Compared to the previous years, the residents of Karbala and the pilgrims that arrive here based on special occasions find the holy city advancing in every way possible. One of the greatest and fast-growing achievements in Karbala city is the advancement in the healthcare institutions and whoever revives it as if he have saved all of mankind. Chapter 5 verse 32 the Holy Quran. We are committed to promote healthier lives through dedication to the care of each patient. This, along with the holy verse from the Holy Quran, is the motto of the establishers and staff of the Imam al-Hujjah hospital in Karbala city. Imam al-Hujjah hospital Karbala project is part of a series of charitable projects established and sponsored by the development and relief foundation under the guidance and supervision of His Eminence Saeed Murtaza al-Qazweeni. The construction of the hospital with its five luxury buildings started in 2008 and is expected to be completed and put to service in the second quarter of 2016 by the will of Allah. After the fall of Saddam, when we were outside Iraq and came to Iraq, I personally started working with hard and hard work. I was affected by the loss of my mental health. I was transferred to the outside of Iraq for a surgical procedure on the heart. I thought that if I had been given the responsibility to build a hospital for Imam al-Hujjah hospital I would have a surgical procedure on the heart. Because we feel that there is no hospital in Iraq until now and until now. There is no south and north of Iraq for a surgical procedure on the heart. With the need for a surgical procedure now. That is why we started working and we focused on Allah SWT. Our goal is the first goal. After that, when we started working and we received donations from the beneficiaries, two days ago I thought that up to now 27 billion Iraqi dinars have been spent. All of that with the donations of the believers. All of that with the help of the outside of Iraq. All of that with the help of the believers and the donations of Imam al-Hujjah. Our goal is to open a wide variety of groups. The eyes, the bones, the children, the women and many more. Our goal is to get the patient here. At least we can get him a surgical procedure if he needs a surgical procedure. He can get out of our hospital if he wants to. But our procedures in the hospital are at a global level. And we have international witnesses. And in the best possible way. This is our first goal. Until now, as I said, 27 billion dinars have been spent. And in order to start the first stage, there are three stages. The first and second and third stages. In order to start the first stage, we need up to 5 million dollars. After that, the second stage comes. And then the third. I hope that the time will come for everything. Hopefully for every time. And with this work, we really call on the believers inside Iraq, outside Iraq, all of the Islamic countries to present this work, the entrance to the heart of Imam al-Mahdi, may God be pleased with him. The hospital does not return to me. Nor to my family. It returns to him. And every time he comes to us from his blessings, may God be pleased with him. There is no place for visitors from all over the world. And we want, God willing, if we work in the hospital, its services are not only for the people. For them, for the visitors, for the visitors, and for everyone. Our goal is to build a level of hospital services in order to be separated even from the outside. In order for its services to surpass and improve all hospitals. This is our goal. And we ask God Almighty that with this work, they enter the heart of Imam Sahib al-Zaman. And on the hearts of the people of Al-Atar. And on the hearts of the poor, the poor, the sick, the sick. And they will return to the world. And in the end, God willing, they will return to Jazeel. With this, I ask all of you brothers to accept God's work and correct their sins. And peace be upon you. And the mercy of God. And blessings be upon you. In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Merciful. And praise be to Allah, the Lord of the worlds. And peace be upon you. And peace be upon you. And peace be upon you. And peace be upon you. The Imam al-Hujja Hospital Project was initiated back in 2008 upon the direction and guidance of Samah al-Sid, Murtad al-Qazweeni. The purpose of establishing a hospital was basically for two reasons. Number one was to provide medical services to the city that were not essentially available at the time and still are not available. This is number one. And second, to enhance the health quality that is being provided by the government hospitals. Those were the two main objectives of the founder when he initiated establishing the Hospital of Imam al-Hujja, peace be upon him. The hospital premise is on 7,500 square meter with a total construction dimensions of 15,000 square meter. It constitute of a main hospital building and four auxiliary buildings that support the hospital's function. The main hospital has eight story levels with altogether eight operation rooms, surgical rooms and 16 beds for ICU and CCU units. The total bed capacity of the hospital is 145 beds. The divisions and disciplines that will be contained in the hospital or the hospital will be serving based on the following divisions. The cardiovascular treatment, the ophthalmology treatment, orthopedics division, OBGYN and maternity, and children, pediatrics and internal medicine. These are the five main divisions that will exist in the hospital upon commission, inshallah. The health condition in province of Karbala generally is suboptimal. It's not as sufficient as it's supposed to be. Iraq is a wealthy country with full resources, natural resources. With educated population. With land that has been sought after by so many tourists worldwide. But unfortunately the health condition generally in Iraq is lagging behind the neighboring countries. I'm talking about Middle East in general. For many reasons. Number one is due to the sanctions at the previous regime, the international sanctions that existed during the previous regime for 37 years. The country experienced lack in health care advances.  They were only essential medical items that were allowed to enter the country. Therefore, they never experienced the health advances that most of the countries have experienced. I can give you a couple examples. For example, when you look at any natural disaster or act of violence, some terrorist act, you see the ratio between the dead and those who are injured are very close. If you have 100 injured, you will have about 50 people who die from the same accident. When you look at other countries, you see this ratio is huge. If there are 100 people who are injured, basically 5 to 10 people who die. Usually between 5 to 10%. This is the normal ratio.  It is an unfortunate situation of the health care status in Iraq. There are many services that are not available in the country. And specifically in the province of Karbala. Up to date, we don't have open heart surgery available in the province of Karbala. Nor the therapeutic catheterization. Just recently, some private hospitals have opened in Najaf and surrounding areas that admit patients for therapeutic catheterization. Therefore, we are lagging behind many countries in the health care sector. For every 1,100 population in Karbala, there is only one bed in hospitals available. Where this ratio must be decreased in half. Meaning for at least 500 population, there must be one bed available for every 500 people in the populations. The specialties are nonexistence. As I said, cardiovascular specialties, orthopedics, some complicated surgeries and ophthalmology. The artificial insemination. Again, some complex surgeries in orthopedics. Those do not exist currently in the province of Karbala. That makes many of patients leave either the country or the province go somewhere else. Go outside of the country to receive medical care. Where they end up paying the emergency amount of money to receive a simple procedure, simple medical care that should have existed in the country anyway. So unfortunately, the medical situation in Iraq so far is lagging behind many countries. And especially in the province of Karbala. To a certain extent, it does. But the potential, the full potential of those doctors unfortunately have not been met. Is that we still don't know when I say we, I mean as a government or as a whole country how to receive those medical professionals and how to assist them in assisting us. When an orthopedic surgeon comes from abroad, definitely he needs certain tools and certain instruments in order to practice his medical specialty. But then he finds that these tools and these instruments do not exist. Or the technical staff that should be associated with this medical doctor they're not available. Therefore, he cannot provide the way that he was supposed to be. Many come with big ambitions. Many come with great passions to help the city of Imam Hussain Ali Hussana. But when they are stuck with realities many of them, you know, they get cold and not happy about the situation. Therefore, I think one reason for having such hospital here in the province of Karbala and the holy city of Karbala is to allow those medical doctors and expertise to come to fly to the city of Karbala to provide their service at best way possible. We try to facilitate all their needs and requirements when they are here to administer the treatment for the public. Hospitals in general are considered the most vital services in any community due to their profound effect on the lives of all members of the society. Therefore, they should be designed and constructed in accordance with strict biomedical codes that comply with international standards and specifications. Constantly, what makes Imam Hujja Hospital project most worthy is that it is filling in the shortage of hospitals with multiple specialties that must operate in accordance with international codes and standards in a province of 1.5 million, notwithstanding annual visitation which exceed 30 million pilgrims. Although Imam Hujja Hospital is a charitable organization it is not affiliated with any official governmental, political, religious or financial entity. However, because of the prohibitive cost of healthcare, at the present time the hospital will provide the medical care in exchange for a nominal fee that will cover the cost of the treatment. Our goal is God's satisfaction and the healing of the ill.


Hello. This is Birking. Hi, I'm David. I'm Jimmy. David and Jimmy. And we're here to enlighten you on things that Google is doing with WNOS on Google Compute Engine.  We're here because we started using WNOS in our Google Compute Engine product, which is a virtual machine product in the cloud. We're here mostly because we want to build a good, solid relationship with the WN community so that we can make that product smoother and more reliable and even more awesome than it is now. And in general, we want to share with you three things. What we've been doing before, what we're trying to do now, and what we'd like to be doing sometime in the future. OK, so just in case none of you have paid much attention to what Google's been doing in the space, I felt I'd let you know what we are. We have a fairly large cloud platform by now. We have Google Compute Engine, which is an infrastructure as a service. We give you virtual machines in the cloud. We also have Google App Engine, which is a platform as a service. You give us some Java code written in a certain way. We'll run it in the cloud. We also expose various storage subsystems at various levels, SQL, persistent disks, NoSQL, et cetera, et cetera. And we also have various app-level services such as BigQuery and various queue services and stuff like this. All these services are built on a common rest interface so that you can write programmatically an interface with the cloud in a fairly consistent way. So what Compute Engine exactly is, it's infrastructure as a service.   We've been around for about two years now. We launched the Google I.O. 2012. And this past Google I.O. in 2013, back in May, we made the product available to anybody who has a credit card. The key idea here is that part of the thing that makes Google what it is, let's Google make the products that it makes that kind of kick butt, is the fact that our data centers are so impressively built and so well-networked and so forth and so on. And the idea is that if other people are able to use that service, then they could also build some kick butt services and make the world a better place. So Google Compute Engine, like I said, is virtual machines in the cloud. You have various ways of accessing the service. You can come in with a command line tool that we give you or build your own. There are programmatic APIs that you can use that all follow the REST protocol. And we also have a little UI that you can use to launch VMs and manage them and so forth. Now, inside the data model basically looks sort of like you have some virtual machines, and you can construct your own private networks and connect them to the external internet. Each virtual machine has a disk of some sort. It can either be a persistent disk that exists when your VMs aren't running. It could be a scratch disk. If you want some cheaper data storage, or you can stick it in cloud storage, your data. These disks are built from what we call image templates. And these image templates are the key mechanism by which operating system vendors we intend to upload their operating systems to our cloud. And I'll tell you more about that later. So I wanted to get you a little demo of what's going on. There we go. I don't know how to use Jimmy's newfangled Linux computer. Let's see. So this is our cloud console for Google Compute. Is there? There we go. So when you sign in, you get this little dashboard that tells you what's going on. You can see some utilization network traffic, this traffic of your entire fleet of instances. You can launch a new instance by coming over here and clicking on new instance and entering some data. Hello, Debian. Let's see. Let's scroll down, which I don't know how to do. And we'll choose a zone. We'll put this one in Europe. We'll give this one a Debian 7 image, which is, I guess, the default. Let's see. And just, well, let's make a big one. Let's make a big 8CPU1 with 52 gigs of RAM and create. And it chugs and chugs and chugs and eventually gives you a virtual machine. I'll wait for a moment for this to complete. How do I switch out? There is how I switch. So like I said, you can also come over to a command line tool called gcutil instances. And you can list the instances that are running inside of your system. And if we run this late enough, we will see the output of the instance that we've just created. There we go. Hello, Debian. Sitting there in the Europe zone. We've got zones scattered across the globe. You can choose the one you want. And how do I get out? It doesn't actually matter. Oh, tab. Tab? There we go. OK. Should we SSH in? Yeah, let's SSH in. So we can SSH in. I should have picked a smaller name. Ah, what about the password? Sometimes, OK, so we use SSH keys to allow you to talk to your VMs, to SSH into your VMs. We have a small management infrastructure that injects some user accounts into your virtual machines and that provisions the SSH keys that you need to connect. You have to control C and start that again. And we should be in. Maybe. Oh, no, wrong key. I don't know if this is any idea. So you only have to generate a key once per machine you're connecting from. It's a private key and it generates a local key pair on your workstation and it uses some cloud stuff and a cron job in the instance to install it. We need music for this. OK, so again, you see that you've got a nice little Debian operating system here. You can run things. You can sudo an app git. I don't know. Less. Let's app git some less. No, I want to do app git move, right? Aptitude move. Aptitude, that's totally proof that it's running Debian. Is that right? There we go. And then if you're really questioning, there you go. Nobody in their right mind would ever fake this interface. OK, good. And I switch back. Alt-tab. There we go. OK, so again, why are we here? We want to basically work with you guys to make the Debian OS on Google Compute Engine products really sing and really integrate nicely for customers. And we also want to make sure that all of the software that we produce for our cloud and for Google Compute in specific, but throughout our whole cloud, basically make it nicely available with Debian packages, et cetera, et cetera, so that it's easy to use for anybody running Debian inside our cloud or outside our cloud. Plus, I want some swag. OK, so the outline of this talk, we're not presenting. So the outline of this talk, we have just a few things to talk about. First, we want to talk to you about how we're actually going building our Debian operating system images and pushing them in the Google Compute Engine. And then we're going to move on and start talking about the package repository mirrors mirroring system that we have in place, that mirrors Debian packages into our cloud for various reasons. And we're going to give you some previews for the tutorial that's coming, that Mandy over here, Mandy, is going to be giving later today, just a short while from now, about an hour, an hour and a half. And we're going to be giving you previews for the BOFs that Jimmy and I are going to be giving today and tomorrow too. OK, so at that, I'm going to give Jimmy over to Jimmy. Hi, so we are using a tool to build the Debian images, which actually came from the Debian community. We did not create this tool. The tool, at one point, supported only Amazon EC2. And we contributed support under the same license, had sent back to the community to add support for Google Compute Engine. And accordingly, the name was brought in to build Debian Cloud. We worked with Anders Engelman. He was very helpful. And we tested with both the Debian Cloud mailing list and one-on-one interactions. And images based on this tool shift in May, very soon after we beat before Google I.O., there was a blog post. And I mentioned in the Google Compute Engine sessions at I.O. We have images for both Squeeze and Weezy and intend to proceed to Jesse when the time comes. So as you can see, the tool has sub-commands for both Cloud that it supports. And Anders is good about merging our patches. We are submitting them pretty often as well. He is working on a Python rewrite support that needs to be added for our Cloud. But that will happen. Build Debian Cloud is a patching license. Our contributions preserve that. It's all free software. So how does it work? So the parts in green are specific to Google Compute Engine within the context of this tool. EC2 has different ways of doing it. The black row about the bootstrap is shared. So it's like a lot of other disk image builds for OpenSack or VMware or what have you or KVM. We have a local disk file. We put a partition table. We put a file system. We loop back Mounted it, the bootstrap, install stuff. It's a very simple tar ball in the end with a disk.goggle file in it that represents the image. We use sparse compression and sparse. We use space efficient using sparse technologies of that work. And we uploaded to Google Cloud Storage, which he didn't say what that is. It's an object value store, like a lot of the other ones, like S3 and so forth. It's a once the image is uploaded there, we can just use gqtilt to add it. And a command similar to that is used. We would probably add it to a testing project. And then when we're ready to publish it, it would basically be this. We can give a description as well. So what we've been doing and what we want to keep doing with Debian's involvement, ideally, is we want to periodically, every time there's a new Debian stable, minor, or major release, or whenever there's enough new Google updates to provide or whenever it makes sense, for bug fixes and solvability or whatever to produce new images. And test them somewhere, I'm going to talk more about this in one of our boss, but there's no great way for Debian to quality show or test a Debian Cloud image. But I do a quick manual test, and Google has an internal test that we run, not comprehensive, but it's useful. And then we publish it in the Debian Cloud project, which is set up so that every customer of Google Compute Engine can see those images. And our tools and web interfaces have some support for the Debian Cloud project and another one for a different OS. And that's the entire process for us for publishing. So the releases right now are built by me wearing both my Googler and Debian developer hats. And it would be great if non-Google or Debian developers were to get involved. We designed the process so that any Debian developer or really anybody who Debian trusts can do this. They just have to have a Google account of some sort, and they can be granted permission to publish to this project. So we want to coordinate with Debian on this and validate things to make sure that it meets everyone's quality. You need certainly Debian's and Google's. But it should be a collaboration, and that will be great. So the name on the slide is slightly wrong. It's Debian Cloud Experiments Plural, which is a free project with a small shared quota. We're covering the cost of this, of both of these. That project is, let's say you want to validate an image or try out building the image or some Debian-related short term or small scale test. That would be our development.  And for the official image releases of the Debian Cloud project, and you can email us at our work addresses, cache, and jcapelowits at google.com for access. OK, so for package repository mirrors, it's always possible to send our customers to the global Debian mirror network. At the same time, if you keep their bandwidth within our network, they can save both bandwidth for them and for Google and money as well for them. So we do have a local mirror that we're running inside the cloud, and our image is default to that. Plus the global mirror redirector. Sure, yeah. So we want the images to be fast and to not overload the public servers and as I said, to save money. So our mirror is synced. You think FTP syncs like good practices suggest. We actually serve it via Google Cloud Storage, which can be accessed directly over HTTP. This has some geo-balancing properties. It has some reliability, scalability. It's replicated, et cetera. It's a good infrastructure. And since we're sort of delivering this system to combine FTP sync and Google Cloud Storage, we have HTTP.debian.net in there so that the app has a very good built-in redundancy. We tested this. It actually does fall over nicely. So people will be sure to get current packages. So some things we would like to evolve this toward. It would be great to talk to the FTP team and the Mirror Admin team about being a tier one push mirror simply because there's a lot of users in the Google Cloud. And Debian is a very common choice now for their operating system. And it would be great to get updates. We may also want to see about getting our mirror added to Rafael's great redirector service, HTTP.debian.net for customers visiting from Compute Engine. And I know Amazon is also using CloudFront to serve a mirror in their cloud. We're trying Google Cloud Storage. It's a similar concept. It would be great to have an interoperable way, not specific to one cloud, to do a direct push to CDNs. This would be more of a development speculative thing. But there are several different clouds where pushing to an object value store in some way might skip an intermediate step and streamline that process. So at this point, we have a brief preview of the two buffs. So I should mention again, it's not a buff per se, but at 11.30, there's one talk in between this one and Mandy's talk. Mandy's talk is a tutorial, an interactive tutorial. You can participate with or without a Google account. You could just use your laptop or watch her as she does it. At 11.30, right here, she'll give you a quick whirlwind spin through it all. And at 15.30, 3.30 PM in this room today, I'll be doing a more debbie and focused buff, but with examples from Google about the question of what Debian should consider an official Debian image in the cloud. It's a bit different than the CD context we have historically done, but with some attention to the needs of public clouds and figuring out how to satisfy the needs of Debian cloud vendors and Debian for its customers in the cloud and how to move that forward. Tomorrow at 9.30 as well in the morning in the second talk room, not here, David will be leading a buff, which is also general to Debian, but he's again bringing examples from our experience about packaging cloud specific software. It often has recent dependencies or fast changing environments and features. There's a bunch of unique quirks to the cloud context and the vendor relationship context that are certainly not specific to Google Compute Engine, and we hope that both of these buffs, other cloud providers, will participate, but they should be good ways to move the issues forward. So a quick preview of my buff this afternoon is basically what I said. There's a question of what official even means in the context of a cloud VM. Sometimes you need to tweak the configuration to work smoothly. Sometimes you have a bug of vulnerability even specific to the environment. We've seen performance issues and other weird situations. Debian, of course, has its values about licensing and it needs control over security and packaging to be reasonable to call Debian. It needs to be supportable. But integration is a tough question as well. CloudInit is one thing that might streamline the process, but there's a lot of other questions that are outside the scope of CloudInit. So we can discuss this more this afternoon right here. So here's David to finish the slides a bit and talk about his thoughts. So I want to go back in history a little bit. I want to go back in history a little bit. Like I said earlier, Google Compute's been around a couple of years now. When we first got into the business of building images for the cloud, we didn't know what to do. And so in general, what we did was we created a local disk file, we mounted it locally, and just started de-bootstrapping and changing crazy files inside. Whenever we needed a package, we copied it in. Whenever we needed some sort of tool, we modded it or we took root it into it and installed some random piece of software outside of the Debian packaging system or the RPM packaging system, which we were in whatever context we were installing software. And in general, we found that that was generally a bad way of doing things because there are several downsides, which you probably all know, which is that you can't upgrade and remove packages very easily. You can't fix bugs with an update or an upgrade. So in general, we've been finding that. And I think in general that the Debian operating system community would rather not have us just putting random files inside the operating system. So in general, what we're trying to do now is take all the software that we're trying to stick into the images and convert them to Debian packages and make sure that they're all just a simple app get install of a Google package. And one of the things that we'd like to have in particular is we'd like to figure out a way of getting these packages wherever appropriate into the official Debian release stream and into backports whenever that's appropriate or if there's some other mechanism we need, we should figure out what that looks like. I want to give you a general overview of the kind of software that we stick inside the images. In general, we only put completely on our free software Apache license stuff. In general, that's Google's way. The key components here are some startup scripts to get the system bootstrapped in the virtualization environment, it figures out what the instance name is, the host name, things like this. We've got a management daemon that manages accounts and networking. So whenever the network changes on the VM, the operating system that can then be notified and said, oh, by the way, you've got load balancing features now or you've got this or you've got that through your IP addresses changed, et cetera. We install some simple tools to talk to the Google Cloud systems. We've got a compute tool and a storage tool. And there will be more coming down the line as we finish the integration with the rest of the Google Cloud properties. We've got some image snapshotting tools to basically let you take the current contents of your disk and create an image template from it so that you can create multiple VMs from the current. So basically you can take the current VM and clone it more or less. We also sometimes try to install some security lockdowns. So for instance, sometimes we want to go in and modify SSH configs. Our security teams are very eager to have us, say, turn off root login and things like this. And so far as I know, there's no great way of just installing the Google security lockdown package and having it go in and modify all the files of SSH and this and that and the other packages that are installed in the system. So some of these things are easier to do than some of the others. It's easier to say, I think, just make them all Debian packages and move on with life. I don't know. How many of you have had trouble building a Debian package before? Oh, ah, sweet. Thank god, I'm in like company. OK, we're still in minority. We should get together the three of us later and commiserate. I'll buy you all of your. Anyway, so moving on. So I want to give you a couple of examples of the things that we've been doing, some of the packages that we've built and some of the things that made them hard. GCU-Till is what we call our command line tool for the Google Compute product. It's a pure Python program. It's got several dependencies. And again, it's 100% open source, patchy license. You would think it'd be simple to just install as a Debian package. We used to be using, part of the problem here is that it's a Python package. We used to be using setup tools and PyPy to do all of our dependency management. But we found that in general, the Python module system was picking up system modules and stuff like this sometimes. And sometimes our modules. And it was just causing us trouble validating and maintaining quality control really over the product.   So eventually, we decided to ditch the PyPy system. We copied all a copy. We basically picked a particular version of each of our dependencies and we basically copied them into our package statically. And we forced the Python interpreter to load all the modules from that directory rather than from the system. And that makes the control, the quality of the products a lot easier to validate. Because we test exactly what the customer is running. And we just inserted a make file into our source code, our tar file, and we run DH make and build, de-package build package and all that stuff to make our Debian. Good. GSU, so that one was somewhat easy because we only had to do the version management, the static linking of the Python code, if you wanna call it that. GSU till is our storage tool. It's a little bit harder. We haven't figured out exactly what we want to do with that yet. And hopefully one of you will tell us. Two of you, maybe multiple, many of you might tell us exactly what we need to do. Again, it seems like it should be simple. It's 100% open source software. It's, the tool itself is all written in Python. It takes many Python dependencies and it takes a few binary Python dependencies. The problem is that both of all the dependencies that we take, the versions that we want to be using are not available in either squeeze or reezy. And so getting a Debian for GSU till that installs and squeeze or reezy is challenging. Either we have to go and build new versions of say CRC mod and things like this and publish those somewhere, I guess, I don't know. We don't know the process that needs to happen here. And again, because this tool uses PyPy and setup tools, sometimes we run into these version conflicts where the system where Python loads a module from one place instead of another place and gets a different version. And we sometimes have to just plaster over those errors, right, whenever the Python interpreter says, oops, there's a version Mets match. And we'd like to have a better solution here too. And if you guys have any recommendations, I really encourage you to come tomorrow at 9.30 to the packaging talk and tell us what to do. Because we need our, we need you guys to help us. That's in the second talk room, not here. Very good points, very good points. That way, I think, right? Below the bar. Below the bar. Afterwards, we can go for drinks and commiserate. Okay, man, all I want to do is buy people beer. Okay, if you help me fix my problems, I will buy you beer. That's my promise to you. Good, was there anything else I wanted to say? Questions. Questions, are there questions? No questions. Oh, there's somebody, there's somebody moving around. What's that? This one works too now, so we have two microphones. So, in terms of API, what you provide is completely different from what AWS and Eucalyptus provide. In terms of API, REST API and stuff like that, what you use is completely different from what Amazon Web Services and Eucalyptus provide. It's different from other services, is that weird? Yes. Yes, we invented a completely new API. We thought that the existing examples of APIs weren't to our liking. They didn't provide the same sort of structure that we would like to see. So ours is a fairly hierarchical structure of, the object model is basically mirrored in the API, if that makes sense. I think most other providers have a flat, sort of key value kind of configuration process for VMs and other things. We wanted to sort of break it out a little bit and we think that that in the future, it's gonna make it easier to integrate with other kinds of products. So for instance, this is sort of happening now if you look at the Google Compute product as it stands now. We started with virtual machines and basic networking and now we're inventing all sorts of new sub-trees in the API for load balancing and advanced networking and routing and different kinds of disks and so forth and so on. And so instead of just pushing them all into one name space, we have a little bit more structure. A couple of related comments. The authentication is handled differently in the normal case than with say S3 or Eucalyptus because it doesn't actually rely on a shared secret. It uses OAuth 2 and so there's scoped and time limited tokens with refreshability and in various ways that's a good security advantage. They can also be revoked. And we do for the cloud storage product, the object value store, have an interoperable way that is similar to S3 and Eucalyptus that you can use it. It's not as full featured as the native API. And one more point, I think just last week, I think we pushed Google Compute compatibility into LibCloud and so I think in the future you'll find that most of the middleware is going to understand pretty easily how to adapt between both Google Compute and other products and but if you want to take full advantage of all the Google Compute features and that nested hierarchy thing, then you come directly to us or if you're building other things for other Google properties, right? They all have a fairly similar structure, if that makes sense, right? And so if I go from Google, if I'm programming for Google Compute and Google Storage and Google Prediction and Google Docs, the APIs are all sort of similar. And there's other middleware that support for our stuff has been added to such as in Ruby Fog, I believe now supports Compute Engine and I believe Voto has support for Google Cloud Storage. Other questions? One simple suggestion. You mentioned different package libraries for the packaging. So why don't you just use a Debian mechanism that already exists and it's called AppPinning. So why don't you use that to specify which versions of the packages you want to use? I don't know. Maybe you should talk to me more about that. I barely know anything about AppPinning. I mean, I know something about it, but I don't know if, like, my understanding, I don't know, so my understanding is that Pinning basically, I don't know. Maybe Jimmy can correct me. It is a bit error prone, especially as you mix different versions of things. We could consider it if the packages are intended, for example, to be used with a stable release only and then we would have a single target to make a repository for. But it would be better to do things in a way where we didn't have to worry about what the pins are. Right, but you don't have to do the whole repository. Maybe you can only specify that particular version, name of the package you want to use. Now the Pinning forces the version of the package on the operating system entirely? So basically you could use a stable system, but you need newer versions of the package so you could pull that particular version from unstable, for example. Without breaking your stable system. But if you're doing the whole repository, then you could maybe break it, but if you specify that particular version, then it's completely safe. I do that all the time. But does each user have to do the Pinning operation themselves or does the package itself do the Pinning? No, no, no, whoever sets up the repository does that. It's a little bit more error prone than you're making it out to, but come to the boss tomorrow morning. Yeah, all right. Then we'll talk to us. How should I see Google computing engine? Can I compare it to a virtual private server, VPS? How does a Google compute engine compare to a virtual private server? It's fairly similar. You have various options when you talk, when you get into the Google compute land, you can connect the virtual machine to Google infrastructure in a little bit more simple way and with more proximity, right? So you can be close to all the Google services that you might want to use. Other things that might be different, you can configure the networking so that you have internet egress or ingress or you can have a private network, things like this. And it's all just fairly, it's all API driven, so you can configure the infrastructure as you want, as you wish. And I think virtual VPS systems don't always give you that functionality. Certainly not the proximity, but otherwise fairly similar. So they also have the persistent storage, for example, is a lot more reliable than a typical hard disk. It's the whole Google compute stack below the virtual machine level. The underlying stack is built on top of stuff that Google depends on for its business. And so there's a lot more focus on low level and systems infrastructure performance and durability and similar things. For example, there's a lot of great stuff happening to improve network performance, et cetera. So there's a lot of advantages to leveraging what Google is trying to do in those regards. There's one other difference is that in general, the market that Google is currently looking at and focusing on is the people who care about having a dedicated server, a dedicated hardware. So if you really need a single CPU to be there all the time or eight CPUs to be there all the time, you get full eight CPUs and full RAM and this and that and the other and full networking, this is sort of the market that we're targeting at the moment. We've started doing fractional machines so that you can get time shares and get a cheaper version of the hardware if you don't need it on all the time. But in general, we've been focusing on people who need a lot of power and a lot of reliability. So it would be a good option for me to use it as a compile engine. Yes, that's the really awesome use case right now. We're building out facilities to give you more features and functionality. If you need web services or work queues, things like that. We're looking for, okay, now I have time for the development. Now I'm gonna start a compile cycle, then I need compute power and when I'm done, I'm going to sleep, I'm going to switch it off and at that moment it shoots the cost counter stop. Yes. Yeah, you would, if the machine is not running, you would only be paying for any stores that you're continuing to use, but you wouldn't be paying for the compute resources or any stores that is not persistent. Right. Thank you. One more question, anybody else? Well, thank you to Google. Thank you guys. And I appreciate the information.


Welcome everyone to the 28th meeting in 2018 of the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee. I apologize from Neil Findlay and Harrison Harris, who can't attend today. Welcome and then place Neil Bibby and Bill Bowman. Before we move to the main item of business, we've just got to decide on taking business in private. It's proposed that we take items 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 in private. Those are consideration of delegated powers provisions in bills and in legislative consent memorandums relating to UK bills. Does the committee agree to take those items in private? Okay, so we'll move on to gender item 2, which is the formal stage 2 proceedings on the prescription Scotland bill. Can I welcome Ash Denham, Minister for Community Safety and her officials? Good morning, convener. Good morning, committee. For the purposes of stage 2, members should have copies of the bill as well as the marshaled list and groupings. The first thing to decide is that sections 1 and 2 be agreed to. Are we all agreed on that? Okay, so we'll now move to section 3 of the bill. Five year prescription exception for certain social security payments and tax credits. I'll call amendment 3 in the name of Mark Griffin, grouped with amendment 4. Mark to move amendment 3 and speak to those amendments. Thank you, convener. I move amendment 3 in my name. Amendment 3 and 4, lodged with the support of Citizens Advice Scotland, seek to reduce the prescription period for reserved and DWP benefits to five years. That will bring the period into line with the five year prescription period for the Scottish social security system. I move the Parliament back earlier this year to deliver greater dignity and respect in the Scottish social security system. My colleague Neil Finlay has lodged amendments to reduce the prescription period for council tax debts. There are no silver bullets, but I feel that they go some way to make sure that this Parliament is using its powers to bring fairness and to align with the principles that the law commission set out regarding the five year rule. Fundamentally, I want to raise concerns about the way that DWP believes that it needs additional leeway to manage its recovery and simply why it does not have its house in order. The issue is debated at length, as you will know at stage 1, with very clear contributions from Mike Daly and Mike Comiard that these periods should be and must be reduced to five years. In their evidence, they put it to committee that this is a simple matter of fairness that why should a claimant only have just one month to challenge a DWP decision but be liable for court action for 20 years. Some of the points that the DWP has raised in their evidence also have to be challenged. Today, I want to add some more detail to how those amendments fit into a jigsaw recovery policy, as well as setting out some of the DWP practices operational today. They said in their written evidence that the recovery of DWP benefit debt will often take longer than five years to recover due to the possibility of higher priority debts, multiple debts and the welfare considerations that limit recovery rates. The application of the five-year prescription would reduce our ability to recover public money and could erode some of the safeguards that we have in place to protect our customers from harsh or excessive recovery rates. They appear to infer that the consequence of the five-year prescription period is recovery of multiple debts. Within a shorter window would directly affect claimants who would be subject to more aggressive recovery procedures. I want to first point out those amendments and the bill relates to recovery, typically through the courts, an option that is costly, lengthy and infrequently used. The DWP does have other ways to recover its debts, direct deductions from benefits, or if a person returns to work for some time this deep pension as well as a bank and direct earnings attachments. Those powers that have no time limit are unaffected by this or the 1973 act and are ultimately reserved. Again, those amendments are not a silver bullet, but it is an improvement within the scope of this bill and within the scope of our powers within the Parliament. I am sure that the committee is already aware, but under current DWP rules, recovery processes are not as virtuous as the DWP evidence suggests. Under universal credit, the recovery rate can be as much as 40 per cent. We know that because advances have had to be requested 20,000 in my region since full service roll-out that many are suffering from such an excessive recovery rate. Secondly, by its nature, UC rolls together multiple benefits into one payment so that when deductions are made to UC, multiple benefits are recovered at once. I agree with the DWP evidence that distinction for legacy benefits is clear, but soon all and work benefits will be rolled together, so recovery will be rolled together too as soon as universal credit is fully rolled out. I disagree with its argument that it makes it harder to recover multiple debts from multiple sources of benefits when eventually they will all be rolled into one in-work benefit. Finally, on the DWP claims that the shorter window would require excessive recovery appears to be one based on misunderstanding. We know that the DWP would prefer recovery through its reserved powers, not through a costly court decree or document of debt. However, if it did exercise its right under the proposed amendment, it would have five years to take action. I am advised by Mike Homeyard that, should they secure a repayment on record through the reserved powers that they will have unchanged by any of the amendments here, that five-year clock would restart. Every single payment that they received, that five-year clock would reset. Every time they sent a letter or started enforcement action, that five-year clock would reset. It is not a hard five-year limit on the time that they have to recover that debt. It is a five-year limit for them to take action to start the process or to take a single payment. I hope that the committee would agree with me that if the DWP is not able to identify and begin recovery of its debt within five years, we should not ask them to get their house in order and start to set out processes that make that achievable rather than leave a 20-year period hanging over someone's head. As I have said, because the clock restarts when payment is made, the provisions under this bill are section 6, which ultimately will limit recovery to a hard 20 years. Can you hear these amendments cancel the existing rule in the 1973 act, which says that reserved social security debts can be pursued for 20 years and changed that rule to five years? That, I think, is far more reasonable than 20 years, and crucially it is in line with the position of this Parliament in relation to our own social security act. They would not prevent the DWP from using its reserved powers to make deductions from reserved benefits because the power to do that lies in reserved law. The DWP is right to pursue the debt through other civil mechanisms, through earnings attachments or direct deductions are preserved. It would align the powers of recovery in practical and operational terms because it would establish a near consistency with the six-year limitation rule in England, not to mention a far better administrative process. Finally, before I finish, I want to make clear that those amendments do not propose to remove child support or maintenance debt from the 20-year rule. Those are not social security paid by the state, although the DWP does administer it. The maintenance is recovered by DWP from the absent or non-resident parent and is provided to the parent with care. I think that retaining the power to recover that vital support until the child is an adult is something that we should all seek to preserve. We do, though, have a chance to use Scottish powers of prescription, not to impede the DWP's work to protect the public purse, nor to make a constitutional point, but instead to deliver greater dignity and respect. I hope that the committee will support those amendments today and move amendment 3 and ask committee members to also support amendment 4 in my name. Thank you, Mark. Any other members want to come in at that point? Thank you, convener, and good morning, Mr Gryffin. Welcome to the committee. We seek to clarify one or two points. You made reference to support from Citizens Advice Scotland. What direct engagement have you had with the DWP in composing those amendments? No direct contact with DWP other than reviewing the evidence that they have made to the committee. You would also recognise that this Parliament has no jurisdiction over the DWP, while it may be desirable for many members in here for the DWP to get its house in order, as you described it. We have no means of making that a reality, as functions of the DWP are reserved to Westminster. While the functions are reserved clearly, if we impose a five-year prescription, I would hope that that would mean that the DWP would get the house in order and collect those debts within a five-year period, rather than leaving those spending on for 20. So there is a practical step that we can take. You would hope that it would incentivise the behavioural change within the DWP, but you can see that that is not guaranteed. If they did not act, they would lose that ability to collect debt beyond five years. You referred to the courts as being a last resort and that would incentivise action within five years, whereas under 20-year prescription, other methods could be explored and exhausted beyond five years prior to taking court action. Would you accept that as correct? No, the advice that I have been given from external advisers who have given advice to this committee as well is that, as soon as any payment is made, as soon as any effort is made to recover the debt that that five-year period starts again, there is a hard limit on 20 years. So, effectively, the DWP could leave debt uncollected through this process until four years and 11 months, start again and have another five-year roll-over period, start again at four years and 11 months and do that four times up until the point where the hard limit of 20 years is met. So, anytime they took a payment, anytime they sent a letter to someone who was in any debt to the DWP that this five-year limit would reset and start again. You have stated, and I mention this again, about desiring the DWP to get their house in order, as you put it. If you wish to see an expedited process, would you require additional resources to be applied to the persons of debt? There are so few debts pursued in this way through legal action that the vast, vast, vast majority of debts are pursued through reducing the benefits that people currently receive or an earnings deduction. However, I cannot see that having a massive impact and a need for greater expenditures from the DWP. But setting aside the scale, the corollary of your argument is that there would have to be an expedited process. That is what you would define as a DWP getting their house in order. Ergo, if there is to be an expedited process, there would have to be some additional resources. Surely that is logical. I would accept that. As far as I would see, it would be minimal, but it would be agreeable to those extra resources if it removed a 20-year sentence over someone's head that the DWP were able to only have five years to carry that out, rather than having 20 years to pursue someone when an individual himself only has one month to go back to the DWP. As long as we are clear, we accept that this could lead to the DWP prioritising resources for persons of debt. I think that we need to make this more of a debate rather than a cross-examination of Mr Griffin. Mr Arthur, have you got any substantive points that you want to make? I do thank Mr Griffin for taking those questions. I sympathise with what is a well-intentioned amendment. However, my concerns are the unintended consequences that could lead from this, such as the DWP has highlighted in its memorandum to the committee earlier this year. I conclude by saying that this is a fairly short piece of legislation with a clear purpose, which is to clarify the law of prescription. Before looking at issues of reserved benefits, that would merit far greater consideration and consultation. As such, I will be unable to support the amendment. Any other members want to come in? Thank you, Mr Griffin, for taking the questions. You will have a chance to come back afterwards. Can I call the minister to say something? I would like to begin by addressing amendment 3. If it is Mark Griffin's intention to remove the exceptions for obligations to reserve benefit overpayments from section 3 of the bill, I would point out that amendment 3 is unnecessary. Amendment 4 will achieve this effect because the exception would be removed from the bill and the obligations would therefore fall to be caught by the new general rule. Reserved benefit overpayments do not explicitly need to be listed in paragraph 1 of schedule 1 of the 1973 act, as amendment 3 would do. Turning to the intent of Mark Griffin's amendments, section 3 of the bill provides that all statutory obligations to make payments will prescribe, after five years, with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions is obligations to repay overpayments of certain reserved benefits, including social security and tax credit overpayments. This exception preserves the status quo for those reserved benefits. In their response to the Scottish Law Commission consultation, the DWP made the point that recovery of social security overpayments often takes place over long periods of time and they would be concerned were the five-year prescription period to apply rather than the 20-year prescription period. That point was also made to the committee at stage 1. The DWP's view is that having a 20-year prescription period for recovery of reserved benefit overpayments allows them to protect the most disadvantaged in our society from harsh recovery methods. I would like to finish my statement well at the end. As an indication of the scale, DWP have, over the last few years, recovered an average of around £120 million per annum from debts that are over five years old. In their evidence to the committee, the DWP have been clear that making recovery of reserved benefit overpayments subject to the five-year prescription would impose greater hardship on the most vulnerable members of our society. They have informed the committee that they have a public duty to protect public funds and to collect arrears. It seems clear that changing the prescription period by reducing it would result in the DWP taking more money more quickly from those who would least likely to be able to afford it. Any move to a five-year prescription period would impact their ability to recover debts where recovery rates have been reduced on account of hardship or where the customer has a number of debts and recovery of later debts is on hold whilst the earlier debt is recovered. Ultimately, the DWP's policy and respect of reserved social security payments is a matter for them. This bill is about prescription generally. It is not the place to make any substantial policy changes in other specific areas. For those reasons, I would urge Mark Griffin not to press his amendments. Mr Griffin, you indicated that you had a question for the minister. I will allow a question, but you then get a chance to wind up. Thank you, minister, for taking an intervention at the end of your statement. It was simply to ask you to repeatedly talk about the DWP's view as to why five-year prescription was not appropriate and the impact that that could have on claimants and debt. What is the Scottish Government's view? Why do the Scottish Government feel that it is appropriate to have five-year prescription for Scottish social security debts? On the other hand, I agree with the DWP that five-year prescription is not appropriate. The Scottish Government's position is that we have accepted the view of the Scottish Law Commission on this matter, that we believe that this is a matter for the DWP, that it is a matter for them and that, more widely, this bill is a bill about prescription to improve clarity. It is not the place for this type of change that would be more far-reaching. I have much sympathy with the member's intention behind the amendments, but I do not think that, at this stage, it would be something that is appropriate to change things in this way without appropriate consultation, because this would be quite far-reaching. With regard to Scottish social security, that is the benefit of devolution. Scottish ministers can decide to make changes or to make a system that is completely different to the one in the UK and one that fits the Scottish context, and that is why the two things are different. I invite Mark Griffin to wind up and press all withdrawal. Given the minister's comments on amendment 3 and the necessity for that, I am happy to go away and look at that ahead of stage 3. I think that the minister has relied or overlaid on DWP evidence when it comes to this issue, rather than taking the principles at the heart of the Scottish Government's policy on dignity and respect. She mentioned that that is one of the beauties of the devolved system in which we are able to take different decisions. That applies also to the prescription bill in which we are able to take different decisions on prescription 2, but I am happy to seek committee's permission to withdraw amendment 3 and not press amendment 4. Are the members happy with that? Thank you, Mr Griffin. I will then move on to the next one, which is a five-year prescription exception for council tax. I will call amendment 5, which is in the name of Neil Findlay, grouped with amendments 6 and 7. I believe that Neil Bibby is poised to move amendment 5 and speak to all amendments in the group. Thank you, convener. I will move amendment 5 and speak to amendment 6 and 7 in the group as well. It is important to say, first of all, that it is not Neil Findlay or my intention to reduce the amount of money that councils have access to. We will continue to argue for sustainable and meaningful solutions to the chronic underfunding of Scotland's local authorities. Although I have not heard the evidence directly, the evidence that I have seen from removing the exemption of council tax from the five-year prescription rule is compelling. The removal of the exemption has been supported by many stakeholders. I know that committee members will be aware of that. There are a number of reasons that the law society has given for why the current exemption in the bill is problematic. Non-payment of council tax attracts a high penalty charge around 6 per cent. That could in fact act as a disincentive on the collecting council as the returns from the penalty will rise above inflation and therefore the effective value grows on non-payment. The payment practitioner has identified potential situations where people might in good faith believe that they had paid the council tax. That is further compounded by the joint liability for council tax, which means that a person could have paid their share of council tax but face a claim for payment again with significant interest because a joint tenant has not paid his or hers. It could prove prejudicial to the interests of justice to incur such high penalties many years later if no steps to collect the tax or enforce an order have been taken in the interim. In many cases it might be expected that uncollected sums are quite small and if the council is not sought to enforce within five years there may be a little practical appetite to pursue them many years later. At this committee, Mike Homeyard from Citizens Advice Scotland also told the committee that the position was unfair, citing problems with obtaining sufficient and adequate evidence from both the debtor and the local authority collection systems. He explained the way in which council tax is collected, exacerbates the difficulties debtors have in understanding their council tax debt and that citizen advice advisers see clients who have built up council tax debts over 10, 11 or 12 years. There is apparently without the council having taken any previous action to collect those debts. The clients cannot understand how the council apparently goes from inaction to drastic action that will have an impact on any property that they own. A five-year prescriptive period would force all creditors actively to try and enforce their debt, which would perhaps put off the need for things such as sequestration by councils. There is a wider point to be made about the cost of living and the affordability of council tax debt. Charity step changes recent report Scotland in the red 2017. Increasingly clients are in debt because they are falling behind on essential bills. In particular, council tax is a growing problem. Among those who contacted step change in Scotland, 41 per cent were in council tax areas up from 37 per cent in 2013. The amount of council tax areas owed also increased drastically by 45 per cent from 1,368 in 2013 to 1,981 in 2017, making council tax areas a much larger proportion of average debt. As members will know, my party is called on the Scottish Government to scrap and replace the council tax as it promised to do in 2007. Until then, we need a wider debate about the meaningful reform of local government and tax-raising powers. I move amendment 5, and I will seek to answer any questions that members have been closing. I will pick up on a few points. I am not getting any specific questions, but there are some areas that I want to highlight. In Mr Bibby's remarks, he spoke about councils being incentivised to delay seeking repayment due to the agreement of interest. It is interesting to know that, in the causal submission, they highlight the potential for a behavioural change if we move to a five-year period of prescription, which we argue would incentivise individuals to seek to get beyond that five-year period so that we were no longer liable for taxies. It is another point at the causal race, which I think is very significant with regard to the autonomy and status of local government. It is that this would remove a parity that exists between taxes owed to the Crown and taxes owed to local government. I have two more practical concerns. It is analogous to the issues raised by Mr Griffin's amendment that additional resources would be required to expedite the process of collecting debt. Mr Bibby alluded to the financial circumstances of local government. That is, again, an issue raised in the submissions from local government that this would require additional resources to expedite the process and these resources could be better spent elsewhere. The final point that I will make again is just with reference in the context of this bill. This is a short bill with a very specific purpose to clarify the law of prescription. Throughout stage one and another inquiry, the committee has explored a range of areas and a range of interests that this bill has provoked. However, what has become very clear is that, while areas such as council tax and a DWP do merit further consideration as a bill is not the place to do it, I would suggest to members who have an interest in those areas to consult and explore further. To bring forward, most substantive proposals that have been constructed following substantive consultation and engagement are not sticking simply to piggyback on the legislation that it is not designed for. I would like to directly address amendment 5, and I would make the same point to Mr Bibby Neil Findlay that I made to Mark Griffin on his. If the intention is to remove the exception for the obligation to pay council tax from section 3, then amendment 5 is unnecessary, as amendment 6 alone will achieve this effect and for the same reasons. The bill does not seek to change the position of council tax and its aim is simply to maintain the status quo as we understand it. Local taxes form a substantial source of income for local authorities paying for essential services like education, housing, roads and so on. The Scottish Government accepts the considered view of the Scottish Law Commission on this matter. At stage 1, COSLA told the committee how a 20-year prescription period for recovery of arrears allows local authorities to quickly begin the recovery process at minimal cost to taxpayers, all the while protecting those who owe arrears by entering into long-term arrangements. All of this would be jeopardised by changing and shortening the prescription period. I note that the committee has written to all 32 local authorities seeking further information on this point and received responses from 26 of them. It is important to note that not one of those agreed that changing the prescription period was appropriate. Instead, they are all adamant that no change to the status quo should be made. Among the points made by local authorities were that the policy reasons, which justify accepting taxes payable to the Crown from the five-year prescription, apply equally to taxes payable to local authorities. That is, there should be no distinction between taxes owed to central government and those owed to local authorities. Highland Council said that it would place local authorities at a disadvantage to HMRC and ordinary creditors. It is inconceivable to believe that this is actually what is at stake. Local authorities continue to recover a significant amount of arrears each year. More than £2 billion worth of council tax debt is currently owed across Scotland and £1.2 billion of that relates to debts that are more than five years old. That is money that would be spent on local services. Making the prescription period for those debts five years would likely force a change in the way councils recover the debt to the detriment not only of the debtor but to all of us who use local services. Local authorities have told the committee that they would have to depart from the summary warrant process, meaning more costs for the debtor and a diverting of local authority resources to collection of arrears. The 26 local authorities that have responded to the committee are all deeply concerned about the impact of any change to the prescription period by shortening it from 20 years to five years and the effect that that would have on their funding. Not only are they concerned about the ability to recover arrears that are already owed to them, but they are also concerned that reducing the prescription period may create an incentive to those who wish to avoid paying their taxes in the first place. If council tax is subject to the five-year prescription period, it is all taxpayers who will suffer as a result as they will have to pay an increased amount of council tax in order just to maintain the current level of services. Finally, this bill is about prescription generally, the point that I made about the earlier set of amendments, and it is not the place, therefore, to make substantial policy changes in other specific areas. Any change to the current position would need wider consultation, particularly in light of the views expressed by so many local authorities, by COSLA and other issues, such as ones raised by Scottish Water, that were brought up earlier in the stages to the committee. Because of that, I urge Neil Findlay, who is represented by Mr Bibby, not to press those amendments. Neil Bibby, to wind up and press or through. Thank you, convener. I think that we have gone over a lot of the same arguments from the previous groups. I would just repeat that those amendments have been developed from the evidence that we have seen from the Law Society and the Citizens Advice Scotland, except what Tom Arthur said about their concerns from COSLA. We will continue to address them. Those there may be small additional resources required, but I do not accept that they would be substantial. I agree with COSLA and Tom Arthur that councils' resources are limited. In fact, they are chronically underfunded. We will continue to make the case for that to be addressed. Following the minister's remarks, I will not move amendment 5 on the basis of what the minister said about that not being necessary, but we will seek to move amendments 6 and 7. The amendment 4, in the name of Mark Griffin, you have already said that you are not moving that. Amendment 6, Mr Bibby, you are moving that. The question is that amendment 6 be agreed to. Are we all agreed? We will go to a vote on that. All those in favour of amendment 6, could you raise your hands? All those against amendment 6, that was disagreed to. Amendment 7, Mr Bibby, are you moving that one? The question is that amendment 7 be agreed to. Are we all agreed? All those in favour of amendment 7, are those against? That was 4-1 against, so it is disagreed to. The question is that section 3 be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The next question is that section 4-6 be agreed to. Are we all agreed? We will come on to technical and consequential amendments. Call amendment 1 in the name of the minister group with amendment 2. The minister to move amendment 1 and speak to both amendments in the group. Amendment 1 addresses the point raised by the faculty of advocates. The faculty and others raised concerns about the section 7 extension of the 20-year prescription period for some property rights, in particular servitude rights, as highlighted by the committee in their stage 1 report. The faculty made the point that the drafting of section 7, as it stands, suggests that when a creditor raises court proceedings in relation to a property right before the expiry of the 20-year period, and the proceedings extend beyond the 20-year period, the period in relation to that right ends when the proceedings end, with the consequence that the property right is extinguished. That amendment is to ensure that where the creditor is successful in the court proceedings, for example obtaining a declarator of the existence of the right, then the creditor should not be denied the property right by the 20-year prescription coming to an end at the end of the court proceedings. Instead, that amendment ensures that where the creditor's claim is successful, the property right is deemed to have been exercised or enforced. The outcome is that a new 20-year prescription period will start to run. Turning to amendment 2, recent changes to the devolution settlement have given the Scottish Parliament legislative competence over a range of benefit payments. The recent Social Security Scotland Act 2018 created a legislative framework that underpins a system of devolved benefits, creating a process in which people are given the assistance to which they are entitled. At the same time, the 2018 act makes clear that those receiving devolved benefits are under an obligation to repay overpayments of those benefits in certain circumstances. That obligation is subject to the five-year prescription period, and that is achieved by section 66, amending schedule 1 of the 1973 act. The bill being considered today inserts a general rule into section 1 of the 1973 act that all statutory obligations to make payments will be subject to the five-year prescription period, and this will cover the obligation contained in the 2018 act that I have just described. One of the main purposes of the bill is to increase clarity and legal certainty and to have two provisions in an already crowded schedule 1 of the 1973 act that achieve the same outcome does not achieve this aim. I move amendment 1. Thank you. Any members want to make comments on that? The purpose of the bill is to bring greater clarity and those amendments contribute to that, so I welcome the minister for bringing them forward. Minister, you can wind up, if you wish. I have nothing further to add, but I thank the committee for their consideration, and I would invite them, hopefully, to approve the amendments. The question is that amendment 1 be agreed to, or we all agreed. The question is that section 7 be agreed to, or we all agreed. The question is that sections 8 to 15 be agreed to, or we all agreed. Call amendment 2, in the name of the minister, has already debated with amendment 1 minister to move formally? I move, convener. The question is that amendment 2 be agreed to, or we all agreed. The question is that section 16 and 17 be agreed to, or we all agreed. The question is that the long title be agreed to, or we all agreed. That ends stage 2 consideration of the bill. I thank the minister and her officials for their attendance, and I will briefly suspend the meeting. Agenda item 3, instrument subject to affirmative procedure, no points have been raised on the draft common financial tools Scotland regulations 2018, is the committee content with this instrument? Agenda item 4, consideration of an instrument subject to negative procedure, no points have been raised on SSI 2018-272, is the committee content with this instrument? I will move the meeting into private session.


today, this is Marc, I'm doing great, thanks for asking. I have six examples with adverts of degree, so let's take a look at them. They enjoyed the party immensely. John could really give me a hand with this. Our trip to Australia was what we expected altogether. I absolutely agree with you. We sometimes need to work awfully hard. If you eat that, it won't help you lose weight much. In this lesson we're going to look at, as I said, adverts of degree, so stay tuned. On past lessons, I talked about adverts of frequency. If you want to watch that lesson, you may click here. This time though, I want to talk about adverts of degree. And when do we use them? We use them when you wish to give more information about the magnitude of an action, of the verb, or the degree to which an action is done. And how do we form them? Okay, we usually form them by adding L, Y to an adjective. For example, fear is the adjective, fear is the adverb, huge is the adjective, hugely is the adverb, large is the adjective, largely is the adverb, entire, entirely, etc, etc. However, there are exceptions. Sometimes an adjective stays the same to become an adverb. For example, hard, hard, and not hardly. Attention, hard, hard, half, half, almost an adjective, almost an adverb. Very stays the same, very, very, well, well, just, just, etc. There are many exceptions. Most importantly, how do we use adverts of degree? The first rule. Use them in the usual positions of agents. What are agents? Agents are optional elements or of secondary importance in a sentence. Let's look at my introductory example. They enjoyed the party immensely. Immensely is at the end of the sentence or the clause. We love Lady D dearly, so it's always at the end of the clause. So it's secondary in importance in the sentence. We do not use the adverbs of degree at the beginning of the sentence, okay? Never. The second rule of how to use adverts of degree is that some of them, like almost largely, nearly, really, virtually, etc, are almost always, almost always used in front of the main verb. Almost always why? I will tell you in a minute. The first example was John could really give me a hand with this. So here, which could or give is the verb? Yes, give. That's the main verb. So it goes before give. So John could really give me a hand with this. Could is a modal verb. So the second, and this will explain why almost always, they are largely responsible for that. Okay, largely is the adverb of degree. And the verb, the main verb here, can you see it? Yes, the verb to be. They are largely. We don't say they largely are. They are largely responsible for that. And so this is the exception. We put the verb to be before the adverb of degree, okay? So like I said in my rule, they are almost always used in front of the main verb, but the verb to be. So I'm going to erase this and I'm going to look at other points on how to use the adverbs of degree. So we're back with the rest of the rules. Other adverbs of degrees, like outright, well, somehow, somewhat hard altogether, are almost always used after the main verb, just like my introductory example. Our trip to Australia was what we expected altogether. Here the main verb is expect. So altogether goes at the end of the sentence in this case and after the main verb. Another example. My explanation was somewhat complicated for some students. And here, like I said before, the verb to be is special, but the adverb of degree goes always after the main verb and, in this case, the verb to be. My explanation was somewhat complicated for some students. Now let's take a look at the other rule. When you want to add emphasis to an action of a verb, use just, quite, absolutely, simply and totally. So let's take a look at the example. I absolutely agree with you. So we have absolutely and agree here is the main verb. So it is placed before the main verb in this case. Or she totally understood the point. Understand is the main verb and the adverb goes before the main verb in this case. She totally understood the point. We go on the fifth rule. Sometimes we use some adverbs of degree in front of other adverbs. They are called submodifiers. For example, like my introductory example, we sometimes need to work awfully hard. Hard is the adverb. And I added a submodifier, which is another adverb, awfully, awfully hard. So I wanted to modify the adverb hard, right? So I added awfully, awfully hard. Another example, her flatmates got on extremely well. So well is the adverb. And here extremely well is the submodifier. So extremely well. How do they get on? Extremely well. The sixth rule, they are adverbs of degree, like much, a bit, most, and worst, for example, that can be used in negative sentences. Like my example, if you eat that, it won't help you lose weight much. So we have, if you eat that, for example, a cake or ice cream, it won't. It will not help you lose weight much. Much here is the adverb of degree. And this is a negative clause. It won't help you lose weight much. And so that's why I added much. Another example, Su doesn't like his attitude a bit. So the negative here is doesn't like, she doesn't like his attitude. He's a very, he's a very nasty boy, for example. So a bit is the adverb of degree that I added in this, in this sentence. So that's it for today. Thank you very much for watching. If you have any comments, suggestions, or if you want to post your own question, you may do so under this video. Please don't forget to share the lesson and don't forget to subscribe to my channel. Have a great day and see you next week with a new lesson. Bye bye.


Welcome to George H. Schmitz's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. John Locke, The Justification of Private Property My last essay discussed John Locke's theory of a negative commons. This was the moral status of natural resources prior to the emergence of private property, a situation in which every person had an equal right to use unowned land and other natural goods. I included this topic in my series on free thought and freedom, because it was germane to understanding how natural law philosophers during the 17th century moved from the traditional Christian doctrine of private property to a more secular approach. But it would be an unwarranted stretch to include additional essays on Locke within my series, so I hereby begin a new series devoted to Locke's ideas. The most important source for understanding Locke's justification of private property is the celebrated chapter of property, which comprises chapter 5 of the Second Treaties of Government. But we also find significant remarks about property in chapter 4 of the First Treaties. Although most of my discussion is based on Locke's treatment in the Second Treaties, I may occasionally draw upon his comments in the First Treaties. According to Locke, in the natural state, that original condition in which every person had an equal right to use natural resources provided by the spontaneous hand of nature, no one had a private dominion exclusive of the rest of mankind over those resources. But such resources would have been useless for human survival and well-being unless they could be appropriated by individuals for their personal use. So how can a transition from unowned resources to private ownership be morally justified? How can one person legitimately claim an exclusive right to use a resource that, in its natural state, could be used by anyone? Locke's treatment of this problem remains highly controversial among scholars. His theory has been used to justify everything from laissez-faire to the welfare state to full-blown socialism. Which of these conflicting interpretations should be covered in my survey of Locke's political ideas is a judgment call, and I frankly remain uncertain about my final decision. I fear that many of my readers will have little, if any, interest in the fine points of Locke's scholarship. However, much of those points may interest specialists. Fortunately, perhaps, I can delay my decision until a later time. Before we can appreciate the ambiguity in some of Locke's statements about property, we must first understand his overall approach. Hence, the purpose of this essay is to provide an account of how John Locke justified private property, while postponing a consideration of the more controversial features until a later time. There is another reason why an overview is desirable before I delve into more technical matters. Only a relative handful of my readers are likely to have actually read the book's two treaties of government. The status of John Locke in modern libertarian movement is rather like that of Adam Smith. Both figures are widely known to non-academic libertarians, as are their leading ideas. But it is a safe guess that the major works of these philosophers remain largely unread. The workaday libertarian is more interested in ideas that he can use in the struggle to establish a free society than he is in arcane historical theories and controversies. And if this libertarian believes that he can find adequate justifications of private property in the writings of modern libertarian philosophers, such as Rothbard, Hayek, and Rand, then why should he spend his time reading earlier and quite possibly less satisfactory accounts? As I have attempted to demonstrate throughout many libertarianism.org essays, the issues discussed by early classic liberals are very central to understanding the origin and evolution of modern libertarian ideas. Many of the internecine controversies among early classical liberals may be found alive and kicking in the modern libertarian movement. The fundamental problems attending an adequate defensive individual freedom are perennial. They arise again and again from one generation of libertarians to the next. However, much of the particular context may differ. There is much to be learned from reading the books of John Locke, Adam Smith, and other intellectual giants in the history of freedom. Knowledge that is directly relevant to the problems confronted by modern libertarians. Having presented my preliminary case for the relevance of John Locke, I shall now explain the basic principles that underlay his case for private property. The key to Locke's moral transition from common dominion to private ownership was his conception of self-ownership or property in one's person. As Locke put it in what was destined to become one of the most influential passages in the history of political thought. Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with and joined to it something that is his own and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it, it hath by his labor something annexed to it. That excludes the common right of other men. For this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others. Locke continued, He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, nor the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, hath certainly appropriated them to himself. Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, when did they begin to be his? When he digested, or when he eat, or when he brought them home, or when he picked them up? Locke answered these questions by selecting the last of these options. The acorns became the private property of the owner when he picked them up, for it was in the gathering that labor was first expended. That labor put a distinction between them and common, that added something to them more than nature, the common mother of all had done, and so they became his private right. But this raises a crucial question. Was it a robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in common? Locke replied that to require universal consent would lead to universal starvation. More is involved here than the practical problem of obtaining the permission of every person on earth. Morally speaking, such consent is not required because, according to both reason and revelation, humans have a right to their preservation. Thus, if even the right to eat acorns and other natural goods could not be morally justified without first obtaining the consent of every commoner, man had starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had given him. When Locke wrote that every man has a property in his own person, he was using property in its older meaning to signify rightful dominion over something. It was quite common during the 17th and 18th centuries to speak of property in one's conscience, property in one's freedom, property in one's labor, property in one's happiness, and even property in one's time. Whereas we might say that this computer is my property, earlier philosophers might have said, I have a property in this computer. Locke included life, liberty, and estate in his conception of property, so when he argued that the primary purpose of government is to protect property rights, he was not merely referring to material objects. Rather, he meant that a government should protect those fundamental rights that are essential to self-preservation and happiness. Locke stressed labor as the foundation of private property because some form of labor is the basic method by which we sustain ourselves, even if that labor consists of nothing more than picking up acorns off the ground. Humans cannot survive without labor, so coercively to expropriate the fruits of another man's labor is to violate his fundamental right of self-preservation. Labor is involved in every life-sustaining activity. It has been said that Locke was the first philosopher to pinpoint labor as the essential factor in the original acquisition of property titles, but I cannot confirm this common claim with certainty. Although I am better versed than the average bear in the early literature on property, that literature is so extensive that I may have overlooked a natural law philosopher who anticipated Locke's stress on labor. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that the philosophers who preceded Locke posited occupation, not labor, as the moral foundation of private property. Both Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf discussed occupation in detail. So why did Locke abandon this focus on occupation and argue for labor instead? This question has not received the attention it deserves. I shall offer my thoughts in a forthcoming essay.