How come you don't yet have a side hustle? You cannot rely on one single source of income, not in this economy. The cost of living, the cost of transportation, the cost of food, the cost of raising a family, all of them have gone only up. I hate to break it to you, but relying on one single source of income, which is usually your job is not something that you could continue doing in 2024. This graph right here shows us the continuously increasing cost of living. You see that? It's on an uptrend position. It shows no sign of going down. And it takes no special degree to realize that this is only going to go up. And if you don't have anything to counter this, then you're going to find yourself in a very difficult financial situation. Now, let me put things a bit into perspective for you. You need around $50,000 per year to live comfortably.  But this means that, averagely speaking, you're going to need around $5,000 per month just to be included in that comfortable area. Do you know who makes that much? People with bachelor's degrees. So you're going to have to finish school. That's 12 years. You're going to have to go to university. That's another like three, five years. And then you're going to have to get your bachelor's degrees.  And all of that just to make enough money to be included in the comfortable area. And overall, this comfortable meaning can mean a lot of things for a lot of people. And I'm sorry to break it to you, but this comfortable lifestyle is just not for me. I want a lot more than that. This is why I started my own side hustle. All right, so now that we have decided you need a side hustle, what side hustle should you pick? So first of all, you have a job right now, right? That's your main source of income and you should keep it that way. Your side hustle should be complementary to your salary. It shouldn't be in competition with that because if you're focusing on two things, you're not going to be able to do both of them. So number one, your side hustle should actually make your life better. Second of all, how much time do you need to have this side hustle? Because for example, if you do garage reselling, you're going to have to drive a lot from garage to garage and find the best products. That's going to take a lot of your time. If you want to open up a social media marketing agency, then you're going to have to be there for your clients. You're going to have to run ads. You're going to have to make decisions. So that's also time consuming. So the best side hustles out there are going to be the ones who are going to allow us to keep our main job until we have a consistent income from our side hustle. And third of all, we have scalability. Now I'm going to give you an example that I used before garage selling. That's a side hustle that cannot quite be scaled to bigger numbers. And if you're watching this video, it means that you definitely don't want to make just a couple of dollars aside your normal income. Alright, so if you also believe that these three criteria are the things that you should look in a side hustle, then drop shipping is the best side hustle for you. Drop shipping can give us everything that I've talked about and a lot more. One of the biggest reasons why I think that drop shipping is the best side hustle for a beginner is the fact that you need zero startup capital. And you're probably asking yourself right now, Hey, sir, but how come do I need zero dollars? No business ever needs zero dollars to get started. Let me explain to you, if you go to the definition of drop shipping, you're going to realize that you will be able to sell products that you do not own, you will not have to keep inventory. And also all of the customers that will buy things from you will pay you upfront. So what happens here is that a customer that will buy something from our store, they will pay a lot more for that product than we're paying for our supplier. Once the customer pays you for the product, that money goes directly into your bank account.  The supplier will ship the product directly to your customer's house and you can keep the difference. Now look, look, look, let's stop for a minute. This might sound very exciting. And it is, trust me, but there are a few catches, right? Because if it would be this easy, then anyone could do it and everyone would be a millionaire. The first catch is that you need to know what product you're selling. You only want to sell products that are making huge waves on the market right now, products that people are buying like hot cakes. Imagine face masks in 2020. That is the definition of a winning product. Anyone who sold face masks made a lot of money. And this is the most important aspect when starting a dropshipping side hustle. Now me personally, I've been able to generate a lot of money with dropshipping. I got a lot of my stores to multiple six figures in sales. Do I think that anyone could do it? Yes, definitely. You just need to write products. I just want to let you know that the more in demand a product is, the more sales you can make with that product. Now, when it comes to product research, you can do that manually or automatically. Doing manual product research will take a lot of our time. And remember, we don't have time right now because we have a job. This is just a side hustle. So we're going to choose the automatic route. And we're going to go with auto DS, which is the best platform when it comes to finding winning products. And this platform will also help us along the way by automating our whole dropshipping business. Now on auto DS, you're going to be able to find daily new winning products that are making waves on the market. As we all know, Valentine's Day is just around the corner. And I think that these romantic products have a lot more potential to sell during these times. This is why I've decided to go with this particular product from auto DS. And as you can see right here, they are telling us for how much we can get the product, how much we can sell it based on the competition. And if you scroll a bit down, you're going to see that there are a lot of stores that are selling this product and you can actually check them out. If you click on each and every one of these links, it will take you to a store that is selling this item. So you can actually learn from them and see what they are doing. They're also giving us an average order figure so we can see how well the product is doing.  And also saturation score, which will tell you how saturated is the market for this product. You will also have ideas for targeted audience.  Alright, so we have decided on the product. What is the next step? The next step would be for us to create an actual store. Right now you might be asking, Hey, Serban, do I have to hire a developer for this? The answer is no. There are a lot of platforms out there that will help you create a store very, very easy and fast. For example, this one right here, build your store.ai. This website will get you a free shop of a store generated by AI in less than two minutes. And the best part about it is that it's 100% free and no credit card required. All you have to do is go to the website, click this button, put your info here, select the niche of the store that you want to be created and click on this button right here. In less than one minute, I got an email that looks like this and they also created a custom AI generated logo. Voila, this is how I was able to get a brand new shop of my store created by AI in less than two minutes and anyone can do the same. Do you remember the Valentine's Day product that I just found earlier in this video, this one right here? Let's go back to Autodesk to the page of the product, click on this button right here, this will basically create a draft of our product, do some changes to the product and make it the way we want to make it and then click on this button to push it to our store. By the way, I really want you to try this out, Autodesk has this amazing AI feature inside of it that will help you create titles and descriptions for the products that you want to push to your store with the help of AI. It's very funny because you can go with multiple ways of creating these titles and descriptions and you can just save it whenever you're happy with it. Remember, the product page is one of the most important pages of our store. That is the first place our customers will go after clicking our ads. So this is the final step, you're gonna have to start running some ads. It doesn't matter what platform, I would recommend you TikTok or Facebook and I would recommend you to have somewhere around $300 for every product that you're testing. Now that might sound like a lot of money but it is worth it, trust me. I'm just gonna give you some random examples. Check out how much I spent yesterday with this TikTok account and how many sales we did. After subtracting the cost of goods, this leaves us to this much profit and this is nothing fancy. The day before that, I spent this much money and I have generated this much. Also, if we subtract the cost of goods, it will leave us to this much profit. So as you can see ads are just another way to fast-track everything and bring those customers closer to you. Alright guys, so the whole idea of a side hustle would be to eventually replace your main income. It doesn't matter how much money will you generate with your side hustle, I strongly advise against replacing your main income with your side hustle only when they are equal. This is the first step towards financial freedom and it also gives you the power to live life on your own terms. Thank you for watching, have an amazing day, until next time.


I think there are six Paralympics sports representatives. Is it 14, I think? 1976. 2006. 2012. I want to say Sweden or Ornesvik. I want to say that it was in Italy. Yeah, I'm going to go Bobsleigh, but I don't think it is. That's awesome, I believe. I think that's snowboarding.


Morning, everyone. My late mother would love the noun icon. My goodness gracious, that's overflattery. Dennis, I hope I can generate the kind of passion you just did. You kind of, as a matter of fact, I love your metaphor, campfire to brush fire. Of course, it basically is something I'm going to steal and I'll attribute it to you. I'm really thrilled to be here for a whole number of reasons. And Larry Cuban and I, when we did our book, Powerful Reforms with Shallow Roots, back in 2002. Essentially, many of you have read Larry's stuff through the years and he's a much better wordsmith than I am. And the metaphor, Powerful Reforms with Shallow Roots, I think defines the Achilles heel essentially of the various waves of educational reform that have drowned us over the last three or four decades. And one of the reasons I certainly would corroborate what Dennis had to say is that the kind of work that you folks are doing in your 20 cities are terribly, terribly important and as far as I'm concerned, has to be the wave of the future. Reform of this system or non-system, fragmented, decentralized American school system with the federal government in 50 states and 14,000 some odd school districts and 90,000 foxholes called individual school buildings is so fragmented. Everybody's responsible and nobody's responsible, which is one of the problems. But what you're about is reform that is bottom up as well as top down. There's basically been, I think, a very false essentially polarity between whether reform is top down and bottom up. The reality is in this system, reform has to be top down, bottom up, diagonally, it has to go in a hundred different directions. And I think the role of the NEA Foundation is a catalyst to kind of generate the grassroots reform that this initiative essentially reflects. Collaboration is very difficult. As a matter of fact, in most places around the country we're at the cutting edge of rhetoric on foundation, on collaboration. It's an extraordinarily difficult process, particularly at a time when economic resources are constrained, people are afraid to put their head up over the trenches when they're worried about jobs, they're worried about their own budgets and schools basically are competing with social service agencies, with health agencies, pension funds, et cetera. And you seem to be doing it in these communities and it's only gonna happen at the local level. Personalities vary, leadership varies in many places, you'll have teacher unions providing the leadership in other places, you may have mayors, you may have city councils, you may have business leaders and so forth. So I think if one thing this administration hopefully has learned is that top down exclusively does not work. And my thesis is, and some of this you'll agree with that we have to rethink the basic governance structure, systems change, not only in terms of schools, school boards, school administrators, teacher unions and so forth, reassessing what they do, but even more fundamental is the need to reassess the chasm and the separation of schools from general purpose government. And this is quite controversial, particularly in light of the pleasant developments in Chicago recently. And one of the incredible unfortunate developments is that when people talk about greater involvement of general purpose government, city council, mayors and so forth, when it's couched in terms of control, essentially it generates all kinds of opposition almost immediately. But what we're seeing and I think is embodied in the work you're doing in your 20 cities is greater influence of general purpose government, which I think is absolutely inevitable. And what I'd like to do is quote from an article by Alex Kotlowitz in September 16th, New York Times. Talking about the Chicago situation, and I think most of you will agree with this. After speaking with teachers on the picket lines, it became clear and I'm quoting, that it was about something more fundamental and something worth our attention. Top notch teaching can't by itself become our nation's answer to a poverty rate that as we learned the other day remains stubbornly high. One out of every five children in America live below the poverty line. In Chicago, 87% of public school students come from low income families. And as if to underscore the precarious nature of their lives on the first day of the strike, the city announced locations where students could continue to receive breakfast and lunch. We need to demand the highest performances from our teachers while we also grapple with the forces that bear down on the lives of the students from families that have collapsed under the stress of unemployment to neighborhoods that have deteriorated because of violence and disinvestment. And we can do that both inside and outside the schools but teachers can't do it alone.  Which means obviously, without being a mathematician, that 90% of a kid's time is spent in front of the tube on the computer, mauling, M-A-L-L-I-N-G, whatever they do these days. And it's apparent that schools in light, and there are some super schools that are overcoming in teachers and teacher organizations. One of the first things I've learned, lesson in terms of American education policy, whatever you say is true, whatever you say is false, depends where you look. There are many, many schools in which kids are overcoming these kinds of handicaps. And I'm not an apologist for schools that aren't doing their job, but the reality is that with the changes in the economy, with the need for two incomes, we still predicate our school day on the notion that it's nine to three and mommy is there when Johnny and Jane come home from school and she'll give them cookies, she'll supervise, play, et cetera. That world is over, it's gone. And somehow or other, if we're gonna build the kind of after school programs and so forth that we have to, essentially we're gonna have to reassess this relationship between schools and other agencies of government. And my viewpoint is that some of the most prestigious mayors in the United States or most visible mayors is probably a more apt way of saying it. Whether it's New York or Chicago or Washington, DC or elsewhere have kind of blown the mayoral control issue because it's become so politicized and volatile that we've lost sight of the most valuable contribution mayors or general purpose government can do, which is essentially to push community school concepts with the social and health agencies and the other agencies that the mayors do control that we can create new sets of relationships, better payoff on our investments by basically having greater mayoral influence or city council influence and synergy with the schools. Otherwise, I think the schools are being set up as scapegoats if you will. John Gardner, one of my heroes, some of the AARP crowd in the audience may remember John Gardner. There was a wonderful secretary of health education and welfare in the Johnson administration. I talked about the anti-leadership vaccine. Dennis was talking about leadership. And we face in this country kind of an unprecedented challenge because there's no confidence in leadership at any level, at any level, maybe at the local level, on the ground, where people are interacting with each other. And there's this mindless anti-government syndrome that's so pervasive.  And it's at the school level. And it's at the school board level. It's at the local level. Now I would contend, as you all know, that all our institutions are changing. Globalization, technology, economic competition, demographic change, and I'll get back to that in a minute because I think this is very, very, very central in terms of Dennis's point early in light of what's happening to the student body. And most of you folks are from communities where you live with the profound demographic changes every day of your lives, of your working lives, in classrooms. Massive changes outside of schooling have radically changed the context of school governance and demography. I have a grandson who goes, who attends the D.C. public schools. We still define a school system in which over 90% of the kids are of color, these kids are minority.  My grandson is very much a minority at Wilson High School. And until we begin the majority, the existing majority, increasingly, as you all know, better than anybody because you're on the front lines of the demographic changes with the young kids coming up, a majority minority. Our major megastates, essentially, California, New York, Illinois, Florida, Texas, our either majority minority, our language has to change. Our semantics have to change. The Latinization of the population, the incredible growth of the very diverse Latino population all over the United States, not just in Texas and California and Illinois and New Jersey and Florida, everywhere. South Carolina, Iowa, Idaho. I mean, I don't think anyone's here from Idaho. I didn't mean to stress that particularly. But we have to be more cognizant of the special immediate and direct needs of kids coming from very different populations. It isn't 17 and 18-year-old white upper middle, the class kids going on to college. Some, I won't get into the higher ed issue. Maybe Tony Carnivali will address that. But it seems to me that colleges have to be a lot more aware in terms of K-16 of a very diverse population which offers all kinds of tremendous opportunities. But the schools are the front line of this issue and the future of the country. So we need new approaches. We need new collaborative approaches. H. L. Menken, that very sweet guy who spent most of his career up the road on Route 95 here, the columnist, said that for every complex question, there's a simple answer and it's invariably wrong. The mayoral control issue is a beautiful textbook example of this. I'm agnostic about structural panaceas. They come, they go, I've been around long enough. I got gray hair. I really don't pay much attention to them. But in many ways, we have to basically build from the inside out. Urban school governance has been called the Vietnam of urban politics. The governance system is in many ways broken. Jerry Weas, preeminent now retired superintendent, and he looks wonderful since he's retired from the superintendency. And I think is really enjoying life. The urban superintendency is called the Mount Everest of Public Service. And in many ways, it's a very, very, very difficult job. So what about leadership? Dennis mentioned leadership. I think we need a new definition of leadership and you people are the first wave coming in on D-Day in terms of what you're trying to do in your community, because you're living it every day and you understand the complexity infinitely more than people like myself will fly at 30,000 feet in Washington DC. Leadership is making connections, crossing boundaries between fragmented sectors and groups, and breaking down the institutional isolation and insulation of schools, the fortress school mentality. It's not the fault of educators. A hundred years ago, we basically separated school governance from general purpose governance as part of the municipal reform movement in the United States and it made a hell of a lot of sense at that time. And again, I'm not an advocate of mayoral control I'm not an advocate of, again, I'm agnostic on it. What I'm saying essentially is that in community by community and by community, we have to reassess the sets of relationships that exist or in most school systems, unlike yours, do not exist between schools and these other agencies. And it requires school people, educators, someone to kind of break out of our shell and recognize that indeed in light of the demographic changes, technological changes and so forth, we have to view our systems much more broadly and inclusively. So that's the definition of leadership. The Committee for Economic Development, a very prestigious group that has business leaders that has been involved in generating some very significant education reports through the years, particularly in the realm of early childhood education, did a report some years ago, putting learning first. And there's a lot of criticism of my kind of rhetoric. You know that the schools have to be educational institutions and not social service institutions. And yes, the schools primarily should be educational institutions, but there are no other institutions that have the social penetration of schools that are in every community that are pervasive. And indeed in too many communities, it's the only institutional base on which to provide services and so forth. And the community school movement is part of this. None of this stuff is ever new. The community school movement started in Michigan through the Mott Foundation way, way back in the 1970s. But there's an urgency now in light of the demographic, technological changes to kind of begin to adopt this philosophy. And again, it will play out very, very, very differently.  These are hard-nosed business people. Social services may be placed in schools, delivered in schools, but they not be the responsibility of schools. And what this says, I think is terribly important. Again, it reaffirms from a group of business leaders, Committee for Economic Development, that indeed we have to rethink the structure and so forth. The Club of Rome, that's Rome, Italy, not Rome, New York, is a futurist group. And they identified three categories of people in terms of the future. One category was people that make it happen. A second category were people who let it happen. And a third category were people who wonder what happened. And in many ways, you guys are at the kind of the embryonic stage of making it happen. And again, in closing, returning to Dennis' metaphor of campfires to brush fires, what you're doing, it's 20 communities out of 14,000. And with the power and perversive impact of the NEA, I hope that your efforts will lead to a national brush fire so that we in education 10, 15, 20 years downstream won't be wondering what happened to probably the most important American institution historically, which are the public schools. So I thank you for your attention. And I think we have a panel coming up that can disagree with everything I've said. Thank you very much.


I am very happy to see such a full room for this panel. We will aim to talk about hosted control planes and how we can revolutionize the control plane within Kubernetes. Now, we have a wide, very wide audience. Before we start, I would like to ask the audience, how many of you have heard about hosted control planes? Right, that's amazing. How many of you are using this in production at the moment? Oh, I can see some hands, perfect. So before we're going to start, I would like to introduce myself and, of course, my panel. My name is Katie Gomanji, and currently I am a senior field engineer at Apple. As well in addition to that, I am one of the TOC, or Technical Oversight Committee member for CNCF. Today, we have a wonderful panel with experts within this area that will share their wisdom and their experience with hosted control planes. And I would like to ask them to introduce themselves. So perhaps we'll start with you, Taylor, and we're just going to go around. Hey everyone, just super grateful for y'all's time today. My name is Taylor Lozowski. I'm the lead architect of IBM Cloud Satellite and work on the delivery of our managed services on-premise and in multi-cloud environments. Super excited to speak with y'all today. Hey, I'm Yusif from Merendez. One of the things that I'm working on at Merendez is our KZero's QP distro and the accompanying implementation of hosted control planes called Cosmotron. Hi, everyone. So my name is Adriano. I'm the founder of a classic company that started to investigate the hosted control plane model from the beginning, from 2020, more or less. And in 2022, we released our implementation of the hosted control plane that is Caled Camaji. It's open source and quite robust and production ready. Thank you. And hello, I am Cesar Wong. I'm an engineer at Red Hat. I've been working on hosted control planes for about five years, which is a very long time for me. Most recently, I am working on the HyperShift project, which is an implementation of hosted control planes for OpenShift, and I'm super glad to be here. Amazing. Now, as we have seen, some of you are familiar with hosted control planes and the notion of it. Some of you are running it in production. However, for the interest of being declarative into explaining the terminology and what it actually means, I would like to ask Adriano to explain what hosted control planes are. Yeah, thank you. So, the Hosted Control Plane is a design pattern. It's a new design pattern for Kubernetes architecture. Well, you have two layers. You have the downstream layers where the tenant cluster are placed, and then you have an upper layer where the management cluster is placed. The Hosted Control Plane, the control plane of the downstream cluster, are hosted into the management layer, and they run as a regular Kubernetes application managed by the Kubernetes in the management layer. So, this is not quite new design because every of us are using managed Kubernetes services from the hyperscalers, and so, this design pattern is coming from the hyperscaler, the management, the managed Kubernetes service. Most of this service that we use every day are based on the Hosted Control Plane model. I don't know if you want to add some more other details or perspective. I think that's pretty much a good introduction. So, we're aiming to run our control planes as pods within our Kubernetes clusters. Now, the natural question after that is why, and where exactly can we apply this particular scenario? So, I'd like to ask perhaps, do you see to share more about that? All right. Quite early on with our K-Zero distro, we kind of saw needs for something like this in typical use cases like, for example, edge networks. On edge, you push your workloads towards the edge of the network where you probably either cannot run or don't want to run the control planes. So, we want to run it somewhere central. Another kind of similar common use case that we've seen and heard about is industrial automation. On factories, well, factories are run by IT probably like 100% nowadays. So, and we want to push the workloads closer and closer to the actual manufacturing process. So, think about things like PLC controllers running within the actual machinery. So, we want to push Kubernetes workloads there. And those are like super, super tiny devices where you just cannot run API server, HCD and all that resource hogging machinery there. So, again, we have to have some central way to manage all the control planes for these kind of smaller, more and more distributed clusters. And hence, well, if you have to have something central, why not use Kubernetes for that? That's why we're all here anyway. Yeah, and so for us, the primary use case is for a managed service and managed service providers. So, managed service providers need a way to provide clusters to their customers and prevent their customers from messing with the cluster, right? And so, the hosted control planes give you a separation of concerns, right? The control plane pieces live in the provider's infrastructure and they are not visible to the customer, right? What is visible to the customer is a CUBE API endpoint. And so, there's no pods running control plane workloads that the customer can see or that they can delete. There's no infrastructure that they can see. It's all managed by the service provider, right? So, that is a huge advantage. The other one is that because you are running control planes in your infrastructure, you can bin pack control planes into nodes and size them appropriately, right? So, some customers may want to use a lot, like require big API servers. It is very easy to vertically scale your control plane when you're running it as pods in your infrastructure. And of course, deploying control planes or provisioning control planes is very easy, right? You have existing infrastructure and when you say, I want a new host cluster, a new control plane, all you're doing is running a set of pods in a namespace. And that's it, you have a cluster, right? So, it is reliable, it is cheaper, and it is faster. You make it sound all that simple. You just run pods. Yes, you run pods. Yeah. So, talking about running pods, let's look into the current ecosystem and tools that will help us to leverage the hosted control plane initiative. Now, usually when I mentioned that, and I had actual people approaching me, when we're talking about hosted control planes, the first interaction or reference they have with their mind is cluster API perhaps and KCP. And I would like to ask Taylor perhaps to describe the relationship between hosted control planes and some of this tooling and perhaps focus on or showcasing some of the new tooling or new initiatives that are focused on hosted control planes at the moment. Yeah, excellent question, Katie. So, really how I view the difference, when you look at cluster API and hosted control planes, I view hosted control planes almost as a methodology, right? This notion of running a Kubernetes control plane in a separate network, in a separate environment, management environment, as a Kubernetes native services, right, pod services, et cetera, almost as a methodology. And then there's the engines to actually deliver that methodology. So, if you look at cluster API, right? Those are going to be your tool sets and your drivers where you can give it declarative information to say, hey, I want to run a hosted control plane, you go out and if you have a connection into, you know, this special management network and this data plane, go provision me my worker nodes in my data plane, go provision me a Kubernetes control plane in my management plane. So, that's sort of how I conceptualize the relationship of the two. Talking further on community initiatives that are ongoing right now, one thing that we've noticed that we've started to hit, especially with the networking perspective of these control plane to data plane workflows. So, think about your API services, your admission webhooks. Today, from the early days, it's still sort of this all or nothing concept to where when you talk about a group of an admission webhooks or an API server, it's either it all goes into the data plane network or it all stays in the control plane network. And what we really want to drive in the community is get finer grain control over that on a source to destination basis to enable an operator to say, hey, I have these set of admission endpoints in my control plane network, let me keep those there. But then this set that my customer is providing, I want those to go into the cluster. So, that's one initiative that we're working on. The second initiative that I would say we're working on is we always see that storing the data is hard. Operating at CD is probably one of the most difficult parts of this hosted control plane piece, right? So, what we really wanted to, what we're working to revitalize and get in the community is a best of breed at CD operator that is tailor focused on the purpose of provisioning at CD for Kubernetes clusters, right? For that purpose. And all the sort of excellence around, fault tolerance and recovery, automatic provisioning, automatic upgrades of those clusters. So, that's the second piece that we're looking to drive in the community. Perfect. Anyone else would like to mention some of the internal toolings that they have or some of the open source tooling that they use internally for HTC? At least my team, but we're working on with this, our open source cost return. It is actually already a fully conformant cluster API provider running the control planes as pods. And I know Adriana's team is also working on. Yeah, yeah. We also are working on a cluster API integration in order to have the control plane created in a declarative way according to the cluster API approach. And so we support almost all the infrastructure providers that are supported by cluster API. And I did want to mention that in our solution we do rely on cluster API for our machine provisioning. And you're looking to have a closer integration there, but that's not the only project that we rely on, right? Like we use connectivity, which is a community project for, and all of us use it, that is the solution to connect to workers, right? And we're talking a little bit about at CD, right? Like managing at CD. Great if we had a community operator to let us manage at CD. So there's definitely several things that we can collaborate in the community. Perfect. So at this stage, we definitely have the benefit of using HCP at the edge for the managed service providers. So now let's look into some of the challenges or perhaps some misconception of perspective. So one of the things that I was always wondering when it comes to hosted control planes is how disaster recovery is actually gonna happen because of course we're gonna have one cluster that's gonna host all of our control planes that might be perceived at the single point of failure. So here perhaps I'd like to have Jason Cesar challenging this point of view. Yeah, so this is very common, right? Like once we explain to people what hosted control planes are, the very first question or concern is, well, now you're running all your clusters or your control planes on a management cluster. What happens if that management cluster goes down, right? Am I dead into water, not just with one cluster right now, potentially hundreds of clusters, right? And the answer to that is, well, for one cluster, the control plane workloads are very similar or are like any other business critical workload that you're running. So if you're worried about control planes, I'm sure you have other business workloads that you run and what do you do to keep those available, right? Like you use things like HA replication, you use frequent backups, those sort of things, they apply to control planes as well, right? The other thing is that the management clusters, there's all kinds of failure modes, right? And it's not like a cluster is gonna go away and like in Star Wars, like a million voices are gonna be silenced all at once, right? It's gonna be a node went down, node hardware failure, right? And in that case, having control planes running as pods is awesome, right?  There's of course cases when your control plane can go down on the management cluster, right? But then you have to remember that your host to control planes are workloads and those will keep on ticking even if your control plane is down. So you could take your time to restore your control plane and reconnect your nodes and it doesn't all have to die, right? So at least from my point of view, is that you need to look at disaster recovery as something you need to practice, plan for, but it's not something that is scary or insurmountable. Yeah, you have to apply all the best practice yourself for the infrastructure level. So like availability zone, backup, you mentioned backup. And the only thing I would add, if anything I think it's a benefit and we've seen in client environments, disaster recovery on VM based deployments take up to 30 days sometimes if it takes to ordering new machines. And you know that sort of process whereas with this process, you're up in the order of minutes effectively if you have the infrastructure available. So I would say that it's a net benefit in that regard. Yeah, I'd really like to emphasize the part that, you know, like Caesar said, your control planes are just as any workload in the cluster, which means that you can use existing tools like Velero to take a full backup for disaster recovery for your control planes. One particular kind of thing that I've been, I've been hitting when testing disaster recovery is that the API endpoint is kind of hardwired into all of your worker nodes in cube configuration, for example. And then if you have to do like really full disaster recovery replacing the cluster with another, your API endpoint address might change. So we actually have quite a few places in different nodes and configuration where you have to go and change that. But you might probably be able to mitigate that with DNS but well, DNS, what could possibly go wrong? It's always DNS. That's the life of an engineer. Now talking about best practices, it seems like well, definitely disaster recovery is something that we need to enforce within our daily practices, not only when we have something going down. And in addition to that, when it comes to best practices, is high availability and scalability. And here I'd like perhaps have Adriano. Yeah, so having the control, I have the control plane running as a pod as a regular workloads in management cluster, you get out of box all the capability of Kubernetes for the cloud native application managed by Kubernetes. So you get out of box for free, high availability, resiliency, reconciliation. So if something is happening in your control plane, the Kubernetes in the management cluster is able to reconcile and to recreate what you have before the disruption. So also the scalability, this is you can scale your control plane pods because they are regular pods managed by deployment. So you can scale up, down depending on the loads, for example, or depending on your needs. If you don't have to use the cluster, you can scale down all the de-deployment scale to zero. And then you can save resources because this way you are not allocating resources for our control plane that is not used. So you get out of box all the capabilities that Kubernetes already offer to you. So it's just... Anyone else on scalability perhaps? I think we're good. So it seems like we can definitely leverage some of the best Kubernetes practices and functionalities when it comes to having pods and running pods, we have deployments, we have those automatic reconciliations as well. Now another topic of interest when it comes to HCPs is of course security and compliance. How can we make our control plane secure and how this actually is addressed by hosted control planes? And Taylor would you like to take this one? Yeah. And again, I just love the power that hosting on a Kubernetes native platform actually brings when you start to run these, especially in a multi-tenant mode, I mean the isolation modes that you get there. So if you think at a high level, then just moving to running these as Kubernetes native deployments that you get, you get to enforce things like non-root deployments, you can have controllers that sit there and actually look at your control plane workload and will not allow that to run unless you're running in a least privileged sort of mode. You can pair that also with mandatory access controls. Think SE Linux, App Armor to have an extra layer beyond the container itself isolation to where if there's a breakout, like a Run C breakout that happened, I believe a few years ago, it was proven that that actual block, since you have those mandatory access controls, you will not be able to get out of the file system that is scoped to just that control plane. So you have that isolation, higher level, right? When you think about the networking isolation that you can do from control plane to control plane, now all of Kubernetes native network policies and the potentials of the additional capabilities that an SDN provider might provide you is all within your ballpark to do. And then of course you look at the auditability of that system now. Everything is declarative to the Kube API server. So you can really, in that management cluster, get a whole idea of every version, all the CVEs, all the potential vulnerabilities that exist across your fleet, be able to pinpoint that down to individual instances and take action to remediate those based off of there. Whereas you're thinking on a large scale VM based deployment, you might be having to SSH into 5,000 nodes and look at version information of 10,000 system deprocesses, just for example. So I think there's a lot of power in that notion as well. And there is the potential to also use different apologies for your control plane workloads. Say you want to isolate the control planes for different customers. It is a matter of using Kubernetes node selectors, right? Putting things in different nodes, that sort of thing. So you do have a lot of power to isolate and separate these workloads. Yeah, this is more a perceived threat than a real technical issue. So one of the questions that often we get is, is it possible that a tenant is able to jump into control plane in his own control plane and then escape from the control plane and jump in the other control plane? Well, that's not possible because the control plane is not accessible to the tenant cluster, to the tenant user. So there is isolation between the upper layer, the management layer and downstream layer where the tenants are running their workloads. So the control plane is consumed as a service with just an IP address, a port and a certificate. And so it is not possible to jump into the control plane. So you can also enforce some additional security. For example, you can run the control planes in a Cata container run times to enforce. But if you protect the control plane, for example with firewall or with the infrastructure itself, there is no risk to jump into the control plane. And so no risk to escape from the control plane stuff. That's more a perceived threat that a real technical issue. One thing I'd like that also for the security point of view is that like Kallar mentioned security policies on network and whatnot. If you run your like traditional control planes and VMs or bare metal machines or whatever, you're always bound to define network policies with IP tables or firewalls or whatever. And then you have like different language for different setups. And you have handful of snowflakes at your hand. Here, what we can do is we can leverage the same language that we all know by heart, Kubernetes YAMLs for basically defining everything. I think it's YAML. Now before we're gonna open the floor for questions, we'd of course like to gauge your interest and perhaps participation in this initiative moving forward. And here I'd like to ask you perhaps to showcase some of the future initiatives and any calls for action. Yeah, so what we recently started was actually a Slack channel. And what we would love to see is folks that are interested and folks that are running this in production. What our goal is is to start to form a community and really start to take ideas from one another and sort of determine what are like these large-scale best practices that we're all implementing, right? So right now we have a Slack channel open for that and we're looking at the proper forms for a more formal group there, whether that be a working group or a SIG, et cetera. We're sort of working through channels to get that established. And we'll let that be known in the Slack channel. It's called Hosted Control Planes and Cloud Native Slack. We'll share that as well. But really looking to get best practices there and then what we really wanna do is take that in a bunch of different directions. So one being, right, we oftentimes see, you know, CIS, Kubernetes benchmarks. And all these benchmarks, these best practices are still applicable in control planes but if you actually look at the controls that a lot of these systems are implementing, it's all VM-based scanning that they're trying to do, right? So it's S-H into VM and look at a file system and make sure it's 0, 6, 4, 4, you know, whatever it might be. Whereas if you're thinking about things now in a Kubernetes-native environment, maybe it's, instead, I should be mounting my secrets as run mode, 0, 6, or 0, 4, 0, 0, et cetera. So once we start to get these best practices and really get a community of a bunch of different, you know, organizations together, I think that'll give us a lot of power to be able to push some of these standards, you know, across the community and really make running these even more efficient at scale across the larger ecosystem of plugins and providers that are trying to come in and, you know, build on top of Kubernetes. So that's definitely one thing that we're really excited about. And would love for your time and to hear your ideas from there. And also, like Lory mentioned, basically all of us are relying on same open source community components already without each other basically knowing us, knowing each other. So we definitely want to do more and more collaboration on all of these common components and common goals and all that. Yeah, our job should be also to educate to the control plane to this new pattern. So all the effort needs to be going this direction because it's something that is working, is safe, it brings a lot of benefits that we discussed. And so what we see that people sometimes are scared of this new design pattern. And so our efforts should be in this direction. Evangelize to make sure that people start to understand the model and start to love the model as we do. Yeah, and I can say that just my brief experience here in the short time that I've talked to you Zee and Adriano, well, I've worked with Tyler for a very long time. But my experience was that we have common problems that we're trying to solve, right? Like we have very different implementations and I know we're not the only ones implementing hosted control planes, right? So like SAP Gardner has been doing this for a long time. There's other people out there.  Thank you. I think that's definitely a great point to kind of finish the panel. If you'd like to get involved, definitely reach out to all of these people. You have their names on the schedule, of course. If you'd like to get involved, more on a daily basis, hopefully, do reach out on the Slack channel, which is hosted control planes and it's gonna be on the CNCF workspace. And I think we should have time for one question, one or two questions. So if you have any questions, please come forward and I'll give you the mic. And if not, that will weigh in the lobby just in case there's others asked you or I'll be there. Hey, thank you. My name is Vasu. I'm from the Gardner team. Thank you for the shout out. Okay, actually I've got three comments. Number one, the HCP model is actually not only for the Kubernetes control plane. Think about the Istio control plane if you want. If you want isolation, you can actually put that actually next to the, in the same namespace of the controllers. Then about backup, there was this question or the statement, you know, you can actually spread your high availability across multiple management clusters and actually also pivot your control plane from one namespace in one management cluster to another. And one remark, yes, we've been doing this since, I think we were in the earliest cohort of doing HCP. And we have a project for you around HCD. There was an HCD operator, but we have a project called HCDrewit. And it does actually most of our production work and keeps it stable. So that's something where you can start off with. And yeah, that's it. Thank you. Thank you. Funny enough, I did talk with Vasu before the panel. He was mentioning we have more than 10,000 HCPs all around. I even lost the count of it, but apparently I'm not allowed to say that. Any other questions perhaps? Yes. And the question to each of you, because each of you has different implementation of how static control planes, how do you handle in practice the persistence of those? Running ACP, doing backups, running Azure Database, how are you doing that in practice? Yeah, I'm more than happy to think that. So if you sort of break down the different layers, what you see in practice is one of two things. So at an HCD layer, you can have multiple instances running local disk, right? Spread across machines where then if one fails, right, you have sort of an operator on the back end that then removes that out, adds a new member and it's all local disk base.  Recovery actions and things like that. There's another mode where at that persistence layer, you can use persistent volumes, right? So network attached storage within zones that still have that highly available, you know, MZR sort of architecture. Some of the hits that you take there, right, is if it's network based storage, you might not get as many IOPS that you're truly using local disk. So that's one thing. The other piece is as far as persistence of the resources within the management cluster itself, you can actually have enforcement on, let's say if you're worried about someone going in and deleting a resource that's not supposed to be there. You can actually have whether it's submission web hooks or whatever other parameters are back, et cetera, that restricts even the operators of that management cluster, the operations that they can do. So maybe it's that an operator can actually never delete a cluster, right? That has to be actually initiated by a client and can only be driven by automated workload that's audited or anything like that with unique ID. So you can actually tie to the operators of that management cluster. You're not allowed to delete any deployments in here. You're allowed to do read some, you know, some read actions to help clients, you know, do whatever they might do, but that's sort of some of the controls on the deployment yamls themselves. I hope that answers your question. One, yes. One thing I'd like to add is that, for example, in our solution and in AWS team solution, you can also point the control plane to an SQL database, for example, an RDS. So one worry less, at least a bit. Yeah, the external database, yeah. Yeah, external database. Yeah, you can use, for example, a Postgres SQL. So it is specific of the implementation of the also control plane. So, but in our case, for example, you can use a Postgres SQL to store the state of the Kubernetes, the downstream Kubernetes cluster. So.


with the um you know we have a monthly audit done by cindy at nemrack and quite often you know they just pull out random random things that they see in the nemrack reports they need to see copies of the invoice to match it up with the nemrack entry so not having the orders back to the town office in a timely manner you know does present a problem and in addition to the ones that the cliff suggested judy is a little hesitant about the lockbox thing because she's concerned especially when ballot start coming in tax payment starts coming in she's a little hesitant um for us to be going into the lockbox not that we would intentionally do anything but she's worried that stuff might come up missing what if it gets caught in with some other paperwork um and when i when i review the orders i have them on the table i spread them out i have my little ruler and i go through each and every entry each and every invoice each and every check and that's why when you see after i've done it i have a little check mark that that's my process of doing that in the parking lot i could do it i will do it if that's what we decide as a team to do but it will make it difficult yeah i'm with you denise i mean when i don't want a process where it's a pro forma signature i mean when the five of us sit around the table there's you know generally one or more of us who you know we do just sign it but somebody always catches something and asks questions and if we're if we don't have the opportunity and there's no we're our processes and even designed to suggest that we're actually looking at them i don't think that's a good process so i know this last time was a little difficult people have work schedules vacation schedules kids schedules all that stuff but if we could as a team agree to be more on top of it and getting it passed off to the next i think barba calls it around robin um i think really that's really the only choice right now well i mean one of the one of the issues we had is we didn't get them there i mean the stack we got was like this because yeah i mean i i had them for i had june orders so it was and march orders so there was a whole stack that we got at once so there we need right we need to do it more often there's probably every time there's more there's process improvement on the front end too yeah what if we i i looked at barba's suggestion 24 hours this is that's not enough time for me just isn't um so i i would never commit to turning them around in 24 hours i mean i'm here i i left my house at 6 30 this morning i'm here at 10 o'clock at night 24 hours is not realistic but i agree um the other thing is if only three of us have to sign them then part of the round robin can be which three of us are taking responsibility for this set so what i could do is after i sign them i can send an email to the rest and say who wants to be next so that we can keep them moving and then somebody can say i'll be next how soon can you do it and move it along that way so that we're hitting people that are available can we actually we actually have a schedule i mean i will do better if we if i know that this week it's this week is i have to make the space and not in 24 hours but if you give me 48 i can i can do it in a week i know that this is my job well we can decide that like at a select board meeting because the orders are done for every select board meeting so like right now um i have the orders who wants to be next and who and how soon can you turn it around i'm looking at my calendar i can get it to okay so do you want to pick them up tomorrow we can arrange to pick them up yeah you can pick them up or i can drive them to you either way i mean it's all a matter of just cooperation it's a little bit of pain in the neck tenice you're going to the clerk's office tomorrow so you can swing by cliffs dump them up there and no i'm not going to the clerk's office i sent i sent the stuff to Sharon to sign Sharon's going to there oh okay but if cliff wants to be cliff wants to be next what if i call you in the morning cliff when i'm done with everything getting everything everybody all the critters around here fed well you can call me in the morning when you're done but it's probably easier if you just call me cliff okay are you done are you well done medium done biff well done and rose what's your schedule look like are you at work yeah um but i if he if he looks at them do you think you'll look at them tomorrow cliff yeah if uh if Denise and i can get him transferred from her to i in the morning yeah i could definitely do him yeah because tomorrow when i get out of work at six i'm going to go by the town office and sign some papers then from there i could go to cliff's house and bring the orders home with me tomorrow in the evening okay and then they're done three of you done here's three so then we just need to get them back to the town office for Judy or Barbara Barbara's working afternoons Judy's working mornings i guess okay and they could and one of them can just pick them up and put them in the office and then they're there and they're in the vault where they need to be yep all right excellent thank you so much all right is everybody ready to be done i think so john john unmute yourself i'm unmuting myself you never believed i could be muted so um Denise is acting chair i'm acting vice chair we have simple procedural thing to get done and i'd like to get it done tonight i know people would like to be vice chair i would like Denise to continue to be a chair she's a wonderful job and i'd like to as i said were threatened many many months ago that i would be stepping down and i would be nominating looking to nominate Sharon Fanon in my stead i think she was interested at that point in time i don't know if she still is um so i would like to get this done um now so i'm going to propose uh a slate uh Denise Wheeler as chair Sharon Wynn as vice chair uh katie is our secretary right recording secretary she needs to be disappointed okay so i'd like to move those two individuals for the chair and vice chair position and i'd like to also um at some point you know we need to come up with roles responsibilities and and how we do things going forward i want to also say that i really think this meeting went well tonight huge agenda but you really did a great job Denise thank you all together moving us through thank you thank you thank you for recognizing that that doesn't that means a lot you left so thank you but i so that's a motion and i'd look for a second for those i'll second that okay is there any further discussion are you ready to vote i'm sure Sharon's turning into a pumpkin any minute i'm waiting for her to turn orange i'm already turned pink oh all right let's take a roll call vote cliff hi Sharon hi rose hi john hi and i'm an eye and i'd like to make note the women are in charge we're always in charge didn't you know that oh i know that but i'm psyched thank you for doing that thank you aren't in Denise all right i was prepared to do minutes but um and i did have a couple of questions cliff i sent you about a couple of the minutes that katie didn't have the information so maybe when you have a chance not right now to see if you can answer those questions yeah i saw you sent one of them i'll take a look at the other one i know what you're talking about i already addressed one of them okay and don't forget july 27 6 30 to set the tax rate and send me any ideas that you want for the agenda and i'm the agenda seems to happen because there's always something going on can i make a motion that we notwithstanding i'm turning into a pumpkin that we go into executive session for personnel matters under one vsa section 13 313 a3 of course i'll second that cliff hi rose hi Sharon hi john hi and i'm an eye katie that was at 1007 thank you katie the recording has stopped


What's up guys welcome rotor riot and welcome back to learn to FPV today. It's going to be all about batteries So I'm going to run down the different specs that you're going to see on batteries and explain what they mean I'm going to give you a few considerations to look at when choosing the right battery and give you just some general safety and good practice tips So lipo or lithium polymer batteries come in a wide range of shapes and sizes and voltages So all the way down from this little tiny one-ass battery that be used for a micro up to these huge 6s 5000 batteries that I run in my helicopters or my electric skateboard But across all these batteries. They all have the same list of specs that you're going to find on them So the different specs that come on batteries are the voltage of the battery or how many cells are in it the capacity The C rating what type of connector it comes with if any at all I think most batteries these days do come with a connector and the dimensions in the weight So how big is it? How long is it? How wide is it? How much is it way? So for voltage remember that every lipo battery is going to have each of its cells range from 3.7 at dead to 4.2 at full voltage So the voltage you're going to find on the battery is I think storage voltage Which is 3.8 times however many cells are in it So like for example a 6s battery. It's going to say 22.2 volts if it was fully charged It'd be a little more fully dead a little low, but the voltage you'll see is the nominal voltage So for those of you that don't really understand the difference between the capacity and the voltage and what all that means I'm not really an electronics expert, but the way it's been explained to me is think of electricity like water So picture like a fire hose your capacity is like how much water is in the tank that you can shoot out the hose And then the voltage is how intensely are you shooting it out the hose? So if you're like tighten the nozzle down, it's shooting out really hard That's like high voltage if it was just barely kind of dribbling out at the end That's low voltage you could still have the same amount of capacity in the tank that's going to come out But at what intensity is it going to come out? So generally higher voltage more overall power So speaking of capacity like I just mentioned the capacity is essentially how much water you have in the tank Do you have a 5 gallon tank? Do you got a 50 gallon tank? It's basically the same concept So if it's a 5,000 milliamp battery like this one, it's gonna be a lot bigger than a 1,000 milliamp like this one So these are both 6 cell batteries or 22.2 volt batteries But obviously the 5,000 is a lot bigger because it just has a lot more juice in it Next up we have C rating C rating is a little tricky because it is important, but it's also kind of to be taken with a grain of salt Unfortunately in the battery industry it's kind of widely known that there's a bit of dishonesty going on so Before I get to that, let me just explain what C rating is So this battery has a C rating of a hundred C So the battery is claiming it can constantly push out a hundred times its capacity. So in this case that would be 100 amps continuous and I think we all generally know that that's not really going to happen At least not and have the battery actually last any amount of time If I were to continuously pull a hundred amps steady out of this for its whole battery life I'm only going to get a few cycles doing that for the batteries bad if it can even actually maintain that so Current flight controllers usually have current sensors in them And you can tell just doing a punch out that you might be able to hit a hundred amps But it's gonna quickly drop down the voltage will sag your overall power goes down. It can't really sustain that So why why is it dishonest? Why do they fudge the numbers? well It's it kind of became like an arms race So that if the competition's battery is a 40c battery Well, like mine's a 45c battery and then they say oh yours is 45 mines 50c And we just keep working up and up and get higher and higher and more and more ridiculous numbers it could also be that The tests that they ran really did give those numbers But they just changed the specs of their tests so that it's a true test But maybe this company is saying ours is 40c But the battery is never allowed to go over a certain temperature and it needs to get X amount of cycles Whereas maybe this company is saying well We don't care how long it sustains it as long as it sustains it for a short amount of time And maybe the batteries totally toast after that We'll call that good enough and ours is a hundred c battery. It could be a little tricky I guess the main thing I would tell you is you can't just blindly Look and say which everyone has the highest c rating. That's the most powerful battery. That's the one I'm gonna go for It's not that easy. I would say what's more important than the highest c rating is going with a brand of battery That's trusted well known and used by a lot of people That will give you a better odds of actually getting a high performance battery because there's nothing to stop anybody from Creating a battery company ordering batteries from China putting their own labels on them that say 200c and here you go Have that at buy them. It doesn't mean that that battery is actually any better Now we're where I will say it does make a difference and where you should be looking at c rating is Within that same brand that is trusted. They're gonna have a range So if brand X everyone knows they make good batteries if they have a 40c battery and a 80c battery I will go with the 80c battery if it's in your price range and it works for your needs It probably is going to be a better battery Just know that just because there's a number on a label doesn't necessarily mean that in the real world It's actually going to perform that well I would go more on Reputation and what's been tested out so another spec to look at is the connector It's important to know which kind of connector your battery is going to have it So it'll work with the drone that you have you can always switch this out But it's just good to know and it seems like nowadays pretty much any battery that I ever see they have connectors When I first got into RC they would usually come bare and you'd have to choose your own anyways It's just good to know if the battery that you're looking at doesn't have the right connector Maybe see if there's something very similar that does or just know that you're gonna have to change it Okay, so here's some things that you're gonna need to consider when you're picking the right battery First off what size drone are you flying because obviously if you're flying a tiny little micro a huge battery like this That's not gonna work So a lot of people when they first get into the hobby They realize that things that fly especially drones or helicopters things that don't have a wing are much less efficient They don't really get a lot of flight time So people always kind of have this similar thought well I'll just get a really huge battery and it'll give me tons of flight time But it doesn't really work exactly like that because the bigger battery you put on it now It's heavier now it requires more power to fly so there's diminishing returns there It's not going to perform as well, and it's just going to pull more amps to haul that extra weight So in every size of drone there's kind of an optimal Range of weight that that drone is going to want to carry another thing to think about is your prop choice Normally your prop choice is going to be an afterthought to the battery I would say the battery is a more key component in the whole overall system and Props are cheap. So if you the reason why it's important is because Depending on the motor in the battery choice you make some props are going to be better some props are going to be worse So you you don't always want to run the most aggressive high-pitched biggest prop you can to get the most power Sometimes you can hit past the point of diminishing returns where it's pulling so many amps and Just the components can't even actually handle the full potential power that that setup could make and Depending on your style, maybe you're not looking for the most absolutely powerful setup Maybe you want something flies a long time, so that's going to require a different prop so We'll get into prop choices on the prop episode, but once again props are cheap It's a lot easier to experiment and find the right prop And then it is to be dead set on a prop and then buying different batteries that go well with that prop So it's just something to think about another really big one to think about is what motors you're going to pick So this could kind of go either way you could start off knowing that you want a certain motor and then find a Battery that's going to match that well or you may start off knowing that you want to run a certain Battery and then find a motor that's going to go with that. Well But it's really important to pair these up correctly. You don't want to be spinning that motor way too fast pulling too much power Making it hard on the system You don't want it to be spinning way too slow and not giving you the right power that you should have another consideration to make is and once again this can go either way you could start with the battery or start with the electronics So with your electronics, you need to understand what the input voltage capability is So if I were to plug a 6s battery into a little micro quad that all the electronics are only rated for a 3s battery It's going to go poof and smoke You need to make sure that all your electronics are going to be able to handle the voltage you're feeding it Or at least the main point of contact where the battery goes You'll probably have some kind of voltage regulation on board to take whatever voltage that you're starting with and drop it down To what the other components need like your FPV gear, but it's definitely important Understand all the voltage capabilities of all the electronics on your drone before picking a battery Or start with the battery and then pick electronic components that are going to work with that battery Another thing I kind of already touched on but it's really important is the brand trust of a battery manufacturer there's tons of different brands out there, but there's really only a handful that Most people in the hobby are going to trust and go with their batteries You don't want to just buy some random brand battery That's way cheaper than everybody else because you're most likely going to find that that battery does not perform very well And it doesn't last very long So if you were to keep buying those you're not going to have as good performing of a drone And you're going to spend more in the long run because instead of getting a couple hundred cycles out of a battery You're going to get a couple of tens of cycles out of a battery and buy another one So along with knowing that you can actually trust the specs that are on the label at least to a fair extent And also knowing that it's going to be a fairly well performing battery Try to stick with brands are well trusted. How can you know that? Well, if you're online and you're on forums you're on Facebook groups You can ask around what people really like for batteries or just go to some of the more well respected shops And they're generally not going to carry Really crap batteries So pretty much any brand that you're going to see on our store race day quads get FPV Those are brands of batteries that we trust if you find some brand that you don't see at any of those stores But it's over here somewhere else on the internet and it's way cheaper By all means give it a shot, but it's probably not going to be as good of a battery. So if it's I would just go for Just try to go for a well respected battery So related to that is the price of the batteries This can be a little tricky. It's not as simple and straightforward as it seems The most expensive battery out there is not necessarily always the top performing battery And sometimes a cheaper battery performs pretty good, but a little bit cheaper than that is garbage. It's like It's really tough to give you an exact idea What price points you should be looking at and what are the right batteries? It really just comes down to People's experience and a brand's reputation. So I guess in general, I wouldn't recommend getting the most expensive battery Or the cheapest battery you can find. I would probably recommend at least for starting go with the middle of the road price battery That you've at least heard of a few times. You know has a fairly good reputation Now you could experiment maybe by the more expensive battery and then by the really cheap battery And then flying back to back and flying for a while because another thing about batteries is they degrade over time And not always at the same rate. You may find that Battery a it seems like it's got more punch. It's more power. I'm getting more flight time than battery b But a month later that kind of shifts. Maybe battery b's Gets more cycles out of it and battery a's after a month or two. It's kind of starting to die And it's really hard to tell you which ones are going to do that, which ones aren't at the end of the day These are all Not going to be exactly the same every single battery. It's a it's a chemical process They make a ton of them. They make batches of them and they send them out It's it's not exactly going to be every single one of this battery is exactly the same every single time Or any other battery you get better batches. You get worse batches things change so Batteries can be a little tricky in that way. Okay, and lastly a couple good practices and safety tips So number one Do not fly your drone until it will no longer take off This is a super common beginner mistake because maybe they had rc cars that work this way or they just don't know You do not want to drain a battery completely. That's not how lithium polymer batteries are meant to work so The general rule is you use 80 percent of that battery Depending on your setup. This can be difficult to know The old school way of doing this is on your radio. You can usually set up a timer So let's say you set up a timer for like two minutes You fly the battery and then you charge it just about every charger can tell you how many milliamps you've put back So then you just do the math So this is a 1000 milliamp battery I want to pull 800 milliamps out of that So when I charge it after flying for two minutes if I've only put 600 back That means I can fly it at about the same type of flying for a little bit longer So I'll go to two and a half minutes repeat that A lot of the current flight controllers have on-screen display So they can tell you how many milliamps you pulled through it and they can tell you what your voltage is at So the most common way that most people do this is they know what their end voltage should be to land And speaking of that you have you have to also take into account that while the drone's still in the air There's a load on the battery So your voltage is going to be a little bit lower than two minutes after you've landed it and let it rest But once again main tip do not just keep flying until the drone doesn't fly anymore come up with either a timer Or on-screen display or some type of system to know that you're not over discharging that battery Another one is leave your batteries at a storage charge if you're not going to fly it within the next couple days This isn't going to immediately cause a huge problem And the battery is just going to blow up out of nowhere or be totally dead But it's just not good for it You're going to you're going to degrade the battery and not give as many cycles out of it if you're Very often or even just a few times leaving it fully charged and just sitting there for weeks and weeks or months It's not good for the battery.  There's different products made to discharge batteries You could even just put it on the quad and hover it in the backyard to discharge it down But once again, don't leave your batteries charged for an extended period of time And lastly, if you can try to store your batteries in a safe place I'm kind of guilty of not doing this at times. I try to keep them at least somewhat where I could get to them but You're generally not going to have a lot of problems like they don't usually just spontaneously combust out of nowhere But you just need to be prepared that if you did have a problem with your batteries What are they close to? Are they in your bedroom with you? Are you going to burn the house down? So it may seem like excessive to keep them out in the garage or Somewhere safe But if you can keep them like in some kind of contained box where the fire won't at least quickly spread out So I'd say at least just do your best that if anything were to happen You can at least get to them quickly get them outside get them somewhere where it's not going to burn the house down Okay, so that's it for the basics on batteries. If you guys have any more questions Definitely leave them down in the comments below and I'll be there to answer you Thanks for watching and this has been learned to FPV


Hi guys. Today marks the fifth in the series I am doing all this month on explaining lesser talked about parts of autism. And I left yesterday off saying that today I was going to cover fear, the difference in the increased fear response in autism, the digestion problems in autism, and the decreased rate of allergic responses in autism. Things that sound like they have absolutely nothing to do with each other, but actually do. For today we're going to need to be talking about hormones, and four hormones in particular. Ones that don't get talked about all that often, or do but only like one or two of their effects. So assuming, you know, very little about this. Hormones are chemicals in the body that are responsible for signaling kind of like a less fast version of the nervous system. So they'll still relay messages throughout the body triggering certain things, but it's not the ultra quick like oh you see something and immediately process it kind of thing. They're more efficient, less quick, but incredibly important. Nearly every single form of life has some level of hormones going on, even outside of the animal. One of these hormones is histamine, which you almost certainly recognize as having something to do with allergies, and you would be correct, but it has a lot more to do with that. See, nature likes being really, really efficient. And so if it can figure out how to reuse something for multiple purposes, it's going to. Histamine has roles in regulating blood pressure, and that's actually where the allergic response comes from, at least part of it. Histamine has sort of two components there, but by causing your blood vessels to dilate or get bigger, it helps certain chemicals sort of fall out of your blood and get picked up by the lymphatic system or be swept out of the body. So that's sort of why it gets used as part of the immune response and shows up with allergies, but that blood pressure role is useful for other reasons as well. And I'll touch more on that after we cover the four hormones and I start talking about what they have in common. So then the one everybody really knows is the nasal response, that you get a runny nose, tend to be a bit itchy, eyes get a little bit watery, that kind of thing. Now, I'm not going to be citing specific studies, there's a lot for this one, but in there is findings that when well controlled for, allergies are shown to only exist in about 9.4% of people with autism, which sounds high, except that allergies show up in 30 to 40% of the population. You are three times less likely, or a third as likely to have allergies if you're autistic. Now, there are some studies that say the allergic response or more particularly the prevalence of asthma is more common in the autistic. Why I said good controls and this will be a repeated thing throughout this series, figured that out yet, is that, and the studies do say this, which is surprising that they don't realize their own mistake. The samples that they are using, the parents of individuals with autism are more likely to be smokers. And so that throws the whole thing off, because now you're looking at, okay, when you combine autism and parents who smoke, which means likely second hand exposure to smoke, how do the asthma and allergy rates, how are they affected? This is why what good controls are important. You only want to be looking at how does autism affect allergic response. And like I said, seems to be about 9.4 versus 30 to 40. So quite a bit lower. Histamine also has roles in your sleep weight cycle and how alert you are. I wasn't kidding when I said nature likes to be really efficient with reusing things. And then histamine also has roles with the production of gastric acid. Produce more histamine, get more gastric acid or your stomach acid, which is obviously an important thing in being able to digest the food you eat. You don't have enough stomach acid, you're going to have a hard time digesting the foods that gastric acid is used to digest. Next up we have acetylcholine, which is also a regulator of blood pressure. Also alertness, not so much with the sleep weight cycle, but it does have that shared role with how alert you are overall. Similarly with attention, those two have a lot to do with each other, but they are technically different things. Acetylcholine also has a role with your urination and again with gastric acid, but also with saliva. Now, histamine doesn't have too much of an effect with saliva, but acetylcholine does, both of them share with the gastric acid. Next up we have vasopressin, specifically in humans, it's arginine vasopressin, mostly with others and other animals. This again has a role with regulating blood pressure, again with the sleep weight cycle, again with urination, but also another curveball one with social bonding. And I'll get into specifically what is meant by that, because there's actually a surprising amount of nuance when it comes to what a pro-social hormone really is. And then lastly we have oxytocin, the love hormone. Although several months ago I had ranted on Twitter about how we really need to stop calling it the love hormone, there's a lot of stuff going on there that is actually pretty complicated, but oxytocin shares an effect on your urination, unsurprisingly with social bonding, and then also how you perform facial analysis. So obviously enough a lot of this is tightly tied together, but also is going to be building up on stuff we've talked about before. So to sort of summarize the general effects these hormones have, we are talking about regulating the rest and digest versus flight or flight states, not the fight-or-flight response, that would be from catecholamines like epinephrine and norepinephrine, but the state. So what I mean by that is if you're in the fight-or-flight state, you're paying more attention to what's going on, your gastrointestinal motility is down, because why would it need to be? You're more in the like, hey I'm out hunting, not hey I'm eating and you need to be moving that. You're going to be paying more attention to what's going on around you, you are going to be more tense, those kinds of things. It's the state, not the actual response. The response you'd have after something startles you or oh hey that's prey I need to start chasing down. Obviously it doesn't really apply to humans in modern society but this biology is still there, it's still relics from how things used to be. Next up is the share a lot of role in social bonding and specifically what I mean by this, because for a good while it was thought that oxytocin especially and vasopressin to a lesser extent were just kind of pro-social. The more of them you had, the more sociable you'd be and of story, actually rather nuanced. I know I do have a link down in the video description for the specific claim. Oxytocin in particular, although this was found a little bit with vasopressin, specifically how the social bonding works, is it causes you to bind more closely to your in-group or especially your romantic partner or your child and simultaneously to develop an anxiety or lack of trust towards individuals in the outgroup. Rather than just saying like pro-social, what I think is a good way to characterize the role of these hormones as far as sociality goes is that it causes you to be more group-oriented or more clique-oriented rather than more of like egalitarian everybody on equal footing. That has actually very major implications in how autism works. I'm going to finish summarizing and then I'll talk specifically in how all of this ties into autism. But then, considering what I said about how many of these have effects on gastric acid production and saliva production, there are some lesser found roles in how they have to do with gastric fertility. So that would be the parastalysis or sort of squeezing contractions that the intestines do that help move everything through your body. That is less pronounced. So this winds up leading to several issues, but primarily constipation. You can't digest your food as well, you can't move that less digested food as good through your GI tract, and constipation is an incredibly widely reported problem of autism. It got ignored for the longest time. Two of the studies that I linked down have reported rates of constipation upwards of 80%, which is extremely common. It is prevalent enough that it probably should be considered part of the diagnostic criteria. Not being constipated does not autistic. Roughly 20% don't present constipation, then you could be autistic and not constipated. But that's another one of those identifying factors that makes it clear that, okay, this person is autistic, it's not that they're like they weren't taught how to socialize properly by their parents, there's more going on here clearly.  This may, although I'm not entirely certain, be a significant part in why the autistic tend to be much more picky eaters. Although sensory things are also playing a role there, but obviously enough, you learn very well whether you're autistic or not, what foods agree with you, what ones don't, and so chances are this is a huge part of why the autistic might have picky eaters. You learn what is easier for your atypical gastrointestinal tract to still digest what isn't going to get you constipated as much. So tying these to autism in particular, I had had for a little bit, but since Delph, much more into that, the vision in particular, something a lot of people, non-autistic people have commented about autistic people and how the eyes sort of are in conversation is it's like we're not paying attention to the individual. We are. I had a girlfriend regularly, they tried to imply that I wasn't paying attention to her, and I can recite word for word what she just said to me. After a few times of that, I just kind of sunk in that like, yeah, I'm actually paying attention to you. I'm listening attentively. She had some insecurities about that too that were confounding factors, but I'm paying attention. But it's like we're constantly scanning the background, which is why it seems like we're not interested, that this often gets described as being like, oh, easily distracted, and maybe the child also has ADHD, which is possible. ADHD is legitimately seen more often with autism, but what I want to propose has been by some research, but as an alternative explanation for that, that probably explains more cases than ADHD does, is what I was just saying about how these hormones have a role in the fight-or-flight versus rest-digest states. If you are more vigilant, if you are more on guard, if you are, you know, less relaxed, you're going to be paying attention to what's going on around you. More vigilant. Not necessarily hyper-vigilant, but you are more vigilant. You're going to be scanning around for threats, not because you're necessarily in fear all the time, that fear response isn't necessarily being triggered, but you are in that more fight-or-flight state. You are more vigilant, and so it makes sense to be scanning for threats. This is almost certainly why the specific visual patterns are scanning the background behind the person being talked to and not just staring off at random things that happen to be moving around. That sounds more ADHD-like, scanning the background, or the other thing I've seen is sometimes scanning entryways or exits. It's a lot more like vigilance. Lastly, the social bonding and facial analysis. We've sort of talked about this from different perspectives in previous videos, but think about what I had said about oxytocin in particular in how it affects social bonding. Higher levels of oxytocin cause you to bind stronger to your specific partner, child, or just in general your in-group. Lower levels cause you to be more egalitarian towards everybody, not tightly fitting into your group, but being more okay with all groups. Similarly, the low levels of oxytocin that cause you to be more tightly bound to your group also cause higher levels of distrust for other groups. This is going to make it seem like autistic individuals are less devoted to the in-group, and there is some validity to that, but that's not the same thing as being a threat to the in-group. However, because of the higher levels of distrust towards people in the out-group, what winds up happening is because you are not devoted to the group, even though you are not opposed to it, you are going to be more likely to be labeled by that group as an outsider, and therefore something to be afraid of. What I am describing is the hormones responsible for the moral tribe's phenomenon and the double empathy problem. See, those aren't just supported in social psychology, they actually wind up spanning multiple different fields. Findings in endocrinology and pharmacodynamics have actually supported those social psychology phenomenon as well. This also explains numerous not diagnostically relevant attributes about the autism, about the autistic, but still very widely reported that the autistic tend to be less judgmental towards others differences, and that makes sense with what I've described about oxytocin and vasopressin because you're less group bound and more people overall. But another, yeah, I lost my train of thought. I hate when this happens, and I'm probably going to forget to edit this out of the video. I will just skip straight to the facial analysis part of that then. Oxytocin in particular, and it seems like vasopressin doesn't have this role, does alter how you do facial analysis, and particularly causes you to scan the background less and focus more on the sort of key triangle between the eyes and the mouth. The oxytocin causes you to pay more attention.  Obviously not as good for making it look like you're paying attention to people who over not over prioritized, I feel like it's over prioritizing, but who heavily prioritized key triangle. It's very possible between the effects low levels of oxytocin has on trust of others in general, so low levels of oxytocin has a higher level of trust for people not in your in-group, so causes you to trust people in general more. We talked about that last time, but also further evidence that the trustworthiness is definitely something assessed in the face, and further backs up why this is being missed in the autistic. As you can tell, especially after this video, a lot of this stuff is not behavioral. A lot of this stuff has neurological or endocrinological hormones, or things that act like hormones, roots. This is obviously been a more medical heavy discussion, so if you need anything explained better or in different ways, please ask down in the comments, but I hopefully did a good job explaining this. Next video, what I plan on doing is talking about the fear response in particular, because it's a great segue into explaining how emotions present differently in the autistic, and unfortunate consequences of that, because a lot of the time we get told we're faking, even though it can be proven that we're not. Until then, have a good one, guys.