Okay, this is James P. Madonna from the Facebook group Everything Is Food. I'm here at the Royal Hibanchi Buffet Route 46 West Saddle Hook, New Jersey. It is about mid-December, Tuesday season, 2019. Here's my favorite sign. And here we have a nice big tray of what appears to be very aromatic chicken gyros. That's right, chicken gyros with, I think it's called tzatziki sauce. Look at it. Beautiful, beautiful. And here's my big ziti with a pink sauce covered by mixed shellfish, scallops, clams, North Atlantic mussels. I want to give a shout out to Commodore Jeff Sambello, as well as exusus Bishop Brian from the hit show Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel. Let's see what else we have. Platanos Maduros. Okay, let me go right over here and do my thing. Let me do my thing as I bring my lovely plate. Let's see. Hey, hello, hello. What are you doing? Okay, here are the chicken wings. The very finest and hot buffalo wings for your very next sporting event. Come to Royal Hibanchi Buffet. You can buy it in bulk. Come in and buy it in bulk for your next sporting event parties at home. Here he is. Hey, how are you, man? The king of buffets. Here we have fresh mozzarella with sliced tomato in honor of Salvatore Mercurio. Do not mess with the moots. Looks really good. Let's see if we have avocado salad. I got to find out if there's a blue cheese dressing here, to be honest with you. Because that's my favorite. Here's avocado salad. The seafood salad doesn't look too bad. Okay, I'm going to get some of this wonderful aromatic chicken gyro. It smells great. I just want you to know people. It smells wonderful. So aromatic. The spices.  Look how colorful it is, too. Here's the asparagus that makes your urine stink to high heavens, but it's delicious. It's like a yogurt cucumber based sauce. What a work of art. What a work of art that is. What a work of art. Let's see what kind of soup you've got here. Crab soup? Yeah, you've got to stir the bottom. That's the only thing. You've got to stir the bottom. Crab soup. I used to call it crab soup. I wonder if there's a difference. I know Duck Soup was a Marx Brothers movie. Here we've got some Spick in the Duck. Spick in the Devil.   The last duck came out. People don't for it. Don't for it like in the day. Mofongo House. Carol Mofongo. This is a site. A site to behold. A site to behold. Look at that. Beautiful. Beautiful. Here at the Royal Hibachi Buffet. Royal Hibachi Buffet. Look at that. 246 West Saddlebrook, New Jersey. There's the ice cream station. Christmas tree. Okay, round two. Now, here we've got flounder fish with the bones. Now, do I feel like dealing with the bones? I don't think so. Here's tilapia. Deep-fried tilapia. I don't know if I feel like dealing with that either. Maybe I'll get some... Oh, short ribs. Really? It says beef short ribs, but it smells like lamb to me. They always taste better on the bone. Why? They always serve mint jelly with lamb. You ever notice that, people? They always serve mint jelly with lamb. That's good enough. I'm always getting yelled at that. I don't eat any vegetables, so I'm going to have to find... Oh, boy. I could get salad if they have... If they have what do you call... Blue cheese dressing. That's got the good desserts on it. But I do like blue cheese dressing, but honestly, I don't know if they have any. I found the blue cheese dressing. You know what? Let me get some asparagus. I think I ran out of space. Oh, it's going to make my urine smell the high heavens. Get some asparagus. Some photos of the dessert. I scream. I scream. Now, they don't have my favorite flavor, green tea ice cream, so I'm going to have to settle for either strawberry. I don't want coffee ice cream. Vanilla chocolate. You know what? I might go for chocolate chip mint. I still don't understand what exactly is designer sauce. I have no idea what designer sauce is. I just want to give a rundown of... Oh, look at that. The shrimp. The Camarones. The shrimp is here. Crocodiles. Blue crab. Anyway, what's on this side? Before I get the ice cream. Langosta. Lobster. Please don't touch your hand with your hands. Snow crab. Ginger crab. Spicy shrimp. Okay. Let's see what this guy's up to. Now you get a chance. Oh, it smells good. Hey, Commodore Jeff Sanbello. The Vapors of Life. The king of Mongolian barbecue. Look at that wonderful aroma. Just elevating, ascending into the atmosphere, into the heavens. We got lots of shrimp there. The king of Mongolian barbecue. I'm not having any this week. There's a private party going on in that room. Let me go back to the ice cream. I could put this woman I know on YouTube on video, but I could put her on YouTube, but she don't want to be on YouTube. I'll make too much of a hug out of myself. I think this is enough. Give you a little more. There you go. This is enough. That's enough. I'm always having chocolate, vanilla and strawberry, and they don't have green tea ice cream. I am having chocolate chip mints.


Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. So Thursday at 9 o'clock block, Ron Flagg, the president of the Legal Services Corporation on the mainland joins us. Welcome to the show, Ron. Thanks, Jay. It's good to be with you. I wish I was really with you because I think I'd be more comfortable wearing a lo-ha wear and enjoying the weather there, but I'm happy to join you. Thank you. Well, thank you for not wearing a lo-ha wear, leaving it to me. Maybe next time you can wear a lo-ha wear. Excellent. So, Ron, you're the president of the Legal Services Corporation. What is that and where is it and what does it do? So Legal Services Corporation is the largest funder of civil legal aid in America. What's civil legal aid? When people, low-income people, have problems, housing problems, maybe they're going to be evicted. Maybe they are potential victims of domestic violence. They have family law issues. They have custody issues. A grandparent may need to get custody of a grandchild. Maybe they have debt collectors after them. Maybe they're veterans and they're owed benefits from the VA. Those sorts of problems need help and LSE is the largest funder of civil legal aid in America. We fund legal aid programs including the Hawaii Legal Aid Society across the entire country. We're funded by Congress and then we grant out the money. And then the other thing we do is try to identify innovations, help practices for all the programs we fund to consider to help them in providing services that are efficiently. How did you get into this? This is not an ordinary legal type of job. Is it? How did you wend your life into it? Again, the people we fund are doing the legal work. Hawaii Legal Aid Society has dozens of lawyers who help flowing Hawaiians with the kind of civil legal problems I described. LSE, the organization that I'm the president of and work with in Washington, provide fundings to these legal aid organizations across the country. Is it a government agency? No, we're a private nonprofit but we get 99% of our funding from Congress and the amount of money we have available to provide in Hawaii and the other 49 states and the territories is dependent on how much money Congress gives us. So COVID has affected everyone and we have yet to learn all of the effects that it has had on our institutions, our society, our people. How has it affected LSE? How has it affected legal aid in general around the country? So let's take, I mean the short answer is it's made a bad situation worse. It's made a challenging situation worse. Let's go back to the good old days prior to the pandemic. In the good old days, a study that LSE did a few years back showed that 86% of the problems faced by low-income Americans were at with either no assistance or inadequate assistance. It was before the pandemic. We've had obviously a spike in unemployment. It's gotten a little better but it's still well above pre-pandemic levels. That means more people qualify for the legal aid that LSE funds and the people who qualify for legal aid are seeing surges and things like evictions or at least potential evictions in domestic violence. We really have a perfect storm for domestic violence. You have great economic stress. You have great health stress and the pandemic requires or puts limitations on people's ability to move out of their homes. So you put those together and inevitably, unfortunately, you get an increase in domestic violence. Any issues a whole host of is have got that were bad before the pandemic have gotten worse. When you say gotten worse, what's the dynamic? We have two years of experience here under our belt. The first year there was a sort of blush about it and the second year it sort of settles in on you, us, and I wonder, has it gotten better, has it gotten worse? It is the same between year one and year two. It really varies across jurisdiction and across problems. Let me just address two different areas, domestic violence and then evictions, which are prevalent across the country. Domestic violence, if you look at the statistics for 2020, in a lot of instances, we weren't in the statistics, that is the reported cases or the reports to police and other law enforcement. There didn't seem necessarily to be an increase in domestic violence. But what actually was happening on the ground was that there were increases in domestic violence, but people weren't reporting them because they were, you know, stuck at home with the perpetrator of violence. In 2021, the communications has gotten better and the reports of domestic violence have caught up with what's actually happening on the ground and we're seeing, in many instances, multiple two or three times the number of domestic violence incidents that we saw prior to the pandemic has not abated. That's only gotten worse. It has had a very kind of up and down run because people, so many people lost their jobs at the outset of the pandemic and lawmakers recognize that, oh my gosh, if everybody who lost their job also loses their homes and are forced to live with friends or families or in homelessness, that would be a bad thing during a pandemic. That would not only be a housing disaster, it would be a health disaster. So what happened is we've had both state and local governments and then the federal government, the Center for Disease Control, established these eviction moratoria, which put a pause on evictions so that we weren't throwing people out of homes during the middle of a pandemic. And so throughout 2020 and through 2021, through around September, the level of evictions was well below the level of evictions prior to the pandemic. The concern about evictions was very high because people were six months, 12 months, 18 months behind in their rental payments, they've lost their jobs, didn't have a means to pay landlords, many of them small, not necessarily wealthy themselves, had mortgages to pay and they weren't collecting rents. So the federal government has provided $46 billion in emergency rental assistance, which was intended to get into the hands of tenants and ultimately landlords so that tenants didn't lose their homes, landlords didn't lose their homes and the buildings that they were operating. It took a long while for the emergency rental assistance across the country to get out. These were basically cooperation, state to state, sometimes area to area, it didn't exist and all of a sudden we have collectively billions of dollars going out that needs to be distributed to landlords and tenants and it took a while to get that up and running, but it has gotten up and running. And so again, through most of 2021, we've seen eviction rates stay below the levels they were prior to the pandemic. The Center for Disease Control moratorium terminated in September of this year. Most of the state and local moratorium have also ended. A few states have continued to have moratorium. But the rental assistance is helping keep down the level of evictions. They're still below pre-pandemic levels, but they're creeping up because there's now not a moratorium in existence in most places. And so we're seeing eviction cases go up. The real fear is the money is running out. The emergency rental assistance was for 12 or 18 months while we're now 18 months into the pandemic or nearing two years come early next year. And so the real question is what's going to happen when that money runs out? And that's the great concern. Well, it strikes me that you're a kind of executive who needs to read the paper closely every day because what's happening in our community, our national community, affects the need for services by legal aid societies around the country. And you have to anticipate, based on what is happening on the ground, what is happening in those legal aid societies. And I don't know how you can tune it up. Can you change the way you distribute your funding to meet problems in different areas and cities and regions? Actually, surprisingly, no. In large measure, no. The funding we get from Congress, the great bulk of it, I'd say 90% of it go out under a formula. The formula is pretty simple. You get from the Census Bureau the percentage of people in each service area whose come is 120% or less than the poverty level. In the 48th of the continental United States, the poverty level that enables you to get laid is for a one person household, just 16,000 dollars. And for a person household, it's 32,000 dollars.  So you have the quite poor, really, to qualify for legal aid. But our money goes out under that formula. So if a state has or a service area, say if Hawaii had 1% of the people living in poverty in the United States, then Hawaii Legal Aid Society's share of our funding would be 1%. We have no discretion. That's what Hawaii Legal Aid Society would get. The only way for Hawaii Legal Aid Society to get more from LSC is for Congress to increase our overall appropriation. Wow, that is really interesting because let me ask you this. If you had your druthers, if you had discretion in a very, what do you want to call it, dynamic challenging time, such the time that we live in, where different areas have different problems, and then they may change. I mean, the numbers on COVID, for example, change. And there's got to be a correlation between COVID domestic violence, the need for civil legal assistance, and so forth. How would you change the formula if you could? Yeah, I wouldn't be in a rush to change it because I'm not sure we could come up with anything better than that. When we got $50 million in COVID emergency funding in March of 2020. And remember, you know, it's we all know how things within a week or two change dramatically during the pandemic. So when we got this funding, you'll you'll recall Washington State had really high cases and mortality. New York City had unbelievably high mortality rates and high case rates. So we got this first $50 million. We granted out pretty much in equal amounts to all of our funding recipients, relatively small grants in the range of $25,000 to help them get up and running remotely. So if they needed laptops and cell phones so that their lawyers could work from home, they were able to purchase that. But the bulk of the money, the $46 million was largely distributed based on population, but we made an adjustment to the population based on the COVID cases that were occurring at the time of our grants. Well, it turned out and we did that. And, you know, and had we granted out the money three months later or six months later, that adjustment factor would have been very different because lo and behold, rates in New York were still high, but they came down a bit. You know, rates in Washington State were still high, but they came down a bit places like Texas and the South, which had very low rates at the outset of the pandemic, you know, had peaks in their in their rates. So our funding is is there for the long, the long run. And, you know, just as you asked it in your question, the conditions pandemic have changed so rapidly. And one place that seems really immune from the pandemic for a week or two, the next week is is really in a bad place and places that were suffering terribly earlier, you know, are relatively better off. As any granting agency, I'm sure you require reports to come back. So you can you can know and you can analyze how the money is being spent by every grantee in every state. So where where does it go? Does it go to you mentioned earlier, maybe equipment, maybe salaries, maybe rent? Where is it going? How have those proportions changed in terms of the way the various legal aid societies in the country are spending it? Well, it by and large, I think for any organization, there there are two major expense categories, human beings and rent. And that's also true for legal aid. And LSE's funding, by and large, is for operational expenses. So these four milligrams enable our legal aid programs that we fund to operate and so they can be used for any reasonable costs of of of lawyers and staff or rent or other expenses, including technology, the pandemic really hasn't changed that too much. That the rent didn't go up. In fact, the buildings weren't being used by and large, but they still had to pay rent with the influx of funding from LSE. Many of our programs were able to hire more lawyers and other staff to help out with the increases in cases. Before the pandemic, the three or four leading categories of cases were housing, family law, consumer issues. Those were really the three biggest housing and family law across all of our programs account for about 60 percent of the cases. I think during the pandemic, they still accounted for over 60 percent of the cases, probably housing creeping up a little bit higher than the pandemic because the loss of jobs lead to the potential for evictions in other housing problems. It strikes me that, you know, we have had, according to the newspapers, a great resignation. And there is, you know, a call of disturbances in the labor market. And that would include the professional labor market. I imagine some civil law firms have dispatched lawyers because they didn't have the work. Some some government agencies probably, too. And the question is, how is the market for lawyers who might be hired or might be terminated by legal aid societies? Is it harder for legal aid societies to hire new staff? I mean, professional staff, is it easier? How are the numbers of lawyers in those organizations changed in the course of covid? Couple of things there, Jay. First of all, because our funding has has, you know, remained steady and we even got a relatively small influx of money at the outset of the pandemic. Our funding recipients have been able to retain their staff. They had the money to retain their stuff. They didn't have to. I'm not aware of any of them laying off staff during the pandemic. In terms of resignations, most legal aid lawyers are pretty much the lowest paid lawyers in America. They're paid less than government lawyers. They're often paid less than public defenders. They make less far less than people in law firms. So they're doing it. Obviously, they're doing it for the money in the sense that they have to keep themselves and their families fed and and clothed and housed. But they're doing it their mission base. They're they're they're doing it because they believe in the mission. They believe in the value of justice and making sure that people of all income levels get justice. So I don't certainly at LSC and as best I can tell within our grantees, we have not seen the level of of resignations that we've seen across other sectors. If you're in it for the money, you know, you might conclude, gee, it's not worth the money anymore. If you're in it because you want to help people in need and those needs have gotten bigger, you're not going to leave. Yeah, I would imagine that a lot of them have doubled down on that mission. They've seen the strife in the lives of their clientele and they're even more dedicated. Having seen that now in the time of covid, if I were there doing that, that's what I would. That would be my reaction. As long as I could make it work on my own, you know, my own life with sufficient funds to live my same life, I would not only stay, but I would be more active, more dedicated than before. You see signs of that? I guess you do. Yeah, no, again, at LSC, we've that's exactly been the case. If there's sort of a lag between what happens in our in the legal aid programs we fund and our learning of what happens. But I think, by and large, people are staying with with this caveat. All of us, all of us, every single one of us have faced increased and in many cases, enormous stress as a result of the pandemic. Those of us, and for me, that would would have been a few years ago, but those of us who have school-age kids trying to help their kids with distant education or maybe had family members we had to take care of during the pandemic, whether it was elder care or self care. You know, that created a lot of stress and, you know, certainly the combination of that stress and the burnout.  I think on occasion you'll see among civil aid lawyers. But with that caveat, you know, I don't believe witnessed a larceness from the civil aid court. You know, it strikes me that, as I said before, you know, everything is changing around us and including the institutions. And it strikes me that going forward, we're not going to ever get back to what we think might be normal. But on the other side, light at the end of the tunnel, I think it's going to be revealed that legal legal services corporation is more important to our society, more important to those particular elements of our demographics than it was before. People will take note, perhaps, by what you are doing now on the other side. Do you think there's a chance of that? Yeah, there certainly been many silver linings from the pandemic. But one benefit, if you want to call it that, is people are far more aware of civil legal issues and civil legal aid in twenty twenty one and they were in twenty nineteen issues like a jins, unemployment and domestic violence, which in twenty nineteen, somebody else's problem.  The possibility of five or ten or fifteen or twenty million people being thrown out of homes, that's a that's an intense grabber. And so we've got more attention from the media, from political leaders than we have before. So I think there is a chance that following the pandemic, that attention to those subject of issues of housing, employment, family issues, you know, my hope is it's we're not going to. We're not going to, you know, our attention span is not going to be too short. Yeah, the mixed blessing, but it is a blessing for LSE. OK, we have to get to Hawaii now for a minute. You gave a couple of grants to the Legal Aid Society in Hawaii and my recollection of the newspaper article was that these grants had an effect on on technology, as you mentioned earlier. Can you talk about the size of those grants and the technology involved? Yeah, I'm happy to. So LSE has a program where grant out about four million dollars a year throughout the country to the programs that we fund generally. And Legal Aid Society in Hawaii is receiving two grants in the coming year. It's going to receive a ninety three thousand dollar grant to support a program called Legal Navigator, which employs artificial intelligence and other cutting edge technologies to help states guide low income individuals to really the best form of legal systems or is available and the grant will enable Legal Aid Society to develop and maintain Legal Navigator for the long term. And it will also create ways for new states and partners to use Legal Navigator. So that was one grant and then a separate grant before you go to that. What exactly does Navigator do?  I've lost my job. Legal Navigator is meant to recognize that as a potential legal problem and then ask you questions to flesh out, you know.  It might lead you to a tool sort of like TurboTax will ask you, what's your name? My name is Jay. Jay, what can I do for you today? I've lost my job. You know, where did you work? How much money did you make? When did you lose your job? How long did you work there? And then, you know, here's the here's the form you need to fill out and it'll help you fill it out. So that in its most ambitious form is how Legal Navigator is designed to work. Yeah, that's that's good because it saves staff time and it gives you that is the client in an accurate direction about where to go. And of course, it gathers the data that can be used by the lawyer later. Exactly. So what about the second grant? So the second grant Legal Aid Society will use and it's about seventy six thousand dollars to redesign its case intake system to really better use technology to ensure that intake is possible to helpful residents. If you go back in time, you know, a number of years ago, most legal programs, if you wanted to get help, you had to go walk into their office and, you know, stand in line and talk to somebody or maybe, you know, call them on the telephone and, you know, annoyingly listen to music for a long period of time.  So most intake systems now are designed to to be more user friendly and to use technology to expedite that system. For example, our programs help people with civil cases, not criminal cases. So if you had an automated system and one of the questions the automated system asked right up front would be, you know, do you have a civil or a criminal problem? And if you said criminal, it would say automatically, sorry, we can't help you. Here's the public defender or the other resource that could help you with that problem. And we wouldn't use a civil legal aid staff member to to direct you. And anyway, so this grant will help the legal aid society with its intake. You know, Think Tech, Hawaii, our organization has changed this way of doing business over the past couple of years. We have a studio, but we don't use the studio. We use Zoom just like this. And the one hand, we've, you know, we don't have the high risk, higher resolution that we would have in the studio. But on the other hand, we can reach all across the world, including you, Ron, and talk to you and people respond to us. And, you know, it has had a permanent effect on the way we see our mission and the accomplishment of our mission. And I can tell you, I know a lot of lawyers and law firm managers where the same kind of thing has happened. It's not total, not 100%. There are, yes, there are person to person meetings, of course, and, you know, you have, so forth. However, as we come out the other side, hopefully soon, you know, their lives, their professional lives will be different. And I imagine that the professional lives of the lawyers in the legal aid societies around the country will be different. Have you observed that? Is that a side effect of these technology grants that they're using Zoom or other such products in order to make their connection with people more efficient? Absolutely. I mean, again, it cuts a lot of ways. I mean, prior to the pandemic, legal aid programs would do outreach to potential clients by, you know, posting liars in churches and community centers and, you know, reaching out to people in percent and inviting people in their offices, you know, for a long period of time, churches weren't meeting. People weren't able to go to community centers. The physical offices of legal programs were often closed. So we had to come up with different means of outreach, social media. Now all of a sudden, people are hearing about programs and can watch programs on the internet, Facebook, other social meetings that used to be face-to-face, can be face-to-face, but where clients have their with all on their phones or if they can get access to a computer, you know, they can meet. And that's a very powerful potential tool. And it was pre-pandemic. If you look at a place like Hawaii, that certainly has urban centers, but then has population dispersed across multiple islands or, you know, a place like Alaska or Montana, where the population is very dispersed and the lawyers are concentrated in a few cities.  You need to come up with ways of overcoming, you know, the digital divide, getting, you know, providing them access to technology tools that will enable them to communicate or who might not be physically proximate to the clients. You know, healthcare face same challenges, but healthcare has actually done a better job. You know, you find health clinics in a lot of remote areas. You don't find law offices in remote areas. So, you know, one thing to do is put a kiosk in those healthcare clinics. Where they could, they communicate with a lawyer that, you know, was located somewhere else. Very interesting. Well, do you feel that Hawaii is a place that has a special need for technology grants? I mean, what would the alternatives, what would the alternatives be in lieu of giving Hawaii technology grants? Well, again, you know, I think in terms of the legal navigator tool, that's not unique to Hawaii. Every jurisdiction, people in poverty, or not everyone in every jurisdiction that has legal problems and doesn't have the financial wherewithal to hire a lawyer at, you know, $100, $200, $500 an hour to help them, it goes to the end and tries to figure out where they can get help. So we need tools like legal navigator to help wreck people to the right resources. And that's not... That's for everybody in the country, every legal aid society. That's not unique to Hawaii. The intake system that legal aid society is gonna use its technology grant for, again, it's not unique to Hawaii in the sense that every legal aid program has to come up with a way to reach out to potential clients and to communicate with them and understand what their needs are and figure out whether they can serve those needs. I think, you know, something that Hawaii has to face, which many states do, but not all of our legal aid programs do is the dispersity of the population where, you know, you do have people living in smaller towns and villages, you know, away from population centers.  And the question is how to get them service. And technology can play a role there. Again, that's not unique to Hawaii. You would face similar issues in Montana or Alaska or Texas or, you know, any part of the United States where there's a geographic dispersity. We have some programs, for example, we have a program in Cleveland or New York City or we have a program in Los Angeles. Obviously their population dispersity is not an issue, but certainly the programs that serve dispersed areas, rural areas, including Hawaii face those challenges. Well, it sounds like these technology grants raise all the boats and it's something the whole country could use and is using now or will use by virtue of grants like this. Yeah, go ahead. It's really critical because, again, the amount of money that Congress appropriates to LSC is not nearly enough. I mentioned at the outset of the program, 86% of the legal problems faced by low income Americans are responded with no assistance or inadequate assistance. So the question is, how do we leverage this relatively small number of legal aid, lawyers and staff? How do we make their numbers bigger in addition to just hiring more? And one way is to make their work more efficient with technology. One way is to enable them to reach, you know, rather than having somebody in a remote town that is a live lawyer in a remote town, maybe they're only 100 people. None of our programs are able to have an office in towns of a few thousand people or a few hundred people. So how do you reach those folks? And you can do it, you know, technology can help. Technology can provide the kind of interactive tool that we were talking about, the sort of TurboTax tool that will help you fill out a form. You know, it may not be as good as having a live lawyer, but it's better than having no help at all, which is often the alternative. Leverage, that's what it is, leverage. That's what we're talking about. We're almost out of time, Ronald. I wanted to ask you one last three-part question. I'll object this compound. Go ahead. This is really relatively subjective. So, Ron, how long have you been with LSC? How long do you plan to be with LSC? Am I right in, and my third part is, am I right in concluding that the same sort of psychic benefit that holds lawyers who legal aid societies around the country applies to you? Absolutely, yeah, well, the answer to the last question is absolutely, Jay, all of us, all of us during the pandemic have felt helpless at times. We've felt helpless vis-a-vis our own health, the health of our family and friends and loved ones. We've felt helpless about lots of things. And to be in a job where every day, at least at times, I feel like I'm being helpful, that is a blessing being a measure. And so that's been terrific. I've been at LSC for eight years. I was the general counsel for the first six and a half and for the last 20 months, I've been president. And as I say, I have found being here to particularly during the pandemic to be an absolute blessing. Thank you, Ron Flagg, president of LSC, Legal Services Corporation in Washington, D.C., which funds our legal society and the late society with technology grants and other grants. Thank you so much, Ron. Thanks, Jay. Stay well. Aloha.


And the House of Representatives has passed for second reading a bill seeking the creation of state police. The bill sponsored by the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Honorable Benjamin Kahlu, alteration bill also seeks to transfer police from the exclusive legislative list to the concurrent legislative list and move that effectively empower states to have state-controlled policing. The establishment of state police has been a subject of controversy and has been advocated for by various regional, socio-political organizations and state governors as a viable solution to the escalating security challenges faced by the nation. The purpose of the state police bill is to establish state police as part of the ongoing efforts to address security challenges in Nigeria. The bill is coming under wake of rising insecurity in the country and comprises 18 classes with six to amend section 34, 35, 39, 42, 84, 89, 129, 153, 197, 214, 215 and 216 of the Constitution. Leading to the debate and the bill during plenary, Honorable Tolani Shagaya said the reason urgent needs was to decentralize the police force to tackle the security challenges in the country. The establishment of state police is a clarion call for a tailored community-centric policing system. It is also an acknowledgement that our states are uniquely positioned to address the security challenges within the border. The alterations proposed in this bill are not just alterations to the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. They are also the building blocks for the more secure, accountable and resilient Nigeria. Mr Speaker, Honorable Colleagues, I urge you to support this bill. Contributing in favor to the debate, some lawmakers said the clumber for state police is long overdue. Questions on insecurity on the floor of this house, from the beginning of Ninth Assembly to death, there was no single week that there was no matter of urgent public importance that has to do with security. The record is there, you can verify. Mr Speaker, most of these motions were referred to commit you on either military, or the responsibility of the non-licensed, like universities are licensed. For instance, if you want to set up a university in a state, if a state wants to set up a university, they will go to AUC, AUC will license them. So we should find a way of licensing police. Any state that meets the conditional precedence that is formed by maybe the Police Service Commission can apply. That in the Sudden and Eighth Assembly, I am one of those who champion the killing of this type of bill. Our reason in then was that state governors will use the bill to intimidate and harass political opponents. But with the situation we are in now, we have gone far, far beyond that. Speaking against the bill, a lawmaker noted that policing is capital intensive and before establishing state police, there is a need to address socio-economic issues of the society. 21 states or so in this country are caught up in the quagmire of socio-political, ethno-religious misunderstanding. Put the case of establishing state police in these 20 states. I can give you an example. How do you create and balance the establishment of state police in the trajectory, history of political situation in Plato states today? And the lawmaker has unanimously voted in support of the bill when it was put to a voice note, a voice vote, I beg your pardon. The bill was referred to the Committee on Constitutional Review. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Internal Revenue Service IRS tax news, important info for people considering making early withdrawals from retirement funds. Honestly, what you really need to know about withdrawals from retirement funds is that we, the IRS, will most likely take a large part of your money. And you need to be okay with that, as you, in your old age, gummed down, well-sogified top ramen or whatever. We would also like to inform you that if you invite a thief over for dinner by the end of the night, you'll most likely not have any more silverware. The difference is that a good deadbolt often keeps out a thief, but we, the IRS, are much more patient and resourceful. You can keep the door to your savings closed and deadbolted for a good long while, however, we will just patiently wait until you're old and feeble, and then at the ripe old age of 70 and a half or so, we'll pry open the door to your retirement fund with the crowbar of required minimum distributions. And at that point, your money is as good as gone, like that silverware. After you had dinner with that thief who took your silverware, remember? Anyway, it's first of a joke. I asked the IRS agent what would happen if I don't pay my taxes. This is it. The moment we should have trained for. They said they were working on a process to made me. Sabotage. My God, man, what does it mean? And I was like, made me? Did you mean make me? We have to tighten security, sir. Find out who's behind it. No, no, no. The word sabotage. What does it mean? No, said the IRS made you. It's a Canadian term. Stands for medical assistance in dying. And together, we'll show the multiverse that Trigon is not to be trifled with. For taxpayers that don't pay, we would like to hire a maid assistant to help you die. Oh, I'm sorry, Bender. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. Also, good news, everyone. We think it would really increase compliance. Careful, you must be when sensing the future, Anakin. The fear of loss is a path to the dark side. And I was like, hold it, so wait a second here. You want to hire a medical professional to assist me in dying for not paying my taxes? Before I knew that you were going to say that. Who's the more foolish, the fool or the fool of all of us? And they're like, no, no. That would cost way too much. That would be a waste of time. We plan on hiring an actual maid, you know, paying her just over what she would get, making beds at a motel six. Once you start down the dark path, forever will dominate your destiny. But she would be administering medication to assist you in dying. That's where the medical part comes in the acronym of maid.  No! COVID tax tip 2022-162, October 24, 2022. No matter how much people plan unexpected events occur, often those events result in unplanned expenses. To cover these costs, sometimes people withdraw funds from their retirement savings early. Let's take a quick step back and think about the retirement savings idea in general and the tools often used for it. So within our working years, it's going to be a good idea for us to put money away so that we have the money in our retirement years, because in our retirement years, we most likely don't have the same kind of capabilities to be able to earn revenue as we do in our prime working years. So that's the general idea. In general as well, people are not good at long-term planning decisions. It seems that we're kind of designed to deal with the upcoming decisions in the current timeframe and therefore we often neglect the long-term planning strategies. Some of the concepts with the retirement plans from a government standpoint would be to give current benefits for long-term savings to try to incentivize people to save for the long-term would be one of the ideas or concepts of some of the retirement plans like a 401K plan, a 403B plan, an IRA type of plan. So in those cases then, if you put money away into the retirement plan, then you get a tax benefit today. You don't have to report the income that you would have had to report as income today. You get to defer it until the point in time that you take it out of the retirement plan. So that can be a great incentive and it could be a huge kind of benefit that say employers can give to employees, but obviously it's only a benefit to people that have the cash flow that can actually take the money that they would have now and put it into the retirement plan to get that benefit. Now the problem with that, of course, is now we're incentivizing people to put more than they maybe otherwise would or possibly even need under the umbrella of retirement plans, a 401K, a 403B, an IRA in order to get current day tax benefits. And then if there's an emergency or something comes up, they don't have the cash flow in order to deal with it because it's under the umbrella of the retirement plan. And part of the trade-off of the retirement plan is if you put money under the retirement plan, then it's going to be somewhat locked up. You can't get into it as easy as you could if you put it in some other area. And that's one other thing I just want to point out. Notice that if there was no such thing as a 401K or an IRA, you'd still want to stay for retirement and you would still use the basic strategies or tools for investment that you would when using a 401K, that being usually mutual funds, for example, stocks and bonds and so on. You would just wouldn't have it under the umbrella of a retirement plan. The only reason you put money under the umbrella of a retirement plan is because you get tax benefits for doing it. If you didn't get the tax benefits, there would be no point of having a 401K plan. It's not like a separate special investment tool. It's just something that's under an umbrella that's giving you basically tax benefits for it. But the downside of that is you're restricting your money. You can't take it out as easily. So when you do take it out, the idea would be that you're taking it out at retirement. Even at that point, you're going to be taxed on it because you got to defer the tax until retirement. That was kind of the deal. But if you need the money early, then not only are you going to pay tax on it, but you might be penalized for it unless there's some circumstance that you can justify taking it out early because that's the whole concept of getting the tax benefit. You get the tax benefit so that you save for retirement. If you pull the money out, you're not saving for retirement because you pulled the money out. All right, that's the general idea with this. So while this may seem like an easy way to get cash quick, early withdrawals can come with heavy penalties and costly tax consequences. They sure can't. So here's some important info for people to consider before they dip into their hard-earned retirement savings. Workplace retirement plans. These are the 401k plan, which are non-government kind of retirement plans, the 403b and the 457b, possibly these items where you're working at a government entity. So these plans can distribute benefits only when a certain event occur. The plan's summary description should clearly state when a distribution can occur. It will also state if the plan allows hardship distributions. So that would be distributions. You can say I'm going to put money in for retirement, but if there's some big tragedy, then I'm going to need the money early. It's my money. I should be able to activate it or get to it without being penalized would be the kind of concept to it. So early withdrawals are loaned. So hardship distributions are withdrawals for a participant's account made because of an immediate and heavy financial need, and it's limited to the amount necessary to satisfy that financial need. So if you have that kind of exception, then you want to make sure that you qualify for the exception. And you want to make sure that when you take the money out of the retirement plan, that you can try to go through the process to inform the financial institution of the circumstances so that when they issue you a 1099 telling you that you had a withdrawal, they mark it off on that as being a qualified hardship distribution because they're also going to send that to the IRS. If they mark on the 1099 that it was an early withdrawal, then the IRS is going to try to charge you penalties and interest. So you got to make sure that you get the right box checked off on the 1099. So the end of the employee includes the need of the employee's spouse or dependent. Hardship distributions are included in gross income unless they consist of designated Roth contributions. So the Roth IRA is a little bit different. You'll recall because that means that you are paying the taxes now and you get a benefit from it at the point in time you take the money out of the Roth distribution. So it's kind of a reverse concept of it. And the reason you might do that is because for whatever reason you think that your tax rates will be lower now possibly than at your retirement timeframe but you still want to save for retirement so that that's the tax incentive tool that you can use basically in that instance. So distributions before the participant turns 65 or the plan's normal retirement age, if earlier, may result in an additional income tax of 10% of the amount withdrawn. So just realize that you might qualify for a hardship distribution and then you might say, well, I'm free and clear. I'm just going to take the money out, no problem. So you're still going to have to pay the normal income tax on it typically because you got a benefit when you put the money in of not paying the taxes. It's a deferral. What you're trying to avoid is the additional 10% penalty for the early withdrawal. And so that's what you want to avoid. So the other income tax that you'll be paying you would have to pay that no matter when you took the money out because you'd have to record it as income when you take the money out no matter what. So paying hardship distributions back to the plan and pulling it over to another plan or IRA isn't permitted. Borrowers repay loans from these plans back to the retirement account. Borrowers should review the limits on loan amounts and other requirements. There's a link to that here. Taxes on this money don't occur if the loan meets the rules and repayment happens on schedule. So the thought process would be, if there's a hardship first, can I pull the money out without being penalized or something like that? If not, is there some way I possibly can take a loan against the money using the money in essence as collateral on the loan which is kind of similar to pulling the money out, right? So you still have the same, you want to make sure that you qualify for that kind of strategy if you're to use that strategy. Required minimum distribution. Taxpayers must make required minimum distributions each year beginning with the year the taxpayer turns 72, 70 and a half if the taxpayer turned 70 and a half in 2019. People calculate the RMD required minimum distribution by dividing the IRA account balance as of December 31st of the prior year by the applicable distribution period or life expectancy. Required minimum distributions are waived for 2020 due to COVID-19 relief provisions. Required minimum distributions are not required for Roth IRAs because of the different nature of the Roth IRA. So the general idea with the required minimum distributions if you think about this would be okay, why would that be? Well, they're trying to incentivize you to put money into a retirement plan by giving you a tax benefit at the point in time that you put the money in and that means it's really a deferral. And then if you wait until a period to take it out then you can take it out without having a tax, then you can take it out without a penalty but you will still be subject to taxes. But what if you don't want to take it out? You don't need it at that point in time and you're like, well, if I take it out then I'm gonna have to pay taxes on it and I already have enough money at this point in time. Why don't I just leave it in there and then possibly inherit it over to my two or something like that? Is there some way I can avoid paying taxes altogether on it? And the IRS is gonna try to avoid that by saying, well, no, we're gonna choose an age which they've been toying with 72, 70 and a half. They waived the required minimum distributions for COVID and whatever this weird stuff but they're gonna usually say the idea would be once you hit a certain age, we're gonna look at your life expectancy from that time frame forward and try to determine how long it would take for you to drain that retirement account because we wanna get paid the taxes on that money that we didn't get paid taxes on because we let you get a tax-free money because we wanted to incentivize you to put it into the retirement account. So now they're gonna make you take it out so they can charge the taxes on it. And they're gonna use actuarial tables to see how long you're expected to live and then how much the required minimum distributions will be based on how much money you have in the IRA or the 401k and so on. So it gets quite complicated. IRAs and IRA-based plans. Individuals can take distributions from their IRA, SEP IRA, or simple IRA at any time. Taxpayers do not need to show a hardship to take a distribution. They can just contact the financial institution managing the account. Early distributions occur when individuals withdraw money from an individual retirement account or retirement plan before 59 and a half. These retirement plan distributions are subject to income tax. Individuals must also pay an additional 10% early withdrawal tax unless the exemption to the early distribution tax applies. There's a link to the exceptions here. So once again you're gonna, if you pull the money out, if it was under an umbrella, now we're talking IRA rather than a 401k, 403B, but still same concept applies. If you pull it out early, you might have to pay the 10% penalty on it. Notice that even if you can wave the 10% penalty, you'll still be generally paying income taxes on the distribution because like with the 401k plan, you got a tax deferral. When you put the money in, that's the point. They put it under the umbrella of this plan even though it restricted you from taking the money out even though it's your money. So regardless of age, the account holder must file a form 1040 individual income tax return showing the amount of withdrawal and complete and attach a form 5329 additional taxes on qualified plans including IRAs and other tax-favored accounts. There's a link to that here to the tax return. These are requirements of early withdrawals and regular distributions. Coronavirus-related distributions and loans. So now we've got the coronavirus laws all got messed everything up and made everything way confusing. So the CARES Act made it easier to access savings in IRAs and workplace retirement plans for those affected by the coronavirus. There's a link to that here. So obviously they're saying, hey, look, we've got this widespread problem where people might need their money and if they need the money, they've got money but they're in the retirement plans and they're restricted because if they take the money out then they're going to have a problem. Maybe we can loosen the belt on the restrictions of the retirement plans during this time and that would be one of the ideas. So certain distributions made from January 1, 2020 through December 30, 2020 from IRAs or workplace retirement plans to qualified individuals. There's a link to that here may be treated as coronavirus-related distributions. There's a link to that here. These distributions aren't subject to the 10% additional tax on early distributions including the 25% additional tax on certain simple IRA distributions. Repayment to an IRA or workplace retirement plan can occur within three years. So you can take a look at those rules if you're in that particular situation that might give some forgiveness of the 10% penalty and give you the capacity to put it back into the IRA at a later time and kind of get back in general to where you were before would be the general idea of it. So taxpayers can include coronavirus-related distributions in income over three years, one-third each year or if elected in the year of the distribution. Divorce-related distributions. Early distributions taken from a traditional IRA to satisfy a divorce requirement or court order so that I was required to take a distribution from the divorce what do you want from me IRS you're going to penalize me for anyway our subject there's a link to regular income tax requirements and the 10% additional tax unless there's a qualifying exception.


How's it going guys? My name's DPJ and today I bring you another BF3 video. If you do enjoy it, leaving a like really helps out and subscribe if you do want to see more.  It makes it for the most part an action skill you can really be and it mounts enemies where you go and do other things, it's that good. Now I've seen a couple of builds based on this new Digiclon and all seem equally great, but they are built up completely different to how I prefer to play the game. My current build is the Winter Soldier and I built this on the basis of being an all round build. I didn't want a build where I didn't have to change up going into certain aspects of the game, maybe besides the shield and maybe grenade. And I wanted the same thing for this build, I wanted to create something I didn't have to change up to do something else besides boss mounting and that's what I have built. A zame build which uses all trees, keeping amazing damage output for zame by the same time brings the clone into play and allows the clone to be capable of much, much more. Now I will state, I'm currently still playing on PC, but I will be going back to Xbox soon. I am limited to what I can apply to this build but what's needed I will state. So keep an eye out for them. A few things that may be worth noting and remembering for future references, weapons with enotments on don't seem to apply to the Digiclon. So when a clone itself is using your currently equipped weapon, the enotments unsaid weapon don't affect the clone. So let's get into the build and let's first off state, shield I believe you should yourself experiment with as all you will achieve at changing this up will benefit your build. Old God would work I believe but there are many, many out there you could try it out and see what you think. And also class mod, I myself haven't had a scene dead with the action skill damage on but this is what you want for this build. This will increase that Digiclon's damage by 30 plus percent alone. So yeah, definitely look for a scene dead with the action skill damage on it. So the footage you're seeing in the background now is with the scene dead class mod, so it won't be even crazier. The action skill damage addition was recently added so keep an eye out for that people. Other suggestions here on the scene dead class mod, I look for direct buffs to you as Zayn and what loadout you're going with. And depending on weapon you're using, obviously you can buff weapons, you can buff so much more. So just keep an eye out for things you think will benefit the build. Grenade for me, that it's piss is the one to go for. An artifact snorkeling for me is always where it's at, Victory Rush is a great bet.  There are many, many artifacts that can indeed help this build out. But to tell the truth, none in particular are required.  So shield and artifact, I mean you guys have seen what's in use here with my build and how it performs for me. So you can go with what I have if you want, or you can mix it up with your own shield and artifact that's completely up to you. So weapons obviously, we are basing this under Digiclone, but at the same time not limited to as we are also using the barrier at the same time. So anointments on weapons are really only going to benefit you as a player as Zayn and don't in any way shape or form affect Digiclone's damage output. So switching places with Digiclone gives you 150% extra damage for a short time is absolutely amazing because remember if you are running places like the raids, a lot of shafts and so forth, the Digiclone can only move about via you switching places with it. So every time you switch places with it, you get amazing extra damage. So that that this is the best anointment for this build in my opinion. So let's actually get onto the build and we're going to start with the Digiclone itself as it's the first action skill we use here. So you want 5 into synchronicity for obvious reasons, 3 points into Premunitus and 2 points into Borrowed Time, 5 points into Dany Brook while we're here too. Now I don't feel I need to at this stage and again give you guys reasons for certain skill usages unless you specifically thought of the reasons and damage. This one, pure damage. We then have 4 points into Doctape Mud. Now this is to trigger the anointment under its piss and at the same time its unique ability as with this setup we use both action skills. So we won't be throwing grenades. We then have Quick River Selected and this comes in handy for sure.  We then have 1 point into Pocket Fuller Grenades. This is a must in Regen and Grenades as you are using that boom enhance, those grenades quickly deplete so we need a way to regen in them. One here though does just fine. We then have 3 points into Supersonic Mud. Remember this is built for all around usage. So yeah we are making the Digiclone as powerful as possible using the 3 trees but at the same time we want Xen to be equally as powerful. So if you choose to you can lay down damage at the same time and we obviously then people use boom enhance which just helps absolutely tremendously and truly optimises damage output for that clone. And finally under Digiclone skill tree we have Double Barrel. This when the clone is obviously spawned in we are all spawning with a copy of Xen's currently equipped weapon which is super important for damage output so keep this in mind. Obviously the better the weapon the more damage a weapon offers like the OPQ system and other weapons I discussed at the end of the video which are more efficient with a Digiclone. This is super important like I said for damage output for the Digiclone so this is a must obviously on this build. Digiclone is used in Action Skill Select 1 like I said with the Augments of Bionose system and this here now won't even begin to pretend how this is pronounced. Ok so onto the barrier which we use for Action Skill Select 2. 5 points into Adrenaline and 5 points into Brain Freeze and competent competence selected at the same time. So onto the third tree of Sentinel. This tree mainly isn't used to buff Zayn as a player as you play. So 5 points into Violent Speed and 5 points into Violent Momentum. Speed equals Damage People. One point into Salvation which is modern enough as when you play them higher mayhem levels a couple of bullets the away modern enough to damage you and your health. 3 points into Cool Hand which gives you extra reload speed with death follows close selected. 2 points into Violent Violence and 3 points into Playing Dirty. We finally good misfortune selected with one point here which when paired with a scene dead class mod, you plus the Digiclone shooting is modern enough to keep those action skills going while damage output is needed. Now like I said in this build it's meant for all round usage but at the same time you can be lazy in those boss fights. As the damage output the clone does it's more than enough for you to take a back seat and just watch the fun hence why I called it a lazy Zayn build. It allows you to indeed be lazy for sure. Weapons besides anointments I spoke about obviously not everything is super efficient with the clone so here it's up to you to test the millions on offer from the loot pool. Obviously the usual crazy powerful weapons will be fine but if I'm honest currently on PC I don't have access to my Xbox Stash so I might do an update video on what weapons work best with this build. In the clips you are seeing though where everything is being mounted, the beacon, the OPQ system, complex routes all mount everything but there are hundreds more to play with people and test with this build. So yeah guys I do hope people out there looking for a decent Digiclone build enjoy this. It is an absolutely crazy powerful build now and I'm so glad Gearbox both that Digiclone. It makes for experimenting a whole heap more fun. So guys if you are new to Borderlands and you do want to join a great community where people trade whatever you want or platforms do join my discord linked in the video description. But on that note we have come to the end of the video. If you guys enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out. If you are new around here and want to see more Borderlands be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video I upload you can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button. But guys thanks as always for stopping by. Hopefully you do enjoy the video and hopefully I will see you on that next.


Here was my least favorite rotation in medical school. Now, during your third year in medical school, you typically will go through four to six weeks of all the major rotations. You'll do four to six weeks of internal medicine, some weeks of surgery, some weeks of OB kind, some weeks of pediatrics. This is just to give you some broad exposure as well as allow you to see all the fields that are available for you to do as a future career. And the one that happened to like the least was psychiatry. Now, nothing against my psychiatry colleagues, but during the rotation, both the structure as well as the patients I was taken care of was not very interesting. The rotation I happened to be on happened to be in a clinic in a hospital that just wasn't very busy. So in the first place, I didn't see very many patients. And when I did, it felt like the attending was pretty much doing all the stuff. I was just kind of observing and trying a few things here and there. And because it was a rotation that I didn't have such a great experience in, it happened to also be a field of medicine that I just never learned enough well about. So now whenever I have psychiatric disease or patients that I have to take care of, it's something that I always feel a little uneasy and not so excited to do. Now, if you enjoyed that behind the scenes of my life in medicine, my life as a full-time physician, make sure that likes, subscribe, and follow for more content just like this.


From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage, live coverage here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE, our next guest, Ed Walsh, Cube alumni. He's also the general manager of storage and software defined infrastructure for IBM. Great to see you. Yeah, likewise. So we just, we're talking to Michael Dell earlier and again, an open ecosystem of VMworld again continues to be a little bit more better vibes this year. There seems to be an uplift around, hey, on-premises is working. Cloud seems to have some visibility. It's not gloom and doom for all this data center, but certainly some work going on. You guys were out front on software defined infrastructure and storage from day one. What's the update? What's going on? Well, I think the upbeat here that we're seeing from VMworld is the same we're seeing across the industry. There is almost a renaissance or a boom happening and being data driven, which plays a story heavily.  Actually, I like how VMware kind of clip, the nomenclature around hybrid is homogeneous across the cloud and multi-cloud is all different types, which we see both. So I think it's helping our business. You're seeing us grow since I've been here, growing pretty consistently above market. You're seeing a large explosion and what we're doing on Flash, mostly because the performance does matter. We did a major new and on. So you're seeing our innovation pipelines alive and really kicking in and it really plays what clients are trying to do. Really be more data-driven. What are some of the drivers of your growth? Some of your successes? What are the key drivers? Yeah, so I think it has to come down to offerings. So if you don't have the right offerings to help people to get, we use the term journey to cloud, but it's really turning more a journey to being data-driven and it has to be in a cloud context. And that is all about having the right offerings. We do focus in different areas for innovation. What we're doing on Flash and it's not just Flash for individual rays, but where that's going as far as how you're going to access the data. It's very different to modernizing a data center compared to what you're going to do on AI infrastructure, cognitive infrastructure, or what you're going to do on these new cloud apps. But they need different things, but it's all about being more data-driven, being more agile, but also really taking the complexity down. So I think you see VMware doing the exact same thing. All the announcements this week were all about making it easier to be data-driven regardless of where you're at, which is what we're seeing. And security too, it continues to pound the security message. At the core, at the core. Which is, you're going to see the same thing from IBM. We're going to talk about technology innovation. We're talking about the industry context, but it has to be the trust and security at the core. And that's where, I think that's why IBM's been doing so well.  But John and I were talking about this the other day. The storage, everybody's been saying infrastructure's dead. I've been hearing that for 35 years. Tom Rosemilius's infrastructure matters. But it's consistently a growth market and a 60% plus gross margin product. So many people don't understand that I hear people that, well, how come the VC's are putting so much money into storage? That company's now, you know, data prediction booming. A lot of companies say, well, we're going to, you know, divest of this or that or get out. You know, you've seen some companies say, well, I'm going to go here. It's just a consistent performer. Your thoughts? So I agree. And it's not just storage. I would say, well, because storage plays into that, right? It's all about being data driven and eventually it has to land someplace for performance. But it's the agility pieces that you're seeing us and the other industry leaders really drive that you can actually leverage this data in different ways. You mentioned backup. So we'll talk about storage rays need to be flexible and fast, but backup ends up really turning into an interesting segment, which you're seeing us lead in, is how do you get more effective? All those copies of data, instead of being some, you know, insurance policy you hope you never get to and it might take you a long time to get the data back. Now these instantaneous copies for recovery, but also for how do you leverage that for being data driven? So also, if you're trying to be doing digital transformation, you have to deal with the infrastructure on-prem or in the cloud. You're looking for ways to do that easier. We used to go out and journey the cloud. It seems more and more it's a journey to being data driven, but it has to be in cloud context. But it plays in a storage or I'll play, you need the right infrastructure to be able to be on this journey. The data driven thing, and you're pounding that message hard, which I love by the way, it's not new for you guys, but one of the things we've been talking about from day one, you know our rap, data is at the center of the value proposition, but we were talking early on years ago about data being a real part of the development process now apps. So one of the things Gelsinger kind of talked about is apps are now the new networks or something around networking, networks. And he also said security, NSX is putting security up around the apps, decoupling that from say network security. So you start to see data in the app component highly coupled with the application, new models around how that's stored and retrieved, service meshes and things going on around the application. How has that changed or have you been vectoring to that place or IBM? So one of our key investment themes is how to do that. And there are a couple of different reasons. How do you become more data driven? So all that data, how do you use it to get better insights, right? And then all the data is typically on, you know, in your infrastructure, a lot of it's on-prem or in the cloud. So one is getting more insights, right? So you need to flexibly go after those copies. And then the other thing is how do you use it to do better app development? So you want to do DevOps, which is, you know, how do you just better quality, faster delivery for a pipeline? But a lot of times if you can't bring the data, bringing like, even if you're doing a test of a mobile app, you need to test it with a production data set. So how do you do that flexibly? And data is the hardest part of all this stuff. So we're doing on AI, how do you get, you know, application driven to go after it in the right performance? But we see DevOps, you can see across our entire product line, an API layer. Yes, we have APIs across all of our storage products and software, but a separate API layer to allow you to do a lot of these things with not to replace any DevOps tools, but to enable those DevOps tools or Kubernetes or whatever orchestration engine to drive the flexibility of your, what I'll say mission critical, either primary storage or secondary storage. Because- So programmability is critical through the APIs. You know, infrastructure is code. If you don't have the right API layer, and we put that in place two years ago. You guys are making that programmable. That's a fact. Okay. And it's in place across our entire portfolio today. So you don't have to have an API for this device or that device or that backup. No, it's an API layer that covers them all. It poises you guys perfectly for the growth of containers, Kubernetes and service measures. So as DevOps starts to move up the stack, you need to have an under the hood programmable model. And that's the software defined. So you guys are saying you have that. Today. So let's- We had you major investments to get there and also do it in such a way that it's a consistent API layer that is abstracted away from the infrastructure. You never want to give, well, in general you don't want good developers access to lower end technology and your system of record data. But you do need to give them access and have the right security around it, access to control. But it has to be API driven. Because sometimes it's not a human. It's DevOps tools. Okay, so let's stay on that for a second if we may. Because Ed, you're known as a business whiz kid. Uh-oh. But people don't realize how technical you are, which probably drives a lot of the people who work for you crazy. But when you think about the ascendancy of virtualization, it changed the way in which, for example, you had to do data protection. And then one of your old companies, you know, you've popularized source side, which made a lot of sense because you were taking 10 servers down to one. As you go into this world of cloud and multi-cloud, you were just touching upon architecturally some of the things you have to do with microservices, et cetera. What are the key components sort of architecturally that you've been driving in your R&D pipeline, which we've noticed over the last two years that you've accelerated at IBM? So we talk about this data-driven multi-cloud architecture. And the only reason for it, it's not, how do you go across a very broad portfolio that IBM Storage has? And how do you have a way to say, we're going to be able to give you a modern, agile, and flexible infrastructure that allows you to participate in modernizing your existing environment or allow you to do AI, you know, literally industry leading type of AI technologies or these new apps. But how do you give clients a way to say this portfolio allows you to do that across your entire portfolio? So one is its API layers. You need to not only have rich APIs around the storage self, but a lot of times you don't want to give those to developers or other people. So we need a separate API layer, which we put across both our primary storage and secondary storage. That was one. That gives you the agility to do almost anything. And it doesn't compete with all these orchestration or DevOps tools. It enables them. It's at the last mile, if you would. Second thing, you need to be software defined. That gives you a way to API, but also literally be able to move things, a flexibility, but also investment protection. And then you need some core innovation, right? So we still make it a lot of hardware. So we're making flash technologies that keep the low latency at workload with encryption on the card at line speed, with Ddupe, et cetera, all the things on the card. So you'll see us innovating on the technology side, but it's also having the agility and flexibility. So you'll see that as a theme. And we can have it in, we see clients adopting it in three areas. It's either modernizing traditional, I would say this is all about modernizing your traditional application infrastructure and how to make it faster, more agile, more private cloud or multi-cloud. The other thing is AI, and it is huge right now getting insights, right? So how do you do machine learning, deep learning, true AI on-prem or in the cloud? And that's different technologies to get that insight. So you saw what we did. The largest AI supercomputer in the world was designed to use 100% IBM storage and actually all IBM systems were the power AI environments. That's a great point about this community. It's really an IT footprint kind of app in its operation. So AI, maybe AI ops, but they're not, AI is not a core competency, like in a TensorFlow. So they need simplicity tools to do that. It's all making it easier, right? So, and I think that's what VMware was doing with a lot of their announcements, just making it easier to deploy. But that's where IBM's been doing, driving that pretty aggressively with our software side, our cloud side, but also what we're doing in infrastructure itself. Essentially, we just had an argument, not argument, on discussion on theCUBE. Yesterday with Jim Covellis and I was saying, I think AI is not in core confidence in this community and he had brought up a good point about AI operations. AI is going to automate a lot of things. But I was saying that's under the hood. There's a general purpose AI, TensorFlow is all these cool, that developers want. Those are the guys that want programmable infrastructure. The guys that want AI ops are going to be under the hood, making things work faster. Infrastructure guys. So- Both are very important. Both are very important, but this is different for Sonos. So like, the mechanics fix the engine. Where do you get your AI? Is it sort of homegrown in your division? Is it a little bit from the Watson group? Where's it come from? So, we like our cloud side. So we have obviously Watson, which is very high end of what we do on a cognitive infrastructure. Very different than normal AI or machine learning, deep learning. But we'll use all the open source tools. So what you're seeing, what we're doing in our, we did the latest product launch, our Flash Desktop 9100, which is granted hardware innovation, NVMe through and through. We talk about AI infused. So it allows you to have better service and support. So what are we using? Machine learning, we say deep learning of all the cold home data allows you to do a lot of analysis. Yes, it's an IBM's cloud. Yes, we use some of the things that we're using in Watson, but it's all the tools. You also see in our power AI for systems or what we're doing in ICP. IBM will go out of the way to say, here's all the open source tools you want to use, Mr. Customer, but you're wrestling with all the open source. We'll help you put it together in a tool without limiting it, but allows you to kind of move forward. Instead of wrestling with the technology, let's move forward. You'll be data driven. We'll make it easier to deploy. So you see that in our storage, but in systems and really kind of an IBM theme, if you would. So I got to ask you a question on the customer impact.  It's been great being there from the beginning. So, but a lot of, I'm notice a pattern. There's a lot of people talking about new players seeing their software defined infrastructure. I'm going to find storage. You mentioned earlier here that you guys made a significant investment. So the question is how do customers have the potential buyers of this journey of going digital, data driven? How do they determine the people who are saying it and actually doing it? What's required? I mean, because that's ultimately they're trying to squint through the noise as Dave says, what, who's got what? So you got multiple years doing this. If someone says, hey, I got them software defined storage. I just launched last week. They might not have the trajectory. So how do customers test who's got the real deal? It's actually a real, you can, I'm looking at the floor across the way. You have to get past the hype, right? So this is where I like being IBM. So why didn't I do the CEO of the next gig or why did I come to IBM? I think, I think storage or infrastructure is a, I use the term big boy, big girl game. I think it's more than just building the next array. It's how to bring all this together and make it easier for clients to live it the way they want. So I think you'll see a lot of these point products people come up and say, I'm the leader at this or a leader at that. And you saw a couple of the storage guys say, I'm the best AI. Look at my benchmark with Nvidia, right? But then you'll look at like an IBM, maybe not as aggressive in the marketing of the infrastructure, but we're building the largest supercures AI in the world. And we can take the exact same technology and give you a quarter rack or half rack or full rack of the exact same technology knowing you can scale it. So sometimes you have to say is, it's not just the point, hey, you kind of got to dig under the, I would say the culture of the- Is there a question you could customer going to ask, like how many years you've been doing it? What's the investment you've made? I mean, how does a customer truly know if someone's really going to be software defined and positioned for that data driven integration, that holistic package? Is there- Well, one would be, you know, so, software defined, you know, the easy thing is, and this is getting a little technical, but just, okay, show me your proposal and tell me how I can run the exact same infrastructure in a cloud of my choice. And you know, either on-prem or not, or on, you know, software, is that we software defined? And there's a lot of hum and hum on it, then you know that not software defined. Now that in itself is not maybe the biggest thing, but who can you partner with that can help you not only, okay, I'm going to get your next array? That's kind of tactical, but who can I partner with to kind of go forward? And you can't partner with 20 different firms. Who can you partner with to kind of get you from where you are to kind of where you want to get to? So I guess my questions are, I would start asking him, how can you help me in a broader scope? And that's where IBM does well. I think the cloud test is a good one. Can you run the storage on-premise and on any cloud seamlessly? What we did on the last launch is Flashless 9100. We also say it's multi-cloud enabled. And what we did is we put all the software in the bundle. We have these validate designs that show you how to exactly do all the major use cases in any cloud and allow you to actually show you test environments. You do this cookbook at works, but also the software, go try it. But it's kind of, how do you make it real compared to put a bunch of clouds in a configuration? But then it's the use cases. So we do a lot with the leaders and laggards. I mean, we're with the leaders, but then we have some people that really struggle to keep up. And some of it is just showing them the way forward and it's, you got to have a broad enough portfolio to get them over time the right location. Otherwise you end up with a point product here and that point product there. And I think that's where no one has enough team to keep up with that. And you also look at the developers and saying, are developers abstracted away and does the storage, does the performance and versatile for developers without even touching it? Back to your infrastructure as code comment. Well, that'll be the next one. So can I run, you know, Ansible? Tell me whatever technology you're Ansible, if you're going to run, you know, whatever workflow you're going to use for your pipeline, will it work for the API as it should, right? Without opening up the whole storage API. You can drive the car, not even look at the engine. That's the key of storage, right? And it has to be that way. And then can I get all the key abilities in the same function? So it's a good question. I'll think about it more. Well, I didn't mean to put you on the spot there. No, it's good. It's a good question. Different people's, how do you tell the pretenders from the players that's ultimately what customers are? And they do bake-offs, when you see bake-offs, we had an auto-nation earlier. Less and less, right? Well, what's the new bake-off? Just run code on it, right? Yeah, that's right. I don't know, I agree. We're all changing. Hey, thanks for coming on real quick. What's your thoughts on VMworld 2018 this year? What's the vibes you're feeling? What's the overall sentiment? What's your view? I think it's overall very positive. You kind of mentioned early on, it feels like an uplifting. I think you're seeing that across infrastructure. Infrastructure does matter. I think this big data economy, you hear a boom and it's going pretty well. So I think it's exciting and I think you feel it among the ecosystem. Any predictions for next year? What we'll see, because we like to roll the predictions from next year. Predictions for 2019, next year at VMworld. What's going to happen? Oh geez, I think more of the same. I think you're going to see even more and more how to be data-driven. Clouds are given during the cloud, but how to be more data-driven and we're going to make it even easier and easier for our clients to do that. And the ecosystem's driving that. And I think you can see more and more of that here. Yeah, he goes, this is rockin'. Thanks for coming on. This is Cube's coverage here live in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us. We're on only day two. We've got three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets, tons of interviews, a lot of great people, a lot of great content, a lot of data. We've got that data we're sharing with you here. We're data-driven on theCUBE. Stay with us. We'll be back after this short break.


Myself, Mr. A. N. Suvadeh, Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering Department, Walton Institute of Technology, SolarPort, today we will learn shear force and bending moment diagram. At the end of this session, students will be able to draw shear force and bending moment diagram for given load condition. For the simply supported beam, carry is UDL over its entire span. So first of all consider a beam supported at A and B having length L carries uniform distributed load over its entire length of rate of load W Newton per meter. Before we proceed we will consider or we will discuss the conventions for the shear force and bending moment. If you are referring the left side of the section, all upward forces are considered to be positive, downward forces considered to be negative. When you refer the right side of the section, all upward forces are considered to be negative, all downward forces are considered to be positive. Whereas in case of bending moment, bending moment at the section xx, if moment acting to the left side of the section is in the clockwise direction and to the right side of the section in anticlockwise direction considered to be positive and it is called as sagging moment. Whereas bending moment at section considered to be negative, if the moment to the left side of the section is in anticlockwise direction and to the right side of the section clockwise considered to be negative and it is called as hogging moment. So this is a simply supported beam carries UDL over its entire length. So consider reaction at A is rA and reaction at B is rB. Therefore some of the forces acting in the upward direction rA plus rB is equal to total load acting in the downward direction. So in case of uniform distributed load, the total load is nothing but rate of loading into distance on which it acts. Therefore total load will be acting total load acting in the downward direction that will be W into L. Now taking the moment about point A, what we will get rB into L, this moment is in anticlockwise direction which is equal to total load acting in the downward direction W into L and this load will act as a point load at a distance L by 2 and therefore reaction at B is equal to WL divided by 2. Therefore reaction at A can be obtained by putting the value of rB in the above equation and by putting that value reaction at A is WL by 2. Therefore reaction at A and B WL by 2 WL by 2. Now consider section XX at a distance x from the left end of the beam and calculate the shear force at section XX to its left side. What are the different forces and reaction acting to the left side of the section? There is a reaction rA acting vertically upward consider to be positive and there is a UDL rate of load W spread over distance X. So total load W into X it will act as a point load in the downward direction to the left side of the section therefore it is considered to be negative. So from this equation 1 we get that shear force varies according to the straight line law and therefore shear force at point A can be obtained by putting X equal to 0. Therefore shear force at A WL by 2. When X equal to L by 2 that is at the center of the beam that is at point C shear force at point C that will be equal to 0 and when you put X equal to L you will get shear force at point B which is equal to minus WL by 2 and your shear force diagram this is a baseline all positive values of shear forces are to be drawn above the baseline and negative value below the baseline. So shear force at A positive WL by 2 hence whenever there is a point load or reaction at that point the shear force value will suddenly increase or decrease by vertical straight line. So as the shear force at point A is positive WL by 2 the shear force value will increases from 0 to WL by vertical straight line. Whereas at point B the shear force is minus WL by 2 hence it decreases from 0 to minus WL by 2 by vertical straight line. So join these two points this is your shear force diagram. Now regarding the bending moment so consider same section XX at a distance X from the left end and calculate the bending moment at section XX referring the left side. So bending moment is nothing but moment due to the forces and reaction acting to the left of the section or right of the section. So bending moment to the left of the section due to the reaction RA the moment is RA into its distance from the section XX that is RA into X and this moment is in the clockwise direction consider to be positive. Whereas there is a uniform distributed load whose rate of loading is W spread over distance X this is total load W into X and it will act as a point load at a distance X by 2. The moment is in the anticlockwise direction to the left side so consider to be negative. So the bending moment at the section is RA into X minus WX square divided by 2 this is equation number 2. So from this equation we know the bending moment between point A to B varies according to the second degree curve or parabolic curve. Therefore when X equal to 0 you will get the bending moment at point A which is equal to 0. When you put X equal to L you will get the bending moment at point B equal to 0 and when you put X equal to L by 2 bending moment at point C that is WL square upon 8. Therefore the bending moment diagram this is baseline at point A and at point B the bending moment is 0 and from 0 the bending moment goes on increasing and it is maximum at the mid that is at point C and from its maximum value it goes on decreasing to 0 at B. So maximum bending moment will occur which is equal to WL square by 8 at point C where the shear force diagram changes it sign from positive to negative or negative to positive. Hence whenever shear force diagram changes its sign from positive to negative it crosses the baseline at that point shear force is 0 and corresponding to that point the bending moment is maximum. For further details my friends refer the textbook of strength of material by R.K. Bansal. Thank you.