Hello, everybody. I'm Sam, I'm here to start. Hi, welcome. So logistically, we have people coming into our committee downstairs at 10.30. They conveniently happen to be the same people who are staffed against in this committee. Damien and Joyce, I hope Joyce will be here as well. So what I'm going to do to start off is to have Damien highlight the differences between what we sent over in our last version to the house and what the house sent over to us in their last version. This is what they have. Great. I'll have this one over here. Oh, thank you. Perfect. I'll save it. Yep. So if you go to the sheet labeled Summary of Changes H107, short two-pager. This is probably the quickest summary of the differences between the two bills. And then you've also got this giant chart here, which if you fold it over, the last two columns. Oh, thank you. We have, like, micro-pages. You can't do that. I'll get to them. We're all in micro-pages. Yeah. So it's legible on 11 by 17. Sorry. Sorry. Oh, my goodness. But if you take a look at it, the furthest two columns to the right show the key components of each bill. And then all the other columns are existing laws in other states. So to get you through the kind of the key points, so the changes, this says Summary of Changes to H107. It means changes from the House to the Senate. So in the Senate, they've gone to 12 weeks for bonding, eight weeks for family care, and a six-week voluntary opt-in benefits for the employee's own illness, what we often call TDI. And that's in comparison to the House, which was 12 for bonding and eight for family care and TDI. And the TDI is automatic, not often. So people, I think, should feel free to ask questions as we go. And I have one with the 12 weeks that the House has for parental leave. How does that differ between a couple and an individual? It does not. So in the House, it is 12 weeks for any employee. So any qualified employee gets up to 12 weeks for bonding, regardless of whether they're a single parent or a two-parent household. So a two-parent household could get up to 24 weeks total? Yes. And ours was, I thought we were at 16 weeks. You are. That's what those two double crosses there lead to a footnote. If you notice, if you look at the back, the microprint. Exactly what you're saying. Even the fan faith is getting it to us. We'll be able to see it in a minute. Yeah. Oh my God. It's slightly larger than the print that's on your check has a security feature. But it's smaller than our double opt-in. Yeah. But anyway, there are, as you can see, there's literally, there are so many little nuances to these family leave bills. I don't know. I've run out of symbols basically for footnotes. And so just getting there, and just if I may, just if we can have a quick explanation from the Senate just about their thinking about the voluntary portion of TDI. We made it mandatory and included a tax rate that included that as a mandatory issue. And the Senate just returned the voluntary with a separate tax contribution estimate as well. Can you just tell me the thinking in the Senate about that? It primarily had to do with the cost of the payroll tax and we tried to figure out ways to keep that cost down somewhat. And we learned that there were a significant number, I think the percentage I've heard, 40 to 50% of Vermont workers already have TDI. And it's probably better TDI than what was proposed in the House version and it's paid for by the employer. And so what I'd say primarily in all honesty was the impact of the contribution rate. And anyone, before Damian moves on, does anybody else have questions? Okay. So it was a finite, I mean it was basically the goal was to see what size program you could get. And it was an expensive benefit and when we, I guess both sides left the option of some sort of sharing between employer and employee and stuck it all on the employee. We felt like we wanted to lower that cost to the employee and this was an expensive benefit for the employee and a lot of employees already had it. So we thought, I'm a fan personally of TDI but given the realistic realism of our body and where we were, this is something that we had to not really agree to. So I still don't see where it says 16 weeks. Is it in one of these? It is in one of the footnotes here. It's laid out. Maybe I have the wrong code here. Oh, I see that. Double cross. Double cross, yeah. Double cross. What does that mean? What is Damian's signal against? Believe me, there's nothing. I'm just a surface here, guys. I am skin deep. Isn't that like Ray's lightsaber in Star Wars? Wow. Kind of deep cuts this morning. All right. So it is in much more legible print than your summary of changes. And we talk about it towards the bottom of the page. So I'll get there in just a minute. The other kind of key difference that is kind of the headline difference is just the difference in the contribution rates. And you were just touching on that. The base contribution rate on the Senate plan is 0.2 percent. And for those who are into TDI, there's an additional 0.38 percent. If you get to a total of 0.58 percent of the taxable wages, the contribution rate on the House plan is 0.55 percent for everything. The reason that you see the large, the slightly larger rate for the voluntary opt-in is because you'll have self-selection in that pool. So folks who want that benefit are going to be in a smaller insurance pool. So they're going to pay a little bit more for that. Is that premised on a number that JFO has come up with a voluntary participation rate? Yeah, so... And this is something that Joyce is better to talk about. But Joyce, what she did is she looked at studies that attempted to sort of model voluntary participation and then built that into the projected costs and the projected incidents of use and so forth. And so you will have more people participating than actually use the benefit. But the ratio between those is closer than it would be in the broader pool so people pay a little bit more for that benefit. But the base benefit cost diminishes significantly because TDI is the biggest driver of that cost. Faith, has Joyce been notified to come up? Yes, she has. Okay, thanks. Damien, did we ever actually get a projected percent of the company of the number of businesses that provide TDI in this name? So there is data on that. Just not from memory. What the percent was? There is data on that from the 2013 Department of Labor fringe benefit study and there is national data. Unfortunately this summer when the labor market information did their fringe benefit study they were looking at different benefits this time around. So they were looking at sort of more workplace wellness benefits that promote kind of healthy individuals rather than looking at leave which was their big focus and their last. Last time they did that and because they're a small shop it's not a study that they're able to do very frequently. We have some national data on that. The numbers around that tend to skew so that you see more instances of short-term disability is really what we're talking about where their short-term disability insurance provided up larger employers than smaller employers but there are folks who enroll in the individual market one of the things that we don't have good data on is what is the average short-term disability policy cover because that can vary by employer some of them cover parental leave others may have different benefits some of them require you to be out of work for a certain period of time others start right away. Some require that you can exhaust all your other options. Unfortunately, most of this is tacked to the larger U.S. where for Vermont a large employer is an employer with 50 or more and most other states that's someone who's low to mid-sized in terms of size so our ratio of small employers would be it's just off the charts in some other states but then if you look at percentages of people employed the numbers come a little closer. And then, go ahead. No, you followed non-Glacier because I think you're following this now. No. So the other part is as I understand it and I think this was still maybe you're going to get to it but actually if an employer is currently offering TDI they and it's an equal or more generous benefit than what this program would be then they can opt out and continue to offer their own program so there's actually no change for those employees is that correct? Right, almost. So if an employer is currently offering a short paid family leave benefit I'm just going to use that as sort of the umbrella term so they cover bonding, family care and then for purposes of the senate bill they either offer automatic coverage for your own disability or they offer opt-in coverage for it they would be able to continue offering that provided their benefits are roughly equivalent or more generous then. The house bill you have to offer all three mandatory on the house bill so but if you've already got that plan the sort of base point of if you already have a leave plan as an employer you can opt to keep that and opt out of the state it still holds true. Because I think that was part of our intent was to not make it more difficult for those employers that were already doing I think it's something that it's safe to say both chambers agree on so Did the calculation in the house on PDI of whatever the amount added to it did that include an analysis that certain employers would opt out of this system and people would not have to buy PDI? That's a better question for Joyce I don't know how she backed it on the on the senate version and I'll admit that it's been a while since I've really been deeply in the weeds in this is if somebody wants to opt in to PDI in the senate version and pay an extra contribution rate can they do that on an individual basis or does their employer have to assign the entire workforce of that employer up for it? It's an employee by employee it's on the employee basis so the choices for employees the only exception to that would be if the employer is offering their own private plan the employer can either choose to enroll in PDI or allow people to opt in on an individual basis Just to be clear compared to other employee leave programs or injury programs businesses cannot opt out of workers compensation we don't have an opt out provision for unemployment insurance and and I mean those are the two paid insurance different kinds of insurance programs but we don't offer the law does not offer opt out for those Yeah so to be clear unemployment insurance is entirely public so everybody every employer in the state for their covered employees pays into the unemployment insurance pool or in isolated instances for example the state government you reimburse for the costs but either way you're paying into the same pool with workers comp there is a mandate that you provide coverage but the coverage is provided through private insurance companies the department of labor department of financial regulation doesn't actually create the insurance product they just regulate the two different sides of that department of financial regulation does the insurance and labor works on the claims and where folks are trying to get back to work and so there you basically have to provide coverage but you can shop around in the market and for employers who aren't in industry where it's difficult to get coverage there is what's called assigned benefit market but it's basically all insurance carriers are required to cover employers from this market they're the folks that people don't want to cover because they're high risk where they have a low experience history so the risk is questionable and so there is a pool that they the assigned risk pool that they get put into and then that's covered on a pool basis by the insurance carriers that are in the market but it's still not a public product there's only one state I know of that does public workers comp and there may be others but the only one that I know of is North Dakota so in most states it's done through private insurance carriers so that's a kind of one is an apples to apples comparison to this which combines a public program with a likely private administrator of that program as well as the option to get private insurance California and New Jersey both have a public program with the option to get private insurance and they've had that for a while so this is not a new proposal the difference in Vermont's proposal is that this proposal contemplates getting a private administrator for the public pool as well so and just one last time I just want to be conscious of the time as well but the idea that insurance can be experienced based where as if you use it your rates go up and this is not in that category these are fixed benefits like the most at 73 whatever this number is I think we've testified earlier this last week that it's at 73,000 that's the cap that's where we get to the nine at least in the senate's provision which is 964 a week so a person can't claim more than 964 times 12 for bonding and it's and if they do they're not going to be charged next year a higher rate like we would do for auto insurance or for unemployment insurance or for where people are charged more for using insurance this is just fixed right yes it is fixed the charges to the employees provided during the public plan the if you're an employer going into a provided plan you'll shop around you may get a better rate with one insurance carrier than another the other thing to note is there is some experience built into this but it doesn't change charges on kind of like a small group by small group basis the charges might change on a statewide basis so if utilization is higher than projected the rates might go up if it's lower than projected the rates might go down the same token as the program gets more established you might see what other states have experienced where their rates kind of settle out after several years as the experience gets established the projections get established you get a sort of an ability to project what's going to come in the state and figure out benefits and so forth Deanna can you talk about and maybe this is beyond your expertise but how the department of regulations currently regulates the employer's compensation insurance so that is it's pretty complicated but I'll kind of try to do it on the very sort of 15,000 foot view that I understand it at so basically the way workers comp works is there are sort of occupational categories so for example office workers roofers, loggers wood manufacturing truckers those are all different occupational categories depending on the category you may have very low risk of workplace injury for example an office worker and whereas a roofer or a logger might have a very high risk of an occupational injury and so the rates within the occupations are based on the risk of injury within that occupation and so there's sort of a base rate that's set, the rate is set between the department of financial regulation and then a national body that kind of accumulates data on injury and risk and I am forgetting their name at the moment I wasn't really... Yes, thank you I wasn't really coming in prepared to talk about workers count this morning but yeah so NCCI comes out with rates proposed rates each year department of financial regulation improves them they get rolled into the policies you may see your rates at individual employers go up or down based on that employer's experience some employers can lower their rates by having good safety practices and avoiding injuries and so but the base rates are sort of set there and then they get put out by the insurance carriers in some industries there are safety programs to help lower rates so if you get your employees to go through training or insurance carrier may agree to reduce your rate slightly and your rates are based on your overall payroll for each sort of occupation so you can imagine a roofing company that's a large enough company may have two or three office workers and then 20 roofers who go out in the field and have a truck driver that sort of thing and so each of those will see a different rate and then their policy will be a mix of those rates put together so it's a little different than this where what this is is it's more modeled on income tax with healing with a tax rate that may vary from year to year based on sort of the state's experience and the reason I say it's based on income tax with holding is if you'll think back to your W4s and your I9s when you start a job you can elect to have higher withholding so for example someone like me where my wife is she's self employed so we may want to try to offset her tax burden by doing higher withholding with your income here that's something we could opt to do so by the same token under the senate plan you have individuals who can opt for the higher withholding rate and that coverage under the house plan there's one withholding rate for everyone so does that make sense a little follow up on that and a little bit back to the experience and this may be more of a Joyce question than a question for you I think some of our thinking around the TDI the notion of the opt-in is there a concern about or maybe there was in the senate or not about adverse selection and so people who want it who know they're going to need it or are likely to need it will opt in which means that a higher percentage of people will use it so the usage rate goes up and the costs go up over time which makes it maybe less desirable for people to opt in as the costs go up so I'm wondering if there was any discussion about that in the senate or whether Joyce has any other thoughts on that so just one thing to note on that is the senate did build in a transaction on that where there's a three year if you opt in it's for three years so for example if I know I might be having surgery in the next year I might want to opt in the TDI coverage but I can't jump back out of coverage as soon as I recover so I'm stuck for three years and then after that it's like your health insurance where there's an annual enrollment period where you can either enroll or disenroll but if you choose not to disenroll you're on it for another 12 months until the next period comes to opt out of the coverage and that provides some safety I think Joyce can talk to you more about the sort of adverse selection but the senate did sort of consider that issue of people sort of jumping on just when they need it which would are probably an unsustainable product versus doing this three year period here where you realize when you're opting in that you're going to be paying in for several years and that would be true every time when you renew it's not for one year it's for three years no it's a one year renewal after three years that makes more sense to say for a period of three years to even enroll you guys have to go at 10 30 we have to go at 10 30 we can stay a little later because our two witnesses are in the room here and three of us are on the committee so let's see if we can get through at least the differences here so let me try to zip through this so in the definition section the senate bill added coverage for family care for the employees sibling it also added definition of family care of the differentiation between TDI and family care and it replaced the definition of the Vermont livable wage with the definition for the Vermont average weekly wage which tracks the average weekly wage that we also use in UI and Workers Com the next piece in the actual program it adds a requirement that the contract with the insurance carrier can be reopened and the coverage for the employees on illness becomes mandatory and it also requires an annual audit of the insurance carrier um um is that okay if we have a question so looking at the annual audit can you just talk through about what the specifics are so the provision requires that the insurance carrier have an annual audit performed provided to the commissioner of financial regulation um and the idea here is to make sure that the basically an audit of the books and all the accounts and statements related to um the numbers basically related to this insurance program to make sure that the insurance carrier is operating it in a sustainable manner um and then the commissioner of financial regulation has the opportunity to review that if there is an issue detected there is oversight at the state level yes will that also include the number of claims denied or grievances or things like that is there going to be some report around that I don't recall that language being in that particular piece um I'd have to look at the bill which is to check on that I mean specific to the program so I can get back to you the next time we come back because it'll take me up to you I think that's important to know that that's actually going to happen as opposed to the financial health of the insurance company which is what I think DFR is looking at yes their ability to provide the service right that data so I put that in as a question and I will follow up the next time we meet um in that if there's not just claims denied but if there's anything about grievance grievances of if there is a claim denied kind of what that is so there is an appeals process built into both bills both the house and the senate and the senate um made some changes to that process and it's on the second page here so we'll get there in just a second um let's see on the contributions we've already talked about the rates um and again the employee pays the contributions but the employer can elect to pay some or all of the contributions just like in the house it's only on this summary of changes because this is a question that everyone asks because the senate did discuss a split between them but the final version um came out with the same as the house the benefits so we've talked about the overall numbers the courtyards here the senate as we mentioned earlier has the combined total of 16 weeks per calendar year if both parents are eligible to use the bonding leave benefits so in other words you take a two-parent household um the two parents combined can use up to 16 weeks of bonding leave under the senate plan under the house plan they can use up to 24 weeks a single parent is limited to 12 under both plans 12 weeks the difference with the senate is that they look at your house overall so you can have one parent use 12 weeks and then the other use 4 um or any other combination that gets to 16 the other caveat in the I just want to mention that I asked Joyce to run the numbers on the house versus the senate proposal there and she says the contribution rate wouldn't change would say about the same 12 and 12 so the other caveat here is that there is a limit to a combined total of 6 weeks per calendar year to care for a sibling or grandparent of one or more qualified employees under the senate version the house does not cover care for siblings um so it's basically added an additional 6 weeks of family care for siblings under the senate version um and then added a combined total limit for grandparents um but it's not adding it's just adding the category not adding weeks for grandparents not add weeks just adding the cow and so the qualifications work and that's on a rolling calendar year but this is that's on a rolling 12 month period but this is for a calendar year January 1 to January 1 bookkeeping issue yeah so if you'll remember the benefits here are on a calendar year basis um in the bill so yeah this is for calendar year so there is the potential that you could have a roll over there at the new year but the qualification if I get hired in March I have to I can't qualify until I meet the financial and the time requirements which could be March of the following year could be 6 months from then right so it's a minimum of 2 calendar quarters um that you need employment and then a minimum of about 11,400 I think under the current minimum wage okay um so the other changes here is the wage replacement um changed so under the houses version it was 90% of the employees uh weekly wages up to the Vermont weekly livable wage and then 50% of the wages above that to a cap of $1,334 a week um the senate's version is 90% of the wages up to 55% of the Vermont average weekly wage and then 55% of the wages above that up to a cap of the Vermont average weekly wage which is currently 964 a week so lower cap um but a somewhat steeper wage replacement when you get above that break point um so the cutoffs there just for some dollar figures here you're at 90% of your wages up to 5,30 a week and then 55% until you hit the cap of 964 under the senate proposal and the Vermont average weekly wage was gone to because uh the livable wage as you all know is determined by JFO it's based on a rough formula but that formula changes um over time and so you sometimes see fluctuations where it might spike one year um and whereas the Vermont average weekly wage is tracked by the department of labor based on all of their accumulated wage data uh and it's a standard measure that we use like I mentioned before in workers company life so this ties us to something that again is more of a standard number question is there a um on the senate version is there a um a dollar figure uh I'm trying to say between the two versions is there a wage an earning level where a Vermont would do better under the senate version versus the house version is there like a place where they cross because of the not um it's not that important I think they're close I'm one of our goals there was to I think to give a greater percentage of wage replacement to lower income workers I mean I think I can speak for the committee that when we did hear this we found this most reasonable you know and especially I mean obviously we like we liked our bigger number but I think that this gets at a more solid way of computing that number and it provides I mean I believe 964 um provides the full benefit like like 964 would represent exactly the formula that you put forward up to a salary of roughly 73 or 74 thousand dollars a year which is I don't think it's the median it's not the median wage but it's but it's in Washington County anyway it's considered a little bit more than a livable wage we found that a reasonable alternative to what we were doing let me just interrupt for a second Faith can you guys someone go downstairs and we're going to cancel the S23 and we'll finish we'll apply another half hour here oh that would be great can we push our hearing to 11 instead no because we have somebody coming here to 11 so just do we've been away some other time that would be great thank you okay so the next changes here in the alternative insurance benefits plans the only change was that because of the TDI under the senate plan the employer now has two options if they do a private plan they either provide automatic coverage for TDI to all employees or they allow employees to opt in either one of those complies with the requirements but that's the the only change there I'm not sure if this is tangential but back on your spreadsheet it speaks to the concept of having a private administrator for a public plan versus a public ramp up statewide ramp up or states ramp up for this is that when we have this under under the effective dates on your spreadsheet it talks about or the rant we have a beginning date it says tax begins on April 1, 2020 and then benefits begin in October 1, 2020 those dates need to change well they need to change anyway but they need to change they need to change because it's next year but the question here is these are based on an assumption that this is a private plan based on the information that was in the RFI which said that a private insurance company wouldn't require the 12 or 15 months of collecting benefits to create the pool that they would automatically have the pool ready so that our program is merely it's a software issue that's rather than a collection of trust fund issues is that because everybody else here is like taxes in our public bill when we've considered it in the past has always been we assume that there's 15 months or so of collection so I just want to make sure that's what that meant so that's because of the nature of the private plan there's a little bit of hanging ahead of time but the they don't the presumption is that a private insurance company this is going to be one of many products they offer they don't need to build up the reserve because they're already carrying a large reserve for all of their products so they're going to budget when they do their RFP or their their proposal in response to the RFP they're basically going to give the state a quote that includes a carrying charge that helps feed that reserve and maintain their solvency so they're I think the way to think about it is with a private administrator you pay over time with the state you need to take that time ahead of time to build up the 6 or 9 or 12 months reserve so that's what you see in those differences we would be the first state no, we would be the second state probably to do this because Connecticut is contemplating something similar although Connecticut's has some twists on it too so but the presumption the presumption is that the presumption is that this is with a private plan if according to the bill there's if when the time comes to choose the plan or choose the way we're going DFR and DOL and human resources are going to tell us that they study these plans and if they come down on the side of saying oh you know what a public plan is going to be more cost effective and a better thing for the monitors that timeline changes completely yes and that is addressed in some changes that the senate made in the effective date section the house bill had a date for the commissioner of labor to report back on a plan to stand up the program and the senate bill if I remember correctly has given the commissioner of labor an additional month and then also created a timeline for when taxes start being collected and so forth the house bill the assumption if I'm recalling testimony and committee correctly was that if we get to that point we're going to be coming back to readdress this in legislation so we'll establish the appropriate timeline then because the deadlines would still be give you a year or not a year but a legislative session to push those deadlines so the bottom line is that by using a private plan employees and workers will be able to access benefits more quickly than if we do a state plan which will take longer by probably about a year before people could actually access benefits by at least a year a year or more so they get it faster this way I mean that's the plus that's a plus of all the pluses and minuses that we're contemplating okay so 577A is a new section in the senate bill it is long and involved but the bottom line with it is this establishes the process for an employee to opt in and opt out of the voluntary TDI program so it includes as I mentioned earlier the whole three year requirement for the initial opt in the one year renewals after that the annual period when employees can opt in or out all of that's covered it covers a few pages for the bottom line is it's setting that up and for the house members it's based very closely on the opt in and opt out that you had for self-employed individuals that came out of the house general committee and was eventually dropped from the bill so it's not an unfamiliar process it's just designed around employees rather than self-employed individuals sorry excuse me Damien I think somebody is looking outside so there's tobacco coming into the room so I'm just going to poke my head out and do you want something to drop on them so just see if I can see anyone thanks so much so Damien when it comes to an employee having to choose voluntarily to come into the program can you remind us about what the notice requirements are I mean I'm assuming that anytime there's a change in employee law there's going to be a poster or a posting in an employer's lounge or back room but do we I know for paid leave we went through a process of making sure that people paid sick days that people knew and we went to some extraordinary or more thorough measures than mandatory can you just talk about what's in the bill and so that's a good question it's actually something that I just discovered was inadvertently left out of the bill this time around so the notice provision normally we would have a poster requirement and then with earned sick time particularly because it was a new program we had a requirement that when you hire someone you give them notice of their rights I've already drafted language to put that in so that's something the committee could add in the other thing that some other states have done to is require initial notice to be given to employees when the program starts so kind of a form notice that or pamphlet that's prepared by the state that lets employees know what their rights are and gives them notice that this benefit is coming you'll either get it through a private plan from the employer or through the state plan and your employer can provide you with more details just so people know that they have that right one of the issues that some of the early adopters have was that employees didn't know they even had the option but that was an oversight on my part in drafting and was just discovered the other day so that's the benefit there are notices that are posted for unpaid leave presently right? There are you can actually see one across the hall in the House General Committee are you envisioning a combined notice or are they going to be separate notices? I think that that would be left up to probably the Department of Labor but traditionally they've been separate notices and what employers typically do is there are giant posters that combine all the legally required notices and employers will get a new one of those for each year you do also have the option of doing what we did here at the legislature for a short period of time which is going to the DOL website and printing out notices and then you fill in blanks with a pen and so we did that for a couple of years here before buying and purchasing the posters You have to purchase them? Usually they're prepared by a company but the one that we have which combines if you go to the back of a restaurant you'll see a bulletin board that looks kind of like what this bulletin board would look like pieces of paper posted everywhere this combines all into a piece of poster so you can do it by free by just going to the DOL and other websites and printing them out which is what I did for Ledge Council when I started working here and then what we've started doing just to simplify that process each year is Mike Ferron just orders it I forget how much it costs but it's a nominal nominal cost but if employers do want to save that or they're a small employer they can do a much you know, cheaper process I would like to get through everything so the next section is the appeals section and this goes to Representative Gonzalez's question earlier so the house bill had an appeal to an administrative law judge they actually what the house bill provided is that the appeal would track the unemployment insurance appeals so the initial appeal could be to the private insurance carrier if there is one and then it would track the unemployment insurance appeals for further appeals the senate modified that slightly to take the employment security board who is kind of the intermediate appeal for unemployment insurance out of the process their oversight is really focused on unemployment insurance so this would have required them to gain a new expertise so there is still an administrative law judge but then your next state is to go to the Vermont Supreme Court and that's consistent with some other areas of the law but it applies it to a three-step process to get to a final ruling instead of a four-step process either way under both systems you have due process for folks who get their benefits denied or who are told that they or an employer who is told that they owe more money than they think they do and so how does this track for worker compensation or unemployment? and workers compensation there are a couple of different appeal routes one is if your benefits are denied there is an appeal process through the Department of Labor there is also an appeal process which is my understanding is not frequently utilized through the Department of Financial Regulation related to the way the insurance product is administered with unemployment insurance so your initial appeal is to sort of to the staff person at the Department of Labor it's an appeal to the Commissioner but it's really to the staff where it gets picked up a level they review your file again it then goes to an administrative law judge after the administrative law judge you go to the Employment Security Board and then it goes to the Vermont Supreme Court so those are similar in other employment laws you may see an intermediate step where it goes Commissioner makes a ruling then it goes to the Supreme Court but typically a three-stage process is not unheard of in the employment laws the variation across the employment laws is pretty broad so next in section 581 the rehiring provision the bottom line of both provisions in the House and the Senate is the same the Senate did a lot of work to clarify that provision after hearing concerns from various interested parties that it seemed to be requiring job protection rather than rehiring and it was based on language from the workers which has been long understood to be a you have to re-offer a suitable job but you're not required to protect the individual's job and unfortunately that language was not very clear and so the Senate did a lot of work to clarify that language and so it makes it very clear that you're entitled to one offer of employment in available suitable job not job protection unless you qualify for job protection under the unpaid leave law which already exists which affects only employers over 10 or more if this bill passes it gets standardized to 10, not the 10 and 15 that exists right now that's roughly three-quarter to full-time employees too who have been employed for a year because it is a smaller than just the pool of Vermont employers that employ 10 or more the rulemaking the only change was to deal with the opt-in benefit there otherwise that and it also provided for the use of unemployment insurance information to help with the determination of eligibility for benefits and the same with the adoption of rules section 4 which just sets deadlines for the adoption of rules the UI employment insurance or UI language is going to be readjusted in section 19-2 which I'll get to in a second the section 15 the Senate required additional reports on the RFI and RFP process so the House had a requirement that at the end of the RFP process there's a report back to tell us why you chose the way you did the Senate adds in a request that the RFI and the RFP be given copies be given to the legislature and that there's an intermediate report back on the results of the RFI process as well so it goes from one report to four so there's an ability for the legislature to track what's happening section 16 this was what I talked about earlier pushing out by one month the date for the state to report back if they don't find a suitable administrator so if the state's going to operate the program they now have essentially two months to come up with a plan and report back rather than one month under the House bill so that timeline that timeline that exists in the Senate the Senate bill for now was sometime in July the RFP was supposed to go out there we're supposed to receive responses by sometime in August and then a decision if it's a private well a decision otherwise a decision whether or not this is a beneficial plan through the private administrator or whether we have to go to a public plan would happen I believe the date is November 15th that's correct 20 would have been 2020 right or it would have been 2019 I just want to flag that as we move dates forward whether or not that timeline is sufficient in 2020 or if we have to make considerations pretty tight well right I mean it is I mean I'll be open and clear it's an election year and there's going to be distractions across the board on and this is this could be used as a as a political talking point and I would just assume see this program studied and determined of whether it's given it's worth based on as much of the data information and as a little bit about politics as possible so we just I'm just putting it out there the 15th may be the best date for it but it's just something to flag for now if we were to look at that would that change post projections among the contributions start cash flow sure the Department of Labor the Department of Taxes needs a certain amount of time to set up their pure old collection system so that we look forward and the first month premium was due the month before that so the benefits moved out the month of that first big payment so now there would be changes something to consider thank you so sections 18 and 19 are really housekeeping changes in talking to the Department of Taxes and Department of Labor on the sun and side last year it became clear that we needed to add in provisions in the tax law and the UI law to allow for disclosure of information to the administrator and the other departments working here and within both those cases it has to be conditioned on certain things and confidentiality protections and so forth and so that's what's added in in sections 18 and 19 and also the rule making sections earlier where I referenced that the section 20 is a study of transitioning from the opt-in program to a mandatory TDI program at some point in the future so that's an all-new study and then section 21 is the effective dates which as I mentioned earlier adds a timeline if the state ends up administering the program itself rather than finding a third party administrator you'll notice the big gap here where section 3 and then sections 5 through 14 were omitted that's because they didn't change between the House and the Senate kind of just a last lingering question will be the very last but just on your review you mentioned when dealing with a private administrator that if the general assembly chooses to go mandatory on TDI in the future that any contract would be reopened that there's a provision that any contract would be reopened in order to determine new rates that is that did I hear that correctly there may be other changes that are necessary to the contract so but yeah it would allow for the reopen of the contract in that case so that the administrator and the state could address whatever changes need to be made beyond just the rates are set by the state and then there's a premium made to the administrator and so the state rates you got to remember keep the state's administrative costs as well as whatever needs to go to the administrator for payment of benefits and their administrative costs so that's all housed in the tax rate and then the state pays out of that to the administrator as well as funding the costs within so there's an IT cost at Department of Taxes there's some administrative costs over at DOL because they have appeals that they'll need to hear and both those agencies DFR last year testified that they didn't foresee additional costs but that could change in the future and need to be baked into that too so so when an RFP goes out you mentioned to me that there's a process from the state when they're looking for requests for proposals that they're bulletins that there are rules basically that are said what is the name of the bulletin that affects something like this that when the government sits down and says okay we're putting this together they have certain rules that they have to go through what is that? that's bulletin 3.5 it's developed by the agency of administration and that covers the state contracting rules there's a similar bulletin for that you may also have heard of which is bulletin 5 but bulletin 3.5 is what we're concerned with here and that covers information that needs to be put in the bid how the bid processes run requirements for contractors so they're for example folks who contract with the state have to assure the state that they're complying labor laws so that makes a lot of as you can imagine would matter a lot and things like road construction or other services contracts here you're still providing the insurance that you're complying with wage and hour and other labor laws but it may be less of a concern for that so I don't think anybody wants to have any impediment to go into mandatory TDI if the legislature chose to do that is there anything in this program or in those contracts that might be set up with private entities that would get in the way of that or should we put something in here to make it clear that contract provisions I mean I think there is something in law or in many contracts that talk about changes that come from legislature that allow for modifications of the contract so I'm just wondering if we have that in here right well I think typically your contract has to if you're in a highly regulated area like this your contract counts in place that it may need to change in the future the I think the re-opener language I think is definitely should stay in I can take a look, Connecticut is the other state that's really done a thorough job of looking at this and I can look to see if they have anything else but typically though it's assumed when you're in a highly regulated area like this that you're going to contemplate that in the contract you know we could we could add language to saying the contract shall include provisions for making adjustments to the terms based on legislative amendments that may occur during the term of contract so that's a good segue because you have one more to do I was quick, just quick on the same time so a bullet in 3.5 for state contracts can that be found online, can people find that online if they want to take a look at it it is at the department of buildings and general services website and I can send a link to and have her report it out to the committee or post it and the state is required to follow bullet in 3.5 and if one wants to make changes to bullet in 3.5 does that have to go through the legislature? that's done by the agency of administration so that's how changes get made yeah the but yet in most cases the state has to follow bullet in 3.5 if they're doing a contract thank you I think that's a good segue we have five more minutes but I segue to a couple of issues at least one issue so it gave me a flipping in its arms head but we had some witnesses as you did from the state and I'm concerned about the exposition of what the state has agreed to with the VSEA and our law and how we deal with that from at least based upon what the senate version is as a contribution rate of 0.2 and what the state employees negotiated as a bump in their wages if they don't get their contracted paid family I believe it seems like what they got made me a little bit more valuable than what we're offering and I don't want to necessarily upset that out of our so we'll probably come back with a proposal on that but I just want to reflect that to you yeah we'll to point by point on what the review that we had from VSEA on what the language is in their contract seems very broad the numbers are the numbers I think that you're talking about would be the estimated well there's 3 sets of numbers there's the actual 6 weeks of this at 60% and then the cost being estimated at 2.5 but then if that program doesn't get into place they get a 0.25 pay increase that would be negotiated in the pay act would be I think they said 1.5, 1.4 so yeah that's fine and the other issue is the one that has been floating around dealing with very low income workers who might have a qualifying event but don't have a qualifying wages and frequently that's the case that you have to show attachment to the workforce at any time before you can qualify for a program so I'm not sure we want to go in the direction of having somebody pay in $5 and qualify for $10,000 worth of benefits but on the other hand I don't think it's a big deal to figure out a way to make those people whole who have put in $10 a program and not qualify financially for the program so we may have a suggestion on that as well yeah so our understanding again of what the benefits would be to pay out would be if you take the $73,000 number is this 946 or 964 964 you know somebody and so they would cap at an individual at that pay rate would cap at just under $12,000 of benefits that top benefit that they can receive obviously somebody is making $7,000 a year $7,300 a year we may be capping at $12,000 but yeah if you want to propose language that addresses that in some way we can have that conversation again we would want to check with Joyce to make sure by somehow refunding their contribution that we don't want to see if that has any impact on the contribution so this is a priority for us to meet at least throughout the day we've kept our schedule open to whatever time frames are available we hope you've done the same how about $430 and in the interim if you have proposals you want to draft up and I've mentioned too that we would draft up and share those when we meet the next meeting $430 seems like a long time but are you we haven't had our caucus yet we're missing our caucus now but we have dispensation to get this done so if $430 works to work through until we're done working I mean I don't want it to be $430 to $445 I'm with you getting this done as soon as possible so I mean we have some drafting to do and if we come in with some proposals we can make some headway at $430 we could do $430 to $6 I think $6 we'd have to why would you have to stop at $6 so why don't we why don't we get back in touch with you we need to huddle up the three of us clearly that's fine sort of way I would if we can fit in as much time during daylight it's not daylight by 6 I know but that's why I would rather if the schedules can be I think we're on the same page we just need to know what our schedule is so two of us are on finance and we have much smaller committees than you have and so it's okay there were form issues in the afternoon so we'll just huddle to be out I understand this is all to be doing conference in January but it's a priority for both of us but we've cleared our schedule I only have four conferences in January thank you Tom for your time like this ladies


In this video I want to demonstrate how you can use my tools to extract information from malware. We are going to take the latest malware, ransomware, the Petia not Petia, and this malware had very little string obfuscation, so we can use my tools to extract some interesting strings. So with our research we can use regular expression to search into the sample. It has a dictionary of some regular expressions, for example we can search for email addresses. Now the sample it's not a text file but a binary file, an executable, so we are going to use option F to do a full read, and then we have the sample here. And as you can see here we can immediately see the email address. With our research we can also look for Bitcoin addresses. So there is a regular expression in there to identify Bitcoin addresses, and also associated with that regular expression is a Python function that will check the checksum of the Bitcoin address, so that we only extract valid Bitcoin addresses. Like this, this is the Bitcoin address. And then with the base 64 dump we can look for all kinds of encoded strings like base 64 but also hexadecimal. Inside is executable, so we are going to look for all possible encodings that are supported by base 64 dump in this sample. And here you can see, okay, that's long sequences of these. That's not very interesting, but there is also an option in base 64 dump, that's option Z, and allows you to ignore null bytes. So that is a workaround to handle unicode strings. So let's do this. And now we can see here that we have something else, something that indeed could be a base 64 string and 306 strings long. And also you see that its representation starts with a zero. So zero, that is 30 hexadecimal. And that is interesting because that could indicate an ASN data structure. So let's take a look. So we are going to look for base 64 encodings, at least 200 bytes long. And let's ignore the null bytes in the unicode strings. Okay, so here we have one. Let me select this one and do an ASCII dump. And you can see here indeed it starts with a 30 and then 82 1A. So this strongly resembles an abstract syntax notation. And here at the end we see 0 1 0 0 0 1. Again, this here is very similar to the modulus of a key, an RSA key. So this is probably an RSA key. And now we are going to pipe this into OpenSSL to make sure. So I'm going to do a dump now, a binary dump, not an ASCII dump. And I pipe this into OpenSSL. ASN 1 parse. That's a command. And the inform is there. And indeed we can see that it is an RSA key. A sequence of two integers. This is the modulus here and this is here the long key.


Hey, everyone. It's Sam here. I want to take you on a journey through sound and learn how to play audio on the web the standard way. Let's go. There's a few different reasons to use audio on the web, although it can be controversial. Everyone knows that feeling of that noisy tab you just can't find. But for long-form audio, that's the content of your page or to enhance the user's experience. Just a sprinkling of audio can be wonderful. Let's take a look. If you drop in an audio tag on your page, setting its controls attribute, your users will get control buttons for free. Maybe you're serving a podcast. Another month. Another podcast. Another podcast. Yeah. But the audio tag isn't just for songs or podcasts, and you can't customize its default controls across different browsers. So if you want to have custom play or pause buttons or even have the audio play some other time, you know, maybe it's feedback when some files are finished uploading, you can look up the audio tag and call it the play method. Oh, look, my upload is done. There's a caveat. In modern browsers, audio won't play unless the user has interacted with the page. In the file upload example from before, the user has interacted with the page by dragging files, so your audio will play no matter what. But if you're building, say, a chat app and a user gets a message before they click on or use a new tab, a notification sound won't play. If you're not sure whether your user has interacted with the page, we can check the return value of the play method on the audio tag. If there's no result, audio will always play. This is the behavior of older browsers. But otherwise, check the return promise for a DOM exception of type not allowed error. And maybe instead of playing audio, you could flash the title bar or do something else loud but visual. You can also create a new audio directly in JavaScript if you're playing sound from code. We can then clone this audio file and play it many times, which lets us layer the same sound. This is really useful for rapid fire effects. We've only just scratched the surface of audio on the web. There's also the web audio API, which is a much more complicated API that's used for games or you want complex audio effects. Check out some resources below. Remember, use the audio element for podcasts, music and such. But if your audio isn't in response to a user action, like a click to play, be sure to check whether the audio has played at all. And finally, you can also use the audio object in JavaScript to play layered sounds. That's playing audio the standard way. See you on the next tip.


Hello. Hi. Thank you for coming. So this is our first workshop organized by PHP Women Asia. So thank you for coming. So our first workshop is called Build a Website for WordPress. So why would we choose WordPress? Because I think it's the easiest platform to build a website. So we have here the organizer of WordPress Singapore. So it's John. Yeah. So his members will also be doing coaching and helping us later. So yeah. So PHP Women Asia. So we just started this year. So these are the few women that are like PHP developers. And we organize our event. And then we come up to teach beginners or interested people who are who I wanted to learn PHP. So yeah. So this is from the different events like the PHP conference, the WordPress conference, and yeah. Word come. Sorry. And yeah. So the objectives of our group is like focus the needs of individual PHP women on a personal or professional level, peer-to-peer learning exchange, and provides comfortable environment for women who are interested to learn to code in PHP. So like this workshop is already one of our objectives. So one of our engagements are our Facebook group page. I think you, some of you have liked it. And social meetups like co-PJS, Bearded CSS, Gitbrunch, and other Git meetups that we have. So and Slack. We also have Slack for all of the PHP developers in Asia. And then PHP Singapore user group, which is our main group who are who we met like every month to like to do speaking. And yeah. So every month from now on every month there will be like a representative from PHP women Asia to showcase our events. So we just started like two months ago. Yeah.  It's like from the Europe and and the US. So we met some of them in the PHP conference because they were invited to speak. So these are just some of the people from the PHP women global network. Okay. So yeah, I think this will be our agenda for today. So phase one or this morning we'll create a basic website using WordPress. So install WordPress and just add plugins, widgets and later we'll discuss more about it. And then so Vina will be the one. So Vina, where are you? So here with the one who is our instructor later. So she's been very good in WordPress. She's been developing WordPress for like five over five years now and now she's been learning Django. Django is like Python and Swift. It's like for the iPhone apps. Yeah. And for the phase two is like if you want to join us later for the phase two to how to like build an e-commerce website using WordPress, then that will be on our agenda this afternoon. So our instructor is Brita. So here's Brita. So yeah, she works in NUS and yeah, she's been like a PHP programmer as well. And she's one of the speaker in the last PHP conference Asia. So yeah, and our coaches is from WordPress Singapore and PHP Singapore user group. Yeah, so that's it. And special thanks to Microsoft people for sponsoring our venue and later they will sponsor also the pizza for lunch. Yeah, that's great. And also for the drinks, if you want to have coffee on the middle of the workshop, then you can have, you can get your coffee or drinks somewhere, like just turn, yeah, just turn left and you can see the pantry over there. And okay, for our first speaker, so I'll talk. Okay. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So he'll be speaking first like 15 minutes. Yeah. So he don't want to be introduced. So yeah, he does himself. Okay. Let's give a round of applause for Gerald. Oh, this is not you. Sorry. Wrong info. Okay. Okay. Sorry. So Gerald is not here, but James. That is why I don't know. I don't get it. So sorry. Yeah. Okay. James. Oh, hi. Just get a quick introduction on myself. I'm James. But I'm a technical evangelist in the developer experience team here at Microsoft Singapore, along with Fami, my colleague. He organized the event today. And I'm just here to give you a quick talk about Azure. So just hands up. Is anybody heard of Azure? You guys heard of it, right? So today you guys will be coding PHP, WordPress, HTML, et cetera. And you'll be doing and deploying that on a local host machine, right? So local hosts is typically what we use when we are testing and doing development. But when you actually really want to get it out to production to your users, you will have to set up a server and deploy it like that, right? I mean, in the old days, what we did was to set up a physical server on-premise, right? But now of the introduction of cloud, we have services like Amazon, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and we have all these different services which allow you to leverage and quickly deploy a website without any hassle, right? So I'll just show you. This is the Azure dashboard. It shows you all your projects and resources, right? So we give many options for people who want to deploy WordPress websites, right? So it's really easy. Just go to the marketplace and you can search WordPress, right? And you can see that we will have a few options for WordPress. The first one is more of a platform solution where you can easily deploy really fast. And the second one is one of our partners, Biennami. So this is more of an infrastructure as a service. So what you get is a full OS and virtual machine stack, right? So you'll be able to customize lower levels of the software. So like the operating system like Linux or Windows, whatever server they choose to deploy on. But most people are fine with using the platform as a service because it's easy and fast to set up, right? So from there, all you need to do is to create a resource and there will be multiple things to fill out, right? You can enter the name for your website and a subscription, right? So we actually do offer free trials when you first start out. So it's definitely easy for you to try. And once you choose the subscription that you're subscribed to, you can choose a resource group. So one of the benefits of hosting on Azure is it can group all your resources into one, right? And that means that it's very easy to manage everything. You can select a database provider. So for now on the WordPress solution, you can use ClearDB or MySQL. They're both MySQL, but one of them is still in preview and it's hosted in a host like us. And lastly, you can do App Service Plan. So what is App Service Plan means, right? Is that instead of just using our subscription to pay for WordPress, you can group many different applications and services within the same service plan. So effectively, you're just consolidating all the costs into one plan, right? And then you can add insights, which will give you analysis. Now, I won't create it directly here because it actually takes a bit of time to speed up, but I've already done this, right? So this is using the same panel that I showed just now and I created this. Then from there directly, I can go to browse, right? And I can go and I have my very own custom URL. So if you quote a WordPress website and you deploy it out to people, you can see that, yeah, give it a lot of load. So you can see 10.org WordPress.azureworkpress.net because I created this yesterday and I just used it instead. So you can see there's all the languages that you can choose. And this is rare familiar if anybody has done the official WordPress.com site. You can just instantly set up everything you need from here. So let's say I just call it test. So just from there, it's really simple. And all you need to do is just go in and log in with the username and password that you had just now, right? And right from there, you're already in your dashboard. It's fast and easy. It's not like the old times where you need to do all the hard work and manual labor when you have to set up a server, right? And from all there, you can enter your posts and everything. Yeah, so I just want to give a quick introduction on what you can do in the future after you've learned coding on localhosts. You can actually deploy it to a real production scenario. Yep, thank you.


show mapping fault lines where we discuss major geopolitical issues from around the world. Now, this week, all eyes are on Europe as a host of meetings are taking place are scheduled to take place over the next few days. We have the g7 meeting or the meeting of the g7 leaders which is taking place in Cornwall in the United Kingdom. We have the NATO summit, which is taking place in Brussels on Monday. And on 16th, we have the much anticipated summit between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Lannaby Putin. Each of these summits, of course, having a slightly different set of agenda items to discuss, but they're also very closely interconnected. We have with us Praveer Purkayasar to talk about this. Praveer, there's going to be a lot of discussion about some of the micro items. For instance, the g7 countries are planning to commit one billion doses of vaccine vaccines and donations. We'll come to that later. But first of all, I want to take the larger picture with all these three summits. There's also the US Q summit in between on Tuesday. So we have about four or five of these meetings. So how do we see these meetings being held together in some ways in the culmination towards the Putin Biden meeting? What are the various strategic equations that are being worked on? Well, I think there are two larger agenda items before Biden in all these summits. One is to how to rally the European Union and the NATO countries behind him. Now that the disruptive role of Trump is no longer there, who tried to get, I would say, essentially protection money from his NATO allies. We are protecting who give us more money, the typical mafia philosophy. Biden has this old strategy, strategic lineup that we are in this together. Of course, you know, we have our demands from you, but you are with us in this larger battle. And don't go with China economically or try and build relations with Russia independently or what we tell you. So essentially, essentially asking European Union to play its vessel role, which it has for the last 30, 40 years. It has really played not an independent role, but a vessel role and continue to play that because it now seems to be wanting to strike some independent equations economically with Russia and China, because European Union is a part, though a small part of the Eurasian landmarks. So does its future lie across the Atlantic, or does its future lie with the Eurasian landmarks is a long term question that the European powers need to answer. As of now, the answer seems to be more that they will be not as much as UK being the lapdog of the United States. These are my words, but what we said pet poodle, these are the words which are commonly used for the United Kingdom, but the European Union also played a somewhat similar role with some noises here and there. And in the later they have played a completely subservient role. In this also we need to think of that it's no longer just about Russia and China and European Union. It's not just in Eastern Europe, which is, which is aligned much more closely with the European Union and NATO, then with Russia or China, but there's also the Central Asian republics, which have come into existence, part of Soviet Union, and they are all in play. And the minute you come to Central Asia, you get also two other players who are not being seen in this context. Turkey and Eddogan therefore becomes an important player, and you will see that by is planning to meet with Eddogan on the, you know, along with the NATO discussions, the separate meeting that plan with Eddogan is also had a telephonic long conversation with them. And you also see that the China Belt Road Initiative is also playing its role in Central Asia, but there is also the Iran angle. So part of Turkey, the other player in Central Asia is Iran. That's not so visible to people, but Iran has a long history with Central Asia, and therefore to think that Iran is not a part of the Central Asian mix would be a problem. Another thing that India has is when you talk about the US pivot to Asia. Now, one part of the pivot is what US calls Indo-Pacific, which is the ocean. Now, this is really more about Southeast Asia than about the oceans, as you know, oceans have ships, they don't have people. So they don't produce economically. They control the land mass, which they might then threaten. So if you look at that, that India doesn't have too much that it has, it can put into play in Southeast Asia. India's role is limited to being a part of Quad and bolstering the American presence, so to say, over there. And even when Britain sends its warships or France sends its warships, they appear to be far more colonial past than an independent national players in this region. The second problem is that when you look at Central Asia, even there it has very little to play with, because the only pieces on the table that India could have thought was its relationship with Iran or his relationship with Afghanistan. And both do not seem to be going very well at the moment, particularly in Afghanistan with the Taliban coming back and Iran because of the way it has dealt with Iran under US pressure. India seems to be squeezed out of the equation, but Iran and Turkey are very much players there. So I think we are, as the Chinese problem says, we are in interesting times because all this is now up for play. I've been in this context wanted to quickly ask you about the Putin-Biden summit, which is, which the US is maybe trying to portray as just one of the summits, but it's really probably at the heart of all these meetings. So we are, there's been a period of rising tension, there's the relations are not very great. The ambassadors of both countries are not even, I have been recalled, they're at home for consultations. And we have been seeing Biden, Biden and various people's administration parroting the same narrative of Putin being Russians being aggressors, attackers of democracy, a threat to, you know, global society everywhere. So do we see the possibility of any de-escalation or any kind of, say, rapprochement or something of that sort, especially considering that nuclear talks for instance are very significant in the next few years they need to pick up, or do we see this tension continue? I think there is an issue of tension which will always be there. Let's not forget, during the Cold War, the Americans and the Soviet Union were definitely at longer heads. There's no question about that, but they still had the borders with India for the top future. What has happened lately is the communications have really broken down. And under Trump, it had particularly broken down, and let's face it, it had broken down because of people like Biden's pressure on Trump, not to talk with Russia, because if we talk to Putin, he becomes a Putin spooler. So now all those kind of things limited from the liberability completely on the issue of Russia. So now that Biden is in the helm, now they need to do a reset to at least have a way of talking to Russia, not talking to a major military power in the region, is essentially bringing threats of war. And this is not a minor war, it's a war between two countries who have the ability to destroy the globe, 5, 10, 20 times over. So given that threat, that they still need to talk and build some equation with Russia so that it doesn't spill over unintentionally into war. And if you have people who are there and I'm sure in all militaries, who always would take a military option over talking to politically and resolving the issues, I think any of these issues like Ukraine or Belarus or any of the others can spill over unintentionally into a military standoff, which I'm sure neither side wants. So Biden needs to work out a way to talk to Putin. So in spite of differences being able to talk is something they need to have. Now behind the rhetoric of all of this is also stands the fact that the United States was losing its NATO NATO allies, and the European Union could possibly build independent relations with Russia and China. I think that is also one of the objectives that Biden has in this, to solidify them behind him, and the sanctions of Russia, which he has extended with the European Union has extended sanctions of Belarus as we have discussed earlier, that what Belarus has done, that all the European and American powers have done, Israel has done, the United States has done. So the fact that all of this they have done, but the thing Belarus doing it is unacceptable. Also, there is an extension of their so-called rule based world order, which is not as per international law, but as the rule set by G7. So it's a really an attempt at new imperial G7 role, which we are seeing, which was there for a long period, held in check by of course the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc at that point of time doesn't exist anymore. So I think reconfiguring that is also the attempt that Biden has, that he has to take into account that Russia cannot be treated like a small Baltic state or a small East European country. Given that, that he needs to have both his NATO allies on board, Turkey is a problem over there to have the NATO allies on board and also has to have a solidity in the European Union vis-à-vis the economic war that the United States is waging on China. I think that's the other axis of this Biden visit that he has to also look at how to mend some bridges with Turkey because as you know, he has Greece on one side, all the European allies on one side and Turkey on the other side, but Turkey is a big player and Turkey has a big player. If for instance, United States wants to use the Uyghur issue, because that's also where Turkey is in play. There are all Turkmenic tribes to speak the Turkmenic language, Turkey has a lot of cultural influence over that region. So I think that that is also part of this visit. But there is an European Union China axis and the Belt Road axis as well, which I think is other part of it. Finally, that was the last question I wanted to come to which is regarding the issues around China as well, because China of course has been promoting a very strong economic agenda, a process of engagement based on that. And the United States has not really in any sense meaningfully been able to counter it and so has been resorting to in the past sanctions. Recently they withdrew the ban on TikTok but nonetheless came out with some strange regulations regarding the tech sector in China. So we're still seeing a very strong mode of confrontation over there. So is it likely that the European powers will continue to stand by the US on this or will they realize the larger benefits that come from something like the BRM? Well, the European Union has all even with Russia taking the position that they will not follow 100% what the United States is telling them. So the Nord Stream was the bone of contention. Finally, the US is given on given in on that and accepted that having European West European particularly Germany's gas dependence on Ukraine. That's the really the key issue is not something which is the interest of Germany. So it was not so much Russia, which was the issue, but how much veto Ukraine could use on the transit of gas from Ukraine into Germany and other countries in Europe. That was really the issue which was in the heart of Nord Stream. So I think that the battle economic battle that you are talking about is not going to be as simple as a strategic one strategically European Union will go with the United States, these are the both Russia and China. But on the economic issues, they are still, I think, are going to look after their economic interest with as much circumspection as they can because they don't want to annoy the United States beyond the point. And why is that because the United States has the power of sanctions on any country, any company irrespective of what those countries national laws are. They think that their national laws US national laws will work on any company and any country, particularly in its sphere of influence, which is what the European Union is. So I don't see European Union taking United States head on either on China or on Russia. But I do see that they would not like to abandon their economic links with Russia or China, because after all as we discussed earlier that they are a part of the European landmass, unless they want to secede physically, which geographically is going to be difficult. I don't see how they can keep themselves out of any economic relationship, because the Belt Road initiative exists. There are huge number of goods being exchanged between for instance Germany and China, using the Belt Road, the rail system. In fact, it is now an effective freight route that has been established. So there is that issue that there is a direct marketing that Germany and other European countries are doing to China, as well as buying from China. And it is not that China is supplying them with food grains, or it's supplying them with raw materials. Both sides are actually selling advanced goods. So both China is selling them advanced goods, so is Germany. So it's something given the size of the Chinese economy. And this is increasingly clear to the world that the pandemic has actually made China's economic strength even more. So given that, that it's likely that by 2030 China is going to be a bigger economic power than the United States. This is completely different from what existed post Second World War, but the United States have 50% of the production capacity of the world. So given that, I don't see how the European Union, while towing the American line, will not also play footsie with Russia and China, both. And China is here the much bigger player, because its economy is much bigger than Russia's. And it also makes a variety of goods, unlike Russia, which has been at the moment more a supplier of raw materials, hydrocarbons to European Union and food, other food items and so on. Given that I think the China angle economically is the much the bigger one. And I do not see that European Union completely going with the United States on that. Yes, they are doing things which by which they're damaging their economic relationship with China, the recent sanctions on Chinese on number of counts towing the American line, probably on the virus issues, a lot of those things will be there. But nevertheless, I think the European Union will not line up completely behind the United States on that. So we are likely to see a more, more flexible response by the European Union on the issue of China and economy. And as we have seen with the Nord Stream and Russia, while on military part they would line up I think far more closely with the Americans. Thank you so much for being talking to us. That's all your time for today. Keep watching this.