Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 Las Vegas. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to HPE Discover 2016, everybody. This is theCUBE. theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We got a crowd chat going on crowdchat.net slash HPE Discover. Essentially, we're documenting a transcript of all theCUBE interviews. Check out siliconangle.tv and siliconangle.com for all the news. Check out wikibond.com for all the research. Vishmal Shand is here. He's back. We're going to geek out a little bit on storage, Vish. We haven't had time to sit here and just one-on-one talk about what's going on in the storage business. So I'm really excited for the activity that I'm seeing, the momentum that you guys have. So first of all, congratulations on all the success. Thank you, Dave. Thank you. Great to be here on. It's been quite a journey. Let's go back a little bit. I just love having this conversation. A little armchair conversation. But when you think back to 3PAR, when you guys started the company in a really exciting time, but you had this vision of kind of utility storage, the storage service provider market, which evolved, of course, into cloud storage, but you really went after a very difficult segment to go after. Tier one block storage dominated by EMC, obviously Hitachi, so to a certain extent IBM. You were able to crack that market, achieve escape velocity in a very difficult time after the dot-com boom, and then land as a public company. Great, successful exit, but it wasn't easy. Yes.  And the rest of the story is history, but it's a great one. So first of all, up until that point, it had to be an exciting ride for you. I mean, I don't know if you've been through anything like that before. I mean, this has been a great ride, right? And while I was not there at three par from the early start, I was there for some number of years, and it did go through several, we had several phases where it was very difficult, right? The dot-com, the economy, economy slowdowns, and many companies didn't survive through that. And so when we finally culminated with the acquisition by HP, it sort of started the next phase, right, of development and growth. And so far it's been a very, very good journey for us. Well, and then, again, HP, at the time, HP, Mark Hurd was the CEO, Dave Donatelli was sort of the head of storage and wanted to do this acquisition, and it was expensive acquisition, it was $2.5 billion, but it turned out to be a great IRR for HP. But at the time, I remember the rationale was, we can take this architecture and go small to large. Correct. At the time, they didn't say we could take this same architecture and go into flash, right? What everybody predicted, myself included, and I was wrong, was that HP was going to, at the time, HP now, of course, HPE was going to have to buy an all-flash player. And you guys said, no, the architecture is going to lend itself to flash. That's how it was designed. Maybe some luck, maybe some brilliance. And everybody said, oh, boy, bolt on. Right. The balance sheet is not going to support an acquisition. That's just sort of the have, can't fix it, feature it, marketing. But okay, but it turned out to be just the case, right? That you were able to transition and become a leader. Absolutely. Amazing, amazing story. No, I think we have to thank our customers and we have to thank the founders, the three-par.  While they didn't publicly state it, they were thinking about flash and credit to the evaluators at HP, looking at the three-par architecture, they had that on their mind. And they saw that potential, right? And then again that- Long-term planning and yeah, okay. And so they did see that potential. Now, of course, there's always a long road between potential and then delivery and then between delivery and adoption, right? And there are many, many different things that go along the way of those pieces, but you know, credit to HP for having HP at that time, for having that force. Well, and you were there in the thick of it. You were in the trenches during that transition. Yes. What was that like? I mean, requirements dealing with the technical hurdles, you know, working with customers, figuring out the pricing models, right? What was that like? Yeah, you know, the journey, I think you were referring to the, when we decided to go all flash with people, right? The supplier, the man-supply, I mean, so many factors. There's so many factors, right? So from a product strategy perspective, I think the first thing we had to handle was, okay, let's make a decision. And at that time, there was some debates on, is the flash market going to be driven primarily by latency, IOPS performance, right? And only performance, right? And you really want to drive to that really, really razor edge of performance. And we had a little bit of a different view there, right? And some of us in the company said, no, you know, performance is very important. It's fundamental, but it's not enough by itself, right? The affordability is a key factor, and so are the data services. And so getting through all of those initial debates was important. And then once we got past the debate, right? And we brought it to Dave Donatelli, and you know, he supported us, right? Through that time, getting past those debates then required the hard work of, okay, flash is different, right? What do you do different? How do you engineer that difference? If you remember, we announced the 7,000 in 2012. We announced the first all flash product in June, 2013. So that was 18 months, right? So that was 18 months what the engineering work that went into three-power all flash. Now, there was a lot of good leverage we could have taken abroad because of the architecture, but that was good 18 months with the engineering. And you have come out of it with an extremely competitive, low latency product with the industries. I think I can say this unquestionably, the industry's most robust and mature all-flash stack. I mean, that's a no-brainer, right? There's no one even close to having the hardened, mature stack that three-power has with all those other attributes. Yeah, and there's one of our challenges now, Dave. I think, you know, that richness of the stack, while it's just massive strength, I think we got to do a better job of explaining that to more and more customers, right? Because as soon as you understand it, and you see the delta differences, right? I'll give you a couple that are really key. Ability to move data non-disruptively, peer motion. People just love that, right? Even if I had to move an aged data off or flash array to something else, being able to peer motion that, big, big one. Another one, peer persistence, active-active failover with transparent orchestration. People love that. The customers really resonate to that solution, right? So, the richness is the strength, and then making sure people understand it, that's work for us.  Okay, so now we're here today, 2016, the big announcements this week were focused on density.  What's the messaging around the density and all flash? Yeah, so maybe first important to step back, Dave, and look at, you know, the three vectors that we've always talked about, performance, affordability, and enterprise class data services. And so, if you dig into the affordability section now, or the affordability vector, to me that's where density plays, right?  If you have, we have service providers in Tokyo, Japan, and I asked them, I said, could you use a large SSD if we doubled capacity? And the answer was, bring it on, Manish. The more you double every time, the more we take on, we have growth. And you know, if you can help us either maintain density or reduce density, that's always welcome. So this announcement, we announced two new drives, right? 7.68 and 15.36. Last year, we announced 3.84, the year before that 1.92. So it's been 2X, 2X, and now 4X, right? And if you want to take a density metric, Dave, in 2012 we were at four terabytes per rack unit. Four terabyte usable per rack unit. We are now at 536 terabytes per rack unit, okay? And again, that may be short in the window, if we look at the last 24 months, 16X improvement in density, 40% lower dollar per gig. So this is really interesting because, you know, we've been on the all flash bandwagon for a while, Wikibon, and Floyer's, you know, he's got his cost curves in it. He shows the cost per bit of flash coming down quicker. Now, sometimes that's an anomaly, you see different, you know, sourcing issues that can affect that. But there's a debate going on in the industry, particularly driven by Moshe and I, right? His company, with Affinidad, is saying, no, you don't need all flash, you need some flash. And so it's an interesting, so how do you guys, I mean, I know how you guys see it, but I wonder if you could talk about it a little bit. You believe that flash is going to be less expensive than spinning disk, let's say by the end of the decade, right? In terms of usable, right? Because you could data reduce it. TCO, we don't even talk about it. I'm just talking about. Data reduction? Yeah, yeah, so what's your take on that? I mean, you guys are obviously betting on that, but are we over, am I overstating that? No, I think clearly there is this move towards what we call the all flash data center, right? And where more and more of the mission critical, more and more of the IT data center spend goes to flash. Now, I think there's still use cases for deploying hybrid systems. We've had a couple that have come on theCUBE and have explained, right? One is the example of data aging. Right. Another one is the example of, I heard this morning from a customer that said, if I have to, by regulation, encrypt at the file and database table level, okay, and it impacts my ability to compress indeed, but the flash level, do I still buy all flash? And I said it depends. How much performance do you need? And if you have to have 1,000 spindles to get that performance, it may still be more economical with a 7.68 terabyte SD drive. Now, but if you don't have that number of spindles, maybe there's a consideration here for spinning, right? Right. So I think at the end of the day, you want to be able to have all of these tools at your hand for your disposal. And I think locking you in into any one approach, while sometimes that's forced on you because of a technical reason, if you can afford the luxury of having the option, we've seen customers go from hybrid to all flash and to what we sometimes term converge flash, right? The cloud was here last year and they talked about 30% of data not being accessed and wanting to move that to a cold tier. So again, I think that this is going to continue. How about the competitive landscape? We'd love to talk about the horses on the track and we haven't done that much this week. So you guys are leading. EMC obviously still a very, very strong competitor. Of course, the Dell merger acquisition is going to be really interesting. You got NetApp made a move to go out and buy SolidFire and they're essentially positioning SolidFire for the service provider market only. They got Ingenio over here and Cluster Nontap for everything else. Hitachi I'm not as familiar with, really not sure what they're doing, although I've been told to get some good, they always have good products. So what's the competitive landscape look like? Give us the summary there. So from a competitive point of view, it seems to me that the major storage vendors are still struggling through disruption. What I call this the multiple plan Bs and no role plan A, right? And still going through the multiple offerings. I mean, even NetApp's most recent Ingenio, all flash, SolidFire, EMC, I think it was very notable that at EMC World this year, there was no mention of extreme IO. There was all flash VNX, all flash Unity, all flash VMAX. And I have to imagine that must be confusing for their customers, let alone for their sales and channel partners that customer would ask and say, hey, what should I deploy? What do you recommend? It must be a very bewildering set of choices, right? Yeah, and I left out IBM. I mean, IBM bought Texas memory systems a while back. Good product, high performance. But they belong to a class where I think data services continues to be a difficult challenge for them. They've used an approach with SVC. If you look at the market data, I don't know, it doesn't appear to be resonating as much. What's the market data saying? The market data is showing clearly EMC, HP, pure storage, NetApp playing in here, less so for IBM. Right, and pure seems to be cruising, I mean, growing, obviously still losing money, but seems like a lot of momentum behind there. You run into those guys a lot. We run into pure storage all the time. How do you compete with pure? What's the... The biggest thing we do when we compete with pure is, first of all, the data services. The fact that we can offer pure motion, pure persistence, replication, both sync and async, we see that a lot, right? The other thing that we see against pure, they're essentially a dual controller architecture and not even an active, active, active passive architecture. And in the world of Flash, controller performance is everything on your performance, right? And so whether it's capacity scale, performance scale, you know, where we beat them, there are many places where they just don't have that scale of performance or capacity. So you're willing to get in a rock fight with any of these guys? You know, I think again, we try and stay focused on the customer need, right? And when we talk to customers, we had plenty of them this week at the show, right? They tell us what they need and then to them, uptime resiliency is number one. I think a lot of the uncertainty around the future of HP, HPE, the split of the two companies is behind you now. Seems like the whole spin merge with CSC has been a real tailwind for you. Stock's at a 52 week high, right? The balance sheet looks a lot better. The Aruba acquisition, a lot of really good things lining up. You know, the other thing is, we've said it a number of times, you say you're focused on the customer. Customers have been rooting for HP this whole time. It's an icon of the industry, Silicon Valley basically founded in a garage at HP. So it's like HP is getting back to its roots of invent. I think the company's split into HP has been very positive, right? And there's clearly a lot more focus. Today, a blogger quoted this to me and he says he's seeing great fruits of innovation. And he was mentioning to me about something called Recovery Manager Central, right? Which we announced another version of it at this show and we have added additional enhancements. Another data service, right? This ability to do flat backup, right? And he was very intrigued about the possibilities with not just flat backup as well as RMC. He also recognized that with that RMC framework and sort of keeping track of these change blocks, your ability to move data now across, say, system defined to software defined. There's some interesting possibilities there now with that RMC framework, right? And some application specificities around SAP and Oracle. Yes. All right, fish, we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for hanging out on theCUBE. Thank you, great being here again. All right, keep it right there. Everybody will be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, this is theCUBE, we're live from HPE Discover 16 in Vegas.


When you're hooked, a fantasy starts being built, a beautiful fantasy, I might add, because I think when we're in a state of we're feeling love but the other person isn't, we romanticize, we take red flags and we turn them into green flags. I am guilty of doing this, so I'm completely aware of this. The challenge we have when someone is experiencing attachment and not love. One of the main differences when a person is experiencing love, they're all in. They're all in.  Doesn't mean they're not in the relationship but there's an all-in.


Thank you. I think we were actually listening to the third very interesting presentation. Unfortunately, it got disconnected. But we already heard two very interesting presentations on Kenny and Cameron. I also looked at the paper on Ghana. I think they have come up with almost the very common, some common stories. I think where I'm coming from, from South Asia and looking at South Southern Africa, I think many things we have in common, especially when it comes to challenges of mobilizing domestic servings. But at the same time, few things probably what we can offer to South Southern Africa in terms of getting some lessons the way South Asian countries perform. And definitely East Asian or South Asian countries perform better than South Asian countries. So we can look at those issues. I think those will be very, very important to understand the whole topic, what we are discussing today. I thought that the first point is of course looking at the economic performance issues, especially the way the pattern of economic growth and in South Southern Africa. It has been low and it has been volatile. I think that is also extremely important to understand how to mobilize domestic savings. If you look at some of the other South Asian countries or Southeast Asian countries in terms of volatility, in terms of keeping a healthy economic growth rate for a longer period of time, I think we see some mark differences. And that is also very much related to building the economic resilience in terms of with respect to the shocks, external shocks. I think this is also extremely important because savings behavior can be affected as you have very, in a couple of the papers we saw external shocks can actually affect the savings behavior and how to absorb the external shocks, the resilience of the economy is extremely important. So my point is that when we think of the kind of unsatisfactory performance of most of the South Southern African countries in terms of mobilizing savings, we need to look at their growth pattern. I'm very sure that these three papers actually look at this. Now when it comes to the growth and savings next year's, so which one affects one, definitely we all agree that it has a kind of feedback loop. So savings leads to investment, investment leads to growth, and the growth leads to rise in income, then it leads to savings. So there is a kind of circularity there. But also one of the very recent papers by Professor Kunal Sen and his colleague looked at the how productivity growth actually affected savings. So when you look at, when you take into account all these issues, I think definitely a sustained period of economic growth which can actually build the productive capacity and then can lead to building the confidence of the households or other economic agents that is extremely important for the South Southern African countries. And that is not only for South Southern African countries. I think that is applicable to the South Asian countries as well. But then how do we do that? How do we achieve those kind of sustained period of economic growth? And in terms to achieve those that's targets, I think those we need to look at those economic policies. I'm very glad that these three papers try to look at those economy underlying economic policies, macro policies, monetary policies, fiscal policies. But then if we really want to, if we, if I have, if I don't misunderstood it, that the larger savings in South Southern Africa, like many other developing countries, that is actually generated by the households. So how to actually what kind of economic policies, what kind of economic macro and micro policies, especially financial policies, can lead to larger household savings in the South, in the South Southern African countries. That is extremely important. And I agree that when it comes to public savings, the relation of public savings with the private savings, you may not really get a very conclusive picture, but again, it's true that if government runs on very large dissavings and then the dissavings has to be financed by external borrowing and then you have a larger dead burden, that also leads to building less, lesser confidence within the economy and which can actually also affect households' savings. So all these are very much interconnected and then also, you don't really find that which one affects directly or which one is a very strongly exonous because they are also interdependent to each other. Related to this, I thought that and also it came out in very strongly in a couple of the papers that the financial sector development is extremely important because looking at the experience of the East Asian countries and also some of the South Asian countries, the way savings facilities have been developed and especially removing the households borrowing constraints, it actually helped the small and rural savers to increase their savings at a low transaction cost. So this is something is very, very important, but even from Bangladesh, the experience what I can share with you that many banks and even under government's policy initiatives which we have seen in a couple of the papers that government has taken initiatives to offer several financial products to the households but actual uptake of these products don't, it doesn't really necessarily depend on the number of products being offered by the banks or the initiatives because there are many other constraints which can actually affect the savers to actually uptake those those products, financial products. For example, there is a very strong policy initiative by the government in Bangladesh for the women's financial inclusion how to increase the financial inclusion of the women and many banks because of the government's policies they are coming up with many financial products for women to undertake to undertake these products, but when you have an economy where actually in South Asia, it's not very applicable probably in South Africa because in South Asia you will have, you will see that low female labor force participation in the economic activities, whereas in South Africa on average the female labor force participation rate is higher so in, so what I'm saying that in South Asia where you have those products being offered but because of women's low participation in the economic activities the uptake of those services become very very less so this is something probably we need to highlight that too so the whole idea of financial deepening, financial inclusion becomes extremely important and how do you devise it and how do you what kind of products you offer which can effectively taken by the savers that will enhance the overall domestic saving scenario one factor I thought that which is structurally given for a kind of given in the sense for the Sub-Saharan African on average for the Sub-Saharan African countries which is you can't really solve this problem in a short time which is the kind of demographic structure because of very high age dependency ratio I just give you the comparison that very recent figure the Sub-Saharan African countries has 82% of age dependency ratio you know proportion the working age population whereas in South Asia it is only 51% and East Asia it is 48% so that means that structurally there is a kind of disadvantageous position for the Sub-Saharan African countries if I have a very large age dependency dependent population who doesn't really save so then it becomes difficult to mobilize this what does it mean it means that for Sub-Saharan African countries to overcome this challenge you need some extraordinary efforts to be undertaken so some very conventional way of thinking would not really work and that can also be translated into a positive side like you can look at the demographic dividend especially the demographic dividend phase many of the Sub-Saharan African countries that are going through and which can actually be very helpful if that demographic dividend can be effectively utilized or ripped so I think that is something a bigger challenge how do you ensure a decent job how do you ensure larger or better productive employment opportunities for this young population which would eventually turn into contributing to larger saving generation finally I thought that I was really very interested to look at Ghanas paper when the title was Institution but I was really not really finding that Institution aspect probably as you said 15% work is remaining probably that that one is extremely important that the role of institution and Professor Sen he has worked quite extensively on that too that in terms of the state capacity in terms of integrity of the financial system the way it can build the confidence among the savers in terms of political stability especially or also in terms of having a very large informal sector in effect it leads to large dominance of informal institution so when you have the dominance of informal institution then again you know how do you really mobilize savings at the national level it becomes difficult to generate those large savings there are problems of property rights we talked about it yesterday especially when you impose taxes land taxes when land rights are not very clearly defined then of course the other institution issues like control of corruption or legal system all these are extremely important and I'm quite sure that the Ghanas paper when you work on this probably you can highlight on these things as well I have a couple of points for the countries for the papers for example in the Kenya paper probably Rosy could highlight a little bit more on the model you applied especially what kind of econometric model you did in the Cameron case ARDL is definitely is a very good application but you also found that when you put both the per capita GDP and per capita GDP growth together then it becomes difficult to explain so I think better you the way you did for regression 3 and regression 4 keep them separate and and then for I think the Ghana paper we unfortunately we missed that the presentation one my final comment would be that these all these three country papers are looking at more using time series data the pro this is a definitely an advantage because when you take into account look at the country context and try to understand what are the factors determining domestic savings or national savings but there are problems too because when many of the data or many of the indicators what we are talking about especially in the regressions some of them are actually not very well developed especially if you look at the if you even plot those data you may not find much variation I think in in addition to this time series regression in each of these papers I think it would be good to bring in all this comparative analysis you know the way south asia or south east asia how they actually address those challenges and what kind of lessons you can uh, you can you can you can get from those, you know by comparison at the same time some cross-country analysis too I think that would actually add more insights to your analysis with this I would like to conclude here. Thank you Uh, and thank you for giving us the conclusions to your paper I think you now have another eight minutes for discussions I will now open it up to the plenary Uh, who we can cut up. So any questions from the plenary?  Thank you for very good presentations One question I'd like to ask The lady from Ghana Could you tell us a little bit about the default by Ghana? and Whether you think more local savings would have Supported the country not default on its debt The other issue is what you said about people not being able to Meet their basic needs. I think when we look at savings, we need to look at it also vis-a-vis the level of employment and also the number of people that are living below the poverty line The other third question is when we look at Savings and revenue domestic revenue mobilization Debt is a fast charge Over the government revenue collections How does that affect the country in terms of mobilization of resources And in terms of development. Thank you Any another question? Just go now Oh Okay for you. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Uh, this is just a comment And it's going to abram. You see that in Cameroon. We have a Central bank which manages the region central or the african region. So this is where we get the monitored policy So is it is there possibility? That's why we have high savings but savings not growing because we have a common monetary policy So that if you're controlling they say the interest rates It may be for the region rather than for the specific country and in that case Are the initiatives taken in Cameroon to ensure savings go up? I don't know maybe it's covered in the paper Then something else which you may also need to consider in the ARDL framework It's the critical values because if the time period is so short then There are critical values which were calculated by Narayan. I don't know. It's 20 something Because the idea is that if the period is so short then the critical values are Understated so maybe that can help you in doing the cointegration. Thank you Go ahead. Yeah. So I had a question. I mean we talked about macro policy monetary policy fiscal policy total external shocks But I didn't see too much of a discussion of financial liberalization or repression If you look at the latin america experience when they had financial liberalization And it had a very negative effect on domestic saving If you look at the station experience they had followed financial repression in other words keeping interest rates capped Almost to a point negative real interest rates and that often is argued that that's why they had high domestic savings So one what is the experience of Cameroon Ghana and Ankinia with financial liberalization And yet and and if they have had financial liberalization, what are the implications for domestic saving? Are they following a latin american model or they're following a east station model? But that's a really important question going forward because many countries are learizing their financial markets. Thanks Thank you. Okay. Could we take the three questions and we've got five minutes So we need to be quick with the answers monica the first three were yours Yes, thank you very much for the question. So the first question I had had to do with Um, our current debt crisis that we are in like the question was do I think if we had more savings? And we maybe wouldn't have defaulted on our debt I I I don't think so I mean, obviously high savings is good. And then, you know, the the the states can have access to resources I I think in our case the default on the debt Perhaps has to do more with how it's spent because um, we had quite a high proportion of people actually Saved up a lot and so most of these people have actually had to undergo And the debt restrictions a restriction that we are at the country is actually facing now So we have private people who have lost a lot. Um because of that. So I don't think The response was quite good. All right. Could you go to abram? Do you have any reaction to the comment? Yeah, so first in in terms of the time period, um, the data is from 1980 to 2018, right?  So it's um Unless you're going to have a time period of 50 years I think that's decent enough for some rigorous time series analysis and you can be relatively confident in, you know, the kinds of statistics and critical values you might have In terms of the central bank. Yeah, the the country has tried to implement measures To increase savings, right? But the central bank actually controls the reserve requirements, isn't it? So in terms of the country specific measures to increase savings in terms of Granting more access to credit to private borrowers And expanding credit significantly to smaller medium-sized enterprises And even the most micro of enterprises the the various countries have taken up those initiatives And that's actually what contributed more to their increase in savings You cannot discount the importance of the central bank But the effect so you can actually feel the what they are doing It's more palpable in terms of the amount of reserves which you're supposed to leave with the bank And rather than the amount of savings which you are going to have so in terms of the reserves Yes, that may have contributed significantly to the savings in each of those countries But then there are also Quite good initiatives in terms of what the government has been trying to do to increase savings In terms of financial liberalization The financial sector in Cameroon is relatively constrained to begin with so even if you were completely liberalized per se I don't imagine it having any serious effects on savings because like I said, it's quite constrained But it's something worth thinking and I can add it to the 15 percent like I said and you know try to see if there's been anything about it And what we can glean from that I can respond to Selim asked How we went about doing our study And one of the things you'll find for these case studies We have used the almost similar methodology One basing it on the life life cycle hypothesis And secondly, we also tried to Kind of standardize the variables that we are using to allow for even comparison across the The various studies so for Kenya we We used a period 1980 to 2019 and The same same things that My colleague here was explaining the ARDL Sort of methodologies is the same thing that we used And the same variables that he was bringing out are the same variables that we used so In terms of a financial liberalization Thanks, prof. I think we We may want to look again because between 1980 And 2019 very many things have happened in the in the country Between 1990 1980 to 1992 That's a period before the Interest rates were liberalized 1992 to Say 2016 17 That's a period before the interest rate copying. Yeah So it's something that we actually didn't bring in Uh, but probably it's something that we need to explore and maybe This time around maybe use a kind of A dummy variable Because I think the interest rate even when we we use it as a real interest rate itself We not capture all the those Dynamics, but I want to say that Yes with the liberalization we saw the interest rates are the The door the deposit rates are slightly going up but The the the clear period when when you you so domestic Deposit rates are carried if staying almost to a higher level In nominal terms Is a period when we had the copying because with the copying they were kept at a certain level But after that they have gone back to They have they have gone down again, but it's an interesting area that we may want to re-estimate and see whether Taking a dummy variable would actually give us something different here. Thank you Was your question answered? Fantastic. All right. Monica. Do you have to your final points? I hope I hope this time Um, my question was on um, why perhaps if we had more savings that could have reduced the defaults or not on our debts and my answer was that And not quite because we still we there was a lot of um, high savings high rates of savings amongst Um, privates, um, you know individuals even to the extent that even when we had the Restructuring of debt with the interest rates going up. We still had the government Bonds actually the government bills actually being over subscribed So I don't think the issue of our defaults on debts. It's coming from the lack of savings I think it's just mainly from coming from the fiscal side how we actually spending it And just before my internet goes out on me again, let me answer the second question that had to do with, um, the focusing on employment and then the poverty line asked the lady Who asked the question earlier said so garner the in garner the The informality is about 80 percent, right? So yes, you can imagine that people um, the the because because of the high informality that we have Incomes may not be as high as um, you know, we would we would want we would hope for So you have a situation where people are still Um unable to cater for their basic needs So then savings wouldn't wouldn't be the first thing they'll be thinking about when they get their money and aside that Um, yes, there's been a lot of discussions about how to widen the tax net to be able to open people in the informal sector because most we we do have very high tax rates. I think You know, the vat's are very high. We've had covet levy. We've had, um, you know, we have we have so many levies That's, um, you know, tries to bring in the informal sector because of the high Informality that we have so there are all these discussions going on But I think that it's important like the discussant said to be able to think of very innovative ways to be able to You know, broaden the tax base so that we can rope in more Revenue for our development agenda The time is fast-paced and I want to respect everybody's time So thank you very much for the opportunity to respond to some of these questions. Thank you. Thank you very much and Sorry, the internet kept falling all the time. Sorry about that. Okay. So I think we've uh, we'll wrap it there It's been a very nice engaging discussion. I want to thank the panel and the discussant There's a lot of land as well coming from a country that We feel the impact of of these challenges We've just mentioned and I think we take all this now forward to formulate into some form of Policies for our nations and see how we can help increase the levels of savings. So thank you very much I want to thank the audience and thank you monica for staying on Uh, despite the challenges. Okay. Thank you man. I wish you all


What's going on guys got Kyle here with Layton sports cards, and we are ripping. This is a four box little personal mixer for Greg M We have one box of 21 22 obsidian football or 22 obsidian football We have one box of 2022 five-star baseball We have one box of 2021 tops triple threads And we have one box of 2022 tops sterling Good luck Greg Yes, sir. Let's do it. We'll start. We'll start with the obsidian. We'll get to the baseball. How about that?  All right, Greg. Good luck. I won't Greg. I won't appreciate the food again yesterday uh He did some up for lunch as well today first up. We've got green Alvin Kamara That is number 250 And a nice orbital here is Patrick Mahomes That is number 299 on the die cut. We have cd lamb Not numbered base Jersey is going to be Jalen Hertz on the equinox gear That is number 200 To 99 we have orange rookie Otto Tristan Ebner That is for the Bears And to 199 we have taekwon Thornton Thornton and number to 15. We have Justin Herbert on the patch Otto There you go, Greg. Nice one there. Matrix Matrix materials Beautiful hit there. That is three of 15 nice one For Herbie We'll mag that one for you Greg Solid one. Yeah, probably 130 Very nice start to the break We'll do uh, let's do a five star first and we'll do triple threads Good luck 2022 five star to 75. We got Dylan Carlson Nice one there And we got a good one here, too It's gonna be rookie Otto bobby wit jr There you go, Greg on the bobby wit Not numbered rookie Otto Very nice hit for you there, Greg doing good so far Two for two Very nice bobby there We'll get that one mag for you, too Let's keep it going, man. Let's keep it going. We got uh triple threads next 2021 triple threads Good luck This is probably my favorite product to open here I love triple threads, man Some insane stuff pulled out of here Pulled deca Down I don't know how don't they have like the 70 70 booklet and uh sterling is out thing that is uh There's a lot of luminaries luminaries. Yeah, yeah Two off the back. I don't know if they have to a lot of them. They have like triples To 150 we got ryan sandberg And to 199 zander bogarts on the base. We got springer miggy And my piazza Think we have triple relic auto sweet one here Going to the white socks carlton fisk uh frank thomas and tim reins That is a sweet one there the uh There's a numbering on that. Oh to 27 there 14 of 27 The triple relic triple auto Oh sweet hits, I guess great great one here too as well, man I Gathered these by the way Forested forested do most of the work here We got singo jumbo jumbo relic that is hose al tuve number to 36 on the tuve We'll mag that uh thomas for you too This is because greg bought us a dinner last night. It's true. This is literally because of that To 259 we got tony guinn mr. Padre and to 299 kc mice This is frank thomas Mike trout and lindore on the base There we go, greg a relic is going to be triple relic to nine that is christian yellich Game warn on memorabilia who you fan of greg? Baseball wise Nice yellish there walk and run. I was gonna say astros before that Not the astros that's for sure And we have jumbo a relic autograph to 99 gonna be jeff mcneal Is game used on the mcneal yankies there we go That makes sense All right, one more for you greg 2022 tops sterling. Good luck Love sterling icons icons We have hall of famers and stat leaders Pretty good categories there. Good luck. Let's see what we can get Very vague Very vague. We'll go with stat leaders first Keep these locked up Stat leaders is gonna be vladimir guerrero jr. Nice one there number 10 of 25 On the dual relic auto vladdy Is sterling season 2020 We'll mag this one for you greg 10 of 25 nice vladdy And now we got hall of famers. Good luck. We're gonna have chipper jones number 17 of 25 For the hall of fame dual relic got a little bat relic and a jersey there Look be game used there for the chipper nice chipper. All right, greg and that will do it for your four box personal mixer, man That was fun. Appreciate you as always. We'll get that right out to you


The HIC implementation in Berlin has had positive effects on the local health system. It has reduced administrative burden, increased financial transparency, and mitigated ethical tensions. Additionally, it has led to lower costs for outpatient health services. However, there has been an increase in inpatient care utilization and costs, which requires further investigation. This article was authored by Nora Gottlieb, Vanessa Ohm, and Miriam Nornschild.


and welcome to the show, it's me, John Park. It's JP's product pick of the week and we are here once again, ready to check out a cool new product. Thanks for stopping by. I wanna thank everyone over in Discord. Hello, people in Discord. Hello, people in the YouTube chat. Also over in Facebook land. I can't keep an eye on it all, but if you're wondering where the discussion is happening, it's gonna be right over there in Discord. So head on over there, check it out. It's Adafruit Discord under Adafru.it slash Discord.  So go good, someone tells me the audio is good. I'm glad to hear it. Let's get on with it. So the first thing I wanna do is I want to send you to this product page because if you watch the show from inside the product page, first of all, good for you, you're surrounded by all kinds of good Adafruit productness.  That's the product page right there and that's the QR code. So if you wanna point a device at that and jump on over to the page, watch the video from right inside of there. If you do, this is what you're gonna see, that's product page right there. I'm gonna go ahead and refresh mine because what you're gonna see is that price will magically, maybe not magic, maybe technology has something to do with it. Look, it just jumped 50% off. But I've already ruined the surprise, you know what the product is, but let's rewind a little bit and have Lady Aida tell us about this product. So take it away, won't you, Lady Aida? Yes, third but not least is a mini GPS GNSS. So this is a global positioning satellite sensor. It is its tiniest one I've ever seen. It's just so adorable, it's called the PA-1010 because it's 10 millimeters by 10 millimeters by about like six millimeters. So we fit it onto a board about one inch by one inch and it has the antenna built on top. Now we're indoors so I couldn't do a demo of it getting GPS data anyways because it wouldn't work from indoors. You do have to be outdoors. But it works pretty well. It's got good sensitivity, good tracking. Once it's outside and it gets ephemeral data, it knows where you are. And what's nice about this GPS is most GPS's are UART only. And it does have UART connectivity over here. We have the RX and TX and power and ground pins and they're all level shifted and that's wonderful. But in addition, it also has I squared C which is why we're able to chain it along these other I squared C sensors. And we've updated our code for the Arduino and circuit Python libraries. So what's neat is there's a lot of single board computers that don't have I squared C, sorry they don't have UART but they do have I squared C. Or other chips that again usually don't have spare UART or you want to use software serial and it's kind of messy. It's a lot nicer to use I squared C because you don't have as precise timing needs and you can read the data much faster and you can share the bus. So this is on address 10. And then on the back we have a spot. We give you a battery holder. We didn't start it on because we actually wanted to, people might want to keep this as slim as possible because when you add the coin cell it does get a little chunkier but we like a removable coin cell so you can always make sure it's fresh and if it gets damaged or runs out you can always replace it. But a GPS on the back will ensure that even when power is cut it retains that ephemera status so that you don't have to re-download it. It gives you a faster fix on a restart. And it has a PPS LED, so pulse per second output. People like that. It has a sleep mode. So you can put it into sleep mode where it saves the ephemera status but it isn't actively receiving because it uses about 20 to 30 milliamps doing that.  So it's a very nice, it's a nice capability that isn't on some GPS's. So it's a very cute, it's the smallest GPS we've seen and with I squared C capability I'm really liking this little fellow. Yay, GPS. Bring my audio back in there. I'm gonna go grab one from my good old mystery cabinet of wonders and cool things. Right back there. I know it's name changes every time. That's part of its wonder. I'm gonna go grab that, be right back. Yes, so that is my product pick of the week this week. It is the PA-1010D, which is a mini GPS module in STEM at QT format. And as you'll notice here I've actually got it plugged into a really long cable. I'm using our active I squared C terminator so that I can get my antenna outside of my workshop so we actually pick up some satellites. So there it is, admire it. We're not gonna see it for a while cause I'm actually gonna run this out the door so that it's facing the sky. Get that up there. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna jump down into an overhead camera view where you'll see, put on some glasses here so I can read it too, what I've got set up here. I have a feather, this is the RP2040 feather, which has this very convenient STEM at QT cable connector to it, and I have that running too. One of our lovely little OLED screens and then there's that I squared C terminator, active terminator I mentioned. That allows me to run this over a long wire so I've got about 25 feet of ethernet cable, cat five cable running over there. So here we can see some of the data getting downloaded from the satellites. This is a global navigation satellite system or GNNS, or GNSS receiver. And what that means is this uses a whole bunch of different systems. So GPS is the most famous one. That's the one that the US set up back in I think 1974 or 78, yeah, 78, I took some notes. But then there's also the GLONASS system that the Soviet Union at the time, no, it would have been Russia at the time. No, in the 80s, so it would have been Soviet Union. Now Russia runs their own global system so you can use it anywhere in the world as well as the European Galileo system. And then this satellite not only can use all of, or this GPS unit can not only use all of those systems but it also uses some of the augmentation satellite systems which use things like other satellites, planes, ground stations, I think even cell towers. So there's this huge mix of things that can be used and this is grabbing using the Circuit Python library that we have here or the Arduino library.  As you can see here, this is telling me my latitude and longitude. And just so you know, I'm actually running this through a bit of a scrambler so that you're not seeing my actual address. I think this will take you somewhere in Peru. That's not where I live. Then it's telling us our altitude, the fixed quality and the fixed quality actually refers to how it's getting the data if it's a, I think it ranges from zero to eight and these are more like categories, things like, it's just data that's been sitting around on the unit since the battery was last unplugged or it's live coming off of satellites or it's an augmented data. So I believe fixed quality of two is one of the ones that we like because it means we're getting active location data from the satellites. And then you can see here, it's actually telling me that it's getting 11 or 10 satellites that it's seeing right now in the sky. So generally speaking, you need four satellites to get a fix on location. There's cases where you can just use three if you know something like your altitude. But we've got 11 or 10 happening right now. So clearly we're grabbing from a couple of different systems because there's probably only four or five, maybe six visible in the sky right now for each one of those systems where I am. So pretty cool. Let's take a look now at some of the info on this. If I take a jump over here to the product page and let me put my little viewer there so you can see that info. So if we look at the product page, this is gonna show you right now, this is 50% off. So normally 29.95 US, if you wanna buy this during this show, you can buy a limit of 10 of them and they're only $14.98 for a really tremendous GPS or global navigation satellite system unit. This gives you a little bit of info on the page here, including some of those systems I mentioned, GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS I believe is one of the augmented systems that's localized to Japan. This does that as well. Talks about its sensitivity, the number of channels it can check. So this unit will read up to 33 signals simultaneously. So that's 33 satellites that you could be getting your info from a whole lot. It can track all of those. And a lot of other info, including what Lady Aida mentioned, you can use this over UART for serial. You can use this using I squared C, which is how I'm using it right now over the STEM of QT. There's also an RTC battery connector. I didn't actually add mine, but that will keep the real-time clock going and it'll keep that ephemeris data stored. You can even do some pretty high-end features with this chip and unit, the little package that we have on here does logging data as well. So there's some info on the manufacturer's data sheet about that. If we click on, speaking of the data sheet, if we click on the learn guide page down here, that'll take us to the overview, some of the info we just saw, as well as how to set it up, the different pinouts, how to set up an Arduino, how to use it with circuit Python or on a Python-based setup on a computer. And if you go over to the download section, here is this PA-1010D data sheet. And there it is. So this unit's a little confusing. This unit actually has a chip set that's the MT-3333, but the coupling of this with the antenna, and I think some of the other goodies on there is what makes up the PA-1010D from CD Technology. This CD top, this mentions some of the use cases, some of its special features, the different channels that it'll read on, some applications. Notably, this is a really small unit and it doesn't require an external antenna. In fact, I can't use an external antenna. So notice on there is mentioned surveillance, which I can imagine if you need something to track something, you might include this in it. I don't know, I'm not gonna surveil anything. The name 1010 comes from the fact that it's 10 millimeters by 10 millimeters, a little small square size unit. And let's see, what else in here? One interesting feature of it is that it will actively cancel the harmonics of other radio frequencies nearby, including Wi-Fi, the different cellular radios as well as Bluetooth. So it's really designed to be in a system, integrated into a system that has a lot of other possible interference going on. It'll reject that interference. And let's see, yeah, so this is some of the main interesting facts about it. Here is a look at the library, the Circuit Python library. If you look at the Python code itself on GitHub, you can see a whole bunch of what's going on behind the scenes, some of the different things you can ask it for. If you look at the code, let's jump into, this is the code I'm running on it. And let me make that a little bit bigger so it's a little easier to see. You know what I'm gonna do, in fact, if you look here in the serial output, I have a little screen session running. So that's the live data coming from the satellite as, or the GPS unit as it's polling those satellites. So you can see we've got our scrambled latitude and longitude, the fixed quality is mentioned here. There's time stamping that's going on, as well as the fixed quality, height, horizontal ID. So there's a whole bunch of extra info that you can get in there. And if you look at my, I'm gonna close this just because that scrolling is gonna drive me mad. If you look at my code here, you can see what's going on. A lot of this is to do with the display that I'm using, but here's the key thing, we import this Adafruit GPS library and then I do some stuff to set up iSquared C and the display, these are the labels that I'm gonna print out to my little screen. Here is the setup for the GPS and there's a few included in this example sketch that you can get in the examples folder when you download the library bundle that'll tell you how to use it in both UART mode as well as iSquared C. And then there's some commands being sent to the unit. This is the format of commands that are written to it, kind of like writing commands to a modem in the old days. And it tells the GPS unit what we want to get returned back. And then in the main loop of the program, every second we're gonna do this GPS.update call. And then what we get back from that is this whole slew of data, which we can then choose to parse and that's what I've got being parsed here. So the GPS timestamp in UTC time for the month, day, year, hour, minute, second, those aren't always available, but when they are, we can use those. And then here's the key ones, latitude and longitude. You just simply ask for GPS.latitude, GPS.longitude. I'm doing a little bit of math to multiply them by my little sort of randomization that I have in an outside file so I don't accidentally show it to you. I called this Tiki because I figured if I didn't do this I was gonna have to invite everyone over to my house for Tiki drinks and we probably can't do that. We probably don't have the budget for that right now. I don't know. So then we go and we can grab some of these other things like the satellites. This will tell us how many satellites are being grabbed. So you can see right now I've got 12 satellites as well as altitude, the speed. So this can be used for movement if you've ever used a GPS even on your phone. If you've used a GPS in your car, you know that it can very accurately tell you your speed. In fact, more accurately than a lot of speedometers and cars, from what I understand. As well as the tracking angle. I'm not sure what horizontal dilution is honestly, but maybe someone in the chat does. And let's see. Someone asked am I on a massive plane because the original altitude was 140 meters? Yeah, that might be a number that I'm messing with. Can't remember on that one. Is that right? Is that what it's saying? Let's see. Altitude 183 meters, is that right? I don't know. I am in Peru after all, right? Johnny Burto says, and by massive plane you mean flat earth? Yes. So that's the basic usage of it. It's very straightforward. Let me go grab the unit back from outside here. And something pretty exciting about this unit is, as you can see, let me change my screen here real quick. As you can see from the nice small size here and the ease of integrating it with either I squared C using the pins or the STEMAQT breakout or with UR using these other pins, this is a nice small unit that you could use for things like small embedded projects. If you've ever seen GPS based puzzle boxes where a box unlocks itself only when you're at a certain location, this would work pretty well for it. I believe, someone tell me if I'm wrong on this, I believe that originally there was a five meter accuracy with US GPS system. I believe with some of the augmentation in the other satellite systems, particularly Galileo, the European satellites, you get about one meter accuracy. So the European system is I believe at a higher altitude and I'm not sure what particulars make it more accurate but I believe you can get anywhere between five meters and one meter accurate. So fairly tight accuracy. I know at one point in the 80s that was dumbed down and then it was in the 90s I believe it was brought back up to a high accuracy even for civilians. So really cool package. You can see there there's that little spot for the battery or for a cat mask I think. That looks like cat woman symbol. I don't have that here, that little battery pack but that is it. So this is, if you don't mind, I'll point yet to that URL again. If you wanna go and get one, you can get it for 50% off right now which is real steal. If you're ever thinking of using one of these for a project, Technobabble in the chat over on YouTube asks how well would this work on a drone? I would imagine that would work really well on a drone. You have a nice clear, if you're outdoors with your drone which most people are, you have a nice clear view of the sky, I think you'd be able to get it quite accurate. Yeah, and another question is does this require, just like most any GPS, yes, it requires a pretty unencumbered view of the sky. It doesn't have an external antenna so you sort of need to use this outdoors.  In fact, I'm gonna unplug this so we're probably gonna see our display go away. Yeah, it's just gone to an error message. That is my product pick of the week. It's the PA-1010D and it is a mini GPS in STEMIQT format for use with I squared C and UART. And I forgot, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna steal that cable because I forgot to make a little hang tag for that. But luckily I can usually get away with it with these little STEMIQT cables. I'll just plug one into either side and we'll have a sort of improvised hang tag for it. There we go, I'm gonna place that on my little STEMIQT board of goodness, which is getting filled up there. Thank you so much for stopping by. That's gonna do it for another episode of JP's product pick of the week. And if I can, oops.  Oh well, I think you know what it is, right? It's this. It is the PA-1010D, UART and I squared C STEMIQT mini GPS. That is easy for me to say. All right, thanks everyone and I'll see you next time. Bye bye.


A study of global seismic noise from 1997 to 2022 was conducted using the Donohoe-Johnston DJ index, which separated the values of wavelet coefficients into small and large. For each reference point in an auxiliary network of 50 points, a time series was calculated with a time step of one day for the median of the values at the five nearest stations. Correlations between the DJ index values at the reference points were then calculated over a moving time window of 365 days. This revealed a decrease in the average values of the DJ index and an increase in correlations indicating an increase in global seismic danger. After 2011, there was a sharp increase in the maximum distances between reference points with large correlations. Additionally, the high amplitude of the response of the DJ index to the length of the day for 2020 to 2022 could predict a strong earthquake in the second half of 2023. The study aimed to improve the mathematical apparatus for assessing the current seismic hazard based on the properties of seismic noise. This article was authored by Alexei Labushan. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Welcome to Tom Meeting TV. I'm here with Trish O'Kane. Trish, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are and where you're working now. You're here at UVM. Yeah, thank you, Megan. It's an honor to be with you here today and everyone who's watching. Yeah, my name is Trish O'Kane. I teach environmental studies at the University of Vermont. I direct a program called Burding to Change the World where I take my students every week to a local elementary school in my neighborhood and pair them with kids and we learn outside in the new north end where I live. I also teach a class called Endangered Environmentalists in Central America because I lived in Central America for 10 years. I was a human rights investigative journalist and so that's kind of the way I connect those two parts of my life. Yeah, and that's what we're talking about today because we met through some connections around Burlington's sister city in Nicaragua that you come with a history of really supporting the revolution in Nicaragua a long time ago and are feeling the disillusionment that a lot of folks are feeling. Is that a correct assessment? Disillusionment? Is that a correct if not? I would say more rage. Rage and also deep sorrow and openness and questioning and wanting to learn and think about my own blinders, ideological blinders that I had on. I don't regret supporting the revolution not for one second and I tell my students as soon as I got out of college I went to support the revolution in Nicaragua. I moved to Managua and I worked with the Jesuit order supporting the Jesuit order and the work they were doing to support the revolution and I wrote for a Jesuit magazine. I worked at a Jesuit research institute and my boss, the priest I worked for father Javier Godostiaga was well known internationally. He was the first minister of planning in the first revolutionary government so I mean he helped make the revolution happen. So that's what I went to do but after many years of supporting the revolution and watching what's happened in the last especially the last 15 years you know it's become a brutal dictatorship and so it's not disillusionment it's horror. I know people in prison and my friends are very afraid the ones who are not in prison and I was a journalist there and all the journalists I know have stopped working. The magazine I wrote for for years which has been around like four decades a wonderful Jesuit magazine about economics and policy and politics. A year ago the editor made the decision to no longer publish people are too afraid. Yeah so there's all these journalists in Nicaragua who I knew and worked with for years who cannot work and in Nicaragua that's there's a term for that now it's called Muerte Civil. It means a civilian a citizen death. Yeah you have to be silent or you risk going to prison so horror it's not disillusionment it's horror and urgency. What can we do to get people out of prison because they're starting to die. Give us a little you know snapshot of the last 30 years in Nicaragua can you give us like give us a timeline of revolution Daniel Ortega being. Sure well make it a little personal so you know the revolution happened in 1979 so many of us admired us. I know in Burlington Burlington was a super important place of support. I was in California starting college I supported the revolution from there I was opposing Reagan's war I was a peace activist and then in 1987 when I finished college and I'd met this priest at a conference in the U.S. because I was part of the solidarity movement like so many people in Burlington and he recruited me to go work for him in Managua because I was bilingual and he wanted me to help because the election was coming up in 1990 the U.S. had this massive kind of propaganda campaign to say that the elections were false and he needed people who could write in English and Spanish to communicate with the U.S. and try to counteract that propaganda machine so I mean that's what I was doing there and then in 1990 the San Anisos lost. I was there during that election I cried too it was you know I wasn't that surprised because as soon as I moved there I saw things I did not like at all especially as regards Daniel Ortega. I mean it was obvious by that point he was starting to just become too in love with power and you know power corrupts absolutely that's really true. I followed him on his 1990 presidential campaign and I'll never forget it I'm a feminist and I loved the women's movement in Nicaragua and I covered it I went to many women's meetings and conferences I was so proud of it and awed by it by what women were doing and when Daniel Ortega had his 1990 election he chose as his slogan Daniel Esmigayo which literally means Daniel is my fighting cock. Okay that's right just throw the women under the bus and appeal to the lowest common denominator I think that will probably sound familiar to people in the United States right? Daniel turned into a Donald Trump that's what I think happened so I remember following him into villages and he would ride in in his cowboy shirt on a white horse with a cowboy hat and the whole thing and it was like oh my god this is such a macho campaign what happened to all the women who supported the revolution and so then he lost the election and I was still living in Nicaragua and there was a move of a huge movement within the San Anista party I was never a member of the party formally but I was always a supporter so there was a move within the party to democratize a very serious movement and after they lost the election people thought okay we're not in the government anymore but so now we can get to work and democratize the party because there's no war anymore we're not going to be invaded and we need some democracy something happened here we should some of the people Stan Anista said we need to listen to the people they voted they voted us out why did they vote us out so I went to I attended the party congress in 1995 in Managua I was actually covering it as a journalist for Radio Pacifica in San Francisco and I was still living in Central America at the time at that time I was in Guatemala and I went to Managua I covered that that that party conference and that was when the party split and I mean I stood there with my microphone recording and cried and I said this is the funeral of the San Anista party people didn't like it on the left in the US when they heard this story but I literally watched Daniel Ortega stopping Sergio Ramirez Dora Dora Maria Teyes Sergio is was the vice president he's now in exile in Spain he can't return to his country Dora Maria Teyes is in prison rotting I watched these people stand up and try to say we need to democratize the party and Daniel Ortega stopped it all and they walked out and I stood there crying with my microphone and that that was it I said that's it this is it this is the end what's going to happen now so that was 1995 what happened after that there were a series of governments you know moderate kind of right wing business aligned governments in Nicaragua and then Ortega was reelected in I think it was 2006 so he has been in power since 2006 and the first one of the first things he did this is this really indicates where he was headed and how wrong we were one of the first things he did was he he went back on one of the pledges of the San Anista revolution which was the San Anistas came in and changed the constitution so that the president could only have one term so you would never have a Samosa dictatorship again I mean we supported the Samosa dictatorship people here in Burlington know that was three Samosas in a row the father and two sons and the revolution was about that never happening again and so the first thing or take one of the first things Ortega did was to get that constitution changed and get an amendment so he can run indefinitely so that was a sign right there oh my god we are in trouble right but I was back in the US you know doing other things like a lot of people I still I had my friends there I communicated with him he got back in power it was very gradual since 2006 Megan that he started to make these changes and one of the one of the theories in the analysis analyses I've read say this that Ortega was so traumatized by the 1990 lost he was like that's never going to happen to me again because the US did the US threw all that money and all that political machinery behind Violeta Chamorro and and the opposition that the US actually molded and so Ortega said I lost because the Catholic Church wouldn't support me the business people wouldn't support me the US wouldn't support me that's never going to happen again so he gets in power the first thing he one of the first things he does is make sure he can run over and over and over again he makes this piece with the Catholic Church he's supposed to be an atheist him and his wife go to the bishop and say we want to get married and we're Catholic okay everything's all good now with the Catholic Church even though it was really right wing the the the bishops right and then he makes this piece with the US and so I think a lot of people don't know here even though there's sanctions against Nicaragua economic sanctions our military does exercises in Nicaragua so you know we are supporting a dictatorship in Nicaragua and the reason we are supporting a dictatorship is because Ortega has a deal with the US to stop people from coming across Nicaragua that are trying to get to the United States and not just from Latin America from Africa and China some of these people have disappeared and who was so who was the president that made that agreement with Nicaragua do you know when that was when that policy was in place I'm not saying there was there's an agreement or a written agreement there's a quid pro quo right okay and it's part of Ortega's strategy to maintain himself in power he's not going to go up against the US again he's no fool he figured it out what he wants us to stay in power so who do I have to keep happy and as far as the church is concerned he threw the whole women's movement under the bus wiped out any rights to abortion in Nicaragua which was very important during revolution and now Nicaragua I think it has the worst and the most restrictive abortion laws in all of Latin America I don't even think if the women mother's health is in danger you can get an abortion don't quote me on that but it's one of the worst if not the worst so I mean it was just it started with the church and then the US and it's just one by one he started taking he started eliminating the gains of the revolution and consolidating his power so that's been happening from 2006 up until 2018 when we started with college students at the University of Central America the Jesuit University and in my class that I teach here at UVM I connected the students at that university in Managua with my students via zoom before COVID and the students the students there explained to my students here environmental students what happened this is what the Nicaragua students said they said there was a massive wildfire burning out of control in a very important Mayan reserve a bio reserve in Nicaragua the students said the government wasn't doing anything to put out the fire that the environmental ministry was corrupt it didn't have very much money and the students were very upset about this so they got they made their signs and they went and stood out in the street in front of the Jesuit University and started protesting that's how the 20 April 2018 insurrection started it wasn't a coup you know there's you know it was it was started with college students and then what happened is once the students started protesting other sectors of the population took note and Ortega at that time I don't know exactly why but decided it was budget cuts to social security so he hit the pensioners the same month that April that the students were in the street like a week or two later he hit the pensioners and so the college students they told this to my students they said it was our grandparents like we live with our grandparents everybody lives in the same house here they were cutting their pensions and so then old people young people everybody got out in the street and that's when the police opened fire and they they occupied the university my students were so stunned when they heard these stories from Nicaraguan students and they opened fire and they killed like 22 students yeah and and and Ortega is now just did another lockdown on the public universities recently yeah right yeah he's confiscating private universities and anybody who criticizes his regime loses their job I know doctors who've lost their job after after whenever there was protests doctors in the public hospitals were told if you help a wounded protester you're fired I know someone that happened to I mean so you're just talking a draconian shutdown across the government uh the the OAS ambassador who I know we're going to get to to Nicaragua Arturo Mcfields yes who just resigned publicly in the middle of an OAS meeting denouncing his government as a dictatorship I've been listening to a lot of interviews with him afterwards and he knows what's going on on the inside of the government and he's just described how people are so afraid at all levels of the government um you know and they're told you can't do this you can't do that and people have just really shut down so it's a police state I mean the police on the street will take your phone away my my friend who I work with there a journalist who's been one of my best friends for 30 years the first interviews I ever did as a journalist the first interview I ever did as a journalist Megan was with Dora Maria Teyes when she was health minister in the 80s in Nicaragua so I mean in and you know now she's riding in prison but my friend and I who've worked together for many years and who's helped me teach this class in Vermont she's gone from speaking openly on zoom to my students to now we only communicate about once a month and are extremely careful she doesn't go out much she can't work it's it's just terrifying yeah and what is I mean here's a maybe overly simplistic question but I feel like back in the 80s that you know the bad guy was the US government yeah getting involved in this uprising and now it feels more complicated than that it's like a network of pro-democracy with a small d not the pro-democracy of you know the hammer of the United States we're going to go in and we're going to make democracy happen small d those of us who really believe in people people's political power just can you talk to me a little bit about that as you've kind of grown through your own yeah political awareness and who who are the who who you know here's Mcfield's part of the OAS and you know really good people inside the US government that are condemning what's going on inside Nicaragua yeah how was that for you with your background seeing these allegiances that are confusing and complicated well it's very important and it's especially important to my teaching because you know I went there in the 80s and you remember what the 80s was like it was a war I mean the largest country the most powerful country in the world was attacking one of the smallest country in the world because they were trying to teach people to read and help people farm and it isn't all that simplistic the San Anisez did some terrible stupid things during the 80s too right that I can see more clearly now but they did a lot of great things that's why we supported that revolution so you know the US was the villain it was Reagan but I've learned since then you know even the villain says things that are true it's not all lies so yes it's much more complex and the 1990 elections really interesting because I was covering that so closely and traveling you know following or take around following all of the candidates around and I actually wrote a guide for the United Nations that was monitoring the elections on all the camps so I interviewed every single political party some of them were receiving money from the US at that time I thought that was horrible and I thought the US shouldn't be intervening in other people's elections but you know now in Nicaragua some of the people being charged and put in prison and it's because they've received money from some US organization I mean the fact is in Nicaragua nobody can do anything without money from abroad I mean all of the NGOs are funded by the European Union or the Norwegian aid you know ministry or the Danish foreign aid I mean all the NGOs operate with foreign funds but what what the government's doing is saying if you take anything from the US your toast so so it's more complicated I like what you said about the little D and I think that even if it's complicated and messy and I'm sure the US is still trying to you know mess around I don't have any doubt about that and I do not support any kind of military intervention in Nicaragua no matter what happens Nicaraguans have to overthrow their own dictator again and they're trying very very hard but we shouldn't be supporting a dictator yeah so it's so it's more complex definitely more complex tell us Hugo Torres right so he just died in prison in February tell us a little bit about him and he had some you know I think he you know in the in what I was reading he lived a pretty low key life moderate just tell us a little bit about him yeah well that was very sad I didn't know him personally I mean I saw him at press conferences I don't think I I didn't ever interview him but he was very good person respected you know people in Nicaragua were saying he was a national hero because he wasn't one of those people that became rich from the revolution okay that's something that happened that was also was very disturbing and I saw it in 1990 when the Sandinistas lost didn't happen with my friends who were Sandinistas all of them left the party but the ones who stayed in it was called La Piñata the Piñata I mean people literally just okay we're going to lose the government in six months it's going to be a new government we're going to have to leave so I'm going to take this desk and computer home you know they just the car they took stuff from the state right Hugo Torres didn't do that so he he was considered to be more ethical but so he was one of the people arrested Hugo Torres he was one of the people who freed Daniel Ortega Daniel Ortega when he was a guerrilla fighter in the 1970s was imprisoned by the Samoza regime and torture Hugo Torres mounted was part of an operation that liberated him and Ortega arrested Torres because he's an opposition leader and he he's so well regarded through him in prison Torres I don't know if he was 70 around seven years old or 70 something had cancer and he died you know I think it was early February the the the regime wouldn't release any details nobody knew what happened they even lied about the day that he died nobody knew where he was he was now we know from repress reports in the hospital and his children did get to say goodbye to him but the family that the government the regime refused to do an autopsy human rights organizations were asking for an autopsy and the regime handed the family a bag of ashes they didn't get to see his body so this is being described as just cruelty deliberate cruelty on the part towards someone who liberated Ortega for prison yeah and to put it lightly that's bad karma it's it's it's that's why I say I'm not disillusioned I'm horrified yeah and you know let's talk about the BOAS so that's the Organization of American States yeah what is that tell us a little bit what is the Organization of American States it's kind of like a united nations of Latin America and like the United Nations the U.S. has always had a very powerful role so it's always been seen kind of by the left by myself included as as an organization too manipulated by the U.S. right so if the OAS said something in in the 80s and even 90s I really was like oh it's the OAS you know the U.S. is pulling the strings there and that's probably still true to a great extent but I do think there are other countries in Latin America that are that have a greater voice than they did before like something very hopeful people don't know it the new president of Chile Gabriel Boric if you want to cry with joy watch his inauguration speech he was a student leader just not even a several years ago and now he's present he's not he's like 30 31 or so he's very young and very dynamic and a person on the left who has said in his speech that Chile is going to support human rights and going to denounce human rights violations wherever they are they don't care if it's a government of the left or the right so this is a different kind of leftist government so I think the OAS I hope I hope people like Gabriel Boric will have more of a voice in the OAS but what happened with the OAS was recently because of the human rights violations because Nicaragua had an election in November that was most people did not participate in there was massive abstentionism media estimates maybe 70 percent abstentionism which is very sad because when I lived there in 1990 it was like I don't know 80 or 90 percent it was crazy I mean people were lined up for hours to vote and you know this was massive abstentionism right so the OAS well what happened right before the election months before Ortega started locking up all the candidates for the opposition charging them with bogus stuff so there would be no one to run against him who could possibly win and so the OAS has been making pronouncements and pronouncements about this so it's been a very contentious relationship between the OAS and Nicaragua and also the UN I mean he or take it throughout the UN the UN has tried to get delegations in their human rights delegations and he he's thrown out the UN so UN can't get in there the OAS I don't think he could get in there and it's been a very contentious like the 80s except except we really Nicaragua really needs international human rights organizations pressuring and observing what's going on I mean any point of pressure again I don't support any kind of military intervention whatsoever or the CIA messing around in Nicaragua because of the history yeah so Arturo McFields is the OAS ambassador from Nicaragua he's been in there for how he was there for a couple of years at least right no no Arturo McFields is he's a very interesting person okay all right so in 2011 he was named to be the press Nicaragua press attaché in Washington at the embassy so you're talking one of the Nicaragua's international mouthpieces in Washington very important and prestigious post right before he'd been a journalist in Nicaragua a tv journalist the only tv journalist allowed to film inside the Ortega's personal residence that's how close he is to Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo his father David McFields was a famous poet and Rosario Murillo vice president Rosario Murillo that's the other thing Ortega did he became president he made his wife vice president okay so we're talking about family dictatorship so Moses style all over again nightmare right so she's a famous poet and she had a group of very you know close poets around her McFields father was one of those so this guy in the OAS who just resigned publicly very very close to the Ortega's so in November Daniel Ortega the president of Nicaragua named McFields to be ambassador to the OAS and I just listened to some long interviews with him explaining because Nicaraguan journalists in exile are asking him why did you accept this post if you really felt this way and he said I did it on purpose because I really believed I could change the system from within and because the only way for me to speak to the president and his wife and get to power was to have a very high post he said that's why I did it and I tried I begged he said my goal was just to even get 10 political prisoners out of jail by December the ones that are going to die including he really was busted up when he up Hugo Torres he said I warned them in October you or take Hugo Torres you've got to let him out and then he died you know and he said I'm not going to say I told you so but he told them so so he purposefully took that post I don't think with the intention of resigning he really believed that there needed to be people on the inside that's what he's saying in the interviews yeah yeah um shall we listen to his yes so there's a there's a speech that's circulating on twitter and I'm going to go ahead and share my screen so that we can listen to that and you can give us a translation of it I speak today in the name of more than 177 political prisoners and more than 350 Nicaraguans who have lost their lives in my country since 2018 I speak today in the name of thousands of Nicaraguan civil servants civilians and military those today in Nicaragua who are forced to pretend by the regime and to fill the public squares shouting party slogans because if they don't do it they'll lose their jobs to denounce the dictatorship in my country is not easy but to continue to be silent and defend the indefensible is impossible I must speak mr president even though I'm afraid I must speak even though my future and my family's future is uncertain I must speak because if I don't do it the very stones of the earth are going to speak for me days before nicaragua announced its withdrawal from the oasis we met in the foreign ministry with a team of presidential advisors in this meeting I suggested that we release at least 20 elderly political prisoners and another 20 prisoners whose health conditions demand our consideration I told them this would be a humanitarian gesture and politically intelligent because no one should die in prison especially if they are innocent or because of inadequate medical attention or because they received no medical care whatsoever no one would listen to me mr president they said we're not even going to write that down what you just said because you know what could happen and remember they said the more bones we throw to the right wing the more they'll demand from us this is what they told me in that meeting in this government nobody nobody listens and nobody speaks I've tried several times over the last several months but every door shut on me I've always believed that dialogue and diplomacy weren't that important in times of peace and tranquility and democracy but that diplomacy is needed most during the difficult times the complex times the times of democratic crisis like the one my country is living through right now however what I've learned over these past months is that the situation in Nicaragua is too much for my meager diplomatic skills mr chairman there is another point of order from in Ciudad in Brabura and I will ask you to let me finish because I'm about to finish shortly okay would you be kind enough to finish Nicaragua please yes I will I will it's just one minute and a half since 2018 Nicaragua has become the only country in Central America probably in all of Latin America where there are no longer any printed newspapers where you don't have the freedom to even post a critical tweet or comments in social media there are no longer any human rights organizations there are none well just one the rest were shut down or expelled from the country there are no independent political parties there are no real elections there is no separation of powers just dark powers powers operating outside the institutional and democratic realm this year the government has begun to confiscate private universities it's shut down 137 nonprofit organizations catholic organizations evangelical organizations environmental organizations operations smile mr president and the list continues to grow 170 000 Nicaraguans have fled the country others are trying to flee right now while i'm speaking mr president to finish i'd like to say that although it appears that all is lost and the panorama is very dark i believe firmly that there is hope i've said this to many people everyone inside the government and outside everyone is tired of this dictatorship in its actions every day there will be more people tired of this dictatorship and who say basta enough because the light will always overcome the shadows because love is stronger than hate and because you can lie to the people some of the time but not all the time god may take his time but he never forgets you thank you i said that that's a pretty powerful statement um what tell us a little bit what was the interruption was that interruption a political interruption was somebody trying to get him to stop speaking or was it just like uh well no so imagine i'm meeting of the oas and it was some procedural meeting and he raised his hand and asked to speak and he gave this statement so they weren't expecting it that i i don't remember it's a subcommittee or something of the oas and they were doing something and so people are just stunned yeah i mean this this has never happened before in the middle where is he where is he now in his family he lives in he's lived in washington since 2011 yeah but but um i've listened now to two long interviews with him with nicaraguan media that's an exile and um he has a lot of family nicaragua and he's afraid for them brothers and sisters and you know um so he's been in washington but he goes back and forth to nicaragua and he's been questioned pretty you know severely by these nicaragua journalists like why did you wait so long and he said you don't understand like they said why did you say that because before the oas he protested that the oas criticized the election that was his role and he said no this was a you know a fair election and everybody could vote and blah blah blah and the journalist said this morning said you know why did you say that and he said you don't understand i was in nicaragua they could take my passport away he said there there are ministers in the government that that have had their passports taken because people are defecting this is a major public defection but he said there are many many people who've been leaving the government for quite some time he said they just do it quietly because they have mansions and properties they've accumulated and he said but i'm broke he said i don't have anything i mean do you see you know with his family yeah and so i guess he figured he had nothing to lose yeah so one of the things yeah one of the things that we talked about because i think we'll come to a close and i think you know you've said it a few times no us intervention in nicaragua um also the lack of news in us newspapers i think the washington post had something that you shared about his defection but nothing in the new york times tell us where you go to get news and information and there is um for spanish speakers arturo mcfieldt is going to have a q&a session in spanish on the 30th of march so i'll put that information here as well but tell us where you go to get information and what you know anybody watching this might take away yes well that's that's a very important question and something i talk about with my students like if you don't read in spanish um you know and i tell my students you've got to study other languages what happened during the 80s as you probably know and other people listening know there was an amazing network of solidarity journalism and a lot of that has just collapsed most of it has collapsed like the magazine that i worked for in nicaragua people are too afraid to write so all those journalists are out of work when you know they're just sitting at home so that's why we're not hearing and the the solidarity journalism that still exists in the us i'm very sorry sorry to say most of it supports the ortega regime now i don't blame them i can understand because in the 80s i didn't believe a lot of the stuff either and so i think people think that it's that the us is lying but nicaraguans aren't lying but if you don't speak spanish how do you get those voices um so here's what i do first of all i have my friends there that give me information um but i read every day i look up confidencial now that's in spanish c-o-n-f-i-d-e-n-c-i-l c-i-a-l that is the only independent media left nicaraguan media and the editor had to go into exile because both his brother and sister have been just arrested that's Carlos Fernando Chamorro who was a sandinista right he was the editor of barricada when i lived there barricada was the sandinista newspaper okay so he was a sandinista journalist and now he's the only independent journalist left um but he had to leave the country because they were going to arrest him um so i go there but if you go to the havana times that's an independent cuban media critical on the left that publishes um some stuff in england has a section in english on nicaraguan i know the editor his name is circles robinson he lived in nicaragua 30 years he had to leave um his wife is still there and and i think a couple of his children circles went there is in solidarity de marigalpa in the um eighties and and you know participated in all kinds of projects and he's still trying to help nicaragua so havana times is a good one i mean i look at the guardian they have more stories yeah i look at el país of spain um but there is a total lack i mean especially since the war in ukraine started and not that that's not important it's very very important and it's heartbreaking and horrific yeah by the way ortega was one of the first leaders of the world to um say that he supported putin yeah and he thought that that was a good idea in fact i have a quote from daniel ortega which just give people an idea of where what direction he's taken he said after uh putin invaded ukraine he said quote i'm sure that if they meaning ukraine do a referendum like the one carried out in Crimea people will vote to annex their territories to russia really that was february 21st 22 22 report in reuters yeah i mean a month later really you think the ukrainians are all going to vote to annex their territory to russia so that's that's where he's coming from um so i get my information all over the place but a lot of it the best is in spanish and it really comes from confidential and the havana times i am very deeply frustrated by the lack of information give you another example of the skewed media coverage i mean how how little there is and how ridiculous it is i mean we're seeing these heartbreaking images of children in the ukraine and their cars with their stuffed animals having to flee and go across the border and it's horrible but the same day in the new york times there was a front page story of a little girl in the car looking at the window with tears in her eyes that same day there was a story in the mexican newspapers about a 19-year-old pregnant nicaraguan girl about to give birth she was in the back of a truck a closed cargo truck filled with people trying to get across the border to the us the smugglers abandoned the truck in the heat did you see this story uh they abandoned the truck in the heat those people were locked in there without air they finally managed to get the door open and as they opened it they trampled her she died where's that story yeah yeah these are refugees yeah well there's yeah i mean there's a lot of threads here the importance of a free press the importance of you know that a democratic society is only as strong as the ability to protect the voices of dissent um racism right our you know our willingness to see the suffering of people that look like the dominant majority versus the folks that don't so yeah there are a lot of threads here but we're in dark times yeah but i'd like to say one more thing there is something we can do i mean i know we have economic sanctions and i know some people don't agree with economic sanctions my friends in nicaragua want more sanctions i don't think our military should be doing exercises there and i also think that berlington has a very special responsibility just like i feel i have a special responsibility as a person of the left who who who supported the revolution who moved in nicaragua became a nicaraguan resident and lived there i have to examine my own blinders and we need moral sanctions and this is an appeal to senator sanders and his supporters and i support him i love him um where's the moral sanction on ortega senator sanders yeah thank you for denouncing gladamere and your statements and your videos and i've sent them to my students and people where's the statement announcing the dictator in nicaragua that you and i both supported yeah that would be a very powerful moral sanction to the left internationally and especially people who still support or take it and don't know all this or don't believe it or think somebody like me works for the cia yeah so burlington burlington as a history of supporting this revolution which was about people's empowerment literacy women's rights it was about things that were very much in line with progressive values that has that has that has imploded upon itself and i'm hearing you say that there is a moral imperative for folks in burlington who supported that to denounce what's going on yes and has have has there been any attempt to reach out to sanders in particular about that yes yes it has i tried i've been trying since 2018 and um the editor of confidencia carlos fernando chamorro who does a wonderful weekly tv wants to interview you senator sanders um and both his brother and sister are now in prison they've been uh charged or convicted eight years on trumped up charges and he is in exile but he he would really like to interview senator sanders and it would be a message to the left internationally and i think it echoes what the president the new president of chile is saying and again i want to end up with a hopeful message god be abhoric that we have to denounce human rights violations wherever they are here in guantanamo in our own prisons the death penalty and in igoraguan in russia wherever they are and especially where we have a a long and terrible history of being involved yeah i've never understood why that was confusing to folks but it is because of political power so trish thank you so much for sharing your the breadth and depth of your knowledge with everyone today thank you so much megan it's been wonderful to be with you here today discussing such an important topic to people in burlington and nicaragua