sort of the first criteria. So, but overall it's engagement and you could argue that attribution size is part of that engagement. You mentioned something. I think Dr. Toronto mentioned this in the presentation, but I also saw it in the submission. And it was a description of we leveraged data and analytics to identify the highest performing providers in the historical primary care referral region and then engage our PC practices in the selection of providers. So, a couple of questions there. What data are you using to measure provider performance in specific? Where do you get that data? And what is the data that you're measuring specifically about cost and then quality? And then what exactly does it mean to engage the PC practices in the selection of providers? Is it creating a network, a narrow network? Are you, I'd like to understand what you're thinking about with respect to those referrals to specialists and hospitals to identify and then steer patients towards high performers. Yeah, we use a third party platform that uses historical Medicare data. That's a care journey actually is the name of the company. So it's not too old that and then we use through their tools and our analysis. We can actually then determine how we rank our specialist in any given area by total cost of care costs per episode plus quality measures that are built into that into that data set. Quality measures. I guess I would be curious as to there's such a range of how we measure quality. So what, how do you measure quality in that data set? You know, I'd have to, I'd have to come back to you and give you an example. It would be different. Cardiology quality would be different than orthopedic quality as an example. But we can, we can get those get that and bring it back to you. Absolutely. Yeah, I'd be very curious about the data. And then what does it mean to engage the practice in the selection of what providers to use? So we work again, as Amir alluded to, we work every month with our practices. So part of one of our exercises would then be to say, let's look at the folks that we've identified as high value providers, the folks that you're already using. That's great. Let's continue to make sure that your patients continue to go there, right? Knowing that the control within the Medicare population is kind of, you don't have that much control. They can do whatever they want. But when you do make a referral, make a referral to a high value provider, they also might see folks on our list. They say, yeah, but for instance, that person's not taking new patients. We can't see that in the data. So then we would remove it or the numbers are small enough that they'd say, but I really like Dr. Jones over here in which case we would say, okay, let's figure out how we can make sure that Dr. Jones is also sort of eligible for that criteria. That being said, to your point about data, once we start getting our claims data, we can actually then continue to verify whether or not our specialists who are our high value providers who are under contract with us to work as high value providers are actually meeting their measures. And to just emphasize, whenever we get the data, we always talk to our PCP practices and a lot of times, over 90% of the time they're in agreement, the data and what our PCPs in the market say, which we find that to be very interesting that they already sort of know. And as John said to stress, we don't have the ability to narrow any network, any of our patients could go anywhere. For us, it's just the way I think about it, if my mom was going to go see an orthopod, I'd probably ask a few PCPs, who do they recommend? Maybe look at some data that I could find. It's exactly what we're doing, having this conversation. And ultimately, most of the specialists we come across are great, but there are some markets sometimes where we find specialists that are over utilizing healthcare services, strictly part of the fee for service game. And those are some of the things that we're hoping to weed out low value care is a big sort of item that we try to tackle. Fantastic. Okay, thank you. Good afternoon and thanks for coming and sharing more information about your model with us. I think it's great that you've chosen to come to Vermont. I think it's a great opportunity for us to see your approach. And it's very easy to get caught up with alternative payment models and be very concerned about risk. And what I have seen listening to you and reading what you shared with us is you look at things through a lens of opportunity and recognizing that working with even patients who are currently very sick. And panels of patients who are very sick. That's where the greatest opportunity is. And so I'm glad you're here and look forward to seeing how you do. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Hi, thanks very much for joining us. I'm Robin lunch, but on the board for about seven years. So welcome. I did have a couple of questions. So when you, so you, you mentioned several initiatives that you look at to work with your providers to ensure, for example, folks are getting their annual wellness visits, post discharge, follow up, etc. When you do you do any baseline data analytics to see are those like big issues with that practice, not really issues with that practice, or do you just kind of assume that everybody can improve there? I'm just wondering how tailored it is to that those programs are how tailored they are to the practices participating. Yeah, the data set I alluded to earlier, we actually use that to determine prior performance. So as we're engaging practices prior to the performance year, we have an idea of where they are. Absolutely. We do believe in things that are just good practice hygiene. So regardless of previous performance, we want everyone to do a wellness exam. We want everyone that's been discharged to be seen. But absolutely, you know, we may see that a practice may struggle more with readmissions and their transitions to care numbers are low. So we may prioritize that first before we do, you know, some other initiative based off their benchmark data. Absolutely. Great. And it sounds like part of your engagement with the practices can get really into the nitty gritty of things like workflow. Is that did I catch that correctly? Yeah, we have a whole team that works on workflow. And then that's sort of our population health associates that do honestly workflow and focus on the metrics. Our medical directors are more about collaborating and really try to focus on the clinical model or even individual patient care where there's opportunity to improve an outcome based on guideline directed therapy as an example. Great. Thank you. And then, lastly, I wanted to just, I guess I had two questions, but one question was around that health equity plan. It sounds like you have to have an approved health equity plan as part of this particular CMS model. I'm wondering what the status is of your health equity plan. And if that's something that you're able to share. You want to take this John or? Yeah, I'm here. I'm not sure I know where it is. Last I heard. So, yeah, I'll give that to you. Sorry. Yeah, we could definitely get back to you for more information in 2023. The health equity item that we started to work on is food insecurity. So as approved by CMS, they had us choose certain markets, certain zip codes for a pilot for food insecurity. We're working with the local CBOs and trying to identify patients in a handful of zip codes that CMS approved for us. So that's what we're doing in 23 is around food insecurity, working with food banks, you know, God's love in New York and different food banks, because we see that, you know, obviously food insecurity is directly linked to hospitalization, especially for certain diagnoses like diabetes and CHF and so forth. But that's been our focus. We're also going to be focused on top of that is transportation as well. Making sure patients are able to get rides to PCPs or specialists or so that way they don't fall through the cracks. But we'll get more information about the exact plan for. It's been approved. It's been approved, Robin, just a friend just phoned me and let me know. So yes. Call a friend is great, you know. Yeah, great. If that's something that you'd share, I'd love to learn more about what you're going to be focusing on in 2024. I think, you know, we have a lot of community oriented, social oriented programs. So I think in going back to the statutory criteria and sharing that there's not duplication and that it's additive, I think is an important consideration. That's a really important point. Sorry. That is actually always our approach. We never come in and say, hey, we have a model. Let's throw it down. We always look to see where we can apply, where there are opportunities to bolster something that's already there as opposed to rip and replace. Great. And then lastly, I met in your submission. I did see a reference to potentially promoting in home care and it wasn't clear to me whether if that was services that someone needed. If that's something that you contract with a provider to do, if that's something you have employees who do or exactly how that works. Yeah. And maybe it works differently in different places. Yeah. So absolutely. So we, you know, sometimes we come across physicians, you know, where we may flag a patient that may need to be seen and their responses. Hey, well, they're not coming into the clinic. You know, I don't do house calls. Like, what do you want me to do about it type of deal? So we've developed a home based practice. You know, we call it our priority care program where we send NPs to the home on behalf. We're not trying to replace the PCPs. We don't want to be the PCP, but in certain rare cases for that one, two percent of patients that may not be able to come in but need to be seen. We send NPs to the home. Right now it's mainly in New York, New Jersey. You know, the fact that we've spread pretty quickly in the last few years to 36 states. You know, one of the things that we are exploring is, you know, maybe we should partner with certain groups in certain markets. As of right now, we're not quite right there for Vermont due to the, you know, the geography and the low attribution, you know, to have those resources. But it's something that we're always open and looking for because we really are big believers in home care. And, you know, some patients are just not able to see their doctor and it doesn't mean that they get ignored and just go to the hospital when things flare up. Sure. That's great. I was curious about it because it seems like in 36 states, you're probably dealing with 36 different licensure issues. And as well as in this state, we have some, we have some designation issues where certain entities or the entity that can provide the services. So I was just curious if that was something you'd started tackling here or not. So thank you. I think that covers my questions. So thank you very much. Could I just ask one more quick question, Chair Foster? Yes. So just curious. I'm not particularly familiar with these practices. But I think I saw in the submission that there was 23 providers at one practice and 29 providers listed at another practice, but only 2000 attributed Medicare lives. Are there, are these all the Medicare lives from these practices or are there selected Medicare lives from these practices? We will manage all that are attributed to us. It's about 20% for both of those practices are Medicare beneficiaries. The other 80% are others. So that's why you see that large number of providers for a small number of patients. They're comprehensive clinics, so they cover a lot more lives than just the Medicare lives. Okay. That's it. Thanks. Okay. Anything from the healthcare advocate? Yes. Sorry. A little bit slow. Good afternoon. Just a couple of questions. Stand by health policy analyst with the Vermont office of the healthcare advocate. Just thank you to vitalize and the board for all your work on this just for vitalizing. I know you're new. We're a consumer advocate. So a number of our questions are going to reflect a consumer protection lens. So my first question, you talked a bit about this in your responses on page seven where you talked about your model of care. You said you encourage providers to take a more active role in their patient's health care and this aligns with what you said on your website where you compare what a typical ACO does with what you do. And one of the things that's different, I think you make a distinction that you do a lot of data analysis. And I'm wondering what type of data that do you provide? What kind of analysis do you do that a primary care doctor wouldn't already have access to or is in addition to what they do already? It typically, it's really more about utilization that's happening outside the walls of their practice. Most folks know exactly what's happening for that, you know, 15 minutes times three or four in a year. But most of the health care that's delivered to that patient happens outside. So we would surface folks who are utilizing services that perhaps based on their the acuity or their their actually disease burden may or may not need or they're just using like. So we spend time talking about folks who spend a lot of time in the emergency room as an example. A lot of times practices aren't aware that that's happening. Sometimes they know sometimes they don't. It could also be someone who's using a cardiologist frequently. I've seen doing this work where there was a patient who saw a nephrologist 52 times in a year every week and not for dialysis. So that's the kind of that's the kind of information that the primary care providers do not see if they don't without access to claim status. Yeah. And to add to that, you know, it's it's flagging things that they don't see patients, you know, we call it proactive scheduling instead of reactive scheduling. It's like, you know, these are patients you should really engage to bring in because there's a need, whether there's discharge or there's a, you know, some condition that they may be struggling with. But and and then while they're in the office is giving them certain open items, they may not be aware that this patient needs a colonoscopy. They may not be aware that there is some type of, you know, medication management that could be improved. You know, we also see a lot of physicians sometimes, you know, their level of experience ends with the residency, you know, their knowledge base and things get changed. You know, struck to know that medical information from a publication studies on PubMed doubles every 73 days. So the amount of physicians keeping up with all the new stuff is not it's not a big amount of them. So, you know, we see physicians who have patients on one therapy for COPD, even those data and studies show they would benefit from dual therapy. So things like that were also able to flag and it's a conversation. They're ultimately the decision maker. It's their patient where we just pull up the study doctor to conversation. Hey, you know, there was a study in 2011 that said patients would COPD benefit on two inhalers versus one share the study. And a lot of times it creates an aha moment for the PCP. Well, they're like, interesting. Thank you. And it gets done. So that's another reason, you know, why this is helpful. Got it. Thank you. On a different tax, I did notice that several individuals online on Google reviews submitted some negative reviews, you know, alleging that your company is a scam. You sent accepted mailings and I know you responded to a number of these and said we take these reports seriously and are taking appropriate action. I wonder if you could just speak to those reviews and what actions you took in response. Yeah. So what ended up happening there is cyber hacking. What happened is people part of identity theft scheme, they would reach out to candidates on LinkedIn pretending to be vitalized health. They would set up an interview. It wasn't a vitalized health employee. It was a third. We don't know. We filed a complaint. I don't know what happened with the investigation. But groups were posing to be vitalized health HR members recruiting. They would send fake job offers out and their goal as part of the job offers to get these candidates to submit back their name, social security, date of birth, home address. So it was a cyber identity. So that's why people started saying it's a scam because, you know, once they submit that information, they wouldn't hear from us. And they would reach out to us and we'd be like, what are you talking about? We weren't interviewing you or anyone. So it was unfortunately identity theft cyber scam that we were, you know, victimized by. Got it. Sorry to hear about that. Thank you. And I apologize for the doc in the background. In February this year, it was reported out that you secured $100 million in venture series seed funding from private equity firms. I'm wondering how you feel about in general, and if you can address the role of private equity investment in primary care and whether or not you feel like it improves health outcomes. I mean, our office is particularly concerned with affordability and access. And I'm sure you aware there have been some critical articles about the role of private equity in that space. I'm wondering if you could speak to that. Absolutely. I'd love to. So, you know, a lot of private equity or just investment groups have gotten a better up in health care. Because if you think about it, if you, you know, I know this happened a lot with the SNPs where a lot of private equity owned skilled nursing facilities. If you're operating in a fee for service landscape, you know, my opinion, not necessarily the company's opinion is I think private equity isn't necessarily the best thing because if you're just trying to squeeze the bottom line in a fee for service world. How do you do that? You cut resources and you maybe do more care that's not needed. You know, our model being in value based care, you know, we're outside of that fee for service model. We generate savings. You know, if you think about the way we generate our money, all our revenues through or our, you know, profit is through shared savings. And we have no ability to restrict care. We have no ability to change, you know, how provider groups operate, you know, on the downstream network.  So they could bring in the extra NP to, you know, have extra bandwidth to see those patients that need to be seen urgently that day. That's how we leverage our private equity money. So I personally think I don't think it's a question is private equity bad or not. I think it's a question of more along the lines of fee for service and value based care. You know, personally really view value based care is the most equitable and probably best government program we've seen to actually address the problem. We have no ability to limit any care. Any of our patients could go anywhere, see any doctor get any medication yet we're on the hook for the cost. So what we do is we work proactively to make those exchanges that are win-win-wins like sending the NP to a patient's home that may cost us $200 to deliver, you know, prescriptions care rather than ignoring that patient for two weeks and having them show up in the emergency room for a $20,000 admission. So that's all we're doing. We're always making bets on things that are win-win-wins for the provider, for the patient, and for us and the taxpayer as well. That's how we're always looking at is how many more of these exchanges can we make? Can we make sure patients are on the proper meds? Can we make sure, frankly, patients that are not getting care to make sure they get care? And a lot of our patients actually, one of the things we're proud of, our patients get 85% more PCP services than the national Medicare average. And that's how we, you know, we do what we do and generate savings. You know, it's not, you know, like all we're doing is creating the environment to facilitate a better PCP patient relationship and more touchpoint. And frankly, the cost savings come from that. Okay. Um, you recently talked about acquiring the Independent Physicians Association of New York, which is one of the largest position associations in the US through your parent organization. We want to give a similar short-term or long-term plan to acquire independent practices or associations in Vermont. You know, as of right now, so we don't have any plans, you know, so for the record that IPA we acquired in New York. We don't, they, you know, only a couple of the practices are owned to out of the hundreds that they're networked with they own. So our PCPs that we work with in line and they're still independent PCPs that own their own practices. We're not managing them. We're actually big believers and independent PCPs. The data actually shows they tend to do better from a value-based care. Fight to bet. I would have to think it's probably due to the relationship. They're probably a better relationship than maybe some of these big health, you know, systems do.  And, you know, they were in desperate space to shell and they were looking to sell some of the big national insurers and, you know, we didn't want it to get corporatized. So part of the acquisition was defensive to keep these PCPs independent in the Long Island market. Okay. I think here's a little bit of my last question. I know this is late in the day, so I appreciate your patients, everyone's patients. On your website, there's an R-results page where you highlight your engaged practices reported 38% reduction, hospital admissions, 9% cost savings, 41% reduction, ER utilization. But I didn't see any information on there. Maybe this is elsewhere. I didn't find it. So I put that on myself, but I'm wondering how that was calculated. How was that analysis conducted? I have to get back to you on that one side, but I'm not sure exactly what data is on the website to double check it. Yeah. You may have to get back to you on that with the details. Yeah. Okay. That's it for me. Back to the board. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you, Sam. Appreciate that. At this point, I guess I will open it up to public comment. Is there anybody from the public that wishes to ask a question or make a comment? Walter? Hi, Jess. Thanks. Welcome to the chair, right? Temporary. Oh, come on. As a patient in a doctor's practice, I've been getting these phone calls, like from people asking me wanting to manage my prescriptions and stuff like that. So I asked them, will you be billing Medicare for that? Of course. Is that what you guys do? One of the things, I mean? Yeah. So a lot of our services that we offer, we do not bill Medicare. So Medicare, interestingly, Walter has a rule where if it is something that they deem as a billable service, legally you have to bill Medicare, because that's how Medicare collects it. So, for example, if we do a house call, we send an NP to do a house call.  So, you know, and that's sort of required by Medicare. It's actually considered, I don't know if it's illegal or looked down upon not billing, but we do have a lot of care coordination and, you know, care coordinators that work to help get patients connected with certain things. Those type of activities we do not bill Medicare for.  Before you move on to that one, Mr. Carpenter. So we do have pharmacists. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Walter. We do have pharmacists that work with us. So they sit in in the particular space, typically in the, for folks who come out of the hospital to make sure that they get that med rec done. That's been proven to be an advantage to keep people from returning. The other thing that we would do is medication management, which I think is what you're talking about, but we wouldn't do that randomly just to make money. It would be someone who was on multiple medications and we would check with the primary care provider and say, hey, can we have this conversation and maybe reduce your medications, not necessarily add more, but deep prescribe, if you will. These folks are just calling me out of the cold blue, you know, I had one two weeks ago managing med, you know, your meds and all that, like, hmm. And when I asked the question, you know, Medicare billing, well, yeah, we'll have to. My second question is, what do you hope to get out of Vermont? You're a private equity firm, right? So you've got a lot of investors and all that. You're here in a small state. What's your purpose in being here? Yeah, could take that. So, you know, you're not here for your health. No, you know, Walter, we really believe that if we have aligned incentives, so the way, you know, we succeed, we don't succeed unless our patients succeed, unless you have a good experience, a high quality experience and we're able to lower costs. That's the way these programs are built.  That's not, we're not able to, even if we wanted to, we're not able to, that's not the way the program works. The program works by just, you know, by doing a lot of the proactive stuff. Like the example we said, you know, rather than ignoring Mr. Smith at home, who's not able to see her PCP. The PCP may have stopped prescribing the medications because they haven't seen Miss Smith in nine months, rather than this being a ticking time bomb waiting to go to the emergency room and have a high cost encounter. Since we're the party on the hook for the costs, we have teams looking at data and analytics and live data that we're getting in order to see, okay, how can we prevent this $20,000 hospitalization in a month? Okay, we could send an NP to do a $200 house visit.  But whether you talk to Mrs. Smith or Mrs. Smith's family, they're happy that she was treated at home with a simple solution rather than needing to be hospitalized for a week and exposed to, you know, hospital acquired infections. So that's what we're doing is how can we make decisions that help everyone, the PCPs, the patients, patients, family members, you know, and that's how we're always like looking at things is how do we make win, win, win, because we cannot win if our patients are losing. Patients are getting sicker, they're in the hospital, they're not having a positive experience or a low quality care. We actually lose money and we don't get paid. So I think the fact that we're aligned, patients, PCPs and us is what, you know, is what makes this model in my opinion very successful and different from a lot of governmental models that I think have their own problems. But, you know, and for us, whether it's Vermont or any other state, we view all the states the same, Medicare is a federal national program, so we don't really discriminate whether it's, you know, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, wherever there is a group that's interested in working with us and, you know, and they're willing to engage with us, we'd be willing to go there, even if that was Hawaii. We are, we are also growing our presence in New England. We have multiple practices working with us in New Hampshire. We're growing in Maine and Massachusetts as well. So it's more of a regional approach. Walter, not necessarily for Vermont, but for New England writ large. Great. Thank you. Thank you for finding your meaning of success and winning. For us, success and winning are, I guess, maybe I'm not, maybe I'm not so sure the difference between success and winning is, but what I think it is, is for us, as I said, you know, patients having a higher quality experience, great experience, lowering costs, and also our clinicians having a good experience. And that's how we all win. And ultimately the Medicare taxpayer also wins by having lower Medicare costs. And these programs, Walter, have actually been proven a cost ACO programs in general. They've saved Medicare, I believe, in the tens of billions of dollars since they started several years back. Because if you think about it, Walter, typically in the healthcare system and a fee for service world, you have no person responsible for the patient. They're just responsible for you when you're in there for Walt. But once you leave, in a lot of cases, you don't have that responsible party. But by having someone on the hook, now you have someone that's responsible to make sure that you or whoever maybe gets what they need in order to, you know, have the best possible healthcare outcome. Thank you. At this point, I think, Walter, given our late time, I'm going to just open it up to anybody else with public comments and try and wrap this hearing up. So anybody else that has a public comment or question to make? Okay. Well, at this point, I think, given our late hour, I want to thank the vitalized team for coming today and presenting this information. And also, Claudine, I know you've been behind the scenes doing all the hearing work. And to our staff and, you know, for all the hard work in preparing us for this hearing and asking great questions. So thank you very much for all of that. And we will be looking forward to analyzing this submission in the coming weeks. Is there any new business or old business to come before the board? Is there then a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. All right. All those in favor. They say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you all. Have a fantastic rest of your week and appreciate all the hard work in this submission. Thank you. Thank you very much for your time. Appreciate it.


From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and of course this year, the event is really happening globally where people are. So we're talking to Red Hat executives, their partners, and we're always thrilled when we get to talk to the customers. So joining me from Buenos Aires, Argentina, I have Maria Alejandro Trozi, who is the Deputy Manager of Solutions Architecture at Edinore. Alejandro, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thanks to you, of course. I'm pleased to be here. All right, so we know we're living in some challenging times right now. Certain things become very important. Everybody's working at home. Of course, Edinore is energy. So talk about something that is essential. You look at Maslow's hierarchy. Want to make sure, number one, everyone's healthy. And pretty soon after that, your company is making sure that things get running. So why don't we start with a little bit. Edinore, tell us a little bit about the company and your role in the organization. Yeah, of course, of course. Well, Edinore is the largest electricity decision company of Argentina with almost 5,000 employees and the 3 million customers in part of Buenos Aires City and surroundings. It represents a nine million population and we have the residential, commercial and industrial customers. So we bring electricity to homes, to schools, to hospitals, to airport and well, of course, commercial and industrial customers that are in our concession area. Excellent. Great. And Solutions Architectures, tell us a little bit about your role there for view of your group. Well, I am part of the information systems of the knowledge information direction in Edinore and as a solution architecture area, we are hoping to establish good architectures for business objectives for the business to meet their objectives in a very or in the best quality and in the best way. We are seeing how the trends, how technology moves, how industries, similar industries and companies are moving beyond technology and architectures and we try to go this way for the company. Great. So just so I understand. So is that the infrastructure piece is cloud part of the mix? Where is your connection to really the business applications? Any developers? Yes. What do you think about the org? I usually think about it as a glue, as a glue that join our pieces together. Applications, infrastructure and all the pieces that makes a solution that it involves software, but it depends on how well it depends on infrastructure, security and so on. There's an infrastructure area, a security area, a solutions area in IT too, in our IT too and architecture is one of them and we try to glue all these pieces to meet the requirements. Yeah, I love, you give that analogy of the glue bringing things together. We know the pace of technology continues to change so fast. The requirements of the business don't stand still. So bring us inside to help us understand some of the integration challenge that you're facing, what drivers of the business are causing you to evaluate what you're doing and tell us a little bit about what you're using today. Yeah, we had a lot of challenges some time ago. We had a lot of integrations running and I think that I usually see these challenges in some, several ways. The integrations that we're running and we're having trouble, we're having a lot of issues or maybe issues in data, in quality and in performance or availability too. And most of these issues were because of online transactions that maybe started to grow much more and started to add some complexity to the system platform that was almost for batch processes. So we have a huge amount of online integrations that started to be big, to be big in volume, to be critical for the business and maybe we don't have, we didn't have the right of the picture. We had to do with a lot of handcraft job with a lot of efforts behind, a lot of micro batches and so on to keep things running, but with a lot of efforts behind that. And the other ask, yeah, tell me. Yeah, just very typical challenges that I'm hearing from you. Help us understand what, how do you choose the technology partners that you're working with? It is the paradox of choice out there. There are so many companies, so many products, especially, I know you're company, you've got some DevOps pieces. I look at the DevOps tool chain today and it is more than any one person can comprehend. So how does that or approach who you integrate with and choose the various pieces? Okay, well, the center of the evaluation or the decision was integration, of course. The center of the evaluation process and the research was about integration. But we wanted an integration platform or to build an architecture, an integration architecture that could solve all of the issues that I mentioned before, all of the issues that we had, but that it could take Edenor to a next stage that prepare us for what, in that time, we could see as the future requirements. And nowadays, they are almost the actual requirements, but at that time, two years ago, we are some kind of future requirements like DevOps, microservices, APIs, and cloud, well, cloud, the cloud requirement was one of the first that we managed at IT, the new concept and for Edenor, and we had to manage all of that, some platform that prepare us for all that were coming and for a cloud or hybrid architecture. So we started our research and we found in Red Hat an excellent technology, but this is a technical aspect and the other aspects that we look for were the experience in the region, maybe there are a lot of technologies that could be great, but maybe aren't present in our region. It's not just the case of integration because integration platforms or the biggest or the best integration platforms, I think that are mostly here, but with many technologies, it could happen that maybe there are good technologies, but not with some pre-sensing in our local region. But adding that, I would say that experience in similar industries and pre-sends and most important for us, and it works really well, a supportive way of working that the company could support us, support all along the project, not just the post-implementation support, but also support for all the terms and all the learning process, all the implementation process. And we could find all of these in Red Hat, of course, that's why we chose it. Absolutely, so Alejandro, tell me where are you with the rollout of what you're using with Red Hat? What have you put into it? Give us where you are so far. Well, we started with an initial phase, pilot phase, where we chose some initial services that were not so complicated, not so complex, not so critical, but with a good sample of what we have in terms of protocols, in terms of patterns, in terms of connectors with other systems. So we started with this kind of sample of all of that and not making some changes in the way of working. It's something like, well, okay, let's go and try the technology, let's put some third services and let's learn. One of the services was not so complicated, but it has had a lot of volume, a lot of transactions. We have almost 800,000 events per day with that service and was maybe the one of the most important of that initial phase in terms of scalability. And we could test it and see the bright of the technology with that pilot. Excellent, and so what's been the result inside the organization? Has that impacted development time? Is it something that your ultimate end customers would have any positive results after you've rolled this out? Well, yes, after we started or we finished the initial pilot phase, we started another phase that consisted in, well, review all the integrations, flows and review which ones were the most critical for the business and have a lot of issues in the actual architecture. So we agreed with the rest of the teams, solutions teams and business teams as well to start to making real changes. So another initiative started that consisted in implementing agile methodologies in trying the scrum framework, for example, and we thought that it was a great combination to try new ways of working in this new phase of integration engineering. So these new services that we arrived, were about where between the outage management system, the system that manages on the technical grid frame of the electricity service and the field management system that is the system that manages all the workforce in the street, the logistics or distributes the work or the prior, in terms of priorities. So all these flow, all of these flows are synchronous or online flows. We have to send data and simultaneously just to change or to review those priorities all the time to make a user schedule and repair things better and faster. I could say that the business and I and our team would be a lot of increases in agility and speed. We could solve issues faster. For example, I learned about how teachers could flow in terms of seconds rather than in minutes and the development processes, the fix processes to have to, we could fix problems in production maybe in a day when sometimes we took weeks. So we could find things like that but with a new way of working too that could take all of the technology could bring. Excellent. Well, when you talk about integration platform, traditionally middleware sits right in the middle between the infrastructure side of the house and all the app development pieces that you have. So I'm just curious as you've rolled out the solution with Red Hat, have there been any cultural changes? One of the things we've been looking at is, can tooling help bring teams together? How much retraining do you need to do? How much fear and uncertainty is there from groups? So from an organizational standpoint, how has this gone inside of Edinor? Well, we have a few huge changes and I can mention some of them or the most important. One of them was that we have to reorganize or many teams have to reorganize their activities. Maybe it's not a structural or organizational situation but functional, the way that the teams maybe organize their activities. We started to build a team where we have a product owner, a scrum master, devs and architects from different providers, all teams and different specialties all working together in the same space and with kind of dedication, I couldn't get full dedication but yes, we agreed to dedication that could give that team the autonomy and then the communication and the collaborative space that we needed. So the teams and managers of those teams had to reorganize their activities and it was possible thanks to that, thanks to them. But the other aspect was that we have to learn the technology and learn new ways of working at the same time and it's not just to have a training, this is an important aspect but besides that, we have to incorporate all of new, this new concept. This is a difficult or the most difficult part because we could do training and take courses but that we really incorporate those new ways of working is really difficult. And we were in viewing the processes team, helping the team just to not to make a hybrid or something that is not genuine because we wanted the genuine change in the way of working just to see better results. Then maybe we could get more flexibility with time, with some level of maturity but in the first time we saw another expert tell us that it's better to attach to the pure sense of the way of working, a new way of working. So we have to incorporate all of that to make a genuine change. Great, well Alejandro, my final question actually, I want to talk a little bit about community. So you've been to Red Hat Summit before, many of the things that you were talking about and the chains that you're going through, many of the companies I talked to, of course, the vendors are going to help you. Red Hat, that their partners, if you have a channel partner, they will help you but oftentimes it is the peers in the community that are an important piece of this that you can learn from others, you can contribute back what you're learning. So the question for you is, this week we're coming together while being a part at Red Hat Summit. So tell us how you engage with the community, the importance of Red Hat ecosystem and your peers in the community around using these sorts of solutions. Well, I always said Red Hat people, or Red Hat group that are near me here in Argentina and now with the US guys that I'm really thankful of all the Red Hat community because they've made real great things and it's really amazing to see the great technology that they could build as a community, as a whole community in all the world, all around the world people contributing and coding technology and this is the biggest collaborative experience I think that we could see and we could learn of a very high collaboration, very much and very spread around the world. It's really a great inspiration for all of that, all of these, all of us. All right, well, Alejandra, thank you so much for sharing your story and all of the updates with Ed and Nor and wish you best of luck with the rest of the rollout of the projects you're working on. Thank to you for giving me this opportunity, it's a pleasure to talk to you. All right, lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.


The organization, which was founded by Monsignor Patrick Anthony, came together about 26 years ago to really and truly preserve and promote the cultural heritage of the country and our Creole language. There was a realization that they were very marginalized people. In St. Lucia, marginalized mainly because of the language, the fact that they did not speak English, and with them was dying a very rich cultural heritage. So basically what the aim of the Focusset Center was to ensure not only that these folks got a voice, but basically that their language would be understood and appreciated and developed to that point, and also that the cultural heritage which surrounds their entire existence would be preserved as something which is truly valuable to St. Lucia. We started very much in the early days going down to all the corners of St. Lucia, researching cultural practices that we didn't even know we had in St. Lucia. We did not know that they were part of us, and in so doing we discovered St. Lucia's people and communities and life, the life that gave both to us as we are now, and we can see things that we are not being taught in our education, and developing a pride and a joy in all of those discoveries and wanting everybody else to know it and beginning to understand the importance of such knowledge in our future development. The Focusset Center work right now is organized around programs in the main. We had many program areas which we collapsed a few years ago into two major program areas that's culture and education, in which we bring culture and education to formal school system and to communities, and we stimulate culture and cultural activity within that program area, and language development where we focus on the Creole language in particular, but our central work has always been around research, documentation, analysis and popular dissemination of information on our food culture. Focusset Center or this institution, as I was saying, I mean that was more or less my launching pad in the arts, really, that's where I really started, you know, all this acting thing. In fact, what I was doing is identifying these things out there and seeing how I could adapt it to stage because a lot of these things was functioning in the community so it was then my way of representing, you know, some of these things that I was dying, some of the arts that I was dying within the community, I mean making it come alive on stage. So a lot of my work, if you look at some of my work, I have a lot of influence on a lot of our traditions, you know, I mean storytelling, the way I am directly, even my acting style is very much a solution acting style. You're not aware of that but it's things, you know, I watch old men, I watch, you know, I mean communities, the storytellers within the community telling stories and the way they carry themselves, the posture, you know, I mean I learn a lot from these people. We recognize that a lot of forms are being changed, a lot of cultural expressions and cultural traditions are dying and we think it's so important for us to preserve in a way that next, the future generations can experience it as closely as possible. The Junectual falls within our language development program. It started off as a focus on our language to try and get us to understand our language and appreciate it a lot more. But then very quickly when we got into Junectual we realized that we cannot divorce language from the realities of the society itself. Okay, so the focus on Junectual started off as a focus on language. It came off focus on our people and our Creole traditions. We perceived that despite all and we developed skills and knowledge and experience in areas where a lot of our governments were not paying attention to. And when development came upon us and we were calling for, you know, experience with skills in areas like language development, our Creole language, some of the cultural forms in folk arts and so on. We would have been found wanting if the focus center had not persevered in some of the areas. So we reached a point where government and governments worked and they worked with the education, the experience, the cultural department could not ignore the tremendous experience and the resources that the focus center had developed. And you find in the last few years we have been getting lots of support. We cannot exist without the culture. I mean people ignoring it but it's something that you cannot ignore. So if you try to ignore it, it will be there confronting you every time. So I'm seeing that, look, this work will just continue. You know, it will just continue because we haven't got a choice. And some of us are gifted to do that kind of work. We cannot do nothing else. So as long as we are alive, that's what we will continue to do. You know, that's what the focus center will continue to do. That's what I will continue to do. That's what other cultural activists in this country will continue to do. The satisfaction one has working at the focus center is that you are forced to become a cultural activist.  You are forced to understand and respect people, respect language, respect cultural forms, respect indigenous habits, etc. And that's one, to me, that's one of my greatest satisfactions working here. I understand my culture better. I understand my people better. I understand my history better. And it makes you become almost a mouthpiece. It forces you to become a mouthpiece for the culture of St. Lucia and for the history of St. Lucia. I can say with confidence that we have contributed quite a bit to that change and development and attitude of St. Lucia and pride towards ourselves, our riches, our resources, our land, our culture. And that is a very, very, very significant achievement of the focus center. We haven't stopped. We've continued. We are continuing now. We are facing a new century, lots of new challenges. What we are hoping to do throughout the next millennium is to ensure that we keep our breast milk technology. We use it so that we can make the best of it to ensure that our information we have gets disseminated and that people become more and more aware. Also, we are trying in terms of language development to ensure that there is government support and government policy and we were basically assured that by the prime minister. And we are working right now on a program to present to him so that we can know what the next step is for the language in St. Lucia in terms basically of the orthography which is the writing of the language. And we are going to be pushing in that direction and to basically see that the language is respected, taught and respected as a language is understood so that we have people in St. Lucia who are not only bilingual but who also are able to write the language and therefore assign the language its place in this country.


What number are we? Number 12 12. Good. God. Well Friends welcome to give the people what they want Which comes to you sorry about that which comes to you every Friday In the evening in India in the morning in the Americas with Zoe and Prashant from People's Dispatch and me Vijay from Globe Trotter It's a pleasure to be with you as you know We're on Facebook live, but we're also of course a podcast On all the the normal platforms you can you can yes, I know I know My camera was moving around Well this week is World Social Forum it also is the World Economic Forum will come back to that because the World Economic Forum come off it What are they going to teach us now? The world is still in turmoil. There are strikes everywhere We had told you last week that on the 26th of of January Indian farmers were going to enter Delhi Prashant, what's the latest story with the Indian farmers and the struggle tens of thousands of farmers Revolting around the country. What's happening Prashant? Absolutely, it's a very critical situation right now because what we are seeing is that The I'll come to the protest of course on the 26th but what we're also seeing is that there is a very concerted attempt by the state by Right-wing forces that have an affinity to the ruling BJP to disrupt this protest to you know Unleash violence wherever possible. So around Delhi there is definitely an air of tension because there have been a number of attempts of this sort So to go back to the 26th The plan of course was that the farmers who have been camped around Delhi for over two months They reached Delhi on number 27 They set out on the 26th of November that they would enter Delhi in tractor parades And there were three parades that were planned. The roots have been decided with the permission of the police Of course the tractor rally began on the 26th morning Most of it was peaceful as per everything that had been agreed upon. It was an amazing logistical Manoeuvre so to speak considering these thousands of tractors from three different points entering a congested city like Delhi. It is a very What do you call a very remarkable logistical move one section of the farmers though did Break away from the determined and they went into the heart of the city They were confrontations with the police some of the farmers ended up at the Red Fort in Delhi Which has a lot symbolic in the pad simple symbolic significance for the people of India because of his history and stuff And they were some of them hoisted and flag religious flag on the ramparts as well now Because there's a movement. There's often, you know, people expect for this is weird understanding of where people expect Movements to sort of always be obsequious and only listen to what the authorities say There's often a lot of chaos a lot of disorder in this case There is a lot of speculation and the farmers movements have made it very clear that what happened on that day was not the plan And that there were probably some Sabotage of provocateurs who were there in that spot trying to sort of push things in that direction And people even have been identified people close to ruining BJP who were involved in that kind of activity But nonetheless, this has been used by the ruling establishment and by the media Which is especially alarming to sort of paint this picture of these protesters these protesters who have been Around Delhi for two months You know struggling for their rights against these three horrible farm laws to paint these protesters as terrorists And this has been an extremely if you look at the reporting on that day, it was Say all the TV channels the expressions range from outright, you know, branding them as terrorists On on air to this kind of shock and concern Because the farmers had actually entered the city of Delhi the people had entered their capital There was just the shock and concern and Horror and anger among the media as though, you know that the capital of the city is not for his people So that it was very disturbing aspect in the media on one side on the other hand Definitely the state seeing this is an opportunity to maybe break the farmers agitation So after the 26th for the next two days, there were reports of cases being filed You know, there was a lot of statements being made which were in that direction Yesterday that's on Thursday night. They tried to evict the farmers from This region called Ghazi poor which is on the border of Delhi in the state of Uttar Pradesh And that move seems to have backfired because the farmers leader over there Akish take care He sent out a very emotional message Talking about how he was willing to sacrifice himself to keep the protests going and this seems to have led to a fresh Resurgence the movement there are reports of mobilizations taking place all across Delhi Meetings taking place gatherings taking place calls have been given for farmers to come back some of their bull left to come back to those protests and With this suddenly that I wouldn't say the tide has turned but there's been a bit of a change in the mood So right now it's still very tense because the farmers are very clearly angry because They have been patiently waiting for two months to get a hearing and the government has not responded in a Meaningful way according to them and instead it has been branding them and all kinds of negative ways And there are right wing elements on the loose which are trying to sort of paint this as some kind of you know Anti-national activity so right now a very tense situation. It's a very significant struggle. They've got solidarity from across the country So I think in the coming days, especially for our viewers for our listeners It's very essential to keep watching India because the 26th was in some senses Maybe even a beginning for a fresh river mobilizing as well. So that's a scene right now and you know when you say watch India, of course, we are asking people to Watch follow newsclick.in for really the best coverage Directly from the front lines of the farmers struggle. It's newsclick.in The farmers of course are fighting to end to have the repeal of three outrageous laws Which you know end state intervention into the farming sector price supports and so on I just want to put Something on the table The European Union spends 65 billion dollars a year subsidizing its farmers The United States government has spent 1.7 trillion dollars over the past 20 years Subsidizing its farmers and yet it's the IMF and others that say that farmers in other parts of the world Must not receive state intervention. So the issue picked up by the Indian farmers is actually not just for Indian farmers I think, you know, we should see this as a global defense of Agriculture in the agrarian life It's not just Indian farmers revolting right now. We go over to the Americas I was reading a reported people's dispatch about Healthcare workers in Peru on strike a long strike from them Zoe, what's happening with the healthcare workers in Peru? Yeah, well healthcare workers in Peru have been on strike for the past two weeks since January 13th You know demanding really basic Really basic demands of you know quality PPE You know timely payment of salaries Peru is a country that has you know super privatized systems So for example, there are a lot of contract workers who haven't been getting their salaries on time They're also demanding. I mean above all which I think is interesting to see is more of a structural demand and increase in the budget of health of the public health sector in Peru because it currently makes up 2.4 of the GDP of the GDP of the health budget is the health budget in Peru So they're they're really demanding, you know that the state invests more in the sector which should be a pretty easy demand given the fact that we're in the middle of a pandemic and We've seen time and time after again that the public health systems are really the only Systems that are able to take care of the people that are responding To this to this crisis yet. They're still in the negotiation process. They're still I mean It's a massive massive strike and of course when health care workers go on strike. It means that You know, there's I think they always are trying to guarantee that there's a timely delivery of services But it really is putting their lives on the line To make sure that this that their demands get met and of course the demands are not just for their own personal fulfillment and betterment You know, of course having salaries is not just one's betterment, but they're really demanding that The sector be improved for all Caribbean society. So They've been on strike since the 13th. It is likely to continue and of course as we've talked about it, you know a couple months ago on the show actually proves currently in a political crisis after the parliamentary clue and so It is a structural problem in Peru of underfunding the public sectors Taking this money for, you know, the the pockets of the Congress people And so I I think it's really valiant that they're pushing this at this moment Seeing the power of People's uprisings in Peru and what that can accomplish and that hopefully hopefully they'll be able to to get this really important demand which is increasing funding for the sector and by the way another On on the same mountain chain of the Andes There's is exciting news for, you know, a country that's been similarly embroiled in neoliberal crisis and Which is Ecuador another country that has seen their public health sector be You know utterly dismantled under the over the last four years really under the government of Daniel Moreno And you know, of course the people have been waging very very strong battles against neoliberalism in the country and currently, you know As we mentioned last week the electoral race is hot and heavy and This next Sunday February 7th, you know, Ecuadorians will head to the polls and the latest Poll is saying that Andres Arauz who is the progressive candidate who is vowed to, you know, reverse all these neoliberal policies I mean, as you mentioned last week, there are some of these Policy moves that Lenny Moreno has taken, you know, are trapping Ecuador into for several years But you know where where possible Andres Arauz has Has committed to bettering the situation He has a very clear plan on how to deal with this economic crisis, which I think is really important It's not just big ideals and values of, you know Humanism, but he actually has a clear root on how to pull the country out of this crisis and he's polling in first It is remains to be seen if he'll be able to clinch the 40% that he needs To win in the first round. He's currently eight percent eight point eight percentage points away from Winning this and of course that would be amazing if he won the first round, but we'll see what happens And that will be really interesting to watch. It's happening February 7th next Sunday Yeah, I mean, this is a key election There's a series of elections on the western flank of South America this year Ecuador Peru and then in Chile and I think we'll be following each one of them with a great deal of interest and Again people's dispatch is the place to to learn about what's happening around the world what struggles You know taking place around the world. Don't forget to visit the site I wanted to talk a little bit about what's happening in Davos You know in in Switzerland where the world economic forum is meeting once again the annual meeting So rather anodine meeting once again the agenda coming out of Davos the so-called Davos agenda Seems to be basically warmed over last year's agenda. There's very little in there. That's of interest The chinese president Xi Jinping made a fascinating speech calling for a more collaboration less confrontation Including in macroeconomic policy setting of the policy agenda for countries China the one country expected to grow this year Maybe up to 7.9 percent growth, which is very high depending on how this new strain of the vaccine impacts china This year last year china grew by 2.2 percent is the estimate. We'll get the exact number later That's a fair amount of growth given that most of the world's economies You know had a narrowing had a decrease in in growth Well, growth is not the only issue the issue is of course that china has seen the Abolishment of poverty in the course of the year And so for the chinese president at Davos to talk about the need for Collaboration should be something that people welcome because it's basically the locomotive of the world economy at this time During this meeting every year oxfam the british charity releases a report on inequality every year This year's report, you know, it was expected because the evidence that oxfam accumulates is actually based a lot of it is based on Prior research that was released, but there's just something in it That made me feel ill That is that the 10 richest people on the planet earth 10 people Okay, there's I don't know what the current number is 7 billion of us on the planet earth 10 people not 10 Million not 10,000 not 100,000 whatever just 10 people that means The fingers on my hands 10 people increased their wealth by half a trillion dollars during the pandemic. I mean You know jeff bezos, of course in the lead it is just mind rattling to see what this means I was very interested inside the report to learn You know that There's a lot of details in the report. It's quite interesting One of the the places where I felt You know again quite troubled Was I didn't realize that afro descendants in brazil are 40 more likely to get covet 19 And you know the the impossibility of getting Vaccines into places like brazil and other parts of the world Is related to this 10 people making half a trillion because this half a trillion dollars Is more than you need to get two vaccinations to everybody on the planet earth I mean that's who it's stunning is just the increase of wealth would be enough to vaccinate everybody And to put paid at least to some extent To the pandemic, but you know, I mean how far are we? From this it's it's pretty extraordinary Instead of course, we don't have clarity and collaboration We have the kind of things that's going on in poland Where it's in the middle of a civic crisis, you know, I mean is this the moment to have to push a hard right agenda? I mean prashant Poland, you know people's dispatch has covered poland. Is this the time To push a hard right agenda.  What's happening in poland? Absolutely, it's it's quite disturbing as you pointed out primarily because We've covered this in one of our earlier shows as well. It was a supreme There was a constitutional court judgment in poland in october Which are basically barred abortions in case of fetal defects now Poland already has a very restrictive abortion regime It's only allowed in case of rape incest and threats to the life of the mother and fetal defects were also there until october when it was banned and This had led to mass protests in poland, of course The national women's strike Razem the leftist party there So civil society groups the entire generation of young people coming out the streets and protesting against This constitutional court judgment talking about how they had the right To autonomy the right to decide over their bodies over their sexual health and how the government had no right to do that And for a while these protests Did make an impact the government was sort of forced to go on the back foot a bit. It delayed the adoption of this judgment But what happened on venice this venice was that suddenly it was announced that The justification for this judgment would be published in the journal the government journal Which basically means it's adopted and this again spurred another fresh round of protests They have been calls for protests today tomorrow until the 31st by the national women's strike for instance and yet again, like you said this points to the sheer Absurdity of the hard right in some senses. It's not absurd. It's actually to be expected But if you look at the law and justice party government in Poland, this is part of very very long-term agenda that they've had The last time the protests broke out. We talked to our comrades in the rasem who talked about specifically this issue then The issue of abortion the issue of social conservatism Is not something that just came with this government Of course, it was a product of the post communist regime that emerged in during the communist regime abortion was legal and the post communist regime makes this Say packed with the catholic church as zofia malice said of rasem that they make this packed with the catholic church whereby, you know, they concede some of these agenda and then as time passes this agenda as further and further established from the state The law and justice party, of course, has taken this to a much much further degree in Poland Similarly in Hungary, there's a fittest party which is of a very similar Ideology, but the law and justice party has also done something very common I think our viewers across the world will recognize it which is it has massively tampered with the judicial system So starting from the constitutional court the supreme court. This is what trump has been doing This is what's happening in india in brazil in so many places You know, you sort of enact this lawfare in its various forms And the judgment we saw in october was in some sense is a culmination Of that lawfare where, you know, your entire judiciary is Taken over by the right wing across the world. They identify that this is one key place where They can, you know, hold back the progress of society hold back the progress of the ideology and thinking of Young people really who want to build a very different world. So the judiciary against serving is a very strong barrier to this the way forward it's still a bit still unclear because The what this means in immediate terms is again huge difficulties for Women in poland, of course At least 100 100 150,000 women travel outside poland every year for procedures because of the restrictions That number is probably likely to increase But what we can I think also say is that This struggle and the kind of movements it has generated for instance, national women's strike. They become a very permanent part of poland's political landscape as well and despite the law and justice party and despite its control Over the judiciary. I think that these movements will nonetheless continue to push You know their agenda push their demands on the ground until they're met You know this whole business This is grotesque. I mean honestly, it's a 21st century and I think editorializing on this issue is perfectly permissible. I mean in argentina We just saw the brave Long-term struggle people to get the right to control women to control their own bodies and you know Let's be precise about it. This is about abortion and it's it's ridiculous. It's a medical procedure It's so heavily moralized. It's not just in poland 25th of january was is celebrated in honduras is women's day zoe there was I mean Honduras, you know prashant talked about women who leave poland to go get Treatments that requires money to leave in honduras women don't have recourse to that kind of money What do they do and what are they what were they doing recently? Yeah, I mean talk about pushing hard right policies in the moment of complete complete, you know crisis And deep economic um distress You know honduras we've spoken about on the show before and we've at people's dispatch. We've covered it very closely But you know honduras has been immersed in a deep deep social political economic crisis I think really since the coup in 2009 and On january 1st, uh the national National assembly in in in honduras decided to pass a law that essentially bans abortion Uh rebanding abortion because uh honduras is one of the countries in latin america where um abortion is criminalized There's it's not legal in any exceptions women go to prison for having abortions And this this law essentially bans abortion Again and makes it almost impossible almost impossible to legalize abortion. Um And of course, why would this be the interest?  I mean we saw a couple weeks back Thousands of people leaving honduras, you know forced to to flee their homes because of this crisis But it what's interesting to point out is that after the coup in honduras one of the first things that the government did was ban misoprostol, which is uh, the you know One of the in the morning after pill also So, I mean the the the agenda against women in honduras has been there since day one this conservative agenda um And then another thing to point out is that this is a country That has some of the highest rates of violence against women So, you know, not only are women, you know forced to get abortions because of product of rape and other things when In other countries if you're raped, you do have a right to abortion in a lot of countries even in latin america where it's a lot more restricted And honduras you do not um, and so I mean estimates Say that between 51,000 and 82,000 abortions are performed in unsafe and cleansed signet conditions And we know that those conditions are condemning women to potentially death and beyond this also It's one of the countries with the highest rates of femicides Um, so really it's it's abhorrent. It's abhorrent that this kind of law would be passed in the midst of its crisis The law also Bans same-sex marriage It takes a very, you know unnecessary Hardline position and I think it's really It's it's it's horrible. Um, but the women of honduras are continuing to organize and they're continuing to push for their rights because they have always Mobilized, I mean we see there's so many Incredible honduran women that have you know stood out in the in the past decade in terms of their You know determined conviction to mobilize against the regime against this dictatorship, which is just full of You know horrible contradictions I mean this is a government whose president has been accused of of drug trafficking But in us courts in us courts has been accused of drug trafficking yet. He has he has the You know audacity to crack down on women's rights to you know Not respond to any of the horrible situations that we've seen on Development hunters over the past a couple of years So I mean it's really All of my all of our solidarity and support to the women and honduras who continue to resist Despite such, you know adverse conditions And also want to point out that the the candidate in the upcoming presidential elections Um for the libre party is a woman. Do you want to talk to us? So I'm sure we're going to be following Uh, you know her her development her candidacy and what's you know, what are the prospects and honduras for enacting change The women of honduras the women of poland both together I just want to recommend to viewers to look at the tricontinental publication corona shock and patriarchy and the reason i'm bringing it up is You know 70 percent of care workers around the world are women And when there's all this rhetoric about, you know Privileging or putting ahead essential workers and so on you're attacking the women's right to a political life Essentially, I mean i'm making the situation in honduras and poland a political question It's not just a medical question. So please take a look at that. The text is called corona shock and patriarchy um Well, you know, it's not been uh an entirely negative week because on the 22nd of january um A treaty went into force which I wrote about for people's dispatch and globetrotter Um, this is the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. It's essentially a banned treaty nuclear weapons are banned By a general assembly resolution. Of course the nuclear weapons states, uh, don't accept this and they haven't Uh, you know either sign the treaty or in fact, they they they boycotted the signing day The the the day of the vote they didn't show up So they didn't abstain they didn't they just didn't come they didn't take their seats I mean, there's a real snub at 122 countries that took a very serious decision to ban nuclear weapons um in the article I decided to go back and reflect on the writing of wilfrid burshet because He has moved people like myself is a great australian journalist who in 1945 Went over seven hour train ride from tokyo to hiroshima He was arrested as soon as he arrived in hiroshima Less than a month after the atom bomb fell on that city and while the u.s. Government in tokyo was saying that There is no After effect that the radiation dispersed, you know because the bomb explodes above the city But yet went and saw fish dying in rivers and so on and I just wanted if you don't mind to read the first Bit of of that story. He says in hiroshima 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world People are still dying mysteriously and horribly people who are uninjured by the cataclysm From an unknown something which I can only describe as atomic plague. This was written in 1945 It was headlined in the daily express as a warning to the world 1945 we are in 2021 122 countries have come together and said ban nuclear weapons Uh, and they are being pressured by the nuclear weapons states United states is pledging to spend trillions of dollars to upgrade the arsenal Has now very dangerous. Um, you know battlefield nukes You know deployed around china. Um, I really want people to pay attention to this ban treaty and to Read about it to find out about it educate others about it. You know for us as reporters We bring stories to people we bring you the story, but that's not our job Our job is to bring you the story. So you take the story to somebody else So we are asking you to take our stories uh into your own conversations with people Campaign on the stories if you feel that it's something that you can campaign or should campaign on Um, what we do is only one part of the process. We would very much like you to take the process forward Every week you join us here at give the people what they want We have a superb producer. So rangya is helpful not only in setting everything up, but also Providing the links if you watch us on on facebook live um, we very much want you to go to um People's dispatch and follow the reporting that takes place over there very much want you to do that um, but of course you'll come back Next week and join us and listen to us again on all the podcasting platforms because I mean, I know this show is chock-a-block. Somebody wrote to me recently. Is it can you make it an hour long show? I'm not sure we have the stamina for that Prashant zoey, would you like to go to an hour? I'm not very sure. I think there's just too much to talk about nonetheless Half an hour show as its own. Yeah It's a very difficult question Right. It is a difficult question zoey. You're interested in an hour long show. Are we happy with half hour? um, I'm interested in giving the people what they want. So, you know, that's uh The will of the people it's the will of the people on the other hand It's a it takes a lot of effort to bring a show like this. We are a community And we enjoy bringing it to you. We'd like you to please Tell other people about give the people what they want share our program We really do enjoy doing this You know, the nice thing about the three of us working together is that there really is no tension between us So come back next week for give the people what they want with zoey and prashant from people's dispatch And myself vj from globetrotter A group of three no tension between us not sub tension in the world. See you next week Next time


SNES DRUNK! If you're subscribed to a channel titled SNES DRUNK, then you probably already know what F-Zero is, but just in case you don't, it was a launch title for the Super Nintendo all the way back in August of 1991, in North America, anyway. And for my money, it's one of the best launch titles for any console ever, because it's so clearly demonstrated a huge leap from the NES to the SNES, and it showed it was up to the task of keeping pace with the Sega Genesis. And all it took to show that was just one glance at the screen. It's that simple. Well, now glance at this screen. Suddenly we got F-Zero with like a million other vehicles, and my mind feels like it's going to fold in on itself. This is just nuts. I love this idea, and it's a lot of fun to play. The basic idea behind this title is obvious, it's you versus 98 other racers, racing with the same vehicles, tracks, and controls as the original F-Zero. But there's plenty of modern stuff added to update the game, like, instead of getting one boost per lap, now your boost comes out of your energy meter. So not only do you have to manage the race and all this chaos, but you gotta keep one eye on your energy meter to make sure you don't boost too often, or you're done. In addition, press the R trigger to do a spin that does damage to other vehicles, but similarly, you can't just spam it constantly. You have to wait for it to refresh every few seconds and pick your spots wisely when to use it. There's also these gold pieces that bounce around all over the place, they're generated by contact between vehicles. Collect enough and press the A button as you would to boost, and if the gold meter in the upper right is filled, you'll move to a track above the action, so you'll have a better chance to gain some ground and save your energy meter. Personally, I like to use these boosts to shortcut my way past more difficult areas of the track. You'll also run into these giant gold cars occasionally, but you'll want to run into them since they give out tons of gold grickles, or whatever these are. Every other vehicle, though, you'll probably not want to run into them too often. It is very easy to crash out in this game. There's usually about 20 or 25 cars that don't make it to the end of a race. The game does give you a good incentive to take a more combative approach with your spin attack, since if you knock out another racer, that will extend your energy meter, but, uh, that's probably easier said than done. Hey, I never said I was actually good at F-Zero. It's still fun, but I think my best finish is like 20th. The game also randomly pits you against four different rivals in every race, and if you finish ahead of them, it gives you a better chance of increasing your overall rank, and you earn even more ranking points if you manage to eliminate them from the race, and it's always really satisfying if you're able to pull that off. And hey, if you have a hard time getting into this one, not to worry, you'll have plenty of chances to practice because the game doesn't waste much time getting you back into the action. I love how fast this game gets you into another race.  And if you'd rather familiarize yourself with the game in a more player-friendly setting, there is a practice mode, and for what it's worth, there's also a workshop where you can customize your vehicle, change your backdrop, and look at your lifetime stats. If you're looking for more of a challenge, there's special events on more difficult tracks, and there's a Grand Prix where the same group races four tracks in a row instead of just one. There's also a team mode that splits everyone into two different groups that go head to head, with a score for each being added up at the end, kind of like they do in Splatoon. Really, my only criticism with F-099 is that there's only like five tracks for the lowest skill levels to rotate between. Each one is voted on before each race, but I'm already at the point where I don't even care what gets picked, because I've already raced each one like a dozen times. I get why this is, it's to help separate skill levels, but as much as I appreciate the familiarity of racing old tracks, it'd be really nice if they got some new tracks on here, either bumped up from the original game, or brand new tracks just for this game. So yeah, I mean, it should be obvious to anyone who's watched any of my content that of course I'd recommend F-099, it maintains the same graphics, controls, and sound of the original while adding a ton of stuff that modernizes it for the Switch. It's really difficult. I mean, I'm already seeing tons of videos with titles like How To Get Good at F-099, and if that's what you're looking for, then you've found the wrong video because I'm not very good at this either. But that's okay because it's still a lot of fun to play. I'm only left wondering what other first-party Nintendo games could benefit from the 99 treatment, like 99 Skydivers and Pilotwings, 99 Bowser's in SimCity, or I don't know, 99 players on each team in Super Play Action Football. The original F-0 already held up well enough on its own, but F-099 is exactly the kind of creative thinking that goes a long way toward helping translate the experience to a modern audience. Definitely check this one out. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.