I'm Marcia Joyner and this is Community Matters and today we are talking to a dear friend and you all know I only talk to dear friends and Kim Coco Iwamoto and we're going to talk about what is currently on the ballot. Some of you have gotten your ballots today and others will walk in on Tuesday, the first Tuesday in November. However, there are two constitutional amendments. Well, one constitutional amendment but there are two issues that deal with the constitution of the state of Hawaii. The state of Hawaii has a constitution just like the United States has a constitution. The counties have charters but those are the things that govern how the state operates. They are the things. So we have asked Kim who is an attorney and she served on the Civil Rights Commission and the Board of Education and more things than I can count. So we have asked him to clarify what is this thing that we keep hearing the ads say con amp. So what is a con amp? So I believe the ads are referring to the constitutional amendment that's being proposed that would be available to the voters of Hawaii to participate in that question and that result. So the question is generally about do we want to amend the current constitution to include a provision that says, and the question is framed like this, shall the legislature be authorized to establish as provided by law a surcharge on investment real property to be used to support public education? So that's how it is worded. That's correct. Now if it passes and I can't say whether it will or it won't, who knows. But what happens then? Let's assume that it passes. Then what happens? So to even get this question put on the ballot, it had to go through the legislature and the legislators had to agree on the language, like what they wanted to include, what they wanted to put up to the people to vote on. And then the governor, the governor, I signed off on it and so here's on our ballot. Eventually what happens, the term as provided by law means that the legislature will get an opportunity to flesh out the constitution. So generally constitutional language in general is much broader than statutory language. So the constitution says this agency has this right or this person has this right, whether it's a right to be free and a right to be treated equally, for instance. That's a very general right. And then oftentimes the legislature that comes in with some of the details or the state agencies. And then under the constitution, then we have the legislature, the statutes. And then underneath that is Hawaii administrative rules, which have the force and effect of law. And that's all the nitty gritty of lawmaking. That's like, for instance, how long somebody has, how many days somebody has to appeal a decision made by, let's say the tax branch or something. So all like when, how much a fine might be. So there's a lot of details put into Hawaii administrative rules that actually explain how the agency of the state is going to interpret the statute. And the statutes often are defined in terms, there are limitations to the constitution. So they must fit within the parameters of the constitution. So having a broad, broadly framed constitutional amendment is actually not surprising. It's actually very typical. So how will we know, how do we guarantee that this, what happens here, will actually support the schools and the teachers? And how do we know that? Yes, because it says it here. It says it in the language. It shall be used to support public education. So there's two details here. So currently our state constitution says that, yes, the state may charge taxes or surcharges, but only currently the constitution says only the counties may tax real property. So the question is, so in Hawaii's unique compared to the rest of the nation, we are the only educational jurisdiction that does not currently rely on real property. So in every other educational jurisdiction across the nation, they rely on land owners to pay for public education. So we are the only ones. And so when the constitution of Hawaii was drafted, I don't know how many of your viewers remember the Big Five, the industry, they were the biggest landowners in the state and they had a lot of influence on the original drafting of the state constitution. They wanted to make sure, right, because if you're taxing landowners to pay for public education, they were like, no, we don't want to pay for the public education of our workers. Let them pay for it out of their income tax or the general excise tax. So it was really about this kind of, in some ways, we call them Republicans. I mean, this idea of don't tax the rich, tax the people using the services, right, that's a very philosophical mindset. So it's very strange to me that a lot of the governors, former governors of Hawaii have come out against this because it's like, why would you not want to tax landowners to pay for these services? So anyway, so the current constitution says only the counties shall tax real property. So in order to be able to raise revenue from real property taxes, we need to change the constitution. There's no way you can do that. So that's the first step. So allowing the legislature to tax real property. And here's an interesting thing. The way the question is rewarded, it says investment property. Investment property is very different than a property that you live in, right? That's a residential property. That's where you live. In fact, we even have exemptions when we have property taxes. If you live in your home and you own it, you're allowed a personal exemption. So that would be not an investment property. So it's very clear in the question that it pertains limits only to investment property. The second limitation that the legislature put on this question is that it supports public education so that means that it's that money that's raised that only goes to public education. So that would take care of not just the teachers, but the deferred maintenance because I keep coming back to that one. Right. Yeah. As of 2015, the deferred maintenance and infrastructure backlog for the Department of Education was $3.5 billion. I mean, so it's really, we've been we've been neglecting public education for decades, for decades. And so this question is really an opportunity, it's a referendum on our lawmakers and our past governors that they've all been neglecting public education and the people are not accepting it anymore. So this is really opportunity to rise up and revolt against the current status quo that doesn't want to pay for this government service. But is that true in all government services? Because we are lacking in lots of government services. Oh, absolutely.  In fact, it's hard to get elected as a Republican. But we have some of them. Democratic 10 is so large that we've allowed so many Republican values to infiltrate the Democratic Party. So now we have these Democrats who are really carrying the propaganda of the Republican Party. I mean, it's kind of amazing this whole idea of let's not tax landowners, let's not raise corporate taxes. Hawaii pays one of the has charges one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the nation. I heard from somebody who works for the government, the state who told me only $76 million of our entire revenue for the state is raised from corporate taxes.  That's ridiculous because no companies are doing so well here. Look at all the huge corporate hotels here. They make they make millions of not billions of dollars and look at Costco where the highest growth in the nation, right? And Sam's Club, people corporations are making tons of money they can afford to pay higher tax more they can afford to be their fair share of taxes if the state just gave them the tax bill. And instead, you know what we do? We actually the state legislature continues to give real estate investors tax credits. Even these investors who live in other states, we're giving them tax credits and tax deductions. Why? We've been trying we've been trying to revoke that that statute that gives them this. At one point, they want to bring more investors into Hawaii. So they kind of use this carrot as an opportunity to bring in investment money. And now Hawaii is doing so well. We don't need to give them we need to be collecting taxes to pay for services, not giving them tax deductions and tax credits. There's so many industries people living leaving here. That's right. So if these big corporations are coming in, what what are they doing to keep our young people here? Well, and that's a whole cost of living analysis that but that actually raises a good point because some of the people who oppose this and I'm going to say con am if you don't mind because it's shorter than constitutional amendment. Once we understand what it is, when I say con am, I'm actually referring to the constitutional amendment. So some of the opponents to the constitutional amendment has said it's going to increase the cost of living or might increase rents for renters, which is a total fallacy. So Marcia, I'm not sure if you know this about me, but I actually am a real estate investor. I have an apartment building in the urban core near Alamona shopping center Walmart that area. And I've had it since 2004. So I have a lot of experience as a landlord investor. I can tell you right now, I don't I've never charged my rental rates based on my tax bill. That's completely ridiculous. I go on to Craigslist and I find out how much an equal like a one bedroom, for instance, in my area goes for, right, includes a parking as one bathroom. So I look for a comparison and that's how I decide what my rate is that I'm going to put out there. And if I deviate too much, if I get too greedy and I make it too high, then my apartment might stay vacant for 30 days or maybe 60 days. But if I price it really low, I might be able to get somebody in there in 24 hours. So it's up to me. So these are part of the market factors. It's never based on my tax bill. So that's one thing that people need to remember. What affects your rental rates going up, its supply and demand, right? So what happened during the, and there were times when my apartments would be empty for months, because there was a surplus of apartments, and frankly, not as many tenants out there in the market. But once the tenant, the demand goes up, like more tenants needing rentals and the supply goes up. So it's no with Airbnb and all of these short-term rental online rental sites that actually pulled housing out of the long-term market and put it into the short-term market. So there's no, there's much fewer apartments being rented to local families. So that means the supply goes down. So the demand stays the same, the supply goes down. And actually after the real estate bubble, the demand went up because people entered the rental market who were previously homeowners. So anyway, what's happened is rental rates have skyrocketed because of that. Again, nothing to do with the tax rate. We need to take a break and we'll be back in 60 seconds. And then we are going to delve into some more pieces of this constitutional amendment and all that it means or can mean. Okay, we'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. That's you. I want to know. Will you watch my show? I hope you do. It's on Tuesdays at one o'clock and it's out of the comfort zone and I'll be your host, RB Kelly. See you there. Hello, and we're back. Hi, Marcia. And today we are talking to my new best friend, Kim Coco Iwamoto. You know, Kim, I think that we sort of take it for granted that everybody knows who you are because you've been such a public figure. But tell us about Kim. Okay, well, I mean, can I speak about myself in terms of my education advocacy? Anything you would like, especially. So that's what the topic is. It's on the constitutional amendment to fund public education. So I spoke about myself as a real estate investor, right? So that's one of the roads leading to this issue. The other aspect is myself as a public education advocate. So I started in public education on the Department of Education, had a program called the Safe Schools Community Advisory Committee, and I joined that in 2004. And then it concluded in 2011. So I was on that for seven years. But in the meantime, I also ran and served on the Board of Education from 2006 until 2011. And while I was on the Board of Education, I also served on the Hawaii State Board of on the Teacher Standards Board, which certifies our teacher public school teachers to make sure that they're qualified, that the pedagogy background, the subject matter background that they're teaching. And, and I've also worked on the career technical education coordinating advisory council as a chair of that for the University of Hawaii. And that covers the, the Hara Perkins money that we get from the feds to make sure that our school, our public school and college alignment for career kinds of jobs are, are there, the structures in place. So I've more than 10,000 hours invested in public education and making sure we're doing things right in Hawaii. And I want to share with you after all of that time and all of those years, my biggest, clearest takeaway is that we have grossly and adequately funded public education in Hawaii. I mean, it's really astounding. I think I might have mentioned earlier that we have $3.5 billion or at least we did in 2015, $3.5 billion in repair maintenance and infrastructure like new buildings. That's a backlog. And we, we have the worst teacher shortage right now. And we saw it coming down the pike. We knew teachers certified teachers were going to be retiring. We just know they're aging out. So we knew we're going to have a shortage and working with the colleges of education, we know how many people are coming in. So we knew there'd be a shortage. So what's been happening is like, I think right now the current figure is one out of every three teachers teaching the DOE might not be certified or qualified to teach. And in fact, I knew, I knew back when I was on the board of education, I knew that there were Wainae and I think Nanakuli high schools, one out of every two students taking math or science, we're taking math or science from a teacher who was not qualified to teach math or science. The, me that had the pedagogy of the subject matter to teach it. So basically these kids are learning math or science from a teacher who may hate math or science. And then we turn around and we blame the students on why they might be testing a knot as well as the other. Cause Mililani, for instance, because more teachers want to teach there, they had a hundred percent of the students were taking math or science from teachers who were qualified in math and science. One of the reasons why we have such few qualified teachers in the DOE is because we're not willing to pay them. We pay, given our cost of living, the lowest salaries in the nation. Well, now, years ago, many, many years ago, they used to, the state provided housing for teachers and Nanakuli. And Wainae, in order to get them to go out there, they provided. And I understand the cottages were lovely. Right. Is there a way to do that again? You know, again, you can't just, you have to build these structures. No, I'm saying, but the idea. And so that's why I meant to explain that the root of every challenge that I've not seen across the board with public education can all be reduced to funding. Yes. But funding. Funding affects leadership because why would you want to be a principal?  What's happening is people aren't stepping up to run a school because you're running a school that may have a lot of unqualified teachers. And there's no teacher waiting behind these people. So even if you want to get rid of like a junk teacher, for instance, there may be, you know, one or two of them. Who's going to take their place? You just don't have people willing to teach because the pay is so low. I've met teachers who've been a science teacher for the GOE who then went into nursing because it paid much more. She can make $90,000. And the social status, she's not beaten up by the media every day, are people bashing our public school system. Right. She gets to have this certain level of dignity when she's working. She gets to seen as a nurse. So what do we as ordinary citizens, what do we have to do? Now, granted, we've got this constitutional amendment. And let's assume it passes. How can we now go before the legislature and guarantee that they will spend it, that they will do what we expect, what we think we're getting? Well, the first step, right, is voting for it. And I don't think we can assume that it's going to pass. But we need to tell your friend, everyone needs to vote yes on this issue and tell your friends to vote yes. In fact, if every single public school graduate and parents of public school students and every single teacher and every single spouse of a teacher voted on this yes on this constitutional amendment, it will pass. So, okay, again, back to now it goes to the legislature. What do we have to do to guarantee our representative and our state senators? That's where I'm going with that. How do we guarantee that they will do what we think? Yes. Well, it's up to us. We have to participate in our democracy. And that's always been the case. But trust me, if the voters vote for this, it sends a clear message to the legislators that we believe that public education is a priority and that they have been neglecting their responsibility. That's what this is. This question is a referendum on their negligence. Yes. I couldn't agree more. I'm just at the point where, okay, now, assume it passes. We need to watch them to stay on them. How do we know that they don't spend this money someplace else? Well, number one, so when I was on the Board of Education, we're part of, when it came to collective bargaining, as a board member, we were a part of collective bargaining along with the governor. So the collective bargaining is where the salaries are negotiated. So if we know we're paying our teachers so low that we can't get enough teachers, then we need to raise the salaries, not just the first year, but also 10 years in. We need to make sure people not only enter as a teacher, but they stay as a teacher because every year they're getting better and better as teachers, right? And for me, I think the teacher should be at the top of the pay scale and not at the bottom because they affect every student that is moving in. Every one of us had a teacher that affected us. And why they are not looked at as the heroes. And especially here, I was reading to a class in Kalihi, this is many years ago, darling little kids, and half of them did not speak English, and they sat there very sweetly and listened. And I thought about it, I was talking to the teacher, how many of them did not speak English. And these teachers do that every day, they get new kids with all these different languages and somehow they manage. And we never, ever acknowledge them for the job they do. That's heroic. Right. And 50 years ago, Marcia, 50 years ago, two elementary school teachers could buy a home together in Hawaii. That's how much they were paid and valued. And that was just 50 years ago. That's not a long time. And today, that would, they, no, there's no way that could happen. In fact, I know teachers who have second jobs because teachers, especially if they're young teachers, they have student loans, right? And so I know teachers who were working at the Sizzler Restaurant right in the same school district. So they would be serving, they would teach the family's kids during the day and they would serve them food at night at the Sizzler Restaurant because they're working two jobs. And I'm a profound believer in one job. One full-time job should be enough. I know. So, yeah. Yeah. So that's where I'm going with this, is like, should this pass, we need, there needs to be a follow-up. We need to say, okay, we've come this far, this is the next step, that we need to guarantee that this money will be spent like we think it should be. Right. So we need to support the governor in negotiating better contracts for the teachers so that, I mean, if we know that teacher pay is keeping us from having to deal with the, to ameliorate the teacher shortage, then we need to make sure that we are offering teachers enough and enough to stay in teaching, right? So that's number one. We need to empower him or her, whoever the governor is going to be, to do that, to negotiate better contracts for teachers. I saw a piece just this morning, in fact, a gentleman that is running for the Congress from West Virginia. And he was hot because he had served in the military and came home to find hungry people, homeless people. He was, so he was teaching school. And the same things you're telling us about, but this is West Virginia. He led a strike, the teachers out on strike. And I was, I was glued to watching this to think that those are the same issues. Yeah. And we, so in Oklahoma, there's not even a teacher's union. So those teachers just on their own collectively said, let's strike, we're getting paid so poorly. Again, if you take our costs of living in Hawaii, our teachers get paid less than those Oklahoma teachers. And they have a union.  They're not, they're keeping teachers in some ways from striking unnecessarily.  Like at this point, are the unions keeping the teachers in the classrooms as opposed to striking? Because if it were like Oklahoma, where there was no union, the teachers just go for it. Because they're like no one's looking out for us. In West Virginia, the teachers went out and then the other unions joined them. Right. Right. Yeah. And that's, I mean, if we all, yeah, I mean, I think that's the main, the main issue. I also want to share another detail with your viewers is that currently in Hawaii, 27% of all privately held land, it's owned by investors on the main land. Right. I mean, so that's something you need to think about. Like when you think about real estate investment property, we're talking about taxing people from the main land. And when these, so when there's a piece of land in Hawaii for sale, you have local people, locally who are bidding on things, and then you have people from the main land bidding, or maybe from other countries bidding on this land.  That's just how it is. The more crowded the market is, the more expensive that land is going to be. So when you talk about families not being able to afford Hawaii local families, it's because we're encouraging these outside investors because we charge such low real estate taxes. It's actually so cheap for them to keep the land here. Now, I want you to look in the camera over here. Yes. And I want you to tell our audience why they should vote for this amendment. Oh, well, hopefully you've been following. But mostly because it is a referendum on the neglect that public education has suffered in Hawaii for decades. We have known that this teacher shortage was coming because we've known we've been underpaying teachers. And we know that, you know, that teachers were going to be retiring. And so the cost of living is so high in Hawaii that even when we're able to recruit teachers to come to Hawaii, we can't keep them here. I want you to know that real estate rental prices will not go up because of a tax bill increase. There are much more influential factors that affect the rental rates that that renters pay more so than the property tax. I also want you to realize that when people oppose this particular constitutional amendment, that the philosophy that they're kind of adopting is one of keep landowners' profits high, keep corporations' investments high, and keep government services low. So if you subscribe to that, which I don't think a lot of Hawaii voters do, if you believe in government services, and if you recognize that public education is a service that we need to pay for, then please vote yes on this constitutional amendment. Thank you. Thank you so much. And it's a pleasure having you. Thank you, Marcia. And come back and visit with us again. Sure. Thank you. Aloha, and we'll see you next time.


Are you ready bro? Yes. Let's go. Let's go. Okay, ready? You go first. Oh, fuck! I love Kennel Publishing! Alright, good. Are you ready for the video? I see Charlotte smiling.  Welcome to this video and this one we're talking all about niches. Niches and Kennel Publishing which you should be publishing in which you should not be publishing in based on our Kennel Publishing experience. I've been publishing since 2016 I'm sitting here by the pool, by our Bali villa all paid for by book royalties. So we do know a thing or two about publishing. We've been doing it for a while published over a hundred books. About 200 now. I want to do a certain credibility in the beginning I think that's enough. But the point is like, we have a lot of experience with all these niches.  In my opinion there aren't, there are bad niches but with that said I think almost 99% of all niches are profitable. There are more profitable and less profitable but almost all of them are profitable to an extent. Let's take a step back and define what a niche is because a lot of people don't know. So there is a difference between a niche and a keyword. So a keyword is basically what a book is about is the topic of the book while a niche is like a book category a category that your book would fall under. Niche and category is the same thing Amazon calls it categories but most publishers call it niches. Can we give an analogy here? So let's say books were food. So if you were to compare book niches to food then there would be a different niche. It would be Japanese food, Mexican food. We'll do this but I think most people know what a niche and keyword is. But then within the niche of Japanese food you have sushi. Sushi would be a keyword. This is just an excuse to talk about food. So what? It's a good example. So that's the difference between niches and keywords. Keywords are more specific and I want to say I think there are a lot of shitty keywords. See that's what you were saying before. There can be worse niches but there's no niche that you can't find something good in. Like I would say Indian food is probably a bad worse niche of food. Me, my opinion. Maybe we could talk about food in the comments section. But there is some good Indian food somewhere in there. Some chicken is a good keyword with an Indian food. So let's go into the computer. Right now we're here in the Kindle bestseller store. Let me disclaimer the nonfiction part of the bestseller store. No fiction today. We will make a future video talking about nonfiction versus fiction. This video is all about nonfiction. If you've not published a book you want to know if you should do nonfiction or fiction you should definitely do nonfiction. Fiction is not for inexperienced people who have never published a book before. You can make a shitload of money with fiction but with no experience it's tough. It's very tough. We tried it in the beginning when we were not as experienced. Not the point of the video. So let me just show you guys how to get there. Kindle bestsellers search in google here. Click on this link wait for it to load go to Kindle ebooks wait for it to load again wait a little bit more for it to load. So the internet is not working very well plus it's starting to rain a little bit so we're just going to move this party.  Vogue, the wire is stuck in the table. Just bring the table. Just bring the table. No, no, no. But we will move inside out of the rain and wait until the internet works. I'm going to move this one. So we're at a new location now and before we hop into the computer I want to talk about what is it that we look for in our favorite niches. So the number one thing that I want in a niche that I'm publishing in is high demand. Like high, high, high demand. Like the very highest, right? There are three niches that we have in mind that have higher demand than any other ones out there. The big three, right? So let's tell those three are. They are business and money slash business and investing. It's called most things on Amazon. Two self-help and then three health, fitness and dieting. So these are the three niches that have by far more demand than any other niche and this is where you're going to find most of the most profitable keywords. About 80% of the best and most profitable keywords are 20% of the categories. So this, like many other things, follows the 80-20 principle also known as the Pareto principle where 80% of things come from 20% of things. That's how I like to explain it. But yeah, the reason why these three carry the majority of the best keywords is because these three categories solve the biggest problems that humans are faced with. Well, that's why they have the highest demand. That is why they have the highest demand. And those problems being people's health, which is solved within the health and fitness category, wealth, which is solved with the business and money category, and then love and happiness which would fall under self-help. So that is why. Just to give you some context as to why and not just do this. Giving you an explanation behind it. Let's actually go into the computer now and show you what these big three niches actually look like. So these are the 19 categories provided by Amazon Fiction. So this is what you could consider the 19 niches within Kindle Publishing. And right here, business and money, health and fitness, and self-help. We see the three we're talking about. So now let's just open them up and look inside of each of them. Business and money, self-help, health and fitness. So underneath business and money will be about 20 more sub-categories. Things like entrepreneurship and small business, finance, investing, marketing and sales, personal finance, real estate. There's probably no, there's not probably there is hundreds and hundreds of really high demand keywords that people are just throwing money at to learn about. And now looking at self-help, here we have about 10 additional sub-categories. Things like stress management, spirituality, self-esteem, personal transformation, motivation, memory improvement, I guess falls under self-help, happiness, creativity. Self-help is probably the most umbrella term of them all. There are so many things that fall under self-help. Anything that just helps you get better. Improves yourself as a person, improves your life, like personality, emotions, stuff like that, right? Confidence, confidence, all that stuff. And then the last one is health, fitness and dieting. And then there's a lot of random ones like addiction and recovery that those are not that bad. Not as high demand. Like health, fitness and dieting is primarily carried by diet and weight loss. And personal health, nutrition, those are all related. Yeah. But diet and weight loss will have a bunch of the best selling books within health and fitness. Now I'll say of the three niches, diet probably has the most competition at the moment, right? So I personally, I don't know about you, I personally prefer business and investing and self-help. Agreed. But diet and health is still a great niche because of how high demand it is. So actually when I got started with publishing back in 2016, I was only doing health and diet and fitness. I had like 30 books on different diets. And that alone brought me to around $10,000 a month in publishing royalties without even audio books. Just e-books and paperback books. But a lot of them actually changed since. So now I would say where we publish our most books in is now definitely business and money. Yeah. I think the reason is just that most, it seems like most other self-polishers have also been focusing on a diet niche. I guess it's a bit easier, and you know the demand is there. So I just kind of prefer to avoid that. For now, that's not to say it's not good at all. That's just a personal thing. I also know much more about the business and investing niche. That's basically all there is to say. These are our favorite and definitely the best publishing niche to get in right now. We got to hit with the magic emoji. Magic emoji. We're talking about it.  Oh, this one. This one. This one. This one. This one. Why? Why? That's why. That's why. Right there. So that's the end of the video. Thanks for watching. Comment, like, subscribe. All that goes to your free training in the description. That's what it is. And let us know what else you guys want to see.


Um Hello fair lady Welcome to the otk shareholders meeting guys. We have a lot of very exciting powerpoint presentations for you Honestly guys, I'm gonna be real like We uh, we need to talk about Good things about ourselves. Who wants to go first? I go first. Okay. I realized recently ever since I started eating healthy that I'm actually amazing I have the best content on twitch In the morning from eight till twelve. I am literally The best straight word. What are the only sure that talks in the morning exactly and the thing is I feel like I deserve more credit You know, I feel like you guys are gonna give me some more love, you know, I get to do five subs. Thank you I I expect more from you. I host it. Well, I I'm going to travel with us. You know what else I realize sometimes what I'm actually like the best gameplay streamer in otk Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's Yeah, yeah, okay. This is all right. Miss you want to start like Huh about good thing about oh Uh, one positive thing about me. Yeah, we've been brainstorming about this. Why are you on your phone? Pay attention I'm just come on then One positive thing about me. Yeah, you're gonna write that it's okay. I'll go first. I actually think that um, all right. Yeah Okay Oh, I watched every luke gobbledon's episode Wow, actually, okay. Who on week eight? Grayson Grayson is a cast member. I'm one week eight. Oh Uh, I don't remember. It was a good episode. It was it was a really good episode. Me and paul. Thank you one And it was really good. Yeah. Well here I will go next. Yeah, um, I think I work really hard and uh, I I invest a lot into what we do. I you know, I've been traveling a lot and I've been doing stuff for the org I'm with ces. I think I should get a lot of credit for You know working really hard I work harder than I work good But you know at least efforts there you go hard on the page. I do Zach, what's wrong, man?  But you want to go ahead? I actually think my hair's going back It's because you stopped streaming on your main You think that's it? Yeah, I think so. I think we're killing it. Um, yeah We're done terrible the whole thing's going down. It's burning. It's over gg Revenues are down. Everything's going terribly wrong. I've been streaming all the time though. You're streaming No one cares about that channel has been And I'm here to tell you guys I have a special announcement. Okay I quit So, uh, yeah, I quit I spent the last two years putting in 100 hour weeks helping build this empire I sacrificed weddings birthdays and funerals to hang out with you guys and try to go to your company I am sick and tired of it. I'm absolutely done. Thank you very much for the severance. The corporate accounts are all cleared I appreciate it bro.  You guys can handle it. But yeah, thank you guys I made no money this year. I lost my hands. You're gonna continue to make no money. All right. Congratulations guys I appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time. I'll see you guys at offline tv piece You were screwed. Huh? What do we do now? We just get rid of one of the chairs. Well, somebody else says I think why are you looking? Okay? Why are you looking at me? Someone has to take you Oh, okay. So the guy who looks the most like tips now has to take tips Yeah We just loaded up We are on the up and up, okay Jesus What's up guys Willis a man, what's up, dude? Do some work Jackets I'm telling you I have like lost energy. Yeah, you have to let him know you have to assert no authority You gotta let him know son. That's right Our next person we're gonna be bringing on stage is none other than the great man himself s-fant Taking away guys My name is s-fant And welcome to loot goblins. Okay. I have a couple things to talk about today and Obviously surrounding otk. I do want to say one thing we have Changed the content space otk game day schooled both phenomenal shows Nobody does it at the level we do and of course Loot goblins, but now It's time For a new level. It's time for us to take it The next step The metaverse Oh god Metaverse, metaverse, metaverse, metaverse, metaverse. Yeah! Metaverse, metaverse, metaverse, metaverse, metaverse, metaverse! Yeah! Metaverse! Guys, the metaverse where you can imagine anything you want to be and you can be that. Why should I have to go to meetings when I can just pop on a headset and I can see everybody that I know right there in person. I can hear them, but I can see them. I can see their avatars in person, but not really. Metaverse! Woo! Now, it's not just for VR meetings. Imagine a world. Imagine a world where you can imagine literally anything you want. You can be anything you want to be. You can be the best version of yourself and, you know, everybody's been talking about metaverse. But why stop there? Ladies and gentlemen, I want to present to you the Gigaverse. All right! You can be the best version of yourself by just imagining it. That's right. Yes, Steve, you can be the best version of yourself. I'm already amazing. I don't have to do any extra work. You don't have to do anything, but you have to think about it. Okay. And thinking is believing is becoming. All right. That's what the Gigaverse is all about. Imagine a world where everyone is six foot four, 250 pounds, rippling muscles, eight pack, 12 pack abs. That's the Gigaverse. That's what the Gigaverse is all about, right, Emeru? Yeah! Yes! That's what I like to see. That's the positivity that we need. I want to show you guys an example of what the Gigaverse can be. Why am I not in a picture? Look at these guys. What do you see? OTK members. Boring. Yeah, true. Bland. Yep. Mid. Little dull, maybe. That's what I see when I take a look at these guys. Not anymore. Ladies and gentlemen, the Gigaverse. Take a look at that right there. Damn. What? The Gigaverse can help you become the best version of yourself right there. Boom, boom. Look at that. Look how much better everybody looks. Amazing. Absolutely incredible. So it wouldn't even work on me? The technology isn't there yet. I'm sorry. But it's getting there. But it is! That's right, Steve! That is right! That is the positivity that we need. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. All about Gigaverse. I want to show you guys the Barberverse.  Imagine a world where at the snap of a finger, you can change your entire hairstyle. Okay, okay. You can go from that boring, bland, dull, that mid-look. Oh my God. Boom. And you can be the next level just by changing your hair. So I'm going to ask you guys a question. What do you guys think of when you think of bald people? Be honest. What are you? Sorry? Gross. You just hate them. Gross. Okay. Well, I'll show you guys some examples.   Sorry. I think unsettling. I think scary. I think loud. Yeah. But not anymore, ladies and gentlemen. Because in the Barberverse, at a moment's notice, you can be gorgeous. You can be beautiful. Oh, there you go. Look at that. Again, that's what the Barberverse is all about. Barberverse. Yes, Steve. Yeah, how do I do that? It's easy. You just have to buy into the Metaverse. Okay. And the subverse of the Barberverse. It even sounds fun to say. Don't you say it. Barberverse. Barberverse. Barberverse. Barberverse. Barberverse. Yes. Yes, Steve. Yes. That's what I've been waiting for. That's the positivity that we need. Next up, I want to show you guys one more thing. The inverse. Why should we stop there? No. Streamers will get real jobs. Yes, that's right. In the inverse, streamers get real jobs. Everything is flipped. We're going to have Mizkiv working at Shake Shack. We're going to have... We're going to have Sear as the head of the Department of Variety Gaming. Why the hell am I working at Shake Shack and he's there? Well... It's the inverse, baby. What do you think? I don't make the rules. Well, it's the opposite of what it really would be. No one can control the inverse. The inverse controls you. It's random. Also in the inverse, instead of saving animals at Alveas, it's simple. We would actively hunt them for target practice. Oh, it's lit. All right. Yes. That's what the inverse is all about, ladies and gentlemen. One place. One verse. One audience. One community. Isn't that four? I want to introduce to all of you right now the universe. Oh, my God. Yes. The universe. That makes so much sense, Steve. In the universe, everyone is equal. Streamers are chatters, and chatters are streamers at the same exact time. In the universe, we're going to have utopian civilizations where people can go and it can be a place to learn. It can be a place to grow. And a place for all equally. We will call these places universities. Oh, my God. Yes. It makes so much sense. Yes. And that's what the metaverse is all about. That is what the metaverse is all about. Now, we're not just going to come here and work our minds and exercise our minds and ascend to the next level in the metaverse. There's also something else I want to talk about. And that's our bodies. And our bodies having ascended to the next level. And that is with a charity liftathon this spring. What if we did a charity stream, a liftathon, where for every single pound that is donated that day, we have to lift a pound? So, yeah.  Well, like, somebody donates a thousand dollars every dollar. Wait, oh, did I say pound for pound? Yes, you did. Oh. All right, bro, listen. Every single dollar that is donated, we lift a pound. So if you donate a thousand dollars, we lift a thousand pounds. That's 10 reps of 100 on bench press. What this will be essentially, it's, you know, the bar goes up. You know, somebody donates. If you get 20,000 dollars in donations, that means everybody, not just me, everybody who is going to be a part of the charity liftathon will come together to lift that 20,000 pounds total. If it's 100,000 pounds, we're lifting 100,000 pounds. So one dollar, one pound. It's going to be sick. It's coming sometime this spring. Yeah, charity liftathon coming this spring. Very excited.


Governor Udomi Manuel says electoral bill passage is key to unlocking Nigeria's potentials, while constitution review is a distraction. And in response to an interview done by President Buhari, Afenfaira calls the nation's leader an unrepentant tribalist. This is plus politics and I am Mary-Anna Cole. Governor Udomi Manuel of Aqaibom has spoken on the passage of the electoral bill saying it is fundamental to the furtherance of Nigeria's democracy. He said that taking the nation on the path of constitutional review would present a distraction as the issue of the electoral bill, which should assure Nigerians of their stake in democracy, is on ground. He added that though the electoral bill may not be a single solution to all of Nigeria's problems, it is a major step forward. Well joining us to have this conversation is Professor Richard Wakko-Cahi is a professor at the Department of Public Law, River State University, and of course joining us is a political analyst at Demola at Diwali. Thank you very much for joining us. It's my pleasure. All right. I'm going to start with- Good pleasure. I'll start with you, Professor. The interesting thing about what the governor of Aqaibom State is emphasizing on is the fact that we should as a country, including our law makers, be focusing on the issue of the electoral bill, making sure that it goes through the process and the different stages and get passed because he feels that this is a step in the right direction and it will help address most of the problems that we're facing as a country. What do you stand on this? I think having an electoral reform, can you hear me now? Yes. Having an electoral reform or concluding the electoral reform is a very good thing, but it's not even nearly the best thing to having our constitution reviewed. Having the right position in our constitution will solve a lot more problems than completing the review process. That's not to say that the electoral reform process is not necessary. It's a good thing, but it's not at all comparable to being able to make fundamental changes in our constitution which the review presents. So which should take precedence? Because he's arguing side-by-side saying that we're paying too much attention to the constitutional review and we're letting the electoral bill lie there and gather dust. So are you saying that both should be taken into consideration side-by-side or one should take precedence over the other because you're saying that the constitution is very important? The constitution is most important of all. Reason is simple. You can only hold an election and a successful and democratic election in a good society or a good political society and that society is designed by the constitution. So even if you have a very good election in a society or a country like ours that is fundamentally flawed we can find so many ways in which we can show that the system structure of our country is fundamentally flawed. The bulk of our money goes to the centre which is supposed to be a place for administration and where the money should go which is the country where we need to develop receives the list. Now if you have a review of our constitution that enables us to get back to the proper federation that we should be you can hold an election with our uncle and we won't hear what is happening in any region or any state or at the centre. It won't be as important as it is now. So getting the society right, getting the constitutional structure right is key. It's only within that frame that you will hold an election. So the election cannot be an electoral reform which is quite important, cannot be more important than reviewing the constitution and getting the country properly structured. Let me come to you Mr Justice. Do you hold the same position as the professor? Because the issue of the electoral bill has, you know it was more on the lips of every person before the 2019 elections and right after. We remember the back and forth between the executive in fact the presidents and the legislature where they were, you know there was pressure on the president to sign it and then they were about to go on some recess hoping that you know the president would do it but then the president didn't and now the 9th assembly has started the process from scratch and it's still ongoing. One would wonder why it's taking so long because I mean we would be hoping that this electoral bill would have been signed into law before the 2023 elections but do you think that it's a priority and maybe if it isn't that's why the National Assembly is not paying attention to it. Unfortunately I think that we have lost our Dimalak Justice but let me go back to Professor Wakocha. Let's look at some of the interesting things in the bill. I remember I've spoken with INEC officials over and over and they keep talking about the issue of e-voting and some other things that need to be infused into that electoral bill that are not there. E-voting is a thing that we have also bandied. We've seen politicians through it here and they even asked the average voters we're pointing towards as something that we need and that might help the electoral process but in reality is it something that really can work in the Nigerian setting? Yes, e-voting can work in the Nigerian setting. It's not so mundane. It's not so much of a rocket science. We have transited from banking in the banking hall to drawing our money anytime of the day we want through the machines. It's not very different. In fact, even the voting, the ATM machines can be configured to be used for voting.  So it's not strange. Besides, a big organization like the Nigerian Bar Association you have nothing compared to the population of Nigeria but we've seen it used by organizations within Nigeria last three elections. Hello, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, so I'll say the Nigerian Bar Association for instance has used it in the last three elections and they were able to conclude their elections. Yes, there were questions but those questions are nothing to be compared to the normal questions that arise from the Nigerian electoral process. And the beautiful thing again about the problem that electronic voting presents is that whatever my practices that are done are usually left here. It's difficult to get them off the system. So even in the electoral appeals, electoral contestation competitions and appeals those things can be pointed out and decisions can easily be reached. So it's not practice science. It's what is going on around the world. It's being done in this country by different organizations that have conducted elections electronically and I dare say that if whatever political reform we are doing does not lead to electronic voting then I think we're just wasting our time. I just want again to plug in here when we talk about it being realistic the Nigerian Bar Association with due respect it's just a handful of people compared to the 200 plus million... At least some tens of thousands of people out there about 100s or 200s. Compared to the 200 plus million people that we have in the country. So really the reality again the reason why I wanted to chime in here is because every single time we want to register a SIM card we do a biometrics all over again. We have a lot of data in this country as it is we have done the NIN as I speak now certain people still do not have the card in itself we still have a piece of paper. We still do biometrics if we want to get an ATM card from a bank you want to do your driver's license so we have so much data scattered about if we have not been able to put all of that data in one place I recently went to get my international passport I still had to do a brand new biometrics so when we say that oh it's not rocket science we do make it seem like rocket science in this country because we have not been able to harmonize all of that data that we have same for our identity card so how do we do that regularize that process of e-voting if we have not been able to regularize the normal ID card the data that we have linked to one one card how are we going to make that happen for our cards when we're voting harmonizing our data into a single data bank there is no doubt about that but that is not a key requirement for the voting every voter is a registered voter biometrics have been captured by INEC so it's not like you're starting afresh INEC has a biometrics right now we are using electronics for verification before voting so the data is already there for those who are going to register newly they will get their number and they will be able to do the same for that particular purpose which is election we are already halfway there because right now as we speak INEC has used electronic process for verification before going into voting the last one or two elections that we have heard so it's not as if we are going to start afresh try to capture everybody's biometrics data again and the rest we already have it in INEC okay let me move to Mr. Justice I think we have him back let's take a closer look at Gov. Domi Manuel's statement about this whole issue of the electoral bill he made a statement saying that taking the nation on the path of constitutional amendment is a distraction from the main issues Ademala Justice you know that Nigeria is facing a portfolio of issues from the north to the south to the east down to the west do you somewhat agree with the governor of Aquabomb states when he says that this constitutional amendment is a distraction from the main issues of Nigeria or could that be a solution to some of the problems that we're facing as a country thank you very much you know I would just want to apply the same route with my colleague who has said one or two things about the necessity of constitutional amendment and at the same time I would want to say as a governor is the chief executive officer of the state and relatively it would have a which is at the time I want everybody to know that the necessity for an amendment of our constitution cannot be underbladed and going by the fact that the age of the constitution and the emerging issues in the nation going by the expectations of almost every state in Nigeria project needs to review the constitution I give you to the governor in the practice of law it is expected that you get to hear from all parties before you can agree but like I said I would give it to him on one side but on the other side it is a long due necessity to review our constitution let's talk about the problems that Nigeria is facing right now it's not news except you leave on Mars even the people outside Nigeria are talking about the situation in Nigeria yes the constitutional review according to you and the professor is a way forward and some form of a solution to some of Nigeria's problems but is that the only thing we need to consider now because we see that our problems are multifaceted fixing a constitution will that douse all the tension and all the agitations that we're facing like we have already been saying Nigeria has numerous issues numerous problems but we don't have a monolithic answer to all the problems the constitution like I said as a democratic necessity would only pave way to just like we say in economics it's a means to the end not an end in itself it would only guide and assist the process of rebutting our nation it will not solve the entirety of the problems it will only lead us to solving the problems to the constitution just like the other speakers the constitutionality of the nation plays a critical role in our dance people to alert and observe that we need to go back to the drawing room and reorganize how our organization was used at the issue so to review the constitution now is as a project as possible but at the same time I will give you another issue that consolidated solution would help us as a nation but the constitution is one because the review of the constitution will take us to the respective concepts of the project called Nigeria constitution dictates how we live as a nation it tells how it's like the nether deltans would have been asserting over the years the issue of how oil wells are signed particularly to I think we lost Mr. Justice there let's move on to back to Professor Wakacha he made mention the governor of Aqaib-e-Masih made mention of the fact that our democracy is a borrowed system of government and he said I'd like to quote him directly that with the level of success so far it has become expedience to streamline the system so the question is how do we streamline this system because a lot of people have complained about the way that we run our democracy I can never forget what a presidential aid under the Good Lock Johnson administration Dr. Doyle Kupe said when he was asked about how we run the democracy in Nigeria and he said that there is a Nigerian way of doing things in other words our democracy was run the Nigerian way but really how do you streamline a government a system of government such as this many have said that we really are running a democracy in this country and most people have said that nations need to embrace a democracy but is it really something that would work for Nigeria because I'm one of those people who believe that there are countries who run very well but they do not run a democracy so does Nigeria really need a democracy to stand on its two feet yes Nigeria does need a democracy the truth we are running away from is the fact that our problem is not so much the Nigerian way of running democracy but an attempt to operate democracy in Nigeria now what is Nigerian about Nigeria it is a fact that in 1966 a fledgling federal nation was suddenly merged into a unitary system a unitary command system now everything changed in our life as a country from 1966 when that happened why that is still there it will be difficult to run a democratic government difficult to do a whole lot of things that you should be able to do in the country but the reason why we are having that difficulty is the constitutional problem the fact that as a federation the federation units do not have the powers that are due federation units of a federation federation units cannot plan their lives federation units cannot generate income and plan their development according to their pace and according to their desire everybody is locked down to whatever is decided at the center at the end of the day we are going to move on to the units from the center instead of the revests which is what happens in federation excuse me in first republic we we generated our resources at the units and paid 50% tax to the center with which the national interest was run and national assignment and responsibilities were run back to today I mean where everybody goes with a plate in hand to ask a jack every month for some handout from the center which they will come here and share among themselves because the bulk of the money is going to the center and because the center really ought not to have any serious business to do they have to ploy it into ploy it into paying huge salaries for themselves we are national assembly members and federal executive officers we aim for the length as far as the Nigerian any system is concerned so if you have that system and you don't fix it there is nothing you are going to do to effectively run a democracy a democracy where your money is not going to where your mouth is it cannot work I want to quickly put in a question professor the question I was asking was not necessarily about the I know that we can of course run a democracy in this country but I am talking about the persons that we have in government is it in it in the average Nigerian politician to follow the tenets and the rules of a democratic system can they follow the rules and regulations because it is easy for us to band the word democracy around but in the real sense of it can we allow the freedoms of democracy in the country we call Nigeria they can but again we need to know that systems are not desired for people to do what they like their responsibilities are duties that is why you have a constitution that is why you have laws governing everything in the nation so we are not supposed to be asking ourselves can the people do it whenever that question is asked it means that our system has failed and we are unable to punish those who are abusing the system or abusing the law because we have an absurd situation which ought not to be people are compelled to do what they love okay I think we are having a little connection issue but I think justice is back before we wrap up this segment let me go back to you Mr Adewale the governor of our Kwaibong state also talked about the what we should be prioritizing now in the life of Nigeria being that we are facing insecurity the economy is taking a deep the dollar is having a free fall you know infrastructure this federal government will tell you that they are building a lot of infrastructure yes but then insecurity is raising its ugly head yet again and it is more than a year that this has been going on so he talked about all of these things and he talked about the fact that we are not really ready to look at the major issues that Nigeria has he made mention of the fact that we do not have pipelines that pump products to every part of the country he also said he asked a question more like which roads are we having these trucks that would take these petroleum products through he was talking about the fact that we keep ear macking monies for infrastructural developments but we hardly see those infrastructural developments we may not really grow as a country if we are not prioritizing certain things in this country now I ask you, I am throwing back that question to you where should the government start to prioritize what do you think if you were put on the table with let's say for example the president and you were asked your opinion as to where we should start to deal with Nigeria's problems what would that be I am so sorry the president is giving us a little bit of problems so I am going to go back to Professor Wakacha hopefully he is back Professor so I throw that question to you where do we start to prioritize Nigeria's problems what do we pick because of course you can't deal with everything at the same time yes the president's place is full but what should he do right now if I have to advise the president I would say he needs to change his perspective a few days ago I know the most critical problem we are facing in the country now is insecurity and it is creeping up everywhere I mean it is coming up in every region of the country and I think the solution lies in the president changing his perspective a few days ago I listened to the president talking about insecurity and he says on one hand hardsmen who are causing havoc in the country are non-nationals on the other hand you don't want to deal with them as criminals and when steps to prevent them from causing havoc in the regions you say that it is inconsistent or that it is illegal and that is wrong we just can't do that so if we are facing foreigners who are killing us in the various parts of the country and you say no we shouldn't do anything to defend ourselves then what exactly are you calling for so I think the president needs to change his perspective on that burning issue because around that issue it involves a lot of other issues and if we don't fix it I wonder if we can even have an election if we can have a country in which to have an election in 2023 so I will advise the president first to change his perspective in dealing with the most fundamental issue now which is insecurity and treat crime as crime a non-national shouldn't come into Nigeria without papers and if he comes in he should work into Nigerian rules until we fix that I am afraid we are running into a deeper problem in this country Ademira Justice is back with us on the phone this time and hopefully we can hear him Mr Justice I'm still going to throw that question to you but this time I'm going to take from what the professor has said he's saying that we cannot allow outsiders to come and cause confusion in our country they have to abide by the rules and regulations if a person comes from outside outside of town and realizes that this place you know you can cut corners and you can do as you like and nobody's held accountable what would stop them from doing what they're doing now the presidency is not the first this is not the first time that they're saying that the people who are supposedly causing all of the insecurity are outsiders but it does not seem like we are treating them the way we should because let's take for example Nigerians were in Ghana causing a mayhem would they be would we really would they be having this conversation on the TV station say oh Nigerians are responsible for banditry but we would not we would not deal with them with the full weight of the law should that even be a conversation we should be having at this point I think we lost him again unfortunately his connection is really bad we're hoping that on the phone we will be able to have him but finally professor before I let you go um the governor of archival states had said that the PDP is what Nigerian needs for it to be brought back to its private place I'd like to quote him directly he said Nigerians need the PDP to step up he also said Nigerians need the PDP to save the country what's the difference between the PDP apart from the acronyms in terms of ideology and what they have to offer us is it about the parties is it about the people what exactly is it I was going to ask not just the ideology but also in terms of the personalities are they not the same people who are moving from one party to the other I do not think that our problem lies with political parties political parties will not solve our problem our problems are more fundamental than political parties and we have discussed some of them we have highlighted some of them in this interview we need something fundamental that changes the structure on which these things are possible and it does not lie in the hands or mouth of any political party to solve that problem we must visit a summation and make those structural changes when those structural changes are made we will see the difference in the first republic did you hear one group fighting the other group or complaining about marginalisation no fix the country get us back to the proper federation and we will all be too busy producing and making wealth and developing ourselves we will be too busy doing that to remember where which person comes from so I think PDP and the APC are not our problem they do not have the key to our solution to our challenges all right well Professor Richard our chat is of the department of public law river states university thank you so much for being part of the conversation Diwali Justice is a public affairs analyst unfortunately his internet connection was really bad thank you all for being part of the conversation well we will take a short break and when we return if any fairer tells us what they think about the President's recent interview stay with us we will be right back


OK, good evening. My name is Nida. I lead the technical team of a company called Active VIA. I'm based in, I work for this company for the past 10 years and I'm in Singapore for the past seven years. I will walk you through this presentation and tell you the tale of our collaboration, a collaboration of my company and Oracle, the team in charge of the JVM. And the effort we did to make Java 9 better on the memory side in order to manage a very large heap. My company is releasing, we build our own product which is called Active Pivot. Active Pivot is an in-memory aggregation engine. You can see it also like an OLAP in memory. I think it's the fastest OLAP engine on Earth as of today since we hold everything in memory. And since the beginning, we were holding all the data in memory. I will give you some use cases later on. But back to our collaboration with Oracle. Actually, our partnership started two years ago when one of our clients asked us, are you able to handle a project which requires 16 terabytes of data that should be held in memory? So that was a serious challenge and the vendor on the other side also was Oracle. So then we did a joint team to tackle that issue. Before that challenge, we used to play with maximum 1 terabyte of RAM, on servers with 1 terabyte of RAM. And then we moved to 16 terabytes. That was a serious challenge because behind the scene, the machine that has, one may ask, what type of machine is that? So this type of machine is called Oracle M6. You can find the equivalent from Huawei, IBM, Silicon Graphics, et cetera. So now every hardware vendor has such a huge amount of RAM, like a few terabytes. So then we took that challenge in 2015.  We've been selected by the Java 1 conference in 2015. And at that time, we were playing with the JDK8. Then we moved to another challenge, which is enhancing. From that challenge, we learned a lot. And then we said, let's enhance a bit the performance metrics we have. And let's do it on Java 9, since the JVM engineer were working on it. And they gave us an early release we started playing with since 2016 with the JDK9. So we felt blessed because we were in a close collaboration with those few guys who are working, who are writing the code of the JVM. And today, the credits goes to a guy called Thomas Schatzel, who is based in Austria, who is part of the JVM team. So he was the team leader. And what I'm going to show you here is part of his work. In-memory computing. So some people could say, OK, in-memory, everything is in-memory. Since the beginning, we load data in-memory for the past 20 years. However, nowadays, if you see the price of the RAM, between the 80s and today, it dropped by 1 million. So today, you have the opportunity to hold the whole set of data in the memory. Before, we were holding chunks of data because the memory was so expensive. I won't detail all the product you see there. But some of them, like Spark, which is quite popular nowadays, Spark is quite fast because they store their RDDs, the intermediate results. You have the ability to store them in memory to speed up the computation. SAP HANA, for the analytics, we do the same. We hold all the set of data in the memory. So then we try to be sub-second close to the few seconds when you fire query to our engine. Then we give you the response. For our work, we focused on a use case for the banking industry because the first challenge was made by a French bank. And for that, what we did is we built a use case on an investment site called a credit risk. For those who are in the banking industry, credit risk requires a lot, a lot, a lot of data because you consume a lot of simulations, Monte Carlo simulations for those who are in that area. And then you have to, for every time point, you have to do the default, the counterparty default simulated and repress all your positions. And you do this, not on a few days, you do this on a couple of years and on every single day. So you end up with few terabytes of data. What we did is we aggregated that, and then we fired query against that use case. So that was our baseline. That project was our baseline that we gave to the JVM engineers, allowing them to play with and to tweak their code to have the best and the optimal performance. In terms of use cases related to the in-memory computation, today, having an in-memory engine allow you to give you an advantage against the competition. So if you are in the financial industry and you give such reporting to your end users, a trader can do some simulation before booking a trade. Compute on the spot, all the analytics, not wait for the end of day or for tomorrow's batch. On the e-commerce side, any website that is having an online store can listen to the prices of the competition and then compute.  For a market maker, you change your strategy and you just try to get rid of the stock or you do a flat tail. So this is quite crucial for your business. And on the supply chain area, for instance, one of the interesting use cases we did was for a company that has to move cars from the producer to the consumer to the resellers. And then you have an SLA. Being a mover, you have an SLA. You're transporting cars here. You're not transporting paper. So there are clients at the end waiting for their car. And if you have a delay, you have to pay for it. And then you can say on the spot, this won't happen here. But what if there is a strike in this country? So I have to bypass this port and then deliver somewhere else, et cetera.  So to aggregate a huge amount of data, you definitely need a language and a technology that gives you the ability to implement complex calculation to be versatile enough. And you're looking for a huge community that will push that solution. This is why when we started our product, we directly choose Java. That was 12 years ago. And I think we did the right choice. At that time, we were hesitating C++ or Java. However, plugging, you're looking for a safe language. When it crashes, it doesn't crash the whole server. You're looking for something quite flexible enough. And this is why Java was the good choice at that time. And still. However, the problem with Java when we started 12 years ago was the garbage collection because the scalability is not limitless. And that gave to the language, somehow, bad reputation sometimes. Especially those people that are not using Java and then kept the ideas of Java 1.3 or 1.1, take ads very slow, applet sucks, et cetera. Some people are still in that mindset. However, since then, a lot of stuff evolved on Java becomes really competitive. In two minutes, I will summarize all the effort we did in the R&D, like 10 years of effort. So some concept may look a bit weird or you never heard about them. So do not hesitate. This is, I will summarize in two slides, a talk that we gave one year and a half ago at the spring meetup at that time. Of course, you have to rely on the evolution of Java. But you have to do some effort in your software as well. And this is what we did. First of all, we took control of the memory allocation. Maybe you heard about the off-heap memory in Java to not keep everything in the heap. For instance, in our data set, we were having 3 terabytes. I mean, I'm talking about the use case. We're having 3 terabytes in the heap and 8, 8, 9 in the off-heap. We decided that all the structures of our in-memory database will be off-heap. For that, we implemented our own memory allocation. And we implemented our own malloc. If you want to look at it, you can check Java, Misk, Unsafe. You can check the NIO buffer. All those packages with our part of the JDK gives you the ability to allocate the memory yourself. But you have to do it wisely. And you have to know what you're doing, because then you can crush the whole server. We also took advantage of all what is the concurrent package, all the concurrent package Java is providing. And we used the fork-joint pools. We used the work stealing techniques. And most of our structures are lock-free. We used a lot of the compare and swap. So then we minimized the contention and we maximized the parallel work. We also tried to partition our data the way we store the data. So then we give enough work to all the cores. And we did the partitioning among all the available CPUs. So this will maximize the parallelism as well. But even more than that, we leveraged the new what we call NUMA architecture, what we call non-uniform memory access. All the huge new servers, they don't have a single memory bus anymore. They have what we call NUMA nodes. So you can see it that way. You have memory chip associated to a CPU. So here, for instance, you can see an example of four NUMA nodes. And for that, what we did, we used several techniques to keep the data within a NUMA node. And all the threads working on that data, we jailed them, we pinned them to that node. For that, we used something called, we did a call to native libraries, like libnuma, libpthread. For that, we used something called Java native access, which is much more flexible than the GNI. You don't have to write C here. You just write Java code. So that was for the software you write if you want to leverage as much as you can from the language. But now the language has also to help you a bit. The garbage collection didn't evolve as the application evolved and as the hardware evolved in the past years. So at the given stage, it became a bottleneck. This is why you will see that in the JDK9, by the way, how many people are using already Java 9? Java 8? Java 7? Still? OK, so Java 8 mostly. Some of the garbage collection algorithm are deprecated for the JDK9. And the default garbage collection is the G1GC. I will describe this later on. So the idea is to have a garbage collection algorithm that won't suffer from that is where the post time is not proportional to the heap. Because if you want to start a JVM on a few terabytes, you will suffer a lot if the post time is proportional. Your users won't be happy. You will have a lot of pauses. You will have stopped the world all the way, all the time. And then you have to restart your application. So this is why the G1GC is now the default garbage collection. Everything good? Is the default garbage collection? And we'll see why and the effort that has been made. The garbage, the G1GC, deals with region. We don't have this block of young, survivor, two blocks of survivor, and old gen. Now you have the memory, and you split that in region. And every region can have a different policy. A region can be young, old, or survivor. What you see in purple is what we call humongous region. I won't detail that, but you may have an allocation that spans over a region. We call this humongous region. Good to know if you have some tuning to do. Of course, you can define the size of a region. You can change that.  So let's see the cinematic of G1GC. Before, I tell you what was the effort that has been made by the Oracle JVM engineers. Let's see the usual how G1GC is supposed to work. So when you start your application, you start allocating some objects. Those objects, the short-living objects will be allocated, as you know, in the young region. And from time to time, young or edin region gets full, and then you have to do some young collection. Every time you have a young collection that will happen, the G1GC, you have this pose that you see here as TW means stop the world, or pose. You're posing the application. You try to pose. This is what the G1GC tries to do. It poses the application to do some young collection. And when we talk about collection, we are evacuating objects from, we get all the live objects. We evacuate them somewhere.  And most of the time, let's say a normal application where you don't have a cache or like our application where you don't have long-living objects. Most of the time, what you keep in terms of live objects is a small fraction. Use the object then you throw. So you leave a lot of cache, and this is why the young collection, like the young collection threads come, the garbage collection thread comes, and then keep cleaning and evacuating your objects from one region to another. When you do the evacuation of a young object from Eden, the live objects are moved to what you call a survivor region. Technically, survivor region still belongs to the young region. And so on and so forth. So your application is evolving, and then you keep moving the object from young to survivor. And at a given stage, your object, the long-living object, will end up in the old gen, tenured space. And then they will stay there. So the young collection at this stage doesn't care about those long-living objects who ended up in an old gen region. We leave them there until the IHOPE happens. The IHOPE stands for Initiating Heap Occupancy Percent. This is a parameter you can play with. It's 45% by default, which means if you reach the threshold, the funny part starts. And now we pause. We have a pause where we do what we call the initial mark. We start looking at all the live objects in the old gen. So here there is a pause. And then we start marking all those objects. The interesting thing is this marking happens concurrently, happens with your application threads. So here we do not pause the application. And as you can see, from time to time, while you're marking the thread, the marking threads are working, you will do young collection. Young collection will still happen. You will do small pauses, and young collection will happen. Then once this concurrent marking stops, you will do what we call a remark, where you check all the live objects that you marked, including the new object that happened between the initial mark and the remark. Because you create objects while you're doing the marking threads. As I said, it happens concurrently with your application thread. So potentially you create some new objects there. After the remark, we collect statistic about the old regions. And we start looking at the regions that we're going to clean. And we'll prioritize the region with a lot of garbage. Maybe some of you know it already. G1 means garbage first, the short form of garbage first. So the region with a lot of garbage, I will clean them first. The cleanup phase is where we decided what are the regions that I'm going to collect. Then just to free as much as I can, I do a very last young collection. And then I do what we call the mixed collection, where I will collect all those regions that have been selected from the old gen. And then back to square one. So this is the whole cinematic of the garbage collection, of the G1GC operation. So you do not, we started with a normal young collection. And then we start doing the marking. And then at the end, I do the mixed collection. The very important thing that we do here, we don't stop brutally the application, and we do a full GC. Especially if you do a full GC on a heap with a few terabytes, it's devastating. Believe me, a few terabytes, we had that. And you have to restart the server. You can just have those mixed collection. If you have the full GC, it will scrub everything. OK, before I detail this, the effort that has been made was on the young collection with the Oracle engineers. Because we noticed it with this benchmark that the young GC was not as good as we expected. Actually, when we started the first time playing with the G1GC on our use case with a few terabytes, some part of the G1 algorithm scale pretty well. And this use case, this first benchmark I'm sharing with you, was made on a static data set. When I say static data set, it means like I loaded the active pivot, which is the name of our database, I loaded everything with a static set. And then I start firing some queries, short queries, queries with some calculation, and queries with what we call a full scan, which means like I try to get terabytes of data. What you see here is the number of garbage collections by pose. For the short queries, it was quite OK. Five seconds in average, quite OK. But when you start doing something quite complex, having the pose of 30 seconds, here I'm talking only about young collection. I'm not talking about full GC, as I mentioned. 30 seconds was too much for an interactive application. This is what we claim for our product, like OK, you use it, use everything in memory. Remember the use case I mentioned earlier? We want you to take a decision on the spot. So if you have to wait 30 seconds to take a decision, it's not interactive anymore. So then we started collaborating based on that to make those metrics better. And since this happened on a static set, we load everything and then we let the queries happen. Every time we see a garbage collection, most of the time this was for the short living object, for the transient memory.  So let's see the improvement that happened on that part. The improvement of the young collection was as follows. So first of all, the GC threads, how do they work? They start from the root object, and then they start to resolve all the outgoing references. And every time you find a reference, you cannot move immediately what you find in terms of live objects to another. You cannot evacuate everything. Right now, you have to enqueue. You keep enqueuing the references in what we call, so those are the GC threads. We enqueue in the public buffer, and we enqueue the references in the private buffer. Why do we have public and private buffer? That is mostly to have a smoother work balance. So before, what happened is when, say, we have two threads, two GC threads that are working. There is one thread which has a public buffer full, private buffer full. The thread too finished with his private buffer and finished with his public buffer. So then this existed before we asked Oracle engineers to make some effort. They were using work stealing to help. So the thread that is done with his work don't remain idle and start helping the other thread. But the work stealing happens only on the public buffer area. And you may get flooded in the private buffer. Maybe you've faced this use case in the past. So you have all the threads idle. You see only one GC thread doing the job. And all the rest, all the other threads are looking at him like, OK, do the job now. So that wasn't good. And especially that in the private buffer, sometimes when you get huge arrays, all the references were copied there. And that was part of the cause of the flooding. So what they did is they changed that by processing those huge arrays by chunk. And they added the way of refilling from the private buffer. We can refill the public buffer. So we give work to other threads who want to help. And based on that effort, the same benchmark you saw in red in 2015, now we have something more predictable. And we have less poses, especially on the second and the third case. So this was really interesting for us. Just the effort that has been done on the young collection. However, for our use case and our product, we do not deal only with static data. Our customers, what they want is to have intraday data coming in, some transactions happening, a guy doing a trade, or some people buying on an e-commerce website. And then you process the order. So there is some mixed workload. You have read and write. And this test that we did at that time was with read only.  At that time, in 2015, when we played with the read and write, nothing worked. So then we decided to improve that by enhancing the parallel marking phase, where we noticed that when you load, when you have some intraday activity, when you have read and write happening in your database, the mixed workload, sorry, the marking phase, the parallel marking phase, if you recall well, this part. This part here, the concurrent marking that was happening. We start doing marking the objects, but thus was taking ages. While there is an activity, a young collection trying to happen, you feel the young area. You feel the young generation. You feel the tenured space. And at a given stage, everything got stuck. And you finish having a full GC, and everything was crashing. So that pushed us to do some effort on the collection of the old gen, and especially on the parallel marking.  The marking thread, they do the same job, but they don't evacuate the objects from one region to another. This is a heap region called the cart. And every, this is here, we are zooming on a marking thread. And every marking thread starts looking at the different live objects. And if it finds live objects, he has to write somewhere and say, oh, in this region, I found a live object. The way we remember those live objects, we use that in what we call data bitmap. So every 512 bits, this is what we call a cart, we have a down sample area there in the bitmap, which is one bit. So if I find an object in one cart, so then I turn the bit on the bitmap. So this was for one marking thread. So if you have few, it's OK. But on a huge deployment, that bitmap becomes a bottleneck. Because every marking thread was having a copy of the bitmap. So this is why G1GC was not well-sized a long time ago now, was not well-sized for a lot of threads and multiple cores and a huge memory on the server you're working with. So to tackle that, what the engineers at Oracle did is they have one single bitmap that is shared across all those marking threads. Because if every thread has a copy of the bitmap, then at the end of the day, you have to merge them. And those bitmaps, if you have several of them at the end of the day, those bitmaps, you're looking to collect the memory. And that was itself a bottleneck. So they changed totally the design. And they were having only one bitmap shared across all those threads. And then they use a lock-free mechanism to access it and to maintain and to remember all the live objects. That was the first improvement on the parallel marking. The second improvement, same as the GC threads, the marking threads, they have a private buffer and a public buffer to enhance the work balance. What we noticed is that that public buffer was guarded by a mutex. It was a very, very simple structure that allows only one thread to access at the time. So by releasing that and having a lock-free type of structure, I'm not saying lock-free is a contention-free. There is still some contention. But by just changing this, we had 50 times the improvement by 50 times in terms of parallel marking. And as you can see here, we were able to do our mixed load reading and writing at the same time. So on the right, you can see for short queries and for full scan, you have read-only with static data and read-and-write, where we were changing one terabyte of data every minute to simulate a huge activity. We were a bit aggressive to see how it behaves. And you can see the read-and-write versus the read-only is less than two times in terms of number of garbage collections. Notice that the resources were also used to change and to reshuffle the data and to refresh the data there. So all the effort that we did with all the, actually, our effort was to build the application and to ask the Oracle engineers for help. And the job they did allow us today to build applications that do not fear the usage of a few terabytes of RAM. Today, if you want to get a machine in five minutes, you can have a machine with at least two terabytes of RAM on AWS. The X1 large is a machine that having two terabytes of RAM. It's very easy to have on Azure as well. On all the cloud providers, you can have a virtual machine with a few terabytes, which means you can, by storing, of course, it has to address a certain use case where you're looking for speed. If you can do something with SQL and your client or the guy who is sponsoring your project doesn't care about taking the decision right now, of course, do not go to the top. But if you're looking for performance, Java can do it. And in end of November, there is, I read something here. Sorry, your stuff is blocking me. Anyway, there is a new garbage collection that will be probably open source made by the Oracle engineers, which is named Z Garbage Collection. This garbage collection claims to have poses of few, like, 10 milliseconds on huge heaps. It's made like their mindset now is to target huge heaps. Red Heart as well, they have their own garbage collection, which will be in competition with this ZGC. That's it for me. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Any question? I know it's a heavy topic. But feel free. If you have any question, don't be shy. I'll try to answer it. Yes, please. Can you go over to Azul Shalmiyev. Excuse me. Yes, we played with Azul VM. Azul VM, OK, actually I played with a few years ago. They will have it. They have this. It's called Xing. And their garbage collection is called C4, like that. OK? In terms of it's poseless. It's poseless. However, most of the time, you use a lot of CPU to do the garbage collection behind the scene. And on our product, when we did a benchmark, Oracle JDK that you can download versus Azul Xing that you have to pay for, we compared both. And we noticed that the post time was really good on Azul. However, the response time and end to end for our queries were better on Oracle JVM. So I guess that, of course, they're famous for that. And I'm pretty sure they are racing as well against those ZGC and other garbage collections to make Java better. At the end is what you have here. You will have it in the open JDK. So it's good for us, if you want to. Yeah, it's good. Competition is always good. Yes, please. What were the DC poses like before you went to DC for your product? Good question. Actually, when we start dealing with a huge set of data before, when I start for a long time, I was working with the parallel old garbage collection. We're having maybe tens of seconds. But the set of data wasn't big. So when our clients start challenging us on the size of the data that we can handle in memory, the JVM was already better. And today, for my clients, by default, I'm using JDK8. I'm working for most of our clients, at least in Singapore, they're in the banking industry. They didn't move to, as you know, in the banks, they take the time to move from one version to another. So today, most of them, they're using JDK8 by default. It's easy for me to convince them to turn the G1 GC on. By the way, G1 GC is good on JDK8, even better on the JDK9, but on the JDK7, it was so-so. It started with the JDK7. I think it was experimental.  G1 GC claims to be, by default, if you read, they will tell you, just turn the G1 GC on and do not tune it. It will work. But believe me, you have to do some effort when you start doing some tuning and you have to understand what's happening there. There is some interesting flags, like you can fix a threshold, like the max pose you want to do or the maximum mixed collection you have to do to reach all what you have to collect or you can resize the regions. For example, if you have humongous objects ending up spanning across two regions, so you can make your regions bigger, so then you don't have humongous issues anymore. But the best thing you can do when you start playing with the G1 GC is to turn all the logging on. And it's quite explicit, actually. Of course, you have to understand all that cinematics I was mentioning. But their logging is better than what you probably was used to with the CMS and the Olga. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.