Russia plans to build underwater tunnel to Crimea after strikes by Ukraine on the Kursh Strait. After multiple strikes by the armed forces of Ukraine on the Crimean Bridge, Russians are seeking alternative access routes to the occupied Crimea. Russian and Chinese businessmen linked to the government are discussing the construction of an underwater tunnel connecting Russia to the peninsula according to the Washington Post. The agency reported that the negotiations at the end of October were provoked by Russia's growing concern about the security of the illegally constructed bridge across the Kursh Strait. It is a crucial logistical line for the Russian army but has been attacked twice by the Ukrainian armed forces and remains a vulnerable target. The negotiations underscore Russia's determination to maintain control over Crimea, which it illegally annexed in 2014 and the increasing dependence of Moscow on China as a source of global support. According to US officials and engineers implementing such an idea would be challenging. Billions of dollars would need to be spent on construction which would take years. Moreover, such work has never been carried out in a conflict zone. Despite doubts about the plan's feasibility, experts say Russia has clear reasons to pursue it. Having failed to achieve a decisive victory in the war, Russia faces the risk that Ukraine noted Alexander Gabuev, an expert on Moscow-Beijing relations. Analysts point out that it is unlikely that the Kursh Tunnel will be completed in time to assist Russia in its military efforts. Moscow may view it as a long-term investment to ensure secure communications with a territory that could be contested for decades. The project also poses political and financial risks for China which has never officially recognized Russia's annexation of Crimea and whose companies could fall into a trap of economic sanctions imposed by the US and the EU on the aggressor country.


Hi, thank you for joining us on Superuser TV today. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourselves? Hi, yeah, look, I'm Kavith Munshi. I'm the CTO of a company called Actira. I'm also on the open-set board of directors as an individual director. And I kind of run the, I'm one of the co-founders of the diversity working group. So, thank you Kavith. I'm Nithya Ruff. I work for Sandisk. And I'm the director of open-source strategy for Sandisk. And I'm also a member of the Women of OpenStack working group. And we are very involved with the CINDA project as part of OpenStack. Great, thanks again for joining us. So, can you please give us a little background on what does the diversity work group does and what Women of OpenStack does as well, please? So, the diversity working group was established to ensure and to kind of take stock of where the open-set project and the foundation stood with regards to diversity. And we cover gender, geographical, social, economic, age. We cover all kinds of diversity. And our aim is to kind of help the foundation become as inclusive as possible. So, this is, we are more about looking at what's there right now and what steps to take in the future to ensure that the foundation meets its diversity goals. I think it's a wonderful, big tent that Kavith leads because it includes everybody. And one of the constituents that PFO is focused on is women because women in tech are really a very, very small percentage compared to the opportunities in tech. They're also going to run into shortages in programmers and coders in tech. And we need everybody to be engaged, everybody to be involved in what's happening in tech. So, our main focus in Women of OpenStack is to help new people come on board with training, with onboarding, with friendly faces type of breakfast meetings. We also help with mentoring. We help with other training programs. Today, for instance, we did GetGarrett training so women can understand what that is. And then last but not the least, we're also trying to create a more inclusive community by engaging with the men of OpenStack and helping them be advocates and allies to women in OpenStack. Great. And so you mentioned, you know, diversity working group kind of looking at what's there today and how do we meet the goals and you're enabling new people to join the community and participate actively in the community. The diversity working group had a survey that they conducted. What were some of the findings from that survey? Great question. So what we actually found out was there were a lot of subgroups that kind of face the same issues of starting out on the projects. They found that it was a bit difficult to get started. They found that the onboarding process was difficult. They found the medium of communication, mainly IRC, to be a bit difficult. They also felt that it was a matter of reaching connecting with the right people, getting the right attention. And we also found that there were certain subgroups that felt they were not being included as much. This went to LGBTQ members of the community. Women also kind of felt that they were not being included as much. So the survey was very telling in so far as it gave us a good idea of the commonality of the problems that people faced and gave us a few areas to focus on and kind of attack to ensure that people felt included in the process. No, I concur. And so was the get-get training you just mentioned, was that decided on based on some of the findings and the tooling that he just mentioned? Absolutely. And in fact, we had men and women at the training. It was open to everybody. And we had an upstream university Saturday and Sunday of this week, you know, prior to the conference starting. And that was also as a result of what Kavith was saying. I think we want to attract and retain and develop coders in the project. And this is the best way to do it and make it as easy as possible for them to get engaged. We also did command presence training on Sunday, which helps people who have to deliver bad news to execs or leadership to be able to do it with grace and with composure. And so these are some of the things that came out of the survey results. I need some other training. Yes, it is good training. Great, so it sounds like, you know, we've accomplished a lot in the short amount of time that we've been focused on these initiatives. What are you focused on now? So what's next from your groups? Sure, so I think we have seen the results from the survey and we have seen some of the initiatives taken at the summit level, at the board level, right? So what, and at the foundation level, what we would like to do personally is, personally, what I would like to see is taking the upstream training local. So go to the various days that are happening, the China Day, the India Day, the Taiwan Day, and kind of organize the upstream training there or maybe a part of the upstream training there. So people who cannot get to the summit also get an opportunity to feel included. I think we also want to provide a better forum for women and other minorities to have a voice. I think we should now focus on doing, taking the initiatives locally and each user group is very well equipped to do that. So it's about empowering the user groups now. Those are really wonderful initiatives and we had a breakfast meeting on Tuesday morning and we worked in subgroups to really uncover what are the next priorities we need to work on before Barcelona. And before I share those priorities, I wanted to say we made a tremendous amount of progress as a women of OpenStack. Just a few years ago, we were 5% of the conference and this conference in Austin, we are 12% of the conference. So that's a huge step and I think numbers and metrics are one of our priorities for the future as well, which is keep track of code commits, involvement in projects, because that will show us progress and that the needle is moving. The second priority is more buddy system for new people coming to conferences, new people coming into OpenStack so that they feel that there's someone they can go to as they progress into OpenStack. The third thing that the women of OpenStack mentioned is to see more speakers, diverse speakers in the open source, OpenStack ranks, whether it's at the keynote level or otherwise, and to make sure that these speakers get the help they need to prepare because they're often the first time suppliers for abstracts or selected and help them be really good speakers on the panel. And lastly, continue to do the mail advocacy work because I think if men are 70, 80% of OpenStack they need to be part of the inclusion equation and they need to be allies, they need just like Kavitha's and Imad, Susu and Mark Mule and others are. So we'd love to continue that program. Great, well thank you and have a great summit. Thank you. Thank you.


Hi everyone and welcome to this course preview on comics and American culture. This is an online course that's going to be taught this fall at North Shore Community College. So let's take a look at this course because you might be asking, you know, of course on comics, what's that all about? Well, I'm glad you asked that. This course actually covers some really great topics relating to comics. So we look at things like the history of comics, how comics communicate, what is literary art in comics, and why people study comics. So then you might also be asking, what are we reading a course like this? Well, just comics, right? Not quite. I mean, we do read a decent amount of comics, and we do read a decent amount of graphic novels, but we also read academic research on comics. What has been written by scholars about comics and how can that inform what we see and what we read in comics? It's really fascinating to see how comic scholars have influenced and made us think differently about comics. And then we also read a variety of material that you yourself are going to reach out into the world and find and bring into the course. I should also mention that this course does not require book purchases. Instead, what we'll have you doing is requesting books through interlibrary loan through the North Shore Community College Library. I bet you didn't know, but our North Shore Library has, is able to use other libraries on the North Shore and really bring in, I mean, you can get access to thousands of graphic novels, all for free. I bet you didn't know that about our libraries, that you could get that. You can read all the graphic novels you want because our libraries on the North Shore all have them. All right, so the next question is probably going to be what kind of work is involved, right? Because it's a course on comics, and you're not quite sure what work looks like. We have a variety of really cool and interesting assignments, and I'm going to list them here, and it's not that you do all of these assignments. In fact, any of the assignments with an asterisk is an assignment you have choice over that. You get to choose many of the assignments that you get to do in this course. So the first assignment is online discussions. Everybody does that. There's no way around that. And that's okay because we, this is a classroom, and we want to have those discussions. But there's a listing of all these other assignments, many of which are optional. Many of which you'll get to choose whether you want to do one over the other. So there's a great opportunity here to really kind of play around with the different assignments to show what it is that you're learning in this course. Now, the next question people typically have is, so what's in it for me? Like, what do I get out of this course? And I like to think that this course can equip you with what I would consider superpowers, abilities to do things you weren't able before you stepped into this course. So the first is a developed and nuanced understanding of comics. I kind of think of this as like telepathy, right? You're able to really get in there and really be able to change other people's minds about comics. You'll get into discussions, oh, comics aren't important. And you'll be able to have a very, very clear conceptual understanding of why they are. You also get analytical skills to navigate different interpretations of comics. I kind of think of this as like, you know, your flash speed. That is, you're able to jump into a comic and really start to understand it on a deeper level. And that's actually really cool, too, because you can have more sophisticated conversations about meaning and purpose within the art or within the narrative. You also end up with appreciation of comics as a medium for communication and a form of literary art. So I kind of see this like your X-ray vision, right? You can see through comics. You can see through, you know, a lot of the poor arguments that are put out there about comics and really talk about their value and their importance. You also get the history of comics and it's a place with a larger property of our culture. That right there is your ability to time travel, right? To top in that DeLorean and go into the past and say, here's where and why comics are important. You also get a contextual sense of comic scholarship. So I imagine this is kind of a vortex where you're able to kind of move through space, right? You're here in one area, but you're able to leap into another and bring those arguments of comic scholars into your discussions. You also end up with an ability to critically evaluate other media. And I see this as your ability to phase through, right? You're in one area and you phase through into another. You're able to talk about comics, but that also gives you skills to talk about film, to talk about literature, to talk about art. So something like this gives you that kind of ability. And then finally, I consider improved communication and comprehension skills. That's your super strength, right? You come out of this course and you're able to think about how words and images communicate better and utilize those for your own improvement. So this is what a course can do for you. It can really ramp up your superpowers, can really make you a much stronger student as you go into other forms or other courses here at North Shore or anywhere else. So thank you for watching. I hope you find this course potentially interesting. If you have questions about it, we want to learn more about it. My email is up there. And I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much.


Yo, how much is a Paris SV? It's about 85,000. 85,000? Okay, and you got the Louis Air Force ones over here. How much are you asking for these? These are 150,000. 150,000, what size is it? Size 10. Size 10, and the watch? The watch is 35,000. 35,000. Wow, and you guys got some crazy heat on the table over here. You got the Travis's. It's a family. Little Dirty Mokas over here, what size is this? 10 and a half. 10 and a half, oh I need a 13. Okay, what's the SVs? Oh yeah, this is great. This is great. Oh, the Dormbeckers. How much you want for these, 100,000? This is crazy. Yo, would you guys buy these for 100,000?