If I can just say to all solutions, I wish them a happy independence, 45th Independence anniversary. I know all these celebrations have begun. Very important time in our calendar for us to remember who we are and what our independence is all about. So I'm very happy to see some of the celebrations that are taking place. I have to say that I'm extremely happy to see that the events are taking place in Souffre. I think that the work that's been done in Souffre over the last couple of years have prepared it extremely well to facilitate hosting independence. And in particular, I have to say on Sunday, I think it is, I'm looking forward to the track and field event that's going to be taking place. I think that the stadium is unbelievable. I think that people are going to enjoy themselves and I think it's going to be spectacular. The only disappointment, Minister, the member from Grossly, is that it still has not been certified. And if you need any help in getting that certification, I'm happy to have that conversation with you to show you how to do it. Sorry. So, Mr. Speaker, I'm looking forward to the day that we can actually come to this house on certain disciplines, certain areas of development. I think foreign affairs, I've said, is one. I definitely think foreign direct investment is another and tourism very much applies to that. That in order for Saint Lucia to succeed globally and for everybody in Saint Lucia to benefit from tourism, it is going to require both administrations pushing the needle forward. I think that the TSA, the satellite accounting system report that was done in 2016 was very revealing. And it's said at that point, and for those who don't know what the TSA is, the satellite accounting system goes beyond arrivals of tourism. And it gets into the indirect impact. So, when we see our GDP and we see that transportation contributes eight or 10% towards our GDP, what percentage of transportation is tourism? So, our taxi drivers, the persons who are providing shuttle buses for staff, the transportation of goods. So, the satellite accounting system actually goes into some of those elements and shows what percentage of their total amount is attributable to tourism. So, for instance, the Minister of Tourism, the member from Castres South, gave a number, 130 million, if I'm not mistaken, for services. Electricity, water sewage, I assume, and telecommunications. So, again, in the GDP numbers, that would be a macro number. But when you break it out, and I've always said in the area of Loosalek, one-third of the consumption of Loosalek's or production is consumed by the hotel sector. But almost 55% of what's paid comes from the tourism sector because the productive sector pays a much higher price than households do in electricity. I say that, and I make the argument, I think that your presentation would have been even more meaningful. That if you recognized what you were building on, and it has been a collective effort over the years to be able to make this thing work. It seems that the highlight of what we're talking about is inclusiveness. Very, very, very important. Very important. And this is, again, not to tout me, but to hopefully get an appreciation of how long Alan Shastain has been thinking about village tourism. It wasn't something that just inspired me. It goes back to when I was the director of tourism in St. Lucia and the program that we have of Let's Be the Best. And Let's Be the Best wasn't about just the tourism workers, was recognizing that every single person in St. Lucia plays a role in tourism. Every single person. Gas station attendant, going to the post office, government services. I mean, in those days, we laugh at it now that persons who are coming here to get married, imagine, would take almost six days to get all the certificates that you had to get married in St. Lucia. And when we made the amendment that allowed persons to pre-apply and therefore only had to reside on the destination for three days before they could get married, what a significant shift that that was. And these persons used to go down to the police headquarters to get fingerprinted. Imagine that experience, right?  People can't just come and get married here. You have to go through a right process. And it was not until we adopted the idea that we were competing against everybody else in the world for honeymoon and for weddings. And relies on other destinations were making it much easier for people to be able to get married. That's all the processes that are so important. I remember getting into a very big discussion with Sir John. May he rest in peace. Over the causeway, I was not a supporter of putting big hotels on the causeway. What I felt was we should have had a road away from the beach and that we should have subdivided it and made it much more accessible for locals to be able to buy into it. Very similar to what we've been talking about at Sandy Beach. And again, when we speak about Sandy Beach, it's not on the beach. It's not that the concrete road would become a causeway. We would not allow any development on the beach but we're going to subdivide. We're going to put in the roads. We're going to put in the water. We're going to put in the electricity. We're going to put in smaller lots that will allow locals to be able to have access to this industry because the lack of equity comes from the high price tag to build a proper hotel room. It's not somebody saying that I don't want locals to be involved. The question is, how do we as a government lower that bar to make it using your terminology making the industry more inclusive? You make it more inclusive because you make it more affordable. And you have a dilemma. Small hotels have a horrible track record in this country. And as a result of that, many banks don't even want to lend them money. When they do lend them money it's because they know the person and they use other assets that that person has but not the hotel asset. And I can go through a litany of solutions who have tried and failed and have gone bankrupt and have lost their assets. What have we learnt from all of those things? How do we resolve that problem? And that's why Village Tourism came into play not just from a physical infrastructural perspective but a component that seems to be missing here is the incubator as it when persons want to open up a small property that they have to apply to become a member of Village Tourism Incorporated and Village Tourism Incorporated will hold their hand in getting the incentives. Village Tourism will provide them with the accounting software. Village Tourism will provide them with the marketing platform, the internet platform. Village Tourism will provide them with the training so if I am part of a Hilton brand as an example we get access globally to training. Sandals has become an international brand itself it is constantly training. A small property of two beds is never going to be able to afford to do that by themselves. So how do we bring those services so we can lift them up? There is no point in saying the standard is up here because we know that's where it needs to be internationally they can't do it by themselves. So it's the same way you say well the trickle down theory doesn't work 100% right, trickle down theory does not work by itself but in economies like ours that are not developed what you need to do is you need to grow the economy to create the opportunity for things to trickle down at the same time you have to give a hand to help push up so that people can access what is trickling down to and that is what Village Tourism was attempting to be able to do. When I left here as a director of tourism I went to work for a gentleman called Chris Blackwell who had a company called Island Outpost and Island Outpost was the first boutique hotel company in the Caribbean and the first one globally was a guy called Ian Schrager so Chris and Ian were the two guys that were leading the world in Village Tourism and the first place I went to work when I joined him was South Beach now South Beach was an amazing development which came about after the Depression and imagine when you go to South Beach today which is from 1st Street all the way to 16th Street Collins two or three streets behind it was all built in almost two and a half years all the Art Deco style they had agreed to a design theme which was Art Deco and all these small properties sadly over the years it went bad in fact South Beach used to be called God's Waiting Room because a lot of the elderly used to go there and then it became famous for Scarface but all of a sudden in the 90s there was a revival and what was difficult is that going to Miami in the mid 90s was not a place that people wanted to go to because of the level of crime and we had to carve out a brand niche for South Beach which became extremely successful we had properties in the Bahamas we had properties in Jamaica the first property we opened up in Jamaica was a property called Strawberry Hill which is overlooking Kingston 3500 feet up in fact it's where Barb Marley went after he got shot Irish town no beach you had to fly into the most dangerous city and then in North America which was Kingston and you had to drive over two and a half hours Jake's and Treasure Beach which were all these small properties but had significant brand value after I left working for Chris I went to work for Air Jamaica and then when I came home to San Lucia I had a choice of two places to build a hotel because I wanted to build a hotel I built a hotel much to your surprise and all these claims of no building or no hotel so could have built the hotel at shock on the beach or I could have built the hotel in Rodney Bay off of the beach and the person who came up with Rodney Bay Village was me the Prime Minister the time was the Minister of Tourism and I remember our first meeting at his office and when we spoke about bringing tourism to Marsha and I remember him saying to me don't talk to me about Naked Virgin because that's not the tourism I'm talking about I said no that's not I said but every day you have tourism in Marsha he said no I don't I said yes you do I said if you go to the hotels back then I found out how many of the workers lived in Marsha the vast majority did and what you just described that sandals did in San Susi is what they should have been doing all the way back in the 90s because there's a saying if your workers are happy they're going to become better workers and they have to be happy at home so help improve the environment around their homes all of these things were discussed all of these things were known and all of these things were very clear objectives from way back then so don't come and try to pretend that you're producing something that is new something that's refreshing all we have not done is that we have not committed ourselves to it and make it happen even faster now Mr. Speaker even myself I'll get there don't worry don't worry don't worry don't worry we'll get there you know Mr. Speaker yes Mr. Speaker blah blah blah you know Mr. Speaker there's a a simple rule in tourism that once you have appreciation for it it really helps you define the urgency and the need for the cost of doing business the fact is Mr. Speaker is that in order to bring tourists to St. Lucia as shocking as it may sound is the first thing that you need is a hotel room if there is no hotel room if there's no Airbnb there's no tour doesn't matter how much airlift you put on doesn't matter how many attractions you put on the singularly most important thing to start tourism so don't tell me it's the only important thing to start tourism where it starts the chicken or the egg is the hotel room the capacity to bring people is simply measured by the amount of accommodation you have in your country the question is how much does it cost to build a hotel room how much does it cost to operate a hotel room so 40 cents kilowatt hour for electricity over 22 dollars a gallon for water airfare to come to St. Lucia is one of the highest not our fault I'm blaming it on anybody it's just a fact and the reality the only way that we can lower the cost of airfare in our country is by bringing more people you have to have enough capacity where you can get diversity in your airlift meaning that you have more than one airline coming in and that you can get more than one flight a day from your key cities because when you are restricted then your airfare goes up so there is a threshold we always used to think that that threshold was 5000 hotel rooms but that 5000 only applies to one market if you're going to be like St. Lucia diversified in different markets then it means that you have to have more than 5000 hotel rooms and there is a need now to move in that direction but Mr. Speaker the member speaks of a premise the premise of this bill and really what I see this bill as is house tidying up taking some existing bills merging them together and then putting some spice in it of what a flavor that they wanted to see come out of this bill but the first premise that the member said was to grow the economy well what I see in this document and what I heard from the minister we're not going to grow we're not going to grow not the simple thing of saying that you're only going to give a 50% tax incentive Mr. Speaker countries out there that are giving land unlimited times on tax incentives are providing labor cheaper than we are providing airfare cheaper than we are providing electricity cheaper than we are the incentives are reflection on our high cost don't go and drink the Kool-Aid of what's the famous term that they have for gone revenue as I said if you do not have a hotel room how much money is generated so there's no arrivals there's no money the moment a person arrives we start collecting money Mr. Speaker the moment the first set of money we collect is the $100 of the airport we're then collecting money from all the jobs on the people in the consumption we're collecting money from the taxi driver who pays duties for his car and who's paying well an extraordinary high amount for gas right now I have no idea what the excise tax is but I'm sure it's way in excess of $4 given what the world market on fuel is right now all of that is tax revenue that's being generated when the people arrive at the hotel the security, the check-in the people who are preparing the room the food the farmers who have to sell the food the transportation to get there the transportation to bring the staff it is a gift that keeps given but that giving is directly correlated to the number of people are staying in our country one, two, how long they're staying and three how much are they spending I know that many of us are still novices in tourism when we go around banting about how many arrivals we have by itself is a meaningless number completely meaningless right now in this year Mrs. Speaker we have a situation where the US arrivals and UK arrivals which are the number one revenue contributors to the country are down but the Canadian market and the Caribbean market which were extremely down have increased so it shows that the numbers of arrivals might be up but the economic impact of tourism has gone down and if we're not going to be honest of ourselves as to how we're going to measure tourism and how tourism creates an impact in our country we're going to be in trouble Mr. Speaker sand and sea that has been lost for a long time that is the 70s and 80s many destinations including commercial ones like the Domingo Republic and even Mexico have diversified away from sand and sea and are creating world class attractions golf secondary home horse racing absolutely polo question it goes around so the reality is Mr. Speaker is sports is one of the elements but sports by itself is a solution to the of all-inclusive really if you don't even understand how all-inclusives came about why did they come about because of value how are you going to show people that they can come to San Lucia and going to an all-inclusive is a waste of time it's where you have great restaurants and you have great things for them to do that would be their preference but you have to be able to sell that product because it's the all-inclusive and the greatest competitor in a good way but the greatest competitor to all-inclusives today is the biggest all-inclusive which is the cruise we've lost out there's no way that shopping is going to exist at a higher level go and check for yourself and go and see the top brands Cartier, Rolex, Vacheron and Costanti have all left San Lucia and it's going to happen in many other destinations it's better on the ship people are feeling more secure about buying it from the ship and on the ship so it means that the urgency that we have to move to diversify and provide products that the ships cannot provide which is the attractions and the experiences authentic experiences we need to beef those things up and that's what Village Tourism has always been about and I would certainly like to see the government when they espouse the word they use community tourism but actually put it into practice it's when you make those investments that is how you're going to grow when you can cause more solutions to open up Airbnbs when you can cause more solutions to get into the small hotels the idea is that you're never going to be able to not have bigger hotels because the bigger hotels Mr. Speaker the bigger hotels Mr. Speaker are what going to drive the airlift to the destination can't replace it because of the density of what they're providing so everybody needs everybody this idea that tourism is in competition with farming, agriculture nonsense the more hotel rooms you have the more bananas and more products you can sell if you don't have those products to sell you only have yourself to blame you have to get to the standard you have to help the farmers to be able to provide those products on a year round basis what are those products and that's why Mr. Speaker that we moved very quickly to develop what's called Brand Solution what's Brand Solution Brand Solution is to take into consideration all of the entities in Solution who promote Solution and to make sure they're on the same page so that's export Solution bananas cocoa rum just to name a few CIP but pretty soon the way the CIP is going and the reputation is gaining it may actually be more of a detriment to us and how it's being marketed all of these companies and invest Solution and Slasper have to work together because they're all spending money out there having Solution we don't have enough critical expenditure to create a brand that's strong enough each one of those entities so that's why the logo that everybody is wearing applies to all of those entities and on the packaging of our food products so that we can benefit the more tourists we bring into Solution the greater opportunity there is for our export products the Corona bear has become the number one selling bear in the world and the United States why? there's 44 million Americans that visit Mexico a year tequila used to be on the lowest level of liquor today it's on one of the highest levels and you have tequila companies being sold for billions of dollars because of the synergy between tourism and that is something that we have to work on very very deliberately and with earnest you talk about airlift I was just reading and I really gave me a chuckle that the ministry was celebrating I guess that's the chairman celebrating a new connection to France so I've already opened up the thing that's fantastic because we're working to try to get it guess what it is you just lie to Martin and you come across on the ferry to Solution so you have to leave the airport go down to get the ferry to come here and I know that the minister obviously has not done any of this because if he personally I encourage him to do that go on the ferry and see how the passengers are treated here and I take blame I physically went down there and tried to get the situation resolved and we could not give it I had not figured out that happened later with the minister so all of a sudden that's a connection that's what we're going to go out and market if that is how low your standard is and you believe that you're going to compete on that product we're in trouble if you want to compete in Europe we need many more hotel rooms we have to have a very proactive Airbnb program and that they can be consolidated into a set of rooms because the two operators are not going to want to go and license each individual one somebody is going to have to do that so there's a lot of work that we have to do because Europe is vertically integrated the airline is owned by the two operator who owns the travel agency who owns the hotel so until you get one of those hotels in there like what Jamaica did with the Spanish chains and even with that look how long it's taking Jamaica to develop that European market I want to speak specifically of Souffre because a member from Souffre brought it up Airbnb in new development what is going to make Airbnb in new development work it's the new roads and sidewalks that we put in that is what's going to raise the level and make every part of Souffre accessible to tourism because the way it was being done before it couldn't work even the idea of Hummingbird Beach the members on the opposite side when they were in government between 2011 to 2016 the same Mr. Dalso sorry I don't want to mention anybody's name I apologize the former representative of Souffre couldn't even get that the concession stands not on just on the beach all the way down what now the stadium is going to do in terms of sports what the stadium can do in terms of entertainment and this weekend is a classic example and I'm going to say to the minister the member from Souffre from Souffre from Souffre, François Jack the copper factory is a golden opportunity to create an authentic shopping mall where people can be producing products that are made in solution and can become a very unique experience it is a huge opportunity and will significantly change the lives of people there and so we can raise by bringing a hotel there by fixing up the drain fixing up sidewalks repainting the place why you already have hotels in the area we don't want it to be just a fish fry one night a week and it's to help improve not change the ownership but improve the quality of the restaurants improve the quality of the experience that people have the same thing in Rosalie castries castries market it should be the number one attraction in Saint Lucia where you can go and experience authentic Saint Lucia the vast majority of products that the vendors are selling are imported even down to a t-shirt the slogan on the t-shirt is imported and that's what we were trying to change that's what village tourism is all about creating all of the services around to help strengthen the tourism product when you put musical festivals on and you're bringing international artists and paying them a million US dollars you're leaving behind your local artist denry segment is a unique sound that can be developed all over and when we talk about village tourism we speak about people like the Lamontines and Fondue world class who took our architecture took our shadow houses and put it on a cocoa plantation not on a beach hummingbird beach and she suffers because of the noise and what's taken on but yet she's trying to provide a unique experience how do we make and create an environment that everybody can coexist and everybody recognizes by hummingbird being successful Fondue being successful Anshasthi everybody being successful and the air bean bees being successful everyone wins because the more people that they have the more opportunity there is to be able to make money View Fort spoke about Sandy Beach about putting the infant inside I couldn't get it to register in my head that he's coming here okay you want to change the name I get that that's the typical thing community tourism but even if you believe in community tourism you ought to have supported what's taking place in Sandy Beach because that is the greatest opportunity to allow solutions DSH didn't have it not Sandy Beach bring it no problem and we'll have the conversation you can call me you can say the DSH is saying alright invest solution in fact the billboards were up there as investment solution yes no problem bring them yes bring them bring them you know what Mr. Speaker I'm so tired of members on the opposite side the member over there wants to make allegations about my wife I deliberately didn't stand up if you have any document with my wife's signature on it bring it to the house stop threatening and speaking half truth half truth go and present it I'll be happy to sit down Sandy Beach development the land that was on the other side of the causeway nothing to do with going on the beach the billboards were up there at both ends being done by investment solution you know because you stopped it you decided that that wasn't a good idea so Mr. Speaker the member now speaks about incentives they have repealed the two incentive ads nowhere nowhere in the document other than what he said indicates what the criteria for incentives are there's no schedule no nothing so you've taken away what existed before that said if you put in 20 rooms you're going to get X number of tax holiday nothing what it says is is that there's a committee that's going to be formed that's going to review it and make a recommendation to the minister to be then endorsed by and I'm sorry Mr. Speaker that's not good enough that's not transparency and it makes it worse yet who the minister is and his one track record that's not something that we should be promoting an incentive act that is very deliberate on what you can invest and what you can expect to get and just expect you're going to put an application in through a hole you don't even know who it is and whether you're going to get and now he's telling me because he's telling us for the first time that the limit is going to be 50% good luck with that Sanusha is not going to be able to compete I can tell you right now that's going to be rejected by the market because you said something that's the most important thing that you've said but I want you to follow through with it you said tourism is an export it's an export that means that we have to react to what the market says you have to have an incredibly strong product even Dubai Dubai couldn't go out in the 90s and sell what they had to do they had to reinvent themselves they had to reinvent themselves they had to attract people they had to resource to do that so exactly what the prime minister said previously is we're going to have to depend on PPPs public sector private partnerships and here it is the government was working with the SAH and the PPPs and all the opposition can do was to criticize and today today I hear the minister of tourism speak a language I didn't know that he understood but I'm so happy he does to understand the importance of Kabat they understand if he ever gets his act together as to what the SAH would bring but I'm also saddened by some of the transactions that have taken place Mr. Speaker GPH being one of them the Banans land being another one of them but Mr. Speaker the levy the levy system is set up you want to now get hoteliers who have not applied for incentives to pay as part of the incentive and 99% of those persons are very very small properties so I think to go and ask them to be collecting the levy I think is the mistake we learned it the hard way because it was originally included and we had to back out of it and after talking to everyone but I'm also going to say to you this idea that you may have of expanding the levy to be attractions take that out of your head because you double taxing the levy is what a tourist pays tourist day he rides at a hotel he pays his levy every single day who do you think is going on the tour the same person the same person is going to go on the attractions so what you're going to charge them now the levy twice that's what you said you said it's going to be expanded not now but in the future that's where you're going to go that everybody is going to pay okay Mr. Speaker so you're going to get the tourist are you paying the airport tax of $100 sorry? they pay the airport tax and they also then pay the levy they were paying the levy it used to be called tax accommodation tax which was a percentage and that's the fundamental change that was made Minister in order to make it easier for us to collect the money as to do it as an absolute amount than trying to calculate selling their room rate at hard to figure out what that rate is hard so Mr. Speaker I find it that there are parts of this that are very good I like the idea of consolidating our business I think that the ideas of some of the committees that have been formed are good ideas but I think that they are too too empowered so Mr. Speaker a hotel license we've argued about this forever the staff remember the many discussions that we had about the license what is the license the license is the accumulation of all the other licenses health and safety the fire certification DCA approval okay all these individual licenses make up the hotel license so what are you going to do now you're going to bring all those services back into the ministry and replicate it should be the job of the ministry to collect the information and ascertain that those persons do have the certification in all those particular areas that's not what it says that's not what it says thank you so Mr. Speaker let's talk about the policy group and it's very important and I'm glad the minister recognized the importance of bringing all the players to the table if we are going to make tourism successful in this country we have to stop thinking that it's the hotelier that's the main player the hotelier only makes up part of the overall product only part the ministry of agriculture plays a part the ministry of labor plays a part the ministry of health plays a part the ministry of national security plays a part the ministry of agriculture and manufacturing services every single one of those entities is tourism the problem that we've had is that we don't talk at the same time on the same subject and that's why marketing was separated I mean the idea of developing niche markets that should be coming market driven and once it comes from the market then now it's how you're going to implement it but the thing that's going to come the other way around you're going to force a niche onto the market doesn't work and so as a destination we still have a lot of work to do I still go around too often and hear people as I said speak about numbers of arrivals that's not taking a jab at anybody that's both administrations that's not a real number when you sit down with the banks and try to figure out from the banks why is it they don't want to lend more money to the sector those are the things the hurdles we have to overcome we have to deal with the cost of doing business in St. Lucia and understand what the market wants if you want to get rid of all inclusives then it means that the environment particularly yours, Rosalie and Rodney Bay have to be stand out that when people come to a sand loaves and they go outside to a restaurant they go in an attraction and they go you know what, the next time I come here I can see myself staying here but when the place looks dirty it looks shattered it looks diminished and we don't have a brand everything that we do in this country has to fulfill that brand does our environment meet that brand promise so Mr. Speaker in wrapping up I think that this is a good initial try like my colleague I believe there's a lot of work to be done when we talk about the tourism certificate committee he has the permanent secretary a representative of the St. Lucia Chamber of Commerce a representative of the Bureau of Standards a representative of the St. Lucia Hospitality and Tourism Association a representative ministry of responsible for health what happened to the police what happened to DCA what happened to fire those are the persons that are heavily involved in the certification and what's good about bringing members from our civil service into that environment is they start learning the jargon they start learning the literacy of tourism because I've been to too many meetings with civil servants particularly inland revenue they don't understand the jargon they don't understand how the industry makes they're just focused on collecting X number of dollars and not knowing how it was I remember they used to calculate the occupancy tax because they used sandals of the model so they knew how much they collected from sandals so they divided by two they come up as to what the estimation is not realizing windjammer landing windjammer landing has 7-8 people in one room in a villa 7-8 in a three bedroom villa but that was just one occupancy tax as one room so the per head was much less and so that's why the numbers were constantly off I want to say Mr. Speaker I want to see this industry succeed I really don't care who's getting the credit for it but I'm hoping that we can sit down collectively together and make sure we're not making the same mistakes over and over and over again I believe in village tourism I backed it up by putting my own resources into it and building Cocoa Palm and I've spent 20 years trying to help develop village tourism in Rodney Bay I mean the member from Mikus of New Fort South that was where we disagreed I tried to get it so that the occupancy tax that Cocoa Palm was spending could go into a fund managed by the businesses and the residents so that it was money to fix up the sidewalks and fix up the lights but that never happened but we need to be able to galvanize all of those things don't worry the gas reason has learned nothing about tourism don't worry about it in fact if there's one job I think he would do worse than what he's doing with the roads is in tourism so Mr. Speaker I just want to leave I want to leave Mr. Speaker by first of all again, I'm expressing my prayers and support to the member from Babino I really hope that she has a speedily recovery and again I want to wish all solutions and my constituents a happy and safe independence and I'm really looking forward to the maturity of this bill over time but I think that the minister will get pushback from the industry and he will certainly get pushback from new investment that wants to come into the country and I look forward to hopefully being able to be in the house and those amendments to the house thank you very much Mr. Speaker


Yeah, my name is Sung, so nice to see you today. Today I want to talk about next cloud architecture in the near future. It's about a near means about one or two years later, okay? So it's a content about, yeah, more or less something, something. But I have some pictures. Can I start, okay, I'm sorry, okay, yeah. So I like this picture when I talk about changes. Let's look at this. It's a 1900 New York City street. There's no carry, actually there's no car in here, only one, okay? But 13 years later, there's no carries at all. That is a change. Nowadays we cannot predict, actually, about one or two years later, our industry, especially ITAE area, right? But I want to talk about our next generation architecture, and please, as I understand, this is my personal opinion, that is the end of this official one, okay? So let's start from the simple is a standard architecture here. So maybe I think you have a microservice architecture, and also maybe you have API server layers, and also maybe you will use API gateways. Also there are some Microsoft modules and application layers, and also maybe you have some cache layers, and also definitely you are using our RDS or something, right? So there's some, you're streaming services like Amazon Kinesis, or you may use Kafka by yourself, and also there's some processing, and also, yeah, there's a recipe or something. So yeah, let's start from here. Okay, the one topic is more solace. Here's question. What is the best way to avoid cloud logging? So there's many answers, right? Okay, my one is this one, on your code, not environment. Yeah, to do this, we have many technical, you know, services and technologies. So typical one is our lambda as a cloud computing, cloud code, cloud computing actually. And also there's a declaration, and the important concept is infrastructure as a code, right? So the more you use your lambda, then you can, you know, avoid cloud logging actually.  So here's the problem. Usually you should integrate your service architecture with infrastructure as a code. There is a constant problem. You should support infrastructure as code.  And how could that? The simple way is our SAM. So to resolve this situation, we support SAM. It's a serverless application model, so in cloud formation. So yeah, definitely you can use those kind of technologies to, you know, suit your infrastructural cloud login. So you can also make and create a CI-CD pipeline, do it yourself away. And also you can do the other serverless frameworks, but I strongly recommend you use SAM. So basically, declaration is a really, really important technology when you want to, you know, avoid cloud logging. So we, our, you know, SAM model is really important when you are in your definition of your serverless code. So SAM is a specification that finds serverless application. And I strongly recommend you use this SAM with cloud formation and other, your infrastructure as a code. So SPAC is very simple. So it's a YAML style of template files. And there's a function definitions and function execution policy rules. And also environment and variable declarations and event source mapping. That is a typical example of our, yeah, SAM. And when you develop Lambda, then I have some, you know, recommendations about that. So there's a Lambda design tips. So well, definitely use your cloud formation and SAM, and also plan to break your application functionality into decoupled models and embrace a synchronicity. And also never keep application state in your Lambda function code. It's very important.  And final thing is very important. Use the right data source. And you should ask this question to yourself. Do you really need any RDMS in your work group? Those are very important questions. I'll take a look at it later. And next thing is actually, well, maybe you need ECS like a container orchestration services, definitely. So simply speaking, the more you use dockerization, then you can get more advantages. So we have ECS. Combination Lambda and imagine ECS and also application load balancer, yeah, you will use more, more, more in your infrastructure architecture. So let's take a look at the changes. Here you can see that there is a ECS services and also many Lambda services and also even in your application workload, yeah, the cluster will be replaced by AWS Lambda. Next thing is the next database technologies. So I asked this one question before. Why do you need RDMS in your architecture? So that's why we have no SQL solutions. But based on my experience, I think 80% of your DBMS workload will be replaced by no SQL. Yeah, no SQL technology is growing fast. And also we have no SQL services as the name is a Dynamo database. But when you use the Dynamo database, you usually face one problem. I think you face this problem at least once, the hotkey problem. Hotkey problem is actually traffic hits some partition intensively.  Or your handling error code does not follow the, you know, backward exponential bag type of logics, yeah. That is a hotkey problem is a common problem when you use Dynamo database and you should avoid these problems. But the one thing you should know that is the formula for calculating the number of partitions. This is the formula. Every Dynamo database up to 3,000 read unique capacities and 1,000 write unique capacities in one partitions. And a single partition stores about 10 gigabyte of data. So calculating is very simple. There is 8 gigabyte and RSU 5000, WSU 500, then number of partition for throughput will be 3. But number of partition for size will be 1. Then we will take maximum, you know, bigger numbers. Then partition number will be 3. That means every, you know, actually RSU and size is evenly distributed to each partitions. So each partition will have, RSU per partition will be 10666 and WSU 106 and data partition will be 2.66 gigabyte. When you change the capacity, when you increase these numbers then problem becomes a different thing. So every capacity evenly distributed that in these cases will increase the number of partitions according to the formula above. And this means each partitions will have equal capacity. But the problem actually occurs in decreasing cases. In these cases, in these cases we do not decrease the number of partitions, only decrease the C use in each partitions. That means a capacity error could occur more often, yeah. So Dynamo Database is a really great service, but there is a lot of good alternative solutions, alternative NoSQL solutions in the world. So one of my recommendation is Couchbase.  And also that means easy to scale your cluster. And that means there's no single point of failure. And also it has at least five replications in our architecture, yes. I don't want to talk about the couch basis of architecture in here. So my recommendation is here. You can easily integrate Couchbase with elastic search. Couchbase provides some plugins to integrate with elastic search engines. That means you can easily realize your real-time search and analytics databases in your architectures. And as consequences, you can get a huge advantage about high performances and scalability and availability. But maybe you still need your RDS, right? Then please use ORA, ORA is a great cloud, you know, database RDS services we created. Actually it's my personal opinion. There is no reason to use ORA anymore. Yeah. If you have any questions, please let me know later. Okay. And there is another new database technologies. So you can add more new database technologies to your infrastructure that is graph databases. Let's take a look at this. There is a node and relationships. And there are so many relationships between nodes. If you express such kind of information in your traditional relation databases, then it could be a hell, right? Like, you know, the famous SQL join problem. SQL join, yes, actually it requires a lot of calls. So also you actually are executed every time you carry the relationship. And the problem is that basically RDS uses B3 algorithm. That means if you add more data into your, you know, databases, then the number of leaf nodes will increase hugely and it makes your search performance slow, very, very fast. So we need more, we need another architecture for handling such kind of information. That is a, yes, graph databases. The famous one is actually now is Neo4j, right? Neo4j actually contains their data, all stores' data into the memories, cache layer. And they actually do not manage their relationship. Actually they have, they store the pointer, pointer addresses to designate their stored data area. So that means it does not need lookups and so it makes so fast. Visualties here. Okay, if you look at these tables, yeah, you can compare the performances between MySQL and Neo4j. It's much faster than MySQL. And there's one is a code example to carry the Neo4j. So you can easily distinguish which, where you should apply the Neo4j. So if there is more connectednesses over your data set, then I think Neo4j is much, much proper than traditional one. That is, let's take a look at the infrastructure changes. Then there's a huge, well, you can take some elastic search and cache bases, you know, integrations. And also there's, in such cases, you don't need cache layers because cache base itself support cache layers in each node. And also you can use graph databases and you will use Aurora Database Engine 2. And so you will use DynamoDB 2, I think. Yeah, that is the change over the data layers. Next one is analytics. So I think you already very, very, you know, have interested in AI and in learnings. So there's some, you know, many applications. So we have already Lex and Poli and Recognition.  Yeah, in this case, well, DIM learning is very, actually concept itself is very simple. And theory actually started from around 1950s or 60s, right? And maybe I think you know that it's a round one is actually represent neuron and line represent synapses. So there is an input node and also there is an output node. This area is a hidden layer. We don't know how many, you know, how many number of layers is involved in this, you know, part. So that's why we call it as DIP. So we call it as DIP neural network. But the concept, basic calculation of a neural network is very simple. Let's take a look at this. The most common neural model nowadays is signoid function. And you can see that the many numbers in here, okay, let's look at it, all the things. So there's a number. So and you multiply this number by this number. This number is we call it as a weight, weight number. So we can get us some number. In this case, 0.8 and 0.2, we got one, then we have neurons. We applied signoid functions to this number. Then we got the number, 0.73. That is the feed forward way. And there is some, so we call it actually the feed forward means a forward propagation and there's a backward propagation. Forward propagation actually is a recalculation about the weight factors. That is a too minimized margin of error of outputs. So we actually repeatedly, so to train the neural network model, we repeatedly calculate feed forward and feed backward. Then finally, you can get the optimum weight numbers. That is the result is the training model, the learning model. That means you require a lot of computer resources when you create training models. So one of our recommendation is using our AWS Lambda. If you use Lambdas, you can parallel calculate your training models in parallel and you can easily get the result. So it's a very typical examples and then this classification. So there is some examples, so you can get many handwritten examples, then you can train and predict a number of handwritten pictures. Yes, there is an input layer and the hidden layer, output layer.  If you want to, well, there's so many applications actually, some face recognition and sentence translation and something. You can use a lot of, you know, also, yes, there is some, our learning Lambda workflow. It says, if you use a Lambda, if you use a Lambda, they can easily calculate the training model. So I will show you the example of the Lambda example. So here is the comparison of performances. If you launch each instance, only one, then it will take four minutes. Relatively, if you use Lambda, it took only, yeah, 47 seconds. We are using many applications actually. So fraud detection, churn prediction, customer support. So finally, we got this architecture. So you are going to apply many AI and deep learning architecture and applications in your analytics, you know, infrastructure step. So that is, you know, my opinion, personal opinion, you can get the next cloud architecture in the near future. Thank you. Yeah. Any questions? Yeah. So in such cases, we don't use, you know, GPU, just the CPU, yes, that's comparison, you know, based on CPU calculation. Yeah. Yeah. And so we support, you know, P2 or G2 types, if you use the, pardon? P2 instances, no, not yet, yeah. Any questions? Okay. Thank you.


Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here with you all for our fifth meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group. Thank you all for being here today, and let me especially thank my friends and colleagues, Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Olexii Resnokov, and Deputy Chief of Defense, Lieutenant General Moyshuk. Ukrainian Armed Forces have inspired the world with their determination to defend their democracy, and you, my friend, have inspired everyone in this contact group with your resilience and courage. So thanks again for being here with us in person today. Today, we're back at Ramstein where this contact group was founded, and we're here to renew our commitment and intensify our momentum to support the brave defenders of Ukraine for the long term. Now, our group first came together four months ago at a turning point in Russia's reckless and ruthless war of choice against Ukraine. Back then, Russia had lost its battle to take Kyiv, to conquer a peaceful neighbor, and to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine. And during that initial phase of the war, we joined with nations of goodwill from around the world. And together we surged in critical military aid to help Ukraine defend itself from flagrant Russian aggression. In late April, Russia shifted to massive artillery strikes against sovereign Ukraine territory in the Donbass. And this contact group responded swiftly to the changing character of Russia's war of choice. To help Ukraine defend its territory, we've committed unprecedented security assistance. The United States has swiftly delivered a broad range of capabilities, including stinger anti-aircraft systems, armored personnel carriers, grenade launchers, MI-17 helicopters, body armor, and millions of rounds of small arms munitions. To take just one example among many, consider howitzers. In April, the United States delivered our first batch of M-77 howitzers, including NATO standard, or introducing NATO standard artillery pieces to Ukraine for the first time. And today the United States has delivered 126 of those howitzers. And along with countries around the world, we've increased the number of howitzer systems for Ukraine's defenders. By more than 18-fold. And since our first contact group meeting, the United States and our allies and partners have delivered a total of 26 long-range rocket artillery systems and the associated Gimler's rockets. And all these capabilities have demonstrably helped Ukraine fight back against Russia's aggression. And even enabled Ukraine to resist Russia's ongoing onslaught. So we've come a long way by working together. And today, four months after our initial contact group meeting, the war is at another key moment. Russian forces continue to cruelly bombard Ukrainian cities and civilians with missiles and artillery fire. But Ukrainian forces have begun their counter-offensive in the south of their country. And they are integrating the capabilities that we all have provided to help themselves to fight and reclaim their sovereign territory. So it's fitting that we're meeting back here at Ramstein. We established this contact group as a free world was racing to meet Ukraine's most urgent requirements. But today this contact group needs to position itself to sustain Ukraine's brave defenders for the long haul. And that means the continued and determined flow of capability now. It means urgently, moving urgently to innovate and to push all of our defense industrial bases to provide Ukraine with the tools that it will need for the hard road ahead. And it means renewing and deepening our resolve to stand by Ukraine with support and strength that doesn't hinge on any one particular battle. We're here because we refuse to live in a world where big powers trample borders by force. Our support for Ukraine's bedrock right to defend itself doesn't waver based on any given clash. And ladies and gentlemen, the face of the war is changing. And so is the mission of this contact group. We will work together to train Ukraine's forces for the long haul. We will work together to help integrate Ukraine's capabilities and bolster its joint operations for the long haul. We'll work together to upgrade our defense industrial bases to meet Ukraine's requirements for the long haul. And we'll work together for production and innovation to meet Ukraine's self-defense needs for the long haul. Now we're seeing the demonstrable success of our common efforts on the battlefield. And every day we see the resolve of the allies and partners worldwide who are helping Ukraine resist Russia's illegal, imperial, and indefensible war of conquest. And we must evolve as the fight evolves. In the weeks since the contact group last met, the United States has committed another $6.3 billion in security assistance to Ukraine. And yesterday the President approved the latest tranche of U.S. assistance to Ukraine, valued up up to $675 million. And this is the Biden administration's 20th drawdown of equipment from U.S. stocks for the Ukraine since last August. The latest package includes more Gimlers, 105-millimeter Howitzers, artillery munitions, harm missiles, Humvees, armored Angleses, anti-tank systems, small arms, and more. And since our last meeting in July, many allies and partners have come forward with their own important new deliveries of advanced radars and tanks and armored personnel carriers. The U.K. has sent a second tranche of M270 MLRS launchers and munitions. And that brings British assistance to Ukraine to a total of 2.3 billion pounds. Germany and Denmark have both also announced significant packages of military assistance. And let me especially thank Minister Landrecht for Germany's recent commitment to boosting Ukraine's air defenses. I'd also like to thank Poland for serving as a linchpin of our efforts to support the Ukrainians and for its generous donations of military equipment. Earlier this summer, for example, Poland transferred three battalions of 155-millimeter self-propelled Howitzers to Ukraine. And meanwhile, Slovakia, North Macedonia, and several other countries have announced their own critical donations of tanks and other heavy armor. So I look forward to building on that momentum and finding more innovative ways for all of us to support Ukraine's defenders. That means reinvigorating our defense industrial basis to match both Ukraine's priorities and our own needs. And it means coming up with new ways to accelerate our production of key capabilities. And so in our discussions today, we'll also talk through the next steps in standing up an international training mission for the Ukrainian forces. We're also going to talk about a new push to bring together our national armaments directors under the auspices of this contact group to intensify our efforts to meet Ukraine's long-term needs. And ladies and gentlemen, just looking around the table, I can see our unity of purpose. I see determined allies and partners who are just as resolute in supporting Ukraine as we were in April when we first met here at Ramstein. And so we've got a lot of work to do today, but I know that we're all going to leave Ramstein this time with even greater momentum. We've done so much and we're determined to do even more. And I know that we're going to deepen our shared resolve to help the people of Ukraine in their fight for freedom. Thank you very much.


So by now, I'm confident that most of you have already heard about this story and know about the details However, even though I'm late to the party. I can't not talk about it because this is one of those stories where it's just Wow, you expect something like this a confession like this to come out years possibly even decades down the line But just a couple of months after this gargantuan lie was told That did irreparable harm to American democracy now. We're just casually getting an admission of guilt here from Sydney Powell Unbelievable, I mean it is believable, but it's just The details the circumstances of this story are stunning to me So Shana Chen of Axios reports Sydney Powell the pro-trump lawyer who spread baseless claims of election fraud Moved Monday to dismiss Dominion voting systems defamation lawsuit against her Powell argues in her motion that no Reasonable person would conclude that her accusations of Dominion's election rigging scheme were truly statements of fact She claims that Dominion conducted a well orchestrated public relations campaign to save their business and that allegations against her are sparse her legal team also requested that the case be moved from DC to Texas if it isn't tossed out Dominion sued Powell for 1.3 billion in January over her conspiracy theories One of which alleged without evidence that Dominion was part of a massive international Communist plot to rig the election over 4,000 lawyers have signed an open letter calling on bar disciplinary authorities To investigate Powell's behavior Okay She is Admitting that she's a liar and that anyone who believed her lies is not a reasonable person This reminds me so much of the Alex Jones defense Well, I'm not a deranged lunatic spreading conspiracy theories.   This isn't just like oh, I told a lie to he please forgive me I'm sorry.   Who believes that you're not reasonable if you believe my lies just stunning Now Donald Trump on the other hand, I don't actually believe He thinks he was lying. I think at first he was knowingly embellishing and outright lying about the election Having said that I think that Trump is deluded enough to believe his own lies But at least her lawyers have a level of self-awareness that we weren't previously aware of But she was one of the most Absurd Bombastic individuals like trying to compete with Rudy Giuliani to be the most outrageous and idiotic But it all comes out now because she doesn't want to be sued She was lying and if you believed her lies, you're not you're not a reasonable person Well, apparently we have a lot of unreasonable people in this country who did believe your lies so Now what we have to live with those consequences We have to live with millions of Americans Believing that the election was stolen when there is zero evidence that that's the case. I hope it was worth it


One of the best pieces of career advice I ever heard was from a successful green business entrepreneur named Paul Hawken and he was talking to a group of job seekers. He said go where you are respected and I think that's true in business as well. If you ever find yourself in a conversation or in a relationship with a prospective client where you feel like you have to convince them about how good your business is, how worthwhile it is to work with you, I don't think that's the right dynamic, I don't think that's the optimal dynamic and I think you can do better than that. Instead, build credibility through your content, which is why I talk a lot about creating consistent content, and do enough networking where you discover finally oh what type of person already is looking for my type of service already respects the kind of thing that I do and then through your content maybe they look at your website, they see some of your videos or read some of your articles, they come to respect you and by the time you're in a conversation with them about your services you're no longer trying to convince them. They're already mostly sold and they just need you to, they just need to experience you live in person in a conversation just for a little bit or they need to ask you some questions to clarify a few things. So don't ever, I mean this is true also in your in your copywriting for your marketing. Rather than trying to convince and persuade, instead uplift, educate, explain, clarify, connect and that's true whether it's writing or whether in conversations. So that's a little message I have for you today. When it comes to marketing and sales do everything you can to not have to convince or persuade but instead create content, do authentic networking so that you know whom you should be talking with and so that by the time you talk with them you're simply educating, of lifting, inspiring, helping and connecting. I hope this is helpful. Until the next video I'm George Cao always open to your questions and your comments and I wish you an enjoyable journey of building your authentic business.


VMware was definitely announcing and talking about GenAI. There was a considerable push to get Generative AI, both sort of directional content and pragmatic content, even things like training people to do Generative AI in their daily business and just use ChatGPT better, right? And it's funny, because we're doing the rack ends sponsoring VMware user groups or Vmugs and our presentations are gonna be very similar using Generative AI to improve your DevOps practices. Welcome to tier for newsroom. And today we have with us once again, Rob Hershfield, CUN Co-Found at Rackend right back from VMware Explorer. Unfortunately, I could not attend even this year due to another conflict, but you were there. And we used to sit down at the events to the whole wrap up and talk about the whole event.  So before we get into some major announcements, some major kind of discussions, let's just talk about how was the event because you have been attending it for a very long time also and you are very core part of the VMware ecosystem as well. So for you, how was the event like? It was a solid event. I think VMware does a good job putting on the show and there's a lot of information. There's a lot of sessions and things like that where they're really providing very solid education for people. One of the things I felt about this show is it just felt like it was more VMware practitioners. It wasn't as big, definitely it was not as big as past shows. And it had a good energy, but it didn't have sort of overwhelming enthusiasm. It definitely didn't have a, everybody looking downcast and sad either. So it was a good solid show for VMware. Maybe not, but if you're used to VMworlds in the past, before they changed the name, there was a lot of activities in and around the show and this didn't have quite that same level of energy. When you're talking to people, what kind of discussions you are hearing? It could be the post-unit, whatever it was, but what was the, I don't want to talk about the official VMware, but I want to hear more about what you're hearing. You want the hallway track pieces. The hallway track on this is that the broad come, the lack of resolution on the broad come acquisition is definitely causing a lot of uncertainty. And that's one of the challenges with any of these shows is every presentation starts with a warning about uncertainty and things like that. And it's very hard for VMware to have a really concrete direction when broad come is standing in the future. And it's a two-sided problem here and it does show up in the show a bit, right? Everything that VMware's positioning is forward messaging is filtered through the, maybe or we think so, there's a lot of concerns in the hallway tracks around what broad come cuts, right? And people don't know how deep it's going to go. It could be, and I've heard rumors all the way down from the whole Tanzu, Kubernetes application stuff gets pushed out in favor of virtualization. I don't have any concrete information on that, but that's a popular assessment. To VMware, broad come raises the prices a whole bunch and people go fleeing for alternatives. And so I think what you see in a show like this with that type of uncertainty is people wanna know about the basics about what they're using and they're more skeptical about whether or not VMware can deliver on the innovation side of these curves. And that's sort of what I saw walking around the show floor is the show floor was dominated by the basics that you need to run VMware and VMware infrastructure which is still the market leader hands down. And so there's a lot of hardware vendors, there's a lot of consulting people, there's backup, there's recovery, there's printing, right? There's those types of things, but you didn't see a lot of the DevOps innovation pieces around it, you didn't see a Kubernetes community pieces around what's going on. And so that's sort of an interesting challenge from VMware and the fact that it's taken so long for the Broadcom pieces to come about.  There unfortunately isn't an expectation that Broadcom's gonna drop a lot of investment in innovation around VMware. I haven't seen anybody turn around and expect Broadcom to be investing on new technologies out of VMware. Sadly, because it's actually a very, very good team. And it's worth noting there are some really interesting things or we should get to that some interesting things that VMware is doing that I think have real enterprise value. A few days ago, the UK already cleared the acquisition so it may close in October or whenever the expected date is and Broadcom also announced investment of $2 billion in innovation at VMware. If you look at the Broadcom's investment and some of these core technologies, open source technologies that VMware is working on, did you hear anything about that? And this is a place where I think the hallway and the punditry is very different than what VMware is messaging because I have a lot of friends at VMware and the people in the Tanzu group are very bullish about Tanzu's opportunity in the market. And as somebody who works in enterprise, I also see a high desire for enterprise-grade Kubernetes that companies run themselves, that runs on-premises in a self-managed way. And this is the thing I found very interesting, right? VMware's done a lot of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud discussion and they keep talking about that. One of the things they've done very effectively here is they've made it possible for people to consume Kubernetes in their own cloud infrastructure and that's really or in their own private cloud infrastructure. And then they're working towards Edge, they're working towards other places and that work is very important to enterprises. And one of the things I think that Broadcom could be doing and VMware is definitely moving towards is this idea of we're making stuff that you can run yourself. And that was fascinating. I say that with the Tanzu filter, the thing I found fascinating was some of the AI work that they're doing, where they are investing in using the open models like Huggingface to then do training on internal data. And there is without a doubt, VMware's aware of this and they're moving towards this. I think it's a great opportunity from a Broadcom perspective of saying, I need to do training on my own data behind my own firewall in my own protected ways. And that is actually a significant opportunity and was definitely part of VMware's messaging here. And this is the place where I think things get a little funny. There's a lot of people who are very much like the cloud is gonna win and all that, but enterprises that we talked to actually are very concerned about privacy and costs and maintaining control of their infrastructure. And we definitely see VMware's talking the right language for those customers, undoubtedly. But if they can clear the air by getting the Broadcom done, right? And then messaging very clear on where Broadcom's making investments, there's a lot of great tech. And VMware stuck to their knitting and talked about this great tech that they're doing and how to use it and deliver it. And that's exactly what they should be doing, frankly. And since you mentioned, Gen AI, of course, Broadcom, they're doing a lot of work there. And of course, we are very, how could, how much discussion you saw there were any booth with any Gen AI technologies or any discussions or any announcements that you saw from VMware? VMware was definitely announcing and talking about Gen AI. There was a considerable push to get generative AI, both sort of directional content and pragmatic content, even things like training people to do generative AI in their daily business and just use chat GPT better, right? And it's funny, because we're doing, Reck Ends sponsoring VMware user groups or V-Mugs and our presentations are gonna be very similar using generative AI to improve your DevOps practices. And that was, VMware was doing the same thing and working towards that process. But there was, as much as in the past, we've seen shows pivot, there was a significant amount of content around the generative AI pieces. There wasn't as much in the booths. And I think that some of that is that it's been, it's harder for companies marketing to position into what generative AI is using. And it's also harder for companies to actually have material products. It's still relatively new. Hats off to VMware, they showed some very, I don't know how soon this gets into product, but they showed some very good integrated assistant. So you could have a VMware chat bot that would actually help you do things in VMware. And I saw a couple of demos where they're using AI to re-identify problems or reinforce issues. So that type of integrated work with AI is very powerful for the VMware user base, right? It means that they can do more effectively on their own premises work.  Those are very, very potent uses of AI. And it's exactly what VMware was showing. So hats off to them for focusing on very pragmatic use cases for this technology. When you were at the event and you saw the attendance, you saw announcement, you saw some uncertainty on Broadcom, what does it mean for Racken? And I'll go back to the point that you and I always discuss is the folks that we are serving the customer, what does it mean for customer solace? And what does it mean for Racken to continue to serve its VMware customers? And it's worth noting that Racken were a software product that companies, our enterprise customers and hosting companies, customers used to deploy VMware and other things. And our customers deploy VMware hundreds of thousands of times a year in a fully automated way. So we're very invested in the tools and the components that go into building infrastructure from the bare metal up around VMware. And so the thing that's interesting to me is there's a lot of value in helping companies do that, especially in Edge. And I keep waiting and watching for the Edge infrastructure side of these conversations to really come about. Edge was not as dominant in this year's show as it has been in the past. But when Racken looks at it, we get very excited when customers start moving towards more infrastructure as code and DevOps processes, which VMware is pushing very aggressively, and then look for ways in which they can do that at the cluster build or the Edge build site. And those conversations are still not really part of the VMware Explorer conversation. VMware Explorer is much more about how do I use VMware? And most people aren't talking in the show about how they install, condition, build an environment around and things like that. There isn't actually a show for that. And so we do definitely go and talk to customers at that show and prospects at that show and partners at that show who are very invested in improving that out-of-box experience because the ROI for VMware actually can be really extended the more dynamic you make the whole infrastructure. So it's been exciting for that. We keep looking for the place where we can talk about how fun and fast we've made VMware installs. And we're happy to do that one-on-one with customers, but the show is not the place for that. Rob, thank you so much for taking me to the conference. Thank you for sharing all those, of course, great insight, the discussions that you heard there. And most importantly, I mean, as you also said, and we'll see how things will look like after October. There is no need to get either super excited or panic. We have had a lot of experience with getting excited or getting worried, but we'll see how things shape up. But thanks for all those, sharing your experience there. And I'll look forward to our next discussion. Thank you. Thank you.


If policymakers could understand one thing better about financial markets that they don't understand now What would you want that thing to be and why? I'd want them to understand that that Any form of near certainty without certainty Anytime you convince the world that something is a certainty, but it's not is the most dangerous time humanly possible I'd look back at the financial crisis and the key moments in it a lot of arguments I'm not even gonna get into the partisan arguments. The right says government did it the left says Wall Street did it Great shocks You know what did it if I had to pick one thing that that that one primary cause of the financial Crisis the assumption that real estate prices can't go down the government made this assumption the so-called mom people will say these Terrible quantitative models were way off at the end of the day somewhere in this giant model in a thousand lines of computer code There was what's the worst case ten-year return for real estate if that worst case was not losing money It's garbage in garbage out. You can have the best model in the world. That's a problem when Lehman failed We went into a huge spiral because people were pretty much convinced that the government wouldn't let anyone fail When money markets when the famous reserve fund broke the buck This is a money marks is supposed to return you a dollar for a dollar It's always been a fiction by the way. You've been lied to for years money markets own portfolios of short-term bonds that move in value They allow them to round to only I think to I could be off by a decimal place only two decimal places That's not a lot Two decimal places for short-term securities means most of the time almost all the time it rounds to a dollar therefore, there's an illusion But they're risky that is to me a very dangerous Asset because it tells people there's no risk when they're actually is risk I'm not saying you have to go out a billion dollars. No one's got wants a NAV. What's your NAV pie? No one wants that but It's it's it's so short. It's artificially looks stable and when you tell the world there's risk in something and Then bad things happen. It's not it's not fun. It's still bad things, but they tend to deal with it much better the famous Many people have observed the internet the tech bubble that I keep talking about when that came down the economic consequences the threats to our system We're far more benign and I think that's because no matter how crazy they might have gone and Nobody thought they were utterly restless They didn't act as a as a group as if there was no possible problem equity losses are expected bond losses are not Expected so I will I will say this if you truly could take all the risk out great If you tell everyone it's risky and it's risky great I think the people think people don't appreciate is how dangerous Things are you think protect you but only mostly protect you you probably drive a little too much too aggressively And you probably have an extra accident to do because of the seatbelt my logic doesn't mean it's always bad to take preventive action But if you thought as we sometimes do in finance like money market funds that you could do anything in a car because you're wearing a Seat belt that's kind of the money market analogy I'm making and I think those are the most dangerous things you


A new song getting loads of airplay and absolutely brilliant. Lauren Doherty of course and the Isle of Vanish free, beautiful. All right, 20 minutes in front of 10 o'clock. Don't forget, Marty Freel's sitting in for Big Aidan tonight, between 10 and 12. No better man with some great music as always, Marty, so we're looking forward to Marty. It's been a while since Marty's been up here in the mornin' out. Hope he doesn't lost the run himself. Paddy Malloy's a top man on and off the stage. I know him from working on the pulse. He met me one day in Remelton. Under the back of the van and gave the wiggle up. A pack of rocky roads. This is the simplest things. Good man, Paddy. That's what it's all about. That's what it'll be. Great show, Paddy, from Mom and Dad. There you are, wishing Paddy all the best. And Gary Mangan, good man, Gary. Good to hear from you. Paddy Sound and Grit and yourself, Paul. Paddy, no better man. Good to hear you on the airways. Hope to see you on Saturday night with the help of God from the one and only. Paddy McMannaman, good Paddy. Hope you're keeping well as well, my friend. Right, we move on to our final guest tonight. And we welcome Hannah Loog. Hannah, how are you? I'm all good. I've been nervous. Nervous? Ah, we've been. Well, coming on here? That's all chakers. We were nervous knowing you were coming in. We saw just big stars coming in. Ah, man. Come here, will you, from Fannard? From Fannard, aye. Right, I'll drive up and out. That's not too bad. No, I've come from Derry. Oh, you came from Derry? Yes, I'm living there now. Ah, very good. And tell us a bit about yourself.  I'm a singer-songwriter. I started... I started running Covid, so I ran my own songs. And then I didn't like any of them at all. None of them. How do you mean to bother honesty in this? Oh, no, no, I didn't. They were terrible. And then I moved to Derry to study music. Ah, and the tech, is it? Yeah, the tech. And I loved it. I loved it so much. I've got, like, amazing lectures and everything. Do you ever believe that many people come up here, young people, and they tell us about this course down there that's been doing it? And I always just wonder to myself, God, I don't know about it, but I don't know how it really goes. Maybe I'm still good in the root songs, but I would've been lovely to do something like that. And how long's the course, three years? Mine's just two years. Two years, okay. And H&C and H&D. And I'm a few months from finishing now. I have some. What's the plans? I want to work for a year, and then keep writing and... ...releasing music and gigging and stuff. Why not? Come here, we're not going to hold back much longer. You want to hear a song for me? Okay. What song are you going to do for me? I want to sing Sue and Emily. It's the one that's been released there last week in the college album. Okay. Yeah. And where can people get that song? You can get it on Spotify or YouTube or... ...Apple music, I think, as well. It's under a paranoid, it's under a college album, so you should find it there. Right. Whenever you're ready, we'd love to hear it. Good luck. Lovely voice, you have a lovely voice. She has a lovely voice. And Michael Bonner says, Lovely song writing and a lovely song. Maria Howard said, beautiful voice. And Daniel Sherdon says, Well done, nice song. There you go. Cheers to that. Isn't it? Nice song. Your recording process, how do you do that? One there, took ages to do, because we had to write songs for classes, and then I wrote that one. And I wanted to get recorded because I really liked it. It was the first one I wrote that I ever really liked. Right. And so I got my lectures, Dominic and Matthew, to help me out. So I sent it to them, and Matthew had a piano and strings to it. And then Dominic's like, I want to add some bass and drums and all that there. And then I listened back to it. I loved the instrumental, and I hated my vocals. And I was like, have to do it again. So I did it again. And then I hated those vocals. And then the ones that were actually on the track, I went, I was like, listen, I have to do this again. And Dominic sat down with me, and he's like so specific in the way he records vocals. He like stopped and started, stopped and started. It's exhausting. But then we got it done, and then we got Harmony's attitude. And you happily at night? Oh, I'm happy with it now. Just something missing the first time, the first couple of times you heard it. There was something missing. And I also had to change a bridge, because it was too long, too wordy. I write too many words, and then I had to cut them down. Who do you sort of like as a songwriter? Who would you listen to if you were a football player? Phoebe Bridgers, 100%.  I love the way she writes music and stuff. And then also like Jeff Buckley. Oh, Jeff Buckley. Jeff Buckley's class. Very good. You play in a band too as well? I do. Me and my friends started a band there last Christmas for the crack. And how's it going? It's going good. We have a song recorded. We possibly have a gig in two months in Sandino's. We're organizing gigs with the college. Does the college do that too? Is part of the course that they help you with? A part of our assignments, we have to set up gigs. So we had one last week. It was a rap night, and it turned out really well. And so we have to do another few. A rap night? Yeah.  So you had to write stuff for that? Well, I don't rap. It wasn't me. The other people, we just had to put on the gigs. So we have the band ones coming up. I'll be in the band one. So part of the thing is you're organizing the gigs. Yeah, the organizing gigs. Very good. How did you find that side of things? Different. Stressful. Was it? Yeah, it was quite stressful because you didn't know if there was actually going to be a turnout. It was the first time we put one on. And especially for the first time in a while at the college, we put one on in Sandino's. So it was just like, I hope people actually show up. And did they? Oh, yeah. We had a great turnout. Brilliant. A brilliant turnout. So I'm hoping the same things come for the bands now. Would you do it again? Oh, yeah. Organize one. Very good. I mean, it's a good experience, like, for yourself. Ah, of course. A very proud mummy here. And fan of listening. Well done, Hannah. Hannah, look. Love you. Mummy, daddy, and the boys. Ah, very nice, isn't it? Ah, can I? Lovely. Graham Strahm says, you're sounding great, Hannah. And Brian Desmond says, traveling soldiers at one of your songs. No, it's not your song. But do you do that in your self-play? No. I used to sing that one of her. I was gigging and fanning. Okay. Don't worry. So are you on social media and stuff? I am. On Instagram. And... Under what name? Just Hannah Low? It's Hannah Low Go To, but then I've got my music account, which is underscore Hannah underscore music. I'll be in my normal Instagram anyways. Uh-huh. Yeah. I'm on that. That's about it, actually. And do you plan to, do you plan to release music or more music? Like an EP or something? Oh, yeah. I'm hoping to get one done by the end of the year. Uh-huh. Either the end of the year or starting next year. So I'm still writing more music, so I need to get that. Do you write all the time? Um, whenever inspiration hits. What way does it work for you songwriting?  I usually, I start with lyrics. I would like write some lyrics down first. Uh-huh. And then I'll find something cool and then I'll try and put music to it then, which is cool to do, but once you get a melody or... Can you pick a, can you pick a topic for a song or does it, you know, does your songwriting go because maybe something's happening in your life?  Um, I write a lot about, like, stuff that's happened.  But if, like, someone gave me a topic, I could probably, like, write something quite quickly. Have you many songs written at the moment? Um, I had six written last year for, um, or one of our classes, but I hate, yeah, again, most of them. Yes. Would you leave them, would you leave them, like, I know you're not writing songs long, but would you leave them on the back burner to come back again sometimes? Oh, yeah, 100% come back to them. Um, and then the next one, I left off for ages and then I came back and I rewrote some stuff. And then I've got another song as well. It just depends how you feel in a day, I suppose.  Hi Paula, young Lily, sounds brilliant. See, here you go. And we'd love to get another song for me. I know this is, this is an original, another original one you've done. Have you released a second one? Um, this one's currently been recorded. Okay. And my friend Megan, I've done one of them. Right. Yeah. It might sound a bit different in the record than it does now. Oh, sure. It's worth that. The acoustic versions can just be, can't be different, but it can be the same as well too. Yeah. We're looking forward to hearing this. Whatever, Eddie. Much indeed. Best wishes, Hannah, from Brian and all the country roads and see you soon as a message. Ah, perfect. I'll be down for a pint. Hello from your best ever friends and we love you, they're saying. Well, I'd love to get more, but time is unfortunately, but you have a gig coming up, hopefully, you're saying, and Sandino's. Hopefully, yeah. And it'll be what, the next couple of months or so? Yeah, the next few months. Brilliant. We wish you well. Continue your success with your songwriting because your songwriting is absolutely brilliant. I don't know what you'd like yourself for a time, but then again, if you set yourself a standard and it doesn't meet everybody else, you know. So, the songs are released and are available on all the platforms. Aye, all the platforms. Spotify. Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, and then I think there's other ones as well. Have you made videos for them? No, no. No. I have to re-release it, so. The beefsteak dancers, Hannah, well done. And that kiddie, is that kiddie? Kiddie Lynch, I love you. That's very kiddie Lynch. There you go. A lot of people send you best wishes. Listen, it's lovely to meet you. Thank you. And thanks for coming up. Thanks for making the journey up and we wish you well. And good luck with your studies. This is your final couple of months now. Ah, getting to the tricky bit now. Why do you do exams then? It's just all assignments and stuff and I need to actually put my head down. But I've done it in case anyone's asked. Yeah, be dead on. Hannah, thanks very much. Thank you. Hannah, hello, everybody.