Okay, hello and welcome to episode 91 of the market maker podcast. And before I begin, I was doing some checks on the stats for the pod. And I saw that on Apple 90% of the people who listen are followers, which is obviously great. Yeah, but only 10% are not followers. So what I'm going to ask for, you know what's coming is if you're part of the 90% and pass this on to a friend or a colleague or someone you think that that might appreciate just being a bit more informed about the economy and what's going on, particularly, I think given that what's happening right now economically impacts people are all levels in all job sectors. So not just for students who are applying for these roles in finance, however, it's also good for them because I've also got a message pending in my inbox from a student saying he's got an interview tomorrow. Can we fast track the episode and get it out. I'm glad it helps. Yeah, please do please do share it. It would be much appreciated for the for the both of us in the team, I'm sure but on the agenda for this week then couple things want to talk about 13 f filings in the US. What are they what do they mean and in particular the reason why because I want to talk about Warren Buffett, because he's come out with a bit detail for us to see about what he's been buying and selling over the last quarter and obviously someone like him with his legendary figure was watching what he does. Can we get any clues over what we should be doing as as the mere mortal common man. So we'll talk a little bit about that. We're then going to talk we just had the UK budget we are recording this on Thursday so literally Jeremy Hunt's just come out and outline the autumn budget so couple of highlights there and we'll talk about UK inflation that figure earlier this week, quite a bit higher than expected in fact the highest is 1981 printing headline year and year reading at 11.1%. So what was underpinning that rise and what does it mean going forward. And then Trump, he's announced he is going to run. So we just want to cover really what's the process from here on out. Not going to touch the politics, because they want to don't want to cause any issues. I'm touching the politics. I'll run you through the process so you know what to look out for in the period ahead but needless to say you're going to get a lot more Donald Trump and if he's back on Twitter. At some point, that's even going to ramp up further and then finally, I've got some inside info for the World Cup. I'm going to share. It's a world exclusive. I've got a tip off. And it's not from Sam North if you're listening it's not from because your tips are not very good. But yeah, we'll go through that. I'm going to tell you who's going to win the World Cup. So stay tuned. I think so. Warren Buffett and 13 F filing so I guess to start with peers perhaps you could give us just a very quick summary of what is in a 13 F filing. Well, you'll have heard of the SEC. The Securities and Exchange Commission, basically the police force for all things kind of US sort of markets and finance if you like a regulator. So they have this requirement. If you're an investor, if you're an institutional investor, I should say so an institutional investor investment manager, and if you've got at least 100 million bucks under management.  What have you bought? What have you sold? What are your current holdings? So yeah, all the big boys every quarter get forced to basically flash their portfolio or their trading book and everyone gets to see what they've been up to. So when you do your own one then, how long does it take you typically? I go under, well, you know, some people do call me the Sage of Ballum. I've been known, but at least one person has called me that in my life. Okay. Taking the piss. Well, let's talk about Warren Buffett because he is one that generates a lot of headlines because the type of companies they invest in, he's investing style, so maybe we can touch on a few of these things. The biggest headline came because he's put on a new position in a company called TSMC where he purchased just over four billion US dollars in the Taiwanese chip maker. Other foreign investors, just to give it a perspective, do include US asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard, the Singapore Solid and Well Fund. So who is this company then? Why are all these big movers and shakers got a vested interest in that firm? Well, yeah, there are Taiwanese based chip maker. And I mean, more than that, they're the largest chip manufacturer on the planet. So this isn't like a kind of shot in the dark kind of, you know, trying to pick up a sort of small company that no one's heard about yet. This is the biggest player on the whole planet. It's an interesting one. Basically, Buffett is notoriously anti-tech, just because I think, well, clearly he's been wrong in that position for the last two decades, but it's really a function of probably age, you would say. I mean, this guy, how old is Buffett now? I know how old he is. So what do you reckon? I believe he's about 148, isn't he? He's close.  I think he is, no? He is indeed, yeah. Go on, how old? 92. Wow. That's just crazy. So he started investing, yeah, like literally, you know, aftermath of the Second World War, he basically began his career. So of course, tech didn't really exist, you know, really. And so, you know, he's kind of old school, traditional. He's a value investor. He's not a trader per se. He believes in the ultra long term. So he will buy and hold. My Lord, can he hold one of his famous, probably, maybe his most famous, although it's perhaps Apple's taking this mantle. These days, but one of his most famous investments is Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola ranks fourth in his portfolio. He owns just a casual 400 million shares of Coke, but he's been an investor in Coke, like literally for decades and decades and decades. And, you know, so it's buy and hold. It's picking solid companies. He really wants to find really solid management teams, because if he's holding for the long term, it's critical that the management team in place is good enough to execute on that kind of long term growth strategy. Right. Yeah, he's typically quite conservative. And so the tech thing, yeah, I think he'll admit probably himself that he didn't quite get the tech era right. But he did, you know, aggressively move into Apple. But only recently, I think it was 2018, wasn't it that he started hoovering up. Bad timing, was it? No, true. Good point. I mean, but, you know, he should have picked that horse in the noughties, right? Not by 20.  But you might be old enough. I'll be careful with how I work this. When IBM was seen as like the tech company to take things to a whole new level, he was invested in IBM for a long time. Yeah, that's a really good point. I think that probably was an experience that burnt him. And yeah, probably then that impacted his decision. I mean, this is like classic psychology, trading psychology, right? You're getting sort of, you probably say, overly negatively impacted by a specific experience and you then carry that with you when you make future decisions. And yeah, I think that IBM trade that went wrong, yeah, probably meant it delayed his move into tech. So his portfolio is very much, it's very, you know, non-tech, right? Until Apple, I mean, is Apple a tech company? I mean, of course it is, but anyway, Apple's now as big as holding, but I think with this, this Taiwanese semiconductor trade, perhaps it is why I think there's, I think two things about it. Number one, maybe he's just now looking to add to his kind of tech, the tech portion of his portfolio just to very gradually pivot, continue that pivot that started with the Apple trade to evolve, update, modernize the look of his portfolio that's looking pretty old, right? I think that's one thing. But then what I will say on the other side, I don't know if he's taking too much risk here because who is TSMC's biggest client? Who's their biggest customer? Apple. So who's Warren Buffett's biggest holding in? Apple, and Apple, that's Apple's biggest supplier, full stop. Apple's biggest supplier is this Taiwanese chip company. So now Buffett's weighted in there as well. So either he's like doubling down on his Apple trade, or maybe this is a strategic play. Maybe Tim Cook has had a little whisper in his ear. Maybe after a board meet, an Apple board meeting, they frotted off for a few glasses of red wine, and Tim Cook just kind of persuaded him to strategically move into a position of authority on the TSMC board just to cement that supplier and to kind of strengthen ties, if you like, in a world where of course semiconductors, they're hard to come by these days, right? Obviously, that was front and center of the supply chain issues. Maybe there's something in it around that angle. I don't know. What do you think? Surely, though, the regulators have got to have a problem with that from a competition perspective in regards to fair play for other chip makers if he's in bed with both. Yeah. But which regulator? Because this is obviously a, well, Buffett's just an investor, right, he would say. He doesn't own a controlling stake in any of these companies. So it's not illegal for an investor to buy shares into companies that are connected from a sort of business perspective. That's not illegal. So I don't know how you would have the regulators prove Tim Cook's too big for any US regulator. Indeed. So big tech runs Washington, no? Yeah. So what was that regulator? What was that? Pipe down. Pipe down over there. I'm in charge. Yeah. On that point, one talking of regulators. Remember when Elon Musk, he's been doing his deposition about his pay or something, isn't it? At the moment about his salary and he's been doing like pre-trial work because he's going to the same Delaware court where he lost a ruling with Twitter. Right. One of the things that came up was he apologized.  He said, oh, no, no, no.  What I meant was save Elon's company stood there in a court of law and said straight faced. No, you've misconstrued my tweet. It meant save Elon's company. I mean, this guy is just. That's funny. There is another angle. So I was just looking here. Obviously, we have the situation with the US and China in terms of what is it escalating tensions. Some journalists might write and you know where that goes and obviously China and their position around Taiwan and Xi Jinping looking to eye up a move there or not. But Apple were talking to other chip maker suppliers like during COVID it was like there's no chips anywhere, you know, where else can we get some from and apparently Apple were talking to Yanxi memory technologies, which is a mainland China based chip maker. Because of the escalating tensions. Apple decided to fear away from them and go a bit more mean TSMC we're already the biggest supplier but I think they've gone even bigger. They put even more eggs in one basket which isn't a great strategy from a supply chain diversity perspective but maybe maybe Buffett is is just maybe it is just an investment. I think he's made where he feels that TSMC might benefit somehow from this if the China US sort of tensions do escalate. So that's another angle for you. I was just trying to have a quick look while you were talking of who else does TSMC supply to be interested to see what that client base looks like and whether there's any connection in that way amongst those firms. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, Samsung would be the immediate one I would want to know about it. If there are if there are major supplier for Samsung, Apple's arch rivals or not I don't know the answer to that. Okay, well, Buffett's well hang on Buffett's look at his other. So I'm just looking. Well check out like people listening to check out Anthony Chung's LinkedIn. I saw a really good post on this couple of days ago where you can get a full listing. That's the 13 F filing I mean which is basically just a spreadsheet of Buffett's holdings. How many shares. What's the value of those shares and then how that's changed over the last quarter. So it's interesting like the top five holdings and Apple number one. He's the biggest. He's the biggest single shareholder right of Apple. I believe it's a hundred and six and a half billion. Decent size. Bank of America's is second biggest holding then it but that's that's down to 30 billion. Apple really is like by far and away easily is biggest, biggest trade at the moment but yeah Bank of America at 30 billion you got Chevron then at 23 billion Coca Cola, 22 and a half billion. So those top four there that's good diversity right Apple is tech Bank of America's obviously finance you got Chevron oil company and then got Coca Cola which is, you know, a consumer sort of discretionary product you might say. So it's top four there's good diversity then he's got annex or his fifth. Then Occidental petroleum which is another oil company you got Kraft Heinz Moody's. He took a chunk out of his Activision Blizzard trade so booking a bit of profit on that. Then US Bank Corp and look there's there's those others he's got what about 50 odd holdings in his portfolio. Yeah, the Taiwanese semiconductor addition, grab the headlines but yeah Apple still the Uber trade that he's still playing. So many looking a portfolio composition like this. Yeah, there any like geographic risk with all of those names you were talking through. I don't have time to go through this definitely the flavor of this is big time American, which a makes sense he's an American investor be makes sense because well America's the biggest economy. C makes sense because American companies you know just from their globalization have probably benefited more than most in terms of value creation and value ads. Of course there's a massive US theme running all the way through I'm just trying to pick out some other international holdings other than that Taiwanese semiconductor. Something here I haven't heard of to be fair, like Liberty media. I'm not familiar with them. But mostly they're really big companies I mean he took took some of his general motors trade off, for example he. You know young things like visa, which I don't think the thing is I think the stuff like visa and amix is a really big holding of his that's been hurting. I wonder whether that he's probably been invested in visa for like 40 years or something. And I just think that kind of thing is a bit, that's probably a bit of an obsolete dinosaur. FinTech FinTech payments aggressive competition in that kind of payment space that visa seem to be way off the pace on so I think he stubbornly holding out I guess for him. You have like the book value of a position and then it's current value so the book values what you bought it at. The current value is obviously the current value and I guess for him if you bought it like 40 years ago the book values basically zero. So it still looks like an amazing trade, even though, yeah visa haven't been doing well over the last few years but the yes overwhelmingly American. So really, in terms of global or international risk you've got to start to delve into each individual, you know, big American multinational and start to think about right where does that individual company have international exposure. And look, Apple top of that list I mean Apple are very exposed to China right in terms of iPhone sales. China's a very very key market for them so. China risk is certainly very present in his portfolio. Yeah and just to kind of surmise Berkshire's long only equity portfolio from a total number declined from 300 to 296 billion. Yeah in quarter three. Yeah. Yeah, that's good going. Yeah. I mean, so that I lost about 10 last 10% right. Sorry, that's one percent we're talking about one percent. Yeah to be one percent down in quarter three. You definitely take that. Yep. Because the indexes got crunched. I don't know what the quarter three like S&P performance was to be honest but it's definitely a bigger loss than 1% that's for sure. Yeah. That's a secret to Buffett's long life. And doesn't he, doesn't he eat at that. Like budget American diner just down the road from his house once a week or something still does. I think that's the week. Every day was every day.  I'm just looking. I can't see McDonald's. You're talking about McDonald's here. Yeah, he gets in McDonald's. He's in McDonald's surely. I'm just looking. I can't. I'm just bouncing down the list. I cannot see any Mackey D's in this portfolio. He's spending all that those $3 for the last 500 years. He must have had at some point, right? Maybe he exited that a while back, but yeah, it's not in there now on first glance. Okay. I'm just having a quick look. The Buffett's Berkshire 3 I own just over 30 million shares in McDonald's. There was a stock split. I'm assuming this was a few years ago though. Yeah, he was in it. Maybe he's up now. He's going Burger King these days. All right, well, let's move to show on and talk about the UK economics because you just had the budget. Very different to the last one. Yeah, just a bit. Yeah, a couple of things then. Feel free to jump in at any point. So I'll just run through or rattle off. There's a lot to it. Try to just pick out some of the main ones that are more, I guess, relevant on the finance side. So the economy, the OBR predict the economy will shrink by 1.4% next year. The Chancellor did acknowledge we're in a recession. Things are going to get worse before they improve. I think from the optics, they've definitely taken the angle him and Rishi of trying to make this sound like the worst economic times ever to manage to appropriately lower the bar of people's expectations, which I think is probably a sensible approach. Yeah, rather than just going gun hoe, let's just go rapid growth, which was the previous strategy. Other things all workers face paying more in tax as a freeze on the personal allowance, basic and higher thresholds, it's been extended to 2028. That's when they were the papers you'll read about it call that the stealth tax by pushing that out. The point at which the highest earners start paying top rate of tax has been lowered to 125 K from 150. Chancellor, Han also confirms that energy industry will be hit with an expanded windfall tax. So that's going up to 35 and 25%. Very much broadcasted though, about a week ago that figure in fact so nothing new there. Port for energy bills is expected to remain in place but become less generous from April. We already knew that stat as well. The 12,300 tax free allowance for capital gains tax is going to get halved to 6K and then your EV is not going to be exempt vehicle excise duty as of April 25. Not happy about that. And then there's not going to be any change to the remit of the Bank of England, of which in any other day I'd say, why do I need to know that. But you need to know that because our friends trust and curtain were actually talking about a bit of a shake up of the Bank of England and their oversight capability but the Chancellor was quite quick today Jeremy Hunter come out and squash that so from a market's perspective intraday that hasn't hasn't been one in terms of a reaction, but it's very normal for that to happen if we're trading side of things. But yeah, any, any thoughts on what's been announced today. Well, the pound is coming up a little bit but actually, it's a bit more dollar strength than anything the dollar strengthening against most currency pairs today so the pound that's sterling versus the dollars down 1%. But then the Aussie dollar against us dollars down 1.3 kiwi against the dollars down 1.1 so you know there is dollar strength theme today. So if all you did was looked at the pound versus the dollar and you go I got it's coming down you and don't look at anything else you might draw the conclusion that the pound is devaluing because of this budget. If anything the pound is is is losing less value against the dollar than other currencies so maybe there's a little bit of sterling positivity in there there's just more dollar positivity overall but look this statement and I think there's much. You know it's been well telegraphed obviously we've been waiting for this statement for the last few weeks and. Yeah, I mean, I think more broadly obviously they had to come in and rescue the carnage. The disaster of the trust quasi show and so they've pivoted and gone right to the other end of the spectrum and look from a fiscal, you know from a UK government debt perspective. This will puts us on a better kind of trajectory to be able to, you know, sort out our fiscal situation where we obviously have to borrow a lot of money to fund all of the emergency stuff in covert you know the furloughing and all the rest of it and it's the biggest fiscal sort of bailout in the history of mankind right so you've got to start to pay for it at some point it's just that these guys are several let's just start paying for it now and let's just. And look, whilst interest rates are high. This makes sense. I think if you had this plan pre covered. Definitely wouldn't have made sense. You know it makes sense when interest rates are low to go fiscally expensive. You know let's invest and borrow it to invest because borrowings cheap. But when borrowing is expensive you know you've got to pivot and change the direction. And so they've definitely done that aggressively here. Yeah one thing like just thinking from our markets of trading or investment point of view. Then he has gone a little bit like some of the surprises in here like capital gains tax. He's gone at that. I think harder than I was expecting. So this is important for investors, because investors here in the UK, you have to pay capital gains tax on any profits from shares right so if you, you know if you buy shares and then sell them for a profit, you get taxed on that. And there was a annual tax free allowance. So it was the case that you used to be able to the first 12,300 pens worth of profits is tax free. Only after that you start to get capital gains taxed on that capital gains tax is like just shy of 30% so it's, you know, a decent whack to your profit. That's why a lot of these investment companies have a huge amount of sort of tax as a huge tax strategy element to the investment process to try and protect their clients from not protect them but try and be tax savvy when it comes to, you know, managing and exiting trades and so on. So, so that capital gains free tax allowance 12,300 is being halved or more than halved to 6000. That's in April 23 then in April 2024 is getting halved again so it'll just be 3000 pounds worth of capital gains tax allowance by April 2024 so that's definitely important for investors. And then also dividend tax. So, you know, if you run a sort of limited company then some of the directors remuneration packages will include dividends, and here what hunt has done is, again made that less tax efficient. So it's halved the free dividend tax allowance used to be just 2000 pounds he's halved it to 1000 so a couple of things in there for the sort of investors point of view that kind of stood out to me, but, but yeah, I don't other than that, we knew what was coming right. I think that cut to the, the threshold for the higher rate. I didn't read anything about that prior to today maybe I missed it but that's where he's like yeah you got to pay 45% tax now on anything above 125,000 it used to be anything above 150. What's quite notable about that is of course the quasi had the master plan of removing that tax threshold entirely don't actually have to pay 45% just pay 40. How does that happen. Like I'm not saying one person is right or wrong. We all know who was right or wrong, but how can you be that off key. I just don't get it like how did that happen and like. Well, it's because trust and quasi quarten were in their little bubble.  Didn't consult anyone didn't tell anyone because they thought I in my opinion I mean I've never met these guys so I'm spiting opinions here without without ever having met them but it looks to me like it's arrogant. But they thought, like I don't know what you want to call it academic or, you know, academic arrogance where they think that I know better than everyone else, so I do not need to consult them. We have the master plan. Da da. Here you go guys. And then the whole thing collapses and then they go Oh, we thought that was going to work. Ah, okay. So really hunt and Rishi. I mean don't forget Rishi, who's the prime minister. Don't forget him in all of this. So he was running against trust very much on a mandate that was much more fiscally prudent. So trust is fiscal expansionary mandate got shot down so we're back to Rishi's fiscal prudent mandate with hunt coming in and they've just gone even more prudent, because they've decided, having seen the evidence from trusses example that that's definitely the wrong direction let's pivot and go more aggressively the other way, because that's what people and markets are like. I guess that's their play. And you were talking about interest rates and how that can play into an influence the fiscal strategy. So one thing was Morgan Stanley, they issued their latest call for UK rates. So they basically say that the Bank of England will cut interest rates by 150 basis points in 2024 stopping their tightening cycle which they see UK rates will hit 4% in March. So I disagree with that second part. I disagree. I mean, I would like the Bank of England to stop raising rates right now. And I know that's hard to do we'll talk about inflation in a minute. It's hard to do when inflation yet again makes another 40 year high. But this, this budget is deflationary. So we're in a recession, demand destruction is happening right now. I do not need to hike rates anymore. I've done enough, in my view, so I wouldn't be hiking from 3% where we are now won't be hiking another 1% by March which is what Morgan Stanley thing I think that would be an error. But we'll see I'm happy to go head to head with Morgan Stanley. See he's right. I'll see if I can get what's his name Mike. Mike Wilson, you can battle it out for your year. Let's do it 2023 S&P call. But let's talk about inflation then you mentioned it there UK did hit a new high it was higher than expected. I think it was expected at 10.7 came in 11.1 up from 10.9%. So, yeah, big figure higher since 1981 the core reading though was unchanged. So worth mentioning that that was at 6.5%. So yeah, how do you how do you see that. Well, I was at yesterday I was at, I was out on the road I've been out on the road last few days, just out there on the front line, running some of our simulations. And I was actually at Loughborough University. And I was there yesterday morning and I brought the FT up. I was looking at it with them just trying to show them how I would read the FT right and I think that's sometimes hopefully he's quite insightful for students just because the FT such a monster publication it's hard to really know. It was the best angle of attack but I flashed it up and obviously the big headline 11.1%. You know, highest for 41 years. And I said, and then I took the, I took the FT off. And I asked them what do you think's happened to the FT 100 today. This morning, with all this data and these headlines and they said I definitely gone down. But she's definitely gone down. So I got the chart up. FT was up 0.2%. Yeah. And I was trying to make two points. Number one, be super careful about sensationalist media clickbait headlines. Don't just react to the headline and then make all your assumptions and decisions. Click in and actually read the body of the article where then it goes into more detail about, yes, inflation is at 11.1%. Yes, it is a 40 year high. But when you take out food and energy, the core inflation number was unchanged from September at 6.5%. And I 6.5% is really, really, really high. But the fact that it didn't rise from the month before on the core level, I think is really important. And is the more important point. Okay.  Basically do your own due diligence on it before, you know, just having that trigger happy reaction to media headlines. Yeah, so to add to that, what happens on a monthly basis is that Bloomberg will conduct their own polls. And so Bloomberg being the benchmark terminal system of all these institutional players, they'll survey economists and I'll say what do you think about where UK inflation will be by at this time, or in this case, they put one out midweek saying, where do you think UK house prices, what's going to happen. And the headline the Bloomberg have been pumping this week is UK house prices risk a drop of up to 20%.  And that's not what they're predicting. That's worst case scenario. Right. Exactly as you were saying. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely definitely. Yeah, need to have breadth, I think in your aggregation of information, and then the ability to be curious, minded to then investigate. Yeah, that's the way to do it. Right, absolutely. But I've got. So really it was all on the food and energy side right this continued upside inflation so number one on the energy side or the price caps in now. Right, the UK government has just capped two and a half thousand pound cap right so that's now in as of this month, meaning the energy portion of the inflation basket will not go up for six months. So if you're thinking about inflation in the future, should the Bank of England raise rates or not. Well, the one of the big contributors energy that's just hit a ceiling and can't go any higher. Anyway, they can't do anything about energy costs doesn't matter what you do with interest rates it's a supply side issue right. So that's one thing. The other thing on the food side. Now some of the food stuff just when gangbusters. I've got some I've got got a little quiz to play with you. I've got some food. Do you realize I'm a vegan. That's fine. I've got some if I got any vegan products in my list. So, like when you're walking the aisles in your where you're what you waitrose M&S food probably right. Little right yeah. That's a good point right where you buying your produce from well there's a big difference. Yes, but I've got stats here in terms of on average how much of the price of certain goods gone up. So, and I'll give you a hint. Overall, the food component of the basket was up 16.7% year on year. Okay, so obviously that's the other I feel that every week. That's the average.  No, no, no fat. No, no, no. How much has milk gone up in the last 12 months. 12 months. Yeah. So again, 45% close 47.9% milk is up. What about your butter. What do you think. Oh, that's probably even more because that every time I buy a tub of that. I just think what if I bought detergent or something like that like why is that so expensive but yeah, well butters up 42.1. Pastor and cuscus. Well, I'm just going to reel these off. Just all your essentials here isn't it. Pastor and cuscus up 34%. Do you like your like sources and your condiments. Of course, they've they've shot up 33% oil, like olive oils and fats and stuff up 33 flowers up 21% eggs up 22. Does anything top milk or is milk. My milk is the milk's the big list. Yeah. So these are crazy numbers right on an annualized basis. And yeah so this is one this is like the key driver at the moment of that inflation basket, along with energy but as I said that energy components not going to be driving higher from this point on. So, yeah, and look, we got demand destruction. We got we're in a recession. And I know these are all sort of everyday items that I'm listing here. It's difficult with stuff like milk, I guess, and like milk and eggs and flour I mean, I guess that's the definitely consumer staples right you're not. You're not going to not buy those but maybe you'll be a bit more conscious of how much milk you're putting on your cereal. Serials are up 14.4% by the way. So yeah that breakfast portion might just get reduced a little bit. I think like inflation is at 11%. Is that not actually a reflection for the majority of people where they pull back on a lot of these other more surplus type spending activities. So their core consumption, which is those staples. It isn't 11%. Yeah, if you average out main typical like I go let's say I do my weekly shop I buy 10 items let's say it's all the ones you just said, right, that's not 11%. That's more like for the month. Right. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. All right, well look let's. I was going to say let's take this in a more positive direction but we're going to talk about Donald Trump, the JT. Yeah, he has announced he's going to run for the presidency 2024 he said America's comeback starts right now. That's right right now. So, yeah, he had hopes so the context here he had hoped that the parties expected gains. I say expected gains, we're going to act as a bit of a springboard for his party's nomination. He was backing a whole host of candidates going into these midterm elections last week and obviously that has not panned out at all in the right way for him. He criticized quite, quite heavily for that.  He has to win the Republican Party's nomination. Just trying to think of the stat I did see it. If a president was to go and then come back. Again, I don't think that's happened for it's over a century. I was reading a long time. So, so this process then what comes next, because obviously we're talking about 2024 here. Yeah, November 24. Yeah. Right. So, it typically starts at least one year before voters go to the polls. So, yeah, you, it's going to start ramping up basically really from now certainly in terms of the noises that he's likely to be making each party candidate is chosen through a series of state contests or primaries. Each candidate is assigned a number of delegates proportional to the number of votes that they won in the state. And then those delegates go on to vote for them at the party's presidential nominating convention that's that's normally like a big star studied event and big convention. Along the way, candidates get to compete in these kind of grueling debates that get highly publicized against each other members within their own party which I always find that a bit weird. It's like because the American political kind of play is just so much more aggressive. It's not like the Hugh Grant British style and we all there. Stumbling through it's, they go at it like so. So currently a major rival is it is a chap called Ron DeSantis. He's Florida's governor who swept a reelection. And so, whilst everyone else was struggling. He just smashed it. And straight away, Trump came out gave him a tongue lashing. You know what Trump calls him. He calls him Ron de sanctimonious. That's loyalty, Trump said.  So yeah, that I mean that's the general process I mean, where are we with Trump and Musk. And I asked that that's a really important piece of the puzzle for Trump's success is can he get himself back on there, because the two of them kind of a buds and then they fell out. Because Elon was an advisor to the administration when he was in power right yeah for slightly dubious reasons. But that aside, they've kind of fallen out more recently but with his necessity to get on because his own company, his own social truth social is just not going to cut it.  I don't think Musk has made any comments yet about right will Trump be reinstated or not I think in his general idea. That's Musk's general idea is that people should not be permanently canceled from Twitter. There shouldn't be temporary bands for transgressions or whatever but you know they shouldn't be permanent bands so obviously that implies Trump is going to come back but when who knows right but I don't know I just feel a bit depressed about Trump and the fact he's coming back. This is how I see it. What about the US electorate. There's two very divided. I'm not necessarily talking about Republican and Democrats anymore.  And they will do anything, anything and they'll storm the Capitol for Donald right they will they will never vote for anyone else if Trump's running. They're all in. Okay, he then got everyone else who's not a Trump supporter. And I think it's so divisive that they're not quite as passionately negative as Trump supporters are positive but they're pretty damn negative about Trump. And so they'll never vote for Trump. Okay, now the problem Trump has is those hardcore passionate. There's a lot of them, but they make up a minority. So I actually don't think Trump can win, because he's those that were middle ground, like in the last election. In the middle ground the election before sorry when he won those that were middle ground, you know did lean and shifted towards Trump but I think he's now alienated the middle ground I mean you saw what happened in the midterms. A couple of the prominent guys that Trump had endorsed so Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and then someone called Carrie Lake in Arizona. So when Trump had backed them, but then they failed and they massively underperformed.  So therefore I actually don't think he can win what the Republicans need to do I think is, they need to put Trump away, they need to look forwards, and actually a lot of the supporters I mean here's a. So Blackstone, the founder of Blackstone is a guy called Steven Schwarzman. He was a massive Trump fan, even after the storming of the Capitol when Trump was saying the boats been rigged. This guy was still supporting Trump saying Trump's right so he was a bit of a die hard right obviously an incredibly wealthy man, one of Trump's financial donors during the 2020 campaign. Even he's turned now his quote was America does better when its leaders are rooted in today and tomorrow, rather than today and yesterday. So like Trump is yesterday's man, they need to modernize move forwards to Santos, he's your man. If they want to win the next election. They need to Santos to be up there I think they'll lose it with Trump, whether whoever the Republicans pick, it is then important to say well who's going to be the Democratic Party candidate, and it might not be Biden. But although after the midterms. Yeah, that would play into Ron's hands okay against Biden right. Perfect polarization of candidates. That's right at the Republicans, they would love it if to Santos was up against Biden, and Biden would get eaten alive. I think the problem the Democrats have is because they did better than expected in the midterms. Biden now as feeling a bit more positive about himself and is maybe going to announce that he is going to run for a second term but Well one thing I was just looking at was the last fed economic projections, because where is the economy anticipated to be by 2024 is also going to be quite crucial, particularly where we're at now, which has been the height if you like of the fear of recession, we're going to get that economic kind of follow through in the short period ahead, but where will we be in 2024 and if you look at the change in real GDP growth. For the end of this year the Fed are expecting growth of 0.2% by 2024 back up to 1.7%. From 0.2 to 1.2 next year to 1.7 so ever increasing GDP growth unemployment they see peaking next year to 4.4% and then staying at that level through 24 and then call PCE inflation. Let's go PCE inflation they see 5.4% the end of this year. And that's a peak, because then they see a dramatic decline to 2.8% in 2023 and then down to 2.3% by the times really the mid the election is in the end of 2024. Yeah, does that help because yeah, it's a better way better situation than the beginning of next year is going to look like. It helps the Democrats yeah I think based on economic cycles and generations of recessions and all the rest of it it's likely pretty damn likely that in the run into the election so let's say through the summer of 2024. We're probably going to get the economy rebounding. And that that recovery phase after a recession is often like the fastest growth phase and you know this is why like equity prices go up the fastest and so if the Democrats are lucky. Based on previous cycles, most likely they'll be going into that election the last part of the election race really buoyed by a rebounding economy. Yeah, which could play into their favor. Yeah. Cool. All right, well look to wrap things up. Last thing I did promise at the beginning I tell you who's going to win the World Cup. And so I have it on very good authority. We're going to make the final. So close, but they're going to come up short again, losing to your favorite. David, David Beckham little kick out David Beckham in Argentina, Argentina. Yeah, I should rather I haven't read this guys. Yeah, where this has come from there's this analyst called Joachim Clement, who works for Libram, I think that's how you say the firm he works for but essentially you'll you'll see a lot of this in the press, kicking off probably in the next coming days, because Goldman's has one more than Stanley will put out one which is when they have this kind of engagement piece where they get some of their analysts to run the models like they would do for a financial market to punch out then different variables to calculate any anticipated pathways for different countries in the World Cup performance. And this guy is his model, which uses economic and climactic variables, apparently, such as GDP per capita population sizes these sorts of things to predict team successes. He called the correct winners at the last few major last major tournaments 2014, 2018, with Germany and France. He has said that the three lions will breeze past Senegal, Mexico and Portugal in the knockout phase, but lose to Argentina in the final. In these guys, GDP per capita is one of his key variables in his model. Is he aware that the greatest World Cup side of all time the country that's won the most. Well, do you know the answer to that. There's one the most. Who's won the most World Cups. Brazil. Their GDP per capita is very low, well relatively low, right. And yet they're the greatest side of all time so not quite sure there's room for GDP per capita in a World Cup prediction model myself. What's the population of Brazil. It's about 180 million isn't it. 150 is it. 214. That's gone up. Yeah. Okay. It's quite punchy. Yeah. But I don't get the correlation GDP per capita to chances of winning the World Cup or not. Yeah. I didn't make the model pairs. I don't know what offsets he's using to like. I do agree that the arson times do look pretty tasty. I think that that's that's who I think I'll win. I don't have a model. That's called a hunch. All right, and on that hunch. We'll wrap it up so thanks as ever peers and thanks everyone for listening. Again, if you have made it to the end you're probably one of our regular listeners. So thank you. I think as I said, share this get out to as many people as possible. You know, it's all aimed at trying to just help demystify really finance and investing for students and for, and for others as well who just, you know, given as I said at the beginning the context of how the economy is at the moment I think it's important that people have education on these matters so. All right, take care and we will see you next week. See you then.


So we're here with Microchip and there's a couple new chips here to Microchip, so how much do we do? There is. I'm Jacob Lassen. I'm working with Microchip, part of our product marketing team. So we have two new products coming out this week. So the first one is the PIC 16F18446 and this new device is having a very nice ADC. This is the first small PIC with the 12-bit ADC with computation as well. 12-bit ADC, what does that mean? 12-bit ADC. So the resolution here means that you can actually do more accurate measurements. So the intention here is that we want to be giving customers a better solution for censoring applications and measuring analogue stuff. So in addition to the 12-bit we have, we also have oversampling in hardware. And that means that you can either suppress noise better or you can actually gain better resolution by signal processing, digital signal processing. So you have 12-bit analogue performance plus additional 3-bits of digital performance. So you're actually up to 14, 15-bits in real-world applications. So the demo we have here, that is with the new device that we have, the 18446. Here we have set up the board. We have a small standard development board that we have soldered on to the base board. And we're then showing different types of sensors, sensor applications when we're using these new analogue capabilities. So the demo that is running right now is doing proximity sensing. So here you see the circle as it goes larger, it means that I'm closer. It has a capacitive touch sensor along the edge here. So that is used to actually detect whenever I'm approaching the board. We then also have other stuff here, other cool demos. We have a pressure sensor, so the small sensor here is detecting pressure. So if I'm just tapping it, you can see that it starts to produce a little bit of ripple here. We have one more. We have the temperature sensor. Let's see if I have warm fingers today. So if I hold this one, it should go up, I'll have cold fingers today. It's cold. It's my fingers are colder than the other one. It's crazy cold in here right now. Right. So the other thing there, we have battery that's not to demonstrate. So the last thing here is the metal detector. So here you have a coil, which is capable of actually detecting if I'm approaching. So I'm using my watch here. And you can see first the gold is starting to react. And then the beeping frequency is increasing. So here we're doing all the metal detections. So all of these things are things you can do with this new analogue capabilities. One chip. One chip. This is the one running it. So what's it going to be used for? Here it says something about the washing machines or what's it going to be used for? I mean anything where you need sensors. So if you have a washing application like this one, you can use it for many of the things where you need to detect water or temperature. You need to detect maybe some of the particles in the water if the washing cycle is automated and so on. So a lot of the things you need are quite good ADCs. So is this a very important new chip? I mean it's nothing like that before? No, because here we have the 12 bit ADC and a very small package. So that is a new part that we think are relatively far on customers. Is the microcontroller with nothing else or something like that? Oh no, no, no. There's a lot of peripherals to it. So you have all the standard communications peripherals. You have a lot of very cool timers that you can use either for detecting like I showed you with the fidget spinner where we have a rotational detection timer. Yeah, I can do that. So here we have a cool speed timer. This is the microchip fidget spinner. Is this the coolest fidget spinner in the world? That's the coolest fidget spinner in the world. So what it does is it's actually using one of our special timers to do a rotational speed detection and synchronizing with a small sensor we have on the board here. So if I turn it on, what I can do is that I can spin it and it will show a microchip text here. Nice. And with eyes, I can definitely see microchip right here. My camera has not the right shutter speed, but it's okay. But it says microchip, like super cool there. Yeah. It can be programmed with to say something else? Yes, it can. Because here we have added our Bluetooth module as well. So it means that you can actually put it into programming mode by holding these two buttons here and you can then load something cool for your wife, for your girlfriend or something that you want to show. You can load it with an app. So basically it senses the speed. It senses the speed. Certainly just you can barely see it here, but you have a small map in here on the backside and you have a whole sensor on the front here. So that is detecting the rotation of the board so that it can actually synchronize to that. Nice. How long is it going to work on the battery? Oh, a very long time. Yeah. The faster you spin it, the longer it lasts. The three batteries because it needs to be balanced. Exactly. So actually there's too much power. There's too much power here. So the main reason for having that, first of all you want to have some weight through it so that it continues spinning. The second thing is of course you want it to be balanced. So for that reason you have large batteries in three areas here. Like 12 year battery life or something. This will last a while. But that's not exactly the same chips that you were just talking about? No, this is another one. So this was just a smaller one that we used just for this demo because that was what we had used when we made it a couple of months ago. We used a different chip. Right. But you know the pick chips are very similar so the peripherals that you would see in this one is things that you would see in the other one. So you're talking about the pick here. What is this Atmega? So as you may know, Atmega was acquired by Microchip two years ago. And with that acquisition all the Atmega products and AVR products that came in. So the AVRs are 8 bit microcontrollers as well. So Atmega is the AVR? Yes, that's an AVR. So here we have the new device that came in the Mega AVR series. This is the Mega 4809 and it actually comes with more flavors to it. We have if you just switch to this one. So we have a number of different variants of this one. We have the 4809, the 4808. So these are respectively a 32 pin and 32 pin and you also have the same in 32k versions. So 48 pin and a 32 pin version of that. So these new cool devices they have a new improved ADC.  Let's just get this oven running. I don't know why it's turning off now. Give me a moment. Something happens here. So some applications are better to use the pick, some are better with the AVR, some are better with the arm. How do people choose? That's a good question. So what I want to show you here is one of the reasons why we recommend 8 bit for some solutions and 32 bit for other solutions and just get this oven running again. There we are, now we're running. So as you know if you go to arm devices you typically have a high operating frequency. So that is something which is really useful if you want to do massive processing. On the other hand an 8 bit is typically with lower power consumption and what we are doing here with the 8 bit is we're focusing on real time performance. So while for the machines they often use the CPU to do a lot of real time performance that can be a limitation as well. So what we're instead doing for the pick and the AVRs is that we put that real time functionality into the peripherals. So the arm suggests that it's the Cortex-R for real time? Yeah, so but still, so we have the arm products next door here. So what we say that you can do a very good call but if you do not have excellent peripherals you can actually not meet your real time requirements. So the demo here is focusing on the analog performance. So here we have the Mega4809 on an Explained Pro board. This is a standard development board that you can get right now. In addition we have made a signal generator and the signal generator is currently generating this signal here so this is a raw signal on top and on the bottom you have the measured signal. So that is transmitted from the board up to this tablet PC. So what we can show is that all right you have this is an ideal situation. This is what you would see in the lab but in reality you typically have noise. So let's turn on random noise. So what you see here is just get this back to where I wanted it to be. Here you see the standard operation of an ADC. The noise that is on the signal is actually measured as well. But the ADC here has some fantastic hardware capabilities. You can do hardware averaging meaning that you can actually do filtering in the ADC itself. You don't have to spend CPU cycles to do that. So if we start turning on this, if we're starting to add the oversampling you can see that the noise, the random noise is attenuated and if we go to the maximum oversampling you can see from that source we can measure that signal by doing that in hardware. Real-time averaging. Real-time averaging. So the CPU is not doing any of this is only in the ADC. The other thing we could look at is, all right, here we have some averaging which can remove random noise but if we have periodic noise that's a different situation. So we still have the averaging turned on but here we have a higher frequency component overlaying our signal which is not possible to remove with the averaging. What we can do instead is that we can add jitter to the ADC we can uncorrelate the noise source and here we turn it on, we do add the sampling delay and you can see we actually are able to uncorrelate the noise. So just to make it worse we're adding the random noise again you can see this is representing a sine wave and a lot of noise and this is what we can actually measure with the ADC without spending a single CPU cycle. And the ADC is, I mean what are the use cases for this? Where does it go? So again what we're focusing on is censoring applications and typically what we see here is that we need it for industrial applications and where you have harsh environments, a lot of noise. There these fantastic features would be fitting well in because you can say you can have noise from a 50 hertz you can have noise from a lot of different things but we are able to remove that. It could be, well we wouldn't use this specifically for radio but it would be for industrial applications where you want to have good analog measurements even though that you are in an electrical noise environment. So this processing that you would normally have to do in software this would require a quite powerful CPU to do the same processing this is something we can do without spending a CPU cycle. So that is coming back to your question about well when do we recommend ARM, when do we recommend 8 bit products? So if you have an application where you need to do good noise suppression and still want to have low power consumption this is typically an 8 bit application where you want to use these kind of features. So these two new chips that you just presented there they are going to enable new products in society right? They are, they are. Like this is going to mean what? New machines, new... So what we see, many of the things that we see today is that a lot of systems are being connected we are talking IoT, connected devices and in all of these situations typically what you do is you are measuring environmental parameters it can be temperature, air pollution, a lot of things and you are collecting data about that and transferring that to a centralized system. So this is part of a larger connectivity story where you actually need good unlike performance to do connectivity and share that information in IoT applications.


Welcome to another edition of RCE. We are back with another episode with a post SC hangover finally wearing off and Going into holidays and already had some work holiday parties. I have again Jeff Squire from Cisco Systems and one of the authors of open MPI Jeff. Thanks again for your time Wow life is tough for you over there in Michigan already having a holiday parties Yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible terrible. That's right. It is good It's like you said it's the post SC detox, you know all the crushing deadlines of Supercuting or past and we're heading right into the end of year round up here So if you're do a couple more recordings and then well, I think we're gonna the plan is to release one and the next one I'll be next year, right? Yep. Yeah, this will be the last recording for 2012 and we already have lined up recordings for 2013 So let's roll into our guest here Our guest this time is Stuart Martin from University of Chicago. He is one of the people working on the Globus toolkit There's been a lot of buzz around Globus and implementation and stuff recently So I'd like to get into the details of what Globus is a Stuart. Why don't you take a moment to introduce yourself? Hi Jeff. Okay, everyone. Yeah, Stuart Martin. I've been working on the Globus toolkit project for about 15 years I've been employed from Argonne and University of Chicago at present And started with the toolkit in the early days when at first first few lines of code were in So what is the toolkit seems like there's a lot of pieces to it? Yeah The toolkit comes as right a number of components that work together There's the toolkit really is Middleware software plumbing, you know for high performance file transfer across organization security remote job management So those are kind of the main parts to it remote log in as well and and middleware as I said for for it's really designed for developers in communities like energy physics like though Earth systems grid Open science grid basically to integrate into their custom and end solutions to use the toolkit for that So I actually learned about a lot of the pieces of Globus under different names Could you go cover some of these names at the big pieces? Right so so for high performance file transfer there's grid FTP and then For security for the cross-organization security, there's a global security infrastructure GSI My proxy is a service to provide proxies for users and services And then there's open SSH SSH using GSI for for secure login And then for remote job management, there's grand grid resource location Management that's what that stands for. So those are yeah, those are the main pieces in the toolkit names So what's the the history of Globus you kind of implied in your intro there that it's been around for a while You said you've even wrote some of the first lines of it long ago. What how did this all start and where's it going? so Yeah, so maybe it's just start back in 1995 or so like a supercomputing conference There was this iWay project and it was basically like a one-week experiment at supercomputing to build the national scale grid with major computing facilities With their high-speed networks virtual reality cave displays, you know with approximately 60 applications as demonstration So basically was you know an event that galvanized what became the grid computing path really with Ian Foster Steve Tiki Warren Smith Johnson Johnson Geisler Basically, you know, you can almost say it was Globus toolkit negative one version And then in 1996 we got a DARPA grant to actually fund the Globus toolkit And that got us kind of started And then over the years we've gotten funding from National Science Foundation Department of Energy NASA NIH we had even private companies IBM Sun and tell fund, you know parts of it at times And so I don't know in the late 1990s or early 2000 You know we're GT really got traction with the high energy physics community and LIGO, you know as a fundamental You know part used in their Custom solutions that is integrated into their custom solutions so I know maybe over the last five years It's really transitioned into a stable production service for Tens of thousands of users, you know per day installed on thousands of servers worldwide I mean another thing in our use of statistics we see you know over a hundred over over one petabyte per day moved using grid FTP And we see several hundred thousand jobs per day using a gram for job submission So you used the word grid in there a lot and grids one of those buzzwords has been around for a long time Could you expand in the Globus world exactly what grid means? Right grid is is a term that's used for you know an organization building a a Out an infrastructure that you know will serve their scientific community researchers To do things easily across and a set of computers. So you've got grids in the US for like open science grid and exceed exceeds maybe a set of 10 to 12 sites or in machines Open science grid. I think is more on the order of likes. I'm not sure but 20 and maybe maybe a hundred resources and machines. So it's kind of like Assembly of smaller communities universities throughout the United States Largely And then Europe has grids and so what the grid is is making it right easy for scientists that would maybe normally use just one machine To be able to harness maybe a sets sets of machines and be more opportunistic To use a variety of computers where otherwise they would have to implement some of the remote interactions on their own and grids provide that Standard remote interaction to then use those remote computers more easily Okay, so you've given a few illusions there of who uses these grids So you're talking about scientists, but you've also talked about Developers as well particularly with the toolkit aspect of it So could you tell me let's focus on the toolkit part of this here? Who is the toolkit for who uses it and how is it used? Right, so So the the toolkit, you know who uses the toolkit is You know thousands of installations worldwide and these these are like grids as we've said so, you know So Europe in Europe. There's a comparable institution like price which has a set of Super computing resources typically or University compute cluster resources Assembled together to make it easier for scientists to do things the scientists would do all disciplines from high-energy physics to Chemistry computations genome searching You know all disciplines really it's it's it's not targeting one So so I guess the toolkit and grids maybe are tend to be in for infrastructure to enable a variety of then In user custom solutions for the different disciplines Okay, so let's let's talk about some of the individual parts and what's unique about them So let's let's start with grid FTP because I think that's the one that's probably the best well-known What exactly is grid FTP and why should someone use it over traditional file transfer methods? right so So good FTP is high-performance file transfer service. I mean it's not just a simple upload download manager You know, and it's it's not a tool where there's always a human in the loop You know, it might it might it's something where you can write delegate credentials and then Off-line a service can do things on your behalf And so it has elements of you know reliability and security In large-scale environments You know basically And great it itself is is a set of enhancements on top of FTP So some of these enhancements for grid FTP are Well, they ask security extensions to FTP And then also parallelism pipeline File offset markers for restart ability Now when you say pipelining and parallelism, can you go into a little bit about what you mean there? Are you talking parallelism across multiple network links for example? Right, so parallelism is the ability to do multiple TCP streams to a single process So and then that that by doing it that way you can you know send data much faster So there was a thing called a striped grid FTP server. What exactly is that? right, so so striping with grid FTP is is a way to send Basically, I would boil it down to one file extremely fast over the over the network, so Striping is that Basically transfer a portion of a single file at the same time using multiple grid FTP processes And then and then transfer a single file to it to a single file But over the network you're really breaking up that file into multiple Processes and TCP streams to them and bring it back to a single file Okay, so with the striped servers when I had done it I had actually used multiple machines and an exceed site Is that a common setup? Right. I'm good point. So Yes, many do use that method And I'm right can achieve really high bandwidth throughput using that method Okay, so how does authentication get handled in all this you said that it might not necessarily involve human intervention What how is authentication handled in something? right, so one why one of the components their GSI security infrastructure in the toolkit allows for The delegated credentials delegation is a key Thing identified and that would be needed with these types of forces and grids so that way a user can come on and and They don't have to be present all the time and then services can do things on their behalf. So So right so then you've delegated you can delegate a credential to a service Using X 509 and security Standards and my proxy and Clovis and GSI implement these standards to implement delegation So how is this different than say, you know just plain vanilla passwords or SSH keys or or a technology like that it's similar in some ways and that with SSH you need to you know put a key on the remote machine and with Credentials and GSI You do need to you get a you get a unique ID DN With your credential and then that needs to be put in a grid map file, but there's also more complex ways that you can Set up authorization and like see a log on and other Technologies are coming on where a your access at your campus Can be used to then access remote machine on like a group Authorization so it's much easier than yet access at a site that if a site wants to enable a set of researchers from University of Chicago Or a set of researchers from University of Michigan that can be done at a at a larger scale and is more Resilient to changes for various personnel that the authorization can be handled at the institution I see and so GSI is the part of the global toolkit that allows this to happen in kind of a uniform Standardized way across multiple different organizations. That's kind of the key here, right? Right and in GSI, you know again what the toolkit provides is a little bit of plumbing that then my proxy kind of implements as a On top of it as a as a service Okay, so there's a thing called Graham and distributed resource management and such. Can you go into what that is and how it works? right so One thing that Scientists, you know do is they can log in and use a remote to computer You know on that computer. There's usually some type of a batch scheduler some something to You know allow all scientists to submit their jobs that they would like done and to schedule all of them across these large supercomputers And what Graham does is basically provide a remote interface to that service to that local service So it it will allow you to submit jobs from remote and cancel jobs and and do that securely Okay, so does this sit on top of the local sites the local resource providers resource manager and such so You still use PBS or LSF or something like that Yeah, one talks to that Right one key distinction. We did early on was we would not require this to like be something that a local site would have to Change their local system to adopt that Graham works on top of The local system so that you can add it if you'd like local users can still use their local access But then remote this enables a new capability to to then interface with that Machine and system from remote so they can do these remote jobs So when you say that Graham sits on top, what does it do? Do you actually interact at an API level with the underlying schedules or just basically invokes CLI commands on behalf of Remote users or how does that work? Right, so there's kind of like a layer and Graham that is for interacting with their machine with the remote with the like super computer and that batch interface and Typically, it's done through right the command line interfaces that are enabled by or allowed offered in In the remote batch scheduler So like you choose Q sub for PBS and Q stat these these commands are typically what Graham uses Additionally, it could use APIs and things but that's that typically hasn't been done It seems to be easier to implement things with the command line tools Okay, and then how well how much do you expose the local policy to remote users because every Site has a different religion about how things are scheduled and where you're allowed to run and how long and you know We actually had a previous show Talking about three entirely different models from three different institutions about how they run their HPC resources How do you expose that to remote users but preserve some degree of commonality? You know to preserve this ease of use that you're you're clearly going for Right I mean, I think the most common way is that this cues you can set up remote You can set up cues in most all batch schedulers Did I know and that's one way they can they can provide a some some similar submission, but yet some control and some secondation if they want the different jobs and Graham can interface to those cues as well to Allow users to specify those cues and and then submit to those cues Okay, so Graham submitting these jobs to all these different remote things you're tying together all these different remote resources A user may have access to Does the user actually have to have a local account on every machine or does Graham run the mas like a globus user? Yes, you do need a local account that they at the remote machine And you need authors to be authorized and accepted just like you would any other user And then this just enables a new capability for you if instead of logging in locally you could then Do remote and you could maybe take advantage of other grid client tools that are more high end For for your your needs So when I let's say I'm a remote scientist and I want to submit a job to your organization through, you know various globus kinds of commands How does my executable get to your Organization and any support input files and the now put files and things like that Does this all kind of happen under the covers via grid FTP and delegation and things or do I have to kind of pre-stage everything? You just do different things They Some will stage Them those through grid FTP Maybe some files are already staged Maybe if they're very large files of stage them by hand, you know Individually and and then maybe as a process stage some files through again grid FTP and then submit their job and then stage some In addition through Graham it provides the also staging capability before and after job So you can do it in a variety of ways and users do it differently Depending on their needs Okay, so Graham does a lot of things in which cases should Graham be used in which cases should Graham not be used Um Good question I'm Graham, you know what some will use Graham to submit Everyone of their jobs in some cases maybe where you get Short-running jobs then some users will And you have many running jobs, you know, some users will use Graham as more of a pilot job and basically You know what that is something like maybe condor g which is kind of a high high level client to manage a personal queue of jobs That then would submit a one job through Graham to start up kind of a remote condor Demon and then condor would talk directly to the demon. So it's a way to kind of bootstrap maybe your own chosen You know grid client method for submitting jobs Down into the super computing cluster Okay, let me switch direction here a little bit. I'm an open source developer kind of guy and I know that you have quite the community around all this development effort too Can you tell us a little bit about how your community is organized? What's your role? How do you guys make decisions things like that? Yeah, so so right we're open source and have been from the beginning So we've interacted with various communities that kind of have come and go And and we've done things.  That's kind of come along more recently, but So we maintain open mailing us so in Globalist toolkit user email list globalist toolkit developer email list Commit list so you can see our commit commits if you'd like to and you can plug in wherever you'd like to get Information so that's one way of distributing information between users and you know hundreds of users Subscribe to these lists So we communicate that way and then we maintain our Log of tasks in JIRA and kind of like choose a set of tasks to do each sprint we kind of run two-week sprints so You know with that you You know have a meeting Every two weeks kind of review what was done Set the next priorities You know choose the next set of tasks to do and put those into Sprint buckets really of two weeks and so that's out there to be seen as well in JIRA that the toolkit project is open there and Anybody would like to take a look and take a look at what we're doing on a on a daily weekly basis So now you say you do, you know an agile sprint kind of development style Do you do you do this every two weeks? Do you have a sprint every two weeks or is it more a methodology of you're just making? two-week Bites of work so to speak that gets distributed around the community Right, so we do we do to pretty religiously two weeks two weeks sprints and come together It's kind of a time to you know have that meeting to review what was done and and what's next and Then certainly things can run, you know tasks or efforts of work that run past two weeks You know you you just break it up into smaller chunks and you know get the design done and then get the Implementation phase one done and another sprint and you know just kind of pound through all the work in order to You know complete complete the job and you know and more of a Larger long-term scale as some things take a longer turn longer time to implement Do you get a lot of commits from outside the University of Chicago space like how would spread around the country are you guys? Well, we work pretty closely with the open science grid community and their developers and their and their team that the Open science grid specific solution and they and they use they base Their solution and part on Globus toolkit so they maintain many patches and communicate some of those you know patches then back to us and So that's very helpful and in making the toolkit than a better product and more reliable And that's kind of how open source works, right? So So that's a that's a healthy relationship there and also with exceed is similar Where they base some of their services and and capabilities on the Clovis toolkit So so we communicate issues and patches with them as well And then in Europe, there's the initiative for Globus in Europe. That was a recently funded effort to then Bring Globus to the European community a more local group in Europe that Support their users needs, you know and answer questions, maybe more quickly or you know work more closely with their community there And really we we do, you know work with grids throughout the world in Canada Australia New Zealand Europe Praise You know us So I don't know they're really they really are grids throughout the world that are based on the toolkit So here's a question. I like to ask a other development communities just for the heck of it in my own genuine curiosity What version control system do you guys use and why? Right, so we've used a CVS You know and maybe there's some newer ones out there, but we've used CVS Man, we're kind of like do some tools around it to do everything we need It you know it provides us with branching and merging and Pretty much, you know, I guess also maybe that we've had some helpers that have been on the project for you know 10 years and plus years So You know what don't you don't need to fix you don't need to fix what it isn't broken, right? Let's let's move on to the future here. What is the coming future plans for Globus says very mature now It's been around for a while. What are the plans? Yeah, I mean I don't know if we have any Huge plans for the toolkit in that it's mature. It's it will evolve and well, you know And evolve for as a community needs. So I mean, I guess one one Also way to answer that is that, you know, there's other effort we're doing with Globus online Which uses the Globus toolkit and provides an end user capability for a high-performance file transfer You know that The toolkit and that's a recent kind of effort, you know a couple years We've been going Globus online and these are the types of things that the tool can enables You know for these type of custom high-end end user Solutions that we would anticipate, you know things, you know new things like this coming up So the coming of the toolkit maybe changes little bits here and there and add some features for users But I don't think there's anything To her shattering, you know that that is planned at this point for the toolkit Okay, Stuart. Well, thank you very much for your time. Where can we find more information about Globus toolkit? Yeah, well, we have a website Globus.org And then close that or slash toolkit to find out more about the toolkit and then All Globus.org you'll you'll find Globus online Which you know also leverages the toolkit and you can find out information about that for user File transfer. Thank you very much Thanks to her. All right. Well, thank you guys


Hello everyone and welcome to our universe. Today we'll be talking about the lifetime of a star. When we look up at the night sky, the stars never really seem to change. In fact, throughout your lifetime, the stars may never change whatsoever. Night after night, century after century, so many people have assumed through history that they have lasted forever. The Greek philosopher Aristotle even proposed that stars were made of special elements, not found on Earth. Since Aristotle's time, astronomers have discovered that stars, like people, have finite lifetimes. Stars are born from great reservoirs of cosmic material, and these are the most common elements in the universe. They shine with immense brightness, and give off so much energy for millions if not billions of years. However, stars do exhaust their energy supply, and eventually die down and go extinct. Understanding the lifetime of a star has been one of the greatest tasks in astronomy, at least during the last hundred years. Astronomers have made remarkable progress in tracking the progression of the stages of a star's phase. So, let's review the broad outlines of a star's story, and how an astronomical object can be discussed in a sort of lifetime, from birth to death, and understanding every stage that a star usually goes through. So, a star begins their life in a kind of incubation. When a dense region happens to form from a huge cloud of dust and gas, the material that will make up the star, falls inwards under the influence of gravity. As the clump of star stuff gets more and more compressed, it heats up, first with infrared energy, and then through visible light. As gravity continues to pull the infant star together, the centre of the collapsing ball of gas gets hotter and hotter, until temperatures at the middle reach an astonishing 10 billion degrees Celsius. At this temperature, protons can collide so forcefully that nuclear fusion can occur. Physicists call this reaction fusion because protons that originally formed in the nucleus fused together to make the nuclei of heavier atoms. In a star like our Sun, four atoms of hydrogen eventually combine via fusion to make a heavier nucleus of helium. What makes fusion inside of a star so useful is the transformation of the element, making it into a slightly heavier one, and this releases energy. The combined energy released by billions and billions of individual fusion reactions flows outward from the star's core. Some of it eventually emerges from the star's surface, as light. The pressure of sunlight, along with particles blown off the surface of the newborn star, sweep away from the surrounding cloud of gas and dust, and therefore a star is now born. Most stars are born in groups, these are often called star clusters. Clusters like this that stay together allow us to track the stories of the stars, while less massive clusters will simply dissolve because of the lack of gravity. These stars in less massive clusters will eventually mix into the general population of the Milky Way. Most stars will simply wander the galaxy until they get into a stable orbit, very similar to how our planet orbits a star. The outward push from nuclear fusion in its core is now nicely balanced with the inward push of gravity, and the star remains in this balanced state for about 90% of its lifetime. This is now at the stage that the sun is now in. It's been at the stage for almost 5 billion years, and it will continue to do this for at least another 5 billion years more. Having a stable star is thought to be critical to the development and evolution of life. How long a star lives depends on how much material or mass it has. Massive stars have a lot of gravity, which makes the centers extremely hot, and therefore they tear through their hydrogen atoms extremely fast, and exhaust their fuel very quickly. The most massive known stars last only a few million years. The core of the lower mass stars, like our sun, is a lot less hot, and burns its fuel a lot more slowly. This means that our star can last for billions of years, rather than just millions. The lowest mass stars, known as the dwarf stars, burn very very slowly, and they may last more than 100 billion years. This is much longer than even the current age of our universe. Nevertheless, the core of every star eventually runs low on nuclear fuel. At this point, the star experiences a bit of a crisis. Gravity is still compressing the star, but the outward push of fusion begins to suffer. A complex series of vents then occurs, which leads the star to collapse on the inside, whilst it swells up on the outside. As the outer layers of the star grow larger, they cool off, and become reddish in color.  Astronomers call these type of stars red giants, and they can become as large as the orbit of Mars or even Jupiter. A particularly dramatic example of a red giant is the star Betelgeuse. It is 425 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Orion, so it's astronomically quite close. It is now grown to be 600 times larger than our sun, and would it to replace our sun at the center of the solar system, it would completely swallow the orbits of all of the inner planets. But all red giants eventually do find a new source of fuel, but the star is never quite the same again. Some of its outer layers are permanently lost, and its resumed instability is only temporary. The lifetime of stars splits into two branches. The low mass stars, which is our sun, have only a limited ability to squeeze their cores to continue the fusion processes. They experience a period of instability, where their outer layers lift off. This period of instability for those stars produce some of the most beautiful objects in the night sky. As a star shreds its outer layers, the gas inside of it is illuminated by the light of the collapsing star, and glows in an array of colors. These are the last gasps of a dying star. These objects were named planetary nebulae because they resemble disks of planets, although we now understand that they have no connection at all to planets. But the name of course has stuck. So on the other hand, high mass stars have significant pressure and temperature at their cores, and this means that they can continue the fusion process. By using these newer heavier atoms that they formed earlier, helium, carbon and oxygen are each in turn becoming fuel to make more energy for the star, and this is fighting against the gravity. And this keeps the star stable, at least for a brief time. Eventually however, the massive star's core becomes composed of simply iron, which sets off the final collapse and the catastrophe. When low mass stars die, they collapse under their own weight, until their centers act in the same ways like a solid. A star like our sun will collapse at the end of about twice the size of Earth.  Perhaps the best known white dwarf orbits the brightest star in the sky. Serious. But it requires quite a large telescope to see it. Massive stars are very different in their ending. When the core of a massive star collapses, its powerful gravity takes it right through the white dwarf stage, to produce one of two extremely bizarre objects, either a neutron star or a black hole. In most cases, the rest of the star blows up in a gargantuan explosion called a supernova. These explosions produce so much energy that the star can briefly become brighter than the entire galaxy in which it's located. This is approximately brighter than a hundred billion suns. Extreme versions of supernova explosions are sometimes referred to as hypernovae and these produce gamma ray bursts. The most famous supernova in history was in July 1054. Records of this still survive from China all the way to North America. Seen today, roughly a thousand years later, its remnant is called the crab nebula and it is one of the most interesting objects in the night sky. It can be found with a good pair of binoculars or a small telescope in the constellation of Taurus.  Star corpses come in three bizarre varieties. A white dwarf fades away as billions of years pass.  Astronomers call these corpses black dwarfs. A supernova explosion leaves behind a far more compressed corpse. The violent end to a massive star produces so much pressure that the star's core experiences a remarkable subatomic change. Electrons that are negatively charged particles which orbit the nucleus of the atom are actually squeezed into the nucleus. The electrons join with the protons to become neutrons. The process also removes all the space within the atom, leading to a fantastic compression of a star's remnant. To make something as dense as a neutron star on earth, we would have to take all the people in the world and squeeze them into the size of a raindrop. But I wouldn't really recommend that. If the dying star is especially massive, the remnant becomes a completely collapsed object known as a black hole. In these objects gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Space, time, matter and energy are all trapped within a tiny region. Understanding the behavior of black holes is one of the great frontiers in the area of astronomy. So by looking at a life story of a star, you might be thinking to yourself, how does this interact with human life here on earth? What's the difference between life and death and previous generations of stars when it doesn't have anything to really do with humanity? The thing is, stars have a chemical make-up and it all started when the universe began with only the two simplest types of atoms, hydrogen and helium. It is not possible to make something as complex as a human being out of just these two elements. You need more stuff, so you need things like carbon, oxygen, calcium, iron and a host of other atoms to make a human being or life in general. So where did these heavier elements come from if they were not present at the start of the universe? Well, heavier atoms had been produced by nuclear fusion at the center of stars. We see much evidence that stars create new elements in the process of making energy. When stars die and especially the ones that go supernova, they seem to recycle their material, blowing these newly made elements into the cosmos. The next generations of stars then forms from these enriched mixtures of elements and therefore, so do planets. It took several generations of stars to enrich our neighborhood so that when the sun and the earth were formed five billion years ago, they would contain enough of the heavier atoms to make living creatures. Every atom inside of the human body, apart from hydrogen and helium of course, was once part of the inside of a massive star and from this process it can create new life, not only for new stars, not only for new planets, but living organic creatures. So I hope that's given you a great insight into the lifetime of a star. If you want to know any more about stars or how they evolve and how they die, or maybe even how they've created life on the planet, I'll put some links in the description below. And as always, if you've enjoyed the video, click the like button and if you want to support the channel, click subscribe and support our Patreon page. Thank you for watching and thank you for your support.