Good morning, John. So last week I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which is, from what I can tell, one of the best places on Earth. I got amazed by mudskippers enchanted by otters amused by mullimulla and dumbfounded by cuttlefish. All of these delights and lore are on display for all who attend. But, Monterey Bay Aquarium has a secret. First, let's talk about Chicago, where in 1930, Shed Aquarium opened. At that time, it was the largest aquarium in the world. The only problem, Chicago, as you may have noticed, is really far away from the ocean. They solved this problem by sending train tanker cars down to Key West, Florida, filling them with seawater and sending them back to Chicago. Now, of course, we can make seawater from scratch, which is what they do at Shed Aquarium today. But it's a pain. You have to buy huge amounts of something called instant ocean that you mix in to fresh water in like 80,000 gallon tanks. And it's expensive, so you have to constantly filter that water and reuse it. Aquariums on coasts do not have this problem, because they get their seawater from the sea. And Monterey Bay Aquarium gets its seawater from some of the best sea in the whole world. If you take a look at the West Coast of the United States, you'll see, after the coast happens, there's that little light-colored bit. That's the continental shelf. Geologically, that bit is part of the continental landmass. It just happens to be underwater. But you'll also notice just one place where there's a little chink in the armor of the continental shelf. A place where the darker blue goes all the way up to the coast. That is Monterey Bay. Specifically, it's Monterey Canyon, which has cliff faces more than a mile high and from shelf to base is roughly the depth of the Grand Canyon. That canyon gives researchers access to an amazing variety of ocean depths and, thus, ocean ecosystems without having to travel far offshore. Monterey Bay and the area around it also has consistent winds that push warmer, less nutrient-rich waters offshore. Cool, clean, nutrient-rich water from deeper into the ocean then rises to the surface in a process called upwelling. That makes this area of the Pacific Coast extremely abundant and it makes the water fantastic. And so, the Monterey Bay Aquarium simply pumps 2,000 gallons of seawater per minute into its facility and a roughly corresponding 2,000 gallons of leaves headed back into the bay. The system that manages this is a marvel and I got to walk around in it and learn a little bit about how it works. The system tracks over 33,000 data points making different exhibits, different temperatures for different animals and ensuring that flow is never interrupted for too long. It's built to handle massive earthquakes and has a redundant backup for everything. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium not only are they guaranteed a perfect match for the chemistry of the sea they also have a perfect match for the microbiome of the sea which turns out to be a benefit to the plants and animals that live there. Just like we are in a healthy relationship with most of the microorganisms that live on and around us the microbiome of the ocean keeps plants and animals healthy. The greater the diversity of microscopic species the less likely it is that harmful infections will occur. Now this all sounds very rosy so far but it turns out building your whole aquarium around the use of raw seawater opens up a whole other set of engineering challenges. The biggest of which is probably barnacles in your pipes. Now you might think like just put like a barnacle resistant coating on the inside of your pipes but there is no such thing as a barnacle resistant coating. They can stick to anything. Barnacle larvae are also tiny too tiny to filter out of the source without the filter constantly clogging and you can't get the water moving fast enough to keep them from cementing in the pipes. So you need two sets of pipes so that several times per year you can close one off at both ends starve it of oxygen killing the barnacles and then send a rubber plug called a pig through the pipe to wash all the dead barnacles into the sea. Apparently this smells just fantastic. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium they'll filter seawater to get the biggest stuff out. After the filtering the water head straight into their Monterey Bay kelp forest tank so the ecosystem of that tank is as close as possible to the ecosystem of the actual Monterey Bay. From there it's distributed throughout the rest of the aquarium. That tank serves as a kind of public facing storage. So whenever new water isn't coming in the level of that kelp tank actually starts to drop. And for the exhibits that contain wildlife native to Monterey Bay you don't even need to filter that water on the way out because all that stuff is already stuff that's in the bay. But while an aquarium in like Atlanta doesn't have to worry about introducing invasive species because it's a pretty long and arduous trip from Atlanta to an ocean ecosystem the Monterey Bay Aquarium discharges water just as often as it comes in. It's a constant cycle. And for their exotic exhibits they have to filter water out and pass it through what's basically a UV tanning bed which sterilizes the water before it's discharged to the bay. So think about that next time you're wondering if you should go in for a tan. And finally anyone who's picked up a five gallon bucket of water knows that water is not light so pumping water requires a lot of energy.  Ocean water over the last 50 years or so has gotten warmer and warm water holds less oxygen. That's bad for many animals but jellies which have been roaming the world's oceans since before fish even existed appear to be taking up the slack. So jellyfish blooms are more common and these steel cylinders need to be replaced more often. So nothing about this place is simple but all of this hard work and engineering in the basement creates this magical experience for the millions of people who visit here every year. Every person who walks in these doors encounters what in many ways feels like another world that we just happen to share this planet with. That world in a way walked right up and knocked on the door of Monterey, California and humans answered this aquarium is that open door giving us an appreciation for the oceans and an understanding that this in fact is all one planet and needs to be treated as such. On the surface it looks like effortless magic underneath we see the secret the work, the engineering, the science, the passion and the geology and climate that make it all possible. What a fantastic place. Thank you obviously so much to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and all the very cool people on the social media team there following them on Twitter or Instagram is an absolute joy. They are some of the best in the world at science social media so I put links to their socials in the description. Thank you to Andrew Huang for the music in this video. All of the tracks were from his album TV and video games and John, I'll see you on Tuesday.


The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the mental health of healthcare workers. Studies have shown that many are experiencing high levels of stress, anxiety, and depression due to the increased workload and uncertainty associated with the virus. Future research should focus on developing strategies to improve the well-being of healthcare workers. This article was authored by Jacob Schreffler, Jessica Petrie, and Martin Huwecker.


Can men and women actually be platonic friends with each other? This is a hot debate on the internet right now, but we're gonna add some new ones to the combo Oh my goodness if you do an internet search on this topic There's literally like 300 threads that pop up and there might also be 300 viral videos You know those MOS's where they're like, hey, let's be honest here guys Can men and women really be friends joining us today to break down this topic all the way from LA We got Nelly Nell Chan man. There's no right or wrong answer to this, but all I know is the gray area It's complicated. Yeah, Andrew. So what's the answer? Can men and women be friends? Let's just give it to them All right, so I think the quick true answer is yes, they can It's tough and we have a whole list of reasons why it is tough for men and women to actually be platonic friends But it's possible and everybody's situation is different things they need and expect are different, right? But but let's just talk about why it's tough So we're gonna provide you the framework to understand, you know, your own situation because it's never just a yes And it's never just to know break it down number one Andrew I think the truth is there are different levels of friends and it could be hard for a male to have a female as a level Five out of five friend, right? Yeah, but maybe like what one through three very common.  Yeah I think like a four out of five is a Girl that you would hang out one-on-one or like your bestie is like, you know a five out of five or best friend Like it's not common. Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of guys Most of their closest friends are guys, but then they might have a lot of girls who are at the two or three They might hang out at events together. They do trust each other They can be honest with each other Maybe they throw like the combined like Christmas parties together and stuff like that But yeah, you're not hanging out one-on-one going on like solo trips together and stuff like that I think it is very very very very tough for men and women to be best friends But we'll get into it. So yeah, and we're not talking about people who are married by the way We're talking about, you know singles generally dating outside of the marriage fear. I will say this I would say it's almost like it's not It's almost like having a six-foot guard be your lead scorer, you know Jalen Brunson friends They in fleet where they're dropping like 35 a game. That's like it's rare You ain't seen it happen. It's not common It's just not common in the NBA to have that scheme and that's not common in life to have that scheme point number two Andrew It's tough, especially if you are a guy who generally has trouble dating Yeah, this is a big so this is part of the big debate right now where it's like hey guys like I want to have like Female friends because I'm gonna learn how to like talk to women and she's gonna introduce me to other women First of all, you should not only be in a friendship for that expectation. Yeah, how's that even gonna work? Yeah, I'll tell you this Spoiler alert, it's not gonna work as well as you think but anyways at the end of the day like if you're a guy who Has trouble dating and even finding women that you want to spend time with you pouring your effort and time into a platonic female friendship and Having that kind of fill that void is not necessarily a service to you Yeah, I think sometimes and I'm not saying 10 out of 10, but a lot of these guys Maybe they're using their platonic relationship with the female as a substitution For like the actual thing that they actually wanted which was a romantic and friendship relationship with one girl They're just like taking half of the equation as a To settle you're right. That's definitely not the right way to do it Like you said don't expect to do that But maybe sometimes these guys need like tips from like their female friends to actually try to get at a girl that they Want to yeah for sure for sure I think it depends when you're coming in with a scarcity mind set an abundance mindset and perhaps That's why the man is fear is so like big on this topic is because they're trying to caution Against one of the examples that we just had but obviously like we said it's not 10 out of 10 all fitting into that scheme Um moving on to number three Andrew It's especially tough if you're in the friend zone that's sort of related to number two Why is that because this is like where the man is fear is like concentrating all its advice right to sort of prevent This thing from happening. Well, yeah, I mean obviously there's a lot to talk on the internet about the friend zone We even made a video about it a long time ago But I think the friend zone is dangerous and because it it tricks the girl out to thinking that she has a trustworthy Platonic male friend when secretly the guy like you know You're trying to get with her or you would really be down for it versus and then also it doesn't help the guy Ever get really what he wants because it rarely does it ever work out So it kind of is like kind of gets into this messy situation where it can get creepy and stuff like that You hear stories from girls at the time be like, yeah, he was my friend But then he like kept like hitting on me and kept sending me these messages. So I just had to distance myself Obviously, that's not a five out of five. Yeah, I guess all right And I'm not saying that this is true or not Do girls have any responsibility to identify guys that are in their friend zone? Because I noticed that there's girls that are like completely unaware that they're friends on a guy And there's other girls that are like super cognizant of it But no, they definitely have a responsibility. I know girls who's Purposely put dudes in friend zones just for like their benefit or whatever, you know But it goes both ways though Like there's guys who like accept to be in the friend zone just so they can get the girls benefit But then girls put guys in the friend zone so the girls can get the guys benefit But it's just it's just a bad toxic situation because like it gets awkward Like when someone confesses their feelings for one another and it's just it's just all bad Yo, actually so for me a red flag of a woman that I'm trying to date is that she purposely has friend zone A guy. I don't like that. Like I don't like that. She did that because I think that's kind of scheming Like if she found out that he had more feelings and was like, hey, I'm sorry. We have to distance ourselves That's like the more responsible way to do it. Just straight up cut them off versus if she's like, yeah I know he's in the friend zone and I'm like Well, what are you gonna do about it? I think when both parties like let's just say for example, and there's this example There's a male and a female they're both like actors and actresses So they're both highly desirable people if they're both friend zone each other That's a lot different than one party having a lot more leverage than the other friend zone or the other And number two, and what's the cuddle buddy situation because this is like All right A lot of people were talking about how there's this middle area called the cuddle buddy where it's like You get close to the girl you get to hug her and maybe cuddle with her like legitimately cuddle You guys get to release oxytocin together But she's controlling it and being like no like we're not romantically involved and I'm not we're not Going to go further than this. I mean this is this is kind of Nell is like shocked. No, what? I know is the girl in the driver's seat for this. Yes I would say the girl is in the driver's seat In the terms of friend zone situations nine out of ten times. Yeah, I'm not saying ten out of ten You know, there's always exceptions to girls only be agreeing to this cuddle buddy thing That do be simp it for those dudes Who'll be agreeing to that? It could be a good or bad, but for the guy, but maybe they Maybe it's an even exchange. Anyways, we'll get into it guys. Um, number four It is tough to be friends with women if you are both attracted to each other So this is different than the friend zone because friend zone is usually one way or the other Um, but this is when both are actually like looking at each other and always kind of like, yeah Well, if the time was right or we had enough drinks I don't know. I just say you with me I think if both people are attracted to each other That's already you've already taken it out of platonic zone completely when it's one sided It's friend zone right either way and I think the only way that a truly platonic relationship Can work between a man and a woman on any sort of sustained consistent basis in my opinion Is when there's literally no attraction to each other. Oh when you're like I'm gonna you can't just be one or the other it can't be definitely both like each other It literally has to be both not like you know, you know working hard on proactively not liking each other Here's what the girl should say she says. Oh, no, he's not even my type or I don't even find him attractive Or the guy has to say like nah Like uh, sarah's cool. She's my friend, but I don't even find her cute Like they almost have to literally say that to themselves because if there is that physical attraction And they're friends then all it needs to do is just it's it's just a volcano waiting to erupt Oh 100 100 I mean I feel like that's why people can be and everybody's family structure is different Like the ones are born into but like it's easy to be friends with your cousin If your cousin is from an opposite gender because it's like well, we're family is all good Right and that which brings us to point number five. It is tough Especially when you get older to make new friends with the opposite sex like past college If you didn't grow up with these people if they're not part of your family obviously or if you didn't even like uh If there's not some type of like deeper bond that you guys share together It is tough to make new men and women friends because everybody got their life going on Dude, it's even harder to just make like just friends in general even of your same gender as you get older I think life is just more complicated. There's a lot more at stake things become a lot more transactional than versus when you're young So you throw the gender Difference on top of that it becomes even more complicated, right? I'm saying it's complicated to have just any new friends in your world Right. Yeah, you're right and this applies to just even just any type of friendship And because relationships friendships, they are they're they're very similar, right? Um, but I would say a tip for this is like if you want to be friends With a girl like have some type of activity that you guys come together and hang out Together to do not just like meet up at the bar and have drinks because maybe meeting up at the bar and having drinks That's something you got to reserve for dates With women that you're trying to date or that you're pursuing versus like friends So it's kind of like if you do an activity whether you hike or do a martial arts or you go running together You kind of get that dual purpose in there together so that you exercise together and you guys hang out So I think that's very important and that girl also goes for friendships with guys too I just think in general Time gets a lot shorter So people are a lot more selective with who they're even just generally friends with at all But I did notice like people that are in the military They they could sort of break free from this convention that we just said like where you're past 30 It's like if you guys are really on some sort of crazy project together That could be the bonding thing that creates like new childhood tier type bonds later in life when you're obviously in the military They're going on like crazy serious missions together. You know what I mean? So I think that that there can be Catalytic experiences later in life, but it's just more rare right point number six I would just say it's tough when it's clear. There's not an Equal exchange of value between the friends now I know that this is going to sound that line sounds very transactional But let's be real and let's just be honest friends should add to each other's life and it can be in different ways It's not only like oh she has this job She hooks me up with This product like I don't know men's skincare because you work for a skincare brand And then I hook her up with this like there has to be some type of value Exchange where you can actually name it out like I was talking to one of our other friends And I was like, oh you have a platonic friend like what do you do for her?  I'm a good listener And then in return she helps throws like parties and she's very social and I get to go to those parties So there is some type of exchange. Oh, yeah, you talking about fred Yeah, right here. We're talking about fred behind the camera right here We're talking to discussing one of his platonic Yeah, yeah, I was saying fred but just because people can't see fred So I just said a friend off camera. But yeah, fred's over there. Yeah, I think that it is true Would you agree with me guys that like And like don't get mad at me guys Men and women typically live different lives The structure of life is pretty different. So theoretically when people live a different structure of life They have I guess like different values and perspectives Yeah, different values different perspectives and and there's two things right So you could say one that doesn't align so that makes it difficult for us to be friends But to your point about fred andrew they they offer something different that they can give to each other To create the friendship, right, right, right? So there just has to be some type of I guess exchange. It's kind of like a lot of people are like, oh friends with like their business partner or some I don't know. You just have to be getting something out of it. Okay And you have to be able to name it in your mind Actually, you have to verbally be able to say what you get from them Yeah, and we're not talking about friends with benefits guys We're talking about friendship the benefits of friendship Moving on to number seven guys, um It's also really difficult for men and women to have platonic friends And I think that there's a reason why this discussion is always going so viral And there's all these mo s's about it because a lot of people somehow they don't have an open dialogue or honesty In the their relationship. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that obviously A friendship is like any relationship, right? There's boundaries There's commitments if one person is always trying to see the other person When they're in town, but the other person doesn't put in effort. Are you really friends? Um, and you know a lot of friends own relationships Exactly guy is going to be hitting up the girl to hang out and the girl's like, yeah, I will And also like can you Um, I got to say this though One thing that I think is a true platonic relationship is if like let's say for example Yeah, your friends with this girl and you guys are like four out of five or three out of five tier friends And then she gets in a relationship and it goes down to one out of five Nobody is sad about it because some people were saying I knew I knew this one guy who was like, yeah, man I like this girl and then she friends on me and then I just was her friend and I was like, okay I'll just accept it. I'll be her friend and then she got a boyfriend And then I almost dropped off the map and it's almost like I got broke up with twice Oh man, that's tough. Yeah, I mean and I think that that's why if you're truly good friends If you're truly at least the three out of five level friend or higher You got to almost be able to say like hey I can't care about like the girl like you almost got to have that talk like hey, you know I'm sorry like dating rob and like, you know, we're just I just can't hang out as much and that's fine And if you accept that as a guy and you're like, okay, that's cool Like that doesn't bother me. I get it because she only has so much time in the world Like because you do that with your guy friends if your your guy friend gets into a Relationship with a girl you have to understand that they're not going to be kicking it with the guys and Exactly There's many scenarios like that for both parties, you know for a guy or a girl that you cannot hang out Or talk to a lot with the opposite sex the opposite sex friend Yeah, but because everybody's like just got a time schedule that they got to divvy up, right? Yeah, and I think as long as you're clear about that like a bro, you know I got to spend time with sarah, you know, it's saturday. So sorry. I can't come out to this thing Anyways guys, uh, the last point that we're going to get to before we get into our overall takeaways is And this is a big one because this is what a lot of the debate online was about. Um, it's just tough If you rely on that female for advice about other women Like you should not go into a friendship expecting that you are going to crack the code Of like, I guess dating women by just being friends with a woman and also I think there's also a sense that maybe like Not all the time, but like the advice that you get from women is not always, uh, the most I guess effective advice That's what a lot of people are saying. We got to talk about this I would say this if you're still in the phase where you're like going out and you're maybe, um Trying to meet a lot of women and you're trying to date a lot and figure it out I definitely think that the advice that you're Platonic girlfriend gives you may not be fully applicable, right? Because they themselves don't go out and I guess like They they never lived that situation But I do think if you're in a long-term committed relationship with your girlfriend and you have a platonic friend She could like maybe coach you through some of the things that your your significant other is feeling Yeah, that you might not be in tune with but in terms of like going out to like the club No Yeah, yeah, I think it does depend on on what you're talking about So like if you have a platonic girlfriend and you're out dating a lot and that's like your goal That's what you want out of life right now and uh, then in that female friend cannot support you in that or cannot Add any perspective like just understand that and just understand why all right What do you guys think about girls always being like i'm the best wing woman? I am such a big good wing woman for my friends. I find that when women say that I would say nine out of ten times They just making that up. I've definitely heard success stories And I do know some women who are really good wing women for their friends, but it's it's not common It is not common and depending on what world you work in like let's be honest Because if you're in like night life or like she's a bartender or a bottle girl Or she knows a bunch of other girls that are very social like that That's probably more how it works, you know, she would it though, man Yeah, definitely wing woman in terms of approaching like a random girl in public probably not but I've definitely seen it Like you said through networks. Yeah, um, I think the best way is that a woman is like Hey, I have a friend that wants to meet you or you should meet like sometimes that's worked out like matchmaking That's more matchmaking than wing womaning. You know what I mean? There's a difference between those two and I think we have to be clear when people when people say wing woman It's like they can help you get You know late with that. Yeah But like not like because like a lot of girls can introduce you to like their female friends But that doesn't necessarily mean they'll go somewhere. Yeah, that's a good point Yeah, it's nuanced a lot of people like you said, you know, there's disagreement on terminology Generally your responsibility as a guy is like you you gotta more know what you're looking for out of life But anyways, uh, let's talk about our takeaways guys. Hopefully that list was helpful David, what is your overall takeaway about this whole debate? You know, it's it's been on tv Men and women can't be friend. It's crazy how trendy it is because not only have gender differences always existed Right stand-up comedy in the 70s and 80s was primarily about the differences between men and women And it seems like it's like 40 years later and I don't know if it's it's probably to be honest Due to changing gender roles in society and a lot of macro movements that didn't exist 10 years ago It just feels like why is this topic so trendy right now because there's so many There's entire channels that are dedicated to asking these questions that were in a book like 50 60 years ago I think it's because a lot of people who watch videos and look for advice on the internet They want the yes or no question. They want the yes or no answer, right? They're just like oh make it easy for me. Oh men and women can't be friends. Good I'll just never think about having a female friend now obviously down But I think that's why our conversation is important because we're just we're explaining to you why it's tough And the things that you probably need to get over About yourself and her in your guys's situation in order for you guys to actually be good friends, you know But I also think again, I stand by I think it's tough to be best friends It is tough if that if that bond is not forged in fire over years and years, you know I absolutely think long story short like my major takeaway is that like people do need female energy in their life And they need women that are really respectable and and have a high position and whether it's your mother Whether it's your cousin whether it's your sister whether it's like a you know I mean auntie like somebody is is very very very important to have that But in terms of like the situations that a lot of guys I guess majority of the times find themselves in and this is obviously not all but like, you know type of Lopsided situations. Those are probably not ideal I think it's uh, it's not impossible for you know, a male and female to be friends or best friends or like, you know Like you say, you know the levels between one two three four or five But it's just very difficult just like we talked about to have A four or five four out of five or five out of five, you know male female best friend or friend because you know There's a lot of a lot of things that go into every scenario and environment. It's just it's complicated Listen to be best friends with someone is Still a relationship It's still a plant you have to constantly water. You still have to ask yourself like hey How does this person respond? When I hit them up to hang out And if that person is kind of like avoiding you or just being like, yo, I got other things to do You're probably not five out of five friends. You're not that good of a friend You know what I'm saying? So I think you just have to understand what you're getting out of the relationship friendship Because relationship is They're all they're all similar So I say you have to understand what you're getting out of it and what you want and your expectations And then you know, I think moving forward from that you probably can be some level of friends But anyways guys, we're just encouraging the dialogue. I think the more healthy discussion There is about this is going to be good because it's crazy right now city boys versus city girls They turn it into a whole meme to a tv show to a cultural movement. You would not believe you know what? I don't like to see I don't like to see a video like this sharing the nuance and actually being helpful Not get as many views as some clip of some guy and girl being like, no, you can't be friends Oh, no, I used to friends on this person because people like that kind of content bombastic Lopsided. Yeah, maybe if we had like a couple hot chicks in this video talking about this too Maybe we get more views too. Well, guess what? We're just three intelligent guys All right, so hopefully that conversation was helpful to you all But thank you so much for watching. Let us know in the comments down below what you think can men and women be friends And at what level let's be honest. There are different levels of friendship I think that is one of our main points and also let us know why are these topics trending for like the next decade Maybe until we figure it out or not. Let us know till next time. We the hot pop boys. We out. Peace


Laws don't exist to prevent wrongdoing. Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix. Humans have two adulthoods. The first is physical maturity, the second is intellectual maturity. The second adulthood is the process of learning that everything you are taught about the world in childhood is false, and discovering the truth of what's really going on. The first adulthood is thrust upon us by nature and time. While the second is a conscious and deliberate process we choose for ourselves. All humans reach the first adulthood if they live long enough. Very few reach the second. Part of growing up is learning that laws do not exist to prevent wrongdoing. They exist to keep society moving in an orderly way for the benefit of the world's worst perpetrators of wrongdoing.  Most of them are quite wealthy and respected, because they benefit from the abusive status quo that laws are set up to protect. I still can't believe the Western political media class spent a year and a half saying it's a Russian propaganda to claim NATO expansion provoked the Ukraine war, and then the NATO boss just blurted out, yeah, Putin invaded because NATO expanded to Russia's doorstep. He told us he would if we didn't stop. A two-party system would work fine if either of the parties disagreed with the most murderous and depraved agendas of the other, instead of enthusiastically agreeing and collaborating with them. So much dysfunction is facilitated by people's Hollywood-induced tendency to divide every conflict up into good guys versus bad guys. Support the good guy Democrats, they're fighting the bad guy Republicans. Support the good guy United States. It's fighting the bad guy Russia. In reality, the good guys versus bad guys' dichotomy is a narrative construct which has no place outside of children's cartoon shows. Real life has no heroes or villains. It only has human beings with their own respective interests. Mature analysis looks at those interests, and how they conflict with and harm the interests of other groups. With the most common dynamic, of course, being that a group of powerful people is harming the interests of a large group of disempowered people. A dynamic which the Democrats, and the Republicans, and the U.S. Empire, generate constantly. The easiest way to attract a massive following and make a lot of money doing indie media commentary that's critical of U.S. status quo politics is to align yourself with the phony populist wings of either the Democratic or Republican Party. Because that's where the numbers are. The closer you are to mainstream politics, the easier it is to get traction, because there are way more people aligned with mainstream politics than those outside it. You learn this right away when you get started in indie media. You immediately notice that your content which finds its way into MAGA circles or Bernie AOC circles gets many times the traction you would get when you're attacking both sides and not pandering to any audience. The difference is not subtle at all. There's an immediate and completely obvious incentive to begin tailoring your content to appeal to one faction or the other, even if it means holding back on attacking one side or being less than honest about the real problems you're seeing in the U.S. political landscape. And you see this happen with indie media commentators all the time. They sit where the numbers are instead of where the truth is, and they're able to feel okay about it because lots of other commentators are doing the same thing. I've watched so many lefties get sucked up into supporting the Democratic Party or going the other way and sidling up to the MAGA faction, knowing full well that it's not in alignment with the truth of what they're really seeing in the world, but unable to resist those sweet, sweet numbers. It is possible to resist the temptation, though. There is an audience for content which uncompromisingly attacks the full spectrum of status quo politics, including its phony populist wings. It will never be as big as the mainstream and mainstream adjacent, at least not until we see revolutionary changes to the political landscape, and you probably won't get rich taking your stand there. But the trade-off is that you don't have to feel gross about yourself for spending your time doing something that you secretly know deep down is fraudulent. An unspoken premise of capitalism is that one day people will invent some technology which allows humanity to keep consuming at a frenetic pace and keep expanding the economy without destroying the biosphere we depend on for survival. That's the only way to make capitalism look like a sustainable model for our planet. But that isn't going to happen. We're never going to consume our way out of the ecosystemic problems we consumed our way into. Technology has helped our species in many ways and will continue to, but no amount of technological innovation is going to make it possible to continue infinite economic expansion on a finite planet with finite resources and an ability to absorb a finite amount of disruption. Human behavior itself is what needs to change. And it needs to change drastically, and it needs to change soon. No amount of technological innovation will ever circumvent that urgent need. We're like a smack addict trying to figure out ways they can keep using at a high volume without compromising their relationships and employment. We're like a miserable narcissist believing he can become happy if everyone in his life changes to accommodate his inner demons and facilitate his happiness. Everyone wants change and nobody wants to change. But that is what's being asked of us. In the age of Bernays, capitalism shifted from a need-based economy to a desire-based economy, which tugs at the strings of ego to fuel an insatiable drive to consume and produce and reject contentment with the way things are, and we're going to have to uproot what those strings are attached to in order to survive. Believing human consciousness can remain chained to these frenetic egoic patterns which drive us to consume and hoard and flail around in a constant state of restlessness and discontentment without destroying our biosphere if we can only come up with the right clever new trick, is just a form of spiritual bypassing to avoid doing the real work that needs to get done in ourselves. Our species has come to its adaptation or extinction juncture in its development on this planet, and the adaptation that's being asked for is a drastic change in human consciousness. We're going to have to grow up and become a conscious species now. Daddy technology isn't coming to our rescue. It's on us. It's time to wake up and free ourselves from the dream of egoic consciousness so we can begin collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem toward a healthy and harmonious world.


The glory for the victory belongs to the Lord. You have no strength in and of yourself. You are weak. You must rely on his strength, boast rather in your infirmities, boast rather in your weakness, boast in the Lord. But don't boast in yourself. Victory in the Christian life only comes by the power of his might. It will not be by your works that you are saved. It will be by faith in Christ. Turn from your sin and trust him with the power to turn from your sin. Repent. Mourn your wicked, deplorable, detestable condition. You have sinned against your Creator. Mourn your state and turn to Christ in faith. Trust him to grant you repentance. Trust him to strengthen you. Trust him to give you faith and follow your Creator. Follow Christ and be saved.


Did Oda break one piece again? Oda broke one piece again. Yeah, Oda broke one piece again. You just gotta love it when a chapter ends with a promise and the next one delivers on that promise. Which isn't always the case in One Piece.  But this chapter, we were served alright. We were served big time because this chapter delivered on promises big time. Last chapter's ending with the menacing promise of J. Garcia Satan's presence continued into this chapter's earth-shattering reveal of the Garcia's monstrous devil fruit form complete with his own hype entrance that rivals some of the biggest celebrities in history. Quite seriously, this man had his own landing station very much like an artist appearing on stage before their concert to the crowd's wild anticipation. Satan appeared on stage in a very mystical and ominous way that went beyond the fantastical realm of devil fruits. It felt like dark magic or voodoo with the pentagram, the black smoke very otherworldly. It's like he was being summoned when appearing as an apparition from that magic circle. I mean, we have magic now. If we do, it's the devil's magic because Satan's form looks like a very literal take on the idea of a devil fruit. Because it is all but confirmed that Satan does indeed have a devil fruit. That it is most likely a zoon, a mythical zoon at that and that the form we witnessed in this chapter is most probably an awakened zoon form. The dark cloud ring surrounding him very similar to the smoke rings we've seen around both Luffy and Luchi's awakened zoon devil fruit forms which also pretty much all but confirms that all the other Gorosei also have the same awakened zoon type powers. Something I can't get over and only actually noticed at the very end of the chapter is just how huge he is. Satan is towering over the Alliance and is at least two to three times the size of Frankie who isn't a small guy either. In terms of Satan's power reveal, we don't know what zoon form this is exactly but he seems to resemble a spider in his lower half while he has horns like a bull on his head. To be honest, he looks like he could be Black Murray's grandpa. But the internet has told me that the inspiration for Satan's appearance may have been a traditional yokai from folklore popular in Japan's western region and Ushi-oni or also known as Gyuuki, an oni which seems to have been associated with beaches or other bodies of water. And fun fact is also the name of an attack that Zoro once used during his battle with Tebo. God rest his soul. You can't help but wonder at all the deeper potential meanings behind these worldly connections or all the other symbolisms apart from drawing connections between the possible inspiration for Satan's devil fruit design. The star imagery was very strong in this chapter as well as the number five. The two obviously representing the five elder stars as Satan is the representative of the Gorosei here. And I don't think that the use of the number five is supposed to represent a ranking or a numbering system as is often the case in other series like your bleachers or your demon slayers where the lower or higher the number indicates how strong a character is. But on the off chance that the number five associated with Satan does in fact indicate his ranking. Is he being assigned number five supposed to be that he is the weakest of the bunch or the strongest like five stars out of five? Given his powers are the first that we're getting introduced to out of all the other Gorosei, you'd have to imagine that it's the former and that Satan may be just a taste of what the rest of the Gorosei are capable of. Even if the five itself doesn't mean anything in terms of rankings, Satan as the first of the Gorosei that we're seeing in combat may mean that there's a reason why Oda has saved the rest of them for later which is a really scary thought. But personally I've always preferred and bought into the idea that the Gorosei are individually just as strong as each other which is nothing to scoff at either because having five individuals this powerful in an alliance all working towards a common goal is still a terrifying looming shadow that keeps the world of One Piece on their toes. Satan himself is so powerful. Imagine him multiplied by five. He's so strong that I genuinely question why he even needs to control the pacifista because I feel like he could take care of the situation here at Egghead without too much difficulty. Bringing the pacifista under his control is just a power play or maybe he likes to play life in easy mode. I may be thinking too deeply about everything at this point but I also wondered about his choice to seize the movement of the pacifistas as he made his entrance as opposed to reversing the order completely so that the pacifista could go back to fighting the alliance. Is it a tactical decision because the pacifista would have interfered in his way? Maybe something to do with an energy output that would make it difficult for him to produce the magic circle to spawn out of or energy that he wants to conserve so that he can repurpose it for his own needs or is he really just a celebrity status diva and didn't want anyone's attention on anyone or anything else so that all eyes would be on his grand entrance or at least the eyes that he wanted to be on him because not everyone was allowed to look. In fact, one of the lower ranking marines' heads exploded after just making eye contact with Saturn for just a brief moment. I'm actually very unsure how to interpret what happened in that scene so I would really like to hear your own interpretations down in the comments below. Initially, I thought of the marines' combustion as something being similar to how Conquersharky can knock out fodders that Saturn's shield dominating presence overwhelms those who are below rear-admiral level which is why they can't look at him and that the marine exploded upon meeting Saturn's eye or maybe that it's more close to how Luffy's awakened form allows him to affect his surroundings to turn rubbery and so in Saturn's case, his spider-like form produces some sort of venomous substance or aura that people have to withstand or even like Bowers Meromero know me but reading it again, I also realized that it might not have been a subconscious or constant effect or aura that Saturn is just emitting by the sheer power of his devil fruit but rather the marine dying might have been the result of a very deliberate action on the Gorace's part because it also sort of feels like that Saturn may have attacked that lowly marine for looking at him despite explicit orders not to and because the marine witnessed Saturn in all his monstrosity even explicitly expressing his horror calling Saturn a monster and so it was sort of as if Saturn was offended by the fact that such a low rank officer dared to gaze upon him defying orders and even had the galls to call him a monster an unforgivable transgression that deserved punishment which is also sort of fitting in terms of the Gorace ultimately being celestial dragons and it's actually quite funny to think about it in this way because then more and more Saturn is turning out to be quite the diva in all seriousness though I know we're essentially saying this every week but this reveal about Saturn's powers and abilities has really changed one piece forever apart from the fact that after who knows how many years we are really finally seeing this scale of a reveal about the Gorace I can just see this leaving a mark on how to powerscale in the series as fans can use Saturn as another measure to powerscale basically anyone who's shown to be not affected up against Saturn will instantly become quote unquote above rear admiral level so Bonnie and Vega-Punk both of whom directly looked Saturn in the eyes standing up to him they are confirmed to be at least rear admiral level which shouldn't be a surprise about Bonnie considering she was fighting vice admiral in this chapter but Vega-Punk will kudos and good luck to him because Saturn is here to complete the mission of eliminating Vega-Punk while his protector Luffy seems out for the count because we also saw the continued battle between Luffy and Kizaru in this chapter and again Kizaru just doesn't seem to be going all out as an experienced combatant he's able to tell how tired Luffy is and while it's clear that Kizaru himself has been tested for the first time in probably a long while I think Kizaru has more in the bag and he could have ended this fight a lot earlier if he really wanted to go and fulfill his mission like he claims that he needs to do not to be remiss we're introduced to another one of Luffy's new attacks which continues on that solar system or constellation theme that we've seen as of late this one is named White Star Gun and it might seem like your usual weapon-like or gun style of attacks that Luffy likes to use but what is very interesting is that idea of the star especially considering the nature of Saturn's reveal and appearance in this chapter and the overall theme of the Gorusei as the five elder stars now I may be reading too much into it and maybe Oda just really wanted to continue that cartoon-style stars circling around the opponent's head but the speculations about the ancient mystical connections between Luffy slash Joy Boy to the Gorusei and perhaps even Imu and the planetary theme has already been discussed before and I highly encourage you to watch this video if you haven't already but Oda seems to be blatantly showcasing that connection to the planetary theme here it's quite intriguing how we seem to have gotten that last bit of the fight between Luffy versus Kizaru in this chapter because Luffy has reached his limit and was seen on his descent to the ground and in his descent into old age but what's even more interesting is how Oda showed or last showed Kizaru in this chapter it's unclear as to what status the admiral is going to be in the next time we see him because the last we saw of him in this chapter getting hit by Luffy's attack which went through his head whilst Kizaru lamenting that this is a bad situation that he's in as well as again the added effect of the cartoon-style groggy stars around his head it made it seem like it may be possible that we have a double knockdown on our hands right now although Kizaru quickly getting back up from this isn't as hard to imagine whereas Luffy is seen depleted and so with Saturn facing off the straw hats with the only one on the island who actually has any chance of doing something about the situation seemingly out of the fight the tension is now higher than usual with the alliance facing off the biggest threat that the series has ever seen without Luffy so what's the way out of here? the obvious answer is still the Iron Giant which typically we did not get an update on in this chapter but I'm sure it's lurking in the background to come to the rescue unless Luffy maxing out his gif fifth form means that the Iron Giant also ran out of juice Bonnie stepping up and standing up to Saturn was cool but mostly I think I was most surprised that Saturn actually bleeds overall Bonnie was quite impressive in this chapter taking on two of the Vice-Admars and we don't know the name of Mr. Butchin yet but we were formally introduced to Miss Bluegrass Bluegrass who has the Ride-Ride fruit which lets her ride and control everything she does Bonnie's own ability was also very cool the near-death experience attack which we were introduced to is a trick that I feel like would be a good attack that Usopp could be inspired from because it's very fitting with Usopp's attack style but of course out of all of Bonnie's scenes the most intriguing is the ending and her recollection of what seems to be Kuma's memories at least for me I imagine what she's recalling is a piece of Kuma's memory that he experienced the witness while Vega-Punk was turning him into a cyborg and the conversation was between Vega-Punk and whoever ordered for Kuma's cyborgification the way that she stabs Saturn right afterwards suggests that it's out of vengeance almost as if Saturn himself or at least the other Gorasei were responsible for what happened to Kuma making the order themselves but from Vega-Punk's dialogue when seeing Saturn it feels like they're only meeting face-to-face for the first time his line of recognition seemed to be more of like a ah, so you're Saturn while the chapter was very heavy on the action and tension there were also nice pockets of comedy that I really did appreciate like Sanji's Lady Raider or Leda? Does that work? Lady Dar? and not only Sanji's faith in it but Vega-Punk's too Sanji's status as a simp is scientifically certified I also really like the new quirky characters like the Butchin Re-Admiral we also got to see cool inventions like the Vega-Tank 8 and the special material Vega-Clouds these sort of technology being the appeal of Egghead Island and given that Frankie got to witness it in action I hope he leaves the arc very inspired there was a notable absence of Robin and Brooke as the only true straw hat not featured in this chapter and I have to say Robin's continued absence feels very suspicious we also got a very cool color spread a special feature on the Shimotsuki family I imagine it's because the one-shot monster is getting an anime adaptation monsters being based on the Sword God Yuma so Oda's trying to generate some hype there and it is working and the best news for me was reading the chapter getting to the bottom and seeing no break next week because real 1095 elaborate on Bonnie's backstory and give us a visual of Bonnie's traumatic thoughts that we saw in this chapter it would be a way to remove us away from the action to further stretch out the tension but either way whether the fight continues or we see the flashback next week at this point you take either of those options because they are both as equally intriguing there has never been a better time to be a one-piece fan and on that note that's it from me I'm sure that there is so much more I could say but I'd love to hear your thoughts so let me know by leaving a comment below don't forget to like please subscribe and thank you for listening to another one of my ramblings thank you to all of our Patreon and channel members as well this is Joygirl and I'll see you again soon


Well, thank you for that introduction. I guess that makes my first slide and my second slide redundant. Yep, I am Dave. I'm from Stark and Wayne. I'm a cloud engineer. So I come from the ops background. We're going to try to do the business thing. But really what it's going to be about is using the resources that you have effectively and making sure that you can get the most out of what you have. So as all of you are here, I'm sure that you know, cloud foundry can be expensive. You roll out your foundry and then you get that first bill from your IaaS or your vSphere team comes to you and says, what did you just do? How did our bill just go way up? Well, that's because you're accelerating the process. And in order to talk about cost, we have to talk about relative versus actual cost. So relative cost is what your app teams care about. You're doing it with, you're showing that to them via showback or chargeback or some form of showing your app developers what they're using. So they care about how much their apps are costing, whereas the operator side care about the actual cost. They care about that IaaS bill at the end of the month that's coming regardless of what you're doing, it's how much you're using, this is what it is. So the first thing we're going to talk about is that relative cost. So it's the cost per app. So how do we bring that down? And this might be a bit counterintuitive, but the answer is run more apps. The more apps you run on the platform, the cheaper each app instance is. And that's because of economy of scale. Cloud Foundry has an overhead to it because you're running the routers, you're running the cloud controller. The things that make Cloud Foundry wonderful and allow you to just do that CF push, well, that's on top of what you need to run the app itself in terms of resources. So what does overhead look like in Cloud Foundry? Well, this is kind of what it looks like. If you're running a Foundry with only two cells, assuming that the cells are force APUs, 16 gigs of RAM, the usual standard, 87% is that overhead. The thing that is allowing you to propel your business, but it's not really the economy of scale that you're looking for. The real break-even point is about 15 cells. Once you're at about 15 cells, you're doing pretty well. At that point, your actual app resources are more than the platform overhead itself, which means you're really starting to take advantage of it. And then once you hit 100 cells, you're at almost 90% efficiency, which is really, really good. So what does that look like in terms of cost per app? And this is for compute cost. How much does it cost for that CPU, for that one gig of RAM that I'm using? Well, it looks sort of like this. When you're at two cells, each app is at about $180 just in compute costs alone. But once you go from two to four, it doesn't drop by half, it drops by more than half. You get down to like that $45, and the theoretical max is right about $11 in compute cost, because that's how much it costs to run a one gig app on that instance. You've almost gotten all the way down to just the bare costs of the resources. So the logical thing is, well, why don't I just scale out to 1,000 cells? This graph shows if I have 1,000 Diego cells, my costs go way down. Well, your relative costs go down, but you're not using those resources, you're just wasting them. So that's where your monitoring comes in. And sometimes when we come into a place, we will see your Prometheus dashboards, and they'll look like this, where you're using 5% of your utilization, you have 200 gigs of RAM, and you're using 10, or you have 2,000 gigs of RAM, and you're using maybe 100, you've way over provisioned what you need. And that might be because you have a really busy holiday season and you need that. You need that for those couple of days where you've got this peak load, but then throughout the rest of the year, you're idling and you don't realize it. So the cool thing about Cloud Foundry is, you can scale up and you can scale down as you need to with respect to your app instances, but you also have to do it with respect to the platform. Because if you don't do it with respect to the platform, you're just throwing the money away because you're running things that aren't going to be used. So what would a better dashboard look like? Well, it's probably somewhere around this if you're not doing a ton of real peak up and down volatile scaling. You're at somewhere between 60% utilization, maybe 70% utilization in Diego cells. In terms of disk capacity, we can do even better than what we have here. This is over provisioned, we can scale that back. Disk is cheap, doesn't mean we have to waste it. So it's all about how we manage our resources. So let's say we scale back all of our Diego cells, we've got that about right, but are we utilizing each VM to its full capacity? And that's where we have to talk about resource-based sizing. How do we size our VMs appropriately in order to use the most of our hardware? So if you've ever been on GCP, you've probably noticed something like this when you go into the dashboard, because you can save $145 a month by doing something with this. Well, what does that mean? How do I just save that? Can I just click a button and it'll save me money? Why don't we all just do that? Well, if you click that, you'll see something like this. It'll say, hey, we recommend that you resize this instance because you're not really utilizing it effectively. We see that you've got three gigs of RAM and you really only need 1.7, two gigs of RAM. You can cut that down. Well, in your foundation where you have 1,000 VMs, trying to do this manually one by one isn't really effective. And even if you go and do it one by one, Bosch is going to realize that something changed and it doesn't like that. Bosch controls everything. So you can't do it out of band. You have to tell Bosch because if you don't, Bosch is going to put it right back for you because that's what it's really good at. So how do we do that? Well, you have to look at each instance type in your cloud config and make the appropriate changes. So for the IaaS is that support it doing custom resource types for the resources that you're looking at is really important. You can say, well, here's our base. It's an N1 standard one, but we can customize it more. We don't necessarily need or can use a pre-baked size. Let's cut it down. So when you cut that down and deploy, it will handle all of those. And then as you scale, it will scale that appropriately across all of your VMs. So you don't have to do that one by one. So now that we've got that, what if you're not on GCP? Because what if you're on vSphere, AWS, the whole world runs on many, many different platforms?  And that's where a tool, I'm going to use Prometheus because it's what I have and it's what I've been using, but there's plenty of monitoring systems that'll show you more or less the same thing. How much CPU am I using? How much RAM am I using? Am I using it effectively? So in this dashboard, you can see CPU utilization is like 2%. Well, if it's 2%, what's the other 98% doing and why am I paying for it? You probably shouldn't be and you should probably scale appropriately. So looking at each VM type and ensuring that you have enough for bursts, for scale, but also that you're not just throwing that away. So this one, we may be a bit over provisioned on RAM, 75%. That's good utilization, but if you get a big spike, you might not be able to handle it, but that's where your heuristics come in. You can see over the past month, here was my peak. All right, let's scale to a bit less than that or during this time of year, we have to scale up by this much because of last year. So you can use those heuristics to better figure out what your sizes should be. And then same thing, go ahead into your cloud config, make your changes accordingly and just keep deploying and iterate. So if you start by going all the way down to what you might need, you might run into some troubles because you may have underestimated. So just take it one step at a time and just make sure that everything keeps working as you go and that you're still fulfilling your needs. But at this point, what if that isn't enough? What if you've cut things all the way back? You're down at one CPU, one gig of RAM, you can't go smaller, what can you do? Because that's a real concern for environments that you need like sandbox or maybe non-prod where you're not getting a ton of real active use, but they have a very important role and we don't wanna skip them. So what you can do is you can co-locate cloud foundry components. So you can take, say, one job that used to run on its own VM and co-locate it with another job that runs on its own VM that may have balanced issues. Maybe you have one that has a ton of RAM but really low CPU and one that's really low CPU and high RAM. They may go well together and then you can bring your utilization to a more manageable level. So what does cloud foundry look like? Well, cloud foundry has a lot of VMs by default. It has a lot of components and this only has three Diego cells. What does the picture look like as you scale out? Well, some components scale pretty horizontally like Diego cells, they will just scale completely out. They're the one thing that you really have to keep on top of, but there's other components that scale just maybe not as fast. So for your sandbox environments, the easiest way to go ahead and cut cost, remove them all. Anything that's high availability, instance it down to one and you just saved a ton of money but you also lose out on your high availability. And for production use and things like that, that's not really viable but for some sandbox environments that may have to live around to test upgrade paths and things like that, it may be a good option for the things that you're not testing that all of the different components need to come up at once. But what if this isn't enough? What if you, this is where you scaled all the way down to one but you can't scale any smaller. This is where co-location comes in. So you take all of those VMs and you push them all onto logical boxes that kind of makes sense. And once you're at this point, you are as small as you can get with Cloud Foundry. If you wanted, you could co-locate every single piece onto one box. I don't really recommend it. It's not really a great solution because everything's on one box, you can't scale your components and test different things. This will still allow you to scale the components that need to scale because each component that is co-located is related to the other components it's co-located with. And when you need to scale one, chances are you'll need to scale the others at a similar time or very shortly afterwards. But at this point, what if you want to leverage this but what if you want to make it highly available? What if you want to take those benefits from compressing the size and co-locating your jobs and making your things more efficient but you also want that high availability? Well, it just scales just like this. So you scale but you still keep the density and you can keep pushing this out all the way up into your environments that require the high availability but maybe not the granularity of configuration like production. So we've gone through a lot but what does this look like compared to the initial? What's the actual change? Well, there's a big difference in terms of VM size, especially at scale. But let's put some actual numbers on it. We all like graphs. Let's see what they look like. So this is what your cost looks like as your Diego cells scale out. And what you'll notice is with your high availability versus your smallest co-located environment, it's more or less a constant savings. You'll save a constant amount of money and as your Diego cells scale all the way out, you're not necessarily saving more as you scale. And that is because in those big environments, the cost of your Diego cells are outweighing the cost of any of the overhead because you've shrunk that all the way down. So you're saving as much as you possibly can and you're using all of the resources that you possibly can at any given time. So what are the drawbacks? There's gotta be drawbacks of co-location, otherwise that would be the default. Well, the drawbacks are, it's difficult to scale individual components according to usage. So for example, if you have one component of Cloud Foundry that's struggling and you have it on a co-located box with seven other components that are totally fine, well, now you scale that to a whole nother VM and you're running way more components than you actually need to. So it's about figuring out which components logically work well together and need to scale together. And that's how you provide that sort of balance. And the other thing is scaling becomes, it's according to the first, with scaling becomes based on the first component that needs to scale. It's the minimum viable. And then from there, that's determining when you need to scale versus more granular and average. So that's pretty much for co-location. But what I think a lot of people have heard about, I think it's called spot instances. They're way cheaper. Why don't we just use them and immediately save a whole bunch of money? So for those of you who may not be familiar with spot instances with AWS, that's where they really got coined and keyed. So you bid for a price on a VM and it's lower utilization. So instances, you get them as bids. So you say, I wanna pay this much. And as that price goes up, you may lose those VMs. They are not dedicated to you, but it's good for ephemeral workloads. And pricing varies based on demand. So let's say I'm running a Foundry and you wanna run one too, there may not be enough VMs for both of us and you wanna pay more. So I just lost the instances. So if you lose an instance, you need that back. And that's what Bosch is really good at. You've got the Resorector. So if you lose a VM, the Resorector comes in and says, wait a minute, that thing disappeared. Let me try to bid for another one. And it will keep trying and it will keep building that back out. So you may experience some downtime, but for lab environments where that's okay, this could be a great option. And the same thing is true on GCP. GCP is a little bit different. You have these things called preemptible instances. So it's a flat 80% discount. There is no variable price across regions, it's flat 80%. The real kicker here is that preemptible instances are terminated after 24 hours regardless of use. So you get 24 hours and then they're gone. But if you time that accordingly and have Bosch rebuild in an environment where you don't care about it, you're saving a flat 80% and that's great for testing. It's great for ephemeral things where I wanna push it out, I wanna see if it works, it doesn't need to live around for a long time. This is how you can save money on those ephemeral environments. So what are the gotchas there? Well, the gotchas are these, this type of bidding, you're saving a bunch of money, but those instances can go away and there may not be instances left. So you have to have a use case where it can be ephemeral and downtime can be okay.  And that's where this can really excel. And from here, it's pretty much onto the conclusion. Basically the conclusion is you need to look at your monitoring and that is what is going to be the key in figuring out what you're actually using. Because a lot of times you'll build this thing and it will work and it will work great, but you don't know what you're actually using. Or you may look at it and you go, look at all this green, look at all the stuff that I have, look at all the capacity that I have. Well, I mean, if you've got an unlimited budget, run everything, scale to the wall because you can. But in smaller environments, this will allow you to run a sandbox where you may not be able to.  The other thing is capacity planning is important. Figure out with your app teams, what do they actually need? And look at that year over year. It's not something that you can just do once, it's something that you have to constantly do a couple of times a year, a couple of times a quarter even, depending on your volatility of use case. And the last point is if you're in an environment where costs are really, really tight, scaling is what is either going to make or break you because you're going to need to be able to scale in order to have that business. But being able to utilize your resources to the highest capacity possible will allow you to do things that you may not otherwise be able to do. That's pretty much all I've got. So if people have questions, be happy to have them. Thanks for the presentation. You mentioned the botch-riser actor can be used to bid on prices in the spot market. Is that some type of common add-on library? How do you get started with that? So that's actually built into the native Bosch CPI config. So it's in there under cloud properties. You can set that you want a spot instance and you can set what you're willing to bid to. I know AWS is changing some things with how bidding is going to be working. And I'm sure that the CPI is going to follow whatever those changes will be. When you show those statistics, is that like for production system? Like I have like four different environments, right? So I'm pretty sure the lower environments are using the least amount of stuff. Is there some way that I could combine it or combine the instances or? Yeah, absolutely. Where I could be running my dev test environments maybe in one container or whatever you call it, field. Cause I think what's happening is I'm getting charged for each one of those environments and they're probably all underutilized because I don't even, you know, I don't have the traffic in it like I do in my stage and production environments. That's where I'm at, is that? Right, absolutely. So what you can do there is you can use that co-location or the ability to size your resources according to what you need. So for your sandbox and maybe your dev environments where you're not getting all of that traffic, scaling your VM sizes down from the default can really net you some really big gains and looking at your monitoring and figuring out what you're actually using is really key there. Cause if you don't know, you can't plan. So being able to look and then plan and then implement and then iterate and having that cycle, the tighter that cycle is, the more tuned you can get down to the lowest cost that you can possibly pay. Anyone else? Yeah, absolutely. So using orgs and spaces instead of completely separate foundries and planning that, according to your security, as well as your upgrade strategies and making sure that all of those line up. Yeah, that's really key in terms of planning your strategy according to your budget. Yeah. Yep. We've done some interesting things to shut down scripts to manage that cost. If you shut down the Bosch director first and then the subsequent end points and components after that, and you bring those back up and then you bring Bosch back up, it allows you to save a little bit of cost in your lower environments too. If you're not worried about having them turned on all the time too. Yeah, absolutely. There's one caveat there.  And then when you bring your VMs up, they don't have any configuration on them, which means they won't come back happily. So just be careful which eye as you're on and look at the particulars. But yeah, that's absolutely a great way on the eye as is that supported, like vSphere or especially the on-prem ones. That's where those will really net you the biggest gains. So to what extent are the Bosch VMs auto scalable? What do you mean by Bosch VMs? So as far as, for example, like auto scaling Diego cells based off the usage? So I have seen some work done with automation and metrics where you can automate deployments and things like that. I don't believe that Bosch is anything built in, but you can absolutely have a monitoring system that looks and has thresholds and then modifies manifests and pushes accordingly. The real trick in there is to make sure that that's very well tested, especially as you start to get into upper environments, because if you run into a bug with your monitoring, which can happen, you don't want it to scale down all of your Diego instances and crash your foundry. That's the danger with the automation of that scaling at a platform level. Okay. Is there anything that you're aware of, like either open source or something that we can use as a reference to get started there? In terms of that, I mainly saw pipelines and internal tools. I don't know of anything that's publicly available in that side of things. Okay, thank you. All right, thanks a lot, Dave. Perfect. Thank you very much.


Davis Media Access is the source of my media consumption in Davis. I became involved with KDRT many years ago and am serving on the steering committee. I've met many friends and find it's incredibly helpful to not only have the world as a source of information through Davis Media Access but also a local community that I can relate to.


Welcome to Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii, where we discuss the impact of change on workers, employers, and the economy. I'm your host, Cheryl Crozier-Garcia, inviting you to join in the—you can do so by calling us at area code<PHONE_NUMBER>, or you can tweet us at Think Tech HI. We've had a number of shows dedicated to discussing how to make better use of under-utilized groups of talent. Today we're going to continue that theme, discussing another group of people who have a great deal to contribute to the workforce—military spouses. Now, most of us know someone who is married to a military member, and so we may have heard about some of the challenges they face in securing meaningful employment and managing their careers while still supporting their loved one in uniform. Joining us today is someone who knows a great deal about this subject. Anne Wilson raised her family while her active-duty husband moved between duty stations. Today, Anne is going to tell us about the contributions military spouses can make to those who employ them, and she will also have advice for spouses who have just arrived in Hawaii and may need advice about how to navigate through the employment community. Welcome, Anne. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. Tell us about your own experience as a military spouse. Which branch you were affiliated with, and maybe some of the places where you've lived. Oh, okay. Well, after 23 years of military experience as a spouse, we've been to Japan twice. We started out in North Carolina. We actually took, like, a detour assignment, a small detachment in Amarillo, Texas, in Hawaii, and, you see, yeah, that's about it, and we extended a few times, but that's pretty much about it, 23 years. And during, did you, now you raised your children during that time as well, but were you employed simultaneously while your husband was stationed in various places? No. Okay, he was Marine Corps, and we started off really young. So we had an interesting kind of situation where we were so young that we started out right from high school. So I still, I actually had a job at the Federal Reserve Bank, which I wanted to pretty much pursue that career, but I was so new to the job that I had just started getting into the corporate ladder. Then we moved to our first duty station. At that time, I was trying to reinvent myself by going to banks and trying to get employment there in North Carolina, and basically it was not as open as it was in St. Louis, Missouri, where I was from. That was the first time I experienced culture shock and how the workforce was a little bit different. At that time in North Carolina, they didn't have as much opportunity as they have now. That was like over 20 years ago. And I ended up staying at home a lot and raising the children, because employment was just like, literally, I was making like $5 an hour. Wow. Wow. What were some of the challenges or some of the resistance that you had to overcome, say, from potential employers? What sorts of things did they perhaps mention to you that led you to believe that maybe you were less qualified or less attractive a candidate than maybe some others? The first time I experienced that was at the banks. What was interesting was they would call me for interviews, and when I would get to the interview, I remember one lady, she looked at my interview, looked at my resume, and then she looked like you're Ann Wills, and I was like, yes. So I'm not really sure exactly what some of the situations were, but it was in North Carolina, and it was over 20 years ago. So there could have been a lot of biases that were taking place, but it was very difficult. I experienced a lot of... It wasn't necessarily the best situations, and then a lot of times I would get phone calls and cold calls for positions, and one time they called me, and my son was crying in the background, and she asked me if I had children, and I told her that I did, and then she just said, oh, okay, well, let me call you back, and she never called me back.  And I ended up working at a better company, and the company that I ended up working for, there was someone that worked with that particular lady, and they explained that she did have a bias against people with children and military, so it was really interesting. So when you find out those kind of things, do you really want to work for that kind of person anyway? I was happy that I didn't get hired there. Yeah, yeah. What kinds of situations made you feel like pursuing, because you say you got married, you were fresh out of high school? Wow. Yeah. But over time, you've managed to complete both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree. What was it about education that you felt was going to be helpful to you in building your career? Well, I knew that pretty soon that the military life was over, because when you get close to 20, it's like you start wrapping it up and trying to retire. And I also knew that I need to make myself marketable, because I understood that with all of the traveling, there were so many gaps in my resume, and so many, you know, breaks in certain... And so many different jobs that I ended up having to reinvent myself for, I knew that education had to be something that I needed to, like, just delve into so that I can make myself marketable since we were going to finally be stable for an economy. So you got an undergraduate degree in what? Well, I actually started out with an associate's degree in general studies. And so I got that in Central Texas College. And because we moved around so much, I had to get general studies, because we moved around so much, I could not finish a degree in one particular field, because whenever you move, then you find out that school you go to, they don't offer it. And 20 years ago, they didn't have so much online classes as they do now, so technology has really helped a lot. But then after that, I ended up getting my bachelor's degree in human resources development. And so then I moved right on and got my master's degree in human resources management, because I know that I really do need to at least have a master's for this economy. And so you're looking at HR as a career? I am looking at HR as a career, but what I'm finding is very challenging. I didn't realize some of the obstacles that I would face. So not only am I facing the obstacle of having the resume that is not like the norm, but I'm also finding that HR is the kind of field where they're usually looking for more experience. And basically, unless you can do that transition where you can say that you're experienced in this field, because there are skill sets that you have that can relate to certain HR situations, like recruiting or basically problem solving when you do equal opportunity or something like that, then basically you wouldn't have that experience. So what you find, they want one to five years of experience, or else you're going to be looking at, as one recruiter told me, he called me and said, we can start you off at like $15 an hour. And he said, no one's going to give you the keys to the kingdom. So I just said, OK, I got a master's degree in human resources management, and he's telling me he can hire me $15 an hour. Sure. Well, in Hawaii, that's not bad money. And I made that before I had a bachelor's degree. Yeah, that's true. Well, let me give you a little bit of advice then. It was something that I learned. I came out of an undergraduate degree in business, and I knew I wanted to do HR. But I was caught in the catch 22 of they won't hire you if you don't have experience, and you can't get experience if they won't hire you. So you're caught. And it sounds like you may be in that realm. So here's what I did. I went through my undergraduate textbook, and I know you still have your textbooks. So go through your basic textbook and look at the table of contents and look at the functions of HR. And as you build your resume, talk about the specific things you did in each area that speak to those HR functions. So say, for example, recruiting and selection. You may not ever have been a recruiter, but that doesn't mean that you weren't a supervisor who had to hire people. Exactly. And that is HR work. And structure your resume to really point up the HR-related functions that you've done across your career. Because that does two things. It helps to alleviate the perception of what I call checkerboarding, where you've jumped from here to here to here. You're presenting yourself as belonging to one profession. And the gaps can be explained by, well, I decided it was time to go back to college, finish up my degree, then I went back for a master's, got that done, and these kinds of things that help to make people look more attractive as experienced candidates. Now, let me ask you this question because, and I wouldn't have asked, but you brought up having become a military spouse right out of high school. And that's the age thing. You and I, I think, are in a similar generation. So talk about what you experience as you become a more mature woman in the job market and competing maybe with people that are younger. What sorts of challenges do you find? Well, basically, you do find that I can only think of one thing in particular that comes to mind. And it really did happen to me, but it happened to the military surgeon, my spouse, he told me about, that when he transitioned over, he came in as an intern. And they actually told him in the safety field. And he actually got in, went to school, and then he transitioned to his employment. And it was in the civil service. And he heard his boss speaking to the boss's boss and saying, I thought that I was going to get younger interns. And so he was absolutely shocked when he heard that. And basically, it has been a real thing for me, because I do understand not only am I dealing with race and with being a female, which is totally an underserved part of society, the females. So and then the military spouse, that's another culture. It's everything that the females, military spouses, I think they probably have a little bit harder. I'm not trying to say anything about that. But basically, it is real. And I do understand that, even though I was going to school for like four years, doing a lot of education, and now I'm really getting back into it, I do understand that I'm going to have to color my resume to try to detract from the years. You and I, we have the trifecta, we're women of color and a particular age. We should be at our most attractive, and yet we find the biggest challenges. Sit tight, we're going to be back in just a minute, but we have some housekeeping to do. So everybody stay with us and take a look at some of the other fantastic programming on Think Tech Hawaii. We'll be back in a minute. Thanks for staying with us on Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Cheryl Crozier Garcia, and I'm here with Ann Wilson, who has some good advice to share with military spouses who may have just arrived in Hawaii about how to make the best first impression on prospective employers. And thanks so much for sitting tight with us. Thank you. Welcome back. Now, Hawaii is part of the U.S., we're a state, and yet we are very, very different from the other 49, if you will. So what advice do you have now, having been a person involved in the employment market here in Hawaii for your fellow military spouses to help them navigate through the job search process? Remain positive. That's the first thing. And make sure that you are just persistent. If you know that this is something, whatever the position is, if you know that this is something that you do have the qualifications for, then just find the strategies for that position. And then also that company, that was something that I was always good about. And that actually did my first job when I came here nine years ago. I actually applied for this position. I had applied like three times online, and when they finally called me, I just started researching everything about that company. And I remember that I believe how I ended up getting that position was during the interview, I told them about what their policy said. They had a list of, you know, they have the guidelines or principles or ethics, a code of ethics that they had. And I memorized all the code of ethics. And I ended up telling them what their policy said about the code of ethics and everything and impressed the hiring manager so much. She took me straight to the general manager and I ended up getting my first job for three months. That's great. So doing some research about the company sounds like it's absolutely imperative in order to differentiate you maybe from other candidates. But what about knowing a little bit about Hawaii and Hawaiian culture? You know, because people may think, well, I've traveled all over the world, so I'm not gonna have any trouble getting along here. And then they find that they have a hard time getting along here. So what advice do you have for the military spouse that isn't really figuring it out as far as culture? Well, one thing that I can say is my first position was here and I was three months here and that was the record breaker that I actually got a job that fast in Hawaii. So I thought it was always gonna be like that. And I worked with great people, a lot of the people were Hawaiian and a lot of people had lived here all their life. And there were a lot of military spouses. And after I left that job, then I had a different experience which was totally different than what I had experienced before. And what I would say is from what I learned is that each experience is different, each company is different, and the cultures in the company are different even if it isn't Hawaii. And so keep an open mind, learn what you can about the culture. And you know, if you have great coworkers, they'll be more than happy to teach you about what the culture is like. One advantage for military spouses is that usually we already know how to embrace the culture because we have cultural awareness. And so that's, and that diversity and being able to understand and respect other cultures and other people and nationalities and races, I think that that makes us a really, really good fit in pretty much any company. So just use what we've learned abroad when we come to Hawaii. And I always say, hey, and sometimes I say, hey, I'm looking for Aloha. And if you know that there's not Aloha there, then you just go to the next company the way you would in any other state. So when we talk about this issue though of Aloha, I do think that there is a reciprocity that everyone needs to acknowledge. And that is not only are we getting people familiar with how to be a good employee in our organization, but we are also perhaps obligated to do some cultural teaching about what's appropriate, what's not appropriate. I remember a particular story where I was, it was my first executive position. And the CEO of the company was a very old school gentleman okay, from the mainland he had been hired and then transferred to Hawaii to do, to run the organization. And so my training said that I should extend courtesy to him because he's the CEO. So I would do things like we'd be going somewhere, the elevator doors would open and I would stand aside to let him go first. Or I would stand when he came into the room, this kind of thing. And he looked at me one time and he said, you know, Cheryl, you've got a real chip on your shoulder. I went, oh, wow, why? I don't understand what I'm doing that's bothering you. And he said that. His expectation was that he was a gentleman and so he was going to extend that courtesy to a lady. I was looking at it from a perspective of non-gender but the person with the senior rank gets the courtesy. So how do we work with some of those things? I think as military spouses, I'll give you an example. So you come to work at a particular company, mostly folks born and raised here in Hawaii and the senior ones are called auntie or uncle, auntie so and so, uncle so and so. As a spouse, would you immediately start calling people auntie and uncle? I can't say that. What was interesting in one of my positions that I was in is that there was, sometimes our children got to come when we did certain events for the company. And one of my, the coworkers told his son, when he introduced me, he introduced me as auntie. And I thought that was really endearing. And it did. And after that, that his son, every time he saw me, that's what he referred to me as. And so I thought that was very endearing and I understood it was a term of respect in my culture. We have similar things like that. So I felt very comfortable with it but unless someone instructed me to call them that, I would not violate that and just start calling them that unless they told me to. And I wouldn't expect to call me that unless they wanted to. Yeah, that's a liberty that can be either embraced or misconstrued as being disrespectful even. And that's a problem. How do you, when you're going into a new place, new position, new job market, new city, new country, what do you think are the two or three most important things that the military spouse should do to position himself or herself as the most qualified applicants say for any particular position? Learn the economy. And that just means doing a lot of research. Okay. And before you even get there, you can actually start researching and sometimes we're not afforded that opportunity to be able to know how much, we don't have that much time in order to be able to do some research but and we may not be able to afford to go there and scope out the place but do as much as you can to learn about that place before you get there.  If there's a certain field that you wanna work in, find out the companies that are in that area start sending out the resume. And if you have family or friends that are already in that area, get them to start doing a little networking for you. So you start just using your resources as much as possible to try to get those doors open before you get there. And then once you get there, then you hit the ground running, especially if you're doing a lot of research, you know what area you wanna live in unless you're living on base, then you try to find that area in those communities. And then you just try to network and basically some good foundations if you like societies, you can go to churches or different types of social gatherings where you can start meeting new people and letting them know that you're new to the area and you're looking for employment and then let them know what field you're in. So there are some different things. If you have to be out there, you gotta beat the pavement to stay at home. It's competitive. It's a competitive environment. Now, speaking of the economy, let's talk about money because I'm guessing that a lot of folks who come here via the military are very surprised at the wage levels or salary levels in Hawaii. It's kind of Mississippi wages with the New York City expense level. So how do you advise the military spouse about, hey, 15 bucks an hour is good money here? How would you get people to be convinced that they may not have a choice as far as the level of compensation that they receive? Well, one thing that I can say is that I was just talking to my hairdresser the other day who was a military spouse and she was telling me, now she's a hairdresser and she's much needed for her skills. She's going to school for culinary, the culinary arts. And so we got into the conversation about how you need to have more than one hustle, especially in Hawaii. So the great thing is being a military spouse, you reinvent yourself a lot. So, hey, I can make $15,000 an hour selling a lot of things. I can, so I know how to clean houses. I've started businesses before. I think I've kind of like, I've got an entrepreneur spirit. So, and I've actually also had a property management company. So when you know how to reinvent yourself, you just take the 15 and then do some other things on the side. Learn how to make it work for you. Yeah, if you've got the time, I think that's great. If you've got a supportive spouse and children that are relatively self-sufficient, you probably can have more than one hustle. And certainly there are civilian families who have more than one hustle just because we live in paradise and paradise costs money. And one other thing too, when you bought up the part about the children and everything, technology has improved so much that online, there are so many types of things you can do even online. I mean, people start selling things on eBay. I've never done it, but I've heard that you can make a little money on the sides doing that. But investigate, do a lot of research and find out what kind of things you can do to supplement your income. So it sounds like to me that the prevailing theme for a successful military spouse in terms of building a career is resilience. Totally. You have to know what you want. You have to be willing to go for it and you can't let difficulties stop you from making things happen. That's exactly right. Well, Anne, you know what? Our time is almost up. It's been a great half hour. So thank you for joining us. Thank you. And thank you to all our viewers on Tech Hawaii. I'm Cheryl Crozier Garcia and we will be back in two weeks to talk more about the effects of change on workers, employers and the economy. So take care and we'll see you in two weeks. Bye.