The panel that we have today, the idea is to give you concrete examples of what's going on in jurisdictions from which we can then start drawing out some of the issues and discussing some of the concerns that folks have about access, again having something to work from in a sense. So there are two people here from the PACER system, the federal PACER system, which has been discussed today several times. We organized this panel before we knew that they needed an opportunity for rebuttal on some levels on the PACER system, my description not theirs. We have Susan Del Monte next to me, who's an attorney advisor for the court administration and policy staff in the U.S. Administrative Office of the Courts. Next to her is Michelle Ishakayan, she's newly appointed chief of the Federal Judiciary's Electronic Public Access Program Office and has previously worked deputy chief of the Information Technology Policy Planning and Budget Office, so again the two of them have a lot of information and knowledge including historical about the PACER system. And then finally we have Art Cohen, who's the vice president of operations and general counsel for the Concord Inc. business but more importantly he's here representing the, I have to read this to get a straight, National Association of Professional Background Screeners and we have several other folks here also representing the constituents of that association and we asked them to come and talk from the private sector side, I love it, data harvester. I'm also from Minnesota way back and I get the harvest thing is something familiar to me as well, so I'll use that term because it's positive, thank you Paul. And we thought there's a value in you hearing what it is that they're interested in doing and what they're providing and that sort of thing, so we're going to kind of in a sense treat them as just another jurisdiction or example of information access and users so you can compare and contrast that thing. So with that I will start with the PACER folks, Susan and Michelle. Thank you. We wanted to just give you a little more background on the PACER system. What it is that we provide through PACER, how much do we charge for it, how does it all work? And we're going to give you I think a little more information too about how we support the program and how it's run because that's sort of a key component. An important thing to remember is that federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction. We hear disputes arising out of federal statutes such as felony criminal statutes or employment law actions, a lot of our civil cases are based on employment laws that are federal in nature. We also hear diversity of citizenship actions where the amount in controversy is over $75,000. So generally there are no family law cases. There are very few if any probate cases, no adoptions, no divorces. It's a real sort of distinct group of cases that we have there. We also have some specialty courts like the court of federal claims, the US court of international trade, but a lot of the issues and I want to just acknowledge this, I've run a lot of the issues that the state courts have to wrestle with with those highly personal documents that come up in family law matters. We simply don't have. And so our issues in deciding what to put out there and how to have it available to the public were a little bit different than a lot of you in the state courts are wrestling with. So although our jurisdiction is rather limited, the federal system itself is fairly large. Looking at the courts across the country, we have 94 different district courts, 90 bankruptcy courts, and 13 courts of appeals. Good afternoon. And when Alan said newly appointed, that's as of September 15th, so very newly appointed. I got a week on that. The mission of the federal judiciary's electronic public access program is to facilitate electronic public access to court information at a reasonable cost in accordance with our congressional legislation and existing judiciary policies, security requirements, and user requirements. The public access program has several components, including a very small program office in Washington, DC, which is responsible for the overall management of the program. Our program operations are handled by a service center in San Antonio, Texas. I'd like to point out that this is not an outsourced operation. We're very proud of our government management and staff. The service center has many functions, including user registration, centralized help desk services, and billing. In addition, it's responsible for the development and maintenance of our technical infrastructure. I have to say, PACER is really less of a system and more of a technical infrastructure. But we'll get into that a little bit later. As we have grown, our workload has grown considerably. It's just incredible, both in terms of responding to users of which they're nearly a million now, as well as the complexities associated with running such a major operation, particularly a financial operation. That requires working closely with the U.S. Department of Treasury and meeting advanced financial compliance and security requirements. As we've already told you, and you've probably heard in other sessions, our system is called PACER. That stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records. I've left a bunch of brochures out on the table in the lobby. I hope you have a chance to take one. There's a lot of misinformation out there about what PACER is and what it has in it, and we're hoping to try to clear some of those up today, not only with the brochure, but also if we don't answer your questions today, you should know that there's a pretty good website out there. It's PACER.U.S.Courts.gov under the Help section on the Navigation Bar. There's an excellent Frequently Asked Questions section that talks both about our electronic filing system, which is separate from PACER, how to use the PACER system, information about PACER billing, and then also information about the policies, what's available, what needs to be redacted, that sort of information. What PACER provides, and why Michelle said it's really an infrastructure, it provides a window for the public to look through and see the court's case management system. That case management system is really separate. They look very similar, and it's easy for people who are attorneys who file in CMECF, which is our case management system, and then go into PACER, and they look almost identical, and they think they're still in the same realm. They're not. They're sort of two different functionalities. What you see through PACER is the clerk's office file. What used to be in the paper files, now it's electronic. But it's really that information that the clerk's office needs to process the cases. So we don't have a lot of information that came, for example, before the charging documents. It was easy for us in writing the redaction principles because there were only a few real data elements that show up frequently in our filings. I often get calls from people in state courts saying, why don't you redact driver's license numbers? Why isn't that a requirement in the federal rules? And the short answer is they just don't appear in federal court filings that are in the clerk's office much. They may be in a system held by another part of the court system, for example, our pretrial services office who examines people who are charged with a crime to make bail determinations. They may have more background information, but that's not typically in that clerk's office file that you're accessing through PACER. When we first started PACER for the federal courts back in the 1980s, it was a modem system. You dialed in to access it, and you could see docket sheets, basically. Over time, courts started adding images of filings. And starting today, or starting, excuse me, in about 2000, 2001, we really moved to being an internet-based system, which showed our new case management system, the CMECF system, which is web-based and which includes PDF versions of all the documents that were filed in the case. Bankruptcy and district courts have fully implemented CMECF, and they've had all of these documents then available through PACER for quite a while. Appellate courts are still implementing the system, but currently it's in use in about 99% of the federal courts. So who gets access to PACER? The answer is really anyone who signs up for an account. I think there's a belief out there that PACER is limited to attorneys. That's not true. I went back well into the 1980s, the 1980 judicial conference reports, when the federal court system was looking at setting fees and charging for access and providing access to its files. And there were some different rates considered early on for different types of users, but it was never exclusively an attorney system. It's always been open to the public as well. So anyone can get a PACER account. You can open an account by providing a credit card online and receive information with your account number nearly immediately. There's a few minute pause while it processes everything. Users who don't wish to provide us with a credit card number can receive their account information through the mail. It takes about a week or so. We don't restrict who gets an account, but we do like the fact that we have our users coming in with a login and a password. It provides some level of security for us. On rare occasions, we do have requests to find out who access to a particular document through PACER. And having that login and password allows us to find that out in appropriate situations. We do have a policy that reflects our PACER users' right to privacy and their dealings as well. But on rare occasion, there is a law enforcement request that we have policies in the judiciary to work with them. And if it meets our standards, we will work with them to provide information. So what do you get access to once you have that PACER account? Basically, you can see any non-sealed document that's in that clerk's office file. And you get to it by seeing the docket sheets. And you can see it virtually immediately upon filing. Once it's been filed, it's made available to the public. There's one exception that sort of proves that rule. It's a relatively new policy for us. It's for transcripts of court proceedings. Transcripts of court proceedings are brought to the clerk's office or uploaded by the court reporters from their own systems. And for the first 90 days after the clerk's office receives them, they are not available for public access through PACER. You could go to any courthouse, go to the clerk's office, and you could see the transcript there. It's typically a PDF file, not a paper record. But for that first 90 days, we have the attorneys go through the transcripts looking for information that the federal rules of procedure require to be redacted. And our earlier panelists ran through what those are, dates of birth, social security numbers, that type of information. That 90-day period also allows us to comply with a statutorily created right for our court reporters to sell copies of transcripts. There was a big concern in the judiciary. We value our court reporters. And there was a concern that if the transcripts were immediately available through PACER, at the lower rate that we charge for electronic access that really would pretty much eliminate a court reporter's ability to earn income that they're statutorily allowed to earn. So that policy went into effect earlier this year. It was implemented in district courts and it will be implemented this fall or winter in bankruptcy courts. We're working out some technical difficulties. Additionally, through PACER, you can get copies of certain judiciary statistical reports. The Civil Justice Reform Act reports, for example, do spell out, they're filed I think by district and by judge how many motions have been pending for more than six months and how many cases assigned to the judge are more than three years old. Those are available through PACER as well. You can perform searches through PACER. As one of our other panelists showed you the search screen. Names of attorneys can be searched, names of parties, case numbers, and dates of filings of new cases. You can specify all of the employment law cases filed in the last week. When you're doing that though, you're working on that particular court system. Each court maintains their own case management system and so when you're on the district of New York's, Northern District of New York's website, you're looking at that court's database for those types of searches. We also have another feature called the US Party Case Index which you can get you through pacer.gov and enter in a party's name or social security number and if there is a match to that, the name of the case will come back to the searcher and that could be at any of the courts that participate in the US Party Case Index and nearly all of our courts do participate. So it gives you a little more of a national level search. Excuse me. In terms of charges, we have a congressional authorization to charge a reasonable rate for access to our information and that rate is set at a level to design to recoup the cost of providing access. The use of the revenues that come in is limited to providing and expanding public access. And on multiple occasions, the judiciary has actually gone in and reduced the rate for the access because there simply was too much money coming in to be honest. Back in the days of the dial-up service it started at a dollar a minute and then it went down to 75 cents and then it went down to 60 cents a minute. In 2001, we switched to the internet service and to try to keep the price comparable with how much data you would receive in that minute at 60 cents on the dial-up service, the fee was set at seven cents. We did need to raise that in 2004. It's now at eight cents a page. There's also a cap on the documents that you access. So you never pay more than a 30-page document. So any document you access in paces, $2.40 with one exception, again, the transcripts of court proceedings. There's no cap on transcripts of court proceedings. They could be 200 pages long and in setting the fee schedule, the judges decided that the pricing for the transcripts online should mimic as closely as possible the pricing for transcripts offline where you again pay for every page you're getting. So that document is excluded from the caps. That rate of eight cents a page applies to every user. We do not have different levels of service or access for government users or for bulk data resellers or Joe Public walking down the street. Everyone pays the same rate and yes, you did hear me correctly, government users do pay. Those who are paid with judiciary appropriations are exempt from the fees. And we did that partly because it just didn't make sense to have one part of the judiciary paying another part of the judiciary, the bureaucracy would just get nuts. And so the court personnel don't pay. Also attorneys who are, for example, appointed as a defense attorney under the Criminal Justice Act, those attorneys typically have two PACER accounts, one that they use for their fee paying clients and one that they use for their appointments. And we rely on them to use the honor system to use the correct PACER account at the correct time. We've had very few problems really over the years with it. But the clerks of court do, or they're instructed at least to sit down quarterly and take a look at the usage levels and make sure there isn't the exempt account that just is totally out of whack. It's used like this and then suddenly spikes. We have a formula online and this is on the frequently asked questions page if you're really super interested. For those reports that can be run that are charged at eight cents a page, but don't really line up with what's typically on an eight and a half by 11 inch piece of paper, there's a formula out there to figure out how many lines of data equal one page of information. We also have another type of exception, users who don't pay at all. And those are at each individual court level, the chief judge has the ability to grant fee exemptions for researchers and other individuals who qualify if they show a need that they want to get access to the court data to be able to perform their research. I'm gonna interject for a moment. We do not have the ability in the program and frankly in my very few weeks, I've already confronted this several times, we have no ability to grant national exemptions. We don't have the ability to grant it nationally through our policies and the local courts, they can only grant the exemption for their own court. This creates a lot of confusion. We also can't grant exemptions for research that's being funded by a government agency and that's caused a little bit of consternation. We also, through our fee schedule that we set up an eight cents a page charge, we have certain information that we don't charge for. For example, if an attorney is a party on a case, they through our case management system, which is remember what you're seeing through PACER, they receive a copy of every filing that they're entitled to without charge. So the parties in the case automatically get one copy free of just about everything. There's a minimum threshold for those public users who open a PACER account unless you accrue charges of $10 or more in one calendar year, no amount of the fee is owed. So a bill is never issued unless the fees get over $10 or more and that's 120 pages at eight cents each. So it's quite a few documents you could download and that was really designed to protect those citizen users who were interested in information but didn't want to incur huge bills. This is a way for them to use our system just periodically and have it cost them nothing. Additionally, we have a system for courts to designate their documents as opinions and opinions are offered on a special opinions report in PACER at no charge. We also offer calendar reports for people interested in seeing what's going on in the court. You can run a calendar report on PACER at no charge. So how much are we getting? In fiscal year 2008, we collected approximately $80 million in revenue and you can add on top of that about $20 million in exempt usage. The breakdown of that is as follows, about 50% of that was for bankruptcy court data, 40% of that was for district court data and I think the difference between my number and Professor Martin's numbers are, you're probably dealing from an older branch article and as the district courts have come up on PACER, see, well I should go back, our case management systems really grew up in the bankruptcy courts, then we developed them in the district courts and now in the appellate and you see it in the usage although of course our bulk of hearings is mostly bankruptcy as well but 50% in bankruptcy, 40% in district, 3% in appellate courts but we anticipate that will go up as more and more appellate courts come up online and 7% is government usage. All of this revenues we stated before has to be used to enhance public access to the courts, more specifically we use the revenue to fund the judiciary's case management systems, both present and future which we're starting to think about now, do more than think about plan four. Each court's case management system and it's database and servers, it all works off of a kind of a base system but everybody has their own system and they modify it accordingly. The federal judiciary's public websites both national and local, the service center I talked about earlier, staff and technical infrastructure. We have a separate network and this is really important, I'll get to why this is really important for state courts as you think about what you're doing but we have an intranet in the judiciary that's a private network. We also have sitting around it a public network the PacerNet which is key to the way we do our business with the public. We also fund related programs such as the bankruptcy noticing center as well as we're getting into the maintenance and expansion of the judiciary's courtroom technology program. I'm sorry that Fred Lutterer is sick and thought that might be of interest to him. Finally, we are funding some pilots with an eye to the future. I know the past is instructive and important. Frankly, I'm new to the program and I'm really excited about the future. One of the things we're working on now is sort of that stage four we saw earlier through a digital audio pilot that's live in five courts and as a way to get into the future we're going to start a program assessment in 2009 and I wanna just say word or two about the program assessment. We are really excited about this. We've got a lot of support for this and we're gonna segment our user population, we're gonna do focus groups, we're gonna do surveys and we're gonna look at difference at what is the public? The public is the media, the public are researchers. I find it incredible that our program doesn't have a way to kind of help researchers out. I mean, there certainly have to be a fee associated with it but there are definitely ways to do this and so we wanna look at some of those demands. Of course, we have our litigant population, we have our general users so more to follow on that. We'll be looking for people to participate in the focus groups and give us all or. One of the things Ellen had asked us to think about what are some of the policy issues we've faced with our fees in the last three to four years. So I kinda came up with a list here. There's always a question of how much to charge. When we raised the fee to eight cents in 2004 that was a bit of a debate. Even having a fee in 2001 for the internet access was a bit of a debate too but we've used the fees as Michelle and I both have said Beck, they have to stay within the program so we've used it to build the case management function which provides those documents for the public to get to and really we don't, it's not a profit center, it's just funding all of that activity and the infrastructure and it's worked out well but there's always a question that arises about should we consider raising or lowering it. Additionally charging government users is a question that comes up from time to time. We have a congressional authorization to do that, we've had it for some time. It's just something that we frequently get calls about from people, why do you do that? And we really need it to recoup a lot of our costs and a number of our users are from government agencies and we're aware that our opinions report which offers opinions for free may not be really fully utilized by the courts and so we're looking at how documents are flagged as opinions so they'll be offered without charge to make sure that that's being applied correctly in the courts and that may be an area where we can show some definite improvement and additionally then in the last year or so we also removed from our fee schedules the fee for dial-up access. There simply was not a demand for it anymore, it got sort of overtaken by the internet access and our new software as it was being designed wasn't quite ready to be capable with it and we decided it wasn't worth the expense of making it do that so there's no longer a fee or access available for dial-up. And now we get to the why you care part. Sharing our experience and the why you might care. We've received a number of requests from other court systems, article one courts, state courts, local courts, at least one court that's represented in this room right now to share our case management software and to a lesser extent to share our electronic billing infrastructure. We are currently working with the Court of Appeals for Veteran Claims and the State of Mississippi to test the feasibility of releasing our case management software and in the case of Mississippi our billing processes as well. The Court for Veterans Claims has very successfully integrated CMECF into its environment at little cost and with minimal effort I think by either party. It's worked quite nicely. We did have to make some modifications to the software especially for security purposes. Mississippi has had a tougher go of it and I think one of the biggest issues there is their technical infrastructure is so vastly different from ours. I mean complete and totally different that it's not, it just doesn't plug and play. That said we're working with them to make sure this is a success. In terms of one of the things we're working with Mississippi on right now is in terms of a PACE or service center type operation you know frankly our service center is handling such a bulk of billing and calls that I think the may, and it grew up over time but now it's a pretty big animal that for anything but the largest of the system's California type system I'm not sure it's something a state system would wanna take on. My recommendation at least to the state of Mississippi is they integrate the CMECF, the case management system develops billing logs and that they integrate the data from those billing logs into their existing fee collection processes and supporting infrastructure. When these, I don't think they're exactly pilots but when these studies are done the federal judiciary will be issuing reports on them. Veterans claims will be much sooner than Mississippi. And to the title of this session the promise of charging fees and the pitfalls. Charging a fee has made a robust electronic public access program possible and this is particularly important given the limited appropriated dollars. At this point I don't know how we would if we got rid of our fees, support all of the programs that the fee is supporting. We've carefully considered how to expand but charging a fee is difficult. I mean there are people who won't pay the fee, can't pay the fee or wouldn't quite be able to figure out how to get up and running. We've thought about how to deal with that. One of the things we've done, Susan talked about it, is our exemption policy. But we've also undertaken a pilot with the government printing office to provide fee exempt access at federal depository libraries. At the moment we have the pilot on suspension to iron out some unforeseen issues but both the government printing office and the federal judiciary are really committed to moving forward in this. And then my final kind of comment on the pitfalls and for those of you who are charging you may have also encountered this. When one has something of value, others might want it. We have had one or two unfortunate incidents some larger than others and quite frankly theft of government data, it's unpleasant, the aftermath is unpleasant but it also because of the way we've set up our infrastructure when people go in to steal our data they tend to do it by running scripts against our case management database. And what it causes are performance problems for that court and the filers. So to my mind more egregious than the theft of the data is really the fact that the way it's being done. We know who our bulk users are, they tend to come in at night. Frankly, we find data theft because it's people downloading and bulk during the business day but I think that's really unfortunate. So I'll kind of leave it on that note and turn it over. I want to clarify for folks what the fees pay for. Just factual, not judgmental. You can have a case management system and not provide access. A lot of courts have that but that's being paid for out of pacer fees. The case management system itself. Then you paid for the access part itself what people dial into, that got paid out of the fees. And then you're using it also to pay to develop the electronic filing. I always get the acronym wrong. CMECS, which is both Electron Filing and our current case management system and it will probably fund future versions which we're working on now. So it's funding more than just the access piece, what they're charging. They're funding a lot of development and the other activities that aren't. You have to have the CMS to get to access and they're funding that. Is it funding hardware replacement, hardware? Oh yes, it funds the entire program. Center and all that stuff, yes. So it's a pretty broad category of stuff that they're funding out of that. And all with congressional notification They know what's going on. Oh. Yeah. And you're telling them. And you're telling them. Yes, they're very interested in this. They have to report back in exquisite details. But it's not budget. It's kind of off budget. It's like it's own little account in a sense. The fees, and that's very generally said. The way it's been described to me by our general counsel's office is that it's taken into account when appropriations are made. So they're certainly fully aware of it. Yeah. I'm not saying they're not aware of it. No, it's appropriations. It sits within our larger Judiciary Information Technology Fund. And when we request appropriated dollars in our submission to the Hill every year, which I've... Part of it is... In my former job, I got to help prepare. All of this is very clearly delineated. So we're getting X million dollars a year from the fees and we're using it to pay for this. Yes. And that's laid out. So there's transparency about what's coming in and what it's being used on. Yes. And it's being used for the wide range of things. Yes. And not only do we put it in our congressional budget submission, we have to put it in our financial plan submission and the Judiciary Information Technology Fund by legislation has to be submitted to Congress on how we spent the money every year. Okay. It's high level, but it's pretty clear. It's right there. There's nothing hidden about it in that sense. No. It's not sealed. No. Okay. So questions about... So I'm happy to talk about it. Questions about PACER specifically. And then we'll talk about a couple others. There's a question up here. Go ahead. Mike. Where's... Thank you. Mike Johnson from Minnesota. Are you charging eight cents a page to criminal justice partners, such as the FBI, NCIC, CIA, Homeland Security, or are you doing integrations with them or are you required to provide them with data outside of PACER? We charge government users, including the Department of Justice and all of their branches and the Department of Homeland Security and all of theirs. For Department of Justice, we reached an agreement... Gosh, probably three, four, five years ago, maybe longer, where we provide them with an estimate of what their amount will be, about 18 months before the fiscal year starts so they can get appropriate appropriations. So there's no surprises. They have an estimate of what it's going to be, but they all... But they're billed on actual use. They're billed on actual use. And in fact, that's interesting. Well, there's one exception, which is a relatively recent congressional mandate and that's the victim's notification system. We have to provide a data feed. Right. We do provide a data feed to a certain part of the Department of Justice that puts it in their victim information system and it's used to make phone calls out to... I think it does automated phone calls to victims to notify them of court hearings and things that are coming up. But that's a very limited... Pretty small. In fact, I understand that at least one federal agency is now discouraging use of PACER because West and Laxus have given them such favorable flat rates and we charge on usage. Okay, other questions? Yeah, Tess and Dewey. The talk has mostly been about documents. Now, so let me switch over to more case management information and to this bulk data question. So if I... Can I get from PACER and the information on all the people who are convicted by the federal courts in the last month, all of the basic information about them you hold, whatever that may be, what the charges were and what the disposition was, I don't want any paper, I don't want any documents, I just want the data. Can I get that out of PACER and if so, how? Basically, it would be tough. We open up our system and it's there you can log in and what we've found is that, as Michelle pointed out earlier, most of the bulk users come in at night with scripted programs and they've seen the system, they know how the database is set up and they have systems that go through and extract the data that they want, the information that they need. So we don't sell, we don't formulate the data. We couldn't give you the specific data elements you're asking for in a particular report, but we just open up what we have that's not sealed and we allow you to come in and get what you'd like. So follow up, if PACER won't give it to me, can I go send the letter to the administrative office of the U.S. courts and say, give me a bulk data download outside of PACER as PACER is the only way, the exclusive way for public access to the data about federal cases? There may be, yeah, in a nutshell, yes, PACER is the access and a request like that, which we do get frequently, would go through, we have a working group of judges and court officials who make a recommendation to a judicial conference committee which sets the fee schedule and they've made the decision not to have specialized bulk reports available. But you can get the data from PACER one case at a time. If you could figure out how to set up a query to get what you wanted, they could get the data. Yes. I mean, I'm not saying that's easy. It may not even be possible on a charge basis. I don't know, but you'd have to write your own middleware, so to speak, to pull out data, I guess. That's the, yeah, interesting. Okay. Larry? What about courthouse access? If I don't wanna create a username and password, if I don't wanna pay, can I walk into a courthouse without any of that and look at a file or look at documents? Sure. The trick is though, you've gotta be at the courthouse of the court whose information you wanna see. So if you're in the Northern District of New York and you wanna see their files, you could simply go to the clerk's office and there are public access terminals right there in the clerk's office that you can sit down at. But it would only be New York. You couldn't look up South Carolina or California or something. Okay. Are there questions about Pacer? Okay, I'm gonna fill in, change hats and play Bob Roper, which is tough.


Welcome to Data Doctor's video, Suggestion 103, Death Before Birth. Many times, suggestions for dates are generated by simple typos, other times by incorrect merges, or wrongly sourced information. Here is the public view of Lara Jordan's profile. As can be seen, her birth date of 1970 is after her death date of 1969, hence the reason for Suggestion 103. Before researching, check for more suggestions. Go to the top right of her profile and click on her wiki tree ID. From the drop-down menu, scroll to the end and click on Suggestions. The next screen, the Suggestion report, shows two suggestions for this profile, both having to do with Lara's date of birth. The first states that her father was dead before her birth. He died in 1928. The second states that she died before her birth. Documenting her date of birth will resolve both suggestions. Return to her profile and check the biography for additional information and existing sources before researching. Hover over her husband's name until an info box appears. She was born in 1900, so it's likely that she was born in the early 1900s as well. Go to the top right of the screen and click on her wiki tree ID again. From the drop-down menu, this time click on Research. On the next screen, Root Search, her information is brought over from her profile. Since we know her birth date is wrong, delete it. Now let's look for sources. Once it is a free site, let's start with Family Search. Click on its link at the bottom. Note, you have to be logged into that site first. Family Search shows two entries for Lara. One, a 1910 U.S. Census, gives her year of birth as 1905. The second, a Marriage Record, gives her year of birth as 1906. Next on these sources, we can change her year of birth to an estimate of 1906. In the biography section, change the birth year to read Around 1906. Next, add the sources to her biography. Go to the Family Search page and click on the U.S. Census. From the next screen, copy the record citation. On Lara's profile, position the cursor beside her birth date since the source is documenting that date and click the inline citation button. Paste the Family Search citation between the Ref Tags. Return to the Family Search page and click on the Marriage Record. From the next screen, copy the record citation. Again, on Lara's profile, place the cursor after the closing Ref Tag and click the inline citation button. Then copy and paste the Family Search citation between the Ref Tags. Click on the preview to make sure everything looks right. The sources are showing properly in both the biography and the sources sections. Go to the middle of the screen and explain your changes. This is strongly recommended for all WikiTree members and is a requirement for data doctors. For me, I identify myself as a data doctor. Copy the suggestion number and name and explain my changes. In this case, I corrected the birth year and added sources. Save your work. Return to the suggestion report and at the far right, click on Status. On the Suggestions Status page, make sure your WikiTree ID is showing. Next, check the other related suggestion. A father was dead before birth since it has also been corrected. Select a status. In this case, corrected. Add a comment from the comment hints or make one of your own. I chose one from the hints and added my own to it. Click the Update Status button. Both suggestions are updated at the same time and are recorded in the status history. And you're done.


My name is Toliver, Jal Toliver from PlanetScale. I'm a software engineer. And this is Jitain. Jitain is the CEO of PlanetScale. So if you have all any questions, you should just ask him. I'm here just to look pretty. So today we're going to talk about Vitesse, which is, and this is called, Stateful Storage on Kubernetes. Vitesse has heard of someone who uses MySQL, okay, that's good. So maybe this is for you. So anyway, okay. So what is Vitesse? Vitesse is a sharding middleware for MySQL, sharding, I think, something, and what's beautiful is that it's massively scalable and provides high availability, like five nines, availability, and it's cloud-native, so Kubernetes, et cetera. How many people use Kubernetes? How many don't use Kubernetes? No Kubernetes? Okay, everyone's Kubernetes. Oh, even better. Great. So who uses Vitesse, so this cache app is square cache. That's like we've seen the take, but for US, also YouTube, Vitesse came from YouTube originally. So they use it, not Burger King and not Instagram, yes. But those are like the top apps in the US, and so they're using it. So here are some of the key adopters. So how many have heard of JD, Jingdong? So Jingdong uses a lot of Vitesse. They're one of the biggest users in the world of Vitesse, and they have 3,000 or more databases, and they have 18,000 or more tablets or MySQL instances, so more than just one. So many. And maybe you guys don't use Slack as much, but Slack, even them, at least 1.25% have changed to Vitesse, so all the chatting is saved in Vitesse. Again, before square cache also, and Pinterest, I don't know if you know what Pinterest is, so Pinterest also uses it for a lot of their advertising. So yeah, so these are some of the many adopters. And as there are adopters, there's also lots of people contributing, changes, PRs, and so includes lots of these companies. And they all, of course, are using Vitesse in production. Am I speaking too fast, too slow? OK, I want you to think from now on, if you think Kubernetes and you want to store stateful storage, I want you to think Vitesse. Why is that?  It's too hard. And we agree, it's not easy. And the reason is, one does not simply move MySQL to Kubernetes. Because if you just try to do that, you're going to run into many problems. Your pods going down, whatever going down. Everything goes down, right? Who has a service that's perfect? Never goes down. Anyone go down at all?  Only three people who have problems? Then you don't need anything. You're perfect. So just a few things about Vitesse. The test started in 2010. And that's when YouTube, who knows what YouTube is? It's like Youku for not China. OK, so YouTube had started running into scaling problems with MySQL. Like many of you, they had just one super big MySQL instance. Of course, they had some backups and some replicas. But they could have too much traffic. And probably many of websites in China, Vietnam, all you guys have lots of web traffic. So YouTube ran into some problems. And then so they needed to deal with it. And they have big apps. They don't want to rewrite. So Vitesse, since in 2010, there was Kubernetes. Kubernetes is five years old now. And Vitesse is older than five years old. But it was designed for Borg. So Borg is the precursor, the Google precursor to Kubernetes. So Vitesse was designed really for Kubernetes as well. Because it's all the same ideas. So yeah, production workloads. So besides YouTube, of course, Stitch Labs is the oldest one. So they started using in 2016, a few years ago. And then HubSpot has many key spaces, or maybe databases, as you may call them. And JD has 3,000 databases with, as I said before, 18,000 yuan, 8,000 tablet. And they have, I think they said, 67 shards now. 67 shards, on their largest. They have many databases, but that's just their largest one. And then there's another company here, Nozzle. And they migrate even between the clouds. So here, you have Al-Yun, and you have Huawei-Yun or something. And you want to migrate from one to another. So they do that. So you don't have to be tied to one cloud. So this is what I thought it was coming after. So MySQL before, it's an old software, very good. But they merely adopted the cloud, whereas Vittest was born in the cloud. It was made for Borg, which is before Kubernetes. So the whole point is, it is cloud native. It did not exist without the cloud. So here is the concrete architecture of Vittest. How many of you guys are running apps that are connecting to MySQL, everyone? Yeah? OK. I'm going to stand over here. Is that OK? OK. So the general architecture, Vittest tries not to break anything. You have big apps, they're running lots of traffic. You don't want to break anything. So before, you have your app servers here. And they used to talk to a big MySQL database. And they use MySQL binary protocol to connect. But Vittest is all of these blue-purple colors. So they're this part and these parts. So it's a proxy to all of MySQL. And under the covers for saving the data is actual MySQL. So you guys, we can actually migrate your MySQL workloads into Vittest actually pretty easily. So what's important here is between the app server and what is these VT gates. These are the proxies. They speak MySQL binary protocol right here, MySQL. And there's a custom protocol here between these blue parts. And then all of this software, the tablet, connect to actual MySQL instances under the covers. And they only talk this way. Does that make sense so far? Good. But why would you want to use Vittest? Not everyone has Jingdong-sized workloads, or YouTube-sized or Yuku workloads. So why would you want to use it? If you have a small workload, what are the benefits of using Vittest? So this was your DV right now. Works just fine. It's all good. But you can actually already put Vittest in between your main DV and the app servers. And when you do that, it provides automatic connection pooling. It does deadlines, like if you have very long-running queries. If you have an analysis, it also provides hot row protection. So if you have many apps trying to get exactly one row, it will stop and pause that while giving other people quality of service, good quality of service. It also enforces row count limits, so not two large queries. And it can also blacklist tables. If you don't want certain applications to access certain things, because it's a proxy, it can also say, oh, I don't want you to access this. And you can cut off usage. So even for smaller workloads, it's OK to use this because it provides benefits for your application developers. Sometimes they make mistakes, have bugs, and then it won't take down the database for everyone else. Does that make sense? That's for smaller workloads. But then once you've put it in, you now have some more benefits as you start growing your workload. So again, before you had only the single database, maybe you had a few backups or replicas. But with your growing workload, you had your previous main database, the master. But with the test, since it actually can parse all of the MySQL SQL, it can actually decide to be smarter. It can do replica routing. It can decide, oh, all you're doing are select statements. And decide, oh, you don't need to access everything. So you can go straight to our replicas to actually do the selects. And thus, it can also do load balancing. You have more connections and whatnot. And you can then use Orchestrator as well if you need high availability, HA, to do failover or promotion. So you can choose one replica. Oh, I want this one to become the master. And you can swap them. And to all the apps, it's invisible. So it's just all natural. So remember, MySQL protocol only happens here. And then this is only management DBA access. Does that make sense? So yes, this is why as you're growing the workloads, if you have a lot of read traffic, you can add more replicas. No one knows the difference. And now you have even more traffic or too much data to fit on one disk or many disks. So you can do a few things. And so with here, with the growing workloads, I can split. Before, I had only main DB, we'll call it DB1. And you had all of the traffic going there. And so you had to have a disk that's big enough for all of your data. But now we want, imagine you have two big tables. They're growing, growing, growing big. And then they're going to blow up in one table. So why don't we split them into two different ones? So with this, you can split table one, which is big, keep it in database one. And then you have the other big table, table two, moving into database two. So yes, you have now table one in database one and table two in database two. But to your application server, because again, it's proxying, you can have a unified view. You can see both table one and table two like they were all in one big MySQL. And again, just like before, each of the database one, you can have many replicas. And database two has different numbers of replicas. Make sense? So also you can, with this proxy, you can do key space subsetting. You can decide your application can only see table one and table two. And different applications can only see table three and table four. So you can split that way too. All right. And as you grow even bigger, remember table two was here. But table one's growing really, really fast.  And they decide, oh, we actually, we have too much write traffic. We have too many orders happening all the time. And so table one, it can be horizontally sharded. So in this example here, we see three different shards. So just table one, we can split into one third, one third, one third. And it will go to separate instances. So you can have now three times the write traffic. And you can still have many more times also the read traffic. And you can control that quality of service there. And whereas table two didn't grow very much, it's pretty constant, but still big. And it will have a different quality of service right here. But again, to the app server, it will all still look like one super big database. Makes sense so far? Good. So and then you get really, really big. So this is, again, a Jingdong style one. And they have, and not just Jingdong, but many other companies, also have before it was all in one big data center or one availability zone. And now, when you have the massive workloads, you don't want one bomb to break the data center. You want to be able to handle the failure. So we can split, even with a single shard, into different availability zones. So this gives you other high availability options. Before, it was only for the reading reason. But now, in case one goes down, we can split and have more high availability. Here's zone one, two, and three. Yes? The test will handle, sorry. Yeah, MySQL connects the actual replication. So you'll replicate the data from through the MySQL binary? Yeah, OK. Yeah. Other questions? Does that answer your question? OK. Cool. All right. Thank you to Ten for answering. So yeah, so even as you go really, really big, you're going to need extra, extra high availability. And that's the benefits here, OK? So some demo time.  But everyone can run it on their own laptops. And I'm going to demonstrate by running on my laptop. So this is a schema, marketplace schema. It doesn't really matter. It's just got four tables. My actual demo only has three tables, but whatever. Same idea. This was all one big main DB. And we have a product table customer, orders, and merchants. But in my demo, we only have less. OK. So I am going to demonstrate this. I have already brought up a show database. So this is actually my SQL. Let me make it bigger. Can you see? Is it OK? Yeah. So I just brought up a MySQL. I actually brought up three instances of MySQL and behind the tests. And if you see databases, we see only a commerce database. And inside commerce database, we actually see three tables here, something called order, called C order, but order, customer and product. OK. Makes sense so far. And I will show you there's some data in each of the tables. It just selected, showed all the tables. OK. But all right. So that's just the data, the current one, in the main DB. OK. So next, maybe again, I said table one and table two got too big and maybe wanted to split into two databases, one DB one and DB two. So here, when we shard, we can decide, oh, all of the products go into one database. And we'll make another customer database called customer in orders. So we'll move two of the tables from the original main DB into a new one we'll call customer DB. Does that make sense? All right. So how do we do that? Good question. I have no idea. OK. So we have some scripts here. And these are actually on the Vittes website tutorial. So you guys can get to the code from Vittes and actually just run these tutorials yourself. It's exactly the same. I'm just showing you. OK. So let me show you. What we're doing. So sorry if this is too small or can't read. These are actual commands from Vittes. I'm just showing you what's in the script. It creates a key space. Key space is a database like database two named commerce. And it says to route all of the traffic for it. Sorry. Sorry. Customer. I'm making a new customer database. But all of the traffic for the customer database actually goes to a place called commerce, the old database, the main DB. OK. So I'm only just going to run this command here. And it's done. And then there's a few other things. This with the next command I'm running just brings up more instances of MySQL, three more instances for the tablets. So here we go. Literally starting MySQL. I will now talk to wait for the time. So it's just bringing up more. But of course, while I'm accessing this, again, I can still see all of the, what it's called, all of the data from the original main database. Nothing's changed, as I wait for that. And the point is in these steps, we're bringing up new databases. And then we're going to slowly move the traffic from seeing all of the data in main database to a different one. But all is invisible to the app server, in this case, the MySQL client. So as you can see here, it's bringing up MySQL and also bringing up the little tablet that's attached to each MySQL. And yeah, OK, great. So it also has a master in the new database too. And so we'll see this working, hopefully. Let's see, show databases. Oh, look, we now have two databases. Before it was commerce only. And now we have customer database. And so, wait a second. OK, before I do that, so I'm going to go to the customer database and show what tables we have. We have some tables. But so all the traffic for if we wanted to select from the customer database, it will look like it came from the other database. Or it will behave like it will come from the other database. But it looks like it's also available in database too, the customer database. OK, sorry. So from there, oh, and I can still access as before all the data. Let's see, OK. So actually, now, before I was getting all the data from the database one, the main database. But now my new script just gets the data from the second database. And it shows that it's available there as well. And now, one of these scripts here is vertical split. So vertical split is the moving of tables from database one to database two. I can show you the code here. It's literally just one command. It's the rest is environment variable that is splitting off the data. So it's doing some stuff. What did it do? Who knows? Let's see. So what it actually did there is, again, we had new empty databases. And it copied all the data from one to another. And then from there, continuously replicates from, even if you write the table two in old database, it will start, you will start seeing it in table two in new database. So it sets up, it does the copy. And then replication from then on as well. So that is what this command just did. So still nothing different here. Actually, again, we haven't moved any pointers for what data we're reading. We're still reading from the old database, even if you now, as you change your app, go to read from the new database. So the next step here, is it visible? We're going to migrate where we read the data. So kind of to go back here, yeah, kind of here. Before, it was pointing originally all of the queries we're going here. But now we're going to actually say, just for the replicas, the reading traffic, hey, let's go read from here and not here anymore. So we can, there are independent pointers to go, instead of pointing from here, point to that one. So inside the shell script, it's just saying, move both the read only and the replicas over. But not the master yet. So this is all the read traffic. So migrate, select customer zero, still looks the same. Remember, if it all looks the same, that's good. If it's not the same, then something's wrong. So yeah, still selecting no problem. And then our last one is migrate the master. So migrate the master, same command only, instead of saying read only, a replica, it says master. So master is, you've decided to change all of your writing traffic over to your new place, OK? And by the way, before we even do this, right now, I have moved my read traffic from replica read only. I've moved it here, but maybe I have a problem. Actually, you can still reverse, because this is a pointer. So you can decide, oh, I want to reverse, and I can go back to reading this. So in case you're worried, you can try it, and if it has problems, just move it back. And then you can debug, try it again, no problem. But once you move the master to the new one, well, now all of your stuff is there. So that's what we're about to do right now. Migrate the master. Pretty fast. Even in production, this should be a very fast switchover, maybe a one second or less delay, just to propagate all of the configuration information. Because again, all of the replication, all the copies, have been happening all of this time. Okay? Yeah, so I've migrated the master, I can still see that. Everything still looks okay. That is the whole demo, by the way. Not very much. So we went from one big database to splitting it, in this example, splitting off tables. It can do horizontal scaling and split that way too. Just don't have time to actually show in this example. So how does all of this work under the covers? This is actually one of the keys of the tests. We call the replication or the test replication. It is filtering all of the replication. So as you see here, originally we had some tables here, and we can set up different types of composable replication, whatever. And we can have, for example, the order information propagate over this way. We can, this is a horizontal shard example right here. This is for what's called the different shard names. It's like half of the traffic go over here, or half of the traffic go over here. So because this might have two shards, split shard one, some of the row data, and split the other, the other half. So it's all doing filtered amounts of replication. So it's not doing everything. So all of this is composable. Oh, yeah. When you have multiple shards, how do you handle good question? So the question is whether you have, actually, do you mind if I answer that at the, right at the end? We're really close, if it's going too long, forgive me. Does this generally make sense? So with this D replication, these are the benefits. You can have materialized views, you can have real-time roll-up, resharding. Again, this is the before was actual examples of resharding in real-time under the cover. Backfilling of lookup indexes. So index is the test index. It's how you decide which shard to go to when you're looking up data or inserting data. And sometimes your primary index is not what you want. Like you have authentication table, you have a user ID, maybe you have user email. If you just want to look up where your given email is, you need to also figure out which shard. So the secondary lookup index, the Vindex, is what that's for. Also, it allows for a different schema deployment and data migration and yeah, change notifications in general. So the beauty of all, how all of the test works, especially with this V replication to do all the sharding and to keep everything in sync. Does that generally make sense? All right, all right, this is the end of the talk. I'm just gonna say some things and then we'll open up the questions, is that okay? All right, so yeah, we have a Slack channel that's at vites.io. Vites.io is where the open source project is hosted. We have a WeChat group. You should come to us only because WeChat has problems with more than a hundred users at a time or some other limits. So come to us, we'll add you to the WeChat group. Also, this is again, was the introduction talk and Juten over here will be giving another talk, a more advanced one on when we actually bring down for disaster recovery, bring down shards or bring down masters and et cetera, what happened. Yeah, I can edit this to show you that. And then also, we're going to have another talk about translation of documents for vites. Right now, unfortunately, all the documents are only in English, so it would be great if we had some translation stuff. And so if you would come by with that, we can talk about how we were going to be doing that. Also, just like I'm running on my laptop, we would love for you to try bringing up a cluster on your own laptops, and we can help you out with that. Read the code, and you can read some blog posts from Square Cash about their deployments of vites, all the problems. And actually, even Jingdong, they just gave a talk on other problems and how they solved them with vites, so you can, and this person here can talk about them if you're curious. I'm on Slack on the Vites Slack channel, at Oliver. And I know Twitter is not accessible, but if you can access it with VPNs or whatever, you can use these things to access. Does that make sense? All right, so open to questions now, sorry. Whoever you are, sorry. Can you repeat your question? Oh, can you? Yeah. Points when you have sharded tables, vertical and horizontal. Right, good question. So the ideal case is you don't do anything wrong, but you have single shard stuff. Like if you have a user table, authentication table, you can co-locate, like based on user ID, like all the user ID data for both tables being one shard. That's the best option. But of course, once you go across, how do you handle that? So we have, what's it called, three modes, or two modes here for cross-shard, what's it called, cross-shard transaction modes. We have a best effort where you can have each one independently transact, and of course, you have the default, or not default, the two-phase commit option, so it can two-phase commit across. That's for insert, but for joins as well, all of the, let me go back to the architecture diagram here. Here we go. Yeah, so you see actually that VT gate, the proxy, actually does talk to all of the tablets. And remember, it does parse all of the SQL, and it actually also collects all of the results from all of the different places, and can do all your joins at that place, if necessary. Does that answer your question? Yeah, so yeah, because each gate goes to all the different tablets. And remember, there's not just one tablet here, you can scale this, I think Jingdong, you guys have like a thousand VT gates or some, yeah, something like that. So it's not just one, you can do many more than one. So does that answer your question? Okay, great. Any other questions? Yes? I have a monthly master cluster replica from Amazon to Alibaba. So I want to support, I want to use VTest. So can I migrate to this without downtime? Jitendra, do you want to answer this one? Alibaba, you have a master in Alibaba and a replica in AWS. And that one is running in EC2 instance. Okay, and what is it that you want to achieve? Okay, so VTest does not support multi-master because multi-master is not a great architecture in our opinion because it can lead to issues when you have rights going to both the masters and then if they're conflicting rights. So for a given shard, we always send the rights to a single master. So even if you have a multi-master architecture, your rights would go to one or the other and we then we would allow you to fail over to start sending rights, say from AWS to the other one or vice versa. Yes, the case we use the multi-master because we have the user in China and we have the user in our China. You know, like some China user, Chinese user, so they want to upset our application. So they just insert data into the data by in China. Okay, so that's why you don't have any conflicts because you have tenant-based architecture. But we still, for the manager, so they have to outside, they need to see the data of vulnerable, so that's why we have. I mean, I will answer a more general question, which is that you can run your masters in one cloud, replicas in other cloud. You need to make sure that you have an IPsec tunnel for them so that you're not sending packets unencrypted across public network. But you can fail over, VTest will allow you to fail over from one cloud provider to another and will also allow you to spin up clusters across cloud providers. Yeah, understood. Actually, we can actually talk about the sharding, right?  You know, you are saying that you know there are some Chinese users, right? And so you can have them in one shard and others in different shards. And remember, each of the tablets, each of the masters, they can, you can individually select where they are. So again, you can have the unified view, but again, based on this one, you can actually have a custom sharding scheme. You can write your own sharding mechanism. So if you know that user one is a China user, user two, not China user, you can shard in that way. Does that make sense? OK, yeah. I want to ask about, because I see that you are moving out, moving out the table to the database. So I want to understand what needs to be changed in the application to the, first of all, we have the version one collected to the database with the table, but we have the version two collected to the table. That's the beauty of VITES, right? As long as the name of the table is identified, if the name of the table does not collide between key spaces, your application doesn't need to know. Your application can continue to write to VT gates, and VT gate will send those rights to the correct database where that table exists, as long as both key spaces don't have the same table name. If there is a same table name, then you have to specify it in the table name, correct? So if DB one had table one, table two, and you moved it to DB two, after that split happens, your app doesn't need to change at all. OK, I see. Thank you. I'm very concerned about the latency. So how VTES can help me? I'm very concerned of the transaction latency. So transaction latency at high right volume is what you're worried about, right? Yeah, so VITES itself adds a little bit of latency to every query or every transaction, because you have to do, if you go back to the architecture diagram, there are two network hops that it has to do, right? Your application is connecting to VT gate. From VT gate, it's connecting to VT tablet. And from VT tablet, it's connecting to MySQLD. So it adds about 4 to 5 milliseconds of latency to every query. But because you can horizontally charge, your write QPS on every master is a lot less. And that's why your latency ends up being a lot less than it would be if you were writing on a single large master. Does that answer your question? So yeah, it may add a little bit of latency to any single query, but it will increase your throughput by quite a lot. Is that answer your question? OK, any other questions? All right. If not, thank you very much for coming. Again, I'm Toliver, and this is Jithin. And we're from PlanetScale. We do Vitesse things. And I think we have some Vitesse here. We may have a few, but not too many, unfortunately. Anyway, if you have any other questions you'd like to talk in private, feel free to come over. Probably outside. I think the next talk is coming. OK, thank you very much.


Thank you Mr. Speaker. A lot has been said on this motion Mr. Speaker. I think the members, the government side have understood what we are doing. I think the members of Shwazel also understood where we are going, where we are heading, where we are heading with that process Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it's a process that is involving a free-stage process. One Mr. Speaker, we started with re-looking, remodeling the village tourism concept to the community tourism concept, which was a pullback from the Nature Heritage Tourism Program. With that Mr. Speaker, you are bringing in locals, indigenous people, indigenous businesses into the tourism sector. Launch Mr. Speaker and ready to go. Then there was an introduction of the youth economy agency, the YAY, the member of Euford North, Castries North put the concept in its proper perspective Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it's not a matter of having windows for young people. It's a matter of making it given a part of the economic superstructure for young people. Mr. Speaker, sometimes it's a concept that people find difficult to understand. Why are you doing that? I even know that some people are skeptical about what it's all about Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it's about a concept that allows young people to excel in what they like. Too many times we believe we can choose for young people and tell them to go and work in a hotel or one work in a consenter or believe in the lies of the employment that they want. Nothing wrong in these forms of employment. But basically it's part of the economic sphere where young people will be able to convert their hobbies into entrepreneurship and their skills into businesses. By getting help with finance, mentoring and marketing. Also training Mr. Speaker. We launched, we passed the legislation, it's out there for public scrutiny and public discussion. Cabinet yesterday appointed a chairman for the youth economy agency, the YAY. The chairman is a businessman who's worked in several areas. He's also a marketing and technical person, so he will help in shaping the vision. This week we are having a strategic meeting for the members of the board. We have not recruited any staff members as yet. The minister, the member for sure is correct. Out of our budget we've said that only 20% can be spent on administrative expenses. And that is to, we are getting the structure together, getting the strategic plan together, putting the staff in the mindset where they can know what we're doing. We're not in a hurry to launch and collapse. We have a problem with office space. And that discussion which the member for Castro is central this morning is a very interesting discussion on office space. We will speak about that later Mr. Speaker. So we hope in January to get out of our first loans, our first grants and launch our YAY in a big way Mr. Speaker. But today we did micro, small micro SME enterprises which I know is a passion of the minister for commerce. But Mr. Speaker, when we configured the ministries, people were wondering why did we put cooperatives in the ministry of commerce? But it was a vision that cooperatives are businesses. It was a vision that says that cooperatives don't have to be put in a place where the people involved do not think that they are businesses. So we put commerce together with cooperatives and business growth and business development Mr. Speaker. So this bill today, this resolution today Mr. Speaker, is going to be impactful in that the ministry and I was already congratulating the minister and the staff. The ministry has set the groundwork for the success of that enterprise. They have held a number of groundings with business people in the community.  You don't stay in your office and believe you know what is happening to small business. You don't know, you don't know what it is what is happening to small business. Mr. Speaker, in one of my future, in one of my past lives when I used to earn some money, I did a consultancy and my friend from himself will let me tell him I was not one of these technocrats. I did a consultancy for the Caribbean Development Bank on costing for small business Mr. Speaker. And incidentally last night when I was preparing, I was looking into my documents and I saw my letters of engagement when I was giving the consultancy for the CDB. And part of that consultancy was to look at the costing systems of small businesses. And in some of the work that we did, we found out that small businesses sometimes it is better for somebody to rent their space. In several other business from the space. Sometimes it is better. And that is why it is important for the minister to have these groundings. Then we have these training sessions. We have them to understand that sales are not profit. We have them to understand that a business can be a hobby. But a hobby must be a business if you want to make money. And we did. And the minister built that up. And I know I heard somewhere. Yeah, you are talking about if you can, what's happening there? What's happening there is we are preparing. We are preparing so we can launch properly and we cannot flop in media. And that is the difference. And that's what the minister is doing. Mr. Speaker, I am very happy that we are getting this money. I hope that it is disposed with a liquidity. I hope that it gets to the people that they want. I know the minister is a certified accountant and someone will ensure that there is transparency and accountability which the bank will ask for. So it is a very good day, Mr. Speaker. It shows what the government is doing. We started by borrowing to assist vulnerable people. People. The economy cannot survive if there are no people. All economies must be for people. And the supply side economics doesn't practice. It has failed. The idea of supply side economics, that has failed. It has failed. You cannot believe that people will wait until your businesses survive for them to improve their quality of life. You have to assist them. And that's what we did this morning with the vulnerable, with the safety nets for vulnerable people. That's what we did this morning. And this afternoon, we are saying to those who have the business argument. We are saying to those who have the business ideas. We are saying to those who want to work for themselves. We are saying to those who have the families to bring up but they still want to earn a living. That here is an opportunity where you can get some support. Here is the opportunity where you can create employment for yourself and create employment for a few other people. And we are doing that with the SMEs. With the SME legislation resolution that we are passing this afternoon. So it's coming to get a business bigger. And what makes me happy is that the proposals in the manifesto and the budget, we are taking them out one by one. We are taking them off one by one. We are taking them off in the first 18 months. With COVID, with Ukraine Russia, we are taking them off one by one. And when I present the budget estimates in March, you will see how we have not only taken them out one by one but the help of the cabinet and the technocrats in the ministry of finance. We have managed and this economy and with the help of the people of St. Lucia. And I must compliment the people of St. Lucia. I have been told that the people of St. Lucia now, they feel a new sense of belonging. They feel that the government is working in their interest. They feel that there will not be second class citizens in their own country. They feel that if they produce, they will survive. They feel that the businesses will be allowed to make a profit. Investors are feeling now that the projects will come to see the light of day without having to meet a minister in his office quietly. They are saying that the fear of victimization and the fear that if they do not go to a particular lawyer or if they do not go to a particular place, their incentive will never reach the cabinet. They have not stopped. They have not stopped. Everybody is a society where we strive for equality, a society where we strive for equity. The speaker, I want to congratulate the minister. I want to thank the staff of the ministry of commerce and together with the speaker St. Lucia, we will take St. Lucia to the next level. I thank you.


Good morning everybody Wednesday pretty sure. Yeah, it's Wednesday March 9th to 2022 when I'm filming this Outside, it's a little little chilly this morning minus 20 Celsius. I'm just gonna Convert that to America speak for you for all my American followers.  That's what we're starting the day off with today It's supposed to get a lot warmer throughout the day That's nice. Oh, yeah, I had the my toke on the heater on the dashboard there For a little while now. I got a nice warm to go my head. I do did the same thing with my gloves. I Always do that. Oh, that's nice Okay, we're hooked up to an empty step deck right now I got to go pick up some freight and Winnipeg and bring it to Glenboro, Manitoba, which is that way Something like south-central Manitoba and when I drop that there I have another loaded portage of La Prairie to bring back to Winnipeg and That's gonna be the day so let's get to it the earlier we get done The less likely that will run out of time That makes sense Don't want to run out of time got to get everything done It's the same trailer we had yesterday I'm gonna use it again today I'm gonna have to sweep off a bit of snow on here today But Should be good to go. There it is. That's all Not that big of a load. That's all got to go to Glenboro, Manitoba. I'm gonna take it there Huh, I think I will Then I have a reload like I was saying before and portage I'm just at the SO card lock here in Oak Bluff, Manitoba Quick pit stop and then we'll be on the road This guy's got a nice super B here. That's the exit over there But nobody can get out because all those drivers Didn't want to park back here in the parking spots and walk in and get their coffee. They wanted to park there So I could go that way, but I'm see now there's a car truck coming in that way. That's why I can't come this way Now we're stuck. Oh, no that guy's trying to back up here. I better wait. I'll just wait That's a little bit frustrating Just a heads up for you Manitoba drivers or drivers coming through Manitoba You know where this Tim Hortons and SO is in Oak Bluff Please don't do that. That's so annoying There's parking spots back here you can park back here where I am and Leave the park and a lot a little easier to get around. All right, so what's this guy doing on this guy's He's gonna go that way Okay, I am going to roll out the entrance and hope for the best And worse comes to worse. I just got to back up again This guy's over there blocking the entire exit Only because they didn't want to walk from the back of the parking lot. That's the only reason there's lots of parking. Oh My friends my friends this guy too. He's parking over here There's room up here to park a few trucks, but there's a limit We got out of here. No problem. Anyway We'll be okay. I'll live I'll survive Maybe though just maybe someone will watch my video though and be like oh, I did that once I'm not ever gonna do that again. I didn't know how rude that was Yeah, that's why I give these little tips because sometimes people are a little oblivious and that's like innocently oblivious and that's okay I don't want to harp on them for that or like Put them down or anything some people just don't know and people are just never taught proper etiquette And what's rude and what is the right thing to do? you know Sometimes they just need a gentle little reminder being like no that is just not the way we do it. That's very rude We want to be courteous, right? Maybe I'm just naggy. I don't know. I'm not trying to nag you guys Just trying to make the world a better place for everybody So I got to take highway two I Think there's a roundabout up here too. Oh great Think number two just goes straight over, but I got to go like around and All right, here we go yippie-de-dee Wait, two west is that way. Okay, so we want to go this way To west cuz Glenboro is on highway two that way this intersection here always Confuses me which way are you going bud? You're going that way. Okay. I'm going this way. Have a good day This intersection sort of at an angle So it's hard to see which way is my directions get all messed up like north-south east west Here we go. I heard that the highway is doing all right. You can see it's still got some icy sections, but To Manitoba standards, this is great great highways. Look at this. You can see the pavement. That's good It's a good day to be truckin Unloaded now in Glenboro Glenboro that sounds familiar Where else is there a Glenboro? Feel like I've been to Glenboro before but it wasn't this Glenboro I didn't even know Manitoba had a Glenboro until today. I thought it was in Saskatchewan Even yesterday they told me I'm going to Glenboro. I thought that was the Saskatchewan No but halfway across Manitoba Now you know we all learned something together empty step deck there it is And we'll put some more stuff on it Because it's always better when you have stuff on the trailer And then you tie it down and you bring it somewhere else That's the fun part Let's see. How far away are we? We are an hour and 18 minutes away according to Google hundred and nineteen kilometers What is that seventy seventy five seventy five miles gonna go that way we're facing south right now So we're gonna go east. You know what? There's a car coming right now, and I am way too nice again Mostly because it's gonna take me a while to get going on this road here It's pretty slippery. I'll just wait. I wonder if they know that I waited for them On purpose welcome for not inconveniencing you See we're spinning like crazy here now come on Okay, let's lock up the interaxle lock. There we go put power to both drive axles Still nothing Okay, and we don't need that. I'm just gonna back up a little bit here. There's no one behind me They're a little bit of a running start at it. My bad for stopping there All right, oh traction control my nemesis Doesn't do nothing transmissions the worst part about automatic transmissions Circumstances exactly like that and traction control Because when you start spinning on a hill like that all traction control does is it just locks up your wheels and you just sink down And now you're stuck and the automatic transmission freaks out because it doesn't know what's going on So it tries to shift into all kinds of different gears and then again you sink right down and you're stuck It's always best to have a manual transmission. I Have a traction control off switch here, which is important. You can make sure you have that on your truck I can always turn it off, but The best thing to do is make sure you have a manual truck If you have a choice in what truck you're driving. I understand a lot of us don't have a choice You work with what you're giving Very rough road, but don't worry. They put up a sign that says surface brakes. So that makes it okay They warned you Feels a quite a remote area of the province is definitely not my home region of Manitoba Not because of the roads of that's not why I say that it's just that they got like Hills here There's the trans-Canada I'm gonna follow the 240 north up here gonna go through Portage La Prairie I've never taken this road before Well, I feel better knowing that I'm not the only truck on this road That's a training vehicle. So straight is what you're telling me. Oh looks like we get to go over a big bridge. That's fun Excuse me, you got a stop sign right right my turn and my feet were cold now my feet are hot There's no winning Look at these little houses. They're like the size of our house That's even smaller than our house Wow Oh, we don't even have to wait for the train. That's nice Orange La Prairie gets it overpasses. I don't know what's up with Winnipeg Look at all those green cars Whoo Wonder where they're going. We're way high up here now. Wow It's like the highest anyone's been in Manitoba. I'm going straight out There's a truck with a green circle around it with arrows pointing in every direction except backwards We can go any direction except backwards So for those of you who are from overseas or from the United States or from elsewhere in Canada It's a big country. This is what Portage La Prairie Manitoba looks like in early March 2022 We don't always have this much snow, but sometimes we do It's kind of nice today Nice and sunshine This is Tupper Street North You could have taken it one step further and called it Tupperware Street Very nice, right? Look at all those drifts. Wow. I just want to take a snowmobile through that When I was younger I had a snowmobile and that is prime snowmobile in real estate right there all those drifts Oh, I would waste a whole afternoon there.   Oh, it's so good But you know as a kid I lived at home with my parents then mom would always get mad I took it in the house because then the whole house smelled like two-stroke exhaust I thought that was a good thing. No, she didn't think so This took a lot longer than I thought I would I was told it would be just a simple, you know simple pickup No problem. Oh, yeah, just like five to six five seven skids five or seven skids. Oh, yeah, it'd be fun They said. Oh, it'd be easy. They said. Oh, yeah But we got it done. We got her all tied down here satisfied with it and Time to head out It's one of the more difficult ones I've done in a while Just because it's a whole bunch of mismatched a little bit of this little bit of that Here and there reels All kinds of stuff and you get some little things up there yet. You got to tie that down Wrap it around get it nice and neat as neat as we could My face is really warm right now or feels really warm It got so cold there for a while. I wasn't wearing my face mask And I got a little cold pretty good gets cold quickly when the sun starts going down All right, bud green light give her give her you're gonna be late for hockey practice, man. Get that mini van and gear There he goes This is portage laprari Main street, I guess what you'd call it The really long main street Goes through the whole city a lot of older architecture here, too. It's a pretty old city I believe it's one of the older settlements in manitoba Oh, I see a gas station over there a dollar 74 per liter Oh That's over five bucks a gallon. I'm pretty sure For talking America speak Man, you know alberta is helping their citizens the alberta government's dropping the fuel tax So the price for gas will go down and give give their citizens some relief I'm hoping manitoba does something of something of the same We need some relief.  That's got to be about six dollars or more a gallon I'm not I'm just doing rough math in my head right now. I'm not that smart. I can't do math that quickly Wow What a world we're living in. Hey, what a world Made it back to the yard day to clock Uh, I got to deliver this load first thing in the morning and then pick up a new load do it all over again tomorrow Hopefully it won't be quite as long of a day tomorrow, but if it is Then it is We stay until the job gets done Okay, let's grab the warm gloves that I remembered to put on the dash Yeah, I got started at 7 30 this morning too. It was a long day And you saw me like I didn't even stop for lunch. No lunch. No nothing. All I did was I uh, I stopped to go to the bathroom At uh, oh bluff there, which was literally 10 minutes The rest of the time was just We don't know this mess I'm gonna hook back onto this trailer first thing in the morning. So I'm just gonna leave it right here and uh Everything looks like it's Where I left it, which is always good. I always like to see that nothing Nothing fell off Yeah, everything looks as it should good. Okay, we're gonna leave it right here I've got to unhook it for the night though Yeah time just Flies by when you're having fun. Hey, it doesn't really feel like I've been here over 12 hours It's one benefit to really liking your job I really do like my job and I'm not just saying that either Really really do enjoy what I do That makes it a lot easier That's just my suspension adjusting That's okay This truck is kind of nice.