Happy Valentine's Day! Today we're going to be doing a new video that is a little bit different because we have Jan here. Welcome Jan! We're going to be doing a Q&A with him. So thank you so much for sending your questions and let's get to it! Okay, so just so you know a little bit more about Jan, he is my husband and we got married last year. It was a very small wedding because of COVID. It was only 10 people including us but I think he was very special, right? He was very special, of course. So we got many questions now that we're recording so I'm going to read them now. So it says, one is do you miss Mexican food? It's so hard sometimes in Germany to find food restaurants and Jan wants to answer these questions. Yeah, it seems like the person who asked maybe where those in Germany lives here are. And maybe I think he's Mexican. Yeah, I understand. We both love Mexican food and it's actually maybe not that hard to find it here in Berlin, maybe other parts of Germany a little bit harder. But since we live here for some years now we have some stores in the neighborhood where we can buy pretty much most of the things we need and also through the corona pandemic we learn to make a lot of stuff like tortillas from the scratch and all these kinds of sauces and so we cook Mexican food every day sometimes even more often than that and it's great. Yeah, we find many chiles for example, guajillo, poblano, we find chile de árbol. So yeah and also we know a very amazing chef here. She's Mexican and her name is Yvette. I'm gonna also put her Instagram account here if you're in Berlin. I would really recommend that you follow her. She's amazing and she always makes the best panda muerto and rosca de reyes. So yeah, we're very lucky that we found her I think. We love Mexican food. Yes. Okay, so the next question is how do you meet? And this is a very popular question many of you asked this. So what I was thinking is maybe you could start the story and then if Yan misses something I can just jump in. So yeah, you can start. Yeah, well I'm sure I'm gonna miss something. It was so many days. Beautiful memories. Yeah. And so where did we meet? We met in Czech Republic. I was studying there and I was also a summer school program coordinator for a summer school that Lucia came over to study at. You were studying history and European studies. Yes. That was back in 2014 and well we started to hang out more and kind of like each other as we go on these excursions that were part of the program to other cities in Europe like in Budapest, Vienna and Prague. It was really nice actually. And Prague is actually where we started dating I think. We were in this park. You can tell us about it. Yeah, the park was, it's like a hill that overlooks the old town in Prague, right? Like the castle, the castle I think. Yeah, it was in Prague Castle in the old town. Yeah, and it's super beautiful. And I remember that for some reason it was only us because some of the students that were with us left to other places and then it was just us in the park. When this happened it was 11 days before I was gonna return to Canada. So I thought that maybe nothing was gonna happen because I mean I really liked him and I think there was some chemistry there. But I was like okay there is no way that, I mean I'm going back, right? But then I said that I was cold because I had forgotten my coat because I always forget it. And he hugged me and yeah, so I think then I was like okay maybe something's gonna happen. But it was 11 days before I left. So as Jan said we were, I know I think you didn't see it, you didn't see it but we were actually going on secret dates after this because he was a staff and I was a student so it was partially not allowed. Like it was kind of like a rule in between the lines I guess or something. Yeah, like after hours when I was with students or you were in your class then we would meet. And then yeah, so that's how everything started and then after the 11 days we decided that we wanted to try to see if we could make it work. And that's how when I went back to Canada we had long distance and then we started to try to work out how we would make it work because we were in two different continents, right? But yeah the rest is history now we're in Berlin and it worked out. So follow your heart. Well that's the moral of the story, right? Like I think that whenever you have a gut feeling or you feel that there is some connection there with someone or with something that gives you happiness I think you should just go for it, right? Okay, next one. Are you planning to stay in Germany forever? No, that's a very good question too. That has been a question for us for a long time and we don't really know the answer. No. That's the answer but I think that's a question of our relationship where we're gonna live. Yeah we have both our families are in different places we have also lived from between Mexico, Chicago, probably Canada, other places in Europe so we will see. If you know let us know in the comments below. At least for the next years maybe we'll stay here. Well we have a bunch of plans that we like so we cannot move all the time. We can put them in a big cargo ship container and go with maybe four meter monstera. Yeah but yeah the answer is that we don't know it forever but we like it here at least for now so yeah at least for now we'll stay here and then we'll see what happens. So does he speak Spanish and do you speak German? Do you speak Spanish yet? Yes, I speak Spanish a little bit more. And we speak Spanish sometimes together. And also with Lucia's family when we go there to Canada for Christmas or when we talk to your more distant family in Mexico. In Spanish, solo en español. Yeah actually I'm just trying to study some more Spanish right now. But I think her Spanish is really good. Yeah and how are you German? I'm a bit German but I have to learn more. Yeah so I studied some German last year every day and I think I've gotten better but it's still new to me so I can speak like I can speak basic things that I can use to survive here in Berlin. Of course here in Berlin many people speak English but yeah I think we can speak German. We even had a we have a new game Wingspan which is amazing and it's all in German and we understand everything I mean he speaks German but yeah but I also understand which is really great. Yeah it's a nice game we like to play board games it's about boards so maybe it'll be one about playing it's a similar one. Yeah that would be amazing. Maybe we need to make it. Yes okay yeah maybe that would be a good idea. Okay so did you ever have long distance? Yes. Twice. Yes oh yeah twice that's true you know we met and then we were together for 11 days and then I had to go back to Canada because we met in Czech Republic and yeah we had long distance for six months I think. Yeah six months. And yeah you know it was it was difficult but it was also really nice right? Yeah we used to have this google drive and we used to put like the dates like our whenever we're gonna have a Skype call and then what we would do so either a board game or watch a movie or watch the office because we used to watch the office a lot and it was really nice because it was kind of like exciting to see what we're gonna do that date or when we're gonna meet. Yeah and then the visits were really exciting too. I mean that was not the first time but the second time when we were long distance for like nine months a couple years ago then that also is just like exciting to be looking forward to the next visit but of course guys go for it but it can be really tough too sometimes. Yeah it can be tough. I think the biggest thing for long distance is that you want you want to know when it's gonna end so you don't want to be in a long distance well I don't know but at least for us it helped to know that at some point we were gonna see each other again and we were gonna live somewhere together right? I think that was very helpful for us so yeah but yeah I think if you're in a long distance relationship it grows for you and yeah I guess it can be fun sometimes but yeah of course it's difficult. If it doesn't work out get it planned. I know. Okay so did your family approve you moving to Germany? Latina problems? Hashtag Latina problems? Yeah that was a little bit difficult. I mean my family was very respectful I think but when I was because the first time that I moved out from the house was actually when I went to Czech Republic because Jan was also in Czech Republic at the time and my dad was very okay with it like of course he was like he was sad but my mom was I think for my mom it was a little bit more difficult the Latina mother. I think they didn't also know me and you were yeah you were just moving somewhere else outside of a country where you came only with your family. Outside of the continent. Yeah so uh but the second time when you moved to Germany I think it was easier because uh because he was already in Canada by then yeah we came enough for a year together yeah that was better yeah yeah but in the beginning it was difficult of course because they didn't know him and it was just hard of course they wanted us to be closer to the family but that's why we're trying we're trying to make a living where we can actually go visit them more often and we can be close and we talk to them a lot so because I don't know about you guys whoever is Latino but we have a WhatsApp group and we call almost every day with them so yeah and the family is here. The family just multiplies them so now we can really enjoy all our family and friends. Yeah okay the next one is another one that is a very good one and it's where did we get married and how was the wedding planning and then in brackets two weddings yeah that's a new story right yeah but it's a fun story yeah we we were planning to get married in 2021 actually but you guys all know the pandemic came and yeah we sort of went with the flow for some time but then we were thinking you know we won't be able to get married in Czech Republic next year actually it's this year yeah well we were gonna go we're gonna get married in Czech Republic but we were inviting people from Canada, Mexico, Germany so after the pandemic is like we thought okay this is not gonna happen and I was also really excited to get married so we figured out in the summer that we will get married somewhere we reached some places and then we figure out that the easiest and the best will be to get married last September in 2020 in in Canada we decided like months and a half before the wedding so it was just eight people or nine people with your knees for the for that and like a hundred guests online which which we don't regret and was really nice and we it was really really nice yeah we got married outside had just a little picnic table and got married under the trees and with the efficient wearing a face mask so it was also a little bit symbolic but it was a very small wedding yeah I mean we because we live in Germany and we decided to move to to have the wedding in Canada so we would have some family there and we had to do the two-week quarantine so we were just like staying in a basement like for quarantine but it was nice because in those two weeks because it was so fast we could plan a little bit more yeah it was also good for just working and planning the wedding yeah we couldn't go out but that was really good because even for small wedding uh yeah two weeks or three or four weeks that we had isn't that much time so but um it was great and I think now after it's just uh it's just a great feeling yeah yeah it's a nice feeling actually and it was small wedding but it was really it was really special and yeah so it was not like the Mexican or like Czech wedding that well Mexican weddings are really big Czech weddings are a little smaller but I think this one was even smaller than Czech wedding oh yeah but I think it was nice like uh people that we loved were there uh virtually so we could share that moment and also some like my family was there which was really nice and yeah it was really special yeah to anyone who wants to do it or is deciding I'd recommend yeah the technology these days is far enough to to make it worse and be really happy with everyone about it yeah uh does your husband have a favorite plant that's always a hard question we have some but um recently I found out I really like like different kind of succulent they grow like these thick thick leaves uh like what's the what's it called fluffy with like yeah sort of like a white fur um and also like the oxalis triambulares wow but we don't have that one anymore we don't have that one anymore and we actually we in the previous apartment we were we uh we our landlords had it there so we were taking care of it and it was really nice so um and also like the monstera and and many other places wow you know many plants okay so let's see so does he love plants as much as you that's a tricky question uh um probably not going I really like them but um it's hard to compare to somebody who takes care of the plants all the time and really likes them so I think I'm a little behind but it's really nice but he likes them yeah I really like plants okay so do either of you both have a favorite pieces of tree do you have one uh for me I would say well this is a pretty common tree but I really really really really like the maple tree because it reminds me of home which is Canada and we had many maple trees when we got married and it was actually the fall so they actually changed color so that's really nice but yeah so I think that was I would say that would be one of my favorites but of course I don't know I mean I like that one yeah I just thought since it's really uh it's winter now and I thought of like a different spruce and pine trees when it's in the mountains full of snow or even these small mountain pines she's more of an outdoor guy don't know what they're called so um yeah those are really interesting trees okay so the next question is do you all speak other languages if so can we hear a small little conversation so as you can see we have accents in English so this is our second language and yeah we speak other languages so my first language is Spanish and my first language is Czech yeah some Czech Republic and then we speak English between each other but he speaks German I'm learning German now because we live in Germany and I'm a bit in German yeah and I speak Spanish with you and with your family and we speak Spanish together sometimes and in fact I already speak Spanish what I just said is that he practices Spanish every day I think yeah and Lucia practices German when she came when she studies Spanish we put like different stickers not on the plants but in German to learn yeah so around the house we have stickers with German vocabulary for the for example the table or the plant and then we have different colors so blue green and pink because they're the sweet gender so blue is masculine pink is feminine and then green is neutral and that kind of like reminds us of what are the articles for each one of them so I think that's a good practice in the house but yeah okay so the next question is related to video production in the channel and it says first what equipment and programs do you use for your video production and how much production time do you spend per video on average also do you guys talk sing to your plants was their favorite music okay so these are very good questions for the videos as you may know I actually use my phone and also I wrote a wi-fi microphone so it's very homemade videos but at the same time I think yeah some production is there I guess but it's actually a funny story because Jan also works here because of COVID he's working from home so sometimes we have to kind of like see how I'm on a record and how he's gonna have his meetings or vice versa so that can be a little yeah yeah I think that would be one of the things that we have in our household and yeah per video on average maybe I spent a day or two so I record a video and then maybe another day to edit because that's what takes the longest I guess but I like it I mean sometimes it can be tiring as he knows but but yeah I like it I guess it can be a little work and just like life there's ups and downs but yeah and let's see do you guys talk or sing to your plants not really I don't think I don't do I sing for myself sometimes or something but not to the plant not to the planes I guess they listen yeah maybe maybe they feel the vibrations but but I think because this is what's their favorite music I don't know but I know that I actually do play music when I water the plants so it's like a nice mood in the house and I hope that they like it I love to do it sometimes we play Italian songs sometimes we play just music that we like like more alternative but I think that it makes it more special because you really get into the mood and it's really nice and if you guys play music when you water your plants or do anything with your plants let me know down in the comments because yeah you'd be nice to know how and when did your love start for plants how do you decide on what plants to buy so uh well my love for plants I don't know you can also say when your love for plants started but I get I mean I think we always like like the plants or we had some plants in the house but not more than most other friends or people we know until until like two years ago yeah yes so it was yeah it was like that actually we didn't have so many plants in the house I actually didn't know so much about plants before I even started this channel but it was just a new journey for me and I wanted to just learn as a beginner and share with you guys and I think the journey with plants actually started at the same time that the channel started and it's just so nice to now see all of these plants and all of this community like the whole community how it is growing so that has been really nice I think so yeah I think throughout this the last two years that's when we started learning more and more about plants and now it's just a very a very big part of our lives I think I mean of my life and then in consequence also we answer and the next question is how do you decide on what plants to buy that's a very good question I guess it depends on your space and the kind of care that you want to give them or where you are in your journey but I would recommend that you watch a playlist that I'm actually working on this month and I'm I'm just uploading many videos on that how to select a plan how to bring a plant home and what to do when you bring a plant home so if you want to check it out I'm going to put the playlist right here or here and yeah just let me know what you think okay so the next question is I'd like to know how you met and how you both ended up in Germany he's very cute well both of you thank you so well we we answered the question of how we met but yeah so Jan is from Czech Republic from Europe and I am from North America specifically I'm originally from Mexico and then we moved to Canada so I'm Mexican Canadian and my family is there so when we met it was kind of like all over the place we lived in Czech Republic then we lived in Canada and it was like like that and at some point we ended up in Canada because I was doing a program in university and the program was actually on European studies because I studied history and that's actually how we met and one of the things that I had to do in the program is to do an internship in somewhere in Europe so we decided that maybe Berlin was the best place in terms of what I was studying and also in terms of how it worked for our relationship so we could be a little bit longer in Berlin and kind of like not move so much around and I think in the end we ended up we ended up liking it right like kind of we never thought about living here the year or two after we met but now we're here for some time and uh and it's been really nice and to see how our internship then I found a job and we started like the city and the rest is history things came together and yeah the rest is history I will see what comes here yeah but we really like here it's a very international city so we we meet many people from all around the world and many couples that are like us so it's really nice to just share that with other people here as well if you're from Germany just comment below and say hello to the sides okay so have you two arguable plans yes we did and we still do we argue a lot but I love him so it's okay but yeah I mean I think we argue because I think one of the biggest things is because of last year because of corona we both work from home and it's not only about the youtube channel but also Jan has his meetings and he also has to work and sometimes the plans as well uh take some time or space so when I have to water them for example we have a space here but it's right in between his office and the kitchen so that can be a problem sometimes so we're working out these little perks every day uh but I guess yeah everyone is kind of like working on this because we basically many of us are working from home so I guess yeah he's about figuring it out but yeah but I think the plans are still the positive they're they're really nice and when we fight we try to not to put the plans in the way it's just between us um yeah yeah otherwise Lucia knows much more about plans than me so I usually follow um and yeah I help out with some care or something yeah yeah but sometimes I also learn about Jan because he knows some stuff that I don't know so okay so the next one is by Christy that boo and she asked a very good question that was how do you ensure your plans are fine when you go away on vacation especially for sensitive plans like alasias if you don't have anyone else taking care of them well you're away which is a very good question because I think we've had this problem because as I was as we said our families are in another country we live in Germany but my family's in Canada his family's in Czech Republic so we try to visit them as much as possible I mean not this year but yeah before so yeah so we have to also take care of the plans when we're away and I think the first thing would be our friends I mean I know that she says that when we don't have but that would be one of the things that we do we ask friends to come or the neighbors to water them and we always well we try to make a video or give instructions to them so it's easier for them because some plants may not need so much water especially the calatheas they need a lot of water or stuff like that so that would be one thing but of course as you said the calatheas or some prayer plants need more water and more humidity so if that's the case then we try to use the watering stakes right that's one yeah it's one thing or just ask the friends to come over more often yeah but I think as we get more and more plants maybe at some point we're gonna maybe try to hire someone when we go away because sometimes we go away for a long period of time and if it's like if it's a lot if it's many plants it can be a lot for a friend to do so yeah we may have to hire there's a bit of a learning curve for the friend and maybe it's a little bit intimidating to take care of a lot of plants so but yeah I would say maybe the watering stakes is a good idea if you're going out maybe for a week or something like this this is very good because it's actually just automatic watering which is great if you're going out for if you're going on vacation for longer than a week I would recommend that you maybe ask someone or something like this or maybe bring the plants that we have done too for example the calasillas or plants that are more sensitive or more demanding we bring the plants to our friend's house so they don't have to come here and they can just take care of them in their houses which I think that was also helpful another question from Christy is do you have a connection to Toronto Canada and yes well I am originally from Mexico but my family and I moved to Canada when I was 15 so a long a long time ago I mean not so long but we moved there and this is our home now uh actually Toronto specifically my whole family is there and yeah it's like a second home to us I guess right yeah it's one of the homes uh important we go we go often there when we can we try to go because we want to visit the family and yeah so I'm Mexican Canadian Jan is dating no sorry Jan is married to a Canadian so yeah especially Toronto I would say yeah so any people who are from Toronto comment below we would love to hear from you so another question from expat gardener how do you like Germany I'm a third generation American Mexican blood I moved to Norway with my hobby 10 years ago I love how you name your plants and your accent is a breath of fresh air thank you so yeah so nice to hear from another Mexican hello um I think how do we find Germany how do we find Germany we uh we like Germany I mean we we live in Berlin and Germany is a big country too so we're yet to discover every every end of it I think I know Germany a little yeah he knows it better than me I live just across the border when I grew up in Czech Republic but we like it and we especially like Berlin it's a very it's very international very through the artists through the through the dark history through the complicated history very dynamic city compared to some other maybe more traditional cities in Europe and so the kind of people that come here we we like that yeah we have a very nice community here too so it's nice and yeah I think but yeah I would love to explore more of Germany like we've we've been to other cities but I think you have explored more I guess but uh but yeah I think we really like it and I would love to learn more German like last year I was learning German and this year because of COVID the classes were stopped but maybe I'm gonna continue online because yeah I also like the language so yeah but yeah I put it really nicely so yeah I would agree with what he said it's a very vibrant city at least Berlin and I think Germany in general is a very interesting country and super beautiful so yeah we really like it as well as Norway yes as well as Norway so hello to Norway spend some time and yeah he really likes it too okay uh Marta Medium asked where is that said said he's caring so uh he's talking she's talking about this one here uh yeah um well that was a big one first of all that was a very big one and our friend who had to leave Berlin and moved back to the United States actually made a video with Rebecca yes yes I can put the link somewhere here so you can see it and um she's amazing she wanted somebody to take care of her plants and uh we got uh from her some of them and this plant was really big we brought it on the subway yeah it was a little bit of a challenge and then uh well actually recently we decided to split it into several plants because it was uh really big and needed more space so we took opportunity to make it a little younger I can also put the link for that because we reported that plant but actually it was really interesting because I didn't know so much about this one like we have another said plant here which is growing new leaves but this one was really really big and uh it started flowering and I didn't know that I was really excited when I saw the flowers but then I learned that when I said said plant in a pot flowers that means that they're stressed like they're trying to reproduce so when I learned that I'm like okay so then we have to divide it so it has more space and now we have three uh this plant is now three plants and one of them is actually growing a new leaf so I'm very excited about that and yeah so that's the story of that plant uh we have another question from a friend here in Berlin and he says why did your hair get so long Jan so why well you can take a guess um been home for a long time hairdressers have been closed and uh I don't know how to cut the hair just uh yeah it's it's okay I mean we don't go out much so and I don't get to be in the shots that often only now so so I cut my own hair actually um yeah so when the barber stores open again and here in Germany in the spring hopefully then I'll go around and get a haircut yeah pretty enthusiastic about that by then I guess I'll just grow it longer so now you do okay guys so thank you so much for sending your questions I can't tell you for us it was really special to have this video made and uh it was really fun so thank you if you uh like that if you would like that Jan is in the videos make sure to comment below and uh he'll be part of some videos in the future and as always I will see you in the next one okay bye


I'm James, I'm an ex-teacher and I now work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and I want to talk to you a little bit today about Python UK and in particular the education track that I attended last year. Just before I get started, I'm imagining that the majority of the audience are developers, is that the case, are there any teachers or educators in the room? Awesome, so we've got some educators, awesome. I want to talk a bit about Python UK and to do that, I'm going to just step back a little bit and I will be re-emphasising a few points that Carrie-Anne made in her keynote this morning. But I want to just step back to how I began as a learner. So sometime in the 80s, and we'll keep that vague, I was embarking upon my early education and my mum particularly was very good at supporting me with just exploring the world and finding out things, and she'd often come home and I'd have a theory for about how gravity worked and it was wrong. She'd come home and I'd greet her with a theory. But as kids are, I was keen to investigate, I liked playing with things and so the things that informed my early education were things like LEGO, which I played with for hours on end, followed the manuals, I don't think I had that set, I think I coveted that set, I think I had the smaller version. About the age of eight, I think we got our first family computer, we got the cheaper version of the Commodore 64, this is the Atari 65XE. Technically it was a family computer, but my siblings knew that really it was mine and I made that very abundantly clear. And I began after playing some games, I started using basic and writing some very simple programs. And I was also really into craft, anything, glue, scissors, cardboard, I'd make anything. And I'll come back to this idea in just a second, but I also progressed from basic LEGO, I progressed to technique. A technique I loved and still love. I got technique this year for my birthday and that was the best present that I got, it was awesome. Recently our house has been packed up as it's been doing an extension. My LEGO came out and I was very brilliant, there's my crane thing. But for me the point with LEGO was I didn't just learn about how to connect things, it taught me about mechanical systems. The first kit I got that had a differential gear in, I was like this is amazing, now I understand how a car works, brilliant. And so I learnt so many things from these, again that's the set I coveted and bought when I was 25. So LEGO really informed my early years as well, knitting was something that my mum taught me quite early on. I lost the skill and I've recently almost picked it back up again, I was on a recent trip and I took some knitting with me. As well as starting out with some basic programming, I picked up some of the Osborne books which were fantastic and I specifically remember this book and a battleship style game that I built. And the point I want to make about these educational experiences, these were before school or on top of the stuff I was doing at school is that all of them were playful, all of them I approached in a playful manner. And every single one of them I could put down at any moment, I could make something in LEGO and I'd throw it away. And this comes back when we were talking about ideas during the keynote. One of the things that I really wanted to bring up at that point was that when you've got to use an idea and you've got to make a project, you're committing to making a project. Whereas if you've got this nice boilerplate scratch pad style area, you're playing. You can play as kids do and then just chuck it away. The other thing about these learning experiences was there was purpose. There was something that I wanted to get out, something that meant something to me. It wasn't someone telling me to do something, I wanted to build that airport. I wanted to knit something, I wanted to build the technical thing and I wanted my game to work and was frustrated when it didn't. And the final thing was that there was progression. There was always somewhere for me to go next. So I started out with Print Hello World and I exhausted all the examples in the Atari manual that came with it. But then I found somewhere else to go. LEGO, there's just so many places you can take that and there's so many crafts out there. There's always somewhere new to go. So those three things, playfulness, progression and purpose, are something that I think is really important in educational experiences. And there's a middle section to my life where I went to university, did computer science, lots of interesting anecdotes involving me mainly losing stuff. That doesn't happen anymore, I'm a reformed carat. But then this was me as an educator. So I moved on from being a learner and in 2004 I started a career in teaching. So I started my time as a math teacher and as someone who could use a computer and there was an outgoing head of ICT, picked up this role and really enjoyed doing it. It was a great experience. But I did get quite quickly frustrated with ICT and this again echoes some of the points that Carrie-Anne was making earlier. A lot of ICT was being driven by office app based programming, was limited to Excel, macros and formula. And a lot of the engaging and difficult, also what I would describe as engaging and what a lot of teachers might consider difficult concepts or activities were left to the end of the year. A lot of primary school teachers that I was sort of talking to around the time was, oh yeah, yeah, we do Lego robotics and we program them in the summer term. Sometimes we don't get the full six weeks, sometimes we do a week because it was those things that leave to the end as the fun activity to end the year and then at the end of the year it fell off the end of the year, never mind, we'll do it next year. And those kind of experiences were always being left to the end. So as I started I was really trying to change the way that I was doing things in school. I managed to convince the school to buy some Lego robotics. We started a Lego club, we entered the first Lego league. Games factory, has anyone ever used games factory? It doesn't really exist anymore. But that's where I started. I remember hanging out in a shop in my local town called Microfuture where they had this system called Click and Play. And it was a drag and drop games engine.  And that was your starting point. And they developed it into an education product. And I used that in school. It was really good. Scratch again, lots of scratch stuff, simulating games, those kind of things. And we also tried to do some HTML. There was some HTML before, sorry I keep turning and the microphone keeps losing me. I'm a fidgeter. So HTML was something that the school had previously done through like a front page or a dream weaver or something like that. And I think you start using those big heavy ideas and you start losing the basics of how that works. That's not how I learned HTML. I learned HTML with a notepad in one window, a browser in another window. Save, refresh, save, refresh, save, refresh. So we did some basic HTML stuff. And I moved on. I went to a secondary school. But I began collaborating. And this is the point where I think things changed a lot for me. Because those frustrations that I had in school, being the only teacher who kind of in my mind got it, was really difficult. So starting to connect with other teachers was really important. I joined CAS, which is a group in the UK called Computing at Schools. I started working with local primaries, helping them deliver robotics in their schools. And then, all of a sudden, it was a few years ago, it was possible to teach the GCSE in computer science. So there was a pilot phase and there was a phase where teachers could pick it up. And I was super excited by this. Because this was finally, all these things that I've been banging on about, were going to happen. And I could pick this up. And I was really excited. And then I suddenly realised, oh, actually, how am I going to deliver this? What's my route to deliver this with kids? And the first question was what language? And that, again, like we mentioned earlier on in the keynote, this took me back to my charter experiences using BASIC and Python was really the clear choice for me. And then this whole, oh, how do I teach this? How do I go about sharing this with kids? And I know how to write a loop or write a function or do this and that. But to me, it seems self-evident. How do I break that down and take my understanding and put it, get it across to the kids? And how do I challenge kids? I had a kid in my first GCSE class who had been programming since the age of five and had never stopped. Unlike me, when I was a kid, we didn't have the internet. We were very late giving the internet. Eventually I convinced my dad to buy us a three-month trial of this internet thing. We got on there and suddenly my horizons were expanded. But he'd been learning Python for years and C in Java. At the time he came to my classroom, he was a far better programmer than I think I will ever be. So how do I challenge kids like that to have this experience? Because there is, unlike traditional subjects, there is this difference of experience. We have been doing this for years and years and years and have a wealth of experience. It will just click. And other kids might be aware of it or might have been put off by it in the past. So whereas in other subjects you might have a fairly level playing field, you've got a whole different range of experiences. So the collaboration with other teachers was imperative, was really important and it was around that time that I gave a talk at Raspberry Jam. I met Cary Ann shortly afterwards, went to Pycademy, joined Twitter, went to more CAS conferences and things. And that was the point at which I became aware of Pycon UK.  So great, yeah, I'll do that. So that's how I got to Pycon UK. So Pycon UK was a fantastic experience for me. Last September and particularly the education track, which is where I spent my day. Unfortunately I had just moved house and so I had a wall to go and knock down or something at home. So I could only stay for the Friday. But there was a two day track. The first day, the teacher's day was brilliant and I'll talk a bit more about how these worked in a moment. The second day was a kids day and developers were welcome to come to both of those two days, encouraged to come to both of those two days. In fact there's a picture somewhere of Nick in a minute. The first picture I've got on here, saying, go to the education track. You should be there. And so it was fantastic. It was filled with workshops, demos, training, discussions, quadcopters towards the end of the day and cake. Which is going to get anyone there really. And the cake's here. If they don't wet your appetite, nothing. They're amazing. We were joined by members of the Raspberry Pi team. So Dave is in the bottom right-hand corner. He's not with us today. He's the guy that Ben was previously talking about, who is doing loads of space stuff. We've got Ben, we've got Cary Ann and we've got Alex who's down here with us as well. And there's the cake. So the cake was amazing. So one of our, a teacher that I hadn't met at this point, but I was aware of from Twitter called Cat, she'd been on a following, the pycademy after me.  She turned up with this cake and it just vanished. I think I saw it in the beginning of the day and then by half way through the day I was like, where's that cake gone? There was one cake left. So it was a fantastic day. The link at the bottom. I've nicked a few things from Nick Tollway's excellent introduction to Pycon UK. If you want to have a more detailed overview of the two days, you can follow that link and that will take you there. And we were also joined by members of the community. I forgot to thank two people at the beginning of the presentation. This is Alan Adamickey, who along with Nick provided last minute a lot of the images that I've used in this presentation because I had some camera failure issues. So, yes, loads of community people that had given up their time to come along to talk about education, how we educate and the projects that we should be focusing on. So this was sort of how the teacher's day was broken down. So, first of all, we had a session on Minecraft Pi and we can see all the teachers worshipping Minecraft there. Or Martin, I'm not entirely sure. So this guy you can see standing at the front there, this is Martin, he's got an excellent website Stuff About Code. And that's how he usually starts his workshop with, okay, please pay your respect to worship that kind of thing. And he gave everyone a little demonstration of how to use the Python library to interface with Minecraft and create amazing things. And if you think back to the first point I made about my early experiences with Lego, Minecraft is often described as digital Lego, okay? This playground, this area where kids can play. I don't see Minecraft. When we talk to teachers, I don't try and put Minecraft across as, oh, here's a game. Minecraft for me in education is a medium. It's a way of expressing things. The idea we talked about earlier on, a game where we've got, you know, it's set on a planet and there's aliens and you shoot them, well, with things like 2D graphics, Pygame, to get kids to make something graphical, I never bothered with my GCSE kids because it was more of an A-level topic anyway, but for the amount of time they had to put in to get something simple graphical on the screen, it just, you know, Pygame wasn't worth playing with at that time. Minecraft, we can build all sorts of things with Minecraft. So we set my kids in school to challenge.   They hid space invaders around the world and just go and find them. So Minecraft is a medium and this workshop is fantastic. And there are loads of people. It was their first experience of Minecraft, first experience of programming, and they loved that. We then, there was a session we had all about physical computing. So some of the things that Ben's just been talking about in his talk, there was a session flashing LEDs, using motors, we had some spinning flowers and bees, is that right? Yeah, okay. I wasn't in that session. There was a bit of a split at that point. But there was some physical computing. We also had a session with an introduction for secondary teachers, particularly to object orientation. For lots of those teachers, object orientation was something they might encounter with libraries that they're using, but wasn't something they were overly familiar with, or wasn't something that they had used for ever or for a long time. So it was a great introduction or refresher. We also, we had a team brought over some, oh that's gone too far. There's a robot there, it's going to disappear. So the robot there is a little, it's got a now robot, and a team brought those over, they danced, they sang, they did all kinds of clever things, you could take them for walks, and they talked about their programming interface behind that and how schools should be doing more robotics. And then the afternoon session, we had an unconference style session. So we started off with all the teachers and developers together, we pitched some ideas, and then we all broke off into groups and we kind of worked together as teachers and developers to either do some resource development. So I want a resource that helps me teach this concept. Let's go and make it together, brilliant. Or perhaps some coaching. So there was a lady who wanted some help with, I think she was doing some web stuff and she wanted some help with Django, the rings of eight bell. And so she sat down with a developer who helped understand how Django works and write the beginning or the framework for a scheme of work to take it back with her kids. And there was people that were sort of talking about how to make some libraries or some tools. So this screen here, there's a thing for one of the GCSEs. They have to do a project on a little man computer. Are you guys aware of little man computer? It's kind of, I don't teach that spec, partly because I don't like little man computer. But I think it's basically, it's a simulator to help you teach kids machine code type, very low level code stuff. So very basic operations and instructions. And the complaint from one of the teachers was at the moment this doesn't run on the Raspberry Pi and we're using them. So they sat down with some developers and they ported it to the Raspberry Pi. And that was like an afternoon's work for a developer. So this bit, the second part of the day was really, really valuable because it gave the teachers the chance to direct the help, the support they needed. And I think this collaboration is really important. So if we think about the first group of people that are there, the teachers. The teachers, they're really great at delivery. They've got years of experience of doing that. They know how to take a concept, to break it down into parts, to work out how to deliver that, to explain that, to get that idea across. They're also great at that sort of idea of progression. So this is your starting point. We want to teach you this concept, what's the pathway that we're going to take to get that. They're great at assessing, knowing where kids are up to and getting a really good measure of what kids understand, what they haven't grasped and what their next steps are. And they're also good at engaging pupils. It's their job. It's part of what they do. But what I need help with, and this is going back to my experience as a classroom teacher, what we often need help with is our background knowledge. I programmed as a kid. I did bits as I was growing up. I did a computer science degree where I did bits of Java, but it was more systems kind of base. I haven't done programming for a long time. My knowledge is rusty, and some people don't have that background at all. They need more support. They may need some help with exploring possibilities, knowing what is out there that can help them. So they want to solve a particular problem or they wonder if, oh, can I do this with code? You guys, the developers, you're the people to ask. Relevance. A lot of the sort of teaching materials that were out there first of all for teaching computer science was, a little maths game where you guess the number and we're going to use some selection to see if you're right or wrong. Or here's a teacher tool to... We're going to write a piece of code which if you put in a score, it's going to tell you what your grade was. Which students are going to care about that? They're not. It's not particularly relevant to them. But developers, you're out there writing software doing all kinds of cool things on things that kids might be aware of, whether it's robotics or web interfaces or whatever. You've got relevant experience for kids' cool things. And also challenging people. They're 16-year-old that I had that was a far better programme than I. Talking to developers means that I can find ways of extending them, pushing them forward and finding new ways to challenge them. And enabling learners. So this kind of comes down to the barriers point that we talked about a little bit earlier on. As a teacher, there's lots of little frustrations that we have, either to do with network administration, the interface we're using, the libraries. Those problems, it's good for us to be able to air those somewhere and have those conversations. And developers. You guys are great at creating solutions. It's what you do. Here's a problem. Create a solution to solve that. You've got the really in-depth detailed knowledge about how the libraries work, how they interconnect, how we can use them. You're great at writing libraries and tools that teachers can take into their classroom. As I mentioned, you've also got that relevance. That experience which is current, relevant, which is real-world stuff. But perhaps what we can help with as teachers is finding new ways to engage learners. So that idea that you have about how it's a cool thing that we can do, we can maybe work out how to make that more engaging for learners. And making Python more accessible. The reason I chose Python for its simplicity and accessibility, I think that Python should be almost the de facto language, the text-based language that kids are using. In the UK it kind of is. Lots of teachers in the UK have chosen Python based on other teachers' recommendations. Whereas in the States we went over there recently and Python is used a little bit in education but not as much as C and Java and processing and JavaScript, which I find weird because they're just so syntax heavy. So that's what I think those two groups bring to it. So the teachers, we kind of helped sort of sought that progression, the bit I was talking about from the learning experience earlier on, the progression of how we get from A to B. Developers, you're great at bringing the purpose, the projects, those kind of things. But the bit that's missing is the playfulness and that's where day two comes in. So day two was the bit that I missed and I saw pictures the next day of all the stuff that was going on and I really wished I could have been there rather than knocking down a wall or whatever. I just nicked some pictures from Nick's presentation, but you just kind of shows the journey that kids go through. So here's some kids sitting down at a computer they're doing some coding, I've got no idea what it is they're doing, but they're doing some Python. It might be Minecraft, it might be GPO, whatever. And you can see there's a look of anxiety maybe and a couple of that, they're a bit unsure. There's one hand on the keyboard, there's a few little things we can notice there. A few minutes later everyone's trying to get hold of the keyboard, the mouse, they're all having a go. And this comes back to the point that Carrie mentioned to her keynote that kids are inherently sort of investigative and playful and want to learn. And they probably, I mean there is a whole series of, there's like 10 photos in this series and they go through a range of emotions like every human emotion you can almost imagine you know there's despair when it doesn't work and all kinds of things going on. But then we get this moment at the end where they've solved that problem they've got through all those little barriers they've worked out what the problem is, they've solved it and the look of satisfaction on their face is fantastic. And that's why we should be getting together as educationists and developers to support these guys. To make sure that they're having this experience with coding that they very quickly, they don't hit that point, the first picture and stop, they're able to get to this point where they see the value, they get the gratification from coding. I've got no idea how I'm doing for time so I'm probably running a little bit short so I'll move on better. So what's in it for the different groups? So first of all it's fun.  We've got a picture up here and the first picture you can't really see it one of the teachers that was on the course Sway is one of her tweets shortly afterwards she tweeted I've just written something in Minecraft I'm having so much fun, yay. Here are some developers who are helping us out on the day. Again, smiling developers having fun, enjoying themselves doing something playful and creative. And here we've got the kids just in awe, probably as Ben I'm not sure what was going on there. Were you talking at that point? I'm not sure. So the teachers, what they get is they get coaching, support, confidence building it's important. So many teachers did not have the background that I had playing with code at a young age and having a little bit of experience of it and that confidence is really important for them. They get ideas for lessons they collaborate with other teachers they collaborate with you guys, they collaborate with the kids which in fairness is actually where some of these ideas should be coming from because I don't want to teach kids how to do something that I want to do because that's my passion, not theirs I don't want them to be leading things so actually getting together with the kids they come up with a good idea, you're like awesome let's make that happen So we might get some new tools or contacts out of that building on network developers you get to adopt a teacher which is awesome, so I had this experience, I sat down with some developers and my project wasn't particularly to do with a scheme of work a learning issue, it was more to do with enabling my use of github in the classroom so I sat down with some developers and I said what I want is I want to be able to push things to github but it'd be private, I want like a local kind of github we found GitLab which we played around with a little bit and then what I want is I want like an automatic backup mechanism from my pies so it pushes there and I've just got a repository that I can comment on and collaborate with the kids for and we started some excellent discussions we played around with some ideas they kind of adopted me for the day and unfortunately shortly after that kind of contact that those conversations very soon disappeared, now it's perfectly understandable developers have day jobs I'm a teacher, I'm back in the classroom and doing things, so it's difficult but if you are going to do this adopting a teacher, it's really fantastic if you can maintain that relationship because it is really beneficial to both and I'll explain why both in just a second so you get to engage teachers and kids with the python community which is a fantastic community and we need to get the teachers and kids engaged within that you get that warm fuzzy feeling which is great but also at this point it reinforces and I'm paraphrasing Nick Tolwell here it reinforces a deeper understanding of your own clarity of thought so just to unpick that a little bit when I was a maths teacher and I said to her kids well I don't know here's this mathematical concept and the kid would say well why, why is that the case and I go well it is it is I don't know how to break that down any further and that was me at the beginning of my teaching career not being able to understand that some things aren't self-evident at that point my knowledge of mathematics was not deep enough that I could explain that concept to a child ok so being able to explain things to people that are non-experts being able to unpick why things are to you maybe self-evident actually gives you a deeper understanding and gives you a better clarity of thought and the kids, what the kids get is they get a safe place to play and learn there's no measuring their progress there's no sort of feeding back of what they're doing apart from in a positive way oh I didn't work, brilliant try this, have a go, ok so they're supported, they're encouraged and so on they get to collaborate with others and that's teachers, that's kids lots of kids don't get a chance to collaborate with adults so that's fantastic lots of kids don't get a chance to collaborate with other groups of kids so bringing them all together on this kind of day means they get that opportunity and they get that sense of pride and achievement I found a photo last night that I couldn't put it back up here there's a picture of Nick standing at the front of a kid and a robot and the kid is just beaming because he's sharing his robot, robotic creation with an audience so they get that sense of I have achieved something I have done something, I am part of something and that's again really powerful to kids and did I mention the cake because that was great so I'm going to just take a brief pause this is another perspective this was a teacher that I'd met on Twitter I met for the first time at Pycon sat down, caught up, chatted with her she sent me this because this was her point of view so I'm going to shut up for a second and just give you a chance to read what her thought was and I think there's a couple of points in there sorry if you're still reading a couple of points in here she regards herself as a relatively knowledgeable computing teacher but really needs that support or values that support from developers what her kids need is something exciting which will inspire them and teachers don't have a huge amount of time the working week is very long so anything that developers can do or other people within the community to say here's this really cool thing by the way when I was at a conference and I was showing here's a library that you can use which if you just run a command it will access the tube times which is not super exciting but it's way more exciting than crunching a few numbers arbitrarily in a fairly trite example so this is really powerful and there's a link there Sway wrote a whole blog post all about her experiences of Pycon I recommend that if you're interested you check that out so how can you help and again I will be reiterating a few points from Careham's talk earlier on so firstly the adopter teacher and that doesn't have to be through a Pycon event or any kind of physical face-to-face meet-up in your local area, wherever you are find out what your teachers are doing in terms of computing programming that kind of side of the curriculum find out if you can support them can you go in and talk about computing in your local school go and talk about the fun bits about your day job go and explain the cool things that you do with code and how it empowers you and what you love about it help develop tools and libraries that support learners and again we've got you've got the homework that Careham set and say we should all be working on that okay run a workshop or a talk for educated and again that could be at an event like Pycon it could be at a local networking meeting it could be if you run like a local python interest group type thing find out what pythons all about have they got questions about python and how to use it in their classroom code club I don't know how many people are aware of code club or how you access them but code club is a great resource it enables a partnering scheme for getting experts to go into schools work with kids, run workshops and that's great because it means that the teacher doesn't have to they can attend and support you but they don't have to be providing all the material you get a chance to network it gives you an in sometimes it can be difficult from the outside to get in with a school going by something like a code club might be the way to do that and there's probably a whole ton of things that we've not thought of amazing things that you could do to help engage kids and teachers a with the python community and with the language itself so if you've got any of the cool ideas come and find anyone from that's applied education team come and chat with us if you've got an idea about something you'd like to do then we're happy to have that conversation and then I've left some time for questions so there we go Thank you Thanks for your talk, it was very interesting I liked the kids day thing Do you know how old the kids were? What was the range of the kids there Nick? and I think that's important as well that it's not limited on age because it means that the older kids can mentor the younger kids and all the younger kids can mentor the older kids and there's lots of great opportunities for those that collaboration Nick, Dawn, you can go on Sorry I've got my hand up, I feel like I'm a child at a primary school so those photos of the children that we saw programming in the series of the longest series of photos actually the kid in the middle at the last one he came along and mentored the other two so they had a problem he came along and there's a picture of him pointing at the screen and then something goes wrong and then altogether they put it right so the other important thing about this slide is that there are no adults involved in this learning as well this is autonomous kids picking up themselves I think that's an important point as well as adults knowing when to step in so in a classroom I would often encourage the kids to make their first few steps by themselves and only ask me for help when they have hit three or four problems because otherwise they feel they have to defer to the adult Alright, thanks very much James Thank you


I want to make a sharp distinction between the provision of social insurance that in principle you would like to reach the whole population, this is very, very important. Social insurance really has to do by risks, so it has to do about everybody being ill or longevity risk or losing your job, and redistribution programs or social assistance that are by almost by definition focused only on a subset of people. The basic problem that I want to deal with in this chat is basically captured by the fact that the interface between social insurance and redistribution is an interface that in some countries, particularly in the countries of Latin America that I know better, is an interface that works very badly. And for that, think of the rose in blue as the division of the population between poor and non-poor by whatever metric, and you clearly want to redistribute from the upper row to the lower row as part of any poverty program. And then think of the columns, which is separate, a distinction between the labor force that can be labeled formal or informal that is covered by other contributory or non-contributory programs, and that in principle you want everybody to be covered by the same social insurance because they're facing the same risks, but that because of the architecture of the system is divided into two separate segments. Ideally the red column should only be one, the whole population covered against risks, and then the redistribution, the blue, should be two from rich to poor. But in Latin America, and maybe this is useful for other countries in the world, the segmentation of the labor market into formal and informal implies that the provision of insurance is made very difficult. The key concepts here is that by construction, by law, the institutions and the laws of most countries in Latin America make some kind of distinction between salaried workers, sometimes are called dependent workers, sometimes paid workers. These are workers that usually have contributory quote-unquote social insurance, which is paid from a wage, and depending on the country that you look at, there's always health insurance, retirement insurance, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, and in some countries you have child allowances like Argentina, in some other countries you add housing like in Mexico, in some other countries you have labor training programs like Colombia. It's all bundled, and we call this contributory social insurance because it's paid from a contribution based on the wage. But over the last 20 years, what's an emerging Latin America, and this was shown partly in the figure shown by Armando, is the emergence of a parallel set of programs that are also providing insurance that we call non-contributory mislabel, simply because they're not financed from a wage-based contribution, but they're financed from general revenues. And these are targeted to all workers not covered by contributory social insurance. We tend to associate that with informal workers being less income than formal workers, but in fact the data shows that that's not really true, because the wage distribution of informal workers overlaps quite substantially with the wage distribution of formal workers, even though the mean of the distribution of formal workers is to the right to the mean of distribution of formal workers, but there's quite a bit of overlapping the distributions. So you have workers of same income levels receiving insurance through different mechanisms. The three big problems with contributory programs, first by design, by construction, they're never going to be universal, because the law does not obligate a whole bunch of workers to actually be enrolled in social insurance program. The risk pooling is limited, and so many workers are left out legally so, even though of course what you also observe in the data is that many firms violate the law and there are many salaried workers that are not covered by contributory programs because the law is being violated. So the first problem that you see is that coverage is incomplete, and I can show you the data there. For Latin America, less than half of the population is covered by contributory programs, but even in some middle income countries like Colombia, like Peru, like Mexico, more than half of the population is not covered by contributory programs. A second big problem is that these programs implicitly generate attacks on salaried employment. Firms are going to pay W plus alpha W, where alpha is the contribution rate, usually a number between 30 and 45% in Latin America. But workers might not think that alpha W, that 45% of the wage, 35% of the wage is really worth to them, 35% of the wage in terms of benefits because of monopoly provision, because they don't trust the pension system, because of quality issues, or because simply the bundle of goods that are being delivered for them is not really what they want.  And then the third problem, perhaps the most difficult problem of all and the most important, is that we tend to think about formal workers as informal workers as separate subsets of the population. But in fact, the data shows that there's a lot of transits of the same individuals between formal and informal status, so that it's much better to say when workers are formally employed rather than to say formal workers, because the same worker sometimes is formally employed and sometimes is informally employed. The same person with the same human capital with the same abilities sometimes is covered by contributory social insurance and sometimes covered by non-contributory social insurance. And here's some data of transits of the same individual, this is panel data, between formal and informal status within one year for various countries of Latin America. And what this does is that it really makes social insurance to be very inefficient. Because if I am an individual that finished high school and I'm working and sometimes I'm covered by some risks and sometimes the same individual is not covered from some risk, the kind of insurance that you're providing me is not really very good.   And what this will do is that the efficacy of insurance is much diminished because most workers will not contribute sufficiently to actually get a pension so that most pension systems in Latin America are actually not going to deliver a pension for most people saving for a pension. And the medical treatments that they're getting are going to be very incomplete because you're shifting from one type of medical coverage to another type of medical coverage. In addition from not being a very efficient system from the social point of view, this system of contributory social insurance is going to induce changes in firms and changes in workers. What firms are going to do is they're going to change the nature of the contract that they offer workers to avoid the tax. And the change in the contract might be perfectly legal because there's some firm worker contracts that don't associate with a salary in which workers are paid commissions or there's rent sharing or there's profit sharing typically in a family firm that are not covered by this so firms will change the structure of the contracts. Of course, firms will also cheat and they will evade. So there's a mixture of illusion and evasion. And to evade, firms must remain small. So what you see is that the size distribution of firms will be affected by the social insurance system. Firms will tend to be small, underexploited economies of scale, economies of scope. And there's a lot of firm churning because firms are very small and very unproductive and workers are actually changing a lot from job to job so it's also affecting workers. So this is an interesting slide that gives you a sense of the tax on formality associated with contributory programs. Colombia in 2012 made a reform in which we deduced the contributions to contributory social insurance from 12.4 to 4%. This is only the health component of contributions. In Colombia, the contributions are much larger. But what is interesting is that formality increased quite substantially after that was changed. If in fact there was no implicit tax, there should have been no change in formal employment associated with the change but there is a very important change. So by the early 1990s, the failure of contributory social insurance in Latin America was evident as shown by the fact that more than half of the labor force was actually being left out from social insurance. And if you think about people transiting between formal and informal jobs, in fact individuals were less covered because part of the spells of their life, they were out of social insurance. So in the early 1990s, little by little in Latin America, what began to happen is that lo and behold, different programs to provide social insurance to informal workers began to emerge. Sometimes a health program here, sometimes a pension program there, sometimes a disability program, sometimes a daycare program. But a parallel set of benefits began to emerge. These programs with finance from general government revenues, that's why the name of non-contributory, they very much vary from country to country. In some countries, you know, they're more generous than in others. But now the country that I know best, you have almost the same health benefits. A pension, not contributory, that is 0.6 of the pension of contributory, you have access to disability insurance and you have access to daycare centers pretty much in the same way that you have your contributory programs. So evidently, these programs from a social point of view are very welcome because they're going to be providing protection against workers who otherwise would not have it. But if you think about it from a point of view of firms, what they're going to do now is they're going to subsidize informal employment because now the value of a contract between a firm and a worker is worth more than the wage paid by the firm to the worker. Because it's an outside benefit that is being paid from general revenues. It's exactly the opposite of what is happening with a contract that is covered by contributory programs. So this will end up subsidizing informality which adds to the tax on formality that is being there. This is an interesting slide from Mexico. On the left, you see the coverage of a non-contributory health program that started in the early 2000s in Mexico. The red line is the coverage of the contributory health program. And on the right, this is work for some colleagues of mine at the IDB. This is a difference in difference estimator of what happened to firms hiring decisions in Mexico when the non-contributory program was put into place. And by looking at firms that were earlier in the program versus firms that were later in the program, what you can see is that firms' decisions were biased against hiring workers legally with contributory programs and actually cheating by firms was much encouraged by the introduction of this non-contributory program. So I've spoken a lot about the problems of contributory and non-contributory programs and I've said very little about social assistance. What I'd like to do now is instead of talking about the columns of my first slide in which I was discussing the problems with the contributory non-contributory programs, I now want to see the interface between the columns of my first slide and the rows of my first slide in which how do these social insurance programs interface with poverty programs? Ideally, all these poverty programs should be targeting workers only on the basis of their income levels. What has happened in Latin America has been a bit of a confusion between social insurance and social assistance and poverty alleviation programs and what has ended up happening is that sometimes these poverty programs are being targeted on the condition of being informal. So there's a confusion of the rows and the columns in terms of the terminology that I was introducing before and what this does is that it affects poor workers' choices in terms of the status that these workers would have in the labor force given that they're poor. And what you might have end up happening and I'll show you a slide that this is actually happening is that workers who would otherwise be formal even though they are poor end up being informal because of the way that the social assistance program is structured. So this is an interesting example of a program in Ecuador. Ecuador has a bono de sarroyo humano which think of it as a conditional cash transfer program in Ecuador. And what happened in Ecuador is that they conditioned access to the poverty alleviation program on the informal status of the recipients. And this is work also by some colleagues at DIDB in which basically what they show is in 2002 to the left of the vertical line are people below the poverty line to the right above the poverty line. And then what you see is the rates, the share of women that should be in social insurance covered by social insurance. And what you can see is that six years later after the conditional cash transfer program was put into place but was being made conditional upon the informal status of the workers, there was a discontinuity and the rates of formal employment of women in Ecuador actually fell by about 15% on points. So this is substantial. And what this is doing is exactly the opposite of what you wanted to do, which is to induce formal employment. And this is because the interface between the incentives of the two sets of programs are not being put together right. So to go back to my columns and to my rows, think that the formal sector has on average higher productivity than the informal sector. This is actually true if you make the productivity distributions of firms in the formal sector, they are to the right of the productivity distributions of firms in the informal sector, even though there's overlapping the productivity distributions, the mean is to the right of the formal sector. So ideally what you would like is to shift workers from the left column in my, no, from your point of view, from the right column to the left column because you would like them to shift from the informal sector to the formal sector to get higher productivity. And ideally what you would like to do is to move workers from being poor to being non-poor.  And if point A, OI was your own earned income, ideally by shifting from point A to point B because you're more productive with your own labor, perhaps because you acquired more education with the CCT and you have better health, now your own income is going to be higher and now you're gonna be shifting from A to B. But I showed you slides before that in fact the combination of contributory and non-contributor social insurance is actually pushing workers in the other direction. And rather than shifting from point A to point B, what you're actually doing is you're shifting from point A to point C. You're getting the transfer because your transfer is conditional on informality, you're actually getting a higher level of income but not because of more own earned income but because of the transfer while you're remaining in the informal sector. And of course if the distribution of the labor force is much affected by these forces, the average productivity of the economy is gonna be punished by the fact that a large share of the labor force in the economy is gonna be pushed or remaining in the informal sector rather than shifting to the formal sector. So the basic punchline of this sort of chat is to say that the current architecture of social insurance programs and interface between social insurance programs and poverty programs is creating a vicious circle between informality and low productivity. You have a lot of people with informal jobs. The policy response to that is I'm going to create a parallel system of social insurance through non-contributory programs, more health programs, more pension programs, more decker programs. Sometimes I'm going to increase the size of the transfers of my poverty programs. But the fact of what this is actually going to do is it's going to subsidize more the informal sector. This has to be paid somehow so you're gonna tax more of the formal sector or you're gonna incur more debt. What this will do is it's actually lower the productivity of the economy and if you lower the productivity of the economy what that's gonna do is it's gonna induce more informal jobs. So Miguel was very nice to mention a book that I just finished on Mexico and I've been looking at the data from Mexico over the last two decades. Mexico is a country that over the last two decades had zero total factor productivity growth. Zero. And while this is not the only reason tax considerations and other considerations are also very important parts of the explanation clearly what we have in Mexico is a system of social insurance and social protection that is acting despite its best interest in terms of what really matters for increasing productivity and creating better jobs for the workers that should be getting from that. So let me conclude a little bit. I think that in Latin America and maybe this might be useful some other countries in the world this dichotomy between contributory and non-contributory social insurance is really bad. We really need to unify regimes and we really need to transfer to universal systems. This of course has many fiscal implications but I think the transit to universal social insurance is really essential from the social point of view because the system is not efficient. Workers are not being well protected. But in addition the system is very costly from the productivity point of view. So universalism I think is a direction where we have to move. And then when we think about the interface between that and poverty we clearly have to ensure that we don't condition any benefits on the poor upon their situation in the labor market. And in fact poor workers should have the right to the same social insurance as all other workers with the same quality of health the same pensions, the same taker, the same systems like that. Of course this implies a big fiscal change but clearly if we really wanna break the intergenerational transmission on poverty we really have to change from one system to the other and not continue in the vicious circle that I was there before. So I think by now there's a large literature that has been accumulated. I just showed a few slides here from one experiment in Ecuador sort of one case in Ecuador, one case in Colombia, one case in Mexico. But there are quite a bit of papers here. Guillermo Cruz is here. He's written some nice papers on Argentina. Other people have written papers from many other countries. By now there's sufficient empirical evidence to be showing that the combination of contrariatory programs and non-contrariatory programs is really distorting heavily firms and workers choices within the labor market so that we need to pay attention to that. And this is a problem of architecture. This is not a problem of enforcement. This is a problem that the laws and the institutions are not well defined, are actually not well thought out. More enforcement is not going to solve this problem. And as an academic issue I think we now need to move beyond the impact evaluation of individual programs. Over the last 20 years we've learned a huge amount by doing all these very careful control treatment impact evaluations with randomized controls about what is the impact of this program, this program, this program, this program. There's a lot that we have learned over the last two decades, but I think now we can use all that learning and all that evidence to begin to think about systemic pieces. Not about individual programs, but about how all these things fit together and to be an integral view of policy. And I think this is really essential because what I think is happening in Peru, in Colombia, in Mexico, in Ecuador, in many countries in Latin America, is that we're constructing welfare states in economies that have stagnant productivity and that are actually not gonna be viable over the meeting term. Stop here, thank you. Thank you.


I mean, we probably will have a little difference in the view from Korea, these. Thank you, Doc. The intensifying and expanding tension between the U.S. and China is a very serious issue to all of the world, but much more serious to Korea. Because of history and geography, as you know, China is our immediate neighbor. And the military alliance with the United States is a backbone of Korea's foreign policy. But more than 30 percent of Korea's total exports go to China and Hong Kong. And Korea is the largest source of China's import. In addition, the United States and China are two indispensable partners for Korea to manage the threat from North Korea, maintaining peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula. The international political order that Korea wants to pursue is non-exclusive. And we highly value cooperation with every country of the world, including China. Therefore, it would be difficult for Korea to join initiative explicitly targeting in China, though Korea shares the concerns of United States of China's economic outreach and its foreign policy. I would like to add one more thing about the Korean companies. Korean companies are global players. And we must note that Korean companies make their investment and business decisions rather independently from the policy of the Korean government. This means even if Korean government follows the U.S. strategic trend as an ally of the United States, business decisions may differ as long as they do not violate relevant laws and regulations. And actually Korean companies are actively pursuing supply chain diversification, recognizing the importance, more importance of political risk rather than efficiency or cost nowadays. I'd like to add one more thing about Korea's specific concern on the expanding the China-U.S. conflict. The consequence of China-U.S. conflict leads to the increasing subsidy of the United States, European Union, and Japan. It's a very serious concern to Korea. Those countries are increasing subsidies, especially in the field of the electric vehicle batteries and semiconductors. The reason is to correspond to the state capital of China. However, it is distorting international trade order, definitely. So we now currently WTO dispute settlement mechanism is totally paralyzed, and we have no means of addressing those distorting international trade practices. So it's a very serious concern. And for Korean companies in order to respond to increasing subsidies provided by the United States through Inflation Leadership Act and Infrastructure and Jobs Act, they are increasing their investment in the United States. And Korean businessmen are fully aware that U.S.-China conflict is a long way to go and it's a constant factor for their decision making. Thank you. Thank you very much.


Hi, I'm David Cantor with the Law Offices of David Michael Cantor. People will contact our office and say, what is felony disorderly conduct? Well, first of all, disorderly conduct can be a misdemeanor and a felony. Usually a misdemeanor means you're just being loud, obnoxious. They call it seriously disruptive behavior. When it becomes a felony, almost always involves a weapon. For example, if I were to take a gun in the middle of a party or an argument and I were to display it to the side, point it up, maybe fire around or not fire around and I was somewhat threatening saying, hey, look, you better watch your tongue. You're dealing with me now. I could be charged with a felony disorderly conduct. That carries a minimum of a year and a half in prison, presumptive of two and a quarter and a max of three years. The minute that barrel points forward and actually puts somebody in imminent fear of imminent physical injuries, serious bodily injury or death, it becomes a felony aggravated assault. Even if I don't fire the gun, now it's five years minimum, seven and a half presumptive, 15 maximum. Either way, they're both very serious charges. A lot of times you'll hear about road rage where people will wave a gun thinking somebody's gonna come into their lane and run into them because they're being mad. Well, the person with the gun almost always gets charged. If any of these situations apply to you, we can help you. We are very successful at defending these types of charges. Give us a call.