Hello, welcome to the Sawas podcast. Each episode we'll be discussing the latest in economics, politics and culture. I'm Isabel Edwards and today I'm talking to Professor Friederika Lubke and we're asking, are all languages created equal? So this discussion was sort of inspired by the fact that this year is the UNESCO year of Indigenous languages. Why do you think that we need to think about Indigenous languages differently from other languages? Well, the clue is really in the notion of Indigenous languages themselves because Indigenous languages only make sense when you think of languages fought in relation to colonial languages or more powerful languages. And so that means there are languages that are not equal because the people do not have equal rights and that goes way beyond language.  So we're talking about colonisation, imperialism, we're talking about genocide, we're talking about oppression and inequality and that has had an impact on all aspects of Indigenous peoples lives but of course also on their languages. And so in contexts where the impact of colonialism is really felt till today, Indigenous languages are the most marginalised and indeed not equal. And do you think it's the fact that there's this perception from what's been enforced on them that they're almost a secondary language, it almost seems that if there's an area that's been colonised then... They are erased actually. If you look at the US, they're attempts to make English the official language of the country completely erasing the Indigenous history of the United States. If you look at Brazil, Brazil is known as a Lusophone, a Portuguese speaking country that completely erases the fact that there are hundreds of Indigenous languages spoken by people who are still there. They still speak their languages. And the recent policy of Bolsonaro is one to completely annihilate the rights of these people and tell them you live in present-day Brazil, you need to assimilate. And do you think there's almost, I don't know if it's almost a fear of that unknown, that it's almost like if you have a language that we don't understand, you have a sort of power that isn't there, is that linked to it at all as well do you think? I think fear is very much linked to monolingualism. Yes, so monolingual people have a fear of other languages because they cannot control them, they cannot understand them. But this is also related to fears that go beyond language actually, that go, that actually are related to the fact that these languages and these, the groups that speak them, they are related to land, Indigenous land. And if we look at how Indigenous languages came to be endangered in the context where they are endangered, and we see that this is not just caused by language policies, although they play a big role. But it's also fundamentally caused by land grab, by resettling people into reservations, so completely destroying the language ecologies that have developed over time there, and by actually turning them then into speakers of one Indigenous language that can be pitched against the colonial language. And how do you think that affects your experience? If you are somebody that speaks one of these languages and you're in an environment where there is another language that is more widespread or that has that more prestige with it, what do you think that's like as a speaker of those languages? Well there's ample research that shows that speakers of Indigenous languages in these mainly colonial settlement colony settings are affected by mental health problems, depression. They have problems to participate in wider society, in economic life, because the stakes are set up against them. And of course they also suffer from their languages being completely devalorized and not being taught, not being respected, even as a language. Very often we find very pejorative terms, you know, this gibberish, these dialects, people are prevented from speaking these languages at school. That's a recurrent experience that speakers of Indigenous languages make. And on the other hand, then very often they are told you have to speak this language and you have to, you know, preserve this language for humankind. So it's very contradictory what speakers of Indigenous languages are being asked to do. Yeah, and I think we probably, I think in the UK especially there's this quite small minded view of the value of languages and I think often we tend to think of it in terms of that like usefulness, like is it going to be useful to you in business or how many people speak the language and it's almost like the more people that speak it, the more valuable we see this language as being. But I think probably, like you say, it's about having that connection to your roots and it's for humankind almost that we need to preserve these languages. Well, I'd like to get back to that a little bit later. So talking about usefulness and the UK attitude to languages, you can't even say that it's an attitude that is driven by, you know, the perceived usefulness of languages. I just think that in the UK this kind of monolingual fear of languages is extremely pronounced. If we were talking about usefulness, you know, 75% of the world's population doesn't speak English. If it was about economic usefulness and instrumentality of language, then every primary school child in the UK should learn Mandarin. That doesn't happen. What we have seen is, particularly over the last decade, 50% decline in the uptake of languages at school. So although primary school children are now learning languages in primary schools, this is completely under resourced, but in secondary schools, despite the introduction of the eBag, which was actually meant to correct this trend by allowing students to take a language up to the baccalaureate, students can only take one language. They don't need to take a GCSE in a language. Yesterday I talked to a secondary school teacher who is now becoming aware of the beauty of being multilingual. And she said, you know, I feel so terrible. I just completely messed up my friend in my GCSEs because I didn't take languages seriously. I really thought, what's that for? And I see my own students are not taking languages seriously. That is really striking because I think it's also related to a particular worldview of fear. So on the one hand, it entails, of course, linguistic insecurities when you speak with speakers of other languages.  Brits are just rubbish at languages. So that's a sad state of affairs, don't you think? I mean, that must be painful. And from that pain, then comes this fear, you know, fear of languages. Oh my God, we cannot speak these languages.  So there's a lot of linguistic conflict going on here. But I wanted to go back to Indigenous languages and the question whether we need to preserve them all. And I really want to emphasize something that this picture of endangerment and loss is not a universal picture. So we find many Indigenous languages that are endangered. And as I said, that's particularly in former settlement colonies, so North America, Australia, parts of South America, and of course, European countries, where you have actually eradicated Indigenous languages through Indigenous internal colonization or nation-state formation. You know, the UK has its own Indigenous languages, Cornish, Welsh, Greek, etc. But there are other settings that have not been colonized by settlers who actually went and lived there. And so these contexts comprise most of Africa, much of South America, Melanesia. And there we find actually much more vital language equalities. Of course, the colonial languages play an important role because in most countries they are the only official languages and they are the only languages taught in the former school system. But in the shadow of these language policies, there is still a lot of linguistic diversity alive and going on. And so it's really interesting to look at these settings as well when we talk about Indigenous languages. I think it's interesting that there's even that difference within that bracket of Indigenous languages. I think a lot of people kind of, it's like you say it's almost this idea that they're a less sophisticated language or that they're dialects and they're not the true language of the country. I think actually I'm sure that in all the research you've done in this area, you've seen that there's much more to these languages than an outsider might perceive. Yes. So from a linguistic point of view, these languages are fully fledged languages in all aspects. So they are completely able to express anything you would want to express. They have very often extremely complex grammatical structures. They some have complex tonal systems. So there is no way in which these languages are inferior. What many of them don't have is a written standard tradition. And I think that is one of the main reasons why people, including speakers of these languages themselves, see them as interior. Because we have this idea hammered into our heads that a language is a language with a dictionary and a grammar. A language can be written only in a particular way in a standard writing system. And this idea is of course related to the creation of nation-states. What happened in the wake of the creation of nation-states was that the linguistic variation of dialects and variable ways of speaking was erased and standard varieties of languages were created that then everybody was taught in schools. And of course, this ideology was exported in the wake of colonization to other areas. So that now very often speakers of indigenous languages see the only root towards being recognized as like in standardization. And that is actually very sad because very often you have languages that are spoken by small numbers of speakers, actually the higher linguistic diversity in an area. So the more languages you have, the smaller the numbers of speakers are. And so imagine if you have a language that has perhaps 500 speakers, perhaps a thousand speakers, and that then sees that it has to write the language and create a standard writing system. Now that might be really important and successful for symbolic recognition. So, you know, this language is now a language in a box, right? A language that has its book. But at the same time, it turns its speakers into kind of guilty illiterates. Why? Well, first of all, it is extremely costly to maintain standard writing, as I'm sure you know. We all had to learn our so-called native languages at school in a lengthy process. And we have a very developed written environment for these languages. And even in Western societies that are very monolingual and very geared towards maintaining this kind of monolingual standard writing culture, we know that many people actually struggle with literacy. So then imagine you are a speaker of language that has 500 speakers, so you are necessarily multilingual. And that is also going to be a much more powerful language and more widely spoken language present in your environment. And that's a language that you will learn at school, or that's going to be a language that has a pre-colonial writing tradition that you may have learned and still learn.  Who are you going to write to? What are you going to read? Who is going to create the resources? Of course, it's too that there is a great inequality. So these languages hardly ever receive any resources from this state. But even, I think, with the best intention to government, there is a real practical problem and that is linguistic diversity is related to many, many small languages. So we need to rethink this idea that you are a language when you are written. And if you have a language, the only way you can actually increase its value and visibility is through writing. And I think also that stems very much back to the problems that we do have in our school systems, where people are afraid to speak and they're afraid to give something a go.  And we're obsessed with this. Exactly. And this is so not the way to keep multilingualism alive. And it's really paradoxical where I work in Senegal and there are children that are highly multilingual already when they start school. And then they learn school, which is a very traumatic experience because school is entirely in French, at least officially, which is a language the children have not been exposed to before. So there's a postulant literacy and numeracy in French and learn French at the same time. And French is not a subject of instruction. And so they fail miserably. Oh, not entirely because they're very, very clever. And then they learn other languages as modern foreign languages in schools and they don't do well. That tells you how absurd it is actually, you know, to teach languages in this formal setting. So we should actually look at these other settings where people are effortlessly multilingual and look at how they do this. And it's through speaking, observing, being part of a supportive community that is geared towards, you know, a positive attitude to language learning.   And I think that's ecologies that we nurture multilingualism. And also through that, actually, you know, mutual understanding, cohabitation, connections between people. And so what is that what your experience has been of learning languages? Because obviously your multilingual, you speak lots of different languages, how have you found, I guess you must have gone through a process of learning them by road to school. And then in your sort of working life, you must have had a chance to explore them differently. Yeah, so my experience is actually one of, you know, your standard average monolingual European who learns languages through formal teaching at school. And that was the case until I was in my 20s. And I started going to West Africa. And many of the languages I was interested in, I couldn't actually learn at university, or anywhere, because they were not even described. And so I had to let go of all this and find my own way to learn these languages. And that was actually a quite difficult experience initially.  You can only, you know, be embarrassing, really. And then I also had this experience of doing my PhD in the Netherlands and coming to the Netherlands without speaking Dutch. And that is an experience that still haunts me, because I was doing fieldwork in West Africa. So I started taking Dutch classes. And then I went to Guinea. It worked on, you know, a tiny language that I had to learn at the same time. And my Dutch just went. And then at some point I just gave it up. Since then I have really great sympathies to immigrants who struggle to learn the languages of their host countries. And I think they get so much bad press, you know, you need to assimilate and they need to make the effort. It is so hard when you come to live in a country with zero or with very little knowledge. And you are supposed to function at such a high level. And the expectations post on you are so high. And they're also so politically charged. And the pressure that comes with it will happen if you don't let this language. Exactly. Yes. So, you know, I think they really deserve more respect and support. But so what this all did to me, and then, you know, going to the field with my own son when he was four years old and since then and seeing how he was able to just pick up languages and go with the flow and not worry when he'd forgotten them when we came back next year. That actually kind of set me free a little bit. And since then, you know, I also think I started thinking that the question that we always ask, how many languages do you speak?  I think it's the wrong question, right? It's a question that reflects this ideology that language is something that you have and you have to have them, you know, at utmost perfection. I think much nicer question is how many languages have you learned? Because what I find, what I see more and more as I grow older and I'm exposed to, you know, different languages all over and I can only master very few of them to perfection. So it's like, how many languages have you learned? And I can say I'm not a speaker of so and so many languages, but I have learned how to learn languages and how to communicate. Yeah, I think also like it's a very daunting thing where you're trying to become fluent in something like you say you feel that pressure on you, whereas actually, I mean, my experience is just that learning language and especially in the beginning stages is so much fun because you're exposed to something completely new and it is that doorway into the culture of that language as well. And it's not as simple as, you know, you can only understand that if you understand everything about using the subjunctive and all of this, it's just, it should be something that is fun to do. I completely agree. And what do you think of, so how do you think we could maybe enthuse people about languages more? So I guess the whole the point of this year is to sense raise awareness of Indigenous languages. What do you think the ideal I suppose outcomes of that would be? Well, I think, you know, for me the ideal outcome would really be that we actually look to the people who are multilingual. So that we look at Africa, we look at Papua New Guinea, you know, we look at the Amazon. And we copy some of the strategies, the speakers that are used, this flexibility, this learning language through real communicative needs, communities of practice. So that would mean, for instance, you know, if in your primary school you have many Turkish and Somali immigrants, why not teach Turkish or Somali? I know there's a school in Walthamstow that has a high Polish immigrant population and they started teaching Polish. And I think that's really great because for the children, they there's something they can really connect with and then they can speak Polish and English in the playground and during breaks and they feel they are valorized. And it's that pride, isn't it, that then you can share that? You can share that, you know, at my son's secondary school at the beginning of the year before they were streamed into languages. The teacher invited all the students to give a little taster lesson on the language that they spoke. And for the first time, these students who are very often just classified as deficient in English, you know, could showcase that they have this hidden wealth of languages. And similarly, you know, we realize so much on translation in English. And if you look, what that does is to our horizon, to our knowledge of the world, it's actually pretty terrible. I think translation into English is mainly from nine languages, that 3,000 languages in the world. What does that entail? We have a complete television and so multi-lingual speakers, they have these multiple perspectives on the world. And so how can we achieve that? Clearly not, you know, by translating everything. But there are so many other ways, you know, you can look at films that have subtitles, you can look at poetry performances that are subtitled and then just, you know, listen to the rhythm of Somali that is there in this book of performance and access, the meaning, you know, in English. So I think there are many ways in which we can kind of weave more multi-lingualism into our lives that would enrich us all. And hopefully, yeah, something that will be inspired to do. And I mean, so as such a great place to get that inspiration, because there are so many, so many languages being spoken, and probably, hopefully ones that when you were looking and you couldn't find those ones, you wanted to study, hopefully some of those are available now. Well, a great thing is also that, you know, we have many languages that saw us, but we have so many languages in London. And there are many initiatives actually, also by speakers of languages that are classified into these languages, who are doing things with languages. So for instance, there is a program called Culture Tree that offers Yoruba classes to children and adults so that Nigerians and people who are actually interested in learning Yoruba, you know, can connect with languages that may not play such a big role in their current daily lives, but that allow them to keep these transnational roots alive. Oh, thank you so much for sharing what you've been up to and telling us why this is so important. And I completely, I think that idea of languages, how many languages you learned is such a nice thing to take away from that and think about in terms of, we're not restricted, we don't have to be put in a box of which languages we speak. I think that's really important. And thank you for joining us for the Sirus podcast. If you'd like to hear more from us, you can head over to Sirus blog or you can visit our website.


Hi everybody, so there are a few things that we need to discuss today in the Jenkins Infra meeting. So the first thing that I want to announce is that we officially switched the mailing lists from Mailman to the Google Groups. So now every post sent to the Mailman, so to the old mailing list is still accepted, but you should receive a message saying that that mailing list is deprecated. And now we are invited to use the Google Groups. So we'll keep working this way for the next few weeks, and then we will just switch the mailing list in recently. One question, I'm not sure if it's been fixed, but when it was first set up, if you click to reply, it's set to reply privately, it's not set to reply back to the group. Yeah, definitely. I changed that this morning based on the comments made by RK. So now if you reply, it's reply to the work group. Yeah, one thing about the current state, does it still block messages from non-mailing list members? You mean on Mailman, on the old mailing list? So on the Google Groups. So on Google Groups, now if you let the state post at the state one week ago, if you sent a mail from a mailing list, from a mail, which is not a member of the Google Group, maybe it bounced, so maybe we could allow emails from everyone? I'm fine. I'm fine with that. It's definitely an option where I can just say if you want to send an email in this group, you need to be registered or not. I just applied the same configuration than the Mailman by default, but I'm totally fine to not force people to register in the mailing list, so I'll change that. Maybe a related question. In other words, standard email for tickets, for jingling their jam, mailing list, or other Mailman ones. Do you have some time to handle that? I don't have the time to work on that tomorrow, but if you write a geraticate, I can do this either by the end of the week or next week. The geraticate was submitted a few weeks ago, that's why I'm asking. If you can put the geraticate in the Google Notes, then I will find them, so I'll go. I just take the different points that I specified in the database that I want to do. The next thing is, I have a working application for the mirrors, so it's correctly unreported Azure. The thing is, either we replace our mirror brain with that new tool, mirror bits, or we have another option which is using Fastly for the CDM to distribute packages. I'm discussing with the SSTM on Fastly sites, and they would be interested to sponsor the Jenkins project, and the idea would be to have a contract the first year, and then we have a contract that will renew months after months. We could use Fastly to distribute all packages and also improve the speed of our websites like Jenkins.io and PlaginSites, but I still have to plan a meeting with them. So that's the current space. So either the Fastly solution works, and then I stop working on mirrors, or Fastly does not work, and then we have to replace mirror brain with, for example, mirror bits, which seems to be working very well and skin way better than the current solution. And so if we switch with mirror bits, we could just, for example, enable HTTPS mirrors and just drop HTTP by default. I think for the users, though, the CDM would be a much nicer experience, it would be a lot faster. Fastly, definitely, Fastly will be the best solution, because right now we don't have a lot of mirrors, and all the people who asked to sponsor, I mean, to provide mirrors in the past few years, each time said that we want to use the CDM and we don't want the mirrors approached anymore, but now that you have to pay for the infrastructure, the mirrors approach it's way cheaper, obviously, than the CDM. So I have the feeling that if we can work with Fastly, then at least for the next year, it will be a bit better. OK. That's what's regarding the mirrors and Fastly updates. Regarding another thing that we discussed several weeks ago, which is enable third party access restriction under Jenkins Infraorganization. So right now, any person who want to use the GitHub, for example, to integrate with a third party by default have access, by default, provide access to the Jenkins organization, Jenkins Infraorganization. So an example of that is Gitter or Sentry. And so because we never configured that restriction and the Jenkins Infra aside, it means that by default, we allow every accesses. And so the idea would be to put in place some restriction. But once we do that, all the token that we generated on the Jenkins Infraorganization will be broken. This means that we need to take some time to have enough time, like in the days to review all the application and be sure that we renew all the tokens. So this is something that we'd like to work on next week, something like that. Do you have any experience with that? No? Yeah. So this is something that should be coming in the coming days. The second, the next topic is regarding the Rackspace sponsoring. So as you saw, apparently Rackspace does sponsoring OSS projects. And so now we have to pay for one of the machine that we have in the Rackspace account, which is Ocrop. And that machine is used for Archive, the Jenkins CI.org, which is our fullback service for our packages. The thing is that machine is totally managed by puppets. So it would be trivial to move it, to move that machine in our Azure account and then configure it there. Anyway, in the current state, it's just like we stop paying Rackspace to pay Microsoft if we do this, because in the end we are paying now for Microsoft. But at least it will simplify the bidding process, because right now it means that KK has to be reimbursed from this SPI. So it would just simplify this management, do it simplify the management from a KK point of view. And so I think it would be really trivial to move it. So this is something that we should work in the coming days. Any question on this specific topic? Otherwise, regarding we have several work happening on the Jenkins CI cross-stache Azure account. So this is what you just spent some time. So if you want to explain all the work that you did recently on that thing. I've done a couple of bits recently. One was to try to upgrade the Terraform that's used in the Azure repository just so that we can clean it up a bit and fix some of the issues. I don't think it hasn't been upgraded in quite a while. And the other is to start looking at packer images so that the Azure VM agents can start up quicker and so that they can be upgraded easier as well. So yeah, this is really nice, but yeah, that's really nice. The only thing that we have right now is because we stopped building the Terraform code from CI to Jenkins.io. It means that we have to manually trigger it and be next to the job to be sure that everything is working fine. So I think we should split the Terraform codes for non-critical resources that can be updated automatically. And if it's deleted by mistake, it's fine. And for example, don't delete it by mistake like Kubernetes cluster. So because right now it's not really, it's not any more transparent. So it's not easy to see. There's too much stuff there. Yeah, so I think we should definitely try to split that repository in different repositories. So for example, what I have in mind is all the part regarding the DNS configuration could be easily automated and generated, for example, from CI to Jenkins.io, for example. So yeah, in your mind, Olivier would CI to Jenkins.io then have the ability to mutate those resources in Azure? So either we could do that or we could redeploy a smaller Jenkins instance inside a VPN so we can delegate the access to someone. So all the people who have access to the VPN can change the infrastructure. But yeah, the thing is, for example, there are some resources like, I mean, I just said the DNS. If the DNS is deleted, monitoring will complain and it will be really easy to redeploy, which is definitely not the case for machines like the VPN or Kubernetes clusters or whatever. So there are resources that where we need validation to change them. Yeah, I agree with that point. I don't know with the service principle that we create for Terraform, how granular of access we would be able to delegate. Because right now, Terraform is using an app and service principle that basically gives it root inside of the Azure account. If we were able to create the service principle such that that Terraform pipeline would just be able to access Azure DNS, then I think that would be totally, that would be fine. I agree with your point there. My only concern is if that credential can be used for mutating other resources. Yeah, so you raise a valid point now, which is the way we manage the access. And right now we have a really basic way to manage it. So basically we just use a basic group in Azure. So either you have access or you have admin access, whatever. And if we want to have a better control of who has access to what, we should probably use a better version of the Azure Active Directory, which will cost us a few bucks. But I think it would be better to delegate the permission. And so, for example, we would be able to just say you have access to recommend this cluster, for example. So yeah, this is something that I think we should work on. Yeah, it would be very good and to be able to define growing access control. Yeah, because right now it's really like you have access to everything or you have read on the access. So I already gave reading the access to few people, but yeah, those are really trusted people. So I really think we need to find great control of who has access to what. So I think if you have to create a ticket for that specific thing. Yep, I now realize that I totally forgot to mention something regarding the infrastructure and the way we are paying it. So basically, the CDF agreed to pay the bill for our infrastructure for the next six months. But we need to go below the 10K per month. So they accepted to temporarily pay the 20K per month, but we definitely need to reduce the cost of our infrastructure. So if we have some monies from Amazon, it would be already easier to manage, but we have to find some ways to reduce the cost of our infrastructure. And sometimes, of course, means May, because from what I heard, it's six months. Yeah, so December, January, February, March, April, May, yeah, so the plan is May. Olivia, you mentioned in the chat, and we've talked a little bit about this before, setting up AKS or having agents spin up on Kubernetes. Do you think that should be done before or after we convert CI Jenkins IO into configuration as code? I think it should be done after because we are, I mean, right now, our Jenkins file are designed to be running and using Docker directly running on the machine. So I think it would be just easier to use the ETH deploy and deploy machines. And so it will reduce the cost on our Azure accounts. And at the same time, we should also work on the configuration as code. So then other people can just refactor or maybe use specific labels for specific repository or whatever. But yeah, we should just switch from Azure VM to SC2 instances. My main concern is about using the architecture because we saw in the past that sometimes we have some latency between cloud providers, but otherwise, yeah, this is everything. So basically for years, we had the master running in Amazon and the agents running in Azure. And now we have the master in Azure and we are moving the agent to Amazon. So yeah, that's my concern. But yeah, it will be just easier to just use the ETH to begin. And otherwise, that's pretty old for me. I don't know if you want to talk about something specific. Have you heard anything about the certificate for the automated release? So that's a good question. And last time I checked, it was no, not yet. So yeah, no news on that side. Again, I should check. So usually I just think in the, in this case, like Yeah, I saw you asked a couple of weeks ago and no response. Yeah, since 6th February. So no response. Yep. This is something that I should bring him directly. So basically, if we have to talk about the automated release now is because we use the cluster, initially we deployed the automated release environment on a Kubernetes cluster that we also use now for all the public application. So we have to deploy a new Kubernetes cluster in a private environment and just use for trusted application. So we have to really play in a cluster and really play the environment in a more secure VPN and more secure network. That's anything that we need to do. And we still have few things that we need to work on. So for the release parts, it seems it's working for the packaging part. We still have to work on the way we publish artifacts. And this will be mainly influenced by the fact that if we have fastly, we don't have to handle mirrors. So yeah, the way we will distribute packages is not really clear at the moment and should be better in the coming weeks. In a similar vein, and Tim, thanks for mentioning the release certs because I had forgotten about that. I've been watching Koski and JFrog go back and forth about Artifactory. I had also seen an alert around JenkinsCI.org certs expiring. And I don't know if that was... We've got two sets of manually created certs that we've made in the past. There was the wildcard JenkinsCI.org certificate and then there was the Artifactory certificate. So it looks like... So Koski has already created the repo JenkinsCI.org certificate, correct? Yes, for that one he already created and normally should be already configured as far as that's concerned. And otherwise, the other certificate is for ADAP service. And the reason to this is because when I refactored the ADAP container, I used the static configuration. So if we want to have dynamic certificate, like generate with the sacred, which is something that could be working now, because in the past, we were using the HTTP method to generate certificates. Now we switched to the DNS01 so we can have certificates even in private environments. So we could have a certificate for ADAP Jenkins.io, but we need a way to to enjoy that configuration in the ADAP container. So theoretically it's possible to use with a new ADAP configuration, but they totally changed the syntax and I don't know it very well. So what I'm really getting at is like, do we need to go buy more certificates? Because I think the expiry that I saw in an alert was 15. Normally those there are two certificates that you need. So I just have to check for the ADAP one. I did not know that it was a wild card. But I have to check for it. Okay. Will you let me know tomorrow or something? And I can go buy the certificate and put it in the right place if we need it. When is the deadline? I think the alert that I remember seeing said the 15th was the expiry. Okay. But I couldn't find that alert if I tried right now. Okay. Okay. So I guess we are good now. If you don't have any other things that you want to discuss, we can stop the meeting here. Has anybody discussed with developers about moving away from this JFrog online service? Or are we just going to leave it as is? Is there any reason why you want to move away from that service? I mean, for me, does it work? Don't we get the certificate installed? It wasn't clear to me that it was. It's not been installed. Yes, I agree. Artifactory has actually worked very well, except when we have to ask them to do it. We went through the same exact same problem the first time when we installed the first certificate. So they clearly haven't gotten any better. But by three year certificates, not two years. I thought that because we gave both new certificates instead of the different ones. So I thought that it was sold. They didn't manage to figure out. They couldn't update it without the key and they wanted them to send them the key. Whoever is working in Artifactory and JFrog support clearly doesn't understand how certificates work. I have to review this. It's not something like there's not an emergency here. I don't think we need to run away screaming from Artifactory. But the recent history show us that we need to work on that quite in advance to be sure that the work isn't part of the line. So anyway, we have to figure out. Tim, you're just looking at that certificate. It seems like do you know when it expires? No, I'm just looking at it from KKZ. I think it was March. It started quite early. Just pulling it up. It's March 2nd. Which is not that far away. No, it's closer than I thought it was. Okay, I guess to me what it sounds like is if somehow JFrog cannot get their shit together that we might want to send an email to the dev list to let them know that they may see an expired certificate and it's okay. Don't freak out. Before it happens, I think we can escalate it within JFrog. Because if needed, we have ways. We have ways. There's always Twitter. We have better ways than Twitter. Are you sure? If I had to Twitter Tim, it would be the best way. I think the CloudBees executive should have some direct lines to JFrog. They're all in the same WhatsApp group. Okay, so I propose to stop the meeting here and go back to RSE. If you agree to add any topic that you want to discuss next week in the Google documents, the video will still be available. See you later.


Hey guys, it's Nate, AKA the Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. And it is right before Footmist.  Now we can actually focus on the promo since we got the messy SBC today that everybody was worried about, that everybody was talking about. It's out, it's here, it's expensive. And the market did rise up a decent amount in other areas, especially the other messy cards after the SBC came out, because it came out as like 2.5 mils. It's went down a little bit, but it's still pretty expensive. So that is no longer hanging over the market anymore. We are now full into Footmist. It is coming. I'm gonna show you guys the loading screen. And we're gonna talk through a lot of things today regarding what we know so far about this promo and what we know from past FIFA's and how that could impact what we look at going forward. So this is the loading screen right here. As you can tell, there's a lot of like hidden things in this with national flags, like the moon and some of the other, the verbiage and stuff that was out there. So I wanna talk about that for a second. We're gonna actually go over to Twitter and do that for the moment. This tweet today by Aviala with the Footmist nation. So basically this is the image of the loading screen and you have all these different nations on here, right? And he's actually got counted up on his very nice tweet. All these different boxes and presents and stuff basically analyze something, right? The 12 different nations that are listed or at least represented on the screen right here. So you've got England, you've got Uruguay, Belgium, Switzerland, Croatia, Portugal, Spain, I think that is right there. And then Mexico, Brazil, obviously Colombia right there. And then France, and this is the car design. And then over here it says the to-do list. Club rank and check twice. So obviously what we're seeing is the club rank for these national clubs is probably what we're pertaining to the club rank, like the check mark. So we can check that off, but then check twice, like what is check twice? Now I'm really interested to see what happens with this and if EA is actually putting something into the game and they're gonna tweet this out because earlier today on Twitter as well we had some code tweeted by Footwatch. And this is the code right here. Basically what it says is quick sell recovery, quick sell recovery rules, recover the player items discarded within the past 24 hours. So this is something that obviously I tweeted this out today and I got a response from a guy named Mexicans on Twitter and it was a screenshot basically from EA pulling back a quick sold player from somebody's squad. So this isn't something that's like new I guess on FIFA but maybe they're giving us the ability to do that ourselves now. I'm not entirely sure what's gonna happen with that but it is really curious seeing like what actually that promo screen with the club rank and the check twice but that check twice is actually going to mean I'm really curious to see what that means for this game. Now I don't see anything other than the menus in here about foot miss. Yeah, nothing really in here about foot miss to be honest yet but that's probably gonna change because it is starting today, Friday at 6 p.m. UK. We also have the team of your vote today that's they're giving us a long time to vote. I think I posted my vote on Twitter. It should have tweeted out. We did that live on stream twitch.tv backslash the foot account down below in the description. You can check me out there. I do live stream on Twitch and that was kind of cool to do that today and they were giving us plenty of time. Basically like that's out for almost a month before team of the year is gonna be released but again, back to foot miss. We talked about this a little bit. We touched on it in one of my earlier videos on basically what foot miss is and we're gonna look at some cards right now on the game kind of like a throwback, a flashback kind of a reminder to last year of what we saw for foot miss and FIFA 19. I wanna show you these cards and this might jog your memory about what happened last year.  I should have had this up already. Last year what we had during foot miss was three SBCs every single day with a countdown by Nation League and Club. This is basically what it was. We got three new SBCs each day the countdown from 11 to one from December 14th to December 24th. So we're 33 player SBCs over 11 days. It was a lot of SBCs. So as you can guess and as you can imagine a lot of SBC fodder moved in price during those few days. It was a fantastic time to make coins. Some people that like to trade with SBC fodder which is not necessarily my forte but if you're good at that during this promo this is like heaven for you. Like this is so easy to make coins as the fodder fluctuate up and down in price based on the SBCs and stuff like that. So this is basically an SBC promo unless they change what they've done in the past which I don't think they'll do since we just had a pack promo with team in the group stage. I think this is gonna be an SBC promo but this year we're probably, obviously we won't have the prime icon SBCs we had last year. There were six new icon SBCs last year and they even gave us the rating. I remember this promo coming out last year and it was weird because they gave us all this information like they basically told us everything that was gonna happen during foot mess and like they gave us so much information that they used to not give us during these promos it was really cool. So we had a weekly objectives which I would assume we have this time and I would also assume that we have the foot mess kits coming back as well which are really cool and stuff like that. So I would expect a page like this on foot mess to be coming out today on Friday at six PM UK just outlining the promo with what's gonna happen and we will probably see our first SBC coming out today as well. So again, we talked about the club ranking, right? We talked about the club ranking let me go find that tweet again right here. So we found the tweet again and basically what he's talking about is the club rank and checking twice and he's got these numbered here basically the club rank from 12 down to one because there's 12 days this year between Friday and between Christmas. Rank 12 is Swiss. So we're thinking the first day that Switzerland would have an SBC second day in Mexico, third day Colombian. Now I'm not entirely sure what that's gonna look like I guess in terms of are they gonna do a player pick SBC where we can choose two items is that what the check twice means? I have heard some people talk about that like maybe they put a foot mess SBC out for the like Netherlands foot miss, right? Or not Netherlands, Switzerland foot miss, right? And it's a player pick SBC almost like a league SBC type format where you can click on the SBC and actually see the rewards, right? That could be a possibility for the way they're doing this it'd be very interesting to how those SBCs would be priced if they did that but that'd be fun I think. So that's a possibility for today and how that could lay out but basically we're looking at like a Switzerland SBC today based on what we know from that loading screen and then we can kinda count it down as you look online you can find the club rankings it goes again back to this tweet it goes Switzerland it goes Switzerland, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Uruguay, England, Brazil, France and Belgium. So that's the order of those teams. So of course like at the end we're really getting the high level and like the good player SBCs because of the nationalities not gonna say that some like the Switzerland SBC is gonna be bad, we could get a Kanji, we could get Shakiri, maybe Berkey or Sommer for a goalkeeper may not be the most desirable but there are some solid guys that we could get from Switzerland as well and then going down, you know, Mexico we could have Lozano, we could have Vela, we could have Raul Jimenez, a lot of options Hector Herrera and then Hamez, Falcao for Colombia, tons of options there for that one as well. And so how can we invest with this kind of stuff? Well, we're really gonna first find out first day what we're gonna be able to invest in if they actually require that nationality of the day which I do think they will so like Switzerland players if you look at some golds, Switzerland players you can pick up especially some of the higher rate Uruguaca is not a bad pick up for discard Summer at around 4,000 coins isn't bad, isn't 84 and then Berkey at like 8K for an 85 rate it isn't bad either but basically again, this promo is gonna be filled with SBCs and SBC solutions so you're looking at Inforums, you're looking at high rated golds that is the two most commonly required things for these SBCs and I'm gonna be honest, if you look at last year's Flemish SBCs FIFA 18 was okay, they told us all the cards were forehand, it was leaked or whatever, we knew what was coming. Last year there were no leaks that we didn't know what was coming and the player selection was really good but the pricing was not, a lot of the SBCs last year were very expensive, they were overpriced for a lot of people and that really turned people off from the Flemish promo. I would expect player selection to be very good again this year, last year we had a son, we had a Dele Alli, Rashford, Matuidi, Lacazette, Jerome Boateng, Firmino, Tiago Silva, Kevin De Bruyne, people loved that De Bruyne SBC, it was expensive, there's gonna be a lot of SBC analysis over these next 12 days of foot miss as well. So again, we're looking at investments, how can you prepare for this?  A lot of the stuff has risen up man, a lot of the high ratings were low after the panic selling from the messy SBC coming out today, a lot of these guys dipped down, 86s were at 12K for a time being, 87s were under 20K, 88s were at like 27, 28, and even 89s were around like 40K for a bit of time. But they've risen back up because people know that Flemish is coming and they've started to buy some cards back right now into the hype of foot miss. So what I would say is, if you can get some cheap deals, I'm talking like 84 ratings with good nations, good nationalities and good links, like Havertz for 4K is what I would wanna pay for him, but still I would wanna pay like 8,500 if you could. A lot of these guys I would wanna get on bid possibly, the goalkeepers and stuff like 7K, most of the other 85s for 8K. You can kinda look at their graphs and really tell, but once we see this first day of foot miss and figure out what's gonna be going on, then we can really figure out how we're gonna be able to invest in this and what we're gonna be able to do to make coins during this promo with the high ratings. But I would expect that informs and high rated golds are the most things that we're gonna be looking at and messing around with in the coming days in terms of SBC requirements. Some of the informs are still low, discard inform investing is definitely a shout here. They will probably put out a team of the week upgrade SBC during foot miss, they usually do, they have in years past. So be on the lookout for that coming at some point, maybe not first day of Friday, but maybe next week in the middle of the week, I think it'd be possible as we get into the bigger nationalities of foot miss and the countdown from 12 to one. But again, some of these like 84, 85 rated informs, if we have a big player SBC that requires an 87 rated squad and an inform, and it's doable, it's like a really good player and it's a good upgrade and stuff like that. Some of these informs could be decent to invest in, especially like a Stubani, right? Discard, he's from Uruguay. That could be huge. Maybe you need an inform and a squad and you need a Uruguayan. That could be a guy that gets a bump up in price because of that. You see some Argentine strikers, you see some French guys, some English guys. You know, maybe when you're focusing, you're investing especially on the informs, maybe focus on some of the nationalities that are gonna be in the 12 countdown. Really focus on those. And even for just your normal high rated golds as well, those are probably gonna be what's required the most. So links to those cards and those nationalities as well, like Raketich for the Croatia day. Could be a good one. Rufier is French. Sommer again, I mentioned him. So yeah, just make sure you're informed with what nationalities are gonna be included in these SBCs and what ones we're gonna be getting SBCs for and as we learn what cards come out and kind of the way that EA is running this promo, we'll be able to adjust accordingly based on what we see because of that. Now I wanna talk about some other things that happened with this promo because obviously there's a lot of player SBCs, right? So when players come onto the market, that player plays a position. It has a value. Either a lot of people are gonna go do the SBC or a lot of people are not going to go do the SBC. So a great example that we've had already this year, we're talking about substitute and compliment, basically trading methods. So this Navry SBC came out, right? It's a right wing in the Bundesliga. It was decent value. What other cards are right wings in the Bundesliga that could be hurt by this price or right wings that are German, right? So we automatically think of John and Sancho. Maybe you have Bellarrabbi as well, would be two direct guys you would think of as players that play that same position same league that are similar cards, right? And that Sancho card I think took a hit when this Navry SBC came out because the Navry SBC was decent value is similar to that price of the Sancho SBC or to the Sancho card, road to the final. And that's basically what a substitute is, like a substitute thing that comes onto the game. Let's say we get a SBC, so we get SBC Furlan Mendy, right? Furlan Mendy who I think is, it's very possible he could get an SBC, right?  Somewhere around like 27, 26,000 coins for this card right here. Let's say he gets an SBC, what kind of cards on the market are gonna be hurt? What kind of cards on the market it could go up as a link investment to him? So Mendy comes out, right? A lot of people would wanna do that SBC. I mean, regardless of the price, they could probably make that SBC 100K, boost it from like an 80 to an 82 or an 83, give him like plus three, plus four stats. And I think people would go for that SBC if it was 100K. Do you think about if he got an inform that was that rating? Might be 100K on the market. So what would you see drop because of that other left-backs that are French? Inform Dean, Dignier, if I'm pronouncing that name correctly, the Evertonian left-back French, maybe even Lucas, not Lucas Hernandez, Theo Hernandez. He has an inform as well, another left-back inform that you could see drop because people are going out and doing his SBC, that Furlan Mendy SBC. Again, this is theoretical. I'm not saying that SBC is gonna come out. I'm just saying that it could come out and this would be a possible market movements because of that. But what would go up in case of that Furlan Mendy SBC? Now, there's a lot of French center-backs that are used in this game. But when you're looking at complimentary investments or link investments to a new footmast card, it's gotta be a good price in order for those link investments to go up because people actually have to do the SBC. You can't go buy link investments to, let's say they put out an Akanji SBC today. You can't go buy like, well, and Bobby doesn't have an inform, so that's not really a good example, but you can't go buy like maybe Delaney to link to Akanji, both on Dortmund. You can't go buy Delaney if that Akanji SBC is really overpriced and it's not a good upgrade on the card and it's not an SBC that people would wanna do, right? If it's good value, if it's cheap, if it's a good card rating, then people would go and do that SBC and that's when link investments work the most. So let's say they make a Furlan Mendy SBC and they make it kinda cheap. Who would you link to him? Veran would probably be a decent one that you could look at. Leng Lei would be a really solid one, I think, just for his price range. How much is Leng Lei? Is it like 50 or 60K? Somewhere in there? 65,000 coins right now for Leng Lei. I'm on a special, accidentally, but what's his gold? His gold is probably on the same right. Just around 65,000 coins for this card right here. That would be the type of card that I would think could go up with a Furlan Mendy SBC if it's good value, if it's priced correctly and stuff like that.  Every single day you're gonna see examples of that on this game because there's gonna be more and more SBCs coming out each day and it's gonna affect more and more areas of the market. Now, of course, if you see panic selling on a Road to the Final card or on a Scream card, that would be something that would be something that I would really pay attention to, right? Because these Scream cards are very, very rare. So like Hamas Rodriguez, for example, this card right now is sitting around 275,000 coins for his Scream center-attack and mid card. Let's say they put out an Isco SBC, right? The Spanish man is Isco. And Isco's SBC costs 150,000 coins. He's got a really good card, not really comparable to Hamas Rodriguez, but it's a really good card. It's a center-attack and mid and somebody who you might replace Hamas Rodriguez with in your team, right? So Hamas would also be a link investment to that guy, but he would might be a substitute investment first. So you might see him drop right away as people sell their Hamas Rodriguez to go and do Isco if it's a good value SBC, if it's cheap again, cheap, and if it makes sense to do a nice upgrade. Then you also could see this card rise up after it gets panic sold because people might sell the Hamas again to go do the SBC. Then they might buy the Hamas back to play him at like a center-mid position or another Lincoln Cam squad spot to that Isco card. So, but a panic sell on a very rare card is something that I would be very, very interested in, especially if it's in a major position for a major league, right? Let's say they put out a BPL center-back. Let's say Davenson Sanchez gets an SBC this week. For the Colombian SBC, let's say it's Davenson Sanchez, right? Let's say he gets a card, he gets an SBC. They boost him from an 83 rated. Let's say they boost him to an 85 or an 86, and they really juice his stats. Like we're talking 80 pace. We're talking like 86 or seven defending.  You might see a little bit of a dip in price of like a scream Odomendi, and that would be something I'd be very interested in because especially a lot of people use the scream Odomendi card. I just typed in scream. Wow, that's a fail. Odomendi, that's who I want to type in. This scream Odomendi is one of the most used BPL center-backs in the prem because there aren't that many center-backs in the prem with special cards. And this guy links to Zennetti. This guy links to Zennetti who's a very popular icon swap player in this game. A lot of people did that one. And then a lot of people have him linking to Zennetti. So that's something to think about and to know. And honestly, the ways you can kind of figure that stuff out is what's going to be a good link investment. What's going to be something that might be panic sold during this is honestly to think about what popular players, people using their teams, right? So, you know, people in this game, there's a ton of people that are probably using the new Wambi Saka inform, right? And who are they linking to him on the right side at a right mid position? Probably right here in Sterling, right? If we get a right mid SBC or another English player, like maybe a Sancho SBC, you could see a little bit of the panic selling on Sterling or maybe like if they do another English center defensive mid or CM, like we have Dele Alli right now. This Dele Alli inform is up a little bit because people are linking this card to the new SBC, or excuse me, the new version of Wambi Saka. So Dele right now is 54K. Wow, yeah, he's up like almost 10K from when he was at his lowest in packs because of that card. So if you saw like a SBC Jordan Henderson come out with like juice stats, maybe you would see a price like this drop, a card like Dele Alli could drop, but you also might see Wambi Saka's price go up because people would do the Henderson SBC and try to link him up in teams together. So that's kind of the fun with all these foot mis promos and all the foot mis hype and all the foot mis players that come out is you really see a lot of fun market movements around those cards because it's shaking up what types of cards we have in the game. And of course, if there's one SBC that a ton of people do because it's a really good value, then you're gonna have to kind of think about, okay, going forward from here, people have this person in their teams. Like a lot of people use ScreamPK and they still use him because of the SBC. That really rose a lot of the Barcelona links and a lot of the Spanish links in La Liga that week because they were using that card. So that's gonna be an interesting thing to look out look out for this week. Foot mis is fun boys. There's a lot of SBCs. It's fun to see who they put in but the not fun thing a lot of times is seeing how they price those SBCs because a lot of times they are pretty pricey and they can get a bit expensive and it could be a bit of a coin sink but the foot mis promo is fun, man. It's over Christmas. There's probably gonna be some team week SBCs that come out as well. We'll look at more of that stuff later on just to see again what EA is planning to do with this promo, how much information that they give us today when they tweet out about this promo. So we'll be interested in all sorts of stuff like that. If you enjoyed this video, smash the thumbs up on it. If you're hyped for foot mis, hit the like button as well. Comment down below if you have any questions and subscribe to the channel. If you are new, it's been Nate, the Foot Accountant. Catch you guys later. Peace out.


Our next speaker is Jaroslav Lisavolik, who now works for as a chief economist for Eurasian Development Bank. And twice already during this discussion, we cited, I cited Zbigniew Żyzynski, you cited someone else, saying that who controls Eurasia probably is the key master of the geopolitics of the world. And so we are very much interested. Are we going to be the leader of Eurasia or we are going to slide a little bit and one way, one belt, we just give it as a present to our Chinese friends? Well, I think this is probably one of the big questions for the next several decades, what the strategy of Russia will be in terms of structuring its alliances internationally. And actually, this was one of the points I wanted to raise during my intervention. But I do think that as Mr. Fushe noted, China is a big part of Russia's foreign economic policy strategy in the coming decades. It's just there, it's already the largest trading partner if you take by country, obviously. And yes, this is going to be one of the key issues for Eurasia. I think we're already seeing signs of competition, hopefully creative competition, constructive competition between Russia and China and Eurasia in some parts of Eurasia in Central Asia. Clearly the influence of China, economic presence of China has increased tremendously. But let me start, before I come back to some of these issues, let me start with a broader general observation that if there is one thing that we can be certain about with regard to Russia in the next several decades, it is that Russia will attempt to stage a catch-up effort. And that effort will definitely necessitate a certain strategy. And the strategy that dominated before seemed to be very simplistic, seemed to be, well, clearly not very successful in the sense that it was largely dependent on the hope that the West would deliver the good, so to say. And the disillusionment with regard to that vision was palpable with striking in some ways in the past several years. Some of the examples that I would bring in Mr. Johnson touched upon some of these issues, and I would say the WTO accession is, if there's one thing that could have been done better, I think in the preceding decades, it's that instead of Russia waiting at the door and seeing a lot of the CIS countries get into the WTO ahead of it, waiting for 20 years, nearly 20 years to get into the organization, it would have been far better, of course, if Russia was allowed to compete equally on equal terms at the outset in the beginning of the 1990s. And obviously, this is one of the several issues that Russians have with regard to the preceding several decades. So accordingly, I think there will be a strategy that to some degree will be based, will represent a contrast effect of sorts with regard to the experience of Russia in the past decades. And I think one part of the strategy that we're already starting to see to some degree is more emphasis on self-sufficiency, clearly the realization that Gershyn Kron, Alexander Gershyn Kron, the economist who came up with the principle that there are advantages and backwardness in countries that are lagging, will adopt technology and catch up quickly. That doesn't seem to work for a lot of reasons. And there needs to be a more concerted effort to forge ahead with modernization. So self-sufficiency import substitution to some degree may be a far bigger part of the economic strategy going forward. I think what is very interesting that you're hearing in the domestic policy debates as all of these economic plans are being devised by Kudrin, by Arezhkin, by the government, et cetera, is the word nonlinear catch up, meaning that if previously the vision was that, well, we adopt this or that technology step by step, we go through all of the necessary stages to all of the requirements, so to say, to reach a certain level. Now Russia is looking for shortcuts. And some of these shortcuts may be precisely represented by the new infatuation of President Putin, namely the digital economy, the new economy. That seems to be from what I understand the topic of greatest interest for the Russian president. And in terms of the model that Russia is going to emulate, again, I would side here with Mr. Foushey. I think if the preceding several decades we had overarching Eurocentric kind of strategy in terms of economic alliances, in terms of the vision of how things are to develop, I think China is certainly seen as far more successful in terms of its transition path. And to some degree I think it's only inevitable that this model will attract the attention of Russian policymakers as will some of the other successful models in East Asia. One of the examples that President Putin likes to, I think, cite and cited on many occasions is South Korea. And that obviously is a model that was not devoid of certain autocratic elements itself, especially in the, obviously in the early stages of its development. But clearly, more of a tilt towards Asia, I think, is to be expected. In terms of the components of catch up, if you take the macro model of any country, capital, labor, productivity, in terms of capital, the key issue that is still unresolved in the preceding decades and that has to be resolved is infrastructure. The issue of industrialization has not been delivered upon so far. And infrastructure is something that allows Russia to deal with the number one curse that has already been mentioned by Mr. Juergens, which is distance. And the issue of distance is tremendously important and under and appreciated by a lot of the economists, because if you look at the balance sheets of a lot of the Russian companies that are strenuously competing with their peers from the West, transportation costs tend to be far higher in terms of shipping costs from hinterland regions, from the inter-religion regions of Russia to external markets. And then we go to the second component, which is labor. And with regard to labor, demographics is likely to continue to, it was a tremendous shock, obviously, probably one of the largest shocks that Russia experienced in the transition period. And we're now still experiencing this. The lower growth rates that are exhibited by the Russian economy are partly because we're losing hundreds of thousands of people from the labor force each year. And this is the aftershock of the 1990s. In these circumstances, migration will have to remain part of the economic policy package. And the key issue for Russia will be quality rather than quantity. And obviously, in terms of quantity, Russia is currently one of the largest recipients of labor migrants in the world. One issue that I would highlight with regard to labor, and it was again mentioned by Mr. Johnston, I think, very rightly so, the issue of human capital, I think. And all of the discussions on the economic strategies of Russia, human capital is being ascribed significant attention. One, I think, interesting angle is generational. Any time frame of 20 years that you look at is about generations. You look at the transformations in other countries, including Ukraine to some degree probably, and the role of generations is clearly to be seen. I think we're starting to see some very interesting signs of this generational shift, including in the upper echelons of power of Russia, whereby you have, for example, the new economy minister, Mr. Areyshkin, a very capable policymaker who's risen to heights in a matter of several years. And he's recruiting, believe it or not, some of his deputies from Facebook and social media. So in terms of how the Russian government is starting to operate is going to be, I think, very different. And this generation of the likes of Areyshkin is, I think, a very interesting one that is likely to be quite influential. And the emphasis, actually, in terms of getting new people on board, whether it's the governors or also the economy ministry headed by Areyshkin, is precisely to recruit the young. And finally, with regard to productivity, this is probably one of the biggest frustrations and one of the biggest question marks for the future. If you take the past 10 years, first of all, productivity was almost every year consistently below real wage growth. And secondly, if you take the past 10 years, no catch up at all vis-a-vis the West. So where we started from 10 years ago in terms of around 30 percent level, a third of the U.S. level of productivity, this is roughly the same where we are now. Arguably, there are good things to be said about low base effects that could be exploited by Russia that could provide some upsides. And some of the low base effects that have not been fully exploited so far, I would first and foremost single out economic alliances. So if you look at the number of FTAs secured by Russia for an average WTO economy, this is, I think, 14, 15. For Russia, this is one or two. One of the recent ones was Vietnam. Obviously, Russia is doing it together with the Eurasian Economic Union, but there are dozens of countries that are waiting in line to forge a free trade area with Russia and its Eurasian partners, diverse partners, potential partners such as Singapore, such as South Korea, which is very keen from what I understand to secure an FTA. Other players like Israel, for example, and some of these cases are actually near-term goals for the government. So this whole issue of what is called by Russian policymakers new openness, openness that is now based on forging economic alliances across the world. Finally, after joining the WTO, Russia is doing it in a way that we can pursue a proper trade policy. This is, I think, very important. The second issue in terms of low base effects is investment. Russia's growth, if it was staged in the preceding decades, was largely consumption driven. Investment, I believe, is likely to be the main driver of economic growth in the coming decades. And that would, to some degree, allow Russia, if it deals also with terms like corruption, to address the infrastructure barrier. Now, in terms of I'm getting pretty much to the end of what I wanted to say. In terms of other resources that could be employed and that could present upside potential to some of the scenarios that we saw from Mr. Dinkin, I think the experience of 2006, 2007 shows that, for example, Russia's resources abroad that are not always readily observed can be a factor. What I'm talking about is the capital abroad of Russia and there could be, you know, judging by the size of the capital outflow in the preceding decades, trillions of dollars abroad that could come back if conditions were to improve. And we saw precisely that for brief periods of time, in 2006, 2007, when Russia experienced relatively significant net capital inflows. Another possible upside potential is the Russian diaspora. Russia has one of the largest diasporas in the world. According to the foreign ministry, it's either third or fourth in the world. And it's probably one of the most high tech diasporas. So if Russia is capable of, you know, exploiting some of this potential that is out there abroad, then this would be, obviously, more of a factor in attaining high growth rates. Finally, I want to end my intervention with a reference to Dostoevsky, who was also mentioned here today already. And believe it or not, his last piece that he wrote in his diary in 1881 was an economic piece on Russia's economy where he made predictions. And we all know that Mr. Dostoevsky is great in terms of predictions. And his main message to Russia was the lack of long-term horizons, short-termism, as probably the ultimate most important barrier with regard to economic development that needs to be overcome. And the second issue was trust, the lack of trust undermining really the effectiveness of economic policy. Whatever was said by Dostoevsky significantly more than a hundred years ago still remains the case. And hopefully some of these issues will be finally addressed in the coming several decades. I think there is cause for hope. Thank you. Thank you very much. So if we carry on with our narrative on bipolarity, no matter in which poor we want to be, democracy or autocracy, we have to do according to Mr. Lisovolic with whom I 100% agree, we have to do human capital, investment capital, and technological breakthrough for which we need a little bit of a more relaxed political climate because those people in the West, about 8 million of high-techers will not come back easily.