And welcome to another edition of Kondo Insider, Hawaii's show about association living, whether you're a homeowner, I remember the board of directors who are just someone interested. Thank you for being at our show today. I do want to say this is a great day, May 4th, 2017, because something very important happened today. The legislature adjourned and no more harm can be done to the citizens of Hawaii. Not to be too cynical, but I think we've all read in the paper recently about all the in-fighting, which probably is not good for any of us. But today the legislature has additionally, has adjourned. At the beginning we had 157 bills introduced affecting association living. Only five were passed, having not been signed by the governor, but frankly all of them were pretty good with respect to what it's doing for the industry. One of the things that's come up quite a bit lately is somewhat in the price that a paradise article we've seen in the news is the incredible rising class and special assessments for associations. For a lot of reasons, sometimes blamed on the reserve studies. So I invited a very good friend of mine, Dana Bergman, from the Bergman Project Group, who spent a lot of time fixing aging buildings. So I welcome Dana to the show. Thank you, Richard. Pleasure to be here. Tell us a little bit about you and being in Hawaii. Like the rest of us, call Paradise Home. I originally grew up on the mainland, but I've been in Hawaii permanently now about 15 years. I enjoy spending time with my wife and my son. And when I can get time away from Condo World, I actually am an avid outrigger paddler. So that's a little bit about me. Yeah, and how to hold your son, though? Say again? How old is your son? My son is almost 16 months. Wow, I can't believe that. I remember when he was born. That's right. Time flies. Well, you're also a principal of the Bergman Project Group. Can you just tell us about your company, what your mission is, what kind of work you do so people understand your background? Sure. Bergman Project Group is a consulting firm. We do project management and consulting work, specializing in AOAO projects. So we do almost entirely retrofit work on AOAO projects. We do a little bit of other stuff from time to time, but our real core competency and the real backbone of my firm is helping AOAOs with their capital improvement projects. And you're licensed, I assume you have engineers or architectures. What kind of people do you have on stand? So construction managers, architects, engineers, and the like. So we've all seen in the news, newspapers, civil beat, all these different press about price data paradise and associations and huge assessments, which creates problems for homeowners because someone has to pay for the improvement. What's happened? Well, there's a couple of things going on. One, these buildings are getting older. You have to look back at Hawaii's history and the lion's share of the condo buildings were built in the 60s and 70s. And just like people, as buildings age, they have more needs and need more maintenance and they need greater care, just like people do. So that's one component of it. The other component of it is cost. And the construction market, as everyone knows, has been extremely busy. I would say arguably, particularly on the repair side, given the aging structures that we're dealing with here in Hawaii. And the combination of structures getting older and needing more care combined with rapidly rising construction costs has created a real problem. Well, I appreciate your example, but I'm not particularly fond of your example. As you're getting older, we're going to need more care. It's a sorry note for me who's aging. But I'll accept your example. But tell us some of the examples of buildings you've encountered and the general type of problems you have. So we see all kinds of different things on the various properties that we work on. Some of the larger things that we're seeing that are problematic these days, some of them people are familiar with, like concrete, small repair. That's something that's been around for a long time that most people know a lot about. We're seeing, in some cases, buildings have put it off, and these problems have gotten very severe. And then there's other things that are coming up that, in some sense, as people didn't foresee or are happening prematurely, examples would be the windows needing to be replaced in a high rise or railings. Arguably, the biggest problem that we are faced with here in Hawaii is the drain waste and vent piping. That is a problem that most reserve studies five years ago didn't have that as a line item. And today, as a community and as an industry, we know that there is a severe problem with waste piping in Hawaii. So is there a useful life of waste piping? Is it going to vary by project based on maybe some environmental or used or whatever? You know, that's a really interesting question. Let me phrase it this way. Different parts of the country see different problems. Here in Hawaii, here at home, we have a major problem with cast iron, with the drain waste vent piping. If you go to other parts of the country, they have different problems. So if you go, for example, to Florida or to the Northeast, they have the exact reverse problem. They have problems with their supply lines that supply fresh water to the units, but they're not having trouble with their waste lines. So it does tend to be regional based on geographic conditions and environmental conditions. Here at home, the biggest thing that we're dealing with right now is that cast iron failure. Well, you know, it's interesting from my experience, being in property management for 25 years or so, is that when you get down to this problem, it's always about the money. Yep. And so what's happened? Why don't we have the money? Maybe I should ask you. I know that it's passed the budget for the state. Are they giving us any money to fix our problems? Well, if you can find some in there, I think everybody would be very happy, but I highly doubt it. Yes. You know, a lot of this comes down to major capital improvement items that either were significantly underfunded in reserve studies or just simply were missing. So, you know, referencing back to a couple of the examples that I gave with concrete spall repair, you typically see that in reserve studies. It's not something that's uncommon. It's fairly common, and so you do see it, but often it's woefully underfunded. You look at something like the waste piping or perhaps another example that we're just starting to see is fire alarms, where you see fire alarms are completely missing from reserve studies and they have to be replaced as they age and fail. Piping, like I said, is completely missing from reserve studies. And when you don't have it in your reserve study, that means you haven't reserved funding for that problem when it comes up. I think probably one of the common issues, you know, the declaration of a condominium defines who's responsible for what. That's correct. And so oftentimes, like the supply line for water within the apartment itself is the owner's responsibility, where there's going to be, I don't know the exact word, but a major supply line to the apartment, which is the association's responsibility. And so how you put that in reserve and what you think through what you should put in has to be carefully thought through. That's absolutely correct. And I would say navigating the intricacies of how declarations were put together decades ago can be really problematic because what we as man and as a society have said on paper and who owns what may not necessarily coincide exactly with the way buildings function or with the way mother nature works. So as an example, we'll stick with the two things I've been talking about, the concrete spa repair. Maybe you say anything outside the railing is the association's responsibility, but inside the railing is the homeowner's responsibility. But the way corrosion works and spa repair works, it's not going to magically, mother nature's not going to magically stop at the railing line and say, oh, I'm going to stop corroding here. With piping, same thing. Delineating who is responsible for what can often be very difficult because sometimes lines serve as an individual unit, and sometimes they serve as multiple units. And so it can be a tricky thing to unravel. Yeah, but one of the things to declare in the statute that the board can take a component and declare it a high-risk item. So if part of that repair is the owner's responsibility, they can force that owner to participate in a solution by declaring it a high-risk component. And that may just be because it has liability for someone to get hurt. It could be because it's affecting their insurance. It could be a lot of reason. The boards have the ability to navigate that because they can make resolutions saying the piping or the supply line or the spalling is a high-risk component on LNI deck. We saw the problem in Alamoana with the railing filling. And so they can really not stand behind what's really the owner's responsibility. They have the ability within their documents to state law to force a resolution to protect the building and the safety for everybody. That is true. It is very specific from building to building as to what each component, who is responsible for each component. So one thing I would say to the associations or board members and owners that may be listening is, especially board members, is please consult with your attorney. Your attorney is necessary to help unravel some of this and help delineate who may on paper be responsible for what. But secondary to that, you're absolutely correct. There are mechanisms that the statute allows where boards can do high-risk resolutions, as you suggest, or other things to get different components included in a larger project. Perfect example. Very frequently, we'll see where maybe the riser piping in a waste piping replacement project is delineated as a common element. So the association is responsible for it. But maybe an individual branch line that services a unit is depicted as being an individual unit owner's responsibility. The problem is that all of that pipe was put in at the same time and it's of the same vintage. And you have to cut open the walls to get to all of that pipe at the same time and in the same location. So from not only a point of just simple logic, but also from a point of being financially prudent and good stewards of association's funds, it actually makes more sense to go ahead and replace all of those components while you're there rather than saying, well, we're only going to do the stuff that's not responsible, the responsibility of the association, patch the walls back up, put the cabinets back in place. And if you have to tear it all apart later on, that's your problem. It doesn't necessarily benefit the owner, nor does it benefit the association. Now do you see a difference in aging with the piping, the wastewater piping, between the horizontal and the vertical lines? I mean, is it theoretically possible that the vertical lines, because of gravity, is much less corroded than the horizontal lines, which are the waste lines that feed into the sewer system probably? It's possible. Different buildings have different conditions. But I would not say that it's uniform. Some buildings have more problems with the laterals. Some buildings have more problems with the risers. But universally, we see problems with both. Another thing we hear is, well, we're just going to leave the existing vent lines in place and try to save money. But again, they're of the same vintage. And surprisingly, we see as many problems with the vent lines as we do with the drain and the waste lines. So collectively, the general consensus from the construction and engineering world is best practices to replace it all, not to piecemeal it and leave different parts of a 40 or 50-year-old system in place. Well, back to what I was saying earlier, kind of leading into my next question is that it's all about the money to me. Yes. People want to have their buildings safe and secure and well-managed and well-run. But obviously, it takes money to do that. And I remember at the legislature this year that I don't know if it passed or not, but there was a resolution to have the governor do an asset study of all the real estate that the government owns here in Hawaii to determine the condition of it and how much money they would need to fix it over time. And sounds like a reserve study in a way. I was just going to say the same thing. Sounds like a reserve study. But the problem is if anyone really saw the number, because remember there are 50, 75 million short at the University of Hawaii. There are hundreds of millions short at the airport and taking the county issues with their sewer lines or billions short. Then the road control, I'm afraid if they ever did that, they would say, wow, we have a lot of money over the next 20 years. And then there's the cost of how you pay for it. If you kind of took the reserve study that's kind of pure as form, they'd say, well, we have to triple the income taxes that are property taxes to save for this, which obviously would take away the affordability of home. So when you have this association that's got this, quote, $10 million problem or a big financial problem, what are their choices to pay for it? Well, let me back up a step and say, first of all, please spend time with your reserve studies. Your reserve studies are a living, breathing document that need to constantly be looked at and constantly be refreshed. It's not something that you should just look at once every five or 10 years and then put it away and blow the dust off of it later on. It really needs to be integral to an association's day-to-day and month-to-month planning. But what do they do if they don't have the funding in reserve because it hasn't been planned for? Basically, you're left with two possibilities. Essentially, they can either do an assessment or they can take out a loan. Now, assessments boards are able to do, without seeking the permission of the owners in most cases, there are some exceptions. And they would need to get legal advice from that, from their attorney for that. However, loans, of course, require the approval of the ownership in order to take them out. Most buildings, it's 50% plus one vote. Some buildings, it's a majority. Some buildings, it's 75%. It does vary from building to building, but most commonly, it's 50% plus one. Yeah, actually, I'm going to correct you about one thing. Please do. The loan is actually only 50%. Correct. It's not plus one. I mean, other provisions that have been documents are either 50% plus one or 67% depending on which you're doing some cases, 80% or 90%. But the reality of it is that a loan, it's an odd part of the statute. It's only exactly 50%. Correct. It requires to approve the loan. But you know what, we have more questions on this. And it's going to be long answers. So we're going to take a short one minute break to get our thoughts together. And then I'm going to ask you some more long questions about money. Sounds great. For the day of the big game, watching at home just doesn't feel the same. What on the list is who's going to drive? It's nice to know you're going to get home alive. Plan for fun and responsibility. Choose the GT. Captain of our team, it's the GT. For every game day, a sign at designated driver. Welcome back to Kondo Insider. We're sitting here talking with Dana Bergman, principal of the Bergman Project Group, about aging buildings and these surprise huge assessments and what's causing them and maybe who to blame or where we get the money from. And we left as we were talking about loans. But I just want to back up one step and just ask Dana to briefly review the most common things admitted from a reserve study. Good question, Richard. The most common things that we see that are admitted, excuse me, missing from a reserve study. Number one, hands down is all your piping components. You just don't see them, especially the drain waste and vent piping. I'm going to interrupt you one second because we have a phone call. Oh, good. And so we're going to take the phone call. So if everybody will bear with us a minute while I listen to the caller and then I'll repeat the question and we'll go back for an answer. I am a potential Kondo owner. Should I be concerned about a building's age? I mean, what should potential owners like me look for when purchasing a Kondo? Well, my question is a potential buyer of a Kondo minimum. And what should they look for when evaluating whether or not to buy the Kondo? That's a great question. I'm not a real estate agent. So some of that might get a little bit outside my own expertise, but from my perspective, I would be looking at whether or not they have major, I would want to look at the reserve study. Look at the reserve study, see if they've got major components in the reserve study and see if they're funded correctly. Find out if they have loans on their books already or if they don't. And try to look at the financial health of the association. That would be my advice. What I have been hearing from the folks that are in the real estate community is that they actually like the buildings that have fixed most of their big problems because it looks like a stable investment as opposed to buildings that have not. And again, I'm not a realtor so I can't speak to those issues, but this is what we are starting to hear. Yeah, let me add two cents because I'm a real estate broker. There you go. All right. Is that not only do you want to look at the reserve study and see if it seems to be adequate and maybe even ask someone who understands it better than a potential novice buyer. But under the law, they have to have disclosures. The seller has to make disclosures and the Kondo Association has to make disclosures. It's an RO 105C for the association. On that form are real specific questions about deferred maintenance, lawsuits, loans, work that needs to be done. By simply carefully looking at the disclosures that are required by law, you'll learn a lot about what the potential problems are down the road. So I'd tell the listener to carefully look at the disclosure by the seller, carefully look at the disclosure by the Kondo Association. If necessary, it gets them help reviewing the reserve study to see if the funds that they're being contributed seem reasonable that what we know that the major components are listed and then make an informed decision realizing the world's not perfect and hidden conditions that surprises occasionally happen. I agree. And I would say that actually builds right back to the question you were asking me before the call came in, which is, what is missing? That's another thing I would say is look for the things that are big ticket items. If they're missing from the reserve study, that could be a red flag. And that's things like the fire alarm systems, waste piping, window replacement, if in fact that's a common element and the like. So back to the money again. So we now have a reserve study at the adequate. We've had our surprise conditions come up. We need to have $5 million. They don't have the money we were started talking about. They can special assess without homeowner approval or 50% approval of the owner, they can get a loan. Typically, yes. Yeah. So what's the pros and cons of that? It's a great question. One of the things that we wrestle with in trying to help homeowners associations is trying to make the cost palatable and affordable. And some people, it's amazing. Even in buildings that you may not think, this may be the case, you'll have buildings where somebody just wants to write a check for their portion of a major major repair. Let's just take an extreme example and say it's 50 or $60,000. There's some people in the building that are gonna wanna write a check and other people that that would put them into bankruptcy. So the major differences are this.  And if they aren't able to do that, that presents a real dilemma. Often people that fall into that category would have a major problem with that scenario, or, you know, kupuna, retirees, people on fixed incomes. And so that's not a great option for them. With a loan, you don't have to put up any personal collateral, it's all done without the owners having to do that and it often gets financed out over a very long period of time. So take piping for an example. If you're going to be replacing your piping once every 40 or 50 years, it's not a bad thing necessarily to put that in a very long-term loan, say a 20-year loan, to keep the payment down for the owners. So loans are most often the best choice because it makes it more palatable for the people that cannot afford to write a check-out, but it also, depending on the association, gives people that can write a check-out the option to do so lowering the overall loan payment for the association. Yeah, let me put a different spin on that a little bit. Let's just say you need a million dollars that's 50 units, that's $20,000 in it. Yep. If you assess them and only 90% can pay and 10 can't, you're 200,000 is short from the million dollars you need to pay the contractor. That's correct. And then what's your choice? Foreclose on the owner who then has all sorts of rights under the statute to delay that, but you're still short $200,000 paying the contractor. That's correct. If, in fact, you do a loan, you have the best chance, and by the way, if you foreclose on that owner, the next buyer is not responsible for that $20,000. So the other people, the people who did pay are going to be slightly responsible for more payments again to make up the difference. That being said, if you do a loan, you've given that person the best chance to pay their share without losing their home. That's right. And a lot of associations develop what we call a present value payment strategy, which says to the owners, okay, we need a million dollars, 20,000 per unit. But let's say 20% don't want a loan, they don't want the interest. You allow them to pay their share in cash, and then you desess the amount you need, which would be 4,600,000 in my example, forgive me if my math is wrong out there, but whatever the residual balance of those are needed to support a loan, and only they pay for that cost. So you're kind of taking the hate to say it this way, because there's no disrespect. You have haves and have nots, people who might have the money who don't want to pay the interest, and those who need because they have health problems, divorce, business feelings, whatever, the cash flow, they don't want to lose their home. So boards have to kind of balance this need to take care of everybody. And so they need to be able to either have a loan, allow those who want the loan to pay in full to do it, and those want to pay monthly to do it. That's absolutely correct. So it does vary from association to association, and they should check with their property manager and their attorney on the specifics for their particular building, but you're exactly correct. The most palatable and the most sensitive way to go about these major capital improvements so that you're giving everybody a fighting chance is to take out these loans. You actually acute something else in my mind, which is an important point. With an assessment, if you wanted to sell your unit, that assessment has to be cleared either prior to sale or as part of the transaction, correct? Whereas with a loan, you just pay your share and if you sell your unit next year or five years from now, your portion of the loan payment just passes to the next owner. So that's an important consideration too. I think back to what I said about the present value that owners who want to pay cash do so up front and you borrow the residual, it's certainly feasible at closing that a contract between the buyer and seller that the buyer has assisted that the remaining present value be paid off, meaning the seller got credit for his existing payments in principle and interest. And it can be a part of the contract. Because I have to tell you, I've done probably or seen over $100 million in association loans in the last 10 years. And most of the ones that these 20 year long-term payouts were frankly fully paid off in 10 years or so, because what happened was people got their income tax refund or they inherited money or they sold their unit and the contract required to be paid off. I've never really seen one go 20 years, to be honest with you. You would know better than anyone. So do you think it affects property values having a loan on the books? I do not. I can tell you personally, I own in an old building in Waikiki and we have a loan on our books and it hasn't affected our property value one bit. Yeah, I own a condo in Waikiki as well. And we had, it's a new condo. We had a construction litigation lawsuit. And because the building needed to be repaired, we were looking at mitigating our damages first of all but making it more pleasant for people to live. We as an association borrowed the money, fixed the building, going through all the legal procedures where the defendants had a right to inspect. So all the things the lawyer would advise we certainly complied with. But at the end, we fixed the building, everybody was happy, but that lawsuit just settled and then they paid off the loan for the litigation proceeds. There you go. And that was their solution. So I think you're right. They need to check with their lawyer. They're going to need to study the reserve study carefully, but ignoring it is probably not a good idea. No, ignoring it's not a good idea.  You know, these problems are only going to get worse and the longer you wait, the more it's going to cost. That's because we're at the end of the show. What's your final recommendation as to boards and owners? Get involved with your board, ask questions, be participatory. To boards, I would say spend a lot of time with that reserve study and fund it because that's the path of financial stability. Well, thank you for being on the show today. My pleasure. We are talking about a very hot topic on how to deal with aging buildings, but those of you who are hoping the legislature is going to give you the money to fix your building, you might think twice about that. But the reality of it is you've got to look at your reserve study, put the components in and look at funding ways to not only fund the reserves, but when the problem surfaces dealing with it because I can guarantee this. If you don't fix it, the problem will get worse and the actual replacement repair costs will be much higher. Again, Dana, thank you for being on the show today. My pleasure, Richard. Thank all of you for watching Condo Insider. We'll be back next Thursday at three o'clock and aloha.


Is Hollywood actually whitewashing the new Hayao Miyazaki animated film The Boy and the Heron? And if they are, what level of violation is this? The classic Japanese story, The Boy and the Heron, featuring Christian Bale, Dave Bautista, Gemma Chan, William Defoe, Karen Fukuhara, Mark Hamill, Robert Patton, and Florence Pug. Do you notice anything, Andrew? David, I noticed that there's a lot of big Hollywood stars on this English dub cast, but I got to say, there's no full Asian guys. Ow! Dave Bautista's half Filipino, but I feel like he doesn't fully play it. Anyways, guys, let's talk about this because a lot of people are kind of upset in the comments section that there are no full Asian men included in this English dub, but there are clearly full Asian women. So, we couldn't have been Mahito Maki with Luca Padovan. Guys, we're going to talk about it. We'll talk about, if I think it's whitewashing, what level of violations it is at. So, please hit that like button. Check out other episodes of The Hop-Hop Boys. But you know what's not whitewash, David? It's SmalaSauce. SmalaSauce.com. Check it out right now. Check out the Instagram for all the cool content that we're making, too. Alright, listen, guys. I don't want to, because I can understand this from both sides, but it is cool that a Japanese Hayao Miyazaki piece is getting that many big names attached to it. Right. And this is the English dub. Obviously, there's a Japanese one that's already done and the movie's coming out, but I'm saying this is for the English voices, because a lot of, they assume a lot of people are going to be watching it dubbed in English. For the Western world, not everybody wants to read the subs. Some people are into the dubs, Andrew. I'll say this, though. It is very indicative, and some people can say it's a big violation, medium, low, middle violation, Andrew. It's very indicative that they left Asian guys off the cast. Yeah, it's definitely a violation. I agree. I'm not making an excuse for them. This is a violation. But classically, because, as you guys know, Japanese anime, there's always been this push and pull with how Eurocentric it is and how Japan itself does not look at Asian representation the same way as Asian Americans do. So that's why Japanese people aren't driven. They care about Japan and they care about the West. Yeah, they don't really... They don't see it like, yo, I need to get a bunch of Asian Americans in there, but if they didn't care about Asian Americans or Westernized Asians, why do they have Gemma Chan and Kara Fukuhara playing Asian female characters? Yeah, I guess they essentially left out Asian dudes out of an animated film that takes place in Japan. So would you say that it does reveal some troubling Asians in the West dynamics? Yeah, I mean, dude, I think it should have been an easy fix, man. They could have left one Asian dude in there. I understand that not making all the characters Asian as far as the voices, because I think there's a lot of great actors on that list, but they could have put one Asian dude in there. Ken Watanabe, maybe somebody without an accent. I'm assuming that they're counting Dave Bautista and being like, well, Dave Bautista's half Filipino, so there's our Asian guy. And that's what Hollywood likes to do, right? Yeah, and I think that he counts a little bit, but I think they could have done better.  They don't like Asian men in Hollywood. Yeah, a little bit. I think it's true. Yeah, because Kara Fukuhara and Gemma Chan are full Asian. And Dave Bautista, even though I'm not taken away as Asianist, I'm just saying a lot of people don't even know that he's Asian. I think it's a violation that they should have made this change. So I guess I can understand why a lot of dudes, especially a lot of guys who love anime, a lot of Asian dudes watch anime and then even in probably the highest profile English dubbing of an anime. Ever done, right? There are no full Asian guys. Yeah, let's get into the comments section. Somebody said just as we expected whitewash, this might be an unpopular opinion, but I think they should only cast Asian actors for any anime. It's hard enough for Asian actors to get booked. Somebody said I also agree. Somebody said one of the whitest cast ever, SMH. People have a right to be mad, right? Especially if they value Hayao Miyazaki. By the way, I think Christian Bale in it, being in it is great. He was in other Hayao Miyazaki dubs. I can get it.  That's dope. That's dope that you would bring out the big guns for the dub. But why leave Asian guys out? Yeah, yeah. And I don't think, I don't agree that the whole cast has to be Asian for the English dub because it's an English dub. It's for the English market. But they should have been a little more sensitive for sure. So I think it's whack that they did that. Of course. People just said, man, why do you want to separate Asian men from the label Asian? Only Asian women actually count as Asian representation. Asian men do not even exist. We are just like essentially not Asian anymore. We're like aliens. Yeah.  That's how weird it is. To be honest, this is kind of just like a Western thing at this point. I just know that anytime there's Asian representation, they're going to get like 90% Asian women and maybe like 10% of it will be like quote unquote like Asian guys. I don't know. It just plays out that way. Somebody said, let them do what they want. Yeah. But that's capitalism too. They can do what they want. Somebody said, even with these voices, watching a Miyazaki film in English is an absolute tragedy. But Andrew, how much of this subs versus dubs? I always watched the subs. I never watched dubs in anything. I don't enjoy it that way. It seems to be kind of weird. But I get for pure non-Asian people why they would watch the subs. But I'm saying everything is going to be happening in the boy in the hair on in Japan. Yeah. So they're going to be saying Japanese names in an English accent like Mikoko. Like, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I did watch Dragon Ball Z sub though. But other stuff I perverse dubbed. Somebody says, why do I think that this said the boy in the heroin? Yeah. I mean, the hair on is just like a, it's a type of like a bird that looks like a crane. Yeah. Anyway, somebody said, but how great is that that Robin Pattinson and these Christian Bale and all these American legends signed up to be a part of it? No, it's definitely kind of cool. You know, and I feel like, uh, yeah, I think overall, man, like David, how mad are you about this?  So like, I'm not like a 10 out of 10. I'm like, I saw a princess. Let's just say you're like a four out of 10. Right? Are you mad? I just think it's very reflective of the dynamics here on the ground right now. I guess the way that the equation is set up. It's just playing out how you think it would play out. Do Asian women just count as representation now? I'm happy that Gemma Chan's on there. I think she's a good actor. Karen Fuguhara. Yeah, it's true. You know, they might be more assimilated or whatever they all, you know, All right. Taking that aside, I do not care at who they're dating or marrying at this point. I guess it doesn't matter to me. I just think that it's whack when Asian guys left out.  I don't know. At this point, I'm just like, dude, if it's an Asian story in Asian setting, and it's made by Hayao Miyazaki who is an Asian guy himself. Like one East Asian guy on there. Throw a Japanese guy who speaks English. Could be Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, whatever. Like maybe one Asian guy on there. Like it's, it's a Japanese story. Right. I mean, ultimately this is just what it is. It's not fair. And I do think that Asian males got left out of representation to be honest still to this day. But it's almost like you're looking at this club line and they're for the Asians into the Western club and they're only letting the girls go into this Western nightclub. You know, the Asian guys are still kept in the back of the line. And I feel like some Asian guys have gotten to the point where they don't even care about getting into the club at all anymore. Question, if this casting for the English dub wasn't full of stars and it was just like no name, low level actors, would we be even be talking about this and there was no Asian guys? Probably not. Probably not. And probably not if the whole cast was whitewashed either. I mean, it would turn into a whole community thing versus just Asian guys being mad about it. Right. Because Asian women, I'm not saying that they don't care and they're not supporting the guys either, they have their representation in character. So you think the Asian community would be more mad if the whole cast was non-Asian or that Asian guys would more than So the Asian-American community would be mad if it was a whole cast of Western stars, they probably would be less mad but still making a tiny bit of a thing of it if everybody was just a no-name voice actor. Right. But then this way it kind of makes, it sort of divides the Asian-American community.  You could have thrown Daniel Day Kim in there. You could have thrown a number of people in there. I guess it's a good discussion to have, especially, you know, that's why we're having it right now but it sort of is just a symptom, I guess, of a larger systemic issue. But on this note that, of course, everybody's going to use this and be like, oh, Asian guys shafted once again. Nobody cares about Asian guys. Right, even though it's such a trivial thing to use the dub of an anime, right? This is just one thing and you also see all this other progress and all these other things for Asian guys. So I guess at what point are we not gonna, are we just gonna not let these little things bother us? I think we should let it, I think for the people who can write think pieces and petition the system to change, they should do that. But I don't blame anybody for just being like, man, I got to protect my piece. I'm an Asian guy, I can't even care about this. Or overall, you just take it because Asian guys overall and the macro are doing better. And you're like, listen, as long as Asian dudes are doing better in the macro, in the big picture, then I'm not going to trip about this. Right, Hayao Miyazaki himself is an Asian man. Do we, did we ever think about who was the English dub for any other anime film? We never thought about it, at least on a mainstream level. Maybe anime geeks did, but I like, I did not. So I don't, in a way it's like. So I guess ultimately are you saying you're caring, but you're not really caring. I think it's a violation, but I don't care that much. Okay. It's a violation though. Let us know what you guys think in the comments section below. Is it a violation because it's representative of these larger societal dynamics, especially in old world industries that tend to be more social based and not like STEM based. Obviously Hollywood marketing business, finance, they may be more, you know, relationship based rather than hardcore, algorithmic, you know, number crunching based. And I think that that's, I'll tell you this man, it's complicated because a lot of Asian guys go to STEM fields because you're not going to see this Hollywoodification dynamics, right? But then if you stay in the STEM fields, even though those are very important fields for keeping America competitive or any economy anywhere competitive, it will never impact the social ladder. Like in America, the social ladder and the economic ladder, I, the one thing that's very different about the West is they're very separate ladders. Whereas in the East, they tend to be more combined into one ladder. So I, it's a catch 22 guys. Let us know what you think in the comment section below. Is it a big deal? Is it not a big deal? What are the implications? Until next time, we'd hop out boys, we out. Peace.


Alfie, what is your opinion of what I posted in Gilded? Oh, I agree with that, 100% here, gang, let me take this stuff down. Oh yeah, gang, I know we're about to take, actually let's talk about comic books. Alfie posted something regarding Jack Kirby because the documentary came out on Stanley, I forget, in Disney. The documentary came out on Stanley on Disney and in the documentary, I haven't watched it yet. There's a lot of I, Stanley saying I did this, I did this, I created this, I co-created this.  Huge respect to Stanley for having the vision to still put his energy into comic books. No problem, good manager, good marketer, good mascot. However, majority comic book characters created for Marvel Comics by a long shot. Hands down, whoo, leaps and bounds above anybody else, including Stanley with Jack Kirby. Anybody in the comic book medium, everybody in the comic book medium that knows anything about comics knows this. 100%, Jack Kirby got shafted, literally, by the comic book corporations, mainly Marvel Comics, which is one of the reasons, by the way, that what the comic book companies did to Jack Kirby was sort of a precedent, right? Something that they did and it was the catalyst that gave birth to independent comic book creators, right? Todd McFarland has been quoted as saying the reason he went independent outside of the main corporations and one of the main reasons that they started Image Comics, where comic book creators would retain the rights to normal comics and keep their art and all this jazz was because of what happened to Jack Kirby, right? Horrendous, horrendous.  I mean, he passed away in 1994, but greatest creators, greatest imaginations in history, human history, we're talking about, right? And that's the way the corporations treated him, right? So there's a lot to be said there regarding what Jack Kirby's son wrote about the Stanley documentary, right?  And he was. Anyone in the comic book medium knows this. He took credit for everything, right? Huge credit needs to be given to Jack Kirby. He was the main creator. He was really the reason why Marvel Comics is what it is, right? In terms of comic book characters, the universe building and all that jazz going on, Stanley had a huge part in it in marketing, right? And they go hand in hand. They were partners. But when one partner starts taking credit for the work of another partner, you got to call him out. You got to call him out. So Alfie, 100%, Jack Kirby's son is 100% accurate. And he said it more eloquently than I did, right? He was more generous to Stanley than I would be telling the truth. So that's my take on it.


What's up guys, it's Josh Werb back here with another video. So the semester is finally beginning to wrap up and one of the big final events for this year was the first year Olympics. Each college gathers their best and they duke it out on old campus in a variety of games and challenges. It was a great time and never before have I felt so much TD pride. I personally signed up for Tug of War and Dodgeball but I think the highlight of the day was seeing my beloved friend Roger absolutely destroy people in the rap battle. There's nothing better than that. Stick around till the end of the video to make sure you see that, you definitely don't want to miss it and let's get into it. Well it is the day it is freshman Olympics right Jake? Yep. Show them the shirt. Oh yeah. What are we doing? I think we're doing tug of war right? We're doing tug of war. But before we hit up the Olympics we actually have a magic show to perform. We got hired to do a birthday party. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on Jake. Jake are you following? I'm counting my cards. Yeah, so it should be a pretty good time. Little birthday party performance in the TD courtyard and then we'll tug some ropes. Alright. Damn. Magic show was a wild success. Those kids are f***ing monsters. They were hard to perform for, well not hard, not hard to perform for but just they were very observant. Oh yeah. They caught everything. I mean you made a few mistakes there right? I mean you went perfect. Which was very surprising. It was good though. It was good. It was fun to see a group of kids. What's up? Hey what's up? I'm doing the rap battle. Yes I am. Are you ready? Yes I am. Are you gonna win?  I was just talking to some other people that were also doing the rap battle and they showed me what they had and it was pretty hot. Question is will you be able to beat them? Wanna see something? Yeah. Roger you wanna hit them with something real quick? Uh. I'm a veteran putting letters together call me letterman and I have never met a better rapper it's so evident an elephant in the room my rapping is just elegant there's never been one like me don't just come to me and bet against me the oaths being your favor the game is hungry but whatever the odds I'm a rapper you were junkie standing among three lines clunky I'm the donkey oldie people know me you're like that put the donkey press the wrong key and you just messed up your line go find a dictionary gets your best use of time you'll be flipping through the pages while I rescue mankind okay I'm done with you who's the next fool in line hey okay that was good stuff that's good stuff I think you're gonna win you got it yeah you got it make sure you just like annunciate so they know what you're talking about oh yes all right let's where do you go tug some ropes yes let's go let's go focus on you in the light it helps me feel my emotions why are we at such a distance find ourselves so out of frame this loves they come in the night you help me heal and reopen why are we drifting away from everything we wanted to save I told you we're about to shit up no I'm just kidding I'll say something cleaner I'll say something cleaner all right we're about to what where are we we're at the first year Olympics you know we're doing our thing we've got the boys you know we're gonna win we're gonna win all of our events today that's all I know what are you doing I'm gonna capture the flag I'm sorry I'm gonna win that's right I'm holding the flag oh and you have anything to say are you vlogging all of this if we don't win what we're transferring we are we're playing a game of dodgeball lost a heartbreaker out there as you can tell we don't love controversy that last game you know we were catching a lot of balls out there and they weren't going out so we're getting a little ruin right now we got our captain angel over there and we got Lizzie we got our two caps they're going to talk it over we're going to see if we can have a little rematch piece all right we'll see what happens can we threaten the TD but it's like I can take a math test you know here with my boy Jack Jensen we just finished the 2018 freshman olympics freshman olympics um Silliman college as you may have guessed who's taking home all the golds today so Jensen Jensen's uh Silliman college across the street we have a little bit of a rivalry just a tad right and uh I think TD took the most up so we won tug-a-war you won tug-a-war but how many events were there that's right that's fair point fair point a lot of events I don't know what I'm saying yeah we're just uh just walking vlogging down Elm with our burritos right saucer fresco run postal all right I just finished lunch and I had received word from the TD group chat that Roger was advancing to the final round immediately I had to drop my burrito sprint back to old campus to make sure I could support my boy you ready yes I'm expecting the best so we have these pairings it's gonna go one on one and then the best one comes towards the final round it's over on the track all virgin aka young check aka what's the conversion rate aka check forever after I got this all right let's go you want to be the most but you've been looking like some burnout shout out to everyone for competing shout out to you I make a fool we're playing chicken on this bitch come closer you're gonna check it out first bro die old virgin I think it's gonna be virgin for life he's probably being the right the battle but I'm sorry oh check check he wants the battle I hope you guys enjoyed this video really meant a lot to me and it means a lot to TD TD takes a lot of heat from the rest of Yale but honestly I couldn't imagine myself anywhere else and I'm sure the rest of this amazing community would say the same thing enjoyed the video drop a thumbs up down below if you have any questions concerns video ideas leave them in the comment section if you want to see more blogs like this in the future definitely subscribe and see you soon


Suppose a certain breed of rabbit was introduced onto a small island about eight years ago. The current rapid population on the island is estimated to be 4,100, with a current rate of growth at 55% per year. That is a huge amount of growth. I wish my bank account had a 55% growth per year. That would be a nice APR. So one question to ask is like, okay, the current population is 4,100. What was the first population? So how many rabbits were introduced onto this island? What was the starting factor, right? How many rabbits started this growth, right? This could be like some invasive species that was introduced, right? Australia has a big problem with frogs and things like that.  And so now they're eating all the birds. Maybe I'm messing up some of those details there, but like these invasive species can be sort of a problem, right? Can we figure out like how many started this whole thing? How many rabbits started this whole growth rate eight years ago? So basically what we know is the following. We're gonna use exponential growth, right? P equals P naught e to the kt. We know the growth rate, right? They're growing at 55% per year. So t, if the growth rate is in per year, that means t is gonna have to be in years, right? Number of years, the number of years since, well, since what? We have to make a choice about that, right? Do we wanna measure since years, how many years since the current timeframe? Since like now, or do we wanna have it from, right? The starting eight years ago. There's a couple of ways you can handle that. So from our perspective, we're gonna take, we're gonna take t to represent the number of years since now, right? So currently, right now means t equals zero. So that's what we're gonna take as an assumption. Therefore, our initial population is gonna be 4100. That's how we're thinking about it. So we have 4100 e to the 0.55 t, okay? But then if we wanna figure out how many bunnies there were at the beginning of this experiment, right? We need to go back in time. And so we'd set t equal to negative eight, right? So t equals negative eight would be, and then eight years ago, okay? For which then we try to solve this. We just wanna solve the right-hand side. Well, I mean, not solve it, just compute it, I guess. We're gonna take 55% times it by eight. That's gonna give us, let me write it down, e to the negative, that's 4.4, like so. We're then going to take, then I'm gonna have to put this in my calculator, of course. I mean, if you want, you could write this as an expo, excuse me, it's already an expo. If you wanted to, you could write this. Negative exponents, of course, the same thing as division. So you get 4100 divided by e to the 4.4. The same thing right here, right? If you estimate e to the 4.4, you end up with 81.45, and then that's been divided by the 4100. This will give you an estimate of about 50. So we would expect, you know, rounding to the nearest bunny, you can't have part of a bunny. So there was approximately 50 bunnies eight years ago that started this whole population growth. Now, the reason I wrote it with the division right here is another approach you could take, right? Because when you decide t equals zero, it doesn't matter what t equals zero is, you just have to make a choice. What if eight years ago, what if we decide that eight years ago is what we meant by t equals zero? In that situation, our model would look like p equals p naught, which we don't know what it is, right? So then we'd be like, hey, okay, the current population is 4100, right? But we don't know the initial population, we get e to the 0.55 times eight, right? So we have a positive eight here, instead of the negative eight we had here, but notice the unknown is the p naught instead of the current population. For which if we wanted to solve for p naught, we'd have to divide by this, 0.55, which we saw earlier, 0.55 times eight was 4.4, right? So we have to divide both sides by 4.4, which gives us that the initial population was 4, 4100 divided by e to the 4.4. That gives us this number we saw right here. But again, dividing by an exponential is just using a negative exponent, so you get 4100 times e to the negative 4.4. So whichever approach you take, it doesn't matter what t equals zero means, does it mean now or eight years ago? Just be consistent, that's all that matters. Pick a model and go with it, all right? So let's say that we have this question right here, so we answer this question. So now let's ask the question, how many rabbits will there be, say, in 12 years? So as we go to the future a little bit, how many rabbits do we expect to have 12 years from now? So again, it matters on what you use as your t equals zero. Where does moment t equals zero in time represent? So with our original example, where t equals zero represented now, right? We then have to compute p, we have to compute p of 12, right? For which we use the current population of 4100, we take e to the 0.55, right, times that by 12, and we compute that. On the other hand though, if we took that t equals zero was eight years ago, notice then our function, what we're trying to compute is we're actually trying to compute p of 20, right? Where does 20 come from? We have to go eight years to get to the present, then we have to get 12 more years to get to the future, right? So that's what we have to compute. And so we take 50 times e to the 0.55 times 20, like so.  So you get 50 times e to the 11, e to the 11 is gonna be approximately 5,987, I'm sorry, I'm off by a decimal. That'd be about 59,874.142. You times that by 50, that would give you an estimate of about 2,993,707 bunnies on the island. So wow, that's a lot of bunnies. And there's a reason I'm using rabbits here. They're known for their growth rate. I mean, as Judy Hopps says in the Disney movie, Zootopia, rabbits are known for how good they are at multiplication. Anyways, so we'd estimate approximately 3 million rabbits coming up in the future, of course, right? Now, I'd showed you how to do the model if we had set the initial time back at eight years ago. But what if you wanted to start from the present, right? This calculation is basically the same. You get 4,100 times e, 0.55 times 12 is gonna be 6.6. Right? And then you have to compute e to the 6.6, which is not too hard to do. You put that in your calculator. You end up with 735. Again, we'll keep it to a couple of decimal places there, say like 0,9,5,2 or whatever. And then times that number by 4,100. And you would end up with about the same number, right? There's a little bit of an error though. Like, so when you do it this time, you get about 3,013,890 if I round to the nearest rabbit. So in terms of ballpark, they're both about 3 million. So it's not like one is super better than the other. But why is there a discrepancy here? The discrepancy came down to this observation right here, okay, that how many bunnies did we start off with? About 50, right? That was the estimate we got. So this number 50 was actually approximated using our model as opposed to the 4,100 which was collected by some other method, right? So in terms of population, the current population is actually a more accurate measurement than the population eight years ago. And so this calculation here depended upon an estimate to get another estimate. And it's kind of like if you take a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy the quality kind of deteriorates over time. So in my opinion, it's better to stick with the most original numbers as possible when you try to make calculations. So I actually feel that using the current time of T equals now, right? T equals zero is now. This is a better estimate. Now again, rounding to the nearest million these are pretty close to each other.  There's only a difference of about 20,000 rabbits in this estimate here. So I'd say that both of them are pretty good but if I had to pick one, I think this estimate's a little bit better because I feel that the 4,100 calculation is more reliable than the 50 bunnies we started off with because those small differences like the rounding to the nearest money over here makes a difference on exponential growth. Even a small change in exponential growth can have an effect over a large amount of time. So try to use your most reliable numbers when you're working with these problems so that you have the most reliable answer when you're done.


Welcome everyone. This is Hasan Turkan. I'm a software engineer living in Turkey and working remotely for UpBound. I have been working as a back-end engineer, mainly focusing on our hosting solution for cross-plane, which is an open-source CNCF project that I will talk about soon. In this talk, we are going to discuss the minimal control plane components, when we want to use Kubernetes as a general-purpose control plane. Building on top of that, I will present our solution to run multiple isolated control plane instances as tenants on a single Kubernetes cluster. At the end, there will also be a quick demo that provides a practical example of the solution proposed. Okay, let me start with the term Kubernetes as a general-purpose control plane. Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration tool today. It's API and control plane is primarily built for managing containers. However, thanks to its great extensibility story, Kubernetes is getting more and more popular for managing any type of resource other than just containers. When we say Kubernetes as a general-purpose control plane, we mean using Kubernetes API and its control plane to manage resources that are not living inside the cluster but external ones. Cross-plane is a very good example for this and the underlying reason triggering us to think about the solution that I will present in this talk. Cross-plane is an open-source CNCF project. Cross-plane itself is also extensible with providers. For example, AWS provider or GCP provider, which allows you to only install the controllers you need or to implement your own provider to manage whatever resource you are interested in with cross-plane. But why Kubernetes API? Why using Kubernetes to manage something that is not actually living inside the cluster could make sense? I believe the biggest advantage of using Kubernetes API is to be able to use the same API that we are using to deploy our applications, which enables easy and native integration between our application and whatever resource that we want to manage. For example, this way, we will be using the same API both to provision our infrastructure and deploy our application. Cross-plane already leverages one API for all concept by building models around infrastructure and applications. A very good example of this is cross-plane being an implementation of open application model, which is also known as OEM, which is a team-centric standard for building cloud-native applications focusing on separation of concerns between app developers and info operators. Kubernetes API is easily extensible with custom resource definitions, and there are existing tooling to easily implement our controllers without dealing with common needs like queuing, caching, and even initial project scaffolding. With its techniques API allows you to define the desired states and leave the resource to bring the system into the desired and combine them together with GitHub-style pipelines. By using Kubernetes API, we will also be able to use existing machinery like namespaces, RBAC for access control, garbage collection with finalizers, and so on. With well-defined API crude semantics, we can just really need in our controller. After this introduction, now I will make a quick definition of the problem that we are trying to solve in this talk, and then I will continue with the solution and challenges that we have faced while implementing that solution. Let's start with a simple question. How do we typically run isolated instances of Kubernetes control planes? Okay. Let's start with a simple question. How do we typically run isolated instances of answer is simple? We run a dedicated Kubernetes cluster which comes with its own control plane. However, what if we need to run these control planes at scale? For example, imagine we need to run millions of these. Then running a dedicated full-fledged Kubernetes cluster does not sound like a good idea since we are only interested in its API and control plane. Before moving on to the solution, let's define our problem as running isolated instance. Okay. I'm continuing. So I will start from this one. Here you can see a diagram of a Kubernetes cluster with all of its components. There are working components running on worker nodes and there are control plane components running on master nodes. Do we need all of these components when we want to use Kubernetes to manage external resources? No. Since we are not going to use Kubernetes as a container orchestration tool, we won't need worker nodes. If there are no containers and workers, there is nothing to schedule. So we wouldn't need the scheduler as well. Similarly, there won't be a need for a network set up between containers, which means we can remove Qt proxy and Qt DNS. Cloud Controller Manager is a component responsible for cloud-specific logic for your Kubernetes cluster running on a Cloud platform. For example, bootstrapping a VM and adding it as an event, exposing service endpoints, or provisioning volumes for your application. All of these functionalities are required for containers. If there is no container, then there is no need for attaching a volume to it. So we can remove it as well. Okay. This makes sense. We just need Kubernetes API. So we have API server, and API server requires ETCD for persistency. But what about the Controller Manager? Do we need it as well? Controller Manager contains core controllers that are shipped with Kubernetes. Let's have a closer look to decide whether we need them or not. Here you can see all the controllers available in Controller Manager as of Kubernetes 118. There are controllers like Demon Set, Jab, Garbage Collector, and CertiCamp token, and for our solution, we won't need the ones that are related to container orchestration. After removing those, these are the required controllers that we will need to use Kubernetes API and its control plane for managing external resources, but still to leverage existing machinery that are not directly related to container orchestration. So the Controller Manager binary has a flag to set the controllers that we want to activate, which we will pass this set of controllers for our solution. Coming back to our diagram, these are the components that we really need to use Kubernetes as a general purpose control plane, which looks much more simple than a full-fledged Kubernetes cluster. But we have a problem. How do we run our operators? Which typically run inside the cluster as a container. Remember, we want to extend Kubernetes API with custom resource definitions and our controllers to reconfile on those custom resources to manage something external to the cluster. Just to make it clear, please don't confuse when I say operators or controllers. I'm usually using these terms interchangeably, actually referring to the same thing. Anyway, so let's also include our operators to the set of components that we need to run. Okay. These are the components that we need to run for our control plane. Remember, we want to run isolated instances of control plane. So let's put them into containers as the first step of isolation. And also we want to run them at scale. For example, targeting millions of instances. I guess we will need a container orchestration tool to manage that amount of containers. And let's use the most popular container orchestration tool for this purpose, which is again Kubernetes. Before diving into the challenges that we have faced with this solution, I want to spend some time on this slide to make the two definitions that we are going to refer in the following slide. The first one is host cluster. It is the Kubernetes cluster, which is hosting our control plane instances. The second one is tenant namespace, which is the dedicated namespace that we are deploying components of a control plane instance. And when we say tenant Kubernetes, we refer to the Kubernetes API of our control plane. Let's talk about the challenges. Kubernetes operators or controllers typically run inside the cluster that they need to interact with. However, in our case, the operators run on the host cluster, but need to watch the tenant Kubernetes API servers. This introduces three problems that we need to solve. Connectivity, authentication, authorization, and packaging. To deal with the first two, let's have a look how this is handled in a regular setup where operator is deployed into the same cluster that it needs to interact. Kubernetes provides necessary mechanisms to connect, authenticate, and authorize a process running inside the cluster against its API server, which is called as in-cluster config. On the right-hand side, you see the source code from Kubernetes go-clined for initializing in-cluster config. The two environment variables, Kubernetes service host and Kubernetes service port, allows the operator to find the Kubernetes API server endpoint. For authentication and authorization, Kubernetes generates a token for service accounts of the operator and automatically mounts their token to the port at a predefined path. We don't have to do anything for a regular deployment, but in our case, we need to adjust them to be able to configure against the tenant API servers. We need to generate a service account token for service accounts of operators on tenant API servers and make it available to the operator port running on the host cluster. To achieve this, first, we need to deploy service account into tenant API servers, then service account token controller in controller manager, which is one of the controllers that we kept enabled, generates a token secret, but inside the tenant API servers. Finally, we need to copy this token secret from tenant to host and mount to the operator port at a predefined path expected by in-cluster config. Once we have the token secret available on the host cluster, we can adapt manifest of our operator port as shown on the right-hand side. For connectivity, we override the two environment arrival, Kubernetes service host and Kubernetes service port for connecting to the tenant API servers and for authentication and authorization, we disable auto mount service account token in pot spec instructing that we want to opt out from automatic token mount and mount to token secret for the tenant API server instead. Another problem related to running on host cluster but watching the tenant API server is related to packaging. A typical deployment package, let's say a health chart of a Kubernetes operator contains custom resource definitions, RBAC rules for accessing those custom resources and deployment manifest of the operator itself. However, here, we need to deploy those manifest into different API servers. We want to extend tenant API server with custom resource definition, but we want to run our controller ports on host cluster. So the solution is packaging controllers and type separately. On the right-hand side, you can see cross-lane packaging as an example, where we have two different health charts, namely cross-lane controllers and cross-lane types. Once we have different packages as such, we can deploy controller chart to the host cluster and type chart into the tenant API server. Next challenge is running ETCB for tenant API server. ETCB as the only persistent component of our control planes requires some special care which introduces some trade-offs that we need to think of. So we have three options to satisfy API server's ETCB dependency. The first one is simple and straightforward. That is to run a dedicated ETCB per tenant or ETCD cluster in case of high availability of the requirements. Maintaining and operating ETCD clusters for production requires some operational knowledge and work. With this option, maintenance costs will be much higher since we will have it per tenant. Another concern is ETCD writes data to disk and recommends SSDs in production, which would mean higher cost per tenant, especially when multiple replicas needed. The second option suggests running one shared ETCD cluster on the host cluster, isolate tenants via ETCD practices, users, and roles. This provides a cost-efficient solution and requires less maintenance compared to the first option that comes with its own problems. First, ETCD is not, for example, scalable, which means after some number of tenant ETCD will be the limit for scalability. Second problem is ETCD does not have any mechanism to isolate resource usage between users, breaking isolation between tenants in terms of resource consumption. This is also known as noisy neighbor problem where a resource-hungry tenant could affect other tenants on the same host cluster. And last option is using Kine together with an external horizontally scalable database. Kine is an ETCD shim that translates ETCD API to other databases like MySQL or Postgres. Kine is an open-source project by Rancher and mainly used by K3S, which is a lightweight Kubernetes distro. With this option, we would need an external database and would still need to prove that this setup works well in production. Another issue we need to deal with is accessing tenant API servers from outside the cluster. This is actually not a real challenge but still worth mentioning. For users accessing from outside, we deployed an ingress controller on the host cluster and created an ingress rule in each tenant main space. By configuring ingress as SSL path through, we could keep traffic encrypted all the way down to the tenant API server that is targeted. I also want to talk about security and isolation a bit since we ended up with a multi-tenant solution on the same host cluster. Since our host is a Kubernetes cluster already, we could leverage what Kubernetes provides for isolation, like putting tenants into dedicated main spaces, defining network policies to only allow required traffic inside the tenant and defining pod security policies to enforce pod security. With limit ranges and resource quotas, we could define resource constraints for tenants. We have configured mutual TLS between all system components and we are also running sandbox containers with GVisor which limits the host kernel surface accessible to the application by providing an application kernel. Host clusters can run multiple instances of our control planes. However, this is still limited because there are limits regarding the workloads that a single Kubernetes cluster could handle. Since we are targeting millions of control planes, we need multiple host clusters which means we need another entity who manages the host clusters and responsible for scheduling control planes. That is another Kubernetes cluster which we call as scheduling cluster. All of these processes need to be automated since we are talking about the hosting solution for our Azure service platform and we automated them via Kubernetes operators. Remember, cross-plane project allows you to provision infrastructure directly from Kubernetes API and we are also using this to create required infrastructure for our host clusters which plays very well with our provisioning operators. Last topic that I want to talk about is taking backups of our control plane. Backups are a little different than other day two operations that we are dealing with which I will not mention here because it is kind of proves our approach in a way that backup controller operates on our tenant control plane just like a regular Kubernetes cluster. We are using Valero which is an open-source project for backup restore of Kubernetes clusters and it is also extending Kubernetes API with custom resource definition and has a controller acting on those resources. So with the setup shown on the left-hand side, we can take backups of our control planes. Easily taking backups of our control planes also enables migration between host clusters which lets us to consider host clusters as ephemeral resources and simplifies operational work. All I presented so far already implemented and running in production which I will quickly show as a demo soon. However, there are some future work plans as well. I try to list relevant plans here. First, we are using ETCD and really interested in using Kine instead since it could help scalability and provide operational simplification if it could be used with the managed database. We did some proof of concept work and it looks quite promising but we still need to evaluate it regarding using it in production. As of our control plane, we are running three components Kubernetes API server, controller manager and cross-plane operators. And we want to investigate whether we can optimize them into a single binary at compile time by also making further optimizations which could help in terms of resource consumption. Last one, using cross-plane composition for provisioning our host clusters. Cross-plane composition is a recently introduced powerful concept that allows us to define composite resources by combining multiple resources as a new type. As mentioned, we are already using cross-plane to provision our infrastructure but currently we have a dedicated operator who provisions host clusters by orchestrating infra resources and deploying applications. As a future work, we want to replace this with a cross-plane composite resource which could simplify our code base. With that, it's time for demo. I have two quick demos. First from terminal, I will provision my local kind cluster as a host cluster and create two control planes as tenants. Second, I will show things in action by creating a dedicated control plane from the UI of our service. So now I want to share my screen. Let's see. I need to give a permission. I need to reconnect, I guess, since I'm already connected from phone. Okay, I'm trying to log into the platform again. Okay, I think I'm back. Now, can you see my screen? Can someone please come here? Okay, cool. So here's, I think you should see the terminal and there is a PNG file which shows flow of demo. So right now, I don't have any kind clusters and now I will call setuphost.sh which is making the provisioning that is shown on top in the PNG. What it does is it is creating a kind cluster and then deploying the host cluster components which is the cert manager for provisioning certificate for ETCD and Kubernetes control plane components and then it's deployed a shared ETCD on the host cluster. So now it is provisioning the kind cluster. It should be ready soon. Okay, kind cluster is ready. Now it is pulling required images for cert manager just to speed things up and now deploying cert manager in cert manager namespace and wait until it is ready. This could take a couple of seconds because kind control plane takes sometimes so kind control plane to be ready. Maybe I can quickly talk about what is the next step. Once the cert manager is ready, ETCD will be deployed and then I will run another comment which is create tenant.sh and give a tenant ID, let's say one and then it will create a dedicated namespace on my cluster and deploy the control plane components for me and then I will, I'm also deploying a debugging component just for simplicity and with that debugging component what I will do is I will connect to tenant API server and show that actually I have a dedicated isolated control plane but let me quickly check what's wrong here. Let's see how we get managers. Okay, it just starts working. Okay, now cert manager being ready. It is deploying ETCD and once it is also ready I will continue the next one. Okay, so the host cluster is provisioned. Now I will go ahead and create two tenants. This is the first one with ID one and then I will create another tenant. So let's see, here you can see the dedicated namespaces for tenants and let's just check one of them. We have two control plane components and one for just for debugging. So let's wait until they are ready. Okay, now I will exec into the QIP debug port which is nothing but a simple containers with QIP CTL in it and configured against tenant API service. Now I have a dedicated cluster view here and this cluster or it is actually not a real cluster does not have any nodes. And let's say I can create a one and here you can see I am in tenant one and I created a dedicated namespace and if I switch to the other tenants I will see that I had a completely different cluster view which is dedicated to this tenant. So yeah, this is actually the first demo that I plan to do and the second one is showing things in action. So this is the platform that we have built. I would highly suggest you go and check out. It is in community preview and you can just check it out freely. So I will go ahead and create the control plane here. Actually we call it as environment and what I talk about so far is actually what is going on behind the scenes. So when I create this environment behind the scenes our operator goes and provisions those dedicated control planes and also deploy cross plane so that I can just start creating infrastructure resources directly from this platform which also comes with some providers like here. You can see different providers so I can just once my environment is ready I can just click one of them and extend my control plane to support this infrastructure resources of this provider. So it is usually taking around one minute so I will just wait. Once it is ready what I will show is I will deploy a provider which will extend for example for let's say AWS and then I will connect to my environment by following the instructions on the screen and then verify that actually those custom resource destinations are available for me in my control plane. So yeah, now my environment is ready so let's go ahead and deploy a provider. I said AWS so just deploy AWS providers from here. So why which is being deployed? Let's connect to our environment of this. I have already set my access token before the session. So okay, so now I should see my cluster view first trip CTR request is taking a bit longer. Okay, so this is my brand new Kubernetes control plane and let's check if it could really deploy AWS resource, let me provide the resources. So yep, as you can see my control plane has just been extended to support this brand new AWS custom resource definition. So I can just go ahead and create an S3 bucket just from my control plane. And let's also see that cool batch here like provider is available here. Yeah, so that's all again, I would highly recommend to you to just sign up. It is live in production and it is now community preview and you can just go and check out. So with that, this is end of my demo. So now I will check the question. Okay, one of the questions, does this demo available to try on GitHub? Right now it is not, but this is definitely something that I have planned. So I will just do that after the session in a couple of days. So you can just check my GitHub profile for that. Okay, so another one can sort manager and ETCB be in the same name space. Yes, there can be, there is no reason for running them in different namespaces. I just follow some, I don't know, guides and end up having them into the two different namespaces. Okay, can we change cloud providers in a tenant? I guess you mean the support of cloud provider. This is what I understand. Yeah, as I showed, you can support multiple cloud providers like deploying multiple packages as I just showed. So this means that you can support or you can have as many cloud providers as you want to support with your control thing. So if I got the question correct, this should be the answer. Another one, oh, I see for provisioning cloud resources things that cannot run in containers. Yeah, if I got this question correctly, we are provisioning cloud resources from Kubernetes and you can consume those cloud resources with applications. You can just check out the cross-lane documentation for more information. But of course, for sure, those provisioned cloud resources are ready for any application to consume. So, okay, one Turkish friend is saying hi, hi. And is this easier? Better than moving to tenant with those containers. The question is, this is brilliant, but stepping back, is this easier, better than moving the tenant workloads into containers? I am not sure I got the question correctly. It would be great if you could rephrase and I can check it again. Another question, how do you constraint the resources used by different tenants in host clusters? Yeah, as I said, we are using the Kubernetes real-time mechanisms for this and there are limit ranges and resource quotas and you can just define resource quotas and say that, okay, this tenant cannot use, let's say, more than one core in total and more than two gigabytes of memory. So, Kubernetes has these mechanisms already and we are just using them. Okay, I think with that, I have answered all the questions that I could do. So, this is the end of my session and thanks all for joining and you can connect me from Slack and we can continue discussing from Slack. Yeah, thanks all and see you.


What's good YouTube? This is your boy Chihuahua back to y'all again with another art tutorial man if you're new to the channel go ahead and hit that like button, comment, subscribe, make you click, post notifications so you will be notified of anything but y'all some heat. In today's video I will be showing you guys how to turn a rapper into a Naruto character so without further ado let's jump right into this video. First thing you want to do you want to find out what picture you want to use for the transformation so let me go to my library because I save a lot of pictures of different celebrities and rappers that I want to draw and stuff so let me stroll, bam. All right look, let's use little skis. After you find your picture you want to hold shift make sure you got your selection tool hold shift drag the corner and center your picture and after you get it centered like you want it you want to drop the opacity down on the picture and lock that layer create you a new layer right above it come up here to your if you're using the digital tablet man it's the only way you can get this option right here the pressure option so I'm going to set my pressure on my brush by clicking this blank sheet of paper right here hit okay come down here to pressure change these two bottom numbers to three then hit okay and now I got my pressure brush so make sure you invest into a digital art tablet if you don't have one so you can get the pressure option so the first thing you want to do when you're trying to create you a Naruto character man you want to go ahead and draw out the head band so I'm gonna draw the opacity on my brush and I'm gonna pick it find a nice neon color so the first thing you want to do you want to kind of make a blueprint or what a headband gonna be and a little metal piece that be on the headband so you always do the sketch before you jump right into the line work man so you have everything laid out see what we're gonna do we're gonna give him a kind of symbol we should we give him in the middle let's do a music note man see your artist we're gonna make a music note so right after you do that got you a good little layout that's all see that's all unique now we're gonna create us a new layer make our lines black now we're gonna go ahead and do our line work and clean everything clean everything go let me go ahead and also too when you're drawing your Naruto characters you want to do the effects inside the eyes just like this just gonna move now let's finish out doing all the line work now that we finish with the line work it's time for the coloring wait I forgot to add the 3d effect let me go ahead and hurry up add the 3d effect on the drip now that we finish the line work what we're gonna do we're gonna highlight everything go to object expand appearance and then we're gonna click merge on our pathfinder to make our outlines become one drag our line work to this blank sheet of paper to make a copy lock the top copy let's find us a nice little base tone to start with hit okay so let our rectangle tool and drag that color over the picture right click the color go to arrange and send to back now you want to highlight everything click merge on your pathfinder so the color can become one with the line work right click the color go to isolate select group and now we can delete that outer color since we don't need it let's go ahead and hit our drop down menu on our color layer scroll down till we see our last black line work and lock all our black lines keep the top to unlock and we can close it now that's gonna make sure we don't make mistake and color or delete our black lines since we locked it all so isolate select group and switch colors around try and just bend down the color I mean this headband color metal piece old shift to color more than one area at a time now that we got a nice base color on everything what we're gonna do we're gonna tweak it a little bit so let's highlight everything just go to edit edit color of just color balance preview a little more now that we got our base colors laid down we're gonna make a copy of our color layer lock the bottom color layer turn the eye off go to the color layer that's in the center and we're just gonna delete the skin tone out of that layer so let's click it hit isolate select group and delete all the skin skin tones out of this layer all the skin tones okay now that we deleted all the skin color out of that layer let's bring it back turn the eye on on the bottom layer create us a new layer in between those two and now we're gonna start adding our shadows so we're gonna sample the skin tone just find us a nice shadow I'm sampling it see I think that'll work for now hit okay go to my pencil tool make sure my color is on on the top and make sure the bottom one is locked so it'll work as a feel and now we're gonna add all our shadows and all I'm doing is looking at my original picture and I'm placing the shadows exactly where I see them on there and there you have it you guys how to turn a wrapper into a Naruto character make sure you hit that like button come and subscribe and stay tuned more heat coming soon and I'm out


Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. I am Suranga and you are watching Around the World in 8 Minutes where we bring you news from working class and popular movements across the globe. In our first story we take you to Belgium where hundreds of thousands of workers embarked on a nationwide strike on February 13th. Three major trade unions representing around 4 million workers staged this strike demanding improvements in pay and working conditions. The strike saw the participation of workers from government offices, schools, industries and the transport and aviation sectors. The workers raised several demands including a meaningful wage increase for all employees and increase in the minimum wage to 40 euros gross per hour or 2300 euros gross per month, reforms in the existing wage law, lower work pressure and workable work, permanent contracts of indefinite duration and a better work-life balance. According to reports as per the current law implemented on June 1, 2016, the Belgium minimum wage levels range from around 1530 to 1590 euros per month depending on age and experience. The unions said the government had put in place a 0.8% cap on hikes and minimum wages for the two years since the law was implemented in 2016. The Socialist Trade Union, General Federation of Belgian Labour said that the Michael government is partly responsible for rewriting the wage bill and putting it into too tight a straight jacket. There was a wage margin of 1.8% but because of the intervention of the government and the new law, we had to do with a meager 0.8%. The General Confederation of Liberal Trade Unions of Belgium said that in recent years the press has commented extensively on the health of the economy, the extent of job creation, the shortage of manpower. At the same time, employers' social security contributions had been reduced. Business taxes have been reduced for all companies and public services, business taxes have been reduced for all companies and public services and social security have been reduced. The Workers' Party of Belgium expressed its solidarity with the workers' strike. In our next story, we take you to the Caribbean nation of Haiti, where protests continue against rising inflation and job losses. More than nine people were killed as police launched brutal crackdown on the demonstrations. Frustrated over increasing loss of purchasing power and miscovenants, thousands of Haitians, members of various grassroots organizations and political leaders mobilized across the country to protest against widespread inflation and to demand the resignation of President Hovenin Moyes. The series of mobilizations began on February 7th, where thousands of people hid the streets throughout the capital Port-au-Prince and other major cities of the country. The four days of agitation saw angry protesters block the roads and set several vehicles on fire in the capital city. On Saturday, February 9th, they gathered outside the residence of the president with a few of them throwing stones at the building. Anti-government unrest resulted in brutal police crackdown, which took the lives of three protesters and left dozens injured. Various violent confrontations between the police and demonstrators took place. Police officials used tear gas and fired several rounds of bullets in the air to disperse the crowd. The dire social and economic conditions in Haiti are a central motivating factor bringing people to the streets. Currently, Haiti is going through a major economic crisis with an accelerated devaluation of the national currency and around 15% inflation since Moyes' assumed office. For many in Haiti, their salaries are not sufficient to buy basic necessities. Protesters on the street also denounced the position of the Moyes' government towards Venezuela, which along with the U.S. and other conservative Latin American countries recognize the illegitimate self-proclaimed president Juan Guaido. Dozens of Haitian organizations released a statement wherein they declared the support to Nicolas Maduro and condemned the attempted coup in Venezuela. In the first week of February, the Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes issued an audit report on the mismanagement and embezzlement of $3.8 billion of Petro-Carrie funds offered to Haiti by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela through a crude oil program to finance its economic and social development. According to the report, over 15 ministers and senior officials of the former President Michael Martelli's administration and a company then run by the current President, Huvindel Moyes benefited from the funds directed to public programs. None of them have been prosecuted. Last year, on October 17th and November 18th, massive anti-corruption protests were held across the country demanding President's resignation, a proper investigation into the embezzlement of Petro-Carrie funds and judicial proceedings against all those responsible. Earlier in July, after the government announced massive increases in fuel prices, Haitians helped several days of protests and demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Jacques-Guy Lafonta and President Huvindel Moyes. Lafonta stepped down, but Moyes has refused to do so. In the last story for this episode, we report on the issue of termination of more than 11,600 government workers in Bangladesh for participating in protests demanding higher wages. This is in addition to thousands of workers who were fired towards the end of January for the same reason. Employers and the police have filed cases against over 3,000 unidentified workers, about 70 of whom were arrested. The Industrial Bangladesh Council, which is the national coordinating body of the affiliates of the Industrial Global Union, said the terminated employees used to work for outdated, supplying international firms such as H&M, Mango, Nex, Matalan, Puma, E-Spirit, Walmart, and Stanley Stella. According to local reports, the companies have forced many senior employees to resign, presumably to avoid paying higher wages and social security benefits. Thousands of workers had hit the streets of Dhaka and other cities for several days in Medjana, very demanding that this monthly salary be doubled from 8,000 Dhaka to 16,000 Dhaka, which is around $191 per month. The authorities, however, responded with the use of force that left over 50 workers injured and one dead. Many workers also said they were physically threatened by unidentified persons who asked them to stop demanding higher wages. Workers say finding a new job is a challenge as the companies are tracking the antecedents using biometric data, which is linked to employment records, with the aim of identifying whether they participated in protests or had any links to trade unions. Earlier on January 29th, over 5,000 government sector employees were sacked for taking part in the protests for a hike in minimum wages. That's all for this episode of Around the World in 8 Minutes. For more stories and videos, please check our website, peoplesdispatch.org, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.


So let's talk about the Archaeans. Remember, okay, first let me tell you this. If you had an Archaean and a bacterium and you set them both right next to each other and you looked at them, you would literally be like, that thing is a bacteria. That is, like, they're identical. And they're both prokaryotes. They both are... well, Archaeans aren't nearly as diverse or popular as bacteria. And however, they have the histone proteins that they share with eukaryotes. So where are you going to see some Archaeans? We actually see them living in crazy, extreme environments. For example, this is a picture of Yellowstone National Park. This is a hot springs, a boiling hot springs. Don't fall in that. And don't throw a rock for your dog. My dog fetches rocks. Most dogs would not fetch rocks, but my dog, my dog won't fetch a stick. But rocks, she'll totally go swim after rocks, but she doesn't get them because, you know, they sink. All right, anyway, don't throw a rock or a stick for your dog at this boiling mud pot hot springs in Yellowstone because it's boiling in there. But critters can live. Can most bacteria live in there? No, can you live in there? No, like cells pop living in boiling environments like this. The cell itself cannot survive. And yet Archaeans can. How do they do this?  Like they can live in the ocean. They can live in places where it's even saltier than the ocean, which means that they can withstand like some crazy pressures. They can live in super acidic environments or super basic environments. They can even live in frozen environments. They can just be fine. They're just doing their thing. They are structurally different and that's what enables them to do this. Some things that make them structurally different, their cell membranes are kind of more solid. Like, remember how we talked about cell membranes or like this, this, what was it called? Fluid matrix, fluid mosaic. Fluid mosaic where things just kind of float around and move around. Archaeans have a more solid cell membrane, which makes sense because it's going to be less likely to break apart if it is more solid. What else is there that you need to know? Oh, they can live without oxygen. Like they often are, they just live in extreme places. You might be like, okay, that's awesome, but who cares? And the fact is that we care, well, scientists care because if they have enzymes that can function at super high temperatures or super salty zones, our enzymes would stop working. But if their enzymes can keep working, we could actually harvest their enzymes and get their enzymes to do work for us in factories and not have to control the temperature. And I'm thinking about like mass producing something and having enzymes that can function in the high temperatures that result when you're like producing something. And I'm sure that I can't get any more specific than that, but I'm sure that in lecture we can come up with some examples of why heat is produced when you mass produce things. Now let's talk about eukaryotes. Now, so we're going to talk about single cell eukaryotes first, which are our group of protists.


No mom, it's not just 10,000, it's 10,000! Bitcoin is on fire. The main cryptocurrency just broke through the key 10,000 benchmark, going past the 11,000, which is at highest points since March 2018. This is the key psychological level, as now we're halfway to reach the most important resistance level of all, the 20,000 of all high. After this week, Bitcoin has power reached its all-time high, which indicates a rising interest in Bitcoin mining. As pointed out by veteran trader Peter Brand, this is the fourth hyperbolic growth for Bitcoin since 2010, which makes Bitcoin a market as no other. Many are saying that the announcement of Libra, Facebook backed cryptocurrency, caused the spike in Bitcoin price as the new coin is deemed to bring cryptocurrencies into the mainstream. Others observers say that the approaching Bitcoin, howling schedule for 2020, will be driving prices even higher. However, not everyone in the space is caught up in the hype. Derivative trader and Bitcoin maximally stone-based has a far more culture since celebrating the new bull run. It doesn't look like the 10,000 number means anything when it comes to Bitcoin, FOMO is setting in and everyone is driving the price higher, whether that's reasonable or not. This giant rise of Bitcoin makes me very, very nervous. I did feel like the latter half of 2017, the prices got out of control, and we paid for it with a big drop from 20,000 to 3,000. I feel that this current rise is even more dangerous than the 2017 rise, mostly because people are going to believe in the old coins again. I don't think anyone learned their lessons, and this whole thing makes me nervous. What do you think, guys? Is it to start over a new unstoppable bull run, or will see Bitcoin dropping again in the near future? Let us know in the comments below. Bitcoin Telegraph, like, subscribe, and hodl.