As you mentioned, my name is Gavin Roy. I'm the VP of Architecture at Aweber Communications. I've been using Postgres for nearly 20 years at this point, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. And I'm going to share a story with you today. It's not a cautionary tale, but like any good story, it's got ups and downs to it. It starts with the cloud. And I'm sure if you've been in the internet industry for some time using Postgres, you've probably heard this, seen this meme, right? That cloud is somebody else's computer. And that's maybe the cynical view of what the cloud is. On the corporate marketing side, the cloud is push button easy, right? Cloud takes away all the things that we have to care about as engineers or DBAs or technology leaders, right? We just push a button and everything is done for us. But like many things, there's a lot more to it than that. On one side, we have the cynical view that we're just using somebody else's computer. On the other, it's magical and easy, but there's a lot of gray area in between. So when I started thinking about how to use resources within the cloud, there are a lot of appealing things about that as I'm sure many of you have thought, right? There's this idea of hands-off management. You don't have to worry about your data center. You don't have to worry about infrastructure management, purchasing, provisioning, inventory control, dealing with deprecation of hardware, the monetary aspect. You don't have CAPEX to deal with. You're only dealing with OPEX. You don't have to deal with server failures, hardware failures. You don't have to call support when a dim goes bad or a motherboard goes bad. You don't have to deal with drive failures with storage. From a database perspective, this is really appealing, right? Having managed large quantities of large databases in a 24 by seven operations environment, the idea that I don't have to worry about taking a database offline to deal with issues that it's all done for me automatically in the cloud is pretty appealing. This idea of automation and deployment, I don't have to worry about the configuration management and the package management at the operating system layer. I don't have to worry about backup. That's done for me. I don't have to worry about upgrades. Upgrades are done for me. It's all magical in the cloud. Failover, if there's a hardware problem in RDS and I've set up a multi-AZ failover scenario, it's automatically done for me. And if I wrote my applications right, they just failover and everything just works. It's great. And then, of course, from a business perspective, anybody who's worrying about the bottom line, about service availability, about problems, about staffing, having technical support available with less than an hour SLA to being able to get a response to a problem is pretty appealing. You know, there's a lot that we do from a day-to-day perspective in infrastructure management as a DBA, as a technical resource system administrator, programmer, whatever it is that goes into managing a lot of the infrastructure side of providing the services that we do in our jobs. Whether it's figuring out why I'm having latency within my database, is it related to IO? Or did I provision, you know, did I purchase the right kind of DAZ or SAN or whatever the technology is? We spend a lot of time dealing with technology outside of Postgres itself. And so moving to the cloud and having all these areas covered for us is pretty appealing. So if it's so appealing, there's gotta be a catch, right? And that's where the story starts. So in my current role, when I was hired, I wasn't hired as a DBA. I wasn't hired as somebody to manage the databases from a day-to-day perspective. I just happened to have been working with Postgres in the Postgres community, pretty knowledgeable in the Postgres area for some time. I came in, there were DBAs that were on staff, people who had expertise in Postgres, who knew all the ins and outs, just like I did. People I could work with and tell them, you know, here's the path that I wanna take us from an architectural perspective across the board with the company. And we could go in that direction. So it wasn't my job to be on call 24-7. It wasn't my call to deal or my responsibility to deal with database problems until the day I came into work and they got a better offer from somewhere else that lured them away all at the same time.  And being the person in the company who actually knew the most about Postgres had operational experience with Postgres, all of a sudden I'm on the hook for that. And that was January of 2016. So before I go into what happened, let me tell you about what we use Postgres for in this particular area, or the area I'm going to speak about. So we're an email service provider. If you're not familiar with Aweber, you may be familiar with Constant Contact or MailChimp or others in the space. Basically what we do is we provide a service that allows our customers to efficiently and effectively market their services or whatever it is that they're doing via email. They're not spammers. In fact, we have email deliverability experts, one of which co-authored the CAN Spam Act. So we feel very strongly about what email marketing is and how it should be done. As part of email marketing, we allow our customers to send out large quantities of email. And of course, people who do that care about analytics with regards to that. Just like somebody who's running a web property cares about their analytics and might use a tool like Google Analytics to keep track of their visits and engagement with the site, we provide tools for our customers to basically keep track of the engagement that the people that they're marketing to have with the content that they're sending them. And that's a lot of data. It accumulates depending on customer size pretty quickly. And so what had been developed over time was this sharded solution that ran on 10 physical servers or 20 physical servers running Postgres 9.0 at least at this time. And it was basically sharded to where there was a customer per database. All told, it was about 15 terabytes of data. And it was deployed and managed using Chef, which configuration management tools are great. But when you're dealing with failover, you're dealing with managing your Postgres infrastructure, it may be a bit too much overhead. If you're dealing with changing roles within Chef and managing things within your configuration management to make hot standby failovers actually happen. And when you have to change IP addresses on the fly, on nodes, it can be a bit unwieldy. Needless to say that that was a somewhat painful stack to deal with and the servers were aging. They were out of warranty, starting to fail, drive failures were starting to accumulate. And here I am, not up until this point in this job, I had not been on call at all, which for me was awesome because in my previous job, I was on call pretty much 24-7 for a very long time. Now I'm on call, I have hardware failing, I can make a recommendation, we're gonna buy new hardware, we're gonna fix this or we're gonna go to the cloud because as I talked about before, the cloud was magical. So I had a little bit of a problem, how do I do this? Right, I've got all this data sitting here in my data center on these servers and I've got to get it over to AWS in a way that works. I could use logical replication, I could put something like Sloney in place to copy all of the data across. That's kind of difficult because RDS, if I'm taking the RDS route, is fairly opinionated about what you can and can't do. And so I'm somewhat limited as to what my solutions are as far as how I could get data from my data center to AWS. Fortunately, we had built a system at that time for pipelining our data into our sharded databases that used RabbitMQ. So in our normal operation environment, we have these different data sources, things that do click and open tracking, collect the metrics of what messages were sent to who, those sorts of things. They went through distribution queues that went to the different databases within Postgres. So the migration was pretty easy. We basically flipped a flag for our customer and say, hey, you're inactive while we're doing this migration. All their data accumulated and then we would be able to move that customer basically dump and reload their database into an RDS database. And then once their data was in the new RDS database, we flipped a switch and all of their queued data that had yet to be written to Postgres got written to Postgres. So that was pretty easy actually. That was probably one of the easier aspects of taking all this data and moving it across. Now, it's not fast, right? There's a reason why, for example, Amazon has, I think it's Snowball where they send you a piece of hardware. You can plug into your network and you can load all your data in and ship it to them because it's actually faster to transfer large quantities of data physically than it is over the wire. So one month later, we're 100% migrated to RDS. All of our customers are up and running, the site's working, the clouds are parting, my stress level has gone from up here to down here. I don't have to worry because it's all managed for me, right? It's pretty awesome, automated failover. Some of the things that happened while we were migrating is we did run into issues, but it automatically failed over for us, right? They promised that, that's what it did. It was really easy to upgrade. We started out on Postgres 9.4, it was a point release, they came out with a new version, I went to the little drop-down box, I picked the next version and I hit upgrade. And what happened? It basically took a snapshot, copied all the data over, upgraded a node, failed over to that node and brought everything up and for minimal amounts of downtime, really minimal amounts of downtime, I had point and click automated failover, that was really awesome. The default settings just worked, right? I went and I looked at the settings and I said, this seems reasonable. I'm going from 9.0 to 9.4, they seem to have things tuned. They also are the ones that are presenting the service, so it, for me to go in and question why they have certain things set certain ways, probably doesn't make a lot of sense. Backups are happening every day. Boxes are being monitored, CloudWatch is basically making sure that everything is up and running the way it's supposed to be. But then there's some not so awesome stuff. How many people have actually used Postgres and RDS? Have you actually tried to get at looking at log data? You have the UI, right?  Getting at and reading log data in their UI sucks, so now you have to use their command line tool and their command line tool basically is a multi-step thing to get at your log segments. You basically have to find the logs. It's not like you're dealing with a file system. You're basically dealing with an API and yeah, getting at logs sucks. You wanna use something like PG Badger or PG Fooine to get at managing your log stuff and dealing with it in an automated fashion, not great. No real super user access, right? So the Postgres default super user, yeah, you're not the super user anymore. There's an RDS super user that supersedes your ability to do things and as the Postgres user, you can do some things. You just can't do everything. Role management, so in our organization, we used LDAP to manage all of our access and dealing with things. Yeah, you can't do that. pghpa.conf, if you're used to using that to put in your ACLs for who can get to what, how they can auth. I want this user to be able to auth untrusted because I know this host that they're coming from is solid using this role and I've got everything set up in a secure way that I don't have to worry and I want this one to have password based auth, all the things that we do in pghpa.conf, yeah, that's gone. Nope, can't do that. Monitoring's not Postgres specific. So yeah, monitoring's there but I'm fairly opinionated about monitoring. I want to know about index bloat. I want to know about locks. I want to know about the performance of what's going on inside Postgres and at least at that time, the monitoring solution didn't care about those things. It was machine level monitoring. You know, what are my IOPS? What's my CPU look like? How's my memory utilization? That was kind of a bummer. So it was like, yeah, I can have this over here for monitoring and CloudWatch for some of the stuff I care about and now I have to have another solution for dealing with monitoring for the other things I care about and dealing with the database. And there are a few of you here that actually know me and know that for me, giving up low level control of what's going on is really difficult for me. I have trust issues or something like that. So we made it through this period and all the things that were being promised were happening and we knew that there were trade-offs. We basically said, you know what? Okay, we don't have anybody here but me. I don't know if anybody ever tried to hire somebody in the Postgres space but it's kind of hard. Takes a lot of time and getting them to relocate, especially if you're not in a major tech area. So, you know, moving into the cloud makes a lot of sense. Then 28 days later happened. I was actually like in a good place. I'm like, okay, all the stuff has moved over. I don't have to stress out about this. Now I can look at our other Postgres databases which are our travesty and how they're set up and the schemas and the operational management and start addressing those issues. I can actually do my other job, my real job, the thing I got hired for and work with the various teams to start planning our next big product and how we're gonna implement it. And I got paged. And the page was that our cues for writing data to Postgres had started to back up and customer data for a particular server basically was stale. I got bit by the maximum frozen XID. Transaction ID basically, Postgres went into a read only mode because auto vacuum couldn't keep up with the velocity of data that we were writing to the database and I had used the default settings. Now I thought, man, I really screwed up here because maybe I got instances that were too small. These full auto vacuum stuff should work. I compared the settings on our auto vacuum usage before even going into this. I knew that this thing existed. What did I do wrong? Well, let me fix it. So I knew that the way that you fix this is you basically have to go in and take Postgres and put it into a single user or single connection mode and force a vacuum. You get the vacuum done and everything comes back online but I'm in RDS and I can't fix it. I don't have access to Postgres at that level. I can't SSH into the box. I can't do anything. Okay, kind of screwed. So it's time to open a support ticket. I've got business level support. It's 24 by seven, one hour. Okay, let's wait. So I get a level one support guy.  I'm gonna have to escalate that. And so I gotta wait. I'm still waiting. Customers are not getting their data. My boss is saying, when's this going to be fixed? His boss is coming to me saying, did we screw up? You know, we haven't had customers who have not had analytics data for six hours at this point. You know, what did you do? So now I gotta pivot. I'm still waiting. The RDS support team comes back to me and they say, yeah, we can fix this for you. What we need to do is take your database offline and vacuum it and I said, thanks. That's what I said I had to do in the original ticket that I can't do because I don't have access to because it's a black box and you guys deal with it for me except for when it comes to actually detecting problems like this before they occur. As you can imagine, I was kind of angry. And I said, well, that's great. Okay, so you guys are gonna fix it for me. How long is it gonna take? Don't know. You got a lot of data in there. We can't forecast exactly how long that's gonna take. Okay, you know, and I'm getting a lot of pressure. And by the way, we've now moved from like day one, we're in day two. So do I wait for support to fix it? No, I'm gonna restore from a snapshot and I'm gonna vacuum and we're back in business. Awesome. Except for restoring from a backup takes a long time. And when I say it takes a long time, I started the process and three hours later, I said, you know what, can't do this.  They've got the EBS volume. Stuff's just gonna copy over and maybe it's gonna take 30 minutes, but I'm gonna be up and running now. And in fact, I actually left it running just to see how long it would actually take to restore the snapshot two days. So somewhere along the line, as you can imagine, I'm getting a little bit of pressure to get this back online. And what I decide the right thing to do because I didn't let the RDS folks take my database away was to stand up a new instance and go back to the process that I went to before and migrate databases off of it. At least it's read only, right? I can get at the data that's there. So I marked all those customers as offline and stood up a new instance and started copying data in. But before that, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't gonna run into this situation again. Now, I have to admit I'm partially to blame for this because I went into this going, you know what, they're monitoring the box for me. I've got a lot on my plate. I'll get around to putting in checks to make sure that all the stuff inside Postgres is okay as soon as I get through these other things on my plate. So we ran for about a month without internal Postgres monitoring, which, you know, that was my fault. I have to take blame for that. Had I been monitoring, I would have seen that that value just kept ticking up and up and up and up and wasn't taken care of. So obviously we learned a few lessons from this.  And that loss of control thing where I'm forced to wait, that doesn't sit well with me. That was probably the most difficult thing about all of this. From a DBA perspective, giving up control and having to wait on other people where my personality type is I like to gain trust in the people who are solving problems for me by having them prove that they're trustworthy. It's trust is earned, right? And I'm waiting on Amazon and their Postgres experts, which I don't know personally, to fix a problem for me potentially. And I have no idea if they're going to do it. And to be honest, the guy that I was talking to at the first level didn't give me a lot of faith that they were actually going to be able to fix the problem. Since I had to explain to him what the problem was and why it existed and how to fix it. And that second is I need to be monitoring things. I can't rely on Amazon to make sure that everything is good. RDS Postgres is not magical, it's Postgres. I'm giving up control in certain areas, but I still need to be a good DBA. I still need to be a good systems administrator. I still need to make sure that everything is working the way that it's supposed to work. And so what this is, we're basically collecting this data, shoving it into a few different data sources or data places, one being graphite, which is what this is showing you. And this is basically tracking. I went back, unfortunately our retention policy dropped the metrics from the event by this time. So when I went to go make this slide, I actually wanted to show you guys this, but I didn't have it. A, because I wasn't recording at the time, but B, it didn't go back that far. So I had mentioned before about accepting the default settings that they had. As somebody who's run Postgres for a very long time, I'm used to going into postgres.conf. And when I set up a server, I go in and I do certain things myself. I know how to allocate memory and I know how to tune the configuration settings. And again, this is on me. I thought I'm gonna pick a sized instance, they've got parameter groups, they've gone through and done the work to figure out if Postgres is gonna run well in this environment tuned the way that they have the default tuning setup. And that's not the case. Maybe it works good from a naive approach for the small application, but when you're dealing with a transaction velocity that we were dealing with, databases at the size that we're dealing with, I actually needed to go and deal with those settings and it sucks. So you go into this page and you got a nice web UI for managing postgres.conf, except for you can't touch everything in there. You can touch the things that they allow you to touch. And you hit save changes. And once you save the changes, you gotta restart the database instances. It's not a reload, it's a restart and the restarts work by starting off with a snapshot and then failing over and they go through the same process they go through for upgrades or whatever the other DR failovers are. And so that's pretty painful when you're dealing with a lot of databases within there. Now, that being said, if I were better at DevOps, I could write some applications to do that stuff for me, but I was being lazy and just decided, I'm gonna do this one at a time and just wait. So I waited it out. And the last thing there was I needed to read the docs. So I went into this thinking, you know what, I know Postgres really well. Heck, I got the job that I had before this one just based on my reputation within the Postgres community and knowing Postgres well. And so what do I need to go in and read AWS's docs about running Postgres and AWS for?  It probably would have taken me 30 minutes of upfront time to read. But with my personality type and the way I deal with stuff, I looked at it and my eyes glazed over and I said, yeah, I know how to create roles. Yeah, I know how to get on it. Okay, I'll figure all that out. Common DBA task for Postgres in RDS is required reading because they cover some of the stuff that I've talked about. They cover really what the pitfalls are in all of this. And so I would say that start there. The other documentation is somewhat boilerplate and wrote but that's where the good stuff is. If you know Postgres, that's where the good stuff is. So one year later, we've been running in production with few hiccups. There have been times where I watched the maximum XID basically grow and I start to panic because database, you know, I've got everything tuned but I try and be patient because I've seen this pattern enough times now. So, oh, look, it's going to catch up. One of the problems with the architecture of how we currently have these databases set up is the logic that goes into picking where customers go can put and we don't know deterministically upfront if a new customer is going to be the 90th percentile customer that doesn't have a lot of data or they're going to be a large customer. We can pick a database and we can put somebody there but if all of a sudden they're sending millions of email per day, they skew one of the databases. So this is more of a Postgres architecture issue than it is an RDS issue. But I've learned watching the XID come up that it'll eventually get to the point where it gets cleared and we watch that pretty proactively. But it's worked solid for us. One of the nice things that we've seen with RDS is that their approach to it has not been to just put the service out there and let it sit. There's nice incremental improvement. So we first went out with Postgres 9.4 and as security releases were made around that time point release was made and they were pretty quick on top of it to fail over to that or give us the option to move to that. In fact, in that area, while I'm thinking of it, they've been so kind as to force security upgrades which is kind of cool.  And again, it's been pretty painless for us. But soon after we went out from 9.4, they put 9.5 support in. And I think within the last three months they've added support for 9.6, so that's nice. They're keeping up generally with Postgres releases. Obviously they have lag time between when Postgres releases come out, at least major releases come out and when they add support for it. But by making sure that they're current, we're able to make sure that we're current and support for that is really easy. I don't have to deal with PG upgrade. I don't have to dump and restore. I pick 9.5 whatever from the list and I hit the button and it does its stuff and comes up and it's running 9.5 and 9.6 was the same way. It's pretty cool. It's been largely headache-free. So we've been running large amounts of data and it's been reliable. So I haven't had instances go away. I haven't had wide jumps in latency as far as application performance. It's been predictable which was one of my original concerns with moving to the cloud. If I'm on shared infrastructure with other customers, if I'm basically being time-sliced at the CPU level or I'm on network infrastructure that's being overloaded by other customers, I will see variation in either latencies for the same queries or I basically will see degraded performance over time. And so one of my concerns from a DBA perspective, from somebody who has cared about the performance level between the hardware, the RAID cards and the DAZs I'm using is how do I get predictable performance out of the cloud? How do I get predictable performance out of this? And surprisingly, maybe not because they have engineered a good solution, that hasn't been an issue. So I've been pretty happy about that. Unfortunately, it's the same pain points. So while they are supporting and making incremental improvements, the pain points that I have with RDS are the same. Now being said, they released a new feature about, well, within the last year called Enhanced Monitoring. And it's kind of weird. It doesn't solve my solution that I care about within internal Postgres monitoring, but what Enhanced Monitoring basically does is it takes snapshots of the running processes and more detailed OS level information than what was there before. So when you are troubleshooting, and you basically, it's a bit of a bridge between not being able to SSH into the box and being able to get operating system level information. So I can go in and use PGStat activity to find a troublesome query that's, or a query that's been running for a long time and use Enhanced Monitoring to go and look, oh, look at that, that one thing is pegging the CPU and it's problematic. So that's a nice improvement, but it's still not Postgres specific. It doesn't give me information about how long exclusive locks have been held or how many access share locks or that sort of thing are going on. So it's not one solution for me for monitoring, which I consider a pain point. But again, it's stable. One of the other interesting things is it becomes, you can put a lot less thought into how you deal with scaling because I'm not dealing with the OPEX aspect. So do I need to basically be able to provide, do I need more cores? Do I need more RAM for this box? I just go in, select, pick the larger size, hit save, it does its failover thing and now I'm running on newer hardware. So that's really nice compared to the thing of trying to prove out that HP's latest hardware platform is gonna give me the performance that I need or whether or not this SAN is gonna provide adequate IOPS in my infrastructure. So is it the right kind of solution for everybody? You know, I don't think so. I mean, you use the right tool for the right job. You give up a lot. You give up the ability to install extensions that you might use otherwise. You give up the ability to use lower level replication solutions that you would otherwise use. You basically are in a very prescriptive environment about how you use Postgres and if that prescriptive environment works for you, it can be a compelling answer to the operational aspect of managing databases. So we've been pretty happy with that. And with that, do we have any questions? Yes? Sorry. Go ahead. Regarding the moving of the Postgres database to the cloud, you have that I've written Q, you're just sitting, does it also move to the cloud or is it in your premise? We actually use Rabbit in multiple environments. So we have it in our data center and we have it in the cloud and we use it to federate data between the two. And so we actually collect data in the data, some of our data in the data center, some of it in AWS, and we use Rabbit as the centralized topology for how we move data around everywhere. So we're sitting in the same data center or sitting in the cloud? Yep. Suppose if you have a private empty running and you have a local data center. Sure. But that is... Right, so AWS Direct Connect is, for us, have been a good thing in that regard, in that instead of going across the internet, we're going across a private connection that we pay extra for. But tying that with their VPN for failover or in case the line goes down has been a pretty solid solution from that perspective. And it dropped the latency down for us dramatically. But yeah, latency is a big issue. Like I was saying, if you're in a larger database scenario, using their physical appliance that you plug in would be a pretty compelling thing. For us, the major issue was, how do I get this data over without impacting a large majority of our customers at any given time? And so it was okay for us to have a slower transfer speed on a per customer basis and have it take a longer period of time as long as we were able to provide an uptime experience for a majority of our customers while that was happening. Obviously, that doesn't work for everybody. In addition, we have a... So part of my job anyway is both like forward-facing architecture but also a bit of archeology and trying to figure out why the application is the way it is or what design choices were made, where and we have... And this is a pattern I've seen in multiple places. We have a big Postgres instance. Is the big Postgres instance. Usually it might be called something like DB one or Postgres one or something like that. And a lot of our core application was built in that over the last 18 years of the company existing. That is not a database that I can move to RDS. Just can't. The way that it's architected, the extensions that are used, the requirements for latency and how it behaves and the hard dependencies, it's not a good choice. Whereas these analytics databases which basically provide a... It's almost service-oriented in its architecture of how things are dealt. It's very customer-specific. Connection latencies are an issue. But by managing and intelligently caching our connections, we're able to get around that. So again, it's really finding the right tool. If we were 100% in AWS, it might not be as much of an issue. But again, the extensions that we use in Postgres that we can't use in RDS would keep us from doing that too. It's not completely downtime-free, but the downtime is seconds less than a minute. It's failover. So basically what they do, as I understand it, and they don't give you lots of detail, imagine there's probably a talk that somebody from the RDS team has given that explain how they manage what they manage. But from a user perspective, it appears that basically they snapshot. They do work in the background. They fill you over to the new node with the new data. And so it's basically a failover window that you see. And that's pretty short. It is writable, yes. Right, yeah, so absolutely. I mean, there's a, I'm totally blanking on the name. What is it, Peter, that Greg wrote? That's Perl? Check Postgres? Yes, checkpostgres.pl is a great utility knife for gathering that data. There's a, PgCatalog has a huge amount of data in it. So PgStatActivity, PgLocks, depending on how you're, you have to be careful about what data you pull out of there because that on its own requires a pretty special big database depending on how much you actually wanna have. Some of the trade-offs that I've seen there, people like to keep table-specific activity here, but if you have too many relations, too many indexes, that can be problematic.  And there are a number of tools that do that. That's what we basically use, checkpostgres. And then, trying to think, Telegraph, which is a newer collector written by Influx data. Diamond, and something that I wrote that I'm embarrassed to still exist in production that I wrote in 2007 called Stapler, actually still exists in this environment. So, I didn't put it in there, somebody actually downloaded it and installed it and I'm like, whoa, what's this? So, for RDS specifically, I ended up writing some Python apps that run queries for the things that I specifically care about and pumping that into Graphite. First, very sorry to hear the problem. It has led us to put it in some internal monitoring of all customers' transaction ID levels. Oh, no kidding. Well, not just your, because they've multiple customers in the last year who have, you know, run out of transaction IDs, have to do the same thing just a little bit on that. And so, we now track that internally and we get notified internally when customers' transaction IDs are increasing too fast and you reach out to the customers and help them tune their auto-backing. It's not automatic because it's a little hard to automate that. It's automatic if you don't like it. Not ready to say we should sell it to them. Sure. So, that's one thing. Another thing is, Graham McAlister in his session yesterday and RDS talked about a new extension when we were doing the same thing. Whenever the support for the new model versus the new model next week or two, that's called Log FDW, which will give you access to the logs. Inside of your instance. So, you can ease your access to the log-ins. Okay. Which you mentioned earlier on. Sure. How about shipping it to S3? Automatically. That would be a lot better. Okay. So, we're right now previewing a feature called Performance Insights. Previewing it together with the Oracle service. Which gives you an Oracle Enterprise Manager style viewing to what's going on inside of your instance. Could use specific SQL statements. What kind of load they're causing. That comes with APIs. So, it's not just a pretty picture. You know, pretty UI. You can also pull it out yourself. We will extend Performance Insights to all of the RDS engines. By the end of the year. Including, of course, Postgres. But others, you know, MySQL, Maria, etc. So, that's something to look forward to as well. So, like I said, incremental improvement. Yeah. You guys have been pretty good at that. Yeah. So, those are some of the things that have happened. Awesome. So, like I said, we have also started sending the onboard emails. If you're excited, the age is about one billion or more. So, are the part of 8MOS artists supporting you? And I'm sorry if you had the... You know, it's, nothing really to apologize for. Because, you know, you're going into an environment. Right? And for me, the key takeaway that I'm hoping everybody goes into this with is that they're trade-offs. Right? And, you know, I came from, or I am used to being the guy who goes into the box who runs iostat minus x. Right? And strace attached to a running thing to look at it. And I'm giving that up. And yes, you know, there was extended downtime and that sort of thing.  I don't have to care about how I'm doing point release upgrades or even major release upgrades because I go to the UI and I click a button and I hit save. And my problem was going in thinking, hey, I got a black box. It's magical. And I don't have to worry about it. And the real thing is, no, it's not, you know, as a responsible DBA, I should take responsibility of what's going on inside Postgres and not rely on Amazon or Heroku or whoever the provider is to take that responsibility away from me. Sure, right, right. Sure. So that's pretty awesome. That's great. Any other questions? Yes. It involves spending about $150,000 in hardware and trying to figure out, because I was also trying to marry the fact that we've been actually from a company direction moving entirely to AWS. And in our new architecture that we've been implementing over the last two and a half years, architecting away from our current application completely. And so part of the trade-off was, do I really want to go spend this OPEX and CAPEX on additional cabinets and that sort of thing for something that I know we're getting rid of? So yes, the escape plan was there, but it was like a plan D. You know, I have the same concerns about EC2. It could have been, absolutely. But again, I care about how predictable are my IOPS and that sort of thing. And actually, I feel better about RDS than I do about EC2. So we run a large quantity of stuff in EC2 and we have nodes that just go away. You know, and we architected for that. It does exactly what we wanted it to do, but I would not, we're architecting towards an environment where we deal with cattle and not pets as far as not having that database really be important in the overall architecture. And I feel like taking and putting Postgres in EC2 just is moving where I have my pet. And I still have to care about it like it's physical hardware, whereas RDS treats it more like pets for us. We don't have to care as much. All right, well, thank you very much.


So it's my pleasure to introduce Tim Wu. Tim Wu, to me, is a somewhat wonky, very enthusiastic first-year law student in my civil procedure class at Harvard Law School. He's grown up. Indeed, I walked into my roommate this past weekend who picked up the program and said, oh, Tim Wu is coming. I said, yes indeed. I've known Tim Wu for a long time. She said, haven't you read The New York Times? So he has just been featured in a major profile. He is a professor at Columbia Law School. He's the author of The Master Switch, which he did, wrote after being a New America fellow. He's also been formerly the senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission. And although we're in the midst of the net neutrality debate, and yes, he did coin the idea of net neutrality and he is deservedly celebrated for that, he is going to actually talk to us on a different subject, always looking ahead. And his topic is how to disrupt stagnant industry. So Tim. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much. I love this conference. The big ideas is it's so much fun you talk about ideas. They don't necessarily have to come true. It's just terrific. And thank you for that introduction, and Marie. I remember her not as the president CO of New America or all the other things she's done, but as a young law professor with a book with about a million post-it notes attached to it with all the different sections in the civil procedure class. So that's how I remember it. So I'm going to talk today about something that has very little to do with net neutrality, but rather draws on my experience both working at the Federal Trade Commission in antitrust enforcement and also having worked at a few startups and having advised a lot of startups and spending some time in the private sector. And what I'm going to talk about is something that's a persistent problem for antitrust enforcers. And I should say that give some credit to Barry Lin, who's done a New America here, who's done a lot to publicize this issue. It is the problem of stagnant industries. You may kind of have a feeling for this yourself. As a consumer, some products from some industries just always seem to be getting better. Next time you, every time you buy a hard drive, they seem to be faster and cheaper. Laptops like this one, this is an ancient machine at this point, you know, they're always getting, the battery lives keep getting better, they get thinner, they're terrific. And then there's other industries where for some reason the prices just seem to go up, the products don't seem to get any better and they just kind of stay the same. And these are what I want to describe as the stagnant industries. And I'm gonna say that they tend to have five characteristics, not all of them but at least some of them. One is the structure of the industry is often an oligopoly or a monopoly or in any sense it's dominated by a number of small number of companies who are able to coordinate their activity easily. You usually see high profit margins that don't seem to have any particular justification. They are often resistant to product innovation. You don't see any real disruptive changes in these industries. You do often see what you might call cosmetic innovation. They'll introduce some new supposed improvement which really isn't much then tinkering with the product and an effort to charge a higher price for it. Number four, these industries tend to feature many artificial barriers to entry. They may be control of the retail sector, some control of a resource necessary to the product. Often it's manipulation of government regulation, abuse of the patent system, all things that make it harder for companies to get started. And finally, number five, many of these more stagnant industries tend to have large investments in government lobbying campaigns to run the regulatory programs. So it's always dangerous to name names but I'm not gonna name companies, well I will name a few companies, but I won't mostly name industries. I'll give two examples of industries that are like this. Consider first the eyeglass industry. It's a large industry, $28 billion. And you may sometimes go to sunglass stores or stores like Glencrafters to buy glasses and you seem to be presented by a selection, Ray-Bans, Oakleys, Prada, Chanel, DKNY designers, seems like there's an enormously competitive industry. The fact is that almost every single manufacturer of glasses or every brand is owned by one giant company named Luxotica and they make all the sunglasses you've ever heard of. They have one competitor that makes the other ones. All those ones I've mentioned, Prada, Chanel, DKNY, all the Ray-Bans, so forth, they're actually made by a single company. They own retailers like Sunglass Hut. So if you're in Sunglass Hut and you're looking around, you're like, why are the prices just seem to be in lockstep? It's because they're all owned by the same company. They also own Lenscrafters, other things like that. And the profits in this industry are relatively obscene. Eyeglasses, when you think about it, are really just plastic and glass and not very complicated. Frames are often north of $300, maybe $400, $500 for designer frames. They cost about $25 to make, maybe 50 at most. And so when you think about it, you charge $500 for something that costs $50. It's a pretty nice business to be in. There hasn't been any serious innovation in the industry. I mean, Google Glass might be the best example, but they're pretty far from getting into it. There are some entrants I'm gonna talk about later. And so this industry just sort of sits there and it makes a lot of money and it is, I would suggest, stagnant and extracts the cost of billions of dollars from American and actually just global consumers. Let me point to another industry similar to this, the mattress industry. If you've ever tried buying mattresses, you've probably had the experience of wondering why unearthed mattresses cost $3,000, $2,000. There is a confusing variety of product brands, all of which have names which cannot be compared. So if you ever try to do comparison shopping, none of the stores name their mattresses the same things even though they're made by the companies. And what I'm sure is a plot, the three major manufacturers all start with S, Sealy, Serda, and Simmons. And I challenge anyone in this room to tell me what the difference is between these companies. So I have never been able to figure.  They'll have some kind of new gel they have or a new layer of something, but basically it's the same product. The one innovation was the temper, the therapy, what's it called? Tempuriputic, and that is, and there were water beds at one point. So occasionally, I won't say there's no innovation. And there they are to add a layer. This is how they do their business. Sales tactics are unbelievably confusing, I said that. And you know, one of the tricks, there's two real tricks to the business. One is that consumers only buy mattresses once every five, 10 years or something, so they're not constantly in this market and they come and supposedly things are new. It's also extremely hard to really test mattresses.  And so, you know, it doesn't really, so this is another industry that is roughly stagnant and is roughly some kind of racket. Now, the problem is that the antitrust law has enormous difficulties dealing with these industries and that is for a number of reasons. I just want to, usually just as a legal matter, these industries are clever enough to understand that what antitrust law bans is explicit price fixing. So they understand that. There's no agreements that you will be found to say all mattresses shall cost $2,000 or whatever it is. But what antitrust law does not ban is parallel pricing. That is, if you have the exact same prices for things, that is not a violation of the antitrust law and it's been a long-standing problem. The other real problem that antitrust law has is that it's never been clear, even if you wanted to do something about the mattress industry or the eyeglass industry, what exactly can its remedies be? So one thing you can try to do, for example, is, well, discover if they're fixing prices and tell them not to do that. But then they'll figure out some other way about it. You can try and break the companies into smaller pieces. That's an aggressive tactic. It involves a lot of government involvement. If you want to lower prices, you really have to contemplate an involvement of the state in the industries, which is hard to really see a sustainable. Most people, even if you're on the left of the spectrum, have some problems with there being a mattress czar who's gonna say, listen, the price of mattresses I've decided is $500. Take it or leave it. It gets a little bit too much like a centralized economy. So this is the problem and antitrust law really is a strung bite. And I'll say the last thing which I should have said is antitrust law is episodic. The enforcers come to this problem, they look at it maybe for a year or so and then they're on to some other industry. And so even if they try and do things, even if they break stuff up, even if they have some remedies, the industry, having survived, just kind of gets angry. They have better lawyers, they have better lobbyists next time around and they're in it for the long run. So my instinct or my big idea is that the best remedy is to try to target stagnant industries and introduce natural competition. My inspiration for this idea actually came from our cottage where we have a problem with too much seaweed. And one of the solutions to this problem, one is pesticides, but the other solution is you introduce natural predators. You introduce these carp that eat all the seaweed. And farmers sometimes do this with their fields. They'll introduce a natural predator to a pest. And so what stagnant industries fear the most, of course, is a new entrant, a company that is going to come in and underpriced what they're doing and offer better service and better products and take this apart. And often we assume that this is gonna happen automatically, but what I'm suggesting is that either as a part of antitrust or as part of some other aspect of government that government could do more to foster the entry of competitive companies into stagnant industries. And I wanna suggest some of the ways it could do this. So idea number one is, well, I'll just call the most wanted list. The government has enormous powers to get information and to publish information in a credible way. This is one of the government's greatest powers. It's used in securities regulation. It's used in the patent law. So one of the things, I mean, often what I notice at the FTC is we would investigate an industry or a company, get very far, have an enormous amount of data, realize the weaknesses and the susceptibilities of this industry to disruption, but then just leave that information in a file somewhere right over here across the street in the Federal Trade Commission. So we know these industries are vulnerable. So one thing that government could do is either as a most wanted list or more regularly, publish more information about the industries that would be used by entrepreneurs to think, well, I never knew that the mattress industry was this vulnerable to disruption or I never knew that real estate, well everyone knows that about real estate brokers. Or maybe chairs, I mean, I don't know. So because people in business school, one challenge they have is informationally, everyone gets focused on hot industries. Most people in business, coming out of business school entrepreneurs are excited about building an app or becoming the next Facebook and they're not necessarily thinking of becoming a mattress king. But there might be actually more opportunities in these stagnant industries. It's just that information is not well known and it's not aware. So if you had greater visibility and more information forcing of the industries that are in a stagnant condition and are vulnerable to disruption, you might see more entrants coming. The second idea is what I call a police escort. So one of the problems for entrants in these industries is sometimes people do try and get into them but they're dealing with masters of the game who've usually mastered some anti-competitive measure or another that keeps them out. Either they can't find any retailers to carry their products or the wholesalers suddenly won't deal with them or they find their tires are all flat when they go to the parking lot, whatever it is, there's ways and they're just like, you don't really wanna be in this industry and so often a lot of entrants get killed and it seems discouraging. The police escort idea is to try to improve the protection for new entrants into stagnant industries by the antitrust agencies or other government enforcement powers and I'm not sure how this would work but it would have to be a sort of quicker version of some of what quicker version of remedies for anti-competitive practices where the Federal Trade Commission or the Justice Department could learn of these and say, you know, you better back off that stuff because the thing is entrants and this is my experience dealing with high tech companies, entrants have this advantage that they're usually newer, they've got a better product idea, they're willing to price lower so they just need a little bit of room to get growing. They have advantages but they have to not be killed in their first couple years of being in the market and a few warnings from government can go a long way towards protecting an entrant in a dangerous market. My third idea, this one maybe controversial is an idea of a reward program, a little bit for the lawyers in the audience like Ketam. So the idea is that you offer some kind of reward to consumers that prove that they are saving consumers money in a stagnant industry. So for example, in the eyeglass market, I wanna highlight a company, some of you may know named Warby Parker which has entered over the last few years. So Warby Parker did a little bit what I said, they noticed that eyeglasses are selling for $400 and cost $50 to make so they had the idea or actually more like $25 and they thought, okay, well, we will price our eyeglasses at $95, undercut them by $400, see how that goes and they're doing pretty well. Unsurprisingly, they have some retail, they kind of did what I suggested and to encourage that kind of thing, you might devise, you have to do this carefully, some kind of program where you can, if you can prove that you have can save consumers some X billions of dollars or even hundreds of millions of dollars that you get some kind of tax subsidy for that. Doesn't have to be a big one, but some kind of tax subsidy so people notice there are prizes out there. So the model for this is KITAM which is a government program that gives people incentives to sue when they notice people defrauding the government. This is people defrauding the consumer as opposed to the government but the principle is about the same. So that's my idea. Obviously this would not necessarily be a popular idea in certain sectors. Companies would complain that new competitions costing them jobs, governments paying favorites and so forth and I understand that but I think it's also important to understand that economic growth is fundamentally about disruption and it is, I'd go back to some of what Secretary Clinton was talking about, America is about a disruptive economy. It is about people taking advantage of opportunities to try to do something new and the way this country grows is when the old replaces the new in a constant cycle. So I believe this could be an important idea. Thank you very much. I think I have time for one or two questions. I see one, I'm supposed to take a view on the back, right? So I see like a silhouette there in the back. Yeah, okay, I don't have no idea, I can't see who it is. Hi Tim, just a quick question. Why do you think the government is better than entrepreneur plus investors identifying stacked in industries? Why is government better at it? Yeah. Oh, they're just able to get information. They're able to get information out of these industries better. They have subpoena powers. And so I know that, so competitors have limited, there's a lot of stuff that's hard to get at and government has a lot better information forcing powers. Yeah, sure, in the front and then that'll be it. Thanks Tim, is this working? Can I ask a net neutrality question? Oh boy, all right. Sure. So my question is, what should the answer be here for what's in the best interests of the people of America? This does dovetail, so one of the things I would have said if it was an antitrust focused is that the most powerful thing for disrupting stagnant economies or industries the last 20 years clearly been the internet. And so one way, a really clever way for the government to get, I don't think it planned on this, but when it funded the internet it did a lot of the work I was talking about. It's probably a better big idea than my big idea, but that's pretty obvious. So part of what, why net neutrality is really important because it represents the idea for startups that there is an opportunity to either put your product out there and try and reach consumers or for speakers to be heard. And maybe not to succeed, but at least you get your shot. So I think that it's very important the FCC preserve this. I think that it has to do so by banning fast lanes and banning all blocking and allowing transparency. And I think the way it should do this is using authority that would make it do it. They're trying to do it. This will get technical with a complex legal picture. I think they should simply use their main authority, which is known as Title II of the 1934 Telecom Act and create a net neutrality principle that hopefully lasts for a very long time and acts as a Magna Carta for startups for a very long time to come. Thank you very much.


Hey guys, it's Nate, aka The Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. After Monday content, it felt like Footies was in the mud, but with yesterday EA turned it around a little bit with the content in a new upgrade pack, SBC, but specifically one other SBC that is making some prices crash on this market. We have to talk about that today. And of course, a player SBC coming once again today after a Footies vote has taken place. And we're going to get the winner of that as an SBC today in this game. So if you're excited for the video, drop a thumbs up on it and subscribe if you are new. Let's start by looking over yesterday's content as always with the objective section. We had brand new Footchains bonus rewards, not too much to talk about here, except they made it easy on us this week. Six French or six Brazilian players is all you need for four different sets of wins. And you get yourself basically this objective completed. I feel like this is a really easy objective to complete every single week. You win five footchains matches, you have to win four to get into qualifiers anyway. And then of course this week with French and Brazilian being the actual requirements, pretty easy to get that all done, get an extra few fodder packs and complete that objective with the requirements that are there. So no MLS, but not too bad, pretty easy there from EA. Now it was all about the SBCs yesterday to be completely honest. And it started off with the refresh of the 86 plus player pick, which I mean is nice, right? We were expecting some sort of player pick. We got two yesterday. But one thing I want to talk about with this 86 plus player pick. Yes, of course, it's another chance and a better chance to have it packing another footies card. But let's be honest, it's really just fodder and some of the best of batch one cards. Take a look at 81 ratings. That player pick coming out again yesterday with no weekend leagues. Wait, Oscar's 900 coins for 81. All of these 81s, they were 2K plus. I don't know how he's 900 coins right now. I really don't know what supply is hitting the market. But guys, I would say if you have some coins, go out and bid on some 81s. Because these cards were all literally 2,000 coins yesterday. And they're probably going to go back upwards of like 1.7 to 2K again today. So Stocker Club with 82s, if you're trying to make some coins fodder every single day, buying it and then selling it at or around the content drop time, especially to lazy buyers listing a couple hundred coins or maybe even a thousand coins, depending on what fodder you're buying over the lowest price on the market, is going to get you a lot of sales and it's going to be the easiest way to trade right now. I'm not sure how 81s are a thousand coins because they were all 2K yesterday. So that's something to kind of watch out for right there. Because that 86 plus player pick refreshes every single day once again. And then EA actually listened guys, we're so happy. That the menu grind has kind of flipped 180, right? We were so upset with the 81 plus player pick requiring an 80 rated squad just seemed absolutely abysmal. EA said, we hear you, we're going to drop a good player pick, SBC, and they re-release the 80 plus player pick, which only requires 10 golds. They don't even have to be rares, they can just be regular golds. I believe golds right now in the market are about 550. So it is worth it to probably go get the commons instead of getting the rares off of the market. I'm probably just going to buy the rares and put the rares in from my club because I opened a couple store packs again yesterday. As you can see, I have a lot of duplicates so we're crafting. But this SBC changes the grind once again, right? I'll take an 84, those are like three, maybe like 5,000 coins right now. They're not 3K, 83s are 3K. But, you know, that puts the grind back into the menus and it makes the rest of the content like the 85 times 10. Or if you're still trying to do other upgrade pack SBCs like the 92 plus attack or icon or the daily unlimited repeatable totes or shapeshifter player pick, the daily best of batch one, whatever you're trying to craft right now, this SBC being out makes that craft so much better. So GGs to EA sports and yeah, golds aren't that expensive. I believe Footbin says that this SBC is 4,000 or 5,000 coins to do. Like, heck yeah, compared to 10,000 coins that the 81 plus is, that is incredible value and so much easier GGs to EA. Now that's not even the biggest SBC it was dropped yesterday. Yeah, it's got a 78% upvote, sorry, a 82% upvote. But the Kali Du Kula Bali, center back, premium. Footy's SBC is what's really moving stuff on this market right now. He is, of course, a Saudi transfer card, but he's a premium item so he gets full chemistry and supplies extra links to Saudi League players, five star week foot upgrade and guys, you know, Kula Bali is always meta and overpowered in game. I used his Team of the Year Honor mentioned card for a lot of games and he was super-duper-duper cracked, 99 strength, 99 reactions, composure, great defending stats, he's lengthy as well, which is nice at this end game stage to have a pretty good pay stat and also be lengthy. If you put, I think, an anchor or a shadow on him, this is gonna be one of the best center backs right now in this game for the price of 150,000 coins, which actually, when you look at the SBCs, so easy to complete, 83 rated squad in the Team of the Week and an 87 rated squad as well with all the fodder packs that are out, he must do SBC honestly and maybe like, hey, I've got Varan or I've got other great cards, a center back to my team. One thing to kind of think about with this SBC is it's not just thinking about right now and the here and now and if you're gonna continue to play FIFA through the next month or so on this game, you know, it's something to maybe plan ahead with a little bit as well because we're gonna have some more Saudi League players dropped in this game, right? Think about all the transfers that have come, whether we have more footies players or just transfer SBCs in general, a lot more Saudi League players might be coming onto this game here in the next month or so before, FIFA 23 kind of ends and like we saw with the Ronaldo Tots card going up yesterday from like 800K, he went all the way to a mill, he's back down a little bit now. I think this Kulabali might be an SBC that even if you don't think you might use it that much with how cheap it is and how much fodder is available right now via the objective packs and stuff. If you have a little bit of time to grind, if you need to play a SBC to craft really quick, do this once, dash it in the club because even if you're not gonna use it in your main team, that's an SBC player that would be very, very helpful for some later on Saudi League special cards that could come out at the end of FIFA's time this summer. Just one thing to kind of think about, I know it's the end game, but we're still trying to be helpful and think about planning ahead and that sort of stuff there. Now this Ronaldo up in price, a lot of prices though are down, especially on the center backs. You saw that a 91% upvoted center back SBC. Whenever a player SBC is that upvoted, that means there are a lot of people doing it. So what happens, right? What's the flip side? People have to sell cards that they had in their team to either do the SBC or to replace that card in their team with the new SBC player, right? It's a classic move or a classic case of new SBC card comes out that replaces existing card in a lot of people's teams and those other cards get listed back up on the market and prices drop and that is what is happening a lot right now to center backs. Take a look at 94 of Iran from 370,000 coins. This Kula Bali comes out, boom, straight down to 250K. He's back up just a smidge. This is happening to a ton of center backs right now in this game, even some big ones. Eddie Militow team in the season, I actually bought Militow yesterday to try to trade with him. He went from 1.28 down to 1 million coins flat. He really hasn't rebounded that much even with the Brazilian hype or virtual Carlos, Rodrigo and the extra packs for weakening objectives. That was the reason why I bought him. He really didn't go back up that much. He's about 50K up from his low point right there. Center backs across this entire game are down. Again, another big time top tier center back that's down is team of the year, Virgil Van Dyke. He was 1.3 million coins almost as well. 1.26, 1.27 went all the way to 1 million coins. Prices everywhere on center backs guys are down a lot even on the lower tier. Sheraldo Becker center back premium card is down like 30% or something crazy. 140K to 80,000 coins. If you had any of these guys in your team, especially meta, semi meta center backs like delict cards like that, a lot of those prices are down bad because this new SBC for Kula Bali is being completed by so many people. And obviously putting three chemistry points straight into your team is very, very easy to link because that player is already on three chemistry points. Now, I do believe that some center backs will bounce up a little bit. I bought this Militao for 6.16, sold them for 6.80. I bought this Marquinhos for 1.75, sold them for 1.97. And I still have a Kunde and a Militao that I'm looking to offload and to sell. So just be careful with center backs. There's gonna be some more demand for them this weekend but their prices are down a lot right now because of that Kula Bali. So just be careful there and watch more of your Saudi leaks and links and stuff like that going forward. And I wrote all those the biggest one but hey, that Kula Bali card may come in handy later on down the line just to put that out there once more. Now, let's look at today, Wednesday. Look ahead into the future just a little bit. What kind of content are we gonna get today? Well, the first thing I wanna talk about is we've been having these footies votes. And I know a lot of you guys are like, Nate, what? There's been footies votes? Yeah, there's been footies votes. They just haven't been inside of the game like we really wish they have been. And we mentioned it once before last week but here we are again with another vote. This was actually posted I believe on Monday and they said which stat is more key for you for a striker?  Well, what's today? Wednesday, this vote was out on Monday. So today I'm expecting a striker with 99 shooting. Yes, based off of this vote, I mean who would not vote for shooting based off of what EA is asking with this question here based off of this vote and based off Shaqiri getting 99 dribbling last week on his card on Wednesday. His award winner SBC I guess is what they called it. I'm expecting a striker with 99 shooting today on this game. No idea who it's gonna be. I hope it's somebody fun, right? Shaqiri was fun and different and also great value. We need something like this. That's just kind of the mantra of footies, right? Fun cards, juice stats and good value and I hope something along those lines comes today as a striker. Now we've just had Tammy Abraham, five star skills forced our week but we just had Harry Kool as well. We've had a lot of really, really good attackers recently. We still have a Jamie Vardy, we still have a Joe Salu, still have Tim Cahill. So we're getting another striker player SBC today. I would have to imagine just like Shaqiri was it may not be a player that we think of or that we're even thinking of right now as like a potential for this player SBC, right? It might be somebody completely different from an off league, not a top five league, maybe who knows. So that's just kind of something to watch out for but hopefully EA does some business with that SBC today on this game. And then also for SBCs, Wednesday last week brought us one of the best value shapeshifter player picks we've ever seen. You guys are like, nah, this thing is not good. It's expensive. It's bad value. It's a gamble, right? You know what you're getting yourself into by doing a player pick like this. But guys, this SBC if it comes back today is probably worth crafting. I'm telling you Bruno and my one that I got earlier last week when it refreshed, I did it again and I got noir. So that one wasn't as good but again, the player pool here is so small. If you're trying to chase after a Yeris of VVD and Rusman Dembele, any of those really top tier shapeshifter cards, this coming back today I think is the best likelihood. I don't think EA can take this player pick and make it better. How does it get much better than this including the icons? Yes, but we already have an icon SBC for that. So I would expect this to refresh today or something along the lines of another upgrade pack player pick sort of thing related to a shapeshifter's player pick like this. So watch out for that. Maybe get some fodder if you needed. And then other than that, the rest of the SBC is refreshing today. 86 player pick, 85 times 10. Guys, I wanna tell this right now and again don't sleep on these team of the season or the team of the week upgrade packs, man. These 81 plus team week upgrade packs are basically able to be done for free. If you're doing player picks all you need is one 84 rated player and a squad of 82 rated players. And you're like, Nate, that's like 20K. 82s are like 2,000 coins right now. Well, you can pack those pretty easily. Chuck those in there. If you've got ones in your unassigned you got ones in the club on your transfer list chuck that into this SBC and you're instantly getting a 30,000 coin player. All team leaks right now in this game are 29 to 30K. If you get lucky and you get an even better one you're gonna have more coins out of it or maybe your card's extinct and you get an insta sell, right? I doubt EA's gonna update a lot of price ranges on fodder. But that's just something that I would kind of shout out to you guys to do. Also, team of the season cards are really starting to go up again. The cheapest Tots card in this market right now if it lets me search, which it might not. Might actually just quit the game right here because that's just how EA like to do things and the servers in this game are just going into the mud. But I'm pretty sure all team of the season cards are somewhere around like 40,000 coins or something like that. Pretty crazy. Maybe even 45K. Let me see if you wanna find one here. 44K for Chesney is the cheapest team of the season card that I can find. Team of the season moments are a lot cheaper. So you could pack a Reese James who's like 25,000 coins out of that SBC but the Tots or Tots moment's upgrade, that one's a bit expensive. It's more the team of the week one that's worth it, right? The team of the week SBC is only 21,000 coins to do. And yeah, obviously we just looked at all team of the cards are like 29 to 30K. So that is an absolute W and I'm getting kicked off of the servers, man. I don't know what is going on. This game is ridiculous at the moment. Just let me in, FIFA. Just let me in. We'll finish the video on foot then because EA don't want us on their game. Anyways, the last thing we'll talk about today with the refresh of all the SBCs and the 85 times 10 and stuff is fodder a little bit. Yeah, we gotta watch fodder once again because like we saw yesterday, we saw these guys' prices spike once again all the way up to those pretty high prices that we can fluctuation trade with every single day on this game. And yeah guys, I still can't log into FIFA. So we're still trying to do that. But last night, these guys got really, really low but they still went back up, right? Immobilized went from 9K all the way to 10,000 coins. Our guy, Lautaro Martinez, had a crazy, crazy fluctuation yesterday. I don't know if you guys saw this or not. It's just on certain cards, right? Certain cards, 9.5K. So we didn't go as low as Immobilized did but he went all the way to 13,000 coins. Like that is nuts. That is crazy. So find a couple of certain cards like that from a fodder perspective that move that much every day and get the trading with those because that's amazing. And watch the low tier. Like we already mentioned, those are 82s and the 81s were legit all 2,000 coins. So right now some of them are showing for like 1,000. Like that's a buy, right? I would stock those and get those in your club. Now we're back into FIFA, thankfully. There must be some PlayStation server issues or something like that going on right now. Yeah, just checking on down detector. You guys know we'll look at down detector a lot on the stream. Just to check out servers and stuff. It's kind of interesting. But Cavani, how much is Cavani? Okay, see that was a football undercut at 900 coins. But you guys know what I'm saying here, right? Get on some bids, hop on some bids and then stock some of these cards. Those are the best things and best cards to trade with right now on this game. The only thing with fodder to have to say is especially with team of the seasons guys, we're getting closer and closer. I think we even mentioned it. Yes, this video, we're getting closer and closer to the end of batch one and batch two might bring some more cards into packs including team of the season. So just be careful with those. Again, Tots cards, 43,000 coins it looks like. And if we go to team of the weeks, 28, 29K. Yeah, 28K into selling for all team of the week card. So make sure you get those SBCs done and all of that. Oh, also really quick, last thing we've been rambling here as these servers have kind of knocked me off course. But our Ferrari goes away today. So hopefully EA dropped McLaren as a player. Maybe that'll be our 99 shooting SBC player today, McLaren. I'm just thinking, right? They got the car theme going on here. Maybe they'll continue that. Maybe they won't. So that SBC or that objective is going away. Maybe we'll get something to replace it and maybe just maybe we could have a loading screen today. EA has not been doing much with the loading screens recently but maybe there's something today to tease batch two or foody's team three who knows. And one other thing guys we'll be talking about a little bit we talked about in the stream yesterday. A lot of rumors are coming out around the closed beta for FC 24. And if you guys know how to get the closed beta it's very, very easy. We're gonna have a video on the clips channel kind of what we talked about in yesterday's stream. So make sure you check that out. And it's a really simple way to just basically you've opt in the emails from EA and choose your platform or whatever console or PC you play on. And you could potentially get a closed beta email and with the code and then you just download the game from there. And that's how you get the beta. It's really, really easy. It's really, really simple. It's definitely kind of like doing a shapeshift there's player pick and getting something good. You have to get a little bit lucky to get the code. But that's something to kind of look out for because it is August now and that is something that usually happens around this time of the year. So a lot to look forward to later on this week on like Friday, right? With everything going on. Footies team three. We're thinking batch two coming into packs the best of batch one going out. So we're gonna cover that day by day as we get more information. But if you guys enjoyed the video today drop a thumbs up on it. Comment down below if you have any questions.  This has been Nathan with account. We'll see you guys in the stream today. Peace out.


Check it out, folks. Do I got the conversation piece for you? Listen, today we're doing cranberry sauce from the can versus the real deal Holyfield. Let's get it. All right, so look, now I'm gonna go ahead and just ask the very first question, right? Everybody talks about this on the internet, so I'm gonna ask you guys, do you like authentic or do you like it out of the can? I'm gonna answer and tell you what I like the best at the end, but I'm gonna show you guys they wanna keep it more traditional. You know what I mean? I'm gonna show you just how easy it is. Now, look, I want you guys to take a look at this right here. Not a whole lot of ingredients, right? So this is this versus this. Super simple. And by me saying that, don't forget, I just launched my website, www.smokingandgrillingwithab. And that's W-I-T-A-B dot com, right?  Now, with that being said, let's go ahead and just get started. First thing I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna bring this up because we wanna start off with it like, ah, about that right there. Like a medium high flame, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and add my water. This is a half a cup. And I'm gonna add my sugar and let it all melt together, right? Then when it comes to the orange, but if you guys didn't know, man, this is super simple to make. You know what I mean? And then you figure out what you wanna do. I'm gonna go ahead and just cut this orange in half. You know why? Cause we got to juice it.  So I'm gonna bring this back into a plate. I'm gonna use my hand as a strainer just to catch any seeds.  Meanwhile, we're starting to boil and dissolve our sugar. Okay, so if you get in here and you take a look, look, my sugar's dissolved. Man, if somebody tell me why I don't have a juicer, why I had to just, ah, and squeeze and muscle that. So we'll just add this to it also. Right? We wanna get it all to boil on its own, right? Don't forget, folks, we making our own cranberry sauce. Okay, check it out. That's what's gonna happen.  You can't wait till it's over with. Now, let's look at, let's talk about these berries. When it comes to these berries, look, I'm gonna start adding some of these in here. You know what I mean? We wanna get these to pop, right? So I keep that heat up the way it is and I'm just gonna keep stirring it like this. You know what I mean? We're gonna cook some of it down. It's gonna thicken up a little bit. You know what, I like it a little bit more than that. But you wanna save yourself some back, right? So look, this is just one package cranberries. For those of you guys that ain't never seen cranberries, this is what it is. All right, so as this is coming back up to heat, I wanna see a little bit of bubble, right? I want it to boil. Look, you remember that cinnamon stick that we saw in the beginning? We're gonna drop that in there and we're gonna let that, you know, work its magic. Now I'm gonna keep quit running my mouth so you can hear when I tell you they supposed to pop. I don't know if you just heard it right now, but I mean pop. That's exactly what I'm talking about. All right, so that popping you here, that's authentic, folks. So when I say pop, I ain't saying pop lock, but do whatever you wanna do. You wanna get all of these to pop.  But we'll keep that heat under the bottom. I adjusted it. I'm coming back, making sure I'm like at that medium, a little bit above medium. Meanwhile, check this out. We wanna get some of that flavor too.  All right, we'll take that one.  You know what I mean? I'm gonna take that and just for good measures, let's do one more. And there we go. Look at this right here. You guys know I got that channel. You know, bottoms up with AB. Look, we use this a lot. Squeeze this, it's a lot of flavor in here. So take a look right here. Let me go ahead and get you some ice cream candy right here. You see that right there? Yes, sir, that's what we want. I'm gonna just drop these peels in. We'll get them out later and we'll just stir this up and this is gonna give us our flavor, folks. You guys gotta trust me. Just the aromatic that's coming off. Don't forget we put that cinnamon in there. These are the things that just make it go over the top. Now we didn't put all of that in there. You know we gotta get some balance, right? So I'm gonna just take it, one, two, three. Oh, just a pinch of salt. That's all we need, folks. And you guys know I like that. What kind of salt? That's right, I like that coxas.  Okay, so you can see how it looks. Now we just wanna cook this for about, I'm gonna say about eight to 10 minutes. What you can see is doing this thing. All right, so if you come in here right now, you'll say, oh man, that's probably ready. I don't want you guys to skip this step. You know what I mean? Because first of all, you gotta get them soft. You know what I mean? So they look like that. And notice this, it's six minutes in and I'm putting in the rest of the berries. Reason being, I like to keep them, you know, for them to look whole. It's about that presentation, right? So we just do it like how you just saw me do it. You can see them on top, but you don't want to eat a hard cranberry. So these next four minutes are gonna be crucial. And that's only gonna do is that's gonna make them like get soft. Okay, folks, so look, let's look at it after 10 minutes, right? Put that down right there. I'm gonna turn off my fire. Remember I said I wanted to keep some whole? They were all popped. And look at that right there. Look at that gel. Now we starting to look like the can, right? I can tell you this too, and I'm gonna go ahead and just be honest with you. I just went ahead and tasted it. It tastes just like the can, but with the berries. You know what I mean? Listen, the cinnamon and that orange juice makes it, I'll just say that right there is what doesn't. But if you see it right here, whoo, look at that. Okay, folks, so this had a little bit of time that you know, to chill. I'm going to put this in here. Look, that's my cinnamon. That's my little level up right here, right? So, and then don't forget we got this in here too. Remember the orange peel? But along with the fresh orange juice. You see that right there? I don't know what to say. You know what I mean? I'm at a lack of words. Now look, I got Tupperware. Look, this happened to be, you know, glass, right? This is still a little bit on the warm side. I'm just gonna put this in here, right? Now you guys can double this recipe. You know what I mean?  Don't try to stretch it, just double and triple it. All right, so look, this is cooled enough. You see I kept the top off, but I want you to look at this. If I hold it there, it's moving almost like jelly or jam. Now imagine when I put this into the refrigerator, it's gonna set up and be a little bit on the firm side, right? So I'm gonna put this top on, put this in the refrigerator, and I'll see you guys tomorrow. Okay, folks, listen to the magic of the camera. Listen, this is the next day obviously you can tell by my clothes, right? Now, I'm gonna go ahead and open this up so you guys can see this is overnight. I got this right here, because look, I'm finna taste this, but you can see it's like hard, you know what I mean? But by the time you put this out, your guests getting there to eat, you know what I mean? This will be a little bit on the soft side. So if I just take it, because one of the things I wanna do is I wanna take my cinnamon out. Some of you guys might wanna take it out, but I like to let it stay in there and let it just marinate and you know, spray it, it's cinnamon flavor throughout. You see this right here? Look at that right there. That is the exact same thing. Now I know some of y'all didn't have this before. You went over your aunties or at somebody's house and you had cranberry, you was like, that's just not the same. Especially after you tasted it right, so it makes it turn on those up. But I can tell you this, ocean spray or whoever these people are that's making this, they need to contact me so we can level that up. Super simple and don't forget y'all, I tell you simple sometimes work. Now let me go ahead and plate this. Okay folks, listen. This is it right here. Look, I'm not finna over talk, over sale and just try to convince nobody, this right here is fire. And then in the beginning, I told you guys, I'll tell you which one I prefer. When I go to somebody else's house and I'm eating, this includes my family. Listen, when I'm near, I like it to see it out of the can. Why? Cause they didn't make it the way I make it. Cause these two right here is just like perfect. Now with that being said, don't forget, I got the printable recipe, new website out, all of that. That's smokingandgrillingwithab.com and that's W-I-T-A-B. Now listen, if you're new to my channel, let me just take this time to say thank you for watching this video. Don't forget to like, smash that subscribe button and tell everybody out there, there's a channel out here that simplifying these recipes and taking the mystery out of cooking. And you know how I leave. Guess what? Boom.


If you look at what it could do to our country, these are the numbers from the Department of Health and Human Services. I might add, if it's a severe or moderate like pandemic, 90 million illnesses, 45 outpatient visits, but look at the deaths, 1.9 million. 742,000 people need to do mechanical ventilators. Right now we have 105,000 mechanical ventilators in this country and anyone given days, 70, 80,000 are in use and during the flu season we get right up to 100,000. We have no capacity and our healthcare system doesn't respond to this. None. This slide really reminds us we can easily go to either camp, check in Little Robin or die. Earlier this year I was on the Oprah show for an hour talking about this with Oprah and the following day for the following week my email system choked the entire University of Minnesota system practically and the emails fell in one of two categories even though it was the same words, the same ugly face, the same message. Half of them said, you know what, guys like you should be hung. You should be fired by your place.  Guys like you are really bad. The other half over here saying you're part of the government cover-up. We know this is going to be much worse. We're all going to die. Why don't you just tell us that and be honest. You know why we do that because that's the easy answer. If you believe it's we're all going to die, take your bottle, go home, get under your covers, we'll come get you when it's done. If you don't believe it's going to happen just enjoy life. It's the truth that's hard and this is where it's about you for the kids. What kind of world are we going to leave you? And today ladies and gentlemen we're doing almost nothing except giving lip service. At the state level, at the federal level we have done very little. I just met last week with executives from 10 of the largest trucking companies in the United States. They've virtually done nothing. We held a national summit in February, our center did in Minnesota. The company's air represented almost $4 trillion in annual revenues. We heard from the oil refinery companies. All of them were there. They said that if we lose 20% to 30% of our workers we can't continue to run our refineries because not only do we have just in time delivery but we also have just enough employee delivery. We've done virtually nothing to prepare for that. This is going to make Katrina seem mild. Responding to the pandemic, I've mentioned the issue about prevention patient treatment. We won't have it. Right now we have to understand that.  Our medical response system already is very weakened. We won't have that. I worry desperately how we're going to get pharmaceutical drugs to you. Today we don't have that pipeline. You can't stockpile if you wanted to. We've got to change that. But there's no economic incentive. There's nothing happening to make that happen. I worry whether you'll get your life saving drugs during the pandemic. Not for the pandemic but for your other condition. In terms of worker patient protection we're going to have to figure out where our health care workers come to work. I mentioned earlier 25% of them wouldn't go to work in Toronto as SARS by the 8th week. If you don't have vaccine, you don't have effective drug and you don't have masks who's going to come to work. Some of you may be doing it in places like this very room giving care. Corpse management, in 1968 the average time from a casket being made till it was in the ground was almost 6 months. Today it's less than 30 days. Crematorium space just in time delivery. We saw in Katrina and we saw in the tsunami when we treat our dead with disrespect. That's what takes us over the edge. We have no plans. Cities like Seattle have gone out and figured out where they can get all the indoor ice arenas they know and they're going to stack bodies right where you're sitting and hopefully keep them until they can process them. We've done none of that planning here. Implications, food and water foods are just in time delivery system today. I deal with that all the time and the work I do. We have no contingency plan on how to get food to people because it is just in time. Domestic security, again, we just did a survey of prison wardens. Most of them told us if we lose 20 to 30% of workers we don't know how to control our prisons. Again, where are the plans for that? We could do it now. Pandemic implications, just imagine a 12 to 18 month global blizzard with mandatory or voluntary closures in national state or even local borders. Public panic in 24-7 media coverage will rain. Governments will have limited resources. I believe at least 20-30% of people won't go to work. We won't close schools because parents will take their kids out of you. You won't have to close them. Even under the worst case scenario, the world's population will survive, however. We have to start planning how we're going to do that now. So what do we do? Well, it's not a matter of if it's just when and where. At a minimum, assume we will not have vaccine for the first six months, then supplies will be limited. If it's a 1918-like scenario, 98 out of 100s will get through it, but we'll still lose 1.9 million Americans in up to 1.9 million people worldwide. Planning is not an option, yet we keep postponing it.  They are. The causes are complex and the solutions are difficult, but there is nothing here that can stop us from doing this. We invest today in things that I have to ask myself over and over again as I go to sleep at night. Is this really making the world safer? When I know there are things that we will, and we're doing virtually nothing. Hoping to spare not strategies, I believe that so much. Why do I do this? My whole career today can be still down in one very simple answer. I don't do it for the money. I don't do it for the 180,000 air miles I travel a year. I don't do it for my kids. It's about my kids, and it's about you students in this room. You're all that matter. We owe it to our kids to make a difference. I can't think of a more important legacy. Thank you very much.


In analyzing ZT improvements due to lattice thermal conductivity reduction, electrical conductivity, and total thermal conductivity are often used to estimate the electronic component of thermal conductivity, kappa E. The Weidman-Fran's law is widely used to estimate kappa E from sigma measurements. However, significant deviations from the degenerate limit occur for non-degenerate semiconductors where L converges to 1.5 times 10-8WωK-2 for acoustic phonon scattering. A first-order correction to the degenerate limit of L can be based on measured thermal power, independent of temperature or doping. The equation L equals 1.5 plus exp, minus 0.7s, is a satisfactory approximation for L within 5% for single parabolic band-slash acoustic phonon scattering assumption and within 20% for PbC, PbS, PbT, C0.8-0.2 where more complexity is introduced. Using this equation for L rather than a constant value will significantly improve the estimation of lattice thermal conductivity when detailed band structure and scattering mechanism is not known. This article was authored by Hyunsik Kim, Zachary M. Gibbs, Inglutang, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.