Hey guys, it's Nate, AKA The Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. I wanna talk to you guys through some things that just happened to FIFA Ultimate Team. That is the headliner upgrades. We got our first headliner upgrades with the consecutive wins in a row on FIFA Ultimate Teams. We wanna take you guys through this really quick and talk about it because it just happened not too long ago. Just happened overnight for a lot of you guys in the UK. And I wanna talk about this and how it all went down so that we know for next time, of course, when more cards get there for in a row and talk about this timeline of events as well. So first things first, just a little bit ago, when I realized that something might be happening, Footwatch, at Footwatch on Twitter, they have access to the code so they see like new packs that are out of the game, new card designs and new SBC code. This new card design was released into the game at like 2 AM UK-ish just a few minutes ago, which is basically the headliner's card design with up at the very top, if you can see it over there right here, I can just highlight it instead of trying to point up in the air. Yeah, I'll just do that right there. This thing right here is like the meter that they showed for consecutive wins in a row and they have got that four wins in a row, Liverpool has, so the Wynaldum and the Salah got upgraded tonight. Now I wanna take a look at something else as well and that is one of my tweets from earlier today. The Salah card and the Wynaldum card, I can show you guys these cards right over here right now. But I tweeted out earlier today, talking about these cards and their inability for EA to upgrade them in the correct timeframe. Supposedly these cards were supposed to get upgraded within 48 hours of their fourth consecutive win. They did not in fact get upgraded in that timeframe. It actually was somewhere around like 50, 52 hours instead of it actually being, actually it was more than that, 54 hours instead of 48. So EA was late on that one. But now it makes sense, we've got the card design and the code, the upgrades are here, all right, whatever it is. And I wanna look at the upgrades really quick and actually look and see how much they upgraded these cards. So as you can see, Salah's 97 pace, 91 shot, 90 passing, 93 dribbling, 50 defense and 80 physical. If we go over here to my tweet from earlier today with the old stats, we got plus one pace, plus one shooting, plus two passing, plus one dribble, plus two defense and plus one physical. And Wynaldum got the exact same upgrade. So Salah's going from 93 to 94, Wynaldum's going from an 87 to an 88. He got the exact same upgrade in all of the same stat categories. So we got plus one everywhere, except for plus two passing and plus two defense. But you would think that the upgrades might be a little bit different because Salah is a attacking right wing, right mid player. And Wynaldum is box to box or holding midfielder, but that's not the case. They did the upgrades the exact same. And that kind of makes me curious, are they gonna do that in the future as well when they upgrade these cards more? Are they gonna basically use the exact same upgrades in the future as well? I doubt they will, but that's just kind of the way that they chose this time to do things. So Salah right now is chilling at just under 2.1 mil where he kind of has been. He hasn't really moved that much. He hasn't really gone up, he hasn't really gone down. And again, I think part of that is just having market knowledge right now. And me seeing this card here, this card with the 2.051 mil bid has been here for over an hour and a half. So if somebody listed at three hours and somebody bid it up to 2.051, so I have not seen a card listed lower than that because that's kind of holding his price up at the moment. His card just got upgraded. A lot of you guys in the UK that watched this video are asleep when the upgrade time actually happened. And so I'm not seeing a lot of panic selling and not seeing, I'm not seeing people list this card up because they're done with it by any means. There's just not a lot of people on the game at this time to see this upgrade and to react. But what is gonna happen with these guys' prices? First of all, I think Wynallum is overpriced in my opinion. I'm gonna have to go check his price right now on the market because he is gonna be harder to compare price on based on what I had on my transfer target. So let's go check Wynallum's price. He was like, you know, 670, 680 right when the upgrade dropped and now he's dropping just a smidge. Like 660,000 coins at the moment. I would expect this card to continue to drop because it got the plus one upgrade, right? I think a lot of this card's price and a lot of the reason why he's already 600K is because he had that plus four, the wins, the plus one for getting the four wins in a row. He had that upgrade built into his price already. And I talked about this when these cards first came out into packs is that I thought these cards were going to get lower after they got their four consecutive wins and after the upgrade actually came out, which I think that's gonna be the case with Wynallum. 660K, I wouldn't be surprised if this card drops down to somewhere around like the 600K range. That would be kind of my fearless forecast for that card. I do think it's possible that those go price range. The card kind of goes back down to 600K-ish because he doesn't get his informs as often as some of these other guys do since he's like a holding midfielder. He does have a special, couple other specials from this year, but it's just not as common as a guy like Salah, right? So somebody bought that Wynallum for 671, which is interesting because he has ones at 660, but it is what it is. Salah's price is different to me, man, because this is arguably one of the best or the best. This is the best right wing, except for Bernardo Silva's SBC card. This is the best right wing in the prem, and I would venture to say that, you know, this is probably better than Bernardo's card, just in like a statistical way with the pace, with the shooting probably, the pace for sure. But it's Salah, right? And he's one of the best wingers in the prem. This is basically the best right wing and I think it's gonna remain expensive because of that. Now he does have the potential to get into this week's team of the week as well. That's gonna keep this card's price inflated. I don't see Salah dropping because he's such a premier player in this game. He is the top of the line, Premier League right wing, right mid in this game. And he's still a live item and he's got that possibility for an inform this week. So if you have Salah or you want to get him, let's talk about this. Salah right now is 2.05. He was 1.8 or something earlier this week because people kind of had forgotten about this during the Future Stars Madness earlier on Friday. And he's supposed to get in team of the week or he could be getting into team of the week. What does that mean for this card? I think it's gonna stay high. I actually do think if he doesn't get in team of the week, that would be like the best time to maybe get back in on this card if you wanted for your team. Obviously cards like this could drop if a mid icon SBC comes, but right now in everything that we do, we're just kind of assuming that there's a little bit of risk for that SBC coming in the future. But if you want to Salah, I do think his price is gonna rise up a little bit and you might be crazy. It's like, Nate, why is his price gonna rise up? He's already really, really expensive. I just think he's the best one out there and I don't feel like there's gonna be a lot of people that would panic sell this card after he gets a plus one. Would he go back under two million coins if he doesn't get in team of the week? I think it's possible. I do think some people bought this card up because they wanted to try to maybe trade with it a little bit or buy one and try to flip it after he gets a team of the week because a lot of people saw this card as a 93 this weekend with the potential to be a 95 come Wednesday with team of the week. So if that does happen, I think he'll go up. He probably could go up to like 2.5 million coins, 2.4, 2.5 somewhere in there. But that's a risk that if you don't think he's gonna get into the team of the week, you probably should not take if you bought this card for an investment. But if you bought this card first week, man, this card was 1.2, 1.3 million coins and like when the lighting rounds came out there were more headliners. So some of these cards have exploded a ton for more than a first word. So that's the move on the upgrades. Those are my opinions on those upgrades for the new headliner cards. Now we do have a few headliners that are getting kinda close to winning three games in a row and you can see it in their prices too, man. This is kinda what I was talking about. Like Lewandowski, I think they've got three wins in a row. I think Porto is a couple wins in a row and I'm not entirely sure. There's some good graphics out there on Twitter. I haven't found any in myself yet but there are some graphics out there on Twitter that kinda tell you where players are at in terms of their wins. I think Orsic they've got a win or two in a row. Actually Dortmund have got three wins in a row as well. So Delaney is up a decent amount. I think Royce is up a decent amount as well. That is just due to the fact that they could be getting upgraded here really, really soon. So watch out for some of these upgrades. There's more league games coming this weekend. So that's gonna be something to keep our eyes on to keep a watch out for because we do know that these cards will get upgraded now. Supposedly they were supposed to have some sort of like a shine. I thought these cards were supposed to have some kind of like a shine around them or like a glow but I'm not really seeing much of a glow man because you can kinda see like the normal glare on the card, right? For Rodrigo, you can kinda see that going through his stats. It's the same thing on these guys' cards. So I don't see much of a glow on these cards in my opinion. It looks kinda the same to me. Maybe I need to go add another headliner to my transfer targets that might not have the upgrade yet. So like let's go look at Royce. Maybe if I add these two cards back to back then you'll be able to see that these cards are different. Let me find a Royce really quick and see if that is the case. Let me add that to my transfer targets. Back out and then compare these cards side by side. Is there a difference between Royce and Sala? I don't see one at all. These guys literally look the same. So I don't know what EA and FAQs were talking about. These cards getting like a blur image around them or whatever it was gonna be called but I don't really see it right now at the moment but the main thing is they get upgraded a little bit late but it is what it is. So GGs, DEA, there's those. I would expect more in the future. Now I wanna talk about, take a moment here and talk about the SBCs that we got today as well. We got 81 plus double upgrade packs and 83 plus guarantee upgrade packs in today's game as well that was the content for today. That was basically all that they dropped. It just wasn't a ton of content on Monday which is, I think we got upgrade SBCs either on Monday or Tuesday last week during headliners. So it looks like they're kinda copying, pasting the same upgrade SBC schedule and I think also what we can learn from these SBCs is last week the upgrade SBCs came out and they expired on Tuesday and that got a lot of us thinking we're like, hey, this might be the day that this promo stops when the promo is ending for headliners and that ended up being correct and these cards again, or these SBCs again are said to expire 6 p.m. UK on Tuesday of next week. So my guess is that this Tuesday, 6 p.m. UK a week from today basically is when we will see the end of the Future Stars promo. So it looks like it's another one of those like week and a half promo type things. I don't know why EA thinks that this is like the best way to do the promos instead of doing like two full weeks or just kind of cramming it into one week for whatever reason they are going to, it looks like to me, do a full week for week one and then kind of like a half a week for week two. So again, a lot of these Future Stars cards have dropped off a bit in price if we take a look at these on foot bin. A lot of these guys have dropped off and that's just due to the end of the week in league not as much demand for them and people, I think people really aren't focused on these cards that much. Maybe they tried them over the weekend. They did that. But then on Friday, we also got all these new objectives to go out and do. So people are grinding the icon swaps. People are grinding the odegaard objective. So I think that's partially part of the reason why these cards have dropped in price. And you know, I mean, these are good cards, right? But I think that people are waiting for that second set as well to possibly be a pretty big set. And that's why you're seeing their prices not really hold that much at the moment. The only one that's really holding well is Kabak because there's not very many center backs in the Bundesliga. This is gonna be a very interesting card to watch throughout the weeks after this promo. Kind of similar to the Scream, St. Jude's Day because that card has stayed high in price and you can tell it fluctuates a lot because there's a lot of demand for special Bundesliga center backs. We don't have a lot of them in this game. But again, if you're somebody who wants to buy one of these cards this week for your team, I might advise you to wait until they actually go out of packs. We see what the second set is. The buy time for these guys might be actually like a Saturday night or Sunday timeframe of next week when the next set of cards is in. We'll just see what happens. See what the second set looks like and watch these card prices over rewards. If they put out more SBCs this week, they put out tradeable packs. That would be bringing supply for these cards onto the game and could drop their prices. So I would just keep an eye on these cards. Any one of them, man. I mean, I bought Martinelli for 650K and sold them for 720K earlier this weekend. I think he was actually lower towards 500K earlier today and he's kind of bounced back up a little bit. But a lot of these cards are low and I would just kind of continue to monitor them throughout the week this week. Now I want to talk about the upgrade SBCs again, just really quick here at the end. Give me a little bit of a shorter vid today. Not as much content from EA, so not as much to talk about. But these SBCs right here and a lot of people are asking me, what should I do with these? If I want to grind these SBCs, how do I grind them? Well, it just kind of depends on how much work and how much time you can put in and your coin amount. You could technically take these SBCs right here and get to these by doing the bronze pack method, grinding the bronze packs, selling the stuff that sells for bronze pack method and opening a bunch of those. Maybe opening like, I don't know, 20, 30, 40,000 coins worth of bronze pack method packs, selling what sells and then chucking everything else in the club, rinsing those non-rare bronzes that don't sell, rinsing those into the silver upgrades or bronze upgrade right here. You get two silver players packs. Some of these guys that are in this Future Stars team, actually a decent amount of them, have silver base cards. That means you could pack them from the silver, the bronze upgrade, two silver players packs. Since their base card is a silver, that means you could pack them from that silver pack. So from there, you upgrade those. All your silver players that are untradeable, you chuck them into the silver upgrade, you get three common rare golds and you can chuck those common rare golds into the gold upgrade, I think, which gives you two rare gold players because this SBC right here requires 11 rares, right? So it's kind of hard to grind this from, yeah, you need 11 rares. It's kind of hard to grind this from all the way from the bottom up to start with the bronze packs, but it is possible. If you wanna open bronze packs and put those extras into the bronze upgrades to get the silver packs, you could find yourself having a chance at packing a Future Star because some of these base cards are silvers. That's not the most efficient way or time-savvy way to do it. If you have a lot of coins, I would just go by the rares. I don't think that rare players are really inflated that much for these SBCs. They were inflated during Team of the Year, but that's just a totally different story. Team of the Year cards are just a totally different ballgame compared to these. So let me check and see if Premier League rares, are they still basically this card? It looks like Premier League rares are still like 750 coins from what I'm seeing because these cards are still here at 750 with no bids on them. So it looks like you can get rares for pretty cheap. Another way we could check is doing this right here. See if they have any bids on them. Yeah, these guys, 650 bids. I'm actually gonna chuck a few of these in the club right now, just a club stock. And I'm gonna be doing some of these. SBCs myself, so I'm gonna chuck these to someone at Discard, man, 650 coins, not 650K. 650 coins is what you can get these cards for right now in bid. So they're basically just almost Discard, easy to get. Chuck them in your club, do a couple SBCs if you want. That's gonna be my plan. And then what you can do from there is then you have the option to possibly do SBCs cheaper from the squad building challenge section. If you're grinding these upgrade packs, this is what I would do. However you're getting these packs, if you're opening the 81 plus double upgrade, with the players that are 81 and 82 rated, the 81s you maybe can throw back into the 81 plus to continue to report rares in that SBC, but the 82s and maybe a couple 81s, throw into this 83 plus. That's what I would throw a few of those into this 83 plus. I know it's only one player, but you're getting a chance at an 83 plus rated player which is gonna help you out for a lot of other SBCs. All it takes is for you to get an 86 or an 87 out of that 83 plus. And you're well on your way to one of the SBCs for like an Alfonso Davies, right? Because I think this card, a lot of people are gonna end up doing this SBC. It'll be one of the first that they try to craft from doing these upgrade packs. So that's one of my thoughts on that because how long is that SBC out for? How long is that SBC out for? It is out for one day, 15 hours. So not a terrible long time, but it's out for a while. And then people will be crafting like this Western McKinney. People will probably craft him, but then play the months as well. Werner, Alexander Arnold, and then Ben Yetter. I think a lot of people will kind of, they're kind of chipping their way, chipping their way away at Ben Yetter's SBC, trying to get him done at some point here pretty soon as well. So that's what I would say. If you had the 82s, I would chuck the 82s into this SBC to get yourself a guaranteed 83 plus.  But I'm gonna be grinding some of these 81 plus packs on the streams and stuff like that this week as we do. I'm gonna try to get a Future Stars card, man, because last year I packed Vinicius and I would so love to pack Rodrigo this game. Kind of like, he's kind of like the Vinicius this year, right, Rodrigo's card. So if we get ourselves a Future Star Rodrigo, that'd be nasty. I would honestly rather have like, I don't know who I'd have, man. Maybe Mason Mount. That'd be a sweet card to have. Tonali as well. Aaron's would fit my team. You know, any Future Stars card, other than like Diabi. Other than Diabi would like fit the squad really good. So I'm gonna take my chance at a few of these SBCs, not spend a ton of coins on them because you know, you can waste a lot of coins on SBCs and my squad is, can't see it. That's my backup squad. But the squad's looking okay. So those are my thoughts for today's upgrades with these new, the headliner plus four upgrades or plus one upgrades for four games in a row. And then also talking about the new SBCs today. I do expect another player SBC today on Tuesday. I would expect a flashback or another Future Stars SBC. That's kind of what I would expect from EA Sports today in terms of content. So I'm glad that we club stocked really quick. I'm glad we club stocked these high rated golds on Saturday night, right? Because these guys are inflated now. The 86s are at 16K, the 85s are at 10. So these guys are all up a little bit. So I'm glad that we stocked earlier and took the safe route there. So GGs, if you guys did that, I would still keep holding onto those. I'm not going to be selling those just yet. I think we have more SBCs to come into this weekend. So if we did a club stock on anything higher rated, hold onto those and don't sell them just yet. Monitor their prices over the next couple of days and we'll see what other content comes out in this game of FIFA 20 Ultimate Team. If you enjoyed the video today, smash thumbs up on it. Comment down below if you have any questions and subscribe to the channel if you're new. It's been Nate, The Foot Accountant. Catch you guys later. Peace.


This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's cutting-edge internet TV show where we're covering all the latest and greatest in technology. Today we're in San Francisco at the first Node Summit, an event dedicated to Node.js. And I'm joined today by the guy who literally wrote the book on Node, Tom Hughes Croucher, the author of the forthcoming Up and Running with Node from O'Reilly. And also here with John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE. Welcome to theCUBE, well, what do you think? You're in theCUBE, we're relaxing. So you wrote the book. I wrote the book. Don't write a book, I don't recommend it. It's good that it's done. Yeah, yeah, it's good for speaking gigs, you know? You get the book out there, I know, but seriously, Node's been such a huge success just recently, just rising really to the top of people's minds and hearts of developers. What's the phenomenon about why so fast? I think it's been really interesting. I mean, I spent the last two years traveling the world talking about Node for both Yahoo and then for Joints, who of course sponsor Node, and just seeing the shift of the developer mindset. Ruby's been really popular, people have bought a lot of great things with Rails, but it's no longer acceptable to have a slow app. Everybody wants thousands of users, everybody wants real time, and that's the reason that people are shifting to Node because they need that high performance, and they need to be able to present a company that can, hey, scale to 10,000 users, 100,000 users, a million users, and if you look at the kind of startups that are really doing stuff with Node like Voxer, they have millions of users making phone calls using the system, and it's like, that's pretty incredible. So yeah, I'm really amazed at the continued growth. So let's talk about that mindset, so this is something that people are trying to get their heads around outside of the community. The mindset, obviously with IO, we were talking earlier with Matt about Voxer's getting that low latency number down, down to the bone as fast as they can, they're pushing the envelope on that, but talk about the mindset, what is that mindset? Is it all about just thinking differently around coding? Is it around more architecture? Is it systems programming, all of the above, multiple languages? What is that mindset that's different from where it was? I think primarily it's the architecture, and I think it's this fundamental assumption. A lot of the architectures that we have, have been this legacy, that's come from the batch computing days, like literally punch cards, where the entire architectures we've been using to build internet applications are based on these multi-user mainframes, where the CPU used to be sized between the different programs for each user, and we no longer have that problem. We now have this problem where we build applications that facilitate communication, and it turns out that the networking piece is the hardest piece, and it can't get any better, because even when we hit fiber, fiber is still constrained by the speed of light. We can't go faster than the speed of light, so at some point, even if everybody has fiber in everybody's homes, it's still gonna take whatever it is, 50 milliseconds to get from here to Hong Kong. We can't make that faster, and that constraint is this real constraint that everybody's been ignoring up till now, and Node really has made it easy for people to deal with that constraint, to take that thing and create an architecture that anybody can code in a way which doesn't care about this network IO problem. So it gives the developer more backend-like capabilities with that constraint, and as benefits, it increases their range of capabilities.  Right, exactly. And talk about that role. I mean, that's a protocol that's obviously standard. Talk about why that's now a first-class citizen. Well, and I think this is, I mean, again, like many languages have this kind of historic culture where they've picked up a bunch of stuff. JavaScript didn't have any real success on the server until Node came along. I mean, some people were using it for a few things, but you went to the JavaScript conferences and it was a few people doing a few things. With Node, we now have this large body of people that have suddenly embraced a new way of doing this coding where Node has specifically been designed to serve websites. It's being specifically designed to do internet applications. So it's not just taking the JavaScript as a language, it's saying, hey, we want JavaScript to do this thing really well. And Node's sometimes criticized because it doesn't do some specific general-purpose application that Java or something else does better. We don't care. The thing that we're really interested in is this large problem that lots of people use the internet and lots of people use the web. And if we can do that one thing really, really well, then we're going to save or make a lot of people a lot of money and create a lot of good things in the world. Yeah, so it's not so it's diverse devices and connections and so you guys just standardize on that HTTP and the server capabilities. And I think this is kind of, you can see that in something like LinkedIn. LinkedIn switched their mobile services to using Node and that had an extremely dramatic impact because the connections that mobile phones have that cell phones have is so poor. So in that context, switching that context has a much higher benefit than a different context such as services to server communication. Are we really talking about the mobile web here? I mean, all the key themes and use cases seem to be high-leg on mobile. I think mobile's a really huge use case. There was some really interesting statistics I saw recently that talked about the sort of the shift between the amount of users that have internet through their cell phone device versus internet through their broadband device. And that's shifting in the US. It's definitely shifting in the emerging markets. So I think there's increasingly, that's going to become an important topic where most users have, especially in the areas where people don't have internet, so maybe less affluent backgrounds, they still have mobile internet even if they don't have broadband wide internet home. And that brings up the whole mutual exclusive argument. I'm on a mobile device, but also I might have three or four other connections going on at the same time and the data needs to manage that. So does that address a well-in node? And we just talked with Voxer about that, that they got to save all the messages, someone's on a mobile phone, they also want to move over to the browser. What's the back-end data flow look like? So I mean, no doesn't solve all problems of scale, but again, this is a key part of internet applications is that a lot of what we do now is we shuffle data around. So in general, if you think of an application like Google as a sort of the canonical web application, if I typed in a search query for cats or something and then Google went out and searched every web page for cats in real time, it would take a month for them to go through all of those web pages. So instead, they compute a search index and they can turn me a result in a matter of seconds. All of that's about shuffling data back and forth. It's not about the actual computation anymore for the user. It's about how do we go and find the information that we've already have? How do we go and find the information that's specific and is the information the user wants? So it's stored somewhere and it's how do we route to that information? So that's the real question. That's the real problem that we're trying to solve for these sort of current up-to-date internet apps. Talk about the impact. Let's stay on that mobile thread because I think that really is a huge and everyone now is shifting to mobile so it's not just about web on the browser anymore. It's actually got to have that device access point connected. Obviously, it's a really a two-horse race with Apple and Android. Where are these guys weighing in on this? And we saw a great demo from Brass Monkey about their gaming, very cool app. This browser doesn't work with Apple TV. So there's issues, Apple, not known for their JavaScript support really well. I mean, they're always digging around with standards and want to control it. What does that mean? Is it going to have linked in? Is it bottleneck? Is it a problem? Not a problem? And Android a little bit more open, less mature than Apple, but open? What do you think views on all that? What we can see is that clearly the cloud services are playing an increasingly large role in mobile apps. So for example, Siri as obviously an Apple product wouldn't be possible without cloud. Siri is simply, it has some very limited on device capabilities but really in order to do any kind of significant functionality, Siri relies entirely on cloud services. So the idea of a cell phone that's connected to the cloud is becoming this increasingly important topic where I mean, for example, the LinkedIn app, of course, we know user's node, but it relies heavily on these APIs. So the data on the device itself is extremely limited and it's then going to the cloud to do that. So we need to do that in a really efficient, scalable, effective way to support all of the users, support all of the different devices. And that's where node really comes in. And I think, I mean, there's a company that I'm advising called Webmobi and the idea is to build a platform which is sort of a, you know, mashing up phone gap apps plus cloud APIs. And this is the kind of space where we're looking to make it easy for people to take an API and take those kind of cloud services that people rely on and then have that replicated into the device. Like, how do you pair those things together? And these are where applications are going where we rely on the big data, the big compute, the big services that we put into clouds like joint and Amazon and Rackspace and all of those places where the server farms are doing all the processing but then the representation to the user is happening on the device that they want. And the actual functionality of the actual functionality you can keep on the device is entirely dependent on this data that we're pulling in from these cloud services. So this is the mindset that you're talking about, this notion that, hey, let's re-look at the architecture, leverage the fact that we have more powerful devices at the edge. I don't want to call them fat clients because they're really thin, but they're powerful and the CPU's getting better and stronger, the network's the bottleneck. Is that correct? Well, I think this is the thing. So if I, this is my phone, I have an iPhone. This is actually the four, not the four S. And the thing that's interesting about this is this device is like $800. $800 of computing power in a server farm is just unbelievably more powerful. The difference in power between my cell phone and $800 in a server farm is astronomical. And this is, you know, why would we, when we have these really powerful communications channels, why would we possibly constrain what we can do on the device based on the computing power on the device? Because pushing that small, battery-efficient computing power to the device is really expensive, comparatively. So what we want to do is we want to use and utilize all of this network infrastructure that we have. And with 4G LTE and like all of these other things coming into play, we're having more and more network capabilities. And nodes really sitting there in the middle, facilitating the communication between these high performance things on the device, you know, the fancy graphics and all of that, but shuffling the data back and forth between that and the high performance cloud computing. And, you know, using Hadoop and Big Data to compute, you know, using many computers in the cloud cheaply. So that's the kind of the difference where it's like, yes, we want to do amazing things, but we still need this thing in the middle to connect them. Yeah, and that's cool. And you can optimize that, but the question back to Google and Apple, are they standing in the way or is it not really a factor? Apple and Android? I think it's less of a factor. I think, you know, we'd love to see node or more platforms. I mean, obviously sort of HP put node into WebOS because they really saw, you know, they really saw a value there. And whatever the success of that product, I think it's inarguable from a technical standpoint that it didn't have a significant impact on that product. It didn't add a lot to that product. So I think what would be really interesting to see is, you know, whether there's going to be some, yeah, whether there's going to be some more bets on node and certainly there are people that are putting node onto Android devices in various different forms. Well, if the developer community continues to get the acceleration that it's getting, I'm sure there's going to be not just pressure, just social proof to these guys that it's going to work. Just to kind of change gears on that thread, I got a message from one of our younger readers and watchers, entrepreneur, young guy, Coder. He asked the question, should I learn Rails or should I learn Node? What should I do? So you got a younger generation of kind of CS guys and or coders, or hackers and CS dudes who would like, hey, I don't mind jumping in and learning four or five different languages, piece of cake, but should I learn Ruby first or Rails first or should I learn Node? And I think, I mean, I would say that, I mean, obviously sort of a node summit, we probably have a bias, but one of the things that's really nice about Node is that JavaScript is ubiquitous. If you learn Node, then you're learning JavaScript. And if you know JavaScript, then you have this ability to work both with Node on the server and have this kind of high performance environment that's getting all the press right now for good reasons. But then you also have the ability to work with that same language and build all these kind of web applications. And I think that's a really compelling argument for some of the younger readers, is if you're going to learn something, learn something that's going to be reusable, I think it's going to be interesting to see Ruby and Ruby on Rails, how much that proliferates. As if Rails continues to stay popular, then maybe it will, but is Node actually going to be a really tangible threat to Ruby on Rails and Ruby is the indie language? As this becomes more popular, as Node has made JavaScript a more viable server-side language, that may actually be a really tangible threat. And I mean, to the point where there are more people on GitHub that follow what's happening on Node and do Rails. And that's pretty interesting, considering the relative ages of the projects. And you see similar things on Google searches and other things. Hey, we're here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. We're here at Tom Hughes Crocker with Clint Finley, managing editor of now DevOps Angle, our new dedicated publication to DevOps, which is Node, which is this new emerging greatness around cloud, new architectures. Having a fantastic conversation inside theCUBE, our flagship telecast, we've got to the events. Let's talk about what you're doing right now. So you wrote a book about Node, you're doing a lot of evangelizing and working within the community. What are you up to now for your work? So I spent a long time at Yahoo, building really large, sort of big websites with lots of users. And it was very lucky that I got to spend some time working at Joint with Ryan Dahl, who created Node. But for me, it was a chance to kind of go out and see what some of the other folks in the industry are doing. So I'm currently running a company called Jetpacks for Dinosaurs. And using my experience and my colleagues' experience working on very high performance websites and specifically with Node, we've been working with some really exciting clients that are building some fantastic things with Node, solving some really big problems. So earlier in the week, we've heard from the guys at Walmart and Walmart labs are really pushing the boundaries of what can you do with the resources of a large company to really innovate and to really take some of those things. So I can't speak for Walmart, but certainly the things that the labs team are doing are really exciting. And I think the perspective that I'm seeing is that there are an awful lot of startups and existing kind of bigger companies like Walmart that are looking to really take something like Node and push the boundaries. They're really looking to sort of, if I'm a startup, how do I really kind of scale my users? How do I build a product that scales fast? And if I'm a big company, how do I take some part of my application that I have and how do I make it faster and more efficient and grow that and spend less on resources? Let's talk about startups, okay? So there's a lot of young entrepreneurs here. We're here at the Node Jam on day two of Node Summit. So, you know, in the other room in there, they're presenting their elevator pitches and whatnot to the crowd of VCs and audience. What's your advice for startup? I mean, a lot of these guys are, we saw some students from Brown and Notre Dame and some other colleges here. We got some young hackers, some CS dudes. What's your advice to startups with playing with Node and around development and going to market? I think Node's a really good place to be right now and I think actually a lot of the VCs that are actually kind of looking at it are looking for people that are doing Node because they're recognizing that people that are doing Node have a technology skill that's going to be very applicable in the future. And I think I've even seen now already that people that have done startups that have used Node, even if the startup hasn't been successful, there's a person have become valuable because there's such a demand for skilled Node engineers now. So I think there's a, particularly for the younger audience, there's a real opportunity there because Node is becoming the next big thing very rapidly. And, you know, we've seen from just from the summit there are a number of large companies hiring Node engineers. So there are really great opportunities based on this technology. I think in terms of startups, the thing that's really great about Node is it's allowing startups to kind of pitch out of their league effectively. So typically you don't have to raise as much money because, you know, on a couple of servers from either join or Amazon or whoever, you can host a startup that will scale to 10,000 people without trying too hard, you know, with some simple technology with Node and maybe Mongo or Redis, so like a few things. And you can really start to have that first 10,000 users that's going to help you raise money without necessarily having to go out there and spend your college trust fund or spend the money that you're earning. So there's really a good opportunity now for startups to be really effective without having to necessarily get too much money. And I think this is kind of, this is a large part of what we're seeing with the increase in angel funding, the increase of people that are getting very small seed rounds is because they are able to do a lot more without having to go and ask for a million dollars to buy a lot of server resources. And also I would comment on that, totally agree by the way, we're totally in the same religion there and it's really great for entrepreneurs and it's great for society. But one thing I'm noticing with Node is that the scale point for success is increased.  You can do more with this, right? So you can actually do a little bit more of a back end headroom, if you will, if you think about it properly. Would you agree with that? I would absolutely agree with that. And I think this is kind of increasingly, I think, what you're seeing is that the products that people are taking to investors are much more developed, they're much more sophisticated and I think in general, you know, tools like Node are giving people the ability to really like push the boundaries of what's kind of considered a successful pitch. Are you in the Bay Area? I am in the Bay Area, I'm based in San Francisco. Well, we have one minute left so we want to wrap up, but I wanted to say really enjoyed the conversation. I think we want to do more, talk to you more with our DevOps angle as we get more into this. Just on a final word, what's your feedback to the folks out there around, what's the community like around Node? Obviously, we're seeing great tight-knit come a bunch of people, small, still and growing. What's the community like with Node? I would say the Node community has pulled, you know, some of the best people from a lot of other communities because they see this as an opportunity to really do things right. And I'm really excited because I've never seen a community grow this fast and I've never seen one that's been quite so respectful. So I feel like the Node community is really embracing if you're not sure what Node's about. Try the mailing lists, try the chat rooms, and you'll find a place where people will openly welcome you and really help you get started. I think I would add, respectful is a great word, I would also add professional. There's a lot of professional and range of it's not just one class of folk, if you will. So the Node community is a respectful, professional, great stuff. Tom wrote the book. Thank you so much for being on the queue. Appreciate it.


Ben's the general manager of research at the Conditon Group in Western Australia. He's an agricultural engineer and he's also the Conditon Group's research manager of farming ahead magazine, which many of you might be familiar with. And he's also a member, some of you may have seen him in the last few weeks, talking with GRDC about stored grain. He's based in Western Australia, but comes from a farming family in the New England region of northern New South Wales. Since completing his engineering studies at the University of Southern Queensland, he's worked for Conditon for at least 20 years. Ben has extensive experience in reviewing and communicating a wide range of innovations and technologies, including in the ag tech field. He's conducted a review of a wide range of commercially available sheep handlers, cattle crushes and yard design. And he'll explain the findings here today. He'll also talk about the things to consider when you're sitting up a new set of yards. So please welcome Ben. Thanks, Jody. Gee, 20 years with Conditon Group. Sounds like a long time, doesn't it, when you say it like that? Yeah, I've been fortunate to work with Conditon Group for that 20 years and we've been able to do some great stuff. So for those of you that aren't familiar with what Conditon Group is, we're a little bit like Choice Magazine, but for agriculture. So we're independent, we evaluate all sorts of machinery and livestock equipment. And we put together a report around that equipment in a magazine called Farming Head, which comes out monthly.  A couple of the research reports that we've done over the last sort of four or five years that are relevant to you guys and relevant to the information that you're getting today is around livestock infrastructure and handling equipment, yards, sheds. Emily's going to talk a bit about sheds later on today. And I think at the end of the day we're talking about machinery or equipment that's going to help you in your farm business and hopefully make things a little bit easier and a little bit more enjoyable. And as Nathan said before, you know what excites you about your business and about livestock production in general. For me, it's some of this new technology, a new equipment that can make life a little bit easier and make the job a little bit more enjoyable. So, just a couple of the reports that we've done. And I'll focus on sheep handlers for a start, so we'll kick off with that. And then we're going to have a look at and talk about sheep yards and then we'll finish off with some cattle crushing information. So, we've done three lots of sheep handler testing. The first probably was around 2015, I reckon, so it's a few years ago now. But it's interesting, you know, Nathan was talking about the rate of change of technology. A lot of these sheep handlers haven't changed too much in that time. We have seen some gradual improvement in performance, but we've also seen the integration of a lot of other tech. So, EIDs obviously come in and created, I suppose, a value add to the handling equipment that we've got there. So, the three reports we've got there included not only your signal animal handlers, but also your bulk handlers as well, so we'll touch on those as well. So, what is it that we want in a sheep handler? What are we looking for? Who owns a sheep handler? Who's thinking about buying one? What do we want? We've got to be ergonomic, we've got to be able to work with these bits of gear. We've got to make sure that it's safe for the operator. Animal welfare, big issue these days. We're going to cart it around the place, it needs to be easy to transport. We're going to shift it from one set of yards to another. Do we need to move, you know, George meant to be before, you know, moving it within the yards needs to be maneuverable. How hard is it to do that? You've got different sized animals you're putting through it. You might need to adjust the dimensions of the catching frame to catch different sized animals through the handler. It needs to be quiet, some of them are bloody loud and it can stir up the animals and of course stress in the animals means it's never a good day in the yards for whoever's working in there if you're working with stressed animals. You need to be able to get to the bits you need to get to if you're doing some crutching or winging, whatever it is and some handlers will actually provide better access for some jobs than others. In a lot of cases we see people that have maybe a couple of handlers depending on what the job they're doing. All the basics come into play, build and quality of finish. If you're going to have it in a set of yards it's a pretty harsh environment you need to make sure it's going to last for a long time and provide you with good service life. It's not going to break or fail in the middle of a mob of sheep. You've got to be able to integrate that technology we were talking about before whether it's EID or anything else. You need to be able to get parts and probably thinking about the service and delivery aspect of things. You need some decent PD. We've tested some handlers where the pre-delivery wasn't done particularly well because the agent selling it didn't know enough about the handler or it wasn't done from the factory. If there's an element of technology integrated into that handler sometimes some training might be required as well. You're looking for all these features when you're buying a handler. Have you got power and air on site? Do you need to think about that as well if you're going to make that investment? To work for left or right handlers, how many left handlers have we got in the room? Do people cater for you? Do people cater for you very often? No. It's a bit rough, isn't it? Can the handlers be customised to suit requirements? Whether that's your yards or if you're not ambidextrous, which most of us aren't, we need to ultimately improve efficiency and workflow. That's what we're looking to do here with a handler. The big one is just reduce that physical effort. Cutting sheep around all day has got hairs on it.  If we make that a little bit easier, we're going to enjoy what we do a lot more. We've got three primary styles, that clamp in the standing position, capture and rotate, and then your bulk handlers. One thing that Nathan mentioned before and gave us a pretty good demonstration of was that lead-up rates has to work. If that doesn't work, the sheep handler is not going to work. It's a crucial part of that investment. If you're thinking about investing in a sheep handler, make sure that you've thought about how you're going to feed sheep into it. Whether that's a dual race, as we mentioned before, whether you've got something like Backup Charlie there that will feed around into it, any backing bars, all these things are important to make sure you get the most out of the investment you've made in the handler. It needs to work in your yards because in some yards, you can't fit this in, or depending on where the handler is going to go in the yards, you might need to think pretty carefully about that lead-up. That's important. Let's have a look at some of the results and some of the findings that we came up with. If you've got one of these handlers and you've got some more to add, I'd really love your feedback, so if you just pop your hand up and let us know what you think. Can you go for the ClipX? So, mate in China, this is the second time we tested these, and we did see some refinement from the first time to the second time. It's got a hot-dip frame, nylon bushes throughout, so pretty low maintenance, wears pretty well. Fold out entry ramp, and then of course you've got both a pre-catch area and a three-way draft integrated. So this is the contractor we're talking about. It's clean from tip with those lifting panels for the head and also the rear end, so you can get to where you need to get to. Air requirement, 85 psi, so 12 CFM compressor to do the job is the recommendation from ClipX. It weighs about 750 kg, so if you're going to shift it around your yards, you might need to think about either not doing that or make some plans not to do that or getting some pretty strong people. It does have some electric jacks that lift it up, but they're incredibly slow. That was how I wanted it. Whether that's improved, since we looked at these, I'm not sure, but again, it's something to just ask if you are looking at a ClipX. Can we clamp? Yep. So ultimately using the weight of the operator, say for someone like me, that's not a problem, probably going to crush a few shape, never know. And we talked about the lefties and the right-handers. The left-handers as well. It can be set up for left-handers. There's some coarse and fine adjustment there for animal size. And that foot-locking bar, the clamping bar will lock, so there's another mechanism that will hold that closed. If you need to walk away and do something else, the animal will still be retained. Trampoline springs used, so easy to get parts if they snap. And you can get a transportable version. But by and large, pretty light by comparison. So, and I think that's the key with any of these handlers is that sometimes they fit for a specific purpose. So drenching, little bung-hole crutch, no dramas at all, full crutch, more difficult. I don't know, what about the Gallagher crutching and dag? Yeah, as I said, again, fit for purpose, crutching, dagging, drenching. It's got a top clamping action and that pneumatic entry gate. You can't adjust the height of where that animal is presented. So for shorter or taller operators, that could be problematic. You might need to make some adjustment to the setup when you first put it down on the ground. Speaking of shifting, it is a two-person job to put the wheels on that and shift it. Can't be done with one person. You can use the drawbar there to leverage it up, but of course you need someone to pop the wheels back in on it. One of the things we thought was that the pneumatic tip cylinder sort of got in the road if you're moving front to rear of the animal, so you've got to walk out around it all the time. And there is an auto-way version as well. So our understanding is that there might be some refinement and a bit of an update coming for this particular unit as well. Peek Hill Handler. Anyone use one of these at all? Couple of things that we came up with. So of course this is mainly fabricated using gal sheet and 25mm sectional steel. Only requires 8CFM compressors, so pretty low air requirement. One of the things we sort of found was that there's a little bit of intrusion from the animal about to come in to the rotational area and that could be problematic. So we just needed to keep them back a little bit. In terms of shifting, retractable handles, a set of quad bike tyres go on and it's pretty easy to shift. Cradle height and clamping positions in front to rear can also be adjusted pretty easily. So a bit of adjustability there. We saw a contract crutcher in WI using one of these and I suppose it all comes down to being used to the machine but is put in through quite quickly. Again from Peek Hill, similar sort of laser cut profile gal sheet with the hex socket, head shoulder screws, upright clamping position, great for drenching, electronic eye, you can move backwards and forwards to adjust clamping position and you might need to do that because depending on how animals are feeding into this if they're going pretty quickly you might need to move the eye back so that you've got that reaction time for the machine to catch the animal but they do tend, depending on whether you've got this optional ramp or not, they do tend to run pretty quickly through it and to parry. So we're due to have another look at this later on this year. It's got a few new features, some adjustment in some of the rotary switches which replace the toggles of the old unit, remote control and integrated hot bars. So yeah, stand by for a little bit more information on that one. So as I mentioned, when we do this testing we normally try and get a panel of farmers together with ourselves. We've got a team of engineers and ag researchers and we we get, you know, we try and get some objective measurement wherever we can. Anecdotal and subjective data is always useful but if you can put some numbers around some of these things, that's always good. So what we ended up doing was putting sheep through each machine and simulated a drench and we did that three or four times just to get a bit of a feel for the sort of typical flow-through rate in this case for 20 sheep. So given this is from a couple of years ago, I reckon those prices have probably increased probably pretty dramatically. We'll talk about buying steel in a minute and of course that's all getting passed on which is great not. Rating here from the panel. So again, Jody's got copies of these reports and we're happy to share them with anyone here today.  Now the peak you'll handle obviously because the sheep's in the inverter position, we're not really going to drench them in that position but just to give you an idea of the, they were just maved for that run of 20 sheep just to give you an idea as to how the sheep were running through that particular handler. So if we go into the bulk handlers, we'll kick off with the pro way so available in six or 12 meter units. The 12 meter is obviously a combination of two six meter units about 840 mil wide. Six meter units can be configured as a transportable unit so you can actually shift that around and you can get an optional roof for those models as well. So again, pretty big unit, difficult to put wheels on but tend to work well. Anyone use one of these? Bulk handler. Just as an indication, so we spoke to a couple of growers who are using these and try to get a little bit of information as to what sort of numbers they're putting through. 20 to 30 full body sheep per raceful and the way this works is it lifts the sheep up about 400 mil off the deck. A little rubber skirt there stops any leg entrapment. Do what you need to do if you're drenching or whatever and then you can open the front gate from the rear once you've lowered the sheep back down on the ground. So one of the people we spoke to was this lady Cynthia Parker. She ended up with a bulk handler. She handles about 8 or 10,000 weathers a year all going to the export trade out of WA. The reason she ended up with a handler is because she was tagging some weathers at one stage and one of them in the race that is. One of them jumped up and hit her in the mouth to break her jaw. She's in hospital in Perth for weeks. 6 months to recover and decided this was a better way to go. We talked about all the desirable features of a sheep handler before and one of those was operator safety. There's some definite benefits to having a handler and Cynthia is a pretty good example of how that's the case. These are a hydraulic unit so you've got to have electricity on site we'll have a generator that will run the hydraulic power pack that will lift the animals up and down sorry and then on to the Murray. Murray another bulk handler two races sort of side by side we've got 7 meters long one of the things that we noticed with all the Murray units we went and had a look at was there was some adaptation up the front so it's a big step to get up into it so either ramps all sorts of combinations of things we used to modify it and I don't think we saw one that didn't have some welding on it and that's one of the things that I think people often do is just they might customize the unit themselves to suit their yards or suit their operation. There's two v-cradles as you mentioned so just as sheep are running into the Murray handler just as if you're getting pretty full you elevate and it's got an interesting sort of mechanism to lift everything actually uses a car tyre inflates that as that inflates it pushes out and lifts the sheep up or lifts the bees up so the bees can actually be adjusted for larger or smaller frame sheep and as I mentioned before it does have wheels on removable stub axle hubs so you can just pop those off put it down and put it around the place couple of modifications different taps release valves if you wanted to open it I wanted to lower the sheep from up the front of the race you can the other one was that we saw quite a few sheep slipping off that bottom platform so just a couple of pieces of rod welded onto that would have done wonders and again as we say the modifications to a lot of this machinery are quite common and that's one of the things this owner was going to do so look there's a stack of others there's a stack of other handlers if I haven't covered the one that you're interested in today come and have a chat to us because we've probably seen most of them so Hecton, Perkins, Dan Darigan there's a whole stack of handlers out there that people are using and every time we revisit this report we're trying to include as many as we can the other thing I want to talk about today is sheep yard design and also integrating that into what we've got with the handler we talked about the importance of getting sheep to feed into the handler and that means that the yards have got to be set up correctly there's a few things we've got to think about if we're going to invest in yard infrastructure planning, design who's going to do it, how are you going to do it think about a long term view incorporating any old infrastructure that might be there are you going to expand what are you going to use to build it with what materials have got on hand already what sort of features are you going to integrate into that design curves or diamonds what's going to make sheep flow well through your yards what sort of sheep are you going to put through it races I've seen so many different designs of races it's not funny which bits are going to be under cover all of it latches and catches it's going to be easy to use in and out if you're going to have a handler that you need power air or water on site what's got to be there you're going to concrete some areas which bits you're going to put a loading ramp in there that's going to conform with some of the new regulations that sit around loading ramps and ultimately if you're going to get someone to install it are they going to do a good job it's a big list, isn't it and you can go down a rabbit hole with every single one of those things trying to work out what you're going to do if you're going to invest money in a new set of yards so let's run through some of those planning and design one of the key things is just thinking about site and orientation are you going to have to shift some dirt you need to get a level site is there another site that you could use that you don't have to shift so much dirt earthworks are costly the yard is going to be in the right spot for the farm from a logistical perspective is there existing infrastructure there an old shed and the big question that we often get is do we try and integrate the existing shed into the new plans or do we just go that's going to compromise that design too much let's bugger that off and start again and that can be pretty tough I don't know if people get emotionally attached to yards I don't know why what's that about terrain soil type again kicking into that earthworks side of things slope and drainage you've got to have some slope there you don't want to be working in a quagmire and have ponds of water around the yards and wind and weather can be a big factor as well some of these things can be for example if you're going to put your yards under cover some of these things may not be too much of a consideration wind and weather if you're under cover that's fine you might want to think about the prevailing winds and how that might affect things even if you are under cover but in some cases whether you've got to shift some trees whatever you have to do to pick the correct site is important invest in an expansion anyone ever traded in a set of yards didn't think so you only spend the money here once so you either put them in or you're cutting them out you're not going to trade them in you might modify them a little bit but at the end of the day this is a long-term investment you're going to spend a fair bit of money on a quality set of yards you use them a fair bit and you might want to think about this just staging that build bit by bit you might want to think well you know as Chris said before we've identified where we can out of our business and get a good return on investment we're going to do that first and there's another component of that that we can do later on so think about staging the build you don't have to do it all at once but in doing that you need to think about how you're going to stage that build and how it might work think about also your future requirements whether that's integrating some technology down the track materials anyone priced there lately but steel prices are going through the roof but if you are pricing up steel make sure you're pricing quality steel there's steel and there's steel sometimes you get away with downgrades that's fine but you don't if you're paying for quality pre-gel section for example you want to make sure that it is good quality think about your thickness options your wall thicknesses and if you're buying for a set of yards through a manufacturer get a bit of an idea of what sort of grade steel you're going to use think about those galvanizing options whether it's hot dip or pre-gel and think also about the railing now the K-rail sort of style is becoming pretty popular certainly in WA we're seeing a lot of that whether the builder will rock up on site or a subcontractor to the builder will rock up on site and they'll have straps that get rolled out in particular profiles and some of those profiles are great they're nice and strong they're flexible enough to go around curves some a little bit sharp on top if you are going to climb over or you have to climb over you want to make sure that there's no potential for injury there so just have a look at some of those options with regard to the onsite rail profiles welds and joins if you're going to buy prefab yards just make sure they're good quality I was at one of the cattle crush manufacturers in Queensland the other day and we were looking at some of the prefab sections there that they had and they said all Australia made welded in Australia and the welding quality was fantastic so how do you make that economic you said well it just happens to be handed with about 35 minutes from Wakehold Jail so they just send all the steel down there and it comes back in panels 35 bucks an hour is all they pay the welders down there or it can well yeah if they had to pay a commercial rate that could be a bit of a different story curves and races bugle still king and they lead up into the race diamonds in between sets yards becoming more popular because it just gives that flexibility on where sheep are going to flow and race as race designs vary as I said before I've seen multiple different iterations and variations of races with mid-race gates that sort of flick over if you've if you don't want to fill a full race dual races side by side animals one leading the other vertical bars in the exit gate just to aid the flow undercover does create a much more pleasant work but who's got yards undercover a couple of little things sometimes you know if it's been a bit dry you might need a little bit of water in there to just settle the dust pop some sprinklers on at home let that settle a little bit of moisture if you can't afford to do it all in one here just think about again doing it in stages you might want to think about just doing the race if you're building a new shearing shed you might want to think about just at least facing it in the right direction or orientating in the right direction so that you can extend the portals out and cover the rest of the yards just to reduce the shadows and balking that can be pretty useful can be done later but you know again as I said you need to just plan for it and they still prices keep increasing in price so it's probably never going to get cheaper than when it is right now latches and catches and I've also included PA gates here you can't have too many of those notice the little dog flap saves dogs jumping over fences and and through panel sections that means it's not as tight at the end of the day and think about how many times you go in and out of a gate how many times you latch and unlatch and relatch how much time are you chewing up there so you know potentially you know some of your top mounted latches like this work well provided you haven't got animals that are going to knock them open on you and box up a couple of them on the shoot or the draft you've just done power air and water make sure you've got those on hand if you need them you know for some hand pieces and sheep handlers you might need both of these things one of the options that you've got with a handler that uses air is that you might put the compressor a fair way away and run a big pipe up to the handler big pipe acts as an air receiver and gives you a little bit more air in the system so that's an option concrete just in areas that are obviously high traffic and you need to think about if you're pouring a race you need to be generous with that pour make sure you've got plenty of space to work down the side quite often it's always six inches too short think about maybe putting a towgap in under the race here just gives that little bit of extra leverage if you're trying to reach out into the race one option you've got is a bag of concrete every three square meters dig that in if you've got solid hoppers that's friendly to that and then plate compact it good quality gravel just makes it easier to clean loading ramps there is an ALRTA guideline that should be followed they talk about access for the drivers and probably just refer you to that document if you are going to invest in a loading ramp it's worth asking the question as to whether it's compliant the big thing is installation if you're going to go and buy a set of yards make sure the installers do a good job don't ever put some of the yards that they've built previously make sure you're comfortable with how they're building the yards and that everything's done as you think it should be done it's a big investment that's it with yards let's move on to cattle crushers who's running cattle you can help me out with this bit of a quick buyers checklist so we're going to kick off with safety the vet gates and vet access areas are all tickety boo just make sure that there's no chance of no pinch points or if there are that they're well labelled we want to keep things down to a minimum from a noise perspective look for areas of potential entrapment if we're talking about particularly on the squeeze there's a couple of different squeeze designs obviously you've got your V squeeze parallel single sided parallel some of the squeezes swing up which means that when they swing back down they might trap feet from a floor perspective you don't want that to be solid and provide some grip you don't want it to be slippery that's a great way to drop animals in a crush and of course it goes without saying that you need some ability to get animals out there if they do go down in that crush just make sure that that latching mechanism is sound needs to be reliable access gates can be a bit of a personal preference as to where you've got them depending on how you like to work obviously being able to get in for vaccinations up near the neck is important so provision for that is obviously something you'd be looking for and when I'm talking about latching here I'm talking about making sure that the latches are easy to use easy to slam closed that includes side gates and also handles as well as head bail action a lot of those can be adjusted according to suit neck extended bars chin scoops as I said before those locking mechanisms for the head bail do vary but we've gone away from that sort of ratchet style that we used to have look at for the release there's the integration of shock absorbers as well that we're starting to see as well going bang and releasing a lot of designs have integrated shock absorbers into that geometry also seeing a bit some new materials integrated into the design and build so oil impregnated nylon bushes are used in a lot of cases might have brass in them back in the day and a really good quality crush and what that means is that it limits some of your maintenance requirement and also seeing in the case of I think it's a lights CIA you've got a bit of a composite design for the head bail rollers one of the things we noticed when we looked at crushes most recently is that some of the components are designed to wear so you might get some of those nylon material particularly on the squeeze might work as a shim or a skid plate that's designed to come off and be replaced in time a lot of these crushes can be ordered as air or hydraulic operated or you can do it later on or you might just want to do certain components so you might just want to do the head bail say as air or hydro at the start or do it later on make sure that you've got ability to integrate your EID and load bar provision and a combination for the scale head so this is a tapari panel that clicks in over this keeps all your electronics safe and sound and tucked away so look there is a report, it's a current edition of Farming Head, we've done a bit of a run through on cattle crushes and looked at pricing and again I'll send that to Jodi she can happily share it with you and if you're not a conventing group member and you'd like to be one, there's a little discount code there so a bit of a plug


Many thanks to Wyder and Rachel for this invitation to revisit a study, an update, a study that we conducted originally in 2013 and that led to a range of publications and projects, mainly focusing on the comparison of Mozambique and Angola for several projects. One of them a collection on aid and authoritarian rule in Africa, edited by Hagman and Reitens. My presentation today evaluates this research that we conducted, both in the light of important and substantial political developments in both countries, now that roughly five years have elapsed, but also mainly in the light of developments in the literature and specifically in one of the frameworks that we used in the original research that has experienced quite phenomenal expansion and development and that is the political settlements framework and specifically Mushtaq Khan's framework and I'll explain what that entails in a minute. So in the light, as I said, of these political changes and in the light of this development of the literature, the question arises about the relevance of re-examining and rethinking where this framework and these new iterations of the framework have something to offer to thinking or thinking about age and fragility. So this is an invitation and it's more of a provocation than anything else. So to revisit a bit and obviously in a very succinct manner, because we don't have a long time, kind of like the gist of our original arguments, we set out originally in 2013 to interrogate dominant narratives about two countries that had a lot in common and some stark differences, Angola and Mozambique and to interrogate what were prevailing narratives and to a great extent narratives that still prevail about Mozambique as a case in point of a driven success story and Angola as emblematic of the resource course. The starting point of the paper was exploring the effects, the availability of very different types of rents, foreign aid in the case of Mozambique and oil revenue in the case of Angola, had in the process of institution building in these two countries that as I said had such stark structural and historical commonalities. Our comparative exercise we thought was feasible because while we had these commonalities they were significant. There was also evidence showing that whereas Angola's post-independence state building process had relied extensively on the oil rent and that in a contrastive manner the contribution of aid or development assistance had been marginal. In a very kind of like striking contrast, Mozambique had received massive amounts of aid. It was considered for a long period of time a very emblematic case of aid dependence and despite more lately developing some capacity in instructive sectors Mozambican elites or the Mozambican state rather had largely failed to effectively capture resources from, sorry, rents from resources. So in this sense our paper first explored those implications of the very different material foundations of the political settlement in both countries, also charted the way in which both states had structure, it's their fiscal basis and also attempted to explain the difference in the performance of both states. Finally putting forward hypothesis about the conditions that led these countries to diverge and the role that the presence or the absence of aid had had in that process. Among other ideas and concepts used at the time we also engage with the political settlement framework and as I said this is the political settlement framework as developed originally by Moush Takan which is different and if I have time I'll probably go into those differences because they're relevant to our discussion from other uses of the concept of political framework. In a nutshell the idea of the political framework captures the fact that studying the formulation and the implementation of institutions and policies can obviously not be done in isolation from understanding a specific context in which these policies and institutions are attempted or introduced but unlike other traditions that also look at power constellations in the context where policies are implemented, Kant's framework focuses on how power is distributed among different organizations in society and how those distributional balances determine economic and political effects. The idea being that institutions and policies are ultimately translated into decisions about resource allocation in society and result in the creation of rents and these rents taking us streams of income or benefits that are accrued from these political decisions are prone to are conflictive and create tensions among groups in society because these groups are affected differently by the creation of those rents and in relation to how much power they can wield their capacity to either support or resist transformation or new policies is sort of like determined. So ultimately the political settlement framework studies the foundations and changes over time of the way that power is distributed among organizations in society and how these results in their relative ability to determine the effectiveness and outcomes of institutions and policies. Obviously the political settlement framework was not originally developed to account for the impact and the effectiveness of aid and in contrast it's been used most traditionally to think about processes of industrial strategies to think about structural transformation and in later years it's been applied to the study of trade and service delivery and many other kind of debates and most strikingly the framework has been more widely utilized in the study of African development trajectories and now there's a number of case studies on Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda that uses the framework and so my interest today is to explore to what extent these new developments in the framework can be applied to thinking about development assistance and the relation of donors and domestic economies. What's happened in this last five years is that the framework has also become more conceptually coherent and therefore there's room for asking these questions. At the center of the question is the observation that aid flows operate as a form of rent and that donor strategies and conditions of disbursement can be conceptualized as institutional and policy initiatives. The key insight of the political settlement frameworks that has applications to thinking about aid is that rather than studying the local power relations and the power balances simply as the context in which aid policies and strategies are implemented it is probably more helpful to shift our focus to analyzing squarely the interaction between aid programming and a more informed understanding of the history of the political economy of organizational power distribution as proposed by Ken in his framework. Secondly, the framework could help understand how institutions will find their interests affected by different initiatives in terms of aid delivery and conditionalities and how different organizations in societies may be able to mobilize politically either in support or against the aid initiatives. Thirdly, it would be extremely interesting to explore how aid is aligned with developmental prospects for structural economic transformation so breaking free from a kind of like discrete study of aid effectiveness and a more mainstream study of aid as one rent among many others having effects in society. In fourth instance, it would be extremely interesting to ask how does the delivery of aid-related rents interact with other incentives in the actual making of political settlements? And lastly, in a way endogenizing donors less as kind of external entities and more as parties to the creation and sustainance of the political settlements. So briefly, if we move away from the idea of power constellations and power relations as the context in which aid strategies and aid programming is received and move towards an understanding where we see aid effectiveness constructing and being an essential party to the formation of political settlements, we are probably into a more interesting understanding of the challenges experienced by aid. I'm not sure I'll have time. I'll probably leave it for the question and session to discuss the differences between Mushda Khan's approach to political settlements and other alternative neo-institutional economics or conflict studies definitions of and uses of the term. But what I think is distinctive about Mushda Khan's framework and which probably is useful in these debates is that in his use of the political settlement concept, he is recognizing that the conflicts created in the allocational decisions, it is rather more useful to stop seeing them as a distortion or an aberration of fragile and violent polities, but instead inherent to development processes. Both in cases where the rule of law administers such conflicts and in cases where violence continues unchecked. So to wrap up, if we think about the core insights of this more coherent and developed framework of political settlements that has been coming out in publications in the last five years, there's a couple of insights that may be more provocative into problematizing political settlements, local power constellations and age. As I said, and I think this is the main takeaway, this epistemological shift away from thinking about power relations merely as the context for the introduction of institutions and policies and in our case the rents that translate age programming and age implementation in the sense that the political settlements framework proposes to refocus the study instead to the relative alignment or misalignment between on the one hand institutions that can be formal or informal and as we know in the classical understanding of institutions as the rules of the game that are present in the state in the rule of law and constellations of governance and local power balances, the capacity of organizations in societies and different groupings, societal groupings to effectively make claims on the stage. And the idea here is that clientelism and other forms of patron-client relations are ripe or exacerbated when our patterns of organizational power distribution are more disaligned or misaligned with institutional settlement, institutional patterns. And these four important historical reasons linked to colonialism, linked to the processes of late capitalist development, is more the case in former colonies with less productive economies as is the case of some of these countries that I mentioned in Africa. There are three ways in which political settlements framework proposes to understand the channels of and the dimensions of political settlements. The one is the vertical distribution of power that speaks about the relative difference in power between the ruling coalition and the excluded factions. And the gist of the argument here is that the greater the difference in power between the ruling coalition and the excluded factions, the larger the space, the wider the space that the ruling coalitions has to develop a more long-term horizon of strategizing. Where when competition is tighter, the ruling coalition has to obviously spend more resources and more efforts into just remaining in place. And this links to a core concept within the framework which is holding power, the ability of the ruling coalition to remain in power. The second dimension that has been proposed is the horizontal distribution of power. And this, if I have a chance to elaborate later on, it's quite key to what makes different or the difference between cancer political settlement framework and other understandings of political framework. Because whereas other understandings of political framework, for instance, emphasize elite bargaining, this horizontal distribution of power claims that elites have and groups in power, coalition groups, are differentiated and heterogeneous internally. And that part of their power or this horizontal dimension refers to their capacity to mobilize within their group politically to resist effectively or to support any institutional transformation and in this case, age delivery or age programming. So in this sense, Cam and others that have adopted the framework reject the idea that elite bargaining explains the totality of the tension happening and claims on the contrary that other than this vertical distribution of power, there is this horizontal distribution within the ruling coalition, the capacity of actors within the ruling coalition to politically mobilize other parts of the coalition. So the higher echelons mobilizing their bases, which are not necessarily contained within the elite. And this obviously is a manifestation of elite legitimacy or group legitimacy and creates when the higher echelons of these organizations have a greater capacity to politically mobilize their bases. They also have a greater space for coherence in action and effectiveness. So it's not purely that contestation between ruling coalitions and groups in the opposition, but also the ability within ruling coalitions to act coherently and effectively. And the third dimension, and one dimension that was key to our original study is to do with the material foundations of the political settlement and the way in which the settlement is maintained. And so finally back to Angola and Mozambique. If we go back to the commonalities of the two cases, we had two countries where the liberation struggle and independence led to socialist powers getting into power. And a process that was followed in both cases by internal armed challenges and in both cases, oppositional factions received important external support from international actors. Both countries experienced long lasting civil wars ending on a transition to multi-party democracy and market economy. And in both countries, incumbent parties have retained power and opposition parties remain marginal. But here is where some important differences begin. And just as a note, obviously more recently we've kind of like moved on from where Mozambican and Angola were five years ago. And in these five years we've had, in both cases, important corruption scandals. And in both cases, a relatively peaceful power transition within the ruling party, but in the case of Mozambique, stronger internal opposition growing and expressed now in form of armed unrest and a very transformed relationship with donors. And to zero in on the differences, well, when the war ended early on in Mozambique in the early 90s, it ended with a negotiated agreement that mediated, that was mediated by third party countries. And it sort of like brought together Mozambique and a number of donors and the kind of relationship became quite strong. And when fiscal effort was necessary to fund the political reconstruction in the post-conflict period, donors were very forthcoming and did support the reconstruction of the state. Very differently in Angola, the war did not end with a negotiated agreement. It dragged on for a decade more. And the war was funded by a resource that Mozambique did not have and Angola did, which was kind of like oil and to a great extent also diamonds, which meant that by the time Angola kind of like the war came to an end in Angola, Angola had not developed this dependence on aid and retained largely a relative autonomy because it could fund part of the reconstruction process from the revenues of its resource extraction. And here we formulated at the time a couple of hypotheses that would be interesting to revisit and to assess the extent to which they succeeded in explaining the contrast between two countries. We found that indeed the different sources of rents in the two countries led to different outcomes, that the different sources of the rents in one case age and in the other natural resources created very different fiscal structures during the post-work reconstruction period and were very central to differences in the state building process. But these structures were not merely different because they are based on different rents, but in rather respond to the effect that the different types of revenue and very importantly the timing of their use in the consolidation of the political settlement in each country was made effective. So for instance, whereas in Angola, the contemporary process, contemporary to the process of contestation during the war, there was the availability of this rent and this resulted in the consolidation through the rent of a very strong ruling coalition in Mozambique after the resources were only made available after the violent consultation was over and resulted in elites that sort of like cohesed and formed before the kind of like resources were forthcoming. In Angola, we find a case of a more unified command with capacity to prospect and to and with the fiscal imperative to use resources aid to propped up the ruling coalition, but also to combine with an in combination with some despotic rule also to create some legitimacy through a modicum of public service provision. What is remarkable about Angola is that in the process the country did craft a highly performing national oil company and secured to a great extent the appropriation not necessarily with progressive outcomes, but the appropriation by the state of the oil rent. Of course, the Angolan regime had an incentive to ensure the oil sector performed because it was the basis of its functioning not only of the state, but of the party and of its very centralized ruling coalition. The ruling party needed the oil rent as much as the oil rent in this case the oil company required a coherent ruling coalition. On the contrary, Mozambique relied on aid in the process of state building and post-conflict reconstruction. From the beginning, aid in Mozambique was a governance rather than growth driven and importantly was focused on strengthening the opposition and on strengthening the electoral process, both processes that had very uneven outcomes. This led to a ruling stage that is comparatively less autonomous and the management of rents is a bit of opposite than what we found in Angola, with emerging interest groups and private accumulators very much linked to the ruling party being considerably autonomous and not necessarily ruled by the top by a very, very centralized opposition. I think that with this I will close and continue discussing the case in the Q&A session. Thank you.