Welcome to the European Central Bank podcast bringing you insights into the world of economics and central banking. My name is Michael Steen. The digital revolution is often associated with labour markets and seen as potentially destroying jobs. In the last episode we did some myth-busting on this and explained how technology is so far not that big evil robot that comes to replace our jobs. On the contrary, digitally intensive sectors can actually make important contributions to employment growth. We also explored differences between European countries and their digital economies. Today we want to dig a little deeper on the impact on jobs. We want to better understand how technological progress affects the way we work and explore the longer term implications of digitalisation on labour markets. Our first guest today is ECB economist Robert Anderton who joined us in the last podcast episode as well. So Robert, thanks a lot for coming back and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for inviting me. In the last episode we spoke about how digitalisation can lead to more jobs in the medium term, contrary to the common belief that technological progress can destroy jobs. And that's one of the results of the paper that you recently published. Now, this concept of job polarisation is one of the effects of the digital revolution on labour markets. And I was wondering if you could start by explaining what is meant by job polarisation. So when economists talk about polarisation in the labour market, we generally mean the ongoing declines in the employment share of middle-skilled jobs compared to high and low-skilled jobs. This process is associated with digitalisation. What was seen over past years is the automation of routine tasks. Jobs characterised by a high content of routine and repetitive tasks can typically be performed more efficiently by machines or computers. This has resulted in a fall in the share of middle-skilled jobs such as bank tellers, machine operators and office clerks. Meanwhile, the share of non-routine tasks is rising. This corresponds to an increase in the share of high-skilled jobs. These are particularly jobs that require complex analytical skills with limited automation potential, which tend to be complementary to digital technologies. On the other hand, automation has not yet affected many non-routine, low-skilled jobs, those that typically do not require specialist education but do require things like intuition, flexibility, adaptability or interpersonal interaction, which are hard to automate. Think of cleaners or security staff. So overall, job polarisation is where automation of routine activities has led to growth in the share of low and high-skilled jobs at the expense of middle-skilled jobs. We talked in the last episode about differences in European countries in terms of the digital economy and how digitalised they are. Some are highly digitalised, some are lagging behind. So looking at job polarisation, what are your observations here? The work on polarisation in our paper shows that over the past quarter of a century, the share of non-routine tasks have been rising, while routine tasks have been falling in Europe. This is consistent with job polarisation and may be associated with increasing digitalisation and automation. Job polarisation is alive and kicking in Europe. We also investigated whether the decline in average hours worked in some EU countries over recent decades has exacerbated or mitigated job polarisation. We found that hours worked have fallen more for some routine jobs compared to non-routine jobs and that the decline in hours worked is exacerbating the impact of job polarisation at the top and middle parts of the skill distribution. Looking forward, various studies estimate that over the next few years a significant proportion of jobs could be automated, while substantially more could undergo significant change as a result of automation. Estimates of how many jobs are at risk differ greatly from around 10% to 60%. There are also big differences across countries in terms of how many jobs are at risk of automation. Looking at some studies, it sometimes seems to me that the countries who may be most affected are those who are currently the least digitalised as the more highly digital countries have already at least partly gone through this process. But of course, as the previous podcast on digitalisation made clear the automation of some jobs will most likely eventually be at least offset by the creation of new jobs. There's also the role of artificial intelligence and people have seen recently in the news there are some now incredible AIs that can even write texts that it's hard to distinguish them from being ones that are actually written by humans. So can you talk us about artificial intelligence and what we think that might mean for the future of jobs? Well, the future may not be the same as the past as increasing use of artificial intelligence may also lead to routinisation of high-skilled jobs. AI algorithms particularly excel in prediction so they can replace humans in prediction tasks which are normally thought of as high-skilled jobs. But of course, you still need humans to decide how to use the predictions although even automating decisions has now become increasingly possible with AI. The legal profession is a perfect example. AI and other technologies can now do many of the tasks that we previously thought could only be done by highly skilled and qualified lawyers. AI software can be used to forecast legal outcomes for instance by finding and reviewing past relevant case law very quickly taking account of past decisions of an individual judge and predicting the likely result of a case. Similarly in healthcare and medicine AI is increasingly used for automating medical diagnosis. Overall, AI can allow the automation of an ever-increasing range of tasks turn in many high-skilled jobs into routine tasks. We don't yet know if this could possibly upend the relationship where technology has historically had a net positive effect on job creation. Okay, thanks a lot for your insights there Robert. Now we are going to turn to job opportunities. So one key aspect in the discussion of how the digital revolution affects labour markets of evolving tasks and more job growth is the so-called digital platform economy. And my next guest is Lara Vivian, also an ECB economist and she's looked into this topic in some detail. Lara, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me here. Okay, Lara, so you've taken a closer look at the platform economy. Help me out here, what does this term actually mean? The first challenge of the platform economy actually lies in its definition. So what all platforms have in common usually is that the two sides of the market match through a platform, an online platform. So the broad term here is sharing economy or platform economy. And they can include the platforms where, for instance, you can look for a place to rent, a chance to invest in a new product, also a specific task such as the development of a software or a ride back home. So if a task is involved such as the development of a software or a ride back home, then we say that the paid labour that is necessary to complete this task is platform work. And then there's this other phrase that I have heard of. This is the gig economy and that's linked to that part of it. Is that correct? Exactly. So the term gig economy tends to be a bit more blurred. However, it gathers the platforms which rely on platform work. Okay. And so, and just to be very super concrete here. So platform economy, that would include just use some household names. Obviously, the ECB doesn't take a stance on which ones are good or bad or anything, but so Airbnb, that's platform economy. Uber, getting one of those scooters that they're left lying around on the roadside. That's all part of the platform economy. So we know what we're talking of. Precisely. That's correct. Now, how has the platform economy evolved recently as societies are becoming more and more digitalized? Platforms tend to rely on algorithms for their business models, for instance, but also the increasing capabilities of the Internet, the decreasing prices of digital devices such as smartphone and tablets. Of course, they've all contributed to the mass adoption of those devices and in turn to the growth of the platform economy that we have observed over the last decade or so. Okay. Because a lot of this is happening on a smartphone very often, isn't it? So the size of the platform economy has increased rapidly, but how do different countries in Europe compare and how do we compare against other major economies? So in the occasional paper, we review some estimates on the platform economy for Europe and according to one study, in 2016, platforms accounted for 0% to 2% of GDP in Europe, which is obviously quite small. Belgium was the country in which platforms only accounted for 0.104% of GDP and while the largest share is about 1% in Estonia. Overall, we do seem to see that sharing economy are larger in Eastern European countries compared to Southern European countries. And in Estonia, as we heard in the last episode, is also a very highly digitalized economy anyway. Although largely driven by the sort of e-government and stuff there, right? Exactly. Okay. So let's go into maybe a bit more detail about what a typical job looks like in the platform economy and some of the possible policy challenges that this brings about. So I want to talk about the survey conducted by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in 16 European countries. And they do find that in 2018, around 1.4% of the workers engaged in platform work as the main job. And this is excluding people for whom platform work might be a secondary or seldom activity. So of course here as well, there is some heterogeneity. So the average worker tends to be male, young, educated and works few hours. So they're not doing this full time then? Exactly. If we include in the share, people, workers that might be engaged in platform work also seldomly, then the share goes up to even 18% in countries like Spain. However, depending on the platform they work in, they might be very satisfied with job flexibility and we see this for instance in platforms where they perform online tasks. Although depending on the survey, a significant percentage of workers may report that they would like to work longer hours. The degree of autonomy that they benefit from also depends on the platform. In some platforms, workers can choose what tasks they want to carry out. In other platforms, it is going to be assigned to the worker by the algorithms. So often among the issues which are raised is the worker status and therefore the level of social protection and contribution, which is often not included in the compensation of the platform worker. There are also additional issues regarding the rules on collective bargaining and access to training for instance. So what are some of the policy challenges that this might bring with it? So similarly, as with most tech companies, there is a risk of the possible emergence of dominant platforms and policy questions also arise on how to promote fair competition without offering the innovation of the platforms might bring. Some policy tools are already in place that could be used such as the regulations of mergers and acquisitions. However, some challenges are specific to the platform economy and there are new areas of policies that might need to be tackled such as, for instance, the role of algorithms in the business models and their transparency, the rating system, or there might be a need to regulate whether workers can and how they can switch from one platform to another, for instance. I will mention here that policy institutions such as the International Labour Organization or the European Commission have launched agendas precisely to tackle the policy challenges which are specific to the platform economy. Okay, so it's still very much a developing area and obviously something that needs to be looked at quite closely. Lara, thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, now we'd like to turn back to Robert for another question which is related to the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdowns which of course have seen a massive shift in the way we work towards much more flexible working arrangements with people suddenly working from home where they previously worked in offices. Just at the ECB itself we saw that more or less from one day to the next about 4,000 of us started working remotely. What are your observations on this? Could this be something that gives us a necessary push towards faster digitalisation? This is a really interesting issue right now. It's a bit speculative but it is possible that the COVID-19 pandemic could result in a permanent acceleration in the take-up of digitalisation. Sometimes this is on a scale and at a speed we would not have thought possible a few months ago and which is unlikely to be fully reversed. We've seen rapid increases in online sales of food, consumer durables etc. which may have implications for offline sales. Growth in video conferencing and teleworking may reduce international and even local travel. This can have implications for the mix of jobs on offer and could lead to some temporary disruption in the labour market particularly if some workers don't have the necessary skills for the new jobs. On the other hand though, the massive increase in the use of teleworking now makes it easier for virtual labour flows to move within and across countries to wherever labour is in demand potentially reducing unemployment. A more rapid take-up of digitalisation can also increase productivity making the economy more dynamic and increase growth and boost employment. Undoubtedly, some of the rapid increases in digitalisation in response to COVID-19 are unlikely to be completely reversed. This may provide some challenges for EU countries but it also potentially offers many opportunities for EU countries to catch up with major competitors in the adoption of digital technologies. In 2015 the European Commission announced a digital single market strategy as part of the Digital Agenda for Europe 2020 programme. Some say that the European digital single market has the potential to become one of the most valuable trade markets in the world for online business. What are our thoughts on that? The digital single market is clearly a very important policy strategy. No progress has been made but its implementation could be possibly accelerated and expanded. Let's not forget that at the EU level the aim is to further the single market in the digital domain and to facilitate the process of digitalisation across the EU. This would really help to deliver increased choice and lower prices for both consumers and firms as a result of scale economies and improved EU competitiveness. But there is also potential for more investment by the public sector in AI and robotics and faster progress in EU government. Similarly, digital startups and investment in intangible capital could be stimulated by greater provision of venture capital. Not all countries in the EU are near the technology frontier in terms of the dissemination and adoption of digital technologies. And firms at the very forefront of the digital revolution are often found outside of the EU. Perhaps a more far-reaching digital policy agenda is needed to overcome second mover disadvantages, advance closer to the technology frontier and to remain competitive in global markets. Thanks very much for those thoughts. Thank you. And thanks also to Lara. This brings us to the end of today's episode. We've discussed how digitalisation affects our tasks and learned about job polarisation. We touched on the role of artificial intelligence, talked about the challenges ahead with the growing so-called platform economy, and we explored how the current coronavirus pandemic can change the way we work for the better. This was the second episode of our podcast series on the topic of digitalisation, so do check out the first one if you missed it. And stay tuned for more on the topic later. We'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts for future episodes via social media. You've been listening to the ECB podcast with Michael Steen. If you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. Until next time, thanks for listening.


And also, Washington's top diplomat and Defense Secretary visited Kyiv on Sunday April 24 using its first official U.S. visit to Ukraine to announce a gradual return of U.S. diplomat and the nomination of a new ambassador. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin traveled to Poland on Saturday. They took a train the following day into Ukraine where they met President Vladimir Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials. The visit was designed to show Western support for Ukraine. And the Cabinet Secretaries also pledged new aid worth $713 million for Zelensky's government and countries in the region's Ukraine's defense need-appentant official set. We had an opportunity to demonstrate directly our strong support, our strong ongoing support for the Ukrainian government and for the Ukrainian people. This was in our judgment an important moment to be there, an important moment for Ukraine, for the war, an important moment to have face-to-face conversations in detail about the extraordinary support that we provided, security, economic, humanitarian, as well as the massive pressure that we've been exerting on Russia. And then to talk in detail about how we carry that forward across all of those fronts. In terms of their ability to win, the first step in winning is believing that you can win. And so they believe that we can win. We believe that they can win if they have the right equipment, the right support. And we're going to do everything we can, continue to do everything we can to ensure that that gets it. So we're engaged with the Chod, engaged with the Minister of Defense. And as this fight evolves, their needs will change. And so as those needs change, we'd like to be one step ahead. But we're going to be responsive to what the Chod and the Mod believe that they need. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


All right, we should begin. We got the sign. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our SICK-SED sessions today. And the topic is forging a stronger bump between SED and Kubernetes. My name is Wen Jia from Google. I am one of the SED project maintainers. And now I'm a co-chair of SICK-SED. And it's my pleasure to have Merrick and James to co-speak with me. Merrick, do you want to introduce yourself? Sure. Hey, I'm Mark Sharkovich. I've been an SED maintainer for the last two years. And with the creation of the SICK, I am the tech lead for it. And I'm very happy to have you here. Thanks, Merrick. Hey, team. So my name's James Blair. I work at Red Hat. And I'm a reviewer for SED along with a co-chair for SED as well with Wen Jia. That's me. All right. Now let's get into our agenda. Today we'll first start with sharing a great news about SED. Or like we haven't mentioned SICK-SED millions of times. And then Merrick will give us a deep dive about the API contract between Kubernetes and SED. Followed by that, James will give us detailed introduction of the new community model and the recent SED releases, features, announcements. We'll close this talk by providing a list of SED opportunities or activities here at Kukang. And then we'll open up for questions. So it's been many years, actually almost close to a decade now that SED had been playing a very critical role in Kubernetes. SED is the data store for configuration data, status data, metadata in Kubernetes control plane. So if we take a quick look at the brief history of Kubernetes, back in 2013, actually a decade ago, the very first SED PR was committed to the SED Ripple. And then very soon after that, we had SED v0.2 released. At the time, Kubernetes is at 0.4 release. And baby Kubernetes adopted baby SED already. Then we released version 2.0. And then we rewrite the API released to v3. And when time comes to 2018, in KubeCon Seattle on a raining day, SED was officially accepted by CNCF as an incubating project. And there, we were all getting together with the founder of SED, maintainers of SED to celebrate that moment. And then two years after 2020, SED moved to graduated level as a CNCF project. And yes, SED is a pandemic graduate. And we can blame all the data inconsistency to that. And then three years later, March this year, Hong Kong and Merrick proposed a case of making SED a special interest group in Kubernetes. And it took a little while to finalize all the details. But we did it on September 12th. That was when SED officially become a special interest group in Kubernetes. And we have the blog post on both SED and Kubernetes website. You can go to the link and find more details. And here's when you should clap. All right. So in the new SED, we adopt the Kubernetes governance. And James and I are honored to serve as a chair of the SED. And Merrick and Benjamin Wong from Vimo are the tech leads. So why do we do that? The goal was very clearly defined in the charter and vision. We do want to build the best production data store for building cloud-native distributed system, like Kubernetes. And we aim to have the most reliable distributed key value store that is simple to maintain and scales for Kubernetes and beyond. Well, how do we do that? In another word, what change does SIC-SED bring to the community? From the Kubernetes perspective, SIC-SED represents, from SED perspective, SIC-SED represents the SED interest in the Kubernetes community. And from the Kubernetes perspective, now SED adopting Kubernetes governments would make it easy to delegate the decision making to SIC-SED. And also we will adopt the consistent process from Kubernetes, like CAPS and PR reviews that will bring the SED code base to the next level, the quality of the code base to the next level. And then we will leverage the Kubernetes release machinery, security responses, and all that. So going forward, there will be continuous investment on some ongoing works. And then there are also some new initiatives associated with SIC-SED. So to name a few, we will continue building the robustness test to avoid data inconsistency. And we will codify the API contract between Kubernetes and SED. And we will continue work on the downgrade story, recovery from the backups. And we are actually planning to provide the atomics to extend SED past current dimensions. Thanks to Hong, now we have a working prototype, actually. What I do want to emphasize the most now is that without the community, without you guys working with us, it will be really, really difficult to get any of this or to get any of this done in the speed that we want. So Special Interest Group is not a magic. Nothing automatically gets better just because we are sick now. It is definitely a great milestone, but it's more of a start of a greater journey ahead of us. And we are all in this to make a difference. So how do we get involved? We do have weekly SED meetings, or donating between community meetings and bug triage meetings, like some of the other six. And we have various channels for offline conversations. We do have an ongoing mentorship program. We cannot add any more people anymore, but we are aiming to provide opportunities like this more in the future. So stay tuned. And you can find the information in the SED.io community. If you cannot find that, please submit a PR to fix the website. With that, I will give it to Marek. Yeah, thanks, Wenja. So I would now want to go more deeply into the Kubernetes HCD contract. The reason is that even though the projects have been for a really, really long time present, the contract itself was never well-defined. And there are still a lot of gaps and correctness, things that we could improve, leading to better performance and better resulting community by allowing further extension of Kubernetes CRD, allowing better extension and better performance of Kubernetes. So API machinery in Kubernetes is pretty complicated. You may start your journey on simple keep CTL get or create and learn about the reconciliation loop. But this is really just a tip of the iceberg. The most of the work to make Kubernetes more performant and scale better is done on the dark bottom on the end. And we have seen a huge improvement in performance because of this. Like there is two, the two on the bottom watch list and consistent cache reads will really reimagine the performance that we can reach. But it makes things pretty complicated. So to be sure that the whole system behaves correctly, you need to understand each and every layer. And we have made some historical mistakes here. No single person is aware of everything. And we have documented cases where Kubernetes just got it wrong. But yeah, so starting from the top, Kubernetes uses leases to manage events. And for events to have limited time spent, we assign to events a lease, which after some time will delete the event. But the problem that it creates is that Kubernetes, for performance reasons, Kubernetes assigns multiple keys or events to the lease. And this breaks Kubernetes watch because when lease expires and events are deleted, they are all deleted in single transaction. And this leading to multiple revisions pointing to the same delete event. And this never happens normally in Kubernetes. And it breaks the assumptions built by the watch. So even as of now, when you are watching Kubernetes events, the protocol can have errors and miss some, you can miss some events or delete events. So it's something that all communities are aware of. And we are working about the fix. But no one spotted it for a very, very long time. Second, HCD wanted to do a performance improvement and how to best improve a list request when you have pagination is stop looking at the old objects and skip the limit or use the limit and skip reading all the objects. But this broke Kubernetes remaining items count feature, which allows clients to know how many objects are still left in HCD to be read after multiple page requests. And unfortunately, we only cut it after HCD release. And the third was HCD watch notification implementation. So for watch to be performant for resources that don't get updated very often, we sent notification about how resource version is progressing to those watchers. So that when they disconnect, they will get much instead of reading from very, very long revision, they will be more up to date. And this, unfortunately, was broken and very broken by allowing a race between an event and watch notification update. So for Kubernetes to really optimize watch and move to the second step, we need this to work. So the story begins with HCD data inconsistencies that really made us look into how we can test and validate the correctness of the API. So it's not about simple requests going into HCD and getting a response. It's about whole distributed system providing the guarantees that we would expect. And testing this is very complicated. So even HCD has done it wrong. And we've released a 3.5. We had a couple of those issues. And this motivated a full effort to build a robustness framework which up to which can take any generic traffic, any HCD setup, and even inject failures into specific places of the code base or simulate any network failure. And we can take all this history of all this experiment, collect all the events, and then validate them for correctness, allowing us to find not only react to bugs or react to failures, we can proactively discover and hunt for the new issues. That way protecting the project before discovery. And this made us look into the Kubernetes HCD contract because if you're validating correctness and trying to explore full space of how we can use API, the best way to start is from exactly how your most popular user or your most popular users are using the API. So when investigating Kubernetes, how Kubernetes uses HCD, we found that no single person was aware of all the behaviors and all the details were hard to find because they're old code base and the code is spread around. So we did a full collaboration of creating a document that everyone could put in their ideas and their thoughts. And we compiled it in and made it public and available. Two interesting things that we discovered is we formalized how Kubernetes Sharding works. If you didn't know, Kubernetes doesn't need to run on a single HCD. You can delegate each resource to a separate HCD instance or a cluster. And this was never really defined how it works, why it works. So we tried to get it right and made everyone aware of it so Kubernetes can utilize it because some people were using it for a very long time, but most of the community was not aware of this. Second one is watch bookmarks. When the feature was implemented, we had some intention how it should work, but it was never really written down and tested for. So by defining this guarantee, we could write specific tests or verification logic that allowed us to find multiple issues with it. What are the results? We discovered that watch in a network partition can travel back in time. So if there was a long enough time for HCD member to be disconnected from a cluster so that it will not catch up by changes but request a snapshot, we found that applying the snapshot will reset the watch. And sometimes the snapshot can be older than the member where the member has already, where it was before, leading to the watch jumping back in time. So that was totally surprising find that required a very detailed definition of watch guarantees and how it behaves, and then writing a dedicated code that can validate those guarantees. Second, we discovered a duplicated event. It mostly goes into HCD client logic for resetting or retrying to get a watch stream. So if there is a network failure, HCD has some logic to try again and restore the stream, and we found that there was, in some specific case, off by one error. Yeah, so with the contract defined and the testing available, we are looking into the future to make the contract something really solid and well tested. We are still missing a couple of things that are harder to implement from the contract. For example, compaction, because compaction at HCD cuts the history, making validation of it a little bit harder. So we still need some work on that. We have a lot of failure conditions, like network partition, like panics, like delay in requests, or delay in specific place of draft. But we need to do more. For example, we are really interested in utilizing the library for injecting disk failures, so to be able to inject any arbitrary disk failure and see how HCD really responds. We technically know how it should respond. We have some hopes that it will do that, but no one ever tested it. So let's find out how to be able to announce everyone that yes, we are testing, and any bug will not pass our reviewers. Going further outside of HCD, by defining a contract, we can implement a fake implementation. It means that when Kubernetes tests run its own tests, it talks to HCD, real HCD, and this limits what we can validate. But if we had a fake that behaves like HCD, we can then bring it to Kubernetes testing framework and replace it with it and cross validate whether HCD Kubernetes works the same as on the fake and versus the real thing and see if there's any inconsistencies. And then we can do arbitrary changes in the fake to find it's called mutative testing to verify if something would change in the HCD implementation, would it break Kubernetes contract? Thus solidifying what we know that is a guarantee that might stand versus what is not. And the last thing is validating the Kubernetes storage layer. So Kubernetes has pretty, like I described, the code that is used to define contract is very spread around and it makes testing pretty hard. If we could bring the same testing, like instead of testing everything on HCD layer, test it on full Kubernetes layer and then validate that Kubernetes behavior or an API server behavior, we should be able to prove and solidify the contract on the correctness or our assumption about correctness of Kubernetes even more and then be sure that whatever performance optimization we do will not cause any correctness issue, allowing us to really go beyond in that. And that's all about the HCD Kubernetes contract. Let me go to James. Thanks, Merrick. So to kind of round out the story of closer integration between Kubernetes and HCD, we have to talk about the humans. We have to talk about the community. So fundamentally, the way we approach community membership directly impacts how our community can grow. So with that in mind and taking on all of the lessons from Kubernetes where we can, in April this year, we formally adopted a new membership model. So loosely based on the Kubernetes membership model, one of the big changes there was the new member role. So sort of like that first rung on the ladder when you're sort of interested in getting into contributing to a project. And we've also sort of clarified and tidied up the roles and responsibilities for a reviewer and maintainer as well. And if we just have a quick look at the requirements for that member role that are up on the screen there, they are really straightforward team. So just where we're deliberately vague about multiple contributions, we haven't put a number there. And essentially, as long as you've got some PRs merged and you've been involved maybe in issues, perhaps, or contributing to discussions, you just need some sponsorship from a maintainer or a couple of reviewers. And just like Kubernetes with Kubernetes slash org where you open up an issue to add yourself as a member, we now have a similar process there for LCDs. So that entry level rung is now there. And for anyone that's really keen to get involved in the project, I really invite you to take that up. Jumping forward. So I just want to highlight a couple of numbers. So there's sort of a historic trend on how the LCD project, total contributions by month have looked. And we're pretty stoked to report things are going in a pretty positive direction of late over the last sort of year and a bit. So let's hope that continues. And we'd love to have you adding to those numbers and joining the team. Looking at PR engagement. So let's say you propose a change to LCD. If we were back in July 2021, you were waiting maybe almost a week to even get a first comment on that PR, which is not too flash. But as you can see, we've been pretty hard at work and the team are doing a great job getting that down. So we're pretty happy about that. Jumping forward. So quick results. We've had this new model for six months now. We've got seven new members in the team. And we've got two new reviewers from those members so that the progression is working. It's been awesome. So we've also now got, thanks to Wengere and the team, the mentoring program underway with the first cohort started. So just know that there's going to be future iterations of that program. And it's another way to help kind of get over those hurdles of understanding the deep complexities of both its city and Kubernetes and contributing. Jumping forward. So very quickly, that kind of rounds out the story there. We'll have a look at some recent releases and some of the features. So since Amsterdam, we've had three patch releases for our 3.5 stable release branch and same for 3.4. I think we've got another 3.4 patch release coming out very shortly. So as Merrick was mentioning, robustness testing is a huge focus for us. If anyone was paying attention, there's actually a data inconsistency between Merrick's slide and my slide as well in terms of the numbers up on the screen. But we've added some more features there. So we've now got support for LazyFS, which is a Fuse-based file system that allows us to, as Merrick was talking about, inject disk failures. We now need to actually pick up on that feature and start adding a lot of instances of using it. We've now got Kubernetes-specific traffic generation for those robustness tests so we can model what Kubernetes would look like when it interacts with XED in these tests. And we've got some more network failure injection happening, which is awesome. Another big one. So if I rewind, it was just a couple of months ago, we announced tier one support for ARM64. So there was a fair bit of work, kind of, wrangling tests and workflows and trying to get equivalents between AMD64 and ARM64. So for anyone in the audience that is running your clusters on ARM, you can sleep easier at night now.  And then shortly after, had to throw that all away after we moved from static ARM64 CI to on-demand runners. So yeah, good times. Lastly, GRPC. So we've done a migration from GRPC Gateway V1 to V2. Huge bit of work, and the team did a great job with that. So this kind of simplifies the dependency tree for Kubernetes and SED. Got us off a deprecated Gateway version, sort of unblocked our updates for OpenTelemetry and GRPC itself, and that was a pretty big roadmap item for 3.6, our next minor, like next minor release. So that was awesome. Very quickly, there is the summarized view of the roadmap for 3.6. You can see we've got a few in the completed column already, which is awesome. But as you can see, still plenty to do. So we need all the help we can get. And there's issues that kind of walk through this. And the roadmap is on GitHub, if anyone is keen to kind of take a closer look at what those involve. So to finish off, we've got a couple of things still happening at KubeCon. So tomorrow, we've got a couple of talks. Now, unfortunately, they are at the exact same time. So you'll have to pick one if you're keen to learn a little bit more about EtsyD. Maybe I'm biased, but we've got a maintainer talk here from Merrick on secrets of running EtsyD. So for any cluster operators in the room, that'll be the one for you. And we've got the booth. So in the top right-hand corner of the solution showcase, we've got the EtsyD project booth and the project pavilion. So we're staffing that full-time, come and hang out, and ask questions if you're curious on anything. And just very quickly, after KubeCon finishes, we've got the SIG EtsyD Slack channel in Kubernetes Slack. We've obviously got the GitHub link there and the mailing list, so you can reach out to us there. And with that, I think we have almost perfectly five minutes for questions. So if anyone has anything on their mind, take it away. Looks like. I think this is already answered, is the plan still to stick with BeBolt for the foreseeable future? So there is ideas to replace BeBolt as part of the proposed vision for the project because we want to play to EtsyD's trends, which for now like storage was not historically great. We adapted a project that was somewhat deprecated and it both costs, like we are bound to that now to the person maintaining it. So it caused a lot of, it requires maintainer involvement and we are not necessarily specialists. So we want to play to EtsyD's trends, which is watch and reliable replication by raft, and possibly think about opening the door and making, instead of extending, replacing full EtsyD, replacing the storage layer does, opening the idea of larger class or larger storage and larger, maybe larger size and maybe multi-tenant EtsyD. Maybe just to add one very quick thing to that. So there's been a bit of discussion about whether or not you sort of have an interface for Kubernetes itself in terms of the storage layer, right? And I think rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as Merrick says, stick to the strengths of EtsyD around distributed consensus and just have an interface at that lower level for the underlying storage, yeah. Thank you. Then one other question. How solidified is the interface with Kubernetes at this point? Are there a lot of feature additions in the pipeline? So the con, like we are working, we have a document that describes all the behaviors that we expect. And we are working on defining a full Golang interface that we could, would be owned by EtsyD project, but would be used to ensure that we have it solidified that we know when some, there is a new change, that's how we extend and any extension is properly tested and verified. And now what was the last part of that? I guess more simply, are there any major breaking changes in the pipeline? Breaking changes? No, no, no breaking, like breaking changes, the main thing we will never, as long as there is version three, we will not break. It's mostly about utilizing, better utilizing watch and better utilizing watch bookmarking to make Kubernetes watch cache better, work better and serve more traffic instead of always going to EtsyD. So there will be, as long as there is version three, there will be no breaking changes. Kubernetes is really strict about this. Thank you. Just add to your B-bolt thing. The part that I talk about, about the extensibility, that's actually, we do have a prototype that building the interface between SED and B-bolt. So basically, hopefully we can swap the B-bolt with other things. There is a working prototype with SQLite underneath. So we don't have enough people to work on it because we have a list of other priorities, but if you're interested or anyone here is interested, it's a very interesting project to work on. Yeah. Hello. First of all, thank you for the effort on ARM support. Since it became a tier one support, I'm from OK, which is Oracle Cloud. We started rolling out EtsyD clusters on ARM and they are doing great so far and we are slowly rolling out across the regions. Regarding the API layer between Kubernetes and EtsyD, maybe I missed your point earlier. So is it intended to have additional implementation just like EtsyD because now it's tightly supported? Once you formalize the interface between Kubernetes and EtsyD, there can be additional implementations, maybe Postgres or... Is that one of the intentions of formalizing the interface? I can quickly respond because we are out of time and now the API machinery in Kubernetes is really strict. Our goal is not to replace EtsyD. The reason is as long as we have EtsyD as a performance goal, everyone is in the same bucket that we need to... We can optimize Kubernetes really for EtsyD and having an alternative implementation would bring more harm to Kubernetes by sharding the community too much. So that's why we are thinking about which layer to do that and it doesn't seem like at least for Kubernetes perspective that the whole EtsyD replacement would be helpful. Thank you, thanks for your contributions. Okay, team, with that I think we're out of time. Huge thanks for everyone for coming along. Great to see you all here, thanks.


An individual's in government who benefit from the rising insecurity in the country had the reason for the security challenges the country currently faces. This is particularly so in the southeast. This was said by Emmanuel Ongubiko, national coordinator of the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria. He added that Namdikamnu did not commit any crime and should be released. He stated that all Igbo's need to join hands to achieve peace in the region. The reason why we seem to have insecurity all around the country and the reason why they're escalating is because certain persons in government and out of government are benefiting immensely. These people are the people who call them conflict entrepreneurs. They make a lot of cash, a lot of capital out of conflict. So these are the individuals that are actually, you know, soaking up the violence in the southeast particularly. And what we say is that it is the duty of the political elites from the southeast region because there are quite a number of people in government from that region of the country. They have not really done sufficient, you know, they have not really shown sufficient commitments. The insecurity you have in the southeast basically, as we said, insecurity is being instigated by elements embedded in the federal government because let me tell you, people are saying you picked up somebody, Namdikamnu, he went to Kenya, the circumstances of his arrest, nobody has told anybody how he was actually apprehended, who did the apprehension. The Kenyan government is saying we don't know anything about the arrest of Namdikamnu. The government is saying we caught him in any case. How did you catch him? How did you bring him back? And there are a few allegations about renditions, illegal abductions and the rest of them. And people are suggesting political solutions to the problems, whether you like it or not, the agitation that some of these young boys and young girls in that part of the country have been doing is because of the marginalisation, because of this kind of attitude of a lot of Nigerians say, why do we have to allow the Igbo to become president of Nigeria? Why shouldn't the Igbo become the president of Nigeria? So the way forward is that the elites from that part of the country, whether you are in government, whether you are out of government, like some of the folks who have never been in government for some time, those of us who are outside the government, who represent the commoners, whether you are a member of the commoner, whether you are a diaspora, it is your responsibility as an Igbo person, as somebody from that part of the region, to contribute your position regarding how to resolve this situation in the South East. And the basic element that can bring about stability and peace in the region is for the president to release nambicano from detention. Because it is not an offence that somebody sit down somewhere in London and somebody begins to throw jibes at anybody.


some questions to see where the room was at before I really dived in. So, firstly, my name is Anna Blanche-Rabe, I'm an Australian, as you can tell by the accent, I'm an Australian trained attorney, I've been living in New Mexico for five years, I don't practice law in New Mexico. Instead, I have a communications consulting company, which has got my name in it, that predominantly works on producing content for mainly law firms, we do some social impact companies and some non-profits as well. We tend to focus on specialist content, about complicated topics, and we try to make those as accessible as possible for people, but enough about the company. What we're going to be talking about today is about international, oh, see, this woman is extraordinary, just so you all know, this is Jamie, and she is wonderful. Jamie is one of the organisers for WordCamp, and when you're at the party tonight, you have to go and say, thank you, now how do we make sure this turns on? Oh, perfect, let's turn, excellent, I love it when it works properly. That's my husband running. All right, so we've done that bit already, we've done that. The first thing I have to say ethically is that nothing I say today is legal advice. This is information only, and the idea is that it's to prompt you to go out and maybe do some more research and to get your own legal advice, depending on the jurisdiction you're in. Specifically attending this presentation, asking me a question, me answering that question, none of that creates a lawyer-client relationship, apart from the fact that, as I said, I'm not licensed to practice law in the state in which we're currently standing, aside, it's yeah, I have to say that, let's go, all right, so, okay, before I go in there, the first question I have for you all is why did you come to this talk? Just, I think really, say that again, okay, you're not going to get that, just so you know, okay, there we go, okay, yeah, that's a really good point, yeah, so kind of the idea of boundaries, national boundaries are a little bit different than maybe what they used to be, anybody else had a reason for coming, yep, okay, so some of what we're going to be talking about today might be a little beyond where you're at, I certainly have other talks and I have some resources that are going to address some very basic issues around law and being a blogger or being a developer, what we're going to talk about today is specifically where some of those things interact or intersect when you have either clients or visitors to a website that are not in the US, so that's kind of really the parameters of what we're going today. As you mentioned, there's a whole bunch of myths around these kinds of things that I hear from a lot of people, no matter where I am in the world, well, the law of that other country over there doesn't apply to me because I'm not physically in that country, as you said, the idea of boundaries and the way things have happened with our websites mean that we often have visitors from around the world, so who here has not, who can tell me that they have not had a visitor to their website, now maybe if you don't have a website, this is true, who has not had a visitor on their website from another country? Okay, how many of you routinely have visitors every day from more than 10 countries? 20 countries? Yep, many people here know that one of their websites is banned in China. It's actually not my business website, strangely enough, it was actually a blog that I was writing when I was doing a PhD, which didn't get finished, by the way, just so I don't have a doctor in front of my name. Yes, I had a friend who wanted to read something I'd written and he was living in China at the time and he sent me an email and said, just so you know, your website is banned in China. So I'm like, I don't know, that's a claim to fame maybe now. All right, so some of the laws we're going to talk about today, even though you might be in the US, you still might have to think about some of them, regardless of the fact that you've never even traveled outside the US. So that's the first thing. Second thing, we're going to talk a little bit today about intellectual property and we're going to talk a little bit today about contracts, especially for the designers and the developers among you. How many designers and developers do I have? Good, that's what I was hoping. I was hoping that because for designers and developers, I want you to just be aware of some of the pitfalls with working with international clients. At the moment, I have clients in five other countries that will probably build. But what is really fascinating for me with some of my content-based clients is that they often don't understand how to make sure to protect themselves. So when you sign a contract, what law applies to that contract, first and foremost, is going to be written in the contract. The first piece of advice I do have for you today is general advice, is read your contracts. I know they're boring, I know they may seem long, but there will always be a clause usually either towards the very bottom of the contract or towards the top that explains what jurisdiction's laws apply to that contract. Now, that can sometimes be a point of negotiation, but know that usually the bigger entity or the more complex entity will usually win that argument. So if you're dealing with a multinational or an international company and they send you a contract and it has a particular country or jurisdiction's laws as being the ones that apply, it might be a little hard to get them to shift. But if it's a B2B transaction where you're also dealing with another small business and you feel like you've learned enough to know that a particular jurisdiction is not going to be favourable to you, it's definitely something you want to explore. Now, what I can also tell you is that how many of you have companies that were formed, legally formed in a different jurisdiction to where you do your day-to-day business? No one else? My company was legally formed in Delaware? I live day-to-day in New Mexico. I'm registered as a foreign, my company is registered as a foreign entity in New Mexico. So what jurisdictions do we have people's companies registered in in this room right now? Texas? New Mexico? Minnesota? Alabama? Anywhere else? Say that again? So you don't have a company registration in the US at the moment? It's just registered? No, but you legally formed in the US? Do you have an employer identification number with the IRS? Okay. So international companies are another thing. I have a company based in Australia that does no business with my American clients. My American company does that.  In the first instance, that should be an attorney, although often an accountant can also be involved in some of those discussions with you. What state is best for you to file in? And how to maintain that over time, especially if you're going to be moving around. The third myth that we're going to talk a little bit today is that I own the copyright to everything I create. Now, I am throwing the cat among the pigeons here a little bit. Is there anyone in the room, and as I said, I'm playing devil's advocate that does believe that that's true. I own the copyright to everything I create. Yeah, here's the problem. What if you created that under a work for hire contract? You don't own the copyright. We're going to talk a little bit about what I mean by work for hire, because that's going to be particularly relevant when we're dealing with certain other countries. So yes, in the US, generally speaking, the default is you do own copyright for everything you create. However, if there's a work for hire contract, that's not the case. And as I said, certain specific, very prominent international countries have different rules around that. The next myth that I often deal with, especially when I'm dealing with bloggers, is that there's nothing I can do about someone stealing my words, images and designs. Does anyone believe that that's true? There's nothing you can do? Okay, there's a lot you can do. All right? And it's okay to believe in the value of the words and images you create. In fact, I would argue that everyone in this room needs to believe in the value of what they're creating. Because unless we have an attitude of respect towards each other in that way, I think it makes the world a not-so-nice place. But that's not really the lawyer part of me. That's a bit touchy-feeling. But basically, yes, we're going to talk a little bit about that. We're also going to talk about what happens if someone in another country steals your images and your ideas. Because I don't know about you, but I've had a few Russians steal my images and words over time. Anybody else had people in another country steal? Yep. Which countries? Do you know?  So they kind of created a sort of mural website? Yeah. Okay. That's the second time. Okay. Sounds like we need to find you a host that has some good security. It's a language that I can purge in. I don't know. Okay. Yeah, sometimes it can be interesting. So we'll talk a little bit. We won't get into too much in it. Finally, you need to intend to market to an audience in that second or third country for the lord there to apply. We'll talk a little bit more in detail why that's not always the case. Why your intentions might be good, but it doesn't necessarily mean that that's how it goes. Here we go. I want to answer this question before we even started. Why does this matter? Why do we even have this discussion? Because it's actually a worldwide web. Has anyone here been watching Holt and Catch Fire or has watched Holt and Catch Fire? Okay, yeah. Holt and Catch Fire is a television show. It's an AMC show that's currently on Netflix, yes, or Amazon Prime, one or the other. It's one of those two because that's all I have. They talk about it's kind of a fictional imagining of what the beginning of the worldwide web and ISPs look like. And it struck me as I was writing this just how worldwide it's become for something that really, in its very early days of military research around the world has turned into huge. So the first question I'm going to ask you that I want everybody to kind of think about is where is your host and web server based? Where is the based? Yes, well you run an ISP, right? So this is true. Does anyone use a host or a web server that's based overseas? No, I'm probably the only one again. So my web server and host is based in the UK. I've been using that web server and host for eight years. Since I started using them I've lived in five different countries. One of the reasons that I chose to stay with them has actually been the increasing, well the changes internationally to the ease with which law enforcement bodies and investigative bodies can access your server data, the barriers to that. So one of the questions I just really want to throw out there to you is to think through why you're using a server based where you're using them. Now your answer may come out exactly the same. I'm using a server based in the US and that's all I want to do. But for those for whom you may have some sensitive user data or you may have user data where you do want to potentially look at siloing that data either based in a specific country or because you are concerned about some of those thresholds for release of that user data to law enforcement, just think about where you might want to do that. I was speaking to Pantheon earlier. They were saying right now they can't silo it specifically to a certain country or to a location even outside the US. But from their perspective that might be something that will come in the next couple of years. So just bear that in mind. The next thing that I want to kind of just throw out there as key policies that I would argue every single website needs to have to legally protect themselves. This is pretty basic stuff. I would argue that every website should have a privacy policy, visible and public on the website. Every website should have, if they're using any kind of branded content how many in the room have employed branded content? Does anyone not know what I mean by branded content? Branded content is when a company pays or compensates a website owner or blogger to talk about a product. So there's usually some form of disclosure. It could be a giveaway. If you're doing any of that kind of thing, which bloggers in the room or even organizations who run blogs in the room might do, you need to make sure you have a disclosure policy on your website in addition to the Federal Trade Commission guidelines, like disclosures that you should have at the top of each post that you're writing about these things. I do have a reference to the FDC document later in the presentation. Thirdly, if you have any kind of legal or professional services that you are talking about on your website in your content. So you might be designing a website for an accountant, for a physiotherapist, for a personal coach, personal trainer. Those kinds of websites should contain legal and professional disclosures, explaining the qualifications of the individual, but they should also include industry-appropriate disclaimers and waivers. By that I mean, if you have a personal trainer's website, you want to make sure that includes things like results not guaranteed. We are not providing nutritional advice. Use these things at your own risk. I know on one level it might just seem like legalese, but there's actually been significant litigation on these topics. So as a general blanket, these are definitely things that I think you should consider, including on your websites. For designers, asking these questions and developers, asking these questions when you're adding those content pieces to that checklist. I didn't check Nathan's list from earlier today to see whether these are questions he had on his scope discussion, but certainly. Now these things, largely speaking, you're going to find samples. I don't recommend you just go to a website and lift what's on their website. I do recommend that you do your own reading, find something that you think might be close to what you want, and then go to an attorney in your local jurisdiction and have them review it. There's two reasons why that's good. The first is if you take something with you, it's going to cost you less than if they write it from scratch, generally speaking, as long as you're not bringing them something completely out of left field from a totally different jurisdiction. Secondly, by doing that, you're also going to be able to test out, and I encourage all of you, when you are seeking legal advice for any of this kind of work, you need to make sure that the attorney you're working with has some familiarity with the industry. So whether it's the developing, marketing, designing kind of industry, or whether it's content creation, intellectual property in terms of the writing side. Just ask the question, by taking something with you, you're going to get a better feel for whether or not the person on the other side of the table understands what's going on. Okay, just quickly, for privacy policy must-haves, just as the second paragraph explains this, the privacy policy should detail what is done with location data specifically, how that data is shared between the content provider, the mobile provider, and any third party providers such as ad networks, and how a user can revoke consent to the use of their data. Privacy policies should also indicate if you are collecting geotag data, like their actual physical location, it should also indicate how you use any information they may provide to you on the website. We're not going to talk about it HIPAA any more than to say this. If you are trying to collect HIPAA data on a website, you really need to think again. Be very, very careful. I'm talking to some of the global sponsors and most of them told me that they are not HIPAA compliant hosts. So just be aware that, and I'm sure that, do any of you deal with HIPAA websites that deal with HIPAA? Okay, you guys know how complicated this stuff is. But just be aware for everyone else, if someone is starting to talk about wanting to collect sensitive personal data on a website, ask them to think again and really give you a good justification for why that's happening, because that is definitely one area that can open you up to litigation. The reason why privacy policies have become a must-have is that there has been within the US significant litigation about not having these privacy policies. So for example, people collecting data on their website and then using it in ways that hasn't explicitly being given permission for, i.e. selling it on to third parties and having someone be able to track that back. Finally, the privacy policy should be written in clear plain language and include contact information for where people can raise any concerns they might have. I've given the specific app example because I'm going to talk about that next. Did anyone not hear about the iTunes situation last year where over a thousand apps were pulled off iTunes because of an issue with this? Okay, we're going to talk about that. Let me go to... No, I can just talk about it now. So basically what happened was that a lot of over a thousand apps had employed a third-party ad platform to put ads on their apps. Now, that third-party ad platform happened to be located in China, which in and of itself is not a problem, but that Chinese owner of that company decided to data-mine all data-mine from those apps and that basically caused a huge kind of privacy issues and what iTunes did was just kicked off any app on their platform that had used that third-party provider.  As far as I know, none of the app developers were complicit in that. None of the app developers knew that that third-party provider, service provider, was doing that to the data. So just be aware that you often can be held responsible for what third parties do in your name. Okay, for branded content, one thing I would say even when you're dealing internationally, so if you open up a giveaway to the rest of the world, which might be something that you might do, just make sure that you understand the rules on, say, raffles or giveaways in another country. Some countries consider a giveaway, especially if you're choosing a name at random to be a form of gambling, especially if you ask them to do anything to enter. So, for example, if you ask them to make a comment to enter, that might be considered sufficient consideration to be considered gambling. So just check, if you open it up to another country, make sure you understand what their country's rules are.  If you'd like a copy of this presentation at the end, just leave me a business card, and I'll email it out to you. We talked a little bit about legal and professional disclosures, and I mentioned that you should go with an attorney with samples in hand. These are the areas that I would suggest that you really need to be particularly concerned about. Cover yourself with contracts. Once you understand which jurisdiction a contract is going to be governed by, you need to have local legal advice to make sure that contract's going to be in your best interest. Consumer protection laws vary as do international property laws. So very briefly, for bloggers and graphic designers, make sure you have a contract and the contract clearly details copyright ownership. So if you are doing contract work with an agency in Australia, the default position is you do not own anything you create if you're doing it as a contract because the default position is work for hire. Work for hire basically means anything you produce is a fruit of that employment relationship and therefore is owned by the person who commissioned you to create it. Is all work done under an employer work for hire in America? No. Now, employer, are you an employee? Generally speaking, your employment contract will talk about that, and generally speaking, the answer is yes. If it relates to your employment duties, if it relates to your job position duties, but we can... You want to have an actual open discussion with them about that because the less you talk about it, the more likely it's going to be covered under your employment agreement and you may not want that. You need to make sure that you think about defending your copyright through DMCA takedown notices and platform-specific forms and requests. That's where, even if the copyright infringement is happening from somewhere else in the world, if they're doing it on a platform that has that takedown request and a lot of major platforms around the world have that, file those requests no matter how minor it may seem. I probably average five of those a month. I'm almost at a point where I'm just invoicing them for the use of the images. Understand that some countries require you to register copyright in an image or in a computer program or an app in order to ensure protection for statutory damages. So, in the US, well, anything you create immediately has copyright act protection. In order to maintain larger statutory damages up to $15,000 and more, you need to make sure you register it. Now, we can talk more about what that looks like, so mostly that doesn't mean you can't claim copyright infringement and get some compensation from the person infringing, but I'm talking about the statutory damages or why you need to register. So, the EU at the moment has what they call this proposed link tax. It's going to be a tax on using links to published news articles. It's going to be crazy if it happens. Spain introduced it and Google just went, we're out of here. And actually withdrew all of their Google news services from Spain. Germany also has it. Google hasn't quite done the same thing there. There's also a second European proposal that would require websites that have audio files to do what they call upload filtering. And that's going to cost anywhere between $10,000 and $25,000 for a medium enterprise to do this. And the idea is that it's supposed to check whether or not an audio file has copyrighted material in it. I suspect that's not going to ultimately be successful, but it is a proposal on the table that you probably should be aware about. I have a huge list of resources if people are interested. I added the Nepalese one for our Nepalese participant today. If you have a question about a specific country, send me an email and I can see what I can find for you. I think that's about... I'll leave this developer's one up there. The reason why I brought up the EU stuff is, generally speaking, what the EU does, the US often follows, even if it's up to 50 years later. The US often follows. So it can be very helpful to keep aware of what's happening in other parts of the world. Yeah, we didn't talk a lot about the location data and international privacy law. Does anyone have any questions? Before we're done, yes. So that's not going to be a... So when I'm talking about a privacy policy on a website, that's going to be when people visit the website. What you're talking about is a privacy policy that you might have someone sign for you to use their photograph. What is it that typically has a thing to do with it? Okay, so these are two different things. What you're talking about actually has nothing to do with websites at all. It does in the sense that if you have someone who has given you what we would... In the industry we call that a model release or a release of use of likeness. So somebody is giving you a license to use their likeness for publicity for your business or your organization. So that would be a separate document. Sometimes people have it on the bottom of tickets when they buy a ticket to an event. It will tell you, I know I signed a waiver to be filmed at this event. And it will explain that on there how you're giving permission for it to be used. But usually it's a separate thing. That's different because that's a two-way agreement. The privacy policy I was talking about on a website is very much a broadcast statement about how you're actually using data, location data predominantly. Does that help? Okay, anybody else? Yep. Yes, so New Mexico would be... It's usually this... Generally speaking, when I'm talking like this, I'm talking about a state or I'm talking about a country. Yeah. Yeah. And the rules for how a contract is governed in New Mexico are different than Texas, for example. Texas is much friendlier to the company who drafted the contract. There are other states that are much friendlier to the vendor, so maybe the little guy. Good, we're done. All right.


Today's lecture, we'll focus on World War II in the United States. In this lecture, we're going to talk about some of the factors that led to the war. We'll also focus on how the United States gets drawn into the conflict, and finally we'll talk about the impact of the war on the United States. In one very fundamental aspect, the war transforms the United States. It goes from being an economically powerful, but politically isolated nation to becoming an international superpower. War also affects the United States in a number of other ways. Certainly there's a very broad social impact. Women's participation in the workforce expands dramatically. It goes from about 12 to 18 million people. In other words, women go from being a fourth to about a third of the nation's workforce. It's also important because it helps give a boost to the civil rights movement, which we'll talk about in a future lecture. It also leads to an important aspect with the Americanization of ethnic populations. There were a lot of immigrants in the United States, and many had lived in largely immigrant communities. As a result of the war, these immigrant communities in some ways are shaken up a little bit. A lot of people are drafted into the military, and they serve in mixed units from people all over the United States. As a result, a lot of these immigrants become more broadly American and lose some of their immigrant identity, and accept more of a broader American identity. One of the last really important aspects of the war is that it leads to the development of nuclear weapons, which of course have a huge impact on the United States in the post-war period, during the Cold War, as we'll talk about in a future lecture. It also leads to the rise of a very polarized political system with the United States and the USSR, or the Soviet Union, as these sort of polar opposite nations that are facing off against each other throughout the world in the post-war period. The World War II has a very dramatic and long-lasting impact on the nation. First, we're going to talk a little bit about some of the causes of the war itself. The war just doesn't happen for no reason. It happens for a number of very, very important reasons. The first of these is that the war in some ways is caused by the settlement of the First World War. The Versailles Treaty, and here we have an image of some of the German delegates at the Versailles Treaty, that settles the war, the World War I that ends in 1918. The Versailles Treaty in 1919, beginning in 1919, largely establishes agreements in the war. One of those agreements is that Germany, the defeated nation of World War I, has to pay these massive reparations, these massive financial payments to Great Britain and France as a consequence of essentially paying back the cost of the war. And since Germany blamed as the instigator of the conflict, it's seen as being responsible for making whole these nations that had lost millions of men and millions of dollars in the conflict. This, of course, led to very harsh feelings in Germany. Not without some justification that they were being punished for the war, which they felt wasn't simply their fault. It was the fault of many nations, not simply theirs. So as a result of the Versailles Agreement, Germany is placed in a very disadvantageous position in Europe. And Germany also goes through a period of chaos in the post-war years, economic chaos, political chaos, and social chaos. One of the things that comes out about as a result of the war is an effort by the winning nations, the victorious nations, to create some sort of an organization to help mediate disputes, to keep another war from happening. And this body, as we know it, is the League of Nations. Well, the League of Nations is not particularly effective. One of the reasons being that the United States never joins it, for reasons we talked about previously. But another reason is that the League of Nations has one of the missions is that they can use armed force to prevent nations from acting illegally. But that never happens. The League of Nations never really has the strength to do that effectively. And so the League of Nations, while it's intended to be this peacekeeping and organization to promote world peace, really never serves effectively in that role. Another thing that's created during this time period, another international agreement, is something that's called the Kellogg-Briand Treaty. And this treaty is signed by the head, by the United States, and by France. And the objective of this treaty is that both nations agree that they will not engage in offensive war, that war is not going to be used as a solution to international political problems, and eventually other nations sign it as well. And the idea of this treaty is a treaty to eliminate war, to make war illegal, to make war not a strategy to be used to solve the differences of opposing nations. Well, between the League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Treaty, many people think, oh, we've solved the problems that have caused World War I, and we'll never again face another war. But the reality is things just don't quite work that way. Following World War I in the 1920s, Germany is in chaos, as I mentioned. It's going through a number of chaotic events. One of these is economically Germany is in very difficult circumstances. It's being forced to make these huge reparations payments. It can't afford it, and so it literally starts printing money to make these payments. And this leads to a period of what's known as hyperinflation, where the German money, the mark, which is the German currency, becomes nearly worthless. And in fact, this image shows people have just discarded their mark notes in the streets and street sweepers taking them and pushing them into the gutter. Literally, money becomes almost worthless in Germany for a period of time. And this leads to chaos and leads to extremist political movements like the Nazi Party wanting to get involved in politics and sort of avenging the German nation. Another thing that this economic chaos does is it leads to good middle-class citizens losing most of their savings. Here we have a German bank that's going out of business and people are lining up to try to get their money out of the bank if possible. So these bank runs led to many people in Germany losing confidence in the government, losing confidence in these financial institutions, and helped bring about in some ways a growing interest in extremist movements like the Nazis. We see the same thing happening in other nations as well in Europe. In Italy, for instance, we have the great General Lisimo and Benicio Mussolini, who emerges in the 1920s as a member of what he creates as the fascist party. That is intended in eventually beginning in 1922. He sees his control of the Italian government. He marches on Rome with his supporters and the King of Italy essentially gives him control of the nation as Prime Minister and he becomes sort of a de facto dictator.  People don't have as many rights, but essentially creating an alliance of a powerful state and a powerful government or a powerful economy that's intent on expansion outwards and taking over weaker nations that are less able to defend themselves. And this is a trend that continues during the 1920s and certainly by the 30s when the Nazi party eventually gains control through legal elections initially and Adolf Hitler becomes the German Chancellor and continues this sort of desire to create a strong German state and essentially to give up on the agreements that Germany had made under the Versailles Treaty, rebuild Germany's military, rebuild Germany's air force. Europe becomes increasingly unstable. Germany grows increasingly unstable in the 30s because of the worldwide economic depression. It starts in the United States, but it spreads worldwide and Hitler is able to take advantage of German unemployment, German dissatisfaction, middle class dissatisfaction with the government and with banking systems to seize control and promise the German people that he's going to create a strong, powerful nation once again. Well, these aren't the only two sources of disruption during the 20s and 30s. In the middle of 1930, we have the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. And this breaks out in 1936 after a disputed elections, whereas a socialist government is elected, the Republicans as they're known, and the Nationalists under General Franco see this as an illegitimate election and they begin the Civil War. The Nationalists gain support from both fascist Italy and from Nazi Germany. The Republicans on the other hand who are socialists, the only nation that would provide them any support was the Soviet Union. And this war in some ways is sort of almost a mini version of World War II. The powers that oppose each other in the conflict are very much the same as the powers in the war. Ultimately, the Nationalists triumph and they defeat the Republicans and Franco gains control of Spain and maintains that control for probably nearly 30, 40 years. But needless to say, what we're getting at here is that Europe becomes increasingly unstable during the decade of the 1930s because of the worldwide depression and because of national political extremism. We also see the same thing going on in Asia, especially Japan. Japan had been increasingly interested in expanding beyond the home islands and gaining control of territories in Northern China and parts of Southeast Asia. In the 1920s and early 30s, Japan launched an invasion of Manchuria, which is Northern China, puts troops on the ground, who eventually take over and Manchuria becomes a Japanese colony essentially and the Japanese move in and take control of this region. And so not only in Europe but also in Asia, the ideas that peace and prosperity will ensure that everything will be nice and happy. These ideas are starting to fall apart because the economic depression of the 1930s political extremism is all leading to a very messy, messy situation both in Europe and in Asia. Well, the question is, what's the United States doing during this period? And the reality is the United States is largely watching from the sidelines. American attitudes as it says during the interwar period. Well, the American attitude during the interwar period is isolation. The Americans are trying very hard to remain isolated from what's going on around the rest of the world. America has decided that after the First World War, that war was not a good thing. War, in fact, was a very bad, bad circumstance and the United States didn't want to be involved in it. And so the United States benefited from its isolation from Europe and its isolation from Asia and argued that the United States would try to stay out of any future war. One of the organizations that was very much important in promoting this was the so-called America First Committee. The aviator Charles Lindbergh was a member of that committee and gave many speeches talking about how America needed to stay out of all these bad circumstances happening in Europe and bad circumstances happening in Asia. Well, the American response to this was to embrace neutrality. And one of the ways they did this was by passing the Neutrality Acts from the beginning in 1935 which is that U.S. firms couldn't do business with belligerent nations, nations at war. I also said that U.S. citizens couldn't travel on non-neutral vessels. So if U.S. citizens were killed because ships were sunk, well, it was their own fault because the government had made it illegal. Now, of course, these attitudes become challenged as the situation in Europe and in the Pacific becomes increasingly unstable in the late 1930s. Nazi Germany in 1938 invades and unifies with Austria called the Anschluss. It also invades Czechoslovakia in 1939. And with this action, it's becoming very clear that war is going to break out in Europe. In 1940, the Nazis invade Poland and the Russians also assist them with that by invading the other side of the country. And so with these events, it's becoming very clear that Europe is headed for war. And how is the U.S. going to respond? Maybe the U.S. is neutral. It can't get involved in this conflict. And many people in the United States argue strenuously that the United States shouldn't get involved in this conflict. But American leaders, particularly President Roosevelt, who was very sympathetic for Great Britain, was very sympathetic for France, very much felt that Nazi Germany was a threat to the United States and one way or another, argue that the U.S. has to do something to support in some ways nations like France, Soviet Union, and Great Britain who are threatened by the Nazis.  And so initially, he conceived of an idea called cash and carry. The idea behind cash and carry is that nations that work could buy military equipment or could buy civilian equipment from the United States from American businesses as long as they pay cash for it and as long as they haul it on their own ships so that American shipping and American firms are not involved anyway in taking material to war zones. And this is sort of an initial step. The idea is that nations like Britain and France could buy equipment, buy weapons, buy supplies in the United States and use them to fight against Nazi Germany. Well, this only goes so far because after a while Great Britain especially can't afford to buy supplies in the U.S. and just doesn't have the money. And so instead, the United States government goes a step further and creates what becomes known as land lease. And under land lease, that idea is that nations like Great Britain or the Soviet Union could essentially borrow military supplies from the United States. Of course, the idea of borrowing military supplies is kind of absurd because most of the cases they're going to be destroyed. They're not going to be able to be returned. But the idea was that land lease would allow military supplies from the U.S. to go to Great Britain to fight against the Nazis and would also go to places like the Soviet Union to fight against the Nazis or for the Soviets to fight against later on the Japanese. And eventually at some point after the war, those costs would be returned to the U.S. One of the most immediate aspects of land lease is in the case of Great Britain, the United States gives Great Britain a bunch of old World War I-era naval destroyers because the British Navy was being decimated by German submarines. And in return, Great Britain gives the United States basing rights in Newfoundland and many parts of the Caribbean so that American naval vessels can operate in that region. And so in return, similarly with the Soviet Union, we're giving them tanks and supplies in return for promises that America would have access to resources in the Soviet Union. But needless to say, this idea of no foreign entanglements means very strongly entrenched among many, many people in the United States. And Roosevelt in some ways is frustrated because he wants the U.S. to do more to assist Great Britain, but the U.S. government, U.S. Congress and the American public really aren't in favor of that. Well, that situation changes abruptly at the end of 1941. And the end of 1941, a very dramatic event happens. The Japanese government decides to attack the United States and try to defeat and destroy the American Navy so that the Japanese can expand in the western half of the Pacific without any opposition. The U.S. and Japan, their relationship had become increasingly strained during 1941. Eventually the U.S. had frozen Japanese assets. Japan, Japanese had a lot of money in the United States. America froze those assets. And then America cuts off the supply of oil to Japan in retaliation for Japan invading China and invading other areas as well. The Japanese decide they can't take this any longer.  And so in December 7th, 1941, Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and utterly devastate the American Navy, nearly destroy the American Navy with the exception of few aircraft carriers who proved very important in later fighting over the next year. Well, the attack on Pearl Harbor is the last straw. America enters the war. Of course, the Japanese are the ones who attacked.  And so initially the United States only declares war in Japan, you know, to avenge Pearl Harbor.  And so by the second week of December of 1941, the United States is at war with Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. A two-front war, a war over two oceans in Europe and in Asia. And the United States for the next four years is tasked with defeating these nations and aiding other countries in Asia and other countries in Europe, like Great Britain, in the task. Well, this is a very monumental undertaking. The United States has to transport goods, equipment, ships, men, personnel across two major oceans to do the fighting. And this is something that takes a lot of resources. So as a result, for the United States government, not only is the fighting about military aspects, but the fighting is also about equipment, supplies, transportation resources. And as a result, this war really becomes a war of mobilization, a war of getting the supplies where they need to go. And so much of the war that's fought is a war of logistics. It's a war of trying to create a nation that's ready and equipped to produce military equipment and supply that military equipment across the sea to support troops in the field. So as a result, much of the bureaucracy of the New Deal, these government agencies that have been created to help administer the New Deal are turned to support government efforts to create military equipment and weapons to fight this two-front war. And as a result, military production goes through a very important shift. Industrial production in the United States has probably led the world in industry. Many industries are retooled to produce military equipment, produce engines for aircraft, to produce bombs and other supplies for aircraft to drop on the Japanese or on the Germans, to produce other kinds of things to recruit troops into the armed forces. Of course, many people volunteer after Pearl Harbor, but they're also as a draft, and the draft is utilized to bring people in to the war. And so the United States government does a really tremendous job bringing all of these resources to bear to fight the conflict, involving rationing of supplies, involving using research and development from American universities and colleges, expanding the size of the federal government to oversee this effort. The government goes from being about a million employees to nearly four million employees, creating things like the War Production Board, the War Manpower Commission, the Office of Price Administration and the Office of War Information to provide reasons why America are fighting essentially wartime propaganda. And this huge collaboration between the federal government, between American individuals, and ultimately between American industry, is what helps create the equipment and resources necessary for the United States to be successful in this military struggle. And so ultimately by 1944, the U.S. and its allies launched an invasion of Europe, land in Normandy, and they land in southern France, and they also land in Italy, even before that, in the Pacific. The United States is pushing the Japanese out of the islands that they had conquered in parts of the central Pacific. And eventually the United States is very successful, and in defeating Nazi Germany in 1945 in the spring, in the summer they drop two atomic bombs on Japan, which effectively ends the war in the Pacific, and as a result the United States is successful in winning this conflict. But the war itself of course has many consequences, least of which is that the United States emerges as the most powerful nation. The war leads to the creation of the United Nations. The League of Nations is scrapped, and this new United Nations, which is led by the nations, the United States and its allies who are victorious in the struggle, emerges as a new organization to help promote world peace. One of the other aspects of this conflict is that Europe is divided between America and its allies in the West and Soviet Union in the East. We'll talk more about this in the next lecture, but this division really kind of anticipates bigger struggles that take place, because the United States and the Soviet Union are the two most powerful nations emerging from the war. The Soviet Union, the most powerful military, has a huge military, the United States economically most powerful, but it has nuclear weapons, and that creates a real standoff between these two countries. Well, Europe at the end of this is utterly devastated. Germany is just obliterated, many cities are obliterated and completely wiped off the map, and it's in a very bad position. And only the United States possesses the economic resources to help rebuild Germany and Western Europe, to rebuild Japan and Eastern Europe, and as a result the US begins to sort of flex its muscles economically. One of these is through an agreement that's called the Bretton Woods Agreement or Treaty. And this is an agreement that's signed in the United States and creates a system in which the US dollar becomes the official, essentially the benchmark currency internationally. Everything is based on the US dollar. It also creates the International Monetary Fund to help provide economic stability and prevent future great depressions. And the World Bank, essentially the kind of the foundations for the World Bank are also conceived during this time period as well. And so as a result of the war, the US, as I said, emerges as this very powerful nation. It becomes economically the dominant nation worldwide, and because of nuclear weapons it also becomes the dominant, at least initially, military power in the post war years. So consequently, World War II has a tremendous impact on the United States. By being drawn into the conflict once again, the United States goes from being this very isolated but economically powerful nation to being essentially a world superpower, to being this new nation that will dominate the rest of the world throughout the remainder of the 20th century. Thank you.


The power of the Russo brothers who Russo brothers. I don't know that is the part of the reason the budget for Citadel is so high is because there were creative differences between them and the showrunner at the time and The showrunner left and they got the decisions made creatively that they wanted Which typically that is not the case kids Typically the showrunner is the big and that made me wonder are there showrunners for the shows I know they call them the executive producers there Maybe that's all they are but do the TV series in India have showrunners like we do where that's like the one who has full creative control over every aspect of the show Probably I mean yeah, do they call them showrunners those like cuz it's typically that's what executive producing used to be Mm-hmm, but but typically if there's a battle between your showrunner and your director the directors are the ones that leave And now with the Russo brothers my friend It might be Amy is probably still obviously people the money are usually the ones that especially big commercial. Yeah, especially TV But also India is unique in the fact that its directors are also mega stars So like I said, so I show movies of the world. Yeah The Shaw Zoyas or whomever whoever I'll have like the extreme Power yeah, and they people go see just for their films as well Yeah, but also if it's like a first time like the guy who directed Ranveer's film this past year He probably if like it was a much bigger film. I don't know if like the exec producer might have been the one that Has the power cuz yeah, I just didn't know if they were called them showrunners because I haven't heard that term in it India television, yeah, maybe Karen Johar. That's what I thought Today we got a trailer what kind called it's a diamond. Yeah trailer. Uh-huh, and it's called Vendu That and that too, got to forgive any mispronunciation. Ladies and gentlemen, it has Cillimbaras and TR Gotham Vasudev Menon and Our nun bar and it's a lemon Tamro gangster film cool. It's coming out in two parts apparently Like Gangs of Wasp or I guess nice And so just a little bit of the info. Yeah, this is forgive the mispronunciation, but I know about this film. You know about this. I've heard about this film. Have you yep from her? I heard it through the grapevine More like the masala vine because India That's Super What's your name, Vidhya? I'm from Pohamunimam. Everyone is trying to escape. They are trying to get away from here. But if they try to escape, they will get caught. If you tell them right, they won't be able to see you. They won't be able to see you. Sounds okay. Yeah, I was gonna say. There is no story in this. Because it's a life. There is meaning. There is no time. But until now, this is just a game. There is nothing else. You can't go, can you? Look here. No matter how big you are, you won't be able to get away. You won't be able to see anything. If you escape, they will let you go. There will be a god even if you try to escape. There will be a god. If not, there will be a god. Since September. Yeah, September 15th. That took a tonal shift, didn't it? It did a little bit. Like in the beginning, it was like gangsta gangsta gangsta. And it almost became more gentle with the song behind it. Yeah, almost like a story of love to survive. Well, I'm sure it's obviously a part of it. It will probably be someone's love story. Yeah. The next scene after that will be their love getting shot. Yeah. Sounds like I got to make us care for the characters. But yeah, it took a major tonal shift to there. Yeah. It looked like the acting would be good. And it was like it would be kind of this gritty kind of tale. It just, I don't know that I would have had that tonal shift. How gritty? I don't know if they're holding their cards close to the vest for lack of a better term in regard to if it's going to be gangs-ish, is it going to have the same kind of gritty, dangerous violence that takes place? Well, part of it, it looked like it would. It did for a second, but then it kind of tamed. And I don't know if that's the scope of the film or if that was just the scope of the trailer. Yeah. But it looks good. It looks like it visually would look like a nice... Acting looks good? Acting looks good. All that kind of stuff. I doubt the music will be any good. Yeah. Because, I mean... He's never actually done anything. No, it's really hard to sit through films. He's scored because it's just so never right, you know? It's just always...  You're going to tell him you're joking? No, because if they don't know I'm joking, then I can't help them. Understand? It's like him and John Williams or Hans Zimmer, all these overrated composers that have been just given awards left and right. Just, you know... What's... What's... Hans Zimmer's worst score to you? Worst? Yeah. Everybody always asks best, what's his worst to you? I'd have to look through the page of his stuff because I can't think of one that's bad. So... But just not as good as the others, what is it? I honestly don't know. I'd have to look at his filmography because he's done so many films and be reminded of one that's not good. I don't base him on popularity, but I can't think of a score. It's truly... It's like, hey, Ramon, I've not heard a score done that isn't good. Now there are some that stand out more to me because they just do, but... I would need to see his... I really would need this. Can you think of one off the top of your head of a Hans Zimmer score? All of them. All trash. What's he done? Who? The director, that's what I'm trying to... See if we've known anything. It was Subin, right? I don't know. Because the moment you said it's Subin, I was looking down at the words the subs. My INB pro right now. Oh well. Anyways, looked cool. Looked interesting. What do you think? Yeah, what do you think about this trailer and anything other information that we need to know and what should be our next Tamil film that we watch? Please let us know down below.