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The Biden regime used Thanksgiving as a reason to celebrate and promote its "accomplishments" this year. They wanted to claim that Americans were better off this year than they were last year under President Trump thanks to COVID vaccines and the American Rescue Plan. But the information was completely filled with lies and misleading information. The first item was in regards to unemployment, where they claim that Biden has reduced unemployment. They conveniently leave out that many states were still under restrictions last Thanksgiving. Americans were unable to work in many instances if they wanted. In the second item, they talked about COVID vaccines. They claimed that less than 1% of Americans were vaccinated last year while 71% are this year. But the COVID vaccines were not approved to be administered until AFTER Thanksgiving last year. The rest of the items had to do with the economy. They boasted in increased GDP, restaurant and bar sales, and retail sales. They again failed to mention the closed businesses that reopened, or the fact that massive inflation is driving higher sales also. They want to ignore that Americans are paying nearly double for gasoline this year and 50% more for groceries this year. Americans are not better off under Biden's agenda than they were a year ago. In fact, they are losing money under Biden. A significant amount of money. All while Biden promotes that he is redistributing wealth across the country. Americans should be thankful that the 2022 midterms are coming and that we can stop Biden's agenda in its tracks. Because if we don't, we may not have a nation to be thankful for next year. Music courtesy of Greg Shields Music. http://www.reverbnation.com/GregShields
It has been 100 days since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan and the country is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. More than half of the country's 39 million people face acute food insecurity as prices skyrocket. Severe drought, the pandemic and the damage caused by decades of war have all helped to bring the economy to its knees. With winter approaching the World Food Programme has warned that Afghans are at risk of being isolated from life-saving assistance. Previously international aid represented around 40% of the country's GDP, but since the Taliban takeover the World Bank, the IMF, and the United States have cut off access to more than $9.5 billion in foreign reserves and loans. With the banking system frozen, aid organisations are struggling to pay their staff on the ground and calls for the United States and its allies to ease sanctions are growing. The international community is now asking itself whether it is possible to prevent the Afghan people from starving while at the same time minimising any benefits to a repressive Taliban leadership. Ritula Shah is joined by a panel of experts. Producers: Junaid Ahmed, Paul Schuster and Marie Sina.
About TimTim's tech career spans over 20 years through various sectors. Tim's initial journey into tech started as a US Marine. Later, he left government contracting for the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for large Unix-based datastores. Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with clients in his current role. Tim is also a father of five children, as well as a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. Currently, he is the reigning American National and 3-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in his division.TranscriptCorey: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn joined by Principal Cloud Economist here at The Duckbill Group Tim Banks. Tim, how are you?Tim: I'm doing great, Corey. How about yourself?Corey: I am tickled pink that we are able to record this not for the usual reasons you would expect, but because of the glorious pun in calling this our Banksgiving episode. I have a hard and fast rule of, I don't play pun games or make jokes about people's names because that can be an incredibly offensive thing. “And oh, you're making jokes about my name? I've never heard that one before.” It's not that I can't do it—I play games with language all the time—but it makes people feel crappy. So, when you suggested this out of the blue, it was yes, we're doing it. But I want to be clear, I did not inflict this on you. This is your own choice; arguably a poor one. We're going to find out.Tim: 1000% my idea.Corey: So, this is your show. It's a holiday week. So, what do you want to do with our Banksgiving episode?Tim: I want to give thanks for the folks who don't normally get acknowledged through the year. Like you know, we do a lot of thanking the rock stars, we do a lot of thanking the big names, right, we also do a lot of, you know, some snarky jabs at some folks. Deservingly—not folks, but groups and stuff like that; some folks deserve it, and we won't be giving them thanks—but some orgs and some groups and stuff like that. And I do think with that all said, we should acknowledge and thank the folks that we normally don't get to, folks who've done some great contributions this year, folks who have helped us, helped the industry, and help services that go unsung, I think a great one that you brought up, it's not the engineers, right? It's the people that make sure we get paid. Because I don't work for charity. And I don't know about you, Corey. I haven't seen the books yet, but I'm pretty sure none of us here do and so how do we get paid? Like I don't know.Corey: Oh, sure you have. We had a show on a somewhat simplified P&L during the all hands meeting because, you know, transparency matters. But you're right, those are numbers there and none of that is what we could have charged but didn't because we decided to do more volunteer work for AWS. If we were going to go down that path, we would just be Community Heroes and be done with it.Tim: That's true. But you know, it's like, I do my thing and then, you know, I get a paycheck every now and then. And so, as far as I know, I think most of that happens because of Dan.Corey: Dan is a perfect example. He's been a guest on this show, I don't know it has as aired at the time that this goes out because I don't have to think about that, which is kind of the point. Dan's our CFO and makes sure that a lot of the financial trains keep running on time. But let's also be clear, the fact that I can make predictions about what the business is going to be doing by a metric other than how much cash is in the bank account at this very moment really freed up some opportunity for us. It turned into adult supervision for folks who, when I started this place and then Mike joined, and it was very much not an area that either one of us was super familiar with. Which is odd given what we do here, but we learned quickly.The understanding not just how these things work—which we had an academic understanding of—but why it mattered and how that applies to real life. Finance is one of those great organizations that doesn't get a lot of attention or respect outside of finance itself. Because it's, “Oh, well they just control the money. How hard could it be?” Really, really hard.Tim: It really is. And when we dig into some of these things and some of the math that goes and some of what the concerns are that, you know, a lot of engineers don't really have a good grasp on, and it's eye opening to understand some of the concerns. At least some of the concerns at least from an engineering aspect. And I really don't give much consideration day to day about the things that go on behind the scenes to make sure that I get paid.But you look at this throughout the industry, like, how many of the folks that we work with, how many folks out there doing this great work for the industry, do they know who their payroll person is? Do they know who their accountant team is? Do they know who their CFO or the other people out there that are doing the work and making sure the lights stay on, that people get paid and all the other things that happen, right? You know, people take that for granted. And it's a huge work and those people really don't get the appreciation that I think they deserve. And I think it's about time we did that.Corey: It's often surprising to me how many people that I encounter, once they learn that there are 12 employees here, automatically assume that it's you, me, and maybe occasionally Mike doing all the work, and the other nine people just sort of sit here and clap when I tell a funny joke, and… well, yes, that is, of course, a job duty, but that's not the entire purpose of why people are here.Natalie in marketing is a great example. “Well, Corey, I thought you did the marketing. You go and post on Twitter and that's where business comes from.” Well, kind of. But let's be clear, when I do that, and people go to the website to figure out what the hell I'm talking about.Well, that website has words on it. I didn't put those words on that site. It directs people to contact us forms, and there are automations behind that that make sure they go to the proper place because back before I started this place and I was independent, people would email me asking for help with their bill and I would just never respond to them. It's the baseline adult supervision level of competence that I keep aspiring to. We have a sales team that does fantastic work.And that often is one of those things that'll get engineering hackles up, but they're not out there cold-calling people to bug them about AWS bills. It's when someone reaches out saying we have a problem with our AWS spend, can you help us? The answer is invariably, “Let's talk about that.” It's a consultative discussion about why do you care about the bill, what does success look like, how do you know this will be a success, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that make sure that we're aimed at the right part of the problem. That's incredibly challenging work and I am grateful beyond words, I don't have to be involved with the day-in, day-out of any of those things.Tim: I think even beyond just that handling, like, the contracts and the NDAs, and the various assets that have to be exchanged just to get us virtually on site, I've [unintelligible 00:06:46] a couple of these things, I'm glad it's not my job. It is, for me, overwhelmingly difficult for me to really get a grasp and all that kind of stuff. And I am grateful that we do have a staff that does that. You've heard me, you see me, you know, kind of like, sales need to do better, and a lot of times I do but I do want to make sure we are appreciating them for the work that they do to make sure that we have work to do. Their contribution cannot be underestimated.Corey: And I think that's something that we could all be a little more thankful for in the industry. And I see this on Twitter sometimes, and it's probably my least favorite genre of tweet, where someone will wind up screenshotting some naive recruiter outreach to them, and just start basically putting the poor person on blast. I assure you, I occasionally get notices like that. The most recent example of that was, I got an email to my work email address from an associate account exec at AWS asking what projects I have going on, how my work in the cloud is going, and I can talk to them about if I want to help with cost optimization of my AWS spend and the rest. And at first, it's one of those, I could ruin this person's entire month, but I don't want to be that person.And I did a little LinkedIn stalking and it turns out, this looks like this person's first job that they've been in for three months. And I've worked in jobs like that very early in my career; it is a numbers game. When you're trying to reach out to 1000 people a month or whatnot, you aren't sitting there googling what every one of them is, does, et cetera. It's something that I've learned, that is annoying, sure. But I'm in an incredibly privileged position here and dunking on someone who's doing what they are told by an existing sales apparatus and crapping on them is not fair.That is not the same thing as these passive-aggressive [shit-tier 00:08:38] drip campaigns of, “I feel like I'm starting to stalk you.” Then don't send the message, jackhole. It's about empathy and not crapping on people who are trying to find their own path in this ridiculous industry.Tim: I think you brought up recruiters, and, you know, we here at The Duckbill Group are currently recruiting for a senior cloud economist and we don't actually have a recruiter on staff. So, we're going through various ways to find this work and it has really made me appreciate the work that recruiters in the past that I've worked with have done. Some of the ones out there are doing really fantastic work, especially sourcing good candidates, vetting good candidates, making sure that the job descriptions are inclusive, making sure that the whole recruitment process is as smooth as it can be. And it can't always be. Having to deal with all the spinning plates of getting interviews with folks who have production workloads, it is pretty impressive to me to see how a lot of these folks get—pull it off and it just seems so smooth. Again, like having to actually wade through some of this stuff, it's given me a true appreciation for the work that good recruiters do.Corey: We don't have automated systems that disqualify folks based on keyword matches—I've never been a fan of that—but we do get applicants that are completely unsuitable. We've had a few come in that are actual economists who clearly did not read the job description; they're spraying their resume everywhere. And the answer is you smile, you decline it and you move on. That is the price you pay of attempting to hire people. You don't put them on blast, you don't go and yell at an entire ecosystem of people because looking for jobs sucks. It's hard work.Back when I was in my employee days, I worked harder finding new jobs than I often did in the jobs themselves. This may be related to why I get fired as much, but I had to be good at finding new work. I am, for better or worse, in a situation where I don't have to do that anymore because once again, we have people here who do the various moving parts. Plus, let's be clear here, if I'm out there interviewing at other companies for jobs, I feel like that sends a message to you and the rest of the team that isn't terrific.Tim: We might bring that up. [laugh].Corey: “Why are you interviewing for a job over there?” It's like, “Because they have free doughnuts in the office. Later, jackholes.” It—I don't think that is necessarily the culture we're building here.Tim: No, no, it's not. Specially—you know, we're more of a cinnamon roll culture anyways.Corey: No. In my case, it's one of those, “Corey, why are you interviewing for a job at AWS?” And the answer is, “Oh, it's going to be an amazing shitpost. Just wait and watch.”Tim: [laugh]. Now, speaking of AWS, I have to absolutely shout out to Emily Freeman over there who has done some fantastic work this year. It's great when you see a person get matched up with the right environment with the right team in the right role, and Emily has just been hitting out of the park ever since he got there, so I'm super, super happy to see her there.Corey: Every time I get to collaborate with her on something, I come away from the experience even more impressed. It's one of those phenomenal collaborations. I just—I love working with her. She's human, she's empathetic, she gets it. She remains, as of this recording, the only person who has ever given a talk that I have heard on ML Ops, and come away with a better impression of that space and thinking maybe it's not complete nonsense.And that is not just because it's Emily, so I—because—I'm predisposed to believe her, though I am, it's because of how she frames it, how she views these things, and let's be clear, the content that she says. And that in turn makes me question my preconceptions on this, and that is why she has that I will listen and pay attention when she speaks. So yeah, if Emily's going to try and make a point, there's always going to be something behind it. Her authenticity is unimpeachable.Tim: Absolutely. I do take my hat's off to everyone who's been doing DevRel and evangelism and those type of roles during pandemics. And we just, you know, as the past few months, I've started back to in-person events. But the folks who've been out there finding new way to do those jobs, finding a way to [crosstalk 00:12:50]—Corey: Oh, staff at re:Invent next week. Oh, my God.Tim: Yeah. Those folks, I don't know how they're being rewarded for their work, but I can assure you, they probably need to be [unintelligible 00:12:57] better than they are. So, if you are staff at re:Invent, and you see Corey and I, next week when we're there—if you're listening to this in time—we would love to shake your hand, elbow bump you, whatever it is you're comfortable with, and laud you for the work you're doing. Because it is not easy work under the best of circumstances, and we are certainly not under the best of circumstances.Corey: I also want to call out specific thanks to a group that might take some people aback. But that group is AWS marketing, which given how much grief I give them seems like an odd thing for me to say, but let's be clear, I don't have any giant companies whose ability to continue as a going concern is dependent upon my keeping systems up and running. AWS does. They have to market and tell stories to everyone because that is generally who their customers are: they round to everyone. And an awful lot of those companies have unofficial mottos of, “That's not funny.” I'm amazed that they can say anything at all, given how incredibly varied their customer base is, I could get away with saying whatever I want solely because I just don't care. They have to care.Tim: They do. And it's not only that they have to care, they're in a difficult situation. It's like, you know, they—every company that sizes is, you know, they are image conscious, and they have things that say what like, “Look, this is the deal. This is the scenario. This is how it went down, but you can still maintain your faith and confidence in us.” And people do when AWS services, they have problems, if anything comes out like that, it does make the news and the reason it doesn't make the news is because it is so rare. And when they can remind us of that in a very effective way, like, I appreciate that. You know, people say if anything happens to S3, everybody knows because everyone depends on it and that's for good reason.Corey: And let's not forget that I run The Duckbill Group. You know, the company we work for. I have the Last Week in AWS newsletter and blog. I have my aggressive shitposting Twitter feed. I host the AWS Morning Brief podcast, and I host this Screaming in the Cloud. And it's challenging for me to figure out how to message all of those things because when people ask what you do, they don't want to hear a litany that goes on for 25 seconds, they want a sentence.I feel like I've spread in too many directions and I want to narrow that down. And where do I drive people to and that was a bit of a marketing challenge that Natalie in our marketing department really cut through super well. Now, pretend I work in AWS. The way that I check this based upon a public list of parameters they stub into Systems Manager Parameter Store, there are right now 291 services that they offer. That is well beyond any one person's ability to keep in their head. I can talk incredibly convincingly now about AWS services that don't exist and people who work in AWS on messaging, marketing, engineering, et cetera, will not call me out on it because who can provably say that ‘AWS Strangle Pony' isn't a real service.Tim: I do want to call out the DevOps—shout out I should say, the DevOps term community for AWS Infinidash because that was just so well done, and AWS took that with just the right amount of tongue in cheek, and a wink and a nod and let us have our fun. And that was a good time. It was a great exercise in improv.Corey: That was Joe Nash out of Twilio who just absolutely nailed it with his tweet, “I am convinced that a small and dedicated group of Twitter devs could tweet hot takes about a completely made up AWS product—I don't know AWS Infinidash or something—and it would appear as a requirement on job specs within a week.” And he was right.Tim: [laugh]. Speaking of Twitter, I want to shout out Twitter as a company or whoever does a product management over there for Twitter Spaces. I remember when Twitter Spaces first came out, everyone was dubious of its effect, of it's impact. They were calling it, you know, a Periscope clone or whatever it was, and there was a lot of sneering and snarking at it. But Twitter Spaces has become very, very effective in having good conversations in the group and the community of folks that have just open questions, and then to speak to folks that they probably wouldn't only get to speak to about this questions and get answers, and have really helpful, uplifting and difficult conversations that you wouldn't otherwise really have a medium for. And I'm super, super happy that whoever that product manager was, hats off to you, my friend.Corey: One group you're never going to hear me say a negative word about is AWS support. Also, their training and certification group. I know that are technically different orgs, but it often doesn't feel that way. Their job is basically impossible. They have to teach people—even on the support side, you're still teaching people—how to use all of these different varied services in different ways, and you have to do it in the face of what can only really be described as abuse from a number of folks on Twitter.When someone is having trouble with an AWS service, they can turn into shitheads, I've got to be honest with you. And berating the poor schmuck who has to handle the AWS support Twitter feed, or answer your insulting ticket or whatnot, they are not empowered to actually fix the underlying problem with a service. They are effectively a traffic router to get the message to someone who can, in a format that is understood internally. And I want to be very clear that if you insult people who are in customer service roles and blame them for it, you're just being a jerk.Tim: No, it really is because I'm pretty sure a significant amount of your listeners and people initially started off working in tech support, or customer service, or help desk or something like that, and you really do become the dumping ground for the customers' frustrations because you are the only person they get to talk to. And you have to not only take that, but you have to try and do the emotional labor behind soothing them as well as fixing the actual problem. And it's really, really difficult. I feel like the people who have that in their background are some of the best consultants, some of the best DevRel folks, and the best at talking to people because they're used to being able to get some technical details out of folks who may not be very technical, who may be under emotional distress, and certainly in high stress situations. So yeah, AWS support, really anybody who has support, especially paid support—phone or chat otherwise—hats off again. That is a service that is thankless, it is a service that is almost always underpaid, and is almost always under appreciated.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: I'll take another team that's similar to that respect: Commerce Platform. That is the team that runs all of AWS billing. And you would be surprised that I'm thanking them, but no, it's not the cynical approach of, “Thanks for making it so complicated so I could have a business.” No, I would love it if it were so simple that I had to go find something else to do because the problem was that easy for customers to solve. That is the ideal and I hope, sincerely, that we can get there.But everything that happens in AWS has to be metered and understood as far as who has done what, and charge people appropriately for it. It is also generally invisible; people don't understand anything approaching the scale of that, and what makes it worst of all, is that if suddenly what they were doing broke and customers weren't built for their usage, not a single one of them would complain about it because, “All right, I'll take it.” It's a thankless job that is incredibly key and central to making the cloud work at all, but it's a hard job.Tim: It really is. And is a lot of black magic and voodoo to really try and understand how this thing works. There's no simple way to explain it. I imagine if they were going to give you the index overview of how it works with a 10,000 feet, that alone would be, like, a 300 page document. It is a gigantic moving beast.And it is one of those things where scale will show all the flaws. And no one has scale I think like AWS does. So, the folks that have to work and maintain that are just really, again, they're under appreciated for all that they do. I also think that—you know, you talk about the same thing in other orgs, as we talked about the folks that handle the billing and stuff like that, but you mentioned AWS, and I was thinking the other day how it's really awesome that I've got my AWS driver. I have the same, like, group of three or four folks that do all my deliveries for AWS.And they have been inundated over this past year-and-a-half with more and more and more stuff. And yet, I've still managed—my stuff is always put down nicely on my doorstep. It's never thrown, it's not damaged. I'm not saying it's never been damaged, but it's not damaged, like, maybe FedEx I've [laugh] had or some other delivery services where it's just, kind of, carelessly done. They still maintain efficiency, they maintain professionalism [unintelligible 00:21:45] talking to folks.What they've had to do at their scale and at that the amount of stuff they've had to do for deliveries over this past year-and-a-half has just been incredible. So, I want to extend it also to, like, the folks who are working in the distribution centers. Like, a lot of us here talk about AWS as if that's Amazon, but in essence, it is those folks that are working those more thankless and invisible jobs in the warehouses and fulfillment centers, under really bad conditions sometimes, who's still plug away at it. I'm glad that Amazon is at least saying they're making efforts to improve the conditions there and improve the pay there, things like that, but those folks have enabled a lot of us to work during this pandemic with a lot of conveniences that they themselves would never be able to enjoy.Corey: Yeah. It's bad for society, but I'm glad it exists, obviously. The thing is, I would love it if things showed up a little more slowly if it meant that people could be treated humanely along the process. That said, I don't have any conception of what it takes to run a company with 1.2 million people.I have learned that as you start managing groups and managing managers of groups, it's counterintuitive, but so much of what you do is no longer you doing the actual work. It is solely through influence and delegation. You own all of the responsibility but no direct put-finger-on-problem capability of contributing to the fix. It takes time at that scale, which is why I think one of the dumbest series of questions from, again, another group that deserves a fair bit of credit which is journalists because this stuff is hard, but a naive question I hear a lot is, “Well, okay. It's been 100 days. What has Adam Selipsky slash Andy Jassy changed completely about the company?”It's, yeah, it's a $1.6 trillion company. They are not going to suddenly grab the steering wheel and yank. It's going to take years for shifts that they do to start manifesting in serious ways that are externally visible. That is how big companies work. You don't want to see a complete change in direction from large blue chip companies that run things. Like, again, everyone's production infrastructure. You want it to be predictable, you want it to be boring, and you want shifts to be gradual course corrections, not vast swings.Tim: I mean, Amazon is a company with a population of a medium to medium-large sized city and a market cap of the GDP of several countries. So, it is not a plucky startup; it is not this small little tech company. It is a vast enterprise that's distributed all over the world with a lot of folks doing a lot of different jobs. You cannot, as you said, steer that ship quickly.Corey: I grew up in Maine and Amazon has roughly the same number employees as live in Maine. It is hard to contextualize how all of that works. There are people who work there that even now don't always know who Andy Jassy is. Okay, fine, but I'm not talking about don't know him on site or whatever. I'm saying they do not recognize the name. That's a very big company.Tim: “Andy who?”Corey: Exactly. “Oh, is that the guy that Corey makes fun of all the time?” Like, there we go. That's what I tend to live for.Tim: I thought that was Werner.Corey: It's sort of every one, though I want to be clear, I make it a very key point. I do not make fun of people personally because it—even if they're crap, which I do not believe to be the case in any of the names we've mentioned so far, they have friends and family who love and care about them. You don't want someone to go on the internet and Google their parent's name or something, and then just see people crapping all over. That's got to hurt. Let people be people. And, on some level, when you become the CEO of a company of that scale, you're stepping out of reality and into the pages of legend slash history, at some point. 200 years from now, people will read about you in history books, that's a wild concept.Tim: It is I think you mentioned something important that we would be remiss—especially Duckbill Group—to mention is that we're very thankful for our families, partners, et cetera, for putting up with us, pets, everybody. As part of our jobs, we invite strangers from the internet into our homes virtually to see behind us what is going on, and for those of us that have kids, that involves a lot of patience on their part, a lot of patients on our partners' parts, and other folks that are doing those kind of nurturing roles. You know, our pets who want to play with us are sitting there and not able to. It has not been easy for all of us, even though we're a remote company, but to work under these conditions that we have been over the past year-and-a-half. And I think that goes for a lot of the folks in industry where now all of a sudden, you've been occupying a room in the house or space in the house for some 18-plus months, where before you're always at work or something like that. And that's been a hell of an adjustment. And so we talk about that for us folks that are here pontificating on podcasts, or banging out code, but the adjustments and the things our families have had to go through and do to tolerate us being there cannot be overstated how important that is.Corey: Anyone else that's on your list of people to thank? And this is the problem because you're always going to forget people. I mean, the podcast production crew: the folks that turn our ramblings into a podcast, the editing, the transcription, all of it; the folks that HumblePod are just amazing. The fact that I don't have to worry about any of this stuff as if by magic, means that you're sort of insulated from it. But it's amazing to watch that happen.Tim: You know, honestly, I super want to thank just all the folks that take the time to interact with us. We do this job and Corey shitposts, and I shitpost and we talk, but we really do this and rely on the folks that do take the time to DM us, or tweet us, or mention us in the thread, or reach out in any way to ask us questions, or have a discussion with us on something we said, those folks encourage us, they keep us accountable, and they give us opportunities to learn to be better. And so I'm grateful for that. It would be—this role, this job, the thing we do where we're viewable and seen by the public would be a lot less pleasant if it wasn't for y'all. So, it's too many to name, but I do appreciate you.Corey: Well, thank you, I do my best. I find this stuff to be so boring if you couldn't have fun with it. And so many people can't have fun with it, so it feels like I found a cheat code for making enterprise software solutions interesting. Which even saying that out loud sounds like I'm shitposting. But here we are.Tim: Here we are. And of course, my thanks to you, Corey, for reaching out to me one day and saying, “Hey, what are you doing? Would you want to come interview with us at The Duckbill Group?”Corey: And it was great because, like, “Well, I did leave AWS within the last 18 months, so there might be a non-compete issue.” Like, “Oh, please, I hope so. Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please. I would love to pick that fight publicly.” But sadly, no one is quite foolish enough to take me up on it.Don't worry. That's enough of a sappy episode, I think. I am convinced that our next encounter on this podcast will be our usual aggressive self. But every once in a while it's nice to break the act and express honest and heartfelt appreciation. I'm really looking forward to next week with all of the various announcements that are coming out.I know people have worked extremely hard on them, and I want them to know that despite the fact that I will be making fun of everything that they have done, there's a tremendous amount of respect that goes into it. The fact that I can make fun of the stuff that you've done without any fear that I'm punching down somehow because, you know it is at least above a baseline level of good speaks volumes. There are providers I absolutely do not have that confidence towards them.Tim: [laugh]. Yeah, AWS, as the enterprise level service provider is an easy target for a lot of stuff. The people that work there are not. They do great work. They've got amazing people in all kinds of roles there. And they're often unseen for the stuff they do. So yeah, for all the folks who have contributed to what we're going to partake in at re:Invent—and it's a lot and I understand from having worked there, the pressure that's put on you for this—I'm super stoked about it and I'm grateful.Corey: Same here. If I didn't like this company, I would not have devoted years to making fun of it. Because that requires a diagnosis, not a newsletter, podcast, or shitposting Twitter feed. Tim, thank you so much for, I guess, giving me the impetus and, of course, the amazing name of the show to wind up just saying thank you, which I think is something that we could all stand to do just a little bit more of.Tim: My pleasure, Corey. I'm glad we could run with this. I'm, as always, happy to be on Screaming in the Cloud with you. I think now I get a vest and a sleeve. Is that how that works now?Corey: Exactly. Once you get on five episodes, then you end up getting the dinner jacket, just, like, hosting SNL. Same story. More on that to come in the new year. Thanks, Tim. I appreciate it.Tim: Thank you, Corey.Corey: Tim Banks, principal cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. I am, of course, Corey Quinn, and thank you for listening.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
After a week off due to illness, we're back with a new episode of Bitcoin Magazine's “Fed Watch'' podcast. In this one, Christian Keroles and I sit down to talk about the mysterious competitive world of central banking. Topics include Powell's reappointment and, funnily enough, what it means for the ECB. There is an epic pivot in loyalties happening right now, as the Fed takes to heart its role as the US central bank and distances itself from a responsibility to Europe. 0:00 Welcome to Fed Watch #71 1:30 Comparing US Inflation to the ECB and BOJ 2:55 Tom Luongo the next Fed Watch Guest 3:38 Reappointing Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve Chairman 7:33 Central Banks Adressen Stabl eCoins, Bitcoin And Crypto Assets 12:37 The ECB and Central Bank digital Currencies 13:07 Europe is under Pressure 16:53 Bitcoin can Benefit from The current Situation in the EU 18:28 Speculative Attacks with Bitcoin 22:36 Europe in the weakest Makro Position 23:45 The Current Bitcoin Price Action 28:51 Go Follow: @AnselLindner & @Ck_Snarks We start the episode with our first trivia winner. I wanted people to answer the question, if central bank balance sheets matter, why are the ECB and BOJ's inflation rates lower and balance sheets higher relative to GDP than the US's? Mitch (@wittyusername30) had the best answer. Congratulations. To paraphrase: central banks don't print money, they swap inert reserves for useful collateral. This has a deflationary pressure on the economy. Powell gets renominated as Chairman Powell was renominated by Biden for Fed Chairman, winning out over his competition, Lael Brainard. Several reasons were cited, like Powell's path through Senate confirmation is much easier, while Lael might meet with a split vote along partisan lines in a 50/50 Senate. Also, officials said Powell was being “rewarded” with another term for successfully shepherding the economy through the 2020 Covid recession. I view this appointment as having a deeper meaning. 1) We've talked at length on this show about Powell's refusal to go along with the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) hype. Other central banks are pushing hard for CBDC, and Powell continuously splashes cold water on that idea. This symbolizes a break with globalist interests in favor of American banking interests. 2) Powell has faced rising Progressive opposition from Congress. Crazies, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have attacked him because he is not dovish enough and not buying into the Fed's role in climate policy. His reappointment is a repudiation of sorts against Progressives and their toxic ESG initiatives. 3) Lael is the more globalist-friendly choice. Powell symbolizes a break with globalists to a more America-centric policy. ECB Regulation and Panic Next, we jump right into ECB news. This week they released a new regulatory framework for electronic payments. The Eurosystem will use the new framework to oversee companies enabling or supporting the use of payment cards, credit transfers, direct debits, e-money transfers and digital payment tokens, including electronic wallets. The PISA framework will also cover crypto-asset-related services, such as the acceptance of crypto-assets by merchants within a card payment scheme and the option to send, receive or pay with crypto-assets via an electronic wallet. ECB Press Release This stands in stark contrast to the US, where the White House and Treasury tried to carve out a bitcoin exception in the recent Infrastructure Bill, which ironically was thwarted by altcoiners wanting to protect scams that are Decentralized In Name Only (DINOs). The ECB is scared that the Euro will lose market share in the years to come, whittling away their “monetary sovereignty”. They want to block competition from dollar stablecoins and bitcoin, while at the same time provide the market with a digital Euro. A digital Euro the market hasn't seen fit to provide itself by the way. It was during the peak of EDC1, that bitcoin first established itself and rallied in the bitcoin bubble of 2011 to $30. Could we see a repeat 30x rally this time? Probably not that much, but a massive rally is in the cards in the coming year. Thanks for listening. If you found this episode informational, please share and give us a rating on iTunes so others can find the show! Links Biden Keeps Powell as Fed Chief, Elevates Brainard to Vice Chair https://archive.ph/9j4PA Eurosystem publishes new framework for overseeing electronic payments https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2021/html/ecb.pr211122~381857cdfe.en.html Written by Ansel Lindner Economist, bitcoin specialist, and author of the Bitcoin Dictionary and the free weekly Bitcoin Fundamentals Report. Find more from Ansel at the bitcoinandmarkets.com
The Build Back Better Act took a key step towards becoming law last week, signaling implications for fiscal policy and taxation as the bill heads to the Senate.----- Transcript -----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Head of Public Policy Research and Municipal Strategy for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the intersection between U.S. public policy and financial markets. It's Wednesday, November 24th at 11:00 a.m. in New York. Last week, the Build Back Better Act took a step toward becoming law when the House of Representatives passed the bill along party lines. While the act now still needs to win Senate approval, likely with some substantive changes, there are two lessons that we learned from the House's actions. First, U.S. fiscal policy will continue to be expansionary in the near term. That's based on analysis from the Congressional Budget Office of the Build Back Better plan, adjusted for some key provisions that likely won't survive the Senate. When added to the analysis of the recently enacted Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework, it shows the combined plans could add around $200B to the deficit over 10 years - close to our base case of about $260B. But more importantly, the analysis suggests most of this deficit increase is front loaded, with around $800B of deficits in the first 5 years - toward the high end of the base case range we flagged earlier this year. This is the number we think matters to the economy and markets, as the durability of the policies that will reduce this deficit beyond 5 years is less certain, as elections can lead to future policy changes. And this number also helps drive some key views, namely our economists' call for above average GDP next year and our rates teams' view that bond yields will continue to move higher. Our second lesson is that the corporate minimum tax looks like it has legs. The provision, also called the Book Profits Tax, survived the house process largely unscathed. While Senate modifications are to be expected, we expect the provision will be enacted. That means investors will have to get smart on the sectoral impacts of this new, somewhat complex, corporate tax. Our base case is that this won't be a game changer for markets. Our equity strategy team calculates a 4% hit to S&P 500 earnings before accounting for any economic growth. And while some sectors, like financials, appear most likely to have a higher tax bill, our banks analyst team expects most of this new expense can be offset by tax credits. Still, this new tax is tricky and untested, so fresh risks can emerge as the bill goes through edits in the Senate. So, we'll be tracking it carefully into year end. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show.
Here's what is happening in the markets today, Wednesday, November 24th:- Futures lower ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.- US Department of Energy said it will tap 50 million barrels of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve alongside several other countries and Crude Oil rallies.- Weekly Jobless Claims at 199,000 lowest for the year and lowest level since 1969.- Second-quarter GDP growth up slightly to 2.1%, but below estimates for 2.2%.- Gap (GPS) down 20% pre-market after an earnings miss and cutting its full-year forecast.- Nordstrom (JWN) Nordstrom plummeted 25% premarket after an earnings miss.- Deere (DE) up 3.0%+ after an earnings beat.- Dollar Tree (DLTR) now the Buck and a Quarter Tree. Yesterday Dollar Tree said prices on the majority of its products will climb to $1.25 from $1 by the first quarter of next year. - Tesla (TSLA) regulatory filings show that Elon Musk has unloaded 9.2 million shares worth $9.9 billion.If you enjoyed the "Stock Market Today" episode, make sure to subscribe to this podcast. And for more stock market news, visit https://rockwelltrading.com.#todaysstockmarket #stockmarkettoday #stockmarket
In this episode of The 5G Factor, part of the Futurum Tech Webcast family of content, I'm joined by my colleague and fellow analyst, Ron Westfall for our weekly look at what's happening the world of 5G. Our conversation today explored the following: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill is good news for efforts to bridge the digital divide. Passage of the bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and the good news that brings for expanding broadband and 5G connectivity across the nation, closing the digital divide and allocating millions to a variety of different initiatives, as well as $100 million to each of the states. Data from the GSMA report: 2021 The Mobile Economy North America including the fact that in North America, $1 trillion of mobile technologies and services generated 4.4% of GDP in North America in 2020, which is a contribution equivalent to $1 trillion of economic value added. Wonder why we focus so much on 5G — these numbers are only going up! Ron broke down growth we can expect ahead, content strategies for CSPs and partnerships we're seeing, along with some info on private networks, which we've covered here frequently Qualcomm had an impressive Investor Day 2021 event this last week and we wrapped the show talking about some of Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon's vision, the diversification strategies the company has and is embracing, and how that's paying off and will continue to do so for the technology giant now and in the future.
欢迎收听雪球和喜马拉雅联合出品的财经有深度，雪球，国内领先的集投资交流交易一体的综合财富管理平台，聪明的投资者都在这里。听众朋友们大家好，我是主播匪石-34，今天分享的内容名字叫做2022年的投资主线，来自似水年华。每到年底，卖方都会做一个第二年的投资策略，虽然十测九不准。对于我等小散来说，虽然没必要写长篇大论的策略报告，但是，大致方向还是需要预判下的。如何看待明年的行情？对于明年的行情展望，其实可以说，今年很难，明年更难。因为，不管是从宏观层面，还是从政策层面，或是从中观层面来看，明年的投资难度，都要远远大于今年。基本面：向下从宏观层面来看，明年的基本面无疑是向下的，不确定的只是滞胀与衰退的区别。今年三季度的GDP增速，已经跌破5%了，四季度可能更低，明年全年的GDP增速，大概率是5%左右，即使不到5%，也不用奇怪，这是转型期需要付出的代价。过去几十年，中国经济高速增长，主要靠投资驱动，即基建与地产，但现在这条路已经走到尽头，最近几年，三驾马车中，下滑最厉害的就是投资了。与此同时，WTO的红利，中国早就享受完了，出口对GDP的贡献也越来越小，去年和今年，中国享受的福利，明年全球疫情结束后，基本也没有了。至于消费，六个钱包大家都懂得。所以，明年的GDP增速，掉到5%左右，基本没有悬念。从投资与出口驱动，向消费与创新驱动转型，是中国经济转型的必由之路，但消费只能起托底作用，GDP蛋糕的做大，最终要靠科技创新。然后，科技创新哪有这么容易，经济结构从地产与基建为支柱，转向数字经济与绿色经济为支柱，都是需要很长时间的，没有十年八年是不可能完成的。GDP增速，从过去的两位数，不断破八破七，再破六破五，都是必须付出的代价。几个月前时，我曾经多次说过，不管是中美，还是全球，要解决经济滞胀或衰退的问题，还有宏观债务率过高的问题，都只能靠新一轮科技大革命来解决。一方面，明年的经济增速会明显下滑；另一方面，消费需求不足，通胀压力不断上升，如果不是今年猪价大跌的话，早就是全面滞胀了。而随着油价与电价的大涨，加上明年猪价也会反转，明年的CPI基本可以确定，会大大高于今年。对于明年的中国经济而言，只有滞胀与衰退两个选项。要想避免滞胀，就需要阶段性降低双碳约束与能耗双控，否则明年就是全面滞胀。不仅是中国，明年的全球经济也是如此，不是滞胀就是衰退。9月中旬后，在发哥的强力干预下，上游资源与原材料价格的过快上涨势头，基本得到了遏制，10月PPI大概率成为峰值。因此，对于明年的基本面，哥更倾向于先滞胀后衰退，算是一种中性结果吧。政策面：中性不管是货币政策，还是财政政策，明年都将是中性。首先，从财政政策来看，过去两年，因为疫情的影响，财政政策是十分积极的，但明年随着疫情的过去，财政政策也该回归常态化了。何况该减的税基本也减了，没啥继续减税的空间了；而且，卖地收入的锐减，也导致政府财政支出的刺激，有心无力。其次，从货币政策来看，去年的货币积极无疑是积极的，今年的货币政策无疑是紧缩的，而明年的货币政策也将回归中性，到时我们可能会看到，货币政策时松时紧，央妈会根据就业数据的变化，时不时的进行微调。只要就业数据好，即使其它经济数据都不行，央妈也不会放水刺激；一旦就业数据出问题，即使其它经济数据再好，央妈也会放水刺激。不仅中国如此，美帝同样如此，宏观调控锚定的最重要的指标是就业数据。所以，不要因为最近地产调控政策微调了，就对明年的货币政策有过高预期。因为就业数据的扰动，明年货币政策时松时紧，可能会是一种常态，但总体上是中性。A股是典型的政策市，货币政策对股市的影响最为直接。既然明年的货币政策是中性，那么大盘就既不会很好，比不上19年与20年，但也不会太差，不会像18年那样差，加上现在我的宏观调控的能力，与国家队的操盘手法，都有了很大提高。因此，明年大盘的总体走势，好的话，继续走结构性慢牛，差的话，走结构性小熊市。中观层面：景气行业将大大减少从中观层面来看，明年的景气行业，将大大少于今年。因为今年GDP增速很高，所以，今年的景气行业是非常多的，特别是上游的周期性行业，今年都非常景气，还有新能源、芯片、军工与创新药等好赛道，景气度也非常高。但是，明年随着宏观经济增速的大幅放慢，景气行业也将大幅减少。一方面，今年高度景气的上游周期性行业，明年都将景气不在，能维持不负增长就相当不错了。另一方面，随着基数的大幅提高，今年高度景气的新能源，明年的增速也将大幅放缓，而芯片行业，随着供求矛盾的缓解，明年的景气度也会明显下降。虽然，明年会有一些新的行业走出来，它们的基本面会反转，但因为整个宏观经济景气度大幅下降，因此，明年的景气行业，会大大少于今年，当景气行业较少时，交易的难度，也会明显提升。明年如何做交易？回到交易上，明年的交易难度，将会明显大于今年，所以，需要做一定的风控，杠杆之类的能不用就不用或少用，仓位最好适当控制下。另外，对于目前市场热捧的景气赛道，新能源、芯片、军工与创新药之类的，降低关注度，特别是对于新能源，明年需要降低预期，不会再是市场主线。这些热门赛道，不是不能玩，也不是没有机会，但是都没有了β，板块整体不再有大机会，更多的是个股行情，像新能源里面的储能、智能汽车、光伏屋顶等，芯片里面的IGBT、设备材料等，军工里面的大飞机，消费里面的电子烟，医药股里面的医美，等等，依然还会走出一些大牛股。只不过，当一个板块的大风走了之后，没有了β只有α时，交易的难度，将提高N倍，大量的股票，都将面临估值的收缩，部分股票将面临双杀。举一个很典型的例子，19年的芯片龙头韦尔股份，去年与今年业绩非常牛逼，每年都是翻倍以上的增长，但为何股价没啥表现？原因很简单，就是因为芯片的大风过去了，市场无法再给高估值了，明年的新能源也将如此，能继续维持高估值的标的，将只是极少数。所以，对于这些热门赛道品种的交易，需要大波段操作，抱着不动，很难再有明显的超额收益。对于明年的交易，我们需要去寻找新的β品种，能够实现估值与业绩双击的品种，这样的品种，才会有大机会，也才会成为市场关注的焦点。像猪股、必需消费、机场旅游酒店等，明年也会有些机会，特别是猪股，也将是一个不错的周期反转机会，但力度是无法与19年相提并论的。
週一天下零時差關注以下三件本週財經大事： 一、行政院主計總處本週將發布第四季與明年經濟成長預測，今年台灣的內需雖疲軟，但在強勁的出口帶動下，經濟成長有望創下10年新高。 二、全球通膨持續延燒，雖然疫情造成的供應鏈瓶頸、運價高漲的短期因素消失後，通膨就有望回落，但長期而言，能源轉型與減碳所引發的「綠色通膨」，可能將揮之不去。 三、美國商務部長亞洲行表示將在印太地區建立新「經濟架構」，透露初美國可能要在亞洲經貿整合上，另起爐灶，和中國競爭影響力。 文：鄧凱元、辜樹仁 ＊訂閱天下全閱讀：https://reurl.cc/g7g0EN ＊意見信箱：bill@cw.com.tw ＊「聽天下」清楚分類更好聽，下載天下雜誌App：https://topic.cw.com.tw/cwapp/applink/cwapp.html
A document leak showing how the Kabila family and associates looted public money in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A doctor in Khartoum tells us about the human cost of the protests in Sudan. The Finance minister of Djibouti worries his country's GDP might freefall unless security in Ethiopia improves. The Mali government is on a mission to stop informal gold mining. And Eskom, the South African power company says it's discovered evidence of sabotage on its network.
Jason Hickel joins PTO to talk about his book, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. In part one of the interview we discussed the comprehensive and all-encompassing character of the ecological crisis which extends well beyond the issue of CO2 emissions. We also talked about the violent emergence of capitalism, and how that process entailed the radical transformation of human subjectivity and how humans relate to the natural world. Finally, we talked about the emergence of GDP as an indicator of societal progress and well being.
Chris - You have a book coming out titled The CISO Evolution - Business Knowledge for Cybersecurity Executives. How critical do you think it is for CISO's to understand the business, and how do they balance their technical skills with business acumen?Nikki - I see you've posted several videos on LinkedIn - my favorite so far is the "paralysis-by-analysis" concept. We've discussed before cognitive limitations and just how much data we could actually put into our decision making when it comes to risk. Where do you think the sweet spot is with amount of data vs quality of data?Chris - You and I participated in the Qualified Technical Expert course from Bob Zukis together. Do you think we will see boards required to obtain QTE's and why do you think boards lack technical fluency now, when so much of GDP and business is tied to technology?Nikki - You spoke at the SANS Cybersecurity Leadership Summit on Translating cyber risk into business risk. What would you say are the biggest takeaways for practitioners to be able to explain and express risk properly to improve security and hopefully, lower risk across the organization?Chris - Do you think Cybersecurity is a business enabler? If so, how do we as cyber professionals help the business view Cybersecurity as an enabler and protecting of revenue?Chris - Do you have any recommendations for Cybersecurity professionals looking to transition into a CISO role in the future? Any key business books or resources to familiarize themselves with?What Does Cyber Resilient mean to you?
How do we encourage economic growth and progress across the country? The United States was once revered as one of the most successful economies in the world—but today, it struggles to generate the job opportunities and market stability necessary for its citizens to ensure their quality of life. This is the question that Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson explore in their book, entitled Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream. In this episode, Alexander McCaig sits down with Jonathan Gruber to have a meaningful dialogue on what the government's missing out on by decreasing funding in research and development. The Effect of RnD on the US Economy According to Jonathan Gruber, public investment in research and development played a pivotal role in the economic progress of the United States. All the technological advancements we have the privilege of experiencing today—such as our smartphones and laptops—were, in part, fueled by the amount of funding that was poured into the pursuit of science. However, the level of public investment decreased drastically, from about two percent of GDP in 1962 to just under half of that today. In his book, Jonathan Gruber explains that the nation's renewed support in science and technology would play a significant part in generating economic growth. This is especially important in an era where plenty of citizens are facing job instability, outright unemployment, and health concerns brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Ushering in a new era for research and development would not just benefit certain industries. Jonathan Gruber posits further that aside from overall growth, it would create better jobs across the economy. This would naturally occur as the market adjusts to accommodate an influx of tech professionals across the country, because they would need these goods and services to support their work as well as their quality of life. Decentralizing Opportunities for Innovation While the US does have certain cities where tech-based growth is made possible, they are not enough to power the economy. In fact, concentrating opportunities in “superstar” cities such as San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and the Silicon Valley can be counterproductive. This is because the demand for professionals will incentivize people to relocate from one city to another. As a result, these cities experienced increased congestion and housing prices—and those who do not have the experience necessary to become a valuable asset to the area will be forced to leave. At this point, Jonathan Gruber emphasizes the importance of government involvement in encouraging basic research. Setting aside funding for research and development that is carried out in other areas would help incentivize private investors, or venture capitalists, to take that risk as well. Will Robots Take Over Our Jobs? One salient point of discussion in the episode was when Alexander McCaig asked Jonathan Gruber about the impact of robotics on the future of work. Alexander pointed out that there may be some routine jobs that may phase out completely because they would be delegated to robots, who would be more efficient at performing such activities. Jonathan Gruber believes that the outlook for robotics is optimistic, and that people should focus on the capabilities that can be developed when there is enough funding for the country to get a leg up on the tech race. Being able to scout the future of artificial intelligence and machine learning would give researchers a head start on the careers that it would affect, in both a positive and negative manner. “The bottom line is, you can wring your hands about the fact that some low-level jobs are going to be taken by robots, or you can get to work making the robots,” Jonathan Gruber explained. To illustrate his perspective, Jonathan Gruber explained how the invention of the wheel raised concerns about the viability of horse-drawn carriages back in the day. Fast forward to modern times, it is clear that refining the wheel has led to a plethora of different jobs across transportation, engineering, and construction as people and cities work to make their locations friendlier to vehicles. Planning ahead for new job roles could help the labor market adjust and accommodate accordingly. Closing Thoughts: Taking the First Step Forward When asked about his parting words, Jonathan Gruber encourages people to take an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. People living in communities tend to go for an incredibly narrow or vague focus, but what they need is an actionable plan that can be carried out step by step. When people have a concrete and tangible action to look back on, they have a source of inspiration that pushes them forward—even if they do not secure the funding needed to make it happen just yet. The future is bright and full of possibilities. It's time to take the pivot back towards science, technology, and data. What's your data worth? www.tartle.co Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe. The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby. What's your data worth? Find out at: https://tartle.co/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TARTLE Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARTLEofficial Spread the word!
What's the future of the Louisiana worker? What a loaded question. Sometimes we get so caught up asking about the future that we forget that it's already here. Chew on this: in 2020, mining for oil & gas accounted for around 1% of Louisiana's GDP. That's down from around 10% a decade ago. Louisiana has been in a pivot for a long time. And while we often talk about this change in terms of economic output, the real question is what happens to our workforce? Don't count out innovation and manufacturing. Missy Rogers and her husband Scott founded Noble Plastics, which manufactures all kinds of custom, plastic molded products for a range of industries. Visit their facility in Grand Coteau and you'll find robots whirring and a few dozen highly specialized employees. Noble's edge is taking both design and manufacturing in-house. They don't just make things, they make the things that make things. A part of the company's line is designing robotic machines and processes for other manufacturers. Here's a blue ocean strategy for Louisiana: digital wallets. Louisiana is a pioneer in allowing residents to digitize their IDs and drivers licenses. Today, more than 1 million people use LA Digital Wallet, and during the pandemic around half a million people opted into a feature that allows you to digitize your vaccine card. Calvin Fabre is the man behind that innovation with his company Envoc. Digital credentialing is a pretty big space. Outside of state IDs, Envoc has developed a line of commercial verification and logistics apps for cargo shipping, inspection services and grading bubble sheet tests. LA Wallet itself is a growing service, and Calvin is actively pursuing Louisiana grads to staff it up. Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded over lunch at Tula Tacos and Amigos in downtown Lafayette. You can see photos from this show by Astor Morgan at our website. Check out Calvin Fabre's last visit to Out to Lunch here when he was just launching LA Wallet. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Trisha's guest this week is Scott Burgess, as part of the healthcare innovator series. His practice focuses on helping ourselves stay healthy rather than use the healthcare system. I encourage you to listen to what he has to say and consider it without judgment or figuring out how you might be able to make dramatic lifestyle changes right away. In 30 days, perhaps you can listen again and see what speaks to you. Maybe try one new thing for a while, see how it works, and then listen again. If nothing speaks to you, the benefit of this medium is that you can simply turn it off. I think we can all agree that change needs to occur in our expensive healthcare system in the U.S. that is not producing any better patient outcomes. Clinicians are burning out, and costs are becoming close to 20% of GDP and unsustainable. The answer to the question is not clear. We can listen to how some people are making changes and see if what they have to say speaks to us. This is part 2 of a 2-part episode with Scott. In this episode, we talk about… [2:49] Justification and reasoning behind health choices and decisions [4:21] End of life care [7:16] Your body is smarter than you [9:41] Taking control of wellness [19:06] Illness prevention [24:05] How to connect with and learn more from Scott Links to resources: Scott Burgess www.scotteburgess.com Subscribe, rate and review: www.providerspropertiesandperformance.com Schedule a healthcare real estate investment strategy consultation: https://docproperties.com/free-consultation-trisha-talbot/ About Trisha: WEBSITE: www.docproperties.com LINKED IN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trishatalbot/ Email inquiries to: info@docproperties.com
วิเคราะห์สถานการณ์ เมื่อกรมธรรม์โควิด เจอ จ่าย (ไม่) จบ บริษัทประกันหลายแห่งเริ่มไปต่อไม่ไหว รวมถึงหุ้นกลุ่มประกันภัยที่กระทบหนัก นักวิเคราะห์มองอย่างไร ไฟเขียวตั้งยานแม่ SCBX ผู้ถือหุ้นไทยพาณิชย์อนุมัติปรับโครงสร้างธุรกิจ และโครงสร้างการถือหุ้น เล็งจ่ายปันผลเดือนสิงหาคม 2565 ตั้งเป้าลดรายได้ธุรกิจธนาคารเหลือ 60% ในอนาคต รายละเอียดเป็นอย่างไร ประเมินเศรษฐกิจไทยผ่านตัวเลข GDP ไตรมาส 3 จากสภาพัฒน์ แนวโน้มเป็นอย่างไร ปัจจัยใดต้องจับตา พูดคุยกับ นริศ สถาผลเดชา หัวหน้าเจ้าหน้าที่บริหาร ศูนย์วิเคราะห์เศรษฐกิจทีทีบี (ttb analytics)
Photo: No known restrictions on publication. CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor CBS Audio Network @Batchelorshow 2/2: The calculable GDP value of water, electricity and liberty.Tim Kaine @HooverInst https://www.hoover.org/research/beyond-gdp-looking-deeper-prosperity-progress-and-nature-value
Photo: No known restrictions on publication. CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor CBS Audio Network @Batchelorshow 1/2: The calculable GDP value of water, electricity and liberty. Tim Kaine @HooverInst https://www.hoover.org/research/beyond-gdp-looking-deeper-prosperity-progress-and-nature-value
１１月1６日(火)ニュース ▼7～9月期のGDP発表 ▼米中首脳オンライン会談 ▼岸田総理 「核兵器のない世界」への決意を示す ▼第2宇宙作戦隊 ▼COP26 閉幕 コメンテーターは 地政学・戦略学者 奥山真司さん See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Coming out of a year marked by greater uncertainty and volatility, 2022 is poised to be a year which favors single stock investing over a focus on style and sector.----- Transcript -----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and Chief U.S. Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the latest trends in the financial marketplace. It's Monday, November 15th at 11:30 a.m. in New York. So let's get after it. 2021 has been another very good year for U.S. equity indices. What's been different in 2021 is the higher volatility under the surface with greater dispersion of returns between individual stocks. This fits very nicely with our overall mid-cycle transition narrative, with one major exception - valuations. Typically, by this stage of an economic recovery from recession equity valuations would have normalized, particularly with the earnings recovery being even more dramatic than usual. In short, while our sector and style preferences in stock picking was strong in 2021, our S&P 500 price target proved to be too low - in other words, wrong. We think this is more about timing rather than an outright rejection of our fundamental framework or narrative. With financial conditions now tightening and earnings growth slowing, the 12-month risk/reward for the broad indices looks unattractive at current prices. More specifically, we expect solid earnings growth again in 2022 offset by lower valuations. However, strong nominal GDP growth should continue to provide plenty of good investment opportunities at the stock level. In our view, the economic and political environment has been permanently altered from its pre-COVID days, although the changes are not necessarily due to the pandemic itself. What that means from an investment standpoint is higher nominal GDP growth led by higher inflation, which is the only way out from our over indebtedness in the longer term. Such an outcome should lead to greater investment and higher productivity, but it will take years for that to play out. In the meantime, we will have to deal with the excesses created by the extreme nature of this recession and recovery. That breeds higher uncertainty and dispersion, making stock picking more important than ever in the year ahead. While our primary theme for 2022 is to focus more on stocks than sectors and styles, one can't ignore them either. We go into the year-end favoring earnings stability and stocks with undemanding valuations, given our view for a tougher operating environment and higher long term interest rates. This puts us overweight Healthcare, Real Estate, Financials and reasonably priced Software stocks. We are also more constructive on Consumer and Business Services. With our expectation for payback in demand from this year's overconsumption, we are underweight Consumer Discretionary Goods, Tech Hardware and commodity-oriented Semiconductors that are prone to double ordering and cancelations. Small cap stocks have done better recently on the back of newly proposed tax legislation that is much less onerous to smaller domestic companies. However, that is simply the removal of a negative rather than an additional positive for earnings and cash flow. It does nothing to ease the burden of what may be one of the most difficult operating environments for small businesses in decades. In short, we favor large caps over small, especially after the nice seasonal run in a smaller cohort. Finally, the obsession over value versus growth should fade as there is no clear winner, in our view, over the next year, but rather trading opportunities like during 2021. Value and growth have each had periods during which they have done considerably better than the other over the past year. But year-to-date they are neck and neck. We do have a slight bias for value over growth for the rest of the year as interest rates move higher, but this is more of a trading position rather than an aggressive investment view we had coming out of the recession in 2020. Expect our bias to flip flop in 2022 like this year, as macro uncertainty reigns. Although strategy is a macro endeavor, with stock dispersion remaining high due to uncertainty around inflation, supply chains and policy, we will focus even more on specific relative value ideas, rather than the index, over the next year. We wish you all good fortune in 2022. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.
■7-9月GDP■豪・国防大臣、台湾有事で米支援を明言 報道■立憲民主党代表選 ◎ご意見・ご感想は iidatdn@gmail.com まで。◎番組内の発言は個人の見解であり、所属する組織の公式見解ではありません。
A week ago, SBI's Research department released a report stating that India's informal economy has shrunk to 20% of its GDP. And since there's been a lot of debate about this number, we thought we'd unpack it a bit in today's episode.
The Bharatvaarta Weekly is our reaction to the news headlines of the week that was. This week we spoke about the Norovirus making rounds in Kerala, the Padma and Khel Ratna awards, India's IPO rush. We also discussed the protests in Maharashtra, the ambush in Manipur, and the revised GDP forecast. If you liked this episode, then don't forget to subscribe to our channel and share this content. You can stay updated with everything at Bharatvaarta by following us on social media: we're @bharatvaarta on Twitter, facebook.com/bharatvaarta.in on Facebook, and @bharatvaarta on Instagram).
It is no longer enough for governments to measure GDP, they should finally use knowledge of sociology and psychology to figure out how to measure the quality of life. And part of these metrics should be about the value of experiencing rather than possessing things. Together with James Wallman, the author of “Stuffocation” and “Time and how to spend it”, and a co-founder of the World Experience Organization, we dig into the topic of how to measure experiences, and how to use these metrics to provoke organizations around the world to be more experiential. We wonder if it's possible to create an equivalent of a B-Corp certification and certification for experience and how it should differ with respect to the final solutions and culture. We also wonder how to capture the subjective assessment of experiences and turn it into a reliable guideline. And we dive into the meaning of boredom, the rabbit hole of creative work, and the idea of trying out our different selves.LINKSWXO websiteB-Corp websiteSelf-determination theory“Stuffocation” by James Wallman“Time and how to spend it” by James Wallman“Rest” by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang“Shorter” by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang“On Writing” by Stephen King“Time traveler's guide to medieval England” by Ian Mortimer“The wire” by David Simon and Rafael Alvarez“Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets” by David Simon“The science of storytelling” by Will Storr“What a dog saw” by Malcolm Gladwell
欢迎收听雪球和喜马拉雅联合出品的财经有深度，雪球，国内领先的集投资交流交易一体的综合财富管理平台，聪明的投资者都在这里。听众朋友们大家好，我是主播匪石-34，今天分享的稿件名字叫做谈谈消费不振，来自ice_招行谷子地。今年股市的表现一直比较低迷，其中一个重要的原因就是我国的经济数据一直不尽如人意。虽然GDP的增速还不错，不过社会消费数据总是不理想，结合最近几个月PMI数据的下滑，中国经济已经出现了令人担忧的趋势。当前当务之急是激发整个社会的消费需求。但是，想要激发消费需求谈何容易。想要激发消费需求首先要弄清楚当前社会的消费需求为何萎靡不振。从我个人的观察，目前国内消费需求不振有几方面的因素引发：一，疫情因素虽然我国的疫情相对于海外的情况绝对是非常非常轻的，但由于我国采取了局部清零的防疫措施，所以对居民的消费意愿，特别是餐饮，娱乐类的服务消费意愿造成较大压制。零星散发的疫情立刻小区封闭，集中核酸，娱乐场所停止营业，动辄离开本地就要核酸检测，甚至被滞留在旅游区。这些都会降低消费者的消费意愿，减少可选择性消费的支出。去年的时候还有人寄希望于疫情结束后的报复性消费，但是随着疫情防控的常态化，报复性消费的可能性越来越小。疫情到现在快2年了，我家外出旅游就只有暑假去了成都4天，飞机落地当天成都就出现疫情，我们一家三口在成都玩的提心吊胆，生怕健康码变色，好不容易回了北京，结果回来就被社区通知去做了2次核酸。以前，我家每年至少一次海外，一次国内旅游，一年旅游开支8-10万，这两年只有一次京郊游，一次国内游，开支只剩下零头了。除了心理上的影响，疫情确实直接影响到了部分服务行业从业者的收入，包括：旅游，交运，教育，餐饮等。这部分人的收入出现断崖式下跌，甚至出现部分人失业的情况。二，避险因素疫情只是推倒的第一张多米诺骨牌，随着疫情的常态化，服务行业恢复缓慢。整个经济体中的潜在风险增加，人们对经济的预期开始降低，消费者信心开始下降，避险性需求开始增加。在经济向好的时候，人们不担心失业，所以消费往往具有超前倾向。但是，当经济的复苏出现反复，人们开始担心失业，为了应对潜在的风险，人们开始降低非必要消费，增加风险备付金，包括：存款和理财。东亚儒家文化圈里，未雨绸缪，量入为出的思想属于主流。所以，当居民感觉失业风险增加后，储蓄和购买理财的意愿比欧美国家的居民更强烈。这对不同行业的影响不尽相同，对于奢侈品消费，餐饮，旅游，保险等相关行业构成负面影响，但对理财业务构成显著利好。三，房屋交易受抑制今年随着涉房信贷的收紧，新房和二手房在多个一二线城市都出现了一定的下滑，随之而来的是装修相关的建材，家具，家装，家电等子行业消费量的下降，这种现象在第三季度尤为明显。四，财富效应财富效应是指由于资产价格上涨，导致资产持有人财富的增长，进而促进消费增长，影响短期边际消费倾向，促进经济增长的效应。 通俗地说当一个人的财产大部分以资产的形式存在，比如：股票。当股价上涨时，会让人觉得自己变富有了。那么，TA在消费的时候就会倾向于提升消费水平或消费量，以前舍不得买的东西舍得消费了。而这种消费的增长又反过来促进了上市公司的收入和利润的上涨，利润的提升正反馈到股价的上涨。上面是正向财富效应，与之对应的还有反向财富效应。最典型的例子就是日本金融地产泡沫破灭后，股价跌房价跌，人们的资产缩水，为了修复个人资产负债表，人们缩减开支，造成整个社会需求不振，企业经营困难甚至破产，更多人失业或降薪，最终成为恶性循环。中国目前已经出现了一些反向财富效应的苗头，今年以来全国房价稳中有降，股市持续低迷，财富缩水造成资产持有者产生变穷的感觉，进而抑制消费需求。上面分析了消费需求不振的几个原因，理论上只要上述因素被消除，那么消费需求就能恢复。但是，很遗憾这里面并不是所有因素都能被消除，或者能被马上消除。上述4个因素中不可控的是疫情因素和避险因素，疫情很难在短期内完全消除，国人的文化传统也不是一朝一夕可以改变的。房地产交易受抑制的问题，国家已经开始意识到房地产交易对于拉动消费的作用。所以近期国家已开始引导银行支持年轻人的刚需购房信贷需求。最后关于财富效应的因素，指望国家放弃对房价的管控是完全不可能的。虽然房价的财富效应短期很难恢复，但股市方面是可以适当利用财富效应的效果。通过拉动股市上涨带来的财富效应，释放潜在消费需求，现在是政府可以考虑尝试的方法。
In this episode of Bitcoin Magazine's “Fed Watch'' podcast, Christian Keroles and I sat down to give an update on Fed news and central bank activity around the world. Topics in this episode include, people at the Federal Reserve and their positions, the Fed Stability Report, Treasury curve update and inversions, the inflation narrative, ECB and BoJ updates, and of course, bitcoin. Bitcoin Day Kansas City First, Christian and I debriefed the recent Bitcoin Day event in Kansas City where I spoke about the end of the dollar system as we know it. It was a great event, with another one coming up in Sacramento early next year. I might try getting one down in Jacksonville next year as well, so be watching out for that. Fed News Next, we jump right into Fed news, starting with the resignation of Quarles. This was kind of a surprise since he had over 10 years left in his term. He has recently faced some backlash from progressive members of Congress, along with Powell, as slightly more hawkish members of the Fed who ignore MMT (modern monetary theory) nut-jobs. This resignation has a chess move aspect to it. Brainard, who has recently been threatening to take Powell's job as Chairman, was first favored for Quarles' position as Head of Supervision. With him gone, Brainard now has an easy path to simply fill that role, leaving Powell basically uncontested for the Chairman reappointment. These moves might seem insignificant to those who are unaware of the shifting tide within the central bank elite. Most central bankers around the world are looking to MMT and CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) as a way to break out of the debt trap and deflationary environment which the world finds itself in. Powell has the most important central bank job in the world. He has been standing in the way of that dangerous agenda. In a similar fashion to a geopolitical realignment, from NATO to AUKUS, Powell appears to represent the same division, from global concerns to national, within the central bank elites. Fed Stability Report This week the Federal Reserve published their biannual Stability Report. This report is meant to increase transparency of the Fed, to show the public what they are paying attention to, and what could possibly affect their monetary policy going forward. The main highlights from the report is the Fed's warning about a rising risk to risk assets. Of course, the mainstream financial press is going to hop on that with their usual gusto. Another interest warning from the report was about Evergrande and the rising risk of contagion out of China. We've been way ahead on this, talking about this very situation for months now. We all know the horrible shape that the Chinese economy is in, and that is slowly working its way into the mainstream investor consciousness. My prediction, based on the fact that this report came at basically the same time as the taper announcement, is that the Fed is setting up a scapegoat for when they have to eventually halt or reverse course on the taper. They will blame their “policy error” on China and the sheer power of their monetary policy. It's comical. Their monetary policy literally does nothing, else we'd have no problems to worry about. US Yield Curve Next we talk about yield curves. We aren't experts on the bond market, but we know that the bond market is much smarter than we are, and much smarter than the Fed. I highlight that the 20-year and 30-year yields are still inverted, along with the 5-year and 10-year breakevens. The latter being the most inverted in history! This should tell us that all is not well with this recent market action. Inflation expectations in the future are mixed, signaling a severe retracement in the “recovery” and the CPI. The inflation narrative is going rabid. It's gotten to the point where people are making fun of the transitory stance despite all signs to the contrary. It's as if the critics haven't looked at a chart recently. But nevermind, the inflation narrative is a huge bonus for bitcoin in the eyes of investors, while at the same time, the deflationary low growth fundamentals are also great for bitcoin. CPI comes out today, which we predict will be higher than last month (but still in a slowing trend) and cause even more rabid inflation propaganda benefiting bitcoin. Global Central Bank Update By comparison, there is little news from Europe and the ECB, or Japan and the BoJ. First for the ECB; it seems as though the ECB is a few months behind the Fed and is still driving home the transitory nature of this recent CPI spike. Mind you, their headline CPI was only 3% in September, where the US's was 5%. The Bank of Japan has even less news to report on. They are stuck with very low inflation. Their headline number is 0.2%, and less food and energy is -0.5%. This is despite promising and actually being irresponsible in the QE and spending department. The BoJ is failing so badly in getting inflation, they have to come out weekly and reaffirm their dedication to being irresponsible and attempting to hit their 2% target. Next, I asked the audience to answer a question for this episode on twitter. You have to quote the Bitcoin Magazine tweet for the episode and tag me. “If the US is exporting inflation, why are the ECB and BOJ's inflation rates so much lower than the US's, especially when they have “printed” more money relative to GDP?” Why is the relationship actually inverse? The more a central bank seems to expand their balance sheet, the lower the inflation, even then the US is supposedly exporting inflation with the highest trade deficit ever. The best answer wins a copy of the Bitcoin Dictionary. We wrap up the show by discussing bitcoin in the context of what we are seeing out there in macro. How bitcoin is a source of growth for all who adopt it. We touch on many important topics in this last minute rip, like velocity of money, bitcoin vs traditional interest rates, surging energy prices, ESG shooting itself in the foot, and layer two fee dynamics with the base layer. Thanks for listening. If you found this episode informational, please share and give us a rating on iTunes so others can find the show! --------------------------------------------- Bitcoin Magazine is back in print! Get Bitcoin Magazine shipped directly to your front door! Get 21% off with promo code: MAG21 https://store.bitcoinmagazine.com/discount/MAG21?redirect=%2Fproducts%2Fbitcoin-magazine-annual-subscription "The Deep Dive" delivers the latest Bitcoin on-chain market intelligence directly to your inbox! Check it out for free here! deepdivebtc.substack.com/welcome Bitcoin 2022 will be the biggest Bitcoin conference ever! Miami, FL from April 6–9, 2022 Get 15% off tickets with promo code: MAG21 https://b.tc/conference/
Grizz Den Podcast - A Weekly Podcast On The Memphis Grizzlies
We welcome Locked On Grizzlies' Shawn Coleman (@StatsSAC) to the GDP to discuss his observations through ten games. We cover the overtime victory against the Timberwolves, Ja Morant's trajectory, Jaren's volatility, defensive struggles, rotation questions, November predictions, and more! grizzden.com IG: @grizz_den Twitter: @grizzden Locked On Grizzlies: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/locked-on-grizzlies-daily-podcast-on-the-memphis-grizzlies/id1159426874
About Micheal Micheal Benedict leads Engineering Productivity at Pinterest. He and his team focus on developer experience, building tools and platforms for over a thousand engineers to effectively code, build, deploy and operate workloads on the cloud. Mr. Benedict has also built Infrastructure and Cloud Governance programs at Pinterest and previously, at Twitter -- focussed on managing cloud vendor relationships, infrastructure budget management, cloud migration, capacity forecasting and planning and cloud cost attribution (chargeback). Links: Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com Teletraan: https://github.com/pinterest/teletraan Twitter: https://twitter.com/micheal Pinterestcareers.com: https://pinterestcareers.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: You know how git works right?Announcer: Sorta, kinda, not really. Please ask someone else!Corey: Thats all of us. Git is how we build things, and Netlify is one of the best way I've found to build those things quickly for the web. Netlify's git based workflows mean you don't have to play slap and tickle with integrating arcane non-sense and web hooks, which are themselves about as well understood as git. Give them a try and see what folks ranging from my fake Twitter for pets startup, to global fortune 2000 companies are raving about. If you end up talking to them, because you don't have to, they get why self service is important—but if you do, be sure to tell them that I sent you and watch all of the blood drain from their faces instantly. You can find them in the AWS marketplace or at www.netlify.com. N-E-T-L-I-F-Y.comCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while, I like to talk to people who work at very large companies that are not in fact themselves a cloud provider. I know it sounds ridiculous. How can you possibly be a big company and not make money by selling managed NAT gateways to an unsuspecting public? But I'm told it can be done here to answer that question. And hopefully at least one other is Pinterest. It's head of engineering productivity, Micheal Benedict. Micheal, thank you for taking the time to join me today.Micheal: Hi, Corey, thank you for inviting me today. I'm really excited to talk to you.Corey: So, exciting times at Pinterest in a bunch of different ways. It was recently reported—which of course, went right to the top of my inbox as 500,000 people on Twitter all said, “Hey, this sounds like a ‘Corey would be interested in it' thing.” It was announced that you folks had signed a $3.2 billion commitment with AWS stretching until 2028. Now, if this is like any other large-scale AWS contract commitment deal that has been made public, you were probably immediately inundated with a whole bunch of people who are very good at arithmetic and not very good at business context saying, “$3.2 billion? You could build massive data centers for that. Why would anyone do this?” And it's tiresome, and that's the world in which we live. But I'm guessing you heard at least a little bit of that from the peanut gallery.Micheal: I did, and I always find it interesting when direct comparisons are made with the total amount that's been committed. And like you said, there's so many nuances that go into how to perceive that amount, and put it in context of, obviously, what Pinterest does. So, I at least want to take this opportunity to share with everyone that Pinterest has been on the cloud since day one. When Ben initially started the company, that product was launched—it was a simple Django app—it was launched on AWS from day one, and since then, it has grown to support 450-plus million MAUs over the course of the decade.And our infrastructure has grown pretty complex. We started with a bunch of EC2 machines and persisting data in S3, and since then we have explored an array of different products, in fact, sometimes working very closely with AWS, as well and helping them put together a product roadmap for some of the items they're working on as well. So, we have an amazing partnership with them, and part of the commitment and how we want to see these numbers is how does it unlock value for Pinterest as a business over time in terms of making us much more agile, without thinking about the nuances of the infrastructure itself. And that's, I think, one of the best ways to really put this into context, that it's not a single number we pay at the end [laugh] of the month, but rather, we are on track to spending a certain amount over a period of time, so this just keeps accruing or adding to that number. And we basically come out with an amazing partnership in AWS, where we have that commitment and we're able to leverage their products and full suite of items without any hiccups.Corey: The most interesting part of what you said is the word partner. And I think that's the piece that gets lost an awful lot when we talk about large-scale cloud negotiations. It's not like buying a car, where you can basically beat the crap out of the salesperson, you can act as if $400 price difference on a car is the difference between storm out of the dealership and sign the contract. Great, you don't really have to deal with that person ever again.In the context of a cloud provider, they run your production infrastructure, and if they have a bad day, I promise you're going to have a bad day, too. You want to handle those negotiations in a way that is respectful of that because they are your partner, whether you want them to be or not. Now, I'm not suggesting that any cloud provider is going to hold an awkward negotiation against the customer, but at the same time, there are going to be scenarios in which you're going to want to have strong relationships, where you're going to need to cash in political capital to some extent, and personally, I've never seen stupendous value in trying to beat the crap out of a company in order to get another tenth of a percent discount on a service you barely use, just because someone decided that well, we didn't do well in the last negotiation so we're going to get them back this time.That's great. What are you actually planning to do as a company? Where are you going? And the fact that you just alluded to, that you're not just a pile of S3 and EC2 instances speaks, in many ways, to that. By moving into the differentiated service world, suddenly you're able to do things that don't look quite as much like building a better database and start looking a lot more like servicing your users more effectively and well.Micheal: And I think, like you said, I feel like there's like a general skepticism in viewing that the cloud providers are usually out there to rip you apart. But in reality, that's not true. To your point, as part of the partnership, especially with AWS and Pinterest, we've got an amazing relationship going on, and behind the scenes, there's a dedicated team at Pinterest, called the Infrastructure Governance Team, a cross-functional team with folks from finance, legal, engineering, product, all sitting together and working with our AWS partners—even the AWS account managers at the times are part of that—to help us make both Pinterest successful, and in turn, AWS gets that amazing customer to work with in helping build some of their newer products as well. And that's one of the most important things we have learned over time is that there's two parts to it; when you want to help improve your business agility, you want to focus not just on the bottom line numbers as they are. It's okay to pay a premium because it offsets the people capital you would have to invest in getting there.And that's a very tricky way to look at math, but that's what these teams do; they sit down and work through those specifics. And for what it's worth, in our conversations, the AWS teams always come back with giving us very insightful data on how we're using their systems to help us better think about how we should be pricing or looking things ahead. And I'm not the expert on this; like I said, there's a dedicated team sitting behind this and looking through and working through these deals, but that's one of the important takeaways I hope the users—or the listeners of this podcast then take away that you want to treat your cloud provider as your partner as much as possible. They're not always there to screw you. That's not their goal. And I apologize for using that term. It is important that you set that expectations that it's in their best interest to actually make you successful because that's how they make money as well.Corey: It's a long-term play. I mean, they could gouge you this quarter, and then you're trying to evacuate as fast as possible. Well, they had a great quarter, but what's their long-term prospect? There are two competing philosophies in the world of business; you can either make a lot of money quickly, or you can make a little bit of money and build it over time in a sustained way. And it's clear the cloud providers are playing the long game on this because they basically have to.Micheal: I mean, it's inevitable at this point. I mean, look at Pinterest. It is one of those success stories. Starting as a Django app on a bunch of EC2 machines to wherever we are right now with having a three-plus billion dollar commitment over a span of couple of years, and we do spend a pretty significant chunk of that on a yearly basis. So, in this case, I'm sure it was a great successful partnership.And I'm hoping some of the newer companies who are building the cloud from the get-go are thinking about it from that perspective. And one of the things I do want to call out, Corey, is that we did initially start with using the primitive services in AWS, but it became clear over time—and I'm sure you heard of the term multi-cloud and many of that—you know, when companies start evaluating how to make the most out of the deals they're negotiating or signing, it is important to acknowledge that the cost of any of those evaluations or even thinking about migrations never tends to get factored in. And we always tend to treat that as being extremely simple or not, but those are engineering resources you want to be spending more building on the product rather than these crazy costly migrations. So, it's in your best interest probably to start using the most from your cloud provider, and also look for opportunities to use other cloud providers—if they provide more value in certain product offerings—rather than thinking about a complete lift-and-shift, and I'm going to make DR as being the primary case on why I want to be moving to multi-cloud.Corey: Yeah. There's a question, too, of the numbers on paper look radically different than the reality of this. You mentioned, Pinterest has been on AWS since the beginning, which means that even if an edict had been passed at the beginning, that, “Thou shalt never build on anything except EC2 and S3. The end. Full stop.”And let's say you went down that rabbit hole of, “Oh, we don't trust their load balancers. We're going to build our own at home. We have load balancers at home. We'll use those.” It's terrible, but even had you done that and restricted yourselves just to those baseline building blocks, and then decide to do a cloud migration, you're still looking back at over a decade of experience where the app has been built unconsciously reflecting the various failure modes that AWS has, the way that it responds to API calls, the latency in how long it takes to request something versus it being available, et cetera, et cetera.So, even moving that baseline thing to another cloud provider is not a trivial undertaking by any stretch of the imagination. But that said—because the topic does always come up, and I don't shy away from it; I think it's something people should go into with an open mind—how has the multi-cloud conversation progressed at Pinterest? Because there's always a multi-cloud conversation.Micheal: We have always approached it with some form of… openness. It's not like we don't want to be open to the ideas, but you really want to be thinking hard on the business case and the business value something provides on why you want to be doing x. In this case, when we think about multi-cloud—and again, Pinterest did start with EC2 and S3, and we did keep it that way for a long time. We built a lot of primitives around it, used it—for example, my team actually runs our bread and butter deployment system on EC2. We help facilitate deployments across a 100,000-plus machines today.And like you said, we have built that system keeping in mind how AWS works, and understanding the nuances of region and AZ failovers and all of that, and help facilitate deployments across 1000-plus microservices in the company. So, thinking about leveraging, say, a Google Cloud instance and how that works, in theory, we can always make a case for engineering to build our deployment system and expand there, but there's really no value. And one of the biggest cases, usually, when multi-cloud comes in is usually either negotiation for price or actually a DR strategy. Like, what if AWS goes down in and us-east-1? Well, let's be honest, they're powering half the internet [laugh] from that one single—Corey: Right.Micheal: Yeah. So, if you think your business is okay running when AWS goes down and half the internet is not going to be working, how do you want to be thinking about that? So, DR is probably not the best reason for you to be even exploring multi-cloud. Rather, you should be thinking about what the cloud providers are offering as a very nuanced offering which your current cloud provider is not offering, and really think about just using those specific items.Corey: So, I agree that multi-cloud for DR purposes is generally not necessarily the best approach with the idea of being able to failover seamlessly, but I like the idea for backups. I mean, Pinterest is a publicly-traded company, which means that among other things, you have to file risk disclosures and be responsive to auditors in a variety of different ways. There are some regulations to start applying to you. And the idea of, well, AWS builds things out in a super effective way, region separation, et cetera, whenever I talk to Amazonians, they are always surprised that anyone wouldn't accept that, “Oh, if you want backups use a different region. Problem solved.”Right, but it is often easier for me to have a rehydrate the business level of backup that would take weeks to redeploy living on another cloud provider than it is for me to explain to all of those auditors and regulators and financial analysts, et cetera why I didn't go ahead and do that path. So, there's always some story for okay, what if AWS decides that they hate us and want to kick us off the platform? Well, that's why legal is involved in those high-level discussions around things like risk, and indemnity, and termination for convenience and for cause clauses, et cetera, et cetera. The idea of making an all-in commitment to a cloud provider goes well beyond things that engineering thinks about. And it's easy for those of us with engineering backgrounds to be incredibly dismissive of that of, “Oh, indemnity? Like, when does AWS ever lose data?” “Yeah, but let's say one day they do. What is your story going to be when asked some very uncomfortable questions by people who wanted you to pay attention to this during the negotiation process?” It's about dotting the i's and crossing the t's, especially with that many commas in the contractual commitments.Micheal: No, it is true. And we did evaluate that as an option, but one of the interesting things about compliance, and especially auditing as well, we generally work with the best in class consultants to help us work through the controls and how we audit, how we look at these controls, how to make sure there's enough accountability going through. The interesting part was in this case, as well, we were able to work with AWS in crafting a lot of those controls and setting up the right expectations as and when we were putting proposals together as well. Now, again, I'm not an expert on this and I know we have a dedicated team from our technical program management organization focused on this, but early on we realized that, to your point, the cost of any form of backups and then being able to audit what's going in, look at all those pipelines, how quickly we can get the data in and out it was proving pretty costly for us. So, we were able to work out some of that within the constructs of what we have with our cloud provider today, and still meet our compliance goals.Corey: That's, on some level, the higher point, too, where everything is everything comes down to context; everything comes down to what the business demands, what the business requires, what the business will accept. And I'm not suggesting that in any case, they're wrong. I'm known for beating the ‘Multi-cloud is a bad default decision' drum, and then people get surprised when they'll have one-on-one conversations, and they say, “Well, we're multi-cloud. Do you think we're foolish?” “No. You're probably doing the right thing, just because you have context that is specific to your business that I, speaking in a general sense, certainly don't have.”People don't generally wake up in the morning and decide they're going to do a terrible job or no job at all at work today, unless they're Facebook's VP of Integrity. So, it's not the sort of thing that lends itself to casual tweet size, pithy analysis very often. There's a strong dive into what is the level of risk a business can accept? And my general belief is that most companies are doing this stuff right. The universal constant in all of my consulting clients that I have spoken to about the in-depth management piece of things is, they've always asked the same question of, “So, this is what we've done, but can you introduce us to the people who are doing it really right, who have absolutely nailed this and gotten it all down?” “It's, yeah, absolutely no one believes that that is them, even the folks who are, from my perspective, pretty close to having achieved it.”But I want to talk a bit more about what you do beyond just the headline-grabbing large dollar figure commitment to a cloud provider story. What does engineering productivity mean at Pinterest? Where do you start? Where do you stop?Micheal: I want to just quickly touch upon that last point about multi-cloud, and like you said, every company works within the context of what they are given and the constraints of their business. It's probably a good time to give a plug to my previous employer, Twitter, who are doing multi-cloud in a reasonably effective way. They are on the data centers, they do have presence on Google Cloud, and AWS, and I know probably things have changed since a couple of years now, but they have embraced that environment pretty effectively to cater to their acquisitions who were on the public cloud, help obviously, with their initial set of investments in the data center, and still continue to scale that out, and explore, in this case, Google Cloud for a variety of other use cases, which sounds like it's been extremely beneficial as well.So, to your point, there is probably no right way to do this. There's always that context, and what you're working with comes into play as part of making these decisions. And it's important to take a lot of these with a grain of salt because you can never understand the decisions, why they were made the way they were made. And for what it's worth, it sort of works out in the end. [laugh]. I've rarely heard a story where it's never worked out, and people are just upset with the deals they've signed. So, hopefully, that helps close that whole conversation about multi-cloud.Corey: I hope so. It's one of those areas where everyone has an opinion and a lot of them do not necessarily apply universally, but it's always fun to take—in that case, great, I'll take the lesser trod path of everyone's saying multi-cloud is great, invariably because they're trying to sell you something. Yeah, I have nothing particularly to sell, folks. My argument has always been, in the absence of a compelling reason not to, pick a provider and go all in. I don't care which provider you pick—which people are sometimes surprised to hear.It's like, “Well, what if they pick a cloud provider that you don't do consulting work for?” Yeah, it turns out, I don't actually need to win every AWS customer over to have a successful working business. Do what makes sense for you, folks. From my perspective, I want this industry to be better. I don't want to sit here and just drum up business for myself and make self-serving comments to empower that. Which apparently is a rare tactic.Micheal: No, that's totally true, Corey. One of the things you do is help people with their bills, so this has come up so many times, and I realize we're sort of going off track a bit from that engineering productivity discussion—Corey: Oh, which is fine. That's this entire show's theme, if it has one.Micheal: [laugh]. So, I want to briefly just talk about the whole billing and how cost management works because I know you spend a lot of time on that and you help a lot of these companies be effective in how they manage their bills. These questions have come up multiple times, even at Pinterest. We actually in the past, when I was leading the infrastructure governance organization, we were working with other companies of our similar size to better understand how they are looking into getting visibility into their cost, setting sort of the right controls and expectations within the engineering organization to plan, and capacity plan, and effectively meet those plans in a certain criteria, and then obviously, if there is any risk to that, actively manage risk. That was like the biggest thing those teams used to do.And we used to talk a lot trade notes, and get a better sense of how a lot of these companies are trying to do—for example, Netflix, or Lyft, or Stripe. I recall Netflix, content was their biggest spender, so cloud spending was like way down in the list of things for them. [laugh]. But regardless, they had an active team looking at this on a day-to-day basis. So, one of the things we learned early on at Pinterest is that start investing in those visibility tools early on.No one can parse the cloud bills. Let's be honest. You're probably the only person who can reverse… [laugh] engineer an architecture diagram from a cloud bill, and I think that's like—definitely you should take a patent for that or something. But in reality, no one has the time to do that. You want to make sure your business leaders, from your finance teams to engineering teams to head of the executives all have a better understanding of how to parse it.So, investing engineering resources, take that data, how do you munch it down to the cost, the utilization across the different vectors of offerings, and have a very insightful discussion. Like, what are certain action items we want to be taking? It's very easy to see, “Oh, we overspent EC2,” and we want to go from there. But in reality, that's not just that thing; you will start finding out that EC2 is being used by your Hadoop infrastructure, which runs hundreds of thousands of jobs. Okay, now who's actually responsible for that cost? You might find that one job which is accruing, sort of, a lot of instance hours over a period of time and a shared multi-tenant environment, how do you attribute that cost to that particular cost center?Corey: And then someone left the company a while back, and that job just kept running in perpetuity. No one's checked the output for four years, I guess it can't be that necessarily important. And digging into it requires context. It turns out, there's no SaaS tool to do this, which is unfortunate for those of us who set out originally to build such a thing. But we discovered pretty early on the context on this stuff is incredibly important.I love the thing you're talking about here, where you're discussing with your peer companies about these things because the advice that I would give to companies with the level of spend that you folks do is worlds apart from what I would advise someone who's building something new and spending maybe 500 bucks a month on their cloud bill. Those folks do not need to hire a dedicated team of people to solve for these problems. At your scale, yeah, you probably should have had some people in [laugh] here looking at this for a while now. And at some point, the guidance changes based upon scale. And if there's one thing that we discover from the horrible pages of Hacker News, it's that people love applying bits of wisdom that they hear in wildly inappropriate situations.How do you think about these things at that scale? Because, a simple example: right now I spend about 1000 bucks a month at The Duckbill Group, on our AWS bill. I know. We have one, too. Imagine that. And if I wind up just committing admin credentials to GitHub, for example, and someone compromises that and start spinning things up to mine all the Bitcoin, yeah, I'm going to notice that by the impact it has on the bill, which will be noticeable from orbit.At the level of spend that you folks are at, at company would be hard-pressed to spin up enough Bitcoin miners to materially move the billing needle on a month-to-month basis, just because of the sheer scope and scale. At small bill volumes, yeah, it's pretty easy to discover the thing that spiking your bill to three times normal. It's usually a managed NAT gateway. At your scale, tripling the bill begins to look suspiciously like the GDP of a small country, so what actually happened here? Invariably, at that scale, with that level of massive multiplier, it's usually the simplest solution, an error somewhere in the AWS billing system. Yes, they exist. Imagine that.Micheal: They do exist, and we've encountered that.Corey: Kind of heartstopping, isn't it?Micheal: [laugh]. I don't know if you remember when we had the big Spectre and the Meltdown, right, and those were interesting scenarios for us because we had identified a lot of those issues early on, given the scale we operate, and we were able to, sort of, obviously it did have an impact on the builds and everything, but that's it; that's why you have these dedicated teams to fix that. But I think one of the points you made, these are large bills and you're never going to have a 3x jump the next day. We're not going to be seeing that. And if that happens, you know, God save us. [laugh].But to your point, one of the things we do still want to be doing is look at trends, literally on a week-over-week basis because even a one percentage move is a pretty significant amount, if you think about it, which could be funding some other aspects of the business, which we would prefer to be investing on. So, we do want to have enough rigor and controls in place in our technical stack to identify and alert when something is off track. And it becomes challenging when you start using those higher-order services from your public cloud provider because there's no clear insights on how do you, kind of, parse that information. One of the biggest challenges we had at Pinterest was tying ownership to all these things.No, using tags is not going to cut it. It was so difficult for us to get to a point where we could put some sense of ownership in all the things and the resources people are using, and then subsequently have the right conversation with our ads infrastructure teams, or our product teams to help drive the cost improvements we want to be seeing. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's not a challenge already, even for the smaller companies who have bills in the tunes of tens and thousands, right?Corey: It is. It's predicting the spend and trying to categorize it appropriately; that's the root of all AWS bill panic on the corporate level. It's not that the bill is 20% higher, so we're going to go broke. Most companies spend far more on payroll than they do on infrastructure—as you mentioned with Netflix, content is a significantly larger [laugh] expense than any of those things; real estate, it's usually right up there too—but instead it's, when you're trying to do business forecasting of, okay, if we're going to have an additional 1000 monthly active users, what will the cost for us be to service those users and, okay, if we're seeing a sudden 20% variance, if that's the new normal, then well, that does change our cost projections for a number of years, what happens? When you're public, there starts to become the question of okay, do we have to restate earnings or what's the deal here?And of course, all this sidesteps past the unfortunate reality that, for many companies, the AWS bill is not a function of how many customers you have; it's how many engineers you hired. And that is always the way it winds up playing out for some reason. “It's why did we see a 10% increase in the bill? Yeah, we hired another data science team. Oops.” It's always seems to be the data science folks; I know I'd beat up on those folks a fair bit, and my apologies. And one day, if they analyze enough of the data, they might figure out why.Micheal: So, this is where I want to give a shout out to our data science team, especially some of the engineers working in the Infrastructure Governance Team putting these charts together, helping us derive insights. So, definitely props to them.I think there's a great segue into the point you made. As you add more engineers, what is the impact on the bottom line? And this is one of the things actually as part of engineering productivity, we think about as well on a long-term basis. Pinterest does have over 1000-plus engineers today, and to large degree, many of them actually have their own EC2 instances today. And I wouldn't say it's a significant amount of cost, but it is a large enough number, were shutting down a c5.9xl can actually fund a bunch of conference tickets or something else.And then you can imagine that sort of the scale you start working with at one point. The nuance here is though, you want to make sure there's enough flexibility for these engineers to do their local development in a sustainable way, but when moving to, say production, we really want to tighten the flexibility a bit so they don't end up doing what you just said, spin up a bunch of machines talking to the API directly which no one will be aware of.I want to share a small anecdote because when back in the day, this was probably four years ago, when we were doing some analysis on our bills, we realized that there was a huge jump every—I believe Wednesday—in our EC2 instances by almost a factor of, like, 500 to 600 instances. And we're like, “Why is this happening? What is going on?” And we found out there was an obscure job written by someone who had left the company, calling an EC2 API to spin up a search cluster of 500 machines on-demand, as part of pulling that ETL data together, and then shutting that cluster down. Which at times didn't work as expected because, you know, obviously, your Hadoop jobs are very predictable, right?So, those are the things we were dealing with back in the day, and you want to make sure—since then—this is where engineering productivity as team starts coming in that our job is to enable every engineer to be doing their best work across code building and deploying the services. And we have done this.Corey: Right. You and I can sit here and have an in-depth conversation about the intricacies of AWS billing in a bunch of different ways because in different ways we both specialize in it, in many respects. But let's say that Pinterest theoretically was foolish enough to hire me before I got into this space as an engineer, for terrifying reasons. And great. I start day one as a typical software developer if such a thing could be said to exist. How do you effectively build guardrails in so that I don't inadvertently wind up spinning up all the EC2 instances available to me within an account, which it turns out are more than one might expect sometimes, but still leave me free to do my job without effectively spending a nine-month safari figuring out how AWS bills work?Micheal: And this is why teams like ours exist, to help provide those tools to help you get started. So today, we actually don't let anyone directly use AWS APIs, or even use the UI for that matter. And I think you'll soon realize, the moment you hit, like, probably 30 or 40 people in your organization, you definitely want to lock it down. You don't want that access to be given to anyone or everyone. And then subsequently start building some higher-order tools or abstraction so people can start using that to control effectively.In this case, if you're a new engineer, Corey, which it seems like you were, at some point—Corey: I still write code like I am, don't worry.Micheal: [laugh]. So yes, you would get access to our internal tool to actually help spin up what we call is a dev app, where you get a chance to, obviously, choose the instance size, not the instance type itself, and we have actually constrained the instance types we have approved within Pinterest as well. We don't give you the entire list you get a chance to choose and deploy to. We actually have constraint to based on the workload types, what are the instance types we want to support because in the future, if we ever want to move from c3 to c5—and I've been there, trust me—it is not an easy thing to do, so you want to make sure that you're not letting people just use random instances, and constrain that by building some of these tools. As a new engineer, you would go in, you'd use the tool, and actually have a dev app provisioned for you with our Pinterest image to get you started.And then subsequently, we'll obviously shut it down if we see you not being using it over a certain amount of time, but those are sort of the guardrails we've put in over there so you never get a chance to directly ever use the EC2 APIs, or any of those AWS APIs to do certain things. The similar thing applies for S3 or any of the higher-order tools which AWS will provide, too.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. 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Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: How does that interplay with AWS launches yet another way to run containers, for example, and that becomes a valuable potential avenue to get some business value for a developer, but the platform you built doesn't necessarily embrace that capability? Or they release a feature to an existing tool that you use that could potentially be a just feature capability story, much more so than a cost savings one. How do you keep track of all of that and empower people to use those things so they're not effectively trying to reimplement DynamoDB on top of EC2?Micheal: That's been a challenge, actually, in the past for us because we've always been very flexible where engineers have had an opportunity to write their own solutions many a times rather than leveraging the AWS services, and of late, that's one of the reasons why we have an infrastructure organization—an extremely lean organization for what it's worth—but then still able to achieve outsized outputs. Where we evaluate a lot of these use cases, as they come in and open up different aspects of what we want to provide say directly from AWS, or build certain abstractions on top of it. Every time we talk about containers, obviously, we always associate that with something like Kubernetes and offerings from there on; we realized that our engineers directly never ask for those capabilities. They don't come in and say, “I need a new container orchestration system. Give that to me, and I'm going to be extremely productive.”What people actually realize is that if you can provide them effective tools and that can help them get their job done, they would be happy with it. For example, like I said, our deployment system, which is actually an open-source system called Teletraan. That is the bread and butter at Pinterest at which my team runs. We operate 100,000-plus machines. We have actually looked into container orchestration where we do have a dedicated Kubernetes team looking at it and helping certain use cases moved there, but we realized that the cost of entire migrations need to be evaluated against certain use cases which can benefit from being on Kubernetes from day one. You don't want to force anyone to move there, but give them the right incentives to move there. Case in point, let's upgrade your OS. Because if you're managing machines, obviously everyone loves to upgrade their OSes.Corey: Well, it's one of the things I love savings plans versus RIs; you talk about the c3 to c5 migration and everyone has a story about one of those, but the most foolish or frustrating reason that I ever saw not to do the upgrade was what we bought a bunch of Reserved Instances on the C3s and those have a year-and-a-half left to run. And it's foolish not on the part of customers—it's economically sound—but on the part of AWS where great, you're now forcing me to take a contractual commitment to something that serves me less effectively, rather than getting out of the way and letting me do my job. That's why it's so important to me at least, that savings plans cover Fargate and Lambda, I wish they covered SageMaker instead of SageMaker having its own thing because once again, you're now architecturally constrained based upon some ridiculous economic model that they have imposed on us. But that's a separate rant for another time.Micheal: No, we actually went through that process because we do have a healthy balance of how we do Reserved Instances and how we look at on-demand. We've never been big users have spot in the past because just the spot market itself, we realized that putting that pressure on our customers to figure out how to manage that is way more. When I say customers, in this case, engineers within the organization.Corey: Oh, yes. “I want to post some pictures on Pinterest, so now I have to understand the spot market. What?” Yeah.Micheal: [laugh]. So, in this case, when we even we're moving from C3 to C5—and this is where the partnership really plays out effectively, right, because it's also in the best interest of AWS to deprecate their aging hardware to support some of these new ones where they could also be making good enough premium margins for what it's worth and give the benefit back to the user. So, in this case, we were able to work out an extremely flexible way of moving to a C5 as soon as possible, get help from them, actually, in helping us do that, too, allocating capacity and working with them on capacity management. I believe at one point, we were actually one of the largest companies with a C3 footprint and it took quite a while for us to move to C5. But rest assured, once we moved, the savings was just immense. We were able to offset any of those RI and we were able to work behind the scenes to get that out. But obviously, not a lot of that is considered in a small-scale company just because of, like you said, those constraints which have been placed in a contractual obligation.Corey: Well, this is an area in which I will give the same guidance to companies of your scale as well as small-scale companies. And by small-scale, I mean, people on the free tier account, give or take, so I do mean the smallest of the small. Whenever you wind up in a scenario where you find yourself architecturally constrained by an economic barrier like this, reach out to your account manager. I promise you have one. Every account, even the tiny free tier accounts, have an account manager.I have an account manager, who I have to say has probably one of the most surreal jobs that AWS, just based upon the conversations I throw past him. But it's reaching out to your provider rather than trying to solve a lot of this stuff yourself by constraining how you're building things internally is always the right first move because the worst case is you don't get anywhere in those conversations. Okay, but at least you explored that, as opposed to what often happens is, “Oh, yeah. I have a switch over here I can flip and solve your entire problem. Does that help anything?”Micheal: Yeah.Corey: You feel foolish finding that out only after nine months of dedicated work, it turns out.Micheal: Which makes me wonder, Corey. I mean, do you see a lot of that happening where folks don't tend to reach out to their account managers, or rather treat them as partners in this case, right? Because it sounds like there is this unhealthy tension, I would say, as to what is the best help you could be getting from your account managers in this case.Corey: Constantly. And the challenge comes from a few things, in my experience. The first is that the quality of account managers and the technical account managers—the folks who are embedded many cases with your engineering teams in different ways—does vary. AWS is scaling wildly and bursting at the seams, and people are hard to scale.So, some are fantastic, some are decidedly less so, and most folks fall somewhere in the middle of that bell curve. And it doesn't take too many poor experiences for the default to be, “Oh, those people are useless. They never do anything we want, so why bother asking them?” And that leads to an unhealthy dynamic where a lot of companies will wind up treating their AWS account manager types as a ticket triage system, or the last resort of places that they'll turn when they should be involved in earlier conversations.I mean, take Pinterest as an example of this. I'm not sure how many technical account managers you have assigned to your account, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the ratio of technical account managers to engineers working on the environment is incredibly lopsided. It's got to be a high ratio just because of the nature of how these things work. So, there are a lot of people who are actively working on things that would almost certainly benefit from a more holistic conversation with your AWS account team, but it doesn't occur to them to do it just because of either perceived biases around levels of competence, or poor experiences in the past, or simply not knowing the capabilities that are there. If I could tell one story around the AWS account management story, it would be talk to folks sooner about these things.And to be clear, Pinterest has this less than other folks, but AWS does themselves no favors by having a product strategy of, “Yes,” because very often in service of those conversations with a number of companies, there is the very real concern of are they doing research so that they can launch a service that competes with us? Amazon as a whole launching a social network is admittedly one of the most hilarious ideas I [laugh] can come up with and I hope they take a whack at it just to watch them learn all these lessons themselves, but that is again, neither here nor there.Micheal: That story is very interesting, and I think you mentioned one thing; it's just that lack of trust, or even knowing what the account managers can actually do for you. There seems to be just a lack of education on that. And we also found it the hard way, right? I wouldn't say that Pinterest figured this out on day one. We evolved sort of a relationship over time. Yes, our time… engagements are, sort of, lopsided, but we were able to negotiate that as part of deals as we learned a bit more on what we can and we cannot do, and how these individuals are beneficial for Pinterest as well. And—Corey: Well, here's a question for you, without naming names—and this might illustrate part of the challenge customers have—how long has your account manager—not the technical account managers, but your account manager—been assigned to your account?Micheal: I've been at Pinterest for five years and I've been working with the same person. And he's amazing.Corey: Which is incredibly atypical. At a lot of smaller companies, it feels like, “Oh, I'm your account manager being introduced to you.” And, “Are you the third one this year? Great.” What happens is that if the account manager excels, very often they get promoted and work with a smaller number of accounts at larger spend, and whereas if they don't find that AWS is a great place for them for a variety of reasons, they go somewhere else and need to be backfilled.So, at the smaller account, it's, “Great. I've had more account managers in a year than you've had in five.” And that is often the experience when you start seeing significant levels of rotation, especially on the customer engineering side where you wind up with you have this big kickoff, and everyone's aware of all the capabilities and you look at it three years later, and not a single person who was in that kickoff is still involved with the account on either side, and it's just sort of been evolving evolutionarily from there. One thing that we've done in some of our larger accounts as part of our negotiation process is when we see that the bridges have been so thoroughly burned, we will effectively request a full account team cycle, just because it's time to get new faces in where the customer, in many cases unreasonably, is not going to say, “Yeah but a year-and-a-half ago you did this terrible thing and we're still salty about it.” Fine, whatever. I get it. People relationships are hard. Let's go ahead and swap some folks out so that there are new faces with new perspectives because that helps.Micheal: Well, first off, if you had so many switches in account manager, I think that's something speaks about [laugh] how you've been working, too. I'm just kidding. There are a bu—Corey: Entirely possible. In seriousness, yes. But if you talk to—like, this is not just me because in my case, yeah, I feel like my account manager is whoever drew the short straw that week because frankly, yeah, that does seem like a great punishment to wind up passing out to someone who is underperforming. But for a lot of folks who are in the mid-tier, like, spending $50 to $100,000 a month, this is a very common story.Micheal: Yeah. Actually, we've heard a bit about this, too. And like you said, I think maintaining context is the most thing. You really want your account manager to vouch for you, really be your champion in those meetings because AWS, like you said is so large, getting those exec time, and reviews, and there's so many things that happen, your account manager is the champion for you, or right there. And it's important and in fact in your best interest to have a great relationship with them as well, not treat them as, oh yet another vendor.And I think that's where things start to get a bit messy because when you start treating them as yet another vendor, there is no incentive for them to do the best for you, too. You know, people relationships are hard. But that said though, I think given the amount of customers like these cloud companies are accruing, I wouldn't be surprised; every account manager seems to be extremely burdened. Even in our case, although I've been having a chance to work with this one person for a long time, we've actually expanded. We have now multiple account managers helping us out as we've started scaling to use certain aspects of AWS which we've never explored before.We were a bit constrained and reserved about what service we want to use because there have been instances where we have tried using something and we have hit the wall pretty immediately. API rate limits, or it's not ready for primetime, and we're like, “Oh, my God. Now, what do we do?” So, we have a bit more cautious. But that said, over time, having an account manager who understands how you work, what scale you have, they're able to advocate with the internal engineering teams within the cloud provider to make the best of supporting you as a customer and tell that success story all the way out.So yeah, I can totally understand how this may be hard, especially for those small companies. For what it's worth, I think the best way to really think about it is not treat them as your vendor, but really go out on a limb there. Even though you signed a deal with them, you want to make sure that you have the continuing relationship with them to have—represent your voice better within the company. Which is probably hard. [laugh].Corey: That's always the hard part. Honestly, if this were the sort of thing that were easy to automate, or you could wind up building out something that winds up helping companies figure out how to solve these things programmatically, talk about interesting business problems that are only going to get larger in the fullness of time. This is not going away, even if AWS stopped signing up new customers entirely right now, they would still have years of growth ahead of them just from organic growth. And take a company with the scale of Pinterest and just think of how many years it would take to do a full-on exodus, even if it became priority number one. It's not realistic in many cases, which is why I've never been a big fan of multi-cloud as an approach for negotiation. Yeah, AWS has more data on those points than any of us do; they're not worried about it. It just makes you sound like an unsophisticated negotiator. Pick your poison and lean in.Micheal: That is the truth you just mentioned, and I probably want to give a call out to our head of infrastructure, [Coburn 00:42:13]. He's also my boss, and he had brought this perspective as well. As part of any negotiation discussions, like you just said, AWS has way more data points on this than what we think we can do in terms of talking about, “Oh, we are exploring this other cloud provider.” And it's—they would be like, “Yeah. Do tell me more [laugh] how that's going.”And it's probably in the best interest to never use that as a negotiation tactic because they clearly know the investments that's going to build on what you've done, so you might as well be talking more—again, this is where that relationship really plays together because you want both of them to be successful. And it's in their best interest to still keep you happy because the good thing about at least companies of our size is that we're probably, like, one phone call away from some of their executive team, where we could always talk about what didn't work for us. And I know not everyone has that opportunity, but I'm really hoping and I know at least with some of the interactions we've had with the AWS teams, they're actively working and building that relationship more and more, giving access to those customer advisory boards, and all of them to have those direct calls with the executives. I don't know whether you've seen that in your experience in helping some of these companies?Corey: Have a different approach to it. It turns out when you're super loud and public and noisy about AWS and spend too much time in Seattle, you start to spend time with those people on a social basis. Because, again, I'm obnoxious and annoying to a lot of AWS folks, but I'm also having an obnoxious habit of being right in most of the things I'm pointing out. And that becomes harder and harder to ignore. I mean, part of the value that I found in being able to do this as a consultant is that I begin to compare and contrast different customer environments on a consistent ongoing basis.I mean, the reason that negotiation works well from my perspective is that AWS does a bunch of these every week, and customers do these every few years with AWS. And well, we do an awful lot of them, too, and it's okay, we've seen different ways things can get structured and it doesn't take too long and too many engagements before you start to see the points of commonality in how these things flow together. So, when we wind up seeing things that a customer is planning on architecturally and looking to do in the future, and, “Well, wait a minute. Have you talked to the folks negotiating the contract about this? Because that does potentially have bearing and it provides better data than what AWS is gathering just through looking at overall spend trends. So yeah, bring that up. That is absolutely going to impact the type of offer you get.”It just comes down to understanding the motivators that drive folks and it comes down to, I think understanding the incentives. I will say that across the board, I have never yet seen a deal from AWS come through where it was, “Okay, at this point you're just trying to hoodwink the customer and get them to sign on something that doesn't help them.” I've seen mistakes that can definitely lead to that impression, and I've seen areas where they're doing data is incomplete and they're making assumptions that are not borne out in reality. But it's not one of those bad faith type—Micheal: Yeah.Corey: —of negotiations. If it were, I would be framing a lot of this very differently. It sounds weird to say, “Yeah, your vendor is not trying to screw you over in this sense,” because look at the entire IT industry. How often has that been true about almost any other vendor in the fullness of time? This is something a bit different, and I still think we're trying to grapple with the repercussions of that, from a negotiation standpoint and from a long-term business continuity standpoint, when your faith is linked—in a shared fate context—with your vendor.Micheal: It's in their best interest as well because they're trying to build a diversified portfolio. Like, if they help 100 companies, even if one of them becomes the next Pinterest, that's great, right? And that continued relationship is what they're aiming for. So, assuming any bad faith over there probably is not going to be the best outcome, like you said. And two, it's not a zero-sum game.I always get a sense that when you're doing these negotiations, it's an all-or-nothing deal. It's not. You have to think they're also running a business and it's important that you as your business, how okay are you with some of those premiums? You cannot get a discount on everything, you cannot get the deal or the numbers you probably want almost everything. And to your point, architecturally, if you're moving in a certain direction where you think in the next three years, this is what your usage is going to be or it will come down to that, obviously, you should be investing more and negotiating that out front rather than managed NAT [laugh] gateways, I guess. So, I think that's also an important mindset to take in as part of any of these negotiations. Which I'm assuming—I don't know how you folks have been working in the past, but at least that's one of the key items we have taken in as part of any of these discussions.Corey: I would agree wholeheartedly. I think that it just comes down to understanding where you're going, what's important, and again in some cases knowing around what things AWS will never bend contractually. I've seen companies spend six weeks or more trying to get to negotiate custom SLAs around services. Let me save everyone a bunch of time and money; they will not grant them to you.Micheal: Yeah.Corey: I promise. So, stop asking for them; you're not going to get them. There are other things they will negotiate on that they're going to be highly case-dependent. I'm hesitant to mention any of them just because, “Well, wait a minute, we did that once. Why are you talking about that in public?” I don't want to hear it and confidentiality matters. But yeah, not everything is negotiable, but most things are, so figuring out what levers and knobs and dials you have is important.Micheal: We also found it that way. AWS does cater to their—they are a platform and they are pretty clear in how much engagement—even if we are one of their top customers, there's been many times where I know their product managers have heavily pushed back on some of the requests we have put in. And that makes me wonder, they probably have the same engagement even with the smallest of customers, there's always an implicit assumption that the big fish is trying to get the most out of your public cloud providers. To your point, I don't think that's true. We're rarely able to negotiate anything exclusive in terms of their product offerings just for us, if that makes sense.Case in point, tell us your capacity [laugh] for x instances or type of instances, so we as a company would know how to plan out our scale-ups or scale-downs. That's not going to happen exclusively for you. But those kind of things are just, like, examples we have had a chance to work with their product managers and see if, can we get some flexibility on that? For what it's worth, though, they are willing to find a middle ground with you to make sure that you get your answers and, obviously, you're being successful in your plans to use certain technologies they offer or [unintelligible 00:48:31] how you use their services.Corey: So, I know we've gone significantly over time and we are definitely going to do another episode talking about a lot of the other things that you're involved in because I'm going to assume that your full-time job is not worrying about the AWS bill. In fact, you do a fair number of things beyond that; I just get stuck on that one, given that it is but I eat, sleep, breathe, and dream about.Micheal: Absolutely. I would love to talk more, especially about how we're enabling our engineers to be extremely productive in this new world, and how we want to cater to this whole cloud-native environment which is being created, and make sure people are doing their best work. But regardless, Corey, I mean, this has been an amazing, insightful chat, even for me. And I really appreciate you having me on the show.Corey: No, thank you for joining me. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, and how you think about things, where can they find you? Because I'm also going to go out on a limb and assume you're also probably hiring, given that everyone seems to be these days.Micheal: Well, that is true. And I wasn't planning to make a hiring pitch but I'm glad that you leaned into that one. Yes, we are hiring and you can find me on Twitter at twitter dot com slash M-I-C-H-E-A-L. I am spelled a bit differently, so make sure you can hit me up, and my DMs are open. And obviously, we have all our open roles listed on pinterestcareers.com as well.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:49:45]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Micheal: Thank you, Corey. It was really been great on your show.Corey: And I'm sure we'll do it again in the near future. Micheal Benedict, Head of Engineering Productivity at Pinterest. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a long rambling comment about exactly how many data centers Pinterest could build instead.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
Trisha's guest this week is Scott Burgess, as part of the healthcare innovator series. His practice focuses on helping ourselves stay healthy rather than use the healthcare system. I encourage you to listen to what he has to say and consider it without judgment or figuring out how you might be able to make dramatic lifestyle changes right away. In 30 days, perhaps you can listen again and see what speaks to you. Maybe try one new thing for a while, see how it works, and then listen again. If nothing speaks to you, the benefit of this medium is that you can simply turn it off. I think we can all agree that change needs to occur in our expensive healthcare system in the U.S. that is not producing any better patient outcomes. Clinicians are burning out, and costs are becoming close to 20% of GDP and unsustainable. The answer to the question is not clear. We can listen to how some people are making changes and see if what they have to say speaks to us. This is part 1 of a 2-part episode with Scott. In this episode, we talk about… [2:59] How Scott decided to start his business [10:27] The need to incorporate wellness into the healthcare system [11:54] Where wellness starts [15:16] The first thing to do when you feel sick [17:13] How Scott practices wellness every day [20:30] The idea that nobody gets paid if we are healthy [25:03] The impact of the microbiome Links to resources: Scott Burgess www.scotteburgess.com Subscribe, rate and review: www.providerspropertiesandperformance.com Schedule a healthcare real estate investment strategy consultation: https://docproperties.com/free-consultation-trisha-talbot/ About Trisha: WEBSITE: www.docproperties.com LINKED IN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trishatalbot/ Email inquiries to: info@docproperties.com
In this episode, we discuss the risk of stagflation, meaning higher inflation and sluggish growth, and the related investment considerations. To read this week's SightLines, click here. The views expressed in this podcast may not necessarily reflect the views of Stifel Financial Corp. or its affiliates (collectively, Stifel). This communication is provided for information purposes only. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Asset allocation and diversification do not ensure a profit or protect against loss. © Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated | Member SIPC & NYSE | www.stifel.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
A.M. Edition for Nov. 5. The world would need to make a $4 trillion annual investment to get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. It may sound like a lot, but the U.S.'s expenditure would be a smaller percentage of GDP than its spending on railroads in the 1850s. WSJ's Greg Ip says Wall Street stands ready to deliver the money needed, if governments can ensure climate-change initiatives are a commercially viable investment. Peter Granitz hosts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this Real Estate News Brief for the week ending October 30th, 2021... the rebound of big city rents, the state and local property tax bonanza, and a tragic reminder to check smoke alarms in rentals.Hi, I'm Kathy Fettke and this is Real Estate News for Investors. If you like our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review.Economic NewsWe begin with economic news from this past week. The latest report on the GDP shows a big slowdown in the third quarter. The Commerce Department says the economy downshifted from 6.7% in the second quarter to just 2% in the third. (1) The slowdown was expected but the Wall Street Journal had anticipated a beefier 2.8%. Economists say we're experiencing slower growth because government stimulus money is drying up while businesses struggle with supply chain issues and the nation continues to deal with the coronavirus.Consumers are working and spending money however, which keeps the economy on the growth side. Consumer spending was up .6% in September. (2) And, the latest unemployment report shows that new state claims dropped to another pandemic low of 281,000. Existing claims also fell, from 2.48 million to 2.24 million. (3) The unemployment rate is currently at 4.8%. Much of that spending went into new homes. New home sales rose in September despite higher price points. The sales rate grew to an annual rate of 14% while the median price rose to a new record high of $408,800. (4) The sales rate hit a six-month high in September, but it's almost 18% lower than it was a year ago. The sale of existing homes went in the opposite direction. The National Association of Realtors says pending sales were down 2.3% in September, and compared to a year ago, they were down 8%. (5) A tight inventory continues to plague buyers, along with rising prices.According to the latest report from the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index, national home prices are up 19.8% from a year ago. (6) For those who can buy, they are making those decisions quickly. The National Association of Realtors says that 86% of homes sold in September were on the market for less than a month. (7)Mortgage RatesMortgage rates continue their slow climb skyward. Freddie Mac says the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose 5 basis points to 3.14%. The 15-year was up 4 points to 2.37%. (8)In other news making headlines…Big City Rents Are ReboundingRents are rebounding in the nation's big cities. Realtor.com says that rents in many cities are now “higher” than they were at the beginning of the pandemic. Rents had dropped as tenants fled to less-crowded areas, but they are rebounding in a big way. (10)Realtor.com's monthly rental report shows that rents in the ten largest U.S. tech cities, are now about 6.3% “higher” than they were when the pandemic first hit. The report says that the annual pace of rent growth for all U.S. rentals is about 13.6% right now. And it says there's no sign of it slowing down.Realtor.com's manager of economic research, George Ratiu, says: “With rents continuing to surge to new highs nationwide, including in big tech hubs, September data confirms the U.S. rental market has moved past the recovery phase and is fully back in business.”Property Tax Bonanza State and local governments have reaped the rewards of higher home prices. An analysis by the National Association of Home Builders shows that property tax collection is now the highest it's been since 2009. (9) That review shows that homeowners paid $703.5 billion from Q3 of last year to Q2 of this year. That's a 13% increase from the previous year. State and local governments rely heavily on property tax. The NAHB says they get about 38% of their revenue from that tax base. Tragic Lesson about Fire AlarmsA story out of Southern California is a tragic reminder to all landlords to make sure smoke detectors are working in all rentals. A fire at a short-term rental in Malibu killed a 22-year-old college student last January, and his father recently filed a lawsuit against the landlords, TripAdvisor, and a TripAdvisor subsidiary for negligence. (11)The lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles by Brad Schneider. It claims his son, Grant, was not able to escape the fire because there were not enough smoke detectors in the home, and the ones that were there were not working. That's it for today. Check the show notes for links. And please remember to hit the subscribe button, and leave a review!You can also join RealWealth for free at newsforinvestors.com. As a member, you have access to the Investor Portal where you can view sample property pro-formas and connect with our network of resources, including experienced investment counselors, property teams, lenders, 1031 exchange facilitators, attorneys, CPAs and more.Thanks for listening. I'm Kathy Fettke.Links:1 -https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coming-up-third-quarter-gdp-11635423260?mod=economy-politics 2 -https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coming-up-spending-income-and-pce-inflation-for-september-11635509727?mod=bnbh_mwarticle3 -https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-s-jobless-claims-set-to-hit-new-pandemic-low-of-289-000-economists-predict-11635423655?mod=economic-report4 -https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-home-sales-soared-in-september-but-is-the-housing-markets-rebound-coming-to-an-end-11635257630?mod=economic-report5 -https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coming-up-pending-home-sales-116354289656 -https://www.marketwatch.com/story/home-price-growth-is-slowing-down-but-that-doesnt-mean-prices-are-falling-11635254340?mod=economic-report7 -https://magazine.realtor/daily-news/2021/10/22/inventory-boost-not-enough-to-satisfy-fall-house-hunters8 -http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/9 -https://magazine.realtor/daily-news/2021/10/26/property-tax-boom-helps-state-local-coffers10 -https://magazine.realtor/daily-news/2021/10/28/urban-rents-soar-as-cities-recover-from-pandemic-hit11 -https://timesofsandiego.com/business/2021/10/22/father-of-mesa-college-student-sues-tripadvisor-com-landlord-after-sons-death-in-fire/
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Full Text: Governor Kate Brown has joined other state and national representatives at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, despite Oregon producing less than 1% of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. While the conference has been filled with doom, Oregonians have a reason to look at the glass half full. Oregon emissions per capita have fallen by 22% between 1990 and 2016, and emissions per unit of GDP (or economic output) have fallen by over 50% during the same time period. Further, energy use per capita in 2016 was at its lowest since 1960. No doubt, politicians at this conference will focus their discussions on increased taxes and regulations. However, a recent Reason Foundation study found that top-down approaches to controlling GHG emissions “may not be as effective as bottom-up approaches that harness the natural tendency of entrepreneurs and innovators to identify more efficient and cost-effective ways to produce goods and services.” Oregon should veer away from regulations and carbon taxes, and instead adopt some of Reason's bottom-up recommendations such as de-monopolizing energy markets, reducing energy subsidies and tax expenditures, streamlining permitting, and eliminating arbitrary, energy-specific mandates. Since emissions per capita and unit of GDP have been declining for over 20 years, it's clear Oregon has done its part. Governor Brown should come home and rescind her emissions-related Executive Order immediately. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/coffeewithcascade/message
欢迎收听雪球和喜马拉雅联合出品的财经有深度，雪球，国内领先的集投资交流交易一体的综合财富管理平台，聪明的投资者都在这里。听众朋友们大家好，我是主播匪石-34，今天分享的稿件名字叫做全球主线-能源升级，来自只买印钞机。我相信到了今天，大家对碳中和已经不陌生了，但是为什么全球会突然发动这样的能源升级？是石油会枯竭还是煤炭要挖空了？亦或是全球变暖的原因？我个人觉得的，传统能源离枯竭还远，全球变暖更多的还是地球自己的运行周期，人力只能是稍微缓解而已。毕竟人类能照顾好自己就不错了。撼动地球的运行周期？其实不太可能。所以我认为，会产生全球范围内的能源升级需求，根本上来说是因为传统能源的使用效能已经到达极限。继续加大使用，其负面作用会远超正面收益。对世界各国是这样，对我们也是这样。在世界各国，例如清洁能源起步较早的德国，已经宣布2022年放弃核电，2050年清洁能源占比达到100%，先不说这个目标是否能完成，就现在，德国清洁能源占比已经达到38%。德国的清洁能源以风电为主，光伏为辅，而我们占比只有11%。德国的清洁能源能发展到今天，是依靠着市场化的方式在发展。采取电价市场化的方式，建立电价电力交易市场来平衡各地区用电不均，以及解决各种电力搭配问题。其电网稳定性排名世界第二，一方面是依靠储能和天然气发电进行调峰，另一方面，依靠精准的电力天气预报系统来进行调节。过去十年，德国经济保持了活力，德国工业没有被电价市场化以后的高电价打垮。而且2015年，德国实现GDP上升的同时碳排放减少。注意，德国也是一个工业国。回看我们国内，中国的工业体量更大，作为一个发展中国家，我们的电力需求还会攀升。为了人民更好的生活，我们需要更多的能源，但是，更多的电力需求却对应着越来越高昂的环境代价。这个代价是沉重的，不可持续的。所以我们定下了碳中和的任务，要解开束缚我国工业发展的能源枷锁，为中国产业升级转型打下坚实的能源供应基础。在最高目标之下，能源局制定了《国家能源局关于2021年风电、光伏发电开发建设有关事项的通知》文件。其核心内容是到2030年非化石能源占一次能源消费的比重达到25%左右。2021年，全国风电、光伏发电量占全社会用电量的比重达到11%左右，后续逐年提高，确保2025年非化石能源消费占一次能源消费的比重达到20%左右。《2030年前碳达峰行动方案》中更具体的规划到：到2030年，风电、太阳能发电总装机容量达到12亿千瓦以上。碳达峰、碳中和，内涵丰富，但其根本，就是颠覆能源结构，实现可持续发展。至此我们就可以对风电、太阳能发电的发展总趋势有一个大概的认识：就是要加速建设，能建多少建多少，能建多快建多快。同时，为了让风电、太阳能发电顺利扩张，在21年7月，发改委还制定了《关于加快推动新型储能发展的指导意见》。意见中指出，到2025年，实现新型储能从商业化初期向规模化发展转变。新型储能技术创新能力显著提高，核心技术装备自主可控水平大幅提升，在高安全、低成本、高可靠、长寿命等方面取得长足进步，标准体系基本完善，产业体系日趋完备，市场环境和商业模式基本成熟，装机规模达3000万千瓦以上。也就是说，与风电、太阳能发电相匹配的储能行业，也会同步扩张，迎来繁荣。由于储能技术的发展，困扰电网的风电、太阳能发电不稳定问题也得到了解决，在21年2月的《关于推进电力源网荷储一体化和多能互补发展的指导意见》中，已经提出了要进行源网荷储一体化和多能互补。这个源网荷储一体化可以简单理解为，新建电厂都必须自己配套储能，以减轻电网压力。其实，在我国风电、太阳能已经发展了快20年，不少早期修建的风机已经要到报废阶段。对太阳能，我相信老股民其实早都炒过一轮了，其中有些太阳能巨头，在残酷的价格战中，已经退市。这也给大家留下一个风电，光伏仅仅是一个炒概念的印象。其实一个产业的发展，必然经历一个早期的繁荣和破灭。因为在早期，光伏风电成本高，技术也不成熟，全靠补贴在支撑，而且国内外竞争激烈，企业很难真正盈利，可以说，都不具备自我造血能力。而到了21年，技术拐点已至，其标志就是光伏，风电平价上网，电价补贴逐步退出。平价上网意味着，光伏风电的发电成本已经足够低，现在投资新的光伏风电发电厂，已经可以盈利。比如在吉电股份的某分布式光伏建设规划中就写到，项目工程动态总投资11.34亿元，经营期内前20年上网电价0.4249元/千瓦时，后5年电价为山东燃煤基准电价0.3949元/千瓦时测算，全投资收益率6.76%，资本金收益率11.19%，投资回收期12.23年，收益较好。这样一个收益，对资本来说其实已经相当可以了。更何况，电价市场化以后，电费的上涨，绿电交易所独有电费的溢价，这些收益都还没算。21年除了技术拐点，政策加速支持也非常明显。其中比较核心的一个制度建设就是：建立消纳责任权重引导机制。能源局的记者问答会上，有这么一段回答。“国家不再下达各省（区、市）的年度建设规模和指标，而是坚持目标导向，测算下达各省年度可再生能源电力消纳责任权重，引导各地据此安排风电、光伏发电项目建设，推进跨省跨区风光电交易。”也就是说，风电光伏项目的推进，以及可再生能源电力的消纳，也就是卖电问题，将会得到极大重视。可以说，未来的风电光伏发电厂的电，是不愁卖的。
‘Build Back Better' has gained support from all corners of the Democratic Party, but questions remain over how the framework is paid for. For investors, a look at short term dynamics may provide clarity.----- Transcript -----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, head of public policy research and municipal strategy for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the intersection between U.S. public policy and financial markets. It's Tuesday, November 2nd at noon in New York.Over the past few days, the "Build Back Better" framework has gained increasing support from all corners of the Democratic Party. And although Senator Joe Manchin put his support for the framework in question yesterday, and there are still some questions on items such as prescription drug reform, our base case is still that "Build Back Better" and the bipartisan infrastructure bill will likely be enacted before year end.However, still up for debate is whether "Build Back Better" is fully paid for by things like stronger IRS tax enforcement and tax increases on corporations. In its current form, the framework proposes fiscal balance, but over 10 years. In the short term, it doesn't mean zero fiscal expansion.Rather as structured, we think the bill would add to deficits over the first five years but get to balance by having surpluses over the remaining years. This distinction is important, and we argue that investors should focus on the early-year deficit dynamic instead of the 10-year deficit language that Congress generally uses to communicate deficit impact.One reason is that policy uncertainty usually increases with time. For example, several spending and contra-revenue programs including a child tax credit, expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, and state and local tax cap relief, roll off well before the 10-year look-ahead period ends. And U.S. elections in 2022 and 2024 could conceivably result in changes to government that could mean the continuation or discontinuation of programs and new tax items.Given this uncertainty and the estimated $256 billion dollar deficit for the bipartisan infrastructure bill -- the takeaway for investors is that we expect bond markets will focus on this early-year dynamic since this is the time frame that ultimately impacts GDP forecast horizons, impacts the Treasury supply forecast horizon and is reliable from a policy standpoint.Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show.
PLUS: Biden wants to give millions to illegals. (Can't he give them Hunter Biden paintings instead?) There is an ISIS threat in DC and Virginia, weeks after unvetted Afghanis were flown to DC. Coincidence? Biden's motorcade had 85 gas-guzzling cars...as he headed to a climate summit! Liberal mayors say that they want 'law and order'--a major blow to BLM. And much more.
[政經最前線] 程曉農1027精華: 中國經濟三大根本性麻煩 曝第三度GDP危機!普京若懂經濟 全世界沒人不懂 程曉農1027精華: 中國下波監管對象金融業?北京下令審查25家銀行 經濟恐傷更重 程曉農1027精華: 全球暖化作假?世界最大科學醜聞 維基解密氣候門曝光。習近平的中國夢 如何影響全球暖化? 程曉農1027精華: 恆大二次風暴 這次把誰拖下水?中國經濟泡沫連環爆 恆大 限電 全球都藏雷!
Today on The Larry Kudlow Show climate change and gas emissions are a topic that's warming up, Larry Kudlow exclaims how the raising of personal rates can slowly turn the country into a social welfare state, and GDP movement and the booming stock market have both caught the eye of economists and Americans across the country.
DB-Oct 29,2021: The Core PCE Index's rise of 3.6% is the latest inflation pressure that has the markets beat. Real Vision CEO and co-founder Raoul Pal joins to unpack the latest in the supply chain deterioration saga amid a weak labor market. With Facebook's latest announcement to change the company's name to Meta, Raoul discusses why the metaverse is an entirely new layer of GDP with endless possibilities for crypto, NFTs, and social tokens. Interviewed by Ash Bennington. Want to submit questions? Drop them right here on the Exchange: https://rvtv.io/3w0ExvE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
GDP grew by 2% -- is that a good number or a bad number? Supply chain issues and childcare shortages continue to haunt the economy, but economists are dreaming of a green Christmas nonetheless. And what's going to happen with housing prices? Philadelphia economist David Fiorenza helps us break down the all the economic news of the week that matters to you in your daily life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Live from the no panic zone—I'm Steve Gruber—I am America's Voice—God Bless America this is the Steve Gruber Show—FIERCE AND FEARLESS – in Pursuit of the truth— Here are 3 big things you need to know right now— ONE— The former Emmy Award winning—former Governor of New York is now a man facing criminal charges that's right Andrew Cuomo—could be in cuffs— TWO— A Wisconsin Sheriff—unveils what he says is clear evidence that election laws were “shattered” in 2020 in his state—and he is weighing his options on seeking charges— THREE— President Biden got hit with more terrible economic news Thursday—as the GDP numbers for the 3rd quarter were revealed—and they are anemic—no make that pathetic—growth came in at a paltry 2% -- a long way from the 2.8 to 3 percent that was expected— Coupled with inflation hitting harder than it has in decades—the supply chain bottlenecks and the massive worker shortage—you would think he would get to work on solving those problems—but instead he is trying to push through a massive spending plan that helps illegal aliens more than it helps working American families— And though he says he has the framework—and he says he can get Democrats on board—it sounded more like a prayer—just before he headed to the Vatican—
If people decide to save rather than spend, this could lead to a fall in GDP, even though people are becoming better off beyond the short term. Original Article: "GDP Tells Us Little about the Health of an Economy" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
GDP numbers for the third quarter just dropped and they are... not awesome. With the economy experiencing slower than expected growth and rising prices, are we entering into a period of stagflation?
The U.S. GDP reading tells us the economy might be slowing down. Is that bad for SPY? TSLA is the biggest global automaker by a mile. Jermal addresses these timely topics, and looks at option flow in TSLA, XBI, LCID and FSR.
The U.S. GDP reading tells us the economy might be slowing down. Is that bad for SPY? TSLA is the biggest global automaker by a mile. Jermal addresses these timely topics, and looks at option flow in TSLA, XBI, LCID and FSR.
ESG Series #7: Are climate goals and economic development on a collision course? As COP26 gets underway in Glasgow, the energy transition is top of mind. Shifting energy production away from coal, oil and natural gas toward greener energy sources like wind and solar power and renewable fuels is critical to cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. In the Asia-Pacific region, there is no clear consensus on the shape of the energy transition. And there is no path to meaningful reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions that does not lead through Asia, which accounts for 60% of the world's population and 75% of global carbon emissions. Climate, capital and energy are truly global in reach. The choices being made today – in allocating capital and in shaping energy and industrial policies – could either reduce or increase the most severe climate impacts around the world for at least the next century. It is a huge challenge to make development both rapid and sustainable. Asia is experiencing substantial population growth and massive economic development. Energy use per capita is rising fast along with the rise in GDP and the buildout of cities, industries and the critical infrastructure that sustains them. The opportunities to invest in new energy assets – whether sustainable or not – are plentiful. Innovative technologies like battery storage and green hydrogen are exciting for the future, but Asia is scaling up its energy sector now. What does that urgency mean for the current investment climate and for the future of the Earth's climate?In this episode, host Allan Marks sits down with Milbank partners James Murray and James Orme in Singapore and former Milbank partner Cathy Marsh, now at the Asian Development Bank in Manila, to look at the energy transition in Asia and the Pacific. About the Speakers James Murray is a partner in the Singapore office of Milbank and a member of the firm's Project, Energy and Infrastructure Finance Group. He represents parties in the development and financing of power, oil and gas, mining, telecoms and other infrastructure projects, and has advised clients on projects and financings across Asia.James Orme is a partner in the Singapore office of Milbank and a member of the firm's Project, Energy and Infrastructure Finance Group. He has significant experience advising clients on the financing and development of complex, large-scale energy and infrastructure projects, many of which involve multi-sourced financing arrangements and multiple tiers of debt.Catherine Marsh is Assistant General Counsel of Nonsovereign Operations at Asian Development Bank, which she joined in 2018. She is a Milbank alum.Podcast host Allan Marks is a partner in the Los Angeles office of Milbank and a member of the firm's Project, Energy and Infrastructure Finance Group. He advises developers, investors, lenders, and underwriters around the world in the development and financing of complex energy and infrastructure projects, as well as related acquisitions, restructurings and capital markets transactions. Mr. Marks also serves as an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley at both the Law School and the Haas School of Business.For more information and insights, follow us on social media and podcast platforms, including Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google and Audible. Disclaimer
Hour 2 of Thursday's A&G features a sad GDP report, David Drucker joins the show to discuss the President's outline for the spending bill. Michael finds an old Halloween safety video. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hour 2 of Thursday's A&G features a sad GDP report, David Drucker joins the show to discuss the President's outline for the spending bill. Michael finds an old Halloween safety video. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
A new push to replace GDP with an economic measure that factors in the value of nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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