Hi everyone! Welcome to our first Spring Live series. Thank you for joining us today. I am Paulo Souza Jr., course lead for SC3x Supply Chain Dynamics, which is part of the MITx MicroMasters in Supply Chain Management program from MIT. I am happy to be co-hosting this live event today with my colleague Miguel Rodriguez Garcia, course lead for SC1x Supply Chain Fundamentals. Hi Miguel! Hi Paulo and thank you so much for the introduction. So I'm really happy to be here with you guys and excited to share some great insights about supply chain with all our learners and today we're going to follow this agenda. So first our speaker will give us a presentation that will last around 25 minutes and after that we'll have some time at the end, around 15 minutes for you guys, for the audience to actually ask some questions to him and Paulo and I will be channeling those questions throughout the presentation. So please use the Q&A feature in Zoom to ask the questions and we'll be working on that throughout the presentation. So before I'll introduce our guest speaker I just wanted to remind you guys that this is a cross-course live event from SC1x to SC3x and verification is still open for both courses so remember that verification is the only way that you can actually have a certificate from us from MIT and it's also the best way to support the program and allow us to keep doing this and giving this content for free to many learners around the world. So if you like the content as I said we'll be posting the verification links in the chat so please if you like it keep supporting us and now back to you Paulo so you can introduce Luis. Thank you so much Miguel. So today we are honored to have Luis Gosling joining us. Luis is currently a senior vice president at LX Partners, a global management consulting firm. He has over 10 years of experience driving projects and diligence for clients in capital intensive industries such as transportation, logistics, infrastructure, manufacturing and warehousing. Prior to LX Partners, Luis covered the logistics, shipping and infrastructure sectors at a logistics M&A advisory firm for clients from Asia, Europe, Latin America and also led diligence for over six billion dollars in transactive assets. He holds a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering and a master of science in logistics from PUC, he also holds a master's degree in supply chain management from MIT. By the way, he also took our micro masters courses just like many of you are doing right now. So welcome Luis, the floor is yours. Thank you Paulo, thank you Miguel, thanks everyone and thanks for being here and having me today. What I want to talk about today is global supply chains. We titled this presentation how did all this stuff get here and really what we want to talk about is we're going to pick one product and we're going to follow that product throughout the world. We're going to go from Shenzhen, China from the port of Yantian all the way to its final destination somewhere in the United States and you're going to see more about that in a minute. To begin with, Paulo gave a brief overview of my background so I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about myself. I've been doing logistics and supply chain touching a little bit of everything under the sun for the last 12 years or so. Focused on finance a lot in the early years of my career, have done a lot of M&A and now I've been focusing on operations and helping our clients better manage those assets, better manage those operations. So anything related to rope freight or ocean freight or air freight, that kind of asset, port terminal operations, that's kind of in my wheelhouse. So we're going to dive right in. The first thing I'm going to do is give you a quick overview of this industry and we selected, we decided to have some fun with this. So we selected the toys industry as our example for today. This is the panoramic 10,000 foot view of what the toy industries look like. I'm not going to read this entire page to the audience but I'll leave it up on the screen so you can read it on your own time. Basically, toys are a sub-segment of consumer products and like a lot of different segments in consumer products, it's very fragmented. There's not one single company that holds 50% of the market, for example. There's a lot of big conglomerates. They're very global and it's a very emotional industry and I like talking about this. It doesn't affect just toys but when you think about toys, you're thinking about kids toys, adult toys and pat toys. Those are the three big kind of verticals of this space and no one buys toys trying to save money. You buy toys with some sort of emotional driver to that consumption decision so it's an industry that benefits from that in a number of ways. At the same time, if you look at number two in three columns on the page in front of you, this industry has very strong fundamentals. It's been growing for the last 10 years non-stop. COVID actually helped the toys industry even though retailers were pretty disrupted between 2020 and 2022. You have an industry that's been booming, if I may say so, with even further growth in recent years because playtime and physical toys and physical goods have seen a boost in the man. At the same time, you have costs, pressure coming very hard, very strongly for these companies, not only supply chain costs like ocean freight, which skyrocketed, the cost of ocean freight skyrocketed between 2021 and 2022 and now it has recently seen a certain depression in rates but also raw materials. You have toys or really products, if we want to call that, that are getting increasingly complex and the existing materials are getting more expensive. You have wage inflation and raw materials scarcity in some cases. Lastly, you don't buy toys directly from the toy manufacturers, you need to go through a retail channel and retail channels as you all know from other modules in this program have been undergoing some disruptions. Omni-channel is a big one. It basically changes everything we've been doing in retail for a number of years and also consumers have been gaining a lot of power recently, which kind of undermines what used to be called the retail art in the late 90s, early 2000s and so a lot to come there. Toys are obviously subject to all that and this is just a very high-level overview of what we're talking about when you think about the industry. I don't want to dive into the operations without letting you, giving you this lead on, hey, this is the space we're looking at. Moving on. So this is a toy. I'm sorry for the spoiler on the next page.  This is a very simple toy. It's a single-body plastic figurine. You probably seen it in a couple of board games. This is a very simple product. Easy to make, cheap to make, cheap to handle and ship around the world and you can make it in bulk and it's cheap to purchase. This is also a toy. This is a sexier toy. It's more complex. It's way more expensive to make, way more expensive and complex to manage. There's so many components and they're so different when you think about an Xbox gaming machine and it's way more expensive to purchase. This goes for at least $500 in retail and it has a few different options when you're thinking about buying one but there's really limited customization. This is also a toy and this falls somewhere in between. This is a collector's figure and it's very complex. It's somewhat cheap to make because most of the parts are plastic or simple metals but it's very complex to assemble. It's very manual and pretty hard to manage. It's hard to forecast the demand for something like this. It's very expensive to purchase which means it caters to a certain niche of the toy industry. It's people that are willing to spend $300 to $500 for a min condition figurine just to put it on the shelf. We didn't pick this one example by chance. This is Megatron, a Transformers character. He's the villain of the Transformers franchise and we're going to follow him throughout the world so he's going to accompany us on our journey. Before we jump into that journey, I just wanted to highlight that these toys from a simple plastic figurine to a video game that's super complex, they're managed by mega conglomerates around the world. They all have different strategies from forecasting to how they execute their operations and how they design the supply chain and they all work. There's no single right answer when it comes to supply chain and I'm sure you've heard this over and over again and these companies are good examples of that. They have very distinct approaches to how they manage the supply chains and they're all successful in doing so. This is a quick overview of what the Megatron supply chain looks like. It's very complex because you have so many different parts going into this product and then finally you have a single point of assembly that takes us all the way to the customers and this is our international logistics piece. That's what we're going to focus on today. We're going to look at how do we go from finished product all the way to product received in the hands of our happy customer. Let's jump right in. This is a quick roadmap of our journey before we jump into the specifics and I'm going to take you in a quick deep dive on each one of those seven echelons. We're going to talk about packaging and load building. We're going to talk about ocean shipping. We're going to talk about port terminal operations. Once you get inland we're going to talk about rail and road freight. Finally we're going to talk about warehousing and obviously DC operations and inventory management which is extremely important what to buy, when to buy it, how to replenish and then lastly the last mile delivery pun intended which is how we get our products from that last point of consolidation all the way to the end customer and of course Megatron is going to follow us through all the pages. He's keeping an eye out for him. The first piece of our supply chain is load building and I cannot stress enough how important this is. Load building is basically how do you put your products in a box. It can be a box, a corrugated box, a different type of packaging. Sometimes there's a plastic cover with some branding. Packaging is really important because packaging some of it will be customer facing. Not all packaging is a boring brown corrugated cardboard box. Some of your packaging will have the company logo and some art in it. That's also part of the customer experience. So packaging is important. Stacking is also important. It can maximize or not or impact the way you ship your goods and how much you can chip and how efficient your supply chain can be. Third, you have load building. This is usually software-assisted these days unless you're talking about a very local, very manual operation. This will be more mathematical and quote-unquote scientific really but oftentimes reality doesn't follow math. As supply chain practitioners, I'm sure you all know this.  One thing I wanted to highlight and I'm going to try to bring some real-life examples in a couple of these pages. I think that illustrates well the concept we're discussing here. If you're not familiar with this diagram, this is a utilization scatter plot. Every container has space and it also has a certain amount of weight it can carry. When you put boxes or pallets, when you load a container with products, you need to think about maximizing the usage of that space but also maximizing the usage of the weight capacity. Some products will cube out before they weigh out and some products will weigh out before they cube out because they're very dense. That's what this chart is representing. This is an example of 10,000 containers plotted on one chart. As you can see, the top right corner of your screen is really, really good. This means these points, these containers had a lot of weight and the volume of the box was really well utilized. You really filled that container. This is a supply chain dream. As you move to the bottom left of the chart, you start having containers that are empty or very light. There's a number of reasons why that can happen. Maybe you had an urgent shipment and you didn't have time to wait for consolidation. You just had to leave with the container half empty. Maybe you have just not that much volume this week and the container had to set sail and not wait for more shipment. When you think about ocean shipping, for example, if we're talking about global logistics here, ocean shipping works in weekly cadences, weekly schedules. If you have something that's arriving on Thursday, you can't wait one day, it's going to be put in a box next week. That's just how it works. If you look at, I brought two examples here on the next page. Points A and B are so dramatically different when you look at what they really mean. Picture A shows us a container that has 50% of the volume occupied, which means it's half empty set another way, and only 8% of the weight utilized, which means it's very light. They're carrying very low density products. While point B, it's not perfect, obviously by all means, but it's way better. We're looking at a container that has 55% of the weight capacity utilized and 60% of the volume. This is by no means a perfect load utilization, but it's much better than the left picture. The last thing I want to talk about when it comes to load is the stacking. Stacking is important because of reasons that defy math. People can do all kinds of things. If you've been in the industry for long enough, I'm sure you have pictures like this. This is absolutely what you don't want to happen with your pallets. If you look at the left side of the screen, you have loads that are almost falling from the pallet because this pallet was broken from the bottom, which is an absolutely no-no. When you're building your loads, you need to think about how am I going to use those loads in the future. If you have a box that you need first, that box should be on top. This is just common sense, but also you have physical constraints to your pallets. For example, if you look at the top right, this pallet is very high. This is very tall, which means it's hard to handle, and you risk tilting your loads and letting some box fall during your supply chain execution. Inside the warehouse during transportation, you name it. Finally, at the bottom, you see there's a box here that got crushed by the weight. This is not good because you risk damaging your product inside that box. This is what causes claims, returns, and so on. This is a good example of what not to do. Let's move on to ocean shipping. We put all those boxes and pallets inside a container, and we set it up out to the ocean. First thing first, there's something called Drage, which is the act of taking a container, putting it on a truck, and taking it to the port. Throughout that entire piece of our supply chain, and really from here all the way to the United States on the water, we want visibility of what that load is. We want to know who's holding it, where it is physically on the map, if possible, and what's our ETA or the expected time of arrival at the next piece or the next part of our supply chain. Finally, the third column here, the third element of ocean shipping is the shipping itself. This works very similarly to road freight. You have carriers that handle your loads, and this is a commoditized service. A commodity service basically works in cycles of supply and demand. Right now, in the barometer or the escape valve of that relationship between supply and demand, is rates. When you look at ocean shipping rates, they have gone up dramatically during COVID because demand was just so high and supply was constrained around the world. Recently, for the past maybe seven months, starting in the second half of 2022, we saw rates declining very dramatically on some lanes, even going to pre-COVID levels. There's a number of nuances around that, and we can spend hours talking about it in the Q&A, but reality is this is a commodity service. It has cycles, and that's it at this level. Finally, port selection is important because you want to go to a port that is as close as you can to your final destination. You don't want to go to a different country and then get on a rail if you don't have to. You also want to go to a port that gives you access to the logistic infrastructure that you need. If you want to put your container on the rail track on a train and take that to the next point of your supply chain, then you want to go to a terminal that has that capability. If you go to a terminal that doesn't offer rail access, that means you're going to have to put that box on a truck, take the truck to another terminal to do transshipment, then put it on the rail and then move on. This can get really expensive, and it's another touch on that box, which means it's harder and more complex to manage at scale. Finally, once we get to the United States, and this took us maybe two to three weeks on the water, we land at a port, and I want to quickly call out that a port and a terminal are different things. A port is a region on the map to put it very simply. It's a region on the map, usually owned by the municipality, and they can subdivide that area into different mandates, some of which are terminals, which are the rectangular spaces, sometimes not rectangular, that actually handle the loads. A terminal is usually divided into four parts. You have the marine, which is what touches the water, touches the vessels. You have the yard, which is where you store containers or handle containers or inward or outward handling. Finally, you have your gateways, which is essentially the paths that a container will take to leave or enter the terminal, which is rail or trucks, which set another way, rail yard or gates. I have a few examples here. That's why I didn't want to talk too much about that on the previous page. This is what a terminal looks like. This is a picture of the Long Beach Container Terminal in Long Beach, California. You can see here the marine area with all the SCS cranes. They're touching the water, which means that's where the vessels will stop in birth for the containers to be loaded or unloaded by these cranes. Finally, you have a pretty automated RNG yard here on the bottom of your screen, covering the entire bottom section of the picture, and then gates in the rail yard or not on this frame. Louis started to interrupt Megatron's journey. I just want to remind some learners that they can use the Q&A feature from Zoom because some learners join us later. If you have questions, we'll be addressing them at the end of the session. Please use the Q&A feature in the chat box. Let's continue now. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Good call out. So a couple of more shots and information about how a container terminal operates. This is what the marine operation looks like. You have the gantry cranes loading and unloading containers from the vessel. Sometimes the vessel will require one, two, three cranes, sometimes more. It depends on the size and depends on the schedule for the, you know, how you're manning that shift that day or that morning. Finally, the cranes take the container from the vessel and they put it on the ground, which is essentially putting it on a truck. And in this case, I have a picture here also from LA with a pretty automated part of that terminal. That container is being put on an automated platform or flatbed, and that flatbed knows exactly where it's taking the container. It's either fully automatic or moved by joysticks with an operator in the room somewhere close by. So this is a really good example of where automation can really drive efficiency and reduce the risk of accidents, for example. Finally, this is the rail yard. Those boxes are going to sit on a yard, either the main yard or the rail yard for outgoing track, outgoing train, sorry. And they might be stored there for a couple of days, maybe a few days. You don't want to store your boxes, your containers at the terminal for too long because you have to pay for it if that happens. You usually have a window of free days. And after that you have to pay the merge and you don't want to do that because it can really stack up and it gets increasingly expensive. Then that box is going to be put on a track, on a car, sorry, a train car, which is going to flow anywhere in the country. And rail is probably the most efficient way to handle container loads, to handle intermodal loads. It's not perfect. You're still limited to the train schedules. You're still limited to the rail capacity and capability. If you have loads that are not perfectly fit for a container box, that can be a little tough to handle or you have to pay a lot more money.  On the rail, you're subject to the network of terminals, which is pretty abundant. It's pretty rich, but it doesn't go anywhere and everywhere throughout the country. So moving on, let's talk about rail. Rail works a little bit like Ocean Freight. You have major operators, not a lot of them. In the U.S., we have seven class one rail operators and they are operating all the way from Canada all the way to Mexico. So you really look at North America when you talk about rail and schedule, visibility, lead times, all the things that we touch on for ocean carriers is also very important for rail. Rail sourcing is a complex activity and there's a number of things involved in that. We're not going to dive into that right now, but it's complex and it's as complex as any other type of freight sourcing. To give you a picture of where our journey is going, I wanted to show you this map. If we're going from LA to Chicago, which is the journey we drew for this example, we're going to take a path that's pretty long and it crosses pretty much half of the United States or even a little bit more than that. Chicago is a great hub for rail. It handles over half of the entire intermodal freight in the U.S. and it's serviced by six out of the seven major rail operators in North America, which is great. No other city in the U.S. can do that, can say they do that, which is really good. If you look at the right side of the page, these are the seven major operators in North America. Two of them are merging. KCS and CP might become a single company in the future, so we'll see what happens there. I think the commentary here is that it seems like an old school industry because it's rail and it's old infrastructure and it's pretty brownfield, but when you think about it, this is also very fast-moving and it changes and it's a commodity service, so you can't just not pay attention to it.  We're going to Massachusetts because we're taking Megatron all the way to MIT in Cambridge, and so we're going to go to the closest possible Amazon DC to E40 in Cambridge. That's in Everett. Freight sourcing is a science and an art at the same time. You have one big decision when it comes to road freight, which is do you do it yourself or do you hire someone to do it for you? You make or you buy. Purchasing freight can be complex. It can be as simple as you want. Routing is very important, especially if you're the one managing that operation and executing that freight, because you can make multiple stops. You have multiple schedules. You need to better utilize your assets to the best of your abilities. Lead times and SLAs are super important. If you have an outsourced freight carrier, that's how you make sure that you're getting what you're paying for. I cannot stress that enough. And then finally, the last piece that I think is really important here when it comes to road freight is load consolidation or deconsolidation. To better utilize your assets, you got to go back to what I mentioned earlier. You got to increase and drive utilization. As a transportation professional, we often joke that you want to do less transportation. And that's absolutely true when it comes to road freight. Moving on.  When you think about a warehouse or a distribution center, really, at the scale we're talking about here, an Amazon DC, it services an entire region. Inbound and outbound logistics is extremely important for these guys. So doctors managing how fast or how well you can manage your shifts and load and unload loads so you don't have that bottleneck in your facility. Same thing for the yard outside the warehouse. That's extremely important. Also, how you manage your storage and your DC operations, that's very important. You can automate it. You can put a number of automation solutions inside the four walls. And that changes how efficient you're going to be, how many people you're going to need. And that goes hand-in-hand with technology, which is a third element I put here on the page. Technology is really good and it's really sexy when we say it like this. But it can also be very challenging because it's expensive. And because the more you deploy technology within the four walls, the more you have to train your workforce and make sure that you're executing it perfectly and that you're troubleshooting. And then you're prepared to deal with technology when it doesn't work, right? And that's not easy. It's just more complexity to your supply chain and you have to pay attention to that as well. Then finally, another extremely important part of any storage operation is inventory management. You want to make sure and I'm sure you guys are going to learn all about inventory management during the MicroMasters. But to put it very simply, you've got to know what to buy, when to buy, and how much to hold and for how long. Some products deserve to sit on a shelf for a week. Some products don't deserve to sit on a shelf for even a day. You want to move it very, very fast. That's it for storage. We're going to tick Megatron out and we're going to put it in the box and take it to the end customer. That's called parcel freight and you can do it yourself if you're managing your own, I guess, limited scale operation. But usually companies at this level, these conglomerates, they're using third party freight providers. In the United States, we have three major carriers or should I say four, if you count the USPS mail, but it's basically FedEx, UPS and DHL. They're really good at different things. There's no single solution for the practitioners in the room. You know that you're going to end up using all of them for different aspects of your operation. But parcel sourcing, parcel freight really works similar to road freight. You need to worry about utilization. One of these vans can make roughly 30 stops. That's not a lot. If you think about a container, an entire container has hundreds and hundreds of boxes. And so this is very quote unquote expensive. And if you're looking at an urban environment, routing through the streets is very challenging because you have a lot of restrictions. You cannot enter every street and alley. You have hours of the day that you just cannot operate. So there's all these challenges. Then finally, tracking in systems. These are things that have been evolving a lot in the supply chain space. We call it log tech, logistics, technology, solutions have been really out there for the last 10 years or so, really evolving and growing with the space. So we wanted to highlight this. At the same time, you have facilities up to this date in the United States that are extremely manual. And you will see people manually typing or scanning barcodes, which is obviously opportunity for improvement. The last thing I wanted to highlight on this page is that the trucks, the little van on the left that looks very futuristic. That's actually one of the newest FedEx electric vans they're deploying throughout the United States. So we expect to see a lot more of those cool looking cars in the next months or years versus the traditional Sprinter vans. And then a quick shout out to the rest of the world.  When you talk about parcel, you also have a lot of other very large players. They're very, very good at what they do across Europe and Asia, South America. But really in this example from Megatron, we're really talking about FedEx, UPS and DHL, which hold combined around 80% of the entire market share of the United States. They're really good at different things. You wouldn't use one provider for all your needs, but have your relationship with all of them can be challenging because it's more things to touch and more players to manage. Then this is the end of our journey. The parcel was delivered to MIT at E40 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And this is a quick highlight of where we went across the world. We went all the way from the port of Yantian, China, all the way to the east coast of the United States. This would take you roughly a month or maybe three weeks if you're being really fast. And the one thing I wanted to highlight before jumping to questions in Q&A is that this is an ever-changing space. This is a very dynamic industry and not only new technologies are coming online, but also macroeconomic factors are always affecting the way we operate and what a good solution looks like. And also new players, newcomers are always trying to disrupt things on every point of the supply chain. And if this complexity feels overwhelming, it's because it really can be. And I think we don't know what the future holds, but what we do know is that the big winners of all this are us, the customers and companies that use all of these services. And that's it for the Megatron journey. Megatron is probably happy now sitting on someone's shelf in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And I am going to close here. And before we jump into the Q&A, I want to leave you with three questions. We talked about the whole supply chain as a very descriptive story, but if you had to really manage this, you would have to make decisions that we didn't really dive into because it was not our focus here. But basically, supply chains often come down to do you want to drive cost efficiency or do you want to drive speed and agility? And so I'm not going to answer this right now because this will take more than a minute. But as you think about it on your own time, I want you to reflect on for this figurine or for any other toys that you can think of, should you be driving cost efficiency and trying to be as cheap as you can on the supply chain and gain scale? Or should you try to be fast and agile and drive speed? Then the last question on the page is really about alternatives. It's really important to have plan Bs. And so I propose here, it's a little tease, to think about what could a plan B be, pun intended, when it comes to ocean shipping. Rates went down recently, but what if they kept going up? It would be increasingly expensive to ship things from China to the US. What could you do about it? There's a number of solutions out there. A number of approaches are not only possible, but very realistic. And we see them every day with different companies. And I would love for you to think about it on your own time and see where you can find examples of these things. Thank you very much. Thank you, Luis. I mean, this has been pretty amazing. I'm pretty sure that Paolo shares my feeling and also our learners. From my perspective as the SE1X course, I think this has been an amazing overview and introduction for the learners to mainly transportation, because they are going to see a lot of that at the end of the course. So this has been just brilliant. Thank you so much for everything. And now, yeah, I think we can jump right into the Q&A. I have selected here a couple of questions to start with. So the first one is related to what we saw, mainly right after COVID in many ports around the world in terms of congestion. We saw the Port of LA with more than 150, I think it was over 100 boats just standing still, basically, for a long time. So Anis Otsoi, sorry if I pronounced it wrong, was actually asking us what would be the best way to manage this kind of operation. So in order for this not to happen again, like looking forward. I'm pretty sure that also this is relevant not only for us, but for many carriers out there, because at the end of the day, it was a lot of money lost for all that congestion. So I don't know, Luis, what are your thoughts on that? Absolutely. And that's a great topic. And it feels like we planted that question, but we did not, I promise. But I do have a backup page that I'm going to use in a second to illustrate a little bit of what that congestion looked like. They did have hundreds of vessels waiting to birth. And some of them were not even accounted for because they started waiting outside of the port waters. They went to open waters to wait in the ocean. And that doesn't even get into the count. So it was really disruptive for the Port of LA and also for different parts of the supply chain in land, because you're basically waiting for all of that to become a big bottleneck. So there's a little, a couple of things that I heard in the question. One of them was how do you manage that? And I'm hearing this from the perspective of a practitioner. So you are the shipper or the BCO. You have your loads waiting on a vessel. And then there's another nuance there, which is how do you prevent that from happening in the future if you are effectively managing the terminal? You're the port of LA, right? The simple answer. And there's a few different things you can do or that we've seen companies do very successfully in the last few years. When that happens, what you can do is immediately diversify. If you're exposing your entire supply chain to one gateway, maybe that's a risk that you're holding. Trying to enter the United States. And that's what we saw. Immediately companies shifted their volumes to the East Coast. That was a little easier. It takes a little bit longer to go through the Panama Canal and then navigate all the way to the East Coast. But using the ports of Miami, Savannah, Norfolk, New York, New Jersey, those were good solutions at the time. Doesn't mean they're better than LA, but they were not as affected by that congestion, specifically on the trans-specific routes. Secondly, you can go to Mexico. You can go to Seattle. You can go to other terminals on the West Coast and then put your box on the rail and then ship it to the United States. That's a very mature solution. It's not like you're going to be trying something new that I don't know has ever done before. So we've seen companies do that as well. Short answer is, if you're exposed to LA, you've got to wait in line. If you have alternatives, then you can explore it. And what I just wanted to show you real quick, I have my cheat sheet pages here to help me answer the question. But this is the Global Schedule Reliability Index. And what this means is you have two charts on the page, and this is tracked every month by Sea Intelligence. What you're seeing here on the left is how often are sales on time. And being very high is really good. Traditionally, historically, we've seen vessels being on time 70, 80% of the time, sometimes almost teasing a 90% result. In 2020, if you look at the green line on the page on the left side, it really went down. It took a dive. Vessels were always late. Not only they were always late, but if you look at the right side of the page, they were getting late increasingly more. They were late by more days. In recent years, and the pink line you see on both charts is 2022, in recent years, they have been steadily improving that schedule reliability, which means they're more often on time. And when they are delayed, they're delayed by less days. So instead of eight days delayed, they're now delayed by five days or so. And so we track this very closely, and this is really important. Awesome. Awesome. This brings a lot of clarity, I think. And thank you so much for the detailed answer to our learners' question. Paulo, did you want to go with another question? Yeah, sure. Thank you so much, Luis. You addressed some key points from F3x, supply chain dynamics. You mentioned about complexity, the drivers of complexity, global supply chains. And we have a couple of questions here. So I want to combine two questions. One is from Aloma and the other one is from Muhammad. So the question is, Luis, we see a lot of companies trying to have a more local supply chain after the COVID challenges and impacts. How do you see this changing the way supply chains work? And the other question combined with this is, in the era of increasing nationalism and protectionism, what are the implications for global supply chains, and how can companies navigate these challenges? Yeah, that's a great question. So we had a different lecture, I think, on fall that touched a little bit on X-shoring and near-shoring. What we're seeing is a little bit of a mixed basket of solutions when it comes to that. There has been, for the last 10 years, I would say, this movement of near-shoring supply chains for all kinds of reasons, some of which are technically very savvy when you think about supply chain risk mitigation or diversifying your supplier base and not being exposed to one manufacturer in Thailand or Singapore or China and rather having plan Bs or alternatives that can supply your goods or raw materials or make the assembly perhaps in Mexico or Eastern Europe or Northern Africa. We're seeing Tunisia growing in that space as well in recent years. More recently, there's been a couple of very tough macroeconomic sanctions and conflicts, and I'm going to say for the last maybe four years. Near-shoring is a reality. It's here to stay. I don't think this is going to basically, look, for the Asian countries in the Southeast Asia to become what they are today, that took decades. That's not going to be undone in a couple of years. That's not a big risk. I'm not concerned about that. What we see happening, and that's the trend I was trying to illustrate, is some of that volume shifting to neighboring countries or plan B solutions. Even more than that, companies and supply chain leaders really starting to think about what the plan B should look like so that when the problem happens, when any disruption happens, be it political, be it macroeconomic, be it COVID or any sort of supply chain decision, they're not caught off guard. That's kind of what the feeling is in the industry right now. Thank you so much, Stuart. Go ahead, Miguel. Yeah, no. I was about to say before going into the next question, because we have a lot of questions. We are not going to be able to answer them all. I can tell you that, guys, but thank you so much for posting them. But what you just mentioned, Luis, is super interesting because we have a researcher here at MIT, one of our colleagues, working exactly on that and looking at some companies actually overreacting because of reshoring. And sometimes it's also a matter of economies of scale. And as you mentioned, Southeast Asia and also China, of course, they have been doing an amazing job for many years in terms of manufacturing many of the electronics products and other things. So changing all that and moving all that knowledge all the way here is not an easy task. And we're seeing companies sometimes overreacting and losing a lot of money sometimes because of those decisions. So it's a trade-off and really interesting topic for sure. So now I'm going to jump to another question from Mohamed. And I'm going to combine it with a question from Norman too, because learners are also interested in learning about technology and how technology affects supply chain. And you mentioned a lot of the automation that is coming. Things that are already there, as you said, in the Port of LA with the automated platforms or straddle carriers, that's how they call them, I think, in the Port of LA. And that's amazing. So I don't know, we want to hear your thoughts maybe on what you think is more promising also from the perspective of maybe artificial intelligence, blockchain or automation. And the other thing is that one of our learners is asking us where the program addresses this automation and technology advancements. And I would say that SC4x, the last course of the of the MicroMasters, is the one that focuses more on this kind of state-of-the-art topics, while other courses are more the basics of supply chain. Even if we, of course, renew the content every year, but still SC4x is the one that focuses more on technology. So, but Luis, what are your thoughts on this emerging technologies and things happening in the supply chain? Well, there's a lot of stuff to unpack there. Technology is always interesting. And I usually look at technology when it comes to logistics, operations and supply chain decisions in three buckets. The first one is, you know, big capex, automation, that kind of stuff. And then the second one is more software oriented. It's more logical.  These very targeted niche solutions, they're really, really good, but it's not like your automated and entire SDS crank. And then third, you have, you know, the other stuff. For example, I've seen sensors and telematics. We're seeing that taking a bit of a bump in recent years, which is really good. I saw the other day, this presentation from, from, it was a startup. I don't know if I can call them a startup at this point, but it's a company that they put sensors on the whole of a vessel, which can track how dirty the hole is. And when it's too dirty, it creates a lot of drag under the water, so the ship gets less efficient from a fuel consumption standpoint. And then they can like track that and do whatever they have to do to, you know, clean it or scrap or sand it and make sure the fuel efficiency is there. So like, these solutions are so niche and so interesting. They're like, it's hard to predict what's going to come next. How I see these things, I think it's great. And automation is probably the hot topic when it comes to container terminals right now. It's a big part of my work. Container terminals, not automation per se. But one thing that will always important to remember is that you have unions in the United States and Canada that pretty much govern the labor relations on both coasts east and west. It's very different. The relationship in the west coast and east coast are very different. But I think it's unrealistic to expect that a terminal in the United States can get 100% automated like we see in a few terminals in Europe and Asia. In the next, I don't know, five years or six. It's just complex. There's a lot of discussions to go on. It's not just let's spend the money. We're sitting on a cash, on a war chest of capital right now, and we can invest this in automation. That's a simplistic view. Yeah, totally. Thank you. Thank you so much for the answer. Paulo, do you want to go ahead? Yeah, we still have many questions here. Many learners are thanking you, congratulating you for your great presentation. I chose another one here. So Kevin is asking, which of the lags that you talked about are the biggest cost drivers? For instance, ocean, railroad, warehousing, storage, etc. And how much does that vary based on the product being managed? For instance, Megatron versus Xbox versus game pieces, etc. Well, that's an entire presentation on itself. So to ship Megatron from China to Cambridge cannot cost more than Megatron, right? Someone's paying for that shipping. It's not free, but it's done at scale, which means a container that will cost you, I don't know, $10,000, $12,000 to ship overseas for that one box will only really, if you want to allocate costs, will really only cost you maybe 10 bucks, a few bucks perhaps, because you have hundreds of those boxes inside that container, right? If I had to guess, I think the most expensive part is the part, well, apart from all the pieces and raw materials that go into the product, which means everything upstream of your supply chain, it will be the part, it will be the echelon with the most labor, the most labor intensive echelon, or set another way, the least scalable part of your supply chain, which is obviously downstream. There's no question about this. It's not ocean shipping. It's not the container terminal. It's definitely not the rail transport. It's probably not the road freight. It's probably storing and parcel delivery. These things are expensive when you think about a little box. Again, a van, a sprinter van, a FedEx van can make 30 stops in a day. Keep in mind, you cannot drive a van 24 hours a day. You have regulations and labor guidance and a lot of very hard restrictions. You can only drive for eight, 10 hours a day, depending on the state, depending on whatever, which means you're going to make 30 deliveries that day. That's it. A container can carry hundreds, if not thousands of boxes. So it's just a different scale entirely, right? Someone mentioned drones here in the chat. Drones are not a solution today. They might be a solution tomorrow, but for consumer goods like Megatron or Plastic Toys, even Xboxes or more expensive things, they're not a solution. One drone cannot make 30 deliveries a day in eight hours. It's just, yeah, they don't rest. You can use them 24-7, but the battery technology is just not there. There's a number of things that were kind of moving in the right direction, but it's just not there. It's a great technology, and we should absolutely be investing in it. It's not the disruption we expect in 2023. It's just not there yet. Yeah. Actually, you just answered one of the questions from another learner in terms of drones being used for last-mile delivery. We actually have some research here going in MIT in this area, and it's still, I mean, it's not mature at all, but it's promising, I would say. Maybe not 2023, but maybe at some point. Yeah, we'll see. No, it's definitely moving in the right direction. I'm not discounting the drone space. It's great. It's just not something, it's just not the solution for every type of product out there. Totally. Yeah. And not only that, I mean, it comes with a lot of regulations from aerospace, like many other things, so for sure. Yeah. So I think we only have time for one more question, maybe. So I'm going to steal one of yours, Paolo, if you don't mind, because I think this one is really good to close the life event, because one of our learners, the VIG, sorry if I pronounced it wrong, is asking us about what you see that are the key hard and soft kills needed for someone interested in pursuing a Korean supply chain management, like looking at the complexity in supply chains nowadays, like the volatility, how things change, and what it requires to actually design a robust supply chain, what do you think are the keys for our learners to pursue a career in this field? Should I do a quick, like, advertisement for the MicroMasters program right now? Of course. So look, supply chain is an industry that's so interesting because it blends elements of engineering and business so well. It's very quantitative. There's no question about that, so you've got to get your math concepts sharp. But that's not to say that you just have to be really good at calculus. There's a lot of very technical elements involved in there, from, you know, inventory optimization, transportation management, but also a lot of finance, a lot of business, you know, concepts, they're very, very conceptual, but also very quantitative. And so all this matters on day to day, from cost accounting to cost management to inventory planning and forecast. Forecasting is an entire science on itself, right? So that's the quantitative aspect of it. Then there's also a qualitative element. Supply chain leaders are people managers, first and foremost, there's not avoiding that. You've got to manage people and simply because, even if you don't want to, simply because there's no way you can do everything on your own. It's supply chain is such a vast field. And for global organizations, like a consumer products company, like the ones we saw in this presentation, they have hundreds of people on each department, on each continent. It's incredible, incredibly complex. So people management, you got to be good at simplifying things, having common sense. Supply chain often comes, or should I say logistics, often comes down to real life common sense. It's not just about the science, it's a little bit about the art as well. So, a little bit of everything to be completely honest, you don't have to know anything about biology, that's for sure. Well, now that sustainability is becoming a huge topic too, I don't know, maybe even biology. So yeah, we are multidisciplinary, that's for sure. So you guys just heard from Luis that yeah, this is a tough field, but also like probably one of the most interesting ones to enjoy. So thank you so much, Luis, Paolo, everyone for being here. I just want to remind the audience before we wrap up that this was the first life event of a series of three webinars that we are going to have between SE1S and SE3X during the spring. So we still have two upcoming webinars, stay tuned for those. And yeah, again, enrollment verification for both courses, SE1S and SE3X is still open. For SE1S, it closes really soon, in only a week. So you're already a learner, but you haven't verified, feel free to go into the main page and verify for the course. If not, you can still enroll right now by clicking on the links that we shared before. And yeah, again, just thank you so much, Paolo, thank you so much, Luis. And of course, thank you everyone for joining us today. Thank you very much, guys. Have a great rest of the week. Thank you so much, you all. Goodbye. See you soon, guys.


A land cover classification system is very important nowadays for various remote sensing applications and many sectors of economy. Therefore, development of algorithms for multi and hyperspectral imagery classification is an urgent task. In this paper we present a new efficient algorithm for multi and hyperspectral imagery classification based on a fuzzy decision tree approach. Multispectral imagery spectral bands are used as fuzzy data source attributes and cumulative mutual information between them and the resulting fuzzy classification as a decision tree inducing criterion. The proposed algorithm ensures good classification accuracy. This article was authored by Sergei Stankovic, Vitaly Levashenko, and Elena Zaitseva.


25th Infantry Division, train alongside members of the New Zealand Army during the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center at Helamano Military Reservation, Hawaii, November 7, 2023. JPMRC is the Army's newest combat training center and generates readiness in the environments and conditions where U.S. forces are most likely to operate. Two pedals, kind of like your tail rotor back there. Once I do that, everyone does that. All right, so first day, let's go. Manly when they're full. They have a small grip. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't keep it open. Twist that, pull it off.  And you're gonna put it out. Yeah, I thought you all like each other, man. I do what we do. The back end of that door. That's what you're feeling in between now that y'all can actually see it. All right now, look at me. I was like, my wife lives in Wisconsin. I don't care about myself. I don't like, are you sure? Oh, pretty. I'm almost scared. It can't be like that. Hey, they're gonna give you guys a GoPro one of these. See what your field just did?


Shocking, a $6 billion mega-city in the sea. A fantastic new coastal city called Eco-Atlantic City, also known as Nigeria International Commerce City, is being constructed on Victoria Island near Lagos, Nigeria. In order to address the severe housing scarcity in the mega-city with the highest population growth in the world, it is being constructed on ground that has been reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean. The Eco-Atlantic project's construction started in 2008, a wall surrounding the city that is 8.5 kilometers long rests on 10 million square meters of land away from the ocean. It is anticipated to be the size of Manhattan's skyscraper district, with a total of 10 districts. Can Eco-Atlantic become the next generation of real estate on the African continent? Will the city need demands for accommodations in the financial, commercial, residential and tourist sectors? Can the city provide advanced telecommunications, pure water, modern urban planning, self-sufficient and sustainable energy sources, and high living standards? Hello there, welcome to today's episode of findings. Stay tuned as we discover more about the Eco-Atlantic City, which is a major project in Nigeria and Africa at large. Take a few seconds to subscribe to Africa Reloaded before we begin. The main features of the project. The Eco-Atlantic project has changed over time, and is now one of the most expensive real estate markets in Africa. It serves as a focal point for investors who gain from strong development growth driven by high demand, as well as a gateway to the continent's emerging markets, which are tipped to become the next wave of African real estate. Using cutting-edge high-tech infrastructure, Eco-Atlantic City blends residential, business, financial and tourist accommodations. China Communications Building Group, a company that specializes in landfill operations and marine dredging, was offered the construction of the city. The project's first phase, which involves dredging, building the dam, and filling it with sand, will take around six years to complete across a total length of 6,500 meters and an average width of 1,260 meters. The base of the metropolis will be built using a total of 91 million cubic meters of sand. Additionally, the Great Wall of Lagos, a projected 8.5 kilometer long barrier made mostly of granite and coated with concrete, protects Eco-Atlantic. The first phase of Urban Development's plan has been unveiled by South Energiq's Nigeria Limited, the project's developer and urban planner. One of the structures that will be constructed as part of the Eco-Atlantic City's first phase is a 26-storey structure called Azuri Peninsula. There will be 120 luxury apartments there. Along with a five-star marina and yacht club, the property will have upscale stores, CAFIS, and a variety of services in a tastefully designed environment. The award-winning global design will be preserved in the architecture, which will also offer the most inexpensive place to live, work, play, and invest. The project's second phase is anticipated to span two years. In this phase, top-notch road construction, drainage system building, and the construction of a self-sustaining power plant will all be done. A water supply system, sewage network, and treatment systems, similar to those found in developed cities all over the world, will also be installed. Eco-Atlantic will help reverse Lagos' worst economic downturn in 30 years. Benefits of the project It is anticipated that the city would add 250,000 new employment and deal with the housing crisis brought on by the expanding population. But since Eco-Atlantic was developed by dredging and piling up land worth 10 kilometers, what makes its development particularly impressive is its position, the planned city directly borders Lagos. Prior to the project's start in 2009, the peninsula was essentially non-existent. As a result, Eco-Atlantic appears to be an artificial island. The Eco-Atlantic city is expected to be at least 40% bigger than the current Victoria Island, and it will be home to 250,000 people, as well as the 200,000 commuters who swarm to the island every day for work. Eco-Atlantic city development is qualified to lease any property as a concession holder and major developer. The investor will thereafter be free to develop his land anyway he pleases. Eco-Atlantic will provide the most cutting-edge amenities now available in the globe, as well as first-rate roads with canals for the drainage of surface water and an enviable sewage collection system, in accordance with the established rules. Other features of the project Features include two sizable marinas, connected by an internal waterway, an independent 24-hour power supply, fiber-optic communication links to each property, elevated street levels to accommodate underground parking spaces above groundwater, and smooth documentation and construction permit processes. The development of Eco-Atlantic is being done through a public-private partnership, with private businesses and investors providing the finance and lego state, and the federal government's remaining strategic partners. The state and local governments collaborate strategically with South Energiq's Nigeria Limited. Several of Nigeria's top banks, including FCMB, First Bank, Access Bank, and Guarantee Trust Bank, partnered with Eco-Atlantic and immediately capitalized on the potential, with assistance from Western Bank's BNP, PERI, BUFF, Fortis, and ABC. A square foot of land in the city is currently being offered for close to $2,000, according to experts, who estimate that the project will cost at least $6 billion, while Eco-Atlantic will help the metropolis housing issues. The state and population's economic gains are what give it such a high potential. The creation of free trade zones, and the dynamic emphasis on infrastructure development at the moment. Challenges Facing the Project The Eco-Atlantic city is no different from the many other projects that are subject to controversy. People who reside close by oppose Eco-Atlantic City, because recent coastal erosion and ocean flooding were brought on by the city's ongoing construction. The amount of water that would be lost from Bar Beach would leak to another location, endangering Menjiri's coastline. Eco-Atlantic City is additionally frequently criticized for being extremely vulnerable to rising seas due to its foundation on an artificial sand bank close to the ocean. Residential areas are flooded, access roads are submerged, and electricity pylons are torn down by the seawater. Some of the residents have also been compelled to relocate as a result of this. However, the Great Wall of Lagos is designed to guard this future city and stop coastal erosion and flooding. When the Atlantic Ocean spilled its banks in August 2012, it swept 16 people into the water, killed several others, and flooded Karamo Beach, Victoria Island, among other places. An environmental expert claims that the lack of the contractors managing the sandfilling activities of the proposed Atlantic Ocean City to implement measures that would lessen the impact of the surge on the environment is what caused the ocean to surge. The APEC led state government's sandfilling, according to a statement from the People's Democratic Party of Lagos state, is to blame for the ocean surge. The party demanded that the Eco-Atlantic project be put on hold and that the relatives of the deceased receive urgent compensation. Those who wish to be a part of a new border and seek a quieter, safer atmosphere for their activities and businesses can relocate to the new city. Eco-Atlantic City represents much more to savvy investors than simply rising land prices in Lagos. As Nigeria keeps moving unabatedly toward becoming the financial hub of Africa, an investment in Eco-Atlantic, which is currently thought to be the world's most promising growth horizon, will create previously unimaginable opportunities to realize the continent's full potential. We hope you have subscribed to Africa Reloaded already. Thanks for watching to the end. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section and remember to like and share this video.


Immune inflammatory rheumatic diseases are common, severe chronic inflammatory conditions that can be used to study the underlying mechanisms of pathogenesis and approach to pharmacotherapy of other diseases associated with autoimmunity and or auto inflammation. These diseases are characterized by uncontrolled inflammation leading to hypercoagulation, which is thought to be a universal pathogenetic mechanism of organ involvement. Inflammation and hypercoagulation are also present in COVID-19 and atherosclerosis, suggesting that thrombo-inflammation may be a key factor in many diseases. Russian rheumatologists have made significant contributions to understanding the overlap between thrombosis and inflammation in systemic lupus erythematosus and antiphospholipid syndrome, which has been useful in treating patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, this research could lead to new treatments for both diseases. This article was authored by Yevgeny El-Nazanov, Tatyana Amryshetnyak, Sergey K. Solovyev and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Hello everyone this is Amit Dan of amitdan.com You are watching Onak Mejib travel videos and today I'm taking to Africa a restaurant and lecture for lunch. We went to the third floor where I saw long rows of tables and chairs to allow two groups to sit together. The third floor had a roof made of tin and canvas. The view of the Nile and the street down below was amazing and I didn't feel hot due to the wind blowing through. We ordered and shared our food. I had soup in clay bowls, bread, vegetables, kebab, grilled chicken, fried eggplant, regular rice, fried rice and much more. Everything tasted to delicious including the Egyptian bottle of Coke. Thank you for watching this video. There will be more videos coming up so I'll see you shortly. Thank you.


Hello and welcome to the session. Let us discuss the following question. Question says, for each of the differential equations given below, indicate its order and degree. d4y upon dx4 minus sin d cubed y upon dx cubed is equal to 0. Let us now start with the solution. Now given differential equation is d4y upon dx4 minus sin d cubed y upon dx cubed is equal to 0. First of all, we will find out order of this differential equation. We know order of a differential equation is the order of the highest order derivative occurring in the differential equation. Similarly, we can see here highest order derivative occurring in this equation is d4y upon dx4 that is fourth derivative of y. So, order of this differential equation is 4. Now we can write the highest order derivative present in the given differential equation is d4y upon dx4. Its order is 4. Now we will discuss about degree of this differential equation. Now we know degree of a differential equation is defined if it is a polynomial equation in its derivatives. Clearly we can see here differential equation is not a polynomial equation in d cubed y upon dx cubed. So, degree of the given differential equation is not defined. Now we can write the given differential equation is not a polynomial equation in its derivatives. And so its degree is not defined. Now our required answer is order of the given differential equation is 4 and degree of the given differential equation is not defined. This completes the session. Hope you understood the solution. Take care and have a nice day.


What do you welcome to psychic medium Tony Green? I am Tony Green. And today I'm doing a extremely special episode called What type of relationship are you in? Now, before I start this show, before I bring on my co hosts, I want to say a few things. First, if you are extremely sensitive, this might not be the show for you. There may be trigger warnings in this show. So if you get offended easily, please take everything we are about to say with a grain of salt. The reason I'm doing this show is, first of all, just relationships today can be really complicated and difficult to navigate. I wanted to bring this show in a somewhat funny way with a somewhat funny. I wanted to be a little bit comical about it. So again, it's all about relationships. But if you get triggered easily, if you are very sensitive to these subjects, please, if you need to click, click away, click away. Okay. Second, don't take one thing I say and run with it. Your relationship is based on many, many different aspects.  This is my whole relation. No, no, it's not your whole relationship. It's one thing that happened. Don't take one thing I say and turn it into your relationship. You know your relationship. This might be one thing that just happened at one point. It doesn't define your relationship. So the first co host today is Dylan. Hey, Dylan, what's up? Good. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So Dylan, today we are doing a show about the different types of relationships and some of some of the aspects in those relationships. Are you ready? Are you ready for this? Let me start there. We will see, we will see if I'm ready. Yeah, I have some really tough awesome. I have some pretty tough questions for Dylan because Dylan is Dylan, you're single dating? Yes, single. Yes. Okay, so Dylan's single. And he has a lot of guy friends. He has a lot of guy acquaintances. So his answers might not be based on his personal experience. But if they're based on experience of what he has seen, he can bring accurate answers. Now, again, part of the reason I'm doing this show is I think sometimes men and women in relationships can easily be misled, can easily be misunderstand where a relationship is at, right? They can think it's one place, but it's really another place just because either there's not clear conversation or, or for whatever reason, it's happening, it's happening. So here we go. The first type of relationship, and I'm comparing these all to different types of movies, just so you know. So the first type of relationship is a rom-com, a romantic comedy, some something that both people are interested in taking it to the next level. They're both working on the relationship.  The relationship goes up and down. There's, there's dinners, there's plans for the future, there's weekend getaways. That's what I would describe as a kind of like a romantic comedy type of relationship where there might be a few misunderstandings, but both people are sincerely and truly working on getting that relationship to the next level with each other. Okay. The next type of relationship is the reality show relationship. It's a lot of drama, maybe some baby mama drama, maybe some family drama, maybe just arguments between the two of you, constant jealousy, maybe some, you know, adult beverages or addictions are involved. There's, it's just a dramatic relationship. Like, it's a Jerry Springer type of relationship. Now, not many of my people are going to be having this relationship, but there might be aspects where like, oh my gosh, his sister just brings so much drama to our relationship or, you know, whatever it is. And the third type of relationship is, are you in a porn? Because, and now before you get offended, don't get offended, everybody, y'all just hold on, take a breath. This is like the friends with benefits relationship. This is the relationship where they come over possibly late at night, mid afternoon, early morning. There's some adult activities going on. So there's a lot of coming and going. Let's just put it that way. There's a lot of coming and going in this relationship, but there's no plans for the future.  And this might be the type of relationship where one person, and I think we're going to spend a lot of time on this relationship over the other two types of relationships today, because this is the type of relationship that can bring one person a lot of confusion, because they think it's going someplace. They have this, they're just hoping or thinking it's going to go someplace. It's going to be a really more of a relationship like, well, we're in this state, but eventually we'll get to this place or be doing this thing. And I think that is probably where we're going to have some serious questions today and some serious conversations, because a lot of people that come into my office, a lot of people that call on the show, a lot of people that have sessions over the phone, this is the type of relationship they're talking about the type of relationship where they are hoping it's one thing or they're thinking it's one thing and the other person is just not on that page for whatever reason. So I'm going to start with a question for Dylan. Dylan, there are there are different types. I have to turn my, okay, everybody, my text, my text notification is a dog barking. So clearly I need to turn that off now. So that that doesn't come through anymore. So, okay, Dylan, a man, when a man, when a man meets a woman, I feel like breaking out into verse on that. And he is serious about this woman. How long does it take a man to know he's like serious about the woman like this is it? Like, not necessarily this is it. I want to marry her just wow, I think I want to find out more about her. How long does that take? Well, yeah, like, you know, keep moving forward. Yeah, well, okay, so it's something he's serious about. So let's just say you go to dinner with a woman. Do you know during that first dinner, or that first date, or that first coffee, do you know how much like in man speak not only you but other guy friends of yours? Are you aware at that point in time that this is something like do you know throughout that conversation, like, hey, I really like this person. I'm going to take it further. Well, yeah, okay, three days are if you want to keep pursuing it. So I was in that first two weeks, you would know. Okay, perfect. So that level that you're and that's really good for women to know because sometimes women think men are wanting to possibly like they keep going out with them or keep meeting up with them. Because the woman thinks it's serious, but the man is just in that casual, let's have fun place, right? So it's good to know that within like maybe that first two weeks, a man is aware of the fact if he wants to take this a little further or not, right? That's really, I think that's very telling. Now, it doesn't mean that within the first two weeks, the man is going to be madly in love with you, or be planning the wedding. That's more of a girl thing than a man thing. So girls, you know, be practical about these answers. And if it doesn't, if he doesn't show something in the first two weeks, it doesn't mean that there's absolutely no interest there either. It just means, you know, that maybe he's on the fence or something like that. But Dylan, in a relationship, what are the steps when a man is serious about a woman? What are the steps that that man will take based on your friends and you with the steps the man will take with the woman to let her know he's a little bit more serious and it's not so casual? Probably introducing to some family or friends, you know, some people that are close to that person that individual is talking about going or talk about future things, more of what couple friends that you have, or intimate interests that you're sharing that kind of information, that would be a very positive sign that it's moving in a really good direction. Absolutely, I agree 100%. And I can't stress this enough. If someone is, I think if someone's truly interested in you, you're going to know by the content of their conversation, and the, the, the time you spend together where it is and what you're doing. Okay. Now, from a man's perspective. And I know this is really hard for women to hear and it's really hard for some men to hear too. And I, I'm trying in my head to come up with that really right way to phrase this, to not be too, to not let this question sound too harsh. But if a woman is allowing a man to come over for adult activities, he will, will he do that for as long as he can without like, a commitment, even if he's not interested in a commitment? That's, that's for you, Dylan. That's a tough one. I think that, that could be different for each guy, I would say. I think off your topic a little bit, if the guy is asking more about maybe a lot of questions or asking what you think of the future, that would be a definite sign that he's interested in pursuing it even further. Even if it is, will you just into that? You know, I think sometimes that's missed that it could develop from starting at that type of relationship. Now this guy, he feels more interested and he's asking more questions and wanting to know more about Okay, that's a good, that's a very good valid point. Thank you for adding that. So if somebody is like starting to ask more questions or starting to be more interested in your life, how, because I think like women assume, like we've not, I don't want to say assume, but we've been together this long, this has been going on. This is just the way it is. Eventually, we're going to get there. And I know you can't speak for all men, but at what point, at what point do women does in a partnership in a couple ship? At what point do you have to say, Okay, it's been like this for this long. And I don't really see progression in the relationship. At what point do you think if a woman is interested in progression, she can really call a guy out on that sort of behavior? Because women, I'm going to tell you from a woman's perspective, and not only from my perspective from, from a lot of women that I've talked to, we try to be understanding, we try to be nurturing, we try to feed the relationship, we think if we do certain things, it's going to lead to a certain place. And we think the guy is on the same page. And a lot of times they're not. So at what point, and I know it's different for every man, but at what point should a woman, or a man in this situation, who wants a serious, a more serious relationship, really say, look, we're here, when are we going to get here? Because you don't want to do that on the third date, you don't want to do that in the first month, even I don't think I don't think the first month is a good time to really try to pinpoint that some plans for the future. So we could go up for this vacation spot. Let's do the show you how serious it is. I love that something that's a month out point blank answer. Let's do this. Let's do this for you know, even a week vacation or going somewhere farther away, that might be where you might get your answer. If he hesitates, like coming up with reasons why he can't, you might have your answer right there. Because he should want to. If it's something hits, he's like, I'm all in. I'm in on this. I want to see this relationship move forward and see where it goes to. Excellent. That's an awesome answer, Dylan. So in that case, like, I think most people know the relationship they're in and the dynamics of it. And many times people let it go so long, they think that well, naturally, there's going to be a payoff or they're just too afraid to quit the relationship and go for something new. They don't the biggest thing I hear from men and women is I don't want to start over again. I just I don't want to start over again. I don't want to have to go out there and start dating again. I don't want to have to go through all those first stages again. I don't want to have to start meeting people again and have it not possibly not work out again. So my I'm going to give you my answer and then I'll let you give yours, Dylan, but you're talking risk, right now risk reward, right? Right? Like, okay, if you I think if you're not getting what you want in a relationship, and you've given it a certain amount of time, and that amount of time has to be comfortable for each person. But I think once you get past a certain amount of time, you have to look at the relationship and say, Okay, this is what it is. I get it's not going to be when you're talking years in. It's I don't think it's changing. Do you once we get to those years, Mark? Period time. So that is up for interpretation. Okay. If a guy is okay, if a guy is serious about a woman, and he's invested two years, is he making those moves to make it more serious? Is he making those moves to let her know? Or is he just going with the flow? He's got to make some tiny commitment as he goes along. He has to maybe it's just something is he lives far away, or he's out of town. He makes a commitment to two years or a year and a half. That's a commitment that he's wanting to move a positive direction. Okay, what if they're both local? And it's good. Because the thing is, I think a lot of times in a relationship, people either have the assumption it's going someplace, or they have the assumption, like this has been going on this long. Let's say it's been somewhat casual for this long. But if I just hold on, it's going to get serious. So in in my in my thought, in my thought, if it's gone on for a certain amount of time, and it hasn't changed, and you've had those conversations, it's probably not going to change. Now, I would agree with you. Yeah, if you've had the conversations, if you've asked the important questions, don't make a I don't think we can make a lot of assumptions in relationships, because we don't know the dynamics of the other person's mind at any given moment. But we do have the right to question where things are going. And if I want to say this, a lot of women will say, Well, I don't want to ask him because I don't want to upset him. In my opinion, if you're afraid, they don't want to know the answer. That's I think that's yeah, I think that's a really big part of it. I honestly do think that we don't want to ask sometimes because we're afraid of the answer, or we're hoping the answer is going to be this and it's not. But if you're sincerely afraid to upset someone by asking them a question, that's not someone you should even be in a relationship with as a friend, let alone a partner. If somebody gets upset, every relationship is going nowhere then. Exactly. You're afraid to ask someone a question? Yes. No. If you're afraid of the answer, that's one thing. But if you're afraid, you're going to upset them with a question, then you already know what the answer is, and they're getting irritated because either they don't want to tell you the truth, or they've already had this conversation. Either way, if somebody's going to get upset based on your question, and you have a certain amount of fear with that, you need to maybe think about letting that go. Just let it go. No, I want to Exactly. I want to go back to getting out of a relationship because I started saying a lot of women and men, they don't want to start over again. But I just have this belief system, if you're not getting what you want in the relationship that you're in, A, you're never going to get what you want in that relationship. And you have to decide, A, is it more important to keep a situation you're not happy in, or get what you want and be happy? Do you believe what you want is out there? And believe me, it's out there. If there's something you want in a relationship, if you want your relationship to look at a certain way, trust me, there is another person out there for you that also wants that. It might take a minute to find them. So I always say, don't be afraid to start over. If you're truly not happy, don't be afraid to start over, don't be afraid to let go and move to something else. If you're not happy and you're not getting what you want, because there are millions of people in this world, you are going to find one that fits your criteria. Would you agree with that, Tim? Dylan, God, where did that come from? I'm so sorry. I would say two things to that. I think another part to that would be in yourself that you should trust that there is somebody that might be the right fit. Yeah, you are taking a risk. You're taking a risk or maybe this is going okay, you're somewhat happy with it, but it's not going anywhere, maybe. And so then you are taking a risk that now, like anything, you might have to take two steps backwards or one step backwards to go two steps forward, right? That would be kind of that. And just the confidence in yourself that you will find something different. You will find something better, but it is a risk. I can see why anybody would be scared of that. Yes, absolutely. It's not easy to walk away from something, especially something you have invested time and love in your heart in. And letting somebody go is never easy. I don't care. Sometimes you could be with somebody for three months and felt such a deep and profound connection to them. And you still know that this might not be the right person for you. And it's difficult. And it sometimes it hurts a great deal to walk away from something that didn't work out or isn't working out. But the the the question you have to ask yourself and it depends on the type of relationship you're in. If somebody keeps, you know, if if you're only getting this aspect of the relationship and you're not getting the whole relationship that you want, are you willing to settle for that for the rest of your life? Because that hurts too to be in something where you're not fulfilled. It eventually you feel defeated. It takes pieces away from you. And whether you're male or female, that that's just a solid fact.  And then, you know, the right thing can come in. What what do you think Dylan? Well, I would say if you've got to be old, you know, there's been a lot of books written out there about if you're open to it, you got to be open to it. If it's going to come, just going to be closed minded and think it'll never happen and go back to that confidence idea that you've got to be confident that there is something else out there for you. Do you have your mind open minded to that? A lot better chance that that's going to happen. No guarantee. Obviously, that's why it's a risk. There's no guarantee, but you're more open minded to and a lot of times I think early on, if you express what you want out of a relationship, you know, you put out there what you want to have. This is what I'm looking for in the first day, not on the second day, but as it progresses in the first month or two, and you express that, well, confidence might be first and more and more. Absolutely. And we are coming up on the 30 minute mark. And I just want to say, I agree 100% with what you said, Dylan. And I'm going to add to that. I always find a way to ask a guy, are you looking for something serious? It doesn't have to be with me. Okay. But if they're not even in a place where they're looking for something serious, that you're not going to be the person that changes their mind. You're not. Because they're not even looking at a commitment. They're not they're nowhere near being in a commitment. It doesn't matter what you do, how you do it. But I think that's a fair question, even on a first date. Not asking, where do you see this going with me? But what are you looking at at this time in relationships? And I do feel like that might be a fair question to put out there right away. So you don't invest either one of you invest in something that neither one of you might be, I'm saying that so backwards. But I think everybody knows what I mean with that one. So have an absolutely amazing rest of the week and a beautiful weekend, everybody.


Greetings, unboxing friends. It's another month and it's another HackerBox from HackerBoxes.com. I don't get paid for this endorsement. I'm neither endorsing nor not endorsing this. I just subscribed to HackerBoxes and I thought it would be interesting to unbox these as I get them. This is HackerBox number 0039 Level Up. So I suspect it has something to do with video games or level shifters. It's heavier than usual or at least it seems to be heavier to me. Let's see what's inside. Alright, we've got another USB cable. I think I got one from the previous HackerBox. Alright, interesting.  No, just wires. So that's interesting. And we've got what appears to be a USB breakout. Nice. I could possibly use that. And we've got a USB thingling. What's in it? What is it? I don't know. Focus. It is transparent and it says RDX on it. Not sure what it is. But you can plug it in to a USB port. Nothing on the side. Am I missing anything? No. Nothing. I don't know what it is. Some of you probably do know what it is. Yeah, I'm kind of loathe to just plug random things into my computer but I don't know. I trust HackerBoxes. Okay, here we have a 3D printed case of some kind. And ooh, what's this? Okay, so far I don't know what level up is referring to at this point. Oh, that's kind of neat. It's got an LCD on it. It says winners, ground v out, ground v in. And are there buttons? Yeah, so I suspect that this is one of those boards where it's just basically a simple like, you know, lab thing with a little LCD display. So it's probably a voltage generator maybe. You can plug this in and see. What else? Wow, lots of boards here. Interesting. Is this for a power supply maybe? Plug the power supply in. You got plus and minus 12, 5 volts and 3.3 volts. Yeah, it looks like you would plug in like an ATX power supply to this. I have one. I have this. I really like this one a lot. This one is from Dangerous Prototypes. It's got these terminals that you can put banana plugs into. It's got this neat little button, which I like. It's got fuses on every output. So does this, but these are kind of these big glass ones. Of course, you can always replace them. So, and it's got LEDs. There's an LED for mains on, power, good, and I think there's an LED for each one of the power supplies. And this one also has minus 5 volts if your power supply does provide minus 5 volts. So I really, really like this and I highly suggest these because you can just get ATX power supplies from junk and just plug it in and then you've got a nice power supply. But, you know, that's this and I guess that's what these go with. So, yeah, I don't know if I'll be using this, really. But it's a neat thing if you didn't have this.  I smell a kit. Oh, neat. Got a challenge coin. Novus Ordo Technica, a new technical order. Okay, nice. Hacker box, challenge coin. Weird. Nano SIM adapters. Okay, all right. That's kind of neat. RTL, yeah, RTL gates. That's kind of cool. Oh, neat. I like that. Yeah, RTL gates. You basically see these inside 7400 series chips, not as inputs or outputs, but sort of like intermediate gates. That's basically all this is. Well, maybe not like this. Usually they're base driven, but, oh, and it's a hacker box's PCB also. That's kind of neat. Yeah, that's what that kit's all about. Oh, and look, there's also a buffer and an inverter. So, you can learn all about RTL logic, resistor transistor logic. That's pretty cool. And you get a sticker and a hack life iron on patch. All right, well, that's pretty cool. So, what does level up mean? Well, maybe voltage levels, because each of these has a threshold. So, when you connect one to another one, the thresholds are important. And that's what the input and output stages of TTL chips are really for. They're for making sure that the levels are correct. So, yeah, that's kind of interesting. I still don't know what this thing is, and I still don't know one nano SIM card in all mobile devices. So, they're a nano, oh, I see, okay. So, this is just a thing that they throw in so that you can have it. So, I guess if you have a nano SIM card, you can turn it into a micro SIM card or a standard SIM card. Or if you have a micro, you can turn it into a standard. So, it also says free. I hope they got it for free, because really, I honestly don't really see a use for this. But that's just me. Right, so this is the kit for this. This is a voltage output. Let's go ahead and hook this up and see what happens. So, I'm going to hook it up to, well, it just says VIN. And it doesn't actually say what VIN should be. I'm going to start, I'll bet it's probably 12 volts, but let's start with 5, just to be safe. So, I have a 5-volt supply here. There's one wire, and there's my second wire. So, now I just need some wires for this. I have a red wire, and I guess I'll be using a purple wire. All right, let's hook this up. So, a red wire is going to be the VIN. I just need a screwdriver. Let's see if this is good enough. Nope, too small, too big. You can't tighten these up too much, because the only thing holding them on are the solder pads. So, yeah, don't apply a lot of torque to this. All right, so this is a fixed 5-volt supply that I'm hooking up. So, I know that I'm not going to ruin anything. Let me just make sure VIN is connected. All right. Okay, so it's displaying 4.35 volts at .1 amp. Let's press these buttons. Nothing. Okay, well, if I press this button, this thing goes down.  It's not very quick. Yeah, it's like, it doesn't instantly respond. So, you know, you're typical, cheap, you know, somebody decided to put together a board based around a chip and, you know, wrote a program that doesn't work very well. That's typical for these sorts of things. I've got, you know, you can get like component testers that look like this. What else can you get? You can get electronic loads that look like this, and none of them are fantastic, but, you know, they're cheap and they do the job. I guess this is for this. Let's measure this. Where is my DMM? Where is my voltmeter? What did I do with my voltmeter? Losing one's voltmeter is not a good thing. All right, so it's saying .37 volts. I mean, 37 volts. Let's see what my meter says it is. Yeah, 3.665. So, if I increase this and let it choose something, 4.2 volts, close enough, is this a boost buck converter? Let's see if it's a boost converter. Wow, I'm pushing this button and nothing's happening. Okay, let's lower the voltage. Nothing is happening. Absolutely nothing. Oh, there it goes. It finally decided to respond. All right. Yeah, it looks like the most that it can do is 4.3 volts based on a 5-volt supply. I'm going to increase the supply because that's how I roll. So, I've got my other voltage input here. This one is outputting 4.8 volts. So, it looks like the maximum that we can get out is 4 volts. So, let's increase this. Yeah, okay. Let's see what happens if I... Oh, okay. I think I've reached its limit. I'm putting in about 9 volts or so, and it's saying 7.7. So, that is... Oh, wait. I can increase this even more. Okay, now it's increased to 8 volts. Let's see if I can go higher. I can. All right. Now it's stopped again. I'm putting in 12 volts. Can I increase this? Yeah. Well, that's pretty weird.  I don't know what its internal logic is, but it is outputting 10.5 volts. So, all right. It looks like we've got a buck converter. A digitally controlled... Well, a button controlled buck converter. That doesn't respond to button presses very well. All right. Well done, whoever you are. Winners, winners. Would I use this in a pinch? No, I totally would not. For one thing, you need a voltage supply to feed this. I guess a 12-volt voltage supply would do. You know, and I guess that would be something like this. And then you can hook this up to this to get whatever voltage you want.  This is compact though. And I guess it's outputting what current it is delivering. I suppose I can put a resistor in there and see, but I don't know. I don't want to break this thing. I'm still kind of puzzled as to what this is. All right. So level up apparently means voltage levels. So we've got voltage levels here. We've got, you know, I guess kind of voltage levels here. We've got voltage from here that you can get using an ATX power supply. Oh, interesting. This one has more pins. I know that there's a difference between ATX power supplies that some of them will fit on this and some of them won't. So I don't know if one is compatible with the other. It looks like it is. There are different shapes to these pins and the shapes seem to align like this. So I guess you wouldn't plug in this part. I don't know. So, and you know, one of these things, again, I still don't know what this is. I'm really puzzled, but I'm honestly, I'm not puzzled enough to plug it in because I am not in the habit of plugging USB devices into my computer is when I don't know what that USB device is. I'm sure it's fine. Ah, is this an SD card reader? There's a slot. Let's see if I can find an SD card. Yeah. Okay. Well, I've got this and that doesn't fit in here. So is it a microcard? Okay. I don't know what this is. So it's not an SD card reader. I could probably take a picture of this and do a Google image search, but I kind of like to puzzle out what it is on my own. Okay. So they did include these SIM card things, but why would, does this take a micro SIM? Well, I guess I'm going to open this up and find out. Where's my razor blade? Razor blades are the most useful thing that you can own or one of the most useful things because you can pretty much open everything with it. That's weird. Where did this come from? Yeah, you can pretty much open, you know, boxes and bags and, you know, all sorts of stuff. Here we go. It was lying right here. Let's take a look. There's a little piece of tape here holding it on. Nope. This is just a holder. Does the holder go in here? It kind of doesn't. Maybe it goes in this way. It is a SIM card holder. In fact, if you put it in this way, if you put it in this way, it looks like, yep, that's the way it goes. So this is a, I still don't know what it is. Well, I mean, if it's got a SIM card holder, then presumably this is to connect your computer to a wireless, to a mobile network, I guess, I suppose. Okay, that is kind of interesting and perhaps somewhat useful if you don't have internet access. You just pop your SIM card in here. Pop that into here if you dare. This isn't going in very well. But anyway, oh, it's already, it's already kind of cracked. Anyway, you pop your SIM card into there and presumably you get access. It's kind of a low chip count. I wonder what these chips are. Did they rub? Did they rub off the numbers? I think they did. So I don't know what this is. Well, anyway, that is Hacker Box number 39. Level up.