Hey traders, this is Tosh. I go by T Bradley 90 in the my invest in club chat general reminder for those who don't know MIC is having a one-year anniversary where bow is going to be trading live in front of our members It's coming up August 17th mark your calendars and as an added benefit to our members The event is 100% entirely free for annual and lifetime members While lifetime on top of that get extra coaching before the event and guaranteed front-row seating While most charged for these events We show our support by making it free again for annual and lifetime members if you are interested in signing up or attending this Specific event DM me and slack T Bradley 90 and or email myself at Tosh at my invest in club comm Now today we have a very special video for you guys every Sunday Matt Chicago trader one of our main moderators in chat Does a how-to series on fundamentals and this week specifically Matt is talking about workhorse, which is w Hks and their agenda While this is just a preview of the full-length video if you want to watch the full-length or any of our exclusive content Then become an MIC member. Hey guys, what's up? It's Chicago checking out here for the weekly fundamental video After last week's I promised that I was gonna do work horse this week. I know it's kind of been out of place since Trump's tweet about it with GM, but I definitely want to go over it kind of my thoughts on the whole Agenda behind it and kind of why the move happened So I guess we can kind of just jump into it. So if you guys don't recall, you know Trump tweeted that GM was gonna sell their Ohio plant to workhorse, which they electric truck maker or electric car maker And Basically what I did was you know the move held up pretty well So that night I kind of do did some digging and read a few articles and definitely Yes, so then someone from the UAW comes out and basically says that in a statement the Union's position was unequivocal GM should assign a product to the Lourdes town facility, which is the Ohio town that it's in and continue operating Here was the also the funny part and where I started to realize it's gonna be you know This deal is likely not gonna get that You know the UAW actually is suing GM for closing down that plant.  I'm just gonna go out on a limb Company has about 65 million Outstanding shares the floats before the move was 56 million Now there's a ton of warrants. So the float if the warrants were all exercised It'd be closer to 80 so again on May 1st was about three and a half million dollars in cash, you know All these warrants could exercise. They have a lot of warrants. They can raise, you know, 30 35 million dollars They're burning a couple million dollars a month. So I mean obviously look at the cash situation They're sitting on fumes before this move and you know the revenue So they have a lot of I think the stock was at 90 cents before it moved and Lot of overhead at 182 three dollars and for three dollars and three cents to be exact so It's a lot of delusion like I mean you think about 23 million shares But you know where the flow is 50 million or 60 million outstanding shares like That's 30% delusion like it's a lot, but at the same time percent twice. It's not Hey traders, this is Tosh I go by T Bradley 90 in the my investing club chat Just wanted to reach out and say if you have any questions about MIC Joining MIC maybe you're a member already you have three ways to contact myself personally and through MIC You can hit our social media You can hit me through pms and chat or you can contact us through my email at Tosh at my investing club calm That's TOS H at my investing club calm I will get back to you in a timely manner And I'm saying this because I'm here to help and I don't want anybody to be afraid to reach out and ask any Question that they have we are here for you guys. All right. See you guys


What is your ontology? What is truth? And epistemology? How you require truth? It seems you accept any most point of view. I don't think there is... there's individual truth, right? There is no the truth. Like, ah, let me rephrase. There are certain the truth. We are born, we die, right? Let's rephrase that because that's not even the truth. We occupy, we come into this present form of existence by going through a birth canal and being born into this existence and we give up the material, the body, right? So even birth and death can be argued upon. So it's difficult, it's difficult. I think it's got to be thought, subject, focused. There is no absolute truth. What is it? What are freedom? Human beings must be free to think whatever it is they want to think, if not act on every thought, right? If you think you want to take another person's life, you should not have the right to act upon that and we have rules in place for that, right? So I don't know. I don't know how to answer these broad questions.


Alex, you're muted. There we go. Well, good evening. My name is Alex or Alejandra and I am the project manager for the WJ Bose Reconstruction Project. This project is the WJ Bose Road is the dividing line between council district number 2 and council district number 7. This does involve two council districts within the city of Fort Worth. I will be managing this project from now until we close it out. I want to thank all of you for joining us this evening. Just to let you know, our agenda is I'm going to introduce the project team. I'm going to explain our project manager role, give you an overview of the project map, and then we're going to discuss the scope of the project, the schedule and budget, contact information, and then we'll open it up for questions and answers at the end of the meeting. The project team is made up of myself. I'm Alex and I'm the project manager, and I report to our program manager who is Raul Lopez. He's also on this call as well. The city has partnered with Graham Associates to design this project, and our two of our engineers are Mark Burkhardt and Joe Perkins. My role as a transportation project manager, I'm the professional responsible for resource coordination, procuring and managing the contracts and services for the delivery of this project, whose limits and scope are predefined by the transportation planners. Our consultant project manager role is their professionals and they are responsible for the design, coordination of the resources needed for the survey, right-of-way acquisition, utility relocations, permit submittals, bidding, and construction management, and ensuring the elements of the predefined scope are included in the final design. Approximately 1.1 miles of WJ Boas will be reconstructed between Boat Club Road on the west and Elkins School Road on the east. The scope of the project includes a widening between Boat Club Road to Elkins School Road. We're going to modify the traffic signal at Boat Club Road. We're going to do some studies to determine if a traffic signal is needed at Bowman Roberts Road, which includes analysis to determine the best design for this intersection. This road is going to become a four-lane divided roadway. We're going to have 10-foot multi-use trails on the north side of the road, and we're going to try to accommodate that 10-foot wide trail on the south side, but there are going to be some areas where the sidewalks have been reduced between five to seven feet in order to reduce the impacts to a private property. There's also drainage improvements, which includes the elimination of the roadside dishes that we currently see out there. We're also going to do some channel and culvert improvements north and east of Elkins School Road. We're also going to include streetlights into this design. The design sections are being reduced in certain areas in order to minimize the impacts to home, to trees, and to parking areas. We're also going to be doing water and sewer relocations on this project as well.  It used to be part of Taren County and it is currently a two-lane country road with side road ditches. The first picture there is looking west at Bow Club Road into the Eagle Ranch area. As we expand this intersection from a two-lane to a four-lane, we will be doing redoing the signal as well. We have a lot of overhead power lines near Bow Club Road. We also have underground natural gas pipelines and franchise utilities that we will be having to relocate as part of this project. Here's some more pictures of the current conditions of the roadway. There are areas where you see quite a bit of space between the existing buildings and the current roadway section. Those are areas where, as development came through the city, the city was able to get a right-of-way dedicated by these particular developers. Especially, you will see that near the storage warehouse on the west side of the project and near West Crest Way, where you could see the white section in the middle picture. There was a temporary roundabout that was recently constructed at the intersection of W. J. Bowes and Bowman Roberts to alleviate the congestion at the intersection. The city plans to conduct a study to determine if the roundabout will need to be expanded or if we need to change it to a traffic signal. We'll have to go out there and our Graham associates will be conducting that study to determine which is the best solution in order to maximize the capacity at that intersection and get a traffic moving. Currently, the existing cyber ditches will be eliminated. The street will become a carbon gutter section, which means all the storm drain will be going underground. And I'm going to get into a little bit. This is just a schematic design. This is just a very preliminary planning schematic that we're using in order to determine what's going to be the best way to design this roadway. It will be four lanes. There'll be two lanes going westbound and two lanes going eastbound. The median will vary in size. It's just going to depend on the width will depend on how where they are and how we can, we can minimize the impact to private property that has developed along this corridor in the last 20, 30 years. And this is just more of that schematic design as, as you go toward the intersection of Bowman Roberts. And I just wanted to reiterate that we will be looking at figuring out whether we're going to keep this roundabout or we're going to put in a signalized intersection. And start starting right around set bar wise street going eastbound. This is where we have a lot of private properties that are going to be impacted by this roadway widening the developments that occurred on the north side of the street to have dedicated right away when they came in for permitting through the city. And on the south side of the street, we have the temple Baptist church and other private properties that are going to require right away acquisition. And then these areas is that we're looking into to really minimizing that median in order to reduce the amount of right away take along the frontage of these homes. As we continue eastbound, the project ends a little bit east of Elkins school road. We are going to do improvements to the current a culvert that's at Marine Creek tributary. That culvert is very undersized and it over tops when we get significant rainstorm events. So that culvert will be upsized in order to minimize the over topping during certain rainfall events. The typical section for this roadway was supposed to have been 110 feet, but we are going to get a variance to try to reduce it to 90 feet in some areas in order to to minimize the impact to those private properties. As we go over toward the east side of the project, that's what we plan to do some some right away acquisition and minimize that to about 74 feet to to 70 feet in order to to reduce that those media widths and be able to accommodate and get this roadway as far away as we can from from people's property. So the schedule we're going to start right away acquisition this summer. Between now, between summer, between 2 and summer, between 3, it takes approximately about a year to get right away. First, this coming month in June and July, we got, we got to get survey started. So, in order for us to really get into into the design of this roadway project, we have to get that accomplished. We have a substantial completion of of the design next summer by 2023. Once we obtain right away, it's going to take about another year to do utility locations as many of you know, that are living this area. This is, this used to be a Tarrant County road. And so there's a lot of utilities that need to be that need to be relocated above and below the ground. And so once we, we get the right away, we'll be able to to do start relocating those. We plan to start construction sometime in the fall of 2024. These dates are very tentative as we progress in the design and figure out the complexities of this project. We'll, we'll be able to give you a more finite dates, but, but for now, this, this is pretty much the, the estimated that for the construction to start in the fall of 2024. And it's going to be anywhere between 18 to 24 month projects. So we're going to assume we're going to be completed around the fall of 2026. We do have a project funding sources. We had a Tarrant County bond election in November of 2021, which the county is, is, is paying for some of some of the, this money. Some of the monies are coming from Tarrant County as well as from the Fort Worth 2022 bond program that the residents of Fort Worth voted on in May of 2022. The construction cost for this project is about 30 million dollars. Here's my information on the left, and there's my phone number and my email address. Feel free to call me or email me if you have any questions. And we also put Raj Gupta. He's our traffic management. He's one of our traffic engineers for the city. And that's his information there in case you have any questions about traffic. And with that, that's all the information I have on the project. I'll open it up to questions. Alex, this is council member Flores. I'm on the call. I wasn't able to come good. I wasn't able to get on the, the meeting line for some reason, but in case I missed it, I apologize. But is there any. Is there any plan, I guess, when it comes to detours due to construction that folks should know about? At this point in time, we haven't quite yet gone through those exercise yet. I think as we get into more, the design will be able to, to make those determinations about detours. Okay. All right. My request being, once we know what those particulars are, if they can somehow be posted on the city webpage, let people know what to expect how to make adjustments to their travel schedule. The meetings get necessary. Absolutely. We can post those up to the, to the project website. Great. Thanks Alex. Thank you. Have you anticipated burying any of the power lines where the construction is going to be so they wouldn't be seen anymore? No, those are going to stay overhead and visible. The cost to bury those power lines is pretty significant. And that's why we were just relocate them to the edges of the roadway. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Alex, we have it. Sorry, go ahead sir. Oh, no worries. This is Billy with Eagle Mount second all school district. And so my question is, have y'all determined how you're going to phase this road as far as maybe building the north and building the south or. Has that been discussed or determined? Well, we plan to keep the current lanes open. One of the pros about this project is that we currently have to functioning lanes going west of East. So the plan is to construct the new pavement first and then swap traffic over and construct the north side of the street where the existing lanes are. Okay. And typically when I start projects, I usually have a list of stakeholders. Which usually includes the, I know there's quite a bit of elementary schools out here, middle school and also Boswell high school to the north. And I also have, I do communications with them also communications with the with the bus. The bus folks to let them know when we plan to change a route. It do anything on this roadway that may impact their route and timing in the mornings. And usually I send those out. I try to do at least two weeks ahead of time. So they're, they, they stay, you know, in the know of what we're doing with this road. Because I know school traffic can be can be hectic during during construction. Yes. Thank you very much. And that obviously that the consideration is very appreciative. And then just so I confirm what you said it's going to be a complete four lane road with center turn lanes. Yes, we'll have a median and some of those mediums will have turn lanes. Okay. Very good. But you so you would have to four lanes each side with a center turn lane. Okay, that's just it's just that some of those some of the width of that road is going to be narrow. If you're on the east side of Innisbrook. Yes. Okay. I think it was. Let me go back. Alex, I think there's a little confusion with semantics here.  If that's what the gentleman is asking. There's going to be a solid median, not a two way left turn lane. And there will be left lanes at those medias at the intersection at the medium breaks. Correct. Okay, but no, no dedicated turn lane. Not a continuous one. No. Okay. They'll be a medium with with with left turn lanes cut into it. Okay. Yes, ma'am. I had a question on the median in front of Billingham and WJ, as is that set in stone. Billingham, let me get to that. Over on the left hand side. We're working through details on those I think as we progress more into the design of this project. We'll be able to make determinations of where we're going to have these medians. Right now, because of Bob Hanger, we're anticipating having one there. I was going to piggyback on that gentleman's question. Bob Hanger has had quite a few wrecks. People will drive through Bob Hanger. Breeze right through WJ Boaz. We've had 3 different cars slam through a brick wall right there at that intersection. And then other wrecks just a little bit down the road. And I was wondering our traffic patterns at Rex and it's going to be reviewed when designing the road or things like that. Absolutely. We take, we follow all of the guidelines for a safer way design. So we're going to be able to, we have, we work closely as well. It's not just my department, TPW, but I work with our traffic management folks to make sure that we're following all the guidelines and all the rules. So when we do these peer review meetings, we look at all that. The traffic patterns to how many wrecks where they are. Appreciate it. We also, when we do warrant study for traffic signals, that's, that's one of the criteria is for our engineers to obtain the, the direct reports, the incident reports at these intersections. Ah, okay. Thank you. So Alex, there's a few questions in the chat. I'm going to start going down them. Is there any plan to widen the road to all the cater road? And I'll answer that one. At this time, that is not funded. That section is not funded. The only section that was funded was the section that we're discussing today. That section is identified for future improvements, but it's not funded at this time. And the next question is why is the construction stop in Elkins, Elkins school road. It's kind of the same question. Yeah, it is not funded yet going all the way to all the cater questions. Will Cromwell Marine Creek and Bella boss will be under construction at the same time. And I'll take this one as well. Alex. And I'm sorry, I'm Raul Lopez and the engineering manager that oversees the design and construction. All of all of the thorough fairs and for orphan Alex is in my team. I have a little more knowledge of, you know, kind of a holistic knowledge of the arterials and what the plans are. So that's why I'm answering some of the questions. We, we try to offset the construction offset the construction so that not all the thorough fairs in construction. Same time. The challenge that we have is that we have to, we have 5 years to deliver all of this products that we have started right about the same time. So they end up starting construction right around the same time. So we will try to offset them and work, you know, with one another logistically to avoid, you know, having all of them. Having at least, you know, routes to to alleviate traffic will some of them are in the construction. The challenges we have to finish all of this products within a year or within 5 years. I'm sorry. Expression is far we are we redoing the roundabout we already spent money on that roundabout at Bowman Roberts is was meant to be temporary sort of a quick solution for the. The traffic conditions at the time, but it's being revaluated whether around about whether it can be expanded or if the traffic signal is more efficient. Once the road is widened to 4 lanes right now is only 2 lanes. So that's going to be taken into account. Any sidewalks in the plan? Yes, there are sidewalks along the entire corridor when we do improvements to the fair affairs sidewalks are always included. We have a we call it complete streets policy and that is meant to provide mobility for cars, pedestrians and bicycles and other means of transportation transit as well. So, if the plan stays as it is generally designed. Where is the closest you turn for people coming out of Bellingham? Alex, can you bring the plan the screen back there? They'll be able to turn at Bob Hanger. If you're coming out of Bellingham. That would be the meeting opening. Which end of the road will you be starting at? That's, we haven't determined that yet. We're at the very early stage of the project. So, this is a very first public meeting that we have and we will have more meetings as we progress the design. And once we have a contractor on the contract, then we'll have what we call a pre construction meeting and will provide that information, which, which side we're going to start. And how are we going to progress through the construction. Excuse me rule. Yes. So the question on those sidewalks where there be sidewalks on the north and south side of the road. Correct. Yes, sir. Okay. Very good. Sure. That's all of the questions that I have in the chat. At this point. I think we'll give it a few minutes. If anybody either on the phone that wants to add an additional question, if anybody comes up with other questions. I think we have 1 more question. I will cars going east and bows, get into Bellingham. So. So they'll, they'll have to either go in. There's 2 entrances to that subdivision. There's 1 at Innisforc Lane, which has a median opening and then there's Bellingham road. So, if you are going. He's bound, you can enter your neighborhood on Innisforc Lane. Or if you don't want to enter there, you're going to have to you turn at Elkins school road. Well, I don't see it unless I'm missing it. I don't see a D cell lane at Elkins school road to make you turn. So they would just be using that center lane to you turn. Yes. Okay. That's something that we can look into to see if we can fit a diesel lane there. I'm going to put that on my notes. 50 feet. You can get in there or something. Jason Sanders. I live in Innisforc. This is more of just a suggestion rather than a question, but I would really appreciate it. I know many others on this call are probably living in this brick as well. If we can somehow reconsider that median when you're going eastbound on bows, turning on Bellingham. I think that would that help us help us a lot of us out. Kind of get through some of this some of these issues that we're having with this project. Okay, we'll definitely consider it. This is just a schematic. Once our grant associates gets into the into the traffic counting and more into a thorough design, we'll be looking at all that. Is there a set time on the hours they're going to be working? We usually let contractors work from 7 to 7 p.m. and they're allowed to work on Saturdays. Construction. Yes, ma'am. Yeah, we usually that'll work. We don't do because of residential adjacency though, they will not be allowed to work in at night. It's typically 7 to 6 on weekdays and then Saturdays. They're not going to work. They need to let us know by Thursday at noon. And he starts at 9 at 9 in the morning cannot start work before 9 in the morning on Saturdays. And it is very rare that they work on Saturdays or Sundays, never Sundays. Does anyone else have any any questions? My information. Alex, this is Mark. I just wanted to add a couple of points to the questions that were asked. One of them is we are considering a signal at Bob hangers to read it all depends on traffic counts, but. We've already discussed that with the traffic engineer that that's probably a possible location for. For a traffic signal. Because of the trip because that rug goes so far to the south. It does carry a lot of cars. We've also looked at. Joe and I have looked at Elkins school as a possible. Small left turn there to provide access for a turn lane. Not showing on the schematic, but. But if you don't turn around there, you would be blocking the traffic to do that. And I think the other point I wanted to make was. It involved the sidewalks and the trail system. Basically, we have a full trail system from. A boat club road all the way to Bowman's. Robert's. We have 10 foot trails on both sides of the road all the way to Bowman Roberts. At that point, we're maintaining a 10 foot trail on the north side. All the way through the project. So it goes all the way to the end of the project on Elkins school and. And then from. From Bowman Roberts to Elkins school in the south side is where we reduce. The trail to actually a sidewalk and areas. So we don't minimize impacts on the existing homes and parking. So on there. And we are trying to the tree line that you see along the north side of the subdivisions. We are trying to maintain those trees as part of the trail system so that there's a canopy cover. Of trees that are. That would possibly shade that and help out with the trail system there. So. This is Joe, the question there's 1 on about the trail different from a sidewalk. It's just mainly the width. The trails are 10 foot sidewalks or less. And the trails are watered just to allow bicycles to be on on the trail instead of on the roadway. That's correct. And then. Yep. I guess the other. The other thing regarding the. The construction and maintaining 2 lanes of traffic. Typically on. Project like this will try to maintain 2 lanes on 1 side. So utilize the existing roadway. I know it's pretty. Close to the center of the right away right now. But whatever side the. That we can utilize more of the existing road. We may have to widen the existing road a little bit during. Construction to keep 2 lanes on. We would widen 1 side of. The road build a full 2 lanes and then move traffic from. From the old 2 lane road to the new 2 lane road and then build the other 2 lanes. Of this road and then finally as a 3rd phase, we would build the medians and center turn lanes. So that would be typically of how we would construct that. So there's 1 more question in the chat is as well. Any ballers were being styled to keep cars from driving. Into the brick wall on the north side of Bose road. I think the big difference from. The existing conditions to the proposed conditions is that we're going to have a curved roadway. There is going to be a curve and curves are usually. What are the functions of the curve is to deter. Try cars when they view off the road to. Going into fences or properties. Typically on a thoroughfare like these are no ballers in style is the curve that serves the purpose of the baller. There are a couple of other questions as well. 1 of them is will the grade be the same or will it be higher or lower. And that's in reference to the sidewalk. I think so. Yeah, the sidewalk is going to be. Higher than the road if that's the question. It's going to look just like your typical thoroughfare where. A sidewalk is about 6 inches or 8 inches above the surface of the road. And this is Mark again on that subject to the. The existing road is built up in the air. So the new road will actually be cut down on more. It'll probably create a small retaining walls along. The sidewalk areas so that'll actually. You know, with the road being lower and the sidewalk wall being there will be more of a deterrent to from people being able to run into your fence. So. The last, the last thing I see in chat roles. Jason says that when schools back in sessions, those U turns are going to be virtually impossible in the mornings and afternoons of schools. They're just letting in or going in or letting out. And he agrees with comments that it's going to cause more accident. Yes. And I want to say something that we didn't say out, you know, at the onset of the meeting is this road is being very challenging to design because we. We were juggling two things. We don't want to take right away, you know. Fast amounts of right away from the existing properties on the south, because that would be number one cost prohibitive and number two. Damaging to all those properties. So, so we're trying to limit the width of the road to avoid to minimize the right away take. Number 2 is where the very preliminary stages and we'll be looking at traffic counts and, you know, school traffic and so on and so forth. And none of this has been set in stone yet, but there will have to be compromises. Prime example is this Bellingham Road versus Bob Hangar Street. We have to have a meeting opening on that road that has the most traffic. We can't give it to the smaller road. Especially when there's no other interest. I'm not saying that's how it's going to end up being, but we have to have compromises because of the limitations on space on this road. The other thing that I want to say is that are new lane standards go from 12 feet to 11 feet. So it's going to be a much narrower lane and that studies show that that forces people to slow down and those all of our roads are going to be are being designed instead of 12 foot lanes are going to be 11 foot lanes. So that's going to slow down people. There's a question or the road has saggy spots. Will the new one have saggy spots? Not really sure what we mean by saggy spots. I mean, it's going to be a brand new road. So it's going to be a smooth surface. Will he have low points? I'm not sure Alex that we have. I'm not sure what the profile looks like. Yeah, they'll be low points throughout the. And there will be inlets to catch drainage at those low points. Can we get a copy of the presentation? Yes, we will post a presentation in the project site. People who live in that neighborhood are so well. I'm sorry. I'm not familiar with the term. This mark again. I was going to mention on the last comment to that the road. From Sam. Country road to Elkin school road is actually going to be out of the flood plain. So it'll be, it'll be raised up. In the air farther than it is now. So all of the new construction will actually be out of 100 year flood point. I know the current flood plain goes over Elkin school around there through the intersection with the tributary. Not sure we covered this question. Alex, is there a room to fit a roundabout at Bob Hanger? I don't believe so, but Mark, you can tell me. Is there a remote possibility that we could feed a small roundabout there? I don't believe so. We would be damaging those proper that property immediately to the north. I would say four houses. Yeah, it wasn't too bad today. No, okay. We did not want to do that. There's just not room there. Yeah, it's it's very tight. Again, we're trying to narrow down the road as much as we can to limit the to the properties to the south. It is a little bit of a challenging project. I'm sorry, I think in address this one will happen to those who have well water. This project does not change anybody from whatever system they're in. If you have a water, you will continue to have your water. If you have domestic water served by the city for work network. So, are those all the questions we have? Well, just 1, 1 more pop up Alex. Okay. The median at the front of Bellingham will generate excessive traffic from those who want to make left turns. Yes, again, you know, we have to make a decision whether to provide a medium break at Bellingham or Bob Hanger and that'll be based on. Traffic counts and. There's a question whether we can have a meeting in person at some point. Jeff, are we allowed to have meetings in person to be able to do that. At some point in the near future. It's not the next meeting, then maybe the. 3rd meeting at least at least pre construction. I know we're going to have a couple more meetings since again, on the side of this project. And for all of those that didn't get the chance to ask a question or a question pops up after we. Close to meeting you have you'll have Alex's contact information. And with that, my, I just put my information back up on the screen just take a picture of it. And if you have any other questions, feel free to call me or email me. And I want to thank you all for for joining us this evening to discuss this project. And have a good evening. Thank you. One more thing for those that are calling users and can't see the screen her phone numbers<PHONE_NUMBER>. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you, staff. Thank you, Alex. Good job. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good night. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.


From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in the Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE for this Leading with Observability series with Under the Hood with Splunk Observability. I'm John Furrier, Arajit Mukherjee with Splunk. He's a distinguished engineer. Great to have you on. These are my favorite talks. Under the Hood means we're going to get all the details. What's powering Observability? Thanks for coming on. It's my pleasure, John. It's always nice to talk to you. Leading with Observability is this series. We're going to take a deep dive look across the spectrum of the product, the problems that it's solving. But Under the Hood is a challenge because people are really looking at, coming out of COVID with a growth strategy, looking at cloud native, Kubernetes is starting to see microservices really be a big part of that in real deployments, in real scale. This has been a theme that's been growing. We've been covering it. But now architectural decisions start to emerge. Could you share your thoughts on this?  Do you buy a tool here? How do you think that through? What's the approach? Exactly, John. So it's very exciting times in some sense with Observability right now. So as you've mentioned and discussed a few times, there's a bunch of trends that are happening in the industry, which is causing a renewed interest in Observability and also an appreciation of the importance of it. And Observability now as a topic, it's like a huge umbrella topic. It covers many, many different things, like APM, your infrastructure monitoring, your logging, your real user monitoring, your digital experience management and so on. So there's quite a set of things that are all fall under Observability. And so the challenge right now, as you mentioned is, how do we look at this holistically? Because I think at this point, it is so many different parts to this edifice, to this building that I think having a non-integrated strategy where you just maybe go buy or build individual pieces, I don't think that's gonna get you very far, given the complexity of what we're dealing with. And frankly, that's one of the big challenges that we as architects within Splaft, like we are scratching our heads with is how do we sort of build all of this in a more coherent fashion? You know, one of the things, Arjun, I want to get your thoughts on is because I've been seeing this trend and again, we've been talking about on theCUBE a lot around systems thinking. And if you look at the distributed computing wave from just go back 20 years and look at the history of how we got here, a lot of those similar concepts are happening again with the cloud, but not as simple. You're seeing a lot more network, I won't say network management, but Observability is essentially instrumentation of the traffic and looking at all the data to make sure things like breaches and cybersecurity and also making systems run effectively. So there's all, but it's distributed computing at the end of it. So there's a lot of science that's been there and now new science emerging around, how do you do this all? What's your thoughts on this? Because this becomes a key part of the architectural choices that some companies have to make if they want to be in position to take advantage of cloud native growth, which is multi-fold benefits and your product people talk about it, faster times of marketing, all that good stuff, but these technical decisions matter. Can you explain? Yes, it absolutely does. I think the main thing that I would recommend that everybody do is understand why Observability, what do you want to get out of it? So it is not just a set of parts, as I mentioned earlier, but it brings direct product benefits as we mentioned, like, you know, faster, meantime to resolution, understanding what's going on in your environment, having maybe fewer outages at the same time, understanding, you know, your cost, there's so many different benefits. So the point is not that one has the ability to do, maybe do APM or ability to do infrastructure monitoring. The main question is, aspirationally, what are my goals that are aligned to what my business wants, right? So do I, you know, what do I want to achieve? Do I want to innovate faster? In that case, how is Observability going to help me? And this is sort of how you need to define your strategy in terms of what kind of tools you get and how they work together, right? And so if you look at what we are doing at Splunk, you'll notice it's extremely exciting right now. There's a lot of acquisitions happening. We have a lot of products that we're building. And the question we're asking as architects is, suppose we want to use, that will help us achieve all of this and at the same time be somewhat future-proof. And I think even if, you know, any organization that's either investing in it or building it or buying it, they all would probably want to, you know, think along those lines. Like what are my sort of foundational principles? What are the basic qualities I want to have out of this system? Because technologies and infrastructures will keep on changing. That's sort of the rule of nature right now. The question is, how do we best address it in a more future-proof system, right? And so at Splunk, we've come up with a few guiding principles and I'm sure others will have done the same. You know, one of the dynamics I want to get your reaction to is kind of two perspectives. One is the growth of more teams that are involved in the work, right? So whether it's from cyber to monitoring. So there's more teams with tools out there that are working on the network. And then you have the, just the impact of the diversity of use cases, not just so much data volume, because that's been talked about. We're having a tsunami of data, that's clear. But different kinds of dynamics, whether it's real time, bursting. And so when you have this kind of environment, you can have gaps. And SolarWinds, if it's thought of anything, is that you have to identify problems and resolve them. This comes up a lot in observability conversations. M-T-T-I, meantime, to identify and then to resolve. These are concepts. If you don't see the data, you can't understand what's going on. If you can't measure it. This is like huge. Yes, absolutely right. Absolutely right. So what we really need now is, as you mentioned, we need an integrated tool set, right? What we mean by that is the tools must be able to work together. The data must be able to be used across the board. So like my use cases should not be siloed or fragmented, that they should work as one system that users are able to learn and then sort of be able to use effectively without context switching. Another thing that I think concept that's quite important is like, how flexible are you? Like, are you digging yourself into a fixed solution or are you depending on open standards that will then let you, you know, change out implementations or vendors or what have you on the line relatively easily? So understanding how you're collecting the data, how could kind of open standards and open source you're using is important. But to your point about missing and gaps, I think full fidelity, like understanding every single transaction, if you can pull it off is a fascinating superpower because that's where you don't get the gaps. And if you are able to go back and track any bad transaction anytime, like that is hugely liberating, right? Because without that, if you're going to do a lot of sampling, you're going to miss like in a huge percentage of the user interactions, that's probably a recipe for some kind of trouble down the line, as you mentioned. And actually these are some of those principles that we are using to build the Splunk observability suite is like no sample or full fidelity is a core foundational principle. And for us, it's not just isolated to let's say, application performance management, where you know, user hits your API and you're able to track what happened. We were actually taking this upstream up to the user. So the user is taking actions on the browser. How do we capture and correlate what's happening on the browser? Because nowadays, as you know, there's a huge move towards single page applications where like half of my logic that my users are using is actually running on the browser, right? And so understanding the whole thing end to end without any gaps, without any sampling is extremely powerful. And so yes, so those are some of the things that we are investing in. And I think again, one should keep in mind when they're considering observability. You know, we were talking the other day and having a debate around technical debt and how that applies to observability. And one of the things that you brought up really about tools and tool sprawl, you know, that causes problems. You have operational friction and we've heard people say, yeah, you know, I got too many tools and just too much to replatform or refactor, it's just too much paying the butt for me to do that. So at some point they break. I have taken too much technical debt. When is that point of no return where someone feels the pain on tool sprawl? What are some of the signaling where it's like you better move now or while that's going too late? Because this integrated platform, that's what seems to be the way people go, as you mentioned. But this tools sprawl is a big problem. It is. And I think it starts hitting you relatively early on nowadays, if you ask my opinion. So tools sprawl is, I think if you find yourself, I think using three or four different tools, which are all part of some critical workflow or the other, that's just think that there's something could be optimized. For example, let's say I'm observing, whether my website works fine. And if my alerting tool is different from my data gathering or whatever the infrastructure monitoring metrics tool, which is different from my incident management tool, which is different from my logs tool, then if you put the hat on of an engineer, a poor engineer who's dealing with the crisis, the number of times they have to context switch and the number of sort of amount of friction that adds to the process, that the delay that it adds to the process is very, very painful. So my thinking is that at some point, especially if we find that core critical workflows are being fragmented, and that's when sort of I'm adding a bunch of friction, it's probably not good for us to sort of make that sort of keep on going for a while. And it would be time to address that problem. And frankly, having these tools integrated, it actually brings a lot of benefit, which is far bigger than the sum of the parts because think about it, if I'm looking at say an incident and if I'm able to get a cross tool data all presented in one screen, one UI, that is hugely powerful because it gives me all the information that I need without having to again dig into five different tools and allows me to make quicker, faster decisions. So I think this is almost an inevitable wave that everybody must and will adopt. And the question is, I think it's important to get on the good program early because unless you sort of build a lot of practices within an organization that becomes very, very hard to change later, it is just going to be more costly down the line. So from an architecture standpoint, under the hood integrated platform takes that tools for all problem away helps there. You had open source technology, so there's no lock in. You mentioned full fidelity, not just sampling full end-to-end tracing, which is critical, wants to avoid those gaps. And then the other thing I want to get your thoughts that you didn't bring up yet isn't that people are talking about is real-time streaming of analytics. Okay, what role does that play? Is that part of the architecture? And what function does that do? Right. So to me, it's a question of how quickly do I find a problem? If you think about it, we are moving to more and more software services, right? So everybody's a software service now and we're all talking to each other in different services. Now, anytime you use a dependency, you want to know how available it is, what are my SLAs and SLOs and so on. And three nines is almost like it's a given that you must provide three nines or better, ideally four nines of availability because your overall system stability is going to be less than the one of any single part. And if you're going to look at four nines, you have about four or five minutes of total downtime in one whole month. That's a hard thing to be able to control. And if you're alerting is going to be in order of five or 10 minutes, like there's no chance you're going to be able to promise the kind of high availability that you need to be able to do. And so the fundamental question is you need to understand problems quick, like fast within seconds, ideally. Now streaming is one way to do it, but that really is the problem definition. Like how do I find the problems early enough so that I can give my automation or my engineers time to figure out what happened and take corrective action? Because if I can't even know that there's something amiss, then there's no chance I'm going to be able to sort of provide the availability that my solution needs. So in that context, real time is very important. It is much more important now because we have all these software and service dependencies than it maybe used to be in the past. And so that's kind of why, again, at Splunk we invented or reinvested in real time streaming analytics. But the idea again being that's the problem. How can we address this? How can we provide customers with quick, high level important alerts in seconds? And that's sort of a real time streaming is probably the best way to achieve that. And then if I were to, yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead, finish. Yeah, I was going to say that, it's one thing to get an alert, but the question then is now what do I do with it? And there's obviously a lot of alert noise that's going out and where people are fatigued. And I have all these alerts. I have this complex environment. Understanding what to do, which is the sort of the reducing the MTTR part of it, is also important. I think environments are so complex now that without a little bit of sort of help from the tool, you are not going to be able to be very effective. It's going to take you longer. And this is also another reason why integrated tools are better because they can provide you hints looking at all the data, not just one type, like not just necessarily logs or not just necessarily traces, but they have access to the whole dataset and they can give you far better hints. And that's again, one of the again, foundational principles because this is in the sort of the emergent field of AI ops where the idea is that we want to bring the power of data science, the power of machine learning and to aid the operator in figuring out where a problem might be so that they can at least take corrective action faster, not necessarily fix it, but at least bypass the problem or take some kind of corrective action. And that's a theme that sort of goes across our suite of tools is the question we ask ourselves is in every situation, what information could I have provided them? What kind of hints could we have provided them to make short-circuit their resolution process? It's funny you mentioned suite of tools. You have an observability suite which Splunk leads with as part of the series. It's funny suite of tools. It's kind of like, you kind of don't want to say it but it is kind of what's being discussed. It's kind of a platform and tool working together. And I think the trend seems to be, it used to be in the old days, you were a platform player or a tool player. You really kind of couldn't do both. But now with cloud native as it's distributed computing with all this importance around observability, you got to start thinking suite is kind of like a platform features. Could you react to that? And how would you talk about that? Because what does it mean to be a platform? Because platforms have benefits. Tools have benefits. Working together implies it's a combination. Could you share your thoughts on that reaction to that? That's a very interesting question you asked John. So this is actually, if you asked me like how I look at the solution set that we have, I will explain it to us. We are a platform. We are a set of products and tools and we are an enterprise solution. And let me explain what I mean by that because I think all of these matter to somebody or the other. As a platform, you're like, how good am I in dealing with data? Like ingesting data, analyzing data, alerting you. So those are the core foundational features that everybody has. Like these are the database centric aspects of it. And if you look at a lot of organizations who have matured practices, they are looking for a platform where maybe it scales better than what they have or whatnot and they're looking for a platform. They know what to do, build out on top of that. But at the same time, a platform is not a product. 99% of our users, they're not going to make database calls to fetch and query data. They want an end to end, like a thing that they can use to say, monitor my Kubernetes, monitor my elastic search, monitor my whatever other solution I may have. So then we build a bunch of products that are built on top of the platform, which provides sort of the usability, right? So where it's very easy to get on, get send the data, have built-in content, dashboards alerts, what have you so that my day-to-day work is fast because I'm not an observability engineer. I'm a software engineer working on something that I want to use observability, make it easy for me, right? So that's sort of the product aspect of it. But then if you look at organization that a little bit scale up, just the product is also not good enough. Now we're looking at the observability solution that's deployed in an enterprise and there are many, many products, many, many teams, many, many users. And then how can one be effective there? And if you look at what's important at that level, it's not the database aspect or the platform aspect, it's about how well can I manage it? Do I have visibility into what I'm sending? What my bill is? Can I control against incorrect usage? Do I have permissions to sort of control who can mess with my cheese and so on?  So I think in order to build something that's successful in this space, we have to think at all these three levels, right? And all of these are important because in the end it's how much value am I getting out of it? Is not just what's theoretically possible? What's really happening? And all of these are important in that context. And I think, Arjun, that's an amazing masterclass right there, soundbite right there. And I think it's because the data also is important. If you're going to be busting down data silos, you need to have a horizontally scalable data observability space. You have to have access to the data. So I think the trend will be more integrated, clearly and more versatile from a platform perspective. It has to be. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, we're certainly going to bring you back on our conversations when we have our events and or our groups around digital transformation under the hood series that we're going to do, but great voice, great commentary. Arjun, thank you for sharing that knowledge with us, appreciate it. My pleasure, thank you very much. Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here, leading with observability content series with Splunk. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.


Naval Air Facility Masawa's 2015 all-navy snow sculpting team has completed their USS Constitution snow sculpture for this year's Sapporo Snow Festival in Hakkaro, Japan. The team spent seven days using hand tools like chisels, hatchets and shovels to cut, shape and smooth a large sculpture of America's oldest commissioned warship. The sculptors turned an eight-foot square block of compacted snow into a replica of the ship while competing in sub-freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall. The sculpture was adorned with sails full of wind and 15 starboard side cannons ready to fire. Thousands of visitors, including team members from other sculpting teams, stopped by to see what Team Navy was all about. This is the 32nd year that NAF Masawa and its tenant commands have sent a delegation of sailors to the festival to create a sculpture and to serve as goodwill ambassadors. Reporting from Defense Media Activity, I'm Petty Officer Charlotte Oliver.


Hi, I'm Zor. Welcome to Unizor education. I would like to continue talking about planes and lines in the course of Solid Geometry. I suggest you to watch this lecture from the website Unizor.com not from the YouTube channel or anywhere else because the website contains very detailed notes for each lecture. So it would be better if you just read the notes before or after the lecture. Now the previous lecture was about two lines and a plane. And I was talking about when they are perpendicular, parallel, etc. Now this lecture is basically like a mirror image of the previous one because now I have two planes and a line. And again it will be very similar theorems. The same three theorems as before in the previous lecture but instead of planes there will be lines and instead of lines there will be planes. So, ok, here they are. By the way, in the previous lecture the first theorem was if you have two parallel lines and one of them is perpendicular to a plane then another one will also be perpendicular to a plane. Now here the first theorem is very similar but as I said planes are lines and lines are planes. So let's assume that you have one line and you have two planes parallel to each other. Something like this. So this is one line and two planes. Gamma and delta. So gamma and delta are parallel planes which means they do not have any common points, no intersection. And also I know that the line is perpendicular to one of them. I have to prove that it's perpendicular to another one as well. Ok, so this line intersects gamma, plane gamma at point p and let's say it intersects the line delta at point q. Ok, the question is does point q exist? So if my line intersects one of two parallel planes it must intersect another one. Well, how can we address this issue? Let's just think about it. If it's not then if there is no q, if there is no intersection then this line is parallel. How can that be? Well, let's just leave it alone. Let's just assume that there is such a point q. Actually, I think it would be a very good exercise if you think about how to prove that the intersection actually exists. So let's assume it exists. So what we will do next is we will create a plane through the line A and the plane, since it completely contains line A it must contain points p and q on it. So it will intersect. So this would be my plane and it will intersect this and this. So this plane, let's call it I don't know how alpha. It intersects q, it intersects gamma at some p, p star and it intersects delta at q, q prime, p, p prime and q, q prime. Now, these lines are supposed to be parallel because we already discussed this theorem when we were talking about parallel planes. So if you have two parallel planes and these parallel planes are intersected by the third plane then the lines of intersection must be parallel to each other. Well, actually this is a simple thing to prove. I mean, if you think about this these lines are lying in the same plane, alpha. They must not have common points obviously because if they do then the planes would intersect and they are supposedly parallel. Alright, so fine. So p, p prime and q, q prime are parallel to each other. p, p prime is parallel to q, q prime. But p, p prime is perpendicular to the line a because a is perpendicular to an entire plane. Now, if you have a line and you have one perpendicular to the line and another line which is parallel to the first one and everything is going on within the plane alpha. So this is the plane geometry. So obviously if you have a line, one is perpendicular and another line which is parallel to this one. It also is perpendicular from the course of the plane geometry. So that means that q, q prime is perpendicular to our line a. Now, we will do exactly the same with another plane. Let's try another plane and we will have another intersection. p, p prime and q, q second. Absolutely the same logic. It's just a different plane. Let's call it beta for instance. And from this we see that q, q second, double prime, whatever is also perpendicular to a. So consequently we have a line which is perpendicular to two lines on the plane and that is a sufficient condition for the line to be perpendicular to the entire plane as we have proven before. Okay. All right. Okay. So let's go to the next. Yes, we still have this hanging issue with the intersection of the line a with the plane delta. By the way, if anybody comes up with some kind of a very nice and concise proof of this, send it to me and I'll just put it on the website. Meanwhile, I'll think about this myself and I'll put it into notes for this lecture. If it's already not there, I don't remember actually. Anyway, number two. Again it's in a way similar to the previous lecture, the theorem number two, but instead of lines we have planes and instead of planes we have lines. Now in this case I have one line and I have two planes which are perpendicular to the same line. I have to prove that the planes are parallel. Okay. So how can we prove that the planes are parallel? Well, in this case we will do the following. Let's assume they're not parallel, which means there is common point. There is an intersection and there is a common point. So let's say these planes somehow are intersecting somewhere. And there is a point somewhere where they intersect. Well, actually planes intersect along the entire line, but I don't really need the line, I need just one point of intersection. What I do next is, using this point of intersection M, I will draw a plane based on the line and the point of intersection M. Now this plane will intersect gamma somehow and it will intersect delta somehow. So the plane which includes line A and point M should have certain intersections with both gamma and delta. Now, since I was saying from the very beginning that A is perpendicular to gamma and A is perpendicular to delta, it means that A is perpendicular to Pm and A is perpendicular to Qm. So within this plane, which is based on the line in M, I have two perpendicular to the same line A from the point M, which in the plane geometry is impossible, right? We have a line, we have a point, we can have only one perpendicular, we don't have two different perpendicular. Which means that our assumption about the intersection of these two planes is just wrong, they do not intersect, which means they are parallel. Okay, and the third theorem is, if you have a line and a point outside, which is not on this line, and you know that there is a plane, this point belongs to, which is perpendicular to A. Now let's say we have a completely different plane, which also originates, well, it contains the point M, different from the gamma. So there is another plane, whatever the plane actually is, something like this, called delta. So delta is also a plane which contains point M. So my point is that if this is a different plane from the gamma, then this plane cannot be parallel to gamma, and it cannot be perpendicular to the line. So again, gamma is containing the point M and is perpendicular to A. Delta is a different plane, which also contains point M. So this new plane delta cannot be parallel to gamma and cannot be perpendicular to A. Well, it's actually a trivial theorem, quite frankly. Well, number one, it's obviously not parallel to gamma because gamma and delta have a common point, right? They're intercept, so nothing to talk about, there is no parallelism at all. How about perpendicularity? Well, let's just think about if delta is perpendicular to A, and we know that if two planes, two different planes are perpendicular to the same line, they must be parallel, that we have just proven that there is no parallelism among these two planes. So it cannot be perpendicular to A. That's basically it. Now, what's important right now is not that these are, well, difficult or anything like this theorem. They're not difficult at all. Actually, they're trivial and everything follows from definitions and probably one or two theorems which we have already proven. What is, however, important from educational standpoint is for you to basically repeat these proofs and preferably not even to yourself but on the paper. If you write these proofs, that will be even much better. You will learn it better, actually, because when you're writing something and you're trying to prove your point, it's actually a tremendous help in development of your analytical thinking, your logic, etc. So I strongly recommend to do just that. You can listen to lecture, you can read the notes, but then put everything aside, have a piece of paper and try to prove these simple theorems just by yourself and that would be the great help for you. That's it. Thanks very much and good luck.


Hello and welcome to the International Daily Roundup by People's Dispatch, where we bring you major news developments from around the world. Our headlines, coup in Guinea leads to a whole throw of government, six Palestinian prisoners, dig a tunnel and escape from Israeli prison, organizations demand an arms embargo in Israel and in our video section we take a look at the importance of the Central Asian region in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In our first story in a coup in Guinea, armed forces captured President Al-Fakondi and announced the dissolution of the government on Sunday. At least two people were wounded in heavy gunfire in and around the presidential palace at the capital, Conakry, during the arrest of the president. The coup leader, Colonel Mamadi Dambuya, a television broadcast declared that the armed forces had taken over control of the country and dissolved the government led by President Kondi. He also announced the dissolution of the constitution and said that military leaders would run the country. The group of soldiers who carried out the coup called themselves the National Committee for Reconciliation and Development. They released a video assuring that Kondi is safe and in their custody. They also announced a national curfew and invited outgoing ministers and former presidents of institutions for a meeting on Monday. Kondi, who is 83 years old, won his third presidential term in the elections held in October 2020 and was declared president on November 7. The opposition had alleged fraud during the elections. His decision to amend the constitution, which had a two-term presidential limit to contest again for the third term in March 2020, had resulted in massive opposition-led demonstrations across the country. The protests were suppressed using force in which dozens of protesters died and hundreds were arrested. However, several regional and global leaders condemned the coup and asked the military to release the president. The economic community of West African states or ECOWAS threatened to impose sanctions. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres asked the coup leaders to release Kondi immediately saying that he was personally following the situation. Several activists and rights groups in Africa also condemned the coup with some claiming that it is backed by foreign powers, such as the ex-colonial power of France and the US. There are claims that the coup leader Damboya and others had links to and in some cases were trained by the US-Africa command. In our next story, six Palestinian prisoners who were being held in the Gilboa prison in northern Israel managed to escape overnight by digging a tunnel in their cell that led out of the prison complex. Local news reported that at least four of the prisoners were serving life sentences. Palestinians from various walks of society hailed the prisoners escaped with many calling it heroic and a blow against the Israeli military. Israeli prison authorities later claimed that they did not detect the escape till 4 a.m. on Monday during a headcount. According to the authorities, the prisoners had dug a hole below a toilet in their shared cell. The other end of the tunnel was situated a few meters away from the prison walls and was covered with beads. According to reports, one of the prisoners, Zakaria Zubedi, was a former commander of the Fatah Party's Al-Aqsa Marti's Brigade based in Jilin. The other five prisoners were members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Resistance Group. Four of them were serving life sentences for alleged attacks on Israeli citizens and have been in prisons since the mid-90s and early 2000s. Qadur Afarez, the head of the Palestinian Prisoner's Club, an organization which works for the advancement of prisoners' rights said that we are happy with this escape. We have called a lot for the necessity of liberating all Palestinian prisoners. If the prisoners can free themselves, this is a great thing. Al-Jazeera reported. Fawzi Barhum, spokesperson for Hamas also hailed the escape, calling it a real challenge to the occupation. Islamic Jihad in a statement termed the escape an utter failure for the occupation army and a strong slap to the Israeli military and the whole Israeli system. Continuing with Israel, over 100 international rights organizations and civil society members called upon the states, parties to arms trade treaty or the ATT to impose an arms embargo on Israel for its violation of the rights of Palestinians and international humanitarian law. Organizations, including the Adala Justice Project, other made prisoner support and Human Rights Association, Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. The Israeli Committee Against House Demositions and Jewish Voice for Peace are signatories to the letter. The letter mentioned several recent cases of Israeli violence against Palestinians, such as the airstrikes on Gaza and May that lasted 11 days. They also noted the wave of ongoing Israeli attacks on Palestinian residents in several East Jerusalem neighborhoods, such as Sheikh Jarrah. The signatories called for all ATT state parties to immediately terminate any current and prohibit future transfers of conventional arms, munitions, parts and components to Israel. The letter cites various articles of the ATT that prohibit the transfer of arms when used to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, or other war crimes as defined by international agreements to which they are a party. It also highlights that fading to act according to the ATT and international law only contributes to the ever-increasing suffering of the Palestinian people. And finally, in our video section, we take a look at the importance of Central Asia in the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The region has been key for a variety of reasons, including its natural resources and proximity to Russia and China. We bring you an excerpt of an interview with News Clicks Prabir Purkayashta on this issue. Afghanistan has always been thought to be strategically important, not only because it abuts South Asia, of course, India and Pakistan, but it also abuts West Asia, and as you said, Central Asia. It also abuts China, which has always been a target. And in the time that the Soviet Union existed, Central Asia was really either Soviet Union or China. So that was the thrust of Afghanistan for the United States, that this was a direct intervention, perhaps a gateway to intervention into then what was Soviet Union and what was Xinjiang province, as we know, also Tibet. So this is one part of it. And let's not forget that United States had an ongoing war at the time with Iran virtually. And after the particular hostage crisis, this was also declared by Carter. Carter had two very important declarations. One declaration was, entire oil in West Asia was a security interest of United States. Anybody intervening with that will be then crossing the red lines of the United States, the trip lines of the United States. So declaring West Asia's oil as essentially belonging to United States in some sense. So that was one. And it is important because dollar was underpinned by oil. And therefore, dollar was extremely important for U.S. financial control, which it wanted to assert over the world, which it did assert after the fall of Soviet Union, particularly. Second was, as you have noted, Central Asia, because it was gateway to what after the fall of Soviet Union becomes what I call the various thans, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that, a lot of them, about Central Asia. Now what's important of Central Asia is something people do not understand. But if you look at the Eurasian land mass, you have Western Europe, which is not very big. It only looks bigger on a market or map. But if you look at what is called the Equal Area Projections, then you will find it's not that big an area. It's a relatively small part of the world. But you have Central Asia, which is pretty large. And you have a number of countries in which United States wanted to intervene after Soviet Union fell. Now increasingly, that has weakened. Over the years, Russia has re-emerged. You have China also emerging. And with the Belt Road Initiative, the economies of these countries may get unlocked in a way that earlier wasn't possible. There are also gas and oil pipelines in these areas. And if you look at the, essentially, the mineral wealth of these areas, including gas fields, oil fields, connectivity to Russia and to China would really unlock a lot of these resources for these countries and for also their growth, integration to the global economy. So if we look at all of that, apart from the mineral riches of Afghanistan, which I think is going to take a lot longer to come into play, if you look at that, other issues also are, for instance, the agricultural producers of this country. So if they get an access to both the Chinese and the West Asian, as well as an investment, the Iranian market, and Iran is a big country with a presence in this region, Turkey is also abutting this region. So it has also some interest, particularly because a lot of Turkic-speaking tribes are Turkic-speaking population in these areas, including in Afghanistan itself. So if we take all of that into account, I think this region is going to play a very important geopolitical and economic role. And that is where the United States really wanted to have a presence. Through Afghanistan, that's what Brzezinski says, and that's what it really was. Afghanistan, particularly with the Iran embryo, and the fact that Iran was an enemy for the United States, I think that was also in the crosshairs of the United States with the intervening in Afghanistan. Don't forget the Iraq invasion followed soon after. So West Asia was definitely in the play, but Central Asia, yes, of course, because already you have Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, all of them abutting on the North, Afghanistan. And then of course, you have a long border with Iran. You have a very small border with China, and also you have a border with Pakistan. Of course, India is supposedly having a border, but as you know, that's really at the moment under control of Pakistan. So given this, I think we are seeing United States having a rather weak hand after this intervention in Afghanistan comes to an end. I don't think it has really made spaces for itself to insert in the now, the stance as we called, and this is really going to get more integrated with Iran on one side, with Russia on the other side, China on the other side, and possibly Turkey as a question mark, what do they do in this period? That's all we have time for today. We'll be back tomorrow with more news from around the world. Until then, keep watching People's Dispatch.