in person and see all of you and thank you so much for being here. So with that we will invite our next keynote speaker up to the stage this morning for the talk What Does Red Hat Want? This is from Brian Exelbeard. So Brian enjoys a good beer, a nice coffee, and a rousing conversation about taxation. Born in the U.S., he now lives with his partner and daughter, Inburno, in the Czech Republic. His focus is on family, walks on artisanal bread, and reading long form articles. By night he tinkers with his thousands of spreadsheets and occasionally works on projects that are often glue code or the interstitial pieces that fill the spaces between systems. By day he is the real business strategist at Red Hat. Welcome Brian Exelbeard to the stage. It's true about the tax conversation at dinner last night. Very very passionate, exciting thing about how taxes have done. Yeah I'm realizing that wherever he got this bio from probably needs a slight update but yeah let's go taxes. I have no slides. No slides. Thank you. I would like you to, please. So I'll try the handheld mic, we'll see how that works. If I need to grip the podium, we'll bounce as needed. I guess I should start by saying that there are no slides, that is not a mistake. There's a lot of reasons for that. If we have Q&A you can ask why. So it's great to be back at Flock. This is my first Flock's actually since 2018, not 2019. 2018 also happens to be the last Flock that I helped plan. I didn't get to 2019 in Budapest because my daughter had just been born and I like all of you but I really love her and when she was only a few months old I wanted to spend more days with her than with you, nothing personal.  Me for all of you, she is here in Ireland at this event and she hopes to come to game night tonight and she invites all of you, she told me this this morning to come and play Unicorn Glitter Luck with her, which is a cooperative game that my partner tells me is also a metaphor for software development. This is also great to be at a Sentos Connect. My understanding is this is actually the second event to carry that name. You'll notice a theme here. I also missed the previous Sentos Connect that was in Brussels earlier this year. This time it wasn't my daughter though, it was an airline. I had been doing some personal travel right before this and they canceled my flight home. So they trapped me on the beautiful island of Madeira for a week. So I was trapped in paradise, literally. And if I had slides I would be showing you pictures of me being very, very grumpy in paradise. My understanding is that someone plans to circulate one of those pictures. So good luck. That is not a badge but it could be useful. There's also a picture of me in cat ear headphones because I was trying to work with all of the equipment I had, including my daughter's headphones. Now, there's some debate about whether speakers should introduce themselves at the beginning of a talk or at the end of a talk. And either all of you got way fitter and way more beautiful or there's a lot of new faces in the crowd. So I'm gonna go with the beginning of the talk. I am Brian Exelbeard and today I'm a technical business strategist for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the REL business unit. I focus on what REL should be doing in like 18 to 36 months. So way out there. My specific area of focus is on upstream communities, developers and something that we call the unpaid Linux market. And as a part of this work, I happen to work directly with the CentOS project as I sit on the CentOS board as the Red Hat liaison to that project. Prior to this, I was the Fcake, the Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator. And that's why I had the privilege of planning Flock 2018 in Dresden. But 2019, this role had passed to Marie Norden and now it's being held by Justin wherever he has run off to. And they are both doing amazing jobs way better than I ever could have. This talk, it has a bit of a history. It's not always a keynote, that's unusual. But traditionally Flock, I should say Red Hat has shown up to Flock. And the VP of Platform Engineering would usually stand up and tell Fedorans what Red Hat was thinking. And when my role was created, they gave the talk to me. This is also the first time that this talk has ever been delivered to the CentOS project. There's a little bit of debate on that, but I haven't been able to find any actual evidence of this talk having been given to the CentOS project. And because of that, I'm gonna spend a little more time on CentOS project concerns, because a lot of Fedorans have heard variants of this talk over the years. And as for the title, well, it is what it is. The talk has always been called the what does Red Hat want talk. And so for tradition's sake, I didn't change it. But I've tried to play with the format over the last few years, and I think you'll see that I've done that again. So before I get into that, I'd like to do what someone in my management chain, Gunnar Helixson, calls some table setting. So let me start with this. I work for Red Hat, and I am here talking on behalf of Red Hat. And that means that I am biased. I like RHEL, I like the outputs of the Fedor and the CentOS projects. Everything else is fourth place at best. At Red Hat, we view operating systems through the lens of the problems that the customers, potential customers, and partners face in the markets that we wanna serve. We're cautious in what we say and in what we promise. Because we expect to be held to those promises and we expect to have to back them up. So we don't casually use words like production or casually try to predict the future. And so with that having been said to kind of give you a frame of reference for where I'm talking from, I wanna start by comparing a few things. I wanna compare code and community. To paraphrase my friend Matthew Miller, Fedora Linux is an operating system. It's bits. In Fedora, it's a reference to the Fedora project, which is the community, and that's people. And I'm noticing more and more that people are using the language of community to talk about bits. For example, I'm seeing a lot of conversation about CentOS Stream, which is bits. And then someone tries to conclude by making a conclusion about the CentOS project, which is people. That's a problem. Something else that I've been noticing is that there's a lot of confusion about companies and communities. Especially when the community project is sponsored by a company. And this is something else that comes up a lot when Red Hat's talked about. Because we sponsor a lot of projects. And I'm seeing that some of our new enterprise Linux friends, they're having this same challenge too. So we need to think about the difference in those. You see, done right, and I do think Red Hat does this right. The community is held at arm's length. The community has the independence to be able to have a separate opinion on the same things that the company has. It means that they have agency, that ability to have an independent viewpoint or opinion. And I want to talk about agency for a minute, because it's a very critical topic. Agency is that ability to act independently, and it is very important. When agency is denied, you will find that actors get carried along a path that they didn't choose. An open source is all about agency. The four essential freedoms of free software are about ensuring that users have agency. Forking is an expression of agency. Special interest groups are SIGs, working groups, spins and labs. These can all be expressions of agency. And Red Hat strongly believes in agency. When Red Hatters go to work in open source projects, they have agency. They're expected to act in the best interests of the project. They have things they want to do, for sure. But they have that agency to go and do it in the way that is best for that community, not just best for Red Hat. And that agency, it shows up in the community projects that we sponsor. Both the Fedora Project and the Centos Project have governing bodies that are set up to govern through consensus. Red Hat doesn't have a magic veto here. Both projects have someone who's in a dual role. That person represents Red Hat to the project and represents the project inside of Red Hat. Now in the Fedora Project, that person is Matthew Miller. I'm not sure where he has gone. But that person is Matthew. And in the Centos Project, that person is me and my role as the Red Hat liaison. We both have the ability to share Red Hat's viewpoint to the project. And if necessary, to vote against a decision on behalf of Red Hat. But we don't have a veto power. Because these communities govern through consensus, any governing board member can stop anything. And so the agency that I'm talking about here that exists for these projects, it's demonstrated actually by how infrequently Red Hat has anything to say. And how we haven't acted to deny consensus. Now Matthew is very active in Fedora Project governance. But he has almost never had to speak as Red Hat. And if you look at the Fedora Council's decisions, you'll find that they're almost all unanimous consensus, but all by consensus. And in the Centos Project, you can see that agency very directly because there's a liaison. For those of you who know me personally, you know that I like to talk, often about taxation. But if you go to a Centos Project board meeting, you will find that I say very, very little. And that is because there I speak as Red Hat, and Red Hat doesn't have a lot of opinions. And we haven't needed to deny consensus. The Fedora Project and the Centos Project have agency. There is not an interlocking governance structure that is shared with its corporate sponsors. And while the projects may at times have a significant number of Red Haters in them, and in their governance in particular, it isn't because this is a requirement. It's because those Red Haters are passionate about the community and the community has recognized this. And they've selected those Red Haters through whatever the process that each project uses to select members of its leadership. They're not being selected because they represent or are acting on behalf of Red Hat. To put a very fine point on this, there are several Linux projects where the CEO of a company is also the project leader, and I like Matthew a lot. And he keeps looking up every time I say his name, which is great. He is a distinguished engineer at Red Hat. And I really believe he deserves this title, but he is not the CEO of Red Hat. And you have a lot of agency. You have the agency to start or join a SIG. You can build a new spin, you can land your code, you can go build a user base and bring them with you. And you should feel confident and safe in your ability to inspire and influence people and know that your work will help many. And I think the real message for this part of this is, if you think you're blocked by Red Hat somehow, come talk to me. I will be very happy to remind you that you're not, because you have agency. Now, before I tell you what Red Hat wants, I do want to spend just a minute talking about CentOS Stream in particular. So the CentOS project is a community, and CentOS Stream is a code base. And people need to stop confusing that. Success for the CentOS project is not measured solely on CentOS Stream. In fact, from my perspective, the SIGs are really the manifestation of a lot of the CentOS project's success. And a lot of this comes about because of the way CentOS Stream is structured. Specifically, it's maintainer model. It's all Red Hat by design. So anyone can contribute or propose a change to the CentOS Stream code base. And those changes get made subject to the agreements of the maintainers. And at Red Hat, we've been very consistent in describing it this way. You can propose a change, the maintainers will review the change. So the real question is, why is it like this in terms of the Red Hat only maintainership? And it's because Red Hat conceived of CentOS Stream for several reasons. And the two that we talk about the most are, that we wanted a place that we could open up minor release contribution and development for RHEL to a broad non-Red Hat audience in an accessible way. This is very much like what we do with major release RHEL development in the Fedora project. Also, we wanted to further enable participation for our open source ecosystem partners. And we've been consistent in describing our goals with CentOS Stream this way. But I think what people are missing is that at its core, what CentOS Stream really is, is it is an open sourcing of the practice of controlled, limited operating system change. Now that is part of what we deliver as the value of RHEL. And that practice results in a code base that is fantastic to use to build Linux distributions. It makes slow and deliberate changes only after extensive testing and a lot of contemplation. And this is why you may see contributions get rejected. You see, if that contribution isn't required by RHEL, then that contribution isn't needed in the operating system. You have to have a basis for accepting contributions and this is the one that we chose. But what if you need that change? Well, this goes back to the agency. You see, that's where SIGs come in. SIGs can build their own Linux distributions. They can layer software on top of them. And this allows them to focus on their differentiation. It lets them focus on serving a specific set of use cases or a specific audience and they only have to do the work where what they want varies from what a RHEL audience would want. And this is a real model. It's existed long before CentOS Stream did and we're seeing other industry actors and open source actors embrace the idea of building on CentOS Stream, which proves the value of the model and the value of CentOS Stream. But it also shows how refinement and targeting make everything better. It makes each Linux distribution more valuable to its users, because you can't be all things for all people. Another proof point for the value of CentOS Stream is that we use it to build almost all of the approximately 17 different versions of RHEL that we are shipping at any one time. The only ones that we're not building from CentOS Stream are the ones in the RHEL 7 major release family. And we don't do that because there is no CentOS Stream 7 to start from. Now, I've talked a lot about CentOS Stream's code, and I can't talk about the code without also addressing the very complicated view that Red Hat has of CentOS Stream binaries. So remember, Red Hat's cautious. We take CentOS Stream, we pass it through a productization process, and we wrap it with a bunch of promises and agreements and services for delivery to our customers. So we only recommend RHEL be used in production. If you have a RHEL-shaped problem, we're gonna tell you to use RHEL. Now, the converse of that is this. If you come to Red Hat and you go, hey, Red Hat, is this recommended for use in production? We're going to say, okay, well, how does it relate to the promises and agreements that we make with our customers? And if it doesn't match, we're not gonna recommend it. And so this is why you can find a statement on a Red Hat website. Right now, today, it says, CentOS Stream is not designed for production use. And the reason for that is that it doesn't fulfill the specific promises and the specific agreements that we make with our customers. Now, there are a lot of Linux distributions out there. And there are a few that claim to solve the same problems that RHEL does. We think RHEL is the best of all of them, and we don't recommend any of the others for use in production. But this doesn't make them bad operating systems. It just means we're not recommending them. And we're not going to make a promise about them. But I want to be super clear here, because there seems to be a lot of confusion. If you've got a problem that CentOS Stream or Fedora Linux solves, use it. They're both great operating systems. They're operating systems you can trust. I know people who use CentOS Stream personally. They're very, very happy with it. I happened to run Fedora Linux, specifically Fedora Workstation and Fedora IoT on my own devices. It fits the bill for me. I don't need what CentOS Stream or RHEL is offering. I've chosen what meets my needs. And when I have this conversation with folks, inevitably they come back to me and they go, okay, Brian, all this is true. Why did Red Hat put that code in the CentOS project in the first place? And so for CentOS Stream to be successful by our measures, we knew that we needed infrastructure that a successful open source project has. And this really comes down to an investment question. Because we could have stood up whole new infrastructure, but we didn't do that. There was obviously some other choices, and we obviously went with one of them. So why do we do that? Well, it all comes back to this investment. When you invest, you're investing for the future at the cost of not doing something else today. A dollar that I save is a dollar I don't get to spend on craft ice cream. So when we were looking around, we were like, where are we making similar investments? We found two places. We were making an investment in the Fedora project, and we were making an investment in the CentOS project. And we didn't want to stop those investments. We need a place like the Fedora project. It is where innovation and integration meet. And Fedora Linux sits right at that intersection point. And we need a place like the CentOS project. It is where we do work in technologies above the operating system, like virtualization. And it's where a lot of work happens, where well stops. And these folks carry it forward in different and exciting ways. So we had to make a choice. We have infrastructure over here in the Fedora project. We have more infrastructure over here in the CentOS project. What is the value of yet more infrastructure? And the answer is, it's wasted duplication. It's gonna deny me craft ice cream. It's gonna deny resources to better uses. And so it was obvious we needed to co-locate this code. The choice of the CentOS project just made sense. So this brings us to the question, or I should say the major topic today, which is, what does Red Hat want? So let me start by saying this. Red Hat does not show up to a project and say, do this. That is not how open source works. Now you will absolutely find Red Hatters from various teams all over the company who will show up on a project and say, hey, we wanna do this. But they don't get to do it by fiat. They do it the open source way. They will propose that change, they'll discuss that change. They'll make that change safe for people to consume in the community. And then they will do the heavy lifting to land that change. Those are not the teams or the themes that I wanna talk about today. So I wanna go back similar to my CentOS stream comments and tell you that this is really an investment question. So we're making an investment in these projects to achieve some goals. And here are some of those goals. And I wanna be clear, these goals apply equally to both the Fedora project and the CentOS project. We wanna see fantastic open source communities. This means you're growing, you're active, you're vibrant. There are places where Red Hatters can go to engage the open source way. And we know that a part of having functioning great open source communities are that people are using your outputs. And so we wanna see your outputs be specific. We want you to know who do you wanna serve, why do you wanna serve them, and how do you plan to serve them? We want the projects to have a voice.  And we're not gonna show up and tell you what to do or what to say. We want you to fill in the white space in Enterprise Linux. White space here is a reference to all that place that, like it's in the background, it never seems to get looked at. And so an example of this is actually in the desktop operating system space. Red Hat and REL are deliberately not in that market. We chose to exit that market, we're not there. We do offer a workstation. Workstations are very specific kinds of hardware, doing very specific kinds of work, not general purpose desktops. The very confusingly named Fedora workstation is a fantastic desktop. And it is doing a very good job of filling that white space in Enterprise Linux. Related to that, we'd like to see cross-pollination between the projects and within the projects. That could be the projects working together themselves. It could be SIGs working together. We wanna see you connect yourself where it makes sense.  And then consuming that contribution through either CentOS Stream or REL. Now, I've talked some about what Red Hat wants. Inevitably, someone will ask in the Q&A, is there anything Red Hat doesn't want? Well, yes, yes there is. Red Hat does not actually wanna monetize the entire market of Linux consumers. We're not interested in that. We know that there are people who do not ever wanna pay Red Hat or may not ever wanna pay for Linux. And that's great, good for you, have a nice day. And I wanna be clear that within the market of folks that we do not wanna monetize, there's a significant number of people who just don't want the things that REL promises and delivers. If you don't need REL, we're not gonna sell you REL. And while I'm talking about this monetization concept, even within the part of the market that we wanna monetize, there are significant segments that we don't want to. And you can see that in the REL developer programs for individual and teams. We're not interested in monetizing what we call the development use case. And there's a related point here. And that is that Red Hat's open source strategy is one of differentiation. Now, people on the internet have suggested that Red Hat might wanna make products out of Fedora Linux or CentOS Stream. And I can't see how that works the way the people on the internet claim.  And the company that just told you that a third infrastructure was not a good investment is not gonna go build yet even more communities that we have to invest in and stand up and help be successful when we already have two amazing communities. Besides, if we really wanted to somehow make one of these things a product, we'd just go create a derivative operating system. Which is exactly what we're telling everybody else that they should go do. It is a model that just works for everybody here. Another thing that we don't wanna see is we don't wanna see the Fedora project or the CentOS project try to deliver the real value and promises. And the reason for this is because we don't see the projects as competition. We wanna make sure it stays that way. But the bigger reason for that is that the projects shouldn't be trying to duplicate each other or Red Hat. Because if there's a legitimate reason why one of the projects feels the need to do that, we have a major problem in our ecosystem and in Enterprise Linux. And we need to go solve that problem, not worry about trying to duplicate each other. So, I apologize, I've lost my place in my notes. While I'm mentioning competitors, we're not worried about competitors. Competitors make a market stronger by bringing differentiated value. And the key here is differentiated value. The operating system is not a commodity, and you can prove this by the number of operating systems that are available for you to use in the market. And so in our view, if someone tries to copy well, without adding any improvement, but just making it cheaper, it harms everyone. This activity creates confusion for consumers who often come away with a false sense of security, cuz they think a promise has been made about the copy that hasn't been made. And when you consider the act of copying, it creates a race to the bottom. It generally starts with a lowering of prices, which is because the copier has an almost zero lower bound for pricing. And all of the costs, they're being born by the thing that's being copied. So this reduces the funding that's available to improve and grow the original. And the response in other industries is to start to cut it. You try to focus it more narrow and more narrow. In software, what you'd see is the code base would become more specialized, and it would meet fewer people's needs. Now as an open source community, we like to think that open source is immune to this. We have the ability to contribute upstream, so none of this is gonna happen for us. But if you start to examine this, what you'll find is, those upstream contributions, they're not the thing being copied. What's being copied is the distribution. And the distribution is an opinionated collection of all of those upstream components. And that opinionation is the differentiation, and that's what's being copied. That opinionation, that differentiation, it's developed by product managers, by market needs.  Now what I've outlined today is not new. Over the years, this talk has gone from generalities to specifics and back again. And in every version that I've seen or given, there is an underlying theme here. Rithub really wants to build the best in class enterprise products for the problems that we wanna solve in the markets that we wanna serve. And critically, we wanna do this through an open source development model. This model enables entire ecosystems to grow well beyond what we can directly address, or even have an interest in addressing. And truly amazing communities like the Fedora community and the CentOS community multiply that even more. Now we've stumbled along this journey at times, and every time we do so, we do it publicly. And every time this happens, we learn a lesson, often alongside or along with most of you. But we pick ourselves up, and we keep moving forward. We stand by our decisions as a commercial open source company, but we recognize that these stumbles, they can cause some of you to have doubts or waver in your trust of us. But our commitment to open source and collaboration has never wavered. And when we say we wanna collaborate, we mean it. So as we continue to walk this path, we're gonna listen and learn and adjust. And we hope that you're gonna walk this path with us to continue to improve enterprise Linux and the open source ecosystem every day. I look forward to seeing all of you in the Fedora project and in the CentOS project. Thank you very much. Justin, Matt, thank you. Justin is supposed to tell me if I'm allowed to have questions or not, cuz Matthew talks a lot. So we're at 1030, so we have a coffee break lined up. But I figure we can take one question here cuz I see one hand and then we'll break for coffee from 1030 to 11. The speech was really good, but one thing I'm thinking of is like a commercial open source project. There's been stumbles. When does the business kind of take over? Like what's happened last month where Red Hat and IBM decided to make closed sourced? So what I wanted to ask is when does profits basically take away open source? I don't know, this is the first time I'm asking a question, so. So a couple of clarifications just to make sure that we're, I'm answering the question that was asked. First, the decisions that were taken recently were all taken by Red Hat as an independent entity. IBM had nothing to do with it and Red Hat's code is still open, it is not closed. However, the core of your question seemed to be, and please correct me here if I'm wrong, when does the business drive decision making that from your perspective may or may not have an impact on open source broadly speaking? Yeah. Okay, I think the answer to that is that like all companies, Red Hat is constantly looking at the market and looking at what is going on in the world and we have to make adjustments to how we handle our product. One of the things that we do is that we have an upstream first philosophy at Red Hat, which means that we contribute all of our code as far upstream as it is possible to contribute it. What we find sometimes is that upstream projects are like, they're super excited to take our code and they do it and their output becomes better and the broader community of us, our competitors, everyone is enriched by this contribution that Red Hat has made. In some cases, we show up to upstream projects and they're like, wait, we wrote this? This is like 10 years old, dude, seriously, no. And that's cool too. Oftentimes we visit our friends in Fedora where they're like, no, that's not happening. We do every 13 months, please go away. But eventually we do find a home for it, CentOS Stream being I'll say the home of last resort because ideally things flow into CentOS Stream. And so in that sense, I think that the business can do whatever it wants on the product side and the code is always out there. The code is guaranteed to be available. Anyone can pick up these upstream components and build the opinionated, differentiated Linux distribution of their dreams. There are absolutely going to be decisions that Red Hat has to undertake for its own fiscal well-being. Otherwise, we can't afford to pay all of those developers that are doing all of this contribution into the upstream. But I will say that there's a natural tension in engineering companies in general, which Red Hat is one of. Between engineering led and business led. And I think that all companies face that tension. And most of the time, most people don't notice it because it's like ripples below the ocean. And sure, occasionally sometimes you're like, whoa, what was that? Oh, one of the teams must have just suddenly asserted themselves. But in reality, a lot of it is around the idea of when you're in an engineering led organization, you are focused on solving the problem that you perceive the customers having from the point of view of an engineer. And when you're in a business led organization, you are solving the problem that the customer has from the perspective of what the market is telling you. And if you, I'm not sure whom you work for. You may very well work for Red Hat, I don't know. But if you go talk to your peers in the industry, I think you'll find out that a lot of people sometimes wind up working on a piece of code that they never execute themselves. Or that their execution of it is, for lack of a better way of saying this, they have the hello world level execution.  I would not pretend to be the example of what Fedora IoT is trying to target. So my ideas of how that product should improve personally are not necessarily relevant to the vision of the market that that product's actually trying to serve. And I think that's the tension that you're seeing a lot of here. Thank you all very much. Enjoy coffee, because I know Justin wants to get me off stage. Thank you, Brian. So quick housekeeping. We are going to break for coffee speakers. Just as a note, we will have laptop provided in the room. So you can open up an online link. Or if you have offline slides, you'll need to make sure you have a USB key or some way to put those on the laptop. We do have some, either me or Sean can get you a USB key if you need. Otherwise, we'll be starting back up at 11. There's three rooms upstairs that have three smaller sessions. We'll have a session back here at the main stage. And we'll be back at 11. Enjoy your coffee.


Hello, welcome to the Donahue Group. It's 2008 and we could not be happier. We're here for a fast-paced half-hour of conversation about state issues. Joining me, Cal Potter, former state senator. Tom Pineski, UW Math professor, who is channeling Lee Sherman-Dreyfus for us today. Very nice. I don't have a vest, but it's sweater. There you go. Close enough. Ken Risto is wearing a Frank Lloyd right tie. And me, I'm just a simple country lawyer, Mary Lynn Donahue. Lots and lots of things to talk about at the state level, I think. I want to start with a special session, actually. Started December 11th, one of the main pieces of it was alleged campaign finance reform. Doesn't seem to have gone very far, although there seems to be some interest in public funding, real public funding, for Supreme Court justices with fairly high amounts. I think I read $400,000 per candidate. Cal, what's the status of the session? Well, the bills, when the session begins, it's nothing more than an introduction of the two bills that the governor wants the legislature to consider. Then it's up to the pace of the legislature to fulfill some disposition of those. And it can take weeks, many weeks. What usually happens is the bills go to committee. They have the public hearing, and they work their way just like any other bill through the process. And like I said, that could take weeks. Right now, of course, the speculation is that those who prevented any bill coming up through the legislative process are those who are going to handle the same bill that the governor has given them. And so there are some prognosticators who are saying it's going to have a tough time, particularly in the assembly, of getting public financing passed that would cover all elections. But there is some hope for the Supreme Court and the court system because of the fact that we've had a censor of one of the court sitting judges. And there is probably general agreement that a nonpartisan body, such as the court, is not only nonpartisan, but should be somewhat totally free, even if you can, of special interest before things are litigated. And I think the court has come out very strongly. Members of the court, in favor of that, that they apparently have felt enough heat for having to go out and get big chunks of cash from private sources. And they would like to see a change as well. And I noticed that a number of interest groups, common cause, ARP, I think, has come on board. A number of very notable, respected organizations have said, at least legislature, give public financing to the courts. And let's get that problem solved. And we'll see where we go with the other bill. I suspect it'll pass in the Senate without a lot of trouble. They'll up the limits. They'll up the contribution that people make on their income tax level and put in strict spending limits or some type of spending limits, which you can do if there is public financing.  But I don't think that's been internalized with the public. And so the assembly may indeed get their way and kill the bill. And of course, that will set the stage for common cause and others to try to resurrect the bill next session again. And if the governor is willing, he'll try again. And sometimes it does take several special sessions and several introductions of a bill before something is ultimately passed. You mentioned something very interesting. The public financing, you could set spending limits. Well, the Supreme Court has basically ruled that if public financing is not involved, there is no way that you can set spending limits for politicians because it's an abridgment of their freedom of expression. And so that's why we'll always come back to the spending limit. And public financing is melded into one. And if the candidate chooses not to do public financing. Well, the unique thing about the bill, the Doyle proposed. They can do it if they can blow it. They can raise as much money as they want. But Doyle's bill, if I remember correctly, provides that if the opposing candidate does not accept public financing, then the candidate that does take financing gets three times the amount of money that he or she would normally get. So, and that to me was a brilliant way to structure the carrot and stick kind of thing because public financing levels, if they're not, I mean, typically they're so low that unless you're a terrible candidate, you're not, I mean, you'd be foolish to accept public financing. So this is putting real money in the pockets of people who take public financing and also making it a little harder for candidates who decide not to. The word is that, and I think we mentioned this in another show, that Annette Ziegler spent of her own money, it will take her eight out of her 10 years on the Supreme Court to reimburse herself for the money she spent getting elected. I was gonna ask about how much was that? Do you recall what the, well, either candidate won't have spent. It was well over two million dollars. Two million dollars, okay. I said the combined amounts. You're right. And I mean, it was obscene. It was obscene. And the Butler, and I forget the judge, I'm sorry, from Burnett County, Gableman, who's running against Louis Butler for Supreme Court, Burnett County judge. And they're only the two of them. That will be a hugely expensive election because the Wisconsin Manufacturers in Commerce has really targeted Butler to get rid of him. And so, again, it's, you know. And you can be assured that we, Appleby, my teacher's union will be right there. If Butler wishes to have that sort of support, that will be the interesting question. He may be put in a position where he really doesn't have any option. What about public financing? Public financing. He has to. Exactly. Exactly. That's what you're gonna be looking at in a large amount of money. Uh-huh. Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see how that all plays out. And then how does Justice Butler, for example, let's play that scenario up. Let's say he's put in a position where he needs to raise funds and Wiatt comes along with their bag of money like they do, and he accepts it. How does he rule on the charter school case that we talked about in the last episode? Well, that's the issue is that you have judges who need to recuse themselves. And there was a recent, very important case that was the 3-3 vote that had been certified from the Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court. In other words, the Court of Appeals saying, we can't deal with this. This is so important, Supreme Court, you do it. What was the 3-3 vote? Because one of the judges had to recuse himself because he had taken substantial financial contributions from one of the parties that was involved. And so this brings us to Justice Ziegler in what must be one of the more protracted, embarrassing positions for a Supreme Court justice or any judge to be involved in. The three-panel judge, three-judge panel that was set up by the Supreme Court to recommend any disposition on the ethical violations that Justice Ziegler admitted to, has come up with a reprimand, which in the big scheme of things is not so important. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign points out that lawyers get suspended from the practice of law for months at a time or are required to pay fines or whatever. For the same, it should be pointed out for the same conditions. I mean, the three-judge panel acknowledged that she didn't financially benefit, but lawyers who unwittingly or unknowingly and did not. I mean, she was somewhat aware, at least the record is, that she was aware of this sort of conflict, didn't think it affected her, so she moved on. Lawyers who unwittingly made a mistake got a higher punishment. We should point out, this is a recommendation. To the Supreme Court. To the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court, the other remaining six justices are gonna have to decide whether they accept that recommendation. No, I don't know this part of the process. Could they up the punishment? Absolutely. Because what she got was the bare bones minimum. In fact, she and her lawyer proposed this punishment. Right, right. Yeah, no, I mean, she could be suspended for any amount of time. So, it's interesting to see how that plays out, but this must be an agony for her, because this has been going on and on. I mean, it's a year now, and that was a terrible, bloody, awful race. Oh, and the Butler Gableman. I'm pretty sure the judge's name is Gableman. Watch, I'll have a Supreme Court case. Someone will tell him about this taping. She didn't remember my name, but I think... That's a November election, isn't it? No, it's April. Oh, this is in April. I had a call, man, this is right. Nonpartisan race, and so those are always in April, and so it will be interesting to see how that all plays out. So pretty soon, man. Yeah. We'll be hearing ads. I haven't heard any ads. No, I think it's a little early, but my memory is that you can run, you probably know this much better than I, the world's best campaign, but that final month is when the wheels come off the car, and no matter how well you've planned, something goes wrong, or you're going so fast, and you're in so many different places, you have so many people working for you, or these negative ads come up, and at the last minute, you're in a defensive posture, so it'll be interesting to see how those ads play out, and I don't know what this judge is like, I think the timing is good, having this bill before the legislature at a time when you can have a court race that's gonna be very expensive, and you have a censure of one of the judges, and they have basically come out and said, we support this bill, so I think they're looking to sort of help us out of this mess that we've created, and I think it's just a good opportunity for the legislature to do good for society, as well as help the judiciary out of their mess. Right, so it'll be interesting to see. I just don't see how we can continue to look the public in the eye and say, we want judges, at least in theory, to approach cases with an open mind and give at least the appearance of being objective and impartial and interpreting the law, and allow, and put them in a situation where they have to raise that kind of money, because to raise that kind of money, they're going to end up going to business interests and unions and other large institutions, which they have to rule on regularly. Well, of course, they don't do that themselves. No, they don't. I mean, that's strictly prohibited, but. But, again, it just raises all sorts. And then how long does that, I mean, how long do you recuse yourself from cases the year after the election, two years after the election, three years after the election? You'll get to the point where the court will be in a very difficult situation in deciding any important, really a very, very important cases. It's always nice to have a Supreme Court that's chock-full of different political persuasions, but it can't be the best justice that money can buy. And I'm afraid that's kind of what it comes down to. Let's talk about a little bit more innocent time and more in the passing of Lee Sherman Dreyfus, certainly one of the more colorful and interesting political figures. Cal, you were in the Senate with Governor Dreyfus. Well, I remember him bowing the assembly when Marty Schreiber was acting governor, because Pat Losey had been appointed the Ambassador to Mexico by Jimmy Carter. And we had a surplus in the state in 1970, 1978. And Lee Dreyfus went around the state with his red vest and his red bus. And the band on top of the bus, and probably our friend Mr. Pineski was probably in the bus with him at times. And beating up on Mr. Schreiber for having this money that was created by a hot economy with rapid inflation. That's what basically brought it about is people's salaries went up and prices went up, the state generated a lot more revenue because of sales tax and income tax and so on. So unbeknownst to Marty Schreiber, it wasn't because he was raising taxes, it was just he was coming in at a very rapid rate and he had a surplus and somehow Lee Dreyfus through the golden tongue that he had was able to spin that Marty Schreiber just wasn't running the ship right. Interesting enough is that we went from extreme inflation to a depression, let it almost a recession near the end of Dreyfus' term, he chose not to run again. Then we had Tony Earl come in and Tony Earl was saddled with a multimillion, hundred million dollar deficit due to the fact that we went in a recession. He had to raise taxes, became Tony the taxer and then we found our friend Tommy Thompson won on that issue. I know, isn't that... So economic conditions really do saddle a candidate or reward a candidate with rhetoric or situations that can bode well or not so well for them and Lee Dreyfus just wrote a very high good situation on wanting to return the money to the people. When was he governor? I don't remember the year. 78, well, 78. To January 83, but 83, too. 78 to 82, well, that's the time when the nation was going through high inflation. It wasn't just the state of Wisconsin. No, but the issue that Lee Dreyfus finessed was the fact that we had a surplus and that somehow the sitting governor stole that money from the people and should return it. Never want to have a savings account, huh? This was a time prior to the tax brackets being indexed and that happens later on under President Reagan. So you're absolutely right, Cal, as people got salary increases just automatically to keep pace with inflation, the state coffers were filling up. I was reading that it was almost a billion dollar surplus. I mean, Dreyfus gave away, well, actually, the number I'm reading here is $942 billion. It was like $10 million, excuse me, $942, almost a billion. Yeah, I said that's when a billion was almost a billion. That was real folding money at that point. But yeah, and then giving it all back, made a lot of, it was very politically popular. And I forgot the solution. It wasn't a tax rebate, it was just simply not taking money off of people's checks. It was a holiday, I think, a month or something of that nature, yeah. And of course, the legislature was gonna go along with it. Here's the guy that ran eloquent campaign against the surplus and the legislature just rolled over and gave the money back and, like I said, in four years we were in a deficit. Well, he came through Sheboygan and campaigned at the campus here and we were also raising money for cancer where you were doing a basketballathon for cancer. Jack Snyder, who was the coach regularly and held a basketballathon for cancer, but Dreyfus came through, spoke to the kids. I was participating in the basketballathon and I said, would you sign my sheet to, because I'm gonna be playing this weekend and he signed it and I played, got so many hours, copied the sheet, sent it to his office and he sent me a check for it. The cancer, I thought that was great. And I also campaigned, I helped around the county. I was getting interested in politics at that time and it was a lot of fun. But look how the Republican Party has changed. I mean, that part of the pre-Reagan, give the money back to the people, certainly part of the Republican platform even today. But when the two somewhat of his credit when the economy did go south and Wisconsin's looking at deficits, Dreyfus actually went along with, I'm sure he wasn't excited about a 1% increase in the sales tax to sort of help. But he was the first, you know, the governor that signed the anti-discrimination laws for gays in this state. Yeah, that was probably the last of the, what I like to think of the fiscal issue, Republicans.  Lee Dreyfus was out there very honestly on the gay issue and it wasn't the campaign issue with him. It was just, he thought it was right and he signed the bill. He did it from a libertarian point of view. He said it's just simply government, it's not government's business to be asking people their sexual orientation. We became the first in the country to have that law. Yeah, Wisconsin was the first. And he just before, you know, his death last year or two years ago, he was with other former governors talking about we shouldn't be amending the state constitution to define what marriage may or may not be constitutionally. So it's consistent all the way through his career about certain areas of government activity. You ought not, you know, human activity, citizen activity isn't any business of government. Well, he was an interesting man and we are the richer for his having been in office and Cal would say probably just for four years. But to move on, we have lots of other things to talk about. The passage of the new cable bill presents the Donahue Group and other users of public television with a wonderful opportunity. Governor Doyle, as I understand it, introduced or one of the vetoes allows public, the cable bill was signed, all right? So no more local cable franchising. What we've been talking about over the years or over the months feels like years was signed into law. But Governor Doyle is saying that public access stations which after three years are not gonna have any more money from cable franchises can make that up by doing commercial advertising and infomercials. So I think that we should have a challenge to our listeners and our viewers and listeners to come up with ideas for the ways that we can raise money for channel eight with commercial advertising. What products, we might demonstrate on this program. What product demonstration? I would be. A veg-o-matic cooking show, yeah. I'm sure that there are things. Little exercise equipment. I'm happy to wear any kind of corporate logos on the show that we can get acuity to underwrite the Donahue Group. Yeah, maybe we could have just. The Acuity Group. The Acuity Group. Sorry, your name's gonna be bummed. That's okay, that's all right. I can handle that. We could start smoking cigarettes if anyone can hold up our camera. I'm drawing a line there, I'm sorry. We'll turn the color of the wall. Yeah, AT&T spent a whole lot of money to get this bill passed. Doyle at least made some amendments to the bill that made it a little bit more palatable, a little more consumer friendly. But I do think there's still a requirement that franchisees pay 5% of their revenues to local governments, but there's no provision for public access programming as I understand it. So one of the best laws that money can buy, I think, is really one of the ways that we can take a look at that. So any comments on that? Well, I would hope that there would be a trailer bill. Trailer bills are oftentimes, when there's a bill that's so well financed and so greased that the thing's gonna go through the system and be signed without amendment because all the proponents have just lined up the ducks so well that the only hope to do something of remediation or improvement is another bill, and that's the trailer bill that comes right behind it in the next session. And in this case, I would hope that someone in the legislature who was opposed to the bill or tried to amend a bill will come in and try to do something for financing of these public access channels because I think, while the Donahue Group is a great show, I think it's very, very important that school boards and county boards and city councils be on the tube, that people see who their elected representatives are, how they operate, what the issues are because you know as well as I do, they're not gonna get off their Duff and Cudown and sit in the council chambers at a county board place. The only exposure they have really in many cases is what they see on public access television. And I'm hopeful that somebody will, and the governor did in signing the bill and at the time of partial vetoes, did say he hoped that there would be something worked out besides the selling of advertising to keep these channels online. And I think there's gotta be some way. And I would hope that the 18 T's of the world would also see that there's a benefit to their communities, that they're gonna be serving as a private corporation to have the school board or the city council or the county board on that tube for the benefit of everybody. Well, as part of public access, don't other, I mean, informational kinds of activities. I've seen the superintendent on channel eight. I've seen healthcare providers on channel eight. I've seen... Tony board. Other people and agencies appear or probably even the chamber. Everybody, that's part of public access, isn't it? It sure is. Yeah, yeah. Folks, anybody can have a TV show here, as I've always pointed out. Although, obviously. I agree with all the council and the county board and all, but there's just the general other agencies. Sure. Well, we'll keep on. And is there gonna be sufficient? Who's, what's interesting about it? You can say, well, let's have advertising and private support. But who is it that's gonna go out there and shake the bushes for that? I mean, you're gonna start saying there gotta be county employees that go out and try to shake down businesses to get money to put the county board on the tube. It starts to get to a point where that's not the logistical thing to do that it oughta be some type of, the people who send it over the wires oughta make access. It's gone to something people say even that television stations and radio stations oughta give politicians, you know, half an hour of free time or something because that's the best way to expose them to the people. And they shouldn't have to, candidates shouldn't have to go out there or in this case, the people who aren't community actors go out and raise money. Oh, it's ludicrous. I mean, one of the reasons people watch Channel 8 or Channel 20 is there aren't any commercials. You know, and you don't have to sit through a whole lot of silly selling to listen to things that are important to you. Well, we'll keep our viewers posted and listeners, I should say, on that, but truly one of the better bills that money could buy. I am delighted to report that Accenture, the Accenture contract that we have talked about over the past years because it's been going on so long, this is the, that contract has been canceled finally by the state elections board just before it turns into the government accountability board. This was a software contract to meet the Help America Vote Act requirements after 2001. I think Bill passed in 2002. The state has spent millions of dollars to get a voter registration list that's supposed to interface and be user friendly and find terrorists, I don't know, what else? Oreo cookies between the mattresses, I don't know. But it has been a joke and the state elections board I think has been stubborn about not canceling this contract and so finally the contract will be canceled. Accenture has agreed to give some of the money back. Half, it's half of the money. Yeah, but we've still paid out millions and millions of dollars. They also have the source code and I'm not a computer person so I don't understand. Accenture has agreed to turn over the source code which apparently will be of great assistance to whomever the contract is turned over to in terms of actually trying to produce the list. I think we're one of eight states in the United States that does not have, has not met the requirements of HAVA and now the elections board is saying that it still won't be in place for the April election but they're going into September and November so I think that's very interesting. I think by statute we have to drop dead be ready to go by the presidential election in November. Well, I think there were several drop dead dates. Right, I mean I know they're giving the national government who's provided some of the funding for this has been giving some extensions recognizing that this is complicated business but I mean Wisconsin will be one of the few states that doesn't have a reliable system up and going. Perhaps, hopefully not but perhaps by the presidential elections. But I think the company gets to keep more than seven million dollars and maybe they've provided some quality or some value to the state after all these months. You would hope so for seven million bucks. Isn't that amazing? How to be a D to be at least pretty well done. I don't know, I just, I'm online with Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. Nonpartisan attacks everybody kind of group but I think does a fine job along with common cause pointing out some really stupid things that happen. And I think that the elections board hanging on to this Accenture contract was not that sensible. Is this like, I mean I've been reading about other states where they've been computerizing their roles and cleaning their roles and everything else and cities and states and some of the reports I've read in other communities saying that's been very helpful. We find 10,000 people who have passed away and now we can at least take them off the rolls and we find the X number of people who have moved we don't need to include them anymore. So it's- And right or wrongly they find felons on the lists. They find felons on the lists. I mean there's a discussion in this country about given the way we've been sentencing the sentencing guidelines, how many people we've disenfranchised. That's an issue maybe for another show. And so this group has been working with the state elections board for how long? Long time. Prior to Governor Doyle. Prior to Governor Doyle. That's more than six years ago. That's like the plumber who just can't quite get the bathtub in your house and you just keep giving him time after time opportunity and pay him millions of dollars to do that. We have just no time left at all. Next time we'll talk about Scott Jensen and where is he gonna be tried? I think it's an interesting issue. Thanks for listening, we're glad to have you with us.


Welcome to ThinkTech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things in matter-to-tech and Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Elise Anderson. In our show this time, we'll cover the Pacific Telecommunications Council, PTC, an annual Asia-Pacific conference for global telecom. Thousands of people come to Hawaii every January for the conference. This year, it was called PTC-19, from pipes to platforms. PTC is a global nonprofit membership organization promoting the advancement of information and communication technologies, ICT, remember that term, ICT, in Asia-Pacific, the most dynamic region in the world today. PTC is at the nexus of two of the most important trends, the rise of the network digital society and the exponential growth in Asia-Pacific. PTC attracts more than 45 countries, 300 companies, 3,500 representatives, and 7,600 participants. Organized in 1978, PTC had its first conference in Honolulu in 1979. It was incorporated as a Hawaiian nonprofit in 1980 and over the years has become a center for ICT in Asia-Pacific. Through PTC's annual conferences, committees, and events, PTC brings telecom leaders together to share insights on industry trends, strategies, policy, regulation, and best practices, as well as cutting-edge ICT products and services. PTC-19 celebrated PTC's 41st anniversary this year. Thousands of members and attendees showed up to share and explore the seed changes in global telecom. PTC customarily meets at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, and this year was no exception. As a membership organization, PTC attracts and connects global leaders in telecom and information technology industries who drive the development of ICT in Asia-Pacific. As a nonprofit organization, PTC is dedicated to educating professionals in the region. It stimulates conversations and collaborations that set the stage for the growth of ICT throughout Asia-Pacific. PTC's vision is a better world, where people in business organizations are better connected and can enjoy a better quality of life through the innovative use of ICT. PTC's outreach initiatives include its academy, its broadband report, its projects initiative, its young scholars initiative, and its annual PTC conference here in Honolulu. The conference is unique and is Asia-Pacific's premier telecom event, a springboard for the telecom industry, and a platform to discovering what ICT will bring in the new year to follow. The conference took place over four days, every day more chock-a-block than the last, and that doesn't include all the meals, networking, and social events, the charity walk, and the Innovation Awards gala, honoring individuals and companies who have made the most notable contributions to move ICT forward. We attended, of course. We walked the halls as we always do. We stopped and spoke to the members, speakers, and visitors who were there, and we toured the exciting exhibits and technologies on display. Many international companies and ICT professionals who came from around the world. We asked them what they hoped to gain at the conference. Some were old friends who look each other up every year. Others came for the first time to see what PTC-19 offered. Yes, I'm Jill Gooding. I'm working for Glory Tech, which is a startup company based in Paris, and we are distributing new technology, which is called LIFI, and from LIFI we have different products. This one bag just in my bag is called LIFI Max that provides fast internet, 100 megabits per second download, and 40 megabits upload, and it's totally secure and radio waves free. That means there's no radiation. We don't use any radio frequency, any microwave. The LED by itself, it blinks naturally several million times per second, and we just use this natural blinking of the light to be like two status, turn on, turn off, turn on, turn off. This is the basic for IT, so this equivalent of zero and one. And then by saying that, the principle is there, and then we have to manufacture a device that could read those blinking and transform those blinking in something like computers can read. LIFI is more like something secure, good for you. There's no radiation, no microwave. We don't use any radio frequencies, just the light. The light we know doesn't go through your body. It's secure because you need to be under the beam of light to get access to the network. People say, yeah, but I want Wi-Fi because it's more like I can get the signal outside. They say, yeah, that's the problem. If you get the signal outside, you don't know who's coming inside your network. Anyone can come and hack your system. This one with LIFI, you need to be under the beam of light.  Any LEDs technically can be transformed into something intelligent. That's why the project is for the smart cities of tomorrow. We can use any street lights, any LEDs to make them communicate. And today, a lot of us are using smartphones. Tomorrow, Samsung, Apple will integrate the LIFI technology that they have already. Wi-Fi is already integrated. You don't need dongles, you don't need anything, any more devices integrated. Tomorrow, I think they will integrate the LIFI technology inside the phone. So you just see your phone, your camera put under the light and then you have the connection and you can receive messages. Yeah, just to show you, this is a LIFI Max, which could be considered as a hard spot that, you know, delivers internet access. You just put this device on top of the ceiling and it covers under the beam 100 megabits download internal speed, forward upload, and then you can connect 16 different users, like meeting rooms, no more cable. Just one cable, this one cable. In the ceiling, you don't see it. So it's Ethernet cable, PoE power over Ethernet. And on the table, nothing that your laptop, only your laptop and the small dangle like this that will connect your laptop. And then you have your connectivity, no need app, just plug and play. We can deliver a message with the LED. I'm going to show you how easy it is. So I'm going to tell this light, I want to deliver a specific message that I will decide the thing to deliver. I'm going to take a picture. I'm going to take a picture of you or maybe the cameraman. Okay, just the cameraman. Okay, I got it. I'm going to program this lamp, this one, to show you picture on my phone. Okay, just right here, I said, read the lamp. I said, ready? Now, I can have this app, okay, this page. And then what I'm going to put right under is going to pop up your picture. You want me to do it again? Okay, see the app right there? Okay, I'm going to slightly put it under the lamp and it pops up your picture. Cool. You plug on DC power and that's it. And here it's like it delivers one signal, which is a QR code, light QR code. We all know what is a QR code. Okay, you flash the QR code and then give you access to information on the cloud. This one is the same. It's a light. So it uses your front side camera. When you put under, it will deliver the message that you have decided. This one will deliver to you. Could be anything, a grocery store. You go to the grocery store, there's lights everywhere. Okay? How about I go, I see the letters, Coca Cola. Oh, send me a message. Oh, if you buy two, I gave you two for free. Only those who was able to read the light can get the promotion. The seniority, expertise and success of the speakers and attendees was evident. So many national and global companies you've heard about and so many others you will surely hear about in the future. There were meetings, keynotes, discussions and breakouts of every kind and nature on every subject of interest to the telecom industry. The conference also served as before as a platform for industry members to negotiate global telecom deals, big global telecom deals right here in Hawaii. This notion of insatiable demand is insatiable demand by global basis and indeed insatiable demand here in the Asian Pacific region. So by 2022 and all of this data comes from Cisco by 2022, 172 exabytes per month. That's a billion gigabytes is an exabytes or 172 billion gigabytes per month here in the Asian Pacific region. It's sort of mind boggling 13 billion connected devices by 2022 as well. So this kind of enormous scaling of networks, enormous scaling of capability, enormous scaling of information and data and how do we as a satellite operate to be relevant in that world and in that environment and it's something that kind of keeps us up at night in terms of how do we integrate and so this is the reason though that we can be fantastically relevant here and in other parts of the world which is despite all of that capability, despite all of that network, despite the terrestrial bill bank, despite the submarine cables that are coming into the region here, there's still almost half the world's population are not connected to the internet, don't have the same access to the world's marketplace, the world's university and school in terms of education networks, the world's social networks. The difference between being connected and not being connected today more than ever is the difference between having opportunity and not having opportunity and if we look here despite the fact that these numbers in percentage terms are growing and improving which is super positive the Asian Pacific region is the region that's the second worst connected on the planet after Africa and so there's much much to do and until seven million people on the planet are connected I think we will collectively feel like our work is not done and so what have we been doing up till now we've been working very very hard with the communities here in the Asian Pacific region in particularly the Pacific islands which are among the most difficult to connect French colonies year 118 I think it is different islands obviously some more populated than others but there what we need is a network of scale and a network of reach and so when we drop fiber or satellite connectivity into single locations you advance the population in that particular town or city but you leave behind a significant number of the population to either live remote from the capital city or and in particular when you're talking about islands which are then further afield so we've been working with OPT since 2007 and we've just engaged in another stage of that relationship where we'll be delivering even more bandwidth and capability onto the islands but also services that we will bundle and I'll talk a little bit about what that means from a satellite perspective our telecom in the Solomons uh Solomons for one of our first 03B customers uh and as as Tim mentioned I was the CEO of 03B 03B is now fully integrated within our broader portfolio of offerings at SES uh and our telecom on the Solomons was was one customer who they they were really suffering at the from the lack of high quality connectivity uh into Honiera uh we're now delivering more than a gigabit of connectivity uh into the Solomons and it's not just a pipe anymore this is services that surround it this is an education network that together with our telecom we've developed in terms of supporting it financing it uh and making a huge huge difference to the population you can see that the growth rate of the population in Africa is substantial they will be by let's say the IMF projecting that by um 2025 one of the largest continents will play the population will come from Africa right there's a growth rate that's exponential and it's going to surpass China and India and it's going to have the youngest population globally right so typically between 18 and 24 years that is where the largest growth rate is going to come from when you have such a young population and the tremendous expansion of urbanization these youngsters here they want to spend money right so that's where that that trillion spike of spend is going to come from it's from this youngest population that's urbanizing in Africa so you have as we move through this you also see the fertility rate is coming up compared to a very slow and aging rest of the world population we saw the the size of Africa we saw where there is potential in the growth of Africa we know why now we know that's because of the young population urbanization that the youngsters would like to spend money right and this is also very attractive for foreign direct investment if you look over the past two years from 2018 and 2017 the US remains the largest foreign direct investor in in Africa by far. Nevertheless, projection coming up for 2018 was 3.4% growth FDI so slowly slowly the continent of Africa is making a comeback to a positive growth rate. The size of Africa remains very very challenging you don't have infrastructures that when we have in North America or in Europe so large population is still unconnected and set like we said remains dominant and productive technology for connectivity however recently there are about 400 million internet users which is the second largest population of internet users globally which is which is massive right and you see the mobile penetration this is growing at an exponential exponential rate. When PTC was founded 41 years ago satellites throughout Asia Pacific were basis for connectivity since then developments in cable have resulted in a shift of data traffic to cable and cable is now critical infrastructure pivotal in the transformation of a global data economy that relies on the internet. Now we live in a time of disruption where innovative technology digitization and the laws of accelerating growth are continually redefining every industry especially telecom AI cyber security the internet of things 5G and the cloud are the keys actually to our future. These discussions were timely in the global context right here in Hawaii PTC 19 showed yet again the magnet that Hawaii can be for telecom and business leaders from around the world they come to talk they come to listen and they come to do business. PTC 19 didn't miss very much the multiple sessions went on every day in mind-boggling depth and detail it was world-class and entrepreneurs delight and an engineer's dream in the technology to connect the mobile devices that make our world go around the enthusiasm was palpable and ubiquitous but we should always remember that at its core PTC is a Hawaii centric phenomenon it was founded here and it has had its conference and headquarters here for all these years PTC belongs to Hawaii and makes Hawaii a global gathering place for telecom this helps us in so many ways it's obvious how valuable PTC is for our hospitality industry for local business and for Hawaii's struggling reputation as a place to do international business for a better future Hawaii needs more high-tech conferences like PTC it is clearly in Hawaii's interest to support PTC and global conferences just like this yes we want to be a hub in Asia-Pacific we want to be a tech telecom and business destination for all the world to see and PTC can show us how check it out at ptc.org and now let's take a look at our think tech calendar of events going forward there's so much happening in Hawaii sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them but think tech will take you there remember you can watch think tech on spectrum oc 16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government industry academia and communities around the islands and the world think tech broadcasts daily talk shows live on the internet from 10 a.m to 5 p.m on weekdays then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends if you missed a show or if you want to replay or share our shows they're all archived on demand on thinktech hawaii.com and youtube the audio is on thinktech hawaii.com slash audio and we post podcasts of all our shows on iTunes visit thinktech hawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and youtube links or sign up on our email list and get the daily docket of our upcoming shows think tech has a high tech green screen studio at pioneer plaza if you want to join our live audience so participate in our shows write the shows at thinktechawaii.com give us a thumbs up on youtube or send us a tweet at thinktech hi we'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives together in these islands and in this country we want to stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us let's think together you can call into our talk shows live while you're watching any of our shows you can call into<PHONE_NUMBER> and pose a question make a comment or participate in the discussion we'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of think tech but first we want to thank our underwriters okay alise that wraps up this week's edition of think tech remember you can watch think tech on spectrum oc16 several times every week can't get enough of it just like alise does for additional times check out oc16.tv for lots more think tech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on think tech visit thinktech hawaii.com be a guest or a host a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on hawaii thanks so much for being part of our think tech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech energy diversification and global awareness in hawaii you can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important think tech episode i'm jay fidel and i'm alise anderson aloha everyone


So here's a crazy concept. Here it is. Let me just spill it out here to begin with. All regrets that you'll ever have in your life are born before you made the decision that led to the regret. Let me repeat that again. All regrets in your life that you'll ever have are born before you make the decision that led to the regret. Now you may be thinking okay that's a bit crazy but bear with me here as I make my point on this and this is a really liberating idea because it makes decision making a lot easier for us. A lot of clients I work with of course in my own personal life we all get to the point where we're like this impasse with the decision will I want I should I shouldn't die what am I going to do option A or option B. Loads of examples a few examples here would be should I stay in my job should I start my own business another one might be should I commit to this relationship or should I not really commit to this relationship another one might be very much more trivial than that seemingly should I go to the gym or should I stay at home and relax okay now there are a million decisions there's probably every day we make thousands of decisions we don't even realize most of the time that we're making decisions but sometimes we do become consciously aware of there's a decision to be made here and it seems important but I don't know what to do right I want this video I want you to come back I want you to save this video right somewhere in your bookmarks or something like that come back to this this video every time you have a major decision to make in your life because it'll make the process a little bit simpler so regrets are born before you make the decision on one level we have the behavioral level which is option A option B right and we spend a lot of time looking at option A option B we weigh up the pros and cons of choosing A or choosing B and we try to make this intellectual decision about it and eventually you know comes to the point where we have to choose one or the other and then we choose option B and shortly afterwards we're thinking oh what was I thinking why did I do this right I'm such an idiot I always make the wrong choice something wrong I'll look at all these negative consequences now if we go back in time before option B was selected we would realize that there's actually before option B was selected there was another decision taking place prior to that before that and that was the decision that was no matter what I choose here am I going to choose to support myself in the choice or am I going to use that choice as a way to build it on myself and undermine myself right in other words when I'm saying here is before you make a choice decide that whatever it is you choose you're going to back yourself fully for making that choice okay I realized that option A or option B the opportunity will always be there if you choose option A there's a no matter what it looks like it turns out to be there's an opportunity to support yourself or to belittle yourself and undermine yourself but so is the case with option B there's the opportunity to support yourself or to undermine yourself criticize yourself so before you choose either of them you have to make a more fundamental choice and that is am I going to support myself here in this choice or not no matter what I choose now once that's been arrived at and you've come to terms with this is what I'm going to do I'm going to use this choice to really support myself then you can start to weigh up the pros and cons and make the best most informed choice that you possibly can right but realize that if you don't make that choice that fundamental choice to support yourself no matter what happens you are probably the default is going to be for the inner critic to come in okay and it will undermine your choice so I hope that makes that a little bit simpler it's it's a concept that not many people too many people are aware of but the idea that all regrets are born before the choice is made it's shown us that there's a more fundamental choice to be made before any external behavioral choice is made any of the pros and cons are even weighed up right so decide if you're in a place right now even when you're indecisive about something realize there's a choice to be made here am I going to support myself no matter what I choose and then the choice will become a lot easier and after you've made it you may notice that there's a tendency to belittle yourself and remember I did I did make the choice you know that I was going to back myself here in this so I'm going to back myself right it's kind of interesting and no matter what we choose there's that inner critic will have something to say about whichever one you choose okay stay in the relationship okay I choose to stay in the relationship three months into that choice why did I stay in this relationship right choose to leave the relationship three months into that choice you know um why did I leave so it's it's the inner critic the nervous system again speaks through that inner critic it's good it's going to find problems that's what it always does so inevitably that will happen no matter what you choose so make the choice to unconditionally support yourself and let me know what you think about that I think I found that to be a really really powerful concept in life and something to bear in mind every time there is a choice an obvious choice to be made I hope that was helpful guys and I'll talk to you next time bye for now


Good morning, everyone. Bonjour tout le monde.  Let me begin by recognizing that we are in Inuit Nunangat, the Inuit homeland. I want to acknowledge ITK President Natan Obed. It's great to see you again. Today, we're fortunate to be joined by representatives from across Inuit Nunangat. NTI President Aluki Koturk, thank you so much for everything. President of the Kivaluk Inuit Association, David Ningungan. Thank you for being here, David. QIA President PJ Aki Aguk and the Inuit Regional Corporation Chair, Dwayne Smith. I want to thank you all for being here, recognize everyone who is here, who's traveled a long way. As Aluki pointed out, the weather is boss and we certainly knew that yesterday, but it was extraordinarily important for me and I think for all Canadians that we be here today, that we be here for this moment of recognition and indeed reconciliation as we recognize the past, the mistakes of the past, and pledge to move forward together in much better ways. I also want to recognize Andy Peartey from the Makavik Corporation and John Charles Lyle from the Kitikmi Inuit Association. My thanks goes out as well to Premier Savikatak and Mayor Redfern for welcoming me to Akhaluit along with two ministers, ministers Bennett and Oregan who are here as well. We need also to acknowledge the elders who are with us today. Thank you for being here. Thank you for starting things off in the right way that reminds us of how important it is to listen to our elders, to respect our traditions, to remember the past and build the future together. My friends, we know where we are and where we're going, but to really know we need to know first where we came from. We have to know our history. We have to face the hard truths that are part of our past because for too long, the government's relationship with Inuit was one of double standards and of unfair, unequal treatment. While Canada was busy adopting the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights many years ago, it was treating people throughout Inuit and Anangat as inferior, identifying Inuit with numbers instead of names. While kids in the south were being praised for learning their ABCs, Inuit children were being punished for speaking their own language. While the government was hard at work creating universal health care, it was forcing Inuit into settlements where disease and infection were rampant. And 70 years ago, while tuberculosis was raging across Canada, the government responded decisively in the south by opening new clinics and training doctors and nurses. But in the north, the government's approach to TB wasn't to show compassion or care but to separate families and ignore people's rights. It was colonial and it was misguided. It wronged and harmed Inuit. I know that many of you present this morning were touched by this unjust policy and too many of you are still grieving the loss of loved ones. Today, I am here to offer an official apology for the federal government's management of tuberculosis in the Arctic from the 1940s to the 1960s. Many of you know all too well how this policy played itself out. Without their consent, Inuit were screened. Anyone thought to have TB was sent south to cities like Hamilton and Edmonton for months or years of treatment in a sanatorium where almost no one spoke Inuit. For a long time, people believed that if you got on the ship in the harbor, you may well never come home. Many people weren't given the time to prepare or to say goodbye to their loved ones. Many children were pulled away from their parents. Many elders were torn away from the homes and communities that were all they'd ever known. It was a grueling journey of thousands of kilometres on ships, on trains and on planes. A trip that took days or even weeks. A trip that took lives along the way. And the mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters left behind, often weren't told where their loved ones had gone or for how long. When someone passed away during treatment, they were buried in the south. Only sometimes was it in a marked grave and only sometimes were their family even told. When people did make it home, they were often dropped back into their communities in the middle of winter without warm clothing, without their family being alerted. Those children that did return often came back to a family they didn't remember, a language they didn't speak and a land of which they had no memory. These were years of isolation, confusion and pain. But the government's management of TV wasn't one bad policy. It was only a piece of the larger history of destructive colonialism. History that the late poet Alutuk Ipili described saying, I did not ask to be forced to learn an alien culture with an alien language. Inuit children sent to residential schools and federal hostels were forced to learn an alien language. They were neglected and abused. But just like in Ipili's poem Destiny acted itself out, deciding for me where I would come from and what I would be. Only it wasn't Destiny deciding. It was the federal government. It was the federal government that decided that families, your families would be moved off the land. The federal government that decided Inuit would be exploited to assert Canadian sovereignty in the high Arctic. I know that people here today and across Inuit Nananga live with the consequences of these policies. Of these years when your communities and your rights were not respected. Because all of this forced relocation the residential schools the TV policy it happened at the same time to the same people within just a few decades. It happened during the same years when the government identified Inuit with numbers on discs and when families had entire teams of Kimit sled dogs killed by officials. This was a shameful chapter in Canada's history and you in this room and across this land know the results all too well. Culture and language eroded families would never again be whole. Lives were shattered beyond repair. These wrongs will never fade. Canada must carry that guilt and that shame. The forced relocation of Inuit the pensioners the government policy concerning tuberculosis all of this happened at the same time within just a few decades. It happened at a time when the government identified Inuit with numbers on discs and when families had entire teams of Kimit sled dogs killed by officials. This was a shameful chapter in Canada's history and you in this room know the results all too well. Culture and language eroded families never again be whole. Lives were shattered beyond repair. These wrongs will never fade. Canada must carry that guilt and that shame. Today, I am here to say sorry to offer an official apology for the federal government's management of the tuberculosis epidemic the policy wasn't an accident it was purposeful it was done even though the government of Canada knew the toll on Inuit families it was done when the best interests of communities were not put first. I am here today to present an apology an official apology for the management of the tuberculosis epidemic between 1940 and 1960. This policy wasn't an accident but intentional. It was done even though the government of Canada knew the toll on Inuit families even though they didn't put the interests of communities first. To the people who were sent south we are sorry we are sorry for forcing you from your families for not showing you the respect and care you deserved we are sorry for your pain to the people whose loved ones were taken away we are sorry we are sorry for breaking what is most precious the love of a home to the people who still don't know what happened to your children your mothers your fathers we are sorry to the communities that are facing the consequences of this policy and others we are sorry we are sorry that because of our mistakes many Inuit don't trust the healthcare system so they can't get help when they need it we are sorry for the colonial mindset that drove the federal government's actions the government has apologized to former residential school students and to Inuit who are forced to relocate but the trauma passed from generation to generation remains and it runs deep we know now that what we did was wrong we know now that we must work to make it right it shouldn't have taken us so many years to tell you that we are sorry that you have carried this burden for too long we are sorry that because we waited there are many loved ones who will never hear this apology today we take responsibility for the harm caused by the policies and actions of the federal government the racism and discrimination that Inuit faced was and always will be unacceptable but an apology alone is not enough we must also promise to do better and although as a country already done we can choose what we do next today we are choosing to create a better future a future built on respect and partnership as prime minister I have pledged to renew the relationship between the government of Canada and Inuit to work together to correct the paternalism and colonialism that was visited upon your communities to continue on our shared journey of reconciliation the path ahead will be long but every step we take we will take together as prime minister I have promised to renew the relationship between the government of Canada and Inuit to work together to remove the paternalism and colonialism attitudes that targeted your communities and to continue our journey on the path of reconciliation the path ahead will be long but we will take each step together and without writing past wrongs we cannot move forward today the federal government is officially launching the Nanilavut initiative a truly collaborative effort with Inuit partners and providing funding to support its work in Inuktitut Nanilavut means let's find them and that's what this project is about about finding and honoring Inuit who went missing during the TV epidemic and bringing healing and closure to everyone who was left behind I can't begin to imagine what it would be like to lose someone you love and to go on never knowing what had happened through this initiative people will have access to information about what happened to their family members and we're providing funding for the four regional land claim organizations to support travel for some families who found where their loved ones are buried we're also providing money to mark graves and create plaques nothing can bring back the voice of a parent or the embrace of a friend but acknowledging where they were laid is a start in honoring their memory because all too often what is done to Inuit have been forgotten or shrugged aside we can't let that happen again that's why we're supporting community-led events and memorials and public education campaigns to keep moving forward with reconciliation as a country we must all take ownership of our history and just like we have to learn from the past we also have to look ahead to a better future a future without tuberculosis TB is preventable and curable it doesn't have to cost lives but TB is still taking away children elders and leaders for Inuit in Inuit Nunangat is more than 300 times that of Canada's non-indigenous population that is unacceptable last year the government of Canada and Inuit Tapirit Kanatami committed to eliminating TB across Inuit Nunangat by 2030 and reducing active TB cases by at least 50% but beating this disease isn't as simple as vaccines or screening although that's certainly part of the equation to end this crisis we have to acknowledge that people live every day with the legacies of colonialism if you remember being South, of course you're wary of government treatment today we cannot repeat the mistakes of the past we cannot impose solutions that's why we're taking a new approach and following your lead our government is investing in your plan an Inuit-led plan with more than $27 million over five years five years towards the elimination of TB in Inuit Nunangat with this investment we're also supporting Nunavut Nunatiavut Nunavik and the Inuvialuit settlement region in developing their own action plans and just like our new approach is founded on working in partnership it's also based on seeing TB for what it truly is a disease that cannot be cured by medicine alone we must address poverty, food insecurity and inadequate housing alongside our work to tackle TB directly we're investing in the basics including more than $640 million for housing in Inuit Nunangat this housing strategy was designed by Inuit in partnership with the federal government and will be delivered by Inuit we are committed to finding community-owned solutions whether it's in this investment the Nuninavut initiative or any of the work we do through the Inuit Crown Partnership Committee of course I don't have to tell anyone here that although we're making progress we still have a long road ahead there's no question that communities face very real challenges but there's also no doubt that Inuit are resilient of course even if we're making progress together there's still a long way to go on the path of reconciliation it's certain that communities are facing real challenges but if there's one thing that I know it's that Inuits are resilient moving forward requires us to be willing to admit that when we're wrong to be ready to do real work to make amends that's why I'm here today this morning's apology is a promise to you it's a promise to never forget the harm that was done to Inuit and to your families a promise on behalf of all Canadians to build a brighter future and to build it together Kujan Namik Thank you