists but for saying look you're putting all the emphasis on the question of distribution Constantly talking about distributing the wealth that's already there But why not talk about production? Well instead of talking about the inequality that exists within distribution of wealth Why not talk about the inequality in terms of the means of production by which wealth is produced in the first place? And he says if you tackle that question the inequality of distribution disappears If you have a more equitable distribution of the means of production If you have common ownership over the means of production The means by which new wealth is produced rather than just trying to tax and spend and distribute the wealth that's already out there He says then inequality will automatically kind of wither away And therefore the solution really is not these kind of newfangled new elaborate tax and spend systems like UBI Which fundamentally leave the whole capitalist dynamic The whole capitalist system which is an inherently unequal system In terms of the fact that the profits are derived from the unpaid labor of the working class Capitalism necessarily the wealth of the few depends on the impoverishment and the exploitation of the many Capitalism is an inherently unequal system but instead of challenging that things like UBI These kind of tax and spend it always hits the wrong people actually Even the taxes themselves hit the wrong people because the rich will evade the taxes They will move their money offshore and actually it will end up being the middle classes Who could be one over to the idea of a planned economy Who end up being hit by these kind of systems And so therefore we should say look we're in favor of the rich paying But rather than the only way we're going to get them to pay properly Is actually if we take we expropriate We actually take these technologies these mega monopolies and so forth These multinationals into public ownership and democratic control Now in that respect we've got to be very clear that actually the problem with capitalism Is not so much it's inequality The actual inequality flows it's a symptom really of the whole system as I said And Trotsky pointed this out himself I just want to read a little quote from the Revolution Betrayed He says the fundamental evil of the capitalist system is not the extravagance of the possessing classes However disgusting that may be in itself But the fact that in order to guarantee its right to extravagance The bourgeoisie maintains its private ownership of the means of production Thus condemning the economic system to anarchy and decay I think that very well sums up the problem The problem is not the inequality that is a symptom of the real problem The real thing holding society about our real criticism of capitalism If you like is not simply the horrific which and it is horrific The barbaric inequality that exists in society where 8 billionaires or whatever it is Own as much as the bottom 50% Rather it's the fact that the fact that they in order to get that wealth They have private ownership over the technology They become a barrier to the development of technology of science of industry of society itself And UBI does nothing to fundamentally solve these problems In fact what UBI really shows is it highlights the kind of paradox that exists It highlights the absurdity that exists Where on the one hand you have this technological unemployment This millions of people made obsolete Alongside this kind of millions of other people who are forced into overwork Into precarious jobs The fact that that kind of contradiction exists and that UBI highlights it Really shows you the real problem that's at play here And therefore as I said at best UBI should really be considered a transitional demand If you like something that highlights the absurdity of these contradictions And is linked to the question of the class struggle Of the need for the working class to take power And they take the levers the key levers of the economy into their hands And it really demonstrates as I say the potential for a genuine socialist society A society based on superabundance Based on a plethora of leisure time And that in turn obviously that plethora of leisure time Being the basis for genuine democracy For the genuine involvement of the masses in the running and planning of society And interestingly in the last week actually I think it was last weekend Corbin actually made a speech Jeremy Corbin made a speech on this question of this kind of modern question About technology, about robots and things like Uber and these sort of things And he actually said Labour's programme is going to be, should be To put the robots under workers control and ownership I think that sounds quite nice It sounds a lot better than Bill Gates' tax of robots But we've got to be very clear Corbin's really, he's putting it quite vaguely And actually what I think he means a lot of the time is the idea of co-operatives He's even said Uber should be run as a co-operative by the workers We'd say no let's go further Uber should exist as a, and these sort of services should exist As publicly owned, democratically controlled services Companies and industries and so forth And if we did that, if we put these robots and machinery and technology As part of the plan of production Then we could really put into place Marx's maxim This motto of from each according to their ability Each according to their needs We are not Luddites, we should make that very clear We are not against technological progress We are not against scientific development We're in favour of automation, of innovation And all of these sorts of things But you cannot divorce these from the question of ownership In terms of who runs and controls society I think a democratic plan of production Could share the gains across the whole of society Could share these benefits of technology across society Share the work out, reduce the hours of the working week Down to a minimum Actually Trotsky himself described the idea that You could imagine very clearly a world where all it was taken Was to pull a lever or press a button The whole economy was into action And we sit there kind of reaping the rewards of that But it has to be on the basis of a democratic rational plan Of production, the basis of a socialist plan of production That allows all of us to fulfil our full potential That allows us to live in harmony with the planet around us Between ourselves and the planet Harmony between man and machine And obviously between each other And I think this has to be the kind of revolutionary change That we're fighting for, that we do fight for And this is the programme of the IMT And I hope you'll join us in that fight Leave it there


The article discusses patient reported outcomes pro in the medical field covering their importance, concepts, significance, properties, types, development, and evaluation, making it useful for physicians, pharmacists, and patients to assist and improve therapy. This article was authored by Prasanna R. Deshpade, Surulival Rajan, B. Lakshmi Sudeepthi, and others.


Hello and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii and It Never Got Quiet. This is a half hour program that explores the Hawaiian connection with the Vietnam War. I'm your host, Vic Grapp. On August 22, 1864, 16 European nations adopted the first ever Geneva Convention. Its purpose was to establish some measure of control to an ever-increasing scale of destruction and warfare. It was inspired by the work of Swiss businessman Jean-Ali Dunant. Dunant was on a business trip to Italy where he witnessed the carnage of the battle of Sulferino in 1859. He wrote a book titled, Oddly Enough, A Memory of Sulferino. The book helped to create the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863 and subsequently the Geneva Convention the following year. Part of the Geneva Convention established one member of the military organization is having a special and protected status on the battlefield. They have become known as the combat medic or corpsman.  Chapter 4, Article 25 of the Geneva Convention states, members of the armed forces specially trained for employment should the need arise as hospital orderlies, nurses, or auxiliary restructure bearers in the search for or the collection, transportation, or treatment of wounded and sick shall likewise be respected and protected if they are carrying out these duties at the time when they come into contact with the enemy or fall into his hands. Article 29 reads, members of the personnel designated in Article 25 who have fallen into the hands of the enemy shall be prisoners of war but shall be employed on their medical duties insofar as the need arises. According to the Geneva Convention knowingly firing at a medic wearing clear insignia that he is a war crime. Combat medics or corpsman are military personnel who have been trained to at least an emergency medical treatment level and are responsible for providing first aid and frontline trauma care on the battlefield. They are also responsible for providing continuing medical care in the absence of a readily available physician including care for disease and battle injuries. Of all the jobs in the military, the combat medic or corpsman is probably the most respected. Our guest today is Alan Ho, former combat medic and now practicing attorney. Alan was drafted into the US Army in 1966. He served in Vietnam during one of the more intensive periods of the war. Alan attended UH Minoah earning a degree in political science, later earning his law degree. Alan has his own private practice and continues his association with the US Army through several other organizations. He is also a member of the Honolulu Poll Club. Aloha Alan. Aloha. Welcome to the program. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here. It's an honor to have you here as I said being one of the professions in the military that is probably the most honored of all in terms of rescuing people and putting yourself in the line of fire and not being able to shoot back. Legally anyway. Legally, you know, and listening to that explanation of article 25 it just kind of, oh, somebody forgot to tell that to the enemy but it never stopped them from shooting at us. That's true. I can remember the number of dust-offs that were shot at, Great Big, Red Cross, and White Square. And I can remember at one point in time they started putting them sixties on the side of them. Absolutely. And eventually, you know, the need for helicopter evacuation was so great that any slick armed or unarmed in the area would drop in and pick up the wounded. A slick being one of the helicopters. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was just curious, what unit were you attached to? I was with the, I was the reconnaissance platoon of the Second Battalion, First Infantry Regiment, of the 196 Light Infantry Brigade. And the 196 Light Infantry Brigade originally when organized in 1967 was part of what was called Task Force Oregon in the northern sector of Vietnam and then ultimately was rolled into the 23rd Infantry Division. And subsequently also became the American. The American. Actually the 23rd and the American, I'm sorry, it's the same organization. Yeah. Yeah. The American had quite a reputation as far as being a great combat unit and very looked up to. I saw quite a few of the guys with the little flashes on their uniforms when they were going out of country. Right. It was the Blue Shield. The Blue Shield with the Southern Cross, the four stars representing the South Pacific. You were in country, what in 1968? 1967. I got there in December of 67 and then came home in ending part of September of 68. And they were located primarily where? In the northern sector, more commonly known or referred to as Chulai, Tam Quay, and up in way and as far north as Ashile Valley. So you kind of had an intermingling with Marines as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, in 1967, 1968, things were quite hectic. And the 196 Light Infantry Brigade was sort of referred to as the Harfen Brigade. So wherever extra rifles were needed, we would pick up and be sent there. Given that experience, I mean, I don't want to judge up bad memories or whatever, but I imagine dealing with casualties. You must be suffering from mountains of PTSD. You know, no, not really. I have, I guess, had been very fortunate to have been raised in a very strong family. And my parents were very religious, were Christians. And so my upbringing provided me with a sense of strength, a sense of family, and of course being part native Hawaiian, it was always this sense of ohana. And so I always kind of viewed each incident, each critical kind of moment where life and death hung into balance as my role to do the best I could to sway the balance toward life. A couple of years ago, and we were talking about this, I tried to, you know, I wanted to get a documentary going on Hawaiian veterans of the Vietnam War and their experience. And we were searching for a title, and it finally ended up, I'll see if I can mess this up, Hapili Vahena Ole, which meaning a relationship that cannot be undone. And considering what Hawaiians went through going to the mainland and going to the training centers, mostly in the South, their experience had to have been somewhat different from mine, especially coming from the mainland and being a Hali. I was treated differently. Now I know you did not have that experience, yours was quite different, but I'm sure that this is kind of the acceptance and we were talking about as far as all. And coming here, it's a different spirit, a much different spirit. And I think that we were going to get into that a little bit as far as your son and Hawaiian culture and how it's, I think we have something unique to offer the world in that, we were talking about Hawaiian language and just the word aloha alone has such a huge depth of meaning, not just as a greeting. Right. Hawaiian cultural traditions, they talk about our culture being dualistic or as Hawaiians refer to it in terms of language and interpretations, the ka'ona or the other, the hidden meaning. And so when we use the term aloha, like you had pointed out earlier, like the Jewish or the Hebrew word shalom has an incredible breadth of acceptance and also in terms of what it means and how it is said between two individuals or how is it, who are friends, like old time friends or how it may be shared with someone you just met for the first time. I think that Hawaiian culture has evolved in terms of, I look at all of the Pacific islands and the language and how closely related the tons are between Tonga and Polynesian or Tahitian and Hawaiian, but again going to this concept of a relationship that cannot be undone and we talk so much about the divisiveness in our society right now and you sent me the account of your son in Mosul and Iraq and we'll get into that in a minute, but it's very stirring and very inspirational to see that there are still young people who believe in going into battle, going into war and taking up the concept of fighting for this nation and fighting for what we believe in. I thought that, wow, at your son's funeral the outpouring of people that came and just even the tourists that came to see the funeral was just amazing, whatever. As I told you, I wish I could have met him. He was just a phenomenal human being, which is, I guess, a testimony to your raising of a fine group of kids. Yeah, you know, he was a remarkable young man. I think like his old man and he and I had this special connection that he used to introduce me to his friends as this is my old man and I'll tell you what, some people may view that as being somewhat disrespectful, but for me that sent a real strong message that my son and I had a deep personal connection that he felt proud enough of me to kind of share his feelings with his friends, but he was a remarkable young man in terms of he understood, appreciated and was an incredible student of history, culture, language, as well as, you know, his military heritage as well. And then for him, it kind of all blended together and he made a decision at some point in time that he was going to pursue that course being a warrior like his ancestors were. And of course, we will never know, you know, if he was going to make this a career or not, but in the few years that he was with us and that he engaged in that activity, he left an incredible legacy that to this day is carried on by everyone who had the privilege to come into contact with him. Well, just reading the article that you sent me that appeared, what, in Welcome Home magazine, that from some of the comments of the people that were in his platoon, I found it interesting that he enlisted, even though he had a degree and worked his way up and immediately got commissioned, or not immediately, but got commissioned, but the impact that he had with the people around him, and one of the people in there said that, oh yeah, he probably would have made commanding general of the army, or chairman maybe of the Joint Chiefs, right, but he had that kind of mana as far as walking into a room and understanding the charge. And owning the room, you know. And that period of time that he served in the army and the unit that he served with was an absolutely incredible period of time, and a remarkable group of young men, both enlisted, who were his soldiers, as well as those who were his leaders, because, you know, his colonel that he served under in combat was, is our now four-star general, Bob Brown from Usurpak. And I look around the army today, and I am absolutely astounded with the numbers of leaders or officers and enlisted men that my son served with, who are now occupying incredible roles of leadership within our country. Alan, we're going to get back to that in a little bit. Right now, let's take a couple of minutes for some messages here. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Aloha, I'm Prince Dax, the volunteer host of The Prince of Investing. Think Tech is important to me because it brings Hawaii's number one financial literacy show around the globe. For the first time, Think Tech Hawaii is participating in an online-based fundraising campaign to raise $40,000. Give thanks to Think Tech. We'll run only during the month of November, and you can help. Please donate what you can so that Think Tech Hawaii can continue to raise public awareness to promote civic engagement through free programming like mine. I've already made my donation, and look forward to yours. Please send your tax-deductible contribution by going to the website, thanksforthinktech.causevox.com. On behalf of the community, enriched by Think Tech Hawaii, 30-plus weekly shows, thank you, mahalo, for your generosity. Welcome back to It Never Got Quiet. We're speaking today with Alan Ho, who was a combat medic in Vietnam, and we were talking about his son, Nino. Nino, yes. You have this flag sitting here on the table. Can you tell me a little bit about that? You know, this remarkable piece of cloth is, I know for a fact, at least 50 years old, because that's how long it's been in my possession, and it is a flag that is faded. The stars are kind of torn and worn, and the gold braiding is now almost yellow. But in 1967, when I joined my long-range recon team, we got this flag sort of as a talisman, you know, for no particular reason, other than it was something to have. And being a medic, I had kind of like the largest bag. And so, you know, there was space in my bag to carry this extra flag. And you know, I carried this flag with me for a good six months, and kind of it just being there. And then on Mother's Day 1968, it took on a very special meaning when my unit got overrun. And I lost 18 men on Mother's Day 1968.  But subsequently, there were 10 of them of the 18 that were missing in action for up to 37 years. But we promised that this flag would be presented to the family of my lieutenant who was missing in action, Fred Ransbottom, from Edmund, Oklahoma.  And it's meaning to dad, and it's meaning to young soldiers. And so, when Nine Oil was deployed to Iraq with his unit, he has shared the story with his young soldiers. And they said, Sir, would you ask your dad to send us the flag? Because we want to carry it in honor of the men that your dad served with in Vietnam. And at that time, in honor of his lieutenant who was still missing in action, oh, you can imagine how proud that made me. So, you know, I said, oh, my God, these young men, they understand, they got it. So I sent the flag to them and they carried it in battle, specifically in the battle for the city of Mosul in 2004 and 2005. And the sad part of the legacy of this flag is that my son was carrying the day he was killed in combat. And subsequently, the story or the legacy of this flag has just kind of grown by huge proportions. And subsequently, it has been on maybe five or six more deployments in the combat by units affiliated with my son's unit simply because they knew the story and the legacy of this flag. So, this flag has been to Iraq five times and Afghanistan four times. It's literally flown the whole country of Afghanistan with the 25th aviation combat brigade, literally hundreds of thousands of miles. It's been around the world. And I think one of the unique aspects as it relates to Vietnam, this flag was on board the Kitty Hawk when it made its last sail as a Navy carrier before it was sent back to the mainland for deactivation and decom. So, yeah, this is a very special flag, Vic. And whenever I get the chance, I take it with me and I share it with the young soldiers and I say, here, take this. This flag has a lot of mana. It certainly does. Take some and give it some of yours. And you know, it brings me great joy to see the reverence in which these young warriors treat this flag. And I'm glad to see that there are still people out there like that. As I said, it does my heart well because I think of the media portraying the divisiveness that is in this country and yet we still have young men and women who will go out and sacrifice themselves for a piece of cloth that is representative of what we are and what we believe. And I think that's amazing. And I know that you've carried on as far as with your time with the Army, you explained to me your position as you currently hold in your relationship with the Secretary of the Army. Could you explain a little bit about that? Yeah, right. I have a very unique honor to be a civilian aide to the Secretary of the Army. And the Army is really the only service branch that has this program. And what it is is that there are 100 of us in the country and there's generally two per state. And our job is to serve as a liaison between the Army and the community. And there's really no specific task that we're given other than to help facilitate good relationships, help the Army to address issues that it may feel they need special assistance as it relates to that community. And on the reverse to help our community kind of adopt more open door policy with our military families who live and reside in our communities. And I think for me one of the not the biggest challenges, but one of the things that I enjoy the most is engaging with soldiers who when they first come to Hawaii to encourage them to you know what you need to live and serve your duty outside the wire. Because you know you will discover when you go outside the wire that it is this is anywhere USA. And you know over the years I've seen how that has evolved and how it's become a remarkable experience whereas before young soldiers would kind of like hang out only together and stay on base or do things that only soldiers would do among themselves. But now you see them out in the community they're engaging in programs in the in the in the schools to help repair and they're actively now engaging in surfing with you know some of our professional surfers on the North Shore and of course the scuba diving and the skydiving and you know things that we used to as young boys do a long time ago, not so much these days. I think also too we were talking about as your son promoted Hawaiian culture and I think that again we have a very unique society here in the islands and one of the things that struck me is being we both attended the ceremony at the 25th of their deployment their 50th anniversary of their deployment to Vietnam and also 75th birthday of the unit standing up and it was very impressive for me to see all these young soldiers out there the the thing that got me was the haka that they did that was unique to their unit and how many of the of the kids out there we call them kids but yeah you know they're adults and but it was a very impressive ceremony and I felt very warm about the whole thing I thought it was a great ceremony yeah I'm going to have to check my picture and make sure that you're in there I know you're in there I was actually on the the vehicle with the reviewing of of the troops that morning well as I recall we were all called out no no before I reviewed you remember yeah yeah that is again that was a very impressive as I said people are sitting there and talking about us look at all these soldiers yeah that's only a third of them yeah it's incredible when you when you see a division online yeah in in in formation it is awe inspiring yes it is yes it is and again the dedication to these kids is amazing yeah thank god for them thank god for that and I want to thank you allen and as I said I have I've met your son through his spirit and I really appreciate that thank you for coming on you welcome journalism is not objective no matter how hard we try we all carry some amount of prejudice towards the topic however there can be alternative journalism where an issue can be discussed without rhetoric or animosity I believe that this is what we have to offer here at think tech Hawaii this media offers an opportunity to bring more than one perspective to the community think tech also provides information on a host of topics that can aid in improving your life but all this costs money we speak of free speech as one of our rights to our constitution but it requires maintenance that maintenance has been measured in the lives of those who have defended and by those who support efforts such as think tech Hawaii through their contribution the staff here are not volunteers they would like to continue to pay their rent the hosts of the programs you watch are volunteers we do this out of service to the community so please contribute the information to do how to do so is on the on the split on the screen below we love to have some feedback if you have some comments please send an email to 808 vietnam vets gmail.com I would like to thank the staff here at think tech Hawaii for all their support and assistance special thanks go to ray and robert who go the extra mile truly without them this program would not be possible please come back again next week for another issue of it never got quiet mahal


What's up, everyone? It's your girl Kinsey here from Layton Sports Cards and I'm ripping 2022-23 Don Russ Elite Basketball Hobby 4 box break number 18 pick your team. Got Anthony P. Hawks, Cheryl F. Wizards, Chiakai L. Lakers, Sons and Kings, Chun Wei W. Rocketsdale, F. Clippers. How can L with the Grizzlies and Pelicans, Henry J. Magic, Hung Y with the Warriors, Jerry J. Spurs, Gion H. Celtics, Jonathan S. T-Wolfs, Jonathan F. Knicks, Joseph T. Bowles, Kengo F. Blazers, Kenneth H. Packers, or Packers, Pacers, Kevin C. with the Hornets and Nuggets, Koji O. Mavs, Mike J. Jazz. Thanks again, Mike, for closing us out. We've got Morgan L. Pistons, Peng Juen C. Bucks, Robert P. Cavs, Seng Jun B. Heats, Stephen W. Raptors, Tyler K. with the Sixers and Nets, and Yingming G. with the Thunder. All right, good luck, everyone. Here we go. Last basketball break of the daytime. We've got Prism Football coming up next. Here we go. Got Spell Bounce, Steph Curry, Orange, Jalen Brown on the die-cut Power Formules. The Orange Rookie of Jake Lariva. Grizzlies, Grizzlies have been pretty solid in Elite today, too. Got Blue to 99 for the clips. Mousa Diabate. Got Redemption coming up here. Redemption. Bells, Blue. Card 6 of a Mark Williams. Mark Williams. That's going to be a Hornet's hit. Mark Williams. Hornets. Orange, Kaminga. Got Luka Donchich on these star status maps. What's up, Don? Orange, Dejante Murray. Rookie of Caleb Houston for the magic. Got Jalen Green on the deck, Acetate. Feel Power Formules. Orange, LeBron, James Spellbound. Die-cut. Lakers. Both Rattle Donovan Mitchell. Purple, Brandon Ingram to 49, Pelicans. We've got Johnny Davis on the rookie auto. There you go, Wizards. One of the last teams taken. There you go. First we've seen a Pym today. Orange crying in town. We've got Dimension, Shortbread, Josh Gitty. There you go, Thunder.  Very nice. OKC is Yingming G. There you go. Get this one in a mag for you.  It's time I've seen one of those. Orange, Dan Whitty. Of course, Long. Thanks for hopping in. Rookie of Benedict Mathern. No, no one of one today so far. We've got Rip Hamilton on the Acetate. Box two. Star status, one on a ball. Got Orange, Jay Chantate. Rookie of Jaden Hardy for the maths. Big auto here. Fox. We've got a Wusebitch on the glass master. Bulls. Spellbound of Trey Young. Full throttle, Orange, Die-cut of Demi and Lillard. Spellbound, Steph Curry. Blue, Zubok for the Clippers, 23 and 99. We've got Impact Compressions Auto of Danny Green for the Grizzlies. Another Grizzly set. I've had an auto in each break, at least one, I believe. Orange, John Wall. Spellbound, Ant-Man. Orange, Trey Jones. Got a Kendall Brown Rookie for the Pacers. Again, you all have more group breaks tonight with four starting at five. Kyrie Dek Acetate. Starting off with some hockey, then F1, and then get into baseball, basketball, and football. Personals will resume after group breaks. Power formula is Curry. And you've got a Sunday daytime first ones with you tomorrow as well. Sunday fun day group breaks tomorrow night. Spellbound, Steph Curry. Star status of Yanis. Got Green, Die-cut, 20 of 32. Little cat action there. We've got Keegan Murray on the Pen Pals Red. There you go, Kings. What is that going to be numbered to? Pen Pals Red. New breed. To 49 on that one. Nice. There you go, Kings. Kevin Love. It's a second rookie honor to 49 that we've seen too. Marvin Bailey, third orange. Box three here. Box three. Got Spellbound, Orange, Die-cut, and the Brown Giant. Brown Giant. Ant-Man, Power Formulas. Got Purple, Bradley Bieler, 49 Wizards. Got another redemption here. Let's see. Elite signatures. Card 24 of K. Conningham. There you go, Pistons. Nice second year hit there. Detroit, that's going to be Morgan L. Very nice. Second year Kade. We'll mag that redemption. Alright, let's see a passing of Torch. Orange, Brooke Lopez. Got Orange, Star status, Die-cut of Damian Lillard. Orange, Christian Braun for the Nuggets. Spellbound of Jelma Rant. Got Impact Impressions Auto of Erin Natesman for the Pacers. Jason Tatum, Power Formula. Got Luca Donchich on the Spellbound. Star status of Kevin Durant. Tari eats in Rookie for the Rockets. Acetate, Kevin Love on the Tidal Wings. Let's see another short front. Give it to you in one piece. Got Spellbound, LeBron, Pothrottle, Jason Tatum. Orange, Luca Donchich. Nice one there, Mavs. Rookie of Patrick Baldwin Jr. Warriors. Got Hekeen the Dream back to the Future. Rockets. Last pack here, box three. Steph Curry on the Star status. Warriors. Alright, last basketball box of the daytime. Again, more tonight with Forrest. We live starting at five. Turn of the Sentry Auto of Tim Hardaway. Warriors. Golden State. Nice one. Got Jordan Pool Orange. Got Spellbound. Jop. Orange, Brandon Ingram. Got Benedict Mather and Rookie. Turn of the Sentry. Colin Sexton for the Jazz. Utah. Last team taken again. Both times, both hit and auto. Orange, Rudy Gaubert. Got Star status. Jomerant. Harris. Orange, Kyle Lowry. We've got Caleb Houston Rookie. Got Carl Malone back to the Future. Acetate, Jess. Kevin Lillard, Power Formulas. Orange, Spellbound, Dica, Zion. None yet today, James. None yet. Keegan Murray on the Purple or on the Orange. Nice one there, Kings. Hopefully we can pull one out of Prism. Got Blue, Justin Holliday. One out of 99. Fox. Got Dirk on the Tidal Waves Acetate. Kate Cunningham, Power Formulas. Got Lamello Ball, Star status on the Orange, Dica. Both throttle, Anthony Edwards. Last pack here, y'all. Got Green, Dicut of Iodosumu, 11 of 12 on that one. Nice little number, Jersey number there. And that'll do it for it. Fox, four. Autos. We had Colin Sexton, Jess. Tim Hardaway, Warriors. Aaron Naismith, Pacers. Danny Green, Grizzlies. Johnny Davis on the Rookie Auto, Washington. Hornets Redemption of Mark Williams. Keegan Murray Redemption for the Kings to 49. We had the Dimensions of Josh Giddy for the Thunder. And then we had a Kate Cunningham Elite Signatures Redemption as well. All right, that'll do it for basketball. We've got Prism Football coming up shortly.


this time. So let's get started. Wow. Thank you for coming joining the presentation. During the presentation, we want to share a lot of important information and tools we developed through the year operation. On behalf of our group, we have three presenters. My name is Ken Garash, and I'm reading the project. And here are also Asako Ishigaki from Entity Software. Also Akihiro Motoki, some from Nishi. So this is a timeline of our project. As you can see, the project just began in June 2014. At the time, we have almost eight people, not fully dedicated, but total eight people were there. And at that moment, we didn't have any knowledge about the operation of OpenStack. That's why we went to 100 servers and did a many scalable tests. And then the team is growing. And also, we did many tests, like a recovery test. And finally, we got 14 people. And now, from this May, we're providing 24 by 7 support. So our team member, highly scalable people, but still, we have a few rules. Sometimes we call it culture. This is important to achieve a higher output by the team. First one is we are just focusing on using OpenStack instead of developing OpenStack. Our team members' numbers are highly limited. So now, we are just focusing on using OpenStack, not developing OpenStack. And also, human resources is the most important asset for us and highly limited. That's why we are always thinking of reducing OPEX, promoting automation. So anything that a human need to do more than twice must be automated. This is one of the key principles of our teams. Also, we actively support HA and also introducing self-healing. This is the tools we are using. Most of the tools for deployment and operation, we are using Ansible and Python. And some tools are written in shell script. And this is our CI, CD environment. Not much difference to the community. But using this CI, CD environment, we've already created more than 2,000 patches in 2015 this year already. Also, we are deploying more than 200 patches to the actual production environment. And we talk about our operations. This is very brief overview of our OpenStack configurations. Actually, they are not different from the architecture I presented at the Paris OpenStack Summit. So if you have interest, please check the URL. And here is the basic ideas. We put more than double redundancies for hardware. And we put at least double redundancies for software. So we support HA. So the operator doesn't need to go to the data center or operation room if there is just one failure. You can just take enough sleep over the weekend. And on Monday, you can go to data center or operation room of a table. And then you can fix it. This is our deployment tools. So once you purchase the hardware, then operator registers hardware information to the CMDB, this kind of CMDB. This CMDB holds information about hardware information and the location of the locks. Also, it has network information as well. And the interesting thing is you can specify load of the hardware by using this CMDB. Actually, this is just a list of our Ansible playbooks. And you can pick any playbooks, whatever you want to assign to the hardware. So in this example, you can see you want to apply a normal node that is a common playbooks for all the servers. And also, you want to configure this hardware as a Nova Compute, which supports special flavor called Nova Compute Standard 1. And based on this configuration, our Ansible leads those tags and create this kind of inventory. It is called dynamic inventory in Ansible. And as you can see, this normal node appears in here. And also, you can see Nova Compute Standard 1 appears here. So once operators configure selects playbooks, then those playbooks are automatically applied to the hardware. So using this CMDB, we can understand the configuration of the hardware and the history of the hardware failures, also loads of the hardware. We also actively developed many tools. As for the deployment, we have playbooks for network configuration, account, logging, service, drivers, and total, we have 37 playbooks. And this is an example of the most difficult one. And in this setup, we need to create a compiler hard disk driver. In this playbook, first, it goes to the cloud and launching a VM and install kernel development tools like libraries. And using the VM, we compile the hard disk driver and also do firmware update. And finally, we install the kernel driver and create a file system. All the complicated procedure is done by just one Ansible playbooks. Also, we have playbooks for OpenStack. Total, we have 62 playbooks. And using this one, we can configure HA like I mentioned before. So as for the operation, we are actively developed. Now, we can take usage for building purpose. Also, we can migrate bunch of VMs and backups. Also, we can manipulate bunch of users. Also, we are developing tools for health check. This is an example of our tools called per host instance check. Using these tools, you can see, you can specify the Nova compute and you can check whether a VM is booting up, also taking a log, getting a network, getting metadata, can log into the VM and SSH. All the things are tested. So if you make some modification to the Nova compute, then we run this tool and check whether the node is configured correctly or not. So today, we have this tool, so we can update our environment very aggressively. So if you want to know more about operating tools, we have another talk at 4.40. The room is here, so please come. Next, I want to talk about our monitoring system. This is our monitoring systems. We are using Xavix for detecting real-time alert. Also, we are analyzing all the logs using elastic search. This is for detecting future bugs and also we use it to detect some malicious activities. Let me talk about Xavix configuration. So right now, we are monitoring about 2,000 items. That is for general stuff like memory, CPU network, hard disk usage. Also, we have simple self-healing mechanism like process restart. As for the open stack, actually, we have about 4,000 items we are monitoring now and about 65 self-healing mechanisms have already been deployed. Let me pick two examples. One is rabbit MQ. This is our configuration. We are using a three-node cluster and we allow partitioning by setting Alt key. In this setup, Xavix keep monitoring, watching whether there is a split braining or not by using these parameters. And also, we keep checking the port and the process. In this setup, at least we need to keep running one node. In that sense, Xavix is checking whether there is one active node for the API check and process check. We are checking the numbers. The second one is about MySQL. This is a little bit difficult. Anyway, this is our setup. There are four nodes here and just one arbitrator is here. And all the lead and light stuff go directly to just one node by the load balance. And in addition to usual monitoring items, we monitor those special items. To explain those items, I need to talk about MySQL clusters.  It goes to the send queue of the master node, and then it sends to the slave node. And once slave node receives a commitment, then it returns okay.  And here, MySQL synchronously consumes a commitment and reflect to the disk. This is a basic principle of MySQL cluster. And here is a problem. If there is something wrong happens in between the queue and the disks, then sometimes MySQL cluster freezes. So we test it, and in case of disk failure, that is not a problem. The slave node is automatically removed from the cluster. But the problem happens in case of disk speed throttling in some reasons. In this case, the slave seems working correctly, but the writing speed is so slow. In that case, all the commitment message is congested at the send queue and the receive queue. And once the receive queue is congested, there is no acknowledgement from the slave. But master believes this slave is working correctly. So in this situation, you cannot write anything to the database anymore. This creates a problem. So this is our dashboard when we lock the MySQL. You can see you will get almost all the alert in this dashboard. But don't be upset. Here is the reason. If you upset and do something wrong, then the problem becomes worse. In this case, if operators reboot the OBS agent, or in worst case, if operators reboot the network nodes, then you will get, you will lose all the connection to the running VMs. So if you cannot connect to the database, you can't do those actions, operations. So it is important to understand what we can do and what we can do if we have a problem. That's need to be gathered and we gather those information and putting it to our knowledge base. So that is very important. And finally, this is self-healing mechanism we introduced. So the hard disk throttling sometimes happens when we take a backup of the MySQL. So that's why we limit the node to take a backup. And also we are monitoring those items now. And if there is some changes to those items, then the node is removed from the cluster automatically. Also we change the backup method. We used to support, used to use so-called online backup. But now we switch to the more safe method. So first, we take the node from the cluster, just this thing, from the cluster, then we lock all the tables and create a backup. And after that, we return to the cluster and once just configure a synchronous again. And by supporting these setups, at this moment, we haven't had the same problems. We haven't had any same problems. So just switch to the presenter and talk about log analytics. Talk about our log analytics. We have four purposes of log analytics. First, we have to detect critical system failure and to recover them immediately. We will be happy if logs could tell us system failures beforehand. Second, we need to detect malicious access. When users floating IPs are accessed maliciously, we need to notify users. Third, we need to detect non-critical errors or warnings. Of course, they are better to be fixed as soon as possible. Bugs might be found by those logs. Fourth, we want to identify errors and warnings that have no service impact. We'd like to filter out them next time. We call them ignorable logs. Large numbers of logs are logged by each component of the system, such as hardware, Linux kernel, OpenStack, and operation tools. It's so difficult for us to find out important real message from them. An example of a day, there were 100,000 logs of critical error and warning, but serious logs were not found in this day. There were only six non-critical error logs and six ignorable logs. We analyzed logs and add the result to our blacklist and whitelist. Logs found in our blacklist are sent to Xabix. Ignorable logs are filtered out with our whitelist. The rest are shown in Kibana. We operated analyze them. We add critical logs to the blacklist as well as ignorable logs to the whitelist. Kibana dashboard is very useful for our log analysis, so that the whitelist can keep growing. Logs to be analyzed have been quite reduced. Now, let me explain our architecture of log processing, adopting black and whitelist. Fluent D on every node sends logs to the log servers. Some devices which cannot be installed fluently on send logs to the log servers using RCS log. Rules of the blacklist and whitelist are contained in configurations of Fluent D. Fluent D sends serious logs to Xabix following the blacklist. Fluent D raises a flag to ignorable logs following the blacklist. Fluent D puts metadata to logs in order to create graphs from them. Then logs are stored in elastic search. Kibana shows graphs by referring elastic search records. They are simplified examples. First example indicates a hardware failure. This message is contained in our blacklist, so Fluent D sends this log to Xabix. And alert on Xabix will tell us the failure immediately. The second example is an IDS log. Fluent D extracts the source IP from the message and inserts IDS value to the item key. Kibana makes graphs from this metadata. The third example indicates users operation error. Since this error doesn't impact to our system, we have already added the message to the whitelist. Fluent D inserts ignore value to item key. Kibana filters out this log from all graphs. Let me show you some of our whitelists. The first message indicates access without any token. Health check from load balancers can't get tokens, so this warning continues at all times in our system. We watch on the trend of response codes. We don't need this log itself. The second message indicates that users request what's denied due to quota limitation. It has no impact to the system, but the log has error level. I think it should be info log. The third message indicates literally hypervisor has more disk space than nova database expected. It occurs when instance of shutoff status exist. This is commonplace condition. We ignore this log. We have enhanced our whitelist. As a result, we have been reducing logs to be analyzed. In other words, many meaningless logs of error or running other open stack operators. As you can see in these two graphs of Kibana, our whitelist is very efficient, very effective. One year ago, when we did dog fooding, we could not analyze all logs.  Next, let me show you some of our blacklist. The first example indicates that there is disk problem on a computer node. Who sent this log to Zabix as running level? The second message indicates that color sync needs to clean up its resources. This condition itself does not impact to our system. Thus, fluently send this log to Zabix as information level instead of running level. We operators find this alert on weekday daytime and clean up them. This rule has helped us several times. The third message indicates a failure of database backup. But we shouldn't worry about the individual failure because backup is scheduled four times a day. Fluently send this log to Zabix as information level. If this alert continued, we would debug on it. Let me demonstrate usage of Kibana. Six dashboards are available on Kibana. We'll show you three of them. This is a dashboard of all logs. You can put queries to filter logs. For example, these queries filter out ignorable logs. Let's select toggle checkbox to enable this query. Then the graphs, logs of the graph has reduced. Role logs are also available on Kibana classified by their log levels. Expanding the critical logs panel, you will find role message of critical logs. You can put text search on all the logs. Let's add a query to find logs containing create failure and wait a moment. Then the results have appeared containing create failed text. This all log panel is very useful to grasp overview. We prepared dashboard to provide further analysis. This is a dashboard of error logs. Let's take a look on the day in September. Since around 18 o'clock, errors have increased and continued. This graph tells us that neutron DHCP agent log have increased at that time. And this graph also indicates that many errors appeared in need of neutron. I try to narrow down to neutron logs. Then now, neutron has been proved to be in some failure. Role logs would help analyzing what causes. This is dashboard of OpenStack access. This graph colors calls API accesses of each services. You can see detail. And this shows trend of response calls classified into normal authentication failure, invite request, and system error. Later, I'll analyze about this system error. This is important list of users who failed to log in to horizon. The user failed dozens times. So he may be taking over his account. We'd better to contact him. Now, I'll analyze the system error. Let's narrow down the logs to error response. Check this checkbox. You can find detail of the access log. Adding filter with request ID. Then, you can see logs related to this access. I found an error. That's all of my demonstration. Actually, we just finished the presentation. And as I mentioned, we have another presentation from 440. And also, we brought all the system to presentation room. Let's see. Today, we have a demo at NNC booth H4. Also, tomorrow, we have a demo at S14. So, if you want to try our tools and especially log analytics, you can come and we can discuss. And also, if you have further questions, comment, you can send email to this. Thank you very much. I think we can pick some questions. Do you have any questions? Don't much? So anyway, we have an exhibition also today. So please come and discuss. Thank you very much.