ystems, and interceptors. It needs artillery munitions. And of course, our industrial base produces all of that. And we have work to expand our capacity in our industrial base to produce anti-tank weapons systems. I appreciate the point.  I just, as you heard, I've limited time. I just want to get through a couple more questions. So what does victory look like for Ukraine? How do you define victory? You may have heard me say this earlier, Senator, but we've said from the very beginning that what we want to see is a Ukraine that's a democratic country that is independent and has the ability to protect its sovereign territory, to defend its sovereign territory, and to deter aggression. Does that mean Crimea is part of Ukraine? Crimea is a part of Ukraine. Well, okay. Right. But in order for the war to be over, does Ukraine have to control Crimea? In terms of how things transition going forward, you know, I would not want to predict what President Zelensky will decide. I think part of the problem with all due respect is that this administration has not articulated what an exit strategy is. To me, this is a blank check for a war that without any clearly defined goals will be endless. And that is, so the skepticism among, I didn't vote for the supplemental, because I don't think that we've, we don't have adequate controls on how the money is being spent. Victory hasn't been defined. So for America's interest, I understand America's interest, we're continuing to head down this road and now we're getting a budget request that doesn't, isn't reflective of the administration's, for however long it takes, statement. So that's, that's part of the objection. I guess one of the issues too is, and I want to make sure I'm clear, is that the administration's position that Ukraine should be admitted into NATO? It's NATO's position overall that... No, the United States of America. What is the administration's position on Ukraine's admission to NATO? I think you've heard the president say that, and of course, NATO has an open door policy. So all of the countries have worked towards... I'm really not trying to put you in a weird spot. I just heard Secretary Blinken say, or maybe it was a mistranslation. So I'm just looking for clarity. If it's the position of the United States of America that Ukraine should be admitted into NATO. Was that question as to whether or not they should be admitted right now or in the future? Either or. Well, right now they're in a war, Senator. Right, so that would be a disastrous result because we would go to war. That's right. Right. That's right. But let's say the war ends tomorrow. That's what all... Or September 30th, based on this budget, ends September 30th. Is it the position of this administration that Ukraine should be admitted into NATO? It's unlikely that the war will end on September 30th, but again, it's the goal of the alliance to bring Ukraine into the alliance at some point in the future. All right. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, a lot of time. Thank you. Thank you, Senator Duckworth, please. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me just say that a free independent Democratic Ukraine that can defend itself is in America's national interest and, in fact, should Russia overrun Ukraine, it will not stop with Ukraine, and then Article 5 of NATO will be invoked, bringing U.S. troops. So this is about keeping U.S. troops out of a war in Europe. Good morning to our witnesses. Secretary Austin, I want to applaud your engagement in the Indo-Pacific. Your nine official visits to the region underscores the United States' deep commitment to our allies and partners. And it is so important that the Department of Defense continues to make the region a priority for investments, including in Guam, Hawaii, and addressing contested logistics in the region. Next month, I am leading a codel with my colleague, Senator Sullivan, to the Shangri-La Dialogues, where we will engage with our partners on a range of national security issues. Secretary Austin, I have long been an advocate for strengthening our mill-to-mill partnerships in Southeast Asia. What investments do you plan to make in the fiscal year 25 DOD budget to implement the U.S.-ASEAN Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, and how can Congress help you in that effort? By the way, I'll see you at the dialogue. We, as you know, the U.S. Secretary of Defense has supported that every year. And again, I think we've made great progress in strengthening our relationships with partners in the region. In terms of ASEAN, we have continued to develop our relationships with ASEAN members. Every year, we attend the Defense Ministerial Meeting members plus. And so I think we've gained a lot of ground in reassuring partners in the region. We also recognize the primacy of ASEAN. And again, I think relationships are as strong as they've ever been based upon the continued efforts of not only the department, but leaders like yourself who continue to go out to the Indo-Pacific. And I suspect you have more than my nine visits to the Indo-Pacific since you've been in office. But so thank you for everything that you're doing. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I've discussed the need to improve DOD's medical readiness in the Indo-Pacific with every service chief and combatant commander who comes before this committee. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that the DOD has adequate military treatment facilities for service members and their families during peacetime and in the event of a conflict. I would like to discuss an NDA proposal for FY25 that is a priority for me. The golden hour for saving lives will be rarely achievable due to the great distances within the Indo-Pacific should there be conflict in the region. So I would like the DOD to establish a medical readiness program in the Indo-Pacific to address current gaps in DOD's medical capacity allowing DOD to access accredited foreign medical facilities for patient care while also creating a medical readiness strategy within the region. DOD already does a version of this in the Republic of Korea and we need to expand this concept across the region where appropriate. And in fact the DOD helped to set up among others the Aju Trauma Center which is designed and to be exactly like the San Diego Trauma Center. I mean the doctor there Dr. Lee Kuk Jong was trained by U.S. surgeons. I mean in fact that is where the North Korean dictator defector was sent in 2018 and his life was saved because he was able to be operated on at that center. Secretary Austin, DOD has a limited number of military treatment facilities west of the international date line. Do you think working with our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific can help DOD improve its medical readiness both in peacetime but also in the event of a large-scale conflict where we are not able to medivac service members back to the United States? I do Senator and I agree with you. I think Korea is a great example from talking to our troops and family members. They really appreciate having the ability to do what you describe and take advantage of existing capabilities. So there's no doubt possibilities to do those types of things in other places and I think we should explore that. Thank you. Secretary Austin, under Secretary McChord and General Brown can you work with my staff and me to refine this proposal with a goal of potentially establishing this medical readiness program in the FY25 and EAA? We will, Senator. Thank you. And you're back, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much, Senator Duckworth. Senator Blumenthal will be recognized. He will terminate the hearing. I must go vote. We will reconvene at 1230 and SVC 217 honor about 1230 for the closed session. So we will see you again in the closed session, SVC 217. I'll recognize Senator Blumenthal as the last member and he will adjourn the open session. Senator Blumenthal, please. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. I will be brief. I want to thank you all for your service as I'm sure my colleagues have and apologize that I haven't been here for the full hearing. I was here earlier. I want to ask about Navy shipbuilding and particularly submarines and the industrial base. As you know, the Navy's recently released 45-day shipbuilding review offered a pretty sobering look into the future of procurement efforts by the Navy. And according to this assessment, every major program faces multiple years of delays, including the Columbia and Virginia class submarines, which give the Navy an essential edge in undersea warfare over our competitors. Russia and China are trending in the opposite direction. They're building more. They're developing more and more advanced submarines. The decision to fund the production of just one Virginia class submarine seems highly alarming. And in addition, it sends a signal to our key AUKUS partner that the United States may not fulfill its commitment to providing a key capability. So I am troubled that this decision seems to undermine procurement stability, the workforce development, and our credibility in this area with some of our key allies. So I would appreciate your comments, Mr. Secretary, on how we are going to correct any potential loss of capability, loss of progress in undersea warfare, and the kind of respect from our allies that we need to continue in this area of undersea superiority. Thanks, Senator. And our undersea supremacy is indeed a strategic advantage that no country in the world can match. And we're going to work to keep it that way. The current issue is one of capacity. And there is a backlog currently in terms of industry's ability to produce submarines on time. So we could increase the backlog or we could choose to invest in the industrial base to expand capacity so that they can speed production up. And that's what we're doing. In FY23 and 24, we requested some $1.9 billion to invest in the submarine industrial base. In this budget, we're asking you for a total of $4 billion. And in addition to that, the supplemental that we've spoken so much about today includes a $3.3 billion request to also invest in the industrial base. And that'll help us strengthen supply lines. And it'll also help industry recruit and retain the workforce that will need to produce these really sophisticated platforms. I just met with the CEOs of General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls. And we talked about the challenges that they were facing and what we're going to do with the resources that we're providing them to expand their capability and capacity. So it's a good discussion. And they are investing some of their own capital to do that as well. So in terms of Australia and the signal that it sends to Australia, I remain in contact with my counterpart, the Australian Minister of Defense, and we've talked about this issue. And they get it. And by the way, Australia is investing in our submarine industrial base as well. So we're doing the right things in investing in the industrial base. And hopefully, hopefully, but that will get us on the right path in the mid to longer term. But but increasing the backlog is probably not the right thing to do at this point in time. And investing in capacity and capability is the right thing to do, I think. I respect that answer because it recognizes the realities of what we face. Electric boat has to hire 5,300 more people in the next year or so, 5,300 skilled welders, pipe fitters, electricians, not just people hired off the street. And I know that on paper, you could easily say, well, we're going to build two submarines a year, but it wouldn't happen. And I think that the candor and and realism are very much to be respected. My purging would be that we make the investment of sufficient size to meet the reality of the challenge. Because, as you've said so well, our undersea warfare supremacy is a key capability. And I would hope the Congress would support you in this effort. Thank you. I'm going to respect the five minute rule, even though there's no one to discipline me. And thank you for your testimony on behalf of the committee and adjourn the committee. Thank you very much. Thanks, Senator.


The first thing to say about siege warfare is that sieges can only be directed against enemy armed forces and never against civilians. In particular, in order for essential infrastructure not to collapse and to ensure that civilians continue to have access to basic needs, international humanitarian law protects such objects that are essential for their survival, such as foodstuffs or water installations from attack or destruction or damage. And even if such infrastructure is used in direct support of military action, international humanitarian law prohibits attacks against it if the civilian would be left so much without food and water as to cause its starvation. Indeed starvation against civilians is prohibited as a method of warfare. This means that deprivation of food and water cannot be purposefully directed against civilians or indiscriminately applied to them. A besieging party cannot cause mass starvation of civilians by claiming that it was merely intending to deprive the enemy armed forces of food and water. And lastly and importantly, international humanitarian law requires that the warring parties always allow and facilitate rapid and unimpeded humanitarian relief for civilians in need. They can of course control relief shipments, but such controls may never lead to undue delays or to make humanitarian relief in effect impossible. Civilians must not be trapped in besieged areas and this means that the warring parties have an obligation to allow civilians to leave the area. In areas where fighting is taking place, one obvious precautionary measures that the warring parties can take is to evacuate civilians or at least to allow them to flee. In fact, the Geneva Conventions foresee that the parties should find arrangements to allow for the evacuation of people at particular risk such as children, the wounded and sick, persons with disabilities or pregnant women. Sieges must not be used to forcibly displace civilians. Civilians can only be temporary and may last no longer than the security of civilians or imperative military reasons demand. Civilians who have been displaced have a right to voluntarily and safely return to their homes as soon as the reasons for their displacement have ceased to exist. When people are left in a besieged area, the warring parties remain bound by all the rules protecting them from the effects of hostilities such as the principles of distinction, precaution, proportionality and the mere fact of remaining in a besieged area, whether voluntarily or forcibly or as human shields or indeed the presence of fighters amongst civilians does not deprive civilians from their protections against attacks. The besieged party must abide by all the rules of international humanitarian law. It must take all feasible precautions to protect civilians from the effects of the fighting, in particular allow them to leave the area or remove them from near military objectives. It's prohibited under international humanitarian law to use civilians as human shields to render immune certain areas from military operations.


In this segment, I'm going to talk about two different, two very important concepts related to interest rate. The first one is the nominal interest rate and the second is the real interest rate. So when you take the quote from a financial institution that you want to borrow some money from them, they will quote a certain rate of interest. They would say that we will be charging you 12% or 18% or 30%. The 30% quote or the rate that you see in the newspaper or any of their brochures that mention interest rate, that is considered as the nominal interest rate. When we adjust the nominal interest rate according to inflation, we said that for example, if inflation tells us that the general price level has gone up to 6% or 5%. So from the nominal interest rate, you take out that particular aspect of inflation when you adjust it for inflation. So the value of the interest rate is called the real interest rate. So if we define the two concepts, we can say that the real interest rate is the adjusted interest rate, which is obtained by subtracting the expected changes in the price level. That is, you have minused inflation from the nominal inflation rate. And then you get the interest rate that will be considered as the real interest rate. And the nominal inflation is present in that and we are quoting the value of the interest rate and we call it the nominal interest rate. The nominal interest rate will be quoted and you will be told, but it is very important that you calculate the real interest rate as well. And according to that, the nominal interest rate and the real interest rate, consider both the values and undertake your investment decisions. So they are two very important concepts. And it is not necessary that if you are getting a nominal interest rate, a high positive rate, then it is not necessary that the real interest rate is also very good. There may be a possibility that when you adjust the nominal inflation rate, then you will get the real interest rate negative. So that is why it is very important that you should not just consider the nominal interest rate and not do your financial decision making. You should also consider the real interest rate. Now when we talk about the real interest rate, we have two types of real interest rates. One we are saying that we have the ex ante real interest rate. And the other we have the ex post real interest rate. So when we talk about ex ante, then this word is used always for the first time. So this means that you are expecting that in the future, how do we define the inflation? We say inflation is the increase in the general price level. Deflation is the opposite of it. The general price level will fall, so we will say deflation has come. Generally you must know that we have a basket of goods and services which are available on the use of a common person. On the average household of a common person, how much amount of ghee, lentils, electricity and other utilities are used. All those things are considered and a basket is prepared. And the value of that basket, all the things that are considered in that basket, what is their value now? And what was their value after 6 months? And what was their value after 1 year? We calculate inflation by calculating its value. So if we assume that after the next 6 months, the value of that basket will increase by 5% then you had a real interest nominal of 15%. You took 5% out of that and said that the real interest rate is going to be 10%. This means that the change in the things is not as much. You are expecting it. So if you are expecting it and considering the expected price level, you have calculated the real interest rate. For example, if the real interest rate is 10%, it means that our expected inflation is 5% and nominal interest rate is 15%. So our expected real interest rate is going to be 10%. You have pre-conceived it. We will say that it is an ex-ante, an ex-ante real interest rate. But after 6 months, you have recorded, the government basically issues that in the last 6 months, or in the last 1 month, or in the last 1 year, the general price level has gone up so much, so you assess that value and see how much was the actual inflation. So when you consider the actual inflation and calculate the real interest rate, we call that real interest rate as exposed. Exposed means later, ex-ante means first. So first ex-ante real interest rate means that you have considered the expected inflation and you have calculated the real interest rate. So it is important that which procedure you have used, you have considered the expected inflation or you have considered the actual inflation. With the help of that, you will know whether your real interest rate is exposed or ex-ante. So in ex-ante, you are already deciding, you have the value of inflation in the exposed, you calculate your real interest rate with the help of that. So when I told you that the inflation rate is minus, the expected prices, so this means that we are going to talk about a standard formula which we use. Do you know the nominal interest rate? Do you know the expected prices? So how will we remove the real interest rate? For that, we have a concept which is called the Fisher Equation. Fisher Equation was developed by Irving Fisher that with the help of this concept, you can calculate the real interest rate. What is it that to calculate the real interest rate, the nominal interest rate, you will subtract the expected price level. So the formula I have written, you can see that there is a small R written with I which is the subscript which represents, symbolizes the real interest rate. And along with that, I have applied an E on the pie. So E is expected and pie is general price level. So when we add the expected price level to the real interest rate, it will become nominal. So if we have to calculate the real interest rate, we will have to subtract the expected price level from the nominal interest rate. So we will be able to come up with the value of real interest rate. When the real interest rate is less, if the value of the real interest rate is less, this means that the borrower will get less cost of borrowing. If he has to pay less, then it is more incentive for him to borrow. So borrower is more incentive for him to borrow. He feels more feasible if your real interest rate is less. But if the real interest rate is higher, this means that the borrower should not buy in this situation. Who will benefit in this situation? The lender. He will get more profit. He will get more profit. In this situation, I am going to tell you a related concept. Whenever the government wants people to invest more and we have more investment on infrastructure, more projects to expand existing projects, then it tries to reduce the interest rate. So when you assess the cost of borrowing, you evaluate your internal rate of return for your business, then you feel that we should borrow more and we should make more investment. Because the value of borrowed money is very less in the form of interest. But when the interest rate is very high, then you see that our investment is squeezed and it becomes less. So the real interest rate, along with borrowing, there is a relationship that borrowing will be more if the real interest rate is low and borrowing will be less if the real interest rate is higher. So there is this important trade-off which we need to understand. Next, we should know that I had mentioned the real interest rate in the beginning. I am emphasizing that on the nominal interest rate, you don't have to make your decision-making, you have to consider the real interest rate. And to discuss this particular aspect, I have shown a graph here for you. In this graph, you can see that we have the data of the real interest rates in USA and the data taken in this is from 1950 to 2010. On such a long time period, you can see that the blue line that you can see is the nominal rate. This blue line is the nominal rate and the black line is showing the real interest rate. So you can see that the blue line is saying that it is very high and the value is continuously above zero. And in the beginning, it was below four, but after that, we can see that its range is going up to 1980. Its value has gone up to eight percent. And after that, in 1978-79, its value has gone up to twelve, it has gone up to fifteen. The nominal interest rate has gone up and then we can see the fall. And then we can see the fluctuations. Overall, wherever you can see, there is a recession. If you see the nominal interest rate in 2007, you can see that the nominal interest rate is going down a lot. But throughout, if you look at this graph from another perspective, you can see that the blue line is significantly above the black line. Now, we have adjusted the inflation of this blue line and we have shown the real interest rate . So, you can see that there are many such points, especially this whole patch in which from 1972-1980, you can see the real interest rate in this entire time period is negative because this is the zero line and here in this entire time period, you can see the real interest rate below the zero line. However, the nominal interest rate is positive in this time period and it has gone up very sharply that I have told you that it has gone up even from 15% but when you adjust it with inflation, you can see that it is going negative in this time period. Similarly, when I told you in 2007, we talk about the recession time period, if you look at the nominal, the decline of the dip in the nominal interest rate there was a recession in 2007 of the financial recession but when you have adjusted it with inflation, you can see that the real interest rate is once again negative. So, if we compare in this whole diagram, if we match the fluctuations of the blue line with the fluctuations of the brown line and you can see that their movement is going together in parallel or not. So, you get to see the amazing differences and they make it clear that when we have to make a financial decision, we don't just look at the nominal interest rate, we have to calculate the value of the real interest rate and consider it because if the nominal interest rate shows very fancy and high values, then when you convert it, then you have seen that there are many such chances in which the real interest rate is going to be negative. So, this particular diagram was explaining the differences in the nominal interest rate and the real interest rate and you can have a better understanding now after having a deeper analysis of this particular diagram that ensures that guarantees that the two are all together different concepts, although they are named but they have different concepts and values and their behavior is completely different over time. So, when you make a decision related to your finances, whatever financial decision making, borrowing, investment, saving, then you don't just have to consider the nominal interest rate, but you have to account for your financial decision making.


Today I'm going to talk about what I call the 10x hypothesis and it's about it's often easier to improve by 10x than to improve by 10% So my name is Arjan van der Ven, like Jim said, I lead a team at Intel whose charter is to push boundaries My job is to find the next 10x. My job is to and my team's job is to find how can we push computing 10x forward? It really is easier to do 10x than a 10% and today I'm going to talk to you through some examples of that And I'm hoping at the end of it you'll actually agree with me In my team we build a Linux distribution. Yes, Intel makes a Linux distribution All our customers have their own Linux distribution today and for us to be able to effectively work with our customers We need to know what's hard for them. We need to know what they're struggling through I mean to show them what what is possible with Linux on Intel architecture So this is sort of a backdrop of what my team does and this is where we build a lot of our innovations and 10x is on top of and Sort of the 10x ID started about in 2008 When at the Plumas conference, I stood up with Auker and we said hey We've shown that you can boot a Linux operating system to a full UI in five seconds And we actually had a machine there and we demoed it and we had to demo it ten times because it went too quick At the time Linux service booted in about two minutes, and then you had your UI up. We showed five seconds and That's a little bit more than 10x in that case People didn't believe it. So we had to show it ten times and we had to we talked all day about how we did that how we changed the rules and The key of how we did that was it is not about making things faster It's about making things fast The mindset we had in that project was we need to not go from two minutes to one minute thirty. We need to go to five five seconds I'm talking 10x so today if you look at our clear Linux we boot in about 400 milliseconds. There's another 10x on top of our 10x but it's a way of You need to think outside of the box to actually get to these kind of questions It's about make boot fast not faster Likewise and This was we talked about a 2012 plumberals again CI CD is hot. Everybody talks about CI CD. Everybody wants to deploy 100 times a second Deploying 100 times a second is fine As long as your deployment itself is efficient in the operating system space where we want to Deploy at least twice a day if not five times a day If your update mechanism is slow No, customer will update you can't actually do CI CD properly if you can't actually update fast and In the age of Docker people sort of ignore it a little bit But even Docker updates you want to be efficient your deployment needs to be efficient So we talked about in 2012 about okay, we're gonna do a half a second OS update not three minutes half a second And if you use your more apt or Sometimes those take a while We show that you can do half a second if you change the rules a little bit If you change if you go to an atomic update model if you go to slightly course a granularity of packages Today Ubuntu snappy Right at atomic. They're all doing the same paradigms But again, it's a 10x change to the existing paradigm to make deployment fast. No 10x Unfortunately not all our lives are 10x If everything was a 10x it was easy sometimes you need a lot of 10% to get a little bit of improvement and I'm not gonna say we don't ever work on 10x 10% because There's a lot of money made and a lot of people investing in a 10x improvements on little things Here we showed in our benchmark ours and the next foundation project There well, you can go a little faster if you do the compiler flags, right? And all the little 10x is 10% these things But you get great press with it and you get some nice quotes, but 10% is nice And you as Intel we do that so that at least people get the 10% improvement, but kind of boring So I asked the team to look at cafe machine deep learning We needed to figure out what is what is what makes machine learning expensive all makes it hard Can we do a 10x on cafe? So we sat down and we said, okay, we need to use AVX. So don't our nice Intel instructions They're supposedly eight times faster. We have multi course. That's for multi-threading And we had a team and they started digging in a in cafe and Pretty soon. It's okay. We're making some some nice improvements. We made that a baseline and Last Friday I asked them. Okay. I'm going on stage on Romans day. Where are we at cafe? 5x So I go to the guys like guys I'm gonna be on stage about 10x and we're at five. They said, yeah, but we only need to X more and Think how great that is if you're working on a 10% project and you tell your boss, I'm at 5% And the boss goes, yeah, but you need to do 2x more you get your ass handed to you and you could sort of walked out of the building My team tells me only need we only need to X more Yeah, okay You have an idea how to do it. Yeah, we have to reinvent how it's chain Neural networks together and we do some parallelism and we have to invent some new locking mechanisms. Okay, you're on your path, right? No worries So they asked me to put in that there's a work in progress because they were not done because I didn't want to be slammed on stage here, but It's a mindset of we only have to X to go. That's the mindset that we were working in my team And it's a mindset is an interesting challenge Don't settle for 10% right if you can say over at 5x we only need to X more Not a bad sport to be So I promised to kitty pictures in my bio. So I have to actually include some pick on cats One of the things that you will see in teams that don't think in 10x but think in 10% is admiring the problem Discussing for hours and hours of meetings. Oh, we have this problem. So we can't solve it We have this this is hard. This is impossible We can't actually get anywhere. We were just admiring the problem If you if you find yourself in meetings where people really spent a lot of time admiring the problems You find yourself in a 10% crew It's Sort of a telltale for me if you're really admiring the problem. It's a really bad space to be so You talked about the Linux OS. So let's talk about containers a little bit container con. We should talk about that And how we can do 10x there. So historically it always was Virtual meetings are expensive but containers have some security concerns. How do you balance that?  You instead of the container running on your bare bare metal kernel you wrap a light virtual machine around it and At least you solve the security portion of it That was a guy in our in my peers said yeah, well I've done virtualization for 10 years and how do container stuff. This is not possible.  It's just not gonna happen. It's impossible I said but well, but I want to do this in a minute seconds And I want to actually have almost no memory consumption like that's absolutely impossible Someone tells me it's impossible That's I think it was a challenge So we started working on this How do we how do we make this faster? We optimize we build some tools we measured where we were we fixed some of the really stupid things like virtual floppy The rise that takes two seconds to start up and we went through the whole process We picked the right we picked KVM tool as a hypervisor Six weeks in we're about 150 milliseconds start up time from start to having a container running Takes about 20 megabytes of memory density was fine. I go back to in the staff meeting and say look It's wasn't impossible. We have you know our memory and we have a startup time and the guy goes oh Well, oh But you can't do Docker Okay We all talker Every single customer. We talked to said the same thing. We need to integrate with Docker Okay, it wasn't even a challenge. Sorry. We just did it Which we have Docker running we've been here last year we talked about it our customers now say hey KVM Tool well if we Google it we see Linus hating it. So we want KVM you Know the strong argument, but customers customer. It's always right. Can we make you am you 10 times faster? You can we do the same thing. Can we make you am you a fast and no This was actually easy because we knew we could actually achieve the objective because we already shown it We just had to do it again in a different technology So yes, we make your time time. We made the same thing happen with Kiam you Anthony zoo. I'm not sure it's here actually spent three weeks and you am you was fast. It was about solving Stupid things removing doing something a thousand time thing instead of once those kind of automations If you think about 10% you'll never get there if you think about okay, we have to change the rules I don't know big deal. We know what can be done. Give me three weeks. Okay, so If you want to see how it works It's Docker, right? I was trying to make a video, but it you can't blink your eyes and then the result is there So I just made a screenshot If you want to see it live come to our booth upstairs But this is this is Docker where the backhand runs in a virtual machine at the density and the time where you would normally run a traditional Docker and The project is open source or in GitHub all that sort of good stuff. I don't have to tell his audience how that works So this was easy to contain it for easy. We only have to make VMs fast. No big deal easy Let's do something hard cloud Intel is pretty invested in OpenStack and OpenStack is complex OpenStack isn't fast So we said on a team last year Can we make open stack launch over VM faster because we can launch a VM in a hundred milliseconds or 150 milliseconds But if you measure open stack it takes 10 seconds to get there What point is it to make a VM start at 150 milliseconds if the decision to start it is 10 seconds So we should be able to get faster, right? Ten X is possible We think we build some tools we measure the baseline if we analyze the hack out of an open stack launch Make graphs all that stuff fix the whole bunch of things unfortunately Forex at that point and we started admiring the problem It's like we have to solve 5000 problems to go from 4x to 5x and each of them is a lot of work and almost no payoff and After admiring the problem for a few weeks those are not a good meetings Let me tell you that and not a good analysis things. It's like okay. We Impossible is nothing but miracles you that there are limits What we really realized is we didn't step back back far enough We set out of the box with the open stack from the outside optimized it We should have taken two boxes back and this is something we do regularly at Intel one of our founders had written whole books about this where Once in a while, there's a cultured Intel where you say let's step out of the room come back as if we were the new People and then decide what we would do as new people Quite often you do the same thing as the whole process everything is fine Sometimes you say we did something different, but it's kind of equal Keep going where you were going. Sometimes you have something coming out. It says this is different How about what we change what we do and incrementally go to the new direction? Especially an open source. It's new features. It's slightly new things and sometimes you come out and say look You just need to stop what we're doing and do something else We call this reinvention or reimagining We But sediment of people in the room. What if we build a private cloud today? What if we do open stack today? What would it look like? How do we get to a 10x improvement there? and The first thing we said is hey if you build a cloud today. It's about containers and Containers and VMs not one or the other. It's not about containers in VMs or VMs in containers It's about containers and VMs are equal A lot of customers love containers, but you have this this legacy app in a VM. Let's have to talk to each other VMs are not going to go away containers are the way to the future, but for the next decade they're going to beat our both We wanted to build it for scale Nobody has a five machine cluster anymore in the IT department. It's more like 100 or a thousand or maybe five thousand We're not going to go to Google scale, but four or five thousand is a nice sort of design point Updates we heard from lots of customers. Well open stack is great But updating means building a second data center and then just install it again Deployment same thing Updates and deployments are very related We need to we need to be able to start and deploy a whole new cluster in five minutes That's what I told my team and last week they were kind of scared because I said first of five Where's the five minutes? Well, we have this big document. Okay, go fix it Lot of our cloud guys say we're running in an hour. Well, I want to do it 10x five minutes This week they told me yeah, we'll get there give us a few more days And we're actually have a plan and we're executing to it Security needs to be there So when we work this on a whiteboard of these other things we want Like it's actually interesting. This is an interesting thing to have we figured out we can build this Made an architecture made a plan Let's build prototypes see what it looks like and I'm going to show you a video of that and The video folks you need to turn on the video Where this is the basic web UI we're going to launch 10,000 Docker containers on a 100 server cluster and Does it 10,000 containers are being started you can see every container gets our own IP address so that they can talk to The virtual machine that which has their own IP address. They're already 7,000 is running Let's add 5,000 VMs We picked Fedora VMs So on the same 100 node cluster we're now launching 5,000 additional VMs on top of that all on the same level to net share network Everybody has our own IP all containers can talk to the VMs and to each other the same network And you can see you can see the IP addresses you can see the MAC addresses. They're being scheduled And they're actually starting to run as well. You can see the number there So by the time the video is done we're about one minute in And then at one minute we've launched 10,000 containers and 5,000 VMs When we first showed this video to some to open stack summit that people said that's fake. Well, it's not we actually built that When we showed people live in the booth Where we did okay, how many VMs do you want and we launched that many VMs and people still didn't believe it Okay, then at some point, what do you do right? So we built this prototype and it works so well. That's where actually we continue development It's called Chao for cloud integrated advanced orchestrator You can it's on GitHub. It's The documentation is a little bit behind because when I asked the team, okay Do I want a five minute install? They said do you want to code or do you want the documentation? Well, let's do the code for us. So give us a week to polish up the documentation, but We are really at a place where We did a 10x on an open stack cell setup Just to quickly recap all my time is just about up. So Every time you go to a project try to think about what is my next 10x Can I do a 10x? Can I make it fast more faster? Can I really? Can it cannot change the rules? Or am I stuck in a admired a problem situation?  We need to go to our good hub place Come to our booth to all of the things I showed here. We actually have demos upstairs And most of all when anybody tells you in a meeting that's impossible remember impossible is nothing Thank you


ro an hour but what kind of services writing that uh they're they're worth five or but they're not worth 890 i don't know it's uh it's a peculiar one all right keep them coming into us really do appreciate it lots of you having your say and i can understand why because i feel really motivated to splurge my opinion as well but uh anyway the county's number one talk show the nine till noon show on highland radio the nine till noon show brought to you by kelly's toyota we can now test drive the new toyota chr combining standout styling an engaging drive and class leading efficiency patio thread lifts and skin boosters which rejuvenate the skin by improving facial contours lifting and tightening the jaws neck cheeks and eyebrows are available at genesis aesthetics and skincare clinic gi dore to choose the right aesthetic treatment for you contact mary ferry your aesthetic practitioner also offering fat dissolving treatments dermal fillers and laser treatments for all skin conditions hair and makeup packages also available genesis aesthetics and skincare clinic gi dore 07495 32575 my eye and two bullet gosh so all you know erin trod not or you have order and she is coming in solar you gosh it's a good quick leg or lean we gosh erin egg mila hot gate for a quick a quick a take with gas networks punk I can chat school and in the chem and I have oil or the glaze August the round, let the quarter, August the winter. At Lidl, we've dropped the prices of over 600 products. This January, we've given over 600 of our products a fresh price drop for the year ahead. So now you put more money back in your pocket with savings through breakfast, lunch, dinner and beyond. That's 600 more reasons to go full Lidl today. Winter sale now on at Cherrymore Kitchens and Bedrooms. 10% of all purchases for a limited period. Tees and see supply, see in store. Book a free consultation today in our Donegal Town showroom on 07497 25822. Luxury kitchens and bedrooms at affordable prices. Expect more and get more at Cherrymore Kitchens and Bedrooms. Does that employer really have to ask why young people are leaving his employment? Good question. I know a company that doesn't employ young people. They get young people through a school scheme. The job is emptying containers and anyone could do it. They label it as training, but it's not training. It's free labor, that caller says. Let me see. Okay, read that. Yeah, read that one too. Absolutely disgraceful that someone would actually admit this is their views, but have gone cowardly and done it anonymously on Highland Radio. Well, listen, the one thing we really have to be... I know there's a bit of a social media field to this, but still we're still in the era where people can contact at a radio station like ours, express their opinion, and then it triggers a conversation. We can have a conversation. The fact that they do it anonymous, is it best that we hear it anonymously? We don't hear it at all. Because if we're not hearing it at all, when we're having the conversation, we're not getting an understanding that that's how some people think out there, and then we wouldn't have this opportunity to obviously, for the most part, praise the young people like we are. So I get where you're coming from, but I mean, listen, the person couldn't in this day and age make the views known publicly. But anyway, the caller goes on to say, if this is their views, they should put a big sign on their door so we all know who it is and have the guts to let everyone know it straight. I plan if young people don't have experience, but how can they possibly learn anything if nobody gives them a chance and further to that? How can they learn if they don't get proper training, which I'm sure doesn't happen everywhere? Plenty of young people are hired and left to their own devices to figure it out. That's not right. How can an employer expect them to know what they're at without training and encouragement? When will some business owners realize that you reap what you sow? How can you incentivize a young person to work for the benefit of your business if you treat them like garbage and pay them nothing? Why should they invest in your business with their time for nothing?  Business Matters in association with the Faculty of Business at ATU Donegal. For a career in financial governance, consider the level 9 MA in governance and IT in financial services, starting in January. Contact the exec Ed coordinator on 9186206 or email donald.hanigan at atu.ie today. OK, we welcome into studio now. Presenter of Highland Radio's Business Matters podcast. That person, of course, is Chris Ashmore. Hi, Chris. Good morning, Greg. Good to have you in. Before we hear what's happening on the show today, let's run through some points of interest and there's a new online planning application process. What's this about? Yeah, well, it's all part of the government strategy to move more public services online. So traditionally, if you were going for planning permission as an individual or as a business, you lodge your planning application through the council office and post things in and whatever. So it's all going online. And this new system means you'll be able to pay it online. There's reduced printing costs in terms of paper and gathering everything together. And, you know, it's just the times that we live in. And also, I suppose, just while we mentioned that people are always interested in property and planning and the Donegal County Council website, you can go on it and there is a planning section and you can look up. Anybody has access to it and see what's the latest planning permissions received, what's been decided, and also what's happening. That's a bit of a rabbit hole because next thing you end up on the onboard planala weekly case. You can be there a long time. The website's okay and on it goes. And actually, yeah, it is there. And also just of interest, Greg, to listeners, I've heard people have seen a property and the sales sign goes up and, you know, months later you're wondering, I wonder how much that went for. Well, there is a national property register online and you can look up. You can put in your town land or your town and you will see every property transaction that has happened for, be it a commercial or residential property there. And it's quite interesting just to see what prices are being achieved wherever you are. I'm surprised there isn't a company yet that hasn't sort of started using that information to find out because you do see the adverts on British television for it. You know, they're quite actually clever. But anyway, okay. Donegal Enterprise webinar, this one on making businesses more efficient? Yes, there's been a series of these. The next one being held by the local enterprise office is called an Intro to Lean. Now, when they say lean, it basically means how to make your business more efficient. And Kira Schein of Schein Seafood in Kilibeg. She'll be sharing her experience of how she has made things more efficient and that takes place next Monday. And if you go on to the localenterprise.ie website, you'll find details on that. And on a not unrelated matter, just to let people know that there is another virtual Start Your Own Business program. This is a very popular program which is run by the local enterprise office. The next one is on Tuesday, the 6th of February. And it's delivered over eight sessions, two evenings a week. And look, if you want to find out more about how to start off your own business, that is a very good first step. So I'm just going through the property website here. I decided to go to Dannings just to see what the crack is. Yes, yes. To see what houses are going for there. It's quite interesting. Rossapena, 450,000. Glenuri, 775,000. Larganry, 150,000. These are all property sales. And these are all quite recent. These ones you're looking at. Yeah, these are in 2022. Derry Cassin, 100K. But there's a couple of asterisks there. I'm not going to dig any deep. Dundone, 545,000. Some big money properties there. There's a few obviously down in the lower figures, but those are the ones that jump out. So you're the holiday home plans, yeah? No, no. Just as I thought, I'd pick somewhere. I didn't want to pick Lahi, because it could be neighbors that are selling their houses. So, but anyway, that's another story. Interesting website, Chris. Okay, I wasn't listening to anything about what you were saying, because I was checking house prices, but I presume we're going on to start your own business program coming up at the Leo? Yeah, we've just mentioned that. That's done with us, too. Oh, you've done that? Yeah, we've done that, yeah. I mean, literally. You were totally distracted. But at least I'm honest, right? So we did talk about that. What's going up on the show? I'm in Leathercanny now. See what prices to go for. I'm looking for a million euro homes, but there's none there. I mean, they're all big money, like a lot of them are big money, but no, you'd want us looking for like a two or three millionaire, but nothing there yet. But these are all residential. Coming up on this week's Business Matters podcast. Yes, my guest is Eugene Gallin from Lifford now. He actually gives, sorry, Chris. Yes. It literally gives the actual house address. Absolutely, yeah. It's very transparent years ago. So such and such, Wolf-Tone Place, Leathercanny, Donegal, the air code and the price that it sold for.  Guess what you're doing at lunchtime. Well, I've kind of, I think I have, it's propertypriceregister.ie. It's an official website. This is not anything hokarypokary. Okay. Right. Sorry, Chris. Now let's focus on the podcast, please. Sorry, it's my fault. Yes. My guest this week is Eugene Gallin from Lifford. Now he established a company called Bon Appetit back in 2021. So not too long ago. He's a background in the hospitality industry. As a chef and been involved in restaurants and he saw a gap in the market for ready-made meals and not just for your microwave, but also for air fryers. And he's built up a very good business in a relatively short space of time and has expanded rapidly. So much so that this week, as we are speaking, he's in the process of continuing to move into new premises out of the Porn in Lederkenny. It's the old Boston Scientific building. So this is going to allow him to expand considerably. And I joined him and he brought me around the new premises. This site that's just around 5,000 square foot. So with proper office facilities. This previously was Boston Scientific site. So it was perfect for us because it had a lot of air purification systems and air conditioning systems built in, which is perfect for the type of business we are for food production. The site, it's a fully enclosed site, which we will hopefully this year have a BRC accreditation once you need to be able to supply the major retailers. And also we'll have a fully C number accreditation, which means that we can supply within the European Union as well too. So this, our previous site, we couldn't have did this. So this is a big part of the move is and obviously the size of the site means that we'll be able to upper production as we grow. So how many people are here at the moment? We have 14 staff as the mixture of full time and part time. So we have this site will allow us to grow, you know, anything up to about 25,000 needs a week from the site when it's fully operational. Fascinating stuff, Chris. Definitely well worth the listen to that full interview. That's only a snippet there, but it's just really interesting to get an insight into what's going on often people don't realise. And as you mentioned, they're going to be producing when they get up to full production now and this new premises going from 6,000 meals a week to 25,000 meals a week. That's a lot of meals and supplying to outlets, not just locally, but into the north. And there's some deals with some of the bigger chains as well and will soon be exporting out of the country because they'll have a license to do that. So all very positive. OK, if you want to hear that interview in full and past episodes, of course, you can go on to our website, the on demand section. That podcast is live for you right now to stream or indeed you can download highlandradio.com. And if you want to listen to it live, it's on after the six hot news on Sunday as well. Chris, if anyone wants to contact the show, how do they go about it? Yeah, they can contact me on businessmattersathighlandradio.com. All right, Chris. Listen, thank you so much for that. We really do appreciate your time there. OK, back with more on the 9 till noon show after these. Watch the show live now on YouTube, Facebook and at highlandradio.com. The 9 till noon show brought to you by Kelly's Toyota with over 45 years of experience. Trust us to help you on your electric journey. OK, let's go on to the show. On this show, we're going to talk about the new style of the Pinschensstaltz, which is not so popular or for the public. What are the people who do this? And who are they? The people who are the people who are the most excited about the show and who are very excited about it. Well, it's not like they're excited about the show, they're excited about the show and you're very excited about the show. So, we're going to talk about And guess what? For a limited time they're offering a 40% discount on any electric fire when you purchase a worktop there. 40%? That's an amazing deal, Grace. Absolutely. 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Call 048 7187 8077 or online spacehubdairy.com for more details. OK, you're very welcome back to the 9 until noon show 08 660 25,000 is the WhatsApp and text number. Or give us a call on 07 491 25,000. OK, we're joined on the program now by Ivan Yates, former government minister and no holds barred podcast host. Good morning to you, Ivan. How are you getting on? Very good, Greg. Happy New Year to you. Happy New Year to you too. Speaking to you from Donegal, one of your favorite places in the country. I seem to recall you're using your news talk platform to tell everybody. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I haven't been in Donegal for a while, but I hear it may be leading the way in terms of what the politics might hold. Because with the new path to power with Mac Cooper, one of the things that I've been saying is that the reason we're doing it is because there's four elections, Udras, local and Europeans in the first week end of June. But I believe definitely that the general election will be on or shortly after that date, certainly by November of next year. One of the things I quote is I've seen polls in Donegal for the next general election, and it shows Sinn Fein winning three seats, and Mike, a candidate, winning a fourth seat. And Finnegale and Fina Fall and McConnell get out scrapping it out for the last seat. So I have been saying that my predictions are and amongst a lot of things is that Sinn Fein could get between 58 and 72 seats. So Donegal might be leading the way. Do you, when deciding to launch this podcast with Matt, did you see a gap there? Listen, I understand it's a competitive market now, and what we see an awful lot of is sort of radio stations getting together a few staff to do useful stuff. Don't get me wrong. You know what I mean? But they're double jobbing that there's a responsibility to put out some digital content there. And it is what it is. Did you see a gap there for a sort of, you know, take no prisoners type of podcast? First of all, when I do my media training, I tell people what sells is not the same, whether you're selling widgets or services, that is something different. First of all, I believe podcasts, I'd be old world, old school podcasts are the future because the same as the player with the BBC in BBC Sounds and Bristol. People want to access news, entertainment, information, analysis, whatever it is, when it suits them, they can't sit down and turn on a radio or television when it suits you. So that's the big change and podcasts therefore make it much more user-friendly. Can I just make a comment on BBC Two, which they're doing very cleverly with the BBC Sounds podcast in there blurring the lines between live and podcast or listen on demand. I think it's a really clever strategy. It's not saying either or, but between being able to be rewined and programmes being instantly available, I think that is the approach. That sort of, what ways is it live? Is it not live? Does it truly matter? Yeah, well, people tell me in BBC that by 2030 there will be no such thing as terrestrial TV. It'll all be on the player. So that's the direction of job. But the point of difference here with Path to Power is your job is to feed to the fire, get transparency, give the news, give accountability. We're not competing with that.  And therefore I think it's completely different. I'm prepared to make predictions. I'm prepared to be wrong. I want to challenge people. I'm not trying to curry favour. I don't want peer strategy to appear on my show next week. Well, let me say this is the thing. This is the thing I, neither do I, or I don't, or I don't mind. But I think, right, I do recognise that there's a gap in the market that you're filling. I think that's actually a poor indictment of our media that that is there, because we're dealing now on access. So we'll get a minister in morning, but we'll ask certain questions. In fairness, in fairness, the podcasts are not the A.I. regulations. You have to be fair. I don't. Yeah, I know. But I also believe in terms of arguing politics discussing, asking, asking hard questions or asking hard questions. There is an absence of that. We try and do that here. But I take your point. There's a lot of controversy. The, the, the, the, if you, if you want to Charlie McConnel, isn't he you commissioner, because he ruled himself out about it, right?  Then there was further speculation. We were talking about it on this show, and we got a press release saying that we were peddling idle speculation, and that he was committed to, it was committed to standing for the people of Donegal. Then there was a Daily Mirror article, Daily Mail article, I believe it was, in which he once again refused to rule himself out of it. Let's see how things go. What is the story? Do you have any insight? Okay, well, first of all, first of all, I have been fueling that speculation because my sources tell me one, irrespective of what Leo is saying, this is without doubt, a fina fall nominee. Okay. So the first option is would me haul go for it himself? And I actually thought it would be a clever career move for him. He gets another five years. He'll be six to four in the first, 64 years of age on the first of August. He's led the party from a near death experience in 2011. He's been t-shirt, like surely it makes sense. But I'm told, me haul wants to be the next president in 25, and he didn't want to go to Brussels, and his wife, Mary, didn't want to go. Fair enough. Let's see how that plays out. The next thing then is, okay, if not me haul, would McGraw like it? No, he wants to hang around for the potential leadership. So what I heard from my fina fall sources, unofficially, and can change, that if it's to be a cabinet member, it will be Charlie Mccunlough. He's definitely interested in it. He's had a lot of experience there as ag minister. And so therefore, I think it could happen. But out of a clear blue sky, someone said that Brussels wants a woman, okay? And obviously you have by elections and consequences of picking a female TD, and hence more a gay than Quinn's name came into it. So, A, it's not decided. So it is speculation, okay? But it will be fina fall and it will be decided on or around the time of the European elections. You talked about your four decades in politics and covering politics as a journalist. Is it different now? Are we seeing a different type of politics? Are your conversations, I haven't had the opportunity to listen yet, but there is a political change here in this country. And I'm not just talking about, you know, more right leaning voices out there. That is a factor as well. But also in, I think, how sitting politicians behave and handle themselves as well. Is that being reflected in your podcast? Does it have to be? Absolutely. I mean, my fundamental argument why there is seismic change. And I'm agnostic about what I want in all this. I'm just calling it as if it was a horse race at fairy house. Voters under 40 are going to vote differently to their parents. And this is particularly true in urban Ireland. In so far as home ownership in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 90s, ESRI have studied from 33 to 45 age cohort was 90%. It's now down to 60% in dropping. People see themselves in perpetuity paying market rents, not owning their own home, and they don't have a defined benefit pension that their parents had. And they're going to vote differently to their parents' party. Because we've had no national election since 2020, four years is a long time. We saw on abortion, on divorce, on marriage equality, radical change. And I'm seeing the same happening in terms of the emergence of a new generation of voters. So that's the first change. The second change, which has taken me by surprise, is the gulf between media speak in Dublin, political speak in highest office in Dublin, and what people are saying in pubs on the ground about migration.  And I'm saying that's the second surprise I'm seeing emerging and it's growing. And listen, we're seeing some political parties, if not most of them, seeing that now and trying to adjust positions and just language and how people, the public see it. It's very important, I think, that the public inform themselves and critique themselves and not rely on someone who they believe are sort of of an equal point of view to make those decisions for them. When will we really start the conversation about the general election, like get into the nitty gritties of it? Like, you know, there's an awful lot of commitment, say, for instance, from the opposition, that it's very hard to see how they all can be fulfilled, for an example. You know, we have yet to see really how much Finafall and FinaGale might turn on each other as an election looms, or maybe it's the Greens that will get the kicking, who's to say, when do you think all of that will start in the real and meaningful way, Ivan? OK, well, I believe that in government circles, first of all, in the cycle of politics, you move from being totally consumed with government and the running of government to running a political party and campaigning. And I think from February on, that's going to kick in. But my understanding is I was amused at Leo saying he wasn't planning an election, a general election in 2024. My understanding inside strategists in FinaGale are saying, look, local elections in 2019 resulted in Sinn Fein doing very badly. They lost 81 seats, they ended up with 78 seats on 9% of the vote. They faced the prospect of trebling their councillors, having pole-topping councillors all over Ireland, who would make perfect candidates for an autumn election. And Leo wants to get ahead of that narrative of clinging on to power, lame duck administration, go in the name of go, you know, God. So he'd like to hold the elections in June, and go some Sinn Fein so they'd have the same problem that they had in 2020, which was they got the most votes, 24.5%, but they left 12 seats behind them, because they're number 2s elected other candidates who actually didn't run enough candidates. So I actually think that the mind is gradually changing, and just the way ministers operate, you know, focused on the civil servants' diary and all that kind of thing.  Yeah, indeed. And listen, I would echo that in speaking to someone, you know, really quite senior in Sinn Fein who I'd respect that they are being told to be battle-ready as well for this year, so the information is disseminated to some extent. It is a perfect year to launch this type of, there's going to be more votes cast around the world than many years before that. Are you focusing on, I think there's enough there to just talk Irish politics?  Well, certainly there will be a look at UK politics. Whether it's a May, June, or November election, I think there is a common factor between the Tories and Finnegale. Both are in power for over 12 years, and I have an iron rule of elections unless it's China or Russia. But once you go over 12 years, whether it's Bertie, whether it's Blair, whether it's Maggie Thatcher, you get up and say, Greg, I'm going to do this about health or housing or education in the same maze. You've had 12 years to do something about those issues. So, I think the sell-by date, I think one of the things you alluded to there, which I think nobody has picked up on, Finnegale and Finnefall are heading in different directions. Finnegale under Simon Harris, after the election, are going to head for opposition to reinvent themselves, rebrand themselves. Well, Leo, to some extent, wanted that the last time round, didn't he? He did. He did. But it just didn't happen in those ways because the arithmetic led to a kind of historic government. Finnefall, conversely, got less votes and less seats in 2020 than they did in 2016. Ergo, the conclusion was confidence in supply didn't gain them anything. Being in opposition didn't gain them anything. They couldn't deliver anything. So, I think Finnefall have decided that they're better off in government. And after a lot of hopping and trotting, I see Sinn Fein somewhere around in large dole, 147 seats, Magic Figure 88, somewhere between 58 and 172, depending on what happens. So, clearly, short of a majority. If they're in the higher figure, they might form an all left-wing government with other parties and people of the left. But if they're on the lower figure, they need Finnefall. And so, therefore, I think on balance the next government to have a majority will be Mary Loom and a new leader of Finnefall, probably McGrath or Dara O'Brien or Jack Chambers. I'll wrap up shortly, but just on that, right? Then coming into election. Everyone's already saying, well, a barf in a gale, we can't rule anything in or out. How do Sinn Fein message the vultures in saying that this government has destroyed the country for generations and generations, give us a chance and then we'll be in government with one of the parties that were saying destroyed the government for generations in the last few years. How do you manage that? Because they will have to facilitate effectively. The probabilities is they will facilitate Finnefall's continuance in power. Well, I'll put it like this. There's a hell of a difference. The Finnefall of 35 and they have 60 something as opposed to being a party of opposition, the control they'd have, conversely, some people that would be no harm to have some experienced people around them. Look, people, the nature of politics is expediency, pragmatism. They will find a way to get over all their principles in all parties if the arithmetic suits them. OK, so people can listen to the No Holds Bar podcast anytime they like except between 9 and 12 Monday to Friday. Where is it available? Which I believe to my short because I knew about these things, but on Spotify and Apple and Spotify Apple it went in. We did two episodes. Went in straight at number one. I'm not surprised. I think there's a huge gap. We want to talk about politics and there's not an awful lot of straight talk out there. I'm personally I'm not surprised. I didn't think you were that popular even to be honest with you, but maybe it's Matt. Absolutely. I think it's not maybe it's definitely. OK, right. So people can search on their platforms for No Holds Bar. It's called path to power. Right. OK, so I keep reading one quote. Path to power. OK. Path to power. I'm sorry. The point is that I said, look, I'm not going to do this forever. The idea is it will go for a year and will conclude when the next government is formed. It's time to pay attention to politics, Greg. Everyone has a needs to do that. Thanks very much, Ivan. Take care of yourself. That's Ivan Yates. They're back after these. How we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner, and greener. At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new net zero hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer. Making your usage clearer. Making your usage clearer. Making your usage clearer. Making your usage clearer. Making your usage clearer. Making your usage clearer. Your trips greener. Your home cozier. And your world brighter. Find our net zero hub at Electric Ireland. A public interest message from Donegal County Council. Donegal County Council is delighted to announce the Community Climate Action Fund is now open for applications. The fund is open to not-for-profit organizations such as community groups and clubs and comms in two strands. The fund is aimed at building low-carbon communities in Donegal. Strand 1A is for shared Ireland Climate Action projects with partners from Northern Ireland. For more information on both strands and how to apply, visit DonegalCoco.ie Donegal County Council Building Sustainable Communities. Revamp your bathroom with the Bath Jack Colrain January sale. Dive into savings of up to 75% on selected bath, tap, heating, and tile essentials. Exclusive, 10% off for Highland Radio listeners with the code HighlandRadio shop online at Bathshack.com. T's and C's apply. Personal improvement deserves recognition. That's progress you can feel and the very definition of the Audi 241 range. From the striking style and comfort of the enhanced Audi A6 to the era-defining iconic Audi A4 with competition addition and the quietly efficient Audi Q4 e-tron certified driving with no compromise. Test drive the Audi 241 range at an Audi dealer near you today. Other updates brought to you by Grant. Building a new home, choose Grant's A triple plus rated air owner, air to water heat pump and you flex under floor heating. Visit grant.ie OK, so it is going to be dry for the rest of today with low winter sunshine across many areas and no more than moderate temperatures. So, please spill over if you're listening to us, you know, much further east than Donegal. There's a chance of a few light passing showers. I'm told temperatures three to seven degrees tonight remaining dry across most areas, but with increasing cloud feeding in from the Irish sea lowest temperatures minus two to plus two degrees generally in light to moderate north east breezes. A slight frost will set in where skies clear tomorrow another cold day is going on in the country and the world. However, if the government has its way with this hate speech bill, no one will be able to open their mouths that will be censored or people arrested, especially since hate is not even defined. People are not truly aware of just how serious this proposed bill is and should be contacting their TD to show their objection or fully familiar else. Like what is being proposed is what amendments are being suggested. You know, I think it's really I don't see anything personally. I'm not trying to convince anyone, but I've looked at it. I've looked at as I say what's proposed, the amendments and the change.  Okay, which seems to happen all the time now or spread false information about people or whatever it might be. I would love if that stuff didn't have to be moderated or policed, but some of the language you hear referring to people just of different colours and it's you know, and then it's not just maybe people that arrived here, it's people that are our friends and our neighbours and have lived here for years and work around the place and they're also having to read awful racial slurs online. Is that really? Is that what free speech is? But anyway, House in Mellon, 1.3 million sold for wazers. I wouldn't mind a 10% cut of that. My son worked in a very busy place before Christmas. They took him in for two months and then dropped him. He's 16. They never mentioned anything about a bad work ethic or anything like that. And when he was there, he worked hard doing everything. They don't remove him. They didn't remove him from the work WhatsApp group and the boss would text in looking for people. When my son rang to say that he was available, he was told that they had no hours for him. Yeah, that's horrendous and it doesn't make him feel good about himself either. Lady saying not to get out of bed for an hour. That's a wrong attitude to pass on to any child. No one wants to see any child taken advantage of, but don't send them out with a bad entitled attitude either as it will just make life difficult for them. And although here the hourly rate is very frustrating as a former business person and no paying wages can be difficult. I believe work for a weekly wage of maybe 50 or 60 euro a day from 10 a.m. till 5 p.m. I know the panic of paying wages while the till is not ringing. Then you're frustrated as to how will I pay them, but that's different because the other business owner he or she wasn't saying that, you know, all things are tight. They're tough to pay. They were just actually basing it on the perceived work ethic of the younger people. I think if the government paid mothers to stay at home and rare the children properly then we could put manners on children. We need to tell them right and wrong at 7 or 8 or else there's no change in them. You get babysitters in the middle of the week. They're not too scared to discipline the children in case they lose their jobs. Everyone works these days and it doesn't and they don't have time to raise children. There's a lot of good young people out there, but there's a lot of sport brats and they can't take criticism and there's more brats than good ones. I have them, Greg. Okay, that's your view. Thank you for that. In relation to the current conversation age discrimination is legal pure and that's simple. That's if you know about it. We're going to have to carry that conversation into tomorrow with all the other stuff that we've lined up for you already a brilliant show for you tomorrow already taking shape. But for me, Greg Hughes and Caroline Oh, who researched and produced and Shannon working away to on the program and on our socials. Have a wonderful Wednesday. Stay tuned. John Breslin.


This video is sponsored by Farfetch, and throughout this video I'll be featuring four pairs of boots from two different brands that I found at Farfetch. If you don't know about Farfetch, it's a great place to shop online for luxury menswear, accessories, and watches. If you like fashion, they've got that. If you're more into classic men's style like me, they've got tons of that as well. He Spoke Style viewers can save 10% by using code HSSFF10 at checkout. Full details are down below in the description. Now let's take a look at these four different styles of boots and eight ways to wear them. First pair of boots we're taking a look at are these right here. These are by the Italian brand Scaroso, a classic leather Chelsea boot, which they call the Enzo Castagno, handcrafted in Italy with Blake stitching. They're made with a high quality calfskin leather with a beautiful finish that you can see on the toe that is created in three steps completely by hand. We have a primarily leather sole, but you can also see that it has some non-slip rubber on there, full leather heel, really beautiful boot. Now let's see it in a couple different outfits. Chelsea boots are very sleek, very minimal, very comfortable, very easy to slip on and off, and very versatile. Not to overuse an overuse phrase even more, but Chelsea boots really do look great dressed up as well as dressed down. You can wear them with a suit, but here I decided to do something a little more business casual. Let's start with the foundation of this look. Pretty basic. We have a white button-down shirt by Polo Ralph Lauren, paired with some navy trousers by Ring Jacket. I layered on a Fair Isle v-neck sweater. This is from Brooks Brothers from several years ago. I'll try to find something similar to link to down below.  This is from the HSS Michael Andrews collection, the very first piece that sort of launched the whole idea for this collaboration. It's a Balmacken, which means it has a raglan sleeve and Prussian collar, really thick wool with an awesome houndstooth pattern, and Quilten inner lining, tons of warmth. Up top, the hat is by Gorin Brothers on my wrist, the Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle. And then, of course, finished off with the Scoroso leather Chelsea boots. Next look here is vintage he-spoke style. I first put this look together a little over four years ago for posts that we did on the website, and I love outfits like this that look just as fresh now as they did way back when. The focus here is sort of on dressing up denim, but in a way that's a little more subtle, a little different, and not simply focused on adding a blazer to the look to accomplish that. So, a few ways that I'm doing this here. First, the Suede jacket. It's by Billy Reed. Suede is a great way to elevate any casual look. The soft, napped texture of it adds a really nice layer of depth and richness and warmth of the outfit. Next is the waistcoat. It's by Lardini. I like it, obviously, for the style. It's also a nice extra layer when it's cold outside that's not a traditional sweater. When you're wearing a waistcoat with jeans, make sure that it's in a fabric that works with the denim. So we're talking about rituals and tweeds and flannels. You want to stay away from those fabrics that have more of a sheen to them that look like they're more from a formal suit. Moving on now, brown gingham shirt is from the HSS Michael Andrews collection. Jeans are double RL. My sunglasses are the Oliver Peoples Banks on my wrist, the Vacheron Constantin Traditionale. And then the Scarosso Chelsea boots, the final way that we're dressing up these jeans. Next pair of boots here are also by Scarosso. These are a lace-up dress boot called the Toto Ebano. Like the Scarosso Chelsies, these are also handcrafted in Italy with Blake stitching made with a high-quality ebony calfskin with that same beautiful three-step hand finishing. These have a cap toe, six eyelets for the laces, a leather pull tab in the back, sole is leather and we again have that non-slip rubber in the center and a full leather heel. Another beautiful boot that is super easy to style. For the first look featuring these boots, we're getting suited and booted. It's not hard to wear boots with a suit. You can put on a suit, add boots, and you're done. There's a little bit of finesse involved with it, however, and you've really got to pay attention to the style of the boot and the overall style of the outfit that you're working with. Here we have a very classic kind of fall, winter, business look, charcoal gray flannel suit and block-striped shirt are both from the HSS Michael Andrews collection. Classic tie here as well, big-striped tie, which is by Drake's. Simple white pocket square, it doesn't get more classic than this. The boots pair so well with this suit because they're simple. You've got the classic dark color, you have the simple cap toe. The fact that it's a boot just adds an extra bit of panache and stylishness to an already stylish look. Let's quickly mention a couple of remaining details here. My watch is the classic Rolex Datejust 36 millimeters on a Jubilee bracelet. Here's another look from the HSS archives, this one from three years ago. Actually a little different as I'm subbing in the dress boots for double monks, which were the shoes in the original outfit, but I digress. This look for me is sort of a great expression of my personal style ethos, which I always say is classic with a modern sensibility. Four basic and classic pieces here, coat, turtleneck, trousers, boots, but there's something about this look that is more contemporary. One of the things that I think contributes to that for sure is the coat by Daniele Alessandrini. The silhouette is slimmer, which gives it a more modern feel. Turtleneck by Cornelliani, paired with the HSS Michael Andrews trousers, also feels modern, casually elegant, sophisticated, and then, you know, like with the suit and the previous outfit, the simple and sleek leather dress boot really just adds an extra element of style to an already stylish outfit. Can't move on without mentioning the watch on my wrist is the Alanga and Zona data graph. Switching gears completely here from a dress boot to something way more casual. This is the Bobby hiking boot by Grinsen. Grinsen is an English company with a history that goes back all the way to 1866. The boot we're looking at here is a hiking style boot. It's in a tan leather that's hand-painted, a little bit of padding around the ankle for comfort, has a leather pull tab in the back, lining is leather as well. We have the hiking style crossover lacing and the big white wedge sole, which is super lightweight. Really great looking casual boot. So I'm going to be honest here and tell you that I was a little bit worried about styling these boots. I've always wanted a pair of boots like this, but they're really quite different than what I typically wear on a day-to-day basis. Ironically though, these were super easy to style and I love them as a way to take a casual look to another level. One very important thing to pay attention to when styling hiking boots like these is the length of the pants you're wearing with them. Typically, you want them to be a little shorter and I think they look best when you've rolled them up, shows off the boot, the cuff looks cool, win-win. My jeans here are Selvage by APC, their new standards, Woolrich Arctic Parka, completely unmistakable. Elevating the denim a little bit and giving it a sort of opera ski feel with the turtleneck here. It's by Topman. Knit hat is by Drake's.  The thing with hiking boots is that they're really easy to style with jeans. Hiking boots and rolled Selvage denim jeans just go together like almost too easily. So I wanted to challenge myself to style them in a way that was different and also to give you guys something different to maybe be inspired by beyond the typical jeans and hiking boots. So this is what I came up with. It's kind of my version of a stylish day in the country. A lot of you noted in my outerwear collection video the fact that I did not have a barber jacket. Well, now I do. It's the Ashby model. It's your classic styling, more of a tailored fit, which I thought looked better on me. Super glad that I made the investment here. Underneath, brown gingham shirt from the HSS Michael Andrews collection, paired with a V-neck sweater from Mizan and Maine. I added an ascot. It's vintage Burberry for a little more warmth around my neck. Chinos are by Bonobos and you can see that I've rolled them slightly to show off the boot. Hat is by Stofa on my wrist, the Rolex Explorer II, and then of course finished off with the Grenson Bobby hiking boots. Final pair of boots we're going to be working with here are these. These are also by Grenson. It's a Chelsea boot in snuff suede, really beautiful color and a really wonderful suede. Of course, being a Chelsea boot, it has the elastic side panels, pull tab on the back there. It's got a stacked heel and a full leather sole. Very cool looking boot. Let's check out some outfits. Because of the suede and because of the color, I really gravitated towards casual looks with these boots, using them as a way to elevate the look with a little touch of luxury. For the first look here, I decided to go with white denim. It's really easy to pair pretty much any color footwear with white because it's so neutral. And I think the color of the boot really pops with the white jeans. Up top kind of two contrasting pieces that work really well together. First we have this linen safari jacket by Infirmale, collaboration they did with craftsmen clothing. Olive color really kind of brings together the earth tone theme with the color of the boots. Underneath just a classic heather gray athletic sweatshirt by Levi's absolute casual essential. And then on my wrist, the Alanda and Zona datagraph. Last look here, playing around with a little bit of a high low thing. Like I said, I was really sort of thinking in the casual realm with these boots and staying in that same lane here. Previous look I would say was more of a daytime look. This one definitely more of a casual evening look. Foundation here is all black, two casual basics. Again, an athletic sweatshirt. This one is by Converse. And then Levi's denim jeans. These are the 511 fit. Coat here, Burberry trench, three quarter length. Now a three quarter length trench is infinitely more versatile than a full length trench, especially for looks like this. Sunglasses are by Mosscott. Really cool, tinted lenses in a Cabernet color. Watch is the IWC Anjanor. And then the boots again, really popping, suede Chelsea boots by Grunzen. Want to thank Farfetch once again for sponsoring this video. Reminder that he spoke style viewers can save 10% by using code HSSFF10 at checkout. Links to the four boots featured in this video as well as all of the outfit details are down below in the description. Leave a comment with your favorite look, your favorite style of boot. If you found any inspiration at all in this video, give it a thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell to get notified every time we publish a new video. That's all for now. Thanks for watching and stay tailored.


COVID-19 is undoubtedly the news of the year, if not of the decade. While thousands of health workers are working tirelessly to help those who fall sick, data scientists are trying to explore the virus through data mining and machine learning. In this video series, we will show you how almost anyone can take the COVID data and explore it. Let's start by getting the data from John Hopkins University's GitHub page. You can find the link in the description below. Just copy and paste it into the file widget's URL line. Press Enter and voila, the data is here. A quick glimpse into the data table shows us how the data looks like. Please note that this data is updated regularly so your results will differ. Now let us see the data. Line plot is the perfect visualization for sequential data such as ours. The curves represent the countries and the x-axis in our plot is the date. From this plot, we cannot see anything really since we have so many countries and the lines are thin. Let us select a few lines by dragging across them and inspect them in the data table. Unsurprisingly, these are the US, Italy, Spain and so on. The countries with the highest number of COVID-19 patients. Okay, we know which are the countries with the highest number of COVID patients. They're all over the news. Surely we can dig a little deeper. Orange comes with a handy data sets widget which by chance happens to have an HDI data set available. HDI or Human Development Index is a data set with many country statistics. So let us add it to the COVID data. Place data sets on the canvas, load HDI and use merge data to merge the two data sets. Make sure to match country slash region from the COVID data with country from the HDI. Let us inspect the result. Data table shows us there are some countries with missing HDI. These were likely not matched properly since their country names differ in the two data sets. To fix this, we will use edit domain and insert it between data sets and merge data. We first transform the country variable from string to categorical, which enables us to edit the country names. In the data table before, we saw that the United States was not matched correctly. So look for it in the edit domain. Double click its name and change it to US. You can find all the other countries and change their names too. Press apply once you're finished editing the data. Great! Now we were able to bring in such data as population and number of doctors per million. Let us construct a pipeline that will tell us how many COVID patients there are relative to the entire population. First, we will remove countries with an unknown population. I will connect select rows to merge data and set total population to be higher than zero. This will come in handy in the next step, where I will use feature constructor to compute the cases to population ratio. I will select the final data from the COVID data set. In my case, it is April 9th. Then I will divide this number by total population. We remove zero population in the previous step to avoid dividing by zero and tearing a hole in the fabric of the universe. Perfect! Now we have exactly what we need. Connect scatterplot to feature constructor. Select cases per million for the x-axis and physicians for the y-axis. This will show us how COVID spread is related to the number of doctors in the country. Let us label our points with country names to make sense of the plot. Apparently, Qatar, Cuba and Greece have a low number of COVID cases with a high number of doctors, which means their healthcare system is in a good position to handle the crisis. Luckily, no one is in the lower right quadrant, but Luxembourg, Andorra and Iceland seem to have a worse cases to doctors ratio. Of course, we know nothing about the availability of the respirators, protective equipment and so on. This is just an approximation for the health system capability and should not be taken out of context. We can inspect other variables too. For example, the number of old people in the population, which is a variable called dependency ratio old age. It is easy to find a variable by selecting the drop-down in the scatterplot and merely typing the name. Now it is up to you to explore potentially interesting relations or even bring in your own data now that you know how much data works. If you wish to dig even deeper into the COVID-19 data set, have a look at our blog, whose link you will find in the description below. And don't forget to follow us for more videos on analyzing COVID-19 data with Orange.


Well, the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade has come and gone and Ethereum has weathered the storm. Now, let me make this crystal clear. Even though people are withdrawing their Ethereum, does not mean that they are selling. A lot of people don't like to have it in other wallets or in other places. They want to put that in cold storage because they've seen what is happening. What is interesting to me is the net staking balance. This is how much has been withdrawn over the time since the Shanghai hard fork. We're looking at 210,000 Ethereum has been withdrawn. In that same time, you've almost seen 100,000 deposited. What does that mean? That means that people have a lot of confidence in Ethereum. And if you have a staking balance of just around 116,000 negative, that's a pretty good timeframe for what has been going on. And what does that mean? Well, Ethereum actually went up in price of 5% and has now breached $2,000.


The Scottcat for the Ninth National Assembly long because for Senate and the House of Representatives has been unveiled at the National Assembly complex. The comprehensive report aims to establish who is a good and effective legislator using the sponsoring and processing of bills and motions by legislators as an evaluation matrix. This is the third edition of an independent performance appraisal of the Ninth National Assembly as it lends an avenue for discussing the performance of the legislature and legislators and bills. In his welcome address, the Executive Director, Okie Eppia, highlighted the reasons behind the yearly publication. As said before now, focus had always been on the executive but its organization has decided to shift attention to the legislature. What we have done this year is to why we are focusing on the base because when we receive feedback we say okay it is not about the base or the number of the base but it is about what is the impact of those base, what is the extent to which they impact the lives and living conditions of citizens. So we have been careful to use a matrix we call the VVIP to distill the data sets that you have before you shortly. In other words, we'll be looking at the base with respect to their volume, their value, their impact and their progression. While commenting the publications, federal lawmakers unanimously agreed that it will not serve as an agenda setting but will bring them to their toes. Making laws is just one of the functions of the legislature. Keeping the union going is a duty and that is done by motions, that is also done by oversight. Those are done by investigations, what are the discoveries of the assembly, what investigations have been carried through and what actions have the executive taken after the fact of investigation. These are ways to follow. Most of our constructions perhaps use a different parameter in assessing us.  Others believe that it is time to enlighten Nigerians that legislators should not be judged by the numbers of weddings and burials they attend but under number of motions, bills and contributions made at plenary or at public hearings. It is also believed that the publication will help to hold lawmakers accountable to the constituents knowing that their performance are being assessed. Glancing through the invitation and the background that the executive director of other people has provided already clears the doubt in my mind and I believe it's time for the Nigerians that will receive this report. The institutionalization of this report, if widely circulated, will in no small measure motivate legislators to be responsive and accountable to the constituent and the Nigerian populace.


I'm Dr Ruth Hussie and I've been asked to chair a group of people who are going to work on looking at health and social care in Wales over the next five to ten years. We've been asked by Welsh Government to do this work, but we are independent of government and we're also looking at health and social care equally as important as each other. We really want to focus on what matters to those who use services, how we better support staff, but also make the best use of the resources available. So we're looking at all the evidence from within Wales, but also from other countries, working with the panel members to bring their experience to consider the issues facing Wales. But most importantly, we want to involve the people who use the services and the people who want to shape and advise on the future of those services. So strongly encourage everyone to have a look at the questions we're asking and please have your say and let us know what you think is important for us to focus on for the future.