Welcome back. Time for a first major conversation right here on the breakfast. My name is Kofi Bartels once again. I guess it's starting by to be justice to the topic, but let's quickly remind you that the Federal Inland Revenue Service has announced that it collected over 10 trillion Naira in tax revenue last year, 2022. This is said to be the highest in the history of the Federal Inland or Internal Revenue Service. Now the service made this known in its FIRS 2022 Performance Update, FIRS 2022 Performance Update, a report signed by its Executive Chairman Muhammad Nami and released to the public yesterday after his briefing with President Muhammad Buhari. He gave reasons why the service did not meet its targets, interestingly, even though this was the highest in its history. He said that he pointed finger rather at distractions and waivers as being responsible for the failure of the Federal Internal or Inland Revenue Service to meet its target. He also lamented that distractions from several government agencies through instituted court cases, petitions and judgments granted to these petitioners contributed to the service not meeting its target. He, however, expressed optimism that the service will do better in 2023. Now joining us this morning to discuss the issue of revenue generation within the borders of Nigeria, we have Gabriel Fulusho Fasoto. He's the managing director, a partner of Gabe Fasoto and Co. He's also the past president of the Chartered Institute of Taxation Nigeria. Good morning, sir. Thank you very much for your time. Good morning viewers. Good morning. Thank you very much. How do you receive this news that the FIRS is raking the largest revenue in a calendar year in the history of the Federal Republic of Nigeria? It is a news that the tax industry received with great joy gladness. The reason being that we are going where we ought to be about 20 years ago. We are heading for that destination. That is a good news. From 2020 revenue of $4.9 trillion of a generated by FIRS. So $6.4 trillion generated in 2021. So $10.1 trillion generated in 2022 is a very large news. Who just looked at that? The head of the body is lamenting the fact that they couldn't meet their target of $10.44 trillion. He cited certain factors. In your opinion, was this target realistic? Looking at where Nigeria is coming from as far as revenue for the year 2021 was concerned. In my opinion and in the opinion of most tax experts, $10.44 billion is done under the statements when it comes to tax revenue again for FIRS. Why? So many things contribute to high yield in terms of tax revenue. Government has budgeted $10.44 billion. The fourth thing we have to ask is what was the basis of even the $10.44 trillion budgeted for revenue from FIRS. I believe that it didn't follow the expected scientific approach. It's just like oh, you have achieved this in the last year, this year you should achieve this. Did we take into consideration so many micro economic situations? No. Now the chairman cited two issues that the body is unable to achieve the target. The first one is what he described as distraction and Nigeria should address this issue promptly. If there is no law, there cannot be tax. So it means that the starting point for any good tax and efficient tax system in any country should be from the law set up in the tax system. And that law starts from the constitutional provisions. We are aware that not all our tax types currently are backed up by reliable tax provisions and that has led to some litigation in court. VAT, for example, that's value-added tax. I think governments should not shy away from the responsibility of providing good constitutionality for our all types of our taxes in the country. Once we have good laws backing up all our taxes, then government is good to go to be able to raise enough revenue. And we have to know the basis for being anxious to make tax as the real base of revenue generation of government. All over the world, we have elected people with the governance of our country. They need to provide us certain services. How do they fund it? Tax is the only sustainable way of funding government expenses. And if the tax system is not okay, government will find it difficult to actually deliver its promises. So that is why we must ensure that the tax system is okay for the country. Once we are able to put the constitutional framework in the proper perspective, the second issue mentioned by the chairman in the waiver that were granted to some tax payers and he cited 1.8 trillion being lost in court, lost in court to waivers. Waivers are there in every good tax system. But the problem with it's also in Nigeria is that you do not monitor the utilization, the utilization of the waiver granted. That is why you are having so many companies that were granted waivers and pioneer companies for only four years and you knew for another three years or so. Obviously now some of them are still enjoying those tax waivers because of lack of money. Thank God we felt it was so that that agreement was being monitored and then government will look into that and do its justice to that. So if we monitor the waiver granted properly, so carry out cost-benefit analysis, we will be able to know to have good use of tax waivers. I've said that for the distraction mentioned by the chairman, once we overhaul the laws, all the laws governing transition in the country, we'll be able to cement that. So with those two being out of the way, we say that Skype is the limit for FRS to be able to raise enough revenue for government. And if I may add this, we are quick to look only at the federal government when we are looking at tax revenue. Nigeria is a federation and it comprises of federal government and sub-national. That's the state government and even the local government. We have to realize that the performance of each of the state domain contributes to the performance of Nigeria at the old. Whenever tax is collected at federal level, it is shared among all the specific states of the federation, including Abuja, as well as the 700 and 74 local government countries. So we should look at tax in totality, how we are using it at federal state and local government level, and how we generate the added performance. All right. Mr. Fashato, are you there, please? Can you hear us? Mr. Fashato, are you there, please? Hello, sir. Okay. Well, all right. I'm told that the network has interrupted our guest. We would aim to get him back online so that we can have this conversation. Very interesting are points that he had been making. I was going to ask him next what is responsible for this record. Of course, we're talking about the factors that stopped or prevented the FIRS from achieving its target of 10.44 trillion naira. I mean, it got 10.1 trillion naira, but it's not too far. Now, this is the second time, the second kind of executive here, that the Federal Inland Revenue Service will be beating and breaking its record. In 2021, they broke the record of 2022. In fact, they achieved the over 100 percent target performance in the year 2021. Okay. They achieved the target in the year 2021, beating the record of 2020. Sorry about that. And this is quite interesting, coming from the Federal Inland Revenue Service. I think it was in 2020 that they crossed the 6 trillion, 2022, right, 2021, sorry, that they crossed the 6 trillion naira mark for the first time in history. All right. For the first time, 6 trillion naira had never been reached. And you look at 2021, things are going, you know, not too, not better off, let's say with the economy, if you want to call it that. But they are making more money. They've got into costs across the 10 million, 10 trillion naira mark for the first time. And with all the economic difficulties, the inflation in country, you know, the wars of the naira, people losing jobs, you know, no petrol, businesses suffering in GDP, I don't know the latest figures, interest rate hikes, how come the Central Bank is able, sorry, the Federal Inland Revenue Service is able to make such an amount of money and break their record by a huge gap. I'm told we have a guest back online. Mr. Vashato, are you there, please? Yes, I'm here. All right. All right. Sincere apologies, sir. Sincere apologies, please. So what in your opinion is responsible for this record set by the Federal Inland Revenue Service? Whilst you were off the air when we lost you for a bit, I did remind our viewers that this is the second consecutive year the FIRS will be breaking its record. In 2021, they collected more than 6 trillion naira for the first time in the history of the country as far as revenue is concerned in performing, recording over 100% performance of their target, achieving their target. So what's responsible despite the hostile, you know, economic climate achieving this record? What are the factors responsible for this? The number one reason is stated by the chairman and which is known to every tax payer. All over the world, we are automation as an introduction to the tax system. The increase in tax revenue you get is always more than job. And in Nigeria, there is no exception to that. So automation has contributed a great deal into this good performance. Then number two, as recommended by the study group on reform of tax system in the year 2000 and 2003. Federal Inland Revenue Service is now taking the tax payers, treating them as costumers and private sector would treat costumers. They are beginning to treat tax payers as costumers and the normal balance is that costumers are always right. Say, they are paying to the tax payers the end, cut your play and then they took them through the system. They are by encouraging the tax. They also cited the issue of data centric tax system, whereby they mind data about the tax payers and they are using that data to be able to manage the health care of the tax payers. Even though, personally, I believe that FRLC needs to do a lot in this area. It's only tax system when it was introduced in 1999. The purpose is to use data of different tax payers who have never known the offices of the tax offices to be able to bring them to tax me. But this area is not yet being effectively used by the tax authorities, including Federal Inland Revenue Service. I would urge them to make good use of this data mining and be able to use it effectively. A lot of people, they don't pay taxes, but they carry out transactions that attract taxes whereby the taxes, certain percentage of whatever they pay, would have been deducted at first. So they would have received information related to this tax payers. That will be another new for bringing them into the tax net. So if they use that one, it will be helpful. Then we also wish to also have data intelligence. That is, before you ask somebody to come for tax audit or tax investigation, you must have certain information, which is not probably known to that tax payer, that tax office is aware of. Some people, they throw party lavish, some companies, they do celebrate 100 years of service and some other things. There will be intelligence reports for the Federal Inland Revenue Service. Once they gather this information, they can now invite such tax payers for them to show the tax payment status. If it's below what the law says, then they will be able to raise more revenue for the government. So that is the part of the reasons why I believe that the FRA is a good report. All right. The activities of the Federal Inland Revenue Service are not without controversy. I mean, I've had the opportunity to speak to some business men and women in Nigeria, so entrepreneurs and private sector people, who are led victimization and victimization by officials of the FIRS. You know the ease of doing business reforms that were implemented from the presidential initiative led by the vice president when that was really, really, really happening and was being implemented as well as they should have. We saw that there were some reforms and it was easier for businesses to relate with the FIRS. These days, I hear, you know, one or two complaints from the business community of victimization and they receive an email, a letter, a notice saying that they're supposed to pay XYZ amount of millions of Naira. They can't reconcile, you know, and then they claim that, okay, if you come, you don't want to pay that, just give us something to settle us and then we will clear it or reduce it for you. Now, these are unsubstantiated claims or unverified because we've not reached out to the FIRS, you know, for their response on this, but I would like you to talk about this because you're an expert and a stakeholder in the sector. I quite agree with you and some of those claims, some of them I tell you, but you also know that out of every 12, there must be a Judas. In every tax system, there are bad eggs and I believe that FIRS is working with them to remove the bad eggs from amongst its staff. I agree that the level of customer support or taxpayer support still needs to be upgraded at FIRS level. A lot of complaints that once you show your face at the tax office, then you have brought it to yourself on yourself, so many problems. In terms of you sitting down at home, not going to the tax office, you are better off doing that than going to the tax office and saying you want to pay your tax, but I believe that FIRS is actually addressing that. This will be improved upon by training and retraining of the staff of the Relative and Tax Authorities, that is FIRS and State Internal Revenue Studies. Once they train them properly, it will ask the tax profession it will assist them in being able to hand you tax payers. Even if you supply a type of tax, there are provisions in the law on how you can bring them to the tax net and how you can optimize the tax collection from them. On the tax of the tax payers, I will urge them to make use of tax professionals because most people will just go to the tax office and they will give their tax that they want to pay, without even having cognizant of the provisions of the law. But if you make use of tax professionals, they will be able to guide you out against some tax payers before, whereby they have paid them and they are organizing so the tax offices, and when we came in, we told them that you know you can pay less than this and you will still be covered legally. That is what we call tax planning and tax avoidance under the law, as different from tax evasion. Tax evasion is where you are not paying tax and you are breaking the provisions of the law whereas tax avoidance is where you are residues in the quantum of the taxes you are paying and you are still within the law. There are provisions in the law which a tax effort can take advantage of on your account as a tax payer. So I urge tax payers to make use of the tax professionals. Every member of the Charter and Socialization of Nigeria, they are tax professionals. If you engage some of them and even if you engage the tax institutes itself, you will not have enough money to pay high amounts of money to pay a tax effort. But if you approach the institutions, they will be able to assist you in getting you a tax effort. Who will assist you? Just like some small and medium-sized enterprises are currently doing and they are taking advantage of that early way introduced by the institute. On the part of the government, they are now putting human pay into the tax system and I urge them to improve upon that. The tax program introduced by the Charter is a laudable project. But a lot seems to be done because we are still having issue of bleaching where you are, where you are, of course, where you are making use of the tax program. So if the tax effort is going to be reduced, the government will be able to make use of the tax effort and the tax payers will also be able to make use of it. Very quickly because we are out of time and a few sentences. How can the FIRS meet its targets for 2023? Are we looking at maybe, for instance, widening, improving the tax net and dragging more Nigerians into the tax net? A lot of people don't pay taxes, don't believe in paying tax, for obvious reasons. Very quickly, please. All right, thank you very much. It's been a through having you. We should have you soon again on the program and we sincerely appreciate your time and, of course, your expert analysis as always on this issue of taxation and revenue in Nigeria. Mr. Gabriel Folusio Farshato is a emerging partner of Gabe Farshato's company. He is the past president of the CIT and the Charter Institute of Taxation Nigeria. He joins us via Zoom from Abuja. Thank you very much for your time, sir. Have a nice day. Thank you for having me. All right, it's still the breakfast and plus CVF car. January is cervical cancer awareness month. We'll be back after the short break to talk cervical cancer awareness and prevention. Please stay with us.


What is the shoe that made you a sneakerhead? The shoe that made me a sneakerhead the first. I think it was the Kobe ones. They were yellow. He wore them in the All-Star game one year. I got those on base one time on the low. I like that. I like that. That's a good option right there.


Hello and welcome to the video lecture on Angular measuring instruments. Fifth part, at the end of this video lecture, students will be able to explain about various angle measuring instruments. The following topics will be discussed in this video lecture. Recap of fourth session, angle gauges. Sign center. Due to difficulty of mounting conical work easily on a conventional sign bar, sign centers are used. Two blocks as shown in figure are mounted on the top of the sign bar. These blocks accommodate centers and can be clamped at any position on the sign bar. The centers can also be adjusted depending on the length of the conical workplace to be held between centers. Sign centers are extremely useful for the testing of the conical work. Change the centers ensure correct alignment of the workpiece. The equipment consists of a self-contained sign bar hinged at one roller and mounted on its datum surface. The table is quite rigid one and the weight of the unit and the workpiece is given fuller and safer support. The table may be safely swing to any angle from 0 to 90 degree. By pivoting it about its hinged end. Due to the work being held axially between centers, the angle of inclination will be half the included angle of the work. It provides a convenient method of measuring the angle of a taper plug gauge. Angle gauges. This were developed by Dr. Tom Linsen in 1941 which enable any angle to be set to the nearest three seconds. These are pieces of hardened and stabilized steel. The measuring pieces are lapped and polished to a high degree of accuracy and flatness. They are 75 mm long and 16 mm wide and are available in two sets. One set consists of 12 pieces and a square block in three series of values of angle. So, here the square blocks means the 90 degree angle gauge, perpendicularity. So, these are the various series 1 degree, 3 degree, 9 degree, 27 degree and 41 degree. 1 minute, 3 minute, 9 minute, 27 minute and 6 seconds, 18 seconds and 30 seconds. Second set consists of 13 pieces and a square block in three series of values of angle. 1 degree, 3 degree, 9 degree, 27 degree and 41 degree. 1 minute, 3 minute, 9 minute, 27 minute and 3 seconds, 6 seconds, 18 seconds and 30 seconds. Addition and subtraction of angle gauges. Each angle gauge is accurate to within 1 second and is marked with engraved capital V. Which indicates the direction of the inclined angle. These gauges together with the square block can be so run that any angle between 0 degree to 360 degree can be set. Each angle gauge is a wedge. Thus two gauges with their narrow ends together provide an angle which is the sum of the angles of the individual gauges. Subtraction of angles is obtained when the narrow ends are opposed as shown in figure. Each angle gauge is marked with engraved V indicates the direction of included angle. When the angles of individual gauges are to be added then the V of all should be in line. When any angle is to be subtracted its engraved V should be in another direction. So, here this is the 30 degree block and 5 degree block. So, it is the 30 degree angle gauge. So, this is the V and this is another 5 degree block. This is the V I am getting here. So, addition of angle gauges when both the V are in same line. So, addition takes place. So, 30 degree plus 5 degree, 35 degree angle is formed. The same thing I take the 30 degree angle gauge and here V is there. So, both are in opposite direction. So, it will be 30 degree minus 5 degree that is 25 degree angle is formed. Numericals on angle gauges. An angle of 33 degree 9 minute 15 seconds is to be measured with the help of the following standard angle gauges. 1 degree, 3 degree, 9 degree, 27 degree, 41 degree, 1 minute, 3 minute, 9 minute, 27 minute, 3 seconds, 6 seconds, 18 seconds, 30 seconds. Show the arrangement of angle gauges with a neat sketch by selecting minimum number of gauges. So, this is the problem given. So, I want to form 33 degree. Is there the 33 degree angle gauges present? No. So, how it can be formed? Addition and subtraction concept of angle gauges I can use it. Here I will form 27 degree plus 9 degree. So, 27 plus 9 will form that is the 36 degree. Then 36 what should be subtracted? How many degrees should be subtracted? I have 3 degree angle gauge. So, 36 minus 3 33 degrees formed. So, the same thing 9 minutes 9 minutes angle gauges present. 15 seconds. So, 15 seconds is nothing but 18 seconds minus 3 seconds. It means engraved v should be in opposite direction here. So, minimum number of gauges required is 27 plus 9 both the engraved v are same direction. Then here opposite direction. So, 27 plus 9 36 minus 3 33 same thing. 9 minutes yes it is already there. Then 18 minus 3 15 seconds. This is always solved the problem using the angle gauges. Now pause this video for a few seconds and try to write answer to the following question. Straight true or false? For addition of angle the engraved v or the v of all the individual gauges should be in line. Probably you have wrote answer to the following question. Limitations of angle gauges. Block formed by combination of these gauges is bulky which cannot always be conveniently applied to work. The second is that errors are easily compounded when angle blocks are ranked in combination. Users of angle gauges. Angle gauges are widely used in industries for the quick measurement of angles between two surfaces. Second it is used to check whether the component is within its tolerance angle or not. These are the following references. A textbook. Metrology by E. M. Mahajan. Second IC Gupta. Engineering Metrology. Dhanpatrai Publications. Third R. K. Jain. Engineering Metrology. Khanna Publishers. Thank you.


And one thing that I wanted to share, the idea was that this morning, the morning that we're recording this, my son is on a plane while waiting to take off. We just got a text from him saying that they're delayed by 15 minutes or something waiting for one more passenger, which will be the one sitting in the middle seat next to him, according to him, which sort of stinks. He thought he had it empty. But I like to put my phone on do not disturb when I sleep at night. But knowing that my son had to get up early on the other side of the country and then, you know, get a Uber or whatever and get to the airport with his cat and all this stuff. I was like, well, I definitely want to be able to have him text me and wake me up if necessary. But I don't just want to not turn on do not disturb. And this is what focus is all about. In fact, I had already created a focus group that I call nuclear it nuclear for the family, not nuclear for like the option. The and what nuclear says is that three people can interrupt me, my wife and my two kids. So our nuclear family and no one else.  And and I actually offered it was like, do you want me to, you know, turn this off at 7am or what? And I'm like, no, I might want to sleep a little past 7am if I'm allowed.  But but that way, texts from my family can get through and emails from my family, like whatever, you know, it just lets them through text, Slack it like it knows, which is very cool the way it sort of offers to link a contact. Like I got a Slack message from you the other day, John. And it was like, do you want me to link this to John F. Braun for focus purposes? And was like, yeah, actually, I do. That sounds like a good thing. So so just thinking about different ways of using focus, this nuclear option, you could call it the family options if you know, if you don't like using the word nuclear. But you know, I figured I'd share. That's what we do on Quick Tips here.


Christina is in the band. Enjoy? I think you can see. So I believe you're waiting for Christina. I hope she didn't leave. Anyhow, I think I'm just going to start by introducing our wonderful artists. Kiki Brokou, director of Jonathan's play. Kate Benson, Lisa and Evans, I think she already left to direct with Kate's play. Then we have Tiny Little Ben, Jerry Lieblich, Ben Williams and Christina Masiati. So wonderful. There was all four presentations. Really wonderful. I'm really, you know, kudos to all of you. I would like to start with a question. So I would love to ask all of you to talk a little bit about the evolution of your pieces. I guess I'm closest. Yeah, so my day job is social work. And that was never my trajectory. And I think on my job, I was introduced to a specific type of community that doesn't get the attention they usually, you know, their stories aren't told as much. And I think what was exciting to me was I was introduced to this sort of different idea of what a love is, that it's wider than I imagine, because me and the staff, we seem to sort of laugh at the strange relationships that happened. Because I worked in housing, I should say. I worked in housing, and it was a tight community there. And the strangest relationships came about. And we sort of laughed at these weird couples that were coming about. So being on that job, I was exposed to a sort of wider idea of what a relationship can be. And I think that's where the play began to percolate for me. That semester at Brooklyn College, and I had a kind of monkish experience at Brooklyn College. I found myself just kind of wondering what romance was for, and also being really irritated at the women's roles in Judd Apatow movies, for instance, which are completely entertaining, but the women are dull. And I heard about a reading of this screenplay of American Pie, in which all the genders were reversed, and the men were complaining that their roles were very boring. And I thought, yes, it's time for me to write a love story, because I don't believe in love. And I'm tired of the usual progress of it. And then I couldn't start it any other way but with a discussion about making sausage. So it developed into this bar play about food and sex, and why we go to bars, and what we want out of our urban environments, and where we look for pleasure. And what happens when we find pleasure, and is it all good? And, you know, no. Our thing came out of, a while ago, Steph had gotten really into reading biographies of, like, tech startup people, like Steve Jobs, and there's a book about Twitter, and... You're doing great. Oh, thank you. And it just got us kind of talking about the idea of success as it exists in our culture right now, and kind of got us thinking, you know, about life and stuff. And also it got us thinking about mythology, and kind of the way that, like, success stories are sort of the type of mythology that we have in present day, and that they give kind of these models for what a good life looks like. And so our process, we do kind of a lot of experimentation with actors, and a lot of playing around. We try to find a feeling that feels essential to what we're talking about, so in this case we were looking at kind of the idea of specialness, or, like, when somebody seems like they have that kind of very special something, or removing that, which is really related to success and failure. We kind of do all these experiments around creating this feeling in a theatrical context, and then kind of based on all that and lots of discussions, I'll go and write something in response. And this piece is kind of smack in the middle of the play, and it's, I think something that we've talked about a lot is that to succeed is in a way, like to have the metric of success and failure means that there's some kind of image of what it is that you're trying to succeed at, because if there's an image, then you could fail to achieve it. But there's kind of always this push and pull of, like, well, one way to not feel like a failure is to abandon the image, but, you know, the person that we see is kind of stuck in this thing of like, oh, it's just that I need a better image. So, I don't know, we're trying to figure out something about what it is to be a person in that kind of construction. You did great. Thank you. This is our partnership. So I was riding a train home with Ben Williams after a show last year, and he was just talking about his experience as a shoe salesman, and he just made this statement, women and hats, they never buy. And I would just start taking with, like, just the grossness of sales, you know, and how it exploits the vulnerabilities on both sides, and just this image of a luxury shoe store as a manufactured image trying to be something it isn't, making you want something you don't. And then the parallels with this young combat vet, who's like trying to convince you he's someone he's not, like his life is riddled with false narratives. So those two things together sort of sparked the project. And how about the directors? How did you get involved with the project? Well, Jonathan had the opportunity to workshop this at Playpen this year, and so I was brought on to direct it there. It was a fascinating process. And so we've continued to work on it a little bit. I think the main interest for me in this is the issue of displacement. I'm really interested in that and that Jonathan is. And so you just saw the very beginning of it, but that ticking is in there. Jonathan's written it in, but we've actually put it in, because this is sort of a countdown to them being pushed out of their homes. And so that context is really fascinating to me. And it's also just a really juicy play to work on. It's like who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, like someone said the other day. So it's been really fun to work with actors on it. Yeah, Kate and I have been working on Porto for like a year. It's our second project together. Yeah, I've just been talking a lot about that food and pleasure stuff. And it will go up at the push and start, right? Yeah. We're a company, so I was there at the inception. I was the inception. So I've been with it the whole time. And now that he's written it, we're trying to make it. And it will go up at Abrans up like us in February. We're also at Abrans. And as you heard, I was there at the train station talking about the old job selling shoes. We put the festival together. We knew the model was failure, but the artist that we choose in the project that we choose, we did not look for, that was not an umbrella that any of these projects should fit in. Now, having seen all of the presentations today, it weaves through in some way, right? Not necessarily failure all the time, but expectations and, you know, what do you live up to? Expectations other people have on you. So what is your, what's your, did you think about this? Was there something, what's your relationship to failure? I guess as a human being, I have a lot of relationship to failure and a playwright. But I think specifically, yes, the play is centered around institutional failure, and specifically on the job I work. A lot of the people I work with are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and the stories are, the stories I hear are all directly related to some sort of institutional failure, family failure, relationship failure. So it was interesting to explore these stories in that way. There's a, there's something that happens like very soon after you stopped watching today in this play, which is sort of the heart of the play, which is they start talking about this baby that they had and the baby died probably because they killed the baby accidentally in some way. And so that, that sort of parenting failure, but as an institutional failure, like these, that these people failed, sure, but that they were also failed. And that's like a really deep part of this play. And it's a thing you start to see at the beginning, but it sort of doesn't really unfold until a bit later in the play. Yeah, I suppose maybe every, well, I was going to say every place by failure, but I don't think that it is. But I think, I think there's a, we fail to remember where our luxuries come from in the moment that we consume them, I think, because otherwise how could we? You know, I've eaten, I'm a barbarian. I have eaten a live sea urchin and it was alive and then I put it in my mouth and I killed it with my teeth and I, and it was delicious. And I can't, I can't really understand, I fail to understand my own human animal in that way. I can know that something is bad for me. I can know that something is terrible for the world. I can understand that, that restaurant that I really like is partly responsible for the displacement of people who used to have a community in the Fort O'Rent. I can understand that the animal was probably tormented, if not fully tortured in its preparation on its way to my plate.  And so our failure to, I suppose, live up to our own ideas about what our values are supposed to be and our failure to understand ourselves as animals and our failure to incorporate some kind of rational care for each other into the systems of the societies we make is a puzzle to me that I, I, you know, it sort of makes me feel like I have the brain of a very, very small insect or at least the memory of a very, very small insect. So, back. How do you follow that? Well, we started to work on the show when I was 29 and I was headed to 30 and I was really having a moment of like, what have I done with my life or what am I doing with my life? Do I want to keep doing what I'm doing? And so I think in some ways our show started from the point of possible failure or like, even like, can failure exist if you don't want it, if you don't want the version of success. So, yeah, and that feels like super at the core of our show is the dichotomy between failure and success and how you take on those two things or whether you have to take on those two things and sort of how to move forward when faced with the severity of those two things. Our central character, Dennis, has failed by every system that's supposed to be a place to help him. He spends a play trying to stop failing himself and his choices. And it's also the place very much about the struggle between this guy and his subconscious and his kind of primal things that he can't really control. A lot of that is also because it's a product of the Iraq War, which, boom, there you go, failure. Well, do we have any audience questions, perhaps? There's to be a wonderful thread between all of your pieces, Dennis. And I sense this socialization issue that we all have to deal with as men and women and soldiers who come back yet and people from prison who come back.  Through the failure you can find success sometimes. So I guess the question is, what did you learn? I actually, I moved home to Detroit for a year in the process of making this show. And I think in some way I learned that it is, that there's a lot of construct, a lot of the things that we think we want or don't want or think are failures or successes. They're things we choose to buy into and we don't have to. I think that's what I learned. And I think on that, it's like, yeah, that process of acculturation, it goes on with every person at every moment. And I think realizing that these ideas of success or what a life looks like or feels like are constructed, is so helpful and at the same time, it's so scary to try to abandon that. And how do you abandon that? Knowing that what am I if not the things that I define myself as or the things that the culture, the world that I live in defines me as, is a scary to precipice to jump off of. Well, thank you all for coming. 6 p.m. is the next, we have a conversation at 6 p.m. So I hope you'll stay and come back. Thank you all for participating and for really, you know, presenting amazing work. So we're looking forward to seeing your shows. Thank you. Thank you.


What do we've been telling you for weeks? Go Bolts. Go Bolts. We get a house in Tampa. We move in. Pang ones. All right. Good season. See you next year. Still a great team of all time. Good season. Greatest franchise of all time. Love the Pang ones. But that Tampa Bay Lightning team, congratulations. Wow. You don't go back to back much anymore. It's not easy to do it. Tampa Bay Lightning squad with Patty Maroon, who's won three straight Stanley Cups now.


n at 8.30 and 1.30, right?  And we train twice a day in our office, we listen to sales training videos, we recap what we learned and we role play and we do energy twice a day every single day. Why? Because we wanna win. We wanna get better and we're not playing casual. This whole little life thing we're doing, man. We're doing it the right way. We wanna win. Winners find a way to win. I don't wanna just halfway do stuff. If it's meant to be, it's up to me. Which means if it's meant to be, it's up to you.  Accept responsibility for your successes. Accept responsibility for your failures. Accept responsibility for the negative things that are happening. You control the controllables. You can control how much you train every single day. Rule number seven, train daily. Rule number eight, okay? Rule number eight, invest in yourself. Winners believe in investing, right? They invest time, energy, and money into them because they know that they are their most valuable asset.  Do you know that? Do you realize that? And are you getting better over time? I'm really, I can tell the last three years, I've came a long flippin' way. Have, look back, three years ago, have you came a long way? Look back 90 days ago, have you came a long way? My question for you is, are you investing time, energy, and money into making you better? Because that's what it's all about. Rule number eight, invest in yourself. These are my eight rules to 8% to make sure that you become part of 8% and you change your life forever. Who is going to, who loves these? Who's going to apply these? And who knows that you have some improving to do in 2021? In March of 2021. Now my question is, of the eight, right? Focus on revenue, focus on finding your true potential, short-term targets, never quit, remove limiting beliefs, effort, train daily, and invest in yourself. Of those eight, which one is your favorite of the eight that I just laid out in front of you now? I'm telling you, there's no need to be casual. We need to get serious about our success. We need to win, and we need to be focused on taking that next level in our life, okay? And the next level for you is getting to 8% Nation 2021 live in Dallas at the Stadler Hotel, me, and you, and 998 other people changing their life forever. Trust me, you want to go. Trust me, you want to be there. Trust me, this is the event to be at if there's one event to be at in our industry, period. All year long, it's this one. Do not miss it. Put it on your calendar right now, July 23rd, 24th. Myself, Eric Thomas, Landon, my dad, Galen, several other speakers haven't mentioned yet. We're having a couple of surprise speakers. I'm gonna have a couple of crazy surprises again. Last year we dropped tens of thousands of dollars live from the ceiling into people's laps. Were you there? How much money did you pick up? Some people picked up more money from the giveaways that I did than they even paid for their ticket. That's what it's all about. And don't forget, last year, the hotel, there's only like a couple hundred rooms, okay? So that's, we're gonna possibly expand outside of this hotel after this year. We'll see. Don't forget to reserve your hotel for the event, okay? Apersnation.com, make sure that you reserve your hotel. You could probably even get there from Kodiaskas.com for slash deals as well, okay? But make sure you reserve your hotel at the Stadler. It's a nice four-star Hilton property because it will sell out early. I guarantee you the hotel will most likely sell out this month, which is insane. So make sure you do that now. Hey, if you enjoyed this, I got another one you're gonna love. It's right there, click on it, see you next time. Welcome to 8% virtual as people are coming and we've had over 10,000 agents registered for this today, live free virtual conference. Number one, hey, I wanna thank you as people are coming in, okay? I wanna thank you.


Hello. I was thinking I'll do one of them ones where you don't talk and it's all atmospheric and ASMR-y on that but I realise that I've got some cooking to do that might go terribly wrong and if it's all art-y and like slow down at ASMR, and then I completely ruin the dinner it's gonna look whacky in it. Felly, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r pwysig, rydych yn bod yn ôl, yn rhoi'r rôl yn ddigon, byddwn ni'n gofio'n ddigon. Oherwydd, rydyn ni'n gweithio'n gweithio'r Cresbyd Berlypawch o'r gwirio ar y ffordd. Maen nhw'n ddangos. I've got tent knocked up. I've just been knocking up some tent pegs. I'll quickly show you how to do it for those that don't know. You can just do it with a knife. I'll do it in real time. This is how quick it is.  You can do it with a saw if you want but you might just have a knife on you sir. It's a quick and easy way to do it and then so you're left with that there which the rope your guideline goes under there and it can't get out and now I mean you don't have to do this but you can chamfer the top off you know if it's really hard ground that you're going into chamfer the top off and that prevents it from splitting when you hit it in and then just use like a chest lever and just take off the material at the bottom. Tuck away your little doohickeys in case you slice one off like wise with your fingers. Now you don't want a sharp point because that's just going to snap so something like that is fine so that's not taking me long at all. Here's someone made earlier. I'm going to just whack these in the tent because this ground is very loose so the metal tent pegs slide out of there but the wooden pegs hold firm because you can make them as thick or as long as you need for the ground that you're using or that you're going into. Hello what's your name? Wood? Woodface what's your name? Peg Emitul. Want to go to the cinema? What do you want to see? Toy Story 3? Why? Cos I've had some woody come on. No and there you go you can see under there that top point is where your guideline sits under and that's not going anywhere. I've got my grill this is what I use top tip it's just a cake cooling rack so nice and thin flat sits down the back of your pack just nice great for cooking on four sticks that I'll put in the ground and that'll be the corners of the grill just adjust it so that they're all sitting on it and that's pretty good do skin first crisp it up and then cook it a bit slower garlic in there so I'm going to just add a little bit of oil to both sides a little bit to the skin side just to help it crisp up and then when I add my salt it'll stick to it you might have seen me use a mini pump to do my air bed up on my long distance hikes and stuff they've come out with this new one they they sent me a prototype but it didn't come with a charger and it was a bit of an awkward thing to charge so I was like I want getting on with it so I told them I'm not I'm not into it because it didn't have a a charger so I waited until they gave me the real thing that does have a a rechargeable battery in there that you can just plug into a usb and I've been using it and it's unbelievable it's so lightweight so if you're a gram shaver it comes with loads of these attachment points so you can just pop it over there and then that goes over whatever air bed you've got you put it on that end and it can deflate things put it on that end and it blows it up I've got the old thermal rest I've had this for maybe I don't know maybe six or seven years it's still going strong over there that's it and it's a lot quieter than the other one as well you plug it in leave it doing its thing while you tend to other things more important than blowing into an air bed they've been kind enough to give me a discount code if you want to use it I think it's 15% off don't quote me on it though but you can have a look it'll be I'll leave the in fact I'll put it there because I'll check that's that's the discount that looks done air bed blowing up sorry yeah that's the discount code I'll leave a link below and I rate it I absolutely love it in fact and that's going to be coming with me this spring and summer on my multi-day hikes oh my god these toggles are really good toggles can make or break a tent for me the lanchan too just a tight elastic toggles at the brilliant the tent is my trusty lanchan too I've put some miles in this thing and I love it it's one of my favourite tents I've just used sticks didn't bother bringing me hiking poles I've just used a couple of sticks either side a sleep system is just my raba cent 900 my exterm neo air and the rapid SL pillow from big agnes it's a lovely feel to it and I'm there I'm just trying out new pillows after the trecology one let me down again as if Rupson are creatures of the night getting so to go with the belly pork I'm going to make a homemade applesauce and to do that it's just a one pan thing I'm just going to whittle I'm just going to whittle these no there's room on the little tiny chopping board I was going to use three but they're not that big so I'm going to use four they're going to break down to next to now anyway Yorkshire butter a couple of things of castor sugar for sweetness star anise just one look at that crispy I'm going to let that chill out for a bit while we do the applesauce I'll get this fire stove to put some little twigs I think and take the garlic off that's that's been on there for ages now that'll be nice and soft I've got a new telescopic camp bellows look at that super long a nice little bit of leather detail on there Fern got me for Christmas thanks Fern here it is in in all its glory because we've got a smoky fire that's not going the bellows going and there you go don't leave home without it I'm going to chuck a little bit of sage in there at the end smush this onto there all caramelised and gooey has cooked a treat applesauce I love making videos and stuff but the worst bit and it happens often you're trying to eat on camera while the smoke blasted in my face when I just want to enjoy it awww what no way it's perfect so good garlicy the crackling is crackly and the applesauce real simple just apples butter a bit of castor sugar a star anise and then end it with a bit of sage ridiculous I won't be able to eat all that I'll have some tomorrow stop it what's that a bug want some park um right I'm going to enjoy my tea in front of fire morning glampers got it pissed it down last night the birds are singing and the rain is falling packing up a wet tent it's not the one is it so it was steady away and then at one point it was just like real heavy woke me up with rain I was just chilling out fire and it wasn't forecast and then it started pissing it down I was like no grabbed everything chucked it in here got in bed early doors and then just I fell to sleep I just tapped out even though it was on the early just a little bit of condensation but that's fine can't really see much a lot of low line mist it's quite atmospheric let's get up this camera's not waterproof either you can't really see me that good custer it's still quite dark just one of them where because it's been raining so much everything like and everything's soaking all the pine needles stick to you mud gets everywhere clotted right do one of these there we are no trace left and it was good to be out in tent tonight mate because as I said I don't know if I did say or whether I recorded it on up but I just thought it but I've been up north doing me van up and when I'm doing that I'm sleeping in the van as well as doing it up so I'm often surrounded by half done things and you know before the heat was done it was freezing and I can't really go camping because when you go camping and if your all your shit gets wet and muddy and stuff I've got nowhere to to dry it out I've got nowhere to clean my pots and pans and it becomes just a bit of a chew it's a bit too much but I've got so much done on my van build this time check the back library if you want to see the van build got so much done and I'm off back down south later on today so I just thought why not get everything wet get everything mucky get out in woods stink of smoke yeah I love it I love it I might come back and sign off whilst I'm going for a swim but if not I'll love you and leave you now all right so it there's not been a lot of chatting and waffling on this one because I was just happy doing what I was doing cooking and chilling in the woods and I feel great today I feel great for it it's just really calming and relaxing and ah just the sound of the rain on the tent it's just wonderful that's the sort of stuff I'll put that on a podcast or a a youtube video like rain on tent videos ASMR to help me fall to sleep so to get it in real life it's just the dream look after these ends and bye for now whatever see you right this is muddy it's very muddy there's a good chance I'm going to stack it so stay tuned there's a chain saw going off over there somewhere but ignore that just imagine the birds are singing the sun's shining and it's nice and warm which it's not but I like to end as regular viewers will know I like to end on a bit of a dip it's slippy that's a fact I'm slid oh my god I'm stuck I'm stuck I've got a level with you I went camping and the day after was Valentine's Day so I had to quickly come and meet Fern and Nimbus and then oh no oh he's trucking all my shit everywhere I was like oh yeah you guys just carry on on your walk I'm just gonna go for a little dip and end my video and I've gone and started sliding there was nothing I can do and then just I mean you saw it didn't you and that's that so that's that if you want to be in with a chance at coming on one of these adventures with me and Joey D and winning a full ultralight camping kit I'll leave a link for that below but for now I love you and leave you take care of yourselves I don't want to camera I'm coming in shit bye bye look I can't even look at the state of it everything's blavoured in shit so say bye to dog oh it's all of it say bye to this is a terrible ending bye dog bye really well did it so all right love you all see you


Scout snipers with weapons company battalion landing team first battalion fourth Marines 31st Marine expeditionary unit work with Royal Thai Marine Special Forces Republic of Korea Navy SEALs and the Muse amphibious reconnaissance platoon on combat marksmanship Drawing from their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan the veteran snipers focus the training on engaging multiple targets over very distances and overall marksmanship So this is training each shooter to be able to well one have confidence in his weapon system but also to be able to engage a threat at any given distance Sharp shooters from each of the three forces fire multiple courses of fire at distances from 100 to 400 meters all using the Marine Corps M40A3 and M40A5 sniper rifles Marine Sergeant Paul Robbins Jr. Saadee Thailand


You've all seen this, right, the BP disaster, oil, of course, now a similar disaster would be a disaster like this, where Facebook could leak and leak out my information as has happened in the past, right, would be a similar accident of similar proportions, where people could see things that are not supposed to see, and we could in fact be sitting here looking at ourselves already in the future or as already being in the oven as far as the data is being concerned. Then we have, of course, a big issue in that what we've done on Facebook is in many ways a game, right? I mean, it's an interesting game, right, but is it real? And of course, then the question really is, when you look at all the stuff and with the Facebook IPO coming up, data and social and mobile is becoming a huge, a trillion dollar market. This is in fact why the telecoms are looking at this market, right, they're saying, wait a minute, we're worth three trillion dollars a year? We should have a piece of this, right, the data, mobile, social, Solombo, as people call it, market. And then we have various confusions in the last couple of years, you know, here's Julian Assange saying, you know, I give private information to corporations to you for free, and I am the villain, and Zook says, I give your private information to corporations for money, I am man of the year. There's many issues that we're facing for the first time. What are the standards of this? What is the standard for privacy? Who is supposed to use it? Why? Why am I doing this? Why am I not doing this? This is actually quite confusing, because it's a first-time thing. I personally think that a do not track option will be very important, but we have a big problem here, right, because in a way we're getting so much stuff for free from those companies that are using our data, like Google, that if we were to ask them not to track us, they would lose the whole argument of giving to us in the first place, right, because that is kind of the deal, right? Can we have the cake and eat it? Look at this research, right? The Wall Street Journal I just did this morning, actually, did research and I actually voted yes. Would you use a do not track button on your web browser?  But if they did this, advertising on the web would be dead, which means that we wouldn't get the free stuff that we're now getting. I mean, how can we get free YouTube if we don't want them to track us, because then they couldn't advertise to us. So this is a big problem in the machinations of the advertising business, which is roughly a trillion dollar business, funding a lot of content.


You need to understand that the US is the most tyrannical regime on earth You get a lot of moral clarity when you realize that the US government is the most despotic and corrupt regime on the entire planet by a very wide margin This clarity informs your perspective in a way that helps you see through a lot of the propaganda narratives Which are laid over the public's vision about what's going on in the world Whenever I say the US is the most tyrannical regime on earth. I get a lot of objections from people And these are always people who simply haven't thought very hard about the horrific realities of US foreign policy Sure, you can name some governments which are more brutal and oppressive toward their own citizenry than Washington But you can't name any who are more brutal and oppressive overall when you zoom out and look at the big picture The United States is currently circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and waging wars Which have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century Its sanctions and blockades are starving people to death en masse every single day It works to destroy every nation which disobeys its dictates by toppling their governments via CIA coups proxy armies Partial and full-scale invasions and the most egregious number of election interferences in the entire world There is no other government on earth about which you can say anything like any of these things No other government on earth is doing anything which rises to this level of evil not Iran Not North Korea Not Russia or China or any of the other big scary boogeymen. We're told we must be afraid of by the mass media You can argue that other other governments have perpetrated comparable evils in the past But you cannot argue that any of them are doing so currently in our present reality as it actually exists The united states is the worst monster and it's not even close There's really no counter argument to this Even if you're an intellectual six-year-old and still believe in 2021 that the us uses its military for beneficent purposes The fact that we now know the us military just wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on a 20-year war Which accomplished literally nothing besides making horrible people rich And lied to the world about it the entire time Should dispel that childish delusion once and for all The fact that the us happens to export the bulk of its tyranny outside its borders, though certainly not all of its tyranny Doesn't change the fact that it is more tyrannical than any other government This just means its tyranny dominates the entire world instead of a single nation And ordinary americans don't even get anything out of it It would be bad enough if they were consenting to their government committing murderous piracy around the world because all that theft Was enriching their lives and making americans the wealthiest happiest and healthiest people on earth But it isn't Americans experience some of the world's worst wealth inequality without any of the social safety nets afforded to people in every other developed nation So they're not even getting a slice of the piracy pie They only consent to their government being the most despotic regime on earth because they are propagandized So in this sense all the accusations the us and its allies make against governments which refused to bow to washington Are in reality a kind of what-about-ism What about-ism is a word empire apologists constantly bleep whenever you point out that the us is perpetrating some version of an abuse It accuses other governments of perpetrating and it always is But in reality, they're the ones using accusations to try and distract the conversation from what it should actually be about The most tyrannical and abusive government on earth There is no legitimate reason to focus on the abuses of any other power structure As long as the us and its allies are committing vastly worse atrocities The most powerful and destructive government on earth should be receiving far more criticism than any other But instead because its propaganda dominates the world It actually receives far less criticism Being clear on this gross imbalance and the need to correct it Is instructive for anyone with their eyes open because it shows where your efforts and energy should be directed Thank you


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's casebreaks.com coming at you with 2020 Prism Football right here. One box, mega box break, random team break number two. Big thanks all of these folks right here for getting into the action. And we're gonna do the break itself first and then we'll re-randomize everybody's name in a different dice roll and top four will win a spot in that $300 football, $300 spot football mixer. We'll do that randomizer at the end. First, the break. Let's roll it, let's randomize it. One and a six, seven times for each list. One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven and a five. Don't encourage it, Martha. Matt, down to Eric. After seven. One and a six, seven times for the teams. One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven and final time. After seven we got the Patriots down to the Cincinnati Bengals in this mega box break. All right, so here's the first half of the list right here, this is 2020. So chargers, there you go, Darren with the bolt right there. Mangles for Eric Aaronson down here. I miss Miami, oh Miami's down there too, Brian Crouch, Miami. Let's see what we got. No trade window in these little filler breaks. Let's just go ahead and print and rip. There it is, good luck. The green pulsars right here are neon green pulsars are what's exclusive to this set. Did I not print that out? No, it doesn't. Come on, friend. Let's get to work. Jack's asking, will Justin Herbert cards go up next season? I don't know. I don't think any of us have a crystal ball. The hope is yes. I mean, if he's healthy and if he doesn't regress for whatever reason, he should be, his card should go up. His rookie card should go up. And then his second year cards may even have some value. Depends on Charger's ownership. Hopefully they'll get a good offensive minded coach. Add some weapons for Justin Herbert. That'd be great for them. And here we go. All right, good luck. Some borough, E.J., Eric? All right, we'll try, we'll try. Maybe a green pulsar borough? Yeah, Josh Allen's rookie cards might go up. That's why it's a good time for those of you who are fast enough to join the mixer, you got a chance at some Josh Allen. There's Layton van der Esch, green pulsar. Let's see what a fully healthy Cowboys team can do next year. There's Josh Kelly. There's Chase Young. He's, oh, sorry, SV. Can't forget about that Justin Tucker, Silver. What if he game winning kick this weekend? Super Bowl winning kick. He's Justin Tucker. He's Justin Tucker's cards might skyrocket. Everyone loves kicker cards, right? Ooh, there's Jeremy Chin, rookie green pulsar. And we got Anthony Miller for da bears. And that'll be for Jack and the bears. That's good, big boys 007. Took a two month vacation to end 2020, nice. No corona for you, good. Good, glad to hear it. The business has been going well. And I never know which injuries are gonna be adversely affected or not by something like that. All right, so nothing too crazy here, except for the Justin Tucker, Silver. All right, let's flip back over here. Let's grab everybody's names. Yeah, we know Justin Tucker's good. Crazy good, good. That's good to hear. All right, thanks everybody for getting in. Now it's gonna be once again the top four names after six, three and a three, hard six, top four after six, good luck. One, two, three, four, five, and sixth and final time after six. Now from five on down, I apologize. We'll get him next time. Sucks. But oh, Kings goal, it's tied now. All right, so sorry. I appreciate you trying though, I really do. Congrats to the top four. That's gonna be Matt Lieber, Mike Leone, Brian Crouch and Matt Arnold. A lot of M names right here. Congrats to you. You're in that football mixture. It's coming up a little bit later tonight. Check the schedule. I'm Joe for jasmizcasebreaks.com. I'll see you next time for the next break. Bye-bye.


into my keynote. So my name is Stella Cotton. I also maybe destroyed my voice a little bit last night at Ruby Karaoke. So I'm probably going to be drinking a little more water than usual. So I decided to completely rip off this like gimmick that my friend Lily did in her talk on Wednesday. And basically any time that I take a sip of water, I would like for you to just like cheer and go crazy. So I'm going to start it off. We're going to practice this. Yes! You know what you're doing. Okay, cool.  So here's the scenario. The phone rings, it's the middle of the night, the site is down. Every single person on your engineering team is just out of cell range or they're at RailsConf. And it's just you. So raise your hand if you feel like you know exactly what to do or where to start. Okay. All right. A couple of veterans in this audience. All right. So close your eyes, please. I can't prove that you're doing this. So nobody else can judge you. Try again. Raise your hand if you feel like you know what to do, where to start. Okay. Everybody's very honest in this audience. My hope is that by the end of this talk, the people who raise their hands will get some ideas for how to share with their team and people who might not be as comfortable. Ways that they can understand site availability. And for the rest of you that you'll find ways to get comfortable yourselves. So one of the big challenges with site availability is that often it just catches us off guard. So every day we might practice refactoring, testing. A site outage can happen for a lot of really random reasons. And so this randomness is like a little scary. And I'm going to start off by telling my scary story. So it's July 2015. I'm working as a Ruby developer at a company called Indiegogo. It's a crowdfunding website. And it's a site where basically people come to fund things that matter to them. And we had a lot of successful campaigns. We had an Australian beekeeping campaign that raised like $12 million. We had a campaign to fund the movie Super Troopers 2. And in July of 2015, the news breaks that Greece is the first developed country in the entire world to fail to make an IMF loan repayment. And through a strange course of events, this action manages to take down our entire website. And it's in the middle of the night in California. In Europe, they're waking up, they hear this news, and they also hear this incredible news story about this really great British guy who just has this wild scheme where he's going to end the Greek financial crisis. And he decides that he wants to help the Greek people out. So he launches a 1.6 billion euro campaign to bail out the country of Greece. And his rationale is like everybody in Europe throws in three euro. They're fine. They meet their goal. They bail out Greece. And so traffic just starts building. And people are contributing really small amounts of money at super high rates. And eventually the Indiegogo website goes completely down. And it doesn't fully recover until we put a static page up front to handle the load. And for me, this is just so unlike my day-to-day coding, deploying, even like triaging and investigating 500s. And honestly, I was pretty unprepared. And I was pretty afraid. And I wondered afterwards like, how could I have been more prepared for this? Low testing is a way that you can programmatically simulate many users making simultaneous requests to your website. It acts as sort of a low stress simulator into like really high stress situations. You can play around, build your confidence. And you can kind of come up with your own site availability playbook before your disasters occur. And as an added benefit, you can also identify some bottlenecks in your application that could be dangerous in the future. And you can also measure performance benefits of changes that you make along the way, which is really important. The downside of load testing is that when I started, because I don't come from a DevOps background, I'm just regular Rubyist, I found a lot of like high level instruction that gave commands to just sort of kick off the load tests. And then there was a lot of like really technical instruction about site performance. But there wasn't a lot of instruction on how to bridge those two things. So it's a lot of like trial and error and frustrated Googling. So I like to share a couple things with you in this talk. I want to talk about how I get started with load testing, how you can turn up the volume on your load testing to really add some load to your site, and then to use just a couple of tools to explore the results that you got. A plus. So how do we get started? So we're going to kick things off, we're going to start just by preparing our load testing tool. We're going to talk about the tool Apache Bench because it's preinstalled on many Linux boxes. And it's just a really simple tool to get started with. So this is the command that starts with A B for Apache Bench.  So we'll break it down just a little bit further. So you want to choose an endpoint for to like send the simulated traffic to and to start a good a good idea is actually a simple static page that doesn't make any database calls. It's just a way to get a baseline. And once you're really confident that your load testing tool is like actually configured correctly, you just want to start choosing pages that will bear the brunt of traffic. So for example, Indiegogo, it's our actual campaign pages, like our homepage is not is not where the traffic is going to go. But for your site, it could be the homepage or it could be something else. And you can start by testing local hosts, if you're just kind of playing around. But the load test itself is a resource, and it's going to be consumed by your computer. And because it's using computer resources, it's going to take away available resources for your web server. And it's just going to it's going to really impact your results, especially as the load starts to increase. So on the flip side, running a load test against production website can impact your user experience or even bring down your website. So it's best to point to a staging server or a production server that doesn't host any external traffic, unless you're like specifically looking to do like stress testing on your production system. But if you're just trying to like investigate, don't point it to your website. And because like at least one person, Lily was thinking it. Technically, you're only you can read this. So in that same Apache bench command that we saw earlier, you'll want to configure the traffic that you're going to use to simulate your tests. To finish up this basic command, you need to provide two things. One is the number of requests that you want to execute concurrently, which is the C flag, and the total number of requests over the life of the load tests. And that's the end flag. So for here, like, we're starting with a concurrency of one and enough requests that the system will get time to warm up, because that's important. So this basically means you'll execute one concurrent requests 1000 total times. And you just want to make sure that you're able to run the load test for a few minutes. And to divine our terms a little bit, when I talk about requests, like what is a single request in this scenario? It actually doesn't mean a single visitor to your webpage, typically. Depending on the number of assets that your page is loading, or a synchronous client request that you're that your frontend application is going to ask from your server, your single unique visitor could actually make a lot of requests in one visit. And then on the other side, browser caching of assets actually means that a return visitor might make even fewer requests than a new visitor. And there's another thing to keep in mind, which is that Apache Bench and server side benchmarking tools won't actually render HTML or execute your JavaScript. So the latency times that you're seeing here are just going to be a part of your user experience. It's going to be, like, the very baseline. So there's going to be more delay for your users on top of this. So let's look at just an example of an Apache Bench output. Here's a snapshot of the full results, and we'll zoom in just a little bit. And zooming in, like, we can see that Apache Bench will show us the percentage of requests served within a certain amount of time. So when you analyze the initial results, you want to validate that this latency that you're seeing just matches the latency you would expect from a request in real life. So low testing is kind of a black box. If you just, like, start plugging in random numbers and you just don't really understand your system, you can get, like, really amazing results. And you're just, like, yeah, my site is amazing, and it's actually not real. So you want to make sure you have, like, a hypothesis for how you would expect the system to perform.  So, for example, if you, like, look at the line that says 99th percentile latency, this is saying that 99 percent of that 1,000 results that we were, a request that we made were served in less than 693 milliseconds. And if you have a graph from your production response times and you're able to see that 99th percentile, and it's showing, like, 650, you're probably on track.    Another common issue is hitting a 500 page or redirects. Apache Bench won't actually follow through to those redirects, so it'll just log it for you as a non-200 request. And the easiest way that you're, to tell that you're load testing error pages is to look at your Apache Bench output. It's going to show you non-200 requests, and if that number is already zero, even without significant load on your site, you're probably running into one of these issues.  I love the enthusiasm. And it's also, there's kind of a weird thing where you need to differentiate between non-200 requests or responses, excuse me, from failed requests. Apache Bench will remember the content length of your very first request, and if it changes in subsequent requests, so if you have a dynamic session value, any other reason that your content length might change dynamically, it's going to register these in a very mostly non-helpful failed request section. And you'll see it in your output. Just make sure that your logs are showing that you're rendering correct pages, and just ignore it. You can also add a dash L flag in later versions of Apache Bench, and it'll accept the variable document length. So feel pretty good. This low key, low concurrency, load test isn't running into any errors, so we'll just start, and we'll start turning up the volume. And as we start to turn up the volume on our load tests, we can see how our app starts to be impacted by load. Let's talk first about how queuing might affect the user experience. So as we increase load, we'll start to see the average response time of this page increase as well. So there's something called Little's Law, which is a fundamental law of queuing theory, and it tells us L is lambda times W, which is like the average number of customers in a stable system is equal to the average effective arrival rate times the amount of time the customer spends in the store, which sounds kind of like ridiculous, whatever. But if you think about it in terms of a real-world example, it's actually super intuitive. So let's think about a store where there's one cashier checking people out. The total number of customers who are waiting in that line over a specific period of time is going to be the rate that they come in times the total time that they spend in line.  And if people just keep getting in line at the same rate, the law is basically just going to say that your line is going to get longer and it's going to take longer for people to get through the line. So it's kind of intuitive. And then you can adjust that equation to help you understand why you would see increasing response time as you add additional load. Because that mean response time, total response time, is going to be the mean number of requests in the system divided by the throughput. So if your server is taking 500 milliseconds to process a request in that same study, which actually might not even happen at a load, it might be going up, the total response time is going to increase if you add more requests into your system. So a simple like web application acts like a giant queue that requests a process in. So in this example, we'll talk about a web stack that consists of a few things. So we've got a proxy server, application server, database. So the proxy server sits behind your firewall and it communicates back and forth with your client, aka your users, and your web server. So a common example is going to be HA proxy or Nginx. And then next, there's the application server. And this is going to deal with the request that need processing. It's going to make calls to your database. And in our scenario, we're going to talk about a single threaded server like Unicorn. And Unicorn has a master process. This is actually something that Aaron brought up in his keynote. It has a master process that has a configurable number of child processes or workers that do all of your work. So even though you have a single server on a single machine, it handles multiple requests at once. And so it's like having multiple cashiers at your grocery store. There's other web servers like Puma. And those are going to use multiple threads instead of multiple processes, but it's kind of a similar, similar idea. And then in this simple stack, we only have one database. So all the cashiers at your grocery store are all making requests to the same repository. And they can all live on the same machine, like the same physical machine, and share the same resources, or they can live on different machines. It's just an example. And your website stack will probably look quite different. And so as we add more and more requests to the system, little's law is going to show that this average response time is going to increase. And eventually, if you just add more and more requests, but you don't add any more cashiers to process the requests that are coming in, your weight is going to grow too long, and your users are going to see a timeout. And your proxy server will allow a client request to wait a preconfigured length of time, and it's eventually just going to say, I'm sorry, I can't help you.  So it accepts more requests. But the danger here is that under extreme load, your request can remain queued up at your application server level, even though your proxy server has long since returned that timeout. And so it means your application server is actually going to keep churning on those requests, but no one will actually be around to see the request, the page rendered. And it also goes against this sort of recommendation of queuing theory, which is that single queues for multiple workers is more efficient when job times are inconsistent. And if you think about this in practice, I give you two available web workers, they can execute jobs, and one is processing this huge file, and one is processing a little tiny file. If another request comes along and you just arbitrarily start queuing up the short requests behind the worker that's downloading a huge file, your short request is going to be unnecessarily blocked by the long requests when another worker could have executed the request in a faster period of time. There's also another maybe strange instinct that you might might feel where you increase the timeout threshold on your proxy server, and you just do it higher and higher, so you'll decrease the error rate. But a user that doesn't see a web page load after a minute or two is going to have an equal or probably worse reaction than just seeing the timeout from your proxy server. But it's also not just your application that gets affected by load, you'll start to see effects on your operating system, like on the operating system level that's actually hosting your application. And so some of these configurations might be in place already on your production machines, but especially when you're bringing on new staging server or a local machine, you'll probably find that you need to tweak them when you get started off with your load testing. Proxy server has to keep track of each incoming client requests, and it basically does this by keeping track of the IP address and the port numbers associated with each request. And because each of these requests takes up a Linux file handle, you're going to start seeing errors like potentially like too many open files. So just be sure that your operating system isn't like arbitrarily capping the number of file handles or file descriptors that your proxy server can access. Like 1024 is a common default. And since your proxy server will use one handle for an incoming request and one for outgoing connection, you actually can run up against the limit pretty quickly. You can actually see on your machine what these are for your user that hosts your proxy server by using the you limit command if you're using Linux. And there's a rule of thumb for calculating this number that's given by the 2.6 kernel documentation. And it basically says that each file handle is basically one K of memory. Don't allocate more than 10% of your available memory to files by default. And so you get about 100 file descriptors per megabyte of RAM. And so you can start there and see if your issues go away. And then so you want to actually check two levels. So one is the system level. And you can edit that by editing this is control configuration. And that's going to be just like the global default for the whole operating system at the higher level. But you'll also want to make sure you adjust the user limit since that's what your proxy server is actually going to come up against. So you'll want to set the soft limit and the hard limit. And those need to be less than that max limit that you set for the whole system.  And then finally, if your proxy server has a file limit configuration, you'll just want to make sure that you adjust that as well. This is an example for engine X, but it'll be specific to your proxy server. Another issue that you might run into is TCP IP port exhaustion. So there's a finite number of ports that are available on your machine. And only a subset of those ports are actually available to your application to use. And these are called ephemeral ports. They're used to handle web requests. And once the process is complete, they're going to be released back into the system so that they can be used on your next available request. And you can tweak two settings to increase the number of ports that are available. One, you can decrease the time wait. So the port is recycled back into the system more quickly. So even though a port is not in use anymore, you're going to see like a period of time where the system holds it back. And this prevents stray packets from leaking across requests. And you can also configure your operating system to just increase the available port range altogether. And that's going to be different on each operating system. And another thing is when you're running your load tests, you just want to make sure that there's a few minutes between each test because these ports will still be in use and you'll want to let them recycle back. Bless you. The unicorn documentation has some really good suggestions for operating system tuning for this for these settings. But like at the end of the day, your application is a very special snowflake. It's you have to think about how your application behaves in the wild and how that's going to affect performance in a way that isn't really being accounted for in your sterile testing environment. So one thing is the relationship between user actions, cache busting and database queries, for example. So if you're testing an endpoint, your URL, and it returns user comments from the database. So an important consideration is like how many rows and what's the complexity of query that you're making against that database. And if there are no comments that are seated on your test machine, or very few comments seated, but an expected user behavior under high load is that people are just like commenting left and right. It's like the Justin Bieber website and it's like comments coming in constantly. Like that's a different real world feeling than in your low testing environment. So even if also if you're returning, you decided to see the million comments and that's on your low testing environment, you're still going to see that query get cached after your first request. So if in your real life scenario is that your user is getting like 1,000 comments a minute and it's continuously busting the cache, you can actually simultaneously run scripts alongside your load tests which will sort of simulate this like true effective comment creation. Another scenario to consider is actually blocking external requests. If you're experiencing heavy load and all of your workers are overwhelmed, any worker that's making a slow blocking HTTP request to like example a payment processor, it's going to add to the overall latency experience for everyone waiting behind that request. And so at this point, you should be really comfortable with sort of the life cycle of the web request in your stack, what logs to look at, like where to keep it out for errors.  And once you're there, you can use additional tools to sort of understand like what are the actual bottlenecks that you're coming up against. And one place to start is to investigate the limits of the actual machines hosting your web server. So as you increase load, you can use top really common tool when you're running your load tests to view what percentage CPU and memory are being consumed overall and who's the specific culprit might be. And one thing to keep in mind is that the percentage displayed is like a percentage of a single CPU. So in multicore systems, your percentage can be greater than 100%. There's also something really nice called HDOP, which I really like. It's probably not preinstalled on your system, but it has just like a really great visual representation of CPU consumption across cores.  And like when you think about these resources, they're hosting your proxy server, your web server, maybe your database. It's all a zero sum game. So if you recall from earlier, there's like a server like Unicorn. There's a single master process that runs and you can configure sort of an arbitrary number of sub processes to handle your web requests. And this is awesome because more workers mean that you can process more results, more requests simultaneously, but they're also consuming the resources on your physical host machine. And so you want to make sure that you don't have so many web servers configured or web workers configured that your system is just running out of physical memory and it's hitting the swap memory, which is like located on the hard drive. And it's really, it's like a lot slower to access than physical memory. And you'll see that slow down. So if you look at the average memory consumption for each of those like workers on your machine, if you don't have a memory leak, you should see pretty consistent memory behavior and you can calculate how many workers that you can reasonably run reasonably run on your box. And if you're running other applications on the same box, those are also going to constrain the resources that your Ruby application can consume. So for example, if your database is on the same machine, you actually might run out of CPU resources as you increase your web workers long before you'll actually start to be able to test pressure on your database itself. And in real life, when site availability is compromised, you might find it's actually pretty easy to spend up more workers to handle traffic. But if they're all trying to access the same database and they're all waiting on the database, it can really, it can cause huge issues. And so if you're wanting to investigate this scenario and how your database is behaving under pressure, you might want to actually point it to an external database, which is pretty easy in Rails. If you have a database server handy, you just configured your database.yaml to point to an external address rather than local hosts. And you'll also need to configure your firewall to accept external connections, but that'll be pretty specific to your setup. But as a PSA, please don't use your production database in this scenario because you can bring down your website. Please don't do it. I'm not responsible. So another thing that a lot of people are probably already familiar with is using application performance monitoring tools to investigate performance issues. One of the most useful tools is just being able to transact, to trace your transactions, which is just going to collect data on your slowest HTTP requests. New Relic and Skylight are third-party tools that typically come to mind. But ideally, you should try to set up the ones that you use in production on your load testing server so that you can see what issues would actually show up in real life. But you can also use like the gem rack mini profile in production or on your load tests. But just remember, if you're running it in staging, switch the environment to run the application in production mode so that it'll actually profile the requests. And there's a couple of tools you can use to see how load is impacting your database. It's disabled by default, but you can turn on the slow query log in MySQL to see a log of SQL statements that take more than a certain time to execute. And you can configure that time frame to be between one or zero in 10 seconds. And there's also a situation where you could be calling a query just way too often. And it may not be expensive enough to show up in the slow query log. But if you look at show process list, you'll be able to see all the queries that are currently running. And if one query is suspiciously running frequently, it could be a bottleneck or a performance regression that you didn't realize that you had. Especially if it's one of those special snowflake queries that we talked about earlier where the cache is just frequently busted when it's under load. And Apache Mint is not always going to be the best tool on the market. It's very simple, and it's available to you probably right now. But there are other tools. Siege is another tool that allows you to use a configuration file to hit multiple endpoints at once, which is really convenient.  There's also Bees with Machine Guns, which is both awesome and has the most awesome name. It's an open source tool brought to life by the news application team at the Chicago Tribune, actually. So it easily allows you to spin up a lot of micro EC2 instances to load test your web applications. If you find that just running from one box is not enough load to really make an impact on your site, it's probably because your site is a lot faster. And then there's also Flood.io, which is a paid service, but they maintain Ruby Jmeter, which is a Ruby DSL for writing up test plans for Jmeter, which is a more heavy-duty load testing tool. And so your app might look pretty different from the app I've talked about today. It might be hosted on Heroku. You might be using Puma, a set of Unicorn. You might be using some kind of complex fault-tolerant distributed system in which you have a totally different set of problems. And I'm sorry you came with this talk. But the great thing about load testing is that it's a framework for curiosity. And it gives you some tools to kind of shine light into your pretty dark and scary places in your app. And it's really, it can be a lot of fun. So thanks everybody. I'll tweet out a link to my slides right after this if you're interested in taking a look. You can find me on Twitter, practiceCactus, and come up afterwards if you'd like to ask me any questions. Thanks.


Hey guys it's Tilly and today I'm here to show you guys my new bath product range and I have just started on my website at tillyandherbooks.com I am very excited to show you guys this I actually released these bath bombs for sale about a week ago and there's been quite a journey from beginning to end from learning how to make these bath bombs to actually wanting to sell them to you guys and to come up with the ideas and packaging and everything like that has been very very exciting and I put a lot of work into doing this and I really want to show you guys so as for the actual bath bombs they're all Australian made vegan friendly and handmade by me and packaged by me as well instead by me as well and they're pretty pretty great if I can say so myself so this one here is the Hufflepuff bath bomb the fragrance in this one is Lemon Sweet Maya which is just like really happy and fluffy and it just kind of wraps you like a warm blanket now these bath bombs are really big they probably go between 250 grams up to 300 grams per bath bomb and for that that means that you can use one for two baths if you can break them in half or just have one really great colorful bath as well because they are so full of like great products inside of them sometimes they do sink to the bottom of the bath but they still overall give you this bubbly foamy and colorful bath that you guys will enjoy so I have five Hogwarts themed bath bombs which is the four houses and a dementor themed bath bomb so as for the overall packaging this is what they look like they come in their little boxes with the Hufflepuff label on the top with the ingredients then you open them up and it has it in plastic wrap the actual bath bomb itself Hufflepuff where they are just and loyal they also just have the shredder paper in the bottom to keep a little bath bomb safe for shipping then we also have the Slytherin one I myself am a Slytherin so I really enjoy this bath bomb the scent first one is sandalwood vanilla and I really really enjoy it so on this one I said Slytherin these cunning folks use any means to achieve their ends and that is the color of that one next up is Ravenclaw this is probably one of my favorite ones in the bath just because the blue of this bath bomb in the water is so fantastic so if it says Ravenclaw if you already mind where those are wit and learning will always find their kind so this one also has the gray and the blue of the Ravenclaw colors and like I said the blue is just fantastic so the scent of Ravenclaw is energy which is this really vibrant and outdoorsy smelling bath bomb and it kind of just wakes you up when you're in the bath and for the last Hogwarts house we have a Gryffindor so this one says a Gryffindor where dwell the brave of heart and the red of this one is once again spectacular I really do like the yellow and the red combined together and in the bath it's just got one of the best scents ever which is honey ale and one of my all-time favorite bathrooms that I have actually created is the Dementor bath bomb what I really like about this bath bomb is that but the fragrances that I picked for this it uses aromatherapy with jasmine scents to help the person in the bath kind of relax and renew and I think that's one of my favorite things about a Dementor one is when you feel like the life is getting sucked out of you you can relax with this aromatherapy bath bomb and it is really really hard to get the darkness of the bath bomb in this color kind of looks more like a darker gray but once it's in the bath a black just goes and it just looks really really cool so in this one it says the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself soulless and evil what I have also done for people who are like me and have baths all the time and would like for a cheaper alternative for these products I have actually put them into bath bomb sachets so these sachets are about 500 grams or more it really just depends on how full these baths can go and with these ones they instant when you put them in the bath they will just kind of the color will seep out and the bubbles will immediately go and you can get more uses from these and they only cost I think 12 dollars 50 whereas the bath bombs are nine dollars 50 and you just get a lot more in there so you have the Dementor one the Gryffindor one the Slytherin one the Ravenclaw one and the Hufflepuff one so some of the other bath products that I have on the website is the Maze Runner this is a limited edition bath bomb I have it in the bath dust and in the bath bomb as well once they were the bath so you get more for your value and this one has Eden's garden scent which is a very earthy and gardening smell which is just really really nice and lastly for the next bath bomb that I have on the website is the Tilly and her books bath bombs so this is the bath dust here which is this wonderful purple powder and then we also have the bath bomb which comes in not only the purple color like that which is a purple edition one but also the striped blue and pink and this one's had the plumeria scent which is basically frangipani I don't even be totally biased but that one's probably one of my favorite ones as well not just because it's my bath bomb though so there you guys have all the bath products I currently have available on the side unfortunately the shipping from anywhere outside of Australia is not the best I've really tried to find the cheapest option available but the best that I could do was what is on the website I do have it on my fact page what the shipping costs are for inside of Australia and international shipping as well so you guys can go and check them out I will leave a link to the actual website below so you guys can go take a look and I really really appreciate your help when it comes to signing this business often any feedback that you guys have to give I would also really love if you guys gave me feedback on different bath bomb ranges that I can do next I do want to be able to do one that is to do with a quarter-thunder roses maybe like the night court themed bath bombs and I'm also really excited because I want to do a Percy Jackson theme one that goes for all the different gods as well which I think will be really really cool but I would love to have your thoughts on which ones you guys would like to see I also do custom made bath bombs or you should do a shipping email and I will try my best to get exactly what product that you guys want and lastly if you guys are inside Perth WA where I am from and you guys would not like to pay shipping give me an email and we can organize for a pickup or a delivery of these bath products because I'm more than happy to do that it's taken a lot of effort and time and money and I'm really happy with the way it looks and hopefully you guys will enjoy it too oh and if you guys do want to buy any of these off the website and have lasted this long into the video use the code Tilly and her books tend to get 10% off your order thank you guys for watching and hopefully you guys have a lovely bookish day and that great things happen to you I swear I've actually been cursed the worst reading time that I have ever read and the worst part about reading stuff is that every time I try to force myself to get over it I get