The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Tuesday, August 8th. Everybody's having a great week. And we are back with, well, we never left with our news roundup. So today, we've got a bunch of, a lot of stories from outside the United States, a little bit in the United States, one science story. So we're going to cover all in just a few minutes Argentina, Hong Kong, China. But okay, let's jump in. A reminder, 250 is kind of our standard for contributions for the news roundup shows. Thank you, Jonathan, for getting us started. All right, let's see. So let's start with Argentina. So the story coming out of Argentina, the big story coming out of Argentina is just the unbelievable inflation going on over there. I mean, we here in the United States are bitterly complaining about 4% inflation. But Argentina is actually suffering from over 100% inflation, annual inflation rate. This is the cost of goods. This is CPI, consumer price index. You know, CPI always hides the fact that some products are going up much faster than that. Some things are much more expensive, which means standard of living quality of life. It's just declining and deteriorating. It's difficult for people to make a living. It's difficult for people to survive. They're afraid to open up accounts in the banks in dollars because the dollar maintains its value because past governments have just confiscated those or just shut those down and didn't allow you access to them. So it's very difficult for Argentinians, those who can get their money out. But for those who are stuck in the country, it is a very, very difficult period. We're also facing an election this year. We're going to have primaries on August 13th, followed by a general election, which is going to be interesting. We have a number of different candidates running, really four candidates who have any chance here. Three of them from traditional parties and one who is, what would you call him? I guess you'd call him something like a populist libertarian, something like that, which is interesting. Javier Malai, I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that, is an interesting candidate and is polling at 20% right now. Probably better than anybody who's considered a libertarian anywhere else in the world. I'll talk about him in a minute. So Argentinian economies just have a standard of living, quality of life. And when you consider, if you visit Buenos Aires and you see the obvious wealth that existed in Argentina 120 years ago. If you look at it, Argentina was the Paris of America. It had a standard of living, quality of life that was very close to the United States up until 1914. It was a rich country, rich in natural resources. It had immigrants primarily from Germany and Italy. So it has a very rich wine country with a long tradition. It has industry and it has some incredibly fertile agricultural lands. It is a beautiful country, so it's potentially for tourism. But this is a country that was doing fantastically well in the 19th century, particularly the later part of the 19th century and early 20th century. And then basically in 1914, when it was very similar in terms of wealth to the United States, it embarked on a statist experiment, an experiment of authoritarian regimes with different variations on fascism, socialism. But fundamentally, a statist, right, government intervention, government interference, government involvement in the economy. And as a consequence, today, Argentina is a poor country.  They look like Paris, kind of the apartment condominium buildings.  You can tell this was an incredibly wealthy place and then you look at the actual quality of life and standard of living of people. Very, very depressing, very depressing. It shows you how things can reverse, bad policy can really reverse the economic prospects. Now, this Javier Millet is an interesting character. I haven't done a lot of research into him, but I've been to Argentina, I've talked to Argentinians about him. He has a podcast, radio show, I guess, and he's big on yelling and really getting in people's faces and being an outlier. His solution to inflation in Argentina is actually really, really good and one that I would support. If I was in Argentina, I'd probably vote for him in spite of the fact that I hear he's also religious and he's just a mixed bag, but just to get rid of inflation would be such a big deal for Argentina that I would support him just on that basis. What does he propose to get rid of inflation? Basically, to get rid of the currency. So what Javier Millet is suggesting is to get rid of the peso, burn down the central bank and get rid of the local currency. And what would you replace it with? Basically, you replace it with the dollar. So the solution to Argentinian inflation is to adopt the dollar. And you might say, but the dollar, that's being inflated and this is libertarians in the United States going, no, no, no, the dollar, it's going to die, it's going to collapse, it's the end of the world. Everybody outside the United States knows that the dollar is not going anywhere and that the dollar is a bastion of relative stability in a crazy world. And I think Argentinians would be happy to exchange the dollar's inflation rate of 4% with the peso, the Argentinian peso's inflation rate of 116%. So he would dollarize the economy, which I would 100% support. I think that would be a great way to deal with it. But I deal like a gold standard.  Too difficult, whereas the dollarized economy is a five minute process. It's so simple, it's so easy, it's so quick. And by doing that, the market would now set interest rates because there wouldn't be any Argentinian banks, they wouldn't have to borrow and lend from the American Central Bank. Interest rates would be set in the marketplace and Argentina could get on a proper monetary footing. And then beyond that, somebody like Javier I think Millet would deregulate, would shut down, would really completely change the framework, change the debate within Argentina. And I think we can put aside some of the more nutty religious oriented policies that he might have just because it's an emergency.  So I'm excited about the prospect. I don't think it's likely that he wins. You know, ultimately, he's only getting 20% of the polls and I think more conventional candidates have a bigger chance of winning, whether of the existing regime in spite of the fact that the inflation is so high, or the previous regime that started out inflation in Argentina. And it's now promising to tackle it, but how they're going to, you know, they've not shown any evidence they're capable of doing that. They're going to cut spending, they're going to cut this, they're going to cut that. It's easy to say those things when you're on the campaign trail, it's much more difficult to do them. Actually, dollar rising economy is brilliant. It was actually proposed in Israel in the mid-1980s when Israel had 1,000% inflation, close to 1,000% inflation. And the Treasury Secretary came out and suggested dollar rising economy. At the time I was a huge supporter of this. He had to resign the following day. The Israeli nationalist freaked out over this. The idea that Israel's currency would be controlled if you will, determined by what was going on in Washington D.C. was anathema to them. He had to resign and that idea got buried. But it is a good idea and I wish more embraced it. Let's see. Thank you, Stephen Hopper. Thank you, Michael Dale. Thank you, Robert. And again, thank you, Jonathan. Those of all stickers are showing of support. Well, because of Sylvanos who came in with $100 and said, what is happening? Who said, hi, Iran. This is for missing the last few shows live. I appreciate that. Sylvanos came in with $100, so that has moved us forward significantly. So we're only $100 short, so hopefully five $20 questions and we're there. So feel free to use that feature. All right. That is Argentina. Now let's move to another kind of depressing place, which is Hong Kong. So if you remember Hong Kong, the Chinese used COVID basically as a guise to enter Hong Kong, impose the national security law because of both fear of the virus and also because of all the regulations, anti-COVID regulations, the demonstrations that were prevalent in 2019, died in 2020 and 2021, and basically China got control over Hong Kong and got control over the radicals and imposed its national security law over the territory. Many, many hundreds of people were arrested and thousands of people have left Hong Kong. So the Hong Kong population, the working population is actually shrunk by 5% for the first time in decades, maybe ever. The working population of Hong Kong is actually shrunk because so many people have left Hong Kong because of the clampdown by the Chinese. But what's interesting is that the clampdown of Chinese is still not at the level that it is in China. So it's still true. For example, in Hong Kong, you can get Facebook and YouTube and Twitter. There's no firewall. There's no great Chinese firewall blocking you. Now the reality is even in China, you can get access to some of these things. But it's certainly in Hong Kong, there's no attempt to block it. At the margins, there's still some free speech in Hong Kong. There's a lot less monitoring. I'll give you an example. The local government banned the sharing and singing of the song Glory to Hong Kong, which was a protest song that was used by the protesters in 2019. Well, a court just decided that the outlawing the song was illegal and they made it legal again to be able to share online and to be able to go out and sing the song Glory to Hong Kong. The Chinese authorities are appealing this, but that could never happen in China. If they decided to ban a song, it would be banned. The song would be banned. There's no legal recourse. There's no process like this. There's still a lot more, for example, hundreds of democracy activists or activists against China are being tried right now, including at least one billionaire, and again, horrific sentences. And these are show trials in the tradition of Stalin and Mao, but this is the difference. The showtiles in China don't have press coverage and you can't sit in on them. And yet all these trials for all these Hong Kong dissidents are open to the public and open to the press. And the press is actually covering these trials. They have no juries.  But at least they're being witnessed. Evidence is going out about them and people can keep track of what's going on and partially keep track of their loved ones and keep track of their friends. So there is some small element of freedom and people are really wondering right now in Hong Kong, how long will this survive? Because the Chinese are clearly not happy with it. And lately there's a new phrase being used by the authorities regarding all of this. And it's called, they're constantly warning against what they call, quote, soft resistance. Soft resistance is this. It's what is being done on the internet. It's singing. It's allowing the song to be sung. It's people sharing the stuff. It's media still thinking at least to some extent it's independent. It's criticism maybe in private of the Chinese regime that would not be allowed in China, in the mainland China. You know, there's the controls on speech, news media, books, culture are far less sweeping than they are in China. And there's a real fear now in Hong Kong that they're going to become more and more and more sweeping, more and more and more totalitarian. So again, one of the great tragedies of this century so far was the Chinese takeover in Hong Kong. And one of the great demerits that the Trump administration gets, I mean significant demerits, is the lack of support that it showed the demonstrators in 2019, almost nothing. And then when China did take over Hong Kong, basically zero out of the Trump administration in terms of protest. And the Trump administration was not the only one. Generally the West, with exception maybe of the United Kingdom a little bit, even there, pretty mild, were pretty silent about, you know, the takeover of what was by economic standards, the freest country in the world, what was a thriving culture, what was a bastion of finance, wealth, creation and just great people. Canada and the United Kingdom have at least granted Hong Kong citizens, and I think Australia, granted Hong Kong residents an easy path to move to those countries. I wish the United States had done the same, but of course given the attitudes of American, American politicians these days to immigration, it's not a surprise, but Hong Kong is restricted. Anyway, it appears that China is starting to prepare the ground for even more authoritarianism in Hong Kong. I feel bad for the people of Hong Kong. I hope more of them leave. And what I really hope, I mean, what would be really good is if a lot of the financial industry that is in Hong Kong started leaving Hong Kong, you know, and making it less valuable to the Chinese. I mean, one of the reasons Chinese always wanted Hong Kong is because it is this financial and production hub. It is a pool of immense talent, and if that talent leaves, then there are less people there sanctioning the Chinese, there are less people there supporting the Chinese authoritarian government. And I wish the world opened up its ability to take those people in. All right, so I hope more Chinese leave, and I hope the fears that China climbs down even harsher on Hong Kong ultimately don't become a reality. We could see more protests in Hong Kong. That would be interesting. It would be interesting if we saw more protests in Hong Kong. All right, talking about China, a lot of news out of China. God, so much stuff out of China. So first, I don't know if you noticed a couple of days ago, a Chinese and Russian, you know, was attend ships, sailed very, very close to the US, what is it, you know, the US line out there in the ocean. There was still international waters, but they came pretty close and for warships to sail that close to a country's sovereign line. It's pretty unusual and pretty rare and usually meant to send a signal. The US deployed for US warships, a P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft to kind of escort the Chinese and Russian ships away. But the fact that the Chinese were coordinating this with the Russians, the fact that it was a joint mission, if you will, not a good sign and suddenly an attempt by China to push us to see where our boundaries are and to see what we would do. Also, to get a sense of our fleet capability in that part of the world. You know, certainly if they invade Taiwan and if the United States tries to defend Taiwan, you could imagine the Chinese, particularly if the US attacked targets in mainland China. You can imagine a Chinese fleet trying to do something in Alaska or even on the US West Coast. They'd like to see what our capabilities are in terms of deterring that. Lots of other news in terms of defense in China. We've just discovered that the Chinese, I mean, we've just discovered that Americans have known this for a while. The Chinese have infiltrated Japanese, hacked into Japanese servers and probably national security, probably government. Quite extensive, quite damaging. Of course, we know the Chinese have hacked into the US. We know that the Microsoft leak, the Microsoft story a few months ago where the Chinese used some kind of flaw in the Microsoft system to basically plant these malware spying software in basically, you know, computers across the United States, including Defense Department and military. And I assume we're doing the same thing to Chinese but we know about what they're doing. You know, part of the challenge of incursions like what we saw with the fleet is that there are no talks between US military and Chinese military. The Chinese have cut those talks off since Nancy Pelosi was in Taiwan a year ago. China is just pushing. It's pushing and it's testing us and it wants to see how far it can get. And it's just, you know, we had the balloon. We had the secret police outpost in Manhattan. We've got the listening station we talked about on the show in Cuba. We've got training in Cuba. We've got pilots and sailors kind of pilots primarily pushing the boundaries of, again, international airspace and kind of harassing US reconnaissance. We've got planes over the streets of Taiwan. There's just a lot of kind of tricky, dangerous activity going on. To some extent, I think this is all a sign of Chinese weakness. When you think about what's going on right now in China, you have to, you know, you have to look at the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is struggling. Struggling may be the most struggled since it's pivot away from Maoism in the late 1970s. You've got a sharp drop in Chinese exports and imports. So trade decline exports declined by 14.5%. This is an economy largely dependent on exports. 14.5% in dollar terms. Imports declined 12.4%, which indicates Chinese are buying less foreign goods, which probably means a decline in standard of living within China. Standard of living is often measured by the amount of imports you bring in, the wealth of your people to be able to afford stuff from outside of the country. But it also, imports would also include oil and natural resources for production, which means maybe production, manufacturing is hooding in China. So this far exceeds anything economists predicted. So this suggests again, real problems that this problem that they've had in the property sector, the problems that they had with local government state, regional governments, is probably broader than just property and local states government. Foreign investment is way down in China. It's the lowest quarterly level of a net foreign investment in two decades, in 20 years. That's huge. Foreign investment to a large extent has fueled Chinese manufacturing, Chinese technology, Chinese economic growth. So it was 4.9 billion. That's down 87% year on year and 76% quarter on quarter. So it's just a plummeting of the amount of money being invested by foreigners in the Chinese economy. I think a big driver really from the days of Deng Chao Pang of Chinese economic growth. So a really, you know, really real warning sign in terms of the prospects of China. And then if you remember, there's a lot of talk about Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, how they're going to take over the world with this and how we should be afraid of it. And generally fear of China has been out, what do you call it, exaggerated like everything else. Well, part of that Belt and Road Initiative led all the way to Europe four or five years ago. Italy signed up for it as one of the European countries involved in this. Well, Italy just announced that it is basically withdrawing from the Belt and Road Initiative. This is by far the biggest European economy that signed up for it. And it basically cuts this Belt and Road Initiative from an alternative trading route and the whole idea of increasing Europe's dependency on trade with China. Of course, trade is not dependent. Trade is a good thing generally. But this is a way, and this is a way to, you know, people blamed, people accused China of using this to get countries to become indebted to China and then China to control them and so on. But the whole Belt and Road Initiative is way behind in terms of the timescale. It's way behind in terms of its actual solidity. And again, you know, Italy is walking away from it four years after it. You know, Chinese firms have put $2.8 billion into infrastructure, including for Italian ports. But Italy feels like, you know, thinks it hasn't gotten that much out of it. Exactly what getting out of it means is hard to tell. But Italy is going to be a lot less inclined to encourage Chinese investment in Italy. So again, whether it's good for Italy or bad for Italy, it's not good for China and it's not good for their ambitions overall. Back at home, it's one year ago since the CHIP Act was passed. I know I talk a lot about this and there's a reason for it. I think these kind of things are a crucial to understanding the future of the US economy and understand the future of what's going to happen from the perspective of economic liberty in the United States. The CHIP Act is a bipartisan, central planning, industrial policy type of act. Its success and its flourishing will only encourage the government to do more of it. But not to worry, you know, the success is unlikely because reality is what it is and central planning doesn't work. Anyway, there's a lot of hype about this, a lot of money flowing in. 200 billion worth of investment in the United States all hoping to grab the government's 50 billion dollars of subsidies. The problem of course with all of this is they're investing 200 billion. We're not getting much for that 200 billion because it's super expensive to build manufacturing plants in the United States. It takes much longer to build about 50% longer, so 650 days to build a semiconductor plant in China and Taiwan. 900 days in the United States even though in the United States the plants are typically smaller. It costs more, about 40% more just to build these plants. So these companies spending 200 billion, in the hope of getting 50 billion but the 200 billion is being spent gets less than if they spend it elsewhere. Exactly what they're getting out of this, the subsidies is not clear. And then operating expenses, once the facilities start running are 30% higher in the United States than in Asia. I think what these companies are hoping for is that these subsidies are not one time that ultimately their production will continue to be subsidized in the United States, which means every chip made in the U.S. is going to be significantly more expensive than the chips made overseas. And of course a big chunk of those operating costs being 30% higher means because labor costs are higher because salaries, not so much salaries but benefits and everything else that goes along with hiring in the United States is more expensive. And of course that is if you can find the workers for the chip manufacturers. But manufacturing is going to be small at the end of all of this. There's not going to be that much being produced and it's not going to effect, it's not going to even supply the needs of the kind of the United States industry for chips. It's also an interesting time for chip manufacturers to be investing in chips. Right now chip demand is low, so the expectation as we come out of this cycle and chip demand will be high again. Not obvious that will happen. It's still true that TSMC and Samsung, the big foreign investors in these chip plants, are still primarily investing overseas. They're putting some money into chip manufacturing in the United States but not anywhere near what they're investing in elsewhere. There are lots of other unintended consequences. One big unintended consequence of this is that China is actually increasing its production of chips. Now the chips are not state-of-the-art but what China plans to do is flood the market with non-state-of-the-art chips and substitute volume for, so you can have one chip that's super fast and can do a lot of things or you can have five chips do the same thing the one chip does. And if these five chips are super cheap, some companies might prefer to invest in the five chips than in the one chip and China is investing heavily in that partially because of the sanctions it can't get. The very sophisticated chips cannot be exported to China and the equipment to produce them cannot be exported so they're investing in building what are called trailing edge chips, last-generation chips and they're going to do that heavily. Overall, we will see what happens with this. You know, government could get lucky and it could turn out to be a good move but I think the probabilities are that, I mean, again, it's a broken window fallacy but the probabilities are that in every respect this will turn out to be a bad move. Again, the small probability there is a positive probability that it'll look like a good move even though we all know whenever you get central planning, whenever you get government involvement in the new area, it's ultimately not good. All right, let's see. Finally, so in March we had scientists announced that they have figured out a new semiconductor material that using a rare earth metal that became a superconductor not at… So anyway, let's backtrack a second. Superconducting is this amazing ability of electricity to flow through a material with no friction, no friction, so no loss of energy as it flow through a material which is revolutionary in terms of delivering electricity, in terms of chips, in terms of electric motors. It would revolutionize. It would be one of the greatest discoveries ever. Now, in a sense, semiconductors or the usefulness of it would be… Superconducting is already was discovered 100 years ago, but it was discovered in materials that were frozen to close to minus 272 degrees Fahrenheit or celsius, which is the coldest theoretically you can get to. So only close to that do some materials become superconductors. At those temperatures, electricity flows through them without any loss of energy. In March, a group of scientists proposed, wrote a paper saying that they could replicate superconductivity with a rare earth material and hydrogen without super cold, but in order to do it, you would have to compress the material under pressure of at 144,000 pounds per square inch. Now, right, it says 10 times the pressure that's exerted at the bottom of the ocean's deeper trenches. That's great temperature. But it's only, it's less than one hundredth of what the past, in the past, the kind of pressure that was required in order to achieve this in the past. So this was considered a big step forward. Anyway, was it last week or two weeks ago? It was like a few days ago. South Korean scientists have claimed that they have a material now, that they have dubbed LK99, that without pressure and in room temperature is a superconductor. Now this would change the world if this was true. This would mean you could carry electricity hundreds of miles, thousands of miles with no loss or almost no loss. It means much more efficient, faster computers and more efficient computers, more efficient electric motors. It would change, you know, I think electric car technologies, but anything that used electricity would be changed forever. And we can't even imagine the kind of the benefits medical scanners would become cheaper and more effective. Gazillion things would change. And there were a lot of people who say, wait a minute, this cannot be. Physics won't allow it. This isn't an impossibility. South Korean scientists are standing by this, and I think they were about to hand over samples to the Korean authorities to check this. In the meantime, the journal, one of the top academic journals in the field, is examining materials, examining materials, the material from them to see if this is credible, if this is realistic. The world is kind of, I think the scientific world in many respects, you know, this is in some ways bigger than fusion even in the sense that this I don't think anybody expected would happen. Fusion, people could imagine what's happening soon. This came out of nowhere. It came completely out of nowhere. If you can mass produce superconductors, it would truly change everything. So we'll say, we'll keep track of this. So the Korean Society of Superconductivity and Cryogenics is about to get, but to get this material from the Quantum Energy Research Center, which is the Korean research institute that did this. So we will know probably in a few weeks and a few months if they can replicate this result, if they can, and if this material is, you know, if this material can be mass produced. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, but from everything I read, this is a real revolution. Whether it's real or not, I have no opinion, I'm not a scientist. It is a big stretch given that just everybody was astounded and skeptical about creating superconductivity under 145,000 pounds of pressure. Now we don't need pressure. We don't need temperature. Just room temperature. Wow. Nobody saw this coming. All right. So we will see. We will see. Let's hope it's true. All right. We're only $30 short of our goal. Let's jump in with Lewis. Lewis says, thoughts on the Library of Congress forcefully taking Lenin to pick up frame pages of the fountain head. God, I don't remember everything that was going on there. God, I really shouldn't comment on it because I can't remember. I mean, it was a complicated deal. Obviously, Lenin felt that this was a significant injustice and that this was wrong. And it was certainly within his rights. But he had given them some opening in the way he had contributed the originals of the fountain head. And from their perspective, that excluded him keeping the couple of pages. So, you know, this is a long time ago and I remember Lenin taping kind of his response and being very upset by it. But yes, I think it was unjust and unnecessary. He committed to giving those pages to the Library of Congress once he passed away. So it was probably unjust and, you know, an injustice towards Lenin and towards his, you know, the fact that he had done something he didn't have to do, which is provide those manuscripts to the Library of Congress. That's the best I can do given my recollection of it. It's a long time ago. Colleen, do you think there is a defense benefit in or argument to having chip production in the United States? Is there a different model we could use in the case to ensure our self-sufficiency in regard to chips in this case? So I don't think we could guarantee self-sufficiency because, you know, we just consume so many chips in the United States that I don't think. And then, of course, we consume like iPhones. You know, iPhones consume chips, but the chips never come to the United States. The chips are made by TSMC and then they're sent to China where they're assembled into iPhones that are then sent around the world. And these, the new iPhone 15, which will come out in September, is going to have the three nanometer, the latest and greatest chips. It'll be the first product in the world that will carry three nanometer chips, which will make it super fast and super efficient and super energy and all of that. So I'm looking forward to upgrading my phone in September. But so I don't think we can be self-sufficient. I don't think that's a possibility and I don't think it makes any sense. I do think it makes sense for the United States to figure out how to incentivize or how to encourage chip manufacturers, particularly TSMC and Samsung, to diversify manufacturing out of East Asia. That is, if you think about where 90% of all chips, really almost 100% of all high-end chips, are all within reach of the Chinese. They're all within reach of a Chinese blockade. Never mind a war if they just blockade South Korea and Taiwan. Now, you could argue that's an act of war, but yeah. So we need to be able to produce chips. We need to be able to have access to chips that is not dependent on access to East Asia, which could easily be dominated by China, if not today in five years, ten years. Now, I don't think the solution is to build chip manufacturing in the United States. How does one incentivize? Well, for example, my assumption is that Pentagon is a big buyer of these kind of chips. Well, we could say to TSMC and to Samsung is, look, we're going to buy your chips. The Pentagon is going to buy your chips, but we'll pay you a small premium on those chips. And in exchange, what we want is within five years, those chip manufacturing plants to be in South America, Europe, Mexico, Canada, U.S. We don't care. We're agnostic as to where you place these chips, but not in Taiwan and South Korea. Now, I don't think they would build it in the United States.  And I don't think the United States government outside of the Defense Department should subsidize it.  No, all I need, all we need is to diversify to get some of the capacity out of East Asia. That's all.  We don't, you know, China cannot blockade Mexico, cannot blockade South America, cannot blockade Europe. So put it somewhere wherever these companies can best invest the money. And the best way to do that is just to guarantee them a profit, a higher profit off of the chips that we must have. And the chips that we must have are those that the Pentagon requires. Now, if you're really worried about it, then build enough capacity in the United States, build enough capacity, let's say Intel, to build enough capacity in the United States for Pentagon use and nothing else.  While minimizing subsidies, while minimizing the impact on the ability of companies to do what they think is in their best interest to do. And if you want them to diversify, then pay them to diversify. But don't tell them how and what. Tell them we want leading-edge chips, best chips in the world that we need to put into our ballistic missiles and into our planes and into our ships and into our submarines. We want those chips, you know, we're going to buy 100,000 of these chips, a million of these chips, two billions of these chips, I don't know how many. But in five years, it has to be from somewhere that is not East Asia, right? So somewhere on this side of the Pacific or somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic. Or even India would be better, right? Diversify to India because India can always ship out the other side and India has a strong interest in a significant military to be able to at least stand up to China and prevent it from blockading it completely. So I do think you have to do something about dependence on Taiwan. And I said this when I did my review of the book, The Chip Wars. We have to do something about our dependence on Taiwan. The question is what, and I think the Chip Act is 100% the wrong thing to do and represents this kind of industrial planning mentality that both Democrats and Republicans now have, which is unbelievably going to be long-term destructive to the US economy. All right, Lewis, what would the world look like if the Soviets and Nazis developed nukes before the United States and why the billionaires must be thus not built skyscrapers like they used to Rockefellers? Well, the world would be, you know, unfree. I think the Soviet Union would have, I don't think there would have been a Western Europe. I think the Soviets or the Nazis would have dominated Europe for a long time. The world would be poor. The United States would be dramatically crippled. But you know what I'm doing a show tonight on exactly kind of related to this topic and the whole issue of Oppenheimer and the development of the nuke. It's a good question to ask me again tonight during that show. All right, Phil says, you're on. I sometimes think you overlook the UK had an end of term lease agreement on Hong Kong that was internationally acknowledged. It doesn't mean the UK dumped Hong Kong. Of course it does. I mean, look, I don't acknowledge treaties with monstrous regimes. That is, I don't think that morally or politically the UK was obliged to just hand over Hong Kong with almost no guarantees of its continued freedom. As I've said many times in the past, I do not acknowledge the sovereignty of authoritarian dictatorial regimes. And as such, I don't acknowledge the sovereignty and therefore any deal that was written in the past with some government that one has to execute. The fundamental here is the striving for liberty, not the striving to do acknowledge the international. I don't like international entities like the UN. I don't like treaties that involve non-free countries. And if a country was free and it goes non-free, none of that I think matters. The free world needs to stand up to authoritarianism and tell them they don't count. And I know politically that would have been almost impossible for Thatcher to do. But there's got to be a way to have done it that was more effective than the way she ultimately did it. And Mikot says, if they can mass produce superconductors, renewables will become reliable. Well, you still need to solve the battery problem, but yes, it will make the whole process. The whole process of moving the electricity and probably a battery technology itself dramatically better and renewables become a lot better. Frank says, can you make a separate video for your art-framed store story? Why? It's a personal story. Why would anybody? I don't know that people have that much interest in it. I topped out every word of your response and posted it, and many people are impressed. I don't know why they're impressed. If they're that story impressed them, they should look at some of my other stories. I've got a lot of stories. Maybe we should do an autobiography sometime. But yeah, we can ask Christian if he wants to post it. Alright, thanks everybody. I really appreciate the support. Thank you, Mary-Eline. Thank you, Keeber. Thank you, John. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you, Gale. Thank you, Finn Hopper. I think Stephen's already been thanked. Thank you to all the people asking questions. We did make our goal. We're scoring 2 for 2 this week. Let's keep this going. And I'll see you all tonight. Tonight we're talking about Oppenheimer. We're talking about an atomic bomb and when to use it. If it's appropriate to use it with Shuman Nagasaki. We'll talk about Ayn Rand's meeting with Oppenheimer. She met him at least twice. Her meetings with Oppenheimer, what she thought of the bomb, what she thought of Oppenheimer himself. And then also, what about the movie? Was the movie any good? Is it any good? Is it worth seeing? All of that we will cover tonight. I'll also give you a quick update tonight on Richard Hananya's apology post or clarification post. We'll talk about that a little bit. But we'll mainly spend our time talking about the movie Oppenheimer and everything peripheral relating to it. Have a great rest of your week, people.


Yeah Hello. Yeah. Hi. I'm Frölde and I'm from the open stack engineering team in canonical I'm just going to show you some Tricks we did with functional testing of some BJP stuff as high quality ago We implemented an enablement for Neutron dynamic routing, which is a feature for up is back, which allows you to Send routes from your open stack network to your exists pre 16 Network outside which talks BGP and when doing that we needed some test fixture to Validate that the things we are enabling actually talk BGP and that the routes are exported and we need to keep it That way we through CICD and and all that so Is anyone here familiar with our deployment tool juju and a mass Some yeah, I'm not going to go into the details of all that but I'm basically just going to show a test thing I have on my laptop here This is mass. I've set it up with the KDM pod. So it's basically controlling virtual machines on my laptop And I have deployed a charm called quagga. It's basically installing the quagga routing software anyone here familiar with us That's the soft piece of software that talks BGP and can interface with regular routers And I'm just going to show a test function for it So what we basically have here is a juju showing a model where there's a spine router and two spine routers and three top-of-rack switches and you can see this is laid out in a CLOS topology where every router has a separate AS number and The charm through the relations Figures out which peers it should talk to and configures BGP to all of them But a judge by just looking at it. I have no idea if this actually works. So because of that, I have a test We should do something like this and let's try to see what happens So far so good And there it broke. Can I see why? Okay, it's complaining about spine one zero which has no BGP peers and if you look at Relations in the model You can see that there are only relations from the first spine To the top of X and not not the second. So that's my error. So I will add that They put it to the wrong about model one second This is what you get with live demos, right? This there then I added the missing relations Then you can see that the charms are doing its work They're basically figuring out which Older charms they should have BGP neighborhoods with And as soon as that's finished, I'll read on the test and see what happens My own test neighbors And it's completed now about it that it actually works So this was something a simple example of how you can test network to couple typologies with juju and charms and mass And that was basically everything I want to the show you any questions or Right, then I'm done


All right let's go ahead and get started with the Rosary. I'm going to read the intentions and then we'll begin with the Our Father in the Hail Mary for those intentions and then move into the Rosary. The the intentions are one two three four five of them are from the USCCB and one I'm going to provide at the end and it begins with for our nation for the integrity of our judicial system that all the that all and that all branches of government be dedicated to seeking the common good and protecting the dignity of the human person from conception to natural death for the overturning of Roe versus Wade and Planned Heard Planned Parenthood versus Casey in the Supreme Court's final decision of Dobbs versus Jackson for the conversion of hearts and minds of those who advocate for abortion for a new commitment to building an America where children are welcomed cherished and cared for where mothers and fathers are encouraged and strengthened and where marriages and the family are recognized and supported as the true foundations of a healthy and flourishing society for our blessed mother's intercession and guidance as the church continues to walk with mothers and families in need and continues to promote alternatives to abortion and seeks to create a culture of life that the bishops would be as vigilant with their teaching and speaking out against abortion as they were in dealing with COVID and that they and all in leadership in the church would be more faithful aggressive and clear about church teaching during future elections our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death amen I believe in God the father the almighty creator of heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ his only son our Lord who was conceived by the Holy Spirit born of the Virgin Mary suffered under Pontius Pilate was crucified died and was buried he descended into hell on the third day rose again from the dead he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the father almighty from then she shall come to judge the living and the dead I believe in the Holy Ghost the Holy Catholic Church the communion of saints the forgiveness of sins the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting amen for an increase of faith Hail Mary full of grace the Lord was with thee blessed art down among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of death amen for an increase of hope hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art down among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now when at the hour of our death amen for an increase of love hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art down among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now when at the hour of our death amen glory be to the father and to the son and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning is now endeavor shall be world without end amen the first sorrowful mystery is the agony of Christ in the garden our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil amen hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art down among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now when at the hour of our death amen hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art down among women and blessed is the fruit Jesus holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now when at the hour of our death amen hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art down among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now when at the hour of our death amen hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art down among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now when at the hour of our death amen hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art down among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now when at the hour of our death Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning is now, whenever shall be, world without end, amen. O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy, amen. The second sorrowful mystery is the scourging at the pillar. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now win at the hour of our death, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now win at the hour of our death, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now win at the hour of our death, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with the blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen. Oh my Jesus. Forgive us our sins, save us from the fire. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy. Amen. The third sorrowful mystery is the crowning of thorns. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come that will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen. Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen. The fourth sorrowful mystery is Jesus takes up his cross. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, when at the hour of our death, amen.  Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be world without end. Amen. The fifth sorrowful mystery is the crucifixion. Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen. Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus? Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.  Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now win at the hour of our death, amen.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now win at the hour of our death, amen.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now win at the hour of our death, amen.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now win at the hour of our death, amen.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now win at the hour of our death, amen.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.  Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now and at the hour of our death. Amen.  Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, whenever shall be, world without end. Amen. Forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy. Amen. Before we conclude, I want to repeat one of the intentions and also, we'll sing the read Regina Chaley here to finish out, but I want to repeat one of the intentions and just make a plea to you, all of the Catholics who are watching here, so I'll share the intention, that the bishops would be as vigilant with their teaching and speaking out against abortion as they were in dealing with COVID, and that they and all in leadership in the church would be more faithful, aggressive and clear about church teaching during future elections. And I would ask all Catholics who are faithful or want to be faithful, that you would be aggressive in the upcoming elections, and that you would be clear to state that it is not possible to vote for a candidate who is for abortion, it is not possible to be a faithful Catholic and vote for a candidate who will support abortion. It's the greatest social evil in our time, and proportionally, it's far more grave than any other, even other very important issues that we have out there. And I'd also ask, and this will be part of the final intention of this, Regina Chaley, that you be also energetic in reaching out to your bishops with charity, of course, but with clarity in asking them to be loud and clear in their own dioceses about this issue, because elections are the issue. During elections is when things change. But of course, we want to pray for all those who are contemplating abortion and all of those things. But in the end, if we have our leaders, our pro-life, anti-abortion, as they should be, this will lead to better laws and protection for the unborn. And so please do that, and that's the final intention as we sing this, Regina Chaley, together. Regina Chaley, let's pray. Alleluia. Quia quem meru sti fortate. Alleluia. Resurrects it. Secundice it. Alleluia. Ora pro nobiste. Alleluia. Gaudi et letaro virgo Maria. Alleluia. Quia surexito minus vere. Alleluia. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. God bless you all. Thanks for joining us. Stay in the fight. Keep praying every day fast, and we will win this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Bye everybody.


This paper proposes a new method for predicting the chance of survival in nasopharyngeal cancer patients. It combines a highly accurate machine learning model with explainable artificial intelligence to stratify patients into low and high chance of survival groups. The predictive performance of the model was compared with a state-of-the-art algorithm extreme gradient boosting, XGBoost, and it showed similar accuracy. Additionally, two techniques local interpretable model agnostic explanations, LIME, and Shapley Additive Explanations, SHAP, were used to provide personalized protective and risk factors for each patient and uncovered some novel non-linear relationships between input features and survival chance. This method shows promise in providing more accurate predictions of survival in nasopharyngeal cancer patients, which could be useful for effective treatment planning and informed clinical decisions.


The Denver Police Department engaged the nation in one of the only chats of its kind in a Reddit dot com forum about marijuana to answer your questions that were online. If you missed it, here are some of the answers. I can tell you that one of the questions that we get a lot is the public consumption question. The important thing for people to understand is consuming marijuana at home is the safest place to do it. If you're in a public area, you can and will be cited for smoking marijuana. But that doesn't mean without exception property owners, business owners, people that own apartment complexes, they can say just as they can with cigarette smoking that people can't consume marijuana on their facility. Be considerate to your neighbors. A lot of the current complaints we get from the residents in the city and county of Denver is that their neighbor is smoking marijuana and it is emitting into their residents or to their baby's room or whatever. There will be challenges for Colorado on the horizon. I think that one of the big concerns for law enforcement right now is going to be to try to ensure that criminal organizations aren't using the Colorado marijuana law to further their business nation and worldwide. I know we don't have all the answers yet, but I hope this was somewhat informative and answered some of your questions. Thanks for joining us on DPDTV.


Previously, we assessed a list of words from an Excel file. Now we can load this data directly with the corpus widget and display it in a corpus viewer. Here we go, 150 words. Okay, we've already developed a workflow where we select a word and find a number of the semantically closest words from our list. We judge the similarity from the embedded representation. So by turning the words into a set of numbers. Now this time let's do something similar again. But I want to make up a reference word in orange directly. So to do this I'll use the create corpus widget. I'll keep just one placeholder for the documents, use new text for the title of the document, and then I can type watermelon in the document text box. I can use another corpus viewer to make sure everything is okay. It is. Now I have one text document containing the word watermelon. Okay, just like before I want to find the semantically closest words to watermelon from my list of 150 words. So I need to embed my words into a vector space. I'll use the document embedding widget to do this and double check its output in another data table. I find my words and there's corresponding 384 dimensional vectors. Great. Okay now I also need to embed my new watermelon document. So let's add another document embedding widget and connect it to the output of create corpus. This way I can also connect this to a data table. So this is what a watermelon looks like in 384 dimensional space. Okay now it's time to wrap up our workload. Just like last time I'll use the neighbor's widget. Feed it the data from my list of words and provide a reference from the text I type in create corpus. I need to make sure I use the data that already includes embeddings though. So I'll connect the outputs of the document embedding widget to neighbors. Also note that the order in which I make the connections matters. I want the word embeddings first and the reference embeddings second. But even if I do it in reverse order I can always reset the links between orange widgets by clicking on the connection. Okay now I'll use the cosine distance in the neighbor's widget and try to look for the three nearest neighbors. Okay let's use the corpus viewer to see what I get. As it turns out watermelon is also a fruit just like grape or lemon. Now let's try some more words say truck. Okay I need to wait a little bit for the results because the text that I typed needs to be processed by document embedding and it can take a while to get the embeddings from the server. But here we go the word truck is semantically most related to tractor van and car. Makes sense. Now instead of single words I can also embed text fragments or sentences. Let's try resting on a porch. I got doorbell blanket and chair. Now chair and blanket are fairly obvious but I guess I can try to explain doorbells as they are pretty common on porches as well. Anyway let's continue and try to find an example where semantic search fails. So let's try animal species. This time we get zoo dog and puppy. Now neither zoo nor puppy are a species of animal. So I might want to try this with a different embedder. If you remember espert is optimized for sentence embedding but fast text focuses more on words. So let's switch over to fast text. I'll first change the one that embeds my list of words here at the top and then I'll also have to switch the other. I have to change both of them because not only do different embedders have different numbers of features but they also map into two completely separate spaces. Anyway I now find elephant tiger and zebra on the output and these are indeed species of animals. Now semantic text search can be pretty fun and turns out to work pretty well but of course everything depends on the quality of my embeddings. So next time we'll try to use these embeddings further to do some semantic clustering.


Hello everybody and welcome to the AlexiAnalyst Data Analyst Boot Camp. This is the first video in the entire playlist, so if you're watching this and you have no idea what's going on, congratulations, you just unwittingly signed up for a Data Analyst Boot Camp. No, I'm just joking, but I'm also being very serious. So before we progress into a lot of the details of this Data Analyst Boot Camp, which is completely free on my channel, I am going to tell you about how this came to be. About three weeks ago, I put out this post and I'll put it somewhere on the screen. And basically it was a bit of a satire. I was mostly kind of poking fun at boot camps just because they put stuff together and they call it a boot camp and they charge you a ton of money. So I was like, I should start one for free. The response was just enormous. I had like 12,000 people who liked it and commented on it and shared it on all different places and people were like, no Alex, you really need to do this. So really quickly, I'm just going to read what I put on LinkedIn and then we're going to dive into the actual Data Analyst Boot Camp. So what I wrote was, I should set up a playlist called Data Analyst Boot Camp on my YouTube channel. They'll walk you through all the basics of SQL, Excel, Tableau, Power BI, Python and more, all accompanied by projects and a way to create a portfolio website for free. Once you're done with the Data Analyst Boot Camp, you can go on my GitHub and download the certification for free. Then you can put Data Analyst Boot Camp on your resume in your experience section. Now if you don't know me, I really like satire and so again, that was a bit satirical. I was just kind of poking fun, but everyone was like, no Alex, you need to actually do this. This is a fantastic idea. So here we are. I created a completely free Data Analyst Boot Camp on my YouTube channel. I'm going to show you what it looks like. I'm going to walk you through it and how you can get that certification at the end. All right. So let's take a look at the Data Analyst Boot Camp. I was not being serious about calling it the Alex the Analyst Data Analyst Boot Camp. That is just, that's insane. So right here, we have our Data Analyst Boot Camp. It is private right now, but when I release this video, I'll make it public so everybody can see it. So let's take a look at what's actually in it. So at the very beginning, we have this video, how to become a Data Analyst in 2023. This will actually be the second video. If you're watching this video right now, this will be above it, but the very first like real video is just this, how to become a Data Analyst. And I walk through exactly the steps I would take. Now in this Boot Camp is basically going to mimic this. It's going to be teaching all the things that I tell you in that video. So we start off with things like SQL. Now this is right now, all of this SQL basics all the way through SQL Intermediate and the more advanced like right here, that is all in Microsoft SQL Server. I'm going to be making an entire playlist for MySQL because that has been highly recommended so that everybody can do MySQL. So MySQL is on the way and I'll eventually replace this. But as for right now, it's all in Microsoft SQL Server. Then if we scroll down, we have projects to accompany this. So we have the Data Analyst Portfolio Project, which is SQL Data Exploration. Then we have a Data Cleaning Project. So two projects, Data Exploration and Data Cleaning was a highly recommend taking. Then next we dive into Excel. So this is all for Data Analyst, right? So this is our entire Excel series, all the way down to our full project in Excel. Then we go on to Tableau. So how to install Tableau, all the way down to a full project. Then Power BI, how to install it, all the things you need to know, all the way down to a full project. And then we dive into Python. So we have our whole Python series, all the way down to, and you guessed it, a full project. Now I am at the very beginning of this Python series. This is just the Python basics with the first project. But I have two other projects. Then I have an entire Pandas playlist. And then I'm going to be making a playlist on regular expression, web scraping, and a ton of other things that I'll also add to this bootcamp. So it's going to get longer, the more stuff I put out. After that, I have some other projects, not just ones like that, but I have web scraping project using Python, API polls using Python for like web scraping from different sites. Then near the very end, we have some other important ones, ones like how to create a portfolio website for free, which is taking all of those projects that we've done throughout this entire bootcamp and putting it into a free website. And then we have creating a data analyst resume. I need to update this because this is about two years old and I'm going to create a new one for this. So in the future, I will replace this. But as of right now, that's the one that we have. And then at the very job, it's tips on how to land a job using LinkedIn. These are real tips and real methods that I would be using to help you find a job once you're ready to start applying and you have all of this created. There's one last video at the very end that you cannot see, which is going to be how to get the certification. So I'm not just going to go put it out there for anyone to just grab and put on their resume. You have to actually put in the work, right? You have to actually take these lessons and learn the information before you get the certification. That's how it works. Now, I'm not going to show you where this is because it's very secret, but I am going to show you what it looks like. Now this says congratulations. You've completed this data analyst bootcamp. You did amazing and you deserve a certification or something to go along with it. Just so you know, we use the honor system here, okay? If you took it, I'm just going to trust that you took it. I'm not verifying any of this and I have a small disclaimer at the bottom basically saying this is all a self-paced data analyst bootcamp completely for free. So this isn't me endorsing you in any way. Just some legal disclaimer. I don't even know if that's necessary. But let's take a look right here. This one's more of the generic one. Verified data analytics bootcamp certificate. But the other one is the one that I think is personally very good. And we may not even be able to see it that well. But it is a certificate of completion. This certificate is awarded to and you'll fill in your name right here. You'll download this and you'll like fill in your name and however you want to do that. I do like word for successful completion of data analytics bootcamp. And here I have, I signed it myself because I believe in you. I believe that you wouldn't tarnish my good name. So this is going to be how you do that, how you look at it, how you actually download that certification. But you'll only be able to see that in the very last video. So that is the Alex the analyst data analyst bootcamp. I'm actually really excited about this. And one of the best parts for me is I didn't have to do that much additional work. It was already all there. All those courses, all those tutorials, all those projects are all already on my channel. I've just kind of organized them so that you don't have to go and try to figure it out yourself. So I genuinely hope that this helps somebody out there land a job and learn these skills completely for free because data analytics should not be expensive, especially the beginner stuff. It should just be all available in my opinion. I don't think we should be charging for basic stuff like this. So good luck, happy learning. And when you're done and you download that certification, just tag me on LinkedIn or Instagram or Twitter or wherever and I'll be sure to like it. So with that being said, good luck.


Yeah, good afternoon. Thanks for attending this session. Infrastructure is something we in the OpenStack community know very well and are familiar with. But however, if it comes to platform, that's also a question that a lot of users demand and I ask for. And my name is Niaz Magnus. I'm here with my colleague, Artem Goncharov. And we'd like to share some insights from our work as architects at the OpenTelecom Cloud when we are confronted with our users asking for platform services. So this is a work in progress report. It's not the final, the ultimate experience we made. And we've just started our journey here. And if any of you have any comments or questions on what we describe here, please raise your hand directly. I'm not sure if I can actually see you because of all the flashing light. And to make it even a little bit more interesting to ask questions, I brought some popsicles with me. So if you're hungry, ask a question, give a comment or something. Yeah, as I said, my name is Niaz Magnus. I'm a cloud architect at the OpenTelecom Cloud. I have more or less two roles at Deutsche Telecom. One is doing architecture, further developing our platform. And the other one is reaching out to technical communities like you are. And, well, I did a lot of consulting security, a little bit, operations, and so on, and so on. I organized a couple of times. Linux Tag, actually, in this very venue, our next door in hall seven, we had a number of Linux Tags. And I'm also a member of the German Unix user group. Well, originally, we planned to have Alex with us, also a colleague of ours. Unfortunately, Alex is sick and is at home trying to get rid of his cold. So best wishes and blesses to you, Alex, if you can see us. I'm actually not sure if we get recorded or transmitted by that. As a very competent replacement, I brought Artem with me. He supported us on some of the platforms and the insides. So he stepped in last minute. Thanks a lot, Artem, for that. Well, this is our agenda. I'd like to give you a rough overview of what we are talking about. The first part is about what is platform, actually, and what does it mean how to deal with this term? The second is how to integrate platform into what we know best, which is infrastructure. And well, originally, we planned to show you a number of use cases in the third part of the presentation with some real-life demos. But unfortunately, that was Alex's part. And so we are not able to show you all the nitty-gritty details of the use cases. But we did a very brief overview. And so I hope you can understand and follow the examples we prepared there. Well, let's take a step back and look from the early days of the term cloud computing. The NIST made a number of definitions of infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service, and so on, and so on. A scheme that is widely adopted today. But looking back to this definition, the NIST defined a service model, platform as a service, or P-A-E-S, as the capacity provided to the consumer to deploy onto cloud infrastructure. Not to read everything here, I highlighted a number of the terms there. So it's something that is consumer created. That is very important for us as a public cloud provider to keep in mind. It is very tempting to try to solve each and every request for our customers directly or beforehand. That usually does not really make sense. It is a good idea to enable our users, our clients, and customers to help themselves. That is meant of consumer created and consumer driven. Well, obviously, we're talking about applications. And if it comes to the platform itself, the P-A-E-S platform started with environments for specific programming languages. So I gave an example here, Heroku, for example. I'm not really sure. I think they started with Ruby on Rails. Is that correct? Can someone confirm or tell me wrong? But this is no longer, especially with the rise of the container world, not so much of an issue, since once you packaged applications in containers, it became way more easy to deploy these applications to a platform. But, well, it's still in the definition there. Well, it's not only the programming languages itself, the code itself, but also library services and tools and so on. And the platform takes care of managing these applications preferably over the whole software lifecycle. Yeah, as said, one of the first examples I know of, maybe, well, the concept, maybe even older, but one of the widely adopted and implemented versions has been Heroku. But today, most of our modern software development takes place inside of containers, because they are so neat and easy to use. But once you started to understand how to work with containers, you quickly realize that containers themselves are not the whole solution, but you need something to manage those containers. So actually, you're looking for some kind of a platform that is able to deal and connect and manage containers. That is more or less what is kind of a common ground of the platform term today. Since it's not exactly the same as the original definition, there is sometimes a mixture of the terms, platform as a service. Some call it also container as a service, or container as a service management, or management platform for container as a service, something like that. I just mentioned this, because platform itself is just a complicated term. And it's hard to get a real agreed upon definition on that. But if you look at the details, you see at least three aspects of that. One is the question of the programming language itself, or the framework in there. And in general, you have also something like a layer of abstraction or convention-based framework inside your platform. So for example, you are asked to provide the code with a convention of entry points, or how to structure your code base, and so on and so on. But even with these attributes, there are still a number of very different platforms out there. I listed a few of them. Well, they are kind of arbitrarily chosen. There's Cloud Foundry, as we can see here, which is for more of a larger enterprise application. Nutanix is very infrastructure-centered and abstraction of the virtualization layer, but also providing kind of a platform. Mezos was very successful at a specific time, and I still think it's still very successful for certain types of workloads. And then there's Kubernetes. And Kubernetes is probably the most successful foundation of a platform that exists today. Can we call Kubernetes itself a platform? I think this is also a difficult question, but if we have a look here at the landscape, the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation issued, we see the vast space that the Kubernetes and Cloud Native environment spans. Hold on a second. I tried to count all the sub-projects there. I think there are several hundreds of projects and components on top or augmenting Kubernetes so that I'm pretty sure that we can call Kubernetes as a kind of common denominator for a platform today. Even if it's not exactly aligning with the official definition. So now let's have a look into how to integrate from an operator's point of view of these platforms into infrastructure. So to deal with this perspective, it makes sense to look at the subject from two different perspectives, angles. The first is the user's perspective. As a user, using a platform, you focus on your applications. You're interested in how can I deploy my code onto this platform and make sure everything is working. Users are generally not interested in the underlying infrastructure. It should be completely transparent or, well, actually many users don't care about the lower levels of the infrastructure. However, the perspective is different from an operator's point of view. So if I talk to my colleagues, especially the colleagues who want to offer our cloud services to our customers, they're interested in a good integration and offering that has a number of features and then that can be easily used as a differentiator from other cloud offerings. But on the other hand, as we've seen on the previous slide, there are so many sub-projects and new developments in the platform space. We see a very fast-paced development. And it's very, very difficult to cater for all needs because workloads are different, applications are different, and the problems are different. So we need different components. So having a one-size-fits-all solution might not be the right way here. And how we try to address this issue, we see in a minute. But we are here at the OpenStack Summit. So one of the first questions is probably, OK, we want to go for a platform, so don't we have something native in the OpenStack universe? Well, actually we have. Magnum is the best-fitting project that takes care of setting up platform environments on top of an OpenStack cluster. On the other hand, Magnum is currently only a little bit more than a unified installer. So setting up a Kubernetes cluster with Magnum is comparatively easy, but this is just the installation. What about day two operations? What about updates? What about resizing? Well, actually you can do that. You can usually resize the number of the nodes. But the actual management of the platform is not covered by Magnum itself. It is covered by the platform. And well, we'd like to see a little bit more integration of those features into the OpenStack platform, since usually the platform components themselves make use of the underlying infrastructure anyway. So for example, most often you need a load balancer. You need storage. You need network facilities, and so on, and so on, to leverage the actual platform. So the main question is how to integrate that in a seamless way and not to reinvent everything that is there on the infrastructure level, again on the platform level, or vice versa. Well, our current approach is to go for a strategy that is, has at least two facets. First of them is providing managed services to some degree on agreed services like a Kubernetes cluster, for example. So an example for that is our service we call Cloud Container Engine. Cloud Container Engine is a managed version of Kubernetes on top of the OpenTelecom Cloud, so on top of a OpenStack installation. But it does not make sense for each and every single detail to offer a managed service for that. And in these cases, we agreed on setting up a set of technical blueprints. A blueprint is kind of an architecture description or a reference architecture that can be more or less used as a template to create the resources you need with the means provided by OpenStack. It's in best effort support that we call somewhat supported. That means my colleagues and I, we are available for requests. We run a blog, for example, and some other platforms to get in touch and stay in touch with our users and customers so that we can iteratively, in an agile way, enhance our blueprints and recommendations. They should be easy, adoptable by our customers. And while one aspect is important for us, we try to stay as close as possible to the upstream, not making up complex solutions that work only for this specific version of our OpenTelecom Cloud, but that works generally on an OpenStack platform. And that can also be shared and distributed to others as well. And a blueprint should implement not a demo setup, but should have a real production ready or production like a setup in mind. So for example, setting up a Kubernetes cluster with Minikube is just a matter of a few command lines. But extending a Minikube installation for something for a production use is very tedious and probably not a good idea. So we decided on going for the production ready setup directly. This takes me to the third part. And well, as I said, my apologies that Alex is not here. He prepared some of the original demos. But to give you a brief overview, we picked more or less arbitrary, but maybe not completely free platform systems, the first being Rancher. Rancher is, to my opinion, a container management in a nutshell. If you just have a number of containers that you don't like to organize yourself with a Docker command and spinning up containers on different O's. So NOVA instances or virtual machines, then Rancher might be a good choice for you. Currently, the version 2.0 with a major redesign in the back end got released in this summer. And with version 2.0, Rancher manages more or less Kubernetes clusters. So that makes it a very easy first step into this field if you haven't investigated that before. The provision that is quite easy, it's more or less there are YouTube videos and so on and so on. So you can be done in 15 minutes if you're quick and have all the resources ready. Rancher provides an installation Docker container. So if you have already a Docker runtime on your virtual machine, you can very quickly get started and, well, launch the management platform. There are multiple cloud adapters available. And, well, obviously, we prefer to use an open stack one. I think there is even a specific adapter available for the OpenTelecom cloud with some extra features. But basically, it's the open stack vanilla one. Our second case study is about OpenShift. And, well, as a lucky coincidence, Artem was here. He's way more familiar with OpenShift than I am. So I ask the mic to you, Artem. Thanks. Well, basically, what is OpenShift? OpenShift is nothing else as, nothing else I wouldn't say, but still it's enterprise version of Kubernetes created by Red Hat. What's funny for me is that OpenShift is, to one extent, would be even developing much faster than the Kubernetes itself. They have packed additional features and those features are evolving even faster than Kubernetes. They, of course, do a really great job by putting those features back to Kubernetes. But that's not a point. So basically, let's consider OpenShift as one type of Kubernetes. What do we have here? Enterprise platform for software development. We can also consider OpenShift IO, for example, as an example of how platform as a service could be created based on OpenShift, which is really also a great example. We also have a managed version of OpenShift, which is a project in systems called Epigile. Basically, it's also exactly a managed OpenShift working on top of OpenTelecom Cloud, which means working on top of OpenStack. But here, even in this case, we have decided to go both ways, managed as well as creating a blueprints, since, in some cases, having really a managed OpenShift would be really costly. Can you please switch to the next slide? Yes, of course. Sorry. Yeah, just a small reference architecture, how it can look like, or how it should look like, in a more or less production environment. So it's definitely we are not talking here about MiniShift or some really small, tiny usage, some example, but something that can be used in production. And we see here on top load balancers. We see here some masters, which should be definitely, in this case, as with Kubernetes distributed across different availability zones. We see here worker nodes. And all those are just normal Nova instances. In some cases, it could be, of course, even a bare metal server. If you, for example, would want to try using Cata containers, we might have also additional persistent storage, which can be also additional Nova instances, for example, running GlusterFace, or SEPF, or whatsoever. So basically, what I'm talking here about is that even with OpenShift, you have so much different options of how to install it and how customers might expect you to provide a managed service that it's simply nearly impossible to cover everything. One customer would come to you saying, OK, I would like to have just two masters. I don't need more. Some would say, no, I need definitely three. But we have two availability zones. How would you place three masters into availability zones? Might be a question. Some would say, I would like to see Etcd, the amount on master. Someone would say, no, please don't do this ever. And so on and so on. Some would say, OK, I'm fine with GlusterFace. And having registry on top of this. So yeah, there are way too many possibilities how you can install OpenShift. And basically the same for Kubernetes that it's simply impossible to follow all the possibilities. Neither you can give a managed service, which would basically provide all the possibilities. Nor you can provide even a blueprint, which would also cover all the possibilities. So at the end of the day, you may make some assumptions, some decisions for you from your practice. But even this is tricky, since your customer comes to you and says, what is really the best practice in having some tool or using some tool or installing? It's impossible for us, even, to follow all the development. With each new release, you would install it even in totally different ways. But let's focus on the typical installation, the typical installation of OpenShift or Kubernetes. I have chatted also with some guys who are using Zoo on top of OpenShift and so on. It's basically quite, quite same for lots of guys. How would you do this? You basically would create a bastion host somewhere in the cloud, and you will either use this bastion host or you will still use your local host with proxy into the cloud. But then you would normally, what you would do next is create a couple of subnet or even networks, one for DNS service and one for the cluster itself, DNS. Basically, yeah, it's a requirement coming from Kubernetes that all instances need to know each other quite good. And while OpenStack is somehow moving and improving in this way, but still, in our case, we haven't found that it's really properly working. So basically, we will create one network and put their own DNS servers and manage your zones yourself. And you will create an additional subnet and put already really a Kubernetes or OpenShift instances there. And then we are not trying to reinvent a wheel and just use OpenShift Unscable installer or a kubespray in case of Kubernetes. Yeah, I think that's all. So basically, that's how we try to make life of our customers who are asking, how can we install Kubernetes or OpenShift in more or less production way easier? Yeah, so as Artem just explained, one size fits all solution is simply not applicable to a framework like that. And however, we published a few examples and work and progress reports on our blog. I think I have put down the link for that in one of the references resources pages. So if you want to get started at a certain point, that might be an option. If you're looking for something on an OpenStack environment. More or less the same also applies to the Cloud Foundry as well, but even one way, one level more upscale. So Cloud Foundry is kind of an abstraction platform for really large enterprise organizations. It has a number of abstraction components for databases and queues and, well, actually covering the whole software development lifecycle. The integrated CI CD, which is, well, if you define it precisely, not the case with OpenShift, but which can be quite easily added to OpenShift. Well, Cloud Foundry was created by originally VMware as far as I remember and, well, devoted a couple of years ago, almost 10 years now. And the project itself is now also under the custody of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which is in turn a part of the Linux Foundation. Cloud Foundry also kind of adjusted their path, and especially the execution or the deployment platform is nowadays more or less also a Kubernetes platform. That's not mandatory, but usually users do this this way. Very, very brief view on the architecture diagram as well. Alex could explain this way better. And, well, the installation itself is more or less similar to what Artem explained for OpenShift as well. So it's more or less setting up some foundation, setting up an initial virtual machine that acts as a bastion or management installer node, creating all the infrastructure, configuring the infrastructure so that you can access the OpenStack components and service endpoints, and then create the necessary Cloud infrastructure. Well, in our blueprint, we used Terraform for that. And after that, you can deploy the so-called Bosch. The Bosch is the deployment tool that is part of Cloud Foundry. And once that is available, Bosch is able to bootstrap itself or is able to bootstrap the Cloud Foundry setup. Yeah, and that's it more or less. This looks so easy, but in terms of the actual resources being virtual machines as well as days spent to install, obviously different. We made a very, very rough comparison chart to show you a little bit about our experiences with the different platforms, their targets, and the resources we spent on them. Well, this is not set in stone, as it obviously depends very much on your specific needs and requirements and workloads. But after quite some discussion, we agreed on these example numbers. So you can run a rancher node with two compute nodes and just a network in between. Whereas you need at least 8 to 10 nodes for Kubernetes cluster and more than 30 to implement the reference recommendations of the Cloud Foundry reference architecture. I just explained the typical workloads, I think. Today, the programming languages are not an issue anymore. So actually, you can use virtually any programming languages. You can package inside a container, if you like, to actually set up and configure everything that is, well, at least similar to a production environment, that differs a lot. And that is also to the fact that, well, the sheer number of services differ greatly between the free platform software components. Yeah, that brings me to a final slide where we collected a few of our resources. Maybe you can look that up in the video or in the conference material. And I'd like to conclude with a few thoughts that are our takeaway from our journey into platforms. So the first is to offer flexibility to our customers and users to adapt their platform to their specific needs or to enable them, to adapt them to their specific needs. We are here to provide support. We hear you. We try our best to answer your questions and to provide solutions if there is something that is missing. We have to constantly monitor the development in the platform area. And once we see specific platforms to become a quasi standard, we also consider providing managed services optionally on top of our platform, as we already did and do with Kubernetes and the Cloud Container Engine. With that takeaway and wrap up, I say thank you and have a great last day of the OpenStack Summit. Thank you very much. Any questions or comments or just interested in the popsicles? Otherwise, I need to take them back again. So if you are interested, just come by and grab one. Oh, yeah, interesting, yeah. But this is actually from the next presentation. Where does it come from? OK, sorry. But it's still true, yeah. Thank you very much.


The World Health Organization's chief security says the Delta variant of COVID-19 forced identified in India is becoming the globally dominant variant of the disease. Sumiya Sramin-Eten also voiced disappointment in the failure of pure vaccine candidate in a trial to meet the WHO's efficacy standard, in particular as highly transmissible variant boasts the need for new effective shots. Britain has reported a steep rise in infections with the Delta variant, while Germany's top public health official predicted it would rapidly become the dominant variant there, despite rising vaccination rates. The whole situation is so dynamic because of the variants that are now circulating and as you said the Delta variant is well on its way to becoming the dominant variant globally because of its significantly increased transmissibility. We need more data again from well designed studies on the efficacy of the different vaccines that are in use in different countries against the different variants. When you look and any of you can look on a website and see the numbers, when you see the absolute numbers it doesn't appear that our African region is in necessarily bad shape it's only in the last week represents just over 5% of global cases and over 2.2% of double deaths but given what Maria said about under diagnosis on the continent it's trajectory that's very very concerning and in the last week we've seen over 100% increases in Namibia and Sierra Leone and Liberia in Rwanda and Zambia and Zimbabwe and Malawi and Lusoto in Congo and South Sudan. We've seen between 50 and 100% increase in cases in places like Mozambique in Cote d'Ivoire. Every region has countries that are now facing a steep increase in cases and deaths. Many countries in Latin America have rapidly increasing epidemics and others have plateaued at high level. In Africa cases have increased by 52% just in the past week and deaths have increased by 32%. We expect things to only get worse.