So I'm really excited that you all came out. I am a morning person. My name is Ernie. I am a morning person. And I'd like to say that it's all just because of the way that I am normally. I've been up since like 5 AM this morning. But mostly it's because I'm from the future. And by the future, of course, I mean the Eastern Time Zone. And I'd like to let you all know that in three hours you will all be bright and shiny and happy and awake as well. So I'm from Louisville, Kentucky. I started saying Louisville after they corrected me for the first two weeks when I said Louisville. And you may know us as the purveyors of fried chicken and also the Kentucky Derby. I have been in Louisville for about 13 years now. And despite that, I guess I've never really properly been kind of Louisville-ized because the Kentucky Derby has never really been a thing for me. I've never gone. I've got no interests really. For me, I think it's kind of amusing that in NASCAR, we like to tease people. We like to tease people for watching cars go around in circles continuously turning left. That's like, oh, such a redneck thing, right? And we like to joke about that. And yet, if horses continually turn left, for some reason, that's something you should wear fancy hats to and drink mint jellips and the like. So I'm not exactly sure about that. So I affectionately call the Kentucky Derby NASCAR with legs. And that's how Louisville I am. OK. So I work for a company called Invisium Security. And I get to work from Louisville remotely. We do application security consulting. And we produce a screencast called SetCasts that, as of last Friday, we just made free. I found the most cheesy free graphic I possibly could. I would encourage you to check that out. So did you all have a good time last night? Did you go to parties? Have a nice dinner, et cetera? Yeah? Yeah? Great. So I had a good time, too. I went with a group of friends to a restaurant called Neighborhood. It was pretty great. I really love this part about conferences in general. But I really enjoyed the time to kind of catch up with friends and just kind of chat about all the rubious and non-rubious things in our lives. I ordered a delicious sounding item from the menu called the Local Animal. As a carnivore, I hardly approve of the local animal. Polish sausages, braised pork, fried eggs, mustard, molasses glaze, or Rugalon, I'm thinking what's not to like, right? So in Sandy's talk this morning, you may have heard her mention that we're all going to die sometime. Now, I took a bite. It was delicious for about five seconds. And then suddenly something happened. Something ignited inside my mouth. It was somewhat unpleasant. I asked the waitress if, in fact, there was an explosion of the dragon population in Poland. She told me that in the mid-'90s, in fact, there was. So if you happen to see the hashtag dragon flesh around, that's what that was all about last night. So oh, yes, yes, that's right. On a bet, I had to include dragon flesh in the talk. So that's that. OK, enough screwing around. So it's business time. You may have heard earlier this year that TDD is dead. In the ground, buried, et cetera. So I got to thinking earlier this year. Well, that's great. But maybe Rails is getting kind of dead these days. And oh, hey, I didn't expect that. So I've been thinking about this a lot because it scares me because I think a lot of Ruby's popularity, obviously, is owed to Rails. Wow, there are so many of you. I love this. Hi, everybody. So I think that Rails is slightly dead, though, in the sense that what we think of as a Rails app these days is very rarely this kind of thick server-side rendering stuff. It's more often the case now that we're writing APIs to support iOS devices. We're writing for JavaScript, NBC frameworks. We're writing all kinds of client-side MVC, and we're writing stuff to support that. And so I think that it's interesting because it seems like we're all not able to escape writing JavaScript anyway. So obviously, I mean, the solution is that we should all move to Node.js. So that's what I'm here to talk to you about today. I don't want you to do that. That's a horrible idea. In fact, oh, I'm not done trolling. In fact, there's this thing, this term, that we use. And it's sort of like, hey, so I'm stuck with this language on the browser. I've been using it so much. Yeah, why not just throw in the towel? Let's just use it everywhere. So anyway, in fact, I've been talking about some stuff since that Rails is a dead slide. But a lot of you probably started kind of freaking out or tuning me out. The interesting thing about polarizing statements is that oftentimes they tell you less about what the speaker has to say than they do about what you all kind of are already thinking, or what you have in your head. Does it freak you out to hear me say Rails is dead? Does it make you go, that's insane. I just started learning Rails two weeks ago.  I'm going home. And I really got worried about this because I'm like, what's going to happen to Ruby? Like what is going to happen to Ruby if I get into a situation where Rails is no longer the de facto standard for the case for Ruby in the enterprise, right? And I can tend to romanticize things. And so there's part of me that really sort of has to kind of check myself regularly to make sure that I'm not just kind of getting romantically entangled to the point where it becomes this sort of creepy obsession where it's like a little intense, maybe a little too much. Oh jeez, I shouldn't have looked. So there's the opposite of, sorry. Okay, so there's the opposite of this. It keeps going. So the opposite of this, the opposite of this, where you're creepily obsessed with the technology is the technology agnostic person, right? You know these people. They're all like the right tool for the right job, right? And everything has its place and et cetera. And I don't tend to trust these people because usually they're just afraid to give an opinion. Like they want to just kind of say everything's right. I personally would rather have a favorite. I think it's okay. It's fine to have favorites. Because there are some tools that are not really suitable for any job, and there are some tools that are downright dangerous to use. So then if I'm concerned about Ruby, if I'm concerned about what's next, then I have to start looking at why did I choose Ruby, right? And for all of us that's a little bit different, in the mid 90s some of you all may have been familiar with this guy, his name is Duke. He showed up, he is the mascot for Java. Also in the mid 90s this album showed up. It's called Dukie. Dukie had a different name as well at some point. A lot of you spent time writing Java code and listening to Dukie and saying, this is awesome, Java and Dukie forever. And then after a while you started figuring out that maybe you weren't thinking quite such positive thoughts about Java anymore and maybe it was like Dukie. People got really fed up with the ceremony of Java. And so a lot of people came from Java to Ruby as sort of Java refugees, right? Now I didn't really, I fled from Java pretty early on whenever I saw it, so I didn't really come as a Java refugee. I would like to point out at this point however that I was doing Minecraft before it was cool. So when I was in junior, early senior high my parents wanted me and specifically my father wanted me to dig out an unfinished basement under the house. This is an actual shot that I asked him to send me in a hurry last week of the area that is still not dug out underneath the house. I think you see where I'm going with this. He gave me a pickaxe. Unfortunately this pickaxe did not exist when I was a teenager. This pickaxe did however. He gave me a pickaxe and said get down there and dig out the underneath the house and we're gonna make a finished basement down there and it's gonna be great. You could have your room down there it would be some privacy for you. He had this big grand plan because he had built my house with his bare hands. And so he kind of knew a thing or two about this. This on the other hand was me in junior high. I would like to say that it looked differently in senior high but not too much. The mullet came, the mullet went. It's not too much better. And this equation really did not compute. I was not the mining type. And a lot of it came down to me not really seeing the end result. I spent more energy trying to figure out how to get out of that work or kind of explain that oh yes I totally did dig. Don't you see that area over there? Then I did actually doing the work.  I'm going somewhere with this and it is that I hate busy work and I think most of us do. I hate busy work even if it has an agile button. And so because of this I gravitated towards a language called Pearl at the time. Now Pearl looks really pretty right? It doesn't look that pretty, not at all. This is Pearl sometimes referred to as a right only language. This is all one subroutine from a 14,000 line long pearl module. I'd like to point out that in this subroutine we are actually dealing with one giant regex. This is the search, this is the replace. Yeah, right? So one of the virtues actually there are three virtues of Pearl, that the creator of Pearl Larry Wall head coin. Laziness and patience and hubris. These all applied to me. Again I was a young buck who knew lots of things and thought he was infallible. It got out of the way and the philosophy of Pearl is there's more than one way to do it, right? And the idea is that this gives, for me anyway this leaves the creative process open. It's like the idea that just because this one way is maybe better in certain circumstances it doesn't mean it is the way to do things. This is in stark contrast to another language called Python. Python, if you don't know, has a few little Easter eggs in its repel. One of them is this little Zen of Python thing you can get up by saying import this in the repel. In particular, two of the core philosophies of Python that are very starkly contrasted with those of Pearl and certainly of mine is explicit, is better than implicit, and there should be one and preferably only one obvious way to do it, which Python then helpfully goes on to show you exactly how much they mean it when you try to quit the repel. So that's fun. So then I found after working with Pearl for a while I found Ruby and I was really happy. And like many of you here, I came to Ruby through Rails and I fell in love with Ruby for a lot of reasons, but firstly it's flexibility. It was very much in line with the there's more than one way to do it philosophy. It oftentimes feels like when you step into a problem and you're using Ruby, you feel like a superhero. You feel like there's nothing you can't possibly accomplish because if the language doesn't have the feature you can totally monkey patch it in anyway, right? And there's this other thing, readability that was huge for me for Ruby. I had come from a language, which you saw earlier looked like line noise. So being able to have like stuff like optional parans around things and just kind of a lot of, a lot of like a lot less noise in the code. A real focus on readability was huge for me and I found a lot of joy in that. I found a certain level of expressiveness. In fact, Steve Yeggy, because he's way smarter than me, long ago wrote that somehow Matt's had stolen basically all the good things from everywhere and made them all work together so well that you didn't even know that it was all there. And so these things all really appealed to me and they definitely run true for me. But you know, it's not always always good. Every good side tends to have a bad side and certainly with Ruby we have flexibility which is great, but sometimes in practice looks a little more like this. It's really easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Not nearly as smart or elegant as you think you are most of the time. And then there's the other big problem we've had for a while and which Matt's acknowledged yesterday, which is the story that every programmer parent likes to tell their programmer children before going to bed, the concurrency story. Our concurrency story at the moment looks a little like this. So, this is another one I can't look at because I just lose it. And you know, a couple of years ago, a couple of years ago, Matt's had said that he's not the threading guy. That's cool, he doesn't have to be that. He's like so many other things that aren't threading guy and we owe the language that we use today and love today to him, so that's totally cool. But at the same time, we need a concurrency story in today's day and age. So you guys are thinking at this point, well, he's obviously never heard about Jay Ruby and celluloid. Like clearly we have a concurrency story, right? But I'd like to introduce you to this guy, Tony Arcieri, who happens to have created celluloid and also happens to be what I would call a threading guy. And he's actually said, actually after RubyConf in 2012, he actually said that there were four language features basically missing for him from Ruby that would have made his life writing concurrent applications and writing any kind of concurrency library better. First being deep freeze, the idea of being able to freeze an entire object graph and ensuring that it's immutable from that point on, that makes concurrency a lot easier to manage. Another being deep copy, giving a whole set of the object graph a new duplicate copy to ensure that you're not gonna have any kind of a problem there. Do we have a problem back there? We good? Okay, all right. Another being ownership transfer, the idea of being able to actually take a thread that has ownership over an object graph and saying, okay, this other thread owns it now so that only one thread is able to mutate something at a given time. And the last being concurrent data structures. You need a consistent memory model to be able to accomplish this, but the idea being that much like Java has different types of primitives and structures that you can use that are guaranteed thread safe, we would like to be able to provide that stuff in the Ruby land as well. So he went on to finish up by basically saying that he can't solve these problems without VM level support for these kinds of features. And I had checked up with him on IRC a while back to verify that's the case and he kind of summed it up this way. Eventually you're in a place where you're trying to build a jet engine of Silly Putty. And Silly Putty's awesome. Silly Putty's really cool because it's super flexible and you can make copies of the comic strip and all kinds of neat things like that. Stick things to walls, whatever, right? But this worried me because I feel like more and more I'm running up against situations where I do need a good concurrency story and so what if Rails is dead? And of course that's silly, right? Rails isn't quite dead yet. Okay, we're all using Rails today, probably. And realistically, yeah, Monty Python fans in the house. Good. But not only that, programming languages don't really die so much as just go into stasis. I mean, I still know people today that are using RPG that are friends of mine, strangely enough, and it's not this kind of RPG. It actually looks like this, this is RPG. And it was invented in 1959. People still write it today. See, they were doing hashtagging before it was cool in RPG. And so really it came down to this. I think some of the discomfort that I personally found whenever I was thinking about what happens to Ruby, Rails dies, is that it's a question of where do I actually get my identity? If you put people to it and you say, give them a tag like this and you say, you can write anything on this, but it can't be your name. They'll eventually push comes to shove, write something in. And it might be like, don't make me do this. But oftentimes it's gonna be, at least in the US, it's gonna be their profession. And so for the longest time I had seen myself as a Rails coder. And then I realized Rails was annoying me a lot. And I really liked Ruby still. And so I was like, well no, I'm a Rubyist. That's what I am, I'm a Rubyist. And then that seemed to kind of narrow because I was starting to experiment with other languages again and finding some of them were really interesting too. I don't wanna be a Rubyist, I'm a programmer, right? That's what I am, I'm a programmer. And these are all true things about me. They're not necessarily the truest thing about me. They aren't something that covers sort of the motivation for why I do things. And so to explain where I'm going with this, kind of to back up and explain how I got into programming. So when I was five, we got on Atari 2600. This dates me, I realize, I am old. And I thought it was amazing. I loved to play video games and then a year later we got a Cocoa 2, a TRS-80 Color Computer 2. And if any of you had this, you're gonna find this next screen, especially in nostalgia inducing. Check out that cursor. That cursor says there ain't no party like a Tandy soft party. That's what that cursor says. If we get somebody in the back and I, whoo, whoo. So I found out that like, oh my gosh, like these games that I love so much, I can totally write these. That's within my power. I can make games just by typing things into the computer. And so like most of you, I started off with a very simple program. Any of you familiar with basic? Probably did something like this. I was very excited to find out that I could make the computer lie to me. This was something that was very exciting for me. So when I discovered that I could tell the computer to lie to me, I was hooked at this point. I loved programming from that point on. Okay, we're totally live coding this, by the way. Can you tell? And so I really loved experimenting with all of the various code that I could find. I would go to the school library, I would check out books and type in the stuff and it would have an appendix like, yeah, that's great, right? It was so much cool. So anyway, I spent a lot of time writing basic. And that was the only computer I had for years and years and years. And eventually in my CS classes at high school, they moved us on to Pascal. And my CS teacher was awesome. He told us at the time, I'm gonna give you the entire coursework for the whole year. You can do it, however quickly you can do it, and then you can move on and do whatever you wanna do. So I blew through the book in like a month because I wanted to get back to doing fun stuff and I wasn't finding Pascal fun. It's like, where are the line numbers? I'm so confused right now, what happens? And immediately I went back to writing some games, which was the whole reason I wanted to be a programmer to begin with.   I wrote a breakout clone, wasn't that though, it was this one. And I realized, you know, this was just like just this year that I really grasp this because I'm slow sometimes, but like it's not so much that I love to be a programmer, but I love to create things. That's what I love to do. I like to build things. I like to see them work and see other people enjoy them. And that was a big wake up call for me. And it explained a lot of what about Ruby specifically appeals to us as Rubyists, right? Matt's got so much right in that the focus on the language was that people wanted to express themselves. And I always feel like programming is a written communication.  And that's what makes it so much fun to me personally, is that creative side. And I've gotten to the point where I now look at the creative capacity of a new language as the thing that makes me excited. Not just language features, right? Language features are great and all, but the thing about language features is unless they're enabling you to think about a problem in a new way or create something new and impressive that you weren't able to do before, then they're not really buying you too much.  There's a lot of value in checking out new languages because they help you think about problems differently. And, but I wanna talk about the really the most important language feature that Ruby has in my opinion. And that's the people. And that's what I love about RubyConf and that's what I love about Ruby Conferences in general is that you get a chance to meet other Rubyists. The Ruby community is by far, far and away Ruby's best language feature. And I love all you guys, you're awesome and I'm so thankful to be part of this community. And you find that Rubyists are in generally pretty happy people. They're innately curious people. And we like to be, and we're constantly being surprised usually in good ways by how flexible the language is and by how much we can accomplish with it. But the really important thing in the core at all of this is that I think that in the Ruby community we get better than many other communities that in reality we're all human beings and we have stories and we relate to one another as individuals a lot more than just people that crank out code. And that's why I've come to kind of, you may have noticed a lot of people going out and kind of checking out new languages, new technologies, it's pretty common now. I know Tony's pretty excited about Rust these days and I know that we have Matt Amonetti is very into go. We have people checking out Elixir and in fact one of our own, Jose, in fact created the language. And I got a little worried that everybody was going elsewhere seeking new and exciting things and what'll happen to Ruby. But I've come to realize that that diaspora of Ruby programmers turns out to be a good thing. But while we're on the topic of diaspora I don't mean this goofy social networking thing that probably nobody uses. Do you think it really makes any sense to trust any kind of software whose logo is an asterisk? Like it feels like it's hiding something. It feels like it's hiding something from you. So, but so we have this diaspora that we're seeing. And I think it's okay.   Okay. All right. So, and maybe a few of us, maybe a few of us. Go ahead. You can do it. There we go. So maybe a few of us are even going back to Java but wherever we go we're bringing this notion that the language should serve the programmer. The programmer shouldn't serve the language. And that, believe it or not, in a lot of communities feels kind of foreign. Like, well, what do you mean this is unwieldy? But we have a really high bar as Rubyists for how far we want the language to come to be human, to meet us where we are. And I think that's a really important differentiator. And more importantly than that, as we go out and as we spend time in these other communities, we come back with important ideas. We come back sometimes with people that are like, I got to check this Ruby thing out because these guys are all deliriously happy like all the time and what's going on with that. And so it's really important to remember that, you know, we don't, it's like Sandy said this morning. Change is constant. What we're doing is going to impact future generations of programmers. And we owe a lot of what we have now because we're standing on the shoulders of giants, people that have created languages before. And so it's really important to realize that these languages don't die. The ideas and the people and the community, that's what endures. These relationships that we make at conferences like this, that's what endures. And these ideas that we bring, we need to carry along with us. So that Ruby, whether we all write Ruby code 10, 20 years from now, Ruby will still be alive and well in the philosophy that we carry with us today. That's really all I've got. Thanks so much for your time.


Okay, let's see. Good morning everybody on the west coast here on the east coast that is good afternoon. I thank everyone for spending their time with us today as we go over a beginner's guide to investing. What I want to do is share my screen with everyone. What I'll do is I will give you a little feedback of myself. I've been a wealth manager for about 28 years, retired about two years ago, and find it a lot more beneficial appealing to give information to wonderful librarians like Doreen, and to work with library patrons like yourself. I'm giving them a fantastic informational database for finances across the board. Today we're going to be going over a beginner's guide to investing. Okay, and with the beginners guide to investing will be going into how you might want to venture into the do's and don'ts of investing, and really some of the pitfalls that you may fall into as well. I just kindly ask everybody to hold on to questions till the end. We'll try to answer as many questions as possible, and hopefully throughout the presentation we have an opportunity to have your questions answered simply by the presentation itself.  I'm sorry to interrupt Tom but there's a little bit of background noise is there maybe a fan or a window open. Is that better. Well hopefully I don't hear anything so I think it does it sound a lot better now. It sounds good to me. Okay, awesome. So, let's go ahead and let's. I'm here at the basics of investing. This is a beginner's guide to investing. And I believe you had a great opportunity to see how to go into the San Francisco public library to access wise financial ratings. The first thing you want to do as an investor is you want to set your goals. That's the best way to set your goals to grow your money. You want to earn higher returns. A lot of people want to say for retirement maybe some people don't want to start a business. For anyone who has children. Child's education is tremendous. And it's a big goal for everybody I know that I just had a son who just graduated from college and I have a daughter that's in college right now so child education very important. That's the best way to set your goals versus return. Higher risk equates to potential higher returns or higher losses. Not everybody holds the same risk and return ratio. I'm sorry Tom also we can't see your slides. You cannot see that okay I have this slide shared. Hold on one moment. Let's see here. Yeah I could always go back. Let's see here. I think you have to allow me you're not you have to allow me to be able to share the screen I can't. Oh, yeah I can. Okay, you are a co host. So you should be able to. So. This is, and I'm already in and it's asking me to launch the meeting, which we were on this before but I am unable to to control anything, and I would you know what I'm going to do I'm going to make you a host. Okay. All right, so. Awesome. Thank you. Yes. Sorry everybody thanks for bearing with us but the only thing is when we're done you have to end the meeting, because you'll be the host. No worries. Thank you. All right, is that better. It still is not allowing me. Can you see my screens. I see you I don't see your screen. Okay so it's not allowing me to share. So that would be that that would be on unbeneficial. Okay. Everyone just give us a minute we'll figure this out. Hello. I was just on before and I was able to share. Somehow, it stopped. I wonder if there's a work around. You could maybe send the slides to me. Yeah, let's do this. Doreen what's your email address. Hey it's my first name dot last name at SFPL.org. Doreen dot your last name. I'll direct message you. Okay. If you see it. It's in the chat. I do not have access to the chat. I see that's the issue. I'm not seeing anything here at at all. Okay. Something's really gone haywire. All right. Let me put a message in the chat for everyone. Okay. Okay. There's a suggestion that you log out and log in again. You want to try that. Yeah, I'm going to wind up doing that. Okay. And can you make me a co-host again before you log out. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I guess we can do it. So go ahead and log out and we'll log back in and start over. And we'll just, the guests are still here. So everyone. Thank you for being patient. Now I see everybody here. So now I can go ahead and I can share my screen. You want me to go ahead and make you the host again. Sorry, I was on mute. So. I can go ahead. I'm okay. Okay. Okay. I'm going to go ahead. Host disabled. Participant screen sharing. So that's why you weren't able to see my screen. Okay. So now I'm going to. There. Okay. Okay. Now see if you can do it. Yay. Okay. All right, everyone. I will go quiet now. Okay. I thank everybody for their patience.  Where we started before because I think it's also important that we have a visual on what we're going. I just want to make sure that everybody can actually see the screen now. It can, can everyone see the screen? Yes. Awesome. Alrighty. So the first thing we want to do as an investor is we want to set goals. We want to set goals so we can grow our money. We can earn higher returns. We want to save for retirement. Maybe we might want to start a business. Save for your child's education. I had made mention before I just had a son who graduated from college and I have a daughter that's in college. Really important that we set those funds aside and start saving for our college education because it is starting to get a lot more costly as time goes on. So it's really important that we take advantage of a lot of these vehicles that we have that, you know, or tax advantages for saving for child's education. Risk versus return. Higher risk equates to a potential higher return. And higher losses. So again, the greater the risk we take, the better the reward. The least risk we take. The lower the reward. That's way to do all of the above is diversify your assets and your industries. Some people. Would also consider industries as sectors of the market. Don't buy all bank stock. Buy in a store and assorted industries or assorted. Sectors of the market. Don't put all your investments in stock. Go with mutual funds or other options as well. The reason why we say that is when you buy one particular company, if that one particular company is affected by the overall market or the overall environment, your portfolio will be a have a direct reflection on that. However, mutual funds are a pool of investments of different companies anywhere from 50 to 200, which will help alleviate some of the risk in the portfolio. You want to invest for the long term. You'll experience ups and you'll experience downs.  Chase. In the market never, never pans out for anybody. Anybody who has said that they've been able to play the market. Usually winds up on the, on the losing end. Tom, the slides are not advancing. I'm sorry to keep bothering you. Cause they're, they're advancing on my side. Oh no. Okay. Oh my goodness. Let me see if. So none of these are advancing. Let me try this. So you, can you see my screens now? I can see that. Yes. Can you see the screen now? I just see the first slide. So I'm not seeing. Go to a. The next slide. Oh. Okay. So. Yeah, this should not. Yeah, this should not be happening like this. Yeah, I've never had these problems. Neither. Neither have I to be honest with you. You know what? Give me two moments. I'm actually going to call my resident sharp shooter in here. Who knows every and anything. About this. So just give me one moment. I'm just going to mute myself for a moment here. Okay. Okay. Thanks for your patience. We'll get it. And we will email the slides to everyone. So you will get copies of the slides. I'm just sorry that. That we're having trouble getting started. Can everybody see this now? Yes. All right. So everyone can see it says invest for the longterm. Yes.  Everyone's been really cool about this in the chat. All right. Let's do this now. And feel free to talk a little longer since we lost about. 10 minutes there. So, you know, take it away. Absolutely. So, you know, we want to invest for the long term. You know, you'll experience up and downs. Riding the downs usually pays off in the long run. And usually people who try to play the market or chase the market, they'll be doing that for their entire investment career. It's so very few and far between. That an investor knows how to time the market the most. The most appropriate way. So. I really stay. Time tested with riding the downs. And just diversify within the market. Time tested with riding the downs. And just diversify within and across all of the asset classes. Manager portfolio manager portfolio for action as needed. Reinvest your earnings and keep your portfolio balanced with diversity. As I mentioned before. Create a watch list on a vice financial ratings website. And you'll get email alerts when your stocks or mutual funds are upgraded or downgraded. And you'll get email alerts when your stocks or mutual funds are upgraded or downgraded. Now, normally at this segment, I would simply go over to the vice financial ratings page. However, I do not want to buck the trend. Everybody sees what's going on. And I want to stick with it. I'm sure that if you have the opportunity, you have a great reference. Librarian in Doreen. If you have any questions, she'll show you how to go in and talk to the vice financial ratings page. And you'll be able to go in and talk to the vice financial ratings page in our everyday lives. And to be able to go in and set up a watch list. Whenever the market moves up or down in your particular portfolio, to get that email, that email alert certainly is very helpful. Fees, you always have to watch out for fees. You got to watch your fees. Be sure they align with your investment strategy. They align with your expenses, investment fees, front-end loads, back-end loads, custodial fees, and 12B1 fees. Now, when we talk about management fees, front-end loads, back-end loads, custodial fees, and 12B1 fees, those are typically all associated with mutual funds or exchange traded funds. Taxes, keep your tax accountant informed and take advantage of tax-free options, which we'll note later on in the presentation. Here's our investment vehicles. Money market accounts, savings accounts, certificates of deposit, college-saving 529 accounts, and of course, traditional and Roth IRAs. All interest-bearing low-risk products, college-savings, 529 plans, and IRAs, they offer tax advantages and tax benefits. Money market accounts typically have higher interest rates than savings accounts. You can write a limited number of checks per month. Most have higher minimum balance requirements and maintenance fees. Savings accounts typically have no minimum balance requirements, but still only allow minimum amount of transactions per month without paying any fees. Certificates of deposits, better yet known as CDs, they offer you a higher interest rate. In some cases, if you leave a lump sum deposit with the bank untouched for a fixed period of time, you typically get a nice return at the end of the time frame of the CD. College-savings 529 plans, they allow you to save for the future educational costs and prepay tuition plan or an educational savings plan. Most states offer tax benefits for contributions to a 529 plan. Withdrawals that are made for qualifying educational expenses are not subject to state or federal income tax. Now, a lot of those educational, qualifying educational programs, they could be like an APEX technical institute. They could be a high school, a private high school. All of those fall in line for qualifying educational expenses. So you don't necessarily need to use that 529 plan for college savings, but for higher education as well, including high school and some even parochial school. If withdrawals is made for non-qualifying educational expenses, those withdrawals will be subject to state and federal income tax and additional tax penalties. So you'll always want to check with your accountant to make sure that the withdrawals for the educational system that you're looking to fund has those tax benefits to it. Traditional IRA, Individual Retirement Account is a retirement account that allows you to grow your earnings tax deferred. It allows you to reduce your taxable income now. Taxes are paid when you withdraw your funds after retirement. Early withdrawals are taxed at a... and they're taxed and they're... are changed at 10% penalty. It's charged, not changed, and I apologize for that typo. You can contribute 6,000 per year in 2022 or 7,000 per year if you're 50 or older. Everyone can open and contribute to a traditional IRA, but your contribution may not be fully tax deductible if you meet certain income requirements. Roth IRA is another type of tax-advantaged retirement savings account. You can fund a Roth IRA with after-tax dollars and the contributions are not tax deductible. But when you withdraw the funds, you do so tax-free. You can contribute 6,000 per year in 2022 or 7,000 per year if you're 50 or older. A Roth IRA is a good choice if you will likely be paying a higher tax rate in retirement than you are now. You cannot qualify for a Roth IRA if you have an annual income of more than $144,000. 401Ks, most of the time 401Ks are employer-sponsored. Often employers match your contributions to a set percentage. If your employer offers a match, try to invest as much as you can up to the percentage that they'll match to take advantage of that free money. Contributions are pre-tax and deducted from your paycheck lowering your adjusted overall gross income and your tax bill. Employees are limited to $20,500 in employee contributions in 2022. Employees that are over 50 are also allowed a catch-up bonus of $6,500 in 2022. Stocks. When you buy shares of a stock, you are purchasing a piece of ownership or equity in a company. For example, if you purchase 100 shares of XYZ company and they issued 10,000 shares, then you effectively own 1% of XYZ company. Your investment risk is that the market value of your share drops below the price you paid and that's the investment risk. While performing companies are likely to grow and your stock values are likely to increase, new or poor performing companies may result in losses. Bonds. Bonds represent debt to a company or a government entity selling bonds. As an investor, you are lending them your money with the expectation of a return. Interest is paid periodically in accordance with the contract. The principal is returned at maturity. A defined date in the contract. So again, all bonds have an expiration. They have a maturity date. And once that bond matures, the promise is that you'll receive your principal in full. Your investment risk is that the entity who sold the bond does not default and you don't lose both any principal and or interest. Mutual funds. We spoke about mutual funds earlier on as a great way to diversify a portfolio. Mutual funds are a basket of assorted products, stocks and bonds. Most funds are already well diversified. You are paid a portion of the income made by the fund itself. The risk is that the fund fails to perform well. The diversity inside that mutual fund makes it less likely for that to take place. Annuities. Annuities are insurance related products. You give your investments to the insurer and they promise you a certain rate of return for as long as you live. You can purchase them with either monthly payments or a single lump sum payment. The insurer disperses payments to you on a set schedule defined in the contract. Depending on the terms of the purchase, you can receive these payments. You may also name a beneficiary who would benefit in the event of a passing or your death. With fixed annuities, you're guaranteed the same payout, each pay period. With a variable annuity, your payments will fluctuate depending upon the stock market and other factors. Examine your risk tolerance carefully before considering a variable annuity. Variable annuities tend to have higher fees and surrender charges if you withdraw your money early. Commodities. Commodities are things like precious metals, gold, silver, which typically perform better in a declining market. Agricultural, wheat, corn, beef, soybeans, and right now we certainly see energy, gas, heat, oil, electric. They all play a vital role in the market as well, and right now energy costs are soaring, so obviously those portfolios are doing well. Hedge funds. Hedge funds at high risk usually require a higher dollar investment. A combination of money from multiple investors get pulled into these hedge funds. Again, hedge funds usually require a much larger investment to begin. The risk is also a lot greater. Savings bonds. They're issued by the Treasury Department at thetreasuredirect.gov. They are considered low risk. You can earn interest for up to 30 years. They're tax beneficial. You pay no state or local taxes on the interest. You pay federal taxes on the interest when you cash in the bond or when it matures. There are additional tax benefits if savings bonds are used for qualifying educational expenses. You can buy up to $10,000 in savings bonds per year. The risk pyramid. We've talked a lot about risk and reward. Obviously the higher the risk, the greater the reward, the lower the risk, the least amount of reward. You can win big, but you could also lose big with risky investments. The higher risk, obviously the features, the futures, options, and other derivatives. Speculative stocks and mutual funds, low rated bonds, mining, precious metals, those are all considered higher risk investments. Moderate risk, growth stocks, small cap companies, medium rated corporate bonds and municipal and zero coupon bonds, mutual funds and rental real estate. A lot of people don't really categorize rental properties as investments. They most certainly are. Limited risk, blue chip stocks, high rated corporate municipal and zero coupon bonds, conservative mutual funds, US Treasury bonds and US Treasury notes. And of course the lower risk, we've talked about that earlier on in a presentation, savings accounts, money market accounts, savings accounts, money market accounts and funds, CDs, fixed annuities and cash all carry relatively low risk. 110,000 in savings account at a rate below inflation will be safe, but will lose value over time. So again, although we may turn around and put 10,000 into a savings account, typically it doesn't outpace inflation and therefore we wind up losing money over time. How do we get started? Educate yourself, knowledge is power.  Hire a financial advisor if you're new to investing. You have to understand the risks and the benefits of investing. Decide what to invest in that will help you best meet your goals. Again, what might be ripe for one investor may not be ripe for the next. Open a brokerage account. There are various types of brokerage accounts. You have full service brokers that offer investment management, experienced advice, research, retirement planning, tax advice and more. You'll pay fees and commissions for those services though. Then you have your discount and online brokers who offer low-cost trades, but you're in charge of managing your own picks and your own trades. You'll pay an extra fee if you want help from a broker at one of those discount or online brokerage houses.  Let's look at some numbers. Stocks. Earnings should be growing year to year. No need for drastic jumps. Nice steady movement. Consistent small jumps are a good indicator. Earnings per share. This is the company's net income or earnings divided by the total number of outstanding shares. Example. Earnings of $50,000 on 10,000 shares outstanding is $5 earnings per share. Long-term stability. Trend line should move in a general upward pattern. The economy will play a role, but again, you want long-term upward momentum. Very similar to the chart you see right here next to the dollar sign. That's a big jump and that's a big movement north. If we could see that fantastic, but remember with that type of movement comes a certain amount of risk that we take in the market. And risk and reward need to play a vital role in our investment lifetime. The industry. Is the industry one that'll be an ongoing concern? Technology, for example, can be outdated very quickly. Apple puts out an iPhone every three, four months. So does Samsung. So again, technology becomes outdated very quickly. And we need to make sure that we're investing in industries that, you know, stand a test of time. Price earnings, P.E. ratio. It's the current share price divided by the earnings per share. The higher P.E. ratios generally indicate good growth. Again, check the industry norm. You can do that all right here on the wise financial ratings. Dividends. Consistent or increasing payment of dividends is another really good indicator. It means it's a strong company. That consistently is giving. Profits back to their shareholders. And a rise in dividend and even more importantly, companies that can sustain paying the dividends is usually a really good indicator of a very strong company. Executive management. Well experienced and low turnover and executive management is always a good thing. You'll always want to take a look at how long the CEO, the COO has been a part of the organization. Again. People have been with an organization for a long period of time, usually help with the stability of the company. Risk tolerance. Risk tolerance depends on your current or long-term needs. Ask yourself this question. Are you looking for current income or long-term growth? Capital gains brings tax implications. You have short-term capital gains if you're holding on to an investment less than 12 months. And then you certainly have long-term capital gains if you're holding on to an investment longer than 12 months. The tax advantage of holding on to it longer than 12 months certainly outweighs the short-term capital gains. Is the money needed to fund a college education or you're working towards retirement? Can you tolerate a portfolio that may have extreme swings in value? Up, down, that can be nerve-racking. You can spend many sleepless nights consistently looking at the market. Are you more comfortable with the conservative investment strategy? Are you investing money that you can afford to have tucked away for many years? My typical rule of thumb is you should have at least a five-year time horizon for this money. Expense ratio. The expense ratio is basically the cost associated with owning the fund. Expenses include things like copies, portfolio management, the analyst salary, coffee, office leases, and electricity. Also, the management advisory fee and basic operating expenses. Lower is better when considering the expense ratios of a company and or a mutual fund. Turnover ratio. The turnover ratio is the percentage of the portfolio that is bought and sold each year. If it is higher than 50%, you may want to consider another fund. The analogy I'll give with that is typically if you see a turnover ratio in a mutual fund of more than 50%, that typically means the money manager is chasing return on a mutual fund to oppose to doing the fundamental research, as I would say, kicking the tires and feeling the pain before making a purchase. Most of the times when you have a portfolio that has less than a 50% turnover ratio, that means they have a money manager that has done their due diligence on the purchases inside the portfolio. Load versus no-load mutual funds. Loads or fees. Look for funds that have no-load or have loads or no-load funds. Sometimes they're called no-load transaction fees. Diversification. The more diversification and less likely one factor can negatively impact the performance of the fund. They sort of work as an equilibrium. If you're holding on to a mutual fund that has information technology and consumer staples. And let's say consumer staples are not doing so well, but the information technology is doing well. Usually they help alleviate a lot of the risk in the portfolio. Index funds. Index funds are based on indexes like the S&P 500 index, or the Dow Jones and just real average. Index funds usually are good bets with low expense ratios and they are heavily diversified. Obviously the S&P 500 is 500 of the top blue chip companies. The Dow Jones industrial average typically is 30 of the top companies in their industries. So either one of those give you a broadband of diversification of companies that have stood the test of time. International funds. International funds are generally higher costs and higher risk because value is dependent on the dollar value of the country that you're investing in. Dollar cost averaging. Really important for an investor. Dollar cost averaging is the best way to keep your risk low over the long term. Example, invest $50 each month into a mutual fund when the market is up. Your $50 buys less shares, but when the market is down, you buy more shares for the same investment. Over time, the average cost basis of your shares is longer. The average cost basis of your shares is lower. And you can build a larger stock position. Dollar cost average is probably one of the more beneficial ways to have a consistent flow of building a portfolio. The Weiss ratings database. Let's take a look. How are you going to log into the Weiss financial ratings database is you're going to simply go to the SFPL.org, which is the library. Again, like we spoke about earlier on in the presentation, you're going to navigate to their research and learn. You're going to scroll down and search for articles and database. And you're going to click on W. You'll have the Wall Street, the two tabs of Wall Street, and then right underneath you'll find the Weiss ratings. If you're logging in from home, enter your right-hand corner and enter your library card number there. Creating a watch list. As you're navigating the Weiss financial rating site, you'll be able to save companies or investments into a watch list. You'll get email alerts if a rating is ever upgraded or downgraded. And if you can ease and you can easily view the ratings of your investments in just one click. You'll see the Watch List button in Research, Results, and Investment Profiles. Click the Watch List button. It's that little star inside, which I'm going to show you in just a few moments, to add a company to your watch list. After a company is stored into your watch list, the button will turn into a check mark, like so. To view your watch list, click on the Watch List tab button in the blue navigation bar. Now what we'll do is I'll show you here. I just want to make sure. Can everyone see this right here? Doreen? Yes, we can see. Fantastic. So what we'll do is we'll go straight into stocks here in the Weiss financial rating database here. And the stock of the day is Franco-Nevada operation. Just like so you have the star right there. If we clicked on that star, there's the check. And we simply pull down our recently added. And there is our watch list. Now every patron will be able to go in and set up their own personal profile. You'll be able to input your email address. Always remember Weiss financial ratings does not collect information for any purpose other than the watch list or emailing you a Metagap report. If I wanted to simply have this removed from my watch list, simply go and I uncheck the box. And now my watch list is empty. Here's some more information. Popular financial advisors. We have Edward Jones, the advisor group. RBC wealth management. Morgan Stanley. Charles Schwab. UBS wealth management Americas. A Mera prize. Fidelity investments. Raymond James. And Wells Fargo. Finding more information. Go to investors.gov. There's the link there.  And if you don't feel the necessity to rush and write things down, you'll get a copy of this from Doreen shortly. The SEC beginner's guide to investing is another great source for education. And of course, to me, always the go to Weiss financial ratings online. Now what I would like to do. Is show you very quickly. Where you can find more resources. For example, the financial literacy tool, the financial literacy tool up top. You have financial literacy basics planning for the future. And this is usually the fourth one down, which is how to become an investor. We click on how to become an investor. And we have all of these wonderful PDF books. What is investing brokerage firms. Financial advisors. All about investment fees. And these are our alternative investments. Now some would say I skipped one. To me, this is the most important book in our financial literacy suite for investors. What type of investor are you? I just want to be able to show you the content of this book and show you just how easy and information. Packed these books actually are different types of investor. What is risk? How to determine your risk tolerance. Everybody's risk tolerance is different from everybody else's. I may have been saving in retirement a lot longer than others have. I may have more put away. So for me, when a particular company, and I'm going to use a hypothetical here. This is not a recommendation, but a hypothetical. Apple. I may own a certain amount of shares of Apple. You may own the same shares. You may have a certain amount of money in retirement. And if Apple winds up taking a hit, it may only equate to about 5% of my portfolio. So in general, if Apple decides to slide in value, it's not going to greatly affect my overall portfolio. But for somebody who maybe does not have as large of a portfolio, but yet now they're holding on to 15 to 20% of their portfolio is an Apple that could have a devastating effect to somebody's portfolio. So that's what I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about how to determine investments, especially in a retirement portfolio. So you definitely, this is probably one of the better portions of this book to go into is how to determine your overall risk tolerance. Again, you had the different types of risk. Different types of stock market risk. The concepts of risk. How do you manage risk? So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to stop sharing. Okay. And we can probably enter in the. The portion here where I'll answer any questions that you may have. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to. I would.


You're welcome back to the Breakfast on Plus TV Africa. It's now time for Today in History. Let's tell you some interesting events that occurred on this day many years ago, and we're going back to the year 2014, and it's on this day, June 15th, 2014. Now, Today in History, we saw some Boko Haram insurgents attack a market in Borno State, and they killed at least 15 people, and that's including traders. So they had stormed a local market in the Daku village of Askira Uba Local Government Area of Borno State. They went to the market on motorcycles. There were about 20 armed men. They invaded the market in the morning. They set fire to the market, burned down lots of stores, cut away foodstuffs, and they just ran away. This was in 2014, and at this time, we had been seeing lots of terrorist attacks. The week before, there were about six attacks in Borno State and in Northern Nigeria. Boko Haram insurgents were bombing cities, bombing towns, invading villages, attacking markets, and selling foodstuffs. So on This Day in History, such an event occurred in Borno State, Northern Nigeria. It's a time that nobody wants to go back to. This is 2014. Well, it's not like much has changed with regards to the figures of people still dying in the country to terrorist activities. But the tactics, I believe, are different. Now, we have even, sadly, even more of these groups. There's bandits, there's kidnappers, then of course, there's the headers. But 2014 was a time when it was mostly just Boko Haram. And there was the huge fears of going to church, huge fears of going to the market. A week before there was an attack in a church in Borno State. Remember those times when you wake up in the morning and you hear that there was a massive bomb blast at the telephone market or any of the markets in the north, and you see the figures of casualties and it just really, really breaks your heart. We've moved away from those times when there used to be bomb blasts. Some people might argue that we're now probably even in worse times with the number of these groups that have now emerged and have become really, really deadly and dangerous. But it's really just sad memories of where we are coming from. And we hope that it continues to get better. And we get to a place where this is all in the past. And Nigerians can walk around freely and go about their businesses, go to the market, go to the church and the mosque without the fear of terrorism or murder in any way. All right. Our next story on today's history is a story that you very likely wouldn't hear in Nigeria. Also, you very likely wouldn't hear among the black community, because blacks like life. And we don't like to risk our lives for any reason. And are we scared of heights too? Yes, we are scared of heights. People would argue that that's one of the reasons why black people don't invent a lot. Don't discover a lot, because nobody's trying to take a risk and lose their lives. We love our lives, don't we? So his name is Nicholas Walenda. He is an American acrobat, aerialist, a daredevil, high wire artist and author. He's also known for his high wire performances without a safety net. So it was on this day that he became the first person to successfully tightrope walk directly over Niagara Falls. He holds 11 Guinness World Records for various acrobatic feats, but was best known as the first person to walk a tightrope stretch directly over Niagara Falls. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Nigeria Niagara Falls. He walked 1,800 feet on a steel cable over the Messiah volcano in Nicaragua. His longest walk, he crossed Niagara Falls on June 15, 2012 on a live ABC special, following a two-year legal battle involving both sides of the Canada-United States border to gain approval. Those required to wear a safety harness for the first time in his life. The reality show aired on Science Channel, which followed his feats. And in 2013, he released a memoir entitled Balance, The Feet aired live on Discovery, breaking rating records for the channel. He is married, of course, with three kids and considers his Christian faith to be a central aspect of his life. So once again, yes, these are things that you would not see a lot of black people do because we like to remain here on earth where we're alive and we're good. Nigerians also, although there's a lot of Nigerians who are really, really, you know, daring, you know, those who still go bungee jumping, who go skydiving and some of all of that. Yeah, that's, that's maybe one of the things that I would love to, I will do, you know, skydive at some point. Okay. All right. So it's the Niagara Falls. Niagara. Yes. And he did great. What did I say? Niagara something. Lord have mercy. Niagara Falls. He goes to make an Igbo name for something. Niagara. So he crossed from the U.S. to Canada. It's crazy how he went through a period of illegal battle to make sure the U.S. and Canada gives him the required approval and permission to be able to make that walk. Because I'm sure that if he had done that, maybe the state would have had some bits of responsibility if any danger had come to him, maybe family suing or whatnot. But he gave, you know, was able to get permission and he walked. Just imagine him saying, you know, the view from above was just so breathtaking. So it was, it was truly an experience. Thank God he survived. He was even able to write a book about a tighter balance. And I think I love the title. It just captures everything and even such balance. Absolutely.  All right. That's all we have for you. 2012 and 2014. Short break. When we come back, we're moving into our first major conversation for today. It's talking on the grazing routes across the country and the president, you know, stands with regard to that and the reaction from southern leaders saying there will be no grazing routes and the ban on open grazing remains. That comes up next after the short break. Stay with us.


Coming up on DTNS, why you don't ransomware something as intention getting as a major pipeline, why Starlink isn't good yet, but might still get there and why forgetful AI is better than other AI. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, May 14, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Ling. From Columbus, Ohio. I'm Rob Dunwood. Drawing the top tech from Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Len Peralta. And the show's producer, Roger Chain. We were just reminiscing about seeing Lord of the Rings in the theater. And all kinds of good stuff on Good Day Internet. If you want that expanded show, become a member and get it patreon.com slash DTNS. We've got two people from Ohio on the show today. I hope you both win the lottery for getting vaccinated. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Twitter added search to DMs on its Android app, which has been available on iOS since October of 2019. So Android's caught up there. The company will also expand search to surface results based on words used in conversation in those DMs later this year. Currently search only applies to usernames. Foxconn, you know, the key iPhone assembler is warning that the global chip shortage will hit its production output this quarter, and that the lead time for getting some parts will be up to a year. A spike in COVID-19 infections in India is hitting Foxconn's production in that country, of course, with iPhone production at one plant down 50% after more than 100 employees at the plant tested positive. Apple said during its most recent earnings call that impact on iPhone production would be limited, but it does expect shortages of iPads and iMacs. According to the state run at China Transport News, 10 ride hailing and freight delivery platforms in China, including D.D. Xuxing were called into a meeting with the country's state administration for market regulation and seven other government departments. Ride hailing platforms were warned to address high pricing, unclear mechanisms for profit sharing with drivers and arbitrary pricing, while freight carriers were warned about abusing monopoly power with transport data and industry prices. Here they go. Moving on to different industry. Samsung updated the blockchain wallet on its mobile devices to let users transfer coins between phones using Bluetooth or a USB cable. The Samsung blockchain wallet was originally introduced on the Galaxy S10 series, providing encrypted local storage of cryptocurrency. On Friday, Ireland's High Court dismissed Facebook's bid to block a European Union privacy decision that could suspend Facebook's ability to send information about European users to US computer servers. This follows a preliminary decision on data flows that the court received back in August from Ireland's Data Protection Commission. Facebook had claimed it was not given adequate time to respond, but its bid was still dismissed. Ireland's DPC leads enforcement of EU privacy law for Facebook and other companies that have their European headquarters in the country. Well, let's talk about this week in ransomware. After that colonial pipeline attack, ransomware definitely in the spotlight. And we've got more news about it. Friday, the Irish government announced that the Irish Health Services Central data servers were under an attempted ransomware attack. It started at the Rotunda hospital, but it seems to be more widespread. The system has been shut down in order to protect itself. We don't know who is behind that attack as of this recording. Toshiba disclosed that it had been attacked by Darkside, the same group believed to be behind the software used in the colonial pipeline attack. And Bloomberg sources say not only did colonial pipeline pay $5 million to Darkside, apparently within hours of the attack a week ago. Yesterday, we talked about the possibility that they had paid it. But now the sources are saying, yeah, they paid it almost immediately. But that the decrypting tool that Darkside provided was so slow that Colonial's IT workers continued using the company's own backups to help restore the system. A couple of things to note here. Darkside provides ransomware as a service, not only directly, but to affiliates. And it may be that an affiliate attacks Colonial, not Darkside itself, and Darkside was unprepared for the scale of that attack. Attacking a target as large and attention getting as Colonial is unusual. Ransomware groups want to get their money and get out. They don't want to be noticed. They don't want publicity. Brian Krebs reports in fact that Darkside is shutting down its service. A message from Darkside posted and then reposted on Telegram reads, a few hours ago, we lost access to the public part of our infrastructure, namely the blog, payment server and DOS servers. The host of their stuff will only tell Darkside that it is blocked at the request of law enforcement agencies. Darkside also says funds from a payment server were withdrawn to an unknown address. So it looks like the government, possibly others, have come for Darkside. Darkside says it will release encryption tools to any targets who are still locked, but have not yet paid. The message is in part attributed to REVOL, which is another ransomware as a service platform presumed to have overlapping membership with Darkside. REVOL says it will continue to operate, but it will restrict its affiliates from targeting health care and education institutions or governments because they don't need that kind of hassle. Intelligence firm Intel 471 believes ransomware operators are retreating from public view right now with the aim of resurfacing under new names with new software variants so they can't be linked to these attacks because the heat's on now. Well, gosh, a lot to parse here. The Irish Health Service, essential data servers being attacked goes against what I know a lot of ransomware companies claim to not want to do, you know, not trying to screw with the health of, you know, a country and that kind of data. And this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Darkside. But yeah, the whole ransomware and the spotlight and we touched on this with Justin Robert Young yesterday is not that it's new, but boy, is it, is it certainly in the spotlight these days? Yeah, this is why you don't go after a pipeline because then you get your server seized and you lose access to your money, which is against the whole operation, criminal or otherwise, right? You need access to your money. All crime is bad.  But you don't want the FBI problems that this company probably has right now. Well, company is a strong word, but the disorganization has right now because they are in the crosshairs. You caused people to put gas and plastic bags. That's not a good thing. Well, you made a custom to put it in plastic bags. I get what you're saying. You created the conditions in which people are putting gas in plastic bags. That's not it's not a good thing. Yeah, I was I was taken aback by the news on Krebs that that dark side had was shutting down, but I shouldn't have been. It's it is definitely we don't know, but it seems likely that it's the US government saying we're not messing around. We're coming for these folks and we can track certain parts of your network and we're going to shut those parts of your network down.  They're not gone. They're not leaving the game. They're just going to, you know, show up named something else, especially because with the overlap to rival anyway, it's likely that that these are folks operating more than one organization as it is. They might have a couple, you know, sitting on the back burner that they can fire up in a couple months once the heat is off.  Yeah, what may or may not be related to the investigation of the Colonial Pipeline Attack Bloomberg sources also say the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, a Cayman Islands company called Binance, is under investigation by the US Department of Justice, the IRS, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The company itself is not accused of any wrong doing but the IRS is investigating both account holders looking for money laundering, as well as some employees. It's likely that that investigation was already happening before the Colonial Pipeline Attack, but certainly there might be some concurrent reasons for that. Disney reported that its streaming service Disney plus added 8.7 million subscribers in Q1, reaching 103.6 million subscribers worldwide. That fell just short of expectations, which were 109.3 million subscribers. By comparison, Netflix has around 208 million subscribers worldwide, but only added 4 million in Q1. A reminder, Disney raised the price of its package $1 a month to 799 on March 26. Disney CEO Bob Chappick said that Disney Plus is still on track to reach the goal of 230 to 260 million subscribers by the end of 2024. Disney's other two streaming services did quite well on their own. Hulu subscribers increased 30% to 41.6 million overall, and ESPN plus customers increased 75% year over year to 13.8 million. Disney is making more deals that include the rights to stream content to ESPN plus. Disney just signed new deals with Major League Baseball and LaLiga Soccer. Yeah, that might be the most interesting part of this to me is where we're going with live sports. I've always wondered how live sports transitions from traditional cable TV to the Internet. And this is indicating the way we're seeing it go to Peacock with NBC. We're seeing it go to Amazon Prime where they just only have it online, at least with Peacock. It's going to be both on cable and on Peacock. And it looks like that's what Disney is doing, too. They've got some stuff that's exclusive to ESPN plus. But as they sign new deals, they want to make it OK to simulcast to say, yes, this will be on ESPN, but we can also put it on ESPN plus without having to have some extra deal, which will make ESPN plus more and more valuable to sports fans. And I think that's how we see that transition happen is slowly things just move from one format to the other. So I am not terribly surprised that they missed their number, even though they didn't really miss it by that much.  And when you start adding all these things up, they are getting to the point to where they cost as much, if not more than what the cable subscription that you cut the cord, you know, a couple of years back might have actually cost. So I'm not terribly surprised there. And I'm looking at that. They're still on track for two hundred and thirty to two hundred and sixty million that, you know, it's going to be interesting to see how the industry goes to see are they going to actually be able to make that number because, you know, they're slowing down a little bit. And, you know, they've got to still do quite a bit of selling of the service to get it to two hundred and sixty million people. Yeah. And Netflix having two hundred and eight million subscribers adding four million and it's key one. And people saying, well, Disney Plus is adding more folks than Netflix is, but Disney Plus is also a lot newer. So, you know, there's we're still in the discovery phase for a lot of folks. That said, anything that is released or at least a popular movie or series that's happening and many have Disney Plus, you know, had had pretty good roll out out of the gate that obviously affects numbers. The numbers aren't too short of expectations, but yeah, you can see where all of these services are going to get to a point where it's like the people who want to pay for it are for the most part paying for it. And how do you get how do you get the new folks coming in? You know, what's the draw? Is the price too high? Because if you're kind of on the fence, you're like, I don't have eight more dollars a month that this just doesn't seem worth my time. On the sports front, like you mentioned, Tom, this does get interesting to me, especially because I mean, I am getting and a lot of this has to I don't watch a lot of live television anymore, but sports or, you know, award shows or, you know, the few other things where I really do want to watch something live that does become a little problematic and something that not that it's a pay per view model, it's really but something that's a little bit more of that a la carte. Like I just want to watch this specific game, you know, and I don't know what, you know, network agreements have been made. I don't really care. I just know that I can go to my Peacock streaming service or whatever it may be and get that game. And maybe it's maybe it's something where I'm only paying for that month of the service rather than some sort of, you know, contractual agreement, which of course is the old way of doing stuff. The more that we get to that model, the happier I think a lot of people will be. Yeah, I think a couple of things to remember about this. One is the perception is that this can cost more than cable, right? I hear that a lot like you just said, Rob, and it certainly can. But you have more control over it is what I always try to tell people is like, but it doesn't have to with cable. You paid or you didn't get it, right? Now you have control about putting these things together. But what I also forget is that there are still 60 to 70 million cable subscribers to wish this is not replacing cable. It's on top of their already incredibly expensive cable bill. And that's another thing Disney and Netflix and everybody else is dealing with is as people are now getting to go back outside and do more things here in the United States anyway, they are looking at these expenses and saying, well, hold on, maybe I don't need all of these. And just like we had no precedent for how this was going to affect things when we went into a pandemic, we also don't have a precedent for how it affects things coming out of a pandemic. I think that applies to more things than this, just this. But, you know, we're nobody really knows what's going to happen and what's going to stick. So it's interesting to see these numbers. Well, Google will provide network services to SpaceX's Starlink CNBC sources say that under a seven year deal, Starlink, the space based internet service will locate ground stations in Google Google's data centers starting in the US and then use Google's private fiber optic network to access cloud services. This is going to reduce latency, not just with Google services, but also other services that use Google Cloud or geographically near Google data centers, of which there are many. It will help reduce latency and lag on Starlink connections. That is an ongoing issue. Starlink is also working with Microsoft on modular Azure cloud data centers that can deploy anywhere and also use Starlink for the connection. That is good news for the future of Starlink as the verges Neelai Patel Friday called the existing implementation unreliable, inconsistent and foiled by even the nearest suggestion of trees. That we did also say it's a remarkable feat of engineering. Starlink currently costs $499 to install and then $99 per month for 100 megabits per second service down and 20 up. So I'm glad that they're going to make it better. I actually have a former coworker who lives in the middle of nowhere. And what the pandemic did for them was that they were on the road up darn near 100% of the time. But because they were working from home and their internet was so bad at their house, they actually had to rent an Airbnb so they could literally drive into the city to be able to work just because their internet connection was so unreliable out in the country where they live. So anything that's going to help those type of customers just get better access for trees and tall buildings are an issue though. So we're going to see how they're going to work around those things. Yeah, and being able to provide a service directly with Google data centers to reduce lag and latency is a big part of that. The other part is launching more satellites, which is something that Starlink has a lot of controversy with because they haven't done a good job of working with the astronomical community to work on a cooperative way to launch more satellites. And there's some opposition to them launching it. I think there's a solution to that where Starlink can get all the satellites up and needs. It just needs to reach out to the community and get them on board. But in the end, yeah, I think Starlink is going to be a reasonably reliable service, especially for people outside of cities. This line of sight steps always going to be an issue when you're inside big cities. You know, everybody talks about Manhattan. How are you ever going to get this to work in Manhattan when you got tall buildings everywhere? You can mount it on top of the skyscrapers, perhaps, and do it that way. But honestly, where it's going to catch on and where it's going to be used the most is in places where it's harder to run lines and provide reliable service. And it'll take a few years to get there, but it does seem like Starlink is a viable way of providing that. At least with this deal with Google, it is. Hey, folks, we love patrons that stick with us. That's why we're happy to offer Patreon loyalty rewards. If you're a patron at a particular level, you can get a unique sticker, mug, t-shirt or hoodie every three months as long as you stay a patron at that level. Each one has a unique piece of art from Len Peralta. It either features the DTNS seven year anniversary logo or that logo with either Roger, Sarah or myself. Get all the details and we shipped out a bunch of them this week. So check your email to see if you're getting one, patreon.com slash DTNS folks, what if every time you had to remember something you perfectly remembered everything around it. Now, before you say that sounds great, think about it. You get up in the morning and you're trying to remember how to make oatmeal and you recall everything you know about water, electricity, microwaves, farming, etc. That's too much. You don't need to wait through all of that to remember how to make oatmeal. But that's kind of what it's like for computers. All the data is preserved. And when a computer goes to look for something, it has to sort through all of the data to remember slash access what it wants to find. Now, computers are really fast at that, which is why they're great at sorting through and finding that. But it's still rather inefficient. And if they didn't have to do that, they'd be faster. Facebook's artificial intelligence scientists have developed a method for systems to forget irrelevant information in order to improve speed and efficiency of these algorithms. They call the method expire span, expire dash span. It predicts how important a piece of information is expected to be in the given context, and then gives it an expiration date. The less important that info is the sooner it expires, this eventually frees up memory over time. Each time a new piece of information is encountered, the relevance of related data is also reevaluated so that you keep the stuff that's relevant. And maybe you push off some of the stuff, you're like, I don't really need that anymore. One of the examples they gave in the blog, if you're having a hard time imagining this, was a word prediction task. You're asking an algorithm predict what the next word is going to be in this sentence. That system can be taught to remember rare words like names, which would be harder for it to predict, but forget filler words like the and of, which are easy to predict without having to remember them. That method is closer to how we do things. The team is researching how to incorporate other types of memories into the neural networks as well, with a kind of a lofty long term aim of replicating how humans remember stuff. But this is this is definitely a way to improve the speed and efficiency of AI. Yeah, this is really cool. I actually read this story twice just to make sure I was, you know, picking up on what was going on here. And, you know, being a form of big data guy, you know, the more stuff that is in memory that you have to recall that ultimately the longer it's going to take to do it. And I know these computers are extremely fast at doing that. But ultimately there's going to be diminishing returns of just storing all data for all time. And we used to think that that's how computers would work. They're just going to know everything. But no, they don't. They just need to know what they need to know. And this is really cool tech. And you're going to see, you know, as this stuff gets developed, I think you're going to see things that it's going to think like a human. I mean, that's what they're ultimately trying to get to. And this is a definitely a step towards that. Yeah, one of one of the things that I was kind of with you, Rob, where I was like, okay, let me think like a computer. Okay, what I love the the example of yeah, predictive text. That makes a lot of sense. Like there are certain article words where you the computer doesn't need to have that at the ready all the time can kind of thin out some data and free up space for more intensive computing power. But there are a lot of other things that computers don't do in the way where as a human, I might be searching for a word, right? Like, okay, I can think like this example, but it's hard for me to understand, okay, well, what is it like a concept that's not word related, like a verbal language that a computer can choose not to shuffle through wasting time? That is, that's thinking a whole different way. Yeah, I was thinking about it while you were were talking, Robbie, you reminded me of just plain old defragging a hard drive, right? The reason you defrag a hard drive is because there is some information on your hard drive that is more important and accessed more often. So you want to move that closer to the center so that the read head doesn't have to take as long to get out there and find it, right? You reorganize the hard drive so that it's faster because some information is relevant and and some isn't this, this in some ways you can be seen as as it just a more complex version of that of saying like information in general, forget about read speeds. Some of it doesn't need to be there clogging up the system and making us look through it at all. Yeah, and to your point, Sarah, you know, we oftentimes I know I oftentimes try to think of a word and have to have what is the acronym or what is the what is the word that I'm thinking of the dissimilar to this word? And we kind of stumble on that as humans computers are not going to have that issue when they know that they need to go get the data, they can still go get the data of the same speed that they do it currently. This is just going to give them the ability to be faster when they don't have to do that, which is really exciting. Yeah, yeah, no, this is interesting stuff. One thing I'll get Facebook very researchers do do a lot of really interesting work. Lenovo announced that Lenovo goal line of devices designed for users who work partly in the office partly at home and partly on the road. There is travel sized wireless multi device mouse that can connect up to three devices and supports wireless key charging available for $59.99 in June. There's also an $89.99 Lenovo go USB C laptop power bank, which can deliver up to 65 watts using a 20,000 milliamp battery and charge up to three devices at a time. More devices in the goal line, including audio devices are coming later this year. Yeah, this is interesting just just simply because they are marketing it towards the hybrid workplace. They're like, you know, I would say that their timing is impeccable because I know for me, I am ready to get out of the house. I can see myself going and working in Starbucks, working in not necessarily cola working places. I mean, you know, try to keep the coffee shops and stuff like that. But I want to go and do that. So if I can actually get me on, let me give me a mouse that I can wirelessly charge really easily.  I'm looking for that kind of stuff. And right now is the perfect time to actually have come out with these devices. So I think that's pretty cool. Well played. Yeah, it is great timing. And I think that, at least for me, and I think we all probably, you know, on this show, we travel with more gear than perhaps the average person. But when traveling, you know, it was always kind of like, okay, what do I for sure just really need? Because I don't want to pack anything more than I have to. But that's more of a, I got to get on a plane and maybe need something while I'm on my vacation or where I'm working, you know, somewhat far away, the more kind of I am a hybrid worker, I am in many places on any given day, or at least want to have the flexibility to be in more places that I used to, you know, either at home or at work type of a thing. It gives you a little bit more of an excuse to be like, okay, these, these devices that make everything just that much more convenient start becoming things I might want to buy. Yeah. All right, let's move on to fire trucks. This week, clean fleet report a couple days ago, wrote that the Los Angeles fire department or LAFD is showing off North America's first hybrid fire engine built by Rosenbauer Group, which is based in Austria. The LAFD purchased the revolutionary technology truck as it's known for $1.2 million last year. It has two electric motors with a total output of 490 horsepower, low center of gravity, optional integrated drone that could be used to scope out a situation out of line of sight, if there's a fire nearby, and the lack of engine noise when a fire rescue team needs to communicate effectively at an emergency scene. So these are all things that make an electric fire engine pretty attractive. Volvo Penta, creator of electric power trains for a variety of applications will power the truck, has an electric drive unit based on one used in terminal tractors. Rosenbauer will also test three more trucks in Berlin, in Amsterdam and in Dubai, and the unit may begin serial production as early as next year. Yeah, when, when I was first looking at this story, I was thinking, well, you don't want your truck to be too quiet because you want to people, you want people to hear it coming when, you know, it's going down the street. But then it pointed out in the article, and Sarah, you pointed out in our production meeting to me that when you're on the scene, all those trucks make noise. And I did a little work in search and rescue. And I remember just how loud it was when all the trucks are running for generators and pumps and sometimes just idling just in case, you know, they're needed at a moment's notice, having an electric version of that, even if it's a, you know, plug-in hybrid is is going to bring that noise level way down and bring the exhaust level down. It provides a lot of things on the scene that I think are incredibly beneficial. Yeah, when I read this, I just thought that did they have the drone in just for extra points because you can't have a drone to a regular fire truck? You can't, you can't. Yeah, no, the drone is important to have. They've been using it to fight fires quite effectively, but it's not like you couldn't have also had. I guess the idea is it can charge off of the battery from the electric truck. So yeah, it's like it's like the the entertainment system upgrade. Yeah, we get the drone. Yeah, we get the drone. It was already one point two million dollars. What's another drone? Yeah, that way you don't have to get the aftermarket drone. So yeah, I look for I mean, I don't live in the L.A. area, but I live in California and fires are of utmost concern to us and certainly other states and all over the world really. So yeah, the more that this can help folks who are doing the good fight in the good fight, I'm all for it. And yeah, that the the a fire engine that is less noisy when emergency crews are needing to communicate with each other. Not something I would have thought about, but makes perfect sense. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Got one from Nick. Nick says I'm type two diabetic. And about nine months ago, I switched from finger sticks to the freestyle Libra 14 day CGM. The advantage of Libra over the finger stick is I can scan the Libra CGM anytime with an app on my iPhone to get my current glucose level. I also don't have to carry my blood glucose monitor and supplies with me all the time. One disadvantage my Libra has is it doesn't generate any alerts for a higher low glucose levels. I can only see when I perform a scan. If the sensor was in a smartwatch, I should be able to get true real time. That would help me monitor what I eat and how it impacts my levels. I also spend about $900 per year on the Libra CGMs. Buying an iPhone with a glucose sensor would pay for itself in less than a year. My health insurance may not cover the cost of an iPhone, but our company wellness program would cover most of the cost. Nick says a blood pressure sensor would also be very helpful since I have to keep track of that data because of my age and because of my health issues. Nick really appreciate you sharing your direct insight into that, because I think a lot of times you hear about these health things and if you don't have the concern, you may not understand whether it's really helpful or not. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. So it's exceptionally valuable to get that insight. Thanks for writing in, Nick. Absolutely. Yeah, especially when you hear about, well, here's how you have to do it the hard way. Yeah. I have to do it the hard way. So this is how much easier it would be for me. Yes. Thank you, Nick. If you have feedback for us questions, comments, anything at all, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels today. They include Mark Gibson, Reed Fischler and Mike McLaughlin. Also, we have a brand new boss yesterday. We said we were going to thank you and we're going to and today we're thanking Andy Toy. Andy Toy just started backing us on Patreon. Give Andy a round of applause, everybody. Andy, you're the best. Well, all our opinions are the best, but Andy, you're also the best. Yeah, you could be the next Andy by backing the show right now. Just saying. All right, let's talk to Len Peralta, who has been busy illustrating today's show. What have you drawn for us, Len? Well, you know, when I saw ransomware and Dark Side, you know, I only went one way for me, right? So I felt like I had to do this. It was sort of written in the stars. Of course, I drew Dark Side, but I drew the DC version of Dark Side, who looks like he's been passed. He's a little bit pwned here because he, you know, got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and got all his toys taken away from him. There's a couple of things in here.  Oh, no, poor Dark Side. I almost feel bad for him. I don't feel bad for him, but he does have a little cute underwear. And Nelson from the from the Simpsons is also yelling, haha, in the background. You can see this at my Patreon. If you're a Patreon backer, patreon.com forward slash Len, you can get this immediately. You can also get it on my online store at LenPeraltaStore.com. And by the way, just incidentally, you can also watch me draw these live pre-show free DTNS on my Twitch channel twitch.tv forward slash Len Peralta. So check it all out, folks. Thank you, Len. And also thanks to Rob Dunwood for being with us today. Rob of the SMR podcast, which is some of my favorite weekend listening. Rob, what's been going on with you? Not a whole lot, folks. Can check me out at everything at Rob Dunwood. And definitely come check us out over at the SMR podcast. We are coming up on Episode 500 of just all kind of Tom Fuller in hijinks and crazy talk about tech. Very good. Well, we're well, I'm not going to say what episode number this is because I don't know because we don't even really know what it is. But we are live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC. If you want to know more, you can find out at daily technewshow.com slash live and we'll be back on Monday with Jen Cutter. Have a great weekend. Talk to you soon. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and host Rich Strafilino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Kuntz, associate producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer Jen Cutter, intern Dr. Nicole Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detteding, our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scott S1, BioCow, Captain Kipper and Jack Shid, modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, Acast and Ryan Officer. Acast adds support from Trace Gaynor, Patreon support from Stefan Brown. Contributors for this week's show include Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Rob Dunwood. Guests on this week's show included Robert Herron, live art performed by Len Peralta. And thanks to all our patrons who make this show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at Frogpants.com. Hope you have enjoyed this program.


This study examined the occurrence of multidrug-resistant E. coli and club-sealer pneumoniae in sewage flowing from a referral hospital through the urban sewage system to the point of discharge in the Indian Ocean. The results showed that 80.9 percent of E. coli and 71.6 percent of K pneumoniae were resistant to multiple drugs with 27.2 percent of the strains showing resistance to four or more classes of antibiotics. Additionally, extended spectrum beta-lactamase production was observed in 40 percent of E. coli and 36.2 percent of K pneumoniae strains. Furthermore, carbon and resistance was detected in 39.6 percent of E. coli and 32.6 percent of K pneumoniae strains. These findings suggest that the sewage released from the hospital poses a serious public health risk due to its potential to spread antimicrobial-resistant pathogens and genes. This article was authored by Nemganga Z. Siguni, Zahora I. Kimira, Frank Musafiri, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.