Aloha and welcome to the Savvy Chick Show on Think Tech, Hawaii. I'm your host, Shantel Seville. Now today on the show, we were to have the amazing and incredible Jason Gretch from Australia, but he has had an overnight success. I mean he's been amazing for a while and has absolutely gone off the right, off the Richter in Australia. So we're going to do a dedication to him in today's episode instead and hopefully we can get him on soon. So this episode is all about being the star of your own show and it's our dedication to Jason Gretch, someone who inspires us very much. He's a person that really believes in women and empowering them and and that means women and girls and just to go out and give yourself permission to create the most amazing things that come from within. So so this week why he's gone so berserk is that he has been on the cover of most papers with the Brownlow Awards. Now the Brownlow Awards are awards for the AFL and they're Australian Football League for those of you who are viewing here in Hawaii. Very popular code of football in Australia and every year they have a big red carpet event and Jason was fortunate enough with a stylist to design the dress of one of the most prominent players. He's a Geelong football captain, Joel Selwood, his girlfriend who attended the Brownlow medals with him. So he was able to design that dress with Britt Davis and it's been an absolute fairy tale. So here they are in the paper in Australia. So they've really made a mark and I mean what a fairy tale beautiful dress. I couldn't be happier for him, you know, really making his dreams come true because he's started, he's been working at his craft for a very long time and each day that goes by something else is happening. So this is pretty incredible. That's the Brownlow medals and even further to that, last night he was actually as part of the Dali Am Awards which is rugby in Australia. He was also able to dress another incredible, I guess should be known as a celebrity I suppose, being Miss Australia 2014, or Miss Universe Australia 2014. So Teague and Martin he dressed as well and that has been again all over the papers this morning. So pretty exciting. Yes, these are two of the big events that have happened lately. Now a few other things that I'd like to talk about with Jason is he is someone who's just, like I said, gone out there, decided to follow his passion, he went to like very sort of humble beginnings and is an absolute, you know, very close to his family and loves just really being a good person and that's why I want to make sure that this tribute goes out to him today. So this is him and his mom and she's, you know, he talks about her so much and she's a very special person to him so I just wanted to share that with you but what I do want to talk about is though he's been, you know, very well known right now for what's gone on the red carpet with his pink dresses on the red carpet, something that really had him shining. I mean he's been designing bridal for a while but he just did this gladiator range. Now the gladiator range to me really showcased what a powerful woman is and captured that and I think that resonated with a lot of celebrities and that's when he really put himself on the map, gave himself creative license to just go for it and he went crazy. It was last year I believe, the spring fashion week, he did this gladiator range and these women just got on the catwalk with the makeup and the hair and the dresses and before you knew it there was celebrities here like Danny Minogue who's very well known in Australia wearing his gladiator range, they had, he had a whole list of different celebrities, you know even there's Delta Goodrum again on The Voice wearing a Jason Gretch piece that he created for her. He had Kelly Osborn, those of you who are from here in the USA probably know who Kelly Osborn is, one of the Osborns. She was on Australia's Got Talent in a Jason Gretch dress of course and not only does he design for these celebrities but he gets a chance to meet with them and talk with them. This is from the catwalk of the spring fashion week last week in Australia, Melbourne spring fashion week, gladiator range, you know look at these things like designer Jason Gretch here and it's just saying that he's absolutely pushed the boundaries and you know made something the all-time favorite list so really getting on the map, this is an Australia's Got Talent celebrity that he's dressed as well and when I say dressed he's not just dressed, he's actually made these made these designs, he sketches them, he sews them, he you know works and fixes them up like this man is incredibly talented and if you don't know of him you will. I believe this is one of the voice contestants there, these are just some of the images we were able to find from him on his Facebook and just share the inspiration with you. Yeah it's just absolutely incredible so those are those are some of the most most known sort of celebrities that Jason's worked with and it's only the list is only going to get bigger as I was saying before.  That's Jason right in front of his studio there in Melbourne with his parents you know I know that he often talks about and shares his parents and how they have such strong family values and they've been together for so many years, I think it's I don't know 50, 60 maybe 70 years not that long but they've they've they've very uh they've been very you know very prominent part of him and I think very supportive and that that is what it takes it does take support around you to make sure that you know your dreams come true and even when people aren't supporting you you're always supporting back yourself and I think that's um that's important this is a funny one it looks like uh way back in the day he had style and pose and nothing has changed he's just that same shining star as he was striking a pose way back in the day so just sharing some inspiration from his family and growing up and hopefully we can actually get him on the show next week uh to to really answer some of the questions that we have from him because we are very inspired by Jason what he's created how he does it you know what's coming up where he's being some of these we're sharing but it would be really great to get the insight and that's why we're hoping him out on the show this week but unfortunately that uh that's not happened so here's Jason uh busily working away cutting some patterns in his studio he um he this is behind the seams as he says so this is what it actually looks like the attention to detail is absolutely incredible I mean I don't know where he thinks of this and that's why we'll have to ask him so focused and just designing the most beautiful pieces there you know it's all like he said being the star of your own show this was his um the studio upstairs there where they would showcase a lot of the different outfits I've absolutely loved going up there and checking out whatever there was look at this attention to detail in the dress just incredible from his bridal I mean he's been very known for for bridal over the years and as you can tell just looking at these pieces so um very beautiful elegant powerful you know sophisticated classy this is for women who really have to show a statement and um this is from the bridal show I believe it was in March these women are looking absolutely incredible wow makes you want to get married doesn't it so um yeah so this is just a little bit of the bridal inspiration wow I guess um you'll have to this is some fairytale weddings here I can't even pick which one I like the best so um yeah that's the bridal and most recently and it's very exciting that they Jason's actually launched a collaboration with IBM which this does not I mean where fashion meets technology that is that's crazy so IBM Watson has basically did a showcase of Jason Gretch because he's been using their programs to um to work with his style so this is what he'll talk about a bit when we see him on the show and these are some of the showcase a lot of pastels absolutely beautiful this is where the inspiration has come from for the dresses that he's done on the red carpet this week and um yeah pretty pretty spectacular you know there's always an attention to detail as you can see even the frills on the bottom of the dress there and it never never stops very good I'm just as inspired looking at them as as you are as you're watching them so um what's coming up for him uh there's always something coming up and there's always things that he can't even tell us that are coming up so hopefully when we get him on the show he'll be able to share this with us but what I do know is he has the fashions on the field coming up it will be the racing time in Melbourne Australia and we'll um well perhaps we can show you some photos of last year's fashions on the field where he again just gave himself permission to go out there and create something bold and edgy and different and you know these are all the different things that you know come to put these together he's a true artist when you put something together you know you really do have to think about it and yeah this is with the finished product so there's a story behind this which I'm sure he will tell us along with um what you know one of the quotes he said is design and construction starts with the 2d drawing and and ends with a 3d piece of self-expression so that's uh that's pretty exciting and special as I said we're hoping I'm out on the show so today the Savvichik show will be kind of a little bit short and um in anticipation of him sharing you know what this hype's been all about how everything's been going where to now and um yes we'll be back with you shortly thank you for watching think tech I'm grace chang the new host for global connections you can find me here live every thursday at one p.m. we'll be talking to people around the islands or visiting the islands who are connected in various aspects of global affairs so please tune in and aloha and thanks for watching aloha everyone I'm maria mera and I'm here to invite you to my bilingual show viva hawaii every other monday at 3 p.m. we are here to show you news issues and events local and around the world join me I'm jay fidel and I'm the host of research in minoa Mondays from 12 to 1 on thinktechawaii.com take a look at us and learn about geophysics learn about planetology learn about the ocean and earth sciences at UH minoa you'll really enjoy it so come around we'll see you then hello my name is crystal let me tell you my talk show i'm all about health it's healthy to talk about sex it's healthy to talk about things that people don't talk about it's healthy to discuss things that you think are unhealthy because you need to talk about it so I welcome you to watch quok talk and engage in some provocative discussions on things that do relate to healthy issues and have a well-balanced attitude in life join me welcome back to the savvy chick show on thinktech hawaii i'm your host chantel civil here uh on my own today we were due to have the incredible talented designer jason gretz and ceo of jason gretz with us this morning unfortunately and fortunately he's had an incredible week and is not able to be with us so hopefully we'll have him on soon perhaps as soon as next week to answer our questions about inspiration and being the star of your own show because he's absolutely been able to do that for himself and he's incredibly passionate about girls like you and helping you bring out your true talents and give yourself permission to be yourself so uh that's really why i wanted to have him on the show to share that inspiration that light you know what because you know i've had a lot of conversations with him being actually a personal friend of mine and he talks about how he was designing beautiful things which he always had but it was when he really gave himself permission to just dig deep and just use all that inspiration that was coming from within and create some really neat pieces that he started to really shine and and get known and i mean it's just gone from strength to strength after that so i would absolutely love to share his inspiration with you but in the meantime we're doing a tribute to jason gretz being the star of your own show and just sharing some beautiful photos of the creations he's made and a bit of inspiration from his um his past as well as where he's going in the future and some of the collaborations he's doing and very excitingly the reason as i mentioned he's had an incredibly big week this week being on the brown low metal the red carpet the brown low metal as well as last night on the deli am awards where he had teagan martin wearing one of his beautiful pastel creations it's inspired by the cognitive couture that he's doing with um with ibm watson what an incredible collaboration i mean on think tech Hawaii it's all about technology and imagine how this technology is affecting fashion it's just two worlds that usually aren't together that have come together for this for this masterpiece i guess and teagan martin's just looking fantastic there she's obviously at the awards look at those tassels on the bottom of that her arm on that dress i mean where does someone even come up with these ideas and inspiration it's just i'm absolutely amazed by what he does and and the reason i mean i was with um when i worked at audi center melbourne years ago when i was in australia that's when we actually um had met and i'd worn so many of his creations over the years and every single time i put them on i always felt empowered and confident and just they fit so perfectly and that's such a you know tribute to what he to what he does they just made me feel amazing and that's really what he wants to do he he creates these and i think that that's what you see when you see these women is what they're feeling and i think that is really what will set them apart and also allows him to uh to get out there and just you know see the person and then create with them so it's been a pretty special journey with uh with him and with some other inspirational people and you know there's many stories i like to tell and share with you girls because my point of this is to say that whatever it is that you want to be and what's in your heart if you have something from it within that inspires you there's a career in it and that's why often when i speak to people talk about jason and wanted to have jason on the show is because you know he just followed it it wasn't easy but he followed it and you know because it's grand final week this is one of the beautiful creations he made and dipper those of you in australia you know uh you know big dipper uh out there dipper robert dipper deminco another another great good fun guy and we were at a ball and was wearing jason's dress and no doubt every time you wear one of those dresses you have fun and you feel amazing so um that was pretty pretty special this is another dress and another function of wearing a beautiful jason grutch creation such attention to detail and just makes you look and feel amazing and anyone watching this you can go to his website um i believe it's jasongrutchofficial.com and purchase not just you know wedding dresses but these dresses you're seeing and the one that's on tegan martin i believe that's that's for sale as well or one similar to it so that's pretty exciting to know that you can be wearing one of these and when i say be the star of your own show just because these are celebrities i mean we're all our own star so whatever it is that you do just because you're not on the red carpet doesn't mean that you're not the star of your own show so you know give yourself permission to feel good about yourself and this is really dedicated to all those little girls with big dreams this is jason and his little niece i mean in a little jason grutch dress um i don't i only know you know hope to know where this little gorgeous thing will go so yeah it's it's pretty beautiful and inspiring to know that girls from any age can be in these gorgeous designs and feel good about themselves and i mean with everything comes a price so if you're not available to be in a jason grutch right now it's always something to aspire to but the main thing is is that you aspire to be the best version of yourself and go out there and do the things that really light you up because when you do jason's proof that your life will be much more incredible and you'll get to do everything and spend time with people that inspire you and create things that you look at and you look back at and um and will inspire you for many many years after that so please do um always stay with us on the savvy chick show we have a few more episodes coming up about inspiration with different people following their passions in their careers to show you that you too can be unsuccessful in whatever it is that you choose to do and as far as you know going out there pursuing your passions if you don't know what they are just think of what you do for free and what you love doing so it can be anything you know it could be styling could be shopping could be walking a dog whatever it is just think of what you do for free and that's probably somewhere along the lines of where your passion lies and where your true talents lie and also there's things that people probably tell you that you're really good at and you might not even realize but start thinking about those things that people tell you you're good at because also that can be a bit of a key to where where your inspiration lies and with the savvy chick show we're here always to continue to inspire you and bring out the best in you just popping up the bachelorette that's another Australian television show that Jason's been showcased on in the past few weeks here so it says um this is what Georgia from The Bachelorette says there are so many girls life that she wants to wear a big beautiful ball gown she sees an amazing dress an amazing outfit and thinks I don't have anywhere to wear that I got to do that after a week love her really her favorite look from a custom made Jason Gretch so he really makes women feel like a princess and I mean who doesn't want to feel like a princess that's why I always wear pink so yeah something um something to aspire to and something that's possible for you and if you're not into dresses that's fine too the reason for showcasing so many different professions on the savvy chick show is so that you can find people and ideas that you recognize and relate to and then create your own so some weeks will have fashion some weeks will have sport some weeks will have an entrepreneur um it'll always be different and that will give you an idea of who you resonate and relate to and who might have talents that are similar to your own and then you can think of what it is that you want to pursue so by us showcasing a myriad of different careers we want to help you get on track for doing what you love so you can live an inspired life and want to wake up and get out of bed every morning and do what you love like I do here with the savvy chick show something else really important please like tweet us Instagram like savvy chicks SAVI CHIX um so we can find your talent because we want to showcase more talent of girls as well or if there's someone who really inspires you and you love I mean we've got like the Oprah Ellen of you know the young women so it's all up to you girls as well to help us make this amazing and get you on the show and get people that you love on the show and help you really follow your dreams and passions and make your dreams turn to reality and live an awesome inspiring life like um like Jason Gretz does and be the star of your own show so thank you so much for tuning into the savvy chick show today we look forward to seeing you next week at 11 a.m. Honolulu time and uh until then aloha okay thanks


Let's get into the big topic of open source, something that we actually have in the past. This is so awesome. We are an open culture that needs to be so focused. It's that process that a developer or let's say a developer. How's the Kubernetes ecosystem really going down? Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you might be. Welcome to the Level Out Power, where we discuss all things containers, Kubernetes and OpenShift. I'm Randy Russell and I am joined by my co-hosts, Jafar Charibi and Mr. Scott McBrien. Hello gentlemen, how are we today? Good morning, Randy. I've missed you guys. I've not been able to participate for a little bit here, but I'm back now and I am very excited about our show today because we are covering that reality of life is that we don't do things once. We don't get to just deploy and forget. No, no, no, no. We have to upgrade container images. We have to do it in production. If you're new to container management, maintaining container image life cycles might seem a little bit complicated. Might even be intimidating, not for our audience. They're brave souls, each and every one, but we're going to talk today a little bit about how you maintain container images over time. We're going to look at the Red Hat ecosystem catalog and container catalog and just talk about upgrading and automating upgrades and certified container images and something called the Container Health Index, which in the modern era, the past two years, anything that has health index in the phrase makes me very, very nervous, but I'm sure it's entirely benign. Anyway, audience, if you will, if you have any questions as we're going along, please do post your questions in chat and also please do remember to like, subscribe, and share so that everybody knows we're here every other week with level of power. Let's get to it. Scott, where first thing we even begin? I think the first place where we begin is where do you get your containers? You could choose to build them yourself and that's perfectly viable and then you have your own ownership of production, wow, any more coffee, your own ownership of production of those images and you can set pretty much whatever you want for your maintenance cadence and processes and procedures. Most people choose to start with a base image first. There are a couple different places where one can get a base image and I'm sure that some of you can probably guess where one might get a base image. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Probably the most popular place would be Docker Hub. So if we take a look at the screen share here, Red Hat has their universal base images shown or available via Docker Hub. So Scott, are you sharing something? Hopefully. I'm just waiting for our producer to toggle it on. All right, so Red Hat is a registered verified provider with Docker. So we are included in the Docker registry and Docker Hub UI and you can see that we share four images through Docker Hub, the four flavors of UBI. And if you're interested in four flavors of UBI, we had a show we talked a little bit about them and we'll reference that a bit later. Here in Docker Hub, you can kind of look at what the most popular containers are and if you click on one, you can see kind of how many pulls it's got. If there are any tags that the container image has, so we can actually like look at older images that are in the catalog, not just the most current. And then you can click the pull button or use the URL and pull it with a Docker URL. All right, but it turns out we can toggle this back off again. So it turns out that Docker Hub is our secondary location where we store container images. We push those four UBI images over there whenever we build UBI images. Our primary location is the Red Hat certified container catalog. All right, so if we bring the free share back in, Red Hat maintains their own container registry and we have more containers here than just those four base images, although it also boots those. So a little bit different flavor for how we store the images, information about the images, we'll get into that in a little bit. There are other registries out there, but Red Hat currently doesn't participate in them. So you might see, for example, some CentOS containers in WSL registry, and that is not a CentOS image from us. That's someone else who has made a CentOS based image and put it there. We have been working with Microsoft to determine what it would take to get into WSL, but right now we're in very early stages of just talking about it and trying to figure out what that looks like for us and how we support it and a variety of other topics that go around managing base containers. Scott, if I might, Kristoff actually posed I think a very relevant question is, do I need an active subscription to use these images? So if you are accessing the universal base image or UBI, those are free to access, free to redistribute. So that's why we have them over on Docker Hub and they're free to access, free to redistribute there on Docker Hub. UBI and UBI derivative images in the Red Hat container catalog are free to access, free to redistribute. However, today, not all the software that comes with RHEL is available for UBI. So today UBI is a subset of RHEL software and it includes a lot of stuff. So for example, it includes language runtimes like Node.js or OpenJDK, but it does not include other things like Postgres. For that, you'd have to package and install your own Postgres in it if you want to retain that redistributability. Now there are some images that are subscription only and those would be the ones that fall into the RHEL catalog of images. So UBI, free, all good, do what you want. RHEL, that provides all the package set for RHEL and you would need a RHEL subscription to access those and that's actually on their Red Hat catalog page too. So it's very clear whether you need one or you don't need one when you're trying to access it. Well, and we have another question already, barely 10 minutes in. So the question is Dr. Hub is an API using the provided API endpoints for the registry. So is there a comparable or analogous functionality on the Red Hat catalog side? Yeah, so the API on the Red Hat catalog is supports most, if not all of the same calls as the Docker API. So you could literally take your Docker Hub thing that you're making calls to Docker Hub with and just swing the URL to the Red Hat catalog and generally it should work. Yeah, I used a lot of Weasel words there, but there's more metadata and other things in the Red Hat catalog of how we track images and image health and some other stuff that would not be included in Docker Hub metadata. So that's something that may be different from the two. All right. All right. So now that we talked about where to go, maybe we like just delve in and find one in the Red Hat container registry and we talk some about how we manage those. All right. So I'm just going to go ahead and pull up UBI based images. All right. You can see that we have a rel7 based UBI images, rel8 UBI based images. There's even a rel9 beta one. And when rel9 is released, those will obviously be moved out of beta as well. So let me just pull up the UBI 8, this guy. All right. So recall when we looked at the Docker catalog, the big metric that was shown on the page was pools. And generally when somebody is looking for quality of image in Docker Hub, I think they generally look at pools. So the more pools it has, the more popular it is, the more popular it is, clearly the better it is. And that we have other mechanics embedded in the Red Hat catalog for providing more depth of quality there. So number one is we also include when the container image was generated. We also have the health index. And I'll come back to this in a second as well as size. The other information that we get is stuff like security. So this goes in a little bit more detail about the health index. I'll come back to it. A little bit of metadata about the content. These are all of the RPMs that we used to build the container image. So rel UBI's and rel images are actually built out of the same RPM software that we use for building rel, rather than like unzipping to our archives and other things that could be in other base images. We also provide you a Docker file. So like if you want to build your own, here's the Docker file you can download. And it will, using a build from Docker file option, perhaps it will make the same thing. And then under get this image, this is how you can pull it. And you can see that there's instructions for using OC, which which Jafar is going to get to a little bit later in the episode. And Podman, depending on whether you're doing OpenShift stuff or a rel container of this stuff. And then you can also use Docker if you're using something like Docker desktop or the Docker tools on your system. All right. And then the last thing, we provide source containers. We had an episode where we talked about this as well. So we tell you where to get the source code for the packages that we shipped with it. Okay. There are literally no mysteries here. Hopefully, hopefully as transparent as possible, right? Well, yeah, that's what I was going to get again. Is that is that this is really the, the, the wonderful thing in the world of open source as you, you know, as you were going through all the various pieces of information and how much insight there is into what you're getting. That is about transparency. There, there shouldn't be any mysteries in there. Right. So in a previous episode, episode 57, we talked about choosing the right image, right? So there's four UBI images, minimal, micro, which is even smaller, regular and in it or multi-service image. And we talked about why you would choose one over the other in that episode. So if you're interested in, like more information on the four flavors of UBI and why you might choose one over another, I would recommend that you go and take a look at that episode. There's also other images that we have here in the catalog that include the language runtimes. And I'll show you one of those in just a second. But those others that include language runtimes are based on UBI. So I promise that we'd come back to the health index. So I know, I know the health index is basically how we gauge the quality of this image. And you can see that for this image, we have a Red Hat bug advisory outstanding for this image. And it is a severity important security vulnerability based on this advisory. So we could go in and like look at what it is and determine what we want to do about it. So because of that outstanding CVE, this container has a health index of B, meaning it's not the best, right? The best would be A. Some other things that we use for gauging the health index would be the length of or I should say the differential between builds and uploads. So the longer the container image sits in the catalog, the worse its health index will get over time. So if you have something that's been there a year, just because it's been there a year and not been rebuilt, it's going to have a lower health index. In fact, that might be like an E or an F because typically you want things to be maintained. So to address that for the Red Hat managed images, we rebuild the UBI's and derivative images every six weeks, just generally. And then if there is something like what we see with this one, where there's a critical or important security CVE outstanding for it, when the remediation for that CVE is available, we will rebuild images. So every six weeks is our general schedule. But if there is a reason to rebuild sooner than that because of a critical or important remediation for a CVE that's been published, we will rebuild sooner than that. So I expect this one to be rebuilt once we have a remediation for this CVE for open SSL libs. And then we'll upload it and then we'll push it to Docker Hub. So we rebuild in the Red Hat catalog first and then pretty much every day or actually multiple times a day, we push updated images over to Docker Hub as a player. All right.  Right. And so this one has one important and two moderate CVE outstanding for it because of its age. And we could see that it's a health index of C. Right. I say just generally I would choose a container image that's an A or a B would be my preference. C is looking a little bit sketchy. And then if we look at some other container images like maybe the Node.js image. So here's the Node.js 12 image built on UBI 8. And we can see that it is also a health index B probably for that very same security errata. So once we have remediated that, all these derivative images will also be updated to go with it. Again, a lot of transparency there. Even to the extent that these images that maybe have more CVEs and really perhaps shouldn't be in active usage, they are still there. And it is possible to in a sense kind of see the provenance of a particular image over time, right? Absolutely. And the reason that they're still there is sometimes people build their life cycle stuff to pull a specific tag of image, right? So if they used this tag, which is the version information when they did a call to then build their stuff into the container and move onward. If we just get away with this tag in this image, that would break their build process, right? Right. It would be a denial of service attack. Well, hey, let's not go there. I'm kidding. But you see my point, though, is that if you start doing that, or if you start just one day, you take an image that might have some outstanding CVEs and you simply yank it from existence, you've effectively done worse than what might have actually happened with the issue itself, right? Possibly. Possibly. Oh, stop splitting hairs. I'm having fun here. It's Wednesday morning. Come on. All right, continue. So, you know, while we keep that in place and we allow people to continue to use it, of course, recommended practice would be that you periodically check back with the catalog and pull the latest, right, and rebuild your stuff based off the latest tag. And that'll make sure that as we do these rebuilds, you will in your automated rebuild process at your own facility where you're putting your stuff in the containers, you'll start with one of those fresh images and build it out. Latest and greatest. Yeah. And then plus as an added bonus, you know, containers are a very persistent entity, right? So just because you pull down the latest and you build your stuff into it and you deploy it and it doesn't work, we still have your older one in your local library or your local repositories. So you can always revert back to that like known good state of container if there's some kind of issue. And that's something else to account for when you're building rebuild processes. It's like, how long do you keep an image? You know, my recommendation would not be to just like, oh, there's the latest pull it down, rebuild it, throw away the old image and deploy the new one, right? You want to have that kind of backup ability to roll back, right? So we talked about rebuilding, we talked about how we actually like show you when things are vulnerable and a little bit on some of the additional features. So at this point, I would mention that we also did a level of our episode, episode 55, on configuring auto updates of containers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So in that episode, we talked about setting up some system deconfiguration so that periodically a machine would check with the Red Hat container registry or your own local registry, if that's how you configured it, to see if there's a newer image available. And if so, you would pull down and redeploy your container images based off of that change in state. And Jafar, I know that there's some OpenShift stuff that can do a similar process. Yeah, yeah, sure. So what you've explained so far is that there are frequent releases to the container images that we provide in the Red Hat catalog. And as probably you all know, OpenShift does rely on those images for everything that is going to run on the container by default, of course, you can enrich it and add your own images, but most of the time what you're going to end up doing is using those images that we provide as we call base images to build upon and have your applications running on top of those images that we provide. So the interesting thing that would be that we offer for our OpenShift customers is that there are some automated mechanism that allow you to pull those updates from the registry and we use some concepts that we call image streams and image stream tags to basically have dynamic pointers from our OpenShift cluster to those images that are on the Red Hat catalog. So if you want, I can do a quick demonstration and try to make those concepts a little bit more visual. A live demo?  What can possibly go wrong? And let's see how it goes. So, yeah, the first step is to be able to share the screen. A serious moment in a live demo. Okay, cool. So can you see my screen as, yeah, let me just move the window there. Okay, cool. So as you can see here, I have an OpenShift project where I have a Node.js application. This Node.js application has been built based upon a node image that comes from the Red Hat catalog. And the way we can check that is I have a build config, which is basically what we use to define how the application is going to be built. So that says that this image is based off an image stream tag. So a tag is basically an image stream tag is basically a dynamic tag that points to a specific image. And this one points to the OpenShift image that is Node.js 14 UBI8. So that's what Scott has explained. We have different flavors. And this one is using the UBI8 version and Node.js runtime 14. So if we check that image in the registry, or yeah, in the internal registry, we see that now we are in the OpenShift namespace. And that's by default where all those images that are used by all the projects are stored. And I can see a list of tags. So I see that there's a tag here called UBI8 that points basically to a version of the image that has been a little bit outdated. So let's have a look at the image. So currently it's pointing to this tag, which is 163. And I see here on the catalog that there's an updated image. And then they recommend to move to that container, to that image tag instead. So what I want to do now is I'm going to update the image that I have that is being used by this application. And I want to see what happens in OpenShift as I do that. So how do we sync our OpenShift images with the ones that come from the catalog? It's very simple. What I'm going to do is I'm going to actually tag the current image stream that is in the OpenShift namespace and point it to the latest tag that we have just seen here. So basically there's the OpenShift tag command. I want to add this new tag to my OpenShift image. And that's the Node.js 14 UBI image stream that is used by my application. So I'm updating it here. And as I do that, you can see that OpenShift has automatically detected that the image that the application has been based upon has been updated. And now it's running a new build of my application. As soon as I'm looking at the build now, it's rebuilding the image based on the application image based on that base image. And as soon as it's finished, it's going to redeploy that application on my namespace. So the reason why we've been able to do that is the build config has been configured to be re-triggered if there's an image change. So basically we've detected that we updated the image stream that this application was based on. And because we allowed that behavior which is allowed to the build to be triggered on an image change, we have detected that we have rebuilt the application based on the new image and we have deployed it to the OpenShift namespace. So of course, so first thing is, yeah, you can see that it's dynamic. It's great. This is a very simple use case where I'm only updating the application that runs in my dev environment.  So now we have kicked off a simple build config, but in a more realistic environment that will kick off the CI CD pipeline itself. And I would have all of those tests run in different staging, etc. And then once everything is satisfied, the application gets redeployed into the projection environment based on that updated image. So yeah, basically that's what I wanted to show you. And those are the main concepts that we wanted to cover. If I wanted to frequently update those images that are in OpenShift from the catalog, there's a dash dash scheduled parameter that we can add when we tagged an image. And when you do that, so for instance, if I do instead of just OC tag, I do dash dash scheduled, it's going to frequently update the image. And by default, it's a 15 minutes timeframe where we are going to pull those remote images and check if there's an update. And if so, automatically import that content to OpenShift. All right, so that's it for me. I'm going to stop sharing my screen. And before anything goes wrong. Yeah, exactly. So far, it's been working. So let's stop there. 100% of the time works every time. That's why I like to see. Exactly. So, Jafar, I know that both of us have kind of gone through and said, use the latest, use the latest. Is there ever times in the OpenShift world where you don't use the latest? And what might be a consideration for that? Oh, yeah. I would say most of the time, we don't use the latest because so there are two things. Use the latest is a good practice to update the base images because that somehow provides you updates for the CVEs that we've been able to uncover and fix, et cetera. So it's a good practice to update those images to the latest ones. But what we do provide with the image stream tags is that you don't have to call your image stream latest for it to point to the latest image. So in your application lifecycle, a good practice is to never use latest because you then don't actually know what's in your application anymore because anyone can update the tag latest. And you don't have anymore a versioning of your application. So usually what happens is your base image is going to point to the latest image that we provide from Red Hat. But your application that has been built is going to be tagged with your commit ID, for example, to be able to trace back the image to the commit in the Git repository, for instance. And you can then add an application version tag that says version 101 or something like that.  And you can trace back things to both image changes and to code changes if you go back to commit IDs and such things. In a sense, latest turns into a black box, if that's the use. And so, yeah, and you want yourself in that situation, which is pretty typical where you have to trace back, okay, things are not working now, or we are having an issue now. Let's go back and try to reconstruct what it is or where that happened. It's like latest gives you a brick wall where you lack the clarity about being able to see past it about specifically what that tagging was. Am I getting that about right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, so. But again, one interesting thing also with the image stream tags is that although, I mean, if you've been punching the latest tag to a specific image, you can always, because it's dynamic pointer, you can say, okay, so we've messed up here, and I want to change the latest tag now to point to an earlier version of my application, and then you can still manage that situation. But it's always better to have a very semantically clear tag to be able to know where you're at with your application versioning and such things. All right, so it's kind of interesting to consider, we had Scott's presentation about a very non-open shift, non-Kubernetes approach to this whole topic of updating and everything, and then we added the open shift piece. And there's actually an area of intersection, first of all, that I'd say is that if you have a particular image, that image is tagged and has a lot of the characteristics as viewed through open shift that you would if you were doing it through one of the registries. So that's a common area. It seems to me, and I want you to correct me if I'm wrong here, Jafar, it seems to me that really what you get on the open shift side is you start to have a little bit more of that life cycle capability when it comes to CI CD and how you are actually managing this, not narrowly from just the perspective of, okay, well, here's my container and I'm updating it, but rather through the whole exercise of saying, well, okay, I'm going to do that, and I'm going to rebuild in dev, and I'm going to rebuild in test, and then I'm going to rebuild in stage, and I'm going to put it in prod. Would that be a fair characterization that that's really the piece that open shift gives you incrementally when you take that approach? Yeah, definitely. So OpenShift provides a lot of capabilities. We've spoken about automated pipelines using Jenkins or using OpenShift pipelines, which is based on Tecton, so that allows you to have full production grade CI CD pipelines that are kicked off on OpenShift and that can trigger things within OpenShift itself, but also outside of OpenShift, and they can also interact with registries that are in OpenShift or outside of it. And so, for example, you know that we provide the Red Hat Play Registry, which is, I would say, a more production grade and high availability geo-replicated registry that you can use for your deployments as an upgrade to the internal registry that we provide. It does allow you to have integrated security scans and such things, and you can configure OpenShift to automatically push and pull data from a remote Quay registry, so that will enhance the capabilities with even better security scans results within your registry. So we've seen that we provide, for instance, the Container Health Index on the Red Hat Catalog, which is very useful to be able to understand the quality and the security implications of a specific version or tag of an image, but it doesn't translate automatically as is to OpenShift registry because we don't show those security results in OpenShift itself by default. But if you do use the Red Hat Quay registry that provides those capabilities, you are now able to not only have your results displayed in the registry, but they can also dynamically be used as a security gate in your pipelines. So for instance, you can kick off the build of your new image within the pipeline, and then you can say, if there are security issues that have a critical severity, then the pipeline won't go further, because I have defined a policy within my pipeline to prevent the application from being promoted if a specific, I would say, criteria is met, security criteria. So yeah, that provides you with these types of capabilities where you can shift into what we call DevSecOps and also with the addition of the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes or what we call ACS. It also provides you additional capabilities in terms of security scanning and applying security, violation policies, et cetera, to your applications. So yeah, we do provide, I would say, these notions of CVEs in the Red Hat catalog, but if you are using the combined value of OpenShift with the Quay ACS and the CI-CD pipelines, you can have a more, I would say, robust and DevSecOps approach where things are automated, where you have gates to prevent security issues from being propagated to the other environment. And yeah, so that's, I would say, the overall value that you can get from that. Right. Well, that provides a lot of clarity. So Scott, we lost you for a bit there and now you're towering down at us. I'm trying to be intimidating. I saw the power company trucks on my street earlier this morning and I went, I wonder if that's going to be a problem? Apparently, the answer was yes. So I'm slowly regaining power again. Okay, so any additional thoughts, questions, concerns or commentary from you? I mean, because as you are offline, I'm sure you had a lot of time to sort of think about these subjects in greater depth. Well, before we left, we were talking about like always latest or not. And I wanted to point out that while, and Jafar made the same point, right, pulling your base images and getting those updated so you remediate the CVEs is important. But notice that in the catalog, we do things like carry NodeJS 12 or 14 or 16. And we continue to update the Red Hat bits underneath of that and even the NodeJS stuff, but we keep it at that like NodeJS 12 or NodeJS 14 version. So you don't always have to run like the latest NodeJS on the latest container image. We allow you to have the choice of what runtime on which version of image. We even still do support of around seven images at this point, although time is running out on those. We only have a couple of years left on their life cycle. Yeah. So just speaking about that, if you've been able, familiar with the .NET, what's the .NET version that runs on .NET Core? You've probably seen that there are some breaking changes when you move from a version to another one. And one of my previous demos was based on .NET Core latest.  And while I tried to rebuild the application that was pointing to latest, it tried to pull like the version six of .NET Core, which is not called .NET Core anymore, because that's what the latest tag in OpenShift was updated to. And of course, it broke everything. The application was not running or building anymore because there was such a huge change between .NET Core two or three, which I was using, and the sixth version. So by going to my build config and specifically saying, do not use .NET Core latest, but use .NET Core version two, I've been able to very easily rebuild my application and have everything running together. Because as you said, we do provide an image stream that is called .NET Core. But within that, we do provide several versions that range from depending on how far back in the component itself, we are going to support the versions. So yeah, that's a very useful feature that we provide. And also from a support standpoint, we are able to give you different versions of those run times and make it easier for you to consume. So that's an example of when not to use the latest tag. A textbook example based on the description you gave. All right. Well, General, this is just another comment speaking about managing the images lifecycle. So something that we haven't spoken about is the Quay integration that we have with OpenShift. And so as mentioned, there's a bidirectional configuration where OpenShift Quay can become the default registry for OpenShift. But we also have a mirroring capability in Quay that allows you to use it, for example, to mirror those Red Hat Catalog images. So basically, you are going to use Quay as your source of truth. But you can have those images that you are going to use in Quay mirrored from the Red Hat Catalog. So they are going to periodically get updated, scan for CVEs, et cetera, and used by OpenShift as the default source for the images. All right. We did have a question that if we could tackle this before we wrap up, it would be great. And that is, we talked about image stream or image stream similar to AAPI endpoints. Is that something that can be used to search for OpenShift images? So I don't know exactly what the meaning of the question is, but the image stream is basically something that we added on top of OpenShift to allow you to have this notion of dynamic tags. So you can think of an image stream as a collection of image stream tags and an image stream tag is basically as a Docker image tag, except that an image stream tag is something that you can change over time. It's dynamic. It's not a static reference to a Docker or container image, for instance. It's a dynamic reference that you can use. And the image stream is basically just a collection of image stream tags. So basically say, for instance, that you have an application that uses three components. You have a front end, front end, a middleware, and a back end. The front end is going to have different versions. And all the images that are built, they are going to be pushed to the front end image stream. And whenever you create a new version, you are going to create a new image stream tag, which is front end, dash, 1.1, 1.2, et cetera. So the image stream tag is the equivalent of a container image tag. And an image stream is just a way of regrouping those image stream tags together. All right. Well, thanks for asking the question view style. Gentlemen, I think we're going to be going a little bit short today. We're the level up hour, but that doesn't mean we will always necessarily be an hour. Scott, any parting thoughts from the world of rel? No. Enjoy your redistributable UBI container images based on rel. All right, then. Jafar, anything else you want to add? I think we've covered the main topics. So thanks again, everyone. Yeah. Well, thank you for joining us. Again, remember to like, subscribe, and share. We're here every Wednesday, every other Wednesday, rather. And so tell your friends, tell your family, tell your kids. And we will see you next time on the level up hour. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye.


GB haven't done what we wanted today, you know, I think it didn't help but we had a me and Craig had a tumble in the first heat and I think if we didn't have that we would have cracked on so yeah we just get focused and clear head ready for tomorrow and you know it's a new day and hopefully we can score more than what we did today. Yeah, tough nine you know, Nils obviously struggling a little bit, unlucky you know and so it's a tough nine but you know it's two days and hopefully we can score some more points tomorrow and but you know after today we we're up there in the mix still fighting for the for the championship and for the medals so everything is still open and that's what important so overall not too bad. I had a good gate good start and I feel you know it's really really good speed so I think it's important points today and we just need to fight you know tomorrow the same and even better so we're ready for everything so we'll see. Yeah for myself I made some really good starts, this track wasn't much passing to to be honest it got a bit more on the outside in the last couple of heats but it was all about the all about the making the good starts and the first corners.


Okay, I've got one of the most difficult jobs in the world.  It's kind of like someone looking in your eyes and saying hey Elvis Presley the king is still alive The king may be dead Japan is very much alive and Japan actually continues to push the frontier of Economics of the way economics and finance interacts with society and indeed Japan in my view Remains a big big model and overlooking it is a big mistake. I'm not going to revise up economic growth That's the easy thing. Yes 3% gross 4% gross. No, this is about zero gross But attaining stability and happening and happiness here. Look at what's going on in the world Yes, we want high gross, but the reality is it is all and practically everywhere about debt deflation demographics Illusion what I mean by that is policymakers thinking they've got some magic bullet. Japan knows all about this debt We've got we've got more than anybody else 230% of GDP Greece blew up at a hundred and thirty percent of GDP, but Japan is Not Greece Japan's debt is owned only by the Japanese Japan remains one of the world's largest Creditor countries on earth every week. There's about four billion dollars more coming into Japan than going out So a tremendous discipline here what that means is if Japan and I don't think it will But if it does if it were to blow up it would only hurt the Japanese not the world deflation Do you know? deflation You in Tokyo now Well real estate prices here are back down to a level last seen in 1981 the wealth destruction here is tremendous But despite this Japan continues to be one of the wealthiest and richest countries on earth people say Oh China has to pass Japan as the second largest economy Excuse me per capita income is the proper way to look at this and on a per capita GDP basis Japan is about ten times more powerful than the people's Republic of China This is not to belittle anybody, but just to highlight with this deflation pole The country is still standing still has the best restaurants and the nicest city streets that is a wonderful achievement Demographics yes Japan is a big four rider today We've got basically one in four people over the age of 64 How many years before China will have the same ratio? Exactly 12 years so learning from Japan How do I cope with an aging society because an aging society doesn't run fast it runs slow Delusion on the policy side Well, there is no magic bullet and it's important to note what Japan never did Japan never took the easy way out Japan never devalued its currency In fact the yen kept on strengthening Japan also Did conduct real? Regulatory reform in finance the strongest ministry the Ministry of Finance gave up its role as Regulator and Japan in my opinion now. It's the best and most unified Financial regulator in the world that by the way stands in sharp contrast to what is going on in the United States of America Right now self initiative very briefly. What do we have?  Thank you


Today, I'm going to talk about how improving developer experience is vital to making frameworks more accessible and also contributes to a healthy open source ecosystem. Good developer experience helps bring engineers together from all levels toward the common goal of learning. My hope is by the end of this talk, you'll be inspired to work on developer experience features or at least think about and appreciate the ones that you consume. I don't have a traditional CS background. My training is actually in journalism, and that's really shaped how I tackle and solve problems in the software engineering space. I actually started my career out in Alaska at a public radio station where I was a journalist and also a web administrator. So I was writing stories about shucking oysters and gardening while also making sure that the website didn't go down, and that's how I learned how to code. And because of my past, one helpful system I use is the classic who, what, when, where and why thought process, which I'm going to use in this talk to describe developer experience. So who am I? Why am I talking to you about this? I'm a UI engineer on the economic graph team. One thing that my team does is release a quarterly workforce report that shows trends in the U.S. labor market. And this research is used by policymakers, by academics, by journalists. So I feel like I've really kept a tie back to my original training by working on this team. And like I said previously, I started out as a journalist. I really didn't have that much experience starting off on the job at LinkedIn three years ago. I really ramped up on the job. And when I was starting out, Ember seemed really new and exciting, but also scary. And not a lot has changed since then, to be honest. Also because of my past, I'm really passionate about working with the Reach Apprenticeship program at LinkedIn. And this program helps engineers from non-traditional backgrounds start full-time software engineering roles. And I really have to tap into the feelings that I had starting out, all of my fears, everything that I struggled with in order to empathize and mentor the apprentices. And also now I have a lot of experience seeing people from very different backgrounds go into the industry and how they learn and how they process concepts. And this has really inspired me to work on developer experience. So my main focus is on Ember data and the related add-ons, particularly M3, which is an alternative to DS model. And when I started learning Ember, that was the area that I found to be the most intimidating but also incredibly interesting. I distinctly remember when I had to hook up my first API endpoint at LinkedIn. I was actually pair programming with someone on my team because I was really stuck. And honestly, I was actually on the verge of tears because I was really feeling like I didn't understand how anything worked. I was really struggling. I kind of had this feeling in the back of my mind that LinkedIn had made a mistake by hiring me. It was one of those really terrifying moments early on in my career. But I was able to push through it. I got a lot of help from really supportive people. And I felt like this incredible joy when I actually got everything to work. And I realized that I was actually learning one of the most powerful aspects of the framework. And that was incredibly exciting to me. And so that experience really motivated me to learn Ember data deeper because I wanted to make it easier for me to understand what was going on and also for other people to understand what was going on. And one of the more recent features I was responsible for was for adding support for M3 models in Ember Inspector. This was actually just basically solving a pain point that I personally had. So what is developer experience? Developer experience is how engineers interact with your framework. It's really at the boundary between people and code. This can include documentation. Which is the entry point for most developers. And probably the first impression that they'll make of your project. If I go to a repo and it has a missing, outdated, or blank read me, I really hesitate to use the project. This also includes debugging tools, which engineers really appreciate. And they definitely remember if they're frustrating. This can also include framework ergonomics. And developers may not be consciously aware of good ergonomics, but they definitely know if a framework has clunky or difficult syntax. So unfortunately, developer experience is often not prioritized. And I believe one of the reasons why is because it involves people. And people metrics are notoriously hard to measure. It's a lot easier to say that you reduce the build size by X amount or sped up the website by X milliseconds. It's a lot harder to say that you made developers work X times faster with your feature. And just to be clear, though, developer experience is important, it should not come at the expense of user experience. Ideally it should be a symbiotic relationship. So I actually ran into this problem myself on a feature that I'm currently working on, the concept of people metrics. So I'm trying to add a button in the data pane to output the store into the console. And this is actually a feature that I wish existed when I started out, because I didn't know that you could grab the store off the container pane. I didn't even know what a container was. I wasted so much time putting breakpoints into my code to try to grab the store. It was very frustrating. But I didn't want to build a feature that I just only found useful. So what I did is I actually talked to a lot of developers from all different levels. I heard about their pain points with Ember data. I also pitched my idea to see if they actually would find it useful. And that enabled me to gain a little bit of consensus and traction, so that I felt confident that what I was working on was actually something that people wanted and that they would use. And I'll be making a PR for that soon, so keep an eye out for that. So why is DX important? If a framework has great DX, it's a lot easier for people to adopt it, to contribute to it, to answer questions, open issues, et cetera. And this really encourages diversity in a healthy open source ecosystem. If the framework is a delight to use, it really makes for happier engineers. If a framework doesn't have good DX, that really limits the type and number of people who can adopt it, contribute to the project, et cetera, this really can create conformity in the types of people that use it and the problems being solved. And also, if only a small number of people understand it, when developers are building out applications, there's a greater risk of bugs being introduced into the code and framework misuse. If the beginner can only understand what is happening by looking at the source code, that is a failure of the framework. And they'll probably go and find something else that's a lot easier to use. They don't have to use what you've built. And luckily, I'm not the only one who thinks that this is a problem. So when should you contribute to developer experience? One great thing is that newcomers bring new and very valuable opinions to developer experience. New engineers have fresh eyes and new insights into the framework. They know what's hard starting off. These insights are really lost the longer you work with a framework. And people can contribute to different facets of frameworks as they gain experience, and each of these ladders is vitally important. And as engineers grow, they should continue to contribute to all levels of developer experience and help new engineers level up. And this will create a self-perpetuating ecosystem. I also really encourage people from nontraditional backgrounds to contribute to developer experience. I feel like there's a lot of pressure for people from nontraditional backgrounds to conform to the expectations of how software engineers should learn and solve problems, and we should really be using our unique backgrounds to make frameworks and the open source ecosystem a more open and engaging place for everyone. So where can you actually contribute? One suggestion I have is to work on features or missing documentation that bother you or hinder you in your day-to-day work. This will help motivate you to contribute, and you'll also directly benefit from it. And a lot of small one-line changes exist. I personally have a huge pet peeve when it comes to deadlinks. Whenever I see a deadlink in the code, I'll make a pull request from the repo to fix it, and this ensures the next person will have access to the information, and I've done this for Ember data, for the octane guides, for Mirage, so on and so forth. And usually this PR gets merged within days, and it really helps build relationships with the maintainers at the very least and kind of give you ramped up onto the framework. You can also add examples of how to use add-ons. So if you start consuming an add-on and you kind of struggle with a bit to figure out how to get it to work, you can create a pull request in the readme with an example. And I've also done this with Ember sign-on queue unit, because like a lot of people, I actually spend a lot of time figuring out how to test my code in addition to writing my application code. And as you work on the framework more, you can add comments into the source code. You can work on developer tools like Ember Inspector.  And maintainers really appreciate you making these fixes, even if they seem trivial, because honestly, a lot of times they don't have time to take care of these themselves. So hopefully now you understand why I'm so passionate about developer experience and how important it is. DX is a great opportunity to help you learn more about the framework and also to help others learn. And if you're inspired to work on developer experience tools, I'm more than happy to talk to you about them. Just let me know. So, thank you.


Nigeria's fiscal sustainability is becoming a growing concern as the country's total public sector debt stoke has set from 46.25 trillion Naira to 81 trillion Naira as reviewed in the Debt Sustainability Report published by the Debt Management Office, Dean M.O. Now findings have shown that Nigeria's debt service in cost has increased by 55.71% to 1.24 trillion Naira in three months. According to data obtained from the Debt Management Office, between October and December 2022, Nigeria spent 406.77 billion Naira on domestic debt servicing, while it spent 312.27 million dollars on external debt servicing, giving a total of 550.51 billion Naira. However, between January and March 2023, Nigeria spent 874.13 billion Naira on domestic debt servicing, while it spent 801.36 million dollars on external debt servicing, giving a total of 1.24 trillion Naira. We will keep our eye on Nigeria's fiscal sustainability. Also, the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, LCCI, has asked the federal government to take the measures in response to the rise in inflation and its impact on households. Well, stay with us as we analyze these issues. I am Justin Akadone. Business Insights starts right now. Welcome back before we get to the matter of the day. Let us just show you just how to write an informal proposal over right back. Stay with us. Writing an informal proposal. The thought of writing a proposal overwhelms many people. But the task does not have to be daunting. Even my proposals are written when people need to ask permission to make a purchase, undertake a project or write a paper. This type of proposal is a way of persuasively putting forth an idea and asking for action to be taking on that idea. When writing a proposal, consider who will read the proposal and what that person may or may not already know about what you are proposing. Follow these steps when writing a proposal. 1. State your proposal. Do this clearly and concisely so that the reader knows immediately why you are writing. 2. Give some background information. Explain why you are proposing your suggestion so that the reader has a better understanding of the problem. 3. State a solution to the problem. This is where you give specifics about your suggestion. 4. Show costs. Lay out any costs that will be involved. 5. Conclusion. Wrap it up by restating the problem and the proposed solution. Welcome back. It's the Business Insights and Plus TV Africa. I am being joined by Gospel Obele, economist and together I will be looking at Nigeria's public debt stock and of course the issue of inflation and how it's impacting on Nigerians. Many thanks for joining me, Gospel Obele. Thank you for having me, Jay. Good morning. Good morning to you. Now according to the debt sustainability report published by the DMO, Nigeria's total debt stock has sought from $46.25 trillion to $81 trillion. Do you share any concerns as by the country meeting up with its obligations judging by the present day realities? Well, the best we can do right now is to restructure obligations in terms of servicing obligations and if possible even restructure repayment and all of those dynamics. And that's the safest way reasons why the current President Bola Amitinibu is very much inclined on the revenue side and closing up all the necessary gaps that exist to fix these issues. However, there is no need to internally begin to think and rework the economics of debt financing, which technically we can't really do without because we are not even generating enough. So whatever President Bola Amitinibu thinks to achieve or thinks to do within the context of revenue mobilization will not still be enough because the markets and the productive sectors are not really working at maximum potential or even mid-level potential to generate the weight of revenue that's required to finance the developmental project. So however, there's still going to be some form of reliance of debt financing. But we're expecting that some little more, the leverage around investors' confidence has been built due to the unification of the rates recently would enable that conversation and that negotiation of debt servicing, debt obligations as we go on into the future. All right, now let's still stay with the report. According to it, the federal government's projected revenue of 10 trillion Nair would push the debt to GDP ratio close to about the 40% limit that is reaching about 37.1%. In comparison, the debt service to revenue ratio would come in as high as 73.5%. I just want you to break all of that. Now what does that really mean? Sorry to say again. I said that there's some figures that was released by the DMO talking about debt service ratio and all of that. But let me specifically quote the report. It said the federal government's projected revenue of 10 trillion Naira would push the debt to GDP ratio close to about 40% limits. In comparison, the debt service to revenue ratio would come in as high as 73.5%. What does all of that mean? Yes, thank you so much. Debt servicing to revenue ratio simply means that the amount of your revenue garnered every year, all right, that fiscal year that is used to service debt. So if you're looking at that 75%, it means that 75% of total government revenue at the revenue list of things will be used to service debt. And servicing debt doesn't necessarily mean that you're repaying it. It technically means that you are paying the interest charge on those debts, and maybe a little percentage of the principal, depending on the agreement and the structuring contracts you had with the principal. So what that simply means is that there may be little or nothing significantly left for financing public sector or even public sector finance or public expenditure to a very large extent. And it's also a bit worrisome, again, because when you also look at the block of revenue potential of the 2023 budget, and you're taking 75% of that chunk for servicing, it tells us that we're in a really, really fiscal mess, and there are big concerns around what fiscal sustainability means. So give or take the primary low-hanging food for the president now would be to expand revenue, because if you expand revenue, it means that you'll be taking a lesser percentage of the revenue to service debt. And technically means you have more money to fund your developmental aspirations. Secondly, would be to also leverage the growing, quote unquote, the perceived growing investors' confidence, and then take advantage of that to find ways to rake in more development financing streams for infrastructure or investment purposes. The very large, big ticket sustainability pathway in the whole of this thing, I mean, I mean, the only, the most sustainable way around this whole mess to a very large extent will be to ensure that debt financing and also extra revenues that have been raised into public expenditure are used in critical sector that can help us unlock productivity and revenue and effects are seen as quick as possible. Once we can begin to achieve that, it's a lot easier for us to service debt, repay back as much as we can, which also grows in the form of confidence within the ecosystem, as well as also grow our market capabilities to fund our developmental aspirations ourselves. So more money will be required to jumpstart the Nigerian economy, and part of sustainability becomes on, are we making enough and how do we expand the market to make enough so that that 75% give or take can shrink based off on, you know, increased revenue targets and all that. Okay, so just before we leave off this issue and talk about inflation in a moment, you talked about the new measures that the president has put in place in recent times. Now, but my question right now would be, how confident are you with the fact that and the last time assembly actually raised the limits of the ways and means and what implications are we going to be seeing anytime soon? Well, we're expecting that many of these policies, I mean the ways and means and all that, just don't forget that a lot of things are really developing stage.  All right, so that's very critical for us to achieve the goal of this bill or this act that has been designed or ruled out in the first place that any form of interruption on the execution process of it being the fact that government has changed hands, you have new people coming to the space and they still need to settle into the government. You know, we're still in the setting, we're not even up to 90 days yet. All right, so a lot bothers heavily at the risk of execution knowing fully how the Nigerian space, you know, thinks about policy, thinks about running out bills and act and thinks about those who would take those things and run with them. All right, so what's the economics of this change and how would it impact on the overall objective of these policies and acts that have been introduced? Let's not forget also, the president has also sought to change the board of many of the Parasitals right now in Nigeria, you know, and there are lots of Parasitals whose, whose, sorry, the success of this bill, you know, is largely dependent on, you know, the initial strength of these Parasitals. All right, so will he make or break, you know, the future of this policy in context to deliver his objective and these are the rising developing questions that we're in this stage in. So for now, it's a ticket of let's watch how the process evolves, who's executing what and to what extent we can really be stopped on the positive side of these bills, you know, going to market and helping us deliver on the objectives. All right, all right, it's still business insights on plus TV Africa, we still have gospel ability with us in the house. We'll take a very quick break and we'll be turning our attention to inflation in a moment to join us again.


Please introduce yourself and then your question. Thank you. I'm Kurt Jensen from the Danish Foreign Ministry. And my question is primarily to the first presenter, not only because you did mention Denmark a couple of times, but also because I work in the Foreign Office with the International Development Corporation, and we want to change the world. And if you turn around, the banner behind you is also about development. So I was taken by the title of your presentation, but I don't think you quite gave honour to the title in your presentation because I'm not an economist, I have to say. The picture or the measurement of inequality that you work with in your approach, in your analysis, I'm just wondering how you as an economist, because the end results that you're measuring, the quantitative data that you presented, there's a reason why this is so. And there's a context around why these levels of inequality are there in the first place. And we heard from the keynote presenter this morning that you can have a government and then you can have reforms and then the picture changes. And you did make a reference to say you didn't want to go into the country level because of ethical reasons. I would argue it has nothing to do with ethics, it has to do with politics. I come from a country where we have one government after the other and the inequality levels are very much dependent on which government we have in power. So it's not a taboo way anyway, this is what it's all about. It's a battlefield. So I would end my question by throwing the ethics back to you as an economist that don't you have responsibility to somehow say, okay, this is a picture. We see that you have painted in your research. But how does that help policymaking? How can we use such information in policymaking, which is what we sometimes do in governments? How can it be helpful for us to, whether we want to have more or less inequality because that's a battlefield also. Some argue that a little bit of inequality is good and some argue the opposite. Thank you. Thank you. I think we had a question there in the middle. The gentleman in the middle, the gray jacket. Sorry, with the gray jacket here. Thank you very much. My name is Muhammad. I'm from University of Helsinki. originally I'm from Sudan. Of course my question goes for the data from Sudan. I would comment that the data which you have presented, my question relates to the two speakers in the middle who present the, and then also on the polarization. I think the middle class which you have shown in the data of 2009, that completely disappeared from Sudan because the vulnerable group joined the poor and the middle goes to the vulnerable. And the last group, which you said is like 10%, I think that has decreased, that is the richest, has decreased quite much from the 10% to 4%. And much of the Sudanese now, like over 70%, like now becoming like poor, about 26%, like vulnerable. And 4% only the richest. And the richest goes from, drop from 10% because of kind of struggle between the, within the ruling party who are not becoming the capitalist. Those are not from the wealthiest part of the society, but they are politicians themselves. So the only 4% of the population are the politicians share the whole wealth of the country. That goes also to the data collection concerning the government statistics and this household surveys. My worry and concern about if you rely on the household surveys conducted by the government, that is a false and vague thing also because we should have to rely on an independent institution that who conducted this household survey. It's not only the household survey that matters rather than government statistics, but who conducted the household survey also matters because the government, if they conducted even the household survey, they know how to twist it and they use it for their own statistics. The question is always those critics raised for the government, but the answer is always that it's like it's globalization. This is an impact of globalization. So my question relates to you both to comment on that and to the last speaker on the connection and divide between the impact of globalization and local policies on inequality. Thank you very much. Thank you. So we have just a few more minutes and we have time for maybe one more quick question and if there's anybody who has a question specifically on the last paper that would be, I'll give you priority. No? Okay, let's ask one question in the front here from Miguel. Thanks Rachel. My name is Miguel Nino from Union Weather. I have two questions. I don't know for the last presentation, but for Alice and Halliden, for Alice, you know, the estimate that you present is based on Milanovic and deletes data, right? But we know that these data sources are based on household surveys, which usually exclude the top or the very end of the income distribution, right? So my question is how would your results would be biased without these critical data sources that you don't have there? One question I have is also on your threshold that you presented, which is beyond the normative considerations, which are equally important, I wasn't sure your technical arguments behind what you said, right? And then on the second presentation is I wasn't sure what was your methodology. So what is new and different from what we know from previous studies? So that's basically my question. Great. Thank you. So I know there are a lot of other questions, but I'm going to stop here so that we can give our presenters a little bit of time to respond. And then I'd invite you to talk to the presenters over lunch and then ask them some of your remaining questions. But for the final presentation, I thought this was a really interesting presentation. All of the papers were really interesting and I'd urge you to download and read them if you haven't done so yet. But I thought the first question would actually be interesting for the final presenter to address as well. I was struck by your final comment about the relationship between polarization and conflict. And I wonder if there's something in your analysis that could be used by policymakers to speak to these issues, the relationship between polarization and conflict. So I know everybody wants to get to lunch and I don't want to cut short the presenters, but I'll ask each of the one author from each paper to speak for one to two minutes briefly and then if you'd like to continue discussions over lunch, please do so, please come up. Okay, so let's go in order of presentations. Thank you for the very good questions. I think there might have been a misunderstanding. It's not that I don't want to go into the ethical discussion. I very much do. But I think there are differences or there might be differences for inequality preference at local level so I cannot discuss these different preferences in a global set for each country. I very much agree with you that the importance should lie in what we can do about actual policy to change inequality. And actually the paper is an attempt to address exactly that because I think the problem with measuring inequality does not lie is that we might address the wrong areas and thus have wrong policy or not sufficiently efficient policymaking. And I very much want to have a follow-up paper that specifically addresses the policy proposals and that must be much more region-specific or even country-specific because it depends very much on the context. But as a first step, I think it's very important to measure inequality and concentration at the top especially in a way that displays the actual changes so that we can address and then look at a specific policy and just change the world. This was connected to the question about the threshold that is I agree to some degree arbitrary. I think any kind of threshold that we want to fix is well maybe not arbitrary but ideologically defined. So the technical reason or the in quotation marks technicality then because it's still ideological is that if we have maximum of inequality of whatever level that is, we know that we don't want to go across that. We don't want to overstep that line. If that maximum is of volume 2 of 1 which is the world average coincidentally that gives plenty of scope to improve and half of the country's at least inequality is not as ambition as I would like it speaking about the maximum or minimum inequality some people saying that inequality should not maybe be zero or very low. I think it can be quite low. I think it could be a more ambitious target still but as a start it's probably a reasonable measure. I'll give some space to the others as well. Yeah, sorry. Thank you. Thank you. Let me address Miguel's more fundamental question to start off with. Actually it's if I had a bit more time I would go back and explain what it is that we were doing why it is that we were doing this but I'll use a very simple analogy. If you want to answer the question of how many poor people are there in the world today how do you answer that? Well, the UN the world community has agreed to use the $1.25. If you believe that the $1.25 in purchasing power parity does a good job in measuring poverty then problem solved and everybody goes back happy and we go to September saying that poverty has been reduced by I don't know is it like 50% or 60% mainly because of China and India. If you believe that the $1.25 is faulty as we do then you come up with a completely different conclusion. I did a paper with the International Poverty Centre two years ago and the results if we use another method to account for the problems with the PPPs then yes there has been progress but probably around 14%, not 60%. We are doing exactly the same by throwing out the use of PPPs to measure the middle class by going back to the national surveys and doing what our colleague in Nigeria has done to look at the survey itself and go back to the very same principles that the World Bank for example has put in order to decide on who is or is not a poor person in Egypt, Syria, Sudan and so forth by going back to the definitions of national poverty lines to define who is poor. Once you define who is a poor person and who is a vulnerable person vulnerable to fall into poverty that's easy because we already have the literature well developed on that real challenge is to come up with an equivalent definition on answering the question of who is a middle class person well that's difficult so what we decided to do is to focus on a question well who's not and that methodology I believe answers that question had more time I would have gotten into the more technical details. One final response to Sudan I agree with you the Sudanese data in particular of all of the nine countries and it comes to I mean robustness but we have to work with the data that we have and there's a lot of again in the ideal world we would have done the harmonization a lot of data harmonization like our colleague has done in the case of Nigeria but we believe that the error margin from mixing up these surveys does not really account for a huge discrepancy of the results so had I more if we had more resources to do the harmonization and we've talked a lot with the World Bank experts on that so we believe the methodologies are comparable then the discrepancies from sampling surveyed I mean sampling from discrepancies and others are not that large to account for a huge difference but definitely post 2009 the results would be different how different we don't know we did the exercise for Yemen and for Syria because we had information that would allow us to do so in the case of Sudan I agree with you it would be very different but we don't just have enough information to say by 10% 15% or otherwise thank you I'll be very quick both the question the first one on quality of the data it's my answer is basically very similar to the first one just to underline the fact that I agree with you the risk of basing the research only on government governmental data but in our case there is also the work by the World Bank the last survey we used for the analysis of polarization in Nigeria was made by the National Bureau of Statistics but in accordance with under the guidelines of the World Bank and in consideration of that we also excluded the fact that the first kind of data the one coming from the first wave that we use in our analysis the one referring to the 2003 the National longitudinal survey is I mean they are not really reliable this is also one of the reason why we decide to adopt this kind of technique of backward imputation in time and the second question on polarization and conflict you are my answer is I don't know because the fact is that there is in the literature this kind of link which could be explored between polarization and conflict for example Jose Maria Esteban Jean-Yves Duclos and so on which can be considered the fathers of the notion of polarization in the literature they also have in their articles in the title of their of their articles the word conflict and this word is always linked to polarization which is the main topic of the article but in some recent papers they wrote in particular Esteban also they complain about the fact that there is little empirical evidence on this kind of link so our next step will be to invent some kind of methodology to work on this kind of link I mean my affirmation is not really correct because there are a lot of works on the possibility to find an empirical link between these two concepts but the efforts and this is the major complain by the fathers of polarization are still limited so we will try to give a link between polarization and conflict in an original way we want the results the empirical results on the fact that consumption distribution as a proxy of income distribution in Nigeria is polarized in this case, thank you okay just a very quick final word thank you to our presenters and to the audience if you haven't done so yet please do read these papers they're very rich papers and we can only touch on issues that they discuss in the presentations so thank you, please head over to lunch