We have a real treat now, and I did say briefly to Dr. Brzezinski that Winston Lord went out of his way to praise in unheralded terms. It was a great trip that he took in September 1978, and May of 1978. So I'm going to use that as the only bridge. Everyone knows Dr. Zabig Brzezinski. He was the national security advisor in the Carter administration instrumental informally establishing diplomatic relations between China and the United States. And of course everyone knows David Ignatius. I look forward to, I don't know which I'll enjoy reading more, his column or his novels. But each of them are stimulating and interesting and endlessly fruitful. So let me turn it to you to get started, David. Great. Thank you, John. I should just say you're allowed to read both. There's nothing that says you have to choose between fiction or non-fiction. It's great to be part of the greatest book party of all time, Dr. Kistner. And sitting here with Zabig Brzezinski honoring Dr. Kistner in his book, I am reminded of a phrase I heard as a student, as an undergraduate at Harvard. A professor named Samuel Beer, who some people may remember, used to give his lectures in what we called Soxi II. And he would talk about the great chain of being, which was this wonderful medieval concept of an ordered universe. And in my mind, I don't know about all that medieval stuff, but there is a great chain of being when it comes to national security. And that great chain of being flows through Henry Kissinger and through Brent Scowcroft and through Zabig near Brzezinski and then back again through Brent Scowcroft. And it's one of the really important and powerful things in our country and what keeps it going. So I think of this in part as a celebration of the great chain of being. And so with that as an introduction, let me turn to Dr. Brzezinski. And we're going to talk a little bit about the book on China. And we're going to talk a little bit about China and maybe some other issues too. But Zabig, I want to begin by asking you the core question at the center of Dr. Kistner's book and any contemporary discussion of China. Which is, are we fated to come in conflict with a rising China? There's a particularly interesting passage toward the end of Dr. Kistner's book in which he's citing a memo that was written by a British Foreign Service Officer. And I'm going to mispronounce his name, but it's Eier Krau. Do I have that right? We think of the Krau Memorandum in terms of Admiral Krau, but this was a much earlier Krau. And he was essentially saying, when you look at a rising Germany, the questions of good faith, of negotiation, of all of the attributes that statecraft might bring to this discussion matter less than the objective fact that this country is getting richer, more powerful, bigger weight in the world. And that if it, and he made naval armament the centerpiece of his analysis, if it goes forward with that armament, nothing else matters. That the objective correlates, if you will, mean that the confrontation is implicit. So let me ask you to take that as a starting point. Well, are we fated to become enemies? When you ask me that, I thought immediately of Henry and myself. So I hope that Henry, when he's up here, will associate himself with what it was reported Winston Lord was saying about me. That'll be the answer to that, but the answer is under suspension until we hear that affirmation. The same is true of the American-Chinese relationship. Both sides have to make an effort, and I think both sides are aware of the fact. I really do believe they're aware of the fact that their fates are somewhat interwoven, and therefore the better part of wisdom is to try to be friends. Maybe friends is too much, but quite seriously. I think we have clearly an awareness, at least on the sort of serious policy level in this country, that demonizing China is not a policy. It's a form of escapism, and it's a self-damaging escapism. I think the Chinese leadership has become somewhat more aware of that in recent months, in terms of its own attitude. If I may say so, I think I contributed a little bit to it in a number of private meetings with the leaders of the Chinese military and also with Chinese senior officials. And also in one meeting at which you, Henry, were there, where I sort of started doing the same act, namely reading to them what some of their serious journals are saying, reading back to them some of the things that their military are saying about us and how it impacts on our attitudes and how it interplays with those here who also spontaneously, or for some other motives, lean towards the demonization of China. My sense is that the Chinese in the last several months have seriously tried to tone down that anti-American analysis. I, for one, who follow this, you know, reasonably responsibly, have been struck by the fact that it's much less of it lately. But there was a kind of crescendo rising in the course of the last year and a half, getting close to a peak late last year. And then, because of a variety of inputs, and I don't want to claim mine was so decisive, but I certainly made a point of making it to the Chinese leaders, there was a change. And then we had the articles by Councillor Dai, kind of, you know, positive, constructive vision of China's role in the world. And what's his name, Zhang Bijun, Bijun, what's his first name? Zhang Bijun. Also, who is the chief ideologist, has written major pieces, reaffirming again the content of the proposition China, peacefully rising, harmonious world, and so forth. Now, I say this, and incidentally, these questions are not prearranged, so this wasn't a prepared speech, but this is an important question. These things are dynamic, and they're really dependent on the goodwill and determination and vision of the leaderships of both societies and in our society, of a more informed mass media. I am worried that in our mass media and in our political partisanship, we may be less able to control volatile public opinion. So that is a risk, but I think the relationship is altogether different from Imperial Germany in 1914 and Great Britain in 1914. So I'm on the whole cautiously optimistic. And in your mind, is there a red line in this Memorandum of Britain in 1907 about rising Germany that the red line was a significant naval armament by Germany that would challenge Britain's dominance of the oceans and its ability to maintain its empire? Is there a similar red line in your mind as you think about China that if they proceeded down a certain path, that would then lead you to say, as much as we like the nice things that people sometimes say, objectively speaking, we have a problem? Well, we may have more of an objective problem. What grounds can we say to the Chinese you're not entitled to an oceanic navy? What grounds? We're entitled to have a navy that can be deployed in the far eastern Pacific, but they're not entitled to an oceanic navy that can reach out, let's say towards Hawaii, or that can somehow or other and be present in the Indian Ocean. If I were Chinese, I would say my strategic security depends on the ability to operate freely on the oceans. And the ability to operate freely on the oceans for a major power cannot be a main gift from a more powerful other state. It has to be intrinsic to their own capabilities. So that is a question that we can resolve, but we have managed to deal even with a much more belligerent, short-sighted and, in its latter phases, incompetent Soviet leadership. We have established a situation of, in effect, a kind of nuclear interdependence. Even though we started off with a massive edge, then they decided to catch up. We decided not to go to war to prevent them from doing it, and I certainly don't think that we would be very productive in terms of our national interest. We went to some sort of conflict with China to prevent them from having something which, inherently, a great power like China is entitled to have. Inevitably, and my question certainly focused you in this direction, in speaking about red lines, you're speaking about ways of projecting power that we could call legacy systems. A deep water navy, the ability to transit the straits of Malacca. I mean, those are images that could arise any time over the last 150, 200 years. When I ask, in my rare visits to China, when I ask Chinese defense analysts this question, I get an interesting answer from one in particular who's a prominent professor at Fudan University in Shanghai named Dengli Shen. And he says, why would we want to contest you in the Straits of Malacca? We have no interest in building a legacy system to rival yours at enormous expense. These are the weapons of the past. What we want is to be able to go into the battle spaces of the future. We want to be very powerful in space systems. We want to have the cyber and other new weapons, beam weapons, other related weapons that will allow us to disable your command and control of your fleet at sea that you have put out at enormous expense and all of your systems. We want to be able to take out any tank, any ship by new means, new technologies, and that's where we're going. And I wonder if you'd speak to that. In other words, you know, when we think about drawing lines, there are sort of lines in the past where we've already been. And that's not where the issues will be five, ten, twenty years out. Well, I'm not sure if that's where the issues will be 20, 25 years from now. They may both be operative, so to speak.  I would sort of play it low-key and try to do whatever is possible within the reach. For the Chinese, sure, competing with us in this sort of new dimensions of global power is obviously an important challenge. The one that they probably feel they have to meet in the longer run. But in the shorter run, they also do have a problem of secure access to something that they desperately need and which passes through the Indian Ocean and then through the Strait of Malacca. And they may well feel, and rightly so, that they don't want to be dependent on the goodwill of their neighbors or perhaps on us helping them even, which would be a long stretch and for which we would probably demand a price. So they will try to work around that. This doesn't mean some sort of a naval confrontation between the Chinese and the Indians, but it means a capability to project their power. It also means, and there are a lot of reports on this, the establishment of some sort of presence on the Indian Ocean in western, southwestern Pakistan, the port of Gardir or whatever it's called exactly. And they seem to be exploring that, building a road, building a pipeline, perhaps building a base. Those, I think, are kind of sensible elements of what obviously is a regional competition and some degree of regional reassurance for something that is vital. Beyond that, they are beginning to ask themselves, I've noticed that in their analyses, they're beginning to ask themselves, what are the implications for them, of what is becoming apparent to them, also to me, of America's decline in the Middle East? Because, you know, we have been the dominant power in the Middle East for the last 50, 60, 65 years or so. I think that power is rather rapidly declining these days for a variety of reasons connected with our policies and errors, misconceptions and even deceptions. But whatever the motive is for the Chinese, what is of course of importance is what happens if we decline. And then what should be their role in the Middle East? And they may need the Navy in that connection as well. Stay with that for a moment and let me ask you, how worried should we be about the reports that Bunderbin Sultan is making a secret mission to China to talk about Saudi Arabia's concern about declining American power and its desire for better relations with China? That comes at the same time that the Pakistanis are signaling quite dramatically their sense that whatever their problems with the United States, they have a good and improving relationship with China. Pakistani officials said to me recently, at last we're on the right side of history. Our relationship with America may be going to hell, but the new rising superpower, there are best friends. When we hear talk like that, when we read about Bunder going to China, should we be nervous or should we say welcome to the Middle East mess, Chinese brothers and sisters? Well, I think we should be concerned about what we are doing or have not been doing and what it means for our position because our decline in the Middle East is not ordained by history. It's a byproduct of our short-sightedness, absence of leadership, political opportunism and indifference to some basic geopolitical or even moral dimensions of some of the problems involved. It's a problem of our making, but that does not necessarily involve China. We have to address that anyway because we have such a stake, political, geopolitical and moral in the Middle East that it's in our interest to address it and the fact of the matter is that for decades now our leadership has been on the whole more skillful in policy. It's programmed to go off when you talk about the Middle East. While they're fixing, let me talk with you for a minute about the context in which you dealt with China, dealt with Deng Xiaoping and the context in which Dr. Kissinger dealt with Zhou Enlai and that context was our concern about a strong, you can argue about whether it was perceived at the time as rising. My recollection is that it was seen as a rising Soviet Union and here was a chance to get a natural ally, an unconventional one, against our common enemy. Well, one analogous situation is as we look at this rising China and try to figure out how much of a threat it is, we look a little closer in Asia and we see a rising India. When I travel to New Delhi, as I'm sure is true for many people in this audience, I hear discussion from Indian strategists about the inherent implicit unity of interest between the United States and India at this time and people don't like to use the C word, the containment word, but that's really what they're talking about and I'd be very interested in your thoughts about this. In a sense it's inherent in the situation no matter what anybody says, but what are the opportunities of it, what are the dangers, what do you think? Well, first of all, when we were competing with the Soviets, we were competing with someone that was openly proclaiming that our end is approaching, even setting a date for when they'll become global and supreme, pursuing programs that were highly hostile and were generally motivated ideologically by very, very articulated and explicit hostility towards us. And of course we reciprocated accordingly. I don't think the situation between us and the Chinese is of that kind, but I can see in that context how it would be in the interest of India to get us at loggerheads with the Chinese. But I think given my sense of what is involved, which is a very complicated long-term development in China in a rather complicated Asian context, we don't need to slide down that path unnecessarily. So I am a little skeptical about some of these efforts to enlist us into some sort of anti-Chinese relationship unless I become convinced that we are in fact facing some sort of a hostile challenge. The challenge that I see at this moment in our relationship with China is more rooted within the United States than it is in the relationship. It's whether we can pull ourselves together, whether we can get on top of the problems that we face. Can we reactivate the potential dynamism of our society? Can we begin to articulate effectively and compellingly a notion of a healthy society which doesn't define well-being purely in the acquisition of material goods? Can we begin to achieve a little more social justice in a society in which the extremes of social inequality are worse of all indexed countries in the world? The tiny percentage of the super-rich owning an enormous share of total wealth and a growing number of the poor were becoming poorer. And in that context we're also of course concerned about our global power and in some cases in a manner that leads us into adventurism in which we start wars under false pretenses. Totally false pretenses and then get bogged down and that of course then leads to a further escalation of the process and to the prolongation of the conflict. So a great deal of what besets us and handicaps us in the relationship with China is not because China is rising, but because to put it very crudely we've been screwing ourselves up for a fairly long period of time. That's powerfully said. I'm going to be pedantic and return to Asia for a minute not to diminish the force of what you just said. I'd ask you to talk a little bit about the map of the rest of Asia. When people talk at conferences, meet at the CSIS, they'll talk about a rising China. They'll talk about the implications of a rising India as a potentially competing power. But they'll sometimes talk about a relative decline in Japanese power. They'll also talk about South Korea as a wild card. They'll talk about an increasingly assertive Southeast Asia. Hard to know exactly where the fault lines lie there. And I'd just be interested in your thinking out loud as a long-time observer of these different pieces of the Asian story. What's your thoughts about Japan, about South Korea, about the ASEAN world and where it's going? Well, I'll just make two points about it. First of all, I think that is a challenge that the Chinese have to think through very seriously. Because in all of this talk about rising China, harmonious world and all of that, these pieces that you rightly bring up don't figure very much. So they better think about it hard. But secondly, and more specifically, I think any talk of writing of Japan as some sort of moribund state populated by elderly people is just a misjudgment of what Japan is about. I think the Japanese went through a terrible experience in the last few months. But what has struck me from following as to what and how the Japanese people are reacting, what has struck me was the courage, determination, self-discipline of the Japanese. And I think Japan is going to make a significant comeback. Maybe it's even a healthy jolt in a way because it's forcing all of the Japanese to ask themselves, how do we conduct ourselves in the world and how do we operate as a society? But they're asking it in a context of really impressive determination and self-discipline. I hate to think who have been like in the United States, if anything like that had happened on the West Coast, let's say. And we have a little preview of it in terms of what happened in New Orleans when the place got ripped apart by our equivalent of tsunami and the violence and this thievery and so forth, practically none of that in Japan. This is an impressive country with impressive people with a sense of its mission. I think Japan is now debating very actively what kind of a defense policy it ought to have, what kind of alliances it ought to have in Asia, whether it should go into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, whether it should go into other forms of association, perhaps, economic partnership agreement with the EU and so forth. I think this is going to give Japan much-needed kind of stimulus for a more active role in the world, commensurate with the size of a GNP. It is, after all, the number three economic power in the world, much larger than a European country. So I think Japan should not be ignored in this context. Let me ask you about South Korea. South Korea often flies under the radar in strategic discussions, but it shouldn't. What do you think, and I'd be as interested in your, how will you assess this if you were a Japanese policy advisor as a Chinese? Well, I think, I know what you're alluding to, and I think the continuing hostility between them is unfortunate, and I hope it begins to wane. And I think in this new emerging context, there may be some acceleration in that waning. But the South Koreans are a wonderful example of economic success. They're now in the top 20 economic powers in the world. They see themselves as a global player, which is an amazing change in South Korea. And they have moved from an authoritarian model of rapid development to a successful polity that is genuinely democratic in its procedures. And in that sense, there may be a hidden example here for the Chinese that the Chinese haven't thought about, because in the long run, one way or another, the issue of self-governance, which we define as human rights, is going to confront the Chinese unavoidably. And I think the South Koreans, in a sense, have demonstrated what might be some of the stages in that evolution. We talk in America often about American exceptionalism, and the parts of Dr. Kitzler's book that I found especially interesting was the discussion of what makes China China. And there's some interesting, simple analogies that are used. One of them that caught my eye was the contrast between our kind of intellectual framework as a chess-playing culture where it's about victory. You just crush your opponent in chess, or it's a draw, where the pieces are all out on the board, where there's something about chess that's highly rational in what we think of as our Western way. And the Chinese fondness for a game that we usually call Go, that I gather is called Wei Qi from reading Dr. Kitzler. Never having played it, I couldn't begin to understand it, you know, about strategic encirclement and kind of going where they ain't, and that sort of thing. There's also in this book a lot of discussion about the Confucian nature of Chinese society, the sort of thing you hear from Chinese, you know, we're different, we want harmony, we want everybody just to get along peacefully. And there is an evocation of this Chinese difference, much more subtly than I, that little shorthand. But it makes you ask the question, you know, does the Confucian part of China overwhelm the Machiavellian part of human nature? There's a blunt way to put it. That's a very good question. Let me first of all say quite honestly that I think Henry's book is really an erudite and elegant piece of work, and he has every reason to be proud of it. It's well written, he has some really wonderful terms of phrases, and it does enhance one's sort of intellectualized understanding of the Chinese, and I used the word understanding in the sense of acquired experience. I was never a student of China as such, and I bow in deference to those who were, but neither was Henry, and I think we acquired a certain understanding of the Chinese, and Henry grasps it and expresses it extremely well. The examples you have cited are the two ones in which I have some doubt however, and I therefore preface my comments by saying something that I've just said, and which I really mean sincerely. I'm not sure that one can push this conflict between chess and go too far. The Chinese are known for playing the game subtly and over the long haul, but if they have the opportunity to produce a decisive one-sided, sometimes extremely assertive, if not to use the word brutal outcome, they do so as well. So the notion that we play... Let me push you on that, what's an example? That's precisely the point that some people would... Well, I'll give you an example, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians in Inner Mongolia right now. I mean, these are things which are resolved by the Chinese without playing go with an outcome like in chess. You know, somebody gets it, and the result stands there. And we have also learned to play the other way. We didn't win the war in Korea, but we were satisfied with the outcome. We didn't go all out for a victory like in chess. We settled for that in Vietnam. Do you want to make a bet about Afghanistan? I think we're all looking for the go outcome there. Yeah, so I have some uncertainty about that. And the other uncertainty, and here I am really on tenuous grounds, and it's not a criticism of Henry or disagreement with Henry. It's really more a question mark, the Confucian aspect. It certainly is there. But I was struck in reading Henry's book that he refers to the monument that they have put up near the Great Hall of the People to Confucius. And that was very, very suggestive and made me wonder repeatedly what it means. I erased it with Chinese leaders, and I noticed they were always a little embarrassed about it. Can anyone in this room tell me where that monument is today? Well, it just disappeared. It's no longer there. Now, these things don't happen by themselves. The embalmed body of somebody else is still in the Great Hall of the People. And there's an interesting debate surfacing right now in China about the relevance of Maoism. I think it's a strained argument, but the relevance of Maoism to the current economic success of China. There's been a book recently published on this sort of economic prospects for China by a Chinese scholar. A rather interesting book, actually, in which he predicts categorically that China will emerge on top. And he gives a great deal of credit to Mao Zedong. Not terribly much to anybody else, except current leaders. So... Really, this is a go player. Yeah, so... I just don't know whether Chinese are really that fundamentally different from us. They operate differently. They have a very different style of personal negotiating. I'm sure Henry experienced it as well, and when they want to put you ill at ease on some issue, they all of a sudden burst into this kind of strange, unpredictable laughter in which you have a sense they're laughing at you.  But I think it's all this kind of gamesmanship. They also become sometimes very vividly angry. And I don't think that's entirely emulation. I think sometimes they really do let themselves go. And you sense that in the public outburst of Chinese nationalism, how emotionally aroused they become. I experienced that not only in the negotiating process, but even in meeting with Chinese students, where we talked about various things, Beijing University students, and their desire for democracy, more open internet, freedom of travel, choice of leaders and so forth. And then Taiwan came up and bang, all of a sudden, all of a very angry and very really nastily ugly. It wasn't contrived. So there are certain cultural patterns that differentiate them. But ultimately, I think their salesmanship is wise. It's prudent. It's patient. Maybe those are the discerning differences. But I don't personally, since I do play chess, I think that it either negates the relevance of chess to their own strategy, nor our ability also sometimes to be cleverly duplicitous, deceitful, patient, willing to proclaim victory when we barely avoided defeat and so forth. Let me ask one last question. I've been looking for John Hamry. So I'm just going to go by my watch, which says it's 3.30 in time for this panel then. John. One more question. And this is a question that I'd love to hear Dr. Kissinger answer to at some point. Reading this book is to be startled again, even though you've read the story so many times, about what creative diplomacy can do as Dr. Kissinger says at the end of the first meeting in 1971 with Joe Enlai and recalls in the last page of the book, this will shake the world. What we're doing here as diplomats, the opening we're creating will shake the world and transform possibilities for both countries. And so my question to you is, is there any diplomatic opportunity you can see at this moment? Anything that genuinely creative, out-of-the-box American diplomacy or statecraft could do. You've already answered part of this, which is clean up our own mess. So I want to ask you to project it abroad. That would change the fundamentals in a way that we'd end up saying, we've shaken up the world here. Are you talking about the American-Chinese relationship? No. More generally. Well, that could be talking about that. I'm really asking you in whatever direction that I was thinking more broadly. Well, yeah, but I think that will divert us to a totally different subject, which I don't think we're here to discuss. I'm convinced that our policy in that part of the world, which now on the map has to be drawn from the Tunisian-Libyan frontier and to the Chinese frontier at Xinjiang, our policy in that entire sector of the world is self-defeating, counterproductive, damaging to our interests, and really posing on history's agenda the question mark regarding our role in the world in the future. This is where I think we are off in the wrong direction, but that takes us elsewhere. When it comes to American China, I think what Henry started and working with Nixon in a brilliantly creative way, which was then consummated some years later by, if I may say so, Carter, is of fundamental importance to our well-being, and this is why intelligent management of the American-Chinese relationship is not only in our interest, it's doable. Henry's book is a very significant contribution to making that possible, and I think we stay on that course, we'll avoid an unnecessary catastrophe and maybe we'll be in a better position to deal with a self-created catastrophe which is now in the process of mushrooming. And this is why I do think we have a serious foreign policy dilemmas on our hand, but it isn't the Chinese one. That's the perfect note on which to close this session, so join me in thanking Dr. Prudence Prudence.


US, Germany, Britain refused to send fighter jets to Ukraine. Ukraine's allies in the West differ in their views of the possibility of sending US-made F-16 fighters and warplanes in general to Kiev. US President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have so far ruled out any jet deliveries, while French leader Emmanuel Macron said such assistance could be provided if a number of conditions were met. Poland and Lithuania, the two countries who lobbied for Western tank supplies to Ukraine the most, also demanded the fighter jets be delivered. Earlier, the Netherlands promised to consider such a scenario. Meanwhile, the Kiev regime has insisted that it is in dire need of warplanes, despite the lack of consensus among their Western partners. On the one hand, the situation is similar to the story with Western-made tanks and option Kiev's partners originally declined, too. On the other hand, the transfer of fighter jets to Ukraine, the training of pilots to use them and subsequent maintenance will inevitably encounter major technical hurdles that could impede the fulfilment of this request by Ukraine. Russian International Affairs Council Director-General Andrey Quartanov told Russian Comissant that no fighter jets would be sent to Kiev in the next 12 months for quite a number of reasons. To him, these include escalation concerns for warplanes would require the West getting involved in the conflict, even deeper than in the scenario with tanks. There are other major technical obstacles, too, ranging from training to the availability of runways at Ukrainian airfields, the bulk of which are not adapted for use with F-16s, let alone other models, Quartanov said. Rather, the focus will be on air defence systems, which are easier to use and it would be easier to disguise those. Russia's superiority in the air is one of the problems facing the Ukrainian army, so this issue will be revisited, the expert concluded.


So, in this talk, I'm going to discuss about using multi-camera system to measure the three-dimensional motion of the birth in the field. So in this talk, I'm going to show you that by improving the measurement accuracy, we are able to measure both, not only the body motion, but also the wing motion of the birth in the field. And this work is a collaboration work between three different universities. And it is sponsored by Human Frontery Science Program. So using multi-camera system to track the motion of the birth has been used in many years. But the problem is that the distance between camera is relatively shorter compared to the distance of the birth to the camera. And as a result, the image measurement accuracy in the direction perpendicular to the image plan is relatively low. So in most previous work, people have just treated the birth as a single point. They are not able to measure the wing motion. So the purpose of our study is that we are going to develop a system that is able to overcome the distance barrier between the cameras so that we are able to improve the measurement accuracy in all three directions. And I'm going to show you that by doing this, how we can measure both the body motion and the wing motion. So this is our simple experiment setup. So because if you want to work in the field, it's very important to make the system very portable. So we actually apply the USB cameras. So those cameras can be both powered and controlled through a single laptop. So we're using four cameras. Each two camera is controlled by one laptop. And in this experiment setup, the camera is looking into the sky. And the birth is flying at a height about 50 meters height. So we set our cameras at the distance into 50 to 60 meters. But in some other system, when the birth is flying even higher, we are able to extend the distance even further. And so as you see here, this is a sample image. We capture from the image when the birth is flying through the cameras. So from these images, you could see that the shape of the birth is clearly distinguishable. So we are able to measure both the body and the location of the wing. And this is how we set up the camera in the field. So the birth species we're interested in is the Jack-Tor and the Rook. Both the birth species belong to Carvold family. So they are social animals. So during the daytime there, they will spend the time in the town to find the food. And in the late afternoon there, the birds were gathering together and flying towards the trees where they spent the night. So the flying path of the birth is very predictable. So we could set up the cameras in the farm just above the flying, just below the flight path to capture the motion of the birds. And so one very important problem is how do you solve the optical occlusion problem. So because the birds, they have very high collared motion and they may fly very close to each other. So you may have some situation when two birds, they form an overlap image on camera one. So as you heard in yesterday morning's talk, they have developed some global optimization work to solve the occlusion problem. But here, since we can take advantage of the larger distance between cameras. So even if you have overlap image on camera one, because the other camera has very different viewing angle, so the birds will not form overlap image on camera two. So we can take advantage of that to develop a simple algorithm to solve the occlusion problem. So first of all, we just follow the simple one-to-one match, just like for each detect the birds on camera one to find the matched one on camera two and to detect the birds. So after this step, you may see that there's still one bird that is missing. You haven't used that information. So we could do additional steps, like searching the unmatched birds from the first one to find the unmatched birds. So we could recover the missing birds. And then by combining these two steps, we're able to recover all the birds. And then we can track them in time to find the trajectory. And so as I mentioned that we are able to measure the shape of the birds. So now I'm going to show you how we can measure both body and wing motion. So initially, we just detect the center of the birds, just based on the center of the shape. So that 2D location is coupled with both body and wing motion. So if you're using this 2D location to calculate the 3D trajectory, you will find out that the trajectory have this wave package, have this high frequency wing motion. So then we can set a cut off, because the body motion has a very relatively low frequency. However, the wing motion is a very high frequency. You could set a cut off frequency to gather the body motion, and then you can subtract the body motion from this hole and to gather the wing motion. Now you may ask the question, whether this body motion really captures the center of the birds? So we could project the 3D location back to the camera to see whether this really captures the center of the body. So yes, we do. We're really able to capture the center of the body. And now, since we calculated the wing motion, we could do a continuous wave wave transform to gather the time dependent wing bead frequency. So as you can see here, we clearly distinguish that the flapping motion, during the flapping motion, the wing bead frequency is about 5 hertz, and then the birds start to decrease height into the gliding mode, where the wing bead frequency is zero. So by doing this, we are able to measure along the 3D trajectory, we are able to measure the wing bead frequency, the time dependent wing bead frequency. And here I'm showing you a sample data with 15 jackdolls flying through the tracking volume. So you saw that for each trajectory, we were able to measure the varying of the shape. So I'm going to show you that because most early work about the birds, about the collective motion of birds, they only depending on the position of velocity. So here, since the wing motion is something which the birds could control, directly control in response to environmental stimulate. So this may help, using wing motion may help us to better understand how the birds is response to other environmental stimulate. So the first thing we can use the wing motion is to classify the trajectory into different flying modes. So we have, so in this plot, I'm plotting some simple trajectory, the changing of height as they traveling around. So we can look, and the color is colored by the wing bead frequency. So we found that the birds can have three flapping modes. So by depending on the changing of height, they could fly horizontally without changing height or clamping or diving. And the birds can also like, has none flapping region, which can also decreasing height or increasing height. For each flying mode, we are able to calculate the flying speed and the wing bead frequency. And the second thing is that we are able to maybe investigate a little bit about the wing aerodynamics in the field. Because people have studied the wing aerodynamics in the laboratory, such as put the birds in the wind tunnel to study how the force is generated on the wing. And they found out that as you increase, after you increase the speed above 10 meters per second, if you keep increasing the speed, they found out that the birds has to flap the wing much faster. That is because above 10 meters per second, if you keep increasing speed, the drag on the wing is become higher and higher. So the power is also increased. So the birds has to flap the wing much faster. But however, such kind of experiment has never been performed, it's very hard to conform in the field. But here, since we can measure the wing bead frequency, so we are able to conform whether this experiment is true in the field, whether it's really happening in the field. So we plot the wing bead frequency as a function of the flying speed. We indeed conform that as you increase in the flying speed, the wing bead frequency also increase. The second thing is that we are able to tell us the response time between a pair of birds. So we found a pair of birds. So you have these two trajectory. The birds A, first of all, clamping and then diving. Then the birds B just follow the path of the bird A. So you may ask, what's the response time? What's the time lag between B and A? So in the previous work, people have determined the delay time based on the acceleration of velocity correlation. So from here, if you plot the acceleration, you could look at the peak location of the when the birds have the highest radial acceleration to determine the delay time. And in both methods, that tells you a delay time about 0.3 seconds. But however, the velocity and the acceleration is the consequence of how the birds changes the wing motion or changes the body posture. So this is a consequence of how the birds change in the wing motion. It may not tell you how fast they respond. So here, because we are able to measure the wing motion, so we could directly measure how fast they respond. So from here, you could see that the red one, if you look very carefully, you'll find that the bird A stops the flap as a wing. But however, the bird B has to finish a whole wing bead cycle, then stops the wing motion. So the delay time is, if you look at the wing bead frequency, it also tells you that the delay time is about one wing bead cycle. So the first of all, the delay time is about 0.3 seconds. They all match with each other. This is a good news. The more important thing is that maybe it tells you that how fast a bird can respond to its neighborhood. It depends on how fast it could flap its wing. If the bird has higher wing bead frequency, it may indicate that the bird could respond faster. So the third thing you can ask is, where the flying group could save energy? So in this well-organized group formed by Snow Geese, some people have shown that the birds in the behind could actually take advantage of the upward wing motion generated by the birds in the front to save energy. However, in this randomly organized group, whether the birds could save energy or not. This is questionable. And we could actually check that. So we plot the wing bead frequency as a function of local density. So local density is calculated by how many neighborhood birds around me. So we found out, as you increase in the local density, like if you have more birds around me, the wing bead frequency also increase. However, the flying speed doesn't increase. So it may indicate that flying in group may not save energy for this randomly organized group. Now we can move on to ask the question, why flying in group couldn't save energy in this randomly organized group? So we calculated the acceleration as a function of local density. And we found out that as you increase in local density, the acceleration has also to increase. That means we could decouple the acceleration in the direction that along the flying direction and in the direction normal to the flying direction. And we found out most of the acceleration is due to the acceleration normal to your flight direction. That means the birds in more dense group has to make more turns to avoid collision into some other birds. So that maybe tells you why flying in group in this randomly organized group doesn't save energy. Maybe also cause increase energy. And the last thing we can use the wing bead frequency is that as I told you before, we have two different bird species. One is jactal, another is rook. If you just look very carefully along how the bird shape looks like, maybe it's a little hard to determine which one is which. Now, because since we can measure the wing bead frequency, maybe we could be using the wing bead frequency to identify the birds. So we did some more experiment to measure some pairs of isolated jactals and rooks. We identified that indeed the rooks and the jactals have different wing bead frequency. So this may indicate that we may able to using the wing bead frequency to identify the birds in this flock. So now I'm going to move forward like we also have some data with flock with about more than 200 birds. So this is around the x1 is around the flying direction and the x3 is the gravity direction. And we saw that the birds as they fly traveling around the distribution is not homogeneous. Instead, they form some subgroups around the flying direction. You saw that the subgroup 1 or subgroup 2. And the subgroups, they are connected by some birds located in between. So you may ask the question, whether this is two subgroups, they are interacting with each other or not. So we actually performed the correlation and analyze to look at the correlation of the velocity fluctuation. So in this plot, we plot the velocity fluctuation subgroup 1 or subgroup 2, or you could do the analyze for the entire group. And in this plot, you show that the blue one is corresponding to this blue curve. You could say that as you increase the subgroup size, the correlation length also increase. And the more interesting is that if you treat the two subgroups as a whole, the correlation length even increase much larger than the subgroup size. So it may tell you that the two subgroups is really interactive with each other. So the next step we are going to do is we are trying to understand how does the information transfer from the first group to the second group. So this is what we are going to do in the future. And the second, so this is a very special case for the car world family, because you will always see a pair of birds flying very close to each other. That is because in this car world family, this pair of birds, they have a very long time social relationship. This pair of birds maybe come from the same family, which is a father and a mother. So you may ask the question, maybe the pair of birds have much stronger interaction within the pairs compared to the rest of the group. And such a kind of heterogeneity, how this heterogeneity will affect the global structure or local interaction is questionable. So this is also the second direction we are going to do. And we have performed some preliminary analysis. You could look at the first neighborhood relatively positioned, like surrounding me. So if the theta is 90 degrees, it means it's on my side. If it's 0 or 180 degrees, it's in my front or back. So you could say that for some birds, which is a pair, so the distribution is more anthropic. So the more anthropic the distribution is, it means that you have much stronger interaction. So we really confirm that the pair of birds has much stronger interaction compared to the birds that is not a pair. And the next thing we are going to do is we are trying to find out whether this local heterogeneity interaction will affect the global structure. And so I put the conclusion here that we develop a portable system that is able to measure both body and wing motion. And I show you that if we're using the wing motion, we are able to better characterize the birds' behavior in the nature. And then I also show you some heterogeneity effect on the global behavior. With that, I'd like to thank all for your attention. And I'd like to take any question you might have. Any questions?


Welcome folks, we have the Dow Industries down to 40, Nasdaq off 80, S&Ps off 26, gold contract up $23 trading at $15.51 an ounce, you have silver up 12 cents, $18.16 an ounce, light sweet crude up $2.27, $63.47, a barrel of notes and bonds, you get the tenure note, up 19 ticks, $129.05, the 30-year up a full point plus four ticks at $157.24, notes and bonds folks, bottom line last week what they did, they tested the lows, had light of volume, rejected the lows, stacked only higher yesterday with volume, they have volume today, they continue to want higher price, lower yield, $Kingdala, $Kingdala up 53 ticks, trading 96, 898, $Kingdala tested the highs of Tuesday, failed on price this morning, bottom line, you can expect Kingdala is going to make its way down to the 95 area, euros at 111, the yen is at 108.16 and the pound is at 130 to 1 US dollar, we get open, we take a look at the S&Ps folks, what you have out here inside the S&Ps, last night what you had is that the, you had basically a drone attack, the second and the most powerful general NIRN got killed, bottom line, S&Ps get out to 3206, markets folks, it's so deviant, it's so cool, it's unbelievable, bottom line you can expect once again a test of the highs, why? Because if we go over to the NQs, what you're going to see is this, the Nasdaq 100 composite broke highs yesterday, had the volume behind the move, bottom line that says it's going to get tested again and I expect the deviance is just about as cool as you can get because you know, you could very well get this high tested today, okay, which would be, this market is shaking everything off, that being said, the bottom line, how it tested is going to say everything, why? Because these notes and bonds, they've been saying for a long period of time, they continue to want higher price, lower yield, they're moving with conviction today which is wide price spread accelerated volume, bottom line they want higher price, we go into Kingdala, just the opposite, Kingdala had broken, it's uptrend last week as well as last month, what Kingdala did out here today, got into the highs of Tuesday, gave it up, gave it up at the price point of 96-103, we got to 105 here at 96-912, you can expect high volatility out here today, we'll see whether it comes into the green, I expect actually we're going to stay into the red, that being said, we've seen the lows of today, I expect you're going to basically test those highs before we go lower in the next couple of days, stay right there Tommy and I, come right back.


We have a Blue Eyes by Dragon 10. This thing is like minty too, so opening this is this.  That's just how we roll here. Here we go. Okay, there is a tiny bit of scuffing. What? What? Do you guys see that? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You guys see this, right? This is not a summon skull tin. This is a Blue Eyes tin. You see what card i'm holding, right? A summon skull. There is a summon skull in our Blue Eyes tin. What on earth is going on?


We're back, we're live. I'm Jay Fiedel here on ThinkTech. Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy on ThinkTech. So our show today is called, we call it, an afternoon with Representative Chris Lee. We're going to talk to Chris about energy and transportation. We address the issue of whether there's a miles to go for us to get a hand on energy and transportation in Hawaii. Now if you want to ask a question, participate in the discussion, you can tweet us at ThinkTechHI or call us at<PHONE_NUMBER>. And we also have my co-host, Meena Merida. So let me get this straight now. Chris is the chair of the House Energy and Environmental Protection Committee right now today. However, Meena Merida is his predecessor and for many years she was the chair of that very same committee and thence she was the chair of the PUC. This is a totally VIP show. And there was one person in between us, Denny Hoffman. Yeah, you mentioned that. Yeah, for a short while. So first we should talk about the session, Chris, because you know we need to hear it from you. We've heard it from many people. Many people have talked about this session as a special, special session. And I don't mean that in terms of a session that meets in the summer. I mean the session that met in the spring was special. You know, it was a very different year than I think most people have ever seen before. Number one, in D.C. you've got, you know, Trump Administration, which is placing a lot of pressure on federal funding and all kinds of stuff. Nobody knows what's going to happen. But locally, we had a lot of big issues. Rail returned, among other things, that kind of blew up at the end of the session. And that sort of cast, So I want to kind of take this kind of logically. First of all, what was the highlight for you personally in this session?  One thing that really stood out was something that went completely under the radar, didn't get a single piece of coverage anywhere. It was a piece, it was a resolution that the state passed. We passed it unanimously, Republicans, Democrats, House and Senate. And what it did was it made Hawaii the first state in the country to say that it should be a right of all families to be financially, economically secure.  Wouldn't that be great, huh? But haven't yet been done here in Hawaii. Yeah, that would be great. We've got local support too. Piro Midyar just put in a whole ton of money into a pilot project in Kenya, I think almost half a billion dollars to give out to people to test what this would mean for an economy. And what we would do here in our own economy, which is very exposed to automation and loss of jobs because of those harness of vehicles and all the kinds of things that are coming down the pipe. So that's something which is, I think, the real world. So the next step for that resolution is to, is this a study or how is it structured? It's a working group. So it's going to be the Department of Labor and the Department of Business Economic Development Tourism, Chamber of Commerce Labor unions, everybody coming together to figure out how much are we currently spending as a state on social services? What is our exposure in our economy to automation and job loss and all these sorts of things coming up? And what will that mean financially for the state? And starting with that baseline, we can then evaluate meaningfully, what will it cost to actually make sure that we have a future here for our families and an economy that's sustainable? Wow, that's pretty visionary actually. Is there a deadline on that, on that committee? Are they supposed to report back to somebody by a certain day? Yeah, we'll be getting a report back beginning of next year right as the legislature reconvenes. That's great. We want to follow that and see what happens. So interesting it didn't get that much publicity. So are there any bills sitting on the governor's desk that was a highlight for the legislature as a whole? I think the legislature as a whole. There is one that stands out and it does go back to cost of living and all the big stuff we're seeing here. And it's a bill that finally starts to give money back to local residents. Earn income tax credit. Earn income tax credit. Which we have been a champion for long before any of us were around. Are you saying I'm old? I'm saying you've led the way. But yeah, so after decades of Hawaii not providing something like this that most other states do, we're finally being able to give support to working families in a meaningful way. Yeah, that's big, that's great. How about in the energy environmental realm? Yeah, off the top of my head, not only are we kicking more money over to our schools for energy efficiency and other things, but there is a bill that would set up a process for farmers, local farmers in the ag sector to be able to be compensated and qualify for carbon credits to sequester carbon. And that's something which could be a sorely needed revenue stream for a lot of folks, particularly when it's done in conjunction with PV and other renewables that they can use to help offset their own emissions. Is that likely to be signed? I think so. I think we've got favorable, I mean I think almost all the testimony, I think all the testimony actually was in support and right now Hawaiian Airlines among other local companies are looking at putting in millions of dollars in carbon offsets and we want to be able to keep that money here in our own economy and reinvest it. So this would be a vehicle to do that. That's good for agriculture, that's the important thing. Yeah, they need various income streams and definitely this helps. You were going to ask Chris about the bill that provided a target for clean energy and transportation. I know you are. Right, you know, we're all watchers here and so one of the bills that we were watching was House Bill 1580 and I guess the main portion of that bill was setting renewable fuels targets and you know we saw what happened to it at the final hours of conference committee and so you know understanding that it's a really big task to come together to put guiding principles policies forward. Have you any suggestions on how to tackle kind of gnarly big policy issues like saying these kinds of targets but more so because we're anticipating so many disruptions in the transportation sector with things like autonomous cars so advancing technologies. Do you have any suggestions on how to move forward on these big picture kinds of issues and the policies needed? Sure, you know I think 1580 was a bill that I think was one of the first years we've had a real significant discussion at the legislature about electrifying transportation and what that means in decades from now but the bill when it died didn't die on its merits. I think there was large consensus in the House and Senate that this was the general direction that we wanted to go and our law right now our state plan currently says that we want to eliminate fossil fuels for ground transportation here in the state. It doesn't have a date attached to it but that's just a guiding principle and so this would have taken that next step. I think one of the things that we did see out of that prior law passed a couple of years ago is the Department of Transportation getting together with the energy office creating this working group with a whole bunch of different stakeholders to look at what are those realistic actual actionable steps and what's the low-hanging fruit to get started on as we make this transition. I think that's something that especially now has been invaluable so if we're going to move forward now to this next step and figure out all right what's realistic and how are we going to get there. I think for sure we've got to try and analyze as best we can what resources we have locally to be able to leverage. And right now I just got back from California actually meeting with their Senate president who's been doing a lot of work in this area as well as the Energy Commission and the PUC their CPUC and they're all working in the same general space as we aren't here and of course they've got a lot more resources to bring to bear. And they have a market if you drive the market. That's right and they are driving the market as we speak and one of the guys was just saying you know right now their their current goal is to sell 100% zero emissions vehicles by 2050 and they're looking at advancing that potentially as much as 10 years based on what the market's actually done in some of these places in California right now and so they're putting hundreds of millions of dollars in various channels to try and tackle this problem of how you actually get from here to there. And so there's a couple things I think people don't realize that are already happening that will probably have much more influence in where we go than any policy we could put into law. You know when I was graduating from high school which was only a few years ago like 1999 I don't know if it was a few years ago but at that point driving in Hawaii was it was a must-do and it was a real desire for everybody. I remember in our high school everybody wanted their driver's license at that time in 1999 99% of 29 year olds had driver's licenses. Today that number is plummeted to just 65% and it's dropping every single year. And that's something that's reflected across almost every age demographic and community around this city. Is there a reason? What is the reason? People want to get around in other ways than boning and driving a car or the other thing that we've come to realize I think which Mina had a lot of influence in is our our zoning and planning policy. So now we're not building suburbs that are way out in the middle of nowhere. So now people can live and work in the same place and it's cheaper and it saves time so it makes a lot more sense. So we're on this pathway already that's changing the way that we commute but you layer on top of that now the EVs that are on the road and the pricing differences that creates for consumers who can now have multiple options for how to get around as well as you have rail and other public transportation options coming online and the biggest thing of course is once autonomous vehicles truly arrive and I mean there are autonomous cars driving around on streets and cities around the country right now but within the next five to ten years as all the latest Booz Allen and PricewaterhouseCoopers and all these big firms are looking at as well as the auto manufacturers there may come a point where it's cheaper not to even own a car but to subscribe to a service like an Uber service where you can just call up a car that's driving out there on the road and it'll take you around. It's inherent in it don't you think because everything is automated you know the whole thing is one big computer and so you try out your cell phone push a button and the thing arrives two minutes later see that's better than owning one it's a combination of Uber and next chapter Uber. If you think about it I mean everybody who owns cars today they probably spent 95 percent of their time sitting idle doing nothing in your garage or your garage at work and so now if you have an opportunity with an autonomous car to be dropped off by your car and then rent it out on an online platform where someone else can get a trip from the airport to home throughout the day it becomes much more efficient so the number of vehicles on the road that you would need to service a population of our size so dramatically drops. So I guess the larger question is that you know this is sort of similar to electricity policy you know there's this whole big transformation on how we live work and do business and and so the next area is transportation and all the disruption that's happening in transportation. So how do we set the platforms necessary to move forward so how do we is there a way to break this down into manageable bite-sized pieces where we can develop a policy and build a consensus to move in a certain direction and then this sorry then the second question is do you think the reorganization of the house um lends itself to take on these kind of one at a time. Big issues. You know Kristen's really good at this he can frame his thoughts and then I won't have to interrupt him with questions. I want to add something to that mix. All right well that is well on. What about the resolution the more rather the the target bill that that failed in this session is that useful I mean shall we assume that it will pass next year and is there something else we should do in addition to that to move this ahead. Sure so um uh you guys need a little scored board that like pops up right over here in the in the feed right so you can click these things off but when it comes to both the long-term planning and this like kind of broad goal and then fitting in these individual pieces of what makes sense next and how do you proceed I think there's definitely an ideal way to do it and what has already been looked at in this working group between the department of transportation and the energy office there's about 37 or 38 individual sort of actionable items everything from looking at reducing transit times and distances in zoning all the way down to how do you get more people to take the bus or get on a bike or walk and then provide incentives for example for people to switch over to an electric vehicle over the long term. These things clearly are in a priority list some things are way hard and really expensive others are really easy and kind of a no-brainer and cheap so we can definitely start with a few of those pieces and already get the ball rolling. When it comes to that broader goal and setting that I think there is value in doing so for sure you know one of the things that is happening right now especially in light of the administrative change in DC is that you have streams of funding that are now shifting federal funding that may no longer be coming in for energy projects for example which we just found out about in the administration's budget this week as well as now alternative means of financing coming from large corporations like Google and others who are investing in this play space but we are competing against other states California of course but more specifically against other jurisdictions and what we're seeing when it comes to EVs and their infrastructure the all the charging infrastructure that's needed nobody really knows exactly what a built-out environment looks like what saturation looks like where you have workplace chargers and chargers and condos and all around so we are competing against other folks for a lot of these resources to put this stuff in and people are I don't say they're giving away money but they're looking for opportunities to invest Hawaii is perfect Oahu in particular where it's dense it's small we have the kind of environment that that this stuff really fits into so if we can demonstrate that we have the political will to not only set a long-term goal but to make sure that we're going to take steps to get there and commit to that I think there's a lot of support that could come to bear and we've been talking with specific vendors and companies in the Bay Area and LA Nevada and other places Tesla and others who are looking to partner and make these investments in Hawaii and that's one of the reasons why I think 1580 setting that goal and doubling down on our commitment to say yes we want to get there we don't know exactly how but we're going to do everything we can and for all the folks in the private sector looking to invest both locally and elsewhere you know we will politically help you and get out of your way when we need to I think that's the value in the bill itself and the last thing I'll say on that is you know when we passed 100% rps and I think even the rps and Mina's credited for creating our rps yeah you're in the state but I wanted a floor but also the thing that changed I mean and even the utility lobbied against it up until the minute it passed as well as some of the fossil fuel stakeholders but the minute it did I mean everybody got on board and said you know what we have this goal we're all committed and the amount of progress that we've seen since then and the amount of investment that's being made and the kinds of things that are happening it was night and day between prior and after the passage of that I think in the same way what we're hoping to do in a much larger national conversation is say look Hawaii is here alongside California others who are already going this route and we're committing to this future we are a place to invest we're open for business and the best part about this is the faster we can roll out electric charging infrastructure the faster ultimately we'll be able to empower people to hopefully save on their commutes to save on cost for transportation and ultimately stabilize our energy grid and help balance everything going on because this is a whole new world of opportunity for everybody and it's a whole new world for a break it's a perfect time to take a break down one minute break that's Chris Lee and Meena Morita would be right back for more on the same subject so what we need to well are you in inherent in your answer with something about seeing into the future and figuring out what it's going to look like later and then working to that do we know what it's going to look like I mean there's variables there's a change but different people have different ideas but no one I think has the yeah for example you could build a thousand charging stations but if the uber automated car comes true you don't need them maybe I mean I think there's there's several issues here one is you know the consumers preference in what they're buying you know and so you know we all know people buy trucks here a lot of trucks here so meeting that consumer preference and and then um but with the acknowledgement that you know you have people that just don't want to own cars three okay we're back with Chris Lee and Meena Morita we're talking about transportation energy in Hawaii and um you know we're talking about like making it clear that we have the political will to attract investment to attract laboratory situations from companies that can come here and use Hawaii as a transportation energy platform and laboratory um but you know you're talking in the break you know about what what it should look like what it will look like it's hard to know what it'll look like because all the parts are moving including this automated car thing which could change things dramatically how do you how do you find out how do you deal with that how do you determine you know what kind of incentives you want to build you're talking you know Meena was talking during the break about the public and the market the market should be I know you're a market person she's a market person I don't look like it but yeah she wants the market to you know to determine what we need yeah but you know sometimes you need a benevolent dictator person to use the expression of benevolent dictator legislature if you will who says you know we see it we understand it and we are going we're going there and we're not only gonna we're not gonna just accept what people want in the marketplace we're gonna incentivize them we're gonna shape the market we're gonna tune because we know that if you have too many cars it's no good if you use too much fossil fuel it's no good and so forth we're gonna try to save the state by incentivizing people to do the right thing whatever they really want so Meena was making a good point about uh you want you don't mention that real quick uh the trucks and yeah so it appears that the preference in Hawaii is small trucks or sometimes big really big trucks and and so you know it's it's it's not like the electricity market where you have the utility that's being regulated and that's responsible for meeting their renewable portfolio standards uh gold mandates so in the transportation sector when you're looking at this whole change out of vehicles first of all you still have a lot of old cars on the road then you have the consumer making these purchases so with that kind of um dependency on the market how do these changes take place yeah you know i think um one of the things that we looked at in this was do you do something prescriptive or do you figure out how you can really push the market along and i think nowhere in the um the discussion that we had this year was anybody trying to force anybody to give up their their favorite truck or or whatnot i drive a gas guzzler too and you know full disclosure but um but the idea is how do you put the infrastructure in place to allow that consumer choice because right now for example i would drive an ev except i have nowhere to plug a car in it's just not possible a street park and so i think like a lot of people who live in condos and everything else they're looking for the same thing and so how do we create this critical mass of ev infrastructure um out there i think that's really the goal of aligning everybody toward this long-term um this long-term target i think one of the things that we hope out of this um you know we don't know what the next toyota light truck is going to look like but we do know that the company is committed by 2040 to sell only electric vehicles and we're seeing already both with tesla's new heavy-duty trucks and as well as some of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles out there eventually these these vehicles and all variations at big suvs and whatnot will all be there so we need to make sure that we're ready so that when people want to buy them they can so the other critical issue here is taxation policies because you know as you move towards electric vehicles um and we're so highly reliant on on gasoline taxes you know for for the maintenance of our roads and and uh matching federal dollars yeah um how do we go about this and and again i go back to the question is you know with with the house reorganization you know are we being set up correctly uh in committee structure um to to move these rail again not only i don't know of any way to describe it issues forward because i think you know on the electricity sector that's where we see some of the slowness playing out and getting um rate design correct you know to to move forward make it equitable and i i see this big um hurdle on the transportation side because we're so reliant on gasoline taxes yeah you know um the house reorganized reorganized uh at the end of the last day of session we have a new speaker of the house Scott Seiki um everything else is a little bit in flux at the moment but we'll have a committee lineup i think over the summer sometime but that being said the biggest difference between the house and senate the senate has one committee that handles both energy and transportation um and those two really i mean go uh hand in hand and and you cannot address one without the other i think at this point it's fair to say in the house we have two committees one that addresses transportation one that addresses energy so we'll need to get together the current chair of the transportation committee is Henry Aquino who's been working on that for a couple of years maybe four years or maybe even longer but we've worked well together and i think the conversations we're going to have to have we'll have to address these things of equity and how do you in a world of proliferating EVs um and no gas taxes paid by those drivers pay for public infrastructure like roads and highways so we have a number of bills that were proposed this year some that moved along which would tax vehicles by weight for example we have another proposal that would do just a blanket lump sum to the department of transportation to pay for roads every year and not even get into the metrics of who's paying from what type of vehicle or all that in the long term the other unknown x factor of course in all this is how much of that infrastructure will we still need if you have fewer vehicles on the road in a much more efficient place do you still need seven lanes wide highways so all this stuff is hanging out there so so in your recent travels have you seen any technology that can help address the taxation issues you know um or again actually there's a number of states obviously looking at this because it's a problem everywhere but or again just implemented a vehicle miles traveled pilot program so the farther you drive the more you help pay for the roads um EVs because they're they're electric and you can communicate much more easily now in some places are being designed um with pilot projects in mind that basically do the same thing based on your usage and in some cases uber and other companies that are these ride-sharing companies that are the networks of vehicles out there have been tasked to contribute in their own way so that every ride they give a portion of that goes to pay for whatever fund so some of these things are out there and i don't think anybody's nailed it yet but i think the one thing that's for sure is that we'll have to come to an answer soon because ultimately we need our roads and people are going to continue to buy EVs we've got 30 percent more sold this past year than the year before and that's when you give those kinds of rebates and stuff of course very few electric vehicles on the highways overall yeah overall and you know the the low-hanging fruit of the people who are excited about the new technology they already bought so now it's harder to sell this idea and i think it's not moving as fast as i would like to see so query you know you can incentivize or you can de-incentivize you could say as they have in other places maybe outside the country you want to buy a gas car we're going to tax you really heavily and we're going to try to discourage you from buying the gas car that works for sure and the person with the big truck you know who doesn't need the big truck the gas gobbler big truck he's going to be discouraged if you add a big tax on that of course it's the other kind of incentive you know where you offer a tax credit which we used to do but we're not doing any more for electric vehicles so is there anything on the on the drawing board for either of those possibilities to actually shape this market that Mina would like to leave as free and unhampered well i don't think there's been a discussion at least a serious discussion that i'm aware of on you know additional taxes for people just because they drive a fossil fuel car but the incentive question has come up a number of times and of course we don't have state money going into an incentive program right now but there is federal money that's been available for some time which is slowly going away but the other thing that we're starting to see is by 2026 the inflection point for the cost of an EV versus a traditional gas vehicle is going to flip that's the year supposedly in which it becomes cheaper to drive an EV and buy an EV up front than it is to buy a gas vehicle and that's been shifting closer and closer not only because we're getting closer to that year but because the technology is evolving faster than anybody has ever imagined and the cost of batteries and the equipment is coming down so it may be a question in the next two or three years as to what point assuming that this is going to happen and EVs are going to be cheaper across the board both up front and in operational costs at what point do we even need incentives maybe not to begin with maybe you're right so in your recent travels again have you seen any again more increased efficiencies in cars getting higher gas mileage in vehicles I mean has it stopped or is the trend still increased mileage the trend is still increased mileage for sure and of course you know electric vehicles are topping that list but even amongst gas cars and light duty vehicles you see continual gains now with the Trump administration looking at undoing some of those standards that that produce that we don't really know what's going to happen but I think it's safe to say that with manufacturers ranging from BMW and Toyota Hyundai of course Tesla and Nissan everybody else already moving in the direction of full electric vehicles or fuel cell vehicles I think it's only a matter of time and we may just be having this discussion which may be moot in a couple years anyway let me offer this thought I mean we could have a hundred percent electric cars not a certain point but if they're all being driven by oil you know in the generation system of the electricity that charges the batteries in the cars we haven't really achieved anything this is what's so exciting though because I think this is where there's most potential when you merge transportation and let's assume we get to a hundred percent EVs on this island if we were to do that overnight now you've got all these batteries driving around that can capture that load when it's let's say when power's cheapest at night and we're now charging our vehicles at night you stabilize the demand curve throughout the day and now it's cheaper for everybody to produce electricity theoretically if you can be more flexible in that power consumption and usage so there's a lot of possibility here how do you do that what kind of legislation do you pass in order to make that happen well I think the PUC yeah it's all I think it's all dependent on rate design yeah you know and and so basically it's like when you have your vehicle attached the utility would have the ability to draw power when it needs or to dump power when this is a better place you remember better place this is exactly the model that they were thinking of I'm in five six years ago so we're out of time you know so this is your opportunity to summarize what we learned from Chris Lee today and you know sort of tell the people what they can expect going forward well I think first of all thank you Chris for coming today or thanks for having me i'm sorry representative Lee for coming today and we really appreciate you having here and it sounds like you've got a lot of work cut out for you we all do in preparing for the next session and and so i'm looking forward to that thanks for having me thank you Chris been great to have you we'll do it again we'll do it again all right thanks yeah thanks that was good yeah they are connected aren't they well that makes them hopefully very sexy yeah if they're connected i mean you're gonna do both at the same time so well you know that part of part of it is again this is where i feel eco has a lot of shortcomings it's all the analytics you know so the ability to process data quickly and make tiny decisions yeah and and yeah I mean


Welcome to the Sherrod BC how-to video series. This video covers managing your connections in Sherrod BC. Let's get started. One of the key features of Sherrod BC is the ability to connect with other educators from within your own school district, in your region, or anywhere in British Columbia and Yukon. Every time you log into Sherrod BC, you should check and see who wants to connect with you, or what connection recommendations have been made for you. There are a couple of ways to do this. You can go to the waiting for action section at the top right of the homepage and click directly on connection requests. You can go to your notifications and to see them there. You can also go to the connections and the connection requests page. This will display the requests that you have received from other users. You can choose to either accept or ignore each request by clicking on the appropriate button. Should you ignore a request, the user sending you the invitation to connect does not receive any indication back that you have not accepted the request. Any outstanding connection requests that you have sent to other users will show in the sent tab. Once you have actioned any new connection requests, why don't you go to the search connections page and see the new users that have joined Sherrod BC and who you might like to connect to. You can use the search and filter options to find educators that teach the same grade or curriculum area, for example. When you find someone you wish to connect with, click on the connect button. Also, a new release of Sherrod BC shows on the homepage any resource and connection recommendations based on your profile. You can choose to connect with them right there. We trust you can find many users you can connect and collaborate with around the province and the Yukon. Thanks for watching and enjoy using Sherrod BC.


BJ was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future. He had a vision. When he got out, he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight. And he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision. He'd spent $10,000 to buy a website that exclusively featured women having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars. All he needed to do was supply the women. And he'd already gotten his 19-year-old son on the outside and named him Vice President for Talent Development and charged him with overseeing auditions. It was my first week in federal prison. And I was learning quickly that it wasn't what you see on TV. In fact, it was teeming with smart, ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wind and dined me six months earlier when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate. Now, 95% of the guys that I was locked up with had been drug dealers on the outside. But when they talked about what they did, they talked about it in a different jargon, but the business concepts that they talked about weren't unlike those that you'd learn in a first-year MBA class at Wharton. Promotional incentives you never charge a first-time user. Focus grouping new product launches. If you get a new batch in from a new supplier you've never used before, always get some long-time crackhead to test it out. Territorial expansion. One of your rivals gets chalked.  But they didn't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days. So the most part, everybody who's trying to survive, it's a lot harder than you might think. Contrary to what most people think, people don't pay, taxpayers don't pay for your life when you're in prison. You've got to pay for your own life. You've got to pay for your soap, your deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, all of it. And it's hard for a couple of reasons. First, everything's marked up 30% to 50% from what you'd pay in the street. And second, you don't make a lot of money. I unloaded trucks. That was my full-time job unloading trucks at a food warehouse for $5.25, not an hour, but per month. So how do you survive? We learn to hustle. With all kinds of hustles. There's legal hustles. You charge another inmate. You pay everything in stamps. Those are the currency. You charge another inmate to clean his cell.  There's pretty illegal hustles.  And there's very illegal hustles, which you smuggle in or you get smuggled in drugs, pornography, cell phones. And just as in the outer world, there's a risk-reward trade-off. So the riskier the enterprise, the more profitable it can potentially be. You want a cigarette in prison? $3 to $5. You want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open and is about as big as your head? $300.  Well, depends on the measurements of the woman and what she's doing. But based on the recurring revenue stream that's available, if you laminate the pages and rent it out by the hour, it can be as much as $1,000. So as you can probably tell, one of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity. Whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse, sculpting people's hair with toenail clippers, or constructing debt weights from boulders in laundry bags tied on to tree limbs, prisoners learn how to make and do with less. And many of them want to take this ingenuity that they've learned to the outside and start restaurants, barbershops, personal training businesses. But there's nothing like no training, nothing to prepare them for that, no rehabilitation at all in prison. No one to help them write a business plan, figure out a way to translate the business concepts they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises, no access to the internet even. And then when they come out, most states don't even have a law prohibiting employers from discriminating against people with a background. So none of us should be surprised that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend within five years. Look, I lied to the feds. I lost a year of my life from it. But when I came out, I vowed that I was going to do whatever I could to make sure that guys like the ones I was locked up with didn't have to waste any more of their life than they already had. So I hope that you'll think about helping in some way. The best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons. Because if we don't, they're not going to learn any new skills that's going to help them, and they'll be right back. All they'll learn on the inside is new hustles. Thank you.