Extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. And now your host, Dave Vellante. We're back, welcome to theCUBE. We're here at Moscone North. This is VMworld 2015 and this is theCUBE. theCUBE goes out, we go to all our events, we extract the signal from the noise and if you want signal, you got to talk to IT practitioners. So we love that practitioner view. We have peers talking to peers at this event. 23,000 people and there's a lot of customers that are helping each other solve problems and just getting some new ideas. Jay Benson is here. He's an IT practitioner from eHealth in Saskatchewan, Canada. Jay, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks very much for taking the time to come on. Thank you, great to be here. So we were talking off camera. This is your first VMworld. It's a great event that's really evolved over the year but the core of it is the IT practitioner audience. It's a show for guys like you. So what are your initial impressions? Well, it's an impressive place. 23,000 plus people, it's phenomenal. Just the amount of people and knowledge sharing that's going on, it's learning opportunities. It's absolutely incredible. Any particular highlights for you this year? Things that you were hoping to learn or any surprises or other things that you didn't expect that you're going to take back? Well, you mentioned talking to practitioners. That's part of what I like to do is talk to others that are trying to do similar things to what we're doing and leverage that knowledge and leverage that experience and learn from others is pretty huge for me. And so looking forward to that and have engaged in a lot of that activity already. Talk about e-health. Tell us about the organization and the role there. Sure, so e-health Saskatchewan is a crown corporation within the provinces of Saskatchewan. We look after and are mandated to support the electronic health record for the provinces of Saskatchewan. So we look after essentially the medical history of all of the citizens of the province, just over a million people in terms of things like diagnostic imagery, prescriptions, immunization records, birth and death records, things of that kind in Asia, clinical encounters, so that our medical practitioners have a full history of every person's visit and journey through the health system as they work and as they move. So I interview a lot of healthcare practitioners and providers in the US and the health system here is quite a bit different. Yes, it is. And so the drivers and the pressures are all around, certainly around compliance, I'm sure you've faced many of those, but things like electronic medical records and here it's meaningful use and they demonstrate use in order to get paid. What are the drivers in Canada? It's very similar in terms of providing information and things of that nature, but as you mentioned, healthcare in Canada is government funded. And in days of reduced budgets and doing more with less, that's really the goal for all of us is to make sure that we're delivering an excellent service, a service that our practitioners use because ultimately it's about patient care but doing so in a cost-effective manner, which is one of our core drivers. We're always architecting for cost is maybe the best way to think of that as well as capability and functionality, obviously. Yeah, so those things sometimes are counterposed, but yeah, it makes your job interesting. So, all right, so let's talk about your environment, your infrastructure, the applications, just put a picture for us. Sure, so we're a single data center today and we support, as I mentioned, electronic health records for just over a million people in the province. Each of those systems that I mentioned, pharmacy, electronic records, immunization records, things of that nature are all disparate systems today, which means we do an awful lot of work around integrations. Integrations is core to what we do. There's also within the province, there's 13 individual health regions that look after a lot of their own systems too that we have to collect at a provincial level to aggregate that record for everybody, which means not only are we integrating with ourselves, we're integrating with our partners within the health sector, and that's an awful lot of work, as you can imagine. It's an awful lot of data normalization, data stewardship type issues, things of that nature that are just core required to come up with one single record for every individual person.  We are. So, I mean, can you give us a picture? Sure. How many servers, how much storage, number of VMs and all the things. So we're currently sitting at just over a thousand production machines. They're roughly a 60%, 40% split between the VMware and Intel stack and a mid-range stack. So we cover an awful lot of technology within our scenario. On the Intel side of that equation or the VMware side of that equation, we're about 90% virtualized today, 95% virtualized today, and that's just over 800 production servers, almost twice that in terms of our non-production environments between development and user acceptance testing. Okay, so obviously, so you know it's funny, we've been talking all week, we started doing theCUBE in 2010 at VMware, and then the discussion back then was, well, what percent virtualized are you? And it's like, well, I'm 30%, and I want to get to 50% by next year, all right? So you've been through that journey. So now it's like, now it's cloud and it's mobile, and so you've got a whole new set of challenges, and one of the ones that we're going to talk about here is sort of end user computing and mobile. So, and that place is huge pressure on the infrastructure by talking about traffic moving east-west instead of just north-south. Absolutely. You've got flash coming in and moving bottlenecks around and everything just, once you think you get to the end of that journey, boom, a whole new one begins. Yeah, start again. Great, so you're on a new S-curve, love it. So let's talk about sort of the end user computing piece, what you're doing. Some people call it VDI or whatever the new word is. Yeah, so we might move around a couple of things here, but fundamentally, we're working on three major projects right now. End user computing or VDI is one of those. But in order to explain that, I got to back up just a little bit. So we're also in the midst of standing up two new data centers. As I mentioned, we are single today. We're moving to a dual data center model, and the intention there is redundancy and reliability for our end users and our practitioners. So that involves a significant amount of work in terms of new equipment, new hardware, new gear, new setups, all of which is gonna run what is essentially a private cloud for the health sector within the province. And one of the core services that's gonna be offered out of that private cloud is end user computing or VDI. Okay. So there are a series of steps for us. And particularly in the end user compute space, our intention is around delivering a consistent experience for our end users. Because when it comes right down to it, Saskatchewan's a fairly large geography in terms of comparison. We're about the size of Texas, but only just over a million people, which means we're spread out across the entire province, and which means our facilities and the places where our patients go are spread out across that province. But to centralize everything in two data centers, we worry about latency, we worry about user experience. So end user computing is gonna do a couple of things for us. The biggest one is to bring those applications, bring those desktops closer to our applications within the data center, allows the power of the data center to expose that speed to our end users on the slow end of those remote links where all we're passing is screenshots for them. The other thing it does is security. As you can imagine with medical records, we're all about personally identifiable information, we're all about legislation and worrying about keeping control of that. So keeping that data within our data centers allows us that control, and but at the same time allows people to access and use it, so VDI is very key to us. So let's unpack that project a little bit. So you're putting in an end user computing solution from EMC, we had those guys on earlier this week and they were sort of describing that stack. You're in the early stages of doing that, but so what's the problem that you're trying to solve and what do you actually deploy? Sure, so I'm gonna back up a little bit in order to set some more context for you. eHouse Saskatchewan, from an IT perspective, we're also looking at moving towards a managed service provider approach for the health sector. So moving away from that traditional enterprise and more to a service delivery type of model. And one of the things that we're offering as part of that is desktop as a service, because as I mentioned, those 13 health regions that we have tend to do things in disparate ways. It's just simply because they're 13 organizations, each with their own budget, each with their own approach. What happens unfortunately though with that is an inconsistent approach, particularly around user experience, right? A lot of our practitioners tend to move between regions, which means they do things one way in one office, one thing, one way in a different facility, and that causes them angst and concern as you can imagine. So we're looking to standardize that and standardize that delivery, which will make their experience better, right? In order to do that, we had to look for a solution that would help us get down that path very quickly, and that's where EMC and the Federation and VMware came into the fore for us. You've been talking to others all week about the end user compute platform and what's happening there. For us, that was a key differentiator. It was around time to market, it was around an engineered solution that we know will work when we get there, as opposed to we could build it ourselves, we could have built it ourselves, but that's a lengthy endeavor. We figured that was 18 to 24 months minimum. We're not sure we can wait that long when it comes right down to it. The demands on us around that user experience, around some new facilities that are being built and new models of delivery within the province around efficiency and sessions following me from room to room from our practitioner standpoint, that's absolutely key, and we can't wait two years to get to that. So the time to market of this particular piece and the VMware stack that allows the orchestration and the automation and the self-serve and the cost models are absolutely imperative to us. It's just the way it needs to be. So what does that, I recall from the description of the solution, it had some flexibility in there in terms of the storage infrastructure, obviously it's UCS or the VBlock, but then the higher levels up the stack. So what did you actually, how did you compose that solution? Because it was semi-composable. If I could... Yeah, so there are some pieces that you could add or subtract as needed. We've been an EMC customer for many years in terms of our storage approach and I wanted to continue to leverage that investment. So from a storage perspective, we're very much a build our own kind of an approach here. We've made some significant investments under the new data center project around individual chunks of hardware, both compute and storage. And we decided to leave that in place. So one of the core functionality or flexibility pieces that we gained out of the UC solution was the fact that we could almost build our own and then layer the software stack on top of it. So it allows us to continue to leverage the EMC investment we've already made in terms of core storage and data replication and data redundancy pieces, layer the UCS platform on top of that from a Cisco perspective and compute, and then finally layer the VMWare software stack on top of that to get us to that point of higher virtualization, higher portability, consistent user experience and the ability to wrap automation and orchestration around all of that to make our staff and our team much more efficient. And then you're doing NSX as part of this? In a small way, yes. So you're dipping your toe in NSX? We're dipping our toes in NSX, yes. You get, again, let's squint through the market, right? NSX is gonna, damn, it's everywhere. Okay, and you talk to practitioners, they're like, yeah, you know, we're interested and we're trying it. So what's your take on NSX? Sure, we are interested. And I certainly see NSX and by extension software defined networking in our roadmap and in our go forward plans. What we're trying to do now is, as you said, just dip our toes in the water. Part of that, particularly with the end user computing solution, I mentioned two data centers that we're gonna run this out of. NSX in this case is gonna be used to help insist with the high availability of the management nodes that will control that end user experience. We wanna make sure that those nodes are available in either data center when needed and part of the engineered solution relies on NSX to do that. As we move forward, items like policy driven security, like microsegmentation, we see a lot of potential in those and expect at some point in our roadmap we will take advantage of them. Right now we're, as we said, kicking the tires a little bit and trying to see how that will actually apply in a healthcare setting. Make sure we can leverage it with some of our legacy applications that we still need to deal with. Jay, as you bring together these so-called hardware-converged solutions, whether it's hardware-converged solutions or things like NSX, which is one of the software convergence, how does your organization change or is it your sort of smaller organization and you don't have all these sort of silos of pockets of expertise centers? Is you're more looking for that solution? Can you describe that? Sure, sure. So, very much today we're a traditional IT shop as you can imagine, individual people that are there to deal with each silo or tower of technology, storage people, network people. We have expertise centers. We always talk about silos in a pejorative, but there's a good side of silos, too, is you've got expertise, you've got deep guys that really know their stuff. But yeah, they're off in their silos, that's true. And they're very good at it. And we actually have a very good team and I put them against just about anybody. But what we're seeing as part of this convergence is and more software defined is they're gonna become less a silo individual team and more of a data center services or data center operations team. And that's really the view. In fact, all of those operations teams within the organization currently report to one person. And his title is manager data center services. And that's why, is to try to drive some of those synergies so that we can leverage the expertise that these people have in a little more efficient manner. Today, the very traditional workflow of, when I request a new machine, I have to go through the steps to get the servers provisioned and the storage provisioned and the load balancers set up and the applications installed. And when it comes right down to it, our goal is to provide a better service to our medical practitioners within the province which ultimately relates to patient care. And when it comes right down to it, doing those individual steps doesn't really add that value. What I'd much rather those people doing is worrying about the availability, the reliability, the user experience that goes with that, getting the right data to the right people at the right time in the right manner. And we see automation and standardization as a way to do that. Which almost inevitably will lead to the convergence of those towers. You're embracing that automation. Absolutely. A lot of IT practitioners, I talk to, they say, yeah, we're headed in that direction but they're afraid of automation. Because I don't want to give up control. They like having the knobs and dials to turn. But are you feeling like you're through that inertia? We're a little bit early in that one yet. We're still working through some of that. Change management, organizational change management is always tough, right? And there's a lot of different ways of doing things. And you're right, control is a big thing. Most IT people like control. And control freaks for good reasons. Exactly, for very good reason. That may sound negative and it isn't, right? It's a very good point. What we are trying to do is move to more of that standard way of doing things. Which allows us to take all of the best practices that they already know and wrap it into a repeatable process so that it isn't onerous on those people to do the same job anymore. It allows us to slow down the treadmill that they're on a little bit and provide a little different value. So your justification for this EMC, you know, EUC solution was the standardization piece. Yes. Primarily. Yep. And the solution itself was differentiable and that's sort of what was the allure. Did you have to quantify all that? To a certain extent, yes. As you can imagine with any type of large investment like this, you're looking at business cases to do that and everything else. So we did spend a significant amount of time looking at how our organization operates, the services that we can provide to the rest of the health sector. And looking at particularly, again, that user experience, the security pieces and the delivery mechanisms that we have. As a fairly distributed province, we worry about latency, as I mentioned before. We spend a lot of time measuring that latency and looking at the potential impact of centralizing that application delivery out of two data centers. To try to help quantify our approach and why we're moving down this path. You mentioned it's a federation solution. Yes, it is. There's a lot of talk leading up to the show about the whole federation. I'm always interested in the practitioner's view because there's not a lot of talk on the floor about what's going on with EMC and VMware and management and all that stuff. From an IT practitioner standpoint, do you pay attention to that stuff? Do you care? Obviously, you like the federation solution. Is the federation of value to you or is it just this one point case and what are your thoughts on the whole thing? It's absolutely of value to us actually. One of the, we're all about outcomes. We're all about getting to the end of the job and when it comes right down to it, the expectation we have is that this stuff has to work and the way we see to do that is items like the federation pieces where you're taking multiple disparate technologies from multiple disparate companies and you're actually putting wrapping engineering hours around them to ensure that everything works together the way it should and the way it's supposed to and then adding on top of that a single support call which means I can avoid the normal finger pointing that you tend to get into when you have multiple vendors involved in a solution. Well, mine works, well, no, mine works. No, the problem's over there and you just don't get anything done. The fact that this is an agreed upon federation approach already with multiple organizations all driving to that same outcome is of significant benefit to us. It allows us to deal with that single support call. It allows us to have that solution built with our staff and decide them but in a manner that we know is going to work and get a significantly further down the path in a hurry as opposed to again doing it ourselves like I mentioned. Awesome, well, Jay, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was really a pleasure meeting you. You too. Sharing your practitioner knowledge with our audience. Great stuff. Great, thank you very much. You're welcome. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Moscone at VMworld 2015. Right back.


Stevenson falls today to Gettysburg, 17-3 going Clark and C. McFadden out joined by the head coach in the Mustangs, Coach Kathy Rayleigh, coach. You were playing the number one team in the country, the two-time defending champions. Given that context, what did you think of your team's effort? Effort is not an issue with us this year. We gave 100% for the full 60 minutes, no matter who's in there.   I will tell you, you know, even with a score like 17-3, I am so proud of a lot of what we accomplished today. We really executed some powerful, powerful defense.  But the puzzle pieces are there and we're so close to putting it all together. I really had some of my proudest moments today to bring that many young players up to that kind of caliber defense. I was really, really happy with that. Well, first thing I would say is happy birthday. Oh, thank you. Not today, but just. Just. 29. Looks good on you. 29 looks good on you. 22 freshmen on that field today. Having said that, Glenn and I have already looked through your stats. Clear is great. Two missed clears out of 17 or something. Right. Clear's were great. Yep. Saves were even. Both teams had nine saves. So, so many good things happening today. So many great things. You know, we worked a lot on clears and for me to have a young team that we put a plan into place and then they execute that plan. That's all a coach can ask for. Right. Being that young, you just never know when the wheels are going to come off the cart with one, two, five, six or ever. Many are out there at one time. Everybody is doing exactly what we need them to do to be great in May. And I really feel like we're going to be great in May. Yeah. The draw controls. Yeah.  What did you see and how does that improve clearly that seemed to be the biggest thing early on is that you just needed to get the ball. We needed to get the ball and one of the things that does and we'll be working with the attack with this. When you don't see the ball for a while, the attack goes into this mindset of being stagnant and we played very stagnant attack today. And we had really gotten to the point over the play days and the Salisbury game. If we were moving well, we're taking a lot of shots and I was really happy with how we were progressing with them. I think when you don't get the draw very often, those attackers that are back there are a little stagnant. They can't get into a flow and I think that that was part of our problem with scoring today. So not only are you not getting the ball, but when you do, you're flat. And so we're going to try to, I'm going to try to point that out so that we know to identify that flatness and know why that flatness occurs. And then try to counter that with really just a high sparking attacking offense. Even if we're getting the ball, you know, seven, eight times a half or having to get it off of a clear every time. I want to make sure that they're on fire when it's their turn to step up to the plate. Well, two tough ones, but two really good teams. And now you move forward right off making next Saturday. Absolutely. You know, at least it's not the number one team in the country. We are super excited to get out there and show what we can do. We have a week to prepare. We'll be able to see them in action. We're just, I'm very, very happy about so many things today.  I charged, can I give away? Yeah. No. I charged Carly Bows to play every minute that Steph Coulson played. So Steph Coulson has been tabbed the preseason player of the year. And I keep trying to tell Carly how good she is and how, you know, how, what she can do in offense. Sometimes on defense, she's the most amazing defender in the country. And sometimes on offense, she's the most amazing attacker in the country. I keep telling her that I wanted her to see that today. So I told her before the game, every minute that girl plays, you're going to play. She had goals.   I could not be more proud of how our player matched up with the preseason player of the year. Awesome. And I'm psyched to bring her up here. So, see, I did your intro today. There you go. See? So I need to, like, my paycheck. Check my mailbox. You can pay as much as I can. Thank you. Happy birthday. Thank you. We'll talk to you. Oh, thanks so much. Thanks. Catch Kathy Rayleigh now.


In the meantime, the South African government is set to call up reservists for the first time for decades as the army prepares to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers on the streets. This follows days of looting and violence that have threatened food and fuel supplies across the country. The defence minister says she has submitted a request for deployment of plus-minus 25,000 soldiers to the president.


Hey everybody! Hey everybody! Hey everybody! It's five o'clock. It's time for Watch Me Work. I'm Susan Laird Parks. We are so appreciative. We say thank you to the public theater and thank you to Howl Around, because they provide the way for the portal so that we can get together on Monday afternoons and talk about your work and your creative process. We've been doing this show for like 15 years. I tell people about it. They're like, Jesus! Good Lord! Oh my God! I'm like, yeah, we sure have. And it's just so joyful. Last week particularly was really beautiful. So we thank you guys. So we know how to do this. I'm sorry. I'm looking for my timer, which is over here. Excuse me one sec. This is what we do. We're going to set a timer for 20 minutes and then we're going to talk with you about your work and your creative process. And if you should have a question about your work or your creative process, Lolly is going to tell you how to get in touch. Go Lolly! That's right. If you have a question, if you're in Zoom with us, you can ask questions by clicking on the raise your hand button, which should be in the participants tab, likely on the bottom of your screen. If you have any trouble finding the raise your hand button, send me a private message in the chat and I will do my best to help you. If you're watching with us on the HowlRound live stream, feel free to send us your questions via the public feeders Twitter or Instagram accounts or via Watch Me Works Twitter account, which is at Watch Me Work SLP with the hashtag HowlRound. That's hashtag H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D. Fantastic. I always want to say R-O-U-N-D. That's somebody else's melody. Okay, so we've got our 20 minutes. You ready? And here we go. Righty, righty, righty. Here we are. We're back. Thanks, Lolly. So now we take, that was the work portion of our program. We're going to take some questions if anybody has any or answers or just want to look at each other's background. Hey, there's a question. Hey, Matthew. Hey, good afternoon. Happy to start everything off here. Yeah. I am continuing to work on that artwork, looking at the people in the future. And because I'd like to do this without having any dialogue being spoken by people, I realize I'm really living in a world of gestures and starting to get really up to speed with how to speak through gestures and running into just a lot of questions about how culturally specific some gestures are and how to try and speak fluently in a way that's accessible to an audience, even with gestures that don't exist in our time that are invented, but in a way that are able to reach others. Again, knowing that there may be some cultural leanings with some people so they wouldn't understand and other people would. How do I navigate that whole path? Correct me if I'm wrong. Please correct me.  There's the poetry and I actually locked that, I just got back from vacation and I'm like, thank you, I'm very excited about that. But one of the poems called Miraculous inspired an artwork, which is going to have three video panels, which will look like you're looking through a window, everything should be hopefully life-sized and they're basically on the other side of the window in the future. We, the viewers are here in the present. There are other elements to it, but ultimately it's these people in the future who get a chance to have the window to the past. Right. And they will be to whatever degree they're trying to communicate through gestures. And again, I think that my understanding is that some gestures are very culturally or regionally specific. So it could be something where people would be making a gesture and then half the people who might see this artwork would have no idea what that means. And the other half would go, oh my gosh, that's perfect. And I know you've done work where you've used gestures without any dialogue. Is there any way of moving through this? Yeah, that's a great question, Matthew. I, it's tricky. I think you actually, depending on what you want them to be communicating, you might have some actors improv and try it out. And I mean, is it, are you going to film what they do? Is it going to be captured or is it? Yes. Yeah, it'll be filmed. So you might want to, you might want to have actors try it out and see what resonates with people.  I think it's interesting at all to you sort of to supplement what is not being said to sort of give the viewer a kind of context. Right, there's actually a whole different context. There are every seven to nine seconds going to be different lines coming up, which are explaining something happening at this time.  And then that will change the future because of course everything that we do, when you think about the fact your great great great great grandparents had to have things go exactly right and then everybody passed that down to us for us to get here. Everything everybody does affects everybody to follow and so that those action steps to the present will be happening concurrently with this stuff that's happening in the future which from time to time will change because of some of these things that are happening now. So there's there's that play against it but you know in terms of what the gestures mean. I'm looking at a diverse cast who will bring in their own language of gestures. I'm assuming but in order to just broaden the palette. I had a little dictionary of body language. Just to get me started but but I'm not somebody who's familiar with working in the theater. And I've worked with actors in conjunction with my work but it's not in quite the creative way. And you're right Matthew that it's culturally specific, some people in and I mean it varies from really person to person because you can have two people from, you can say the same culture, and somebody might speak a lot with their hand, and somebody from the same culture might not speak at all with their body at all. Because that's more about maybe the way they were raised. So, I would say maybe, you know, let the actors do their thing. And, and it's funny, I would say, you know, if there's there's no way to really communicate what specifically that they're saying so I would just let the act give the actors room to just act with their bodies but not to. I don't say worry about it too much it's weird but but I, I think you, the more important it is for you to have the audience understand what specifically they're saying, then you might augment the gestures with some language.  It's fantastic, and you can't see the actors when you do a lighting queue. Okay, if I want to be honest to the actors I'm going to have to modify my idea a little bit so that my work can be appreciated in the way I wanted to be appreciated. So you might see what happens you know. Would it help to give them ideas of things to try and communicate. Definitely you can give them prompts and sure oh definitely definitely definitely. Yeah definitely and and and work with them collaboratively to see what what you guys start developing you know. Again a great project man. Thank you so much. Thank you. Looks like we have Lou up next. How was your project. How was your project last you were giving it to the publisher where you how's it going. I was giving it to my agent.  And it's still evolving it's still going. I'm still going I'm still working all the time. Trying to separate the like you talk about the marketplace versus the art of it. But I spoke to her again today. She still wants to work with me so I think it's going well. She's still you know she's still invested I'm invested so thanks. So great. Yeah, I feel the best about it, then I felt in the four years I've been working on it. And I'm going to try to ride that as long as possible and I think I only feel as good about it. Today because of how much work. I do want it like I used to see the work and it not being in the light of day as like a failure like you know it only still lived in my computer or something but. I'm sitting now that the work is making it better and richer and it actually might be a gift that nobody's wanted to run it yet because I think I'm only getting better, and I only understand more what I want to do so. Some of that's about being here with you and everybody and working so thank you for that. My question is related to my project, which inside of my project I talk a lot about my career and advertising and some of the difficulties that I faced, and being a person who couldn't be featured in the advertising, but making it. And that disconnect between having a body and a physical form that's not aspirational but manufacturing aspiration for people. And part of the journey of the story is about, is about me being in these spaces for literal decades like I worked in media for a literal decades.  And I realized that myself as a character might seem like not believable or something like like that this idea of like me as a character in these spaces saying these things about the things I saw but like where I am now I'm evolved to a point where I understand my relationship was toxic but like while I'm inside of it. I went there willingly. I went there every day on purpose. I did things. So I guess what I, maybe my question is about like solubility as a character, or my question is about flawed decision making as a character. And I think it's particularly difficult because the character is me, like the narrator of this piece. But I guess I wanted to ask you about people who make bad decisions and like how to write them with heart or how to maybe, and I think I want to ask a question that there's no answer to you which I kind of want to absolve myself from judgment from the reader for like making decisions where I put myself in these, these environments and now I'm talking poorly about them and I think if I were to read that I might be like well what the fuck are you doing there for 15 years. So this is like a little bit again I don't know the answer but I just kind of want to talk about like, when people make bad decisions in art like what, or decisions that maybe you don't serve them, like what is that dynamic like and how do you have grace for them and when you're creating them. I don't know. I think it's a great question Lou. I mean, you know for me it's like anybody who was lived, really lived should have compassion. If you, if you're really here. You know what I mean, if you're really here. You know how difficult it is, you know, if your phone and it in, and you're, or you're someone with massive amounts of privilege who unlike the Buddha, never left his parents house, you know, to go and see what the world was really like, or whatever you think of Jesus you know he left his dad's house or his parents house to almost see what the world is like yo oh it's rough. You know what I'm saying so, if you really live then you, you would have compassion for people so we might read your book or other books were, or other, we hear about people who stumble. And sure we say you know we want, we want them to get up and we want them to be perfect but we know how difficult it is to really live in the world. And I think that it sounds like what you're writing a showing is how you, yeah you went to work every day with intention and on purpose, and that was the best you could do at the time. Now you're somewhere else, you know, working to make better choices. You know, and if we want to like this you for that or whatever. You know, then we've never, we've never done anything.  We've all been there. Yeah, we've all been there. And it's really honest to say like, I've made mistakes. I'm not perfect. I had a hard time. You know, I, there was that that those that we could I didn't know all the answers for that month or that year, or decade or decade or two. And I thought, well, because, because there's all sorts of reasons why we're involved in, you know, relationships systems, you know, we sometimes we try to change things from the inside. Sometimes we figure that this is the best we can do for ourselves sometimes there are all kinds of reasons why we're in situations that aren't. I think the people who stand outside of systems and situations and just are always given it a thumbs down, or cancel this person cancel that person I feel like whoa, you know, put some years on your back.  You know, go into a meeting and see how hard that is, you know, and then you'll then you'll know that it's a lot harder to actually be in those rooms. And you're, you can't always be heroic.  So, yeah, a lot of the story is a big theme in the story is how I thought I could change things from the inside and then learned that that was. Sure. Yeah, you can't change the master's house you can't dismantle the master's house the master's tools. Sure. But with so many of us tried that I mean we're in the world. We're going to make the world a better place well. You know. Yeah, that's beautiful though. And but that's and that's that that can be a part of the book that is amplified you know I think the the narrator. If they're you know you can you can amplify that. You can come up against that kind of often touched upon situation. Which is, which is very beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thanks great question I'm glad it's gone glad you're proud of your work, because you have done the work you really been working hard and I like the nail polish. What color is it like black or dark red or what. Sorry, it's like a wine color, you know. Thank you so much. Thank you. I love it too. Very cute. Sujin me looks like they have a question. I'm asking you to unmute. Hey, so Jen. Hello, hi everybody. Hi, Susan Laurie. I have a question about. I'm at this place where I've written a bunch and it's been sitting in the drawer or in the files, if you will for a while and I'm about to apply as a cohort to this DC thing called the welders I don't know if anyone in New York has heard of it or maybe you're all over. It's been around I don't know about three iterations about nine years now and then they're doing the next generation so every three years, people apply to help self produce and I have to go through all my play babies and figure out which one do I want to open up again. And in fact, when I look at plays, I kind of see them as lovers, honestly, because you get really intimate with the world and I feel like, who do I want to sleep with again and you know it's like really hard to figure that out.  It's time to you know, get back on the apps or whatever. So I'm in this quandary, and there are a couple of new ideas I'm excited about. I haven't really fleshed it out. I've been it's been like lurking in my imagination for several years. And then of course, there's like my MFA thesis play that, you know, I haven't really gone back to, and I don't know if I was ready to write it like, I think it was like 15 years ago I wrote it. It was probably I was I was probably too close to things that happened and I wrote it too early and it was a little traumatic to write.  I think I have a better vantage point to write so that all the characters are more three dimensional and it's not like there's only one bad person, right. There's all the characters have different shades in them, right. Right. So, um, I'm wondering when you have to pick either a play child or a play lover to see again. How do you choose.  Um, what is your process and how has that been for you. And it's something that I could always switch up like we have to do applications now, but maybe in a couple of months I might not be in love with what I proposed. And so when no one's going to be like well you you know this and that so. Right. Right. That's great. Great question. Great question. So, um, you have to do the application now. Yes, like yeah, I'll get 15th is the deadline. Great she got like a month. And you have to hand you have to send them a manuscript. No you don't. It's, it's, you know you're just proposing that I could always say I have, you know, the fifth iteration of the, you know play or what have you I can count back, but you don't need to turn in something you just have to basically take a paragraph like a quick little synopsis. Okay. And then you say something about yourself as well. Yes, kind of like why do I want to apply to be a welder. It's okay I can be out of the closet about it, and I think other people. You know, whoever that's great. No, and how many do they take. They're only taking one group. So it has to be like six or seven folks, because we are going to be the, you know, the theater company kind of like a pop up your company for three years if you will. Right. So, yes. So, you're going to get in right. I hope so but the thing is we need to propose like six new works it's not just like ooh we're just going to pick one, but we're hoping that each person in our group. They'll obviously have something that they've been dreaming of or you know, wanting to work on with us. And so it's it's probably six artists with six new plays and hopefully. And then as a group you go in as a as a as a as a cohort. Okay, you did say that. Great. Okay, okay. So I would say, which, and I say, since reading rereading the plays will take too long. Okay, so how about writing all the plays on separate index cards.  Okay, and then you lay them all out on a table and you which one is most like me. You know what I mean which one feels like me the most most or which three feel most like me which are interesting, which one feels like me right. I'm not saying which one is the most personal or tells the most, you know, you know, autobiographical and saying that which one really shows myself. However, you want to define that right. That's the one I would go with the most which one I'm most excited about. And I listened when you were talking about your, your former MFA thesis you were talking about it more than the other ones. You know, like, you know, we're talking about dating, you know, you're talking about that person more, you know, I feel like I'm older now and I could go back to that and I could make something of it. That's exciting to me you know there shows that there's some interest there. But but I don't I don't know I don't know about your other projects so much. So which one gets you the, which one is most exciting to you. Because if you get in or you don't. That's the one you should work on anyway. That's the one that you should carry across the finish line. Right. Does that does that does that. That's super helpful I love this index card writing thing. That's not hard. Right, we got to make it easy.   I love it because it's crazy I love it because there are 100 characters. I love it because they're 12 songs and acrobat I don't know what you know what's got but you just kind of why you love it, why you love it so much. I think this is the first time I wrote our love it's because it's the most recent play. I love it because, you know, and, and when you get to the place where I think this one is cool because people will think it's cool. Maybe not so much. You know, maybe not so much. The ones that you really think are exciting to you. Then you then it's a win win. Right. Okay. Great. I will do the index thing and I'll just carry it around and you know when I wake up I wonder which one I'll grab like you know that kind of thing. Thank you so much that's that's that's really helpful and also lovely space I didn't know this was going on for did you say 15 years. Well, it's been a while. Yeah, well the pandemic, the lockdown made all the years do weird stuff so. Lockdown has brought us together in this in this zoom because before that we were just in the lobby of the public theater it was, you know, Milani can tell she used to call in every week. It was kind of rough. It was rubber Lin was there. Yeah, back from there we were like hanging out the lobby anyway but this is much nice. I'm just sitting in my living room. I love it and I love your guitars. Thank you so much. Thank you. Good luck with it and check back in and tell us how you're doing. Melania. Yes. Hi. I'm fine. I remember those times I remember trying to make my question as a tweet, because I did my way. And they were so long. It was one. I love this face. Yeah. Yes. And I have this question that I am. I love our group and I am listening a lot about enthusiasm. There is something about what we love what we like and trying to do that going to to the things that give us this right joy. Right. What is happening to me that long ago before doing this presentation that I gave my my work you remember the novel that I could finish and I, I show up there and I did it. There was a play that the person that I said family member from Argentina, she's an artist and she asked me about a play because she knows that they write. And I said, yes, and we began the process. It was fine. She was very happy. Everybody has read that. And I don't know what happened to me. I told you about this long ago. They didn't because they said I would love to have a play written by you and I say, yes. Right. And the process will be read something. Then this other opportunity came. I stopped that and now that process was wonderful. And then I got stuck. I couldn't go further and this other thing appeared. So I left that the first project. And now what is happening to me that the idea of coming back to that work doesn't give me a lot of enthusiasm and more that I want to do it. But I don't know if I am scared because I am stuck or it's like maybe not something that I should do right now. I don't know how to discern what to do with the project because I gave my word. I say yes. I said yes. And I, I, I like to keep my, my word now because I try to, I say yes. Right. So I don't know what is happening to me is that, and I am, I know that I am thinking about it. And it comes when I, for example, I am listening to all of you and I am learning a lot. And I could feel that that they came comes to me all the time. At the same time, I would love to write more for children. It's something that I, there is a desire there. So I don't know exactly what, how to proceed to the future is should I try this play and try to finish something at least a first draft so I can give it to this person that I love. And I promise the work. Or saying no and saying no makes me feel weird, but at the same time trying to do the work. I know it's going to be tough because I don't know how to go on. It was a wonderful beginning and then something happened and I don't know what, what it was. And I would like to know what are your thoughts about when when something doesn't give you enthusiasm but at the same time you feel that it would be good to do it, because I would like to finish that. Right, right, right, right. That's a great question Melania your question you're always so good. So let's say enthusiasm, closeness to the spirit. Right, I think that's right right okay so enthusiasm. It, it, it, it's, it's, let's just say you're a talk to start talking about dating is it's like love. Right. And God is talking about dating and dating. It's like love so some days, you feel a certain kind of love. We feel love for your partner but it's going to. Maybe you're kind of annoyed at them because they didn't clean out the bathroom or whatever. So it's like, I love you, you know, like that. And sometimes it's love because they cook your favorite dinner or something like that. I love, right. So this enthusiasm. Why don't we say it manifests itself in different ways. Sometimes it's like, oh goody I get to work on the project. Sometimes it's like yeah I really see myself as writing that kind of thing. And sometimes it's like, I really got to finish this. Maybe that's a form of enthusiasm. So, now it's much easier to go, I'm excited, you know right and excitement enthusiasm that kind of thing. This this sort of quiet, the enthusiasm of responsibility. The quiet call they're like, the work is calling to you from behind of a thick block, which could if you see it in the right way become a stepping stone. So, so how do we answer the call of enthusiasm when it is. It looks like it's being obscured by difficulty right. It's a circumstance. We, and it's great we find a way to work. Right. So, maybe we work for, I don't know, could you, could you spend 15 minutes a day with it. You know, is that, is that a possible. I mean by 15 minutes of that like you set your timer for 15 minutes, and you pick a time, you know, maybe, I don't know, first thing in the morning or what at whenever right before you launch into your bigger project, and you spend 15 minutes, just, I don't know, right, you, maybe they have a work has a special notebook and you just write your notebook about it.  Right, you just spend or let's make it let's make it 10 minutes. Let's make it easy. Right. 10 minutes a day. Sorry, they're coming to get somebody. 10 minutes a day. Right. 10 minutes a day. You just spend 10 minutes a day with this, this project. That's all inch forward. Take one little step. Right. Maybe the project shy. Maybe they're scared. Maybe they don't feel like, I don't know, they don't know what they're doing. They don't want to waste your time. I don't know whatever the reason is, you just inch toward them. So you have a project that maybe you spend an hour on a day in this project is only you spend 10 minutes on a day. Right. You know. Okay. Right. You yourself I can't hear you. Yeah, I was trying to say yes. Thank you. It's very helpful. Because you are changing my way of looking at it. It's another way of looking at it is another narrative. Right. The enemy. No, no, no, no. It's definitely not the enemy. It's probably a really deep old friend. That you just need to approach gently. And with love and care. And you don't expect the answers to come quickly. And you're working on it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's so fun because we get to, you know, again, like you said, Milani, we changed, we reframed the narrative. We changed the narrative on things. Right. Yeah. It's very, very helpful. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yay. Hey, how are you doing, Len? Hey everyone. I'm so sorry. My internet. I was just asking Len how she was. How are you doing? Oh, I can't hear you. Can you unmute yourself? I think I unmuted you. Thank God. I just wonder how you're doing. That's all. There's my voice. The beautiful background. That's so gorgeous. Oh, thank you. You know, this lovely woman who was 92. Made these back, you know, paints and made these backgrounds and, and I was just so moved by some of them. And so I keep on changing my background and putting her picture self occasionally, you know. Yeah. I love that. Yes. I'm writing every day and, and I'm focusing. You know, I went to this workshop with a woman named Natalie Goldberg. Oh yeah. Oh, she's a great writer. She's wonderful. Yeah. Just wonderful. And, um, It was very stimulating. I get stimulated by listening to other people. It gives me. Ideas. You know, I'm a little shy. I love that. Yes. I'm writing every day and, and I'm focusing. You know, I went to this workshop with a woman named Natalie Goldberg. I'm a little shy about asking, but, um, It gave me a focus on, uh, you know, Just. She constantly talks about writing practice. That is to say writing every day. And, um, And that has really, really helped me to, uh, have a continuity and it turns into a focus, you know, And so I'm ever grateful for her, her workshop. You know, And of course I love you and I'm ever great for you. You know, When is your next, can I ask you a question? When is your next play going to be done in the fall? Oh, All or this spring. No, no. Um, I have three this fall and one in the spring. Um, Top dog is going to be back on Broadway plays for the plague year is going to be at Joe's pub and Sally and Tom is going to be in Minneapolis. Wow. Wow. Wow. Top dog is going to be on Broadway. Top dog is going to be back on Broadway. Fantastic. I know it's good. I know 20 years. People. I know it's going to be, but thank you for asking. Yeah. It's going to be fun. They're all happen. It's like, I'm going to be everywhere all at once, but I feel like we can, we can keep watching work going as much as possible. Because of zoom. So we ran and the way that the public fear and how rounded kept it pulled together, which is a real gift. That's really a real blessing. Top dog again. I mean, I saw it originally is so awesome. It was just so awesome. It was like, thank you. Oh God, you can write anything. Yeah. In a room. Yeah. It was, it was amazing to me. Thank you. One of my stimulations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you. So, so I'm good. I'm good. And I'm delighted to be having continuity to my writing now. I just love you.  Well, it looks like we're at six o'clock. It's six. Oh my gosh, it's six o'clock already. We'll be back next week. We will be back next week. All of the sign up sheets are on the public theater website. So sign up and we'll see you same time, same place. Thanks everybody. Great question. Thank you.


Turned over chest. Transhumanism comic book. The surrogates by Robert Vendetti. Oh, nice. And Brett Weldell. Cool. I haven't read that one. The surrogates. This series explores the consequences of technology mediated existence and the divide between physical and virtual realities. That's very cool. On that note, transhumanism. There's one British series. I forget. Humans. Oh, yeah, yeah, this is it. Humans is a fantastic series on AI and, well, AI and transhumanism. AI and transhumanism actually covers both. So humans, it's a UK series. Fantastic. Really, that's a fantastic series. Humans, humans. Very good series. Brilliant. It's the only series that I know of that introduced two versions of AI splitting, diverging from each other, while including transhumanism. Fantastic series.


bull market, bear market. You could call a potato, potato. You could put a tomato, tomato. You could put lipstick on a pig. Whatever makes you sleep better at night, right? Price action is price action. Our opinions, again, for the multi-millionth time, doesn't mean anything. Stocks are either going to reclaim levels, defend them, and go back higher, or they're going to lose levels, confirm them to the downside to start a next leg up. And so far, what we're seeing is really, really good strong market action. If you haven't traded long enough, again, I get it. You have your opinions and this and that and the other thing, once you start trading 10, 15, 20, going on my 24th year, unfortunately, this is not my first rodeo. I've gotten caught in phases of my career that I tried to guess, tried to rationalize. Again, the market doesn't make sense. It doesn't have to make sense. It's all irrelevant. It's all price action, right? Netflix missed their numbers, but the subscribers went up. I can't believe it.  It doesn't make it. The stock is $50 high. The only thing that matters, literally matters in trading, is price action off the data.


Budget time What's up money geeks mr. V here welcome to another video guys so in today's video I want to Talk to you guys about Establishing your day trading budget. I know you're probably like a mr. V. Why do I need a budget? I mean, I'm actually trading the market. Yes, believe me You do need a budget as a day trader if you want to dabble into the space You have to be organized and one of the ways to be organized as a day trader is to have a Steady and consistent budget so before we get started guys if you're new to the channel We took about how to earn money how to save money how to invest and build wealth So if that's something that interests you go ahead and hit that subscribe button and the notification bell So you don't miss out on new content So I've been getting this question from people asking me a lot about how much is that day trading week and all that good stuff And the purpose of this video now is just going to give you an idea as to the way I approach it And I've mentioned this on the channel several times Approach day trading as a business. Don't just approach it as Oh, I'm just gonna go put some money in the market and make some profit and then take that profit and do whatever Approach it as this is a business. This is my livelihood if you approach it without mentality You would succeed, but if you just go in there's like I'm just gonna dabble in there It's just like taking $20 at a casino like I don't care if I win or I lose I just want to go out and have fun So if that's if that's the case with you then this video is not for you But if you are on the side of I want to take this serious. I want to make a consistent profit I want to make a consistent Income off of this then you have to establish a budget and so what's your day trading budget? So in my situation I've established a budget that I use to day trade so And it's a fixed amount Again, you're hoping that that amount you keep making profits. You're not losing so I'll give the example So if my budget is $10,000 in my trading account That is my base amount. So every month. That's what I start with so I start trading with that amount So if at the end of the month my account is up to $15,000 means I make $5,000 that month That's what I'm going to transfer from my trading account to my My checking account. So that's my income. So I made $5,000 and then I reset and I start with $10,000 all over again So that way, you know exactly what you're doing. You know, this is a business You have your initial investment your initial copy car, which is that $10,000 and so every month as soon as you trade You make profit, you know that you you have to reset and start again with $10,000 again If you are looking to expand your account, you want to go from maybe $10,000 you want to start investing with $15,000 That's cool The only thing you need to do is when your account gets to $15,000 and then you have to set that as your base So if at the end of the month your account is under let's say $10,000 if you start it with $10,000 Then you don't get a paycheck that month. You're broke You're not gonna make a paycheck because you didn't make any money As a matter of fact, you lose money in the market. So you don't get a paycheck. So I want you to have that mentality I want you to have that approach because it would force you to be very consistent force you to do your research force you to understand You're in your entry and your exit strategy for each trade so that way you don't lose money and again For me, like I said, if you start with $10,000 as your base as your budget for investing Every month you reset that to $10,000 you you have the possibility of granted account to 10 15 20 30 40,000 if you want to do other investments, I would advise not to do it in your trading account. I do have On Weibo, I do have a margin account and a cash account. So my cash account is where You hear some of the IPOs that I talked about here on the channel some Reviews that I do here but as far as stocks, I would buy those I can the swing trade or a whole long term In my cash account, but in my margin account, I don't hold long term I treat it. I make profit and I can take some of that profit I can transfer it to my cash account and buy stocks long term But the goal of my margin account is to day trade and to day trade only I don't mess around with it So I want you to have that consistency and it's gonna help you. So that's it for this video Let me know what you think about that strategy. Is this something that you're doing already? Or is it totally new to you as far as being able to establish a budget for yourself? And again, if you're looking to get started with investing my highly recommend Weibo and I'm gonna put the links in the description below where if you signed up on deposit a hundred dollars You get a free stock. So definitely go check them out And also if you're new to the channel, we talk about how to earn money how to save money How to invest and build wealth So if that's something that interests you go ahead and hit that subscribe button and the notification bell So you don't miss out on new content and as always guys stay motivated


Can I now ask all the presenters here today to join on the table at the top and can I now introduce our discussant Yese Lastonen who will give some reflections on the presentations so far All right. Thanks a lot David and thanks for the very insightful presentations. So I'd like to start by expanding upon something that David mentioned in the introduction I think Grins also mentioned which is say a little bit more about the Southmount policy notes So like mentioned since 2015 when the Southmount project was started at UNU Wider Kind of one fundamental piece of the project has been delivering these three-day training events to local participants in the respective countries covering the models Covering an introduction to tax-benefit micro simulation modeling in general and one of the challenges with these Training events earlier has been kind of to trying to keep participants engaged after after each training And between training events which are usually around one year apart So we wouldn't want to attend these of these events simply to forget about the models for a year after hopefully attending the next event and These policy notes with which you've seen today and there are many others as well They're kind of an innovation to help address this issue So to have the participants to work actively on the models also after its its training event And it's not just additional engagement as we saw from the presentations The policy notes also offer us a way to kind of ask the right questions questions that the local experts know are Important to their countries So in these training events which we now actually call retreats as I think Grins also mentioned We asked the participants to come up with policy ideas policy evaluation ideas where a You can actually use tax-benefit micro simulation models to evaluate them and be Notes that address questions that are actually important to the local policy debates in each country So the participants start to work in the in the retreat and then continue Working on the on the policy notes for the coming months after the after the retreat with the help of Myself and others at wider SASP and of course the national teams from which we have representatives here in the panel So, yeah, I think it's a great initiative and as you've seen It's a very interesting mixture of of notes that cover a range of policy reforms and their effects on public spending poverty and inequality among other things So I thought I'd mention a few things that I think Tied these notes together a little bit. So I think one common threat that comes up quite a bit is Targeting so not surprise not surprisingly. We've seen that if you really want to reduce poverty in a country You need to target the poor similarly, if you want to improve the welfare of Self-employed women or orphan children or older people you should really target those groups in most cases And I think these studies really highlights how policy goals can be achieved cost-effectively when targeting is done done in a proper way so you have you know more per capita support for the target group you can use less resources overall and It's also possible to design the benefits more often to promote desired behavioral Behaviors like school attendance in the case of one of the Vietnamese briefs Of course, there are some caveats or counterarguments just using this narrow Targeted benefits like the general difficulty in identifying a small group of beneficiaries Targeted benefits can also be harder to administer Sometimes politically less feasible and so on so there are these caveats that we also need to keep in mind when thinking about these benefits Another point that is relevant to the topic of the conference is that even if the targeting is successful any Effective social protection measure still requires sufficient funding sufficient revenues raised to fund it so We saw for instance from the Mozambique note that increasing the benefit amounts and the coverage Amounts of the BSSP policy. It's it can reduce poverty quite substantially same with Orphan gas transfer in Tanzania Some of the model benefits had a very large impact on poverty reduction in the country But at the same time the cost implications are are quite noticeable in those cases and these ties to what I would call Win-win reforms where changes in tax-benefit arrangements actually lead to reductions in poverty and inequality Without requiring additional public spending on net or even increasing revenues on net terms So as we saw in the note from Ghana for instance the focus was on Streamlining the little bit problematic education support policy and reallocating these additional resources to the kind of more cost-effective OLEDs benefit one of the Vietnamese notes in turn showed how a New education related benefit to minority children could be fully funded by income tax adjustments So these are some of the examples of these these type of policies that allowed for both Allowed for reduced in poverty in the revenue neutral manner and the zombie on case was also Similar not fully revenue neutral but basically also had the goal of using public resources kind of more effectively to reduce poverty and inequality and Identifying these Finvin situations basically hypothetical reforms That are favorable both from budgetary point of view, but also distributional point of view I think this is where tax-benefit micro simulation modeling really signs and it's also where I think policymakers would benefit most from the methodology So yeah, finally just another kind of a policy related point, but also a technical technical point Which is about different scenarios you've seen in many of these policy notes so In one of the well from a policy maker's point of view you want to have policy options that you can easily Compare against each other. There should be something that would make them easily comparable and In one of the Vietnamese notes for instance the one with the benefit to self-employed women The study compared three scenarios that differed by their targeting and benefit amounts But the total budget in each case was exactly the same So this makes it really easy for policy makers to kind of pick and choose based on their goals Which reform would be the most favorable? So this is something I think we should strive to do in these analysis in most cases Simply because it makes it easy to compare the findings So yeah, I think I'll leave it at that And hand it back over to David and leave the rest of questions to the floor. So thank you Thank you. Yes. I Before we open up the questions to the floor Can I ask any of the speakers so far whether they'd like to respond to any of the points that yes a has just raised? I think he is a kind of who not really raised questions, but Sort of argumented what has been done I was in this country and he tried to show again What we've been in for say that he this particular model can be really very useful in Trying to translate what people see at the macro level people talk about the economic growth Those macro variables, but you don't see what's happening on the ground. So you see It's important that we are able to show to the policy maker Especially the government people that look all this struggle in efforts to reduce the inequality and poverty Can be really achieve within? Exactly evidence-based scenarios. I think this is what he has been trying to say I think it will help a lot to have something on table to say look We talk about vulnerable in terms of example based on this does more than we have done in universal coverage There has been a big debate in that to help a lot a lot to clear and give insights They've been issue about the vulnerable individuals in the households the child grants and now we've done this often and People talk about what would be the impact of introducing different subsidies and they are quite a number of other Areas we are going to look at especially when they introduce the The fees I mean taxes of easy on communication plus the one on the I can remember we call tozo there is in communication when you use it when you call somebody and The other also taxes as well old fees So the quite a lot this model which are capable of doing to try to bring an evidence on the table of What will be the impact in one sense when it comes to welfare and inequality what that will cost government resource whether is the sort of exempted taxi or Using a public fund, but more so the kind of beneficiaries in a little bit criteria So I think he just has tried to summarize what has been doing and I'll really thank you very much You know where to come with this innovation or form Do a retreat where people Come with a policy brief because this government people are very busy Well, they're there after meeting they're going back So if you tell them in advance you people from social protection unit, what do we think is important? You people from the minister of agriculture. What do we think is important then come with the idea then you work with them They see example the new scenarios. I think that's helped a lot That is to support to what this has been saying. All right. Just just to add a few words Yes, it mentioned. Thank you and you mentioned targeting as one of the key challenges when it comes to Suggesting policy reforms and that is what makes these Particular reform. We are suggesting the update car case. You're searching in Ghana quite unique Because then the government doesn't have to disturb itself with worrying about issues of Seen to it that the targeting is quite propo because with this reform it it it kinds of on its own Delineates the poor from the From those who are actual those who can actually pay and are willing to pay. So then the government takes up just the Day cost then those who are willing to pay for the residential Moves on to pay and no one is discriminated against right? So this this is also unique way to go around the Targeting issues because currently their suggestions about government's properly targeting and Focusing on those who actually need these cost the fee Rebates and those who actually need these benefits, but the challenge has been how to Target on the government side and I think this can be a crazy targeting strategy that can be adopted by the government. Thank you Yeah Just to conquer with the other speakers. I'd like to speak also additionally about another aspect Obviously yes, I mentioned some of the important things that we're able to do But also as a member of the team working on the model the policy notes and the policy solutions also help us as teams Working on the model to also think about Some of the limitations of the model. What else can we do to improve the model? What sort of data? Can we look for because as we discuss these various ideas we then also are able to realize that the model has limitations There are certain data limitations and I think this process has been helpful for us also as teams to understand How else can we make this model work? What sort of questions are being asked? What policy questions are being asked that we might have challenges answering? And so how do we work to improve that model? What other pieces of data can we look at? How can we find these data pieces and put them into the model so that we basically Help and improve to understand Some of these are problems for example one of the challenges we had is When we looked at the the policy note that we prepared we were not able to model The administration costs which are quite huge and so the model or the presentation results will basically show that This change will be as a result of this this this reform will result in additional costs But in reality we know that the savings on the administrative costs, which we do not model In the in the model are far higher And so actually even with the new reform and the additional funding in reality the government might not be able to In the government will not need to spend additional money So it's sort of those challenges that we also face that help us to think about how best we can Improve and work on the model so that we ensure that our results are actually more effective and more convincing for the policymakers. Thank you So I just want to add some few words for the case of Vietnam And I think that the tax policy of the tax policy the reforms of tax policy is a way controls Not only in Vietnam, but also in other countries So the micro simulation comes from the household level So it can like be a good evidence base or for convincing the government to include some kind of the Evidence for the government to think of the policy adjustment So for example, it might be in the case of Vietnam. We have some some reason reforms of the tax management system So one of that is like the personal income tax that I have already presented or In one case that the forthcoming study on the Adjusting excited on tobacco is quite consul to control so And it has been last quite long time ago five six years ago in one way the producers they want to promote their productions and they want and in other side the government want to increase the revenue so What to do with the VN mode or the micro simulation is that we provide The evidence base so that to have some justification as well so conferencing for the government through some of the very specific Programs specific policy or very specific amount that can be like evidence Thank you men. Thank you everybody Okay, we we started slightly late, so I hope you don't mind if we continue for about another ten minutes Can I ask Questions on the floor and whether we have any questions online? Yes questions on the floor we have one of we any more should we take to take two questions if we've got them Okay, just a gentleman here first Could you introduce yourself say where you're from please? Thank you I'm Arnold Chinfuenbe from the Zambia Revenue Authority. That is Zambia so I'm not sure if it's more of a question or a comment, but Great presentations and I think it's it's great research obviously in what we're trying to look at Social welfare and reducing poverty But obviously when you look at the flip side of the coin There's an issue of raising those the revenues and obviously you can't just rely on grants There's the taxation aspect and if we take an example of a country like where we are in Norway The rate of personal income tax is quite high So those are factors that would probably need to be considered when we look at When we talk about the social benefits you look at the flip side of the coin on how it to affect the taxation of the individuals in those countries so now this also takes me into the targeted groups my thoughts around this With Ghana, I think because of the targeted groups. It's something that works well, but when you look at Probably Tanzania. I was thinking around instead of looking at Providing cash to the households. Are you able to convert that into another form of benefit? proposing maybe foods foodstuffs for example maybe rice a bag of rice because if you are going to provide Cash to a household that is looking after an orphan Chances are that that person might not actually benefit from that actual resource that is being taken to that so my thoughts were around that if in in the research probably there's a Way in which you can move the element of the cash transfer for the orphans Especially children instead of giving the the people that are taking care of them that's actual cash Try to find ways in which you can support They may be give them uniform for schools or pay for their school fees Do that actual benefit instead of just giving them cash and on a lighter note You might find that relatives are taking out each other's what they benefit from their resource. Thank you Thank you for that for that question before we ask the panel to answer that there's a lady of the head has a question as well Thank you. I'm Lillian Prasthair from NORAD and thank you for great presentations And a variety of examples that were really interesting to listen to so I wanted to ask about Specifically the Zambia case but a bit general where you compare a Policy that is related to distributing inputs versus cash. I mean I think it's a bit You know there this will create quite a bit of interest I think because cash is a little bit in time now but I was wondering if When making policy recommendations whether you then also have to consider effects of you know introducing cash instead of inputs when it comes to The access to these inputs for people who get cash instead I mean will it raise the price or what will happen to that? Yeah, so that was One question whether you need then to follow up or or if you can I don't know if it is possible to capture it And the other question was how And more generally to the model how The alternative Policies are selected. Is it selected together with the government to? you know to choose alternatives that are Doable or desirable from the government side Or is it more kind of based on your research design? Yeah Or both maybe Thank you very much for those two questions. Can I suggest that? Michelle, oh do you want to take the question about FISP first as that's quite specific and then the questions around? The Bates around the food packages versus cash and the issue in the process of policy reform selection is maybe a broader discussion for the panel Okay, great Yeah, so obviously It's quite interesting that we compare two programs So firstly the social cash transfer program in Zambia, which is which provides cash to households has also been running for around the same period also around two decades and This is delivered in cash to households Maybe the issues would be the difference in what the purpose is so for example The cash transfer is then meant to support the household in terms of it meeting food costs and other Living costs so whatever it is that the household needs to pay for whereas For the inputs, they are very specific and they are forming inputs. So they receive them in kind However, the challenge is and why we looked at this particular program is these inputs firstly are not produced locally in Zambia so These are imported inputs Fertilizers imported and in the last two or three years the price has been significantly high because of what has been happening in Ukraine So it's meant also that government has been had to spend far much higher There are other issues also outside the inputs that we consider for the agriculture sector I think one of the concerns from policy makers is what happens to nutrition. What happens to food production? One of the things that we look at they're not considered in the model At the point of selecting these policy reforms is we also consider what are the productivity levels? If you look at rural households in Zambia that are already receiving these inputs for farming 30% of rural households in Zambia are actually net buyers of maize because the inputs largely go into maize production So despite government giving inputs to produce maize 30% of these rural households actually end up buying maize meaning in terms of productivity There is nothing that's happening on the ground. So those are also some of the concerns that we consider So ideally instead of pushing these households to produce maize We're basically saying can we give them a cash grant that they can then use to buy food rather than Production of maize which they might not be so good at. Thank you Yes, let me attempt to attempt to the Three questions quickly as fast as there is concern. Then my friend will help as well So I understand that there is a tax fatigue And in our governments, they always tax those who are formerly which is very bad So this model allow to look for source other than tax And when we are doing for example in West of earth coverage We have so many other source outside of the tax system. It's not all about doing tax swaps So we went to the livestock market. We assume if Every for a single let's say Keto or goats you take this amount You go to a tourism. There are quite a number of transactions there. You take certain amount You go to airport assuming that the People are traveling a middle class and the they afford a lot of things So we have a range of issues where we can generate a big sum For the case of sounds a bit was even interesting because the doing this is negotiations They talk so much about zakat and the zakat. I think is Like what is it teeth in Christian and the Muslim sons bow and at nine point nine percent They give a lot and have institution and they say they give a thing to is easy 2.25% and that's the amount of money significance the issue is about the Mechanism through which that can be turned around it to be sort of social protections It's done it partly Nigeria southern Sudan most of these Arabic countries and it ends a lot of in it It's not only about tax and the in Tanzania or Kenya or other areas There is this they say syntax the casino and whatever so there are so many others other than the former one it all depends how you Implement and this is bring me to the second day beats I mean a shall we give direct money to the parents who may end up a colleague or do other things or Should have other approach and in that most of this is a transfer They are programmed other than giving that the money condition condition attending school condition attending clinic or The package you could have been in the hospital for example maternity grants and the supermarket where You only get in kindly but the man has already been paid in there So there could be many approaches to ensure that the targeted the orphaned child Or vulnerable or poor household or whatever they really get the money. I think he That's gonna be done. And the it's about it's about how you you organize in the plant that one And the last one was about the member Sure, well, should we can I ask whether and Prince and Min would like to respond to the question the ladies question about the Process through which policy reforms have been selected Yes, maybe a bit of that one like in your case. You see I just presented on behalf of the government people And this one is a good case because in this is a good in this is a group what was referred as the Intersectoral multi-sector short protections Where is the under prime minister office as heading that but people come from Minister of Agriculture Minister of Health some government departments the TASF and the vulnerability department in prime minister. So It's them they engage they came with ideas We only organize II think it through whether it can be done within the model and we let them go with some support from Some support from you wider and they come up with a policy. So this policy is really by MDS means Government means department and agents who came together under the training for the case of the one for Tanzania That said, I don't think there's much to add from Ghana because the strategy to Selecting policies is basically the same. So we don't impose any policy prescription on them is the participants who have Who have diverse background who come up with these? Policy suggestions and our role is just to to help them see whether the model can help address The questions they have in terms of policy and then essentially that helped because they come From a point of need that okay the government or the civil society Institution is interested in knowing ABC about tax social assistance How does gamut help then we help them shape things and then put this up, all right Yeah, so for the case of Vietnam's we Especially first one talk about the upcoming study first. So on the excite tax on tobacco The policy is being promoted by the government on the tax reform system so we involve in a lot of Debate and also involve in a lot of dialogue with the policy makers and also the other stakeholder of the industries we found some of the Scenarios that is being discussed or being or maybe included in the proposal to the government so by using the model we can have some better evidence or better Justifications for the government to see that if you change that kind of policy You can get how much and how much come to the household how much come to the production and how much come to others Different stakeholder. So that is like the real policy reform So not only in like the policy note the two other policy note is also comes from the ideas of the Participants from the training retreat and but actually it's still based on the very practical issues in Vietnam That you you have not yet touched upon a certain target group that need to be like Have more benefit. Yeah. Thank you Okay, I'll just finally also that these policies from from particularly from Ghana often Policies where there's much talk about it in in Normative talk, right without facts. So these Individuals are often interested in How do we get facts to contribute to this discussion? Right. So currently ongoing free research is a big talk in Ghana now, but it's all being okay out of value judgments So this helps them add some figures So some statistical basis to the suggested reforms Thank you very much So we've just about reached time now in fact just gone over for my side I just quickly reflect to my three main reflections I think both from the sessions today, but also from my in my years of work on this program with colleagues here and around the world Firstly, I mean a conference this week We've heard a lot about the importance of Simulating tax and tax reforms for generating revenue. I hope for the you'll see you'll have seen today That also there's a lot of value in in simulating the effects of benefit reforms in conjunction potentially with tax reforms For tackling poverty and inequality across the global south. I Hope you'll agree with me that and the models that you've seen presented today Demonstrate a high degree of flexibility We've heard about policy notes on issues around low-income women children in schools Orphans farmers labor constrained households. There's been work around the effect of the impact of COVID on incomes and distributions So these models have a great deal of flexibility both the modeling the effects and tax systems, but also benefits And finally a theme that has been raised a number of times over the last few days And is the importance of collaboration and I think this is a real strength of the south pod program in that There's no way we could have reached the point We are now without really strong bonds and working relationships between Our local experts on the ground in these countries Why they're ourselves that's asked for the other academic institutions, but also really importantly the participants in the training courses The people who are employed in the ministries who actually know on a day-to-day basis what these policy needs are Which we can hopefully help to support them in developing this evidence base So I'd like to thank everyone who's come today to watch I'd like to thank everybody online and find I'd like to thank our our speakers and our discussant


There have been a lot of great animated comedies over the years, such as early stuff like the Flintstones to later ones like the Simpsons that will never end. Today I break down my top 10 on this episode of Cartoon Rama. That's a working title here on Guru Hub. Right out of the gates, this list is built on a foundation of lies. I have only seen a handful of Rick and Morty episodes, but what I did watch tickled my fancy quite a bit. And based on viewer feedback that I respect more than my own children, like these fine folks, this at least had to make the top 10 spot.  Master Shake, meatwad, a floating box of fries with superpowers and a goatee make for the perfect meal. One that's not complete without a trashy neighbor named Carl to enjoy it. He's gonna melt your faces all! Dr.  It's full of danger, mystery, and a whole lot of laughs. Patrick Warburton once more steals most of the show as bodyguard Brock Sampson, fighting off some of the most hilarious villains since Dr. Evil, with The Monarch being my personal favorite.  Stop motion Mario Kart in the vein of Grand Theft Auto is not something I immediately knew I needed in my life, until I watched Robot Chicken. This show doubles down on the Family Guy pop culture jokes with great success. And the Star Wars specials continue to be something worth revisiting every single year. I have no friends. No friends.  When Family Guy creator Seth McFarland announced he was working on yet another animated comedy, I was a little leery at first. I thought he was stretching himself too thin and it would just be the same recycled humor from the previous show. While there is definitely a similar style to American Dad, this show is a far cry from a Me Too Family Guy. Archer feels like the venture brothers to me in the best way possible.  The show has a full package of offerings and I myself like a full package. Phrasing. I like most caught Family Guy during its second coming on Adult Swim. That was a sentence. The humor and funny use of animation instantly hooked me. I still catch the show on occasion and get a laugh or two from the often focusless episodes, but the first four or five seasons were just magic. Sometimes I look to a show for some good insight and clever politics, and other times I just want to see a grown man fight a chicken for five minutes. The Simpsons lost me as a viewer almost two decades ago after around season nine or ten. I believe they're coming up on the 30th season, easily the longest running show of all time at this point. Even when it loses old fans, it brings in brand new ones. There's no denying that shows like this and the Flintstones, it's not on my list, but I respect it, paved the way for animated adult comedies, and this one's still going strong. I put Futurama high up on my list for a multitude of reasons, which I will list now. It basically had two finales, showed on multiple networks, continued to put out consistently quality episodes, and wrapped up in a fantastic way for the fans. And it's another show created by Matt Groening. The guy knows how to build incredible concepts. It's also one of the rare cartoons that's not only funny, but also downright sad at times. That episode where Fry's dog Seymour waits outside that pizza place for his owner to return only to die of old age after years and years of nothing. It's heartbreaking. There are no words. There are no barks either. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are some of the funniest guys on the planet, and the proof is in the pudding. That pudding is South Park. The animation may appear simplistic, but the commentary on display is often right on the nose and at times very profound. It's pretty amazing that a show featuring a talking towel, a magical sh**, an obese kid who wants to wipe out all Jews, a man bear pig, satanic worshiping Christmas critters, Kanye West identifying as a gay fish, underpants gnomes, crab people, Rob Schneider as a carrot. Completely lost my train of thought. Oh yes, it's a smart show, dammit. And if you haven't given it a shot, jump in. Start around season four or five. That's when things really let loose. Well, there you have it. The best animated comedies of all time. I refuse to believe anybody else has a better list than I do, but I'm willing to share a couple more thoughts on Twitter. Tony Roosevelt says South Park slash Aqua Teen Hunger Force. C.A. currently goes with Teen Titans Go. I think that's a controversial pick. People were upset when Teen Titans changed its style or something. I don't know. The Aussie Hornet says Archer, South Park and Bojack. Thanks for watching Comedy Maniacs. It's a working title. It's based off Animaniacs. You get it, you're sharp.