Welcome to the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2018 in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today. I'm Mr Siabonga Quelle, who is the Minister of Telecommunications and Postal Services for the Republic of South Africa. Minister, welcome to the studio. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for welcoming us. So I'd like to start off by talking to you a little bit about the fact that there's considerable attention being placed on harnessing the power of information and communication technologies and ICTs that enable for good, for development, for the benefit of people, for families, communities and nations. And I wanted to ask you, what is your personal perspective on this? We as a country, we really embrace that because we come from developing nations. We are seeing the power of these new technologies and ICT in particular being crucial for us to deliver services to our people in a smarter way, in a faster way and in an interactive way. We are also, as developing nations, seeing this as part of this agenda which we have been part of to make sure that this power of ICT is cut across every aspect of life, every aspect of government, every aspect of business. We need to adopt them in order to leapfrog our people to development. Coming from Africa, we are really every state and South Africa and government. We are adopting these new technologies as a mechanism to make us leapfrog in terms of development, to be on par with the rest of the development world. Now in terms of sustainable development, this planning potential conference is the first since the world agreed on the sustainable development goals in 2015. I wanted to ask you perhaps you could give us a few examples of how ICTs are helping to drive sustainable development in your country. They are very critical. We were honored that through the ITU, SGU, now serving in the UN Broadband Council for Sustainable Development. But as a country, we are looking at these things to help us to deal with the critical challenges we face as a nation. If you look at the key priority of South Africa is education, digitizing education content. It also helps with access to education. Whether it is online education which is rolling out, particularly for the workers to upscale their skills. Whether it is in basic education or higher education. Because education is such a high priority. That's why, for instance, in South Africa we have connected all our universities to high broadband connectivity as a link of all higher education institutions. I was just putting education as an example. Health is quite critical in terms of people because people move but they go to different health facilities. But in addition, the new technologies assist us to have specialist care where there are no specialists. Just by deploying the connectivity and these technologies to remote hospital and remote clinic, we see that it's going to help us as a country in South Africa to ensure that every citizen has got access to quality healthcare. So those are some of the practical examples. We are a mining country and the new technologies are helping us to reduce the accidents which are caused by mining using artificial intelligence. Those are some of the things which I think are positive and we are doubting them. In agriculture, for instance, in terms of improving agricultural yield and making sure that people have got access to markets and e-commerce, so those are the things we are really developing in our country to ensure that our citizens actually participate and see the benefit of these new technologies which I imagine. I just wanted to ask you about half the world's people are connected to the internet. The other half is not. What is the Republic of South Africa doing to get everyone connected? It is very important to bridge this divide. Developing countries like South Africa, they were not so much beneficial in the face of the third revolution and we see we are preparing our nation, our workers and our people to participate in this new emerging revolution. In terms of the things we are actually doing at this moment, last year we adopted the Internet for All initiative which is very critical in ensuring that we have got innovative mechanism to ensure that everyone is connected. We have got 22 million South Africans who are not connected to the internet then and we are starting now to feel the impact of this because there is a multi-stakeholder forum where business, community and government are working together to find innovative ways to deal first with the issues of infrastructure in the difficult areas because even areas are connected. Now I left the almost half a billion of the world population and those who are difficult to connect. So we are looking at innovative ways. We are working with satellite companies, telecos, we are working with OTTs to really find innovative ways to deploy affordable infrastructure to those areas. What has come out quite clearly? If you make your internet affordable or infrastructure affordable, particularly startups, just this week I was launching one company, a startup, they are not just doing trial, they happen to have spectrum which is like what would be 5G spectrum, it's called RAIN, it's a small startup but it's quite disruptive because they are giving this high-speed internet in townships, in cities and in rural areas at the 4G levels of course. So those are the things people are supporting SMM is going to be key but that internet for all projects has got skills element because what we find is not just on the supply side but the demand side measures are quite critical because we can have infrastructure but people may not use it because of cost, particularly cost of devices, skills and the content, the relevant content is becoming more critical because if we use things like language, use people, things they can relate to, even if they are not rich but they'll pay for it because it's beneficial to them. So that internet for all projects will be giving the first report in January to World Economic Forum but the other initiatives to make sure that we not leave anyone behind is, like I said, the massification of skills. We have our own training agencies, not from our skills going to the university or in the classroom, even part-time causes just to make sure that the SMMEs can use this, the workers can feel comfortable using technologies. Those are things we share. We're working with domestic companies and international companies and our own NGOs to massify the skills, the digital skills element so that people can find comfort in using the internet. So that's why, for instance, we have been pushing the issues of ensuring comfort, security that people feel secure in the use of internet. Those are the things we've been pushing here. I do another multilateral for us to ensure that citizens, even from developing countries like South Africa, they must feel comfortable in the use of internet because internet is a very empowering. So those are some of the initiatives we are doing as a country. Of course, the ITU has been helping us. I'm very grateful to the ITU in terms of capacity building. I'm very happy that we're working with them now as an outcome of the Daven World Telecom that we're building this African Center for Digital Transformation in South Africa, in Pretoria to really help with this multi-stakeholder approach in terms of policy development, in terms of assisting our SMMEs with testing and conformance and standard testing, in terms of helping them to innovate and bring venture capitalists to assist them to commercialize. So we are very happy that we're working very closely with ITU to empower people of Africa. So we're saying we have to reduce this gender divide. It is a very important principle because as a country, we also come from a history of apartheid. And we know what a divide can do because the apartheid system is a system of dividing the people. So our constitution doesn't allow it. And that's why we're working starting with the girl child and empowering young people, young entrepreneurs to participate. Our policies as government, we are required to demonstrate that as a company, if you do business with government to encourage them, we have got also women, we have got youth, either empowering them or in terms of enterprise development, those are very positive things which we have to close quite fast if we are to have everyone participating in the digital economy for the future. Finally, I'd like to extend to you the opportunity to pass a message on not just to participants here, but also to our wider audience as well. Now, firstly, we will say we're very grateful. Let me first congratulate the elected officials of the ITU. We have got full confidence in them that they'll be able to take this organization to play its historical and new role in terms of ensuring that we reach our sustainable development goals by 2030 using ICT. Secondly, we are quite happy with the outcome. Of course, when you're coming to negotiate, you can't get everything. But in terms of key areas of developing countries, I think our teams have negotiated in good faith with other participants and we have achieved in terms of gender issues, in terms of developmental issues, in terms of training and capacity building, in terms of protection of young people and children, so those are some of the things we are quite happy about that the ITU will continue to play this role and really we hope that they can increase their role in developing countries like Africa or continent like Africa to help us to come out of poverty because at the end of the day, what we are facing in Africa is the issue of unemployment. If you can educate or you train them to participate, it will have a huge impact on poverty we are seeing as a continent. It will have a huge impact in terms of development and prosperity of our continent. Those are some of the things in terms of outcome and we will continue to support the ITU. We are grateful to those nations and countries who help us to come back to the council and elected council and the regulatory board and we really commit as a country that will do our best to make sure that we have a positive contribution for the development of humanity. Thank you. Thank you very much for joining us in the studio today and taking the time to be here and we look forward to catching up with you again in the future too.


Hi, and welcome to the session. My name is Reshi. I'm going to help you to solve the following question. Question is, obtain all other zeros of 3x raised to the power 4 plus 6x cube minus 2x square minus 10x minus 5 if two of its zeros are root 5 upon 3 and minus root 5 upon 3. First of all, we should understand that a real number alpha is a zero of a polynomial fx if f alpha is equal to zero. This is the key idea for solving the given question. Let us now start with the solution. Let fx is equal to 3x raised to the power 4 plus 6x cube minus 2x square minus 10x minus 5 and its zeros are root 5 upon 3 and minus root 5 upon 3 implies x minus root 5 upon 3 multiplied by x plus root 5 upon 3 are factors of fx which can be further written as x square minus 5 upon 3 which is equal to 1 upon 3 multiplied by 3x square minus 5. We can recall by factor theorem that x minus root 5 upon 3 and x plus root 5 upon 3 are the factors of fx. This implies 3x square minus 5 is a factor of fx. Now we divide fx by 3x square minus 5. Now we will start the division. Since the first term of the dividend is 3x raised to the power 4 so we will multiply the divisor with x square to get the desired term. Multiplying the divisor with x square we get 3x raised to the power 4 minus 5x square. Now subtracting the light terms and bringing down the rest of the terms of the dividend we get 6x cube plus 3x square minus 10x minus 5. Now first term is 6x cube so we will multiply the divisor with 2x. Multiplying the divisor with 2x we get 6x cube minus 10x. Now subtracting the light terms and bringing down the rest of the terms we get 3x square minus 5. Now to get 3x square we will multiply the divisor with 1 so now the next term of the quotient would be 1. Subtracting the light terms we get remainder equal to 0. We know dividend is equal to divisor multiplied by quotient plus remainder. Now substituting these values we get 3x raised to the power 4 plus 6x cube minus 2x square minus 10x minus 5 which is our dividend is equal to 3x square minus 5 multiplied by x square plus 2x plus 1 plus 0. 0 is our remainder 3x square minus 5 is our divisor and x square plus 2x plus 1 is the quotient obtained in the subdivision can be further written as root 3x square minus root 5 square and x square plus 2x plus 1 is equal to x plus 1 whole square. Here we have used the identity that a plus v whole square is equal to a square plus b square plus 2ab. This is further equal to root 3x plus root 5 multiplied by root 3x minus root 5 multiplied by x plus 1 whole square. We have applied the formula of a square minus b square is equal to a plus b into a minus b. Now for finding the zeros of fx we will put all the vectors of fx equal to 0. Therefore root 3x plus root 5 is equal to 0 which implies x is equal to minus root 5 upon root 3 which is further equal to minus root 5 upon 3. Similarly root 3x minus root 5 is equal to 0 which implies x is equal to under root of 5 upon 3. Similarly we can write x plus 1 multiplied by x plus 1 is equal to 0 which implies x is equal to minus 1 or x is equal to minus 1. So the first zeros of the given fx is equal to minus root 5 upon 3 root 5 upon 3 minus 1 and minus 1. Hence four zeros given fx are minus 1 minus 1 root 5 upon 3 and minus root 5 upon 3. This is our required answer. This completes the session. Hope you enjoyed the session. Goodbye.


Everybody man here for late in sports cars ripping 2022 tops heritage baseball three box break number two. Pick your teams We have just a second here. It's in paste over correctly Any problems just give me a second. All right, we have This won't be an alphabetical order, but we have Tim W. D. Bax white socks Rockies Marlins Brewers Phillies Rangers and Blue Jays KCS Orioles Brett V. Guardians Dodgers Kevin L. Nationals Eli C. Royals Anthony S. A's Patrick T. Giants and Cardinals Tony K. Pirates Chester F Astros Rosie A. Cubs George M. Red Sox Scott T. Padres Jessica G. Reds and Twins Chester F Rays I'm sorry Scott T. Rays Chester F Mets Carol G. Braves Daniel K. Mariners Glenn W. Angels Anthony S. Yankees and John W. Tigers I'm sure why I did that on me. All right. Here we go. Good luck first three boxes were excellent Box topper Aaron Judd Yankees Let's fill up pristine baseball For box number one pick your teams that is up next We have Braves Reds Angels Marlins Brewers Mets Yankees A's Phillies Pirates Padres Mariners Cardinals Rays Rangers Blue Jays and Nationals So some really good teams left. It's like a hot box here There's Blocker Bueller hot box refractor that is up Not numbered we'll have one of those per pack here rookie pitchers Marlins And TJ Fridle hot box refractor That's Vidal Bruja and rookie I'm just gonna call them purples the hot box refractors. Yep hot box starting us off here for this break This is Jacob DeGrom That's an image variation.  You don't have to check the backs on every one of them now I start Yeah fielders. That's d-backs cubs marlins do a dice roll on these one one two Left three four center and five six, right This will be for all the trio cards in the break and it's four that goes center middle cubs on that one Lots of really good teams left for pristine baseball four box break number one pick your teams Zach Wheeler This is nice twins Otto Jim cat Batting there as a twins pitcher must have predated the uh DH rule in american league I don't even know if you guys know when the uh DH came into effect. It's uh salvi Yeah, I get it Well, there's a dual card. That'll be one two three left four five six right for All duels in the break that aren't hits. That's one It's left martin It's jaren durrann Ortez liam hindricks youtube chat cut out or did everybody just get quiet over there Joey vato just got quiet over there. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't Ignoring anybody except beer. There's sep beer purple What's up, Patrick? Thanks. Yeah, sometimes on uh the re-stream chat youtube will just like drop off Strasburg and tani Wander rookie. There's randy rosa reyna With all brujan raise pack there g was Wander brujan rookies and uh rosa reyna hotbox refractor There's a mini mookie bets. That is 78 of 100 nice one dodgers A little tricky to top load nice one la Buster posie Yeah, that's one of the things I love about heritage though. You get a Hard serial number to 100 and it's like kind of a big deal in heritage. There's glaver Or is in a lot of products then In a lot of products you get something number to 100 and it's normal It's brandon marsh cedric mullins Almost wrote on but then there's matt manning Tray turner last pack box one U darvish Tip box one box two allen clauster Yankees lower edges a little fuzzy there Yeah Heritage break's been good so far Guys, let's fill up pristine four box number one pick your teams We have braves reds angels marlins brewers mets yankees a's fillies Pirates padres mariners cardinals rays rangers and blue jays some really nice teams left Horner pristine four boxers up next uh, no there was a uh Or yeah, there was it was a gym cat Bente What's up dachshund dachshund? How you doing? There's ronald akunja chrome All right, so there that's to 999 Royals jersey Andrew benintendi We go kc already got our hips in the box now. Let's see a crazy variation or low numbered parallel Like to see a throwback variation So who's everybody's favorite to win the world series just this year? And uh, why is it the cardinals? I they're getting hot or they're hot right now, but I hope they don't Peak too early Usually when they win the world series, they uh just squeak into the playoffs and just get hot at the right time Uh, could you imagine them winning the world series all on uh? Like during puhol some olinas last year Hey, thanks, Mike. Appreciate it. Happy to be back. All right. So pristine baseball four box Number one pick your teams. Still several teams left braves reds angels marlins brewers Uh, metz yankees a's fillies pirates padre's mariners cardinals raise rangers and blue jays. Let's fill those up Hey, what's up, bach? Yeah, thank you Appreciate everybody jumping into chat Yeah, we will be on the lsc baseball youtube channel tomorrow Smith There's o'neill cruise rookie and base One box to go box topper is garrick coal Yankees Yankees got all three toppers the judge the coal and at a 73 buyback But you got the reds in two breaks. Nice. Good luck in that 22 bowman space Guys, let me drop you a link in the chat here It's like we have 16 teams to go for the next break if that filled up and keep the day rolling Last time I ripped pristine cardinals. You're still available. Last time I pulled Three good cardinals sets out of a four boxer It's like an orange aronato gulch mid auto and Make an orange paul de young patch auto Nice that is jake of the grog chrome refractor nice one metz That's the 673 set beer space That is yankees yankees dominating here That's jersey erin judge Here we go yankees Yeah, it's been a solid couple of uh three boxers here. Let's see a big variation Hey word Still several teams left for the next break. We've got the braves the reds the angels Uh brewers metz yankees a's philly's pirates padreys mariners rays Rangers and blue jays Kunya just two packs to go here What is this nice? Rays rookie image variation short print wander franco Congrats tampa bay. That is awesome nice wander Congrats rays Mag that one for you. Yeah Third the last card of the break good stuff. Give me just a second to mag that one Just a sec here guys Here we go quick recap We had yankees jersey erin judge Metz chrome refractor jacob de graham Royals jersey andrew ben ntendi Braves ronald a kunya junior chrome That was dongers many mookie bets twins auto gym cat Now it was a jacob de graham image variation And then rays Wander franco rookie image variation short print very nice. Congrats rays That'll do it for the break. Give me just a second here. We'll do a random for the non sports. All right, and here we go This is for the non sports cards eight times one two three four five six seven and eight that goes marlins. Congrats, miami That'll do it for the break. Thank you everybody appreciate it pristine baseball is coming up next


Hi, welcome. This talk will be about improved classical and quantum algorithm for the subsetsome problem. I'm Mi-Shin-Sheng from University of Paris. This is a joint work with Xavier Pontan, Jaime Bericou and André Chauden-Laura. The subsetsome problem is the following. Given N integers A1, A2, and An and the target S, we want to find a subset of the integers that sums to the given target. The subset that we are looking for can be represented by a n-bit vector E of coefficients in 01, where each EI represents whether the corresponding EI belongs to the subset or not. More generally, we are interested in a modular version of the subsetsome problem. The decision version of this problem is well-known to be NP-complete, and there are three very different regimes, depending on the relationship between L and N. In this talk, we are interested in a case where L is roughly equal to N, because this is the hardest case. The other cases can be approached by different techniques and can be solved efficiently. The subsetsome problem is relevant for cryptography, because it is used as a hard problem for post-quantum cryptography, and it appears as a subroutine in the quantum-hidden-shaped algorithm used for isogenic-based analysis. Furthermore, the techniques that we will see also applies to other problems, such as generic decoding algorithms. In cryptography, we are interested in random instances, not just worst-case instances. Typically, we sample the weights and the targets uniformly at random as N-bit integers. Note that the modular is now also 2 to the power N, so we expect this to be a hard instance. All non-classical and quantum algorithms take exponential time. We are interested in improving the exponent in the time complexity. We further make the extra assumption that the Harming weights of the solution is N over two. In other words, we are looking for subsets containing half of the weights. This is without lose of generality, because it is known to be the hardest case. There have been various improvement in the exponents over the year. We were able to improve the best classical exponent to 0.283, although it's a very small improvement. But our main contribution is in the quantum setting. Before I can present it to you, you need to know more about quantum memory models. In order to obtain quantum speedup, we always need quantum random access to the data. That means be able to read all the data in superposition. However, we may or may not assume access to quantum writes. All previous subsets and algorithms assumed the stronger memory model called quantum memory with quantum random access, where quantum writes are allowed. But in reality, this model is not yet considered realistic. What is more realistic is the classical memory with quantum random access model, where only classical writes are possible. Our first result is an algorithm in this weaker model that is competitive with the state of the art. Even though they use the stronger memory model and the conjecture on the quantum work of the object that I will not talk about. So it is reassuring to see that we don't actually need quantum write. Our second result that I will not talk about in this talk is a faster quantum algorithm in the stronger memory model. We have two variants of the algorithms. One was the same conjecture and another one was out. In fact, we were also able to remove the use of the conjecture in all previous papers. And this also applies to the quantum information set decoding paper of Tillich and the Kashgar. Unfortunately, we were not able to remove the use of the conjecture in our best algorithm. If you are interested in this part of the results, then I invite you to read the full version of our paper on e-print. I will now briefly try to explain the classical approach. We would like to find the solution e of weight n over two. What we can do is to choose a random t and solve two easier subset some problems presented here. They are easier because they're having weights of the vector that we are looking for not n over four instead of n over two. And the module is smaller. It is now two to the power cn where c is a constant smaller than one. Whereas for the original problem, it was two to the power n. When we have two solutions, e1 and e2, we need to add them together and hope that the sum is now a solution to the original problem. For this to work, two known trivial conditions must hold. We know that the sum is a solution module to the power cn, but not necessary module to the power n. Furthermore, the weight of the sum is not always n over two. This is because e1 and e2 may have some ones on the same position. So when we add them together, it becomes a two. The idea is that if we have many different solutions, e1 and e2, we can hope to find one solution for the original subsets and problem. Therefore, our new strategy is not to just find one pair of solution, e1 and e2, but two lists of solutions to the easier subsets and problems. We call this process of putting together solutions, merging and filtering. When merged solutions with respect to a bigger module, and then we filter the results to keep those of expected heavy weights. If the lists, e1 and e2 are uniformly distributed, then the result of the merged is also uniformly distributed if the previous module is a divisor of the new module. We can also compute the expected number of merged solutions. However, it is not clear that the filtering process produces also a uniformly distributed list. Here, we make use of a standard heuristic in a field that says that the filtered list is indeed uniformly distributed. The algorithm introduced by Hohgrab Guahan and Zhu implemented this idea. It can be represented by a tree where each level can be seen as a step of merging and the filtering. Here, we introduced the notation dm alpha, which is the set of vectors of length m and of hammer weight alpha m. The top level of the tree is a little bit different. We can start with vectors where the first half or the second half of the coordinates are all zero and merge them together. Then the merged vectors have directly the required weight. We only need to verify the modular constraints. This is an easy way to construct a list of vectors which satisfy both a wave and a modular constraint. After the HGJ algorithm, Baker, Corrine, and Zhu improved it by using vectors with coefficients not only in zero one, but in minus one, zero one. In the last step of the tree, we still need to find the solution with half zero and half one. But now the solution can be decomposed into sums of vectors with coefficients in minus one, zero one. So there are many more ways to do that and this can improve the complexity due to the power zero point 291 m. In all results, we have two new ideas. The first one is that in the previous algorithms, the starting list on the top of the trees are sets of all possible vectors having a certain hammer weight. So if the cardinal of the set is large, then the time complexity can also be large. Our idea is to sample uniformly at random formats and choose the list size which optimize the running time. With this idea, we can actually improve the BCJ algorithm to 0.289. The second idea is a natural improvement of the BCJ algorithm. Why should we stop at using minus one, zero one? We can also allow coefficients of being two. This will further improve the number of the compositions of the solution vector. By combining these two ideas, we can improve the algorithm running time to 0.283. So now I'll talk about our quantum algorithm using classical memory with quantum random access. Suppose we have n elements. Only t of them are good and the rest are bad. How do we quickly find a good one? We assume that we can sample an element in x at random and test whether it is good or not. If we repeatedly sample until we find a good element, then we have built a sampling procedure for g. We expected that it will need n or t tries to succeed. Let's consider the following example with four good elements. We sample one element, it is bad, sample another one, still bad, yes, another bad one, and finally we succeed at the fourth trial. In the classical case, this is the best we can do if we can only sample and test. But in the quantum case, we can do much better. We only need square root of n over t queries roughly. But obviously this requires the sampling and test procedures to be quantum algorithms. The way it works is that we start with a uniform superposition over the search space. This means that if we measure now, we will get a random element. But what we can do instead is to use the test algorithm to amplify the probability of the good elements and reduce the one of the others. If we amplify only once, we can still get bad elements. But if we amplify roughly square root of n over t times, then we only get a superposition of good elements with high probability. Now I will talk about our quantum search algorithm using classical memory with quantum random access. In the classical case, we have two lists and we merge them with some modular constraints and we keep only those of required handling weights. A different point of view is to assume that one of the lists is given. So in this picture, the blue list is given and we assume that we have a sampling position for the red list. We then build a sampler for the result of the merge. The way it works is that we sample the list L1 and we search for the unmatched in L2. This is an instance of the classical search that we saw before and it gives the complexity on the right. After that, we filter the list L, which is another search instance. Now, if we have quantum samplers for the list L1, we can obtain a quadratic speedup for the two search steps. We obtain the formula on the right for the time complexity of these steps. Now the HGGA algorithm can be seen as the following. We first construct a sampler for L03, then we obtain a sampler for L02 and then for L01 and in the end, we obtain a sampler for the solution. Quantum search improves the sampling time of the list but there is one problem. When we merge, we sample from one of the lists and assume quantum random access to the other. That means that we need to first build the other lists classically. In particular, if they are as big as the list in the classical HGGA algorithm, then we will get no speedup. The solution is to make the tree unbalanced so that the classical lists are much smaller than the quantum ones. By optimizing the sizes of the lists, we obtain the exponent 0.2356. An important feature of our algorithm is that it only uses polynomial and number of qubits. To conclude, I will now show you again the results that we obtained in this paper in the classical and quantum settings. They are all the fastest among their own category. As you have surely noticed during the presentation, our algorithm in the weaker quantum memory model only used 01 as coefficients of the intermediate vectors in the tree. We actually tried to add minus one but the asymmetry of the tree made the formula more difficult to handle and our optimization program doesn't seem to converge. As a general observation, using more symbols for the coefficients improves the algorithms but the improvement becomes smaller and smaller as we continue to do so. One open question is thus, how far can we go with this method? Another open question is about the conjecture on the quantum work updates that we were not able to remove completely. We probably need to update MNRS quantum work framework to solve this problem. A third open problem is that since the subset problem and the general decoding problem share some similarities, we obtained better quantum algorithms for the general decoding problem, especially in the weaker quantum memory model. That will conclude my talk. Thank you for listening.


Good afternoon. I'm Eric Bustos, chair of the Future Forum Board, and on behalf of the Future Forum, thank you all for joining us for a conversation on motherhood work and the pandemic. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about three and a half million moms of school-aged children shifted out of active work in April 2020, moving into paid or unpaid leave, losing their jobs, or leaving the labor force completely. Today we'll talk about the struggle of Texas mothers during the pandemic and what might change. The LBJ Future Forum is an organization that brings together individuals of different backgrounds, experiences, and points of view to discuss local, statewide, and national topics that affect us today. Our goal is to create a civil-informed and bipartisan discussions. The Future Forum events are made possible by our incredible members and sponsors, including the Downtown Austin Alliance, Carbock Brewery, and Joe Cooke's catering. There will be an opportunity to answer your questions at the end of the conversation. You're able to type questions in the Q&A box throughout the conversation, and we'll address as many as we can at the end. And now I'll turn it over to our moderator, Abby Johnston, Deputy Editor of the 19th, to lead our discussion. Thanks so much, Eric, and thank you very, very much for having me. I'm very excited about our conversation today, which is a topic that is really close to my heart at the 19th.  And so the ways that the pandemic has impacted women, impacted mothers, specifically, something that we report on a lot. And I'm very excited to have this group of panelists here to discuss that with us. So I'd like to introduce them. We have Dr. Nazgul Bagri, who is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Geography at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is author of a recent study on COVID-19's impact on working mothers of color. Dr. Bagri is also a proud recipient of the 2017 President's Distinguished Teaching Excellence Achievement Award at UTSA. So thank you so much for being here with us today, Nazgul. Our next panelist is Catherine Goldstein. She's the creator and host of the critically acclaimed reported podcast, The Double Shift, which is about challenging the status quo of motherhood. She's an award-winning journalist at Harvard, Neiman Bellow. She's extensively quoted as an expert in issues facing working mothers in New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, and on WNYC and NPR. Thank you very much, Catherine, for being here. And then finally, we have Dr. Elizabeth Gregory, who directs the Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Houston, which has just published its 2021 annual update on Houston, Harris County, Gender, and Sexuality data, as well as on the ongoing pandemic gender snapshot. So thank you very much. I'm excited to dive in. We have a lot to talk about. I just wanted to kind of set the stage here because I'm sure that not everyone thinks about all of this quite as much as we might. But, you know, the pandemic has hit working women in many ways. This is our first women's recession in recent memory. And internally at the 19th, we sometimes call it the she session. But women felt the brunt of the economic impact when businesses began to close because of the pandemic. And even as things have begun to stabilize, we're not seeing that women have recovered jobs in the same way that men have.  It's availability. It's affordability. And what we still expect from mothers in terms of the equal distribution of labor in the household and unpaid labor. So I'd love to hear a little bit about how we got to this place where child care was such a problem in the United States. And then for Nazgul and Elizabeth in particular, what that is looked like in Texas specifically, because I know that we have a one son, San Antonio and Houston. So Catherine is as the as the North Carolina outsider love to start with you. And then we can kind of zero in on Texas, the, you know, so most of what we are seeing in terms of the fallout from the pandemic are not new problems. They're just existing problems that have been really exacerbated. So basically, childcare in America was a highly privatized, expensive, unstable industry that relied that was largely unsubsidized relied on high cost for families paying low wages for workers and mostly in workers of color, women of color were largely staffed those industries. A huge percentage of childcare workers lit who work full time live in poverty. It was a very, very broken industry. And so a stress like the pandemic with additional cost closures, safety concerns have forced so many childcare centers out of business. So from a national perspective, you know, our childcare, our childcare infrastructure was terrible before the pandemic. And now it has been stress tested, and it has collapsed. So there is really not going to be any kind of economic recovery until our childcare system is really invested in and built back up. And so what's been exciting for me, I mean, it's, it's bittersweet with because part of what, you know, my work is focusing on a lot of these issues over time. And, you know, for the first time, you hear people like the Fed chair talking about, you know, childcare as an important part of the economy, which is like brand new as part of a national discussion, which is, which is it's sad that it's taken taken it to this point to have that conversation. But because these issues are now going to affect men, and they're going to affect the economy, we're starting to people are starting to seriously consider much more comprehensive public policy solutions, including a couple of initiatives from the Biden administration that are now compatible. Nazgul, can you talk a little bit about about that question and also tell us a little bit about, you know, what you were finding in your research and looking at women in Austin and San Antonio area? I want to start my answer with this quote from Helen Petterson. She says other countries have social safety nets. The US has women. So as Catherine was suggesting, our childcare system is was already broken. And in the state of Texas, a majority of those co workers are going to be women. Almost 80% of workers in childcare in the state of Texas are women. And more than half of them are going to be immigrants, women of non white women, perhaps, and either first or second generation of immigrants. So while we were talking with a lot of women's mothers with one of my student who is actually attending here, Joshua, yes, during our online ethnographic, we found out that some of the child care centers actually really put their workers in a really bad situation. They gave them two choices, which were both bad. One, you can go ahead and lose your job and collect unemployment. The other one was basically work for more than 60 hours to meet the needs, the increased needs of childcare. And that happened in the childcare that my own daughter is going and a lot of those teachers had to work 60 hours. So as Catherine said, these problems were existing and the pandemic like any other societal problems have exaggerated them, they brought them to the surface so we can see what's going on. And you're right, they have been telling us if we don't get the kids back to school or the daycare, we are not going to go back to the economy. I have a lot of more stories from these mothers from that online ethnographic, but I'm going to allow Elizabeth to reflect on that and we can come back to women's stories whenever you're ready. Thank you. Yes, thank you. The dynamic that I agree with everyone, it's always been a problem. It's highlighting the problem that was already there. It was already having an economic impact, but we assumed that economic impact. And this is the opportunity now to be transformative or not, right? So that's the challenge that we have. And that a lot of the Biden gestures, the ARP and possibly the American Family Plan, if that is passed, are raising these issues because they do have feminist economists in their offices, right? They're running a lot of this discussion. So it all fits together, right? So you have women making really low wages all along, getting limited childcare. And part of the reason that they're making low wages is because they have limited childcare and employers can anticipate that they will be unreliable workers. So this is true in Texas and it's true around the country. So the term that I like is schoolwork synchrony. That's what we need, right? If we don't have schoolwork synchrony, then women can't be reliable workers and employers will not invest in them, even if they don't actually have children, they might. So why would an employer invest in a female or you know, with the raises or promotions?  They never got into a position where they could create policies that would allow them to move up at a greater rate. So it's been this sort of vicious circle or cycle where it's been self defeating for decades. So we finally have a moment like right before the pandemic where we did have high levels of female employment, we did have women getting elected at higher rates were 25% in the Congress or so, and in the Texas legislature. So you're having women move into policy making roles. And people like Heather Boucher and other economists working for the around the American family plan and things like that are saying, we need to make this investment. So this is the opportunity that we as a state and we as a nation have to imagine, well, not just how do we get back to where we were before, but how if we actually did invest in childcare and an infrastructure, would that actually boost the economy and make a kind of transformative situation in which people could participate in very different ways. And that includes both women and their children, because, you know, about a third, a little more than a quarter, I guess, 20, 29% in Houston of moms are single moms. And their median income is 35,000 so they're not necessarily in poverty, but they are not, they are struggling. And so are their children. So, and that's true, you know, among partnered moms as well. So you have an effect that's not just on the female workforce, but also on the impoverished children, who are also workforce of the future. So these are all workforce issues that could be catalyzed in a very positive way, if we take this opportunity. I want to we'll get back to the childcare industry and some of the things that because I think Elizabeth, like you said, we have an opportunity now with a lot of the big investments that that we're starting to see from the Biden administration. But I want to I want to talk a little bit about the individual impacts on moms and the opportunities that that we're going to see taken away because they had to step back in many cases from work. So, you know, like I mentioned before, we're starting to see women re enter the workforce. It's still not a possibility for many and then still others might have chosen not to re enter the workforce for other reasons after the pandemic and a lot of them relating to childcare. And it's it's a little maybe hard to put a number on this. But we basically we've seen decades of progress for equity in the workforce for women erased by all of this. And so I'm curious from y'all's perspectives, like what are some of the long term impacts that we might expect to see from this giant exodus of women and mothers in particular from the workforce. And Catherine, we'll we'll start with you there. I think that, you know, we we we don't have a clear, you know, we've never no one alive basically has lived through an experience like this. So we don't have an exact blueprint for what's going to happen. But what we can learn is from what happens when women take time out of the workforce to care for children in the before times that were not pandemic related. So what that is, I think the best blueprint for us to understand what could happen without sort of significant public policy and sort of concerted effort in the private sector as well. So basically, research has found it is very hard for mothers, even when they take short amounts of time out of the workforce to get back in at the same level that they were.  So it wasn't worth it. But a lot of times those are very sort of, and again, this isn't a judgment on any one's personal individual decision, because these are such difficult decisions. But a lot of times that that making that calculation actually obscures other costs. So for example, if you decide because your salary is not very high, and so you want to leave the workforce because you don't want to devote most of your salary to childcare, that doesn't account for the retirement savings that you might be getting from that job or social security or professional advancement of working in that field for a number of years that allow you to reach new levels and earn more. So so all of that is to say is that it is even, you know, even if the economy recovers, it's also because of systemic bias against mothers, we may it may be very, very hard for people to sort of reclaim like pretend this didn't happen in terms of their career and their earnings. And that, as Elizabeth was mentioning, is also going to affect who runs companies, who runs for office, who has power in this country, because money is also very equivalent to power in this country. So economic power has a huge, you know, it's hugely influential in in, you know, how we shape our society. So that's sort of the kind of the guide is not, you know, the path forward, if we treat mothers like we've, we've have historically treated mothers, it's going to be a long road to getting back without some really significant cultural and public policy investments. Nazgul, some questions. Yeah, I want to focus on a little bit, give attention to education. UN, back few months ago, published their report on the status of women in rural places in developing countries. And it seems that's what they usually focus. Unfortunately, they don't recognize sometimes in their reports that women are coming in all colors and ages and with different choices in their life. As Catherine was saying, we all, we don't all have similar choices to make, right? So many of these girls and young women have to quit their education during the pandemic to take care of their younger siblings, or their even young children. So education being how we get to go to the, get equipped with the skills to get those higher end or higher paid jobs was interrupted, double the rate for men based on the UN report. So that's something to consider. Women are not just losing their job or are being forced to make really difficult choices to leave their job and stay at home with their kids. They're also have to quit educating themselves either at like higher education or even like a high school education, just come back home. And it's really hard as Catherine was saying, we don't get to jump back where we left when you like, Maryam is a computer engineer. We talked in Austin and she and her husband are both engineer, computer engineer. She gave birth to her daughter in last June and she was making similar to her husband, but because they weren't any daycare availability, she sacrificed, she basically was forced to sacrifice to quit her job.  So this instruction is going to, as Catherine was saying, very unexpected result on women power and economic power. I also wanted to mention that 2020 kind of jumping on what Elizabeth was talking about women being empowered before the pandemic. 2020 was the 25th anniversary of the Beijing platform for gender equality. So it was supposed to be a very, very exciting year for us as women to celebrate. And guess what happened? We are pushed back again. And so I'm all ears to hear what Elizabeth think about that. It was also the Suffrage Centennial. So that was a big point of discussion. And one thing we discovered was that in Houston, because of the close proximity of August to November, and registration had already closed for the people who wanted to vote had to pay a poll tax and they had to pay it by January, they waived the poll tax. And 14,000 men voted and 14,000 women voted and 6,000 of them were African American in Houston because of the waiving of the poll tax. So it was just a sort of hugely informational moment. And that did not occur again when the poll tax was reinstated shortly thereafter. I don't know if I'm still being heard because you are all frozen there for a moment. Can you hear me? But the other point that I wanted to note also was the effect which people have hinted at around issues of status. So for instance, in that couple that you mentioned, where you have two people making the same wage because the decision was made. And we can say that couple made a decision, but also that decision was helped by the infrastructure set up that she would stay home. Another alternative would have been for her to stay home for three months or something or some set of some period of time and for him to stay home too. That would have been an option and it is rarely discussed in our in our universe. But that's also part of why women are viewed as unreliable workers is because it's expected that they will do this work. And if you're going to change things, you actually have to not just have women also do paid work, but also have men do homework. So you have to have it. You can't just say, OK, women will do them both. That doesn't happen. It doesn't work. I mean, or you get the burnout that we're currently having. But what you get as a result of that status change, not to speak to this couple at all, but there, you know, there are various effects of status change and one in the wider world is one of dependency. So if you're if you're making enough money to let's just put this in sort of stark terms, if you're making enough money that you could leave, if the situation became violent or unpleasant, then the likelihood that you will, that the situation will become violent goes down. But if you are making less and you are dependent, that creates a kind of vulnerability that may in itself lead to violence that would not otherwise occur. So what we did see arise in pandemic violence, you know, which was variously registered because sometimes you see, oh, there's a rise in calls and that's a sign. But also sometimes the decline in calls will be a sign that people are locked in with their abuser and that kind of thing. So one of the takeaways if you do see women losing status and economic position is you'll see an overall rise in domestic violence just because it's an effect of dependency. And it plays out in very different ways. It doesn't necessarily have to be direct violence, right? It can be other kinds of status issues within relationships. And as women get more power than we see, you know, you know, equal power, that would be the goal, not more power than others, right? But an equitable voice in society, then you'll see things change about the way decisions around all the infrastructure and about who does care work. If I may, Abby, Elizabeth, you're absolutely right about the status. And in this case, in this couple of years, Maryam decided to breastfeed her so that it's the nature that enforced her to be, you know, later on, perhaps you can equally or some sort of I always have problem with the equal. I don't know how equal the partners can be really, really equally. But in this case, she was like not just forced by the economy and just it was also by the nature. She had to stay there and she knew and as you said, the violence is going to be just the impact of that economic and a status imbalance. She also was suffering from mental health, keep questioning herself. I got my master, what's going on? I'm not going up the careers ladder. So it was like a really, really hard, challenging situation with her. And she and I kept going back and forth about women's rights and the equality as a mother, as a new mother. Yeah, so I would say that's again an infrastructure issue, right? There's you don't have to because breastfeeding cannot be done by men. But but there are other ways to divide time, right? So if you had longer leaves, then you could say at a certain point a woman might start pumping. And then that might be balanced out by the dad staying home. And there is a sense that if that is enforced because otherwise they would lose a certain amount of weight of of leave overall.  Some countries have tried those. It does introduce the male parent to care work in a more direct way. And it makes it something and I was impressed by story. There were a number of journalistic stories about how well, my husband lost his job in the pandemic and he was going to stay home with the kids. But after three days, he couldn't take it. So I quit my job. And I was like, what? Three days, you know, but this was somehow people are not used to this idea of sharing care. And and we as a society have to figure out ways to and, you know, give people that experience because it's actually quite a pleasant experience in many respects and men would enjoy it if if only they knew if only if were compensated with respect. Elizabeth, I think that is a great point and I've also seen some research that, you know, men who take real paternity leave are more involved in their kids caregiving up to age six. Like they, you know, they check in with them over time. And so it's also about those competencies. So a lot of times it starts the beginning. If men don't have paternity leave, don't take paternity leave, they don't feel comfortable doing this care work and it creates these lifetimes of imbalances that then also have these economic ramifications as well. So yeah, I mean, one thing I always say is the most feminist thing a man can do is take his fully allotted paternity leave. And that is really part of the overall picture of, you know, not only gender equity in the home, but gender equity in the workplace and like for men to understand how that how hard care work can be and how valuable it is, creates all sorts of different dynamics in our society rather than, you know, the idea that any man who you hire is going to be a better worker because they're not going to have care responsibilities, like that's part of, you know, changing those dynamics in the home also changes those dynamics in the workplace. May I? Yeah, before we go, I think it's very important the feminization of the care. It's a systematic societal level change we need, you know, another example of my own life is that my husband did have the leave, but he was saying and he did take the leave for parents to leave. But many of his male colleagues didn't. So as you were saying, Catherine, it's a systematic ideological problem we have in the U.S. And I'm sure many other countries we have that that needs to be changed. We need to be educating about the the ethics of the care and the feminization of the care in this country, like going back to what we have been finding 82 percent of the nurses in the state of Texas are women. So again, you see that feminization of care in a lot of industry is repeating and also care. Studies has shown that care for elderly parents is usually done by the doctors. Even they are outside the home country. There was an excellent studies of Nepalese graduate student who went to Japan and study and the study shows that the female graduate studies were checking on their parents much more than the male graduate students. So it's just a feminization of the care and how we value care.  But that's exactly what gender is. Gender is a work assignment system and the work that women are assigned is the work of care. And it also has a pay scale, which is zero. So so that's basically what we're fighting as we work to to rethink work assignment and to realize, you know, that the the job of being a human being has been transformed, you know, just in terms of our lifespans. Just we don't have as many children. So you don't really need to spend your whole life working in that. So that kind of specialization of care doesn't make sense in the same way. So as an economy, and we even, you know, without asking big questions about the larger assumptions about our economy, which is essentially exploitative and assumes that somebody will be doing a lot of work for very little, not just women. But even apart from that, we have to rethink it because it doesn't make sense. And we're not really utilizing the perspectives of all of the potential market makers, you know, and the idea that people should be poor and therefore they'll do multiple jobs for very little is a sort of desperation economy is is a very mean way of running your economy. But it also sort of ignores the idea. Well, if people had money in their pockets, they would be spending it. You know, they'd be going to your business. It's not just that you're giving money to them and they're sitting on it. They're taking it.  They go out and they spend it in a lot of other places, which takes us back to this. Well, what happens with the three hundred dollars going away over the summer in our economy? How much of that is going to cause people to go back to work and how much of it is just going to impoverish mothers who are stuck without child care access? So, you know, well, the child care tax credit does start this summer. I will be getting a hundred dollars a month for my three children, six and under. So I think that's actually really transformative. We don't really know the effects because it hasn't gone to effect yet, but this is a potentially transformative policy that if people aren't aware for one year, families, most most American families, if you earn under one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, will be getting between two hundred and fifty and three hundred thousand, sorry, not a thousand, two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars a month cash to help you offset child care expenses. And actually people up to four hundred thousand dollars will also be getting a benefit as well. So it's basically it's a hugely interesting new economic experiment in America that I'm personally excited to benefit from. And I think we'll have a huge economic positive economic benefits as well for many, many others. And the big thing with with the child care tax credit, too, is that it's finally reaching the poorest families out there. You know, that's been a loophole for a long time as the people who are not paying taxes or not getting this child care tax credit. And that's going to be a big change, which there's big lofty goals from the administration that say that it's going to lift. I mean, it is some really huge percentage of children out of poverty. We don't really know how that's going to bear out yet. But it is a really this is a it's a big step as a big step. And speaking of big steps by the administration, I'd like to talk about the American Rescue Plan for a little bit. You know, we've seen we've seen a number of economic stimulus packages where money has been earmarked for child, the child care industry in particular. The American Rescue Plan is the biggest one so far. They they've put thirty nine billion dollars toward the child care system that will be distributed to states. The states will turn around and figure out it's a one time investment. They will figure out what they would like to use on. The administration has issued guidance, but it is mostly up to the states to figure out how to distribute those funds. We're seeing some really interesting things across the United States in terms of like how how people have started to use previous stimulus dollars towards child care industries. But I'm curious if if you all can talk about anything interesting that you've seen in terms of how those investments are being used, how people are talking about how the investment should be used either in Texas or in other states that we might look at, too, as a model. And now as well as Elizabeth, I can start with you. Oh, sorry. No, you're fine. I had a conversation with someone who indicated that one option would be a child care voucher that could be taken to any provider that would allow people to make their own choices as opposed to being told to go to one or another. Kind of provider. So that was that was an interesting. Consideration that was being made because I states, counties, cities, ISDs are all school districts are all having to make these decisions really fast and try to be innovative. So they need input from people around those. And making the I think there is discussion around making the child care credit permanent over the long term. We were calculating there about three million poor children in Texas who previously were not eligible for the tax credit because their family didn't didn't file taxes. So it was only people who filed taxes who were eligible. So the people who needed it most were not being served. So now they are. So they'll be getting this access. And that's in addition, all the other children will be also seeing a boost, you know, who were previously getting some their families were getting some. We're getting, I think, like two thousand dollars a month, they'll now be getting the three thousand to thirty six hundred dollars, not per month, per year, per child. So that's that's also a huge boom to the economy of Texas, right? So and Texas has been in this complicated. You have a lot of loss of women's jobs, but there's also a turn down in the oil and gas. So that's a lot of men's jobs as well. So there's been a sort of it's different from state to state. But yeah, child care vouchers and expanded care are being discussed. Everywhere, I imagine. Naskul, do you have anything to add to that? Perhaps on privatizing the child care, having some more options for parents to choose. Right now, we have like a lack of enough child care in Austin, where I live, perhaps having more like public school or public options for. Mothers or for parents would be something. But I never thought of their child voucher. That sounds like a great idea. It is a bit was not mine. But the other thing that I should mention, though, but it was I liked it. Happy to carry it for that. I should mention about Texas is we have a huge undocumented population who frequently do not have access to benefit. So then you have this whole other issue of poverty that may not be addressed by even a tax credit. So the other side of it is regularizing immigration, which is, you know, it has a direct impact on children and women who are in tech in Houston. Hispanic women are living in poverty, 21 percent, where Hispanic men, 11 percent. So that's huge. And it must be in some. Dimension related to parenthood. So there are a lot of parts of our economy that we don't know about, or we don't care to know about. And that's true for Texas. It's true for other parts of the country, too. But part of doing this kind of feminist analysis of women's participation would also be doing an actual analysis of how the economy works. And what's good and bad about that, you know, not just assume that the old way is the way we have to move forward, but be innovative across the board. The only thing I would jump into add is that I haven't I haven't heard of. I think there's a lot that's still being figured out about these plans. But, you know, one of the sort of thought provocations that I would want to put out there and I would want, you know, people, policymakers to be thinking about and families to be thinking about, like, why as a society do we believe that starting at age five, kids are entitled to a free education. But below five, you are on your own, like that there should be, you know, there are some are existing small subsidies for certain groups. But basically, you know, the idea that everything below five privatize everything above five, you know, again, public the public school system, there's plenty. We could have a whole another conversation about different problems and equities there. But as a society, we've agreed that public school should exist and that there is some government funding for that. So really challenging, like, why do we think it's OK for there to be no support for people who have children under five? A lot of that has to do with our our ambivalence about mothers in the workforce. A lot of this has to do with reinforcement of traditional gender roles. But just assuming that it's OK for this to be a private, you know, that raising children and having children is, you know, a personal hobby akin to windsurfing or something that you should just feel, you know, if you want to invest all that money in, that's up to you is, you know, it's not working as we're seeing from the terrible birth rate. But like, we're basically at a like, you know, society is not going to continue to function if we treat parents like how we're treating them. So it's it's the question is not just about whether or not we're helping parents. The question is ultimately existential about why why we think about these things in this way. Again, may I connect what Catherine said to what Elizabeth earlier called this vicious cycle, right? We don't value those kids education before five and those kids are going to stay behind and they're going to continue being behind. Unfortunately, majority of them are going to be people of color, immigrants, low income. So you see the cycle starts then they're just born not having access to right education. The mother is coming back and forth from three jobs, doesn't have enough time to spend with her kid and the education starts maybe four or five year old. So we are seeing that lacking behind going forward with that. They they just fall unfortunately in that vicious cycle. Now, the attitude seems to be it's your family, it's your problem rather than these are the workers of our society and why and because we value our population, we want to invest in them with make sure they have good food and health care and a good education. Those would be what you would assume a society would want to give to its people from the beginning, as you say, not just when they're five and whether or not they you know, we do see all these people who can afford childcare. Hey, they started three months. So, you know, the school work synchrony model would be eight a.m. to six p.m. from age three to age 18. And you don't have to go to school till six p.m. if you don't want to, but you have that option. So, you know, you don't have to have your kids in summer school, but you have that option. So, you know, I calculated it currently in the setup of the school day. Children are in school during the work hours over the course of their lifetime between zero and 18 37% of the time.  Call me service days. You know, it's like what who do you think is going to be taking care of these children? If you had a fully synchronous program, you'd have hundreds of thousands of extra jobs. You would be taking people out of dependency, but you'd also be allowing people to like get their homework done before they go home and spend more positive time with their, with their families when they get there, you know, they're just a lot of ways you could restructure the school day. And I know that one of the other areas that people are looking at now with the school district money is expanding after school offerings so that they do go from 230 to six. And if you made that available universal, that would be transformative also. And if, you know, I don't think they're going to be able to gear up for this summer. But if they start thinking about, you know, how do we offer an enrichment program over the summer that also keeps up with learning loss, you know, on does that, how positive would that be for millions of people? Because it's not the case that everybody is in camp, you know, over the summer in some idealized universe where they're all out in Elizabeth, what you're talking is exactly the feminist ethics of care where we are being seen and interconnectedness of our identities. And you, if you are better, I'm going to be better. But that's not the system is not working. We need women like you, women who believe in this way of thinking in a policy making in a decision making level. And that's why I'm still believing this is a structure. We can like do all of these little things change these leaders, but we need to get women and men at the same time change their ideas about this gender relations. And I think the pandemic, you're right. If it is an opportunity, those tax credit, all of these changes that we're making are going to take us. But I think we might need more revolutionary, perhaps feminist ethics in our society. I'm here for it. I'm here for the revolution. You know, we're talking a lot about, you know, that this is an opportunity like the pandemic has has exposed so many of the issues that we had within childcare, within gender roles in the home.  But within the homes and seeing this unpaid work, the distribution of that when it when it comes to childcare, we have talked a lot about how care for older family members also usually falls on women. What can be done even within the homes like smaller conversations, anything to start to correct that. And, and also how do from your research from speaking with with mothers who have gone through this who have had the burnout, do you think is that shifting? Did the pandemic exposed to maybe husbands that there is a real shift that needs to happen here? And also before I let y'all answer that, I'd like to remind people that we do want to leave some time at the end for Q&As, you can go ahead and start dropping questions in that box and I'll be able to see them. But yeah, what can we do about all of this? I have many, I have many thoughts on this at a very prescient move in the end of 2019, the double shift, we did an entire series on the idea that the revolution begins at home and that we can't see changes in the world until we see changes in our own home lives.  And I feel like, you know, the pandemic has only further exposed that I think. So the number one best resource on this topic is a book by my friend Eve Rodsky called Fair Play. And the idea around Fair Play is that all time is equal and that in a relationship, if someone makes more money, it doesn't mean that their time is inherently more valuable in a relationship. And she has a lot of very concrete ways to think about dividing time in partnerships in the home. But I think that I think that, you know, one of the things I don't think this is nest, I think, you know, for example, in academia, this sort of time during the pandemic of like more being at home, like men are publishing at a much higher rate than women because they are not taking on more care giving. There's the reports about working from home where men like are much more likely to say it has had no negative impact on their productivity where women are reporting the opposite. So I think that a lot of this, you know, again, whatever individual systems we had and supports and outsourcing that white color women had to sort of skate by have fallen away.  Like that's not they don't find that enjoyable. They're benefiting from that unpaid labor for that someone else is doing. So I think having very, very challenging conversations in our own homes and also, you know, thinking more expansively about, you know, why, why are we so committed to the nuclear family as an ideal? Like that's not how most people that's not how we've raised families for most of human history. Like why can we think more expansively about extended families and communities and co-housing and all these different things. So I think it's not only about personal negotiation, but also about how can we, you know, create legal statuses for, you know, families that have more than two parents and all this sort of thing. So I'm totally down for these conversations. And I think, you know, just negotiating who's doing what is really only the beginning of these very, very tough conversations that we need to be having as a society. I agree. I agree. I'm going to talk a little bit about the story of the destroyed Catherine and I can bring up two stories from these women. Rosa, she is a restaurant worker and she is a single mom of two kids.  So what you're saying exactly matches what we are saying. Remember, Maryam in Austin with the same education and a paid a scale at her husband. She had those difficult conversation with her husband and her husband was like, tell me, let's have a schedule. Let's have items that I do and items you do. So maybe perhaps we can have a public education system. Elizabeth, maybe it is there in other countries that they are happier than us or ranked more happy in the ranking of the cities or countries or right in the world scale. What are they doing that they are able to share those unpaid domestic and childcare in a more equal way or at least more enjoyable way. Elizabeth, right? Well, are they doing it? Some countries do have structures that award leave on a structured basis, right? Where you do have a requirement that men and women equally participate. There was, I remember a few decades back, I mean, I don't remember literally, but I have seen that there was a discussion of writing up contracts, right? Where you divide household work. And then this is immediately it was suggested it was mocked as, oh, these feminists are there just too, you know, that's not the way real life is. People don't live by a contract. But why not? I mean, in a basic way, you can divide up tasks and just not do them if they aren't your tasks. Just don't just say, okay, well, they didn't do it. I'll do it. You know, just don't do it. And have that difficult dynamic. But I think you can't have it just in the familial situation. You also have to have it reinforced by social structures that indicate that there actually is positive respect and endorsement you know, that people will maybe get paid more for not being productive during the pandemic in their academic point system. I don't know. Because that shows you were actually doing more. You were probably doing all that childbearing. But where you change the way things are recognized. Jumping back to what Elizabeth and Catherine both said there are several already several publications about how women academics have not been either publishing as much as their male colleagues or being conducting laboratory research. And guess what? It's not just the childcare. We in our universities, they care for graduate students and undergraduate students is definitely feminized, right? We all experienced it. Most of the students come to female professors to get the care to be heard to be helped out about something outside the classroom. So that's again, feminization of the care in all aspects of that. And Elizabeth, I would love to see an example of that contract between a partner's how they did it and are they still together or what happened? They divorce shortly thereafter. But that was back in the 60s. I think I can find it and send it to you. Yeah, I mean, it's across the board and status is hugely important at every level and particularly reinforcements for impoverished women are the the step that is key. But the same dynamic occurs at all at all levels. And you know here in our state, we have other kinds of dynamics of lack of support that we need to rethink, right? So we have particular problems around support for health care, support for fair wages and support for reproductive health access, which is also part of a property manufacturing machine, you know, so if you don't have access to birth control and abortion, then you are more likely to be in a cycle of poverty as are your children. And these dynamics have to be discussed also as part of a larger entity of lack of support, so or system of lack of support. So as a state, we have particular concerns, but these are echoed throughout the United States. So they're parallel. It's a great segue to a question from our audience and you already started to answer this Elizabeth, but we have a question, what can or should Texas parents ask their lawmakers to do to expand our social safety net, either on a state or city level? To expand the social safety network, well there are so many ways. So currently they could stop trying to limit access to reproductive health care and clinics and things like that, or they skipped an opportunity to expand the Medicaid option under the affordable care act that was actually offered by a partisan set of legislators and you know, it's still time. It could happen again, I suppose as was noted, you know, there's such inequitable education system in our state. We rank 42nd in terms of investment in education and a lot of the highly paid jobs here are filled by people from other states where they do invest in education and Texans don't get the benefit of their own state's economy thriving. So that's another area. You know, there are just so many issues, regularizing wages around immigration. Huge issue has to be done in collaboration with the feds, but if you want equity you have to recognize that there are huge numbers of workers who are doing making the workforce, the cost of living lower. Everybody takes that work for granted and then castigates the people at the same time but there has to be some real addressing of that. Access to free good child care fix the criminal justice system in so many ways. You could talk to your talk to your and they all affect the economy and not just the gender roles of women, but also the gender roles of men that are also limiting. If there's something, Dad, just to note that we only have about two minutes left, I wish we could do this for another 30 minutes, but I just wanted to jump on Elizabeth listed so many great causes and sometimes people can feel overwhelmed. There's so many issues I could possibly get involved with. What I have seen from listeners, the double shift community listeners and stuff and heard from other moms, especially moms were stretch really thin. We can't take on all these issues, but find what your issue is. It's around your local school board, whether it's around universal child care in your county, whether it's a specific bill in the legislature and really get involved in that. You can't fix everything, but get some friends involved too so you don't feel like you're doing it alone. If there's something that really speaks to you, find that issue and stick with it. That is how we make change over time. We can't fix everything in one fell swoop, but it's okay to do that. We need to focus on this working with my community, to address these efforts and really focusing on these issues in an ongoing way does make a difference. Those mothers that Catherine said had focus on one specific subject. I would like to see a change in a specific policy how does concretely change that mother's life or her children life. to real life experiences. It's going to change your life in this way and that way with solid facts and numbers. So other women who might not be interested in getting politically active can see the result in their own life and be more inclined to join their movement perhaps. Great advice everyone. Well, I wanna thank all of you again, Nazgul, Catherine, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for being with me here today and thank you so much for inviting us and hosting this panel. This is a great discussion, obviously a lot to talk about here, but I loved hearing from all of you. Thank you for having us. Thank you very much.


Now, you might be wondering why I've come here to talk about OpenStack, but it's going to be about the idea of running Cilium somewhere else than in Kubernetes, because we all know this picture, right? We all love it, but life is not always like that. So, standard Cilium usage is in Kubernetes, right? Our story is that we don't have just Kubernetes clusters. We have a few different clusters. I'll tell you in a minute. So, the problem is running Cilium outside of Kubernetes. The features or the possibilities you have in the OpenStars version is Cilium external watercloth. What that allows you is to import. It can be a VM. It can be a bare metal server. You can import it into your running Kubernetes cluster. You will need to just get the hostname, get the IP addresses. You can add labels to it, and you will just put that into a YAML, into the Kubernetes object, put that into your cluster, and the cluster will know the identity of that external workload. So, there will be Cilium agents running on the VM, for example. It will allocate an identity to the whole VM, and that identity will be shared in the cluster. What you will see is that you just need to use at CD, so you need connection to the at CD. You can't actually use the Kubernetes with the external workload. So, our story begins when our manager came to us one day and said, guys, this is all great. We can use Cilium in Kubernetes, but our users also have OpenStack. So this is an OpenStack logo. And they have their databases in OpenStack. They can't just migrate them, and they can't just run them in Kubernetes because they're MySQL databases, Postgres, and they're used to run them in OpenStack. So, can we somehow make Cilium work in OpenStack world as well? And that was a bit of a challenge. We started slowly. We discussed it with the community, with the Cilium maintainers, so thanks a lot, guys. We were able to run Cilium agents on each OpenStack node. The node is actually the machine which hosts the VMs, so there can be 10 VMs, for example, on a single node, just like in the Kubernetes world. So then, when you run Cilium agents on them, they just need, again, a connection to the at-cd. What you can do then regarding the policies, so there also was a security team that came to us and said, guys, is it possible to secure somehow the workloads, the VMs? And we are okay. We can try to find it. And there was this Cilium policy import command which you can run from inside the Cilium container. So you can import a JSON file which will have what should be allowed, what should be blocked, so just the definition of the policy. But the problem is you need to go one by one and do that on every node. I mean, you can do some scripting around that. You can perhaps have a cron job that does that for you. But what about updates and stuff like that? So we came up with the idea of what if we put Kubernetes next to the OpenStack? So what if we somehow configure these agents to connect to a Kubernetes, but apply everything on the VMs themselves? So in OpenStack, just like in Kubernetes, you have worker nodes, you have master nodes. There's the control plane, right? We are used to run at CDs on them. So it's easy, right? We just spawn the Kubernetes on those nodes. So it can be, it turned out to be a K3S with just the control plane. No worker nodes, so no workloads, but just the master nodes so that we have the Kubernetes control plane. We can apply something in there, right? So we can actually use the Kube CTL and apply the standard policies, what you would apply to your standard Kubernetes cluster. You can apply them to these, for example, K3S, and Selium agents are configured to access and to pull everything from those Kubernetes cluster nodes. So then they just apply the policies, can be the same ones as in Kubernetes case. But it's not it, right? If you have just a single cluster, it's not enough. Our users, they want cluster mesh. They want to share the identities across all of it. Which means we somehow need to expose those at CDs to the other clusters. And we've heard how the cluster mesh works. So Selium agents will pull or will synchronize all the identities, the IP addresses, from the remote at CDs and will update their IP caches and the identity maps. And then the communication can happen, right? So if I connect one server from a different cluster, I can see it's IP, I know what it is, I know the labels. So turned out this is actually possible. But I have only briefly said what it was, high-level overview. So now if we take a closer look how it works in OpenStack, there is, this is a single node, right? So there is a node, there is a VM which is running on the node. What had to happen was we had to create a tool. We call it Selium OpenStack plugin, which is similar to what Selium Docker plugin is, which is in the Selium repo. You can take a look at it. So we've created this. What it does is it needs a source of the information, right? So in case of OpenStack, it's LibVert. It's what's spawning the VM. So OpenStack control plane will tell LibVert, hey, spawn me a VM and it will do that. And what LibVert does, what allows you to do is you can hook into LibVert, you can see the events that are happening there, okay, VM is about to be spawned, VM is about to be deleted and we can work with these events. So we're watching these events and taking the information from them and just transferring them into something that Selium needs to know. So we are using an API to tell Selium agent, hey, this is a new VM. It has these labels, it has this IP address and just create all the BPI programs and attach it, please, to my tab interface, which is what's in the OpenStack world. And if you want to use host firewall, you can use that. It will just attach just like in Kubernetes to your public interface if zero in this case. And then we have BGP, so it's no different compared to the Kubernetes. We use BERT in this case. So which means there can be a few different problems if you're running something that is not standard. So I've said that we're using APIs. What Selium does, what allows you to do is to use the low-level APIs. The one we use only is the endpoint one. So what you can do is if you have something that's running on the node where the Selium agent is running, you can just tell, we are doing Unix socket, hey, create me an endpoint. If labels change, patch the endpoint, delete, whatever. So this way, you can tell it if you have this information. So again, you just need an IP address, you need labels, you need an interface name and you need to make address and the data path configuration. In our case, we don't use any IPAM related to Selium, we just use the OpenStack one. So we use the external IPAM true. We needed to let the ARP packets to go through so that the ARP resolution protocol works. And we also needed to tell Selium to install the IP route so that the traffic can actually reach the VMs. So then we just created with the endpoint create command. So this way, we have Selium running on the node and we have an endpoint, a Selium one. What you can notice is that usually you would see here, usually you would see here K8S because Selium, you are used to run Selium in Kubernetes, right? And by default, Selium will prepend Kubernetes label source to your Selium endpoint. What we had to do was patch Selium and we've created a new label source called OpenStack. So we are prepending an OpenStack prefix here, which is important to us so that our users can distinguish between if they are applying or allowing access from OpenStack or from Kubernetes. So this way they can do it. So again, that was a short intro to OpenStack. But now if you actually want to test things out, what you can, for example, our common use case is we have a client or API in Kubernetes and we have a database in OpenStack, so in a VM. So usually if you have something like default deny policies applied, you would expect that traffic is blocked, which in this case it is. But you know the labels which you want to allow. So you just create a network policy, right? So usually you do not have to specify the prefix here, so the label source. In this case we want to specify it because we are explicitly saying, okay, allow me access to the OpenStack world. So we create Selimet for policy on egress, two endpoints with labels, yeah, cluster, namespace, the app, and we prefix it with the OpenStack. And voila, things start to work. So this way you can allow access between these two worlds. But this was only a small part of our puzzle because our manager came to us again and said, guys, this is amazing, but our users, they use something else, something that has been here for a long time. Could you somehow figure out a way how to put this into the picture? And if you've been paying attention today, you have seen this picture. Does anybody know what it is? Yeah, it's Calico, exactly. So our story is that we are still running Calico in Kubernetes also in OpenStack. And we are trying to figure out a way how to put this into the picture, how to somehow connect Calico, which is like an outside world. If you communicate from this cluster, from a pod, and towards your Selim enabled clusters, either Kubernetes or OpenStack doesn't matter. This will be just like in any other outside world application. So it won't be, Selim knows nothing about IP address from Calico. So what we managed to do was create yet another tool, we call it Calico Selim Bridge. And what it does is it will take workload endpoints, which is like Selim endpoints in Calico world. So it's watching the workload endpoints in the Calico at CD. And it transfers them, converts them into something that Selim understands. So you need at CD per every Calico cluster. And this tool can migrate everything that's in the Calico at CD into your Selim at CD, which you've just spawned, for example. And then it can just watch the events again. It uses the Selim library at CD1 to do that. So it will watch the workload endpoints with the prefix slash Calico. Thanks to the Selim library, it will allocate an identity. So you need to tell it which cluster ID should be used. We've heard it today that you need, for cluster mesh to work properly, you need cluster ID per every cluster. So for this work, you need to tell it, okay, this is the cluster ID that this Calico cluster will use. It will allocate the identity for every workload endpoint and save that into the at CD. And then that's the first part, that's the identity. And then you need the IP address and the connection with the identity. So it will also save the IP address as the IP identity pair into the at CD. So this way, in the end, you have in the at CD, you have the identity by value and by the number in the at CD, in the target one. And you have the IP address with the connection to the identity. So these informations are needed for the cluster mesh, cluster mesh to work properly. So now we've successfully managed to create cluster mesh across all these different environments. The problem was our users, right? We need to somehow teach them how to use all these functionality because they are not used to create network policies or, or silly network policies. Now they have, they have option to, to create that in Kubernetes, which is native. They can use Hubble, which will help them. They can use the silly network policy editor. But if you're combining all these worlds, they also need to understand where are you applying this? So with Calico in the picture, what you can do is just like in OpenStack, we've added yet another label source Calico, which allows you to just specify that anywhere you want. So if in case you have, you are slowly just migrating from the, from the Calico clusters and we are trying to convince them, guys, with this, it, it's easier, right? You can just small, in a small, small portions, just one by one, one component by one, convert them to, to the Cilium Kubernetes. So if they have client in one, in Calico cluster, they have the API in the, in the new Cilium Kubernetes cluster and they have the database in OpenStack. With this, they can just allow and block access from wherever they want. It just works, it just works. But the problem is they need to understand where is the policy actually applied and if it works everywhere, they are used to, they're used to use. So in <IP_ADDRESS>, this works. So you have a service of type notebook, right? So policies are applied there. The ones I just shown, in case of service of type bolt balancer in DSR mode, you actually see the original client source IP and it can be applied. So the policies can be applied also in this case. If the traffic reaches the node, for example, that is hosting the, the backends. But if we have ingress in the picture, the problem is, it's a proxy, right? So usually it terminates connections, HTTPS connections. So if you use ingress, usually what you see on the back end is the source IP of the proxy, not of the original client that initiated the connection, but you see the proxy. So what you, the only thing you can, you can do is to allow access from the proxy. But you cannot, you cannot tell it, allow only this specific client. You will be allowed to access the ingress. You can use, I mean, maybe in a, in a cloud world, I don't have those experiences. You can tell it, okay, allow only, only this subnet perhaps. But then last week came the <IP_ADDRESS> and I want to give shout outs to, to Jarno, which was the contributor, contributor to it. There is a possibility to specify CNPs targeting the ingress itself. So now with <IP_ADDRESS> you can tell, allow only this specific client to access my ingress. And we are good to go. So with, with that, the mission is accomplished. And hopefully our users will be, it will be easier for them to migrate to, to Cilium. So if this is interesting to you in any way, if you think you would, you could use that, please reach out to me. We have, we have yet to open source both tools. We have not done that because we are just wondering if it makes sense to you. So with that, thank you so much. Do we have any questions? So your, your Calico plugin and your OpenStack plugins, how do they reconcile state if they get out of sync? How do they reconcile state if what? Sorry? If they get out of sync? So let's say like your, your OpenStack cluster, if, if an event is missed by the plugin. If it's missed. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, yeah, just like you said, there's a reconcile which periodically synchronizes the state if it did all it should. So the plugin will, will get the current state from the libvert and it will just try to send that to, to Silly Magent to somehow synchronize if, if it missed something or not. It's not perfect, but yeah, it works. I was wondering what, I guess, lower level of networking model you're using with OpenStack. Was it using OVS? No, sorry. Yeah. I forgot to mention it. It's, it was, it has been based on Calico the whole time. So there is a BGP and L3 networking. So no open V-switch, unfortunately. So maybe it could be a start. The other thing is how, how would you handle IP collisions between like private networks within OpenStack and also inside the Kubernetes networks? Or did you just restrict the IP schemes? Yes. We have a specific subnets for, for OpenStack and different ones. So they are unique. If we want cluster mesh to work correctly, it has to be unique, right? So we are connecting all of them and yeah, have separate subnets for. Okay. Thank you. Just one question about the networking model. Are you using just native rounding mode? Yes. Exactly. And to, to no tunnels or anything? Nope. Okay.