Welcome everyone. Welcome to the Hyperledger Global Forum. This is a breakout session where I will show a really quick but live demo of Hyperledger Cactus, along specifically an example application of ours. So the tool title is Blockchain Interoperability Demo with Cactus. My name is Peter Sromadivari and I'm a Technology Architectural Center. And I'm also one of the maintainers of Hyperledger Cactus. So with that said, let's look into the demo. Just before I actually show it, I just wanted to quickly outline the business logic behind the demo application, which is completely made up by me. And it's very simple. Obviously not something production ready, but it should demonstrate well enough the points that we're trying to demo. So the idea is that in the application there are three different ledgers, basic or fabric. And the application itself needs to provide a consistent view of the data that's stored on these ledgers. And at the same time, it needs to be able to insert data into all these ledgers and make it so in a way that the data contains references to each other. And so the supply chain app example that I'm going to show has this story behind it that's about tracking bamboo tree harvests, then tracking bookshelves that are made out of those, and then finally shipping the bookshelves somewhere. And we'll show that an application can be developed that shows the data for all three of this in a single view so that enterprise application users have sort of a convenience factor in there. And the idea behind hyperledger cactus that it makes it hopefully easier to develop an application like this compared to if you had to make it from scratch and if you had to instruct the ledgers individually. Demo, we have two main parts, the front end application and the back end application and the ledgers. And I will show off the front end first and then really quickly highlight the pieces of code that actually make that happen. And then we conclude demo and I'll ask if anyone has any questions. Finally, before I show it, do try this at home. This command can be used in any terminal that actually has Docker installed and it should just work. I did this before the demo and now I am going to step over here. You can see that localhost 3100 has been loaded. And we have bamboo harvests, bookshelves and shipments. And I can create, yes I can create a harvest that is just prefilled with dummy data. And when I hit insert or submit, it actually sends the data to the core ledger stored in a core smart contract. Same thing I can do with the bookshelf and I can associate a record that I just created to this so that there's a connection between the two.  So now we are shipping the bookshelf. Obviously this is very, very oversimplified, but I want the demo to be quick. So there's a record and the magic happens behind the scenes. Now we have data on all three ledgers and we can see two. And let me just quickly switch over to the IDE with the screen sharing. So here we can see the data model in solidity for the core room and the basic contracts. You can pretty much see the same thing that goes on the slides. And then here's the bamboo harvest repository contract itself, which is again very simple, but it does something and we have the ability to call this contract straight from the browser for the Cactus REST API. So when I clicked submit in the browser just now, this is the code that ran. It presented a model. I entered the details and then it called the API back by Cactus to insert the data. On the back end, this is what happened. The API client further passed along the information to the core connector that we have to invoke the contract, passing in additional metadata that if you're seasoned with solidity that you probably guessed is needed, such as the invocation type and the data for the invocation, signing credentials, etc. And so after hitting that back end point, the execution reached the actual cactus code that is the core connector, which has this invoke contract method that takes in a request of invoke contract and then returns a response of invoke contract. And then this is where the magic happens. Basically this just calls the smart contract that I showed earlier here. Then this gets executed, then the response gets passed back all the way to the browser. And the point I wanted to make here is that we're hoping to simplify developing applications like this and obviously much more complicated ones as well. And so if there are any questions about this, we run daily pair program sessions where anyone is free to dial in and ask about the code whether they are contributors or just trying it out for the first time. It doesn't matter. Everyone's invited and the little fine print there is for the next two or three days for the duration of the hyperlegical rule before these sessions are canceled. But I think come Friday, we resume them every day. So I invite everyone to join us there and ask questions as well. And I will now open it up to Q&A. Hi, Joster. Sorry if I'm butchering that. Thank you. Yes, you're definitely hard at work on other platforms. We actually also support quarter, but it hasn't yet been added to the example. So that's why it wasn't part of the demo, but we are heavily focused on quarter as well. We want to make sure that we support that. Yes. Also, there are efforts underway to add Saative. Also, we have an internship or a mentorship with Hyperledger where someone joined as a mentee and they are going to work on Iroha integration. So that's also going to be great. That should come out in a few months once the internship concludes. Thank you for questions, by the way. You're most welcome. Is the interoperability group still there? Yes, I think it still exists. And we have four more minutes for questions. Of course, you can reach me after the presentation as well. Communication between Hyperledger to Hyperledger, is there any standardization? Well, it depends on what you call standardization exactly, but there are various efforts. On the way, there are actually multiple labs being proposed that are also aiming to be projects that are aiming for interoperability. And there is on top of that an ongoing effort for Cactus and those projects to work together in some shape or form. So if you want to be a part of that discussion, then I recommend joining the Hyperledger architecture work groups mailing lists. No problem, Bala. Yeah, there should be a button to be able to speak, but to be honest, I'm not sure. This is my first time as well using this platform. Patrick Bernal. Hi, thanks for the presentation. Is it possible to have some kind of observer pattern, e.g. actions in one chain trigger events or smart contracts in another? Yes. Yes, we are planning on adding that as well, as in adding that to all the ledger connectors. We recently added WebSocket slash socket IO support to the API server. So while you cannot do that today, but that's heavily underway. And that's not actually true either. I mean, you can do it today. It's just going to be a little more work than what we plan on providing. We plan on providing a lot of convenience, but it is possible as of today. No problem, Patrick. And thank you for Takuma. He's also one of our maintainers from Fujitsu. So he appears to have more of today information about that than I do. And we only have one minute left. So ask away. We probably have time for one more question, then I have to close the session. So we'll talk more about that in the upcoming session on Thursday, but I can tease it now. We are hoping for it to be this autumn. Yeah, thanks for the great questions. And that's it. Time's up. So this was the breakout session for Hyperledger Cactus. And thanks for showing up. Bye, everyone.


three or four months, but we've agreed to go. We've sold out and we've agreed to very danger we get out. Sound like he wants to push with the diplomatic or the military situation. Just can't.


Still, the breakfast welcome and thanks for staying with us, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, recommends 26% of annual budget of developing nations through public education or to our educational sector. Now Nigeria's allocation to the sector is still less than 10%. President Mohammed Buhari had made promises at recent international forum that a location to education would be increased by at least 50% in the next few years and by 100% by 2025. Allocation to the sector in the 2022 budget estimate still fell short of stakeholders' expectation as it was pegged at 1.29 trillion nair or 7.9%. That was allocated to the education sector out of the 16.39 trillion appropriation bill presented to the National Assembly. Now the 555.3 trillion nair budgeted by the federal government in the last six years you only have 33.5 trillion nair as allocated to the educational sector and this represents less than 10%. In 2016, of the 6.06 trillion nair total budget, 369.6 billion nair or you like to say 6.7% was allocated to public education in the country. Now in 2017, 550 billion nair or 7.38% was allocated to education out of the 7.29 trillion budget we also have in 2018, 605.8 billion nair or 7.04% was given to education out of the 9.2 trillion that was in the budget. Moving to 2019, 620 billion or 7.05% was allocated to education out of 8.92 trillion nair while in 2020, 671.07 billion nair or 6.7% was given to education out of 10.33 trillion nair and in 2021, 742.5 billion or 5.6% was allocated to education out of the budget proposal of 13.6 trillion nair. We had already talked about 2022, let's have a bit of some comparison to what is obtainable in some parts of Africa. For instance in Ghana, you have Ghana allocating 23.81% of its national budget to education in 2015 and 22.09% in 2016, 20.1% in 2017, 18.6% in 2018. Although this is not Mita UNESCO's recommended 26%, is it better than less than 10% that we have in Nigeria? While in South Africa, the spin continues to increase allocation to the sector from the out to 46 billion to 16.7% in 2018 and in 2019, you could say that you had 307 billion run in 2020 that was also projected till it hits 416 billion run by 2023 and 2024. We have a guest joining the conversation this morning. It's a good thing that he's off the educational background. We're talking about Dr. Peter Ogundo, he's an educational researcher. Thank you, Dr. Peter for joining us. It's my pleasure to join you, good morning. So my question here is if education is a very important part of our lives and you have different countries, you know, you have nations devoting a huge part of their budget to the educational sector, what then is the problem? Why haven't we have such interests reflected in our budget in Nigeria? The open secret there is that the people who run their fairs of your country in Nigeria are people who are not training their own children here. And so they do not wear the shoe and they therefore do not know where it pinches. So since they are training all their children abroad, they do not care about how well we run the educational system. And so they prefer to put their money into things that are of importance to them. For example, security, they want to stay alive and keep wasting the money that is available to our national coffers. That having said that, we also have to recognize that most of these people are really illiterate, illiterate not in terms of not being able to read and write, but illiterate in terms of not appreciating and understanding the indispensable place of education in fast tracking development for a very poor country like Nigeria. And so so long as you continue to have these kinds of politicians who run their fairs of your country and then supported by their cronies, who populate the ministries of education without having a good background in education principles, then you continue to find yourself in a situation where they are not going to have adequate funding and the right human capacity to run the system. Unfortunately, that is where we are. And I think that we need to make an urgent effort to get out of this very unfortunate place. So one of the things that you mentioned is that, well, they are not in the know and so for them what's important is security. And if security is important, don't we understand why we're having the insecurity or the security situation that we have the challenges that we're faced with as a country at the time. Let's look at the out of school children. There are reports that about 18.5 million children are out of school. And we understand how this is a major threat to education. So how do you now say you're solving the issue of security and not understanding that if you take care of education, then security can also be handled? Yeah, that's the point I'm making. Elite trades are running their fairs of your country. They don't have brains that have been developed to understand how these things are interconnected. That if you fund education adequately, and of course, it's not just about funding. You also need to have the right people in the right places so that we can provide the right education. At the moment, we're not providing the right education. So people just learn the words of things and not the why of things. And until we're able to move our children to the why of things, they won't be able to think properly. And so when education is not properly provided, you discover that people go through the schooling system without getting educated. And they therefore lack the capacity to provide and save jobs. And even when you create the jobs and give them to do for you, they haven't got the knowledge and the skills to be able to do your jobs well. And so that's where we are. If you fix education, you have indirectly fixed security. You have indirectly fixed politics. You have indirectly fixed other social problems as well as the economy. But so long as you continue to make education take a backbench, for that long will you continue to have these other challenges that all of us are running about to try to fix. So the point I'm making overall is that we need to get the right people in the right places who can do the thinking. We haven't got think-as in government until we are able to get the right people in those kinds of climes and spaces who continue to have these challenges. OK, so let's continue to look at this because you have stakeholders saying that poor funding is responsible for the output that we have down. And over time, we've had stories that a lot of peasants were out on the streets who are not very employable. So we have constantly chunked out people who cannot be employed. That would mean that they don't have any value to add. But on the other hand, the argument also has been that we're not moving with the trend. Our curriculum might just be a problem, the kind of curriculum that we have. And also our ideology towards education, for instance, we seem to pay attention to conventional institutions rather than vocational. We know we have a vocational, but the number of vocational decisions that we have and that of the conventional universities, you know, you seem to have one on the other hand. So is the problem really just about poor funding or a curriculum or an ideology about education is also a problem? All of all of that, all of that as a matter of fact, I think that the funding matter shouldn't actually be our number one problem because we can fix that if we have the right people in the right places. We haven't got the right people in the education spaces, making policies and implementing the policies. That is the major problem because the politicians take their cronies and give them very significant positions in the ministries of education. And so those people haven't got the brain it takes to devise our proper policies that will guide us into where the money is because we don't really lack money the way we are thinking about it. But I do not understand why in the year 2021, we continue to believe that the average Nigerian parents will not be willing to pay for his child's education when the child is in the university, whereas almost everyone has the children in private schools and they pay a great inconvenience to keep their children in those places. Why should the child pay 100,000 per term while in primary school and get to university and is paying 25,000 Naira per term per semester? It doesn't make sense. So we have to get a model that works. The current model where the government picks up all the bills that run the education system at high education level is a very wrong model. We have to get to a point where we agree that Nigeria is a poor country and the government will not have control to have the capacity to fix all the problems in education funding-wise and then get parents to the table. In all of these conversations about us, I'm not aware that parents are part of the equation. They are not involved in the conversations that will lead us back to the classroom. And they are a very important element in this system. Unfortunately, they have been marginalized in the conversations that are going on. And until you are able to get them involved, because they will help you to fund the system, you will not be able to find a sustainable solution to the problems with the higher education system. You mentioned that you talked about the private institutions. So what exactly is the private sector doing? Because in Nigeria, if you have the means and you have what it takes, we seem to have a lot of persons ticketing towards the private universities. And so what exactly is the private universities or university or institution doing that the public sector is not doing and you have this great movement? Well, the challenge, as I said much earlier, is that the people running the system, especially as policy formulators and implementers in the ministries of education, are people who are either training their children abroad or have them in the private school system. And interestingly, the politicians and their cronies are also the people who own the private, you know, most of the private universities in the country. So as to strike benefits private universities, because it makes them more attractive compared to public universities, because every time you have this kind of strike, then all parents withdraw their children from public universities and move them to private sector to the private sector. But that is not going to help anyone because even the private universities in Nigeria are not providing the kind of education that parents are thinking is available in those places. Because who are actually the people teaching them in private universities? They are junk lecturers, essentially, from the public universities, universities like the University of Jaws, the University of Amadu, Bello, Sokka, Lagosibara. They are the ones who go to the private universities to go and teach, and they don't even want to take permanent jobs there because they don't want to, you know, be controlled by the missions and the private sector people who are in those kinds of places, because they want their academic freedom, which is very fundamental for good quality education to be provided at that level. So we are not deceiving ourselves. We haven't got it right. And the philosophy is not right. We don't know what we are doing as a people. We are unwilling to allow Nigerians who are even happy to self-forfeit to be able to help us to fix these problems because of our selfish interest which we are trying to protect in high places. And so, my sister, your problem is not about the end. Even if we get asked to throw this official fire coming from the president back into their classrooms, it is not going to provide us a lasting solution. And let me reveal this to you. By the time the strike is over and children return to their classrooms, they will discover that about 50 percent of their professors have left Nigeria because that's where we are. They are tired of this decrepit system and they are living in droves. And so we have to change ourselves. And we are going to pay lecturers for about five months without having got services from them. And that's very poor thinking. So every time we have this strike and we let lecturers stay away from their classrooms, we are bargaining for services not done that we are going to pay for. And this is what can come only from politicians who haven't got the right brains and who are not willing to let people who teach them what to do. Well, would you say that at this point now we need to get the right brains? Where do we get the right brains from in this space? We are only for the players. I trained in education. I studied up to PhD in England and in several other countries around the world. I was in Oxford. I was in Cambridge. I was in Norway. I was in Sweden. I was in Austria. They are Center for Innovation and Education. And there are several other Nigerians who have my kind of background. And we are willing to come home and stay here for a while to help to fix this place. But nobody is willing to give us the space to help Nigeria to move forward. And so, so long as you continue to ignore the people who know and you use illiterates to run the Nigeria education system for that long will you continue to live with the kind of problems that we are discussing this morning. So that's the thing. We have got the brains in diverse places around the world in the UK, in America, in Canada. The reason why we are not happy to come is because the politicians will not give you the freedom and liberty to use what you have acquired from Sena Climes to help to develop the Nigerians' higher education system. But if we repent suddenly and give Nigerians the opportunity who have the idea, the opportunity to run the system, you'll discover that these problems will disappear overnight. So we therefore have no right to blame those people who are moving their children, including those who are calling the shots. I mean, the elites now moving their children outside of the country, you know, because you mentioned that these are Sena Climes and it feels like it's better there, you know, to acquire an education rather than to be in this system. So we shouldn't blame them because the system is nothing to write home about. But quickly before you weigh in on that, I'd like to show your thoughts on this as well. Do you think that this is a very logic thing to do? Prior to now, this is 2022, in 2021, you had bills at different stages of legislative activities at the National Assembly for establishing 235, you know, federal universities, polytechnics and colleges of education and special institution. Now you said poor funding should not be an issue. But in the midst of the fact that we're not even able to fund the ones that we are, do you think that this is a smart move? Do you think that this is the best that we can do as a people? You don't have to be an educationist like me to understand that our problem is not the need to create more universities. We have enough. We have enough. We have enough universities that will accommodate everyone who has the intellectual capacity to benefit from university education. We don't need new universities to do that because in a modern society, actually, you don't have to always get up your pool in fiscal spaces to train them. In the UK, for example, opening a bus in the UK, you know, hundreds of thousands of students and who don't have to gather in fiscal spaces to learn. MIT is training hundreds of thousands, millions of people across the world without those who haven't traveled to America. So why do we keep thinking that we need fiscal spaces to give people good quality education in the year 2021? This conversation I'm having with you, we're not having it in a fiscal space. I mean, far away, you're in Victoria Island and people are able to participate in this and enjoy the conversation we're having. So why are the professors not able to work with politicians to recognize that the way forward is not to establish more universities, but rather to equip the ones that are in place and then use modern technology to take us to where we need to be? But I tell you one thing, politicians use the establishment of new universities as tools in their hands to convince voters to vote for them. Election is coming, it's around the corner and so they are going to tell voters at look in the past four years that I have been in office as your representative, I was able to get this university and this polytechnic into our community and so on that grant vote for me again. So that's the whole essence. It's not about giving people access, it's about using something to bag in for votes, which is very unfortunate for us. So the people here are not, the people who are in your country are not thinking at all. Country. Thank you so much, Dr. Peter Goudoro for being part of the show. You are Nigerian, except you're saying that it's only my country. You're here and we're all in this together. That's on a lighter note. Is there a country, some of us are beginning to get access from what politicians are doing. Sometimes we speak the way we do, but part of us are these cruisers. No, no, that's okay. And give us better control of us to get into it together. Yes, I mean, I wish we could continue this conversation. I really don't know how much of time that we do have waiting to get that prompted to leave, but let's see if we can have you share your thoughts one minute with the ongoing back and forth with ASU, the NLC and the federal government. NLC saying they are going to and back on a strike as a solidarity to the union, ASU, for them to implement the agreement that has entered. And the government is saying that the strike is illegal. On the other hand, the government is saying two weeks has been given for all of these issues to be resolved. We are saying you don't need two weeks. You need two days or three days to resolve the issue. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I agree with NLC, I agree with ASU. They have completed bargaining. It's just for the president to, the president shouldn't actually be talking to ASU. The president should be talking to the people who report to him. They should release the funds needed. They should provide the laboratory equipment. The ASU has my ASU, the ASU members are employees of government. So they have got nothing to do with how you fund the system. Where you work, is it your responsibility to look for money to make sure that the studio runs? Your business is to come into the studio and make this presentation. It hosts me for us to have a good conversation. So the president shouldn't be talking to ASU. The president should just direct ministry of finance to release the funds needed and then working in collaboration with Central Bank of Nigeria. All the funds are released and then by tomorrow, ASU wouldn't even need to go back to the negotiation table to get their members back to the classroom. So I completely agree with that. We don't need two weeks. We need only probably two to four hours to get their members informed that the government has done the needful and they should return to the classroom. But I must warn that if they return to the classroom in a hurry, the problem will come back to us because they haven't found a sustainable model for funding the university system. As I mentioned to you earlier, if you don't get the parents involved and the students who are benefiting from university education, if you don't get them involved in the equation, they are not going to have a sustainable model for funding Nigerian tertiary education sector. And that's very critical. For now, government officials, the politicians and those ministers of information, they don't seem to be looking in that direction. Everybody seems to be in a hurry to get ASU back to classrooms. That is not what we should be concerned about. We should be concerned about how to get a sustainable funding model for tertiary institutions in our country. Dr. Peter Ogudoro, thank you so much. I would like to speak with you again in regards to the educational sector of Niger. I appreciate your time. My pleasure. Have a great day. You too. Well, we've been speaking with an educational researcher. Dr. Peter Ogudoro, thank you so much. And like you have had, we hope that the relevant quarters will swing into action. We'll take a breakdown. We'll look at the role of public figures in nation building.


my son didn't fall in war he didn't fall in battle he was, he rose in battle he was elevated by the opportunity to protect the Jewish people and you also see the same thing when it comes to other of our students one of the students of Levesh Morella I see you're showing now Yonatan Samo decided to dedicate all of his organs he saved six people I spoke to his mother and she was telling me that she was able to hear her son's heart in the body of a 50 year old that he had saved so they're saving us Jews in Israel and Jews around the world through their courageous heroic actions and even posthumously some of them have saved have saved other people and I think that's the message that Orturba Stone relates and believes in and that is the responsibility to engage in helping to protect and guarantee the eternality of the Jewish people and it's not just that it's something that you also see from the Jewish community worldwide I belong to a number of WhatsApp groups all around the world and what I notice about all of them it's not about what denomination you belong to what rabbi you follow what ashkenaz.t I mean religious and not religious the idea your 100% right Albert your point is so beautiful I mean you had hundreds of thousands of Jews that came together in Washington DC it was a large part of the North American Jewish community that was there and they came from all stripes and it just reminds us that we are one people and for a small period of time before this war we forgot about that but we've come together and we recognize the fact and when I go to the to the crowd when I go to the various areas in which our students are fighting either the North and the South and I sit with them I study with them and I speak to them and I share with them that under the leadership of the Jewish federations of North America under the leadership of the president's conference of the Jewish federations hundreds of thousands of Jews came together to support them it gives them strength because they realize they're not just here to protect the Jews in Israel they know they're here to protect the Jews around the world and the fact that we've all come together and share this idea of together we will triumph is really something that is important to our soldiers both in the North and in the South my final question to you is about the fact that it's from a larger perspective also I was driving through South Florida recently and I just saw all over on Baptist churches Evangelical Christian churches on many of the Armenian and Roman Catholic churches I was in former Soviet Georgia the Republic of Georgia a Christian Orthodox there who support Israel this is a bigger picture than just Jews you're 100% right and I'm so happy you mentioned South Florida because I was rabbi in Bokritown, Florida for 15 years so South Florida is a second home not as great as Jerusalem but a wonderful place and it's true Bishop Robert Stearns and others who I've had a personal relationship with Pastor Hague and others they have really come to the plate and they speak truth to power by speaking about their commitment to the state of Israel and to the Jewish people Dr. Kenneth Brandon, the president and Rosh Hashiba of Oratora Stone joining us live now from Jerusalem thank you very much for joining us thank you for having me I want to go back to our studio because I wanted to ask you about hold on, we're just getting word in now we're now getting word that the hostage families have just been notified that they should start moving to the hospitals all across Israel to the Sheba Hospital in Israel we're being told now of course the process seems like the process has begun Amir, this is the process we saw now for three days around this time the families get notified and then they go yeah, I hope it will work better than last night we weren't sure this is going to happen anymore and we really need to make sure that Hamas sticks to the deal exactly as it is it doesn't try to extend it to more days because if they do this is a red line this is a red line that will require Israel to go back to operation and stop negotiating with them at least for a while so I think they got the idea that we're not going to really... what's the idea of the ploy what's the idea of this oh you didn't do this right you didn't do this right I'm gonna cross the T dot the I you didn't do this right they want to extend this ceasefire for a longer time they want to see if they can maybe manage to start releasing less less hostages and for more days every day they believe will bring them to the point where they maybe are able to completely stop the war and get a permanent ceasefire this is what they want a lot of people look like heroes to the pro-Palestinian demonstrators but more important than that they want to exist they want to make sure that this doesn't end in their destruction that they stay in control and this is their win they don't care how many Palestinian terrorists or citizens will be killed they don't care about their destruction their houses they just want one thing they want to stay in charge of Gaza let me ask you a question since you were the former deputy commander for the IDF there in Gaza we've been told Hamas has screamed to everybody that 11,313,000 people have been killed how do we get accurate numbers how do we make sure in Israel you have a I'm not an Israeli citizen but I know that every Israeli citizen has a social security number not exactly who, what, where and why how do we get accurate numbers it's very hard I'm sure there are many bodies under the rubbles of the houses inside the tunnels we exploded I don't think Hamas really knows exactly what are the numbers I think it will take many months and maybe more to understand it after the war but we'll see he's held captive by Hamas and Gaza for the past 50 days as we mentioned they finally returned to Israel after this craziness two days of hostage releases and two days that it didn't happen according to plan and now Israeli officials warn that today's wave of release is also in jeopardy so what we've done is we've asked Middle East correspondents to go and Israel also want to take a look at this and he has this report until the last moment but basically just to give everyone up to speed let me give you up to speed update as to what's happening momentarily it's now 422 eastern 422 Israeli time which is about 10-22 eastern time in New York we have been told now that the families of the hostages that are expected to be released today should start making their way to the hospitals to start receiving their loved ones this is the process that has occurred now for three days and this is what is so important this hours long delay that occurred yesterday does not want to happen again Middle East correspondents now has that report until the last moment it almost didn't happen 13 Israelis 8 children, 4 mothers and a young woman along with 4 Thai nationals were released by Hamas and delivered to the Red Cross Saturday night the second stage of a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas and the delay caused by Hamas threatened to derail the entire agreement the occupation has not until this moment fully complied with the terms and standards of the ceasefire agreement whether concerning security breaches and firing at our people the number of aid trucks to reach northern Gaza or manipulating the names and criteria for the release of our prisoners this puts the agreement at risk but in fact no less than 200 aid trucks at least 50 of them reached northern Gaza a claim confirmed by the Palestinian Red Crescent Israel said it was Hamas who didn't keep its end of the deal by splitting up families of hostages 12 year old Hilary Rotem was released without her mother, Raya while 21 year old Mayra gives brother Itai, who is 18 years old remains in captivity Hamas reportedly claimed it couldn't locate the two and offered to release two elderly hostages instead of Raya and Itai Israel refused we stopped the fighting in order to execute the deal we need to make sure that the agreement is implemented if it is not, we will resume the fighting after Qatar received most of the praise for the first wave of release the day before Egypt wanted to highlight its role as mediator too and having full control over the broadcast of the release doesn't hurt the swift and last minute efforts by Egyptian mediators are what brought the successful resolution two days of hostage releases and in both it didn't happen according to plan Israeli officials warn of additional delay attempts of the third wave of hostages by Hamas who continue to hold some 200 hostages deep inside Gaza and to bring everyone up to speed in case you're just joining us here on I-24 news the 13 hostages that are expected to be released, they are expected to now start making their way towards the Rafar crossing in Gaza what they've been doing for the past three days now there are 13 hostages, Egypt has just told the world that 13 hostages will be released 39 Palestinian prisoners will be released in exchange for the 13 one of those that are expected to leave is four year old Avigile Eden, she's an American this is someone that President Biden pushed hard to get released Emily Hand who's an Irish Israeli was released but it looks as though the Irish Prime Minister just could not say Hamas was a bad group that did this who are these 13 let's take a look


Artificial intelligence and robotics are two different fields. Robots are more the physical, mechanical instantiation of the technology, but there's some overlap in that we try and put artificial intelligence into robots, clearly, and we will increasingly do so. There are some really great use cases popping up for robots as a tool for teachers to engage children, because kids love robots that have eyes and faces and can really engage kids. One interesting use case is in working with autistic children where it's oftentimes difficult for an adult to engage the child. Robots can help with that because they turn out to be much more engaging than an adult and so they can facilitate the interaction with the adult. I don't think that they're going to be able to completely replace human ability anytime soon, but the ways that they'll disrupt education or labor markets generally really depends on how we decide to use them in those cases. And one of the things that I'm a little bit concerned about is I don't want us to start to try and replace human ability because in supplementing human ability through these systems, there's so much potential to combine the skills of robots and humans in ways that we might not even know right now. And so instead of focusing on technology that kind of replicates what a human can do, we should be focusing on technology as a tool to enhance our capabilities. I find that a lot of people right now tend to either overestimate or underestimate what current technology is capable of. I mean, robots are still pretty dumb. They can't operate a fork.  I always like to show some videos of state-of-the-art technology to kind of set people's expectations. But we are starting to be able to harness robots and artificial intelligence to do specific tasks really, really well, which is fun. I know there's a lot of hype right now with these new technologies and everyone wants to integrate them in some way. And again, I think there's a danger of overestimating what it can do and maybe implementing things that aren't quite ideal for right now. Yeah, a lot of the technology is still really dumb and doesn't work the way that we expect it to. So incorporating it in small bites in ways that, again, enhance people can use it as a tool in some way that makes people's work easier is great.


Hello everyone, welcome back to another iOS 17 tutorial slash iPhone tutorial. This is a quick one, I'm going to show you how to share your location in the Messages app. This is with the new update. Just click on messages. I'm going to click on my brother Mike here and you'll see here that I've already done this and it's got 57 minutes on it. So I set a timer on it. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to click at the bottom left. You'll see the plus sign.  One of them is location. That's the one. Click on that. And now before I send it, I get a few options. I can go ahead and click on request so I can request his location, which I don't really care. I know he's at work or he should be or I guess if I was a wife or someone like that, that could be weird. Okay. And then the other option is click on send. And when I click on that, you'll see here that I get some options. You'll see here. Here's the location. I click on it and zip. It will send it over. Now, if this is your first time sharing a location with someone, it'll ask you if you want to share it indefinitely. If you want to share it to the end of the day, or if you want to share it for one hour, I've shared it for one hour and that's why you'll see 56 minutes because I shared it four minutes ago as well. And there's a timer clicking down on it. So that's all there is to it in iOS 17 and iPhone. Thanks for watching.


Jen asks, how do you envision markets transitioning from centralized to decentralized exchanges? What are the implications you see at large? Decentralized exchanges are a fantastic idea. I think it can be applied fairly directly to trading between open digital cryptocurrencies. But trading cryptocurrencies to fiat currencies, trading between US dollars and Bitcoin, is a lot harder to decentralize, and the reason for that is because the dollar system is centralized. You have some examples of decentralization, and recently they haven't been growing as fast. Things like local bitcoins or various types of cash markets, ATM machines, those are fiat to Bitcoin exchanges, and they are decentralized. But they can't really generate a lot of volume of transactions. They are not very convenient. Whereas doing things like cross-chain atomic swaps, where you can swap currencies from two blockchains with two transactions that are trustless and where neither participant can cheat, means that we could see many more decentralized cryptocurrency to cryptocurrency exchanges. We will see how that happens. I think that will be really interesting. Another possibility that we are seeing, and I think a lot of different participants are now exploring, is the possibility of having fiat currencies expressed as some kind of pegged cryptocurrency. An example of that would be Tether, or there are some proposals for other forms like that, where you have fiat currency in reserve, then you have a cryptocurrency asset that is issued in equal proportion, and you can trade that on a blockchain. That allows you to do arbitrage and decentralized exchanges for fiat currencies too. Although of course the bank deposits that contain the actual asset, for example US dollar, are still centralized. Will a Tether collapse lead to such a fierce bear market that it kills off Bitcoin? Will decentralized atomic swaps and bisque be too late and weak to save the day? I haven't really studied what is happening with Tether, but I do know that it is a centralized and centrally managed system, and that represents counter-party risks like any other centralized and centrally controlled system. Having lived through a few very, very big crises in Bitcoin, I am really not fearful of a fierce bear market that could kill off Bitcoin. I really don't think that that can happen for a variety of reasons. One reason is that most people who get into Bitcoin today don't realize how big a deal the collapse of empty Gox was. We are talking about a time when there was only one exchange, when that exchange was responsible for price setting, and when that exchange was responsible for the vast majority of all of the exchange volume, and when it collapsed, it collapsed suddenly, catastrophically, and with a loss that was a staggering amount of money, as a percentage of the total amount of Bitcoin in circulation, and Bitcoin didn't die. It was the first and only time I was afraid that this might really knock Bitcoin back by a long time, or even potentially stop it in its tracks, and force us to reboot the currency and start something new. When it didn't happen, I realized that Bitcoin is more resilient than I thought. Then I started thinking about what my reaction would have been if Bitcoin had dropped precipitously back to double digits, or even single digits, in value against the dollar. I realized that what I would probably do is buy all of them with whatever cash I had. Then I realized that everybody else would be thinking the same, or at least a very large number of people who had seen that this experiment was working and believed in it, would think the same. This idea of buying the dip isn't always investment advice or good investment advice. In fact, in some cases, it's terrible investment advice. It's catching a falling knife, as they say, in investment circles. But there are some people who believe in this project so strongly that if they see an opportunity to get back in at a much lower cost basis, they will. Some of these people have a lot of money now. What they consider a buying opportunity is much higher than what I would. In fact, I recently saw a tweet that was funny, which said, what would you do if Bitcoin dropped to zero? No one responded, it wouldn't. If it dropped to one penny, I could buy all of them for $168,000 than I would. That kind of attitude at different price points means that I don't see that scenario. Could a collapse of something like Tether set us back by a significant period of time? Yes, we keep seeing these things happen. They are the result of centrally controlled, centrally managed custodial systems. Tether is one of those. The same thing could be said for the recent massive theft at Coincheck, which was half a billion dollars worth of NEM and a significant amount of Ripple. We will continue to see these centralized systems introduce counter-party risk. Every now and then, that counter-party risk will turn into an actualized loss.


Personal finance PowerPoint presentation, estate tax. Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Support accounting instruction by clicking the link below, giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website, broken out by category, further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion, making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Most of this information comes from Investopedia, Estate Tax, which you can find online. Take a look at the references, resources, continue your research from there. This by Julia Kagan, updated May 7, 2022. In prior presentations, we've been taking a look at estate planning, then focusing in on particular tools or components of estate planning, which may be applicable depending on your circumstances, this time that being estate tax. First question, what is an estate tax? An estate tax is a levy on estates whose value exceeds an exclusion limit set by law. Only amounts that exceeds that minimum threshold is subject to tax. So we'll go through a quick recap of the estate planning process. Obviously before death, the idea would be at the point of death. You have a couple goals. You want to be able to allocate your assets in accordance with your wishes. You want to be able to make things as easy as possible on your loved ones. And you want to be able to reduce the tax implications as much as possible, which in essence, reversed back to goal number one, being able to allocate your assets in accordance with your wishes, which of course you would think would be not given the money to the government if possible. The estate taxes then are going to be a tax at death. You might call it basically a death tax. The idea then being that you're going to be compiling the assets together for the individual at the point of death, which we're going to call the estate assets and liabilities. We're going to see how large that value is. And then we're going to compare that to an exclusion to see whether or not it's going to be subject in essence to an estate tax. So you would think then the estate tax would typically be applied to more wealthy individuals who when they die, they have a fairly substantial estate, which might be subject to the estate tax. Now remember the estate tax can be a little bit confusing in America. We typically think of the major form of taxation as an income tax, taxing earnings as we earn them. The estate tax, if applied, is kind of like a double tax because it taxes the earnings that have already been taxed on kind of a balance sheet side of things now at the point of death. So you've got to value the assets at that point in time, then see whether or not they're subject to the tax. Although there's an exclusion, so it's generally going to be assigned to more wealthy individuals. Okay. Assessed by the federal government and a number of state governments, so you could have state taxes as well in the United States, state estate taxes. So these levels are calculated based on the estate's fair market value, FMV, rather than what the deceased originally paid for the assets. So notice if you're trying to value the estate, you've got to determine on a balance sheet basis what point in time are you valuing it as? It's going to be somewhere around the date of death, right? And then you've got to reallocate or value what the assets are, which is easier said than done for some assets than the other. If you're talking about, say, stocks and bonds, for example, then you're not going to value it at what they paid for it. You're going to try to value it at the current market value, which you can look at the current stocks being traded. So it should be fairly easy to determine for some of those publicly traded stocks, for example. Other things can be more difficult, such as a home or jewelry, for example, because they may be unique in nature more difficult than to value as of the current point in time. But that's the idea. So the tax is levied by the state in which the deceased person was living at the time of their death. So how federal estate taxes work? Under what is known as the unlimited marital deduction, the estate tax does not apply to assets that will be transferred to a surviving spouse. So if you have one individual, it's a little bit more straightforward because obviously when they die, you could try to value their assets and tax them. If you have a married couple, you would think the definition of marriage would be two people now basically combined as one person legally speaking, you would think, and therefore if one of those individuals die, you would generally think the assets would convert to the other one or as one legal entity. And again, the definition of a financial legal entity may differ from state to state, whether they're community property or non-community property, but the general idea would be that the estate wouldn't really be taxed until the second person dies with regards to the estate tax, right? One person dies, the other person is still living, so you can think of it as their assets go into the other person or as one legal entity has not yet died because one person is still living and therefore when they die, that's when the estate tax takes place. Now that's good in terms of when one person dies, possibly not being subject to estate taxes at that time. However, when we think about how the estate taxes work, we usually think about an exemption, the exemption being similar to like a standard deduction for the income tax. So the estate tax is not really taking place until you clear the exemption, but for the standard deduction on an income tax, when you're married, they double the standard deduction as to when you're single. For the estate tax, you don't generally have that same kind of thing, so that means that if one spouse dies and all the assets go to the other spouse, when they die, they're going to have twice as many assets which are still subject to one individual kind of exemption. So then that's when planning could take place for using trusts or stuff like that to try to make sure that you're maximizing the exemption for both individuals in a married situation which we talked about in prior presentations. Okay, however, when the surviving spouse dies, who inherited an estate dies, the beneficiaries may owe estate taxes if the estate exceeds the exclusion limit, which is kind of similar to the standard deduction. The Internal Revenue Service IRS requires estates with combined gross assets and prior taxable gifts exceeding $11.7 million for 2021, $12.06 million for 2022 to file a federal estate tax return and pay estate taxes as required. So we're not talking about income here like an income tax. We're talking about kind of the asset value, the value of the estate on the balance sheet side of things that we got to value the estate and then determine if it's over these thresholds to see whether or not it's going to be subject to the estate taxes. Now, when you look at these thresholds, you might say, well, that's a pretty big number, not a whole lot of people are going to be subject to that and that's true, but also just realize with these estate planning, it's a long-term planning kind of thing. There's a couple things you want to keep in mind here. One is even when we put in the federal income tax, we thought it was only going to be applied to very wealthy individuals and obviously like middle income individuals are clearly subject to the federal income tax. And then on the estate tax, we really thought that that would only be applied to really well-off individuals, which you're thinking generally at this point would be like billionaires, you would think. And the $12.06 million is still pretty far away from a billion. So it's far away from the billionaire kind of status. Also, just note that as time passes, there's going to be inflation that's going to eat into that, so that number might not look quite as large. Also, when you're doing long-term estate planning, you also got to take into consideration that threshold can change drastically based on whoever's in the political power at any given time.  When you die, it can change drastically just depending on whoever's in political power at the time. Just a couple things to consider. In many instances, the effective U.S. estate tax is substantially lower than the top federal statutory rate of 37%. This discrepancy happens partially because the tax is assessed only on the portion of an estate that exceeds the exclusion. So the exclusion, kind of like a standard deduction, you're paying taxes on the amount that's over and above the exclusion. To illustrate the impact of the exclusion, consider an estate that's worth $13 million. With the 2022 exclusion limit of $12.06 million, federal estate taxes would be owed on $940,000 of the estate or less than a tenth of its total assets. In 2022, the rate is 40%. So that tax bill would be $376,000. In addition, state holders and beneficiaries or their attorneys continually find new creative ways to protect significant chunks of a state's remaining value from taxes by taking advantage of discounts, deductions, and other legal structures. So obviously, you're going to have a lot of debate over what the estate tax, how effective it is and whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing. Clearly, this threshold or this limit in terms of what the exclusion will be will have a big impact. Obviously, as we lower that threshold, some people would argue, well, that's good because it's still on fairly wealthy individuals and we need to get more money and so on on the estate taxes. But also, that will give incentives for more people to try to do estate tax planning, which as we've seen in prior presentations, gets more and more complex using complex structures such as trusts, which can get to a degree of complexity where you don't even really know who owns what. And it also creates a whole industry of lawyers and whatnot that are doing things in order to deal with this estate taxes, which you would think, like if you didn't have that there, they might be applying their considerable skills and efforts to other areas and whatnot. It's an interesting area of law and taxation to be in, but there's pros and cons related to it. In any case, how estate taxes work and a state that exceeds federal tax may still be subject to taxation by the state where the deceased person was living at the time of their death. So we also have the state estate taxes as opposed to federal estate taxes, possibly depending on the state you're living in, if you're in the United States. That's because the exemptions for state and district estate taxes are only a fraction of those of the federal exclusion that said, estates valued at less than $1 million are not taxed in any jurisdiction. So jurisdictions with estate tax, and let's just quick look at the state side of things for the estate taxes. So here are the jurisdictions that have estate taxes with the threshold minimums at which they apply showing in parentheses. So we got Connecticut, $1,100,000, District of Columbia, $4,254,800. This being the exemption, so if you're over that threshold, possibly subject to the estate taxes for that locale. Hawaii, $5,490,000, and again this is the state's, in addition to whatever you might be subject to on the federal side of things, which we talked about earlier. So Illinois, $4,000,000, Maine, $6,010,000, Maryland, $5,000,000, Massachusetts, $1,000,000, Minnesota, $3,000,000, New York, $6,110,000, Oregon, $1,000,000, Rhode Island, $1,648,111. It's a funny number, it's probably because it's going up with inflation or something. Vermont, $5,000,000, Washington State, $2,193,000. Above those thresholds, the taxes usually assessed on a sliding basis, much like the brackets for income tax in 2021. The tax is typically 18% or so for amounts just over the threshold and rises in steps usually to 39%. So in other words, these numbers are kind of like, you can think of them as the equivalent of kind of like the standard deduction for income taxes applied to the state exemption amounts for the estate taxes over that amount. That's the amount that could be subject to taxation possibly. And then you've got the progressive tax system in a similar way possibly to the income taxes, meaning the amounts that are on the lower income or asset value side are going to be taxed at lower amounts.  So some states such as Massachusetts offer tax rates as low as 0%, depending on the taxable size of the estate. The relationship between estate tax and gift tax.  So remember the interplay that's going to happen here, it gets quite complex, right? If someone says, hey, I'm going to take your money when you die, right? What are you going to do, right? When you die, you're going to try to give all your money away to your son or daughter, most likely on your deathbed so that you don't have any money for them to take when you're actually dead. So then the person that wants to take your money, the government, doesn't like that. So they're going to say, well, no, you can't give your money away on your deathbed. We're going to make rules with regards to the gifting of money and tie those rules to the estate tax in some way, and then the merit go round, goes round and round, and it gets complicated. So however, the federal gift tax applies to assets that are given away in excess of certain limits while the taxpayer is living. According to the IRS, the gift tax applies whether the donor met the transfer as a gift or not. So then the question also becomes, well, was it a gift or not? Well, if you gave some money to someone else, did you get something in return? Was it a market transaction? Or if you didn't get anything in return, you would think it would basically be a gift, right? That would be the general idea. So gift tax exclusion. However, the IRS offers generous gift tax exclusions. For 2021, the annual exclusion is $15,000, meaning tax filers can give up to 15,000 to each person they wish without paying tax on any of those gifts. So now you've got a threshold in terms of how much you can give away per year in an attempt to limit how much you can give away, like in one year, like right before death or something like that would be the general idea. So if, you know, 15,000 is a decent size number, but when you compare it to like a multi-billion dollar estate or something like that, it's not quite significant with regards to, you know, the overall billion dollars, right? So the ratio, you know, so in any case, so that would be taken into consideration with the estate planning. For 2021, the annual exclusion is 15,000. For 2022 tax year, the annual exclusion is $16,000. And again, note that that 16,000 isn't the total gifts you can give. That's the gifts on a per person basis to give multiple persons up to the limit of the 16,000 would be the general idea. And they may offer gifts up to the value of the gift exclusion year after year without incurring tax. So now the idea, if you're trying to lower the amount of tax as you're going to have for the estate tax, you've got to lower your actual estate. One way you can do that is try to give money away while you're alive in such a way that you're not going to be subject to taxes, which means that you could start giving money away of the 16,000 to multiple individuals. As many individuals that you would want up to the, basically the 16,000 would be the idea. The other thing you could start to imagine is, well, what if I gave money away, quote, gave money away to like a trust, like a separate entity and a trust, and that's where, you know, creative, other creative strategies can basically take place. So these provisions make gifting an effective way to avoid tax on assets transferred to people such as non-family members who might be subject to the estate tax if the assets were transferred as part of an estate gift exclusion limit. If your gifts exceed the gift exclusion limit, they aren't subject to tax immediately and may never be taxed unless your estate is substantial. So now you're going to say, well, what if I go over that amount? Well, then you've got to note that you've gone over that amount, but it's kind of tied still to the estate tax because you can basically think of it as kind of eating into your exemption limit for the estate tax. So the amount above the gift limit is noted and added to the taxable value of your estate when calculate a state tax after you die. For example, let's say you decide to make a gift of $76,000 in 2022. So since the annual exclusion is $16,000, you'll be spared tax up to that number. The remaining $60,000, however, will need to be reported on a 709 gift tax return. So you're filing the gift tax return 709 to report the fact that you've given amounts over the limit to an individual.  You've cut into your exemption amount there. And so that means that if your estate is over the $12 million now, you could be subject to the estate taxes at that point. And also your estate tax exclusion to $12 million. So estate taxes versus inheritance tax. An estate tax is applied to an estate before the assets are given to beneficiaries in contrast, and inheritance tax applies to assets after they have been inherited and are paid by the inheritor. So notice we in the United States, we usually think of the first tax as like an income tax, meaning when you get money. That's usually when the taxation happens. And we have the estate tax too, which is a little bit confusing to us here because that means you're kind of taxing the person who died's balance sheet instead of the income statement side of things. And you've got to value the things and then tax basically the balance sheet as opposed to saying, and it kind of would make more sense from an income tax side or an income tax system to say, well, when the money goes to somebody else, now that's income to them, and you would think that it would be subject to the income tax at that point in time. But that would have different implications because if it's an estate tax, you're trying to value the entire estate, you know, put it all together and you're taxing this one lump kind of value on the balance sheet side of things. If it's an inheritance tax, then you could have, you would have strategies when the person receives the money and people would try, you could try different tax strategies to give different people different amounts of money and use trusts in different ways so that so that when they receive the money, you know, different people are going to receive different proportions of the total estate and possibly be subject to the tax if you had an inheritance tax. So how an inheritance tax works, there is no federal inheritance tax. An inheritance tax, however, and only select states, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, still have their own inheritance taxes. So when you're talking on the federal side of things, we're usually thinking in the United States, the estate taxes on the inheritance tax, you could have differences in terms of the state that you are in with regards to how they may conduct their estate taxes. Maryland alone has both an estate and inheritance tax. So you would think that normally you wouldn't have both of those two things because you're taxing it kind of twice if you tax it on the balance sheet side and then when it gets distributed to the person that receives it, but Maryland apparently has that. So the inheritance tax is assessed by the state in which the inheritor is living, whether your inheritance will be taxed and at what rate depends on its value, your relationship to the person who passed away and the prevailing rules and rates where you live, as with a state tax, an inheritance tax, if due, is applied only to the sum that exceeds the exemption. So you have a similar kind of process because now you'd get the money which you would think you might cover like on the income tax, like kind of if it was a federal like kind of on your 1040, but you might have a separate kind of thing where you're basically getting kind of income which we're defining now as inheritance, obviously, and then applying the rate when you receive the money. So above those thresholds, part of the problem with this, of course, is that when you receive the income, if it was an inheritance and you have a progressive tax system as we do in the United States, then when you get that lump sum money, that would bump you up into a higher tax bracket and a lot more of it would be taxed and so on and so forth. So it gets quite complicated. But in any case, above those thresholds, the taxes usually assessed on a sliding basis, rates typically begin in the single digits and rise to between 15 and 19 percent. The exemption you receive and the rate you're charged may vary by your relationship to the deceased. Inheritance tax exceptions. So life insurance payable to a named beneficiary is not typically subject to an inheritance tax.  Although life insurance payable to the deceased person or their estate is usually subject to an estate tax. As a rule, the closer your relationship to the decedent, the lower the rate you'll pay. Surviving spouses are exempt from inheritance tax in all six states. Domestic partners too are exempt in New Jersey. Descendants pay no inheritance tax except in Nebraska and Pennsylvania. Jurisdictions with inheritance tax. Here are the jurisdictions that have inheritance taxes with their threshold minimums shown in parentheses. You got Iowa, 25,000. Kentucky, 500 to 1,000. Maryland, 50,000 to 100,000. Nebraska, 10,000 to 40,000. New Jersey, none to 25,000. And Pennsylvania, none to 3,500. Because the rates for estate tax can be quite high, careful estate planning is advisable for individuals who have estates worth millions of dollars that they want to leave to heirs or other beneficiaries. So if you have a substantial amount in the estate, then it could be worthwhile to go through the rig of a role of doing the estate tax planning strategies.