I'm Leslie McVane. Welcome to Portland Media Center member highlight. Today my guest is Chelsea Malachara who's the sustainability education outreach coordinator for the University of Southern Maine. Welcome. Hi thanks for having me. Yeah so you've got a big event coming up and it's what year seven I think? Yeah so this year April 20th from 8 to 12 is our annual free electronic waste recycling day. It's our seventh year so you're correct on that and it's a collaboration between the City of Portland, the University of Southern Maine North Coast Services which is the entity that takes all the electronic waste and then just some community members so it's a really great experience and an event that happens every year. In the last several years we've actually had the Portland Sea Dogs mascot slugger come and give out free tickets to people to go to the game later that day and so it's just kind of a fun community event but also really good for the environment and for human health. Right and it's an education chance opportunity to let people know what can be recycled and what can't be recycled. Exactly. And in this day and age I mean in the old days you had a telephone and you had that telephone for life. You had a TV and you had it for 50 years. Exactly. Now technology's changing so fast we end up with all this stuff we don't use and we don't know what to do with. So do you want to talk a little bit about what people can bring on that 20th?  So the first part is electronic waste has a lot of different toxic substances in it so lithium, lead, mercury all things we don't want in the environment and also pose a threat to human health as well but then we also but electronic waste also has some very valuable materials in it that are environmentally intensive to mine but also are very valuable to reuse. So there's high value plastics and metals like copper, silver, and gold so we take all of that and recycle it responsibly and if those were to end up in the landfill they'd pose a risk to human health and have an environmental impact. So for the electronic waste recycling day we collect things like a laptop, a cell phone, and things like VCRs, DVD players, those old televisions that some people still have in their basement, new televisions. There's a whole list of things on our website which I can talk about later but those are kind of the primary things that people bring but you can also bring things like computer monitors and keyboards and mice and what not. But not larger appliances. Not larger appliances. Yep so things like refrigerators and ovens we don't want those but we also don't want things with refrigerants in them so that includes air conditioning units which are really popular people are like oh I'm getting ready for summer and then they wonder what to do with that and the because of freon in it the freon in it yeah so but the most common things that people do bring that we don't want are batteries and then any kind of light bulb. Okay so what do people do with those?  I mean eco-main has scrubbers to scrub out the harm in it but you don't have to do anything special but light bulbs should be you can recycle re-recycle them at Home Depot or bring them to different drop-off locations and eco-main actually has this great app called Recyclopedia that I use a lot personally but also we use a lot at the university to figure out okay where do these different we try to tell our students and our staff and faculty to figure out where things go when they're at home yeah so because I know with light bulbs I don't know what to do with them so that I just put them aside and then I'm I keep reaching for them when I change a light bulb I'm like no that's a bad one yeah now I can look up where I can take them yeah I was actually looking for those for some samples at home and I found that I still had a whole barrel full of light bulbs I just haven't gotten rid of so we don't want those but there is a if you look up online the main DEP website Department of Environmental Protection also has a whole list of the product stewardship program so another thing we don't want are mercury containing thermostats which actually can get a $5 rebate for returning those and yeah anything they're like I said there's a whole list online of everything but those are the most common things that people will bring but people can go and check before they come in and that's on the 20th from from 8 to 12 8 to 12 will there be people there helping you unload your car if you thought of stuff that's a great question so we it's a very well oiled machine seven years later so you just drive up you don't even have to get out of your car and we have folks who come you tell us what you know what the items are that you need removed if they're in your trunk or your back seat we'll take them away and then the other really unique and and something I'm really proud of piece of this event is that we accept donations because we're collecting all these things for free and so accept donations every year for a different organization or charity and this year we're collecting donations for the usm student emergency fund so it's something that usm set up the usm foundation set up to help students who are in emergent situations that might prevent them from continuing school or missing classes or you know unforeseen you know fees for books or something like that so they can apply to this and so all the donations this year are going to go towards that and last year we raised about $1400 to go towards cultivating community so I'm excited and and and so that's a really unique kind of cool piece to this event as well it's terrific now you talk about doing responsible recycling and you mentioned the name of the the organization that takes these things to recycle tell us a little bit about that and what they do I mean we see pictures of children in dumps in Guatemala or China or somewhere pulling out the things and it's very dangerous to do that so how do they do this recycling yeah that's a great question and I don't I'll be honest I don't know the full process of what happens to everything but I would say a large portion of the items that we collect from this event are essentially mined if you will so all the metals and valuable plastics are taken out those are recycled or sold to places that will make them into something new and then the the date hazardous pieces are disposed of according to main state law so again something that you could find on the main DEP website but is it a local company that does yeah north coast services they're new england based and they do like south portlands e-waste recycling event and a lot of other southern and just just general main recycling events so they're very reputable yeah I think it's wonderful you do this every year and you could probably do it more than once a year and and still get a load of stuff yeah I'm sure you've talked about that yeah the first year that we did this event so seven years ago we collected 80,000 pounds of electronic waste now last year we collected 25,000 pounds but more communities are doing this so we're getting less you know folks from buxton or gore or windom coming down because they have their own their own way but well and I don't know if you've been watching that tv show with the Japanese woman who's telling you to to cleanse your home and get rid of things and that the donations to goodwill and all that have gone up like 100% so I'm thinking that you may get quite a crowd on the 20th of April that's a great point yeah I didn't even think of that but we have been usually in the beginning of March we already have people emailing and calling us saying I hope you're doing it again this year I did a big you know basement clean out this winter and this spring and I'm planning you know planning to bring bang so yeah well I know April is when I plan to clean out my basement and my garage and I know there are things that I can be bringing on the 20th so great thank you so much is there anything else that we should let our audience know um well like I said if you want more information in a full list of what we accept we um you can just visit usm.main.edu slash sustainability and at the bottom of the page there's uh an events section and our event is there so it has a full list and you'll see posters around town and if you follow the office of sustainability on facebook we have an event page for that and also all the other events that we do around the year so it sounds wonderful thank you so much for all you do yeah thank you so much for having me


Hello, hello. Welcome, everybody. Welcome. I'd say welcome to Atlanta, but I'm guessing you've probably been here more than just this instant, so me welcoming you here is probably a little bit late in the game, but it's the first time I've seen many of your faces, so welcome to Atlanta. One of the things you may or may not know about me is that I was actually born here at DeKalb County General Hospital, so I did not grow up here, but there's some roots, so it's sort of fun to be doing the open stack summit. Before we get started on this, I want to let everybody know, if you don't already know, we've got a really fun, awesome book that we put together. Lisa, who's the main author on it, is back in the back and going to be doing, oh, she's dancing around now. So everybody watched Lisa dance. Nope. She'll be back in the back available to give them out and sign them and stuff like that, so definitely take a peek at it. There's a particularly snarky illustration on one of the pages that I particularly enjoy myself. Anyway, give that a shot. So I've only got 20 minutes and I typically don't tend to get through my talks in the allotted time anyway, so I'm going to go ahead and jump right in. And I'm going to, in theory, tell you everything you've ever wanted to know about the future of cloud and where it's going. So after this, you'll have all of the secrets and know everything, and that's all probably completely not true. So my name is Monty Taylor. I work for Hewlett Packard as you might be able to figure out by the very large Hewlett Packard logo on the slide and the hp.com after my email address. I also, for those of you who don't know me as well, sit on the OpenStack Technical Committee, the OpenStack Foundation Board, and I'm a past PTL of the OpenStack Infra-Program, where I'm also currently a core reviewer. So we do a lot of stuff with OpenStack on a day-to-day basis, and I'm going to talk about a little bit of that today. But to start off with, I would like to show the stereotypical OpenStack marketing slide, because it's the best marketing slide in the world. And also it's more graphically interesting than any of the other slides that I'm going to show you, because it turns out I'm not a graphic designer and do not make slides that are this pretty. So as I'm assuming most of you know, since you're here, OpenStack is some open-source cloud software. And that typically needs more explanation for other audiences. I'm assuming at this point that most of you know that it is software that provides compute networking and storage services on top of some hardware to your applications. But it's your applications part of it that is the interesting part to me at this point. That little gray box up the top that looks sort of unimportant, because it's not what we're here to build. We're here to design and decide what we're going to do with OpenStack over the next six months. I think it's extremely important for us to keep that top box in mind, because the whole reason that we have cloud, the whole reason that we have hybrid cloud stories and things like this is in service of your application. Because at its root cloud is an abstraction layer, at least it is to me. It can be a force multiplier. It can allow you to get your thing done quicker and easier. It can allow you to make choices in an agile manner so that you're not, say, putting in a ticket to get a new server that's going to come back in three months. And maybe it'll be working or maybe it won't be working. These things are tricky things to deal with. But I think that also this is a thing where I'm a little bit at odds with the normal things people say. Because when you start talking to customers, and weirdly enough HP lets me talk to customers, which is distressing, I'm sure, for everybody involved. One of the things that we'll typically tell people is that, listen, cloud is a bit different. You need to start thinking about the journey to get your applications ready for cloud. You've got to do things differently because clouds go away or whatever. And so we talk a lot about the difficulties that enterprise customers might have in running their traditional enterprise applications in the cloud. And I actually think that it's not as bad as all that. And to illustrate that, and to illustrate where I think that's going, I'm going to talk about myself because narcissism is my best quality. And I'm going to talk about some of the stuff that we do with the OpenStack Infra program, which it turns out is all one big cloud application. So if we're going to think about that gray box at the top of the OpenStack marketing slide, it's a readily available example of that. And it starts off with a very awful piece of enterprise quality Java software called Garrett, which we use as the basis of our entire OpenStack developer workflow system. So this is just a screenshot of that because I couldn't come up with something else to show you to talk about Garrett. And the point of this isn't to say things about Garrett as to what we do with it in the project. If you're involved in OpenStack, you will have seen many screens like this and it's nothing new to you. It's a code review system. It has Git repositories baked into it. It has some APIs, and that's all great. The thing about it is that it is a monolithic Java application. It is not intended to run in a cloud. In fact, I believe that one of the times that we told some of the developers earlier that we're talking to them about some performance problems we had. And they're like, what type of machine are you running it on? We're like, we're running it in a VM in the cloud. They're like, oh, my gosh, you can't do that. That doesn't make any sense. We're quite happily and successfully running it. In fact, I believe it might be the largest Garrett in the world. And it is running in a public cloud. It is a single instance running on a single machine. And so if it goes down, it's a bad thing. All of the developer productivity in all of OpenStack stops if this goes down. Luckily, it turns out that doesn't actually happen as often as the marketing materials might make you think. It turns out you can actually just run this in the cloud. Now, what you need to do is the same thing you need to do with all your other normal IT things. You've got to take backups. Don't just run it in the cloud and expect to not back it up ever. You've got to do the things you do to system it. But this is sort of a step one. I'm going to start with a single monolithic Java application running in a cloud, and it's going to work. But that's great. But cloud is there to get us past that, to get us to the next step. So cloud is there to allow us to move at a higher velocity. It's there to allow us to do things that we can't just do with that single Garrett running in a cloud instance. And so starting off with just that Garrett there running, and we had a single Jenkins server connected to it, which I'll also point out is a single monolithic Java application that is basically akin to a normal enterprise app. Also not particularly well suited for the cloud, and I'll talk about that in a second. That was great three years ago when we had the entire design summit that we're at here in a room half the size of this room, and all of us were sitting at the same table. Scaled really well for that. But we've sort of hit this point now. We have 355 companies involved in OpenStack. We in the last cycle merged 17,000 patches. Probably a single machine isn't the thing that we're looking for to take care of that anymore. We have 2,000 cumulative contributors and over 450 contributors on a month-to-month basis. On average we have 466 people contributing to OpenStack every month. And that's a great success for the project. It's one of those things where for the people dealing with the developer infrastructure, it sort of would be better maybe if we weren't quite so successful, because all of those people write patches and they submit them to our system, and we have to deal with them. This is in fact a graph of people interacting with the monolithic Java application that's running in the cloud called Garrett over the last five days. So we've had, what is that, somewhere between, and you can see the weekend. Apparently we don't work on the weekends in OpenStack. So last week we were doing somewhere around 300 code review activities an hour. Even in the lead-up to the summit, we've got people uploading new patches at the rate of about 50 an hour, even in slow times, except on the weekend where it's only like 25 an hour. So this is all well and good. This is a lot of patches and OpenStack is a really complicated piece of software. So we had to write some code to handle the coordination and management of the integration testing of this. Because this isn't just one piece of code. It's a lot of pieces of code and it's complicated. So if you do much with OpenStack development, you'll know that we wrote a piece of software called Zool. Zool is the gatekeeper, because it helps us manage the gate. And what Zool does is it helps make decisions about what jobs we're going to run to be able to test changes that come into the OpenStack developer ecosystem. And in a thing that I think is sort of a happy accident, the graph of Zool's activity looks a little bit like I think the crossing of the beams from the Ghostbusters. It doesn't look quite as much like that and there's not a stay-puffed marshmallow man at the end of the graph. If there was, it would be the best graph ever, but I don't really know what graph produces that. So we'll just assume that actually this does that. So this is describing a reasonably complicated amount of effort that has to go into ensuring that we have the ability into our testing system to be able to test exactly all of those changes that people are putting up and in all the combinations that need to be tested to be accurate. This is where the cloud kind of comes in. Zool itself is actually also kind of, it's in Python, but it's sort of a monolithic thing itself. It connects to some message buses, but it's kind of like the normal app you'd write yourself. We need to run, we need to build clouds, right? This is what we're doing here. So every time we say we talk about testing OpenStack, we're talking about actually spinning up an entire cloud and there's some great slides that Sean Diggs can be doing, this elastic recheck talk later in the week with some numbers on this one. But we're spinning up like 18 clouds per patch and each one of those happens in its own discrete cloud server that we create for, especially for the purposes of doing that and then delete when we're done. This is in fact a lot of cloud activity. Our public cloud providers who give us things don't always like us, but we try to do our best. Thank you, Ulf, for helping us out there. Because we do things like this. This is the last five days of the output of our node pool system, which is what keeps available nodes available for us to be able to test on. And you can see that roughly about five days ago, there was a period of time where we were using between 900 and 1,000 VMs in that particular moment in time. And you can see that it varies quite wildly with the activity in the project. So again, the peaks and valleys are there with the evening. So this is actually much more your more stereotypical cloud application. This is custom built for the cloud. I need lots of build resources and I need them in an elastic manner. So what could be better suited for the cloud? I've got elastic resources and they're actually rising and my usage of them is rising and falling based on demand. Oh my God, it's the exact thing we wrote this for. But this is actually all tied back into that monolithic Java application that we started with. Each of these cloud server activities are ultimately triggered by somebody having an interaction with that one Java server. So it's sort of more, we talk about hybrid cloud a lot. In my mind, this is actually a hybrid application. We've got traditional applications going in here and we've got custom built for the cloud applications and they're operating in, dare I say the word synergy, but something like that, like synergy, corporate word synergy, but they're doing that. And what's really exciting about this, from our perspective on the open stack infraside is this is done in a multi-cloud manner. We have two public clouds that are providing us resources and that node pool actually spans them. So I don't have a pool of rack space nodes and a pool of HP nodes. I have a pool of nodes that the system is using across those things and that has been running in that way in production for a couple of years. So people tell you that cross-cloud compatibility is a dream. I can tell you that I do it 10,000 times a day. It's pretty directly. And one of the reasons that this is really important, each of the clouds in and of themselves are fantastic pieces of software. But I don't want the open stack infrastructure to have this problem. It's sometimes things happen and when this happens, the Netflix people get really unhappy and people can't watch Game of Thrones or whatever it is that really happened last time they crashed.  Whereas if you can spread your load across multiple things, you can weather your application, which is the important thing, can weather more of those things. Then it gets more complicated. We're producing cloud software. So it's great that I can install a cloud in a VM in the public clouds, but what if I wanted to start testing things a little bit more deeply? What if I actually maybe wanted to test the Ironic project, which is booting bare metal? I probably can't boot bare metal in a public cloud, or at least not any of the ones that I've got access to. So there's lots of different characteristics. Even in the public clouds, we have different characteristics from them. Some of them have chosen stability over speed, some of them have chosen speed over stability, and those are valid choices to make as an operator. And as a consumer of those clouds, I can actually take advantage of understanding some of those semantics to put some of my load in a particular place at a particular time. There's other various things, but there may be features that one of them just simply doesn't have, such as a bare metal thing. And ultimately the point there is that one of the reasons for having an ecosystem of multiple clouds is that one size in fact doesn't fit all. I need to be really clear, however, it's made clear to me by product management at HP. I'm not saying that HP condones putting children in boxes. And I get in trouble one stage a lot, and that's not the point of this. We're not selling children in boxes. So anyway, because one size doesn't fit everybody, we sometimes may need to be able to do more things. And this is one of the reasons that we started up the Triple O project, because we've already got a whole bunch of things that know how to do elastic things on clouds, or to do orchestration with cloud workloads. So if I can do a similar thing and have a similar environment to get some multi-mode bare metal environment so that I can do similar testing that I'm doing in the public clouds for the single node testing, then that's pretty spectacular, right? And it actually gets us to this graph, which is a little blown out from the one I showed earlier of our node pool usage. This is our current node pool usage broken out by Provider. And you can see that we've got usage by HP and Rackspace, but we also have two different cloud regions that are private cloud instances that are being run by the community using the Triple O software. So I've got now a dynamic cloud workload spanning public and private cloud instances, and I'm running production workloads on those. This is happening live today. Like, this is going on. This is actually a live... I snapshot it a half an hour ago, but this is straight out of the graphite.openstack.org graphing server. Like, this is the operational stuff. So it happens. And so what we wind up with, ultimately, is we wind up something a little bit like this. This is a very simplified version of our architecture. There's many more lines and many more boxes in the real version. But so over here on the left, we've got some monolithic applications. We've got some things that are single points of failure. If they go down, it's really bad. And we sort of have to treat them with kid gloves in that way and we care and feed for them. In the middle, and I did talk about this a lot because I'm running out of time already, we had originally a Jenkins server in here, and it turns out it doesn't scale, and that's fine. We're doing things with it that are evil and nobody really should be expected to keep up with the evil things we do. So what we did there is we took it and made it a scale out solution. We added a Gehrman bus onto it. So we run eight Jenkins masters at the moment, not just one Jenkins master. And each one of those, on average, we've determined that they can handle about 100 slaves. So we attach those. Our node pool software that manages all of those nodes attaches nodes to individual things, and it pulls them out of, this is apparently what the clip art for a cloud looks like, by the way, pulls them out of the cloud and attaches them to the Jenkins. So we have elastic combined with scalable, combined with monolithic to get the entire thing, which is my applications. This is at the end of the day. The future of cloud, the future of cloud is your applications. The future of cloud is that you don't care about cloud. The future of cloud is that you run your workloads and what you're doing using cloud to get it done. And with that, I am done, and I will pass it on to the next people. Thank you very much.


Welcome to figments the power of imagination on Dan fig leaf. Hey, did you notice that intro where they had the arrows in the middle of the target. That's because that's where I was on December 6 2021 when I said on a crown mark, the end of the pandemic. And guess what people, the government in particular, finally catching up with that. I won't go too long because I have a lot to talk about today and first let me give for those who are tuning in for the first time. I hope there are some people who are tuning in for the first time. A little bit about myself. My name is Dan leaf I go by fig because I was an Air Force fighter pilot for 33 years. I then worked in the defense industry as an executive, and then came back to government to be the director of the Daniel Key in way. Asia Pacific Center for security studies here in Honolulu where I currently live and will live forever. Well I won't live forever but I'll be here as long as I live. And now I'm a retired sort of guy consultant author commentator and if Lord willing I'll turn 70 this year how did that. Hey, hang on. Hello. Car warranty. I don't think I have a car warranty so couldn't have expired so please don't call me again. Thank you. Yeah, I'm sure you get those all the time I do and especially as I get older I worry more about scams against the elderly, and they're out there. Social Security account frozen your this your that. I'm not scared I love to engage the people who call and give them a hard time if I can get profanity out of one of the scan colors I feel like it's a good day, but they're out there. Scams make me mad. And the one that makes me the maddest is the massive coven scam being perpetrated by the United States government. I mean, and I'll explain that in a minute so let's talk about what today shows can have have we're going to talk about coven. The Canadian trucker protest and Russia Ukraine we have to talk about Russia Ukraine because as I record this on President's Day we usually don't allude to the day of recording but I'm looking my TV with cable news on and it is not a good day for world peace or national sovereignty or anything else really so let's talk a bit about scams and why I say that, and I use that word advisable impact my wife all 100 and I had a long discussion about using that word and can you really say this is a scam, and there are two elements of scams one is in dishonesty, and the other is defraud, and yes I think you can. And I'm going to share some personal experiences with that and it's all related to the closure of government offices unnecessarily, and really indefinitely. Supposedly because of COVID now pandemic commentaries covered everything mass mandates add in tonight and the vaccines the boosters the boosters to the boosters. Social distancing the various variants and the economic impacts probably should have gotten more discussion but they're talked about. I haven't talked about how the government has denied or delayed services to its citizens under the guise of COVID-19. And it's having a real effect on people and if you do an internet search. Let me suggest one social security office closure. And you'll see that it's affected a lot of people, including your host. And I'll talk about that. Now, right now we're in the point of hand wringing about the I'm a crown variant be a to dot to. And yet the pandemic is effectively over and it's become a common endemic disease. The common COVID and even Disneyland and Disney World are opening up with pure even no restrictions, but the government. The US government not so much here's a quote from opm.gov opm an organization I've had some dealings with. Here's the quote, federal offices nationwide continue to perform mission critical. I'm trying not to choke on that mission critical functions and operations as determined by agency heads. By the way, we didn't elect the agency heads. They were appointed. They're not accountable. But they control our access to services. So here we are on March in March or in February. And we've been in two full blown years of the COVID pandemic. And for example, social security offices remain closed. You can't go to your local social security office. Here's the quote from. And this is all because they closed them a long time ago. Here's the quote from the social security website. We are open to receive your calls. On Tuesday, March 17 2020, we suspended face to face service to the public in our field offices and hearing off hearings offices nationwide until further notice that notice has not yet been received by the way. However, we are still able to provide critical services via phone facts and online. I'd like to make two main points. One is why are they closed. Why are they closed. Everything else is open you can go to the gym go to a bar go to a restaurant, get in an airplane. Go to a baseball game go to a football game with tens of thousands of people some with masks some not. You can't go get government services that you pay for if you're a taxpayer if you're not a taxpayer please don't watch this episode because it doesn't apply to you and you don't get to be angry. Why are they closed. And it is specious to say they're closed for safety because first of all it's very even in normal times such as they were. It's a very controlled environment. They have a door they can lock they are usually in a building with a metal detector and everything else they control complete access and government employees are required to be vaccinated. And they're at like a 90 plus percent vaccination rate. There's no danger to the government employees they're just electing to telework. And point to the notion that they provide the same services online or by telephone. I personally know to be baloney. I said that properly there are other terms I'd use but it's a lot. It's dishonest to say they provide those services. I will give you two examples. The Office of Personal Management I deal with because I was a federal government employee for five years after my 33 years in the Air Force and I had a change I needed to make that involved some thousands of dollars of my money that the government was taking and shouldn't have been taking money especially if you're Elon Musk or Bill Gates but kind of my money so I wanted it. I tried to do that online and by telephone. It should have taken a week. Reasonably I submit a phone form so so here's the situation why you should stop taking money out of my account. They go yeah you've provided the appropriate documentation and we're doing that. Instead, it took six months and a phone call. A normal phone call to talk to somebody took 25 attempts. Usually I had to be up at four to five in the morning. Why time because they're not on my time schedule. But 25 attempts and often when I dial their phone call their number. I'd go through the process you know the menu of press one to be annoyed press to be really annoyed, etc. And eventually I'd be put on hold and hear music that I don't have on my playlist when I work out. And enter 15 minutes into the hold I'd get a message that really you know guess what they can't take your call 25 attempts to get through to be told they couldn't do something. Okay, that's dishonest. Here's what's fraudulent. I'm taking my money because if I had that money I could deposit in an account and get interested might be pennies for me but if you put all the means together that are trying to get their work done with the government. That's a lot of money that we're not getting in the federal government is. I get put on hold I finally get through I actually talked to somebody who I assume is a human being they could be an alien but let me let's assume the best they're actually human being, maybe even an American. And they say well you know we have your request but we've sent a request for further information by the US Postal Service, not a government company I don't think anymore but the US Postal Service. You know what that was, that was a lie. And I had that with opm and and social security, where they both alleged to have sent correspondence, either informing me of my status or requesting further information. Thank you. Now, the US Postal Service is not a high performing organization, but generally I get my mail. You know, if I've got to pay my mortgage, or a credit card bill or order parts for my Mustang, I'll get that mail. Why is it somebody a representative of the Office of Personal Management, and later and Social Security Administration would told me, oh we mail the two, and it never came never. How does that happen happens because it's a lie. And I'm convinced of that because, as I went through the six month process that should have taken a few days with opm. Eventually, I pushed them enough that I'm talking about maybe 50 hours of trying to call them and calling them. Eventually, I convinced them to resend their request for information. And in that weird, right, Colorado, as they say in Spanish, very weird that when I was angry enough, what I get this letter, by the way, it still took three weeks because it has to go through the bureaucracy. They are defrauding people. And in terms of opm this was kind of an annoyance it got straightened out eventually after six months as I said. Social Security, they're impacting people's lives. And if you look at it online as I suggested you'll find that there are a lot of people who are being denied money that allows them to pay their mortgage, get their health care, get care for disabilities. Life changing costs through this fraudulent effort from the government to not work. And that's what they're doing. They're not doing their job. Now, let me go back and say that the Social Security is saga isn't quite done yet so I'm pretty probably putting myself at risk right now I'm not getting my Social Security benefits but I'll hope for the best.  And, and they acknowledge when I talked to them they acknowledge two things. One, either that they can't do their job as described online and through the telephone, or two that some of the online information they're providing is wrong. And in Social Security's case, the processing time still says on the website two to four weeks for a standard claim for retirement for an old geezer like me, two to four weeks. All of them will say, and that's really all of the representatives I've talked to will say it's might be 45 days but really it's at least 90 and don't call back until then and we're sorry and we will say we have asked our leadership to update the website but they won't. That's a scam period plain simple. So, why are they doing this. It isn't for health it cannot be for health because everything is else is open. Are they doing it to get that interest that the government gets and we don't. Are they doing it because they know they've given their workers a benefit, they get to work from home, less supervision, less scrutiny, frankly, it would be unreasonable to think that we're getting a full eight hour day from telework.  Take a look at what's available online and that's all I'll say about that. I had the same experience here in Hawaii and it's a little more personal because it's here where I live. And it was simply to get an alpastile not not money no money was involved in this.  I had to do with another country. Good thing, try to make the world a better more peaceful place. And that should have taken two days maximum, had to get a certification, a record and a certification another certification and another certification but all within walking business. And here's what it says about the Hawaii state capital by order of the state control or the Hawaii state capital is currently closed to the public due to the COVID-19 pandemic. No date on this, but they do do their operations online and the email Maloney, the online instructions are ridiculous if you call them or email them you'll get garbled data back and you'll do what I did. You'll go back and forth, many times trying to figure out what you need and get it done, and don't even suggest that you drop a document often purpose, no, or in person know it must be delivered by the US Postal Services, which apparently isn't reliable for from OPM or USPS but for the state it's okay. Why am I bringing this up because it is an even more striking illustration of the fraudulent nature of these claims by government organizations that they need to be closed. Not only is everything else open and opening further reopening, but the Hawaii state employees at the capital got priority over people like me, an old guy with risk factors, not horrible but they got priority over us when the vaccine came up. So they could telework safely. I'm pretty sure that these state employees are out in the community like I am. They can be at their work at their office at the capital. What reason is there to not do it. This one is probably not as finite financial but maybe it's more convenient and they don't have to struggle in our somewhat legendary traffic to get to work but dude, why aren't they at work. Well, if you close the capital you have less oversight. And as we've seen with a couple of very disturbing corruption cases, maybe less oversight is good for the government. It's not good for the citizen, and they should stop immediately. So that is my get off my lawn statement. I'm mad about this because it doesn't really hurt me. I'm not missing mortgage payments because I haven't received my social security benefits yet. I'm not homeless or hungry because of that, but I'm absolutely certain that some people are. And that's wrong. And it shouldn't be the case. Let me take a break and a breath here now I shoot up some time with that but I feel very strong about this. This is a scam. It shouldn't happen. All right, next week, next week, next week on signals star imagination I may have a guest I hope I have to call him, send a text, but I'm going to talk about North Korea because by then, whatever chocolate mess. North Korea in Korea in the Ukraine will have revealed itself, and we'll be able to talk more about North Korea's recent activities missile tests, etc. And why they do it. I think that's a very important discussion why is North Korea doing that. So, in the meantime, or the rest of today's episode let's talk about two more cases and I'll go into less detail. One of the other kind of head scratchers for me. One is the Canadian truckers protest, and I am very much intrigued by this because it's, it's kind of different. Right. You've got workers protesting against a liberal government, a significantly less left wing government this is odd. It's not the norm. I'm not an expert on Canadian law and I'm not a Canadian Max our engineer today shout out to Max is in fact a Canadian citizen. But why is this why, first of all, it has this protest gotten such an aggressive response from the Trudeau government. Why are they doing it. And what in heaven's name would compel use of the Emergencies Act because the Emergencies Act is a big deal. The Canadian Emergencies Act and I know that Canadian law is different. They don't have all of the protections that we do. But the Emergencies Act is a big deal and it's been used. Or as I know, never wasn't used on September 11, by the way, when we diverted hundreds, maybe even thousands of airplanes into Canada. The other thing is it's seriously in danger seriously in danger. Canada. Okay, those are the words of matter seriously in danger Canada, not annoying citizens of Ottawa, not disrupt commerce but seriously use several times in there. The sovereignty the security and territorial integrity of Canada. I've watched these truckers on TV and doesn't look like that to me. Again, I'm not an expert, but this concerns me why does it concern me the use of the Emergencies Act. And why does it concern me as an American who is pretty far away in Hawaii. It concerns me because of what they've done financially, what the Canadian government has done financially. As part of this they've taken financial measures to do two things, freeze or sanction protesters. That doesn't sound right to me. And actually, either divert or deter donations to support the protesters who whose primary crime as far as I can tell is disagreeing with the government. Isn't quite that simple but they disagree with government so they're going to sanction them they're going to freeze their bank accounts. Take their assets, repossess their truck or whatever doesn't sound right sounds extreme for a not so extreme situation, not violent. And this could happen here. Because there's likely to be a trucker protest in March, maybe a drive to the to Washington DC. So watch this space, because if a similar overreaction occurs. We're on the precipice of a transition to a far more authoritarian government. That's not a political statement. It's not. It's about how do you respond to difficult situations. And what seems to be an extreme overreaction from the Trudeau government is a lesson for the American citizen. I'm concerned speaking about being concerned. I'm really concerned about Ukraine but the heck isn't. And today's news again we shouldn't tie this to date but it's President's Day. And today, President Putin of Russia has said he's going to recognize as independent to regions in Eastern Ukraine.  I've got a bunch of outcomes here. None. Let me tell you which one isn't going to happen. Nothing happens isn't going to happen. And Russia could relent right here they could stop right here but, but they've already gained some sort of a concession because nothing bad has happened yet. For them, they, they've done this, despite the threat of sanctions, despite tough talk. And they've been put in and said that he will send forces as peacekeepers to these now independent states. This could lead to a major incursion, a minor incursion, a real war, and it could have global effects. Global sequel sex problem there so how does China look at this gambit by Putin which seems like it's going to be successful, and then adjust their own activities their own pretty aggressive activities in with regard to Taiwan. Yeah, and elsewhere in Asia. Nothing good is going to come of this and nothing good is going to come of this because we seeded the initiative we NATO in the United States not fought a war for NATO so I think I can speak for, you know, I'm not, I'm not a spokesman, but we gave up the initiative. So, boy, it sure seems like he's going to attack it might be a minor incursion and what we're going to be mad as heck but we're not mad yet, but we're going to be. Clearly that did not deter President Putin. It's unlikely to deter President G. These are dangerous times that will have an effect because even the sanctions could affect your average American citizen. Be ready for some shock and all the next time, maybe not the next time, but two or three tanks of gas. When you take your car with its expired warranty to fill it up. Be ready for some shock and all because this will affect us. And it doesn't make a rat's hind end to Vladimir Putin. And I suspect it means precious little to jeez and pain, giving those autocrats freedom of operation is a very dangerous thing. And that later, I'm worried I have nothing. I don't have a nice presence days about all I can say but these are dangerous times so we always close with what would fig do. Number one, regarding the office closure scans contact your elected representatives and tell them to give us what we're paying for, we're paying for government service. I can go to a stadium with 70,000 people or get in an airplane or go have a my tie on the beach, or let's say indoors. I ought to be able to go to my local government office and get things done to vote.  So think about security, you don't have to be an expert, but you should at least know what matters. Ukraine matters. Taiwan matters, and we should be concerned. I'll see you in a couple weeks on pigments the power of imagination. I'd like to thank think tech. I think that Hawaii is a great organization that gives citizen vote journalists like me the chance to speak our mind, and I'm glad I got to speak my mind today I feel better already. Aloha, and Mahalo.


How do you pronounce the following words? Do you say thick, thin and then? Well, if you do, then you do not have to watch this micro lecture. But if you say, sick, thin or then? Well, in that case, you have the typical German problem with the TH in English. Or in phonetic terms, you cannot produce the dental fricatives well enough. The problem is that the dental fricatives are not part of the German sound system. So we have an inventory difference between present-day English and German. One option to come to grips with this problem is an articulatory approach that carefully defines and trains the production of a dental fricative. Let's apply that together. Place your tongue just behind your teeth, like this. So that you can just see the tip of your tongue behind the upper teeth. Then slowly blow air through it and say THA. THA, THA, THA. Now, do the same without voice. THA, THA, THA. And while you do this, always be aware of your tongue position. Maybe you also want to use a mirror to check your tongue position. Remember, don't stick it out like this, but just a bit. Once you can do that, try some words. that then they mother feather thank thick thief athlete author teeth and now some sentences their mother was gathering the stuff together their mother was gathering the stuff together the athlete ran 3,000 miles to the north the athlete ran 3,000 miles to the north and finally here is your mastery sentence first in a slow version they thanked the author on Thursday three times and now faster they thanked the author on Thursday three times well and if all that training doesn't help here is an escape hatch replace each dental by a labial dental one a phenomenon known as th fronting they thanked the author on Thursday three times well and if you ignore the lips the auditory effect is almost the same they thanked the author on Thursday three times well and it's some varieties of English for example in cockney the London variety th fronting is a standard feature anyway ideally however you should try and master the dental fricative to avoid misunderstandings like these hello this is the German coast guard what are you thinking about so thanks for listening I hope my advice helps